Speaker 1I had this experience of I am one with everything and everything is good. It was like getting hooked on heroin. I was like, whatever the f*** that is, I'm obsessed.
Speaker 2I'm excited to have you here, Joe. Welcome to the podcast. I don't know if you know kind of what this podcast is all about, but basically the people who listen to this podcast are very much like me and Sam. We're business junkies. We're entrepreneurs. We're sort of perpetually always starting things, but also students of the game. Always trying to learn. You've done many things. You started your life story in 10 seconds. It was kind of like a kind of punk rock kid to discovering an entire area of wisdom to go work in. You've been in the business world as a VC, and now you coach some of the highest level players of the game. You are one of the coaches to some of the top CEOs and entrepreneurs in the game, including Sam Altman and some other friends that we, we were talking about before we started. And so we're really excited to have you here.
Speaker 3Are you able to name drop at all? Can we give you like 10 seconds just to brag?
Speaker 1The names that I can drop are the ones that are on the website. I find that it's better if you all name drop for me than me name drop.
Speaker 2We've seen Mark Pincus. We've seen Sam Altman. We've seen Eric Tornberg. Ev Williams, I think.
Speaker 1Ev is a good one. Yeah. Stacey Philpott-Brown. She was head of Google India and ran TaskRabbit.
Speaker 3Is your specialty like type A high achievers that just need a little bit of help? Like, how do you summarize the you're starting here and you end up here?
Speaker 1No, I really like to have a variety of people, you know, like all sorts of people. The only thing that I think all of all the people that I work with have in common is they're ambitious. Only some of them are maximalists, but they're all super ambitious.
Speaker 2What's a maximalist? I don't even know what that is. Yeah. What's maximalist?
Speaker 1Maximalist is someone who's like, I want it. I want it all right now and I can get it all right now. I would put like Sam Altman in the maximalist category. Any limitation that a normal person would see, they're just like, no, we can figure out how to do both. Is that achievable? No, I don't think it's achievable entirely, but I think that much more is achievable if you think that way. Right? So the limitation, like limiting beliefs are like hold us back dramatically.
Speaker 2Let me ask you a question about limiting beliefs. I had never heard this phrase. So I went to a Tony Robbins event and then he started explaining it. And I started now, then I started seeing it everywhere in myself and my, my family members, different people where people, we tell ourselves these stories. Can you, can you talk a little bit about this? Cause I think it's pretty universal.
Speaker 1Yeah. The idea of a limiting belief outwardly is just any thought process that you have holding you back. And so I'll give you a one that probably everybody has experienced. They have some sort of transformation, something happens, and then they ask themselves, will it last? That's a great limiting belief. Because all that really is, is just a whole bunch of anxiety presenting itself as a thought process for you to believe. And in, instead of saying like, oh, every learning that I've ever had ebbs and flows, like I've totally learned stuff and then I've forgotten it. And then I relearn it, or I've been able to make that shot in golf and then I can't make it, but then I learned to make it over time that there's this natural pendulation of learning that occurs. And so the ebbs and flows are actually good. Because that is what learning is instead it's, oh, I might lose this thing. And then they have a moment where they've lost this moment of transformation and then they go, oh, I've lost it, which is a second limiting belief. So that would be like a very common limiting belief that people have, or they're like, they're on a diet and they're like, will I be able to maintain the diet? And then they have that one piece of chocolate cake and they're like, oh, well, I couldn't maintain the diet. Right. As if they couldn't like just have the piece of chocolate cake and then go back home. And go back to the diet.
Speaker 2Well, you don't need to make it personal, Joe. I don't appreciate that. Sam, when we say limiting belief, does one pop into your head?
Speaker 3Yeah. Like, for example, you have to grind really hard and do tons of stuff that you don't like in order to get to the end result, which in this case, let's say selling a company or making a lot of money. And you must suffer and suffer and suffer. And once you achieve whatever the end goal is, you will be at a place where you are new and happy. That's a great one.
Speaker 1Hypothetically. Yeah. You know, I've heard that. Yeah. Asking for a friend. Yeah. There's two beliefs in there. The first one is that you have to suffer to achieve what you want to achieve or that you have to grind to achieve what you want to achieve. So I have a client who I can't mention their name and probably one of the most successful VCs ever has been involved in some of the biggest companies. And most of their investments have been in big companies. I think they work like three or four hours a week and they had like a grind period of a couple of days. I mean, a couple of years kind of in their 20s, but they just just don't work really hard. And I can name another 10 people who have been able to be incredibly successful without grinding like that. They've just been able to be in the right place at the right time. And then the secondary piece of that grind is.
Speaker 3If you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so I worked with HubSpot. To put together a step-by-step process showing you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals. And the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision? Things like that. And it's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes. And I'll show you how I use it. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.
Speaker 1Here's something that I've never seen. I've never seen a venture company or a startup fail because of lack of effort. Everybody is like anybody who's got a startup in Silicon Valley. Anyways, they are efforting all the time. And yet a tremendous amount of them fail. But the idea is if I work harder, I'll succeed. But obviously that's not true. So then the question is like, what is the most important thing? And it's usually the relationships you hold and the decisions that you make.
Speaker 3How do you teach people how to flip that? Because like, for example, if I go to the news all day, I see like these big exits or these big funding rounds. And you constantly, particularly right now, have this feeling of I'm being left behind because everything's changing so fast. And you just said it's the relationships. So that's one of these things where you read a book like How to Win Friends and Influence People. And you're like, duh, that's obvious. And it almost. It almost becomes a reminder. And yet I'm like, but how do you tactically make that switch where you say enjoy the relationships, not seeking the outcome?
Speaker 1Yeah. So if you're going to make any transformation effectively in your system, you have basically three levels that you need to address it at. The first level is the level of the mind. And this is what we're usually pretty good at. Meaning most people know that they should work out, but it doesn't mean that they work out. Most people know they shouldn't be dicks to the. People who they need to run their business, but not everybody is. So intellectually understanding, that's actually usually the easiest part for Americans is to actually get that to grok that. And then there's the emotional level, the mammalian level of the brain. So the prefrontal cortex is the thinking level of the brain is very human. And the mammalian level, I would like call it the heart. I call it the emotional. And so a lot of the times if we're trying to make transformation, we have to look at what's emotionally needed to make that transformation. And then there's the part of our system that's more of the reptilian. It's the nervous system. And is that nervous? Can we address the nervous system? So if you want to make real transformation, you have to address all three levels of the system.
Speaker 2Can you walk through an example of that? So like, what's the transformation? Because, you know, you had me at the head, you sort of lost me at the heart. And then by the time we got to the nervous system, I didn't know what to do. I don't know how to, I don't have the instruction manual for that one. So let's take an example and walk through it.
Speaker 1Let's do an example that probably touches most of the entrepreneurs that listen to this. Self-reliance. So the self-reliance pattern is basically a pattern that somewhere when you were young, you were taught that you had to fend for yourself. And 90% of the time, it meant you had to fend for other people. You had to take care of other people. Maybe that's because your parents were super critical, or maybe it's because you had an alcoholic father and you needed to take care of that father, or you had a depressed mother. But somewhere you learned, hey, no one's going to be there to take care of me. I got to take care of myself. My needs aren't going to be met otherwise. And then the outcome of that is that those people have a hard time asking for help. Typically, they have a hard time owning what they want, being able to just say, this is clearly what I want. They usually have an authority problem, which means they neither want to be the authority because they don't trust the authority of their childhood. They don't fully step into their own authority, and they kind of rebel against other authorities. So they have this mixed relationship with authority, typically. And then they have a very hard time announcing that they're hurt. It's the last move that they'll make is to say, hey, I'm hurt. And so that's the pattern that comes out of self-reliance. So now, how would you address it? The first way is to talk about the way I just talked about it. I saw both of you and probably most of the people in the audience click. Oh, that's all related, really? To be able to tie that together, to show that this is a pattern that came from your childhood, it is in particular a reality. And so that kind of like creates a little space for different action, different movement, but oftentimes just seeing it's not going to really deal with it. So then there's the emotional level. The emotional level is two things, right? Typically, but there can be others, but typically there's an emotion of helplessness that I refuse to feel. I'm not going to feel helplessness. I will go and like storm the gates of hell. I will grind forever over the idea of
Speaker 3feeling helpless. Dude, I'll walk into the grocery store and not see what I want and refuse to ask the counter guy where the thing is. So trust me, I'll leave. We're not eating that tonight.
