0:00I 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 that is, I'm obsessed.
0:16I'm excited to have you here, Joe.
0:18Welcome 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.
0:26We're entrepreneurs. were 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 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 uh CEOs and entrepreneurs in the game including Sam Alman and some other friends that we we we were talking
0:55about before we started. And so we're really excited to have you here.
0:58Are you able to name drop at all? Can we give you like 10 seconds just to brag?
1:03The 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.
1:10We've seen Mark Pinkis, we've seen Samuel Alman, we've seen Eric Torberg, Ev Williams, I think Ev is a good one. Yeah. Um Stacy Philpot Brown, she was head of Google India and ran Task Rabbit. Is your specialty like type A high achievers that just need a little bit of help? Like how do you summarize the um you're starting here and you end up here?
1:35Uh no, I I 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.
1:50I don't even know what that is. Yeah. What's maximalist? Maximalist is someone who's like, I want it all right now and I can get it all right now. I would put like Sam Alman 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."
2:09No, I don't think it's achievable entirely, but I think that much more is achievable if you think that way. Right.
2:15So, the limitation like limiting beliefs are like hold us back dramatically. Let me ask you a question about limiting beliefs. I had never heard this phrase till 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 because I think it's pretty universal.
2:38The yeah the idea of a limiting belief outwardly is just any thought process that you have holding you back. And so I'll give you 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.
2:55Cuz 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 es 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 learn to make it over time that there's this natural pendulation of learning that occurs. And so the es and flows are actually good
3:24because 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.
3:41Or 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 I couldn't maintain the diet, right?"
3:51As if they couldn't like just have the piece of chocolate cake and then go back to the diet.
3:55Well, you don't need to make it personal, Joe. I don't appreciate that.
3:58Sam, when when we say limiting belief, does one pop into your head.
4:02Um, yeah. Like for example, you have to grind really hard um 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.
4:26Hypothetically, yeah, you know, I've heard that two.
4:30Yeah. Asking for a friend. Yeah. There 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
4:58they 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 if you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process
5:26showing 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.
5:51and I'll show you how I use it. So, check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.
5:58Here's something that I've never seen.
5:59I'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.
6:20So then the question is like what is the most important thing that you're doing?
6:24And it's usually the relationships you hold and the decisions that you make.
6:29How 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 becomes a reminder and yet I'm like but how do you tactically make that
6:58switch where you say enjoy the relationships not seeking the outcome?
7:04Yeah. 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 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 gro
7:33that. And then there's the emotional level, the mamillian level of the brain.
7:38So, the prefrontal cortex is the thinking level of the brain. It's very human. And the mamleian 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 happen. And then there's the part of our system that's more of the reptilian.
7:59It'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 the system. Can you walk through an example of that? So, like what's the transformation and then because you know you 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 I I I didn't know what to do. I don't know. I don't know how to I don't have the the instruction manual for that one. So, let's take an example and walk through.
8:23So, let'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. you 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.
8:49But 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.
9:00Typically, 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 they because they don't trust the authority of their childhood. They don't want they don't fully step into their own authority and they kind of rebel against other authorities. So they have like this mixed relationship with authority typically and then they have a very hard time announcing that they're hurt. Like it's the last move that they'll make is
9:29to say, "Hey, I'm hurt." Right? 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 like the way I just talked about it. I saw both of you and probably most of the people in the audience click and oh I never is that's all related really like to be able to tie that together to show that this is a pattern that came from your childhood. It isn't particular reality and so that kind of like creates a little space for a different action, different movement, but oftent times
9:58just 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 feeling 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.
10:26So, trust me, I'm Exactly.
10:28I'll leave. We're not We're not eating that tonight.
10:31Exactly. Exactly. So, 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 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 feel the helplessness and and how to actually look forward to and enjoy the helplessness which sounds radical and impossible
11:01but the way that this works is what 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.
11:16So, you don't want to feel helpless in the grocery store, so you don't ask for 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
11:44what perpetuates the thing. In this case, helplessness. So learning how to say, "Oh, I'm helpless. 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 It's not my boss anymore." Cuz if you're all your decisions are based on not feeling helpless, it means there are certain risks you're not going to take.
12:07It means you're not going to rely on other people that you need to to scale the business etc etc etc right so that would be the emotional is is the right way to think about it like um 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 so then but if we were going to play on like the phrase that what Sean just said or whatever um I think you said whatever emotion you try to avoid you end up
12:36inviting into your So then what's the opposite? What's the inverse of that?
12:39What's like the sentence that um is the solution?
12:42Fall in love with the emotions you're avoiding.
12:45Like 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. Is the same thing for emotions.
12:58And then on like a day-to-day basis, let's just say that we are doing the hard work or like this has to suck in order to get a good result.
13:05Do you tell what do you tell yourself every day for the next 2 years? Like are there like common inner thoughts that you find to be productive for this emotional state?
13:14So that answer 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.
13:36What'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 yet, it's it's actually not it doesn't work like that at all. And and the cool thing is it it can often just be I've literally seen the moment that somebody fully understands the beauty of the emotion.
13:57Oh, 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-m is constrained by a false limitation. So, I'm so stoked that I'm feeling it because I have those three signals now.
14:19And 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.
14:27Is the right way to think of these feelings as like a messenger kind of the way you're describing it. If you 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 you you use it and move through it. Is that the right way to think about this or is that a It's kind of h say half of it. The other half is to see that the that the emotional thing that's happening is let's say like it's a tube of energy, right? And so like a a a hose with water
14:57running through it. And if it runs clear, meaning it's not that hose isn't kinkedked, 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.
15:21And 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 motherucker, you.
15:32But if you uncink 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 for having it, 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
15:59showing up to work every day and none of them have ever thought, "Boy, I really hope the CEO is upset with me today."
16:07Or, "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 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 if there's the 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 I need to go pay attention there."
16:36You you seem very into words and I 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 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 um positive impacts on type A people?
16:58Yeah, absolutely. There are. However, the the the awareness is more important than the words.
17:06So let let's let's take for instance a common thing that is is effective is you know positive affirmations or uh 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
17:34can 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.
18:04And 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 they Tibetan book of living and dying samurai and then also what was it is like the Marcus Aurelius. Yeah, there's a great
18:34stoic book, Stoicism book, where you like close your eyes for five minutes and you assume everyone's dead, your kids have cancer, the worst things on earth. You open up your eyes and you say, "None of that is true. How grateful am I?"
18:45Right. 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 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.
19:10I'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 grieve 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.
19:37We don't 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.
19:47The the visualization thing is interesting. Um, the inner game of tennis talks a lot about that.
19:53Great book. And I actually just listened to um uh a talk by the coach of George St. Pierre, who's one of the greatest UFC fighters of all time. And they talk about preparing fighters for the most dangerous, scary sport there is. And he was like, "We find the competitor's walkout music. We wear our outfit, you know, our we're like a dress rehearsal.
20:11We listen to the music constantly." And so we do that when we practice. And we practice the walk out. We have the bright lights. This way you are visualizing this to the point of not just visualizing but you hear it and like he was even saying something about the smell. They try to get use the same glove so it smells the same. And this way when you first 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 and you are
20:38prepared. It's the same thing like so I don't know how many entrepreneurs I've walked through that the visualization of the death of their company. Everybody gets laid off, you know, 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 be.
21:00Do you do that daily, monthly? Like how often should someone practice that?
21:04It's more until the fear 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 then that's going to like it's how you do it is more important than than than repetition and reps and what is the how you do it you you sit in a room turn the lights off like walk me through what how
21:33do you actually do this I 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.
21:44The the big trick is to feel the things you don't want to feel. The reason that that's the trick is because look, if I said to you like most entrepreneurs, one of the things that they get scared about is being homeless. 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 think of the best time you've ever felt in your entire life, it's going to be 10x that all the
22:14time. If if you knew that to be true, how scared are you to be homeless?
22:18I want to be homeless.
22:20Right. Exactly. So, what's actually occurring is that we're scared of an emotional experience, not an actual experience.
22:28And and and and it's 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 Deart's 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
22:58um 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 cuz you can't make decisions. And this was people who had brain damage or like a stroke in a certain area that and you oh your logical center is still working and decisions are logical, right?
23:18And it's like no, no, not not right. Not even simple decisions are the the only decisions that aren't emotionally based are the decisions that bypass the emotional center like a snake coming at you like you jump back without without it going through that part of your brain.
23:35What about the 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 co-orker that says, "Can we talk?" And you're like, "They're quitting.
23:55I feel like you feel like you get goosebumps and you like you feel something."
24:00Um, how do you how do you address this at a neurological level?
24:04Yeah. 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.
24:26Occasionally 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
24:55under attack when we're not and so it it amps up. Now sometimes that occurs because we have an abusive self-t talk and so if there's if I had a if I was your boss and I was like oh you you that up you did that wrong 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
25:24because 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 how the intellect and the nervous system relate. But there's a whole bunch of things that also happen with the nervous system. I I'll use my own example in this is my mom German super rigid woman loved me dearly in her capacity
25:52but like if I was 5 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
26:21get messed up so there's some nervous system stuff that happens just like through training and so one the 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
26:49in and you're like, "Oh shit." You just stop and you're like, "What is it like to be me?" 2 seconds and then you go ahead and do your thing. Like go ahead, be anxious again. Like don't don't try to control yourself because trying to control your anxiety is just 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
27:17necessary. But it's necessary to do it over and over and over again to see what's actually occurring in your system and and what's really necessary. And then 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. Hey, can I ask you about avoiding
27:45conflict? 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 doing it. I can feel myself doing it. I know I'm not supposed to be doing it, but I'm doing it. 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.
28:10So so can we talk about conflict and avoiding conflict uh especially with those who we're closest to where I think it's maybe the hardest.
28:17Yeah. So I think intellectually the 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 and you're like great thanks and you ignore it. That's what avoiding conflict is like because conflict is the place where efficiency
28:46can be gained whether it's in a marriage or in a business or between business partners.
28:53So I I I'll give you um a 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
29:23going to avoid the conflict and and we're and as a as company deciding like how does this feedback 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 that for the facilitator to work on. And if this person's doing it out of some sort of like arrogance or um uh narcissism, like I think I can do a better job and the feedback is
29:51then 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, right? Yeah. You're avoiding progress, not not conflict.
30:18Exactly. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.
30:19Yeah. But that's what a lot of people feel like. Like for example, I've talked to like really big 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."
30:30And so, like you just said this on a on an intellectual level, totally I'm 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.
30:46Yeah. So, let Yeah. Let's get into that. that I think that the I I do want to say one more thing intellectually too because it's um that if I was 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.
31:06I guarantee you that the 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. Just 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
31:36into 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 choose not to do it. And the third is I'm going to destroy something that I care about.
31:58Like I have the hard conversation, that person leaves, and then the company's going to collapse or then the sales department's going to collapse or whatever.
32:05Is 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. I feel like that's like a a reason for one of the other excuses, but I'm sure that there's moments where that that's the case. And sometimes that's there's actually some there's some validity to that. Like I've given them feedback. I'm going to wait a couple 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
32:34so some of that speaks to the fact that the person doesn't know how to make the conflict productive reliably.
32:43Like 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 one example cuz 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. So most people in a hard conversation say, "Hey,
33:10sales 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
33:38disempowering the person and you're not coming in and telling them what to do.
33:43So 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 let 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 would ask a lot of open-ended questions. I would make sure
34:12that they feel very heard and so I understand what's going on. So, as a 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
34:42what'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 um we've lost trust." Like I I'm I notice 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
35:10than making about them. So, this is again back to the self-reliance piece.
35:15Uh, 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 of 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
35:44example 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. If the CEO is happy with the way the company's going, the company is going the way it should be going. If the head of marketing is happy, but the CEO is miserable about where the company's going, that's not a good investment.
36:06So, 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
36:33their childhood. So, so that's an example. So, 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 on all 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
37:00reasonable for me to ask, if you feel like I'm actually helping this person become more empowered and 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. If I was like, "Hey, Sean, you're such a dick."
37:27Like, "Why are you such a dick?"
37:30Or 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.
37:57So your your calm, your what I would call veagal 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.
38:13You have um this cool quote. I think it 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-t 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 are do you have any um patterns that you have seen of self-t talk and what are
38:42the practical tips on improving that? So there's there's like three or four different kind of self-t talk abuse cycles that you you're 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 didn'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 this 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 selft talk then there's like some like
39:11kind of hidden ones which are like uh Uh, 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 you can shoot the basket.
