The Art of Living with Matthew McConaughey and Rob Drydek

27:37And all of a sudden, someone has to tell you, no, you crossed the goal line, you scored. You're like, oh, I did? I thought we had to go another 40 yards. Now you're on to something right there, brother. That's that whole concept that when they wrap shooting, you're like, we're wrapped? Right. I'm coming back tomorrow. Yeah. I got to tell you, I think what it gives you maybe is freedom. I think it's a freedom when you're totally emerged in a process and not so concerned about results or outcomes. It creates a freedom. And then that science, you can actually navigate in an art form when you're in it.

28:07I think that allows the art to sort of take over the energy, the whatever it is, when you're totally free. That was a great conversation. And if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow The Ed Milet Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Here's an excerpt I did with our next guest. I have a really good friend here today. One of the most downloaded shows we've ever done before because he'll surprise you. You know him from television. He's an incredible television personality with ridiculousness and a million other projects that he's done. But I don't know him from that.

28:38I know him from his brilliance as an entrepreneur and as a human optimizer of himself, of time, and in everything connected to him. And he's a very, very good friend of mine. And I love my conversations with him. He's one of my favorite people I've ever met in my life to talk with, if not my favorite. and I thought today I'd just let you sit in on one with us. We're going to talk today with the great Rob Dyrdek. Welcome to the show, brother. Hey, thank you for having me. It's nice to go from... Laguna's a beautiful place to do a show, but it's nice to come to Hollywood into the fancy studio as well.

29:14This is more your comfort level, isn't it? Like this Hollywood thing. So you were saying to me... No, it's not. I stay away from this area of the city. You know what I'm saying? When I'm driving over here, I'm like, man, I haven't been here in forever. Look at this place. I think that one certainly has changed over the years and it hasn't improved, but that's probably a whole other conversation. You were saying before we started, though, it was four years ago that we did our show, and that at the time when we were doing the show, there were a lot of theoretical things that you talked about on that show that you believed in that you were implementing into your life, and now you're like, now I have some data to really validate some of the stuff that I believe in.

29:48So what are some of those things that, like you said on the show, and you're like, and now I'm seeing in real life the results from those things? Yeah. You know, I think the most profound one was really about sort of what I really discovered and talked a lot about in 2018. We did the show was that life is about this pursuit of the ideal version of yourself. Right. And this has been something you've talked about forever, where it's it's this idea of, you know, putting out into the future what you want to become and then building a plan and strategy and put in all the energy and effort to go and achieve it.

30:26And you will grow into that person over time. And so that pursuit we talked a lot about as being really important. And I was talking a lot about it from the business lens and doing it from a balanced perspective. and what happened for me in in that conversation is it led to what happens when you reach that person and i made the comment of i think like when you eventually get to the ideal version of yourself that you sort of settle in to sort of a rhythm um and you and your pursuit wouldn't quite be the same. And within four years, I achieved all of the goals that I set in 2016 and became the ideal version of myself.

31:14So I actually, rather than guess at what would happen to me when I finally reached the ideal version of myself, I actually experienced it. And what What was so profound for me is since you grow into your ideal self, you're growing along the way. And as you learn more and see, you begin to see further. So the ideal version of yourself is always off in the distance. And it's not about ever ending the game and that you're there. It's actually the pleasure and the actual joy that you get from living is in that pursuit. The difference was is I learned to control that pursuit and grew in a systematic, harmonious way and then grew beyond what my ideal version at that time would become because I grew into a completely different person by the time I got there.

32:14You guys all get it now? See what I'm talking about? It took four minutes and there you get it. So his wife's my dude to talk to. He is special. The success that he's had in his life isn't by mistake. And I'm not just talking about his financial or television success. I'm talking about kind of father he is, kind of friend he is, kind of husband he is. None of this is by mistake. Like in my life, I have some really brilliant entrepreneur friends and I have some really brilliant personal development friends. I don't know anybody with a combination of both like you. I don't. One of the things I'm learning from you, I want to go right to some of your stuff.

32:51I'm a work lots of hours guy. I'm a pound it. Let's go grind. Bingo. And you're like, hey, that's not exactly how it works, bro. Hey, there's a better way. And so why don't you share with us the better way what your theory about hours and time and and and also the value of a minute the value of time? Yeah, it's funny because you know, I'm you know, sometimes I'll you know, I'll watch your stories and it's like I don't feel like going today, but I got to get up and I got to make it happen. And I'm like, man, why you don't feel like why? Why are you? Why are you putting yourself in a position where you don't feel like going today?

33:33You know what I mean? Yeah, it's fair. Because I almost like to look at myself. I've evolved into a blend of sad guru, Ray Dalio, and who's the great, the good doctor that's tapped into the quantum field? Dispenza. Dispenza. I'm basically a combination of all three of those. Whoa, Dalio, Dispenza, and sad guru. Right. Hello. That's maybe the best combo ever. Look, when I think about what's intersected through me, it's that analytical, like data-driven side of Dalio. It's the tap into the quantum field of Dispenza. And it's the, hey, the reality you experience today is based off of every action decision that you have made in the past.

34:21That is the sad guru sort of karma concept, right? and and to me you know if you want to have a truly rich fulfilling life you you have to find joy in every part of it and in order to do that you have got to to use your time with absolute intention and so for me it's it's everybody knows that it's the only resource you got it's the only resource that's a limited man you're locked up and and for me is that your impression of me no that was like middle middle ground one you know what i'm saying but it's i was halfway in it i was halfway in it you know i push you towards like a wrestler voice you know what i mean um but i'm when i started tracking all of my time my life changed right because it's like i i used to design what i call the rhythm of existence right so i i built the rhythm of existence in 2015 which was essentially the operating system for my life.

35:20And so it had all these principles and had all these things that I would do with my time. And then I would create a rhythm of the year, like when sort of all the constants were and when the variables would happen, you know, because your life flows around weekends and holidays and birthdays. It has this cadence that you can build sort of your time around that you can get better and better at predicting how to use your time more efficiently. but boy I started tracking all of it I would just you know I plan a lot of it and then I would be highly adaptive and adjust it but the thing that I started doing every day is just tagging every hour and what did I do and I eventually found somebody in 2020 that heard me talk about it and came in and and wrote a script that went into my google calendar that pumped that thing out into a dashboard.

36:10And now I could see how I used my time on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis by hour and by percentage. And so that, that began to create this really interesting clarity as it related to like the time matrix from a percentage standpoint, right? If you have, you know, 8 ,760 hours in the year and you do something for 365 days a year for one hour, it's 4 % of your life. If you sleep seven hours, it's like 28 % of your life. If you work a 40-hour week, it's 23 % of your life. So I began to see the structure of this time. And as you begin to understand and design it against how you want to use it, you begin to question its efficacy.

37:05How high of efficacy are you using with this actual time? And then when you decide to do something, you start thinking about it in second and third order consequences, right? Because we'll get excited about an idea that we want to do. And we just think about the idea. We don't think about the time, energy, and mental capacity that it'll take from. And then the long tail of that. Because once we commit to something, what happens? We could be trapped by it, right? And if it ends up taking way more time, it could end up being detrimental to your overall well-being and your balance in your mind. So for me, as I began to do all that and really look at the time matrix, I began to put value on every bit of that time.

37:53And then I began to assess that time by how did it make me feel qualitatively. and that then began to make me continually adjust how i designed the time because what i realized is what's happening the world's changing you're changing at all times you're evolving everything around you is evolving so you can't just make one great schedule and there you go you did it you have a perfect time time management skills like you're constantly need to be adjusting how you use time and the value of that time and and and how you see you should spend that on an ongoing basis or on an ad hoc basis like and you have to continually design it better and better over time and what i did was grow the skill set of continually optimizing time and assessing it and redesigning it that allowed me to get more and more efficient so i could go from you know doing 250 episodes of television doing you know 52 podcasts managing you know you know if i have core six companies that I have to be actively managing inside it to go along with all my other pursuits and still do that with only 23 % of my time.

39:05You know what I'm saying? Like that is where you now have gotten so efficient that you choose efficiency over anything else. You might give them an example because I know it. Like, for example, like when I've come to you with different things like, hey, I got this TV show. You're like, well, how much of your time is it going to take? How does it make you feel? What's it going to cost you somewhere else? You know, what percentage of it is for you? Even when we first started here, even this podcast, I'm like, it's this percentage of my time. It's this percentage of my income. However, it's a big percentage of joy for me.

39:34Yeah. But in your case, if you don't mind, and if you don't, it's okay. But like, even the way you shoot your show. Yeah. One of the things, when you hear this man talk, he has as big a life as about anybody that I know. I mean, he's got a show where he shoots a bazillion episodes. He's in the production side. He's on the talent side. He's got the Dyrdek machine. He's got his investments. He's got different business. He's got a core and he's got, he's a very, very active father, very, very active husband. He's got a public persona to keep up. He's got a social media. He's got a podcast. And that's just like some of it.

40:05Yet I don't know anyone who navigates their life more seamlessly and beautifully than you do. I don't, but you'd make it, it wouldn't seem that way. So give us a practical example for you, like on the way that you scale time, like for your show, what you did in the way that you shoot it and that the gaps in between shows is that too personal or no no just share that because this because i want people to think okay that sounds really good theoretically but like i'm trying to get my startup off the ground my kids are in soccer you know i've got the the gym i got to get to so what does that look like practically how do i actually begin to navigate it yeah look i i think you know like it's every bit of your life has the ability to be designed into time you know what i mean and yes things are going to come at you that you need to change and then and then everything you want to drive to automation right everything in my life i try to drive to automation and then when i feel friction um i try to i i go to optimize it when i feel friction i apply a system or a solution and i just keep doing that over and over and over to reduce all friction and drive everything to a much higher state of efficiency right and the show itself is this beautiful example of it is I used to shoot 60 episodes a year and it would tear the soul out of me it would tear the soul out of me I wouldn't I didn't even want to shoot the show anymore I didn't want to shoot the show anymore because it just took too much energy it would be five weeks straight where I would shoot like four days a week and it would just like I would be at the end of it I would be so exhausted and be like I don't even like enjoy doing this like I don't care what it pays me it's like it's too much of my energy and well-being right and and so I began to just look at ways to make it more and more efficient and look at the things that bother me because we used to shoot two a day and then we would you know shoot for an hour do all these pickups in between then I would stay for an hour and then do voiceover on the stage for an hour and then we would break for an hour.

42:10Then I would do the whole thing again. I would get there at like nine 30, 10 and leave it like six. Right. And then that would be a five week stretch of like four days a week and just, just terrorize me. Then I'd have to drive out to Glendale, um, to get prepped for the shows and spend three or four hours going through all the shows. And I just slowly kept looking at every possible thing that I could optimize. And it started first with how they built the shows and presented them to me and I got to instead of driving out to Glendale to look at them hey let's start doing it online and send them to me and then it's like start presenting to them to me in this structure and then it got to the point where I stopped even talking to them they just would send to me I would review them and it went from three hours round trip to do it to 15 minutes this is Rob right here you guys this is the stuff and and and to then actually shooting the show then it was like how can we make it more and more efficient all right i'm not i'm just gonna do to fire off a lot more off the cuff stuff that you can edit in instead of doing the voiceover and then i took you know shooting the show for an hour hour plus and then do an hour of voiceover i drove that all the way down to about 35 minutes then i said hey how do we take if we can we take one clip out of every single one of these uh because we're only We're shooting with six clips, but we're only editing four and five.

43:39And so we took a clip out of everything, drove the time down to 29 minutes. Right. And so then it became, OK, you shoot two a day. Let's shoot two a day before lunch. Then it was like, OK, let's shoot three a day before lunch. Then it was like, all right, let's shoot six a day, three before lunch, three after. and then now I could get six done in a day and then I could spread out when I shoot to where I only shoot a couple times a month then boy now I feel like it's back in my life it's back in my rhythm it's no longer taking energy it's much more efficient to get prepped for it's easier to shoot the energy's not gone because I'd shoot it so quickly that it that the energy's good pop into the next one but i just kept looking at way after all these different ways that i continue to optimize and optimize and then now going into next year i'm gonna start shooting 336 okay and i'm gonna shoot eight a day and so i was like i don't want to give up any more time where can i save time we have 15 minutes between the shows uh to change wardrobe so if i eliminate two wardrobe changes and in between the shows and 15 minutes at lunch i get back that hour and now i can shoot um 336 in the same 42 days five hours a day uh as i did to shoot the 252 with prep time the night before and drive time there and back that is four percent of my life see you guys this is why I want him around me.

45:20Let me give you, let me interrupt you. Okay. I want to give you guys like the easy application for me. This hyper obsession with optimization of time and oneself, when you're around somebody, they become a friend of yours. Some of it rubs off on you. So I don't have the types of show that he has. I don't shoot 350 episodes. I don't have that, but it has caused me to begin to evaluate where am I just pissing time away? Where is it causing me more stress. What are the different things I do? I'll give you one small thing. That's a massive thing. After I met you, I started looking at just meetings that I take and I'm like, why are all my meetings one hour long?

45:58Why is it blocked from you? Think about all of you do is you're like, that's right. Why is it from four to five o 'clock? How do, how do I know this thing's going to last an hour? And because it lasts an hour, because we've blocked an hour, we take up the hour, but perhaps this is a 20 minute meeting, right? Perhaps this is a 14 minute meeting. Why is everything 4 to 4.30, 5.30 to 6? Why are they all these round number blocks of time that we've all accepted need to be blocks of time? And because that's the block, that's how long the meeting takes, right? You're nodding when I say this. So I've gotten with my team now, and now they know.

46:33Let's find out how long this meeting is required to happen, the most efficient time for the meeting. Not where I'm dismissive of people or don't give them the adequate amount of time or the emotional connection. but you'll find everybody most meetings don't need to be an hour they don't they don't they don't need to be a half an hour yeah and so when i started to get those things done i have a lot of 15 minute meetings now and my whole life opened up because of it and here's the other thing i bring better energy to those meetings so you're so right like when you first i'm like this is really good in theory dude because you got this big old life but for the beginner they just gotta Go yeah, but the truth is when you're just going I want you to speak to this so let's let's now go the guy goes That's great.

47:16I don't have 350 of anything. I don't have 64 of that. Yeah, I got a job. I've got a side hustle I got a family. I'm trying to get this going so I'm throwing a bunch of time at it But my thing I want you to speak to is your lack of valuing time is Impacting not only your fatigue your energy your performance, but it's impacting every part of you because other Other people don't value your time or you when you don't. And when you begin to take control of time, even as a beginner, my belief is other people value you more. Do you agree with that? Yeah. And look, I think the other thing is you end up creating sort of your system that also allows you to be available a lot more than you should be.

47:59Good point. You know what I mean? And then people rely on that availability to then have a more scattered erratic schedule that you've got to be fit into. and they pull the energy from you because you're essentially operating that way and that scatteredness becomes how the people operate around you, right? Which almost never allows you to get there, right? And to me, when you start thinking about your whole life, forget about just time because time is just one sort of piece of what you need to have high energy and have a great life. And so it's if if you don't design time to meditate, to free think, to get to the gym, to do all these things that, you know, you need to do that make you the better version of you and make you feel more balanced in your mind that allows you to have better energy and more clarity at at that meeting.

48:51and you just continually go from thing to thing to thing because, oh, I have to go from thing to thing to thing, then you are never going to have the time to do the things that you want to do because you're too busy doing the things you have to do on an ongoing basis as a way of life. Man. You are the machine and you design the machine to go from thing to thing to thing to thing till you're exhausted, then you complain, then you overcorrect. and try to get rid of all these things to get it back when in fact it is the way that you have built your system that has bound you to this habitual way of not having time rather than designing your whole system around using time the right way.

49:35I think it's the most breakthrough stuff anyone's talking about right now, particularly designed for this time. I mean it. I think it speaks to everybody at every stage, no matter if they have a big, huge life and all the things you have going or I have going or they're beginning to build their dream life. If you don't get intentional about this, that's the micro. But let me say this to that, right? Everybody's got a big life because everybody, I have the same time, energy and capacity as you. Yeah. Like anyone listening to this, we all are in the same construct of time. We all, we all, yes, our energy may vary, but we all have control to take care of ourselves, to do more things that we like, to begin to evolve our life in a way to where we have higher energy.

50:19But we all have a limit, a human physical and mental capacity. And if we go over it, we collapse in. Even me, right? Like I have completely organized, perfectly designed time, beautiful rhythm, clear vision and goals and executing everything within this beautiful matrix. I'm highly optimized. Why am I overwhelmed? Why am I overwhelmed? because I went past capacity, right? And that's sort of the second edge is understanding your physical and mental capacity and being able to manage that inside the way that you design your time. Because when you become overwhelmed, your decisions like degenerate and then you ultimately start overcorrecting.

51:02By the way, how brilliant you are about that. I make the worst decisions when I'm fatigued and typically what I'm doing when I'm fatigued is the overcorrection that I'm like over scheduling. Then once my energy comes back, I look at a day or a week and I'm like oh my gosh What was I thinking when I agreed to all of this stuff? And a lot of it isn't productive stuff and then I don't have time for the things that would move the needle in My fitness in my mental health in my financial life and all of a sudden Lots of stuff is in a schedule that doesn't necessarily move the needle in my life in the areas that I want to move the needle to move to Speaking of life and needle moving.

51:35I don't know if you texted me this or you posted it So it probably doesn't matter. But that's the micro stuff. The macro is you're so obsessed with this that you look at, like, duration of time on the planet. And it was something about you just realized. You read something on your laughing. But did you text me this or did you post it? I just posted that I wanted to live one million hours. That's exactly right. So you read something that convinced you that you could live to a particular age and you deduced how many hours. So I actually think this is brilliant. Because this type of focus... causes us to live with intention and attention and the lack of, I think all the time, do you know when I pray at night, you're going to laugh at this.

52:17Never said this out loud, not even to my wife. I'm going to tell you and about 70 billion people right now. When I pray at night, one of my last prayers is that I'm going to live to 128 years old. Okay. And I really believe now again, someone will listen to this in three years. Wow. It's so sad. He passed away, but, but, but I, I, I have that prayer and that intention, and I've repeated it over and over and over and over again because I believe if I don't pick a number, if I don't pick a time, if I don't set a goal, if I don't, then I'll be up to the whims of whatever else comes my way. And I really believe that you create a space when you set something like that that didn't exist before you did it, and then you find the behaviors, the people, the things, the thoughts, the technology, the nutrition to fill it up.

52:57What I didn't do was calculate the amount of hours that it gives me to then optimize that time. So speak to that whole thing. Yeah. And look, I'm, you know, it makes, it really makes me happy. That means we're going to, we're literally, we're going to be friends deep into our hundreds. We're going to be having these conversations about, well, what do you think? You're thinking you're going to 128. You think you're good. I don't know. I'm pushing. I'm feeling pretty good right now. but i think about it more from a this is what i'm big on this is your existence right and this is this is the framework of the the experience the human experience right you only truly can judge anything your energy how well you're using time everything that's happened in your past how you actually feel in the present moment you can only do it in the present moment and you only experience it in your mind right and then you have to make a decision of like I want to change all of these things so I'm going to create a better future experience that is the human experience and I realized that it that I wanted to make it last to 112 I initially wanted to live to 104 and be shot in a rocket into space and explore the universe without the light pollution from planet earth for the last year before I died and then floated out into the cosmos.

54:20Now that was before I had a wife and kids. And so it's like now the audacity of don't worry about me. And then like, I'm up there for like 24 more years. So that changed. And then when I read the book, Icky Guy, right, the Japanese long life and happiness book, um, they talked about super centurions and I'm like, Ooh, like that brand. I want to be a super centurion. So then I made it that I would want to live to 112. And then as I started getting deeper into, okay, how many days is that? All right. Okay. That's how many days I have. This is how many days that I've done so far. Then when I was going through my time matrix and looking at all these different things where I spend time of like, wow, I spend nearly as much time shooting a television show as I will picking up my kids and taking them to school for the year.

55:18Right. And, and to me, as I just started looking at these hours and then where am I, where am I losing a lot of time on the couch watching Netflix? You know what I mean? It's, it's me and the wife on there watching our favorite show. But boy, when you start looking at what that is, man, you're letting, you're letting the hard eight to 9 % go on the couch. you know what i mean like it's it's cold hard reality but as i looked at that you know i'm i then was like you know what is like what's a round number of time and like wow one million hours is 114 years and 54 days i'm gonna i'm gonna experience a million hours on this earth right and so of course a lot of people push back on like oh it's good yeah you're like a vegetable boy, what are you going to do?

56:05And it's like, like, I didn't even contemplate that. And it's because you live in two different mindsets. There's, I live in a mindset that I just keep getting healthier and happier, more balanced, lighter. Life is more effortless. My system, that is my entire body is more efficient and I can show you in blood work. I can show you in net worth. I can show you in time and I can show you in qualitative data that I have collected about how I feel about my life, work, and health, that I am in healthier, better physical condition, wealthier, more balanced, and happier in the data, which only proves to me there's no reason why you can't keep getting healthier, happier, and wealthier for the remainder of your life.

56:54And then I'll just fall right off a cliff, you know what I mean, whatever it ends up ending. But again, what's it go back to? I want to live with absolute intention. And I want to experience every moment that I get into and feel the vividness and the richness and the beauty that is the human experience and life. This is the Ed Myron Show.