Speaker 1Exactly. So there's this feeling of helplessness that those people will absolutely not feel. Because as a kid, if you felt that helplessness, if you're like, holy shit, there's nobody here taking care of me, it's like death and destruction. So you don't do that. And so this feeling of helplessness never got to be felt as a kid. And so emotionally, it means you have to learn how to understand and how to actually look forward to and enjoy the helplessness, which sounds radical and impossible. But the way that this works is what I will call the golden algorithm, what we call the golden algorithm. So the emotion that you're trying to avoid is the emotion you're inviting in the exact way that you're trying to avoid it. So you don't want to feel helpless in the grocery store. So you don't ask for help, which means you walk away with the emotion that you're trying to help, which means you walk away without the thing in the grocery store. Or you don't want to feel helpless about your business not doing well. So you grind, which keeps you more burnt out, making less good decisions, destroys your relationship. So you feel more helpless. So the action that you're taking to not feel the thing is actually what perpetuates the thing, in this case, helplessness. So learning how to say, oh, I'm helpless. I know how to experience it. I know how to experience that feeling. I know how to actually go, oh, this is just an emotional thing that's moving through me. And I don't have to be ruled by it. It's not my boss anymore. Because if all your decisions are based on not feeling helpless, it means there are certain risks you're not going to take. It means you're not going to rely on other people that you need to to scale the business, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So that would be the emotional.
Speaker 2Is the right way to think about it? It's a counter to the idea of, what you seek, you know, what you seek, you shall find. It's almost like what you avoid, you shall experience. Yeah. Yeah. The self. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3But if we were going to play on like the phrase that what Sean just said or whatever, I think you said, whatever emotion you try to avoid, you end up inviting to your life. So then what's the opposite? What's the inverse of that? What's like the sentence that is the solution? Fall in love with the emotions you're avoiding.
Speaker 1Like, think about it this way. It's just like working out. You want to work out, you're going to have to like lean into the burn. And eventually you're like, I like working out. I like that burn. It's the same thing for emotions. And then on like a day-to-day basis,
Speaker 3let's just say that we are doing the hard work or like this has to suck in order to get a good result. Yeah. Do you tell your, what do you tell yourself every day for the next two years? Like, are there like common inner thoughts that you find to be productive for this emotional state? So that,
Speaker 1answer is part of the pattern you're trying to interrupt. What do I do every day? One, every day. Two, what do I do? Those are the two things that make you grind. It's up to me. I got to do it. There's no grace. There's no surrender. There's no letting other people help me. And I got to do it every day. What's the thing that I do that I can control, that I can grind at, that will fix my grind? So if you're really taking a look at it, it's actually not, it doesn't work like that at all. And the cool thing is it can often just be, I've literally seen the moment that somebody fully understands the beauty of the emotion. Oh, I can't wait to feel helpless because when I feel helpless, what I know is that I am not delegating well. What I know is that I'm not letting other people help me. What I know is that my decision-making is constrained by a false limitation. So I'm so stoked that I'm feeling it because I have those three signals now. And I'm going to go take action on those three things because I know that signal in my system. And as soon as they get that, they don't, there's no more effort required.
Speaker 2Is the right way to think of these feelings as like a messenger, kind of the way you're describing it? If you reframe them as a messenger or a signal, then it's not something to, you know, you don't shoot the messenger. You don't avoid the messenger. You take the message and then you use it and move through it. Is that the right way to think about this? Or is that a-
Speaker 1It's kind of half of it. The other half is to see that the emotional thing that's happening is, let's say like it's a tube of energy, right? And so like a hose with water running through it. And if it runs clear, meaning that hose isn't kinked, then life is good. If it kinks in one way or another, then there's all sorts of problems that happen. So let's take anger as an example. So you have anger moving through your system and you kink it one way and it's like this, nice dress. And you kink it another way and it's like this, I'm not angry. I just need you to do the thing. I'm not angry. And you kink it another way and it's like this, you mother f***er, f*** you. But if you unkink it, if you actually let that emotion go through, which means you're not having resistance or shame, you don't think that you're bad, you're not having a good time, you're not having a good time, you're not having a good time. You're not having a good time. You're not having a good time. You're not having a good time. You're not having a good time. You're not having a good time. You're not having a good time. You're not having a good time. Then anger looks like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. It's determination and clarity. And when you see CEOs do this, where they go, oh, right, I'm constantly pissed because I constantly feel like I'm alone in it. And I constantly feel like no one's got my back. Even though I have 20,000 people showing up to work every day and none of them have ever thought, boy, I really hope the CEO is upset with me today. Or boy, I hope that the work I did doesn't please the CEO. So you got 20,000 people trying to please a CEO who feels all alone in it. And so they're getting angry. And when they realize, oh, wait, if I don't resist this, if I just listen to it, then there's actually some wisdom here. And then they start listening to it without that shame, without that kink. And all of a sudden they're like, oh, that means I have a boundary. It means that's something inefficient is happening in the company and
Speaker 3I need to go pay attention there. You seem very into words and I buy into that. I think you like use these phrases and then it kind of like shapes the way you think. And you called out some of the words that I use and that's pretty helpful. But are there other like on the emotional level words or phrases that you have found that if you change or shift or tell yourself consistently that they seem to have positive impacts on type A people?
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. However, the awareness is more important than the words. So let's take, for example, a thing that is, is effective is, you know, positive affirmations or, you know, visualizing things going right. I'm going to go into a meeting and I'm going to visualize things going right. So you can do that. And there's a certain amount of effectiveness. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right and you feel the emotions of it going right. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right in the present instead of in the future. So you can actually feel what it's happening right now. So all of those things that's like, that's really effective. But if you really have the awareness of what's behind that, then it's going to be a lot more powerful. And so what's actually happening, say with the positive reinforcement is that you're changing your identity. You're saying, okay, I'm no longer this person. I'm going to visualize myself as this person, and that's going to change my identity. And if you're really looking at identity shift and being comfortable with identity shift, then you also have to visualize the negative outcomes so that you don't get scared of them. The samurai use this, the, I mean, so many traditions use this, which is visualizing their own death. And the Tibetan book of living and dying samurai. And then also what was it?
Speaker 3It's like the Marcus Aurelius. Yeah. There's a great stoic book, stoicism book where you like close your eyes for five minutes and you assume everyone's dead. The worst things on earth, you open up your eyes and you say, none of that is true. How grateful am
Speaker 1I? Yeah. Right. So, so the, if you visualize this and you actually feel the destruction that you're trying to avoid, then you've already lived it. So you don't have to be scared of it anymore. So I'll give you an example of this with my, with my wife. So we've been married 27 years. I've been married to at least three women in that 27 years. She's like, she's changed. Dramatically. I've changed dramatically. And so we come to points in our relationship where it's not working for us. And what our, what our path is, is that we both grieved the relationship. It's over. We're getting a divorce. We visualize the divorce. It's horrible. We like have the entire experience because once we've had it, we don't have to be scared of it anymore. And so when we show up, we act as ourselves. We don't try to accommodate. We don't walk on eggshells. We don't, we're like, no, this is what I want. And so we're like, no, this is what I want. And so we're like, no, this is what I want. And then we can actually have a conversation, how we can both be happy as we are now, not trying to save the marriage. The visualization thing's interesting. The
Speaker 3Inner Game of Tennis talks a lot about that. Great book. And I actually just listened to a talk by the coach of George St. Pierre, who's one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time. They talk about preparing fighters for the most dangerous, scary sport there is. And he was like, we find the competitors' walkout music. We wear our outfit. We're like a dress rehearsal. We listen to the music constantly. And so we do that when we practice. And we practice the walkout. We have the bright lights. This way, you are visualizing this to the point of not just visualizing, but you hear it. And he was even saying something about the smell. They try to use the same gloves, so it smells the same. And this way, when you're going into this thing that's a life-changing thing, you have been there before. Because you can sort of trick yourself into thinking this is real
Speaker 1and you are prepared. It's the same thing. So I don't know how many entrepreneurs I've walked through the visualization of the death of their company. Everybody gets laid off. People go broke. Same thing. It's the same thing. You visualize the end of the company so that you can stop acting from fear. And you can actually build the company that you want to build and be the person that you want to
Speaker 3be. Do you do that daily? Monthly? Like how often should someone practice that? It's more until the
Speaker 1fear is gone. And it's not really how often, but it's how you do it. So example would be like if you do it and you actually deeply feel the emotions of it, then it's probably you don't have to do it very many times until the fear dissipates. And that's going to like it's how you do it is more
Speaker 2than repetition and reps. And what is the how you do it? You sit in a room, turn the lights off, like walk me through. How do you actually do this?