39:26I know you can, Mike." Like, you would never do it because you have confidence in that person. So, this 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 selft talk negative selft talk one of the ways that you know it's negative selft talk is cuz it's repeating right
39:54so when when negative selft talk starts dying in your system when it starts a atrophying you just have a lot less thought just is a lot less thought occurs and the thought that you have is more like epiphies it's like oh here's a cool idea oh that's a cool idea they're not repetitive ative over and over again thoughts. So I'll give you just a couple really practical ones.
40:19Um if you try to change the selft talk it's very inefficient. If you change the way you react to the selft talk it's far far more efficient. Your selft talk is like, "Wow, you just really screwed up that podcast, Joe."
40:34And 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.
40:49Uh-huh. Yeah." That's how we listen to our selft talk. Most of us listen to our selft talk as, you know, oh, you screwed that up. It's like, "Yep, I screwed that up. I should do something about that." Like, that's 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.
41:11I'm right here with you. You can be scared." Or, "You up. Uh, wow. That's really shitty management. Could you try to manage me in a different way, please?" You up. Prove it.
41:25You up. Well, 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 selft talk happens that day, every time you remember you react in this way that you're experimenting with.
41:45And then 2 days later you do a new experiment. 2 days later you do a new experiment. So you're constantly changing the way that you're reacting to your selft 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.
42:06We the the voice in our head reacts differently depending on how we treat it and you get to start seeing that.
42:13And so that's a really simple way to start man not manage but start like bringing awareness and therefore changing and transforming your negative selft talk. The other another really good one that's just really easy is like name like write out here are the 20 things the 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 I can give you if you tell me anything that your negative voice in
42:42your head says to you on a regular basis I can prove and I can tell you five ways it's not true. Hey, can I ask you a question that um it sort of violates that rule, you know, never ask a man a question that a salary depends on uh the answer or whatever?
42:57So, so you know uh 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 veagal authority. I'm like oh I got to go look at that. I want to learn that. I want to learn to do this. And then within like I would say as soon as I pass like the 90minute 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
43:27everything and then I'm like oh my god this is so much work. I just want to go back to being a 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 and I think actually recently this kind of a maxing kind of phrase caught on at least in Silicon Valley. Other people are probably like what the hell's this guy talking about? But um 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.
43:55Yeah. 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 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 the psyche and all of its different parts?
44:13Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you have it seems like you have two questions in there. the 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 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
44:41experiment I'm going to run this week and and that's maybe yours another person's is like I have to be perfect and so that like takes all the joy out of it and and 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.
45:08Um you know the way I think about meditation is a is a 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?
45:32That that's a question. Or how do you enjoy self-rowth 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
46:00once I you know 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?
46:11What's the 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.
46:31You're going to make a lot more progress on the first than the second.
46:34I think that's a great insight. I want to come back to the second question, but just to add on to 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. Uh, here's the musical notation. We're going to memorize all these letters and here's what we're going to learn rhythm and 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 but like she basically presented the whole elephant that I'm going to have to eat. And I was
47:03like, "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 this 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 what made you want to do this? What's a song you like and what would be cool if you could play it?" I'm like, "Ah, 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 do the right hand and we're just going to learn this intro lick. You'll walk out of here. You'll be able to play this little thing, right?"
47:31And you know, it just got c. And then it's like, "Oh, do you want to be able to play the next thing? You're going to have to learn what a chord is. You know what 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. Uh so what you said definitely re I didn't realize the connection between those two until you said that.
47:46Yeah. If anybody told us what we had to do 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.
47:57Yeah. Yeah. Or having kids or anything else like that. Uh can we can we do the second part now of uh are we better off just being uh sort of you know boxing and and 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 it 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
48:27that has really really hard recruitment because everybody because AI 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 and the CEO of the other even though they might be great CEOs in the business of their choice because one is not high
48:55margin, one is low margin, one is about a certain kind of efficiency, one is 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 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,
49:23then you're just shooting yourself in the foot by not being self-aware.
49:28There'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?
49:39And then there's like holy this is life is better. And then when you hit the holy life is better moment often times like two or three years for people that they really get that moment then it's just like why in the hell would I ever stop this?
