The One Mindset Shift to become 10x More Creative Feat. Dan Sullivan

I'm going to talk to you about scarcity because Peter talks a lot about abundance, but I want to talk about scarcity first. And scarcity starts with an emotion. Okay? Okay. So I got a 15-minute grace period here when I'm— We got an agreement, Joe and I, you know. Okay. Okay. So here's it. All stuff, all loss of energy in your life starts with envy. Envy is the emotion that kills energy. Okay, envy. Okay, and envy is looking at what someone else has and wanting them not to have it. That's what envy is, and it's the most— it's the energy killer, any kind of envy. And envy, so it's stuff. Envy is about stuff. What are people envious about? They're envious about stuff. You got more stuff than I got. I don't want you to have that.

Okay.

All right. And envy leads to guilt because you got more stuff than other people, so you're guilty. So on the one hand, you're envious, and on the other hand, you're guilty.

Okay.

You're guilty. And so you get caught between these 2 emotions. Both of these are all energy killers. Okay, and then there's blame, because you've got to blame somebody why the world is structured such a way that some people have a lot of stuff and other people don't have enough stuff. So now you've got 3 things going. Can you see how this really, really kills energy? And this is how all scarcity— it's a set of emotions that become a system. That's how scarcity— Scarcity, there's more than enough for everything to go around, But the energy systems that people— or the devoid stuff systems that people prevent there to actually be any abundance. And what that leads to is a sense of massive unfairness. I mean, I went to college, I go back to college reunions, and it's about the unfairness of the world.

Yeah.

You know, it's about the unfairness of the world. Living in America. Talk to the Uber drivers, they're all immigrants, they love this place. Their solution is send all the unhappy Americans somewhere they came from. So unfairness, and then depletion. The depletion. The planet is being depleted. Okay, there isn't enough to go around. In 1800, we crossed a billion. Now we have 7 billion. Average incomes are up 17 times. Lifespan is up 42 years. You know, all the great slides that Peter had this morning, there's just massive amounts. And the reason is because it comes out of human imagination and human imagining an infinite future and then having more and more energy in your life. And then the other one is the zero-sum. If you have something, that means I don't have it. If this person over here has it, it's only at the cost of someone. These are killer thoughts. These are killer thoughts. They destroy energy. They destroy any possibility of creativity. Okay? So I call this the scarcity system, and it's a stuff system. The whole thing's based on stuff. The whole thing's to. All right. Now I'm going to. That's that was quick. I had to get through that quickly. Then I go to the abundance spiral starts with gratitude. Gratitude is the single most powerful energy-producing emotion on the planet. Abundance is connected— gratitude is connected to another word which we use interchangeably, which is called appreciation, which is interesting because it has both a psychological meaning, but it has an economic meaning. So stocks appreciate, land appreciates. So appreciation means growth. And I say that every time you're grateful, you appreciate the value of something. You appreciate the value of that person, but you appreciate who you are because you're grateful. So if you want to know how to enter and continually grow within the world of abundance, you have to be grateful for everything. Okay? And you'll never run out of new things to be grateful for. And people can tell that you're grateful, and people love being around people who are grateful. And they hate being around people who are envious. Okay, so gratitude leads to is energy, and it leads to creativity. Steve Jobs, they said, Steve Jobs, what is creativity? He says, it's putting things together. People who put a lot of things together are really creative, are really creative. You only put things together that you love and you appreciate. Creativity only you only put things together that. You really like, and creativity leads to cooperation, which is really what capitalism is. F.A. Hayek said that capitalism is an ever-expanding system of increased cooperation among strangers. Big thing there is strangers. So when I was in— and the thing that really gets me about this is the ATM. I mean, I— You know, I mean, I grew up in slow times, so ATMs were really, really exciting to me. And we were in Vienna, we were at the soccer hotel, very famous for the soccer tour. And I came down to the concierge and I said, is there an ATM here? Of course he knew what I meant. He says, yes, you come out the front, walk down 2 blocks till you get to McDonald's, cross the street, and the ATM is right between Starbucks and the Apple Store. I go there. They ask you, you know, language. Okay, they ask you currency. You put in your card. Millions and millions of strangers cooperating with each other. I get by. And Babs is there. I turn to her and I say, "What a world!

What world!

I love it. I mean, I love it. This is massive cooperation among strangers. Most of the world still you can only have cooperation among friends and family." Okay, finally, real quick opportunity.

Opportunity.

Opportunity. When you get this, you get massive opportunity, which leads to ingenuity, which leads to Peter's favorite subject, exponentials. And this is the energy system. So what you have to do now is that you have to put a barrier, the abundance barrier, between these 2 systems, okay? And what you have to do is continually surround yourself With people who are energy people, which I call the abundance neighborhood, which goes like this, goes like this, goes like this. And this is what this is. This is what Joe is putting— he's putting together abundance. This is what Peter does with Abundance 360. We put together an abundance neighborhood. So this is my whole take on how going from the simple thing of getting past, present, and future right in your mind, And then understanding that the mechanism for growing the future is to actually increase the amount of energy in your life, reduce the amount of stuff, you end up in a neighborhood like this, and it's a good world.

There's another system out there, and this one gets better media coverage than the system I just talked about, and it's the one based on envy. And envy is the 180-degree opposite of Gratitude. And envy is really based on resenting the better results and advantages of others.

Okay?

And this is very easy to do if you're into that game. Very easy to resent the better results of other people because they're all around you. Okay? And then what envy leads to is also correspondingly a sense of guilt that you're feeling badly that one's results and advantages are better than someone else. So I find that people who are Feeling guilty— feeling envious also feel guilty. They seem to go together with each other. So if you multiply envy times guilt, what you get is massive indignation, anger that some people's results and advantages are better than others. And I grew up with a cartoon strip called Little Abner. How many of you remember Little Abner? Little Abner, He had various characters in there, but one of them was an organization, this is in the 1960s, called SWINE, S-W-I-N-E, and that was Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything. Okay, and it was a big joke, but it was, you were talking about students who were at the very, very top of human life, you know, they had just been born into the most wealthy Victorious society on the planet. They were given every advantage. There was massive— and they were, uh, they were just wildly indignant about the unfairness of what had been happening to them. And the reason is their model didn't start with gratitude, it started with envy. Okay? And this again is a choice, but you make the same choice enough times in a row, it starts to become a habit. Okay? So a lot of people can't remember Um, you know, where it all started, but if you do envy for about 20 years, it's a very, very powerful habit. If you do gratitude for 20 years, it's a very powerful habit, but it was a choice at the beginning. Okay, and that's why, you know, people say, well, they couldn't help it. Well, I said, that sounds like it's in this system. You can always help it. You can always help it. In a moment that you can help it just by choosing gratitude over envy. And And then if you have guilt times indignation, what you get is a sense, a massive sense of unfairness, believing that everyone's results and advantages must be made equal. So there's a lot of political talk these days about making things equal. But you have to understand that all those thoughts about unfairness are based on envy, guilt, and indignation. Okay? Indignation times unfairness leads to the concept of depletion, and depletion, believing that the resources of the world are being used up by an unfair minority, okay? So one of my favorite writers is a man by the name of Julian Simon, who was an economist, actually a statistician, and he came to the understanding that the bigger the population on the planet, the more resources we have. If you want to increase the resources on the planet, increase the population. And he says with every increase of population, the lifestyle, the well-being of human beings increases. We're incredibly better off with a population of 7 billion than we were with a population of 1 billion. What about all the resources we're using up? There hasn't been one that's been depleted ever. As a matter of fact, every 10 years the amount of, for example, just using the fossil-based fuels, 10 years ago they thought we were running out, now they estimate the United States just with natural gas has about 300 years of natural gas available. And he said, there are no natural resources. There's just one resource. It's called human ingenuity, and it's only human, uh, human thinking and human ingenuity that actually makes anything valuable. He said, camel was just something that got camel's feet dirty before human ingenuity turned it into something valuable. So again, where do you find ingenuity? You don't find ingenuity in this system. You find ingenuity in the other system.

