19 Harsh Truths About Human Nature - Alex Hormozi

if you suffered from racial inequality if you suffered from gender inequality you would be completely justified in the fact that you are not achieving the things that other people who didn't have those disadvantages have achieved and I say this as a white guy who was born in America to a doctor father but at the same degree you have the opportunity that Chris nor I have which is that you can be an inspiration to people who went through the same thing because I can promise that there is somebody who has had it worse and has done it better Alex o'muzzy welcome to the show thank you for having me my pleasure man uh one of my favorite things to do is to scrape through people's twitters that uh aphorists and come up with little pithy statements and then break them down so I want to go through some of the things that I've learned from you over the last year or so go into those and then there's some talking points I don't think I've heard you speak about before as well I want to get amped beautiful so the first one is so many lives would transform overnight if they realized my life sucks I have nothing going for me really means I have nothing to lose and that makes you a very dangerous person so in any kind of game position so like in business right every position has advantages and disadvantages and a lot of people look at the really big guys and they're like man they uh they like they're like they're looking at me like must be easy for Alex right and I remember when we had uh Jim launch and we had a very big company I would tell the guys who were coming I was like if you're trying to compete against me I was like you have advantages I was like if you're on a sales call you're like listen you're just a number to Alex you're never gonna talk to Alex right here with me you're gonna get my attention I'm the one right I was like that's how you're gonna throw stones at me I was like but on the flip side if it's me marketing to the masses I'm gonna be like this kid's in his mom's basement he has no idea what he's doing he's been in business for 12 months and of course he has no idea like wouldn't you want somebody who's thousands of success stories behind it because we've made a system like both sides have advantages and so what happens is people are in this small position where they're more Nimble they can give more personalized attention to people Etc and they see it as a pure disadvantage and so you can flip the fact that you have nothing going for you with you have nothing to lose and that means that you can take lots of risks very quickly and end up in the exact same position you are which is nothing and so if you eliminate downside it should decrease your action threshold meaning you should be able to do more things faster rather than do fewer things because you don't have a great life or things going for you and so I think if people flip that a lot more people would take action because they actually realized the advantage of their position Jack butcher says you get rich by taking lots of risk with small amounts of money and you stay Rich by taking small amounts of risk with lots of money yes I wholeheartedly agree I didn't know that was his quote uh he may have repurposed it there's something called churchillion Drift do you know what that is no so it's a a phenomenon at the core it's not the opposite it's that um quotes that weren't said by Churchill often get like erroneously attributed to him it's like all quotes lead back to Churchill even though they didn't and Socrates yeah it's like it's just one of those things where it's like I I think Churchill once said yeah get rich by making large amounts it's like no he [ __ ] but there's another one as well uh that a good friend James Smith talked about which is if you're succeeding at a job that you hate imagine how good you'd be at a job that you loved and that's kind of the same this person is starting from essentially zero how much [ __ ] worse can it get right is the downside if you can eliminate someone's downside for action it's like then the bias it should bias you towards taking action why is it that people in that case if they do have nothing to lose still feel like they have lots to lose because I think most of the times so this I think this is really important is that they have nothing objectively to lose and so everything that they feel like they have to lose is purely made up in their mind it's stories that tell themselves about what other people are going to think about them when those people aren't even think about them to begin with right but like that's where they live all of their lives or live out all of the potential downside is in the mere reflection of what other people will think about them in the future should they fail and I think that is the like if we were if we're trying to get real and I'm like talking to somebody's like well I I mean because I know that if I actually had somebody in front of me they'd start squirming right if I said the first thing right like you have nothing to lose and then because then they do have something to lose and I just have to name it for them and be like okay who's the person in your mind who's the voice it's like blah blah six questions deep it's my uncle okay why like let me state it this way will your belief that you're going to be viewed as a failure by your uncle be the sole reason that you live the rest of your life below your potential and regret everything that you don't do because of Uncle Tom that's the wrong one Uncle Harry when you say it like that all of a sudden they're like I don't want to let Uncle Harry have that kind of power and then all of a sudden it breaks and then they like get free of it and so I think it's getting really specific and really narrow on the because people say it's Society it's other people it's like it's usually one or two voices and if you can get really specific on whose voice it is then you can name it and then like I think I'm a big believer in like shame only exists in the shadows which is like once you put it in the light you look at it and you're like my mom that was really it like when I really think about it it's because it's not even just my mom it's my mom in this circumstance when I come back home for Thanksgiving I just am so afraid of the comment that she's gonna make it's like well what if we confront that okay your mom you sit down at Thanksgiving dinner and you haven't made money yet and you quit your job now what is that better than you spending the next 60 years hating her or resenting her for the fact that she held you back and then it's like when you give the real scenario they're like well [ __ ] and then like this weight comes off and they're like [ __ ] I guess I should do this and you're like yeah shame on me Shadows is nice yeah I like that and it definitely is cleansing to just be like look here it is out in front of you yeah and it really you realize just how irrational it is because we don't want to look at it yeah because it's in the shadow and we put in the shadows because of how it makes us feel about ourselves in my opinion and so it's it's so scary we avoid it we avoid it we avoid avoid it but it's like I think the faster you can kind of build that muscle of like huh I've got this hesitation what is the real reason because like logically I can do that whole thing cool you have nothing to lose you're poor great zero right okay but then what is it that I'm that I do have something to lose it's relational Capital it's status within my tiny micro community that doesn't matter but like my perceived status okay name the names and but by pulling it out from the Shadows it'll but like that confrontation from here to here is I think where all the fear is because it's embarrassing to be like it's my mom the other perfect thing or great realization I think for anybody that's starting out and is feeling self-conscious about what other people are going to think is when you're starting out by Design there are so few people looking at you that even if you do fail no one [ __ ] sees right so this is something we realized when we were running nightclubs that we would try and launch a new event around freshers week in September and we would we would have this great idea and it would be everything would be about flamingos or everything would be it would be a smart night on a Tuesday so people could go out after they've been to sports club or whatever it was and then it would flop right and we'd do 150 people and all of the guys that work for us would be stood outside looking destitute and upset and they're good so unbearables there so it looks like there's more room oh dude we had so many tricks we'd pump the pump the room full of smoke we would pad the back off so that everyone had to go to the front we get the DJ to play music all sorts of [ __ ] but all of the boys would be like [ __ ] this makes us look so bad everyone's gonna think that we're [ __ ] I was like no no no no 150 people are gonna think that we're [ __ ] yeah like the advantage of running a [ __ ] business that doesn't reach many people is that not many people saw your [ __ ] business yeah and that's when you're starting out people that are concerned about becoming a content creator I I'm worried about starting a podcast because what if everyone sees how [ __ ] my podcast is it's like dude no one's going to see a [ __ ] podcast it took me three years three and a half years to get even an appreciable amount of people listening to this show and it was effort three times a week no one cares when you start so you can be liberated from that as well and it's just objection handling objection handling objection handling all the way down I think a lot I think a couple frames that are just different frames around content making since we're on the topic um that helped me was one is seeing it as practice rather than the game so like when we're doing a podcast if you start you're like hey I'm gonna do a podcast I'm gonna post it's practice for me getting better for future me rather than like I'm like this is the main game it's like no the game is the whole thing and this is just like we're still in pre-season like these these these scores these touchdowns don't even matter yet right now you can say yet even though like I can still feel like I'm a preseason but I think from a mental framework it actually decreases the stakes associated with doing it and I think that's been helpful for me especially it was in the earlier days the other one was um kind of the equal opposite of this problem which is not wanting to start because no one's watching because it feels like you're doing all this work what's the point and so I actually the little mental trick that I had was um one I track lots of stuff and the more ways you track the more ways you can win and so it's a little thing that I found out so like if you track 100 stats and you only need one of them to go up so you feel like you made some progress so that's like an easy one and the second thing around the tracking is that I would look at like the biggest possible number so a lot of times you can see like the impressions of you know a post that you make even if you only got like 16 likes I got like 100 Impressions and I thought to myself I was like well if there was a room of 100 people I'd be stoked like that would be awesome especially in the early days I was like that would be I would totally feel like that was worthwhile and so taking those little impression numbers and pretending that they were like micro events that I was making the work or the content for all of a sudden made it feel worth it for me and so the combination of I can have a small room and I'm really impacting like when I get a view that has like 13 views on it you know for like a video in the early days I'd be like well shoot I made this video and 13 people saw I was like a small room like that works but looking at both absolute growth and relative growth so it's like okay well I went from 10 followers this month to 15 followers this month it's like well you can say that you only gain five followers I was like or you can say that you gained by you went up by 50 and that was exciting and so then I because I'm a Excel projection guy I was like okay well if I do this every month and the team knows this because I project everything out I'm like if we do this because I I'll predict where we're going to be in like 12 months and how about usually hit it very really very but how do you account for the unforeseen 5 million play video that comes in well that's my padding right so like I'll project that with no white swan events where something good happens yeah but it just if we keep doing what we're currently doing at this trajectory we compound at 13 a month yeah that's what it is right now so 13 monthly and that's just on one of the platforms we're on um and so I can just see what we're going to be at six months and that's exciting so James Smith gamifies it in the same way you're busy yeah absolutely exactly the same way and he always says that it's just like playing uh levels on a computer game in this month wow like I got another XP point or whatever and I think that's very important because social media and the fact that it is associated with status even though everybody says oh you know it doesn't really matter and blah blah it does like it's very hard for us to remove the human hierarchy from what is evidently just Quantified [ __ ] status right on a screen and what he did was he removed himself a lot existentially from that by saying it's not comment on my worth as a person it's not a comment on whether I'm you know going to be loved or accepted by the world it's me putting some stuff out and wow we won this month yeah and this month oh maybe we didn't win why didn't we win where I go back the same way as if someone beats you at FIFA unless you like a pro FIFA Player or whatever but again with that what's the difference between the the amateur FIFA Player and the pro FIFA Player the pro has put his existential connection right to his content and the success of it oh my God so many little things on this that I want to go into one of them is uh so Dr cash is my closest friend he's like a behavioral whatever loves studying why humans do things um and so people who are most successful a lot of times with their it's not that they necessarily have more willpower they find ways to they find other ways to reward themselves and so he's like the more skills you have the more ways you have to reward yourself and so somebody who somebody can extend how long their time Horizon is because they do gamify it so people who don't have the skills of figuring out ways to reward themselves in the meantime can't make it the whole way but that's like when you're doing cardio and you're like okay it's 5 30 you know it's five times five to get out of here right you you create micro games within the longer game to keep yourself going and the thing is I've seen that across uh verticals so like if you look at uh so Travis mesh is a Olympic lifter Olympic lifting coach out of North Carolina and he has this really cool way of getting lifters to PR every workout so have a personal record every workout and what he does is he have them map every single set in rep range for every single lift at every weight and so what happens is all you have to do is go through your book of 200 lifts and every single weight and you can always find one that you did a year ago and I'm like this is my eight rep max PB on good mornings yes and you're like well I can hit nine on this or I can add five pounds to it and so every workout they win yeah and so they get excited because they get rewarded every workout and so that's why it's like the more ways you track the more ways you can win and then I think that that's those little micro wins can keep you going over the long game that you have to just keep playing one of the other Associated tweets that you did was if your life sucks the easiest thing is to change your environment oh yeah this is something that I saw moving from a very good life in the UK to now I as excellent of a life as I can imagine in Austin and I'd met about a million people throughout my time as a club promoter and had a handful of friends I was like [ __ ] like I feel like my people met to friend conversion should be higher than this I feel like I'm the the funnel is very wide and like the conversions are very low to use your terminology yeah and then moved out to Austin and it's like I have more friends than people I've met which is just [ __ ] insane so definitely changing your environment what other ways given that not everybody could move to Austin what other ways would you say if your life sucks the easiest thing is to change your environment what other ways could someone do that I mean the environment is I mean like you know this is a I'm going to tangent I'm gonna come back so if you've ever heard somebody say like man I hate Cincinnati Cincinnati sucks right or they go some City and like they go there for two days and they make a judgment across the entire city right but it's like okay let's go really deep you ate at three restaurants and you saw seven total people in Cincinnati does Cincinnati suck or do the two restaurants that you went to or the seven people that you were with not are they not that cool well it's so easy to just move like two miles down the street it's the same reason people do staycations it's like you don't even need to change cities you can be in the same city and still change the environment like just moving out of your mom's basement you know what I mean and just going into another place with four guys can change the environment and so like that's the the thing that to me was so telling on this was uh so heroin addiction super addicting I'll put it that way and when a bunch of soldiers came back from Vietnam they had been addicted I don't know if you've heard of this right 25 percent of soldiers who went to Vietnam tried heroin it was like an insane statistic and in the U.S 90 of heroin addicts who go to clinics relapse so they have a 10 long-term success rate tough the stats are completely reversed from people who got addicted or did heroin in Vietnam and then came back to the US which then you could make the you could draw the line which is it's better to change your environment than to even do anything else because what happens is you eliminate all the triggers and cues that are associated with The Habit that you're trying to destroy do you see that the American government was absolutely concerned that there was going to be an epidemic yeah they were they were adamant that all of these soldiers were going to come home and they were going to be these veterans that were all addicted to heroin yeah wild and there are for sure but proportion so much proportion less than their quote should be because the problem with the current system of and like for anyone who's listening you can still extrapolate the principle or the concept people are in the environment that they are addicted they change environments and they go to a clinic they change the environment they change their behavior and then they go back to the same environment and their behavior changes yet again to match the environment and so it's like if you want to change your actions the easiest thing you can do is just change the environment because if you can do that a lot of times a lot of the negative things you have you just don't get triggered you don't get the cue for the behavior it just gets extinguished so the way that I've worked this into my home working setup is I think I have six or seven different places that I can work at and I do different tasks at each one of them so I've got a place I'm writing a book I've got a place that I write my book that's first thing in the morning I've got a place that I do my emails at that's a recumbent desk bike which is [ __ ] unbelievable dude zone two cut 180 minutes a week of zone two cardio 180 minutes a week of emails with Zone 2 cardio uh the place outside I've got my studio record inside we've got two living rooms with different houses that I can go into I'm like different spots for each one and if I'm in this Vibe I'm over here and everything's a bit go for a walk come back move somewhere else now I'm in a different mode totally and I I'm actually so it works in the equal opposite too if you want to start something right so like we were talking about was extinguishing bad habits by changing the environment by eliminating the queue but on the flip side if you want to start a habit like for me one of my quote famous ones is like I want to put sunscreen on it's like this it's like one habit that's like 80 20. why do you need to put sunscreen on so much because oh no not so much if I could just if you do like it's like kind of like walking like if you just walk once a day and if like if everyone just did that like you add 10 years to everyone's like it's like what are the few things it's like baby aspirin walk like if you do that crushing it uh from a like uh skin cancer prevention a and then B just like less wrinkled Alex future um suntan lotion or SPF stuff uh is like the the 80 20 of that right instead of having a zillion other things so like okay I don't like it I realize the reason I don't like it I don't like oil on my hands sounds so stupid but like that's enough punishment for me doing it that I stopped doing it and so I had to overcome two things one was that I hate the oil on my hands and the second is that I don't remember so I put one thing of sunscreen at each of my watering holes so I get cued because I see it as soon as I sit down so I eat lunch at the same table I work at the same table and on my nightstand there's the three places that I spend my time and so I have one in each of the three places and then the type of sunscreen I have is that I have one that's dispensed through a thing so I don't actually have to touch it so it's like do I know what it's like if you can identify why you don't like doing something then you can isolate why am I being punished for this behavior and think okay is there a way I can fix it and the other is how can I cue myself on a more regular basis by changing my environment rather than setting an alarm on my phone where if it goes off right now in the little podcast I'm not going to pull out suntan lotion or I'd have to carry everything with me which I would never do right that would punish me far more than just not putting it on to begin with and so just thinking through both of those things anyways that has been really helpful for me in starting and cueing myself to do new behaviors that I want to do and then also stopping behaviors that I don't want to do very nice most distractions come dressed as easy opportunities oh yeah this is interesting because as people begin to accumulate the success that they say that they want this becomes an increasingly big problem yeah um I think it was Andy Grove who said this probably Churchill um there we are showing another one up for Winston it might have been Packard I think I've actually been Hewlett Packard it might be one of those guys um he said that businesses die of indigestion not starvation and so they overeat they're not starving it's the entrepreneur that and this is like you go back to human behavior which almost all roads lead back to it but the entrepreneurs get reinforced for changing direction because nothing worked nothing worked nothing worked you change that direction Something clicks and so what happens is you learn a lesson from that you're like oh so if I change direction good things happen but that's not the right lesson which is one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is making sure that we learn the right lesson from this from the from the instance or the circumstance it's like I hired a sales guy he did a bad job all sales guys suck not the right lesson right but that's actually something that it is pervasive in even the internet community of like lessons that people they'll tell the story and then they'll say the lesson but sometimes the less all we know is the facts of what happened not necessarily the thing you took from it anyways um I was making a point Churchill start instruction easy opportunity so the the the higher up in business you get the more attractive the opportunities that you have to learn to say no to and this has been really hard for me because at every level like I thought great I have I can check the box on distractions I've learned to say no to ten thousand dollar opportunities but then when you're when you're making a hundred thousand dollars then you have to be able to say no to 100 000 opportunities and the thing is I called the woman in the red dress but the woman in the red dress have you heard this like this little analogy I have no okay this is like one of my favorite analogies so in The Matrix Morpheus takes them through a training program to teach them one thing about agents and so they're walking down the street and there's all these people going going and he says were you listening to me or are you looking at the woman in the red dress and he says look again he looks back and the woman in the red dress you walk by is an agent putting a gun in his head and I see distractions the same way which is that the better you become the more attractive the woman in the red dress is and so you can say no to a six but what about a seven what about a 12. exactly what about hypothetical thousand yeah right like that's that's really what it becomes because there is no limit on the upside and so that's why having like some of the Soft Stuff of like this is the vision this is what we're trying to do and there's a hundred other things I could do but each of the cost of those things is the one thing that matters most and I think that one of the things that Layla has been so good at helping me with and I think a lot of My Success earlier on was propelled by the fact that like when I met Laila I had a chiropractor agency I had a dental agency I had five gym locations I had a gym launch business where we did turnarounds I had all of those things going on and there was no CEO besides me a CEO of all of them because I didn't understand how this stuff worked and and I also made no actually I mean I made money from all of them but no income like everything was just enough to break even it was nine spinning plates and it's because like I was so opportunistic and it's very classic new entrepreneur to just say yes to everything and Warren Buffett said that the difference between really successful people and the most successful people this is me paraphrasing is that the most successful people say no to almost everything and I've tried to take that because it's so hard and I think that a lot of the you know it's so simple and so hard which a lot of success habits are which is like if you do the same thing for a very long period of time I think this is Neil uh shushing I can't remember the name but I'll I'll say that yes Churchill again um he said success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are and I just love that quote why do you not need to convince yourself that you're smarter than you are doing the same thing I think it's because you think you can handle both and so you're like oh I got uh okay because if you did think that you were smarter than you are you would then start to take on more stuff so quote from John Maxwell which I absolutely adore that says you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything but she's just [ __ ] perfect and it's the call it was so uh Greg mcewen's essentialism is one of my top five books of all time and it's for this precise reason that it's an antidote to the type A Fallout right I can do it all I will do it all watch me suffer and bear this burden and you're like look you can do the hard work thing right you can you can do that but the working hard and being spread thin are two different Dynamics and one of the one of the like interesting idea I've been playing around with a little bit recently is periodizing uh work so in the same way as your weightlifting coach we'll have the guys doing his sub Max for 90 days he is building up for 90 days he has comp prep he is blah blah blah blah blah whatever it is mobility um that's a much easier way to um blend what we're talking about here as maybe a little bit earlier I think you need to specialize more as you get bigger and bigger because the distractions are going to be even greater especially how so so if you are uh the CEO of your company and then someone comes in with you've got so much more Downstream from you that if you get distracted the repercussions the ramifications of becoming distracted are magnified even more what do you think about that do you agree I I think the The Specialist piece is the piece that threw me because I always feel like the the higher up you go the more generalist you become in terms of skill set but not in terms of projects or in terms of projects specialized in projects generalizing skills there we go yeah yes I like that we'll get back to talking to Alex in one second but first I need to tell you about HubSpot 28 of some people's weeks are spent reading deleting and sorting emails which means that very much email is not dead starting an email newsletter means that you've got direct connection with your audience it means that you actually own your