The Dark Side of Success: Burnout and Mental Health in Silicon Valley with Andy Johns, Clues.Life

This episode is brought to you by Intercom. Connect with your customers at exactly the.

Right moment using powerful messaging and automation.

Scale your customer service without additional investment.

While still providing a fast and personal experience. Apply to get a 95% discount at intercom.com traction that's I N T E R C O M.com T R A.

C-T I O N Separate yourself from the environment you're in. That's one big thing that people can do to shock the system and give them a reminder. There are countless places and cultures around the world where people live differently. I don't have to be in San Francisco or Menlo park or New York City or Venice beach and grinding myself into dust every day for all the conversations that go on around how important meditation and mindfulness is. Look, I'm a supporter. Clearly it works when people dedicate themselves to a daily practice. There is value in learning how to calm the mind. I support that. But there's no sense if all you're doing is trying to meditate as a coping mechanism to the environment you're in. I need some traction. You need some traction. Lets get some traction.

Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors, this is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

They say success comes at a price, but what about the hidden toll it takes on the minds of those who dare to dream big? Our guest today on the Traction podcast is Andy Johns, a former tech exec and VC who spent the last 15 years investing in and driving growth for some of the biggest brands, including Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront, where he was also president. As a startup employee advisor and investor, Andy was a part of nine startups, each worth more than a billion. And after several years of working through psychological pain stemming from childhood trauma, Andy left it all to become a mental health advocate and writes now at Clues Life, he's on a mission to help others heal from emotional pain, transform themselves and and discover their life's purpose. So today we'll dive headfirst into the new reality of mental health and the stigma that has kept it locked away for far too long. Welcome back to Traction Andy. How you doing? You look great by the way. I love the backdrop. You look happier and healthier than ever.

Before. Yeah, I'm doing well, man. I'm doing well. I'm in a good place after many, many years of working on myself and turning the page to a new chapter in my life.

And where is that? Where are you tuning in from?

At the moment, I'm on the Big island of Hawaii, where I'll be for a bit. I'm actually here to do some additional healing work as part of my ongoing journey. And then after this, I will probably make my way either somewhere to Central or South America or Southeast Asia.

You look like you're in celebration mode, man. It's a good energy that it gives off. You've had what many would call a unicorn career. You have worked for some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley. But what specific incident made you say, enough is enough. Leave Silicon Valley and embark on this lifelong mission?

You know, there are a couple times where I basically did a face plant, what the world of addiction recovery would refer to as hitting rock bottom. One of those events was in my late 20s. I was actually working at Twitter at the time. Was definitely on sort of an upslope in my career. Things were going well professionally, yet I had a sudden and intense onset of panic attacks. Near constant panic depression and sudden thoughts around death and dying and suicidality, which shook me. Scared the hell out of me, frankly, because it came out of nowhere. And that's when I first sought therapy. I was in so much psychological distress that it was often the case that I would be at work and I could feel that I was about ready to have a breakdown of sorts. And so I would just quietly grab my laptop, leave the office so that I could get away from everyone. And oftentimes it was just sit somewhere or get back on the train to head home. And I would just cry somewhat uncontrollably. That's what initiated this process, which I've been sort of in and out of for the better part of the last 10 years.

That is really hard, leaving this amazing career. I think one day something hits you and you just pick up and leave. I mean, with me, it was one fine day, decided to just pick up and leave and move to Dubai and change my perspective on life. Like just ejecting out of that environment and surrounding myself with new people, new experiences, positive energy. Just changed my life. But it's hard to do. How long did you deliberate that I'm going to just pick up and leave?

Oh, man. I waffled on it for eight, nine years. It's indicative of how stuck we can be and how we can Sort of be moving in a particular direction in life and have so much momentum in that direction that we fail to see just how sick and imbalanced we have become. And it's understandable in the sense that so much of that conditioning around moving in a particular direction in life begins really early in life for me. I've come to understand how the early traumatic circumstances surrounding the death of my mom when I was 10, that's what planted the seeds for the sort of existential crisis and emotional breakdown I had beginning in my late 20s. And that was just old pain and trauma that hadn't been processed, that my mind had just pushed down and put many layers of cement over it. And in order to cover that pain up even more, I turned towards achievement and success as my drug of choice from the age of 10 to 35, 36, 37, that was my drug of choice. That was the thing that I had so much momentum on. And so, to use poker terminology, you feel pot committed in the deepest sense. Like you put all your chips into this direction. And that could mean that in order to move away from the current way in which you're living, you may need to fundamentally remove yourself from all of the external aspects of life that define your identity, where you live, your professional circle, your friendships, the career. Like all those things, I changed in pursuit of living a healthier, more balanced and fulfilling life. And breaking free from this direction in life, I'd been moving in as propelled forward by the pain of really young version of myself that was still untreated and lived within me. So it's difficult to make these changes because in many ways it means the fundamental eradication of the old sense of self and all the external artifacts of one's life that was built on that old identity. So it's understandable that it's hard to make those changes because it's such a deep rooted part of who we are.

And you know, I was fortunate. I mean, 20, 21 was probably the worst year of my life. You come into a bit of money, but you realize it has no meaning if you're dealing with all these suppressed issues. And over time compound interest on that is huge if you haven't dealt with it. And a lot of people I talk to and people around me, they don't even know how to deal with it. And when you ask questions a few down, you realize there's some deeper suppressed issue that's causing them this pain, but they don't even know it's that. So how do you even internalize that? There's something deeper out there because people deal with burnout and stress and depression. And they kick the can further down the road by taking medication or drugs or drinking. How do you even start to internalize that? Hey, there's something deeper here, and it might not be work.

I think about this a lot, and I do believe that this is part of this perpetual pendulum of life and the swinging from the dark to the light in that in most cases, not all. The breaking free from the prison we construct in our minds Happens when we make a really big swing into the dark. And I believe that that's part of the fundamental nature of reality and how things work. That's not to say that not everyone needs to experience great suffering before they can experience some form of deep awakening. What I would say is that, you know, as a culture, I'm speaking about culture in the west, in America in particular, When I think back, it's like I wasn't taught anything about the nature of the human mind. I wasn't taught anything about how it works, how important it is to have not only an understanding, but the ability to control one's mind and to control the things that influence it. I think one of the ways of bypassing this eternal pendulum of dark to light Is at an early age to develop an understanding of how life tends to work. And how the mind can fall victim to great suffering if it's left unchecked and it's not understood. There are cultures around the world where teaching about the power of the mind and how it can work for you and against you is. It's a part of the system of education or the system of cultural knowledge that's established earlier in life for some folks within that culture. And you tend to see that there's less of this strong swing from a full face plant into that being the propellant to awakening. So I think there's some solution that exists at the level of culture. I would like to see more of that within the American culture. Yet at the same time, I understand that we're sort of like this early adolescent in terms of the age and the maturity of our country. We're still a very young country, and we have a lot to learn about the art of living and what it means to build a healthy culture. And so I suspect that. And from what I've observed is that culture behaves, or civilization behaves nearly identically to the nature of an individual. And so if it takes a full face plant or a big swing into the dark in order for that person to be propelled into the light. The same is true at the level of large groups of people, the collective conscience, if you believe in Jungian psychology. So those are my thoughts on it. I think part of it is that's just the way shit is, you know.

I've had the good fortune of living in different places and having different cultures impacted by different cultures. My parents are from India, I grew up in Kuwait, was a refugee of the Gulf War, and then went to school in Canada in the last 20 odd years in the United States. But one thing is common, all these cultures is people don't talk about mental health. People are afraid to bring up mental health issues. Indian cultures, Western culture, Middle Eastern culture, we don't talk about mental health. And so it was always very hard for me to speak with anyone. Fortunately though, my wife's a doctor and so I found that peace. And she would always say, see a therapist. And I kept pushing it off because having this mix of Indian and Western culture in me, saying, I'm a man, I'm going to deal with it myself. And I kept killing myself from within. And she kept saying, listen, you got to see a therapist. I'll talk to you, friends will talk to you, but you need to see a therapist. Because there is a process. And things just changed. As soon as I had that first therapy session, I started to see things differently. And they pointed out certain points of trauma in my life that was sitting in the back of my brain that I hadn't made peace with. But when it comes to tech and Silicon Valley, I think it's that culture on steroids. Now, yes, Western, Indian, Middle Eastern cultures, we don't talk about mental health, but I think in the Valley people think it's a sign of weakness to share what they're going through. Everyone is crushing it until either the company gets crushed or they get crushed. And so sometimes you got to pull yourself out of that environment. Why do you think this happens? How can we as a community make it a better place so people are more open with these things?

I don't think that there is a systemic solution that exists at the level of, call it work policy. I think there's a fundamental flaw in that thinking, in the sense that it externalizes the answer. It says that the answer to establishing a healthy working relationship that still produces great results lies outside of ourselves. And for anyone that's done enough digging into their own self knowledge, their own transformation, they'll eventually realize that there are very few, if any externalized solutions. The answers lie within. So the thing that I advocate for is not that we change how Silicon Valley works necessarily in terms of its frenetic energy, because the fundamental premise of a startup and the financial systems that surround it clearly are working in a sense that huge amounts of financial growth and job creation is coming out of what historically was a 30 mile radius around Palo Alto. You know, of course it's sort of spreading to other parts of the world now. But you can look at the results and say, well, in terms of company creation, new wealth creation, all that, it's working. The question is, what is the trade off? And what we're experiencing in terms of people's well being is the trade off. And so the thing that I advocate for is conscious participation in that system, whether you're a venture capitalist or you're the individual employee, is like, let's focus less on how do we change all the aspects of this environment? Because if we change it, it's going to come at a trade off. And we can talk about what that is, but there's no solutions in life, just trade offs. You change X, it has an influence on Y. So we could talk about that at the level of work culture. But I think the more important thing is whether you're an executive or you're a founder, you're thinking about starting a company, or you're just one of those young, hungry high achievers that was willing to run through walls to grow the career, which there are many of those that are attracted to the technology industry. It's more of a question of am I aware of and very conscious of the decision I'm making and how I choose to participate in this system of wealth creation and do I really understand the full set of trade offs that are there? The younger version of me that was building my career had almost no thought process regarding this because like you mentioned earlier, the things that happened to us earlier in life play a major role in most of our day to day behaviors and decisions. And so I sort of had this unresolved trauma in me where I interpreted these challenging early life experiences as I need to be a perfect kid. Because if I'm a perfect kid, that's how I get love. And if I'm not a perfect kid, then I'm not lovable. That was a central part of my identity. And so I entered into Silicon Valley with that identity, unaware that that was my identity. And then I almost drove myself into an early grave as a result. So that's the real thing to consider, is understanding at the level of the individual, who am I and why am I doing this?

You Touched a right point there. The first step to making any change, any lasting change, is acknowledging that you have a problem.

Right.

Sometimes you don't know you have a problem. You just think it's you. It's your behavior, it's your personality to react or to cry or to get angry or whatever your emotional reaction is. And then you look around the executive room and people just dismiss you for being all you're too emotional kind of thing. But the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem. What are some signs and signals one should look for? And what are the different manifestations of mental health issues you found?

