30 Days to Take Control and Shape Your Future | Jordan Peterson, Arthur Brooks, and Dave Hollis (Archived Episode)

Chasing the wrong things in life, missing opportunities you practically prayed for, and not seeing yourself moving in the direction you wish leaves you feeling lost. It’s like walking aimlessly and wondering when someone will tell you which way you’re supposed to go. [Original air date: 9-29-22] Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and best selling author of books like Beyond Order and 12 Rules for Life. Though he’s seen as highly controversial, he’s strong in his truths and stands in his authenticity. Watch his full episode with Tom here: https://youtu.be/6_IGHMSsdD0 Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, social scientist and bestselling author of From Strength to Strength. He specializes in the science of human happiness. Check out his full interview here: https://youtu.be/swccXduWHqs Dave Hollis is the CEO of the Hollis Company, host of the popular Rise Together podcast, and best selling author of Built Through Courage. Enjoy his full episode with Tom: https://youtu.be/Bp4w_Prs1Q8 SHOW NOTES: 0:00 | Introduction to Jordan Peterson 0:23 | Take Control of Your Story 30:04 | How to Find Your Identity 58:24 | Don’t Waste Your Life 1:24:07 | How to Find Fulfillment 1:44:30 | How to Adjust to Change CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS: Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com/ Miro: Bring your teams to Miro’s revolutionary Innovation Workspace and be faster from idea to outcome at https://miro.com https://miro.com/. Legal Zoom: Launch, run, and protect your business at https://www.legalzoom.com/ – use promo code 'IMPACT' for 10% off! Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Follow Jordan Peterson: Website: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drjordanpeterson Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL_f53ZEJxp8TtlOkHwMV9Q Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business: join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business: see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox: sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT athttps://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/0482bfe8-8502-11ed-af5d-3bdc320068d7/podcasts/0a41f61a-9ddf-11ed-9eb7-dbb3a40775f5/episodes/8ac68366-8a85-11ef-bb65-abca3ffdcf54/www.twitch.tv/tombilyeuwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  I'm hoping that they find it useful, the same way they seem to have found the first one. I'm embarrassed.

• 1:14Tom Bilyeu?

  How to order their life.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  The book actually hurts me. Actually, both of them hurt me, I would say, because I'm very hurt. I'm a very destroyed person in many ways, and so I feel unworthy.

• 1:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Unworthy of what?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  You name it.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  In the book, you encourage people to think from an evolutionary perspective, which I think is incredibly important. And I think what you offer people is, one, you make, we all struggle with our own internal demons, and you allow people to see how that's a heroic endeavor, maybe the ultimate heroic endeavor, to conquer that inside of yourself. And then going back to the beginning of identity being a function of behavior, by helping people begin to identify as the hero, engaging in relatively straightforward behaviors like cleaning your room, or like in the new book, making an area beautiful, refusing to give in to resentment, aim at one thing, which fuck was one of my... Favorite parts of the book and see how extraordinarily good you can get at that.

• 2:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Like when I think about some.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good thing is you got to aim at something. It's like otherwise your life is meaningless. Well, what should you aim at? Well, I don't know. Well, pick something. Pick something, aim at it. As you move toward it, you'll get wiser, then maybe your aim will change. That's okay. But at least it'll change in an informed way. It's like discipline yourself in one dimension. See what happens. Well, that's exciting.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And I think that's something that's open for everyone. You can do that. I shouldn't say that because I don't believe that. I think you can find yourself in a situation that's so dire that you don't. There's no escape from it. But that doesn't matter because this still, this is, the hero myth might not be. The best we have might not always work.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  But it's still the best we have.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  It's still the best we have. I mean, everyone dies and so we fail in some sense. The fact that a symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to.

• 3:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, when you put that in an evolutionary context and you acknowledge that people are compelled by biology to strive, they're compelled by biology to progress, they're compelled by biology to um be courageous, that they will be rewarded for being courageous neurochemically, they will be punished for being a coward neurochemically. And.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, think about, you know, the thing about that biological explanation too is that we've been social for a very long time. We've been social for so long that our social nature is programmed into our biology. And so you'll be punished if you're not useful to other people.

• 4:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  By your conscience because you're a social creature. And the question is, well, how could you be most... Here's another question that starts to verge on the religious. What does the most useful person look like? Well, who is everyone hoping they'll meet? And that's a genuine question.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  And that's the ideal. The ideal is the person everyone's hoping they'll meet. That's Christ in the Christian culture. Psychologically speaking. Independent of any religious claims. So that's... These... This is... I suppose the essential idea of the archetype from the Jungian perspective. We have the image of an ideal. And because it is the ultimate ideal, it has a religious element. It's compelling. It's a judge. Why is it a judge? Well, if you fall short of the ideal, your conscience punishes you. So it's a judge.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  And it's merciful. Well, why? Because if you act out the ideal, then your life improves. You know, and I said, well, the question, what is the relationship between these images of the psyche and reality? I don't know the answer to that. I don't know where the archetype shades into reality.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  It depends to some degree on how you define reality. And you know, this is... I've been... People don't like that statement. But when you're asking questions that are deep enough, you start to have to ask, what do you mean by true? For example, what do you mean by real? Because the questions you ask get so deep that they're of the same kind as the question, what is real or what is true? You know, if... Think of it this way. Reality is what we adapt to. By definition. That's reasonable. If you're a Darwinian, you have to say, that's actually as far as you can go. Reality is that which shapes us. You can't get a better handle on reality than that.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Well, when you make a picture of objective reality, it's not the same as that. It's a different picture. And it's not obvious which one should play trump. Now, the hero myth, as far as I can tell, is an evolutionary artifact.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  And that means that, for human beings, that the hero image is the path of optimal adaptation.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Does that reflect reality? Well, it does, insofar as reality has selected that.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Well, does that mean that reality is a story? Because the hero myth is a story, or at least that's one of the things it is. Does it mean that reality has a narrative aspect? Well, it does, insofar as we act things out.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Does that mean that reality is ultimately a story? Well, I don't know. But the answer isn't obviously no.

• 7:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Reading the book, Beyond Order, there was a part in there that struck me as, this is gonna be the new battleground that Jordan is gonna be fighting on.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 7:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you have a sense of what in the book is gonna trigger people?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  No. I mean, I didn't think that the lobster example in the last book was gonna be so hilarid. I mean, I thought it was, I thought it was really cool. It's like, oh, my God. Serotonin mediates dominance in lobsters and people. How ancient. How remarkable.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  But, well, that took off in all sorts of directions, you know? And people made fun of it. It's like, well, you can make fun of 350 million years of evolutionary history if you want. You can put your social constructionism up against 350 million years of evolutionary history. Good luck to you. I didn't think it was like, and, you know, the idea that I was trying to insist that because lobsters live in hierarchies, that hierarchies are the source of all moral value. You know, that's, I was trying to insist that hierarchies are so inevitable that you see nervous systems adapting to them across virtually every level of animal.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And why? Well, because some things are valuable. And since and within any given domain of value, some valuable things are more valuable than other things. And so you have a hierarchy. There's no avoiding it as long as you need something, as long as there's scarcity. A hierarchy is inevitable.

• 9:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  You know, nobody cares how many big pens you have. It's because they're not scarce.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  So you can't have status because you have 200 of them. But as soon as there's scarcity, there's a hierarchy. And there's always scarcity of one form or another, no matter how rich you get. You know, if you're, if you have a hundred million dollars, Picasso paintings are still scarce.

• 9:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, the uh, the pushback on the lobster thing. It falls into two things for me. One, I don't understand why people look for a reason not to listen to somebody, which to me, most of the people coming after you for that one, just. They didn't want you to be right or to be heard. And so they went after something that they thought they could memify and shut down on. And then the other one.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Well, I understand that, like, I understand that. I, it's obvious why people are looking for a reason not to listen to someone. It's like, how goddamn many people can you listen to? There's nine billion of them. You know, so you have to not listen to almost everyone. And so you'll fall for any excuse. And sometimes that's not so good, you know, because you have a bias. That prejudices you against a viewpoint that you actually need. That's, that's a problem. But the phenomenon itself, like, you know, you, you mentioned, sorry to bring this up again, but because it's germane and relevant. Someone said something disparaging about me and they were on your staff. It's like, well, you have lots of. Options for guests. You're looking for no.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  You're always looking for no. Because you can only say yes to a very limited number of things. So. That's another reason we have to be very careful about our prejudices because.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  We need them, you know, to, I don't mean prejudice in that, obviously, in this inappropriate social sense, but Jesus, we have to shield ourselves from an excess of information. We're very limited capacity processors.

• 11:12Tom Bilyeu?

