We are back again, speed inciting our way through stuff about how hard life is. The Queen of England died 18 months ago. She ruled an entire nation and accumulated more wealth than 99.9% of humans. And yet... You haven't thought about her, except for right now. No matter how big your dreams, you're going to die. Everyone will move on. Do what you want. It sucks to not be liked, but it sucks more to not be yourself.
Yeah. It's really interesting when we think about what tactically happens when someone dies, right? Like a lot of emotion exists in the vague, but far less in the specific because you plan your funeral, right? And then you think that everyone's going to be standing there just forever changed because of the death and the impact that you had on their lives. But the reality is there's going to be a caterer at the funeral.
some people are going to like the food some people are going to comment that it was too cheap you know the food that you had um they're going to have comment on the venue like oh i don't really you know it's a little hot there's gonna be somebody who's gonna uh make a list of people they're gonna check them off some people aren't gonna be able to make it last minute because
things came up and it got busy. And after the whole funeral's over, everyone's going to go to a restaurant and just eat dinner and then move on with their lives. And so not to say that, you know. The people who, you know, mean a lot to you won't remember you to a degree. Sure. But on the macro scale. When I think about somebody like the queen who accomplished so much in her life as the zenith of accomplishment.
And most people probably haven't even thought about her today, except for the fact that we just brought it up. And so I think that just, whenever I have my harder times, that's my reminder to self of the absurdity of it all, which is like... someone's gonna argue over what appetizer they're gonna serve when I die. This probably doesn't matter that much. How does that change the way that you show up and operate in the moment?
I think it just decreases affect in the acute moment. So I define resiliency as the amount of time after an aversive stimulus, after a bad thing happens, that you return back to baseline behavior. And so, um, and then there's different one, which is how long is your fuse, which is toughness. And it's a whole different thing. Right. But resiliency is like, okay, I've been cracked. You know, I've hit the fuse. The bomb's gone off. What size of the bomb is.
irrelevant like you can be super resilient have a terrible day your father dies and the next day you're back people are like holy it's like you like go to the depths of hell you touch the bottom of the pool and then you shoot back up and so i think about how many different tools can I have in my tool set to make the rebound from down to back up as v-shaped as possible what are those tools for you
Cosmic relevance is probably the biggest one when I think about like, because it's so fast, I feel like I do it almost automatically now, which is like, okay, I want a planet spinning around the sun inside of a galaxy inside of a universe that will never reach the end of because it's, it's expanding fast in the speed of light. Okay. The fact that, you know, there was a mistake in my book printing, no one's going to care. No one, it just doesn't matter. Right.
So that's one of them. Another one's the frame of the veteran, which I use a lot, which is if this inconvenience happened a thousand times in a row, on the thousandth time, what would I think about it? Well, I'd probably be like, well, this is just how life is. And then if I could feel that way on the thousandth time, then it means that I can feel that way on the first time right now because it's just choice because the actual circumstance is the same. Those are probably like my two.
most prevalent or you know the ones that i like my default ones that i they're in my back pocket there's a cool insight that the more you complain the less accurate your model of reality so complaining is you saying the world isn't delivering to me that which I anticipated or expected or desired from it, which is also you saying, I don't understand how the world works until it comes and meets me in reality.
god i i haven't heard it phrased that way and i really like it um i i think about um the the hate um that we all get, whether it's from ourselves or other people, or the hate that we spew towards the external conditions is simply boiled down to this person lives their life in a way that I would not prefer. And so I have translated every single negative comment that comes to me where someone complains about me. So flipping the script to Alex lives his life in a way that I would not prefer.
And so it's actually been this very weird like, oh, they said all this stuff. And I was like, does that mean that I live my life in a way they wouldn't prefer? Great, because they live their life in a way that I wouldn't prefer. And that's why it's their life and I live my life. And it's just been this really wonderful reframe that just almost comically completely minimizes most things. But I think that complaints come down to that. The universe exists in a way that I would not prefer.
It's like, why are you not bending to my will? Yeah. And so, um, I think, uh, shoot, I can't remember the psychologist. I'm going to, I'm going to butcher it, but one of the big guys, um, talked, I want to say Kinsey, but I don't want to mess it up. Um, talk about there's three. primary things that everyone casts all their pain and suffering to, which is you have circumstances, you have other people, and then you have self. And that's it. Those are the three big ones that everyone...
puts all of their blame on. And so the first two obviously don't serve you. The third sometimes serves you depending on... what you do as a result of it, right? And so that actually, those big three has just been a really easy filter. It's like, oh, am I blaming circumstances? Am I blaming other people? Am I blaming me? And obviously you want to skip to you because that's the only thing you can do anything about.
idea that all of the things that you're working toward, all of the dreams, all of those things are going to stop. There is going to be a day when you no longer answer your emails. Like, I think about this. I think about how many, even now, right? Email's not been around for that long, widespread, what, maybe 25 years, something like that. Most people have had an email address, maybe 20 years. All of the people that have died between then and now, they just have email.
inboxes just accumulating stuff from lots of newsletters, lots of online retailers, but there will also be people expecting a reply and saying, why hasn't this guy replied to me? It's like, because he's dead. Yeah. There's just thinking, I mean, I think a lot about the end of my life. Maybe it's a.
borderline obsession of mine, but thinking about like what the last five years are going to look like. And also thinking about my cognitive decline, which is going to be inevitable on the back half of my life.
And it gets really tricky when you think about fluid intelligence, which peaks when you're like between 25 and 35. And then like at our age right now, it's just all going down. Like we're beginning the slow decline. And in thinking about that, I was like, I will actually never be sharper than I am today.
for the rest of my life. And the idea that there will be young people who will replace me because humans are all replaceable. We have proven that. And so... when I think about that, it decreases the stakes of these huge dreams that if I don't accomplish them, I will be upset or else. And so it's like we have these big or else's like we want to threaten the universe. Like I can't stand it if this does not occur. It's like and the universe remains unchanged and the universe is undefeated.
Correct. Well, that's why I was such, my Twitter bio for a long time was locally reversing entropy. I remember that. Yeah. And I just love that idea that you have the entire universe, this force entropy, which is going to... inevitably destroy everything. Not just everything you care about, everything that could have created anything that anything could have cared about. And it's going to destroy it. But for a brief period of time, you know, a few decades.
you locally stop the most powerful force in the universe. I think that's so fucking cool. I don't know if you saw this, but Bezos has this one page that was just brilliant. And... He basically paraphrases Richard Dawkins talking about how over time all organisms revert to their environment.
literally like the temperature of your body once you die eventually just normalizes with the environment the acidity of what's going on like inside of your body normalizes and then eventually you become one with your environment and so it's the exact same concept and so Bezos was talking about that quote, which was about biology. But he said, this is originally about biology, but so much more so about the way that...
We want to live, which is that everything around you will try and force you to dilute yourself. It will force you to try and merge in, fit in with your surroundings. And he said like this force.
is natural and it's inevitable and yet we have to fight it and the fact that it's hard does not make it less worth it and i thought that was like it was just i i mean i reposted because i thought it was so elegant it's like a cosmic regression to the mean yeah it's exactly that's exactly what it is um and yeah so i think if we all know that we're going to we the regression of the mean is inevitable like
And like, again, I think about these things that are honestly, I don't know if humiliating is the word, but like humility inducing. But like the idea that I'll die and then like worms will eat my body. Just like a very simple thing like that. Or if I die, like I was like, what if I just died by an animal killing me? Like sometimes I think about that and I'm like, I would just be it's lunch.
Like everything that I've done up to this point, it's like my arm will feed its child and like my thigh will feed it. And then like they'll leave some of it for the carry. You'd be a good meal. You would be a good meal. I'd be one good meal. Yeah. And it just like, it just, it just takes the stakes of like, I'm so important, right? I'm all of these goals matter to just like, I could be lunch and that kind of, you know.
gives me one large exhale. The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a good mood in the absence of things to be in a good mood about.
I think that tweet has been my theme for 2025. Um, it's been, it's, it's funny cause that was the most shared tweet I've ever had. Um, and it was, it was like, it was almost, um, not the opposite of ironic it was fitting right it was completely fitting for the year and it's been because like this year i've had a just i would say a series of unfortunate events um that has occurred and it's really tested my
Tools, right? Tools in the tool belt for reframing reality so that I can make my experience less miserable. And so... I thought about that. It's like if I were to boil everything down of all the skills that you can learn, if everything that we do eventually becomes irrelevant, then the single greatest skill that you can develop... is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. And so one of the other frames on this is
And most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood. Like I'm just in a bad mood. So it's like, well, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, it's like, you might as well be in a good mood for no reason. Cause that one at least serves you. And so I've been trying to exercise like, cause there's on one degree, there's like. Let's count things to be grateful for. On the other side, it's like, why do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood? Like, why is...
trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood? Like, can I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood? Because I've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood. And so I've been trying to flex that, which is like, sure, we can find things to be grateful for. And when those things pop up, yes. And of course it's a, you know, it's a practice. You get better at it, but like.
What if I can just be in a good mood? And so I've just tried to break that relationship between the two because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find. How successful have you been at that? Mediocre. Well, look, I think it's a... Lovely idea in isolation, in theory, but I'm not convinced about how effective it is in practice for the reason that humans have a negativity bias. You know, it's our psychological entropy and your ability to detect.
things that are a risk to you significantly better than your ability to detect things that are just pleasant. Like this morning I texted you and I was like, hey man, like I really love the feeling I have of anticipation on a morning before we do a podcast. That's a... normal, boring, mundane source of pleasure to me. If I'm not really, really training myself to notice that,
I just, it just fucking falls away with the fact that, huh, I asked for almond milk and I bet this would have been better with like whole milk. If that's the thing that ruins the day. And the thing is, is you do notice it though, right? You do notice that. Um, so I've had, um, one of my themes this year has been focusing on moments and on both the positive and the negative.
When we think back on, if I think back on the last year, right, I don't remember probably 95% of the year. Like I, you know, I did the same things. And so it's like, it just didn't get recorded. Like nothing notable happened. And so really, like when we think about a year, we really just recall a handful of moments and that's it. And those moments in time are usually very short. And so I've been trying to think about the bad.
you know, seasons as, well, maybe it wasn't a bad season. Maybe I had five bad days or really five bad moments that I then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been five minutes times five into an entirely bad year. And so it's like, okay, well, if we can do that in the negative, can we do the positive, which is obviously the thing to exercise. But to the point that you said earlier about our
our ability to detect threat and risk at such a such better accuracy than our ability to detect good things it's so interesting because if you use that side of your brain um Not to derail us, but like, I think that has been one of the things that's helped me a tremendous amount in business because.
when i think about a business and i want to grow it for example i would think okay what are all the things that can destroy this business and this is charlie munger this isn't me um but basically he says invert always invert and einstein said that too and it's because like
You get to use this way stronger horsepower engine of like, how do I grow my business? You could obviously think that way. But the alternative would be like, how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves? And then when you list out those moves, you're like, cool.
Now let's do the opposite of that. And that has been honestly, a lot of the, some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us. Well, what if we did the even more obvious thing and did the. the opposite of what would destroy us um and it's worked it's worked um better than i deserve so this is the problem yeah uh
you can be rewarded professionally for focusing on things that you do not want to focus on personally. And Ryan Long taught me this. He was talking about how He's a comedian, Canadian comedian, really funny guy. Spends all of this time, you know, dialing in these bits and obsessing over how it could be better. And then he says to himself.
Yeah, but I don't want you to do that in your relationships. No, can you let that go when it comes to the way that you show up for your partner or your friends or your body image or whatever? You don't get to compartmentalize stuff like that. It is a very unfortunate irony of the world that the skill set you often need to become successful in business is the one you need to get rid of to be happy in your life.
Yes. So I was thinking about what you were saying earlier with regards to risk and our ability to detect it. So the other part of that that's been really interesting is... Not only do we detect more threats, we also overemphasize how catastrophic they could be. And the converse of that is we...
rarely identify the upside. And when we do, we typically underestimate the upside. And I think this is something that a lot of people don't talk about as much. Obviously, I always have a business hat on, literally. And, but I think about this because I think this is where like you said at the very beginning that people complain because they cannot accurately view reality. And so if we tie that to this concept, then it means that people will.
disproportionately blame the universe and then perceive significantly greater risk for them asking a girl out, starting a business, taking a loan, asking a stranger to buy something. making a podcast and for fear of what other people on the internet will say or people who know them right so we we catastrophize this side but the flip side is
And you hear this a lot when people do make it and whatnot. They're like, I never dreamed it would be this big. Now, some people are obsessive and absolutely have thought through everything. I fall more on that side. But on the other hand, though, a lot of people do get there and they're like, I never thought it was going to be this big. And it's because we typically just under emphasize the upside, which is where.
from the business perspective, it's like, that's where the off is. That's where the outperformance exists, where most people think, hey, this bet, it could go to zero. And you're like, I don't think it's going to go to zero. But even if it did go to zero, I have a 10x here. And so...
If I have a 50% shot at a 10X and the other 50 is zero, I should take that shot every single time, knowing that I'm going to be wrong half the time. It still makes sense to take. And so I think people are not good at making those risk-adjusted return bets.
obviously financially, but even in the very micro aspect of our lives. And so we talked earlier about the cosmic irrelevance and the frame of the veteran, but there's a third frame that I think about a lot, which is, I call it play it out. And so it's like, no, let's sit in there. Because again, fear exists in the vague, not in the specific. And in the resistance. Yes. And so like when we have these specificities of like, okay.
I'm going to start a podcast. I can't start a podcast. Like, okay, it's this big, vague thing, but no, like, let's play it out. Like, let's see what actually would happen. So I'm going to upload something and then people don't listen to it. Okay. Well, they didn't listen to it. Okay. Well, then that's not a problem. Okay. Let's say people, let's see tons of people listen to it, which I don't know how that magically happens, but let's say tons of people listen to it and they all hate it. Okay.
And immediately you have this anxiety, but let's play it out. What happens next? It's like, okay, is it going to change what I eat? Is it going to change where I sleep? Okay, let's say all of a sudden I lose all the money that I have. It's like, okay, well, I probably have a bunch of people that if I really needed to sleep on their couch or in a spare bedroom, I could do that.
okay, so I'm not really going to be a homeless. And if I really didn't have enough money for food, I can go to a homeless shelter and get food, right? So it was like, wait, so my worst case scenario is like, I have shelter and I have food and I'm still breathing air. So that's the downside. And so there's this catastrophizing that we, because we, our brains are meant to keep us alive. We literally think if we fail, we die. Like everyone will ostracize us from the group and we will be alone.
and die and so just actually playing it out not one step but like two more steps after that you're like okay so my actual downside risk is nothing but my upside is everything i've wanted And even if I'm at 50% off on that, it's still worth the shot. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentus. If your workouts feel flat, your recovery's slow, or you've just been feeling off, it might not be your training plan or diet. It might be something a bit more boring.