Okay.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

And then the final one, unfairness times depletion leads to a fundamental understanding of zero-sum, which means believing that one person's gain comes from at the expense of someone else's loss. So if you have something, it means that someone else on the planet has been deprived of something, and you can see how this is self-reinforcing. So I have actually college friends that I graduated with who now, you know, basically almost 50 years later, I could see that their entire life over the last 50 years has been based on that system. Okay, and it's very, very interesting because they're very smart. The smarter people are, the less they actually examine their own thinking, because they're very confident about their thinking. What I notice is that when I get together with them, which I don't frequently, nothing's changed in their life, except they're a lot older and they're getting tired. They're feeling that basically they're witnessing the last age of humanity. 'Cause it's all going to end with them, which I think is a bit of an arrogance, you know. Okay. So the interesting thing is that I want to express to you that the reason why we get this huge polarization in society, huge inequality, is basically because the microchip forces everybody to be a 1 or a 0, and there's no in-between. And the 1, if you want to be on the 1 side, you have to have gratitude as your starting point. If you want to be on the 0 part—

Gratitude.

You start with envy.

I have a question here. How do you decide who gets your time, what gets your time, how do— and how do you politely say no to set boundaries?

Because it's got to be all these opportunities. There's opportunity costs, right, with opportunities. So you have to spend that time.

Well, there's a variety of ways of doing that, and you have to build— as your wealth of opportunities increases, the infrastructure that you have around you to deal with the opportunities also has to expand. And so there's a variety of ways that you decide what gets your time when you have more opportunities than you know what to do with. And first thing you have to do is figure out what your priorities are, right? So you need a vision for the future that's well developed, and then you have to see if the opportunities that you're being presented with are in keeping with what it is that you're trying to achieve. And that should be very— Well delineated, then I have a lot of people who help me with that. I'm surrounded. I wouldn't call them gatekeepers exactly, because that's not the right way of conceptualizing them. I have a variety of people around me who help me negotiate and who prioritize potential opportunities for me. And there are people who know why I'm doing what I'm doing and who are on board with that. And so when they're making decisions, I can be confident that they're Bringing to my attention and prioritizing opportunities that further the broader mission. And then I suppose that I also use money because money is the way that we negotiate priority. And so, and it's a very efficient way of doing that. If I have 2 opportunities that look like they're of equal value with regard to their relevance to my aims and one pays twice as much, well, it's obvious which one to take. And That's partly why we use money, right? Because money is a universal representation system for value, and it can't— it's not perfect because it doesn't fully capture potential opportunity, right? It's like when you're trying to value a company, you can value the company with regards to its current earnings or its profit margin, but you also have to factor in growth, and that's a difficult thing to do. And so if I'm trying to prioritize opportunities, The financial return is obviously relevant, but the possibility for growth coming out of the opportunity is also— now that's more difficult to quantify, but that's also why I have lots of people around me who help me with that. And like, I have lots of people around me who do this for me. There's probably altogether, all things considered, there's at least 15 people. There's probably more like 30. who are doing this for me all the time. And so all the opportunities that do end up on my desk, so to speak, have been vetted extraordinarily thoroughly, and they're almost inevitably worth further pursuit. But so if you're overwhelmed by your responsibilities and your opportunities, part of the reason for that is that you haven't distributed enough responsibility to other people. You haven't set up a team that's of sufficient quality. And then you have to ask yourself why. You know, one possible reason might be that you're not brutal enough to make the hard decisions that are necessary with regards to staffing. So, for example, I've been running a tour Now for 8 years, I guess. 8 years. And we're very cut and dried with regards to our touring staffing. We have very stringent rules. And one rule, for example, is don't bother the people who come and see me. You are obligated to be 100% polite to them under all circumstances. All the time. And that goes as well for— I travel with some security guys, for example, and they help me with logistics. And they have to be good to the waiters and to all the service staff that we encounter. I want to travel to the places I'm going, leaving nothing but a good taste behind. And this is something very important to consider if you're running any kind of business, especially as you become more successful, because If people have a certain degree of admiration for you, let's say, or you're even willing to meet you halfway, and then you disappoint them, they will never forget that. And they will tell like 1,000 people. And you don't have to make many mistakes like that till word gets around and things are not good. And so our policy, especially on the tours, is you don't make mistakes. If you make mistakes, we— you don't come along. And I know I shouldn't exactly say that because people are going to make mistakes. They have to fix them, right? I mean, things are going to slip sideways from time to time, but you have to fix it and you have to treat everyone well. And that's our criteria for that are very strict and stringent. And that's the case for all the staffing and hiring decisions that we make. And because of that, I'm surrounded by people that I can really trust, and they have their things to do, and I leave them alone. So that's another thing. If you're overwhelmed with responsibility and opportunity, you got to ask yourself if you're trying to control too much. And you might think, well, I want to pay attention to every little detail. It's like, no, you don't. No, you don't. You want to use your time, which is rare, So that you focus on those things that only you can do and that you do best. And everything else that anyone else could do, that should be distributed down to them. And you can do that if you're willing to be picky in your hiring and your— what would you say? Your willingness to maintain people over the long run. If you're picky about that, then you can distribute responsibility. And Huge advantage to that is then you get to focus on what you're best at and what you find that's most compelling, and you get to further your aims. There's no loss in that. And it also stops you from getting worn out, and it stops you from getting resentful. And you don't want to get worn out because then you do stupid things and you die. And you don't want to get resentful because then you're miserable to yourself and everyone else. And so you maximize the opportunity that's in front of you by building an efficient infrastructure. And then you shouldn't be overworked. You know, you've got to also ask yourself if you're overworked, if that's a reflection of egotism. You know, because you might— there might be part of you that's thinking, well, you know, only I can do this. It's like, there are probably some things that you're doing that only you can do, but you have to be able to maintain that, sustain it across time. But as I said, even more importantly, the probability that you're the only person that can do absolutely everything you're doing is very low. There may be some things that you're particularly good at, and you should obviously be doing almost nothing but that. So on the tours, for example, I don't do anything but show up. I show that— like, there's a rule. I'm to be there an hour before, come hell or high water, and ready. So I have to have a rest beforehand. I don't pay attention to flights. I don't pay attention to hotels. I don't pay attention to restaurants or any details whatsoever. I have people that I follow when I'm walking through airports. Like, all I'm doing is focusing on the tour. And I suppose a subsidiary concern there is my wife, because she travels with me, and we have to set up the tour so that she's also thrilled to be along. And thrilled matters because we've been trying to make this, which is probably the most intense thing that I do, we've been trying to make this sustainable. And to make it sustainable, You have to not be upset about it because otherwise you'll just stop doing it. And so, well, you handle more responsibility and opportunity by building a more differentiated substructure under you. And that's the other thing that's cool about that is there's no limit to what you can do then, right? Because you just keep building layers of— infrastructure beneath you, and if you hire properly and you're very careful about that, then you can just keep jumping up the ladder, so to speak. That's how you're— that's how you work neurologically, by the way. When you pay attention to something and you practice it, you build little automated structures that are neurological, and then they run unconsciously, and then your consciousness jumps up a letter— a level, so that you can concentrate on things that haven't yet been automatized. So you're trying to put in routines all the time underneath you so that you can free yourself up to attend to only those things that are crucial. You know that if you study people too, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I mean, Jobs in particular was absolutely— I know people who've worked with him very closely, as well as Musk. Jobs was unbelievably good at deciding what he wasn't going to do. Right. He put all his attention on the things where the maximal return would be. This is something to know too. Even technically. So you've heard about the 80/20 rule, I presume. 20% of your customers provide 80% of your business. That's not the rule. The rule is way more remarkable than that. So here's the rule among the people that work for you. The square root of the number of people that work for you do half the work. So that means if you have 10 employees, 3 of them do half the work. But if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work. Now, this is an unbelievably well-documented phenomenon. I'm not telling you something that's in the realm of speculation. This is a solid statistical law. Now, there's a rule that goes along with it. This is very difficult for managerial people to understand because they almost always do exactly the opposite. Spend all your time with your most productive people. Now, the typical manager does exactly the opposite. They find the 10% of their staff that are floundering and spend all their time with them. I can understand why you do that from the perspective of, let's say, sympathy, although it's counterproductive. You're not going to help them. You don't have the ability. You don't have the time. They don't have the motivation. It's not going to work. You spend all— it's not going to work. You can't do it. You spend all your time with your most productive people. And the same with your own use of time. You spend all your time on those things that are— that you are best suited to do. And you have to be brutal about that. And there's nothing in that that's anything but good, because you end up doing the maximum amount of good that you can in the most sustainable way, and you provide the largest possible number of people with the greatest opportunity. Like, there's nothing in that that's anything but good. And the people who are floundering, you know, I had a hard time in my lab when I was a professor letting people go when I should have. And I learned to do that quite painfully, I would say. One of the things I realized, and this is something to really get in your head too, if you can, especially if you're a little more on the agreeable side and you don't like hurting people's feelings. Enabling someone's failure is not a moral accomplishment. And so if you have someone who's either outright failing or worse, kind of drifting along so they're not, you know, performing poorly enough to really come to your attention, but they're really not all in, it's like there's no reason not to sit down with them and say, like, you know, you're not thriving. So what the hell are you doing? You want to drag your sorry carcass through this job doing a second, you know, hitting this in a second-rate manner for the next 15 years as you age painfully? Or do you want to go out and see if you can find something you could commit yourself to? Like, this is not a game. And so there's some pain in letting people go, but there's pain in— there's real pain in maintaining people in a Quasi-failure situation. And so it's better just to say, why don't you go find something you want to do? And, you know, people don't like change, and they might be all upset about the fact that that didn't work, but you lying about the fact that it's working isn't helping them. And then you could put someone in that position who's like pretty thrilled to be there and is They're gonna devote themselves completely to it. And then, you know, God only knows how good that's gonna be for them and the people around them. The other thing— the other problem with having people around who are doing a second-rate job is that they're really hard on the people that work for them. You know, they don't know how to distribute reward properly. They're jealous of anybody who's working effectively. They're gonna push down anyone that they see to be a threat. They're going to hoard information.

No.

You just described the typical day of most entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

Hey, the management side is a tough one. It's a tough one. And it's hard to wrap your head around the balance between separating the wheat from the chaff, let's say, and being sympathetic and kind. But sympathetic and kind in the moment is not a good medium to long-term strategy. It's kind of the difference on a trait level. It's the difference between being agreeable. Agreeable people avoid conflict. And you can understand that. And they default towards sympathy and mercy, let's say. Conscientious people look at performance. And agreeableness isn't a bad ethic for within a family, but conscientiousness is the ethic that works on large-scale enterprises and Conscientiousness is pretty straightforward. It's like, can you do the job or not? And if the answer is no, well, then you should find a different job or retool your attitude. That's unlikely, by the way. And the probability that you as a manager are going to get someone to shift their attitude at a fundamental level is pretty low, especially if they're really in a failure pattern. Because you don't even know what the hell's going on with them. And so better to spend your time with your high-performing people. It's a very hard thing to learn, and it's cruel in a way. It has that element of cruelty, but not in the long run.

Did you experiment with limiting your digital access? Did you experiment with being A little more analog?

Oh yeah, yeah, totally. Because I, I had no social media. I mean, to this day, here's my— here is my iPhone, right? I do not have Facebook on it. I do not have Instagram on it. I do not have Twitter on it. I do not have LinkedIn on it. I have no— now I have like, how did I post on Instagram today? I have a second phone over here, right? And that's the one that, uh, I hardly ever, uh, used. It's just a backup.

Right?

And so if someone like sends me something to look at that's on social media— also, I'll tell you, like these big tech companies and their anti-freedom of speech and their political slant is sickening. I mean, it's a tough call right now. There are certain things I just won't do even though there's money to be made in it, just because I don't even like supporting some of the platforms anymore.

Right!

So that's a struggle that I go back and forth with. It's like, yeah, you can reach people in certain ways, but at the same time, you know, who do some of these people stand for? And there's a lot of people that I used to respect as entrepreneurs and business owners and icons of industries that I think now, you know, pardon my language there, you know, I find some of them being piece of shit globalist human beings.

Hmm!

So that's a little bit of the tug of war that I go on in my mind right now. And, you know, I also look at every time I don't understand someone or I disagree with them, it could be in any sort of belief system, politically, whatever, I think to myself, if I had to argue for their side, how would I do that?

Right.

So I don't just go into something purely with my opinion. I really try to view the world through other people's lenses. Like, you know, our, our Genius Network member, Dr. Don Wood, you know, he's a trauma a therapist, a great guy. And he, he has this wonderful line where he says, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, uh, everything that they do would make sense. Why they believe what they believe. Could be anyone. Could be Putin, it could be Trump, it could be Biden, it could be anyone.

Yeah.

You know, if you understood the atmospheric conditions of their life, how they end up the way that they end up, you know, it would make sense. And so I— there's a part of me that, you know, I try to understand that everyone's going through their own journeys in their own way. And but I'll tell you, there's— yeah, there's an interesting way when you interacting with other people.

I was recently— we were talking about Jordan Peterson. And, you know, in his book, 12 Rules for Living, 12 Rules for Life, for Living, there's one of the rules is to treat yourself like someone you're responsible for helping. And You think what a mind shift that is, first off, too, that causes you to be detached from yourself, to look at yourself with empathy and realize this guy just needs a little help. He needs to— we need to do this for him. And I've been taking that mindset and thinking about it from our prospects, our marketing.

Yeah.

things when people operate, when people are inquiring about something in your business, or when you're generating a bunch of leads to treat people. How would you treat them if you're responsible for helping them?

Right.

You know, it's like, it's one of, it's one of the greatest provocations, and it's right up there with Gary Halbert's idea of What would you do if you had to get a sale or you were going to be beheaded?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah.

The gun to your head that you have.

Like, under your head marketing. Like, if you had to make it work, how would you do it?

Yeah.

And, you know, in the same— yeah, in the same thing, uh, it does require, uh, really flexing the empathy muscle and also realizing, um, the anger and the bitterness and the reactiveness. You know, when my life functions, I'm responding to life. When my life is not functioning, me while I'm reacting. And taking a sabbatical really gave me a chance to learn how to better respond to life. I did a boatload of yoga, a ton of breathing. I was doing Wim Hof breathing a couple of years ago. And then I became friends with James Nestor, who wrote an incredible book called Breath. And I'll ask Gina to post that in the chat. And by the way, a lot of people are posting in the chat. When I do this, because of my distractibility, if I look at it, it'll totally throw me off. So I I'll read every comment later, I promise.

Recommend everybody do that too, by the way.

Yeah, and we will upload this. So if there's anything useful that I've said, you want to watch it again, we will put it up as a, as a YouTube video and as an I Love Marketing podcast. But yeah, the thing with, with breathing, I learned how to breathe more effectively, even though I have a deviated septum and it's actually hard for me to breathe through my nose. If you don't use it, you lose it. And so I started taping my mouth, you know, before I went on sabbatical because of, you know, James Nestor and what he helped me with. And then he introduced me to a guy named Patrick McEwen who wrote— I think Patrick's written a bunch of books, but his latest book, I believe, is called The Oxygen Cure. Great guy. Any of you have asthma, sleep issues, I mean, he will literally— he can train most people how to eliminate many conditions that in some cases people spend a fortune trying to fix medically.

Yeah.

But when, when me and, uh, me and Cherie were on, um, uh, when we were on, uh, sort of a vacation in Park City, she was listening to the Wim Hof book. And I had, you know, I had never read Wim Hof. I've watched videos on Wim. I have friends that are personal friends with him that have offered to introduce me to him. Sam Karashi— I don't know if Sam's on here, but Sam, uh, has, you know, made a connection with me and Wim. I'd like to get Wim actually to come out to one of my you know, future events. But we started towards the end of the sabbatical. Out of all the different stuff that I had done, learned about cryptocurrency, learned about NFTs, I'm by no means an expert. I do own a couple of CryptoPunks, which is kind of cool. But nonetheless, and I own the CryptoPunk that looks exactly like me, bald-headed dude with like a goatee. It's great. But we're going to utilize uh, that NFTs and stuff for funding, uh, recovery for Genius Recovery and Artists for Addicts and whatnot. Uh, but I started doing, uh, cold plunges. So I see, uh, Lauren here. Okay. Uh, she's here. And I met Lauren at a place called Optimize. I don't know if, uh, if Michael or Jesse from Optimize are on here today, but if they are—

Michael's on.

