#683 - Shaan Puri - 7 Semi-Controversial Rules For Success

25:01There's definitely an undercurrent in the UK of excitability, almost being naive, it being kind of immature, it's being lame. And then, you know, even as you move up through the IQ distribution, smart people like the idea of being cynical because it seems heterodox and it seems like you've considered all of the options. Only somebody that's a, you know, a smooth brained idiot would believe that things are going to go well. Obviously, you know, that's what the normie midwits think. No, no, no, I've considered the options, but it fails to recognize that ultimately your experience of your life is largely determined by the story that you tell yourself about it.

25:45In fact, you could maybe say that it almost exclusively determined by that. There's a thing called the, so people talk about vicious cycles. And we've seen vicious cycles, how people slip into depression, how companies fail, how vicious cycle, a vicious cycle for example would be, if you break it down into its core elements, there's just three, it's a triangle, three dots. Dot one is belief. If I believe that something is not going to work, this relationship is not going to work, this company is not going to work, this meal is going to suck, whatever it is. If I believe that it's not going to work, the second dot is action.

26:17How much action am I going to take towards making it happen, right? I'm gonna take minimal action because I don't believe that it's gonna work. If you don't believe it's gonna work, you're gonna sort of tip toe in. You're not actually gonna go full force on it. So minimal belief leads to minimal action, which leads to a minimal result, which only reinforces your shitty original belief. And that's the vicious cycle. So then the next time, you just reinforce that. Oh, you know, I don't really believe I'm gonna stick to this diet. So therefore, I'm not actually gonna like throw away the junk food.

26:51I'll just put it away in the closet a little bit. And therefore, I'm gonna actually end up snacking on the stuff because I know where it is. It's in the closet. So I just have to open the door. And then I get a shitty result and I say, I knew it. I'd never fall through with these things. These are the stories you tell yourself silently in your head, the voice in your head. And the opposite is true. There's also the winter cycle or the virtuous cycle. The virtuous cycle is the exact opposite. Massive belief. Oh my God, this is gonna work. What if you knew that like if you knew that if you get to this like You're what you're going to the corner store and if you knew at that corner store There is the winning lottery ticket.

27:26It is there the next person who prints it wins Would you would you walk or would you run right like you're going to run? So your belief if you really believe that you would take massive action you would sprint and when you sprint You would actually get there first right and like you would actually have a different result then the lottery's not exactly right, because you're not gonna, the belief is ill -founded in that case, but you would take massive action, and generally massive action over a consistent period of time leads to results, which reinforces your belief that I'm the type of person that whenever I set my mind to something, I do it, and when I do it, I get results, right?

28:00Like that just becomes how a winner thinks. And so enthusiasm is another word, it sort of, it, you know, roommates with belief. And if you say belief, beliefs are these kind of like heavy, long term, You only have a few beliefs. Enthusiasm is a general state that you operate in. Such that it takes your default level of belief in something up, which takes your action up, which takes your results up over time. And that is sort of like the strategy that explains why this works. Not only does it feel good to have positive enthusiasm or positivity, but like there's an actual advantage. I think there was a TED Talk back in the day called the Happiness Advantage.

28:38And the guy was talking to his Harvard professor and he explained that happiness is not just, doesn't just feel good, it literally makes you perform better. They did many tests to see how you actually perform on the same, same test. If you came in in a certain state versus a different, a different state, the happy, happy state versus not. Yeah. George Mac has this really great idea that I'm going to write an article, a co -written article with him about of public metrics and hidden metrics. And he talks about stuff like peace of mind being a hidden metric, but money being a public metric and time is very interesting times somewhere between the two.

29:12We kind of don't know time, but we kind of do as well. So for instance, people will happily sacrifice their peace of mind in order to achieve money because there's no dashboard that tracks your peace of mind. And it's almost like enthusiasm, right? Enthusiasm is such a hidden metric as opposed to it being something that you fail to see the cost of. It's something that you fail to see the returns on because the in a texture of your mind is not something that you're open to. So that's people will learn another language, it'll tick a box. Oh, I'm gonna learn Spanish versus work, if you said I'm gonna work on upping my general level of enthusiasm, you'd be looked at like an insane person.

29:49What's gonna actually serve you better in life? We need to do a lingo. Which one of us? Do a lingo for enthusiasm. Actually, I prefer the opposite. I am happy to be the one who is massively exploiting this arbitrage. Capturing all of the games is... Exactly. It lets a talentless guy like me thrive in a world like this, right? Okay, second skill. What's the other one? Storytelling. So stories are the storytelling is, is, is massively underrated because stories are the natural, like transfer mechanism between individuals. So like, if you want something to stick and somebody else's head, you really have two choices.

30:26Music or story. And, you know, you look at like through all of time,

30:36what are the Do you remember all of the rules of religion? No, but people remember the stories. Same thing with anything that lasts a long time or sticks in people's heads. I couldn't tell you what I learned in seventh grade, but I could tell you the plot of Lion King. Play by play plot of Lion King. Why? Because it's encoded as a story. So stories are like an encoding mechanism for information or for knowledge. And music isn't other one. People will naturally remember catchy music. Most people don't have the ability to make music, but almost everybody could tell a good story. So if I could do the music thing, I would, but instead I'll do the story thing.

31:14And I think this is underrated because, and I think Steve Jobs had some quote like this. He's like, it's something like the storytellers, the most powerful person on earth, because they get everybody else to take action. So they're the ones who move one person to the next. And this is how politicians get people. This is how CEOs run companies as stories. And so, but you're very rarely taught how to tell a story. Like if I went and asked somebody, like just explain to me like how, if I wanted to get better at storytelling, what would I do? Like what are the skills? Like give me like the two or three big concepts.

31:48And so they're very, nobody really knows how to articulate it. You're not taught this in school. And because of that, again, there's a massive arbitrage. You have a thing that is very valuable. That most people don't know how to do very well. So if you even try a little bit, you'll become the top 10 % of storytellers very quickly. And from there, you get the results that a great communicator would get. What are the principles of storytelling as far as you're concerned? So if you listen to Aaron Sorkin, so the guy, the writer and movie guy who did, I think he did whatever West Wing and newsroom and a bunch of other stuff, the Sholeswood Network movie, he's like, if you ask him, I wanted to take his masterclass.

32:29I had set out a day, I was like, I'm gonna learn everything there is to know from this guy about storytelling, because this guy is a master storyteller. I cleared my calendar and like in the first 30 minutes, he just repeats the same one principle over and over again. I'm like, oh, that seems to be it, which is stories are about intention and obstacle. He says, I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. So basically, if you watch any movie, you watch any TV show within the first second, you will, you should know, right? Like, at any given time, you should be able to pause and you'll know this usually within the first five minutes of every story.

33:01There's a hero and the hero wants something, they have an intention and they have an obstacle. What's in the way of it? Last night I was watching a show called hijack. You see this? I finished it. Did you finish it? I finished it last night. Yeah, everyone should go and watch it. Idris Alba. Yep. Right away you see Idris Alba while I won't spoil it. But Idris Alba wants one thing, right? At the very beginning is he wants to be with his family and he's got some obstacles. Life doesn't want to be with. All right, so like you You get that. If you go watch Die Hard, Die Hard. Oh, it's this movie about defusing a bomb and doing it.

33:30Let's create this terrorist plot. What does he want? At very beginning, he gets a call. He wants to be home with his family. But then there's this terrorist plot. And really, at the end of Die Hard, all you try to do is just get to his family. The whole movie is Hero wants something and there's something in his way. In this case, a terrorist plot. And then throughout any story, that escalates. So let's take this show hijack, right? The name kind of gives it away. A plane gets hijacked. Okay, cool. So now this person wants something different. He doesn't want to bring his family back to you. He immediately just wants not die from this terrorist, right?

34:04Or not die from this hijacking. What land safely? Now that's the intention. What are the obstacles? Well, there might be people working against that plan. And so every story must have at its underpinning an intention and obstacle. Okay, that's the first key principle of storytelling. And it doesn't matter if it's a romantic comedy. Oh, what does she want? Well, she's a high powered lawyer, but all her friends are getting married and she's not dating anybody. What is she? She has an intention. She wants to have a loving relationship. The obstacle. She's so successful and all the guys she meets her assholes.

