I love everything that you do.
I can't believe. I genuinely can't believe it took me as long as it did to find your work.
It's Charlie Hooper from Charisma on Command that said you'd been a gateway drug for him to a bunch of other stuff.
And I get the sense you're kind of an underground hero in sort of the selfwork world who's now becoming increasingly less underground.
Because of you. And open AI, you're now the head of Open AI?
No, not head. And I just am working there maybe like 25 days this year, but I'm working with the compute and research teams, basically the management of the folks who are creating the technology.
It's great work. The cool thing is that when I think about, generally like the creation of technology or the creation of art or the creation of this podcast, it's a reflection of the consciousness of the people who are creating it.
And so to be able to be in there and work with consciousness and how the culture's consciousness is and how the people interact with each other and how they view themselves, to me, is a complete honor to be able to work there with them.
Because you're further up than all of the things that are going to come after that.
All of the products, the branding, the way that they deploy this stuff, yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah. And they're just sweethearts.
I can't tell you, once that news came out, So many people came to me with a lot of fear.
There's a lot of fear in the AI space.
And I understand why people have the fear, not both the people on the outside and the inside.
Like, oh, this is a revolutionary technology.
What's gonna happen?
We don't actually know, so fear arises.
And I think what surprised me about it is just like, especially open AI, just the folks are just sweeties.
Like, they're just like such lovely humans, yeah.
What drives you? What are you trying to achieve with your work?
Oh, yeah, so what I would say is that, generally, we have this epidemic of stress and lack of enjoyment in our society right now.
And the thing about that is that it's corrosive both on an individual and on a societal level.
So individually, it means that we do not learn as well.
It means that we make bad decisions.
It means that we don't get the world that we want.
It means that we're uncomfortably living, means we die faster.
All those things because we're stressed and we're not enjoying life.
But on a society level, if I'm stressed, I mean, the world's a threat.
That's why we stress as mammals, right?
So, oh my gosh, the world is a threat.
And if I ask, act like the world is a threat, and then eventually I'm like, you're a threat, you're a threat, you're a threat, eventually you're going to be a threat to me, if I treat you like an asshole, you're going to act like an asshole eventually.
If I treat you like a threat, you're going to act like a threat eventually.
So you're looking at our world right now and it's whole bunch of stressed out people treating everybody like threats and everybody's starting to act like a threat.
Doesn't matter whether you're looking at politics or marriages or relationships or, so there's this just, so to me, then the question is like, how do we work on that stress and increase the enjoyment?
And typically the way people look at that is, I'm too busy, the world is too complicated.
The politics are doing this.
Like there's a big unknown future.
I have my phone and it's distracting me.
So they put it all outside of themselves.
And that's actually, they contribute.
Like having a cell phone buzzing all the time is gonna increase your stress, no doubt, but they're not the actual cause of the stress.
The cause of the stress is three things.
and then this is where I get, this is where I'm really, this is where my work comes in.
The first thing is repressed emotions, causes a shit ton of stress in humans.
Second thing is lack of connection causes a huge amount of stress.
And the third thing which I think is most relatable for people is the negative self -talk, causes a lot of stress.
So if there's a voice in your head that is constantly criticizing you, you're constantly under attack.
That's constant stress.
That's like a war zone in your head.
And so, that's where my work is.
My work is in changing the voice in the head.
And the thing about the voice in the head is that I think most people, the way they think about it is I want it to stop or I'm gonna be in self -improvement, I'm gonna improve myself, I'm gonna improve, but that's just more abuse.
So I flip from self improvement to self understanding.
Today, we are starting this thing and you're looking at the thing.
You understand the videos and you're, and it's because you have understanding of all that stuff.
You didn't say I've got to learn.
You better, better, I gotta be better, I gotta be.
You're just like, you learned the stuff and then it happens.
But somehow when we interact with ourselves, it's you gotta be better.
You gotta be better.
You gotta be better.
Instead of how do I understand myself?
and then all that changes just by the nature of understanding.
And in emotions, what you'll hear a lot of in this sphere is emotional regulation, emotional management.
And this weird thing happens in our brain that it's like we either have, we are either controlled by our emotions or we're controlling our emotions, and neither of them lead to emotional clarity.
One, repression, like right now, if I said to you, stop feeling all of your emotions, I'm going to ask you to try to do it.
Stop feeling all of your emotions, your muscles constricted, your face just got ripped.
That is stress, that is what stress is.
So self management of your emotions is a tightening down of the system.
And so instead we think about it as emotional clarity.
And so what that means is that if you have a tube, let's say of emotion moving through you, and let's call that this emotion particularly anger, and you crank it this way, it's like, nice shirt.
And if you crank it this way, it's fuck you, you son of a bitch. But if it's actually like open, that anger is clarity.
It's boundaries, it's Gandhi, it's Martin Luther King.
That's what that anger looks like.
And so, but you don't get that through management, you get that through welcoming and loving the emotion.
So that's the emotional side of it.
And then the last side is just connection.
So whether it's the longest study Harvard ever did that shows that connection creates better health, outcomes, more happiness, or just the fact that if you do the Occam's Razor of connection when you're thinking about any problem that you have, it almost always helps you solve the problem.
How so? So how do I get a better podcast?
How do I connect with the people better?
How do I better relationship with my wife?
Oh, I'm gonna connect better." Because connection is what humans actually want.
So any problem that you have that's human -based, which is most of the problems that we have. So it's not, it even can help you, let's say you're a hedge fund manager, you're programming, you know, the next AI.
You know, and I know that if you're playing sports or if you're programming, your level of self -connection is gonna influence well you perform.
We call it flow but it's really just connection.
So if you look at connection, it's just very productive, but it also is what we are drawn to as humans.
Like when my daughter was like, not only like, I think she was like 18 months old.
It makes me miss you thinking about this.
Like if I came in all amped, my nervous system was all amped from.
She would like sit on my lap and she'd grab my face and she'd be like, and she's like, I love you, daddy.
She's like, I need to feel that connection with you.
Yeah, now she makes fun of me before.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How the tables have turned.
Exactly. You talked about the negative inner voice, that critical self talk.
Where does that come from?
Typically it comes from somebody who was raising us, typically, and that could be...
As a matter of fact, that same daughter and I were listening to our podcast on Voice in the Head and she was 10 years old.
She's like, I know where my voice in the head comes from.
I'm like, oh, she's like, my teacher and my grandma.
And she just named the people she could hear in her head.
Yeah, so it's basically stories that we were told when we were younger.
So if mom and dad are mad at you and you're thinking to yourself, oh, that has to be something I did.
It doesn't have to do with you know at eight, you're not like it's their coffee habit or you know They had a bad day at work So then you start.
Oh, I shouldn't do that.
I have to do this and you're basically trying to figure out how to Exist in the world and this voice starts developing in your head.
It's an incredibly non -productive voice.
It takes so much energy Like I think somebody I think it's the Cleveland.
I say that there's 50, 60 ,000 thoughts that a person has a day.
Most of those repetitive, many of those negative, and you phrase up so much energy when that stuff changes.
Yeah, it's interesting thinking about how kids, they can't change their environment so they have to learn to exist within it.
You don't have a passport and a bank account and the Uber app and you know Airbnb to be able to go and get yourself away.
You you don't even know what that means like what does it mean to do this you you don't even know if you're in the right when your parents say that you're not in the rights like no no no that's not what it should be in there and you go well the the case for the defense seems to be woefully underfunded here you know the case for the prosecution has all of the benefits of being an adult and being the one that's in command and then being two of them and only one of you yeah and And it's normal, this is the only thing that you've ever known.
So it's completely normalized, you're not even getting the idea of, like, oh, it could be different.
This is just it. And we're geared, neurologically speaking, we're geared to be programmed in those years.
So, you know, the brainwaves, theta brainwave is a brainwave that basically is the programming brainwave right?
It's like, is that place between awake and asleep is when adults feel a typically.
but kids feel it most of the time from zero to seven years old.
So in human development terms, they're basically in that place that is - Spongey.
Yeah, exactly, and it's why they believe in fairy tales and Santa Claus and all that stuff because they're in that world.
And so it's like the place where we get programmed.
And so that's why if you have certain modalities of healing, there's some there's like I can describe everything that's wrong with me but nothing has changed.
That's because you're working in the head.
That if you're working more intellectually, if you're working in what that theta brainwave space, you're like, I really can't describe the whole thing.
But, shit, my world's changed.
And that's why those when those modalities, oftentimes the ones that work really effectively are the ones that you can't quite explain what the fuck happened.
Stuff like Breath Work, perhaps.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, they rip you out of that, I have control, here I am, self authoring, making things go.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
What about self -reliance?
I feel like there's an issue of too much self -reliance.
A lot of people want to be highly agentic.
They want to self -author, they want to be able to take control.
I don't need to be able to rely on anybody else.
But is this such a thing, it's too much self -reliance?
Yeah, so I think it's just the way that you— where you're in developmentally.
So, there are some people in the world who feel like they don't have any control over their life.
They're tossed and turned.
So, self -reliance there is probably a great thing to learn.
That's a great moment for them to learn, oh, I have choice, I can't command.
I do have the ability to make my world what I want it to be.
But then at some point, that weighs down.
Then you're, shit, I'm responsible for everything.
And I can't rely on anybody.
And that's typically where those super self -reliant people, and I'm speaking about us here, like both of us grew up this way, on some level there was some learning earlier on in our lives that it was, I'm alone in this, there's some I'm alone in this.
And that makes us, I don't wanna feel, so this is where the emotional thing comes in.
I don't wanna feel that deep aloneness.
Couldn't feel it as a kid.
Don't wanna feel it now.
And therefore, my reaction to not feel it is self -reliance.
And so that really slows us down because you can only accomplish so much as yourself.
You can accomplish a tremendous amount as a team.
But you can't do that in a team where you're always, always alone, feeling like it's all on you.
We all have had bosses like that.
They're horrible to work with.
They start yelling, I'm all alone in this.
Why can't anybody fucking pa pa pa pa pa?
That's like ultra self -reliance instead of actually realizing that this is something that I teach CEOs all the time.
Everybody here at this company wants you to feel like they're doing a good job.
Everybody in this company cares that you think they're doing a good job.
Everybody in this company didn't didn't wake up and say, you know what I want to do?
I want to go and have a shitty time at work today.
I want to really under fucking perform.
Nobody wakes up saying that and yet you feel all alone in this because CEOs are typically very self -reliant.
So it's a blessing and a curse it's just what stage you're in.
What would be an indication to somebody in their personal in life that they are overly self -reliant?
What would be the sort of behaviors, thought patterns, ways that they show up, things that they do?
Typically, it's I'm alone in this.
It's that feeling of, oh, I'm, I can't depend on somebody.
See, they're not there for me again.
See, I've been abandoned again.
It's that feeling, it has to be on me, I have to do it.
So I have a client who worked with one of the biggest Silicon Valley narcissists And every week, it was review time, and they would just yell at her, just yell at her and her team.
And then they'd go to the next team and yell at them and their team, and they'd go to the next team and yell at their team.
And one day, she just looked at him and said, hey, I see that what you are saying, your wisdom is really important.
And I want you to know that everybody in this room wants you to get your vision met.
It's just hard for us to do it when you're yelling at us.
And he never yelled at her again.
because she addressed the actual underlying thing, which is, you're not alone.
Mm -hmm. And so if you're dealing with somebody who has that self -reliance, that's the solve is to say, hey, I see what you care, how much you care about this thing, I see that you really want this, and I want to help you.
If you want to help them, don't be inauthentic about it.
And that's the solve of working with somebody like that.
If you address the core underlying issue.
That's there. Then you'll solve it.
It seems to me, looking at your work, that a lot of the solutions, or a lot of the answers come back to the same endpoint, which is some variant of soften up, open your heart.
Yeah, so that's actually, so that's because of those three things I was talking about.
Connection benefits from softening up and opening your heart.
That's how we are going to connect.
I'm not gonna connect with you if I'm like, that's not gonna create the connection.
It is also the result and we talked about this last time, but Joy is the Matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house that her children aren't welcome.
And so if you actually welcome and allow for emotional clarity, allow for that emotional movement that you're neither either taken by it or controlling it, then the natural outcome is that softening.
And if you aren't beating the fuck out of yourself in your head, then the natural outcome is the softening.
So that's, yeah, so that's how it works.
Yeah, exactly. I think for a lot of people in the modern world, they've steeled themselves against pain, against being open, vulnerability, this sort of fear of needing anyone.
I don't really need anybody.
If I need somebody, then that means that they can take away from me something which is necessary.
Right. And how am I going to operate?
That's my life support system.
But if my life support system is completely endogenous, and I've got a solar panel on my back, and I can just continue to trek even if I move more slowly, even if it's more miserable, even if I feel alone, even if I'm not supported and I'm detached, at least it can't ever be taken away from me.
I had this insight, this thought – one of the reasons that people continue to prioritize their careers over relationships is because only they can leave their career, but not only they can leave the relationship, that somebody else can exit a relationship.