Speaker 1I just sit down, close my eyes and visualize everything. And anything that I don't want to visualize, I slow way the down and feel everything I don't want to feel. The big trick is to feel the things you don't want to feel. The reason that that's the trick is because like if I said to you, like most entrepreneurs, one of the things that they get scared about is being homeless. And who knows why, but it is something that many entrepreneurs get scared about. And if I said to you, hey, you're going to be homeless, but you are going to be happier, more content. You're going to feel great. Like how the thing of the best time you've ever felt in your entire life, it's going to be 10x that all the time. If you knew that to be true, how scared are you to be homeless? I want to be homeless. Right, exactly. So what's actually occurring is that we're scared of an emotional experience, not an actual experience. And neurologically, this is proven. So if I was to take the emotional center out of your brain, you would have an IQ that is the same as it is now, but you would have an incredibly hard time making decisions and your total life would fall apart. So, and you can read a book about this. It's called Descartes' Error. It was written by a neuroscientist in like 2012 or something. And so we've known this for a long time. So basically, if I pull out that emotional part of your brain, it's going to take you like a half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It's going to take you an hour or two to decide where to have lunch. So your whole life falls apart because you can't make decisions.
Speaker 2And this was people who had brain damage or like a stroke in a certain area that, and you've, oh, your logical center is still working and decisions are logical, right? Yes. And it's like, no, no, not, not right. Not right. Not even simple decisions. Right.
Speaker 1The only decisions that aren't a emotionally based are the decisions that bypass the emotional center, like a snake coming at you. Like you jump back without it, without it going through that part of your brain.
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Speaker 3What about the nervous system bit? Because that seems like the most challenging. I've read the body keeps the score and I like intuitively know that like trauma is a physical thing, but like to put it on a really practical level, you ever get like a Slack or an email from a coworker that says, can we talk? And you're like, they're quitting. I feel like you feel like you get goosebumps and you're like, you feel something. How do you, how do you address this
Speaker 1at a neurological level? Yeah. So nervous system, that's like a super tricky one. There's a lot of things that you can do, but this is like, it's all very primal. And this is where like repetition and do I do this every day? This is where it really comes in handy. So there's not like an intellectual or emotional aha that can change a nervous system just like that. Yeah. Occasionally like high doses of like psilocybin or something I've seen change nervous systems, but it's very undependable. And so this is actually where repetition matters in the nervous system. So one of the, like the key principles is how do you allow yourself to experience pleasure more and more deeply because pleasure means that we're not under attack. So our nervous system thinks that we're under attack. When we're not. And so it, it amps up. Now, sometimes that occurs because we have an abusive self-talk. And so if there's, if I had, if I was your boss and I was like, oh, you, you that up, you did that wrong. What, like, why are you biting your nails? Why aren't you looking at Joe while you're, while you're podcasting? Why are you taking notes instead of being connected to your co-host? Like if I was doing that perpetually, it would cause you stress because you're perpetually under attack, but often we're doing that to ourselves. And so that's activating the nervous system. So that is the intellectual, that's like how the, how the intellect and the nervous system relate. But there's a whole bunch of things that also happen with the nervous system. I'll use my own example in this is my mom, German, super rigid woman loved me dearly in her capacity. But like, if I was five minutes, early, I was late and I would get in trouble. You know, it was like that kind of a thing and like things needed to be very perfect. And so there was a sense of obligation. And if I wasn't going to fulfill that obligation, I was going to be in trouble. And so my nervous system gets activated when, you know, I'm a minute late for a podcast, though, it's not going to affect anything. My nervous system is going to get messed up. So there's some nervous system stuff that happens just like through training. And so one, the kind of the overall background thought process is how do I allow as much pleasure as possible as to like to reset my baseline. But the second thing is to really start to notice and be present with for like one or two seconds, those moments when my nervous system is activated or when your nervous system is activated. So when that phone call comes in and you're like, oh shit, you just stop. And you're like, what is it like to be me? Two seconds. And then you go ahead and do your thing. Like go ahead and be anxious again. Like don't, don't try to control yourself because trying to control your anxiety is just an anxiety producing, right? Like it just, it just creates more of the same thing. It's just being really, really in touch with what's going on. Like bringing awareness into that moment is all that's really necessary, but it's necessary to do it over and over and over again to see what's pretty soon. It unpacks what's going on beneath your nervous system. Your intellect starts to understand it, but your intellect will never get it at first. It, it really requires lots of just being with present for one or two seconds when you notice that activation occur.
Speaker 2Hey, can I ask you about avoiding conflict? Something that I, I thought, you know, I think I'm usually pretty good at, but man, lately there's been a situation where I'm just, I can see myself do it. I can feel myself do it. And I'm like, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not supposed to be doing it, but I'm doing it. I, by God, I'm doing it. And, uh, you know, I don't really have a lot of language or kind of experience or wisdom around this. And I was really hoping you could help me out with that. So, so can we talk about conflict, avoiding conflict, uh, especially with those who we're closest to? Yeah. I think it's maybe the hardest.
Speaker 1Yeah. So I think intellectually the, the important thing to recognize about conflict, it is imagine you're working in a factory. And somebody can tell you where the machine is going to break, or someone can point to you. This is where the machine's broken. This is where the machine's broken. And you're like, great, thanks. And you ignore it. That's what avoiding conflict is like, because conflict is the place where efficiency can be gained, whether it's in a marriage or in a business or between business partners. So I'll give you a, um, um, a story about this. So recently we had a facilitator in our business and somebody who probably wants to be a facilitator in our business and the, who felt like the facilitator wasn't doing a good job and wanted to give the facilitator feedback. And we have a very open culture where everybody can give anybody feedback. And we could say, you know, you need to go to their boss and then their boss will have the conversation because we're going to avoid the conflict. And, and we're in as a, as a company deciding like how, Is this feedback going to work? And what we realize is that if this person gives feedback to the facilitator and the facilitator gets hurt, that's something for the facilitator to work on. And if this person is doing it out of some sort of arrogance or narcissism, like I think I can do a better job, and the feedback is shit, then that needs to be addressed. But either way, if he has arrogance and narcissism, addressing that's going to make our business better. If this facilitator isn't doing a good job, that's going to make our business better. And so every time that we're avoiding conflict in a business, we're looking at a place that we could potentially make the system better and we're not going to do it.
Speaker 2Right. Yeah, you're avoiding progress, not conflict.
Speaker 1Exactly. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3Yeah, but that's what a lot of people feel like. Like, for example, I've talked to like really... Big shot tycoon types, and they'll be like, I need to let go of this person, but I'm too afraid of the conversation. And so like you just said this on an intellectual level, totally, I'm on board. Totally agree. Everything you're saying makes tons of sense. And yet I'm still like, but I don't have the courage or I don't have the toolbox or the language to do this effectively.
Speaker 1Yeah. So yeah, let's get into that. But I think that the... I do want to say one more thing intellectually too, because it's... If I go in and monitor a company's health, I literally just use two metrics. How quickly do they have the hard conversation and how quickly do they resolve it? So let's say you have a CEO who's a yeller. I guarantee you that a lot of hard conversations aren't going to be had and they're not resolving quickly. And let's say you have a CEO who's conflict avoidant. A lot of hard conversations aren't going to be had and a lot of things are going to be avoided. So it doesn't really matter what the actions are of people. To think about those two metrics as the health of an organization is just a great way to go in and very quickly see how healthy that organization is. Okay. So now how do you do it? So typically, before we get into how you do it, let's talk about the resistance to it. So the resistance is usually I'm going to be abandoned, not loved. This is a waste of my time. I'm not going to get anywhere anyway, and it's going to take so much energy. I could use the energy somewhere else. That's the second reason that people... And the third is I'm going to destroy something that I care about. Like I have the hard conversation, that person leaves, and then the company is going to collapse or then the sales department is going to collapse or whatever.
Speaker 3Is there a fourth one, which is like, I don't even know if this is a problem worth addressing. Maybe I should just give it time.
