The Exchanges

Q Speaking of being better, what about, what about when you're working with somebody who's really resistant to change? Do you have a process where you can just shake somebody out of Ruining their life?

A Um, yeah, I mean, the thing I like to, to think about is like, what the future could be if somebody hasn't changed, you know, and so it's like, if we go back to the whole idea of like, the only time somebody will make a change is when the pain of staying the same is more painful than the pain of change. Like, I had a guy one time that came up to me after a speech that I gave like five years ago, and he was pretty overweight, and he's like, Rob, I want to lose weight, I don't know how to lose weight, what should I do? And I was like, okay, well, tell me about it. What have you tried? I was like, what's your, what's your fear that if you don't lose weight? He's like, well, I'm just afraid that like, you know, I won't be healthy later on in life. I'm like, okay, that's not really good. Like, what, what are you actually afraid of? And after talking to this guy for a few minutes, he's like, I was like, okay, what's your biggest fear? If you don't lose the weight that you want to lose, what's your biggest fear is going to happen? He was my biggest fear. His daughter was like 10 at the time. He was my biggest fear is that I won't be around to walk my daughter down the aisle. And I was like, That's it. I was like, okay, so walk through this with me real quick. Let's say, you know, say his name's John. John, let's say that you decide not to change. You decide not to lose weight. You dec…

AI assessment note: “the only time somebody will make a change is when the pain of staying the same”

Q Yeah. And do you think that should one expect side effects from having high blood pressure, only taking pills? It seems like maybe that might be a reason why you're having other illnesses and disease pop up, but actually we don't talk about that. It's like, well, if I manage the symptom, then like whatever else happens is totally unrelated to said issue.

A No, it's physiologic whack-a-mole, right? You can't, like if you have an imbalance in the human body, and this sounds Whoa, but it's really not. Like if you have an imbalance in the human body, you simply cannot whack this mole without three more popping up. You, it's very difficult to give someone a medication for any condition and not have something else happen because of it. You give someone a proton pump inhibitor because they have gastroesophageal reflux, right? Well, then you have an increased rate of pneumonia because of side effects. Then you have malabsorption of multiple nutrients, including B-twelve and other things that are dependent on the acidity of your stomach. So you have all of these downstream side effects because the problem really wasn't that they had a deficiency of a proton pump inhibitor. This isn't a pharmaceutical medication deficiency. This is an imbalance. It's a signal to us as physicians or as patients, quote unquote, that there's an imbalance in your body. In the case of, um, you know, gastroesophageal reflux, it usually has to do with dysbiosis in the gut at some level, whether it's, you know, the small intestine or some part of this. That's leading to a reflux and dysfunction of the esophageal sphincter. If you can get at the root of that and correct that with dietary change, lifestyle change, you probably don't need a proton pump inhibitor. And…

AI assessment note: “it's very difficult to give someone a medication for any condition and not have something else happen”

Q So you think that you got those because of over-medication when you were younger?

A No, I just know that I had those for whatever reason. A genetic predisposition in the setting, in the context of eating standard American diet manifests those things, and I was over-medicated as a kid. So I grew up with a lot of medications. That didn't affect me positively either. Giving your kid lots of antibiotics can affect their gut flora, right? Giving your kid lots of stimulants To treat their asthma because we used to give children theophylline called theater. I got this in my applesauce when I was a kid. It makes kids anxious and hyperactive. So that doesn't help with elementary school performance or learning. So these things negatively affected my life, and it was this sort of domino effect. So at some point in my life, generally when I was out of college, I began to think about my food and started thinking about what I was doing with my food that was giving me this autoimmune condition, this series of autoimmune conditions. Really, it's a triad. It's called an atopic Condition, right? It's, it's basically eczema, asthma, and allergies, and it got to the point that it was bothersome to me, and I had numerous flares of my eczema that were very severe, requiring more systemic steroids, which are not great for anything, and at one, at times in medical school, the eczema would get infected, and I would impetigo, so like, from being on the mats for jiu-jitsu, so really imp…

AI assessment note: “No, I just know that I had those for whatever reason. A genetic predisposition”

Q Why did we stop doing raw milk versus pasteurized?

A Good question. So up until the early 1900, all milk was raw. In the early 1900 people were moving off of farms into cities, and people wanted milk. A lot of people were sickened by raw milk because they were milking cows in sub-sanitary conditions, mixing feces or urine with the milk, doesn't sound very appetizing, and they were feeding cows swill, which is the spent grains of alcohol fermentation, that's where the term swill comes from. And so they were feeding cows garbage foods, they were milking them in sub-sanitary conditions, and people get sick, and then the milk was Heated and pasteurized, and that helps with the public health issue, and we never sort of got back to the idea that we can now, with more technology, make milk raw in clean conditions, and potentially expose this to people who can benefit from it.

AI assessment note: “then the milk was Heated and pasteurized, and that helps with the public health issue”

Q You've lived such a fascinating life. What question have I not asked you that you think I should? What story should I be asking for that I haven't asked you about?

A Well, I love the idea of Misogi, and you've talked about this a lot, right? It's this Japanese, this idea, this cultural idea that says you need to do something that's really difficult and challenging for you every year. Something that the probability of you failing is high. Maybe. 49%, you know, maybe 10, but, but it's possible that you're not going to be able to accomplish this goal. And I started doing this years ago and I didn't, without realizing it, cause I never heard of that. And then someone brought it up and I go, oh my gosh, fascinating. And Something that I did, ah, a couple years ago was, ah, the most difficult and challenging stunt of my career. I did an escape called Cold Shock. Ah, 100 pound weighted vest was chained and shackled to my body. I was then dropped into 39 degree ice water. And I had to hold my breath in the ice water and pick three locks, remove the locks, remove the vest under water, and then come back up to breathe again. And Originally, my idea was, I'm gonna fake it. I'm gonna get some fake ice, you know, we'll gimmick the thermometer, whatever, because I've done, I've done underwater escapes, we're gonna live stream it, like, we'll just fake it, right? And then as I looked into it, as I looked into it, it's like, well, fake ice, it's acrylic, it sinks, it doesn't flow. Oh, ok, so I went to a movie production house in, in Burbank that was like, …

AI assessment note: “Something that I did, ah, a couple years ago was... an escape called Cold Shock.”

Q To really be simple here, what's the right way to start the day breakfast-wise as a chick? What should we be eating in the morning?

A Make sure you're eating like, 20, 30 grams, 30 grams if you can, of protein in the morning to just start you off because your body is looking for that protein for all those amino acids, for all those nutrients. To keep it simple for myself, like, you know, I don't have time to cook first thing in the morning, so I'll make a protein smoothie that's also very digestible, absorbent, um, You know, meal that you can make quickly. I throw in, you know, pretty simple blueberries to get a little bit of fiber. Um, I throw in some protein in there, protein powder. Either almond milk or, um, oat milk, unsweetened usually. And what else? I throw in some nuts. Um, I throw in my creatine in there. And I think that's pretty much it.

AI assessment note: “Make sure you're eating like, 20, 30 grams, 30 grams if you can, of protein”

Q at it like SSRIs or something. We're like, we're like, you know, they should make us happier, but because they dole these different things, or then there's actually these third and fourth order side effects that, like, we want to keep our eye out. Does any part of that actually make sense, medicinally? Or, and what do we, is that just, like everything else, it's like good things in measure?

A It's a very good point. A couple of things. One is we are consistently engineering, re-engineering drugs to have better main effects and fewer side effects. To the point of SSRIs, there's a new medication that just got approved in early twenty-twenty-four, late twenty-twenty-three. Uh, Japerone is the, uh, not the trade name, Japerone is the generic name, the trade name is Exua. E-X-X-U-A. I don't know who the hell comes up with these drug names, but beautiful. Um, it has very similar, probably slightly elevated antidepressant functions compared to traditional antidepressants, but its effects at the very least on food drive and on sex drive are not statistically differentiable from placebo, which means that now there is an antidepressant pill That takes you out of major depressive disorder, uh, but at the same time doesn't really mess you up in seemingly very many ways. That's not a gen one drug. That's like gen nine or something. So as drugs evolve, uh, they're seeking to reduce the side effects, some of which you describe, and increase the main effect to the point where if you, let's say, have like a blood pressure drug that you take, someone can legitimately ask you, if you take a modern blood pressure medication, they're like, so what are the side effects? You're like, I, I, I don't think there are many or any, you look at the medical literature, like a few austere side eff…

AI assessment note: “we are consistently engineering, re-engineering drugs to have better main effects and fewer side effects.”

Q Yeah. If you go back to thinking about some of those instances, what do you think of, like, what was the biggest failure you've had in business?

A I had a company called Sheets. They were these, like, oral dissolvable, so like a Listerine strip that you put on your tongue, but they were infused with caffeine. So they were, it was like, basically like drinking a Red Bull, but you put it on your tongue, and it just goes right into your bloodstream, and like, you get this burst of energy. And at the time that we launched it, Five Hour Energy was selling 10,000,002 and a half bottles of five hour energy a week. So the category was huge. And I'm like, we're gonna, we're gonna, they're at, we're gonna put them out of business. And I was so sure we'd just sold Zico to Coke, Marquee had just gotten sold. Like I was, it was a good, a lot of momentum for me. And I'm like, so we started this company called Sheets. I partnered with LeBron. I brought in a lot of celebrities, a lot of star power. I took in money from everybody I knew, because I'm like, give me 10 grand, and I wanted to be a hero. You're gonna get an island back. Like, your 10 grand's gonna turn into an island, and we're all gonna be neighbors because of this strip. And I had, I would back-to-back big wins, and I believed it. I was so sure. And we did a focus group. It didn't go well. And like, I just, anyway, um, it didn't work because at the end of the day, it was super bitter and, um, your product has to be good. It doesn't matter who's endorsing it, who's in the com…

AI assessment note: “I had a company called Sheets.”

Q What do you take away from this? What are the learning lessons so that we can only be the ring founder after he became a billionaire, not during Shark Tank?

A Yes. Ok, so here's a big mistake that people make when they're pitching. Pitching on stage, pitching on a video call, pitching to an investor, is they prep their pitch and not their first impression. But people decide how smart you are, how trustworthy you are, and if they're gonna like your idea when they first see you. That is even before your opening line, and so what I learned in that was that his first impression was one of the worst first impressions I've ever seen. So what he did, is he was trying to be clever, is he came in and he knocked on the door of the Shark Tank. And they said, who's there? And he said, it's Jamie, here to pitch an idea. And he asked his own name. In that moment, I think he lost the deal. The reason for this is because an accidental question inflection, when you accidentally ask your name, or your number, or your statement, people question you. And so I think in his opening line, and this is a mistake people make all the time is they ask their name or they ask their number and you're begging people to negotiate with you and do tons of sales trainings, right? And here's what I hear all the time. We'd love to have your business. We'd love to work with you. And the price of that will be 5000 dollars. You ask your number. You're telling people, I don't really believe this number and neither should you. Those people have the lowest close, lowest, lowes…

AI assessment note: “what I learned in that was that his first impression was one of the worst”

Q doing it in a world with the lowest trust levels since before the age of the internet, um, it's necessary, so it's smart. Now, I want to talk a little bit about, um, Like, I think a lot of times in first interactions, we're scared. We're scared to pitch. We're scared for an interview. We're scared to sell. Can you hide fear? Does it matter? Can other people feel that?

A You're not going to like this answer very much, but our emotions are contagious, and so if you're afraid, people will pick up on it. So there's a study that changed the way that I think about this, which is they brought people into their lab, And they sold them up to two different groups. One group, they wore sweat suits and ran on a treadmill. So they, they got sweat into this suit and they collected the sweat. Second group, they said, you're gonna skydive for the first time. Put them in sweat suits and push them out of a plane. They took the two samples of sweat. This is where it gets kind of gross. They asked unsuspecting participants to smell Both of the sweat. They had no idea what they were smelling in an fMRI machine. Everyone who smelled the fear sweat, the skydiving sweat, caught the fear. They had no idea what they were smelling, but their amygdala lit up where they were afraid. What this shows us is that when you are afraid, you are sending off all kinds of signals that you don't even realize. Not only your face, not only your voice, but also even your chemical physiology. And so this is why I think it's really critically important for my introverted entrepreneurs, my introverted business owners, Is you got to get yourself right before you walk into a room and you got to know your stuff, right? Like no one can fake warmth and competence. We can, I can give you the cu…

AI assessment note: “our emotions are contagious, and so if you're afraid, people will pick up on it.”

Q make sure that I get every single human only what they need when they need it to become an owner. You might like this. Hit the link in the description below, and we will sort you to figure out what kind of business buyer are you. So let's say you are hiring and you want to figure out if somebody's lying to you or not. How do you do that?

A Okay, my favorite topic. So I love lie detection research. In fact, we've done a lot of research in our lab on, we've had people submit videos of themselves lying. We have a whole process for doing it, and then we analyze them for cues looking for patterns. And there is no Pinocchio's nose. There's no one cue that says someone's lying, but there are statistical cues to deceit. There are Cues that we saw over and over again in the lying answers. So here are a couple of those lie detection cues. So, um, the first most obvious one is, um, when something's incongruent. So someone says something, but their body shows another. So I'll give you a really good example. One of the challenges we have them do is two truths and a lie, where they say two truths about themselves and a lie. On the lie, so many people shook their head no.

AI assessment note: “the first most obvious one is, um, when something's incongruent.”

Q Like, is there a difference in men and women and what you need to do to be attractive and likable?

A Oh my goodness. Okay. So two, two questions here. So there is big differences between men and women, um, and that is because men and women send off inherently different cues and different signals. Typically not always women have higher voice tones, right? Typically not always women use the question inflection more and that's cultural, right? A lot of the times women have been taught be liked So they're, as parents, not always, but they're warmth, warmth, warmth. Whereas boys are taught get ahead, be respected. So they're often taught competence, competence, competence. So in the research, by the way, this is Dr. Susan Fisk's research from Princeton University. She found, she calls it the stereotype content model, which is that women, by default, are seen as higher in warmth and lower in competence. Men, by default, are seen as higher in competence and lower in warmth. Now I say, great to know. Like, I would rather know that. That is why I dial up my competence in my presentations. When I'm corporate speaking, the name of my business is Science of People, right? Like that is the most competent name that you could possibly have. Because I know I'm fighting a default that's higher and warmth, but I also use that to my advantage sometimes as well. So it's just important to know that default for you, and then you can purposely dial up as you wish. You know, You have a high, a higher…

AI assessment note: “there is big differences between men and women... men and women send off inherently different cues”

Q company, not just externally? So we talked about how to open up meetings, we talked about how to do pitches, but you and I obsess all day when we're talking about how do we build bigger companies and how do we sell internally? And I don't think a lot of people think about that. So what do bad leaders do or what mistakes do we make when we communicate internally?

A What people don't realize is that your internal marketing To your team is just as important as your external marketing. You've got to get your team on board on an idea and how you want, I think the mistake that you will make is they frame ideas or initiatives or phases as like vitamins as like, this is good for the team. So like a vitamin idea would be like, guys, our software is really out of date and we got to switch to that new LMS. We got to switch to that new, you know, CRM software. It's going to be good for the team. I know it's going to be painful, but we got to do it. What team member is going to be like, yeah, whoa. You as a business owner can do vitamin things for your business. You can do things that are good for the business that have long term, short term pain, but long term game. Your team members aren't thinking that way. You're lucky if they're thinking six months to a year at your company. So you want to try to emphasize what is the painkiller? Why is this going to help us immediately? That's going to help them get over that short term pain. So the difference between a vitamin painkiller, vitamin is like, this is good for us. It's going to be really, you know, we should do it. A painkiller is like, You know how you're having lower close rates because we lose contact cards? That problem will be gone next week. Literally gone. Now we're gonna have to set up some…

AI assessment note: “the mistake that you will make is they frame ideas or initiatives or phases as like vitamins”

Q Interesting. So what about, um, What about negotiation in the way that people typically think about it? We were talking about money. How do you negotiate for a salary and do it in the right way?

A Uh, first of all, empathy is always about how does the other side see things? Empathy, tactical empathy. It's not sympathy. It's not compassion. It's not accurate. It's not the truth. If you can release yourself from all those things, it's not fair. How does the other side see things? So at the job, nobody ever goes to the boss unless they want something for themselves. So whether we like it or not, bosses, supervisors are conditioned to think of everybody as selfish. Because every time you come to me, you want, all you want is something for yourself. That's the reality. You didn't cause it. You're not selfish. However, when was the last time you went to the boss and say, Hey, is there more work I could do for free? I want to do more. I don't want to get compensated for it. I want to take more of a load off your shoulders and I don't need anything extra for it at all. I just gonna do it. Cause I want you to feel good. Like that doesn't happen. So what's the reality? You go to the boss cause you want something. Realize that that's the case. So you can walk in and say, look, boss, I'm probably going to seem like another selfish employee that only comes to you when I want something. That's an empathy statement. That's good. That's not saying that you are, or that's true, fair, or it's accurate. You say, I'm probably going to seem like, cause that's how you're going to seem. And th…

AI assessment note: “look, boss, I'm probably going to seem like another selfish employee”

Q And so what are some like really quick actionable things you can do today, even if we're not going to have the muscle of Dr. Gabrielle?

A I don't know. You're, you're pretty close. Uh, we were doing some pushups right before this, but Um, what you're saying is actually very relevant, and things are very confusing. There's a chaos-making machine. People don't know what to do, even if they have resources. A very simple, easy way to think about nutrition is, again, prioritize protein. One of the reasons why it's hard to get is because when you eat it, you're not hungry, because dietary protein, because of these individual amino acids, it kicks off certain mechanisms in the body that it decreases hunger. It, you're just able to manage your blood sugar better. You're not all over the place. You're able to think and execute and not sleep under your desk. First meal is most important, and that needs to be a high protein meal, and that needs to be 30 to 50 grams. That could be a scoop to two scoops of whey protein, something easy. It could be some Greek yogurt. It could be some eggs. It can't be your oatmeal alone. It can't be your fruit smoothie alone. It should not be your donut. Or pancake, etc. It is something that everybody could do, and understanding just hitting that high protein at that first meal is critical. And then the other thing is, let's say you're interested in only two meals, then that last meal before you go to bed, actionable items, five ounces of steak or chicken or fish, it doesn't have to be complic…

AI assessment note: “First meal is most important, and that needs to be 30 to 50 grams.”

Q Yeah, Lori, Lori killed it. Another thing you talk about that changed my perspective on working out was this idea that habits versus hygiene and how you see fitness will change the entire way you do fit. Can you talk about that?

A Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, habits are something that's associated with a decision that you make to become better at a certain skill, right? Or something that you want to do less of. Habits are kind of a reinforcement. So your habits around, let's say working out is the fact of going at a certain time or following a program or seeing a coach, like a whole different means of what all those variables do to encompass that piece of hygiene, right? Hygiene is the aspect of you will decay or die if you don't do it, right? If you don't brush your teeth, like you're going to have nasty teeth and it's going to break down. Same thing if you don't wash your body, bacteria. I view fitness as the same thing. Where it's, it's a piece of hygiene, like it has to occur, um, otherwise you're becoming sedentary, complacent, and you're decaying. You're dying.

AI assessment note: “I view fitness as the same thing. Where it's, it's a piece of hygiene”

Q I love it. Okay, I want to add with some rapid fire. Term limits. Should politicians have them?

A I'm not an advocate for term limits. Two quick reasons. Number one is we've seen in states that have implemented term limits how it's really about money. So when you look at powerful incumbent politicians, they are powerful because Because of the big lobbyists and corporate money that goes to incumbents. You implement term limits, the power, the, the money and the attention shifts from the special interest away from the elected politician and towards the unelected chiefs of staff, professional committee staff members, those who stay on regardless of who the elected official becomes. And when you have this forced rapid turnover of elected officials, then you see them come in Say, hey, maybe it's Cody Sanchez. She's a phenomenal business owner, never worked in government before. You come in, and you're like, OK, I need, I need to talk to some people who know how the machinery of this place works. Maybe you go and you hire a chief of staff who's been there over five different previous representatives, and you get your advice from this person or this professional staff member or this person or that person. The moneyed interests are funneling through them, who will never be held accountable, rather than the elected official Uh, who has that forced transparency, uh, that many of our laws require. And number two, it takes away what I believe our founders intended, which is the right o…

AI assessment note: “I'm not an advocate for term limits. Two quick reasons.”

Q I like that. Isn't it true that in parts of Africa, the Bush's first names are some of the most popular names for children? I heard that statistic. Is that true?

A Uh, well, I, I don't know if it's true, but I do know this. I, I was in, on that same trip in, in Nigeria. The guy came up and introduced himself to me, and he said, I am a governor of the state in the Delta region of Africa. And he said, do you know what the most common birth names are for young men and young girls, boys and girls in my part of Nigeria? And I said, I have no idea whatsoever. He said, George and Laura. He said, uh, tell America thank you for PEPFAR, for saving our people. Twenty-five million people alive today because of the generosity of the United States. And, um, you know, it, it was, uh, George W. Bush was a vehicle to do that, but it was an expression of America. We did this after World War II. You know, it was, we, we saved a, we saved a continent that had been ravaged by war, and, ah, and then with PEPFAR, we're saving a continent that was ravaged by disease. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “He said, George and Laura. He said, uh, tell America thank you for PEPFAR”

Q So what would be an example of that?

A Well, John Kerry liked the fact that he was, you know, um, You know, that he had, he wanted to be pure thoughtful and so nuanced, but what it made him look like in reality was like he was, um, fully capable of going here and going there. So that, so that we've got it, Mark McKinnon picked up on this with an ad, with an ad, we got footage of him windsurfing on the Columbia river. And so that, you know, he, first he said this, you know, this, then he said that. You know, it's like he voted against, he voted against, while, while we're in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, he votes against an eighty seven billion dollar war funding bill. And we, we bought 11,000 or 14,000 dollars worth of ads in Huntington, West Virginia. I think it was February or March of 2004. He was going to be appearing the next day in front of the VFW audience to talk about his military experience versus Bush's lack of it. So we ran these ads talking about how he voted against While American troops are under, under fire in combat, he voted against the eighty seven billion dollar war funding bill. And because he wanted to be shown as thoughtful and nuanced, he stood up the next day with a microphone in front of the veterans and said, I actually voted for the eighty seven billion dollars before I voted against it, which became the line that, that exemplified the 2004 election. So we took what he thought was a str…

AI assessment note: “I actually voted for the eighty seven billion dollars before I voted against it”

Q life, completely redefined your life, then launched like, you know, a podcast platform company now called Boise Changes, what we're going to talk about, but that you say things like, I loved the pain and the pain loved me back. I wanted to start off by asking you, what do you mean by that? And when did you start turning pain into your actual teacher as opposed to your tormentor?