  No question.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  I, I don't understand though, I don't understand really. And it's really killing me, I think. I might, might mean that literally. I don't understand why I'm so controversial.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I can't figure that out. It's very distressing to me.

• 11:34Tom Bilyeu?

  You want me to take a stab at it?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Sure. Good metaphor.

• 11:39Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So my gut instinct in terms of why a certain type of person responds negatively to you is when you think of a person as a blank slate and that we all have this collective responsibility to make sure that everybody ends up the same, then you saying some people are better at something than others already is, feels judgmental. And so

• 12:10Speaker 01

  It is.

• 12:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, yes, for sure. And, but when you have a collectivist view and you believe that everyone should have equal outcome, which, by the way, I think everybody, yourself included, like, if only, right? Like, that would be amazing. Like, if everybody could live truly in harmony and that didn't violate principles of just the human animal, which is why I always remind people to remember, you're having a biological experience. But you say things that are, they violate a deeply compassionate person's desire to take care of everybody, the sort of no child left behind type thing. And when you insist on, in your own life, like, I'm only going to say that which is true, and I'm certainly not going to let

• 12:54Tom Bilyeu?

  somebody force me to say something I don't believe is true. So now with that, and by the way, all of that, and this is a key thing, I think you have to understand, you're fighting with a level of intensity that may Makes sense when you realize your obsession with what happened in the 20th century, the Gulag Archipelago, what happened there, uh, obviously Nazi Germany, Mao's China, like the number of people that have been killed in these essentially social experiments. So you have this deep intense thing trying to get people to understand like hierarchies are real, there's no escaping them. Not everybody is as good as everybody else at everything. And by the way, you have to shoulder responsibility and

• 13:34Tom Bilyeu?

  that's where people are like, you just to them, I cannot, and before I say what they think, I will reiterate. You have changed my life forever and for the better. I will forever be grateful to the things that you continue to put out into the world. And I missed you horribly as a thought leader during 2020 of all years to be on a Jordan Peterson diet. I was not happy about that. But what they think of is that you're being mean for the sake of being mean, that you're not trying to help them see. You cannot pretend reality isn't reality in pretending that the dragon is not there. The dragon does not go away. The dragon grows more powerful, more likely to devour you and your family. And so

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you get smaller.

• 14:16Tom Bilyeu?

  They don't see that. And so that's why I'm like, when I see people attack you, I'm like, Jesus Christ. How many times does he have to say, this is about a balance between order and chaos, that you need both of these things that you have to show the responsibility because that is what reality demands that you're in, you're nested in an evolutionary context. There are things like hierarchies that will play out in, uh, in the, the body

• 14:42Speaker 01

  In your perception.

• 14:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Exactly. And so you may not want to feel bad when you walk in the room and are worse at something than everybody else, but you're going to. You may not want to feel bad when you're rejected, but you're going to. You may not want to feel bad because you're just lazing around your house and not doing anything, but you're going to. And you have peered into enough of human nature to recognize, hey, there are just certain truisms. You've now given us 24 of the, I forget how many were originally in the core article 49 or whatever. So

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Forty-two.

• 15:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Forty-two. Okay, we've got 24.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  It's the answer to the life, the universe and everything, right?

• 15:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that all?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Douglas Hofstadter's number.

• 15:20Tom Bilyeu?

  So, oh my God, that's perfect, actually.

• 15:24Tom Bilyeu?

  It is this incredible thing, once you break free from ideology. And that's where, again, this is one of the rules in Beyond Order. Not to fall prey to ideology. This is where I thought you were going in the beginning with identity. I thought you were gonna say, "Identity has become pathological because it has become, it's been simplified." You talk about this in Beyond Order. "Once you simplify something," and this is how an ideologue gets you. They simplify it, they make it very understandable, becomes very clear who's in and who's out. You can reward and punish based on that. People are grabbing these unnegotiated, self-determined pieces of identity that don't necessarily bring value to the larger world,

• 16:07Tom Bilyeu?

  which will create dissonance in their own life, because they've got all this substructure running telling them to be valued.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Well, they don't bring tradable value. You know what I mean. It's like, I'm not saying they're, like, your race, I suppose, is of value, but it's not a tradable value. And your gender and your sex, the same thing. It's like, I guess it's partly because there's no scarcity. You know, it's like, we've got enough white people. Being white doesn't buy you anything.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  So, and I'm not saying that with any pleasure.

