9 Harsh Truths No One Wants To Admit - Shaan Puri
Guests: Shaan Puri
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People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that. Me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at Chris Williamson.com. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So if you're a fan of everything, Modern Wisdom,
come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland. Chris Williamson.com. The economy is just smart people, paying beautiful people, to promote stuff to win secure people. This episode is brought to you by. I mean, isn't it, right? Like, once you see it, you kind of can't unsee it. But, you know, I don't know.
I just kind of observed that one day that a lot of the way the world works is a small group of people who have some sort of idea or an agenda. And by the way, this is not always nefarious. They just might. Maybe they believe that this product is really great or that this way of living is really great. But the way we transmit that to society is this weird food chain. It's like if aliens came and observed this ecosystem, how these animals work, it's like it seems like the sort of the smart ones seem to somehow bribe the beautiful, attractive ones with the big feathers. And then they're tapping into some fear in the general pop and gen pop.
And so, you know, then you go through life. You listen to some commercials. You watch some ads. You see what's going on. And you can kind of work backwards from that. And by the way, this is actually good business advice too. And again, if your intentions are good, I think it's useful to use this advice, which is, somebody said this, they were like, you know, you sell a mother safety.
Like, you know, mom's number one fear is like the well-being of their child. So like if you're selling a mother, you know, something you should sell in the safety of their children. If it's a woman, you might want to sell her beauty or, you know, youth. If you're selling a man, you want to sell him status. And so, like, you know, you've been a club promoter. you know, how do you get somebody to buy a table? How do you get somebody to buy a bottle that they know if you walk across the street, it's $50 and they have to buy it for $500 here because you're selling them status, power, importance. And so you kind of have to know
what root insecurity someone has if you want to pull on their strongest lever. Makes the economy sound very predatory to basically be this fear engine diagnosing and then attacking each person's individual vulnerability? Well, the world is sort of predatory, right? You go on Instagram, follow like nature is metal. You go see what animals do to each other. I would say, I think it is a bit foolish to see the world as you think it should be versus as it is. So I think by default, you view the world as it is.
And then you get to decide with your agency if you want to shift it towards what you view is a better world, how you think it. should operate more like, but you're not going to get very far if you don't understand human nature. If you don't understand what's going to make people move and what's going to make people behave in a certain way. I think there's a great marketer, Gary Halpert. I don't know if you ever seen this guy, but you can go watch his old school videos on YouTube. And anybody who wants to learn marketing, don't read the modern stuff. Go go read the guys who could sell things through direct mail, like, you know, postcard and they would drive millions of dollars of sales. These guys understood something about human nature. And he said to a room of marketers, never has more
money been lost than selling somebody what they should want versus what they do want. And so, oh, that's great. You have to meet people where they are. What do they want? And how do you frame your offer, the benefits, the product that you believe improves their lives in such a way that it resonates with what they do want? Half business advice, half just people advice, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I suppose the argument would be you are pushing people toward the thing which isn't necessarily best for them, but is simply sort of playing to their most base instincts. But you go, well, okay, do you want me to run an unsuccessful but virtuous business? I think that's not the way that the market works. Right. Yeah, but I do think it's a false choice. So I think in many cases
you can run into this scenario where option one sounds bad and option two sounds bad. And what people do is they waste all their time debating option one and two, whereas you've got a very clear signal that all you need to do is make option three. Like, you've correctly identified two poor options. Don't waste your time on those. That's a clear stimulant that you need to go create another one. So what's the other option? If option one is kind of manipulate people, do maybe not what's in their best interest, but it's kind of their, you know, tap into the worst side of them, but you'll be successful. Tickle the brainstem in the right position. Exactly. And then you have this nonprofit it kind of like save the world crusader who never understood what people actually wanted,
could not craft a message that would resonate, didn't create products that people wanted to use, and got nowhere nobly, right? Okay, we don't want to do either one of those. What's the third option? I think the third option is you marry an understanding of human psychology. Hey, people like stories. I should frame what I do in the form of a story. Hey, people really resonate when you tell them not the work that's going to be required, but the happy ending on the other side. You, you use that in your marketing. You market the benefits of your product versus the features of your product.
So you understand the human nature and then you use it towards a noble cause. To me, that's option three. And anybody who waste their time on option one or two is like pissing their talents away. Like if you're noble, but you don't know how to reach people, you're pissing your talents away.
If you know how to reach people, but you don't do anything noble, what are you doing? So like, everybody should shoot for three. I think that's a general aspiration. I think we can agree on. What's the A, B, Z method? A, B, Z. Okay, this is a little framework that I think will help anybody who finds himself in a pattern where you want something, you know you're smart and you're hardworking, but you seem to overthink things. And I think overthinking is fucking disease, is COVID. You know, it's everywhere. It's highly transmissible also because one person's overthinking leads to another person's overthinking. So what's the cure for overthinking? And I think the cure for overthinking, obviously, is to simplify.
how do you simplify getting what you want in life? I call it A, B, C. So the common trap with most people when they want to do something is they say, okay, I need to know the first step, second step, third step. I need to know A, B, C. Then I'll do D, then I'll do E. Then I'll do E. By the time they get halfway through the alphabet, A, they're exhausted and B, like doubt has compounded.
It has multiplied. I had a little doubt about A times doubt about B times doubt about C. By the time you get to the end, you just full of self-doubt. And it's paralysis. Here's the alternative. The alternative is you only need to know three letters in the alphabet. A, B, Z. A is where you're currently at.
An honest reflection of reality. So if I, let's say I want to get in great shape. Z is great shape. Z is me with my shirt off, feeling confident and like enjoying looking at photos of myself and not feeling like kind of like, who the hell is that guy? Z is being able to run the race with my friends and not, you know, be the guy who holding everybody back. Whatever your Z is, by the way, these are all personal anecdotes.
So I know Z well. I speak from experience. But then you got to know A. Here's where I'm at. If you delude yourself about where you're at, you're not going to get very far either. You'll be in denial. And then all you got to know is B. What is the next incremental action that gets me towards Z?
And then you repeat. Once you've done B, you've got a new A and you got a new B and Z stays the same. And you just go one foot in front of the other. The reason this works is the general advice of just take it one step at a time. what people do in their heads is they imagine all of the steps it's going to take when you tell them that. It's like, cool, I'll take one step at a time. But this one step doesn't get me there. I'm going to have to do all these things.
And instead, if you just start to give yourself some labels, A, B, Z. And if you had faith that that's true. Like, I believe it's true. You know, for example, my trainer always uses this analogy with me because he trains a lot of, like, I don't know, successful Silicon Valley people types. And so he notices patterns and that type of high achiever. And what he noticed was they're stressor achievers. They do achieve, but they, God, they stress the whole way. It's like, zap the fun out of the whole process.
It's like, what was the point of this whole thing if you kind of were stressed the entire way? You know, the journey is this long and the destination is this small. So like the bulk of your, the vast majority of your experience was stress. Brief relief, new goalpost, new stress. And so he wants to help people. He's like a personal trainer for fitness, but he kind of notices these patterns. And so he said, what if you had confidence that Z would happen? Like, do you believe that Z can happen?
Yeah, of course. I believe it can happen. It goes, cool. Imagine walking to the corner store. So let's say you want some ice cream. And the ice cream's at the corner store. Well, today you're at your house. You're not at the corner store.
That's fine. What do you just start doing? You just start walking. And you know, I'm going to go this way, take a right, go straight for a little bit, take a left at the street light, and then the corner store is there. So you understand that you're not. there today. You know where you want to be. You want the ice cream. But because you don't doubt you're going to get there, you just sort of focus on what's the next thing I need to do.
And you don't worry about all the other stuff that you couldn't do now even if you wanted to. And what you've said was like, more things in life should feel like that. This analogy of like the whole walk to the corner store, I'm not stressed. I'm not worried about if it'll happen, when it'll happen, how it'll happen, all these extra questions that are not serving me on the walk. And so I found that analogy quite useful in pursuits that feel on the surface a lot more complicated than the corner store. How have you used this in your life? Okay, let's take what I do. So I have a podcast.
I want to be the next big podcast. I want to have, okay, I got 30 million downloads this year. We need 100 million next year, right? Whatever the goal is, some Z, some happy ending. That I have my own beautiful studio and my dream guests are coming on, right? a relatable outcome that we both, you know, have pursued. Well, what's my reality today? Today, these are the guests I reach.
This is the type of show I have. This is my skill level. This is, you know, the amount of outreach that I'm doing. This is the amount of time I'm putting in to prepare. Cool. I can take an accurate view of reality. And then I know what my happy ending is and it's very motivating. It pulls me towards it.
I want that. And instead of beating myself up about not having it yet, I'm just going to label A, B, and Z. B, what's the next logical step? All right, Tony Outreaches this week. What's the next logical step? I'm going to study Chris Williamson's intros because I think he's better at that than I am.
What does he do? Oh, he doesn't do this long-winded thing. He just reads him a tweet. Oh, interesting. What does this other guy do? What does this guy do? And so you just start to focus on the parts that are in your control, the parts that generate progress.
And progress equals happiness in my life. I just believe that to be true that any moment in life where I don't feel a sense of progress, regardless of objectively how good my life is, that somebody else might say, your life is amazing. What are you complaining about? Right? And we all have that.
If you're like, have your limbs and you're in America, you're in not in like a third world slum, you know, with somebody else could say, your life is amazing. I can't believe you're not just waking up ecstatically happy every single day. But the reason we don't feel that way is not because we're asking, is because the human body is wired to feel happiness during progress. And it's just relative to wherever you're currently at. And so this is a kind of a formula for not just hitting your goals,
but feeling good while you're hitting your goals, which is the trick. It also detects acceleration and deceleration as well. It changes in speed, like particularly palpable. Yeah. Yeah. This is why the start of projects is so fun. Partially because you don't know the pain to come. But a big part of it's because you get, it's nonlinear.
You get huge gains of momentum at the beginning, a huge acceleration from a cold start, once you get going. And that feels really good. All requests for advice are actually a request for permission. They don't want information. They want a short-term loan on courage. Yeah, I think you probably get this a lot. People might ask for advice, or in my position, I've spent a lot of my life asking people for advice. I was big on mentors and trying to get advice. And I realized that actually people don't want. information. They don't want advice. They're shopping for permission. What do I mean by that? I don't know if you've ever noticed when you ask somebody for advice, you ask five people for
advice. What are you really doing? Like you're really looking for somebody to say the thing that you actually want. You're looking for somebody to confirm that you're on the right track or be like, it's okay. Yeah, you should break up in that relationship or you should quit at job or you should do this thing. You are looking, it's like you parked in this place and you have your little parking thing and you just want somebody to validate your parking so badly. Just punch a hole through this, tell me it's, tell me it's going to be okay. I just notice this in people that very rarely is the thing that people actually want is a useful new perspective to change their mind. I think more often than not people want permission. And I don't mean that as a knock. I actually think
it's a feature, not a bug, that actually what holds us back from having the things we want in life is courage. It's not intelligence. Like I think I have a tweet that I shared with you that's one of my favorite tweets, which is that the world is not intelligence gated. Gates in your life are not, don't require intelligence to break through. Like the world is courage gated. It's action gated. It's wisdom gated. Those are the true energy gated. Those are the real gates of life. We all know people who are not smarter than us, but get far further ahead that have happier lives and better families and better marriages and all the things that we want in the good life. And it takes energy.
It takes wisdom, choosing, you know, one path versus the other. It takes courage to go do it, to try, to make a fool of yourself, to be a beginner. These are the things that it takes to actually have the things that you want. And so often what we need is not information. We just need permission to go for it. Permission to fail, permission to suck, permission to be alone, permission, whatever it is, whatever the thing is in your life. And so it's actually worth asking yourself, instead of asking others for advice, what permission am I seeking? If God came down from the heavens and said, son, it's okay, yes, you can do that.
No problem. You'll be all right. That's the way. It's the right thing to do. It's not that you're really so confused about should I go left, right, center, backwards, which way should I go? We often know in our heart which direction we're called to go towards. And the reason we're not going is some version of fear. And so permission is giving yourself permission to go do it is usually the thing you need.
Do you think you need it from other people? Can you give that to yourself more readily? Is there a way to give yourself that more readily? Well, that's the reason I share this is because once you're aware that that's the thing you want, you might realize, do I really need to go ask somebody for it? Or can I just give myself the person? That doesn't mean it's not nice to be supported or get that from other people. I think we've all had moments in our lives where somebody believed more than we believe.
and we kind of took a short payday loan of courage from them of their belief. Like I often ask successful people, who is your first believer? And they can answer like that. Oh, it was this guy, you know, he saw me. You know, I have a piano teacher right now, singing in piano teacher. And I hired him for the piano. And then he's like, you want to sing? And I was like, I wanted to sing my whole life.
But no, I can't sing. He's like, who said you? Who said you can't sing? I was like, nobody said, I can't sing. I can't sing. I can show you. I can't sing. Want me to do that?
I want me to prove that to you? And he's like, let's hear it. And I was like, oh, fuck. Fork in the road. Do I really just shut this down or whatever? Let's give myself permission to look like a fool for this guy. If nothing else to kind of rule myself out of the singing camp. Let me prove to you how much I can't say.
Let me prove to you. Yeah, I went in with that. So I do it. And he's like, he's like, okay. He's like, you can, he's like, yeah, there's things we can work on. He's like, but I've made people sing, people sing who started off way worse than you. Really? I don't know if he could have told me a bag of life, but it didn't matter.
You went home until this life. Because I've been singing for two months, dude. I found the worst singer that I've ever worked with. You wouldn't believe. And I've many times let doubt creep in along the way of the last two months. I'd be like, listen, you can just tell me. If this is awful, we could just break up right now and just not do that. We can just go back to playing the piano and reading the sheet music.
And so he told me a story about his life. He's like, I grew up, he's a black guy. And he said, I grew up. I said, but it's easy for you. You've always been singing. And he's like, come on. Are you going to do that? It's easy for you to say shit?
And he goes, I was in, he goes, I didn't sing until I was in high school. I was like, what? And he goes, yeah, actually, I was afraid to sing. I thought I couldn't sing. And he's like, actually, I grew up in a, like, I'm a kid in this, you know, the city that I grew up in. Black guys like me, we play football. Singing, that's gay. You don't do that.
And so he's like, I got made fun of. I assumed I must be bad plus I'm bad for even liking singing even worse than being bad at singing so I just shut it down he's like then I moved schools and I was in this empty room one day and I was
the talent show auditions were going on and I liked the song so I started singing along but I was in the other room practice room like by the side just after school waiting for my ride and the choir teacher poked her head in and she was like was that you?
And she's like she listens to him and he's like would you tell me like would you be honest with me like can I sing? And he's saying and she's like, she's like, who told you you can't sing? And he's like, uh, and then he, you know, now he's, he's been on American Idol. He's at this incredible thing. And he needed that believer.
He needed that choir teacher to poke her head in and give him permission. Yeah, you could do the thing you really want to do inside. I asked him, I go, I go, um, so did you always want to sing? And then she gave me the thing. And he goes, it was killing me. He's like, I didn't realize it. I just thought that's what life was. And then when I started doing it, I realized this like, wait, that was. was off me. Like he's like, it was killing me actually that I wasn't doing the thing I was kind of called to do. And I think we would all, I mean, like, how sad would it be if you go through life
not doing what you're called to do? Because you're afraid. Of course. There's nothing else. There's literally nothing else. That is the only reason you don't do things. Whatever you say, if you just ask why, why, why, why, why, why? Afraid of failure. And then you ask why one more time, what happens if you fail? What's about about failure? underneath all of that is a fear that I'm not enough, I won't be loved. Nobody says that part out loud, but it's the true part underneath the fear of failure. And then we stack all kinds of fancy words on top, right? Like stress is a fancy word for fear.
What the fuck you stress about? What do you stress about? It's fear that, you know, if you have stress, it's a code word for fear. If you have anxiety, it's a code word for fear. It's just fancy. Procrastination. It's a code word for fear. What are you waiting on?
Why are you afraid of doing it? Fear. And so it's normal. Everybody has it. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder, Jeff Byers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary.
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Right now, you get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Are heading to livemomenus.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. It's interesting to think about courage. I had this conversation with Jocko that he says, courage is not feeling fear, courage is feeling fear and then doing it in any case.
Yes. And that reframe is really interesting because I think people assume that there is this precursor that's needed before you can go and do action. Like motivation is, I feel like I want to do it, or I'm ready to do it, or I know that it'll go well, or something and courage is the absence of fear or uncertainty or doubt or whatever, but it's not.
It's motivation is feeling that and then going through it in any case. Courage is feeling that and then going through it in any case. Yeah, you never say someone's courageous for taking this sit. Why? Because they weren't at risk. It was nothing on the life. They didn't perceive they were at risk doing it. Now, let's say I had never had a sip of this before my life.
And you knew that. And you knew that I actually had this weird condition where I was afraid of this. You might be proud of me for taking that. It's the same action. Yep. But it's, you know, what's person's internal state? And, like, I'm a dad. And so you learn these truths even more and you feel like the pride when your kid wins in this way.
Like my son would never go in to like, we would like sign him up for all these classes. Like go try jiu-tzu. Go try tennis. Go try basketball. But he's really scared to go in. And I think this common like kids, you're with your parent walking up and it's like, let go in my hand. Go in. here's a stranger and a bunch of kids that, you know, just that's not what he was used to.
He was like born during COVID and stuff like that. You know, so he was always scared to do it. And it frustrated the hell out of me. It's like, and I think it's probably normal to do this where it's like, I drove you here. We paid for the shit. You did this last time. I've been going in there the last three times with you, making you fool of myself. It's not allowed.
The teacher emailed us saying, parents, please stay outside. He doesn't know any of this. He doesn't know what email is. But I'm like, that's my internal state. Whereas his eternal stage is just like, I don't know what the hell is, I'm afraid to go in here, I'd rather stay with my parents.
Yeah. And so one day I took a different approach. I was like, I'm not instead of getting frustrated with my son and being a shitty dad, I, what does he need right now? Okay, what does he need?
And I told him, I was like, look, I actually, I used to be, I used to be, I used to go to gymnastics class and cry all the time because my mom has told me that.
I was like, it's super common. And what I told him, I said, hey, like, you know, do you feel scared? Sometimes I do. I feel it like,
right here. And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, um, um, that's okay. And sometimes like today, sometimes the fear wins. Like we have courage here in our heart and we got fear right here in our stomach. And they fight. And he likes Pokemon. He likes fighting. He likes any animals fight. He likes anything fighting. So I'm like, they fight. And sometimes the fear wins, right? That happens. Sometimes Charzar beats Pikachu. That's what happens. Today, maybe the fear won. And we'll sit here outside. We'll watch this and we'll hang out. And next time, maybe courage can win. Maybe bravery can win.
And so I say this to him. I still want him to go in right there. He just lets fear win. And I was, okay, whatever. Four weeks later, we go back to that class. And he's three times in a row hasn't gotten in. But I'm like, okay, whatever. Still go.
He goes in. I'm like, wow, that was amazing. He comes out. I'm so proud of you. And he just says, he goes, I didn't want to let the fear win today. And I'm like, put me in the dad. Hall of Fame right now. Did you, I told him that a month ago.
I forgot about it. He remembered it. He brought it back. I'm writing a book. So that's how I felt. But when you see it in your kids, it's obviously just like a little tiny metaphor for like your own things, you know, in life. And now I'm like, am I letting the fear win here?
Or am I, you know, I think we could all use a little bit of that. Yeah, if you've been outcouraged by your child, it's a particularly shameful place. You're asking your kid for permission. It's like, is it okay if I can do this thing? That's funny. The single thing holding most 20-year-olds back is their hometown. Life is like jiu-jitsu. Position before submission.
Even a small seed can grow if put in the right soil. Right. It wouldn't be a podcast without a jihitsu reference, I feel. It wouldn't be an Austin podcast with that one at least. Yeah, the most impactful thing I did in my life was I moved to San Francisco. I wanted to be a successful entrepreneur. And I was pretty dumb about a lot of things, but at least part of my... kind of caveman way of thinking was,
go there, right? Like, if they go there, I go there, right? Like, if everybody's smart is going there, and that's where all the companies are built, maybe I should just go there and see what's up, what's in the water. And I think that moving is an extremely underrated thing, that we like to attribute most of the kind of successes in our life
to our personal attributes and decisions and all this stuff. And I was of our own making. And we, you know, we think where there's, beautiful flower and we forget about the soil. And the soil matters a lot. You know, there's a phrase in business, which is that when a great founder meets a bad market, only one of them retains their reputation. It's the bad market. And so you, you would always, even if you think you're a
great founder, you would always rather be in a great market. And same thing for life. Like, you want to be in great soil. It is far easier to succeed in great soil. And we feel an attachment to the familiar, where you grew up, your hometown, your friends, your family, your job, whatever it is, that's keeping you where you happen to grow up. Like if you, if you zoomed out and, you know, it was just like life just said, hey, choose the best place for you, probably wouldn't choose, you know, this random spot in Kansas, you know, Kansas. But you're already there and inertia is a very powerful force, you know, objects as much to say as much, you will stay where you are even if it wasn't the right thing for you. And so I think this is kind of my advice to
in the 20s, it's like, look, I don't know what you should do. But here's what I do know. Whatever you have an interest in, you should go move to the white hot center of wherever that is. Because you will be around other people who are very motivating to you. Proximity is power. Being near, very close, literally, like living in the same house, ideally, with other people who have similar dreams and passions as you is going to be, it's going to do more for you than any book, than any podcast than anything that you could do. It's the single greatest variable you can change in your life. And so I think there's probably a lot of people whose life would go very differently
if they just moved. I remember when I moved to San Francisco. It was a very shocking sort of realization. The first day I get there, I don't have like a place to go. So I just go to this coffee shop. I sit in the coffee shop all day because I'm just like with my suitcase.
And the table next to me was like cliche San Francisco thing. It was like founder, investor. Founders like peptides for dogs. And like, you know, 30 minutes later, it's like the next, you know, brain dead idea after, like terrible idea after a terrible idea and the investors sitting there listening and they, and I'm just listening.
I'm like, wow, this is what a bizarre place. And what I realized was in San Francisco, it's very normal to be weird about ideas, about business, about your career. That night, I went to an event and there's a guy who worked at JP Morgan Chase and he was at this like startup event. He was introducing himself shamefully. He was like, I work at JP Morgan, which normally anywhere else. It's a badge of prestige. And he was like, but I'm going to leave soon. He's like, he immediately had to hedge. He was like, I just, my cousin asked me to be there. But I'm, I got my own idea. I got my own startup. It's low status to be at JPMorgan in San Francisco. It's high status to be working on pet tides for dogs and to have a crazy idea that you're
chasing. So simply by moving to a place where status is given for chasing a startup idea and status is revoked for working at Big Corp was so opposite to anything else I'd ever experienced. Where before I was the weird cat for not having a job being unemployed and going to try to do it. Where was home for you? Well, I was in Australia before I went to San Francisco, but I moved around a lot. So Houston, Denver, Australia, those are the places I was at. And in all those places, normal was reversed. And so I think it's extremely underrated to move.
I mean, you moved. Did you experience that? Yeah, massively. Massively. I mean, the northeast of the UK is not exactly a hotbed for entrepreneurship. I did. I managed to make it so, at least in, heart, I guess, with some of the guys that I found and that I started my business with. But yeah,
I mean, it's a rarity. This is the kind of place that people are born, live, work and die within a 20 or, you know, 40 mile radius of. And that's not a knock on that. Like, you know, in many ways, you could say that that's a more elevated life without having to be travel across the Atlantic to build this cathedral of bullshit in an attempt to be like, oh, now I fit in or whatever. But I think a lot of people, and this is certainly my experience, I felt like there was a cord that was being played on a piano and there was one note that was out and I was the note that was out and all of the rest of them were in harmony like bing and there was one that's off and it's like why am i that note why is that me and okay well i'll i'll try am i a bad note yeah like maybe it's a me thing maybe i should
fit the chord and you go okay well maybe there's just other chords being played somewhere that the note that you get to be fits into perfectly or fits into more and i think a lot of people feel like huh am i Like, there's that Reddit subreddit, like, am I the asshole? It's like, am I the bad note? And it's not really about being a bad note. I think it's okay. Are you around people that resonate with you? Are these people that make you want to investigate yourself further that you feel like you can sit in silence with that you don't need to have a filter around that understand you, that encourage you to dig more deeply and become yourself, right?
Become more of you, as opposed to having to perform more of what you're not. And yeah, yeah, it's a strange situation. but George is the same, that both of us have moved from the UK to fucking Austin, Texas, and I think both of us feel significantly more at home here as cultural immigrants. Not even culture, there's straight up immigrants, right? The fact that we speak the same language doesn't mean that we're from the same culture. And, yeah, we have managed to find a degree of resonance over here. And I think a lot of people, a lot of young guys and girls probably feel that way.
I used to walk down the stairs the house I still have in Newcastle the bathroom was upstairs and the shower was upstairs like classic N Terrace British house like you know early 1900s 1800 sort of just after Victorian era thing
and I walked down the stairs and there was a little yard outside and I would open the door on my way out and it was my proto cold exposure things it would be fucking freezing and I'd walk outside after I've been in the shower and it'd be nice it would cool me off just a little bit
before I go into bed. But I'd look up at the night sky and I'd wish that I could just be anywhere. So I just want to be anywhere. And I had a good life. You know, I ran a business. I had this, one of the biggest events companies in all of the UK. I had business partners that I enjoyed working with. I was making a living that was incredibly successful. I was the first person to complete university from my entire family and did two degrees and all the rest of this stuff. But even with all of that, the fact that you're a note that's out, you can't really compensate that. Right. The There is not a escape velocity of success and wealth and accolade and stuff that will offset, huh, like I just don't feel like I fit.
And I've met this huge big bucket of people. And I've got a handful of friends and they're great. But like, you know, the needles in the haystack are not sufficient. The dosage is not enough in order for me to not still feel like my interactions with a lot of people, whether it's a barista or the taxi driver or the person that. I see at a night out or this guy that's the table next to me for dinner or whatever. Like it's more like a milieu. You're in a soup. And what is the, what is the flavor of the soup? And do you kind of fit in with that as opposed to can I find? Because everybody can go
and find a couple of weirdos that are in the city that they're in. But there's like a, there's a saturation dose of weirdos that you need that after a while is not you selecting people. It just is people. Right. It's just the founder that you're sat next to or even the investors that are coming along the J.P. Morgan Chase guy. Yeah. First of all, I got to give you slam poetry snaps for the piano chord analogy. I love that. I mean, that is so beautifully said. And I also think there's a seasonal component to it. Like, maybe there's a season of your life where that's the thing to pursue. And maybe there's going to be another season of your life where it actually is about a different set of values
and priorities. And if you feel you're in that season or you feel called, like answer the call. I think that's the summary of the whole thing, is have the courage, give you permission to go answer the call. And often that can require moving or moving can be a tremendous accelerant in answering that call. I've been having this pretty obsessed with this idea about obsession, actually. So discipline, motivation, and obsession. Discipline is I will make myself do the thing. Motivation is I want to do the thing. And obsession is I can't not do the thing.
So it's all about friction. Discipline is friction accepted. motivation is friction removed and obsession is friction inverted. So you're pulled toward the thing and you can't not do it. And I think a lot of the time people, if you don't listen to your obsessions, and there can be negative ones, right, politics, porn, your toxic X. But if you've got something even tangential to a positive obsession, maybe it's to do with fitness or maybe it's to do with learning to sing
or maybe it's this new band or whatever, like just something that's like a really, really intense passion, it's the freest discipline and motivation that you're ever going to get. And if you don't move with your obsessions, presume caveat they are positive. If you don't move with your positive obsessions, you're just giving up free fuel. It's the freest fuel that you're ever going to get. You know, when I started this show, all I wanted to do was learn podcasting. I wanted to listen to it. I was taking YouTube courses on my own.
I've still got the notes in here, 3,982 Apple notes. And somewhere down, like number 500 or some shit, is going to be me obsessively taking notes about how thumbnails work and YouTube and like click through rate and watch time. And I didn't know any of this and I'm going to learn it. I'm not going to have friends around me that are going to teach me. I'm not going to be able to ring Paddy Galloway or fucking, you know, whoever, whichever consultant we're friends with so that I can get, oh no, I'm going to go and find the course and then take the course on my own in my bedroom in Newcastle. I'm going to write all of this stuff down because I just wanted to. And now what looks like talent or
momentum or privilege or motivation or discipline, is much closer to the cooled remnant of what was once hot lava that was an obsession. Right. This thing was burning hot. And now it's just me. It just is me. The same thing with training. I wanted to gain weight because I'd been bullied in school and I wanted to be good luck in
and maybe girls would like me and wouldn't that be great? And I'm 18 and I'm in the center for sporting excellence at Newcastle University. I'm like, ah, like if I lift and I learn how to do this thing. And I'm like not going on nights out when I'm 19 to read bodybuilding.com forums. Maybe this fucking blueberry extract is actually the secret to my chest gains or whatever it might be. And I was obsessed. I was really, really obsessed with going to the gym and learning about training and muscle gaining and protein and stuff like that. And now it's just who I am.
Training is just a part of me. And it's even more a part of me because I have like the physical remnants of all of that time, which are like baked into my physiology. I guess you can see it in some ways with like, well, the subscribe account is kind of that. But it's a little bit less sort of, you know, grand and artistic in that way. But yeah, if you've got the obsession, if now is telling you go and do this thing, that won't be there forever. And if you let that obsession energy pass you by, you don't get to get it back. You don't get to put it on pause and go like, hey, just hang there for a second. I'm going to do the safe thing or the obvious thing or the whatever.
And that doesn't mean that you're supposed to just be blown around by the winds of the next obsession that comes careening into your consciousness. But at the same time, if you let all of them go, you will spend your life working against friction as opposed to. to with it and you will end up missing these things that are just you kind of very quickly lazy rivering your way through what is most compelling and most interesting to you at the time. Well, what I like about that is you're going to get your calories from something. So you're going to have fuel in the tank to do something. If you choose that the fuel is discipline and you make, you know, Gagins makes that his identity, right? Some people make that identity. They take great pride in that. So they know that way of when.
and they know that way of living and they know that fuel. And other people use inspiration and motivation. And they're, you know, they can be pulled towards things and they follow that. And then you have obsession. These are all just calories. And like, just like in food, you can get protein and you can have some calories from clean sources. You can have calories from some sources that are going to have some side effects and some long-term consequences. You can have some things that are sustainable and some things that are not sustainable.
And so you get to choose which fuels you're going to use, clean or dirty, right? Like, sustainable or unsustainable? Which ones are you going to do? I like the framing of obsession there. I always say this thing, like, inspiration is like an avocado. It's very perishable. It's going to go brown,
you know, within a few days. And so once you trust yourself enough to follow it, even if you don't know where it leads, that is a muscle and a like habit. It's a discipline. It's a way of living that you can just choose to do or not do. In the same way, some people sit up right, some people slouch.
and some people just say, look, I will follow something even if I don't know where it leads. The famous example of this is the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford. You know, this one? Well, you haven't seen this? Oh, my God.
That's shocking. Steve Jobs gives the commencement seat at Sanford, and his message is he tells the story of his life. And he goes, you know, I came to this small college, not Stanford. You know, he went to, I forgot where he went, some small college. And he goes, you know, he was an orphan boy, right?
He didn't grow up, like, in a very, like, type A high achiever thing, even though Steve Jobs achieved incredible things in his life. And his thing was he followed obsession. And so he goes, I got to college and I took a class in calligraphy that everybody else, you know, was like, what are you going to do with that? What's the point of that? He's like, the point is I'm interested in it. And so he goes and he takes it and he falls in love with calligraph and fonts and scripts. And he learns the difference between seraph and non-serif. And so he learns all this, the beauty that is type.
And guess what? When they build the Mac, he's the first, you know, Steve Jobs' gift is that he brought beauty and art into technology in a way that nobody else had really done before. He built beautiful, simple products. And so when the Mac launches, they were the only ones who took the care to launch with different fonts that you could choose that would look beautiful when you typed, that would change the way people felt when they did this. And it made the Macintosh more successful because they had that.
And he goes, you can't connect the dots looking forward. Now I can say it's because I took that class and I learned all that things. And then when I started Apple, I knew that. And I knew the guy and I hired the guy. I couldn't have known that then. So you cannot connect the dots in life looking forwards, only backwards. Only in retrospect does it make sense how it all connected. So then if that's true, what do you do?
you make every dot as bold as you can so that it's going to be easy to see it easy to connect to. You have a real vivid dot there that might connect in some future way. How do you get a vivid dot is when you do the things that are like your genuine interest, your genuine obsession, and you do them like fullheartedly despite not knowing if and when this might ever lead to anything. And I think that's a way of living that is hard for highly analytical people because we like windows, not doors. We like to see through the other side and know what's there.
Certainty. I remember being at dinner with a friend. We had this guy who was the youngest venture capitalist in San Francisco. And my friend who's kind of like my mentor was at dinner with us. And he goes, you know the problem with you? He's telling the young guy. He's like, he goes, you only want to open windows, never doors. And the guy's like, what?
He goes, like, everything you say is only I'll do this because I know it'll lead to this. Well, like, a lot of life is doors. You don't know what's on the other side. You just got to go knock. sometimes nobody answers. Sometimes it opens up. Sometimes it's not what you want on the other side. But you got to go do that enough times to create enough surface area of luck and enough things to happen where fortune will fall your way.
And you're so worried about these. You're so focused on window opportunities that you are shortchanging your own success in life. And I was like, wow. And so I started to notice that. Like, where am I really gravitating towards windows? And like, what's a door that I might be able to go knock on or open? knowing that maybe there's nothing, maybe there's the boogeyman on the other side. I'm not sure. But if I do it enough, if I do it enough, this will fall my way.
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And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally, so don't be scared by the currency amount. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the pod six by going to the link in the description below are heading to 8Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code Modern Wisdom a checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T-Sleep.com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom, a checkout. What's the story of I and John? This is a story I got obsessed. Okay, so here's the interesting way that this came into my life. I recently sold a company, and as one does, when you achieve what you want in life, you get lost, and you don't know what to do. And so, congratulations. I had all the money I'll ever need for me
my kids and their kids or whatever. And now, what do I do? Who am I, if not the guy who's chasing that? You know, like the dog who was chasing the car and then I caught the car and I have no idea why I was barking at this car the whole time. So I hired this guy who has this reputation for being like this, sort of like, this epic, like life coach is the wrong way to say it. He, if you ask him, he's like, I just read people's souls. I know I can understand people's gifts and what they're called to do and then I help them see that for themselves. So I had heard about this guy five years ago, but it wasn't the right time. And when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
So somehow he shows up on my feed with a little TikTok clip with 10 views, but he says something very profound in that. I said, I think I need to look this guy up. So I go pay this guy some money and I say, tell me, what should I do with my life now? And he's very much, he's the first person I've ever met like this. That's like Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid. So, you know, he's got me doing wax on, wax off. And I'm like, hey, I wanted to learn karate.
And he's like, you are learning karate. by, and I'm like, am I? How does this work? He's like, it'll all make sense later. So I show up to this session. His name is Jack Skeen, Dr. Jack Skeen. And he goes, I want to tell you a story. Can I tell you a story?
I guess that's what I'm paying you for. These calls ain't cheap. Go ahead. What are we doing? And so he says, I'm going to tell you the story of Iron John. Have you heard this story? I said, no. He goes, it's a fable, like a old fable.
And fables are great because it's wisdom that's just packaged in a beautiful, simple story that can survive like a mushroom. It can survive like thousands. of years in a way that normal advice doesn't. So he goes, here's the story of Iron John. There was a kingdom. Near the kingdom was this, like, giant forest. And so one day, this dog goes into, this guy's dog runs into the forest, chases a deer, never comes back.
Guy's like, oh, I got to go find my dog. So the guy goes into the forest to get his dog. Guy doesn't come back. His buddies are like, what happened to Steve? So four friends go out. Let's go find Steve. They don't come back. All right. So now people start to suspect something's up. Something's mysterious, powerful is in this forest. Why isn't anyone coming back? So the king says, he sends his top knights battalion. We'll go figure this out. They don't come back. At this point, people just stop going on in the forest. And so for many years, nobody goes in the forest. They don't know what's going on there. They know there's something powerful, but they don't know what it is.
Now one day there's a teenager and as teenagers are, you know, full of piss and vinegar and they're bored and they're looking for something to do, looking to cause a little bit of trouble. He asked the king, he says, is there anything to do around here? And he goes, well, you could go figure out what's going on in that forest. Nobody's been in there for 10 years. And there's a dog and Steve and four of his friends. Yeah, we'd love to hear what happened to the dog, at least. And so he goes, he brings his dog and he walks in the forest and he's walking through the tree. trees and he sees this kind of like swamp like this little pond and as he's walking by this arm reaches out grabs the dog takes the dog dog dog's gone and the boy says to himself this must be the place interesting comment by this boy's this must be the place so he goes back and he tells his buddies he says hey um we got to figure out what's going on this pond they grab some buckets like we're going to bail the whole all the water out we will get to the bottom of this so they go bail it out takes forever and when they get there at the bottom of the pond,
they see a wild man. He's covered head to toe and hair, red hair, actually. So they call him Iron John. It looks like he's rusted. It's a wild, strong man at the bottom of the pond. And the author, Robert Bly, is a guy who has retold the story many times. And this guy, Robert, spent his whole life
basically working with men all around the world. Men's groups, men's work. He really pioneered that movement in the past. And he says, He says Iron John is in the story. Iron John represents wild masculine energy. And Iron John is like the manifestation of the wild man. And he says, in every man is the wild man.
But most of us have never met him. We've never seen him. He's in the bottom of the palm. So they lock up Iron John. They bring him back to the palace. Tell the king, we found him, we got him. He's locked in the cage. And so everybody moved.
moves on. Iron John's, we're all safe now. The kingdom can be happy. Now, the king is getting older and he's got a little boy, son. This boy is going to become the king someday. And as Jack says, he goes, this boy, he's a good old boy. He's a good boy. He's a good boy. He's a good boy. You know, they say please and thank you. They dress up properly for court. He listens to his mommy and daddy. And, you know, he does everything that a good boy does. He listens. And one day, the good boy is going to become the king. If he does everything right, if he pleases him, everybody, he gets to be the king. And the boy was given this ball.
And the story, the ball, this golden ball that the boy has represents like the boy's vitality. He's like kind of the golden ball that, let's say all of us have something that's like, that's our life energy, our vitality. So he's got this golden ball. It's his favorite toy. Dad gave it to him. One day he's playing with the ball. Ball slips out of his hand, rolls into Iron John's cage.
Boy says, uh, Mr. John, can I have the ball back? Iron John laughs and says, I'll give you the ball back, but you got to let me out. He says, I can't do that. You know that. He says, all right, no ball. Next day, boy comes back and he's starting to get worried. Like, if I really lost this golden ball, my parents are going to be pissed. And he's so used to being a good boy, he doesn't want to get in trouble.
So he says, please, Iron John, give me the ball back. Iron John says, I told you, let me out of the cage. He says, look, even if I wanted to let you out of the cage, I don't know how. I don't have the key. I couldn't do it if I wanted to. And he says, the key to the cage is under your mother's pillow. kind of Freudian. And, you know, in the story, Robert Bly talks about how for every good boy, the key to the
wild man, the key to the cage is where the mother rests her head at night, where she sleeps and has her dreams and hopes and dreams for the boy. And mothers don't dream of their young boy becoming a pirate or, you know, a wild man. They want him to become something safe, something proper. And so he's got to go steal the key, steals the key, lets Iron John out. Iron John is ready to go back to the forest. gives him the ball, the boy realizes what he's done, this trade that he's made. And he's like, they're going to kill me when they find out I let this powerful wild man back out on the loose.
He's really worried. And Iron John says, I'm not getting back in the cage. But he goes, you know, even though I was in the cage, it's you who's trapped. So why don't you come with me? The boy says, what are you talking about? I was trapped. He goes, you were trapped. He goes, I live in a palace.
and Iron John says, you may live in a palace, but I know riches which far greater than you've ever seen. Come with me. Put some on his shoulders and he goes back out in the forest. Now this is chapter one of the Iron John story. So he tells me this story. I'm like, what's chapter two? What does it all mean?
And he goes, let's stay on chapter one for a second. And he taught me a very profound lesson about the world. So he goes, in life, there's three types of men. There's good boys. is wild men and great kings. We all know what a good boy is. A good boy is a pleaser. A good boy does what's expected of them.
A good boy does what they feel is going to please other people. So whether it's their wife that they think their job is to bend over backwards and please their wife or their parents or society or they dress a certain way. And they're told like, you know, life is go to school, get good grades, get a good job, get a good job. Then you're going to meet a good girl, meet a good girl, go buy a house, have two children, get the fence, get a country club. and by God, haven't we done it? And like nowhere along the way did the good boy ever really ask, like, is this what my soul wanted to do in life?
Is this what I wanted to do? Or is this just what I thought I was supposed to do in life? And they lived their whole life that way. And even further, it comes out in weird ways. Because even though they're not aware of the wild man, he is in there. And so then they start doing all kinds of behaviors,
self-sabotage and sort of odd behaviors. And they're dissatisfied, even though they have everything they were supposed to have. Why are they so dissatisfied? Life is good, right? And the dissatisfaction comes because they've never but the wild man out of the cage. So there's the wild man. Wild man, what most people think is the opposite of a good boy is a bad man.
No, it's a wild man. A wild man is a free man. And the wild man is ferocious. He goes for what he wants. He's courageous. He's disciplined. He has principles. He serves his needs.
But he only serves his needs. And then you have great kings, which is what we all really want to be in life. I think we would all want to be great. And we all want to be great men. I think if you ask somebody, we'd rather be a great man or not, they'll choose it. But how many great men do you really know? Like, if I ask you, how many truly great men do you know?
Not many. And you have a world-class network. You invite world-class people. You talk to them three days a week or whatever, right? And it's not many for you. Imagine just a normal person in life. How many great men they know? So what he says is that a good boy never becomes a great king.
a wild man can become a great king if he starts to care about things beyond himself. So this is part of the lesson. Now, I asked him, I said, look, I love the fable. But like, how do I apply? I was like, I don't think I'm a good boy. I think I am more of a wild man, but I am not a great king. I think I'm a wild man right now. And he goes, well, I was like, can you make it?
Do you feel you're a great king? Like, what are you trying to say here? He tells me this great story. And I hope he doesn't mind if I share this, but he tells me this great story. goes, I remember the first day I encountered the wild man. So, all right, tell me. He goes, I was 15 years old and I liked this girl at school. And I mustered up the courage to ask her out on a date. So I want to take this girl out. Only problem is I don't have a car. And so he's like, I got to go ask my older brother. Let's call him Tommy in this example. I'm going to go ask Tommy, hey, we drive us to
dinner in a movie. And he goes, now Tommy was always, he's a big brother. He's always messing with me, punk in me. He doesn't really take me seriously. But I thought surely, surely he knows how important this is. He's not going to screw with me on this one. So Tommy says, yeah, I'll take you. He's smirking. So he starts to get a little worried. He goes on the date. They drive to dinner. At dinner, he pays for the dinner. He's not trying to be a man. He's not trying to be a boy anymore. And so he pays for the dinner. Waitress brings back to change. But, you know, the way Tommy, he's sitting closer to the waitress. He's older. She just gives him the change. And he puts it in his pocket. Kind of bothers him, but he doesn't say anything.
he goes out to the movie after the movie they drop her off at the house, he walks her to the front step, gives her the peck, it's been an amazing day, everything he wanted. He's walking back to the car, and now Tommy does what big brothers do.
He starts to fuck with him. And so he's walking back to the car. He just moves the car up five feet. He wants him to have to chase the car in front of the girl and like punk him. So he keeps doing it. But he doesn't, he refuses to chase.
And so he instead, the guy's driving the car, he reaches out his hand, and the antenna comes in a hand, he just rips it off. It just breaks off. Brother stops the car. He's like, what the hell? I was just messing. It was a joke.
What are you doing? You've messed up my car. So he gets in the car and he goes, what are you doing? And he goes, give me the change. What change? The change from dinner. He goes, the change from dinner. What are you talking about the change?
Like, you just broke my car. That change pays for the, for what you just did in my car. He goes, give me the change. He goes, I would have never done this. I would have never acted like this. This was totally unfamiliar. And I didn't even decide to. It just happened.
The wild man showed that he was there. And he goes, he took the, the brother takes the change, throws it into the street. He said, go get your change if you want it. He says, no, you go pick it up. Bring it back. Give it to me. The brother's like, I don't know who you think you are. What has happened to my brother?
But this is, and so they drive home, leave the change in the street. Don't care. Drive home. Don't talk the whole way. 15 minutes. They get home. They're both still pissed. They start wrestling.
They start fighting. Big brothers beat him up a little bit, but he's punching him back in the face. And he's getting beat up. But he's like, unlike most times when I was getting beat up and, you know, eventually I call for mercy and I kind of capitulate and mom has to save me. Tommy realized that I'm not capitulating. I'm not winning, but I'm not going to stop this fight. He's going to kill me if he wants this to end.
He realized it. He's like, he realized it and I realized it. I don't know why something changed in me that day. And so he described, he goes, that was the first time I ever met the wild man. He goes, but I didn't let him out for good until 15 years later. So he's telling me this story. And it honestly has inspired me. It's got me thinking a lot about this.
I think every guy should start to look at areas in your life where you're being the good boy. Areas in your life where you've seen the wild man and notice him. Give it energy. Don't leave Iron John in the cage. And then further, obviously the last step is ask yourself, how do you become a great king? How do you use the energy of the wild man to become a great king? How do you do that? You start to care about things bigger than yourself.
So another model that this guy has is this idea of your circle. So he says, like, you know, when you're born, you're a baby, you only care about yourself. Like, you're literally yourself and you're just needs. You need milk, you need a diaper, you need a nap. That's all you need when you're a baby. And you cry if you don't have it. And over time, you start to care about, you know, more things in life. Maybe you start to care about your appearance.
Maybe you start to care about your grades. You start to care about more things. And every time you care about something, you have to grow to meet that need that you now have. So when you said, I got bullied and I decided, I don't want to be that guy anymore, I want to become, I want to build myself.
You had to become more because you now cared about something more than you cared about your comfort, more than you cared about your safety, your familiarity. So when that scale tips and you care about it more than you care about your comfort, you have to change, it forces you to change. You become more. Letting out the Wild Man is one,
great way to do it because it carries with a tremendous power and energy and ferocity. You know, he told me another story where he's like, the ending of, forget the story, the ending was, I chewed off my leg to save my life. He sacrificed something. And he goes, and now I was a three-legged wolf. And I'll forever be a three-legged wolf because I lost something by doing that. But I'm a free wolf and I'm a fierce wolf now. And, you know, you hear these things, you start to realize there are moments in life,
these little crucible moments where you can like let iron John out of the cage. And you won't be the same again. It's a one-way street. You will become more because of this. And so how do you go from Wild Man to Great King is when you realize that being a king is about more than serving your needs. It's about having a kingdom.
You want people of your kingdom to be happy and thriving, whether that's a family, it's your friends, it's your neighbor, it's strangers on the internet, it's people in your community, it's people who have this rare disease that you've decided to serve. You've decided to apply your fierce wild energy to something that is worth more to you in terms of meaning
than your comfort and your lifestyle and your whatever. And that's the message I needed to hear because I got a beautiful lifestyle. And he said it. He was like, dude, you got three kids. I talk to your wife. You have a happy marriage. You're healthy.
You got all the money you need. You got hobbies. You got a podcast. You're famous. What do you want? We're still talking. Isn't that interesting? Why are we still talking?
Because you know there's more. There's something more. and there's something more that's beyond you. In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. Aren't you younger than me? Yeah, but my dad got a DUI.
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There's a video. It should be about maybe three minutes long, two minutes long. Here it is. Wow. Dude, the speed? That was incredible. My relationship with Charlie grew from phone calls. I mean, he first called me up.
He goes, he used to message after message him answer from about three years ago. He's left message, and he's like, God, fucking Hill, Thomas, it's easy to get old a fucking
fucking sand across in you are at the new son. He goes, oh, well, you know, everybody wants you. I'll call again
and he calls it like, boo-d-d- message 18. And eventually, he goes, I pick up the phone at 6 o'clock,
he goes, oh, I got you? I fucking got you, and I. I said, Charlie, he goes, hello,
I'm like, hey you're doing. I'm good, he goes, what's going on? And I thought, um, and I had to split up
around the bush and just gonna fucking turn him straight because, you know, break the ice. I'm gonna be of a bad way at them. He goes, oh yeah, what's your mind? I go, yeah, I'm not, I'm just not, I'm just not, I'm not comfortable, you know, I'm saying goodbye to somebody that, you know, that I really love and I'm not, I'm not happy,
I'm not in a good space, and, you know, I can't be with a woman and I can't be without one and I realize that, you know, I probably have a relationship with my mother, you know, that is in, you know, and you know, you know, infiltrated all my relationships with women. I always find myself stuck in a triangle that I'm trying to break this pattern and it's really painful.
It's like, therapy 101, Charlie Bronson, the first time I ever spoke to. I found myself repeating the same pattern, expecting a different outcome, insanity, you know, and I just need releasing from this, you know, like, I got to release myself, I'm going to do the work on it. I don't know how to, but, you know, he goes, right, right, he goes, Tom, but yeah, because did you, do you remember the fly? When Oxford, he goes, yeah, the floods, do you remember the floods? So yeah, he goes, do you remember that boy, he got his foot stuck in the grate and the river kept rising?