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Sick. Very fierce. And it's getting to this point here, which is fear exists in the vague and it exists in the resistance. Going back to the single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. Again, I think it's fantastic in theory. I wonder how much it works in practice, both of us. Everybody would love to be in a great mood for no reason. So I guess you can perhaps try and cultivate. I can try and be positive.
when there's nothing to be positive about. I would say that the other neurobiologically informed solution to this is to find increasingly small things to be increasingly happy about. So, huh. That was a really good training session. Yeah. Yeah. Look, you know, it was annoying because half of the gym's under construction and I got some dust on my shoes. Yeah. But, huh. That was a good session. I really enjoyed that. Rick Hansen, who wrote Hardwiring Happiness, is 20, 25 years old. Hardcore.
neuroscience guy, Dharma teacher, meditation expert, life person. Fucking awesome intersection with all. And he has this wonderful acronym of HEAL. Have a positive experience. enrich it. And by enrich it, he means sort of sit with it. So you allow it to, you actually notice it.
absorb, which is imagine that sinking down and becoming a part of you. And then the L is optional, which is link. So you can link it to a bad experience and you can oscillate between the two to help bring down the volume of a...
a bad experience so right now there's nothing else i want to be doing right now than having this conversation having a good experience huh but that just washes by you and then you think in retrospect oh wasn't that that was like a good thing at the time but you don't ever actually
arrive at having a good experience. So the enriched bit's important. So I'm like, huh, this is cool. Like I'm enjoying having this conversation, absorb, imagining it sinking down and becoming a part of you, which is basically spending 30 seconds to a minute. letting that emotion sort of fill you out as opposed to noticing it cognitively, like allowing it to go below the neck would be a good way to put it. Okay, this is going to go below the neck, this sensation.
I'm actually like, people are going to watch this and it's going to make them happy. It's going to give them insights about their life. And isn't that lovely? It's the most obvious thing, which is, I mean, this is a pretty grand thing as things go. It's certainly more grand than like.
I had a fucking nice coffee or something like that. So I wonder whether one of the skills that you can develop in the pursuit of becoming a person that's in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. is to become increasingly proficient at finding things to be in a great mood about. And I'm aware that in your frame...
that still makes it contingent on external, which is going to be an issue. I'm still happy to be in a good mood when there is things to be a good mood about, for sure. If you can become increasingly skilled at finding things to be in a good mood about. I get the sense, especially if life's kicking you in the dick, which it's done to both of us for the last while. And I also think that it's an interesting comment, realization from you.
given that you've been kicked in the dick because you think, huh, this is an insight that you will only learn when things aren't ostensibly going well. Yeah. Because it's the sort of realization that you get when inertia and momentum and bravado and confidence and upward trajectory are all taken away from you. And you go, ha. I'm like... I'm having to do the budgeting equivalent, like the mental equivalent of living on pennies from a well-being perspective.
I want to say we talked about this four podcasts ago, this specific thing, which was that I have this, maybe it's sadistic is the right word, but like I do take some sadistic pleasure in or masochist i don't remember the word is but when you when you enjoy your head paint um whenever i have these prolonged moments of suffering that kind of break past what I would consider the normal variance of life, right? It's like, no, this broke through the barrier of shitty. I do have this history.
of having significantly larger improvements that happen post dip right so it's like we kind of get the opportunity to buy the dip uh for our own negative consequences. And I've bought the dip at almost every time and it's rewarded me disproportionately. And so... I hate to make a parallel between the economy or the stock market and your own internal happiness, but I think that's what's happening right now. But that thought process has shortened some of the...
the shittiness that happens because then it's like, okay, well, it has to be worth it, right? I have to make this worth it, right? Because 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. But, um...
Beyond that, because gratitude has been so difficult for me, which I've talked about before, like 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... How do you operationalize gratitude, right? And so the simplest way that I have is imagine something terrible and then remember that that has not happened.
Like, it's like, I've yet to find, like, that has been the simplest way, like, be grateful. It's like, what do I do to be grateful? Like, no, no, like that more. 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 it would be like to not have this, then this thing now in the moment becomes worth more. And so it's basically creating a wider discrepancy between the moment we're trying to find gratitude with and something else in order to basically... manufacture a delta. Because I think that, 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. It's 100% playing pretend. All gratitude is playing pretend.
I mean, sure. I think if something happens and you're grateful for it, that's you enriching something that exists. But what we're doing- What is enriching, mate? 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 that we noticed 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 de Sol at Q2 Stadium in Austin, which is where the football club plays. And... rufus de sol great music real cool and with a ton of my best friends um it's finishing at a time that's not insane you know the weather was lovely but just by six yeah yeah i was in bed by something um but it wasn't that loud
The sound wasn't that good at the time. Everybody was like, wish it was louder. Wish it was louder. Because it wasn't. We were at the very back of the stadium. Beautiful view, but not fantastic for sound. You go, dude. You're watching fucking Rufus Dussault in a stadium with your friends in Austin. Weather's great. Everyone's got a beer or a sparkling water in their hands. It's having a great time. This is something that you can notice in the moment you have. Pick your direction, Western man.
And you are picking the sound's not good. But in your business, you are rewarded over and over and over again for realizing that the sound's not good. This can, I've done this before. 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 light. The alignment of the Instagram logo with the F from follow us here.
And the N from Newtonic below is out of alignment by what looks like one point. It's less than a millimeter. Guess who noticed? This guy. I have been rewarded throughout my entire professional career for noticing things that other people didn't and then claiming that they were a sufficiently big issue that we should actually change them. Yeah. Reverse gratitude.
and yeah this is a small thing it is now a big it's a massive it's a massive problem because you win in the weeds yeah but you don't win in the weeds when it comes to happiness unless you are doing it in the other direction yeah right so you need to and this is so hard and this is
This is why we enjoy talking about it because just for everyone who's listening, Chris and I had a conversation prior to this being like, 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 this difficulty because one of the other things that's come up with regards to gratitude and happiness has been there's a second conversation i think happens internally at least for me which is that like i will judge myself on being not as happy as I should be or not like, Hey, I didn't notice anything. I'd be grateful about you. 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 habit, you know, as a personal practice. And so I've been thinking about that, 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, screw it. Yeah. It's just like, it's irrelevant. And so now I'm getting to the point where like, well, it'd be.
It would be nice to also have this while I have all these other things. 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 polmosi light.
lifestyle approach. That's a big deal to make this pivot. 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 or so since we've been recording together. From an architecture perspective, it's largely been the same. 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, um, yeah, you've got, as you said earlier on about how you, you take small bad moments, maybe very. impressive bad moments and then you scale them out. You're not having a bad year. You've had a few bad days that you're thinking about for the rest of the year. I've found it helpful when I'm in a bad season like I'm in right now to just focus on having a good day.
A good day 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 or bad days you have, but which days you think about. over and over again in some seasons of life maintaining is winning couldn't have put it better myself um
This has been my big focus right now is, and I'm not the first person to say this, but just winning the day. And Bill Ackman had this, I heard him on a podcast talking about this hard season where he was getting divorced. He just lost four.
billion dollars in perishing square his investment firm and he was not him today he was earlier on his career so i mean it was just the worst and because he lost his money the divorce was for way more money because it was based on his net worth that didn't exist anymore and was just a terrible slog And he said one of the difficult parts about that period is that there was no one thing that was like, oh, I can tackle this today.
Like you're not going to finish the divorce today. You're not going to undo the $4 billion loss today. And so it's like when you have these larger, more complex negative things that do scale, it's like, how do you navigate through that?
for anyone who's listening right now, it's like, maybe it's the bad breakup. Maybe it's the, or maybe you're getting divorced, right? Or maybe it's like the business isn't working the way you want. It's like, and there's like 10 things that you have to fix. And it's like, well, I can't fix that change in the 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. you, it's almost, it's almost negligible, right? But at 30 days, you're like, okay, I moved this. And at 90, you're like, wow, you know, this, this is really, this is really materially changed in what's happened. Now, does this mean that we're, our mood is still being dictated by circumstance?
Yes, I'll be honest. Yes, it does. But I think 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, on business vector, I'm murdering it. I'm crushing there. But like I had, 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, right? So it's like, and I have two great fears in life. One is that I lose my mind, which is really just more that I'll be a burden to everybody else. I won't know 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 in navigating those scenarios, just trying to chip away and also...
take the reverse of, I had this one great podcast today. I'm going to make that thing, the thing that's making this a great day. And then if I can make that great day, then maybe it could be a great week. And then trying to expand those, basically let those good moments eat up the season. And I made a conscious decision on May 1st. And I think I, did I send you the screenshot of my HRV? Yes. So it was May 1st. I was like.
fuck this. I told Layla, I have decreed that the rest of the year will be good. And so I'm putting so much mental effort into this, which is why this is so timely from us talking about it. In actively trying to minimize all the down things and super, super focus on those moments and be like, cool, I had that good moment. That's my day. Days made. And I'm trying to even say that more.
Oh, this podcast made my day. This podcast made my week. Now I used to think, Oh, this made my week. When someone would say something small, I'd be like, that's what made your week. Like you must not have a lot going on. So true. Right. Like mentally, I like my own judge.
Judge machine, right? That's lame. Yeah, exactly. What 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 you're... expectation of life is that it's going to be well until i play the main stage at edc until i make the billion dollars until i get married to the love of my life until i get these things
You're just holding your happiness hostage until something great happens. And what if, again, what we said before, what if something small could be something great? And it exists in the specific. Like the tiny moments. Yeah, that's been a huge focus. Boring victories, dude. 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 day.
makes my week how little thing can make can make my month and like how crazy would it be if a year from now i say 2025 was a great year you know i woke up pain-free For probably like 70% of my days. That was a great year. But like I got to have coffee with Layla in the morning once a week. And that filled me up for the whole week.
Like if I can, and I want to, I'm putting, so anyone who's 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? 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 like...
I don't need to do this. Like I don't need to work this hard. Um, and so I have to make, or I'd like to, I'd prefer to make the ride more enjoyable. We'll get back to talking to Alex in just one second. But first, I need to tell you about Element. If you often feel tired, you might not need more sleep. You might not need more caffeine. You might just be dehydrated. Proper hydration...
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That's a huge departure, I think. Prefer. I will still fucking ride at dawn. That's a huge departure, though. And look, dude, the conversation that we had the other week, and I think the one that we're having now... It might be less Goggins, Jocko 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 a position like the one that you were in or the light equivalent that I was to talking in this sort of a way, there's an awful lot more humanity. I think that people can see in that because work until your eyes bleed. Nobody cares about your emotions. Fuck you, dude. Just go harder. Although it sounds fantastic in theory, it's very impersonal.
And it sounds mechanistic. It sounds robotic. It sounds detached. And that's fantastic. And you can do that for a while. You can completely disregard the way that you feel for a while. Yeah. But only for a while. And sooner or later. The entropy of positive affect being a motivator, the fact that enjoyment is efficiency, 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 if the book had been finished in twice as long? Yeah. You know? Yeah. Your system sort of contributes to itself in a global sort of stress-based manner. It's... You know what's weird is that...
the thing that's made the season hard is not actually like work ethic or even time constraints. Cause like I've worked pretty much every day, all day, but like that, that's, that's been baseline. And that doesn't really bother me. Like I don't even bother me very much. I like doing that.
The thing is that the nature of what fills that time. And so like, if I have all the things that are not work that are related to work that I must do as a result so that I can get back to doing the work I like doing, like me writing a book. is the most fulfilled, like is my favorite thing in the entire world. Us doing these podcasts is some of the best moments that I get to have in my life.
uh like twice a month i'll have uh business owners to come out that are bigger that were that are like kind of like not portfolio ready but like they're they're doing usually like you know five to $25 million a year, like right in that range. And I get to, I spent a whole day with those 10 businesses. And it's like, and I tell them, I'm like, this is the fucking best. Like, 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. Right. And so like for us, I had, I think I told you, I'll tell everybody publicly, like I had, I think eight or nine lawsuits within like 30 days at the beginning of this year.
And so I was like, okay, that sucked. And then I'll tell you the story that happened on top of this, just to give everyone some context. Um, Layla had a health thing. She went to the doctor to get it checked out and, uh, our EA was with her. And, uh, I was like, Hey, you know, how's it going? What's going on? Um, and she had said earlier, like she can't get in. I was like, what, what does that even mean? And then, and then the next text I got from the EA was she has cancer.
And so I remember reading that text and being like, okay, 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. So I'm thinking, okay, like,
Like, what do we need to do diet? 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 with. 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.
that was what she was using as her excuse. Layla doesn't have cancer. And I was like, oh, she does have this other stuff, right? But she doesn't have cancer. And the thing is, is that Layla, after that occurred when I hung out with her later that night, was... you know, obviously annoyed at whatever issue she was dealing with. But for me, I was like,
I saw her and I just gave her this big hug and I was like, Hey, I was like, you don't have cancer. And so it's crazy. There's this 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.
you have now, at least it's not cancer. And so, um, to bring this back, that all still happened in the same period of time. Um, and, uh, Chris mentioned this earlier, uh, I don't know if it was before this podcast, but like I, uh, 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, and I was like,
no one's going to care. No one's going to care. They're just going to remember that they got a fucked up book. And so I had to destroy those. Right. And so I, 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 so there's these things that all of a sudden now... am I better at gratitude or did I solve the problem? I don't know. I'd be like, really? I want to be real. I don't know. But as of May 1st, things are a little better. And my actual health for anybody who's a health nut, my HRV average was about 32.
Um, and I'd have many, many low twenties days for a 36 year old active male, pretty bad. Um, and since May, like May 1st, uh, 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, I'm not, I'm not tossing out 2025. Like, and I started in the beginning of the year and I was talking to a good friend of mine and he was like, dude, fuck bad year. He was like, fuck, 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. Turn 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. The problem is to achieve the highest levels.
You have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hoped the achievements would get you. There comes a time when the hard work you have to do is learning that you can't work any harder any longer, and that you have to change what got you here to what will get you to where you want to go. Yeah, 2025. In the day. Yeah. The hard remains the same. Actually, I've given this a huge amount of thought.
what makes something hard? Like just in and of itself, like what actually makes something hard? And so if we think about this as an aversive stimulus or a negative stimulus, then you have...
Because habituation happens on both sides. And this is what I think is so fascinating because it's like, okay, well, you know, I wanted this big thing to happen. I wanted the Rolls Royce. I wanted the Ferrari, whatever. Saved my whole life and here I am, right? And I was happy for a week and then all of a sudden I got used to it, right? So I was like, why can't I habituate to...
the suck, right? Why can't I habituate to the suck? And the thing is, is that you do. The only thing is, 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 them the same way. You have to increase intensity and change how you do it. And the beautiful thing is that life doesn't fight fair. And so life will change the intensity.
and will give you more variety. I mean, how many times have you been like, I didn't know life could suck in this way. Like, this is a new one. You know, like, wow. Like, you spin the roulette of life and you're like, oh. Here's another one that sucks. My dick was kicked from another angle. Yeah. Congratulations. Had no idea. And so, so in thinking about that, it was like, okay.
I think the reason that the hard persists is because the nature of the currency that you pay or that you exchange for the thing that you want changes. Because in the very beginning, you basically have to like, you know, conquer
your friends and family who tell you that this might be a bad idea. Okay, fine. You get over that. And then you have to conquer yourself in the most basic level of like, I have to do something. Okay. So you start, you start taking action. You start learning, you start learning how to learn stuff, which is learning through failure and learning. So you start doing that and you realize you're not going to die.
if you fail. Okay. Then after that, then it's like, okay, but then now you have this dramatic skill deficiency, right? So you have to very quickly level up in a ton of different things 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 too it's too uh generalized so the failures that that occur are specific and so it's just like oh i didn't know i could fail in this way right like we had an event um
So we hold an event at our headquarters monthly. And when people come out, I remember it was like three times in a row. There was this thing at the front desk that got messed up. And I was like... how like it was the can thing it was like how how right and i swear to god they i got i got the message back and they said um well the system messed up in a different way. And I was like, same issue. 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 up. And so it's like, it still sucked. And so the thing is, is that I think failure is. Our, our habituation to failure is so narrow that every new type of failure, all three of those hurt. Micro novelty. Yes. And so, um, and so when I think about that, it's like when, like.
