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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back, man. Another speed running, podcasting booty call.
- [00:05]
B
That's the hope.
- [00:07]
A
Do more hard things every day is a great mantra, but it should be less about ice baths and more about making that decision you've been putting off for three months.
- [00:18]
B
Yeah, I think that there's been a big misconception around hard stuff, which is just that, like, running a marathon necessarily means that you can have a hard conversation with your wife by saying, I do hard things, but those hard things don't necessarily generalize. And so I think domain specificity is much more narrow unless you decide to generalize to an identity label of I am the type of person who can do hard things because I ran this marathon or because I do these ice baths, and then as a result, I can then generalize that label to other behaviors. But if you can make that label and identify with it, then you don't need to run the marathon in order to do the hard thing. You just need the label.
- [00:57]
A
What are the hard things that people should be focusing on more? What are the step change, function, hard thing, capacity, skills that people should focus on more?
- [01:09]
B
I think it's being cognizant of. What outside forces are influencing your behavior in a way that is aversive or against your goals. And so if you're like, I want to start a business, but I am afraid of what other people will say, then it means that we are allowing those other people to control your behavior. And I think when you say it in really plain terms like that, you're like, wow, I didn't know I was giving them that much power for my life. It's like, I am not doing this because of them, which means they control me. And to me, the hard thing is in some ways just not allowing that control to persist or to keep going.
- [01:48]
A
It is interesting how many people can do hard things physically but can't do hard things decisively.
- [01:54]
B
So I have our security team and whatnot. And this is a discussion that I've had with probably each of them at different times because I've seen combat and death and all that kind of stuff. And what's funny is that the amount of risk that they are willing to put their physical bodies in, literally their lives at stake, but then how that doesn't necessarily translate to being able to have, call it vulnerable conversation with a wife, spouse, lover, et cetera. It's just interesting. And this is again, back to these things. Don't generalize. They look good, but they do not mean the same thing.
- [02:27]
A
It's weird that we publicly admire the obvious hard thing, even if that isn't the one that actually makes the biggest difference to people's life direction, it's not predictive of being a good friend. It's not predictive of being the best partner. It's not predictive of being a successful business owner. But because it's more obvious, because it's more publicly laudable, you can flex it online and you can tell people, I ran a marathon, as opposed to when my partner asked me a difficult question, I didn't shy away from it. I told them the truth.
- [03:00]
B
And to be clear, I think that those things are laudable in and of themselves. Like, you go fight a war, you go do like you go run a marathon. I think all of those things are praiseworthy. It's just the generalizable component of that hard being, oh, I can do all hard things is really the misconception. But I do think that if, for whatever reason, you tell yourself a narrative that because you did this hard thing, you can do all hard things, then that's amazing. And by all means, if someone's like, I started doing jiu jitsu, and it completely changed my life, it's like, that's awesome. But it probably isn't because you learned how to do guard better. It's probably because what learning to do guard meant for you changed these other series of behaviors down the line.
- [03:37]
A
How correlative do you think it is? People that do hard things physically versus people who develop the capacity to do hard things that matter.
- [03:46]
B
Can you say that again?
- [03:48]
A
Let's say that doing hard things electively versus doing hard things decisively. The big difference between the two, to me, seems to be decisions that require emotion and decisions that require effort. That seems to be one of the big delineations here.
- [04:03]
B
So it's like, call it hard conversation versus hard physical tasks.
- [04:06]
A
Yeah. And how many people who develop the skill to do hard physical tasks, Tasks as a transformation, how many of those do you think carry over into being able to do the hard thing emotionally?
- [04:15]
B
Probably the same in the opposite direction. The guys who are like, can have, quote, hard conversations, the attorney who can get through all these complex ideas and have whatever then sucks on at jiu jitsu or sucks at in the weight room or doesn't try hard. I think. I just think that skills are more specific unless you generalize them.
- [04:33]
A
How do you generalize?
- [04:35]
B
I think it's creating labels and identity with personality. And so if we define personality by the aggregate of how you behave in all conditions, so all these conditions, how you act is Your personality, the label we ascribe to that personality would then be the identity. And so if we decide to change that label, then that label, this is getting a little technical, but basically becomes a global reinforcer for your behavior. Like, I am this, I am honest. And so we make this label and then honest has a lot of sub behaviors underneath of it that we then act because we believe that honest is good. And so we want to act in accordance with this global reinforcer for ourselves. And so when we enter a new situation, we think, okay, what is in alignment? What behavior is most aligned with this label? And then we do that. And then when we don't do, when we don't act that way, then we feel guilty because we broke our own rules of behavior.
- [05:29]
A
So the big lesson here is just because you're doing hard things in one domain does not mean that it crosses over into all domains unless you purposefully try to make your identity wrapped up
- [05:38]
B
around it a thousand percent. I'll say. I remember when I went to college, I wanted to pledge a fraternity, and it was in the sec and they're known for hazing and whatnot. And so I called my dad and I was like, hey, this might be bad. I might have to go through some stuff that's hard, I don't know. And you know, my dad's given me a lot of lasting gifts, but one of them, he said, think about every hard thing that you've gone through up until this point. He's like, there is nothing that they can do to you that is worse than that. And that actually was incredibly empowering. And I remember when there were more hardships that were going on, I just immediately went to the worst things that I had gone through and I was like, oh my God, this is nothing. So I was able to like go through this relatively hard thing where there were people who were like cracking and crying and all this stuff. Like I want to say grown men, but I would say adult boys next to me. And I was able to stand tall because it was just like, there's nothing that these other 21 year old guys can do to me that I have not suffered through.
- [06:37]
A
It's a good justification for doing hard things that Rogan's got this line, the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. And if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is somebody misspelling your name on a Starbucks cup, that's a big deal. But if the worst thing that's ever happened to you is a thousand times worse than that. I think one problem we have is recency bias, that if you haven't been through a tough time right now, your memory of being able to deal with hard things, you kind of get velvet prison syndrome. And sometimes you can forget. I guess chicks would say, I'm still that bitch. I've still got that capacity. Sometimes we forget.
- [07:16]
B
Yeah. I think one of the strongest frames that has gotten me through those harder times is that this is the story I will one day tell. And so it just like, almost the more bad things that happen, it's like the more epic the story becomes. And so, I mean. And the main beneficiary of the stories that we tell is ourselves, because we're the giver and the receiver of most of the stories. By percentage of stories told, we are the biggest receiver of the stories. And so I think that's actually been, I think, just such a powerful frame for, like, of course this terrible thing will happen. And, like, doesn't that make the story so much better?
- [07:45]
A
Yeah. What's cool is, I think when you say we're talking in narrative, story personification, arc, hero's journey, it all sounds kind of wishful in a way. Mythological, irrational, symbolic. But that's the way that humans brains work. We work in story. And even if it's not strictly the way that the neuroscience behind how the medial prefrontal lateral cortex works in order to make us a tougher person, if you are the kind of person that tells yourself the story, that you're the kind of person that can get through this, that is functionally exactly what you're chasing. Like, what you're after is the story. And by putting that on the front end and going, okay, I'm just going to keep on building stories that I'm going to refer back to in future, I think you're actually being more direct than if you were trying to take a more rational view of exactly how behavior is put together. Like, the story is the rational view of how your behavior and your identity are put together.
- [08:53]
B
There's a lot there, I think, like, with the neuroscience and the brain labeling and all that stuff, I have no idea. So that's. That's above my pay grade. But yeah, I just think about all of our. All of our behavior is just in aggregate. We do what we've been rewarded for doing. And it doesn't mean we get a cookie. It could also mean a bad thing goes away. There's a lot of different types of reward. And so if we remember a story so like, let's say you have that story of you went through this hard thing and then you survived. Then it basically serves as a reminder of the reinforcer of the behaviors you did to get through it. And so it's almost like with a kid who's smaller, if you're like, hey, remember last time you did this, you got ice cream. If you remind them of that reward, then they're more likely to repeat the behavior. And so I think we basically use that narrative as a reminder to, in the short term, increase the relative value of a reinforcer. And so if we think about, like, what is motivation in general, that's functionally what you're doing if you motivate someone. Like, if you sell someone something for the short term, you increase the relative value of a specific reinforcer. You didn't wake up wanting to buy cologne, but you see an ad, and for the short period of time that the ad goes on, it increases the relative value of smelling good. And so as a result, it changes your behavior and then you buy. And so I think stories function in that same way where we use them to motivate ourselves in the short term to do the desired behavior. That might be less comfortable in the short term, but we're reminded about the larger reinforcing event that we had in the past.
- [10:21]
A
How many people do you think are doing hard things publicly in order to not need to face the lack of capacity they have to do hard things privately?
- [10:31]
B
I don't know them, so I don't know. To be honest with you. That's my honest answer. I don't know. I think some people really do hard things and it's what they capture online is a fraction of what they really do. And I think there are people who 100% of the hard things they do are online, and they're not even that hard. Yeah, and they're not even that hard because they've got a squad of people behind them. Like, I always, I think there was a meme around this for a moment that was like, but you had a camera there. It's like the girl collapses because of crazy news or something like that. It's like, but you had a camera there. And so there's just this element of mistrust, performative nature.
- [11:09]
A
The three step process of how to win. Number one, realize no one is coming to save you. Number two, take responsibility for your current position. Number three, be willing to sacrifice who you are for who you want to be.
- [11:27]
B
I think that those three is really all about power and the realization so probably in sequence. Probably the first one should come first, which is, you own everything. It's like, okay, if I own everything, then you could still hope that someone saves you, but it still relies on someone else to change your condition. And so it's like, okay, I own all these outcomes. I'm not going to rely on someone else to change my condition. But you're still there, which means you have to take the third step, which is that I have to sacrifice. I have to give up something in order to get something else. And I think where people actually stay stuck the longest in their careers, from an entrepreneurship perspective or just from a personal development perspective, is the trades that we are unwilling to make is basically the desire to have everything at the same time. And the easiest analogy I have is it is totally reasonable to want to have a mountain view and to be on the beach and be walking distance from a Whole Foods, but you probably will not find a place that has all three of those because they are all at apparent contradictions or apparent odds. So what happens is we just stay in this paralysis of indecision because we feel like all paths are settling. And I think there's this movement or narrative around, like, never settle and things like that. But people mistake, never settle for never make trades. And so we have this obsession with optionality or optionality maxing. But options are only valuable when taken. And so when we never take the option, which means we don't cash in the option that we have available, some options need to be taken, and when they are taken, other options disappear. Because just having maximum potential does not mean maximum reality.
- [13:14]
A
Because you need to commit.
- [13:15]
B
You have to commit, which is the elimination of alternatives. And so, like there, I mean, show me anything that was worth doing that did not require commitment, which is an elimination of alternatives, a trade off. And so in the beginning of our lives, when we're younger, we are praised for maximizing our potential, right? How can we have as many colleges accept us? How can we have all the best grades? How can we have all the paths in front of us? But I think many people know people who are really successful earlier on for maximizing potential but not realizing potential. And I think the gap between the maximization of potential and the realization of potential is the commitments that we're willing to make, which is the trades, the elimination of the alternatives. When we have to start cashing those options in and realizing that some of them are never going to come to fruition because we could only have one life. And some of those trades are permanent, you can only not have a kid until you have a kid and then at that point you have had a kid. Right. There's no going back. Right. Some decisions in life don't have refunds. And I think that is what I would say maybe in the earlier part of my career, especially single guys, because I think a lot of that's really prevalent in social media right now is just options maxing. But even in the attempt to options max, you still close off other options, which is that you will not have the benefits of let's say a committed
- [14:38]
A
marriage early on because you've kept your options up, right.
- [14:40]
B
And like you will not have the benefits of like a very large business if you try to pursue 5 or don't pursue any because you want to not make commitments. And so I think that commitment is actually a really strong signal for maturation and growing up.
- [14:55]
A
Lots of mistakes were made by standing still. Like people think that inaction isn't a decision, but it is totally.
- [15:02]
B
I mean your conditions change through inaction still, like doors close. There are moments where you have opportunities where you have to act or they will go away. And so I think it's like being able to seize those opportunities. And that means that you have to actively say no to something that you might want or might want a lot. And I think those are the traits that we. I think being willing to make those trade offs clearly and trade them for the things that you want more is how people can progress through life and get more of what they want.
- [15:32]
A
The pain of having to accept trade offs holds a lot of people back
- [15:35]
B
100% and then they end up getting nothing. And I honestly think that is at the crux of why so many people are not realizing any potential at all is because they are unwilling to make any trade and then make the biggest trade of all.
- [15:48]
A
How do you think about overcoming that decision paralysis? Lots of good options in front of you. Spent a lot of time trying to maximize surface area of available options. And it's insane to say, but it's functionally true for humans that more options make you more miserable, not happier.
- [16:08]
B
Super true. And also we probably know someone. I mean I can think of people off the top of my head that didn't have many options, but the option that they had was very clear. Like this guy is a super nerd and just loves coding. And it was very clear straight on. And so there was a lot of things that weren't available to him physically. Probably wasn't going to be the sports star, maybe even in super great shape. But it was Almost like that path was predetermined. But then when you fast forward, it's not like they're less successful. It's that because they just already knew what they were going to do, they got to start pulling the future forward down the one path and start walking. And so there's again, this. This, like, fetishes, fetishization of having options and seeing that as a proxy for status, when the reality is that they're all blank checks. You haven't cashed any of them in. And so I think the original question ladders to, like, people get stuck because they don't know what they want. And I define what you want by what you're willing to sacrifice to get something.
- [17:06]
A
Take responsibility for your current position. What's that mean?
- [17:11]
B
It's identifying yourself as source. And to be clear, it doesn't mean that, like, your position in reality is 100% because of you, but from a. So this is a validity. This is a invalid but useful, more useful way of going through life, which is that it absolutely might not be your fault, but it is still your problem. Since you are the only one who you can influence directly, then you are the one who is source. Because you could still be correct in saying that because I insert grievance, insert trauma, insert genetic predisposition, insert zip code I was born in, or language or poverty level or whatever it is, all of those things could be true. And yet you still have to take action as the only source that can change it.
- [17:55]
A
Mm. No one's coming to save you.
- [17:56]
B
Yeah. Which goes back to the first one.
- [17:58]
A
The interesting thing about no one is coming to save you also means no one is coming to stop you.
- [18:05]
B
I think some people might. I think, actually, as soon as you start, I think the. The lobster or crab analogy in the bucket is. Is so true. I actually think that the. The hardest. I mean, I. I think. I mean, for me, again, like, the hardest part of entrepreneurship was the first set of friends that you have to relinquish, because once you do it the first time, you realize that you will still survive, you'll still make it through, you'll find new friends. But, like, in the first time, it's sacrificing everything you've known and loved for something that you've never experienced and hope will happen and have no idea if it actually will. So the cost is known, the payoff isn't. And that is why I think it is the riskiest and why so many people struggle to make the job. Yeah.
- [18:44]
A
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- [20:05]
B
I was asked, if you could transfer only one trade to your son, what would it be? And I really thought a lot about it and I was like, all the traits, what would I trade, what I would have transferred. And I think it's courage. Because if you don't have courage, nothing else matters. Like you can't take any action, you can't do anything worth doing, you can't stand for anything because you have no courage. And so I think that's why it's so much more preferable to be a failure than a coward. And I think that I would hope that I could transfer just that lesson and try and reinforce as many times as I can in his upbringing that you have to take jumps and you have to lose and you have to be willing to lose and then realize that losing doesn't actually make you a loser, because losing is the first signal on the path to winning, but not playing is the actual signal for a forever loss.
- [21:10]
A
What is courage to you?
- [21:18]
B
Really good question. I needed to find it better. Being willing to take action where there's a large short term cost with an uncertain delayed benefit. So if you want to start a business and you think that you're going to get made fun of or snide remarks or like, oh, yeah, you're doing your podcast thing again. Oh yeah, don't miss out, right? You know, don't miss Friday night because your big podcast, you know, you're going to suffer that short term, that's a known cost. And then the payoff is delayed and uncertain. Like, not only will it come later, if it were guaranteed, if you knew you were going to make a million dollars doing a podcast, then you'd be like, whatever. Fuck. Takes significantly less courage. But I think it's the fact that it is unknown and delayed. So you basically have to be willing to get kicked in the nuts and multiple times and sometimes for extended durations before the hope that you will get something. But I think the only way to get through that kind of kicked in the nuts period for however long it's going to be, is realizing that you have two paths. One that is guaranteed, which is that the path you're currently on will not get you where you want to go. And the other path, it is not guaranteed to get you where you want to go, but it's the only one where you have a shot where you do.
- [22:55]
A
And that's where your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you're able to tolerate and how long you can tolerate it for.
- [23:02]
B
And I think that also goes to the bigger the games we play, right? Like, the longer the game you play, the bigger the game you play. And so if you want to create rockets that go to the moon, you have to be able to deal with uncertainty for just an absolutely absurd amount of time compared to most humans on any endeavor.
- [23:17]
A
There's a line at the end, pain of feedback. I'm interested in that.
- [23:24]
B
I mean, rejection hurts, failing hurts. And I think. When you give it your all and then the market, society of the universe, whatever determines that you are still not enough, that is very painful. I think that in time you learn that feedback is fuel rather than failure. And once that new association gets paired, I mean, you've had plenty of incredibly successful people on this podcast and I would say many of them have the same kind of, I would call it lesson. It's like, it's not failure, it's feedback or it's not failure. But it just means that fundamentally they have a different pairing for losing. And so everyone has to go through this because losing is good. And feeling bad about Losing is good because it forces you to change. And that change means that over time, as long as you're changing in the correct direction, you get better.
- [24:23]
A
Or else you would continue to do the strategy that caused you to lose last time and you would just run it back again.
- [24:27]
B
And this is why I have this. Like, I actually, I thought on the way over here, I was thinking about this and like, I think one of the big losses or failures of society right now is that we are trying to castrate the teeth from the pain of loss. We're trying to not allow kids, people, the feeling to feel bad. It's like we have determined that feeling bad is bad, but feeling bad is not bad. Feeling bad is a signal so that we need to change. Because if no one feels bad ever, then it means that everyone is doing what they want to do all the time. And that is not how a functioning society works. Sometimes people do stupid shit and need to know and feel bad for it.
- [25:11]
A
Eventually reality is going to come into contact with your decisions.
- [25:14]
B
Yes.
- [25:14]
A
And the more that that's put off, the less likely you are to come up with a way to avoid that reality coming into reality.
- [25:20]
B
And so. So the way that you know right now what's going. And this is probably the more frightening part about like, some of the media that's out there is like trying to just redefine reality and create a fantasy where you losing and you feeling bad isn't true. But it doesn't change reality. It just changes someone's perception of it for the short term. And then they have to pay reality back with interest in time. And the check always comes due. It's just like the interest is much bigger. And so in light of my son, my child that I have in the future, I want him to experience the pain of loss so that he can learn. Because how else can you learn? You have to. Otherwise everything's quote going by feel and then also somehow thinking that feeling bad is bad and also that feeling good is good. And there's tons of things that you can probably do that feel good that are not good. And there's tons of things that you can do that feel bad that are not bad.
- [26:17]
A
Well, what a gift to give somebody to say you can feel bad and not feel bad about it.
- [26:25]
B
Yeah. And that's okay. Like, you lost. What will we learn? What will we do next time? Great. Do it again next time.
- [26:33]
A
That feels like resilience. Yeah. As opposed to any time that you feel this emotion, which is negative, that is worthy of rushing in and panic and control and distance. That. That's almost like a formula for fragility.
- [26:48]
B
So laddered onto this. I know we haven't talked in a while, so this is. This is fun. Is the idea that we need like, that because you. Because you feel bad, it means that the path that you're on, like, you need to change something. And so it's equal, opposite, which is like, okay, if we know that we're on the path of getting kicked in the nuts right now, and I know I'm on my 17th or 100th podcast, and I'm still not, like, a millionaire yet. I have not achieved what I want yet. It does not mean that I have to change course.
- [27:21]
A
But earlier on, you said that bad feelings, feeling bad are important to update the way that you're approaching this situation. So how do you distinguish between the two?
- [27:31]
B
No, and that's. And I would say what you hit on is the crux of it, which is judgment, which is like. And this is one of the hardest ones is like, how do you help someone recognize patterns of when you need to? Basically, it's the eternal question of when do I push and when do I pivot? Right. When do I push through the hardship versus when do I adjust?
- [27:48]
A
Am I giving up on this set in the gym because I'm being a pussy, or am I giving up because I'm about to injure myself?
- [27:53]
B
Yeah, pivot.
- [27:55]
A
I like that.
- [27:56]
B
Yeah. And I've worked through this a lot because it's a pretty classic entrepreneurship issue of, like, do I have product market fit? Or, like, do I need to keep pushing? Like, you know, where am I just trying to push up a hill? Is that if one of the fundamental assumptions that you began your quest with has been proven untrue based on the feedback, then that is where pivoting makes sense. So if you said, like, I think that I'm going to create a doggy skateboard, because I think that a lot of dog owners will want to buy skateboards for their dog and be like. And I believe that the percentage like, and I would make a billion dollars doing this. That would mean that there's this size of the market. This percentage needs to be the take rate in order for me to get that market share. It's like, okay, if I talk to 100 dog owners and none of them want to buy my doggy skateboard, I would not say that is a push situation. I would say that is a pivot situation. Because our fundamental assumption that we started this quest with is false. And so we need to Take that feedback and then pivot. If as we're going through, they're saying, I maybe, but, like, I don't know what you have in your hands. What the hell is that? So it's like the assumption is not proven, but it's more of an execution issue. And so it's like, okay, I just need to get better. I need to push through. But I'm saying it is definitely one of the harder lines to. To know, like, where. When should I push? When should I pivot? What lesson do I learn from losing? Mm. Because losing. Losing teaches you shit. And we just need to make sure that we learn the right thing. Like, teaching will occur.
- [29:27]
A
Yes. Whether you take it away or not is up to you.
- [29:30]
B
It's the. It's the. I hired my first employee and he was a fuck ass, therefore all employees suck. Right. So, like, losing will teach you something. It's just want to make sure that we learn the right lesson.
- [29:41]
A
I feel like this is a justification for making early decisions as right as possible. 100% to try and avoid that PTSD of it's far easier to learn something than it is to unlearn something. Probably a hundred times easier to learn something than it is to unlearn something. If you've drilled a particular habit, particular bad habit. If you have come up with a mode of interacting with your employees or the world, because all of your employees, the first three employees, you get all of them fucked you over. And then finally you get to the fourth, you have to unlearn all of the compensatory mechanisms that you built on the first three. Now that you've got someone who's worthy of that and you're restricting their progress, you're slowing everything down. You're being hyper vigilant. It doesn't feel like a good place to work. Try and make your early decisions. Right.
- [30:24]
B
Yeah. Changing a behavior with a long history of reinforcement is harder than changing one with no history.
- [30:30]
A
Such a hardcore behaviorist.
- [30:32]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, it's the only thing that's made sense to me in the world. Like, it's. I mean, it's.
- [30:37]
A
Skinner pilled.