49:55You know it's a little bit like working out. I speaking of like working out and actually Sean's example with 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.
50:13I'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 lb over the next year. like here's like a really interesting progression and here's like uh some experiments or workouts you can do each week. It might be too reductive, but are there like a this idea of experimenting weekly is pretty cool.
50:34That sounds exciting and that sounds fun. Is there like a checklist or a playbook where it's like No, I 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 that what's a thing they could do that would this get get them on the road? Yeah. And like what are and then what's the progression and where are some other weekly experiments that I could like follow to improve myself?
50:58Yeah. 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'll be published in like whatever a year and something that has 52 experiments on different topics.
51:25Um and and then a whole bunch of writing on these topics.
51:30A really cool s 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. No, nothing to it. So, just do that five times a day for the next week.
51:52Five times a day. Go, oh, how do I enjoy myself without changing anything? Just 5% more, 10% more.
51:58That sounds like so basic and almost stupid. And then I think of myself wanting to do that and I'm like, that's actually really helpful.
52:04Like 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 um Oh yeah, this one's good. Especially if you're a grinder. Don't do anything you don't
52:31enjoy for a week. Do go to work and you can only do the 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.
52:48And I hated taking the trash out. But I also didn't enjoy smelling the trash. So I was sitting there like, but what do I do? Cuz 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.
53:04And 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.
53:20So you said you said something in that first experiment. You said without doing anything different enjoy it more. Which to me reads like and you know because 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 that's fair.
53:36But 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.
53:41That's why they're that's why they're two experiences, two experiments, right?
53:44And I 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?
53:52Is it is it what you thought? He's like, honestly, no, not at all. He's like, I don't feel anything. Yeah.
53:57And 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' you think you just start today and suddenly feel it at level 100? Like you never used that muscle before. So like the actual
54:25thing to do was 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 V2 max. It's way higher than mine. Is that does that line up with like I've never done the research. This is my life experience. Yes, definitely. Definitely.
54:50Especially 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.
54:59The positive ones are.
55:01The positive ones. Yeah.
55:02Why? Why does that destroy your identity?
55:04Go be in bliss and find out where you are.
55:06Well, I I I experienced that when I had kids. When I had kids, I I 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. Uh, 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.
55:28And you're like, that part of me just died. I 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.
55:38Less. Yeah. And it like and I'm happy. I prefer this life.
55:42And 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 cuz we've been talking about self-reliance.
56:01Thank 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.
56:13Hey, how do you find joy and how do you find what you should be doing? Because you're like find 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 asked themselves or can't answer what do I love doing?
56:33Yeah. I think because it's a false I think that's really just like a self- abuse in 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,
57:03but 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 an a car, if I wanted an
57:32efficient 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.
57:54And often that does 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 than if I had a yoga class that sucked and I hated it.
58:21And 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 and say, "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.
58:50It's interesting you say that. You know, I when when Sam asked these questions 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 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 two sides of the brain type of thing. Yeah. But I feel like when you're answering some of these, you you are kind of thinking your way through, I guess. Can you talk about
59:19just noticing or feel rather than where does that play in for you?
59:23I can give you a great story on this. So my wife and I were sitting we we do these very intense long retreats and so it's very tiring and we were at the end of one of the retreats 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 and um 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 would you sell this business for a
59:53billion 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, "We wouldn't." Like that was our 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
1:00:23something you can grow into a billion dollars. And she's like no something I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars.
1:00:29And 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. I like uh talking with
1:00:57people 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 to show that like they're one of us. But are there any interesting stories or observations
1:01:24about the 1% the 1% of performers that would surprise us or at least entertain us on how these guys might think that might surprise us or be different?
1:01:35Yeah. Specifically, I can't do obviously, but um 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.
1:01:49Like there's there's that the the things that you're wrestling with are the exact same things that they're wrestling with, right? The what what attributes do you tend to notice? Are they 10 out of 10 on and or one out of 10 on?
1:02:00The really really the exceptional ones of like very fastpaced 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 fa paced business, but in a fast-paced business, you can't seconduess yourself very much. So very very few of them are secondguessers.
1:02:25So they just are like and part of it is because they have to make so many decisions in a day. And and so decisiveness is another one especially for the fast-paced industries. There are some um 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 I would say
1:02:54like 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.
