Ep. 179-Unlocking Genuine Growth Beyond Achievement with Jacob Kaufman

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All right, y'all, welcome back to another episode of the You Winning Life podcast. And I get to say y'all proudly because I have a wonderful guest who's living in the Atlanta, Georgia area. And you know that you're not from Atlanta when you call it Hotlanta. So we're gonna make sure we don't go there. But Jacob Kaufman, who is a transformer, transformative coach, author of the new book Let Love In: The Pain Stops When the Truth Starts. And we're going to talk about some hard-hitting New Year game plan strategies and some insights on how to make life seriously kicking ass. So Jacob, thanks for hanging out with us.

Jason Wasser, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited for the conversation today.

Yeah, me too. So let's reverse engineer the process here. One of the things that I love out from people is when did they know that what you're doing now is everything that you're supposed to be doing?

Sure.

So talk us, talk us a little through that.

Oh man. Well, I mean, in terms of what I do now, one could suggest that, you know, I've essentially been prepared for this my entire life, you know, as someone who has experienced a fair amount amount of pain throughout the course of their lives, it now prepares me and equips me to be able to support people in the alchemy of moving beyond their pain and turning that pain or transforming that pain into purpose, power, and progress. But when I knew that this was what I was supposed to be doing was shortly before I started doing it, roughly back in 2015, 2016. So about 8 years ago, 8, 9 years ago, when I first stepped into the world of personal development, I did, I did so because I had to, right? There's two great catalysts for transformation, and that's great love or great suffering. And for me, it was great suffering. And so, you know, I went into personal development to change so that I could become a better, you know, more idealized version of myself. And shortly after doing so, the moment I experienced a little bit of transformation, of course, I wanted to share it.

So I find that journey, that, that experience of going through stuff, like you said, right, it's, it's, it's transformational. And this word of like personal development, personal growth, transformation, have in a lot of ways become cliché, right? It's, it's, it's, and so, you know, those that do the work, I kind of put it as a binary, you're either doing the work or you're not doing the work. And even that phraseology of doing the work is you know, for some people esoteric, or it's mythical, or they claim to be doing it. What are you finding, one, for yourself? But, and obviously I'm assuming what you're doing for yourself and what you found for yourself is what you're trying to help guide other people with. What, what do you think separates one from the other, where that's the talk versus the action?

Oh man, that's a great question. Well, here's what I will say. To, to kind of tee up the answer is that the primary goal of the ego is to maintain the status quo, and the best way for it to do that is to hide the truth from you. So what this often looks like is us convincing ourselves that we're quote unquote doing the work when in reality we're not. Right? We're trying to solve for the ego with the ego, which just gives us a more strongly reinforced and cleverly disguised ego. It's like rearranging the deck chairs— it's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at the end of the day. What this looks like, practically speaking, for a lot of people is, especially this time of year, right? Shortly after the New Year, people are making resolutions, they're setting goals, they're bringing all of this New Year, new me energy into, you know, the new year. Unfortunately, what we see is that their approach to making a change, right, is just has them overcompensating in the opposite direction. Whereas before they were, and not to use an extreme example, but they were overweight, they were out of shape, they were lacking or they were experiencing significant challenges in a certain area or certain areas of their life. And the New Year represents like this benchmark, this opportunity for a fresh start for them to make a change. And so they oftentimes exercise or leverage willpower in order to get in shape, lose the weight, get their finances in order, whatever, you know, their resolutions may be or, or may be focused towards. But it's the same energy, different strategy. All they're doing is they're bringing their ego, right, that had them be overweight, out of shape, or whatever their specific unique challenges were, into attempting to solve for that, which is why it never works long term. And all you have to do is look at the statistics around the number of people who stay on track with their New Year's resolutions, not to mention actually accomplish them. Like, the statistics are just absolutely awful. I think come March 1st, over 85% of people are not on track to accomplish their New Year's resolutions. And I believe come end of 2024, or over 92% of people will have failed when it comes to reaching their New Year's resolutions. Why is that? You know, you could say it's a lack of commitment, a lack of discipline, a lack of resources, et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, all of those things are just symptoms. They're just symptoms. They're these external factors that are currently being motivated by underlying unconscious factors. Yeah. And until we do the work of actually undoing the parts of our personality that had us overweight, out of shape, you know, again, whatever your specific unique challenges are, fill in the blank, all you'll end up doing is creating more of the same. You will revert back to your former level of behavior. Yeah. Right. But the ego wants nothing more than to avoid that entire process. So it'll convince us that we're being productive by getting us to go to the gym more consistently, or, you know, we quit drinking for a month, or we adopt a new, you know, diet plan for a period of time, and we actually see results. That's not the question. But the question is, where are you 6 to 12 months from now? And the answer for most people, unfortunately, and the statistics back this up, is they're right back to where they started.

Yeah, yeah. The way we look at it, the way I was trained, was the attempted solutions to solve your problem only gets you more stuck. So there's two things that you described in that accurately, is you have the attempt, right, the action, and then you have the beliefs that come along with that, right?

The—

what's, what's the, you know, what's the beliefs, assumptions, expectations, and story? And how does that serve you? How does that not serve you? You to stay stuck or not stay stuck. That's part of that. So like you said, unless that stuff gets unpackaged and put on the table and looked at of like, well, how does it serve you not to achieve this? Who doesn't it serve? Who does it serve?

Right?

It won't serve someone if you're going out and training for a half marathon and you're now out of the house. That may not serve somebody else, and you may want to honor them by dishonoring yourself. So that's very, very accurate in that New Year's resolution. And we see that, you know, the world of first-order versus second-order change, which is one of the ways that they talk about it in cybernetics and systems theory, is right? The first order change is I'm going to do it differently. Second order change is what's the beliefs behind that? So very, very much apropos. And that's kind of like where we were brainstorming. It's like the New Year, New Me versus New Year, old beliefs, different attempt based on the same place that got me stuck in the first place.

Absolutely. Which is why we never rise to the level of our goals. We always fall to the level of our beliefs. And so this is really at the heart of the work that I do with my clients because, you know, you are correct. Oftentimes people, the people, especially for the people that accomplish their goals, oftentimes they're very discouraged to find that they accomplish their goals, they achieve what they set out to, and they feel the exact same way.

Yeah.

Or for some people, they feel even worse, right? Now they're experiencing an even greater degree of emptiness, or an even greater degree of anxiety, or overwhelm, because they didn't— again, they were just treating the symptoms, right? All the work that they were doing was merely surface level in an attempt to solve for something that resides inside of them.

Yeah, yeah. One of my favorite stories about that is, you know, that person that wakes up in the middle of the night and they, they think they're hungry and then they go to the fridge and they open the fridge and they're looking inside like, eh, it's not there. And then they, right then they go to the cupboard and they open up the cupboard and they're looking around. No, it's not there. And then they go to the other shelf and then they go back to the fridge again and it's still not there as if it's automatically going to pop up. Right. That's like so descriptive of what you're describing. Right. And how many of us do that? We all do that in our own unique way. And this, this, this paradigm of like I've realized over the last couple years, and tell me if this makes sense to you, um, that a lot of times what people describe as goals are really just action steps.

I would agree with that, you know. I mean, I think at the end of the day, it can't be about the goal in and of itself. Because that always proves to be incomplete and insufficient to the task. You know, part of what we'll be talking about today is my book. You know, anyone who's ever written a book will tell you the exact same thing that, you know, after having completed the book, you know, you grieve. You grieve all the things the book could have been but is not, right? It's never about the end goal. It's about who you are forced to become in the process of accomplishing that goal. We always glorify the goal, and, you know, we're almost always inevitably disappointed, you know, because our focus tends to be in the wrong place. It's about accomplishing this thing that's outside of us, the inherent assumption being that my happiness, my joy, my happiness, my fulfillment will be found on the other side of that, right, goal realized, which is really just to imply that my joy, my happiness, my peace, my fulfillment is not available to me here, right? Right here, right?

Right.

Correct. It's out there in the future, which of course creates time. And in that gap, right, that's filled with time is suffering. Because that's what we're saying is that the things that we're after right, the feelings, because that's really at the heart of every goal that we pursue or have for ourselves. It's not the actual thing, but how that thing is then going to make us feel or what it will enable us to do. So it's a really empty game when you think about it, because it has so many people chasing after their happiness in the future.

Yeah. So if someone's listening to this right now and they're trying to figure out, okay, do I do that? What are some of the things in their languaging? So like, you know, I challenge my clients and I'm always listening to the thing that they say they want to accomplish, not just the story, right? The story is always important, but it's the— but it's the unconscious rules that they're expressing that has to serve the maintenance of the thing they think they want to get rid of.

Right. Yep. The unconscious motivation beneath the conscious desire.

Right. So what would you say as people are listening to this, they should be looking out for in something that they want to achieve and they're hearing themselves or they're just finding that they can catch themselves leaning into a narrative that isn't supporting them? Like, what would be like— so if you hear yourself saying this or you hear these words or phrases coming out? This might not be supporting you that you found with a lot of your clients.

Well, it's classic, it's classic if this, then that thinking. So my encouragement would be not just to determine what you want, but why you want it. What are you hoping that that's going to enable you to do and then therefore feel? The key being, what is it that needs to happen in order for you to access that feeling now? That's, that's the big thing. That's the big thing. So it's this classic if this then that thinking, dualistic thinking, right? This or that, this then that. The idea being, again, that I can't access or have what it is that I really want to feel until this, this happens. And that's how we create a win-win situation, right, where we can still have goals, right? Because goals are not inherently bad or wrong. I would suggest that they're very supportive, because we're wired for transcendence, we're, we're wired to desire expansion and growth. So that's how we create a win-win situation where we still have our goals. But we're not attached to them as the source of our happiness, because we are able to cultivate and create happiness for ourselves in this very moment.

Yeah, and I haven't shared this on any previous episode in the ways that it comes up for me with my clients is that both and, right, you're talking about the dual versus non-dual paradigm, right? It's the both and is that one, while you're working through or struggling with X, how can we manifest Y?

Right.

And it's not correct. Right. And we also have to talk about the rules. And is that allowed culturally, gender, religion? Right. All the things that are playing out and holding us back from that and put those on the table, make those unconscious conscious and see where those things are. But also dancing in that duality of how you even describe it, right? The sentence of I can't wait, right? This thing is going to be really amazing, but such and such and such. And when people flip the struc— the, the sentence structure of even though I'm still working on this, I'm very excited about that, right?

Yep. It's, it's always both, right? One, one should not have to come at the cost of the other, but that's oftentimes the game that most people play, even if they're unaware of it. Right. They oftentimes sacrifice their present happiness for the sake of accomplishing future goals. And so they end up self-sacrificing in a certain or specific area in their life for the sake of attaining or reaching that goal. You know, because as a society, by and large, we're addicted. You know, we're addicted to accomplishment. We're addicted to success and achievement and looking good. All classic um, you know, classic addictions of the false self, which is why the addict's creed is we always want more of what doesn't work.

Yeah, yeah. And the question that, you know, this is way deeper than I was even thinking about asking, is, you know, the world is set up with these things and we're working away or working towards something different, and the universe obviously benefits from us having to struggle with this. And we obviously benefit from having to struggle with this. But this is not something new. I mean, this is time, time is all this, right? There's all this history. And I don't know if you've ever, you know, dabbled deeper into, well, where the hell did this come from in the first place, right? I mean, we obviously have different theories of ego and superego, and then, you know, the dual/non-dual paradigms and the psychospiritual stuff. But what's your best understanding and appreciation of why this came into existence in the first place for humanity?

Well, it's— I would suggest that it's divinely designed and it's the necessary pattern. I mean, if you look at the course of history, it really transcends time and cultures and different religions. And it seems to be very true for everybody that in the beginning, we always overcompensate. Right? Like we're born with this innate wounding, if you will, or this propensity to sin, which is like the classic religious term for it. But put in another way, we all have this fault that we are ultimately trying to make up for. And so we overcompensate, right? So we become this person that we think we need to be in order to be loved, accepted, successful, admired, etc., then as the pattern would follow, at least we then would ideally decompensate, which is why true transformation is always predicated on dying to something and has much more to do with unlearning than it does to do with like learning or developing. And then we properly compensate.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So, so yeah, this kind of, you know, transcends time, religion, cultures, 'cause you, you find it all over the place, even in ancient mythology, for example, where, you know, even in like ancient stories, like take Hercules, for example. On some deep inherent level, he, you know, had this intuitive notion or feeling that he was born of royal blood. Like, this is classic stuff. Yeah, you know, that, that still even shows up in— oh gosh, what's the, what's the new Pixar movie? Or the latest Pixar series of the two sisters in Frozen. It's the same thing. It's the same thing, you know. So in Hercules, he had this deep inherent knowing that he was born of royal blood, you know, that ultimately caused him to like try to live up to that, which was to say like overcompensate, only to then realize that like, oh, I am of royal blood, I don't actually need to overcompensate, I can just be myself. Yeah, right. Essentially, which then enables him to show up authentically, right, properly compensate. And that's the journey that we all—

the hero's journey, which is what a lot of people would describe that as.

Yeah, 100%. You are correct, right, which was popularized as a framework for storytelling and used in Hollywood, but really is the spiritual journey that we all must go on in order to move from, you know, this self-actualization or individuation stage of development and move into self-transcendence. In fact, um, Maslow in his hierarchy of needs, self-actualization, um, in his like first iteration of it was the highest, right? The, the notion or the idea of becoming like the highest version of myself, but it was all based around individual success and achievement. And toward the end of his life, he came into contact and he met Viktor Frankl, who, if you're familiar, wrote Man's Search for Meaning.

Logotherapy.

Correct. Who was a psychiatrist, the founder of logotherapy, who came to essentially popularize and found what is known as, as will to, will to purpose. That man's primary motivation is for meaning, for significance, and for purpose. And the only way that that can happen is to be dedicated to a cause greater than oneself. And Maslow eventually said, yeah, that's actually higher. That is actually higher than what I have prescribed is the highest level of needs, that being like accomplishing or achieving the highest version of yourself. It's actually bigger than that. It has to supersede you. It has to go beyond you, right? Outlive you, if you will, right? In order for you to be truly fulfilled. Because as long as the idea is that as long as we're focused on ourselves and the pursuit of our own individual private perfection, right? God, the universe, whatever you want to call it, um, can't utilize us to our full potential in a way that benefits humanity and allows us to be of highest service to humanity.

Yeah, and it's powerful coming from, from him because of his experience of going through the Holocaust and surviving. And, and just the, the most of the book, right, a lot of the book is, is describing what his experience was like. And, and I'm wondering, comparison, you know, in comparison to Maslow, right, having those two different experiences, right, academia and, and whatever it and, you know, being in, being, being in a safer place than literally having to live in a latrine in a death camp and surviving in a, in a toilet, uh, which, which we know that he did. And, you know, and he tells that story in Man's Search for Meaning. Looking at those angles and perspectives, that's why we all need some type of— yeah, right. And not to run away from it and not to avoid it.

A necessary struggle, right, is what Carl Jung essentially said, we all must go through and/or experience in order to go from the first half of life to the second, from self-actualization and individuation to transformation and transcendence. Yeah, right. We have to experience this necessary struggle or necessary suffering, where our current mental resources, our strong willpower, and our acquired knowledge are just like not a match for, right? We have to confront something that we just don't know how to deal with. And that's, that's kind of where my book literally picks up and starts off, is me acknowledging, you know, that I was sexually abused. And for the first time in my life, I'm having to confront the pain of that. And the 15+ years of suppressed and repressed emotions that were just kind of lying dormant inside of me. That I had been simply performing my way around. And by performing, I mean, you know, being career-oriented and overly obsessed and consumed with accomplishment and achievement and climbing the corporate ladder and being successful as an entrepreneur. Again, not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but it was simply a compensating strategy so that I could avoid my pain. Yeah. You know, and then all of a sudden I was, you know, I experienced this existential crisis, for lack of a better phrase, where I came into relationship with, like, the parts of my persona that were not actually me, but that I had spent so long self-identifying with, which really led to this— I mean, there's really no other way to put it than this deep, deep state of depression. And I think most people, at some point in time in their lives, are confronted by this, you know, we call it the midlife crisis for a reason, you know. And there seems to be people having like this quarter-life crisis now, you know, because of like social media and this egoic game that it has us playing where we're constantly comparing and competing and, you know, all of this other stuff, right? But it's all just this, this game. That's all it is that we— but that so many people, especially men, are getting stuck in nowadays. Right? And we don't actually move beyond this phase of individuation or self-actualization, uh, and we're where we get opened up to this bigger picture and caught up into a purpose that is, is so much bigger than, than us.

And the title Let Love In, right, that's very descriptive of especially around men and, you know, being loving in that classical sense is about what do I take care of, what am I responsible for, how do I show up in the world, what have I achieved and accomplished, right? Which is, which is very different than the whole Brené Brown power of vulnerability paradigm. And because a lot of people still, especially men, are more, are very likely to describe that vulnerability as a weakness and as what's going to, how is that going to take me off my A-game? How did you decide on that title? And, and as the primary jumping-off point?

Great question. Well, I mean, it was one of the things that I would suggest, actually the primary thing that kind of woke me up to the game that I was playing, for lack of a better phrase, where I was constantly holding people at arm's length, right? I was hiding behind these various masks that I started to take on in childhood. One could suggest that accelerated after my abuse, where I started to act as if— I started to act as if I was successful, as if I had it all together, as if I was quote unquote fine. And how many men do we know nowadays that would kind of fit the bill?

Fine.

Yeah, right. I'm fine, you know. Um, but when you actually sit down and have a real honest conversation with them just like if you had done so with me in my mid-20s, despite my career success, despite from the outside looking in, like I had it all together and I had everything going for me. And in many ways I did, but all of it was just this unconscious performance to overcompensate and ultimately make up for this deep-seated insecurity and lack of self-worth that I experienced due to my abuse. And this is, you know, what I find most men, especially highly accomplished men, are in the position of nowadays is this, this high performer persona that they take on in an effort to become successful is really just this unconscious attempt to claim victory over their pain. That's really all it is. You know, um, and that's why so many men, despite their success, report increasingly higher levels of unhappiness, of anxiety, of depression, of suicidal ideation, of suicide attempts. And so this has become so unfortunately redundant, especially in my work, because, you know, I'm constantly coaching people. It's what I do for a profession. It's a tale as old as time. Like, I got everything that I set out to achieve, and yet on some deeply inherent level, I feel empty inside.

Yeah. And I see how many— so many people, especially with the men that I'm working with, where they can't necessarily put their finger on it. It is that compensation. But look at all these wonderful things I have in my life. Why am I still missing something? And, and it is— it's, it's because we are— we have this role of being, you the provider and the take care, right? All these things that we have, these obligations, societal obligations. And I love— it makes me so happy to know those of us, you and others, who are helping people have— yes, you can have all that success. Yes, you could be kicking ass at work. Yes, you can, right? You can have that reputation and you can be a leader and you could be committing to those things in your life. And you can also feel and believe that you are and life is amazing. And I'm so glad to see that shift over the last many years, where I remember starting as a young therapist in my early 20s, the joke of like, you know, the difference is in New York, but right up north, right? Everybody went to therapy, right? That was like the thing, right? And in Florida, it's kind of like, oh, you're a therapist, and how that's changed over the years where like, sure, it's not like, oh, you you don't have a therapist in New York, something's wrong with you.

Sure.

All right.

I bet. Yeah, of course.

Right. And because that's just— everybody goes to their therapist up in the Northeast. And that was right there, the DC, you know, corridor. That's the thing. But now as it moves this way, maybe in LA, maybe also, but you know, here in the South, right, in Florida and Georgia, southern states, right? It's, it's now become so thankfully more normal that I'm sure you're probably seeing people that would have never called 5 years ago, finally showing up.

Yeah, no, and it's, it's really awesome to see. One could suggest the progress that we've made overall as a society, especially amongst men, you know, because women obviously, you know, they tend to have this at least historically speaking, this really beautiful therapeutic embrace about them, right? They tend to congregate in groups much more. They tend to talk about and be open about their feelings much more and what's really going on with them, where historically men have trended in the opposite direction, which is to shut down how they feel, which is to close off, which is to hide, which is to not have close relationships. And again, the statistics back this up. I believe they say that 1 in 5 men report having no close friendships nowadays, which is insane to think about. But I do believe it is the thing, that thing being suffering, that propels us to seek help. Yeah. Or to, or to go, or to go to therapy. You know, going back to what I said at the beginning of the episode where I said the two greatest catalysts for transformation are either great love or great suffering. And if you know great love, great love tends to come with great suffering. So it pretty much just boils down to great suffering. You know, we, we seem to need things to get so bad to where, you know, we can no longer ignore them. And I think this serves to kind of support this Tony Robbins quote where it's like, until the pain of staying same is greater than the pain of change, then you're not going to actually change, right? You're going to go on continuing to live under this illusion, which is to just say you're going to go on continuing to be addicted to your ways of being, doing, and living that allow you to have the life that you have, but still wrestling with this, this internal void, this emptiness, or this very high baseline level of anxiety that so many people now report these days. Yeah.

And I think it's— I mean, I've heard it from other people, but I know Jesse Itzler, who's, you know, local boy to you.

Yep. Local Atlanta guy.

Look at— yep, very— yeah, part owner now of the Hawks. I believe so.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I know in his coaching community, he talks, right, when you're sick, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Right, which is not his originally. But I know he talks, you know, he uses that phrase a lot. And I still see, it's so interesting where I still seen it is primarily a lot with men, where there's this intellectual knowing. But that space that, you know, that foot between the head and the heart is the longest distance.

And yeah, absolutely.

They may say they want it. And they may say they know, and they, right. And I hear this commonly from, I know, I know, I know. I know I need to be doing that. I want to be doing that.

Yep.

And it's just figuring out like, what? Well, okay, where is it?

What's going on?

And that's the necessity of the work with you and the work with me and the work with other people that are handling the space. That is absolutely— and I want to challenge people, right? If you're listening to this and you're like debating, and it's right at the beginning of 2024 now, and you're listening to Jacob and— Jacob and I talk, and you've been waiting and you've been waiting and you've been waiting. We're here. Jacob's here.

Right, right. Yeah. And this is, I mean, obviously, between you and me, we have a high fluency for how the psyche works and how it's all interrelated. But for those of you who are listening, you know, this is the difference between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, right? The conscious mind is, it's connected to what we know, and it's responsible for what we say. Right? So for example, what we say we want, but it's our subconscious mind that is connected to who we actually are. And it's responsible for what we do. Yeah, the actions and the decisions that we, that we make or take. And so in order to create a fundamental foundational, long-lasting sustainable change in our lives, whatever that looks like, with regard to whatever area you're seeking to improve in, right? We have to shift the unconscious person. You can't just adopt new habits or incorporate new patterns of behavior. Like, that's not gonna work.

You can't kamikaze it. Yeah, don't, don't be a kamikaze. Just dive right into all that.

Yeah, right. Again, just— we're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That's all, that's all it is at the end of the day, right? I'm gonna I'm going to buy a gym membership. I'm going to hire a personal trainer. I'm going to adopt this new clothing, new sneakers.

Yeah, new—

totally. Yeah, exactly. 100%. Building a house on top of a faulty foundation, um, you know. But the real work of addressing the foundation, the foundation being, right, our relationship with ourselves and our self-identity, that's the work that the ego seems to resist the most. Because it seems to be that more than anything, the ego is resistant to change, right? At least true change, not just, again, changing, you know, my, my habits, or, you know, my patterns of behavior in terms of like what I eat, or who I spend time with, or those things. It's really about, you know, who I be and, and how I show up and the decisions that I make in the world.

I love it. So short of Instagram, which everybody pull— if you're not driving, take out your phone right now and go on Instagram if you do have Instagram still, and, and just search I Am Jake Kaufman, K-A-U-F-F-M-A-N, and you can find some really great links. And, uh, there. But where else can they, uh, track you down and get more information besides obviously getting the book on any, you know, resale?

Yeah, yep, absolutely. If you're interested in picking up the book, you can do so via the link in my bio on my Instagram. Otherwise, It is on Amazon. It is my full name. So something to keep in mind, it's Jacob Kaufman. Again, that's K-A-U-F-F-M-A-N. Otherwise, you can sign up for my newsletter on my website, which is awakewithjake.com. And I look forward to connecting with you on the interwebs.

Awesome. So for if you, anybody who's listening to this, if you either took one little takeaway from it, we would love to hear you. That's, you know, hear from you. So that's why I said just, you know, grab out your phone and send Jake a message and just say, hey, I love this little tidbit, send me that message. That we know that we're getting these really awesome guests. And obviously the person that introduced us is doing a great job of— I know you've been on some of my other friends' podcasts. Shout out to Eric Cabral. Yeah, definitely.

Oh, nice.

Really good buddy of mine. So yeah, I know the right people are getting to the right places. And obviously we want to make sure that you're knowing that you're being not just received, but that people need this. And I want people to really give us that feedback of like, hey, this really did hit for me and this is what I'm going to do with it. And check out Jacob's book. And like everything else, yeah, just please, everybody, you know where to reach us. And Jacob, again, congratulations. One, first on doing the work and not just talking about it, but doing the work. I know just the bits and pieces that you did share with us. And I would love to actually invite you back to— what you have gone through is not talked about enough amongst the male population. And it is coming out in certain circles. I know, here, within, you know, within the Jewish community, there's a lot more talk about, about, about abuse from, from men to men, specifically in the community. And others, people who are leading those conversations, and it's finally coming out. I know, certain church circles, it's coming up, but just in the general society of personal development and personal growth, where that has impacted and what you can do with that is a powerful conversation. So if you would love to come back, and we can delve a little bit more into that and any other topic, obviously, definitely neurology and philosophy and spirituality, all that other stuff. But thank you again for sharing your time with us today.

Jason Wasser, thanks again for having me. I appreciate it.