- [30:39]
B
I mean, it's just. I don't even. It's just my reality. So I'll say it differently. Many people do not get what they want. They look up at their lives and they're like, this is not what I want. And so if you don't have what you want, it means that the model that you view the world through is incorrect. Or you have the correct model and the incorrect Variables or insufficient variables, that's basically all it is. And so for me, the more I have looked purely at inputs and outputs, the more I've gotten my predictions correct. And so I have been super reinforced for using this style of thinking. And so I do it more. And so it's just. And like, I read some of my old stuff and I'm like, oh man, I could have said this in half as much words if I had now. Because it's understanding why, like, at the most basic level, it's just understanding why. I'll give you an example. And I think this is why the vast majority of the world walks around confused, which is I don't have what I want. That didn't go the way I expected. She took that worse than I thought. So you're constantly surprised by reality. And so in a simple sentence like Johnny stole because he's dishonest, right? Most people would nod their heads and be like, yeah, Johnny stole because he's dishonest. But we said, what does dishonest mean? Dishonest means it's a label, right, that we ascribe to somebody who does a series of different behaviors, one of which is stealing. And so if we were to restate that sentence with the broken down definition, it would then be Johnny stole because he's the type of person who steals, which is circular and makes no sense because the real reason that Johnny stole is because he's been reinforced for stealing in the past. Or he saw someone who got reinforced for stealing and then modeled their behavior. That is why Johnny stole. And so because of that basic misunderstanding, most people have these words that they use to explain the reality that they don't actually understand. And as a result, reality fools them more often than it should.
- [32:31]
A
He was rewarded for it or he was punished for doing the opposite of it.
- [32:34]
B
Exactly. And so that basic. That like, and that what I just explained is the difference between description and explanation, which is relatively heady and I think difficult sometimes to grasp, but is at the most basic level, like my worldview.
- [32:51]
A
This is what happened, this is why it happened.
- [32:53]
B
Why? Yeah. And so from that one kind of basic understanding, everything else can kind of pretty much get laddered up. And so said differently. If, if I wanted to tell a child, get good at basketball, right? I would not tell him, get better at basketball. Because a five year old would be like, I don't know how to do that. What does that mean? So I'd be like, okay, well let's break it down. We've got dribbling, passing, shooting, okay, do that a little bit closer. But they still probably don't know how to. If I say, go, get better at dribbling, passing, and shooting. Still can't do anything with that. Until eventually, be like, okay, passing. So I want you to take a step with your left foot towards the person, and I want you to extend your elbows and finish with your thumbs down. And if the ball goes towards them in the direction that they're running and they catch it, you've passed successfully. And then I would repeat that chain of events until eventually they would understand that that chain of behaviors equals passing. If they do it a lot and they hit the target many times, they would be good at passing. And we'd repeat that all the way down until they're good at passing, dribbling, shooting, et cetera. And then eventually we'd describe them as a good basketball player. But that basic unbundling and rebundling of terms is why I think the vast majority of people are wildly confused by what's going on around them. Is that someone says, why don't you love me? And he's like, what are you talking about? He's like, I pay the bills. I take out the trash. What do you want from me? And she says, like, you don't tell me I'm pretty. You don't hug me. Like, you don't listen to me. You don't ever ask me how my day's going. And it's because, for her, she defines love in these behaviors, and he defines love in these behaviors. And so then they fight forever rather than just saying, like, what does that mean? What does that mean? We had two employees that were arguing about something at acquisition. And one was like, hey, can you. I would be fine if you were just, like, kind and polite to me. And I was like, okay, what does that mean? And there was obviously a moment of hesitation there because it's like, okay, so you want the other person to guess what you think in your mind means good behavior, but you've never articulated it. And so you want them to guess and somehow get it right. And so finally, it just was like, can you ask more questions rather than making more statements? And the other person was like, yeah, sure. It's like, great. But that basic thing now, and they're fine now, and everything's great. And so. But, like, this is why I view the world and behavior. Because I have wanted things, but I didn't know how to get them, which happens in reality. And so as long as I live in reality, I prefer to define things. Through reality. And then reality tends to behave far more as I predicted it would.
- [35:35]
A
Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. They're discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer, the margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes, even if your habits stay strong. Mitopure from timeline contains the only clinically validated form of urethylene, a container used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones. In studies, this supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying Strong into your 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, There is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.commodernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.commodernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. On the I want you to do this, but I didn't tell you. It's that Neil Strauss line. Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentment. Why don't you do this thing that I didn't tell you to do?
- [37:04]
B
Yeah, probably not deliberately, because I think a lot of people do it.
- [37:07]
A
Not on purpose, of course, but it's unconscious, premeditated resentment. The investment that you are making will be a resentment in future that you aren't aware is about to come about. Another thing on the people's map of reality is inaccurate. I think one of the most obvious realizations that you can have when you hear somebody who complains a lot is that their framework of reality is incorrect.
- [37:33]
B
Oh, by a mile.
- [37:34]
A
A complaint is you saying, why is reality not delivering that to me, which I anticipate and reality doesn't care. Reality is just going to continue to deliver to you that which it is giving. Why is there all of this traffic on the way to work? There shouldn't be all of this traffic. I didn't anticipate all of this traffic. I Assumed there wouldn't be traffic. Reality disagreed with me. Reality is not wrong.
- [37:58]
B
It's undefeated.
- [37:59]
A
Reality is undefeated. Yeah, it's a million and o. A million TKOs.
- [38:06]
B
So this is really, I mean,
- [38:10]
A
I
- [38:10]
B
can talk about this as long as you want. You know this. So with what this becomes really interesting is how often this misconception of reality causes people to get fooled and keep. Keep the wrong people in their lives and keep sometimes the right people out of their lives. And so I call this malicious benefit or well intentioned harm. And so on one hand, if there are a number of people who make, let's say, negative videos about you, they intend to harm you. But when you look at your media and the way that you are compensated through the impressions that you earn and the amount of relevance that you have, you make more money. And so though they intended to hurt you, they have taken their time and effort, which you normally have to pay people for, and then for free, promote you. What a gift. It just means that they are incompetent at doing harm, which is wonderful. You want all your enemies to be incompetent in their harm doing. On the other hand, you have somebody who loves. I'll use this in quotes, right? Loves you, means you well, but is also incompetent. And as a result, whenever they enter your life, your life gets worse. They cause negative consequences to occur. And so a lot of people care a huge amount about intention. And this was one of the larger shifts that I think happened in my, I'll call it career, but just my life was completely stripping people of their intentions and only looking at their outputs. And that made navigating relationships significantly easier for me because it allowed me to remove the noise from the signal of the person. And so there are some people, like, I mean, honestly, the reason that one of the this is like probably the very beginning of this kind of thought change was with Layla. Like I had an advisor, if you want to call it that, at the time. And I was like, I'm not sure if I want to marry this girl. Help me make this decision. And he said, well, just look at your stats. He's like, are you in better shape? And I was like, well, yeah, she eats healthy and she goes to the gym, so I go with her. And he's like, okay, so you're exercising more, you're eating better. Okay, are you drinking as much? I was like, no, she just really doesn't drink and I like drinking. I'm probably a bad influencer. He's like, okay, so she decreases this Kind of negative thing. Okay, got it. And he's like, what about business wise? I was like, oh, I'm making more than I've ever made and she's helping me do that. And he was like, okay. And so he just went down the list of all these different kind of components of my life that I could measure. And he's like, it seems like your life is significantly better with this person than it. And when I contrast that to some of the call it relationships I had in the past, it was almost the opposite. I would get into the relationship and all of a sudden I wouldn't work out as much and I wouldn't eat as healthy and I would go out more and my business would suffer and so all the things that I cared about would go down. And so even though I don't think that person had any malicious intent, I think they had good intent, but they had well intentioned harm. And so that lens has helped me make so many decisions in, in a way that removes a lot of the emotional weight behind them, which is like, oh, I absolutely believe that you are a well intentioned person. I was like, I just think you're very incompetent at doing good for me. You do not have the skill to help me.
- [41:35]
A
I'm not prepared to be the collateral damage of your good intentioned errors. Yes, as you spin around trying to give me a hug, but by accident, punch me in the face. Yes, you're driving down the street and because you didn't mean to, but weren't paying attention, you ran somebody over. Functionally, the difference between that person being dead because you didn't mean to, because you were texting on your phone, or because you're a bad driver and you swerving off the street to hit them, the outcome is the same.
- [42:06]
B
And this is something that our society actively disagrees with. Because if we look at how our laws are written, we try to tease out intention and we change punishment and consequences based on intention.
- [42:17]
A
Is that not important?
- [42:18]
B
To a degree it can be. But I'm just more saying, I'm not saying should or shouldn't, but I'm saying in terms of how you navigate getting what you want out of life, if you were the one who got hit, you're dead either way. And so when n equals 1, I would look at the signal, what happens rather than the intention.
- [42:38]
A
100 times out of a hundred, is there any space? It sounds like for as long as this person in my life benefits me, it's good to keep them in. And the moment that they stop benefiting me, then I get rid of them. To some people, that would come across as a very transactional view of relationships.
- [42:57]
B
I think it assumes a binary of benefit, not benefit. And most people have many things that they do. Like, let's say you're like, I'm married to somebody. What happens when that person stops serving me? Well, it's very unlikely that tomorrow someone goes from, I help you in these hundred ways. Do I either hurt you or help you in zero. It's more common, more likely that you had a hundred ways, and now 10 years later they help you 70 ways. And maybe 10 years later they help you 40 ways. But if you're at least cognizant of the hundred ways that that person helps you, then it allows you to articulate, hey, when you do these things, it helps me a lot. It would really mean a lot to me.
- [43:32]
A
Reinforcement again?
- [43:33]
B
Yeah, I mean, and I appreciate. Yes, but in different terms. I was going to put my Chris hat on. It's just good communication. How do I know what you want until you tell me? And I think that people say what you just said, which is people would see this as transactional. And then I would say, and yes, and why is this wrong? Why have you decided that having an exchange is incorrect? It's how society works. All of capitalism, which is the best societies have been built on exchange, voluntary exchange.
- [44:09]
A
Think so. Some people would feel icky about applying that exchange capitalism dynamic inside of friendships and intimate relationships.
- [44:16]
B
I think that exchange happens either way. They just don't want to say it. If you have a friend and you are like, oh, we're ride or die, it means you have a long history reinforcement, which means you have a long extinction curve. It just means that you've been reinforced many times for this friendship, which means that you are willing to deal with blips. But the amount of blips that you're willing to deal with is proportional to the history of reinforcement. If someone new comes into your life and has almost done nothing good and then does a blip, you don't have
- [44:41]
A
as much ballast in the system.
- [44:42]
B
Exactly. You have no reason to. So the hope the basically the extinction curve is functionally just how long you're willing to hope that the good thing comes back.
- [44:50]
A
You probably should have a degree of recency bias, though.
- [44:53]
B
Oh, yeah. Because if the person's behavior is changeable. Yeah, for sure.
- [44:55]
A
Yeah.
- [44:56]
B
It's going to be.
- [44:56]
A
It's always discounted someone that was 50% a good guy and 50% an asshole. The 50% that is closest to you is more salient than the 50% that started 10 years ago.
- [45:06]
B
Oh, yeah, if it was front half, back half, 100%. And that's. And honestly, and this is like, I think this is super relevant for a lot of people. Like, people do change and that's okay. And you can be friends with the person they once were and no longer friends with the person they are, and that's okay.
- [45:21]
A
Mark Manson dropped this unreal line that reminded me of you.
- [45:24]
B
Okay?
- [45:25]
A
Do hard shit not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it, you broke for it, you earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point. And that's your line. Everything is hard and no one cares.
- [45:49]
B
I'm sorry, accomplishing your dreams wasn't fast, easy and risk free. Like, they wouldn't be dreams if they were. And you wouldn't call them wins if they were easy, because they would just be you tying your shoes. And what was once a win when you were five is no longer a win when you're competent. And with increased competence comes increased stakes. You have to be willing to bet more, put more on the line to win bigger. Which means, like, if you're a billionaire, playing $10 hands of poker is a complete waste of time.
- [46:18]
A
Gabe from I Prevail, he's the drummer from I Prevail. You will always think you suck. That's okay. It's okay to suck compared to your standards. As you grow, so will your standards. That doesn't mean you actually suck.
- [46:36]
B
I think it would just be the actuality of sucking versus the perception of sucking. Correct.
- [46:41]
A
It's that as you increase in capacity, you increase in standards. And given that your standards will always outstrip your capacity, there will always be this felt sense lack between where I am and where I want to be. But yeah, that Mark Manson line, I think is really important in sort of an era of AI because you can speed run or shortcut getting the outcome without putting in the requisite inputs. Now, because everybody's obsessed with leverage and trying to get as many outputs from as few inputs as possible, that does make sense. But when you begin to fully detach it from it and you don't focus on the journey that got you there in the same way, and you're not scrutinizing the outputs with the same level of finitude and resolution. Yes, yes. And it's not just the outputs that matter. It's not just the output. And this is where the sort of leverage crowd doesn't fully come into reality. It doesn't come into contact with the way that humans are telling themselves the story of their life. If you could come up with some sort of super quick code that would write hundred million dollar leads for you. Hmm. The entire project would feel different. Your process of getting that, it could be word for word the exact same. Take every word that I've written and create this book based on this brief dink.
- [48:03]
B
I would prove that I knew a lot about leads, but not me. And I think, I mean, I think this, this, this sits at the discrepancy between saying the output of your life is who you become and the aggregate set of behavior that you've learned over your life. Or if the output of your life is the stuff that you. That exists as a result of you being here. And that is more of a philosophical question than I think it is a. Like right or wrong. I think you can make arguments for either side of like, the purpose of your life is what changed as a result of you being here, what you
- [48:38]
A
did or who you became.
- [48:38]
B
Yeah. Or the purpose of your life is all of the outside only existed to change the inside. And I think there's, there's arguments for both. I have, I'm. I would say I have strong affinity towards both definitions. Definitions. Because I would say that when I go through harder times, I lean more towards like, this is happening for me. And when I'm going through easier times, it's like I'm hap. I, I am happening to it.
- [49:02]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [49:03]
B
I'm happening to reality.
- [49:05]
A
But the binary of that.
- [49:06]
B
Yeah.
- [49:07]
A
Seeing it as only one or the other will create a kind of fragility. If all that you're focused on is outcomes, then you're never going to think about becoming the person who can generate those outcomes because you're gonna find shortcuts that don't necessarily work. And if you're only ever focused on inputs, you're never gonna actually work out if all of this suffering amounted to anything. Show me some. George in the house last night was reading one of these books and he wasn't happy with the way that the author had put together the sentence. And he says, show me something I can drop on my foot. That was his line. Like, I can't drop anything on my fucking foot with this. Show me something I can drop on my foot. Wishy washy, vague language. Do you remember the park bench scene in Good Will Hunting?
- [49:50]
B
No. I've seen it long enough ago. Yeah.
- [49:52]
A
Sat on a park bench. Robin Williams talking to Matt Damon. About love. And he has this line. He says, love is an active commitment, Will. It's a choice to value someone else's well being as much as your own. If you watch the film, you'll know that he doesn't say that. He says this instead. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term visiting hours do not apply to you. It's the same thing, same idea, right? Idea, picture, words. And that is the order. Not idea words, pictures. Show me something I can drop on my fucking foot that I can drop in my foot.
- [50:41]
B
It's clear language, both of them, both of the examples. I think it's interesting because with the drop on your foot, it's like, I think the, the, the picture is obviously like more emotive and because of that can be more motivating, more persuasive, et cetera. Where I think the drop on my foot part, where I like where, where I have struggled as a human being is taking that idea and saying, I want to do that, I want that type of love, and then saying, well, the person I love is not in the hospital and I don't have the opportunity right now to sleep standing up and have a doctor know that visiting hours don't apply to me. What do I do? And so then it does go back to what I'm willing to give up in order to maintain something.
- [51:35]
A
It's interesting when there isn't that level of pressure, you know, when you brush up against the grain of life, when you're swimming into the stream, it's very easy to see effort because the whole world is bearing down. And you said there's an enemy to go up against. I think when things are easy, it's like, okay, well, what does love look like when things are easy?
- [51:56]
B
We talk in relational love.
- [51:58]
A
Yeah,
- [52:03]
B
I think it's really. Well, I'll just say more how I measure it, but I think it's just what you're willing to give up in order to maintain something. And so if I have a relationship and I have somebody that I love a lot, then I'm willing to give up everything, including my life, in order to maintain that relationship. And so, or for that person or for that idea, for freedom, for the country. If you love something a lot, you're willing to give up everything for it. And so when that person asks you to do something or doesn't ask you to do something and you think that they would still like it, then you are willing to Inconvenience yourself to a large degree in order to do that. And I think that, like, the reason this stuff is so valuable for me is that, like, it allows me to both give the things that I think the other person wants or that they've told me they want, but also how to differentiate who is using words in order to try and manipulate me. When someone like, dude, dude, you know I love you, you know, if it was bromance, obviously, but then you could say, what have you given up in order to maintain this? In what way have you inconvenienced yourself in order to maintain this relationship? Because all of the actions you've taken, you've taken out of convenience. And this relationship has been only beneficial for you. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But there will come a time where our needs are at odds. And in that situation, I would like to know how reinforcing was all the other stuff so that it is worth. Basically it's saying, how much good was the good for you so that you're willing to deal with some bad.
- [53:36]
A
Can that lead to a situation where you almost purposefully try to seek out difficulty in an attempt to stress test relationships? Because not all relationships should have. The glorious friendship would be seamless between you and another guy. And there's never anything you have to navigate. And it's all just beneficial and positive in both directions.
- [54:00]
B
I have a friend like that. I've been friends since sixth grade. And I don't think we've ever had conflict, which is great and rare and that's why we are so friends. But no, I think that it's okay for conflict to occur. It's okay for seasons of friendship to end. But you can measure how good of friends you are by how. And I don't know how much inconvenience he might be willing to deal with with me. But it just so happens that we really haven't had friends, any need for conflict or competition. He's an FBI agent, and so his measures of success, like he has zero. There's no jealousy, there's no envy, there's no anything. It's just like how many bad guys you catch today? And he's like, bro, you gotta hear this one.
- [54:41]
A
Right?
- [54:41]
B
And so we could just. And he's like, you know, then he'll just ask ridiculous questions about money stuff. Cause he just thinks it's funny. Yep, yep. Yeah, so. And that has worked out well.
- [54:51]
A
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- [56:11]
B
Yeah, it's measuring the output difference with. Without comparing the input difference. I think it's basically it. It's like, why isn't my podcast like Rogan's? It's like, okay, well, he's got 10 more years. You would know the answer to that, right? Ten more years and however many more podcasts, more. And so it's okay, well, if I were to match that and have done it back in time, would I have the same? Would I be bigger?
- [56:36]
A
Same skill, the same, all of that.
- [56:38]
B
And so it's comparing outputs without comparing inputs. And I really just think it comes down to that at the most basic level. Now, most of the time you are early because most people who make that, I would call it error in judgment, are earlier in their careers. And I also don't think there's anything necessarily wrong. A lot of people are like, comparison is the thief of joy. I don't agree with that. I think comparison is how you measure things like this. This is the discrepancy. Labeling the discrepancy as bad as the thief of joy. Comparison in general is how you can know what the discrepancy looks like between what you want and what you have so that you can fix it. So we should compare. Absolutely. You should compare yourself to Rogan. I'm just using you. But I should compare myself to Elon. Of course I should. So I could look at the massive discrepancy between me and Elon. And that just gives me clarity on what things I need to do to try and decrease that.
- [57:35]
A
How do you think about getting rid of the label of bad?
- [57:40]
B
I think that the first action you take when you have not been reinforced for an action you do through modeling, and this is why we do these types of podcasts, I assume, I mean, is that if you haven't done the hard thing or the hard thing that you want to do, or taking the bet or taken the risk, we look for other people who have been the penguins who jumped off the edge first and was there an alligator? Well, no alligators for penguins, but polar bear at the bottom to eat them or did they swim and get to the next iceberg and then they found whatever. So we look at other people. And so modeling is a very real way. It's how you learn everything when you're a child is you look at what other people do, good things happen to them. Okay, I'm going to do that. And so in the short term, we model the long term play is that once you take that first step, ideally you don't get eaten by a polar bear and instead you also get a fish. And then you go up and then you get reinforced for that. And then basically every moment after that is your own experience becomes the loop. But the first jump comes from looking at whatever everyone else does and then takes the jump. Now where that's so difficult to do is that you're looking at what everyone else is doing, or at least the people that you want to emulate, which is really important. Don't listen to the people closest to you. Listen to people closest to your goals, which is not necessarily the same people. Often not. I want to listen to them, I want to model their behavior, but then also still ignoring all of other. So it's like I'm listening to these people, I'm ignoring these people. But behavior is tough because you're still valuing other people a lot. And so I think this is why so many. I would say again, I come from the entrepreneur side, but like successful entrepreneurs have a very first principles approach of thinking because at some point no one has gone to the moon and you just have to say like, does physics prevent me from doing this? And then when you reason Everything from the ground up, you're able to find discrepancies between what people believe and what's true. And that's obviously where opportunity exists.
- [59:34]
A
You're David Deutschpild with that. Does physics prevent me from being able to achieve this? If not, then I just need. Yeah, it is possible. Yeah. I think one of the reasons that these episodes resonate is that a lot of people who want to do things aren't around people who know how to do them. And the harder the thing is that you're trying to achieve, the rarer it is to find people who are able to support you in the doing of it. And not even just support you, but give you legitimate advice about how to get that.
- [60:11]
B
I 100% agree, and this is something that I've struggled a lot with, because what gives you the credibility to gain media and attention is being exceptional in some domain most of the time. And being exceptional in a domain makes you unrelatable. And so it's kind of this very
- [60:27]
A
difficult catch 22 where credibility and relatability are inverse.
- [60:32]
B
Right. And I. But like to your point, poor people are surrounded by other poor people and then assume that that is everyone, because it's everyone they know, not everyone that exists, but it's their everyone as far as they're concerned. And I think that's what makes it so difficult in the beginning to. To get out of that first bubble is because you have to look outside and. And look at some people who might even appear unrelatable and try and grasp at the straws of their character, their origin story. Where again, people could hear me say that I slept on the floor, that I didn't have enough money, whatever, but, like, they only see me, not then. No one's interviewing the gym owner who's sleeping on the floor, who's going to someday become something, because they don't know
- [61:11]
A
yet that's your one regret, or one of the regrets that I have that's the same as yours, which is, I didn't track the early journey enough.
- [61:18]
B
If anyone is listening to this, I'm not a big advocate of regrets in general, but a behavior that I would have changed, that I don't think would have changed. The outcome is document. And you don't have to share it publicly. Just take pictures, take voice notes, email yourself whatever catalog you want. I remember one of the most important personal moments that I had was when I lost everything for the first time. I screenshot of my bank account. So I went from having six successful gyms to losing all of it and having $1,000 to my name. And I remember looking at my bank account and I was like, wow, that's what the bottom of the barrel looks like. And I hadn't seen a number that low in a very, very, very long time. Even in high school, I had more than that just because I had jobs and I didn't have expenses. And so I screenshotted it and it was this very cathartic moment for me because I was like, never again. Like, I will not let this happen. And I will have this be part of the story I tell. And I still have that screenshot and I show it because, like, so basically you want to document it because you believe that you will be the hero that will overcome. And I think that if you can, if you can really just grasp it, like just beginning the documentation story, like even the fact that Kanye had some of those early videos, it's like he believed that he would make it and he believed he would use it. And so I think one of the, one of the greatest things you can do is. And it was almost like at that point I believed when I took that screenshot that I was going to win. And I did believe I was going to get it back. And so the earlier you can have that realization that I have to document this monster, otherwise I won't be able to tell the story. And the receiver of that story, biggest beneficiary of that story is you.
