Chasing Success vs True Fulfilment - Nat Eliason | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes.

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Some of the best parts of life I think are things that you cannot appreciate or understand until you experience them.

I call these like known costs with unknowable benefits.

I wish I focused less on work.

I wish I spent more time with my family.

You basically never hear I wish I had had fewer kids.

I wish I had spent more time on work.

I wish I had spent less time with my partner.

You have to deliberately try to overcome your short term bias.

If everybody on an executive team agrees with a decision, you shouldn't do it because it means that you haven't fully explored the risks or the possible downsides.

You need to like cancel the meeting.

Everybody go off for a day or two, think about what you're missing there.

And then come back and try to present what the like devil's advocate is for it.

Matt Eliza, welcome to the podcast, how you doing?

I'm doing great, thanks for having me on.

So you have a book coming out soon, Crypto Confidential, which is very exciting.

But I don't really talk much about crypto stuff, but I really love your general life advice stuff.

And I've been following you on the internet since like, I mean, 2017 or something, I've said like that, since your SEO days.

For people who might not be familiar with your story, can we get a quick like backstory?

And how did you end up writing a book about crypto?

Yeah, totally. So when I was in college, I wasn't much of a student, I really didn't like classes or learning that way.

And I wasn't particularly excited about the job prospects that were common for people with like my kind of background.

It was a lot of people going into consulting, banking, some people going into programming, but a lot of, you know, go to New York and worked at a big firm.

And I tried doing an internship at that, hated it.

And during the internship decided this just wasn't for me.

And so I started literally hiding in the back corner of the office.

I like moved all of my desk stuff over there.

And I would come in a little bit early, I would bang out all of my work for the day in two hours, and then I would spend the rest of the day reading books about entrepreneurship and like taking notes on them and everything.

And this was back in 2013.

So I was just sitting back there in the corner, I had the Kindle app installed on my work computer, which they never minded, thankfully.

And I was just, I mean, I was main lining business books, right, like you started with four hour work week and gosh, what were all the other ones?

You know, immutable laws of marketing, kind of like that whole era.

And I was reading all of them and I thought, okay, I want to start a startup.

I need to get good at something related to startups.

I should figure out how to do internet marketing and like content marketing.

Cause I was at least a decent writer, I was doing a philosophy degree.

So I had some of those chops.

So I started my first blog back then, and then I tried to do a startup and that didn't work, but I kept blogging along the way.

I went, you know, I went and I worked for a company for a little bit, kept blogging along the way.

I went and did the nomad thing for a bit, had some like passive income from an app I built, kept blogging along the way.

And I just kind of like kept blogging.

And, you know, eventually that turned into getting really good at SEO, which you mentioned.

I kind of like figured out how to really work Google during that 2017, 2018 to 2021 period.

I was really, really good at it.

And so I built a whole marketing agency around helping other businesses do that.

And I was working on that from 2017 through 2020.

And at the start of 2020, I mean, everybody knows a lot of stuff went to shit.

And it was, we hit like our peak revenue month in February, lockdowns start, the market crashes, everything happens in March and we lose more than half of our clients in the span of a month.

And we have payrolls, we have healthcare, we have all these costs and now we're losing money.

And I had to just go into total overdrive to save the business, right?

It was like the last thing I wanted to do was have to lay off everybody when there were people's, you know, mortgages and healthcare and like all of these things riding on it.

So managed to get it all back on track.

But then by the end of the year, I was completely burned out, totally wrecked.

I was kind of tired of doing SEO because I'd been doing it since 2014 at that point.

And this sounds bad, but it was almost like too easy.

Like I knew what to do.

I knew that if I started a new site in this niche and followed all the steps and made the content, it was going to rank.

It wasn't a fun game anymore.

And I was just, I was burned out on the agency side too.

So promoted our COO to CEO.

She started running the business, I stepped out.

And then I was kind of left with this question of what do I do now?

And part of me really wanted to just focus on writing.

Back then I've always loved writing.

That's the thing that I'd always stuck with despite picking up all these other interests along the way.

But I couldn't make the money work at that point.

I didn't have my agency salary anymore.

I had some income for my blog, but not enough to pay for me, my lifestyle.

We had a kid coming, some of these other costs.

And so I said, okay, I got to figure out something else first.

And the first thing I actually did is I tried to get into YouTube, which is how I found you.

And then I was watching your Skillshare videos.

And in one of your Skillshare videos, you were reading one of my articles.

Which is when I reached out to you and that's when we connected.

I was like, dude, this course is incredible.

Like thank you for making this.

But a few months into YouTube, I realized that wasn't the thing for me.

Got started getting into programming and then all of this crypto stuff was taking off.

Crypto was just going bananas.

And I started to get more and more in my head like, hey, maybe I can go make a bunch of money really quickly doing crypto things.

And then I can come back to the writing.

And that led to a whole bunch of shenanigans over the next year and a half.

And eventually into getting a book deal to talk about that period.

So it kind of ended up working.

Because now I am just full -time focused on writing.

Okay, there's so many different areas I want to go into.

I've been a fan of your blog since 2017.

And you've recently switched it over to Substack.

And I have here your 40 lessons from 30 years, which you wrote last year.

Now I've just turned 30 as well, about a month ago.

And so I've been thinking about these like, I've been thinking about these life lessons and all of this sort of stuff.

And I think you're like probably one year older than me.

And so I'd love it if we can riff on some of these life lesson.

Yeah, let's do it. Nice.

So the first one, it's never the right time.

Anytime you catch yourself saying, oh it'll be a better time later, you're probably just scared or unclear on what to do.

There is never a right time for the big things in life.

Having kids, changing jobs, breaking up, getting engaged, married, moving in together.

And no, it's never an amount of money either.

How did you land on that realization?

That's a good question.

It's definitely something that had been floating in my head for a period.

So my wife and I have kind of a funny story for how we ended up together.

We started dating in college and, but we started dating when I was in my senior spring and she was still a sophomore.

So it kind of had this deadline built into it.

It was, I'm going to graduate and then we're going to kind of cut things off and then we didn't and then we were on again, off again, on again, off again.

And in my head I felt like I was too young to fully commit to a relationship.

I needed to go do this digital nomad thing.

I needed to build a business.

I needed to make a bunch of money and then I could find a partner.

And I think that's a common story a lot of men tell themselves especially.

But I got to this point where I was like, this doesn't feel like it's really serving me, constantly running off and trying to explore these things.

And we kept kind of coming back to each other.

And so we said, well, let's stop being in this yes or no state and let's just really make a big decision here.

And what we did, which I really recommend to anybody in an earlier stage of our relationship is we said, we're gonna go backpack through Asia.

We're gonna live in hostels and be just, basically no alone time, nothing.

We're just stuck together for weeks and we'll either break up on that trip or if we make it through the trip, we'll move in together.

And we agreed on that before we left.

We were very clear like we don't wanna do this on again, off again nonsense anymore.

We need to create like a clear go or no go situation.

And so we left for the trip.

Neither of us knew which way it was going to go.

I would have, we would have kind of believed either, but a week and a half into it, we were both like, yeah, this is it, we're fully committing to this.

And we got back from the trip, we moved in together in New York, we got a dog for months later, we moved to Austin, six months after that, got mirrored a year after that, had a kid two years after that.

We did all of these things earlier, I think that a lot of people like in our demographic, just because we kept realizing, or we kept asking this question of like, if not now, when?

Like, what actually specifically has to change where we would feel ready?

And we kind of realized that we would always be able to invent a reason not to get a dog, not to move in together, not to get married, not to have a kid.

And so we may as well just do it now because every previous time that we had said, okay, let's just do it.

Like, we're never gonna feel ready, let's just go.

It had worked out great.

And we'd been super happy with the decision.

And that kind of has just been such a big reoccurring theme in my life that I've noticed over and over and over again, is I would want to do something or be thinking about doing something.

I would start saying, oh no, I have to like make this other thing happen first.

Realize that that's just fear, that's just procrastination, that's some personal blocker.

Then if I say, no, actually we should just do it, it pretty much always works out great and ends up being incredibly rewarding.

There's another idea embedded in that that I want to riff on too, if you don't mind, which is there are really some of the best parts of life, I think, are things that you cannot appreciate or understand until you experience them.

So I blank or I call these like known costs with unknowable benefits.

So a lot of the best improvements to your life have these known costs, but you don't know how great the benefits are going to be.

Like getting married is a great one, right?

Where a lot or just committing to a partner is a great one, where it has all of these incredible benefits and it's just such a wonderful thing to have in your life once you do it, but until you do it, you often only think of the costs like, oh, I'm not gonna have full control of my schedule anymore.

I'm not gonna be able to date other people.

I'm gonna have to prioritize somebody else along with myself.

And those might seem shallow, but they're known costs, but you don't know how great it can be on the other side.

It's the same thing with kids, right?

You know that there's going to be a period of not getting great sleep, your schedule is going to be affected, it's gonna be harder to stay in touch with certain friends.

And then you see people complaining about having kids on Twitter and Instagram everywhere else.

So you know all of these costs, but you don't know how amazing all these other little things are.

And so I actually feel like it's a useful heuristic that if there's something that a lot of people seem to get a quiet satisfaction from, but then, and there are some relatively meaningful costs associated with it, it's probably worth paying that price because there are probably all these other benefits

that you just can't totally understand.

I mean, exercise is another great one, right?

Carving out time in your calendar to go for a run, getting sweaty, doing the actual running or whatever, those are all very knowable costs, but you don't know how great you might feel in three months, six months a year of working out consistently.

And you might discover that, oh my gosh, I feel so much better that it's so worth investing that time every day.

Love that. Air on the side of too early over too late.

So, I mean, the first thing that can be hard to remember is that we're going to die, right?

Because we like to not think about that because if you think about it too hard, your brain basically breaks.

And unless you have very deep rooted faith, right, and then you can maybe manage it better or just very deep spirituality.

But even in that situation, it can be hard to think about the finiteness of life.

And so it's very easy to just put things off and do them later.

And some things you can put off for quite a while without as big of a cost, right?

Like writing a book is a good one.

You know, people write books in their sixties and seventies.

So if you put it off by two or three years, it's not going to be the end of the world.

But the thing that inspired that idea, the better too early than too late, was actually, again, around having children.

I don't want to make this like, everything is about having kids.

But I had this tweet that went viral that I said, where I said a lot of people try to focus on their career before having kids, but that's actually a big mistake because you really only have until, call it your late thirties to, you know, I mean really until your early mid thirties to easily have children,

until your late thirties to like have children.

And once you get into your forties, it gets pretty hard.

So once you graduate from college, assuming you're 22, 23, you have about 18 years to, you know, date enough people to figure out what kind of partner you want, find someone, date them, get engaged, marry them, be together for a while and then start having kids.

And so if you want three or four kids, even if they're a year apart, that alone is going to take four or five years.

If they're 18 months or two years apart, now we're talking like eight to 10 years.

And so if you try to just focus on building your career into your early mid thirties and then think about that, you've lost most of the time to do that thing.

And that's, I mean, that's a really rough thing to talk about and like, I don't want it to come off like I'm shaming anyone for making that decision because I'm not, you know, everybody has different situations, but if you don't really think about that time cost, it's pretty easy to keep saying, I'll

think about this next year, I'll do this next year, I wanna focus on my business or my work, whatever, right now.

But the truth is you can do almost any kind of work into your sixties and seventies if you're healthy and active and whatever.

And if you delay advancing your career by 10 years, it's probably not going to be the end of the world.

You're still going to have a lot of time for that career.

But if you delay finding a partner and having kids by 10 years, you might miss most of that opportunity entirely.

So it's often better to do some of these things earlier than later.

And this kind of applies to entrepreneurship too, because if you have any inklings of doing something entrepreneurial, that could be starting a YouTube channel, that could be building a lifestyle business, that could be, you know, making a space, rocket company, whatever, right?

Like if you do that in your early twenties when you have like basically no cost of living and no other obligations, it is so much easier to actually focus on that, to have the energy, the time and whatnot, to give it that go then, than if you say, well, I'm going to work for a consulting firm for five

or 10 years, and then I'll try to do the startup.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's going to be way harder to do it after, because one, you're going to be used to consulting or banking or tech job, whatever money.

So you're not going to want to live on 50K a year anymore.

And two, you don't have that same like energy and lifestyle and like low -cost living that you had earlier.

So it's way better to do a lot of the big things in life too early and risk having to like figure something out than it is to put it off to later and then discover that, oh, like there is no later, like I actually can't do this thing now.

Some people might listen to your first point around the kids thing and say, well, you know, that your twenties really are the time where you've got to grind on your career as well, because like, if you don't grind on your career straight out of college or straight out of university, you're going to

fall behind. No one wants to hire people in their thirties or forties or fifties.

So like, I kind of need to use my twenties to grind on my career and also to have kids like, what's up with that?

Yeah, I mean, that's a real concern too.

It is definitely harder to get started on a career in your thirties, especially in some of these industries.

They're like, if you want to go to medical school, kind of have to do that right out of college, right?

Like you would know better than I, do people go back to medical school in their thirties?

Probably not very often, but you do have a choice of how hard you want to grind on it, right?

So you have a choice of, I could do the 12 hour days and try to be the absolute number one person at this job and advance as quickly as possible.

Or I can do the eight to nine hour days for now, dedicate the rest of that time to finding my partner, figuring out that part of my life.

And then once I have those other things that I have a shorter fuse for, like on track and have started to figure them out, then I'll actually have a lot more freedom to really grind on my career and really put more of my energy there.

It's actually been surprisingly easier for me to be fully committed to writing and my work now that I have a wonderful wife where we can share responsibilities.

I have children who give me this incredible sense of purpose for why I'm doing these things.

And that's not an uncommon story.

If you talk to people who have kids, they'll often say, I thought this was going to make me less productive and it did give me less time, but it made that time so much more impactful because I am constantly, you know, I was a productivity guy, like not like you, right?

I wasn't like that in it, but I was a, you know, I considered myself a pretty high output guy.

Like I knew how to be productive.

And I am still constantly asking myself, like, what the hell was I doing with all of my time before?

These things, again, it's like these known costs on noble benefits.

You might think that grinding on your career and investing in it is going to get harder once you settle down, but in a lot of ways it actually gets easier.

Yeah, one of the big things I took away from when we met in person last year was there was something you said around, you know, I think I asked you, like, nah, you're like 30 and you're already married with two kids, that's kind of soon, isn't it?

For like an Austin living tech bro.

And you said something to the effect of, you know, more people tend to, if you ask most people, they tend to say, they tend not to regret the number of kids they have.

If anything, the regret is like, I wish I'd had more kids.

Yeah, or I wish I'd had more time with my kids.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

And so like, how did that lead you to decide to have kids super early?

This is kind of, it goes back to the same thing where you can read these interviews that are done with people who are dying.

And these, you know, they pop up on Twitter all the time, there are books that talk about this.

And across the board, a lot of them say the exact same things.

I wish I focused less on work.

I wish I spent more time with my family.

I wish I had more time with my kids.

I wish I had more kids.

You basically never hear, I wish I had had fewer kids.

I wish I had spent more time on work.

I wish I had spent less time with my partner.

And so you have to deliberately try to overcome your short -term bias, right?

Because your short -term bias is that those things are scary, they're gonna be hard.

I need to, you know, I want to like, enjoy my fun party phase, whatever, in my 20s.

And like, that stuff is fun.

And I had plenty of that too.

But I just kept hearing those stories and Cosette and I, my wife would talk about it.

And we would say, it seems so obvious that when we're in our 70s, 80s, the thing that we are going to value most is time with our family.

And if that family is bigger, and if the kids are older, and we can actually be like running around visiting them and everything, when we had our first kid, I was 28 and Cosette was 25.

So she'll graduate college when Cosette is 46 and I'm 48, 49.

Like, that's pretty cool.

That's still really young.

We can be just going all over it.

You know, if she has kids at the same age that we did, we'll be in our like early 50s.

We'll still be like, you know, I could chase them, or you know, I could run with them.

Like, I could do all of these things.

And we started imagining that future more and more.

And we realized that, oh, we would actually much rather have that future than have a couple extra years of partying and being like a young, fun married couple.

And we're still a young, fun married couple.

Like, we still get to party and we still, you know, hang out with friends.

You know, we had you guys over for dinner and like the kids were just asleep upstairs and we hung out for like three, three and a half hours and, you know, had some wine and dinner and it was awesome.

And like, you still get to do all of those things.

So that was the other part is we went into it deliberately choosing to sacrifice some of that for this other future.

And then found out that we didn't end up having to sacrifice that much of the current life that we enjoyed at all.

That's great. I've shared that conversation that we had with a bunch of friends and a friend of mine yesterday was saying that he has been thinking about that conversation that I reported to him.

And now he and his wife have decided that they're going to have kids sooner than they were originally planning to.

They're like 26 or something and they're like, oh, we might as well start now rather than wait until arbitrarily, or I don't know, 30, 32, 33 before getting started with that.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, it's been so, so like wonderful and there have been so many other benefits we didn't expect.

And I will say this, if you're the kind of person who is listening to us talk right now, you are probably an unusually capable parent or potential parent, right?

And you probably have the financial resources to make it work better than you think you do.

And you have to remember that the people who are just like happily enjoying time with their kids are probably not posting about it online.

It's the people who have a bunch of other stuff going on in their life where they're kind of fundamentally unhappy people who are the ones online complaining.

And if you're not a fundamentally unhappy person who's complaining about stuff all the time, you're probably not going to be an unhappy, complainy parent either.

Like you're going to figure it out.

Like if you're here listening to us talk right now, you're somebody who knows how to figure out challenges in your life.

And so yes, there are going to be challenges around sleep and negotiating responsibilities and all of these things, but you're going to figure it out.

And then you're going to get all these other incredible benefits too.

And honestly, it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with like the sleep and some of the other challenges when you're in your 20s than when you're in your late 30s or 40s.

There's this other, this like mini version of it that I've heard that I really like, which is the reason it's so easy to pull all -nighters and run on fumes in college and med school is because that's when your body is supposed to be dealing with a toddler, right?

You're literally like biologically designed to be able to run on less sleep during that period and to be in a more chaotic environment because like your body knows that like maybe you should have kids at this age.

And a lot of these things just end up being, I don't want, you know, parenting's not easy.

But if you are the type of person who is listening to us talk, it will be easier for you than you expect.

That's nice. Great.

Standing social events.

Talk to me about standing social events.

What's up with that?

Dude, this is, in my opinion, the biggest hack for seeing your friends more often because everybody's busy, everybody has, you know, they have their alone time that they want, they have their work, they have their life maintenance.

And scheduling with people is a big annoyance in general.

Texting a friend and saying, hey, let's get dinner.

You know, what's your next week look like?

Oh, next week is busy.

Like, how about the week after, like, can you do Thursday?

Yeah, but I have to come in six.

Okay, well, we could do five.

You know, it's just like doing that constantly just to see your friends is a huge impediment to spending time together.

And so what Cosette and I have tried to do really intentionally is create as many standing social events in our calendar as possible.

So one that we did for years was a Thursday morning swim in Barton Springs.

So Barton Springs is this wonderful, cold, natural spring pool in Austin.

It's basically right in downtown.

And every Thursday morning at 7 45, we would meet up with a bunch of friends there.

We would hop in the pool, tread water, talk, hang out for a bit, and then I'll go get coffee and breakfast together.

And by 9 AM, we'd all spent an hour, hour and 15 together.

We'd gotten a little bit of exercise in.

We've gotten some coffee and on a given week, there might be six people there.

There might be 12 people there.

It fluctuated based on who could come that week, but you always knew that if you showed up at that time, you were going to see some friends.

And that was awesome.

We kept that going basically every Thursday morning for four years.

And the people who came fluctuated over time.

And even when our first kid was born, we just brought her.

And she just sat in her stroller by the side of the pool and we gave her a snack or a toy to play with while we swam.

And she was right there.

If she cried, we could hop out and take care of her.

It wasn't a big deal.

And we were just always getting to see friends on Thursday.

And now we have a bunch of other of these.

We always go to the farmer's market at the exact same time on Sunday.

And so all of our, a lot of our friends know that and a lot of them show up at the same time too.

And we either shop together or the ones with kids, we go play on the playground with our kids together and we know we're going to see each other.

There's a coffee shop that we always go to at about 9 a .m.

on Saturday morning.

And we always see friends there.

There are certain like common spots that we hang out at.

And so we can just text the group or text a bunch of individual people quickly saying, hey, we're going here at this time today.

And people will almost always come through.

And that way you're never constantly like trying to plan things with people.

You just know that there are these events in the calendar when people can see each other and you can just toss invites out into the ether and just see who shows up.

And by very deliberately doing that, we get to see friends at least four or five days of the week if not every day of the week between the things that we do plan and things that we don't plan.

And more than half of that requires no effort because they're just standing events.

And being very open to people bringing their friends as well is great because then you're naturally meeting new people, you're naturally growing the friend group, and it becomes this wonderful way for people new to Austin in particular to suddenly find a friend group of their own.

Because Austin, especially in 21 and 22, everybody was moving here.

And so these new people would just show up at Barton Springs with their friend who they knew when they moved here, and then we would get to know them.

And now suddenly we have new friends too.

It's a really, really cool way to meet people and to continue to connect with the people that you already want to spend time with.

This episode of Deep Dive is very kindly sponsored by YNAB, which stands for You Need a Budget.

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What's your take on like the Dunbar number of like three close friends versus like 10 close friends?

Like is there not a risk that if you're seeing too many of these people, you're having like too many like superficial relationships with friends like, yeah, how do you think about that?

Maybe, I guess I don't think about it too much because I think that that number is constantly in flux the people that I'm closest with, I'm gonna be texting all the time anyway, and it's nice and it's, there's nothing wrong with having friends who you mostly talk at these events where you see each other

every three or six months.

And it's actually really nice.

And I mean, I'm somebody who's like not on Instagram very much, I have an Instagram, but it's basically just for posting.

So I sort of don't know what's going on in most of my friend's life most of the time, which makes it extra fun.

We hang out because then I get to find out.

We have like a lot of stuff to talk about.

And so I've never felt overwhelmed by that.

There was one point that Cosette and I hit where we said, we're doing too much.

We're trying to be too social and we need to dial it back because it was getting in the way of family time, but it took a while to get to that point.

And when it got to that point, it was because we were having people over for dinner or going to people's for dinner every single night of the week, plus doing multiple hangouts with people or groups on Saturday and Sunday.

So there was just no alone time.

There was no family time.

And we said, okay, this is a little bit too much.

Let's limit it to like three nights a week with friends and two nights, just us.

And that was great too.

So I think it's just something you naturally figure out and you find balance for.

But I think that this is another like don't cost a noble benefit.

I think a lot of people who think they prefer to be at home alone more, you would actually really enjoy it if you had standing social things with friends where you get to hang out and have dinner or just hang out in a park for a little bit, you just have to kind of get over the activation energy to

do it. And it's scary to invite people to things, but most people are waiting around hoping to get invited to something.

You just have to be the one who initiates it.

And if you can get over that little hump, you get this incredible reward of getting to spend so much more time with your friends and have these very rich in -person relationships.

Yeah, I kind of have a rule that I often say to myself, which is that everyone is friendly, but you have to go first.

That's so great. That's such a great way to put it.

Yeah, yeah. I find that whenever I feel that like, oh, that sense of, oh no, it's weird to be the one to organize the thing.

I'm like, nope, everyone is friendly.

Everyone's waiting around to be invited to stuff.

I can be the one to initiate the organization, or I can ask my assistant to, or whatever the situation might be.

And once you get in that mindset, the other mindset you really need to develop is that if people you invite to things are not reciprocating, if they're not inviting you to things, that's okay.

It's not a quid pro quo relationship because a lot of people just don't organize things.

And they don't take that initiative and that's fine, right?

Every friend group needs somebody to organize things.

And so it may as well be you.

And you just can't expect everyone else to do it as well.

Cause if you do, then you might get like bitter and annoyed and, oh, why aren't they inviting me to things?

It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It doesn't have to be balanced.

Like you just keep inviting people to things.

You become the organizer and it leads to a really, really rich social life.

Should I learn how to cook?

Yes. Can I get by by just ordering takeaway when I have people around?

Cause at the moment I get by by ordering takeaway when I have people around and I dabbled with, I think I've read some blogs of yours and I dabbled with cooking like last year and occasionally I'd have friends over and we'd all like chop the veg together and that was kind of fun, but then I sort of got

out of the habit and then I was like, eh, restaurant, go for a walk in the park with a little sandwich, like takeaway.

It's all the same sort of thing.

But I know you're a big advocate for cooking.

Yeah, I mean, I'll give the caveat that if you live in London or New York City or downtown Chicago or something, it might be harder to do this.

But we live in Austin and we live a little bit outside of downtown.

So we have a relatively large kitchen, living room, a nice dining area.

And so for us, it's more fun to be able to cook for our friends when they come over.

And we're also a little bit particular about ingredients and sourcing and things.

And so it's nice to be able to control everything that's going into the food and cooking.

So I think this is less of a problem for people who are maybe not like white Americans, but a lot of white Americans think that when you cook a meal, you have to cook like a protein and a vegetable and a side, and you have to make a dessert.

And it becomes this huge thing in your mind.

But there are all of these incredible recipes where you basically just throw a bunch of shit in a pan and make some rice or have some bread or some tortillas.

And it's delicious.

It takes like 20 minutes.

It's going to be better than what you order from takeout.

And you're going to have that satisfaction of, you know, actually having made it yourself.

And it means a lot, I think, to people too, when you can actually cook something for them.

And so Cosette and I just started looking for these recipes and we started finding more and more of them.

And we actually have a physical recipe box, which I also highly recommend, where whenever we find a recipe that we really love, we actually write it out.

So that whenever we're making dinner, whenever we're buying recipes for the week, whenever we're hosting people, we can just open it up.

We can pick one of these 20 recipes that we use a lot, and we know it's going to be delicious.

We know how to do it.

And we know it's going to be pretty quick and painless.

So you just want to find like that way to optimize it.

You don't need to throw a dinner party.

It doesn't need to be this huge affair.

Having an awesome rice bowl with, you know, a napkin and a drink is great and delicious.

And so I think optimizing around that is really, really the way to do it.

And I will say that like trying to get the guests to help with the cooking often doesn't go as well, unless they're also really big into cooking, usually better to get a lot of it prepped before they get there and then throw it in the pan once they're there to finish it off and then serve everyone.

Although if you have friends who also really love cooking, that is super fun too.

I had a friend who, Miles Snyder, he's Miles Cooks, I think on Twitter, he's got this 80 20 cooking class and he shares all these incredible recipes on his blog.

And when he was in Austin, he would come over all the time with a couple of other friends and we would all cook dinner together.

And that was super, super fun too.

But you've got to make sure that it's with other people who really like to do that, because not everyone does.

That sounds interesting.

Trust your negative gut, not your positive gut.

Yeah. So we definitely have this like, lizard brain hardware running behind our, smart rational brain.

And that part of our brain is really, really good at detecting bad vibes.

And you'll have this experience where you'll consider working with someone, you might start, talking to someone, you might be like buying something and this little, there'll be this little feeling in your brain that goes, no, you shouldn't do this.

And you shouldn't work with this person and you shouldn't trust this person.

You should always listen to that.

And it will be wrong some amount of the time, but it will be right a lot of the time.

And if you try to reason your way out of it, you'll often come up with reasons to, work with this person anyway, like, oh, it's going to be a lot of money.

Like, oh, then connect me to a lot of people.

And it might be great at first, but one, two, three months later, you'll realize that you were right.

You should have trusted that instinct.

Like that instinct is very, very powerful and worth listening to.

But on the flip side, there might be a situation where some opportunity pops up.

You're just like to the moon about it.

This is so exciting.

Oh my God, such an incredible opportunity, whatever.

And you're just euphoric over it.

And that's a good opportunity to kind of pause and reflect and to say, you know, why am I so euphoric about this?

What, what do I think this is going to get me?

What, what future am I imagining that might be a bit of an illusion?

Because you can also get too excited about things and you might not always want to trust that instinct because it can get you into like short -term thinking.

It can make you ignore certain risks and downsides.

A team version of this I've heard that I really like is that if everybody on an executive team agrees with the decision, you shouldn't do it because it means that you haven't fully explored the risks or the possible downsides.

You need to like cancel the meeting.

Everybody go off for a day or two, think about what you're missing there and then come back and try to present what the like devil's advocate is for it.

Because if you can't present a compelling argument why you shouldn't do something, then you might be getting caught in some, some story that has these hidden risks that you haven't fully thought through.

So you gotta be a little bit more careful about that side.

Like that. You've got a post titled, when the money's just too damn good.

Why did you write that post?

And what is it? What do we talk about?

So I wrote that as I was winding down my focus on crypto and getting back into writing.

And there's, you know, there's this wonderful book called turning pro by Steven Pressfield.

Most people are probably more familiar with the war of art and turning pro is the sequel.

And in turning pro Pressfield talks about, okay, you understand that you have this resistance inside of you to do your creative work.

Now you want to go pro in your creative work.

How do you turn pro?

And one of the big challenges, the big obstacles that he talks about in that book is shadow careers, careers that you take on because you're a little bit afraid to do the big thing, but the shadow career gives you some other wonderful benefit that blinds you to the true cost, which is that you're not actually going

after your calling.

And for me, what I really realized from being in crypto was that it was making me unhappy.

It was hurting my relationships.

It was hurting my health.

It was not fulfilling work, but I was making a lot of money.

And if I had kept at it, I could have made a lot more money.

I could have, you know, retired my kids probably.

You know, if I had really just kept on that path, the potential riches could have been insane.

And I got to this decision point where it was, okay, I either go all in on this, become a full crypto influencer, try to join a VC firm, really, really double down so that when crypto comes back in 24, 25, whatever, I'm in this incredible position to make the most of it.

Or I say, this is actually where I have to quit because the desire for money is just completely blinding me to what I started doing all this to do, which was to write.

And that story actually started way earlier.

It started in 2017, where I was living in, you know, this little studio in Manhattan with Cosette, and I was going to Starbucks every day, and I was really trying to make writing work.

And I wrote some great blog posts in that period, but I literally did not have the money to just focus on that.

We were, you know, paying Manhattan rent, we had other food costs and all that stuff.

I wasn't making much.

And so I said, okay, I have to put this aside because I have to go make money doing something else.

And that's when the SEO agency started, but somewhere along the way, I forgot that I started doing all this other work just to be able to afford to get back to writing.

And so I hit this peak in crypto, and I didn't have the outcome that I thought I was going to have.

Most of the money that I thought I made went away, but I did make enough where I could just focus on writing for four, five, six years and spend some of that down to pay for my lifestyle in the meantime.

And I just kind of had this wake up moment where I realized if I don't do this now, if I don't get off the money train now, it's just going to totally take over.

And I don't know when I'm going to come back to this.

And so it's there. It sucks to try something and have it fail, but sometimes it sucks more to try the wrong thing and have it succeed because success at the wrong thing is its own curse because you're getting this social validation.

Oh my God, you're so good at this.

Oh, you're so smart.

You're succeeding. You're winning at this game.

You're making all this money.

And you start thinking like, oh, this is what I should be doing.

And money is like the most corruptible tool for getting you stuck on the shadow career.

And so sometimes, yeah, you have to say, you know what?

The money is distracting me from the thing I actually want to do.

And I got to get back to that.

And you've got to be really aware of how that can happen when you succeed at the wrong thing.

Yeah, for me, I think one thing I really took away from reading that was that I realized that there are so many instances in my life where the primary reason why I did a thing was for the money.

And I'm now very suspicious when that's the case.

Like if the primary reason is for the money, I think twice.

And then three times, and then four times, I'm like, wait a minute.

And I run the thought experiment of like, let's say I had a hundred million in the bank.

Would I still choose to do the thing?

And if the answer is no, then I'm like, okay, do I really, really need the money?

I kind of don't. So it's like, it's usually not a good idea to say yes to the thing.

And I'm slowly getting better at like calibrating to that.

Absolutely. It's a hard question to ask too, but I had the same realization.

I was like, okay, I did the agency because I needed money and I legitimately needed it.

Like I needed to pay my bills.

But then when I started doing the crypto stuff, we could have pulled our spending way back and I could have gone all in on writing.

It was kind of an in -between point.

But now it's at this point where I was literally just doing things for the money.

And the crypto money had just ruined my relationship with money.

It had corrupted my brain so thoroughly that I'd sort of become this person I didn't recognize anymore.

And it really, really scared me and it was really, really hard.

And so I had to get very serious about like, not only am I going to quit this and focus on writing, but I am going to force myself to not do anything else besides the writing that could make money in the meantime, unless I sell all of my crypto, unless I am truly out of that piggy bank and I actually

have to go get a normal job, whatever, to support my family, I will not do anything else besides focus on the writing for making money.

And that's a really scary thing because making money from writing is a long, slow process.

If you pull it off and most people don't, it's kind of a crazy career to go after, but I felt like I had an opportunity.

I felt like I could get good enough at it.

And I just have to, like you said, I have to keep reminding myself, these shiny objects pop up all along the way.

When the AI tool started coming out, I was like, oh my God, I could make a write with AI course and I could probably make six figures, maybe seven figures selling this like awesome course on writing with chat, TBT and Claude.

And God, it was hard to say no to, but I had to.

Like I knew that I had to do it if I wanted to really focus on this, because if I went down that path for another two years and then woke up in two years, having not made any progress on the writing, I would really, really be kicking myself.

What do you mean the experiences in crypto corrupted your brain when it came to money?

So this is all in the book, but at the beginning, at the beginning, I'm like just trying to replace my agency salary.

I'm just trying to make like 150, 200K or something enough to focus on the writing for a year to give me that piggy bank.

At the peak of the story, I have over $10 million in like paper crypto gains.

And at no point when my, that money wasn't like in my bank account, I couldn't like pull it.

There's a lot of problems with seeing that number.

When it was at that number, I wasn't thinking awesome, I'm done, I can like take this, I can take out what I can, I can quit, I can get back to the things I wanna do.

I'm thinking this is going to a hundred million.

I'm thinking like I'm done.

This is just gonna keep going up.

And I was literally rolling over in bed every morning, hitting a button and getting like 10, 20, $30 ,000 like liquid that I could have pulled out to my bank account, but I wasn't.

I was reinvesting it in crypto.

I was putting it back into the market.

I was making more in a week than I had hoped to make for a whole year and I wasn't taking it out.

I just kept doubling down with most of it.

And I had a couple of really scary things happened where I literally almost lost all of it.

And it was this crazy wake up of like, oh, like what happened to me?

Like, who is this person?

Like why am I leaving all this on the table?

I literally have like a newborn and I'm not pulling the money out for her and for our family, like what is going on?

And that was just such an insane wake up to realize that I've gotten into that space and that I needed to fix something.

And I mean, that's literally why I like don't let myself look at almost anything crypto related now because I know that I'm an addict.

I know that I'm a gambler.

Like I will get sucked back into it if I let myself.

And part of my self -preservation is I have to keep that distance from it to not let those demons back into my head anymore.

But the big blessing I think is that having had that experience relatively young, if I come into some really significant amount of money in the future again, which I hope I do, I'm gonna have a lot more respect for it.

I'm not gonna be deluded into thinking that this infinite money printer is gonna keep going on forever.

I'm not gonna keep leaving all of it on the table.

And that's actually kind of a common story too.

If you listen to like entrepreneurs and stuff who have an early win and then they might end up losing all of it because they double down to go to the next thing.

They use their secondary sale to like pay off the taxes on their stock options and then their company ends up going to zero and they don't end up getting anything out of it.

It's not an uncommon story and everybody thinks it won't happen to them.

They think that oh, if I see this huge number in my crypto wallet, I'll pull it out.

I'm smarter than that.

You're not, like it'll get you too, most likely.

And so it was at least useful in that sense to give me that story to keep in my mind of myself that like this could happen to you again.

So you have to be really, really careful about it.

Nice. What are your thoughts on living in a lower cost of living place?

And I ask cause like we're thinking of maybe, we're thinking of leaving the UK and maybe going to Hong Kong or maybe going to Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur.

And one of those has like a five X lower cost of living than the other one.

And I'm trying to think like how much of a difference will cost of living make to my life realistically?

And do you have any thoughts on that?

I think it's an incredible tool when you need to use it to get started.

So when I started working for myself doing this entrepreneur lifestyle business blogger journey, I did the far work week thing.

I literally went to Buenos Aires and I lived there for five months.

I rented a small bedroom and SF for a few months.

I got my cost of living as low as I possibly could.

And I kind of needed to do it because that was the only way I could focus on some of the work that I wanted to focus on at that point.

And I wasn't making very much money.

But if you can afford to live in a major city, I do think that moving to a low cost of living area is kind of a bad choice just because you get so much by living in a big city, you get access to more interesting people.

You can travel to see other people a little bit easier.

You get a lot of like safety and security.

You probably have better facilities and other accommodations.

And it's kind of like optimizing for taxes, right?

It's like, sure you could move to Puerto Rico in the US and like not pay income tax, but paying taxes to live in New York City or Chicago or Austin, you need still to pay federal income tax is like worth it to be around all of those people.

And I really feel like the energy that you're around is really important.

And being around people who are very driven to do big, great things with their life is very infectious and very powerful.

And it's harder to find those people in areas where people are going to try to minimize their cost of living as much as possible.

I also think it makes a big difference if you have kids.

If you want to do the low cost of living thing, yeah, do it when you don't have kids because once you have to think about preschools and elementary schools and stuff, it's going to be harder to find one that you really like in Bali or somewhere, or they're not going to get exposure to a big diversity

of people. And the diversity of people you get access to, I think is a big deal too, because whatever, this is going to offend some people, but I'll say it.

My idea of hell is living in one of those regions of Bali only surrounded by other people trying to do drop shipping or influencer businesses, because then you just have no variety in the people that you're talking to, right?

And I think that would be really hard as well.

So wonderful tool when you need it to get yourself off the ground.

But once you don't, I kind of see it as like a way to bootstrap your entrepreneurial career.

