The 6 Steps To Become A HIGH VALUE Guy Women WANT! | Lewis Howes

When you start asking yourself these questions, what's the most important decision you made in work? What's the most important decision you've made in your family? What's the most important decision you did for yourself?

Right?

What's the most important decision you make when taking on a conflict? Whenever those things are in alignment, happiness, confidence, success, performance goes up. When they're not.

How do we build that confidence in ourself when all we hear is a negative feedback though. And it's gonna happen. We can distance ourselves, but we keep hearing it. How do we then say, okay, I'm not gonna listen to this, but it really affects me and it hurts me.

Yes.

How do you then say, all right, I'm gonna hear it every day or every week. It's gonna come my way no matter what I do. But psychologically, internally, what are the tools or the skills we can acquire to develop that belief?

First thing I always say is you gotta take yourself back to any time in your past career or even current career and remind yourself of all the things that you're good at.

All the accomplishments.

Celebrate your wins. Amen.

Right.

These is what, man, I'm a tall, handsome brown man. You know, I'm really good in math. I look good in white dress shirts. Whatever those things are, remember, Ivan, you were the first person to get your PhD before the age of 30. Whatever those things are, and it's not enough just to tell yourself, you got to write it down. When I took that job as an AD, even as a job as a vice president, I, you know, self-doubt comes in.

There's enough people tell, I got to-.

I've never done this before.

Why should I be in this position? You only got the job 'cause he's black. You only got the job 'cause you're a woman. Whatever it is, there's all people that are gonna be coming at you. And if you're not careful, you'll start to take on those thoughts. And then those thoughts will influence your belief system. And that belief system will then influence your actions. And you'll start messing up. And it's this self-fulfilling prophecy. So stop that thought. Put something down on paper. You'll hear me speak about a self-confidence letter, a letter you write to yourself. There, Louis, congratulations on building your business. You set a goal and you accomplished it. I was in a lit, whatever it is, right? And it's your personal brag sheet to yourself. When I became an AD, I had to read that probably, I kid you not, two weeks straight. And this isn't about ego. This isn't about, oh, you're telling everybody how good you are.

No.

This is your personal brag sheet. And I equate this to, you remember when you were in a track and field meet and you were a kid, there's some kids that put their medals on and they work around the track and field, first place, first place, first place. And then there's the person who takes their medal and puts it in their bag. But when they get home at night, they put it on and they're looking in the mirror, it's like, yes, yes.

Whatever that is, that's the difference about a self-confidence letter. Interesting. Yeah, self-confidence letter or a letter to yourself, we call this rainy day notes from an exercise that I've been through where it's like, write yourself a letter that when you're going going through something challenging, you open it up and you remind yourself of your gift, how much you matter, the contribution you've made in your life, your family, your friends, things like that. Or you could get a group of friends to write letters to you that you seal and you open up when you need some inspiration or motivation.

I love it. There's a researcher by the name of Lubormowski, Sonya Lubormowski, and she speaks about taking a gratitude, taking a letter and writing it to one of your friends, a gratitude letter to your friends, telling them of all the things you appreciate in them and how that builds your happiness and your optimism and your confidence, not just in the moment, but even when they come back 30 days later, it's even higher than in the moment.

Yeah. Right.

And so those are the things you need to think about is, okay, you know, sometimes we think about just a letter to ourselves, but if you can share that happiness and genuine praise with others, it also boosts your own happiness and optimism.

Why is that? When we Express gratitude or appreciation towards others, it increases our happiness.

What they say And the science of it says it releases dopamine, right? And when dopamine comes in your, it's the, I'll say, the endorphin, the happiness chemical. And the more dopamine in there, the better you feel. Unfortunately, as you get older, dopamine receptors, dopamine gets down in your body. Really?

Yes.

Just naturally or- Naturally.

Naturally.

You have to actively build it.

Yeah.

You always wonder, why grumpy old man?

What is this?

I'm getting to be the grumpy old man.

Really?

Get my dopamine up. So you got, it's a chemical thing.

Where it's like testosterone or something else.

Exactly.

The older you get, you start losing it.

Yes.

I feel it.

I feel it coming on.

You already feel grumpy?

I already am a, you know what? Crazy whippersnapper man. I got less patience. I feel it's like, really coming back. Am I Sanford and Son? Is that what's happening? Wow. You're not old enough to know even who Red, are you old enough to.

Know who Red Fox is?

Sanford and Son? Sanford and Son, yes.

Oh, old junk man.

Okay, just checking. Just checking. It's interesting. So this is something you really got to cultivate. I interviewed Dr. Lori Santos on and she's got the Happiness Lab. She's, I think it's one of the most popular classes at Yale. Yale, yeah. And I asked her, I go, what other, you know, because she was talking about gratitude as one of the key factors of happiness. And I go, you,'re talking like a self-help personal development person now with no science backing anything, just saying be grateful and express gratitude and appreciation. She's like, this science is proving that that is true. The more you express gratitude, the happier you'll become. The more you do for others and contribute to others, the happier you become.

The science of, and not only just from feeling good and happiness, but the science also then links that to performance. And don't quote me on the numbers, but it's related to your creativity output, right? I think the same Lubormoski, the same study she did, I think you're 19% more productive. Analytic problem solving. You're 29% quicker to solve complex problems. And here's the big one.

When you're what?

When you're happier, when you express gratitude, when you use positive statements of affirmation to yourself. The big one, you increase your revenue by 36% if you use three statements of happiness, personal affirmations.

No way.

Sonia Lubomirski, 2006, Harvard Study.

Wow, so if you do, how are you going to increase Your income?

Three affirmations, three positive statements of gratitude, three expressions of hope, warmth, joy. That is what showed.

Yeah.

Wow. About yourself, about- Either yourself or others.

Oh, interesting. Right? Now, what if you're saying something about yourself, but you're really lying? You talk about this too. It's like, is it a, you know, the science of lying to yourself? How do you say something like, I'm a great individual. When you're like, actually, I haven't been a great individual. I've been bad, treating people bad. I haven't been showing up on time, whatever it is.

Yeah.

And so this is an interesting one.

The lying self-talk that hurts you.

It's hard to say because what might be a lie to me may not be a lie to you. I'll tell you a story. I had a guy, his name was Kyle, who made my soccer team. And he believed that he was the greatest guy. I'm like, I'm gonna make this team. that guy showed up and he had like a foot like a donkey, right? And I remember seeing him come onto my team and I had just taken over this team at Ryerson. I was like, oh, he's a black guy from Jamaica. He's gonna be fast and so happy. I was never so disappointed.

Wow. Right?

And that guy was gonna be an equipment manager. Yeah, at best. Fast, like, fast forward four or five years. This guy became the captain of my team, an all Canadian and a starter on my first ever team. that went to the national championships. He had no business believing that he was good enough to make this team. I mean, I coached at this championship, that world championship, Olympic World Cup qualified. So maybe I'm not the one to judge what is a lie. But I will tell you, if you think you're gonna fly, I'm gonna be a bajillion dollars, I'm gonna be a million dollars, I will tell you it's not the statement that really sets you up, it's the fact that people then start putting into their psychological mindset steps to move them in. in that direction. Whatever those little steps are, they stop feeling helpless and unable to affect their own destiny and start moving in the right direction. And that's where the impact happens.

That's an interesting thought because you might look at someone like Jeff Bezos who's like, I want to build a trillion dollar company when he had never done anything close to it. Well, you might have laughed at him, but even though he was lying to himself in the moment, he didn't have that, but he was setting himself up to create that and to become the person he needed to become the leader, the man, the human, to develop the skills to potentially do that one day. Yeah. Is that right? Or like, you know, Tesla with Elon Musk or, you know, sending rockets out into space and all these different things.

I can't imagine, and I'm gonna ask you for my own, let's turn the tables. When you were sitting on your sister's sofa, what were you thinking when it started to germinate? When did the seeds start to germinate?

I started to really think of I don't have anything right now and I don't have the skills, the confidence to go do the things I want to do, the big dreams. And so I said to myself, I'm gonna go face all those fears and overcome all those doubts by doing them, by acquiring those skills so that I can then go out and accomplish my dreams. Because I knew in order to have the dreams come true, I had to overcome a lot of challenges myself.

Did you have the dreams though?

Oh, I had a lot of big dreams.

But you weren't articulating them.

I had very specific dreams. Yeah, yeah, very big dreams.

People must have thought you were crazy. You didn't even have a job.

My family was like, go get a job.

Yeah, you ain't got two shoes to work together, right?

Yeah, so. But I believed it. And that's all that matters really for me. And I think, you know, and I say this a lot to people that it doesn't matter if the world believes that you're, and you probably had a lot of great athletes as well who you were like, you're amazing, you're the best, you can be so great, but they didn't believe it themselves. and it didn't matter if you and every other player thought they were incredible, if they didn't believe it, they were gonna be subpar. And the reverse is, it doesn't matter if everyone else is against you or doesn't think that you have the skills, if you believe it, you can make it come true, which I think is unbelievable.

I will tell you the number, there's two factors I've always seen that derail a young athlete or a young professional's career. Number one is their self-doubt, right? Their inability to believe in themselves. And interestingly enough, number two is the people that they have surrounded themselves that become distractions that take them away from their goals. Over and over and over again, they fall into the wrong crowd, they get with the wrong partner, they-- the wrong advice.

I think of Maurice Clarett. I don't know if you know who he is.

Yes.

I'm from Ohio and so we're the same age and so when he was a freshman and they won the national championship and he was like this all-star running back, he was like, this is the chosen one, he's gonna do unbelievable things. But then he was surrounding himself with the wrong people who got him into the wrong things and influence and persuaded him to do bad things and take the wrong steps. And that sent him to jail and he never got in the NFL. And it was so much talent that could have been.

It was such a shame. I remember that story quite vividly when he declared early. Didn't the NFL change the rules to make sure that that never happened again?

Yeah, yeah.

And he, and so it goes to show that being around the wrong people could influence you and potentially set you up in the wrong ways. So how do we make sure that we get out of that? When we're so, we're such social creatures that we don't want to hurt people's feelings, that we, it's hard to go meet new people. You know, this is your comfort zone. These are your boys from the past. Like, they've been with you. How do we get out of that and say, hey, guys, like, I'm gonna.

Do this thing over here instead. Oh, I I wish I could give you the, the. the gospel on that, because that is harder to do than what I'm gonna say. But here's where I always believe. And every time I have not done this, I have faltered. We all have that little tiny voice in our head. Whenever I don't listen to that little tiny voice in my head, I falter. And to me, that tiny little voice is, you know, I don't know. I'm gonna now use some voodoo language. You got your head voice and you got your heart voice. and it's hard to, whenever I make a decision purely logically, I always am bitter, right? If I buy the cheap car instead of the one I want, if I do the practical decision instead of the emotional one, I'm always bitter. And then you got this little heart that's sitting there, that little self-conscious piece that's telling you when you know when you're going south. I don't know if it's your crap detector or your holy smoke detector. There's no science behind this, but anytime I don't listen to that voice, when I fall off my values and my principles, I go south. And it's cost me money, it's cost me friendships, it's cost me opportunities.

How do you determine what your values and principles are when you're not sure?

That's a good question. I'm going to walk you through a little exercise. Do we have time for it?

Sure.

All right, I'm going to ask you and we'll do it together. I call it my purpose exercise. what's the, in the last 18 months, what's the most important decision you've made? I'll do mine, right? And we'll share it for 30 seconds. In the last 18 months, you know, I gotta be careful with this one, but I've made a decision, right, to take the vice president's job at Dalhousie University. I was the king of my fiefdom. I had all the freedom, all the things I want. And I made a decision to do this. take that job. Boom.

Decision I made was to get into a relationship. Ah, yeah, a new relationship in the last 18 months.

Yeah.

You got now seven words, only seven to tell me why you made that decision. And so I could be nice and fluffy. I had. It was time for a new challenge. Seven words. I could say I had outgrown the job, right? I was bored, whatever it is. But seven words.

She made me a better version of myself.

Ooh, nicely done.

I'm gonna put that at seven, but.