audience it is the only way that you can own them without going through a third party like a social media platform and from HubSpot right now you can download their free email template that will teach you how to make your own newsletter you can learn how to build an 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Conquering tiny impulses I think it's exactly what we were talking about earlier it's like if you like I I got a there's a a tweet that I made actually you you were the one who made it go viral right uh which was uh when you quoted me quoting you to David Gogan yeah it's just this endless Human Centipede of [ __ ] homozy quotes um but he's like you don't you don't uh you don't feel confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror but by stacking Oh by having an undeniable stack of proof that you are who you say thank you that's work yourself down thank you I'll quote you to you which is a new a new low so so that right yeah um a lot of people were like no but what if you don't have any successes like how do you get started and I still think that the the quote is 100 valid it's that they don't realize the validity of the smaller things that they have done up to that point and so it's being able to transfer your successes of like okay like did you get dressed this morning like did you did you get in front of the computer like you have evidence it's smaller evidence but you have enough evidence to make the claim that you can do this and then you do that enough times that you have enough evidence to make a claim that you can do this and support it and I think um that's where the big outcomes come from lots of of constrained tiny impulses of saying like you know what I'm gonna get this tiny Victory and I know how to say no to that I noticed a hair say no to heroin today or whatever yep um that would be a hard one you know a lot you're implicit probably larger um but that's the idea is just stacking as many of those pieces of evidence that give you proof that you are who you say you are that you can you have done what you say you can do yeah it's uh the the challenge of action or belief first is something that I've been playing around with so much and my friend James he wrote a book uh the c word like confidence it was a book about how to be confident right and um I do feel like a a big footnote summary could have been that quote from you and the problem is this is something that I've seen as well a good example coming from a world where I was successful in business before I was successful personally um I have a skill set now and my capacity within this particular skill set and the performance of what that does are intrinsically linked right there's almost a linear relationship as I become better at networking with guests with recording with doing all of the other things the show increases when I run a business there were so many degrees of freedom between my inputs to the business and the success of the business that someone with uh like malignant imposter syndrome could always explain away how things had gone well so I would say oh it's because we timed the market right oh it was because of like this member of staff that we brought in I mean I trained him but really he would have been great without me or whatever and um self-doubt can sort of wheel its way in in very sort of Nefarious ways when you do that um then switching to something where you have a relatively undeniable stack of proof even undeniable to the part of you that wants to deny proof right which is that imposter syndrome after a little while it's just a crushing weight that you cut I call it imposter adaptation so you know if you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world and it persists you have to admit to yourself that it's got nothing to do with your capabilities and everything to do with your addiction to feeling like an imposter this is just a trend of how you think about the world you're looking for competent you have competence without confidence which is a lack of belief and confidence without competency self-delusion right so you need to have this balance between the two but people when they say well surely self-belief becomes before action I'm like well not particularly not if that's not your nature I don't think like you're asking for delusion there and it is significantly easier for you to think I am a fitness person if you just went to the gym and did 10 push-ups then I am a fitness person when I go to the gym tomorrow and do 10 push-ups like where's the show me spit and sawdust where's the [ __ ] reality of this you know I agree good opportunities only look like opportunities in the rear view mirror today they look like Risk how does someone get around this this um asymmetry between the fact that in retrospect it seemed totally obvious and yet the thing that you're looking at right now looking forward you go that might not be obvious in retrospect again it's tough because um a lot a lot of the big wins you know like like Uber's the classic example right like let's start a business where strangers pick up girls who are 16 you don't even drive them to their friend's house it's like that sounds like a terrible idea right like it just it but in retrospect you're like no it'll be totally fine because there's going to be a mutual rating system and blah blah blah right taking out the fact that there are people who've been captured and whatever anyway what we'll put that to the side right um and the thing is is like just because we're on the investing side what we found is that there are always reasons to say no to a deal you can always find reasons to say no because there's nothing that's risk-free even treasuries have risk the US economy could collapse and treasury could be worth nothing like and you could create a really compelling argument lots of influencers spent a lot of time doing that right um is it likely maybe I don't know but it's probably less likely than than a bank failing because if the US fails all the banks by default are also failing so which one you know which of these is greater risk so then it gets then you start comparing risks rather than trying to eliminate risks and so if we're looking at opportunities that's why I like Risk adjusted return is one of the things that a lot of investors look at which is like is there a way that I can appropriately adjust this risk to normalize different opportunities and I think that that single skill set is one of if not the most important important skill sets as an entrepreneur because fundamentally it's betting like that's what we're doing we're making bets every day we bet with our time we bet their money um with the limited constraints we have or limited resources we have against unlimited opportunities because that's the hard part is that there is unlimited women in the red dress now there's some fours and there's some sixes and there's some eights but you have to both rape the girl right the opportunity and then also how crazy is she right or whatever you know whatever risk factor you want to you know associate with this is you going to stab me in my sleep I don't know right does she have a crazy ex-boyfriend I don't know about I don't know right and so that's why we do the diligence process but like the the way that we because I just just tied up this chapter in the book that's coming out is when we're organizing opportunities that we're going to pursue with a business we look at what are the ones that we have the absolute highest likelihood of success that we we need no new skills and no new effort if we can do that or the least amount of new effort and no new skills that would be the first thing we're going to do and then once we take off all the ones that take basically no effort and no extra skills we're like okay which ones take more effort and still no skills and then once we do that then we're like okay now we can start learning a new skill and of the different skills that we could learn which of these is going to give us the highest leverage as in most output for the least amount of input and that's pretty much how we tick down which of these opportunities we want to pursue because those have the lowest likelihood of not happening does this work in the personal world as well this one is an investor that isn't in business that's just thinking about life opportunities do I want to learn to salsa dance or code I think that the investor frame is a is is simply people who have been scored and Quantified on their ability to make decisions and so I think that we can learn a ton from how investors make decisions overall it's like why Ray dalio's book principles became like a bestseller even though 99.9 of people reading the book aren't even investors or definitely not investors at his level but the principles of good decision making are just Quantified and we have a scoreboard for these guys being excellent decision makers whereas most other people you don't have a real scoreboard so we can't tell how valid is their advice and I think that's what makes uh taking advice from really world-class investors who've been doing it for decades um as a great source of information because we can validate that they have a stack of undeniable proof that they are who they say they are very nice okay so this was not Churchill this time so this was this is something that I've actually relied on a little bit myself uh whenever I get to a low point where I think why do I even bother I just remind myself this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win and this relates to another one which is a reminder for the Gladiators in the arena who feel beat up and scarred with no hope in sight building a business is hard hard feels shitty this is what hard feels like and this is why most people can't do it but you can this is what hard feels like is so [ __ ] nice to lean on it is so nice to lean on take me through that low Point there's actually a story I'm getting a little Goosebumps telling that so um I was way back in my day um like you a party party promoter but I was in a fraternity so I was president of fraternity and this was my first semester being president and so you have a pledge class you get two pledge classes as a person you get a fall and a spring and then that's your your tenure and then another president comes in and what we knew and this would be really interesting for the audience from a human behavior perspective is that like clockwork every time we start a new pledge class within 14 days 10 to 14 it was like clockwork they would all get together and they'd revolt and they'd say we don't want to do it anymore this is what we signed up for this is way [ __ ] harder than we thought it was going to be like we thought we was going to party with you guys like that's what we expected which also shows you how long it takes people to adapt or acclimate to a very a significantly more difficult situation right I'll tell you what happens after and then I'll tell you what happened in between after we have this kind of talk that we had and I'll tell you how I how I explained it when I was President um all of a sudden it all vanishes because their expectations of reality have come completely reset we break reality like in the first 10 to 14 days it's so painful for them because it's such a contrast not the fun stuff but what's not fun oh my God I mean they can't drink can't talk to girls the only people they could talk to are brothers or each other and we're mean to them so they could really only talk to each other and the whole point is that we're trying to get them close together because there's a bunch of dudes who don't know each other from different parts of the campus right and we have to get them in eight to twelve weeks to leave as one unit of people who know everything about one another that trust one another that know everything of the other people in the house so it's like how do you do that well there's only x amount of communication you can have every day so let's cut out anybody who's not us okay and then if we really want them to be close together we'll also reinforce that we're mean but part of what they had to do is they had to learn everything about everyone else in the house and so every pledge has to do something that would impress a brother and then they get a signature from their brother being like I approve of you and you have to get every single brother's signature by the time you're done right and so that's where each of those side quests become as insane as you might imagine right and there's lots of you know there was lots of hazing back in the day which is not fun and you know a lot of sleepless nights and things like that and you go from like partying with girls from like your top of the world all these brothers feeding you drinks being like be like you're awesome dude to then like the next day and this is literally how it happens this is how like the break in reality happens we do this huge party to like launch the new class and the next morning they all wake up they're all like they all sleep at the house because that's one of the requirements and they're all hungover and got their ties like vomit in the corner or whatever and we're like great clean it up and they're like what because up to this point they haven't cleaned after a party because all they did is got to parties see the girls and then leave but then all of a sudden they're like mopping bottom in the corner and they're hungover and they feel terrible and they're like what the [ __ ] this is what I signed up for right so anyways two weeks of this they get together and they wanted me to meet them and this always happens because they want to meet on their their Turf and I'm like all right guys what's up and so it's just me all right and my vice president and like 25 guys so there's like a you know there's like a size comparison of like just animalistically there's way more of them than there is of me and so I just asked them a couple questions I was like who here before pledging started was like I want to be a part of this house the guys are like you know me okay like okay got it who here thought it was going to be easy all right who here thought it would be hard they raised their hands I'm like guys this is what hard feels like and all of a sudden there's just like this big exhale in the room they're like expectations get reset this is normal you wanted this thing you expect it to be hard reality now matches conditions so our expectations now match conditions this is what heart feels like and then all of a sudden it's like they got permission to feel shitty and by getting permission to feel shitty they stop feeling shitty because they're like this is just my new world and so then you know you're