Sam Morris on The Zen of Being a CEO, Leading with Wisdom, The Opposite Side of Humility, and Dr. Mark Goulston's Impact On The World

"Octonon Verba" is a show that's raw and real, featuring hard-hitting interviews with people that live by the ethos of actions, not words. Marcus Aurelius Anderson is a TEDx speaker, best-selling author, veteran and leadership and mindset coach. With this show, you get to join Marcus as he goes inside the minds and experiences of the world's most successful warriors, leaders, entrepreneurs, and experts. With each episode, you're going to get the philosophies, concepts, tactics, and strategies these leaders use to turn adversity into victory, live an extraordinary life based on actions, not words. Now, here's your host, Marcus Aurelius Anderson. "Octonon Verba" is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believed, don't listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I'm Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Sam Morris is co-founder and CEO of E-9 Global, a Mar-Tech company advancing data sovereignty and brand protection. A former Adventure Leader turned paraplegic after a car accident, he founded Zen Warrior Training, inspiring thousands worldwide to transcend limitations to resilience, authenticity, and transformative leadership. Now, we were supposed to have a conversation last week, but he was too busy talking to this place called UCLA. I guess it's a big deal. I'm not sure about that, but we'll talk more about that in the moments to come. Sam, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're very busy and in demand between this company, really starting to grow and expand, and everybody wants to talk to you, so thank you again for being here, my friend. When I saw your invitation, I was thrilled. It was a great conversation last time we talked, and it's been too long since we last caught up. Yeah, we were talking about this even before we hit record in today's environment, sometimes it's difficult to just observe, difficult to just see what's happening without a motion being a vote. Without, I think, cynical was the repeatage that we used. Yeah. There's a lot going on, if you get caught in the drama of culture, it can lead to some very undesirable places. For me, I have to be very cognizant of that on a daily basis, because there's the desire to know, there's the desire to sort of keep pace with what is happening in the news cycles and so forth and all of that. At the same time, it is kind of really designed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in a manner in which it is very easy to get emotionally so provoked by whatever, no matter where we stand in terms of our opinions, to get emotionally hooked and then to develop a certain amount of potential cynicism around the state of the world. I would find that that's a shitty place to hang out, so I try to spend as little time there as possible. Yeah. I like also that, and I think that you're, you're echoing the same sentiment. I think it's important to at least acknowledge that it exists and not try to gaslight ourselves around it or put our fingers in our ears and say some bullshit, positive affirmation that we don't even believe and then try to move forward. I think being able to, again, allow it to run its course through us, breathe it out, make peace of it, and then sort of exercise it from us as it were, just like in meditation, we come back to the breath, we come back to the presence. So this misery device that we call a cell phone and the interwebs and chat GPTA and AI, if we allow it, it will absolutely use us up, it will absolutely have us in this hypersensitive fight or flight stays, sympathetic nervous system going crazy, and now we're reactive, we're not responding, we don't have an opportunity to actually dive deep into what it is. And even what we do, it's difficult to be completely honest about what it is we're doing. We have to go layers, layers, layers, layers below that to get to what's happening. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something I have to remind myself of and something that I've repeated many times in working with clients with in my Zen warrior training practice is recognizing that frequently when we are projecting our concerns into the outside world, it's a somewhat convenient scapegoat for our own inner, you know, it's like an excuse for where we aren't really focusing on what we can have agency over. And I see a lot of people sort of training their own energy around because they are focused on what's happening in the external world and they're caught in the drama and they want to fix something and then they think they can fix something through sharing their opinion or their belief on social media and it's just a matter of oh, if I just share this, then I'm going to feel better about myself that at least I've said something that is in response to all the problems of the world and then they maybe temporarily feel better about themselves but in the meantime, there's things that they're ignoring that they could potentially be paying closer attention to internally in terms of their own health or their family or their community. And that's where I suppose, I don't know, there's a certain amount of hubris that goes into that way of thinking that we don't even really realize we are participating in when we're doing it. Yeah, and that's what, and because of hubris, that's what gives us the desire to try to say something. Hey, look at what I have to say. I want to be heard. I want to chime in on what's happening. But the reality is we don't have to chime in on every single thing that happens. We don't have to say I agree or disagree with this. I support or don't support this. Yeah. And frankly, within the wake of whatever that statement is and whatever feedback you get or whatever comments you get because we live in a world now where if you have a Wi-Fi connection, you're entitled to an opinion, even if you're not qualified to have the opinion. Now it becomes this thing where, as you're saying, you know, we, it's our cup, right? Our energy level. And every morning we wake up and we had this full cup. And even if I'm just, you know, spilling little bits of it around over into social media or to whatever these things are, over a lifetime, that 10% that I've wasted, could change the entire trajectory of my destination or my capacity to actually make an impact on the things that I can control. Right. Right. It's a really great point. Absolutely. Yeah. It's, um, we have really have to monitor how much virtue signaling we are participating in. Recognizing that the virtue signaling is frequently paradoxically undermining true virtue. It is. And we also, if we look at what's to be gained, whether it be directly monetary or just the capacity to keep their brand going, then yeah, they're doing it for the wrong reasons. Oh, yeah. When there's an agenda involved, yeah, it's like, yeah, and, you know, that's something I even discovered to a certain degree, I found myself resisting social media posts. For exactly that reason, because I realized, and when I say social media posts, particularly around my own personal brand, when I was emphasizing more of the Zen warrior training work, I found that in order to sort of keep the personal brand marketing machine, if you will, alive, it required a certain amount of self promotion in terms of, like, finding some type of concept to lean into or something, some type of idea to share that promoted a certain type of mindset philosophy, ideology, et cetera. But recognizing that paradoxically, that's not very zen of me to be attaching myself to a concept or an ideology or a philosophy that felt like as somehow more virtuous to put out on. So I had to deal with this kind of, like, this problem, this real problem, like, I want to stay true to what I know to be integrity, I suppose. I want to stay true to that. But at the same time, knowing that one needs to sort of self promote, if you have, especially if you have a personal brand, so how do you do both at the same time without becoming like a caricature of yourself, and that's something that I really don't like. And I find that it happens a lot, and it's really easy to see in other people who are in the self promotion sort of hamster wheel, it's like, yeah, I feel like they're not really being fully authentic. They're being a caricature of themselves to keep selling whatever their product or services. As soon as you can see it, and then you see it, when I saw it in myself, I'm like, suddenly there's a lot less inspiration to share. Or I suppose it's maybe a greater challenge to share something that is perhaps just a little bit more raw, real, that doesn't have that sort of context of self promotion that is associated with it. Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum to play with. If you've dealt with that yourself all the time, the other thing too is we see the people that really wrap themselves in that there is no way out. They have to costly give a pound of flesh to this machine, X amount of times, they're looking at metrics, they're looking at these things, but the other part is, I love having this show simply because it gives me an excuse to have a deep conversation with you. And now we can share that with other people and it meets them where they are. But recording four shows in a week and then getting 100 sponsors that want me to pimp out my audience and become a product or that's just not how I feel. I like the fact that I don't have sponsors, even though I've had people approach me many times because you can say whatever we want, however we want, you can, if you want to drop that bombs all day, you can, if you want to talk about one leading ideology or another, you can a religion, a lack of religion, philosophy, whatever it is, that's what a conversation is supposed to be in my opinion. And the more interesting and more honest we can be in those conversations, the more it can challenge people. And as you're saying, people will put us into boxes, right? They will make us into a caricature, oh, if I say something that's like you said, raw and real, they're going to say, okay, put them over in the jock or the day of a Gogans box and if I say something that is more in tune to self reflection or enlightenment, then they'll be like, oh, well, he's trying to come over here. The goal is to just speak truly from an authentic voice from where we are at. And even though we don't want to be an echo, there's nothing that I can say that has not been echoed by millions of intelligent people for centuries before or after work on having said that if I can at least say it in an authentic way, from my experience or from my observation in real time, if that serves somebody else and that's the goal. So I'm finding with social media platforms, unless you're willing to pay for more of these things, they're going to throw that into your engagement, that doesn't really matter. The idea is to try to do the best work you can irrespective of what the vanity metric says you are or are not doing or when they move the goalposts and say, hey, this week, we're really focusing on this thing. It's like, because my team will come to me and they'll say, hey, this is what they're doing. Now this is what they're trying to do for a real or whatever this thing is and it's like, I just don't care. I'm sorry. It's hard for me to keep up with something. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of removes a lot of the spontaneity of it all when one starts to become overly strategic. And it's not that there aren't, isn't a valuable place for strategy. I mean, with my other business, I'm constantly strategizing, but I find it easier because it's not about me personally, you know, it's just, and perhaps there's a, perhaps there's a takeaway from that with respect to how easy it is in the sort of personal branding space to be associating the person with the brand a little bit too much. If it's easier in other domains where there's less of a personality thing related to it, then it's like, oh, no, maybe that's actually something to be learned from with respect to how we perceive our own sense of self, you know, so. And you and I have been in this arena long enough to have met some people that portray themselves in a certain manner online and then you meet them in person and it's like, oh, that's not exactly congruent with their branding or what they're claiming to be doing. And I know that everybody's human, I'm not saying that people are, you know, being imperfect is bad because obviously we all are, but there is a difference between people that are looking at a metric or the amount of subscriptions or the amount of people that listen as saying, okay, these are marks and these are people that I try to go out and turn into prey for whatever the thing I'm trying to push and the people that are actually trying to just say, listen, this is where I've been, this is what I've experienced. This is what helped me, I hope it helps you, by the way, if this helps you help somebody else with it, by sending it to them or whatever it is, something that's more authentic as opposed to a, they hit them over the head with it. And if you win the five people at the back of the room here, we're going to get you involved in the next blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so. I suppose I'm just glad I'm not young and sexy enough to be able to get away with an only fans account. Same, I don't have that, I don't have that problem either, it's like, oh, sorry, some people who are caught in that whole world and I'm like, oh, man, if that's what you're doing that you think is going to provide for yourself in the long run, like, wow, there's a wakeup call that is coming down the pike ready for you, you know, it's like, and I suppose, you know, beyond that, there's so many different, whether it's personal branding or whether it's, you know, anything really, these days, one of the great challenges of this era is knowing what you can sort of find a sense of stability on, so many people are trying to find a sense of financial stability, that kind of thing on a particular job or career trajectory or whatever and whether, you know, it's one thing to be an only fan star, which I'm sure has a very short half-life to it, but then if we extend that beyond that and into all the other ways in which job displacement and replacement is going to be happening left and right, it really puts us in a position of who are we independent of the things that we have typically found a sense of stability in terms of our finances and our careers and so forth, and I think that's one of the great challenges of our age is developing a sense of adaptability, and that's, you know, you spoke at the beginning of the pod about the UCLA presentation that I just did last week, and it was specifically on that topic, I spoke to the whole group of the MBA program on the subject of adaptability in this modern era, and was using my experience of everything that I've gone through with becoming paralyzed when I was a young man with, as a parallel for what needs to be, or a metaphor, if you will, for the skills that we need to develop in order to be adaptable in this modern AI age. Yeah, I think that's a great point, and you said it here, this idea that stability for some people equals identity, but that does not necessarily mean there's adaptability built within that. In fact, the moment there's one, there's a static identity, I think, the moment that static identity gets sort of fixed, a fixed sense of self, the moment that happens, we start to attach ourselves, our sense of security around that fixed sense of self, and I know that you have experienced that on a very deep level with your own health years ago, it's really insidious, because we want, on one hand, we want that stability, we want that security, we want to say, well, I know that this is going to be predictable, I know that if I have gotten here today, then chances are I'll be able to get somewhere tomorrow where I'll have, I'll accumulate a little bit more based on the patterns of what I do in the world and how I perceive myself and so forth, and I can accumulate more, I can build my bank account, I can, you know, this and that, but the moment that happens, we start to develop attachments around that outcome, and we actually become more rigid and less flexible and less adaptive, and so it's a real existential challenge that we're all being presented with right now, to be able to know what it takes, what the inner skills are to require, and I think it's a, personally, I think it's a psychospiritual evolution, like nothing we've ever seen at a global level before. There's in my new book that's about to come out, I talk about this idea, because we hear the word work-life balance or balance in some capacity, but when you're chasing balance, because people see balance exactly where you're describing this fixed area, so if I'm on this surfboard, balance is constantly about adapting, but what keeps me balanced for this second is not going to be balanced for the next millisecond. So true. So by learning to adapt skillfully, by being able to accept the truth irrespective of source, irrespective of outcome, and then put that data through this equation and execute to do what needs to be done, it allows us to let go of these expectations, you know, Cuba Ross's idea of the very first stage of of anything is this idea of denial. So if we're stuck in it over and over again, and we're in business, or we're in a situation where seconds count, that literally is what keeps us stuck in this place, and now we can't adapt well or skillfully over your two rigid, and there's a millions in or Taoist examples of this between, you know, the oak that's not pliable or all these other the willows and all these other things, but you mentioned this inner skill set that is required, and it is this ability to say, and again, we think in, you know, let's check the box of these caricatures, as you mentioned earlier, I love that because a lot of people say I had to be motivated, I had to be driven all the time 24/7, 365 team no sleep, and then there's the other side of the equation that's like, you know, treat yourself, but they do that for eight weeks, and now whatever momentum or whatever desire that they had, or whatever driving purpose that they've had is sort of evaporated, and now they have this feeling of lack of fulfillment, that entrail narrative can be brutal sometimes when they're calling themselves all these names, or they're kicking themselves when they're down already, this ability to say, listen, I can be driven and still be grateful, I can be humble, and still not be satisfied with where I am, and still endeavor to be better. This is where all that comes, and then there's the CEO you're seeing that, right? You have to be able to talk to your people, this idea of pragmatic epithetial saying, okay, how am I conducting myself towards this person? How are they receiving it? Well, I'm the CEO, I can tell them what to do, it's like, well, you can, but if you ask them their opinion on this, and then your tone, this is the plan, now you get buy-in, now they want it to work, as opposed to saying, well, this is what Sam said to do, and I really don't like the way he talked to me about it, I really didn't receive it well because I don't feel like he gave me enough information or whatever it is, and so yeah, there's so many parallels in this. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there, a lot there, I want to go back to your surfing analogy, because I think it's really an appropriate one. The beauty of surfing is that while it takes that regular adjustment to find balance, and your body is constantly adjusting, and your mind's constantly adjusting to be able to find balance, the beauty that I think a lot of people don't recognize with respect to that analogy is that we don't create the wave, we just have to balance ourselves on it, and I think when people think that they also have to create the wave, then it's like impossible, it's like, oh man, I have to create the waves in my life, and then I need to balance on them like, holy cow, that's way more than I'm capable of doing, and you feel inferior, or you feel a sense of anxiety, or you feel like, oh my god, like, what am I going to do? But when we recognize, and this is very Taoist, when we recognize that nature has its own waves, we're not creating them, we are participating with them, and if you can align with the waves that exist in nature, and the waves that exist in culture, and recognize that they have their own power and their own velocity, and their own energy behind them, aligning to that, and then balancing on that, now it's like, okay, now at least, I don't have to create the wave, that's important to know, it's not up to me, that's part of the greater mind, if you will, that's part of the greater consciousness that already is pre-existing, it's not up to me to create it, it's up to me to find how to adjust my weight over my surfboard so that I can ride it without wiping out, and that takes a lot of that anxiety out. I love that, and it's true, like you say, and then what else has to happen? In order for us to gain that experience, we have to wipe out many times, which removes the fear of wiping out, but the people that are rigid, I don't want to fall, I don't want to fall, they're about to fall, because they're definitely holding on to this. Exactly, or if you expect that the wave that you have ridden is going to continue after it's crashed, and you keep on looking for why isn't the wave that I that got me here, why is that not, you know, why I don't, and I feel it anymore, well, you're probably, there's probably a new wave that you need to learn how to surf. Yeah, it's that rhythm and rhyme, it's that understanding of these seasons. The understanding that this is, it's not permanent, none of it. It's all fleeting in many ways, and when we do that, we don't hold on to anything. It helps us to be in this true flow state, this motion, this idea of no-mindedness. I see the next wave is this coming without expectation. I don't judge it, I just see there's opportunity. Am I willing to get out there? Hey, I'm going to miss this one, but by swimming out there, it positions me to have the potential for another environment to use that way. Yeah, yeah. Tell me when the most recent wave, whether it's unexpected or unexpected, has come into your life recently. Be curious. Yeah, so for me, there's two, this book that's coming out soon. I wanted it to be out around this time last year, and I was traveling and speaking a lot like you are and teaching a lot, and what I found was I've had front load a lot of things to be able to do those things, and then when I would come back, I would try to catch up. But because of that, I was not making my writing the priority. I would allocate a time, but it wasn't the best use of that time, or the muse would visit me when it was inconvenient, and I would tell her to go knock on somebody else's door, which was my own fault. And so I had about 80% of it, but all the stuff that makes a book incredible, all the stuff that connects it beautifully, it makes it flow seamlessly, and makes it something that really helps somebody was not there. And so there was part of you, it was like, you know what, I'm just going to get the team, I'm just going to create this wave that's not even there, and I'm going to release a STEM thing, because that's what I said I was going to do. And I realized as I was thinking that it's like, oh, that's your ego idiot. And then I can imagine what would happen now if we had this conversation after I'd done that prematurely. I'd probably feel like, you know what, I didn't do what I was supposed to do. Unless you're JK Rowling or somebody like that, you're not going to become a millionaire overnight by releasing a book. So you have to really bleed onto the page and believe what you're saying in a way to help people. And you will make money, and it will make impact. It'll help it other ways, of course. But that's with the first book, nobody, nobody knew who I was, so there was no pressure. So it's like the musician, right? They released the first album, and then they get the sophomore jinx because they had an entire lifetime to write this first album, or write this first book. And now they feel like they have an audience or a voice or a signature or a sound, and they have to stay. My nogginist of that thing is like, no, they don't. You can be a different person each time. And then for me, this component with AI and Chad GBT, I have an employee Lacey. She's the one that edited my first book. She's one that does on my websites and everything like that. She was talking to me about this, and I pushed back, and I was like, listen, I don't want to be influenced by something artificial to create my voice. And so she showed me whether there were blind spots in that. And she's also being the silo for me. So she showed me, she said, listen, I put your Chad GBT, I put your TEDx talk into the Chad GBT, and then I asked it questions. And she gave me answers from it that were influenced by that. Then she said that I put the PDF of your book into it. Then I put your warrior wisdom episode from the podcast into it. And now when I ask it questions, she says, it's powerful, and it's compelling, and it's valuable. And she says, so it's a tool. How are you going to use it? I love that. And so for me, now I'm making peace with the idea that eventually the website will have a living legacy library. So for example, let's say they come up and they say, Sam Morris, I heard about him, and they come into that library. They'll see both of our interviews. They'll see a 200 word summary of this interview. And he'll talk about these things we've talked about, and now it will lead them to you or to your company. And it's just naturally living organic ecosystem. Yeah. That's something that serves people, and I've got six years of this material, 200 and almost almost 300 episodes at this point. So if somebody wants something from there, they can find it in a categorical way to where now it's almost like a library card back in the day. And now they can find, oh, I want to find out about leadership. Oh, what about Zen sort of leadership? What about this idea about it overcoming diversity, whatever it is? It's all there. So those are the things that I've had to learn to adapt to because this wave is coming as you say, and I can either stay on the shore and be safe, but cities and illusion when it comes to doing these kind of things. Yeah. I'm reminded of something that a mentor of mine years ago shared with me, incredibly wise woman, Emily Conrad. And she said, and this is sort of in the early days of the internet, she said, you know, the internet is a technological prosthetic for a biological imperative. And I was like, interesting, a technological prosthetic for a biological imperative. And I thought about that with, and I still think about that on a regular basis about how on some level biologically or evolutionarily, we seem to want something that gets facilitated by the prosthetic of the technology. But when we are operating with the prosthetic, it can be scary because it's like, well, this is an artificial thing. This isn't actually real. It's artificial. But on some sense, it's creating real outcome. So if we look at the internet despite all of the really horrific things that have come about because of social media and fishing and scams and all of that stuff, but on the other hand, it has created a global ecosystem of connection that never existed before, at least in terms of being so tangible. It might have existed in some sort of a theoretical level. But now it's very tangible where you can literally have a Zoom call with someone in Pakistan, you know, and it's like you're hanging out in the same room with each other. And then if we add AI to that, it's on a whole other level of scale. So the question I suppose is if we remove all fear of the technology and what it could potentially do that is outside of our control and look at it from the level of okay. But on some, if we look at it as part of a biological imperative, something that wants to or has to happen for the evolution of humankind, what exactly, what is the impulse behind it? If we look at it not from the place of individual fear and scarcity and so forth, but like why is this movement happening right now on the planet? And what is the, what is the imperative behind it? What's the impulse behind it? And to your point, you know, it's creating a sense of far more efficiency where people can have interactivity with you and through the interactivity with you, find people who are guests on your show and have interactivity with them and deepening their relationships in a way where as individuals, we simply don't have the time and resources to be able to have deep conversations with many people. But if that can happen at some sort of scaled form, there's a lot of potential benefit that can happen in that. So that's the sort of, I don't subscribe really to the notion of optimism per se, but perhaps in the silver lining in the midst of all the chaos and uncertainty around the direction that we're going as well, it's happening. And can we really separate it from nature doing this? You know, it's easy to look at it since we use this term artificial and since it's coming from a new medium of digital interaction versus the organic carbon-based thinking that we're all familiar with, you know, it's so easy to sort of say, well, this is different, this is separate, this is a different thing. And it really feels different at times, but then there's times where I interact with it where it actually feels organic. And I'm like, wait a minute, is this really separate or is this somehow nature expressing itself through an unfamiliar medium? Yeah, that's a powerful question and it's an incredible observation. I think that you're dead on both Dr. Mark Gulston, right? What was he trying to do before he passed? He was trying to create that bot of himself to live on to create this legacy of what he was doing. You know, I can't think, I mean, he and Dr. Marshall Gulzman, two men that were really sort of pioneers in this idea of true reflection into leadership, self-leadership, being very, very honest with ourselves about, hey, you're expecting all this stuff from these other people, are you walking the walk or are you at least trying to walk the walk? Right. Wouldn't that be a strange unexpected outcome, you know, with mention Mark Gulston, whose whose world was all around deepening empathy and what he termed surgical empathy, the ability to so go into someone's experience and understand them from a deep, deep level that they felt so heard that all of their guards come down and they feel seen for the first time perhaps in their lives and when it be so ironic if the very thing that we think is artificial is actually helping to facilitate a deeper sense of empathy with one another. Yeah, that would be beautiful. It would be poetic in many ways. That conversation that I had with him, it was life changing. He asked me a lot of questions. He let me push back on him and then that was to my knowledge his last interview because he was going to write before surgery. Oh my gosh, I didn't realize that. And at the very beginning before we hit record, because she know how he is, he's a great man, but he also doesn't meant words. And so when we were there at the beginning, I talked to him in a little pre-interview and he's like, are we going to ask real questions or are we going to just kind of dance around? And I was like, no, we'll ask real questions. He's like, okay, and that's when I was like set the tone for how we came out, but it was beautiful. And he, if nobody else got anything from it, it made me really take a good hard look at where I was at, what I was doing, what I thought I was doing, or what I claimed I was doing, but I wasn't doing deeply. Remember a podcast where he interviewed Dave Asprey? And it was the only time that I've heard anyone put Dave Asprey in a position where he was not Dave Asprey at all. It was like, he was not the brand. He was the human being on a much more raw level. And I thought, this is Mark Gullston's magic. He can take someone who has a personal brand known around the world. And without even that person expecting it, suddenly they're sort of on the spot in the most raw and vulnerable way possible. But that's what Mark did. He would make you feel in uncomfortably vulnerable, but in a manner in which it's like, okay, why am I uncomfortable right now? You know, it's not he's not doing it to undermine our sense of integrity at all. In fact, it's there to actually help to provoke something deeper. And like if you're not willing to be seen in that space, well, that's your own protection against that deeper level of raw authenticity. And vulnerability is an essential component to recognizing that that invulnerable self, but that invulnerable self can only be accessed through those moments of vulnerability to be able to get there. And it happens in such a natural, organic way that you just find yourself there. And it's like, oh, shit. And I can either stay in the pocket and stay locked in with them, which I chose to do. I did circumvent one of his compliments. And that's when I realized I was like, okay, why can I take a compliment from this guy? So I just called it out. And I said, I have a hard time taking compliments. You know, what is that about? He's like, I'm the same way. So again, him being vulnerable, him being honest, him with over 30 years of experience between executive coaching and psychiatry practice. So he took both of those mediums to where it just flowed naturally for him. And he could see down to the fiber of your being. I love that we're getting a chance to honor Mark, one of my best friends from favorite people. I was going to say, tell us how you met him. Mark threw a men's group that I'm still part of. He was a member of when we first met, it's called a medal, which stands for media entertainment technology, artists and leadership. And it's a global group of entrepreneurial men that I've been part of for the past 11 years or so. Yeah, it's a wonderful group. It would be, if you haven't heard of it, man, you'd be a great member of metal. You would be your perfect metal material. And for anyone who's listening who is an entrepreneurial man who wants to connect with heart-centered entrepreneurs around the world, check out metal. Metal.men is the URL to learn about it. It's been a real cornerstone of my entire life, both personally and professionally since I've been a member. So Mark was one of the first people I met when I joined metal. And we immediately hit it off and became close friends for years after that. Yeah, he had such a reading his books, his book just listened. I think I told you I do a listening exercise with companies when I go with them, and it just is groundbreaking simply for the fact that for so many of us having this opportunity to hold space, to pay attention to listen, to not try to fix it, to not try to judge, to not correct, to not interrupt, to just be there, shut your mouth, be there for this person, let them say what they need to say. And then how many times have we found that if we would just maintain the discipline of listening for 10 seconds longer, whatever is the perfect list question that I had or got you that I was going to give this person, they would continue on and speak into that and answer that question. But if I were to trespass and stop them, we would lose all that momentum, all that trust, all that ability to share. And now we have to start all over again. But when I give them a timer and say you have three minutes, your job on this side, you're accrossing them, your job shut up, listen, you can't talk, you can't touch them, you can't say anything, you can respond with your body, but you cannot do anything to inhibit them from speaking. And on this other side, you guys talk for three minutes, and if they talk for one minute and there's two minutes of silence, great. But then what happens, that surgical empathy, that pragmatic empathy, now I want to reciprocate so badly because Samson, an amazing job to listen to me, he let me speak and I felt heard and I said stuff I never thought I would say before because I knew that he cared about this and he didn't give a shit about his phone or what was going on in the world, all that matters is this moment, now I want to give back. And then I escalate the questions and within half an hour, you have two people, especially their strangers, they're sharing things with each other that they've never shared before, or Mary Couples, they've been married for 30 some odd years, that learn stuff about one another, that they didn't know that was there. This is the beauty of that real connection, and this is the beauty of Mark's work and how it contributes to live on through through our work that we're doing today. I love that, yeah. Have you ever tried the practice or facilitated a practice where you ask two people sitting together, one person to tell a story, and to go on for maybe three minutes telling a story, and then have the other person try to repeat everything that they heard in that story, the exact content, the exact tone of the feelings that they hear, it's really, really hard to do. And it's an amazing practice because it shows us just how much we have the habit of listening to our own thoughts and not someone else when we're supposed to be listening, and we're actually listening to our own strategic communication. How do I strategize around being intelligent or reinforcing my own opinions once this person is done speaking, and then I'll share my own stuff. But then we've missed 90% of what was being said because we're listening to our own thoughts, we're too distracted, and we're actually listening to what the person said to us. So it's an incredible practice. I don't know if you've ever done that in a workshop or anything. Well, I'm about to. It sounds like it's so powerful and it's so true, as you say, we can hold the narrative of our own thoughts, but that means we have to disengage with this person speaking. And if we can suspend and dethrone our ego enough to listen this person and just give them the courtesy, the grace of listening. Yeah. And give ourselves freedom of the anxiety of needing to respond. You know, it's so habitual that we take it for granted, we just assume that this is how all human beings are always operating, as we're always thinking about our response and advance of, but actually life can be more spontaneous than that. If we are willing to deal with the anxiety and discomfort of not knowing what we're going to say, but really paying attention to the other person, we open up whole new levels of spontaneity that are possible, that we don't maybe not realize or are possible. It reminds me of that state of play with kids, right? Yeah. There's this safety that's built into it. And we're not keeping score or we have no expectation of winning. We're just there. And that gives us that psychological safety to do these things and be spontaneous and be silly and be, you know, dumb, but the child's not going to judge us for that. They're going to love it even more. The more that we lean into that, the more they're going to enjoy it. And so I don't have to worry about having all the answers or teaching a moral lesson to this person. It's like, we're just out here in the sandbox, getting dirty and figuring out how we can put the sand from this side over here. And do I want to use my hands? Do I want to use a bucket? Am I scraping with a stick to get over there? What if we did all of them? And now you're just there in that moment. And that's all that matters. And that's a beautiful reminder for everyone, I think. Right. How much of the time are we just spending trying to reinforce a fixed perception of ourselves and our intelligence and our wisdom and our beauty and all that bullshit, rather than just playing? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like this is a great playful conversation in which to do that. Yeah. Guru Nassantar Bruce Lee's protege, my instructor says that you can't teach anybody anything once they get to a certain technical level. All you can do is cultivate the environment that allows them to discover. And that to me is very similar to all these philosophical notions that we try to live by. And then if we're courageous enough to do that, we can expand that into any sphere of our existence, into our business, into our relationships, into our physicality, our spirituality, any of that. Exactly. Same rules apply. When I'm CEOing, it sounds very serious, but I'm trying to have as much fun and play as I possibly can. I'm just trying to listen spontaneously versus, you know, be an authority. I have no interest in being an authority. I have an interest in finding what idea is or the best idea is. And having fun and treating it as an adventure and surfing the wave together versus, you know, sort of crunched brow and leadership. You know, kind of KPI, KPI, I'm doing that. Tell us how you look at leadership, but I mean, you gave a good kind of insight there, but so many times as CEOs, there are so many things buying for our attention. There are so many priorities. And then everything becomes a priority. And then nothing's a priority because of that. And then we have a fire to put out over here. How do you look at it as a CEO and as a leader? And then why do you do it that way? Because it's sort of, you've obviously seen other people do it in a way that wasn't skillful. And it didn't lead to everybody winning in the process. Like, maybe, do that make sense? I kind of went off on it. No, it absolutely makes sense. I would say the way I see my job is to, well, primarily, help to reinforce our own ability to be self-governing at any given time, but self-governing, not from a place of, oh, I've got this. And I'm the one with the right ideas and so forth, but self-governing in a way where you're prioritizing the team. You're not doing it for your own ego gratification because that never ends well. And it always ends up creating things that are overlooked that are out of sync and out of integrity. I'm not talking about some sort of moral integrity, but out of integrity is in, like, someone was operating in a way where the puzzle piece wasn't fitting the puzzle because they're operating from their own individual agenda versus actually coming from that place of ego freedom and paying attention to the entire group mind of the team. So with that balance, which is like we're using the surfing analogy, it's a day-by-day balance, has to be rediscovered every day. What is the balance between total autonomous sovereign agency and paying close attention to everything that's going on on the team so that you can be surfing the same wave together and not interfering with one another and not overly leaning or relying on any given person and so forth. I don't want people to be relying on me to be able to help to create the vision. I can help to create a vision or I can help to create a sort of sense of cohesion amongst the team members, but really ultimately the vision is being co-created. And I'm one amongst many who is helping to facilitate that process. And I'm so, so I think I really benefit from having had so many incredibly genuinely humbling experiences in my life where it was not about me at all. And my entire life was being facilitated by others helping me to stay alive literally so many times in my own life. That I know that it's never about me. It's like I'm going to bring the fullness of my attention to what I'm doing, but I know damn well not to ever mistake that for it being about me. You know, like let me see how I can contribute to the whole but also recognize that simultaneously there is all of these other influences both in the people on my team and what's happening in the world and all of that that are all contributing to my ability to be here doing what I'm doing. I think that's a powerful insight. I'm also curious because you're very good at maintaining the self-awareness and reflected back on things and trying to take a very honest snapshot of the existence that you're in in that moment or any of these things. What is the way that you have found that helps your team maintain a state of awareness and more self-awareness, I suppose, because if we sit down and say, okay guys, this is our meeting and we're going to talk about self-awareness and a lot of you guys need to be more self-aware. That's the best way that I know of to those people off and make them not even want to look at that. But if we're able to kind of reflect that again, all leadership of self-leadership, and I know that you lead very well in that capacity, hypothetically, if you were to have a teammate or a C-suite executive that wasn't doing that, we'll be your approach to help them maybe redouble their efforts or rediscover that awareness. Yeah, well, I would be very open and honest about it and have a conversation where I'm just trying to get clarity around what is behind what they are doing and why they're doing it. I would say one of the most important parts is trying to be discerning from the beginning with the types of people that you bring onto the team. I had a situation not too long ago, a few months ago where we brought on a young fellow who was incredibly talented, like right and ambitious and just incredibly intelligent and had so much energy to make things happen. And for the first several meetings we got together, I was pretty excited. I thought, well, this is great. This young, ambitious guy has got a lot of enthusiasm, very intelligent so forth. But I was overlooking a few red flags in terms of ways that he would communicate sometimes, which indicated, hmm, there's some narcissism here. There's some, you know, he's not actually paying attention to the team dynamics. He seems to think that he knows best what we need and he's not listening to, he's not in the team like he's part of an organism. It's like there's him and then there's the team. And we keep on talking about how we operate as a team, but I keep on seeing that he's operating with a separate agenda and we have to keep on listening to where he is and trying to bring him over. And it's like, ultimately, I realized that it was not a good fit because no matter how intelligent and ambitious he was, and I think he's going to be incredibly successful with the right team that is good for him to work with. And it's no judgment, really. It's just something that I observed and I observed it regularly enough that I'm like, you know what, this would actually, if we don't, if we don't address this now, this is going to take down our team versus build our team. And so it was for me, that was a really valuable experience because it helped to enhance my organization's immune system. It was like a little injection of a vaccine, you know, that carries a certain energy with it that the body then learns how to become resistant to that energy because it's had to develop immunology around it. And so I look at it not as a mistake or a failure that we entertained having him on the team for a while, but ultimately, it's like, oh, that was something where we mistook the talent and the ambition and the intelligence for something that would be inherently valuable. And we were willing to overlook certain red flags in terms of his attitude and contributions sometimes that were not so connected to the heart of the team. And we almost, we could have potentially let that go on. And if that had festered, it could have torn the entire team apart. That's one example that, you know, just happened a few months ago. That was a great learning experience for me. And for all of us. No, I absolutely agree. There's how many companies do we see that say, you know, I want to scale. But you're talking about this idea that if we are going to scale something, we want to try to tighten it up as much as we can. Make sure there's no leaks because if we have this red flag as you're saying and we scale it in addition to the company, it may outscale everything else. And it could choke productivity. It could get rid of other people because they don't want to be around that. But in our mind, it's like, we just keep pouring gasoline onto this thing. And it actually engulfs us. And now we've scaled ourselves out of business because of this one person or this one issue. And as a leader, how many times have people seen things, but don't say anything? Or how many times we brought up, like you said, I'm sure you brought that subject up many times. And if you're bringing a subject up, we're a person up on the same subject more than twice, then that means we need to address it in some capacity. And if we're constantly talking about that person or that situation over and over again, then we're not corrected inappropriately or we don't have the courage to have the honest conversation and say, listen, this is what it feels like. This is what I see. And then again, when you have a person like that, they may either act as if they don't understand or they don't know or they know what words to say. But again, this optimum verbiting, if you want to know what they believe, look at the patterns, look at their actions. If the self-serving is altruistic, are you claiming that it's altruistic when it is self-serving? That's my gay villainism at that point. And now it becomes actually deleterious to our existence and our culture and our breeds as cancerous. It really is. It really is. And it has to be addressed in little ways every day because we all bring unconscious sort of ego tendencies into everything. And I'm not excluded from that. And I will do the same thing myself. And my business partner uses a fantastic analogy. It is exactly what you were just talking about, about how a potter, when they are throwing a pot, they spend the majority of the time working out the bubbles in the clay because any bubble in the clay will interfere with the pot being able to take the proper shape and maintain balance on the wheel. And so it's really about massaging the clay and getting the fibers of the clay to all be sort of, I'm not a potter, I'm probably using some bad metaphors, but getting the air bubbles out and getting all the fibers aligned and so forth. So by the time that clay hits the wheel, it naturally takes shape and you can trust it to take shape. And all you have to do is hold the space for it to take shape. And that's the effortless part. That's the fun part. But it's not so fun if you overlook things and you're so focused on the outcome of the pot that you want to create that you overlook taking the bubbles out of the clay before putting it on the wheel. And so that's when I think a lot of people will so be so focused. And this is where I think wisdom really plays an important role in governing an organization and something that I think doesn't exist a whole lot universally is wisdom in leadership roles. I think there's a lot of knowledge that exists in leadership roles, but knowledge doesn't equate to wisdom. And if there's not regular wisdom being cultivated on the leadership team, that business will fail at some point. And you'll be so focused on the outcome that your knowledge could potentially create that you're undermining the other very, very important pieces around team architecture and strategy and all of the other incredibly even more important components around creating something together. I always say knowledge that is acquired but unutilized is the equivalent of ignorance. How many people do we know when we go to a seminar or if we go speak or do whatever we're giving them all these things and they're excited and they clap and they want to get a picture and all that stuff with you, which is great. But then come Monday morning, they're doing the same thing they were doing before. For us, as you're saying, wisdom is the love of knowledge, is this philosophy, this love of wisdom. And the object of wisdom is not to acquire it but to execute on it. And especially if it's the first time we're doing anything, you're a great guitar player. The first time you pick up the guitar, you weren't in pentatonic minor skills. You were just trying to figure out how do I get my finger in the right place without it making that horrible sound of being between friends. That's the idea but that humility that gives us the capacity. And an instrument is an inanimate object. And we've heard people say it's like, "Oh, the guitar's better than I am." But the truth is, it can only do so much for us if we don't have the ability to apply the scale or the arpeggio or even tune the damn thing, then how in the world can we expect? And again, we can't play the guitar. It's like me blaming this pen for me grinding the wrong answer on its ass. It's like, and I'm the one that's controlling that thing. So that's where you're going. Yeah. And then there's musicians. There's a plenty of guitar players who I hear with a technical facility and knowledge of the instrument that is way beyond what where I have gotten with respect to the technical facility. And then I listen to them play and I'm like, "Huh, there's nothing interesting about this. It's fast and it's technically accurate and all of that stuff." And it's like, "Well, that's pretty impressive that their fingers can do all of those, dexterous, acrobatics, but I don't feel anything." And so that's a whole other thing. The feel, that would bore me to play that fast and that technical would no feel. And so the feel itself is another, I don't want to use the term discipline, but discipline in terms of not necessarily some, it is discipline in that it must be practiced, but it's more discipline in terms of the ability to distinguish between something that is just memorization and repetition and something that actually has some type of deeper, more substantial feel associated with it. Yeah, like you said, it's a skill set that you're acquiring, but then you have to have the emotional component behind it to drive that thing. I've had a Lee McKinney on my show a couple of times. Incredible guitarist, an amazing instrumentalist. He signed his first record deal at 17 as a guitar player, so he kind of had like his biggest dream came true at that age, but when you listen to him play, you feel this extra dimension, this robustness come through. And that, again, that's that emotion that can come through. And just like anything else as you're saying, in V.J. Momstein was incredible at what he did, and he kind of revolutionized the neoclassical ideal. But yet, as you say, it's like, okay, I've kind of heard, I've heard one song and he plays 64th notes and 120th, that's great. But I also found from Lucinda Blues, we're seeing a musician who's just out there pouring their soul into this singular note. If all we do is play fast, it stops sounding fast. If I go slow, if I step back, if I detach, if I breathe, if I meditate, now it allows me to clean that slate, fresh eyes. And now, even if I play a little bit faster than what I was, my contrast is so much faster. All right. Then if I build it up or break it down or do all these other things, again, that syncopation, the ability to have cadence, all these ideas, that's what creates emotion because that's what life is. It's never perfect. It's never ideal. There's always sour notes. There's always places where we miss something. But within that, that's where we can find beauty between the notes, between the existences, between the breaths. Well, there's a resonant quality that has to be there in order for us to really be able to feel it and not just it's to go back to the AI analogy. It's like, like many people say, this is as bad as it will ever be. It's like the fact that it can actually spew out any number of different topics at such a high level of reasoning. And so rapidly, in a matter of a fraction of a second sometimes. And suddenly, it's, whoa, you know, that's like the technician who has memorized and learned the scales in a way where they can be so accurate and so fast. And it's impressive. But then where's the feel? Is there actual feel there at all? And so it's, this is where there's something really interesting. I think that we're going to discover about human beings. I don't know if I want to use the word potential because it's so wrapped up in the notion of achievement and so forth. But potential in that's in if we take the term potential and apply it not to the ability to execute on a task quickly, but or or accomplish something per se, but rather potential in terms of a resonant humanness, a deeper sense of humanness that we intuitively and I think you intuitively sense that we have only begun to scratch the surface of with respect to we actually are on a more profound and subtle level than we tend to think about when we define ourselves purely through our sense of accomplishments and our ability to regurgitate information. Yeah, there's so much there and it's as understanding as you say, this is only the beginning. I saw Tim Ferris put up a video and he says, AI is here and it's scary as hell. And it was a video of him speaking about selling Bitcoin. And then at the bottom of it, he says, by the way, this is a being. Wow. And I understand that, you know, he's omnipresent in a lot of these spaces, but the reality is with AI now, it could sample our video, our images, our words now and create something that never happened. Yeah. So I believe also, as you're saying, because we're running so diametrically, opposed one direction towards this, these capabilities that are limitless, I think the human being desires the other direction more, they don't want more social media, they want more actual connection, they know what more knowledge they want to feel with them, they don't want to observe, they want to experience. And I think that whether they can put their finger on that or not, that is the truth as humans. And I think that the more that we can meet those humans where they are on a human level, and then just like you were talking about with AI before, use it with that expectation of how will this cultivate something that will help people for generations to come to create legacy in a way without it ego, without expectations. That's that altruistic work that we're actually trying to do, whether we realize it or not. And I think that that paying attention to that intention is what helps us start the path in the correct direction in the first place. Tell us about E9, tell us about what you all do because the website has some incredible stuff on it and explain to us what got you there. Yeah, and what got me here is kind of a mystery actually. It always is, right? Yeah, so we're a data-centric MarTech company and we are combining a couple of different technologies together, one of which is an anti-counterfeit technology that is an invisible layer of protection that gets printed into product packaging or potentially laser engraved into products themselves. You can't see with your naked eye, but if you scan it with a smartphone app, you can tell that there's an image that pops out of the packaging or out of the product that tells you whether it's an authentic product or whether it's been counterfitted. And so that's one component of it. And then there is another component that is a separate technology that we're combining with that, which is a patented QR code-based digital ecosystem for interacting with products or surfaces, branded surfaces. So a customer would scan a package or a poster or maybe a seat back on an airplane or something like that and they would receive content from that brand or from that organization that is stuff that they want to participate with, loyalty, reward stuff or product information or videos or user manuals, all the sort of stuff that that product or that surface could potentially communicate with that customer. And then the cool patented component of this is that it also allows for what is called a key for other stakeholders, say in the business or a shipping department, logistics, etc. So when they scan a QR code, they get an entirely different form of information that's specifically related to their job and what is relevant to them. So that information is private and accessible only via that private key and any number of different private keys can be given out from a company or organization for different roles. So it's all role-specific. So there's the public content that most people would get it when they scan the product and then there's all these role-specific keys for different people in the organization to get content relevant to them. And for the brands, the companies that are working with us, the benefit for them is they are getting zero-party data, which means self-opted in data that the person who is interacting with the product wants to share with that company. So it's not something that there is being scraped that they're not knowing about. They know that they're sharing that data because it's valuable to them. And then that company can take all of that data and create better efficiencies with marketing and with their logistics, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's two separate technologies combined in a totally unique new way. And it's been something that has, you know, in terms of how I got here and how this has all happened, if you would ask me two years ago, do you think you're going to be the co-founder and CEO of a tech company? I would have been like, you got to be out of your goddamn mind. I've never coded a single line of code in my entire life. I know nothing about tech. I use it like an amateur, but I know nothing about it. But the opportunity found me and it was really because of the folks that I'm working with, meeting me, seeing my leadership qualities and so forth and feeling like I would be a good person to take the helm of the team. And so that's where we are right now. Was it overwhelming when you were offered the opportunity and then you looked at the vastness of what this could be? It was not really, I mean, it was, and I suppose the reason it was not was because we started out with a sort of a simpler objective, which was really to focus primarily on the anti-counterfeit thing. And I thought, okay, I can kind of wrap my mind around this anti-counterfeit technology and what I don't know I can learn about and I'll happily admit what I don't know and where I need to learn and so forth. And then as we have worked together over the past, this is, it's been in the sort of conceptual framing stage for the past little over a year where we've been putting together the various different pieces and finding the opportunities and developing go-to-market strategy and the investors and all that stuff. It's been congealing in this way that has been incremental enough so that I've been having to learn at hyper speed, but because of the fact that it's been incremental, I've also been able to go, okay, like suddenly I've sort of developed a whole new capacity to lead a team and to be able to have a pretty good grasp of the technologies that if it had all happened at once, yeah, it would have been totally overwhelming. I would have been like, what? But because of the fact that it happened in this incremental way and because of the fact that I have such a fantastic team that I'm working with, I've experienced entrepreneurs and really, you know, they have a lot of knowledge in this space and in other spaces. So we're learning together all the time and that's what it has taken. That's what has allowed me to avoid overwhelm is having a really, really strong and reliable team. Well, I think it's allowed you to, it's prevented overwhelm but it's also prevented overreach on your part because you understand you're like, listen, I'm the CEO, I'm up here. I don't need to be micromanaging this person and saying, hey, how are you making that? Because I don't know. And as the CEO, we're not supposed to, we're supposed to be up near the top looking, this idea of looking up and out in the military. We always said that leaders don't get bullets. So I have to trust these people. I have to direct these people. I have to believe that they understand the mission well enough that they can adapt and flow effortlessly into whatever that gap may be or to ride this way that's approaching that I had no clue was even going to be here. And they're the ones saying, hey, Sam, in six months, this way is going to be here and we can need to be near the top of it, learn into adapt or we can get crushed under it and then we can have the audacity to be surprised. And if they tell you and you say, well, let's worry about that when we get there, like you said, that's a great lesson too. So yeah, and that requires the wisdom to really take the time to, you know, not be just constantly pushing forward, pushing forward, pushing forward, and overlooking important things, but really take the time to tune in, really take the time to practice active listening, really take the time to be aware is something in sync or is it out of sync? If it's out of sync, is it out of sync because of something we're doing or not doing? Or is it out of sync because it's not the right thing to do right now? And all of those things require a high level of discernment. And I'm grateful that my life has given me the opportunity to learn discernment. Yeah, it's and that comes from again self-awareness, that ability to be humble. That's right. That ability to be honest enough to because how many people do we know that you'll appreciate this? How many people build their ego around claiming that they're humble? I always love that. Oh my gosh. Yeah, no, I love that. It runs rampant in the martial arts. And I'm the most humble person that you will ever come across. No, I'm the most humble one is more humble than me. No, I am. Let me open the door for you. I don't want to walk through it because I'm humble. Well, I don't need to do that because I don't because I'm humbler than you are. Okay. I see that in philosophy, martial arts, even circles within these sort of arenas have been like, oh my god, you guys don't understand that this is the same coin of humility, but it's on the other side because your ego is involved too much. Right, right. Yeah, humility is not something to identify with. Humility is so to say, ongoing, ongoing verb. How we show up not who we are. Yeah, everything. Sam, I could talk to you for a long time and we will continue to talk for years after that. Yeah, one of the days will be a chance to connect in person. Yeah, absolutely. Have them be able to gather. I would love that. I would absolutely love that. In the meantime, where would you direct us to learn more about Zenwari or training, about E9, about where you're speaking next and about everything that you're doing? I've embarrassingly lit my Zenwari or training website go as I've been working on E9, but you can follow me on Instagram @ Zenwari or training. LinkedIn, I'm Sam W. Morris. E9 Global is E9 Global.com and if anyone wants to reach out to me directly, Sam at Zenwari or training, if you're interested more in the embodied philosophy piece and Sam at E9 Global, if you're interested in the brand protection and martyck side of my life. And I was going to say, it sounds like that's something that we all need to be more aware of and to at least examine looking at these, what your things you're talking about. Because what have you done? You've taken two spheres and then you've seen where they overlap like a Ving diagram and that's the area where you guys can really help people and really differentiate yourself from everybody else who claims to be doing one thing, but then there's a lot of things to be desired on the other aspects. Yeah, yeah, it takes a little, a lot of massaging and nuance to try to recognize how you can really position yourself to be a market leader. And if this company didn't allow us to be able to think in terms of how we could be a market leader, I probably wouldn't have found it interesting enough to be a part of, you know, it was like, I want to be doing something where I know that we can be market leaders. And or at least there's a very good chance of that. And if the competition does come along, which it inevitably does, it always does, but we can find a way in which we can continue to to be positioned in that respect. It is fun. It is fun. And it's, it's, it takes a little bit of, well, more than a little bit, it takes a lot of creative engineering in order to do so to position oneself in that manner. And you have to have the access to the right people and the right technologies and all of that. But if you can find that position, it's a lot of fun. Well, I think that again, starting with this blue water mentality, blueish mentality. And like you said, even when competition invariably gets there, they're going to be racing to the bottom. You're already going to be the very top of the echelon there and that gives you the ability. So they're chasing two or three other versions, the older versions, and you guys are already evolving into 3.0, 4.0, whatever that is for you. And then I love, it's so funny. People talk about philosophy and how it may not be functional in some capacities. But if you look at some of these great entrepreneurs, they literally are using these philosophies. If you look at the Naval, Tim Ferris, you know, all these people that are doing big things, they were using that philosophy and being courageous enough to apply it in real time when the stakes are high. And that's when most people pull back. But you have this beautiful knowledge of this philosophy and you've lived it for so long that you can step into that gap without expectation, but also without fear. And that's when you can find these beautiful experiences that, as you say, we can't plan to be spontaneous. We are either spontaneous or we're planning. And that's where some of those incredible opportunities arise. And that's why you guys are in the position or with the United States. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for saying that. And I recently heard a quote that I'll paraphrase because I think it's very relevant. And I think I've said something similar in the past that academic philosophy is basically conceptual masturbation, you know, real philosophy is a lived experience. I couldn't agree more. Yeah, absolutely. Sam Morris, I will talk to you soon. Thank you again, my friend. Marcus, really, thank you very much for inviting me. I really appreciate a wonderful conversation. Always. Thank you for listening to this episode of Octa Nonverba. If this message resonates with you, please share it out with others on social media. Hit that subscribe button and leave a review for the show anywhere you listen to podcasts. To learn more, please go to marcusarelliusanderson.com. And join as octa nonverba inner circle, get exclusive content, news, and information. Until next time, remember, talk is cheap. Live your life based on actions, not words.