Like I said, this year financially has been the best year of my life, right? And so that's been awesome. But I've had all of these, I mean, I've had health stuff, Layla had health stuff that was separate. We had legal things, which is another whole thing. Business stuff, book stuff. Yeah, there's the book stuff. Staffing stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of things. And so all of those things happened. And I was like, oh. So it's just that the currency has changed.
the currency that I'm paying. And so I'm very happy to pay the long hours currency. I'm very happy to pay the, what am I willing to give up in terms of social life? Like that to me, I've habituated to that price. That's not hard for me. I don't even consider it a sacrifice anymore, which is, I think.
what you want. Cause people, people will sometime maybe see you or maybe they'll see me and think of like the Goggins, uh, you know, work until your eyes bleed. The thing is, is it like, and maybe, maybe I don't know Goggins, but I'll just speak for myself. I don't. I don't really push that hard. Like, I don't really push. I do it, and I've already habituated to this. Like, this is not an excess for me. Pushed in the initial to get up to the momentum. Yeah, to get to here.
Yeah. And I, I like, we worked, so I had my whole team in a, in a boardroom at the very beginning. You saw my, my timer. So I have a timer. That's. Well, on my phone, it has like 22 and a half hours on it. And so what I've been doing is I've been challenging the team to, they wanted to do a 12 week project. And I said, hey, can we do it in seven days?
Right. And not only are we going to do in seven days, we're going to actually see how many actual hours does it take of us working together to get this done. And my hope is that we get the whole thing done in under 50 hours with eight guys. And so I'm like, okay, so. we can shrink what was once going to be three months into this period of time. And so over the last two days, we just did this, and I'm going to do it again tomorrow, 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. And so you're talking 12, 14 hour days, but like. on the whole time and the thing is and this is what's this is what's crazy every single guy who was in that room texted me afterwards was like that was 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 of 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 that we talked about.
a powerlifter friend of yours who like he went to go train with the best coach of all time and so there's the bulgarian system which is the same thing uh in bulgaria this tiny little nation disproportionately outcompetes 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? Like you have to... pursue high leverage opportunities and that is the working smart and then if everyone is working smart then the only thing left that you have to compete is working hard right because people say work smart not hard only works when you compete against dumb people like
My competition is smart and they're also working hard. And so we both have to work hard. And so that price though has been something that I've been staring at for myself because I've never had the aspiration of being. Number one, for at least for me, it's not in my DNA. I haven't had that desire to be the richest man in the world.
not something I care about. And so then it's getting into, okay, what's the sweet spot that maximizes enough where I can actually start looking at some of these other preferences that I have and say, you know what? I am no longer willing to make that trade. And the... The other part of me, we talked about lame earlier, like 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 would say disdainful almost take when I would hear somebody who, okay, I'll take this. Fine. I'll just take, take this, whatever you want. Um, you know, someone gets to a few million dollars a year and they're like, That's it. I made it. I made it. And I have to fight against this. This is what I'm working on. I see that and I'm like, out of the game. He's out. He's out. Done. Quit too soon. Yeah.
Yeah. Like there's so much, so much juice left to squeeze. Right. But then it's like, well, the thing is, is that the, 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. Yeah. who gets to however much a year, 50 grand, 100 grand, a million, 2 million, 10 million. And they go, that's enough. Yeah. Who won? Yeah. Because that person finished their race.
Way before you. Way before you. You're the fucking retard that's still running. Let 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 in the neighborhood 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, uh, 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? It was like, yeah, sure, man. What's up? Like, you're like, you're doing great. Whatever. He says, um, hey, I don't want to be manager anymore. And I was like, what do you mean? You're quitting? He's like, no, no, no. I just want to be a trainer. And I was like...
But I mean, but you realize your, your pay would get cut in half like that. Like that doesn't really make sense. And he just looked at me and I still 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 a bomb dead. And I looked at it, and I was literally speechless, and I just said, I respect it, but I will never understand it. And the thing is, is that...
he is to this day. I got to see him. I got to see him three weeks ago. First time in like 10 years. He was then the happiest person I've ever met. And today, or when I just saw him, Just is happening. And he's like, dude, I mean, can you believe that we were starting that gym and you were at the floor? And we were getting some of those old stories. He's like, look what you have, man, all this stuff. And I was like, dude, you won. Like, I'm still trying to catch up to you.
And that was a lot of the conversation that we had. A quick aside, if you've been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, focus, and performance. But most people have no idea.
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And for the first thousand Modern Wisdom listeners, you get $100 off, bringing it down to $399. So you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and save another $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com. 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?
I'll give a micro example of a sacrifice that I've chosen to reverse, which is that I love training. I love working out. I've been doing it. It was my first love. The first thing I ever liked, like really got obsessed with. And over probably the last however many years, I still obviously trained. I was still in shape.
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. And I was like, and I can't even have my workout be as long as I want it to be. And so I basically made a rule for myself that I will not work out if I'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 it takes two and a half hours, or I'm with a friend and it takes three hours, which is 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. And I was like, why am I sacrificing one of the only three things in this world that I know that I enjoy to get something?
that I hoped would buy me the freedom to work out as much as I wanted whenever I wanted. And so what are the things that I put on the altar of the success? So what are the things that I sacrificed for this, this God of achievement? And I was like, this one, I'm not willing to sacrifice anymore. And so. I think part of the reason that like has been a life, a lifeboat for me or a life raft while this kind of worst season has happened. 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. And I was like, man, and I'm focusing more on this, like my training partner every day. I'm like, dude, thank you for doing this with me. Like, this is. this is awesome. Like, this is great. Like my, I've won the day. Like 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, Puritan 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. They would have got there eventually. They just died first. You know?
But I think that for most people, it's not. And you reach, I would call it something like sort of lifestyle escape velocity, where you go, all of the objective metrics are right, and the subjective ones aren't, which is a good example. of sort of what you've hinted at. And you go, how can I assume that the solution is fixing subjective metric problems with more objective metrics?
And, and, and then, and I'll say this for anybody who's in the season where like, listen, you're 22 years old and you're like, I need to work my face off. You do, you need to, you need to work your face off. But the thing is, is like, there will get to a point where fast forwarding, you know, however many years, but there's nothing like, I don't.
regret the amount of work that i've done um and i and i i don't regret it at all and i think that it was absolutely the right decision and i work a lot now but people make this extrapolated moment they take a moment of your life and they will extrapolate it to forever and assume that if you change your mind that what you did before this was wrong but it wasn't wrong it was right for that time and then we got feedback
during a different time. And this is right for me now. And so I'm going to course correct now. And if something else changes, guess what? You're free to change your mind tomorrow. Yeah. I love this. And I think about it so much that one of the... with asking anybody who's successful for advice is that they tell you what they do now. Yeah. Not what they did when they were in your position. Thousand percent. 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. And if you are the sort of person who goes, huh, this strategy worked for me previously or didn't. Or I thought it worked for me and it didn't. I'm going to update the way that I operate. Perfect example.
I've been on this sort of a flex similar to yourself. I would say my lifestyle escape velocity, I needed to reach a lower altitude than you. So I was getting into coast as opposed to still using the booster rockets earlier. But I started talking about... how like purposeful de-optimization, you know, what is it that you're doing the things for transitioning from the work until your eyes bleed to a different mode of reward and stuff like that. And some people... that I think don't understand me.
super well, which is fine because no one's supposed to understand you, especially not random people on the internet. But people will see snippets of whatever's been sort of the most salient narrative. And a bunch of them said something to the effect of, bro sold us the problem, now he's selling us the solution.
And I was like, huh, that's really interesting because what I'm doing is saying this works for me right now. And what I was saying in the past was this works for me right now. Nothing has changed. And this is why. There's often, when it comes to internet advice, it's very patronizing the way that the audience is treated by people that are critics, as if they're sort of these 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. Like I'm a single father of five kids. 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 older. I'm half the age, whatever.
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, you know, like at least my content is like, this is me showing what's going on. And I try to be real. And that means that if I change my mind, then it'll change. Third.
model the rise if you want the rise, model the plateau if you want the plateau. And so saying, oh, you know, Warren Buffett says he had a great year if he only makes one good decision. It's like saying, oh, to get rich, I should fly private.
Doesn't really work that way. I should play basketball. I want to get tall. 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 when I'll do it. It just conflates sequence, right? It's a when-then fallacy. I think the, man, I haven't talked about this in, I don't even know if I ever talked about this. The greatest skill is the ability to discern.
what things to use and what things to cast out. It is the 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.
in the most crystallized, distilled, concentrated manner when it can be translated into do this instead of that, period. And everything else, the amorphous words that people use, especially the motivation manifesto, or just... manifestation i'll get into that one uh people get triggered on that um
That is what leads more people astray. And so they take the entirety of someone and without all of the other conditions that apply to that person and say, oh, I will take this and apply it to my life. And if you cannot... pull out what is useful for you, you will never win. And that is a really strong statement. But because all you're going to be doing is trying to, and I love, this is my favorite tweet that I've heard from Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny.
Here are the numbers for my winning lottery ticket. Every entrepreneur explaining how they were successful. And so like the next Google isn't a search engine, right? The best version of your life isn't copying. or copying Williamson. It's being able to, with nuance, apply the principles that are generalizable across domains, but then having the... wherewithal, yeah, the discernment to apply the nuance to your specific circumstance. And being able to map those two things, I think is...
the skill that has gotten me the disproportionate return on my life. I have bought, and I've been public about this, I've been, you know, very... The early part of my career is very involved in what I would consider the alternative education, you know, space, right? People, 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 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. I'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 as we, you know, we adjust 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. You have equipment.
my model was for people who had trainers and who were teaching classes or sessions or semi-privates. And so in those instances, if you're at 99 and you go to $200, you're not going to lose half your customers. You might lose a third, but you still make more money, have more profit, et cetera. But he had taken...
what is otherwise something that has made so many gyms profitable and successful. And he applied it to a specific context. Now he says, I'm a gym owner. He said gym stuff. 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, it takes 10 minutes of disclaimers to get to the point. Right. And so then this is why fundamentally like winners will always win because they will still be able to find, you know, the 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 sword of Gryffindor was made of dwarven steel and dwarven steel in the mythology of Harry Potter could only take in that which made it stronger. And so it's not to say that the Sword of Gryffindor couldn't cut butter or couldn't just get into a sword fight. But if it happens to...
you know, kill a basilisk, then it will absorb the poison of the basilisk. And 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. it has been easier for you to complain and say, this did not work the way that I would prefer, right? Rather than like, how can I make this work for me? How can I turn this into something that has been, that can still be a W?
And I think that one skill has probably been the single unlock. that I've been able to have because like I learned these alternative, you know, this alternative world of education of like, how do you sell? How do you, how do you run ads? How do you, how do you sell, you know?
courses, how do you do coaching, all this stuff that has a really negative kind of vibe. But the thing is, is the fundamentals of persuasion there are so powerful. They were just being used to sell stuff that's not good. But the thing is, is that there's so much buyer resistance there that if you can sell stuff in that market when you go to sell insurance you murder and so i think people fail to take in
to consideration the context of the person who's giving the advice and what piece is useful that they should use and the rest you can cast away figure out what you want ignore the opinions of others do so much work it would be unreasonable that you fail. Realize it never mattered to begin with. Help others once you get there. You've already achieved the things you said would make you successful. Yeah, the first five steps there is my...
It's basically my master life plan. Figure out what you want, which 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 i kind of adopted that as a worldview because it's like once you're really clear like this is what i want That 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 it changed is do I have your permission to change what I want? And I think we should all have permission to change what we want in any given moment and not having basically. sunk life bias of like, I put 10 years into this thing and that's okay. And that's what I needed to do at that time. And today I'm willing to, I'm going to change everything.
What's really interesting about if you look at addicts and alcohol, people who need to quit whatever bad habit they have, there's a really strong frame, Ed Milet talks about it, which is basically one more. It's been super helpful for me to not think of my changes as permanent because it's allowed me to make such...
dramatic changes in my life or my business much faster than I think most people have been willing to because there's this weight of forever on top of everything. Like we extrapolate, like you're in a relationship. She told me to pick up my socks. She's going to nag at me forever the rest of my life. We need to break up, right? Or I can do this for today and tomorrow.
If it still works, I will do it for tomorrow. And if five days from now or 25 days from now, if I work this way, I then say, you know what? I need a day. People are like, oh, he's burned out. It's like, I took a day because that's what I needed that day. And I think giving myself permission to have that freedom has allowed me to take significantly faster action in what apparently looks like higher risk scenarios, because who am I apologizing to?
Realize it never mattered to begin with. What's that? Cosmic irrelevance. 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. It's like, well, yeah, but you didn't because you actually chose the path that you're on and you weren't willing to do that. But what you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone. And so 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 of, we want everything without the cost and everything has a price and you will never be able to get the sufficient price tag paid on everything. to reach critical mass, to achieve a modicum of success in any domain, unless you are willing to trade from another. And I think that that has significantly minimized my regret.
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We give up the thing we have most of for the thing that we have least of. And we give up the thing that we want for the thing that's supposed to get it. Right. I 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.
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 20s wanting to be richer and older and have a family. Then we start that in our 30s and we gain more wealth and do the family thing. And then we get back to get to our 40s and we've got more responsibilities. We've accumulated all of this stuff. And then we think, God, if only I could go back to my 20s.
But you were fucking miserable in your 20s. This is a great lesson from Morgan Housel. Fantastic. I think I sent you the nostalgia article. Yeah, yeah. People should just search nostalgia. What's his fund 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...
He 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. And he said, well, God, wasn't that the golden years? Like how amazing, do you remember? Do you remember how amazing that was?
His wife turns to him and she goes, honey, you were miserable. You hated it. You had no idea whether you were going to be successful. You were constantly concerned about money. You were desperately needing validation from all of these people around you. You were permanently in dissatisfaction about this stuff.
And he realized that in retrospect, he knew that all of his worries were a waste of time. But at the time, he had no assurance that they weren't something he should fret about and keep himself up at night. We already know how the movie ends when we go back and say we want to relive it. And you can't relive it into the same context because uncertainty is the largest part of the story.
I had a personal example that was similar to this, which was Laila and I were talking and I said, you know, when we, you know, didn't do any of the speaking and all this other stuff that we're doing and all we did was just own the portfolio companies and get distributions. I was like, man, life was so chill. We could do whatever the fuck we wanted. We didn't have an office. We didn't have to show up. We just did whatever we wanted. And she said, You were the worst. And 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 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. The idea of freedom is a blank calendar, but a blank calendar that never gets filled is not a fulfilling day. And so we want the ability to have whatever we want during that day. And so I think being deliberate about what are my good day moments that I can try and recreate every day. And I have it on my wall. I have two things that are permanently in my office wall. Logic, evidence, utility.
And what does it mean? How do you know? And why does that matter? And the other three are work out with friends, eat food with friends. Write something. My good day formula. And so I 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.
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. I've tried many lunches and 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, maybe, maybe. And yeah, you've tried a lot of lunches. That's good. But do you really, like, 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 could be you?
excusing the pain of adventure and the pain of potential failure. A bad lunch. I might try a new lunch and it might be worse. What a 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. 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.
Zach, my housemate, had a fucking sock sellotape to his wall for the two years we lived together. I was like, what's that doing there? He's like, I don't know. well why is it there and he just because he's you know covered in tattoos and fucking playing guitar and and writing fucking poetry and doing stuff it's just to him that doesn't that doesn't really matter and i was like
I should be around people that push me beyond my limits to do new things more. In different ways. Yes, yes, yes. I need different levels of stimulus there. Just to linger for one more moment on that sort of nostalgia golden years thing. There's this really, really lovely insight.