like listen you give eight weeks you're gonna get three and a half years other people are going to drive you around late at night other people want to clean after you like it's a good investment right and that it was a good deal like you give one semester and you get the rest of them to just do whatever you want um but that concept like that quote on both of those came from that experience of having someone tell me this is what heart feels like this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win is also another beautiful bit of motivation and given that I spent a little bit of time with Goggins and cam Hanes two guys I was telling you about this before you said must be nice as we walked in so Cameron Haynes bowhunter extraordinaire lives in Oregon and he has behind the power Rack in his garage where he left he has must be nice written and I was like why why have you got that put up on there and he was like it's because everyone says it must be nice to be you Cam must be nice to be sponsored by height and all of these like top level bow things and go on Rogan he was uh there was a video that went super viral of Goggins losing his [ __ ] after Jon Jones won last weekend uh and the guy that he's hugging his cam so it's like it must be nice for you to be backstage at UFC you must be nice for this and I've seen what that guy does and that guy picks up a rock that weighs about 80 pounds and it's got the word poser written on the front of it because people call him a poser and he carries it up a hill that is Maybe Maybe like a thousand foot of elevation mile and a half high with no Fanfare at the end no Finish Line doesn't post it on social media unless the team's there filming it with someone else and then carries it back down puts it in the boot of his Raptor drives away and he just does that because he needs to remind himself that he's doing the stuff that is hard and this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win combined with this is what hard feels like justifies things being hard now I do worry and I find this in myself sometimes as well that you can be so good at dealing with suffering that you can actually push yourself a little bit too far and you go I'm starting to Bear more burden than I can basically take on and the Art of not burning out is something that I think a lot of people if you if this resonates with you the art of not burning out is something that you really really need to be able to feel and like realizing what happens when you just start to glance off the bottom side of it and go okay like I'm just gonna ease off the gas so that I need to take this afternoon to go sauna and get some sunshine and chill out and get some food and then I can put my foot back on maybe a little bit tomorrow and we'll temper it um but just it it justifies the fact that I use this stat all the time 90 of podcasts don't make it past episode three and of the 90 of the 10 that do 90 don't make it past episode 20. so by making 21 podcasts you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history that's what hard feels like and that's not even hard it's just consistent [ __ ] me it's less than half a year yeah insane I hear stats like that and I just think man it is so easy to win like that I mean like when I hear that that's exactly what I think I'm just like man for everyone's like struggling to win it's like you like most of the pain that people experience is purely in their own minds and so to your point I think there's an interesting one between like burnout versus hard and so like for me burnout is when my I would Define it as my output per unit of time decreases so I can see that that's measurable right now like I can say like number of pages that I edit or the quality of the content that I create like my output like the team knows when I like when I'm like six hours seven hours into recording something they're like I literally start like slumping you're like like physically I just start like slumping and I like my my Cadence isn't as like I'm just not as sharp right there's that versus emotional burnout which I think people mislabel as burnout when really it's just like they don't know how to reframe reality and so what it really is is they got a comment on a post that bugged them and like again it's like pulling it from the Shadows it's like no this stuff doesn't work it's like hold on what's the one voice that actually is coming through what is the real thing well there's this comment okay great it's embarrassing to even have to say that but when you say it then you admit it and all of a sudden you put it in the light and the shame kind of starts to evaporate because then you can name it and be like is this comment better than my bigger than my future is this comment bigger than me and one of the things that I um that has helped me was saying like what's true about this we'll get back to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about seed seeds ds01 daily symbiotic is one of the most advanced probiotic and prebiotics on the market it's a 24 strain broad spectrum probiotic and Prebiotic formulated for Digestive gut immune and additional system benefits with 53.6 billion AFU it's a two-in-one via Cap Technology capsule encapsule protects against stomach acid digestive enzymes and bile salts for viability through your digestion it means that the probiotics will actually make it to the end of the small intestine for delivery which massively increases how successful this is going to be for you altogether it means that your digestion is going to move more smoothly so if you've been thinking that you want to make an upgrade to your digestion you've been considering using some probiotics and prebiotics for a while seed is the most advanced option on the market also you can get 15 off your first month if you go to seed.com Modern wisdom and use the code modern wisdom a checkout that's s-e-eed.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout are you familiar with Byron Katie do you know her I've heard her name yeah the work she does the work and um the one of the first questions that she asks you is uh is it true how do you know that it can be true yeah and so it's like the same thing bring it from the Shadows right into the light okay you have this sense there's no [ __ ] it's like a [ __ ] smell it's like yeah maybe something's a bit maybe something's maybe I might be like a piece of [ __ ] maybe I'm not competent maybe I'm not whatever you go okay let's and the next one is like what if we confront it and say like what if they're right now what because a lot of I think a lot of effort gets put into trying to deny deny reality right like there's this clip that I shared uh from Tom Billy and he was talking about how he gets made fun of for his ears being big right and I think it's a really good clip because his point that he was making because it's such a visual easy example for people to understand um he's like is that it's true I do have big ears and and so that's that's like the if they're like you have no right to be making content are they right okay and yeah I'm still gonna do it anyways because the thing is like I one of the things that I had earlier on in my career was like I didn't think I was a really good person like I was like I'm not a good person yeah like some people like yeah I just had that right and I had a history you know whatever and one of the things that gave me a lot of respite or relief from that kind of thought process was like comma that's okay because I can still do the things that create success and not deserve it and still get it and that actually felt very powerful for me because it was like I don't have to deserve to success I can still just do the stuff that gets it it's like you don't have to you don't have to deserve the girl but you can still do the things I get her and do you deserve it when you have her I don't know who knows I hate the word deserve to begin with right yes but like that concept because also I could segue into like gratitude around like if you think you deserve it then you don't you don't enjoy it but um that has been super powerful for me which is like what if they're right and because a lot of people just trying they spend so much effort trying to fight the fact that the comments might be right this might have been a [ __ ] terrible thumbnail you know what this might have been a boring video this this post might have been regurgitated content this post might have been inspired too closely by someone else's post right what if they're right and yeah does it make me a piece of [ __ ] what if it does and you end up getting down to base which is pretty much nothing right all that there is is actions all that there is is what you're going to do in response to this you know what another brilliant uh add addition to this that you kind of mentioned yeah which is uh the fact that this is what hard feels like most people get to this stage and they decide to stop and now the bar is set so low Goggins said this in the episode with me and it gave me chills when he said it he was like it's so easy to be successful nowadays because people are weak yeah everybody's weak Dana White says it as well I tell my kids it is so easy if you are even a like weekend Savage you will run these kids over yeah and for every single person it's giving me chills again for every single person that likes to castigate the very padded victimhood mentality of the modern world okay cool like you can you can rail against people that say that the world is against them even though it's not and etc etc how does that inform the way that you should operate in the world right well okay what you're saying is everybody else it is fallible weak fragile in some way or another how does that inform the way that you act the way that you should act is holy [ __ ] if I have even a modicum of resilience right this makes the market environment for me so much easier whether I want to get the Girl by the house become successful in whatever domain I choose to the bar is set solo yeah this uh if we're going if we're going tweets um this segues into one of my favorite ones which is uh you stay in poverty until you learn the first lesson of poverty which is two words my fault and so when I was younger I was really angry at my parents like many people are right Justified or not doesn't really matter I was very angry and I blamed them for the woes of my life and I realized when I was 19 that these people that I hated I was giving all the power over the fact that I wasn't the person I wanted to be and I was like well it's their fault and the idea that I had actually given these people that I hated power over My Success was ultimately something that made me feel sick to my stomach and was what allowed me to point the finger of blame inwards and say my fault and then at least take ownership over the fact that like and like sure maybe your dad didn't hug you enough or maybe your mom was in present or whatever it is right it's like and and like I said this the other day and it'll probably piss off a lot of your audience so you know we can put our soft earphones on um like if you were if you if you suffered from racial inequality if you've suffered from gender inequality if you suffered from being born in Bangladesh if you were racist sexually abused your entire life you would be completely justified in the fact that you are not achieving the things that other people who didn't have those disadvantages have achieved and I say this as a white guy who was born in America to a doctor father I understand that but at the same degree you have the opportunity that Chris nor I have which is that you can be an inspiration of people who just who went through the same thing and succeeded comma despite those circumstances because I can promise that there is somebody who has had it worse and has done it better and I think that that one single point of proof and like there's a global point of proof that you can look for for sure but like you can be that very local point of proof in your community or sub community and I think um as soon as we shed that that's like I just I'm a big fan of uh Power follows the blame finger so like wherever you point the blame fingers where the power follows and so it's like if you point us if you point it to the government government has the power if you point it at your your spouse and say like it's their fault that I'm not in shape it's their fault they never let me do anything it's like well you're giving them all the power and so it's like until you're like it's my fault it's also responsibility what is what if it's not your fault it doesn't matter and hmm like I can't run marathons because I lost my leg at Birth and either you can just never try or you put the metal thing on and you do it anyways so this is one of the themes that I'm very interested in to do with your work in general and it's one of the reasons why it Bridges the Gap from what we're going through which are you know some really lovely philosophical insights and all of the rest of it the difference is you seem to have a knack to be able to drag yourself out of the philosophy and get yourself into action there's not too much mental masturbation that goes on so let's say that there's someone who's listening to this podcast you know thousands of people that are listening who are that person Millions thousands of people that are that person there'll be a lot of people that are listening don't worry um that person that goes I I love when I hear these aphorisms and and things and maybe it goes on the Whiteboard that's on the front of my fridge for a couple of months how does that person get from mental masturbation yeah around it to action that this this impact my life in a tangible way that actually makes a difference to me any of the things that we go through today all right two things one is knowing the input output equation the second is knowing what your fuel is going to be so if you can't define the inputs and outputs that are going to get you what you want then there's no way to start right because you don't know what you're supposed to do so you have to Define it down to like the most basic first action so it's like if I want to start creating content that means I have to post something if it means I have to start doing cold I always think in terms of business because that's what I'm in but like I'm either doing a cold reach out I'm doing a cold call cold email cold DM whatever that is I have to make a piece of content I have to post it and make a podcast I have to make a YouTube video to make a short whatever that is make a blog post um I have to run an ad right I have to I have to run the ad I have to press go I have to spend the money whatever