The $500 Billion Secret: Why Top Leaders Chase Stress | Sébastien Page : 1272

There's an ideal dose of stress that creates the highest performance, and it's different doses for different things. Maybe you hate bankers. Fair. But this one, you want to hear him out. Because the guy managing $500 billion a day doesn't just handle money, he masters pressure. Sebastian Page, chief investment officer at T Rowe Price. Governments trust him. Fortune 100s call him. He moves markets with a single decision.

Optimal performance does not happen at zero stress.

But this episode, it doesn' focus on money, it focuses on performance. If you procrastinate, you're not lazy, you're strategic. If stress runs your day, you're not broken. You just never trained for it. And if you still think leadership belongs in the C suite, you've already lost the room. Because the people who perform under pressure don't rely on motivation. They run systems. This is the psychology of a leader.

There's this whole area of research called Yerkes Dodson's curves. The origins of the research is fascinating because they started with testing Japanese dancing mice. Those curves are fascinating because at zero stress, you're not at the optimal performance point. As stress increases, your ability to perform as a money manager or in any aspect of life increases.

How do you handle the mental burden or stress of managing $500 billion every day? Leadership isn't a title. It's a mindset. You don't have to be a CEO. You just have to start acting like one. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Hey, real quick. If you've only been listening on your favorite podcast app, you're missing half the fun. Head on over to my YouTube channel. I'm doing way more over there. Full video podcast episodes, weekly YouTube only videos, and some wild extras you're not going to hear here.

Just search Dave Asprey on YouTube.

See you there. Sebastian, thanks for coming to the studio in Austin, flying across the country for this, the week of launching your new book, the Psychology of Leadership. I asked you to do that, and you were kind enough to say yes, because you have an incredible story. The idea is you're running a $500 billion fund and you studied leadership and interstates. And I'm all about, well, how do you manage what's happening inside your thinking, your emotions? Because most people lose their mind around money. And so you've got this cool leadership thing in a big executive. You're all over the news talking about markets going up and down and all that stuff. Oh, by the way, should I buy or sell right now?

What a tough question, Dave. This is probably the worst week in history, almost. To ask that question, I'd say, sit tight, don't panic.

All right? Sit tight, don't panic. Is that basically the summary of the psychology of leadership?

That would be a nice summary. There's a lot in there. Sit tight, don't panic. I would say a few of the talking points would be think long term, embrace stress for resilience, which I know you talk about in your show. So some of those would be the headlines.

How do you handle the mental burden or stress of managing $500 billion every day?

You have to learn to deal with stress. And the biggest finding for me writing this book was that optimal performance. Dave and I know you've talked about this on your show. Optimal performance does not happen at zero stress.

Thank you for saying that. And you just reminded me of something. When I first started the biohacking movement, the very first consumers of it were hedge fund managers, even before tech entrepreneurs. Because my seed capital, back when I was at Bulletproof and I was just getting it going, a small investment bank called clsa. Hey, you've definitely heard of them. Well, they hired me to fly around the world so they could go talk to hedge fund managers and I could tell them how to be smarter. So, like, guys like you are the most mental and stress performing humans on the planet. And the fact that you took the time to write it all down to say, well, here's how I do this incredibly burdensome job. I want to really pick your brain in this episode.

You know, I wasn't doing well when I started writing the book, researching psychology, especially sports psychology, which is a big part of the psychology of leadership. I was beating myself up for being stressed.

Oh, you were mad at yourself for being stressed?

Yeah. And then I started talking to a sports psychologist. Name is Dr. Daniel Zimit. He's awesome. He's helped me in this project. And he looked at me and he said, you know, stress increases performance up to a point. And there's this whole area of research that's super fascinating. It's called Yerkes Dodson's curves. Yerkes is Y E R K E S. Okay. It's been researched in psychology and in particular in sports psychology for decades. The origins of the research is fascinating because they started with testing Japanese dancing mice. Okay. So I explained the tests in the.

Book and the fact there is such a thing as a Japanese dancing.

Apparently they have an ear defect. But those curves are fascinating because it's simple. At zero stress, you're not at the optimal performance point. As stress increases Your ability to perform as a money manager or in any aspect of life increases and then up to a point, those curves are different depending on the task. So if you're trying to do research, to innovate, to write computer code, your optimal performance point on that stress curve is closer to a low stress level. If you're doing powerlifting or you're running 100 meter sprint, there's almost no level of activation that where your performance actually going to decrease. So the curve looks different for different tasks. And then the other part of this is that the curves are different for different people.

That might be an important personalization of stress. How would I know if I need more or less stress as a human being versus for a task?

So as a human being, you have to stop beating yourself up about being stressed. Tim Ferriss wrote I love this. He wrote embracing stress is like a superpower, right? So that's the first thing. And we all want to be like Neil Armstrong. This is an example of a human being who had a really stress curves that were really interesting. So let's go back to the lunar lune landing in 1969. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, they're in the lunar module, everything goes wrong. Dave, it's a famous story. They lose connection, the computer stops working, they run out of fuel, the module goes off course. And this is a critical moment in human history. And Armstrong takes control and manually lands the thing in the wrong spot that wasn't planned for, but he lands it and then everybody knows what happened next. He said it's a small step for a man, a giant leap for humanity. Here's the thing that it might be interesting for biohackers. For example, he was hooked to a heart rate monitor. Can you guess his average heart rate for that mission while all of this was going on?

Probably like around 60 or something.

75. It's like a resting heart rate for most people.

Wow.

And it spiked when he actually landed. But now we have someone whose stress tolerance is extreme. And there are ways you can improve your stress tolerance. And I know you talk about this in your show, but repetition, repetition and even mental repetition, you're going to do something maybe a little stressful like going to Dave Asprey show. Well, spend the last, you know, 24 hours before kind of doing a few reps of what you're going to say.

This isn't really stressful for you, is it?

Having fun so far, I mean you've.

Been on CNBC and you know, two minute interviews and all that. This is I most of my guests aren't stressed.

I got to say, I love the podcast format. I'm just so psyched for it. First of all, you gave me some awesome coffee. And the thing with the podcast format is we can have conversation. If I go on that live national TV on CNBC, and it's two to five to 10 minutes, and it's about the debate of ideas, and it's high pressure. It's not the same.

You got to hit your beats and you don't get another chance on. On national tv. It's. It's really stressful, for sure.

It's not the same.

I noticed you brought a notepad. Fell down. You want to. You want to grab it? All right, so what's on your notepad? Like, what kind of notes do you take? So you want. So you're not stressed.

So there are things. This is a security blanket. Okay. So a lot of times I do this. This. These media engagements, and I put this down, and I never look at it.

Yep.

But it's a little bit of a security blanket. And in my defense, you have one, too. Okay. So the other thing is, there are things that are not as intuitive that I want to talk about, and, you know, instead of just giving you an answer about the research, I want to give you an answer that has a story behind it or something interesting. And sometimes I tend to forget. So, for example, under sports psychology, I have this idea that just give you an example in there.

It's cool.

Okay. So sports psychology applies to money management. It's fascinating. And one of the things that you have to learn is that you lose. You lose. You lose in sports, and you lose in money management, the power of losing. But to the extent you have a little edge and you can replicate it over time, over long periods of time, that little edge can add a lot. So I have a note here that says Federer, because Roger Federer went viral about a year ago, speaking to students, and he looked at the crowd and said, I have played 1500 games in my career. I have won 80% of them. That's a top tennis player. Close to top. Maybe top tennis player.

Don't tell the Brand brothers when they were on.

He goes, do you know the percentage of points that I've won? It's 54%.

Oh.

And then he goes, no matter what game you play in life, you're going to lose, and you better get used to it. And there's another link between sports psychology and money management and life, frankly, is how sports psychology, surprisingly, is not about winning. Dave. It's about losing. And what do you do with the loss?

Yes. Okay. What do you do with the loss? Because there's a lot of people allergic to losing.

Yeah. So what do you learn from it and how do you grow from it? When I started working on the psychology of leadership, I had this moment where I met a sports psychologist. I mentioned him before. Dr. Daniel Zimit. Okay. The guy also has 44, 0 national titles in the sport of handball.

So that's a really rough sport.

That's like squash, but you hit the whack the ball with your hands. 40 national titles. He's a sports psychologist, but he's got his mental game together and he actually is a high performing athlete. So we sit down and I'm asking him about sports psychology, Starting the research for the psychology of leadership. He starts telling me the story of his best match ever. And I listen. It's fascinating because it was maybe 10 years before. He remembers every point. Wow. He remembers where the ball was at every point. And then there's a moment where he's on his knees, the crowd's going crazy, he makes an extreme shot and he almost has a tear in his eye. And he's telling me this story and it's complete letdown because then he goes, oh, and then I lost the next two points. I go, what? You lost the game? He goes, yeah, but that doesn't matter.

Because he made the shot.

And moreover, that day on the court, he grew. He realized he was playing a stronger opponent. He realized he had improved his skills to play at a different level. So what about that mindset that's so powerful is that it's. You're starting to almost embrace losing. As long as you grow from it. It's fascinating. Fascinating mindset. And going back to investment management, you gotta embrace your failures and learn from them.

I'm gonna go back to your cheat sheet. There's a reason you're doing it that you might not be aware of. It's not just a security blanket. It's one of the most powerful ways to memorize content is to make a cheat sheet. As if you're going to cheat. And I adm in 9th grade. I may have cheated on the test once or twice like everyone else in my class.

Where did you hide the sheet?

Well, I mean, we'd like. You'd write it on piece of whatever, a little thing. And you like put it somewhere in your sleeve, your shoe. There's all this stupid stuff that kids do. And yes, I recognize that cheating isn't what you're supposed to do and it was wrong and all that, but hey, I was a dumb kid. So I realized after a little while that just making the cheat sheet made me think about it and compress it and put it in my memory.

Yes.

And it's still. It's one of the reasons I write books, because the act of structure, structuring information so I can communicate it clearly in a book makes it locked into my brain. So I'm just using it to be a better biohacker. So I think when you wrote that, you uploaded it in a more structured way into your consciousness. And this is a way anyone can increase their memory. So you're getting the security of having it, but the act of making it was the real value. Does that match your.

I could not agree more because, you know, 99% of the time I don't even look at the thing. But the process of distilling the ideas in a few words on a sheet, that process itself helps me prepare. And there's a lot to say about process, Dave. You know, process over outcomes. Here I have a process that helps me prepare and writing, I'm just addicted to it. I just love, love, love, love writing and what you said writing is learning. Absolutely. You organize your thoughts, you gain clarity on how you're thinking about an issue. There's nothing that compares to that. Sitting down with a blank page and organizing by writing. And it's a lot of fun when you get into it.

When you get in flow, it really is fun. And I'm assuming that means you didn't use AI to write your book.

No. But you know what, in terms of editing, I think the tools that are out there right now, they're really good. And I have no qualms about using AI based editing. It's just very powerful sometimes in my day job, I'll admit, if I write an article quickly, I might say it's been helpful for the intro and conclusion. So I have the article, I got to put it out. I go into AI and I go write the intro three bullets or help me craft a conclusion. I end up rewriting about 50% of it. But it's helpful. It's a tool.

It's totally helpful. And some people are saying, well, that's cheating. Look, you flew here on an airplane instead of walking. That was cheating too. Like, we all do things for efficiency. And I have to say, my next book, I'm not going to let AI write it for me, but I am going to structure my ideas to the best of my ability. And I'm going to say, what did I do that wasn't as good as it could have been. And when it says organize it this way, I'm going to listen and maybe I'll take it, maybe I won't. But I actually had a, a relatively difficult conversation with my girlfriend.

Right.

Like there was something. I was looking for the right words just to talk about it. And she's a relationship coach, like we coach other couples at her. We deepen things. So it's not like we aren't well experienced. But I'm like, I know that I don't have the right words. So I kind of put it in. I was like, hey, you know, help, help me out here. And it did a better job of structuring what I want to say than I was capable of. I don't have a problem with that. And I told her I did it and she laughed and said, that's so cool.

You know, I see it in business. It's starting to pop. Sometimes I get emails and they're overly polite and agreeable and I know the person and I go, no way. That, that, that's. That. No, that's A.I.

I did have in one of the companies I own. I the, it's a very young company, the CEO, more president, whatever the, the top executive was. I basically said, well, don't ask me if you want to do something, show me the plan with numbers and expected outcomes, which is a normal executive thing to do. And so he pasted in this long stupid chatgpt thing. And I'm like, oh, we're playing this game. So I pasted it back into ChatGPT and I said, shoot this full of holes and use as many words as possible. And then I pasted that and sent it back to him. I'm like, we can play the AI dumb game all day long. And that was a good lesson. And at that point we became more concise and intentional about our communication. So it can be used for wrong. But for research, I bet you found some studies you didn't know about as you were pulling this together. And that's where the beauty of all of human knowledge. Knowledge is available. As a leader, knowing that you have access to all of this, whether it's for writing the psychology of leadership or just in your daily interactions, are you using AI not for trading but say in difficult leadership situations or when you're questioning yourself, do you go in and and analyze it with an AI or did you go to a therapist or you're a sports psychologist, what's your practice when you hit a wall.

I don't go straight to AI. Maybe I will over time. You're kind of giving me an idea here to at least try it. When I face difficult situations, I just take a pause and try to be mindful of my own reaction and what's going on. I talk about this in the psychology of leadership. Leaders, Dave, have, especially in business, especially money management, a tendency to be decisive.

Right.

And that is a well accepted fact or quality that is completely overrated, especially when emotions take over. So I talk about this as psychology of leadership. I go, look, an underrated skill is strategic patience. There are plenty of decisions that come at you as a leader that might trigger emotion or stress. Where the answer is strategic patience. You in a lot of cases, not all cases, sometimes you need to make the decision, but in a lot of cases you take advantage of the time you have left to make the decision. And we in business leaders, we tend not to do that. So. And I have a whole model behind strategic patience. But you know, if you go out and look for a restaurant and you're walking around with your girlfriend and you're not too hungry and you give yourself an hour to find a restaurant, your standards should be really high at the beginning because you have an hour. Yeah, you have an hour. But if, if you're like at the hour and you're starving, you might end up at McDonald's. I don't think you would ever end up at McDonald's, but it's unlikely. Yeah.

Fasting is more likely. Okay. In my time as a venture capitalist, and I'm not one anymore because, well, I don't. Maybe that's a predatory business model. Just kidding. VCs, we're all friends.

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I learned that the top VCs will tell you they have an intuitive knowing right away about a deal and then they take a little bit of time and then they think about it and if they line up, they write the check and they make money. But there's times when they have an intuitive knowing right away, that decisiveness. And then their brain says no. But then they invest anyway and they often make money. But if the intuition says no and the brain says yes, they never make money. So you trade much more frequently than that and you're dealing with a very large organization. How do you know when to use your intuition and when to use your brain?

Right? So as I said, some decisions require you to be absolutely decisive. There's no doubt about it. Other decisions, and this is where most leaders fail, require strategic patience. So how do you know the difference? Very simple. How much time do you have left to make the decision? Simply asking that question, I guarantee you, even I myself, others leaders, we don't spend time even parsing through this. How much time do we have if someone comes to you with an Urgent decision. Just ask the question, hey, do we need to make this decision now or not? You'd be amazed how that question does not get asked because there's a central emergency. We're in business, we're moving fast. Let's go. No, just how much time do we have? And the longer you have, just take the time, because then things might resolve themselves. As a leader, when you have two people who disagree and they come with you to you to solve things, this is a really tough part of a leader's job. I don't know if your organizations, if that happens and how much of your mental space that takes, but it takes, surprisingly, a lot of a leader's mental space. Resolving conflict. Well, a lot of those are opportunities for strategic patience.

Hey, we use pepper spray.

That's the other way pepper spray model. But if you wait it out and you go, okay, let's, I'll take a beat. And you don't immediately rush to the rescue of resolving the conflict. Oftentimes you're empowering people in your team to resolve the conflict between them. You're giving them time to do it.

It took me about 10 years of running a company or a portfolio with multiple companies in it to really get down to that. Where at the beginning of being a CEO, someone will come in with a problem and I'd believe it, which is a bad idea. And then I, well, let's fix this. And now, unless it's really, really urgent, I'm just going to say, okay, what are you going to do about that? And I'll maybe get the story from the other side. And I hold back and I want my people to resolve it. And if I have to step in, it means my culture's not working. Right.

Right.

So what percentage of the time when there's conflicts do you have to step in as a CEO?

First of all, you mentioned culture that is super important in resolving conflicts. And there are cultures where people just want to agree and it's consensus driven and that's not productive. And then there are cultures that are just combative.

Yeah. Like the Steve Ballmer Microsoft thing.

And you know, they're famously in the money management. There are places where it's well known that it's all about direct confrontation. One of my friends works at one of these places and he said there's lots of Ferraris in the parking lot. I've never seen so many miserable rich people. Yeah, that's the importance of relationships. So the key is trust and mutual respect. We don't necessarily have to like each other. We don't necessarily have to agree on everything. But if there's a certain level of trust and mutual respect, and if we assume good intentions as opposed to assuming bad intentions, then we get to a place where ideas survive on their own merit. It's just so important in money management, Dave, because what you want is get the best thinking of the team on the table. It's super hard. We don't know the future. We're allocating money and we don't really know what's going to happen in the world. So we need the ideas to balance and we need to almost like reach team, team level, flow and engagement.

You sound a little bit like, like Ray Dalio when you say that, who's, you know, written one of the most amazing books ever. And so you're saying you want an idea meritocracy.

Right?

Now, if people aren't really comfortable with losing, then they're going to lose the argument and they're going to be emotionally reactive.

Right.

So how do you get comfortable losing an argument without losing your mind?

Rule number one, your idea is not you. Oh, your idea is not you. And by the way, Ray Dalio, in my mind is an extreme version of this. And I read Principles and I love that. And I also read, you know, the other book that maybe goes unmentioned, but that kind of goes behind the scenes. Okay, I'm actually blanking on.

Okay, got it. This is another one about the culture at Bridgewater.

Yes, but it's an unauthorized version. Oh. And you can see how out of hand and extreme these things can get. Mutual respect sometimes is more important than, you know, me giving you direct, immediate feedback. In your face. It's not for everybody, as they would say. Anyway, I don't like talking about competitors. I'm in the money management business.

Yeah. But I think the respect that we both have there comes through loud and clear, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But the idea meritocracy is necessary for high performing teams. Absolutely. And you have to do this, leave your ego at the door. Yeah, right. That's. That's key. Is not taking it personally. Your idea is not you. And the process of feedback, which is a big part of the firm we just mentioned, is key to that. The problem is everybody hates it.

Okay, let's talk about this. I do employee performance reviews. All my executives do. We have software that helps and we have structured conversations. And I work with people who I think are great. And still there's been times where I say, you know, there's this one time, you know, this this wasn't what we want. And I can never predict when someone's just going to be fully triggered and just lose their mind over necessary feedback. What do you do about that at work and then in your relationship?

First of all, let me ask you, do you like that process or would you rather be doing something else when.

You have to give, It's a horrifying process. I'd rather be doing something else.

Yeah. No one likes it yet. We need feedback. We need feedback to grow. So Dr. David Rock, I mentioned him in the Psychology of Leadership, has this hack, if you will, for feedback. I see your eyes light up when I mentioned the word hack.

Yeah. Give me the special recipe here.

It's so simple. Ask for it. So build a culture where people proactively ask feedback. So you would love his research because there's neuroscience. They hook people up to monitors, they have them go through exercises and they measure the biological response to the feedback process. And they do this little tweak instead of just giving feedback, asking for the feedback and then receiving it, that decrease the stress response by almost half. So as a leader, you got to go around and say, how did I do? And then people look at you doing this and then they start doing the same. How did I do after this, Dave, before I fly back home, I'm going to ask you, how did I do? And then there's another trick. Make it forward looking. What can I do better next time to improve? So that takes a lot of the stress out of the feedback. But let me ask you a question. Sure. Can I give you some feedback?

Absolutely.

But how do you feel when I ask that question though, when I. Well, isn't that like one of the most stress inducing questions you can.

No, not for me anymore, literally.

You didn't flinch.

I felt excitement right in my chest.

That's awesome.

But I have spent six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head and I fully believe in my soul in continuous improvement. And I only do that with data. So if you've literally been like, dave, you're dressed like shit, I would have been like, this is so cool. Someone's actually telling me the truth. My big challenge actually is, and you may get this as an exec too, people tell you what they think you want to hear instead of the truth. And I, I want to be reality based in everything I do.

Right.

How do you get people to tell you the truth?

There is a way. It's not perfect. It's the anonymous peer review. Now this is another one we all hate.

Yeah.

But at the same time, because it's anonymous, I'm ambivalent about it. But things will surface that otherwise would be very difficult. Now, if you have the right culture and people are like you, and I say, can I give you some feedback? And you genuinely had a positive reaction, you might be the only person out of a million who will generally have, can I give you some feedback? And you're like, please, that's amazing.

I'm very weird.

So you have this anonymous process, and a lot of it comes out of it. A good way to do it is to collect feedback anonymously. As the manager, you read it, understand it well.

Don't you also have to judge who wrote it?

Yes, no, absolutely. Absolutely. The research shows that the feedback that someone gives you reflects almost as much as their of their own attitudes and worries incompetence as yours. And by the way, I pontificate about feedback. I've struggled with it. I've struggled with it for two decades in the business. I've always been way too sensitive. And so learning about the research, Dr. David Rock, Understanding to ask feedback and just learning to embrace it a little bit more, it's been a process for me. That's why I talk about it in the Psychology of Leadership.

I've shifted my perspective on this. If my job is when my team's talking to me, no matter what they say is to not be triggered, or at least be the hardest person to trigger in the room. Every single freaking time. It's a high bar. I don't always make it. But if I do react instead of. Of accept whatever the information is, whether it's feedback about me or bad news in the business or whatever, then I sit down and go, all right, what's going on in my operating system? Like. Like, what do I not know about myself that made me do that? And I'm just like, like relentless about it. And I have technology to help me and processes.

And you. Yeah, that's a good reaction. But don't try not to be triggered. I mean, that's not natural. You can't go around wanting to be at zero stress. Wanting.

Oh, I didn't say zero stress. And it's zero triggers.

Zero triggers.

That's stress that I didn't choose. I want to be mindful in my allocation of stress.

Right. You might feel the stress response or not.

I turn it off. That's the book I just gave you. The heavily meditated. It's the recipe. And so the reason I invited you here is this idea in the Psychology of leadership, saying there's an ideal dose of stress that creates the highest performance and it's different doses for different things. And so my unusual path, and I could be wrong about this, but it's. I want to be able to, with 100% accuracy, allocate all of it as useful stress. And none of it is reactive stress.

Right.

And I don't know that that's ever been done, but if I could have that ability or even just half of it, I feel like I'd be a much higher performing human at the stuff I'm doing in the world.

What you're doing is a prescription of sports psychology. It is. Which says reframe it. They use different words. They don't like to use the word stress. In fact, I worked with a sports psychology on some of the editing in the book and he thought I was using the word stress a little bit too loosely. In sports psychology, you talk about arousal, which is assign scientific term in the literature, or activation.

Oh, okay.

What you're doing, Dave, if I get it right, is you're accepting the fact that stress increases performance up to a point, and you're also working on reframing it into activation. Basically excitement.

Yes.

Which is key.

Sometimes I'll do six interviews like this back to back in a day.

Wow.

And people are like, how do you keep your brain going like that? I'm like, well, I'm not wasting any stress over stress, over being stressed or stressful or being tired. And at the end of the day, I know I'm tapped out, right. I'm going to go recover. And if in the middle of it I get a text message that says, you know, whatever, there's a lawsuit or, you know, somebody didn't make their numbers or some kind of stressful thing, I will not. My heartbeat won't change, like, oh, okay, information. And then I'll set it down. I will not think about it. It will not be ruminating. And partly I'm like, how do we teach people to do that? And then when it's time to focus on it, I will. For me, the ability to partition those things and say it happened. My resistance or reactivity to it is just like pouring money down the drain because I wanted that precious energy to focus. So that's been an emergent thing for me. And I think it's part of sports psychology and it's more important for entrepreneurs and CEOs. So let's say that you're sitting there, you're trading your $500 billion and the market's shit by 10%. What is your internal process? Do you have in your chest an oh, shit moment? What happens and what do you do to process the energy in that?

As we're speaking, the market is kind of panicking and freaking out over the last couple weeks. So I've had time to think about this and. And repetition. Being used to living in the markets, reframing what we just said, how you try to turn this into activation, mindfulness. Here's what's happening to me. Not trying to push it down.

So you feel the feeling fully.

Yes.

Okay. That's a personal development kind of technique. So you get the pit of the stomach or something. What does reframing look like for you? I mean, do you take a deep breath? Do you go for a walk? What is that?

I keep it very simple. I like to remind myself of what I talk about in the psychology of leadership. By the way, this has been a journey for me. I say in the introduction, you're reading this book for self improvement. I wrote it for the same reason. So I think about that journey, and the little tidbit that I keep reminding myself is that you need stress to perform optimally. And that just in itself, in the moment, is reassuring. And then the reframing, how am I going to use that energy? I mean, do you want your surgeon to be like zero stress? I think you want the surgeon to be a little anxious and prepare and try to, you know. So that's why sports psychology tries to use different words. It's a broad concept. Stress, arousal, activation, and that's where the performance is.

There's a recent quote from Jeff Bezos. I want my employees to have terror every day. I'm paraphrasing because they know that we have to be the best and all that. And I'm thinking, if I had a terror level of arousal every day, I would hate my life and I probably wouldn't do a good job. But are there people where that's the best performing state for them?

Well, look, we keep talking about the optimal point. We keep saying stress increases performance up to a point. Let's talk about the other side. And here's the thing with performing optimally, which the sports psychologist reminded me of. You're always pretty close to being too stressed. Right. Some of those curves have a pretty tight peak. So you're always on that edge. And if you are stressed too much, and there's plenty of research behind that, and you talk about cortisol on your show and so on, it's bad, it's unhealthy, it's going to kill you, basically. But there is a point and we kind of want to approach that point to perform optimally. And that's kind of, that's the idea.

As a young man, I had Asperger's syndrome and ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder, which I think is a trait for entrepreneurs. And my brain is very different now.

Than oppositional defiant disorder.

It's called odd and it's actually diagnosable. Have you ever heard the Rage against the Machine song? You know, fu. I went to what you told me that's just running constantly in your mind. And you literally have a visceral and mental reaction when someone tells you to do something. You're like, I will not do that and no force on earth can make me do that. Yeah. Now, in school you may not have great outcomes from that, but in terms of willpower, it might be good, except it makes you programmable because people tell you not to do something they want you to do and then you're like, okay, right, right. So I don't have that anymore. But what I did notice was that if I wanted to perform my best, I'd wait until the last minute. And this is classic ADHD stuff. And a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of execs actually have adhd. So you're saying, okay, I have two hours and I could use two hours to write this up. But if I wait till 15 minutes before perform better, I'm going to just crank it out and it'll be really good. And so what's going on with there.

Is some of that for sure.

Yeah. Like intentionally increasing stress by creating time stress. Is that a thing that you see in your org? Is that a thing that you do?

You know Adam Grant? Love him. Fantastic author. And he's on the psychology side and the business side as well. In one of his books, he talks about procrastination and how procrastination can be good because you're spending more time mentally preparing. And then the other side of it to dovetail with our discussion, is that you're ramping up your stress curve, maybe closer to your optimal performance. But if I look at my son, he's 17, I don't know if he has, he didn't necessarily have a diagnosis, but I can tell you that he takes it to the extreme. Right. So it's going to be an all nighter before the exam and then he slips on the other side of the curve. I've done it many times, so that's, that's the risk.

And maybe over Time wisdom steps in. I do think there's great value, like you're saying, to allowing your unconscious to process info. So if you have an hour and you spend a half hour playing a mindless video game or going for a walk or doing something and then you sit down to focus, for me at least the answer will already be there. And then I can write it in the time that I have. But if I sat down right away and just wanted to come up with something that took creative energy or thought, I would crank the whole hour and it would not be good. So maybe the creative portion of the stress curve is lower and so you won't experience that up front. And then the producing type, where you're in more of a beta state, would be later. And beta is not like lack of alpha male. This is a beta brainwave state I'm talking about.

It applies to leadership too, Dave, because if I have a team and we're working towards something that's pretty straightforward, you know, we're building a house, digging a ditch, I kind of want to crank the pressure up. If I go to my research and development team and I go create, innovate, by tomorrow, it doesn't really help. And so if you look at the curves for sports, going back to something I said earlier, powerlifting, just full activation, pump the adrenaline as much as you can.

All beta, all adrenaline, all cortisol and break.

Yeah. Archery, different. Different stress curve.

Very interesting. I don't think I've talked about this on the show, but one of my companies, TrueDark, makes the glasses I'm wearing. We have things that are almost clinical grade. They tell your brain that it's dark outside. And we published a study that shows they drop your brain into a meditative state. They reduce brain stress. And Powerlifters when they use them. One of the most famous coaches in that industry said, Dave, I'm seeing 6% heavier personal best lifts when they wear the glasses, because the stress, visual stress goes down and then the stress goes somewhere else, like into the biceps or back or whatever muscle they're doing. So there's some kind of internal allocation of stress that we can become more masterful of. So as an executive, if there's a really emotionally stressful situation, right, and we talked about, okay, the market drops or something like that. And it was like, okay, I got stress, I got good stress. How do you know where you are? I mean, do you have like a little meter inside your head to go, I'm at 72%. What, what's the metric? What's the way of knowing so anyone listening can learn it.

It's a skill that you develop through self awareness.

Okay.

By the way, the glasses, my wife wears them. She's a huge fan. So I just, I didn't know. She's been wearing them for quite a while. Yeah, no, she drinks your coffee. She'll be happy to see this show.

Amazing. She'll send it back after home for you.

She was super excited for me to be on this show. Look, what we're talking about is learning to use stress as a tool, understanding it, maximizing the positive impact of stress and living with it, not going around in life, beating ourselves up for feeling stress, which is kind of, you know, my job is incredibly high pressure.

Oh yeah.

And before I started writing this book, the Psychology of Leadership, you know, and the title says it all right. I was kind of beating myself up. Just I felt anxious. And my immediate thought was I shouldn't be anxious. I'm a high level executive. I've 25 years of money management. Why the hell do I feel anxious about these little things and just beating myself up after writing this book? It's oh, I feel anxious. There's something there. Can I use this as a source of energy? And by the way, that's okay. I feel anxious. It's part of it we think of. And you said earlier as a leader in your organizations, you like to not have an emotional response to things. And I completely get it because you set the tone for the team. If you go off the handle, then everybody looks at you and they're going to start letting themselves do that and.

They become less truthful.

Yeah. So absolutely you intimidate them. So I completely get that. But this idea that the ideal executive, the leader, is completely unflappable and doesn't experience stress like Neil Armstrong is just a fallacy. It's just a fallacy. We all feel it. It's a human condition. And you talk about this quite a bit on your show. So let's just reframe this. So many things about leadership are counterintuitive. This is one, the other one that leaders need to be outstanding communicators. That's what they do. They talk to others. The higher you go in the organization, the more it's the opposite, that you got to become a better listener, which is the skill that will get you up the ladder after a certain level. Very counterintuitive. What we were talking about earlier, leaders have to make quick decisions. No, some of the best ones actually have strategic patience. A strategic patience mindset. Or this idea of building consensus leaders, they need to just build consensus now. And I know you've covered personality psychology. Leaders sometimes have to be able to be disagreeable because they need to make tough decisions. So there's so many things that are just counterintuitive about this. And it's all. The more you study psychology, the more you realize how sometimes it's the opposite.

You run a very large business. How much of the stuff in the psychology of leadership applies to an entrepreneur with three people or 20 people on their team?

I think all of it, Dave, because these are principles of human performance, kind of what you're about. And in fact, you don't even need to manage people to benefit from sports psychology, from understanding personality psychology, from positive psychology, setting the right goals. We talked about everything we talked about so far. We talked about feedback, we talked about managing your stress. Those are all things that are super, super important for leaders as self improvement, but they also matter for managing individuals, managing teams. So, you know, you don't need to be a people manager to be a leader. You're a leader in your family, you're a leader in your church, you're a leader in your community.

And some people would say, well, you know, that's not true even at home. One of the things that my girlfriend teaches and we deepen the relationship mastermind is that you, you have to have someone who's CEO of the relationship. And she said, well, it's usually the women. It doesn't have to be, but it usually is. And you can step up that way. So there's always an element of leadership or if you're in parenting, same thing. You're talking about something that, that is really difficult and it's stress over being stressed. I have seen so many people, they get a sleep tracker. Yeah. Now I've been tracking my sleep for 18 years now, almost every night because I was so bad at it and now I'm really good at it.

You still track it?

Not because I need to, just because it's built in at this point. Like it's, it's easy. It's part of my alarm clock. Right. It's, you know, it's part of my bed. It's built in.

Yeah, I track mine too.

Okay. You do? Yeah. And I have actually two rings on. I'm comparing them because I'm a nerd.

You like data?

Yeah. And I, I like data, but it's not for self judgment. It's more like, you know, oh, I took a different supplement or I did something and I wonder if it'll change my heart rate variability, which by the way, was about 80% higher than normal last night. And I'm like, what did I do that caused that? So it's more continuous learning versus judgment. But so many people reach out and like, oh, my God, my sleep score was, you know, 28 last night. I mean, I have the worst day ever. And it's just what you're saying, they're stressed over data, they're stressed over being stressed, they're stressed over being tired.

Right.

And it's been my experience that fear of being tired is. Is probably worse than just being tired.

Right.

And stress over being stressed is probably worse than just being stressed. So if you could provide one single piece of advice for someone who's stressed about being stressed or tired, what is it?

Flip the script.

Okay.

It's everything we've talked about. Don't hate stress.

Okay.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's the human condition. Dave. I know people who have tried sleep trackers and it's completely destroyed their sleep. And then they just threw them away way. Right. Because they know it's tracking and.

Yeah.

So, yeah, fear of judgment. Yeah. You just have to reframe it. And this is what sports psychology is all about. Because you know what athletes, you look at them, you think they're cool under pressure and they don't feel anxiety. And the sports psychologist told me pro athletes are incredibly neurotic. They get nervous. Do you think this, the basketball player, when there's a three point shot to be made and there's five seconds left, you think they don't feel anxiety and adrenaline and stress response? Absolutely they do, but they flip the script. It's part of their performance, it's part of their job.

They welcome it instead of fearing it.

Yeah. I mean, easier said than done. But striving towards that is the way.

Something Nick Foles talked about when he came on the show and we got to be friends. What a great human being. And, and his. Exactly what you said. It's incredibly stressful because of all the focus and all the physiological, physical stress. And so it's like, how do I increase my energy as much as possible and welcome it.

Does the name Felix Baumgartner ring a bell?

The race car driver.

So he's not sure if he races car. He's mostly famous for something he did in 2012 and it was a huge deal at the time. He was in the news cycle. And now, you know, we don't hear as much about his exploits. Felix Baumgartner this might ring a bell. Went up in a balloon. 24 miles.

Of course, of course.

Okay, so he went up.

The Red Bull thing made me think it was a race car.

24 miles in the stratosphere on the edge of space. Wore a special suit, dropped free falling for four minutes.

So cool.

He reached first human being to reach without an engine. This the Speed of sound. Mach 1.25.

That's so badass.

Okay, it's pretty amazing, right? What most people don't know is to do all of this. He was trained, coached day to day, up until the moment by a sports psychologist. And it's amazing how this is going into mainstream. And I hope maybe even in your show you'll explore even more of this. I really love how in your show you start with health and fitness, but you're also looking at mental health and fitness. And so sports psychology, right now, 80% of the pro baseball team, they have a sports psychologist on staff. And by the way, I think the 20%, they're just not telling you that they do. So this is where we are. And in business there's lots of applications. We just haven't explored them as much.

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I like the idea.

I have not read it and I am not remembering the author's name. It was a while ago, but. But his point was that senior executives and entrepreneurs are the same as professional athletes, except professional athletes. They play, then they stop and recover. But in business there's always more business. So we don't get recovery, but we have actually sometimes even the energy output of a CEO because of what's going on in our heads. It can be substantially higher or it can be as high as an athlete, depending on the sport. So that we would would require the physiological handling of our bodies as well as our stress management like an athlete.

It's huge.

And you've taken that into leadership now, which is beautiful.

It's huge. And everything we're talking about the brain is 2% of your body mass. It's 20% of your calorie consumption. That's a big deal. I was asked to give advice to MIT students a couple years ago and they're doing a Master's in finance. And I'm thinking, what am I going to tell them? Most of them have jobs lined up at Goldman Sachs. You know, they don't really need my advice. What should I tell this group of students? And I came in and I said take care of yourselves. And I insisted on three things, sleep, diet and exercise. And my point was if you take any of these three away, the other two basically don't work so if you don't sleep well, you'll get hungry. Your hunger hormones are all over the place. If you don't eat well, you don't have the energy for exercise. And my point to them was this is my career advice. They were expecting something businessy. Right. So have these three in a triangle where you don't take away any pillar. No one's perfect. You're not going to eat no one. Not everyone is Dave Asprey. You're not going to eat no toxins. Perfectly. Exercise, but take care of yourselves. And that's the corporate athlete. Take some rest. Rest is hugely important and difficult in business, especially as we're talking these weeks. The market's going berserk.

I recognize that sort of the computer hacker culture. That was my thing in my late teens and early twenties. These are the days of stay up all night, eat pizza, drink Jolt Cola, which is equivalent to monster energy today. And, you know, you kind of celebrate that, that side of things.

Yeah.

So you're ruining your sleep, you're eating crappy foods, you're using stimulants that aren't appropriate and performance enhancing for long periods of time. And there are those like Modafinil. But when I look at the effect on my performance in my career, I still made $6 million when I was 26. I was just fat and miserable and I lost it when I was 28, probably because I was anxious and wasn't making good decisions. Right. So I hope everyone listening to the show understands that's where leadership and resilience comes from, because it's not that hard. But it is hard to know how to get good sleep. It is hard to know what diet works for you or even what exercise. Right. I tried the exercise thing around then. It didn't work for me because I did it wrong. So maybe invest in developing those skills to find out what you need that's personalized. So this works. And maybe it doesn't work for your wife or something.

And that might have been the best career advice I could have given them because otherwise they had jobs lined up. They're at mit, they're small, smart, they're going to perform well. I also, though, talked about relationships, you know, thank you. Nice. Work hard, but be nice to people around you.

You know, be nice or be kind.

That is an interesting distinction. How would you define the difference between nice and kind?

Well, sometimes being nice means not telling someone the truth because it might hurt their feelings. And being kind is being truthful, even if it's hard, but with empathy oh, with empathy. Right, right. So you can be the hard charging jerk CEO and it's like you failed in whatever. And if you're being nice, you say, well, that wasn't as good as we wanted, but it's not going to land. And then they're going to do it again, which means they're going to continue in a cycle of failure and you're going to increase your stress. So I've worked with my kids and I work with people on the team. Like, no, we're not a nice culture. We're a kind culture. It's one of our core values for my companies. But kindness also means that if someone bad comes in, we will expel them from the organization. We have a 60 day rule. If we hire someone and they're a narcissist or a sociopath or you know, they lied, whatever, they're out. And the kindest thing I can do to support the A players is to get rid of the people who are liars. Right. I didn't used to be that way. But kindness includes letting people go when it's when they're not. Right. And I believe that that's actually an act of kindness towards the person I fired because then they're going to find a place where they're comfortable because they know they're underperforming. And so kindness has a value versus niceness. I was just asking because I've been working on that a lot in my head.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. And being just nice for the sake of being nice leads to passive aggressive behavior, leads to back channeling and it's just not productive. Kind might be harder.

It's much harder.

Yeah, much harder. But has long term benefits for the culture. You know, I was in business school and used to read about corporate culture and I always thought this is fluff. Me too.

It's junk.

I was studying math, finance, investments, accounting and then we have these classes. Culture starts at the top. And I didn't realize until 10 years in my career I switched company.

Oh.

So I've switched companies twice. And there you realize the culture is everything. It's how people feel about going to work every day. It's how they interact with each other. And the burden of being a leader is that everybody's looking at you. Even when you don't realize, you can frown at someone and not even think about the fact that you might have just ruined their week. You might say something just as a gut reaction and that might mobilize the organization in a way you don't want to or you set the tone for the culture and it's a burden and you have to accept it and live with it. It's a huge part of leadership.

How much of your stress comes from that burden?

That's a fascinating question. So let me make up some numbers for you. Sure.

It's going to be a guess, like.

Out of 100% stress. And some days it'll be 100% just dealing with conflict at work. Right. Human relationships. Other days it'll be 100% the market. Right. But so I'm chief investment officer in a large company and I would say that it's about 50, 50 between task or business related stress and people stress.

Wow. So it's big.

It's huge. It's huge. And I was talking to a me mentor one day from our board of director and I was telling him, this is someone who was a CEO for many years of a very large industrial company. And I was saying, I got so many conflicts and people stress at work, I don't know how to deal with it. And he kind of just said, that's the job, man. He said, I've worked. He had worked with presidents, he had worked with other CEOs, he coached other CEOs. And so like, that's kind of like embracing stress. That's part of the job. Everybody feels that way in your position. And that kind of just reassured me a little bit that it was acceptable.

It's really cool to have mentors like that because one thing that happens when you hit a certain level of leadership, it's lonely because you're not going to share your internal state with your team because it can be dysregulating for them. Like, I'm having a rough day. And there are some cultures where we'll do that. Like in, in my culture, I'll say, you know, guys, my brain is cooked today. You know, I took the wrong nootropic or whatever. So.

Yeah.

And I'll say if I act like a jerk, like, give me a little bit of leeway here because, you know, I'm, I'm running on empty.

But Dave, you're doing this right? And Brene Brown is awesome with this on vulnerability. You're being vulnerable, you're being real. And most of us leaders will feel like if we disclose the, if we disclose, hey, I'm not feeling well today or I'm uncomfortable, we'll be perceived as weak and it'll erode our leadership gravitas. But what Brene Brown says in her books and her research is, it's the opposite, actually. Showing vulnerability like you just described you do is a sign of strength. You're comfortable enough in your own skin to tell your team, I'm struggling with this. Guns and gals. I'm struggling.

I'm not sure that would work in all cultures, but because I'm the CEO, I get to kind of make the culture or screw it up, as I've done more than once. So that. That's a part of it. But humans are wired, kind of like sheep. I learned this as a farmer sheep. If one of them is sick, it'll hide it from the other sheep so it doesn't get kicked out of the flock. Yeah, right. Because then a predator will eat it. And humans are the same way. We never want to show that because we get kicked, picked out of the tribe. And then things like cats, you know, one of them gets sick, it goes off and dies in a tree somewhere, and so the other cats don't get sick. And it appears to be a deep species kind of thing. So there's some weird middle ground of. Of saying this. Otherwise you're also going to be a whiner. You know, oh, I have a headache again today. You know, that's not appealing or useful. So I don't know that I do it right.

No, perfect.

Some of the time. I probably do.

Like a lot of the things we're talking about, there's nuance.

Yeah.

I have a friend who had Lyme disease and it was heart disease. Charging executive in the oil and gas. Oil and gas industry. Very stressful, very hard charging business. And he hid his Lyme disease from his bosses, his colleagues for almost two years. And he would go to work with a PICC line with antibiotics hidden under his shirt because they were carpet bombing his system and antibiotics trying to kick it.

I went through that once.

He would go down to the parking lot and take a nap in his car and then go back to work. And he's about my age and he's retired. And you know what he's doing better? His chronic Lyme disease. But he had to retire. And I understand that decision.

I've worked with so many executives in that position. And one of the things that stands out, one of the first venture capitalists to support my last big company, bulletproof. And guys, if you still think that I am anything to a bulletproof. I do not. Danger Coffee is my new thing. But he wrote. He didn't even tell me this. He wrote an article on the day we announced the funding, and it was on medium and he said 60 days after I met Dave, at the end of the day, I started crying in my BMW on Sandhill Road. At the end of the day, I'm like, What?

What?

Number one, VCs don't cry.

VCs don't cry. I like that.

And number two, and I'm not naming him, just, he knows who he is, but I don't know if he wants me to. And number two, he said, my entire adult life, I've suffered from crippling fatigue all day long, and I've hidden it from everyone. And because I started putting butter in my coffee, which goes against every fiber of my being.

But.

But at the end of the day, for the first time in my adult life, I still had energy to drive home.

So there were tears of relief, joy.

Like, oh, my God, I had a good day. He's a top guy at his firm, and nobody knew. And this is how far. And when we look around, there are people in our organizations who are just like this, and we're afraid to talk about it because it's that ancestral. They'll kick us out of the tribe. How do you get your other people on your team to be willing to be like, hey, man, I got an issue here.

It's kind of self preservation in a sense, for example, with the flock of sheep. But to me, there's a dial with vulnerability and finding where to be vulnerable and where it makes sense and fostering that culture, not oversharing and going all out and not just keeping everything inside and trying to look like the unflappable leader. There's a dial there.

It's a middle ground.

I think. So.

Okay, that makes sense. And just for. For to support your point, there. There was a time early, early in my career, I think it was late 20s. I was briefly married in my 20s, and it was a stressful marriage. And when I was just hitting to the point of like, I can't handle this anymore, I went to my boss at a small startup up, and I said, I need to take 10 days off. And he's like, what the hell? Like, we're a startup and you want to go next week? Like, what, what, what is this for? And it was to go to this personal development thing that was supposed to fix my anxiety about the relationship. And I looked at him and said, I'm. I'm getting divorced. And. And he just sat down, he goes, what? And. And he said, how long have. Have you known it? I said, oh, it's been about six months. And. And he just had this look on his face. Like, you never said anything. You never change your behavior. You never changed the amount of work you do. Like, like, like that's not okay. And he was right. Almost hurt.

He didn't need to hide it that much.

Yeah. But I, I didn't feel safe. This is a competence thing. That was my issue, not his. But I think he might have, in retrospect, taken it as a failure of leadership that I didn't share that. Right, Right. And that was all on me. And I look back from that to the point where I'll tell my team what's going on. Like, they, they know my dating life. I don't overshare. But it's like, you know, if something's not right with me, I know I'm going to be a dick. So I'm going to tell them.

Okay? And that, and that makes it, you know, better. In a sense, it does.

You write something else really interesting. In the psychology of leadership, you say setting big goals is dangerous. Okay. This flies in the face of everything. What do you mean?

Yeah. So I talk about goal induced blindness.

Okay.

When you suffer from goal induced blindness, you're so obsessed with the metric, usually it's a measurable goal that you lose sight of everything else that might matter. Your personal health and I think your early life as a professional. You've talked about this or your sense of ethics. Like, you start cheating in the sense literature in psychology, goal induced blindness is very well documented. It happens to all of us. Dave, I was at a conference two weeks ago with about a thousand university students, and something shocking to me happened. And I'm going to ask you the question. It's a thought experiment, and I know what you're going to answer, but let's think about what the students might have answered, because I just asked them to vote. It's a hypothetical example. I give you a bowl with a hundred gummies. Now, I'm sure you don't eat gummies, but bear with me, 100 gummies. Four of the gummies in that bowl have poison and are going to kill you. And then I ask, would you take a gummy randomly and eat it for a million dollars? And I'm sure you say no. No. And then I ask a billion. I'm sure you'll say no. I asked the students, and these are ambitious finance students, and I got about 15, 20% of the hands. They would take a gummy for a million dollars. And then when I went, that's a million.

Yeah. Don't they know that Biden was in office and our currency collapsed instead. My God.

And then I got a few more hands for a billion. It was interesting, that curve, right? So in the literature on goal induced blindness, the most famous example that's always used is the deaths that occur on Mount Everest. If you want to summit Mount Everest, you have 4% chance of dying in the process.

Wow.

Hence my example of four gummies at 100 are going to kill you. And so in the book, I kind of ask, why would someone want to climb Everest? And that's an example of goal induced blindness. It happens all the time in business. I mean, you know, Volkswagen world class company started cheating on their emission tests.

Right.

You know, what's up with that? Wells Fargo world class company started creating dummy accounts because they had goals and metrics and KPIs. So I talk about, in the psychology of leadership, the importance of long term goals. Goals. I bring positive psychology into it. But then I also warn about goal induced blindness. A lot of. And by the 1 measurable goals, a lot of your most important goals, you can't measure process improvement. Yeah, super important. That's how you're going to get better over time. You can't really measure that. Right. But it really matters.

That's so fascinating.

Can I ask you, do you look at your podcast ratings, do you compare yourself to, to say how Joe Rogan is doing? Do you have metrics goals?

I do. In fact, my producer's over there. But I don't compare myself to Joe Rogan or others. Every now and then I ask the team, like, how are we doing? Look at the growth rate of the industry versus growth rate of others in our space. If our growth rate's lower, I should know about it. But I compare myself to myself to say, are we growing our number of listeners? Right. And, but it's not about like, am I as good as everyone else is? Is am I producing stuff that's worth more than the amount of time that someone invests listening to it? Right, right. And is our listenership growing? Because if not, then I need to change my behavior.

Right.

Or we need to change our audio editing. Like something's not right. But there are people who religiously, you know, look at the competition, like the Andy Groves, you know, only the paranoid survive model.

Yeah. And so I'm not into that. Why? Who am I talk about your business, but I'm going to talk about it.

You're a seasoned executive, right?

In social media, you can have goal induced blindness very easy. And the thing is, is you have a goal of growing your presence in social media. You might put out content that has a lot of clicks that is not true to your mission. But you're just doing it because you have gold induced blindness. I want that number to go up.

The number of plastic people out there who are completely fake because of that.

But they can get clicks.

But they get clicks. But they're also not useful clicks. Like I'm, I'll probably this week cross 1.3 million followers on Instagram.

Awesome.

Every single one of those is real. Like I, I haven't done. And people say well that was. No, it took 10.

My wife is, my wife is one. As I said, she wears your glasses, drinks your coffee. She's probably going to go to your big event that's coming.

Oh, the bi racking conference. Well, you know, tell her to say hi.

Right.

And it took 10 years to do that. But I could have bought followers, right? In fact I, I went on someone's show and this person clearly like, like way I think ten plus million followers. But you look at the comments, they're all bought. Com and you realize this is like a manufactured reality and you do get some credibility from that. But the people who listen to this, the people who listen to me on social, they actually trust and they can feel unreal. At least I think they can. If not not you can unfollow me. It's okay. Right.

And so, but that's gold induced blindness.

It, it is. And, and so I'm hoping I don't have that on, on social, but I do. Like I just told the team and guys, you should know this if you follow me, my guys research shows very heavily that in the first three seconds on, on video formats having a visual hook will engage someone's nervous system. So then they'll get the message. So let's do the visual hooks that I don't particularly love but I think that it'll be of service to people because then they'll get the message. Otherwise neurologically, before they can think, they go to something that has a hook. So let's try it. But I wouldn't want to think that I was doing something that wouldn't be in my followers interest.

I think the way you're avoiding goal induced blindness it relates to positive psychology. You have tremendous sense of meaning in what you do.

This is true.

You come across as someone who just enjoys always helping as many people as possible. And if your sense of meaning stays in what you do, then you'll avoid goal induced blindness. Yeah, you might have some clickbaity thing, but under it you're really trying to help people in a genuine way.

I believe my content does that and I could be wrong. I'm always open to feedback, but so far it's helped an enormous number of people and I have gratitude. And it was. It was not in my early career. It was, I want to build something really cool. So that's ego. And it was, I want to make a lot of money because money will make me free and safe and it doesn't do any of that stuff. So I just. That was a lot of goal induced blindness back then.

Yeah. I think it comes down to meaning. I have a story in the psychology of leadership. It's a well known story, Dave. I don't know if you've heard it, about the three bricklayers. It's about meaning in life and business.

Oh, do tell.

So this apparently takes place about 200 years ago. So there's an architect who walks up to three bricklayers. The architect asks the first bricklayer, what are you doing? The first bricklayer says, I'm laying bricks to make money to feed my family. And that bricklayer doesn't seem very engaged. The second one says, I'm building this wall. But what's interesting is the third one, who's fully engaged, energetic, says, I'm a cathedral builder. I'm building this awesome cathedral. All three of them are doing the same thing. They just have a completely different approach to meaning behind what they do. So going back to our social media example, I could say, what are you doing, Dave? You could say, I'm just trying to get to a million followers. Or you already had a million. I'm just trying to get 10 million followers.

That's not the goal.

Or you could say, I'm doing a podcast. Or you could say, I really want to help as many people as possible using science with their health and fitness in very practical ways. And I've heard you say that about biohacking, so I know you have the meaning there.

Right. Okay, I gotta turn this around.

Am I sucking up to you too?

No, no. Dude, you're a banker. How can you have any meaning in what you do?

Oh, I love that question. So I'm in California a few months ago with, with two really good friends, Charles and Christian. I won't use last names. Christian is an engineer. He wears T shirts. He's secretly wealthy. He swears a lot. No nonsense. He actually owns his own company. Successful guy. Charles is the next investment banker who's comfortably retired. We're drinking our California wine and Christian said something about me being a Bankster. So a bankster in his mind is kind of like a broad insult to anybody in finance. You all are up to no good. And usually I just laugh it off and kind of move on. But that day, I decided to have the conversation. I want to hear this about the meaning of what we do. And I said, look, Christian, every day I go to work, it's to make money for our clients, to help them pay for retirement, lead better financial lives, send their kids to college. But we're not curing cancer, but we're doing something meaningful for people's financial lives, pay their bills. And I said, by the way, we've done it over time in very productive and value add ways relative to, say, buying index funds. So I got into it, and two weeks later, we had a nice conversation.

You know, these are your friends.

Still friends. He sends me an email and he goes, have. Have cash lying around in my company. Let's talk about, you know, what do we do with. I wasn't selling him or anything, but. So in finance, it's a great question, because sometimes meaning is hard to find. I could walk to an analyst and say, what do you do? Oh, they might say, I'm just debugging this spreadsheet. I could walk. I'm doing the Bricklayers. But another version, I could walk to another analyst and say, what are you doing? And they could say, well, I'm building a strategy to try to beat the markets. And then the third one might say, hey, I'm doing everything I can to make money for as many of our clients as possible. That's the cathedral version of it. Right.

I want to inter. I want to interrupt for just a second here because this is important. So there's a portion of people listening who are saying, that's bullshit. Guys, I can read people's energy. I can tell when someone actually believes what they say, unless they're a very skilled narcissist or sociopath, in which case I'll still root them out eventually and hunt them down and remove them from my life. So when you said that, you fully believe that, right? So you. You have found meaning. Like, that was not at all fake or a pitch. And I think it's important.

It's. It's what we do. We'll measure every day. Are we helping people build better retirement requirements? How's that not meaningful?

You've changed my mind. It's a great lens on it. And of course, I'm mostly teasing you like, you're.

No, I get it.

I tried to trigger you and Raise your stress. It didn't work.

I'm sure a lot of our audience will still think it. You know, I'm full of it, but I, I really believe it. And this whole thing about active management in finance has an important function also to. It's good. I don't want to get too wonky, but it's price discovery. It's about allocating resources in the economy is the engine that makes the whole thing hum and work.

So without money flowing well, a lot of things don't happen in the world. And so you can argue, well, they're predators or whatever. There's predators in every business and there's good people in every business.

And by the way, there's an article out there about that dinner conversation I had. Find it on LinkedIn. It's a two pager. Wow. And the title, this is our marketing team I thought were open minded because we never used the title like that. Talk about clickbait. The title is My friend called my profession bs. Here's what I responded.

Oh, wow.

And it's the conversation we just had.

So we talked about how you work with your friends and all that stuff. You also have a wife and you have kids, a couple teenagers about my kids age. So how do you apply the psychology of leadership to leading your family?

Balance. I have to as a leader, understand that when I get home, I'm in a different environment. I'm not the CEO of the family, my wife is. And so it's about creating that balance and understanding the difference in context. And so we both have teenagers about the same age. How do you lead them? It's very difficult and I think you have to lead by example. Be honest, be open about your own vulnerabilities. And I gotta say, not to go on a tangent, but teenagers are struggling these days and so it's about listening. I've realized over time whether it's at home, in business, everywhere. I used to think leaders need to be great communicators. They need to talk, inspire others. It's just so counterintuitive. But then maybe the number one leadership skill is listening. And that works at home too. Just listen. Actively understand where people are coming from.

How do you get teenagers to talk?

So my son is an interesting example. He'll very rarely want to talk. I could show you our text conversations. Mine are this long, his are okay.

I think it goes with the age.

Yeah, I think so. But once in a while and I'll always take that call. And this happened last Friday. He called me and he was having a tough time and once in a while they'll just open up. And that is the critical moment where, depending how you handle it, they'll be more or less likely to open up again. And what's the number one thing I do when I get one of those skulls?

Answer it.

I answer it. But then I shut up mostly. Most beautiful not. Tried to help. I used to do that. Tried to help, tried to reassure, tried to intervene. Run the thing like I'm a leader. In my day life, I've learned to do the exact opposite. Just if you're there, just being there, picking up the call and listening.

Very, very cool. It's exciting to be able to talk about your book and it's just coming out this week. The Psychology of Leadership It's a different mindset on leadership than I've seen and I've had some other great psychology of Leadership professionals on the show. I really like the the ideas that are counterintuitive in the Psychology of Leadership. You're talking about things like, you know, being overconfident about the toxicity of goals. And this is something that I think as adds to the field of psychology and leadership. So guys, if you enjoyed this episode of the show, you should pick it up. It's by Sebastian Page, the Psychology of Leadership and there's wisdom in this book that is hard to find. So if you want to grow your career or just be a leader in whatever part of your life there is merit in this book. So thanks for writing it.

Thank you, Dave.

See you next time on the Human Human Upgrade Podcast.

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