- [63:02]
A
I wish I'd done the same. I wish that I'd done the same. You know, all the way back in my previous life, there was a period in my placement year, I would have been 20, I was living in Scotland. And one of the problems that you have with running businesses in events, especially long single outcome events, is that it's all costs until you finally get to cash in the revenue. And there was a dwindling pot of money that we had because we were putting all of this time in and driving from Edinburgh to Glasgow to Stirling to Dundee to come back to hand out flyers, to manage the guest listers, to restock the bars with the T shirts, to sell the thing. And the event wasn't going to happen for another month. And that just meant it was all output. I needed to pay for my gym membership and I needed to eat food and I needed to drive to these different places. Dwindle, dwindle, dwindle, dwindle. And we're not going to get to withdraw this money until it happens. And I had a friend who came to help me hand out flyers because My business partner needed to look after Freshers Week in Newcastle and I was going to look after Freshers Week across all of Scotland. I had my friend who, who came up, a bit of a rough dude, but nice guy, and he'd grown up in serious poverty in the northeast of the uk and this was the first time that I was out of money. 00 money. And I could have rung my parents and I'm sure that they would have sent me some cash, but I had too much pride and I felt too ashamed to do it. And there was this moment where we were in this flat and saucy hall street in Edinburgh, on the far side of Edinburgh. Sorry, Dean Park Road. Dean Park Road on the other side of Edinburgh. And I was saying, hey man, like I, we're out of food in the house and I don't know where we're going to get it from. He's like, oh, don't worry man, I was going to steal some. And his background, his background from his upbringing was that when you run out of money, you go and steal food. And I remember thinking, yeah, it's wild. I've got myself to the point in life where stealing food is a realistic decision and that. Do I want to video my friend Dean, like stealing sandwiches from the Tesco around the corner? Probably not. But the fact that that story only exists for me in my mind and then the only way that I can communicate the lessons that I took from it and the way that it made me feel is by having to go through this retelling. Yeah, captcha shit. Especially in the beginning,
- [65:23]
B
the worst case scenario is you delete it. I'm just saying for like, what's the downside of doing it? The downside of doing it is that you don't use it and that you delete it. But the upside of having it as an artifact of kind of the stepping stones of who you wanted to become, I think is invaluable.
- [65:40]
A
Everything looks like luck to the unskilled. Ignore them.
- [65:46]
B
Yeah, You have to have skill in order to perceive and recognize skill. You have to have a base level of skill. Now, you don't have to have the same level of skill as somebody else, but the greater skill you have in any domain, the more you appreciate the skill of somebody who's exceptional. So, for example, if you don't understand the rules of basketball, it's just guys passing a ball around and you don't know who scores or how it works or why they're wearing different shirts. Like you have no understanding of what's going on.
- [66:21]
A
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is a great example of this. No idea. Is that good? Is the guy.
- [66:27]
B
Is he winning?
- [66:27]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Who's winning? Who's winning?
- [66:30]
B
Right? And then the greater your skill, the greater your appreciation for how good someone is at that thing.
- [66:37]
A
Resolution, more dexterity, 100%.
- [66:39]
B
And so for that reason, if people who are around you as you begin to walk up the ascension of beginning to get successful, you have your first signs of life. Like, oh, my God, this might actually start working. And you get angry. Only speaking from experience here. When people attribute the success to luck rather than effort, the reality is, one, there was probably some luck. Two, they don't have the skill to recognize your skill. It's a question of competence, not malicious intent. And I think just defining it that way has made it significantly or made it significantly easier for me to realize. It's like, oh, they don't have the ability to recognize what I didn't. Because if they did have the ability to fully comprehend the skill that it took, they would be able to do it too.
- [67:29]
A
Mark Manson, James Clear have got an idea that's similar to that. You only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you cannot see. 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. You only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you cannot see.
- [67:53]
B
Yeah, I love Jimmy Cars. People want what you have, but not what you did to get it. It's just so good, you know, I think the first time I heard that, I was like, fuck, I wish I'd
- [68:03]
A
written I was on this pod.
- [68:04]
B
Yeah.
- [68:04]
A
So good.
- [68:05]
B
I wish I'd written that. But, yeah. And I think. I think part of it is just like, it goes back to what we started with around trades is like, they're just price tags. And you can totally say that something costs too much. Like, that is good. Like, those shoes are nice. They're not worth a billion dollars or whatever that relative. Yeah, to me. And so I think that being able to say, like, I think it is okay to say something is both good and not worth it. And people have a hard time with that. So they say it must be bad because I'm not willing to pay the price for it. But it's like, they might be great shoes. They might not be worth it for you, but they're still good shoes.
- [68:42]
A
I think what particularly hurts is when you, as a person who's put a lot of effort in, see the price that you paid to acquire a skill and it appears to be dismissed by somebody that doesn't understand it.
- [68:52]
B
Or when you buy the shoes and then someone says, I can't believe you bought those shoes. There's no way I would ever do that. And you're like, I know you would never do that. That's why you don't have them. And it's okay that you don't have them either. I'm not saying that as a judgment on you. It's like you don't have the shoes. I do. I thought they were worth it. You didn't. And guess what? We both are different people who live different lives. And so we have stated the obvious.
- [69:16]
A
In other News Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Alo and Nutonic, which is why I partnered with them. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with Shop Pay you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically you didn't get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff. Bull on the back end. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product and Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allow you to focus on the job you actually came here to do, designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Nutonic. With Shopify right now you can sign up for A$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.commodernwisdom all lowercase. That's shopify.commodernwisdom avoiding people who make it harder for you to achieve your goals is the highest form of self care. The fastest way to change your life is to get around people whose minimum standards are your life goals.
- [70:25]
B
It's like I violently agree with both of these statements that I wrote.
- [70:30]
A
I agree with me. It'd be great if you didn't agree with you.
- [70:35]
B
I was like whoever wrote that is a fucking idiot. This is at the heart of the and I was I wrote that right in the thick of my thinking around malicious goodwill or sorry, malicious benefit and and well intentioned harm was just I think I had some people around me at that time that Had. Had done me harm and had said, but I didn't mean to, you know, I had good intentions. And if you were telling that as the person who was texting and driving to the wife of the person whose husband you killed, I don't think. I think they are justified in not caring. And I think that if that person who continues to drive while texting afterwards because they lack the skill to not drive without texting and continues to run over your spouse or whatever, you are justified in removing them from your life despite their good intention. And I just think intention is desired result, which is like, if my intention was this, this is what I wanted to have happen. And it's literally just a lack of competence. And competence is incredibly rare. So it makes sense to remove many people who are not competent at helping you.
- [71:54]
A
Intentioned, but incompetent.
- [71:56]
B
Yeah. And so I think that's why being really clear about, like, hey, if you do this, this would help me. This decreases my risk of failure. That would be helpful for me. Makes serving, and I say that, like serving you as a friend or as a spouse or as a whatever. You give people the tools to help you. And I think that you should totally do that. If you give someone the tools and then they choose not to help you, then I think you are also justified. Or it would be rational for you, if you value your goals more than you value the relationship, to sacrifice the relationship for the goal. And again, we would say which one you love more by the one that you're willing to give up.
- [72:37]
A
The harshest truth every young man must eventually learn is that everyone was always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Your wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk higher. Every first date you've ever been on, they've been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke, people hoped it would have a hilarious punchline. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themselves, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own. Denzel Rust.
- [73:07]
B
I was supposed to say. I was like, who wrote that one? It's all your fault. No one's coming to save you. Sacrifice who you are, but people aren't
- [73:23]
A
against you, especially the people that are in proximity to you. People's proximity to you is a reflection of themselves. We hang around with people who we want to be like and who we want to win so that we can be in the collective glory of it.
- [73:37]
B
So this is where the worldview I think is super important for me at least, which is like, we hang around people who've rewarded us for being around them. So either they've removed stuff that we hate or they give us stuff that we like. And I think where it becomes difficult is where you have competing priorities, where you have multiple things that you like and you want to shift. It's where you begin to change. Basically your motivating factors start to change, but your environment hasn't. And so what was once reinforcing for you or was once rewarding no longer is as much. And so this is where people feel this tension between desired of like, this is the life I want to live versus the life that I have.
- [74:12]
A
Trade offs.
- [74:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, I could. I've given a tremendous amount of thought to trade offs. And I really think it comes down to that, is that people are just unwilling to make trades.
- [74:26]
A
Why? Experientially, why?
- [74:33]
B
Because we want everything. And when we get everything we wanted, we no longer want it because we have it. And I think there's this amazing comedian. I think his name's Kanan. I'm going to mess it up. But he says he has this awesome bit on this. It's like more philosophy than comedy. And he says all the joy is in the getting. He's like, but once you get it, you just have it. He's like, and getting so much better than having having. He's like, but the only thing worse than having is losing. And then you lose and all you want is to have it again. It's like a two minute bit. And he's like, you don't get kids, you have kids. And he's like, you are have. And that is why you will never be satisfied.
- [75:19]
A
But yeah, you only either live in the desire or in the have. And the have is unsatisfactory. And the desire is always compelling and out of reach.
- [75:26]
B
Layla has been talking to me about this more recently where she's like, you know, the things that, that make you us, et cetera, like, very good at business is always seeing where things could be better, where things could be improved. And it's this incredibly, you said earlier, these habits that have been reinforced, these grooves of behavior that lots of water has run through. Right. And being able to live life with two modes, I find incredibly difficult. Which is like, all I am in one part of my life is dissatisfied. And seeing the imperfections in what we do. And then the key to satisfaction of life is saying everything is great. Or rather, I accept everything as it is and I do not wish to change it. And I think that conflict is, I would just say just one that I not conquered, just one that I walked through.
- [76:19]
A
Is that line about a problem to be managed, not paradox to be solved.
- [76:23]
B
Yeah, dichotomy. Yeah, exactly. It's a problem to be managed, not a dichotomy to be solved. Yeah. And I think many of these things, like there is no. Oh, number 42. That's the answer. That is the answer to this. I think we do the best we can. And I think again to the question that started with, which is why do people have such a hard time with trade offs? Which is that the trades, we don't want to make the trade. We want to be able to date everyone and have the benefits of a committed relationship. And when you begin to walk down one of those paths and see the other one start fading into the distance, people have an emotional reaction and then they change course and then they flip flop back and forth between these two things. But then they never actually get to realize any of them.
- [77:05]
A
Because loss is more painful than gain. If you lose five pounds, it is more painful than finding five pounds. And that means that you're always going to try and avoid loss as opposed to expedite gain, even if you would be happier by doing that. Because the pain of the loss is always going to be felt.
- [77:27]
B
And probably short term, long term as well.
- [77:29]
A
Yeah. Bill Perkins has got this line. He says people will endure years of misery to avoid a couple of minutes of pain.
- [77:37]
B
Oh, my God. Yes. Incredibly true. And again, if we think about motivation, it's just that short term pain is always immediate and so it always motivates you not to do it. So you have many motivating operations that are working on us at any given moment. And so even though something is short term, it's funny because many people, obviously there's some people who just love going to the gym. There are significantly more people who don't love going to the gym. The moment they get to the gym, then you warm up, then all of a sudden you feel good again. But there's this period where you're like, I don't necessarily want to go right now. And so you have a motivating operation at all times that is working against your best wishes or your best desires. And our goal of motivating ourselves is to tell ourselves those stories so that in the short term we can overcome the short term discomfort so that we can get the long term benefit that we ultimately want to, that we know we want. But we're reminded and the first time you work out, it only looks like pain. And then we model, we look at somebody else who's already done it for a long time and say, well, I want that. And so we model that and we borrow that credibility, that outcome of the penguin that jumps off the cliff and say like, I want the fish. So I guess I'll try and do that. And then after that the loop takes over.
- [78:53]
A
It's like hyperbolic accounting rather than hyperbolic discounting.
- [78:57]
B
And it happens both ways. So like for example, if I want to set an alarm, right, if I set an alarm at 5 o' clock for the night before, for 4 o' clock in the morning, I'm going to wake up super early and I'm going to do all this shit, right? We get the benefit of the idea of our productivity when we set the alarm, but the cost is discounted because it's in the future. But when we have to pay the cost, it's immediate. And so the benefit of hitting the snooze button is immediate and the cost of getting up is also immediate. And so we hit the snooze button. And so it's like, I feel like that is the microcosm of humanity of setting an alarm 12 hours before or 8 hours before you're supposed to wake up and being super jacked about it because you only get the benefit and there's no price attached to it. But then in the moment that you have to make the trade, all of a sudden your priorities change because the motivation operations have changed.
- [79:46]
A
And the long term benefit of what will happen to your life if you become the sort of person who gets up early is also in future.
- [79:52]
B
And if you do it a few times in a row, then you tell yourself, I am the type of person who does this. And then that becomes a second operation which can help you overcome the short term. Like, I'm a big believer in I am statements as motivating operations. Meaning, like, I am this type of person. I tend to be really hesitant to say I am statements because I believe they're very powerful in terms of changing behavior. But it's also something that I feel like I listen to a lot when I'm talking to other people. I mean, this happens a lot, especially in dating. Think about first dates, second dates. People are like, well, I'm a. In the first meeting, they'll give you like 20 IMs. Like, I'm a neat freak, I'm a blah, blah, blah. Like they just give you, okay, here's my lattice work of my Beliefs about myself, when in reality all of these things are just shorthand for a number of behaviors underneath it. They're saying, I'm a great at basketball and I'm also great at swimming. And you're like, whoa, there's so much here. But where it gets difficult is when you need to stop dribbling and start passing. But you said I'm great at basketball, but I'm supposed to do both. But I actually need to change only one of them. And that's where people get into these really hard times. Which is why I think defining everything at the granular and then moving it back up, but being able to go clouds to dirt on these definitions of behavior allow you to change who you are much more fluidly because you understand that the label is actually just that. It's just shorthand. It's not reality. It's just a bucket. To make communication easier.
- [81:12]
A
I can't be bothered to describe all of the things that this particular term means.
- [81:15]
B
And it would be unreasonable if I had to say he's a good basketball player. But instead of saying that, I'm like, oh my God, he's really good at taking his right foot and putting in front. It would be ridiculous. But you have to understand at that level in order to communicate really clearly. In my opinion.
- [81:27]
A
This tension between excellence and satisfaction is an interesting one. I had this line this year which was what you are praised for in public, you will pay for in private A lot of the time. The things that make you fantastic operator when it comes to business and your career often can be totally unadaptive, maladaptive when it comes to the kitchen table, competing priorities.
- [81:55]
B
And like this is, this is such a, this is one that I think, I think a lot about this because there is a priority, there is one that you want more. And I think people have a lot of trouble with that.
- [82:07]
A
This is why people who are monomaniacal often get so much further than people that don't. Because even just the thinking cost of managing, navigating the trade offs. Yeah, that's why someone asked me basically how, how monomaniacally should I go after my career? And I said, well, it depends on what phase you're in. But I think it is almost impossible to make a big swing, make big progress in your life without going complete psycho mode for an extended period of time.
- [82:39]
B
It's about 10 years. I mean, I've just, I think it's. It's like about 10 years. I've just gone, I'm not going to compromise. Yeah, it's no compromises. It's no. There's this episode in Breaking Bad, and the title was I think no Half Measures. And I think it was about whether you punish someone or kill them. But that was. But I remember watching that episode and the line stuck with me a lot, like, no half measures. Either do or don't. And I think that half measures yield null outcomes.
- [83:19]
A
Yeah. It's not that you get half results. Yeah.
- [83:22]
B
And so what many people are plagued by is they are doing half measures in four domains and have yield in none. And they feel like they are trying all the time, they're working every hour that they're awake to pursue or serve four different masters. And it's the realization that compromise on one means getting neither. And I think that people have a hard time with that because they're unwilling to say, I want one thing more than another. And I think you just have to be able to say, like, I'm willing to sacrifice this thing. Not forever, but for now.
- [84:00]
A
Obligation because of anchoring bias, because of the momentum of where you are now, because of the fear of regretting it. But this is where. This is where the inaction thing comes back in. People think that inaction has no cost, but it does have a cost.
- [84:22]
B
Usually it's higher. Like, it's like, money loves speed, wealth loves time. Poverty lives indecision. And if you think about inaction as an action, we are always doing something. Even if you are watching television, you are taking an action. It's just not making. It's not making any progress. Well, maybe you're making progress in a show. Maybe you're making progress in your relaxation, Maybe you're resting. Heart rate drops like, things are always occurring. And I think it's just whether we are voting with our behavior about the outcome that we truly want. And most of the outcomes that we truly want happen at a delay, which is what makes them worth wanting but also makes them equally hard to get.
- [85:20]
A
Don't listen to other people's opinions. Friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor pansies. And don't listen to them when they try to deter you from whatever it takes to succeed. The average person will always try to keep you average. It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that an ordinary person would see as extra. This is the really hard part that I had to come to terms with. It's that a lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risks that they chose not to take. We always have to think about listening to the people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us.
- [86:00]
B
We yearn for the approval of many people who don't have lives that we want. And so if they have a specific life, then it means that that is what they think is valuable. And if we don't want what they have, then why would we value their weight on our decisions? And so it's like, you have this. They're like, we have this mold that is my life. Your life no longer fits my mold. And you're like, right, I don't like the pot that that mold makes. And so somehow when people state the obvious, which is that you are living your life against my preferences, we somehow feel like that needs to change. Because when we're younger and growing up, we can't leave. Yeah, you can't leave. And you do need to live your life according to your parents preferences, your teacher's preferences, your classmates preferences, your principal's preferences. But when you get older, you do have to break the mold and decide what mold you want. And in so doing, you will be against their preferences. And if the vast majority of people have a life that you don't want, then you're going to do things that the vast majority of people don't agree with.
- [87:18]
A
I think the average American adult is obese, likely to be divorced, and has less than 1k in the bank. Doing what everybody else does sounds like a great idea, but it's actually a reliable route to a life that you're probably not looking for.
- [87:36]
B
This is. I feel very passionately about this particular topic because it means that the path to exceptionalism is lonely. And loneliness is something that we decry as a society, that there's something wrong with it, there's something bad, there's something wrong with you if many people disagree with you. But success and pursuit of large endeavors is one of those few domains where everyone disagreeing with you is a signal that you are actually doing something different. Now, sometimes you doing something different is the wrong move. I think Larry Ellison said this. He said, if everyone thinks your idea is stupid, either they're right or you're right. And if you're right, then you're likely to make a lot of money. I'm loosely paraphrasing, but basically it's like we have to be willing to do exceptional things in isolation and deal with the pain of rejection. And some of rejection isn't people saying, no, I don't want to buy from you. Some of rejection is people just rejecting your behavior, rejecting who you're becoming, rejecting the choices that you're making. And I think that rejection oftentimes is harder because it often surfaces as snide remarks, jokes that are demeaning, that have a little bit too much edge to them, like a little bit too much
- [89:10]
A
truth or even just being excluded. A more silent version of that. Not commission, but omission. We won't invite them out. You turned up to squash practice. I didn't know it was on. I just thought that. I don't know. Do you guys not tell me? Oh, yeah. Well, all right. Come on, join.
- [89:24]
B
Yeah, those moments, and I think those moments are very painful. But you trade those moments for the many moments when you're at home alone, looking at your life around you and saying, this is not what I want.
- [89:42]
A
I don't want to be here.
- [89:43]
B
Right. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be who I
- [89:46]
A
am, and I don't want to be there with them either.
- [89:48]
B
Right. And so it's no man's land. And I think that that is like the beginning of the metamorphosis. It's the beginning of the transformation.
- [89:55]
A
It's the single most powerful idea that me and you have come up with. The Lonely Chapter. By far. By far. And I think the reason that it speaks to people is that the amount of doubt that you have to endure when doing this for the first time, when nobody around you understands what you're trying to do, when you're actively being discouraged from making changes and you have no promise of glory or success on the other side of it is one of the most perfect cocktails of pain and discomfort that you can go through.
- [90:23]
B
And this happens on every mountain. So it happens on your first mountain and it happens on your second mountain. Like, if you are. You've achieved some level of success that everyone around you deems as successful enough by their standards, not yours. When you pursue the next summit, they. Then all of it begins again. The machine begins again.
- [90:41]
A
I actually think that for a lot of people, the first big lonely chapter that they will feel will be after their first success. Because for a lot of people, the first success is done within the frame that they're already inside of. They get to the top of it and realize it wasn't what they wanted. And then some people decide to go back down. Maybe some people don't need to go up the first mountain to realize they're somewhere they don't want to be. But for a lot of people, especially people that are driven and pushed toward excellence, I think they actually have to get there within. This was My story, right? Getting one of the biggest events companies in the uk, running an organization that is cool and fun. And I got to define and I was the boss and everybody knew me. And there's some wealth and some status and some freedom and there's girls. Everybody's telling me that this is something that I should be happy about and satisfied with. And for some reason it didn't feel right. And the only way to try and find something new is to let go of something that everybody else is telling you is something that you should want.
- [91:47]
B
Local maximums. And it's like the furthest up they can see up the mountain. And then when you get to that new local maximum, you have a different perception than they do and you can see the next peak and they can't.
- [91:58]
A
Some people don't need to go up the peak, but I think a lot of people do.
- [92:01]
B
Yeah.
- [92:02]
A
I wonder if those are different types of lonely chapter. I wonder if there's a different type of a lonely chapter of letting go. I've kind of been. Hold that thought. I just. I really wanted to talk to you about the difference between having fallen off and having never made it. And having fallen off a lot of the time is somebody going from one local maxima to another local maxima that's higher or to a global maxima. Like, sure, some fall offs occur not through choice, but that evolution might be somebody going, my priorities have changed and you are judging me on the scorecard of the game that I used to play. I'm not bothered about that anymore. Oh, that guy fell off,
- [92:43]
B
man. I have two. Two completely different thoughts about this. One is short, and then I'll make the longer one. I realized when I was writing something a while ago that when you haven't. When you have no evidence or no proof that you're going to be successful, everyone will ask why you're working so hard. And then once you win, everyone asks why you're working so hard.
- [93:08]
A
You know, that was the Mark Manson one that he said, will tell you how lucky you are.
- [93:13]
B
Oh, is it?
- [93:14]
A
You liked the idea of. No. They just ask you again why you're working so hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was a funny remix.
- [93:22]
B
Yeah. And. And it was just a realization that people were literally always going to ask me why I was working so hard or why you were working so hard and why are you pursuing your goals? Because they're saying that your goals are not the goals that I would pursue. And to which you would respond. Y. The second thing was I was talking to an entrepreneur really successful. And they were saying, hey, I really want. I want to dominate my market. I want to put everyone else out of business, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as somebody who has put people out of business, I will say that it doesn't come with parades and it doesn't come with balloons. And it's not Goliath versus Goliath, because by the time you actually beat them into true submission, it's really like a giant beating a child. Because it's almost never a true fair fight. And there are no rules and there is no referee, and no one determines you the winner. And so what ends up happening is you get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then they shrink into irrelevance. And then you see a Facebook post that says that they've changed their goals and that they actually determine that this isn't as important to them as it once was. And I think that, one, that's okay. Two, it's not satisfying at all. Three, when you see the jobs and the employees that actually worked at the company that were just, you know, living their lives and have kids, and all of a sudden, like, this idea of this conquest that you're going to beat someone feels significantly less rewarding. That's glorious, 100%.