And he kept rising and he kept rising and eventually they tried to get him out but he drowned. Yeah, it was, well that wouldn't have happened to me, right? Because do you know why? I went, yeah, yeah, sure, because I'd have said, cut it off, nah. Tom, what I'm trying to say this, right? What I'm trying to say this, son, is sometimes, yeah, you've got to cut a little piece of yourself off,
yeah, no matter how much it hurts in order to grow, yeah, in order to move on. Do you know what I mean? What are you having for your tea? When I'm having a stake, because, oh, you can't, because I fucking have a state, man.
What's going on outside your weekend? I was like, fucking out. This guy's dope. Not the sickest clip. 15-year-old clip of Tom Hardy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that idea of I need to sacrifice a little bit of myself in order to be able to... Does that resonate for you? I don't know if I'm just at a time in my life. No, my own John story got me thinking in a way that most stories don't have me thinking. Yeah, I think as guys get a little bit older, this, and especially as you touch
some bits of success because there's always the promise of success is the fears you have the insufficiencies you have the need for validation all of that will be sated if only you build the castle big enough if only the mountain that you climb is high enough and I think for a lot of people they get there and they go okay I kind of had an inclination that this probably wasn't going to fix my I hope that it might do it's a shame that it hasn't or that it's achieved something but there's this much bigger challenge that I'm facing. And now there's new challenges, which is when that fuel source
and that destination, the fuel source has been spent, destinations has been reached, where the fuck do I go now and how do I get there? So yeah, this existential, like the founder's existential crisis. I mean, I'm pretty sure Andrew Wilkinson told me about,
he's part of some men's group, and it's exclusively like nine and ten figure founder exit, people who are in the most, you know, salubrious version of PTSD that you can imagine, you know? That's why I met Jack, through Andrew. Right. Yeah, entrepreneur PTSD. In fact, this may be part of the same sort of a thing. And he's like, why is it that so many people when they achieve everything that they want,
they encounter more challenges than beforehand? Well, it's because they are now cast adrift and they're sort of directionless and rudderless. don't know why to go. And they start to ask themselves questions about, okay, well, what was the reason for me getting there in the first place? Like, what was the fuel that got me there? Right. And what did I sacrifice? What parts of myself did I sacrifice? And now, what calluses have been built up psychically in me? What are the coping mechanisms and the paths of least resistance and the ways that I've avoided things that I needed to feel and the ways that I felt things that I shouldn't have done? Right. All of these patterns that I have. And,
Now, if I want to not be at the mercy of how I've got here with no longer a destination for me to get to, I need to either get rid of the calluses and the patterns and the fears and the insufficiencies, or I can just run it back and get gold medalist syndrome. And think, oh, that was it. What it really is is I need to do it twice. Because the ones could have just been luck. And now what it, I need to prove, because if I do it again, if I do it the set. You know, two, two, because two can still kind of be so, I'm pretty sure that. Elon's done it four. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, it is a trillion dollar. And then you're like, okay, do you do? I was at dinner in Austin with one of the founders of Airbnb and he was doing a new company. And I was like, why do, why do anything? Why do this? Like, why go back to the grind? And people give many answers.
But he said very honestly, he was like, you know, part of me wants to prove, you know, that it wasn't like, I didn't get lucky. And I was like, prove to who? Do you think you got lucky? I've heard the story. Just, I mean, very little luck. The walls you guys bulldozed through to make that thing, that should have died a hundred times. And he's like, I was like, you know,
nobody is saying that we think you got lucky. You know, so there's like that, but everybody can fall into these, the smartest people the world will fall into these, you know, psychological, you know, sort of traps that we set for ourselves. Yep. One of my favorite ideas that's universal for everybody is what serves you most will also be what screws you if you're not careful. The dose makes the poison. So like Andrew, myself, one thing we're really good at is telling stories. It could be persuasive. Well, guess what? We're going to weaken. That means I can make myself believe anything. I am patient zero for all of my persuasion.
Sciopping myself. Yeah, of course. That's my superpower. So it's also going to be the thing that I could totally screw myself with. And it's useful to be aware of that, right? Like to understand that the dose makes the poison. And the thing that's going to serve me is what's going to screw me if I'm not careful. And I have to know how to use that because it's such a powerful tool. It's like when you get a power tool, you've got to put your goggles on and make sure you don't drill your foot. Yeah. You can break concrete, but you can also break your foot.
A good analogy is that most swords are double-edged. And the same one that you use to cut other stuff is the one that nicks you on the back swing. Like, okay, well, it doesn't mean that you throw the sword away. it means that you just learn how to wield it properly. Right. And yeah. That's part of the skill. Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can have people, this is what makes, I think, you a particularly impressive person, which is, at least now, this stage of life that I'm in, I'm significantly less impressed by success. I'm much more impressed by success that's done with balance and success that's done with fun, because success is hard. I don't mean to diminish people that have achieved lots of things. But it's nowhere near as difficult as,
doing it and having a good time, doing it and being a good person, doing it and feeling your feelings, doing it, and being a part of a community and helping your family and not just using the people around you, being transactional in your sociality, all of that stuff. Like that, just the outcome thing is kind of, it's still impressive, but it's pretty like low stakes for me. And it's, it's low skill. If you want to achieve some degree of success, there is a formula for you to get there. If you want to achieve some degree of success and do it whilst being connected
to everything else in life, that's much closer to art than it is to science. Right. You want to build a good business? Okay, Blue Ocean, good margin, founder, don't stop. You know, like, stay agile. Okay, but like show me the formula for how you do that and maintain a good marriage.
Show me the formula for how you do that and don't deny yourself, of you. Show me the formula for that about how you alchemize your pain from the past as opposed to turning it into something that is a chip on your shoulder that now becomes your identity. Bingo bingo, bingo, all of this stuff. And it is, this is kind, I've never even thought about this before, but, you know, we talk about the superficiality or the, the vacancy of achieving stuff. Sometimes it's called the arrival fallacy. And we talk about that in our own experience, but we never really talk about it when we meet other people who've done it.
are you like oh well maybe this person's got it figured out and much of the time you meet this person and you're like oh i was following him i thought he was i thought he had the fucking answer and he's like just as lost as me right or even more so or he's lost and he doesn't know it he's more delusional right or whatever it might be and um you know that's not to say that people can't have success and and manage to get all of the things right i've met lots of people that have but again on average, the success is the precursor to doing the work. So if you've managed to find someone who's arrived at success whilst having done the work at the same time, they've like contiguously had two full-time jobs. And that is significantly rare. Well, I would just say you've defined what
winning is for you. What you just defined, which is like, winning is not just success in one area, but it's this sort of science of success meets the art of fulfillment and doing both and being a good dude and being a good friend, being a good dad, and being a good husband, while still doing cool shit with your friends and having some ambition, but not letting it get the best of you, that's winning. I know that formula because I share that same blueprint. Now, not everybody has that. One man's heaven is another man's hell. I look at Elon's life and I'm like, I'm so glad you exist. And I'm so glad I'm not you. And I'm so glad I'm not you. Bingo. I would hate it. And he looks at me and he says, fuck. Come on. I would, yeah, I just go ahead and
myself if I was you. You know, I would just have to rebuild myself into me. Yep. And so we, you know, it's good to understand. Some people really do have that psycho, Jake. Like, that's where, that's where they're happy. And we need them. And we need them. And we love them. We love to watch them. And like, that's why I told you. I was like, there's a greatness bubble. Because not only do we need them, but they're so attractive to listen to, to watch, to popularize. They're so interesting that we create movies about them and books about them and shows about them and all the stuff, podcasts about them, because it's fantastic. I love listening to David Gagins, talk about how he runs up the 100-mile mountain with his shins breaking off like, you know,
Kit Kat bars along the way. I love it. I want to be David Gagins for one hour a day when I'm working out. And then I don't want to ever think about David Gagins again, right? That's David Gaggagins for me. And I take a lot of inspiration. But at the same time, I cannot let the admiration become my destination with him. Because I would hate to be that, right? And I know that with a lot of rich guys, right? Like, I know a lot of rich guys. You might have a billion dollars. You're bankrupt, dude. You wake up stressed every single day. You treat people poorly. You don't know your kids. Your kids don't even like you. So to me, in my definition of success, that would be bankrupt. I know a lot of bankrupt billionaires. That's crazy. You know, I know a lot. There's just a lot of
fat doctors running around. So, you know, there's just a lot of like, there's a lot of that. So you've got to be, I would say, independent minded about what is winning to me. Find examples. Some people are a partial example. You take a piece of what they do and you say, that'll serve me in this area of my life, but not in others. And you find some people who seem to have like more of that puzzle together. No one's perfect, but more of the puzzle together. And for me, making that more of my North Star was very, very helpful in life. Yeah, you've got this line that's similar. Anything extreme is not worth doing. Bodybuilding, mega celebrities, billionaires, Olympians. The final 10% costs more than the first 90%. The internet has created a greatness bubble.
extremism is highly visible but highly undesirable. We confuse an extraordinary result with an extraordinary life. Did I say that? That sounds good. I mean, that's how I feel. And it's hard because I'm like you. I do podcasts where I interview those people. I watch podcasts where I listen to those people and it is intoxicating when you hear it. And you start to think, like, I could do that.
If I just lock in, if I just sleep under the desk, it's like, do I really want to sleep under the desk? or can I surrender? So I love Kevin Kelly, who's a very interesting guy. He started Wired Magazine and, you know, does all these projects like the Long Now project where they build a 10,000 year clock
in a mountain as an ode to long-term thinking, like a really cool art project with Bezos and he edited the whole Earth catalog and he did all these really interesting things in his life and somebody asked him. My friend David Perrell asked him a question. He goes, what was the cost of being Kevin Kelly? He said, that's a great question.
He goes, The cost was greatness. And I thought when he said it, he was going to say, like, you know, I just had to, I had to work hard, I'd have to be obsessed. I thought that's what he was trying to say, like, normal greatness porn. And instead, he goes, I was happiest being like a gadfly, like just floating from thing to thing and spending a stint there. But I didn't build the biggest magazine empire. And I didn't build the best this. And I didn't become the richest guy or the most famous guy.
But I wrote a book that I thought was good. And I did this. And I did that. It goes, I had to surrender to greatness. I had to surrender that, that idea of me, that version of me that could maybe have existed, I surrendered that because I didn't want the price that comes with it. The final 10%. The final 10%.
And our brains are pretty bad at nonlinear. Like there's all these stories about like, oh, you know, the guy who was negotiating with the king, he's like, I'll take a grain of rice, but double it every day. And the king's like, that's it. Sure. And then like within 30 days, he's got like, he owns all the gold in the empire, right? because we don't understand compounding or exponentials or nonlinear progress. We think you do a little, you get a little, you do a little more, you get a little more.
Do a little more, you get a little more. If you just do a lot, you finally get a lot. That's not really how anything works. Like the way progress works is this weird curve where when you start, you get this initial burst. So you do a little, you actually kind of get a lot of gains right away. You get all of the beginner's gains that come with starting a thing. Then you're going to plateau for a while and more work doesn't. It was very incremental.
And you can get to this 80%, 85, 90% mark on things without massive sacrifice. But getting that last 10% and the last 1% to go be Michael Phelps and go be, you know, all the greats, you do what Michael Phelps did and you don't miss a day of swimming for whatever. Yeah, of course. Because you're in order to get to that level, you are competing with people who are prepared to pay that price. Exactly. It is selected down to the other. There will be someone else who would, I mean, I think it's 25% of Olympians say that they would
they would happily die, or not happily, but they would trade dying in four years' time for a gold medal. One quarter of them would say, I'll happily be dead four years after the Olympics if I get to win it. Right. And, okay, are you prepared to be that person? Right. And we-
How shiny is that medal for you, you know? For some people, it's the ring. It's okay. It's okay for you to say yes, but it's also okay for you to say no. And we don't have a very good culture of... Well, you're not going to get a movie. You're not going to get a book. You're not going to get an invite to most podcasts. You're not going to get those. It's not going to feel like glory.
It's not going to feel like glory. We don't have a good culture for people. Like in meritocracy, especially a capitalist one like today, that glorifies people who have done extreme things and got to the top of their craft, it is radically revolutionary to say I'm okay. Right. To say I'm satisfied. Like that is the most revolutionary thing you can do.
And this is, I think, getting again at what I was talking about, like, Success on its own, greatness on its own is really admirable, but it comes with a side dish that almost everybody doesn't want. And the only way they get to find out is by going and achieving it. I don't know if you, what is that about, Catch 22 or is that that great scene or the guys in the, he gets invited to this like great Gatsby party type of thing. And the guy who, the friend who brought him is like, you know, this man, the guy who owns this place, he's the wealthiest guy here.
He has this. He has this. has this and the main character goes well I have one thing he'll never have he goes what's that enough and um you're not you know there's not a lot of examples of that out there and in fact like when I woke up today I was like I'm excited to come on this podcast as I like talking to you and I'm also like but it's also different I think me three years ago would have been like oh it's great I'm I come on this podcast we're going to have a good time and it's going to be this awesome like new audience boost blah, blah, blah, like, at this point, like I've deleted all the social media off my phone.
I don't even check the shit anymore, right? So it's like, why am I still excited to come, right? Because I'm not looking for any gain. It's like, well, I still like the conversation. That's always fun. I like having a good conversation about things that matter or interesting ideas. I like the trade of ideas. But the second thing was like, kind of like the great king mindset of like,
is there anything I could do that's going to serve anyone else besides myself today? So I'm going to have a great conversation either way. I'm going to come in here. We're going to trick my new tonic. I'm going to have a great conversation. But does anybody else? get any benefit. If I just come here and I just tell you the same shit, which is like, you got to really want it and you just got to grind and you got to be obsessed and you got
to do whatever. If I just said that, I feel like I would have served nobody because that's, you know, that's in full supply everywhere. Over supply. Over supply. But I think sharing examples of stories or ideas or pushing people to think about other questions, I think it can actually serve people pretty well. I'll give you a story from last night. So there's an idea about like greatness, which is a common. When we think about greatness, we usually think about great accomplishments. Somebody who broke this world record, made this much money, whatever, all the, ran this race, whatever it is.
Accomplishing. So that, in my mind, that was the definition. Greatness is achieving something great. And then I realized that's quite a limited way of thinking of things. What about being great? Hmm. What's being great? You know, when I walked in, how I greeted bar shop, like, I could be great.
for 30 seconds right there, because I could be in my head, focus on this. Hey, good to see you, bye. Or I could ask him about his, like, I could just be great for a moment. I can compliment him on what he's wearing because I know he probably picked that shirt out today. I wanted to feel good. There's everyday moments to be great in your life. And I think if people focus far more about being great, showing up in a great way to whatever the daily situation is versus accomplishing a great thing, I think people, it would, we wouldn't recognize what the world looks like. So, for example, last night, I told you we're on our boys trip. That's why I'm in Austin.
And we're all sharing kind of like stuff that's going on in our lives. And somebody goes, Ramon, you got to tell him about the commencement speech. And he's like, ah, he's a humble guy, doesn't want to say. I was like, what's the story? I want to hear it. And I thought maybe he gave some really insightful, like, point-hand. Steve Jobsy. Steve Jobsy, you know, go change the world speech.
And actually what he did was the following. This is kind of amazing. So Ramon is a single dad. he's raised his son since he was a baby, which already I'm like, you're a great king. Props. Now, his son played,
to get his son to be kind of more social and athletic, he encouraged him to do sports. And someone wanted to play football. Now, Ramon's from, like, the Netherlands, and he doesn't know anything about American football. They didn't have a coach for the, they didn't have a team, so he starts a team, becomes the coach,
orders 16 books about American football, starts learning, like, anything, about this. He shows up every day and he coaches these boys. And his son makes friends. His son transforms his body as he's becoming a teenager. And then, you know, son decides like, I'm not playing football anymore.
Or I forgot what happened. He maybe went to high school and this was eighth grade. But the team wasn't going to have a coach. And so he was like, he knew if he just stops because his son got his needs met, like the team kind of falls apart. But there's other boys that he was coaching. So he decides, I know I have a business and I have I'm a single dad, but I'm just going to now coach
these other eighth graders for fun. So he starts coaching these other eighth graders. And again, because he doesn't know anything about American football, he changes the emphasis of like, well, I'm not going to be great at X's and O's, but I can get you boys to like come out of your shell and like learn what it means to like work hard and all this good stuff. So he teaches good lessons. So he's getting messages from the parents that are like, you know, I don't know what's going on in those practices, but like my boy is different. Like he has blossomed into the child that like, we always wished he would be. I don't know what you did, but I just have to say thank you. And so this goes where the school then asks who, they ask the students, like, hey, we're taking recommendations for who should give the commencement speech.
And the boys are like, it should be Ramon. And he's like, no, no, I don't want to. He's not the type. But they're like, you got picked. You got to do it. So he's like, again, buy 16 books on commencementments. He just starts to try to learn. He's like, all right, seems like you're supposed to say some like thing.
But that's not really me. I'm not the type to go pontificate. and tell these boys to like whatever. Also, they're eighth graders. They're not even going to listen. Who am I doing this for myself? And I think almost every commencement speech is for themselves. Like it's not really for the students.
So he realizes, he's like, you know, there was this one kid who really came out of his shell. He used to be the most shy kid. And then he's like, the last like kind of like few practices, he would like always be like dancing. And like he was like having fun in a way that was totally different. So he has an idea. He goes, he gets on stage.
And instead of doing his speech, he invites that kid on. stage and he tells the story. He said, you know, when I met this boy, he was very different. He's come out of a show. I'm so proud of him. And, you know, as a tribute to him and he plays Gangam Style, the song that the kid always loved, kid puts on the glasses, does a dance. The friends come up with him, do it together. And they're like, they will never forget this moment that he created for these group of kids. That's being great. As being great at whatever scale you want to be great. That's being great. And so I've taken a lot of inspiration about
this idea moment to moment, day to day, situation to situation, how do I just be great? And if you do that enough, guess what? You're fucking great. You know, like, what's, what else? What else could be the result of consistently just trying to be great?
Not accomplish something that no one cares about and that won't make you happy. You know what I mean? And I've done enough of that. I've spent enough of my life trying to get ahead to know that that ain't it. It ain't the only thing. You know, that's not the only way.
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You've heard about like Gottman, Dr. Gottman? You'll probably explain it better than I do. Maybe give the contest a Goblin. I think this is very interesting. I only recently learned about this. So the Gottman's are a couple who are basically kind of gold standard for relationship studies. And they brought lots of married couples at varying states of love and disrepair into the lab. and then they've done assessments around them.
And they've come up with a variety of different theories. There's one other couple that has done something similar. But when it comes to sort of modern marriage relational dynamics, they're kind of the goats. And he had this like parlor trick where he could watch a couple for some short amount of time. What was it like a minute or five minutes or something like that and predict with 90% accuracy if the couple would stay together or not? Which is incredible. And it's a credible proof point. He did it many, many times.
Like they've kind of studied it. And the whole thing, it was not, you know, how compatible are they? Do they have similar hobbies and interests? And do they share core values? His understanding of how relationships work was basically how well do you fight. When you argue, when you disagree, how do the two people behave? And it's basically, when there's a cut, do you heal to 99% or do you heal to 101? And if you're healing the 99% over time, your relationship,
is degrading, and it's just a matter of when and how often those cuts happen. But if you can go to 101, and like what a simple thing to strive for? It's this little 2% swing. What does it take to just make that 2% difference? Probably not that much. And you learn the things that were in his research about what the couples who were healthy did versus the couples who were in health, unhealthy did. I just think that's like a very powerful idea of, because when you're in that moment of the cut, you're not focused on the healing. You're focused on the cut. And how much, How dare you? And I can't believe he did this again. And like, yeah, I might have cut you, but like, it's only because you earlier cut me. And so we always just focus on that. And it's just
the shift of perspective to, all right, how do I get this to 101 instead of 99? What would that take? Probably not much. But if I know, I know if I do that, I'm made. You know, this relationship is going to be great. It's going to be great over the long term. It's going to get greater and greater as the years go by. And who doesn't want that? Yeah, Vizcan Barasami talks about how, uh, the marriage paradox, the divorce paradox, how is it that lots of people who around dinner were seemingly each other's favorite person end up getting separated? He says because bad times are a far bit better predictor of relationship outcomes than good times are. And it's the arguments, not the glories that work out the duration of a relationship's existence, that almost no
relationship has broken up because there were too few peak experiences. Far more of them break up because there are too many low experiences. Right. And you're okay, well, how do you relate when things are going badly? Because that is the predictor. Right. God, I mean, think about how many people are in relationships that are predicated mostly on conflict. It's, they would kill to be at neutral.
neutral for them would be bliss. And should you strive for more than neutral? Yeah, absolutely, of course. But there are many, many, many circles of hell below that. And there are people who are in less than neutral marriages that stay together for life. And you go, okay. So if minus can stay together, neutral should be like fucking easy work. And then on top of that, we can actually start to look to build.
I think there is an interesting question of like what healing a cut during the argument to 101 instead of 99, like what that looks like. I think that is sort of tactically where the rubber meets the road. Well, I mean, I'm no expert in this. I'll tell you one thing that I started doing, which was, I was in argument. Again, my trainer kind of gave me this advice and he's like, look, what are we trying to do here? And it's a simple, but what are we trying to do here? And not about the situation that is where the disagreement has started, right? It's not like, what are we trying to go to, you know, Mexican food or Italian food? That's not, maybe we're arguing about something like that.
But that's not what he means when he says that. It's like, what are we trying to do here? I love you. You love me. I'm trying to have a great time. Trying to be like, we want this to be an awesome relationship. And the sooner you can bring your awareness to that of like, wait, what matters? What am I trying to do?
What are we trying to do here? Do I love you? Do I want this to be amazing? We're on the same team. The sooner I can bring my awareness to that and not the wrongs of the situation. the edge goes off. And it's never really the situation. It's like how people are reacting in the situation.
And the difference between a reaction and a response is like that's the make or break of your life. Like the people who are truly great, it's because they respond versus react. They know when something happens and shit's always going to be happening, we all have an impulsive reaction towards it. But those who are able to bring awareness
to what they actually want, long term, to how they actually feel about it, to what the other person might be thinking, and then get into response mode, we're much better as responders, which is why we're much better giving other people relationship advice versus ourselves in the same situation. Because when it's us, we go into the fight or flight reaction mode versus being able to be able to respond. And so how can you differentiate? And then just be like, oh, I really didn't, I didn't like my reaction back there. That was stupid. You know, I, the way I reacted, I'm not proud of that. So let me, try again.
Boop, rewind and like, give yourself some tools. Like, literally the rewind shit, I do that at my house. I'll make the sound effect and do it. And it kind of lightens the mood. And then you're like, let me just try again real quick. Yeah. Because it could be really hard for me to like, error carried forward with what I just did.
Yeah. And go there. I need to shake the etch of sketch. I literally just got it. And I literally have to like break our like tension right now with something goofy. I learned this when I did an improv class. And I go to improv. and I'm like, okay, my friend drags me to improv and I'm like, okay, fine, I'll do improv.
I'll do this one class. And what do he, the first class, they don't teach you anything about like how to be funnier or even like yes and they don't really teach you like none of that stuff in the first class. The whole first class was basically just getting you to turn the little voice in your head off. And the way they do that, she's like, look, like, who here would love to be able to be put on the spot and say the right joke, could take the scene in the right direction and have that really funny thing that gets the big laugh. We're all like, yeah, obviously, that's the happy ending. We wouldn't be doing improv if we didn't want that.
Everybody wants that. Who here is afraid of stepping up, not knowing what to say, saying something stupid, making it awkward, and like effing up? Everybody's hands up again. She's like, bad news. You're all going to do that. If I was a good enough teacher to prevent you from ever doing that, then I wouldn't be working here at the San Francisco improv beginning of a class. I'd be like, wherever. but I can teach you how to navigate this
and she basically just goes you're going to learn one thing you're going to learn how to fail well so she goes when you say something that immediately the voice in your head's like uh oh that was bad that was stupid she goes all you're going to do is you're going to go whoop and she goes and when one person does it
I want everybody else it's called response you go whoop everyone goes we all it's literally like it just gets like you shake it up it's gone clear clean slate let's keep going and so the whole like first 20 minutes was just practicing, like, she'd be like, say a word. You're like, ah, flabbergasted. And she's like, say another word.
You're like, say another word. You're like, name a woman. And you're like, Michelle Obama, name another woman. You're like, Michelle Obama's sister. I don't know, right? So you just, you start to do that. And that little technique, the little whoop was so powerful because all of a sudden we had a way to clear the slate.
And so I think like in your life, it's useful to almost be a little silly, a little goofy with this stuff to be able to clear the slate. Tony Robbins, I don't know if he told you this story. he has a great story of one of the presidents that he coached. I don't know anything about history or politics. So don't ask me that. But it was like whoever, like Reagan or whoever, whoever was negotiating with like Gorbachev or whatever in Russia. So there was like some tense situation, Cold War situation going on.
And they, he flies to, things have really reached their peak. So he flies to Russia and he goes in and there, the conversation is not going well. It's two alpha males posturing. It's not really going anywhere. and president gets up, turns to walk out. He says, you know what? I know what we need. And he gets up, it leaves, and he's walking out.
And right when he gets to the door, he just does a little turn back, comes back up. Hey, I'm Ronald. It reintroduces himself playfully. And it cracks a smile. And it literally changed the state of what was going on. And then they had their conversation and like, whatever, things diffused. Wow. I don't know how true this whole thing is, but I love the story because it works.
If you're able to like just have some of these tools in your back, that are not like standard tools. You might feel even a little silly doing them. God, they work. You know, like, it's like you can't always just logic your way there or brute force your way there. Also, use these other tools. Playing inside of the rules of the game
kind of constrains you an awful lot, as opposed to being like, okay, I'm going to break the frame of this a little bit. Right. I'm going to call out what I think is going on here. Is anybody else feeling, and, you know, if you're Joe Hudson, you're doing this by going, I'm noticing a little bit of agitation.
Is anybody else in this business meeting that we've been in for 45 minutes? feeling a little frustrated that we're all trying hard and everybody really wants the same outcome, but it doesn't feel like we're getting anywhere. Who feels like that? Everybody feels like that. Okay, we've called out the fucking problem in the room. Right. Right. And I'm not, this isn't a value judgment on anybody. I'm not saying that you're better or worse or that it's somebody's fault, but we've just called it out. We've said what the fuck is going on. Okay. Now that that, which is almost all of the pressure, right? There's lots of pressure on the fact that we haven't
achieved anything in the business meeting, but there's way more pressure on the fact that we know, that there's pressure and no one's calling it out. There is pressure inside of a marital dispute. You should have taken the kids and I thought I was going to but then work happened and all the rest of the thing and it's like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, scoop up, big kiss. We're on the same fucking team. Are we on the same team? We were on the same fucking team or whatever the like stupid thing you come up with. And you're like, all right. And then you've broken the frame. You're like playing this game of tennis hitting the ball back and forth. I think this is one of the reasons why having arguments when you're not together, like if it's a phone argument or a text
argument and stuff, like, you can't break the frame because you're in the, yeah, like, we were on the same fucking, like, you know, it doesn't work. It's not the same. It can, if you go, if you are playful enough, you can be, literally be on the phone and be like, and it's like, oh, hold on, I have another caller on the line for you. It's me, but not less of an asshole. Hey, sorry about that other guy. He was saying some stupid things a second ago. He already regrets it. And rather than letting it sit, he wanted me to call in. It's right? Right. You could just be ultimately playful. I kind of love, like, the reason I kind of don't like the, like, I like Joe Hudson,
but I don't like to like, let me, let's go into our feelings. Because, like, yes, you want to be able to feel your feelings. But shit can, like, you don't always have to go the heavy way. You know, like, there's a whole other style of martial arts in this game of life. That's like, dude, use humor, use play, use silliness, use a, dude, just like, I don't know. What if I tickled you? You know, whatever it is. Like, why do we love?
limit ourselves into only things that sound super adult. That sound really like, well, that's substantive. It's thick and meaty. It's like, dude, it doesn't have to be that serious. We all know if I change the music behind a video, you'll feel totally differently. But we think we're these like intellectual creatures. It's like, dude, I can literally put a laugh track behind this. You'll think it's funny.
You'll start laughing more. And it's like, we're not as sophisticated as we hope to believe. But when you accept that, then you get new tools. that you can play it other ways. Sometimes you can do the heavy work and the deep work. But you can't always go there. Sometimes you do just sit down and grind. But you can't always grind.
Life's not supposed to be a grind. Like, you know, like learn the other arts. They're fun. They make things easier. Heck yeah. Sean Puri, ladies and gentlemen, Sean, you're the best dudes. I appreciate you.
I'm excited to do Rabbit Hole as well. Thank you. What is going on now that you are post-economic. What the fuck you do? I'm finding my ways of doing A, fun things that will bring me back to the bottom of a mountain, reinvent myself. So I'm making a movie right now and working out. We're building this amazing kind of crazy magic thing in New York.
That thing is really fun. So I'm trying to do creative projects with people who are super inspiring. Because I know, I was like, you know, you do a little soul searching. And after all this soul searching, my like answer was like, I love doing projects with the boys. That's my, that's my happy place. And so, like, who are the boys? So who are those people that I just want to spend a bunch of time with? excuses and what projects will bring the best out of us. What projects will bring something new out of us?
What projects will have some meaning in the world, either make people have a lot of joy or maybe have them be great in a way that they weren't if they weren't otherwise. Like push people. Like I think we aim far too low. And if I can help people aim a little higher, but towards, you know, like going for it and whatever their version of going for it is, I would feel really happy if I did that. So I don't know. I'm going to play around the projects like that. And yeah, do projects with the boys, the idea. Unreal, projects with the boys, LLC. Appreciate you, man. Until next time. Thank you. All right, goodbye, my beauties.
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