Yeah, Michael's on. Michael's on. Okay, good. Well, Michael, I'm gonna have you, I'm gonna have you talk in a minute then and tell people why they need to do this. 'Cause, um, so we, we started, We— me and Cherie, uh, were listening to Wim Hof's book called The Wim Hof Method. And what struck me, because I personally think Wim is like batshit crazy— I mean, he's, he's a nut, right? Uh, but he's just done incredible things and he's broken world records and like the stuff that he can do with his body is, is, is pretty amazing. And why do we have Michael featured while I'm still talking? Get, get rid of that. Yeah, put it back to me because I feel insecure if I don't feel like I have a frame around me.

Look at me!

I want to pretend I'm a narcissist right now.

Yeah.

So we'll come to Michael in a moment though, because there's a story behind this. And by the way, the reason I'm telling you this, if anyone was waiting for a brilliant marketing strategy, this has made the most significant impact on anything I have done in over a decade.

It is unbelievable.

And so And by the way, when I'm talking, can you see me or is it totally fixated on Dean?

It's going back and forth.

Okay, okay. Just want to make sure.

I recommend for people, if they put it in speaker view up at the top there, that means whoever's speaking will be the biggest piece.

Okay.

Yeah, my Zoom is doing weird things.

If you want to be all Joe, you can just pin Joe up in his corner there.

And there you are, it's all Joe. Um, so, all right, so I listened to this Wim Hof book on audio because we're driving around different parts of like Park City, Salt Lake, Bountiful, Utah, this— and this is during Thanksgiving. And the part about where Wim talked about his wife that had gone deeper and deeper into depression and how she ended up jumping off of an 8-story building and committing suicide. And he was left with 4 kids, no money, and literally no time to grieve, and how the cold had healed him. And I hate the cold. I freaking hate the cold. It's just uncomfortable. Why I say hate the cold, I mean, I live in Arizona for a reason. I don't like freezing my ass off. And so, um, I— while we're there, the science that he talked about, because Wim, I believe his world records is he, uh, has up to his neck and packed in ice, an hour and 18 minutes, I believe, is his world record.

And he—

and his core body temperature does not change. That's how much control he has learned how to develop over his body. And so we started doing cold plunges while it was snowing out in Utah. And then when I've gotten back, there's only been maybe since Thanksgiving of last year, I'd say total At this point, uh, because I actually missed a couple days, uh, this last week, which is the most I've gone since I did it, uh, even though I was taking cold showers, not getting into a cold plunge. Uh, I think there's maybe been 7 days since Thanksgiving of last year where I have not gotten into a cold plunge. And when I say cold plunge, I'm talking up to my neck. And by the way, Gina, do we have that video? Yeah, I can play that.

Yeah, let me get ready to share it. Hang on just one sec.

Yeah, this was done at Optimize, and we're gonna have—

well, no, don't share yet.

I'll, I'll have Michael go first and then we'll, we'll show you his facility. So I come back from Utah and I'm at Whole Foods, um, picking up some food, and I run into Michael, who I knew Michael, but we weren't like, you know, we didn't hang out much or anything. We just knew each other from friends that had introduced us. And he's there with his girlfriend Lauren, and I'm like, hey, how you doing? And stuff. I said, you know, I've been doing cold plunging. I started, you know, I went through Wim Hof's book and Uh, and Michael's a Wim Hof certified trainer, so he knows Wim. And, um, and, and I said, you know, I just told him about the experience I was having, uh, having done it. And I said, so what do you got going on? He goes, well, you know, I have a Wim Hof training this weekend. And he wasn't trying to sell me on it, he was just telling me what's going on in his life. And I'm like, really? And I'm like, well, I'm still on a sabbatical, I can do whatever the hell I want, right?

Ah.

So, uh, 2 days later I'm there, uh, at at this Wim Hof half-day training that Michael's doing. And I get into a 32-degree tub filled with ice.

What?

And that was, you know, that was the coldest that I'd experienced so far. And now he has a facility here, one in Tempe, and him and his partner Jesse, one in Arcadia. And so, you know, I sign up for their place and every day I do Wim Hof breathing. I do, or some type of breathing, not always Wim. I usually do 20 minutes in the sauna. And if you look at the research that, like, you know, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, uh, talks about online, uh, you, you have a 52% reduction in heart disease if you do a 20-minute sauna 5 times a week. You know, there's decades of research to prove this. You literally can dramatically improve your ability to stay alive. and function by stuff that really doesn't even cost much, if anything. You can, like, when it comes to cold plunges and you can do cold showers. So like the medical industry hates this shit because there's no way for them to exploit, you know, people for money with that. And so I got trained, started hanging out with Michael and started doing this stuff. And so Michael, um, uh, just for people here that are like, what the hell is Joe talking about? Uh, why would anyone want to immerse themselves into a cold plunge on a, uh, you know, regular basis?

Great question, and, uh, good to see you, Joe. Uh, hi everybody. Well, here's the, you know, the way I look at it is that stress isn't going anywhere. You know, everywhere we go there's stress. You can't hide from stress. You're going to get stressful phone calls, you're going to get, um, stressful situations, have stressful days. So you can't really hide from stress. You can pretend to, but eventually it's going to catch up with you. But what you can do is you can train and prepare for stress. And when you use stress in a positive way, like a cold bath or cold plunge or sauna or exercise or the breathing exercise that Joe mentioned, what you're doing is you're preparing your body and your mind how to react and adapt to stress in a healthy way. So that's kind of the fundamental core of the Wim Hof Method. It's fundamental core of what we do at Optimize. And what we're doing is we're using stress as a teacher. And when you're in a stressful situation like an ice bath, you can learn how to influence your nervous system, your endocrine system, and all these different physiological responses just by using the power of your mind and your breath. Because you're breathing, your breath actually kind of is like a steering wheel for your nervous system. So you can steer it, you know, fight or flight based on the way you breathe, or you can steer it into the more calm and relaxed. And the more you train and practice that, just like anything else, the more you're able to, to kind of translate that to everyday life, you know, stressful moments, stressful days. So basically Me, Joe, Eunice now, Gina, Lauren, a lot of people from the Genius Network crew, we're all training ourselves on a daily basis how to react and adapt to stress in a healthy way.

Yeah, no, totally. And I will tell you, so I asked Gina, I have this video that we did, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, and it was very cold. The ice was sticking to me.

Very cold.

And, uh, yeah, and usually when I go to Optimize, the temperature's between, you know, 39 to like 43 degrees is the average of their— you know, around 40 is where they have their cold plunges and stuff. Um, I was getting in my swimming pool, uh, when it was still pretty cold out. And I know for some of you, like, you know, Evan Carmichael sent me a video yesterday and it's snowing in, in Toronto. So nonetheless, I know some of you are still in very, very cold weather, and there's people that are all over the world that are on here right now. Thank you for 360.

I did that.

Live right now, which is great. Uh, but play this video, uh, and, and I'm, you know, this— I stayed 3 minutes in this cold plunge, and I think it's like a minute long.

Hello.

Yes. Hello.

Wow.

Volume. Gina, is there no volume? Yeah, Gina, can you hear me? Unfortunately, we need, we need some sound. Can we play it with sound? Gina, you're muted.

There's a share computer audio, Gina, in like the settings.

There I am of Zoom.

All right, we got it, we got it.

Okay, this is for my Genius Network members. I'm at Optimize right now. I've been in here for 2 minutes so far, 2 minutes and 18 seconds. This is pretty darn cold. How cold is it right now, Jesse? This is 32 and probably less than 32 in some areas. So it's pretty much freezing. So I know this seems crazy. I hated the cold until I started doing this daily. Now it's one of the best things I've ever done. So at some point at the Genius Network meeting, we're gonna hold a Wim Hof workshop. We're gonna show you how to do the breathing, the cold All that, and it's a game changer. I know it sounds insane, but it's one of the many things we'll introduce you to if you don't already do this stuff. And I'll be at three minutes and six seconds.

Wow!

So I go Joe.

That's it, everyone.

I did a in Toronto at my house there.

I had a hot tub.

And I was there one Christmas and I was in the hot tub and with my friend Glenn and a couple other people. And you were— you remember, you know, I was on a snow-free millennium, right? Like, I'm totally against cold. And I— we decided it'd be a great— because it was snowing outside and on the deck there was this big pile of snow. And we thought, boy, wouldn't it be great if we got out of the hot tub and rolled around the snow like the Finnish people do? And I did that, and we jumped in the snow like doing snow angels, and it was immediately like being shot with needles in my body because every— your cell or whatever, your pores were all wide open. Being hot, and then they get in and they're immediately closing as tight as they could be, and it was the most uncomfortable thing I've ever experienced.

Choo choo choo choo choo!

All over my body. Oh man!

Well, here's here's the thing though. Like Wim says, it takes about if you do it for ten days straight, you will become adapted to it. And I cannot tell you. I mean, look, I for some bizarre reason. will suggest things to people and they do them. I don't know why.

I don't know. I don't know.

Like, I don't even, you know, I'm not beating it down anyone's throat that you need to go do cold plunges. I, you know, I, I just tell people about it and I've gotten dozens and dozens of people to start doing this.

Interesting. It's just an interesting thing to put yourself in a position that's so counterintuitive what you naturally seek out. Nobody seeks out, I need to, I need to, you know, cool down. I need to get— unless you're hot, but nobody goes to seek out for comfort. I need to get really cold. Nobody like seeks out a fire. You know, like you want to curl up, but we naturally gravitate to being warm, but nobody kind of gravitates to being cold. It's an interesting, an interesting dynamic because it's the opposite of what you would expect.

Well, here's the thing. That's where the reward comes from.

Yeah.

Because like, I can walk outside now where, like, you know, we were out in Sedona and it was snowing and I was out in like a t-shirt walking around. It literally did not bother me. And if you would have asked me before, a week before Thanksgiving, that I would be getting into a cold plunge every day and I would be looking forward to it, I'd be like, you're out of your mind. There's no way in hell. You're nuts. Here's what I would encourage everyone to do. Um, it will— I believe it will change your life if you, uh, go into things that are uncomfortable. You will be able to not only tolerate things that at this particular stage in your life you may find incredibly difficult, but you will then learn to embrace them and love them. And, uh, John, uh, you, you just posted, I have to go. I just happened to look down and see John. And John, you do cold plunging, right? Are you still there? Did you take off? He might have already gone by now. Darn it. But, um, yeah, the thing with, uh, with cold plunges is if, if you try it, uh, anyone that's in Genius Network, we at the last annual event, we're going to have Michael lead a few groups and take people through it. We may even do some at my office because I have a big building that I own and, you know, we have a cool setup so we can—

Yeah.

Yeah, where the FlowPod room is and where we could do, you know, a couple of cold plunges and whatnot. But it is— what it's done for me mentally, I cannot even explain. Like, the— I can handle things on an anxiety level way better. So you think an easy way to start, would you just—

to— and when you're getting in the shower or out of the shower, turn the cold water on to end the shower? Is that the—

I mean, yeah, probably simplest way is download the Wim Hof app. He has a Wim Hof app. It is— it's spelled W-I-M-H-O-F-F. Uh, Michael, you want to speak to kind of a short course on how to do it? You can come down to Arizona and go to Anyone that is a friend of Joe Polish can have a free trial at Optimize.

Uh, yes, absolutely. Anybody on this call, and you guys come into town, come check out Optimize. But if you really just want to get started, one of the easiest things you can do is just take a normal shower, and at the end of your shower, just turn it cold. And, you know, summertime's approaching here in Arizona, so we don't have too much time left of cold showers, but the rest of the country, I'm sure, is going to be pretty cold. For at least a couple more months, but you can start off with 30 seconds and then you can start working your way into like 1 minute, 2 minutes. But basically the discomfort of the cold, which, you know, Joe keeps referring to, right, is like doing something uncomfortable, is putting your body in stress and then your body's adapting to that. So it's producing adrenaline, it's kind of creating some— also some different chemicals that are occurring in the brain. Um, one of the, the types of adrenaline that your body produces is called norepinephrine, and that decreases inflammation. So there's a lot of like mental and physical benefits, but you can start with a cold shower and then you can kind of transition into doing like cold pool, ice tub, and all that good stuff.

Yeah, no, totally. I just posted a video that actually Michael's the one that first showed me this video. It's a 9-minute video with Wim that's, uh, It's really not about the methodology, it's more about the mindset. And, and watch that, I think you'll find it to be, uh, pretty powerful. There's a ton of stuff online. And, uh, read the book Breath by James Nestor, watch my interview with James. All this ties in— breathing, sauna, cold plunge. Those are practices that actually don't take time. I believe they will give you time, they will give you more life. They will give you more energy. It's not about time. It's about what you do with the time that you have and how you best allocate it. And, you know, and so the sabbatical thing really taught me better ways to take care of myself and best utilize my time.

For entrepreneurs who've already achieved everything that they thought would make them happy but still feel empty inside, where should they start to find real peace Without losing their drive, because you kind of—

There it is.

You kind of address that. And then the fear of whatever fear is, because fear could be different things to different people. And I remember this conversation, to go back to my buddy, Ned Hallowell. Is it David Neeleman, the guy that was the founder of JetBlue Airlines? Is that how you pronounce his last name?

I don't know.

But the guy, I remember him telling me the story, and David had given him permission to tell this story, where he had sold JetBlue. He had a billion-dollar check, billion dollars, and he was walking down the street, and in his mind, he felt like a total loser.

Yep.

And it's just like, what the hell is that, right? You work so hard, but then it's like, okay, what is this sort of perception? So where should they start to find real peace without losing the drive if they— 'cause you said it, you went through—

this is—

and see, that's the dark night of the soul that most people don't feel sorry for the rich person with the nice house or the successful business owner, 'cause they're like, they have no problems, 'cause we unfortunately live in this thing where people think if you've worked really hard and have tremendous ambition and you've done it in a way that has produced you to have financial success, that that somehow equals satiation or arrival, when in reality—

Yes, yes.

It could have just been like, you know, it could have been just the first stop on this grueling journey.

Yeah.

Well, here's what I would say to that. And, you know, hold me to task that I'm answering your question directly, but I've got to come at this one contextual as well. And so I call it inside out or outside in.

Okay.

And so when it's Outside in, when you're living your life from the outside in, that's where you're running everything through that ego filter, which is comparing, competing, judging. Okay, that's all the darkness. That's all the fear-based stuff. And to the guy sitting in the house on top of the mountain or whatever you described there, you know, at a minimum, you know, that ain't all bad.

Right.

So, but with that, I don't think our souls are fully happy and fulfilled with that. And so at a minimum, you know, my advice is go build that and do that thing, and then you'll have some time and money to go inside.

Right.

Ideally, utopia— that's why I'm trying to move that 5th piece of content to the front end of the 5 pieces of content, again, so that the entrepreneur starts out healthier because there's actually more drive. So that outside-in drive burns a lot lot of energy, but it does motivate the traumatized, driven person. I know firsthand.

Mm-hmm.

Inside out is when you're making your decisions from your true self. It's from— it's all coming from inside of you. It's an inside-out approach. It literally has 10 times the energy, gives you 10 times the drive. You will become more driven because now all of your decisions are love-based. And I believe everything is coming more from a calling Than it is this desire to compete, win, this, again, this external drive. So hopefully that's making sense so far.

Absolutely, and I have something to say to that. No, keep going.

Well, go ahead and say what you're gonna say, 'cause then I'll piggyback.

So I think it's you're either in competition with yourself and others, or you're in collaboration with yourself and others. And so for instance, we take our Genius Network members, the ones that want to, it's not forced upon anyone to go to the women's prison here in Arizona, although we've done trips to other prisons too, men's prisons. And we take them to these 4-hour prison visits and they go and they speak to the prisoners. And it is, I know a lot of very successful, wealthy people, some entrepreneurs, some not, 'cause I do a lot of stuff in recovery and I hang around crazy entrepreneurs all day long, kind of like you. And I know many people that live in prisons with golden bars. So they have, in some cases, even less freedom from their own minds than some people I've met in prison, even though they don't have actual freedoms to where they could go to a restaurant, they can leave. They're incarcerated. And spending time with people that are in prisons, I have found to be one of the fastest, quickest ways To help remind people of what they have that they sometimes forget. Secondly, to give perspective, because I'm always searching for perspective.

For fun.

I can get really caught up in, oh, my life is very difficult. But the moment I think my life sucks, if I go help someone else, all of a sudden it kind of pulls me outside of my own bullshit and I see it happen to other people. And the other is the brain, the monkey mind. which is constantly dopamine-seeking, when you have to put your phone away and you can't look at a screen and you go into an environment and it really— you know, you can watch this on TV, you can read about it. It is not the same as stepping into a prison, having the doors loudly crash behind you. And now you're in this environment where you oftentimes you have to sign a waiver that if you're taken hostage, they're not going to send someone to save you.

Yeah, correct.

That sort of thing, and it just creates a certain— it develops gratitude. It's really wild. And what I've learned, I cannot tell you how many Genius Network members have said to me, going to that prison visit was worth becoming a member of the group, because all the other business stuff we teach, something happens, and not for everyone, but for a large percentage of them, sometimes it takes a couple of times, but it's just mind-boggling. So I think, you know, there's all kinds of weird ways to find connection and love where it's often hidden.

Yeah, so, oh, there's so many things I wanna say. And this is where we could go 2 hours now that we're here. And so you get to control the clock, obviously, and stop me when it's time to stop. But you're prompting like 3 different thoughts. And again, I'll try and clarify these, but what I'm gonna share, you know, is 5 years of, going deep into this stuff and experiencing the dark night of the soul. And so I describe it, like I said already, as an awakening. And so I have this theory, but I look at it as my experience. I just don't know the 5th step in this theory, but this theory that what happens to us in life is, it's almost like these 5 stages. Stage 1, we are born and we are born perfect. We are born our true selves.

Mm-hmm.

Then in stage 2, somewhere the world gets ahold of us. And it's typically by age 7 and fucks us all up, you know, and wounds us and conditions us and, you know, forces us into this system. And then the 3rd stage is when we have an awakening. And the awakening, I lovingly say, happens somewhere between age 15 and 30 lifetimes from now.

Right.

So I don't know where. But for me, it happened at age 50. So hallelujah, it happened to me in this lifetime. And when you talk about that prison thing, some are just not ready. Their souls are not ready. They're still climbing the mountain or whatever you want to call it. So then the 4th stage is— so after the awakening and you see life as it is, and you see this ego structure, and you see this darkness and this fear-based living, Right. It's gross, it's disgusting, it's depressing, and it rocks your world. And so for me, it was 5 years of my world being rocked. For some people, I think it's longer. For some people, I think it's shorter. That's kind of the dark night of the soul stuff. Then the 4th stage is reentry. Okay, and that's where I feel like I am in my life in this last 2 years, is you now have to reenter this reality that we're all in. As an awakened soul. And it's really hard, you know. And so I'm not a religious guy, but Jesus said, you know, be in the world but not of the world, you know. And so that's really hard to do. And then I believe the 5th stage is enlightenment, is where it's like you fully can function in this world, you know, as your true self. So for what that theory is worth, we're all somewhere on that journey of those 5 stages. And so that's the first point. And so your prison point, like I said, for me, it was a few books, meditation, a little bit of plant medicine. I think it's different for all of us. For some people, it's an illness. For some people, it's a death. It's all different things. But these are the things that wake us up and help us really understand what's going on with our egos, because our egos are simply a tool.

Right.

Like our eyes, like our arms, like our gut, like our intuition. It's— these are tools to help us function in this world. And when we really understand the ego for what it is and its purpose, oh, you then open these prison doors and you just shine. And then coming all the way back to your point, you become more driven. You become aware of fear-based thinking. You can just see it. You can watch your ego operate. When I saw my ego for the first time, it was— I was so disgusted by how, from all the trauma and pain I experienced in the past, how it was masterful. It thought 20 steps ahead to never feel that pain again. I could head somebody off in 3 moves, and there's like literally 17 more moves. You can't get to my pain. And so it's just gross to see that structure and then to bring that structure down and realize you're safe. And love yourself is incredibly powerful. And then there's one last point I want to make in this. I'm losing it. I don't want to lose it. So I'm hoping it comes right back to me because it's right there. Oh, yes. So, you know, we're talking all around this, but what we haven't talked about is how you then shed that, because that's the hard part. This pain that we locked inside of us, the trauma we experienced. The ego took it, stuffed it all the way down there in this energy field that is our body, stuffed it down there, and then created a structure to protect it so you never feel that pain again. Well, that pain is in there and it needs to be released. And that's the power of meditation or stillness or again, all of these different experiences. And what happens, we're so afraid to feel the pain because as Michael Singer says, it's going to come up just as painful as it went down. So we got to re-experience the pain, but when we do, it finally goes away forever. It goes away forever and we feel peace.

Yeah. You know, I guess my interpretation of this, you know, which is the only thing I would be able to do is see everything through my own lens, is that I like this saying, don't handicap your kids by making their life too easy. And oftentimes if we try to, on one hand, we want to save people from wasting a lot of their life and a lot of their energy, but we also know damn well that if— no one's going to lift weights and not exert any effort. If you don't lift something that is harder to lift than the previous, you're not going to grow. You'll just maintain. And on an intellectual level, I think most people can understand intellectually what it is that you're saying, but it's— I don't know if it was Stephen Covey who said this, you know, to know but not to do is not to know. To understand but not to do is not to understand. And I think a lot of what can be happening here is people will hear it. For some people, oh, it sounds good. They're gonna go out, they're gonna read another book, listen to another podcast, go about their thing, and they'll avoid any— you know, their ego will, yeah, fuck that. Who cares what that guy says?

Yeah, yeah.

Other people would be like, What's this meditation thing? Should I read The Untethered Soul? Should I read Letting Go by David Hawkins, which are both great books, by the way? Should I do a plant medicine journey? Maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't, 'cause believe me, I know a lot of my friends get high in a camper at Burning Man and call it a spiritual experience.

Exactly.

We could go on a whole thing there, but maybe we shouldn't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the point is we're planting seeds. And if people really take a look at it, You know, when it is the— when the student's ready, the teacher appears. And so I think in a lot of ways, our books, our conversations, what I do in Genius Network, the prison visits, there will come a time where we put that tool in their toolbox. They may not use it right now. It might be 5 years from now. It might be 10 years from now. It might be never. It may not even be needed.

Yeah.

But when the time comes and you can resource yourself, That's what I think is important. And when they hear other people that have— because I'll tell you, you know how hard— like, success traps are harder to get out of than failure traps. When you're down and out and you got nowhere to go but up, yeah, you figure shit out. But when you're up here and it looks great and everyone's admiring you and you hate your life and you can't even come up with a logical reason as to why does this feel so when you could have thousands, sometimes millions of admirers and you feel empty. It's the Janis Joplin thing. You know, I go and make— you know, she died of an overdose and she was a singer, for people that are too young to know who Janis Joplin was. And she had this line where she said, you know, I'd go out and make love to 20,000 people and then I'd go back to my hotel room alone. And why is that? You know, what is it? Is it because— it doesn't even matter. The fact is—

Yeah.

If you don't feel connected, Why is that? And the more that you numb or avoid that, rotting food doesn't get better in the refrigerator with age, it gets worse.

Yeah.

So you either have to clean it out or you have to, you know, and I'm saying that metaphorically. All humans have some part of them, some cross they have to bear, and they're holding onto that suffering and they're not letting it go. You can function and still be successful and be depressed half the time. And that doesn't mean your life sucks, 'cause there are a lot of people that would trade their shitstorm for someone else's shitstorm all day long. The point is though, the moment I think when you say you actually shed that, your contribution, your connectedness, your peace, you know, the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so he had this very, very interesting line. He died many years ago, but he, and I've thought about this a lot. He goes, you can have freedom or you can have peace. Don't ever count on having both at the same time. And I've thought, can you have both? I think you actually can. It might not be for long periods, but I've pondered that and I don't even need an answer to it. You know, it's like, I've just thought about it a lot. Like, you know, you can have freedom or you can have peace. Don't ever count on having both at the same time. And it's just like, you know, if you want freedom from tyranny, and there's tyrants out there, and no one's stopping it, you're not going to be very peaceful. But if you're not, but in that not being very peaceful, you might get freedom.

Yeah.

Or vice versa.

Yeah.

You might be really peaceful, but you're under control. So it's like, what do you mean by that?

So anyway, so let me, I want to say 3 quick things to that. The first is, you know, so I describe what you're talking about. And I urge is I call it having your soul pinged. Okay, at some point you out there are gonna— your soul is going to be pinged. And if it's not being pinged now, it's okay. And so go back to the other 4 pieces of content and go build an empire. At some point your soul is going to get pinged. That's point one. So that's why anybody that's not feeling this part of the conversation we're having, it's perfectly fine. Go build an empire. But when you do get pinged, this is like a heads up because when you get pinged, it's hard. It's challenging. It's disorienting and it's scary. And if anything, what we're doing is helping them understand what's going on because I didn't know what the hell was going on. I mean, I was pinged for the first time at age 30 and I've been trying to figure it out since then. But again, it was in a massive way at 52. But at some point, you're gonna get pinged. And it's just understanding what that means. And it's getting it out. And there are so many ways of getting it out, because we're talking about peace. When you release the pain that you've been holding onto since age 7, and I'm just grabbing that round age, because there's some science around age 7.

Yeah.

When you release it, You will experience peace. And for some of us, especially you, but I've had a lot of trauma. There was a lot of stuff in there that came up and it came up over a 5-year period. But each time I would release, there was more peace and more peace. And I believe those of us that have felt an incredible amount of pain, we actually experience more peace. It's almost like the more pain, the more peace. It's just a theory of mine, but it's what I'm experiencing. And so it's just trying to help articulate, as painful as it is, what's on the other side. It's worth it. And there's just— we offer 30 different ways to shed your shit, as we describe it, in the book Shine. And you just pick the way that works best for you.

Yeah, that's great.

That's great.

Well, I would just reinforce, like, so I was with— at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. I took 56 people in a chartered bus, including the former mayor of Phoenix, a bunch of different individuals. And it was wild. And I was walking, because we had to park the bus literally over a mile away. There were so many people there, like a couple hundred thousand trying to get in. And I'm walking with Phil Randazzo, who started a group called American Dream U.

Love that. Yeah.

And he said, he's worked with thousands of military people, a lot of stuff to prevent and stop suicide, help heal PTSD, et cetera. And he said, I'll tell you, like all the soldiers that have been through horrible wars and have had the worst PTSD, suicidal, he goes, the ones that had the hardest time, he goes, all of them, they think it's the war, And that certainly attributes to it. He goes, but it's heavy. I believe he said it's when they're 6, 7, and 8 years old, something happened.

I still get that.

And the real war started then.

Exactly.

And when they went to war, how they lived it out, how, you know, and it was really profound. And I said to him, I go, we have to do an interview just on that because you— he goes, I've seen it so many times.

And he was—

he's convinced that That it's the childhood stuff.

Yeah, I'll add to this. You know, I keep saying my theory is, and I'm speaking from experience in terms of this is what happened for me. It's why I'm calling it a theory. It's technically not a theory because I'm speaking from experience. But I also view what, you know, what just what you described there, they're all lessons. I believe we are here to learn those lessons. It happened for a reason. It happened to teach us something. And whatever that lesson is, It's ours for us to figure out what that is and just to continue to grow and ascend as beings on this planet.

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think it's all about transcending suffering, whatever that is.

It is fascinating that Phil said that all that military trauma is doing is bringing up the trauma from childhood.

Right.

That is so profound.

And that's what he said. And of course, I want to dig deeper into this because I'm fascinated by it. By going, well, okay, let's say someone had a wonderful childhood, they didn't have trauma, but they're put into the middle of a war with just the most horrendous violence and torture and every despicable and horrible thing that a human could ever witness or be involved in, and the pain and the suffering, and then try to digest that and have that not impact you, but then have that tied into your upbringing.

You know, it's interesting too, because this is nowhere near the level of trauma, but it's making It's making me think of, you know, so that's a military example. Just imagine a spousal example, you know. So we experience trauma with a significant other when it's all our shit from when we were children, you know. So it's just bringing that up in that particular situation. There's nothing that person is doing to you. It's just bringing up all your shit, because that's the other thing that happens. We're here to teach each other lessons.

Yeah, I mean, I think we find people whose dense match our dents. I think there's a—

exactly. I think there's a name, it's called a trauma bond.

Yeah, trauma bond.

We're attracted to people with the same trauma to teach each other something.

Yeah, no, exactly.

And most unfortunately don't learn the lesson and they die in misery together.

Um, yeah, yeah, very true.

It's a little— so explain this.

How much should this—

how much does it cost to do these things? Sometimes I do books short. Yeah, this took me about a year.

Yeah, it's really cool.

And this is a summary of my first 30 years of publishing. That page right there. So I wrote a book with my daughters when they were both 8.

Yeah.

Here, show them. And I asked my daughters, my daughter's a photographer, if she would do the photography for my books. And my other daughter is a graphic artist and she'd do the branding. So I built that as a family legacy and then I just give it, you got one, right?

Yeah, so it's really cool.

I've actually gone through this. Yeah, it's, it's, it's real.

I'll leave this out so people can check it out. Um, so define results.

Getting results, I mean, that's, that's a word that everyone throws around, but what's that mean to you?

Um, Paul J. Myers. Anybody a studier of Paul J. Myers, remember him?

Yeah.

Uh, influenced my life a lot in regards to that question, Joe. And so did Earl Nightingale. Anybody Earl Nightingale fan?

Mm-hmm.

The Strangest Secret, you become what you think about. I'm going to expand the answer to tie Peter together to make sense on why I think we're sitting here. One of the cool things about Peter is something I really believe in that ties to results is you need to be really clear on what you value before you set your goals of whatever the result you want. And so a lot of people set goals of the result they want and they don't really dissect with intention the detail of their values. And so I would answer your question, Joe, by saying it starts with what you and I preach. That's why we like each other so much is because we believe grounded, any kind of result you want needs to start with the ground of what you value. And then you add on top of that what Peter said when he asked the question to Dan about the fund.

Yeah.

If the result you want is a life full of excitement and fun and influence, well, is that what you really value? And is that the result you want in life? So is your result you want a feature of selling your business and cashing once or 2 or 3 or how many times have you done it? 6 or 10?

Several exits, yeah.

Yeah. Is that, or is the goal to have a life that's incredible? I walk in your place here and I'm like, who wouldn't want to be Joe? The Harvard study I just came across in the last month or so, 20-year study, $20 million study, 75-year study on why people are the happiest. It's because of relationships. And you look at this place, this is like the coolest people in the world and you got relationships with them.

Yeah, it's a good gig.

My answer, long answer on that one is I think everybody should think about results tied to what they value.

Well, let me ask you about it because we had the conversation prior to you guys coming up where Jeff Pavone over here was talking about golf when Dan was talking about ambition. And there's a lot of contradictions that I see with people that say they value health, but their—

Bingo.

The way they live their life doesn't really is congruent with that. And they seem to be living someone else's values. And the Kekich Credos I sent over to you where it says he has a credo that's like, lasting happiness does not come from consuming values, but producing values and producing more than you consume is the only justification for existence. And the way I interpret that is people read all these books and they try to adopt someone else's value system, but they don't integrate it into their own life. And so they pretend, or at least try to act as if or whatever, that they're someone else's system, but it doesn't really quite work for them. And I really think it's into the integration.

I think integrating anything into your—

yeah, so, yeah.

Do you know about his life manual?

The what?

The pilot manual?

Yeah, the life manual.

Tell them about that, tied to that comment, please.

Sure. You all know I lost my son in the year 2000. And Todd, he took his own life, and he aged 35. And he was a— A good kid. He was a good kid. He knew what he wanted in life and did a lot of traveling. And he made the decision that he was done. He was finished. And it was the toughest thing I'd come up with so far in my life, a hurdle to figure it out. And in that process, when I lost Todd, I was trying to think of a way to celebrate his life rather than mourn and grieve it all the time. How can I celebrate his life? And he lived a real values-based life. And he was full of love. He loved everybody. There was not a bad person on the earth as far as Todd was concerned. So what came out of that process of thinking was I developed a program called Life Pilot. And what Life Pilot was, was a program to teach you, first of all, how to recognize your values. What are your values? What are you about? And I'd ask each one of you now, You have a piece of paper, just put it down and not now, but anytime you want, write down your values because that's what do you stand for. Now, my values today are health, freedom, happiness, integrity, and I added legacy. I added legacy about a year ago. So health, freedom, happiness, and integrity and legacy. Yours can be relationships. There's probably 50 or 60 values you can have. So when I do something, health, freedom, happiness, integrity, Like, I wouldn't do— like, if let's say Joe said, Joe, we're having a party tonight, and please come, Peter, because we're going to do a bunch of heroin, and we're going to have the best time in the world. You know, I'd say—

It would be a party.

Joe, I'd love to come. I'd love to come. I probably won't take any heroin, but I'd like to be with you.

And I'm—

I've got no moral obligation to what you do, but I know that this temple is not going to have anything in it today that's going to be derogative or Or hurt it from being healthy.

What if it was mushrooms?

Mushrooms. And then freedom. One of my values is freedom. And that means to be free and to be free and do whatever darn well I want to do. That's why I work hard to make the money that I want to earn from the gift of being free. So I would do nothing to impair that. Yeah. Because I don't— so you—

go ahead.

No, no. And I'll tell it.

Like, I've spent enough time with you now.

I've been on your boat with you.

We've gone and hunted.

Yeah.

I mean, like, you actually live those values. You even have those cards you gave me with all your values on them. Yeah.

So everything I do— and so that's what I try with that program. So I taught this 4-hour program to YPO. And I put a number of $25,000 on it. And I went all over the world. And I gave that money to charity. And it sort of got me back centered because I've been thinking— Todd is my— today, Todd's my chairman. And so Todd is my son's name. And so Todd's my chairman. And he's in charge of all that whole values and all that thing.

I'll tell you, like, one of the ways me and you connected was when I was on a 1-year sabbatical with you and I met Rita first, right, at that party.

And we're at this event and it's not a business event.

It's just like a freaking grand opening for this place where you had your private planes.

Airplane, yeah.

And I started talking to Rita and she started—

It was Corey's place?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we started talking about addiction. I have an addiction recovery foundation and then I totally hit it off with Rita.

She's like, you got to meet my husband, Peter.

So then me and you started talking, and you're— and I'm like, I'm on sabbatical right now. I don't need anything.

I don't want to talk about business.

And me and you got together. We didn't talk—

we didn't talk about business.

We just—

and that's how we became friends first.

And then like—

and that was, you know, probably, I don't know, uh, 4 months be—

or 6 months, I think it was, before I ended my sabbatical. And then after that, yeah, it's—

I was telling Darryl a little while ago, I've never ever worked For I've never ever worked for money. I never wanted to be richer and stuff like that, but I'm really driven. I love toys, and I started off with a bicycle. Like when I was picking blueberries as a kid in home, and I picked enough berries to buy a bicycle. Then I quit picking berries. I had my bicycle, you know. And then I realized I wanted different clothes than my mom wanted to buy me. So I so I started picking more berries again. So all the way through school, I was independent financially.

Yeah, his life's a little interesting because he. Now on his 3rd yacht at the same time, so he has to keep making that money. I'm just kidding.

But, but, but I, but I feel like life is for having fun and being happy and loving and caring and giving back to the community. Like, that's what life is. Yeah, you know, and if you can get yourself involved in it, there's nothing more exciting. Like, nothing more.

I think you have like such a young, youthful energy in this, like, unbelievable giddy enthusiasm that you have, which I think is Don't you like hanging around with him?

Oh yeah, no, he's, he's, he's fun. I mean, he really is.

Like, yeah, Peter's a goofball too. Like, I mean, we're also hiking once, like, uh, on— we were hiking up, uh, what trail was it over by 32nd and Camelback?

Whatever.

Yeah.

And some freaking guy bumps into him, but pretty hard. And Peter's like, like, literally, like, you know, starts yelling at the dude as he's running. But he's like, this guy's an asshole.

I've seen him, like, run into people. And then Peter finally had enough. And I'm like going, Jesus Christ, I hope he doesn't get in a fistfight.

You know, Dan had mentioned about, uh, you can reverse your age. One of the things about Peter is I think there's 3 types of ages that I talk about. I've written 3 books on health, 4 books on health. There's the chronological age, which is your birthdays, right? Everybody's got that one. Do you agree? Chronological age. Then you got your biological age, and there's biomarkers like telomeres That you can judge on your biological age. And there's the mental age. Like, this dude's like, like, he's like, he plays like he's a teenager.

You know, we're all the different kinds of people. Like, some of us early morning people, some of them mid-morning people. We're all different kinds of people. When you understand what you are, what people you are, well, then you feed those things. Like, if you're the noon person, noon is when you just— your highest peak of the day is noon. Then work with that. Like, don't try and make yourself a morning person. Be the noon person. I always like to feel like, you know, in life, it's like God— every little baby that's born, God can let the little baby just— here's a deck of cards. And so that baby's got— everybody one of us got a deck of cards. We got aces and we're dealt a hand. And that hand is what you've got. Let's say it's 8 cards in your hand. Well, you might have an ace, a deuce, You got to play what you got. And, you know, there's— I'm— there's so much I don't have, but I play the ones that— I play my aces all the time. Like, if I'm going into negotiation with what have you, like, I'm a nice guy and I'm goal-oriented and I'm honest and I'm communicative. So I let the guy that I'm buying something know all that. Look, I'm here to— I really do love your property. I really do want to buy your property. I hope that we can come to an arrangement. I'm prepared today to make a non-refundable offer on your property. Is that what you're looking for? Yeah, that's what I want. Well, let's start talking. State my goal and work towards that goal. But be transparent. Be you. I think I probably got maybe— I think I have an ace. My communication is probably an ace. But my math is probably an 8. You know, my physical ability is probably an 8 or 9.

How many of you play to your strengths?

But play—

Is that something you should double down on? So many people like work on their weaknesses and go, I want to keep—

Yeah.

But man, what he's saying, to play to the strengths, right? I thought that was an aha for me. I don't know, Joe, a few years ago. And I was like, wow, when I'm coaching people, I'm like coaching them all up. And I'm like going, hey, you're so good at this. Why don't I double down on that?

And encouraging, you know, with people, Like, I, I said one time that I believe that everybody is a genius. Every single person in this room is a genius. You guys might have heard me say this before, but everybody is. It's that— well, but you don't all act like you're geniuses sometimes. You act like you're kind of stupid sometimes. So all, all of us. So, well, why? If we're geniuses, why do that? Well, what's wrong with that? You are geniuses, but many people are not aware of it. Like, they just can't By the fact that they're a genius. You know, we're all like, you know, we're born and we have this, this amazing body, brain. We have all this stuff like a car. When the, when the Ferrari comes out of the factory, it's got a key sitting there. What are the chances that car will start? And what are the chances that car will probably go 200 miles an hour? Because it's built for that. It's built to do that. Well, we're built, we're specially built By God, we'll use God. But here we are with these incredible gifts.

Like, what—

the people who are leading this country, the top people in the country, what have they got that you don't have? Like, what, what couldn't— we just saw with the recent political appointments, they can take somebody from this field here and put them into there. You know, people are so amazingly capable of doing things. The thing that holds us back is Collectively, we don't believe in ourselves. Like collectively, we don't believe enough in ourselves.

Yeah, I took a note when Dan was talking earlier also. Did you guys catch that about how when you get something done, your confidence goes up? Anybody else write that note down? I thought that was a good one. I'm like epiphanies, epiphanies, epiphanies, right?

Well, shout out to Dan. Yesterday, when you know we were in the beginning, we're asking what we all caught out of yesterday. What the thing I got out of yesterday. And I do it all the darn time. It makes me mad that I had to learn it from Dan because I do it all the time myself. And I usually go 10 years or 15 years ahead. I love 3. I love 3 years. That's just— it's not too far. 5, 10 is getting a bit too far, but 3 years is not far from now. I mean, every single one of us should shut our eyes for 10 minutes and say, okay, what do I look like 3 years from now? Physically, what am I wearing? Where am I? You know, am I married? Am I single? Am I— what's my career? And build that model of what you want because that's what you'll be then.

Tied to your values.

Yeah.

Tied to your values.

Yeah, tied to your values.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that'll be useful and awesome, Click here.

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