Yeah, so I'll tackle that in two parts, and I'll talk about sort of this nature of understanding one's identity and then the warning signs. I think it's important for folks to develop deep self knowledge because what they'll eventually understand. And this is what I actually learned through my process of addiction recovery. I spent 45 days in a addiction treatment center. And the tendency at the very beginning is you go into it with a great deal of shame when you realize, oh, shit, I'm an addict. And the tendency at first is to think almost like, okay, let me take this spoon. Let me just dig the addiction in me, out of my brain. And then once I've done that, all of a sudden I'm this perfect person. I've got my superpowers, but I no longer have these character flaws. Right. But eventually, what you learn through this arc of letting go of the shame of addiction and understanding the root of it and really developing deeper knowledge around the role of shame is that it doesn't work that way. Our superpowers as an individual are the other side of the coin of these other characteristics that we would deem as negative or unacceptable that predispose us to potentially to mental illness and addiction and other behaviors that we may find misaligned with our own values. And so the point is, it doesn't work that way. You don't get to scoop one part of you out and keep just the good stuff. What's required is that you understand the interconnected nature of both and that you learn how to channel them in a direction that's consistent with the life you want to live and that provides fulfillment. So that's one part of it. To your question of the warning signs, this is where getting in touch with your own body again and performing some sort of inventory and checking in with yourself is really important. It's hard to do because if you think about our work in the tech industry, it's largely an intellectual pursuit. And all of our life experiences leading up to that have trained us to become people that make our way through lives at the level of intellect. We try and think of everything as a problem that can be solved through the analytical capabilities of our mind. And in doing so, we get very disconnected with our intuition, our emotional nature, and even with the sensations in our own body. We literally sort of move our daily presence up into the brain and forget everything else. And it's important to sort of first realize, like, wait, not everything should be solved as an intellectual problem. That's not how life works. When I think about the future and what I want my life to be like, why isn't that determined based on how I feel? What sort of lifestyle do I want? I can read Gary Vaynerchuk and listen to him about crushing it and killing it all day and think that, okay, he's figured it out. So if I just read enough of Gary V. Stuff and I write down a list that describes my future, well, then that's the solution. But what happens if that advice and that list is completely disconnected from what you actually feel like doing? Do I feel like running an organization of 100 employees where there's going to be all kinds of bitching and moaning as there typically is at startups, and I'm going to have to deal with that all day? I didn't think about that before I became president and was on deck to become CEO of a company. I just did it because that was the next rung on the ladder and I appreciated that the leaders around me thought that I was capable of running a billion dollar company, but that was an intellectual decision and process on my part. But then when I was in the job, guess what? I fucking hated it. I didn't feel like doing most of the daily job functions every day. Nonetheless, I did it. So now that I'm separated from all that, most of the time when I do my writing and do my mental health advocacy, the way I moved into that line of work to begin with was what do I just simply feel like doing? And we all know what that feeling is inside. We definitely know what the feeling of resistance is. Every time you open up your laptop each day and you just know you're going to have 100 emails that you don't want to answer. We know what that feeling of not wanting to do something is. So now the question is, can you get back in touch with the feeling of what you want to do? I mean, there are more straightforward red flags to look for that Are basic biological functions that are indicative of the state of your nervous system. Do you sleep well? Are you putting on unnecessary body weight, especially around torso fat? And these things are indicative of like declining health. Do you have these huge bags under your eyes? Are you grinding your teeth and clenching at night? Do you have tension all throughout your body? What are the quality of your relationships? Are you seeing your family? Are you going outside? It's about getting in touch with that stuff. If your body is screaming at you like, hey, I need a break, something's not right. You have to be able to identify that in yourself. And if you can, then you can intervene on your own behalf before you trip and fall and do a face plant.

Unfortunately for some, there's no other option. Then you have to trip and fall and do a face plant. And hopefully it's not too serious where you have the opportunity to pick yourself up and put yourself on the right path. But so many they don't, right? This is the one thing that needs to have advocacy around. You need to break the stigma so people can recognize these signals and be proactive on them. From what you've seen, I mean, managing hundreds of employees running unicorns, what are some of the biggest mental health challenges that people in the tech industry faces? And how can companies and leaders better support their employees in this regard?