That hurts. Yeah. Why does that hurt?
Oh, just that like the idea that the lack of vulnerability will bring you happiness.
I think it steals you against the potential for unhappiness, perhaps would be the way that people see it.
Yes, exactly. It ensures it.
Well you guarantee failure privately by not exposing yourself to failure publicly, right?
It's like, I know that if I stick to this particular route and this is the person hard -charging, chasing after their career, this is what comes first. And you think, well, what are you doing this for?
What's the outcome that you're looking to get here?
Yeah, you want recognition and validation and all the rest of it.
But it's like, you've got it in the person that you lie next to at bed every night.
You've got it in the kid that's 10 feet above you in the next room.
Why are you seeking all of this validation from people who, if you stopped doing what you did, would stop giving a fuck about you, whereas the people that are in the house around you don't care about what you do, they only care about who you are?
And you're trading people who care about you for who you are for people who care about you for what you do.
And I think the reason is?
That's what makes me sad.
That's the thing that hurts.
people chasing happiness and only creating their own misery in it.
I think it's a, and I understand it, it is an easy route to avoid something being taken away from you because it's only you that can stop driving on the mission, right?
But when you're doing a career you're playing tennis by hitting a ball against the wall and for as long as the wall doesn't break.
Which is going to take a very long time for you to do that with a tennis ball.
You can keep playing whereas a relationship is you playing tennis with somebody else, and if that somebody else decides I don't want to play tennis with you anymore.
There's a degree of vulnerability there that makes you think well I'm just going to focus all of my attention on the career side of stuff.
Because that means that at least it can't be stopped unless I decide to kill the music.
Yeah, the two things that, yes, I agree.
That's the thought process.
The two things that I think are being miscalculated there is just the idea of human needs.
So when you're self -reliant, human needs in your mind exist as water, food, shelter, you know, maybe having some money.
When you're not self -reliant, you realize human needs.
And so there's not the need to survive.
there's the need to thrive, and humans can't thrive without connection.
People can't thrive without communication with a sense of safety.
There's a whole bunch of other needs that are there just to thrive, right?
And so, that's the first miscalculation.
The second miscalculation they have is that that heartbreak can't create more happiness.
Every time you allow yourself, your heart to break, every time you allow your heart to break, it increases your capacity to love.
The same old? How so?
My buddy gets in this relationship, great relationship.
He's a heavy drinker at the time, he's got a business, he's doing okay.
He's doing revegetation on Indian tribe, he's doing this stuff, and this woman breaks up with him.
He asked me, what should I do?
He has this long trip from Flagstaff to Yuma, And I'm like every I just want you to mourn like cry ridiculous cry on the way there and on the way back So that's twice a week for a couple hours And he calls me a couple days later.
He's like, man the voice is coming out of my eyes, like I'm wailing I sound like I who knew that I could like make you Six months later, he's in shape Six months later.
His business is thriving six months later.
He's his like his home life is like better everything is better about his life.
And the next relationship he got into was twice as healthy because he mourned the thing.
And then the way he describes it is that I started mourning the relationship and then I mourned everything that got me into the relationship.
All the things I had learned, all the things that I thought were true that allowed me to put up with the stuff that I put up with or not speak my truth or not say the things that were important to me in that relationship.
And so if we allow ourselves to feel that grief, it totally changes how we interact with the world.
And another example of this is my wife and I, we've been married 26 years and it's maybe seven, I don't know how many times now, but every once in a while we'll be in a fight.
And our process now is we'll just mourn the end of the marriage.
We'll go and cry and just be like, it's not going to work and just fully mourn the marriage so that we can show up and say the things that we actually want to say that are our truth.
Because - Why can't you say them, without mourning the end of the marriage?
Because you're scared of the moment.
You're scared of the end of the marriage.
Right? How many things have you do not say in a relationship because you're scared of, they're they're gonna react.
They're gonna abandon you.
They're gonna leave you.
They're gonna get mad at you, right?
We walk on eggshells because of the emotional response of the other.
If I fully grieve the end of the marriage, then I can act.
I'm like, I've already felt it.
I'm already through it.
I can be myself. It's the same way that the samurai or the stoics or, or the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying over the death, you just go through the thing.
And then, you know, because what we're avoiding is the emotional experience.
We're not avoiding the actual thing.
So a big, high achiever thing that people all fear.
Oh, I'm going to go homeless.
Right? If I don't, like, keep on going, I'm going to go homeless.
So if I said to somebody, yeah, you're going to be homeless, but you're never going to be happier.
The joy that you're going to feel is going to be amazing.
That level of connection, you're going to feel so good about yourself.
Now what the mind's going to go, that can't happen if I'm homeless.
What is there to be afraid of?
But what is there to be afraid of?
Because we're actually scared of the emotional result of things, not the actual thing itself.
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two of your insights, we often abandon ourselves in an attempt to prevent other people from abandoning us, and if you're trying to manage other people's feelings you're abandoning your own.
Yeah, yeah, well that's a great example of those things.
So, generally if you're walking on eggshells, it's one of two ways.
Either I'm gonna break the person if I say my truth, and that means you're dealing with somebody's more passive -aggressive.
If you're dealing with somebody's more aggressive, then you're worried about them getting angry at you.
And so you're trying to manage them.
And if you're managing them, you're not in your own truth.
So in your own truth, you're going to say your truth and loving an open heart, and you're going to deal with the consequences of it.
And if you don't, you get resentment.
That's where the resentment comes from.
Where does passive aggression come from?
A person who's not able to be aggressive.
So, if I'm doing a workshop and someone gets passive -aggressive with me, I'm like, okay, just get angry.
So it means that anger was bad in their childhood and so I can't be angry so I'm going to go, nice dress.
I'm not going to actually, or I'm going to be late or I'm going to not call you when I say I'm going to call you all the things that passive -aggressive people do.
The thing about passive -aggression is that the people who are passive -aggressive often don't know they're doing it.
Sometimes they do, but oftentimes, they don't know they're doing it.
What they feel like the person who's self -reliant feels alone, the passive -aggressive person feels like they're stuck.
They feel like I can't get out of this situation and so the only thing I can do is.
Take away. Yeah, take away, which by the way is what we do with ourselves.
That's how the voice in the head works the exact same way.
So some part of our voice in the head that we hear and we can really go with is you should work out more.
I mean you probably don't do that but but you should work out more and then Then there's this other part that like is like, yeah, maybe I won't go to the gym.
I'm gonna And so we actually have the same relationship inside of us And if that relationship inside of us changes on the relationship externally changes.
Mm -hmm Yeah, so if you don't accept your own passive aggression internally you won't accept it in the outside world Yeah, I think I had this idea of shadow sentences that a lot of the time people are scared of saying what it is that they want or what it is that they need.
So instead of pointing at it directly, they sort of gesture in the direction of it, it's sort of, it's over there, they sort of leave it to hang in the air a little bit, like sort of dropping a fart and then leaving the room, I suppose, or, you know, like people say this about La Croix, you know, the sparkling water, it's so lightly flavored that they say if drinking the lemon one it's like somebody shouted the word lemon in the next room while it was being built.
And that's what the shadow sentences make me think about, you know the sort of phrases said through closed doors and thick walls, it's like, what was, hang on what was that?
Is that? And then you end up with, well I mean it's culpably deniable and the reason that I think it feels safe to be passive aggressive in that way or to use these shadow sentences is that if you don't specifically ask for something, the denial of the thing doesn't feel quite as bad.
So you go, I didn't actually ask for it.
So they've got culpable deniability in disappointing me in not giving me what it is that I want and my needs don't feel quite as spiked at because they weren't fully rebuffed because I didn't actually ask for the thing that it is that I was after.
Right, and the worst part is that that you're less likely to get it.
Because if you're worried about the reaction of asking for what you want, then you're gonna ask for it in a weird way.
So if I'm scared you're gonna get angry at me, I'll be like, oh yeah, so I was thinking I was kinda would love it if we could do a thing and that's like, I don't want that.
No, I want to be met with somebody who's in themselves.
And so not only is it not being direct, it also makes it an increased likelihood that you're not going to get the thing you want, which is brutal.
Yeah. But it's such a vulnerable thing to just ask directly for what you want.
People like, that is a really, as a matter of fact, so yesterday, I'm with a guy who I've worked with for a long time, and he's showing me his dating app.
And in his dating app, he has a question, just tell me one thing that you want.
Like that's his prompt.
like what one thing that you want and I was like what percentage of women answer that question he's like that's about five percent I'm like that's probably where you're going to find your woman you can actually own but that means that she's done the work that she can actually own her want yeah so yeah just happened the other day.
Defensiveness you mentioned that why do people get defensive?
Why do people get defensive because they're protecting their ego.
They think that they're – and they don't even actually know what they're protecting typically.
So, anything that you can get defensive about is true about you.
So, like, what? You could tell me I'm stupid, I can think of a way I'm stupid.
You can tell me I'm a dick, I can think of a way that I'm a dick.
You can tell me I'm wrong, I can think of six ways I'm wrong.
like there's nothing you could say to me that isn't fucking true.
So what am I defending?
So I have to actually believe that there's a me to defend, to be defensive.
It means I have to be in my head, I can't be in my heart.
If I'm in my heart, there's nothing to defend.
Like there, it could hurt.
Oh God, that hurts.
Like why are you saying that, ouch?
say ouch, but there's nothing to defend.
Like what, like who am I proving it to?
What am I... What exactly am I defending?
Anytime I see somebody defend something, I'm like, what exactly are you defending?
And that really throws people because they can't find it.
Yeah that's interesting, I suppose sometimes people inject themselves into situations where, you know, defensiveness when somebody is being attacked so to speak is, I guess, one level of it but a degree of defensiveness which is not even necessarily about that person, it's like hey this thing happened and it made me feel sad and then defensiveness comes out from the other person if this sort of injection of them into you or into the situation.
Okay so there's one thing that it rhymes with the voice in your head if you say something to me that makes me defensive whether whether it's at me or not at me, it rhymes with something that I say in my head to myself.
I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy.
Right. Yeah. Exactly.
Or, I shouldn't eat wheat.
You say to me, yeah, I've given up gluten, and I get defensive.
It means there's something in me who's also like, yeah my diet's got crap.
Yeah, exactly. So it's rhyming with something in my head is one of the things that we're defensive against. And if you think about it this way, this is a key to like, unlocking the way the negative self -talk works, is that you do that same thing with yourself again.
Your voice tells you this you should do this, dah, dah, dah, and then there's a defensiveness that happens, and that keeps that whole loop cycling.
Like, there's a resistance to force, and when we try to force ourselves, we resist against it.
And so that just keeps the whole thing in place, And it's why, which is typically why shame is an emotion that stagnates.
Anything that you're ashamed about is something that you're going to continue doing.
So if I said to you, write down the five things that you've told yourself you should do for the last 10 years, and you haven't, and you haven't changed, or you haven't done, I guarantee you, there's shame on all those things.
I guarantee you that you tell yourself you should do all of those things.
Because shame stagnates, and it's why self -improvement doesn't work as well as self -understanding.
Because if you're shaming yourself to improve, if you're on yourself to improve, that force will be resisted, and it happens between people and it happens within yourself.
Yeah. The desire that this sort of tendency that we all have to whip ourselves into submission to think, wow, if I just beat myself hard enough, and again, that rhymes with the voice in the head.
Yeah. you know if you're very self -reliant, if you're the sort of person that's got hard charging type A insecure overachiever, you go, well this seems to, it's got me places in other areas of my life, so maybe that's the way that I should show up in my relationship.
Maybe that's, you know as soon as the partner says something which kicks one of the tripwires that lay in my head, you go, well, You know, yeah, that is right, but to sit with the huh, what if I am this thing?
Like what if that is the case?
Not what, it is absolutely true.
There's nothing you could say, say something to me that isn't true about me, not physically, obviously you could say like I'm six -foot -nine, but there's no part of humanity that I don't encompass.
Liar, yeah, I can think of it.
Like anything, it's absolutely true.
So the idea that to be defensive against it is, it's just, you know, it's almost like admitting when you're defensive, you're almost admitting like, yeah, I'm really ashamed about that.
Which is actually a really cool thing if you're working, if you're like, if I'm with my wife or I'm with my kid and I see them get defensive, I see what actually is happening is they're in shame and I address the shame.
So in a relationship, if I see somebody getting defensive, I'll say like, oh, there's nothing in me that wants you to feel bad.
about this thing that I just said.
There's nothing in me that wants you to feel like you should be ashamed or that you've done anything wrong.
And I see how much you're trying.
And then I see them.
I see how much you're trying, I see how much you care about this thing.
I see how you want that to be different.
And the whole, the fight just goes away.
Because all that's happening is two people throwing shame back at each other in a fight.
You should be ashamed.
No, you should be ashamed.
No, you should be ashamed.
And one person is thinking, oh, I'm defending myself.
And the other person's thinking, oh, I'm defending myself.
But this person's thinking you're attacking me and this person saying and you're attacking me, but it's just two people defending themselves from shame and then the other person's taking it as an attack.
