NEVER Overwork Again: The Secret to Sustainable Success | Ezra Firestone DSH #581

Miss the point of this game we call life.

If you're miserable and overworked and underfucked and working all the time and you're just like, it's like you got to take care of yourself mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, energetically, have hobbies, have relationships so that when you show up to your work, you can bring enthusiasm, you can bring joy, you can make it a party.

It doesn't mean you don't grind, it doesn't mean you don't work hard, but like you can bring a kind of energy that is like attractive and people want to work with you.

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And here's the episode.

All right, guys, we got an e-commerce legend here today, Ezra Firestone.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks.

Happy to be here, man.

Yeah.

Dig your whole show.

Absolutely.

It's been a surreal moment for me.

I've been watching you for five, six years, man.

Right on.

I used to be big in e-commerce, but Jersey champs.

Jersey champs, baby.

Left the space for podcasting, though.

Higher margins.

Yeah.

And more fun.

More fun.

And we were just talking about that balancing that fun with money yeah and once you reach a certain amount you know i mean i think that really here's my philosophy on business number one have fun because if you are not enjoying yourself you've missed the point of this game we call life if you're miserable and overworked and underfucked and working all the time and you're just like it's like You got to take care of yourself mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, energetically, have hobbies, have relationships so that when you show up to your work, you can bring enthusiasm, you can bring joy, you can make it a party.

Doesn't mean you don't grind.

It doesn't mean you don't work hard, but like you can bring a kind of energy that is like attractive and people want to work with you.

First, have a good time.

Second, make good shit.

Make things that are truly valuable.

Make something that serves the world.

And you are never done making your product better.

Your homie just told me about you guys are building a studio.

It's like, you got to keep making your product better.

Number two, make good things.

Number three, be profitable.

If you can do that at any scale, you won the game.

I don't care if it's 50,000 a year, 500 million a year.

I mean, you and I are both chasing large wealth creation, but but it's like, if you, I know so many people who are shackled to these businesses that are like weighing them down.

And they may be big businesses, but it's like, I don't want that life.

I'm not trying to live that.

So it's like, have a good time, make good things, be profitable.

That is the winning.

I've been doing this 20 years now.

It's like, if you can do that, you won.

I think that's important because some people just chase the profitability and they don't care about anything else that comes with it.

And then what happens is they got no friends and they're all fucking miserable and they're all overworked and they have nothing in their life other than business.

And it's like, hey, scale is cool.

I'm interested in scale.

I sold a business for a whole lot of money, like, but not at the expense of your life.

And you're told everywhere you look is like, everyone is selling you how you're flawed.

Everything you look at is how you're too fat, you're not tall enough, your teeth aren't white enough, you don't make enough money, you're whatever, some inadequacy.

Someone is selling you that you're inadequate in some way.

And then, hey, we got the solution here.

And people think, especially young men, that making money is going to bring them fulfillment.

It's going to bring them happiness.

But I will tell you, if you cannot have, insert love,

pleasure, gratitude, joy, appreciation, presence here and now, you won't get it there and then.

There is nothing, no amount of shit that you will acquire that will make you happy, that will make you fulfilled.

You cannot acquire your way to fulfillment.

It's like.

fulfillment cannot be had or gotten.

You can be fulfilled.

And that is a mindset that is an internal thing it's not something you can get from the outside so i see a lot of these young dudes coming up in the game and they feel like oh as soon as i make some money then i'm going to be happy it's like nope you wherever you go there you are and you're going to be that same person chasing that thing and it's like whatever it is that you want in your life you've got to figure out how to have it now and if you can be gratified by your life what's interesting is then that somehow attracts all the shit that you want I agree.

And the thing with money is when you set these goals, it's never enough once you hit it.

And your lifestyle expands.

I went from being on the very low end of the economic spectrum growing up, I mean, like for real, to now I'm like one of the wealthier people that I know.

And money will buy you comfort.

And it's nice to be comfortable.

I like to be comfortable, you know, it's like, but there's a certain level, I'm going to say maybe half a million bucks a year that like after that, it's not doing anything for you from a happiness standpoint.

But, you know, under, if you're making under a couple hundred grand a year, there's a lot of comfort that you can buy.