Speaker 1I feel like that's like a reason for one of the other excuses. But I'm sure that there's moments where that's the case. And sometimes there's actually some validity to that. Like I've given them feedback. I'm going to wait a couple of weeks and see what happens instead of like be on their ass every day about the thing. I can see that there would be some validity to it. And so some of that speaks to the fact that the person doesn't know how to make the conflict productive reliably. Like I have conflict and it just ends up in a worse fight that just like doesn't go the place that I want to go. So typically if I'm talking about it, let's just take... I'm going to take one example because this gets a little complex. If I'm taking just, I want to have a hard conversation with somebody, what do I do? The first thing that I'm going to do is I am going to not solve the problem for them. To most people in a hard conversation say, hey, sales is off. And what I need you to do is make more phone calls. And we're going to monitor those through this set of data, right? That's incredibly disempowering. And that conversation usually doesn't go very well. But if you say instead, hey, sales are off. I need a plan. Please present it to me tomorrow about how we're going to get sales back on track. That's a far more powerful way to do it because you're not, you're not disempowering the person and you're not coming in and telling them what to do. So letting them solve the problem for you rather than you solve the problem for them, you solving the problem for them is self-reliance again. And it's what most CEOs do. Instead of letting them solve the problem for you, which is far more empowering to them. And it makes them feel like, like they can't blame you for it. So that's one of the like skills that I would teach. The other one is I would really try to understand their situation before having the hard conversation. So I'd ask a lot of open-ended questions. I would make sure that they feel very heard. And so I understand what's going on. So as the CEO, I sit down and I'm like, I have an idea of what's going on over here in billing. But I don't. I do not have the full picture. If I have the full picture, I should fire the person because they're not doing a job good enough where I don't have to pay attention. So the first thing I want to do is really ask their context and understand what's actually going on with them and see like if they're even happy with the job that they're doing or what's going on actually. Another thing I would do is I would actually be very vulnerable about where I am with it. So I would say something like, wow. I feel like we've lost trust. Like I noticed that like, I'm not trusting that this is going to get done. And so I'm not having confidence around this and that sucks for me and that's got to suck for you. And so I want to know how we're going to fix it. So I'm going to be very vulnerable with how I am rather than making about them. So this is again, back to the self-reliance piece, entrepreneurs who are self-reliant have a hard time expressing when they're hurt, have a hard time expressing some sort of. This isn't working for me really well. And therefore the problem is always about the other person instead about them helping fix you, fix your issue, which is the way an organization is designed, right? The energy is backwards. If you're trying to like fix everybody's issues rather than everybody's fixing your issues. Like if I was to invest in your company as an example, and I got to pick one person who was just stoked as hell, I would pick the CEO. Because that's going to be the best investment. The CEO is happy with the way the company is going. The company is going the way it should be going. If the head of marketing is happy, but the CEO is miserable about the way that company is going, that's not a good investment. So the happiness of the CEO is where everybody needs to be pointed. It doesn't mean that the CEO's job isn't to be helpful to people, but it means that the general energy of the company is supposed to be towards pleasing the CEO, making the CEO happy. Which self-reliant CEOs have a really hard time like getting through their head because that puts them in the position of the authority that they don't particularly want to be because authority was bad in their childhood. So that's an example. So those are all ways that I would talk to somebody if I'm having that hard conversation. So there are like very practical skills of having hard conversations, but the biggest skill over all of this stuff is... The internal space, if you feel like you're bad for having the conversation, if you feel like this is completely reasonable for me to ask, if you feel like I'm actually helping this person become more empowered and I'm doing them a service and helping them become a better at their job, like that state of mind has a huge impact on how the person receives it. So I'll just give you like a very short example. I was like, hey, Sean, you're such a dick. Like, why are you such a dick? Or if I said, oh, Sean, you're being a dick. You're going to take those two things very, very differently. Because in one case, I don't want you to be a dick. And in the other case, I'm like, oh, you know, you're being a dick. That's okay. And so your attitude coming in, if you're scared. You're like more likely to get attacked. You're more likely to have a bad experience with it. So your calm, your what I would call vagal authority, your nervous system authority coming into the room and your understanding of you're here to be of service to this person is going to make all the difference.
Speaker 3You have this cool quote. I think I don't have in front of me. I think it was something like negative self-talk is. Always wrong or something like that, which like I read that. And I was that was kind of shocking to me. And it seems like self-talk is a really important thing. And a lot of like ambitious people, I think, are like they're like their biggest hater. Most people generally. Most people. Yeah. Are you do you have any patterns that you have seen of self-talk? And what are the practical tips on improving that?
Speaker 1So there's there's like three or four different kind of self-talk abuse cycles that you like. There's like the really overt one, which is like, you're up. Why are you up? Why didn't you like, why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? There's that version. There's then there's the version of you got to do this. Now you got to do this. You got to do that. Why don't you do this? You got to do this. Don't forget to do this. You got to do this. There's another version of negative self-talk. Then there's like some like kind of hidden ones, which are like, you've got it. You can do this. It's all good. You've got this thing. You can do this thing, which you would like. Could you imagine going to? You know, Michael Jordan and going, yeah, you can do it. You can shoot the basket. I know you can, Mike. Like you would never do it because you have confidence in that person. So there's this subtle undermining saying that you actually need this, right? It's not, you're fine either way. And like, there's not like a natural confidence in it. So that's all. There's about 20 tools to work with self-talk, negative self-talk. One of the ways that you know it's negative self-talk is because it's repeating, right? So when negative self-talk starts dying in your system, when it starts atrophying, you just have a lot less thought, just as a lot less thought occurs. And the thought that you have is more like epiphanies. It's like, oh, here's a cool idea. Oh, that's a cool idea. They're not repetitive over and over again thoughts. So I'll give you just a couple really practical ones. If you try to change the self-talk, it's very inefficient. If you change the way you react, to the self-talk, it's far, far more efficient. Your self-talk is like, wow, you just really screwed up that podcast, Joe. And like most people, they listen to that the way that they would listen to a, think about the politician you hate most talking on stage. And then think about the person in the audience who's like, yep, uh-huh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Uh-huh, yeah. That's how we listen to our self-talk. Most of us listen to our self-talk, as you know, oh, you screwed that up. And it's like, yep, I screwed that up. I should do something about that. Like that's the relationship. So instead you change the reaction to it. Like, oh, you screwed that stuff up. Oh, I see how scared you are. I see, I'm right here with you. You can be scared. Or you up. Wow, that's really shitty management. Could you try to manage me in a different way, please? You up, prove it. You up. Oh, really? I think you up. So you're changing the reaction. And so like a great experiment to run on this is, think about the reaction that you want to experiment with. It doesn't have to be good or bad. It's just an experiment. And you, every time your negative self-talk happens that day, every time you remember, you react in this way that you're experimenting with. And then two days later, you do a new experiment. Two days later, you do a new experiment. So you're constantly changing the way that you're reacting to your self-talk. And just like both of you are different when you're interacting with each other than when you're interacting with your significant other or your kids, if you have them, or your best friend from college, we, the voice in our head reacts differently depending on how we treat it. And you get to start seeing that. And so that's a really simple way to start manage, not manage, but start like bringing awareness and therefore changing and transforming your negative self-talk. The other, another really good one that's just really easy, is like name, like write out here are the 20 things and negative voice in my head says the most and look for seven ways they're not true. And if you can't find them, ask your friends, because what your negative voice in your head is saying is not true. I mean, I can give you any, if you tell me anything that your negative voice in your head says to you on a regular basis, I can prove, and I can tell you five ways it's not true.
Speaker 2- Hey, can I ask you a question that sort of violates that rule, you know, never ask a man a question that a salary depends on the answer or whatever.
Speaker 1- You can try, yeah.
Speaker 2- So, you know, whenever I learn about this stuff, and as you can see, I got notes and notes right now. Like I love, I get like really fascinated by this. You're saying words like vagal authority. I'm like, oh, I gotta go look into that. I wanna learn that, I wanna learn to do this. And then within like, I would say as soon as I pass like the 90 minute mark of any of this, I'm like completely exhausted. And I almost like go through like this cycle where I start out as a idiot caveman, then I think I'm becoming this like elevated higher level being who's really in touch with everything. And then I'm like, oh my God, this is so much work. I just wanna go back to being a lovable idiot again at the end of this and like, dude, it's all good. Don't worry about it. Like, you know, I go, and I think actually recently this kind of a retard maxing kind of phrase caught on, at least in Silicon Valley, other people are probably like, what the hell is this guy talking about? But this idea of like, you know, you're trying too hard to be too smart, you're too in touch with your emotions, you're over-therapized, like there is a reaction to the reaction. And I almost wonder, like, are people better off just being kind of like more like a dog, like just dumb and happy, you know, just wagging our tail and running around and, you know, licking our butts? Like, are we just happier that way than trying to go do all this work and kind of master the psyche and all of its different parts?
Speaker 1- Yeah, that's a great question. You have, it seems like you have two questions in there. So let me address the first one, which is that cycle that you get into, which is, oh, I'm super inspired. And now I feel exhausted. And the thing that's happening there is that in your mind, you're telling yourself you have to do all this stuff. And that's what makes it exhausting rather than like, what's the one cool experiment I'm going to run this week? And that's maybe yours. Another person's is like, I have to be perfect. And so that like, takes off. Takes all the joy out of it and makes it like less effective. So to me, it's like how you approach it is incredibly important, both for the effectiveness and for whether it's worthwhile. You know, the way I think about meditation is kind of an example. One of the things that I say is meditation for most people is just self abuse because they're just sitting there trying to manage themselves for 90 minutes. Right? And there's no enjoyment in it. And so the question is like, how do you enjoy meditation? That's a question. Or how do you enjoy self-growth or self-awareness or understanding yourself better instead of making it a grind? If you can do that, then it's great. And it's totally worth it. And it's lovely. And you'll be inspired to do it. But if it becomes like this to-do list so that one day you'll be good enough so that, you know, if you make it like your company, right, which is once I get enough money and I have enough power, then I'll be happy. Once I understand myself enough and I deal with the voice in my head and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then I'll be happy and then I'll be done. Or you can be like, oh, like, what can I learn today? What's the experiment I can run? Right. And this is the same way that I would suggest if you want to learn how to market, it's the same thing. Like, what's the experiment you can run? What can you learn today? What can you read about that's fun to read about? What's the cool thing to try rather than, oh, my God, I got to do this because my business completely depends on it. Right. You're going to make a lot more progress on the first than the second.
Speaker 2I think that's a great insight. I want to come back to the second question, but just to add onto that, last year I decided to learn the piano and I had two teachers. The first teacher I went to made me almost quit the first day because we sat down and they were like, all right, so here's what you're going to need to learn. Here's the musical notation. We're going to memorize all these letters. And here's what. Then we're going to learn rhythm. We're going to learn the scales, but you can't get the scales if you don't first don't have finger control and posture. Why are you sitting like that? And like she basically presented the whole elephant I'm going to have to eat. And I was like, oh, God, I'm like, I'm just tired thinking about what all I'm going to have to do just to be able to the stupid dream of mine. How much did I really want this anyways? And then the second teacher, so I luckily I didn't quit. I just I bumped into a second teacher and then the second teacher was like, cool. So like, what made you want to do this? What's the song you like? And what would be cool if you could play? I'm like, oh, this song. She's like, oh, you know what? That's actually not that hard here. Forget the left hand. We're just going to look at the right hand and we're just going to learn this intro like we'll walk out of here. You'll be able to play this little thing. Right. And, you know, it just got and then it's like, oh, do you want to be able to play the next thing? You're gonna have to learn what a chord is. You want a chord is. And then I learned the next thing progressively. And now I can play the piano. Right. It's like that for all things in life. So what you said definitely I didn't realize the connection between those two until you
Speaker 1said that. Yeah. If anybody told us what we had to do just to make our business successful and like just handed. Like, this is everything you're going to have to do. Like most people would be like that.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. Or having kids or anything else like that. Can we can we do the second part now of are we better off just being sort of, you know, retard backs and then not over introspecting, not overly getting in touch with our feelings and just saying, like, feel good, do more doesn't feel good. Do less. Let me just move on and not overthink it.
Speaker 1It can potentially work out if you're super lucky and the world doesn't change under your feet, but it's not going to work out otherwise. Meaning like the CEO of a tech company that has really, really hard recruitment because everybody because everybody with any kind of AI degree is already recruited is going to have to have a different set of skills and understanding than the person who's running a tomato 50,000 acre tomato farm. And potentially the CEO of one is not going to be successful in the CEO of the other, even though they might be great CEOs in the business of their choice. Because one is high margin, one is low margin, one is about a certain kind of efficiency, one is about a certain kind of creativity. So if you are not self-aware, then you better have landed in a place where you by nature are going to be capable and that place can't change. But if you are going to be required to change as a human being and change who you are and your identity as a human being to maintain or continue success. Then you're just shooting yourself in the foot by not being self-aware. There's also this kind of trajectory of self-awareness. Like the beginning is, why am I doing this work? And then I can't see the change. Other people are telling me I'm changing, but I can't see the change. Why am I even doing this? And then there's like, holy shit, this life is better. And then when you hit the holy shit, life is better moment, oftentimes like two or three years for people, they really get that moment. Then it's just like, why in the hell would I ever stop this? You know, it's a little bit like working out.
Speaker 2Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click. And I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC.
Speaker 3Speaking of like working out and actually Sean's example at the piano was awesome. And we've only been talking for an hour and I'm like totally bought in. I love what you do. I believe what you were saying is true. But in the back of my head, I'm like, this sounds amazing. I'm a little overwhelmed. I don't know where to start. And if it's like working out and if you said, you know, the end goal is you want to bench 300 pounds over the next year. Like here's like a really interesting progression. And here's like some experiments or workouts you can do each week. It might be too reductive, but are there like this idea of experimenting weekly is pretty cool. That sounds exciting. And that sounds fun. Yeah. Is there like a checklist or a playbook where it's like,
Speaker 2I think starting point is a good word. Like if somebody listened to this, great. What, you know, what's a beautiful place in the next 24 hours, 48 hours that they could go? What's the thing they could do that would get them on the road?
Speaker 3Yeah. And like, what is, and then what's the progression and where are some other weekly experiments that I could like follow to improve myself?
Speaker 1Yeah. So there's, I can tell you how I did and I can tell you the resources that we have for people. So I just basically pick topics. That I was interested in, I would read something on that topic and I would design an experiment for myself and I'd run that experiment for a week. And I actually have a book that I just finished writing that will be published in like whatever year and something that has 52 experiments on different topics. And then a whole bunch of writing on these topics. What's one of them? A really cool, super cool experiment is, so right now, enjoy yourself. Don't change what you're doing at all. And, but just enjoy what you're doing 10% more, right? Totally possible, totally capable, nothing to it. So just do that five times a day for the next week. Five times a day go, oh, how do I enjoy myself without changing anything? Just 5% more, 10% more.
Speaker 3That sounds like so basic and almost stupid. And then I think of myself wanting to do that. I'm like, that's actually really helpful.
Speaker 1Yeah, super. Yeah, it's like all of a sudden, like you'll be sitting in a meeting and you'll like your whole mindset will change. And then the thing you say will change. And yeah, that's a simple, like really cool little experiment to run. The other one is, I think we talked about the one with the voice in the head. That's another great experiment to run. Another great experiment to run would be, oh yeah, this one's good. Especially if you're a grinder. Don't do anything you don't enjoy for a week. Do you go to work and you can, you can only do the shit that you enjoy. And at some point in that week, there's going to be something that happens. And I'll tell you my experience of this. I did this before I had a business and I was sitting in front of the trash and I hated taking the trash out, but I also didn't enjoy smelling the trash. So I was sitting there like, well, what do I do? Cause I've committed to not doing anything I don't enjoy. And then I was like, oh, I have to figure out how to enjoy taking out the trash. And so, that's another cool experiment is just see what it's like to live a week doing only what you enjoy. Because a lot of the lack of enjoyment that occurs is because we tell ourselves we have to endure it when we absolutely could be enjoying it.
Speaker 2So you said, you said something in that first experiment, you said, without doing anything different, enjoy it more, which to me reads like, you know, cause one version of how do I take out the trash more? Oh, I'm going to listen to my favorite song while I do it. Okay. I changed what I was doing, right? That's fair. But there's the other version, which is I'm literally not going to do anything different. I'm just going to feel it more. I'm going to like bring my awareness to it.
Speaker 1That's why there are two experiences, two experiments. Right.
Speaker 2And I had this when we sold a company and then I asked my business partner, Ben, I was like, dude, how does it feel? Big, you know, big win for you. Like, you know, first, like, how does it feel? Is it what you thought? And he's like, honestly, no, not at all. He's like, I don't feel anything.
Speaker 4Yeah.
Speaker 2And we were laughing and he didn't know what to make of it. So his meaning he put on that was like, dude, was I chasing the wrong goal this whole time? Like, am I, was I wrong in what I wanted? And what I kind of reframed or what I, my life experience was this. I was like, dude, I think all these feelings are like a muscle. You just never, how many times before this, did you feel ecstatic and triumphant and never? So what'd you think? You just start today and suddenly feel it at level 100. Like you'd never used that muscle before. So like the actual thing to do is practice using that muscle when, without having to sell your company, and then, you know, you sort of build up the capacity to feel, but you can't just, like, I think we, we think, oh, my happy is your happy, dude. I got an uncle who I'm like, his capacity to feel happy is just fundamentally higher. Like a VO two max. It's way higher than mine. Is that, does that line up with like, I've never done research.
Speaker 1This is my life experience. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Especially the positive emotions, but they're the scariest emotions for most people to feel because they're the biggest identity destroying emotions. They just wreck your identity.
Speaker 2The positive ones are the positive ones.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Why does that destroy your identity?
Speaker 1Go be in bliss and find out where you are. Well,
Speaker 3I experienced that when I had kids, when I had kids, I wrote a post about this. I was like not having kids was so much better in terms of ambition because it's quite simple. I just work, work, work, and there's a clear ladder and you just climb it. And then you have kids and you're like, I only mostly care about this and everything else is insignificant. Yeah. And you're like, that part of me just died. I guess you grieve it a little bit. I don't know how you feel, but like when you have children, you're like everything that I thought I cared about, I now care about significantly less. Less. Yeah.
Speaker 1And it like,
Speaker 3and I'm happy.
Speaker 1I preferred this life. And yet you're still working and still being effective, which is also an interesting thing to let your mind recognize that the identity doesn't have to be so attached to be able to be successful. Yeah. One more experiment that I think is really cool for entrepreneurs, especially if they have, because we've been talking about this, we've been talking about self-reliance. Thank five people a day. Consciously look around and go, what did somebody do for me that I'm grateful for? And thank five people a day. It'll totally change your self-reliance pattern.
Speaker 3Hey, how do you find joy? And how do you find what you should be doing? Because you're like, fine. One of your exercises was do only what you like, or, you know, like, or enjoy something more, but that's actually kind of complicated because I don't think a lot of people have actually, actually asked themselves or can't answer. What do I love doing?
Speaker 1Yeah, I think because it's a false, I think that's really just like a self abuse and disguise, right? Like what's my purpose? What's my purpose is just a way to beat yourself up that you don't have your purpose. What do I enjoy? I think that the people that I find who have purpose and, and enjoy what they do, they, a lot of them weren't like, I think that what I'm going to do is I'm going to like really get into risk analysis, but they ended up there, but they learned how to geek out on it and enjoy the thing itself. So I think the way that you find what you enjoy is on a day-to-day basis, asking yourself, how would I enjoy doing this? How do I enjoy this? What would make it a little bit better? How would I change this? And, and I think for entrepreneurs, they think that that's a nice to have, but it's, it's far more important than that. So if I had enough, a car, if I wanted an efficient company, we think of it as a fast company. I got from A to B quickly, but if we had a car, A to B quickly, isn't an efficient car. That's just a fast car. An efficient car is a car that gets to A to B without a lot of energy. And so if you want efficiency in your life, it's how much energy you spent in that day. And often that doesn't end up making you go faster. And so if I get to the end of the day and I say, how much did I enjoy myself? That's the best measure of efficiency because I have energy for the next day. And I want to come back. If I do a yoga class and I enjoyed the hell out of it, I'm far more likely to come back and do yoga and do it well tomorrow. Then if I had a yoga class that sucked and I hated it. And so as people learn that like how enjoyment works in their system, how to enjoy what they enjoy, what they're great at, then their whole business becomes far more efficient. And as a matter of fact, we get a lot of people who come in and say, well, I'd like to work for you. And I'll just say, what's your passion? What's the thing that you care about that you would love doing? And if they say the thing that we have a slot for, then we'll talk to them. Because it's so, like, if someone's naturally motivated, it's so useful.
Speaker 2It's interesting you say that. You know, when Sam asked these questions, I'm kind of like, how do you know? You know, my guess was that you were going to just be like, you know, when you see it, you feel it. It's not a heady thing. You can't think your way into this or out of this or, you know, to analyze your way into success in these. Like, there's a whole, like, kind of east-west or two sides of the brain type of thing. But I feel like when you're answering some of these, you are kind of thinking your way through. I guess, can you talk about just noticing or feel rather than, where does that play in for you?
Speaker 1I can give you a great story on this. So, my wife and I were sitting, we do these very intense, long retreats. And so, it's very tiring. And we were at the end of one. And there was this investment we could have made that would have given us enough money where we didn't have to start a business. And we were sitting there thinking and I said, I'm really glad that didn't happen because we wouldn't have done this. And she said, yeah, me too. And I said, I'm just curious, would you sell this business for a billion dollars if we could not do it again? Like, we would be done doing it, but we'd get a billion dollars. And both of us went like this. We both went. Like, we wouldn't. That was our answer. And I don't know. I told my, I came home, told the story to my daughters. And then like two or three months later, one of my daughters comes in and says, I found my billion dollar idea. I'm like, cool. Something you can grow into a billion dollars. And she's like, no, something I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars.
Speaker 3That's cool.
Speaker 1And so, if you're doing something that's like. Deeply meaningful to you, that's one way to test if that's something that's deeply meaningful to you. If you're doing it for other reasons, if you're doing it because you think it's going to make you happy, if you're doing it because you think people will like you or because you'll have enough money or to just be better or to win or something like that, those are, those can actually create very big and successful businesses, but they won't create contentment.
Speaker 3I like talking with people like you because you have this really cool perspective. Where you've talked to the titans of industry, the best of the best, the Illuminati, you know, you like, you have seen them. And we all know what they appear like in the media or on podcasts like this, where they usually look like they have their act together or they'll show just a little bit of vulnerability, show that like they're one of us. But are there any interesting stories or observations about the 1% of the 1% of performers that would surprise us or at least entertain us on how these guys might feel? Do you think that might surprise us or be different?
Speaker 1Yeah, specifically, I can't do obviously. But what I could say is that the, there's nothing I've said on this podcast that I haven't said to one of the titans of industry. Like there's, there's the things that you're wrestling with are the exact same things that they're wrestling with, right?
Speaker 3What attributes do you tend to notice? Are they 10 out of 10 on and or one out of 10 on?
Speaker 1The really, really. The exceptional ones of like very fast paced businesses. So not like if you can be a slow paced business, then there's a different kind of attitude. You can be, you can actually be quite self-abusive in a slow paced business, but in a fast paced business, you can't second guess yourself very much. So very, very few of them are second guessers. So they just are like, and part of it is because they have to make so many decisions in a day. And so decisiveness is another one, especially for the 1%. For the fast paced industries, there are some like investment. If you're an investor and you can be a billionaire investor, you can really second guess yourself a ton and still be a successful investor. But if you're the CEO of a, of a tech company, you that's in fast pace, you can't do that. The other thing that I think those very high performers, it's not all of them, but I would say like at least 60, maybe 70%. They both feel like they're better than everybody and worse than everybody. Simultaneously. So they, on one level in their conscious mind, they're like, I am more capable than people, than the average person. But underneath they're like, I'm broken. And so they're kind of doing this thing because they know that they're better and they're trying to prove that they're not broken. It's not all the time, but it's, it's more common in that population than in any other population that I've seen. A lot of people walk around thinking that they're better than everybody. Right. I mean, you can, you can go down into like the dregs of our society and you will find somebody who thinks they're better than everybody, but that like underlying, like, oh, I'm broken simultaneously with it. And the way that that presents is very, there's a lot of it in that realm.
Speaker 2Well, you know, one of the things we did in this podcast, that's sort of backwards, probably for most podcasts, most podcasts start with like, tell me about your background and your story. Yeah. And we do it the opposite. We say, show me all the gold you've collected on your journey. First, we start there. And then we say, where'd you get all this, man? Where, where did you, what kind of journey did you go on? Can you give us now, now that we've, you know, gotten to see some of the gold, can you give us a little bit of the, the, the journey? And I'm curious about one thing in particular, but I've read something about like an, an eight second meditation experience. I'm very curious about that, but if you give us the journey, but make sure you hit that along the way.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, I grew up going all over the world. I think by the time I was 28, I had lived in 26 places. My dad was a CEO, but also became an alcoholic. And so I rebelled against that, had a Mohawk, was a skateboarder, got kicked out of my first college, graduated valedictorian for my second college. And then first thing I did when I left college was like, I'm just having adventures one after the other. So I butchered. Fish in Alaska and I hitchhiked throughout the United States. And then I did international stock lending and I was in a band and I, so I was just like, I'm having whatever adventure I want from life.
Speaker 3Like James Bond, man.
Speaker 1Because it was, cause my, I saw my dad just like do this corporate thing and end up in misery. I was like, yeah, I'm not doing that. Then I met my wife and my wife was like, if we're, we're going to get married, we're going to see a therapist. We're going to do. We do a 10 day silent retreat and we're going to travel through, um, third world together for like six months. And if we can do those three things, we're going to be capable of getting married and being successful. So those were her tasks. And so I did them. The therapy was amazing. Uh, we got blessed with a really good therapist and they're pretty rare. And then the silent retreat was my first time meditating ever. And on day three of Vipassana, they have, you know, it's when it changes from putting all your attention into your breath to like moving your attention through your body. And I had this experience of like evaporation. Samadhi is what some people would call it. But this experience of I am one with everything and everything is good. And it lasted eight seconds. And I, and it was like getting hooked on heroin. I, my entire life changed. I was like, whatever the that is, I'm obsessed. And unfortunately, I went, I went about it in a very inefficient way. I very much was like, once I get there, I'll be happy. It was just the search for enlightenment was just like porn for perfectionism. It was just like my porn. Right. And, but the, the plus side was that like, I just, because I had authority issues, I just went and explored everything and took nothing very seriously and made everything an experiment. So, and send the, now that's how we teach. Like when we do our courses. Everything is done as experiment. There's not like, we're talking and saying, this is how things are. We're like, go and experience the ship for yourself. Here's how you do it. You can do it with people right now. It's very in the moment experimentation. And I wasn't willing to say you're the authority, you're the guru. I was like, I'm going to listen to every single modality that I can find from neuroscience to psychology, to, you know, traditions that are 2000 years old. I'm going to try 10 forms of meditation. I'm going to do the Hoffman process. I'm going to do somatic work. I'm going to, I just did everything. And I was pretty dedicated to that. I'm not pretty. I was like totally dedicated. I didn't work for seven years. I like lived off credit cards. I meditated for like seven hours a day, looking, searching, and, um, I was, I was obsessed with it. The search ended the, what, what people would call awakening happened and it wasn't an end at all. There was no finish line, just like, you know, selling a company. It was just like, oh, I see how this whole thing is. It's just easier and, and more spacious than I thought it was. And then my identity got trapped in that for a while. Like I was the awake guy and then that evaporated. And in that time period we had kids and then the kids were where the big emotional work came in was like really learning. I, there was this thing called hand in hand parenting, which I highly recommend a book called listen, which is like one of the most profound practices in my life. And that was really where the big emotional understanding. And started coming in that, that like, oh, I can be with my children in these big emotions. all they need to do is feel them and accept them to become amazing kids. And now my girls are 17 and 20 and they are fricking amazing. And it is, I think, all because of Hand in Hand and my wife, she's amazing. And so that was it. And then at some point I became a venture capitalist and- As one does. As one does. Yeah. I literally went from meditation, I did art and then became a venture capitalist. You're like a sellout. Both of them just sit around all day doing that a lot. No, what happened was I was doing this large scale art installation for a wealthy family and I was giving them business advice because before I had done international stock lending and other things. And it was like at the time when oil was going through the roof and gold was going through the roof and I was just telling them like, hey, here's this thing. And they did,
Speaker 3and they made a lot of money. That's a hilarious thought, by the way. A guy doing an arts installation at a rich person's house, got like the guru energy. And it's like, hey, do you guys want to discuss your bond portfolio?
Speaker 2What did you actually tell them? What was going on? What was the call?
Speaker 1Buy oil and gold. This is a long time ago, right? But I've always been obsessed with business as well. And the way I think about those years is I was meditating and worrying about money. Those are the two things I did. So I had like a stack of financial times in the corner. And so I was, when they still had paid me, I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And I would read the financial times and I, because I started, I, one of the jobs I did was international stock lending. And I, I got like promoted three times. And so I was inside of like a 16 month period. And so it was just kind of, it was just something that I always thought about. And like one day we were sitting and having lunch and I was just like, hey, here's this thing. So he comes to me and he goes, hey, do you want to come and work for us and like help us in the family office? And I was like, no, I'm, I'm love being an artist. It's good. And he says, well, if you could do anything you want, just tell us what it would be. And so three months later, I was like, well, I think the biggest change engine on the planet, this is around 2006. I was like, is going to be clean tech. I think that this is like the, the biggest technological changes on the planet, I think have come from, from venture. So I do that. And then I would work in the nonprofit, like helping increase consciousness, particularly in children. And so he said, yeah, let's do it. And it turned out I was a venture investor because I needed to be needed too much. Like, like a great investor is the investor who's like, they do, I am investing because you don't need me at all. And I was like, I need to be needed, which was horrible as venture investor. And in that, so the only way for me to be successful was to coach the CEOs into like turning their companies around. And we had a we invested more. And so I was investing for about 12 years, but pretty soon the word about my coaching got out. And in doing venture, the thing that I realized about the personal work was that if you take a standard business tool and you put the awareness of personal work into it, the standard business tool gets better, right? If we have something that we teach called view, it's in our connection course. It's about how to communicate with people, how to have hard conversations, how to have sales conversations, how to have hard conversations. When people have it, they sell better. They do product better. They talk to their husbands and wives better. They have hard conversations better. And it's because they're all related. And so as I was coaching people and learning all these business tools as a VC and blending them together, I just found more and more effective ways to do it, which made me a better coach. And so at some point I was like, I should be doing this and only this. And so 2000, 16, I started the transition. 2018, I stopped working for the family and I started building an art of accomplishment. And we've been growing ever since.
Speaker 3You're fun to talk to because you, this stuff is all really helpful. Like I'm so convinced now, like you've got me drinking the Kool-Aid where I'm like, here, you're talking about this. And I'm like, nothing else matters except for this. And that's a little bit of an overwhelming feeling. Is there like a practical way that I can get started other than going through one of your programs? Like anything that you suggest I read or do? Because this sounds very fascinating. And I'm like, I'm in.
Speaker 1Yeah. So the one thing I would do, we have a podcast that I think has now like 180 episodes and they're all on different topics and it's all basically some version of a teaching. So I would pick a topic that's like particular for you. And you're like, oh, wow, I'm a perfectionist. I go to the perfectionist podcast. I have self-reliance issues, go to the self-reliance podcast. And then if there's not an experiment in it, a lot of them have experiments that you can run, then design an experiment from that and play there. We also have an experiments page where it teaches you how to design the experiments and how to run them. That's another thing that I think is really good. We have a podcast on running and designing
Speaker 2experiments. That's another one. By the way, Sam, so brilliant that they call them experiments. He frames everything as experiments because so much of this industry that he's in is a, you should do this. You need to do this. This is the way. You need to do this versus less preachy, less rigid, more open.
Speaker 3Like try this weird thing and see what happens. You might be surprised. Yeah. And it makes it more fun. Yeah. It makes it more fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1It's also, there's another reason for it. So we have a part of our brain, I'm not going to be very specific about this, but we have a part of the brain called the habenula. It's with all invertebrates and it's basically the part of our brain that like traffics our dopamine and stuff like that. And it prevents us from making the same mistake over and over and over and over again. And the reason this is for is because if you're a bear and you're fighting for sexual dominance and you lose, it'd be really stupid to go and like fight the next day, right? If you eat the mushroom, it makes you sick. It'd be really stupid to eat that mushroom the next day. Unfortunately, what this does for us is it means like, we're not going to make the second sales call because we just got rejected. Or when we stop, we eat that piece of chocolate cake that we talked about earlier. I'm going to just quit my diet. That's what it does in our brain. So if you frame it as an experiment, you're not going to make the second sales call because you just got rejected. Then what you're doing is you're constantly learning and you're never failing. And so they did this study about people who were like, I think it was at or below poverty, and they figured out who lost weight when they tried. And the people who did were the people who were constantly iterating where there was no, we failed. There's just, I'm going to try this. Now I'm going to try this. Now we're going to try this, which we obviously see in business, right? Those are the people who succeed in business. They keep on trying new stuff until they find the thing that works. And so to me, it's like, I'm going to try this. I'm going to see self-awareness as a series of experiments. And every experiment you learn, and all you need to do is learn about yourself, then you never really can fail. And it works a lot better. And if you think about like fixing a watch, if you understand a watch, you can fix it. If you understand yourself, right, you can change.