1:03:25It's not all the time but it's it's more common in that population than in any other population that I've seen. There's 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 drags 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 it's there's a lot of it in that realm. You know, one of
1:03:54the things we did in this podcast that's sort of backwards probably from most podcasts. Most podcasts start with like, "Tell me about your background and your story."
1:04:02And 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 did you what kind of journey did you go on?
1:04:13Can 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 read something about like an an 8-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.
1:04:31Uh, yeah. I mean, I grew up going all over the world. I think by the time I was 28, I lived in 26 places.
1:04:38My dad was a CEO, but also um became an alcoholic. And so I would rebelled against that. had a mohawk, was a skateboarder, got kicked out of my first college, graduated valadictorian from 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 um throughout the United States and then I did
1:05:08international stock lending and I was in a band and I so I was just like I'm having whatever adventure I want from like with James Bond man because well it's cuz 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 a 10-day silent retreat, and we're going to travel through um third world together
1:05:38for like 6 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.
1:05:55And then the silent retreat was my first time meditating ever. And on day three of aa 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 samadei is what some people would call it. this experience of I am one with everything and everything is good and it lasted eight seconds and then it was
1:06:24like 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
1:06:52went and explored everything and took nothing very seriously and made everything an experiment. So instead and then now that's how we teach like when we do our courses, everything is done as an experiment. It'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.
1:07:13And 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 2,000 years old. I'm going to try 10 forms of meditation. I'm going to do the Hoffman process. I'm going to do sematic work. I'm 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
1:07:41cards. I meditated for like 7 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 just easier and and more spacious than I thought it was.
1:08:06And then my identity got trapped in that for a while like I was the awake guy and then that evaporated.
1:08:12And 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 handin-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 started coming in that that like oh I can be with my children in these big emotions and all they need to do is feel them and accept them to like become amazing kids
1:08:42and now my girls are you know 17 and 20 and they are freaking amazing and it is I think all because of handin and and my wife, she's amazing. And um so that was it. And then some point I became a venture capitalist and uh as one does.
1:08:59As one does. Yeah. I uh I literally went from meditation, I did art, and then became a venture capitalist. I you you're like a sellout.
1:09:08Well, both of them just sit around all day doing that a lot.
1:09:12No, what happened was uh I was doing this large scale art installation for a wealthy family and I was giving them business advice cuz before I had done international stock lending and other things and I 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 and they made a lot of money. That's that's like 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, uh, do you guys
1:09:40want to discuss your bond portfolio?"
1:09:42Yeah. Wait, what did you actually tell them? What was going on? What was the call?
1:09:46Buy oil and gold. This is a long time ago, right? But, um, I was like I've always been obsessed with business as well. So, 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, you know, I was when they still had papers and I would read the Financial Times and because I started I one of the jobs I did was international stock lending and I I got like promoted three
1:10:14times 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 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 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 3 months later, I was like, "Well, I think the biggest change agent on the planet,
1:10:43this is around 2006." I was like, "It's going to be clean techch. I think that this is like the the biggest technological changes on the planet, I think, have come from from venture." So I'd 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 not a great investor because I needed to be needed too much like like a great investor is the investor who's like they do I am
1:11:13investing 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. Uh and we had a positive result on the portfolio. So we invested more. So I was investing for about 12 years. But pretty soon the word about my coaching got out.
1:11:42And 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.
1:12:07when people have it, they sell better, they do product better, they talk to their husbands and wives better, um 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 2016
1:12:3616 I started the transition. 2018 I stopped working for the family and I started building Art of Accomplishment and we've been growing ever since.
1:12:44You'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 talk 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, "Yeah, I'm in."
1:13:08Yeah. 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. You're like, "Oh, wow. I'm a perfectionist." So 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
1:13:36you 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 experiments.
1:13:51That's another one. By the way, Sam so brilliant that they call them exper 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 versus less preachy, less rigid, more like try this weird thing and see what happens. You might be surprised.
1:14:13Yeah, it's and it makes it more fun. Yeah, makes more fun. It's also there's another reason for it. So if 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.
1:14:24It's with all invertebras 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 is because if you're a bear and you're fighting for sexual dominance and you lose it 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
1:14:53just 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, 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
1:15:21iterating where there was no we fail. There's just I'm going to try this now.
1:15:24I'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 see self-awareness and 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
1:15:52you understand yourself right you can change.
1:15:56You're like uh 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. uh what is this? And like people are like popping their tops at parties like what do you think this is? And uh like if you go to a party with you, everyone's like, "Fix me." Uh or like give me the answer.
1:16:16It must be exhausting. You You probably have to lie about what you do.
1:16:19It's a little Yeah. It can be annoying.
1:16:21I Chris Williamson. Do you have you do you all know Chris?
1:16:25Yeah. So Chris Williamson was um hanging out with me and he was uh he was like, "You know, my life is walking down the street, some 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?"
1:16:50So I would say that's one good way to start. The other good way to start is on YouTube. I do these 15inute 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."
1:17:07And then watch the coaching session, you can get change that's not just on an intellectual level. This 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 transitionary 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 this. This was the perfect medicine.
1:17:30Cool. I'm happy to make some recommendations for you if you're interested.
1:17:34I'm all yours. Yeah, tell me everything.
1:17:37You can tell me you can tell me off air.
1:17:39Okay, brother. You got me eaten out of your hand right now. I'll do whatever you say.
1:17:44the that as far as the book, the one thing that I think would be really useful, we have a program that's specifically for venture-back startups that have found product market fit but 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. Super effective. Basically, we are all about getting that how do we have the hard conversations quickly and effectively and creating that so that
1:18:14you 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 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 the council And we open up applications once a year.
1:18:39Dude, it's crazy the responsibility you have. Like uh I read that the OpenAI team sends a car, picks you up and you 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 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 what I mean? Like 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.
1:19:07But secondly, like you know what responsibility? Like coaching the people that are building the thing, the bomb, you know, like either the greatest thing ever, the worst thing ever. Sometimes they say it's the greatest ever and sometimes they tell us it's going to be the worst thing ever. It's got to be a pretty uh pretty heavy thing.
1:19:21Yeah, that's that's really interesting.
1:19:23So just to be very clear about my like I I coach people at OpenAI. I don't co 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 inerson 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.
1:19:51You know, if you you've had a kid, your wife's in the O or in the birthing room or maybe she you had a duel 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
1:20:20supportive 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 concerned. You you must have seen the 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 the tweet was a guy who
1:20:47worked 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 uh one guy quit and then the guy who's still there who 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.
1:21:06Um do you have an opinion on um the seriousness?
1:21:09I 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.
1:21:18Does AGI exist now? Will it ever exist?
1:21:21Are 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.
1:21:37There's not everybody on one corner and everybody on the other corner. And so my take away from that is they're 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 with any kind of reality.
1:21:51That's such a you answer. That's a and it's a beautiful answer.
1:21:54So that's that'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 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
1:22:22say 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 sherk our responsibility by saying it's about one leader who's going to do it.
1:22:43Does that make you feel better, Sean, or no?
1:22:47Honestly, no. Not at all.
1:22:51Some are going to die.
1:22:53No, not even that. uh it's I guess on on one level there's a sort of humor in the situ to use your analogy of like you 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 AI's daddy has daddy issues therefore maybe the AI is gonna have daddy issues as it grows up um you know
1:23:22yeah just just like just like Meta's business is a reflection of the consciousness of Mark Zuckerberg.
1:23:29Yeah, 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 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
1:23:58that we want to get behind.
1:24:00Part of that is because of their own poor communication and presentation. Uh you know, so it's not like they're they're just hated because of who they are, right? They they contributed to some of that.
1:24:10And 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 me feel a lot better? No, not necessarily.
1:24:23I 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.
1:24:37The funniest the funniest tweet was uh when the Antaric guy was like yeah 10% chance it kills all humans. And then somebody quote tweeted it and said by the way LeBron was 9% to go to the Sixers this summer. Just put that perspective for me.
1:24:52I I 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 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."
1:25:07Wait, wait, explain this. I don't even know what what is the Dead Desi Scrolls are like the the ancient biblical text.
1:25:13Yeah, 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 enough 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 Joe thanks for coming on man uh everybody go check out Art of
1:25:41Accomplishment and the podcast and all the good Yeah, thanks for having me.
1:25:46All right, that's it. That's the pod.