34:35Okay, cool. She's busy in hat meets assholes. Okay, now what do you do to make a story more compelling? The next ingredient you need to add is steaks. So you sprinkle some steaks on there. What are steaks? Steaks are elevating the what's at stake if they don't get it. So intention obstacle if the intention is I'm hungry and the obstacle is you know lunch is over there in the other room. It's not that exciting of a story. If the stakes are. This person has a need and 30 days and there you know if they don't eat they're gonna die right now all of a sudden you have something more interesting so stakes are how you live it now stakes don't always have to be life or death the best story some of the best things like I don't know if you've seen the show called the bear that's out recently it's on the sun hulu and it's cool it's just kind of like critically claimed like.

35:20cool people think it's cool type of show. And in that, there's not life or death stakes. There is no terrorist plot. There is no life on the line, but they know that for everybody, in whatever your world is, there's something that's the highest stakes thing. The thing you want the most. And all you have to do is convince the audience that this character really cares about this, that the character really feels like it's a life or death, it's a life changing swing, if it happens or it doesn't happen. So all you have to do is make it believable, that that's the case. So when I tell stories, I actually take those pride in a story where on the surface, the stakes are small.

35:56Like, I told the story once at a corporate retreat. It was like an executive retreat. And they went around the circle and everybody was supposed to say, what's going on? And everybody was trying to one up each other with a bigger problem, a more urgent fire that they had to put out. And I went the other way I said, so I just moved out of my house into my own apartment. This is back in the day. I just moved out of my house in my own apartment, living on my own for the first time, and my my mom is coming over. Now my mom's coming over and I had told her that like I'm living on my own, I'm a man now, I'm a big boy now, I can do it.

36:24But the reality is I was still there, like clothes are all over the floor, houses of mess, I don't have groceries, nothing. But I had told her I'm cooking dinner for her tonight and I'll be damned if I didn't look like an adult for at least two hours while my mom is there. And so I've established the intention, I've established the obstacle, right? I'm trying to look like an adult obstacle. I'm not actually an adult. So, stakes, my mom's opinion of me matters to me. I can convince you that it matters. I can convince you that like, drop everything. I will not fail at this. It will be so bad for me if this happens.

36:55And I talk about it in the story. I'm like, you know, I, and this is a true story. I mean, Brussels sprouts, because that was the most adult thing I could think of. I'm trying to figure out how to make Brussels sprouts taste good. I've never even eaten Brussels sprouts. And like, I tell the story, people loved it. They loved it because I took a low stakes thing and I told a story well. I love that. That's really, really great. And yeah, I say this a lot, but aspiring, fledgling podcasters that ask me about sort of what I wish I'd known when I started the show. And there's all the technical stuff and all of the strategic stuff that's good for growth hacking.

37:25But when it comes to the show, when I first started doing it, I thought that the job of a podcaster was to basically be blinckist for your guest, that you were supposed to ruthlessly index whatever's in their head and that you, any moment that was meandering away from it, any sentence that wasn't directly driving some sort of return that people could action in their life, I basically wanted to be Andrew Heuberman's website dictated to people, but for everybody on the planet. And over time, increasingly, I've realized that the best podcast is just five architects. They architect the vibe. And all that they're doing is they're just allowing you to marinate in that vibe.

38:05Today's vibe is here are some contrarian thoughts that you may take offense to, but you're probably going to find interesting. We're going to whimsy our way through a bunch of side stories before I decide that it's time to move on to the next one. That's the story. That's the vibe for today. People know what they're going to expect. I love these listicle -style articles in particular because it keeps everything quite snappy and it keeps it moving and it stops everything getting to. It's not about being like, right, Chan, I need to the five step process on storytelling and then I need to understand exactly how to do the whatever.

38:37It's good because it focuses you to make sure that you get something out of a conversation, but allowing someone to meander and let's not forget, I've sat down opposite Rogan. A lot of my friends have multiple, multiple times. That man is a, like, he is like a cook for meandering. Like he is in love with meandering and it works amazingly on his show. because it just feels so naturalistic because that's how you talk with your boys or that's how you talk with your girls, right? When you sat at the dinner table or out having a beer or you've just finished playing pickle ball or whatever, someone sees a particular type of bird.

39:17Guess what? The next 15 minutes are about birds. Like, and then the next five minutes after that are about how birds are actually a siaop from the government and I saw this conspiracy theory online. And oh, what about Australia? Remember you've seen that thing that Australia doesn't exist and that's a siaop? But yeah, actually my aunt went to Australia. I've got a friend who's doing rattlesnake conversion therapy because rattlesnake's a turning game, due to East regions and the water. How do you think that Alex Jones trials going and isn't he the most suprous, and you're like, it just fractures and branches off.

39:43It's like freestyle rapping, but really slowly. And I think that that protracted just allowance of, I'm gonna follow the curiosity. It keeps people who have got very interest interested because it doesn't pigeonhole you too much. it's a natural representation of how people have normal conversations. And even if you sit down to try and have a normal conversation with someone and then you began to constrain it, everyone would feel the constrain. Like I've got a friend, really famous comedian who sat down with dinner with Jordan Peterson. It's a long time ago now. It's the first time he met him and he's become friends.

40:15The first time he met him, he had notes. He tried to have a conversation with Jordan and apparently halfway through, it was like, I need to stop fucking about with these notes. Like I'm not here to interview you. I'm not the New York Times, right? Washington Post. He'd just have a conversation with the guy. And guess what, like if he had a bad flight that morning, you're talking about flights for 20 minutes. And that's fine. And yeah, I vibe architecting, storytelling, whimsy, really leaning into it, like, you know, unnecessary detail, like cold blustery November night. All this shit, like, yeah, get in there.

40:50I love that. I love that. Yeah, I think it's a podcasting is a medium that allows for that. That's the beauty of it. Not other mediums, you can't do that. You can't meander in a TikTok in the same way. But you could do other things in a TikTok, which are very interesting. You can say nothing in a TikTok and it works as long as you had the vibe right there too. Have you seen this girl who did this? What the fuck did DJs actually do? Video that went viral? You haven't seen this? No, what is it? Oh my God, we need Jamie here to pull this up for you. So this is TikTok. because this girl, I think she's a model.

41:26She's just looking at her phone. Like she's like very close to her phone. It's not even like a staged, whatever. It's like she's just looking at her phone. And she's crying. It's like a tear going down her cheek, which is inexplicable because all she's saying is, she's like almost like broken down. She's like, what the fuck did DJs actually do? Like what are they, what are the buttons are they pushing? What did the buttons do? Is it connected to anything? And she just, she did that and it was so funny. It was not trying to be funny, but it was so funny. She was saying nothing, which was, the whole vibe was there because immediately she was like, somebody who was so shook by this unknown and this like realization that I don't even, I don't even understand this thing.

42:03And I think it might even not be real. Are we sure that this was real? And they went viral now. And then a bunch of DJs started to do it. It turned her saying that into a sample and turned it into a song. So they're turning it into a song. And then she came but as she came back on also, like the very next post where she was like, somebody DJs are answering me about what DJs actually do. And now I just got me thinking, what is footballers actually do? I mean, like, are you guys just running around? Like, almost flirting? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you guys should slide into my DMs now and tell me what you do, because that other one works so well.

42:35But she gets TikTok in a way that nobody does. I think like she's gonna be a superstar. I watch a bunch of her content. It's because she is a vibe architect there. She knows how to be at her house doing nothing while still entertaining you and making you feel like you know her like she's did this like kind of like Girl next door hot thing right so she's hot enough that TikTok is interesting But she's makes it feel like she's not trying she's relatable enough that feel relatable Yeah, yep, and she's talking about nothing But she's entertaining when she the way she says it so it's just like amazing like mashup now Rogan does the equivalent of that for podcasting, where he's like, he gets a good guess, but not like celebrities, really.

43:20Like it worked when it was like his friends were good hangs. It's like, then we're going to talk about stuff. Well, we'll kind of go wherever. And we could talk about nothing, but you still are entertained. And he's still kind of learned something because we talked about a nothing subject that you knew zero about. And so you know, he gets you that way. So I find this stuff very, very entertaining, very interesting how it all plays out. It's not how you would have thought. And I'm sure many people told him like dude three hours way too long for a podcast. Yeah. Cut it down, trim it out, edit it, make it 40 minutes, that's the length of a commute.