• 16:40Tom Bilyeu?

  That's what I think people miss. This is why I think people come after you. They don't recognize that you're not saying it, you're not relishing in this. You want people to be happy. And I'm always so confused. Jordan, I don't know why you remain as vulnerable and open as you are. After the time saying, I was like, "What the fuck?" You sounded so kind, open, compassionate, after, what, four years of, you know, some percentage of the world relentlessly slandering you. And obviously, you get people that cheer you on, probably way more people that cheer you on than don't. But you still remain vulnerable, which is fucking incredible. But the fact that they don't recognize that you're trying to help?

• 17:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, I could get it if they said, "Hey, look, I disagree with Jordan on this side or the other."

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Maybe they do recognize that. You know, there's a lot of cynicism about the help. And I can't understand why you'd be cynical about help unless you weren't that helped, weren't that pleased about the idea of help. You know, like, all these deplorables that I'm helping, these angry young men. You know, they don't deserve help. Well, I don't think that. I don't know anyone that doesn't deserve help.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  You know, there's this idea in the New Testament that you should love your enemies. It's like, why would you do that? Well,

• 18:08Speaker 01

  it'd be better if they weren't

• 18:11Speaker 01

  your enemies. And their unnecessary suffering doesn't help.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  It's not helpful.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  It's not like you don't, you know, anyone with any sense, anyone who's human is liable to take pleasure in vengeance. Or even in, but you know, when people go after the journalists that have gone after me, I don't take any pleasure in that. I don't sit back at my home and rub my hands and think, you know, you got what was coming to you. I do think sometimes you've got what was coming to you, but I think of that more like watching someone in the road, you know, they're in the road and they have their back turned and a truck runs over them. It's like, well, you were in the road and there was a truck. And so you got what was coming to you because you were on the road and there was a truck, but I don't take any pleasure in it.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  I don't see that it's helpful.

• 19:11Tom Bilyeu?

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• 19:53Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:38Tom Bilyeu?

  The follow-up actually happens instead of living in your head. When you can't pick up at all, QUO's agent does. It answers questions, gets the details, and texts them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and you can jump right in. It's also an official connector in Claude and ChatGPT. Ask who called while you were out and it's handled. QUO is the number one rated business phone on G2. It's trusted by over 90,000 businesses. When money is on the line, always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free plus get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/impact. That's Q U O dot com slash impact. What do you want people to get out of Beyond Order?

• 21:23Tom Bilyeu?

  It is extraordinarily well thought through. It is very well laid out. Each sentence stacks like a brick upon the next. I wouldn't advise, I don't know if you feel differently, but I wouldn't advise people read them out of order. It's literally this very careful case being made that taken in totality is breathtaking.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  I think you can read them in either order. I think you can read them in either order. I tried, maybe, maybe they're better read in order, but, but, um, I think that if you read the second one first, then it would color your vision of the first one.

• 21:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, I mean, the rules. The, I think you're right, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, it doesn't matter, there are yin and yang.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Oh, you mean the rules themselves?

• 22:08Tom Bilyeu?

  The rules themselves, just, it, it stacks so well.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  So, otherwise, it wouldn't be a book, hey? I mean, each, the thing about writing a book is that you're outside of time and space in relationship with the book, because chapter one comes before chapter 12, but not when you're writing it, you can go back and modify chapter one because of chapter 12. I did try to tie them together so that they make a book, you know, and they, one builds upon another. That's like, that's the musical element of it as well. Recurrent themes. I'm glad you liked it. See, I can't tell. I can't evaluate it. Um, I'm hoping that it it's of the same level of quality that the first book was. And I'm not making any claims saying that about the level of quality of the first book. I'm just, that was as good as I could do.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  And I wrote the second one under unbelievable duress. And so I can't tell if it's, you know, whether that was a curse, or, well, certainly a curse. No doubt about that. I don't know how it impacted the book, though.

• 23:12Tom Bilyeu?

  It's hard to say.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  What do I want people to get out of it? Well,

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I'm hoping that they find it useful, the same way they seem to have found the first one.

• 23:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And how to order their life.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  The book actually hurts me. Actually, both of them hurt me, I would say. Because I'm ashamed, you know, of what's happened to me.

• 23:34Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you mean?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  They're books about life, and my life is, I'm very hurt. I'm a very destroyed person in many ways, and so I feel

• 23:46Speaker 01

  unworthy.