- [94:50]
A
And
- [94:54]
B
I used to joke that when losers lose, they change their goals rather than say they lost. And I think it's more that they might have at some point while they began to lose. Maybe it's the first quarter or the second quarter of their game, they're down by a few points. They might have some awareness of what it would take in order to win, but they determined at that point that the trade was no longer worth it. And I think that that's okay. And I would say that that is a shift that I've had personally, is that if someone no longer determines that the price is worth it, then amazing, They've made a conscious decision. What I would say I advocate against is having that decision made for you because you weren't conscious of the decision being made to begin with and then just basically accepting it.
- [95:42]
A
Can vengeance be deranging in that way?
- [95:44]
B
Then I say it again.
- [95:45]
A
Can vengeance be deranging for whom? The desire to get one over on this person. It compels you to act in a way which is being puppeted by them in a very odd way.
- [95:59]
B
Yeah. They control you.
- [96:00]
A
Yeah. The person that you're trying to beat has cajoled you and tempted you into doing something that isn't necessarily in your interests. And then when you do reach the Finish line. They're never going to say, well played, man.
- [96:16]
B
Fair fight.
- [96:17]
A
Yeah, exactly. No one else knows. It's largely just this silent war between you and your projection of them.
- [96:25]
B
And to be clear, I think that vengeance and revenge can be incredibly motivating. And if the only fuel that you have is that to get what you want, then use what you have. But I think that.
- [96:40]
A
That
- [96:42]
B
the outcome of it, of beating a specific person, is not nearly as fulfilling as you think it will be. But if along the way, you can create good from it, then I think that there's some reconciliation of pros and cons that happens, of good stuff happened, bad stuff happened, and is there more good than bad that we sum up at the end of our lives? But I find it interesting when I think about when I look at the oldest, the old wise men that I pay attention to or that I read their dead books or they're dead, the books are alive. It is interesting how much they talk about the folly of youth and how much we value things that never really mattered to begin with. And I try to think, what is that guy going to say about what I'm currently doing? And will he approve of it? And, I mean, to be clear, I feel like I always have the answer, but I think it takes the edge off both sides. On the downside, if you do have your losses, it's like, well, this is okay. And on the upside, when you do have your wins, you're like, I'm not that important.
- [97:46]
A
A lot of this feels to be about the expansion of time, being able to see things on a broader time horizon. Is that fair?
- [97:57]
B
Time and space, I think those are the two things that can shrink or expand anything. So if we zoom in the atoms of this table versus zooming all the way out to the cosmos, all of a sudden, whether two monkeys are having a podcast that they're recording matters significantly less. And also, when we think about the billions of podcasts that get recorded over the next however many years, it shrinks it. But in this exact moment, this becomes the most important thing that I'm focused on right now. And so I think playing with time and space as ways to cope with hardship is one of the most viable tools that you can have in terms of getting through.
- [98:31]
A
Does zoom into enjoyment, zoom out of difficulty, pain?
- [98:35]
B
Yeah,
- [98:38]
A
you can get competent at nearly anything in 20 hours. The problem is, most people spend a decade delaying the first 20 hours. More potential is wasted through inaction than incompetence.
- [98:49]
B
I saw a TED Talk years ago where a guy talked about how you learned how to play the guitar in 20 hours. And that TED talk changed my life. Not because I learned to play the guitar, but all of a sudden complex tasks or seemingly complex tasks felt much more attainable. Where I was like, okay, I might not be the best website developer in the world, but in 20 hours I can have a website. And that 20 hour mantra for me has just been like two days, two full days, two 10 hour days, fully focused. You can pretty much go from zero to not hero, but zero to competent. And when you string hundreds of those 20 hour days together, I think you become incredibly dangerous. We were talking earlier about range, the book, I think being cross departmental, being cross.
- [99:40]
A
What's the multidisciplinary?
- [99:42]
B
Thank you. Disciplinary. Multidisciplinary is hard to calculate how valuable it is because of the, because the first 20 hours of almost every discipline is probably the biggest, most meaningful concepts from that discipline.
- [99:57]
A
From not being able to ride a bike to being able to ride a bike. Yes.
- [100:00]
B
Being able to not read, to read. Even if you can't read Shakespeare, but you can read, all of a sudden
- [100:05]
A
like 80% of the world of Shakespeare is now opened up to you. It's just a matter of time before you get there.
- [100:09]
B
Yeah. And even if you could never read Shakespeare, the 80% of the books that you can read as a result of a sixth grade reading level is basically more books than you have time to read. And you will get the largest returns from those first 20 hours. And so there's a very strong argument for trying to collapse the time between wanting something and beginning those first 20 hours. Because the 80, 20 of the skills you gain that have utility, your usefulness across a huge amount of domains is multiplicative, not additive. So I've said this example before, but Jay Z, in the very beginning, it's like he might have had some rhythm or something. And then all of a sudden he learned how to rap, and then he learned how to sell. Now some people say maybe sold earlier than that, but I'll just leave it there. He learned how to sell, and then all of a sudden he learned how to market. And with each of these additional skills, his income didn't go up BY like, oh, one plus one equals two. It went, you know, one. Well, one's a bad number. So two to the 10th power all of a sudden becomes significantly greater than what you can do. And so when, when unsure about what step, like when you're not sure what to do, Build potential. Because when the opportunity does come, you want to be ready and so it does make sense in the beginning of your career to maximize optionality. It's just that you have to be willing to trade it in. And so when you're not sure what to do, the logical thing to do is, I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, but I'm going to get a good night's sleep. I don't know when I'm going to meet a mate, but I'm going to start getting in shape now. I don't know what I'm going to sell, but I'm going to start building an audience and making content. There's always an argument for, like, if you don't know what to do, there's still plenty of things to do. But the goal is not necessarily to do those things forever, it's to do those things, to then use them as the launchpad to get the thing you really want.
- [101:59]
A
The trap is opening up so much optionality without the concordant decisiveness that you end up being trapped. Yeah, you end up being stuck because you think, I've got all of these directions that I could go in. I've spent all of this time building up panoply of routes that I could take my life down and I do not have any ability to decide on which of those to take.
- [102:25]
B
Panoply.
- [102:25]
A
Panoply. You like that?
- [102:27]
B
Myriad cornucopia. A plethora.
- [102:29]
A
Yeah. Two people that are obsessed with language have a war with each other. But one is British, so he wins. You only need to get rich once, so you might as well work as hard as you can to get it done as fast as you can. The fastest way to attract what you want in life is to deserve it. By doing so much work, it becomes unreasonable not to achieve it. Do so much work, it would be unreasonable that you fail. The seat at the table is yours if you want it. Do the hard work, build the skills no one can ignore. Adjust your mindset to match where you want to go, then pull up a chair and sit down. You want to work with such relentless obsession that when people see you, they're grateful they don't have to compete against you. The fastest shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts. Do the work.
- [103:16]
B
Are those all mine or one? Violence is the answer. There's two quotes in the first few pages of our sales handbook, eternally@acquisition.com 1 is volume negates luck and violence is the answer. And I would say that those are like credos that the team lives by. Violent team they are, and Violently successful. I think there's a lot of power in knowing that you're doing every single thing you possibly can to win. Because if you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, I have controlled the controllable, I think there's some level entirely the controllable, not the uncontrollable. Those things can happen. I could do my book launch, and there can be a lightning strike, and there can be no power in Vegas. That can happen. But in the event that that happens, if you leave it all on the field, if you have nothing left in the tank, I don't think there's a feeling that's more satisfying as a man than knowing that you've given everything that you had to give to an endeavor that you deemed meaningful. And so Layla and I have this thing that we say a lot, but a man must have a quest. And I just really, really like that. It's like you need to do something. You need to go towards something. And your quest could be the best being the best father. It could be being the best musician or the best podcaster, the best businessman or the best tire replacer or the best sweeper, whatever it is. But like, I think. I think being questless, being aimless, and never being able to use the violence that you are capable of in the pursuit of endeavor that you find meaningful is where people find themselves lost and without hope. Because hopelessness comes from a perceived lack of options. We don't know what to do. Anxiety comes from many options, but no priorities. And so there's many things to do, but we aren't sure which one. And so a quest remedies both of those, because you have one path that you're clear on, and you know the only thing that you have left to do is destroy everything in your path to getting to where you want to go. And I'm using strong language on purpose rather than saying that you literally need to destroy everyone. But more so, the ideas, the thoughts, the doubts, the perceived risks that aren't even really risks. Those are the things that we have to march triumphantly towards. And I think having someone in your corner who believes in that better version of you is one of the rarest gifts that you can have in life. And there's a line from 300 that I love. The Queen says to Leonidas, she says, come back with your shield or on it. And I think that we all want a spouse or a partner who can reward us for the good fight. Because what that queen is saying in that moment is not like, I want you to win. She's like, I want you to die trying. So. And I think that that's like all we. I mean, to be fair, that's literally all we will do is die trying to. All of us will die trying. And I think, well, rather all of us will die. Some of us will die trying. And I think that's about as good of a life as I think anyone can really ask for.
- [107:07]
A
One of my least favorite groups of people are those without a quest, mocking those who have one.
- [107:17]
B
Wastes of space.
- [107:19]
A
It causes doubt. This is another reason why the lonely chapter thing resonates so much. That people who are in it have their certainty about wanting to get out of it diminished by people who can't see the fact that they're in it. And you go, fuck. All of my friends are saying, well, why, why are you staying in? Because you want to go to the gym in the morning. What does it matter if you miss what does it matter if you miss your workout? Doesn't matter if you. It doesn't matter if you miss your workout tomorrow, dude, go. No, I really, really want this thing. And my wanting of this hard thing and the efforts and sacrifices and trade offs I'm having to make in order to get there. The doubt that already exists inside of me is being multiplied by people who are outside of it. And if I could give everybody a gift, it would be the ability to turn down the volume on people who don't understand the goals that you're trying to achieve. It shouldn't be your job to explain yourself to people who don't understand what you're trying to do. And the confusion of this person gets it and understands it and this person doesn't. You shouldn't be listening to them at equal measure.
- [108:30]
B
I have a lot of live translation that I think I've wired into being able to handle some things that were difficult, which is I pretty much translate all hate into you. Live your life against my preferences. And so whenever they're saying all of these things of like, no, you don't have to go to the gym, we were doing this other thing. It's just saying you're living your life in a way that's against my preferences. You're valuing things that I don't value. And you're like, you're right. And so it doesn't mean we don't need to have the same values, at least in the short term. And I think just accepting that that is okay and that you can still be friends, at least in the short term, is Fine. And what they're really trying to do is get you to comply with their way of living. Because maybe not always when you live in accordance with your new values and new preferences, it brings into sharp contrast how they are not living in accordance to theirs. Yeah.
- [109:26]
A
Yeah. This was 10 years ago when, as a club promoter, I decided that I was gonna take six months off from drinking, which now sounds like commonplace now is almost a caricature of something lame that people do too much and drinking has come back around. But 10 years ago, I was on the fucking frontier. And I remember when I stopped drinking, so many of the people that I would hang out with went from being surprised to ribbing mockery to almost offended. And I think a lot of that was people realizing, oh, shit, the fact that Chris has stopped drinking throws the fact that I need to drink in order to feel social into harsh contrast. My bad habits are being highlighted by the fact that someone near me has broken them.
- [110:16]
B
And what's really interesting about that is that you made money from other people drinking. And so you clearly had no problem with anyone drinking. You just chose not to drink for you so that you could grow the business, get more in shape, whatever, which
- [110:27]
A
makes it feel even more elective. Which makes it feel like even more of an insult. Right.
- [110:30]
B
Which is. Which makes it also more. More ridiculous. Ridiculous how violent they were about opposing this choice because you were like, I'm not projecting anything on you. I would prefer it if you drank. Please, please spend as much money as you can at the club.
- [110:46]
A
Continue.
- [110:47]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But even that, like, it's a perfect example because there's. There wasn't a shade of judgment behind it because you are incentivized to have them. I was opening the doors myself and cracking the bottle.
- [111:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much.
- [111:01]
B
And so, like, I actually think it is the perfect example because it shows that it is not about you. That is the point. Because there was no judgment. You were literally incentivized for them to continue that behavior, and yet they still felt bad and angry that you were not doing something they were doing, which then made them feel that they felt like they shouldn't be doing it either. And then they just projected it onto you. And it's like when you have this violent opposition, one of the things that I've actually been more recently thinking about is no one hates you. They hate the projection that they have of you. That's 99% made up, because no one can know 100% of you. Like, the only person whose hate you should really pay attention to is your own, because there's no other person on earth who has full context to who you are. And so the person that someone's making fun of or they hate or that they're disagreeing with is the person within the context of here, obviously, that's consumed six 30 second clips of you over the 37 years you've been alive and has filled in the blanks for every other minute of your existence with the exception of those three minutes that they have consumed. Correct. And so how much weight? I should probably proportionally weight the opinions of people based on the shared experience that they have of my life with me. And so if someone has spent one day with me out of the 37 years that I've been alive, I have 37 times, 365, more context on the individual than they do. And so I should probably weight it appropriately to that.
- [112:36]
A
There's a idea from Gwinda Bogle which is about this. It's called Tilting at windmills. An online stranger doesn't know you. All they have are a few vague impressions of you, too meager to form anything but a phantasm. So when they attack you, they're really just attacking their own imagination. There is no need to take it personally, which is related to this principle of humanity. Every single person is exactly what you would be if you were them. This includes your political opponents. So instead of dismissing them as evil or stupid, maybe seek to understand the circumstances that led them to their conclusions.
- [113:11]
B
You know, I love that.
- [113:13]
A
Oh, God.
- [113:15]
B
It also teases out something that I might have to put my. Put my. My hat on for.
- [113:21]
A
Switch it out.
- [113:22]
B
Which is that if everyone, if you were going to be the same, if you were the exact same person as they are, if you were them, then it removes the concept of free will.
- [113:41]
A
Mm. Mm. Yeah. If you're poor, try the Buy Nothing challenge. The Buy nothing challenge. For 30 days, buy nothing except food, rent, gas and insurance. Don't bring your wallet with you when you leave home. Pack lunch. See how much you save. Repeat until you have as much as you want. Brackets Pairs well with working 12 hours a day. Being good with money literally just means spend less than you make and put the extra in things that go up, not down.
- [114:20]
B
Financial education in two tweets. The hardest part about most things isn't knowing what to do, it's doing it. And the hard part about doing it is that you're often more rewarded for every action except for the one that you need to take. And so there's a hundred Things you can spend money on. There's only one nothing. And so it's so exhausting to not spend money when you don't have any. Because every single thing that you want or many things that you want have price tags associated with them. And you have to at all moments in the day, say no a hundred times in order to, quote, spend nothing. And so it's this muscle that we have to build. But I strongly encourage the buy nothing challenge because one, you realize how little you can really live on. And when you realize how little you can really live on, you realize how much more risk you can actually take. Because the apparent downside of what if I lost everything? Becomes incredibly tangible, which is like, well, I lived on $200, $500, not even that bad. Yeah, it's actually. And when you realize that, and this is, I think Morgan Strusel. I don't say his name right. When we look back in time at some of our happiest moments, we think we were happy when we were poor. But I'll just say on an anecdotal level also my own words, we often say that we'll be happy like we already have the things that we said we want that would make us happy. And yet here we are.
- [116:01]
A
Yeah, there's a nostalgia discount for sure. That nobody ever believes that we're living through a golden era. Golden eras only ever occur in history.
- [116:11]
B
The good old days.
- [116:11]
A
Yeah, it's always the good old days. I asked a question actually recently, which was there's certain periods that people look back on nationally as times that were particularly wonderful. I did ask the question, do you think anyone will look back at 2026 and think that it was the good old days? At some point, every generation believes that they're living through a moment which is markedly different than the generations before. This one does feel particularly unremarkable in that way. To a degree. Yeah. I think when I. I'm trying to project forward stuff that currently we think about with loving nostalgia from the past. And I'm not sure, but then probably during the 90s, right. Did people think that WWF and F16, fighter rocket, the fighter jets and Limp Bizkit were going to be what people in three decades time would look back on with loving tenderness?
- [117:12]
B
So I'm going to say two things that I think are so One, a behaviorist can explain the nostalgia paradox, which is that across species, negative consequences fade, fading, affect, bias. Yeah, but positive doesn't. And so that's why you have your ex that you always want to go back to because you forget how crazy she is and then you see her and then you're like, oh, my God, I forgot how crazy you were and why you drink. And then the next morning you say, I'm never going to drink again. And then seven days later you're drinking
- [117:44]
A
again that Khadi to my life.
- [117:45]
B
Right? And so but like, even being cognizant of the fact that punishment fades and reward sticks is helpful for making decisions in the future. So that's thing one, the second is that, like, when I really think about at least the eras of my life, so I'll just talk personally. When I think about when I was, you know, sleeping on the gym floor, in a lot of ways, that was like the good old days. Like, I was. I was fighting really hard for something I really cared about. And then, you know, there was a moment where it started to work and I started, you know, launching gym to gym to gym with Layla, which was
- [118:19]
A
like,
- [118:21]
B
wasn't necessarily the good old days, but like, it was she and I and we were figuring it out. And I think I have a lot of respect and admiration for that kid who was just working his ass off. Even though I didn't know what I was doing, I just tried. I tried. And then obviously when things started working out with Jim launch and it was really scaling, it's like, I remember that period and like, I think you can ascribe a good old days, especially on a personal level, to almost every season of life when you look in retrospect, just because the negative has faded, of course. And so it's one of these things that's a great way to feel bad about how you feel today because you know you should feel better because you know you will feel better about today in the future, because the future will have today without the negative consequences and the stressors of today that in the future seem irrelevant. And so it's like whenever you think about this stuff, like, what is my operation for gratitude is imagine something good, imagine losing it, and then realize that you haven't lost it. That is how you feel gratitude at the most basic level. And so whenever you repeat that operation, either in your mind or in reality, like, you feel gratitude. And so I think nostalgia is a flavor of that. As we go back in time, now we can't get it back, but I guess we can see it through a new lens.
- [119:46]
A
That's the memory dividend thing from Bill Perkins.
- [119:49]
B
Phenomenal book.
- [119:50]
A
Everyone Die with zero. Gone by die with zero.
- [119:52]
B
Really, really good book.
- [119:53]
A
Really great. Three hours to read. Fantastic Yeah, I think some of the areas that people rely on with more nostalgia from a personal standpoint, times with more simplicity and fewer trade offs I think tend to be looked back on with. Huh. I was really singularly focused in that way.
- [120:16]
B
Life was simpler then.
- [120:17]
A
Correct. And there is an accumulation of complexity. So I wonder if simplification would be a way to remove some of the restrictions between now and front running some of that gratitude for now in the moment.
- [120:33]
B
I think that's really interesting because I think that the complexity of our lives in the moment that we were living them was just as maxed out as it is now because we're human, not because life was more complex, but because we always find the maximum amount of problems that our brains can perceive. And so at any given moment, whether you're 20 or 40, you might have absolutely more problems when you're 40, but you also have higher ability to deal with those problems and the problems that you perceived when you were 20. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing ever happened to you. You will still have the same number of problems. And so the idea of simplifying our lives is really just an attempt to mirror only the incomplete memory that we have of that moment.
- [121:09]
A
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm going to try and get rid of the trade offs that I did have to do in the past, in the moment. To make the moment more like the past. Yeah. There's a. Adam Lane Smith taught me this a couple of years ago. I think it's really, really true. Your life does not need to be easier, it needs to be simpler. Your system is designed to handle stress and challenge, but not complication. You probably handle hard things pretty well, but feel overwhelmed when they become messy. Do not attribute to difficulty that which can be explained by complexity. Really, really cool. And I think that's. That's where a lot of stress is felt. And this is the line from whatever fucking four episodes ago where there's no such thing as being overworked, only underested. That overworked is the asterisk. Overworked at a small bucket of things. But there is such a thing as being spread too thin and overworked across a larger bucket of things. If all that you have to do for the next six months or two years is write a book, it's going to be stressful, but it's going to be enjoyable. If you have to write a book and raise a kid and manage finances and go to work and try and get in shape and connect with your partner and Your mum's ill, it only takes two or three of those and people fall apart. System is designed to handle intensity but not complexity.
- [122:45]
B
I think. I think most people would be astonished at how much they can accomplish if they remove things, because I don't think focus is also not additive, but multiplicative in that the best things that I've ever made, books, things like that, the best works that I've created have been things that had many coats of paint. And so I can look at the same project over a long period of time when I'm on good days, on bad days, it rains, it's sunshine. Layla and I are good, Layla and I are bad through all these different seasons. And so I look at the work through as many lenses as I can and then it creates the texture to the work that gives it that depth. And I like the many coats of paint because you have to let it dry. It's very rare that something on the first shot is very good. It just takes a lot of attempts. But you can't get that surface area of thinking if you can only think about it a handful of times. And so there's only so much thinking time that you have, which means that if you give it to five projects rather than one, getting one inch deep on five projects is rarely a novel concept. You rarely will come up with something that is inherently unique because many people can give one inch deep thought towards any idea.
- [124:01]
A
Well, also somebody who is 1/5 as good as you at doing that thing are giving 100% of themselves. So you're basically curtailing your capacity by spreading it across multiple things.
- [124:15]
B
And again, I relate things back to business. But in some ways, you believing that you can pursue multiple masters is actually arrogant because it assumes that the people that you compete against can't beat you when they're fully focused on one thing. And that you can somehow compete with three or four or five people at the same time and still win. And maybe you can, but I think the vast majority of people just lose.
- [124:40]
A
Stop whining. Every position has an advantage. Younger means cutting edge. Older means more experience. Smaller company means more personalized. Bigger company means longer track record. Rich means resources to use. Broke means nothing to lose. You aren't limited by your resources, only your resourcefulness.
- [125:07]
B
There's always a way to win, Just not always a enough desire to win.
- [125:18]
A
The position of simplicity as well. I think so much of today is about trade offs. It's cool looking across all of these, I can't see any of them that would be improved by complexity. Young Old, small, big, rich, broke. It's a universal rule that cuts through all of them, which I think is really interesting. But yeah, everybody is able to find a reason why the situation that they're in is either great, but more typically not great. Because finding all of the ways that the thing that you have or don't have either limits you or restricts you in a way that it wouldn't if you were somebody else or in a different situation allows you to front run why you might fail in future.
- [126:14]
B
This is the reason why inversion is one of the most powerful ways to get what you want. Because we are hardwired to survive. And part of survival is threat identification. What are all the problems that exist around me in my environment, in my life, that threaten me? And so when you try to think about what's good with your life, you have to sit there and be like, okay, I have to do my five minute journal in the morning and think, what three? And you're like sitting there like, okay, what three things am I grateful for? And you have to try to do that, especially if you do different things every day. Right? But what's interesting, and this is why I think Munger was so, was so brilliant with this, is if you frame what are all the threats that I have to accomplishing what I want? What are all the things that are going to get in my way? If I had to guarantee failure, what would I do? It's much easier to come up with the list of all the things that will guarantee failure because we're programmed to find those threats. And then all you have to do is just flip it as soon as you've figured out that monster list of the things that guarantee your failure. And then you just do that.
