Coach for SpaceX & OpenAI destroys your limiting beliefs for 88 minutes straight
I 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 fuck that is, I'm obsessed.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never look back.
I'm excited to have you here, Joe. Welcome to the podcast. I don't know if you know kind of what this podcast is all about, but basically The people who listen to this podcast are very much like me and Sam. We're business junkies, we're entrepreneurs. We're sort of perpetually always starting things, but also students of the game, always trying to learn. You've done many things. You started your life story in 10 seconds, was kind of like a kind of punk rock kid to discovering an entire area of wisdom to go work in. You've been in the business world as a VC, and now you coach some of the highest level players of the game. You are one of the coaches to some of the top. CEOs and entrepreneurs in the game, including Sam Altman and some other friends that we were talking about before we started. And so we're really excited to have you here.
Are you able to name drop at all? Can we give you like 10 seconds just to brag?
The 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.
We've seen Mark Pincus, we've seen Sam Altman, we've seen Erik Thornberg, Ev Williams, I think.
Ev is a good one. Yeah. Stacy Philpott Brown. She was head of Google India and ran TaskRabbit.
Is your specialty like type A high achievers that just need a little bit of help? Like, how do you summarize the, you're starting here and you end up here?
No, I really like to have a variety of people, you know, like all sorts of people. The only thing that I think all of them, 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.
What's a maximalist?
I don't even know what that is. Yeah, what's a 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 Altman in the maximalist category. Any limitation that a normal person would see, they're just like, no, we can figure out how to do both.
Is that achievable?
No, I don't think it's achievable entirely, but I think that much more is achievable if you think that way. Right. So the limitation, like limiting beliefs are like hold us back dramatically.
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.
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. Hmm. 'Cause all that really is, is just a whole bunch of anxiety presenting itself as a thought process for you to believe. And instead of saying like, oh, every learning that I've ever had ebbs and flows, Like, I've totally learned stuff and then I've forgotten it and then I relearn it, or I've been able to make that shot in golf and then I can't make it, but then I learned to make it over time, that there's this natural pendulation of learning that occurs. And so the ebbs and flows are actually good because that is what learning is. Instead, it's, oh, I might lose this thing. And then they have a moment where they've lost this moment of transformation and then they go, oh, I've lost it. Which is a second limiting belief. So that would be like a very common limiting belief that people have. Or they're like, they're on a diet and they're like, will I be able to maintain the diet? And then they have that one piece of chocolate cake and they're like, oh, well, I couldn't maintain the diet.
Right.
As if they couldn't like just have the piece of chocolate cake and then go back to the diet.
Well, you don't need to make it personal, Joe. I don't appreciate that. Sam, when we say limiting belief, does one pop into your head?
Yeah. Like, for example, you have to grind really hard and do tons of stuff that you don't like in order to get to the end result, which in this case, let's say selling a company or making a lot of money. And you must suffer and suffer and suffer. And once you achieve whatever the end goal is, you will be at a place where you are new and happy.
That's a great one.
Hypothetically, Yeah, you know, I've heard that.
Yeah, asking for a friend. Yeah, there's 2 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 3 or 4 hours a week. And they had like a grind period of a couple of days, I mean, a couple of years, kind of in their 20s. But they just 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 showing you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, and the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life, like how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision? Things like that. And it's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes, and I'll show you how I use it. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.
How 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 switch where you say enjoy the relationships, not seeking the outcome?
Yeah, so if you're gonna make any transformation effectively in your system, you have basically 3 levels that you need to address it at. The first level is the level of the mind. And this is what we're usually pretty good at, meaning, Most people know that they should work out, but it doesn't mean that they work out. Most people know they shouldn't be dicks to the people who they need to run their business, but not everybody is. So intellectually understanding, that's actually usually the easiest part for Americans is to actually get that, to grok that. And then there's the emotional level, the mammalian level of the brain. So the prefrontal cortex is the thinking level of the brain. It's very human. And the mammalian level, I would call it the heart. I'd 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. It's the nervous system. And is that nervous? Can we address the nervous system? So if you want to make real transformation, you have to address all 3 levels of the system.
Can you walk through an example of that? So like, what's the transformation? And then, 'cause, you know, you had me at the head, you sort of lost me at the heart, and then by the time we got to the nervous system, I didn't know what to do. I don't know how to, I don't have the instruction manual for that one. So let's take an example and walk through it.
So 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. And 90% of the time, it meant you had to fend for other people. You had to take care of other people. Maybe that's because your parents were super critical, or maybe it's because you had an alcoholic father and you needed to take care of that father, or you had a depressed mother. But somewhere you learned, hey, no one's going to be there to take care of me. I got to take care of myself. My needs aren't going to be met otherwise. And then the outcome of that is that those people have a hard time asking for help. Typically, they have a hard time owning what they want, being able to just say, this is clearly what I want. They usually have an authority problem, which means they neither want to be the authority because they don't trust— because they don't trust the authority of their childhood, they don't fully step into their own authority, and they kind of rebel against other authorities. So they have, 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 to 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 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 creates a little space for different action, different movement. But oftentimes, just seeing it's not going to really deal with it. So then there's the emotional level. The emotional level is 2 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 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. So trust me.
Exactly.
I'll leave. We're not, we're not eating that tonight.
Exactly. 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 shit, there's nobody here taking care of me, it's like death and destruction. So you don't do that. And so this feeling of helplessness never got to be felt as a kid. And So emotionally, it means you have to learn how to feel the helplessness and how to actually look forward to and enjoy the helplessness, which sounds radical and impossible. But the way that this works is what I will call the golden algorithm, what we call the golden algorithm. So the emotion that you're trying to avoid is the emotion you're inviting in the exact way that you're trying to avoid it. So you don't wanna 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 wanna feel helpless about your business not doing well. So you grind, which keeps you more burnt out, making less good decisions, destroys your relationships. So you feel more helpless. So the action that you're taking to not feel the thing is actually what perpetuates the thing, in this case, helplessness. So learning how to say, oh, I'm helpless, I know how to experience that feeling. I know how to actually go, oh, this is just an emotional thing that's moving through me, and I don't have to be ruled by it. It's not my boss anymore. 'Cause if all your decisions are based on not feeling helpless, it means there's certain risks you're not gonna take. It 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 the right way to think about it. Like 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, I think you said whatever emotion you try to avoid, you end up inviting into your life. So then what's the opposite? What's the inverse of that? What's like the sentence that is the solution?
Fall in love with the emotions you're avoiding. Like, think about it this way. It's just like working out. You wanna work out, you're gonna have to like lean into the burn. And eventually you're like, I like working out. I like that burn. It's the same thing for emotions.
And then on like a day-to-day basis, let's just say that we are doing the hard work or like this has to suck in order to get a good result.
Yeah.
Do you tell yourself— 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?
So 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 2 things that make you grind. It's up to me. I gotta do it. There's no grace. There's no surrender. There's no letting other people help me. And I got to do it every day. What's the thing that I do that I can control, that I can grind at, that will fix my grind? So if you're really taking a look at it, yeah, 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. Oh, I can't wait to feel helpless because when I feel helpless, what I know is that I am. not delegating well. What I know is that I'm not letting other people help me. What I know is that my decision-making is constrained by a false limitation. So I'm so stoked that I'm feeling it because I have those 3 signals now, and I'm gonna go take action on those 3 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.
Is the right way to think of these feelings as like a messenger, kind of the way you're describing it? If you reframe them as a messenger or a signal, Then it's not something to, you know, you don't shoot the messenger, you don't avoid the messenger, you take the message and then you use it and move through it. Is that the right way to think about this? Or is that a—
It's kind of, I would say, half of it. The other half is to see that the emotional thing that's happening is, let's say, like it's a tube of energy, right? And so like a hose with water running through it. And if it runs clear, meaning that hose isn't kinked, Then life is good. If it kinks in one way or another, then there's all sorts of problems that happen. So let's take anger as an example. So you have anger moving through your system, and you kink it one way, and it's like this: nice dress. And you kink it another way, and it's like this: I'm not angry. I just need you to do the thing. I'm not angry. And you kink it another way, it's like this, you motherfucker, fuck you. But if you unkink it, if you actually let that emotion go through, which means you're not having resistance or shame, you don't think that you're bad 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 'cause I constantly feel like I'm alone in it. And I constantly feel like no one's got my back, even though I have 20,000 people showing up to work every day, and none of them have ever thought, boy, I really hope the CEO is upset with me today, or boy, I hope that the work I did doesn't please the CEO. So you got 20,000 people trying to please a CEO who feels all alone in it. And so they, 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 happening in the company and I need to go pay attention there.
You seem very into words and I buy into that. I think you like use these phrases and then it kind of like shapes the way you think. And you called out some of the words that I use and that's pretty helpful. But are there other like on the emotional level words or phrases that you have found that if you change or shift or tell yourself consistently that they seem to have positive impacts on Type A people?
Yeah, absolutely. There are. However, the awareness is more important than the words. So let's take, for instance, a common thing that is effective is positive affirmations or You know, visualizing things going right. I'm gonna go into a meeting and I'm gonna visualize things going right. So you can do that. And there's a certain amount of effectiveness. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right and you feel the emotions of it going right. It's even more effective if you visualize it going right in the present instead of in the future. So you can actually feel what it's happening right now. So all of those things, that's like, that's really effective. But if you really have the awareness of what's behind that, then it's gonna be a lot more powerful. And so what's actually happening, say, with the positive reinforcement, is that you are changing your identity. You're saying, okay, I'm no longer this person. I'm gonna visualize myself as this person, and that's gonna change my identity. And if you're really looking at identity shift and being comfortable with identity shift, Then you also have to visualize the negative outcomes so that you don't get scared of them. The samurai use this. The, I mean, so many traditions use this, which is visualizing their own death. And the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, samurai, and then also, what was it? It was like the Marcus Aurelius. Yeah,
there's a great Stoic book, Stoicism book, where you like close your eyes for 5 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?
Yeah, right. So, so the— if you visualize this and you actually feel the destruction that you're trying to avoid, then you've already lived it. So you don't have to be scared of it anymore. So I'll give you an example of this with my, with my wife. So we've been married 27 years. I've been married to at least 3 women in that 27 years. She's like, she's changed dramatically. I've changed dramatically. And so we come to points in our relationship where it's not working for us. And what our 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, we 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.
The visualization thing's interesting. The Inner Game of Tennis talks a lot about that.
Great book.
And I actually just listened to a talk by the coach of Georges 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 competitors' walkout music. We wear our outfit, you know, our— we're like a dress rehearsal. We listen to the music constantly. And so we do that when we practice and we practice the walkout. We have the bright lights. This way you are visualizing this to the point of not just visualizing, but you hear it. And like he was even saying something about the smell. They try to use the same gloves so it smells the same. Yeah. 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 prepared.
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 wanna build and be the person that you wanna be.
Do you do that daily, monthly? Like, how often should someone practice that?
It'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. And that's gonna, like, it's how you do it is more important than repetition and reps.
And what is the how you do it? You sit in a room, turn the lights off, like, walk me through. How do you actually do this?
I just sit down, close my eyes, and visualize everything. And anything that I don't want to visualize, I slow way the fuck down and feel everything I don't want to feel. The big trick is to feel the things you don't want to feel. The reason that that's the trick is because, 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 gonna be homeless, but you are gonna be happier, more content, you're gonna feel great. Like how the, think of the best time you've ever felt in your entire life. It's gonna be 10x that all the time. If, if you knew that to be true, how scared are you to be homeless?
I wanna be homeless. I'm not scared.
Right, exactly. So what's actually occurring is that we're scared of an emotional experience, not an actual experience. And neurologically, this is proven. So if I was to take the emotional center out of your brain, you would have an IQ that is the same as it is now, but you would have an incredibly hard time making decisions and your total life would fall apart. So, and you can read a book about this. It's called Descartes' Error. It was written by a neuroscientist. in like 2012 or something. And so we've known this for a long time. So basically, if I pull out that emotional part of your brain, it's gonna take you like a half an hour to decide what color pen to use. It's gonna take you an hour or 2 to decide where to have lunch. So your whole life falls apart 'cause you can't make decisions.
And this was people who had brain damage or like a stroke in a certain area. Oh, your logical center is still working and decisions are logical, right?
Yes.
And it's like, no, no, no, not, not right. Actually. Not right. Not even simple decisions are right.
The, the only decisions that aren't emotionally based are the decisions that bypass the emotional center, like a snake coming at you. Mm-hmm. Like you jump back without it, without it going through that part of your brain.
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What about the nervous system bit? Because that seems like the most challenging. I've read The Body Keeps the Score and I like intuitively know that, like, trauma is a physical thing. But, like, to put it on a really practical level, you ever get, like, a Slack or an email from a coworker that says, can we talk? And you're like, they're quitting. I feel like you feel like you get goosebumps and you, like, you feel something. How do you— how do you address this at a neurological level?
Yeah. So nervous system, that's like a super tricky one. There's a lot of things that you can do. But this is like, it's all very primal. And this is where like repetition and do I do this every day? This is where it really comes in handy. So there's not like an intellectual or emotional aha that can change a nervous system just like that. Occasionally, like high doses of like psilocybin or something I've seen change nervous systems, but it's very undependable. And so this is actually where repetition matters in the nervous system. So one of the, like, the key principles is how do you allow yourself to experience pleasure more and more deeply? Because pleasure means that we're not under attack. So our nervous system thinks that we're under attack when we're not. And so it amps up. Now, sometimes that occurs because we have an abusive self-talk. And so, if I was your boss and I was like, oh, you fucked that up, you did that wrong. Like, why are you biting your nails? Why aren't you looking at Joe while you're podcasting? Why are you taking notes instead of being connected to your co-host? Like, if I was doing that perpetually, it would cause you stress because you're perpetually under attack. But often we're doing that to ourselves. Yeah. And so that's activating the nervous system. So that is the intellectual, that's like how the intellect and the nervous system relate. But there's a whole bunch of things that also happen with the nervous system. And I'll use my own example in this, is my mom, German, super rigid woman, loved me dearly in her capacity. But like, if I was 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 get messed up. So There's some nervous system stuff that happens just like through training. And so one, the kind of the overall background thought process is how do I allow as much pleasure as possible as to like to reset my baseline? But the second thing is to really start to notice and be present with, for like 1 or 2 seconds, those moments when my nervous system is activated or when your nervous system is activated. So when that phone call comes in and you're like, oh shit, you just stop and you're like, what is it like to be me? 2 seconds, and then you go ahead and do your thing. Like, go ahead, be anxious again. Like, don't try to control yourself because trying to control your anxiety is just anxiety-producing, right? Like, it just creates more of the same thing. It's just being really, really in touch with what's going on. Like, bringing awareness into that moment is all that's really necessary. But it's necessary to do it over and over and over again to see what's actually occurring in your system 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 really requires lots of just being with, present for 1 or 2 seconds when you notice that activation occur.
Hey, can I ask you about, Avoiding conflict. Something that 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, you know, I don't really have a lot of language or kind of experience or wisdom around this. And I was really hoping you could help me out with that. So, can we talk about— Conflict and avoiding conflict, especially with those who we're closest to. Yeah, I think it's maybe the hardest.
Yeah. So I think intellectually, 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 down, or someone can point to you, this is where the machine's broken. This is where the machine's broken. And you're like, great, thanks, and you ignore it. That's what avoiding conflict is like, because conflict is the place where efficiency can be gained, whether it's in a marriage or in a business or between business partners. So I'll give you a story about this. So recently we had a facilitator in our business and somebody who probably wants to be a facilitator in our business, 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 need to go to their boss, and then their boss will have the conversation because we're going to avoid the conflict. And we're, as a 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 for the facilitator to work on. And if this person is doing it out of some sort of, like, arrogance or narcissism, like, I think I can do a better job, and the feedback is shit, then that needs to be addressed. But either way, if he has arrogance and narcissism, addressing that's gonna make our business better. If this facilitator isn't doing a good job, that's gonna 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 gonna do it.
Right. Yeah, you're avoiding progress, not conflict.
Exactly. Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, but that's what a lot of people feel like. Like, for example, I've talked to like really big shot tycoon types, and they'll be like, I need to let go of this person, but I'm too afraid of the conversation. And so, like, you just said this on an intellectual level.
Correct.
Totally, I'm on board. Totally agree. Everything you're saying makes tons of sense. And yet I'm still like, but I don't have the courage, or I don't have the toolbox or the language to do this effectively.
Yeah. So, yeah, let's get into that. I think that the I do wanna say one more thing intellectually too, because it's, if I was, if I go in and monitor a company's health, I literally just use 2 metrics. How quickly do they have the hard conversation, and how quickly do they resolve it? So let's say you have a CEO who's a yeller. I guarantee you that a lot of hard conversations aren't gonna 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 gonna be had, and a lot of things are gonna be avoided. So it doesn't really matter what the actions are of people. Just to think about those 2 metrics as the health of an organization is just a great way to go in and very quickly see how healthy that organization is. Okay, so now how do you do it? So typically, before we get into how you do it, let's talk about the resistance to it. So the resistance is usually, I'm gonna be abandoned, not loved. This is a waste of my time. I'm not gonna get anywhere anyway, and it's gonna 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 gonna destroy something that I care about. Like, I have the hard conversation, that person leaves, and then the company's gonna collapse, or then the sales department's gonna collapse, or whatever.
Is, is 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 reason for one of the other excuses, but I'm sure that there's moments where that's the case. And sometimes there's actually some validity to that. Like, I've given them feedback, I'm gonna 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 so some of that speaks to the fact that The person doesn't know how to make the conflict productive reliably. Like, I have conflict and it just ends up in a worse fight that just, like, doesn't go the place that I wanna go. So typically, if I'm talking about it, let's just take one example, 'cause this gets a little complex. If I'm taking just, I wanna have a hard conversation with somebody, what do I do? The first thing that I'm gonna do is I am going to, not solve the problem for them. To most people in a hard conversation, say, hey, sales is off, and what I need you to do is make more phone calls, and we're gonna monitor those through this set of data, right? That's incredibly disempowering, and that conversation usually doesn't go very well. But if you say instead, hey, sales are off, I need a plan, please present it to me tomorrow. About how we're going to get sales back on track. That's a far more powerful way to do it because you're not, you're not disempowering the person and you're not coming in and telling them what to do. So letting them solve the problem for you rather than you solve the problem for them. You solving the problem for them is self-reliance again, and it's what most CEOs do instead of let them solve the problem for you. which is far more empowering to them, and it makes them feel like they can't blame you for it. So that's one of the skills that I would teach. The other one is I would really try to understand their situation before having the hard conversation. So I'd ask a lot of open-ended questions. I would make sure that they feel very heard, and so I understand what's going on. So as 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 if they're even happy with the job that they're doing or what's going on, actually. Another thing I would do is I would actually be very vulnerable about where I am with it. So I would say something like, wow, I feel like we've lost trust. Like, I noticed that, like, I'm not trusting that this is gonna get done. And so I'm not having confidence around this, and that sucks for me, and that's gotta suck for you. And so I wanna know how we're gonna fix it. So I'm gonna be very vulnerable with how I am rather than making it about them. So this is, again, back to the self-reliance piece. Entrepreneurs who are self-reliant have a hard time expressing when they're hurt, have a hard time expressing some sort of, this isn't working for me really well. And therefore, the problem is always about the other person instead of about them helping fix your issue, which is the way an organization is designed, right? The energy is backwards if you're trying to fix everybody's issues rather than everybody's fixing your issues. Like, if I was to invest in your company, as an example, and I got to pick one person who was just stoked as hell, I would pick the CEO, because that's gonna be the best investor. 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 the way that company's going, that's not a good investment. So the happiness of the CEO is where everybody needs to be pointed. It doesn't mean that the CEO's job isn't to be helpful to people. But it means that the general energy of the company is supposed to be towards pleasing the CEO, making the CEO happy, which self-reliant CEOs have a really hard time getting through their head because that puts them in the position of the authority that they don't particularly want to be because authority was bad in their childhood. So that's an example. So those are all ways that I would talk to somebody if I'm having that hard conversation. So there are, like, very practical skills of having hard conversations. But the biggest skill over all of this stuff is the internal space. If you feel like you're bad for having the conversation, if you feel like this is completely reasonable for me to ask, if you feel like I'm actually helping this person become more empowered, and I'm doing them a service and helping them become 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. Like, why are you such a dick? Or if I said, oh, Sean, you're being a dick. You're going to take those 2 things very, very differently. Because in one case, I don't want you to be a dick. And in the other case, I'm like, oh, you know, you're being a dick. That's okay. And so your attitude coming in, if you're scared, you're like more likely to get attacked. You're more likely to have a bad experience with it. So you're calm. You're what I would call vagal authority, your nervous system authority coming into the room. And your understanding of you're here to be of service to this person is gonna make all the difference.
You have this cool quote. I think it— I don't have it 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 that was kind of shocking to me. And it seems like self-talk is a really important thing. And a lot of, like, ambitious people, I think, are like, they're like their biggest hater.
Most people generally. Most people, yeah.
Do you have any patterns that you have seen of self-talk and what are the practical tips on improving that?
So, there's like 3 or 4 different kinds of self-talk abuse cycles that you're like, there's like the really overt one, which is like, you're fucked up, why are you fucked up? Why didn't you like, why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? There's that version. Then there's the version of, you gotta do this, now you gotta do this, you gotta do that. Why don't you do this? You gotta do this. Don't forget to do this. You gotta do this. There's another version of negative self-talk. Then there's like some like kind of hidden ones, which are like, you've got it, you can do this. It's all good. You've got this thing. You can do this thing, which you would like, could you imagine going to, you know, Michael Jordan and going, yeah, you can do it. You can shoot the basket. I know you can, Mike. Like, you would never do it. Because you have confidence in that person. So there's this subtle undermining saying that you actually need this, right? It's not, you're fine either way. And like, there's not like a natural confidence in it. So that's all. There's about 20 tools to work with self-talk, negative self-talk. One of the ways that you know it's negative self-talk is 'cause it's repeating, right? So when negative self-talk starts dying in your system, When it starts atrophying, you just have a lot less thought. Just as a lot less thought occurs, and the thought that you have is more like epiphanies. It's like, oh, here's a cool idea. Oh, that's a cool idea. They're not repetitive over and over again thoughts. So I'll give you just a couple really practical ones. If you try to change the self-talk, it's very inefficient. If you change the way you react to the self-talk, it's Far, far more efficient. Your self-talk is like, wow, you just really screwed up that podcast, Joe. And like most people, they listen to that the way that they would listen to a— think about the politician you hate most talking on stage, and then think about the person in the audience who's like, yep, uh-huh, yeah, yeah, that's right, uh-huh, yeah. That's how we listen to our self-talk. Most of us listen to ourself talk as, oh, you screwed that up. It's like, yep, I screwed that up. I should do something about that. 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'm right here with you. You can be scared. Or you fucked up. Wow, that's really shitty management. Could you try to manage me in a different way, please? You fucked up. Prove it. You fucked up. Oh, really? I think you fucked up. So you're changing the reaction. And so, like, a great experiment to run on this is think about the reaction that you want to experiment with. It doesn't have to be good or bad. It's just an experiment. And you, every time your negative self-talk happens that day, every time you remember, you react in this way that you're experimenting with. And then 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 self-talk. And just like both of you are different when you're interacting with each other than when you're interacting with your significant other or your kids, if you have them, or your best friend from college, we— the voice in our head reacts differently depending on how we treat it. And you get to start seeing that. And so that's a really simple way to start managing, not manage, but start like bringing awareness and therefore changing and transforming your negative self-talk. The other, another really good one that's just really easy is like name, like write out, here are the 20 things the negative voice in my head says the most, and look for 7 ways they're not true. And if you can't find them, ask your friends, because what your negative voice in your head is saying is not true. I mean, I can give you any, if you tell me anything that your negative voice in your head says to you on a regular basis, Proven. I can tell you 5 ways it's not true.
Hey, can I ask you a question that sort of violates that rule? You know, never ask a man a question that his salary depends on the answer or whatever.
You can try. Yeah.
So, so, you know, whenever I learn about this stuff and as you can see, I got notes and notes right now. Like, I love— I get like really fascinated by this. You're saying words like vagal authority. I'm like, oh, I got to go look into 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 90-minute mark of any of this, I'm, like, completely exhausted. And I almost, like, go through, like, this cycle where I start out as an idiot caveman. Then I think I'm becoming this, like, elevated, higher-level being who's really in touch with everything. And then I'm like, oh my God, this is so much work. I just want to go back to being a lovable idiot again at the end of this. And like, dude, it's all good. Don't worry about it. Like, you know, that I go and I think actually recently this kind of a retard maxing kind of phrase caught on, at least in Silicon Valley. Other people are probably like, what the hell is this guy talking about? But this idea of like, you know, you're trying too hard to be too smart, you're too in touch with your emotions, you're over-therapized. Like there is a reaction to the reaction.
Yeah.
And I almost wonder, like, are people better off just being kind of like more like a dog? Like just dumb and happy, you know, just wagging our tail and running around and, you know, licking our butts? Like, are we just happier that way than trying to go do all this work and kind of master the psyche and all of its different parts?
Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you have, it seems like you have 2 questions in there. So let me address the first one, which is that cycle that you get into, which is, oh, I'm super inspired and now I feel exhausted. And the, the thing that's happening there is that in your mind, You're telling yourself you have to do all this stuff, and that's what makes it exhausting, rather than like, what's the one cool experiment I'm gonna run this week? Hmm. 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 makes it like less effective. To me, it's like how you approach it is incredibly important, both for the effectiveness and for whether it's worthwhile. You know, the way I think about meditation is kind of an example. One of the things that I say is meditation for most people is just self-abuse because they're just sitting there trying to manage themselves for 90 minutes, right? And there's no enjoyment in it. And so the question is, like, how do you enjoy meditation? That's a question. Or how do you enjoy self-growth or self-awareness or understanding yourself better instead of making it a grind? If you can do that, then it's great and it's totally worth it and it's lovely and you'll be inspired to do it. But if it becomes like this to-do list so that one day you'll be good enough so that You know, if you make it like your company, right? Which is, once I get enough money and I have enough power, then I'll be happy. Once I, 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? What's the experiment I can run?
Right.
And this is the same way that I would suggest if you wanna learn how to market, it's the same thing. Like, what's the experiment you can run? What can you learn today? What can you read about that's fun to read about? What's the cool thing to try rather than, oh my God, I got to do this because my business completely depends on it,
right?
You're going to make a lot more progress on the first than the second.
I 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 2 teachers. The first teacher I went to made me almost quit the first day because we sat down and they were like, all right, so here's what you're going to need to learn. Here's the musical notation. We're gonna memorize all these letters and here's what, blah, blah. Then we're gonna learn rhythm and we're gonna learn the scales. But you can't get to scales if you don't first don't have finger control and posture. Why are you sitting like that? And like, she basically presented the whole elephant that I'm gonna have to eat. And I was like, oh God, I'm like, I'm just tired thinking about what all I'm gonna have to do just to be able to, this stupid dream of mine. How much did I really want this anyways? Yeah. And then the second teacher, so I, luckily I didn't quit. I just, I bumped into a second teacher and then the second teacher was like, Cool. So like, what made you want to do this? What's a song you like? And what would be cool if you could play it? I'm like, oh, this song. She's like, oh, you know what? That's actually not that hard. Here, forget the left hand. We're just going to 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.
And, you know, it just got cute. 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. And it's like that for all things in life. So what you said definitely resonates. I didn't realize the connection between those two until you said that.
Yeah. If anybody told us what we had to do just to make our business successful and like just handed like, this is everything you're going to have to do, like most people would be like, fuck that.
Yeah. Yeah. Or having kids or anything else like that. Can we, can we do the second part now of are we better off just being sort of, you know, retard boxing and then not over-introspecting, not overly getting in touch with our feelings and just saying like, feel good, do more. Doesn't feel good, do less. Let me just move on and not overthink it.
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 that 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 in the CEO of the other, even though they might be great CEOs in the business of their choice, because one is high margin, one is low margin, one is about a certain kind of efficiency, one is about a certain kind of creativity. So if you are not self-aware, then you better have landed in a place where you by nature are are going to be capable, and that place can't change. But if you are gonna be required to change as a human being and change who you are and your identity as a human being to maintain or continue success, then you're just shooting yourself in the foot by not being self-aware. There's also this kind of trajectory of self-awareness. Like, the beginning is, why am I doing this work? And then I can't see the change. Other people are telling me I'm changing, but I can't see the change. Why am I even doing this? And then there's like a whole holy shit, this is— life is better. And then when you hit the holy shit, life is better moment, oftentimes like 2 or 3 years for people, do they really get that moment? Then it's just like, why in the hell would I ever stop this? You know, it's a little bit like working out.
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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. I'm a little overwhelmed. I don't know where to start. And if it's like working out and if you said, you know, the end goal is you want to bench 300 pounds over the next year, like, here's like a really interesting progression and here's like some experiments or workouts you can do each week. It might be too reductive, but are there like a— this idea of experimenting weekly is pretty cool. That 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? What's the thing they could do that would just get them on the road?
Yeah. And like, what is— and then what's the progression and where are some other weekly experiments that I could like follow to improve myself?
Yeah. So there's— I can tell you how I did it and then I can tell you the resources that we have for people. So I just basically picked 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. And then a whole bunch of writing on these topics.
What's one of them?
That sounds like so basic and almost stupid. And then I think of myself, wanting to do that. I'm like, that's actually really helpful.
Yeah, 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 enjoy for a week. Do you go to work and you can only do the shit that you enjoy? And at some point in that week, there's gonna be something that happens. And I'll tell you my experience of this. I did this before I had a business and I was sitting in front of the trash and I hated taking the trash out, but I also didn't enjoy smelling the trash. So I was sitting there like, well, what do I do? 'Cause I've committed to not doing anything I don't enjoy. And then I was like, oh, I have to figure out how to enjoy taking out the trash. And so that's another cool experiment is just see what it's like to live a week doing only what you enjoy, because a lot of the lack of enjoyment that occurs is because we tell ourselves we have to endure it when we absolutely could be enjoying it.
So 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, 'cause one version of how do I take out the trash more? Oh, I'm gonna listen to my favorite song while I do it. Okay. I changed what I was doing, right? That's, that's fair. But there's the other version, which is I'm literally not gonna do anything different. I'm just gonna feel it more. I'm gonna like bring my awareness to it.
That's why they're, that's why they're 2 experiences. Right. 2 experiments. Right.
And 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? Is it what you thought? He's like, honestly, no, not at all. He's like, I don't feel anything.
Yeah.
And we were laughing and he didn't know what to make of it. So his meaning he put on that was like, dude, was I chasing the wrong goal this whole time? Like, am I— was I wrong in what I wanted? And what I kind of reframed or what I— my life experience was this. I was like, dude, I think all these feelings are like a muscle. You just never— how many times before this did you feel ecstatic and triumphant? And never. So what'd you think? You just start today and suddenly feel it at level 100? Like, You'd never used that muscle before. So like the actual thing to do 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 VO2 max. It's way higher than mine. Is that, does that line up with like, I, I've never done the research. This is my life experience.
Yes. Yes, definitely, definitely, especially the positive emotions. But they're the scariest emotions for most people to feel because they're the biggest identity-destroying emotions. They just wreck your identity.
The positive ones are?
The positive ones, yeah.
Why does that destroy your identity?
Go be in bliss and find out where you are.
Well, I experienced that when I had kids. When I had kids, I wrote a post about this. I was like, not having kids was so much better in terms of ambition because it's quite simple. 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.
Yeah.
And you're like, that part of me just died. I, you, 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.
Yeah.
And it like, and I'm happy, I prefer this life.
And yet you're still working and still being effective, which is also an interesting thing to let your mind recognize that the identity doesn't have to be so attached to be able to be successful. Yeah, one more experiment that I think is really cool for entrepreneurs, especially if they have, 'cause we've been talking about self-reliance, thank 5 people a day. Consciously look around and go, what did somebody do for me that I'm grateful for? And thank 5 people a day. It'll totally change your self-reliance pattern.
Hey, how do you find joy and how do you find what you should be doing? Because you're like, fine, one of your exercises was do only what you like or, you know, like, or enjoy something more. But that's actually kind of complicated because I don't think a lot of people have actually asked themselves or can answer, what do I love doing?
Yeah, 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 enjoy what they do, they, a lot of them weren't like, I think that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna like really get into risk analysis. But they ended up there, but they learned how to geek out on it and enjoy the thing itself. So I think the way that you find what you enjoy is on a day-to-day basis, asking yourself, how would I enjoy doing this? How do I enjoy this? What would make it a little bit better? How would I change this? And, and I think for entrepreneurs, they think that that's a nice to have, but it's, it's far more important than that. So if I had enough, A car, if I wanted an efficient company, we think of it as a fast company. I got from A to B quickly. But if we had a car, A to B quickly isn't an efficient car. That's just a fast car. An efficient car is a car that gets to A to B without a lot of energy. And so if you want efficiency in your life, it's how much energy you spent in that day. And often that doesn't end up making you go faster. And so, if I get to the end of the day and I say, how much did I enjoy myself? That's the best measure of efficiency, because I have energy for the next day and I want to come back. If I do a yoga class and I enjoyed the hell out of it, I'm far more likely to come back and do yoga and do it well tomorrow than if I had a yoga class that sucked and I hated it. And so, as people learn That, like, how enjoyment works in their system, how to enjoy what they enjoy, what they're great at, then their whole business becomes far more efficient. And as a matter of fact, we get a lot of people who come and say, well, I'd like to work for you. And I'll just say, what's your passion? What's the thing that you care about that you would love doing? And if they say the thing that we have a slot for, then we'll talk to them. Because it's so like, if someone's naturally motivated, it's so useful.
It'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 gonna 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, I feel like when you're answering some of these, you, you are kind of thinking your way through it, I guess. Can you talk about just noticing or feel rather than, where does that play in for you?
I can give you a great story on this. So my wife and I were sitting, we do these very intense, long retreats. And so it's very tiring. And we were at the end of one of the retreats and there was this investment we could have made that would've given us enough money where we didn't have to start a business. And we were sitting there thinking and, I said, I'm really glad that didn't happen because we wouldn't have done this. And she said, yeah, me too. And I said, I'm just curious, would you sell this business for $1 billion if we could not do it again? Like, we would be done doing it, but we'd get $1 billion. And both of us went like this. We both went, we wouldn't. Like, that was our answer. I don't know, I told my— I came home, told the story to my daughters. And then like 2 or 3 months later, one of my daughters comes in and says, I found my billion-dollar idea. I'm like, cool, something you can grow into a billion dollars? And she's like, no, something I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars.
Huh, that's cool.
And 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 gonna 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 talking with people like you because you have this really cool perspective where you've talked to the titans of industry, the best of the best, the Illuminati, you know, you like, you have seen them. Yeah. 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 about the 1% of 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?
Yeah, specifically I can't do, obviously. But what I could say is that there's nothing I've said on this podcast that I haven't said to one of the titans of industry. Like, there's the things that you're wrestling with are the exact same things that they're wrestling with, right?
What attributes do you tend to notice? Are they 10 out of 10 on and/or 1 out of 10 on?
The really, really The exceptional ones of like very fast-paced businesses. So not like, if you can be a slow-paced business, then there's a different kind of attitude. You can actually be quite self-abusive in a slow-paced business, but in a fast-paced business, you can't second-guess yourself very much. So very, very few of them are second-guessers. Hmm. So they just are like, and part of it is because they have to make so many decisions in a day. And so decisiveness is another one, especially for the fast-paced industries. There are some, like, investment. If you're an investor and you can be a billionaire investor, you can really second-guess yourself a ton and still be a successful investor. But if you're the CEO of a tech company that's fast-paced, you can't do that. The other thing that I think those very high performers, it's not all of them, but I would say, like, at least 60, maybe 70%, they both feel like they're better than everybody and worse than everybody simultaneously. So they, on one level, in their conscious mind, they're like, I am more capable than people, than the average person, but underneath they're like, I'm broken. And so they're kind of doing this thing because they know that they're better and they're trying to prove that they're not broken. It's not all the time, but it's 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 go down into like the dregs of our society and you will find somebody who thinks they're better than everybody. But that like underlying, like, oh, I'm broken simultaneously with it. And the way that that presents is very— There's a lot of it in that realm.
You know, one of the things we did in this podcast that's sort of backwards, probably for most podcasts, is most podcasts start with like, tell me about your background and your story.
Yeah.
And we do it the opposite. We say, show me all the gold you've collected on your journey. First we start there and then we say, where'd you get all this, man? Where, where did you, what kind of journey did you go on?
Yeah.