A That's a great question. I mean, first of all, thank you for having me. It's delightful to meet you and I'm very happy to be here. I think pain became my teacher very early in my life. Um, I was a pretty awkward adolescent kid who struggled to make friends. Was unsure about how to connect and always felt constitutionally different from my peers, which made me introverted and shy and reluctant to place myself in social situations. And I also was somebody like a young kid who showed zero promise in terms of athletic prowess. Like I, I can't hit a ball. I can't You know, kick a soccer ball, like anything with eye hand coordination, I've always been a disaster. So I was the last kid picked for kickball. I was bullied at the bus stop, like all the kind of, you know, stuff that is visited upon an awkward young child. But the one thing that I did have a little bit of innate talent and prowess in was in the swimming pool, as it As a young kid, like I love being on the summer swim team and, uh, and I was actually quite good at that. And there was a decision that I made around 1314 years old that I wanted to really invest in that. And I found myself as part of a club team in Washington, DC, where suddenly I was surrounded by very talented young athletes who had national age group records or had qualified for the Olympic trials. Uh, and I realized immediately that the talent that I though…

AI assessment note: “I think pain became my teacher very early in my life.”

Q yours, and so I asked him, what would you, what do you want to know? What would you ask Rich? And one of them said, ask him about Inventory, what it is, but maybe even more than that today. Do you think people who are not traditionally addicted could use or should use inventory in their day-to-day lives in some way? Because you still do it to this day, right?

A Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part and parcel of like any twelve-step program are the 12 steps, and these programs are shrouded in mystery, you know, they're anonymous for a reason. Um, but The blueprint and the tools and the steps I think are incredibly powerful for up-leveling your life and for self-understanding that anybody can benefit from doing. And one of the fundamental tools, which is step four, is doing a fearless moral inventory. And the process of doing that is basically going through your life and writing down every single person, institution, Uh, that, that you have a resentment towards, like, who, who, who are all, go through your entire life. Who are the people you're, you resent? And then go do a fear inventory. What are all the things you're afraid of? And then do a sexual inventory. Go through all of your relationships and sexual encounters and try to identify where you were selfish, self-seeking, and not compassionate, right? And if you're morally rigorous and completely honest in doing this, What you will discover is that patterns emerge and those patterns reveal in an objective sense where your character defects lie. And so you will see like, oh my goodness, when I, I, I, all these people that I resent, like my side of the street is that I did this. Like, how did you contribute to that resentment? And what can you, um, when I look at the relationships that I'v…

AI assessment note: “anybody can benefit from doing. And one of the fundamental tools, which is step four”

Q of course. You know, Tim's wife, he got this badass woman who's beautiful and, you know, kids and also really tough, but when you told me what you had to do to get her attention, you know, you took a, maybe more face punches in that than you did in the UFC. Like, what was the story about how you finally got her to say yes to even a date?

A She didn't say yes. I know. One, I had to figure out her pattern of life. This, if you try to do this to my daughters, I will find you and I'll wear your skin as a birthday suit. I'm being super clear here. Like, this is stalking. But in, ah, you know, in 2005, this is okay behavior for a special forces guy in a, in a special forces town. So, like, I had to figure out who her friends were. I had to figure out where she worked. I had to, I had to find out, like, what she liked to do, and I found all of this out from her friends, which I was slowly starting to befriend as I was building the network of people around her. So, you sound so bad. Oh god. Once I made friends with all of her friends, Uh, I created an event knowing the things that she likes. Music, food, wine. So we're going to do this, this live music wine pairing at my kind of historic house downtown Fayetteville. Um, and I told all of the friends different times than what she was told. She was told a time to the left, and they were told a time a little bit later to the right. And so when she showed up, 20, 30 minutes late. To her time, it was still 20:30 minutes before anybody else was gonna show up. And this was like the Razor three flip phone era, where you had to hit, like, if you wanted the letter C, you'd hit the, um, letter two, three times A, B, C. So I had saved a draft of a text message to go out to all of th…

AI assessment note: “She didn't say yes. I know. One, I had to figure out her pattern of life.”

Q egoically wrapped up into how much cash we have in our bank account and what our title is without even realizing it. So one, I think it's really cool that you talk about it. It must be really, really hard, especially when you were one of the first ones. What actually happened? I've read lots of different accounts. I've heard about it. In your words, how did you get there?