It's like, once you don't need it, it's really nice to be around very motivated people in a big Metro area.

One of the things a lot of people seem to do in the US is there might be any New York or an SF or an Austin or something.

And then at the point where they have kids, they're like, hey, I'm going to move to, I don't know, North Carolina or something where there's more like family values.

And it's like, the nice house of the suburbs with the white picket fence and the whole shebang.

And there's more of a, I don't know if this is just a romanticized view of certain areas of the US, but more of a, hey, we're all going to get together and have a barbecue on the weekend kind of vibe.

Yeah, yeah. We've thought about it and it is very appealing.

There's a lot that you get with that.

I mean, if you're willing to go 30 minutes outside of Austin, your money goes three times further in terms of what house you can get, right?

Like you can have a bigger yard.

You can have the white picket fence.

You can have space for everybody.

And that's very appealing.

And a lot of people do it too, to be in your family because they want help from their family for raising kids or they just want the space.

And especially with remote work, like you can live in those areas and probably still do a lot of the same job.

And Cosette and I have talked about it a lot and it is very appealing.

And where we eventually settled is that, where we are in Austin, we're not downtown, but we're 10 minutes away from it.

We have a yard, it's a small yard, but it's a yard.

We have space for everybody in the house.

And we're kind of like in between, we're definitely not in the suburbs.

We're not downtown.

And we get a bit of the best of both worlds where we are right now.

And we're very, very fortunate that we can afford to do that.

That's the big caveat, is that we can afford to live in our house with up to four kids and not really have to change anything.

And I mean, that's an incredibly privileged position to be in.

The other conversation that we've had though, is that if something changed, so let's say that Crypto Confidential completely fails, I can't get another book deal and it's going to be three, four, five years before the writing career can start to pay for like, and Cosette works too, she's a realtor,

but we kind of rely on both of our incomes.

If, and if for some reason, Crypto goes to zero and I don't have that piggyback.

If all of these really bad things happen where we could no longer really afford to live in the part of town that we're in and have as many kids as we want to have, we would much rather move out of an area we like to somewhere less expensive and have the family we want than stay in the busier area and have a smaller

family. And I think that's an important, that's like an important conversation to have, right?

Like what's more important to you?

Is it being near the action or is it having the family and being willing to adjust your life around that?

And, you know, we, it's conversation that you have to have and that's kind of where we settled and we would love to be able to have like, you know, there's a couple of other neighborhoods in Austin that are as close to downtown, but where you can get the like big white picket fence house, but it's,

you know, $3 to $5 million.

It's crazy expensive.

And like, I would love to have one of those houses and definitely can't afford it right now.

But you know, if that happened, that would be great too, but we're not like riding on that happening.

We'd much rather be like cozier and more compact and be where we are around so many of our friends than have to like give some of that up prematurely.

Yeah, nice. One thing, another one of your blog posts that I really liked many years ago was, I think you were talking about how you were living the four hour work week lifestyle and there was this void.

There's the chapter in four hour work week are literally called filling the void.

Yeah, what's your, what's your take on this?

Cause I guess a lot of people who watch my stuff aspire to the whole financial freedom thing where they're like, ah, if only I had the business that I could that made passive income, I'd be able to do whatever I want, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

And it's like, well, when you ask like, well, what do you want?

It's like, I don't know, just being able to not do things that I don't want to have to do.

It's like, okay, but then what do you want to do?

It's like, it becomes quite confronting in a way.

Oh, what was your experience with that?

Well, and it's such a funny thing because I feel like everybody misses that chapter the first time they read the book, they just focus on the, how do I make a bunch of passive income?

And then if they get it, basically everybody realizes that they're just not very happy in that life.

It's fun for like three, six, 12 months.

You do the traveling, you do the, you know, taking whatever random classes you want, playing with your hobbies, and then you feel kind of empty inside and you realize that meaningful work is a core part of human fulfillment.

And what I realized, you know, first back then was that just doing these things to get some passive income so that I could quit doing them was really a losing proposition because doing a bunch of work that you don't really want to do so that you don't have to do work that you don't want to do is kind

of this like silly trade -off if you have the option to make it.

And that was the first time when I was like, okay, I should try to actually work on something long -term.

Something that I could actually keep working on year after year after year after year after year and enjoy working on it because that's where you're actually going to get this long -term happiness.

And the thing that nobody in the passive income world wants to tell you is that there's really no such thing as passive income because the minute you let it go passive, it starts dying.

It starts just slowly going down and it will trickle away.

Other people will come in and eat your lunch.

Your work will get stale, your products will get stale.

It'll get beaten out on Amazon or for your courses or for your SEO or whatever.

And in two years, you're going to be back where you started before you built the thing.

So you better use those two years to get somewhere interesting because if you think that you can just gallivant around living this funded lifestyle forever, you're actually going to be worse off than where you started at the end of it because not only will you be back to square one without the passive

income, you'll have now lost two, three, four years of your life.

So where I think the passive income for our work week lifestyle business stuff is very useful is a way to bootstrap working on something bigger.

So if you know that you want to be a writer or a painter or a YouTuber or any of these careers with a long startup time to pay your bills, doing the lifestyle business first to fund you for two years while you get that going is actually pretty smart.

I mean, same thing with the startup, right?

If you can do the lifestyle business to give you some runway to actually work on a startup so that you don't have to take money right away and don't have to dilute yourself, that's an incredibly good use case.

But trying to fill the void with experiences and novelty does get old really, really quickly.

And you have to be ready for that.

And I don't tell people not to do it.

I don't tell them not to chase it because nobody believes you when you say that, right?

They're like, yeah, you got tired of it, but I won't.

I love traveling. I love going to new restaurants.

I love doing these things.

And it's like, yeah, you love them because they're a break from the work that you don't enjoy doing and because they're occasional things.

When that's your whole life, you're gonna get bored really quickly, but you have to go experience it to realize that that's the case.

But then once you have that little inkling, don't feel guilty about it, accept it, say, cool, I checked this box and now I have this runway to go do this big thing that I was scared of doing before, but I now have the means to do and go do that thing.

Nice, yeah, that's great.

Finite and infinite games.

You talk about this book, I think in one of your YouTube videos from back in the day.

I talk about it everywhere.

This is one of my favorite books.

You know, whatever, yeah, I've never read the book, but what should I understand or what should listeners understand about the idea of finite versus infinite games?

So it's a wonderful book.

It's very short, it's weird and philosophical, but also very tactical in its own way.

And the core thesis of the book is that everything that you do in life is a kind of game, right?

So this conversation that we're having for your podcast, for your YouTube, is a game of sorts.

And there are two ways to think of games.

A finite game has a closed boundary.

It has a winner and loser.

It has clear rules.

And there's a way to succeed or fail.

There's an end to it, all of these things, right?

A football game is itself a finite game because there'll be a winner or a loser at the end of it.

If I came into this conversation with a finite game mentality of I need to win this conversation, I'd be very focused on slipping crypto confidential into everything that I talk about.

Yeah, exactly, like buy the book, right?

If you buy by the end of this podcast, you're gonna get 10, whatever, right?

You'd be milking it for all that it's worth.

But if you take a more infinite game approach to something like this, your only goal is to basically have fun.

The reason you play an infinite game is to keep the game going.

It's to continue to extend the boundaries and the realm of play.

And if you're thinking about it that way, where it's not transactional, it's not a winner or loser, you behave very differently because the only thing that I'm focused on right now is having a fun conversation with you.

And if the book comes up, great.

If it doesn't, I also don't care because we're friends, we've known each other on the internet for years, we're just having a good time and hopefully it's valuable to people too, which means that we're going to have a lot more conversations over the course of our life.

This game that we are playing together of being internet creators, book writers, whatever, can continue to expand infinitely as we continue to support each other over the course of our hopefully very, very long careers.

And you can think of so many things in your life this way.

Even the sports analogy, if you're constantly focused on winning this tennis match, then your emotion, your identity and everything is tied to the outcome of each match.

But if the game that you're playing is getting better at tennis, then whether you win or lose the individual game, you're still winning at the infinite game of getting better and better.

Or if your infinite game is just that I love to hit the ball, right?

There's this wonderful Djokovic interview where he's like, my advantage is that I just love hitting the ball.

And that's why he's like one of the best tennis players in the world.

And if you can think about it that way, then you're less attached to short -term outcomes and you end up like winning more of these little finite games along the way because you're not attached to their individual outcomes.

And so he ties this into so many things, he ties it into relationships, right?

Like the best way to find a partner or to have a successful date is to not be trying to make it a successful date, right?

Is to like just be yourself and be interested in them and like have a conversation and not be checking the watch and wondering if you're gonna get to go home with them and like trying to get something out of it, right?

If you're working on YouTube videos, right?

Like playing the infinite game of trying to make each video a little bit better is going to pay off a lot more in the long run than being obsessed over every single video hitting like a very specific metric.

Me as a writer, like I hope that this book does good.

I wanted to do good, but I'm in this for the rest of my life at this point.

And so I know that by focusing so much more of my energy on making the best book possible, instead of on milking as many sales from it as possible, that's gonna set me up for many, many great books in the future and over a long term that's gonna compound it to more and more interesting things.

So that book is just so good at showing you all of the parts of your life where you could be thinking on this more infinite horizon instead of constantly being attached to winning whatever little thing you're in in that moment.

Oh, that's nice. All right.

That's a good sales pitch.

I'm gonna read the book.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of my own stuff.

And I had a great chat with someone at a wedding a couple of weeks ago, and she was a tenured professor at like UCL teaching computer science or something.

And you know, tenured professors don't make very much money.

Maybe I don't know 40, 50K or something like that, but they get to do whatever they want.

And she's like, yeah, I can basically do whatever I want.

The university pays me basically forever for the rest of my life to just do whatever I want, do interesting things and teach a class every now and then.

Yeah. It kind of got me thinking that, oh that's a very infinite gamey type career where the goal is to just sort of keep on doing the thing.

Yeah, there's all the sort of incentives to publish and stuff in academia, but once you're a tenured professor, it's like you're pretty set.

And it kind of got me thinking that like me making YouTube videos, you doing your writing, it's like in this creator world, we are all tenured professors just not by an institution, but by the thousand true fans that we have who will pay for our stuff or whatever the thing might be.

And if I think of it in that way, it's like if a university were to offer me a full -time tenured professorship where I can do whatever I want and teach a class every now and then and pay me 50K, I'd be like, whoa, that's incredible.

But for some reason I feel like I need to make way more than 50K in this tenured professor of being a YouTuber or being a podcaster or whatever.

Like, what's up with that?

It's really true. It kind of goes back to the shadow career versus the true calling from the turning pro discussion.

It's like, your true calling is going to be an infinite game for you because you're not attached to these other things that you need to satisfy you when you're stuck in a shadow career or a shadow calling.

And so that is actually a really great way to figure it out is like, could I do this every day for 30 years and be happy, even if I don't have a big financial outcome from it, right?

Like, could it be something where it's just worth doing for the sake of it and not purely for some financial outcome?

Like these questions are really, really helpful for realizing what that kind of work might be for you.

Yeah, it was a great quote I came across from Alan Watts from one of his like audio clips, which is, you know, people often go up to him and ask him, or back when he was alive, like, you know, what should I do with my career?

And his answer is always like, well, what's the thing you would do if money were no object?

Why don't you go and do that?

And people are always like, well, I can't possibly do that because I need to make money.

But I kind of think increasingly, yeah, obviously, you know, there is some level of intelligence and like strategy that sort of goes into this.

But broadly, if you find the thing that you would do if you weren't worried about making money, you could probably, in this era, find a way to make enough money and be able to continue to do the thing, yeah.

And I think that the like four hour work week, passive income, lifestyle, business, and even some of the creator economy stuff has like sold this lie that you can make a ton of money really, really quickly.

And like, then you can go maybe do the thing later, or that like if you pursue one of these careers, you can make that money really, really fast, right?

And a few people definitely do, right?

Like we know a bunch of people who have had that kind of success, and they have hit those numbers, but the vast majority of people don't.

The only people who do are the ones who, in many cases, are in it for the like infinite game aspect of it, they didn't start doing it because they wanted it to make a lot of money really quickly.

And the reality is that in the vast majority of work and in careers, it takes a long time to get good enough to make good money in it.

And if you're always in this mindset of, I should be making like six figures from this thing in a year or two, you're never going to put in the work and the time that you need to actually get good enough to actually make the amount of money that you want to make.

You have to let that myth go so that you can spend the time necessary to actually get good at the thing.

And then the money's going to follow.

In almost any domain, you're going to find a way to make the money from it.

You just have to be willing to put in the time and get good instead of always looking for a quick hack to the top.

Talk to me about your brief stint with being a YouTuber, a TikToker, an Instagrammer, like influencer type person.

And like, what was the arc of that?

Yeah, this is kind of a funny one.

So I started playing with YouTube back in 2020.

I thought maybe I wanted to do it then, ultimately decided not to.

And then I started working on the book in 2022.

And by the end of 22, I had a first draft, but I basically thought it was shit.

I didn't think it was good at all.

And I was really feeling rough about it, especially because one, I'd been working in crypto where there's just constant stimulation.

You're making and losing money.

You're placing bets, you're getting winnings.

You're responding to messages all the time.

Plus, I was like a blogger and I was very active on Twitter.

And so anytime I wrote something, I got immediate feedback on it, right?

Like my whole dopamine system was fried from all of that period where I expected to get quick wins for anything I worked on.

And then I switched to working on this book and there are no quick wins, right?

Like you're writing it alone for months and months and months and like editing it and tweaking it.

You're not getting to publish anything along the way.

The only bit of satisfaction I had was my little spreadsheet where I tracked every writing session.

And I could look at that and I could say, okay, I did something today, even though nobody else in the world knows that I did anything this week.

That was really hard.

It was a really, really hard adjustment.

And so, and I didn't cope with it very well.

So when I finished the first draft of the book, what I told myself was book talk is becoming a big thing.

I should go build a book talk so that when the book comes out, I'll have that audience to promote the book to.

I think what was really going on was that I didn't feel good about myself and I needed to make a number go up to like tell myself that I was smart and capable.

And I wanted to just go like hack on something.

And so while the first draft was sitting, I started doing all these book talk videos and I mean, it just like went bananas.

I got to like 50K on TikTok in six weeks and then a hundred K on Instagram in two or three months.

And it just kept going and these videos kept going viral.

And I was getting like millions of views.

It was like, oh my God, this is so cool.

And then I said, okay, like, I need to do something more with this because you can't make that much money like just talking about books on Instagram and TikTok.

So like now I can get into YouTube and I'm gonna do long YouTube videos about the books and I'm gonna do the podcast.

I'm gonna do all these things.

I'm gonna be like the big book influencer and like this is gonna be great.

And it continued through that year while I kept working on the book.

And then it got to Thanksgiving.

And at this point I had finished Cryptocompidential.

I had turned it in.

I was working on my sci -fi novel.

And over Thanksgiving I had a very constrained schedule because my family was in town, preschool was off.

I only had a couple hours of day, hours a day to work.

And I spent all that time making YouTube videos.

And at the end of the week, I realized like, wait a second.

That's not my most important work.

The most important work is writing.

Like why am I not writing to do this other thing?

And it was just the shadow career all over again.

It was like the crypto stuff all over again.

I was like, wait, I got sucked into a different thing.

Trying to make like a short -term number go up.

Trying to get like short -term fame, whatever.

Cause I wasn't feeling good about the long -term thing.

But actually long -term thing is pretty good now.

Like the book is great.

I'm very proud of it.

I don't, I shouldn't be putting all of my energy here because it's actually getting in the way of me having success in the thing that I care about.

And so I basically just quit.

I was like, it was like, I was like, I literally just can't let myself do this because I will get sucked in.

It will distract me from the writing.

The getting to publish every day is like making me feel good but I should be feeling good about writing every day.

And so I basically abandoned it.

And what I did instead, which I think was actually kind of smart and I'm glad I did was when the first draft of the sci -fi novel was sitting, I built an app where I could track my writing sessions and like have other people follow me and I could follow them and we could comment on each other's writing

so that we could all like feel good about working on long -term writing instead of needing to like publish something for the algorithm every day.

And that's actually been super helpful.

I was surprised by what a difference that made with like feeling good about working kind of in the dark every day.

It's like, if I could at least put a little post up on prolific saying like, hey, I wrote today then that was reward enough.

And I didn't feel as pulled to like pick up some other projects to get some short -term wins.

Nice. Is that now public?

Like we'll use the app.

It's on the app store now.

So, yeah. And, you know, my rule with that is it's like only when I have free time side project, I don't want it to turn into a big business, big company or anything.

But, you know, I really enjoy hacking on it when I need a break from writing.

It's a tool that I use every day.

And so even if nobody else ever uses this thing it was kind of a win to make it.

And if other people do, great, like that's awesome.

I'd love to have more people in there where I can like cheer them on for working on their writing projects.

Nice mate. I've literally started a new writing project as of like two days ago.

I'm going to start using prolific like literally right now.

Oh, amazing. Thank you.

Is this the new book?

This is potentially the new book.

Yeah, I'm sort of tinkering away with some ideas.

Feeling it out. Thinking maybe self -publish or hybrid rather than traditional.

Cause I don't want the pressure again anytime soon.

I like the idea of every now and then doing like a big book with a publisher maybe, but then like in between doing like shorter books, a bit more vibey.

Just doing it cause I want to do it.

Cause I think it might hopefully be helpful rather than trying to play the prestige game which is what I was doing with the first book if I'm being honest.

I think that's a great way to do it, you know?

And the doing the vibey thing that feels more true to you might end up doing better too.

Like it wouldn't shock me.

There's a good line.

I was talking to a mutual friend, David Prell about this last night and he heard of this story where Jerry Seinfeld was at a party and ran into David Letterman.

And he goes to David Letterman and he's like, Hey bro, you know, I've got this new film.

Like I don't know what to do.

Do you have any advice?

And David Letterman says the biggest advice would be fail at doing something you really want to do or what's that effect?

Fail at something you really want to do.

I like that. Or aim to fail at making the movie you really want to make which is kind of nice cause it's like aim to fail.

It's like, Oh, okay.

Well I'm aiming to fail anyway.

So everything above that is like success and making the movie I really want to make.

It's like for me it's like aim to be not commercially successful by writing a book that you really want to write.

And I think ironically, as you say, that's probably going to make it reasonably commercially successful.

Yeah. Almost certain way.

Almost certainly. Nice.

So now you're living the life of a dad to two kids and a full -time writer.

How, what does your like work day routine look like amongst the kids stuff?

How do you like balance the stuff?

Yeah, it's actually nice because it provides so much structure to the day.

So all what I like to do is I'm in promotion mode for the book coming out.

So this period is a little different but when I'm in writing mode, I'll try to get up at like six ish and I'll look at what I wrote the day before.

I'll look at my outline.

I might read a book on writing or read a fiction book that I'm trying to emulate the style of.

And, but I won't do any writing.

And then I'll just start, you know, I'll prep lunch for school and I'll make some breakfast for myself, have some coffee, get the kids up, get their older daughter off to preschool.

And then at nine, we have a nanny who comes and she watches our younger daughter during the day.

So from about nine 30 to four 30, I'm on in work mode and I'll usually go to a cafe at nine 30 and do my writing or actually I'm becoming, I've been doing in the office more cause I've got a treadmill desk now which I really like writing on.

And so I'll come here and I'll write from like nine 30 to 12 but really my rule is that I have to get 2 ,500 new words down when I'm in drafting mode.

So if I get that done by 11, awesome.

Like I'm free. If it takes until one, then it takes until one but I don't let myself eat or do anything else, open any other windows on my computer, have any meetings, literally anything until those words are done.

And if I'm in editing phase, I just double it.

So get through a 5 ,000 word chunk of the book for editing.

And that's like my, those are my daily reps.

It's like, I've got to get that done before I can do anything else.

But when I'm in, when I'm in actual just like creation mode, I then try to leave the afternoon as open as possible.

I take as few meetings as humanly possible on the phone.

I'm always happy to like meet up with somebody for lunch but I might go to the gym, go for a walk, play with the creative project, do something unrelated to that but always with a little less stimulation than I want.

So if I'm going for a walk or going to the gym I won't listen to music.

I won't listen to a podcast or have anything like that because that's when like a lot of the real work happens.

It's when the ideas pop up.

And so I'll just have my notebook or I'll take voice notes on my phone and catch anything that comes up along the way.

And then pick our older daughter up from preschool at 435, have dinner, hang out with them until they go to bed.

And then from like seven until 9 .30, I come sit and I just hang out and maybe watch an episode of something, read.

And it's a really nice routine.

That sounds highly idyllic.

Yeah, it's lovely. It's making me excited to have kids.

It's great. Yeah, and like, I'm really never working in the morning.

I'm never working late at night.

Like again, this period is weird because I'm going on podcasts and reaching out to people and all of that.

But when I'm in that routine, it's great.

I mean, the only downside of it is that it is so predictable that the days kind of blend together a little bit but that's why it's nice to have little social things and stuff during the work day, occasionally to break it up.

And you also get the great ideas for the work just chatting with friends about random things too.

Yeah, all right. So you've written this book, Crypto Confidential.

What will, if someone's gotten to the end of this video slash podcast, what will they get from reading the book?

They'll have a lot of fun.

It reads like a thriller.

And that was very intentional.

It's not a crypto 101, what is Bitcoin?

What is Ethbook? It is a fun, fast paced, first person journey of working in the middle of the insanity during the last crypto cycle, both on the degenerate gambling side and on the actually like programming and building things side because I was in both worlds.

And that was really intentional.

I spent a lot more time studying fiction than studying nonfiction because this is kind of a dry topic, crypto, and I don't think most people want to read a Crypto 101 book, but I wanted to write something that could teach people a little bit about crypto, but where they wouldn't feel like they were doing

any work to read it.

I wanted it to be like a beach read, like a James Patterson or a Stephen King or whatever where people can just fly through it.

And that was really, really what I optimized it around.

So it's like, sure, you could try to run the same playbook next cycle and try to make a bunch of money in crypto.

There's that knowledge in there too.

Or you might realize that you really don't wanna be in that world and you're just gonna like hold Bitcoin and ETH and like not look at it.

Like you get an education along the way, but the main thing you get is just like a really fun story.

Like you're just gonna have a good time reading it.

And so that's really the pitch more than anything else.

Love that. I think that's a great place to end this.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thanks for having me on.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive.

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[The Art of Living: Balancing Ambition, Family, and Finding Purpose]-[Chasing Success vs True Fulfilment - Nat Eliason]

📋 Summary

Navigating Life’s Trade-offs: Insights from Matt Eliza

Known Costs and Unknowable Benefits

The Fallacy of the "Right Time"

Standing Social Events: The Antidote to Loneliness

The Trap of the "Shadow Career"

Finite vs. Infinite Games

Conclusion: Choosing Purpose Over Quick Wins

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript