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 to on heroin which was like where that is i'm obsessed i feel like i could rude where to know i could be what i want to from at all in and like a day's off on a road less travel never i'm excited to have you here joe welcome to the podcast i don't know if you know kind of what this podcast all about but basically the people listen to this podcast are very much like me and sam we're business junkie for some entrepreneurs we're sort of perpetually with starting things but also students of the game i was trying to learn you've done many things you started your life story in ten seconds was kind of like 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 that think game you're one of the coaches to some of the top ceos and entrepreneurs in the game including sam alt and some other friends that we we we were talking about before we started and so we're really excited to have you here are you able to name trap at all can we give you like ten seconds to brag the names that i can drop are the ones that are on the website and i find that it's better if you all name drop for me than me name we've seen mark pink we've seen sam alt we've seen eric thorn williams ave is a good one yeah stacy phil pot brown she was a head of google india and rant task grab it it's your specialty like type a high achieve 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 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 them all the people that i work with having common they're ambitious only some of them are maximal lists but they're all super ambitious what's a maximal i don't even know what that is yeah what what's maximal maximal is someone who's like i wanted it all right now and i can get it all right now i would put like sam alt in the maximal category any limitation that a normal person would see they're just like now 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 though so i went to tony robbins event and then he started to explaining it and i started now then i started seeing it everywhere in myself and my my family members different people where peep we tell ourselves these stories can you can you talk a little bit about this because i think it's pretty universal the yeah the idea of a limiting belief outward is just any thought process that you have holding you back and so i'll give you a one that probably everybody's has experienced they have some sort of transformation something happens and then they ask themselves will it last that's a great limiting belief because all that really is is just a whole bunch of anxiety presenting itself as a thought process for you to believe and in instead of saying like oh every learning that i've ever had ebb and flows like i've totally learned stuff and then i 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 pen punctuation of learning that occurs and so the ebb 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 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 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 and 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 hi yeah you know i i've heard that too to the yeah 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 wanna achieve or that you have to grind to achieve what you wanna achieve so i have a client i i can't mention their name and probably one of the most successful vcs ever has been involved in some of the biggest companies and most of their investments have been in big companies i think they work like three or four hours a week and they had like a grind period of a couple of days i mean a couple of years kinda in their twenties but they just just don't work really hard and i can name another ten 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 wanna 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 chat gb as a life coach so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals and the output is that i have this gp that i can ask questions that i'm having issues within 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 twenty 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 here's something that i've never seen i've never seen a venture company or startup up fail because of lack of effort everybody is like anybody who's got a start up in silicon valley anyways they are effort all the time and yet a tremendous amount of them fail but the idea is if i work harder i'll succeed but obviously that's not true so then the question is like what is the most important thing that you're doing and it's usually the relationships you hold and the decisions that you make 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 that influence people and you're like duh that's obvious and it almost becomes a reminder and yeah i'm like about how do you tactically make that switch where you say enjoy the relationships not seeking the outcome so if you're gonna 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 g that and then there's is the emotional level the mammal chameleon level of the brain so the prefrontal cortex is the thinking level of the brands for human and the mammal chameleon 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 rep till it's the nervous system and is that nervous can we address the nervous system so if you wanna 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 that because you know yeah that'd be at the head you sort lost me at the heart by the time we got to the nervous system i i i i didn't know what to do right i don't know how to i don't have the the main instruction manual for that one yeah yeah let's take an example and then walk through 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 you and ninety percent 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 now called father and you needed to take care of that father or you had a depressed mother but somewhere you learned hey no one's gonna be there to take care me i gotta take care of myself my needs aren't gonna 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'd 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 a 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'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 is in particular reality and so that kinda like creates a little space for a different action different movement but oftentimes just seen it's not gonna really deal with it so then there's the emotional level the emotional level is two things right typically but there there can be others but typically there's an emotion of helpless that i refuse to feel i'm not gonna feel helpless 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 refused to ask the counter guy where the thing is so exactly i'll leave we're not we're not eating that's what i exactly exactly so so there's this feeling of helpless that those people will absolutely not feel because as a kid if you felt that helpless if you're like holy shit and 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 helpless never got to be felt as a kid and so emotionally it means you have to learn how to feel the helpless and and how to actually look forward to and enjoy the helpless which sounds radical and impossible but 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 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 perpetuate the thing in this case helpless 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 because if your all your decisions are based on not feeling helpless it means there are certain risks you're not gonna take it means you're not gonna rely on other people that you need to to scale the business etcetera etcetera etcetera right so that would be the emotional is is the right way to think about it like it's a counter to the idea of what you seek you know what you see you shall find it's almost like what you avoid you shall experience yeah yeah the self yeah exactly the but if you're gonna play on like the phrase that what sean just said or whatever this i think you said whatever emotion you try to avoid you end up inviting to your life so then what's the opposite what's the inverse of that what's like the sentence that is the solution fall in love with the emotions you're avoiding 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 is 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 your what do you tell yourself every day for the next two years like are there like common inner thoughts that you find to be productive for this emotional state so that answer is part of the pattern you're trying to interrupt what do i do every day one every day to what do i do those are the two 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 gotta do it every day was 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 del well what i know is that i'm not letting other people help me what i know is that my decision making is constrained by a false limitation so i'm so stoked that i'm feeling it because i have those three signals now and i'm gonna 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 is 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 the 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 you use it and move through it is that the right way to think about this or is that it's kinda have 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 a hose with water running through it and if it runs clear meaning it's not that hoses kinks 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 for as an example so you have anger moving through your system and you can't get one way and it's like this nice stress and you can't get 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 can't get another way it's like this you mother you but if you un 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 twenty thousand 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 twenty thousand people trying to please the 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 kin 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 you seem very into words and i and i buy into that i think you like use these phrases and then it kinda 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 positive impacts on type a people yeah absolutely there are however the the the awareness is more important than the words so let let's let's take for instance common thing that is is effective is you know positive affirmations or you know visualizing things going right i'm gonna go into a meeting and i'm gonna visualize things going right 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're 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 uses which is visualizing their own death and they to ben book of living and dying samurai and then also what was is like the marcus aurelius yeah there's a great stoic book stoic is book where you like close your eyes her 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 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 i'll give you an example of this with my with my wife so we've been married twenty seven years i've been married to at least three women in that twenty seven years she's like she's changed dramatically i've changed dramatically quickly 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 into divorce we visualize the divorce sickly 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 egg shells 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 the visualization thing's interesting the inner game tennis talks a lot about that great book and i actually just listened to a a talk by the coach of george saint pierre who's one of the greatest cf fighters of all time they talk about preparing fighters for the most dangerous scary sport there is and he was like we find the competitors walk out music we wear our outfit you know our we're like address rehearsal we 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 gloves so it smells the same and this way when you first when you're going into this thing that's of 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 dissipate then that's gonna 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 like walk me through what how do you actually do this i just sit down close my eyes and visualize everything and anything that i don't wanna visualize i slow weigh the down and feel everything i don't wanna feel mh the the big trick is to feel the things you don't wanna feel the reason that that's the trick is because like if i said to you like most entrepreneurs is 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 thing of the best time you've ever felt in your entire life it's gonna be ten x that all the time if if you knew that to be true how scared are you to be homeless i wanna be home scared right exactly so what's actually occurring is that we're scared of an emotional experience not an actual experience and and and and it's neurological 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 in your total life would fall apart so and you can read a book about this it's called des decor error it was driven by a neuroscientist scientist in like twenty twelve 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 decide what color pen to use it's gonna take you an hour or two to decide where to have lunch so your whole life falls apart because you can't make decisions and and this was people who had brain damage or like a stroke in a certain area that and you oh your logical center still working and decisions are logical right yes and it's like no no not not right 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 mh like you jump back without it without it going through that's part of your brain hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses what 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 on a really practical level you ever get like a slack or an email from a coworker that says can we talk and your like they're quitting i feel like you feel like you get goosebumps and you're like you feel something yeah how do you would 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 and i've seen changed nervous systems but and it's very understandable and so this is actually where repetition matters in the nervous system so one of the like the key principles is how do you allow yourself to experience pleasure more and more deeply because pleasure means that we're not under attack so our nervous system thinks that we're under attack when we're not and so it it up now sometimes that occurs because we have an abusive self talk and so if there's if i had if i was your boss and i was like oh you you that up you did that wrong what like why are you biting your nails why aren't you looking to joe while you're while you're podcasting why are you taking notes instead of being connected to your c like if i was doing that perpetually it would cause you stress because you're perpetually under attack but often we're doing that to ourselves and so that's activating the nervous system so that is the intellectual that's like how how the intellect and the nervous system relate but there's a whole bunch of things that also happen with the nervous system i'll i'll use my own example in this his my mom german super rigid woman loved me dearly in her capacity but like if i was five minutes early i was late and i would get in trouble you know it was like that kind of a thing and like things needed to be very perfect and so there was a sense of obligation and if i wasn't gonna fulfill that obligation i was gonna 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 gonna affect anything my nervous system's gonna get 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 in and you're like oh shit you just stop and you're like what is it like to be me two seconds and then you go ahead and do your thing like go ahead and be anxious again like don't don't try to control yourself because trying to control your anxiety is just an anxiety producing right like it just it just creates more of the same thing it's just being really really in touch with what's going on like bringing awareness into that moment is all that's really necessary but it's necessary to do it over and over and over again to see what's actually occurring in your system and and what's really necessary and then pretty soon it unpack 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 conflict something that i i thought you know i think i'm usually pretty good i have a man lately it's been a situation where i'm just i could see myself doing it i can feel myself it i know i'm not supposed to be doing it but 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 you out with that so so can we talk about conflict avoiding conflict especially with those who were closest to yeah i think it's maybe the hardest yeah so i think intellectually the the important thing to recognize about conflict it is imagine you're working in a factory and somebody can tell you where the machine is gonna break or the someone can point to you this is where the machine broken this is where the machine is broken and you're like great thanks and you ignore it that's what avoiding conflict it's 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 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 gonna avoid the conflict and and we're in as a as a company deciding like how does this feedback is this feedback gonna work and what we realized 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 na ism 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 in na system 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 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 big shot ty 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 a on an intellectual level k totally i'm i'm on board totally agree everything you're saying makes tons of sense yep and yeah 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 let yeah let's get into that but i think that the i i do wanna say one more thing intellectually too because it's but 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 yell i guarantee you that the 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 avoid 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 two metrics as the health of an organization is just a great way to go in and very quickly see how healthy that organization is okay so now how do you do it so typically before we get into how you do it let's talk about the resistance to it so the resistance is usually i'm gonna be abandoned not loved this is a waste of my time and 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 is gonna collapse or then the sales department's gonna collapse or whatever 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 a 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 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 because it 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 dis empowering 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 gonna get sales back on track that's a far more powerful way to do it because you're not you're not dis empowering 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 them as 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'd ask a lot of open ended questions i would make sure that they feel very heard and so i understand what's going on so as the ceo i sit down and i'm like i have an idea of what's going on over here and 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 the first thing i wanna do is really ask their context and understand what's actually going on with them and see like if they're even happy with the job that they're doing or what's going on actually another thing i would do is i would actually be very vulnerable about where i am with it so i would say something like wow i feel like we've lost trust like i i'm 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 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 you fix your issue which is the way an organization is designed right it the energy is backwards if you're trying to like fix everybody's issues rather than everybody's fixing your issues like if i was to invest in your company as an example and i got to pick one person who was just stoked as hell i would pick the ceo because that's gonna be the best embedded the ceo is happy with the way the company is going the company is going the way it should be going if the head of marketing is happy but the ceo is miserable about way their company is going that's not a good investment so the happiness of the ceo is where everybody needs to be pointed it doesn't mean that the ceo job isn't to be helpful to people but it means that the general energy of the company is supposed to be towards pleasing the ceo making the ceo happy which self reliant ceos have a really hard time like getting through their head because that puts them in the position of the authority that they don't particularly want to be because authority was bad in their childhood so 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 reasonable 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 like why are you such a dick or if i said oh john you're being a dick you're gonna 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 you're like more likely to get attacked you're more likely to have a bad experience with it so you're your calm your what i would call va 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 in front of me i think it was something like negative self talk is always wrong or something like that which like i read that and i was that was kind of shocking to me and it seems like self talk is a really important thing and a lot of like ambitious people i think are like they're like they're biggest hate most people generally most people yeah yeah are you do you have any patterns that you have seen of self talk and what are the practical tips on improving that so there's there's like three or four different kind of self talk abuse cycles that you you you're like there's like the really overt one which is like you're why are you applied didn't you like why don't you do this why don't you do that there's that version there's then there's the version of you gotta do this now you gotta do this you gotta do 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 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 you can shoot the basket i know you can mike like you would never do it because you have confidence in that person so it's this subtle under my 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 twenty tools to work with self talk negative self talk one of the ways that you know it's negative self talk is because it's repeating right so when when negative self talk starts dying in your system when it starts at at you just have a lot less thought just as a lot less thought occurs and the thought that you have is more like epiphany 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 u yeah yeah that's right u yeah that's how we listen to our self talk most of us listened to self 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 screw that stuff up oh i see how scared you are i see i'm right here with you you can be scared or you up wow that's really shitty management could you try to manage me in a different way please you up proven it you up oh really i think you up so you're changing the reaction and so like a great experiment to run on this is think about the reaction that you wanna experiment with it doesn't have to be good or bad it's just an experiment and you every time your negative self talk happens that day every time you remember you react in this way that you're experimenting with and then two days later you do a new experiment two days later you do a new experiment so you're constantly changing the way that you're reacting to 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 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 man not managed 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 right out here the twenty things and negative voice in my head says the most and look for seven ways are not true and if you can't find to mask your friends because what your negative voice in your head is saying is not true i i i can give you an if you tell me anything that your negative voice in your head is 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 question that it sort of violates that rule you know never ask a man a question that a salary depends on the answer or whatever you can try yeah so so you know whenever i learned 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 va authority i'm like gotta go look at that i wanna learn that i wanna learn to do this and then within like i would say as soon as i past like the ninety minute mark of any of this i'm like completely exhausted and i almost i go through like the cycle where i start out as an idiot caveman man then i think i'm becoming this like elevated higher level being who's really in touch with everything and then i'm like oh my god this is so much work i just wanna go back to being a lovable idiot again at the end of this and like dude it's all good don't worry about it like you know that i go and and i think actually recently this kind of a re recharge maxing kind of phrase caught on at least in silicon valley other people are probably like what the hell this guy talked about but there's idea of like you you're trying too hard to be too smart you're too in touch with your emotions you're over 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 to wagon her tail and then running around and you know licking at our butts like are we just happier that way than trying to go do all this work and kinda master the the psyche in all of its different parts yeah that's a great question yeah you 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 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 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 you know the way i think about meditation is 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 ninety minutes right and there's no enjoyment in it and so the question is like how do you enjoy meditation that 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 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 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 gotta do this because my business completely depends on it right you're gonna make a lot more progress on the first than the second i think that's a great answer i wanna 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 maybe almost quit the first day because we sat down and they were like alright so here's what you're gonna need to learn here's the musical notation we're gonna have memorize all these letters and here's what they were 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 posture why are you sitting like that and but like she basically presented the whole elephant 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 the stupid dream of mine how much did i really want this anyways and then the second teacher so i have a look i didn't quit i just i bumped into a second teacher and then the second teacher was like cool so like what page you wanna it is what's the song you like and what would be cool if you could play i'm like oh this song she's like oh you know what that's actually not that hard here forget the left hand we're just gonna look do the right hand and we're just gonna learn this intro like we walk out of here you'll be able to play this little thing right and you know just got and then it's like oh do you wanna be to play the next you're gonna have to learn what a chord you wanna chord this and then i learned the next thing progressively and now i can play the piano right it's like that for all things in life so what you said definitely resin i didn't realize the connection between those dudes tell 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 gonna have to do like most you would be like that yeah yeah or having kids or anything else like that can we can we do the second part now of a are we better off just being sort of you know re retired backing vaccine and then not over expecting not overly getting in touch with our feelings and just saying like feel good do more of doesn't feel good do less let me just move on and not overthink it it it can potentially work out if you're super lucky and the world doesn't change under your feet but it's not gonna 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 gonna have to have a different set of skills and understanding than the person who's running a tomato fifty thousand acre tomato farm and potentially the ceo of one is not gonna be successful in the ceo of the other even though they might be great ceos in the business of their choice because one is not 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 in your identity human being to maintain or continue success then you're just shooting yourself in the foot by not being self aware there's also this kind of trajectory of self awareness like the beginning is why am i doing this work and then i can't see the change other people are telling me i'm changing but i can't see the change why am i even doing this and then there's like holy shit this is life is better and then when you hit the holy shit life is better moment oftentimes like two or three years for people though they really get that moment then it's just like why and hell would i ever stop this you know it's a little bit like working now thanks podcast guess is bought to you buy my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo and chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like it very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who dis disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them n a member's fdic i'm speaking of like working out and actually sean's example what 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 goals you wanna bench three hundred 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 productive but are there like a the 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 i think starting point is good word like if somebody listen to this great what you what's a beautiful place in the next twenty four hours forty eight hours that they could go that what's the thing they could do that would just get get them on the road yeah and like what and then what's the progression and where some other weekly experiments that i could like follow to it yeah improve myself yeah 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 picked topics that i was interested in i would read something on that 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 year and something that has fifty two experiments on different topics and and then a whole bunch of writing on these topics what's one of them a really cool soup 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 ten percent more right totally possible totally capable no nothing to it so just do that five times a day for the next week five times a day go oh how do i enjoy myself without changing anything just five percent more ten percent it 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 like super yeah it's like all a sudden like you'll be sitting in a meeting and you'll like your whole mindset will change yeah and 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 talk about the one with the voice in the head that's another great experiment to run another great experiment to run would be oh yeah this one's good especially if you're a grinder don't do anything you don't enjoy for a week do you go to work and you can 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 but what do i do because 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 on that first experiment you said without doing anything different enjoy it more which to me it reads like and you know because one version of 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 i'm literally not gonna do anything the i'm gonna feel it more i'm gonna like bring my awareness that's there that's why they're two experiences right two experiments right and i i had this when we sold a company and then i asked my business partner ben was dude does it feel a big you know big win for you like you know first like how does it feel as feel 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 and he didn't know what to make 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 kinda reframe 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 fence and never so what you think you just start today and suddenly feel it at level one hundred like you never used that muscle before so like the actual thing to do was practice using that muscle went without having to sell your company and then you know you sort of build up the capacity to feel but you can't just i think we we think oh my happy is you're happy dude i got an uncle who i'm like his capacity to feel happy is just fundamentally higher like a v two max right way higher than mine is that does that line up with i i've never done this is my life desperate spirit yes definitely definitely especially the positive emotions but they're the scariest emotions for most people to feel because they're the biggest identity just trying emotions they just wreck your identity the positive ones are the positive ones yeah well why does that destroy your identity go be and bliss and find out where you are well 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 with so much better in terms of ambition because it's quite simple i just work work work and there's a clear ladder and you just climb 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's 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 less yeah and it like and i'm happy i prefer the life and yet you're still working and still being ineffective which is also an interesting thing to let your mind recognize that the identity doesn't have to be so attached to be able to be successful yeah one more experiment that i think is really cool for entrepreneurs especially if they have because we've been talking about self reliance thanks five people a day consciously look around and go what did somebody do for me that i'm grateful for and thank five people a day it'll totally change yourself reliance pattern hey how do you find joy and how do you find what you should be doing because you're like fine you one of your exercises was do only what you like or you know like a or enjoy something more but that's actually kinda complicated because i don't think a lot of people have actually asked themselves or can't answer what do i love doing yeah i i think because that it's a false i think that's really just like a self abuse and disguise right like what's my purpose what's my purpose is just a way to beat yourself up that you don't have your purpose what do i enjoy i think that the people that i find who have purpose and and enjoy what they do they a lot of them weren't like i think that what i'm 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 do 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 at 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 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 so useful it's interesting you say that you know i when when say sam i'm asked ask these questions are kinda 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 heavy 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 choose two sides of the brain type of thing yeah but i i feel like when you're answer answering some of these you you are kinda thinking with through 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 we do these very intense long retreats and so it's very tiring and we were at the end of one of the 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 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 billion dollars if we could not do it again like we would be done doing it but we get a billion dollars and both of us went like this we both went we wouldn't like that was our as our answer and but i don't know i told my i came home told the story and 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 some you can grow into a billion dollars and she's like no something i wouldn't sell for a billion dollars 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 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'd like you have seen them and we all know what they appear like in the media or on podcasts like this where they usually look like they have their act together or they'll show just a little bit of vulnerability show that like they're one of us but are there any interesting stories or observations about the one percent of the one percent 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 the there's nothing i've said on this podcast that i haven't said to one of the titans of industry like there's there's the the things that you're wrestling with are the exact same things that they're wrestling with right what what attributes do tend to notice are they ten out of ten on and or one out of ten on the really really the exceptional ones of like very fast paced businesses so not like if you can be a slow pace business then there's a different kind of attitude you can be you can actually be quite self abusive in a slow faith pace business but in a fast paced business you can't second guess yourself very much so very very few of them are second guess so they just are like and part of it is because they have to make so many decisions in a day and and so decisive is another one especially for the fast paced industries there are some like investment if you're an 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 i would say like least sixty maybe seventy percent they both feel like they're better than everybody and worse than everybody simultaneously so they on one level in their conscious mind they're like i am more capable than people than the average person but underneath they're like i'm broken and so they're kind of doing this thing because they know that they're better and they're trying to prove that they're not broken it's not all the time but it's it's more common in that population than in any other population that i've seen 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 there's a lot of it in that realm well you know one of the things we did in this podcast that sort of backwards probably for most podcast podcasts it's most podcast podcasts start with tell me about your background in your story yeah and we do it the opposite we say show me all the goals you've collected on your journey first we start there and then we say where'd you get all this man we're where 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 the the journey and i'm curious about one thing in particular well i've read something about like an an eight second meditation i'm very curious about that but if you give us the journey but make sure you hit that along okay yeah i mean i grew up going all over the world i think by the time i was twenty eight i lived in twenty six places my dad was a ceo but also became an alcoholic and so i i would rebelled against that had a mohawk was a skateboard order got kicked out of my first college graduated val for my second college and then first thing i did my left college was like i'm just having an adventures one after the other so i butcher fish in alaska and i hitch hi throughout the united states and then i did international stock lending and i was in a band and i so i was just like i'm having whatever adventure i want from life james bond man because it was because 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 gonna get married we're gonna see a therapist we're going to do a ten day silent retreat and we're going to travel through third world together for like six months and if we can do those three 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 three of vip pasta 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 is what some people would call it but this experience of i am one with everything and everything is good and it lasted eight seconds and it was like getting hooked on heroin i my entire life changed i was like where were 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 horn for perfectionism it was just like my corn right and but the the plus side was that like i just because i had authority issues i just went and explored everything and took nothing very seriously and made everything in experiment so and insane 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 ship for yourself here's how you do it you can do it with people right now it's very in the moment experimentation and i wasn't willing to say you're the authority you're the guru i was like i'm gonna listen to every single modality that i can find from neuroscience to psychology to you know traditions that are two thousand years old i'm gonna try ten forms of meditation i'm gonna do the hoffman process i'm gonna do somatic work i'm gonna i just did everything and i was pretty dedicated to the i'm not pretty i was sick totally dedicated i didn't work for seven years i like lived off credit cards i meditate for like seven hours a day looking searching and 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 and then my identity got trapped in that for a while like i was the awake guy and then that evaporated and in that time period we had kids and then the kids were where the big emotional work came in was like really learning i there was this thing called hand hand parenting which 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 seventeen and twenty and they are freaking 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 some point i became a venture capitalist and as one does as one does yeah i i literally went from meditation i did art and then became a venture capitalist i you you're like a sellout well of them just sit around all day doing that a lot no what happened was i was doing this large scale art solution for a a wealthy family and i was giving them business advice because 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 there's was 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 do you guys wanna discuss your bond portfolio there was what did you actually tell what was going on and i was called by 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 that 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 times and so i was inside of like a sixteen month period and so i was just kinda it was just something that i always thought about and like one day we were sitting and having lunch and i was just like hey here's this thing so he comes to me and he goes hey do you want to come and work for us and like help us in the family office and i was like no i'm i'm love being an artist it's good and he says well if you could do anything you want just tell us what it would be and so three months later i was like well i think the biggest change it on the planet that this is around two thousand six i was like is gonna be clean tech i think that this is like that 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 yeah because i needed to be needed too much like with like a great investor is the investor is 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 so i was investing for about twelve 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 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 two thousand sixteen i started the transition two thousand and eighteen i stopped working for the family and i started building out of accomplishment and we've been growing ever since you're fun to talk to it because you this stuff is all really helpful like i'm so convinced now like you've got me drinking in the ko aid where i'm like hey here you're talking about this and i'm like nothing else matters except for this and that's a little bit of an overwhelming feeling is there like a practical way that i can get started other than going through one of your programs like anything that you should suggest say 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 not like a hundred and eighty episodes and they're all on different topics and it's all basically some version of a teaching so i would pick a topic that's like particular for you and you're like oh wow i have a perfection so go to the perfection 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 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 an experiments that's another one otherwise like him so brilliant that they call them experiment 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 preach less rigid more like like try this weird thing it's see what happens you might be surprised yeah it's and it makes it more fun yeah it makes 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 gonna be very specific about this so we have a part of the brain called the ben with all invert and it's basically the part of our brain that like traffic are 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 bearing 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 it'd be really stupid 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 because we just got rejected or when we stop weed 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 failed there's just i'm gonna try this now i'm gonna try this now we're i'm gonna 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 in 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 okay what is this i'd like people are like pop of 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 you probably have to lie about what you do little yeah i can be annoying i chris williamson did do you have you do you all know chris yeah yeah yeah so chris williamson was hanging out with me and he was he was like you know my life is walking down the street 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 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 fifteen minute coaching sessions i do some with business folks some without business folks they're incredibly powerful they're incredibly potent and so if you can go through them and say oh i have this issue and then watch the coaching session you can get changed it's not just on an intellectual level 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 transitioning periods of our lives with families and like business and so this was like a treat for us because i think i needed this 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 you tell me everything you could tell me you're tell me off yeah that's okay brother you got me eat out of your hand right now i'll do whatever you say the 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 fifty people and we have a program for their executive teams so their executive teams come and do a summit with us twice a year so super effective basically we are all about getting that how do we have the hard conversations quickly and effectively and creating that so that you know you know and i know that like two founders not getting along can cost of 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 dude it's crazy the responsibility you have like i read that the open ai team sends a car picks you up and you you like coach the whole team or you catch the execs and then i'm on twitter and there's like hey i lead safety research it's like today like the big story right i was like and drop guys like hey like we think there's a greater than ten percent chance that hey kills all of humanity you what i it's like first of all they need a little comm coaching i don't know if you do that on the side but that would be nice but secondly like you know what responsibility like coaching the people that are building the thing the bomb you know like yeah either the greatest thing ever the worst thing ever sometimes they say it's the greatest ever and sometimes they tell us it's gonna be the worst thing ever it's gotta be a pretty pretty heavy thing yeah that's it's really interesting so just to be very clear about my like i i coach people at open it i don't get coach the whole leadership team and i've 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 you've had a kid your wife's in the or r or in the birthing room or maybe she you had a duel at the house but just imagine like she's giving birth this thing and now imagine like there's protests outside and there's people saying that they're gonna 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 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 i it it might be given that you talk to high school people do you actually have an opinion on what that basically for the listen to the the tweet was a guy who worked at claude quit and he said the there's a ten percent chance or more that everyone's gonna die because of ai it was a very great one guy quit and then the guy who's still there who leads that team that guy was on said no he's right we do believe that i personally think it's a greater than ten percent chance yep do you have an opinion on the series 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 twenty questions does ag exist now will it ever exist or the things and then that were asked to line up on this line and they lined up very very differently like they were spread out okay is it gonna destroy the world is it gonna be the best thing for humanity they're all spread out on the line every single question there not everybody on one corner and everybody on the other corner and so my takeaway away from that is they're re they're thinking about what's gonna 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 that's a and it's a beautiful answer so that's that's that's my opinion on it i mean of course this has a chance to destroy humanity sodas does nuclear weapons and so does global warming and sodas does and something will eventually you know and the the question that i asked myself personally is like what can i do that can affect a positive outcome and am i participating in that and somebody can say that's easy joe because you're you know coaching people like sam but i would say it is a democracy of clicks and and money that's gonna determine ai more than any one leader and i think we shook our responsibility by saying it's about one leader who's gonna do it does that make you feel better sean or no i don't think so honestly no all so we're gonna die no not even that it's i i guess it's on on one level there's a sort of humor in the situation to use your analogy of like the other sort of birthday this technology and you said a lot of the opinions of these people has less to do let me para said yeah a lot of their opinions is less to do with the facts on the ground and the research what they're seeing in the data versus how they array you know their daddy issues and it's like yeah ai daddy has daddy issues therefore he's gonna have daddy issues as it grows up yeah yeah so just just like just like meta 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 version tech guy version right this 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 this is zero trust yeah zero belief in the that those are our great kings and fearless leaders that we wanna get behind yeah part of that is because of their own poor communication and presentation you so it's not like they're they're just hated because of who they are right they 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 this weird complicated thing that's going on but to answer your question sam of you know doesn't make feel a lot better now 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 the funniest tweet was when the top guy was like yeah ten percent chance it kills all humans and then somebody quote tweeted and said by the way lebron was nine percent to go to the six or this summer put that perspective i 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 wait wait i don't even know what is the desi scrolls are like the the ancient political tax 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 then we had y two k i don't know if you will or old but that was the end of the world then we had like two thousand and twelve 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 part of accomplishment and the podcast and all the good things thank you thanks for having me appreciate it alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rude the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna 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 too and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast