#952 - Alex Hormozi - 41 Harsh Truths Nobody Wants To Admit

26:04I have to make this worth it, right? Cause this sucks. So what can I learn from this? What can I be better from this as a result? And so obviously there's things that I've been working on in order to improve. beyond that, because gratitude has been so difficult for me, which I've talked about before. I've never once said I am the champion of happiness, but in an effort to try and make it easier for me, I was like, well, how do you operationalize gratitude? Right? And so the simplest way that I have is, imagine something terrible, and then remember that that has not happened. And it's like, I've yet to find, like, that has been the simplest way, like, be grateful.

26:45It's like, what do I do to be grateful? Like, no, no, like that more. It's like, that's, it's like, it's been difficult. So it's like, okay. And on the flip side, imagine something that you love, imagine it's gone, and then remember that it's back again. And so that's, I think, the operationalizing of those moments, which is, I have this coffee moment. Man, if I never had another coffee moment like this again, this would mean more to me. Okay. and by doing that and by remembering what would be like to not have this, then this thing now in the moment becomes worth more. And so it's basically creating a wider discrepancy between the moment we're trying to find gratitude with, and something else in order to basically manufacture a delta.

27:23Because I think that to your point, we're so much more sensitive to the negative delta than we are on the positive delta, that we have to make the positive delta massive. And so how do you make moments massive? It's like, well, then we just have to drop the floor out and then remember that now all of a sudden, we went from the bottom of the pool back to the surface, even though we're not above the water. It's like playing pretend. So I'm gonna 100 % plank pretend. All the gratitude is this plank pretend. Mm -hmm, I'm not sure. I think if something happens and you're grateful for it, yeah, that's you enriching something that exists, but what we're doing, what is enriching me?

27:54Uh, really noticing it. Because things that you should be grateful for will often pass you by without you noticing them. So we noticed them originally and then we noticed them. Do you notice them? Do you notice them? Oh, I know. I have to remember to be grateful and then I have to go look for shit. Yeah. But even as it happens, right? And this is the point as it happens. I'm here. I went to Rufus Tussol at Q2 Stadium in Austin, which is whether the football club plays. And Rufus Tussol, great music, cool. And with a ton of my best friends, it's finishing at a time that's not in time. saying, you know, the weather was lovely.

28:32But the six. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was in bed by something. But it wasn't that loud. The sound wasn't that good. Okay. Well, everybody was like, wish it was louder, wish it was loud. Because it wasn't. We were at the very back of the stadium. Beautiful view. Yeah. Not fantastic for sound. You go, dude, you're watching fucking Rufus to Seoul in the stadium with your friends in Austin. Weather's great. Everyone's got a beer or a sparkling water in their hands. How many great times? I just this is something that you can notice in the moment you have pick your direction Western man. Yeah. And you are picking the sounds not good.

29:05Yeah. But in your business, you are rewarded over and over and over again for realizing that the sounds not good. This can. I've done this before. Yeah. Are you zoomed? Can you do this? So if you look very, very closely here, I might even have to get out of the way for the the alignment of the Instagram logo with the F from Follow Us here and the N from Newtonic below is out of alignment by what looks like one point. It's less than a millimeter. Guess you noticed this guy. I have been rewarded throughout my entire professional career for noticing things that other people didn't and then claiming that there was sufficiently big issue that we should actually changed them.

29:51Yeah. Reverse gratitude. And yeah. And yeah. This is a small thing. It is now a big massive, it's a massive problem because you win in the weeds. Yeah. But you don't win in the weeds when it comes to happiness unless you are doing it in the other direction. Yeah. Right. So you need to, and this is so hot and this is, this is why we enjoy talking about because just for everybody who's listening, um, Chris and I had a conversation prior to this being like, what are we, what are you thinking about right now? And so we're both actually in the same vein of thought, which is why both of us were looking forward to having this conversation with you guys about this difficulty.

30:25Because one of the other things that's come up with regards to gratitude and happiness has been, there's a second conversation that I think happens internally, at least for me, which is that I will judge myself on being not as happy as I should be, or not like, hey, I didn't notice anything I'd be grateful about. You fuck. Right? And so trying to separate the fact that I, Like to take this to the absolute extreme, why should I be grateful? Why should I be happy? Why do I demand of my life that it must be happy, like that I must be happy during it? That's a demand. And so I try to decrease my demands in general as a personal practice.

31:02And so I've been thinking about that concept in and of itself because the very early, the earliest part of my career, I just was done with happiness. I was like, it's irrelevant. It's irrelevant. And so now I'm getting the point where I'm like, it would be nice to also have this while I have all this. I'm aware that this is a very sort of basic bitch insight, but I do think that given the starting point that you were at, and to a lesser degree the starting point I was at, is like a polmosy light, like lifestyle approach. That's a big deal to make this visit. And I think it's one of the reasons I was particularly interested in talking to you today, because I would say the last three years are so since we've been recording together.

31:42From an architecture perspective, it's largely being the same. Yeah. That it doesn't matter how you feel, the hard work just needs doing, hard things are hard, that's why they're hard and disregard the emotions that are getting in the way of it. And I do think that that works for a good while and it can really propel you to great things. But I also think that sometimes stuff you have such an orthogonal change in the way that your life's put together where you go, I might have exhausted this fuel source. I might need to switch from booster rockets to something else. And yeah, you've got, as you said earlier on about how you, you take small bad moments, maybe very impressive bad moments and then you scale them out.

32:30You're not having a bad year. You've had a few bad days that you're thinking about for the rest of the year. I've found it helpful when I'm in a bad season, like I'm in right now, to just focus on having a good day. A good day in a bad season is a bite -sized victory, string a few of those in a row, and a bad season feels less hard. I'm pretty sure the difference between a happy life and an unhappy one doesn't come down to how many good, bad days you have, but which days you think about over and over again in some seasons of life, maintaining is winning.

33:03I couldn't have put it better myself.

33:10This has been my big focus right now. I'm not the first person to say this, but just winning the day. Bill Ackman had this. I heard him on a podcast talking about this hard season where he was getting divorced. He just lost $4 billion in perishing square, his investment firm. He was not him today. He was earlier on his career. It was just the worst. Because he lost his money, the divorce was for way more money because it was based on his net worth that didn't exist anymore. It was just a terrible slog. And he said one of the difficult parts about that period is that there was no one thing that was like oh, I can tackle this today Like you're not gonna finish the divorce today You're not gonna undo the $4 billion loss today And so it's like when you have these larger more complex negative things that do scale It's like how do you how do you navigate through that and for anyone who's listening right now It's like maybe it's the bad breakup.

34:00Maybe it's that or maybe you're getting divorced right or maybe it's like the business Isn't working the way you want it's like and there's like 10 things that you have to fix and it's like well I can't fix that change in the logo until the next run. So I just have to see this every single day. And so he had this very tactical advice, which I liked a lot, which is he just tried to make progress. And that was it. And he said, you know, in a day, it's almost negligible, right? But at 30 days, you're like, okay, I moved this. And at nine, you're like, wow, you know, this is really, this is really materially changed in what's happened.

34:32Now, does this mean that our mood is still being dictated by circumstance? Yes, I'll be honest. Yes, it does. But I think many of us have this ideal. We'd love to be able to be in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. But sometimes progress is the W. Like maintaining in some seasons is winning. And I've had to tell myself that also that we can have these different, like on the business factor I'm murdering it. I'm crushing there. But like I tore my quad this year, which sucked. I had a, yeah, painful. I have a neck thing that's just been bugging the hell out of me.

35:11Right? So it's like, and I have two great fears in life. One is that I lose my mind, which is really just more than I'll be a burden to everybody else. I won't know because my mind will be lost. Right? And the other is chronic pain. There's like my two great fears in life because chronic pain is really tough. Like the first thing you think about when you open your eyes in the morning is pain. And it's like, fuck. It's like, and now I have to be in a good mood, right? Because I demand this of myself. And so, So when in navigating those scenarios, just trying to chip away and also to take the reverse of, I had this one great podcast today.

35:44I'm going to make that thing, the thing that's making this a great day. And then if I can make that great day, then maybe it could be a great week. And then trying to expand those, basically let those good moments eat up the season. And I made a conscious decision on me first. And I think I, did I send you the screenshot on my HRV? Yes. So I was May 1st, I was like, fuck this. I was like, I tell Layla, I have to creed that the rest of the year will be good. And so I'm putting so much mental effort into this which is why this is so timely from us talking about it. In actively trying to minimize all the down things and super, super focused on those moments and be like, cool, I had that good moment, that's my day.

36:27Days made and I'm trying to even say that more. Like, oh, this podcast made my day. This podcast made my week. Now I used to think, oh, this made my week when someone would say something small, I'd be like, that's what made your week. Like you must not have a lot going on. It's so true. Right, like, I like my own judge machine, right? That's lame. Yeah, it's a stupid thing. Oh my God, how feeble, how small is your life that something so unimpressive is a source of gratitude to you for a week or a month. And yet, and yet. Yeah, your life is made up of small days like this. That is what life is and if your Expectation of life is that it's going to be well until I play the main stage at EDC until I make the billion dollars until I get Marry to the love of my life until I get these things You're just holding your happiness hostage until something great happens.

37:21Yeah, and what if again, what we said before What if something small could be something great? Yeah And it exists in the specific, like the tiny moments. That's been a huge process. Boring victories, but trying to make it, basically, I've had to recalibrate my entire scale to how little of a thing can happen that makes my day, how little of a thing can happen that makes my week, how little a thing can make my month. and like how crazy would it be if a year from now I say 2025 was a great year. You know, I woke up pain -free for probably like 70 % of my days. That was a great year. But like I got to have coffee with Laila in the morning once a week and that filled me up for the whole week.

38:17Like if I can, and I wanna, I'm putting, So anyone is listening to this, I'm putting a huge amount of my discretionary effort into this because it's my belief that right now what will prevent me from achieving my ultimate goals, because that motherfucker's not gone. The thing that will stop me from achieving my ultimate goals is running out of steam because, and this may not be real for some people, but I don't need to do this. I don't need to work this hard. And so I have to make or I'd like to, I'd prefer to make the ride more enjoyable. We'll get back to talking to Alex in just one second, but first I need to tell you about element.

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40:11Modern wisdom.

40:17That's a huge departure, I think. Prefer. I will still fucking ride it, don't. That's a huge departure, though, and look, dude. I, the conversation that we had the other week, and I think the one that we're having now, it might be less Goggins, Jocco, Pilled, Screaming, Alpha Motivation, fucking sleep token track over the top of it. Edit thing. However, one of the things that I've noticed when seeing somebody that goes from position like the one that you were in or the light equivalent that I was, to talking in this sort of a way, there's an awful lot more humanity. I think that people can see in that because because work until your eyes bleed, nobody cares about your emotions, fuck you dude, just go harder.

41:09Although it sounds fantastic in theory, it's very impersonal and it sounds, it sounds mechanistic, it sounds robotic, it sounds detached and that's fantastic and you can do that for a while. You can completely disregard the way that you feel for a while, but only for a while. and sooner or later, the entropy of positive affect being a motivator, the fact that enjoyment is efficiency, does tend to catch up with you and it'll catch up with you in sneaky ways, right? The quad tear, who knows, and I'm completely open to this, who knows whether the quad tear would have happened And if the book had been finished in twice as long, you know, your system sort of contributes to itself in a global sort of stress -based manner.

42:02It's, you know, it's weird, is that the thing that's made the season hard is not actually like work ethic or even time constraints because like I work pretty much every day all day. But like that, that's, that's been baseline and that doesn't really bother me. I like doing that. The thing is that the nature of what fills that time. If I have all the things that are not work that are related to work, that I must do as a result so that I can get back to doing the work I like doing. Me writing a book is my favorite thing in the entire world. Us doing these podcasts is some of the best moments that I get to have in my life.

42:38Twice a month I'll have business owners to come out that are bigger, that are not portfolio already, but they're usually like five to $25 million a year, like right in that range. And I spent a whole day with those 10 businesses. And I tell them, I'm like, this is the fucking best. I love this. This is my favorite thing in my entire life. But it's everything that's not that. And Basis talks about the overhead, right? And I think it's when the overhead starts to become a disproportionate amount of your time. And I think that at every level of at least entrepreneurship, I get these periods where the overhead just become bigger and bigger and bigger until I fix it.

43:19And so like for us, I had, I think, I told you, I'll tell everybody, probably, like I had, I think eight or nine lawsuits within, like 30 days in the beginning of this year. And so I was like, okay, that sucked. And then I'll tell you the story that happened on top of this just to get through in some context. Laila had a health thing, she went to the doctor to get it checked out. And REEA was with her, and I was like, hey, how's it going? What's going on? And she had said earlier, she can't get in. I was like, what? What does that even mean? And then the next text I got from the EA was, she has cancer.

43:58And so I'm reading that text and me like, okay. All right, this is reality now. like this is now the new frame and I sat with it just long enough to enrich and absorb That concept yeah, and so then I was like all right some thinking okay like chemo like what do we need to do? Die like I'm already thinking through this stuff and I was like okay What kind of cancer is it what state like that's what I'm going to this? So I asked for more details and she was like oh my god No, the reason that it was delayed was because the front desk girl has cancer and she just messed something up And that was what she was using his or she used laylitt is enough cancer and I was like oh there she she doesn't I don't even have this other stuff, right?

44:37But she doesn't have cancer. And the thing is that Laila, after that, occurred when I hung out with her later that night, was obviously annoyed at whatever issue she was dealing with. But for me, I was like, I saw her, and I just gave her this big hug, and I was like, hey, I was like, you don't have cancer. And so it's crazy, there's been the exact example of gratitude, this terrible thing, and just kidding, it's not a thing anymore. And now I'm really grateful that you have the terrible thing that you have now. at least is not cancer. And so to bring this back, that all still happened in the same period of time.

45:12And Chris mentioned this earlier, I don't know if it's before this part, but like I, there was a, there was a mishap with printing my next book that's coming out. And the equivalent of one and a half acres of trees basically became unusable because there were sufficient errors in the book that I couldn't in good, you know, in good conscious, kind of like the can. It's like, how bad of a mess up does the, does it have to be on the can for me not to sell it, right? And like, I had to have this internal, I was like, maybe I could make it a thing like, hey, our, our books had some mess ups and we're, you know, it's like, no one's gonna care.

45:48No one's gonna care. They're just gonna remember that they got a fucked up book. And so I had to destroy those, right? And so I have, I could, I have like seven more massive ones, but I'm not going to get into it. But the beauty of this entire thing was I got to have this experience of being forced to say, okay, is there a world where I'm going to have to endure more of this? And the answer to that, if I continue to do what I'm doing is yes. And so I need to build a legal team, which is what I've now built. And like, and so there's these things that, and all of a sudden now, am I better at gratitude or did I solve the problem?

46:26I don't know. I'd be like, really? I don't want to be right. I don't know, but as of May 1st, things are a little better. And my actual health for anybody who's a health nut, my HRV average was about 32 and I'd have many, many low 20 stays for a 36 year old active male, pretty bad. And since May 1st, I'm up like 15 points on my HRV and I have changed nothing. Like I eat the same, I work out the same, I'm pretty routine oriented and the only thing that has changed was the decision that 2025, I'm not tossing out 2025. Like, and I started in the beginning of the year and I was talking to a good friend of mine and he was like, dude, fuck bad year.

47:09He was like, he's like, stop fucking saying that. And I was like, you're right, I should stop saying that. It will be a handful of moments, over five months that were spread out. And then the back seven, I was like, I can fucking murder it. It's on this around. Yeah, we're turning the ship around, right? And so that's it. I've actually been like, it's almost been like an exciting thing for me right now. I have a little bit of a smile because I'm pumped for it. Personal observation. You get absolutely better returns at the top ends of achievement, because oftentimes, assets pool to the winners.

47:39The problem is, to achieve the highest levels, you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hoped the achievements would get you. That comes a time when the hard work you have to do is learning that you can't work any hard or any longer, and that you have to change what got you here to what will get you to where you want to go. You can work to get anything you want, but you have to sacrifice the other things you want to keep it. And that's sometimes harder than the work.

48:05Yeah, 2025. In the day. Yeah. The hard remains the same. Actually, I've given this a huge amount of thought. So like, what makes something hard? Like just in and of itself, like what actually makes something hard? And so if we think about this as an aversive stimulus or negative stimulus, then you have, because habituation happens on both sides. And this is what I think is so fascinating, because it's like, okay, well, I wanted this big thing to have, I wanted the rules of the Royce, I wanted the Ferrari, whatever stayed my whole life in here I am, right? Now I was happy for a week and then all of a sudden I got used to it, right?

48:36So I was like, why can't I habituate to the suck? Why can't I habituate to the suck? And the thing is, is that you do. The only thing is that what makes the suck keep sucking is what makes punishment effective, which is increasing intensity and variety. And so if you want to effectively punish someone, you can't just keep punishing the same way. You have to increase intensity and change how you do it. And the beautiful thing is that life doesn't fight fair. And so life will change the intensity and will give you more variety. How many times would you be like, I didn't know life could suck in this way.

49:08Like this is a new one. You know like, wow, like you spend the roulette of life and you're like, oh, here's another one that sucks. My dick was kicked from another angle. Yeah, it's a congratulations. had no idea. And so, when thinking about that, it was like, okay, I think the reason that the hard persists is because the nature of the currency that you pay or that you exchange for the thing that you want changes. Because in the very beginning, you basically have to conquer your friends and family who tell you that this might be a bad idea. Okay, fine, you get over that. And then you have to conquer yourself in the most basic level of like, I have to do something.

49:43Okay, so you start taking actually, start learning, you start learning how to learn stuff, which is learning through failure and learning through it. So you start doing that and you realize you're not going to die if you fail. Okay, then after that, then it's like, okay, but then now you have this dramatic skill deficiency, right? So you have to very quickly level up and a ton of different things in whatever domain you're in, right? And then that has many failure loops that have we have we have we habituated to failure? No, it's to it's to generalized. So the failures that that occur are specific.

50:13And so it's just like, oh, I didn't know I could fail in this way, right? We had an event, so we hold an event at our headquarters monthly. When people come out, I remember it was three times in a row. There was this thing at the front desk that got messed up. I was like, how? It was the canned thing. I was like, how?

50:37How? Right? I swear to God. I got the message back and they said, well, the system messed up in a different way. And I was like, same issue, the root. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, and it happened three times in total. And so it was the same problem, three complete, they're like, well, we fixed that version of the problem, but then this one came out. And so it's like, it's still sucked. And so the thing is, is that I think failure is our, our habituation to failure is so narrow that every new type of failure, all three of those hurt. Micro novelty. Yes. And so, and so when I think about that is like, when like, like I said, this year, There financially has been the best year of my life, right?

51:17And so that's been awesome. But I've had health stuff, lay -led health stuff that was separate. We had legal things, which is another whole thing, because it's in a book stuff. Yeah, there's the book stuff. And then there's that thing stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of things. And so all of those things happened, and I was like, oh, it's just that the currency has changed. The currency that I'm paying. And so I'm very happy to pay the long hours currency. I'm very happy to pay the, what am I willing to give up in terms of social life? Like that to me, I've habituated to that price. That's not hard for me.

51:50I don't even consider to sacrifice anymore, which is I think what you want, because people will sometimes maybe see you or maybe they'll see me and think of like the Goggins, you know, working to your eyes, but the thing is that like, and maybe, maybe, I don't know Goggins, but I'll just speak for myself. I don't really push that heart. Like I don't really push. I do it and I've already habituated to this. This is not an access for it. Pushed in the initial. Yeah, to get you here. Yeah. Yeah, and I like, we worked, so I had my whole team in a boardroom at the very beginning, you saw my timer. So I have a timer that's, well, on my phone it has like 22 and a half hours on it.

52:30And so what I've been doing is I've been challenging the team to, they wanted to do a 12 week project and I said, hey, can we do it in seven days, right? And not only are we gonna do in seven days, we're gonna actually see how many actual hours does it take of us working together to get this done? And my hope is that we get the whole thing done under 50 hours with eight guys. And so I'm like, okay, so we can shrink. What was once going to be three months into this period of time. And so over the last two days we just did this and I'm gonna do it again tomorrow, is that everyone was starting to work at seven and continued, didn't really leave the boardroom except for like to use the restroom until about nine o 'clock at night.

53:01And so you're talking 12, 14 hour days, but like on the whole time. And the thing is, and this is what's crazy. Every single guy who is in that room texted me afterwards. just like that was fucking awesome. Like, I wish we could work like this all the time. And so like, I don't think like, we talk about work and what makes work hard and all these things, but like, most of the things, once you learn how to work, the work itself is self -reinforcing and you enjoy it. It's everything else that you didn't know you're going to have to sacrifice so that you could get back to working. And so that's where I've had to really consider this Bulgarian method approach.

53:41So we talked about a powerlifter, a friend of yours, who like he went to go train with the best coach of all time. And so there's the Bulgarian system, which is the same thing in Bulgaria. There's tiny little nation disproportionately outcompete in Olympic lifting. And the way that they do it is they have a system, which basically just breaks everyone who does it, except for the one person who can sustain it and he becomes champion. And so I actually see business, unfortunately, or fortunately, very similar in a lot of ways, which is that the path, the science of achievement is fairly straightforward, right?

54:14Like you have to pursue high leverage opportunities and that is the working smart. And then if everyone is working smart, then the only thing left that you have to compete is working hard, right? Because people say it works smart and not hard. Only works when you compete against dumb people. Like my competition is smart. And they're also working hard and so we both have to work hard and so That price though is has been something that I've been staring at For myself because I've never had the aspiration of being number one I have at least for me. It's not in my DNA I haven't had that desire to be the richest man in the world not something I care about and so then it's it's getting into Okay, what's the sweet spot that maximizes enough?

54:52Where I can actually start looking at some of these other preferences that I have and say you know what? I am no longer willing to make that trade and And the other part of me, we talked about lame earlier, like a coffee, you know, major week, to the same degree. Oh, like this is enough for you. And I've actually had a very, I was just a disdainful, almost take when I would hear somebody who, okay, I don't know, I'll take this, we'll find out, take this, whatever you want. You know, someone gets to a few million dollars a year and they're like, that's it. I made it. And I, and I have to fight against this.

55:28This is what I'm working on. I see that and I'm like, pfft, out of the game. Like he's out, he's out, done. Like, I roll it. Quick to, quick to, yeah. Yeah, like there's so much juice left to squeeze. Right, but then it's like, well, the thing is that the juice that it comes out is your output and the thing that's being squeezed is you. And so that's what I've been thinking a lot about. Look at that person who gets to, however much you go. Yeah, 50 grand, 100 grand, a million, two million, 10 million. And they go, that's enough. Yeah. Who won? Yeah. Because that person finished their race way before you, way before you, you're the, you're the fucking retard that's still running.

56:11Let me tell you this story. So my first gym ever, I had my first manager who worked there. And he was a trainer. He was awesome. Best trainer I ever had. and I promoted him to manager. And with that pay raise, he went from something they bred of like $25 ,000 a year as a trainer paid by session to getting a salary of like $45 ,000 a year, which for me was a ton of money at the time when I was paying somebody else, right? And he did it for six months, crushed it, did an amazing job. And he said, hey, man, can I talk to you after work today? And I was like, yeah, sure, man, what's up? Like you're doing great, whatever.

56:44And he says, hey, I don't want to be, I don't want to be managing anymore. And I was like, what do you mean? You're quitting? He's like, no, no, no, I just, I just want to be a trainer. And I was like, I mean, but you realize your pay would get cut in half. Like that, like that doesn't really make sense. And he just looked at me. And I still remember this to this day. He looked at me, he's like, I'll just be poor then. And I, and I, it was like, it was like, it was like, it was like a bomb dead. And I was like, and I looked at it and I was literally speechless. just then I just said, I respect it, but I will never understand it.

57:23And the thing is is that he is to this day, I got to see him, I got to see him three weeks ago, first time like 10 years. He was then the happiest person I ever met and today, or when I just saw him, just as happy. And he's like, dude, I mean, I can't believe that we were starting that jam and you were at the floor and we were getting some of those stories and he's like, and look what you have man, all this stuff. And I was like, dude, you won. Like, I'm still trying to catch up to you. And that was a lot of the conversation that we had. A quick aside, if you've been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem.

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58:51We're heading to functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom that's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. The problem is to achieve the highest levels you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hope the achievements would get you. Yeah what's that?

59:09I'll give a micro example of a sacrifice that I've chosen to reverse, which is that I love training. I love working out. I've been doing it. It was my first love. The first thing I've reliked, like really got obsessed with. And over probably the last, you know, how many years, I still obviously trained. I was still, you know, in shape. But my training was, you know, sometimes two days a week, sometimes three days a week, it would be, you know, 60 minutes, maybe 90 if I got lucky. and I had this realization it was during this year, 2025, where I was like, you know, I have all this fucking money and I can do whatever I want.

59:43And I was like, and I can't even have my workout be as long as I want it to be. And so I basically made a rule for myself that I will not work out if I'm rushed. That's the deal. And so I will work out for as long as it takes to work out. And that's that. And so that means that if my workout takes two hours or takes two and a half hours or I'm with a friend and it takes three hours, which was just like talking between sets and having a great time. There are three things in this world that bring me joy. Working out with somebody that I like, eating food with some of that I like ideally, after I worked out and writing the three things that bring me the most joy in life.

1:00:16And I was like, why am I sacrificing one of the only three things in this world that I know that I enjoy to get something that I hoped would buy me the freedom to work out as much as I wanted whenever I wanted. And so what are the things that I put on the altar of the success. What are the things that I sacrificed for this God of achievement? And I was like, this one I'm not only to sacrifice anymore. And so I think part of the reason that like has been a lifeboat for me or a life raft while this kind of a worse season has happened. It's like, I put on like 20 pounds of muscle so far this year because I've been able to like, I've been using that as a really wonderful outlet.

1:00:52And I was like, man, and I'm focusing more on this like my training part every day. I'm like, dude, thank you for doing this with me. Like this is, this is awesome. Like this is great. Like my, I've won the day. Like, I've, I did nothing else. I get to the end of the day and I'm like, I crushed this workout. And that was, and that's enough. It's a big pivot, dude. And it's one that I think everybody that's driven by the sort of hatred of past self whip yourself into submission, pure, written work ethic thing will inevitably come to realize after a time. There may be some outlier for whom their capacity for discomfort and for sacrifice is literally greater than the duration of their life.

1:01:37They would have got there eventually, they just died first. But I think that for most people it's not. And you reach, I would call it something like sort of lifestyle styloscate velocity where you go, I'm all of the objective metrics are right, and the subjective ones aren't, which is a good example of what you've hinted at. And you go, how can I assume that the solution is fixing subjective metric problems with more objective metrics? And then, and I'll say this for anybody who's in the season where like, listen, you're 22 years old and you're like, I need to work my face off, you do. You need to work your face off.

1:02:16But the thing is, is like, there will get to a point where fast forwarding, you know, having a year's. But there's nothing like, I don't regret the amount of work that I've done. And I, I don't regret it at all. And I think that it was absolutely the right decision. And I work a lot now. But people make this extrapolated moment. They take a moment of your life and they will extrapolate it to forever. And assume that if you change your mind, that what you did before this was wrong. But it wasn't wrong. It was right for that time. And then we got feedback during a different time. And this is right for me now.

1:02:51And so I'm going to course correct now. And if something else changes, guess what? You're free to change your mind tomorrow. Yeah. I love this. And I think about it so much that one of the issues with asking anybody who's successful for advice is that they tell you what they do now. Yeah. Not what they did when they were in your position. 1000 % And you should not ask somebody, how are you maintaining your success right now? How did you achieve your success when you were at the stage that I was at? That is the question that you need to ask. And it's the same thing. Stupid people see somebody changing their mind as a weakness, not as a strength.

1:03:34And if you are the sort of person who goes, huh, this strategy worked for me previously or didn't, or I thought it worked for me and it didn't. I'm going to update the way that I operate. Perfect example. I've been on this sort of a flex similar to yourself. I would say my lifestyle escape velocity, I needed to reach a lower altitude than you. So I was getting into a coast as opposed to still using the booster rockets earlier. But I started talking about how purposeful de -optimization, what is it that you're doing the things for transitioning from the work until your eyes bleed to a different mode of reward and stuff like that.

1:04:15And some people that I think don't understand me super well, which is fine because no one's supposed to understand you, especially not random people in the internet. But people see snippets of whatever's been sort of the most salient narrative. And a bunch of them said something to the effect of, uh, bro sold us the problem now he's selling us the solution. Yeah. And as I, huh, that's really interesting because what I'm doing is saying, this works for me right now. And what I was saying in the past was, this works for me right now. Nothing has changed. And this is why there's often, when it comes to sort of internet advice, repatronizing the way that the audience is treated by people that are critics, as if they're sort of these agency -less, undiscerning sponges that are totally incapable of applying or filtering, huh, well, Alex doesn't have fucking five kids and no wife, right?

1:05:13Like, I mean, single father or five kid, what are you know, living in Brooklyn and a single bedroom apart? So, okay, I think you might need to adapt some of the things that he's saying. Or I'm twice as old or I'm half the age, whatever. Like, you should ask somebody what they did when they were at the stage that you were at, not where they are now. So many things I want to respond to. So number one, my embedded command to everyone is use if useful. Use if useful. Number one, number two. This is a documentary, not a sermon. This is a showing, at least my content is like, this is me showing what's going on and I try to be real.

1:05:58And that means that if I change my mind, then it'll change. Third, model the rise. If you want the rise, model the plateau, if you want the plateau. And so saying, Warren Buffett says he had a great year if he only makes one good decision, it's like saying, oh, to get rich, I should fly private. Doesn't really work that way. I should play basketball, I wanna get tall. You're conflating variables, right? I should go to the gym once I have energy. I should start saving money once I'm rich. That's what I'll do. It just conflates sequence, right? It's a win -then -falsie. And so I think the man, I haven't talked about this in, I don't really know if I ever talked about this.

1:06:44The greatest skill is the ability to discern what things to use and what things to cast out. It is the central narrative of noise versus signal. And the reason that I've spent such a disproportionate amount of time focused on behavior was because there's so much noise that if people cannot translate their quote advice into what I should do, then there's nothing useful about it, which is why I think the density of useful information. People, I think people are bloodhounds for value, but I think that value gets translated most crystallized distilled, concentrated manner, when it can be translated into do this instead of that period.

1:07:32And everything else, the amorphous words that people use, especially the motivation manifesto, the, the, the, or just manifestation, we'll get into that one. People get triggered on that. That is what leads more people astray. And so they take the entirety of someone and without all of the other conditions that applied to that person and say, oh, I will take this and apply it to my life and If you cannot pull out what is useful for you? You will never win and that is a really strong statement, but because all you're gonna be doing is trying to and I love this is my favorite tweet that I've heard from Andrew Alkinson from tiny Here are the numbers for my winning lottery ticket.

1:08:16Every entrepreneur explaining how they were successful. And so like the next Google isn't a search engine, right? The best version of your life isn't copying Hormosi or copying Williamson. It's being able to with nuance apply the principles that are generalizable across domains, but then having the, wherewithal, yeah, the discernment to apply the nuance to your specific circumstance. And being able to map those two things, I think is the skill that has got me the disproportionate return on my life. I have bought, and I've been public about this, I've been, you know, very, the early part of my career is very involved of what I would consider the alternative education space, right?

1:09:04People, you know, the courses, the world that has, I would say, a relatively bad reputation. But I have yet, in my life, to have purchased anything from anyone that I have not had an exceptional return from. And is that because of them or is that because of me? Who knows? But I can say that when I even had bad experiences, I could say, these are all the things that I I will not do to a customer. And then I have my notebook of the Crinkled Can and the end that's off the center. And that ability to observe and pause before immediately taking action. Like there are some people that I have met where I know, I'll tell you this story because it's heartbreaking.

1:09:49I've helped a lot of gyms in my career as probably my second season of entrepreneurship. One of the things that we'll do to a gym to make it more profitable is we just pricing. Sometimes we send a price raise letter and this, you know, this thing's tested, we've done it hundreds of times. A guy, you know, reaches out and said, hey, I did your, the whole price raise and 90 % of my members left. And I was like, what? Like, what, like, how, what happened? And so he explained that he had a $29 a month gym. And then he raised it to $200 a month. That only works when you were a service business, not a, what I consider a facility usage business where you're just like $10 a month crunch and it's just like you can use the gym, whatever you want.

1:10:35You have equipment. My model was four people who had trainers and who were teaching classes or sessions or semi -private. And so in those instances, if you're at 99 and you go to, to $200, you're not going to lose half your customers. You might lose a third, but you still make more money, have more profits, etc. But he had taken what is otherwise something that has made He made so many gyms, profitable and successful, and he applied it to a specific context. Now, he says, I'm a gym owner. He said, gym stuff. Why did that? But then what happens is for you and I, or anybody who wants to make content, if I were to say, okay, under these situations, under this particular context, if you have a decent relationship with your customers and you have ongoing communication, then you can say, it's like, you don't need, it takes 10 minutes of disclaimers to get to the point, right?

1:11:20And so then this is why fundamentally like winners will always win because they will still be able to find You know the silver lining even in the terrible experiences that will make them better and my favorite My favorite visualization of the type of person that I want to be is and this is a Harry Potter reference But the sort of Driftendor was made of dwarven steel and dwarven steel in the in the mythology of Harry Potter could only take in that which made it stronger And so it's not to say that the sort of girlfriend or couldn't cut butter or couldn't, you know, just get into a sword fight. But if it happens to, you know, kill a basilix, then it will absorb the poison of the basilix.

1:11:59And so like so many people lose because they want to prove that this too did not work. When in reality it was that you don't know how to make it work. And it has been easier for you to complain and say this did not work the way that I would prefer, right? rather than like, how can I make this work for me? How can I turn this into something that can still be a W? And I think that one skill has probably been the single unlock that I've been able to have because I learned these alternative, this alternative world of education of like, how do you sell, how do you run ads, how do you sell courses, how do you do coaching, all this stuff that has a really negative kind of vibe?

1:12:42But the thing is, is the fundamentals of persuasion there are so powerful. They were just being used to sell stuff that's not good. But the thing is, is that there's so much buyer resistance there that if you can sell stuff in that market, when you go to sell insurance, you murder. And so I think people fail to take in to consideration the context of the person who's given the advice and what piece is useful that they should use. and the rest, you can cast away. Figure out what you want, ignore the opinions of others, do so much work, it would be unreasonable that you fail. Realize it never mattered to begin with, how others once you get there.

1:13:25You've already achieved the things you said would make you successful. Yeah, the first five steps there is my, is basically my master life plan. Figure out what you want,

1:13:39which my first boss, I had a pretty terrible first out of college experience of work, but from that I learned some of the most important life lessons that I still take to this day. And that boss particularly said one thing to me one day, she said, figuring out what you want is 99 % of it. She said, once you know what you want, getting it's the easy part. And I kind of adopted that as a worldview, because it's like, once you're really clear, like this is what I want, then everything that's not that is what I'm willing to give up to get it. Now, that thing can change. And I think that's the part that people miss, is that like, once you learn how to get stuff, then it's like, okay, well, he said he was willing to do, it's like, yeah, well, the thing I want to change, is do I have your permission to change what I want?

1:14:31And I think we should all have permission to change what we want in any given moment. And not having basically sunk life by us. I've like, I put 10 years into this thing. And that's okay. And that's what I needed to do at that time. And today, I'm willing to, I'm going to change everything. And what's really interesting about, if you look at like addicts and alcohol, people who need to quit, you know, whatever bad habit they have, there's a really strong frame. Ed Milett talks about it, which is basically one more. And it's been super helpful for me to not think of my changes as permanent because it's been it's allowed me to make such dramatic changes in my in my life or my business much faster than I think most people have been willing to because there's this this weight of forever on top of everything like we extrapolate like you're in a relationship she told me to pick up my socks she's gonna nag at me forever the rest of my life we need to break right or I can do this for today and tomorrow if it still works, I will do it for tomorrow.

1:15:35And if five days from now or 25 days from now, if I work this way, I then say, you know what I need to do? People are like, oh, he's burned out. It's like, I took a day, because that's what I need to that day. And I think giving myself permission to have that freedom has allowed me to take significantly faster action in what apparently looks like higher risk scenarios because who am I apologizing to?

1:16:01Realize it never mattered to begin with, what's that?

1:16:08Cosmic relevance. So we're willing to sacrifice everything that we have for the thing that we want, and then once we get the thing that we want, we want back the things that we sacrificed, which really just goes to the heart of the human condition, which is we want it all. And we're not willing to make trades. And so one of the reasons that I've actually, I would say largely tossed out the deathbed regrets of most people is that what they do typically is they will have the bias of wanting the other path they could have taken without considering the cost of that path. So they say, hey, I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.

1:16:46It's like, well, yeah, but you didn't because you actually chose the path that you're on and you weren't willing to do that. But what you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone. And so I've had a few moments of clarity over the last year or so. But if you want it all, life will give you nothing. And that has been helpful for me because in pursuit, We want everything without the cost and everything has a price and you will never be able to get the sufficient price tag paid on everything to reach critical mass to achieve a Monarch of success in any domain Unless you are willing to trade from another and I think that That has significantly minimized my regret Before we continue if you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold This is going to help.

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1:19:03We give up our 20s for our 30s. We give up our 30s for our 40s, our 40s for our 50s and we trade everything we achieved in our 30s, 40s and 50s to get back to our 20s.

1:19:16We give up the thing we have most of for the thing that we have least of. And we give up the thing that we want for the thing that's supposed to get it. Right. I will become happy when I'm sufficiently successful and I will sacrifice my happiness in pursuit of success so that I can become sufficiently successful so I can finally be happy. Yeah, we're the problem. Yeah. That's reliably the takeaway. But I think it's a really, really good point. This retrospective life -reprogramming thing that people do, where we spend our twenties wanting to be richer and older and have a family, then we start that in our thirties and we gain more wealth and do the family thing, and then we get back to our forties, and we've got more responsibilities.

