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Kickoff Sessions
Weekly podcast episodes with the sharpest minds in the world to help you live a richer & more fulfilling life.
Previous guests include Luke Belmar, Justin Waller, Sahil Bloom, Gad Saad, Peter Schiff, Stirling Cooper, Jack Hopkins, Sadia Khan, Matt Gray, Daniel Priestley, Richard Cooper, Justin Welsh, Arlin Moore and more.
Kickoff Sessions
#265 Sahil Bloom - The 5 Types of Wealth You’re Ignoring
Pre-order ‘The 5 Steps of Wealth’ by Sahil Bloom: https://a.co/d/fBZjUvv
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Wealth isn’t just money.
You don’t want to be the richest person in the graveyard.
Or the guy squeezing out of a sports car, burnt out and alone.
True wealth is multidimensional.
I sat down with Sahil Bloom in NYC to dive into his five pillars of wealth:
- Freedom: The ability to control your time and priorities.
- Mental Clarity: A focused mind beats a scattered one every time.
- Physical Health: Without health, nothing else matters.
- Relationships: The real currency of life.
- Financial Security: A foundation, not the whole story.
Sahil shared why staying in the game is the ultimate lever for success—and how compounding time and effort can create exponential results in every area of life.
This isn’t just about Stripe balances or bank accounts.
It’s about creating a life worth living.
If you’re ready to rethink wealth and build something that lasts, this podcast is for you.
Smash that like button for more episodes like this!
(00:00) Preview and Intro
(01:50) The Power of Showing Up Daily
(05:17) The Concept of Life Missions
(07:15) Balancing Personal, Professional, and Health Goals
(10:53) The Truth About Time and Desire
(12:31) Meeting Andrew Huberman: Authenticity in Action
(14:49) Developing Focus and Self-Awareness
(18:23) Defining the Main Thing in Life
(22:08) How to Create Value and Earn Trust
(26:25) Lessons from Business Mistakes
(30:56) Avoiding the Trap of Material Validation
(32:47) Playing the Infinite Game
(38:16) How To Build Quality Relationships
(45:17) Exploring Delayed Gratification
(47:07) The Value of a Supportive Partner
(52:28) Sahil Bloom’s Marriage Advice
(56:04) The Five Love Languages
(58:50) Understanding Your Emotions
(01:01:05) Men's Mental Health
When I say, never bet against the person that just keeps showing up, that's literally what I mean. It's the person who just is willing to show up day after day after day, who gets knocked down, who comes back, who gets knocked down again, who comes back. That's the person that's ultimately going to win. The showy flashes of brilliance those people fade, and you've seen this time and time again in anything that you were pursuing in life. Like the people that just show up and it's not sexy and they just put in the work, that person eventually finds a way to win. Stephen Covey said this like the main thing is keeping the main thing. The main thing that's so true across business, across your relationships, across your health, all of these different areas that I write about in the book. That's the main point. Figure out what the main thing is and then place it on a pedestal and focus your energy on delivering the high leverage systems that actually affect that outcome.
Speaker 2:so you said a lot, of, a lot of shit. That's like super impactful to me, man, which I don't even think you realize, and one thing that I keep referencing is you mentioned but never bet against someone who just keeps on showing up, and I've honestly been referencing that, I'd say, every week for the past six months since I've seen it yeah, I um, I forget where I read this, but it was just the idea that, um, basically, life is one long game of compounding, and compounding is just returns to the power of time, and everyone focuses all their energy on the returns part of that equation.
Speaker 1:you're constantly thinking about how you can juice your short-term returns. You're like, oh, I want to make more money in the stock market, so I'm going to try to trade fancy things. Or I want to grow faster in the gym, so I'm going to do some fancy new routine. And the reality is, if you just look at the equation, the most important part is the exponent, which is time, and all that is is just showing up over long periods of time. That's how you actually generate outstanding growth over long periods.
Speaker 1:And so that quote when I say that, when I say never bet against the person that just keeps showing up, that's literally what I mean. It's the person who just is willing to show up day after day after day, who gets knocked down, who comes back, who gets knocked down again, who comes back. That's the person that's ultimately going to win, because the showy flashes of brilliance, those people fade, and you've seen this time and time again in anything that you were pursuing in life. It's like the people that just show up and it's not sexy and they just put in the work. That person eventually finds a way to win.
Speaker 2:I think, starting with physical area, and that is always the best Like for me for you it was baseball, For me it was rugby. Actually, for me it was 100 meter sprinting as well and that was like the ultimate determinant of like you're going to do this for many, many, many, many years before you win and also anyone who's really successful in the beginning. They're usually the guys that fade off the quickest. So when I was running, the guys that were coming seven, eight, seven and eight would end up coming first four years from now because they were just eight shit. They just ate shit for half a decade and they're the guys that actually make it in the long run.
Speaker 1:Right, that's such an interesting. I've never thought about sprinting um sports. I mean, it's the most classic example of this. And I, just more generally from a life perspective, often think that the most meaningful things in life take way longer than you would ever imagine to go and build and generate. There's nothing good in life that comes quickly.
Speaker 1:Anything that you really want and desire is going to take much longer than you expect, and going in with that assumption and going in with that understanding is really empowering, because then you're not disappointed. When you don't all of a sudden get it overnight, like if you know today that the physical gains you're trying to make are going to take two and a half years, not two months, then you're able to go and endure those feelings of the ups and downs. You're able to endure I call it the valley of stagnation. It's like that period, that long period of time when you feel like you're making no progress. The person who is aware that that's a part of it is able to endure that. The person who thinks that they're screwing up, who thinks that they need to adjust course, who thinks that they need to quit during that, is the one who's never going to figure it out. Who's never going to figure it out, who's never going to be able to go and build those things that are really meaningful.
Speaker 2:What have you taken from, let's say, the marathon running that you're preparing for now, which is, by the way, it's a crazy? Your first marathon was six months prep and you did 257. And then the next one 253 is crazy, and I've seen, like, the impact that you've had. Like there's very little people that I get up and I watch their story. Similar to you, I follow like 10 people on Instagram and I literally watch your stories every single day, man, for like six weeks, because it just seems so crazy that you were able to achieve that. Now, what was the cost of doing that in the context of everything else? Because that seems that you squeeze a time down so much to achieve that exponential result that most people never do. Just want to take one quick break to ask you one question have you been enjoying these episodes? Because, if you have, I'd really appreciate if you subscribe to the channel so that more people can see these episodes and be influenced to build an online business this year. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have this concept that I've been really hyper-focused on recently in my life of missions, and it's sort of a metaphor and what I really mean by that is you get to choose a few missions in life, and it's not five, it's not ten.
Speaker 1:You probably get three missions in life at any point in time and those are like the big things that you're trying to do, the big things that you're going after.
Speaker 1:I think, personally, that I have a professional mission, I have a personal mission, and then I have a health mission, and my professional mission is to impact a billion lives over the next 50 years.
Speaker 1:My personal mission is to build a house full of love that's my closest family and friends and kind of broader network of people that I'm connected with.
Speaker 1:And then my health mission is to live at an incredible level relative to my age, and basically what I have found is having these missions and a clear, real clarity around them has allowed me to cut out the noise of everything else, and what I mean by that is like, with this pursuit of the marathon falling within that health mission, I basically need to say no to anything that doesn't fall within one of those three buckets, and that includes people that are trying to pull at me that aren't on one of those missions with me. That includes, you know, any new ideas, business opportunities. Anything else just becomes noise if it's not clearly within one of those missions, and so I've found this like life changing magic of having a clear sense of what those missions are, because then you can just say no. You're saying no to everything else, right. You're like these are my tradeoffs that I need to make. I need to focus on these missions if I actually want to drive them forward, because they are ambitious and they're very challenging.
Speaker 2:Dude, I think the fact that you're able to recognize that just allows you to have way better focus in on that period of area that you're focusing on. So let's say it is the marathon and that's so numeric so it's so easy to measure. You know you did this time in this amount of weeks invested and you ran at this pace. Was there a pullback in the other personal area and professional area during that period of time? Like, how do you come to terms with that? Because I kind of find out sometimes if I'm over indexed on one or two others, I see a drop in the other two or three components, that's it.
Speaker 1:No, I, I did not have a drop off on a personal level. I mean, I'm not willing to make sacrifices to my relationship with my wife and my son, or my parents or the closest friends in my life. I'm more than willing to make sacrifices to the broader network of hundreds of people that I know and I'm connected to and unfortunately that's a reality. Right, like you need to at some point. You only have, you know, you have a fixed pie of energy and if you're giving a whole lot of energy to one thing at any point in time, you need to pull back on other areas. And again, like knowing what those missions are, knowing who important piece because, um, lacking that clarity and lacking the communication with those people around you of like, here are the missions that I'm on. You are on one of these missions with me and we're in it a hundred percent, together towards this thing.
Speaker 1:Then they understand, like my wife as an example, when I told her that I was going to do this marathon, she kind of like rolled her eyes at me initially because she knew how much the running was going to take and how much training I was going to have to do over what was really a 10 week training block to build up for it.
Speaker 1:Um, and what I told her was look, the main thing with a marathon training is the one long run per week. It's like a, you know, 20 to 26 mile long run that you have to do generally on the weekend and that's, you know, two and a half to three and a half hours, so long long period of time during a window. That's normally family time on the weekends. And so what I told her was um, I will never be out on a long run when you and Roman are awake, and she trusted me on that, and it was true and what I? What it meant was that I had to wake up at 4 am and start those long runs by 4.30 or 5 am on the weekend, and that meant that I had to get up and I had to eat a full meal at 4 am on a Saturday morning.
Speaker 1:And so I would be like stuffing down a thousand because I was trying not to lose weight while I was doing it, which is again me being crazy, but like I was waking up at 4, 3.45, eating 1000 calories and starting a run in the pitch black at 430. So that I could commit to what I said I was going to do, which is I'm going to be back by 730 or 8am after running 22 miles and then also have the energy during the day to commit to you and Roman and any activities we're doing. That's not for everyone and most people won't want to do that, but it was a mission that I was committed to, something that I really wanted to do.
Speaker 2:Before we go any further, I have one question for you. Do you want to generate more leads for your business? Well, I've put together an entire system how anyone can use a podcast to generate more leads for their business, and the best part is, you don't even need a podcast to get started. I've created an entire guide and framework for you to be able to get more guests, more clients, more customers, more people in your pipeline and generate more revenue. This exact system is available right in the description down below, and you'll be able to leverage a podcast to generate more leads for your business and be able to increase your exposure, increase your authority and increase your influence in your industry. So check that out right down below.
Speaker 2:Well, you proved that it's possible because you're able to allocate the time right. It's almost like you said no to everything else, and it also makes you better at what you're doing. Right, because if you know I need to be up at 4am on a Saturday, I need to go to bed at maybe 10 on a Friday one. You're not going to be going for beers, you're not going to be. But even when you're working, though, right, your writing is going to be more concise, like Parkinson's law. You're gonna be much more deliberate with your time, to the point that when you do go and do your long runs, it can actually elevate other areas of your life as well, which you don't realize about sacrifices and the right things.
Speaker 1:I mean, look, uh, here's a hot take for you. It is not your lack of time or energy that's holding you back, it is your lack of desire. We make time and create energy for the things that we really want to do. And I'll give you an example If you have a 6 am flight to go and catch, you are going to get your ass out of bed at 3 am to go and catch that flight. If it's for a vacation, if you're going on a vacation at 6 am, you're going to get your ass out of bed at 3am to go catch that flight.
Speaker 1:But then that same person will say they don't have the time to work out before work at 630am. It's not their lack of time, it's just their lack of desire. It's that it's a vacation versus a workout. If you want to go and do that thing, if you want the life that working out early will allow for you and will afford you to build, then you'll go and do it. And so oftentimes, when we start putting our time or our energy as the complaint or as the, we're placing blame on that. Really, what it is is it's a lack of desire. We need to actually point the finger back at ourselves and recognize maybe we just don't want it bad enough Because, again, you make time and create energy for the things that you really want to do in life.
Speaker 2:Man, that's when I learned so much from you on the no complaining element right, If you can change it, if you can change it, just change it and make those changes, Because you can make those changes. Where it's physical, if it's held and if it is well, you can put yourself on a path to create something that you need. Does that make sense? Whether it's a new business, moving job, changing career, a lot of these things are actually in our control that most people don't even realize.
Speaker 1:Now tell me about when you met Andrew Huberman, what was it that you learned about him that you didn't realize initially? I've known him. For what are we in 2024. I've known Andrew for three years. We sort of came up at a similar time, like when I had started tweeting was originally at a same time. Like when I had started tweeting was originally at a same time when he was starting his podcast.
Speaker 1:And obviously now he's become, you know, one of the more famous individuals within the health and wellness space in the world. Um, even you know he's. He's crossed the chasm across being an internet person, like he's on jimmy fallon. You're. He's like very big mainstream name and personality. I would say the thing that I notice about him is he's very authentic to his nerdiness about the things that he talks about. Like you, you know, you never really know when you meet someone that's a kind of persona around a certain thing, whether that's a character that they play or whether that's actually who they are as a person. And you spend time with him and the stuff that he nerds out about on the podcast is stuff that he nerds out about in person, right, like we're getting a lift in at his outdoor gym and the whole time we're talking about training philosophies, we're talking about anti-rotation and why it's impactful for muscle development like that's what he actually enjoys talking about and what you realize is there's kind of two types of people in the world.
Speaker 1:There's salesmen of an idea and then there's product products of an idea, and what I mean by that is like a salesman of an idea is not someone that lives by it.
Speaker 1:They're trying to sell you the thing, but they're not actually living by the thing they're selling you. That's the person who, uh, sells you the course about flipping houses, but they're making money by selling a course on flipping houses, not by actually flipping houses. Then there's the product of the idea. Who's the person that's actually living by all of the things that they're talking about, and you are buying it because they are a product of the ideas that they're quote unquote selling. He is much more into that category of people. I mean, he is living by the things that he says in terms of his uh, you know his physicality, the way that he eats, the way that he goes about his training, the way that he goes about uh, you know the people that he's spending time with. Uh in just really admire, like anyone that's actually living by it and they're actually authentic. In that way, I have a lot of respect for.
Speaker 2:And it goes back to his values too. Right, you can see that all of the elements that he talks about, these are things that he truly believes Him. Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, all these guys that are at the top of the game. They haven't really changed their topic. Does that make sense? Because he's just the health guy, he's a science guy, he loves that element. He hasn't gone into business content. He hasn't gone into the business of what he's been doing, even though he's wildly successful. It's a very important, interesting observation that people don't change depending on what the market is going to pay them the most for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, focus is probably the number one trait that stands out among successful people. Focus and self-awareness Like. Self-awareness is a very interesting one that few people talk about. You can read every business book in the world about all these common traits of these successful people. You pretty rarely hear people talk about self-awareness, but I, in my own observations being around these incredible people, I've noticed that they are hyper self-awareness. But I, in my own observations being around these incredible people, I've noticed that they are hyper self-aware, meaning they very clearly identify what they're great at, their competitive edge, their winning edge, but they also very clearly identify what they're terrible at and they build walls around that so that they're not exposed in those ways.