- [127:21]
A
You know, it's a cool version of this. If you were to design a day or a lifestyle for your worst enemy who's trying to beat you, what would it be? And the inversion of the inversion is imagine that you were going up against you, but with a mustache. It's you versus a mustache. And this version of you is doing everything that they can to beat you. They know all of your failures. They know all of your shortcomings and your fears. What would that person do? Just do that. Do what that person would do that would beat you. Do what you with a mustache would do to beat you. And that's one of George's ideas. And I think it's really cool. It's the same as basically, what would you do if you had 10 times the agency? Because presumably that person would have way more agency. They wouldn't doubt themselves as much. They'd be more decisive. They would reduce complexity. They would be less distracted.
- [128:15]
B
So there's a frame in the investing world, which is, if someone else were to come and buy 100% of your company today, what would they immediately do in the first 30 days?
- [128:24]
A
Holy shit. I can't believe that they're spending this much money on catering.
- [128:29]
B
I can't believe they still have that guy who was good two years ago and just shows up for work now. And I think it's because what that frame provides you is an emotionless view of your current situation. Your best. The person that you would. Your worst enemy would have no emotion around.
- [128:51]
A
With a mustache.
- [128:51]
B
Yeah, with a mustache. Would have no emotion around making the hard call, because he's not you. He's someone else. And the person he's firing is not your best friend, Todd. It's just this inadequate person who's no longer upskilled. And so when we make these. When we talk through, you know, when we have these podcasts around feelings and emotions and whatnot, like, there's the feelings that we. There's the experience of life, of the things that we feel while we go through it, and then there's the decisions that must occur in reality. And I think trying to serve both masters is where people get. I don't want to say in trouble, but at least they understand that they're making a trade. I keep Todd on because I feel guilty. Okay. We at least understand that Todd is hurting your business, and you would rather hurt the business than have the conversation with Todd.
- [129:44]
A
Show me your priorities.
- [129:45]
B
Yeah, and we know the priorities. It's just. Are the priorities the priorities you want?
- [129:49]
A
What are you willing to sacrifice? Well, you either care more about Todd or more about not feeling guilty than you do about your business. Yeah. Show me your priorities.
- [129:59]
B
And we know them. We know the priorities. And so. Oh, behaviorist. Like you, man. Yeah, And I think that, like, your life is a consequence of your priorities. And the question is just whether or not many people want to want. They don't actually want.
- [130:16]
A
Yeah,
- [130:18]
B
they want to be willing to give up things in order to get stuff, but they don't actually give up things in order to get stuff.
- [130:26]
A
Above your intelligence, above your work ethic, you will be compensated in proportion to your risk. If you're afraid to take the risk, write down in excruciating detail what you're actually afraid of happening, step by step. What happens next when you fail, you'll often find it's not so bad when you spell it out. Fear exists in the vague, not the specific.
- [130:56]
B
So risk comes in a handful of flavors. One is what we know we will give up, that we hope we will get something back from that's bigger. There's also the we want something bigger, but we will pay a cost. So different ways of saying the same thing, like it's going to be lose something good, get something bad, are the things that risk presents for us. A different view on risk that I've been thinking a lot about is proportionality of risk. And at the most basic level, this is a lot of what investing really is, which is there is always risk, but is the risk priced appropriately? And Peter Thiel had this commentary around Elon where if he had just had one of his three companies succeed, it would have already been a crazy win, but somehow he got all three of them to become, I guess now multibillion trillion dollar plus companies. And he said he must know something about risk that all of us don't understand. And I think there's something incredibly powerful about studying the person who's accumulated the most wealthy in history, or at least in present day. And that man's understanding of risk is different. And it's probably a more accurate view of true risk rather than perceived risk. And he often talks about like, well, the downside of trying as hard as you can is basically nothing. If you're in the developed world, the likely that you starve to death is almost nothing. And there is free shelter if literally no one in your social construct would allow you to crash on a couch. And that assumes that during the day you are incapable of working in any way that generates money, which there are many ways to generate money that do not require tremendous skill, at least today. And so the downside is nothing. And so that is why the risk of going after whatever it is that you want is mispriced by the vast majority of people because they have this fear of the big thing that's good that's going to go away, or a big bad thing that's going to come as a result. But the big bad thing is nothing. But the big thing that's good that they miss out on is everything. And so the risk is almost always mispriced because our brains are wired to misprice it, because if you mess up once, you don't pass on your genes and you die. But it is in no way wired to maximize your potential and what you're capable of.
- [133:21]
A
This mismatch between ancient programming and the modern world is kind of hilarious. We've got a nervous system that was built to fight bears and now it's worried by group texts. It's true. It's true. And how do you think about.
- [133:36]
B
Let me add one more piece on that risk piece. I was talking to an entrepreneur a week or two ago, and she had grown her great grandmother's business from 4 million to 44 million in three years. It was like, awesome, super cool story. And it became obvious to her that her brand and needing to create more content was kind of the constraint of her going from call it 45 million to 200 million and beyond. And she said, okay, so do you think I should like hire an editor? And it was interesting. She's like, well, how much is that going to cost? And so the business is doing a million month of profit now. And what was interesting to me is that oftentimes we don't also recalibrate our appetite for risk as our exposure to opportunity expands. And so you right now are still operating from the $4 million business owner risk angle, where you were making a million dollars a year and one or two editors was 10 or 20% of your net income. When you're making $12 million in profit, we should be thinking about how do we make a two, three, four million dollars bet that we think is going to result in an extra 200 million or $100 million on top of that, which is a phenomenal return. And so, I mean, I open up the offers book with one of my top two quotes from Jeff Bezos. He talks about how if you have a 10% chance of 100x payoff, you should take that bet every time, knowing that you will be wrong nine times out of ten. The difficulty with that example contrasted with reality is that if you were at a casino and you had a 10% chance of 100x payoff, of course you should take that bet. But then just assume that the minimum bet is 10 years and you only have three hands to play. And that's the reality of life. That said, when we look at what that loss of that 10% when the 90% of the time that it fails isn't actually a loss, though you've accumulated
- [135:38]
A
a lot along the way.
- [135:39]
B
Yeah. And you've gained experience, you've gained lessons, you've gained skills, you've gained network, you've gained relationships, perspective. And so you only move forward by taking these shots on goal. And I think that if every risk was only seen as zero downside, only upside, and either I win or I learn, which we are not the first people to say that. But whatever version of that narrative you need in order to realize that life has given you an endless amount of scratch off tickets and you just have to cash them in, I think that more people would take bets and more people would win.
- [136:14]
A
It's way better to be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and wrong. You know, like I'm just going to go for it because at least if you're high conviction and wrong, you move sufficiently quickly to be able to update your system based on the results that you got. It's. Why indecisiveness again. And that inaction thing. Inaction has a cost. Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price. It does have a price. Yeah.
- [136:35]
B
And it's, and it's, and it's a. This is one of those labels that we're saying at the very beginning about shorthand. It's like inaction isn't even inaction. We are always taking action. It's action against your priorities versus action towards your priorities. Which of them will help you accomplish what you want.
- [136:50]
A
And when you think that presumably nobody wants to be less decisive, there's very few. I mean there's being rash, which I don't think is the same as being decisive. When I've met the threshold that is satisfactory or should be satisfactory in order for me to make this decision I make it is not the same as I make a decision before I have sufficient information in order to be able to make it.
- [137:10]
B
It's an information question, not a time question.
- [137:11]
A
Yeah, but when you think, don't practice what you don't want to become. And if you are practicing being indecisive couched in the wrapper of keeping optionality open, you're just practicing being indecisive over and over again. And if you think of your indecision as an investment in your future decisions, I. E. Making them harder, that actually makes indecision a really, a really, really horrible pitfall to go down.
- [137:43]
B
I remember one of the things that allowed me to take the bet to quit my job was. And people see me now but like I'm still very risk averse, believe it or not. And so I mean, remember I was a, you know, finish. I didn't have the like school failed me. What do I do? I had the opposite curse of options. I had done really well, all that kind of stuff. And the thing that got me was if not now, then when, Because I figured a future version of me that I was delaying this decision for would either have A wife to support or a wife and kids to support only gonna get hurt, right? And I was like, so if it's this hard for me now, how can I make the assumption that it's going to somehow be easier at some point in the future? And if I really say that I want this thing then, how can I not do it now when the chips are most stacked in my favor? And you said one other thing earlier that I. Oh, about. We have a desire for perfect information in order to make a perfect decision from a world that will give us neither. And so we have to be willing. So what separates a rash decision from a well informed decision? Well, taken to the natural extreme, a perfectly informed decision, the decision has often been made for you because the outcomes have already occurred. Which means that if you have perfect information, the opportunity has already gone away. And so we have to be willing to make some assumptions, we have to make some bets, which is why having a worldview or a good model of prediction makes you better at getting what you want. Because you can say, listen, I know this. I believe this based on my pattern of how I think the world works. And because of this fill and I think this is a good or decent bet. And a lot of that calculus is the what's my upside? What's my downside? If I'm wrong and if we know that the downside of being wrong is zero, then go for it.
- [139:42]
A
What's that? All loss is just psychological until death.
- [139:45]
B
Dude, that's Jocko. I saw that and I was like, fuck Jocko. Shout out. I love that quote. It angers me how good it is. So good.
- [139:55]
A
I was thinking about, it's been almost exactly a year since me and you sat down. A lot of the. This is seventh time you've been on maybe something like that. Is it really maybe? Yeah, sixth or seventh. Plus we did the one with me, you and Layla. And I think there's always an interesting progression. So one of the things that I've noticed, looking at the time capsule of the last year of your writing and what I've been thinking about too, is risk, uncertainty and decisiveness seem to be themes that are in there a lot. And I came across this Nabeel Qureshi quote that is maybe a little self serving, but I think it's really true about why drilling 20, 30 hours, 40 hours, however long me and you have spoken, why it. Why I think it's important and why I don't get bored of it. He says a cursed fact of the world is that the most important Life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others because they always sound like cliches. And there's a bit of me in the back of my mind that hears, it's not that deep, bro. You're overcomplicating it. You don't need to look at life with this level of resolution. This seems to be unnecessarily dissecting. This is majoring in the minors. This is taking too seriously things which don't matter in that sort of a way, paying too much attention. It's a kind of fragility of optimization, et cetera, et cetera. And the fact that lots of things that are important sound like stuff that you've heard before doesn't discount the fact that you need to hear it. Because if you know it that well, why the fuck are you still in the same place? If you're bored of hearing about how important cold, dark quiet is in order to prepare your bedroom for sleep, why do you sleep still suck? Why does your sleep still suck? If you're bored of hearing how it's important to integrate emotions, but there are times when you need to put them to one side, that they're information, not a master, why is it you still don't have a good relationship with your emotions? If you know this stuff, if it's so obvious, if this is the sort of thing that you should have been taught by your father or you should have learned in school, or you shouldn't have had to wait until you're in your 40s to understand, why is it you haven't mastered it? And the most important life lessons that you learn are the hardest to communicate to others because they always sound like cliches.
- [142:33]
B
We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. And so that means that the gap between what we have and what we want is typically not a lack of information, but a lack of execution. And so if it's a lack of execution, then it ladders up to what are the motivating operations that are either preventing me from doing it or that are insufficient to compel me. And so this is why I think Chris and I go into this very, very minute detail about, okay, you would just sleep on your friend's couch, and how bad is that? And trying to actually spell out that the downs, like, how do you put the picture? Like we were saying earlier with the waiting room or the hospital bed,
- [143:19]
A
it's
- [143:20]
B
trying to take three steps forward into the reality of what living through your downside would look like, so that you can realize that the downside is 10 times worse in your mind than it is in reality. And if it's 10 times worse in your mind than it is in reality, then it means that you can take actions in reality because the downside doesn't
- [143:35]
A
really exist and the excruciating detail is needed in order to be able to bring this imagination into reality. Oh, I can feel that. I imagine what it would be like to be on my friend's couch. I know it would be brown. It would be on the left hand side of the room. I would have a little thing on the floor that would be a mobile desk that I might work at.
- [143:50]
B
And sometimes it takes actually reaching out to a friend before you take a big jump and say, hey, if all this. I'm about to do something wild, if this went to shit, would I be able to crash at your place for like an extended period? I would be willing to do X, Y and Z. I don't think it's going to happen. But would you be willing to do it? Because you saying that you're willing to take me in is going to allow me to do that. I would say that if you actually have real friends, 10 out of 10 of them would be like, yeah, dude, go for it. Like, I got you. And I think having, like I had, there was a handful of people that I probably called every single night during the six months leading into me quitting my job where I basically rehashed the exact same decision a hundred times with them and rederived it.
- [144:33]
A
I think people would be surprised to hear that. I think people would be surprised to hear that Mr. Decisive seemingly would need to have that conversation. I also think it's cool to hear that story because it legitimates somebody's bravery in the face of uncertainty and repetition. I think a lot of the time we feel like we're a burden to our friends for asking them for advice about the same problem that we've come to with before. I've done it with you and like, hey man, I. Yeah, no, no, it's not new. Yeah, no, it's that. Yeah, it's the, it's the. It's the same thing again. I'm sorry, it's. Yeah, I need to say no, no new perspective. No, I need to say the. I need. Yeah, it's going to be. It's the conversation from last week, but. But now, again, is that cool? So the license, giving people the license to be boring in their learning and in their need for support from people like, I'm sick of moping about this situation, and I have a friend that's prepared to sit in it with me that feels really good
- [145:53]
B
to give more color to that, that period. Because one of the things that Layla and I were talking about was she has a desire to make successful people more relatable so that people who don't have successful people around them can feel like it is attainable. So I'm going to add a handful of colors to that little chapter and hopefully people will be okay with it. So in that time period, many people know this, but I got fired. And so, like, who would fire Hermozi, the hardworking maniac? Well, I just wasn't that good of an employee. And so I basically just read books all day instead of working. And I read most of the self help books that you've heard of. $100 million offers, $100 million leads. Those are the books. I'm kidding. I wasn't reading this. No, but I was reading, you know, and to be fair, I don't think any one of them. I'd say, like, I can, I can say a handful of them. Phrases in entire books stuck with me. One phrase I heard in a book, can't remember which one it was, was wantrepreneur. And the phrase disgusted me so much because it was like, oh, yeah, all those people who just want to be entrepreneurs. And it just said it flippantly, wasn't even decrying the term. It just said like, oh, yeah, this is how we define these people who are like, not there, but like business interested.
- [147:16]
A
The nonchalance is even more insulting.
- [147:18]
B
Exactly. And that's why I was like, I'm. That I am this disgusting thing. I don't want to be this. But that still wasn't enough to motivate. It was a negative operating. It was negative, but it still wasn't enough. I listened to Arnold's Ladder of Success speech that he gave. This is obviously 15, 16 years ago. It was this speech. I found it on YouTube and I listened to it every morning before I go to work. You cannot climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets. And I listen to that every morning. I, I read Relentless by Tim Grover. And it was basically the first book that I think gave me permission to use called the Dark side to get things done. And I'd be like, I would say, now, I don't necessarily operate 100% from that same perspective, but it was what I needed at the time. And I called a friend of mine, his name was Victor. He was considering quitting his job too. And so every night we basically just planned and schemed of how we're going to, our exit plan, of how we were going to. We just mentally masturbated. The idea of what freedom would be like if we actually left. And I would have this, I had to have an early Bluetooth thing, which is a piece of shit now. And I remember I had this cowhide carpet in my apartment that I got from ikea that the path that I would walk on while he and I would talk started getting treaded. So there's this line in the middle
- [148:38]
A
of, I've done that in my house
- [148:39]
B
where I would pace. And the, and so the things that. And I would have the lunch with my dad, the like, hey, I'm going to quit my job and do my own thing. I didn't have that lunch one time. I had that lunch many times. And each time he would reasonably talk me off the cliff and say, listen, this is the boring chapter. You're just going to do your few years and then you're going to go to business school. And like, this is the plan. And so it was very clear that I was following a path that was trod upon. And to be fair, my dad absolutely did what he believed was best. And I think his intentions are perfect. And so all of these things were happening with me for me during that period of time. And I just remember having read as many self help books as I could get my hands on. And then I looked around my room and apartment and realized that my life hadn't changed at all. And that was when I googled online and decided that I was going to start a business. I narrowed it down to three and then one guy got back to me who had a gym. And even then when I had my first conversation with him, I was like, I really want to start a gym. He's like, so you don't have a gym? I was like, no. He's like, okay, well basically you're going to need to do something before I can help you. And so you need to make a serious commitment, make a decision. So I thought about this for a while and then a few weeks later I texted him, I said like, I'm ready. And so I called him back up again. He's like, well, okay, great, so you have a lease. What's the, you know, what's the, you know? It's just like, oh, oh no, no, no, I don't have that. And he was, and he was disgusted and he was like, lose my number, dude. Like, and he was disgusted by how little I had done in that meantime. And so all of these things happened. It wasn't one of them. And so as much as I can say, I just read this one book and my life changed. Sometimes you have to hear it a hundred times before it either sinks in or there's enough negative or enough positive or both that it gets you over whatever perceived threshold of action that you have. And so it was only when all of those things happened and I came to the realization, and I also applied to business school because I was like, what do I do in the meantime? So I was doing four hours of GMAT problems every day because I had, I was still violent then so that I could ace the gmat. And then I got above Harvard's mid score. And then I was doing all the applications because it's something else that you can do that you can procrastinate with. And so I did all the applications into business school and one of the questions that came up was, how will a Harvard MBA or a Booth mba, I can't remember, help your short and long term goals? And I remember belaboring over this question for three days and I answered all the other questions and I was thinking about it and I was like, I don't think it is going to help my long term goals because I looked at the math of like, okay, it's going to cost me $120,000. This is at the time, and I won't be able to make money for two years, so I'm going to stop making money and it's going to cost me 120. And then the starting salary was 120 or like average starting salary post business school. And so I thought to myself, could I take two years, $120,000 and within that period of time believe that I could get to the point where I could make $10,000 a month, but I would own a business rather than having a job to then maybe someday own a business. And I believed that that bet felt reasonable. And so even then you're like, okay, so that's when he quit and did no. And so it was all of those things. And then finally the realization that it was never going to get easier. And so then the fear that I was never going to start the business that I said I wanted to someday start, the fact that I actually had an exploding offer from life, which is that it was only going to get harder and that I realized how hard it had been for me to that point to still not have made a decision. And it was the fear that I was never going to make it, which compelled me to make it. And that's what got me to pack all my shit, drive my car halfway across the country, and then, and only then, call everyone and tell them that I had left so they couldn't talk me out of it. And so if anyone is like, man, the so decisive Hormozi or whatever, like it took a Herculean effort to suspend a shitload of doubt and risk aversion. And also in terms of when I talk about this stuff with caring about what other people thought I cared so much about, other people thought that I knew that I cared so much about what other people thought that I wasn't even willing to hear them because I knew if I did hear them, they would talk me out of it.
- [153:06]
A
That's how fragile your conviction was, that one sentence from the wrong person moving you back in that past direction would have pulled you.
- [153:15]
B
I needed to physically create so much space that even if they had talked me out of it, it would still take me a day and a half to drive back. And so the reason, I think you read one of the quotes earlier, like, if you want to change your life, change your environment is so powerful, is that your environment as it currently stands right now, the combination of where you live, where your friends are, the routines that you have, the places you go, have created loops of behavior for you. And so the best way to change what you're doing is change the entire environment. There's the Vietnam War vets. They did this research study, you probably heard of it, but all these guys did heroin when they were in Vietnam. It was like 25%. It was a gigantic percentage. And then weirdly, when they came. I think Clear talks about this in his book. When they came back, only 10% of the heroin users relapsed into heroin only. I mean, but still, it's. It's small compared to heroin. That's yes. The success rate of, or the failure rate of rehab institutions, like 78%. So it had a 8x, you know, difference in, in, in relapse rate. But there wasn't even rehab that happened. The only thing that happened was that every single environmental cue was changed. And so if you are having trouble getting out of your current condition, then get out of your current condition. Move, go to a different city. Even if you can't move to a different city, Move across town, move 30 minutes away, train at a different gym,
- [154:41]
A
go to a different coffee shop to work.
- [154:42]
B
Yeah. Make different friends for the short period. And realistically, you probably won't make different friends, but just stop hanging out with the friends you got for period. And if you decide that once you've gone through that session, that series, that chapter, you still want to be friends, if they are really your friends, they will welcome you back with open arms. If they only were friends with that version of you, then that's not the version of you that you want to be. And that's not what you want to go back to anyways. And so that was one of the trades that you made to become who you wanted to be.
- [155:08]
A
It's crazy that we think we can change our thinking environment whilst keeping our external environment the exact same. And we're going to just continue to use. I don't know what type of effort we think it is that we're applying to our own brain whilst experiencing the same cues and stimulus, but hoping that our thinking is going to adapt.
- [155:30]
B
You have to change to change. And it sounds so like. Does that sound like a trite truism or whatever?
- [155:36]
A
Like cliche? Yeah.
- [155:38]
B
If nothing has changed, nothing will change. And so you have to be like. Something has to be the catalyst. And you were the only. Like, either you get in a car accident, your girlfriend breaks up with you, you can use the negative at least. Like if you are not happy with your life and then something bad happens to you, be grateful for it in the moment because it means that a change, a chaos variable, has entered the building. And that means that you have the ability for a short period of time before equilibrium gets re established, that you can change shit without the same consequences because all of your loops got muddled. And so those are the periods of time where you can go through tremendous change because you're like, well, fuck it. Everything that I thought to be true isn't, so what else did I think was false, but isn't, and then you can start moving towards it.
- [156:20]
A
Came across this line from Beauty of Sass. It is an unwritten rule of life that after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty, there is going to be a period where you achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. The only requirement is that you do not give up on yourself.
- [156:41]
B
Failure and success are on the same road. It's just that failure is an earlier exit.
- [156:50]
A
What's that one about? Whatever you do, don't be the guy who gives up at the exact moment when you should be fighting with everything you have. You'll make it through either way. But there's only one way you'll look back and be proud of yourself.