A Yeah, so it, it didn't happen because I was like buying big expensive things. So I remember at one point, look, there was the internet boom. I sold a company during that time, but then I cashed out. So I remember just hitting reload on my, you know, account, and like there was fifteen million dollars, like, cash in there, and I was so happy, because it does, you do feel happy, like, oh, now this whole thing I've had to worry about my whole life, like I was born broke, lived broke, Grew up broke, and suddenly I had this money, which meant my kids were gonna be okay, they wouldn't have the worries that I grew up with, or my parents grew up with, and I did it. And, but then suddenly, I saw, oh, all these other people are selling their companies in this internet boom, and I would look at my fifteen million, and it, it didn't feel like a lot anymore. Like, this was, this is gonna sound crazy, but this is how I thought. I actually felt, all of a sudden, Like I was broke, even though I had the fifteen million. So I felt, you know what? I'm going to make a hundred million because then I'll really have something to talk about. And so I started, so how do you go from 15 to a hundred million? Well, I figured investing is the way to do it. And I do nothing about investing, but the problem with making money is you think all of a sudden you're smart. Like, oh, I made money in this one area. …

AI assessment note: “I sold a company during that time... I figured investing is the way to do it.”

Q was like, what do you think? Do you have to leave your hometown to grow or not? And you were like, well, I did, so let's talk about it. Alright, the part I think is interesting is that you were born in Houston, you left Houston, and then you came back to Houston. We want to know, do you have to leave your hometown to grow? What's your two cents?

A You don't have to leave, but I do think it behooves anyone that wants to experience something different to leave. I mean, honestly, I think the, the problem with staying in your hometown is that you stay around the set of beliefs that you grew up in. So the things that your parents told you to believe in, the things that your friends peer pressured you into believing, things that you thought you believed, you'll never question that until you are out of that, of that environment. And for me, I think I grew up a very specific way and then I went to college and I was like, oh, And I didn't have the comfort of my, I didn't have the fear of changing my beliefs over my back because my parents were two and a half hours away. And then I moved to Kansas City after that, then I moved to Los Angeles, then I moved to Tennessee, then I moved back to Los Angeles, now to Houston. I've moved everywhere. So I feel like every single time I've moved, I've just changed my beliefs because every time I'm away from the people I'm comfortable in, it allows me to question what I thought I believed. And I think that's super important for anyone wanting to grow.

AI assessment note: “You don't have to leave, but I do think it behooves anyone”

Q Yeah. And so, what gave you the courage to actually leave first for college? Was that hard for you at all? I know, like, my parents, you're Latino. I'm Latino. My parents did not want me to leave. In fact, I didn't leave because I thought I should stay close by. Was that at all the same?

A It was tough because my parents are immigrants, and they came to America to give us a better life, and they did, right? Like, I, I was born here. I had an amazing life from my perspective, right? And so it was really perplexing to my parents, the thought that I wanted to go to like the University of Texas in Austin, when for them coming to America, anything in America is great. And so my dad, I remember him being like, well, son, I know you want that, but the University of Houston is like, 20 minutes from our house. I just can't fathom why you needed another school other than that. That's, it's an American university. And so it was really tough because I love my family. We're all very Close. It wasn't something that I necessarily wanted. I wasn't like, I gotta get out of this place. But the idea of just something new and scary was just, I don't know why it was appealing to me, but I felt like I had to do it.

AI assessment note: “the idea of just something new and scary was just, I don't know”

Q if you can get around other rich people, it looks like statistically you have a higher likelihood of becoming rich yourself. And two, it looks like you have a high likelihood of not becoming rich if you never leave your hometown, which is wild. Um, maybe one of the last questions I have for you is like, you went back to Houston. So you left, and now you're back. Why?

A So I started having kids with my wife and, um, at that point I felt like my identity was solidified. My beliefs were questions. My, my beliefs were questioned by me. My beliefs were solidified. I didn't need to explore anything anymore. Like I've explored it. I had moved to five cities by the age of 33. Don't recommend that. But I did it. And I had seen all the viewpoints. I had made friends from all spheres of beliefs and political in there or otherwise. I was good, and I had kids, and I went home, and I just saw my, my daughter playing with my niece, and I was like, how can I not How can I take this away from her? You know what I mean? So my wife and I were like, let's move back to Houston. And my, my parents live here. My two sisters live here.

AI assessment note: “I started having kids with my wife and... let's move back to Houston.”

Q to this idea of accelerating your career, or accelerating your business, and the fact that you've done it without being in a massive hub, and having not come from law, You didn't raise capital for a long time. You built a lot of the business yourself. You kind of did it all the quote unquote harder way. So what other frameworks do you think would be relevant to people listening?

A Yeah, I have this one, uh, called the ladders of wealth creation, and it's my attempt at breaking down All the things I observed to be true about making money and building wealth, and then try to explain it systematically. And so basically takes you through these ladders of first trading time for money, and then like basically first having a job and then having a services business where you're still trading time for money, but you have to learn these new skills and then productize services and then ultimately into, uh, products. And I try to teach through Basically, there's a thousand skills to making money and building wealth, and if you try to learn them all at once, you're going to fail, or it's going to take an absurdly long time without any positive feedback along the way. Like, it's just going to be depressing. And so instead, if you break it down and you move between ladders and you learn, you know, these small skills, right? Like you and I forget this now. Uh, cause we're like, if, if we say, Hey, let's start a new business, form an LLC done next move on. But you don't realize that the first time you form an LLC, that's actually really hard. You know, because you just, you don't know what you don't know, and you're like the secretary of state, and what phone number should I put on this, and a registered agent, what is that, you know, that sounds so official. And so you …

AI assessment note: “I have this one, uh, called the ladders of wealth creation”

Q two million in revenue. And that really means not a lot. And so the real question should be like, you know, what's your, what's your net profit? Or what's your margin in your business? And what can you sell your business for? Or even better, is your business sellable at all? If you're a creator, do you have thoughts on either of those before I let you out of here?

A Yeah, the first thing is that creators are the best in the world at capturing attention. And on one hand, they're great at monetizing it, right? We talk about the creator who makes a million dollars a year and that that's insane, right? They're making more than most doctors who went to school for eight years for this one thing and worked their way all the way up the ladder. And a creator is like, yeah, I've been doing this for three or four years and there's a million bucks, you know, at a high margin with good tax incentives as a small business owner and all that. But I see audience after audience that is under monetized, making a million dollars a year and crazy under monetized. One of my favorite examples is Mark Sisson, who, he had a blog called Mark's Daily Apple. It's still around, but in 2014, I think he had about a 150,000 subscribers on his email list, and I estimate he was doing between one and two million dollars a year in revenue. So, amazing business, wildly successful, And he is monetizing through, ah, some digital product sales, advertising, affiliates, that kind of thing. Pretty traditional playbook. And if you think, okay, a 100,000 subscribers, a 150,000 monetized to a million or two million, that's pretty good. But what he ended up doing is saying in his audience, they kept saying to him like, Hey, we want paleo friendly, uh, not just recipes, but we want to …

AI assessment note: “he sells it to Kraft Foods for two hundred million dollars”

Q Interesting. What do you think the difference in definition is between struggle and grind?

A I think struggle, struggle is quite like value, value neutral. Like you can struggle while you're at the gym. You can struggle in, I don't know, to make a breakthrough in your relationship, but like, it's a good thing. If you're doing an ayahuasca trip, you're struggling, but it's for the sake of something valuable. Whereas grind has those connotations of meaninglessness around it, where the thing that you're struggling for is not in fact the thing you want to be struggling for. And so, you know, parents will often say that raising kids is a struggle, but they wouldn't say raising kids is a grind, but you would say that like going to a boring corporate job is a grind rather than a struggle. So I think it's about what the end goal is and how purposeful it feels and how meaningful it feels.

AI assessment note: “struggle is quite like value neutral... Whereas grind has those connotations of meaninglessness”

Q thinking, you know, flash forward five or 10 years, do I like the person that I see that is in my current state, uh, that I hope to be in? So that's really interesting. Another question I wanted to ask you is, you know, when you Work. Do you feel like you have to have purpose beyond joy in it? Like is joy enough of a purpose in your work?

A It is for the short term, but not for the long term. So I get, I get a lot of joy out of watching out of playing video games, for example, but it doesn't feel that like meaningful or purposeful, uh, or fulfilling, even though it's joyful. Um, I get a lot of joy out of, I dunno, just Playing squash with like some friends or something like that. And again, it doesn't feel very purposeful, because I think purpose comes from working towards a goal that is sort of bigger than ourselves. Um, the most purposeful thing I ever did in my life was I directed the pantomime that we put on in my hospital many years ago. This was like getting all the medical students together, this big ensemble production of a hundred people. And we're doing this parody of Cinderella with like medical stuff and changing song lyrics to make them medical and things like that. And that was so fulfilling. And it was weird because it was taking up so much time while we were all in medical school and super busy. But they were like, it was a group of us. We were working together for this bigger cause cause it was like a production we were doing together. It was for charity. And I remember being so energized by that, even though it was hard work. And I have never done anything that's been more fulfilling than that. And I think this is why people enjoy like these sorts of acting productions and musicals and things, be…

AI assessment note: “It is for the short term, but not for the long term.”