1:20:04We've accumulated all of this stuff and then we think, God, if only I could go back to my 20s. But you were fucking miserable in your 20s. This is a great lesson from Morgan House, or, fantastic. I think I sent you the nostalgia audience. Yeah. Yeah. People just search nostalgia. What is fun called? Fuck. Collaborative fund. Nostalgia Collaborative Fund. It's a great essay. And in it, he's talking to his wife. And Morgan's wife is discussing with him what their plans are when the kids are going to move out. And Morgan starts talking about their time in their 20s where they could lie in on a Sunday morning and they didn't have any responsibilities and the kids didn't need taking to soccer practice.

1:20:47And he said, well God, wasn't that the golden years? Like, how am I going to remember? Do you remember how amazing that was? His wife turns to him and she goes, honey, you are miserable. You hated it. You had no idea whether you were going to be successful. You were constantly concerned about money. you were desperately needing validation from all of these people around you, but permanently in dissatisfaction about this stuff. And he realized that in retrospect, he knew that all of his worries were a waste of time. But at the time, he had no assurance that they want something he should fret about and keep himself up at night.

1:21:19We already know how the movie ends when we go back and say we want to relive it. And you can't relive it into the same context because uncertainty is the largest part of the story.

1:21:32I had a personal example that was similar to this, which was Layla and I were talking. And I said, you know, when we didn't do any of the speaking and all the other stuff that we're doing and all we did was just own the portfolio companies and get distributions, I was like, man, life was so chill. Like we just, we could do whatever the fuck we wanted. You know, we didn't have an office. Like we didn't have to show up. We just did whatever we wanted. And she said, you were the worst.

1:22:05And so, and now we're working like maniacs, right? I haven't worked harder than I have in the last 18 months in a while. And she's like, I prefer you working the way that we do now to when you didn't have enough to do. And so I only partially say this for the one person that this this affects, which is that like even like we seek freedom, but it's really that we seek we seek options like the idea of freedom is a blank calendar, but a blank calendar that never gets filled is not a filling day. And so we want the ability to have whatever we want during that day. And so I think being deliberate about what are my good day moments that I can try and recreate every day.

1:22:58And I have it on my wall. I have two things that are permanently on my office wall. Logic evidence utility. And what does it mean? How do you know and why does that matter? And the other three are work out with friends, eat food with friends, write something. My good day formula. And so I had the desire for freedom when you aren't sure what things to fill that freedom with. When you know what to fill the freedom with, then you're willing to give up optionality because you already know you've already pre -selected your lunch for the day because it's your favorite meal. And so, so you are willing to make some sacrifices in terms of flexibility because you'll be able to have even more of those lunches or write even more by making some of these tricks.

1:23:48I've tried many lunches and a few are better than this. Yes. Exactly. And I do think the perennial creatures of habit like you are, and I think certainly I am as well, there is a tendency to disparage new options. So no, no, no, no, I already know the best lunch. Like, uh, you maybe, maybe, and yeah, you've tried a lot of lunches. That's good. But do you really like your, so what, so you're never ever going to try another new lunch? Yeah. Huh. Well, okay. So maybe, but also how much of that, how much of that could be you excusing the pain of adventure and the pain of potential failure? A bad lunch.

1:24:32I might try a new lunch and it might be worse. What a fucking waste that would be. Look at all the time that I've put into trying lunches. Look at the quality of lunch I could have had compared to the new one. And this is a kind of a lesson of getting older and this is almost certainly one of the reasons why people's openness to experience on ocean decreases as they get older, that they have this sort of experts fallacy thing. So I've spent time recently around a lot of people in bands and these guys are very artistic. They have studios that are filled with fucking torn up magazine sheets and like a sock.

1:25:07It's Zach, my housemate, I had a fucking sock sell it to his wall for the two years we lived together. It was like, what's that doing there? So I don't know. But why is it there? And he just, because he's, you know, covered in tattoos and fucking playing guitar and writing fucking poetry and doing stuff, it's just to him that doesn't really matter. And I was like, I should be around people that push me beyond my limits to do new things more. In different ways. Yes, yes, yes. I need different levels of stimulus there. Just to linger for one more moment on that sort of nostalgia golden year thing.

1:25:38There's this really, really lovely insight. Perhaps golden years can only happen in our memory. Nobody believes that we're living through in gold and era right now. We never think we're in the good old days, but the good old days are always new. Well, sometimes, I mean, in COVID probably wasn't, there's some, there's periods during which people would go, that wasn't the good old days. But when you're 85 and you were 25 in COVID, you fucking give anything for it. Yeah, true, true. Yeah, I guess good old days can be in many, come many varieties. It depends on how bad now is. Correct. But I'm sure that in the, whatever, like the 80s and the 90s in America, how many people considered that were living through the golden era.

1:26:18Yeah. Very few and yet in retrospect, everybody just wants fucking Britney Spears back. Do you know what I mean? Like the old one, not the new one, crazy. That's what everybody wants. They want this sort of creed, big tackles from American football, 18 -wheel articulated lorries and big American flags flying. I have spent a huge amount of mental resources accepting suffering and not saying that there's something wrong with something bad. Like a huge amount of mental resources is gone to this because my I've been better and faster at correcting the loop of like, oh, I am not happy with this particular thing.

1:27:00And therefore, there's something wrong. So it takes the story that I tell myself. It's supposed to fix the same. And that's been super helpful with the addition of everything that I remember will always be better than it was. And the nice thing is that there's tons of science that backs us up, which is that we We learn through reward and punishment. Punishment fades with time. No matter how bad it was, like you get drunk, you get hungover, you say I'll never drink again seven days later, you're out drinking again. Why? The punishment of the hangover fades quickly. You are with somebody for a while, you're like, this bitch is crazy or this guy is crazy and then you break up and then all of a sudden, what do you remember?

1:27:41The good times. Because reward sticks. And in some ways, there's a little bit of a hopeful message there, which is that when you look back on your life, you will disproportionately remember the good times. But it only becomes a problem if you limit the present, which is the only thing you've ever actually lived in. That's the fading affect bias. Tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing psychology has to an equation. All right, next one. People only root for others at two times. first, when they're at the beginning of the race, second, when they finish. Neither is when you need it. So you have to master the middle.

1:28:15The boring, exhausting, soul -crushing middle, that's where the winning happens on your own. People will only cheer for you as long as you can't beat them at the game they value most. Friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until I aunt, it's a bug not a feature.

1:28:34I mean, I feel like as you read these, you're reading my soul from this year. I mean, that's why I mean, I tweet these every day as they come up because that's what's top of mind for me. And you know, the boring, mundane middle, like I think about, you know, the very, very beginning people say, you know, I'm really excited for you that you're trying this thing out, right? And I noticed that everyone was very happy for me to try because I temporarily decreased my status. I actually being worse than them during that period of time. And then as soon as I achieved a level of success, which I then realized that their happiness for me was proportional to where they were on the ladder relative to me.

1:29:10And so as soon as I passed some people, then they stopped being happy and then they'd start, you know, you know, saying bad things, right? And the people who were still always ahead were still like, keep it up, keep it up. And there's still people who have been that way my whole life. And I just wonder, even when I pass them, will they flip? I don't know. But also to the same degree, it was after you start the race, when you're in the thick of it, because you'll quickly pass the people who've done nothing. But then you have this long period of time where you don't catch up to the people who've been doing it for a long time.

1:29:40And that's the part where it's very lonely, because you don't have your initial, your initial posse, you have to leave them at some point. But then you don't get to the new group that's, you know, way ahead and actually has some proof behind them that you can actually like sit at the table. And so like today, if I were to do something, I have tons of support, but I don't really need the support now. I needed it in the middle, right? In the many years that like, no one knew who Alex from those years was. And that's the hard part. And I think it's the story that Morgan Hassel tells, which is that you just don't know how it's gonna finish.

1:30:16And that's what makes it hard. It's the uncertainty of like, what if I give up everything that I've done in my life for nothing? And then all of a sudden, if I knew that, then I wouldn't be willing to make this trade. But in retrospect, when you do have the thing, you're like, of course, I was, if I knew that this was gonna happen, I would happily make the trade. But you don't know. And so you're just putting the money down and they're rolling it, but you get to find out if you hit black, five fucking years from now. It's why dealing with uncertainty is such a meta skill. And it's one that, to be honest, it's one that I really suck at.

1:30:47I'm very, very not good at dealing with uncertainty. My required line of assurance in order for me to commit to a decision is incredibly high, which is why I've basically never failed at anything that I've done. All of the stuff that I've done, a string of incredibly slow but very reliable success is just because my required number of sort of justification points is very high. And in retrospect, it might look like it was a risk. It's like, dude, I took so long to fucking make this decision. It's like, I knew that I wanted to move to America for fucking ages, years and years before I actually ended up doing it.

1:31:29And it took a long time for me to commit to that decision. I knew that I wanted to pivot out of night life for a good while before I got myself to the stage where I was prepared to do that. On the on the friend point, it's a painful realization that the small number of good friends want you to win in case you take them with you. And the large number of bad friends are scared if you're winning in case you leave them behind. The best way to know who a real friend is is how they react when you win. and when that happens, you'll realize how few real friends you really have. I mean, look, I don't know whether it's just some sort of cosmic blessing or whatever, but maybe I'm discerning with friends, I don't know, or maybe it's a small circle thing or whatever.

1:32:20It's been very rare that I've been on the receiving end of that. That I've ended up being around as soon as I left the UK, and even the people that I was around in the UK, I'd chosen a relatively small group of people, but all of them fucking like still now to this day love. We're still in touch, we still support each other and I keep it, I love him to see what they're doing, but I get the sense that if you're a little bit more open, if the circle's a little bit more open, there is a huge amount of incentive for you to listen to people who do not have your best interests at heart and they fucking suck and those people need to get out of your life.

1:33:00One of my rules is you should only take advice from people whose dreams for your life are bigger than yours are, which is a very small number of people. Sometimes it's your parents. Sometimes your parents really do have bigger dreams for you than you do. In different ways as well. Yeah, in ways that you don't notice. I mean, I think the closest approximation to yourself is a spouse. It's the most tactically aligned person that you can have. still obviously there are some spouses who are not good, but I could say that I think Laila's dreams for me have been in many ways bigger or ahead of where my dreams for me have been, and I have big dreams.

1:33:35And listening to her has yielded really great returns. But to the point that you were saying earlier about those friends that were kind of with you in the early days, I think it's actually cyclical. So the people who are closest to you in the beginning, if they're like true like actual friends, then you recognize that because they actually want you to win. And that's amazing. A lot of people don't have that. And so what I have felt at least for me was that when you're a little ahead is where the friction is. When you blow them out of the water and there's no question, like it's, it's beyond reproach, they will do one of two things.

1:34:15They will, they'll be really happy for you or they'll change the game that they're beating you at. That's great, but I'm in better shape. That's great, but my marriage is better. Or whatever game that they choose to play. So I think the last quote that you had there about friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't, it's a bug not a feature. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

1:34:45people who doubt you will be right most of the time and this further increases your uncertainty about the path that you're choosing to take. But on a long enough time horizon, most people who don't bet are guaranteed to lose and And so they get to win at being right more times than you get to win at being right. But what that equation doesn't take into consideration is intensity, which is, can I be so right one time that it makes all of the times that I was wrong or relevant? And in the nature of life, the answer is yes, almost a resounding yes for just about every domain. Like, everyone can say that every person you've ever dated has sucked and they could predict that you're going to break up until you find the person that you're going to marry.

1:35:38And in that moment, who fucking cares about the other 90 people that you went on dates with? That everybody said it was a bad idea or that you have a bad picker. You don't have a good taste. It's like, well, you're not marrying them. I dated away this different than you would prefer. Great. But I didn't find this thing. the first thing that I ever did was an online fitness thing and it kind of worked. And then I did my first gym and it kind of worked. And then I started all these other side projects that I distracted and I didn't know. And many people were like, sure, like good luck with that.

1:36:11But I knew that they just weren't really rooting for me. They were rooting for me to fail. They were rooting for the me the wrong way. And so the downside risk is significantly smaller and more frequent. It's both. You're more likely to lose and it's more like it'll have more times. It's just that upside is uncapped. And so and I think about this one a lot. So there's this story of the guy. Do you know the guy who wrote jingle bells. No. So I didn't even know that that was right. I thought it was like happy birthday. I thought it was just gifted to humanity when when we started. So there's this guy.

1:36:44He's a he's a he's a he is the most tragic life you can imagine. Just like. like a complete, like, you don't know his name, right? I can't even remember his name, right? Has did nothing but failed was a failed everything and his entire life was nothing. He just happened to write the small thing called Jingle Bells and it has become, you know, but the number one song in Christmas time, like maybe globally. And I think about that life where it's like, what if I failed at everything? But then I have one thing that actually makes a permanent impact. I was like, what I trade that life for Aristotle's good life, where I am out to nothing, but the whole time was good.

1:37:22And this is just one of my eternal battles where I think with myself that I have no answer for it to be clear. But when I'm thinking through the periods where things suck, I'm like, well, maybe I'll get a jingle bells out of this. And maybe it'll just take 20 years longer than I thought. On the contribution of other people, the pessimists get to be right, the optimists get to be rich. And it's because of intensity. It's the thing that we are so bad at estimating values returns. Yeah, it's very hard for us to comprehend an outside return. We're very good at binary thinking of yes, this worked, no, this didn't work, but we're not very good at thinking through the bet of, I get 10x and I'm gonna lose 50 % of the time.

1:37:59People don't make that bet and they should do it every time. The reason that this is being a particular interest to me is I would consider myself a criticism hyper -responder. Yeah. I'm not sure why being on the outside as a kid, maybe being a little bit more socially isolated. Only child syndrome being hideous. But I mean, I was pretty, I was a very late bloomer, right? And you talked funny. I do talk funny. I did for the place that I was in, as well as the place that I'm in now. I just had a career of talking funny in different places.

1:38:33But the reason that I'm so averse, So the reason that I really don't like people who put down those that are trying to do something different or have big dreams is that I know how close I came to not taking a shot because of the opinions of other people around me and I'm aware. Yeah, this is not super alpha, lone ranger, solo, degenerate, pruneer, fucking pilled, right? The canon and the lore of someone that's supposed to be successful is basically one long middle finger to all doubters. But this is what every single rocky training montage gets wrong, which is rocky never doubted the direction and the path that he was only just doubted whether or not he could get there.

1:39:25That's not the way the personal growth happens in my opinion at all. You are filled with uncertainty. Is this even working? I have no idea if this glory on the other side of this, you know, to the other side of the loan, it's the process of the loan chapter. And if you have people around you that are adding weight onto the bar that you didn't choose, like, well, you're just making it fucking harder for me to stand up. It's already hard enough for me. And yeah, increasingly, I just wanna be around people that make me feel good about the things that I'm trying to do. And I don't think that that's an unreasonable demand.

1:40:02And I also think that it can seem fragile, shallow or fickle or uncommitted or needy or undriven, not robust. And yet I still want it. And yet for me choosing to swim against the tide just seems like a stupid decision. So I want people in my life who's dreams are bigger for me than mine are and who believe in me more than I do. And I think when you find people like that

1:40:40who help you achieve the goals that you set out to achieve, you realize when you achieve the goals that they were more valuable than the goals that you got. I said to you before and hopefully about to move into some sort of office studio location in Austin. And I've just tapped out my fucking solo DJN energy. You know, you don't work in a cupboard but anymore as much, sometimes, but not always, to my dismay. Yeah, where? I can't be in the cupboard. Where? I can't stay with the wall. Yeah, put me in platform known in three quarters. Yeah. Yeah. Because I've just run out of that gas tank and I want to be around people, I want to be around, my friends, I want to be around the people that I work with and I want to have a little squad of people that help, you know, bolster me.

1:41:38If you talk about work life balances of 22 -year -old man, you're hanging around with the wrong people. That annoying feeling when you realize you've outgrown your social circle isn't loneliness, it's your ambition, finally speaking louder than your need to belong.

1:41:53And there's a narrative that we should not criticize ourselves. We should not say the things that we could have done better. But I believe that that voice isn't an insecurity. I think it's a version that wants you to chase your potential. And so I think not judging the criticism, but accepting the criticism. I think those are the two separate things. And I think that's what that's what unlocks the potential while making it somewhat palatable along the way. Yeah. Well, it's uncomfortable, right? You position an ideal. You can pay yourself to that ideal. You find yourself lacking. There is pain in that.

1:42:33So you can either sit with the pain or you can judge the pain. You mentioned this earlier on, I call it second order emotions, Mark Manson calls them meta -emotions. So, feeling frustrated at your anxiousness, and then feeling bitter about your frustration at your anxiousness, and then feeling resentful about your bitterness at your frustration about your anxiousness. And you don't have all that much control over the first ones. Emotions are going to come and go. You have a lot of control over the ones that come after that. Did you tell me the story of Buddha in the second era? No. Oh, it's great.

1:43:03So, the Buddha I was trying to teach a lesson and he says, if I shoot you with an arrow, does it hurt? And this student was like, yes, it would be hurtful. That would suck. And so he says, okay, if I were to shoot you with a second arrow in the same spot after the first arrow without her, and he said, yes. He said, the first arrow is life. He said, you can't avoid the first arrow. He said, but the second arrow is you. And that one you can avoid. And so suffering is a constant. That's a fixed cost of life. We're going to have downsides. We're going to have bad seasons, bad moments, bad days. But I think a great rule to live by is like only suffer once.

1:43:44Like, great. And I mean, my God, I think if everyone only suffered once, like just because I like tiny little monitors that I can remind myself in the moment of, okay, this happened. I will only allow it, I will only suffer this one time. I will not relive this moment over and over again. I will not judge my software not, you know, behaving the way I would have liked to have behaved, I will not judge the version of me that I should have been in this moment and around and around it. It's talking infinite regressive self -castigation. Right. And so it's like, I want memory, I want memory dividends, not memory liabilities.

1:44:19Yeah. If you talk about work life balances of 22 year old man, you're hanging out with the wrong people. This goes back to the, ask them what they did when they were at your stage, not what they do now thing and look to hear you get within the same fucking universe as something approximating work -life balance. Let's calm down. Yeah, I get to it ahead of yourself. I mean, that is a really sort of cosmic change for you in your direction. And as somebody who cares about your well -being, it's one that I've kind of been hoping for. At some point, a bit of humanity to come through. Yeah, you know, to prove that.

1:44:59And I said it earlier on, dude, it proves that there is a, there is a human inside of that. I'm being, I'm being serious. And I think it does a bunch of things. It shows that somebody who is very staunch about an opinion can change their mind, which I think is something that's very admirable. I think it is significantly more relatable to most people with a more common level of work ethic, desire for life outside of it, maybe a broader number of things than three, you know, on the posted notes. And I think, you know, selfishly for me, it gives us more to relate about, because I have more to relate about someone who's trying to navigate what life looks like outside of work.

1:45:46But if you are, if you are, you're slowly getting that. You notice that as of yet, I haven't had some sort of Cassandra complex about, I think I'll have mentioned if we go back to episode three at four minutes and 55. I told you so. But it might not be okay to work your life away, but it is okay to work your twenties away. And so many of the realizations that we have arrived at are only really accessible to you because you've closed the loop of all of the ones that you I want to aggressively comment on this. So everything I set up at this point, I take it all up. Yeah. No, I want to comment on this because I think it's meaningful.

1:46:32So number one, so I would actually challenge a couple of the things you said. The biggest one being like, that just shoulds in general, which is like you shouldn't work your life away, you should work away your 20s. My opinion, do whatever the fuck you want. But if you have a goal, then there will be ways that will increase your G -Crisis likely to achieve them. And so, if, and having simultaneous goals, dramatically decreases the likelihood of accomplishing any of them. And it's typically easier to accomplish goals in sequence or chronologically, rather than in parallel. And so, if I were to say, hey, what are the three goals you have?

1:47:12And you say, one, two, three. And I say, okay, which of these three goals is the most important? Well, then let's work on that one first. and does that one goal allow us to, does it decrease, does it decrease the failure rate of the other two goals, which then makes it the most important goals. Sometimes they are dependent on each other. I'm going to get in shape, get rich, then find a wife. Yeah. As opposed to I'm going to find a wife, then try and get rich, then try and get in shape. Yeah. You'll get dramatically higher quality talent. For sure. But maybe she'll just love you for you. Who knows?

1:47:42We can all hope. Regardless. Now, most 22 year olds, irrespective of domain, if you, if, and that's why I have these content, like if you seek to be good at something, then you have a tremendous deficit in experience and repetitions that people who are ahead of you or have achieved what you want to achieve have over you. And so the only thing that you have now, you do have an advantage. You have a couple. Number one is that you will have more energy than they do. Period. And so your ability to work long hours, sleep less, and maintain high levels of focus while maintaining peak fluid intelligence is that it's peak.

1:48:20Use it. The second thing is that you have nothing to lose. And so the thing is, is people always fear being the new, the new entrant. But when you have nothing to lose or you have nothing going for you, it also means you have nothing to lose. And that means that every position on the board always has an advantage because anybody who has achieved this big thing that you have was also once a 22 year old who had nothing going for that. And you're at zero. Right. You can't get worse than this. You have unlimited shots on goal. And so not taking the shot is like saying, life, I don't want to scratch off this lottery ticket, but the lottery tickets free.

1:48:51Why would you not scratch it off and try it? And so the first advantage you've got, you've got energy. Next advantage, you have nothing to lose. Third is you also have time and you have very low responsibilities. And so you have not only the ability to put all of your self into something, you also have no circumstantial things that are preventing you. Now, if somebody's listening to This is like, I'm 25 and I've got a kid. Cool. And which thing do you want to sacrifice? I'm saying sacrifice a kid, but I'm saying like, you're going to have some trades. Now, I take things to the logical extreme and say, okay, well, base of test kids, Bill Gates has kids, Warren Buffett has kids.

1:49:25This is just if you wanted to be, you know, business successful. It's like, okay, well, then that can't be a reason that I can't be successful. And so whatever reasons that we usually give ourselves in the beginning for why we can achieve something, you can almost always find not only just someone, but someone who's achieved world -class levels of success with worse conditions than you currently have, which then means it's absolutely possible, and then the only thing that it takes to get there is work. And so I just wanted to be very clear that if you're 22 years old, like the world does not hate you, you're just not good at anything yet.

1:50:00I felt so jilted by the world as a young business person, because we were stepping into these meetings with 40 and 50 -year -old nightclub leisure company owners and me and my business partner were 19 or 20 and we were saying, hey, nice club, shame no one's fucking in it and we can put people in and the fact that someone twice our age or three times our age was sat up at the table from us and didn't give me respect. It made me really discouraged. So I'm I'm like, you need me. You need people. I have people. Why can you not see this? Why can you not see the value in what it is that I do? And it feels like a personal curse, some sort of cosmic judgment that's just bestowed on you.

1:50:56Oh, it's because of my failing. It's because they are being mean to me. Another 20 year old business person who would have went in there, they would have been given the respect that they deserve. It's like, no. If you're young, everybody in business is going to be skeptical of you. Now this is changing a little bit. I think the rise of the Wonder Kids, the Elon Musk Doge, Degener, World, I think maybe is, leverage that kid that made the AI app that takes photos of food and it does calories and he's making like a million dollars a month or something, he's 16, 17, 18. He just vibed coded his way to like multi -millionaire status in his teenagers.

1:51:33Okay, we're starting to realize that ideas get unlocked through technology and through youth and through insight, but there is still an industrial era of mindset, industrial revolution, era mindset, which is this craft of some type will take a lot of time for you to get that. And by virtue of that, people are skeptical of young guys and young girls. And you're right. But if you're 22 and starting out in business, the world doesn't hate you. They're just skeptical of you. You know what's interesting is what you talked about earlier about like the low risk path, like you'd look at all these things.

1:52:11I think you become the exception by being the rule. And so I'll impact that. But like we highlight the 16 year old, right? We don't nearly as much highlight the 30 year old who's crushing it because it's like, well, obviously he worked for a decade and then he got there. It's like, but if you work for a decade and they get you there, you are exceptional. You are already at the very ends of achievement and you did it by following the rule, which is just maybe not unprotected. Yes, it's not a surprise. And so I think people can fleet surprises with exceptional. And it is exceptional in that it's rare, not necessarily that it's the only kind of rare.

1:52:51It's rare that it was a lottery ticket more than, and of course, and I want to be clear, maybe he's 16 or something like Mr. Beast is a perfect example of this. He's 25 I think now something like that 25 to 6. I know we're getting old And so the thing is is that he started I think making videos when he was 12 right and so it's like oh Well, he's got 13 years in just one game spending every hour of every day for that 13 years doing it and so some of these kind of younger guys And I think part of this is just proliferation of information and access to information is just gotten you know bound to for everyone and with AI, it's been easier for people with fewer resources to start actual things, right?

1:53:31The cost of entry financially is significantly lower and the access to information is basically almost zero. And so when you combine those things, if you're 14 years old, you have high fluid intelligence, like your brain's working. So if you're on the younger side, there's no rule that says that an app designed by a 14 year old is in some way or anyway valued less by a customer than an app that's developed by a 40 -year -old. There's no rule. And so I will also push back on one thing, which is if you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously, if you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously because of your age, it might be not because of your age, it might be because you suck.

1:54:19And I think that is a significantly harder and more probable pill that you'll have to swallow. Well, especially given that self -assessment and reflection is difficult to do when you're young, your own ability to understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie, it's hard, full stop. Sure. It's really hard if you're 20, right? Or 22. This is from Mark Manson. I had this episode with him this week. It was so good. And before you win, everyone will ask why you're working so hard. And after you win, everyone will remind you how lucky you got. Holy fuck. You know it's funny. I actually, it's okay.

1:54:55So I didn't know where the quote was going to go. I thought it was going to go before you win, everyone asks you why you're working so hard. After you win, everyone asks you why you're working so hard.

1:55:11That's, I mean, both of those work. Yeah. And it's, it's true. But I think in that, in both of those situations, both of those things are true. In both of them before you and everyone will ask you why you're working so hard, there's no proof that this is going in the right direction. You don't have any evidence that you're actually even good at this thing. the likelihood of a positive outcome is incredibly low. And after you win, have you not yet reached escape velocity where you don't need to do this anymore? Why are you capitalizing on an opportunity? Why are you capitalizing on conquest instead of continuing to just start from opportunity at the bottom?

1:55:54Like because you've now reached the fucking top of the mountain. There's enough enough. or, dude, you know, just so pressient to start a business at that time. Like, you know, like, you really timed the market. Or, I've been learning about, it's not venting, but it's a, I can't remember what it's called. It's this particular type of put down that chicks give other chicks. And I don't think that guys have, frankly, don't think that guys have like the lexical capacity to do this socially. But it's something like, I imagine that a bunch of girls are at a wedding together and there's one goal that doesn't like another one and she'll say something like, you know, I really admire your confidence.

1:56:38Like, I would never wear a dress like that. And it's just like, I'm, you know, it looks, you know, with your body type, like it's really impressive that you decided to wear that today. Like that's just, you know, you've done, your comp, you don't really well. Or, you know, you're prepared to like just eat, like, you know, I can't, I can't just like keep eating, but it seems like you just don't really mind. And it's this sort of odd venting come put down, you know, are you trying to, no, I'm saying the dress looks, you know, it's this sort of culpable deniability of the insult.

1:57:20And, that it's a backhanded insult, not a backhanded compliment.

1:57:29One, there's a meme from family guy that does this exact thing. It's two girls eating lunch together, just trading insults like this. And then it just pans to two guys eating lunch after like a 60 second exchange of just insults. And he says, hey, John, I like your tie. He says, oh, thanks. And it says, men, we know how to be friends. I was just thinking about that while you were saying it. But it's so interesting. I have that statement that I said at the beginning, which is, you live your life in a way that I would not prefer. And all of these things, well down to that, and I've had this as my internal translation mechanism because before you, before you win, they're saying, you live your life in a way that I would not prefer.

1:58:14And then after you win in Mark's example, you have won in a way that I did not prefer. And then if you continue to work, you continue to live your life in a way that I would not prefer. And so at the end of the way, there's cast of preferences onto you and then somehow they expect you to give a shit. And I think this is where I've lost friends.

1:58:34And that's okay. And they're entitled to think that you should care and you're entitled to knock her. The problem here, especially again for me and for the people who are the criticism hypersponders that are listening, if you overindex, or even if you just index on other people's input, you think, huh, maybe for a while you didn't have as many people contributing to your life as you might have wanted. And now, as a pauper, how can I reject this penny, someone's flick me? What you don't realize is that this penny could have arsenic on the other side of it, or it might be a fake penny, or it might be a joke, or it might blow up in your hand or something.

1:59:11You go, So maybe this person's comment is like useful. Maybe I should take heat of this. Maybe it's something that I should listen to. And the ability to be discerning when you're not used to receiving feedback is a difficult skill. And again, I can just middle finger my way through life not listening to anybody's opinion is an interesting one, but practically it's very difficult. And it's a skill that you need to learn. And you do need to listen to feedback. Like if you had never changed how you did your podcast from day one until now, your podcast would not be what it is. Right? If I had made sales presentations, if I had written emails, if I had made products that didn't respond to feedback, then we would not be where we're at right now.

1:59:56It's a really interesting question of like, how do you discern which feedback is good and which feedback isn't? Yep. And I'm trying to think about what my perspective is on that. I think it comes down to number one, aligned incentives. Like does this person benefit from me doing better? Number two is competence. Are they, do they actually have sufficient domain expertise where their feedback would be relevant? Now I'll be clear here. If you have a yogurt company and you want somebody to try your yogurt and your friends say, I don't think the yogurt tastes good. Well, they probably had a lot of yogurt and they've eaten stuff before and so they could very well have domain expertise.

2:00:41If you have a business, that's a yogurt business and then your mother gives her opinion about how the business works and she's never run a business, that's different. And so the second would be domain expertise or competence. The first is aligned incentives. And then what do you think, I think there's your like, I'm trying to think of I understand you think those two are, because you can start adding shit on, but it just makes it harder. And the first one ensures that the person is pointing in the same direction as you. The second one ensures that they actually know how to fucking row about. Yeah.

2:01:16So yeah, I like that. I like that. Success really just boils down to this. You've got to want it more than you hate what it takes to get it. If you're willing to suck at anything for 100 days in a row, you can beat most people at most things. Okay, I'm so excited to say this. So we talked a little bit about how I'll rewind the clock. So there's this quote that I read from Kobe where he said he thought that it was going to be super competitive in the NBA. But when he got into the NBA, he realized that people, well, they figured out that they they had made it and weren't willing to sacrifice as much as he was to continue to win.

2:01:58And I would say that that realization has been somewhat true for me, which is that like winning, it's like it hasn't gotten harder from the actual doing stuff side. There has been the trades that had been different than I expected. But especially when you're looking at the population of everyone to a hundred days of doing something in a row. There was a there was a friend of mine who had a he offered a guarantee on a product that he sold and the guarantee was this. He said, all you have to do, you can get all your money back if you just open up a Google Doc and say what you're going to do every day and at the end of the day you're going to say what you did.

2:02:40That's it. And you just do that for six weeks. That's all you have to do. And if you do that, you don't get the results. I'll you know, I'll give you money back. And what's crazy about that is when he was talking about, he said, do you know what the completion rate of twice a day doing something is, it's like, it's like less than 1%. It's like, so I can happily do it because it seems so simple. And so I think we, we, we underplay how simple success is and extrapolate an expectation of how easy it must be from that. and then we are disappointed or dissatisfied when it doesn't meet those expectations.

2:03:21Like, it is harder than we expect, but also the rewards may be also greater than we expect. Hmm. James Clear has this fucking unbelievable insight. It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire to crave the result, but not the process is to guarantee disappointment. fuck. Yeah. Holy fuck. Super true. I mean, I think Navale could have this blog a long time ago, but desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you want. And if you know, if you basically know that you're never willing to put the work in to get the thing.

2:04:01Yep. That's an iron law. Like that James Clear thing is an absolute iron law. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. There is a path between where you are and the place that you want to be. If you're not prepared to do that walk, still wanting to reach the end of the path is just guaranteeing that you're going to live in unsatisfactory life. And so when I hear that quote, I immediately go to my operational side of like, okay, how do I release myself from a desire? So I thought about that. And I actually think it's a lot like dating. So hear me out on this.

2:04:37So there is the old saying, I think it's a girl saying, I'm going to assume it's a pro -sign, which is if you want to get over somebody, get under somebody else. Right? Now there's a point to this, which is I don't think you can release desire, but you can replace it. And so it's like if you have a terrible breakup, there's basically some totem of reinforcement that's been removed from your life. Getting over something or someone is simply getting enough exposure to enough new things from the time that you've bought back from this reinforcer being gone, to find another reinforcer, which is why I genuinely think that the idea of like, oh, I shouldn't date for a while after I get out of a breakup is just complete stupidity.

2:05:16Like, why would you, like, what, why? What rule is there? Well, you have to heal. Healing for most people is defined as I find something else that brings me sufficient joy that my baseline returns to normal. But if I'm going to bring somebody else into my life, that person's also going to serve that same function. And so like, I could, I can replace it with tennis or gardening or business or just the next person I'm going to date and why is one better than the other. To clear releasing of desire, I think it's just, choose to want something else. So if I were to say, if I were to give someone the direction release the desire, I would say, don't try and release the desire, try and justify or reason why wanting something different is better.

2:05:56Also, maybe be a little bit more open -minded about how that desire could be fulfilled. It's like, huh, and to push back on the, why you should have a little bit of a break between partners. I would say that there is a specific type of learning that comes especially from intense and emotional experiences that takes a little bit of time for you to imbibe and that if you very quickly move into a new relationship, you're trying to find the direction that you're going in while you're also rowing the fucking boat and trying to fix the holes from the last one. I get the sense that there are certain realizations that come about by we're often very bad at taking lessons from a thing while it's still happening.

2:06:41And I wonder whether you very quickly move into the I can't take lessons from this thing mode because I'm focused on the new thing as opposed to let's sit down and debrief a little bit after this. And what does life look like? Perfect example of this. A lander boton has a beautiful insight where he says, people rarely change often not in relationships and never when you ask them to. It seems that most people's changes in the way that they show up in relationships occur between them. Now, I would guess that a lot of this is because change is very emotionally painful and breakups are emotionally painful, therefore people change when they break up.

2:07:21It's like, ha, my world got ripped out from underneath me. But I do wonder whether moving on very quickly stops the reflective process that allows sense making to occur by immediately giving you new novel stimulus that is distracting. So I will challenge back, which is one, it assumes that we must change. If we take that frame, which I wouldn't necessarily accept in all cases, number two, it assumes that the change that we're going to make in between is something that's going to increase the likelihood that we find someone that we like, which may or may not occur. Third, I do think that change would happen no matter what, because you've removed somebody who was altering your behavior.

2:08:11And anyone who says that the person they date doesn't alter the behavior, like I don't know what you're talking about, like of course, they give you little kisses when you do stuff and they say, thank you. Of course, you have reward cycles and punishment cycles that exist constantly. And so like, oh, she's always different when she's in a relationship. It's because they have somebody else who's deliberately changing their behavior. And that's normal. And we do control and counter control to our partners all the time. People like who's in the word control, but it's exactly what you do. If you want your husband to pick up the socks, then you do, you say things and you give him a blowjob afterwards, whatever.

2:08:35Like you do some sort of rewarding contingency in order to get more of the type of behavior you like. And also you say, hey, don't say that when they say something that they said, And hey, are you going to finish your dinner? And you're like, I used to have a needing disorder. And my friends used to say, I wasn't eating my food, blah, blah, blah. And so with the relationship piece, I think that you were going to change when you have a reward or punishment stimulus that changes. And until those things change, nothing is going to change to Ellen DeBotta. Ellen's name, that, him. And so if you get out of relationship, you will change regardless because the conditions have changed.

2:09:11And so your behavioral change. And so, and all of these things, I then posit as the question is like, and do I need to do this in order to find the person that I want? How many people have gotten into relationships where they've changed the things that they like to do? They've started staying up late because they're part of the stasable. I have this guy getting up early because they're part of the get's up early. Let's say just that because it's kind of simple. And then they get out of this relationship and they ask themselves the question, and still going to bed late or waking up early, right?

2:09:39Because they've habituated that type of behavior. That's themselves, well, I kind of forgot that I used to go to bed early or stay asleep in. I forgot that bit of me because for the last 12 months, I've been in this relationship with this person and I adapt it. We sort of met in the middle or maybe they really changed me or whatever it is. Well, is that the way that I want to be? Is that the actual change that I want to make? or do I want to go back to, or do I want to optimize both of these things together and create this new world? I'm not convinced in theory, maybe, in practice, no. And in practice for most people, certainly no.

2:10:22It takes time for this stuff to filter through. Yes, particular landmark events that you go through that are very traumatic. I don't even think it's landmark. I think you can change behavior really quickly and it's just not a huge thing. Like Layla used to say in the very big and rural relationships, she said, ah, your stupid, she would make that joke and I'd say, hey, I don't really like that. And then she stopped. It's just a very small thing. It wasn't like this traumatic thing. I just said, it's a preference of mine if you don't say that. And she said, okay. And then that was it. With regards to the staying up late thing, the contingency of reinforcement, that was the other partner who was there is gone.

2:10:56So now, the reason that they were doing it before was that they didn't have this reinforcement. So reinforcements introduced so they're willing to change their behavior to accommodate this later, you know timeline I don't have transparency with ourselves though, you know, I don't know what that means. We do not see All of the reasons for our behavior and where they came from immediately Do we ever? Really, but we will get more with distance, I think to go, huh I'm no longer receiving the stimulus. It's like I tried to run on I tried to run on Jupiter Jupiter, Jupiter was really heavy. I adapted my running style.

2:11:32Huh, I'm back on Earth. And oh, this is gonna take a little bit of time for me to get back into this new running style. So the reason, so I will continue to dial this because I feel like, no, I like, what I'm describing has been the central world view that has been responsible for a great deal of my material success. And it's rapid day of your change. Rapid behavior change, but also being able to accurately view the world, at least to my, I think I view it more clearly than I did before. And my decision quality has dramatically increased by isolating variables that are dependent that actually change behavior, change outcome.