Yeah, that's pretty close. Why her? So for me, why this job? Right? People told me I couldn't do it. The one word and it's got to be a value, the challenge.

Mm. Right?

The challenge.

One word.

Yeah. Why her? Vision. Right. Five years ago, I had done a guided visualization of the dream person I wanted to be with. Yeah. And she was the image of that vision.

So now we've just found two values.

Right.

For one of my values is challenge. One of your values is growth, Vision, whatever that word is.

This.

You saw it. And so when you start asking yourself these questions, what's the most important decision you made in work? What's the most important decision you've made in your family? What's the most important decision you did for yourself?

Right?

What's the most important decision you make when taking on a conflict? Those help, that's the exercise I do.

It could help with your values.

To help me find my North Stars.

Interesting.

And whenever those things are in alignment, you'll hear Daniel Pink talks about this transcendent purpose. Whenever those things are in alignment, happiness, confidence, success, performance goes up. When they're not, sick days go up, disease goes up, conflict arises.

Poor choices, yeah.

Right, and so those are the things you need to think about. Now, that's the exercise I use, but I find it very, very helpful.

Wow. So back to this science of lying. So how do we lie to ourselves in a positive way? to set ourselves up for success or accomplishing our dreams. If I have, I've been doubting myself for a long time and I've got no money and I've got no skills and flunked out of college, whatever it is, but I got this big dream and I'm gonna do this thing. Is that actually realistic to say those things or how do I then use that dream and that image on my mind of what I want to create, who I'm gonna become, how do I then apply that into life? to actually making it come true when it seems so far away.

I love this. So I will say this, everybody's dreams are lies because they don't exist, right? Everybody's dreams are, they're just making that up. That's why they're dreams. And so the difference, though, between people who are successful or not is how they choose to pursue those dreams. So let's just say I had a dream to become an Olympian. I always in my mind picture that dream on the top of a staircase. And I have these series of steps that go down. And every step represents a quantifiable smart goal that I'm gonna put on there.

Right?

So, let's say I've got a dream.

Speaking of my language, 'cause I would frame my dreams and goals.

100%. So, I'm gonna get out of bed every day and exercise for 30 minutes. I'm gonna get out of bed.

Step one.

Step one.

Exactly. Wow. What's step two? I'm gonna get out of bed every day, right? And I'm gonna find myself a coach that is from the very, I am gonna, I love what you did when you went to New York City. Same thing Bruce Jenner did. When he decided he wanted to go to the Olympics, he found out where the best people were that were training for the decathlon. He went to San Diego and he started training with them. Step number three, I'm gonna find the best person in my field and I'm gonna be relentless and pursue them. and train with them. If that means I gotta pick up their shoes, if that means I gotta clean their toilet, whatever that is. And that is you start putting those steps in there. Now, when you put those steps in, be like, oh, guys, success came. No, they're gonna say, no, hell no. Just like they said, what are you doing here, Gringol?

You don't belong here.

This is Eastern European handball.

Exactly.

Right?

But now you got to say, stop. Don't let that come in. That's where you use the power of affirmations. Stop. We talk in psychology about this thing called centering. Physical actions that you'll see athletes do.

Like a trigger, like some like a snap of a rubber band. Stop the negative stop.

Slap in the face, whatever it is, right? Yeah, replace deep breath in.

You got this.

Yeah.

Right, whatever that is. Whatever it is, because you're gonna be on your step, your first step. I didn't get up today.

You start again tomorrow. So you need that mantra or positive affirmation or stopping process and then a mantra, right? Yes. You gotta stop and add a positive affirmation.

Make it automatic and recognize that it's a skill. Get your three. You got this. I work harder than anybody. Nobody outworks me. I can learn everything. Whatever it is, get it ready. And then figure out what your trigger is going to be. Don't mix it all up. Get your trigger. A friend of mine was when he was trying to quit smoking. He put it all, his hands was always in there because he always jingle coins. Another person, always their keychain. Shake, shake. And then it becomes automatic. It becomes automatic and that's where you want it to be. I got this. I got, you can't beat me cigarettes. No, no, no, not today, whatever that might be. But recognize how important it is to ladder up that step because if you put that big dream out there, it becomes so overwhelming. Where am I gonna start? Oh my gosh, the tiniest step is the one that moves us towards our goal.

The tiniest step. And then do you celebrate after you reach the next step? How do you... You've been studying. I feel like I've studied a lot of sports psychology. just through the practice of sports and then reading a lot of books and interviewing a lot of people, but I always love everyone's take on it.

This is, I think, a mistake that people make is they don't take a moment to make the celebrations. And so they don't ever get to reward it. I just tweeted the other day somebody who graduated from university and I said, Savor the moment. Your person from Yale, she will speak about savoring. That's a big component about happiness. And savoring means live in it, feel it, relish it, embrace it. You know, and sometimes it's cold and you want to just get out in the sun, you just like, ah, and you just feel it. That savoring.

Yeah.

Pausing, slowing down, engulfing it. It's almost like when something's happening, like pull yourself out and just watch yourself with your friends and appreciate it.

Society has brainwashed us to believe that love and identifying it takes time. That's a lie. In most situations when it takes months, you have not fallen in love, you've learned to tolerate them. You've grown a tolerance.

-Wow.

All right.

You've enjoyed a part of the process, it's giving you connection, you're not lonely.

-Exactly. And and when you've invested months, you are more likely to not want to walk away from it because all the time and energy you put in. So, now you mistake attachment to the investment as love and it's not really love. When you sit down with people who can say they felt a real or they have a real connection with their partner. I think every story, I don't know if any one story that's opposite of this, they will all say it was pretty much instant. first date, you may not know a hundred percent fact I'm going to marry this person, but you knew the potential was there. You knew like this could be the one that at least came to mind. And so again, when we don't have that in that first conversation, that first day, it's unlikely. I'm not going to sit there and say it's impossible that it can happen days later or a week later or whatever. But typically, and even if you can't articulate it as you knew they could be the one. When people look back, they can tell you that they felt something very strong in that initial engagement with their partner that said they knew something was different. They may not even know what it was but they knew, okay, this isn't normal. This isn't like the rest. Something's going on here. And then there's a full realization of this is it.

What is that something that we can't understand, that feeling What is that called? Is that just like your magnets connected to each other? Is that your energy is so attracted because there's so much opposites or it's so much similarities? What is that force that gets people to say there was something different about this person when I met them?

I personally believe it's your spirit recognizing its match. Because there are, if you speak to a lot of people of different religious beliefs, there's a belief that things happen in the spirit before they happen in the physical, all right. So, it's almost like the spirit is ahead of us which is why the spirit knows the truth which is why intuition, gut instinct, third eye, whatever you want to call it, it always seems to be accurate because your spirit knows before you know. So, we're feeling it within our spirit the problem is it's getting our mind in tune with the spirit. It's allowing our heart to accept what the spirit is saying to us. but we feel it, we just don't know how to always explain it. Those who are very in tune with the spirit can recognize it much quicker and accept it for what it is much quicker because they're very in tune already.

Why is it so hard for our mind and our heart to get caught up to our gut or intuition of that initial explosion of chemistry? And also, can that explosion of connection and chemistry be harmful in a different way?

Okay, so one, fear. fear is the number one reason why we struggle to accept. So, one of the things I explain to a lot of women, you know, and I have my membership group for them. So, I've had this discussion where I say, listen, you know, the difference between intuition and fear is logical deduction. So, when you're trying to analyze and break things down, that's your mind, all right. And fear is coming into that because you're saying, well, I shouldn't do this because of that or this can't be this because of that. Intuition requires no logic. Your spirit requires no logic. It simply feels, it senses, it knows. That's it. You don't have to explain it. Again, gut instinct doesn't require things to logically add up. It just tells you this is it or something's wrong or this is right or whatever the case may be. So, fear is the number one thing and that fear stems from lack of healing from past relationships. We've been down this road of emotional investment. We've gotten hurt before. We've been wrong in our lives about wanting to believe someone could be it. Even though we know this feels different, we still have the fear of disappointment that creeps back in.

How do we let go of that fear and not sabotage an amazing opportunity in a relationship?

You got to heal from your past. There's no way around it. And this is why I say people who have not healed, they can meet their connection right now. The most amazing partner and it will scare them to death. And they will either run, self-sabotage, something. It's going to be a problem because they have not healed. And when you have not healed, the vulnerability that's required in connection is so unlike anything else or with anyone else that if you don't have a level of confidence and again, a foundation of healing in your life, it seems way too overwhelming and scary. So, you've got to heal in order to not Find yourself sabotaging, running away and not being able to embrace that real love.

What if both parties come to something and there's this explosion of chemistry or just instant like, wow, there's something different feeling and both have not healed their past, but they stay together, they figure it out and they're together. Is there going to be a lot of problems and trauma and stress that comes up over the years if they both haven't healed before they get into a relationship or can they heal in the relationship together.

It is possible... Let me backtrack a little bit. First, let me say that people have to understand there is a such thing as right person, wrong time, all right. People don't want to believe that there are a lot of people who reject that idea. They say oh, if it's the wrong time it's not the right person that's not true. You can meet that individual that you have an amazing connection with but both parties still need growth before they can come together, all right. And so, now is... What happens if.

They come together and they haven't healed?

So, here's the thing, it is possible to get through that and survive and have a healthy relationship. It is unlikely for most people to survive being with someone you have a connection with and you have not healed. Again, most people won't even allow themselves to be with that person.

They'll sabotage it so much, they'll they'll dive in but then they'll cheat or they'll they won't respond to the person they'll do something, right?

Yes, and speaking of cheating, they tend to have a history of going back to an ex because the ex feels safer because it's not as vulnerable over there, all right. I can maintain more emotional control, it's familiar so it's easier. So, I've seen plenty of situations where again, the connection was so overwhelming so they ran back to their ex. No one is not, they're not for the ex is not for them and they're not for their ex. But again, it just feels safer there. So, yes, a lot can go wrong if you try to be together when you have not healed and you have this connection. It would be best to acknowledge okay, you know what? We got some work we need to do. We realize we have a connection here. Let's work on ourselves in the meantime before we take that next step.

Can you heal while having sex with one or multiple partners for fun on the side.

I'm not going to say it's impossible, but again, highly unlikely. Sex is such a distracting thing. And we have to understand that so much can come from our sexual interactions. There can be new drama, there can be hell, an unwanted pregnancy, there can be a host of things. And all of that will derail you in the healing process. You also have to be honest with yourself. You may be having the sex because you're trying to distract yourself from the healing. Like the sex is just a coping mechanism for you. Same as drugs, same as alcohol. People turn to these things because they don't want to deal with their reality in life. So, you've got to be honest. Are you trying to just bury your head in sexual interactions or is it just... If it's happening in a natural flow of life, Okay, then there's a greater chance that you can survive this, but you got to be really careful. I would suggest cutting that off.

Yeah.

If you're trying to heal, you know, again, I don't want to say it's impossible, but you're going to make it extremely difficult and highly unlikely for sure.

I want to ask you about the best ways to meet someone these days, 2020 moving forward, the do's and don'ts for online dating. But what I'm hearing you say is that you shouldn't be trying to meet someone, you shouldn't be doing the online dating game until you've fully healed, or at least start of the process of healing because healing is a journey. Sometimes things take a lot longer to heal fully, but at least acknowledging and starting that process, what would be a process to start healing your past relationships or pains before we get into the conversation of do's and don'ts of online dating? Okay.

So of course, going to a therapist or coach is the ideal thing to do. you typically need that outside party that can help you process some things, help you see new perspectives, and go through a process of healing. Now, I will be honest, not every coach and therapist is going to help someone heal. Sometimes it just turns into a venting session. So you've got to be real careful about, okay, if I've been going to this therapist or coach for many weeks or months now, what progress have I really made? Have I been resolving or have I been coping? because many are teaching you how to cope and manage and how to function within your brokenness, but they're not resolving it and helping you heal. Now, of course, you know, I'm big on healing. So I have my book, Love After Heartbreak, which gives people the exact steps to healing. So one of the steps, I'll give you the first step, is getting the hurt out in front of you. So it's this who Hurt Me list. And so you get a piece of paper, you write down who hurt me and you ask yourself the question, who hurt me? and now everyone who comes to mind, you put them on the paper. Doesn't matter if it happened very long ago, doesn't matter if you think you moved past it. If they come to mind when you ask the question, then that means there's some kind of relevance there. And so now you put them on the paper and like two sentences of what they did to hurt you. This will now at least help us identify what you've been holding on to and where the hurt is and what needs to be properly addressed. And then from there, we can do the other steps of getting things off your chest and forgiveness and all these different things that's involved in healing.

I love that. I'm a big proponent of writing letters to people that you never send them, telling them how it made you feel, what you're frustrated and angry about with them, forgiving them, letting it go. And then I like to burn the letter and bury it as well in the ground to hopefully create a sense of like, okay, this was alive in me and now I'm killing this and this feeling, this energy, and I'm putting it to bed. putting it back in the world to hopefully create something new, to grow something new and more loving and powerful and create that intention. But I think that's really important. When should we know that we have are healed enough? How do we know when our healing has gone far enough of that on its journey before we should get into meeting someone new, putting ourselves out there on social media, online dating apps and things like that? All right.

Well, first thing I want to say is now there are going to be times where sending the letter to the person is actually the best thing.

Really?

Yes. A lot of people are scared about that. And it's a very difficult hurdle to jump. But I literally got a DM today from a woman who read the book. She wrote her letter last year was to her mother. She didn't want to send it. She held on to it. She said she just finally built up the courage because I tell them in the book 99% of the time I'm going to tell you to send the letter. So she finally did it. And she said they end up having the best conversation they've ever had in their life. Now they're like the best of friends, like it's taking their relationship to a whole new level. And it's not, that's not the purpose of sending it, but there's so much good that can come from taking the extra step of actually sending the letter and making sure that person is aware of how you felt and what you were going through. Now, in regards to knowing when you've properly healed, number one thing is when you can embrace being fully vulnerable with somebody. All right, if vulnerability still scares you, you have not healed enough, all right. You've got to be willing to open your heart. We can't say we want love and then put walls up around our heart and be afraid to give it to someone. You're contradicting yourself, you're working against yourself. So, you've got to be willing to be vulnerable. You also have to make sure any negative perceptions that you've held onto due to past experiences you've done away with them. So, for example, if you have been saying all men are dogs because you've been hurt by so many men, well, you can't be out there dating and still screaming all men are dogs. That's not going to work in your favor. You've got to accept that good men exist and you can receive a great man, that you deserve a great man. So, when you have a more positive outlook and way of thinking and listen, we're going to all have our negative thought moments. that happens. But your dominant or more consistent thought pattern is positive, hopeful, and things of that nature. Now we can say you're ready to get back out there.

How important is the language or the inner thoughts, the actual physical words we use in the inner language, the inner dialogue, in terms of attracting or finding the right partner?

It's extremely important. We hear it all the time, words are power. And the reality is that the words you speak to yourself, the thoughts you have, they will... Whether knowingly or unknowingly to you, they will dictate your energy. The energy that you give off to people or the way that your spirit comes across to individuals. And so, you can put on a happy face. But if your thought is negative, pessimistic, all right. And dwelling in this, then your energy will still be negative. All right, what you do on the surface isn't going to be able to hide that. Which is why you have some people who swear well, I'm not a bad person. Yeah, but you're not a positive person, all right. You can be good people but no, you are miserable. And it's not even just you're miserable like you're dwelling in it in your life but you give off miserable energy. And so, who's going to want to be around that? Who's going to want to commit to that? At the most, they might want to have sex with you But they're not going to want to tie themselves to you in a committed long-term relationship or marriage.

And people can feel that energy. I don't care if you're a man, woman, or in between, you can feel the energy of someone. And if you haven't healed properly yourself, you may be attracted to a wounded individual to then try to find some validation or try to find some connection there. And that's why it's important for you to heal so that you can fully see the energy around you and see who is a potential great match for you. because if you haven't healed you're going to keep attracting negativity and repeating certain patterns, is that correct?

That is absolutely correct. And if you talk to any person who has healed they can tell you how they feel energy even more now where they become more aware. It's so much easier to see past the facades that so many people are putting up because now healing allows us to get more in tune with our spirit. And by getting more in tune with our spirit we get more in tune with everyone's spirit. because technically, we are all connected through the spirit, all right? And so, it's easier to be in touch with that when you get away, get rid of the blockage of trauma, past disappointments and hurts, disappointments, things of that nature.

It's powerful stuff, man. I'm still trying to give to my, one of my first questions, which is what's the best way to meet someone these days and online dating? But it sounds like that's so far ahead of what you need to be thinking about first, like have I started to heal? Are there people who have hurt me? Are there people that I need to apologize to, you know, all these different things. It's almost like you got to do the work before you can start doing the work of finding someone.

Absolutely.

So what is what is really to be rich? How much are we talking about?

Because just money if we're talking about money.

Yeah.

You know, I think you probably need 20.

20 million. Then you're rich.

You need 20 million. You probably need 20. Now the problem with this, okay, this is where everybody hates the podcast now. So see, the problem is nobody wants to like confront the real magnitude of the mathematics. And that's why people are like, that's ridiculous. No, what you're saying is you can't imagine how to get to 20 million. See, I wish somebody had told me this in accounting. I went to accounting for, I spent five years getting an accounting degree. I only went there for one reason. I thought they were going to teach.

Me how to account. I thought it was a freaking money course.

Okay? I'm thinking in the fifth year, dude, it took me five years to get out of this course. I'm thinking, this year they're going to teach me about the money. There's nothing about money. And the only reason I went to that course was figure out, dude, how.

Do you make money?

How do you keep money? How do you multiply money? The basic money class. So, like, if you just do the math, a guy's like, oh man, 80 grand, I'm good. 80 grand. Another guy's like, 100 grand and I'm good. They haven't done the math. Another person says, if I just make a, if I just have a million dollars, I'm good. but you haven't done the math. The actual math. You know, like how much money is that really? You know, 100 grand in Los Angeles, 13,000 goes to the state. You have $87,000. Okay? Half that goes to the federal government. You're at $42,500. I've done the math. Yeah. Okay. You're at 42-5. You go to Whole Foods once a week just to take care of your little baby girl and your wife. You're broke. Okay? So you're broke. You're broke, okay? And we hadn't handled the health care issue. Trumpcare, Obamacare, you don't care if you don't get your money, right? I mean, that's the facts. So most people have never done the math. There is no school on it. There's no class on it.

Why is that?

Why, man?

So frustrating.

But do you know how many people the middle class support? How many bad, awful groups? You know, I mean, just think about it, man. Like if the middle class, if 215 million people in America knew the truth, And they weren't sitting there saying, but look at my two cars. Look at my two little girls and I got dresses for them. And look at people in Ethiopia, they're starving. You went over to Africa, you know, compared their situation to our middle class. Everybody here is rich, including the guy on the street corner that's a panhandler. Absolutely.

Right?

So why is the freaking killer question? Why have so many people been put under the spell of the middle class? That is who determines who's the president of a country. Look what happened in this last election. That middle class is starting to get a little edgy right now. They're starting to be like, I ain't had a good job. I ain't had a freaking pay raise. You keep talking about unemployment going down. Where's my money? I don't get anything at the bank. I earn a half a percent at the bank. So your mom, my mom, my mom, I watched my mom earn 12% at the bank. She earned 1% a month on her money. So the battle cry back then was save your money because you could earn something right save your money today. What do you get nothing? Nothing lose money you lose money okay?

Yeah, so inflation is yeah, don't take a risk.

Don't take a chance diversify why why would I diversify? Why rich people do not diversify? Okay, they got the wealthiest people on this planet when they went into trains They went all in on the trains when Henry Ford went into cars he didn't diversify. He went all in on cars Elon Musk. He's going all in on solar Right? That's how you make hits. But the middle class is taught what? Put a little here, put a little here, put a little here, put a little here. Put 27 different things out there. Why? Who benefits from 27 investments? Those people.

Wall Street. Yeah. Okay.

Start early.

Start early.

Start early. Okay? Get a Keo account. Get an IRA.

Who benefits?

Freaking Wall Street. Dude, all that money gets pushed over.

There for 30 years.

Mm-.

So, so where do you put your main, your money then? Well, let me just say this.

Yeah. If they offer it to you, okay? It's like, it's like, it's like insurance in Vegas at a blackjack table. You know, when you got you, they got an Ace up, and they're like, you want insurance? Dude, if they offer it to you in Vegas, this is what my mama taught me. She's like, if they offer it to you, don't take it.

So.

So if Wall Street offers something to you, it's probably not good for you. So where do I put my money? I put my money. Number one, where I have total control. number two, where it is indestructible. Like the investment has to be indestructible. So I'm. I'm indestructible, right? I can invest in me and I'm in control of that investment. That's the first that I would tell everybody. Like, don't even invest. Don't even think about a financial investment until you have 100 Grand set aside. And until then, you got five, you got 10, you got 22, you got 50. Just keep reinvesting that money in yourself. Courses, classes, whatever. And until until you're taking the action necessary, the money will show up at the bank if you keep investing in you, the vehicle. And then the second thing is where the money goes. Okay, the money's got to go into something indestructible. No technology can wipe it out. And it needs to be very simple for me, like so simple that I can explain in one sentence.

So what's that?

Well, it's not Bitcoin because I can't get my head wrapped around the cryptocurrency and most people can't explain it to me.

But you're receiving payments from Bitcoin.

I will take. I will take your crypto. Yeah, I'll take it, but I'm not going to invest in it. Yeah, I'll take anything, dude.

I'll take your donkey.

Yeah, sure. So my office feels differently about that, but because we got. We had this phone call, like, hey, will you take 50, 000 in Bitcoin? And Sherry was like, no, Jared's like, no. I'm like, hey, dude, take that money, son.

Mm-.

Okay, take that freaking... If it's that or nothing... Take it, man. Don't tell people no. Figure out how to make it all right to say yes to it. So, what was your question?

You said...

So what are you putting it in then?

Yeah, I mean, I load up.

Everybody knows I'm loading up in real estate. You know, I buy apartment buildings. And so the simple thing is I buy a place where somebody has to live. They rent it from me and they're gonna rent it from me for years. and that's going to pay down the debt on that place. I don't own homes. I don't buy houses. I buy rental property that people have to live in, that they want to live in because they're great properties. They're really nice properties. And it's affordable living. It's not this $5,000 a month, you know, stuff that you live in. It's affordable, $1,100 a month, great neighborhoods, great properties, safe environments. We go in and improve them. fix them up, happy living, take care of people. We don't abuse anybody. I don't do any government programs, right? Even though there's a lot of money in them. And then, and I know that money will be there for my kids 30 years from now. I mean, that money will be there 100 years from now.

So you put a hundred percent of your investments in that or either in yourself, your team.

Yeah, yeah. Or real estate in my business. In myself, my business. Every Surplus Penny twice a year, I go broke.

Twice a year.

I'm like, put it all in. Really?

Into real estate. Yeah.

Wow.

And then it's gone.

And then you have to reach. I gotta go back in. I gotta go. But literally, I'm like, like real estate guys. There's the same. Real estate guys. Don't ever go to dinner with them because they never have any cash on them. I'm broke right now.

Really?

Like, yeah, we're going all in right now. So I go buy a big unit. Our big units. I exhaust my reserves, and, and then we got to go back out and say, okay, let's go again. Really? Let's go. Let's go sell a book. Let's go sell a, let's go get a millionaire booklet out there in the marketplace because there's nobody. There's nobody that I know in our space that. That will push as hard for a nine dollar product as I will. I don't know anyone, right?

Nobody.

I don't know anyone.

Nobody.

I'll go from one.

Maybe.

You know what?

Timmy. Tim Sykes.

Yeah.

He pushes pretty hard. Did you know he won't. He won't drop down to, like, a.

A three dollar product, dude. I don't know. Yeah, maybe not.

But, I mean, you can come to.

One of my seminars. You'll see me at the back table. Freaking selling $2 stickers.

So why is that?