Speaker 1:Athletes, you see this all the time. Like, if I know, as a tennis player, that I have a weak backhand, I'm going to play the whole match trying to make sure that every situation I can, I'm prioritizing and setting myself up to be hitting out of my forehand Baseball. It was definitely that way. You were trying to position yourself into counts as a pitcher, where it would be advantageous to you. That way you were trying to position yourself into counts as a pitcher, where it would be advantageous to you, and in business it's no different. You need to be self-aware.
Speaker 1:Tim Cook is a great example of this. He's been a mentor and friend, incredible you know builder and operator. He knew from the get-go that he was not Steve Jobs, and what has made him successful as the CEO of Apple, what has allowed him to create literally trillions of dollars of enterprise value, is that he knew that he didn't try to be Steve Jobs. If he had tried to be Steve Jobs, if he tried to be a constant, insanely visionary product person, marketing person, he might have failed as a leader at that company. What he needed to do was mature the company from an operational standpoint and do what he did best, and what he knew was his real skill and build the people around him. That could be that product side, that could be the marketing, that could be the design. And I think that that flies under the radar for a lot of these people is just the level of self-awareness and, frankly, the people who don't have that self-awareness will eventually crash.
Speaker 2:Interesting man because at that point you can find what you need to fill the gaps in. If Andrew Huberman is coming with a new supplement, for instance, he can find the operator that can do the manufacturing. Chris Williams can find the operator that can do Neutronic. There's always going to be that, but it's like if you try to. What's interesting here is if you try to do the other elements, then what your zone of genius is, you're going to fall down on and trap down on it. You know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you pull yourself away from the thing that you're actually good at. So you also dilute the thing that you're good at by pulling yourself in the direction of the thing you're not good at. It all goes back to this idea that we said at the outset of these missions and pulling yourself too thin. Right, if I'm trying to be, uh, an exceptional runner and, uh, that's my main mission in life, but then I'm like, oh, I also want to be able to deadlift 400 pounds, but my main focus is I'm trying to run a two 30 marathon. Those two goals are going to be very challenging and pull intention with one another.
Speaker 1:If your pursuit is to run a 230 marathon while deadlifting 400 pounds, you can set up a whole plan to try to get there. It'll probably take you five to 10 years. Maybe you'll be able to do it if you're genetically gifted, but in reality, you need to, like, figure out what your main thing is, and I think Stephen Covey said this like the main thing is keeping the main thing. The main thing and that's so true across business, across your relationships, across your health, all of these different areas that I write about in the book that's the main point. Figure out what the main thing is and then place it on a pedestal and focus your energy on delivering the high leverage systems that actually affect that outcome.
Speaker 2:So, within your professional sphere and keeping that focus dialed in. Like what are the different kind of businesses you have now operating underneath? Because they are all interconnected. But, like you guys, you have a very strong ability to be able to manage a lot of different things by either working with people, partnering with people, but how does your ecosystem kind of fit together that it's not completely disconnected over here? You're not doing something that is pulling you away from writing, running being a good fodder. Yeah, so it's not completely disconnected over here? You're not doing something that is pulling you away from writing running being a good fodder.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's not perfect, but the way that my ecosystem generally works is that my media and platform all sits over the top and that is all of the creative work. That's the book, that's newsletter, that's all the social media platforms, that's any content we're creating, that's any future media stuff that I do that is not currently in my sphere. All of that I think of as providing a halo over the entire business ecosystem, meaning I can very effectively drive eyeballs to any businesses that we're launching or building underneath that, whether it's a high ticket services business or whether it's a consumer product business, whatever it might be, assuming I'm actually credible to talk about the thing, and assuming it's a high ticket services business, or whether it's a consumer product business, whatever it might be, assuming I'm actually credible to talk about the thing, and assuming it's authentic, something that I actually care about, use or do on a regular basis, I can drive a whole lot of eyes to it and as the eyeballs that I'm, you know, commanding and that, trust me, grow at the top, those businesses naturally benefit from it sitting underneath grow at the top, those businesses naturally benefit from it sitting underneath. The key part is that there are people whose entire job in life it is to run those businesses, and they're highly incentivized in ownership to do that at a very high level. And that's really essential to the way that this whole thing works, because now there's six businesses that sit underneath. All of them have different operators running them day to day that are really in the weeds and they need to own enough that they're not calling me to ask me questions about the businesses because, a I'm not qualified to answer those questions and, b it's not going to be particularly efficient for me to need to answer things across. All of that. It's going to be pulling me away from the thing that I can really do to affect the outcomes, which is the media and the creative work, and not only the thing I can really do, but also the thing that I really want to do. That's what I want to spend time on is positively impacting people.
Speaker 1:My broadest way of thinking about this has been to say that commerce follows trust, and what I mean by that is, if you trace this back 50 years, trust was centralized in the hands of a few large companies P&G, johnson, johnson, etc. They owned the radio waves, magazine, ads, newspapers, all of that and so consumers trusted those companies and they built commerce on top of that. All of the nodes of commerce Fast forward to today that trust has been decentralized into the hands of thousands and thousands of nodes like us People who have built trust among a following base. Now you can build commerce on top of that trust. The key is that trust is the actual atomic unit that you need to build.
Speaker 1:A lot of people confuse it. They think that follower counts or like counts or view counts are trust. The reality is that they're actually really separate things, and so you see a lot of people with huge accounts, huge followings, that can't launch a business worth shit because there's no actual trust there. The person doesn't actually know who they are. And so my main focus if you think about that mental model, my focus is how can I continue to create value and impact which, in turn, allows people to gift me with their trust, and then I can build businesses, services, products, et cetera that are built alongside that.
Speaker 2:So how? How would you advise someone to build that trust as a result, like doing that hard work, like what is it that you're sharing that connects with people, to build your authority and influence?
Speaker 1:I think it's all about creating value. So to me, it's create value, receive value is like the golden rule around all of this Create value first and then you receive value in return in the form of trust. If I can create value on a consistent basis in your life by giving you new ideas, new frameworks, new systems, new learnings, et cetera that actually positively impact your life, that you then go on and live slightly better than you were living before, you are going to trust me as a result. You're going to say like, oh, I trust the things that that person says. Alex Hormozy is a good example of this. He's given out free business ideas for mainly salespeople for several years. So now if he says something those people trust they've gotten a lot of value from it. They've probably done a better job getting leads, they've probably done a better job converting those leads, et cetera, and so now people trust there's a lot of trust that he has established as a result that he can build a whole lot of commerce on top of.
Speaker 2:And I think he's a fantastic example because of the fact that, if you think about what he's doing, he has all his products in the back end. He's a PE firm in the back end which is the motorized machine which he's really optimizing for and he's just getting. He's bringing everyone along this five or 10 year journey for them to get the 3 million a year to work with him. So he is the ultimate trust versus your traditional private equity firm or investors that everyone is, you know, doesn't want to look at. They want to work with someone that they know they can trust effectively. Okay, last question on that is like how do you deal with the letting go of the control element of you're building these organizations underneath your holding company but when you're handing this off to good operators, how do you have that trust in them and the control element?
Speaker 1:I think the essential part there is that the character and integrity of the person is aligned, and that is the central value. Um, I have no issue with business mistakes and screw ups. Truly I don't. Um, I have a huge issue with character flubs and character questions. I do not ever want to get a text from a customer or someone that had interacted with one of our businesses that says this person wronged me in some way or did something fundamentally that wasn't okay.
Speaker 1:I have no issue if the person says, hey, didn't get a lot of value out of the service we're going to churn as a customer, or like we want to refund because it didn't really work. Okay, that's, that happens, right. Like, you may screw up in business, but you can't screw up your reputation. You can't make mistakes that harm your reputation because, at the end of the day, anything I'm involved with has my name and my face on it, and that has been the core principle for me. And who I partner with it has to be people that I truly trust. In that way, I know their character, I know their integrity, I know their core values and if I have that, then everything else I can live with and falls into place.
Speaker 2:Control is like actually putting everything into it, especially who you hire, and do they have the same ethos as you? Are they going to willingly not necessarily take shortcuts to jeopardize the outcome? Does that make sense? And like that's where the online space can have that negative attitude? And that's what people are trying to fix as well at the moment, because of the fact that people feel burnt. So for you to expand and give control to other people, you just got need to have good operators in that space. Yeah, and, by the way, all of these learnings, any of this stuff is only burnt. So for you to expand and give control to other people, you just need to have good operators in that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, by the way, all of these learnings, any of this stuff, is only learned through painful mistakes. I mean, the most painful experiences lead to the most important lessons, and it's a reminder that you can never regret the past or past actions, because all of that in the dark contributed to your future light in some way. And so I've learned that through screwing it up, through partnering with someone that didn't make a whole lot of sense to partner with because I was going after the short-term money or whatever the thing was, and I've generally noticed that anytime it's a reminder that you need to put your focus on the right thing and so, like that's why I talk about trust so much, or that's why I talk about creating value so much. That's why, you know, I really try to focus on, like, creating these positive ripples in the world when I talk about that, because what I know is that if I do that, I will make money in the long run. I don't know how it might be a thousand different ways, but if I impact hundreds of millions of people positively, if there's hundreds of millions of people over the next 50 years who say that some tiny thing I did helped them, I'll make a whole lot of money and I'm not worried about it. Somehow I will.
Speaker 1:But if I focus on making money, I might do some shady shit that is really dumb and partner with some bad people and make some short-term decisions that aren't aligned with my values.
Speaker 1:That don't, you know, build my name and my character in the way that I want to, and I've learned that the hard way, like I've, every single time I've tried to do something short term. If I've tried to make some money quickly, you know, do some crypto thing, you know, whatever it was, trade NFTs, like I've lost my shirt over and over again on every single time I've done that. And so now I've learned it enough. I'm like you know, I get texts every day oh, you got to get into this, you should invest in this thing, you should, you know, flip this house, do this and I'm just like, nope, I don't do that. Yeah, and I'm probably losing out on money, maybe in some of those things, but I'm perfectly happy with that because I just know, when I put money as the main focus, I make bad decisions. When I put creating value as the main focus, good things tend to happen.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess for you you're holding your reputation at such a high level that that's what's actually going to make money in the longterm, whether it's like shorter making less revenue, less profit in the short term, but over the long run you're not having these huge ups and downs Like how many people get into the space and build up a brand, they get exposed or, whatever happens, go back to zero. You know, the quicker the kind of rise, the faster to fall at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, there's this concept I talk about and write about in my book that I call earned status, and it's this idea that status is a natural way that humans align themselves around hierarchies. That has existed since the dawn of mankind. That exists in monkeys and apes, et cetera. Money has historically been the way that people have thought to accumulate status, because we can no longer just like puff our chests up, beat the shit out of someone in order to show that we're more powerful than them. Money became the thing, the way that people quantified this.
Speaker 1:The challenge, though, is that money doesn't actually get you the respect and admiration that you think it does, because the way that you got that money is actually more impactful. For example, if someone wins the lottery, a really wealthy, successful businessman doesn't respect and admire that person. They just have a lot of money, so it's not. You can't actually equate money with status. That's an easy way of showing that what they do respect and admire is building something that created a lot of value.
Speaker 1:If that same person that won the lottery goes and builds an enormous business on the back of that money that they won in the lottery and goes and builds something that impacts 100 million people and it becomes some huge business and they triple that money. Now, all of a sudden, that person is getting invited to the White House to a state dinner. You know they're highly respected and admired, and so the point is that it's not really the money that we're after, it's the respect and admiration that we think it confers. You're much better off focusing on doing the things that actually build that respect and admiration, which is building things, that last building things that are meaningful and that can never be done overnight. There's no such thing as doing that overnight. These things take long periods of time and they require a whole lot of effort over long periods of time.
Speaker 2:That's one of my favorite parts of the book, because I think the problem with my generation specifically is that everyone is using any sort of cash to do bought or bought status. You know they're trying to get the watch, they're trying to get the car. My favorite part is about do you drive the car? And would you drive the car if no one knew you were driving it? Or do you drive it just because you want to drive up the mountains and that that's. I see that in myself sometimes because it's very easy to to fall into that. You know and we're not like I'm not talking from a perspective of. This doesn't happen to me, it happens everyone, but it's almost. You need to check yourself and that's why I love your mental models around this, because it's like do I want the thing that I want, or do I want that thing because other people want it as well?
Speaker 1:yeah, you want other people to see you having it right. We live in we live in the social media age, so there's at some point. There's no avoiding it. And look, if you film a short form video standing in front of a Lamborghini, saying here's how I bought this Lamborghini in three days, that video is probably going to take off a lot more than a video of you saying, um, it's going to take you 10 years to go and buy this Lamborghini. Yeah, it just is right. And it might be complete bullshit and they might be selling you a course after saying here's how I got this Lamborghini in three days by my course.
Speaker 1:But that is what gets clicks and what gets views, and the problem is that is diametrically opposed to what the reality is of building the life that you want. And so a lot of my book and a lot of what I talk about, what I'm trying to do is anti all of the things that you're seeing on social media, and I sort of know that's going to be a much longer, slower game and I know that it might not get as many clicks as other people. Uh, you know we'll get in the short term. But again to the point we made at the beginning. Time is the exponent, and so staying in the game long enough is what I'm focused on.
Speaker 2:And also like taking elements from your book on the purpose side, purpose and the mission and everything going back to like. That's when you start to end up playing like the infinite game of much more. I'm doing this beyond just a metric, because you do get to a point whereby you have enough cash, your kids are taken care of, you have everything that you need. To some degree that it's much more of like. Am I playing this game for a longer time horizon? And that's why your area of like writing and Twitter and the content you're putting out is very much more in a category of one versus the younger. I want to show people this for that specific reason. Does that make sense? It's almost like everyone needs to go through that hump, but it's almost like what is the end goal of what we're doing, which is for you? You're building like equity. You're building a long-term horizon. The short-term games end up getting short-term results effectively.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:It's a good teal there I really just want to do. We're here for a pretty short period of time and in reality, life is not actually short. We make it short by rushing through it. We're sprinting from thing to thing. We're constantly busy. We're, you know, jumping at a million different opportunities. We forget to slow down.
Speaker 1:It's like Ferris Bueller has that whole line in that movie of you know, life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around every once in a while you might miss it. And it's really true. I am just focused on I want to build cool things with people I like and that might go for my family, that might go for businesses we do, that might go for content. But once you get past a certain point economically and you no longer have the kind of concerns over the like basic burdens and stresses of life, that is where the focus needs to turn if you're going to build, you know, durable, lasting contentment and happiness. And that doesn't mean that you're like a 10 out of 10 happy, you know, feeling giddy every single day. There's stresses that happen no matter what, but the happiest people that I know are the people that center themselves around that every single day. I think this is something we didn't really touch on our first podcast.
Speaker 2:You write about who's going to be at the end of your funeral. Who's going to be sitting in the front row of your funeral? Why did you open the chapter with that line?
Speaker 1:I'm a big believer in the idea that it's highly useful to begin with the end in mind.
Speaker 1:48 laws of power, yes, and I love visualization exercises. I always have Closing your eyes and thinking about that, thinking about at your funeral, who is going to be sitting in the front row, what stories are they going to be telling about you, what are they going to be saying to each other about you, and what do you want them to be saying to each other about you? I find that highly, highly impactful on how I actually want to live my life on a daily basis Because, again, it's very easy to not think about those things, to cast them out of your mind and to just go on living the way you are and not see your. I was in that life. I saw my parents once a year. My parents are. If I happen to die before my parents which you know I hope doesn't happen, I suppose but if I happen to, they're going to be sitting in the front row and yet I was seeing them once a year. My sister I was seeing once a year my sister. Your sibling is the one person that you know from the beginning to the end of your life, and I was seeing her once a year.
Speaker 1:We weren't close, we didn't have a good relationship, and so you have all these people in your life that you know are your most important people, and yet your actions in the present are not aligned with that, are not aligned with that awareness, because you're not thinking about it, you're going on, you're just doing whatever you have to do on a daily basis to get by.
Speaker 1:And so the points that I'm trying to get across with those big questions in the book is to just shock you back into reality a little bit, so that you have the discussion with that loved one, so that you say to someone hey, I read this interesting question and it made me think about you. We should spend more time together, honestly, even just so you send that one text that you wouldn't have sent before. If you just wake up every morning and text one person that you normally wouldn't have texted and just say, hey, I was thinking about you, you can change their whole day. You can change your whole relationship with that person with one second, a one second little change. And so that, to me, is the real essence of this whole book is like take one tiny action like that and it can change your whole life. The ripple effects of that can extend 50 years into the future, but you have to actually take that little step.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. I think that's the problem with if you have those people that are on the outskirts of your, of your uh, your connections, whereas you know you could make more effort, you know whether you could, but there's this to-do list to do and there's this, so it's like you almost cripple yourself into not making those decisions. And that's when your friend group starts to separate, your family group starts to separate. You're not staying as true to the mission. And so when you reverse engineer that because now that's back to your pillars effectively of your professional, personal and health, how do you kind of internalize that? Because I know you write about, you know you spend more time with yourself. As you get older, loneliness increases. How do you view that now without like literally getting depressed in the present moment?
Speaker 1:I am just deeply focused on depth with people. In this stage of my life I would say in my 20s and I think in most people's 20s it's a great time to build a breadth of relationships and of network, because relationships compound just as effectively as any financial investment that you can make. If you can build an incredible network of people, personally and professionally, during your 20s, that compounds and creates value for you for the rest of your life. I'm in my 30s now and I'm sort of beyond the point where I want to be at networking events. I don't get a lot of energy from that. I find it very tough to interact and engage at like a group dinner I get.
Speaker 1:I'm sort of socially anxious. I don't really like settings like that. And what I love is going deep with people. I love sitting and having a conversation like this. I love one-on-one dinners with someone new where I can really sit and learn and understand who they are and the things they care about and their values. That's what I'm really focused on now is every week I want to go deeper with a few people and that might be with my wife. It might be with my wife, it might be with my parents, it might be with my sister, hopefully, um, but I want it to be focused on depth. I'm no longer interested in surface level connections and I'm really not interested in transactional quid pro quo surface level connections, which are so prevalent in this day and age.
Speaker 2:Especially amongst my generation and that was something I definitely wanted to ask you was like how do we, how should someone turn that around? Right? Because it feels like the opportunity to get closer to successful people has never been easier. But as a result, people view it as much more of transactional, especially when they don't have. You know, it's not necessarily mutual, because when you're starting it, you actually don't have much to give apart from your time and energy. So people are looking for that transaction straight off the back of someone, without helping someone, without helping someone, without building a relationship. Like, how do you, how do you view that? Because that must happen to you a lot right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would just say that nothing good has ever actually come from a transactional relationship. People seem to think that good will come from it, so that's why they pursue it. They like go after the you know oh, I just met someone, you know, can you do this for me, or can you do that. Or like you know, I'll do this for you and then you do this for me. They, you know, pursue things that way. Yeah, and keeping score Ooh, that's one of my biggest pet peeves in the world is like people that are like hey, I did that thing for you that one time, so now I'm coming to call. It's like that's just not how I want to live my life. Um, I just don't have time for that kind of thing. I'm like I just feel like I'm too old and like I just don't have time for that anymore. Um, yeah, they're like oh you, I got you a drink you know, six months ago so now you owe me a drink?
Speaker 1:It's just like no, no, we're not doing that anymore. It's why it's actually why I don't split checks anymore at restaurant, like I'll just pay for the dinner and like we don't need to. We're adults, we don't need to split checks anymore. We can just we can do this. In my twenties I definitely split checks. Now I'm just like we don't need to do that and I'm notional relationships. So your entire focus should be on real relationships, real depth, really understanding the person. That doesn't mean that you're going to have an unbelievably deep relationship with every single person, but what it does mean is that you should actually seek to understand the people that you're spending time with and actually genuinely try to be valuable to them, be useful to them, not with the expectation of something in return. All of the best things in life come from giving with no expectation of return.
Speaker 2:If I was to guess, I would say it would be tied to scarcity, because people don't have the resources, that are like how can I get as much as possible from you or work with you or buy you buy something from me as a result, and then it takes away that personalization element, whereas for me, like a lot of my best relations from people now that we have either no ties to business or, if we do, we actually end up working together and it's not keeping score just because we both have a mutual interest and we're actually, at a core level, very strong friends. Does that make sense? But it's almost like you need to find that balance. You'll find this quite interesting.
Speaker 2:I met this guy before, quite recently, and he gave me this framework of a bulldog and a gentleman. He said every relationship male preferably there's a bulldog and a gentleman. The bulldog is much more logic, like do, do, do, try to get this done in order. You know someone who's just going to blast it to get a business launch or whatever. He's less empathy driven. The next, the opposite side, then, is a gentleman. Gentleman is much more someone who is empathy driven, who works to fit in the emotive side of relationships and almost like, assists you in that regard.
Speaker 2:So if you meet someone who's another bulldog, both of you guys are almost jostling over who's the best effectively, and then, as a result, that's when the transactions start taking place, whereas if you meet someone and maybe they want to take more of a dominant role in the relationship, that's when you might think, okay, let them kind of be in their best seat here. You're the gentleman in that in that regard, and it almost changes over time. You know it can evolve effectively, but that's when there can be a lot of clashes. And a perfect example is like a co-founder relationship, where two guys are very similar they're both sales guys or two technical guys. It's like you almost want to put someone in their best seat. One guy is taking care of operations, one guy is a technical founder. That would be the best example there in that regard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, another way to say that is that complementarity is more important than compatibility in relationships, like an idea that you need both in a relationship. I think that a lot in romantic relationships, we all focus on compatibility and how compatible are you with someone, when what really matters is how complimentary are you, how are their strengths covering your weaknesses, how are your strengths covering their weaknesses and how does that come together? I think a lot of. By the way, the like generational thing when you talk about is a failure to appreciate and understand delayed gratification. The younger generation and I include myself in this because I, for the most part, grew up with social media is entirely programmed for instant gratification. Everything is right there. You can get Amazon deliveries right. Like every day is Amazon day, you can order and it's at your house within two hours in New York. Like you can get a drone drop off stuff and you know 30 seconds. Like it's crazy, um, and at the end of the day, delayed gratification is the key to life. It is the key to building the life you want. All of these things I talk about throughout the book whether it's relationships, whether it's purpose, whether it's your physical health, whether it's financial wealth all of these things require delaying gratification. They require doing hard things now to build the meaningful things later. And if you come from a set of experiences that have programmed you to avoid that, to seek short-term pleasures, you're never going to be able to build those long-term things. You're never going to build meaningful, long-term relationships if you're chasing short-term novelty and pleasures.
Speaker 1:It's one of the reasons that I think a lot of people struggle to find a meaningful, loving relationship romantically in the younger generation. Because we're not used to struggling through the mud in a relationship. We no longer have the ability to endure those hard conversations that are so meaningful. It's why I've talked about this several times in the past. I wrote about it in the book that falling in love is easy and growing in love is very, very hard. Falling in love is Instagram. That's the like images from the honeymoon, the fancy pictures in Bali or the Maldives, and everything looks incredible and covered in a filter. But that's not what life actually is. Life is the hard conversations, it's the struggle, it's the challenges, it's the doing nothing along the way, and that is where beautiful, meaningful relationships are grown over long periods of time. But you have to be willing to delay gratification in order to get to that end.
Speaker 2:The majority of my guests run content businesses. They've used content as the main element of their business to drive more revenue and build their influence online. We've been doing this through a podcast for many years. We have many guests, clients and even customers use a podcast as their main source of driving more revenue for their business and building their influence online, and we're offering a handful of spots to book in a call with our team to learn how you yes, you can leverage a podcast to generate more revenue for your business and drive your influence online. Many of our clients and customers start from nothing, but each one of them are action takers and they want to learn more about how to build a podcast and a brand right around their business. So if you want to learn more and you're really interested in building a podcast, check out the link down below and book in a free call with our customer success manager and he will guide you into how you can build and generate more revenue from your podcast this year.
Speaker 2:I have so many questions for you on relationships as well. On that side of things, the big thing in the online space is all about should you get the money before you get the girl Right? It's such a it's such a big debate and, like I think, me and you are on the opposite side, which is like we've grown with our partner, like literally, I met Elise at the very beginning. I know you met your wife coming out of university or high school quite early. What do you think about that? Right, because the whole idea I think it's based on insecurity is that guys are like, oh no, you don't need to go date or you should say no to a partner until you build this business.
Speaker 1:And then you go find a partner that complements that. Like, what's your take on that? Oh, uh, I think if you're waiting to find your person until after you've made money, uh, you're screwed in a lot of ways. If that's how you're thinking, um, a loving, supportive partner is the single greatest asset you can have for building the financial life and successful life that you want. You will never find that, you will never build that life if you aren't able to find someone that is understands who you truly are as a person in those early days. And so if you're, if you think that, like, oh, I'm going to go and make all this money and then I'm going to go find the perfect person, versus that person being an incredible asset for you to go build that future that you're trying to build, those are like two very diametrically opposed perspectives and opinions.
Speaker 1:I just think that, like I would be nowhere without my wife and without the partner that I've had, because she has been so complimentary to me in all of these different areas as I've been through highs and lows along the way, she was the one that encouraged me to go in off on this entrepreneurial path. I wouldn't have done that without her. I would have stayed on the path of just continuing to make money, continuing to be miserable, and I would have died right. That would have been my life. I would have woken up in 50 years and wonder what the fuck just happened If not for having a partner who complimented me in that way, who was able to tell me, who was able to keep me accountable, who was able to keep me humble along the way, who's able to call me on my bullshit, to lift me up when I was down.
Speaker 1:I just if people are losing, you are so far off on what a partner is and what a loving relationship is. If you think that it's just a thing that you can, you should go and get like, oh, I'm just going to go get that after I've already built this thing. That person, finding the right person, is literally the ultimate life hack for building the life you want. That's the person that's going to lead you to all of these things support, you know, through all of the greatest joys and miseries of life. That is your person.
Speaker 2:That's going to be alongside for it all the energy you you give out is energy you receive. Right, if you're coming at this being like I have all this money, I can do all of this, what are you going to attract in that regard? You know what I mean it's going to be. You're setting yourself up for failure.
Speaker 1:You can go find it. Like it goes back to the novelty thing. Like if you yeah, yes, if you want to go find a hotter person or a better look, you know, whatever If that's your mindset, you're never going to find a meaningful, loving relationship. And I, like I'm just I'm not trying to be an asshole about this, like it's just. I have hundreds of friends who have pursued life this way. Right that they're like well, now I'm rich, so now I'm going to go find a meaningful relationship. Very, very difficult, very, very difficult. My, like my friends that have the happiest, most loving relationships. They have grown with that partner. They achieved things together, they failed together, they have actually struggled through the mud together from where they were to where they are today, and that I think you can't replace that. You can't get that. If your mindset is that this person is like an asset to be acquired which is what I think so many young men think these days You're like oh yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm going to go and acquire the woman after I have the money, because now I'm a valuable man. If you think that the money is going to make you a valuable man, by the way, you're screwed in life Like you're done. If that's what you need to be a valuable man, you need some certain amount of money in your bank account. You're a valuable man. And then you went and made money. It starts internally, it starts around your identity, not because of the external success and the difference you made.
Speaker 2:There is about a loving relationship, right, like that's that's the real important word. There is, like an actual loving relationship and, dude, like, I've taken so much from you, even from our last conversation I don't even remember much, but I was asking you about, like, components of getting married, and I took your advice and that's how we almost ended up. We got married as a result. It was taking the stuff that I knew myself and using your mental models, and then, six months, nine months later, we actually are married, you know. So I think that's it's important to understand, like, if you're viewing these lenses, like, okay, start doing these tests.
Speaker 2:You know, I was literally listening to your feedback on this being like, this is who you should look for, this is how it should work, this is the relationship you should have, how you accompany each other. I was like, yeah, this like makes sense for me. You know, whereas most guys are not thinking through that lens, which is why, again, a part of the book is that, like, there's a huge element of leading to divorce and people falling out of relationships, and it goes back to not communicating effectively, not having an open dialogue. Like, how do you think about that, like what would be your marriage advice, even for me, right, like you've been at this much longer than me. Like what would you? What would you advise someone like myself who's just just married?
Speaker 1:Never avoid hard conversations. That's my number one piece of marriage advice.
Speaker 2:What was your hardest conversations you had?
Speaker 1:When, when we were going to leave California and move back to the East Coast and I was quitting my job, we just built a house in California. We were all of a sudden going to sell it. We were going to move back to a place we had never lived. That was a very hard conversation, because normally I'm really big on evidence. If you're going to make a big change, you need evidence to support that idea. Even with my teams that I work with, I hate when people say I think they're like I think this. I think that I don't really care what you think, I care what the evidence supports. So come to me with evidence. And I had no evidence to show my wife for the idea that we could go and build an incredible and beautiful life on the other side of this change. So that conversation to be able to say to her that I wanted to make this big change, that I wanted to leave my job, that I wanted to move back to the East Coast to be closer to family that coincided with a time when we were struggling to conceive and all of that coming together at once. That was a very, very hard conversation and it was direct and her reaction to it was everything which was let's go, do it. Um, and of course you can go and build a new life and do this other thing. Because I believe in you right now more than you believe in yourself. And like what more could you want in a partner than someone that feels that way about you, someone who literally will say you have no evidence to support this belief? And yet I believe it because I've known you and seen you through every single up and down that you've had in your life, since I met her when I was 14 years old. She was 14 years old, I was 15. Crazy, and for her to respond in that way and say that that was the most empowering thing I can imagine. And we moved. That was in the span of 45 days, and within two weeks of getting back to the East Coast and making all those changes changes she got pregnant and to me it was like this, you know, like almost cosmic energy thing of like when your energy all comes into alignment, everything falls into place in the way that it should.
Speaker 1:But the point on hard conversations is, when you avoid a hard conversation, you are taking on a debt that you have to repay with interest in the future Such a cool, and if you think about hard conversations that way, you'll approach them very differently, because it's not free. Avoiding a hard conversation you can't. Time doesn't heal anything when it comes to relationships. You can't brush things under the rug. You're going to pay for that at a date in the future. So make those minor repairs along the way. Have the small hard conversation so that it doesn't become a massive one later. That's ultimately what ends up leading to enormous breaking conflicts in relationships. Is that you didn't address the thing early on. You didn't address it as it was starting to bubble up. You didn't change behavior. You didn't communicate in that way. I forget who said it, but your success in life is proportional to the number of hard conversations that you're willing to have.
Speaker 2:That's such a good point. Anything else on marriage advice.
Speaker 1:So having a hard conversations, anything else you Recognizing love languages is like this is an old book. The five love languages I'm going to let me see if I can recall the five love languages are touch, gifts, acts of service, words of affirmation and quality time. There you go. We got assistance from your wife. That's perfect, and I would argue that it remains one of the most impactful ideas from a relationship standpoint for my wife and I and for obviously millions of other people who have read or listened to or heard the ideas. And for me, the reason it was so impactful was because I finally realized, after being with my wife for 10 plus years, that her love language was touch.
Speaker 1:And I'm naturally a fixer right Like men in general are kind of fixers and it's one of our yeah, it's one of our worst traits from a relationship standpoint is like my wife would come home from work and this is soon after we were married.
Speaker 1:She'd come home from work and she would have something she wanted to vent about. Something happened at work, someone so-and-so did this, something was going on, and I would be like I'd listen to the whole thing and then I'd say, well, what if you had approached this that way? And what if you had done this differently? And maybe you could have done this and she would literally be fuming, staring like it would just be a fight.
Speaker 1:And then we were in a fight and we wouldn't talk and it was like this whole thing and what I realized was literally all I needed to do was just listen and say, like that sounds terrible and give her a hug. And that was all she wanted. That was what she needed from me in those moments. And yet my blindness to that was not allowing me to give her what she needed in those moments. Recognizing that and being able to navigate those just common daily occurrences in a way where you're actually giving the other person what they need not what you want to give them, but what they need in that moment is a really important principle from a relationship standpoint.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that burnt me for quite some time because in my element it was like logic we could solve the problem with logic. So I said to Elise always like, do you want the logical answer? Do you want, like, the emotional answer? And she's like oh, emotion is like okay, everyone's going to be okay All right, we're done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you literally ask do you want to be okay? All right? Yeah, we're done. Yeah, you literally ask do you want to be helped, heard or hugged? Yeah, in the moment, do you want to be helped, heard or hugged? And it's like helped, I can give you the answer, I can talk through it. I can, you know, help you navigate the situation. Heard, I'm just going to listen, you're just going to vent, I'm just going to listen. Or hugged, touch, just like, do you need me to actually give you physical touch in this moment? And when you actually just ask the question, you start to identify what is the love language that that person needs, what do they actually need in that moment? I just think doing that would help solve like 90% of relationship challenges and conflicts.
Speaker 2:So you suggest that'd be good exercise to sit down and try to figure it out with your partner what would be yours as a result.
Speaker 1:Mine is. Acts of service is my love language for sure. Um, like, I experience an incredible amount of love from the stupidest acts of service. Like a fresh trash bag in the trash. I'll be like, oh, that's like, that was amazing. That person did that with friends, with my parents, with my wife, whoever. That's just how I experience it. Um, I don't need touch at all. Like I could you know. It effectively feels like nothing to me, not that in like a weird way. I'm just like. That's just not how I experienced love.
Speaker 1:Um, I generally like to be helped. I'm like the logical side. So if I, if someone were to ask me that question, what do you want in this moment? I generally want them to listen and then give me advice. Like, where does it sound like I'm missing things? Where does it seem like I have gaps in my logic? Where am I being an idiot? And my wife knows that now, so she will do that. Like, if I'm talking to her about something from the book that I'm struggling with during the writing process, she's going to give me advice on like, what resonates, what doesn't, what would connect what's a different way to think about it.
Speaker 2:Um, and that's been really impactful again in our relationship and I think the fact that you're able to recognize that because again makes all your other relationships not romantic, just all of them in general much better. Yeah, most people are not really cognizant of that and that's where they have an emotional reaction to something going wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, every relationship is sort of like a uh, diluted version of a romantic relationship.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like.
Speaker 1:I don't have a romantic relationship with my best friends, but like it's effectively like the same principles apply to your friends as due to your romantic relationships, especially if you have a female friend that's a really close friend. It's probably going to be similar in some ways in terms of how you interact and the things, whether it's logic or whether they just want to be listened to or hugged or whatever it is. And with my male friends, like we've had to figure these same things out because as you get older, you know when you're young, you generally avoid vulnerability and especially men, you're like I can't be seen as being weak, so you don't want to talk about things that are troubling you. You don't want to talk about, um, your emotions.
Speaker 1:I was in baseball locker rooms my whole life. You didn't talk about depression. You didn't talk about anxiety. I had a few teammates who were deeply depressed during our college years. Their performance went like this on the field, they suffered and they couldn't talk about it. We're in an environment, in a locker room, where you didn't talk about that kind of thing back then. Now it's much more socially acceptable which is an amazing thing for them to open up to teammates to talk about it and I just think about the amount of misery that could have been avoided in a lot of these people's lives if they had just been able to open up.
Speaker 1:I mean, I had a former teammate commit suicide. It's like an awful, tragic, terrible thing and I still think about. I just wish the person had been able to feel like they could have opened up in a more meaningful way to us. I don't know if it would have fixed it, but I wish we could have tried and being able to rewind the clock and try to have those interactions, try to open up about these things that we're currently bottling up.
Speaker 1:But now in my 30s, I mean like all of my friends right, we're all struggle with different things because you're at an age where challenging things happen regularly. Our parents are getting sick, our friends are, you know, getting divorced, like you, just every day. Now in your 30s, there's something that's happening. It's no longer. You're no longer in the like honeymoon period of life where nothing's bad in college, like everything's good right. No, it's like. Now, bad, crushing things happen. Kids get sick, spouses get sick. It's you need to be able to open up to your community around you and have those hard conversations again, um, in order to make it through.
Speaker 2:Same with team members too. I've noticed myself, the more I've kind of gotten more into leadership, reading more about leadership, building a like a circle of safety so people can operate in their best, in their best, their best way. I've realized that different elements of someone's character trait male or female, so some guys they need like a hard press. Some guys and they want that. Some guys are much more elegant. So you need to be able to see which personality type you're working with internally and then to make sure that people are actually seen and heard, putting them on a trajectory. So even though we're like a small company all the guys that are 20, 21, 22 we want to put them on a pad and actually help them get there. So they're learning professionally, personally and they feel seen and heard right, which I think is this you know big companies say they do it, but it doesn't actually happen in real life, whereas if you're building good relations with people from that angle, it becomes a whole new world. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:yeah, there are scientific studies that show that psychological safety positively impacts performance. 100. Being in an environment where you feel psychologically safe to share things, positive or negative, that you're experiencing or feeling impacts positively your ability to perform to the best of your ability. Fundamentally, I think that's because you're in an environment where there is high support to match the high expectations they have for you. So in a professional setting, everyone has high expectations for you. They want you to deliver up to a certain bar. Psychological safety fundamentally means that they also have a high level of support for you to go and meet those high expectations, and the combination of those two is what allows someone to thrive. So in an environment like that, as you think about creating teams as well, or as you think about building your family unit, that's what matters. I do have high expectations for my son and for my wife. I'm also willing to give them my shoulders to stand on to go and meet those expectations 100%.
Speaker 2:I want to ask you about alcohol. We didn't get the alcohol last time, so I saw your tweet around alcohol not being black or white. And then there's an element that drinking alcohol, obviously in the right setting, lifts up the social battery, lifts up the social wealth. In that regard, how do you view alcohol now? What's your perspective on it?
Speaker 1:I hate black and white stuff. I fundamentally reject any time I find that I dig my heels in on something when people try to push me into a corner, and I have found the narrative around alcohol to be that right, like the science shows that it is poison going into your body. There's a whole lot of things, by the way, that we do, that are poisonous to us Our phones, our phones are poisonous to us. Our phones are poisonous to us. Uh, you know, I'm like I probably increased my risk of dying just as much by, like you know, driving a car as I do. Uh, you know, like, aggressively driving a fast car is probably way more dangerous, and yet we're not yelling at people who buy McLarens or Lamborghinis in the same way that we are people who drink. So, point being, uh, I hate black and whites and I like to observe my own experience and take into account new information and data to adjust accordingly.
Speaker 1:What I have personally found with alcohol is that, uh, it is a meaningful driver of deep connection in certain settings. For me, what that means is if I'm having a meal or something one-on-one with someone that I'm trying to build a bond with, or someone that I am close with and I want to have a glass of a really nice wine or a glass of a really nice tequila or whiskey, I'm going to go ahead and do that, and if I'm not doing that, I'm not going to drink. So I don't drink on my own anymore at home. You know, my wife was breastfeeding for many years and was pregnant before that. So we don't drink in the way at home that we used to.
Speaker 1:Um. But if my wife said, hey, I want to have a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, I would have a couple of glasses of wine with my wife. Um, if she felt like she wanted to do that or needed that. I'm not going to sit there and say, like that's poison, we can't have wine tonight. Right, like I would slap myself in the face if I ever said that to someone. Um. So that's where I stand on it, and I think people need to come to their own determination on these things. Uh. But I think that most of the golden life is found in the grace. Um, living in any black and white way, uh, and just accepting these dogmas and like falling into narratives just because you heard them and not because you found what works for you, is a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 2:And it goes the same for everything too, right, like, whether that's training in the gym, running on the road, like obviously there's marathon runners who take it to the next stream and then pull down other aspects of their life. So it's like, if you view the five pillars of wealth to be like a score, like in a GTA game, well, if it's going to drag down all of the other ones just to bring up one, well, if it's going to drag down all of the other ones just to bring up one, then that's already going to be the scoreboards off effectively. So I think that, like, where the alcohol debate gets a bit hairy is the fact that if you're having that one or two glasses of wine and it's like a celebration, it's perfect, right, like that's, that's what it's used for. But people are using it for, like, commiseration and the sad element of it, and like they're using it to escape in large quantities.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's where, like, alcoholism has got so bad in ireland, the uk and so on, because it's not used in the context, the way you're describing it and the way that I think it should be used, right, yeah I mean look, if, if, if you have a problem with alcohol, or if you have a problem with gambling, or if you have a problem with drugs or social media porn, or if you have a problem with gambling or if you have a problem with drugs, or if you have a problem with porn or if you have a problem with social media, you should fix that problem.
Speaker 1:Exactly All of these things. The dose makes the poison right. That's a great phrase. The dose makes the poison with all of these things. If I check social media a couple times a day to check in with friends and to share things that I think are valuable, great. If I'm on social media 20 hours a day, not so great Poisonous. If I'm gambling every now and then because I want to enjoy a sports game a little bit more with my mates, fine, probably. If I'm doing it every single day and I'm a degenerate and losing a lot of money, probably not so good. The dose makes the poison.
Speaker 1:Alcohol is the same way. It's like once a month, few times a month, with close, close friends. It's helping you loosen up a little bit so that you show up as your best self in a social situation where you would normally be anxious. Probably totally fine. If I'm drinking three drinks every single night, not so fine. You find your dose yeah, you have to find your dose that works for you.
Speaker 1:And again, everyone's so focused on the fact that it's poisonous and bad for your health right. Loneliness is really bad for your health too Proven Leads to dementia, leads to higher all-cause mortality, leads to all these problems. If a little bit of alcohol like if having a beer in your hand at a party helps you loosen up slightly and you're a little less socially anxious and you're able to talk to people so you feel more connected, that's good for your health. I don't care what the science says about the actual alcohol, because the human connection is an offsetting factor there, and so I think that that gets lost because again, it's confusing variables, right Like you can't assess both of those in a single study and I get that. But again, there's a separation between chugging eight beers at that party and just holding a beer in my hand so that I feel like I'm connected and I have a little bit of social lubricant.
Speaker 1:I get socially anxious in big groups, right Like I. Having a drink definitely helps me loosen up, and when you say that on social media, people are like oh, you have a bigger problem If you need to have a drink to loosen up and it's kind of like dude, excuse my language, but fuck you Right, like, okay, you're the most socially secure person and confident person in the world. I guess I'm a loser, but I sometimes need a drink to loosen up when I'm talking to new people. That's just the reality. Sometimes I do, and if that helps me connect with new people and then I build some relationships out of it, I will take that trade 10 times out of 10.
Speaker 2:And that's where, like, it's so important to understand, like, what's needed in that environment. And I'm not saying that you need alcohol in that environment, but if you're going to constantly be going out and you want to meet other people, you want to expand your influence of people, even find your romantic partner, you're not going to do that locked inside on Twitter, right? Does that make sense? There needs to be that element of like social interaction to be able to get to that point. So it's almost like, again back to the scoreboard what's going to drop in the pursuit of that goal? Um, and it's funny, you mentioned around everything in moderation.
Speaker 2:So if you go to the hospital right now, especially abroad, you get fentanyl. Right, that's a main anesthesia right now. You're getting is fentanyl. Obviously you come down the street here or you could walk around la fentanyl is taken out of massive context, but what what it's used for is for people that are injured in the instance, right. So it's interesting to see, like, where we take these variables. And that's where their variables begin with, because they move up and down, but they take it for granted yeah, yeah, there's also just um that's interesting about fentanyl.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that actually I didn't realize that the dose makes the poison.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's um, you know, sort of an underlying principle to all of this is to like if you've ever heard heard the phrase to like zig when other people zag. You're like there's a lot of upside to be found in life, personally and professionally, by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. It's how investors make a lot of money, right? You don't make a lot of money as an investor by investing in the consensus pick, like there was way more money to be made in crypto before everyone knew about crypto than there was once everyone learned. Same thing with ai, same thing with any of these spaces.
Speaker 1:Um, socially, doing things in person is non-consensus. Now, like actually going up to a girl at a bar that you haven't tindered with or that you haven't, you know, been on a, an app, whatever the new app is with and going up to a girl at a bar and saying hello and offering to buy her a drink. That is like where all of the upside is now, because no one is going up to that girl at the bar, because every guy is sitting there on their phone, being like, oh, can I match with this girl before I go up and talk to her, because it's way scarier to just do it cold. And so again, it's like in all of these different areas, you almost want to just observe what everyone's doing and then just go do the opposite. Of course, man.
Speaker 2:I love that, because the whole idea is that the market's catching up to it, right, we're all trying to do this Just one step, one degree. This way, we're going to be completely open to a new vertical. I want to ask you about time, and this is something that I really, really liked the fact that it was that. Two nice observations of the book. I like the fact that you have, like, time towards the front and you have financial at the back, and I guess there's an intention where financials towards the back.
Speaker 1:But looking at Mark Randolph's quote about never miss a Tuesday night date, how have you utilized that in your I don't know in how you set up, how you set up like romantic relationships and what you do as well, because that's a really, really hard set rule to really nail down. Yeah, so I raised this concept in the book of. I call it a life raiser. It's a single defining statement that allows you to cut through the noise in your life, and the important part about it is that it is identity defining meaning. It's not just the statement, it's that you are the type of person that does that thing. So in Mark Randolph's case, I am the type of person that never misses a Tuesday dinner with my wife. He had this hard rule all the years he was building Netflix, when he had first founded it. He would leave at 5 pm every single Tuesday to go and have dinner with his wife. It wasn't just about the dinners, it wasn't just about the date with his wife. It was about what it meant for the type of person he was and how that applied to every other area of his life and how that showed the people around him the type of person he was.
Speaker 1:In my own life, my version of that is that I'll coach my son's sports teams. My son is two and a half years old. I don't actually coach any of his sports teams yet. The point is that the statement is identity defining for me. It means I'm the type of father that makes time to be there for my son, that I turn things down in order to be there. As the type of father I want to show up, as it signals to my wife that I'm the type of person as a family man, as a father and as a husband that prioritizes family over other things in the world. It signals to the people around me that same thing, and it reminds me on a daily basis what's most important.