43:51Yeah. And he was like, I'm just going to do what I want. How about that? I remember when I first started doing podcasting and I looked, you know, run everything by the data. Okay. So what is the optimal length for a podcast? Well, if you want to maximize completion and balance that with value, you're looking at it's between sort of 30 and 40 minutes, I think because that's the length of a commute you want people to be able to commit to it during a commute. It doesn't account for those psychopaths out there like me and probably you that listen to stuff at like 1 .5 or 2 or 2 .5 times speed. That's like double commute or whatever.

44:23But yeah, and ultimately it comes down to you having fun because if enthusiasm with storytelling, enthusiasm plus storytelling or enthusiasm about your story is a vicious combo. Me and my house might always talk about this. These Rally Crust, not Rally Crust. Is it Motor Crust or Rally Crust, Rally Driving, off -road, rally driving, like Colin McCray, what he used to do. There are these guys that wear anorax and it's the Scottish Highlands and it is the middle of October and it's pitch black and freezing cold and they've been camping there and they stand there by the side of this dirt track to see 0 .25 seconds of a cargo go past, that's it.

45:08And then they turn to all of their boys and they're like, and they can't believe it. And watching anybody get fired up that much about anything fires you up as well. This is why enthusiasm is contagious. And this is why toxic positivity and going against cynicism is good because it has a trickle down effect, right? Like a contamination zone from a nuclear spill, you've got this fallout that just continues to go. And it can happen on the internet and it's this girl. This girl was genuinely so intrigued and found it so funny to observe this thing like what do DJs do and I've employed them for 15 years and it's still a question that I can't give her a definitive answer to.

45:51She's on the sun. What the fuck do they do? So yeah, I think very, very good. Okay, next one. If you're in your head, you're dead. What's that mean? I guess there's kind of a theme with these, which is smart people do really dumb things. And I think an example of that is people who are in their head a lot. So if you're in your head you're dead. I heard that once and they're just resonated with me partly because it rhymes. I'm a simple 10. But also partly because there was something that was very true about it. And I didn't even fully understand it yet. But I was like, yes, what though? Yes and what?

46:25That was my reaction to it, which is a very good signal for something you want to know know more about, which is an immediate visceral yes without the intellectual understanding yet. And what I learned from this was a very simple thing. I want to be happy, like many people do. But I did something that most people don't do, which I tried to figure out how they held you actually be happy. One of the things about actually being happy is that you need to get out of your head. So most people who are, again, the type of people who listen to podcasts, I'll call out with a lot of people who listen to podcasts, they are in their head.

46:56They try to think their way through life. They think their way into, they think their way through problems and that serves them. But then they think they can think their way through feeling. Like, they want happiness. So they try to think their way there. Wait, whoa, no, no, hold on. You can't, you know, like that's like saying, I'm going to talk my way through cooking. No, no, there's two different things. Like I can maybe think my way, like an logic, my way through logical problems. but I can't think my way through emotion. That's not how emotion works. Trying to think your way out of overthinking is like trying to sniff your way out of a cocaine addiction.

47:31George Mack. Two, George. Two bangers in the sevens. I love it. He's great. I just added, by the way, I just added George to my work slack even though me and George don't work together because I was like, I just think more George in my life. So we just have a channel on Slack or like, I'll just dump random shit like this and he'll do the same. It's amazing. Highly recommend. So the realization here was I always had a mindset. I thought the formula work like this. I thought if you think a certain thing, you will feel a certain way, which will lead you to do a certain thing. And that is true. If I think that this person is, this person just cut me off while I was driving, I will feel pissed, I'll feel angry, and I will then do something in retaliation.

48:19I'll road rage, I'll drive, I'll cut them off, I'll flick them off, whatever it is. Think leads to field leads to do. I thought it's a one -way street. I didn't realize most like math equations are reversible. Like if A plus B equals C, then C equals A plus B. So the other way also works. And it actually works better in this case. So if you do a thing, you will feel differently, which will cause you to think differently. And so anybody who exercises knows this intuitively, whether they've wrapped words around this or not, which is If you focus on, if you think you're feeling tired or shitty and therefore you You know if you think I don't have enough time or I'm feeling I didn't sleep enough last night Whatever you'll feel tired and shitty and therefore you won't do exercise But if you just happen to overcome that if you if you quickly just short circuit that and say don't not listening to that thought And you instead just go do the thing.

49:11You go and you do 50 pushups right now on the ground. You go into a cold plunge. You do something physical. You will immediately feel different, which will lead you to have a different thought. And so once I realized the equation works better the other way, the traffic is less crowded going, driving the other way on that road. I was like, this is the hack. And so now I realize that the thoughts are not the sort of master controller of the universe. They're just an equal party to this. They have one seat at the table, feelings have another and actions have another and Actually, they all influence each other.

49:44So if you want to feel differently, you can either think something different or do something different and doing is just way easier Because if you try to think yourself out of it, you just tie yourself up and not usually and so once I realized that Realized this I realized I had lived a lot of my life in my own head trying to think my way through everything and a much faster version of this was to just do something This plays itself out in a bunch of different ways. So one time I saw on Twitter, somebody say something like, I've been having panic attacks. So anybody found a way to get myself to not have these panic attacks.

50:16And they were like therapy or you could try just really talking yourself through it so you're not feeling that you don't think that thought they're or you don't have that feeling they're for you don't have the panic attack. And then Emmett Sheer, who's the CEO of Twitch, the guy who had acquired my previous company, replied to it. And this was, I never really thought a CEO would chime in on like, hey, here's how I deal with panic attacks, but he did. And he goes, uh, fastest, fastest hack for panic attacks, uh, immediately dip your face, uh, submerge your face into ice cold water. Um, you will stop having the panic attack immediately because it activates the mammalian dive reflex.

50:52Yep. And I never heard, heard this before. I just completely needed me, but it was exactly in the same line of thinking, which is often the fastest way to change how you feel is a rapid change in your physiology, which then will lead you to think a different thought, which then will lead you to feel it in a way and have a different action. It's just a hack. It's just a complete life hack that most smart people don't utilize. They're just brains sitting in a dead vessel. And you see this, go watch how people operate. They just sit in their car, sit on their couch and sit at their desk, or like you want to make a, you want to have a meeting where you're going to make a key decision that might change a trajectory of your entire company and everybody sits there hunched over tired after a long day, eating shitty food.

51:34Full of muffins, yeah. Yeah, trying to get a coffee just to stimulate themselves, just to kind of get through that thing. It's insane. We make decisions when we're in that physical state. It is, it is an absolute leak or weakness in both people's game. One of the interesting things I learned from Kelly Starritz, Supple Lappard Guy was if you've ever had to take a really mentally challenging phone call. What you will sometimes find yourself doing is like a puppeteer has got a hold of you, you'll stand up from your seat and you'll start locomoting around the room. You'll just do laps. You've got a 30 square foot room that you're in and you're somehow managed to create some totally arbitrary route that you're walking in a figure of eight or an infinity symbol or whatever around this room.

52:19We're just built to move. Humans are built to move. We're built to be on the ground. We're built to be out in nature. We're built to be connected to the ground to see sun, et cetera, et cetera. You don't need to go full, like, all -brain markers, psychedelic, like, biohack, Ben Greenfield, biohack stuff here. Like, it's just, notice within yourself what your physiology feels compelled to do when things happen to you. Like, you do something, you reach for something because the cookies or the cinnamon rolls or the coffee or whatever is in front of you and you've conditioned yourself to think that that's the thing that's going to change you.

52:55Heuberman's got the best quote on this, which is, you cannot change the mind with the mind, you have to change it with the body. I don't know if that's strict as with most aphorisms, there's exceptions. Meditation is purposefully changing the mind with the mind, right? Like it's actually isolating the mind to cycle on itself. But I think the broad rule is very true. And I've always said this that if you gave me the choice between having a good night's sleep or going to the gym. I will go to the gym every time and my mood will be reset more from pre -to -post training than from pre -to -post bed.

53:30I can wake up and yesterday's bad mood or whatever can bleed through the night. I'll have a dream about being kidnapped by people from Liverpool and being forced to do the marketing. I had that literally happened a couple of weeks ago. I also had another one where I'd committed a war crime and my old cricket team from 20 years ago knew that I'd done it and And they were mercenaries hunting me and Sam Harris was a newscaster trying to track me now. Speaking of Sam, the episode that I did with him here, this really lovely bit where he's talking about kind of this cerebral pornography that a lot of us have where we sort of prey at the altar of cognitive horsepower.

54:08And presumed that because we've got such good concepts that we can just, you know, we can sort all of this. And when he tries to explain to his smart friends that meditation and maybe letting go of that and finding a little bit more ease, releasing the tiller a little bit more might be a good idea. They say, well, that sounds roughly equivalent to being hit over the head with a hammer. You know, I look at all of my great concepts, you would have a much better life if you had some, you should have more concepts like mine. Like, imagine how great you'd be if you had my concepts. Right. And it's, yeah, I, it's a permanent battle, I think.

54:42And you're right as well to point the finger into the ears of the people that are listening to podcasts like mine and yours. because you're so good at this. You just told a funny, the story about being adapted forced to do their marketing is so funny to me, by the way, that is like an amazing. And then you connected the dots to some like Sam Harris, like you have this like bank of quotes and frameworks and nuggets from the smartest people on earth. That's so amazing that you have that. So first of all, you're good at what you do. I appreciate that. Thank you. The second is I had a realization while you were talking that I think is a new philosophy that I have just realized.

55:22Let me try to work this out live. Mental minimalism. So basically, I think it's becoming vogue to have a sort of minimalist lifestyle, maybe fashion style, like minimalism is in in a bunch of different areas. One area where it's not in is mentally. So the sort of knowledge porn, worshipping at the altar of cognition, collection, collecting mental models and frameworks, like their stamps, I think a lot of this is complete wasted energy and actually counterproductive. What's that Bruce Lee thing? It's like, I don't fear the man who has, those a thousand cakes, I fear the man who's practiced one cake a thousand times.

56:04Same, same, same zis. That's how I feel about, I really just wanna understand a few principles and that's it and how would it be? I want to go how do you know which are the right principles? I think there's the I think they're the ones that resonate and they'll still change over time So like at any given season of your life you need different there's different principles that will speak to you Almost in a like when the student is ready the teacher appears type of thing Right now in my life. I think that there are certain ones that that stand out more than others, but this Mental minimalism thing I think works because it ties into my favorite meme the the midwit meme the Yours mine and George Max George is asking about if he's going to do it the midwits guide to life So I never heard this he's thinking about doing a Coffee table book which is every page is a different midwit meme And it's just them just All of them I mean first customer Whatever you start I'll put I'll put me into whatever it is.

57:09Yep that meme. I I told my business partner at the beginning of the year I said, this is the meme of the year. I said, this meme explains everything I've done wrong in life and everything I've done right in life. When I did it right, I did it right according to this meme when I did it wrong. So if people don't know the meme, it's basically, I'll actually, I think you might explain it better than I do. Can you articulate what is the midwit meme? And then let's play with that a little bit. Of course, yeah. So it's an IQ distribution, which is a bell curve, right? So you have a graph. And from left to right, you have stupid on the left.

57:38And you have super, super smart on the right. And you have this bell curve that runs showing that there's more people in the middle than there are on the edges. On the left, you have this guy that kind of looks a little bit like in the underthrow with this sort of furrowed brow and sort of these sort of recessed eyes, he looks kind of thick. And then in the middle, you sort of have this woke sort of SJW screaming very tense kind of like glasses, stress out guy. And then on the right, you have the sage who almost looks like a Jedi master or whatever. And usually you have both people, the stupid and the smart person end up coming to the same realization and the person in the middle has some over complicated ideas.

58:18So one of the obvious examples would be lift weight -eat protein, stupid guy in the middle. I must ensure that my pre -digested grass -fed coffee butter is perfectly served 30 minutes before to ensure that my protein window, lift weight -eat protein, right? George is, but George's favorite one of these is the guy in the left says I'm the guy in the left. The guy in the middle says I'm the guy in the right and the guy in the right says I'm the guy in the left. That is good. There's levels to the midwit meme I'm now learning. Matters. I think that meme explains so much of life. I think that most people should strive to be, you know, the funny thing you could strive to be either the Neanderthorough or the Jedi doesn't matter.

59:00they come to the same conclusion. And this idea of mental minimalism, can you distill down why you're doing something to one reason? People love pros and cons lists. And they tie themselves in knots trying to weigh this out the scale of one pro, one con, two pros, one and a half cons. And they can't make any decisions. Or this happens to me a lot in the business world. I talked to a founder today. They're starting a new company. I said, your last company was so interesting. You raised $20 million. You did all the stuff. You did some good things, but obviously they didn't work out. That's why we're here versus on your yacht.

59:34So what'd you get wrong? And you proceeded to talk for 20 minutes, telling me about everything he did right. And I was like, what happened? I asked you a question. I said, where did it go wrong? You gave me 20 minutes, which already is an incorrect answer, because the answer should be simple. And then the 20 minutes were weaving through things you did right and things that other people did wrong and things that other companies tried. What are you talking about? people don't even learn the right lesson from what they did. And so like, you know, I would simplify a lot of the things in life, right?

1:00:06They like the diet part of my life, eat real food, not too much exercise, right? Like that's it, right? Um, um, eat real food, mostly veggies and exercise. I know this is, this is diet advice at the simplest level. Um, all I need to do now is intensely do that thing, right? at the difference between knowledge and wisdom, knowledge is knowing what you should do, and wisdom is doing what you should do. Like to me, that is my definition of wisdom. It's knowledge applied. It's doing what you should do. You do need enough knowledge to at least know roughly what you should do. But what most people do is they then over index on knowledge and go try to learn all the possible things that there are to know about the subject and under index on wisdom, which is actually doing and applying the base knowledge that they have.

1:00:53Yes, so trying to take the mental minimalism thing Making it a little bit more applied. I think that it makes me think a little bit about the explore exploit framework Which is that you need to be able to expose yourself to enough ideas that you can work out which ones are good Which ones are bad Tim Ferris has a phenomenal idea, which is his system for memorization and it's called the good shit sticks and What he suggests is you know if your Tiago forte and your Ali Abdal and your built from like that? cohort of people. You'll have a perfectly organized, ever -no external brain that's got everything's root -folded and decision -tried back to whatever, whatever.

1:01:35If you listen to something and it stands out to you and you can't not send a screenshot of it to someone from a book or screen record it and send it to your friends or put it in a group chat or write it down in a note. Yeah, that's good. That's good. The good shit sticks. And that for me is the easiest way to to remember stuff because you don't ever have to remember things that you're not excited about remembering. It's easy to remember stuff like the one that I've got from you earlier on today that Ceney's get to be right and optimist get to be rich. Money, beyond money, right? I can't forget it.

1:02:07I can't forget, I'm going to remember that now for five years, right? I'm going to be quoting that in half a decade's time. Can't get rid of it. You don't matter. If the story about storytelling, if you switched off and you started thinking about what you've got to do later on today or what you're going to make for lunch or whatever, like sweet, then you don't need to go back and try and remember that because it wasn't for you. And that's that, you know, you just enjoyed the lovely warm tones of what we're going through. So explore, exploit, good shit sticks, good, good, that's it. So we've got, how do I expose myself to it?

1:02:36How do I allow things to pop up? Like, what's my selection criteria from the things that I've been exposed to? So that's a nice little framework to run ourselves through. And then I would maybe say, when it comes to like stopping yourself praying at the altar of cerebral horse power quite so much, all of the people that I know that are the most effective in life have a very small number of operating principles and one orientation, usually, one single orientation. And this is a less than orientation. What did you mean by that? They are moving toward a particular destination. I hesitate to say goal because I don't think it's quite the same as a goal.

1:03:16It's more an area that they're moving toward. So for instance, for George, his would be he wants to be able to have fun and write. So his entire life is built around him being able to have fun and write. It's to write for two hours every single morning. It doesn't matter where on the planet he is, and he wants to have fun. And fun for him can be from hanging with friends. It can be doing cold to cold to be learning to play pickleball. It can be traveling. It can be doing whatever. Right. Two stories. One from Jeff Bezos. Apparently, while he was at Amazon, every single decision that was made was run through one single orienting principle.

1:03:53The orienting principle was, does this improve the customer experience? Does this improve the customer experience? Every single decision. Don't know if it's true, symbolically, it's useful. Second one, Elon Musk. Does this get us closer to Mars? Does this get us close to Mars? And if you have a single orienting principle, evidently, Does me taking a poop now or taking a poop in 15 minutes time which one gets as close to the Mars like that you know you're not going to ask yourself that question but just having that orienting principle and this is why Homozi who has got an interesting approach to this he talks about periods of life phases phases or periods of life and he was talking about for this next phase or for this next period and he's breaks him up into seven year blocks He was like, I know that I'm going to be in Vegas for the next seven.

1:04:43So I don't mind. Like, I can just lock in. I mean, Vegas, this is what we're going to do. We've got the apartment. I've got, I know where I'm going to buy an office and I'm going to do whatever and I'm going to build a gym. By having phases or periods of your life, it allows you to be more ruthless with your orientation principle because you don't, it doesn't need to scale for quite as long. If you accept it, you're time bound on what you're doing at the moment. I actually think seven years is fucking insane. Like, obviously, he's probably got it broken into 90 day sprints and one year blocks or whatever.

1:05:17But by having it at least time bound, what it permits you to do is be like, right, okay. All that I need to do within the next 90 days is build up a healthy eating habit. And my social life can go out of the window and my business might take a little bit of a hit. But I've decided in advance that this is the thing that I'm going to do. And I like the orienting principle as like a way to simplify down. I've been exposed to all these ideas. So I'm good ones have stuck about the ones that I enjoyed are the ones that I've kept. Now what am I really, really aiming towards? Okay, which ones spoke to me the most?

1:05:48How does it fit with my lifestyle and how can I time by time bound that for the next? However, long. Yeah, the time thing is interesting because you can use it in a bunch of different ways. You can play with time in a bunch of ways. So when you think that something's going to be really hard, you shrink the time to time box to be like, cool, what's the best I can do in the next 45 minutes? And all of a sudden, the brain becomes a, I call the brain an answering machine. You just have to figure out with the right questions, right prompts, like AI. What are the right prompts I need to give it in order for it to give me a different answer?

1:06:24Ask a better question, get a better answer. And so you could time box on the short scale to be more productive, to be more creative. You can time box, like you said, to depressurize a decision so you can think in both directions, what I'll do sometimes is say, what if I was long, how do I take a longer term orientation towards this? So for example, I might say there's a meeting on the calendar. I don't really see the agenda. It doesn't tie into this thing I'm doing right now. But like over a long time horizon, I think Chris is awesome. And I want to do awesome things with awesome people in the long run.

1:06:58Great. It's worth doing. Or, you know, this person, I could kind of win more in this deal now. But maybe if I give a little, it actually builds some good will with us and it lubricates the next 10 deals we do together. I met a friend once. I really wanted to be an investor and I had no money. And he was like, so first I just didn't do any deals because I didn't have the money. I just limited by my imagination. Don't have money, don't do deals. And I missed three deals that became billion dollar companies. And at that point, I was like, okay, well, I don't want to really see number four. So I'm going to find a way.

1:07:32I still have no money, but I'm going to find a way. So I asked a different question to my brain. How can I invest even though I don't have money? Brain says, well, you got friends who have money. Why don't you ask them? Why don't you do a deal with them? Take a little less economics, but at least you do the deal. And immediately go to a friend who's maybe 10 years older than me or so seven to 10 years older. And he's got money and I said, I wanna do this deal, he said, yeah, I said, okay, well, I don't really know what's the fair split here. Like, is there a standard? I'm googling, I can't find it.

1:08:01I don't wanna be a sucker, but I also don't wanna be greedy. And I don't know the answer. And he, I thought, well, this guy's a business shark. So I'm like, certainly he's gonna shark me with this offer. I gotta prepare myself for this shark attack. This guy's been so successful, made hundreds of millions of dollars. He is, I'm playing Chesa against Magnus Carlson here, We're trying to negotiate this deal with this guy. And instead, he text me and just says, whatever you think is fair is fine with me in this deal. I actually don't care about this deal. What I care about is doing deals with you for the next 20 years.

1:08:31And I was like, huh, never had a text message like that. Never even had an experience like that. Never met somebody who takes that long term orientation. Basis and others have, I think Basis donates a lot to the long now foundation, which is like this, in San Francisco, there's a clock that's like 10 ,000 year clock or some shit like that. like this tells you like think longer, think bigger. You will operate differently than somebody who's always short -term minded. So you can go that direction or you could shrink the time horizon and say, you know what, I don't know the forever answer of my purpose in life and what I want to do with my career and all the stuff.

1:09:05But what I do know is like, this is fun right now. I think it'll be fun and why don't I just set two years? What are great decisions I can make that I'm happy to commit to for a two -year period, but not necessarily a 20 -year period. So you could depressurize the situation and allow yourself to think more clearly. My buddy Sam has a version of this called worry time. And he's kind of like, I'm a pretty laid back guy. He's a lot more like high strung in general. And I'm like, how do you live like that? And he's like, oh, I found my mechanism. So he goes, I have something called worry time. He's like, I used to worry all the time about whatever it is.

1:09:35Money, my car repair, whatever's going on. He's like, and I realized like that really doesn't get me anywhere. To have this like low ambient worry at all times. There's low level, non -specific stress at all times. He's like, so I just started setting out time. He said, okay, I don't worry about money, except for Sundays from 11 a .m. to noon. And that's my time. I know it's there, and I'll think about money during that time, and I'll say, do I have enough? And am I spending too much and whatever? And I'll make some adjustments. I say, I'm good. Till the next Sunday. And he's like, that's what I do.

1:10:05I literally just scheduled it in. And just the fact that I scheduled it of like, now's the time I'm going to work on this or worry about this. totally changes my, like, allows me to then function freely and think clearly other than that. I love that hack. Justin Marys has a similar one about choosing what to work on. He's like, a common thing you see is people get to a certain point, like, middle of their career, and then they get paralyzed. They can't decide what to do. They're looking for the perfect project as the perfect conditions. That's just going to be, like, sufficiently ambitious and prestigious and noble and lucrative and all these things, and they just don't know what to do.

1:10:39They can feel totally lost. And he goes, one of the big things that works is basically committing to something and being like, I'm going to not question this decision every day. My trainer says this thing, he goes, you don't plant the seed and then dig it up the next day. Are you growing? Like, no, you plant the seed and you just water it. You just water it. You just, you know that that plant is going to take a little time to sprout. That's okay. You don't dig it up every single time and question it. And so, um, getting the sort of scheduled worry time or scheduled commitment times. I think I think people are mostly victims to time and then you meet some people that are sort of masters of time.

1:11:15They manipulate time in a different way and I didn't even have language around this until I met them and I started to realize, oh, there's some games you can play with time that actually make it work for you versus just this thing you're running out of and don't have enough of. Next one. People think they learn from failure, but I don't find that to be true. Why? It's another one of those things that everybody says and you sound crazy to disagree with it. Everybody says, oh, I failed, I learned so much, right? I didn't lose, I learned, right? And it's a great mindset to have if it were true. It is simply not true in most situations because if you press on that, you ask about it.

1:11:56So what did you learn? answers not at the tip of the tongue. Okay, let me give you some time. Let's think about it. Okay, so what did you learn, right? I gave the example of the founder who I said, well, it failed. Why did it fail? And they had a different story. Some people in success learned the wrong lesson. I had a guy work for me, 18 years old, and he was talented at what he was doing, but he had like many people do. I did at 18, too. I had a bit of a degenerate streak, like to gamble. And you know, when I game what I played online poker kids nowadays they play Robin Hood and they play crypto and they play other things right so He was like, you know, I'm talking to him on a call and he goes quiet for a second I'm like hey, did you are you do you hear me like I said let's do this you're writing the notes you stop writing what happened He goes oh, sorry.

1:12:43I saw the Bitcoin crash to $4 ,000 and I wanted to buy and I go and I'm like two things a We're in a meeting. Why are you looking at the big one price B? Why is big one to 4 ,000? I want to buy two On like some crazy leverage so he's buying like 25x or something like that So he puts in like 5 grand but buys 25x worth But like he's gonna get liquidated if the price drops anymore, but he played that right makes money and so he's 18 or 19 years old I think he's got a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank from like combination of like taking all the money I paid him for work and then gambling and trying to run it up and And I'm like, okay, that's good.

1:13:23And I had always talked to him about this one company. So there's this company that he was really interested in that was like whatever, some gaming company listed on the Australian stock exchange. It kept talking to me about this. I'm like, dude, do you think I care about some company in Australia? That I can, why do you tell me about this? He's like, oh, I think it's gonna be big. So I'm like, if you think it's gonna be big, you should invest in it. But I forgot that he's not a normal person and he's going to invest everything in it. So he does. He invests all of his money into this one stock.

1:13:51Of course, things don't go right. That company wasn't doing so well. They say they decide, you know what? Shit's not going well for us. We're gonna do what was in Vogue at the time. We're gonna pivot to crypto. So they go and they say, we are now a blockchain gaming company. Australian stock exchange doesn't like that. They boot them off the exchange. They say we don't support crypto publicly -traded companies. So they delist them. So now my friend is 20 years old. He's holding $200 ,000 of a stock that is no longer listed on the market and basically has no pathway to get back on there and just seems like a dead end.

1:14:28So he joins this Facebook group of people who also were like stockholders, like victims of a victims group. And people in that group are just like, what do we do? Like I own the stock, I can't even sell it anymore and so it's not publicly traded anymore. So what do I do? And so some people are offering, like, look, I'll buy it off you for like, you know, 10 cents of the dollar. Like, I'll just, I'll give you 10 cents for every dollar you have of this. And people are happy to move on from their position. So my friend decides, you know what? The thing I'm gonna do, the lesson I've learned so far in this like extreme risk -taking thing is that I didn't take enough risk.

1:15:04He immediately goes and doubles down on it. And he buys, he goes and borrows more money and it starts buying more stock from all these people that are selling for pennies on the dollar. He becomes like one of the largest shareholders of this company. Somehow through like dumb luck, this company starts to like crypto, crypto hits a bull run, crypto starts to run up. Now any crypto company is looking good. NFTs become a thing, this company's perfectly positioned to do something. NFTs share price goes way up, but it's still delisted, but it's now worth a lot. So a guy approaches him and says, I'll give you two million dollars for it.

1:15:42Hold on, I gotta take my daughter to go pee once I - That's okay, all right. Potty training.

1:15:50Here I am. Drop in knowledge bombs and then I have to go wipe a butt. And potty training. That's the duality of man. Get you a man that can do both. Exactly, that was the commercial right there. Where was it? Okay, guy comes up, offers him two million dollars for his stock. I'm like, how the hell did this work out from? Of course, he says, no, he says this is gonna go bigger. And he goes forward. And I'm telling the story. And at the time I told the story, I was telling it, because I was like this guy who was my intern had this crazy story, like, isn't that amazing? And one gentleman at the table goes, huh.

1:16:27He goes, so do you think he learned the right lesson out of that? And never even heard somebody say this question, which is, did you, you learned, yes, But did you learn the right thing from this experience? And I don't think I had even learned the right lesson and definitely my friend who was the kid who was doing this had not learned the right lesson, which was He was taking away this lesson of like I'm a genius and I'm right As his like take away when he actually probably should have been taking away, you know a slightly different lesson And I just see this over and over again And I think there's a practical part of this too people don't write down what they were thinking at the time or later, like they don't really have a system in place that will let them assess what they're doing.

1:17:08So that you can kind of like, our memories are generally quite bad. Our memories of our own thoughts are worse. Our memories of our thoughts when we were wrong, you're kidding me? Like there's no chance we have an accurate view of that. And so because you don't actually have this like accurate, like, I'm doing this for this reason. I think this is how it's going to play out. Fast forward. Here's how it actually played out. Well, you don't have this before and after to learn from. So I think generally people aren't very good at learning from this. And I think it's also interesting that they don't have a system to do it.

1:17:41And I think people should have a system to assess the decisions you make. Because judgment and decision making is probably the most important skill you can hone over time. But we just kind of leave it up to like, I hope it just comes with age when actually you can probably increase the rate of learning on your decision making if you like establish a little system for yourself of being just writing things down, right now, why you're doing what you're doing and why, and then assessing it later regularly, regularly assessing it. I always thought it would be really cool if there was such a machine as being able to take a photo of the texture of your mind and being able to revisit it, you know, for the people that are trying to become more positive or more enthusiastic or more balanced or or economists or mindful or peaceful or aggressive or overcome their shyness, whatever.

1:18:28Go back to you five years ago, you ten years ago and get a sense for what sorts of things captured your attention on a daily basis. What were the sorts of things that you were caught up ruminating about and worrying about whether they were going to happen or how they could have happened or what you would have done had you not wanted them to happen. If you were able to go back and experience that, literally feel it again, the texture of your mind, the contrast would be so unbelievable, but it's the drip, drip, drip, Japanese water torture of erosion that's so slow, like a tectonic plate moves over time that it nudges what we expect from our daily existence to the point where you can't notice it.

1:19:14When did you become confident? When did you overcome become your shiners. When did you, whatever? Like there's no point at which it happened. It's like asking someone when they became old, right? It's just a gradation that you went through. When did you become peaceful? When did you become angry? When did you become resentful? All of these things, they just occur. And I think that self deception around things that we got wrong, as you said, is just it's fucking unbeaten. I went to the doctor the other day and I'm sitting there and I'm like, yeah, I think I might have sleep apnea. I don't really know.

1:19:50I did a test back in the day. They said, you know, it was very mild, but I feel like it's gotten worse. I don't really know. And he goes, um, he's like, have you gained any weight? And I was like, um, yeah, maybe a little, I don't know. Yeah, I think so, but like, I, not like something drastic. And he pulls up my chart and the, the doctor's off as I go to, it's like the chart's like in between you two. So it's not like back in the day the doctors used to have it and they used to look at it then talk to you Here we could both see the screen and so I'm looking at the chart and literally he's like so 20 2017 you were 40 pounds lighter than you are now I was like 40 pounds.

1:20:26That sounds like a lot of weight to get. I guess it has been I basically gained 10 pounds a year for I think eight pounds a year for five years And it was like um, yeah, I knew I'd been getting kind of out of shape dead bod status, but like uh when you hear it that way or you see it on a chart, you're just like, what? Like it was eye opening. And that's me and I can see my body. Imagine my brain and my level of wisdom and the things I focus on and my intellect and my decision making, like I have no chance of noticing, either the degradation or impor improvements, to be honest, of those over time.

1:21:01I do wish a such a machine would exist. George, so again, this is like that George is the third guest here. It just doesn't happen to be contributing to be very quiet today. He's got this thing that he's doing, which is pretty de -de -de -c -pilled as it goes. Where at the end of each day he's trying to capture some key lessons about the day so that he can make the hidden observable in terms of how he feels. And, you know, journaling is kind of a more qualitative solution, I suppose, for this. But you know a dashboard like what Rob is trying to design or George has managed to cobble together on a free type form website and whatever it is that he's using I do think is a good way to start visualizing the things that you care about all right next one I love this one being a billionaire is a stupid goal Why you're around billionaires you you're your amount of of many means and do you have friends with as many means and even more means why?

1:21:57Well, first of all They just give the money away anyways. So clearly it couldn't be that valuable. Like they worked their whole life to get it and then they give it all away. So all ready that tells you that like a massive accumulation and abundance of money beyond a certain point certainly doesn't matter otherwise they would not give it away. Like let's say I gave them extra health. I don't think they're donating that. Let's say I gave them extra time, 100 extra years of life. I don't think they're donating that. But you can give them a billion dollars and they'll give away 99 % of it. So that's the first thing.

1:22:29Just the first signal that maybe this is overrated. The second is, I'm not against abundance. So some most people who hate billionaires just hate abundance. They hate when anybody wins at a large scale. I'm not that guy. I like people who win. I admire and respect and strive to be what those people. But what I admire and appreciate the most is somebody who picks the right game to play. Somebody who chooses a game or designs a game of their own liking. So the question then becomes, What are the other things that could become massively abundant and a massive winner of? Okay, the money game is one.

1:23:04And there are certainly checkpoints along the way of money that matter. When you don't have to have any more money, like you don't have to have a job because you have your investments make you enough money, right? That's financial freedom that was like the key checkpoint of life or it's not being in debt. Getting back to zero for somebody who's in debt is a big checkpoint. But beyond that, you know, the checkpoints run out or they spread out in a big way. And then the prizes shrink. It's like, what's the difference between somebody's got $50 million and $500 million? It's like one, rents the jet, the other owns the jet.

1:23:33There's not that much of a difference, right? One has a library in their house, the other guy pays the library at the school. It's like, ah, two cares. Do I really care about that anyways? Not worth dedicating my life to. So the question is, what things of abundance are worth dedicating your life to? And how do you think about those? So I think it's great to have an abundance of time, free time, but also youth. youth. That's youthfulness. And also if you're just a young person, like when I was 21, I just wanted everything that the 40 -year -olds around me had. They seemed to have the money, they seemed to have the relationships, they seemed to have the cars and the status and the cool job and everything else.

1:24:08And now that I'm, you know, getting, I'm 35, I'm getting it before I assume, all I want is what the 21 -year -olds have. Time, youth, energy, abundance, like freedom. Like, you know, and so, you know, youth is wasted on the young in that way. So I think having an abundance of time is amazing. Having an abundance of generosity. It would be amazing. Having abundance of fun is amazing. I've figured out what to do with my life just by simply asking the question, who is having the most fun in their career? And that was a much better guiding principle for me to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life was look around and figure out who's having the most fun.

1:24:42I knew a lot of successful people, those people were not having a lot of fun. And the scary part, the most dangerous part of it all was, if you ask them, are you having fun? They say, yeah, but if you observe them, it's like somebody whose volume knob is stuck on seven. They don't even know that there's eight nine and ten. They can only go to seven. They think seven is sufficient and maximally fun. Once you see somebody on ten, you look at the seven, you're like, ah, there's a clear difference. Who was the people that were at ten. So there's some people that are like, I would say first, it was sad how hard it was to think of this because I was like, I know a bunch of people who by traditional measures are successful.

1:25:22And it wasn't like I just could rattle off 20 names of people who are winning. Like if you said, who's winning the money game, I could name you 20 people. If you said, who's winning the audience game, I could name you 20 people. But who's having the most fun? Who are the people that are dominating that have fun in life game? It was a lot harder for me to think of those names, which means kind of surrounded myself with the wrong people, the wrong inspiration. I think that Joe Rogan has a ton of fun. And he's kind of like a popular person, so it's not that cool of an answer, but what I think he's done amazingly well is he has managed to make his life about his hobbies without turning his hobbies into jobs.

1:25:58So his hobbies, loves, you know, martial arts, fighting UFC, becomes the commentator for the UFC gets to call all the biggest fights sit ringside. No, gets to know the fighters, follow the sport, study it for get paid to study this thing. Get paid to watch this thing. He would otherwise be paying to watch. Hmm, that's great. But he also avoided all the trappings of that job. He's not on the road 200 days a year like Dana White is. He doesn't have to, he literally just said, I'm only going to do the Vegas shows, which happened to be the best shows, which happened to be one hour from where he lived, you know, was living in the US in LA.

1:26:32And he's like, I'm not going to travel to Abu Dhabi for once one fight, it's just not worth it. Right? He loved comedy, he finds it creatively challenging to do that and finds it amazing to like make people laugh for a living. He does that. And he is one in that game as well. But again, doesn't have to tour 250 days a year like most comedians. It doesn't have to censor himself like many comedians. Podcasting, he's like, oh, I'm just curious guy. I'd love to have these conversations. Became an unwanted podcaster, right? Didn't have to, but what you don't see him do is what a lot of content creators do.

1:27:02They get on a content treadmill, that they don't enjoy, and they're constantly begging for audience. Trying to figure out, what do I need to do to get more clicks, more likes, more, whatever, and they almost ruin what's otherwise the best job in the world. He's managed to become the podcaster without doing that. And so he kind of hits the goals, but also what you call the anti -goals, which are basically the traps you could fall into while achieving your goal. I'll never forget like a friend in college, her dad was a partner at a big consulting firm. And he was making literally $1 million a year.

1:27:31And I thought that was mind blowing. That somebody could make $1 million in a year, let alone like, I thought having a million dollars was like what you accumulate over time. That was the end point of money. And he was making a million dollars a year, but he also traveled Monday through Thursday night. And he would get back Thursday night and then be there Friday Saturday. And then Sunday he would leave again, basically travel for his job. And he did that her whole life and now she's in college and he missed like basically her whole her whole life and she Resented him for it and I was like wow You know can you you know you want success, but you want your kids to like you you want success But your kids to know you you want success But you want your wife to still like you and be faithful in that relationship so like you know define the game a little differently So I think big a billionaire is a stupid goal because it defines the game on terms that for an abundance that doesn't actually matter I love that are you familiar with I just die with zero, Bill Perkins stuff.

1:28:22Good book, yeah, I like that book. Yeah, I became really tight with him after. I brought him on the show. He, I mean, for anybody that doesn't like that book and I can understand why it rubbed certain people up the wrong way because it's a book that's written for people who have surplus income and not everybody does, which means that the people who don't have it get upset about it, he is a man that lives that philosophy. We finished that. Which is classic case, by the way, of pointing the blame the wrong way. You're mad at this guy who wrote this book for some people because you don't have what those people have, that's misguided anger.

1:28:55I would agree. Yeah, we finished that podcast within 30 minutes, we are on his boat, being driven by the captain of his boat, wake surfing for the next three and a half hours, with Phil the unabomber, somebody, the poker player. And I'm like, this is brilliant. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then over the next three or four weeks, I spent a ton of time at his house and he just he does the things. This is related tangentially to something that I think you've done recently or at least I've seen someone write about you or maybe you write about yourself, which is the life -changing nature of having an assistant and integrating them correctly into your life.

1:29:37What does that look like? Let me say two things. One, there's only one thing I remember from the day with zero book. I read it. I liked it. but I only remember one thing and this is a story he tells about. I want to tell it again because it was so impactful to me and I feel like everybody needs to hear this. So I'm like, oh, let me just say his bit here. He talks about like he was, he had some job at a bank or investment firm or something like that, like, you know, the job you want. And his friend was like, I want to go on a trip to Europe for like five or six weeks. Like, let's go back packing through Europe.

1:30:09There were like just out of like school 22, trying to through to 25 years old, some like that. And he's like, let's go back right to Europe. And I think I was like, oh, you know, that sounds great, but like how are we gonna get six weeks off? He's like, we're not probably, we'll ask, but they probably won't say yes, and then we'll quit, and we'll hope that there's a job for us when we come back. He's like, oh man, like that's irresponsible. Like I don't wanna do that. So his friend goes and he's, at the time, he's laughing at him like, stupid guy made stupid decision to quit his job and go backpacking, and frolicing through Europe.

1:30:39And I was like, you know, I'm here making wise decisions. That guy's making unwise decisions. Friend comes back, friend is like, dude, he's like, how was he? I mean, I can't even put into words. Like anybody who's done study abroad comes back with the same thing. We were like, it's hard to even explain. It was so amazing. I stated these hostels and I was, I remet this band and we just jumped on their van and we toured with them for two nights and then I met this girl and she was amazing. We're still dating and I tried this food and whatever. Slept on the beach three to three of the nights, it was amazing.

1:31:09He's like, wow, he's like, I knew immediately that I had made a mistake. Should have had those experiences. And second thing he says, finally, he's like 32, 33 years old. He's like, has accumulated enough social capital as his company to be able to take time off and go do this. So he goes on the back packing trip at like 33 or 32. And he's like, you know, it's not that fun staying in a hostel when you're 33 and like, you know, it's different. There's actually, it's not just that it would have been better to do it then. He's like, there's a time, a season of life where you should do certain things.

1:31:40And there really, those things have maximal impact during those seasons. And what I thought he was doing was unwise. And actually, he was doing the life -wise thing to do, which was to take its vantage of our youth. And it'd go have this experience at the time where that experience is amazing. And I just, oh, that stuck out with me. I just I feel like that is such a such a important lesson, right? They would do it to add a an additional one in that he hasn't released yet. He has this shows the levels of wealth. We're about to talk about your assistant. This guy's got an experience architect who that only job is to find different things that they think he might want to do and then put them to him.

1:32:24And then even if he says that he doesn't want to do them, convince them that he's going to go and do them. And one of them was training, which is like inter -railing in Japan. And there are these five star, very expensive trains that go the full length of Japan. And it's like being on a cruise, but being on a really, really expensive train. And they sent it across to him and he said, each shit, that sounds fucking lame. I don't want to do that. Why am I going on a train? I've got a hot wife. like what am I, I'm gonna go on this train on my own, it's gonna be full of old people, I'm gonna hate it, it's gonna be moving around, blah blah blah.

1:33:01They convinced him to go, he gets on, falls in love with it. He's like, I wanna do this, I wanna do this every month for the rest of my life. What he realizes is that he can do that when he's 70. He can't keep weightboarding when he's 70. So he is banking this anticipation for when he's going to get back onto inter -railing or training or whatever across Japan and God knows where else he's gonna go. So, but that's for the future. So there are certain experiences that you can only do at particular periods of your life. They're better maximized during that time. It's kind of less lame to do them during that time.

1:33:32And it allows you to match the... It's a lot of it is to do with health, like health, wealth and time, and the three factors that you play within this book. Your health is largely a determinant of what it is that you're able to do because your hips aren't going to take it skiing when you're 80, right? Right. You probably find to do training, like to sit on a train and be served like cake by a nice Japanese person, right? Like that's going to be fine. So yeah, periods, yes, you, assistant, what have you done? How's it worked? Yeah, I mean, I don't even think it's that crazy, but I think that most people, I sort of rail on these controversial things, which is like the common theme of all of my beliefs comes down to the following, which is, don't follow what most people do, because most people don't have a result that you would want.

1:34:24So like in America, most average person is obese, literally, like by the definition, I think the average person obese, what 50 -something percent of marriages end in divorce, so that's kind of like, that's the average expected outcome there. And most people don't have, you know, more than $1 ,000 in a bank or $10 ,000 for, you know, like an emergency. Whatever the numbers are. The specifics don't really matter, directionally they're all correct, which is that it is easy to feel safe doing what most people do until you realize that most people are going to a destination you don't wanna be at. Then it becomes very risky to do what most people do.

1:35:02So, most people, when they get money, by luxurious things, like fancy cars, clothes, watches, maybe vacations, things like that. And I have this, and so there's this, I would say one of the general wisdoms is, experiences are greater than things. And I always say, services are even better than experiences. Like, I was able to hire an assistant who works full time for me for the cost of a couple of purses. And an assistant improves the quality of your life far more than a person that sits in your closet because you're afraid to take it out and get a scratcher. same thing with a car. I hired a private chef for our family for less than what most people pay for a luxury car because I didn't care what it looked like for like when I drove around or you know like I like a quality car a safe car But like I didn't care if it was an Instagram car But I did care that somebody would Go get fresh ingredients make healthy food for me and my family that tastes great and better than I can that I don't have to worry about Going getting groceries cooking or cleaning or cleaning up afterwards So I got my time, I got my health, and I got my taste.

1:36:13Like, I can't believe everybody doesn't do this, who can? Right? So that's the first thing. Assistant, same thing. Higher assistant. Through Shepard, she's in the Philippines, so I didn't even go with a full -on personal assistant here. So let me try first. Let me dabble with it this way. And it's great. She's the first line of defense on your email inbox and your time. And she makes me, she helps me be a better friend. I'm like, hey, my friend had this thing. I think I want to get them this gift. Can you go find a, you know, I want to buy a McCandle that has this funny thing about this inside joke on the front and just send it to them in a month.

1:36:48And also Windsor birthday. Let's make sure we remember that this year because I'm kind of a shitty friend otherwise. And they just help you be a better person. They help you be whatever the person you want to be, they can help you be. And I created a system to like, to do that. So I had to learn how do you even operate, you know, with this, with this new functionality to have, to have somebody who can do this with you. Once I learned it is pretty big unlock, but I would say just in general, finding a way to buy luxuries that you actually want is great. I will also say, I think for people who are sitting there listening, they're like, oh great.

1:37:20Oh wow, it was great to have a private chef and assistant, good for you, douche bag right? Like that's fair, take that on the chin. But I will say, I used to have a big reaction whenever I would experience, whenever I encounter people who had this type of stuff. It was basically bitterness. And then it would be disguised as, oh that's stupid, I wouldn't want that, that's stuck up. I would tell myself some story that would make myself feel better. And the story was either that having that thing would make me a bad person or that I don't want that anyways for whatever reasons, reasons. And I had this visceral experience.

1:37:57I went to somebody's house in Las Vegas and they live in like a, basically a palace. And then they drive the fanciest cars and they have literally there's a pool that goes around their house like a circle like a moat But it's just that's their swimming pool. It would be cooler if it was a moat Exactly, it's like a swimmable moat It's a moat you just want to stay in instead of cross. Yeah, and And I was talking to my buddy and I was like yeah, they have all the stuff I wouldn't want that anyway. I was being defensive about it. I didn't even realize it and he goes He goes, you know, just gonna let you know one friend to another You know, like one black belt to another trying to master, we're both trying to master our minds.

1:38:31You're talking very differently than you usually do and it kind of makes me feel like maybe, you know, it's kind of bothering you that you don't have these things and you're telling yourself all these things about why you don't want them anyways or why it's bad to have them or how this person's a douchebag for having them. Instead, what if you switched it? What if this was Costco and you got to walk around and you're sampling a bunch of things of a lifestyle to figure out which ones you want and which ones you don't. And so instead of the reaction being, I don't have this, therefore I feel bad.

1:39:01Be like, oh, I'm so lucky, I get to try this, to figure out if I like this, how I like this, or if I don't care for this at all. Fantastic, what a cheap way to learn that. And I just flip my mindset to like, oh, I actually seek being exposed to other ways of thinking or living, in order to get a sample, a little taste, a little test to find out, oh, that's awesome. or, hmm, they do it this way, but I would want it this remixed way. Or just, oh, I don't want that at all. I think I don't have to desire that because this is not something that appeals to me. And that really changed the way I interacted with people who I felt like, because I felt embarrassed at the way I was reacting before.

1:39:40Having a friend who calls you out in a, what sounds like, reshuring, but firm way like that about your bullshit is, You need to keep those sorts of people close to you. Well, we made an agreement. It was like, hey, look, I want to be this way. You want to be this way. We're both nerds about this stuff. So let's make an agreement that in our quest to master this, to become a black belt, there are going to be times where you're going to have to point out techniques I'm doing wrong, things I'm doing. And so I want you to just say I'm to me when you see them. And I promise you that I will receive it as a gift.

1:40:19The feedback is a gift and I will receive it that way. So that's the agreement. We're both gonna do that for each other. That's part of who we're both like mine in this way. So we know we can talk to each other about that. Whereas if we talk to the wrong person who's not seeking that type of input or opinion, they might take that the wrong way. But let's set an agreement in a foundation right now. We are men who wanna live by a certain code. That's our code and we both are down with this. crowdsourcing your personal growth. I like it very much. Sean Pouri, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I'm so glad that we got to run this back.

1:40:52The first one was phenomenal and I want to do this again. So please keep on coming up with controversial tactics for people to have a better life. Where should people go to keep up to date with all of the different things that you do? Yeah, you can go to my email list is where I put I think the best content. So just go to shanporee .com, S -H -A -N -P -U -R -I, dot com, you can put the link in there, whatever. I just put your email in there. I send out stuff that I think is the most thoughtful stuff that's hopefully gonna make you think. It's really all my only promise. I think I can spark thoughts in your head.

1:41:26And then the second thing is the podcast. So we have a podcast called My First Million. If people listen to this podcast, probably to become more wise, most people listen to this podcast, or our podcast to become wealthy. And so, yeah, it's me and my buddy Sam. It's a good time. It's very entertaining. And it's kind of about business and opportunities that we see or stories that we hear that, you know, we get to share on the pod. So my first million go subscribe to that. Hell yeah, Sean. I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you.