2:12:09And so when you said knowing why, it's like a bingo red flag for me, not red flag, but just like a pay attention thing. Because when we say, oh, I figured out why, in my opinion, for the vast majority of people, and they figured out why it means that I have crafted a narrative that I accept, which may or may not have any bearing on reality. And so I focus purely on the observable because they are far more predictable in terms of predicting your own behavior and predicting other people's behavior. And so with regards to the relationship, it's like people have many counter -controls that they do.

2:12:49And so because of that, you change your behavior. And then all of those things are removed at once. Now, were there other things that are also variables in your life that occurred in that period of time? Of course. Do we know them all? No. And so, I take the position that there are so many variables. Why do I need to know why? And I never will anyways. And so why would I waste my time trying to figure out whether do you think you're this way because your father didn't hug you enough? I don't know. I know that I am this way. Period. And it might be 20 different things because we're gonna generalize work ethic to your dad didn't hug you enough, whenever it might be like, I write because I've had enough reinforcing canidities around writing that I write.

2:13:28And that's different than what I'm willing to speak, which is different than when I do podcasts, which is different than all these others. And so when we get into the, basically we extrapolate out, reasoning mind analogy works really well. When we get really down to what are the behaviors that change when you were in the relationship versus not in the relationship. And if you can get isolating on that, which you can be specific about, not necessarily why it happened, but that it changed and what behaviors changed, then you can look at your laundry list of, Okay, these are the changes in my behavior that I have continued to keep post -relationship or any of these conducive to me getting a more attractive or better partner in the future.

2:14:01Now, if the person that I was with got me to go to the gym because they went to the gym, and then the gym itself became reinforcing because basically totems of reinforcement can shift over time in terms of the work itself can be reinforcing. I might say this was a laundry lit, this is one of the items that changed when I was in this relationship, and I am okay with it. And so if we have that laundry list, then again, why do I need time? And so I, it was, I push back on this very hard because me discovering why I did something gives me zero value. That's interesting. I would class myself as a understanding why, especially around myself, is one of the greatest sources of pleasure that I've got in my life.

2:14:47Okay, this may be why me and you, Diffa. Oh, no, we're gonna fucking jam on this. I'd love this. Okay, so I will give you, I think, a perfect analogy for this. And the reason that I'm in general, somebody who's not the biggest fan of therapy, as it's traditionally practiced. If I were playing tennis, right? And I went to a coach and they said, Hey, I need you to change your grip from this to this. Straight forward. would I spend the vast majority of that session with the coach being like, let's try to discover why you hold the grip that way. Who fucking cares? I do. Now, when we get to why, I use the word control before.

2:15:32If we can understand the dependent variables, then it means basically if you can predict, it means you can control, which people don't like that. But if you can predict what's going to happen, it means that you know what the variables are and you can influence those variables, which we can influence the outcome, which means you can control the system. And so knowing why, from a narrative perspective, I think again, you'll never know why. You will have a narrative that you've accepted. And so what? Because then, what do I want to do next? I only want to, like, we have a set of behaviors or skills that will increase the likelihood of goal achievement, whatever that goal is, being spiritual, being a good husband, whatever it is.

2:16:11these behaviors will do that. To increase the likelihood of me doing these behaviors, then I have to have more good stuff, less bad stuff. I will down that hill. Beyond that, what is anything that happened prior to this matter at all insofar as it only works if I can use that same variable and then use it again to change my behavior yet again to be conducive to the goal. What if I love this shit? I can tell. I can tell. It's either the naked team or the debate. So what if the actual outcome that you wanted was the pursuit of trying to work out why? Because for me, and tried to word that relatively carefully, not finding out the actual why, but the pursuit of trying to work out why.

2:16:59It's the reason that I fell in love with evolutionary psychology. Because to me, it started to explain why we are the way we are. It's one of the common themes in this podcast, over 900 and something episodes. It is a place for people to come to try and get some approximation of why they are the way they are. And even if that's wrong, even if it does not fully explain, partly explain the process of that discovery for me is fascinating. I have a journal entry from a long time ago when I was on mushrooms. And it was post -party or post -whatever, And I was back at the house and I had some music on and I was just thinking through ideas like this And I could feel this game of tennis occurring in my mind as I thought a thing and then I asked why and then I asked why and then I asked why and then I asked why and It felt like this sort of movement Almost probably certainly was default mode off and you know, hemisphere is talking and all the rest of it and I wrote down not what I was thinking about but I wrote down the sentence I loved the way that my mind works because I like that conversation of tighter and tighter spirals of sort of deeper and deeper questions.

2:18:08And for me, I enjoy the why such. It's something that in and of itself brings me joy to try and work out why we are the way we are, why I am the way I am. I wholeheartedly accept that learning things is enjoyable.

2:18:33And I think I come purely from the perspective of changing behavior and the why is super important. And not always knowable and so. I. I push back on narrative so heavily because. In a way and like. Take this not as a as a slight. I see a lot of that as mental masturbation. I would agree. And I do not decry that in any way. If someone wants to do something with their time, awesome, play video games, do it every month. If we want to say this increases the decrease the likelihood that we achieve a goal, then that is where I will, because that we can know. Does this increase the decrease the likelihood that we achieve a goal?

2:19:22And the difficulty with describing why is that we cannot know, because we cannot relive the same circumstances again. And so in any equals one situations, It has, and I say this to somebody that obsessed for a long period of my life, and this is not to say that now I'm better or different or anything like that, over the wise, but when I, the reason that I have two, two, three statements on my wall, the good day, and those three, what does that mean? How do you know that and why does it matter? And so if we say, these are the changes that occur in this relationship, okay, Okay, that's what it means rather than like, I'm stressed now or you know what, she rubbed off on me because she was really anal.

2:20:07What does that mean? Okay, it just means that she counted her calories and I now, you know, when I go to a menu, I order like a diva, whatever, right? Like these are the two behavior changes. When I say anal, this is what I mean. Great. Okay, how do you know that? Well, did I do that two or three times or is this every single time that I go out? And so, okay, now I know the extent to which this thing that I've not defined. And who cares? Why does that matter? I'm anal now. Well anal just means I changed the way I order. Does that matter? No. Okay. And so instead of trying to maybe I maybe it was because I sought out approval from her and other people because I have this hole inside of me and I wanted to gain some sort of you know in group out group.

2:20:52I wanted to be accepted by her and her friends who also do that. I think maybe that's what who cares? And so it was that. That's, does me counting my calories and being a D .V .O. Night Order decrease the like that I find the next mate. If the answer is yes, then I'll change the paper. If no, fuck it. Interesting. I'll be, the pursuit of the why to me improves my well -being and the quality of my well -being is a goal in and of itself. So let's say that one of the few goals that you have is to Be in moment to moment happiness a satisfaction or something like that for me the pursuit of the why is a source of that So I'm aware that that's like a lexical fucking Giu -Gitsu move but I thought about this a lot and it's been one of the most sort of common themes in the show and it's even if it's pointless kind of like like fucking skimming rocks, a sort of thing that it only occurs for a small moment and accumulates nothing over time.

2:21:58I like it. Yeah, so this is the second half of that quote from above, the bar for excellence has never been so low. Most of your competition quits after the first sign of difficulty because they've never known what hard feels like. If it's hard for you, it's hard for everyone. and most people avoid hot things, which is why you can beat most people by just trying. I think the vast majority of people don't actually know what it looks like to put tremendous effort into something. And I think one of the most viable things that the office, which now you're gonna have, has given me is the people who now work in my proximity, one of the number of things that I get back to feedback is like, I really didn't understand how much he works and like, he doesn't stop.

2:22:44And it's easy to say these things and it's hard to actually, because one of the difficulty, especially, the vast majority of successful people have one thing in common, which is they're consistent. And consistency, you cannot see in a snapshot. You can't see consistency in a sound, but you can't see consistency in a reel. And so consistency is one of those things I think you've talked about, unlearnable lessons. I think they are difficult to learn without large amounts of exposure. And so those, and I think those are the types of lessons that become unlearnables that you need large amounts of exposure in order to encapsulate the lesson itself.

2:23:20And so, trying is one of those. Like the act of trying. Yes. And so, Laila had a mentor of hers, say this to her, and it's lived red -free in my mind since then. So we had this thing that we had this house that we were pursuing and The and we we ended up not getting the house or whatever The mentor first said Are you settling or did you move mountains? And it's just a great it's just a great visual for me in terms of like Did you did you try or did you move the fucking world? to make it happen. And when you think about like the extreme versions of this, which is maybe the person that you care about most in the world dies if you don't, the amount of options of action that open up is dramatic.

2:24:24And I think people are so constrained in their thinking of what level of effort is because they haven't considered what trading way more for that thing is, but they would be, they would be willing to trade far more for that thing if the trade were clear. But because they've never tried hard at anything, they just think, oh, this is what trying looks like, which might be like the occasional Google search and a couple hours a week of like watching some videos on YouTube on something. It's like, that is not trying. Like, that is not trying. Like, if you cannot count the amount of repetitions that you're having in the hundreds, that is not trying.

2:25:00And like, and the longer I've been doing stuff, That's, you know, you'll do the material reward. The greater my history of delay on me getting what I want with volume. And so it's like, I know that this thing, like everything in my life, volume negates luck, you know, violence is the answer. Like these are things that are plastered around the wall of this office because they've been so true for me that you can brute force what you want into reality. And yes, today, you know, we talked about the trays that we're not willing to make. But if you want something like,

2:25:40did you fucking move mountains? Well, the trades that you're not willing to make is you're saying, I don't wanna move that mountain. And I think, and that's, and that's. Perfectly acceptable. Yes. You might say, I could do, like, I thought, so because she posed that question, I thought about all these other things that I could do. I was like, well, I could offer an extra $20 million $1 ,000 for the house. That would probably get me the house. Okay, am I willing to do that? No. Okay, what else? I was like, I could, I was like completely de -constrained thinking I was like, could I pay somebody?

2:26:14Kidnapped. Yeah, well, that was a thought, but I was gonna say that one. Could I pay someone to, you know, we could figure out, I could have a private investigator figure out, went, basically, tailed them, the other buyer who's thinking about buying the home. and when they're visiting it, have crime occur next to them or near them or in that vicinity. To be like, oh, this is not a safe area, right? And I was like, oh man, I completely opened up my, now am I willing to do that? No, but it completely deconstructed my thinking when I just raised the bar of, okay, let's say I would pay anything. And let's start at this guarantees me success.

2:26:53Okay, I'm not willing to pay that, okay. Well, this also pretty close to guaranteeing me success. Am I willing to pay that? No. Well, this one still guarantees me saying, oh, I'm willing to pay that. And so it starts at goal achievement and then works backwards on price, rather than starting with price. And then you negotiate the costs with yourself. Backwards from the assumed success, which is why do so much volume, it would be unreasonable that you were successful. for. I think the bar being set incredibly low is just a, it's such a fucking perennial truth. And there's sort of two things happening at once here.

2:27:32One is you can work way harder than you think you can. Yes. And another one is most people work so not hard that even a small amount of working hard puts you into a rarefied strata of people. And both of And there's things the true at the same time, right? And not a third one. And the bigger the goal is, the fewer the people were pursuing it. Just because they think it is a big goal and therefore it must be harder to achieve. That's the fairest thing about most people try to achieve mediocre goals, which makes them the most competed for. And they assume that how difficult it is to compete for that goal must therefore extrapolate proportionally.

2:28:09On the consistency point, no one cheers you for not drinking for a day, not smoking on long drive or not overeating for one night. No single workout or meal is ever impressive on its own. The reason so few people understand success is consistency never looks impressive in the moment, only at the end. The point that you are making before around you don't get to see the process, you don't get to see what trying looks like, right? Trying is opaque, outcomes are obvious. What you have done is you have made what was previously processed into an observable outcome, at least a little bit. For Alex spends a lot of time in his office.

2:28:48Let's say I mean, I assume that he's working. I already knew the output of work that he was getting out of him, but now I've actually seen the process that he goes through in order to be able to get that. And unless you are moment by moment, turning your process into some kind of an outcome, live streaming it, tracking it, journaling publicly or privately or whatever, no one ever actually gets to see the inputs but only the outcomes. And no one knows that's real impressive. Maybe it came easily to it. Maybe he's able to crack it out in half an hour. Maybe he's got a team of people to do on his behalf.

2:29:22Maybe he, maybe he, maybe, maybe. And yeah. You can try way harder than you think you can. And most people aren't trying it all. I'll give a tactical thing that has helped for trying. And like this is actually one of those more rocky cutscene type things. But when you work and you actually are working, you're writing the emails that you need to write, you're preparing for the podcast, you're doing that work that you know is not short work. This is going to take me two hours and take me four hours. When you get to the end of that and you're like, man, I'm kicked. You know, I earned my shower today.

2:30:02I think the difference is that But at that point, you go, you grab a bottle of water and then you look at your to -do list at the next large thing and say, great, let's start on this. And I think people who don't witness that happen, they don't see four hours and this is what working side -by -side someone can do. I remember when I, we just have, we have a new director of marketing in his first week. We needed to, we needed to write some massive amount of stuff. And he was like, okay, so we have to do this. And I was like, great. Well, the document, let's go. And he was like, oh, like now. And I was like, you got something else to do.

2:30:38And he was like, oh, I mean, I know, okay, yeah, let's do it now. And then we shared screen for eight hours. And then we finished it. And he was like, oh, wow. I was like, great, what's the next thing? And he was like, oh, yeah, we have this other thing. I guess we can do to. And I could see his like perception on the level of work, shifting in real time. And so if you have the opportunity to work with anyone that is exceptional at anything, especially in that sub -30 crowd, for the love of God, move across the country, live in a tiny apartment, live far below your means, work for free if you have to, because the skill that you will get from learning the unlearnable or the difficult to learn lessons, because I, it is pithier to say unlearning, but like it's harder to learn these lessons.

2:31:29If you can get in proximity, you will learn so much, so much faster. Like if you want a time warp yourself, you can try and observe the little bits and nuggets and crumbs from videos, podcasts, things like this, because all we're doing is trying to describe scenarios. But when you live them, it completely changes you forever. Like if you want to win, Angela Duckworth talked about this. The number one most consistent way to become a champion is join a team of champions. Have I given you my 2D lessons, 3D lessons thing? No, but I'm very cool. So Bill Perkins wrote a book called Die With Zero. Great book.

2:32:03Great book. Three hour listen, everyone should go and get it. You'll be far less motivated afterwards. Keep going. Yes, that's true. But he's fun and he is in important redress to people that struggle to spend money and struggle to have fun. So Bill Perkins writes this book, Die With Zero. I bring him on the podcast. The book is about how to use your money in a manner that gives you a life that you will enjoy at any level of wealth. That's a 2D lesson. Even speaking to him on the podcast was largely a 2D lesson. We finish up the podcast and he says, well, you do now. And I said, well, I was going to go home and write the show notes for this because it was me, an editor and a Mormon assistant in a Facebook messenger chat.

2:32:46That was our business at this stage. And he said, well, you want to go wake surfing? Can you wake surfing? Yeah, I can wake surfing. Do you want to go wake surfing? Like, when? Now, yeah, okay, I mean, we've just been on a podcast for two hours, three hours, it's middle of the afternoon. So, okay, no worries, we go downstairs, his drivers outside waiting for us, we get into the car, we get to Austin 360 Bridge, his boat captain is there on the boat with shorts for both of us and towels and food and snacks and caffeine and immediately we're waiting surfing within 30 minutes of having finished the podcast.

2:33:20I was like 3D lesson, 2D lesson, reading the book, 3D lesson, going to Bill's house and seeing his staff. Ha! This guy puts his money where his mouth is. And the difference for exactly what you're talking about. 2D lesson, 3D lesson. The value of narrative. Yeah. There are two types of people. Those who want to know more, and those who want to defend what they already know. So many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even there's to begin with.

2:33:55Man, I got some good quotes. That first one's Morgan House. You can go for yourself. Yeah. No, because I like it's interesting that we said that because I was like, man, fuck, I was like, I don't even remember that shit. That's why. Yeah. There's a idea called the second half is is I did right. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what the dead internet theory is? No. Over time, so much content on the internet is going to be created by AI and bots that nothing is going to be left that's used to generate it. Essentially, it's going to be a rounding error of that. This is dead internet theory. I get the sense that the people who are concerned about dead internet theory should have been concerned a long time ago, given that most people are propagating ideas that they didn't even come up with and can't explain.

2:34:38It's like you're worried about mindless robotic creatures producing things on the internet that you might have to read. Have you seen what most people put on the internet and ask them about where they got that idea from? So yeah, I think the dead internet theory's already occurred. It's just, as Navarra says, people failing the touring test and reverse.

2:35:05People failing the touring test and reverse. So they behave like robots. Hmm.

2:35:14The second half of the quote was what? So many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even thus to begin with. Hmm. So there's this quote by Marcus Aurelius that I have, I wrote on the executive as well. How much fucking wall space have you got? It's all whiteboard. Yeah, there's a lot. And it was, is what are you so afraid of losing when nothing in this world belongs to you? And I read that and I was like, fuck, that's good. And so, there's also things, but there's also beliefs. Like, what are we so afraid of? Because every belief that we have, like, we got it.

2:35:49Like, we come as a blank slate, right? Now, you could say, you know, I combined three things and made it my own. You know, I think you've read enough quotes in this world that like, most interesting things have already been said. Yeah. But the ability to change your mind, like if you can't, if you can't explain why you believe what you believe, then it isn't your belief, it is someone else's. And what's weird about that is that people are willing to defend someone else's belief, but they're not willing to accept someone else's belief. It's just that it's just one step removed. I've talked it to you and it's your belief.

2:36:21And I'm defending another person's belief, but it's mine right now, but it's not mine. And I, you know, strong beliefs loosely held, Is I think a saying in the white, white, commonator world? Like before I get this like big trigger effect of like, ah, he says that I am wrong. And therefore he is calling me stupid and I'm inadequate and I will die because I will, you're like, and you just strapped like it's everything. I think the quick check of like, why do, like, what if he's right? And I think that's a great perspective. I remember having my own mind change on something like this. I had to do a debate when I was in high school for affirmative action.

2:36:57And so I was a very pro -ferment of action guy Going into that debate. I had to argue the opposite perspective for the debate. That's cool and by And that was I think I think it was one of the requirements that teachers have everyone had to say what side they were on and then just flipped it Which was amazing teaching by the way. That's really cool And at the end of the whole thing I was like I Was wrong. I actually think this hurts people more than helps people and like I had all these and I had all this reasoning behind it and And I'll tell you a completely different scenario of this in terms of questioning our beliefs.

2:37:29So in the gym world, which is where I came from, I remember a period of time where I saw people work out and I would judge them. I'd be like, oh, that guy's form is bad or he's doing too much volume or he's not squeezing in the right way, whatever. And then I learned more and then learned that that thing that I was seeing some guy do actually was more effective and my thing was not as effective. And then a few years passed and then I learned that the original thing that I said was actually the thing that mattered. And then I learned even more and it was like, oh, so all of these things have different rates of progress based on, quote, efficacy, but all of us eventually cap out at our genetic max.

2:38:12And so all we're really debating, all really debating here is how quickly we recharge genetic max. And if I enjoy training, wouldn't I rather have longer progress over a extended period of time? So then which one is better? Huh. And so it's just like, and basically having myself and luckily for me at least, um, each of those times where I I could learn that I was wrong, it was in silence. And I, after like the third or fourth time of this where I got flipped again and again, I was like, you know, maybe I should back off a little bit. Just be humble. Yeah. Like, like, like, I'm just going to exercise the way I like to and kind of like the pursuit of why for you, like, I, I like training this way.