And all that needs to be done is I see you and I don't want you to be ashamed.
And if they, if you say that with an open heart and they can see it, there's, there's nothing left to fight over.
So that's a way to interject as the person speaking to the one that's maybe a little more defensive, at least in this situation.
What about accepting that, or how can people get over their own defensiveness?
How can people become less defensive in themselves?
So the way I think about shifting behavior is that there's three - this is going to be a long answer to your question, but I think it's really useful.
there's three ways, there's three brains at play, right?
There's the human brain pre -protonal cortex, there's the mammalian brain, which is the emotional part of our system.
And then there's the reptilian brain, which is the nervous system part of our system.
And if you don't address the change on all three levels, then it's the change isn't particularly gonna stick.
So you really wanna address it on all three levels.
So if you find yourself defensive, the first one is intellectually find that it's true.
We just go, I know that whatever they said, there is truth to it and find the truth in it.
And so that kind of calms the intellectual piece of it.
What the emotional thing is happening is that if you're in a defensive place, you're in shame, you think there's something wrong with you.
And so usually what shame is doing is stagnating an emotion underneath it.
So if you can feel the emotion that's underneath the shame and fully welcome that in, not accept, I will accept this emotion.
It's like, I'm welcoming this emotion in and feeling it, then that's the emotional side of it.
And like I said, we make decisions to feel certain ways, right?
We don't want to be homeless because we don't want to feel a certain way.
And then there's the nervous system, and the nervous system is telling, I'm not safe, I'm under attack.
And so if you can just come to your senses, literally feel like, rub your legs or just put your attention on the bottom of your feet.
Anything where you're coming to your senses, it will calm the nervous system down.
And those are the three ways of doing it.
Yeah, you say, if you're scared of feeling an emotion, you're already in it.
Yeah, yeah. What's that mean?
Yeah. So, if I am scared of feeling something, then I am, I don't know how to say it any clearer, actually.
I'm all ready in. Yeah, I was about to define it by saying, just restating it.
If there is an emotion that you don't want to feel and there's that, it means that you've already tasted it to not want it.
The problem is that you often intellectually, we don't understand that we are in the emotion.
So especially if you were brought up like I was, like deeply in my head.
So I had to learn that I was scared, but by the way my mind worked.
So I was in binary thinking.
Any time I was in binary thinking I'm like, oh that's fear, because I actually couldn't feel the system.
So if you take a kid who is physically abused and you put a quarter in one hand without telling him, and a key in another hand, they won't be able to tell you which is which, because they've learned to cut off the sensations of their body.
And it's the same thing if you were emotionally put through it, call it abuse, just told emotions weren't okay, you will learn to stop feeling those emotions.
And so, a lot of times we don't actually know we're in the emotion that's happening.
But if you're scared of that thing, it's a great signal, of the emotion, it's a great signal, you're in it and you're resisting it and that's what the fear is actually doing.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah. I'm scared to be abandoned means you're already abandoning yourself.
that moment in the relationship where you're not saying your true thing, you're scared of abandoning, you're already in it.
That self -reliant person who is scared of being left alone in it or having to do it all by themselves, they're already left alone in it, already having to do it by themselves.
Yeah, the thing that you fear has already come to pass and you've been part of the architect that's put it together as well.
— emotionally, yeah.
— Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Live with it long enough and the actual thing will happen, too.
When you're thinking it's binary, fear is running the show?
Yeah. So there's two things that the mind does when fear is at play.
The first thing it does is it creates binary thinking.
So I buy the car or I don't buy the car.
It's not I negotiate for the car, maybe I buy the car as a Honda instead of the Toyota version.
We just do this black and white thinking.
either I leave her, I don't leave her.
I either leave the job or I don't leave the job.
So immediately, you know your compromise, your intellect is not working at the level that it could work, if you're doing any kind of binary thinking.
The other thing that it does is it creates a false end.
I will be homeless.
And you don't think, and then what?
You know, even that, like I said, that death meditation of the samurai, they go through the end of death.
I'm going to die, and then that's it.
They don't, you don't think about and what's next.
And so those are the two things that when you do that you're in fear, and that's why making a decision from fear often begets more fear because you're limiting the possibility that's there.
You're saying oh it's gonna be this way or this way in your mind and so you're creating that reality in the world and so black -and -white realities create fear because there's you know if you were either friends or were enemies like that's that is a scary -ass situation as compared to, oh we could be all sorts of kinds of friends, and all sorts of kinds of enemies, and we could be both, and which all exists in the world.
What about someone who feels like fear is running the show a lot in their life?
That that's a very prevalent sort of emotion?
Yeah, there's a couple things that can create the fear.
One of them is repressed excitement, one of them is them not getting their actual needs met.
And the other one is other emotions that they use, that they can't allow themselves to feel, so they'll use the fear.
So oftentimes you'll see the last one with that classic mom who's using their worry to try to control everything.
They're like, I'm so scared about you driving that four -wheel drive, please don't do that.
Or I'm scared about, be careful when you take that trip to Thailand, that whole thing.
that's like, is that fear or is them not taking care of their needs, or is it them not feeling empowered?
What's the actual feeling that if they could feel it the fear might go away?
And oftentimes that's excitement, which is crazy.
So there's a really cool hack.
Take anything you're scared about.
I would ask you to do it, but I don't know if you're good, but take anything you're scared about and literally say out loud, I'm excited 10 times.
I'm excited. I'm excited.
I'm excited. I'm excited.
I'm excited. I'm excited.
I'm excited. And the way that neurology is wired, it's they're very close to one another.
And so apparently, uh, it's, I mean, my self experimentation is it's like 90, 95 % effective.
I go from fear to excitement.
And I think it's in the, I think it's in the Jewish tradition that they actually have two words for fear.
And one fear is like, I'm scared of physical, like physical death or like, and the other one is I'm scared is I'm stepping into a bigger room.
I'm stepping on stage.
I'm like, I'm asked to do something to go to the next level.
And so much of our fear in modern society is that second kind of fear.
Type 2 masquerading as type 1.
And so, exactly. So if you actually allow the excitement, oh, I'm stepping into a bigger room.
Yeah, like if I was scared coming in here, am I scared or am I just like super fucking excited?
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Rick Hanson has this really wonderful insight where he's talking about people fearing change.
So there's new things that are happening in life.
One of the insights that he has there is not only is there a binary, so you guys agree on that, but he says why do you assume that the change is going to be worse?
Look back on most of the changes that happened in your life.
Most of the changes were better.
But most of the things, most of the times where there was a change, it preceded an improvement.
So, he has this wonderful little maxim where he says, see yourself as the sort of person who can handle change well.
Like, wow, I am the sort of person that can handle change well.
That change isn't some big scary threat, that it's not going to cause some massive catastrophe for me.
huh, what if it's, the choice isn't between this or worse, but this, but better?
Yeah. Or what if I just get excited over whatever the change is?
And I think that this is, yeah, this is one of the prevalent things and it's, a lot of that has to do with the voice in the head because the voice in the head is constantly trying to, okay, you're going to do this if this happens and this and this happens and then make sure that this if this ever thing, like they're calculating and you're playing three -dimensional chess.
And instead of – like if you do that playing sports, you're going to suck, you know?
If you're thinking instead of actually there playing the game, you're going to suck.
And so it's the same thing in life.
Like all that pre -thinking often really slows down performance.
Yeah, that's an interesting one.
For the perennial overthinkers, a lot of the time I think people have this sense that they're thinking about life and they're watching themselves experiencing it whilst not experiencing it.
You know what I mean?
There's this sort of, they're supposed to be playing Call of Duty first person, but they're actually playing it third person.
And they're observing it happen and it's taking them out of the moment and they're thinking about the thing that they're experiencing, which by design stops them from experiencing it.
In trying to get it right, which can't be gotten, like there is no right to be gotten.
in. So I'm going to think about everything so that I make the right choice.
The right choice when?
The right choice in two minutes, the right choice in four minutes, the right choice in two years?
Like how many things that you did that were complete disasters led to you being here right now?
All right, so there's no right choice.
You can't even measure if the choice was right afterwards, but you spend literally 20 minutes trying to figure out or 20 hours or 20 days trying to figure out.
Yes, you say there is no way of getting it perfect.
There is no complete, no finish line, no done.
There is simply what's the next experiment.
There is only play.
Yeah, so the way I think about that one is...
So when is an oak tree perfect?
When it's an acorn?
When it's like a sapling?
When it's like 100 years old?
When it's 200 years old?
Like when is it perfect?
But yet somehow or another we have to be perfect, but it's not.
It's just iteration.
It's just, it's just evolution.
Evolution doesn't end.
The only thing that ends is an idea in our head and our egos.
Egos can't exist if you actually really understand that there is no end.
The ego has to evaporate.
Say more on that. Right?
So oftentimes if people who are searching for enlightenment, they think once they get the enlightenment, then it'll be done.
Right? That's just the ego talking.
That's just, that's just, Oh, there is going to be this end point where then I'm going to be happy.
Like that, that, that is an ego thought process so that they can, so you can whip yourself and beat yourself up to get to that place.
And it is just a way to convince yourself that what you want can't be found right now.
So if I said to you right now, without going into the past, without going into the future, you can't find any evidence from the past or any evidence in the future, find a problem with you.
Yeah, that's funny.
Yeah, there's none, you can't find it.
So you need an end, because there are no other choices to be in this moment, which is where the ego doesn't get to exist. I wrote this quote from Van Gogh this week, in my newsletter that said, if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now, for wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.
oh I like that that's so that's so fucking good this same thing you're talking about right it is the acorn okay I'm gonna I'm gonna wait as we to even if people think it is I'm gonna be geek out let me geek out for just a second so today I got a text from somebody who is Zen teacher that I know and he was worried about AI and and so found out that I'm working the other guy to us yeah apparently they're coming for my Zen teaching say yeah are they coming for my zen teaching?
Tell me Joe. And my response was just like everything this river is going to find the lowest ground so where it's gonna end up is already determined and it's the same thought process that you just said there like even the action that I take and that all the people will take towards influencing AI.
Like all of that is set and in for that same kind of point of view.
So our job is the same.
It's like show up with love, do what you're called to do.
You know, draw the boundaries, say the truth that you can see.
But the whole idea of like I have to manage my entire world to get to the place is just, it's just a huge amount of stress.
It's all self talk.
Not real. Again, to sort of fly the flag for the insecure overachievers out there, the desire for control, you know, if I can prepare sufficiently well, if I can know every different permutation of every different outcome, then I reduce down the play within the system so it's so precise so that what I think is going to happen and what is going to happen end up being so tightly correlated that there's no variance at all.
Ah, okay, there we go.
There's a bit of certainty, isn't that nice.
Isn't that death? Yeah, I want this wholly under control and absolutely predictable existence.
Yeah, I think about this in a slightly different way, but there is no life without tension.
A cell doesn't exist without tension, your lungs don't exist without tension.
A salad? Cell. No, cell!
A salad doesn't exist without tension.
Dude I had this vision in my mind, I was like, why is it...?
Has he got like bits of fucking lettuce leaf hanging across a string?
I had that, like a tightrope walk but it's just individual leafs of lettuce hanging over a salad bowl, holy fuck, wow, yeah.
Okay, getting back to it a cell doesn't exist without tension.
So life doesn't exist without tension.
So the idea that you're going to be at peace when there's no tension, the idea that you're going to be at peace when you've narrowed everything down so that you don't have to actually feel that tension, is death.
So you don't find peace by having no tension.
You find peace by enjoying the tension of, welcoming the tension, looking forward to the tension.
Is safety got anything to do with it here?
Is there a degree of unsafety?
There is no safety.
Safety is an illusion.
What the fuck is safe?
Like we're sitting in, like, we're in Austin, Texas in a cool thing, like, yeah it's pretty safe, but hurricane, earthquake, fire, they're like, safety is just something that we like to pretend exists.
Yeah. and also a form of death.
If it feels scary to say, it's important.
If it feels scary to say, not saying it will hurt your connection.
If it feels scary to say, not saying it prioritizes their imagined reaction over your truth.
Yeah, why? Why? Why?
So, I'm not scared to say things that aren't important to me and vulnerable to me.
So, I could qualify that and say that quote.
I could qualify that quote and say, with an open heart.
To say it with an open heart.
And I think that would probably be more accurate.
But if I'm scared to say it, it means that there's something important and it's something vulnerable.
If I say the important thing to you, and I'm vulnerable with your our connection deepens, always the case.
If I am not willing to say that, it means I'm scared of a reaction that you're going to have for me, which means I'm prioritizing you more than I'm prioritizing my own needs.
I'm actually prioritizing my fear over our connection as well.
And over yourself? Yeah, and over myself.
That's right. And so this is how I run my business, it's how we run our marriage, and this prevents resentment.
It's amazing. If I find something that doesn't feel right, I will speak to it.
I might not speak to it right now, it might take a day, because I'm not going to be heartless and not pay attention to the person or have compassion or empathy for where they're at, but I'm going to say the thing that's scary to say or the thing that's bothering me.