You can take care of your family, take care of your community, take care of your parents.

You can like, you know, get yourself some support with child support.

You can get like physical, you know, trainers.

Like, yes, a certain amount of money is going to make your life way less intense.

But then, but there's like, there is that level.

And I, there was some study that came out, and I'm going to quote it because it was like seven years ago.

It said, after 75,000, but it's like, that's not

too low.

It's like after probably like 250 grand.

I agree.

For me, it was when I had to stop looking at the check at restaurants.

That was like a big thing for me because I used to always worry about it.

I love seeing your Instagram.

You're always posting all the restaurants.

of my hits.

I'm like, yo, dude, like, where should I go and do that?

Did they try them out?

No, I'm going, we're going to Lotus of Siam.

How's it going, man?

You'll enjoy it for sure.

Did you always have this mindset?

Because I feel like...

Well, so I grew up on a hippie commune.

And it's an alternative lifestyle experiment.

It's a group of people who sort of checked out of society and said, hey, we're going to do something different.

We're going to like explore how to live pleasurably in a group.

And they are one of the only groups of people.

So do you know anything about the commune movement in the late 60s, early 70s in America?

I just know they did a lot of acid.

Yeah, they did.

Good times, man.

Let me give you just a quick, brief overview.

Okay.

So here we are.

We're post-the Great Depression.

I think Eisenhower is president and he's looking for a way to stimulate the economy.

And they come up with this idea of military tract housing, which is what we now know as the suburbs.

If you look at America, it's developed east to west.

The houses on the east coast are like...

Victorians.

They were big.

They fit the whole family.

The west coast is like single-family units, you know, two-in-a-box, white picket fence.

The reason reason they did that was because they could repurpose the um sort of like uh factories that were being used to make tanks and all that to make consumer durables washers dryers toasters and then they had a mass broadcasting system that was visuals like this is the the late 50s so you've got tv so you can promote this idea of hey if if you know the leave it to beber the pleasantville the if every single family unit lives separate from one another.

You don't have your, you know, grandparents and all that.

Every house is going to need a washer, going to need a dryer, going to need a toaster.

And then they wrote the GI bill, which gave the mostly white soldiers coming back from the war access to affordable housing.

Boom.

Greatest economic stimulus plan in the history of America.

Then the baby boom happened.

That's my parents' generation.

These baby boomers,

the flower children, they came of age in the late 60s, early 70s.

We are pre-AIDS, post-penicillin.

There's no STD that can kill you.

Baby, free love.

Let's go.

It's a good time to be alive.

And so this group of individuals, they decided to, groups of them on the coasts of America said, hey, you know what?

This whole nuclear family thing, we're going to rebel against this.

We're going to start communal living.

We're going to go back to living in communes.

And you had, you know, a few thousand communes spring up on the coasts of America.

You get a group of people together.

Commune, intentional community, it's just a group living together.

And like where I grew up is not like some of these places, like you have to buy into some ideology or whatever.

Like this is just like a commune of hippies.

Okay.

What happens when you get a group?

Two people is a group, right?

Let's imagine a relationship across the gender line, across the intimacy line, you got two people, things come up, jealousy, money, possessions, communication, sensuality, power dynamics, gender dynamics, money dynamics.

Most groups of two fail.

They just don't make it, right?

Because it's like you fail at any one of those things, you're going to fail at the relationship.

Now imagine stacking multiple people and the relationships between all of them and multiple couples.

It's like these things fall apart so quickly.

Think about a business, how hard it is to even retain employees.

And that's like

there's no emotional stakes on the line.

It's just salary and then work environment.

So it's hard to keep a group of people together.

And this place I grew up has successfully navigated living together as a group and is one of the only examples really in America of like successful long-term group living.

And so I was raised in this environment where it was like about these concepts that I'm talking about now.

And it is what has made me successful in business.

I'll give you one more little run and then I'll stop, which is up until about a year ago, I did this speech.

I have a mastermind for e-commerce business owners.

I did a speech and I was like, I have 180 employees across five brands.

And in 17 years as a CEO, not a single person has ever quit because they were unhappy or they weren't paid well or there was some conflict we couldn't navigate.

And then fucking five people left like the next week.

So I can't say that anymore, but I can say that keeping a group together is very difficult.

And I think still what we have done, which is very few people have ever left, is pretty uncommon.

Very uncommon, especially in the workplace.

I feel like people get a new new job every year these days.

Totally.

And also like you're going to have conflict and you're going to have, you know, you're going to have managers bulldogging and power dynamicking on the people underneath them.

You're going to have people stealing from you.

Like there's going to be shit's going to go down.

People are going to people on each other.

And you got to figure out how to handle that because you keep a group together over time.

You can be pretty successful.

Yeah.

Cause that's.

like our grandparents generation where they would get the same job every day for 40 years and never leave.

That doesn't happen anymore.

So how do you think you were able to do that?

Well, for one,

I treat my team members.

So like as human beings, you and I, we are of equivalent value is my viewpoint.

Now, in a corporate hierarchy, I am above the people on the team.

But as humans, I'm like, look, we're of equal value.

And I say three things when people join my company.

One, if you see something, if you see a way we could make our products better, that we could serve our customers better, that you could be enjoying your work life more, please tell somebody because you're the only person who can see from your vantage point.

And I want to know what you see.

And I value what you see.

Hey, we may not take your feedback every time, but like, I want to know.

And if people feel like they have autonomy and freedom to share what they think and that it will be listened to, there is nowhere, nobody is listening to anybody who's low down on an organizational chart.

Usually in leadership, if people feel like these people will listen to me, I have agency within this company to direct.

If you see a system within our company that is not serving you, some meeting that's boring or stupid that we don't need to be doing, tell your manager or tell tell me.

And we will take that into account.

And it's like people feel like, wow, I can affect change in this organization.

Second thing I do is I set goals for them and say, look, within three years, you are going to be the best social media manager in the world.

Here's how, so I give them a goal.

Here's how we're going to get you there.

We're going to have a Slack channel and it's going to populate all the best social media blogs.

And you're going to read it four hours a week.

You're going to take notes.

We're going to meet once a week or you're going to meet with your manager and we're going to figure out what, what did you learn that we could implement in the business?

And we're going to let you cut your teeth on that.

We're going to go through these courses.

We're going to send you to these events.

Like we're going to give you a path towards growth.

And we have other ways, but it's like you have people feel heard, listened to, acknowledged, valued, and you have a clear way in which you are supporting their professional development.

Dude, nobody is fucking leaving.

And then you also, you pay as generously as you can.

You have as good benefits as you can.

You don't micromanage them all crazy.

Like you treat them the way you would want to be treated if you were working somewhere.

And if you do all that shit, and there's more we can talk about, I don't want to waste a whole podcast, but it's like

people are loyal to you.

The other thing I did, I mean, look how many of my cousins are here right now.

My dad's,

I hired all my friends and family, all their friends and family.

Downside of this is you end up with a homogenous group because your friends and family tend to look and think like you.

And that is bad in a business.

So eventually you got to like go out from that.

But I also feel like, hey, I want to work with people that I love because do you know how much time you spend working?

A lot.

And you want to work with random cranksters?

And you want to work with people that you know and like and trust.

I had to fire cousins.

I had to, you know, you, it doesn't, business isn't a charity.

Some people have to show up and do a good job, but like I like working with people that I know.

That's interesting because a lot of people advise not to mix the two.

I know.

Well, a lot of people suck at communication.

At the end of the day,

communication is everything.

It is how you convert because at the end of the day, if I'm going to sell you something, I got to have a communication.

Most people communicate and it goes, eh, it kind of doesn't quite land.

It doesn't get there.

Communication is not what you say.

It is what they hear and perceive and feel.

And if you take responsibility for what someone heard, then you win at communication.

You ask them at the end end of the meeting, so what did we just cover?

What did you get out of this?

What did you hear?

You get reinforcement.

Like you get good at communication.

So it's interesting, this hippie commune that I grew up on, right?

One of the areas of their study is sensuality, the potential of the human nervous system for sensation.

And everybody wants to come to us for sex information, but it's like.

Sex?

Yeah, well, sensuality, sex, like your ability to perceive sensation in your body, sex, sensuality, whatever.