2:38:52I can't really explain it to you while it just seems to give me joy. Yeah. Yeah. There's this idea from Gwinda Bogal. I had something to this, which I saw this, this yacht. And it had that because every yacht names are always like wild, right? And it said, don't analyze your pleasures. What's that mean to you? He's the word analyzed, but I think judge is the word that he, that he, that he, I'm assuming it was he could make you feel good. Yeah. Don't, don't question it. Don't worry about it. Just let it be. Yeah, that's really cool. That is really, really cool. Like don't, just, it's like the suffer, like only suffer once.

2:39:30Like don't judge this. Thing went well. Sure. I mean, just, you, you, you enjoy it. Yeah. You enjoy it. Uh, Gwinda Bogels got this idea to step flow theory. Most people's opinions are copied from their favorite influences who in turn copy the opinions of their favorite mass media as such Politics is largely a battle between two armies of puppets being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers And that's the you defend an opinion so many people are afraid of changing the mind when most of their beliefs aren't even there To begin with and this people who want to know more and those who want to defend what they already believe Oh so interesting because it was kind of like this is like the kind of like the Mark Bansing Court I thought it was going to go in a different direction So based on that premise, my expected outcome was these people copy the behaviors of their favorite influencers and the influencers are using the most tested thing that the masses have said is the highest performing version of it.

2:40:22Okay, so it's like a means -tested outcome. It's like, oh, the best rose to the top and then everybody's copying that. Well, I mean, maybe, but I think that the point here is that original thinking is very rare. And that you have, it's maybe one of the reasons why you get conceptual inertia and stuff takes a very long time to change. Even after a heliocentric version of the universe is fucking turned around, you have a long time for humans to catch up. and I wonder whether this plays back into the breakup thing. She's like, there's just this fucking conceptual inertia sometimes thought patterns for someone who has trained it, perhaps be able to change like that.

2:41:04But fuck me when you start to scale that across an entire society and media and legislation and government and expectation and religion and what was it, a lumbering behemoth that sort of drags its feet? We end up with that.

2:41:23thinking is hard, which is why the vast majority of people delegate it. What's really interesting, and I think you had George Mack, and this is this whole thing with high agency, you can be exceptional by just actually trying to come up with your own opinions. Starting with, what are the few things we know, which is, you know, reasoning from first principles which people say over and over again, but don't know what reason from first principles is to begin with, which is we start with the facts, the things that we are observed in the observable universe, and we only go from there. And we build on that.

2:41:59And if we, if we arrive at our current thing, then I will also agree with it. If I don't arrive at the current thing, then I'll arrive at somewhere else, and then I'll have reasoning to believe that thing. And the thing is, is that if you do reason from first principles, it does give you the ability to sustain the course for an extended period of time, because your logic is sound. And so you can look at everyone and there's one of my favorite memes. I like my two favorite memes of all time. And one of them is there's this one dude and it's probably standing within front of like a zillion little heads that are going the other way.

2:42:31And he says, yes, you're all wrong. And I love that meme because to me it's like that meme is agency. It's like I know I don't know why you all believe what you believe, but I know why I believe what I believe. And until I have observable evidence that somehow contradicts the stack that has built this belief, this is what I'm going with. The problem is that this takes time to do that research, to do that thinking and come to it. Whereas, as much as we can, you know, throw shade at people who delegate decision making, we all do because you can't actually derive, you don't have enough time to first You don't have enough time.

2:43:13So we have to just be more purposeful about, what are the beliefs that I'm actually, like what hills will I die on? So I will die on my hill of behavior change because that is what I spent a huge amount of time thinking about. But if it's around food stuff, I'm like, I don't know. Like, and I was in the business for 13 years. I was in the business for a long time. Or a fitness and nutrition and things like that. But even then, it's like, you know what? This guy's Dr. Mike Smart, and I believe that he spent his time looking at all this stuff. So I'm just going to delegate my thinking to him. Incentives are aligned.

2:43:45Yeah. If he doesn't get people leaner or more muscular than his business falls apart. Pretty, you later will have to put it. Yeah, he's only known. Yeah. The fastest growth periods are often the most miserable. If you want progress, get used to pain. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. The hardest you've ever worked is the hardest you've ever worked. Every new challenge shows you a new territory you were scared of but survived. Every time you break a new limit, you now know you have the capacity to handle more than you ever did before. It's inverse PTSD, like workload exposure therapy that teaches you, oh, I've been here before and I didn't die.

2:44:24This is okay. So one of my training partners, what he likes me to tell him when he's in a hard set is you're fine. That's what he likes me to tell him. So he's right at those money sets where you're like, I'm dying right now. You're like, you're fine. Not keep going. You got this. It's an odd people like that. He's like, you're fine. You're fine. And I think that that's probably what he tells himself when he's going through those harder times because I am. So when I was back in the fraternity days, I was in the SEC, which is the South, and and they were notorious for heavy hazing. And so I was going to join as a pledge.

2:45:05And so I called my dad up and I was like, hey, I don't know what's going to happen. And he said this to me, which actually was one of the strongest things that was my frame going into it because of what he said. He said, he said, there is nothing that they can do to you that you have not already had worse happen. And it was this great like, huh, they can't do anything worse than what I've already had happened. And so going into all of these, it was this very comical like, oh my God, I was like, this is so much not as bad as this other stuff that's going through. And I think that to your point of like, you have only worked as hard as you've ever worked.

2:45:45The frame of, I can stand it because I am not dead. I am living proof every day that I have stood withstood everything that I have been through, which I think almost all of us could probably give ourselves a little bit more credit and the day that you can't stand it anymore, you won't have to. What would you have said if they could have done something worse to you than what had already happened to? Am I dead? Guess what? I have a new bar that I do that I can't stand. Yeah, more evidence. That's the new territory that you go through. It's a, that sort of safety thing, I think, of... You're okay.

2:46:20This is fine. Yeah. You're fine. Yep, it's a lovely bit of reassurance. And I wonder whether a lot of that comes down to control, just this sense that even if this is a new territory, like your capacity to cope with it still exists, and that in that there is a kind of control that you have. Or maybe it's not a direct control, but it's certainly a... Not a sense of lack of control, right? or not a sense of lack of outcome.

2:47:00I'm trying to unpack what you said. When you reassure somebody that they're fine, what it tells them is, even if this is something which is novel or outside the bounds of your current model, It's something that you can handle. I think that's what I was trying to get to. You have evidence that you have... So, this would be... We will generalize your history to this novel situation, and it also applies. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You've been through breakups before. You'll get through this one. Even if this one was. Even if this one was. And maybe it's got nothing to do with the breakup. Maybe it was to do with the way that you handled that change in career.

2:47:49Maybe it's not even to do with any one thing. Maybe it's the fact that you've handled all of your life put together up to right now, is 50 % of the suffering that you're going to get and the other 50 % is going to come from this one thing. Or maybe it's, this is 99 % of the suffering is coming from this one thing, but in the one percent that you've had so far that is the only evidence that you've got, I reckon that you still got this. There's this idea, I might have told you this before, but a friend of mine told me about a time that he went through a really rough period, sort of public scrutiny and lots of bad things happening to him.

2:48:27And he said, all my life I was scared that I was a coward. I was terrified that I was a coward that I didn't have bravery. And I think of myself as a hard man, I hang around with hard men, I do hard men things. and I'd tested myself, but I'd only ever really tested myself under my own volition and in my own control. And one day I thought, huh, the world's gonna test me an amount of that I didn't get to choose and it's gonna test me at a velocity that I wasn't prepared for. He used his sentence, I fucking adore. He said, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door.

2:49:13I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. And then his wall came crashing down. It's like, and I wondered whether or not that guy next door was going to stop fucking coughing and kick the door in. And sure enough, he did. And it's this lovely explanation of the difference between chosen and non -chosen suffering. It was one of the criticisms I had that everybody made around CrossFit.

2:49:41That training so hard, you know, the Ryan Fescher, like, world of this. Like, dude, you made yourself fucking pass out from a heat stroke in a competition. But even though that is unbelievably extreme and really, really impressive, it's making no bounce about it. You chose to be there. You chose to do that pursuit. What if I said you need to lie on the couch for three weeks and not train? How hard would that be? That's the difference between shows and an unchosen suffering. And the weird thing is that you can't choose unchosen suffering. It's very difficult unless you throw yourself into kind of chaos, you know, like flicking yourself and like fucking throwing yourself off a cliff is like, well, I don't know how this is going to go.

2:50:24So yeah, the clearing my throat, clearing your throat in the room next is so fucking wonderful visual. I have two thoughts on this. So number one is that one of the strongest reframes for suffering is that it gives you the opportunity to create evidence of the person who you want to be. And so it's like I cannot say that I'm the type of man who can withstand hard things without having gone through hard things. And so this hard thing that has occurred that was not of my choice can still be something that serves me and my ultimate goal to become the type of man who can do these things. And so reframing, suffering as opportunity to create more proof, I think, is really, really strong.

2:51:08Because we are ultimately just the behaviors that we do. But we also describe our narratives to why we do those things, which may or may not be true. But we do describe those narratives. And so being able to say, like, this is going to be an amazing story was one of the things that got me through the earlier parts of the Jim days when there wasn't any evidence. And I could say, hey, this was many years of my life because if it had happened overnight, how unrelatable would that story be? And the reason that we don't tell stories of the prince who just goes up to the girl and she says yes, and they lived happily ever after is a very terrible story.

2:51:43And so I think at the end of our lives, we would much rather have the twists and the turns and the depths of character and then the triumph and then the, and then, and then, like, this is a story that's far more interesting than this. Dude, I had Jeffrey Katzenberg on the show the other day. Do you know that is? Hmm. Guy that founded Dreamworks with Steven Spielberg. Oh, cool. The dude that did Lion King. Oh, amazing. And, like, every big fucking Disney movie. He was a legend. And I asked him, what did you learn about storytelling? He says, story is only as good as it villains. Oh, yeah. I mean, the Joker in Dark Knight, I mean, it's a psyche made the movie.

2:52:20And another way to put that would be the story is only as good as it stakes. Yeah. The bigger the monster, the more epic the hero. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Find a woman who kills drama instead of starting it, makes life quiet and not louder, tells you you're better than these guys, you can beat them, and wants you to win even more than you do. Then become the man required to attract that woman and marry her the moment you find her. Yeah, that was just a tweet about my life.

2:52:55When I was debating whether I should marry Leila, I had a mentor who I reached out to know, okay, what do you think? And I was actually just not sure. I just honestly came in with open hands here. I was like, I don't know. Because my relationship with Layla was different than any other relationship that I'd been in before. And he said, look at your stats. And this is probably the most hermosian of love story decisions. But he was like, your business is up. You're eating better. You're working out. You are less stressed than you were. And she has done all of these things to create the space for you to do that.

2:53:41And when I translate it into like what has changed about my life rather than you know, do I feel the chemical compound of whatever? It actually made it a much easier decision for me to say, you know what? This makes sense, which was by the way my proposal to layla. I think it would make sense if we got married was my actual which wasn't a question. It was a statement. It was just like, is that a proposal? And I was like, well, are you saying yes? It's just like, yeah, I was like, okay, then we need to get you a ring. And that was that was our boss. There was there was there. Yeah, so that's it.

2:54:14Hermos is romance. But anyways, I think that. I think a lot of people chase the the fireworks rather than the the cool the cool furnace that takes a long time to heat up. But then it just it keeps it keeps going and it can power for a much longer time during good times and bad times. Because if it makes sense, if it makes sense without emotion, then it will make sense when the emotions are gone. Yeah, that's an interesting assessment of the way that the human attachment system works that basically you have sanity in sanity, sanity again. Yeah. And you should everybody should see themselves as potential future drug addicts that are playing around with maybe one of the most powerful substances on the planet.

2:55:14The only issue is that it's endogenously created inside of you as opposed to exogenously given to you by a guy in a BMW. That's what Falling in Love is. Falling in Love is choosing to deal yourself drugs for between six and 24 months. Yeah. So during that time, you cannot trust your own decision -making. So you need to make as rational of a decision up front in the belief that that will be where you end up on the other side of this window. For the terminology, it's the passionate versus the companion attachment system. It's because serotonin gets robbed in the brain because you're just dopamine, epinephrine, or epinephrine, fucking dry, dry, drive.

2:55:57And then you don't sleep, you don't eat, you're like, oh my God, you've gone crazy. He like, come out of it 24 months later, and you're like, what the fuck was that? And if you're not careful, you're now in a relationship in a fucking house with a golden retriever and maybe a ring and maybe a kid with a person who you don't really like all that much. And Major says, go down. Do you ever hear the diary entry that Charles Darwin wrote when he was unsure about whether or not to get married? Yes, but you could re -cance it. Fuckin' sick. The document has, so Darwin's unsure about whether or not he should get married so he makes a list.

2:56:31The document has two columns, one labeled marry, one labeled not marry. And above them circled other words, this is the question. On the pro -married side of the equation were children, if it please God, constant companion, and friend in old age, who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with. After a reflection of an unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog anyhow. He continued, home and someone to take care of house, charms of music and female chitchat. These things good for one's health, but terrible loss of time. Without warning, Darwin had, from the pro -marriage column, swerved uncontrollably into major anti -marriage factors, so major that he underlined it.

2:57:13This issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at greater length in the appropriate, not to marry column. Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it, conservation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarreling, loss of time, cannot read in the evening, fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books, and, if many children, forced to gain one's bread. even experts in mating and evolution struggle with big decisions.

2:57:51Fucking sick. The line that I remember from that most vividly was less money for books. Just sit your like, and less money for books. Yeah, that will be in there. I want to do another one. I don't mean to just read shit that exists. Have you ever read Richard Feynman's love letter to his wife? No, I read the pleasure of finding things out. Okay. But I love Feynman. Love, love. I mean, you can see a lot of information. I might not be able to say this without crying, which is going to be very embarrassing, but I'm going to try.

2:58:24October 17th, 1946. To Arlene, I adore you sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear it, but I don't only write it because you like it. I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write you. It is such a terribly long time since I'll ask you to, almost two years, but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am stubborn and realistic and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing and that I have done so much in the past I want to tell you I love you, I want to love you, I will always love you.

2:59:00I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead. But I still want to come fit and take care of you and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you. I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until now that we can do that. What should we do? We started to learn to make clothes together, or learn Chinese, or get a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you. And you are the idea woman and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick, you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed.

2:59:43You needed to worry just as I told you then, there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true. You can give me nothing, yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else, but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assume that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you a surprise that I don't even have a girlfriend except you sweetheart after two years, but you can't help it, darling. Nor can I. I don't I don't understand it if I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone.

3:00:32But in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real. My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead.

3:00:50Tough.

3:01:06To play the reverse out, it's like, what I want Layla to write that letter. And I don't think I would, unless she was happy writing that letter. But if the removal of me as a contingency of reinforcement for her meant that she couldn't find that in somebody else, what's sad in me. And so I've already, so like with lay life, I've told her, I tell her a lot. I was like, I'm going to die before you, statistically, for sure, gonna die before you. She's a little younger. She's younger and I think. Female. And she exercises like she's for sure gonna live longer. And I was like, I want you to spend as little time as seemingly possible from the time that I die to finding somebody else.

3:02:02You do me no service by making yourself miserable. and you do not discredor to dishonor me by finding somebody else to spend your life with. So, yeah, I only think about that from reverse. There's a joy of melancholy. It's an interesting kind of emotion that's complex. This strange... Like wallowing? Satisfaction and whistfulness. And yeah, while the wings may be a little more loaded. But melancholy, you know, there can be odd joy and sadness and a kind of beauty that you get to experience after something is gone that you can't experience during it. I've not had anybody in my lifetime, only child with the mother and a father that's still alive.

3:03:00like I've got, there's no one. Must be nice. Yeah, yeah. Just fuck. But there's not been many things that I've lost. And this is me fucking Monday morning quarterbacking. I don't know, but maybe.

3:03:18What's a mood setter? Modern women see Layla and think, I'll wait to establish myself in my career before I date, I'll get married or have kids. But they forget, we got married when she was 23 and we built this together. Love is one of the rare times you don't do life in order, but rather all at once.

3:03:49If you find someone that makes your world go round and makes the world make sense to you, where you both look at the same thing and say, oh, you saw that too? Like, I feel like I was the only one. I think that for high achieving individuals, finding someone who sees the world the same way is incredibly rare. And when you find that person, you should stop what you're doing, and then you should get them to stay with you. And it's been, you know, one of the best decisions of my entire life, Mary Leila.

3:04:21And there's, There's this, especially unfortunately for women right now, there's this huge, you know, put it off to lay, there's no rush, but it doesn't actually take into consideration two things. One is that biology has an advance with culture and society. You can't have kids past, you know, 35, I mean, you can, but you're a geriatric, you know, it's a geriatric, geriatric pregnancy past 35. Ruthless time. Yeah, I'm just being real, right? Yeah, and so I mean I this is like super prevalent and I know there's so much more common theme on the show and I don't touch it very much, but It's it's just I just say it more like because it I think it sucks It's a fun.

3:05:04It's yeah, it's like objectively. It's not fair guys can wait the right you know their whole lives they can do everything And you have to if you go to college graduate college at 21 or 22 and If you want to have four kids assuming that you have perfect pregnancies and you have exactly one year or 18 months between each one. Okay, that's six years by the time you're done. And so if we rule out geriatric pregnancy as our last, then it means that we have to basically hat or we have to have your first kid at 29. Well, maybe it'll take, let's just tack one year on of marriage to have the kid and be married.

3:05:42Okay, 28 year married. All right, do you want to marry somebody within six months of meeting them? Let's give it two years to give our logical, you know brain in okay, so 26 26 you graduate at 22 you have 48 months and I think that Again, this is if you have if you don't want kids then all of this is no If you do then you have a very small window To piece that together now of course there's surrogates and maybe in the future, you know like I I'll say in general betting on And I'll smoke cigarettes now because by the time I'm old, they'll have a cure for it. I don't know. I just, I don't make those bets.

3:06:25And so. It's easier to work with reality the way it is, not the way you hope it's going to end up landing. Yeah, to knowingly incur basically a guaranteed price for the potential of maybe a non -existent solution is probably not the best decision -making process. And to be clear, I say this, Layla and I, we don't have kids, she's not 35. But I think that we have these unrealistic expectations that someone is going to make our lives, that they're going to complete us in some way. When I think that for me, the best thing that a partner can do is help you be the best version of yourself. And that may mean that you also have other friends who fulfill other needs for you.

3:07:07I remember a mentor of mine. He had a wife that most people have wives that are not involved in their business. I'm more of the exception there. But his wife wasn't involved at all in the business and they had a very happy marriage. And he said, and I said, do you ever wish you could talk shop with your wife? And he said, God no. And I was like, why not? He said, that's what I got you for. And it was just such a business wife. It was just such a flippant, like offhanded answer that I was like, there was actually a lot of wisdom in that. He's like, I don't need, I don't need her to do that. He's like, I need her to do this.

3:07:43And he's like, and I've got you and you and Kevin to do these things with. And he's like, and when I want to do like church stuff, I go to these people. And so, and I think a lot of that is because we've become increasingly remote, people live together in close quarters for extended period of time. And so it's like our exposure, our surface area with one another is gone so far up compared to how the vast majority of kind of relationships were called even 50 years ago. Like you didn't spend nearly as much time with your spouse. And so it was more normal to have different people or different parts of your life that were or needs being fulfilled by many people and only the ones that are confined by the laws of marriage being delivered on that.

3:08:21Now if you get somebody who can take two of those boxes or three of those boxes, amazing. But I think the idea, because I tend to reject the idea of soulmate. And I think that people have this fallacy of the perfect pick. Like I have to pick this person perfectly when there's also the Buddhist perspective, which you and I have both, you know, spoken length off off camera about, which is like, suffering is going to be a constant. And this person will like, we get to choose how we want this to go.

3:08:59And of a perfect partner and think, does this person make me better? Will this person hold me back from my goals? If the answer to this, that is, they will make me better, they will make it more likely that I do the things that I want to do and we have know what I would consider non -negotiable. I would have kids, they don't want to have kids, I would have traveled, they never want to travel. If those things are good, I think part of the excitement of life is learning how to be married. There's a cool idea Louise Perry taught me about which is how people buy a lamp. So if you were to move into a house completely unferished, finding the right lamp is super easy.

3:09:40Get any lamp. The house will fit around it. But if you've spent a decade and a half constructing the perfect house and all of the The poultry is chosen and the arts on the wall. There's this sort of sage effervescent candle over the far sides, even the smell. Trying to find a lamp that fits that perfectly curated house is really difficult. And it's a price that we don't like to talk about. I say this as somebody who's unmarried at 37, right? And is constructed a pretty fucking elaborate complex life. It's significantly more difficult to find a lamp that fits into a house that you've designed for a long time than it is to build a house around a lamp and assuming that you want a lamp in your house, getting the order at least somewhat right may make it easier.

3:10:29Now there are lots of great fucking things about the fact that your house is more big and complex and you've had fun in building it and all the rest of the stuff. But it is a cost that we don't talk about which is how much more difficult is it? What are some of the irreversible doors that you have of just being older and more ingrained in your habits and this is the theory versus practice tension again of well you know if I find the right person I can you know we can it'll and you go yeah dude but your mind is not that of 21 or 25 or 30 that of 35 or 40 and it's going to be harder for you to feel as satisfied with your choice the difference between satisfying and maximizing and the problem is even if you're looking for satisficing, you start that bar begins to raise.

3:11:15Yeah, exactly. And how do you know that you're not kidding yourself into selling that short? We've seen, I was at Zach, Zach's wedding a couple of months ago. And this is such a fucking universal truth of every wedding that I've ever been to as soon as the ceremony is finished. All of the the eyes of the older people turn under the single people in the fucking crowd. And they're like, you know, locked on like this and they're coming over. Anybody that's not married? Didn't they? Christopher. When are we going to see? You know, when are we going to be? You know, you can't, you must not wear the same stuff.

3:11:52So we forever. Yeah, exactly. And uh, he's vicious. Like a fucking heat seeking missile from all of the older people that are there. And uh, Zach's mom had had a lot to drink and was being super loud and came out with an an absolute fucking slammer of an insight where she's, you know, so when do you think it's so and so far? I can't wait to be a dad. I can't wait to have a family. I can't wait to do the thing. I feel like I've spent a lot of my life looking after me and I'm starting to get sick of myself and I'm looking forward to looking after somebody else. And she said, uh, that's all well and good.

3:12:28Make sure that you love, you fall in love with the girl, not with the institution. And you see this with women because they have tied to timelines again. That as the nightclub lights are about to come on, the standards have to increasingly slip. And it's not entirely the same for men, but look, most relationships that are an age gap of two years -ish. I think the average is 1 .5 years, either older in the guys direction. You can play around with this all that you want, but it's going to become increasingly difficult if you're talking like over 10 years, like, okay, like how much you're going to have in common, very different life stages.

3:13:12You can get a particularly youthful older person or you can get a particularly mature younger person, but come on. Like, it's going to be another challenge for you guys to get past. And yeah, make sure that you fall in love with the girl, not with the institution. Don't reverse engineer this situation out of somebody that isn't right for it. I think is a good insight. I think there's a distinct advantage to be clear, not that everyone needs this, but if you are a younger guy, the fear that you have is that you're not going to have the resources to attract, you know, a super eligible bachelor at.

3:13:47But I think that there's really deep bonding that occurs and going through hardship together. Like when, and this isn't me saying my way is better, I promise like, hopefully the end point of this whole podcast is like, ox clearly has no idea. But Layla was 23, us 26, and she saw me lose everything twice. And that was before we got married. And so I felt very confident that she liked me for me. And I think that one of the people don't talk about is the flip side of this like playing it out. Right. Let's play it out a couple steps. Let's say you do have the the nice place, you have the big bank account, you have whatever income stream, all the the societal W's.

3:14:34You are not sure if she loves you or the institution of you.

3:14:40And is there a way to know? I don't know. We can stress test it, but it's a high risk. Yeah, right. Yeah, purposefully bankrupt myself to see if this woman loves me. And so I, it without being 1950s nostalgic because we weren't there and it was probably not as good as people think it is now. Yeah. Um,

3:15:04find the person who allows you to be the most aversion of you. And I think that that really comes down to it. And the most aversion of you, I think, is the highest potential version of you. The person who can lubricate the gap between who you are and who you want to be. I've said this before, but the person you marry, marries two people. The person you are and the person you want to become. Just make sure they love both of those people. Because they're going to be the one who's either going to prevent that from happening or even be the one who's a rocket pack for you. It's really interesting is that there was a super red pill podcast that reached out to Leila and wanted to interview her.

3:15:42And she turned down the request, but in the invite it said, you and Alex seem to have the only relationship where it's like modern relationship, but it seems like it's working because they're super, you know, tried, conserved, whatever. And, you know, Layla responded, we had a conversation basically about the invite, she didn't do it, but I think what a lot of people don't see publicly is that, like, like, Leyla and I actually have an incredibly traditional relationship. And in some ways, I just feel like Leyla is the most extreme wife you could possibly find, which is that she just said, I will support my husband in every possible way to help him achieve what he wants, including becoming his business partner.

3:16:25Yes. And that's what people don't get. Like Leyla has done everything for me. And that's the part that people can't see. and like sure she'll get girlboss and like whatever, you know, that world wants to, but like we have a very traditional relationship and Leila is also a very strong woman. And I think that for the very strong women that are out there, this will probably be, you know, chopped in a million pieces and put all over the internet. But I think you just need an even stronger man. And so unfortunately with like the purification of society, especially men, and the flip side of like the more or girl boss, et cetera, is that it's making it harder for those very confident, strong, achieving women to find men that they will let be men.

3:17:14And the real real is that the guy that you will end up with, he will not accept you, quote, letting him be a man. He will be a man. And then you will fall into that world. You will fit within it. And I know that that will probably, you know, rub some people the wrong way, but that is my worldview. And Laylin shares this worldview. And this is again not as public on because you can't do it in Instagram sound bites but Layla's life has been one of absolute service and she just did everything she fucking could to help me And she still does to this day to the point of pushing herself into health issues to to help us win and I think the sooner that you can get an ally That you can absolutely trust we think about confidence and we think about its setups, right?

3:18:00A wife is ideally, like recommendation to the other guys, find a competent wife. The incentives take care of themselves once you get married. And I will say that contrary to popular, you know, pop culture, getting married makes you more money. So as much as Darwin said, this will cost me money. I will have less money for books. Getting married will make you more money. And I'll say even at the most basic level, because you're not spending a third of your mental effort chasing tail. You get a third. The Admin. The sheer admin of dating in the modern world. It's true. Yep. Yep. And you go from a third of your time chasing tail with always trying to gauge people's intentions and all this stuff to getting all of that back.

3:18:46Plus another three thirds of somebody else provided your align on where you want to go. And like I would not be here without Leila. not just because she's been instrumental in everything that we've done business -wise, but she above all else created space. She allowed, and she was the first person in my life who just wanted me to be me. And even in the times when I would, I was at a wedding and I was about to post something and lay loose with me and I was like, oh, that's a little bit edgy. I was like, I don't want to piss people off. And she just looked at me and she was like, never dilute yourself.

3:19:23And it's like somebody who wants you to be the most concentrated, potent, unshackled, unconstrained version of you. Like, she puts up with the fact that I wear the exact same thing every single day. I eat the same lunch every single day, the same breakfast every single day. I talk about only one topic, which is business, and I do that unrelentingly and forever for every single conversation. And she is dealt with all of these things.

3:19:46And the perspective that I have on this is that like after the two years of all the the serotonin hyperdump or neurooprenephrine and dopamine that you get from the love drug. What you'll have left is you and them. And if you do not fit into their idea of what they wanted you to be, and that is going to be a tough ride. And so I think the baseline is, I accept you for who you are, and I also accept the person that you want to become. And I'm going to do everything in my power to help you get there. And ideally, both of us becoming that person is aligned with the same actions. I had this insight from George Maxx birthday last year in Miami.

3:20:24I haven't met George. I feel like he's a fucking normal. He lives in Austin now, so come through. I know you never travel, so that's a hollow offer that I never actually need to cash in on. A friend was recently asked to his best friend is he said he wasn't sure to be a rare question after age 12. So the question was asked differently, who'd you have the least amount filter with when you're around them? Another good question is, who can you sit in silence with and not have to fill it? Even if there isn't a single person that wins, these are the people who should prioritize spending your time with.

3:20:54We all feel the compulsion to change ourselves to fit in. We adjust our behavior, words, nature, everything in attempt to be liked, validated and accepted. The more people who make it feel safe for you to truly be yourself around them, the more confidence you'll have to be that person every day. And I feel like that's a correlate to that. your partner should be someone that helps you become more of you, not dilute. They should be salt. Not to bring out the flavor. Yeah, obviously. And I know you have a limit. Yeah, and I know these have limits, but like salt, more of you. And so you brought up authentic authenticity as I define it from a behavior perspective is how you behave if you have no risk of punishment.

3:21:38And so what would you do if you could not get punished? And if you behave that way in front of them, then it means that either they do not punish you where they have no desire to punish you either way, it accomplishes the same thing which is that you behave as though they weren't there.

3:21:56How to get to top to your goal? Oh God. Did I say this? Just mind your words. Yes. I'm sorry, it is. How to get to top to your goal? Number one, get in shape. Yeah. Number two, get rich. Yeah. Number three, don't be a dick. Pretty good advice.

3:22:17So the second one, so get in shape, I highly recommend. Like the first thing, like strongly, strongly, strongly recommend for young guys, like, for the love of God, get in shape. It'll never be easier. You'll never have more time. I had one of my sales guys who I said, dude, I don't see you at the gym. and he said, you know, I'm just really busy and I just like, I was like, you will never have more time and less responsibility than you do now. So I kind of used the James Clear thing. I said, hey, if you can't make it work now, except that you're never gonna be in shape for the rest of your life.

3:22:50He was like, whoa, I was like, think about it. Registral self of the design. Yeah, I was like, you're just never gonna be in shape. He was like, whoa, I mean that. I was like, right, so do it or don't, but stop wanting it. And so back to that point. So I think that getting a shape just dramatically enhances the people that you can hang out with. And I have this belief from humans in general, all humans at ideal body weight and like normal levels of musculature are almost all attractive. Like at like a one or zero binary scale of attractive, like almost all humans are just purely physically. And so like just don't have that be a constraint for you.

3:23:28Like don't have it be a negative at the very least, right? Yeah. I've got this limitation and that limitation and another limitation. It's like, okay. You're just adding another? Yeah. I think Peterson said something like, they say they're depressed. He's like, well, you're living in your mom's base and you're unemployed. It's like you didn't give yourself a chance. Now, if you're in shape, you're rich, you do all these, you've achieved whatever you've achieved. That's have to be rich, but you've achieved whatever you want to achieve. If you're still depressed, then we can talk about it. But until then, you haven't even given yourself a shot.

3:23:56I can't find girls. Well, are you any of these basic things? No, we'll then do that first. The rich thing is more, I mean, obviously for me, I think Professor G. Galloway said this, it's more about the signal that you have the ability to gain resources more than having them. And so, like, if you think about Trust Fund Kit, now, there is the element of having money, which does, for sure, there are girls who just want the money. But if you compare that to the young hungry guy, I don't know if they went in ahead to head, right? And so it's the same reason that the starving artist sleeping on his friends couch, yeah, but who's got lots of upside potential as attractive.

3:24:39Yeah. So I could be fucking has one guitar and a pair of boots to his name. Like how's that? Well, yeah, but so did Dylan. Look at the predictors that I'm seeing here. Look at the fucking early the unsat alarm warnings of something potentially great in this future. So get in shape, signal that you are ambitious and that you plan on pursuing whatever it is that you're going after. And then finally, it just don't be a jerk. Like I'm not saying you have to be like, you know, the world's sweetest, whatever, but just don't be a dick. If you do those three things like you'll be able to get whatever girls you want.

3:25:15What does don't be a dick consist of? Great question. So it would probably be the behaviors that, so that is a bucketed term for many behaviors underneath of it. That basically just decreased the likelihood that a girl would want to continue to fraternize with you. But like, you know, specifically, it's like, and I think that also depend on the girl to be real. So girls might prefer this. So whatever your target girl is, she probably has a bucket of behaviors. Now that's different than do what she wants, very different. It's, is there something that is non -negative to me that is beneficial to her?

3:25:51Do as many of those things as you can. Mm -hmm. It's interesting as well that it probably means you need to ensure that the kind of girl that you want to be with and the kind of behavior that you want to have around her will often align because those two things might not. You might want to be a really distant, I'm just going to work on myself kind of guy, but you might want a very forthcoming, very caring sort of woman and you have really reduced down your mating pool if those two things don't tend to correlate and I'm going to guess that they don't. If you want a really forthcoming, very caring woman, I'm going to guess that she's going to kind of expect that sort of interaction in reverse.

3:26:36And if you're not prepared to give that, it's like, rid yourself of the desire, or you're gonna have to change your preferences, or you're gonna have to change your behavior, one of the two. Worth bringing up early, if you are on this, like, you know, I would like to find somebody trained. This is something that worked exceptionally well, which is I, and I think our first or second date, I just said, all front, all the non -negotiables that I had, which to be fair, this isn't the like red flags, whatever thing, it's just like, I work a lot. I will not sacrifice that. If that is a problem, then this will not work, and that is okay.

3:27:10I just wanna be up for that. These are the things, like I work out, I will do that, I'm not going to give that up. I will not give that up for anyone. And so, just stating those things, and I would say, because people have this, like they want to put on a show, right? They peacock, they have to do the mating dance, and I have to present myself in a way that's different than I currently am. But I would say over time, the less you can make the discrepancies between how you're quoting or performing and who you are at baseline for that person, the better it's gonna be long -term, because they're gonna find out eventually.

3:27:42And so they might as well find out upfront and then you could just say, triage. I said this a bunch of times, but I went through breakup at the start of last year, three and a half year relationship and I was like, okay, I'm back in the dating world, very different world, very different person, very different environments, so on. And I did the sort of intellectual equivalent of a shit test, which was early on, I would start sending them psychology today articles and weird sub -stack posts and stuff, just to see, huh, are we going to have it at some point when we next catch up, but we're going to have a discussion about this, because this is the sort of thing that's interesting to me.

3:28:16And I don't see this going away, at least for a little while. I imagine the next decade of my life, maybe for the rest of my life, I'm going to be reading stuff, I'm learning about human nature, and I think it's important to me to be able to talk about this with my person. This is really good. So what you just said reminded me of a speech that Horowitz gave, Ben Horowitz. He talked about not pursuing your passion as a career choice. And one of the main arguments that he makes is that your passions will change. He said the things when you're really passionate and when you're 20, aren't the things that you're passionate when you're 40.

3:28:56And to link that to something that Jeff Bezos talks about, which is when asked, hey, you know, what do you think the future of Amazon is going to look like? He said, people always want to know what is going to change. He said, I think it's far more valuable to think what is not going to change. And I think that if you're trying to find a mate, you really want to find the fewest common denominators, like what things will not change about me over a long period of time? If you happen to be in a stint that you're really into fencing or whatever, that may change. And I think that's where like in some ways it lowers the bar for the quote perfect match because trying to find the perfect match today versus that same match 50 years from now, virtually impossible.

3:29:37And so if we accept that many of the things that are surface level today are going to disappear on a longer time horizon, then there's only going to be a few things that actually matter, which are going to be what are the behaviors under duress, right? What are the core things about myself and my behavior set that I find it unlikely that will change over a long time horizon? What are the things that are predictive of the things that end up manifesting? Like what is it that underpins this? What are the foundations? And so I think that if you can do it and it's probably just a handful of big rocks rather than hundreds of pebbles and so when when girls have the The guys to right have the big list of like the hundred things that I can never have it's like You probably should have three that you must And then kind of ignore the rest because that's the game.

3:30:24People who obsess about work -life balance are typically mediocre at both. Obsessed people apply their obsession to everything and just call it life. I stand by my statement. I mean, have you met anybody who's like... Maybe it's genetic, you know, the finding the dent in the can and the like, I mean, the first thing that lay on the knee when we got married is that we went through a divorce course because we're like, well, shoot in version, right? We're like, well, let's just find out all the reasons that people get divorced and let's handle all of those things now. And so we did that as the first thing.

3:31:01What are the reasons? Money's a big one. Kids are a big one. And then a lot of it is actually really tactical preferences. So like when I come home from a long day of work, do I want you to then unload all of your days, you know, woes on me? Probably not. Right? And so for me specifically, and it's being, I mean, a lot of it comes down to communication assuming that you guys like each other at some point, right? And that and rounding up, I call it rounding up, which is like, if I said something and there's two ways of taking it a bad way and a good way, I meant the good way. We're married. I love you.

3:31:36And so having that be kind of the default setting and like Layla has learned a lot of my nuances, which I actually only got to learn with her because the thing is that we're going to have, you know, novel experiences that then become routine. So, you know, when we work together, there was no me coming home at the end of a long day. But we, I mean, we work in the same company now, but we don't like work together during the day. And so very often she's at home and I get back and she learned because I just, to just give me space. Like I usually just want to be left alone for a minute to basically let the dust settle on my head so that I can be fully present for her.

3:32:16But I could see somebody who didn't know that, assuming that if I don't wanna talk to you when you get back, you don't love me. That's a problem. And so it's really just dissecting these issues and saying, it's just saying like you hate me or extrapolating this to our relationship forever and always, just as a preference in behavior and obviously, lay list subscribes at the same perspective on behavior that I do, which has made our relationship so much easier to navigate without the landmines. Because she'll just say, what would you prefer I do instead? And I say, can you do this instead of that?

3:32:46And she says, sure. And that's it like recently. So this action, this is super, super recent. We went out and had dinner. And she said, thank you for dinner. Because I paid women to restaurant. And I was like, it really hit me. And I was like, I haven't had someone like, no one's basically no one thinks me for buying shit because I'm the assumed default guy who pays for shit. But on top of that, Layland, I work together. We make this money together. So it's almost weird that she would think me for paying for dinner. So it's not like in polite or where's the time? I've not done it. Yeah, it's our money, right?

3:33:21But I was like, that meant a lot to me. It means a lot to me too. Yeah. And so what she's realized is, If she says, I'm proud of you, you're awesome. That was great, whatever. That means a little bit. But for the most part, I'm like, well, I have a whole bunch of things that I could have made better and you just didn't see it. And like, here's to the, you know, I'm thinking about that stuff, right? It's like, it means something, but it doesn't mean the most. But when she said, thank you, I was like, please do this more. And so, this is this week. So this is like a very fresh top of mind for me.

3:33:55Like I came home yesterday, after the two mega days that I was talking about the beginning of this. And she said, thank you for working so hard. And I was like, it's just the tiny shift in terms of verbiage. Instead of saying like, I'm so proud of you. And she said, thank you for it allowed me to feel like I was actually serving us by doing what we do. And it basically gave a huge reinforce on top of my already large existing reinforcers for working. But it's like, I'm like an appreciation camel. Like I don't need a lot. And it can carry me for a long time. But she was like, and she said the thing that she said at the very beginning of our relationship.

3:34:29She said, I'm coachable. And I told you that you're stupid thing. The one superpower that Layla's had in our relationship, which I think everybody could use is that the number of times that I have to repeat feedback is zero. She is the most responsive person to feedback. And maybe it's hyper criticism responder, whatever it is. but she will immediately change behavior permanently. And it's been one of those, you know, I mean, when we were dating, there was a period of time where I said, I don't think this is going to work. And she was like, why? I was like, you're too cold. And then like the next day she was like, okay, what does warm look like?

3:35:10And I was like, well, if you do these things, she was like, okay, I'll do that. And so, and you know, some people might hear this. It's doing something that makes you a mate happy without incurring a cost on you. There you go. If it means, if it makes no difference, Now, if it doesn't grow our costs, have the conversation. Okay, well, this is a trade -off here. And there was a period of time she made all of my meals for a very long period of time. And then like in 2019, she came to me and she was like stressed out over my, she was like, I can run this company or I can make you into all of the business.

3:35:40No, seriously, she was like, and she just said, tell me what you'd prefer. And she was like terrified to have this conversation because she was afraid that I would, I say you have to be this and this. And I was like, oh no, it's a way rare scale to do what you can do in the business. I was like, we can just find someone to cook the food and choose like, oh, I was like, it's great. I was like, but this is like, this means way more to me. And so just having that like, hey, I'll do it. Just I also just like to like if you had an employee not to say that they're the same thing, but like you can't just say keep doing more and more things.

3:36:10At some point, there's a priority that has to happen. I have to do this instead of that. And so what things are you willing to trade? And then us being able to openly talk about behavior the way that we do has made this way less emotionally charged. Because the sense of self, it's attached to. It's interesting with that. I think a lot of people will feel like it's some sort of denial of who they truly are when this happens. I remember when I first started working with a speech coach, I got a addiction coach. I figured that if I was going to talk for a living, it would be good to speak to somebody that was an expert at doing that.

3:36:44And addiction. Addiction. and also, yeah, yeah. Diction coach. Uh, and a bunch of my friends said, uh, well, you, we worried about losing the way that you speak. You know, you've got to, you've got a way that you speak and that, you know, it's going to change who you are. Yeah. And I didn't really understand until probably only this year about why they were uncertain or had a bit of pushback against it. And it's because the way that you speak is seen by many people, and maybe rightly so, as attached to who you are, you're not only your sense of self, right? It's a very sort of transparent, so many thoughts.

3:37:28Hold down to that. And the analogy that I used was, well, let's say that I started learning to play the saxophone. And I said, I'm gonna get a teacher to teach me how to play the saxophone. And your response to me was, well, what about your natural saxophone playing ability? I'm trying to be a better boxer, and I get a boxing trainer. Like, yeah, but what about the way that you naturally throw jobs? Like, okay, if we assume that there are better and worse ways to do it, then yes, there might be some unique quirks that you have, which if they were eroded away would lose a specific competitive advantage with this.

3:38:07But the things that we attribute as very closely attached to our sense of self and the things that we don't, I think are really interesting and the way that we speak would be one of those. But if somebody starts to expand that to everything that they do, whoa, I mean, this relationship is not going to work if you don't like the way that I open doors. Like my door opening is that's a unique part of me. You're denying the person that I am by doing this. How can you know this is really important to me? My door opening ability is really important to me. You go, that, and I wonder what the size of territory that somebody is or is not prepared to adjust.

3:38:50I wonder what that is, you know? I mean, I have, yeah, I know. So I think you wrote a longer blog piece, I wanna say a month or two ago, about how, do people love me for the things that I do? Or do they love me for the person that I am? And then the follow up is, do I love me for the things I do versus who I am? And I think I texted you afterwards, which is what is the difference? And I mean that now people get, all the woo world gets really upset. But if you say, if I said who is John, the first thing that you would do to describe who John is, is talk about what John does. And so I think that the whole being is XYZ thing just confuses a lot of people.

3:39:35And so our identity in, you know, Alex's worldview is just the out the malgumation or the aggregation of all the behaviors that we do. Just put together. It's all the stuff we do. We are, like he is a carpenter. Chris has a podcast. He does podcasting. Like that's part of who you are. But like it's just what you do. And so to hold a specific action that you have on a pedestal, you make it mean something. But fundamentally it's just a behavior. And so I think that if we see ourselves as just this list of a thousand behaviors, then we get to ask the question, does me changing this behavior and going through the effort of doing that mean more to me than this relationship?

3:40:19And if the answer is no, well, then then change it. And especially if it's at virtually no cost to you and a significant benefit to them. And I think that trade is when you see yourself as I'm just a person who does these things, then there's way less emotional rigidity with change because you're like, oh, I'm happy to trade this for that. I could be do. Especially given that the thing that you're doing now in terms of a behavior might mean a little to you, but not that much, and your pleasure in doing something that makes your partner really, really happy could be fucking infinite. Yeah, this is related to one of yours that I didn't do earlier on.

3:40:56Lazy people don't know how to start, weak people don't know how to finish, successful people don't know how to stop. People demand success, but refuse to work weekends. People want opportunity, but won't talk to strangers. People claim ambition, but sleep in every day. We are the result of our actions, not our aspirations.

3:41:19I think once you've actually learned how to try, really try one thing for an extended period of time every single day and take in all of your discretionary effort and your money and your time and your resources and put it towards just doing that thing, number one, you realize how few things you can really do well because of the amount of time that to take. The second thing is you realize how easy it is to be different because of how few of them actually do that. And

3:41:55that learning how to try becomes a generalizable skill across domains. So when you do learn how to play the saxophone, and if you want to pick up tennis, you think about how many sessions you did to fix your, and you know, play a more advanced thing over and over again. And then when you realize that the domains are similar in terms of skill achievement, you're like, oh, this is the same thing. And then when you go like, oh, I need to make content now. It's like, oh, it's the same as hitting 504 hands in 500 backheads. And I make 500 tweets in 400 posts. And if I do it for an extended period of time and I take the feedback and I don't stop, are probably most people.

3:42:40You also get to see if I am focused on playing the saxophone and becoming the best saxophone player that I can be, but I also want to be kind of good at tennis. The better that I get at playing the saxophone, the more repetitions it takes for me to become even one increment better. And in order for me to become even remotely in the same fucking universe in tennis, how long is that going to take? And I need to work really, really hard. It's like when you play a computer game, right? You're playing some fucking RPG. And the first few levels, it's just new games all the way. You fucking level it up every time you turn it on.

3:43:18And then people are grinding and grinding and grinding to get from level 94 to 95 to 96. And go, well, all of the games are crucial to the people at the top. And if you've invested all of this time into this thing, you are getting per unit of effort way more back than you ever were in the beginning. The difference is that you no longer feel the progress quite so much. So we have this odd issue that willpower at the end can sometimes wane, but the returns are at the highest and the progress per unit of time put in is at its lowest and the inverse happens when we start something and this is why when people get to the top of the thing And plus motivation, which is maybe just tiredness with the pursuit of a thing and it is eye of a novelty generally, which is maybe a little bit of a different.

3:44:10But this is why people get to a thing. And then this thing's tangential to that. Maybe I'm going to start. You know, I've been learning to play the saxophone for a long time. I learned to DJ. DJing is kind of the same. You're starting again at this thing in the beginning. Maybe it can augment in a different way. You know, is it as close as, I know lots about training, so I'm going to learn about diet? Or is it, I know lots about lifting weights, I'm going to learn about playing tennis. And some things augment and enrich, and other things detract and take away.

3:44:47I think the better you get at one thing, at least for me, the less it's made me want to do other things because I know what's going to take. I'm going to do it to this same level. And then I think, well, if let's say I'm a nine out of 10 at saxophone and I would like to be a nine out of 10 at tennis, I know how much work it would take to be a nine out of 10 at tennis. And then I just wondered myself if I took all of that and put it right back in the nine out of 10 that I'm at saxophone, would I go from being top hundred in the world to number one in the world? And then how different would my life be if I was a nine out of 10 saxophone player to nine out a tennis player versus a 10 out of 10 sax player and which life would I prefer?

3:45:31And I have tended to be a maximizer in my whole life and so like I'm probably pretty, my diet is relatively cast in terms of like I'll be doing business for the rest of my life. It's the only game that I really enjoy that I spend all my time on. But I recently have had a really strong consideration that you and I talked about, which is I've been really strong considering devoting myself to taking meditation as a practice seriously. And the reason for that is because the literature on basically the standard deviation improvement and subjective well -being, basically how happy people are of Buddhist monks who have meditative for like 40 ,000 plus hours is like three to four standard deviations above the norm, like monstrous.

3:46:14So to put context here, once gender deviation would take you from like 50 % to like 84 % in terms of like general population. if you're two standard deviations, you're at 99. That's two, three and four. And so what's interesting is that like a year of meditation gets you that first chunk. At an hour a day? I was looking at four hours a day, but I'm aggressive. And so, but the thing is that in looking at this, it was basically like in order to replicate those outcomes, it takes about four hours a day. Now if you do an hour a day for a decade, you're gonna get probably one, maybe one and a half, depending on who you are, whatever.

3:46:52And so, I, being a max master, was like, well, okay, let's start with spending $20 million on the house. Like, okay, if I spent all of my time that's available to doing this thing, would it be worth it? And the thing that's been troubling me is that the answer is yes. And so this is something that I've been, it's like, I know what it looks like for me to go work really hard at something, and I've just been like, I've been teetering at the edge of this, being like, okay, am I really going to do this? And so everyone's getting this as a snapshot of where I'm currently out right now thinking through this because The single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about and Seeing these guys literally just take their median and just move it all the way up They get the first arrow that hits them and they just completely avoid all the other second arrows and then it vanishes in the moment and And the description of what three to four standard deviations ahead of subject while being is a constant state of bliss.

3:47:55If you look to Gary Weber's stuff, he's one of the guys. He's a somebody who has become awakened in light and like permanent abiding, not to do all the whanness. Oh, super cool. Type thing. And that's his description. I mean, you know, it's uh, unstressed testable in many, I guess put me in an FMRI, but you know, as if this is because of the meditation or they were the sort of person, et cetera, et cetera. But unless everybody is part of the same grift, I choose to get you to sit in silence for a long time with your eyes closed. Yeah. The incentive Sun seemed to really be there to, to get you to do that.

3:48:30And the thing that's been like enticing me about it is, and I don't know if you're the same way, but like when I see how bad I am at something on my first few tries, I'm like, oh my God, my newbie gains are going to be through the roof. Yeah, because I'm a meditation hyper -respondent. Oh my God. Well, me trying to meditate is like, I'm so bad at it. So bad at it that I'm like, I'm gonna unlock so much. And so, and I also like it because like, it fits so well in my worldview of like, of course, having that level of happiness takes work. Of course, it's not me changing my, because I spent my life changing my external conditions.

3:49:18I literally live in a fortress of my own making. We're in one of two huge rooms that are my gym, right? And I look the way I look because of that effort. I married the person I wanted to marry. I did all of those things and yet, this guy who has a chair in the middle of Tibet that is, is Festfucking you and everything. Yeah, he's just murdering you. Well, this is, you know, we spoke about this when we chatted the other week and I do think it's an important pivot and I think that the story as well is an important pivot, more for you than for me, but for me a little too, of, you spend a long time trying to achieve things that you think are going to make you happy and fulfilled and they bring with it material, objective, real changes in life and some of them are really important to front load and some of them can only be achieved at a certain period of your life.

3:50:20And after a while you ask yourself is this still the game that I need to keep playing? I'm 10 out of 10 in this thing and 11 doesn't exist but tiny increments of tens do Yeah. If this isn't the answer, does it make sense to continue trying to fill an internal void with external goals? Yeah. And I think it's pretty cool to hear you look at a different, even just consider a different mode of input with regards to that. And just for the record, I'm only doing it because I think unlocking the next level of achievement. I have to still have my logic brain for why I'd be worth it. But no, it's, I think the reason I'm actually considering it is it takes so much violent level of work.

3:51:20It's true though. The only way that anybody could describe meditation as well. Okay, the only way that you could convince yourself to do it is to call meditation, violence. But like, something, and this is me stealing you and then repurposing it in a different way, we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it. Like we sacrifice happiness in order to become successful so that when we're sufficiently successful, we can finally be happy. And then if you were to make some sort of psychological equation and just strike off success from both sides, you kind of get left with the happiness piece.

3:51:59But when not closed systems, humans need a sense of validation. They want to be recognized by the world. We have goals that we want to do and it is important to realize it's an untouchable lesson. It's important to realize that the thing you thought was going to fill the void wasn't the thing, but you can't realize it wasn't the thing that's going to fill the void until you've got it. And then once you have you go, okay, sick, take that one off. Now allow me to move on to the most subtle insight that I could have never achieved had I have not gone there. And so when I was 1920ish, kind of when you have a lot of these existential crises, it's very common time between 18 and 22 when people develop their world, you're at least solidify some version of it.

3:52:41I strongly debated leaving everything and pursuing the meditation monk path because I saw I saw the same research that I'm looking at now 16 years later, right? And what was interesting was that that was actually during the process where I was like fuck happiness. I'm not I'm not going to even think about this anymore. And I made my new life goal to just be useful because the thing is is that and this might be me doing the lame judgment on other people, but me seeing a guy who sits in a hut and then just sits there and is happy for eight hours a day every day. I see that. I saw that I tried to have no judgment here, but as a waste.

3:53:20Because I think there's also a duty that we have to help other people. Now that's a shit. I want to be clear So you don't you know, obviously don't have to subscribe to that But I at least have it deeply enough in me that I feel like we should be useful to one another And so I my desire to be useful has been greater than my desire to be happy But if there is a world that at this point I can be both I'm okay with it Money doesn't buy happiness past $70 ,000 per year because spending money effectively is a skill and most people never acquire it. Someone who runs more than $70 ,000 a year, what have you learned about the skill of spending money effectively?

3:53:57So, it's so funny because people assume that they're not levels to skills. And I remember seeing, you know, my first billionaire started spending money and I was like, whoa, that's a thing, interesting. And a lot of people who even do make money or save a lot of money never learn how to spend it well. Now, I'm not saying blow it on stupid things, but the 3D learning that you described with with Bill, he spent money to create that experience. And it was probably worth it. And so the most people just limit themselves to house, car, food, travel. That's the majority of it. But there's so many other things that you can do with money that improve your daily experience of create memories that will pay memory dividends for a long period of time and The biggest the easiest ones to basically pay down our time and so it costs roughly $1 ,500 a month to get about 90 hours a month back if you add up a driving gas preparation cooking cleaning of food cleaning of your dwelling, cleaning and prep of your clothing.

3:55:13If you put all of those things together with the average American spends per week, it's about 20 -ish out, 25 hours a week that they spend doing all of those things for themselves. And so 90 -ish hours per month. And the cumulative cost of fixing all that stuff is about 1 ,500 bucks at once. That'd be a made slash housekeeper person who maybe could also cook or maybe a cook who's separate. but Uber, daily, at the low end later, you can have a personal driver, but yeah, totally. Just those two, those are the only two. Then you have food prep? We could do, oh man. Yeah, one stop shop, house, keep a, probably cost a little more there, but yeah.

3:55:53But it would fold two rolls into one. Yes. And so thinking about that, and we have our $70 ,000 per year, you know, kept, but if we're assuming, okay, we're making more than that, if you make a million dollars a year, It's like, okay, would you be willing to spend 70 to get somebody who does all of those things for you? And you get a hundred hours a week. Well, if you get the hundred hours back, let's just say it's, let's say it, let's keep it at $5 ,000 a month for what we're willing to spend. So more than that. Okay, so if you can make more than $50 an hour with your free time, or you simply would pay $50 to get more free time to line a hammock, that to line a hammock, then it's worth the trade or go wakeboarding.

3:56:28And so I think that most people who start making more money, they just stop at a nice house, nice car, maybe a nice clothes, and places to eat occasional travel that they spend once or twice a year. That's it. That's all they do. But there's so many ways to improve your existing environment. I get the sense that it's actually the middle level. It's the people who may be on a hundred grand a year in the USD, maybe sort of 70 grand. They're the ones who are likely to probably need this information the most. Because if you're up to the half a million, a million a year or something like that, It's like you you've probably realized that this is something that you can spend money on people don't I talk to entrepreneurs all the time Well, that's that's it's one of the first things I do when I look into a company I say what do you like do you have do you have a housekeeper?

3:57:10Do you have that like and we go through all this stuff because the highest ROI money I can spend as an investor is getting a hundred hours a month back for the entrepreneur for 50 grand My god, well, I mean the yes, that's crazy and also if you are someone who to whom an additional 50 grand a year of income would be 30 % of your net worth or 30 % of your annual income making 150 grand a year. For you, this opens up a lot more than it actually does for the guy that's let's say that I guess when you're making a million each hour that you would then spend would be worth more et cetera, et cetera.

3:57:46But yeah, it's that overcoming that sense of, I can do this for free. Therefore, I shouldn't pay someone to do it. Guilt of spending. This sense of opulence and wastefulness, entitlement. Overcoming that has been a real challenge for me, and it's good that I've been around people like Bill, yourself, and it's almost like, it's a very specific type of ambition, and it's not ambition in the material sense, it's ambition in the life quality sense. Freedom. Yeah. Actually, only. So one of the things I think from today that's been novel or interesting to me has been updates in your worldview. So reflecting on the last 12 months or so, what do you think are the things that you've changed your mind on the most or updated your beliefs on the most?

3:58:43Instead of saying fuck happiness, I am open to the idea that I can be both useful and happy. I'd say that's probably the biggest one, that it's not a trade between the two. That's number one. I would say the second is getting very specific about moments, not extrapolating moments to days, weeks, months, years. This one good thing, can I spread that wide? And this one bad thing, can I shrink it into the absolute smallest possible box and making sure that I don't suffer the second arrow? I'd say that if I had the two, probably those are probably the two biggest things that I would say I have been actively working on for how I see reality.

3:59:34Well, I look forward to seeing what you've learned next time. I appreciate you, man. Thank you for having me.