And my expectation with the 18 or so people in our organization is that they do the same thing.
We tell them that's the job.
You gotta say the hard thing.
We actually start our meetings with, what's the scary thing you're not saying?
Because that's what keeps relationships clean, that's what keeps the problems at bay.
That's like stepping into it instead of trying to avoid it.
I was trying to think about the difference between selfish and selfless.
And this is a third one that's not either of them.
So you're not being selfish because you're actually hurting yourself in it.
You're not being selfless because you're killing the connection.
And I'm like, what the fuck is this?
And you're not trusting them.
Yeah. It's like, what is this?
You know, it's one of those interesting situations where it's neither selfish nor selfless.
Yeah, that's really cool.
Yeah, there's no...
Well, actually, it's destructive to the self and it's destructive to the other as well.
I guess that's one way to put it, right?
But it's, like, it's bad on all fronts.
I remember having this moment where— so I—we did this in our company, and I was just like, we do this.
We're gonna—if something's upsetting anybody, we talk about it.
That's how we're doing it.
And one day I came into, and I was the woman who at the time worked with most closely.
And she—her name's Sarah.
She's ama—anybody who's worked in our— or done anything in our organization knows Sarah.
She's amazing. And I walked in, I was, like, frustrated.
I was like, oh God.
And she goes, oh, I'm so excited that you're frustrated.
I was like, what? She goes, every time you're frustrated, it means that you're seeing something that we're not seeing and we're gonna make a big improvement.
So what is it? Totally like changed the whole, like my, the way I hold my own frustration to change that.
And then it also changed like how I like looked at the whole business because I was, oh, wow, this is really important.
It's like alchemy. Yeah.
Doing that. Exactly.
So I had this conversation.
I told you about this episode I did with Naval which will be out by the time people are listening to this and hopefully many millions of people have listened to it.
And it he... I came up with this idea having watched him and you haven't heard him speak but I'll try and explain it as best I can.
He is patient zero for what you've just said there.
I've seen him at dinner parties, if we're partway through a conversation that he's just not interested in, he just gets up and walks over to another corner of the room.
There's no airs or graces.
There's no apologizing for him not being sufficiently entertained.
I must, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to go here, very much. There's no excuses and no nothing else.
Lovely. And I came up with this term of like, holistic selfishness, or as sort of integrated self priority, whatever you want to call it.
He's unapologetically prepared to put himself first, and he is not concerned about the discomfort that that causes in other people, or in himself actually.
And I just wanted to sort of sit with that, it feels like a lot of what we've talked about at the moment is self prioritization.
It's like, okay, not selfish prioritization, but deciding that your needs are legitimate, not subjugating your desires or the things that you want from the world because of a fear of them not being requited or reciprocated, or received or whatever, or retaliation for them.
What would you say to the person who is unusually comfortable with de -prioritizing their own needs with not seeing their wants or their desires as legitimate, with regularly subjugating what it is that they would like to get from the world in place of not wanting to sort of upset the applicant in that way.
Yeah, I would say, I'd probably start off saying something a little provocative like, wow, you're a really non -compassionate human being.
So the reason I would say that, first of all, is selfishness generally is just something we were told we were when we weren't doing what our parents wanted us to do.
So it was just basically our parents being selfish and we weren't doing what they wanted, and they're like, you're selfish.
That's a great take.
So that's where selfishness generally comes from.
The second thing is, let's say, let's bring God into it for a minute.
If you believe that what's best for you, ultimately, ultimately what's best for you is not what's best for everybody else.
then God is a sadist. God has set up a world where you have to make a trade, you have to make a trade.
And my experience is that when I am doing what's actually deeply right for me, I am doing what's deeply right for everybody.
There's no, apologies, I thought that was off.
No, no, no. Yeah, the Deeply right for me.
Yeah, deeply right for deeply right for somebody else.
So the, so my experience is that the compassionate act is often hard, sometimes easy, sometimes in the middle, but it's it's the thing that is best for both you and for me.
If I am not going to be true, So for instance, the easiest way to look at this is, do you want me to come to your party if I feel obligated to come to your party?
No. Yeah, exactly. I'm saying I can't be selfish, I have to go because I said I was gonna go, but now I'm coming out of obligation.
You don't fucking want me there if I'm obligated.
And that, if you really get in touch with, even in business, if you're like, oh, do I really, is the thing that's really best for me to get that extra 10 percent or the thing that's really best for me is having a really strong relationship and having something that's equitable and feels good for everybody or feels equally bad for everybody it's just going to be better so compassion is often saying the really hard thing it's saying i'm not interested in this conversation and i cannot tell you how many friendships i developed because of that exact thing i remember i was sitting there getting pitched
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I'm like, yeah, my whole body just constricted because you just disconnected from me and tried to sell me instead of being a human with me.
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This is, when I tap into the best part of me, and I think it's the part of me that I hear when I listen to guys like yourself, Alain de Botton from the School of Life.
As much as he's like the least cool fucking guy on the internet, Sam Harris, when he's at his best. I think, you know, he really sees this and it's this weird blend of sort of compassion, self -belief, of firmness in your own principles and like a hopefulness that if you ask for it, maybe the world will actually give you what you need.
And I'm sure there's a million other things that are going on there too, but that's kind of where it triangulates for me, which is, huh, maybe if I just sort of say the truth in a way that's charming, hopefully, and not unnecessarily sort of mean or passive or sort of wrapped in sugar or wrapped in spikes and poison.
Huh. Like maybe things will actually go really well if I do that.
It's the only thing, it's the only way things go really well.
Because if you're not being yourself then the world you create is not for you.
That's great. Like, okay, so I'm going to not be me and now the world has created, I've created a world for not me.
And then railing against the fact that this world doesn't seem to fit me.
I managed to get myself into this relationship with someone who seems to like me for a person that I'm not.
Exactly. It's like, who have you been?
Yeah, not me. It's like, well, who the fuck do you think they were going to get into a relationship with, then?
Yeah, exactly. Why is there resentment now?
Well, that's why. You can't be accepted for who you are if you're not showing up as who you are.
Yeah, that's right.
So, that's what he's doing.
It doesn't feel good in my system to walk away from a conversation without saying, hey, goodbye or something.
Or maybe he did, my point being the unnecessary overture of oh, I'm gonna just do the thing.
It's like dude, you're not accepting an Academy Award, fuck off, like honestly, just go.
Exactly. I'm gonna go and see what's going on over there or whatever.
But yeah, that's so great that you need to ...
If you're not showing up as who you are, what the fuck world do you think you're going to create?
Exactly, yeah. Yeah, the one that's built for the person that you think you should be, not the person you are.
Yeah, it's similar to ...
The interesting thing, the one thing I want to say about that, the interesting thing is that it creates an open heart.
If you look at the people who live that way, my experiences, my experience of living that way, is that because you're accepting yourself, it's easy to accept other people.
The more of yourself that you can accept, the more you can accept of others, the more kinds of people that you can accept.
So there's also that reflection.
So the people who live like that, our mind wants to say they're selfish And they are full of hubris and arrogance and blah, blah, blah.
But when you actually meet those people, like if you've ever hung out with a llama for… That's how they operate.
That's how they move in the world and they're completely dedicated to compassion.
They're completely dedicated to non -pertense as well.
Self -compassion. Hmm, yeah that's interesting, that what we think we're doing, and it's like you said before that we have this binary trade that we keep inside of our mind, which is either we can appease the world or we can appease ourselves.
That's right. This is the same thing going on here.
This is fear. Why do you think it is that this equation, this odd imbalanced equation of can either could be good for them, or it can be good for me, but it can't be good for either.
And if it's good for me a lot of the time, it's bad for them.
What's that? What's the?
Fear. Okay. Yeah. So, anytime there's that binary, then there's a fear.
In this particular case, it's a fear that was probably built at a very young age, that was, mom's gonna be happy with me, I have to abandon myself, or dad's gonna be happy with me, and I have to abandon myself, or I don't abandon myself, and I'm gonna get punished.
And that's, I think, where that typically comes from.
just sit a little bit longer in the this sort of bravery you know, this somebody listening who says Fuck like that's me.
I compromise myself all the time.
I don't say what I mean I do I've done it so long that I don't even know what I mean to say anymore Don't even know what I need.
Don't know what I want.
Yep. I've subjugated it under, you know, fucking layers and layers of sedimentary rock now how can someone start to show up more bravely in the world in that way for themselves?
So it's really about, so this is where the emotions come in.
So if you can imagine the emotion that you're going to have to feel when you say the thing and you're going to get rejected and you can live that experience and you can welcome that emotion, then there's nothing to be scared of.
Yep... they're gonna get mad at me.
Okay, I felt that, I know that's what that's like, I'm gonna be there with them.
The interesting thing is, you can get really mad at me and if I can stay in an open heart, it's fucking not a problem at all.
My job is to have people get mad at me.
I'm going away with you at the end of this year or maybe I'll be getting mad at you at some point.
I guarantee and I mean if you look at my handle on Twitter, it's f**k you Joe Hudson.
It's F U Joe Hudson.
Oh, I didn't know what that stood for.
It's because people when I work with them often are like, f**k you.
Like that's the job but if I'm sitting there with like big open heart, like it's my response typically is I love you too.
Because that anger is a vulnerability.
That anger is a, they care.
You don't get angry at s**t you don't care about.
So it's like, but if I get defensive, it's f**king hell on earth.
If I get scared, it's hell on earth.
So that's the that's the thing.
And all these relationships that people get into.
It's amazing because there's all so scared of either breaking the other person or their anger.
Mm -hmm. Yeah that someone's either too weak or too strong basically to take it.
Yeah. Yep, exactly.
Yeah you cannot love fully unless you see that you are completely empowered.
It is near impossible to love what you think compresses you.
Yeah those are two different things.
So one is if you close your...
I don't know if you want to do this but for the audience, if you close your eyes and you feel unconditional love for a minute and then switch and then feel full empowerment like you're Superman and there's no kryptonite, you don't have to worry about the future.
like you've got it, and then go back to unconditional love, and then go back to full empowerment, and then put them together, feel them both.
That's what I mean.
If you feel weak, not weak isn't the right word, but there's lots of ways of feeling weak that are great, but the, if you feel like you don't have, you're not empowered in the world, then you're not empowered to love fully.
Is that the job of you?
Is that the job of the person that you're trying to love?
Oh, you're totally responsible for your own, your capacity to receive love in your capacity to give love often are pretty much very highly correlated and absolutely your responsibility.
However, when you do that, what you notice is that all of a sudden you're surrounded by a lot of very loving people.
Well, it's like you said about the depth of relationship that you had with that person or you said, maybe you said that thing and I tensed up in this way, as long as someone believes, as long as it is true and someone believes that it's true, what you have there is an unusually reliable person.
You have somebody, it's like, oh fuck.
I can actually have faith that when this person says that this thing is good, that they actually mean it.
And they're not just paying lip service to it or blowing smoke at my ass.
Yeah, you can't trust somebody who can't say no. You can't trust somebody who doesn't, who doesn't have conflict with you.
That's the whole thing is that when you watch CEOs who are conflict avoidance, their companies become untrustworthy.
Nobody trusts each other in their companies.
Trust is built - It's obfuscation all the way down.
Yeah, because trust is built with you and I have conflict and we get through it and we're better on the other side.
It's why people who have been in war together have lifelong forever friendships because they have a deep trust that we will get through the shit together.
You had my back, I had yours.
Yeah and same with the marriage or same with the relationship.
If every conflict you have turns into some self's recognition, turns into some recognition of how you want to be different or some realization of yourself, then that relationship is solid.
If every conflict doesn't get brought out, you don't know what's going to happen or it just turns into this yelling match that you throw underneath the mug, then that relationship will absolutely fall apart at some point.
There's a cool lesson about, I had this guy, Edward Slingland, he wrote a book called Trying Not To Try, which is about Wu Wei, which you'll be familiar with, and then he wrote another book about the history of alcohol, and he basically described alcohol as kind of the perfect drug for the human race, and in many ways he's right, and I used to be club promoter now, really not a big drinker, and I was like, alcohol's rubbation, blah, blah, blah, but explained it in a really interesting way and one of the things that it turns out is that when you're drunk or even tipsy, probably tipsy rather than drunk,
you are worse as a liar because it's shut down some of your prefrontal cortex, but people are actually better liar detectors when they're tipsy, so if you have a groom of people who are all tipsy, that totally makes sense that's something that you're describing like half the business meetings of my life.
Not business meetings, but like business meetings.
I mean, when you're a venture capitalist every evening, when you're like networking everybody drinks together.
Like it is a thing that you do.
And it totally makes sense because it builds trust. Yes.
And one of the other things that it does, you know, reliably if you drink a lot, you're going to suffer the next day.
So there is a… you look through history, a tradition of armies getting really, really drunk a few nights before the first battle.
Now, there's also quite a few famous battles in which the guy in charge of the army has maybe mistimed that and they've woken up to be attacked the next day with a stinking hangover, which I imagine is probably the worst way.
You can talk about long flights back from Vegas or whatever, it's like, dude, if you're not in mortal peril by a fucking Mongolian wielding a spear like this there's been and but what he talked about there was when you're drinking there is in the back of everybody's mind as you go through this there is this sense of yeah this is fun now but we all know we're going to pay for in the morning and you're still here with me you're still doing it I love that thought process so the idea of getting drunk as a we're going to bond over the pleasure and then we're going to bond over the pain right as well
and We're going to share an experience that neither of us are going to be entirely proud of explaining to other people to have an experience.
And so we have this thing on each other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
That's cool. Yeah. I love that.
Um, there was another insight as well, which I… I fell in love with this really, really great essayist, and he was talking about, I think he calls it the divorce paradox.
He says many people are surprised by why couples who in public are seemingly subperfect end up splitting up and it's because of a lesson that we haven't fully internalized in the modern world which is it is not the good times but how you deal with the bad times that predicts the longevity in marriages, it's not how much fun and vibe you have when things are great, it's how well you move through rupture and repair and come back out on the other side.
When I'm asked by people about is this the right person for me, My answer is almost always the same, which is, two things.
One, are they working on themselves and do they see the relationship as a way to work on themselves?
Two is, when you have conflict, how's the repair?
And if you have those two things, it'll work out.
It might not be pretty.
It might be hardcore for awhile, but it will work out.
Well, I kind of think about it like trading in a way that your stock can move – intra -day, intra -month, intra -year, it can move an awful lot, but as long as you don't bottom out, as long as you don't actually end up getting kicked out the bottom of your trade, you're like, I'm still in the f***ing market, baby.
Right. But if it decides to go to zero and that is a we actually can't do rupture and repair particularly well.
Well, we can do rupture well but we can't do repair well.
Yeah, and then it just turns to resentment and then resentment to disdain and then it's over.
Talk to me about resentment.
Where does that come from?
There's a couple of things.
Typically in a relationship, one of the main ways resentment happens is that traditional say, someone has the male role, the female role.
The male role often is like, my job is to try to make this person happy.
That's going to create resentment.
Just that action right there.
My job is to make this person happy.
Because what you're saying is you can't make yourself happy.
You need me. Fuck you.
I don't need you. That's the underlying thing that's happening.
So you'll see, the man is like, and it happens both ways don't get me wrong, but the man is like, oh, I need to, I need to do that.
Like I've done everything I can to make her happy and she's still not happy.
I mean, how many guys have you heard that from?
It's like, right, she's not happy because you're not treating her like a full grown fucking adult who knows how to take care of herself.
And that is one of the main things that resentment comes The other thing that resentment comes from is that I'm not speaking my truth.
So I don't say the thing because I'm scared of the conflict.
Eventually I have to compromise myself, and if I'm compromising myself enough, I am going to be pissed at somebody.
And it's gonna be you.
And it's easier to get pissed at you than it is to get pissed at me.
Yeah, and I'm gonna call, and it's gonna look like resentment.
Because I can't be just outright mad at you.
It's just gonna be this low level thing that happens.
So if you wanna cure resentment in a relationship, have the hard conversations.
with respect, with love.
Yeah, and there's a lot of tools on that, but like - What are some of your favorites?
Have agreed to some rules on fighting.
That's a really good one.
Go and get angry but not with each other present.
Like, Hey, we're having a fight.
I'm going to go fucking yell.
You go fucking yell.
And then we're going to come back.
I like getting naked for a fight.
That one really worked.
I'm completely naked, it totally changes the dynamic of the fight.
Making sure the person feels deeply listened to is another great one of, I'm just going to repeat what you're saying and see if I've got it right.
See them, tell them, take away the shame, there's dozens.
There was... Neil Strauss was sat there not long ago and he had just this fucking slamming line, one of the best insights, which is very Hudson Pilled, which is, Unspoken Expectations of Premeditated Resentments.
Oh yeah. Oh, holy fuck, dude.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, Unspoken Expectations of Premeditated Resentments.
Yeah. And that again, shadow sentences.
I'm not gonna say what it is that I want in case it means that you can't rebuff for or unrequite what it is that I'm after.
I'm gonna abandon myself before you abandon me.
Mm -hmm. It's really what that is.
as if that's gonna work.
You mentioned a bunch of times to me and also on this episode about opening your heart.
Yeah, yeah. We had a call ahead of the thing that I'm gonna go and do with you later this year, which is super exciting.
And there was this sort of trying not to try moment where the insecure overachiever that wants to get the A grade, like right, okay, so what's this sort of five -step process to heart opening please, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
But I do think that even if that can't be satiated, a degree of definition of opening your heart, what does it mean, where does it come from?
I do think that might be useful.
Totally, Ken. I didn't give it to you in that moment because you had already accessed it.
So I wasn't gonna, like, let that.
So the way we think about it is a simple acronym we call VIEW, which is vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder.
So you can access any one of them and it'll open your heart.
So vulnerability means I'm gonna say the scary thing.
Imperationality means I'm not gonna try to manage you or try to get you anywhere.
I'm just gonna be with you as humans.
Empathy means I'm going to emotionally be with you but I'm not gonna be in you.
So it doesn't mean I believe your story, it doesn't mean that I'm, like, with you in the thing, I'm gonna be in myself, but I'm going to, when you cry I don't go, it's gonna be okay.
I'm like, oh yeah, fuck, that hurts.
Right? And then wonder, which is curiosity without trying to find an answer.
It's the way we look at a sunset or the way a little kid picks up a frog.
If I can just be in wonder with you, just like one of them, if I can just be, I have no idea.
I have an idea of who you are.
Let's say you are my brother.
I have an idea. I have this whole history, but instead I'm going to drop all that shit.
And I'm just going to be like, what is actually going on?
What is it that I don't know about you?
Heart opens. Oh, I'm going to say the scary thing.
Like, bro, I love you, but that thing you did really fucking hurt me.
Boom, my heart opens.
I'm gonna empathize with you.
I'm gonna be with you in your emotion.
Boom, my heart opens.
So all of those are just, we just call it view.
And that's, any one of those tools will work, multiple of the tools work really well.
And why is opening your heart such a panacea?
It's not particularly a panacea.
I mean, it feels good, so there's that.
You know, like, uh, but it's not a panacea, it's just really effective.
Like we have mirror neurons, so I hang out with you and I have an open heart.
You're more likely to have an open heart.
You know, that person who's like openhearted and everybody gets around them and they're openhearted with them.
And occasionally someone's a dick and they're still openhearted and they look like a real dick.
And so it's just really effective.
It's that you create a world where people are openhearted with you and, and you have more depth and you have more connection and people wanna help you more and all those things happen.
It's just an effectiveness thing.
It also feels really good.
It also makes it that you treat other people with a tremendous amount of compassion which is all good things.
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Yeah. The other half of what we were talking about before talking about compassion, and I guess, sort of oppression is pretty close to an opposite of that, it is near impossible to love what you think oppresses you.
Oh yeah, that one. Yeah, so, when we do, we do this one thing about working with the voice in the head, and at one point we'll have everybody get really, really angry at the voice in the head and dominate it, because it's the first step of being able to love something.
And if you think that something is controlling you, that you don't have choice.
That you have to subjugate yourself or cut off a part of yourself to because of this thing, it's really hard to love.
And that's what happens inside of relationships that fall apart is I've given so much of myself, I'm so oppressed by you that I can't love you.
And it's the problem in our political world too.
And it's like, if you're angry at somebody politically, it means you feel like you're being oppressed.
And so there's no heart opening.
And so there's no fucking solution.
It doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on.
This is how it works.
And so, I mean, it's what allows — and so if you look at someone like a Gandhi, for instance, or a Mother Teresa, or a Martin Luther King, they walked into the world, and they're like, you don't oppress me.
And it's because they could love.
Gandhi could love the British people, and the Parliament and all that.
Like he had a big open heart, and because he could, he could not agree.
You cannot agree that you're being oppressed.
And so I think there was a New York Times writer, at least this is the way I heard this story, there was a salt mine, they were controlling the continent through salt.
He has 500 ,000 people lined up to take the salt mine, and there's like 20 guards or something.
and you know, some version of that.
And there's four by four coming in, the guards beat them down, and they go.
And they could mob the place they could win.
And the New York Times reporter, apparently, wrote something to the fact of, it's not a question of when they'll be free, they are already free.
They're like, they can be oppressed because they had an open heart.
So it works both ways, but it's really hard. In your mind, you think you're oppressed.
It's really hard to have an open heart towards somebody or love them.
but if you can get over that, then you can love them and then you can't be oppressed.
Why does giving bits of yourself to somebody else create a sense of oppression in you?
Yeah. So if you're giving a bit of yourself to somebody, it means you feel like you had no choice.
That's not something that you would do unless, oh, there's a consequence.
Oh, they're gonna do this.
Oh, I'm gonna be killed.
Oh, I'm gonna be, and so obviously there's people who are actually oppressed, but I'm talking about it on a psychological level.
And so if I'm giving a piece of yourself, if I'm compromising something important about me to you, that means I'm scared of the consequences which means you have power over me.
And that makes you into a kind of taskmaster.
You into the taskmaster.
Yeah, exactly. As opposed to some sort of an equal.
Right. Ego is as much what you don't think you are as what you think you are.
Yeah, okay, so this one's cool.
So we have this exercise in one of our programs where everybody who's really gotten to know somebody gives them a compliment and so it's like 10 minutes of receiving compliments and here's what most people do.
Yeah, at the beginning.
Or the people who are just listening and they're like, oh, that's not really the kidd—oh, thanks for saying that.
It's a dismissal. It's basically saying, you're lying to me.
That's a nice compliment, where you're just lying to me.
You're just saying it to make me feel good.
You don't actually mean that.
That's what that thing is.
And we will do that instead of letting the emotion and let the whole feeling hit you.
And so we teach people how to like fully receive the compliments and they'll cry, they'll shake, they'll have like they'll have like physical reaction to out allowing the compliment all the way in because it is taking apart their identity.
So that voice in your head says you're not doing this good you're not doing that good, right?
So let's say I do this podcast and I fly home and I think this is the shittiest podcast in the world and somebody comes in and is like, I watched that podcast, it totally fucking changed my life.
If I let that in, my identity of a shitty podcast guest has to fucking die.
That's a one -time thing.
But if I have an identity of I'm not smart and that shit has to die, and so ego is just an identity and that includes what you are.
I'm the greatest guy ever.
And it, it includes what you're not.
I'm stupid. I'm not very good.
And so Compliments are one of the biggest ego -destroyers if you fully let them in because it shatters what you think you're not.
That's interesting.
I mean most people would assume that Compliments would be ego -fueling as opposed to ego -destroying.
I know. It sucks. And it leaves so many people hungry ghosts.
So many people are hungry ghosts.
They just want to be seen.
And then when they're seen, they're like, no, no, blah, blah, blah.
And so they can never fulfill the thing.
Mm -hmm, well I suppose this is one of the, again, disadvantages of not showing up as you, like abandoning yourself in order to appease other people, not speaking whatever it is that you think is true going forward. You know I did this TedX talk ages ago, and in it I sort of talk about, I give a prescription for how you can feel alone in a crowd and hollow in victory, which is to basically do what you said.
And you know you can be the most popular person in the room but if the work that you have done to get yourself there is not something that truly resonates with you, you feel more like a marionette, you feel more like a puppet than you do like a person.
And you can get to this stage where you know you've sort of played this role for a long time perhaps it's involved subjugating your desires or putting yourself second or third or fifth or 75th.
And yeah sure externally you've got all of the accolades and trappings of somebody that has created a body of work that they're proud of or that people resonate with, but internally the persona has subsumed the person, right?
You've got this sort of weird parasite that you made of yourself that's crawled inside of you and is staring out through your own eyes, and you're like, holy fuck.
Like this isn't me and all of these people are here for Not me.
How amazing that they're here for Not me, and it's why, you know, you don't ever feel love, you only feel praise, you know, because people aren't applauding you, they're applauding the role that you played.
And you go, well done to me for conning all of these people into believing that I was the thing that they like.
And yeah, you end up in this sort of very bizarre scenario where I think a lot of resentment, you know, from a creator perspective, whether it's an artist, a musician, you know, a teacher, career person, whatever it is.
If the body of work that you have put together is not something that is sort of true that it flows out from you and that you genuinely resonate with, yeah sure like externally you can get yourself to the stage where success has been achieved and the box has been ticked.
Yeah. But it's gonna feel incredibly hollow and I think you're going to resent a lot of the people who look up to whatever it is that you've created because what what they are to you is a reminder of the fact that your true self was unlovable.
The true version of the work that you should have created, or could have created, wasn't good enough.
And it's another 10 -person audience, 1 ,000 -person audience, 1 ,000 -person audience that just reaffirms, oh, yeah, you need to be somebody else in order for the world to accept you.
And it's unfalsifiable for as long as you're not prepared to actually show up as the person that you are because you never actually get to disprove the hypothesis.
So the cool thing is there what you just did there I think is one of the more brilliant descriptions of ego so if you just take away the whole idea that this is something you created in your but it but if you just put that same thing the thing that people create as their identity and they're not being seen and so it's never satisfying like that whole thing that is ego, that is the description of ego.
This thing that I built to protect myself, because there's something essentially that I thought was unlovable about me, and it's the ego that can get defensive, right?
And I usually don't use the term ego for this reason because then people say, I got to get rid of my ego, which is another egoic move because that means now the thing that's wrong with you is the ego.
So that's problematic in itself but if you can just see that it's a structure and if you understand yourself clearly then that structure just can't exist and you're back to the thing that's ultimately lovable.
What about the people who have hidden that sort of truth the person and delays and delays of persona and obfuscation and subjugation all the rest of it...
you mean all of us?
Yes, what about us?
What about humans? What is a way that people can begin sort of mining through that to find something that's a little bit more?
Yeah, so anything that disintegrates, there's many, many ways.
Any way that disintegrates the sense of self is, it does that.
So meditation, the practice of silence is one of them and probably one of the more well -known ones Because for you to think you are something, you need a reflection, and things don't reflect in silence, so if you're in silence, eventually.
But it can also be done in a relationship, it can also be done—if I have so much love for another person that the differentiation between me and them evaporates, that also is a ego disintegration.
To see that there's this a tribe in Africa and they have, I don't know how big their villages are, but if a couple in the village is fighting, they don't see it as a problem with the couple.
They see it as a problem with the village.
Oh, that means there's something wrong with the village.
And so we as a village, heal that thing.
They all come together and they have a ceremony, that they do where they do some yelling and whatever, but to heal the couple, that dissolves the sense of self.
Understanding that there's no end dissolves the sense of self.
There's so many ways to dissolve, our traditions only hold like one or two of them, but there's so many ways to see through.
Does dissolving the sense of self allow you to access a truth as well?
Sort of this is what I want, this is what I think.
I used to use this example, I guess, of more recent.
What you want and what you think aren't you.
They change. What you're going to want now and in two minutes and in ten years is going to be different.
So that can't be you.
And what you think, you can't even control your next thought.
You can't stop your thoughts.
So that can't fucking be you.
Right? So we need a comparative mind to define who we are.
And so if, the question, what am I?
Is a question that I stayed in for like a decade.
Just constantly asking that question, only to find out that the lack of answer was the answer.
People don't want you to be perfect, what they want is to feel connected to you.
My favorite story about this was that I was on a plane once and I asked a person a single question, and two and a half hours went by and I just listened.
And then we were getting up, and at that point he realized what had happened.
And he apologized. And I was like, no, it's a total pleasure.
And he's like, that was like one of the most meaningful conversations I've ever had.
We don't, yeah we just want connection from people.
We want to idolize perfect people.
We don't want to actually like be their friends.
I think we have, do you know what the pratfall effect is?
No, no, no. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
So Richard Shoton, who is a great behavioral economist from the U .K. told me about this study where I think it's like...
By the way, man, you've got to have one of the fucking coolest jobs.
I love my job. And like, there's very few jobs that I'm like, oh, that's a cool ass job.
But you get to meet some amazing folks.
Yeah, I've designed my own university degree, speaking only to the experts on the planet on my own schedule with no homework about the specific niche that I want and I get to swear.
So yeah, you're right, I'm fucking blessed with what it is that I get to do.
And to be able to text, if I need to text Richard now and be like what was that platform thing again?
I think I'm going to recall it, hopefully not incorrectly.
The study is done at a pub quiz, it's either a that gets the most right answers gets invited up.
And as this person is invited up, the one that completely blown everybody else out of the water because they are one of the, whatever they're called, compatriots of the study so they kind of cheated, I guess, cause they already had the answers.
In one iteration of the study, they go up, they accept the reward and they come back down.
And people are asked to sort of rate the likability of this particular person.
The second iteration of the study is they're getting up, they drop their papers everywhere.
Or they spill a coffee on themselves or they drop pens and stuff like that.
And people like the person who's got that degree of sort of fallibility in them.
I think, you know, looking at the way that you said to that, like, hey, you know this thing made me feel really uncomfortable or having a friend who's prepared to get up and sort of leave, you're like huh, that's like an odd quirk that's a part of them but I trust it it's very authentic, it's incredibly reliable as a signal of sort of genuineness, so I can put my faith in them.
Yeah, and also, if I feel connected, we have mirror neurons, you're going to feel more connected.
So, who doesn't want that?
You know what? I've never heard anybody say, you know, I hope tomorrow I feel more disconnected.
Yeah. People who are exhausted all day are often in the habit of beating themselves up or telling themselves how they should be.
Yeah. People at war are exhausted, too, because they're constantly under attack.
You're constantly under attack.
You're gonna be exhausted." The amount of, as I worked with the negative self -talk and as that voice just dissipated, the amount of stuff that I can do, the energy that I have in the world, it's just unreal.
I never even thought it was possible.
And you can see it, like, in my business, you can see people just are, how are you creating so much content so quickly?
The people I work with are, it took me a while because my expectation was that everybody else should be able to work at this level.
But it's, I'm often working.
I always make time for my family.
I always make time for my exercise and my mental health.
But outside of that, I will often work from 7 to 11 at night happy as a clam without being exhausted because I'm not using dirty fuel.
And that's the thing that I think people will have often is they think, oh, if I beat myself up, I'll perform, but it's really dirty fuel.
It works, but it's really fucking dirty fuel.
And so they get exhausted.
They burn out in their career.
How many entrepreneurs have you met who are like, okay, then I'm going to be able to sell my company and be happy.
It's like I wouldn't sell my company.
My wife and I were sitting down.
We were finished a seven day retreat, like the one that you're gonna come to.
It is fucking hardcore.
And we're tired, you're exhausted then.
sitting in this hot tub and we were talking about this transaction that we could have made for a lot of money and that we didn't make it and I was saying, and really it was years ago, I was like I'm really grateful that that happened, and she said yeah me too.
So I think we would still be married but I don't think that we would have started this business.
And she goes yeah we wouldn't have and then I said if somebody offered us a billion dollars for our business, and our business is not even worth even close to a billion dollars right, but they said that we couldn't do what we do, would you take the money?
And we both went, no, cause you want to, but we were like, no. And, and, and, and I remember weird part of the story, but I told, came home and told my girls that thing.
And then like three days later, my youngest was like, I'm looking for my billion dollar idea.
I'm like, Oh, you want to be a billionaire?
She was like, no, I want an idea that I wouldn't sell for a billion dollars, which is like, so sweet, but but you don't get that if you can't have that kind of lifestyle, you can't have that kind of joy unless you're like not beating yourself up over it all the fucking time.
If you're beating yourself up all the time, you just want to sell it, get your exit, hang out on a beach and then beat yourself up for not starting your second company, which there's somebody listening who knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah, talk to me about that sort of gold medalist syndrome thing.
When people finally achieve the outcome, the destination, they arrive.
I've arrived, I mean, you work - this is, I imagine, the fucking middle of the bullseye of a lot of the guys that you work with.
Oh yeah, so again, head, heart, gut.
What's happening is the head, they're constantly been beating themselves up for years.
And so their nervous system level, their adrenals are shot.
So there's just some study, if I recall correctly, where they took a whole bunch of CEOs, put them in a house, told them they couldn't talk about work but they just had to hang out for three days, nothing to do.
And then they had a group of psychologists come in and say, we want you to diagnose these people, but you can't ask them about work.
And they came out saying, diagnosis like a house full of depressed people.
And so you see these big time CEOs, when they retire, they go into this two or three year in their pajama moment, and they beat themselves up for not - You see Vinny Heimath, the guy that founded Loom?
Did you see what he tweeted a couple of months ago?
He's like, I've sold my business, I'm miserable and I have no idea what to do.
He tweeted that. and Naval, the guy I had on the show, he replied and he said, God, kid's mission, pick at least one.
Uh uh uh. Very very forthright.
I like that. Yeah so, so oftentimes what, so there's the adrenal fatigue, there's the constant self abuse and if they actually take a break and they stop abusing themselves, then the recovery time is much quicker.
You still have the adrenal recovery time that you have to deal with and there's lots of supplements and things you can do to help with that.
But otherwise. And then emotionally, the problem is, is that they've been living under this fear for an extended period of time, which means that they're not actually feeling their full breath of emotion.
So if they can actually start feeling their full breath of emotion, it helps with the recovery.
Yeah. It's interesting you use the term dirty fuel or toxic fuel.
I definitely said, you know, for a good while, lots of the high performers that I've spoken to or become friends with or whatever, I would say somewhere in the region of probably 70%, 80 % of them are running away from a life that they fear is supposed to running toward life that they want, that they're driven by, they're driven by two North Poles as opposed to North going towards South.
They're sort of having to push it as opposed to being polled.
It's all seen. It is potent fuel, but toxic if you use it for too long.
And there's a time where you sort of need to learn to transition through this.
I must have sent this particular podcast episode of yours, I'm not kidding to 10 people, 20 different people.
So you did an episode called your obsession with productivity is killing your productivity, and holy fuck if I wasn't seen by that.
But I wrote an essay about it, so I wanted to give you this and I want to reflect on it.
because I think that this, hopefully this two minute read explains the people that haven't listened to that episode should go and listen to on art of accomplishment, kind of what it's about and then maybe we can have a chat about it.
There's a very painful transition that everyone eventually needs to make in their career and productivity journey, from operator guy to idea guy.
The beginning of your career, the only advantage you have is your work rate because you have no experience to draw on and any natural talent is capped by your inexperience.
So you just work hard to get ahead.
You answer all the emails, you take all the would love to connect calls, you send the invoices, write the copy, hire the contractors, it's all you.
But eventually, that stage of your journey expires, and you need to let it go.
Maybe you have staff to delegate to now, maybe you've been given a promotion, and you need to be thinking more strategically at a high level.
Previously, your job was to work hard. But not so much anymore.
Your job isn't to work hard. Your job is to have great ideas, says Joe Hudson.
Here's the problem.
You've spent an entire career acclimatizing yourself to getting stuff done.
You've built It's a monster which sucks in difficult, tedious tasks and spits out completed efforts.
You've created a link between being busy, doing things you don't want to do and success.
The issue is that it's really hard to work out what you truly want and determine whether or not you're moving toward it, but it's easy to see the number of emails you sent or how many hours you spent on calls.
Being busy is more satisfying than being effective.
It's very hard to work out if your productivity efforts are actually useful or if they're just a dopamine fix that allows you to check the done box and feel like you completed something Ask yourself, is your job to press enter on emails or to actually move this mission forward?
The level of busyness also helps to make you feel important.
A full calendar is a hedge against existential loneliness.
There's no way I can be an unwanted piece of crap.
Look at how many calls I have today.
Look at all the people who need my time and attention.
I must be important, I must be valuable.
Please, please, please, assuage my deep feelings of insufficiency.
You are hooked on the dopamine of, I got stuff done today because even if this wasn't a use of your day, at least you don't feel useless.
And you didn't have any time to consider that you might not be fully actualizing your potential in any case.
Another challenge is that conspicuous busyness is much more societally rewarded over quiet effectiveness.
We want other people to see how hard we're working.
Even if the very best thing for your mission's outcomes was for you to go and lie on a beach and think today, who is going to congratulate you for taking on that challenge?
Near burnout is worn like a badge of honor to show fealty to the mission.
Obviously, productivity is more praised than private efficacy, and here's the thing.
Almost everyone's life goal is where I just don't have to do anything I don't want to do anymore.
But what happens when you actually get there?
So much of your self -worth is derived from overcoming hard things and pushing yourself through difficult tasks that you don't want to do.
So imagine that you do reach your goal.
Where do you find your satisfaction from now?
This is why it's so difficult to let go of doing grunt work and being permanently busy even when your precise goal was to get right here.
And finally, why is it so hard to take pleasure in our successes?
Well, largely because you are constantly peering over the shoulder of the present moment to see what's coming next.
Even during the act of attaining a goal you are already looking past it, getting ready to move the goal posts further away.
We are all chasing a sense of completion, but we never actually allow ourselves to savor any tastes of completion that we get along the way.
It's great. Is your podcast repurposed into a two minute essay, but this obsession, this transition from front -end busyness, signaling off of how much I got done, not asking the bigger questions, busy calendar, hedge against existential loneliness, obvious productivity.
This transition, I write a lot of these things, and this was one that just fucking snap people half.
So I think this is something you're really onto and is something I wanted to talk about today.
I would say if we go back to the beginning of the podcast where I said there was these three things connection, emotional clarity, and then negative self -talk in the head.
That like, if you look at your essay, half of it, you don't want to feel this, you don't want to feel this, you don't want to feel this.
So that's, that's what's happening.
And the dopamine fixes the nervous system thing, I don't want to feel this is the heart thing, and the head thing is, oh, I like, I'll stay busy enough not to look at the actual big, the big issue.
So that's one of the things that I say.
The other thing that the thing that helped me make the transition was the understanding that enjoyment was efficiency.
That if I'm going to, I think maybe we talked about this last time I can't read it I did yeah okay so but basically a fast car is not an efficient car and efficient car is a car that uses less fuel, enjoyment is how we know we're using less fuel so if you say what does an efficient Chris Williamson create as compared to a fast Chris Williamson I'm gonna go for efficient like oh that means that you can do this podcast and if you're doing it in full enjoyment probably with like a third of the energy which means now you have two -thirds energy to go build something else that's cool, or a family, or whatever
it is that you that gives you purpose.
And so when I recognized that, I did two things.
The first thing I recognized is that enjoyment isn't what you're doing, It's how you're doing it, at least in part, it's how you're doing it.
So right now I can say to you, how do we enjoy this moment 10 % more?
Right, well how do I enjoy these emails 10 % more?
And that changes. That makes us more efficient.
And then there's also, what do I enjoy doing?
But it's both, it can't be, I will only do what I enjoy because that doesn't fucking work because we're going to not enjoy ourselves 20 % of the time, no matter what we're doing to some degree, unless we learn how to enjoy whatever it is that we're doing.
Can you just, for the people that didn't listen to our first episode, Tell that story about when you tried to do an experiment where you were not going to do anything that you weren't going to enjoy, and you stared at the bin.
Yeah so yeah this is when I was in LA, and this is like, when I was like meditating seven hours a day, or something.
And I decided I was going to only do for, I think it was one or two weeks I'm only going to do what I enjoy, and it's I hated fucking taking out the trash.
And I was sitting there at the trash can, smelling trash, I did not want to smell trash, That was not enjoyable.
I did not want to take out the trash.
And I was just standing by the trash can for minutes, maybe longer.
And then I was like, wow, I have to learn how to enjoy taking out the trash or learn how to enjoy the smell.
And I learned how to enjoy taking out the trash.
And which was such a recognition that I wasn't going to control my environment into enjoyment.
I was going to learn how to enjoy my experience and control my environment, both of those two things are levers that I have for it, and so if you focus on that, then all that other stuff takes care of itself.
All that other stuff occurs because you're focused on your own efficiency, and you'll be sitting there doing something and you'll notice, oh it's so easy to delegate something from a place of enjoyment, from a place of rush, it's really hard to delegate something.
I'm just gonna get it done, it's just me, I'll be reliable, I'll get it done, I can finish it off.
It's quicker to do it this way than to hand it to somebody else.
And if you're enjoying, you can't be in that rush and therefore life becomes much easier to delegate as well.
And then there's all this extra space to do, have those really creative, cool ideas.
Again, it kind of comes back to this, I need to brand it better, it's a brand to branding problem.
But there's whatever we want to call it, like holistic selfishness, this sort of integrated self -prioritization, this belief that, you know the way.
I call it compassion.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's not just compassion, it's a elevated version of what we, because when we think about, at least when I think about compassion, I think about doing something nice for somebody else, and very rarely think about doing something nice for me.
And I even more rarely think about how doing nice for, doing something nice for me is doing something nice for someone else and for everybody else as well.
I would not even use the word nice.
Nice is maybe a problematic word there too.
It's doing the thing that cares for.
Okay, yeah. Because sometimes it's not fucking nice.
Yes. You know, like the best experience of this, I was like in the seventh grade, no, no, wait.
Wait, what grade? I was, no, I was in high school.
I was a freshman high school, I went to a boarding school because I was a fucking problem kid and had a green Mohawk.
And, you know, it was like, no, this isn't happening.
And, um, I just lied a ton to try to make people like me.
I was just lying all the, and this guy, I still remember his name.
And if he's listening right now, his name is Alex Bell.
And, um, if he just came to me with one of the last couple of days of school and he said, Joe, just so you know, everybody knows that you're lying and if you just were yourself, we'd be so much easier for us to like you.
And I stopped lying, like that day.
I mean, not completely, I'm sure.
But that habit of habitually lying just stopped because that guy did an incredibly compassionate, not fucking very nice thing.
He took a big risk, said a very scary thing to me.
And that's compassion.
That's so sick. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. and the exact opposite, in some ways of nice.
And best for him, best for me.
Yeah. But that definition of compassion, most of the time we think I'm doing it for somebody else, I'm doing it for me.
Everybody but Alex Bell just had that feeling.
God damn it, Joe is there, he's fucking lying.
I can't say anything to him, Alex Bell, he felt like this.
I said that to Joe.
compassion for him, compassion for me.
We're often scared of the consequences of revealing who we actually are or what we actually think, but whatever that consequence is also happens to be a direct path to the life where we are accepted and in love for who we are.
Yeah, that's the thing we were talking, you've said it I've said it.
If you're not being yourself you can't be accepted as yourself.
You can't create a world for yourself.
And Alex Bell came in and said, hey man, the world probably might accept you actually for who you are, but it's not gonna accept you for not who you are.
Yeah, yeah. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Actually that's actually, how true is that?
I think that's pretty fucking true.
I think you can get Instagram accepted for not being yourself.
I think you can get, like, not a deep form of acceptance for not being yourself, but I don't think anybody gets deeply accepted for if they're not being themselves.
It depends on how much you want to feel connected to this level of acceptance, because - Yeah, that's true.
Fuck. Good example, you know what Goodhart's Law is?
It's pretty cool. So you kinda like Parkinson's law.
Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time given for it.
And Goodhart's Law says that when a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure.
So - Oh, wait, wait, I haven't heard that.
That's so good for so many companies I've been involved in when a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure.
Yeah, so it's kind of like, so good.
So, for instance, let's say I did something I'm doing this year, I really want to grow my email list. So, I'm working hard and I'm trying to grow my email list. My goal is a million email subscribers by the end of 2025.
So what I could do is I could say, everybody that subscribes to my email list, I'm going and give you $1000 and then I could get million email subscribers, but I wouldn't give them $1000.
And okay, so what was the measure that you wanted?
Well, the measure I wanted was a million email subscribers.
Have you got it? Yes.
Why are you not happy with it?
Well, what was the outcome?
The outcome was a million people who care about what I write who genuinely want to be here, who weren't conned into it, who don't resent me, who actually opened the emails, you dah dah dah, dah dah dah.
Or a version from a business is, our most important thing is reducing fraud.
Okay, right, so we want to reduce our fraud, right?
So all of the intercom workers that do customer service and inquiries and stuff like that, they begin to treat every customer like a potential fraudster.
And you go, okay, we've driven fraud down to basically zero, but the customer experience is fucking horrendous and the company's tanking.
So when a measure becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good measure.
Yeah, it's great. And I think that the Instagram fame thing is an equivalent of that.
So I want all of the trappings of notoriety and validation and recognition by people that I respect and so on and so forth, but it's like if you know that you were just playing a role, do you know what it feels like to me?
It feels like Dubai, the city of Dubai, right.
As Eric Weinstein described it, he said, it's like a gold bar that's been beaten down into gold leaf so thin that if you poked it, your finger would go through.
That it has the appearance of gold from the outside, but as soon as you go in, you realize, this is just sort of prefabricated bullshit.
Like it was all manipulated, it's all very contrived, very contrived I think, you know, it'd be hard to do this without this sort of sense of manipulation, this sense of preparedness.
You should be very, very cautious about achieving the goal outwardly, which doesn't actually represent the goal that you wanted inwardly.
And I think that, you know, the Thousand True Fans audience thing that you can have, I reckon if you're doing something that you genuinely care about, showing up in your relationship with your partner, the level of promotion that you've got to work in the job title that you live with, all of those things, I think that you can be much more efficient with those if they're much truer to you.
You don't need as many followers if the followers genuinely see you and if the work that you're doing resonates with yourself.
You don't need as big of a pay packet obviously beyond a certain limit.
your partner, your partner doesn't need to, all of these things, he's like, oh fuck, like this is there for me.
And it's the reason why I think when we look at people that are super, super, super successful, we should probably look at them with more pity than we do envy.
So you think, holy fuck, what is it that this person is compensating for?
What is it that they're having to try and overcome?
So that's a batch of them.
There are some of them who are just so mission -driven.
Yeah, they're the 20%.
Yeah. Yeah. There was something that you said, you were talking about the folks like Sam Harris and you described the whole thing, and one of the things you described was that that you're hopeful that you'll get what you want, there's a hope of.
My experience of that is that goes actually away.
There's a thing — I have goals and everything, but my experience is that if I live by my principles, which you also talked about in that moment — if I live by my principles, If I live with an open heart, if I act, speak the truth that I see, my life is a lot fucking better than what I hope.
What I hope doesn't compare to what actually seems to occur, and that's consistent for a couple of decades now.
I could not have imagined that I would be able to be the dad that I am.
Recently, we were having Christmas and I'm like, oh, we're a family, this is what family is supposed to be.
I didn't have any fucking idea what family was supposed to feel like.
I didn't have that as a fucking goal.
I wasn't like, hey, I'm going to have a great family, but there I was having the family that I had always wanted that I never knew that I wanted.
That's how I see it work, is if you are true to yourself and your principles and you live by them, despite the consequences, then the thing that you hope for is negligible compared to the thing that you get.
Yeah, there's a kind of, I don't even know if this is the right word, I'm gonna use it in any case, like solipsism, or it's sort of narcissism, over self -reliance, it's like, oh, you know what's best for you, do you?
Right. You think you know what's best for you.
In all the different permutations of the world, you're the fucking omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, fucking divine mystic.
You know exactly what's best for you.
You don't, go fuck yourself dude.
Right. And also you think you know what's best from a place where you haven't evolved to the place where you're going to be, right?
So it's like if I'm thinking what's best from 10 years ago, my consciousness is nothing like it was 10 years ago.
Evolution, there's no end.
And so the thing that I couldn't even conceive of the reality of my consciousness today, so how would I ever possibly know it was a potential goal, yeah.
People cannot be split up into parts you accept and parts you reject, a person as a whole?
Yeah, what I'm pointing to there is mostly internal but also external, but you have to experience it internally first, is that We like to say this part of ourselves is good and this part of ourselves is bad or some version of that.
And, but the way a human registers it is that if I say you are a shitty speaker, you don't hear that as I'm a shitty speaker and there's 99 .999 % of me.
That's great. You hear it as I suck as human.
So if you are not able to like love all the parts of yourself, there's still something wrong with you.
And then that's the way people feel it in the other, right?
And if you're in a relationship, and particularly like a love relationship, and you're like, I love all this about you, but I don't like these things about you, that you're not actually loving them.
You're trying to manage them, you're trying to control them.
You're trying to get them to change.
And trying to get somebody to change makes for a fucking horrible relationship.
Because you're basically saying there's something wrong with you and I don't accept you as you are.
Cool, let's hang out for 30 years on that one.
It'll be happily ever after.
Rather than, oh, my job is to get back to unconditional love with you and face whatever I have to face in myself that doesn't allow me to do that.
Because my ability to love you has nothing to do with you.
You're gonna be mad at me and I can love you, you can be resentful of me and I can love you.
My capacity to love you is really most strongly defined by my capacity to love myself.
Are we not allowed to have preferences and partners?
Ways that we would prefer that they did and didn't show up.
Of course, and ask for them and have boundaries, all that stuff super important, but that doesn't mean that you have to stop loving them.
That's the weird thing is that people think is, obviously boundaries are really important.
When I talk about boundaries, I'll say, a great boundary opens your heart, because you're speaking your truth.
You're, you're, you're being, you know, that no matter what happens next, what you're, what's going to happen for you is good.
So let's say this, the truth of this is what I discovered when my dad was drinking.
So my dad he's passed now, but he was a drinker.
And at some point I said to him, I'm just not going to come home.
If all you do is criticize me.
That opened my heart because what I was saying was I'm not going to accept criticism, both externally and internally.
No matter what he did next, it didn't really matter because I had made a boundary that was self -care that opened my heart.
A year later, I could realize, I can actually be around him as long as he's not drinking.
Like that actually works for me.
My boundary had shifted.
but the boundary was as much for me as it was for him.
It was me saying I'm not going to put up with this.
And if I do it externally in the world, then it reaffirms the internal boundary that I'm having of I'm not criticizing myself like that anymore either.
What do people get right and wrong about boundaries?
Is it kind of a buzzword?
Yeah, oftentimes people use boundaries as a way to control other folks.
So the two rules I have about boundary is when you think of the boundary you're going to do, it opens your heart no matter what they say.
and two, it's telling them what you're going to do, not what they're going to do.
So if you yell at me, I am going to leave. I'll be gone for 15 minutes.
And then I will come right back and continue our conversation without you yelling at me immediately allows me to open my heart.
I'm taking care of myself.
I'm not telling you what you have to do.
Are you saying I can't yell at you?
No, you can yell at me.
I'm just not going to be here for it.
And so those are the two things that people often get wrong with boundaries.
The last one is that there's two forms of attachment.
One is the action, well, there's many forms of attachment, but two of the main ones are anxious attachment and...
Avoidant. Avoidant attachment, thank you.
So if somebody is anxiously attached and you draw a boundary of I'm leaving, if you don't say I'm coming back in 15 minutes as punishment, it's death for them on some level, on a little kid level.