Can you give us now, now that we've You know, gotten to see some of the gold. Can you give us a little bit of the journey? And I'm curious about one thing in particular. I've read something about like 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.
Okay. Yeah, I mean, I grew up going all over the world. I think by the time I was 28, I lived in 26 places. My dad was a CEO, but also became an alcoholic. And so I rebelled against that, had a mohawk, was a skateboarder, got kicked out of my first college, graduated valedictorian 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 throughout the United States. And then I did international stock lending and I was in a band and I— Wow. So, I was just like, I'm having whatever adventure I want from life.
Like James Bond, man.
'Cause it was 'cause I saw my dad just like do this corporate thing and end up in misery. I was like, yeah, I'm not doing that. And then I met my wife and my wife was like, if we're gonna get married, we're gonna see a therapist, we're going to do a 10-day silent retreat, and we're going to travel through third world together for like 6 months. If we can do those 3 things, we're gonna be capable of getting married and being successful. So those were her tasks. And so I did them. The therapy was amazing. We got blessed with a really good therapist and they're pretty rare. And then the silent retreat was my first time meditating ever. And on day 3 of Vipassana, they have, you know, so when it changes from putting all your attention into your breath to like moving your attention through your body, And I had this experience of like evaporation. Samadhi is what some people would call it, but this experience of, I am one with everything and everything is good. And it lasted 8 seconds. And it was like getting hooked on heroin. My entire life changed. I was like, whatever the fuck 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 plus side was that like, I just, because I had authority issues, I just went and explored everything and took nothing very seriously and made everything an experiment. So instead, then now that's how we teach. Like when we do our courses, Everything is done as an experiment. There's not like we're talking and saying, this is how things are. We're like, go and experience this shit for yourself. Here's how you do it. You can do it with people right now. It's very in-the-moment experimentation. And I wasn't willing to say, you're the authority, you're the guru. I was like, I'm gonna listen to every single modality that I can find from neuroscience to psychology to traditions that are 2,000 years old. I'm gonna try 10 forms of meditation. I'm gonna do the Hoffman Process. I'm gonna do somatic work. 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 7 years. I like lived off credit cards. I meditated for like 7 hours a day, looking, searching. And I was obsessed with it. The search ended, 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 more spacious than I thought it was. And then my identity got trapped in that for a while. Like, I was the awake guy, and then that evaporated. And in that time period, we had kids, and then the kids were where the big emotional work came in, was like really learning. There was this thing called Hand in Hand Parenting, which I highly recommend, a book called Listen, which is like one of the most profound practices in my life. And that was really where the big emotional understanding 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. And now my girls are, you know, 17 and 20, and they are fricking amazing. And it is, I think, all because of Hand in Hand and my wife. She's amazing. And so that was it. And then at some point I became a venture capitalist and—
As one does.
As one does, yeah. I literally went from meditation, I did art, and then became a venture capitalist.
You're like a sellout.
Well, both of 'em just sit around all day doing not a lot.
No, what happened was I was doing this large-scale art installation for a wealthy family and I was giving them business advice 'cause before I had done international stock lending and other things. And I would— 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 art installation at a rich person's house got like the guru energy and it's like, hey, do you guys want to discuss your bond portfolio?
Yeah. Wait, what did you actually tell them? What was going on?
I was like, buy oil and gold. This is a long time ago, right? But 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 had, you know, I was, when they still had papers, and I would read the Financial Times. And because I started, one of the jobs I did was international stock lending, and I got like promoted 3 times. And so I was— inside of like a 16-month period. And so it was just kind of, it was just something that I always thought about. And like one day we were sitting and having lunch and I was just like, hey, here's this thing. So he comes to me and he goes, hey, do you want to come and work for us and like help us in the family office? And I was like, no, I'm, I 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, this is around 2006, I was like, is gonna be clean tech. I think that this is, Like, the biggest technological changes on the planet, I think, have come 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, a great investor is the investor who's like, they do— I am investing because you don't need me at all. And I was like, I need to be needed, which was horrible as venture investor. And in that, so the only way for me to be successful was to coach the CEOs into like turning their companies around. And we had a positive result on the portfolio, so we invested more. And so I was investing for about 12 years, but pretty soon the word about my coaching got out. And in doing venture, the thing that I realized about the personal work was that if you take a standard business tool and you put the awareness of personal work into it, the standard business tool gets better, right? If we have something that we teach called VIEW, it's in our connection course. It's about how to communicate with people, how to have hard conversations, how to have sales conversations. When people have it, they they sell better, they do product better, they talk to their husbands and wives better, they have hard conversations better, and it's because they're all related. And so, as I was coaching people and learning all these business tools as a VC and blending them together, I just found more and more effective ways to do it, which made me a better coach. And so, at some point I was like, I should be doing this and only this. And so— Hmm. 2016, 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.
You'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.
Yeah, 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 you can run, then design an experiment from that and play there. We also have an experiments page where it teaches you how to design the experiments and how to run them. That's another thing that I think is really good. We have a podcast on running and designing experiments. That's another one.
By the way, Sam, so brilliant that they call them experiments. He frames everything as experiments. Because so much of this industry that he's in is a, you should do this, you need to do this, this is the way, versus less preachy, less rigid, more open.
Yeah, like, like try this weird thing and see what happens. You might be surprised.
Yeah.
It's, and it makes it more fun. Yeah.
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. It's with all invertebrates and it's basically the part of our brain that like, traffics our dopamine and stuff like that. And it prevents us from making the same mistake over and over and over and over again. And the reason this is for— is because if you're a bear and you're fighting for sexual dominance and you lose, it'd be really stupid to go and, like, fight the next day, right? If you eat the mushroom and 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 gonna make the second sales call 'cause we just got rejected. Or when we stop we eat that piece of chocolate cake that we talked about earlier, I'm gonna 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 iterating, where there was no— we fail. There's just, I'm going to try this, now I'm going to try this, now we're going to try this, which we obviously see in business, right? Those are the people who succeed in business. They keep on trying new stuff until they find the thing that works. And so to see self-awareness as a series of experiments, and every experiment you learn, and all you need to do is learn about yourself, then you never really can fail, and it works a lot better. And if you think about, like, fixing a watch. If you understand a watch, you can fix it. If you understand yourself, right, you can change.
You're like, the worst doctor is a dermatologist because when they go out to parties with their family, everyone's like, I got a rash, check this out. What is this? And like, people are like popping their tops at parties. Like, what do you think this is? And like, if you go to a party with you, everyone's like, fix me. Or like, give me the answer. It must be exhausting. You probably have to lie about what you do for a
living. Yeah, it can be annoying. Chris Williamson, do you all know Chris?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so Chris Williamson was hanging out with me and he was like, you know, my life is walking down the street, some 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? Yeah. So, so I would say that's one good way to start. The other good way to start is on YouTube. I do these 15-minute coaching sessions. I do some with business folks, some without business folks. They're incredibly powerful. They're incredibly potent. And so if you can go through them and say, oh, I have this issue, and then watch the coaching session, you can get change that's not just on an intellectual level.
This has been a treat because I'm, I'm seeking, 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. I needed this. This was the perfect medicine.
Cool. I'm happy to make some recommendations for you if you're interested.
I'm all yours. Yeah. Tell me everything. You can tell me, you can tell me off air. Yeah. Brother, you got me eating out of your hand right now. I'll do whatever you say.
The, 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-backed 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, you know, you know, and I know that like 2 founders not getting along can cost a business decades, if not the entire business, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so we find that working with the team, the executive team, is far more efficient for having a change both with the CEO inside the company. So that would be— it's called the Council, and we open up applications once a year.
Dude, it's crazy the responsibility you have. Like, I read that the OpenAI team sends a car, picks you up, and you like coach the whole team or you coach the execs. And then I'm on Twitter and they're like, hey, I lead safety research. It's like today, like the big story right now is like Anthropic's guy's like, hey, like we think there's a greater than 10% chance that AI kills all of humanity. You know what I mean? It's like, first of all, they need a little comms coaching. I don't know if you do that on the side, but that would be nice. But secondly, like, you know, what responsibility, like coaching the people that are building the thing, the bomb, you know, like either the greatest thing ever, the worst thing ever. Sometimes they say it's the greatest ever, and sometimes they tell us it's gonna be the worst thing ever. It's gotta be a pretty, uh, pretty heavy thing.
Yeah, that's, it's really interesting. So just to be very clear about my, like, I, I coach people at OpenAI. I don't coach the whole leadership team. And I have coached most of the people who are in the research, like leading the research department. And I've worked with people in our like, in person and other programs from all the AI labs. They all come— one, multiple from all of them have come through our thing. I have a really interesting take on this. You know, if you've had a kid, your wife's in the OR or in the birthing room, or maybe you had a doula at the house, but just imagine, like, she's giving birth to this thing. And now imagine, like, there's protests outside and there's people saying that they're going to destroy humanity and You know, like, these people are doing something that's, like, substantial. And as a society, we are really not being supportive. And the reason I say being supportive is because the outcome is gonna 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 must have seen the tweet Sean's referring to. That actually, this isn't in your wheelhouse maybe of expertise, but it might be given that you talk to all these cool people. Do you actually have an opinion on what that, basically for the listener, the tweet was a guy who worked at Claude quit and he said there's a 10% chance or more that everyone's gonna die because of AI. It was a very—
Okay,
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.
Yeah.
Do you have an opinion on the seriousness? Yeah, I do.
I have a very, very strong opinion. I've sat with a whole bunch of researchers and they were asked, like, these are the people building it, and they were asked 20 questions. Does AGI exist now? Will it ever exist? Are the things. And then they were asked to line up on this line and they lined up very, very differently. Like they were spread out. Okay, is it going to destroy the world? Is it going to be the best thing for humanity? they're all spread out on the line. Every single question, there's not everybody on one corner and everybody on the other corner. And so my takeaway from that is their 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.
That's such a you answer. And it's a beautiful answer.
So 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. And the question that I ask myself personally is like, what can I do that can affect a positive outcome? And am I participating in that? And somebody can say, that's easy, Joe, because you're coaching people like Sam. But I would say, It is a democracy of cliques and money that's going to determine AI more than any one leader. And I think we shirk our responsibility by saying it's about one leader who's going to do it.
Does that make you feel better, Sean, or no?
I don't think so.
Honestly, no. Not at all.
So we're going to die.
No, not even that. It's, I guess, on one level, there's a sort of humor in the situation, to use your analogy of like, you know, they're sort of birthing this technology. And you said a lot of the opinions of these people has less to do— let me paraphrase what you said— a lot of their opinions has less to do with the facts on the ground and 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 going to have daddy issues as it grows up. Yes.
Yeah. Just, just like, just like Meta's business is a reflection of the consciousness of Mark Zuckerberg.
Yeah. I think that's why you coach, because you can affect that. I think that's why maybe you have comfort because you know some of the people. I think that's why a lot of the people who are just in the YouTube comments who have a sort of billionaire aversion, tech guy aversion, right? This is like, this is like if you go look at the sentiment, the sentiment around—
That's horrible.
Billionaires, tech leaders, and specifically the billionaire AI tech leaders, it's awful. Like, there is zero trust, zero belief in the— that those are our great kings and fearless leaders that we want to get behind.
Yeah.
Part of that is because of their own poor communication and presentation. Yes. You know, so it's not like they're, they're just hated because of who they are, right? They contributed to some of that.
Yeah.
And some of it is people's— their own current life situation makes them hate, you know? And, and that's, you know, it's just this weird, complicated thing. that's going on. But to answer your question, Sam, of, you know, does it make you feel a lot better? No, not necessarily.
I sort of think of it like, I don't know, just a much higher level of, like, the Earth has been around for billions of years. The odds that I will exist when the demise is here is very, very, very, very low.
Yeah. The funniest tweet was when the Anthropic 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 in perspective for you.
I actually took a lot of comfort when I was reading about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and I found out that it was in— 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 back then.
Wait, wait, explain this. I don't even know what is the Dead Sea Scrolls?
Dead Sea Scrolls are like the It's like ancient biblical
texts.
Yeah, exactly. That were like in a cave somewhere. And they were kept by a cult just post-Jesus, I think, that was like, the end of the world is coming and we have to prepare for it. And then we had Y2K. I don't know if you all are old 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. Everybody go check out Art of Accomplishment and the podcast and all the good things.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
All right, that's it. That's the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel, never looking back.
All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Siu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.