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

We are back again, speed insighting our way through stuff about how hard life is.

The Queen of England died 18 months ago.

She ruled an entire nation and accumulated more wealth than 99.9% of humans.

And yet, you haven't thought about her, except for right now.

No matter how big your dreams, you're going to die.

Everyone will move on.

Do what you want.

It sucks to not be liked, but it sucks more to not be yourself.

Yeah, it's really interesting when we think think about what tactically happens when someone dies, right?

Like a lot of emotion exists in the vague, but far less in the specific, because you plan your funeral, right?

And then you think that everyone's going to be standing there just forever changed because of the death and the impact that you had on their lives.

But the reality is there's going to be a caterer at the funeral.

Some people are going to like the food.

Some people are going to comment that it was too cheap, you know, the food that you had.

They're going to have comment on the venue, like, oh, I don't really, you know, it's a little hot.

There's going to be somebody who's going to make a list of people and they're going to check them off.

Some people aren't going to be able to make it last minute because things came up and it got busy.

And after the whole funeral is over, everyone's going to go to a restaurant and just eat dinner and then move on with their lives.

And so, not to say that, you know, the people who mean a lot to you won't remember you to a degree, sure.

But on the macro scale, when I think about somebody like the queen who accomplished so much in her life as like the zenith of accomplishment,

and most people probably even thought about her today, except for the fact that we just brought it up.

And so I think that just it, whenever I have my harder times, that's my like reminder to self of the absurdity of it all, which is like someone's going to argue over what appetizer they're going to serve when I die.

This probably doesn't matter that much.

How does that change the way that you show up and operate in the moment?

I think it just decreases affect in the

acute moment.

So

I define resiliency as the amount of time after an aversive stimulus, after a bad thing happens, that you return back to baseline behavior.

And so,

and then there's the different one, which is how long is your fuse, which is toughness and it's a whole different thing, right?

But resiliency is like, okay, I've been cracked.

You know, I've hit the fuse, the bomb's gone off.

But the size of the bomb is irrelevant.

Like you can be super resilient, have a terrible day, your father dies, and the next day you're back.

People are like, holy, it's like you go to the depths of hell, you touch the bottom of the pool, and then you shoot back up.

And so I think about how many different tools can I have in my tool set to make the rebound from down to back up as V-shaped as possible.

What are those tools for you?

Cosmic relevance is probably the biggest one when I think about like, because it's so fast, I feel like I do it almost automatically now, which is like, okay, I'm on a planet spinning around a sun inside of a galaxy, inside of a universe that will never reach the end of because it's expanding faster than the speed of light.

Okay,

the fact that, you know, there was a mistake in my book printing.

No one's going to care.

No one, it just doesn't matter, right?

So that's one of them.

Another one's the frame of the veteran, which I use a lot, which is, if this inconvenience happened a thousand times in a row on the thousandth time, what would I think about it?

Well, I'd probably be like, well, this is just how life is.

And then if I could feel that way on the thousandth time, then it means that I can feel that way on the first time right now, because it's just choice, because the actual circumstance is the same.

Those are probably like my two most prevalent, or you know, the ones that I like, my default ones that I, they're my back pocket.

There's a cool insight that the more you complain, the less accurate your model of reality.

So, complaining is you saying, the world isn't delivering to me that which I anticipated or expected or desired from it, which is also you saying, I don't don't understand how the world works until it comes and meets me in reality.

I haven't heard it phrased that way, and I really like it.

I think about

the hate

that we all get, whether it's from ourselves or other people, or the hate that we spew towards the external conditions, is simply boiled down to, this person lives their life in a way that I would not prefer.

And so I have translated every single negative comment that comes to me where someone complains about me, so flipping the script,

to

Alex lives his life in a way that I would not prefer.

And so it's actually been this very weird, like, oh, they said all this stuff.

And I was like, does that mean that I live my life in a way they wouldn't prefer?

Great, because they live their life in a way that I wouldn't prefer.

And that's why it's their life and I live my life.

And it's just been this really wonderful reframe that just almost comically

completely minimizes most things.

But I think that complaints come down to that.

The universe exists in a way that I would not prefer.

It's like.

Why are you not bending to my will?

Yeah.

And so I think,

shoot, I can't remember the psychologist.

I'm going to butcher it.

But one of the big guys

talked, I want to say Kinsey, but I don't want to mess it up.

Talked about there's three primary things that everyone casts all their pain and suffering to, which is you have circumstances, you have other people, and then you have self.

And that's it.

Those are the three, those are the three big ones that everyone puts of their all of their blame on.

And so the first two obviously don't serve you.

The third sometimes serves you depending on what you do as a result of it.

Right.

And so that actually, those big three has just been a really easy filter is like, oh, am I blaming circumstances?

Am I blaming other people?

Am I blaming me?

And obviously, you want to skip to you because that's the only thing you can do anything about.

The idea that

all of the things that you're working toward, all of the dreams, all of those things are going to stop.

There is going to be a day when you no longer answer your emails.

Like, I think about this.

I think about how many, even now, right?

Emails have not been allowed around that long, widespread, what, maybe 25 years, something like that.

Most people have had an email address, maybe 20 years.

All of the people that have died between then and now, they just have email inboxes

just accumulating stuff from

lots of newsletters, lots of online retailers.

But there will also be people expecting a reply.

Right.

And saying, why hasn't this guy replied to me?

It's like because he's dead.

Yeah.

There's

just

thinking, I mean, I think a lot about the end of my life.

Maybe it's a borderline obsession of mine, but thinking about like what the last five years are going to look like and also thinking about my cognitive decline, which is going to be inevitable on the back half of my, you know, life.

And it gets really tricky when you think about fluid intelligence, which peaks when you're like between 25 and 35.

And then like at our age right now, it's just all going down.

Like we're beginning the slow decline.

And in thinking about that, it's like, I will actually never be sharper than I am today for the rest of my life.

And the idea that there will be young people who will replace me because humans are all replaceable.

We have proven that.

And so

when I think about that,

it decreases the stakes of these

huge dreams that if I don't accomplish them, I will be upset or else.

And so it's like we have these big or else is like we threat, we want to threaten the universe.

Like I can't stand it if this does not occur it's like and the universe remains unchanged and the universe is undefeated

correct well that's why i was such my twitter bio for a long time was locally reversing entropy i remember that yeah yeah and i just love that idea that

you have the entire universe this force entropy which is going to inevitably destroy everything yeah not just everything you care about everything that could have created anything that anything could have cared about and it's going to destroy it yeah but for a brief period of time, you know, a few decades,

you locally stop the most powerful force in the universe.

I think that's so fucking cool.

I don't know if you saw this, but Bezos has this one page that was just brilliant.

And

he basically paraphrases Richard Dawkins talking about how

over time,

all organisms revert to their environment.

Literally, like the temperature of your body once you die, eventually just normalizes with the environment.

The acidity of what's going on, like inside of your body, normalizes.

And then eventually, like, you become one with your environment.

And so, it's the exact same concept.

And so, Bezos was talking about that quote, which is about biology, but he said, this is, you know, originally about biology, but so much more so about the way that we want to live, which is that everything around you will try and force you to dilute yourself.

It will force you to try and

merge in fit in with your surroundings and he said like this force is natural and it's inevitable and yet we have to fight it and the fact that it's hard does not make it less worth it and i thought that was like it was just i i mean i reposted because i thought it was so elegant it's like a cosmic regression to the mean

yeah it's exactly that's exactly what it is um and yeah so i think if we all know that we're going to we the regression to the mean is inevitable like and like again i think about these things that are, I want to say, I don't know if humiliating is the word, but like humility inducing.

Um, but like the idea that I'll die and then like worms will eat my body, just like a very simple thing like that.

Or if I die, like I was like, what if I just died by an animal killing me?

I like sometimes I think about that and I'm like, I would just be its lunch.

Like everything that I've done up to this point, it's like my arm will feed its child and like my thigh will feed it.

And then like, they'll leave some of it for the

one, one good meal.

Yeah.

And it just like it just it just takes the the stakes of like i'm so important right i'm all these goals matter to just like i could be lunch and that kind of you know

gives me one large exhale

the single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a good mood in the absence of things to be in a good mood about

i think that tweet has been my theme for 2025.

it's been it's it's funny because that was the most shared tweet i've ever had Um,

and

it was, it was like, it's, it was almost

not the opposite of Iron.

It was fitting, right?

It was completely fitting for the year.

And it's been because like this year, I've had a, just, I would say, a series of unfortunate events that has occurred.

And it's really tested my tools, right?

Tools in the tool belt

for reframing reality so that I can make my experience less, you know, miserable.

And so

I thought about that.

It's like, if I were, if I were to boil everything down of all the skills that you can learn, if everything that we do eventually becomes irrelevant, then the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.

And so one of the other frames on this is most people don't question someone who's in a bad mood.

Like, I'm just in a bad mood.

So it's like, well, if you can be in a bad mood for no reason, it's like you might as well be in a good mood for no reason because that one at least serves you.

And so I've been trying to exercise like, cause there's on one degree, there's like, let's count things to be grateful for.

On the other side, it's like,

why do I have to have things to be grateful for in order to be in a good mood?

Like, why is trying to find things a requirement of being in that mood?

Like, can I not find things and still choose to be in a good mood?

Because I've certainly not had things to be in a bad mood about and been in a bad mood.

And so I've been trying to flex that, which is like, sure, we can find things to be grateful for.

And when those things pop up, yes.

And of course, it's a practice of practice.

you get better at it.

But like, what if I could just be in a good mood?

And so I've just tried to break that relationship between the two because then it makes it contingent on something that I can find.

How successful have you been at that?

Mediocre.

Well, look, I think it's a

lovely idea in isolation

in theory, but I'm not convinced about how effective it is in practice for the reason that humans have a negativity bias.

You know, it's our psychological entropy.

100%.

And your ability to detect things that are a risk to you significantly better than your ability to detect things that are just pleasant.

Like this morning, I texted you and I was like, hey, man, like, I really love the feeling I have of anticipation on a morning before we do a podcast.

That's a normal, boring, mundane source of pleasure to me.

Yeah.

If I'm not really, really training myself to notice that,

I just, it just fucking falls away with the fact that, huh, I asked for almond milk and I bet this would have been better with with like whole milk.

That's the thing that ruins the day.

And the thing is, is you do notice it though, right?

You do notice that.

So I've had one of my themes this year has been focusing on moments and on both the positive and the negative.

And so like when we think back on, if I think back on the last year, right?

I don't remember probably 95% of the year.

Like I, you know, I did the same things.

And so it's like, it just didn't get recorded.

Like nothing notable happened.

And so really, like, when we think about a year we really just recall a handful of moments and that's it and those moments in time are usually very short and so i've been trying to think about um the bad you know seasons as well maybe it wasn't a bad season maybe i had five bad days or really five bad moments that i then thought about for the entire season and turned what would have otherwise been five minutes times five into an entirely bad year.

And so it's like, okay, well, if we can do that in the negative, can we do in the positive, which is, you know, obviously the thing to exercise.

But to the point that you said earlier about our

ability to detect threat and risk at such a such better accuracy than our ability to detect good things, it's so interesting because if you use that side of your brain,

not to derail us, but like, I think that has been one of the things that's helped me a tremendous amount in business.

Because when a business and I want to grow it, for example, I would think, okay, what are all the things that can destroy this business?

And this is Charlie Munger, this isn't me.

But basically, he says, invert, always invert.

And Einstein said that too.

And it's because like you get to use this, this way stronger horsepower engine of like, how do I grow my business?

That's

you can obviously think that way.

But the alternative would be like, how would I absolutely destroy this business in the fewest possible moves?

And then when you list out those moves, you're like, cool.

Now let's do the opposite of that.

And that has been, honestly, a lot of the, some of the sources of my greatest kind of creative creative moments have come from these apparently obvious things that would kill us.

Well, what if we did the even more obvious thing and did the opposite of what would destroy us?

And it's worked, it's worked

better than I deserve.

So this is the problem.

Yeah.

You can be rewarded professionally for focusing on things that you do not want to focus on personally.

And Ryan Long taught me this.

He was talking about how he's a comedian, Canadian comedian, really funny guy, spends all of this time, you know, dialing in these bits and obsessing over how it could be better.

And then he says to himself,

Yeah, but I don't need to do that in your relationships.

No, can you let that go when it comes to the way that you show up for your partner or your friends or your body image or whatever?

You don't get to compartmentalize stuff like that.

And

it is a very

unfortunate irony of the world that that the skill set you often need to become successful in business is the one you need to get rid of to be happy in your life.

Yes.

So I was thinking about what you were saying earlier with regards to risk and our ability to detect it.

So the other part of that that's been really interesting is

we also, not only do we detect more threats, we also overemphasize how catastrophic they could be.

And the converse of that is

we rarely identify the upside.

And when we do, we typically underestimate the upside.

And I think this is something that a lot of people don't talk about as much.

Obviously, I always have a business hat on, literally.

But I think about this because I think this is where, like, you said at the very beginning, that people complain because they cannot accurately view reality.

And so, if we tie that to this concept, then it means that people will disproportionately blame the universe and then perceive significantly greater risk for them asking a Girl out, starting a business, taking a loan,

you know, asking a stranger to buy something, making a podcast, and for fear of what other people on the internet will say or people who know them, right?

And so we catastrophize this side, but the flip side is.

And you hear this a lot when people, you know, do make it and whatnot.

They're like, I never dreamed it would be this big.

Now, some people are obsessive and like absolutely have thought through everything.

I follow more on that side.

But

on the other hand, though, a lot of people do get there and they're like, I never thought it was going to be this big.

And it's because we typically just underemphasize the upside, which is where, from the business perspective, it's like, that's where the alpha is.

That's where the outperformance exists, where most people think, hey, this bet, it could go to zero.

And you're like, ah, I don't think it's going to go to zero.

But even if it did go to zero, I have a 10X here.

And so.

If I have a 50% shot at a 10X and the other 50 is zero, I should take that shot every single time, knowing that I'm going to be wrong half the time.

It still makes sense to take.

And so I think people are not good at making those risk-adjusted return bets,

obviously financially, but even in the very micro aspect of our lives.

And so

we talked earlier about

cosmic irrelevance and the frame of the veteran, but there's a third frame that I think about a lot, which is, I call it play it out.

And so it's like, let's, no, let's, let's sit in there because again, fear exists in the vague, not in the specific.

And in the resistance.

Yes.

And so like when we have these

specificities of like, okay, I'm going to to start a podcast.

I can't start a podcast.

Like, okay, it's this big vague thing.

But no, like, let's play it out.

Like, let's see what actually would happen.

So I'm going to upload something and then people don't listen to it.

Okay.

Well, they didn't listen to it.

Okay.

Well, then that's not a problem.

Okay.

Let's say people, let's see tons of people listen to it, which I don't know how that magically happens, but let's say tons of people listen to it and they all hate it.

Okay.

Immediately you have this anxiety that raises up.

No, no, no, but let's play it out.

Like, what happens next?

It's like, okay, okay,

is it going to change what I eat?

Is it going to change where I sleep?

Okay, let's say, let's say I, all of a sudden, I lose all the money that I have.

It's like, okay, well, I probably have a bunch of people that if I really needed to sleep on their couch or in a spare bedroom, I could do that.

Okay, so I'm not really going to be homeless.

And if I really didn't have enough money for food, I can go to a homeless shelter and get food, right?

So it's like, wait, so my worst case scenario is like,

I have shelter and I have food and I'm still breathing air.

So that's the downside.

And so there's this catastrophizing that we, because we, our brains are spent to, are meant to keep us alive.

We literally think if we fail, we die.

Like everyone will ostracize us from the group and we will be alone and die.

And so just actually playing it out, not one step, but like two more steps after that, you're like, okay, so my actual downside risk is nothing, but my upside is everything I've wanted.

And even if I, even if I'm at 50% off on that, it's still worth the shot.

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Have you heard Ferris's idea, the world rewards the specific ask and punishes the vague wish?

I like it.

Very Ferris.

And

it's getting to this point here, which is fear exists in the vague and it exists in the resistance.

Going back to the single greatest skill we can develop is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.

Again, I think it's fantastic in theory.

I wonder how much it works in practice.

Both of us, everybody would love to be in a great mood for no reason.

So

I guess you can perhaps try and cultivate.

I can try and be positive when there's nothing to be positive about.

I would say that the other neurobiologically informed solution to this is to find increasingly small things to be increasingly happy about.

So, huh.

That was a really good training session.

Yeah, look, you know, it was annoying because half of the gym's under construction and I got some dust on my shoes.

Yeah.

But, huh, that was a good session.

I really enjoyed that.

Yeah.

Rick Hansen, who wrote Hardwiring Happiness, is 20, 25 years old,

hardcore neuroscience guy, Dharma teacher, meditation expert, life person.

Fucking awesome intersection and all.

And he has this wonderful acronym of heal.

Have a positive experience.

Enrich it.

And by enrich it, he means sort of sit with it.

So you allow it to, you actually notice it.

absorb which is imagine that sinking down and becoming a part of you

and then the L is optional, which is link.

So you can link it to a bad experience and you can oscillate between the two to help bring down the volume of a bad experience.

So

right now, there's nothing else I want to be doing right now than having this conversation.

Having a good experience.

Huh.

But that just washes by you.

And then you think in retrospect, oh, wasn't that, that was like a good thing at the time, but you don't ever actually arrive at having a good experience.

So the enrich bit's important.

So I'm like, huh, this is cool.

Like, I'm enjoying having this conversation, absorb, imagining it sinking down and becoming a part of you, which is basically spending 30 seconds to a minute, letting it, letting that emotion sort of fill you out as opposed to noticing it cognitively.

Like allowing it to go below the neck would be a good way to put it.

Okay, this is going to go below the neck, this sensation.

Yo, huh.

I'm actually, like, people are going to watch this and, and it's going to make them happy.

It's going to give them insights about their life.

And isn't that lovely?

It's.

The most obvious thing, which is, I mean, this is a pretty grand thing as things go.

It's certainly more grand than like, I had a fucking nice coffee or something like that.

So I wonder whether one of the skills that you can develop in the pursuit of becoming a person that's in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about is to become increasingly proficient at finding things to be in a great mood about.

And I'm aware that in your frame, that still makes it contingent on external, which is going to be an issue.

I'm still happy to be in a good mood when there is things to be a good mood about, for sure.

If you can become increasingly skilled at finding things to be in a good mood about, I get the sense, especially if if life's kicking you in the dick, which it's done to both of us for the last while.

And I also think that it's

an interesting

comment realization from you,

given that you've been kicked in the dick, because you think, ha,

this is an insight that you will only learn when things aren't

ostensibly going well.

Yeah.

Because it's the sort of realization that you get when inertia and momentum and bravado and confidence and

upward trajectory are all taken away from you.

And you go, ha,

I'm like, I'm having to do the budgeting equivalent, like the mental equivalent of living on pennies

from a well-being perspective.

I want to say we talked about this four podcasts ago, this specific thing, which was that

I have this, maybe it's sadistic

is the right word, but like I do take some sadistic pleasure in, or masochist, I don't remember what the word is, but when you, when you, when you enjoy your own pain, um,

whenever I have these prolonged moments of suffering that kind of break past what I would consider the normal variants of life, right?

It's like, you know, this broke through the barrier of shitty.

Um,

I do have this history of having significantly larger improvements that happen post-dip, right?

So it's like we kind of get the opportunity to buy the dip

for our own negative consequences.

And I've bought the dip at almost every time, and it's rewarded me disproportionately.

And so

I hate to

make a parallel between like the economy or the stock market and your own internal happiness, but I think that's what's happening right now.

But

that thought process has shortened some of the

shittiness that happens because then it's like, okay, well,

it has to be worth it, right?

I have to make this worth it, right?

Because this sucks.

So, what can I learn from this?

What can I be better from this as a result?

And so, obviously, there's things that I've been working on in order to improve.

But

beyond that,

because gratitude has been so difficult for me, which I've talked about before,

I've never once said I am the champion of happiness.

But in an effort to try and make it easier for me, I was like, well,

how do you operationalize gratitude?

Right.

And so the simplest way that I have is imagine something terrible

and then remember that that has not happened.

Like, it's like, I, I've yet to find, like, that has been the, the simplest way, like, be grateful.

It's like, what do I do to be grateful?

Yeah.

Like, no, no, like that more.

And it's like, that, it's like, it's been difficult.

So it's like, okay.

Um, and then the, on the flip side, imagine something that you love, imagine it's gone, and then remember that it's back again.

And so that's, I think, the operationalizing of those moments, which is I have this coffee moment.

Man, if I never had another coffee moment like this again, this would mean more to me.

Okay.

And by doing that and by remembering what it would be like to not have this, then this thing now in the moment becomes worth more.

And so it's basically creating a wider discrepancy between the moment we're trying to find gratitude with and something else in order to basically manufacture a delta.

Because I think that

to your point, like we're so much more sensitive to the negative delta than we are on the positive delta that we have to make the positive delta massive.

And so, how do you make moments massive?

It's like, well, then we just have to drop the floor out and then remember that now all of a sudden we went from the bottom of the pool back to the surface, even though we're not above the water.

Playing pretend.

So, I'm just 100% playing pretend.

All gratitude is playing pretend.

I'm not sure.

I think if something happens and you're grateful for it, that's you enriching something that exists.

But what we're doing is- What is enriching me?

Really noticing it.

Because things that you should be grateful for will often pass you by without you noticing them.

So we noticed them originally and then we noticed them.

Do you notice them?

Do you notice them?

Oh, I know.

I have to remember to be grateful and then I have to go look for shit.

Yeah.

But even as it happens, right?

And this is the point, as it happens.

Yeah.

I'm here.

I went to Rufus DeSol at

Q2 Stadium in Austin, which is where the football club plays.

And

Rufus DeSol, great music, real cool.

I'm with a ton of my best friends.

It's finishing at a time that's not insane.

You know, the weather was lovely.

Bed by six.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was in bed by seven times.

But it wasn't that loud.

The sound wasn't that good.

Okay.

Well, everybody was like, wish it was louder.

Wish it was loud.

Because it wasn't.

We were at the very back of the stadium.

Beautiful view, but not fantastic for sound.

You go, dude, you're watching fucking Rufus de Soul in a stadium with your friends in Austin.

Weather's great.

Everyone's got a beer or a sparkling water in their hand.

It's having a great time.

This is something that you can notice in the moment.

You have, pick your direction, Western man.

Yeah.

And you are picking the sounds not good.

Yeah.

But

in your business, you are rewarded over and over and over again for realizing that the sound's not good.

This can.

I've done this before.

Are you zoomed?

Can you do this?

So if you look very, very closely here, I might even have to get out of the way for the light.

The alignment of the Instagram logo with the F from follow us here and the N from Newtonic below is out of alignment by what looks like one point.

It's less than a millimeter.

Guess who noticed?

This guy.

I have been rewarded throughout my entire professional career for noticing things that other people didn't and then claiming that they were a sufficiently big issue that we should actually change them.

Yeah.

Reverse gratitude.

And yeah, and yeah.

This is a small thing.

It is now a big problem.

It's a massive problem because you win in the weeds.

Yeah.

But you don't win in the weeds when it comes to happiness unless you are doing it in the other direction.

Right.

So you need to, and this is so hot.

And this is.

This is what we enjoy talking about because just for everybody who's listening, Chris and I had a conversation prior to this being like, what are we, what are you thinking about right now?

And so we're both actually in the same vein of thought, which is why both of us were looking forward to having this conversation with you guys.

Yes.

about this this difficulty because one of the other things that's come up with regards to to gratitude and happiness has been there's a second conversation that I think happens internally, at least for me, which is that like, I will judge myself on being not as happy as I should be or not like, hey, I didn't notice anything I'd be grateful about.

You fuck.

Right.

And so trying to separate the fact that I like

to take this to the absolute extreme, why should I be grateful?

Why should I be happy?

Why do I demand of my life that it must be happy?

Like that I must be happy during it?

That's a demand.

And so I try to decrease my demands in general as a habit, you know, as a personal practice.

And so I've been thinking about that, that concept in and of itself, because the very early, the earliest part of my career, I just was done with happiness.

I was like, disregarding it.

Yeah, it's just like, it's irrelevant.

And so now I'm getting to the point where like, well, it'd be, it would be nice to also have this while I have

this.

I'm aware that this is a very sort of basic bitch insight, but I do think that given the starting point that you were at, and to a lesser degree, the starting point I was at is like a Holmosey light

lifestyle approach.

That's a big deal to make this pivot.

And I think it's one of the reasons I was particularly interested in talking to you today because

I would say the last

three years or so since we've been recording together,

from an

architecture perspective, it's largely been the same.

That it doesn't matter how you feel.

The hard work just needs doing.

Hard things are hard.

That's why they're hard.

And disregard the emotions that are getting in the way of it.

And I do think that that works for a little for a good while and it can really propel you to great things.

But I also think that sometimes stuff

you have such a orthogonal change in the way that your life's put together where you go,

I might have exhausted this fuel source.

I might need to switch from booster rockets to something else.

And

yeah, you've got, as you said earlier on, about how you take small bad moments, maybe very impressive bad moments, and then you scale them out.

You're not having a bad year.

You've had a few bad days that you're thinking about for the rest of the year.

I've found it helpful when I'm in a bad season like I'm in right now to just focus on having a good day.

A good day in a bad season is a bite-sized victory.

String a few of those in a row and a bad season feels less hard.

I'm pretty sure the difference between a happy life and an unhappy one doesn't come down to how many good or bad days you have, but which days you think about over and over again.

In some seasons of life, maintaining is winning.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

This has been the, this has been my, my big focus right now is, um, and I'm not the first person to say this, but just winning the day.

Um, and Bill Ackman had this.

Uh, I heard him on a podcast talking about this hard season where he was getting divorced.

He just lost $4 billion in Parishing Square, his investment firm.

And he was not him today.

He was earlier on his career.

So, I mean, it was just the worst.

And because he had lost his money, the divorce was for way more money because it was based on his net worth that didn't exist anymore.

And it was just a terrible slog.

And he said, one of the difficult parts about that period is that there was no one thing that was like, oh, I can tackle this today.

Like you're not going to finish the divorce today.

You're not going to undo the $4 billion loss today.

And so it's like when you have these larger, more complex negative things that do scale, it's like, how do you, how do you, how do you navigate through that?

And for anyone who's listening right now, it's like, maybe it's the bad breakup.

Maybe it's the, or maybe you're getting divorced, right?

Or maybe it's like the business isn't working the way you want.

It's like, and there's like 10 things that you have to fix.

And it's like, well, I can't fix that change in the, in the logo until the next run.

So I just have to see this every single day.

And so he, he had this very tactical advice, which I liked a lot, which is he just tried to make progress and that was it.

And he said, you know, in a day, you, it's almost, it's almost negligible, right?

But at 30 days, you're like, okay, I moved this.

And at 90, you're like, wow, you know, this, this is really, this has really materially changed in what's happened.

Now, does this mean that our mood is still being dictated by circumstance?

Yes.

I'll be honest.

Yes, it does.

But

I think many of us have this ideal.

We'd love to be able to be in a great mood with in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.

But sometimes progress is the W.

Like maintaining in some seasons is winning.

And I've had to tell myself that also, that we can have these different, like on the on business factor, I'm murdering it.

I'm crushing there, but like I had, I tore my quad this year, uh, which sucked.

I had, uh, uh, yeah, painful.

Um, I have a neck thing that's just been bugging the hell out of me, right?

So, it's like, and I have two great fears in life: one is that I lose my mind, which is really just more that I'll be a burden to everybody else.

I won't know because my mind will be lost, right?

Um, and the other is chronic pain.

Those are like my two great fears in life because chronic pain is really tough.

Like, the first thing you think about when you open your eyes in the morning is pain.

And it's like, fuck.

It's like, and now I I have to be in a good mood, right?

Because I demand this of myself.

And so when in navigating those scenarios,

just trying to chip away and also to take the reverse of, I had this one great podcast today.

I'm going to make that thing the thing that's making this a great day.

And then if I can make that great day, then maybe it could be a great week.

And then trying to expand those, basically like let those good moments eat up the season.

And I made a conscious decision on May 1st.

And I think I, did I send you the screenshot of my HRV.

Yes.

So it was May 1st.

I was like,

fuck this.

I was like, I told Layla, I was like, I have decreed that the rest of the year will be good.

And so I'm putting so much mental effort into this, which is why this is so timely

from us talking about it

in actively trying to minimize all the down things and super, super focus on those moments and be like, cool, I had that good moment.

That's my day.

Day's made.

And I'm trying to even say that more.

Like, oh, this podcast made my day.

This podcast made my week.

Now, I used to think, oh, this made my week.

When someone would say something small, I'd be like,

that's what made your week.

Like, you must not have a lot going on.

That's so true.

Right.

Like, meant, like, my own judge, judge machine, right?

That's lame.

Yeah, exactly.

Stupid thing.

Oh, my God.

How feeble, how small is your life that something so unimpressive is a source of gratitude to you for a week or yet and yet

your life is made up of small days like this.

That is what life is.

And if your

expectation of life is that it's going to be, well, until I play the main stage at EDC, until I make the billion dollars, until I get married to the love of my life, until I get these things, you're just holding your happiness hostage until something great happens.

And what if, again, it's what we said before, what if something small could be something great?

Yeah.

And

it it exists in the specific.

There's like the tiny moments.

And that, yeah.

So that's, that's been, that's been

boring, boring victories.

But, but making, trying to make it, basically, I've had to recalibrate my entire scale to how little of a thing can happen that makes my day, how little of a thing can happen that makes my week, how little of a thing can make, can make my month.

And like, how crazy would it be if a year from now I say, 2025 was a great year.

You know, I woke up pain-free

for, for probably like 70% of my days.

That was a great year.

But like, I got to have coffee with Layla in the morning once a week.

And that, that filled me up for the whole week.

Like, if I can, and I want to,

I'm putting, so anyone who's listening to this, like, I'm putting a huge amount of my discretionary effort into this because it's my belief that right now,

what will, what will prevent me from achieving my ultimate goals because that that motherfucker's not gone um

um

the thing that will achieve that will stop me from achieving my ultimate goals is um running out of steam because and and this may not be real for some people but like i don't need to do this like i don't need to work this hard um

and so i have to

make or i'd like to i'd prefer to make the ride more enjoyable.

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That's a huge departure, I think.

Prefer.

I will still fucking ride at dawn.

That's a huge departure, though.

And look, dude, you know, I,

the conversation that we had the other week, and I think the one that we're having now,

it might be

less

Goggins, Jocko-pilled,

screaming, alpha motivation, fucking sleep token track over the top of it edit thing.

However,

one of the things that I've noticed when

seeing somebody that goes from a position like the one that you were in or the light equivalent that I was to talking in this sort of a way, there's an awful lot more humanity, I think, that people can see in that because

work until your eyes bleed, nobody cares about your emotions.

Fuck you, dude, just go harder.

Although it sounds fantastic in theory, it's very impersonal and it sounds

mechanistic, it sounds robotic, it sounds detached, and that's fantastic.

And you can do that for a while.

You can completely disregard the way that you feel for a while,

but only for a while.

And

sooner or later, the

entropy of positive affect being a motivator, the fact that enjoyment is efficiency

does tend to catch up with you.

And it'll catch up with you in sneaky ways.

Right?

The quad tear, who knows?

And I'm completely open to this.

Who knows whether the quad tear would have happened if the book had been finished in twice as long?

Yeah.

You know?

Your system sort of contributes to itself in a global sort of stress-based manner.

It's, you know, what's weird is that the thing that's made the season hard is not actually like work ethic or even time constraints because like I work pretty much every day all day, but like that, that's, that's been baseline and that doesn't really bother me very much.

Like, not even bother me very much.

I like doing that.

The thing is that the nature of what fills that time.

And so like, if I have all the things that are not work that are related to work that I must do as a result so that I can get back to doing the work I like doing.

Like me writing a book is the, is the most fulfilled, like is my favorite thing in the entire world.

Us doing these podcasts is some of the best moments that I get to have in my life.

Like twice a month, I'll have business owners to come out that are bigger, that were, that are like kind of like not portfolio ready, but like they're, they're doing usually like, you know, five to $25 million a year, like right in that range.

And I get to, I spend a whole day with those 10 businesses.

And it's like, and I tell them, I'm like, this is the fucking best.

Like, I love this.

This is my favorite thing in my entire life.

Um, but it's it's everything that's not that.

Uh, and Bezos talks about the overhead, right?

And I think it's when the overhead starts to become a disproportionate amount of your time.

And I think that at every level of at least entrepreneurship, I get these periods where the overhead just become bigger and bigger and bigger until I fix it, right?

And so, like, for us, I had, I think, I told you, I'll tell everybody publicly, like, I had, I think, eight or nine lawsuits within

like 30 days at the beginning of this year.

And so I was like, okay, that sucked.

And then I'll tell you the story that happened on top of this, just to give everyone some context.

Layla had a health thing.

She went to the doctor to get it checked out.

And

REA was with her.

And I was like, hey, you know, how's it going?

What's going on?

And she had said earlier, like, she can't get in.

I was like, what?

What does that even mean?

And then, and then the next text I got from the EA was, she has cancer.

And so I remember reading that text and being like,

okay,

all right, this is reality now.

Like, this is now the new frame.

And I sat with it just long enough to enrich and absorb that concept.

Yeah.

And so then I was like, all right.

So I'm thinking, okay, like chemo, like, what do we need to do?

Diet?

Why?

Like, I'm already thinking through this stuff.

And I was like, okay, what kind of cancer is it?

What state?

Like, that's what I'm going with.

So I asked for more details.

And she was like, oh my God, no.

The reason that it was delayed was because the front desk girl has cancer and she just messed something up.

And that was what she was using as her excuse.

Layla doesn't have cancer.

And I was like, oh, she does have this other stuff, right?

But she doesn't have cancer.

And the thing is, is that Layla, after that occurred when I hung out with her later that night,

was,

you know, obviously annoyed at whatever issue she was dealing with.

But for me, I was like, I saw her and I just gave her this big hug and I was like, hey, I was like, you don't have cancer.

And so it's crazy.

There's this exact example of gratitude, this terrible thing.

And just kidding, it's not a thing anymore.

And now I'm really grateful that you have the terrible thing that you have now.

At least it's not cancer.

And so

to bring this back, that all still happened in the same period of time.

And

Chris mentioned this earlier.

I don't know if it was before this pod, but like I,

there was a there was a mishap with printing my next book that's coming out.

And

the equivalent of one and a half acres of trees

basically became unusable because because there were sufficient errors in the book that I couldn't in good evidence, you know, in good conscience, kind of like the can, it's like, how bad of a mess up

does it have to be on the can for me not to sell it?

Right.

And like, I had to have this internal, I was like, maybe I could make it a thing.

Like, hey, our, our books had some mess ups and we're, and I was like, no one's going to care.

No one's going to care.

They're just going to remember that they got a fucked up book.

And so I had to destroy those.

Right.

And so I had,

I could, I have like seven more massive ones, but I'm not going to get into it.

Um, but But the beauty of this entire thing was I got to have this experience of being forced to say, okay, is there a world where I'm going to have to endure more of this?

And the answer to that, if I continue to do what I'm doing, is yes.

And so

I need to build a legal team, which is what I've now built.

And I like, and so there's these things.

And all of a sudden now, am I better at gratitude or did I solve the problem?

I don't know.

I'd be like, really, like, I want to be real.

I don't know.

But as as of May 1st, things are a little better.

And my actual health, for anybody who's a health nut, my HRV average was about 32.

And I'd have many, many low 20s days for a 36-year-old active male.

Pretty bad.

And since May, like May 1st,

I'm, I'm up like 15 points on my HRV.

And I have changed nothing.

Like, I eat the same.

I work out the same.

I'm pretty routine oriented.

And the only thing that has changed was the decision that 2025,

I'm not tossing out 2025.

And I started in the beginning of the year, and I was talking to a good friend of mine.

And he was like, dude, fuck bad year.

He was like, fuck.

He's like, stop fucking saying that.

And I was like, you're right.

I should stop saying that.

It will be a handful of moments over five months that we're spread out.

And then the back seven, I was like, I can fucking murder it.

Turn this around.

Yeah, exactly.

We're turning the ship around.

Right.

And so that's it.

I've actually been like, it's almost been like an exciting thing for me right now.

So I'm, I have a little bit of a smile because i'm pumped for it personal observation you get absolutely better returns at the top ends of achievement because oftentimes assets pool to the winners the problem is to achieve the highest levels you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hoped the achievements would get you there comes a time when the hard work you have to do is learning that you can't work any harder any longer and that you have to change what got you here to what will get you to where you want to go.

You can work to get anything you want, but you have to sacrifice the other things you want to keep it.

And that's sometimes harder than the work.

Yeah, 2025.

In the dark.

Yeah.

The hard remains the same.

Actually,

I've given this a huge amount of thought.

So, like, what makes something hard?

Like, just in and of itself, like, what actually makes something hard?

And so, if we think about this as an aversive stimulus or a negative stimulus, then you have,

because habituation happens on both sides.

And this is what I think is so fascinating because it's like, okay, well, you know, I wanted this big thing to happen.

I wanted the Rolls-Royce.

I wanted the Ferrari, whatever.

I saved my whole life.

And here I am.

Right.

And I was happy for a week.

And then all of a sudden, I got used to it.

Right.

So I was like, why can't I habituate to the suck?

Why can't I habituate to the suck?

And the thing is, is that you do.

The only thing is that what makes the suck keep sucking is what makes punishment effective, which is increasing intensity and variety.

And so if you want to effectively punish someone, you can't just keep punishing the same way.

You have to increase intensity and change how you do it.

And the beautiful thing is that life doesn't fight fair.

And so life will change the intensity and will give you more variety.

How many, how many times have you been like, I didn't know life could suck in this way?

Like,

this is a new one.

You know, like, wow.

Like you spin the roulette of life and you're like, oh, here's another one that sucks.

My dick was kicked from another angle.

Yeah, exactly.

Congratulations.

I had no idea.

And so, so in thinking about that, it was like, okay.

I think the reason that the hard persists is because the nature of the currency that you pay or that you exchange for the thing that you want changes.

Because in the very beginning, you basically have to like, you know, conquer

your friends and family who tell you that this might be a bad idea.

Okay, fine.

You get over that.

And then you have to conquer yourself in the most basic level of like, I have to do something.

Okay.

So you start, you start taking action.

You start learning.

You start learning how to learn stuff, which is learning through failure and learning to do.

So you start doing that.

And you realize you're not going to die if you fail.

Okay.

Then after that, then it's like, okay, but then now you have this dramatic skill deficiency, right?

So you have to very quickly level up in a ton of different things

in whatever whatever domain you're in, right?

And then that has many failure loops that

have we have we have we habituated to failure?

No, it's too it's too generalized.

So the failures that that occur are specific.

And so it's just like, oh, I didn't know I could fail in this way, right?

Like we had an event.

So we hold, we hold an event at our, at our, at our headquarters, uh, like monthly.

And when people come out, I remember it was like three times in a row.

There was this thing at the front desk that got messed up.

And I was like, how?

Like, it was the canned thing.

I was like, how?

How?

Right.

And I swear to God,

I got the message back and they said,

well, the system messed up in a different way.

And I was like, same issue, new route.

Exactly.

And I was like, and it happened three times in total.

And so it was the same problem three completely.

They're like, well, we fixed that version of the problem, but then this one came up.

And so it's like, it still sucked.

And so the thing is, is that I think failure is our, our habituation to failure is so narrow that every new type of failure, all three of those hurt.

Micro-novelty.

Yes.

And so, um, and so when I think about that, it's like when, like, my, like I said, this year financially has been the best year of my life.

Right.

And so that's been awesome.

Um,

but I've had all of these.

I mean, I've had, uh, I've had health stuff, laylaid health, health stuff that was separate.

We had legal things, which is another, another whole thing because business stuff, book stuff.

Yeah, there's, yeah, there's the book stuff and and then there's

yeah, there's a lot of things.

Um, and so all of those things happened.

And I was like, oh, I was like, so it's just that the currency has changed, the currency that I'm paying.

And so I'm very happy to pay the long hours currency.

I'm very happy to pay the, what am I willing to give up in terms of social life?

Like that to me, I've habituated to that price.

That's not hard for me.

I don't even consider it a sacrifice anymore, which is, I think, what you want because people, people will sometimes maybe see you or people they'll see me and think of like the Goggins, you know, work until your eyes bleed the thing is is that like and maybe maybe I don't know goggins, but I'll just speak for myself

I Don't I don't really push that hard like I don't really push I do it and I've already habituated to this like this is not this is not an excess for me pushed in the initial Yeah, get up to the

end.

Yeah, and I like we worked so I had my whole team in a in a boardroom at the very beginning.

You saw my timer.

So I have a timer that's well on my phone.

It has like 22 and a half hours on it.

And so what I've been doing is I've been challenging the team to, they wanted to do a 12-week project.

And I said, hey, can we do it in seven days?

Right.

And not only are we going to do it in seven days, we're going to actually see how many actual hours does it take of us working together to get this done.

And my hope is that we get the whole thing done in under 50 hours with eight guys.

And so I'm like, okay, so we can shrink what was once going to be three months into this period of time.

And so over the last two days, we just did this, and I'm going to do it again tomorrow.

Is that everyone was starting to work at seven and continued, didn't really leave the boardroom except for like to use the restroom until about nine o'clock at night.

And so you're talking 12, 14 hour days, but like on the whole time.

And the thing is, and this is what's, this is what's crazy.

Every single guy who was in that room texted me afterwards.

It was like, that was fucking awesome.

Like, I wish we could work like this all the time.

And so like, I don't think like we talk about work and what makes work hard and all these things, but like

Most of the things, once you learn how to work, the work itself is self-reinforcing and you enjoy it.

It's everything else that you didn't know you're going to have to sacrifice so that you could get back to working.

And so

that's where I've had to really consider this Bulgarian method approach.

So we talked about

a powerlifter, a friend of yours, who like he went to go train with the best coach of all time.

And so there's the Bulgarian system, which is the same thing in Bulgaria.

This tiny little nation disproportionately outcompetes in Olympic lifting.

And the way that they do it is they have a system, which basically just breaks everyone who does it except for the one person who can sustain it and he becomes champion.

And so I actually see business, unfortunately, or fortunately, very similar in a lot of ways, which is that

the path, the science of achievement is fairly straightforward, right?

Like you have to pursue high-leverage opportunities, and that is the working smart.

And then if everyone is working smart, then the only thing left that you have to compete is working hard, right?

Because people say work smart, not hard, only works when you compete against dumb people.

Like my competition is smart, and they're also working hard.

And so we both have to work hard.

And so

that price, though,

has been something that I've been staring at for myself because I've never had the aspiration of being number one.

At least for me, it's not in my DNA.

I haven't had that desire to be the richest man in the world.

Not something I care about.

And so then it's getting into, okay, what's the sweet spot that maximizes enough where I can actually start looking at some of these other preferences that I have and say, you know what?

I am no longer willing to make that trade.

And the other part of me, we talked about lame earlier, like

a coffee, you know, major week

to the same degree.

Um,

oh, like, this is enough for you.

Yeah.

And I've actually had a very, I would say, disdainful almost take when I would hear somebody who,

okay, I don't, well, take this, fine, I'll just take it, take this, whatever you want.

Um, you know, someone gets to a few million dollars a year, and they're like, that's it.

You know, I made it.

And I, in, and I have to fight against this.

This is what I'm working on.

Um, I see that, and I'm like, out of the game.

Like, he's out, he's out, yeah, done.

Like, or quit too soon.

Yeah, yeah, like there's so much, so much juice left to squeeze, right?

But then it's like, well, the thing is, is that the juice that it comes out is your output, and the thing that's being squeezed is you.

And so that's what I've been thinking a lot about.

Look at that person

who gets to however much a year.

Yeah.

50 grand, 100 grand, a million, two million, 10 million.

And they go, that's enough.

Yeah.

Who won?

Yeah.

Because that person finished their race way before you.

Yeah.

Way before you.

You're the fucking retard that's still running.

Let me tell you this story.

So my first gym ever, I had my first manager who worked there.

And he was a trainer.

He was awesome.

Best trainer I ever had.

And I promoted him to manager.

And with that pay raise, he went from something they read of like $25,000 a year as a trainer paid by session to getting a salary of like $45,000 a year, which for me was a ton of money at the time when I was paying somebody else.

Right.

And he did it for six months, crushed it, did an amazing job.

And he said, hey, man, can I talk to you after work today?

And I was like, yeah, sure, man.

What's up?

Like, you're doing great.

Whatever.

And he says,

hey,

I don't want to be manager anymore.

And I was like,

what do you mean?

You're quitting?

He's like, no, no, no.

I just want to be a trainer.

And I was like,

I mean, but you realize your pay would get cut in half.

Like that, like, that doesn't really make sense.

And he just looked at me, and I still remember this to this day.

He looked at me.

He's like, I'll just be poor then.

And I, and I, it was like, it was like, it was like a, it was like, it was like a bomb dead.

I was like,

and I looked at it, and I was, I was literally speechless.

And I just said,

I respect it, but I will never understand it.

And the thing is, is that he is to this day, I got to see him.

I got to see him three weeks ago, first time in like 10 years.

He was then the happiest person I've ever met.

And today, or when I just saw him, just as happy.

And he's like, dude, I mean, can you believe that we were starting that gym and you were at the floor?

And, you know, we're recounting some of those old stories.

He's like, look what you have, man.

All this stuff.

And I was like, dude, you won.

Like, I'm still trying to catch up to you.

And that was a lot of the conversation that we had.

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The problem is to achieve the highest levels, you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hope the achievements would get you.

Yeah.

What's that?

I'll give a micro example of a sacrifice that I've chosen to reverse, which is that I love training.

I love working out.

I've been, I've been doing it.

It was, it was my first love, the first thing I ever liked, like, really got obsessed with.

And over probably the last, you know, however many years, I still obviously trained.

I was still, you know, in shape, but my training was, you know, sometimes two days a week, sometimes sometimes three days a week.

It would be 60 minutes, maybe 90 if I got lucky.

And I had this realization.

It was during this year, 2025, where I was like, you know,

I have all this fucking money and I can do whatever I want.

And I was like, and I can't even have my workout be as long as I want it to be.

And so I basically made a rule for myself that I will not work out if I am rushed.

That's the deal.

And so I will work out for as long as it takes to work out.

And that's that.

And so that means that if my workout takes two hours or takes two and a half hours, or I'm with a friend and it takes three hours, which is just like talking between sets and having a great time, there are three things in this world that bring me joy.

Working out with somebody that I like, eating food with somebody that I like ideally after I worked out, and writing.

The three things that bring me the most joy in life.

And I was like, why am I sacrificing one of the only three things in this world that I know that I enjoy to get something

that I hoped would buy me the freedom to work out as much as I wanted whenever I wanted.

And so what are the things that I put on the altar of the success?

So, what are the things that I sacrificed for this, this God of achievement?

And I was like, this one I'm not willing to sacrifice anymore.

And so, I think part of the reason that has been a life, a lifeboat for me or a life raft, while this kind of worst season has happened, it's like I put on like 20 pounds of muscle so far this year because I've been able to like, I've been using that as a really wonderful outlet.

And I was like, man.

And I'm focusing more on this.

Like my training part every day, I'm like, dude, thank you for doing this with me.

Like, this is, this is awesome.

Like, this is great.

Like, my, I've won the day.

Like, if I did nothing else, I get to the end of the day and I'm like, I crushed this workout.

And that was, and that's enough.

It's a big pivot, dude.

And it's one that I think

everybody that's driven by the sort of

hatred of past self, whip yourself into submission, puritan work ethic thing

will inevitably come to realize after a time.

There may be some outlier for whom

their capacity for discomfort and for sacrifice is literally greater than the duration of their life.

That they would have got there eventually, they just died first.

You know?

But I think that for most people, it's not.

And you reach, I would call it something like sort of lifestyle escape velocity, where you go, I'm I all of the objective metrics are right, and the subjective ones aren't, which is a good example of sort of what you've hinted at.

And you go,

how can I assume that the solution is fixing subjective metric problems with more objective metrics?

And

then, and I'll say this for anybody who's in the season where like, listen, you're 22 years old and you're like, I need to work my face off.

You do.

You need to work your face off.

But the thing is, is like, there will get to a point we're fast forwarding, you know, however many years, but there's nothing, like, I don't regret the amount of work that I've done.

And

I don't regret it at all.

And I think that it was absolutely the right decision.

And I work a lot now.

But

people make this extrapolated moment.

They take a moment of your life and they will extrapolate it to forever and assume that if you change your mind, that what you did before this was wrong.

But it wasn't wrong.

It was right for that time.

And then we got feedback during a different time.

And this is right for me now.

And so I'm going to course correct now.

And if something else changes, guess what?

You're free to change your mind tomorrow.

Yeah.

I love this.

And I think about it so much.

That

one of the issues with asking anybody who's successful for advice is that they tell you what they do now,

not what they did when they were in your position.

A thousand percent.

And you should not ask somebody,

How are you maintaining your success right now?

How did you achieve your success when you were at the stage that I was at?

That is the question that you need to ask.

And

it's the same thing.

Stupid people

see somebody changing their mind as a weakness, not as a strength.

And if you are the sort of person who goes, Huh, this strategy worked for me previously, or didn't, or I thought it worked for me and it didn't,

I'm going to update the way that I operate.

Perfect example.

I've been on this sort of a flex, similar to yourself.

I would say my uh lifestyle escape velocity, I needed to reach a lower altitude than you.

So I was, you know, getting into coast as opposed to still using the booster rockets earlier.

But I started talking about how

like purposeful de-optimization,

you know, what is it that you're doing the things for, transitioning from the work until your eyes bleed to a different mode of reward and stuff like that.

And some people that I think don't understand

me

super well, which is fine because no one's supposed to understand you, especially not random people on the internet.

But people will see snippets of whatever's been sort of the most salient narrative.

And a bunch of them said something to the the effect of, Bro sold us the problem, now he's selling us the solution.

And I was like, huh, that's really interesting because what I'm doing is saying, this works for me right now.

And what I was saying in the past was, this works for me right now.

Nothing has changed.

And this is why

there's often, when it comes to sort of internet advice, it's very patronizing the way that the audience is treated by people that are critics, as if they're sort of these agency-less, undiscerning sponges

that are totally incapable of applying or filtering.

Huh.

Well,

Alex doesn't have fucking five kids and no wife, right?

Like, I'm a single father, a five-kid, what are you know, living in Brooklyn in a single-bedroom apartment.

So, okay, I think you might need to adapt some of the things that he's saying.

Or, I'm twice as old, or I'm half the age, or whatever.

Like,

you should ask somebody what they did when they were at the stage that you were at, not where they are now.

So many things I want to respond to.

So, number one,

my

embedded command to everyone is use if useful.

Use if useful, number one.

Number two, this is a documentary, not a sermon.

This is a showing, you know, like at least my content is like, this is me showing what's going on.

And I try to be real.

And that means that if I change my mind, then it'll change.

Third, model the rise if you want the rise.

Model the plateau if you want the plateau.

And so saying, oh,

you know, Warren Buffett says he had a great year if he only makes one good decision.

It's like saying, oh, to get rich, I should fly private.

Doesn't really work that way.

I should play basketball.

I want to get tall.

It's your, you're, you're conflating variables, right?

I should, I should go to the gym once I have energy.

I should start saving money once I'm rich.

Like, that's when I'll do it.

It's just, it just conflates sequence, right?

It's a win-then fallacy.

And so

I think the, the, man, I, I haven't talked about this in a, and I don't, I don't even know if I've ever talked about this.

The greatest skill is the ability to discern what things to use and what things to cast out.

It is the, is, it is the, the, the center narrative of noise versus signal.

And the reason that I've spent such a disproportionate amount of time focused on behavior was because there's so much noise that if people cannot translate their quote advice into what I should do, then there's nothing useful about it, which is why I think the density of useful information, people, I think people are bloodhounds for value, but I think that value gets translated most.

in the most crystallized, distilled, concentrated manner when it can be translated into do this instead instead of that, period.

And everything else, the amorphous words that people use, especially the, you know, the motivation manifesto, the, the, the, or just manifestation.

We'll get into that one.

People get triggered on that.

Um,

that is what leads more people astray.

And so they take the entirety of someone and without all of the other conditions that apply to that person and say, oh, I will take this and apply it to my life.

And

if you cannot pull out what is useful for you,

you will never win.

And that is a really strong statement.

But because all you're going to be doing is trying to, and I love, this is my favorite tweet that I've heard from Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny.

Here are the numbers for my winning lottery ticket.

Every entrepreneur explaining how they were successful.

And so like

the next Google isn't a search engine, right?

The best version of your life isn't copying Hormose or copying Williamson.

It's being able to,

with nuance, apply the principles that

are

generalizable across domains, but then having the

wherewithal, yeah, the discernment to apply the nuance to your specific circumstance.

And being able to map those two things, I think is the skill that has gotten me the disproportionate return on my life.

I have bought, and I've been public about this.

I've been, you know, very, the earlier part of my career is very involved in what I would consider the alternative education, you know, space, right?

People, you know, the, the courses, the, the world that has, I would say, a relatively bad reputation.

But I

have yet in my life to have purchased anything from anyone that I have not had an exceptional return from.

And is that because of them or is that because of me?

Who knows?

But.

I can say that when I even had bad experiences, I could say, these are all the things that I will not do to a customer.

And then I have my notebook of the crinkled can and the end that's off the center.

And

that ability to observe

and pause before immediately taking action.

Like there are some people that I have met where I know, and I'll tell you this story because it's heartbreaking.

I've helped a lot of gyms in my career as, you know, probably my second season of entrepreneurship.

One of the things that we'll do to a gym to make it more profitable is we, you know, we adjust pricing.

Sometimes we send a price raise letter and this, you know, this thing's tested.

We, we've done it hundreds of times.

A guy, you know, reaches out and said, hey, I did your, the whole price raise and 90% of my members left.

And I was like,

what?

Like, what, like, how, what happened?

And so he explained that he had a $29 a month gym and then he raised it to $200 a month.

That only works when you're a service business, not a, what I consider a facility usage business where you're just like $10 a month crunch and it's just like you can use the gym whatever you want.

You have equipment.

My model was for people who had trainers and who were teaching, you know, classes or sessions or semi-privates.

And so in those instances, if you're at 99 and you go to $200, you're not going to lose half your customers.

You might lose a third, but you still make more money of more profit, et cetera.

But he had taken what is otherwise something that has made so many gyms profitable and successful, and he applied it to a specific context.

Now, he says, I'm a gym owner.

He said gym stuff.

Why did, but then what happens is for you and I, or anybody who wants to make content, if I were to say, okay, under these situations, under this, you know, particular context, if you have a decent relationship with your customers and you have ongoing communication, then you can say, it's like you don't, it takes 10 minutes of disclaimers to get to the point, right?

And so then this is why fundamentally, like winners will always win.

because they will still be able to find

the silver lining, even in the terrible experiences that will make them better.

And

my favorite visualization of the type of person that I want to be is, and this is a Harry Potter reference, but the sword of Gryffindor was made of dwarven steel, and dwarven steel in the mythology of Harry Potter could only take in that which made it stronger.

And so it's not to say that the sword of Gryffindor couldn't cut butter or couldn't, you know, just get into a sword fight.

But if it happens to, you know, kill a basilix, then it will absorb the poison of the basilik.

And so like, so many people lose because they want to prove that this too did not work.

When in reality, it was that you don't know how to make it work.

And it has been easier for you to complain and say, this did not work the way that I would prefer, right?

Rather than, like, how can I make this work for me?

How can I turn this into something that has been, that can still be a W?

And I think that one skill

has probably been the single unlock that I've been able to have because, like, I learned these alternative, you know, this alternative world of education: of like, how do you sell?

How do you, how do you run ads?

How do you, how do you sell, you know, courses, how do you do coaching, all this stuff that has a really negative kind of vibe.

But the thing is, is the fundamentals of persuasion there are so powerful, they were just being used to sell stuff that's not good.

But the thing is, is that there's so much buyer resistance there that if you can sell stuff in that market, when you go to sell insurance,

you murder.

And so

I think

people fail to take into consideration the context of the person who's giving the advice and what piece is useful that they should use.

And the rest, you can cast away.

Figure out what you want.

Ignore the opinions of others.

Do so much work, it would be unreasonable that you fail.

Realize it never mattered to begin with.

Help others once you get there.

You've already achieved the things you said would make you successful.

Yeah, the first five steps there is

basically my master life plan.

Figure out what you want,

which

my first boss,

I had a pretty terrible first out of college experience of work.

But from that, I learned some of the most important life lessons that I still take to this day.

And that boss particularly said one thing to me one day.

She said,

figuring out what you want is 99% of it.

She said, once you know what you want, getting it's the easy part.

And I kind of adopted that as a worldview because it's like, once you're really clear, like this is what I want, then everything that's not that is what I'm willing to give up to get it.

Now,

that thing can change.

And I think that's the part that people miss is that like, once you learn how to get stuff, then it's like, okay.

Well, he said he was willing to do it.

It's like, yeah, well, the thing I wanted changed is, do I have your permission to change what I want?

And I think we should all have permission to change what we want in any given moment.

And not having basically sunk life bias of like, I put 10 years into this thing and that's okay.

And that's what I needed to do at that time.

And today I'm willing to, I'm going to change everything.

And what's really interesting about, if you look at like addicts and alcohol, people who need to, you know, quit, you know, whatever bad habit they have, there's a really strong frame.

Ed Milette talks about it, which is basically one more.

And

it's been super helpful for me

to not think of my changes as permanent because it's been, it's allowed me to make such dramatic changes in my, in my life or my business much faster than I think most people have been willing to because there's this, this weight of forever on top of everything.

Like we extrapolate, like you're in a relationship.

She told me to pick up my socks.

She's going to nag at me forever the rest of my life.

We need to break up.

Right.

Or

I can do this for today.

And tomorrow, if it still works, I will do it for tomorrow.

And if five days from now or 25 days from now, if I work this way, I then say, you know what, I need a day.

People are like, oh, he's burned out.

It's like,

I took a day because that's what I needed that day.

And I think giving myself permission to have that freedom has allowed me to take significantly faster action in what apparently looks like higher risk scenarios.

Because who am I apologizing to?

Realize it never mattered to begin with.

What's that?

Cosmic irrelevance.

So

we're willing to sacrifice everything that we have for the thing that we want.

And then once we get the thing that we want, we want back the things that we sacrificed, which really just goes to the heart of the human condition, which is we want it all.

And we're not willing to make trades.

And so one of the reasons that I've actually, I would say, largely tossed out the deathbed regrets of most people is that what they do typically is they will have the bias of wanting the other path they could have taken without considering the cost of that path.

So they say, Hey, I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.

It's like, well, yeah, but you didn't because you actually chose the path that you're on and you weren't willing to do that.

But what you are saying right now is that you want it all.

Sure.

So does everyone.

And so

I've had a few moments of clarity over the last year or so, but

if you want it all, life will give you nothing.

And that has been helpful for me because in pursuit of, we want everything without the cost, and everything has a price.

And you will never be able to get the sufficient price tag paid on everything.

to reach critical mass, to achieve a modicum of success in any domain, unless you are willing to trade from another.

And I think that that has significantly minimized my regret.

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we give up our 20s for our 30s we give up our 30s for our 40s our 40s for our 50s and we trade everything we achieved in our 30s 40s and 50s to get back to our 20s

we give up the

thing we have

most of for the thing that we have least of and we give up the thing that we want for the thing that's supposed to get it

right i i will become happy when I'm sufficiently successful and I will sacrifice my happiness in pursuit of success so that I can become sufficiently successful so I can finally be happy.

Yeah, we're the problem.

Yeah.

That's reliably the takeaway.

But I think it's a really, really good point.

This

like

retrospective life reprogramming thing that people do

where

We spend our 20s wanting to be richer and older and have a family.

Then we start that in our 30s and we we gain more wealth and do the family thing.

And then we get back to get to our 40s and we've got more responsibilities.

We've accumulated all of this stuff.

And then we think, God, if only I could go back to my 20s.

But you were fucking miserable in your 20s.

This is a great lesson from Morgan Housel.

Fantastic.

I think I sent you the Nostalgia artist.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That people should just search Nostalgia.

What's his fund called?

Fuck.

Collaborative Fund.

Nostalgia Collaborative Fund.

It's a great essay.

And

in it, he's talking to his wife.

And And

Morgan's wife is

discussing with him what their plans are when the kids are going to move out.

And Morgan starts talking about their time in their 20s where they could lie in on a Sunday morning and they didn't have any responsibilities.

And the kids didn't need taking to soccer practice.

And he says, well, God, wasn't that the golden years?

Like, how am I?

Do you remember?

Do you remember how amazing that was?

His wife turns to him and she goes, honey, you were miserable.

You hated it.

You had no idea whether you were going to be successful.

You were constantly concerned about money.

You were desperately needing validation from all of these people around you.

You were permanently in dissatisfaction about this stuff.

And he realized that, in retrospect, he knew that all of his worries were a waste of time.

But at the time, he had no assurance that they weren't something he should fret about and keep himself up at night.

We already know how the movie ends when we go back and say we want to relive it.

And you can't relive it into the same context because uncertainty is the largest part of the story.

I had a personal example that was similar to this, which was Layla and I were talking.

And

I said, You know, when we, you know, didn't do any of the speaking and all this other stuff that we're doing, and all we did was just own the portfolio companies and get distributions.

I was like, Man, life was so chill.

Like, we just could do whatever the fuck we wanted.

You know, we didn't have an office.

Like, we didn't have to show up.

We just did whatever we wanted.

And she said,

You were the worst.

And so, and now we're working like maniacs, right?

I haven't worked harder than I have in the last 18 months in a while.

And she's like, I prefer you

working the way that we do now to when you didn't have enough to do.

And so, I only partially say this for the one person that this affects, which is that like,

we seek freedom, but it's really that we seek options.

The idea of freedom is a blank calendar, but a blank calendar that never gets filled is not a fulfilling day.

And so we want the ability to have whatever we want during that day.

And so I think being

deliberate about

what are my good day moments that I can try and recreate every day.

And I have it on my wall.

I have two things that are permanently in my office wall.

Logic, evidence, utility, and

what does it mean?

How do you know?

And why does that matter?

And the other three are

work out with friends, eat food with friends, write something.

My good day formula.

And so

I had the desire for freedom when you aren't sure what things to fill that freedom with, when you know what to fill the freedom with, then you're willing to give up optionality because you already know, you've already pre-selected your lunch for the day because it's your favorite meal.

And so, so you are willing to make some sacrifices in terms of flexibility because you'll be able to have even more of those lunches or write even more by making some of these.

I've tried many lunches and few are better than this.

Yes, exactly.

And I do think

the perennial creatures of habit, like you are, and I think certainly I am as well,

There is a

tendency to disparage new options.

So, no, no, no, no, I already know the best lunch.

Like,

maybe, maybe.

And yeah, you've tried a lot of lunches.

That's good.

But do you really like you're not so what?

So, you're never ever going to try another new lunch?

Yeah.

Huh.

Well, okay, so maybe.

But also, how much of that, how much of that could be you excusing the pain of adventure and the pain of potential failure?

A bad lunch.

I might try a new lunch and it might be worse.

What a fucking waste that would be.

Look at all the time that I've put into trying lunches.

Look at the quality of lunch I could have had compared with the new one.

And this is a kind of a lesson of getting older.

And this is almost certainly one of the reasons why people's openness to experience on ocean decreases as they get older, that they have this sort of experts fallacy thing.

I've spent time recently around a lot of people in bands, and these guys are very artistic.

They have studios that are filled with fucking torn-up magazine sheets and like a sock.

Zach, my housemate, had a fucking sock seller tape to his wall for the two years we lived together.

I was like, what's that doing?

He's like, I don't know.

Well, why is it there?

And he just, because he's, you know, covered in tattoos and fucking playing guitar and writing fucking poetry and doing stuff.

It's just to him, that doesn't, that doesn't.

really matter.

And I was like, I should be around people that push me beyond my limits to do new things more.

In different ways.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

I need different levels of stimulus there.

Just to linger for one more moment on that sort of nostalgia golden years thing.

There's this really, really lovely insight.

Perhaps golden years can only happen in our memory.

Nobody believes that we're living through a golden era right now.

We never think we're in the good old days, but the good old days are always now.

Well, sometimes.

I mean,

COVID probably wasn't.

There's some periods during which people would go, that wasn't the good old days.

But when you're 85 and you were 25 in COVID, you'd fucking give anything for it.

True, true.

Yeah, I guess good old days can be in many, come many varieties.

It depends on how bad now is.

Correct.

But I'm sure that in the, whatever, like the 80s and the 90s in America, how many people considered they were living through the golden era?

Yeah.

Very few.

And yet, in retrospect, everybody just wants fucking Britney Spears back.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like the old one, not the new one.

It's crazy.

That's what everybody wants.

They want this sort of creed,

big tackles from American football, 18-wheel articulated lorries, and big American flags flying.

I have spent a huge amount of mental resources accepting suffering

and not saying that there's something wrong with something bad.

Like a huge amount of mental resources gone to this because my, I, I've, I've been better and faster at correcting the loop of like, oh, I am not happy with this particular thing And therefore, there is something wrong.

So fix the story that I tell myself is about to fix the thing.

And that's been

super helpful with the addition of everything that I remember will always be better than it was.

And the nice thing is that there's tons of science that backs this up, which is that we learn through reward and punishment.

Punishment fades with time.

No matter how bad it was.

Like you get drunk, you get hungover, you say, I'll never drink again.

Seven days later, you're out drinking again.

Why?

The punishment of the hangover fades quickly.

You are with somebody for a while.

You're like, this bitch is crazy or this guy is crazy.

And then you break up.

And then all of a sudden, what do you remember?

The good times.

Because reward sticks.

And in some ways, there's a little bit of a hopeful message there, which is that when you look back on your life, you will disproportionately remember the good times, but it only becomes a problem if you lament the present, which is the only thing you've ever actually lived in.

That's the fading affect bias.

Tragedy plus time equals comedy is the closest thing psychology has to an equation.

All right, next one.

People only root for others at two times.

First, when they're at the beginning of the race.

Second, when they finish.

Neither is when you need it.

So, you have to master the middle.

The boring, exhausting, soul-crushing middle.

That's where the winning happens, on your own.

People will only cheer for you as long as you can't beat them at the game they value most.

Friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't.

It's a bug, not a feature.

I mean, I feel like as you read these, you're reading my soul from this year.

I mean, that's why, I mean, I tweet these every day as they come up because that's what's top of mind for me.

And, you know, the boring, mundane middle, like I think about, you know, the very, very beginning, people say, you know, I'm really excited for you that you're trying this thing out.

Right.

And I noticed that everyone was very happy for me to try because I temporarily decreased my status.

I I actually became worse than them during that period of time.

And then as soon as I achieved a level of success, which I then realized that their happiness for me was proportional to where they were on the ladder relative to me.

And so as soon as I passed some people, then they stopped being happy and then they start, you know, you know,

saying bad things.

Right.

And the people who were still always ahead were still like, keep it up, keep it up.

And there's still people who have been that way my whole life.

And I just wonder, if and when I pass them, will they flip?

I don't know.

But also to the same degree, it was the, it was after you start the race when you're in the thick of it, because you'll quickly pass the people who've done nothing.

But then you have this long period of time where you don't catch up to the people who've been doing it for a long time.

And that's the part where it's very lonely because you don't have your initial, your initial posse.

You have to leave them at some point.

But then you don't get to the new group that's, you know, way ahead and actually has some proof behind them that you can actually like sit at the table.

And so like today, I have, if I were to do something, I have tons of support, but I don't really need the support now.

I need it.

I needed it in the middle, right?

In the many years that like no one knew who Alex Ramosi was.

And that's, that's, that's the hard part.

And I think it's, it's the story that Morgan Hassel tells, which is that you just don't know how it's going to finish.

And that's what makes it hard.

It's the uncertainty of like, what if I give up everything that I've done in my life for nothing?

And then all of a sudden, if I knew that, then I wouldn't be willing to make this trade.

But in retrospect, when you do have the thing, you're like, of course I was, like, if I knew that this was going to happen,

I would happily make the trade.

But you don't know.

And so you're just putting the money down and they're rolling it.

But you get to find out if you hit black five fucking years from now.

Yeah.

It's why dealing with uncertainty is such a meta skill.

And it's one that I, to be honest, it's one that I really suck at.

I'm very, very not good at dealing with uncertainty.

My

required

line of assurance in order for me to commit to a decision is incredibly high, which is why I've basically never failed at anything that I've done.

All of the stuff that I've done, a string of

incredibly slow,

but very reliable successes, is just because my required number of sort of justification points is very high.

And, you know, in retrospect, it might look like it was a risk.

It's like, dude, I took so long to fucking make this decision.

It's not, I knew that I wanted to move to America for fucking ages, years and years before I actually ended up doing it.

And it took a long time for me to commit to that decision.

I knew that I wanted to pivot out of nightlife for a good while before I

got myself to the stage where I was prepared to do that.

On the friend point,

it's a

painful realization that the small number of good friends want you to win in case you take them with you.

And the large number of bad friends are scared of you winning in case you leave them behind.

The best way to know

who a real friend friend is is how they react when you win.

And when that happens, you'll realize how few real friends you really have.

I mean, look,

I don't know whether it's just some sort of cosmic blessing or whatever, but, or maybe I'm discerning with friends, I don't know.

Or maybe it's a small circle thing or whatever.

It's been very rare that

I've been on the receiving end of that.

That I've ended up being around as soon as I left the UK.

And even the people that I was around in the UK, I'd chosen a relatively small group of people but all of them fucking like still now to this day love

we're still in touch we still we still support each other and I keep in I'm loving seeing what they're doing but

I get the sense that if you're a little bit more open

if the circle is a little bit more open there is a huge amount of

incentive for you to listen to people who do not have your best interests at heart and they fucking suck and those people need to get out of your life

one of my rules is you should only take advice from people whose dreams for your life are bigger than yours are

which is a very small number of people sometimes it's your parents sometimes your parents really do have bigger dreams for you than you do in different ways as well in ways that you don't notice i mean i think that the closest approximation to yourself is a spouse it's the most it's the most tactically aligned person that you can have still obviously there are some spouses who are not good but i could say that i think layla's dreams for me have in many ways bigger or ahead of where my dreams for me have been.

And I have big dreams.

And, you know, listening to her

has yielded really great returns.

But to the point that you were saying earlier about those friends that were kind of with you in the early days, I think it's actually cyclical.

So

the people who are closest to you in the beginning, if they're like true, like actual friends, then you recognize that because they actually want you to win.

And that's amazing.

A lot of people don't have that.

and so what i have felt at least for me was that when you're a little ahead is where the friction is when you blow them out of the water and there's no question like it's it's beyond reproach they will do one of two things they will either be really happy for you or they'll change the game that they're beating you at

that's great but i'm in better shape That's great, but my marriage is better, right?

Like, or whatever, you know, whatever game that they choose to play.

And so I think the last, um,

the last quote that you had there about friendly reminder that every person who doubts you is right until they aren't.

It's a bug, not a feature.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Yeah.

People who doubt you will be right most of the time.

And this further increases your uncertainty about the path that you're choosing to take.

But on a long enough time horizon, most people who don't bet are guaranteed to lose.

And so they get to win at being right

more times than you get to win at being right.

But what that equation doesn't take into consideration is intensity, which is, can I be so right one time that it makes all of the times that I was wrong irrelevant?

And in the nature of life, The answer is yes, almost a resounding yes for just about every domain.

Like everyone can say that every person you've ever dated has sucked and they can predict that you're going to break up until you find the person that you're going to marry.

And in that moment, who fucking cares about the other 90 people that you went on dates with that everybody said was a bad idea or that you have a bad picker or you don't have a good taste?

It's like, well,

you're not marrying them.

I date in a way that's different than you would prefer.

Great.

But I did end up finding this thing.

The first thing that I ever did was

an online fitness thing and it kind of worked.

And then I did my first gym and it kind of worked.

And then I started all these other

side projects.

I got distracted and I didn't know.

And many people were like, sure, like, good luck with that.

But I knew that they just weren't really rooting for me.

They were rooting for me to fail.

They're rooting for me the wrong way.

And so

the downside risk is significantly smaller and more frequent.

It's both.

You're more likely to lose and it's more likely to happen more times.

It's just that upside is uncapped.

And so, and I think about this one a lot.

So there's the story of the guy.

Do you know the guy who wrote Jingle Bells?

No.

So I didn't even know that that was.

I thought it was like happy birthday.

I thought it was just gifted to humanity when we started.

So there's this guy.

He's a, he's a, it's, he has the most tragic life you can imagine.

Just like an a complete, like, you don't know his name, right?

I can't even remember his name, right?

Has did nothing but failed, was a failed everything.

And his entire life was nothing.

He just happened to write this small thing called Jingle Bells, and it has become, you know, the number one song at Christmas time, like maybe globally.

And I think about that life where it's like, what if I failed at everything, but then I have one thing that actually makes a permanent impact?

I was like, would I trade that life for Aristotle's good life where I am out to nothing, but the whole time was good?

And this is just one of my eternal battles where I think with myself that I have no answer for, to be clear.

But when I'm thinking through the periods where things suck, I'm like, well, maybe, maybe I'll get a jingle bells out of this.

And maybe it'll just take 20 years longer than I thought.

On the contribution of other people, the pessimists get to be right and the optimists get to be rich.

And it's because of intensity.

It's the thing that it's, we are so bad at estimating

outsized returns.

Yeah.

We're very, it's very hard for us to comprehend an outsized return.

We're very good at binary thinking of, yes, this worked.

No, this didn't work.

But we're not very good at thinking through the bet of I get 10x and I'm going to lose 50% of the time.

People don't make that bet and they they should do it every time.

The reason that this has been of particular interest to me is I would consider myself a criticism hyper-responder.

You know,

I'm not sure why being on the outside as a kid, maybe being a little bit more socially isolated,

only child syndrome being hideous.

I mean, I was like pretty, I was a very late bloomer, right?

And you talk funny.

I do talk funny.

I did for the place that I was in, as well as the place that I'm in now.

I just

had a career of talking funny in different places.

But

the reason that I'm so averse, so

the reason that I really don't like people who put down those that are trying to do something different or have big dreams is that I know how close I came to not taking a shot because of the opinions of other people around me.

And I'm aware this is not super alpha, Lone Ranger, solo, degenerate preneur, fucking pilled, right?

The canon and the lore of someone that's supposed to be successful is basically one long middle finger to all doubters.

But

this is

what every single Rocky training montage gets wrong, which is

Rocky never doubted the direction and the path that he was on.

He just doubted whether or not he could get there.

That's not the way that personal growth happens, in my opinion, at all.

You are filled with uncertainty is this even working i i have no idea if there's glory on the other side of this you know it's the other it's the other side of the lonely it's the process of the lonely chapter

and

if you have people around you that are adding weight onto the bar that you didn't choose like well you're just making it fucking harder for me to stand up it's already hard enough for me and um yeah increasingly

I just want to be around people that make me feel good about the things that I'm trying to do.

And I don't think that that's an unreasonable demand.

And I also think that it can seem

fragile, shallow, or fickle, or uncommitted, or needy, or

undriven, not robust.

And yet I still want it.

And yet, for me, choosing to swim against the tide just seems like a stupid decision.

So I want people in my life whose dreams are bigger for me than mine are and who believe in me more than I do.

And I think when you find people like that

who help you achieve the goals that you set out to achieve, you realize when you achieve the goals that they were more valuable than the goals that you

got.

I said to you before, I'm hopefully about to move into some sort of a office studio location in Austin.

And I've just tapped out my fucking solo D-Gen energy.

You know,

you don't work in a cupboard anymore as much.

Sometimes, but not always.

To my dismay.

Yeah,

where?

I can't be in the cupboard.

Where?

I can't stare at the wall.

I'll be in platform nine and three quarters.

Yeah.

Because I've just run out of that gas tank and I want to be around people.

I want to be around

my friends.

I want to be around the people that I work with.

And I want to have a little squad of people that help, you know, bolster me.

If you talk about work-life balance as a 22-year-old man, you're hanging around with the wrong people.

That gnawing feeling when you realize you've outgrown your social circle isn't loneliness.

It's your ambition, finally speaking louder than your need to belong.

And there's a narrative that we should not criticize ourselves.

We should not say the things that we could have done better.

But I believe that that voice isn't an insecurity.

I think it's

a version that wants you to chase your potential.

And so I think not judging the criticism, but accepting the criticism, I think those are the two separate things.

And I think that's what unlocks the potential while making it somewhat palatable along the way.

Yeah.

Well, it's uncomfortable, right?

You position an ideal.

You compare yourself to that ideal.

You find yourself lacking.

There is pain in that.

So you can either sit with the pain or you can judge the pain.

You mentioned this earlier on.

I call it second-order emotions.

Mark Manson calls them meta-emotions.

So feeling frustrated at your anxiousness and then feeling bitter about your frustration at your anxiousness and then feeling resentful about your bitterness at your frustration about your anxiousness.

And you don't have all that much control over the first ones.

Emotions are going to come and go.

You have a lot of control over the ones that come after that.

Did you tell me the story of Buddha in the second arrow?

No.

Oh, it's great.

So

the Buddha was trying to teach a lesson and he says, if I shoot you with an arrow, does it hurt?

And the student was like, yes, it would be hurtful.

Or

that would suck.

And so he says, okay, if I were to shoot you with a second arrow in the same spot after the first arrow, would that hurt?

And he said, yes.

He said, the first arrow is life.

He said, you can't avoid the first arrow.

He said, but the second arrow is you.

And that one you can avoid.

And so suffering is a constant.

That's a fixed cost of life.

We're going to have downsides.

We're going to have bad seasons, bad moments, bad days.

But I think a great rule to live by is like, only suffer once.

Like, great.

And I mean, my God, I think if everyone only suffered once, like just, because I like tiny little monikers that I can remind myself in the moment of.

Okay, this happened.

I will only allow it.

I will only suffer this one time.

I will not relive this moment over and over again.

I will not judge myself for not, you know, behaving the way I would have liked to have behaved.

I will not judge

the version of me that I should have been at this moment.

And the round and round you can.

It's like an infinite regress of self-castigation, yeah.

Right.

And so it's like, I want memory, I want memory dividends, not memory liabilities.

Yeah, if you talk about work-life balance as a 22-year-old man, you're hanging out with the wrong people.

This goes back to the ask them what they did when they were at your stage, not what they do now thing.

And look,

to hear you

get within the same fucking universe as something approximating work-life balance okay let's

just calm down here

too ahead of yourself i mean that that is a that's a really sort of cosmic change for you in and your direction and

as

somebody who cares about your well-being, it's one that I've kind of been hoping for at some point, a bit of humanity to come through.

Yeah, you know, to prove that, and it's, I said it earlier on, dude.

It proves that there is a there is a human inside of that.

I'm being, I'm being serious.

And I, I think

it does a bunch of things.

Um, it shows that somebody who is very staunch about an opinion can change their mind, which I think is something that's very admirable.

I think it is significantly more relatable to most people with a more common level of work ethic, desire for life outside of it, uh, maybe a broader number of um

things than three, yeah, you know, on the post-it notes.

And I think,

you know, selfishly for me, it gives us more to relate about because

I have more to relate about someone who's trying to navigate what life looks like outside of work.

But if you are life outside of work, if you are, you're slowly getting that.

You notice that as of yet, I haven't had some sort of Cassandra complex about, I think I'll have mentioned if we go back to episode three at four minutes and 55.

I told you so,

but

it might not be okay to work your life away, but it is okay to work your 20s away.

And

so many of the realizations that we have arrived at are only really accessible to you because you've closed the loop of all of the ones that you needed to first.

So, I want to I want to aggressively comment on this.

So,

everything I said up to this point, I take it all, but yeah.

Um, No, I want to come on this because I think it's meaningful.

So number one, so

I would actually challenge a couple of the things you said.

The biggest one being like the just shoulds in general, which is like you shouldn't work your life away, you should work away your 20s.

My opinion, do whatever the fuck you want.

If you have a goal, then there will be ways that will increase or decrease the likelihood to achieve them.

And so if and having simultaneous goals dramatically decreases the likelihood of accomplishing any of them.

And it's typically easier to accomplish goals in sequence or chronologically rather than in parallel.

And so if I were to say, hey, what are the three, you know, three goals you have?

And you say one, two, three, and I say, okay, which of these three goals is the most important?

Well, then let's work on that one first.

And does that one goal allow us to, does it decrease or does it decrease the failure rate of the other two goals, which then makes it the most important goal overall?

Sometimes they are dependent on each other.

I'm going to get in shape, get rich, then find a wife.

Yeah.

As opposed to I'm going to find a wife, then try and get rich, then try and get in shape.

You'll get dramatically higher quality talent

for sure.

But maybe she'll just love you for you.

Who knows?

We can all hope.

Regardless.

Now, most 22-year-olds,

irrespective of domain,

if, and that's why I have these continued, like, if you seek to be good at something,

then you have a tremendous deficit in experience and repetitions that people who are ahead of you or have achieved what you want to achieve have over you.

And so the only thing that you have, now you do have an advantage, you have a couple.

Number one is that you will have more energy than they do, period.

And so your ability to work long hours, sleep less, and maintain high levels of focus while maintaining peak fluid intelligence is at its peak.

Use it.

The second thing is that you have nothing to lose.

And so the thing is, is people always fear being the new, the new entrant.

But when you have nothing to lose or you have nothing going for you, it also means you have nothing to lose.

And that means that every position on the board always has an advantage because anybody who has achieved this big thing that you have was also once a 22-year-old who had nothing going for them.

You're at zero.

Right.

You can't get worse than this.

You have unlimited shots on goal.

And so not taking the shot is like saying, life, I don't want to scratch off this lottery ticket, but the lottery ticket's free.

Why would you not scratch it off and try it?

And so the first advantage you've got, you've got energy.

Next advantage is you have nothing to lose.

Third is you also have time time and you have very low responsibilities.

And so you have not only the ability to put all of yourself into something, you also have no circumstantial things that are preventing you.

Now, if somebody is listening to this and like, I'm 25 and I've got a kid, cool.

And

which thing do you want to sacrifice?

Now I'm saying sacrifice your kid, but I'm saying like, you're going to have some trades.

Now, I take things to the logical extreme and say, okay, well.

Bezos has kids.

Bill Gates has kids.

Warren Buffett has kids.

This is just if you wanted to be business successful.

It's like, okay, well, then that can't be a reason that I can't can't be successful.

And so, whatever reasons that we usually give ourselves in the beginning for why we can't achieve something, you can almost always find not only just someone, but someone who's achieved world-class levels of success with worse conditions than you currently have, which then means it's absolutely possible.

And then, the only thing that it takes to get there is work.

And so, um, I just wanted to be very clear that if you are 20, you know, if you're 22 years old, like the world does not hate you, you're just not good at anything yet.

I felt so

jilted by the world as a young business person because we were stepping into these meetings with 40 and 50 year old nightclub leisure company owners.

And me and my business partner were 19 or 20.

And we were saying, hey, nice club.

Shame no one's fucking in it.

And we can put people in.

And the fact that someone twice our age or three times our age was sat opposite the table from us and didn't give me respect made me it made me really uh

Discouraged.

I'm like I'm you need me you need people.

I have people

Why can you not see this?

Why can you not see the value in what it is that I do and

it feels like a

personal curse some sort of cosmic judgment that's just bestowed on you.

Oh, it's because of my failing.

It's because they are being mean to me.

Another 20-year-old business person who would have gone in there, they would have been given the respect that they deserve.

It's like, no.

If you're young, everybody in business is going to be skeptical of you.

Now, this is changing a little bit.

I think

the rise of the Wonder Kids, the Elon Musk Doge, Digen world, I think maybe is leverage.

There's that kid that made the AI app that takes photos of food and it does calories and he's making like a million dollars a month or something.

He's 16, 17, 18.

He just vibe coded his way to like multi-millionaire status in his teenage years.

Okay, we're starting to realize that ideas get unlocked through technology and through youth and through insight, but

there is still an industrial era mindset, industrial revolution era mindset, which is

this craft of some time, of some type will take a lot of time for you to get there.

And

by virtue of that, people are skeptical of young guys and young girls.

And you're right.

If you're 22 and starting your own business, the world doesn't hate you.

They're just skeptical of you.

You know, what's interesting is what you talked about earlier about like the low-risk path.

Like you look at all these things.

I think you become the exception by being the rule.

And so I'll unpack that.

But like,

we highlight the 16-year-old, right?

We don't nearly as much highlight the 30-year-old who's crushing it because it's like, well, obviously he worked for a decade and then he got there.

It's like, but if you work for a decade and they get you there, you are exceptional.

You are already at the very ends of achievement.

And you did it by following the rule, which is just maybe not unpredicted.

Yes, it's not, it's not a surprise.

And so I think people conflate surprises with exceptional.

And it is exceptional in that it's rare, not necessarily that it's the only kind of rare.

Correct.

It's rare that it was a lottery ticket more than, and of course, and I want to be clear, maybe he's 16 or something.

And like Mr.

Beast is a perfect example of this.

He's 25, I think now, something like like that, 25, 26.

I know we're getting old.

And so the thing is, is that he started, I think, making videos when he was 12.

Right.

And so it's like, oh, well, he's got 13 years in just one game spending every hour of every day for that 13 years doing it.

And so some of these kind of younger guys, and I think part of this is just proliferation of information and access to information has just gotten, you know, bountiful for everyone.

And with AI, it's been easier for people with fewer resources

to start actual things.

Right?

The cost of entry financially is significantly lower, and the cost of the access to information is basically almost zero.

And so, when you combine those things, if you're 14 years old, you have high fluid intelligence, like your brain's working.

So, if you're like, if you're on the younger side, like there's no rule that says that an app designed by a 14-year-old is in some way or any way valued less by a customer than an app that's developed by a 40-year-old.

There's no rule.

And so, I will also push back on one thing, which is

if

you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously,

if you continue to feel like people don't take you seriously because of your age,

it might be not because of your age.

It might be because you suck.

And I think that is a significantly harder and more probable pill that you'll have to swallow.

Well, especially given that self-assessment and reflection is difficult to do when you're young, your own ability to understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie is hard, full stop.

Sure.

It's really hard if you're 20, right?

Or 22.

This is from Mark Manson.

I had this episode with him this week.

It was so good.

Before you win, everyone will ask why you're working so hard.

And after you win, everyone will remind you how lucky you got.

Holy fucked.

You know what's funny?

I actually, it's okay.

So I didn't know that's where the, where the quote was going to go.

I thought it was going to go,

before you win, everyone asks you why you're working so hard.

After you win, everyone asks you why you're working so hard.

That's, I mean, both of those work.

Yeah.

And

it's true.

But I think in both of those situations, both of those things are true.

In both of them, before you win, everyone will ask you why you're working so hard.

There's no proof that this is going in the right direction.

You don't have any evidence that you're actually even good at this thing.

The likelihood of a positive outcome is incredibly low.

And after you win,

have you not yet reached escape velocity where you don't need to do this anymore?

Why are you capitalizing on an opportunity?

Why are you capitalizing on

conquest instead of continuing to just start from opportunity at the bottom?

Like, because you've now reached the fucking top of the mountain?

Is enough enough?

Or,

dude, dude, I mean, you know, just so prescient to start a business at that time.

Like, you, you know, like you really timed the market.

Or I've been learning about,

it's not venting, but it's a, I can't fuck, I can't remember what it's called.

It's this particular type of put down

that chicks give other chicks.

And I, I don't think that guys have

I frankly don't think that guys have like the lexical capacity to do this socially.

But it's something like

imagine that a bunch of girls are at a a wedding together, and there's one girl that doesn't like another one, and she'll say something like, you know, I really admire your confidence.

Like, I would never wear a dress like that.

And it's just like, I'm, you know, it looks, you know, you're just with your body type, like, it's really impressive that you decided to wear that today.

Like, that's just, you know, you've done, you're coming, you've done really well.

Or, you know, oh, you, you're prepared to like just eat.

Like, you know,

I can't just like keep eating, but it seems like you just don't really mind.

And it's this sort of odd venting, come, put down, you know.

Are you trying to?

No, I'm saying that the dress looks, you know, it's this sort of culpable deniability of an insult.

And

yeah, I get the sense that the look

retrospective look conversation thing is a little bit like that.

It's a back-handed insult, not a backhanded compliment.

One, there's there's a meme from Family Guy that does this exact thing.

It's two girls eating lunch together, just trading insults like this.

And then it just pans to two guys eating lunch after like a 60-second exchange of just insults.

And he says, Hey, John, I like your tie.

He says, Oh, thanks.

And it says, Mend.

We know how to be friends.

I was just thinking about that while you were saying it.

But it's so interesting.

Like, I have that statement that I said at at the beginning, which is,

you live your life in a way that I would not prefer.

And all of these things boil down to that.

And I've had this as my internal translation mechanism because before you, before you win, they're saying, you live your life in a way that I would not prefer.

And then after you win, in Mark's example, you have won in a way that I did not prefer.

And then if you continue to work, you continue to live your life in a way that I would not prefer.

And so at the end of the way, they just cast their preferences onto you.

And then somehow they expect you to give a shit.

And I think this is where I've lost friends.

And

that's okay.

And they're entitled to think that you should care and you're entitled to not care.

The problem here, especially, again, for me and for the people who are the criticism hyper-responders that are listening, if you over-index, or even if you just index on other people's input, you think, huh, maybe for a while you didn't have as many people

contributing to your life as you might have wanted.

And now,

as a pauper, how can I reject this penny someone's flicked me?

What you don't realize is that this penny could have arsenic on the other side of it, or it might be a fake penny, or it might be a joke, or it might blow up in your hand or something.

You go, huh?

Well, maybe, maybe this person's comment is like useful.

Maybe I should take heed of this.

Maybe it's something that I should listen to.

And the ability to be discerning when you're not used to receiving feedback is a difficult skill.

And again,

I can can just middle finger my way through life, not listening to anybody's opinion, is an interesting one, but practically it's very difficult.

And it's a skill that you need to learn.

And you do need to learn, you do need to listen to feedback.

Like, if you had never changed how you did your podcast from day one until now, your podcast would not be what it is.

Right.

If I had made sales presentations, if I had written emails, if I had made products that didn't respond to feedback, then

we would not be where we're at right now.

It's a really, it's a really interesting question of like, how do you discern which feedback is good and which feedback isn't?

And I'm trying to think about what my, my, my perspective is on that.

I think it comes down to number one, aligned incentives.

Like, does this person benefit from me doing better?

Number two is competence.

Are they, do they actually have

sufficient domain expertise where their

feedback would be relevant.

Now, I'll be clear here.

If you have a yogurt company and you want somebody to try your yogurt and your friends say, I don't think the yogurt tastes good, well, they probably had a lot of yogurt and they've eaten stuff before.

And so, like, they could very well have domain expertise.

If you have a business that's a yogurt business and then your mother gives her opinion about how the business works, and she's never run a business, that's different.

Right.

And so, so, the second would be domain expertise or competence.

The first is aligned incentives.

And then, what do you think?

I think those are like, I'm trying to think of this.

I honestly think those two

are,

because you can start adding shit on, but it just makes it harder.

And the

first one ensures that the person is pointing in the same direction as you.

The second one ensures that they actually know how to fucking row a boat.

So yeah, I like that.

I like that.

Success really just boils down to this.

You got to want it more than you hate what it takes to get it.

If you're willing to suck at anything for 100 days in a row, you can beat most people at most things.

Okay.

I'm so excited you said this.

So

we, we, we talked a little bit about how,

well, I'll rewind the clock.

So there's this quote that I read from Kobe where he said he thought that it was going to be super competitive in the NBA.

But when he got into the NBA, he realized that people,

well, they figured out that they had made it and weren't willing to sacrifice as much as he was to continue to win.

And I would say that

that realization has been somewhat true for me, which is that like

winning,

it's like it, it hasn't gotten harder from the actual doing stuff side.

There has been the trades that have been different than I expected.

But especially when you're looking at, you know, the population of everyone to 100 days of doing something in a row.

There was a friend of mine who had a, he offered a guarantee on a product that he sold.

And the guarantee was this: He said, All you have to do, you can get all your money back if you just open up a Google Doc and say what you're going to do every day.

And at the end of the day, you're going to say what you did.

That's it.

And you just do that for six weeks.

That's all you have to do.

And if you do that and you don't get the results, I'll, you know, I'll give you your money back.

And what's crazy about that is when he was talking about it, he said, Do you know what the completion rate of twice a day doing something is?

He's like, It's like less than 1%.

He's like, So I can happily do it because it seems so simple.

And so I think we

underplay how simple success is

and extrapolate an expectation of how easy it must be from that.

And then we are disappointed or dissatisfied when it doesn't meet those expectations.

Like it is harder than we expect.

But also the rewards may be also greater than we expect.

James Clear has this fucking unbelievable insight.

It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.

If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.

To crave the result, but not the process is to guarantee disappointment.

Fuck.

Yeah.

Holy fuck.

Super true.

I mean, I think Naval quoted this blog a long time ago, but desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

And if you basically know that you're never willing to put the work in to get the thing.

Yep.

That's an iron law.

Like that James Clear thing is an absolute iron law.

If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.

There is a path between where you are and the place that you want to be.

If you're not prepared to do that walk,

still wanting to reach the end of the path is just guaranteeing that you're going to live an unsatisfactory life.

And so when I hear that quote, I immediately go to my operational side of like, okay, how do I release myself from a desire?

So I thought about that.

And I actually think it's a lot like dating.

So hear me out on this.

So there is the old saying, I think it's a girl saying, I'm going to assume it's a girl saying, which is, if you want to get over somebody, get under somebody else.

All right.

Now, there's a point to this, which is,

I don't think you can release desire, but you can replace it.

And so it's like, if you have a terrible breakup, there's basically some totem of reinforcement that's been removed from your life.

Getting over something or someone is simply getting enough exposure to enough new things from the time that you've bought back from this reinforcer being gone to find another reinforcer, which is why I genuinely think that the idea of like, oh, I shouldn't date for a while after I get out of a breakup is just complete stupidity.

Like, why would you like what?

Why?

What rule is there?

Well, you have to heal.

Healing for most people is defined as I find something else that brings me sufficient joy that my baseline returns to normal.

But if I'm going to bring somebody else into my life, that person's also going to serve that same function.

And so, like, I could, I can replace it with tennis or gardening or business or just the next person I'm going to date.

And why is one better than the other?

To Clear's releasing of desire, I think it's just

choose to want something else.

So if I were to say, if I were to give someone the direction, release the desire, I would say, don't try and release the desire.

Try and justify or reason why wanting something different is better.

Also, maybe be a little bit more open-minded about how that desire could be fulfilled.

It's like, huh.

And I'd, you know, to push back on the why you should have a little bit of a break between partners, I would say that there is a specific type of learning that comes, especially from intense and emotional experiences, that takes a little bit of time for you to imbibe.

And that if you very quickly move into a new relationship, you're trying to

find the direction that you're going in while you're also rowing the fucking boat and trying to fix the holes from the last one.

I get the sense that there are certain realizations that come about by,

we're often very bad at taking lessons from a thing while it's still happening.

And I wonder whether you very quickly move into the

I can't take lessons from this thing mode because I'm focused on the new thing, as opposed to, let's sit down and debrief a little bit after this.

And what does life look like?

Perfect example of this.

Alanda Botton has a beautiful insight where he says,

People rarely change,

often not in relationships, and never when you ask them to.

It seems that most people's changes in the way that they show up in relationships occur between them.

Now,

I would guess that a lot of this is because change is very emotionally painful, and breakups are emotionally painful.

Therefore, people change when they break up.

It's like, ha,

my world got ripped out from underneath me.

But I do wonder whether moving on very quickly

stops the reflective process that allows sense-making to occur by immediately giving you new novel stimulus that is distracting.

So I will challenge back,

which is, one,

it assumes that we must change.

If we take that frame, which I wouldn't necessarily accept in all cases.

Number two,

it assumes that the change that we're going to make in between is something that's going to increase the likelihood that we find someone that we like, which may or may not occur.

Third, I do think that change would happen no matter what, because you've you've removed somebody who was altering your behavior.

And anyone who says that the person they date doesn't alter their behavior, like, I don't know what you're talking about.

Like, of course, they they give you little kisses when you do stuff and they say thank you.

Of course, it you have reward cycles and punishment cycles that exist constantly.

And so, like, oh, she's always different when she's in a relationship.

It's because they have somebody else who's deliberately changing their behavior, and that's normal.

And we do control and counter control to our partners all the time.

People don't like using the word control, but it's exactly what you do.

If you want your husband to pick up the socks, then you do, you say thanks, and then you give him a blowjob afterwards, whatever.

Like you do some sort of rewarding contingency in order to, you know, get more, more of the type of behavior you like.

And also, you say, hey, don't say that when they say something that you, they said, hey, are you going to finish your dinner?

And you're like, I used to have an eating disorder, and my friends used to say I wasn't eating my food, blah, blah, blah.

Right.

And so

with the relationship piece, I think that you are going to change when you have reward or punishment stimulus that changes.

And until those things change, nothing is going to change to to Ellen Debot up,

Ellen's name, him, that, him.

And so

if you get out of a relationship, you will change regardless because the conditions have changed.

And so your behavior will change.

And so, and all of these things, I then posit as the question is like, and do I need to do this in order to find the person that I want?

How many people have gotten into relationships where they've changed the things that they like to do?

They've started staying up late because their partner stays up late.

They start getting up early because their partner gets up early.

Let's say just that because it's kind of simple.

And then they get out of this relationship and they ask themselves the question, still going to bed late or waking up early, right?

Because they've habituated that type of behavior.

They ask themselves, well, huh, I kind of forgot that I used to go to bed early or stay, sleep in.

I forgot that bit of me.

Because for the last 12 months, I've been in this relationship with this person and I adapted.

We sort of met in the middle or maybe they really changed me or whatever it is.

Well,

is that the way that I want to be?

Is that the actual change that I want to make?

Or

do I want to go back?

Or do I want to alchemize both of these things together and create this new world?

I'm not convinced.

In theory, maybe.

In practice, no.

And in practice, for most people,

certainly no.

It takes time for this stuff to filter through.

Yes, particular landmark events that you go through that are very traumatic.

I don't even think it's landmark.

I think you can change behavior really quickly and it's just not a huge thing.

Like Layla used to say in the very beginning of our relationship, she said, ha ha ha, you're stupid.

She would make that joke.

And I'd say, hey, I don't really like that.

And then she stopped.

It's just a very small thing.

It wasn't like this traumatic thing.

I just said, it's a preference of mine.

If you don't say that, and she said, okay.

And then that was it.

With regards to the staying up late thing, the contingency of reinforcement, that was the other partner who was there is gone.

So now

the reason that they were doing it before was that they didn't have this reinforcer.

So reinforce is introduced, so they're willing to change their behavior to accommodate this later timeline.

We don't have transparency with ourselves, though.

I don't know what that means.

We do not see all of the reasons for our behavior and where they came from immediately.

Do we ever?

Rarely.

But we will get more with distance, I think.

To go, huh?

I'm no longer receiving the stimulus.

It's like

I tried to run on Jupiter.

Jupiter was really heavy.

I adapted my running style.

Huh, I'm back on Earth.

Oh, this is going to take a little bit of time for me to get back into this new running style.

So the reason, so I'm, I'm, I will continue to die on this because I, I feel,

no, I, I, like,

what I'm describing has been the central worldview that has been responsible for a great deal of my material success.

And it's rapid behavior change.

Rapid behavior change, but also being able to accurately view the world, at least to my, I think I view it more clearly than I did before.

And my decision quality has dramatically increased by isolating variables that are dependent, that actually change behavior, change outcome.

And so when you said knowing why,

it's like a bingo red flag for me.

Not red flag, but just like a pay attention thing.

Because when we say, oh, I figured out why.

In my opinion, for the vast majority of people, when they figured out why, it means that I have crafted a narrative that I accept, which may or may not have any

bearing on reality.

And so I focus purely on the observable because they are far more predictable in terms of predicting your own behavior and predicting other people's behavior.

And so with regard to the relationship, it's like people have many counter controls that they do.

And so because of that, you change your behavior.

And then all of those things are removed at once.

Now, Were there other things that are also variables in your life that occur during that period of time?

Of course.

Do we know them all?

No.

And so I take the position that there are so many variables.

Why do I need to know why?

And I never will anyways.

And so why would I waste my time trying to figure out whether, do you think you're this way because your father didn't hug you enough?

I don't know.

I know that I am this way, period.

And might be 20 different things because we're going to generalize work ethic to your dad didn't hug you enough when it might be like, I write because I've had enough reinforcing contingencies around writing that I write.

And that's different than when I'm willing to speak, speak, which is different than when I do podcasts, which is different than all these others.

And so, when we get into the basically, we extrapolate out reasoning by analogy works really well.

When we get really down to what are the behaviors that change when you were in the relationship versus not in the relationship, and if you can get isolating on that, which you can be specific about, not necessarily why it happened, but that it changed and what behaviors changed, then you can look at your laundry list of, okay, these are the changes in my behavior that I have continued to keep post-relationship.

Are any of these conducive to me getting a more attractive or better partner in the future?

Now, if the person that I was with got me to go to the gym because they went to the gym, and then the gym itself became reinforcing, because basically totems of reinforcement can shift over time in terms of the work itself can be reinforcing.

I might say, this was a laundry list.

This is one of the items that changed when I was in this relationship, and I am okay with it.

And so, if we have that laundry list, then again,

why do I need time?

And so, I, anyways, I push back on this very hard because me discovering why i did something gives me zero value that's interesting i

i would class myself as a

uh

understanding why especially around myself is one of the greatest sources of pleasure that i've got in my life okay this be maybe where me and you differ oh no i'm gonna we're gonna fucking jam on this i'd love this okay so I will give you, I think, a perfect analogy for this.

And the reason that I'm, in general, somebody who's not the biggest fan of therapy, as it's traditionally practiced.

If I were playing tennis, right,

and I went to a coach and they said, Hey,

I need you to change your grip from this to this, straightforward.

Would I spend the vast majority of that session with the coach being like, Let's try to discover why you hold the grip that way?

Who fucking cares?

I do.

Now,

when we get to why,

I used the word control before.

If we can understand the dependent variables, then it means basically if you can predict, it means you can control, which people don't like that.

But if you can predict what's going to happen, it means that you know what the variables are and you can influence those variables, which we can influence the outcome, which means you can control the system.

And so,

knowing why

from a narrative perspective, I think, again,

you'll never know why.

You will have a narrative that you've accepted.

And so what?

Because then, what do I want to do next?

I only want to change, like,

we have a set of behaviors or skills that will increase the likelihood of goal achievement, whatever that goal is, being spiritual, being a good husband, whatever it is.

These behaviors will do that.

To increase the likelihood of me doing these behaviors, then I have to have more good stuff, less bad stuff.

I will, I will down that hill.

Beyond that, what does anything that happened prior to this matter at all insofar as it only works if I can use that same variable

and and then use it again to change my behavior, yet again, to be conducive to the goal.

What if?

I love this shit.

Yeah, I can tell.

I can tell.

I can tell.

It's either the nicotine or the debate.

So what if the actual outcome that you wanted was the pursuit of trying to work out why?

Because for me, and

tried to word that relatively carefully,

not finding out the actual why, but the pursuit of trying to work out why.

It's the reason that I fell fell in love with evolutionary psychology because to me, it started to explain why we are the way we are.

It's one of the common themes in this podcast, over 900 and something episodes.

It is a place for people to come to try and get some approximation of why they are the way they are.

And even if that's wrong,

even if it does not fully explain, partly explain

the process of that discovery for me is fascinating.

I have a journal entry from a long time ago when I was on mushrooms.

And I was, it was post, post-party or post-whatever.

And I was back at the house and I had some music on.

And I was just thinking through ideas like this.

And I could feel this game of tennis occurring in my mind as I thought a thing.

And then I asked why, and then I asked why, and then I asked why, and then I asked why.

And it felt like this sort of movement almost probably certainly was default mode off and, you know, hemispheres talking and all the rest of it.

And I wrote down not what I was thinking about, but I wrote down the sentence, I love the way that my mind works because I like that conversation of tighter and tighter spirals of sort of deeper and deeper questions.

And for me,

I enjoy the why such.

It's something that in and of itself brings me joy to try and work out why we are the way we are or why I am the way I am.

I wholeheartedly accept that learning things is enjoyable.

And I think what you described more or less was that

the

I

come purely from the perspective of changing behavior, and the why is super important

and not always knowable.

And so

I

push back on narrative so heavily because,

in a way, and like take this not as a slight, I see a lot of that as mental masturbation.

I would agree.

And

I do not decry that in any way.

If someone wants to do something with their time, awesome, play video games, do whatever you want.

If we want to say this increased or decreased the likelihood that we achieve a goal, then that is where I will, because that we can know.

Does this increase or decrease the likelihood that we achieve a goal?

And the difficulty with ascribing why

is that we cannot know because we cannot relive the same circumstances again.

And so, in n equals one situations, it has, and I, and I say this to somebody that

obsessed for a long period of my life, um, and this is not to say that now I'm better or different or anything like that, um, over the wise,

but when I, the reason that I have two, two, two, three statements on, on, on my wall, the good day and those three, what does that mean?

How do you know that?

And why does it matter?

And so, if we say,

these are the changes that occur in this relationship, okay,

that's what it means, rather than like, I'm stressed now, or you know what, she rubbed off on me because she was really anal.

What does that mean?

Okay, it just means that she counted her calories.

And I now, you know, when I go to a menu, I order like a diva, whatever, right?

Like these are the two behavior changes.

When I say anal, this is what I mean.

Great.

Okay.

How do you know that?

Well, did I do that two or three times or is this every single time that I go out?

And so, okay, now I know the extent to which this thing that I have now defined.

And who cares?

Why does that matter?

I'm anal now.

Well, anal just means I changed the way I order.

Does that matter?

No.

Okay.

And so instead of trying to,

maybe I maybe it was because I sought out approval from her and other people because I have this hole inside of me and I wanted to gain some sort of in-group, out-group.

I wanted to be accepted by her and her friends who also do that.

I think maybe that's why.

Who cares?

And so

that's,

does me counting my calories and being a devil night warder decrease the likely that I find the next mate?

If the answer is yes, then I'll change the behavior.

If no, fuck it.

Interesting.

The pursuit of the why,

to me, improves my well-being.

And the quality of my well-being is a goal in and of itself.

So let's say that one of the few goals that you have is to be in moment-to-moment happiness or satisfaction or something like that.

For me, the pursuit of the why is a source of that.

So I'm aware that that's like a lexical fucking jiu-jitsu move, but I've thought about this a lot.

And it's been one of the most sort of common themes in the show.

And it's

even if it's pointless,

kind of like

fucking skimming rocks or something that it only occurs for a small moment and accumulates nothing over time.

I like it.

So

this is the second half of that quote from above.

The bar for excellence has never been so low.

Most of your competition quits after the first sign of difficulty because they've never known what hard feels like.

If it's hard for you, it's hard for everyone.

And most people avoid hard things, which is why you can beat most people by just trying.

I think the vast majority of people don't actually know what it looks like to put tremendous effort into something.

And I think one of the the most valuable things that the office, which now you're going to have, has given me is the people who now work in my proximity, one of the number one things that I get back is feedback is like, I really didn't understand how much he works.

And like, he doesn't stop.

And it's, it's easy to say these things and it's hard to actually, because one of the difficulty is especially the vast majority of successful people have one thing in common, which is they're consistent.

And consistency, you cannot see in a snapshot.

You can't see consistency in a soundbite.

You can't see consistency in a reel.

And so, consistency is one of those things.

I think you talked about unlearnable lessons.

I think they are difficult to learn without large amounts of exposure.

And so, those, and I think those are the types of lessons that become unlearnable: you need large amounts of exposure in order to encapsulate the lesson itself.

And so,

trying

is one of those

act of trying.

Yes.

And so I, so Layla had a mentor of hers say this to her, and I've been, and it's, it's lived red-free in my mind since then.

So we had this thing that, we, we had this house that we were pursuing, and

the, and, and we, we ended up not getting the house or whatever.

The mentor of her said,

Are you settling or did you move mountains?

And it's just a great, it was just a great visual for me in terms of like, did you, did you try or did you move the fucking world to make it happen?

And when you think about like the extreme versions of this, which is maybe the person that you care about most in the world dies if you don't, the amount of options of action that open up is dramatic.

And

I think people are so constrained in their thinking of what level of effort is because they haven't considered what trading way more for that thing is, but

they would be willing to trade far more for that thing if the trade were clear.

But because they've never tried hard at anything, they just think, oh,

this is what trying looks like, which might be like the occasional Google search and a couple hours a week of like watching some videos on YouTube on something.

It's like, that is not trying.

Like that is not trying.

Like if you cannot count the amount of repetitions that you're having in the hundreds, that is not trying.

And like, and the longer I've been doing stuff

that's, you know, yielded material reward, the, the greater my history of delay on me getting what I want with volume.

And so it's like, I know that this thing, like everything in my life, volume negates luck.

Violence is the answer.

Like these are sayings that are plastered around the wall of this office because they've been so true for me that you can brute force what you want into reality.

And yes, today, you know, we talked about trades that we're not willing to make.

But if you want something like,

did you fucking move mountains?

Well, the trades that you're not willing to make is you saying, I don't want to move that mountain.

And I think, and that's, and that's perfectly acceptable.

Yes.

You might say, I could do, like, I, so I thought, so because she posed that question, I thought about all these other things that I could do.

I was like, well, I could offer an extra $20 million for the house.

That would probably get me the house.

Okay.

Am I willing to do that?

No.

Okay.

What else?

I was like, I could, like, I had, I was like completely deconstrained thinking.

I was like, could I pay somebody

to, yeah, well, that was a thought, but I wasn't going to say that one.

Could I

pay someone to, you know, we could figure out, I could have a private investigator figure out when, basically tail them, the other buyer who's thinking about buying the home.

And

when they're visiting it, have crime occur next to them or near them or in that vicinity to be like, oh, this is not a safe area.

Right.

Like, what?

And I was like, oh man, I have completely opened up my, now, am I willing to do that?

No.

But it completely deconstrained my thinking when I just raised the bar of, okay, let's say I would pay anything and let's start at this guarantees me success.

Okay, I'm not willing to, I'm not willing to pay that.

Okay.

Well, this also pretty close to guaranteeing me success.

Am I I willing to pay that?

No.

Well, this one still guarantees me.

Oh, I'm willing to pay that.

And so it starts at goal achievement and then works backwards on price rather than starting with price.

You negotiate the cost with yourself.

Backwards from the assumed success, which is why do so much volume, it would be unreasonable that you were successful.

I think the bar being set incredibly low is just a

it's such a fucking perennial truth.

And there's sort of two things happening at once here.

One is

you can work way harder than you think you can.

Yes.

And another one is most people work so not hard that even a small amount of working hard puts you into a rarefied strata of people.

And both of those things are true at the same time, right?

Yeah.

And I'll add a third one.

And the bigger the goal is, the fewer the people who are pursuing it, just because they think it is a big goal and therefore it must be harder to achieve.

That's the fairest thing about most people try to achieve mediocre goals, which makes them the most competed for.

And they assume that how difficult it is to compete for that goal must therefore extrapolate proportionally.

On the consistency point, no one cheers you for not drinking for a day, not smoking on a long drive, or not overeating for one night.

No single workout or meal is ever impressive on its own.

The reason so few people understand success is consistency never looks impressive in the moment, only at the end.

The point that you were making before around

you don't get to see the process.

You don't get to see what trying looks like, right?

Trying is opaque.

Outcomes are obvious.

What you have done is you have made what was previously process into an observable outcome, at least a little bit.

Fuck, Alex spends a lot of time in his office.

I mean, I assume that he's working.

I already knew the output of work that he was getting out of him.

But now I've actually seen the process that he goes through in order to be able to get that.

And unless you are moment by moment turning your process into some kind of an outcome, live streaming it, tracking it, journaling publicly or privately or whatever,

no one ever actually gets to see the inputs, only the outcomes.