Speaker 3You're like the worst doctor is a dermatologist because when they go out to parties with their family, everyone's like, I got a rash. Check this out. What is this? And like, people are like popping their tops at parties. Like, what do you think this is? And like, if you go to a party with you, everyone's like, fix me or like, give me the answer. It must be exhausting. You probably
Speaker 1have to lie about what you do. It's a little, yeah, it can be annoying. I, Chris Williamson, do you, have you, do y'all know Chris? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Chris Williamson was hanging out with me and he was, he was like, you know, my life is walking down the street. Um, you know, UPS driver says, Hey man, good podcast. I'm like, thanks. Your life is, Hey man, I've got daddy issues. Can we have a quick session? So, so I would say that's one good way to start. The other good way to start is on YouTube. I do these 15 minute coaching sessions. I do some with business folks, some without business folks. They're incredibly powerful. They're incredibly potent. And so if you can go through them and say, Oh, I have this issue and then watch the coaching session, you can get changed. It's not just on an intellectual level.
Speaker 3This has been a treat because I'm, I'm seeking, uh, I'm looking to hire an executive coach. Sean has one and he's, we're both like in some transitioning periods of our lives with families and like business. And so this was like a treat for us because I think I needed this. Uh, I needed
Speaker 1the, this was the perfect medicine. Cool. I'm happy to make some recommendations for you if you're interested.
Speaker 3I'm all yours. Yeah. Tell me everything. You could tell me, you could tell me off air. Yeah. Brother, you got me eating out of your hand right now. I'll do whatever you say.
Speaker 1As far as the book, the one thing that I think would be really useful, we have a program that's specifically for venture-backed startups that have found product market fit that are under 50 people. And we have a program for their executive teams. So their executive teams come and do a summit with us twice a year. And we have a program for their executive teams. So their executive teams come and do a summit with us twice a year. Super effective. Basically, we are all about getting that. How do we have the hard conversations quickly and effectively and creating that so that, you know, you know, and I know that like two founders not getting along can cost a business decades, if not the entire business and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so we find the working with the team, the executive team is far more efficient for having a change, both with the CEO inside the company. So that would be, it's called council and we open up applications once a year dude it's crazy the responsibility you have like
Speaker 2i read that the open ai team sends a car picks you up and you like coach the whole team or you coach the execs and then i'm on twitter and they're like uh hey i lead safety research it's like today like the big story right now is like anthropics guys like hey like we think there's a greater than 10 chance that ai kills all of humanity you know it's like first of all they need a little comms coaching i don't know if you do that on the side but that would be nice but secondly like you know what responsibility like coaching the people that are building the thing the bomb you know like yeah either the greatest thing ever the worst thing ever sometimes they say it's the greatest ever and sometimes they tell us it's gonna be the worst thing ever it's got to be a pretty uh pretty heavy thing yeah that's it's really interesting so just to be
Speaker 1very clear about my like i i coach people at open ai i don't coach the whole leadership team and i've coached most of the people who are in the research like leading the research department and i've worked with people in our like in person and other programs from all the ai labs they all come one multiple from all of them have come through our thing i have a really interesting take on this you know if you you've had a kid your wife's in the or or in the birthing room or maybe she you had a doula at the house but just imagine like she's giving birth to this thing and now imagine like there's protests outside and there's people saying that they're going to destroy humanity and you know like these people are doing something that's like substantial and as a society we are really not being supportive and the reason i say being supportive is because the outcome is going to be different right like i'm sure they're out there but i haven't met one of them yet who's trying to not do something that's good for humanity that they don't and they're not
Speaker 3concerned you you must have seen the shot the tweet sean's referring to that actually this isn't in your in your wheelhouse maybe of expertise but it might be given that you talked to all these cool people do you actually have an opinion on what that basically for the listener the tweet was a guy who worked at claude quit and he said the there's a 10 chance or more that everyone's going to die because of ai it was a very okay one guy quit and then the guy who's still there
Speaker 2who leads that team that that guy was on said no he's right we do believe that i personally think it's a greater than 10 chance yeah um do you have an opinion on um
Speaker 1the seriousness i do i have a very very strong opinion i've sat with a whole bunch of researchers and they were asked like these are the people building it and they were asked 20 questions does agi exist now will it ever exist are the things and then they were asked to line up on this line and they lined up very very differently like they were spread out okay is it going to destroy the world is it going to be the best thing for humanity they're all spread out on the line every single question there's not everybody on one corner and everybody on the other corner and so my takeaway from that is they're they're thinking about what's going to happen with ai has far more to do with how they were raised than it has to do
Speaker 3with any kind of reality that's such a you answer that's a and it's a beautiful answer so that's
Speaker 1that's that's my opinion on it i mean of course this has a chance to destroy humanity so does nuclear weapons and so does global warming and so does the global warming and so does the global warming and so does and something will eventually you know and the the question that i ask myself personally is like what can i do that can affect a positive outcome and am i participating in that and somebody can say that's easy joe because you're you know coaching people like sam but i would say it is a democracy of clicks and and money that's going to determine ai more than any one leader and i think we shirk our responsibility by saying it's about one leader who's going to do it does that make you feel better sean or no
Speaker 3i don't think so honestly no
Speaker 2so we're gonna die no not even that uh it's i guess it's on on one level there's a sort of humor in the situation to use your analogy of like you know they're sort of birthing this technology and you said a lot of the opinions of these people has less to do let me paraphrase what you said a lot of their opinions has less to do with the facts on the ground of the research what they're seeing in the data versus how they were raised you know their daddy issues and it's like yeah ai's daddy has daddy issues therefore maybe the ai is gonna have daddy issues as it grows up um yes yeah just
Speaker 1just like just like meta's business is a reflection of the consciousness of mark zuckerberg
Speaker 2yeah i think that's why you coach because you can affect that i think that's why maybe you have comfort because you know some of the people i think that's why a lot of the people who are just in the youtube comments who have a sort of billionaire aversion tech guy aversion right this is like this is like if you go look at the sentiment the sentiment around that's horrible billionaires tech leaders and specifically the billionaire ai tech leaders it's awful like there is zero trust zero um belief in the uh that those are our great kings and fearless leaders that we want to get behind yeah part of that is because of their own communication and presentation uh you know so it's not like they're they're just hated because of who they are right they contributed to some of that yeah and some of it is people's their own current life situation makes them hate you know and and that's you know it's just this weird complicated thing that's going on but uh to answer your question sam of you know does it make you feel
Speaker 3a lot better no not necessarily i sort of think of it like i don't know just a much higher level of uh like the earth has been around for billions of years the odds that i will exist when the demise is here is very very very very low yeah the funniest the funniest tweet was uh when the
Speaker 2antarctic guy was like he had 10 chance it kills all humans and then somebody quote tweeted it and said by the way lebron was nine percent to go to the sixers this summer just put that perspective
Speaker 1i i actually took a lot of comfort when i was i was reading about the dead sea scrolls and i found out that it was in it was the the scrolls were kept by a cult who saw the end of the world coming and i was like oh the end of the world was coming wait wait explain this i don't even know what what is the dead sea scrolls are like the ancient biblical texts yeah exactly that were like in a cave somewhere and they were kept by a cult just post jesus i think that was like the end of the world is coming and we have to prepare for it and then we had y2k i don't know if you all are old but that was the end of the world then we had like 2012 the mayan prophecy that was the end of the world so like humans do have a thing about like the end of the world is coming we do we do like that
Speaker 2joe thanks for coming on man uh everybody go check out art of accomplishment and the podcast and all
Speaker 1the good things yeah thanks for having me appreciate it all right that's it that's the
Speaker 5pod i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back all right let's take a quick break i want to
Speaker 2tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcasts
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