Because it's a flow, dude. It keeps the flow going, okay? It's about money's about, it's about, it's about a, what is this? It's a cycle. Circulation, circulation. It's, it's, it's, this has to happen for you to have money. And the bigger the circulation, you know, I was in Australia, I was on this dive. It was a nine-day dive, live aboard. We didn't see land for eight days.

Wow.

Dude, I saw so much activity. underneath, right? At 80 feet and 100 feet, like there was economies without any money, tremendous economies where they're trading food, right? I mean, there's all this activity, giant tunas. I mean, a group or bigger than this wall right here, where there's this big, this food, right? There's this just a cycle of food and ecosystem. And, and that's what the economy is. The economy is basically an ecosystem of people. that either have confidence or don't have confidence, you know, screaming and yelling. That's why I like New York. I love New York 'cause you can feel that energy. I like a circus because, you know, you got the guy Hawking. You know, Ed McMahon? You remember Ed McMahon? Okay, Johnny Carson. He was the opener for Johnny Carson. A lot of your, how old are you?

34.

Yeah, so you probably don't even know who Ed McMahon was. Ed McMahon, freaking, he was the opener for Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson preceded Jay Leno. Yeah. And the other day, the Late Show or whatever, right? Yeah, exactly.

He was the ultimate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, Ed McMahon was his opener.

They got him hyped up.

Yeah.

Here's Johnny. Yeah. Right.

That went on for 30 years, dude. I grew up with that in my household.

Right.

So black and white. And Ed McMahon, his first job was a barker in a circus. where you'd be like, right over here. You see them in the Home Depots, right, to the Vitamix machine. Ladies and gentlemen, come on over. Come on over, okay? Have something to write. They're pitchmen. They're, they're dragon audiences, which is such a powerful thing. And so many people today are unwilling to do that. Like, no, no, I'm not going to do that. You know, look at the actors and actresses in this town that wait for the audition, wait for the phone to ring rather than show up cold to an audition and say, I know I'm not on the list. They have to see me. That takes balls.

Balls.

Big time. Okay.

Wow. So you're selling two dollar stickers and 200, 000 programs in anything in between. It doesn't matter.

And in November, we raised 15 million dollars for the real estate. So.

So for a fund you're doing, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you who do you know that can go from one dollar to 15 million bucks in a freaking, in, in, in literally, like, just that fast?

Wow.

One thing is because I, I, I'm an ethical person. Like, like, I think people need that sticker. I think people need that book. I think people need to invest with me because I'm not going to rip them off. I'm not. I am in control of that property. Somebody has to be in control. So to the degree that you are a person, I believe Is ethically like clean hands is to the degree that they can pitch full on so you can sell hardcore as you want, as.

Much as you want. And if you can't, if you can't.

There'S something either in your present or in your past that you're still uncomfortable with. Something.

Yeah.

Like you feel like you're too pitchy ever?

Do you feel like, oh, maybe I was too aggressive or. Yeah, yeah, I've heard that before.

Maybe I've been, I've heard that before from people that didn't buy from me. only from people that didn't buy from me. People that buy from me never complain about me being too pushy.

What do you think about the people that never buy from you but are following you and commenting?

I just either hadn't pitched it right, hadn't found the right time to pitch.

Them or.

They haven't seen the right product yet.

Right.

Or maybe they're never gonna buy from me.

When I hear the word mindfulness, to me what it really means is intentionality. What I mean by that is are you crafting, designing and intentionally creating your life or are you just coasting in the passenger seat of your life which is just dragging you and driving you wherever it's taking and so it's the difference between being the driver or being in the passenger seat. And so to me, living intentionally is what allows you to live a life of by design. And so I'll give you an example of what mindfulness can look like. There's something in the book that I talk about called the three S's, which are sights, sense and sounds. Now, if you think about that, we're exposed to sights, sense and sounds every single day.

Yeah.

Every single day. But how many of us have crafted those to be sight, sense and sounds that we want in our life? So this is what I realized when we were monks, one of the most important things was, what was the first thing you saw, the sight, when you woke up?

And right now, most people are probably seeing their screen.

Yeah, I think 80% of people look at their screens first thing in the morning and the last thing at the night. So you've seen your screen first thing in the morning, but what are you really seeing? You're seeing everyone else's priorities. you're seeing everyone else's issues and challenges, you're seeing everyone else's messages to you, which means you're already starting your day off reactively. But what if you started your morning looking at a painting that inspired you, or a picture of a loved one that brought joy in your heart, or your favorite quote by Lewis or by anyone else that when you read that in the morning, you were like, oh yeah, I feel in charge today to make a difference in the world. So imagine the first thing you saw in the morning was something inspiring. How much would your day That's mindfulness. Mindfulness is being intentional and mindful about what you are exposing yourself to. Let's talk about sounds next. So sounds were something that I started to study actually much later from a modern life perspective. But when we were monks, we would wake up to birds, we would wake up to water, we'd wake up to gongs or cymbals. Chants. Exactly. Which are all beautiful sounds. The crazy thing is all of us wake up to something called an alarm.

Now, I'll write this slide.

Literally, I don't know why anyone would want to wake up to an alarm. Why would you want to wake up alarmed? It means now your system is alarming. Like, why would you want to do that? Why would you want to wake up in shock? In a state of like a jolt? I don't think that's a positive way to wake up. So changing the sound that you wake up to. Now, I'm not saying that everyone can wake up to nature sounds. Maybe you're one of those people who just hit the snooze button again. But what if you woke up to a sound or a song that brought you joy? Now, when I lived in New York for two years between 2016 and 2018, I started to feel quite exhausted by the end of the day. And I was really looking into, like, why is it that I feel tired? And I started to realize I came across this term called cognitive load. And what it means is that A lot of the sounds that you hear in New York City are sounds that are insignificant for your mind to process. Drilling, construction work, taxis honking, driving, cars.

Screeching, scratching, people yelling at each other.

People yelling at each other on the streets. All of that sound is called cognitive load, where your brain is now trying to make sense of meaningless sound.

It's also just like, should I be afraid? this is a loud sound. There's my brain going to fight or flight, like I need to protect myself. So you're always being alarmed.

Yeah, exactly. And you hear sirens, the amount of sirens that I remember hearing on the streets. Now, when you hear sirens, sirens have an emotional trigger and they have an emotional response to them. So think about your day. Think about when you come home from work. Well, now you're working from home. Right. What sound do you want to hear when you're working? What sound? sound do you want to hear at the end of the day? When you sound design your life, that's called mindfulness. That's being intentional. And then finally, scent. Scent is such a powerful sense that we're not even aware. How many of you, when you smell your favorite food, can't already wait to eat it? Like, you can almost taste it. You can taste it already without just through scent. Why is it that every time you walk into Yeah, my favorite, yeah, I think pizza has one of the best sets.

Well, your wife, Roddy's got some amazing food. That was amazing set. When I walked into the kitchen last.

Week, I was like, mmm, this is amazing. That was for you, that was special. That was for you, that was a good meal. That was a really good meal. She really appreciated that you love to eat too.

She was happy, her heart was full. Exactly. Bring a former jock into your house.

And you'll clear all the food out. She was like, I've never I've never seen someone eat that much. And I was like, you know, this like big American dude. I was like, this is like, you know, he can eat. And so, no, it was great. She was so happy that you appreciated it so much. She really appreciated that.

But the scent is important in your life.

When you walk into a massage spa, it's the scent, the eucalyptus, the lavender, the sandalwood, it puts you in a peaceful state. Dude, scent puts you in zen without trying. and so mindfulness is intentionally creating a life that makes you feel what you want to feel without having to just create the feeling from inside. You may say, Jay, you know, I really struggle trying to be positive. I struggle trying to deal with anxiety. I struggle trying to be focused. Your sight, sense and sounds can help you do that.

Yeah.

And you start creating an environment where you naturally feel that. Like today, when I walked into your studio, I saw your books, I saw these motivational quotes, I saw a boxing glove, and it's like all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm in an uplifting environment.

Right?

So you already get triggered.

Exactly. Yeah, I think a friend of mine mentioned one time on the podcast, Chris Lee said, you, want to create an environment like a rainforest where things can thrive and grow, as opposed to having an environment like a desert where things go to die.

That's beautiful.

And if you have sites scents and sounds that are like a desert for your life, for your heart, and it's going to be hard to grow those things from your heart. But if you created an environment of a rainforest where things can grow, water, nature, cool air, things like that, then you can really start to cultivate that growth. You mentioned about creating and designing your life. How much of the world do you think we receive by being here? And how much of the world do we create ourselves?

Yeah, that's a beautiful question. It's a complete dynamic dance between what the Vedic tradition would call fate and free will. So fate is what is already created for you and a good example would be the place you were born, the type of family you grew up in, the socioeconomic background you had. It was already there when you you walked into the world. But within that, you had choices where your Free Will came about. You had the choice to either do what everyone in your neighborhood did or to do something different. You had the choice to have a relationship with a particular person or not. So what happens is that we're constantly creating new spaces from which we have another choice.

Right.

And so you kind of see as this Dynamic. between, okay, now I'm in this situation and now what is my choice in this situation? So I would say, I'm not saying it's equal. I'm saying it's a dynamic balance and a switching process where you're constantly creating a new level and then now in that level you have a next choice.

Because we didn't have the choice to be created here. We were here and that wasn't our choice. Now everything after that is our choice, right?

Yeah. and there are some, obviously there are some traditions and I'm a big diver into like reincarnation and past lives. So according to the beliefs of reincarnation of past lives, you have at some point made a choice to be here. But taking it more simplistically, the truth is that when you're brought into a situation, it's the best analogy that I've heard and it's been told for years is of a father is an alcoholic, one of the sons that he has decides to become an alcoholic because his father's an alcoholic. The other son decides to never drink alcohol because his father's an alcoholic.

Right.

So they were exposed to the same situation and same scenario.

Same environment.

Same environment. But they both made different choices based on their experience. And that's the choice element. That's the element that we should be trying to empower in our lives because we can constantly say, I'm limited by my environment. or I've been restricted by my environment. And hey, it's true. There are so many of us that have been limited and restricted. But by now you repeating that, you are going to repeat that restriction in your life.

How much of a positive environment supports us in our growth or holds us back? There are some people who have the perfect family situation, resources, beautiful backyards in nature, who are lazy. And there are others who have, you know, divorced parents, abusive parents, abusive friends, an environment of a desert. Yeah. And they figure out a way to thrive.

Totally.

How much importance does our environment play in our overall success?

If you look at the examples that you just shared and you really analyze life, you'd see very little because you see people craft their own life. So a good example for me is that when I came back from living in the ashram and there were other people who may have been monks who'd also left the path, and I came back to a not financially successful or supportive family. So my family doesn't have abundant wealth and couldn't necessarily have taken care of me or paid for me forever. And I had to figure out my own life. And that to me was a a great sense of impetus and incentive to go and figure it out and learn new skills and network and meet people. And I saw other friends who'd parents had, like, a property portfolio with, like, 10 properties ready to hand them over. They had a BMW the second that they came out, whatever, you know, from their own life.

Yeah.

Or I even have friends that had all of that and didn't become monks and didn't even find careers. So I've also got friends that I went to school with. that today don't even have careers, even though their parents were really well established.

Right.

Which has all of these examples have continued me to believe that we truly have influence in our more than our environment. Our environment affects us for sure. It plants seeds and weeds into our life, but there is still a choice. And, and I think even if you feel there isn't a choice, simply by accepting that there is, it means you have a chance to get out of there.

And I think that's what- Because if you don't accept that there is, then.

You'Re just gonna stay stuck. Correct. There have been so many times in my life and there's a beautiful quote from Edison. I don't think I said this last time, but if I did, it's worth repeating. He said that when you believe you've exhausted all options, remember this, you haven't. And the reason why I love that is your mind continuously feels stuck when it's tried the obvious. and that's why a lot of creativity and focus studies say that the first 10 ideas that come to your mind are never the most interesting. It's when you get into the 11th idea that you start breaking the pattern. And so if someone asks you, oh, what's your best business idea? Your first 10 ideas are probably not that innovative. And so the mind constantly gets stuck on that train, and you've got to keep reminding yourself that there is another door. There could be another pathway. I was thinking about a piece of advice that so so one of my closest spiritual mentors who was in London, I knew him since I was probably like 12 and properly since I was 18. He passed away this year from stage four brain cancer. And he'd had brain cancer for about, I think, like three, three, four years now. And so I hadn't really had a real interaction with him for the past few years because every time I saw him, he wasn't fully functioning in his short-term memory. His long-term memory was there, but short-term memory wasn't. And I remember speaking to him probably about seven, eight years ago and asking him the question. I said to him, you know, I've got so many ideas. There's so many things I could do. Where do I start? And he said this beautiful thing to me. He said, you, know what? Your role should be to open up every door possible. And he said, let the world close the doors you're not meant to walk through and walk through the ones that remain open.

Oh.

And what I realize is most of us are just not opening up enough doors because we think we only have the option of two doors. We look at life as binary, zero and one, zero and one, right?

It's just this or that.

A or B, this or that. And I mean, I think you'd say this too about you and every guest you ever had on, I don't think life is ever this or that. It's like this, that and that, and maybe that and that. And there's always a gap.

Of course. The challenge that people have that I've sensed a lot a lot is the fear of criticism when you go after something that you weren't supposed to do or that people don't think you're supposed to do. Why do so many people fear criticism from peers, family, friends, the media? Why is that such a big fear and how do we overcome criticism from others?

Psychologically, we feel a sense of safety and security when we think people agree with us. Right, that is just psychologically true that we would rather avoid conflict and sit in a space where we agree and therefore we have something called confirmation bias and the echo chamber where we keep surrounding ourselves with thoughts and ideas that are similar and reaffirm our beliefs. Now, I think that you can have that and at the same time entertain ideas that you're not sure about yet. and so one of my favorite examples was MIT did this study where they asked people which person was more creative and innovative and they showed two charts. One chart was employee A and the other chart was employee B. The chart for employee A, all of the people they knew knew each other and knew them back. So it was almost like a closed loop. And employee B, they knew lots of people who didn't know each other and they found that people who have more people in their network who don't know each other are more likely to be creative and productive.

Really?

Why is that?

Because they expose you to opposing ideas and they may counteract how you think. So one of my favorite examples of this is a conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and one of his mentors. So Mark Zuckerberg told this story at the Facebook headquarters a few years back. I wasn't there. I've seen it on video. I'm sure it's available. And he talks about how when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook in 2009, he approached his mentor and his mentor happened to be Steve Jobs. Wow. Pretty cool.

Wow.

Pretty cool.

I wish.

Really?

Yeah.

It's so cool, man. And so anyway, so Mark Zuckerberg goes to Steve Jobs and he says, I'm.

Struggling with the direction of Facebook.

Remember at that time Facebook was five years old. There was no fan pages. I don't think. I don't think it was. There was no creators. There was. I I think there were fan pages. It was very much used by university students at that stage. Like, I think it was mainly like Ivy Leagues, college kids, and I don't even think it was international in a massive way, very early days, and now we can't even think of that. But 2009, I mean, you know, you just about had the iPhone and just about had Instagram and YouTube. So he ran up to Steve Jobs and he said, you know, I'm struggling with the direction of Facebook.

What do I do?

Now, Steve Jobs at that time obviously was already the founder of one of the biggest brands on the planet and obviously the brand still is. He had access to investors, he had access to business coaches, I'm sure he had access to life coaches, he had access to health experts.

Health experts.

He had access to anything. Like I don't think there was any scientist, whatever. Scientists, PhDs, I don't think there's anyone in the world who Steve Jobs couldn't have called up at the time. And Steve Jobs said something amazing. He said, you know what Mark? I think you should go and live in an ashram in India. He did not. He did.

Oh, way.

He goes.

And when you go to live in.

The ashram in India, that's where if you spend some time there, that's where you'll find your answer. Shut up.

And Mark did it.

No way. Went to the ashram.

It's a true story.

Not long. I. I believe he was there for.

I believe.

I've seen two online. I've seen two versions of the exact time he was there. I've seen some people said to have. It was a couple of days or a week or some people said it's a month. So I think it's hazy how much time he actually spent there. But he went. And he says that based on that experience, that's where he found the direction of Facebook, to be connecting people. Now, the reason why I love that story is because it's the unobvious alternative random connection. And when Harvard did a study of 3,000 executives, they looked at and asked them, what's the number one skill for being a good leader? and a lot of people would say communication, a lot of people would say vision, vision, strategy, humility. And the number one answer that they got from 3, 000 Executives was the one word, which is called associating. And what that means is the ability to spot patterns where everyone else doesn't see them. And that's the connect that real leaders can spot patterns and Connections in anomalies. So most people be like, what does an ashram got to do with tech platform.

Right.

But that is where you expand your mind to find answers that you never expected.

How important is creating alone time with noises, people, busy work to allow your mind to expand? Is that the only time in that silence? I think you mentioned it. Silence to hear in between the lines.

Yeah.

Is that where we start to hear what we're supposed to be creating, where we're supposed to be heading, our mission.

That's, yeah, I'm really glad you brought that back. I wanted to get back to that. So when we talk about, there's a beautiful statement by David Lynch, who's movie producer and a deep meditator, and he says that prayer is how you talk to God, and meditation is how God talks to you. And whether you believe in God or the universe or spirit or divine, whatever it the point is that there is a dialogue in a conversation.

Prayer is like you're speaking, you're saying.

Here's what I want.

Here's how I feel. Help me.

Help me, yeah. And meditation is more receiving. Receiving, yeah. And so I love that statement because I think it makes it very clear that we have to have a dialogue with the universe. We have to have a dialogue with people in our lives. We have to have a dialogue and there's both giving and receiving. So when I talk about hearing in between the lines, the best example I can give you Louis is let's take a look at you and your relationship and mine and my wife's relationship. One of us is always traveling.

Yeah.

So you travel, your partner travels. I travel, my wife travels. Sometimes we're missing each other. Imagine you've got really busy and hectic. Do you think, and anyone listening or watching, you can ask the same question. If you were really busy and hectic and stressed out, do you think your partner feels comfortable to tell you how they feel and get your attention.

If I'm busy, stressed out, overwhelmed, will my partner tell me how I feel about themselves or about-- yeah.

Do you think they would feel confident to be like, Louis, I need to tell you something really important.

I don't think they would.

They wouldn't. They really wouldn't because-- They don't want.

To stress you out more.

They don't want to stress you out more.

You're not present, all these things.

Exactly that. And so what happens is, when you're still, your mind and body actually get to speak to you and give you signals of how they feel. And so when you're still, that's when you notice that ache in your foot that you haven't noticed for a month. Sometimes when you slow down, that's when you get sick because your body wasn't allowing itself to be sick because you were pushing it to get through stuff. And so just like your partners can't communicate with you until you slow down, your body and mind can't communicate with you until you still. and so there's a beautiful Buddhist teaching that says what movement does for the body, stillness does for the mind. And so when we find that space, stillness and solitude, you really are able to hear your deepest desires and challenges, your physical pains and areas of growth. It's one of the reasons why when people meditate, they feel sleepy afterwards and they they think they're doing it wrong, but actually they're doing it right. Meditation just told you you needed more sleep. You needed rest. Yeah, meditation was just a signal.

So sometimes when I meditate with people.

That I'm coaching, they're like, pass out. Some of them will be like, oh.

I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry Jay.

I'm just feeling so tired. And I'm like, no, then sleep, then rest. Yeah, that's what your body's telling you because you finally listened. And some people are like, oh Jay, I feel so energized. And I'm like, yeah, because you allowed.

Yourself to be in line with your body and now your body's saying that.

You feel energized and that's great. You've got that energy, go work out, go build something.

Or you've cleared out those negative thoughts or you've let go of those distractions, resentment and so you're not feeling this weight so you feel lighter.

Correct and so that stillness and silence is one of my favorite ways for you to actually build that relationship with hearing your inner voice.

How do you manage your own with the success you get. You know, you've had success in multiple areas of your career, from a seal to an author, to a business leader, to an executive coach and leadership coach. How do you manage it when you are training CEOs from companies that have a hundred thousand plus employees and you're number one on the list and top podcast? How do you manage it daily?

Because I've seen over and over again through my own experiences through the books that I cover on my podcast, the books I've read in my life. If you want to open yourself up for a massive downfall, just let your ego get out of control.

Really?

If you want to let that happen, yeah, let your ego get out of control. So every single day for me, it starts at ground zero. I've got to go forward with an open mind, with a humble mind looking at the world. You know, it's classic. Like when I get asked a question, I don't think to myself, oh, I know the answer to this. And I get asked questions all the time. And generally when I hear a question, 99% of the questions that I hear, I've heard in some form before. But I don't go, I've heard this before, I already know the answer. I say, okay, well let me hear this. What detail is this person talking about? What angle is this person coming at it from? What can I learn from this question? How can I assess this question? so everything that I look at, I try and look at from a humble perspective. And if you don't do that, it's going to be a problem. I mean, even when you're asking me questions about God, right? You're asking me questions about my beliefs. It's like, hey, here's my beliefs. I'm humble and I'm listening and my mind is open and this is what I've seen and this is what I can tell you about it. I'm not sitting here jumping up and down saying you should believe this or.

You should believe that.

I'm saying you should stay you should keep an open mind about what's going on in the world. I am. I think you should do the same thing.

Wow. How do you... So, it's a mindset. Every morning you wake up with an open mind. Yeah.

And I don't want to get in this whole like morning routine where I go and look in the mirror and say, Be humble. No, I don't do that. Like, I'm not... That's not... That's not me. But when, you know, you wake up and I'm just saying the way I go about my my business and my life is to say to myself, okay, well, I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong about this. You know, it's, I mean, even the book that I wrote, follow on to extreme ownership, the book is called the dichotomy of leadership. And what's interesting about this book, so the dichotomy of leadership is like, you can't be extreme in one direction or the other, right? You can't be, if you're in a leadership position, you talk all the time, right? Obviously, as a boss, you need to communicate, you need to talk to your people. But if you talk too much, guess what happens? People start stop listening to you. You're putting out too much information. They don't know what's important, what's not. So that's bad. You can't go too far in that direction. The other direction is you can't not talk enough. And now no one knows what's going on. No one knows what's happening. So you have to be balanced. And that's the whole idea of the dichotomy of leadership. But probably the first dichotomy in leadership that I had to say to myself, you know what? There's another side to this is I used to tell the young SEAL officers that you have to be aggressive. You got to be default aggressive. That's how you got to be. Because when something's going on, you got to be aggressive to make that, get that problem solved. And if you're not being aggressive, then you're hesitating. Well, then you can get killed.

Okay, so there you go.

And that's what I used to tell guys. And as a, that's extreme. That's an extreme. Yes, that's the problem with it. And so the question is, can you be too aggressive?

Yes, absolutely.

You can, hey, there's a machine gun nest over there, let's attack it. So you charge up the hill and everyone dies. You've been too aggressive. So what you have to do is you have to be balanced. And that's probably so even as I had these kind of mantras, like default aggressive, can you do too much of that? Yes, you can. So you end up with this, what do you end up with? Can you be too passive?

Absolutely.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, now we're not making any progress. now we're getting crushed by the enemy because we didn't maneuver. Okay, so that's bad. So where do you want to be?

You want to be balanced.

Even the idea of extreme ownership. Can you take too much ownership? Yes.

Yes, you can. Really? Yes, you can.

But I thought you said you need to take ownership of everything. 2 different things. Listen to this. If you're working for me and I say, okay, here's the mission that I want you to accomplish tonight. Here's the people I want you to work with. you to take. Here's the weapons I want you to bring. Here's the vehicles I want you to bring. Here's the, here's the route I want you to use to get to the target. Here's the method I want you to use to secure the target. Here's the route I want you to do to get back. So that's the plan.

Now, you take ownership and, and go execute.

Now, can you really take ownership of that plan? If someone else gave you the whole thing. I mean, I gave you the whole thing, right? Is that your plan? No, no. It's my plan.

So when you go in the field.

And now you come up against an obstacle and you're executing my plan. What's your attitude?

Well, it's not my plan.

It's... Yeah. And you're at an obstacle now and you're like, hey, Jocko didn't think of this.

Right, right.

So now you just back away and you come back and you say, hey, we failed the mission because you didn't think of this. You didn't think of this option. Yeah, yeah.

Right.

So that's me taking too much ownership. So what I need to do is I say, hey, here's the plan or here's the mission. How do you want do it. And now, if you're a good leader, you'll go get with your people and you'll say, oh, hey guys, here's the plan. Or here's the mission that we have to accomplish. How do you guys want to do it? Now, you all come up with a good plan. You come back to me and you say, Here's the plan. And I say, that looks pretty good.

Go execute.

And now, when you hit an obstacle in the field, what's your attitude? I need to adapt and adjust. What's your plan? You'll make it happen. -You came up with this. -Yes. So, can you take too much ownership? The answer is yes, you can. So, with just just about every, you can name a trait, right? You can name a trait from a leadership perspective that you think is a positive trait and you'll immediately see that if you go too far with it, it'll become bad. It'll become bad. So you have to be balanced. So even as I came up with the dichotomy of leadership, I had to be humble enough to say to myself, you know what? Being aggressive is really, really good most of the time. But if you're too aggressive, that's not good.

Yeah.

So like you said earlier, you're constantly questioning everything. And to me, what that is, that's humility. That's you being humble enough to say, you know what? I really don't understand this that well. And there's some things in my life that I don't get. Whereas opposed to you walking around saying, I already got this figured out. I already know what I'm doing. I already know where I'm going. I already know what God is specifically. I already know what's gonna happen to me when I die. All those things. But instead you're questioning everything which in my mind is a positive thing.

-Yeah. That's good to know. -Is there anything that is missing in your life? You feel like something's missing?

I know. I feel like I'm living a pretty good life right now. I mean, I'm totally blessed. I mean, I got a great family. I got great kids. I got a great company. I got working with great people. No, healthy. Healthy, you know, I get to work out, train, I'm feeling good. Living the dream, man. Yeah, living the dream. So you never feel like there's something.

Missing for you right now. If there is, you're working towards it, you're working on the next book, you're building the business.

Yeah, well there's a difference between something missing and am I satisfied? Yeah, right? Because I'm not satisfied. I mean, I always want to go, like I never get done with the end of the day and go, Cool, mission accomplished. Like it's like you got to be close.

Yeah, yeah. So you're not satisfied but you feel like nothing's missing. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd say that's a fair statement.

What brings you the most joy in your life and makes you smile the most?

Oh, I mean my kids. My kids are cool. They're funny. You know, my wife and kids. Yeah, my wife and kids are cool and funny and we have a good time and lots of inside jokes and all that.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, and I trained Jiu Jitsu and that that's very fun and surf, that's fun.

Yeah.

Guitar, that's fun.

How old are your kids again?

20, 18, 16 and 10.

And what's the biggest lesson you learned about being a about yourself being a father to them?

Your kids are not going to be who you want them to be.

You can't train them to be they're.

Going who they are. And you can give them some course corrections a little bit, but they're going to be who they are. And the more you try and force them into what you want them to be, the harder they're going to push back and rebel.

-Wow. -Did you learn that the hard way.

Or did you get... -Yeah.

-So, you tried to train them in.

A certain way or... -Yeah, somewhat. And it's pretty obvious obvious. Like, from my perspective, I was having a similar conversation with a bunch of Executives, and. And they were. We were talking. We, you know, we went down the road because we're having dinner now, so we're done talking about work. But now everyone wants to ask me about, you know, parenting and everything else.

And.

And I said at the table, I'm like, hey, who here ended up doing exactly what their parents wanted them to do? And there's, like, one guy out of 10, right? Because most people, you know, your parents are wanting to do this thing. And you do something else. I mean, I joined the Navy when I was 18 years old. Like that's... That probably wasn't even on the checklist of top 20 things that my parents wanted me to do. Not even in the same ballpark, right?

They didn't want you to go to war.

Yeah, they didn't want that. So here you go. Yeah, see ya. That's... So the more you try and kind of pigeonhole your kids into being something that you want them to be, the worse off it's gonna be. It's the same thing with leadership. It's the same thing with leadership. If I'm trying to force my plan down my team's throat, the more resistance I'm going to get from it. Whereas if I plant the seed and I allow that plan to grow with them, the better it's going to be received. Like when people ask me, how do you get people to buy in? Well, you allow them to come up with a plan yourself.

What if in your mind you're like, you really know that plan is not that good.

It depends on how bad it is. How bad is it? Or what's at stake? If you're working for me and you're going to meet with a client and you have a bad pitch that you're going to give them and the client is some tiny client that I think is a low probability of us working with and the contract doesn't really matter, I'd be like, hey, hey, give it a shot. Here's a couple. I might give you a couple adjustments and give you some coaching on it and then you go and you do your thing and you come back and you're like, oh no, we didn't land it. And I say, well, what do you think? Let's debrief. And now we talk about it and say, you know, you said this and you said that. Here's some other ways to go about it. I might even actually have you do it to me. So then I could sit there and take some notes and say, Hey, here's some other things that might have worked. Now, if you're going to meet with a big client that really was going to add value to our company, I'm going to either step in and be like, okay, let's think about that. what's their reaction going to be? And by the way, that's what I'm not going to say, no, don't do it that way. I'm going to say, tell me that again and let me give you some objections that you might hear from them. And all of a sudden, I'll let you come up with the solutions. Even though I'm sitting there going, yeah, what he needs to say is this. No, I'll let you come up with the solution. So then you're kind of going in.

There like you got this dialed and then you're going to feel like you won, which you did. That's great. Which is great. It gives you more ownership, more respect in yourself, calmness its belief. How important is feedback for leaders? Getting feedback from peers, coaches or employees, team members. Feedback is how you get better.

No feedback, no improvement. And if you're not humble, you're not looking for feedback and you're not listening to it. So if you think you know everything, you're not listening, you're definitely not asking for it. Even when it gets told to you, you don't listen to it. So feedback is built upon being humble.

What would you say is in your way to getting to the next level? What feedback do you think you need to hear or receive from your team or people in order to reach the next goals that you have?

I mean, the weird thing about me is even though you might think, look at me and think, oh, who's gonna tell this guy anything, right? The reality is if anyone of my friends, my team, anyone that works for me up and down on the chain of command, if they think I'm wrong, everyone will say, Hey, I don't know if that's a good plan. So even, you know, when I was a task unit commander, so I'm in charge, and I'm the head seal for this 40 seals, I'm the main guy.

Yeah.

Anyone in that chain of command, those guys would all come to me and say, Hey, I don't know if this is a good way to do it. And you know what I'd say? Why not? What do you think? What are you thinking? How do you think we should do it? My mind is open. If my plan is bad, please tell me. They would know that.

So.

My friends, my family, they'll tell me when I'm doing something wrong all day long.

They're not intimidated or scared of you. No, that's good. No. So, how does a leader cultivate that with his family, friends, team in order to welcome the feedback of the information?

-Yeah. What you do is when somebody gives you feedback, you listen to it. This is like, you know, just the other day we have a we have a leadership event that we do two or three times a year. But the thing that I was telling this group of people was, as a leader, you should be listening 98% of the time and talking 2% of the time. So, every time you come to me and you say, Hey, Jocko, I don't like this plan. I don't say shut up and do it my way. I say, How would you want to do it? Tell me what you don't like about it. and then tell me how you want to do it. So therefore, the next time you have an objection, you're like, you know the door is open, you know that I'm going to be open-minded and listen to you and that's how you build it. Every time you shut someone down from speaking their mind, you actually are creating a negative environment where you're not going to get the feedback and if there's no feedback, as we just said, you're not going to improve.

What are two things that any leader could do to improve their leadership skills right off the bat. Two things you can think of. And what are two things that wannabe leaders do that hold them back from being great leaders? So, what are the two things they could add?

Yeah, two things that you have. Number one is listen, which we just talked about. So, that's fresh on my mind. And you'd be surprised about how many leaders are thinking that because they're in a leadership position, they should be talking all the time.

Wrong answer.

Wrong answer. I'll sit with a client or with one of my companies and I'll listen for 38 minutes. And at the end of those 38 minutes, I'll have already thought through every discussion that's been had. You know, you want to argue with him and he's arguing with her. And guess what? I get to sit there and assess those arguments and see which one is the most important. Meanwhile, you're expending all your ammunition. She's expending all her ammunition. He's giving up everything he's got. I'm learning all their thought patterns. I'm learning the pros and cons of each one of their arguments and I do that for 38 minutes and in the 39th minute, I say, Hey, here's what I think we should do. And guess what? Because I've done an accurate assessment and listened, I'm actually going to be able to make the best decision. It wasn't because I was smarter. It wasn't because I had better tactical understanding. It's because I actually shut my mouth listen to everyone spill their guts, learned everything that they knew and did a good detached assessment of what the right thing to do was. So listen and the other one is the word that I just used which is detach which is not getting emotional, not getting into the weeds about stuff that doesn't matter. If you can take a step back and look around, you're gonna see infinitely more than you can when you're in the weeds, staring the firefight in the face, looking down the sights of your weapon shooting. If you're doing that, you can't see anything else. Just think about that metaphor right there. If I'm looking down the sights of my weapon and I'm shooting, my world is this big. The minute that I stop shooting, point my weapon at high port, take a step back and actually look around, I see infinitely more. So apply that to a meet. This is the meeting that we just talked about. A 38 minute meeting. All this chaos is happening. Sure, I'm the boss. I could jump in there and start arguing and giving my opinion. But what am I really doing then? What I'm really doing then is in the weeds and I'm not able to assess what is actually happening. So that so there you apply it there to your personal life. If you and I are arguing, you're my friend and you did something and now we're starting to escalate an argument and I'm starting to get emotional. Am I able to listen to you anymore? Am I able to logically figure out what's going on? If I'm talking to my wife and she did something that made me mad and now I'm starting to raise my voice, is that whole situation going in the right direction?

No.

No, it's not. It's not. So what I need to do is take a step back, detach, calm down, listen to what she's saying and then try and assemble a logical thing to say back without saying you need to calm down or you're too emotional. No, no, no, no, no. Because if you come to me and you're mad about something, you come to me whether it's my wife or whether you're a business partner, you come to me and you say the dang supply department didn't give me the stuff I needed. If I say hey calm down, Right? If that's my reaction, then you realize that I'm against you.

Right?

I don't get it. And so now it's me and the supply department against you.

No one understands.

No one understands. So I do a little technique.

What is that? Yeah, I call.

I call it reflect and diminish. So I'm gonna reflect your emotions back to you, but I'm gonna diminish them a little bit. so that we're not escalating the situation. How would you do this with your wife? So if you come to me and you go, the supply department's been late for two weeks on this stuff. I don't say, calm down. I say, oh, you gotta be kidding me. Two weeks? And you go, yeah, can you believe it? Ah, that's horrible. We gotta put a solution. We gotta get that figured out. In the meantime, what do we need to do right now to get the problem solved?

So we already, now we're on the.

Same team so we can work together.

To find a solution. on the pain.

Yes.

You felt the pain.

Yes. We're on the same team. Okay, my wife, what's gonna make my wife mad? The ice machine's not working.

Right?

The ice machine's not working. It's your fault. Whether it's my fault, we don't know. The ice machine's not working. By the way, this is a real story. This is happening today. The ice machine's not working. She didn't get mad about it, but the ice machine's not working. If I go, hey, chill out. You have a refrigerator. and house and we just calm down, right?

How's that gonna go?

It's not gonna go good. Now she's gonna get mad, now it's me against her. So instead, the ice machine's not working. Ah man, that thing is junk. Have you called the repair guy? You know what I mean? And then all of a sudden we're on the same team and she's like, well, no, I haven't, but I'm about to. Okay, cool. As opposed to the ice machine's not working. Well, okay, do you want me to have ice shipped in from Alaska there, princess, right?

That's not gonna go over well.

So what would you call it?

Reflect and diminish.

Reflect and diminish.

What if someone's coming after you and attacking you? Not like a supply chain or the ice machine, but it's like you didn't do this. Oh yeah, this is your fault.

I want you to guess what I'm gonna do.

What's that?

What do you guess I'm gonna do?

If you come and attack me and tell me something's my fault, what do you think I'm gonna do?

You personally, you would listen, reflect and diminish.

I would actually-- Detach.

Detach?

Yes.

How do you detach your emotions from someone coming after you emotionally? Even if it was or wasn't your fault.

Well, there's a couple things that you've asked me now in the last couple minutes. No, it's all good, 'cause it's all-- It's okay. 'Cause I can see like your mind is spinning here. You're absorbing and you're like, oh, this makes sense. if you're attacking my ego immediately, as soon as I feel frustrated, angry, defensive, all three of those things are red flags to me that that's my ego. Okay. I immediately know. I go, when you, when I feel them, my bristling.

Yeah.

When I feel that, I know it's. I guarantee it's 99. It's just my ego that I'm mad. So what are you doing that? Immediately go, oh, that's your ego. You idiot. Listen to you got to say, let's win. Let's win. So how do I win? Do I win by attacking you?

No.

No, I don't win by attacking you. If you're the only winner, you both lose.

Yes.

So when you attack me... You both need to win. And you say, whatever your attack is, you say, this is your fault. I go, you know what? Absolutely. This is my fault. Here's the mistake that I made and I know it affected you in a negative way. Here's the things that I'm working on right now to remedy it. What are you going to do? Are you going to yell? me more? Are you gonna say, are you gonna tell me it's my fault again?

Like I just, a crazy person might.

Say a couple more times. And a crazy person, I'll be like, yeah, I know. You know, I get this, this is another question I get when it's sort of like similar to what you said earlier, when you said, yeah, but what if it's not really your fault?

Right?

The other one I get a lot is if you say, hey, listen, Louis, this is, this is my fault that this happened. You go, you,'re right, it is your fault. And then people say, what do I do then? What do I do then? If the person's blaming me, how do I take ownership then? And I'm like, that's the whole point. That's the whole point. The whole point of taking ownership is when you look at me and you point your finger and you say, this is all your fault. I say, Yes, I know. That's what I just said. This is absolutely my fault. I'm the one that's in charge and these are the things that I'm going to do to fix it. That's where we're going to start. So when someone blames you, yes, take ownership. Now, if you have in the back of your mind, like you did earlier. Like, hey, maybe this isn't really my fault. Like, if you have that in the back of your mind, you're actually wrong.

Wow.

You're actually wrong. You're in charge. And that applies to your life as well. That applies to your life as well. How you, you know, you got to take ownership of what's going on in your life. When you're not where you want to be and you say it's because the boss doesn't like you or it's because the girl treated you this way or the guy did this, like all those things. you got to take ownership of them. And if you're blaming all these other external things, you're not going to make any changes and that's going to be a problem.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. I just want to dive into what this philosophy is and and how you actually live. Right.

So my main goal is to live awesome. That's the tagline. That's the motto of our company. Primal Blueprint, live awesome. And what does that mean? It means extracting the greatest amount of pleasure, enjoyment, contentment, fulfillment that's possible out of every possible moment. Now, there are going to be bad times, of course, but to live in the moment, to appreciate the now, to appreciate the relationships, to have fun when you're working out, to enjoy every single bite of food you ever eat and not choke something down just because it's healthy. So it really revolves around orchestrating a life way of pleasure, of hedonistic experiences in the context of this modern world that we have here, understanding that we sit here with hunter-gatherer genes that have certain sort of proclivities and expectations of us. that we can meet either through natural means or through artificial means. And sometimes there's not a right answer, but it's about choices. So how do I make choices that serve me in the short term, that give me pleasure, that don't harm me in the long term? So it's sort of an overview of what we're up against here. But as you drill down, as you boil it down and distill it down to what does it look like, it looks like you know, what are the types of foods that we choose to eat that turn on genes, that build muscle or burn fat? What are the types of, you know, how much sun exposure do we get that allows us to make vitamin D and get tan, but not too much so we get burned? How much sleep do we get? That, and by the way, sleep is a very pleasurable thing if you're willing to acknowledge that. How much sleep do we get in a way that reinvigorates us and allows us to be creative on a daily basis and not brag about how so well we do on so little sleep. So all these, how do we use our brain on a regular basis beyond just the rote stuff of checking the PDAs, but how do we do puzzles? Do we play games? Are we creative? Do we play musical instruments? Do we learn a language? How do we use our brain? All these things make the totality of the human experience, and I love to look at all the ways in which we can choose these behaviors that manifest themselves pleasurable, enjoyable, providing contentment and fulfillment, and build us toward a better human being.

When did you start to take this on? Because you were a triathlete?

Yeah, I was a marathoner in the 70s. And actually the late 60s and early 70s. And from there went to triathlon. I was always trying to improve my performance. Optimize performance. using the tools of the day, which were pretty rudimentary. It's like, all right, run a lot of miles and eat lots of carbohydrates and you'll be where you need to be. Well, you know, that's what we knew. That's all we knew and it wasn't exactly appropriate. So over the years, I got injured, I got sick from the over-training, from the diet, which was very highly inflammatory and caused sort of... Pastas and breads or what?

All that stuff that they said you had to eat. I had so many pasta meals and meals, lasagna meals, the night before every game. And I remember just being so exhausted in every game. High school, college, pro, it's just like exhaustion.

Right.

Yawning.

I would yawn so much.

That's a classic symptom.

Why am I yawning? Right. I'm supposed to be excited about the game. I wanted to take a nap. I wanted to take a nap. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we have these sort of old conventional wisdom technologies that we were using to improve performance. theoretically, and they weren't. So I basically ended my career early prematurely. I was too injured to continue running. My health had suffered. I had arthritis and tendonitis and irritable bowel syndrome, and I got sick a lot, and I had heartburn and hemorrhoids, and I was like a real wreck. I mean, here's theoretically the picture of health because of the training I was doing, but I was falling apart on the inside. I sort of rededicated my life to figuring out how I could be fit and strong and lean and happy and healthy at the same time without being overly, without too much struggle and sacrifice and suffering. Is there an easy way, an easier way to be all those things I wanted to be that allowed me to have more pleasure in the moment and didn't sacrifice my long-term health? So that was the big shift in me and it's been going on for 35 years and it continues to go on. So as soon as I made that shift, I started doing the research. I wrote my first book in '82 on how to train for triathlons. And even then, I was calling upon evolution as the main basis for how we train and I was looking at the previous few years of triathletes because In '82, there hadn't even been a decade of triathlon training. But I already recognized that we were doing it wrong. We were training too hard. We were-- Too many miles. Too many miles. Too much redlining the heart and the body. And there was a better way and an easier way to do it. So I started recognizing that back in '82, and then even up until three years ago, When I started researching the Primal Endurance book, I started thinking, well, you know, all of the science continues to show us that the old choice was probably a wrong choice. That reliance on carbohydrates and that intent of managing our glycogen stores in our muscles was kind of the wrong approach. And maybe we ought to come at it from the exact opposite end of the spectrum, which is how do we become really good at burning fat? and in so doing spare glycogen and in so doing unburden ourselves of having to take in so much carbohydrate in the form of pasta and breads and cereals and rice and crackers and cookies and all the other stuff.

Sure, sure. And you're 62, right?

Yeah.

Right?

And you're leaner than anyone I know. So what's the most effective way to burn fat? Still be strong.

Yeah, of course. You know, as we said initially in the Primal Blueprint and I've said it decades before I wrote the Primal Blueprint, 80% of your body composition is determined by how you eat. So if you, there's a certain way in which you can eat where you can literally reprogram your genes to derive most of your energy from your stored body fat. Really?

Yes.

So as opposed to waking up being hungry, having breakfast, being hungry at the 10:30 break, being hungry for lunch, having a snack in the afternoon, having a dinner and having a snack before you go to bed, which is this sort of standard American approach. Even the old bodybuilders would say, Don't go more than three hours without eating or you will cannibalize your muscle tissue. That was all based on an assumption that we had to burn carbohydrate and had to access glucose and glycogen for the muscles to be able to continue to work. It never contemplated that we are obligate fat burners. We are born with this amazing ability to extract calories from stored body fat. And the reason that we don't as we go through life, as we present our, you know, you're two years old, you're eating cookies and crackers and mushed peas and ice cream and all that stuff. And so your body learns to depend on glucose, on carbohydrates as a source of energy and never really gets to the point where you force it to burn fat. So what we do is we shift the diet around. It's not painful. You get rid of the breads, the pastas, the cereals, the crackers, the cookies, the candies, the sweet and soft drinks. Well, it does sound kind of obvious, doesn't it? But what you're left with is meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, some starchy tubers like sweet potatoes, things like that. Those are great tasting foods if you eat them right. And they're real food. And they're real food. And you can use butter and lard and you can eat bacon on this program. And what it does is it reduces the amount of simple sugars and carbohydrates you take in. and just sort of forces gently, forces your body to upregulate all the enzyme systems that access stored body fat and burn it and allow you to have more energy throughout the day without having to eat so often. So the first thing that happens is your appetite self-regulates. So now you get into a space where you become a good fat burner, you start to melt away fat, you're not as hungry because you're not as hungry because you're always carrying around A meal. It's on your thighs, it's on your ass, it's on your belly, wherever it is. It's, you know, that's your body becomes so adept at accessing those stored calories, it says, I don't need to eat. I'm really not that hungry. Wow.

Yeah. And that's so empowering for so many people. But when you, you know, I was a still love sugar. But I used to be really bad at sugar. I feel like I have much more under control. But I feel like when you're eating a lot of candy, sweets and sugar, you're never satisfied.

You just want to eat more and more and more. But that's the end. Until you're sick.

No, exactly.

I'm full because I'm sick now. Yeah, I mean, stories of Lamar Odom eating four pounds of candy before games.

Four games or whatever.

Crazy. Yeah, but I mean, we are, look, we're all hired. Look where he's at now. We're all, but by the way, sugar is a very addictive substance. It's so addictive. So, you know, we're all hardwired to seek out sweet things. That's part of that hunter-gatherer DNA that we all carry.

Really.

It hasn't changed in thousands of years. So how do we shift our minds? But the first way you do it is you go from the craving, which is what you're talking about, like you crave sugar so you eat sugar and then that just promotes more craving and it gets you into this sort of addictive cycle. You're actually producing sort of opiate-like substances that are occupying receptor sites that are giving you sort of a feel-good experience. So you got to kind of be willing to get rid of that. So you get rid of the candies, you get rid of the sweetened beverages, the soft drinks, teas and you get rid of the carbohydrates that not all carbs, but the breads that convert to glucose in the bloodstream so rapidly. So now you've lowered your blood, your glucose experience on a daily basis. So now the brain is starting to get, yeah, I don't need to really get that much glucose. You know, I can, I can, the body is burning more fat. As a result of you being able to burn fat, you create these byproducts called ketones. which the brain loves to burn ketones and burns them preferentially. So you need less and less sugar to maintain clarity throughout the day. If you haven't become fat adapted and you're a sugar burner, which is what we, it's not a derogatory term, but we use a term to describe people who haven't become fat burners yet they're sugar burners. If you don't eat, it's true. If you don't eat for a couple of hours, your blood sugar dips because you haven't learned how to burn fat yet. you don't know how to access it, you can't take it out of storage and burn it. So now the blood sugar is low.

The brain goes, I gotta go get.

Some more glucose, I gotta get energy so much. Sugar or something.

Sugar or something.

So you have the bagel at 10:30 in the morning. Oh my gosh. Or you have the- Tastes amazing. Well, for an hour and then it's- no, exactly, but then you're hungry again and that's this vicious cycle. So if we can take the steps, we say it takes 21 days, that's why I have a book called the 21 Day Total Body Transformation. 21 days of this cutting these sugars and starchy, not starchy but simple carbohydrates out of your diet and just focusing on healthy fats and lean proteins and vegetables. Your body gets the message and says, I'm not going to be getting that much glucose. I'm going to learn how to burn fat and I'm going to do it well, damn it. And then it takes the fat out of your body fat stores. So over time you lose a pound, two pounds a week, and you trend toward your ideal body composition. So all of this is a 10-minute long-winded answer to your question of what does it take to burn fat? It doesn't take a lot of exercise. It mostly takes the dietary shift. Yeah, you got to do some exercise. You don't have to do anything, but you can choose to do some exercise. It'll help accelerate it a little bit. but most of it happens as a result of the shifts you make in your diet.

