Burnout Expert: "I Became A Millionaire At 23 And Felt Nothing" | Ep. 444 with Brent Freeman

0:00Money does not make you happier. If we knew how much pain being an entrepreneur actually was, we wouldn't do it. I had all the things, but I was empty. I was surrounded by people, but I was lonely. And my social media feed said I was crushing it. Knighted by Italy's former royal family, 20 companies, over a billion dollars in revenue, founder of the number one Airbnb experience in the world, Brent Freeman built everything, and it nearly cost him everything. We have way more failures than success. The number one lie we've been sold and told. Once I make money, it'll solve all my problems. What you're doing is neuroscience backed.

0:38Yep. And I call it investing in joy because it is an investment of your time, your attention and sometimes your money. But 99 % of the time is...

0:52so brent at 23 you closed a 10 million dollar deal and became a millionaire on paper however though you said that you felt emptier take me back to that moment and let me know does money make you happier full stop money does not make you happier 23 years old i had been working for almost two years on this deal. I was just fresh graduated from college. I had a quarter million dollars in debt. I put myself through college at USC. My parents helped where they could. I took out student loans. And then when I graduated, I was like, oh my God, I got to pay this back as quick as possible. And so we started a commodities import export business with the sole purpose of making as much money as fast as possible.

1:35And we had an office in Dubai and in LA and we were hustling and grinding. We finally closed a deal. These are large, you know, long cycle deals. We finally closed the deal. And it was my best friend and I as business partners at the time. And we go and celebrate, right? It's like we're at the Burj Al Arab and we have, you know, huge cocktails and a big five foot hookah. And, you know, we're spending money and oh my God, we made it, we're rich, we did it. And I woke up the next morning, not just hung over, but I woke up emotionally hung over. And I was expecting to feel this feeling inside of my body of fulfillment, of gratitude, of appreciation.

2:15And all I did was feel empty. And I remember the feeling that I felt. My only goal in life when I was a kid, because I come from Italian heritage, was to go to Italy, meet my family and learn the language. And when I was a kid, we didn't have a lot of money, but I had a dream of going to Italy and it was like pre-internet, you know, I was born in the eighties. And so like, it seems so far away. And I never thought that I would ever get there. And then fast forward to college, I study abroad there in Florence. And I remember arriving and landing and having the most joyful feeling emanate from inside.

2:53It was like a balloon of happiness and joy. It was just exploding inside. It was beautiful. And when I closed that deal in Dubai, I expected it to feel the same way. And man, I was so, so, so wrong. And it was the first time in my professional life that I really questioned the story and the program that were told and sold of make more money and money and success, quote unquote, will make you happy. And then over the last 20 years, I've had the opportunity to learn that lesson again and again. It's almost like you have to go into business wanting to make money. Maybe you want to solve a problem.

3:31Maybe it excites you. But if you don't have money, the business won't run. And then if you don't have money, you can't really live maybe the lifestyle that you want to live. How do you balance wanting to do something because you also need to make money and you want to be happy at the same time? Money is very important to society. It makes the world go round. It buys freedom, right? It gets food and shelter and all of that. It's very important. It's just as important as air and food and water, but it is not the only element. And I think we put money up on a pedestal that if once we have enough, quote unquote, and that's a moving target for many people in a lot of ways.

4:10once we get this certain thing, we defer our joy, our happiness today for this elusive one day. One day when I have enough time, when I sell my company, when I make millions, when I do this, blah, blah, blah. And so we're like, no, no, no, I'll self-sacrifice. I won't do the things I love. I won't be around the people I love. I won't invest in the things that light me up. And typically it's like this one degree point of separation at the origin point compounded over time is a very different destination. And so money is very critical, but it is not the be all end all. If you don't have enough money, it sucks.

4:43And it's impossible. And you are at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs trying to figure out how to live. What we're talking about is once we kind of get above that and we have enough and we are in that pursuit of self-actualization of like, why are we here to live our dream life? And, you know, that's really what we're talking about in this structure. Don't just chase money for its own sake, but use money to allow you to enjoy the ride. And that's what it's about. I say my message to the world is we defer joy for one day and my message is make one day today. So you founded 20 companies, over a billion dollars in revenue.

5:23You continued for 18 more years. What kept you running after your learning experience at 23. You know, I think it's important for all the entrepreneurs out there, founders or people wanting to be in this to understand that those 20 companies that I was a part of or co-founded, we had way more failures than success and we failed our way forward. And, you know, I had to adopt the mantra of you win some, you learn some. And that's easy to say and really a lot harder to embody. Right. And eventually when we became a part of a venture studio and marketing team and agency that was behind the growth of some very large brands, um, consumer brands, household brands that people would know.

6:02Um, when we helped, uh, them, you know, we catalyzed a billion in M and a, and we catalyzed a billion in revenue plus plus, and we were the team kind of behind the scenes of that. Um, I really got to see firsthand what happens when you defer your joy for this elusive one day. I lived it. I never started this or wrote the book or any of that stuff to share. It was not about that. I built the alchemy of joy process for myself because I was unhappy. I had all of the things, but I was alone. I was surrounded by people, but I felt completely lonely, right? And so I woke up one day and I said, well, what am I doing all of this for?

6:48And a friend kind of hit me on the head with a phrase, which I love, which is, there's no dress rehearsal in life. And my mom died when I was seven. And so I learned that at a very early age that we're not promised the destination. So we need to enjoy the journey. And so when it comes to money, I do not think making money is bad. I think it is an outcome of bringing value to the world. And it is a massive jet fuel to opportunities and freedoms and giving. But when we put money on a pedestal to chase it as the false idol, that that's going to be happiness at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

7:28And so we're not even going to enjoy the pigments of color along the way. We're missing the point. I know a lot of people in business that from the outside look successful. Maybe they got deals on Shark Tank, they've done different things. But the reality is they're not really taking home a lot of profit. And all the money that they're taking in is now being spent on the business. And they do this for many years, hoping for an exit. when they missed out on being able to do things that bring them joy and many times it's at the expense of relationships i'm all about longevity in business and in life that's why i take coco via a daily plant-based supplement powered by coco flavanols bioactive compounds found in a coco bean clinically proven to support heart and brain health only coco via uses coco pro the most concentrated and consistent cocoa flavanol extract on the market.

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10:31That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, Upwork.com. do you think there is a way to balance these things out or is that the only way to get to a certain level of success i love this question so f yeah there's a way that is my whole life's work now with the alchemy of joy right that's what the book is all about it is the path and the way i remember 20 years ago when tin ferris released for our work week and i read it and i felt like i had a roadmap um is this is like that for your personal life it is a very uh no bullshit uh a roadmap to beat burnout and live the life you love, retraining your brain, your subconscious mind, it is not bad to make money.

11:12It is not bad to have goals or sell your company. What's bad is when we self-sacrifice our health, our family, our friends, our community, our love, right? In the chase, in the pursuit of. And so I work with the highest performers in the world, entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, right? Who have had billion dollar plus plus exits or early stage startups. and they come to our workshops and our retreats and I coach them one-on-one. And I can tell you firsthand that the folks that have the most money typically are the ones that are undoing a lot of the trauma from their past in a way so that they can actually enjoy it.

11:45And so there is a way and there is hope, right? So if you're burned out or you are chasing, it actually is not this big thing of like, you need to get the exit. It is actually stopping and becoming present along the way to enjoy the journey. And I call it investing in joy because it is an investment of your time, your attention, and sometimes your money, but 99 % of the time, it's not money. A sunset is free, which changed my life. We can talk more about that later, right? A moment with your dog in the morning or your spouse or your partner really being present and looking in their eyes, that's free.

12:21We spend most of our lives as high performers living in the future, which is where anxiety lives or ruminating about the past, which is where depression lives. But joy is right now. I call it the absolute value of the present moment. And so to answer your question on those three ways, we can absolutely achieve along the way, but it's about being present to the journey and making sure that we are not in the balance in the pursuit of our goals and our dreams, missing out on the journey because we're not promised the destination. We're just just not promised it. This reminds me of we just had Damon John, and he talked about all of the things that you're saying, losing everything at the expense of his family, getting divorced, his health was terrible, getting cancer, almost dying, not sleeping, all of these things.

13:12But it's almost as if along the way, no one told you there's another way, which is great. Why you have this book, right? So you say that what you're doing is neuroscience backed. What happens to the brain during burnout? So love Damon. I met him 15, 20 years ago with a program in LA, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, where we had one of our kids in a pilot program win the national competition and he took her out to brunch. He's an amazing human. Love that guy. We had brunch at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. He's an amazing dude. And I love the message he's putting out in the world right now, right?

13:48Which is about enjoying the ride and building and creating value and being a visionary. That is exactly the message we need to hear. But to answer your question about neuroscience, all right, so let's just do some quick basics for people so we can kind of just really kind of build a small mental model. Our body is a machine. And when we learn how to control the machine, a high performance machine, mind you, right? When we learn how to control that machine in different ways, we can start to understand what's going on versus being the person experiencing it that is dysregulated, having an emotional experience that might be hijacked in some way, shape, or form.

14:22And so when it looks, the brainwaves that we have is we have, when you're asleep, you have delta brainwaves, the slowest. Then one step above that is theta, which is the hypnotic state, the programmable state. One step above that is alpha state. That's your flow state. And you lose track of time. You might be skiing or out of the beach or running or writing or whatever. It's a creative state. And then you have beta brainwaves. And beta brainwaves is consciousness. And in consciousness, you have low, medium, and high. High beta is fight, flight, or freeze, your amygdala response, right? So a dinosaur is chasing me.

14:53I need to get away from it, right? Oh, my gosh. And then 90 seconds later, you're safe. It calms back down. That's how it was meant to fire. It wasn't built for Slack and messages and social media and emails and the constant pressures of our day-to-day. So our organism hasn't evolved as fast as our technology has. And so what happens is in that high beta brainwave state, we normalize living there like it's okay. It's high cortisol. And when you're in high cortisol and you are running from a predator, let's say, that is not a space for a time in your body for it to digest or have the immune system operate really well or sleep.

15:33But we are living our lives there. And so what happens is we end up becoming sick and our immune system shuts down and we just normalize this state of high stress and high cortisol. But it turns out if we learn how to work with our body, and this is where I say working with willpower versus flow power is the game changer, right? So all my work is based off of working with the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind. Conscious mind is willpower. It's force, right? And I tried that for years as an entrepreneur, just bang my head against the wall until the vision works. And it turns out that hurts a lot and you burn out and half the time it doesn't get you where you want to go.

16:11But when you work with flow power, your subconscious mind is 40 to 50 ,000 times more powerful than your conscious mind. And when you start to understand how to work with your subconscious mind and your brain wave states, right? And you can use tools like breath work, breathing in general, meditation, going for walks in nature. I do something called forest baths, where I go for walks in a forest, and the Japanese are famous for this, and use nature to calm my nervous system. We start to understand that I can take myself out of high beta brain wave down into low and medium, and even maybe into alpha state or even into theta state.

16:50And that alpha and theta state is when my body actually starts to become regulated. It's like I get to go into neutral because when we're in that high cortisol state, it's like driving a hundred miles an hour on the freeway in first gear. It's just, uh, it's going to blow up at some point. And that's what burnout is. And so anybody that's listening to this, that is burned out. I don't care if you're a founder or an entrepreneur and executive or a parent and you're burned out, there's nothing wrong with you at all. It's just you're running in overdrive. And so the book that I wrote was based off of the methodology that I spent almost a decade biohacking on myself, going to meditation retreats and trying different therapeutic modalities, you know, from regular therapy, CBT, to psychedelic therapy, all the way through to understanding neuroscience of like what goes on in our body.

17:37And I really just wrote about the things that are actually effective because nobody has time to read all these different things and then piece it all together. And I call it the alchemy of joy because it's about the transmutation of hardships, of when your brain spikes, of when your body's dysregulated, of things that happen seemingly to you to turn them into things that happen for you. So you can have more joy in your life and you can enjoy the ride because it's easy to say, Hey, enjoy the ride. But when you're worried about the next round of funding or the employee or the lawsuit or whatever, I've been in all of those situations.

18:09You're not present to the magic that happens in this present moment. And so that's kind of the nature of the game there. Can you give me one tool from the alchemy of joy that somebody could use right now to change the state that they're in? Yeah. So it's something we call the reset breath, and it's kind of an embedded tool and a larger tool. but the reset breath is just like how do you get present when you're pissed off you're frustrated you're worried you're anxious it's actually getting back into your body and feeling safe because what your body is telling you subconsciously is you're it's not safe something's happening and it's not safe and so we use this reset breath of an inhale for six you hold it for four seconds and you exhale for eight and you have a little audible exhale because when you do that, the exhale that's longer than the inhale, it calms your nervous system and tells your nervous system you're safe.

19:05That audible sigh and exhale actually stimulates the vagus nerve in your body that tells your nervous system you're safe. Do that for one minute. Just that, for one minute. If you're in a board meeting, you're with an investor, you're with your family, your spouse says something, your kid's pissing you off, do it for one minute and it changes your entire neurology to come back down to create a bigger gap between stimulus and response. And that's what it's all about. Viktor Frankl and his Man for Search for Meaning book, the best book in the whole wide world, said when you lose everything as a human, the one thing that nobody can ever take from you is your response, the gap between stimulus and response.

19:44And that's what that breath can do. If you want to have extra credit, we're all high achievers on this, you do something called the one-minute window. You stop, you get into your breath that way, and then you zoom in almost like you've never seen something before. Like you just get really focused on the detail. I have this wood inlaid pen as a really good example. And I got it in Italy, right in Sorrento. And if I, if I just pass by this, it's like, okay, cool. It's beautiful. But if I really zoom in, I'm like, man, the amount of things that went into this to make this, the hands, the architecture, the, the design, the artistry, the wood, it's pretty magic.

20:19And that is a tiny moment of joy. It is, it's something that brings me into the present moment. I can't actually see that unless I'm present. Real talk. We used to run our entire sales process on spreadsheets. Every new hire made it messier. Deals slipped through because nobody knew who to follow up with or when. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Switching streamlined everything. Onboarding got easier, everything stayed organized, and we stopped missing sales. Their new meeting intelligence features seal it. Automatic briefs before every call, an AI note taker built right into the CRM and updates drafted for your approval.

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21:33And then you go into this, the soften, you bring up an elevated emotion of love and gratitude. And when you do that, stop, see, soften, that's the, what I did my TEDx talk on last year. it changes everything and it only takes 60 seconds. And so joy, I say, is a skill. It's a practice, right? It's our birthright. But as adults, we lose touch. It's like Peter Pan, right? We forget how to fly. And we have to just reconnect to presence and to our bodies in order to experience the joy that is all around us all the time. We are just not tuned into it. Do you think we mix up fight or flight in high cortisol with hustle?

22:19Yes. I think the hustle culture has become very toxic. I think there is something important to understanding that when you are building, there is a level of exertion in creation that needs to happen to get something from A to B. That's important, right? That's creation energy, right? Creating human life. There is energy exertion in that. It makes sense, right? So hustle, when you're creating a company from scratch, it's important. But where it's kind of gone off the rails is hustle at the expense of everything else. This hustle and grind culture of hustle, create, hustle, create, sacrifice your days, your nights, your weekends, your body, your family, your friends, your spouse, your this, that, and the other, all in the means of what?

23:02An ROI for your investors or for you. If you get to the top of the mountain one day and you look around and no one's around you or the people that are around you you don't like or you don't have your health, what does it matter? And so that's that message of like, don't sacrifice today for this one day. And energy is important, but doing it, there's a Taoist philosophy called Wu Wei of flowing with the river, right? Not against it, not upstream, not lying down and dying and drowning and all of that, but flow with the current of the river with effort to create. And I think that it's very important for entrepreneurs to understand when is it time to create?

23:43When is it time for them to invest in themselves, their joy, their happiness, their presence, their family, their children? How many kids are out there trying to get their parents' attention who are wrapped up in their phones or emails? You never get those moments back. I'm always fascinated how somebody came up with a phrase, a statement thousands of years ago. Like meditation has been around for thousands of years, and yet it is more needed now than ever. It makes me wonder about how far along have we as humans really developed? I think every generation we evolve a little bit in certain ways, and in some ways we forget.

24:23And I think as energy, as technology rather has evolved, we have forgotten some of the more ancient wisdom over time. And when the light bulb was invented, it changed our circadian rhythms as an entire society. And then as technology has come online and screens have come online, that changed it again and again. And so our organism hasn't had enough evolutionary time to be able to adapt to the changes in technology. And so the hijacking that happens is really to our dopamine system for our attention. right and so uh all of the dopamine hijackers whether it be fast foods or sugar or social media or porn or whatever right it is these things that that hijack our dopamine system for an instantaneous uh moment of a drip of dopamine that makes the natural dopamine systems that we used to get dopamine from from like a hug or seeing a loved one or looking out at the sunset that feel less intense or sweet.

25:33And so I say, it's like, if I gave you a candy bar right now, if I gave you a Snickers bar and you ate that, and then I gave you a Fuji apple, one of the sweetest apples, the apple would not taste as sweet, even though it's natural, right? So I think what's happened is we, this generation has lost a little bit of touch, but it's waking up in different ways. There is an awakening that's happening around plant medicine, around meditation quicker than we think because Gen Z is very attuned and tapped into this way more than I would say kind of Gen X and above was millennials are kind of a hybrid, right?

26:12We got caught kind of in between on the millennial side of like, let's go change the world. And we all got hit in the face by 10 ,000 things, right? But the millennials are hitting midlife crisis faster than any generation. And so I think we are coming back to ancient wisdom, ancient call it technology and connection, um, uh, the, you know, faster than, than, than some of the other generations did. What were some of the early warning signs that you missed? It was like a frog in boiling water. Um, all of my businesses were also social enterprise businesses. So how do I use business to create for-profit impact around the world?