Perhaps golden years can only happen in our memory. Nobody believes that we're living through a golden era right now. We never think we're in the good old days. But the good old days are always now. Well, sometimes. I mean, COVID probably wasn't... There's somewhat... periods during which people would go, that wasn't the good old days. But when you're 85 and you were 25 in COVID,
You fucking give anything for it. True, true. Yeah, I guess good old days can be in 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 they were living through the... golden era yeah very few and yet in retrospect everybody just wants fucking britney spears back do you know what i mean yeah like the old one not the new one it's crazy um 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 has gone to this because I've been better and faster at correcting the loop of like, oh, I am not happy with this particular thing.
And therefore, there is something wrong. So fix the story that I tell myself as opposed to fix the thing. 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 learn through reward and punishment. Punishment fades with time, no matter how bad it was.
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. 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? The good times. Because reward sticks.
And in some ways, there's a little bit of a hopeful message there, which is that when you look back on your life, you will disproportionately remember the good times, but it only becomes a problem if you 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, the 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 they aren't. It's a bug, not a feature. I mean, I feel like as you read these, you're reading my soul from this year. 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 became worse than them during that period of time. And then as soon as I achieved a level of success, which I then realized that their happiness for me was proportional to where they were on the ladder relative to me. And so as soon as I passed some people, then they stopped being happy and then they start, you know, you know.
saying bad things, right? And the people who were still always ahead were still like, keep it up, keep it up. And there's still people who have been that way my whole life. And I just wonder if and when I pass them, will they flip? I don't know. But also to the same degree.
It was after you start the race, when you're in the thick of it, because you'll quickly pass the people who've done nothing. But then you have this long period of time where you don't catch up to the people who've been doing it for a long time. And that's the part where it's very lonely because you don't have your initial...
your initial 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, 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 Ramosi was. And that's the hard part. And I think it's the story that Morgan Hassell tells, which is that you just don't know how it's going to finish. And 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, if I knew that this was going to 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 i to be honest it's one that i really suck at i'm very very not good at dealing with uncertainty my uh required line of assurance in order for me to commit to a decision is incredibly high, which is why I've basically never failed at anything that I've done. All of the stuff that I've done, a string of incredibly slow. but very reliable successes is just because my required number of sort of justification points is very high.
You know, in retrospect, it might look like it was a risk. It's like, dude, I took so long to fucking make this decision. I knew that I wanted to move to America for fucking ages, years and years before I actually ended up doing it. And it took a long time for me to commit to that decision. I knew that I wanted. to pivot out of nightlife for a good while before I got myself to the stage where I was prepared to do that. On the friend point, it's a...
A painful realization that the small number of good friends want you to win in case you take them with you, and the large number of bad friends are scared of you winning in case you leave them behind. The best way to know... who a real friend is, is how they react when you win. And when that happens, you'll realize how few real friends you really have. I mean, look, I don't know whether it's
just some sort of cosmic blessing or whatever, but, or maybe I'm discerning with friends. I don't know. Or maybe it's small circle thing or whatever. Um, it's been very rare that that's, that I've been on the receiving end of that. Um, that I've, I've ended up being around.
as soon as i left the uk and even the people that i was around in the uk i'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 we still support each other and i keep in i'm loving seeing what they're doing But I get the sense that if you're a little bit more open, if the circle is 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. One of my rules is you should only take advice from people whose dreams for your life are bigger than yours are. Which is a very small number of people. Sometimes it's your parents. Sometimes your parents really do have bigger dreams for you than you do. In different ways as well, in ways that you don't notice.
I mean, I think that the closest approximation to yourself as a spouse, it's the most, it's the most tactically aligned person that you can have. Still, obviously there are some spouses who are not good, but I can say that I think Layla'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. And, you know, 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 beyond reproach, they will do one of two things. They will either be really happy for you or they'll change the game that they're beating you at. That's great, but I'm in better shape.
That's great, but my marriage is better, right? Like, or whatever, you know, whatever game that they choose to play. And so I think the last, um, the last quote that you had there about, um, friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't. It's a bug, not a feature.
it's not a bug it's a feature yeah people who doubt you will be right most of the time and this further increases your uncertainty about the path that you're choosing to take but on a long enough time horizon most people who don't bet are guaranteed to lose and so they get to win at being right more times than you get to win at being right but what that
equation doesn't take into consideration is intensity, which is, can I be so right one time that it makes all of the times that I was wrong irrelevant? And in the nature of life, The answer is yes. Almost a resounding yes for just about every domain. Like everyone can say that every person you've ever dated has sucked and they can predict that you're going to break up until you find the person that you're going to marry. And in that moment.
Who fucking cares about the other 90 people that you went on dates with, that everybody said was a bad idea, or that you have a bad picker, or you don't have a good taste? It's like, well, you're not marrying them. I date in a way that's different than you would prefer.
great. But I didn't end up finding this thing. I, the, you know, the first thing that I ever did was, you know, an online, an online fitness thing. And it kind of worked. And then I did my first gym and it kind of worked. And then I started all these other, other side, side projects. I got distracted and I didn't know.
Many people were like, sure, good luck with that. But I knew that they just weren't really rooting for me. They were rooting for me to fail. They were rooting for me the wrong way. And so the downside risk is significantly smaller. and more frequent. It's both. You're more likely to lose, and it's more likely to happen more times. It's just that upside is uncapped. And so...
And I think about this one a lot. So there's the story of the guy. Do you know the guy who wrote Jingle Bells? No. so i didn't even know that that was i thought it was like happy birthday i thought he was just gifted to humanity when when we started so there's this guy he's a he's a it's he has the most tragic life you can imagine just like an
a complete, like, you don't know his name, right? I can't even remember his name, right? Has did nothing but failed, was a failed everything. And his entire life was nothing. He just happened to write this small thing called Jingle Bells. And it has become, you know, the number one song at Christmas time, like maybe globally. And I think about that life where it's like, what if...
I failed at everything. But then I have one thing that actually makes a permanent impact. I was like, would I trade that life for Aristotle's good life? Where I amount to nothing, but the whole time was good. And this is just one of my eternal battles where I think with myself that I have no answer for, to be clear.
But when I'm 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 it's we are so bad at estimating
Outsized returns. Yeah. It's very hard for us to comprehend an outsized return. We're very good at binary thinking of, yes, this worked. No, this didn't work. But we're not very good at thinking through the bet of, I get 10x and I'm going to lose 50% of the time. People don't make that bet and they should do it every time. The reason that this has been of particular interest to me is I would consider myself a criticism hyper responder. You know, I'm not sure why being on the outside as a kid.
Maybe being a little bit more socially isolated. And so ugly. Only child syndrome being hideous. I mean, I was like pretty, I was a very late bloomer, right? And you talk funny.
I do talk funny. I did for the place that I was in, as well as the place that I'm in now. I just had a career of talking funny in different places. But the reason that I'm so averse So the reason that I really don't like people who put down those that are trying to do something different or have big dreams is that I know how close I came to not taking a shot.
because of the opinions of other people around me. And I'm aware this is not... super alpha lone ranger solo degenerate preneur fucking pilled right the canon and the law of someone that's supposed to be successful is basically one long middle finger to all doubters but this is what every single rocky training montage gets wrong which is rocky never doubted the direction and the path that he was on he just doubted whether or not he could get there
That's not the way that personal growth happens, in my opinion at all. You are filled with uncertainty. Is this even working? I have no idea if there's glory on the other side of this. It's the other side of the lonely. It's the process of the lonely chapter. 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...
want to be around people that make me feel good about the things that I'm trying to do. And I don't think that that's an unreasonable demand. And I also think that it can seem fragile, shallow, or fickle, or uncommitted.
or needy, or undriven, not robust, and yet I still want it. And yet, for me, choosing to swim... against the tide just seems like a stupid decision so i want people in my life whose dreams are bigger for me than mine are and who believe in me more than i do and i think when you find people like that who help you achieve the goals that you set out to achieve, you realize when you achieve the goals that they were more valuable than the goals that you got. I...
I said to you before, I'm hopefully about to move into some sort of an office studio location in Austin. And I've just tapped out my fucking solo degen energy, you know. You don't work in a cupboard anymore as much. Sometimes, but not always. To my dismay. Yeah. Where? I can't be in the cupboard. Where? I can't stare at the wall. Me and platform nine and three quarters. 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. If you talk about work-life balance as a 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.
And there's a narrative that we should not criticize ourselves. We should not say the things that we could have done better. But I believe that that voice isn't an insecurity. I think it's... a version that wants you to chase your potential. And so I think not judging the criticism, but accepting the criticism, I think those are the two separate things.
And I think 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 compare yourself to that ideal. You find yourself lacking. There is pain in that. So you can either sit with the pain or you can judge the pain. You mentioned this earlier on.
I call it second order emotions. Mark Manson calls them meta emotions. So feeling frustrated at your anxiousness and then feeling bitter about your frustration at your anxiousness and then feeling resentful about your bitterness at your frustration about your anxiousness. And you don't have all that much control.
over the first ones. Emotions are going to come and go. You have a lot of control over the ones that come after that. Did you tell me the story of Buddha in the second era? No. Oh, it's great. So... The Buddha was trying to teach a lesson and he says, if I shoot you with an arrow, does it hurt? And, you know, the student was like, yes, it would be hurtful or like, you know, 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, would that hurt? And he said, yes. He said, the first arrow is life. He said, you can't avoid the first arrow. He said, but the second arrow is you. And that one you can avoid. And so suffering is a constant. That's a fixed cost of life. We're going to have downsides. We're going to have bad seasons, bad moments, bad days. But I think a great rule to live by is like only suffer once.
Like, great. I mean, my God, I think if everyone only suffered once, like just because I like tiny little monikers that I can remind myself in the moment of. Okay, this happened. I will only suffer this one time. I will not relive this moment over and over again. I will not judge myself for not...
behaving the way I would have liked to have behaved. I will not judge the version of me that I should have been at this moment. And around and around you go- It's like an infinite regress of self-castigation. Yeah. Right. And so- It's like, I want memory dividends, not memory liabilities.
Yeah. If you talk about work-life balance as a 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. Okay. Let's calm down here. Don't get too ahead of yourself. I mean, that's a really sort of cosmic change for you and your direction.
As somebody who cares about your well-being, it's one that I've kind of been hoping for at some point, a bit of humanity to come through. Yeah, you know, to prove. And I said it earlier on, dude, it proves that there is a... There is a human inside of that. 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 post-it note. 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. Who's life outside of work? 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 20s away. And so many of the realizations that we have arrived at are only really accessible to you. because you've closed the loop of all of the ones that you needed to first. So I want to aggressively comment on this. Everything I said up to this point, I take it all up and up. No, I want to comment on this because I think it's meaningful. So number one, so I would actually challenge a couple of the things you said.
Um, the biggest one being like the just shoulds in general, which is like, you shouldn't work your life away. You should work away your twenties. My opinion, do whatever the fuck you want. If you have a goal. then there will be ways that will increase or decrease the likelihood you achieve them. And so if in 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? And you say one, two, three. And I say, okay, which of these three goals is the most important? Well, then let's work on that one first. And does that one goal allow us to, does it decrease the failure rate of the other two goals, which then makes it the most important?
important goal overall sometimes they are uh 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 uh for sure Uh, but maybe she'll just love you for you. Who knows? Uh, we, we can all hope regardless. Now, most 22 year olds, irrespective of domain, if you, if, if, and I, that's why I have these continued, 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 you have now you do have an advantage you have a couple number one is that you will have more energy than they do Period. And so your ability to work long hours, sleep less, and maintain high levels of focus while maintaining peak fluid intelligence is at its peak. Use it.
The second thing is that you have nothing to lose. And so the thing is, is people always fear being the new entrant. But when you have nothing to lose or you have nothing going for you.
it also means you have nothing to lose. And that means that every position on the board always has an advantage because anybody who has achieved this big thing that you have was also once a 22-year-old who had nothing going for them. And you're at zero. Right. You can't get worse than this. You have unlimited shots on goal.
And so not taking the shot is like saying, life, I don't want to scratch off this lottery ticket, but the lottery ticket's free. Why would you not scratch it off and try it? And so the first advantage is you've got energy. Next advantage is you have nothing to lose. Third is you also have time.
And you have very low responsibilities. And so you have not only the ability to put all of yourself into something, you also have no circumstantial things that are preventing you. Now, if somebody is listening to this and like, I'm 25 and I've got a kid. Cool. And? which thing do you want to sacrifice? And I'm saying sacrifice your kid, but I'm saying like, you're going to have some traits. Now I take things to the logical extreme and say, okay, well,
Bezos has kids. Bill Gates has kids. Warren Buffett has kids. This is just if you wanted to be business successful. It's like, okay, well, then that can't be a reason that I can't be successful. And so whatever reasons that we usually give ourselves in the beginning for why we can't achieve something, you can almost always...
find not only just someone, but someone who's achieved 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. I just wanted to be very clear that if you're 22 years old, the world does not hate you. You're just not good at anything yet. I 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 uh and the fact that Someone twice our age or three times our age was sat opposite the table from us and didn't give me respect. It made me really discouraged. So 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. Oh, it's because of my failing. It's because they are being mean to me. Another 20 year old business person who would have went in there, they would have been given the respect that they deserve. It's like, no. If you're young, everybody in business is going to be skeptical of you. Now, this is changing a little bit, I think. The rise of the wonder kids, the Elon Musk, Doge, the gen world, I think maybe is leverage. There's 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 vibe coded his way to like multi-millionaire status and in his teenage years okay we're starting to realize that ideas get unlocked through technology and through youth and through insight but there is still an industrial era mindset industrial revolution era mindset which is
this craft of some type will take a lot of time for you to get there. And by virtue of that, people are skeptical of young guys and young girls. And you're right. 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. I think you become the exception by being the rule. And so I'll unpack 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 unpredicted.
Yes. It's not a surprise. And so I think people conflate surprises with exceptional. And it is exceptional in that it's rare, not necessarily that it's the only kind of rare. Correct. It's rare that it was a lottery ticket. more than, and of course, and I want to be clear, maybe he's 16 or 17, and like Mr. Beast is a perfect example of this. He's 25, I think now, something like that, 25, 26. Jesus Christ. 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 has just gotten bountiful for everyone. And with AI, it's been easier for people with fewer resources that...
to start actual things, right? The cost of entry financially is significantly lower and the cost, the access to information is basically almost zero. And so when you combine those things, if you're 14 years old, You have high fluid intelligence, like your brain's working. So if you're on the younger side, there's no rule that says that an app designed by a 14-year-old is in some way or any way valued less by a customer than an app that's developed by a 40-year-old.
There's no rule. And so I will also push back on one thing, which is if you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously. If you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously because of your age, it might be not because of your age. It might be because you suck.
And I think that is a significantly harder and 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. It's really hard if you're 20 or 22. This is from Mark Manson. I had this episode with him this week. It was so good. Before you win.
Everyone will ask why you're working so hard. And after you win, everyone will remind you how lucky you got. Holy fuck, dude. You know what's funny? I actually... Okay, so I didn't know that's 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.
That's, I mean, both of those work. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's true. But I think in that, in both of those situations, both of those things are true. Um, in both of them before you 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, because you've now reached the fucking top of the mountain. It is enough enough. Or... dude i mean you know just so prescient to start a business at that time like you you know like you really timed the market or uh i've been learning about um it's not venting but it's a
I can't 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, I frankly don't think that guys have like the lexical capacity to do this socially. But it's something like, imagine that a bunch of girls are at a wedding together and there's one girl that doesn't like another one. And she'll say something like, you know, I really admire your confidence.