it is like whatever that core initial action go to the gym lift the weight put the shoes on whatever the input is you have to Define what the input is that's going to get you the output you want now once you know what that input output is the next one is why aren't you doing it right and so I think a lot of people are looking for something that is very hard to find and so and then they attribute their lack of success or lack of action because they don't have passion or motivation right and I was the same way and so uh the short story around this was that I uh I watched all the TED talks in college like that was like what I was like I'm not watching YouTube I'm watching TED talks and I was like and then I realized and then I heard the term mental masturbation and I was like oh that's definitely what I've done I was like my life hasn't changed at all and then I got my jobs out of college and I would read all the self-help books like every night that's all I did I just read all these self-help books and I found one of them that said there are people who are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs and I remember hearing that word entrepreneur and I was like it made me feel sad I was like I want to be [ __ ] watch Brothers like I'm not some [ __ ] like like but but I was like but what if they're right I am a entrepreneur I'm not an entrepreneur I want to be one and I'm not and from that point it took me six months to quit my job to actually decide to do the entrepreneurial thing and the thing there are many things that contributed to me being able to leave and I think a lot of it's not like we were looking for one thing it might be a big bag of wise a lot of them right that add up together to be above your action threshold and I think in the early days people are looking for the big carrot they want the big Vision they want the big passion but they don't have it but I want to I'll give you the first rule of Entrepreneurship that I've learned which is use what you have and a lot more people have pain a lot more people have anger a lot more people have shame and if you can use that as your gas in the beginning you'll eventually get to a point where you can get out of that Loop and then find something that you are really passionate about but if you can't tie your shoes you can't lift the weight you can't send the DM then you have to start with whatever you have and so for me it was hatred of my current existence I hated being an entrepreneur I hated being a wannabe I hated being one of those people who like talked about all the things they were going to do and didn't do anything um I hated living the life that my dad wanted me to live I was I was his [ __ ] that's what it was I was his [ __ ] I was living his dreams out not mine and that was you know led to that other tweet which was um sometimes your parents dreams have to die in order for yours to live and for me I realized that the idea that my father had of me as his son that image had to die in order for the image of myself that I wanted to be to live because I kept trying to quit my job and go be an entrepreneur and every time I'd have the conversation be like ah come over we'll talk about it we'll have dinner you know what and he'd always talk me off the ledge it was always over and over again salesman yeah and or great authoritarian you don't need to persuade when you have compliance um and so uh and so everybody has that person or or it might actually be somebody who's talking off the ledge or might should be a voice in your head doesn't really matter because that that voice in person that only happened once or twice probably keeps talking to you when you're at home um but the big thing for me when I when I decided to make the jump and mind you I was such a [ __ ] about it that I I had to drive across the country before I called him to tell him that I left yeah I remember like I didn't want to yeah I didn't want to confront him um which he then like flew off the handle about um but I just knew and this is the Tony Robbins quote but it's just when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change and I think that I think pain moves people far far more effectively than pleasure does like the easy thing to wait to prove it is like point a gun at someone's head and you have absolute compliance and they will do what they need to do right automatically just like that like death is the great motivator and the gun just reminds you and so I think that if you can create the figurative gun to your head of the pain that you're experiencing and then I'm a big fan of future casting out negative scenarios so people talk about like positive visualization I prefer a negative visualization which is what if I keep doing what I'm currently doing for the next 10 years will my life look like then that usually takes my current pain and then just magnifies it and then that allows me to get my action threshold high enough that it goes over the edge so that I can take that first move and so if you know what the inputs outputs are of what you need to do the guy who has the little quote on his wall and you figure out whatever fuel you've got not the one you wish you had but the one you've got and you use that to do the first input you cross the line you're in the game I told the story on the episode that I did with Goggins about bullying in school and this was something where I like opened up about a topic that I haven't spoken about a ton because it made me feel weak and it made me feel vulnerable and so on and so forth but one of the things that's only really recently happened and it's actually been assisted by the guy that reached out and messaged me this dude messaged and said that he was sorry for what had happened his daughter was going to school and it reflect made him reflect on his time um at school and how he treated me and he was like dude I just wanted to say that I'm sorry I don't even know if you're going to see this I'm happy that you seem to be happy but you know I I just had to get it off my chest and that really helped not that I was carrying much yeah but one of the questions you know you've spoken about your dad in this kind of like authoritarian relationship and living out that dream how did you avoid or how have you got yourself to a stage now where you're no longer driven by a chip on your shoulder toward him because I think that there are a lot of people that go through challenges in their past yeah that you find fuel in it and they go wow I can be filled by hatred yeah phenomenal I can alchemize this toxic thing into something which is useful totally but I would imagine that that has a a shelf span right that if you keep on using that for long enough there are more optimal ways that you could start to move perpetually under your own motion transmuted into something else how did you get past having this chip on your shoulder about the relationship that you'd had with your dad and where it had set you back or forward or whatever um or have you yeah I think I have um I think my realization was you know first the goal was make as much as my dad then it was make more than my dad then it was making more than my dad had ever made and I realized that the approval that I had that I saw it was always going to be moved right I mean I've told this story before but maybe not your audience but like when I when I my dad and I didn't really speak a ton you know we texted you know two minute phone call hey you're alive okay cool um but for that was kind of like for like five-ish years um after I left home uh to go do the gym thing and only once gym launch was like printing money um and so we were I think I was taking home a million and a half a month at like 27 or something like that and he gave me a call out of the blue and like my dad doesn't like cold call me um and so I'm sitting at dinner and I step outside and he says um hey you're going to want to sit down for this and I was like okay he's like I'm sorry I was like about what he was like everything and I remember in the moment actually feeling nothing and thinking that was curious and then being like huh okay and I probably should have just like accepted it for the Olive Branch that he was probably trying to like lean out to me um but here's what I said instead I said you know how people get up on stage when they win the awards and they're like I just want to thank my mom and dad for always being there always believing me I was like I'm not going to say that I was like because you weren't and you didn't believe in me and right after that he was like well we'll see how long it lasts and so it was after that phone call that I realized that everything that I'd done to that point was to try and beat him at his game because everything my dad cared about and not everything he's a good guy like you know we're fine now but like when I was growing up and it's fairly common in most foreign families to be very like money driven and I always knew that kind of subconsciously and he would never say this but like I felt it because whenever he introduced somebody he told me how much they made immediately he'd be like this is John John makes this like this is Bob he makes this like it was just it was just like the worth and the name was like immediately tied together and so I realized that I was trying to win his game rather than playing my game and I think when that happened it was the same instance of kind of like the blame finger but just at a different level of saying like Okay well I don't blame my dad anymore but I'm still playing his game and so I'm winning not my game I'm winning someone else's and so I think when I was like okay well then I have to define the game and the meaning of the game that I want to play I have more responsibility now because I have to define the rules what matters most to me Etc um but that was where I feel like I got and maybe there's more that I'll unpack later but that was kind of the next level at least for my awareness of how I perceived what I was going after do you remember you I think you spoke about people that break the law in an attempt to make money and he said uh we sacrificed the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it so we sacrifice uh freedom for money in the hopes that the money will give us freedom yeah Downstream from that this is one of the best things that I learned for all of last year and you created the framework and then I filled it in so I talked about the tension between uh success and the desire to feel like we're enough I think that this speaks to what you're on about here success is a strange thing presumably we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness meaning and fulfillment is the problem we sacrifice the thing we want happiness for the thing which is supposed to get it success failure can make you miserable but I'm not sure that success will make you happy and if you end up with an equation if you could imagine like we sacrifice happiness to achieve success in the pursuit of happiness like if you just remove success from both sides of the equation what are you left with it's just happiness there are um we can't deny the fact that we're statusful beings that we you know we require external validation we can't just you know go and live in a cave and in peaceful Bliss and all the rest of it like there are things that we need to do but I do feel like a lot of the time we overclock our lives with regards to success and the Pursuits that we go through in an attempt to to do this and that uh we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing which is supposed to get it is like I see that all the time I always ask myself am I over complicating this like am I am I doing more than I need to do is there a simpler way to do this I think um I mean I think this is a actually a game theory thing um and you're from okay so I can I can I can go on it or I cannot if you want I'll bring it on Bring It On yeah so I mean Simon sinek popularized this but you're finite in infinite games right finite games where you have no known players agreed upon rules um and an outcome that that wins the game right uh and then infinite game you have known and unknown players no rules and the point of the game is to keep the game going and what happens is that people apply finite rules to infinite games and then they wonder why it's not working as an example so a final game would be like baseball no the players at the end of the game the person you tally up the ones with the most runs and you win and there's you can't you can't run you can't hold the ball and run it around the bases like there's rules of play with an infinite game the Vietnam War isn't a simple example that Simonson net gives which is basically the US lost the Vietnam War because they were they were applying a finite structure which is we're going to win this war and the Vietnamese people were were playing an infinite game structure which is we're going to stay alive and keep fighting and as long as someone is staying alive and keeping fighting they will beat the person who's trying to end something and so the infinite frame always conquers the finite and the thing is is that most of the games worth playing are infinite and so if you're trying to get in shape you don't win getting in shape the point is to stay in shape for the rest of your life you don't win at marriage the point is to stay married you don't win at business the point is to stay in business and keep doing business so the point of the game is to keep playing I think if if the six and I would imagine success if you put all of those things together it's an infinite game and so the point of success is to do the things that make you successful and so if you're doing the things that are making you successful then you are by definition winning and I think that for me redefining what is a perfect day and living as many of those days in a row as I possibly can to me that's winning and I and obviously have a relatively contrary in world view but which is that like when we die nothing happens and you know we know what it was like to die because we've all been dead before which is when we were before we were alive um but I don't think that what I will do will ultimately matter in 500 million years and so that kind of eliminates a lot of the pressure for me around like the external outcome sure I'm human there are definitely motivators but if I can just over time chip away at how much that weighs on the scale and I can keep putting more and more coins on the other side towards the infinite game of like the point of the game is to keep playing and like there are some things that I remind myself over and over again this is like the point of the games to keep playing that's the point that is the point is to just keep playing the point of the game is to keep playing I very much like that what was that you found out um the three trait the three most common traits of Highly Successful People do you remember those yeah it was um it's so funny superiority conflicts so the three most common traits of hyper successful people that they looked at and it was interesting because there's the influencer world wants to be like you have to wake up at five or you have to do cold plunges or whatever the [ __ ] right but the thing that but there was actually very few that they all had in common so number one was that they had a superiority complex they thought they were better than other people and that they deserved more the second is that they suffered from massive insecurity and feeling that they would never be enough and third they had impulse control and so you've got this combination of people who are like I want to do this big thing so this big toward thing and they've got this big away pain that's like I'm never gonna be enough I always have to do more and then they have impulse control that keeps them focused on the goal without seeing the woman in the red dress or getting pursued by her and that like so it's like shoot High have a big thing that that motivated like have a big tiger behind you and stay on the path have you ever heard uh Jordan Peterson talk about that study of starving rats in a tube with a spring attached to this no [ __ ] brilliant this is this is what you're talking about so um starving rats are placed into a tube yeah and they have a spring that is attached to the tail that can measure the force that they pull out and that's a proxy for desire then they waft the smell of cheese in from the front of the tube and the rat poles and they measure how hard they want to go and you think these rats are starving they'll be pulling pretty hard then they do another iteration of the study this time they waft the smell of cheese in from the front but they waft the smell of a cat in from behind and the Rats pull harder yeah and what's the lesson that you'd not only need to run towards something that you want yeah but you need to run away from something that you fear yeah the problem and this is I like super superiority complex crippling insecurity impulse control right I like that the problem is people who we admire the most due to the most success in the real world don't necessarily have the most admirable internal states that to me isn't necessarily the most peaceful Blissful way to live your life what does it say that especially in the modern world we uh Revere the people who have external accolades of success and yet the three most common traits of these super successful people lead from a place which is almost objectively miserable unadmirable yeah how do we how do we Square this circle I think it's just what are we solving for so um like I mean a lot of people I love watching Last Dance which is Michael Jordan's you know mini docu-series phenomenal yeah unbelievable um I think most people could see him there and be like I don't know if I really Envy this guy's life like he still seems like pretty upset despite being a billionaire despite all the you know these these these other things and so I think that if like what are we solving for like my my closest friend Dr Kashi he has a statement because he coached Olympic uh Olympic teams and he was like Champions are broken I was like huh he's like they people look at Champions and try and find something that that champion has that they don't have he's like but it's not that at all he's like they lack something everyone else has which is an off button they just don't stop and at the end of the day like if we're if we're optimizing for outcomes then the most broken person will win the person who has the absolute biggest you know desire for achievement the absolute biggest fear or pain that they're running away from and the hardest impulse control now impulse control most people would agree is a good thing the other two not as much and so what are we optimizing for what problem are we solving it's my favorite it's probably the number one most frequently Asked question that I asked to our portfolio companies whenever we're about to do anything which is what problem are we solving if the problem that we're solving is that I want to be content well there's a lot of ways to do that you don't need to do all these other things if the problem you're solving is that you want to be the richest man in the world well you're going to have to have a lot of spirit accomplished you have a lot of crippling insecurity and you have a lot of impulse control and you have to wait a long time there's a quote from Jason Pagan that says accept all of your heroes are full of [ __ ] Your Heroes aren't Gods they're just regular people who probably got good at One Thing by neglecting literally everything else yeah I just I agree with the statement [ __ ] money um I it's just so interesting to me I've been thinking about this to do with Billy McFarland uh let me let me just get this in hit it and that's okay because if they wanted that then that's the problem that they're solving for like I get criticized all the time for work-life balance people are like well you don't have any hobbies Alex and you don't whatever right and I'm like I don't [ __ ] want any so why do I have to sacrifice things that I would prefer to do to do things I don't want to do to satisfy your objective measure of what you deem as work-life balance why so that's what this is what you were talking about uh was it optimized for the outcome or what's the metric of success uh yeah he was saying like what is it that people are optimizing for right it seems to me that you have stepped back and decided axiomatically this is the thing that I'm optimizing for that I enjoy most doing yes that's I enjoy playing the game and so everything I do is about the game yes my podcast is called the game I draw pictures all day about business I write books about business I make content about businesses I've never seen a picture offers a zillion pictures in there oh are they done by you 100 all of the drawings are mine and 100 leads is like 100 Doodles in it are you doing good are they nice I think so are they are they cute yeah you've got little animals in yeah they don't have animals and I'm not I'm not gonna look at them there's little bag of money big bag of money like that's how nice dead serious but no but like and and I spend the rest of my day doing business and so it's like why don't you Garden because I don't care here's the other thing right I I always talk about this Steffi Graf um they one of the greatest female tennis players of all time and she gets tested when she's 10 years old 11 years old and she's in some tennis academy and they engage the players on two criteria they gauge them on desire to train uh and skill set all right and she was 10 out of 10 on both so okay not only has she got the raw materials to make a phenomenal tennis player but she'll outwork you and to her it won't even feel like work that's [ __ ] terrifying yeah and that's why I do think for the people that look at yourself and say uh Alex is on a road to burn out it's because you are using your theory of mind about how you would feel if you had to work as much as you do but okay what is the thing that you can do longer than anybody else and to them it looks like working to you it looks like play or feels like play what would that be oh well for me it would be uh computer games or knitting or rock music or whatever okay so imagine if you've just got to do that all day but instead of it being rock music it was [ __ ] business yeah someone commented the other day um was it you're sprinting on a treadmill uh they were concerned that the pace that the show is going out at was going to cause me to burn out and in retrospect I'm you know in five years time I'm like oh [ __ ] yeah I was moving too quick but I don't think I don't think that like I work at the pace that I like to work at and I also like to see where those limits are and that's exciting to me to go okay just how much harder can I go here and then again you've got to temper it with that's burnout like that's just the beginning of it and you only know that after you've burned out like 30 times uh but that's it's trite to say after atomic Habits by James clear right but the intersection of like what you love to do what you're good at and what you can be paid for is like slap bang in the middle of it slaves worked all the hours they were awake for their entire lives in American history in Egyptian history in the rest of the world that had slaves which is most of the world at some given point I think like if they can do it so can I now you're like well did they have a happy existence well they didn't get to pick the work they did but it means that you can work that's if you have the cat behind you you can work every hour of the day I'm like well if you get to have the cheese and you get to eat the cheese the whole way you're going then I mean there's the famous quote uh you know the person who the person who loves walking walks further than the person who loves the destination right and so like I think it's the same thing but the everyone so many people want to project their idea of of what they think your life should be like onto you and it's just completely irrelevant it just doesn't matter like if all I did if I if I weren't married right because people were like okay well he is married and like I am in shape but I also just like working out but if I didn't have either of those things and all I did was work all day more people would talk about the work-life balance thing for me than they currently do and who cares I just like I just I fundamentally am like you are gonna die and you're not gonna matter and I'm gonna die and I'm not gonna matter so why do I care about what you're gonna say when you're not even gonna show up to my funeral who gives a [ __ ] in other news that has never been about the time to start an online side hustle and hosting it is making creating a website as easy as possible if you're looking to start your own website or online shop but don't have the technical or design skills you can look no further than hosting it with hostinger you can launch your own website or online shop in minutes and Thrive online for 2.99 a month hosting it provides an all-in-one website builder domain hosting and professional email service it's the most affordable option for getting your online hustle started and it's ridiculously simple to use with hosting it you can launch a WordPress website in just one click or use their drag and drop website builder plus you can choose from over 150 beautiful and fully customized templates for e-commerce blogs portfolios landing pages and more if you need a logo hostinger has got you covered with their AI logo maker powered by chat gpt's API you can create a logo in seconds and make your brand Stand Out head to hostinger.com modernwisdom for an extra 10 off if you use the code modern wisdom at checkout that's h-o-s-t inger.com modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout what is it that you're taking an enjoyment from then the one step deeper than this there is something that you're optimizing for I love I love the reward what reward the micro rewards I get every day like of operating a business of all things business related yep so I love writing the book about business I love talking to my editor about what we're changing oh that's a really way better way to say it right or I like tweeting about the thoughts that we have I love doing discussions like this because I talk about my favorite topic which is business for the most part um like and I actually am pretty averse to punishment I've learned that about me like I do not like it and when I say punish me in the formal sense like things you don't like right and so like I avoid them like the plague I don't do them and so I just do as many of the things I can that reward me as frequently as possible but from the outside to a lot of people that looks like punishment right yes interesting how can someone uh cut through societal expectations the ways they've dealt with past trauma expectations from parents all of the things that aren't their thing yeah how can somebody because what you've done again axiomatically a priori this is the thing I want to optimize for how do people find the thing that they want to optimize for I don't have a thing Alex that's [ __ ] great for you with your business it just happens to be something else that's at the intersection of making a [ __ ] ton of money yeah how do I find it I was lucky with that yes that that just happened to be the intersection because if I love knitting and I didn't like business yeah that's a whole step because like you can turn knitting into a business but like if I only like knitting then there's a way to make a living for that but to to get to the person who's like uh how do I find my thing um I'm a big fan of being directionally correct rather than absolutely correct and so I think what happens is most people are trying to find the perfect answer when they have no perspective from which to make a judgment they're trying to find the perfect thing to do and they haven't done anything so how would you have perspective to make a judgment like if you try a lot of things in the beginning which you have to know what your inputs outputs are decrease your action threshold enough with either a cheese or a cat whatever you need most people have more cats than they have cheese in the beginning so use the cat to start running towards something and the thing is is the rad it's so simple it's like there's cheese here but what you really just need to know is that there's cheese out there and there's a cat behind me for sure and so if I just go anywhere away from the cat I have a higher likelihood of getting closer to the cheese not that I will find it but I will get closer to it and I think it's and I've lived my life through a series of Rapid iterations not trying to pick the right thing because I just like even when I was starting my first business I was between frozen yogurt test prep and a gym those are the three businesses that I was choosing makes complete sense yeah right a lot of things that I like right you know and so so I'm choosing between those things and like why were those the things I was like well I was pretty good at taking tests in college so I get that I like frozen yogurt and I mean it sounds simple but like I was like everybody likes something right and I actually didn't know that I was gonna like business that's the crazy thing because also hey when you and I were younger Instagram wasn't there YouTube like none of this [ __ ] existed and Entrepreneurship wasn't cool yet and so I just hated my job a lot and I hated where I lived a lot and so I was like well I will just not be here so cat don't know what city I'm gonna go to but just not this city I went across the furthest place from Baltimore which is California and then I was like okay well what do I hate doing well let me not do that which is you know sitting on meetings all day and doing whatever you know doing grunt work for [ __ ] that I felt like was meaningless and instead I was like I'll do Fitness because I like Fitness and I was like at the very least I'll do something I enjoy which I liked Fitness at the time and if you're like well I don't like doing anything it's like well then that's impossible because your brain is wired to be rewarded for things and so you are doing things that reward you that's why you do them like everything we do is because we've been rewarded for doing things like that in the past and we project the same activities and we predict that doing things like we did in the past that reward us reward us again in the future that's where our Behavior comes from and so it's like okay well what is your rewarded to do in the past where's the cat go the opposite way yeah so the the reverse role model is something similar but you're you're almost taking this into a lifestyle perspective so the reverse role model is if you live in a town or you grow up somewhere and there's no one around you like the sort of person that you want to be like but there are tons of people like the person you don't want to be like you can say there's a way marker I don't want his relationship with gambling I don't want the way that Hema handles his finances I don't want the way that him and his wife communicate with each other it's like okay there we go Warren Buffett uh Mungus says uh like an amazing amount of success has been achieved by not trying to be smart but avoiding being stupid uh so there's your way markers there but what you're saying is that this is almost like a a abstracted lifestyle version of this these are all of the things that I hate to do what's the opposite of that yeah and the uh challenge of I don't know precisely what the exact thing is therefore I can't move toward it is one of mine which is perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control I was gonna say it's a it's a fallacy it's a it's a decision-making fallacy it's the same it's this is why investor frames can be so useful like if you're looking for the perfect investment you won't find one there's always downsides every every investment has risk right and so using that frame you're like well there's all these paths which one do I choose it's like well you have to the one thing that's guaranteed is if you keep the money it will go down in value because it'll inflate right so not investing is the only way guaranteed to not get a retirement investment is that a the fact that inflation exists do you think that's a useful motivating force for business people you know you could imagine a different form of world economics where you know like embedded growth obligations weren't there and like whatever you know inflation didn't happen do you think that that sort of motivates people to actually be like oh [ __ ] like I need to I need to do something with this money I can't just sit sit and leave it in the bank I think it would motivate investors yes more yeah yeah but I mean the the business people would just like probably keep more coins in there in their vault and just keep transacting is that Scrooge McDuck yeah they'd be less likely to they'd be less likely to deploy Capital faster because if you feel like there's a cost of capital that's higher for keeping it like letting it sit there then you have a higher urgency to do something with it if you have less urgency then you only do it when you know it's gonna crash you gain nothing from underestimating your opponent mm-hmm how does this relate to your world so a lot of the tweets that I have actually come from conversations I have with our portfolio CEOs and so they'll say something right um and they're like oh we're way better than those guys and I think somebody said like something like that on a meeting and I just thought about it and I was like what a stupid thing to say I was like you gained nothing from that statement I was like you literally gained like what do you gain from that you gain complacency right you you increase you increase the likelihood of looking stupid in the case that they do Crush you right I was like because on the flip side like how many UPS like the only things that upset the guys who are on the top of the mountain is hubris like there's really no reason that the guy on the top of the mountain should ever lose he has the most resources he has the most he has the highest perspective he's the most Vision like he is everything he's all the food at the top of the mountain and yet history shows us humans act like humans and so we lose because of our egos and because it hurts to say what if that person's better than me and so I think that if you it actually is is really uh parallel with a different uh tweet that that kind of took off which was people underestimate how much smarter you can see him if you have 20 minutes of preparation yeah that's that's so [ __ ] true right and so like believable people get into businesses and like well what if you actually had to face this team people were like well I don't want to practice it's like why not like why wouldn't you practice like for a lot of Fighters show up not having prep for the fight not really hard I'm like what do you gain from that because if you practice really hard you get better period and like all it is is purely an ego play the only the only win you get from not prepping and showing up to the fight is that you appear to be more naturally gifted and I would rather be known for my work ethics than my natural gift as an aside but you appear to be more naturally gifted and then you win by less than you would if you prepared you gain nothing and so it's purely an ego thing but you we do it all the time and so I wanted to like my my Twitter stream is just thoughts to self I deleted because I don't have enough room in my profile to say but it was originally like notes to self and it's just like to remind me of things as they come up because I fall into that trap too I'm like I'm gonna we're gonna outperform this guy or like this company is going to crush it like but we don't gain anything from that it's like so we just have to assume that we're always the underdog and then they've got to trick up their sleeve that we don't know about it's like that's the whole uh only the paranoid survive um a reverse of that or something that's interesting to do with people at the top of the pyramid is there's only one way I know to beat people who copy you get bigger it's not by direct conflict but by making them shrink into irrelevance by comparison agree I mean especially when it comes to content creation I imagine that this is something that oh yeah that you know you see one thing that becomes effective and then Downstream from that a lot of stuff happened and you know if you've done the hard work of forging ahead trailblazing pathfinding split testing wow we finally came up with this thing and then within four weeks you're like oh brilliant this is all over the internet now well I always see it as like a first mover thing which is like they need me I don't need them they require me in order to iterate their content I don't because I don't look at Theirs to make mine and so and it's because like everybody knows man as well everybody knows every single person that's copying thumbnails there's copying subtitle subtitle Styles that's you know going after the same talking points they know deep down that what they're doing is creating a rough-hoon pixelated equivalent of what they think they can try and be at at best what you can hope for is being the second best Alex homozy in the world right and I'll win that game but like they would beat me at being whoever they are correct I mean this sounds so trite but like I I'm trying to say this in a different way so that it hits because like people have heard like there's only one version of you like there's just so much actual meet to that concept because this is this is you know Gary originally did the document don't create thing and I think that the the reason that the content that we have is quote original is because like we document I I document through Twitter the things that come up in my actual life and so it's not like what's trending right now it's like well I had this meeting with a CEO and he [ __ ] said that thing about the competitor and that's my tweet and there wasn't somebody else in the meeting also going oh brilliant that's a lesson that I can take that I can use for my Twitter right and so it's all from like original source and if everyone else like and this is on the flip side if you're the person who's doing this like you need to find what your original sources of content because like you will always be second or who SEC you'll never be first is really the is really the statement and like at least for me if I'm playing a game I want to play for the Long Haul and the point of the game is keep the game going and if you want to keep the game going then you can't be dependent on someone else there was another one I thought was quite interesting especially given the kind of current world of uh men's advice and rich guy uh existence online more people stay poor because of their egos than get rich off them yeah at the moment it seems like egos are being valorized on the internet especially among men's advice yeah how is it that more people stay poor because of their egos and get rich off them if there's a bunch of examples of people with seemingly big egos that also have money I think that's um what's the fallacy um whatever the whatever the cognitive follows you for what's in front of your eyes there you go um I think there are far more people who are successful and significantly more successful than the people who are visible on content who and I would say many of those people aren't actually that successful and so if we're looking at the objective measure of success as like net worth just for just for the sake of this conversation there are far more people who are rich and Anonymous than there are people who flaunt their Lamborghinis that they rented for a day now they're I mean if you really think about the influencer world of business there are not that many guys who actually like are really in the game like most of those guys sell something from their platform about building a platform like that's that's 90 not even 95 it's probably like 98 99 and so there's only like a very small select and and to be fair those guys are all pretty humble like you look at the Gary's you look at the the Andes you look at the um Tom Billy like these at my life like you know like the guys who have become you know in in the business space like they're not particularly egotistical guys and it's usually because they know what heart feels like and they know what it's like to be inadequate over and over and over again because you only can be inadequate if you go to another level if you feel amazing it's because you haven't moved up does that mean that if somebody wants to be successful and they feel like they've still got an ego that they need to do some work on dissolving that I think they just need to do harder things like you need to fight harder opponents like because you're waiting in this little pool the only way you can maintain an ego is by believing that you're a big fish in a little Pond right it's a big fish in whatever size Pond do you think it is and if you're a big fish you're not in a big enough pond it's totally delusion it's hard to comprehend like Bezos if you've heard any of his interviews seems like a very humble guy but like you could have a hundred billionaires in a room and he is worth the same amount as them and then if you had each one of those billionaires is a thousand millionaires he's still worth the same the same amount as one thousand one hundred whatever a hundred thousand millionaires ended him so like there's just levels to it and I think the moment you get the ego is the moment you stop growing because you feel like you beat the level but you just keep repeating the love rather than moving up because there is a harder boss and they just haven't faced it yet I suppose it's an easy way you know if you were going to a karate class uh but you decided instead of going to the adult one to go to the one that's Under 11's yeah and you're gonna kick the [ __ ] out of all of these yeah and you video it and you're like look at me and it just happens to be that they're the same size as you and like just imagine they're like dumb on the inside but they're human you know adult size and you're kicking the [ __ ] out of them it's like yeah do it to Jones right like not gonna happen yeah and so like this yeah I'm just trying to say this the way that I take this the way I mean it I get comments from people who are like love your humility Alex and like I don't think I'm that humble of a guy being real at least internally in my own head but I am reminded daily of my inadequacy on the business game because like right now we've moved up a level in terms of like now we're now we're doing deals now we're investing in companies we're taking on big risks we're writing checks like the another level of the game than just owning not to say that owning one business and growing it is not hard it absolutely is a different kind of heart but like I'm getting into this game and I'm absolutely the small fish like Warren Buffett made 90 billion dollars on the trading made in apple in 2020. one move right and so I'm like I am entering into a game like how could I say that I'm good like even if I was exceptional it's still going to take 20 years to prove it so like I can't say anything and by that point I'll probably have other guys who are you know who are [ __ ] Titans at that point to remind me of the fact that I'm not as good as them so in your estimation is the presence of an ego something which artificially limits the size of the vision of how high you want to climb yeah 100 and because it's you cannot you can't both say that you are you cannot admit death sits and say you're awesome at the same time in my opinion like I can't say like I suck at all these things and then also be like I'm the best you can't do it you either like you suck at all these things and I think it's the Dunning Kruger effect which is like the more you the more you learn about something the more the more you realize you don't know and so I think that if you have a tiny tiny subset of things that you are studying and a tiny subset of people you're comparing yourself to then it it's really easy to feel awesome about yourself but if you compare yourself to I mean I compare myself every day to Warren Buffett and like he's my app him and Monger like my heroes mostly because the way they lived life and what they like just everything about the way they lived is something that I just love and like I have Buffett's net worth by age tracked and I have like mine tracked and I'm like all right just gotta stay above that line at the moment I am right now but like I had a you know like his world was different yeah like I got Warren didn't have Warren to learn from yes very interesting it's um I mean you took we spoke about this at the very very start where you were saying you have the opportunity of using the blueprint that has been laid down by me yeah so if you've got nothing to lose do um do the me thing yeah you know you have all of the mistakes all of the failures and all of the successes and he there was another one where you said the rarer you are the rarer the people are who share your perspective in this way the greater your success the fewer people you can share it with I was playing with this quote from a land about on from the school of life for ages which was uh loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind and I'm really not sure because since I've been in Austin the complexity of Mind thing which is that hasn't stopped but the loneliness changed and I figured that that was a big function of change of environment and maybe like whatever embracing or an acceptance of of what was going on but again is this a byproduct of success that a lot of people don't necessarily realize it's a price that's going to be need to be paid if you want to achieve a ton of success you end up at this rarified strata out in the troposphere somewhere and you're like well you're like five people that I can talk to that understand what I'm going through at the moment or another question as well is that a combination of hubris and self-delusion like is that true or other things that the bus driver or the lady that serves you at Whole Foods can actually like relate to you on so two questions one is I would probably reject the notion that it's a prize overall because like being in like if you think about it as a mountain there's less there's less square footage at the top of the mountain just is there's fewer people there and the air is thinner it's harder to get there harder to breathe right and you have to adjust it you have to acclimate and the people that are around you like there are fewer of them but you can make the argument that they have even more context than anyone else possibly could so maybe the relationship you have are potentially deeper even if they're not humans don't need that many relationships so like you just have a smaller pool to choose from but like most people only have two or three good relationships in their life anyways and so like you just have a narrower pool that you can make that selection from and um I mean of the people that I have interacted with who are far above that above me on the mountain um that's been there that's what they've relayed to me um but it's only bad if you think it's a cost if you're okay with it because there are plenty of people who are lonely right now and don't have [ __ ] so and there's you know and you already know this but like there's something being lonely and Solitude you know um and one is seen as bad the other scene is fine or good so in some circles that scene is self-care so uh so to me it just means that like I think your tolerance or your standard for friends raises and I'll share this and hopefully it comes off the right way I entered communities as I was coming up and was like wow everyone here is bigger than me and then I was able to through achievement rise through that and then I lost context with that group and so I think there's just more free agency a friendship that happens on your climb up because you're just moving between strata more frequently than it is that if I settled at one of these levels then I would eventually find all the people at that rung but if you're constantly on the move up the mountain then more of that is in transitionary Period on the on the climb and it's only a problem if you'd hate it I don't what don't you hate you don't hate the fact that sort of people come and go that some of these relationships are kind of transient yeah it just doesn't bother me because I think it's like a should statement which is like one of my big things it's like why should I why does it have to be why must it doesn't must anything it just is that way and that's fine talking about social media we mentioned this earlier on what are your predictions for the next six months to a couple of years in terms of what you think is going to be big any focuses or any interesting trends that you're noticing at the moment I will stay first off that I'm not a social media expert by any stretch but just you know I think AI is going to be the main driving force behind the future of social media and I don't know how we're going to deal with it um I mean there's already the Deep fakes of Rogan doing entire podcasts with Steve Jobs that are gone out there and the entire thing is both created and recorded with AI and so I think it'll be really interesting because right now it's still not as good as the best creators but in a few machine Generations it'll make the best content every time in seconds and I'm not sure what it's going to I think that I know the verification check mark is going to matter more it'll change in its meaning right now I mean status in the future it'll mean real person um so that I'll make that prediction that the verification of Bot versus human will become more important in the future I can make that prediction um and that there will be more AI generated content in the future than there is today um and how we respond to it I don't know it's scary to think that what we basically had for the last five years or so since the algorithm started to get really tight is a three-way feedback mechanism from algorithms designing better delivered content to users it also nudges the user's preferences so that they are easier and more predictable to predict that was that two-way street was something I learned from Stuart Russell is [ __ ] amazing uh everybody needs to understand that it's not just you programming the algorithm it's the algorithm programming you and it's one of the reasons that it explains increasing Division and extremity because if you are far right or far left or super whatever or super the other thing it makes you way easier to predict and that's a byproduct of any algorithmic optimizing function and then the third element of that is audience capture by the creators because they are the third element of the creation of the content right that they go how well did that perform uh oh well we will red meet that a little bit more in a little bit more in a little bit more and then you end up on your knees like cooking for the audience right the fourth element of this is going to be then you are able to algorithmically create content that understands the back end of the algorithm that can nudge preferences and can get feedback and all of that I mean that to me is [ __ ] me if we think that you know like the degree of over bearingness that social has on our lives at the moment like that's a very very big deal we'll cut out the middle man the Creator being the middleman and then just becomes a vertically integrated platform that creates content on its own using Ai and just feeds it directly to the audience that's why as soon as those uh the AI images of hot girls came out and then chat GPT you go look like only fans you're no longer an agency you're now a tech company that should be the move that you make every single person should have their own curated wifey girlfriend online and that's that's what you that's your thing like and it would be infinitely scalable you know like the perfect Dirty Talk completely curated and twiddled to your specific whatever it is uh but that doesn't bode particularly well for how much limbic hijack and freedom people have from social media because it is only going to become more and more compelling which isn't necessarily a good thing I mean I good bad no idea um I I think there will probably be a little bit of a counter movement um of people who want to do more things in person make social media human again all right well you know an interesting thought experiment that I had I was like because we've we've taken some things and I I do think AI is going to happen but like I said it will continue um but I was like we accept all technology as inevitable and I was thinking about this and I was like has there ever been a technology that humans have created that we were like nah we shouldn't do this I thought about it I was like there is one nuclear bombs we all were like I think it's better if we don't we should just not do this and everyone just like agreed we're like we're not going to do this and I I think the the rate of AI how disaggregated it is like will prevent that from happening but I just thought about that as like it just there hasn't been any other technological thing that I've seen besides nuclear bombs that we all together were like this isn't good for us have you seen how tabletop genetic sequencing machines work no this is a really good example of what you're talking about so the way that pretty much all of them are cloud based and in order to sequence whatever it is that you're looking to sequence it sends the the request up to the cloud and there's three gradings there's green Amber and red and if it's green you can just do it no one checks if there's Amber you have to submit a proposal for what it is where it's going BSL level Etc security security if it's right you just can't do it and then presumably someone comes around and goes excuse me what the [ __ ] are you doing trying to make smallpox yeah um but that there's been I think it's either two or three times in the history of Gene sequencing there has been a moratorium placed globally on this everyone's gone every [ __ ] machine goes off everything stop until we work out what's going on so there are situations that's a great example like cloning as you just said as soon as you start to atomize that and disaggregate it and distribute it between enough different actors how are you going to be able to control you know and the the other thing is with genetic sequencing the the kind of machines that you need the hardware is complex yeah it's expensive and it's rare yeah the hardware is not complex for anybody can code and the reward is everything it's the world it's the world it's it's domination it's money it's success it's all of those things this is why I don't know man like the [ __ ] the Techno Optimist thing ever since I read super intelligence by Nick boss from five or six years ago I just don't see an AGI future where stuff doesn't get [ __ ] uh I don't know would whether we get the general bit of AGI super AGI is like still up for a big part of debate but if you end up creating this very strange World in which everyone's limically hijacked with their own personal news feed of like perfectly remember Cambridge analytica and the um those scandals around the Hillary Clinton ads it's like I know you're prep references and we're going to create these perfectly done ads so okay I mean the ads are still created by a human and it was still you were bucketed into a content with other men of this age with these interests in this area with these voting habits imagine if every single news feed not just post news feed was perfectly curated to maximize time says hey Chris like that's the first line of every ad yeah crazy yeah but it might just be the same as email the first time there was personalized email all of a sudden you stop becoming responsive to your own name um so like I think though I think they'll be push-pull um on that stuff but uh I'm with you on the AGI long term you know as a weird thought experiment if you think about what God looks like in terms of most most definitions they're like an omniscient omnipotent being and I think we're just creating that like what does AI know it knows everything right what can it do everything immediately like weird usually God would be benevolent yes rolling the benevolence in there yeah might be good if we could it's long God's long-term benevolent uh but short term sometimes mean yeah you are true it's definitely wrath yeah in almost all things what are you working on now what can people expect from you next uh 100 leads 100 million dollar leads uh which is the second book in the 100 million dollar series um is going to come out this year so that's exciting uh we will we will be done the the edited final draft uh within seven days so I'm like it's been uh we put in 3 500 hours um together my editor and I um combined over the last two years doing it so it is the first four to six hours of my day every day like before I came here I was editing the book and that's what I did yesterday and that's what I did before um so that it could be really really good and so that's that's the that's the big creative side of me is the is the book it'll be 99 Cents there you go I get 33 of that by the way um yes yes we're having a rich um and then the rest of uh my life is all about deals it's just uh we've got some really interesting companies that we're investing in um very very pumped on that side um so yeah if you've got a one to ten million dollar ebitda business uh and you would like a growth partner go to acquisition.com and let us know I really appreciate you I really really enjoyed this today it's been cool to come and see so thank you for having me appreciate it hopefully the audience got what they wanted what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe face foreign

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 1,041,182

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, Chris Williamson modern wisdom, modern wisdom podcast, chriswillx, Chris Williamson Modern Wisdom Podcast, Alex hormozi, Leila hormozi, hormozi, $100 million, 100 million dollar company, how to build a successful marriage, Alex and Leila Hormozi, Alex & Leila Hormozi, Grant Cardone, how to be better, self improvement, human behaviour, psychology, business, resilience, ego, Alex hormozi twitter

Id: JuNOFW-oVn8

Length: 106min 5sec (6365 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2023