- [157:04]
B
This is the meta Frame of the story that we one day tell. Like we tell stories of what type of person we are all day long when we're confronted with different decisions. What type of person am I? And I would like to be known to myself as a fighter is that I'm willing to fight for what I want and for what I believe in. And I think that that is why I think I would want to have courage be the one thing that is transferred. And I think it's because I'm going to go back to that season because I think it's relevant. Like, I. I was a really good student at Vanderbilt. I was vice president of the powerlifting team. I was president of the fraternity that I was in. I had a 3.8, I think GPA. And I graduated in three years. But I was so afraid of not getting a job that I took the first job that I was offered from the first person, which was an introduction my dad had from a patient of his. And to be clear, some people were like, oh, it was an epitaph. It wasn't a great job. But I was so afraid that I would be jobless that I just took that job. And I only say this to say that, like, You can change your stars. I was not the type of person who does the types of things that I do now then. And. I retell those stories. I don't talk about them as much because honestly, I blocked most of them out because I was in so much pain during that period of my life. And the reason that I'm willing to keep making content and write books and all that stuff is because I know that there is another person who is going through a similar chapter and worried if they are sane or if it is only them and it is not. And so, like, you can't compare yourself to people who are different chapters. You just have to believe that you can change incrementally, one behavior at a time over an extended period of time. And that those changes will aggregate, that they will stack up. Because, like, we don't know what the last chapter is going to look like. We only know what the next page does and we get to write that today. And like I was, I was so driven by fear. I was so. I was so afraid of everything during that chapter. And so it was like other people's opinions. What if I fail? What if this doesn't work out? What if people make fun of me? Like, I had all this, the sphere around it and the emotionality that I have now towards it is because of the. A mix of Pity and pride that I have for that young man, the young Alex that was going through that, because I'm proud that I made it through that. But I also pity the amount of pain that I was going through to make that jump. And so I don't know who's listening, but, like, fear can be useful if you know that you were driven by fear to some degree. And in some ways it's almost shameful to say it because it was the reason that the word that I never want to have used described for me is cowardly is because I behaved like a coward. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of my dad's judgment. I was afraid of everything. And the flip that made it for me was just using that fear against something bigger was that I was more afraid of looking back on my life and never having tried. And I knew that that would be so empty and I would be so filled with regret and that I knew that I would beat myself up over it every single day as I got older, that that existence was more terrifying to me than the practical consequences of me taking a step where I would fail. And it sounds. It's very easy for me to say now to you or anyone who's listening, like, of course the downside's not that big. You'll sleep on a friend's couch, whatever. But at the time, for me, it was everything. And it was all of the status that I had spent all of my time trying to accumulate. I was president of this, president of that. I'd done all the good grades, I had a good job on paper. And so whatever fuel you have, whether it's anger, whether it's shame, whether it's fear, even if you have all of them, if you know you have them, try and put them behind you to get you to run away from it. If it's right now, it's in front of you and it's preventing you from taking the next step. And so it's like, if you can just put it behind you so that you're running away from this future, it's like run harder away from the future that your current path is taking you towards, that you're afraid of, than the short term path that running away from it is going to run you into. It's like you either have to be, you know, it's like, I'm taking some liberties here. It's like you can either fear the whip of the person behind you or the enemy in front of you. And the direction you face is the one that you fear the least. And so if you know that there's an enemy in front of you and a whip behind you, it's like you just need to, in the short term, increase the pain of the one that you want least.
- [162:57]
A
Have you seen Succession the first season?
- [163:01]
B
Okay, so I don't watch it because it's too real for me. So it keeps me up and I get too amped when I watch it because I like it. But I'm like, I can't do this before bed. I need vampires.
- [163:16]
A
In the final season, Tom is having a conversation with his wife and he says, I wonder if the pain that I would feel without you would be less than the pain that I feel by being with you. And that seems to be what you're talking about here.
- [163:40]
B
It's 100% that when you talk in
- [163:43]
A
retrospect about that period about what that guy went through, doesn't sound like pity to me. It sounds like grief. Sounds much closer to grief. Like somebody nearly died or did die or suffered a lot and didn't deserve it.
- [163:55]
B
Well, I think that person totally died. Like the. I don't want to say the man I was, the boy that I was totally died. And I think, I mean, the hardest, the hardest loss that I had to take was the, the boy that I was in my father's eyes that was living up to his expectations, which is all that I wanted. And so sacrificing that and it took years. And my dad and I are cool, we're great. But like for. For a season, that's what I. I had to sacrifice that person. And it was all I had wanted, was to make him happy. And so. And again, no fault of his own, but that is all I wanted. And so it's like I had a tree. I had achieved the dreams that I had as a younger man. And in so doing, it had become my nightmare.
- [164:38]
A
And
- [164:40]
B
that's why the third point that you read about, no one is coming to save you. Everything is your fault. And you have to sacrifice who you are for who you want to become. I think is so real for me, is that you do. And someone's dreams will die. It is yours or theirs. So you just want to make sure that the person who is dreaming for you has bigger dreams for life than you do. And sometimes well intentioned people, because they want to be practical and they want to be realistic, have smaller dreams for you than you do. And if they have smaller dreams, then you should listen to you and not them.
- [165:18]
A
Obviously your dad built a story about what Success looks like.
- [165:22]
B
Yeah.
- [165:23]
A
And you rejected it slowly but loudly. Now that you're about to have a child, what story are you going to
- [165:31]
B
tell that kid of that period or.
- [165:35]
A
No, this story about what success looks like. How certain are you that the story that you tell your son isn't just a new version of the same cage that you had to break out of?
- [165:49]
B
It's something that I think a lot about. How do I, you know the child is going to be born into? By the time he has memory, he will be the son of a billionaire. That's a lot. And in some ways I don't wish that on anyone. And yet I'm bringing someone into that which has its own thought circles I won't get into. But I am going to focus him to the degree that I can influence his behavior
- [166:27]
A
on.
- [166:31]
B
Being courageous, on leaving nothing on the field. I will care endlessly about his effort and very little about the outcomes, assuming he controlled the controllables. And I will hold an incredibly high standard. And it is because I respect him and believe in him and that he has the potential to achieve it. And what's been very difficult for me because I haven't fully defined this, and maybe I will by the time he's born or by the time he's a little older, is. I've had trouble trying to define what a successful parent looks like and what a successful child look like. Because if we define a successful parent by the output of the child, there's a whole hell of a lot of people that have had pretty tough parents that have turned out really good. But then does that mean that the parents are good or bad? I don't know. And the successful child is the successful child that he is happy? I tend to reject that definition. Overall, is it that he has purpose? I'd probably prefer that because I think happiness can be fleeting. Purpose tends to stick a little longer. But at the very end of the day, I think character, which I still just define as just huge sets of behaviors. I want him to be brave and I want him to try his ass off. And if he does that, well, no matter what, he will be good enough for me. But I will just more so make the commitment that given all the resources that I have, both mental and. And financial, I'll do the best I can with what I have to give him the maximum possibility of achieving what he wants.
- [168:23]
A
Have you been thinking about life differently for yourself with the prospect of a kid on the way?
- [168:27]
B
Not really. That might surprise some people. But first off, I'm not pregnant and so I don't believe in the we are pregnant. I do not have a baby inside of my stomach. And so, no, my behavior hasn't really changed because my conditions haven't really changed. I suspect that when the child comes, I will change accordingly. And I think that this is one of those, I would say, Internet strawmans of like, well, just wait till the kid comes. I'll be like, yeah, and then I'll change. There'll be a new condition, so I'll change to that. It's just like, well, what if you change your mind? Then I'll change what I'm doing. It's just like, this has worked for me so far. And I'll probably take the things that continue to work and I'll probably adjust others. I don't think that having children in any way is going to get in the way of the goals that I have. And my proof points are that the wealthiest, most successful business people in the world almost all have children. And so I see that as pretty strong proof that it's not something that prevents you from achieving business success. And to be clear, business success for me is more so I want to leave everything I have on the field. And if that results in growth, then great. If I have many seasons of hardship ahead of me, which I'm sure I do, and moments of plateaus and stagnation and things like that, until I figure out whatever the next thing I have to do is or the next person I need to become or sets of behavior that I have to do, then that's the game. That's what I signed up for, that I chose this. But I also know exactly what I chose. This, what I traded this for, which was the young boy and that life. And I would happily make that trade 100 times over. And so I in no way say that my life is perfect or anything, far from it. But it is the life I chose and I am okay with that.
- [170:06]
A
You talked about changing your environment, often changing your desired outcomes. Going to be about as big of an environment change as you've had in a decade. More.
- [170:17]
B
Yeah, I'm sure it will change me. And I.
- [170:24]
A
What would be the most surprising outcome?
- [170:28]
B
I think the most surprising outcome is that I don't change at all.
- [170:31]
A
Right. I actually think that's the second most surprising outcome.
- [170:36]
B
I'll say the outcome that might surprise other people the most is that I think there's a very real chance of a reality where, like, I work significantly less than I do now because I prefer hanging out with the kid than I do working and if I do, then that's what I will do.
- [170:50]
A
Is that a pathway of satisfaction that hasn't necessarily been front and center of your life for quite a while?
- [171:00]
B
Basically being willing to enjoy a moment for the sake of the moment and nothing else.
- [171:05]
A
It's a less instrumental view. A lot of your life and mine as well is very instrumental. I will do it because I will do it because not I will do it.
- [171:14]
B
Yeah. Also because I enjoy it.
- [171:17]
A
But there's only one more step.
- [171:18]
B
Yeah. Yes. And I think it's just because it's in accordance with values that I have. Like I want to be a good father. And so I deem that a label that I would like to live up to. And so I'm willing to make some trades. And I think that's. I will, I will be making trades in the future and I'll try to make the trades the best I can.
- [171:37]
A
Isn't it interesting that after a decade and a half, a couple of decades of contorting yourself into this very specific type of engine or a sort of monster that sucks in challenges and spits out completed tasks that to most people holidays sound like leisure. But to a certain category of people, holidays feel like work because they need to let go of the routine and pathway that they've sort of constructed themselves into that there might be a lot of work required in order to be able to co sleep with your kid at three in the afternoon with it laying on your chest, reading fiction or not just lying staring at the ceiling thinking this is cool, huh? That should be naturally, biologically, hormonally, energy expenditurely relatively seamless to do. And yet there's potentially going to be a ton of areas for growth in you there.
- [172:38]
B
I'm sure, I'm sure that it will be a new challenge and I will dedicate my effort to succeeding at it the same way I do other challenges. And I'm sure I will be uncomfortable as I have been with other challenges. And I will try and meet that discomfort with action and let myself get used to a new reality. And I will do my best to enjoy it, every second of it. Because I mean, I do look a lot at older guys who have kids and one of the really fun ones to look at is people who have second families. So they kind of like do first, run first wife, kids, whatever, and then
- [173:20]
A
take the first business. How does he run the second one?
- [173:23]
B
Yeah, kind of. And so what's interesting is I've tried to observe what those guys do differently. And almost to a man they'll say I should have spent more time with the kid. And like. And it's one thing to say that you should have. It's something very different to see them do it the second time around. Now there's the obvious of like. Well, easy for them to say because they built the empire the first time and so they get a do over
- [173:49]
A
that was collateral damage in getting to the point where they're sufficiently satisfied.
- [173:53]
B
I thankfully, knock on wood, whatever you want to do. I built what I needed to build to feel like I had a sufficient platform to provide for a child in all manners. Both like my time flexibility. I work because I. But I have the flexibility and we cannot work whatever and the kid can have whatever.
- [174:14]
A
So the side effect of you working whether you chose to or not is a degree of material comfort and ticking off of the accomplishments that closes the loops around them.
- [174:23]
B
I think that if I can live this season trying to steal as many chapters from people's second go, I'll see that as a good idea and I'll basically use that off of modeling. Like I'm just looking at what good things seems to happen for them. I'm going to try, try that and I'll adjust as we go, but I'll probably use that as my base case baseline. And then, and then I'll figure it. We'll figure it out together, you know.
- [174:52]
A
Well, I have a little. Have a little something.
- [174:59]
B
Wisdom pending. Loading. Loading. Competence.
- [175:03]
A
Yeah, it's very important that the baby's got good merch.
- [175:06]
B
So it's all about the merch.
- [175:08]
A
Yeah, that's right.
- [175:09]
B
Well, this, this spot on him is, is we have a retail price for the ad space. So I'll, I'll let you know. And then.
- [175:15]
A
Okay, that's cool. I imagine I assumed it would just be acquisition.com but front end of the funnel, front side of the baby.
- [175:23]
B
Yeah, he'll be like a NASCAR driver with all the sponsors, everything everywhere.
- [175:28]
A
If you're going to chase a dream, go all in. If you're going to love, love fiercely. If you're going to walk away, never look back. So many people never even give themselves a fighting chance because they never fully commit. If you're going to go, go all the way. No half measures.
- [175:46]
B
I was about to say no half measures. I was like, no, no. Who wrote that? You think so many solutions are, are fully committed to and as a result they don't actually work. And then we think, oh, this, this path was wrong. This business was a bad idea. I shouldn't have started making Content when it never had a fighting chance because we didn't even do close to the amount of volume that would be sufficient for it to work and not for nearly the duration that would be required. And so it's like people don't do enough for long enough to get anything to work. And I think the biggest issue there is because we expect our dreams to be accomplished faster and easier and risk free when it will be hard, take a long time, and we will sacrifice more things than we expected. And I think one of the hardest parts about accomplishing big things is that the cost is unknown. So even though it is more than you, you know you're giving up some stuff, but you still don't even know everything that you're going to give up.
- [176:39]
A
It's like running a race and not knowing how long it is.
- [176:41]
B
100%.
- [176:42]
A
I don't know where the finish line is. Yeah.
- [176:44]
B
And what's fascinating about that is that if you know where the finish line is, you can usually handle just about anything. It's the easiest.
- [176:50]
A
That's why Uber works. Yeah, that's the main reason. Yeah. You can order a cab from anywhere and you don't need to work out the local taxi number and stuff. The main reason why it works is you know how far away the car is. I know how long this wait is. Remember in the before times, just ring a cab and it would just arrive at some point.
- [177:07]
B
Yeah. I think Rory Sutherland had the thing about the. I think the Chunnel, this is your people's thing. But you could see that people complained about how long it took and they could either build another Chunnel, which would cost billions of dollars, or they could do what they did, which was just tell you how long you had to wait. And it like solved all the concerns.
- [177:27]
A
It was Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5. If anyone's ever taken a connecting flight inside of Terminal 5, it's mad how many times I've done that. And it's always the same fucking escalator. I don't know whether it's fly the same routes or if that's just the one funnel to go up through internal security for the second time to briefly enter England before you then fly back out without actually being able to leave. And people were complaining about the fact that it was taking too long to get through security. And classic engineer problem, they decided, we're going to get new detectors and we're going to speed up the conveyor belt and we're going to have an S shaped queuing system which will spread people out into More fingers so that the security checking people can get them through. And more expeditious. Just millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in reoperating costs. And Rory and his team were like, let's. There might be, there might be a cheaper solution. And they fixed it by just putting wait time posters 15 minutes from here, 20 minutes from here, 25 minutes from here. And the wait time was always five minutes longer than the amount of time it took to get moving fast. But it's moving. Yeah, dude, they said it was going to be 25. We got in 17. We got a bit of a bonus.
- [178:38]
B
Get some good time.
- [178:39]
A
Yeah, dude, that's why, that's why his book's called Alchemy. Right? Behavioral science applied well, is kind of like magic. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, the no half measures thing, dude, like so much of the pain that people feel when it comes to decisions is in the indecision even in making the decision. It's the uncertainty when they do it. And this is what common optionality focused advice is. Well, well, if the decision's reversible, then it doesn't really matter so much. But you should treat reversible decisions still as if they're irreversible. And this is Brian David Epstein's new work, which is people are much happier with irreversible decisions than with reversible ones. For instance, if every jean store that you went into did not allow returns or exchanges, you would be happier with your genes even if you wanted to exchange them or return them.
- [179:41]
B
It's like the kid store. You can't return the kid. So most people are very happy with their kids. This is just like you can't. Yeah, I mean you can't really go back. And so it makes it's way less cognitive effort to justify and rationalize that it was a good idea.
- [179:56]
A
So I am an investor and a huge advocate of embryo selection through IVF and Herasite, which is the company in the world that's best for this. Have just an endless list of philosophical justifications, medical justifications, biological justifications, humanitarian. Humanitarian justifications. And I think that if you agree that trying to avoid disease is good, it scales all the way up to trying to increase robustness, which is pretty much any trait that you care to care about. The thing that I'm still yet to hear a compelling case in argument against is buyer's remorse. Because if you have chosen this particular embryo out of a list of 10, because this one had the particular diagnostic criteria and dashboard that you like to look up. Now the thing that's weird is this was already happening by doctors because they look through the scope of the microscope and they go, that one looks healthy round, that one's. It's A, B, C. Right. You don't want the C's. B's. Probably not. You've got three A's, two A's in there. Let's try and implant this one. Doesn't tell. Take one, whatever. So this was already being done and eyeballed by the doctor, but even that wasn't your decision. So you can maybe be angry at the doctor, but it's like, hey, look, we just took the advice of a professional here. We decided to do the thing that is the one element that I wonder whether, when this becomes more widespread, whether we're going to see just a little tweak.
- [181:24]
B
I don't think so.
- [181:25]
A
Okay.
- [181:26]
B
Just because I don't think the, like. Because it, I think it would be more akin to you go to the gene store and they show you maybe like a thread on a thing and maybe a die. And then. But the genes that you get, you still can't return. And so it's so far from the final product. If you had six kids and you could only pick one and they were fully you and you could talk to them and then you're like, but you can't go back. I think people might have more buyers
- [181:53]
A
because you would have seen what the other options.
- [181:54]
B
Yeah, with the full. With the full. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [181:57]
A
Don't stop trying because it didn't work. It never works the first time. It takes everyone a different amount of time to realize everyone is just thinking about themselves. No one's watching. And you should have just done whatever the fuck you wanted to all along.
- [182:13]
B
Yeah. Look at old people. Like, old people have it figured out. They're. I mean, my, I did. So my, my debt, my, my, My father's father died before I was able to function. But my dad had called a father figure who functioned as a grandfather on that side. And one of the things that I always admired about him was that he literally didn't have time for this. He's like, I've got like 10 years. I literally don't have time for this. And so his give a fuck level was so low that he just, he walked through life unscathed by the worries that weigh down most people. Like, oh, I wonder if I said that too rudely to that person. He was already on to the next thing. He's like, I literally don't have time.
- [183:06]
A
That's. The youth is wasted on the young thing.
- [183:09]
B
Yeah. But it's one of those like you so funny you brought that up. I don't know if youth is wasted on the young. I think you just have call it peak cognition and health state and you don't know anything besides like nothing hurts and everything works. And then you just have a. A slow degradation of everything works and nothing hurts until. And then at the very end you just.
- [183:36]
A
Nothing works and everything.
- [183:37]
B
Yeah. And everything hurts. Yeah. And I think that's just it.
- [183:45]
A
There's definitely a unique value in the future is long and broad that has a quality all of its own that is only available to people that are young. That is not nothing. And it does not just exist inside of your head. You're able to make a materially different type of plan when there is a long amount of time in front of you than when there is a short amount of time in front of you.
- [184:13]
B
Assuming you don't die or something else happens, of course.
- [184:16]
A
Or the probability distribution of you being able to fulfill these plans is different. And this is Bill Perkins thing about it's not memory dividend but you can only do certain things at certain periods of life.
- [184:27]
B
A really great concept.
- [184:29]
A
Yeah. That going downhill skiing at 80 is unlikely with your knees. I think he told me he's 50s and he said he got offered the opportunity to go wake boarding, wake surfs a lot. We got the opportunity to go wakeboarding a year ago, a couple of years ago. And he didn't want to go. He's tired or something. And then he realized, thought this is probably one of the last times I'm ever going to be able to go wakeboarding. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to do this again. And he did. And that very well might be it. There are certain things that you can only do at certain times. And I think what we're trying to do, and it's interesting about that cliche line, unteachable lessons. We choose to learn the hard lessons the hard way. And what we're all trying to do is get as many cliches into our experience in order to be able to skip over the most well known pitfalls of the ages ourselves. Like we're trying. We know that it's coming. We know it's going to happen. For some reason we refuse to learn by the doing of others. We have to choose. We decide to do it ourselves. We're trying to pick up, we're trying to imbibe the most commonly held wisdom that is least absorbed by everybody. Money Won't make you happy. Fame won't fix your self worth. You don't love that hot girl. She's just pretty and difficult to get. You should see your parents more. Nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it. All your worries were a waste of time. We're just trying to. The mountain of evidence and exposure is greatest and our ability to. It's like a some sort of macronutrient which is unbelievably pervasive and unbelievably hard to absorb. You can ingest tons and tons of it, but for some reason. And what we're trying to do is find the enzyme or the particular way to cook this thing so that we are able to finally absorb it. But yeah, it takes everyone a different amount of time to realize everyone is just thinking about themselves. No one was watching and you should have just done whatever the fuck you wanted to all along like that. Is every old person ever telling you that it's just a case of okay, how quickly can I believe that the people, all of the old people are right? Because it's one of two things. It's true. Either all old people have arrived at a similar sort of insight, which is that one, or they've all been inducted into some sort of psyop cult to lie to younger people about the same coordinated false flag in order to get them to do something. I don't know.
- [187:18]
B
I think so. Each of the isms that you just said to me is a clear behavior loop where there is a super strong short term reinforcer and a very long term one. And so almost all of those are things that you would opt for in the short term. And so until you have a strong thing that tells you that that is wrong, the other magnet is just too strong to resist for the vast majority of people. And I would also imagine that the older folks have a much closer proximity to death, which, I mean, when you see one or two people die, it can affect you. When you see a lot of people die, and the good ones and the bad ones and the in betweens, all of a sudden you're like wait. Because I think when you go through death or someone close to you dying, I think one of the most jarring pieces of death is how quickly everyone else moves on and how everyone just keeps operating as though that person never existed. And of course there's the like, I always remember XYZ person and of course that's fine, but the world moves on. And I think when you see that happen at times, unless you are completely delusional, you assume that it will move on from you. And then I think what it does is it creates this gigantic pill of humility that I think older people have. Not all older people, of course, there's often off oddballs but like I think by and large old people are significantly less competitive. There's less ego, I would say as a, as a class they're more like, that's a young man's game. Like I don't, I don't want to. Basically they just choose not to play at a lot of the status games and things like that because they've just seen people with the best status and the worst status. They all die the same and everyone moves on just the same. And so I think they, they shift more to more being present because also they could die soon too.
- [189:02]
A
I think that's one of the reasons why seeing somebody who is old playing a game that they should have transcended gives us a sort of a sense of like we wince a bit.
- [189:12]
B
It's like cringe almost.
- [189:13]
A
The businessman who is in his 60s, still attending every high powered conference who already has done the exit as many times as is needed trying to win the validation of the same group of people who have cycled through a bunch. He never exits. It's like being stuck on the level of a video game whose boss you've defeated and just going back and running it back again because maybe this time it would be different.
- [189:37]
B
Yeah, I think Arthur Brooks talks about this with From Strength to Strength in that book or the second. Everyone has to make this leap from first level of fluid intelligence, high energy, high work ethic to at some point you make the second jump and some people don't. And then it just becomes this curmudgeons, these very miserable older people and he's like, you have to make this leap where you switch the way you work.
- [189:58]
A
You're not. An old person is not going to beat a young person at being young.
- [190:01]
B
Right. And that's where people. And that's where I think some of that cringeness and it happens on both sexes, men and women. The six year old woman who's trying to pretend like she's 20, it's like it's.
- [190:11]
A
Yep. Yeah, there's something there too. If you're nervous, do more. It's hard to be nervous when you've practiced the same thing a thousand times in a row. When in doubt, stack reps. Anything you start you will suck at. It will be embarrassing, but you will survive. Then you will Realize that looking like a fool lasts a moment. Being one that never started lasts a lifetime.
- [190:32]
B
I think people wildly underestimate the value of accumulating significant enough volume that it's no longer something that you have a reaction to, so you desensitize yourself to it. And so, like, for example, exposure therapy. And so if you give a speech and you're nervous about the speech, if you do it enough times that you are bored of doing it, that you are sick of the presentation, you're probably ready. And so I.
- [190:58]
A
How many times did you do the Buck launch?
- [191:01]
B
Over a hundred. Easily. Easily over a hundred. It was a lot, but by the time that it happened, I was like, I know what the next slide. Like, I had words on the slides, but I knew what the slide was going to say because my words started them before the words appeared on the slide. And that has just become my litmus test because, like I said earlier, I definitely cared a lot about what people thought. And so you can do the very hard work of not caring what people think, or you can do so much work that there's nothing left to control. If you've controlled the controllables, then I think, at least for me personally, my anxiety levels around performance and things like that, that go down to essentially zero, because it's like, I have done this before and before I did both launches, because I've had them. I've done two big ones now. The first one that I did, I did at a venue. And the woman who like kind of ran the whole thing, she's like. She had people going on stages and all the time, and she said something right before I got on stage. She said, you were the most calm out of any person that I have seen. And I just remember looking at her in the moment and I was like, I have done this before. And I said it a little bit violently, but I was just like, this is not my first time doing this. Like, I will do exactly what I did the last 20 fucking times I did this. And that is all I will come. I will do my job. And I just. That's why I'm a big fan of the Patriots under Belichick. Like, do your job. Like, you cannot control everything. Do the things you can control. And it just. It takes so much of the anxiety and the second loops of thinking and third order consequences that you're worried about out of your mind, because that is it. And so if you. If there's a lot of stakes, do so much volume that it would be unreasonable that you fail. And then at that point, if you do fail, you will not blame yourself because you're like, I did my part and that's okay. And next time I'll try and control the things that are outside.
- [192:55]
A
And the judgment of other people becomes less scary because your likelihood of failure becomes lower overall and less culpable to you. Yeah, in
- [193:07]
B
admission, people think after they fail, they think to themselves, like, oh, I should have done this differently, I should have done that differently. It's like, well, think about what you're going to say when you fail and then do that before you fail. And you probably won't fail.
- [193:20]
A
That's why I think people feel so aggrieved when something happens that was out of their control when they'd done everything. Because it is going to suck if there is a lightning strike in Vegas and you go, for fuck's sake, dude, I worked so hard. I worked so hard. Everything was done. Yes, it's not your fault, but there's a. It's not that frustration won't come and that you won't be agitated at it. It's a different flavor and it's certainly better than blaming yourself. But it's like, I think about, you know, botched pediatric surgery, something like that. You know, you've got the kid that had been in the traffic accident to the hospital on time, but that surgeon that particular day just wasn't paying the right amount of attention or whatever happened. And then there's, you know, there's some bad outcome. Fuck. Like, we did everything. We did everything and we did everything is reassuring, but there is a type of lack of control that comes along with that, that must be also very difficult to deal with. The same for business launches and everything else.
- [194:31]
B
So two fun things there. So one, people don't know this, but the day before the launch, the last one I had, someone filed a tro, which is a temporary restraining order, to try and prevent me from launching the book. Let's just say an adversary. And the hearing for whether I could do the book Launch was at 4 o' clock on Friday for a launch that I'd spent $10 million on and almost two years of my life, plus the other books leading up to this. Right. And so at 4 o' clock, there was going to be a decision. Obviously it was dismissed, but, like, there was a world where I was not going to be able. There's a parallel universe where I wasn't going to be able to launch the book.
- [195:13]
A
What time did you launch the book?
- [195:14]
B
9am Saturday.
- [195:16]
A
Right.
- [195:18]
B
Tight.
- [195:19]
A
Did you have to attend the hearing?
- [195:20]
B
No, I have my counsel do it. But what was interesting is that when they told me that it was dismissed in the weird one or whatever, my honest reaction was like, darn, it would have been a sicker story, I swear to God. Because I already was like, this book is so good, people want to make it illegal. The marketing would have written itself. But anyways, I say that, say one is, I'm a big believer. From a marketer's perspective, you should never waste a crisis. And that means that there's always a story to tell, and you're the best person to too. The second one is that especially with a kid coming, I call them, like getting kicked in the nuts type problems, which is if toddler wakes up and then decides to, you know, if I. Let's say I had something that was super valuable and very fragile, finds it and then destroys it. And it's, you know, a year and a half. You know, year and a half old or two years old, in that moment, there is nothing that I can. I can't. There's no screaming. There's no punishing it doesn't comprehend what's going on. All I would do is condition it to hate me if I were to punish it in that moment. And so I just have to suffer. There's nothing to do there. You just suffer. And you can try and avoid it and put it elevated. So, of course, control the control ball. But let's assume that you did that and it still happened. But I think there's a certain amount of peace knowing that you did what you could and shit happens. There's just nothing you can do. There's just nothing you can do. And I think in some ways that's very freeing. Like, shit happens to everybody.
- [196:56]
A
It's interesting how I think about this when I watch people perform, especially people that have become very familiar with their craft. So people leak out who they are in the breadths in between the things that they're doing. Hmm. Somebody's character is not revealed with how they pick you up on the first date, but it's how they treat the waiter, whether or not they hold the door open for somebody else who goes in. And I think about this when I see performers on stage, watching a band this year and seeing the drummer who is playing and his stick breaks. And while he's playing the particular beat, he just seamlessly switches this hand, reaches behind him, picks up another one, twirls it twice, and then gets back to it. That is something that you have done 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 times. It's got nothing to do with the actual role of playing the drums, not the skill or the talent of playing the drums, but it's the breath in between what he does. And I think about the same here with. It's easy for anybody to look composed when things are going well or even when things are going neutral, but it's very exposing when things go poorly about their character. It's the breath in between the big thing. It's you going well. What I'm here to do is give the presentation for the book. Okay, well, how do you deal with a TRO the night before?
- [198:20]
B
Right.
- [198:21]
A
That's the reach behind. Can I keep going?
- [198:24]
B
I see it as I actually. So to. To. And this is not to pop the bubble of romanticism around it, because I do think that's really elegant. It's just how you behave on different conditions. And so if we see personality as how you behave in the aggregate conditions, it means that you can behave under perfect conditions and you can't behave under imperfect conditions, which means that you need to practice behaving in imperfect conditions so that you can behave the same way. And so, again, part of the reason I think of having so much practice being basically being a proxy for the preparation is that you will have been exposed to so many different conditions that none of them.
- [198:55]
A
That's what happens when the clicker stops working.
- [198:57]
B
Exactly. And I had that happen during one of them. One of my practice, I had two. The two times I had the clicker stop working. So I was like, oh, am I gonna do that? Like, it didn't happen when we were live. One of the issues had it have happened.
- [199:06]
A
You've already run that, right?
- [199:07]
B
We figured that out. I had another run where I had the case of the book stuff, and then it all fell over. I had. I had. I had one where, like, I put it, they were backwards. They were like, upside down or whatever. So, like on the camera.
- [199:20]
A
Tell me about that.
- [199:21]
B
So there's. There's. There's all these different permutations that, like, it's like you can decrease the likelihood of failure if you try and get all the failures out before you actually. Before it counts. And I think that's, like. At least for me, how I approach performance is how do I get all the failures out of the way so that I have the highest likelihood of succeeding when the time that matters counts.
- [199:40]
A
I wonder if Elon intended to do that with the cybertruck. How many times have you tried to throw that steel ball at the window of a cybertruck presumably not. None. Yeah, presumably it's happened before. You just get a little bit overexcited with too much adrenaline and launch it with too heavy of an arm. You'd be surprised how far you can get by only knowing what you want and not accepting anything else until you get it.
- [200:04]
B
So we've talked about commitment and decisions a lot. I find it interesting. Decisions, the root of that, from Latin, is decidere, which is to cut off. And commitment is the elimination of alternatives. And so they're almost like cousin words in terms of their meaning. But by definition, if you are the most focused person in the world, then you would have nothing but the one thing that you focus on. If you're the most focused reader in the world, you would only read. You would not drink, you would not sleep, you would not eat. You'd be the most focused reader in the world. Anything that is not reading is making you less focused. And so if you know what you want, which I think is for many people, more difficult because it's not knowing what they want, it's deciding all the things they're willing to give up in order to get what they want want. Because what you want is what you're willing to sacrifice for. Right? And so if we want multiple things, which one of the things that we still want, are we willing to sacrifice for the one that we want more? And I think if you get clear on the thing that you're willing to sacrifice other things for, that you're willing to put all those things on the altar to sacrifice for the one thing. Life gets to our point earlier about simplicity, much easier because you have a singular lens to make all decisions through. Kobe was notorious for like, does this make me a better basketball player? That was it. Every decision was filtered through that lens. And so it makes decision making incredibly easy. And so the amount of mental bandwidth that you get back is all of it. But the hard part for more people is making the decision that this is what they want. Not once you made the decision following through.
- [201:33]
A
Yeah, it's the elimination of alternatives, not the continued commitment to the thing, which is none of the alternatives.
- [201:39]
B
We talk like there's tons of stuff on productivity for, like, switching costs being, you know, horrendous. But I think that what is not talked about enough is basically the cost of switching desires, like you're switching wants, and the amount of time and effort that gets wasted in the loops of making the decision and then yearning for the cost of that decision that you already said was worth it. So one of the things that's been really helpful for me for big life decisions when I have, I would say, conflicting priorities, like multiple things that I want to. Is when I make the call, I'll usually write out a document that explains all of the reasoning in its totality so that I don't. So, one, if I have this moment of doubt again, I revisit it, and then I read it again, and then it basically closes the loop almost instantly. And so rather than have these endless thought loops, I'll have one or two, I'll reread it, and then it kind of goes away. And this is especially on the relational side. If you. Let's say you had a breakup or something like that, and you're like, or maybe you were the one who did the breakup, and you know you could get them back, but you don't know if it was the right decision. Blah, blah, blah. Like, writing out every reason that you did it because you forget. And this is the whole point about punishment fades and reward sticks, is that in the moment of pain after she comes back and she's crazy, you have to remind yourself of all the shit, of all the things that you know you will forget. So it's almost like you're writing a warning letter to your future self of like. Like, don't forget about this. Remember the time she keyed your car? She did it again, Right? Like, you have to put all those things down so that when you're in that moment of nostalgia, looking back, you know what? Those were the good old days. You know, she wasn't so bad. Maybe I was being a little bit unreasonable. You can read again. You're like, oh, my God, I can't believe. Thank God I made that call. But that way you don't actually have to then waste the next six months relearning the same mistake again. Because you already documented in an artifact
- [203:24]
A
that's called borrowed authority, exercises borrowed authority, but instead of borrowing it from someone else, you're borrowing it from a past version of you.
- [203:31]
B
Yeah, I like that.
- [203:32]
A
Yeah. The fading affect bias thing is pretty fascinating. Adam Mastroianni says that tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing that exists as a formula in human psychology. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. Some stuff that was kind of horrendous in the past over a long enough time horizon becomes neutral or hilarious. And some stuff sticks about as bad, but even the bad isn't as bad. But, yeah, it's tragedy plus time equals comedy is kind of true. And I think that's one of the reasons why Gallo's humor that soldiers use when they're away. Was talking to this British SAS guy and he got. One of his teammates got friendly fired in the ass by a misfire from someone's handgun. And they're in the middle of a firefight surrounded by enemy combatants. They're now gonna have to get this guy out of there. That guy's not gonna be able to fight anymore. They're gonna have to sub someone in for the team. Maybe this means that everybody, everyone just started laughing. It's like, for fuck's sake, everyone laughs. I do get the sense that trying to bring forward humor as a tool. How do you think about that? Serious guy take up his suits with a, a, an existential level of drive. How do you think about the role of humor?
- [204:54]
B
So it's funny that you even said serious guy because like, I would say I'm serious on this podcast because we talk about serious things. But like, if you were to talk to my team, like, the recording studio is a not PG zone. It is not like everyone knows there's two places HR is not allowed. One is where I record and the second is the gym and there's just no HR allowed. You just got to deal with whatever I'm gonna say. But if you were to look at my newsfeed right now, it is entirely stand up comedy. And so I'm probably closeted or not. Like, I'm a huge standup fan. It's almost all that I consume. And that's because I think that comedians are modern day philosophers. They point out these apparent truths that we don't wanna look at.
- [205:34]
A
Some comedians, some.
- [205:36]
B
But what's interesting about comedy specifically is that that most of the time they say statements that they would be punished for saying in any other condition than on stage. And so comedy gives this veil of protection, which I think we need to protect for them to say things that like, if you think about comedy at the most basic level for like a human. Kids can laugh when they see someone do something they should get punished for, but not get punished. So you see Roadrunner get smashed with a hammer or whatever, and then they laugh, right? Or you see Three Stooges, whatever. And so it's slapstick because that's the level of humor that a child can understand. But it's basically punishment avoided. And so we laugh. And so when somebody goes up there and says something they should get punished for, they should get bonked on the head, but they don't. We laugh. And so I find that like endlessly, I mean, I laugh a Lot. So I don't remember the question was. But yeah, I'm a big fan of comedy.
- [206:32]
A
Yeah, it was. What's the role of comedy in manipulating but using, using, using humor as a tool. I guess in that way the ability to dispel this thing feeling serious.
- [206:46]
B
Yeah.
- [206:47]
A
By laughing at it is kind of magical.
- [206:50]
B
It's like the Bogart in Harry Potter. Like how many of my big fears can I just laugh about how funny this will be soon? And if I can pull, if I think it's going to be funny eventually, I might as well think it's gonna be funny today.
- [207:02]
A
That's a fucking great archive poll to think about the boggart in Harry Potter, which is how you do it. It's to make it look silly. This is the thing that you are most scared of and the way that you get it to fuck off is to turn it into something hilarious.
- [207:16]
B
I still remember the first time I learned about this. I was probably 11. My friend, we were on this road trip and he.
- [207:26]
A
At 11.
- [207:27]
B
Yeah, well I was, there were parents who were driving. Yeah. But there's, there's him and his brother, right? Yeah, we were just crushing, crushing life. And, and right before the road trip he, they had just picked like those yellow cherries, whatever those are, you know the little, they're like cherries, but they're yellow and red like golden cherry. They look like golden apples, but they're whatever. Anyway, they're cherries, some sort of cherry and they just picked them from like the tree that had just gone ripe or whatever and there was a whole bowl of them, them and he had all of them. And then we went in the car to go on this road trip and about an hour into the trip he's like I, I, I need to go to the bathroom. And they were like, well we're not there yet. Like we'll, you know, we'll stop at the next bathroom. He's like no, no, like I, I really need to go to the bathroom. And so they had to pull over to this like small town that had nothing and they literally knocked on doors to see if someone would let an 11 year old kid, kid in. And so there was an old lady who said yes through a window. I couldn't even make this up. And we had to go through this spiral staircase up to her, her flat or whatever, her apartment. And I was behind him because they were like, well all of you kids are going to go use the bathroom if we're going to stop. Right. And so it's his dad, it's the old lady, his dad, him, me, and then his younger brother. And then the mom. Actually, the mom went in the car. But anyways, that was the. That was the lineup. I'm looking up and as we're walking up, I just remember this horrendous smell. And then I was like, oh my God, he's ripping ass. And then I see just a fucking deluge of shit just come out and drip down his leg. And it's on the steps and he's walking through and we're all trying and it was horrendous. And he's 11. And anyways he goes, he has to wear his dad's boxers because he shits his pants, right? So his dad doesn't have boxers. He has his dad's boxers on. And he was so humiliated. And he was like, don't fucking joke about it. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And obviously we're 11, right? And so his mother, when she saw it, cracks up at this happening, even though he's like super serious about it. And she says, you are going to laugh about this in a few years. Like, this will be a very funny story. And I just remember that she was already there. She like, she was already there. She was already at this is hilarious. And she was like, it might take you some time, but this is very funny. And I. That was like. That was the time where I learned. That was like your tragedy. Plus time is comedy can. If it becomes that eventually, then you might as well have it now. Of course we have a tro. Ha ha. Like, how ridiculous is this?
- [210:04]
A
Unreal.
- [210:05]
B
What a better story it'll be. Because, like, I don't remember anything about that trip besides the fact that he shit his pants.
- [210:10]
A
That'll definitely breach the threshold for emotional activation. Yeah, novelty and intensity are the two things that create emotion, create memories. That's definitely one of them. Talking of the young people thing, young people don't want to work hard anymore. No, young people don't want to work hard anymore for you. You have to create a company worth working hard for.
- [210:34]
B
Yeah, I mean, I just fundamentally reject that humans have somehow changed. I do think that there are going to be preferences that change between. What do you call it? Not classes.
- [210:45]
A
Generations.
- [210:46]
B
Thank you. Generations. But they just work differently. But I mean, I see some 15 year olds, 20 year olds that are just as motivated as 15 and 20 year olds. And I see some lazy 15 and 20 year olds that were just as lazy as 15 and 20 year olds that I knew. I think it's just convenient more than anything. And Typically, it's easier for older people to say that we had it harder and you did, so what? And also most generations say, I want to make it better for the next generation. And then when it is better for the next generation, we resent them for it being better and easier. But wasn't that the point? And so it's really just like resenting them for receiving the gift that we gave them.
- [211:24]
A
What does creating a company worth working hard for mean?
- [211:28]
B
I think it's a combination of the micro environment within the company and then the global reinforcer that the company stands for. And so I see when Elon says we're going to Mars or more realistically, we're saving humanity, which is, I think, what most people were bought in on. His vision. See, he's created the most noble cause of all time that you should a goal big enough that it's worth suffering for. And so people are willing to suffer as long as the price is worth it. We're willing to go through just about anything. And so making the company worth suffering for or worth working hard for is about, number one, making sure that where we're going is a place that people feel inspired to work towards. Right. I think this is worth doing on the micro. It's okay. How can I make the work environment something that people want to come back to? And that a lot has to do with just training leaders and managers in order to make environments that ward off people who suck and encourage people who don't suck.
- [212:25]
A
Yeah. If you have a company that continues to get great talent that you should, you can hire people who just weren't right, or were not going to work hard or weren't going to be bought in, but after a while, especially if you've got enough staff that work for you, if they continue to be demotivated and to not want to work hard, it's a you problem. What's more likely? That all of your exes are assholes who are argumentative or that you're the argumentative asshole? Because you are the common denominator between all of these different exes or them,
- [212:53]
B
me and them, there's two. Them is the other, right?
- [212:56]
A
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [212:58]
B
No, but. So no, to your point in seriousness, if we see that as culture, which is this big amorphous term, but obviously it's the business world, so I've defined it, which is the rules that govern reinforcement in organization. Right. So what are the if then statements that when someone does this, this happens. And so the culture of any group, not necessarily even a company, but of any team, any group of people is going to be, what are all the things that are rewarded? What are all the things that are punished? And then kind of third category is what are the things that are themselves reinforcing that we permit, but we shouldn't.
- [213:25]
A
Right.
- [213:26]
B
And so being really clear, and this is why I'm big on defining things in observational terms, is so instead of saying, hey, Suzy was lazy, we'd have said, like, Susie doesn't respond to slack quickly, and she showed up late to two meetings. Okay, so that's what she did. Is she lazy? That's a label that doesn't really help anybody. But if I can tell Suzy, hey, people are beginning to describe you as lazy, and it's because of these things, I'm assuming you don't want to be described as lazy, right? Okay. If you just do this instead next time. And it just. It just. It cuts out so much of the noise of, like this generate. It's like many of the times they don't even know that's what good looked like. No one ever defined success. No one ever defined what the. What the standard was. And so I see that probably the most important job of the leader is to hold the standard is to define what good looks like in observable terms so that everyone knows this is successful.
- [214:18]
A
Therefore failure is also obvious.
- [214:19]
B
Right. And then obviously all the downstream implications of that, of how do you model behavior so that other people do it, et cetera.
- [214:24]
A
It's very hard to have a vision when you have bills to pay. I saw this old white guy giving financial advice on TikTok getting roasted in the comments. Boomer, fake guru, et cetera. The guy was Ray Dalio. That's when I realized there was no amount of success that can legitimize you to the ignorant. If you actually met everyone, you'd realize some people aren't worth being loved by. It's a good thing to be hated by a bad person.
- [214:57]
B
Violent agreement. But that moment with Ray Dalio was like. It was actually. There are these moments that you have that change the way you behave. And that was one for me, that I don't want to say it was the last nail in the coffin, because I don't think anyone is impervious from outside influences. But it was a significant nail in the coffin of the public opinion for me in terms of content, because when I. Because I think to some degree maybe I'll just speak for myself. There's always a chase for more legitimacy. Am I legit yet? Do I need to be billionaire. Yeah. Do I need to be a billionaire to be legit? Do I need to be a DECA billionaire to be legit? When am I legit? Right.
- [215:40]
A
Which.
- [215:41]
B
Which really means when will everyone love me and no one hate me? But when I was writing that, I was thinking to myself, like, oh, everyone loved me. Well, I've met a lot of people that I think that if they loved me, I don't think I would like me.
- [216:00]
A
I would see that as a compliment.
- [216:02]
B
Yeah. And so then it was like, oh, well, this is just. This is a fixed cost. I just would prefer to be liked by the correct people and I should prefer to be disliked by the incorrect people, in which case, great, some people didn't like me. That makes sense. I'm not for everyone.
- [216:20]
A
Adam Masriani's got the two laws that govern the Internet. The Internet is a very big place and people have differing opinions. Just when you combine those two things together, it means that some huge portion of people are going to hit you. Yeah. And as you get exposed to more given that the Internet is a very big place, had Joe Santagado on the show, One of the biggest podcasts in the world recently sold out msg. Fucking huge. Sat there and the first thing that I said to him was like, dude, you. They do the same plays as we do on Spotify. The same play. They got their award, their button award. That's literally the same announcement. I got mine non zero and number of fucking plays. Right, right. Worked very hard at it. Joe, what do you think is the big podcast just sold at msg? I do tours too. I podcast. It's like how Venn diagramy how much? And he's like, I think it's like the headlights of a fucking Jeep. It's like two big circles. He's 80% women at his live events. It's 90, 95% women for him and his co host, hilarious comedian.
- [217:23]
B
I've never heard of it.
- [217:24]
A
So yeah, be on YouTube. The Basement Yard. Joe San El. Like, fucking awesome talent. Generational talent at what he does. All of the comments. All of the comments. I like this guy. Who the fuck is he? The Internet is a really big place. It's a really, really, really big place. And sometimes you can have that, which is, wow, two Venn diagrams come together and they actually mix quite nicely. Other times it's like oil and water. And given the fact that the Internet's a big place and lots of people have different tastes, the problem, I think is taking feedback from people who you think are your People, but aren't. Because the difference between, huh, this person is unencumbered and has a type of unbiased perspective of me that is novel and useful to take, as opposed to people who have seen a lot of me and can frame. Maybe I was a bit mean, but they know I've got enough ballast in the system that they give me a pass. Suppose this person that saw me for the first time was like, I think you were a bit rude to that person. You go, fuck. Actually, do you know what? Maybe I was. But the other side being this person just isn't my people determining those two from the Internet with the disembodied egg profile thing or everybody, everybody now, especially with how the platforms work, everybody can go viral because it's no longer about followers, which I feel unbelievably annoyed by that I was small when followers mattered, and now I'm big when just content matters. Like, I invested into the market when it was really, really difficult. And now that I'm at the top of the market, it means that it's easy for everybody at the start, whatever, but the same thing's for me.
- [219:05]
B
How do you really feel? Yeah, it's true.
- [219:08]
A
It's true. It is. It is. Followers seem to matter an awful lot and meant that you'd just piss out huge plays because of your subscriber base. And now everybody. The fact that anybody can go viral, how fantastic. It's egalitarian. It means that new creators can come through and I've seen lots of them, and I coach lots of them and help them to try and get up. But at the same time, that means that people who aren't creators can go viral. Someone can just yap because they wanted to. I was on this American Airlines flight and I can't believe that this thing happened, but you wake up the next day and you're a headline. You go, ah. I don't know if all of these people who don't know who I am are my people or are not. And the feedback is very difficult to discern.
- [219:44]
B
Or if they see the 15 seconds. I think the. There was that lady who had that. She went off on the airline pilot. I don't know anything about it. I literally only know that.
- [219:52]
A
I thought you were gonna say the one about that. This is like 10 years old now. The chick that said, I'm heading to Africa, hope I don't get aids. Lol. Just joking. I'm white. And she tweeted it before she got on the plane, got off the plane, and her whole Life was in flames. Family Guy did a bit about this. Brian did it before he got on a plane. So good.
- [220:13]
B
And they saw, and the world saw however many, less than 280, whatever the characters is, and took that and then just said this. I know everything about.
- [220:23]
A
This is who you are.
- [220:24]
B
Yeah. This is everything that you are. And I think that in a nutshell is like, why we can't take too much weight for. Okay. They have consumed 280 characters of every character that you've ever said or thought in the history of you. It's like one thing that I think brought to. To argue the complete opposite side of this. I think there's a very powerful question, which is what if they're right?
- [220:47]
A
And.
- [220:49]
B
And so what? So, for example, I get a ton of like juice, head gear, steroids, whatever
- [220:56]
A
Jew said,
- [220:59]
B
I don't get that one. But. But I get a lot of like, steroid related stuff, especially if I don't have, you know, my. My flannel on. And I used to be like, really offended by it. And then Leila was like, you've taken steroids? And I was like, that is a fair point.
- [221:17]
A
What if they're right? Yeah.
- [221:19]
B
And it's just like. And I was like, oh, this makes sense. And then like, Leila, people, you know, get after her for her. Her voice being low, and it's like she's like, I took steroids. So, yeah, that's how that happens. Anyways, moving on. Yeah.
- [221:35]
A
Look, do you know Joe Hudson? Have you come across him yet? No, he's been on my pod. He's Sam Altman's coach, head of Human Culture performance, something at OpenAI. Like one of only maybe two or three people that deserve the title of Master Coach. Dr. K being one of them. Probably Tony, I guess too. And his handle on Twitter is fu. Joehudson. And as I like, where's the F you from? It's like, because people say fuck you, Joe Hudson. Because one of my friends a long time ago said, you know what, Joe? You're an asshole. And I thought about it for a while and I realized I am an asshole. So sometimes the things that people say to you just are true. They're just right. And in the fighting against it is where all of the pain is.
- [222:20]
B
That's all the pain. Exactly. And then as soon as that, like, that happened, I either that comment stopped tapping as much or I stopped seeing it. I don't know which one actually happened, but either way it stopped affecting me. And so, like, I mean, I guess it is Simply a frame of acceptance of like, what if they're right? Well, maybe they are right and so what? What does that mean?
- [222:41]
A
Oh, but the answer what works? Whether they're right or wrong. Which is why, I mean, that's one of your old ones, right? And thinking about. But one of my favorite lines of yours that I keep coming back to this year, the stress of being perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. Stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections. I think there's a burbling but pretty rapidly growing anti optimization cult at the moment, and I think that people are feeling overwhelmed with advice. I think they're uncertain about the future. There's loads of chaos going on. Is AI going to take my job? Is the Iran war going to bleed over here? What's going to happen? Is Trump going to run for a third term? Is there going to be a civil war? There's too much information. I'm overwhelmed with screens. I haven't got good sleep. I'm taking too supplements. And they just want someone to simplify life. You can simplify life by trying to wrangle it down into an aggressive routine. But what that looks like from the outside a lot of the time is sort of fragility. And this is your America was built on the backs of men who ate bacon for breakfast and smoked cigarettes. If you miss your morning routine today, you'll be fine. The line between this is important for me to improve my mental health in order to create the structure that I need to make progress, and this is a glorified rain dance that I'm doing because I'm superstitious about how things work. I even saw this with Jocko. The first ever episode I did with Jocko. He was in a bit of a terse mood. As a terse man that was like terse square. And someone brought it up to him afterward a couple of months later on Twitter, and he said, I hadn't trained that morning. I was in a bit of a grump, hadn't been to the gym. And I reflected about that a lot and I brought it up to him. I spent a few days with him over Christmas and I was like, remember when that. Yeah. Interesting. Because training is obviously the structure that you have built a lot of things on and it makes you feel good and it facilitates your performance. But if the removal of the training doesn't allow you to do the thing, there is a kind of fragility that's baked into the system there. You want to be able to perform regardless of whether you've got to train or not, and the training builds on top. Does that make sense?
- [224:56]
B
1,000%. If the routine that you do is additive, great, then you have baseline performance without it. If the routine creates dependence to do baseline performance, then it becomes a crutch and then you become fragile. And so yeah, I'm. I would say on this, on the spectrum of routine versus retard maxing. I'm on the maxing side of like just work grab, you know, grab your. Grab your stim. Grab your stimmies and get to it. And I think it's because my. I think one of my big fears in life was becoming soft, is allowing like nothing feels like success is letting the laurels soften me to the game. Which is like the reason that I still do like Q&As with smaller business owners that are doing a few million dollars a year or whatever is. That's going to come off weird, but is I have to stay connected to the earth. I have to stay grounded here. Otherwise I will lose the edge. That is where all the details are one. And so I'm a. I'm as a flag for self. If you cannot function without your routine, your routine owns you. You do not own it full stop. If it's just additive, great. And that means that if you don't have it, you should still be able to win. Because one of my big beliefs is whenever someone has an excuse for losing, that's like, well, it wasn't a perfect day for me. It's like there's this scene in. I think it's Invictus. It's Matt Damon movie. He's like a rugby player, whatever, with Morgan Freeman.
- [226:35]
A
South Africa.
- [226:37]
B
And there's this scene where Morgan Freeman is Nelson Mandela and he's talking to Matt Damon. And I think Matt Damon says something to the degree of, you know, we're not playing it 100%. And I think Morgan Freeman says no one ever is. And I don't even think it's a quoted part of the movie, but I remember seeing that and being like, fuck, no one's ever at 100%. It's like saying, I can win if I have perfect weather, perfect conditions, perfect whatever. And so I think that's why trying to get all the failures out so you can try to create or recreate the randomness that imperfect conditions can and still win. And I think that's why I'm such an advocate of just winning win. Like. Like it does. Like it just does. Because the thing is Is after the game is played, no one remembers whether the ref gave you a bad call or the weather was bad or whether your starting lineup had two entries on it. No one remembers. And so if they're not going to remember it in 20 years, then it shouldn't be a reason that we're going to try and lose today.
- [227:38]
A
There's a Floyd Mayweather quote where he says, you felt like you were on your A game today. And he said is, I ain't got to use my A game, my B game, my C game. I can use my Z game. I don't even have to hit him hard. The result's going to be the same. The prospect of being able to beat somebody with your C game is really cool.
- [227:57]
B
I love it. It's violent.
- [228:00]
A
Most people think the hard part is getting started. The hard part is continuing to do the work when the excitement wears off and the grind feels hope.
- [228:12]
B
The visual that I always think about this is the marathons, marathon runners is that people get excited at the very beginning of the marathon where there's all these balloons and their friends and they're like cheering them on, there's music. And then at the end of the marathon is where everyone cheers you on at the end. But the marathon is one in the 26.1 miles between those two tenth of a mile. And it is the boring, unending, relentless, mundane middle. And I think the game is mastering the middle. It's just unending, unyielding, and everyone can get motivated for a moment. It's just like people feel motivated, but motivation is incredibly ephemeral, right? It vanishes. And that's why creating the conditions that make failure less likely is so important. Because if we can make successful actions the most likely actions, success becomes the most likely outcome. And I think that is like, that is the piece that people miss because they actually stack their deck against themselves by never arranging the conditions to make successful actions the most likely action. So it's like I have to have, like I have to use perfect willpower to go out with my friends and not drink. I have to. And because of that, I'm going to stay out late. But I can. I'm going to have. I'm going to get home and immediately fall asleep. And if I fall asleep perfectly, I will get up by the time that I have this interview or by the time I need to give this presentation. And they need everything to go perfect in order to have one win when it is much more. Let's use anti fragile to set up the conditions so that Everything can go wrong and you can still win. So when we did the launch for the Money Models launch, one of the frames that we had is we wanted it to be inevitable. And so in order for it to be inevitable, we wanted to have three or four different ways that we could break the record. Record was that like, if we only do this, we break the record. If we only do this, we break the record. If only this happens, we break the record. If only we do this break, we break the record. And we figured that if each of these had 80 or 90% likelihood of happening that the likelihood that we'd break the record would be very high. And at the end of the day we still didn't know. But I think stacking probabilities and in thinking about, I'm going to, I'm going to bridge this for a second, but I think the number of ways that people attack the problems in front of them is not nearly enough in terms of volume and not with nearly enough the intensity. Like they are not going at it with full measure. Like if you knew that your family is going to die or the thing that you care about most was going to disappear, how differently would you attack this problem and how many different ways would you attack the problem? If you said, ah man, I don't have a job right now, it's like, okay, well what have you actually done? Right? And it's like, well, I applied to three places. It's like, okay, cool, well how long did that take you? It took me 45 minutes. Okay, how many hours are there in a week? How many hours are there in a month? What are you doing? That's not that. That is increasingly likely that you get it. Basically nothing. And so there's nothing that stops you from applying to a hundred or a thousand jobs in a month. And the likelihood of you apply to a thousand jobs and you have the requisite requirements that you don't get one is very low. And so it's just like, why are you not doing that? And I don't know the answer to that because I've just been a relatively violent person by nature. But I think once you have a very clear path to getting what you want. But it's like, okay, how do I remove everything that prevents me from getting it? Not in a self aggrandizing way. I am flawed too. But I'm just saying it helps.
- [231:34]
A
It is true that more dreams are destroyed by distraction than incompetence. And that's in the micro, but in the macro as well.
- [231:40]
B
A billion percent. So if you had a white room that you were locked into. And. And there was nothing in the white room except for one black dot. What is the most interesting thing in that room? The one black dot. And so people struggle to get motivated to do the work because there are other more interesting things to do than the work. And so you're not going to willpower your way through making work more interesting, but you can absolutely put yourself in a situation where work becomes the most interesting thing, and that is how you do a shitload of work.
- [232:18]
A
We talked a lot about risk. I said, you know, over the last sort of 12 months, looking at what you've talked about, uncertainty, managing risk. But respect is something else you've been thinking about a good bit. What have you another R word? The other R word. What have you been thinking about to do with respect? Well, there's one that you brought.
- [232:37]
B
I'm so excited you. I'm so excited. You're out best. So I've been trying to think about the operation of respect because I thought, okay, what. What is something that I've. I've wanted my whole life, right? I think many men want respect. Some people say status, but I'll. I'll define respect as this. So respect is letting someone else's word change what you do, even when they cannot make you.
- [233:05]
A
You.
- [233:06]
B
So if I respect someone, what they say changes what I do, even though they cannot force me to do it. And so there's two sides to respect. There's the earning of respect, and there's the giving of respect. And so I was trying to encapsulate this into an acronym that I could remember because I know I'm going to talk about this a lot, especially with our leaders at the company, because leaders want respect. That makes sense. But how do you. How, how. How do you gain respect and then also not pass the line of being a. A tyrant?
- [233:35]
A
It.
- [233:36]
B
Right. And so the acronym that I have is Powers, which is the behaviors that earn respect is. Number one is that you pay the cost, which is that you sacrifice for the group where they can see it. So if I. I remember the first time. So when I was. When I was a pledge back in my fraternity days, it's a group where everyone's even, right? No one's. No one's special. And there was a particular senior who was known for being a bad hazer, and he called the goats. And so the goats had to go to the house, and you had to go in pairs, right? And so he called one guy, and the guy was like, it's Goats. It's just a derogative term, derogatory term for a pledge. Okay, yeah, yeah, worms, goats, whatever. Well, goats, because they're gophers and they go do shit for you anyways. They. And so he just looked at the group of, you know, 18 other guys and he's like, who wants to come with me? Because. And we knew he was going to get hazed. So somebody just has to basically sacrifice themselves. And so I remember I was like, I'll go with you, dude. And it's a tiny act where that sacrifice gains respect from the whole group because that micro benefits everybody else for not having to go through it. And so when you are in a new organization, this is the operation for respect. You sacrifice yourself in a way that benefits the whole, in a way that is visible. You don't have to do it visibly because then it looks cringe but like, like they will see it eventually turning up early. Yeah. Number two is outcomes, which is that things get better when you are involved for everyone. And so functionally it's competence, which I would define as outcomes improve with your involvement that are traceable to you repeatedly. So it's the opposite of luck or free riding. Right. Three is your word. Right? The W, which is what you say will happen, happens, and what you say you'll do, you do. E is in force. And this is the sticky one. I'll get to more in a second. But it's. You don't let people cross you consistently. The R is restraint, which is that you hold back when you could punish more and you give more credit than you need to. And then S is steady, is that you function in high stakes situations the same as normal situations. And so what ends up happening is that enforcement is basically your compliance floor, which is that if I enforce rules of like this is how I want to be treated, then people will at baseline just do that. But that is where you have a tyrant on their own because you need the other ones to have respect. You have to be competent. Like if you have just enforcement of rules but you have no competence, things is not better for anyone. You've never beared any cost. Everyone fucking hates that guy. And the moment their ability to make that person's life worse goes away, so does the behavior. And so the key that separates basically fear driven or compliance versus respect is that they have to be able to do it even when you have no ability to make them. Now on the flip side, if you have all of the competence things but you have no enforcement, then you are the admired Doormat. You do things for everyone, but like, no one respects you. So then the next thing that comes up is like, okay, so enforcement. And this is probably the hairiest of the, of the ones that is still required. And so there's three things that have to happen in order for you to be obligated to enforce a standard, which is that, number one, someone has to know the standard you have where you're like, please do not talk to me that way. Please do not address me in that manner. Whatever the. Whatever, whatever. Do not. Do not turn in the dinner that's cold. Whatever. They have to have a known standard. Number two is that they have to have the ability to adhere to that standard. And then three, choose not to. Now, a lot of times people can feel disrespected, but if you've never articulated that this is a preference of yours, that you do things a certain way, and then you basically punish someone for treating you in a specific way without ever having told them, then that is when you'll be seen as tyrannical.
- [237:26]
A
Unspoken standards are premeditated disrespects.
- [237:29]
B
Yeah. And so, so imagine the situation where you have a chef who's, he takes a shithole, turns it around, is best in class chef, and he's known for both being incredibly hard, but everyone who works for him loves him. So it's like, how do we manage this apparent contradiction? So new sous chef comes in, messes something up, the plate comes back in, and then the head chef takes it, it dumps it and looks at the kit. He says, you just cost us that table. We're going to comp the bill. But don't worry, you're still with us. Show up again at 6am tomorrow and do better. So you have the moment. We have to enforce it. But it's about the behavior, not the person. And that's the big, that's the big unlock.
- [238:16]
A
What would doing it about the person look like?
- [238:19]
B
So it's basically, you lazy piece of shit. It's basically labeling them rather than the behavior and criticizing who they are rather than what they did. And so the three things is, number one, it has to be a known rule. Number two, they have to have the ability to follow it. And number three, choose not to. That is when a transgression occurs. Now, then it comes into, okay, what are the consequences that happen? Does that mean that you just let people transgress after you say, hey, don't do that, and hey, don't worry, I still love you. Well, the consequence for crossing you needs to be Consistent, which means that every time someone crosses you, there needs to be a consequence. If there isn't, then you teach people to gamble with you because it's a variable reinforcer. You need to have consistent reinforcers, which extinguishes the behavior. And so it has to be consistent, it has to be immediate and it has to be escalating. Which means if the first time I tell you, I say, don't worry, you're with us, be here tomorrow, do better. Fine. If you do it again, then it's like you're off for the night. If you do it again, you don't come back. And so there has to be an escalating consequence because what happens is at some moment it stops being about punishing the behavior, and it should be about punishing the pattern of behavior, which then means it is the person which might be. At that point, I don't want to, I don't want to train this person anymore. And so at that point, you have to respect the standard for everyone. And out of owing it to everyone, we have to let this person go, even if they're a perceived high performer. And so the flip side of it, so that's the how you earn respect, is you do powers, you sacrifice for the group. You have outcomes that you demonstrate competence for. Your word is your bond. You do what you say you're going to do. You enforce the standards publicly, swiftly, consistently, and escalatingly. You show restraint. When you could yell, like, go nuts on this kid for something up. You choose not to, even though you could good. And then s is that you're steady. Even when the biggest Michelin star judge is there, you still act the exact same way as though they were just a normal dinner table. On the flip side, it's like, okay, how do I give respect? Because this is equal opposite. If you're like, well, this person needs to show me respect. And I think this is important because if you're like, I felt disrespected. Well, one did we say what our preference was? And this has been super useful for me because I sometimes will feel disrespected by somebody who, who, who doesn't know. And so it helped me just to say, hey, you might not have known this. Don't do this again. We're still cool. You didn't know if you do it again, now we have a problem. Right? So I, I just came up with an acronym, hearted, which is all, all I could make from my memory, but basically honor, which is that you respect their preferences, you respect their lines and you don't test the limits. E is esteem. So you praise them when they are not present, attend, which is that you listen to them without cutting in or interrupting. You are reliable in that your word is as good to them as theirs is to you. If you say, I've got the soup, you'll get the soup. You show them respect by saying what you said you were going to do to honor them. The next is truth. And this is where it gets a little bit more interesting. You tell them straight, including what they will not like. And so that means that if you really respect someone, you don't coddle them them, just like a parent would respect a child. I'm not going to dumb this down for you. And then e, this is another hard one is expectations, is that you hold them to the same standard. And so you don't lower the bar for someone because otherwise that's just watering it down and diluting it. Don't talk down to me.
- [241:43]
A
Bringing the standard down to their level of confidence.
- [241:45]
B
Exactly. And so it's equal, opposite. And then finally, D is defer. Is that in their area of expertise, you defer to their decisions. And so this has been really helpful for me to define this, because respect is one word, but it has many behaviors underneath of it. And so by defining it that way, it's been incredibly helpful. Because when I'm talking to leaders, it's like you need to earn respect and you earn respect in this way and that way. I could say you have not visibly sacrificed anything for this group or the outcomes that you've generated in no way have demonstrated competence, or you said you would do this thing and then you haven't done it. Or you are allowing people to treat you in a way that is not the way that a treater, a leader, would allow someone to treat them. And you have not enforced anything. I would say that the e happens on both sides. I would say that I have some leaders in the company, for example, who are overly enforcing and people absolutely comply with what they tell them to do. But it's because it's all out of fear of just don't cross them. Right. But you don't know what it is, which just means that they look like a loose cannon on the other side. You've got the people who are really competent, but they're just like, ah, you know, it's okay, you know, jolly, you know, happy go lucky. But like, they don't get the respect because they never enforce anything. I can think of two different leaders in my company right now. That are on both sides of this, both competent, but one that probably over enforces and another that basically under enforces. But until I had the words and these behaviors, I can't give them good feedback. Which is why I'm so adamant about defining these terms in terms of behavior, because then I can actually help someone gain respect. And so if you were like, man, I fucking. No one respects me. It's like, well, there's the list. What things did you miss or what things have you not done? And that's just like this is something that it's obviously a huge passion of mine because defining the vig or defining the amorphous in terms that people can be like, wow, I did that operation and I now have gotten respect. That's very cool.
- [243:32]
A
For me, I read a really great essay about how status is accumulated and there's broadly two ways, especially ancestrally, dominance and prestige. And the interesting thing is that in times of war, tribes tend to prefer dominant leaders. Problem being that a time of war, hopefully if you don't lose will last, it'll end. And then you're stuck with this tyrannical dominant guy who's surrounded himself with sycophants. And that's when you want someone who's prestigious and to find someone who's prestigious. The issue being that sometimes they're not as decisive or as cutthroat as you need in a time of crisis. And
- [244:17]
B
this was the issue with Churchill, right? I mean Churchill was like an amazing wartime leader and then didn't do as
- [244:22]
A
well after a tyrant. Yeah. I mean he wasn't built as a peacetime leader. Yeah, he just. That wasn't what he needed.
- [244:28]
B
UK history.
- [244:29]
A
Yeah, of course, dude. Here's one about Churchill. I'm reading the Splendid and the Vile, which is the best book about Churchill. Only go the whole book, I think it's 500 pages and it's 18 months is what it covers. And it's all of the journals and diary entries from all of the different people. Best thing that I learned about Churchill so far is that he really hated whistling. He was like allergic to whistling. And there was one day there was a boy that was walking down the street whistling and he ended up in this huge back and forth with this 11 year old kid, some street urchin. And Churchill. One of the biggest wars before his campaign began was between him and this 11 year old child. Brilliant, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Finishing this off, just talking about like probably the word of the day, risk. You can't get rich if you never risk losing money. You can't get loved if you never risk getting rejected. You can't get strong if you never risk getting injured. You have to risk looking broke to get rich. You have to risk looking weak to get strong. You have to risk looking desperate to get loved. Egos hold back more dreams than failure and rejection ever will.
- [245:49]
B
It's like risk not, have not. It's like you have to put something on the altar at the most basic level. It's like the first step is what you're willing to lose. And it is trade of a known and inferior thing for a unknown and superior thing. And it's the fact that it's unknown that is the thing that bugs everyone. And I think. Most of the gains in life and the lack of gains come from being unwilling. To sacrifice mediocrity.
- [246:37]
A
It's interesting to think about sacrificing mediocrity.
- [246:40]
B
Right. But I think that is the appropriate term. People fear being less than extraordinary, and in so doing, sacrifice being extraordinary. It's like you sacrifice one either way, and so either you sacrifice being extraordinary to be ordinary, or you sacrifice ordinary for the chance at being extraordinary or less than ordinary. But if you really think about it, many people who are ordinary have failed. And so you're really just still ordinary. And so why would you not sacrifice ordinary for extraordinary thought?
- [247:17]
A
Gammon, I appreciate you. It's always good to sit down with you.
- [247:21]
B
Pleasure is mine, as always.
- [247:23]
A
All right, see you next time, everyone. Dude. Yes. Yes. So good. We speak. Fuck. There we go. Sit back. Tent. You can present you with two versions of a very famous photo that's going to be behind you for most of the episodes.
- [247:46]
B
A Rembrandt.
- [247:47]
A
Yeah.
- [247:48]
B
An original.
- [247:48]
A
Yeah. This is an original. I'm not sure if you've noticed.
- [247:52]
B
I'd like to thank my friends and family. Your hair is also really short here, too. So you look like. And this one. You look like a child with the.
- [248:02]
A
I do? I look like some sort of freak child with bicep veins?
- [248:07]
B
I think it's like ancient Chippendales.
- [248:09]
A
Yes, it is. For some reason. For some reason. You're in Hawaiian Shop.
- [248:12]
B
Thoughts?
- [248:13]
A
I didn't notice that. And then the one behind it is the. This is the original.
- [248:19]
B
All class.
- [248:19]
A
It's just. Yeah, all class. No breaks. I love how they've kept me in a necklace, but this one's become, like, so baroque. Yeah. We're a tasteful group.
- [248:31]
B
I think we're looking at truth.
- [248:33]
A
That's true. That's correct. That's correct. Disregard risk, luck and truth.
- [248:37]
B
Yeah.
- [248:37]
A
Yeah, fuck it. Appreciate you, man. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com/books. That's ChrisWillX.com books.