So to draw a boundary that says here's how I'm gonna reconnect.
Drawing a boundary where connection is is part of the boundary until the boundary is I'm not going to connect with you anymore that's fine too but until that is there you're always leaving a place for connection to come back under circumstances they can choose not to do it.
Happy to reconnect with you when you're not yelling at me.
Many people believe that peace means never feeling agitated.
deep peace is the ability to be with agitation without aversion.
Yeah, this is the tension thing with the lung or the salad.
Mm -hmm. Yeah, I prefer the salad.
Life doesn't exist without it, so you can't have a non agitated state.
But agitation's really fucking enjoyable.
So the thing about emotion, so here's the thing about the emotion.
So we talked about how there's that open channel and then you can kink it in different ways.
that when it's open, it's a full welcoming of the emotion.
It's almost every emotion I've ever experienced is actually really quite lovely.
It's like a lovely experience.
It's the resistance to it that's painful.
So going to the bathroom doesn't, isn't uncomfortable, but resisting going to the bathroom sure as fuck is.
And similarly emotions when they're fully allowed, when they're fully moving through you, they're actually, they're invigorating.
Like ask any punk rocker about anger.
Remember like old Sex Pistols?
It's just an energy, anger is an energy.
It's like, there's so much joy that they're feeling like moving that anger in those moments, not all the moments, but some of the moments, like it's actually an incredibly exhilarating experience to allow emotion to move through your, as soon as you fucking resist it though, really painful.
So it's a deep welcoming.
And then some people will say, well how could I ever enjoy feeling hopeless, how could I ever enjoy feeling abandoned?
You say, as long as you're resisting it, you won't.
But if you can actually fully let it in, it's actually quite spacious and energizing.
What does that mean, fully letting it in?
So we have a thing called emotional inquiry which is like the easiest way to know it but it's bringing view to your emotional state and or actually allowing your body, your muscles, to express the emotion.
If it's been repressed for a long time, expression is gonna be necessary for a little while because if you've been holding, I used to be like this because I was holding all the repressed anger from my dad's criticism, and I'll call that the critical parent hunch. I'll see it in people.
I'm like critical parent hunch. Sometimes it's goaliosis, but usually it's a critical.
And as that changed in me, my body posture changes.
That anger got to be released, my body posture changed.
So when people do week -longs with us and they're moving a lot of their emotions, you'll see their faces change.
You'll see their bodies change.
Physically, they call it like the groundbreaker's facelift. Like you'll see that it's happened so often.
And so you're holding, those emotions are holding this tension in your system.
And so when you actually move it, you're actually allowing the muscles to move in a different way.
You're allowing flexibility that wasn't there before.
Oftentimes a tremendous amount of energy moves through the system where people feel like buzzing through the system when that happens.
Yet, But certainly the resistance and that sort of openness, everybody knows what it's like when some thought loop has been going on and on and on in their head.
I think like, what if it does happen?
Exactly. So if you meet any emotion in view, vulnerability, meaning I'm going to allow it to feel, impartiality, meaning I'm not going to try to control what the fuck, empathy, meaning I'm actually going to be with it and wonder like, what is this?
So if you have an emotional experience, it means that it's a somatic experience.
It means it's moving in your body.
How does it move? How thick is it?
How far from the center is it?
Where is the center of it?
How dense is it? What color is it?
Nobody does that with an emotional experience.
Their, with emotional experience, they're like, I'm angry.
But there's a very unique sensation.
They've done heat maps where they show unique set unique heat signatures for different emotions and bodies.
So, like, what is it to actually explore the shit out of that?
What is that exactly?
The way that you would, like, if you're lifting, you would explore the deep sensation of, oh, I got my tricepter right here, and it's like, you can do that with emotions.
And that's what fully feeling and letting it have its full way with you.
And usually, typically the way it works is your mind goes, it's not rational, like, I shouldn't be feeling this, well, yeah, emotions aren't rational.
You know? And because emotions are, create a tremendous amount of clarity, but they do it differently.
Rationality creates clarity like A plus B equals C.
Emotions create clarity, like, brrrr, oh, that's it.
And you see this all the time with like a CEO who's like really stuck on something, like let's go get fucking angry.
We go get angry and then like halfway through the anger, he's like, oh, I know what to do.
Or she's like, oh, that's the thing that's been bothering me.
I know the boundary I have to keep.
And typically that in anger, specifically, it is a sign that there's a boundary that you're not holding.
Why? Because anger in its clarity is determination and clarity.
And so oftentimes that determination you're getting angry because something...
You care about something and it's not happening.
And so I care, I love, I want this thing, it's not happening.
It means that there's something that doesn't feel right to you, and you're not drawing the boundary.
Like Gandhi would have drawn the boundary or in a relationship.
It's like, oh, to my dad it was, I was angry all the time.
As soon as I said, hey I'm not gonna accept that anymore, well a lot less anger.
I was angry because I thought I had to fucking accept it because I bought into the fact that he was my oppressor.
Most people believe confidence comes from being really good at what they do or never messing up.
But unshakeable confidence comes from knowing your worth isn't tied to your performance.
Yeah, so you can't - That's a banger.
Thank you, you cannot fuck up.
You and I have sat here in this room, we've both fucked up countless fucking times.
So if you go for perfectionism to give you confidence, it's never gonna ever work.
So confidence comes from, oh, I know who I am, I understand myself.
It's a sense of understanding oneself, and if you understand who you are then value is...
It either makes no sense or it's so clear that you have it.
There's no idea… There's no such thing as one person being more valuable than another, and of course un -valuable.
Because it's no longer contingent on how you have performed, how you showed up.
Yeah, I've never seen anybody hold a baby in there like, not valuable enough.
Here you go. And so that whole idea is bullshit.
Yeah, there's certainly, again, the curse of the insecure overachiever of being able to look at a particular performance, a day, a date, or whatever it is, and zeroing in on the one area where something went slightly wrong.
And I think this tension, it's an interesting one because in a lot of ways, this is the thing that has, this is the competitive advantage that a lot of people should actually be quite grateful for, you know, if you look at your business, branding for instance, I do a lot of work around branding, so Nutonic, this thing, every single bit of… Does that have caffeine in it?
Yes. Okay. Every single bit of coffee but the other one doesn't, so the element… Elementee.
Yeah that peach thing, which is grapefruit, that does not, that's just electrolytes, that tastes fantastic, so that will keep you going.
Yeah, I know this brand.
Every single bit of copy that's on this, every single piece of branding, the color hue, it's not quite white, it's an off -white, everything, the fact that, I've talked about this before, the Instagram logo is half a step outside of the follow us, which fucking kills me, because we did a million can order of this with this slide that's there, all of that.
So my capacity and many other people's capacity within business, within other areas of their life, Within their body, their diet, their health.
You know I'm able to zero in, okay, where is it that could be optimal?
Where could I be better?
Where could this thing be better?
And you think, with that level of detail orientation.
A comedian, working on a set, crafting this, yeah it's not quite there, it's not quite there, it's not quite there.
There it is, there it is, I finally got it.
You know it's this sort of unreal - Like with my tweets?
Yes, yeah this unrelenting craftsmanship, right?
Neater, tighter, more precise.
So much joy in it. But you've created this kind of demon that looks for issues, that looks for problems. Oh, except that I have never written a perfect tweet.
Of course. So you're like, I'm going to continue to continue to work, I'm gonna vacillate, I'm gonna ruminate, I'm gonna continue to work, what could be better than that fuck, fuck, fuck, what is it, what is it, what is it.
That's, ah, that's better, that's good.
You go, yeah, I want you to be like that around branding, but not in my friendships.
Whenever you go, you know, you've already gotta be my friend, I don't want you to do around branding.
But so that's going to kill the connection on the brand.
Like you'll lose the, you'll lose the, the bigger picture.
Like, yeah, go ahead and do it and enjoy it.
Like, enjoy it like, Oh, I want this perfect.
And that's cool. And I want to do that.
That's great. But the rumination makes you miss the, Oh, is this something that I want to drink?
it misses the, oh, what's the total vibe of this thing and how much does it connect with me?
Yeah, perhaps rumination was the wrong, I think what I'm specifically trying to get at is the level of detail orientation and this could be better, right, this could be neater, tighter, more precise.
And that most people believe, confidence comes from being really good at what they do and never messing up.
In many ways when you look at your tweet, you go, well, I could be better, this could be less messed up.
You know what I mean?
You can perform some lexical Brazilian jiu -jitsu fuckery to end up in a place where this sentence is just you talking about your tweeting.
And you're being like, well, this just is a justification for accepting suboptimal tweets.
You know what I mean?
And I just think, Ryan Long, the reason I used the comedy thing, Ryan told me about this.
We were talking about it a few months ago.
And he's a real craftsman when it comes to the way that he puts his sets together and he does these sort of like real zingy, one -liners and stuff.
And he said, I realized that it's real tough for me to draw, compartmentalize and draw boundaries around.
I want you to be this detail oriented and this sort of obsessively focused and precise and all of the rest of the stuff within the domain of comedy.
But I don't want you to go, it's gonna bleed out into your nature.
It's gonna bleed out into other areas of you.
It doesn't for me. I don't know, I've never really looked at this deeply.
I am very precise about certain things.
If I'm putting together a workshop, every time we do a workshop, we refine it to make it even more powerful, even more, it doesn't matter, we get a 90, whatever, 5 % completion rate.
I don't care, I'm like, how do I make this better?
How do I make this more useful?
But I'm not like that when it comes to the performance of somebody that works with me because it kills my connection.
So in my system, there's a prioritization of connection.
I don't know how that happened.
So I'm not sure if I have any wisdom or valuable thought on it, but I just know that to me, that only happens when it helps me feel connected, but if I feel disconnected by it, it stops.
Yeah, that's interesting.
It's just that whatever you wanna call it, curse of competence, curse of that inner voice.
But it's this particular suite of traits where people want to achieve well, they want to create work that they're proud of, they want to work hard at things.
But also they know that the whole reason they're doing this is to kind of enjoy it, ultimately.
And if they whip themselves into submission, they can look back on a career of a string of miserable successes and go, hooray?
What do I do with this?
Yeah, that's I mean, I've had a lot of clients who have found themselves exactly that.
I've got everything that I always wanted except I'm not happy.
And that is an unbelievably common thing because they were chasing happiness with a bad strategy.
Through success. Through success, yeah.
Or money or power or influence or whatever.
But that, like, gold medal happiness is whatever the five minutes on the podium, or maybe a couple of days if you're lucky.
Happiness, you know, comes from understanding yourself.
It doesn't come from achievement, long -term happiness, short -term happiness, definitely achievement.
And I think Eckhart Tolle says this, which I really appreciate.
He says, the reason that we're happy when we achieve something is because we have a moment where we don't want anything else.
Which I think is like a brilliant thought process.
So I was talking to Naval, I didn't actually bring this up with him, but I put it in here because I wanted to say to you and see what you thought.
Happiness is the state where nothing is missing.
Where nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or the future to regret something or to plan something.
Happiness is the state where nothing is missing.
Yeah, I mean, we just experienced that when I said, don't go to the past or the future to find something wrong with you.
Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. Yeah, that's exactly.
The dilemma with that is that for years people are like, be present and that'll make you happy, and then what people do is they say, why am I not fucking present?
I should be more present, which is the opposite of presence.
And so presence as a modality is a very slow -moving.
Like it's a very slow moving, it takes a lot, like 10 years to constantly practice presence to get there, but there's But there's other things like connection, which is always there.
Presence is also always there, but I can find connection right now here with you, and I don't have to try for it.
And presence is the same way, but presence isn't quite as easy to see.
I can feel a connection with you.
I can feel a connection with even the microphone.
I can feel a connection with myself.
It's like a very right there.
I'm always having an emotion.
I can always have that experience of letting that emotion ride through me.
They're like very simple things.
We're present somehow, at least the way in our society, it's like I gotta get off my phone.
I have to do this thing.
I have to be present.
Instead of even I'm on my phone, how do I be more present on my phone?
Wait a second, actually, the more efficient thing is what about me is right now present on my phone?
Mm -hmm. And so, even that idea of I have to do something to get there, I have to be more present is counter, is a way for, is moving away from happiness.
Happiness is self understanding.
Self understanding.
Because once you understand yourself then you realize there's nothing wrong.
Heck yeah. Joe Hudson, ladies and gentlemen.
Joe, you're great. I'm fired up to do this thing later on this year with you.
We've got a day tomorrow as well.
Yeah, yeah. Where should people go?
They want to check out all of the stuff that you do.
Oh, thanks. Yeah, artofaccomplishment .com is a great place to get all that the podcasts, Art of Accomplishment.
We got 100 and something things.
So if you're doing that, just go through and pick a topic that's interesting to you and then listen to that.
Don't listen to it in order.
Yeah, highly recommended.
Dude, it's really fantastic.
I'm very, very glad that I found you.
And I always look forward to seeing what you're putting up.
What a pleasure to be with you, thanks.