I would never wear a dress like that. And it's just like, I'm, you know, it, it looks, you know, you just with your body type, like it's really impressive that you, that you decided to wear that today. Like, that's just, you know, you've done your comp, you've done really well or, you know,
you you're prepared to like just eat like you know i i can't i can't just like keep eating but it seems like you just don't really mind and it's this sort of odd venting come put down you know are you trying to No, I'm saying the dress looks, you know, it's this sort of culpable deniability of an insult. And yeah, I get the sense that the look, retrospective look conversation thing is a little bit like that. It's a...
Backhanded insult, not a backhanded compliment. One, there's a meme from Family Guy. that does this exact thing it's two girls eating lunch together just trading insults like this and then it just pans to two guys uh eating lunch after like a 60 second exchange of just insults and he says hey john i like your tie he says Oh, thanks. And it says, men, we know how to be friends. 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 boil down to that. And I've had this as my internal translation mechanism because before you win, they're saying, you live your life in a way that I would not prefer. And then after you win, in Mark's example, you have won in a way that I did not prefer.
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, they just cast their preferences onto you. And then somehow they expect you to give a shit. And I think this is where I've lost friends. that's okay. And they're entitled to think that you should care and you're entitled to not care. The problem here, especially again for me and for the people who are the criticism hyper responders that are listening.
If you over-index, 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 flicked me? What you don't realize is that this penny could have arsenic on the other side of it, or it might be a fake penny, or it might be a joke, or it might blow up in your hand or something. You go, well, maybe this person's comment is...
useful. Maybe I should take heed 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, the...
I can just middle finger my way through life. Not listening to anybody's opinion is an interesting one, but practically it's very difficult and it's a skill that you need to learn. And you do need to learn, you do need to... listen to feedback like if you had never changed how you did your podcast from day one until now your podcast would not be what it is right if i had made sales presentations if i had written emails if i'd made products that didn't respond to feedback then
we would not be where we're at right now it's a really it's a really interesting question of like how do you discern which feedback is good and which feedback isn't yep um and i'm trying to think about what my My perspective is on that. I think it comes down to, number one, aligned incentives. Like, does this person benefit from me doing better? Number two is competence. Are they... do they actually have sufficient domain expertise where they're
feedback would be relevant. Now I'll be clear here. If you have a yogurt company and you want somebody to try your yogurt and your friends say, I don't think the yogurt tastes good. Well, they probably had a lot of yogurt. And they've eaten stuff before. And so like they could very well have domain expertise. If you have a business that's a yogurt business and then your mother gives her opinion about how the business works and she's never run a business, that's different.
Right. And so the second would be domain expertise or competence. The first is aligned incentives. And then what do you think? I think that those are like, I'm trying to think of those two. 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 a boat. So 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 you said this. We talked a little bit about how... Well, I'll rewind the clock. So there's this quote that I read from Kobe where he said he thought that it was going to be super competitive in the NBA, but...
When he got into the NBA, he realized that people, well, they figured out that they had made it and weren't willing to sacrifice as much as he was to continue to win. And I would say that that... that realization has been somewhat true for me which is that like winning it's like it it hasn't gotten harder from the actual
doing stuff side there has been the trades that have been different than i expected um but especially when you're looking at you know the population of everyone to 100 days of doing something in a row uh there was a
There was a friend of mine who had a, he offered a guarantee on a product that he sold. And the guarantee was this. He said, all you have to do, you can get all your money back if you just open up a Google Doc and say what you're going to do every day. And at the end of the day, you're going to say what you did.
That's it. And you just do that for six weeks. That's all you have to do. And if you do that and you don't get the results, I'll give your money back. And what's crazy about that is when he was talking about it, he said, do you know what the completion rate of twice a day? doing something is? He's like, it's like less than 1%. He's like, so I can happily do it because it seems so simple. And so I think we underplay how simple success is.
and extrapolate an expectation of how easy it must be from that. And then we're disappointed or dissatisfied when it doesn't meet those expectations. Like it is harder than we expect. but also the rewards may be also greater than we expect. James Clear has this 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. Holy fuck. Super true. I mean, I think Naval quoted this blog a long time ago, but desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And if you basically know that you're never willing to put the work in to get the thing. Yep. That's an iron law.
Like that James Clear thing is an absolute iron law. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. There is a path between where you are and the place that you want to be. If you're not prepared to do that walk. still wanting to reach the end of the path is just guaranteeing that you're going to live an unsatisfactory life. And so when I hear that quote, I immediately go to my operational side of like, okay, how do I release myself from a desire?
So I thought about that and I actually think it's a lot like dating. So hear me out on this. There is the old saying. I think it's a girl saying. I'm going to assume it's a girl saying, which is if you want to get over somebody, get under somebody else. All right. Now, there's a point to this, which is. I don't think you can release desire, but you can replace it.
And so it's like if you have a terrible breakup, there's basically some totem of reinforcement that's been removed from your life. Getting over something or someone is simply...
giving it getting enough exposure to enough new things from the time that you've bought back from this reinforcer being gone to find another reinforcer which is why i genuinely think that the idea of like oh i shouldn't date for a while after i get out of a breakup is just complete stupidity like why would you like what why
What rule is there? Well, you have to heal. Healing for most people is defined as I find something else that brings me sufficient joy that my baseline returns to normal. But if I'm going to bring somebody else into my life, that person's also going to serve that same function. And so like I could.
I can replace it with tennis or gardening or business or just the next person I'm going to date. And why is one better than the other? To Clear's 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.
maybe be a little bit more open-minded about how that desire could be fulfilled it's like huh and i you know to push back on the why you should have a little bit of a break between partners I would say that there is a specific type of learning that comes especially from intense and emotional experiences that takes a little bit of time for you to 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. And I wonder whether you very quickly move into the...
I can't take lessons from this thing mode because I'm focused on the new thing, as opposed to let's sit down and debrief a little bit after this. And what does life look like? Perfect example of this. Alain de Botton 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.
I would guess that a lot of this is because change is very emotionally painful and breakups are emotionally painful. Therefore, people change when they break up. It's like, 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...
so I will, I will challenge back, um, which is one, um, it assumes that we must change. Um, if we take that, if we take that frame, which I wouldn't necessarily accept in all cases, um, Number two, it assumes that the change that we're going to make in between is something that's going to increase the likelihood that we find someone that we like, which may or may not occur. Third, I do think that change would happen no matter what.
because you've you've removed somebody who was altering your behavior and anyone who says that the person they date doesn't alter their behavior like i don't know what you're talking about like of course they They give you little kisses when you do stuff and they say, thank you. Of course, you have reward cycles and punishment cycles that exist constantly. And so like, oh, she's always different when she's in a relationship. It's because they have somebody else who's...
deliberately uh changing their behavior and that's normal we do control and counter control to our partners all the time people like using the word control but it's exactly what you do if you want your husband to pick up the socks then you do you say thanks and you give him a blowjob afterwards whatever like you do some sort of rewarding contingency in order to you know get
more more of the type of behavior you like and also you say hey don't say that when they say something that you they said hey uh are you going to finish your dinner and you're like i used to have an eating disorder and my friends used to say i wasn't eating my food blah blah blah right and so um with the relationship piece
I think that you are going to change when you have reward or punishment stimulus that changes. And until those things change, nothing is going to change to L.N. Dubada. L.N.'s name. And so if you get out of a relationship. you will change regardless because the conditions have changed. And so your behavior will change. And so, and all of these things, I then posit as the question is like, and do I need to do this in order to find the person that I want?
How many people have gotten into relationships where they've changed the things that they like to do? They've started staying up late because their partner stays up late. They start getting up early because their partner gets 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, still going to bed late or waking up early, right? Because they've habituated that type of behavior. They ask themselves, well, huh, I kind of forgot that I used to... go to bed early or sleep in. I forgot that bit of me because for the last 12 months, I've been in this relationship with this person and I adapted. We sort of met in the middle or maybe they really changed me or whatever it is.
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 alchemize 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. It takes time for this stuff to filter through. Yes.
particular landmark events that you go through that are very traumatic. I don't even think it's landmark. I think you can change behavior really quickly and it's just not a huge thing.
Like Layla used to say in the very beginning of our relationship, she said, ah, you're 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. It's just 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. So now...
The reason that they were doing it before was that they didn't have this reinforcer. Reinforcers introduced, so they're willing to change their behavior to accommodate this later timeline. We don't have transparency with ourselves, though. 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? Rally. 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 Jupiter. Jupiter was really heavy. I adapted my running style. Huh, I'm back on Earth. oh, this is going to take a little bit of time for me to get back into this new running style. So the reason, so I will continue to die on this because I feel, no, I like.
What I'm describing has been the central worldview that has been responsible for a great deal of my material success. And it's... Rapid behavior change. Rapid behavior change, but also being able to accurately view the world, at least to my... I 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. And 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, when they figured out why, it means that I have crafted a narrative that I accept. which may or may not have any bearing on reality. And so I focus purely on the observable because they are far more predictable in terms of predicting your own behavior and predicting other people's behavior.
And so with regard to the relationship, it's like people have many counter controls that they do. And so because of that, you change your behavior. And then all of those things are removed at once. Were there other things that are also variables in your life that occurred during that period of time? Of course. Do we know them all? No. And so I take the position that there are so many variables. Why do I need to know why?
And I never will anyways. And so why would I waste my time trying to figure out whether, do you think you're this way because your father didn't hug you enough? I don't know. I know that I am this way, period. And might be. 20 different things because we're going to generalize work ethic to your dad didn't hug you enough when it might be like, I write.
Because I've had enough reinforcing contingencies around writing that I write. And 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 by analogy works really well. When we get really down to what are the behaviors that changed when you were in the relationship versus not in the relationship, and if you can get isolating on that, which you can be specific about, not necessarily why it happened, but that it changed and what behaviors changed, then you can look at your laundry list of, okay. these are the changes in my behavior that I have continued to keep post-relationship. Are any of these
conducive to me getting a more attractive or better partner in the future. Now, if the person that I was with got me to go to the gym because they went to the gym and then the gym itself became reinforcing because basically totems of reinforcement can shift over time.
in terms of the work itself can be reinforcing. I might say, this was a laundry list. This is one of the items that changed when I was in this relationship and I am okay with it. And so if we have that laundry list, then again, why do I need time? And so I, anyways, I push back on this very hard because me discovering why I did something gives me zero value. That's interesting. I, I would class myself as a.
understanding why, especially around myself, is one of the greatest sources of pleasure that I've got in my life. Okay. And this may be where me and you differ. Oh, no. We're going to fucking jam on this. I love this. Okay. So. I will give you, I think, a perfect analogy for this. And the reason that I'm, in general, somebody who's not the biggest fan of therapy, as is traditionally practiced. If I were playing tennis, right?
And I went to a coach and they said, hey, I need you to change your grip from this to this. Straightforward. Would I spend the vast majority of that session with the coach being like, let's try to discover why you hold the grip that way. Who fucking cares? I do. Now, when we get to why. I used the word control before. If we can understand the dependent variables, then it means basically if you can predict, it means you can control.
which people don't like that. But if you can predict what's going to happen, it means that you know what the variables are and you can influence those variables, which 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. These behaviors will do that. To increase the likelihood of me doing these behaviors, then I have to have... More good stuff, less bad stuff. I will die on that hill. Beyond that, what does 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. Yeah, I can tell. I can tell. I can tell. It's either the nicotine or the debate. What if the actual outcome that you wanted was the pursuit of trying to work out why? Because for me, and I tried to word that relatively carefully, not finding out the actual why.
but the pursuit of trying to work out why. It's the reason that I fell in love with evolutionary psychology, because to me, it started to explain why we are the way we are. It's one of the common themes in this podcast, over 900 and something episodes. It is a place for people to come to try and get some approximation of why they are the way they are. And even if that's wrong.
even if it does not fully explain, partly explain, the process of that discovery for me is fascinating. I have a journal entry from a long time ago when I was on mushrooms. i was it was post post party or post whatever. And I was back at the house and I had some music on and I was just thinking through ideas like this. And I could feel this game of tennis occurring in my mind as I thought a thing. And then I asked why, and then I asked why, and then I asked why, and then I asked.
why and it felt like this sort of movement almost probably certainly was default mode off and you know hemispheres talking and all the rest of it and i wrote down not what i was thinking about but i wrote down the sentence i love the way that my mind works Because I like that conversation of tighter and tighter spirals of sort of deeper and deeper questions. And for me, I enjoy the why search. It's something that in and of itself.
brings me joy to try and work out why we are the way we are or why I am the way I am. I wholeheartedly accept that learning things is enjoyable. And I think what you described more or less was that 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 slight. I see a lot of that as mental masturbation. I would agree. And I do not decry that in any way. If someone wants to do something with their time. Awesome. Play video games, do whatever you want. If we want to say this increases the likelihood that we achieve a goal, then that is where I will, because that we can know.
Does this increase or decrease likely that we achieve a goal? And the difficulty with ascribing why is that we cannot know because we cannot relive the same circumstances again. And so in N 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 whys. But when I, the reason that I have 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.
that's what it means rather than like, I'm stressed now, or you know what? She rubbed off on me because she was really anal. What does that mean? Okay. It just means that she counted her calories. And, uh, I now, you know, when I go to a menu, I order like a diva. whatever, right? Like these are the two behavior changes. When I say anal, this is what I mean. Great. Okay. How do you know that? Well,
did I do that two or three times or is this every single time that I go out? And so, okay, now I know the extent to which this thing that I have now defined. And who cares? Why does that matter? I'm anal now. Well, anal just means I changed the way I order. Does that matter? No. Okay. And so instead of trying to, 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 in-group, out-group. I wanted to be accepted by her and her friends who also do that. I think maybe that's why. Who cares? And so it was that. Does me counting my calories and being a diva when I order decrease the likelihood that I find the next mate? If the answer is yes, then I'll change the behavior. If no, fuck it. Interesting.
The pursuit of the why, to me, improves my well-being and the quality of my well-being is a goal in and of itself. So let's say that one of the few goals that you have is to be in moment to moment happiness or satisfaction or something like that. For me, the pursuit of the why is a source of that. So I'm aware that that's like a lexical fucking jujitsu move, but I've 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 fucking skimming rocks or something that it only occurs for a small moment and accumulates nothing over time. I like it. 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 hard things
which is why you can beat most people by just trying. I think the vast majority of people don't actually know what it looks like to put tremendous effort into something. And I think one of the most viable things that... the office, which now you're going to have, um, has given me is the people who now work in my proximity. One of the number one things that I get back is feedback is like, I really didn't understand how much he works. And like he.
doesn't stop and it's it's easy to say these things and it's hard to actually because one of the difficulty is 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 soundbite. 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 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. And so, trying... is one of those. The act of trying. Yes. And so, Leila had a mentor of hers say this to her, and it's lived rent-free in my mind since then. Um, so we had this thing that we had this house that we were pursuing and the, and, and we, we ended up not getting the house or whatever.
are you settling or did you move mountains? And it's just a great, it was 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 And I think people are so constrained in their thinking of what level of effort is because they haven't considered what trading way more for that thing is.
But they would be willing to trade far more for that thing if the trade were clear. But because they've never tried hard at anything, they just think, oh. this is what trying looks like, which might be like the occasional Google search and a couple hours a week of like watching some videos on YouTube on something. It's like, that is not trying. Like that is not trying. Like if you cannot count the amount of repetitions that you're having in the hundreds, that is not trying.
And the longer I've been doing stuff, that's yielded 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, violence is the answer. These are sayings that are plastered around the wall of this office because they've been so true for me that you can brute force what you want into reality. And yes, today, we talked about the trade.
that we're not willing to make but if you want something like did you fucking move mountains well the trades that you're not willing to make is you saying i don't want to move that mountain and i think and that's and that's perfectly acceptable yes you might say uh i could do like i so i thought so because she
posed that question, I thought about all these other things that I could do. I was like, well, I could offer an extra $20 million for the house. That would probably get me the house. Okay. Am I willing to do that? No. Okay. What else? I was like, I could, like, I had, I was like completely deconstrained thinking. I was like, could I?
pay somebody kidnap to yeah well that was a thought but i wasn't gonna say that one um could i um pay someone to you know we could figure out i could have a private investigator figure out when basically tell them uh the other buyer who's thinking about buying the home and uh when they're visiting it have crime occur next to them or near them or in that vicinity to be like oh this is not a safe area right like what and i was like oh man i completely opened up my now
Am I willing to do that? No. But it completely deconstrained 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. Okay, 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. Oh.
I'm willing to pay that. And so it starts at goal achievement and then works backwards on price rather than starting with price. You negotiate the cost with yourself. Backwards from the assumed success, which is why. do so much volume, it would be unreasonable that you were successful. I think the bar being set incredibly low is just a
it's such a fucking perennial truth. And there's sort of two things happening at once here. One is you can work way harder than you think you can. Yes. And another one is Most people work so not hard that even a small amount of working hard puts you into a rarefied strata of people. And both of those things are true at the same time, right?
And I'll add a third one. And the bigger the goal is, the fewer the people who are pursuing it, just because they think it is a big goal and therefore it must be harder to achieve. That's the fairest thing about most people try to achieve mediocre goals, which makes them the most competed for.
And they assume that how difficult it is to compete for that goal must therefore extrapolate proportionally. On the consistency point, no one cheers you for not drinking for a day, not smoking on a long drive, or not overeating for one night. No single workout or meal is ever impressive on its own. The reason so few people understand success is consistency never looks impressive in the moment, only at the end. The point that you were making before around...
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. In fact, Alex spends a lot of time in his office.
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, only the outcomes.
No one knows. That's real impressive. Maybe it came easily to him. Maybe he's able to crack it out in half an hour. Maybe he's got a team of people that do it on his behalf. Maybe he, maybe, maybe, maybe. And yeah. you can try way harder than you think you can and most people aren't trying at all i'll give a tactical thing that has helped for trying and like this is actually one of those more rocky cutscene type things but when you
work and you actually are working you're writing the emails that you need to write you're you're you're preparing for the podcast you're doing that that work that you know is not short work it's this is going to take me two hours and take me four hours when you get to the end of that and you're like man
I'm kicked. I earned my shower today. I think the difference is that at that point, you go, you grab a bottle of water, and then you look at your to-do list at the next large thing and say, great. Let's start on this. And I think people who don't witness that happen, they don't see four hours. And this is what working side by side someone can do. I remember when we have a new director of marketing.
uh, in his first week, uh, we needed to, we needed to write some massive amount of stuff. And, uh, he was like, okay, so we have to do this. And I was like, great, we'll have a document, let's go. And he was like, oh, like now, and I was like, you got something else to do? And he was like,
oh, I mean, I know. Okay. Yeah. Let's, let's do it now. And then we shared screen for eight hours. Uh, and then we finished it and it was like, oh, wow. I was like, great. What's the next thing? And he was like, oh yeah uh we we have this other thing i guess we can do too and it was and i could see his like perception on on the level of work
shifting in real time. And so if you have the opportunity to work with anyone that is exceptional at anything, especially in that 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.
If you can get in proximity, you will learn so much, so much faster. Like if you want to time warp yourself, you can try and observe the little bits and nuggets and crumbs from videos, podcasts, things like this. 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- Very cool. So Bill Perkins wrote a book called Die With Zero. Great book. Great book. Three hour lesson. Everyone should go and get it. You'll be far less motivated afterwards. Keep going. Yes, that's true. But- He's fun and he is an important redress to people that struggle to spend money and struggle to have fun. So Bill Perkins writes this book, Die With Zero. I bring him on the podcast.
The book is about how to use your money in a manner that gives you a life that you will enjoy at any level of wealth. That's a 2D lesson. Even speaking to him on the podcast was largely a 2D lesson. we finish up the podcast. And he says, what are you doing now? And I said, well, I was going to go home and write the show notes for this because it was me, an editor and a Mormon assistant in a Facebook messenger chat. That was our business at this stage. And he said, well,
Do you want to go wake surfing? Can you wake surf? It's like, yeah, I can wake surf. 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 the middle of the afternoon. So, okay, no worries. We go downstairs. His driver's outside waiting for us. We get into the car. We get to Austin 360 Bridge. His boat captain is there on the boat with shorts for both of us and towels and food and snacks and caffeine.
immediately were wakesurfing within 30 minutes of having finished the podcast. And I was like, 3D lesson. 2D lesson, reading the book. 3D lesson, going to Bill's house and seeing his staff. I'm like, huh, this guy puts his money where his mouth is. And the difference... for exactly what you're talking about. 2D less and 3D less. 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 theirs to begin with. That first one's Morgan Housel. Is it? You can go fuck yourself. No, because 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... The second half is... 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 user-generated. Essentially, it's going to be a rounding error of that. It's dead internet theory. I get the sense... that the people who are concerned about dead internet theory should have been concerned a long time ago, given that most people are propagating ideas that they didn't even come up with and can't explain. It's like you're worried about mindless robotic creatures.
producing things on the internet that you might have to read. Have you seen what most people put on the internet and ask them about where they got that idea from? So yeah, I think the dead internet theory has already occurred. It's just... It's, as Naval says, people failing the Turing test in reverse. People failing the Turing test in reverse. So they behave like robots? Hmm.
The second half of the quote was what? So many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with. So there's this quote by Marcus Aurelius that... I have, I wrote, I wrote on the executive assistant. How much fucking wall space have you got? It's all whiteboard. Yeah, there's a lot. And it was, 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. What are we so afraid of? Because every belief that we have... we got it. Like we come as a blank slate right now. You could say, you know, I combined three things and made it my own. You know, I think you've, you've, you've read enough quotes in this world that like most interesting things have already been said. Um, but.
The ability to change your mind, like 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'm talking to you and it's your belief and I'm defending another person's belief, but it's mine right now, but it's not mine. And I, you know, strong beliefs loosely held is I think a saying in the Y Combinator world. Um, like before I get this like big trigger effect of like, oh, 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 know, like, and you extrapolate it to 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 changed on something like this. I had to do a debate when I was in high school for affirmative action. And so I was a very pro-affirmative 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 of the teachers, everyone had to say what side they were on and then just flipped it, which was amazing teaching, by the way. Yeah, 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 it helps people. And I had all this reasoning behind it. And I'll tell you a completely different scenario of this in terms of questioning our beliefs. So 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, I would judge them and I'd be like, oh, that guy's form is bad or he's doing too much volume or he's not, 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. And so all we're really debating here is how quickly we reach our genetic max. And if I enjoy training, wouldn't I rather have longer progress over... extended period of time so then which one is better huh and so it's just like and and basically having myself and luckily for me at least um each of those times where i quote learned that i was wrong it was in silence and i
After like the third or fourth time of this where it got flipped again and again, I was like, you know, maybe I should back off a little bit. Just be humble. Like, I'm just going to exercise the way I like to. And kind of like the pursuit of why for you. I like training this way. I can't really explain it too well. It just seems to give me joy. Yeah, right. Yep. Yeah. There's this idea from Gwinda Bogle. Can I add something to this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw this yacht.
And it had, because every yacht names are always like wild, right? And it said, don't analyze your pleasures. What's that mean to you? He used the word analyze, but I think judge is the word that he, I'm assuming it was he. This thing makes you feel good? Yeah. Don't question it. Don't worry about it. Just let it be. Yeah, that's really cool. That is really, really cool.
It's like, only suffer once. Like, don't judge this. Thing went well. Sure. I mean, just enjoy it. Enjoy it. Gwinda Bogle's got this idea, two-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 their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with. And there's people who want to know more and those who want to defend what they already believe. Oh, so interesting because it was kind of like, this is like the, kind of like the Mark Manson quote. I thought it was going to go in a different direction. So I, so based on that premise, my expected outcome was, um,
These people copy the behaviors of their favorite influencers and the influencers are using the most tested thing that the masses have said is the highest performing version. Oh, okay. 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 yeah and that you have it's maybe one of the reasons why you get conceptual inertia and stuff takes a very long time to change even after a heliocentric version of the universe is fucking you know turned around you have a long time for humans to catch up and i wonder whether this plays back into the breakup thing 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 but fuck me when you start to scale that across an entire society and media and legislation and government and expectation and religion and What is it? A lumbering behemoth that sort of drags its feet. We end up with that. Thinking is hard, which is why... the vast majority of people delegate it. And I, and what's really interesting, and I think you had George Mack and this is this whole thing with high agency. Like.
You can, you can be exceptional by just actually trying to come up with your own opinions. Like, and, and starting with what do we. What are the few things we know, which is, you know, reasoning from first principles, which people say over and over again, but don't know what reasoning from first principles is to begin with.
which is we start with the facts, the things that we are in the observable universe, and we only go from there. And we build on that. And 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've like my two favorite memes of all time. Um, and one of them is there's this one dude and it probably seen it with in front of like a zillion little heads that are going the other way. And he says,
Yes, you're all wrong. And I, I love that meme because to me, it's like that meme is agency. It's like, I know, I don't know why you all believe what you believe, but I know why I believe what I believe. And until I have. observable evidence that somehow contradicts the stack that has built this belief, this is what I'm going with. The problem is that this takes time.
to do that research to do that thinking and and come to it whereas and as much as we can uh you know uh throw shade at people who delegate decision making we all do because you can't actually derive you don't have enough time
It's too effortful. Yeah. You don't have enough time. So 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 spend a huge amount of my time thinking about.
But if, if, if it's around food stuff, I'm like, I don't know. Like, and I was in the, and I was in the business for, for 13 years. Like I was in the business for a long time, you know, around fitness and nutrition and things like that. But even then it's like, I, you know what, this guy's.
Dr. Mike's smart. And I believe that he spent his time looking at all this stuff. So I'm just going to delegate my thinking to him. Incentives are aligned. If he doesn't get people leaner or more muscular, then his business falls apart. Pretty relatable expertise. The fastest growth periods are often the most miserable. If you want progress, get used to pain. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.
The hardest you've ever worked is the hardest you've ever worked. Every new challenge shows you a new territory you were scared of but survived. Every time you break a new limit, you now know you have the capacity to handle more than you ever did before. It's inverse PTSD. like workload exposure therapy that teaches you, oh, I've been here before and I didn't die. This is okay. So one of my training partners, what he likes me to tell him when he's in a hard set.
is you're fine. That's what he likes me to tell him. So he's right at those money sets where you're like, I'm dying right now. And you're like, you're fine. Not keep going. You got this. And a lot of people like that. He's like, you're fine. You're fine. And I think that that's probably what he tells himself when he's going through those harder times. So when I was back in the fraternity days, I was in the SEC, which is in the South.
And they were notorious for like heavy hazing. And so I was going to join as a pledge. And so I called my dad up and I was like, hey, you know, I don't know what's going to happen, blah, blah, blah. And he said, he said this to me, which.
actually was one of the strongest things that was my frame going into it because of what he said he said he said there is nothing that they can do to you that you have not already had worse happen and it was this great like huh they can't do anything worse than what i've already had 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 i've had to go through and i think that um
to your point of like you have only worked as hard as you've ever worked um the the frame of i can stand it because i am not dead I am living proof every day that I have stood, 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 you? Am I dead? Guess what? I have a new bar that I know that I can't stand. More evidence. That's the new territory that you go through. It's that sort of safety thing, I think, of you're okay. This 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 not a sense of lack of control, right? Or not a sense of lack of outcome. I'm trying to unpack what you said. When you reassure somebody that they're fine, 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 where we're trying to get to. You have evidence that you have. So this would be, we will generalize. your history to this novel situation. And it also applies. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You've been through breakups before. You'll get through this one. Even if this one's worse.
even if this one's worse. And maybe it's got nothing to do with the breakup. Maybe it was to do with the way that you handled that change in career. Maybe it's not even to do with any one thing. Maybe it's the fact that you've handled all of your life put together up to right now. is 50% of the suffering that you're going to get and the other 50% is going to come from this one thing. Or maybe it's, this is 99%.
of the suffering is coming from this one thing, but in the 1% that you've had so far, that is the only evidence that you've got, I reckon that you still got this. There's this 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. And he said, all my life, I was scared that I was a coward.
I was terrified that I was a coward, that I didn't have bravery. And I think of myself as a hard man. I hang around with hard men. I do hard men things. 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 going to test me in a manner that I didn't get to choose. And it's going to test me at a velocity that I wasn't prepared for. He used this sentence, I fucking adore. He said, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door.
I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. And then his wall came crashing down. 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 unchosen suffering. It was one of the criticisms I had that everybody made around CrossFit.
training so hard you know the ryan fisher 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 Let's make no bones about it. You chose to be there. You chose to do that pursuit. What if I said you need to lie on the couch for three weeks and not train? How hard would that be?
because that's the difference between chosen and unchosen suffering and the weird thing is that you can't choose unchosen suffering it's very difficult unless you throw yourself into kind of chaos you know like flicking yourself and like fucking throwing yourself off a cliff it's like well i don't know how this is gonna go uh So yeah, clearing his throat in the room next door is a 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 because we are ultimately just the behaviors that we do. But we also ascribe our narratives to why we do those things, which may or may not be true, but we do ascribe those narratives. And so being able to say like, this is going to be an amazing story.
was one of the things that got me through the earlier parts of the gym days when there wasn't any evidence. And I could say, hey, this was many years of my life because if it had happened overnight, how unrelatable would that story be? And the reason that we don't tell stories of the... The prince who just goes up to the girl and she says yes, and they lived happily ever after is a very terrible story. And so I think at the end of our lives, we would much rather have.
the twists and the turns and the depths of character and then the triumph. 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 who that is? 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 its villains. Oh, yeah. I mean, the Joker in Dark Knight. I mean, it's just like he made the movie. And another way to put that would be the story is only as good as its stakes. Yeah.
The bigger the monster, the more epic the hero. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Find a woman who kills drama instead of starting it, makes life quieter, not louder, tells you you're better than these guys, you can beat them, and wants you to win even more than you do. Then... become the man required to attract that woman and marry her the moment you find her. Yeah. That was just a tweet about my life.
When I was debating whether I should marry Layla, I had a mentor who I reached out to and I was like, hey, 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 Hormozian of...
of love story decisions. But he was like, your business is up. You're eating better. You're working out. You are less stressed than you were. And she has done all of these things to create the space for you to do that. And when I translated into like, what has changed about my life rather than, you know, do I feel the chemical compound of whatever?
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. She was like, Is that a proposal? And I was like, well, are you saying yes? She was like, yeah. I was like, okay, then we need to get you a ring. And that was our proposal. There was, yeah. So that's Hermosi's romance.
Anyways, I think a lot of people chase the fireworks rather than the... the coal the coal furnace that takes a long time to to heat up but then it just it keeps it keeps going and it can power for a much longer time during good times and bad times because if it makes sense if it makes sense without emotion, then it will make sense when the emotions are gone. Yeah, that's an interesting assessment of the way that the human attachment system works, that basically you have sanity.
insanity, sanity again. And you should, everybody should see themselves as potential future drug addicts. that are playing around with maybe one of the most powerful substances on the planet. The only issue is that it's endogenously created inside of you as opposed to exogenously given to you by a guy in a BMW. That's what falling in love is.
Falling in love is choosing to deal yourself drugs for between six and 24 months. During that time, you cannot trust your own decision making. So you need to make as rational of a decision upfront. 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 at attachment system. It's because serotonin gets dropped in the brain because you're just dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, fucking drive, drive, drive. and then you don't sleep you don't eat you're like oh my god she's amazing he like come out of it 24 months later you're like what the fuck was that and if you're not careful you know 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 stats 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 recant it. Fucking sick. The document has... So, Darwin's unsure about whether or not he should get married, so he makes a list. The document has two columns. One labeled marry, one labeled not marry. And above them, circled other words...
This is the question. On the pro-marriage 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 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 chit-chat, 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. This issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at greater length in the appropriate Not Marry column.
Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it, conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children. perhaps quarreling, loss of time, cannot read in the evening, fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for bucks, and, if many children, forced to gain one's bread. Even experts in mating and evolution
Struggle with big decisions. Fucking sick. The line that I remember from that most vividly was less money for books. It was just such a like, I had 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, love. I mean, you can see a lot of influence. I might not be able to say this without crying, which is going to be very embarrassing, but I'm going to try. October 17th. 1946. Darlene, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear it, but I don't only write it because you like it. I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write you.
It is such a terribly long time since Alash wrote to you, 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. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead.
but I still want to comfort and take care of you. And I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you. I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until now that we can do that. What should we do? We started to learn to make clothes together, or learn Chinese, or get a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you. And you were the idea, woman.
and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick, you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn't have worried, just as I told you then, there was no real need. because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now, it is clearly even more true. You can give me nothing, yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else. But I want you to stand there.
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend except you, sweetheart, after two years. But you can't help it, darling. Nor can I. I don't understand it, for I've met many girls.
and very nice ones, and I don't want to remain alone. But, in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real. My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife My wife is dead Tough To play the reverse out. It's like, would I want 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, um, what's saddened 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, there's for sure going to die before you. She's a little younger. She's younger and I'm bigger. And she exercised like she's for sure going to live longer. And I was like.
I want you to spend as little time as humanly possible from the time that I die to finding somebody else. You do me no service by making yourself miserable and you do not discredit or dishonor me. by finding somebody else to spend your life with so yeah just I only think about that from reverse there's a the joy of melancholy yeah is an interesting
kind of emotion that's complex. This strange... Like wallowing? Satisfaction and wistfulness. And yeah, wallowing's maybe a little more... loaded um but melancholy you know there can be odd joy and sadness and and a kind of beauty that you get to experience after something is gone that you can't experience during it. I've not had anybody in my life die. Only child with a mother and a father that's still alive. Like I've got, there's no one. Must be nice. Yeah. 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. What's a mood setter? Modern women see Layla and think, I'll wait to establish myself in my career before I date or get married or have kids. But they forget we got married when she was 23 and we built this together. Love is one of the rare times you don't do life in order. but rather, all at once.
If you find someone that makes your world go round and makes the world make sense to you, where you both look at the same thing and say, oh, you saw that too? Like, I feel like I was the only one. I think that... for high achieving individuals finding someone who sees the world the same way is incredibly rare and when you find that person you should stop what you're doing and then you should get them to stay with you and
It's been one of the best decisions of my entire life, marrying Layla. And there's this, especially unfortunately for women right now, there's this huge, you know. put it off, delay, there's no rush. But it doesn't actually take into consideration two things. One is that biology hasn't advanced with culture and society. You can't have kids past, you know.
35 i mean you can but you're a geriatric and it's a geriatric geriatric pregnancy past 35 ruthless time yeah i'm just being real right yeah um and so i mean i this is like super prevalent and i know this is a much more common theme on the show and i don't touch it very much but it's it just i just say it more like because it i think it sucks um
It's not fair. Objectively, it's not fair. Guys can wait 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, you know, 18 months between each one. Okay. That's six years by the time you're done. And so
if we rule out that geriatric pregnancies are last, then it means that we have to basically have, or we, you have to have your first kid at 29. Well, okay, maybe it'll take... Let's just tack one year on of marriage to have the kid and be married. Okay, 28, you're married. All right, do you want to marry somebody within six months of meeting them? Let's give it two years to give our logical brain in. Okay, so 26.
26. You graduate at 22. You have 48 months. And I think that, again, this is if you don't want kids, then all of this is null. 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'll say in general, betting on... 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.
And so it's easier to work with reality the way it is, not the way you hope it's going to end up landing. Yeah. To 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, you know, 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. I remember a mentor of mine, you know.
He had a wife that most people have wives that are not involved in their business. I'm more the exception there. Um, but his wife wasn't involved at all in the business and they had a very happy marriage. Uh, and he said, um, and I said, do you ever like wish you could talk shop with, you know, your wife? And he said,
god no and i was like uh why not he said that's what i got you for and it was just such a business yeah 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. And he's like, and I've got 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 has gone so far up compared to how the vast majority of relationships were, call it even 50 years ago. You didn't spend nearly as much time with your spouse. And so it was more normal to have...
different people or different parts of your life that were or needs being fulfilled by many people and only the ones that are confined by the laws of marriage being delivered on that. Now, if you get somebody who can tick 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 off camera about which is like suffering is going to be a constant and this person will like we get to choose how we want this to go
And so I think that if you take off the societal pressure of a perfect partner and think, does this person make me 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 no, what I would consider non-negotiables. I want to have kids. They don't want to have kids. I want to travel. They never want to travel. If those things are good, I think part of the excitement of life is 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 unfurnished.
Finding the right lamp is super easy. Get any lamp and the house will fit around it. But if you've spent a decade and a half constructing the perfect house and all of the upholstery is chosen and the art's 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 has constructed a pretty fucking elaborate complex life um it's significantly more difficult to find a lamp that fits into a house that you've designed for a long time than it is to build a house around a lamp And assuming that you want a lamp in your house, getting the order at least somewhat right may make it easier.
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. It's that of 35 or 40. And it's going to be harder for you to feel as satisfied with your choice. It's the difference between satisficing and maximizing. And the problem is, even if you're looking for satisficing, you start, that bar begins to raise. Yeah, exactly. And how do you know that you're not kidding yourself into selling that short? We've seen, I was at 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 eyes of the older people turn onto the single people in the fucking crowd. And they're like, blocked on like this, and they're coming over. Anybody that's not married, the next...
Christopher, when are we going to see, you know, when are we going to be here? You know, you can't, you must not. Yeah, exactly. And, uh, it's vicious. It's like a fucking heat seeking missile from all of the older people that are there. And. Zach's mum had had a lot to drink and was being super loud and came out with an absolute fucking slammer of an insight where she was, you know, so...
when do you think and so on and so forth. 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, That's all well and good. Make sure that you fall in love with the girl, not with the institution. And you see this with women because they have tighter timelines again.
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 older in the guy's direction you can play around with this all that you want but it's going to become increasingly difficult if you're talking like over 10 years
Like, okay, like how much you're going to have in common, very different life stages. You can get a particularly youthful older person or you can get a particularly mature younger person. But come on, like. It's going to be another challenge for you guys to get past. And yeah, make sure that you fall in love with the goal, 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 a super eligible bachelorette. I think that there's really deep bonding that occurs in going through hardship together. Like when, and this isn't me saying my way is better. I promise.
hopefully the end point of this whole podcast is like, Alex clearly has no idea. Um, but Lalo's 23, I was 26 and she saw me lose everything twice. And that was before we got married. And so. I felt very confident that she liked me for me. And I think that one of the, what people don't talk about is the.
the flip side of this, like playing it out, right? Let's play it out a couple of steps is let's say you do have the nice place. You have the big bank account. You have whatever income stream, all the societal Ws. you're not sure if she loves you or the institution of you. And 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 yeah um and so i uh without being 1950s nostalgic because we weren't there and it was probably not as good as people think it is now um find the person who allows you to be
the most version of you and i think that that really comes down to it and the most version of you um i think is the highest potential version of you the person who can lubricate the gap between who you are and who you want to be um you know i've said this before but
the person you marry marries two people the person you are and the person you want to become just make sure they love both of those people because they're going to be the one who's either going to prevent that from happening or it'd be the one who's a rocket pack for you like
What's really interesting is that there was like a super red pill podcast that reached out to Layla and wanted to interview her. And she turned down the request. But in the invite, it said, you and Alex seem to have like... the only like relationship where it's like modern relationship but it seems like it's working because they're super you know trad conserve whatever
And, you know, Layla responded, um, what, you know, we had a conversation basically about the invite. Um, she, she didn't do it, but, um, I think what a lot of people don't see publicly is that like Layla and I actually have an incredibly traditional relationship.
And in some ways, I just feel like Layla is the most extreme wife you could possibly find, which is that she just said, I will support my husband in every possible way to help him achieve what he wants. Including becoming his business partner. Yes. Yes. And that's what people don't get. Like Layla has done everything for me. And that's the part that people can't see. And like, sure, she'll get girl boss and like, whatever, you know, that world wants to, but like.
We have a very traditional relationship and Layla is also a very strong woman. And I think that for the very strong women that are out there, this will probably be chopped in a million pieces and put all over the internet. i think you just need an even stronger man and so unfortunately with like the pacification of society especially men um and the and the flip side of like the more girl boss etc is that it's making it harder
for those very confident, strong, achieving women to find men that they will let be men. And the real, real is that the guy that you will end up with... He will not accept you, quote, letting him be a man. He will be a man. And then you will fall into that world. You will fit within it. I know that that will probably rub some people the wrong way, but that is my worldview. And Layla shares this worldview. And this is, again, not as public on, because you can't do it in Instagram soundbites.
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, to help us win. I think the sooner that you can get an ally that you can absolutely trust, we think about competence and we think about incentives, right? A wife is ideally like recommendation to the younger guys, find a competent wife.
The incentives take care of themselves once you get married. And I will say that contrary to popular 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 the admin the sheer admin of dating in the modern world it's true yep um and and you go you go from 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, plus another three thirds of somebody else, provided you're aligned on where you want to go.
I would not be here without Layla, 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... who just wanted me to be me. And like, even in the times when I would
Like I was at, I was at a wedding and I was about to post something and Layla was with me and I was like, ah, this is a little bit edgy. I was like, I don't want to piss people off. And she just looked at me and she was like, never dilute yourself. And it's like somebody who wants you to be the most concentrated.
potent, unchackled, 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 has dealt with all of these things. And the... the perspective that i have on this is that like after the two years of all the the serotonin hyperdump or norepinephrine and dopamine that you get from the love drug um what you'll have left is you and them and if you
do not fit into their idea of what they wanted you to be 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 Mack's birthday last year in Miami. I haven't met George and I feel like 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 who his best friend is. He said he wasn't sure. It's a bit of a rare question after age 12. So the question was asked differently. who do you have the least amount of filter with when you're around them? Another good question is, who can you sit in silence with and not have to fill it?
Even if there isn't a single person that wins, these are the people who you should prioritize spending your time with. We all feel the compulsion to change ourselves to fit in. We adjust our behavior, words, nature, everything in an attempt to be liked, validated, and accepted.
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 the, your partner should be someone that helps you become more of you. not dilute. They should be salt. To bring out the flavor. Yeah, obviously analogies have limits. You want to salt wife. Yeah, analogies have limits, but like salt, more of you.
And so you brought up authentic. Authenticity, as I define it from a behavior perspective, is how you behave if you have no risk of punishment. And so what would you do if you could not get punished? and if you behave that way in front of them then it means that either they do not punish you or they have no desire to punish you either way it accomplishes the same thing which is that you behave as though they weren't there
How to get a top tier goal. Oh God. Did I say this? Is this mine? Yes. I'm sorry. It is. How to get a top tier goal. Number one, get in shape. Number two, get rich. Number three, Don't be a dick. Pretty good advice. So 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 uh it's it'll never be easier you'll never have more time i had one of my sales guys who i said dude i don't see you at the gym And he said, you know, I'm just really busy. And I just like looked at him and I was like, you will never have more time and less responsibility than you do now. So I kind of.
use the james clear thing i said hey if you can't make it work now except that you're never going to be in shape for the rest of your life it was like whoa i was like think about it rid yourself right yeah i was like you're just never gonna be in shape he's like I mean, 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 in 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. Like don't have it be a negative at the very least. Right. I've got this limitation and that limitation and another limitation. So, okay.
are you just adding another yeah i think i think peterson said something like uh they say they're depressed he's like well you're living in your mom's basin 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, doesn't have to be rich, but you've achieved whatever you want to achieve. If you're still depressed,
Then we can talk about it. But until then, you haven't even given yourself a shot. I can't find girls. Well, are you any of these basic things? No. Well, then do that first. The rich thing is more, I mean, obviously for me. I think, uh, professor G Galloway, um, said this, it's, it's more about the signal that you have the ability to gain resources more than having them. And so like, if you think about trust fund kid, now there is the.
element of having money, which does for sure, there are girls who just want the money. But if you compare that to the young hungry guy, I don't know if they went in a head to head, right? It's the same reason that the starving artist sleeping on his friend's couch, but who's got lots of upside potential is attractive. It's like, but he fucking has one guitar and a pair of boots to his name. Like, how is that? Well, yeah, but- So did Dylan.
Look at the predictors that I'm seeing here. Look at the fucking early onset alarm warnings of something potentially great in this future. Yeah. 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's just don't be a jerk. Like, I'm not saying you have to be a, like, you know, the world's sweetest, whatever, but just don't be a dick. If you do those three things, like you'll be able to get whatever, whatever girls you want. What does don't be a dick consist of? Great question. So it would probably be the behaviors that, um, so that is a bucketed term for many behaviors underneath of it.
that basically would just decrease the likelihood that a girl would want to continue to fraternize with you. Uh, but like, you know, specific, it's like, and I think that'll also depend on the girl to be real. Some girls might prefer this. So whatever your target girl is, she probably has a bucket of behaviors. Now that's different than do what she wants. Very different. It's, is there something that is non-negative to me that is beneficial to her? Do as many of those things as you can.
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. And if you're not prepared to give that, it's like...
rid yourself of the desire or you're going to have to change your preferences or you're going to have to change your behavior one of the two worth bringing up early if you are on this like you know i i would like to find somebody trained this is something that worked exceptionally well um which is
I, and I think our first or second date, I just said upfront all the non-negotiables that I had, um, which to be fair, this isn't the like red flags, whatever thing. It's just like, I work a lot. I will not sacrifice that. If that is a problem, then this will not work. And that is okay. I just want to be up for that. These are, 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.
like just stating those things and i would say like because people have this like they want to put on a show right they peacock they have to do the mating dance and i have to you know present myself in a way that's different than i currently am But I would say over time, the less you can make the discrepancy between how you're acting or performing and who you are at baseline for that person, the better it's going to be long term because they're going to find out eventually.
they might as well find out up front and then you can just say triage. I've said this a bunch of times, but I went through a breakup at the start of last year. three and a half year relationship and I was like okay I'm back in the dating world very different world very different person very different environment and 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 substack posts and stuff just to see, huh, are we going to have it at some point when we next catch up? Are we going to have a discussion about this? Because this is the sort of thing that's interesting to me. And I don't see this going.
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 and learning about human nature. And I think it's important to me to be able to talk about this with my person. This is really good. So what you just said reminded me of 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 when you're 20 aren't being the things that you're passionate when you're 40. And to... to link that to something that jeff bezos talks about which is when they asked um hey you know what do you think the future of amazon is going to look like he said people always want to know
what is going to change. He said, I think it's far more valuable to think what is not going to change. And I think that if you're trying to find a mate, you really want to find the fewest common denominators. Like what things will not change about me over a long period of time. If you happen to be in a stint that you're really into fencing or whatever, that may change. And I think that's where like in some ways.
it lowers the bar for the quote perfect match because trying to find the perfect match today versus that same match 50 years from now virtually impossible. And so if we accept that many of the things that are surface level today are going to disappear on a longer time horizon, then there's only going to be the 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...
And it's probably just a handful of big rocks rather than hundreds of pebbles. And so when girls have the, and guys too, 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. People who obsess about work-life balance are typically mediocre at both. Obsessed people apply their obsession to everything and just call it life.
I stand by my statement. I mean, have you met anybody who's like, maybe it's genetic. You know, the finding the dent in the can and the like, I mean, the first thing that Leland and I did when we got married is that we went through a divorce course.
Because we were like, well, shoot, inversion, right? We're like, well, let's just find out all the reasons that people get divorced and let's handle all of those things now. And so we did that. It's the first thing. What 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 liked 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. And 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, is that we're going to have, you know, novel experiences that then become routine. So, you know, when we work together, there was no me coming home at the end of a long day, but we. I mean, we work in the same company now, but we don't like work together during the day. And so very often she's at home and I get back and she learned because I, to just give me.
Like I usually just want to be left alone for a minute to basically let the dust settle in my head so that I can be fully present for her. I could see somebody who didn't know that, assuming that if I don't want to talk to you when you get back, you don't love me.
There's a problem. And so it's really just dissecting these issues and saying, instead of saying like, you hate me or extrapolating this to our relationship forever and always, just as a preference in behavior. And obviously Layla subscribes to 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 and she says sure
And that's it. Like recently, so this actually, this is super, super recent. We went out and had dinner and she said, thank you for dinner. Cause I paid, you know, I paid women to restaurant and I was like, like really hit me. And I was like, I haven't had someone like no one's basically no one thanks me for buying shit because I'm the assumed default guy who pays for shit. But on top of that, Layla and I work together.
we make this money together. So it's almost weird that she would thank me for paying for dinner. So it's not like impolite or weird that you haven't done it. It's our money. Right. But I was like, that meant. a lot to me. It means a lot to me too. Yeah. And so what she, what she's realized is when she, if she says, I'm proud of you, you're, you know, you're awesome. That was great. Whatever. That means a little bit. Um, but I've, 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 the, you know, I'm thinking about that stuff. Right. But like, it means something, but it doesn't mean the most. But when she said, thank you, I was like, please do this more. Like.
And so this is this week. So this is like very fresh top of mind for me. Like I came home yesterday after the two mega days that I was talking about at the beginning of this. And she said, thank you for working so hard.
And I was like, it's, and it was just a tiny shift in terms of verbiage instead of saying like, I'm so proud of you. And she said, thank you for, it allowed me to feel like I was actually serving us by doing what we do. And it basically gave a huge reinforcer on top of my already large existing.
forces for working. Um, but it's like, I'm gonna, I'm like a, I'm like an appreciation camel. Like I don't need a lot and it can carry me for a long time. Um, but she was like, and she said the thing that she said at the very beginning of our relationship, she said, I'm coachable. And I told you that your 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, hyper criticism responder, whatever, you know, whatever it is, but she will immediately change behavior permanently.
And it's been one of those, 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 the next day she was like, okay, what does warm look like? And I was like, well, if you do these things, she was like, okay, I'll do that. It's doing something that makes your mate happy without incurring a cost on you. Bingo.
If it makes no difference. Now, if it does incur a cost, have the conversation. Okay, well, this is a trade-off here. And there was a period of time, she made all of my meals for a very long period of time. And then in 2019, she came to me and she was stressed out of her mind. She's like... i can run this company or i can make you no seriously she was just like and she just said
tell me which one you'd prefer and she was like terrified to have this conversation with me because she was afraid that i would i say you have to be this and this and i was like oh no it's a way rarer skill to do what you can do in the business i was like we can just find someone to cook the food and she was like
oh i was like it's great i was like but this is like this means way more to me and so just having that like hey i'll do it just i also just like if you had an employee not to say that they're the same thing but like
You can't just say, keep doing more and more things. At some point, there's a priority that has to happen. I have to do this instead of that. And so what things are you willing to trade? And then us being able to openly talk about behavior the way that we do has made this way less emotionally charged.
sense of self that it's attached to. It's interesting with that. I wonder, I think a lot of people will feel like it's some sort of denial of who they truly are when this happens. I remember when I first started working with a speech coach, 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. Oh, addiction. Addiction. Addiction coach.
A bunch of my friends said, well, are you worried about losing the way that you speak? You've got a way that you speak, and it's going to change who you are. And I didn't really understand until probably only this year about why. they were uncertain or had a bit of 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. It's your sense of self, right? It's a very sort of transparent hole down to that. And the analogy that I used was, well... Let's say that I started learning to play the saxophone. And I said, I'm going to get a teacher to teach me how to play the saxophone. And your response to me was, well, what about your natural saxophone playing ability? I'm like, I'm trying to...
be a better boxer and I get a boxing trainer. They go, yeah, but what about the way that you naturally throw jabs? Like, okay, if we assume that there are better and worse ways to do it, then yes, there might be some unique quirks. that you have which if they were eroded away would lose a specific competitive advantage with this but the things that we attribute as very closely attached to
our sense of self, and the things that we don't, I think are really interesting. And the way that we speak would be one of those. But if somebody starts to expand that to everything that they do, well, I mean... This relationship's not going to work if you don't like the way that I open doors. My door opening, that's a unique part of me. You're denying the person that I am by doing this. This is really important to me. My door opening ability is really important to me.
And I wonder what the size of territory that somebody is or is not prepared to adjust. I wonder what that is, you know? I have. Yeah, no, I have. So I think you wrote. a longer blog piece i want to say a month or two ago about how um do people love me for the things that I do or do they love me for the person that I am? And then the 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 world gets really upset. But when I, if you say, if I said, who is John, the first thing that you would do. to describe who John is, is talk about what John does. And so I think that the whole being is XYZ thing just confuses a lot of people. And so our identity in... you know alex's worldview is just the amalgamation or the or the aggregation of all the behaviors that we do just put together it's all the stuff we do we are like he is a carpenter
chris has a podcast he does podcasting like that's it's part of quote who you are but like it's just what you do and so to to hold a specific action that you have on a pedestal you make it mean something But fundamentally, it's just a behavior. And so I think that if we see ourselves as just this list of a thousand behaviors, then we get to ask the question, does me changing this behavior and going through the effort of doing that...
mean more to me than this relationship? And if the answer is no, well, then 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.
No big deal. Especially given that the thing that you're doing now in terms of a behavior might mean a little to you, but not that much. And your pleasure in doing something that makes your partner really, really happy could be fucking infinite. This is related to one of yours that I didn't do earlier on. Lazy people don't know how to start. Weak people don't know how to finish. Successful people don't know how to stop. People demand success, but refuse to work weekends.
People want opportunity but won't talk to strangers. People claim ambition but sleep in every day. We are the result of our actions, not our aspirations. I think once you've actually learned how to try, really try one thing for an extended period of time, every single day.
And taking all of your discretionary effort and your money and your time and your resources and put it towards just doing that thing. Number one, you realize how few things you can really do well because of the amount of time that it takes. The second thing is you realize how easy it is to beat everyone else because of how few of them actually do that. And that...
learning how to try becomes a generalizable skill across domains. So when you do learn how to play the saxophone, and if you want to pick up tennis, You think about how many sessions you did to fix your fingers and play a more advanced and a more advanced thing over and over again. And then when you realize that the domains are similar in terms of skill. achievement uh you're like
oh, this is the same thing. And then when you go like, oh, I need to make content now. It's like, oh, it's the same as hitting 500 forehands and 500 backhands. And I make 500 tweets and 400 posts. And if I do it for an extended period of time and I take the feedback. and I don't stop, I'll probably beat most people. You also get to see 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, you're playing some fucking RPG.
And the first few levels, it's just noob gains all the way. You're fucking leveling up every time you turn it on. And then people are grinding and grinding and grinding to get from level 94 to 95 to 96. And you go, well, all of the gains accrue 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 their highest and the progress per unit of time put in is at its lowest. And the inverse happens when we start something. And this is why when people get to the top of the thing. Plus motivation, which is maybe just like a tiredness with the pursuit of a thing and a desire for novelty generally, which is maybe a little bit of a different.
But 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. Yeah, but you're starting again. at this thing in the beginning. Maybe it can augment in a different way. 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, so I'm going to learn about playing tennis?
And some things augment and enrich and other things detract and take away. I think the better you get at one thing. at least for me the less it's made me want to do other things because i know what's going to take to do it to this same level and then i think well if let's say i'm a nine out of ten 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 to myself, if I took all of that and put it right back in the nine out of 10 that I'm at saxophone.
Would I go from being top 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 and a nine out of 10 tennis player versus a 10 out of 10 sax player? And which life would I prefer? And I have tended to be a max.
animizer in my whole life. And so like, I'm probably pretty, my die 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 um which is i was i've been really strongly considering devoting myself to um taking meditation as a practice seriously
And the reason for that is because the literature on basically the standard deviation improvement in subjective well-being, basically how happy people are of Buddhist monks who have... meditated for like 40,000 plus hours is like three to four standard deviations above the norm, like monstrous. So to put context here, one standard deviation would take you from like 50% to like 84%.
in terms of 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 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, 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 going to get probably one, maybe one and a half, depending on who you are, whatever.
And so I, being a maximize, 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 at right now. I'm 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.
seeing these guys literally just take their median and just move it all the way up. They get the first arrow that hits them and they just completely avoid all the other second arrows and then it vanishes in the moment. And the description of what...
three to four standard deviations ahead of subjective well-being is a constant state of bliss. Have you looked at Gary Weber's stuff? He's one of the guys, he's somebody who has... become awakened okay enlightened like permanent abiding non-dual awareness oh super cool type thing and uh that's and he's that way his description i mean you know it's uh
stress testable in many, I guess put me in an fMRI, but he knows 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, which is to get you to sit in silence for a long time.
with your eyes closed yeah the incentives don't seem to really be there to to get you to do that and the thing that's been like enticing me about it is and i don't know if you're the same way but like when i see how bad i am at something on my first few tries i'm like oh my god my newbie gains are going to be through the through the roof yeah because i'm a meditation hyper responder oh my god well me me trying to meditate is like is i'm so bad at it
so bad at it that I'm like, I'm going to unlock so much because I'm so bad. And I also like it because 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 of course because like i spent my life changing my external conditions i i literally live in a fortress of my own making we're we're in
one of two huge rooms that are my gym. 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... is is fist fucking you yeah he's just murdering yeah 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 certain periods of your life.
And after a while, you ask yourself, is this still the game that I need to keep playing? I'm 10 out of 10 in this thing. And 11 doesn't exist, but tiny increments of 10s do. If this isn't the answer, does it make sense to continue trying to fill an internal void with external goals? And I think it's pretty cool. to hear you look at a different, even just consider 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, I have to still have my logic brain for why it'd be worth it. Um, but no, it's, it's, um, the, I think the reason I'm so I'm, I'm, I'm actually considering it. is it takes so much violent level of work it's true though the only way that anybody could
Describe meditation as violent. The only way that you could convince yourself to do it is to call meditation violent. But look, something, and this is me stealing you and then repurposing it in a different way.
uh we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it like we sacrifice happiness in order to become successful so that when we're sufficiently successful we can finally be happy and then if you were to make some sort of psychological equation and just strike off success from both sides, you kind of get left with the happiness piece.
We're not closed systems. Humans need a sense of validation. They want to be recognized by the world. We have goals that we want to do. And it is important to realize. It's an unteachable lesson. It's important to realize that the thing you thought was going to fill the void wasn't the thing, but you can't realize it wasn't the thing that was going to fill the void until you've got it. And then once you have, you go, okay, sick. Take that one off.
now allow me to move on to the more subtle insight that I could have never achieved had I have not gone there. So when I was 19, 20-ish, kind of when you have a lot of these existential crises, it's very common time between 18 and 22 when people develop their worldview or at least solidify some version of it. I strongly debated leaving everything and... you know, pursuing the meditation monk path because I saw, I saw the same research that I'm looking at now, 16 years later. Right.
And what was interesting was that that was actually during the process where I was like, fuck happiness. 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 try to have no judgment here, but it's a waste because I think there's also a duty that we have to help other people. Now that's a should. I want to be clear. So you don't, you know, you 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. Um, and so I, my desire to be useful has been greater than my desire to be happy.
But if there is a world that at this point I can be both, I'm okay with it. Money doesn't buy happiness past $70,000 per year because spending money effectively is a skill and most people never acquire it. As someone who earns more than $70,000 a year, what have you learned about the skill of spending money effectively? So it's so funny because people assume that there are not levels to skills. And I remember seeing, you know.
my first billionaire start spending money. 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... the 3D learning that you described 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, that create memories, that will pay memory dividends for a long period of time. And the easiest ones to basically pay down are time. And so it costs roughly $1,500 a month to get about 90 hours a month back. If you add up driving, gas. preparation cooking cleaning of food cleaning of your dwelling cleaning and prep of your clothing if you put all of those things together
what the average American spends per week. It's about 20-ish, 25 hours a week that they spend doing all of those things for themselves. And so 90-ish hours per month. The cumulative cost of fixing all that stuff is about $1,500 a month. That'd be a maid slash housekeeper person who maybe could also cook or maybe a cook who's separate. Uber daily. Yeah. At the low end, later you can have a personal driver, but yeah, totally. Just those two? Those are the only two? Well, then you have food prep.
We could do a one-stop shop housekeeper. Probably cost a little more there, but yeah. Yeah, but it would fold two rolls into one. Yes. And so thinking about that, and we have our $70,000 per year cap, 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 100 hours a week. Well, if you get the 100 hours back, let's just say it's, 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. To line a hammock, then it's worth the trade or go wakeboarding. And so I think that-
Most people who start making more money, they just stop at nice house, nice car, maybe nice clothes and places to eat, occasional travel that they spend once or twice a year. That's it. That's all they do. But there's so many ways to improve your existing environment.
I get the sense that it's actually the middle level. It's the people who maybe earn 100 grand a year in USD, maybe sort of 70 grand. They're the ones who are likely to probably need this information the most. Because if you're up to the... half a million, a million a year or something like that. It's like you've probably realized that this is something that you can spend money on. People don't.
I talk to entrepreneurs all the time. It's one of the first things I do when I look into a company. I say, do you have a housekeeper? And we go through all this stuff. highest ROI money I can spend as an investor is getting 100 hours a month back for the entrepreneur for 50 grand. My God. Well, I mean, 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, 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. But yeah, it's a... That overcoming that sense of I can do this for free. Yeah. Therefore, I shouldn't pay someone to do it. Guilt of spending. This sense of.
opulence and wastefulness entitlement totally um overcoming that has been a real a real challenge for me and it's good that i've been around people like bill yourself and uh it's almost like It's a very specific type of ambition. And it's not ambition in the material sense. It's ambition in the life quality sense. Freedom. Yeah. Actionality. 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? updated your beliefs on the most. Instead 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 and not extrapolating moments to days, weeks, months, years. this one good thing can I spread that wide and this one bad thing can I shrink it into the absolute smallest possible box and making sure that I don't suffer the second arrow I'd say like if I had the two
Those are probably the two biggest things that I would say I have been actively working on for how I see reality. Well, I look forward to seeing what you've learned next time. i appreciate you man thank you for having me
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