And no one knows, that's real impressive.

Maybe it came easily to him.

Maybe he's able to crack it out in half an hour.

Maybe he's got a team of people that do it on his behalf.

Maybe he, maybe he, maybe, maybe.

And yeah,

you can try way harder than you think you can.

And most people aren't trying at all.

I'll give a tactical thing that has helped for trying.

And like, this is actually one of those more rocky cutscene type things.

But

when you

work

and you actually are working, you're writing the emails that you need to write.

You're preparing for the podcast.

You're doing that work that you know is not short work.

It's this is going to take me two hours.

This is going to take me four hours.

When you get to the end of that and you're like, man,

I'm kicked.

You know, I'm this, you you know, I earned my shower today.

I think the difference is that at that point, you go, you grab a bottle of water and then you look at your to-do list at the next large thing and say, great, let's start on this.

And I think people who don't witness that happen, they don't see four hours.

And this is what working side by side, someone can do.

I remember when we just have it, we have a new director of marketing.

In his first week, we needed to, we needed to write some massive amount of stuff.

And

he was like, okay, so we have to do this.

And I was like, great, blah, blah, blah.

Let's go.

And he was like, oh, like now.

And I was like, you got something else to do?

And he was like, oh, I mean, no, okay.

Yeah.

Let's do it now.

And then we shared screen for eight hours

and then we finished it.

And it was like, oh, wow.

I was like, great.

What's the next thing?

And he was like.

Oh, yeah, we have this other thing I guess we can do.

And it was, and I could see his like perception on the level of work shifting in in real time.

And so if you have the opportunity to work with anyone that is exceptional at anything,

especially in that sub 30 crowd, for the love of God, move across the country,

live in a tiny apartment, live far below your means, work for free if you have to, because the skill that you will get from learning the unlearnable or the difficult to learn lessons, because

it is pithier to say unlearning, but like it's harder to learn these lessons.

If you can get in proximity, you will learn so much, so much faster.

Like if you want to time warp yourself, you can try and observe the little bits and nuggets and crumbs from videos, podcasts, things like this, because all we're doing is trying to describe scenarios.

But when you live them, it completely changes you forever.

Like if you want to win, Angela Duckworth talked about this.

The number one most consistent way to become a champion is join a team of champions.

Have I given you my 2D lessons, 3D lessons thing?

No, but I'm very Very cool.

So Bill Perkins wrote a book called Die with Zero.

Great book.

Great book.

Three-hour listen.

Everyone should go and get it.

You'll be far less motivated afterwards.

Keep going.

Yes, that's true.

But he's fun and he is an important redress to people that struggle to spend money and struggle to have fun.

So

Bill Perkins writes this book, Die With Zero.

I bring him on the podcast.

The book is about how to use your money in a manner that gives you a life that you will enjoy at any level of wealth.

That's a 2D lesson.

Even speaking to him on the podcast was largely a 2D lesson.

We finish up the podcast and he says, What are you doing now?

And I said, Well, I was going to go home and write the show notes for this because it was me, an editor, and a Mormon assistant in a Facebook Messenger chat.

That was our business at this stage.

And he said, Well,

do you want to go wake surfing?

Can you wake surf?

It's like, yeah, I can wake surf.

When do you want to go wake surfing?

Like, when?

When now?

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

I mean, we've just been on a podcast for two hours, three hours, it's the middle of the afternoon.

So, okay, no worries.

We go downstairs.

His driver's outside waiting for us.

We get into the car.

We get to Austin 360 Bridge.

His boat captain is there on the boat with shorts for both of us and towels and food and snacks and

caffeine.

And immediately we're wake surfing within 30 minutes of having finished the podcast.

And I was like, 3D lesson.

2D lesson, reading the book.

3D lesson, going to Bill's house and seeing his staff.

And that, huh?

This guy puts his money where his mouth is.

And the difference for exactly what you're talking about, 2D lesson, 3D lesson.

The value of narrative.

Yeah.

There are two types of people.

Those who want to know more and those who want to defend what they already know.

So many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with.

Man, I got some good quotes.

That first one's Morgan Housel's.

Is it fuck?

You can go fuck yourself.

Yeah.

No, because

it's interesting that we said that because I was like, man, fuck.

I was like, I don't even remember that shit.

That's why.

Yeah.

There's a

idea called the second half is.

Yeah, I did write that.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you know what the dead internet theory is?

No.

Over time, so much content on the internet is going to be created by AI and bots

that

nothing is going to be left that's user-generated, essentially.

It's going to be a rounding era of that.

So it's dead internet theory.

I get the sense that the people who are concerned about dead internet theory should have been concerned a long time ago, given that most people are propagating ideas that they didn't even come up with and can't explain.

It's like you're worried about mindless robotic creatures producing things on the internet that you might have to read.

Have you seen what most people put on the internet and ask them about where they got that idea from?

So yeah, I think the dead internet theory has already occurred.

It's just, it's, as Naval says, people failing the Turing test in reverse.

People failing the Turing test in reverse.

So they behave like robots.

Hmm.

The second half of the quote was what?

So many people are afraid of changing their mind when most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with.

Hmm.

So there's this quote by Marcus Aurelius that I have, I wrote, I wrote on the executive.

How much fucking wall space have you got?

It's all whiteboard.

Yeah, there's a lot.

And it was,

what are you so afraid of losing when nothing in this world belongs to you?

And I read that and I was like, fuck, that's good.

And so, like, there's also things, but there's also beliefs.

Like, what are we so afraid of?

Because every belief that we have, like, we got it.

Like, we come as a blank slate, right?

Now you could say, you know, I combined three things and made it my own.

You know, I think you've read enough quotes in this world that like most interesting things have already been said.

But the ability to change your mind,

like if you can't, if you can't explain why you believe what you believe,

then it isn't your belief.

It is someone else's.

And what's weird about that is that people are willing to defend someone else's belief, but they're not willing to accept someone else's belief.

It's just that it's just one step removed.

I'm talking to you, and it's your belief.

And I'm defending another person's belief, but it's mine right now, but it's not mine.

And I,

you know, strong beliefs loosely held is, I think, a saying in in the Y Combinator world.

Like, before I get this like big trigger effect of like, oh,

he says that I'm wrong and therefore he is calling me stupid and I'm inadequate and I will die because I will, you know, like, and you'd extrapolate it to everything.

Um, I think the quick check of like, why do it?

Like, what if he's right?

And I think that's a great perspective.

I remember having my own mind changed on something like this.

I had to do a debate when I was in high school for affirmative action.

And so I was a very pro-affirmative action guy going into that debate.

I had to argue the opposite perspective for the debate.

That's cool.

And by,

and that was, I think, I think it was one of the requirements the teachers, everyone had to say what side they were on, and they just flipped it, which was amazing teaching, by the way.

That's really cool.

And at the end of the whole thing, I was like,

I was wrong.

I actually think this hurts people more than it helps people.

And like, I had all these other, and I had all this reasoning behind it.

And I'll tell you a completely different scenario of this in terms of questioning our beliefs.

So in

the gym world, which is where I came from,

I remember a period of time where I saw people work out and I would judge them.

And I'd be like, oh, that guy's form is bad or he's doing too much volume or he's not squeezing in the right way, whatever.

And then I learned more and then learned that that

thing that I was seeing some guy do actually was more effective and my thing was not as effective.

And then a few years passed and then I learned that the original thing that I said was actually the thing that mattered.

And then I learned even more and it was like, oh, so

all of these things have different rates of progress based on quote efficacy, but all of us eventually cap out at our genetic max.

And so all we're really debating, all we're really debating here is how quickly we reach our genetic max.

And if I enjoy training, wouldn't I rather have longer progress over an extended period of time?

So then which one is better?

Huh?

And so it's just like, and basically having myself, and luckily luckily for me at least,

each of those times where I quote learned that I was wrong, it was in silence.

And I, after like the third or fourth time of this, where it got flipped again and again, I was like, you know, maybe I should back off a little bit.

Just be humble.

Yeah.

Like, I'm just going to exercise the way I like to.

And kind of like the pursuit of why for you.

Like, I like training this way.

You can't really explain it too well.

It just seems to give me joy.

Yeah.

Right.

Yep.

Yeah.

There's this idea from Gwyn de Bogan.

I'm going to add something to this, which is, I saw saw this

yacht, and it had the, because every yacht names are always like wild, right?

And it said, don't analyze your pleasures.

What's that mean to you?

He used the word analyze, but I think judge is the word that

he.

I'm assuming it was he because this thing makes you feel good.

Yeah.

Don't question it.

Don't worry about it.

Just let it be.

Yeah, that's really cool.

That is really, really cool.

It's like the suffering, like, only suffer once.

like don't judge this thing went well sure i mean you just

enjoy it yeah enjoy it uh gwynda boglet's got this idea two-step flow theory most people's opinions are copied from their favorite influencers who in turn copy the opinions of their favorite mass media as such politics is largely a battle between two armies of puppets being ventriloquized by a handful of actual thinkers and that's the you defend uh an opinion so many people are afraid of changing the mind when most of their beliefs are even theirs to begin with and there's people who want to know more and those who want want to defend what they already believe.

Oh, so interesting.

Because it was kind of like, this is like the Mark Manson quote.

I thought it was going to go in a different direction.

So I, so based on that premise, my expected outcome was

these people copy the behaviors of their favorite influencers, and the influencers are using the most tested thing that the masses have said is the highest performing version of.

Oh, okay.

So it's like a means-tested outcome.

It's like, oh, the best rose to the top, and then everybody's copying that.

Well, I mean, maybe, but I think that the point here is that original thinking is very rare.

Yeah.

And that you have, it's maybe one of the reasons why you get conceptual inertia and stuff takes a very long time to change.

Even after a heliocentric version of the universe is fucking, you know, turned around, you

have a long time for humans to catch up.

And I wonder whether this plays back into the breakup thing.

She's like, does just this fucking conceptual inertia sometimes thought patterns

for someone who has trained it perhaps be able to change like that but fuck me when you start to scale that across an entire society and media and legislation and government and expectation and religion and

what the what is it uh a lumbering behemoth that sort of drags its feet

we end up with that

thinking

is hard, which is why the vast majority of people delegate it.

And what's really interesting, and I think you had George Mack, and this is his whole thing with high agency.

Like,

you can be exceptional by just actually trying to come up with your own opinions.

Like, and starting with what do we, what are the few things we know, which is, you know, reasoning from first principles, which people say over and over again, but don't know what reasoning from first principles is to begin with, which is we start with the facts, the things that we are observing in the observable universe, and we only go from there.

And we build on that.

And if we, if we arrive at our current thing, then I will also agree with it.

If I don't arrive at the current thing, then I'll arrive at somewhere else.

And then I'll have reasoning to believe that thing.

And the thing is, is that if you do reason from first principles, it does give you the ability to sustain the course for an extended period of time because your logic is sound.

And so you can look at everyone.

And there's one of my favorite memes.

I have like my two favorite memes of all time.

And one of them is there's this one dude and it's probably standing with in front of like a zillion little heads that are going the other way and he says yes you're all wrong and i i love that meme because to me it's like that meme is agency it's like

i know i don't know why you all believe what you believe but i know why i believe what i believe and until i have observable evidence that somehow contradicts my

the stack that has built this belief

This is what I'm going with.

The problem is that this takes time to do that research, to do that thinking and come to it.

Whereas, and as much as we can, you know, throw shade at people who delegate decision making, we all do because you can't actually derive, you don't have enough time to first.

It's too effortful.

Yeah.

You don't have enough time.

So we have to just be more purposeful about what are the, what are the beliefs that I'm actually like, what hills will I die on?

So I will die on my hill of behavior change because that is what I spend a huge amount of my time, you know, thinking about.

But if it's around food stuff, I'm like, I don't know.

Like, and I was in the, and I was in the business for 13 years.

Like, I was in the business for a long time, um, you know, around fitness and nutrition and things like that.

But even then, it's like, I, you know what?

This guy's, Dr.

Mike's smart.

And I believe that he spent his time looking at all this stuff.

Yeah.

So I'm just going to delegate that thinking to him.

Incentives are aligned.

Yeah.

If he doesn't get people leaner or more muscular, then his business falls apart.

Pretty

simple expertise.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The fastest growth periods are often the most miserable.

If you want progress, get used to pain.

The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you.

The hardest you've ever worked is the hardest you've ever worked.

Every new challenge shows you a new territory you were scared of but survived.

Every time you break a new limit, you now know you have the capacity to handle more than you ever did before.

It's inverse PTSD, like workload exposure therapy, that teaches you, oh, I've been here before and I didn't die.

This is okay.

So, one of my trading partners, what he likes me to tell him when he's in a hard set is, you're fine.

That's what he likes me to tell him.

So, he's, he's right at those money sets where you're like, I'm dying right now.

And you're like, you're fine.

Not keep going.

You got this.

It's, and a lot of people like that.

He's like, you're fine.

You're fine.

And I think that that's probably what he tells himself when he's going through those harder times.

Because I, um, so when I was back in the fraternity days, um, I was in the SEC, which is in the south, um, and they were notorious for heavy hazing.

And so I was going to join as a pledge.

And so I called my dad up and I was like, hey, you know, I don't know what's going to happen, blah, blah, blah.

And he said, he said this to me, which actually was one of the strongest things that was my frame going into it because of what he said.

He said, there is nothing that they can do to you that you have not already had worse happen.

And it was this great like, huh, they can't do anything worse than what I've already had happen.

And so going into all of these, it was this very comical, like, oh my God, I was like, this is so much not as bad as this other stuff that I've had to go through.

And I think that

to your point of like, you have only worked as hard as you've ever worked.

The frame of I can stand it because I am not dead.

I am living proof every day that I have stood, withstood everything that I have been through, which I think almost all of us could probably give ourselves a little bit more credit.

And the day that you can't stand it anymore, you won't have to.

What would you have said if they could have done something worse to you than what had already happened to you?

Am I dead?

Guess what?

I have a new bar that I know that I can't stand.

More evidence.

That's the new territory that you go through.

It's

that sort of safety thing, I think, of

you're okay.

This is fine.

Yeah, you're fine.

Yep.

It's a lovely bit of reassurance.

And

I wonder whether a lot of that comes down to control, just this sense that

even if this is a new territory, like your capacity to cope with it still exists, and that in that,

there is a kind of control that you have.

Or maybe it's not a direct control, but it's certainly

not a sense of lack of control, right?

Or not a sense of lack of outcome.

I'm trying to unpack what you said.

When you reassure somebody that they're fine,

what it tells them is, even if this is something which is novel or outside the bounds of your current model, it's something that you can handle.

I think that's where we're trying to get to.

You have evidence that you have.

So, this would be:

we will generalize your history to this novel situation, and it also applies.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

You've been through breakups before.

You'll get through this one.

Even if this one's worse.

Even if this one's worse.

And maybe it's got nothing to do with the breakup.

Maybe it was to do with the way that you handled that changing career.

Maybe it's not even to do with any one thing.

Maybe it's the fact that you've handled all of your life put together up to right now is 50% of the suffering that you're going to get.

And the other 50% is going to come from this one thing.

Or maybe it's you've, this is 99% of the suffering is coming from this one thing, but in the 1% that you've had so far, that is the only evidence that you've got, I reckon that you've still got this.

There's this idea, I might have told you this before, but a friend of mine told me about a time that he went through a really rough period, sort of public scrutiny and lots of bad things happening to him.

And he said,

all my life, I was scared that I was a coward.

I was terrified that I was a coward, that I didn't have bravery.

And I think of myself as a hard man.

I hang around with hard men.

I do hard men things.

And

I'd tested myself, but I'd only ever really tested myself

under my own volition and in my own control.

And

one day

I

thought,

huh,

the world's going to test me in a manner that I didn't get to choose.

And it's going to test me at a velocity that I wasn't prepared for.

He used this sentence, I fucking adore.

He said, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door.

I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door.

And then his world came crashing down.

It's like,

and I wondered whether or not that guy next door was going to stop fucking coughing and kick the door in.

And sure enough, he did.

And it's this

lovely explanation of the difference between chosen and unchosen suffering.

It was one of the criticisms I had that everybody made around CrossFit.

That, you know,

training so hard, you know, the Ryan Fisher like world of this, like, dude, you made yourself fucking pass out from a heat stroke in a competition.

But

even though that is unbelievably extreme and really, really impressive, let's make no bones about it.

You chose to be there.

You chose to do that pursuit.

What if I said you need to lie on the couch for three weeks and not train?

How hard would that be?

Because that's the difference between chosen and unchosen suffering.

And the weird thing is that you can't choose unchosen suffering.

It's very difficult.

Unless you throw yourself into kind of chaos, you know, like flicking yourself, like fucking throwing yourself off a cliff is like, well, I don't know how this is going to go.

So yeah.

The clearing my throat, clearing his throat in the room next door is a fucking wonderful visual.

I have two thoughts on this.

So number one is that

one of the strongest reframes for suffering is that it gives you the opportunity to create evidence of the person who you want to be.

And so it's like, I cannot say that I'm the type of man who can withstand hard things without having gone through hard things.

And so

this hard thing that has occurred that was not of my choice can still be something that serves me and my ultimate goal to become the type of man who can do these things.

And so reframing suffering as opportunity to create more proof, I think is really, really strong.

Because

we are ultimately just the behaviors that we do, but we also ascribe our narratives to why we do those things, which may or may not be true, but we do ascribe those narratives.

And so being able to say, like, this is going to be an amazing story was one of the things that got me through the earlier parts of the gym days when there wasn't any evidence.

And I could say, hey, this was many years of my life.

Because if it had happened overnight, how unrelatable would that story be?

And the reason that we don't tell stories of the prince who just goes up to the girl and she says yes, and they lived happily ever after is a very terrible story.

And so I think at the end of our lives, we would much rather have the twists and the turns and the depths of character and then the triumph.

This is a story that's far more interesting than this.

Dude, I had Jeffrey Katzenberg on the show the other day.

Do you know who that is?

Guy that founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg.

Oh, cool.

The dude that did Lion King.

Oh, amazing.

And like every big fucking Disney movie.

He was a legend.

And I asked him, what did you learn about storytelling?

He says, story is only as good as its villains.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, the Joker in Dark Knight.

I mean, it's just like you made the movie.

And another way to put that would be the story is only as good as its stakes.

Yeah.

The bigger the monster, the more epic the hero.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Find a woman who kills drama instead of starting it, makes life quieter, not louder, tells you you're better than these guys, you can beat them, and wants you to win even more than you do.

Then become the man required to attract that woman and marry her the moment you find her.

Yeah,

that was just a tweet about my life.

When I was debating whether I should marry Layla, I had a mentor who I reached out to and I was like, hey, what do you think?

And I was actually like, just not sure.

I just honestly came in with like open hands here.

I was like, I don't know.

Because my relationship with Layla was different than any other relationship that I'd been in before.

And he said, look at your stats.

And this is probably the most hormosian of

love story decisions.

But he was like, your business is up.

You're eating better.

You're working out.

You are less stressed than you were.

And she has done all of these things to create the space for you to do that.

And when I translated into like, what has changed about my life rather than, you know, do I feel the chemical compound of whatever?

Um, it actually made it a much easier decision for me to say, you know what?

this makes sense which was by the way my proposal to layla i think it would make sense if we got married was my actual um which wasn't a question it was a statement she was like is that a proposal and i was like well are you saying yes

she was like yeah i was like okay then we need to get you a ring and that was that was that was our proposal there was there was there was yeah so that's uh her mosi's romance but anyways um i think that

i think a lot of people chase

chase the um

the

the fireworks rather than the

the the

coal furnace that takes a long time to heat up, but then it just keeps it keeps

going and it can power for a much longer time during good times and bad times.

Because if it makes sense, if it makes sense without emotion, then it will make sense when the emotions are gone.

Yeah, that's an interesting assessment of the way that the human attachment system works.

That basically you have

sanity,

insanity,

sanity again.

And you should, everybody should see themselves as potential future drug addicts that are playing around with maybe one of the most powerful substances on the planet.

The only issue is that it's endogenously created inside of you as opposed to exogenously given to you by a guy in a BMW.

That's what falling in love is.

Falling in love is choosing to deal yourself drugs for between six and 24 months.

During that time, you cannot trust your own decision-making.

So you need to make as rational of a decision up front

in the belief that that will be where you end up on the other side of this window.

So the terminology, it's the passionate versus the companionate attachment system.

It's because serotonin gets dropped in the brain, because you're just dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, fucking drive, drive, drive.

And then you don't sleep, you don't eat, you're like, oh my God, she's lazy he like come out of it 24 months later you're like what the fuck was that and if you're not careful you're now in a relationship in a fucking house with a golden retriever and maybe a ring and maybe a kid with a person who you don't really like all that much and made your stats go down

do you ever hear the uh diary entry that charles darwin wrote when he was unsure about whether or not to get married yes but please but you could recant it fucking sick the document has so uh darwin's unsure about whether or not he should get married so he makes a list.

The document has two columns, one labeled marry, one labeled not marry.

And above them circled are the words, this is the question.

On the pro-marriage side of the equation were children, if it please God, constant companion and friend in old age, who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with.

After reflection of an unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog, anyhow.

He continued home and someone to take care of house, charms of music and female chit-chat, these things good for one's health, but terrible loss of time.

Without warning, Darwin had, from the pro-marriage column, swerved uncontrollably into major anti-marriage factors, so major that he underlined it.

This issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at greater length in the appropriate not marry column.

Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it,

conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarreling, loss of time, cannot read in the evening, fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books, and, if many children, forced to gain one's bread.

Even experts in mating and evolution struggle with big decisions.

Fucking sick.

The line that I remember from that most vividly was

less money for books.

I was just such a, just such a like, and less money for books.

Yeah, that will be in there.

I want to do another one.

I don't mean to just read shit that exists.

Have you ever read Richard Feynman's love letter to his wife?

No, I read the Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

Okay.

But I love Feynman.

Love, love, love.

I mean, you can see a lot of influence.

I might not be able to say this without crying, which is going to be very embarrassing, but I'm going to try.

October 17th, 1946.

To Arlene, I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear it, but I don't only write it because you like it.

I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write you.

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you, almost two years, but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am stubborn and realistic, and I thought there was no sense to writing.

But now I know, my darling wife, that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past.

I want to tell you I love you.

I want to love you.

I will always love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead.

But I still want to comfort and take care of you.

And I want you to love me and care for me.

I want to have problems to discuss with you.

I want to do little projects with you.

I never thought until now that we can do that.

What should we do?

We started to learn to make clothes together, or learn Chinese, or get a movie projector.

Can't I do something now?

No.

I am alone without you.

And you were the idea woman and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick, you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed.