Absolutely. It's all in the kitchen. Yep.

So, you can get abs in the.

Kitchen and not do anything different working out. Absolutely. Wow. Yeah. Okay, so what's the difference between because it sounds like a little paleo-ish.

What's the difference between primal paleo and a bulletproof which has kind of been picking up as well? You know, they're all sort of versions of a similar theme which is to cut the sugar's way down, cut the processed carbohydrates way down, get rid of the industrial seed oils so that would be the soybean oil the corn oil, the canola, which are causing inflammatory responses in a lot of people, and just kind of go to real food. With the Primal Blueprint, we said at some point, dairy, if you like it, why not include it in your diet if you don't have an issue with it.

I love it.

But all these foods exist on a spectrum. So, dairy, there's raw milk, which is good for you. There's A2, new protein, which is a form of casein. We could have a whole discussion about the different types of cows and the different types of protein that they make, but on the far end of the spectrum, the good end, there's butter, there's cream, there's all these things. At the other end, at the bad end, there's 2% skim, homogenized, pasteurized, non-fat, whatever, stay away from that stuff. So all these foods sort of exist on the spectrum. So cheeses, for instance, part of the dairy family, I love cheese.

I love cheese.

So, you know, we include it in our eating strategy because we say there's no real reason not to. Paleo, yeah, exactly, artisanal cheeses and there's good and bad cheeses as well. But on the Paleo program or the Paleo strategy is pretty strict for a lot of people. So they would say no dairy at all of any kind. So no milk, no butter, no cream, no cheese. So that's, you know, there are little variations in this here.

But mostly whole foods.

Mostly whole foods is what we're all looking at. I mean, even if you look at a vegan experience these days or a vegetarian experience, it's really these dietary programs work largely as a result of what you eliminate, not what you're eating. So if you eliminate the crap and you're left, even if you're only eating vegetables as long as you're getting enough protein, you should be fine.

Gotcha. Okay. What is LGN? And how does it motivate you?

Yeah, so LGN is look good naked. And it's a, you know, it's just a little mnemonic device we've used for the last 10 years. I think people have used it before, but we sort of made it a meme for a while. And it's just this idea that one of the things that we are seeking is we want to look good naked. And I think that happens for a lot of people. that's a subset of their greater goal or it's a side effect of the original intent. The original intention for a lot of people go to Primal Blueprint and to Mark's Daily Apple, my blog, is they're frustrated. They're sick. They can't get off the meds. They've had health issues and they've not been able to resolve them through the traditional medical channels. So a lot of people come to me having had that experience in the medical community, not a good one. So, the first thing that they recognize is their blood sugar normalizes or their polycystic ovarian syndrome goes away or their irritable bowel syndrome goes away or their GERD or whatever it is that they're dealing with goes away and that's wonderful. And then they go, oh, by the way, I'm losing some weight too. That's awesome as well and I'm starting to look good naked. So, it becomes a nice side effect.

Gotcha. So what's a typical eating day look like for you? Like what are you putting in your system? Yeah, so what time do you put in?

Yeah, so I wake up in the morning and I have a cup of coffee around 6:30 in the morning. I like coffee, I'm a big fan of coffee. I don't eat until 12:30 or 1. So I use what we call a compressed eating window. Now, I will wake up and I have plenty of energy because I'm so good at burning fat. I've trained my body to do that. I don't have the energy. I have the energy. I'm not, I'm not In a slump waking up from having not eaten for the 12 hours that I was sleeping, it doesn't matter. I'm so good at accessing the stored body fat, I got plenty of energy. In fact, I'll go to the gym at 9:30 or 10 o'clock and I'll do my workout fasted. Sometimes it'll be a heavy leg day, sometimes it'll be intervals of some kind. Again, I don't, and you feel fine. I feel fine. And then when I get home, I won't eat if I get home at like 11, I still won't eat for an hour and a half, partly because I'm not hungry and partly because I got stuff to do.

Right, right, right.

Exactly. But I'm not compelled to go, oh my God, I just finished my workout.

I must eat a post-workout shake or something. Yeah, there's so many people that say that, you know, have a protein shake within the first 30 minutes of waking up to start your metabolism, drink a shake right after a workout.

Why do they say that and why do you think you don't need to? I think you don't need to because if you become good at burning fat, a couple things happen. First of all, you have the energy to get through the day. Second of all, if you're good at burning fat and you're not hungry, I say if you're not hungry, why are you eating? If you're not hungry, don't eat, because that's kind of key. When you become good at burning fat, you don't enter that cannibalistic zone that the bodybuilders enter when they're dependent on carbs a lot, which is you start to tear up your muscle tissue. Because when you're a sugar burner, and you run out of sugar and you're depending on carbohydrate. By the way, I use glycogen, glucose, carbohydrate and sugar sort of interchangeable. But when you're a sugar burner and you haven't eaten for a while, you've depleted the glycogen in your liver and your muscles because your body's expecting you to have sugar all this time and that's where you store it but you don't store very much of it.

So when you run out of it.

The brain, you need to fill it up. The brain goes, Hey, something's something's off here, we got to eat. And if we don't eat, then here's what we're going to do. We're going to signal the adrenals to create cortisol, which is going to go tear down muscle tissue so that the amino acids can be sent to the liver to be converted into glucose so I can fuel the brain. So it's like you're tearing down the muscle you just spent all the time trying to build because of your dependence on glucose. All that goes away when you become a fat burner. When you become good at burning fat, Now, when you don't eat, your body knows how to access the stored body fat so your energy levels don't dip, your blood sugar doesn't dip, and so you don't cut into muscle tissue.

Gotcha. So you can train really hard to try to build muscle and you're still saying you don't need this post-recovery shake.

Afterwards if you learn how to eat the right way. Exactly, exactly. Now, if you're, again, if you're the old paradigm and you were the carbohydrate dependent athlete, then yeah, you probably do want to eat a post-workout meal because you probably will cannibalize some of the muscle tissue because you're working on an entirely different operating system. Interesting, man.

And so that 21-day transformation is how you get off of that cycle and get into the fat-burning cycle essentially. Okay, cool.

We'll have that linked up here as well. And also the Primal Endurance, the book, has a lot of it in there. This has it all in here, but this is really specific to people who want to race 10Ks, 5Ks, marathons, triathlons.

Spartan races, all that stuff.

Gotcha.

Yes. Have you done a Spartan race yourself? I haven't.

I did want a short one, like a five miler. It's pretty intense. Yeah, it's intense. It's fun, though. It's fun, though. I wish it had been around when I was in my prime. You would have been a machine. Because I was a good marathoner, but I had my DNA fitness thing done a few years ago, and I was like 57% endurance and 43% strength. What that means is it made me a pretty good endurance athlete, but I was never going to be the best in the world because you'd have to be 80% or 85%, right? But it also told me that I had the strength, which is sort of in retrospect, that's why I realized I used to lift weights even when I was a marathoner. I lifted weights in the gym. So, I maintained my strength. And I was a gymnast before I was ever an endurance athlete. So you look at the Spartan races and you go well, that's you know, it's got some gymnastics some you know, some parkour type movements Rope climbing some some heavy lifting all that stuff combined with the endurance that would have been your thing my thing Wow, but right now it's like I'm I'm too guarding of my of my current fitness level and health. I don't want to get injured, you know and yeah, of course so like the big thing for me is my ultimate frisbee game once a week. You're an ultimate frisbee.

Oh, my God. I love ultimate frisbee. You gotta come out to Malibu, man.

College champion with my team in college. Get out of here. It's been a small, small D3 school. Whatever, man.

But you know what?

So I can run a jump. And we have, we have a game in Malibu every Sunday at 9 30. It's been years, but I'd love to come. No, no, it's the most fun. Can we wear cleats?

You can wear cleats. I wear my vibrams, but of course.

Yeah, guys were cleats.

Wow.

No, it's anyway, so you know, I.

Would love to come.

You know what a good workout it is then.

That's one of the hardest workouts. An hour of Ultimate and I'm excited. We play two hours, by the way. Oh my gosh. I would just be like, something in 15 minutes. I'd have to get back into shape for it. Wow, that's cool. In Malibu, huh?

In Malibu, yeah.

9:30 a.m. Yep. I'll be there.

And there's guys from West Hollywood that come out there too. I will come out for sure. Was it like 30 guys go out there?

We get, last week we had six on six. That's the most fun. Wow. The summer we'll have 10 on sometimes.

A little bit crazy, but yeah. Wow.

Okay, awesome. Okay, so you wait until about, you have coffee in the morning, then you.

Wait till about noon to one.

Oh yeah, we haven't even gotten to my any food yet.

And then what is that meal? Yeah, so that meal is typically, it might be what I call a big ass salad. You know, it's a big salad with lots of vegetables in it and some form of protein, with lots of salad dressing. If you make- you- have your own salad dressing. And now I have my own salad dressing because I couldn't find any that I could put a lot on and feel like this is-- that isn't filled with sugar. Or unhealthy fats or unhealthy oils, like the soybean oil that I was talking about, or the canola. It's like no canola. Our salad dressings are made with avocado oil, which is the healthiest of all the oils. So I have a big salad with chicken leftover from the previous night or a piece of fish or something on it. Nice, okay. And then I go till the middle of the afternoon, maybe late afternoon, I might have a handful of macadamia nuts. We do make a protein bar now. All my products I make for myself, by the way, just so you know. I make stuff that I wish existed.

This one, the Dark Chocolate Almond.

Dark Chocolate Almond looks amazing. It is amazing. And it's got 15 grams of protein, but mostly it's 9 grams of collagen. So it's got more collagen than a cup of bone broth. I love bone broth, but it, you know, as a, when I'm driving my.

Car, you know, with a, we pour out a bottle of bone broth. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so the bars are, are there because I'm really into the repair. So one of the issues I have as a 62 year old guy trying to keep up with 20 somethings.

Right.

On a Sprint to the end zone to defend a long pass is my Achilles, you know, so, so the collagen really works well, really for Keep seeing. I know that I can tell the difference between when I've been eating a lot of collagen and when I haven't. In just your Achilles.

In my Achilles, yeah.

What happens is tighter when you're not. Yeah, they feel like they're gonna snap. Really? And they'll feel sore enough that I'll choose not to back way off. Interesting. For weeks at a time. So anyway, so that's, I might have a dark chocolate almond bar in the afternoon.

I'm gonna have to get all this stuff.

Yeah. I'm gonna have to try it all out.

Okay.

And then in the evening, you know, I have a piece of steak. I've got this great Wagyu short rib that I get. It's my favorite cut of meat anywhere in the world. And I'll have that with a whole ton of steamed vegetables or lightly grilled vegetables with some butter on it. And once in a while I'll have a glass of wine. And that's it.

That's the whole day.

Yeah.

So much more than that.

No, so here's the thing. You may have gleaned from that that it's not a lot of food. And one of the things that you realize when you become good at burning fat... You don't need a lot of food. You don't need a lot of food. So a few years ago, I had this thought experiment. I thought, well, you know, I used to my whole life see what I could get away with, see how much food I could eat and not feel like I was going to puke or not feel like I was going to gain weight. It's how much food can I eat and not and not gain weight. I think a lot of people live their lives that way. They sort of finish what's on their plate. They basically, there are a lot of people who run or work out just so they can eat more. Like, why do you run so much, Louis? Well, I run because I love this kind of thing.

I love to eat.

Well, dude, I love to eat too. But I don't want to beat myself up just so I can eat more. So that was the thought experiment. And then if you you reverse it, you go, well, if that's the case, what's the least amount of food I can eat and maintain my body mass, maintain my energy, not get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. And it turns out it's about 30% fewer calories than I used to eat.

What do you want to happen? Well, you want to get to know this person better, spend more time with them. Invest at an organic pace based on the level of investment that's going on, right? Don't invest in someone based on how much you like them. Invest on based on how much they invest in you.