Okay.

But it's like, look, your sex is going to be as good as your communication.

You spend 99.9% of your time communicating and 0.01% of your time sexing.

It's like sex is not your problem, but that's what people think.

Wow.

So you're saying to have more sex or I'm saying have as much sex as the two people in the relationship feel is pleasurable and fun.

But at the end of the day, the quality of that sex, and we'll get back to business in a second, but like the quality of that experience is going to come down to your communication ability, not your technique.

I mean, look, you got to be, you have to know where the clitoris that you you got.

If you're a guy, you got to, you guys, there's some things you got to know.

But at the end of the day, it's like, it's not really about that.

It's about your intention and your communication.

And that is ultimately what is going to result in a winning relationship, whether it is one that includes sensuality or not.

I could see that because there's sexless marriages.

And when you look deeper into it, it's because the communication isn't there, right?

Yeah.

And people don't connect the dots there.

Wow, that is fascinating.

You recently stepped down as CEO, you said, right?

Yeah.

Was that a tough choice for you?

No.

I think everybody would do it once they see the the other side of the thing.

It's like, I was a CEO since 2007.

So I don't know how many years that is, but that's when I first, I got into e-commerce in 05 before the iPhone.

I made my first, I sold a Fu Manchu mustache wig to some woman in Arizona off a couch on the Lower East Side, Chinatown, New York City.

And I was like, if this woman had any idea who she just bought from on the internet, she would be shocked.

I'm just some kid, you know?

So it's like, I've been running companies so long and I sold one of my companies for over 50 million bucks back in 2020 to a private equity firm.

And I always thought, never sell your company.

Why would you?

You don't want a boss.

You don't want to deal with somebody.

If you're making money and having fun and being profitable, why would you ever sell?

I got a whole bunch of reasons I sold.

We can get into, but once I sold and I was like, oh, what these people are doing is strategically advising me on how to grow this company, but they're not operating it.

I am operating it with my team and they own the majority now.

They own 70%.

I only own 30%.

And so when this thing is successful, they get most of the upside, but they're not doing the daily grind of it.

And I thought, that is very smart.

And I already had a CEO for one of my other companies and it was going well.

And I was like, okay, my new strategy is buy or build.

And I'm building takes too long, so I buy

and then advise because there is like ultimately you get into entrepreneurship because you are chasing some form of freedom, freedom of time, freedom of not going to a shitty job that you hate.

You're running away from pain, the pain of your parents not being able to pay their bills, like the pain of growing up poor, whatever it is.

Like I had all these things.

And so then a company gets so big that the freedom that you were chasing is reduced because the structure and systems and processes it takes to run a hundred million dollar company do not allow for the kind of schedule and freedom in your schedule that we started, that we were chasing as do-it-yourself virtual entrepreneurs.

And so I got to a point where it's like, you see my daughter here.

She passed away nine months ago, almost to the day.

And throughout her life, it was her life was not a tragedy.

It was a love story.

It was really beautiful.

One of the things I learned is that it seems to me that expansion kind of happens in all directions.

So it's like our capacity to feel pain and fear and anxiety and loneliness and anger and all of that was like stretched to a point that I cannot describe.

But then on the flip side, our capacity to feel presence and love and beauty and

gratitude were equally stretched.

It was like the most beautiful experience of my life.

And it was on paper tragic.

I mean, it's a little girl born at one pound, 11 ounces who spends, you know, half of her life in an ICU unit across four different states.

She made it home.

She's a little miracle baby

who dies of cancer.

But I sort of lost my train of thought now.

Sorry.

What were we taught?

Daughter was born and it was.

Oh, so why did I pull that?

So through that experience, I realized like, hey,

I kind of like, everybody has blind spots.

And I have built my whole

business life.

I'm all virtual.

I have no office deliberately.

I never have

to like have a lifestyle that I was interested in, which was being at home with my lady and hanging out on my piece of land and like just, you know, specifically and deliberately building towards a particular lifestyle.

And I realized when my daughter I had to step back for the year or two that was like caring for her,

I was kind of like, you know, I don't think I'm interested in going back to a 40 to 50 hour CEO work life.

So I hired some CEOs and now I'm doing, you know, investment advising strategy.

And I like it better.

I love that.

Yeah, it's kind of ironic, right?

You build up the company to a certain point and it restricts your freedom that you fought your whole life getting.

Exactly.

So it's about finding that sweet spot.

Yeah.

And we were talking earlier.

I think the sweet spot, look, I think it's different for everybody.

And I think ultimately there is no right answer.

There is only what is pleasurable for you.

And by the way, hey, when I was in my 20s, I'm late 30s now, right?

I had more energy and desire to grind.

A 12-hour day was no problem.

I can't be doing that now, dog.

I'm not,

you know, it's like, so you kind of like, there's, there's seasons of your life.

Like, you know, you're a young, you're pretty young, but I'm sure when you were 10 years younger, the grind was a little easier.

15 hour days.

And so I feel like there's those seasons and some people never get out of that and they build their whole.

infrastructure around needing,

you know, that as the backdrop of their existence.

They're just working all the time.

And it's like, you're going to get to be 40 years old, 50 years old.

And like, what do you have to show for it?

Yes, you maybe made some money and you got a cool business, but like, what else that life has to offer have you explored?

The compound effect too on your health is nasty.

Yeah.

I mean, I have bad anxiety and panic attacks from just working all day, every day.

You need to get out there, man.

Yeah.

I mean, there's there, you know, it's like success is a very important part of feeling like you are contributing is a very important part of the human psyche and of your own ability to be fulfilled.

But like, it's like when you extract vitamin C from the orange, you just cannot absorb it the same way as if you ate the orange with everything else in it.

Yes, you can take the vitamin C tablets.

It doesn't work the same.

So it's like you need rest and human contact and hobbies and things that you're interested in.

You need the whole picture if you want to be fulfilled.

Love it.

You mentioned buying is quicker than building earlier.

Yeah.

How much quicker is it, in your opinion?

Building is so hard.

Like the way I think about it with entrepreneurs is most people, they start a business and they start judging it at like year one.

It's like, no, do not judge your business until you have put in 36 months and you've worked at it at least a couple hours, couple hour blocks, three, four times a week, and you've been at it for three years, I don't want to hear nothing.

Like you can't, you got to give it time.

It's like gardening.

You ever grown anything?

Like when you, I've grown something.

I've tried.

I've failed.

Okay.

Well, gardening is, I just did the speech for the million dollar sellers event where it's like people garden, right?

Or people start a diet or a workout program and they start and they stop and they start and they stop.

But what's happening with gardening is like you plant a seed and you water it.

Nothing happens.

And you water it.

Nothing happens.

And you water it.

Nothing happens.

Some people just give up.

But what's happening is below the soil, the seed has sprouted and it's starting to travel up, but you don't see anything.

So you give up.

It's like, give yourself three years before you judge the thing.

I think now once you have money, it makes so much sense to buy because when you buy, you've established product market fit.

You're building.

You don't know if there's going to be product market fit.

I know there's some sales when I buy something.

I'm like, I can see the profit margin.

I can see the sales.

I can see the customer.

It's like, yo.

And so now I buy companies in the

$5 to $40 million a year revenue range.

And do you care about the profit margins?

Profit margin is everything in business.

And profit margins are eroding post-COVID, post-IOS 14.5, the reduction of the digital ad effectiveness, all these wars going on in the world, fuel costs increasing.

You used to be able to, in e-commerce, buy for one and sell for five pretty effectively.

If I bought something for five bucks, sell for 25 bucks, plenty of margin in that.

You kind of need to buy for one and sell for seven or eight unless you're buying for expensive.

If you're buying for 50 bucks, okay, you can buy for one and sell for three because there's a hundred dollar margin there.

If you're buying for $5,

you know, you kind of like don't have enough margin.

If you're, if you buy for one and sell for five.

So you buy for five, you sell for 25.

It's only a $20 margin.

It's not enough.

It's ad cost.

Yeah, think about it this way for e-commerce.

Okay.

I can give you the breakdown of I run an information publishing business, software as a service business,

agency business.

All those are in the $10 million a year range.

But for e-commerce in particular, let's imagine you got a million dollars a a year in revenue.

300 grand going to cost of good, 200 grands going to general and administrative costs, salary and shit like that.

300 grands go into marketing.

You got 200K left in profit, 20% profit margin.

If you're lucky, if you're not losing money on shipping, if you don't have other crazy insurance, it's like you have, you have to buy for one and sell for five at a minimum.

What would your advice be to me?

So this podcast does about $3 million a year in revenue.

Let's go.

I want to scale the 10, though.

Yes, sir.

Let's go.

I want to scale the 10, though.

You know what I mean?

So what would your advice to me be?

Well, so the interesting thing about, so what you have is, that's really awesome is the attention of a lot of eyeballs, right?

Like we are in the attention aggregation business.

If you can garner attention and leverage that to promote products, promote services, build your own brands,

I think it's going to be hard to get to 10 million on just sponsorship alone unless you get much bigger, which maybe you will.

And I mean, obviously, like I follow your Instagram.

You're having big names on all the time.

Like you're compelling.

So some people are trying to be creators and it's like, yo, you're just, I'm sorry.

You're

boring.

It's like, you may have information but it's like nobody wants to listen to your boring ass dude it's like you know it's like i'm sorry you know

you have to have that thing whatever that is the enthusiasm the the spirit you have that right but when you look at a business i'm gonna look at you objectively as a business you got three million how much of it's coming from sponsorship i'd say 40 okay and then what else you got you got products you got paid guests events and views from like youtube and stuff paid guests events views from youtube great so

high ticket in an information business is always the right answer so if there so for example you know we we have an agency we do services for people i'm not telling you you should do services but i've got a company that sells a hundred million dollars a month and they check they write to me to run their ads about 200 grand a month wow so it's like the anything that you can sell that is high ticket a mastermind like my mastermind business is my best business it's 1500 bucks a month so it's like 18k a year and I make maybe a million, million and a half in revenue on it, 40% or so profit margin.

It's not that hard.

It's super valuable for the the members.

Not that hard for me to do.

It's like, that's a great business model.

So product expansion.

So here you have sponsorship, you got guests paying you, you got events.

And then I can't remember what else you said.

What else can you add on?

Well, you could add on the development of your own physical products and you could sell.

I mean, you would, you, you came from the physical product game, too.

You know what's up.

Margins scare me, though.

Not for apparel.

Or, I mean, apparel, dude, apparel has, you can get some real high margins for apparel, any consumable.

Like, how many people listen to this are digital creators like the dude was just telling me out there which is your guy is awesome bobby bobby love that guy he's he's the man but uh he was like yo we've been we've been we've been going hard this last week i'm tired like i'm gonna take an energy shot any physical product that has that is you notice everything i sell is consumable that's deliberate i only sell consumables right because once i get a customer i know i'm gonna get a repeat customer so for you I'd look at how can I add a high ticket?

How can I sell my own product or service to this audience that is watching me and then just keep doing what you're doing i mean what year are you in on this uh a year you're a year in you already had three million yeah oh here dog you're good you're good you're gold i got big goals man i'm trying to get those joe rogan numbers yeah you'll get there you know yeah i love that though um what are you up to now because you stepped on a ceo so are you working full hour 40 work i'm trying to figure that out you know it's like i i

am definitely not working 40 hours a week anymore i i started a foundation for my daughter um for to support other you know the interesting thing about i don't know if you've ever been in in an ICU or let alone an ICU with all sick and dying or some hopefully not dying babies, but it's like, it's a very psychically intense environment.

It tends to affect people on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

The people who have babies in there tend to have other kids at home and not be able to visit them.

And so you're in there.

There's a hundred babies.

The doctors and nurses are doing the best they can.

There's no parents.

There's nobody there.

And you just got all these crying babies.

I was trying to take some of them.

We had this little neighbor baby.

I wanted to adopt her.

But it's like, so this, this foundation is providing financial grants to families so they can not work and be with their babies because when a baby has nobody with it, it's so much more likely to not make it.

If the mom can be there holding the baby, the numbers go through just from holding it?

Holding them.

Wow.

So it's an energy thing.

Well, it's like, you need human.

It's like, you ever seen the study where they have the monkey that they gave the stuffed animal as the mom and then the monkey that they gave the real monkey?

The stuffed animal monkey is a psychopath.

Because it's like, you got to look this up.

You need contact.

You need touch.

And for men in particular, I do jiu-jitsu.

I grew up in doing judo and jiu-jitsu.

It's like the beautiful thing about jiu-jitsu for young men is it is a safe and societally acceptable way for men to have contact with one another, which is so fucking important.

You have many lonely men there are committing suicide.

Like we have an epidemic of lonely men between 25 and 45 with no friends.

It's like, go join jiu-jitsu, dude.

So I'm doing that and I am back to, look, I'm out on the road.

I'm speaking again.

I haven't made a piece of content in like six years.

When Boom blew up and my other businesses blew up, it was like, well, I can't be a digital creator anymore.

I got real businesses that need my attention.

So I hired a CEO, put them in place, and I haven't done any content.

It turns out I kind of like this shit.

I like podcasts.

I like videos.

I like speaking at the events.

So I think I'm going to do a little more of that.

And, you know, we bought this company called Navage, which is a, it's a really big company.

It's in all the drugstore brands,

drugstores and everything.

And I'm doing.

digital strategy for that brand, which is really fun.

So, you know,

what's the product?

It's a nasal irrigator.

It's like a powered neti pot.

So it's basically

push.

And it actually was good timing for us because it turns out all the epinephrine, all that stuff you put up your nose doesn't actually work.

The FDA just came out and said, ours is natural.

It's just a saline solution that pushes through your nose.

I'll send you a link.

I love that.

I snore and I actually tape my mouth at night now.

Dog, you got to try and navage.

Those are really phenomenal.

Yeah, I always feel like I'm like, I don't know if it's the desert air because there's no trees out here, but I feel like I'm lacking air out here.

Yeah, I mean, who knows?

Allergies, food.

I don't know what you eat.

You're constantly at fancy restaurants.

I'm pretty good.

I just tested my biological age, man.

What are you?

21.

Oh, shit.

You ever do that test?

I haven't.

No.

Are you into health?

Yeah.

I mean, I'm more on the Eastern medicine

to Western than Western hospital, you know.

But I would do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I had to do some blood work here and there for stuff.

Yeah.

You know, key-man insurance.

Key-man.

Yeah.

When they, when someone buys your company, they want to make sure you're not going to die.

So they buy insurance on you.

So if I die, they get paid because I'm an integral part of this.

Yeah.

So they had to do this whole crazy thing on me where they took all my blood and and they did everything.

Wow.

Just so they could assess how likely is this guy to die?

So we could figure out what kind of insurance policy to put on him.

I did not know that.

I wonder if Steve Jobs had that.

Everyone has it.

Any big CEO, there is T-Man Insurance on that team member for sure.

That must have been a billion-dollar.

I mean, he died from cancer, right?

I don't know.

That one never made sense to me because when you have all that money.

But think about it.

He was a fruitarian for like six years.

And there's all these studies now that are linking high sugar to it feeds cancer.

And like,

what do I know?

I don't know what I'm talking about, but I will say, you know, you can't just eat fruit for.

I actually had a fruit terrorian on the podcast.

And did they look any kind of healthy?

No.

Yeah.

To be honest.

No, he didn't.

He did it for eight or 10 years.

Now he eats vegetables with it because he said it was just.

Yeah.

Look, here's what I will say.

I was a raw foodist for many years.

I followed a vegan diet.

And like, I'm the kind of guy.

It's like, one of the things that I do have going for me is I will do whatever the thing is.

Like, I have, I'm into willpower challenges.

I drink only water for 21 days one time, 21-day water fast.

I like the idea of challenging my will and saying, can I do this?

And so I will do the thing, whatever it is.

Like I will show up every day with a positive attitude and consistently put attention on growing my business.

I will eat the diet however we say we're going to eat it.

And I'm going to tell you about Korean 8 constitution medicine in a second.

It's pretty sweet.

But basically, here's what I found with the vegans and the, and hey, if you're vegan or raw food, you know, rock and roll, man, I support, I, I am the guy who thinks you're doing it right, who thinks you're perfect as you are, who is in support of however you want to party as long as you're not hurting anybody.

so this is not meant to attack you but i will say my experience was that many of these people are so neurotic about what they're going to eat they're so caught up in it it's like yo if you just chilled the back yeah and just ate whatever you thought was pleasurable and tried to eat in a good way and relaxed you would be healthier this neuroses around i can't eat this i can't eat this the titan it's like that is not good There is a mental,

I got to find the study, but it's like, how you feel when you ingest food is very important.

If you're all freaked out, that's what you're getting into your system.

I agree.

Yeah, people don't factor in the mental side of it.

They just

see it as black and white, but there's more to it.

But with the fruits and vegetables, man, if you're not eating it organic, there's just so much pesticide.

All that bullshit in it.

Yeah, it's

not goes with meat, too, but it's scary to eat right now

from any grocery store.

You heard this Korean eight constitutional stuff?

No, tell me about that.

All right, so check this out.

I'm a sucker.

I'm looking to be sold.

Any good hustle.

Someone's got a good diet or program.

I'll try it out.

I'm interested.

Okay, so their philosophy is that there's eight types of sort of profiles of people.

There's really only four, but there's kind of eight within the four, each, each four kind of has like a similar one.

And the way they think about it is that your bone structure, your eyes, your sort of hardware as a human comes from both parents.

But your software, which is your blood, your organs, you know, all that.

comes from just one and you get sort of one of these eight different softwares and they measure you based on the relative strength of your internal organs.

So they call me like a colonatonia, which means I have strong lungs and a strong colon.

And then I've got like weak liver and weak kidneys.

And so that's kind of like, these are your strong organs.

These are your, your weak organs.

And what I like about it is, so then they say, hey, based on your profile, we're going to rank meat, you know, grains, fruits, everything from this scale, double positive, positive, neutral, negative, double negative.

They're not saying don't eat meat, don't eat grains, don't eat fruits.

They're saying if you eat them and you eat the positive ones, you're going to feel better.

And so they tell you, eat 80% positive foods and you're going to feel really good.

I've been doing this now for a couple of years.

Yeah.

I feel really good.

Wow.

It's the best.

Now, is it a placebo effect?

Is it just because I believe and I bought into the shit?

I don't know, but I really like it.

And it's like, I like it because it's not trying to exclude shit from you.

It's saying, look, for your profile and your blood and all that, you think this is righteous.

And then they got another, the dude I went to, he like did a whole sales webinar.

And I was like, this is my guide.

I kind of fell asleep halfway through it, but I was like, I like you because you're pitching.

So basically, his viewpoint is there's only a few things affecting humans, mold, virus, fungus,

EMF, and I don't know, something else.

And he's like, essentially, if you're messed up, it's like one of these things, then he's got some upsell and how he clears.

I don't know.

Wow.

That's Korean?

Korean eight constitution medicine.

I'm going to look into that.

How did they measure your organ health?

They

get your pulses and do all this stuff.

And they got this electromagnetic.

I don't know, man.

I'm into trying weird health things.

Well, it's kind of like, look, if you have a diet that you believe believe in and you follow it and you feel good about it, you're probably doing better than most.

But then if you're like excluding a million things, you might be deficient in certain things.

So what I like about this one is it's like, there's no exclusions.

There's just these ones are better than these ones.

I love the Ezra.

It's been fun, man.

Anything you want to close off with?

What do I want to close off with?

My motto in business is serve the world unselfishly and profit.

And I think that is a description of how it goes.

I'm not saying that because I think you should do it.

I'm saying that my experience is if you show up in a role of service for your team members, for your business, for your family, for your community, if you look to

if you are intending for a contribution of spirit to your world, you're going to profit in every sense of that word, financially, karmically, energetically.

And so,

you know, for the young people, I know a lot of young people watch this podcast coming up.

It's like, it is not about how much you work.

It's about what you produce.

It is is about

how much you pull out.

It's about what you put in.

What you invest into your world will ultimately result in what you can get out of it.

And if you look around and you say, how can I have a good attitude, show up and contribute to whatever is going on, you're going to be successful.

I love the.

Thanks so much for coming on, man.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you next time.

Boom.