Yeah, I think of the common challenges for tech employees at two dimensions. The first dimension would be the more outward facing or more obvious dimension. We subject ourselves to a constant state of low level stress. Sometimes that low level stress hits these temporary spikes of extremely high level stress. For example, with the most recent incidences with major banks and how that impacted startup operations. And so we slowly expose ourselves every single day to that low level of stress. And then we become the frog that's boiling in the pot without realizing that the temperature is slowly rising. Until all of a sudden, face plant. And then we're kind of surprised by the face plant, even though we shouldn't be. In its own way, it's kind of the equivalent of like say you got a six year old child and you put them into a stressful household because the parents are fighting all the time, or one of the parents is very volatile. We are a tuning fork to our environment. The entire body is one sense organ to everything that's happening around it. And that child will develop a highly anxious nervous system if you expose them to that daily level of stress. It doesn't have to be these big spiky blow ups. It can just be an elevated amount every single day or it's the equivalent of some of our veterans where they do deployments to warfronts. And then they may not have been shot at directly, they may not have directly seen somebody hit by driving in a Humvee, driving in a vehicle, and then hit a road mine, but they may be in an environment where they're hearing the gunfire and the shelling that's happening around them. And that is enough to, over months and in some cases years. That shocks the nervous system in a way that you could say is consistent with a complex PTSD diagnosis, which is another way of saying your nervous system has fundamentally been rewired to where it's switched on all the time, because it was in a constant state of sort of fight or flight. And you might not have perceived that, but that's exactly what just happened. But because it's not attached to one singular event, that's why it's considered complex, because it's like there was a lot going on there. There's a version of that in the technology industry is sort of referred to it as work hours and mind hours. The work hours are the hours you're in the office or sitting at the laptop, but even when you close it, you're working in your mind because you know, more of the emails and all the other bullshit is still piling up. And like we slowly boil ourselves alive in that environment. So that I think from what I've observed and experienced, that's the major sort of outward facing or external form of it. The other major source of crises is kind of what you and I have experienced, is that prior life circumstances which were very emotionally difficult, left its fingerprints on our mind and our nervous system. I think of the brain as basically just an autobiographical engine. What happens to it? It stores in memory, and then when you move forward through life, it is your mind telling the story of everything that's happened to you previously and projecting that through your thoughts, feelings and behaviors and all your day to day activities. And so I think there's this like very misunderstood but hugely influential level of autobiographical trauma that undergirds a lot of the very irrational drives to succeed and perform. Where the way I frame it is like for a pound of performance, there might be a pound of pain, right? Where we have these people who are achieving and pushing themselves to these next levels. But the question is why? What is behind that? I wasn't born to be Andy, the VP of growth, you know, the growth guy. I was conditioned to become that. I sought out the opportunity to do it as I experienced it throughout my Career. But like the thing underlying this incessant drive to just do more, like, I was dead set on becoming a part of $10 billion companies. It's like, why 10? The fuck is the point of that? Just this arbitrary thing. I can tell you why now. The why came from when I was a little kid, I was hurt in certain ways by my mom in particular. And then I was conditioned by the culture of excellence and achievement. So much so that this put this tremendous chip on my shoulder that if I was always succeeding, I was worth something. And if I wasn't, then I wasn't worth anything. I think that's underlying an awful lot of people, not just in Silicon Valley, but in finance and education and government and politics. And look at Trump. And look, I'm not making any political statements here, but like, you know what he is? He's a wounded child. You grow up with the father that he had and you become what that is. Look at Tiger woods. Same thing. His superpowers were also offset on the other side by these, quote, character flaws. He was conditioned into becoming exactly what he was. Is that his fault? When you were conditioned in that way when you were a kid, before you even had the fucking choice? No, that's how the world works. We're in adult bodies walking around autobiographically telling the stories of our childhoods to each other, taking that out on each other without even being aware of it. That is the nature of reality. And so to this question of red flags and Silicon Valley, what? I guess for the person that's listening to this, I'll go back to it. You have to understand who you are and how the mind works. And if you do, you still may make the choice and say, yeah, I love building technology. That's when I'm in a flow state that's. I love this act of creation and I'm going to go do it and I'm going to create this company. And maybe I have the self awareness to know that by year three or whatever, once it gets to 50 or 100 employees, I become the chief Technology Officer. But I'm not the leader of the company. In a sense, I'm just the guy or the gal who really likes building tech. Okay, that's okay. Just do it from a place of deep self awareness before you walk yourself into a corner.

Definitely, this is great advice here. Now a lot of this then gets thrown out as saying employees are burnt out. External factors, External factors. The word burnout now in the last two years especially has been thrown around like a bag of chips here they say it's a common issue for many people working in the tech industry. But what you've outlined here is there is a deeper place where that burnout is coming from. It's compound interesting on years of running and dealing with chaos and not internalizing and dealing with some trauma that you're faced with over the years, but now what are some strategies you've used or coached people through to prevent this burnout and maintain a healthy work life balance?

I think one of the most important things, and this is where there's a deep benefit that comes with this new opportunity for external work, which is to separate yourself from the environment you're in. That's one big thing that people can do to shock the system and give them a reminder. There are countless places and cultures around the world where people live differently. I don't have to be in San Francisco or Menlo park or New York City or Venice beach and grinding myself into dust every day. That's one of the things I say to folks is change your environment. And for all the conversations that go on around how important meditation and mindfulness is like, look, I'm a supporter, clearly it works when people dedicate themselves to a daily practice. There is value in learning how to calm the mind. I support that. But there's no sense in trying to develop that capability if all you're doing is trying to meditate as a coping mechanism to the environment you're in. It's all just let me do something to control the symptom, but let me not do anything to address the root cause. So what I advocate for is root cause level understanding and root cause level changes. And one of those would be change your environment. That could be in the form of I just got laid off, but hey, I got a little bit of savings. Let me move to another part of the country or the world where it is very cheap, but where people live differently. Like I mentioned, that's one of the reasons I'm going to be heading to different parts of Central South America. Southeast Asia is like it has the elements of healthy living and more communal connection and a different way of thinking about the importance of work that I'm seeking at this point in my life. And so I want to be in that environment that's conducive to balance and healthy living. And it comes with the benefit of the US dollar going much, much further there. So sure, I'm making a temporary stop here in the Big island, but I can't afford it. So after I do some of the therapeutic work here I'm doing, I'm getting the fuck out of here. I'm going to go somewhere else. That has this beautiful nature but comes at one tenth the price, right? That's one of the things that they can do. This root cause level stuff is even if you're not at a point of crisis, but you're feeling stuck, bit confused, the mind's running, or you're aware that there's this thing inside of you that feels of existential nature that's sort of probing and suggesting like something's not quite right. Listen to that voice and go get a coach or go to a therapist and try to unpack that voice a little bit. Understand what it's asking you to do and where it's coming from. Those are two of the biggest things. The third is the ABCs of lifestyle changes is be very specific and conscious around what you eat. Get up early, go outside, get some sunshine and then get some exercise in. Doesn't have to be intense walking 30 minutes here and there, a little swim, whatever exercise you enjoy. Pickleball, doesn't matter if you like it. Dance, it doesn't matter if you're a 50 year old dude that's got no rhythm. If you feel like dancing, go dance. So make those three changes. I recently interviewed a Harvard psychiatrist and assistant professor there's who has his own clinical practice as well as conducting a bunch of research with his team. His name is Dr. Christopher Palmer and he wrote a book called Brain Energy. And the message of the book is that there is a direct connection between the food we eat, how it influences our metabolic health and how that metabolic health has a direct connection to the functioning of our mind and whether or not mental illness is present. And so he treats many of his patients with a ketogenic diet. It doesn't have to be keto. From his clinical research, it works pretty well on quite a few folks. But in my case it's more heavy protein, moderate fat, almost no carbohydrates and nothing processed. And when I do that, and because I'm on that specific diet, I'm actually in the process of tapering down the SSRIs that I was on for a couple years to help me through a rough spot. And the role of diet and exercise and metabolism and brain health is so powerful. This is the natural way of living. I really suggest to folks like, if you want to get over burnout, you've got to get back to the basics of healthy living.

Well said. You know, a lot of people look for external factors, exogenous means, but the answer is within you, right? Like exercise, surrounding yourself with positive people, speaking to a therapist, your diet, you know, want to double click on that a little more? Because our diets, our western diets are full of processed sugars and processed foods which create inflammation in the body. Can't be good for you. When I started to cut out all these things is when I started to feel better. In fact, I fasted for almost a year just eating one or two meals, largely ketogenic. I'm no expert and so I don't want to advocate for anything, but I saw a material improvement in my well being and my health and the environment thing. It's easier said than done. But last August I moved to Dubai with my partner, two dogs, three kids, and it changed my life. I finally feel settled after living in more than 10 cities thus far since childhood. Right. Dubai is a very positive city. People do not discuss bad news. It's all good news. Some may say it's like the Truman show or it's like Disneyland, but the compound interest on bad news every day, right, left wing, right wing, wokeism, cancel culture, shootings, work stress, the compound interest on discussing and being a part of this 247 triggers certain traumas in your brain, makes you an angry person. I went to a very popular city a couple days ago, traveled, and there was so much chaos in the city that everyone was fighting and arguing with each other like almost everywhere. And I started to find myself getting angry and frustrated and I realized the environment plays such a big, big role. You know, where you are can put you in an elevated state of fight or flight or could put you in a state of calm. So it's important. It's very hard to do though. Not everyone has the opportunity to pick and leave unless the opportunity presents itself.

Right? Yeah. And I've had people say to me like, well Andy, you're privileged. I was like, look, look, look, look. We throw that word around too much. Because the way in which it's used, the tone in which it's used often implies a singular definition of privilege, which is a granted privilege. Like you were given this. When I say to him, I was like, I wasn't giving shit. I came from a. Or blue collar, low middle class and it wasn't even middle class for quite a bit of it for me. Farming family, where my mom died from mental illness. She was bipolar and schizophrenic and in and out of psychiatric institutes and rehab centers. It was a broken home. My parents got divorced. I witnessed the aftermath of One of her suicide attempts, you know, I saw her in an open casket when I was 10. That was fucking brutal. That was not easy. We were a top ramen family for a while, right, because we also went bankrupt during that whole process. I applied myself. I was a straight A kid, I got a good career, I worked hard, and I made intelligent decisions with my money. There are two forms of privilege. You can be given stuff, you can earn it. And so when I chat with folks and they say, oh, I want to make these changes, but I don't know if I can. Of course you can. If you really want it, if you want to do this for yourself, if you're serious about it before you face plant and then you get serious after the face plant, you'll find a way, especially if you work in tech. You can get a job, you can make some money, you can save enough, and then you can leave. Choose the game in life that you're trying to play. Define the rules of success. Play that game, win the game, then leave it. You can do that. And so for anyone else that's listening to this, if you get a similar message, it's like, oh, that must be nice. Oh, what a privilege. Those people are not your friends, and they're not being honest with themselves and you ignore them. And if you want to change, do what is necessary to make that change happen.

Now more than ever before, people with the Internet, with so many tools, with so many opportunities around you, finally can design the life you want to live and build your work around it.

So.

So people are telling you you're privileged. I get that too. I mean, oh, you exited your company, you. You came into money. It's easier said for you than ever. But I had a very supportive wife who left her career as a Stanford physician to come with me here because she recognized what is important is the mental health and the longevity of the family. And I think it's very important to look from within and see what you can do. If you all of a sudden lose your job and you have no means to live in that boiler room environment, then you're going to find something new. And that usually comes from a face plant. Why wait for that?

Because it's not pleasant.

It certainly isn't pleasant. I got overweight. I looked 20 years older. I found myself crying in the bathroom many times. I used to drink and smoke heavily as a coping mechanism, and I regret not taking care of it a lot sooner.

The harsh truth is, not everyone survives the faceplant.

Exactly.

If you can avoid it, don't go there, it wakes a lot of people up. Then some people that face plants are no longer with us.

That's why it was very important, especially for people like you and I to come out and be vulnerable and discuss this. Because it is okay to not be okay. But a lot of people don't talk about it.

That's why I think of it less and less about vulnerability as time goes on and think more and more of it is just truth. Truth is the essential ingredient for change and the elimination of suffering. And the truth is that suffering is a universal constant. Everyone will suffer in some way throughout their life. I think of it as like a blanket that lays across all of humanity. It's not evenly distributed from one population to the next, but it's also not evenly distributed over time. An individual can suffer in one decade and not suffer in the next. A group of people can suffer in one century and not suffer in the next. This is also part of the nature of reality. Suffering is universal. And you don't have to expose yourself to too much unnecessary suffering. There's the necessary suffering wall experience. People will die, will get sick and injured, get old. Everything will ache, it'll hurt. Some of us will get serious illnesses. That is part of life. But so much of the suffering we go through day to day is self imposed and is unnecessary because we don't want to confront what is true. Am I unhappy despite making six figures? Am I doing this job because I'm just trying to prove to these other fuckers that I can do it when they didn't think I could? Am I building this company because I think I'm changing the world as if the world isn't constantly changing already. Confront these truths. Have the courage to do so, beginning with yourself. Confront the truth of who you are and why you are that way and the truth of how you actually want to live. And then confront the external truths, like you said. Like we're bombarded by these messages and negativity and violence. Then of course the population of people in America is going to get angry and anxious and have these more erratic outbursts. And we should be fucking pissed off at the so called leaders who are pumping this crap out to us every day because they are conditioning your mind in ways that you're not in control of. But you can choose to exit that and you can choose to remove that artificially created unnecessary suffering. That is up to you. And yes, it can be hard, but it is doable.

Certainly is. I can't say that enough. It's up to you. To curate the environment that puts you in the best frame of mind. Your well being depends on it. Nobody's going to do it for you. Do not try to build society's definition of success. This is the problem, right? We first start to please our parents, then our teachers, then the leaders in the company, then our venture capitalists were always on this treadmill of building someone else's definition of success. And the compound interest on that over time we forget ourselves and then we face plans. So don't wait for that to happen. If you could go back in time and do things differently, what would you.

Do now that I wouldn't change? The thing I've come to realize and for me, I've accepted the role of a higher power in my life. I was this hyper rational person. I believe that everything is fundamentally measurable and that there's a rational explanation for everything. You know, I was a self proclaimed atheist and I've turned a corner on that. And I did through my own process of healing and a couple special moments I had where I connected with something that there was no rational explanation for. But that in some of my darkest moments, it played an important part of helping pick me up off the ground and move forward. And I just generally refer to it as the universe. It doesn't have a religious, institutional, religious prescription to it. But at this point I just see far too much complexity and far too much beauty. When you truly explore like what kind of experience are we living in? We live on this planet in this immense environment that we can't even fully understand and measure. We don't know just how big it is because we can't even observe how big it is within the observable universe, which is just a small part of something that is much bigger and potentially infinite. But even just within the observable universe, there are somewhere around 2 trillion galaxies. And then within each galaxy there's a couple hundred million celestial bodies in that, and that's just in the part of the map we can see. And then we have this funny thing that we call consciousness. We have this awareness that we're having some experience we call reality. But even that experience we call reality is just a fraction of the full nature of reality. Because take our senses for example, and how we perceive reality. Our eyesight is finely tuned to some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is less than 0.01% of the full spectrum of observable energy. And so what our eyes see is actually just a very, very small fraction of the full spectrum of energy that makes up the Full picture of reality. And then you layer on top of that everything we just talked about the mind being this easily malleable autobiographical engine. And it takes in stories from the world around us, whether that's on TV or it's from the stories from our parents and our teachers and our friends. And then it interprets them in a certain way. And through that process of interpretation, we even distort reality. So, basic example this. Somebody says something to you, and then you perceive it as an insult when what they were saying wasn't an insult whatsoever. This happens on the Internet all the time, right? You assign intent to what that person said, and it manipulates that experience. And so I look at it and I'm thinking, like, okay, we're in this vastly immeasurable experience where we can't even fully perceive the nature of reality. And the fact is that this engine of creation, that is the outermost layer of. And the most modern part of our brain, commonly makes mistakes when interpreting this experience. So what do we actually know? Nothing. Very little. So one can find meaning and value in life by being the astrophysicist or the philosopher, whatever, that finds these questions interesting. And so they just explore it and study it, knowing that they'll never fully really know what the answer is. But for them, that gives them meaning. These are the Stoics, the philosophers. For everyone else, that is a dead end. And so the question isn't like, what is this ultimate meaning in life and how do I make sense of it all? You have to flip it on its head and say, no, maybe we're actually living in some sort of, like, Etch A Sketch type experience where, like, I get to decide what I want this reality to be. So I'm going to determine and become the author of my own life. And I'm going to flip that question of what's the meaning of life? Over and say, what meaning do I want to give to life? That seems more fitting and more appropriate. And for most people, that's the solution. That's the answer. So tech people think of it that way, all right? You're not the only one changing the world. That's a lie. Everything is changing at all times. There was a philosopher, I can't remember who it was, said a simple little statement, you know, the same man has never stepped foot in the same river. For the man is not the same, and neither is the river. It captures an essential understanding of the nature of reality, which is that everything is changing at all times. Understand that. Realize that you, too can change and that you're suffering that you might be experiencing right now doing a job you don't care about is because you were resisting change. And something inside of you might be begging for you to make a change and live in a way the authentic version of yourself that's been buried under decades of societal conditioning, of traumatic conditioning. It's begging for you to come out and live how you want. That's why I created the website. I created clues. Life. That's the whole point. Find the clues to discovering the life you want to live. And the ultimate clue is there is no fundamental truth. There is no fundamental single way of living or being. You pick your path. You find your own way to Bangkok, so to speak.

Do things that bring you joy. The only thing constant is change. Don't resist change. Someone from within is probably begging you for that change. But do things that bring you joy. Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. I was able to reflect my journey throughout this conversation, but you're right. At the end of it, I wouldn't change a thing because you have to go through it yourself. You have to deal with it yourself because if you don't, you're eventually going to deal with it at some point. I hope this serves as a great learning for others in this boat of burnout and constant treadmill, hamster wheel kind of thing and they can take a learning from this or two and not have to eventually face plan. Thank you so much Andy. Wishing you a fun time and the big island there and hope to see you sometime in person. Maybe you find your way to Dubai and let me host you.

I love to do that and thank you for giving me an opportunity to spread my message folks.

Check out clues C L u e s.life and follow Andy's advice and advocacy on mental health. Thank you so much my friend. Love and peace. Thank you.

I need some traction.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at Boast AI that's B o a S T A I blog.