You needn't have worried, just as I told you then, there was no real need, because I loved you in so many ways so much.

And now, it is clearly even more true.

You can give me nothing, yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else.

But I want you to stand there.

You,

dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you'll assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness, and don't want to be in my way.

I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend except you, sweetheart, after two years.

But you can't help it, darling.

Nor can I.

I don't understand it, for I have met many girls, and very nice ones, and I don't want to remain alone.

But, in two or three meetings, they all seem ashes.

You only are left to me.

You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife.

My wife is dead.

To play the reverse out, it's like, would I want Layla to write that letter?

And I don't think I would

unless

she was happy writing that letter.

But if the removal of me as a

contingency of reinforcement for her

meant that she

couldn't find that in somebody else,

what sadden me.

And so I've already, so like with lay life, I've told her, I tell her a lot.

I was like, I'm going to die before you.

Statistically, there's, I'm for sure going to die before you.

She's a little younger.

She's younger and I'm big.

Female.

Like, and she exercised, like, she's for sure going to live longer.

And I was like, I want you to spend as little time assumingly possible from the time that I die to finding somebody else.

You do me no service by making yourself miserable.

And you do not discredit or dishonor me by finding somebody else to spend your life with.

So,

yeah, just I only think about that from reverse.

There's a

the joy of melancholy

is an interesting kind of emotion that's kind of complex.

You know, this

strange

wallowing?

Satisfaction and wistfulness.

And yeah, wallowings may be a little, a little more loaded.

But melancholy, you know,

there can be odd joy and sadness and

a kind of beauty that you get to experience after something is gone that you can't experience during it.

I've not had anybody in my life die.

Only child with a mother and a father that's still alive.

Like, I've got, there's no one.

Must be nice.

Give fuck.

But there's not been many things that I've lost.

And this is me fucking Monday morning quarterbacking.

I don't know, but

maybe.

What's a mood setter?

Modern women see Layla and think, I'll wait to establish myself in my career before I date or get married or have kids.

But they forget, we got married when she was 23.

and we build this together.

Love is one of the rare times you don't do life in order, but rather all at once.

If you find someone that makes your world go round and makes the world make sense to you, where you both look at the same thing and say, oh, you saw that too?

Like, I feel like I was the only one.

I think that for high-achieving individuals, finding someone who sees the world the same way is incredibly rare.

And when you find that person,

you should stop what you're doing and then you should get them to stay with you.

And it's been, you know, one of the best decisions of my entire life, marrying Layla.

And

there's

there's this,

especially unfortunately for women right now, there's this huge, you know, put it off delay there's no rush but it doesn't actually take into um consideration two things one is that biology hasn't advanced with culture and society you can't have kids past you know 35 i mean you can but you're a geriatric you know it's a geriatric geriatric pregnancy past 35 ruthless tum yeah i'm just being real right yeah um and so i mean i this is like super prevalent and i know this is a much more common theme on the show and i don't touch it very much but it's it just I just say it more like because I think it sucks.

It's unfair.

It's not fair.

Yeah.

It's like objectively, it's not fair.

Guys can wait the rest, you know, their whole lives.

They can do everything.

And you have to, if you go to college, graduate college at 21 or 22.

And if you want to have four kids, assuming that you have perfect pregnancies and you have exactly one year, you know, 18 months between each one, okay, that's six years by the time you're done.

And so if we, if we rule out geriatric, that geriatric pregnancy is our last, then it means that we have to basically have, or we, you, have to have your first kid at 29.

Well, okay, maybe it'll take, let's just tack one year on of marriage to have the kid and be married.

Okay, 28, you're married.

All right.

Do you want to marry somebody within six months of meeting them?

Let's give it two years to give our logical, you know, brain in.

Okay, so 26.

26.

You graduate at 22.

You have 48 months.

And I think that, again, this is if you have, if you don't want kids, then all of this is null.

If you do, then you have a very small window to piece that together.

Now, of course, there's surrogates and maybe in the future, you know, like I, I'll say in general, betting on

I'll smoke cigarettes now because by the time I'm old, they'll have a cure for it.

I don't know.

I just, I don't make those bets.

And so it's easier to work with reality the way it is, not the way you hope it's going to end up landing.

Yeah.

To knowingly incur basically a guaranteed price for the potential of maybe a non-existent solution is probably not the best decision-making process.

And to be clear, I say this, Layla and I, you know, we don't have kids.

She's not 35.

But

I think that

we have these unrealistic expectations that someone is going to make our lives, that they're going to complete us in some way.

When I think that

for me,

the best thing that a partner partner can do is help you be the best version of yourself.

And that may mean that you also have other friends who fulfill other needs for you.

I remember a mentor of mine,

you know,

he had a wife that, well, most people have wives that are not involved in their business.

I'm more of the exception there.

But his wife wasn't involved at all in the business and they had a very happy marriage.

And he said,

And I said, do you ever like wish you could talk shop with, you know, your wife?

And he said, God, no.

And I was like, why not?

He said, that's what I got you for

and it was just such a

business wife it was just a such a flippant like offhanded answer that I was like there was actually a lot of wisdom in that he's like I don't need I don't need her to do that he's like I need her to do this and he's like and I've got you and you and Kevin to do these things with he's like and when I want to do like church stuff I go to these people and so um and I think a lot of that is because we've become increasingly remote people live together in close quarters for extended periods of time and so it's like our exposure our surface area with one another has gone so far up compared to how the vast majority of kind of relationships were call even 50 years ago.

Like you didn't spend nearly as much time with your spouse.

And so it was more normal to have different people or different parts of your life that were or needs being fulfilled by many people and only the ones that are confined by the laws of marriage being.

delivered on that.

Now, if you get somebody who can tick two of those boxes or three of those boxes, amazing.

But I think the idea, because I tend to reject the idea of soulmate, and I think that people have this fallacy of the perfect pick, like I have to pick this person perfectly, when there's also the Buddhist perspective, which you and I have both, you know, spoken at length off, off, off camera about, which is like suffering is going to be a constant.

And

this person will

like,

we get to choose how we want this to go.

And so I think that if

you take off the societal pressure of a perfect perfect partner and think, does this person make me better?

Will this person hold me back from my goals?

If the answer to this, that is, they will make me better, they will make it more likely that I do the things that I want to do.

And we have no, what I would consider non-negotiables.

I want to have kids, they don't want to have kids, I want to travel, they never want to travel.

If those things are good, I think part of the excitement of life is learning how to be married.

There's a cool idea Louise Perry taught me about, which is

how people buy a lamp.

So

if

you were to move into a house completely unfurnished, finding the right lamp is super easy.

Get any lamp, and the house will fit around it.

But if you've spent a decade and a half constructing the perfect house and all of the upholstery is chosen and the art's on the wall, there's this sort of sage,

effervescence candle over the far sides, even the smell, trying to find a lamp that fits that perfectly curated house is really difficult.

And it's a price that

we don't like to talk about.

I say this as somebody who's unmarried at 37, right, and has constructed a pretty fucking elaborate, complex life.

It's significantly more difficult to find a lamp that fits into a house that you've designed for a long time than it is to build a house around a lamp.

And assuming that you want a lamp in your house,

Getting the order at least somewhat right may make it easier.

Now, there are lots of great fucking things about the fact that your house is more big and complex and you've had fun in building it and all the rest of the stuff.

But it is a cost that we don't talk about, which is

how much more difficult is it?

What are some of the irreversible doors that you have of just being older and more ingrained in your habits?

And this is the theory versus practice tension again: of, well, you know, if I find the right person, I can, you know, we can, it'll fit.

And you go,

yeah, dude, but your mind is not that of 21 or 25 25 or 30.

It's that of 35 or 40.

And it's going to be harder for you to feel as satisfied with your choice.

It's a difference between satisficing and maximizing.

And the problem is, even if you're looking for satisficing, you start to, that bar begins to raise.

Yeah, exactly.

And

how do you know that you're not kidding yourself into selling that short?

We've seen, I was at Zach,

Zach's wedding a couple of months ago.

And this is such a fucking universal truth of every wedding that I've ever been to.

As soon as the ceremony is finished, all of the eyes of the older people turn onto the single people in the fucking crowd.

And they're like, you know, locked on like this.

And they're coming over.

Anybody that's not married, the next

Christopher, when are we going to see?

You know, when are we going to be here?

You know, you can't, you must not.

Yeah, exactly.

And

it's vicious.

It's like a fucking heat-seeking missile from all of the older people that are there.

And Zach's mum had had a lot to drink and was being super loud and came out with an absolute fucking slammer of an insight where she was, you know, so

when do you think?

And so on and so forth.

And I said, I can't wait to be a dad.

I can't wait to have a family.

I can't wait to do the thing.

I feel like I've spent a lot of my life looking after me and I'm starting to get sick of myself and I'm looking forward to looking after somebody else.

And she said,

that's all well and good.

Make sure that you love, you fall in love with the girl, not with the institution.

And you see this with women because they have tighter timelines again.

Yeah.

That

as the

nightclub lights are about to come on, the standards have to increasingly slip.

And

it's not entirely the same for men, but look, most relationships that are an age gap of

two years-ish, I think the average is 1.5 years

older in the guy's direction.

You can play around with this all that you want, but

it's going to become increasingly difficult.

If you're talking like over 10 years, like,

okay, like how much are you going to have in common?

Very different life stages.

You can get a particularly youthful older person or you can get a particularly mature younger person.

But come on, like,

it's going to be, it's going to be another challenge for you guys to get past.

And yeah.

Make sure that you fall in love with the girl, not with the institution.

Don't reverse engineer this situation out of somebody that isn't right for it, I think is

a good insight.

I think there's a distinct advantage, to be clear, not that everyone needs this, but if you are a younger guy, the fear that you have is that you're not going to have the resources to attract, you know, a super eligible bachelorette.

But I think that there's

really deep

bonding that occurs in going through hardship together.

Like when, and this isn't me saying my way is better, I promise.

Like, hopefully, the end point of this whole podcast is like Alex clearly has no idea.

But

Layla's 23, I was 26, and she saw me lose everything twice.

And that was before we got married.

And so I felt very confident that she liked me for me.

And I think that one of the, what people don't talk about is the, the flip side of this, like playing it out, right?

Let's play it out a couple steps is let's say you do have the nice place, you have the big bank account, you have whatever income stream, all the societal W's.

You are not sure if she loves you or the institution of you.

And

is there a way to know?

I don't know.

Well, you can stress test it, but it's a high-risk.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Purposefully bankrupt myself to see if this woman loves me.

Yeah.

And so I,

without being 1950s nostalgic, because we weren't there and it was probably not as good as people think it is now.

Find the person who allows you to be the most version of you.

And I think that that really comes down to it.

And the most version of you,

I think, is the highest potential version of you, the person who can lubricate the gap between who you are and who you want to be.

You know, I've said this before, but the person you marry marries two people, the person you are and the person you want to become.

Just make sure they love both of those people.

Because they're going to be the one who's either going to prevent that from happening or even be the one who's a rocket pack for you.

Like, what's really interesting is that

there was like a super red pill podcast that reached out to Layla and wanted to interview her.

And she turned down the request.

But

in the invite, it said, you and Alex seem to have like the only

relationship where it's like modern relationship, but it seems like it's working because they're super, you know, trad, conserved, whatever.

And, you know, Layla responded, responded.

Um, what, you know, we had a conversation basically about the invite.

Um, she didn't do it.

But um, I think what a lot of people don't see publicly is that, like,

Layla and I actually have an incredibly traditional relationship.

And in some ways, I just feel like Layla is the most extreme wife you could possibly find, which is that she just said, I will support my husband in every possible way to help him achieve what he wants, including becoming his business partner.

Yes.

Yes.

And that's what people don't get.

Like, Layla has done everything for me.

And that's the part that people can't see.

And like, sure, she'll get girl boss and like whatever, you know, that world wants to, but like we have a very traditional relationship.

And Layla is also a very strong woman.

And I think that for the very strong women that are out there,

this will probably be, you know, chopped in a million pieces and put all over the internet.

But I think you just need an even stronger man.

And so unfortunately, with like the pussification of society, especially men,

and the and the flip side of like the more girl boss, et cetera, is that it's making it harder for those very confident, strong, achieving women to find men that they will let be men.

And the real real is that the guy that you will end up with, he will not accept you, quote, letting him be a man.

He will be a man.

And then you will fall into that world.

You will fit within it.

And I know that that will probably, you know, rub some people the wrong way, but that is my worldview.

And Layla shares this worldview.

And this is, again, not as public on, because you can't do it in Instagram sound bites.

But Layla's life has been one of absolute service.

And she just did everything she fucking could to help me.

And she still does to this day, to the point of pushing herself into health issues to

help us win.

And I think the sooner that you can get an ally that you can absolutely trust, we think about competence and we think about incentives, right?

A wife is ideally, like recommendation to the younger guys, find a competent wife.

The incentives take care of themselves once you get married.

And I will say that

contrary to popular pop culture, getting married makes you more money.

So as much as Darwin said, this will cost me money and I will have less money for books.

Getting married will make you more money.

And I'll say, even at the most basic level, because you're not spending a third of your mental effort chasing tail,

you get a third.

The admin, the sheer admin of dating in the modern world.

It's true.

Yep.

And

you go from a third of your time chasing tail with always trying to gauge people's

intentions and all this stuff to getting all of that back, plus another three-thirds of somebody else, provided you're aligned on where you want to go.

And like, I would not be here without Layla, not just because

she's been instrumental in everything that we've done business-wise, but she, above all else, created space.

She allowed, and she was the first person in my life who just, who,

who just wanted me to be me.

And like, even in the times when I would, like,

I was at a wedding and I was about to post something and Layla was with me.

And I was like, ah, this is a little bit edgy.

I was like, I don't want to piss people off.

And she just looked at me and she was like, never dilute yourself.

And it's like, somebody who wants you to be the most concentrated, potent, unshackled, unconstrained version of you.

Like, she she puts up with the fact that I wear the exact same thing every single day.

I eat the same lunch every single day, the same breakfast every single day.

I talk about only one topic, which is business.

And I do that unrelentingly and forever for every single conversation.

And she has dealt with all of these things.

And

the...

The perspective that I have on this is that like after the two years of all the serotonin, hyperdump, or norepinephrine, and dopamine that you get from the love drug, what you'll have left is you and them.

And if you do not fit into their idea of what they wanted you to be, then that is going to be a tough ride.

And so I think the baseline is I accept you for who you are, and I also accept the person that you want to become.

And I'm going to do everything in my power to help you get there.

And ideally, both of us becoming that person is aligned with the same actions.

I had this insight from George Mack's birthday last year in Miami.

I haven't met George, and I feel like you've never been there.

Well, he lives in Austin now, so come through.

I know you never travel, so that's

a hollow offer that I never actually need to cash in on.

A friend was recently asked who his best friend is.

He said he wasn't sure.

It's a bit of a rare question after age 12.

So the question was asked differently.

Who do you have the least amount to filter with when you're around them?

Another good question is, who can you sit in silence with and not have to fill it?

Even if there isn't a single person that wins, these are the people who you should prioritize spending your time with.

We all feel the compulsion to change ourselves to fit in.

We adjust our behavior, words, nature, everything in an an attempt to be liked, validated, and accepted.

The more people who make it feel safe for you to truly be yourself around them, the more confidence you'll have to be that person every day.

And I feel like that's a correlate to the.

Your partner should be someone that helps you become more of you,

not dilute.

They should be salt

to bring out the flavor.

Yeah.

Obviously, an analogy.

And salt wife.

Yeah.

Analogies have limits, but like salt, more of you.

And so you brought up authentic.

Authenticity, as I define it from a behavior perspective, is how you behave if

you have no risk of punishment.

And so, what would you do if you could not get punished?

And if you behave that way in front of them,

then it means that either they do not punish you or they have no desire to punish you.

Either way, it accomplishes the same thing, which is that you behave as though they weren't there.

How to get a top-tier goal.

Oh, God.

Did I say this?

Is this mine?

Yes.

I'm sorry.

It is.

How to get a top-tier goal?

Number one, get in shape.

Number two, get rich.

Number three, don't be a dick.

Pretty good advice.

So the second one, so get in shape.

I highly recommend.

Like the first thing, like

strongly, strongly strongly recommend for young guys, like, for the love of God, get in shape.

It'll never be easier.

You'll never have more time.

I had one of my sales guys who I said, dude, I don't see you at the gym.

And he said, you know, I'm just really busy.

And I just like looked at him and I was like, you will never have more time and less responsibility than you do now.

So I kind of used the James Clear thing.

I said, hey, if you can't make it work now, accept that you're never going to be in shape for the rest of your life.

He was like, whoa.

I was like, think about it.

Rid yourself of this.

Yeah.

I was like, you're just never going to be in shape.

He was like, whoa, I mean, that.

I was like, right.

So do it or don't, but stop wanting it and so uh

back to that point so i think that getting in shape just dramatically enhances the the people that you're gonna that you can hang out with like and i i have this belief from humans in general all humans at ideal body weight and like normal levels of musculature are almost all attractive like at like a one or zero binary scale of attractive like almost all humans are just purely physically

and so like just don't have that be a constraint for you like don't have it be a negative at the very least least.

Right.

I've got this limitation and that limitation and another limitation.

It's like, okay,

are you just adding another?

Yeah.

I think, I think Peterson said something like, they say they're depressed.

He's like, well, you're living in your mom's space and you're unemployed.

It's like you didn't give yourself a chance.

Now, if you're in shape, you're rich, you do all these, you've achieved whatever you've achieved.

It doesn't have to be rich, but you've achieved whatever you want to achieve.

If you're still depressed, then we can talk about it.

But until then, you haven't even given yourself a shot.

I can't find girls.

Well, are you any of these basic things?

No.

Well, then do that first.

The rich thing is more, I mean, obviously for me,

I think Professor G.

Galloway said this.

It's more about the signal that you have the ability to gain resources more than having them.

And so, like, if you think about trust fund kid, now there is the element of having money, which does for sure.

There are girls who just want the money.

But if you compare that to the young, hungry guy, I don't know if they win in a head-to-head, right?

And so it's the same reason that the starving artist sleeping on his friend's couch, yeah, but who's got lots of upside potential is attractive.

Yeah, it's like, but he fucking has one guitar and a pair of boots to his name.

Like, how is that?

Well, yeah, but so did Dylan.

Look at look at the predictors that I'm seeing here.

Look at the fucking early onset alarm warnings of something potentially great in this future.

Yeah.

So

get in shape, signal that that you are ambitious and that you plan on pursuing whatever it is that you're going after.

And then finally, it's just don't be a jerk.

Like, I'm not saying you have to be

the world's sweetest whatever, but just don't be a dick.

If you do those three things, like you'll be able to get whatever girls you want.

What does don't be a dick consist of?

Great question.

So it would probably be the behaviors that

So that is a bucketed term for many behaviors underneath of it

that basically would just decrease the likely that a girl would want to continue to fraternize with you.

Uh, but like you know, specifically, like, and I think that'll also depend on the girl to be real.

Um, so girls might prefer this.

So, whatever your target girl is, she probably has a bucket of behaviors now.

That's different than do what she wants, very different.

It's, is there something that is non-negative to me that is beneficial to her?

Do as many of those things as you can.

It's interesting as well that

it probably means you need to ensure that the kind of girl that you want to be with

and the kind of behavior that you want to have around her will often align because those two things might not you might want to be a really distant i'm just going to work on myself kind of guy but you might want a very forthcoming very caring sort of woman and you have really reduced down your mating pool if those two things don't tend to correlate.

And I'm going to guess that they don't.

If you want a really forthcoming, very caring woman, I'm going to guess that she's going to kind of expect that sort of interaction in reverse.

And if you're not prepared to give that, it's like rid yourself of the desire, or you're going to have to change your preferences, or you're going to have to change your behavior.

One of the two.

Worth bringing up early if you are on this, like, you know, I would like to find somebody trained.

This is something that worked exceptionally well,

which is I, and I think our first or second date, I just said upfront all the non-negotiables that I had,

which to be fair, this isn't the like red flags, whatever thing.

It's just like, I work a lot.

I will not sacrifice that.

If that is a problem, then this will not work.

And that is okay.

I just want to be upfront that these are, these are the things, like I work out.

I will do that.

I'm not going to give that up.

I will not give that up for anyone.

And so like, just stating those things, and I would say, like, because people have this, like, they want to put on a show, right?

They peacock.

They have to do the mating dance and I have to, you know, present myself in a way that's different than I currently am.

But I would say over time, the less you can make the discrepancy between how you're quote acting or performing and who you are at baseline for that person, the better it's going to be long term because they're going to find out eventually.

And so they might as well find out up front and then you can just say triage.

I've said this a bunch of times, but I went through a breakup at the start of last year.

It was a three and a half year relationship.

And I was like, okay, I'm back in the dating world.

Very different world, very different person, very different environment, so on.

And I did the sort of intellectual equivalent of a shit test, which was early on, I would start sending them Psychology Today articles and weird sub-stack posts and stuff just to see, huh?

Are we going to have it at some point when we next catch up?

Are we going to have a discussion about this?

Because this is the sort of thing that's interesting to me.

And I don't see this going away, at least for a little while.

I imagine the next decade of my life, maybe for the rest of my life, I'm going to be reading stuff and learning about human nature.

And I think it's important to me to be able to talk about this with my person.

This is really good.

So, what you just said reminded me of

a speech that Horowitz gave, Ben Horowitz.

He talked about not pursuing your passion as a career choice.

And one of the main arguments that he makes is that your passions will change.

He said, the things when you're really passionate about when you're 20 aren't really the things that you're passionate about when you're 40.

And

to link that to something that Jeff Bezos talks about, which is when asked,

hey, you know, what do you think the future of Amazon is going to look like?

He said, people always want to know what is going to change.

He said, I think it's far more valuable to think what is not going to change.

And I think that if you're trying to find a mate, you really want to find the fewest common denominators, like what things will not change about me over a long period of time.

If you happen to be in a stint that you're really into fencing or whatever, that may change.

And I think that's where, like, in some ways, it lowers the bar for the quote perfect match because trying to find the perfect match today versus that same match 50 years from now virtually impossible and so if we accept that many of the things that are surface level today are going to disappear on a on a longer time horizon then there's only going to be the few things that actually matter which are going to be what are what are the behaviors under duress right what are the core things about myself and my behavior set that I find it unlikely that will change over a long time horizon.

What are the things that are predictive of the things that end up manifesting?

Like, what is it that underpins this?

What are the foundations?

And so I think that if you can just, and it's probably just a handful of big rocks rather than hundreds of pebbles.

And so when girls have the, and guys too, right, have the big list of like the hundred things that I can never have.

It's like

you probably should have three that you must.

And then kind of ignore the rest because that's, that's the, that's the game.

People who obsess about work-life balance are typically mediocre at both.

Obsessed people apply their obsession to everything and just call it life.

I stand by my statement.

I mean, have you met anybody who's like,

maybe it's genetic, you know, the finding the dent in the can and the like, um, I mean,

the first thing that Leila and I did when we got married is that we went through a divorce course.

Because we were like, well, shoot, inversion, right?

We're like, well, let's just find out all the reasons that people get divorced and let's handle all of those things now.

And so we did that.

It's the first thing.

What are the reasons?

Money's a big one.

Kids are a big one.

And then a lot of it is actually really tactical preferences.

So like, when I come home from a long day of work, do I want you to then unload all of your days, you know, woes on me?

Probably not.

Right.

And so for me specifically, and it's being,

I mean, a lot of it comes down to communication, assuming that you guys liked each other at some point.

Right.

And that, and rounding up, I call it rounding up, which is like, if I said something, and there's two ways of taking it, a bad way and a good way, I meant the good way.

We're married, I love you.

And so, having that be kind of the default setting, and

like Layla has learned a lot of my nuances, which I actually only got to learn with her.

Because the thing is, is that we're going to have, you know, novel experiences that then become routine.

So, you know, when we work together, there was no me coming home at the end of a long day, but we, I mean, we work in the same company now, but we don't like work together during the day.

And so, very often she's at home and I get back.

And

she learned because I to just give me space.

Like, I usually just want to be left alone for a minute

to basically let the dust settle on my head so that I can be, you know, fully present for her.

But I could see somebody who didn't know that, assuming that if I don't want to talk to you when you get back, you don't love me.

Yep.

There's a problem.

And so it's really just dissecting these issues and saying, instead of saying, like, you hate me or extrapolating this to our relationship forever and always,

just as a preference in behavior.

And obviously, Layla subscribes to the same perspective on behavior that I do, which has made our relationship so much easier to navigate without the landmines.

Cause she'll just say, What would you prefer I do instead?

And I say, Can you do this instead of that?

And she says, Sure.

And that's it.

Like recently, so this actually, this is super, super recent.

We went out and had dinner.

And she said, Thank you for dinner.

Because I paid, you know, I paid when I went to a restaurant.

And I was like, it like really hit me.

And I was like,

I haven't had someone, like, no one's, basically, no one thanks me for buying shit because I'm the assumed default guy who pays for shit.

But on top of that, Layla and I work together.

We make this money together.

So it's almost weird that she would thank me for paying for dinner.

So it's not like impolite or weird that she haven't done it.

Yeah, it's our money.

Right.

But I was like, that meant a lot to me.

It means a lot to me too.

Yeah.

And so what she, what she's realized is when she, if she says, I'm proud of of you, you're, you know, you're awesome, that was great, whatever, that means a little bit.

But I'm, for the most part, I'm like, well, I have a whole bunch of things that I could have made better and you just didn't see it.

And like, here's the thing, you know, I'm thinking about that stuff, right?

But like, it means something, but it doesn't mean the most.

But when she said thank you, I was like, please do this more.

Like,

and so in the, like, this is, this is this week.

So this is like very fresh top of mind for me.

Like, I came home yesterday after the two mega days that I was talking about at the beginning of this.

And she said, thank you for working so hard.

And I was like, it's and it was just a tiny shift in terms of verbiage.

Instead of saying like, I'm so proud of you.

And she said, thank you for, it allowed me to feel like I was actually serving us by doing what we do.

And it basically gave a huge reinforcer on top of my already large existing reinforcers for working.

But it's like, I'm, I'm like a, I'm like an appreciation camel.

Like I don't need a lot.

And it can carry me for a long time.

Yeah.

Um, but she was like, and she said the thing that she said at the very beginning of our relationship.

She said, I'm coachable.

And I told you that you're stupid thing.

The one superpower that Layla's had in our relationship, which I think everybody, you know, could

use,

is that the number of times that I have to repeat feedback is zero.

She is the most responsive person to feedback.

And maybe it's hyper, hyper-criticism responder,

whatever it is, but she will immediately change behavior permanently.

And it's been one of those, you know, I mean, when we were dating, there was a period of time where I said, I don't think this is going to work.

And she was like, why?

I was like, you're too cold.

And then like the next day, she was like, okay, what does warm look like?

And I was like, well, if you do these things, she was like, okay, I'll do that.

And so,

and, you know, some people might hear this.

It's doing something that makes your mate happy without incurring a cost on you.

Bingo.

If it means, if it makes no difference.

Now, if it does incur a cost, have the conversation.

Okay, well, this is a trade-off here.

And there was a period of time.

She made all of my meals for a very long period of time.

And then, like, in 2019, uh, she came to me and she was like, stressed out of her mind.

She's like, I can run this company or I can make you use all of these meals.

No, seriously.

She was just like, and she just said, tell me which one you'd prefer.

And she was like, terrified to have this conversation with me because she was afraid that I would, I would, I'd say, you have to be this and this.

And I was like, oh, no, it's a way rarer skill to do what you can do in the business.

I was like, we can just find someone to cook the food.

And she was like, oh, I was like, it's great.

I was like, but this is like, this means way more to me.

And so just having that, like, hey, I'll do it.

Just, I also, just like if you had an employee, not to say they're the same thing, but like.

You can't just say, keep doing more and more things.

At some point, there's a priority that has to happen.

I have to do this instead of that.

And so what things are you willing to trade?

And then us being able to openly talk about behavior the way that we do has made this way less emotionally charged.

Yeah,

the sense of self that it's attached to.

It's interesting with that.

I wonder, I think a lot of people will feel like it's some sort of denial of who they truly are when this happens i remember when i first started working with a speech coach uh i got an addiction coach i figured that if i was going to talk for a living it would be good to speak to somebody that was an expert at doing that and oh addiction addiction a yeah addiction coach

uh and a bunch of my friends said uh well you we worried about losing the way that you speak.

You know, you've got a way that you speak and,

you know, it's going to change who you are.

And I didn't really understand until probably only this year about why

they were uncertain or had a bit of pushback against it.

And it's because

the way that you speak is seen by many people, and maybe rightly so,

as attached to who you are,

not only your sense of, yeah, it's your sense of self, right?

It's a very sort of transparent

hole down to that.

And the analogy that I used was: well,

let's say that I started learning to play the saxophone.

And I said, I'm going to get a teacher to teach me how to play the saxophone.

And your response to me was, well, what about your natural saxophone playing ability?

I'm like,

I'm trying to be a better boxer.

And I get a boxing trainer.

They go, yeah, but what about the way that you naturally throw jabs?

I'm like, okay, if we assume that there are better and worse ways to do it, then yes, there might be some unique quirks that you have, which if they were eroded away, would lose a specific competitive advantage with this.

But

the things that we attribute as very closely attached to our sense of self and the things that we don't, I think are really interesting.

And the way that we speak would be one of those.

But if somebody starts to expand that to everything that they do, well, I mean, this relationship's not going to work if you don't like the way that I open doors.

You know, like my door opening is, that's a unique part of me.

You're denying the person that I am by doing this.

How can you know this is really important to me?

My door opening ability is really important to me.

You go

that, and I wonder what

the

size of territory that somebody is or is not prepared to adjust.

I wonder what that is, you know?

Grab me.

I have, yeah, no, I have.

So I think you wrote a longer blog piece, I want to say a month or two ago, about

how,

do people love me for the things that I do or do they love me for the person that I am?

And then the follow-up is, do I love me for the things I do versus who, you know, who I am?

And I think I texted you afterwards, which is,

what is the difference?

And I mean that.

Now, people get, all the woo-woo world gets really upset.

But when I, but if you say, if I said, who is John?

the first thing that you would do to describe who John is is talk about what John does.

And so I think that the whole being is XYZ thing just confuses a lot of people.

And so our identity in Alex's worldview is just the amalgamation or the aggregation of all the behaviors that we do, just put together.

It's all the stuff we do.

We are, like, he is a carpenter.

Chris has a podcast.

He does podcasting.

Like, that's, it's part of, quote, who you are.

But, like, it's just what you do.

And so to

hold a specific action that you have on a pedestal,

you make it mean something.

But fundamentally, it's just a behavior.

And so I think that if we see ourselves as just this list of a thousand behaviors, then we get to ask the question, does me changing this behavior and going through the effort of doing that mean more to me than this relationship?

And if the answer is no, well, then change it.

And especially if it's at...

virtually no cost to you and a significant benefit to them.

And I think that trait is when you, when you see yourself as I am just a person who does these things, then there's way less emotional rigidity with change because you're like, oh, well, I'm happy to trade this for that.

No big deal.

Especially given that the thing that you're doing now in terms of a behavior might mean a little to you, but not that much.

And your pleasure in doing something that makes your partner really, really happy could be fucking infinite.

Yeah.

This is related to one of yours that I didn't do earlier on.

Lazy people don't know how to start.

Weak people don't know how to finish.

Successful people don't know how to stop.

People demand success, but refuse to work weekends.

People want opportunity, but won't talk to strangers.

People claim ambition, but sleep in every day.

We are the result of our actions, not our aspirations.

I think once you've actually learned how to try,

really try

one

thing for an extended period of time, every single day, and taking all of your discretionary effort and your money and your time and your resources and put it towards just doing that thing.

Number one, you realize how few things you can really do well because of the amount of time that it takes.

The second thing is you realize how easy it is to beat everyone else because of how few of them actually do that.

And

that

learning how to try becomes a generalizable skill across domains.

So when you do learn how to play the saxophone, and if you want to pick up tennis, you think about how many sessions you did to

fix your fingers and

play a more advanced, a more advanced thing over and over again.

And then

when you realize that the domains are similar in terms of skill

achievement,

you're like, oh,

this is the same thing.

And then when you go like, oh, I need to make content now, it's like, oh, it's the same as hitting 500 forehands and 500 backhands.

I make 500 tweets and 400 posts.

And if I do it for an extended period of time and I take the feedback and I don't stop, I'll probably beat most people.

You also get to see if I am focused on playing the saxophone and becoming the best saxophone player that I can be, but I also want to be kind of good at tennis.

The better that I get at playing the saxophone, the more repetitions it takes for me to become even one increment better.

And in order for me to become become even remotely in the same fucking universe in tennis, how long is that going to take?

And I need to work really, really hard.

It's like when you play a computer game, right?

You're playing some fucking RPG, and the first few levels, it's just noob gains all the way.

You're fucking leveling up every time you turn it on.

And then people are grinding and grinding and grinding to get from level 94 to 95 to 96.

You go, well, all of the gains accrue to the people at the top.

And if you've invested all of this time into this thing, you are getting per unit of effort way more back than you ever were in the beginning.

The difference is that you no longer feel the progress quite so much.

So we have this odd issue that willpower at the end can sometimes wane, but the returns are at their highest.

And the progress per unit of time put in is at its lowest.

And the inverse happens when we start something.

And this is why when people get to the top of a thing, plus motivation, which is maybe just like a

tiredness with the pursuit of a thing and a desire for novelty generally, which is maybe a little bit of a different, but this is why people get to a thing and then

this thing's tangential to that.

Maybe I'm going to start.

You know, I've been learning to play the saxophone for a long time.

I learned to DJ.

DJing is kind of the same.

Just go, yeah, but you're starting again

at this thing in the beginning.

And maybe it can augment in a different way.

You know, is is it as close as I know lots about training, so I'm going to learn about diet?

Or is it, I know lots about lifting weight, so I'm going to learn about playing tennis.

And some things augment and enrich, and other things detract and take away.

I think the better you get at one thing,

at least for me,

the less it's made me want to do other things because I know what's going to take to do them.

To this same level.

And then I think, well, if let's say I'm a nine out of 10 at saxophone and I would like to be a nine out of 10 at tennis,

I know how much work it would take to be a nine out of 10 at tennis.

And then I just wonder to myself, if I took all of that and put it right back in the nine out of 10 that I'm at saxophone, would I go from being top 100 in the world to number one in the world?

And then how different would my life be if I was a nine out of 10 saxophone player and a nine out of ten tennis player versus a 10 out of 10 sax player?

And which life would I prefer?

and I have tended to be a maximizer in my whole life and so like I'm probably pretty my diet is relatively cast in this respect in terms of like I'll be doing business for the rest of my life it's the only game that I really enjoy that I spend all my time on

but I recently have had a really strong consideration that you and I talked about

which is I was I've been really strongly considering devoting myself to

taking meditation as a practice seriously.

And the reason for that is because the literature on basically the standard deviation, improvement, and subjective well-being, basically how happy people are of

Buddhist monks who have meditated for like 40,000 plus hours is like three to four standard deviations above the norm.

Like monstrous.

So to put context here, one standard deviation would take you from like 50% to like 84%

in terms of like general population.

If you're two standard deviations, you're at 99.

That's two, three and four.

And so what's interesting is that like a year of meditation gets you that first, that first chunk.

At an hour a day?

Uh, I was looking at four hours a day, but um,

I'm aggressive.

And so, but the thing is, is that in looking at this, it was basically like in order to replicate those outcomes, it takes about four hours a day.

Now, if you do an hour a day for a decade, you're going to get probably one,

maybe one and a half, depending on who you are, whatever.

And so, I, being a maximum, was like, well, okay, let's start with spending $20 million on the house.

Like, okay, if I, if I spent all of my time time that's available to doing this thing, would it be worth it?

And the, the thing that was, that's been troubling me is that the answer is yes.

And so this is something that I've been, it's like, I, I know what it looks like for me to go work really hard at something.

And I've just been like, I've been teetering at the edge of this being like, okay, am I really going to do this?

And so everyone's getting this as a snapshot of where I'm currently at right now, thinking through this, because

the single greatest skill that you can develop is being in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about.

And seeing these guys literally just take their median and just move it all the way up, they get the first arrow that hits them and they just completely avoid all the other second arrows and then it vanishes in the moment.

And

the description of what three to four standard deviations ahead

of

subjective well-being is a constant state of bliss.

Have you looked at Gary Weber's stuff?

He's one of the guys.

He's

somebody who has become awakened,

enlightened, like permanent, abiding, non-dual awareness

type thing.

And that's

that way.

His description.

I mean, you know, it's unstress-testable in many ways.

I guess put me in an FMRI, but who knows if this is because of the meditation or they were the sort of person, et cetera, et cetera.

But

unless everybody is part of the same grift, which is to get you to sit in silence for a long time with your eyes closed,

the incentives don't seem to really be there to get you to do that.

And the thing that's been like

enticing me about it is, and I don't know if you're the same way, but like when I see how bad I am at something on my first few tries, I'm like, oh my God, my newbie gains are going to be through the, through the roof.

I'm a meditation hyper-responder.

Oh my God.

Well, me trying to meditate is like, is I'm so bad at it.

So bad at it that I'm like,

I'm going to unlock so much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

so bad.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, and I also like it because, like, it's fits so well in my worldview of like, of course,

having that level of happiness takes work.

Of course, it's not me changing my, of course, because like I spent my life changing my external conditions.

I, I, I literally live in a fortress of my own making.

We're, we're in one of two huge rooms that are my gym.

Right.

And I, I, I look the way I look because of that effort.

I married the person I wanted to marry.

I have the business.

Like, I did all of those things.

And yet this guy who has a chair in the middle of Tibet is

fist fucking you and everything.

He's just murdering you.

Yeah.

Well, this is, you know, we spoke about this when we chatted the other week.

And I do think it's an important pivot.

And I think that the story as well is an important pivot,

more for you than for me, but for me a little too.

Of

you spend a long time

trying to achieve things that you think are going to make you happy and fulfilled, and they bring with it

material,

objective, real changes in life.

And some of them are really important to front load, and some of them can only be achieved at certain periods of your life.

And after a while, you ask yourself, is this still the game that I need to keep playing?

I'm 10 out of 10 in this thing, and 11 doesn't exist, but tiny increments of 10s do.

If this isn't the answer,

does it make sense to continue trying to fill an internal void with external goals?

And

I think it's pretty cool to hear you

look at a different, even just consider

a different mode of input with regards to that.

And just for the record, I'm only doing it because I think unlocking the next level of achievement.

There we go.

I have to still have my logic brain for why it'd be worth it.

But no, it's the, I think the reason I'm so, I'm, I'm, I'm actually considering it is

it takes so much violent level of work.

It's true, though.

The only way that anybody could describe meditation is

fucking, the only way that you could convince yourself to do it is to call meditation violence

but look I

something

and this is me stealing you and then repurposing it in a different way

we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it like we sacrifice happiness in order to become successful so that when we're sufficiently successful we can finally be happy and then if you were to make some sort of psychological equation and just strike off success from both sides,

you kind of get left with the happiness piece.

But we're not closed systems.

Humans need a sense of validation.

They want to be recognized by the world.

We have goals that we want to do.

And it is important to realize it's an unteachable lesson.

It's important to realize that the thing you thought was going to fill the void wasn't the thing, but you can't realize it wasn't the thing that was going to fill the void until you've got it.

And then once you have, you go, okay,

sick.

Take that one off.

Now allow me to move on to the more subtle insight that I could have never achieved had I have not gone there.

And so when I was 19, 20-ish, kind of when you have a lot of these existential crises, it's a very common time between 18 and 22 when people develop their worldview or at least solidify some version of it.

I strongly debated leaving everything and pursuing the meditation monk path because I saw the same research that I'm looking at now, 16 years later.

Right.

And what was interesting was that that was actually during the process where I was like, fuck happiness.

I'm not going to even think about this anymore.

And I made my new life goal goal to just be useful because the thing is, is that, and this might be me doing the lame judgment on other people, but me seeing a guy who sits in a hut and then just sits there and is happy for eight hours a day, every day.

I see that.

I saw that.

I try to have no judgment here, but it's a waste.

Because I think there's also a duty that we have to help other people.

Now, that's a should.

I want to be clear.

So you don't, you know, you obviously don't have to subscribe to that.

But I at least have it deeply enough in me that I feel like we should be useful to one another.

And so my desire to be useful has been greater than my desire to be happy.

But if there is a world that at this point I can be both, I'm okay with it.

Money doesn't buy happiness past $70,000 per year because spending money effectively is a skill and most people never acquire it.

As someone who earns more than $70,000 a year, what have you learned about the skill of spending money effectively?

So it's so funny because people assume that there are not levels to skills.

And I remember seeing, you know, my first billionaire start spending money.

I was like, whoa, that's a thing.

Interesting.

And a lot of people who even do make money or save a lot of money never learn how to spend it well.

Now, I'm not saying blow it on stupid things, but the 3D learning that you described with

Bill,

he spent money to create that experience, and it was probably worth it.

And so

most people just limit themselves to house, car, food, travel.

That's the majority of it.

But there's so many other things that you can do with money that improve your daily experience, that create memories that will pay memory dividends for a long period of time.

And the biggest, the easiest ones to basically pay down are time.

And so it costs roughly $1,500 a month to get about 90 hours a month back.

If you add up

driving,

gas,

preparation, cooking, cleaning of food,

cleaning of your dwelling, cleaning and prep of your clothing.

If you put all of those things together, what the average American spends per week, it's about 20-ish hours, 25 hours a week that they spend doing all of those things for themselves.

And so 90-ish hours per month.

And the cumulative cost of fixing all that stuff is about $1,500 a month.

Would that be a maid slash housekeeper person who maybe could also cook or maybe a cook who's separate?

A Uber daily.

Yeah.

At the low end, later you can have a personal driver, but yeah, totally.

Just those two?

Those are the only two.

Well, then you have food prep?

We could do

a one-stop shop housekeeper.

Probably cost a little more there, but yeah.

Yeah.

But it would fold two rolls into one.

Yes.

And so thinking about that, and we have our $70,000 per year cap, but if we're assuming, okay, we're making more than that, if you make $1 million a year, it's like, okay, would you be willing to spend $70 to get somebody who does all of those things for you?

And you get 100 hours a week.

Well, if you get the 100 hours back, let's just say it's, let's say, let's keep it at $5,000 a month for what we're willing to spend.

So more than that.

Okay.

So if you can make more than $50 an hour with your free time, or you simply would pay $50 to get more free time.

To lie in a hammock.

To lie in a hammock, then it's worth the trade or go wakeboarding.

And so I think that most people who start making more money, they just stop at nice house, nice car, maybe nice clothes and places to eat, occasional travel that they spend once or twice a year.

That's it.

That's all they do.

But there's so many ways to improve your existing environment.

I get the sense that it's actually the middle level.

It's the people who maybe earn 100 grand a year in USD, maybe sort of 70 grand.

They're the ones who are likely to probably need this information the most.

Because if you're up to the half a million, a million a year or something like that, it's like you've probably realized that this is something that you can spend money on.

People don't.

I talk to entrepreneurs all the time.

Well, that's that's it's one of the first things I do when I look into a company.

I say, What do you like?

Do you have do you have a housekeeper?

Do you have a like?

And we go through all this stuff because the highest ROI money I can spend as an investor is getting a hundred hours a month back for the entrepreneur for 50 grand.

My God.

Well, I mean, the yes, that's crazy.

And also, if you are someone who to whom an additional 50 grand a a year of income would be 30% of your net worth or 30% of your annual income, making 150 grand a year, for you, this opens up a lot more than it actually does for the guy that's, let's say that I guess when you're making a million, each hour that you would then spend would be worth more, et cetera, et cetera.

But yeah, it's

that overcoming that sense of, I can do this for free.

Yeah.

Therefore, I shouldn't pay someone to do it.

Guilt of spending.

This sense of opulence and wastefulness, entitlement.

Totally.

Overcoming that has been

a real challenge for me.

And it's good that I've been around people like Bill and yourself.

And it's almost like

it's a very specific type of ambition.

And it's not ambition in the material sense.

It's ambition in the life quality sense.

Freedom.

Yeah.

Functionality.

So one of the things I think from today that's been

novel or interesting to me has been

updates in your worldview.

So reflecting on the last 12 months or so, what do you think are the things that you've changed your mind on the most or updated your beliefs on the most?

Instead of saying fuck happiness,

I am open to the idea that I can be both useful and happy.

I'd say that's probably the biggest one.

That it's not a trade between the two.

That's number one.

I would say the second is getting very specific about moments and not extrapolating moments to days, weeks, months, years.

This one good thing, can I spread that wide?

And this one bad thing, can I shrink it into the absolute smallest possible box?

And making sure that I don't suffer the second arrow.

I would say, like, if I had the two,

probably, those are probably the two biggest things that I would say

I have been actively working on how I see

reality.

Well, I look forward to seeing what you've learned next time.

I appreciate you, man.

Thank you for having me.