• 23:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Unworthy of what?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  You name it.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  I hope people find it useful, you know? I hope it alleviates some unnecessary suffering.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  That's the goal.

• 24:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's how I read your books and everything that you've put out into the world. The people that should write the instruction manual are the people that have struggled. And in your suffering, you have been able to piece together useful information, which is the barometer by which I judge a book's value for sure. The reason people flock to your lectures, they buy your book, is you have made, in modern times, the single most coherent and useful instruction manual for life. Period. So, the, I fear that the brokenness that you feel,

• 25:04Tom Bilyeu?

  the heartache that you feel translates into something usable that couldn't be written by somebody that hadn't gone through what you've gone through.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Well, I would like to believe that was true. You know, there's a bit too much self justification in it for my taste, but...

• 25:24Speaker 01

  I thought the other day I'd probably do this too, and...

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I would, I have to record an announcement for this book because it's coming out on Tuesday. I thought the best announcement would be just to thank people for all of their kind attention.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  I'm very fortunate in that regard. I get letters from people all the time that...

• 25:51Speaker 01

  They open up their hearts, you know, it's really something.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  But I am somewhat nonplussed, let's say, for all this work. I'm pretty broken.

• 26:08Tom Bilyeu?

  In general, or just in this moment?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Don't know.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  I think in general.

• 26:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, well, I will say this, as somebody whose life you have touched. And the thing I want you to recognize in me, as I imagine countless other people want you to recognize in them, more than warm wishes, is I have put to use the things that you're teaching and they have made my life better and they have made the lives of those around me better. And, man, it is really heartbreaking to see you

• 26:55Tom Bilyeu?

  go through what you're going through now, and I certainly get it.

• 27:00Tom Bilyeu?

  You know, and I don't know you well enough to offer you any sort of familial consolation. So I will just say that what you do matters probably more than you think it does, certainly as much as you think it does. And I, I had never met you through 2020, and I started reaching out to people that we both know, asking about you, because I, I believe that the world needs the insights that you uniquely have, coming from your background of mythology and understanding what is deeply ingrained in the human psyche from an evolutionarily shaped perspective.

• 27:43Tom Bilyeu?

  And that nobody is putting it together the way that you're putting it together, and the fact that you've been...

• 27:51Tom Bilyeu?

  You know, I mean, hopefully it's, it's small in comparison to the people that are supporting you, but Jesus, like, I don't, I, I know I would not put up with the amount of shit that you've put up with. And the fact that, I think the individual is the only way to approach any systemic problem. Like, you just have to deal with the individuals, and then from there, it will echo out into society, and so the fact that that's your approach.

• 28:13Tom Bilyeu?

  I kept telling people, "We need Jordan Peterson right now." And I'm so grateful you're back. And I know this book will be very successful because-

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Well, I'm glad you liked it. I'm glad you liked it, because like I said, I, it's really hard for me to evaluate it. You know, sometimes I- Well, I have every possible thought that you could have about it. You know, sometimes I read it and I think, "Oh, that seemed to have turned out pretty good." And other times I think, "Jesus, I've said this fifty times already." And yeah, I'm all over the place. I can't... I think that happens. It happens when you write a book, you get so... Because, you know, when you read someone else's book, you can kind of tell if the ideas are original, at least insofar as you're concerned. Well, I can't tell, because these are my ideas. Well, not all of them, obviously, but... They're ideas I'm at least deeply familiar with, so I can't tell to what degree it's original.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  None of it. And so... And it's also, I suppose I'm quite apprehensive about its release in some sense, because I've set myself up an impossible second act. You know, because the first book was so insanely popular. I think it's six million copies now in all the languages it's been published in. So, um... That's impossible. That never happens, right? It's certainly, it's like winning the lottery. It's probably less probable than winning the lottery. In fact, I'm virtually certain that it's less probable than winning the lottery. And to imagine doing that twice is...

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Well, that's just... It happens, but it's highly improbable. Anyways, it's going to all come... And then, you know, I'm in a different space than I was when I released this first book. So... This is compared to all, this is going to be compared to all my electronic avatars, which are busily working out there in the world. I think there's more of me outside of me now than there is inside of me, weirdly enough. That's another phenomenon I can't really get my hand, my, my, uh, mind around. You know, the power of YouTube. Jesus, that's quite the technology. When I put those first videos up, you know, I was, this was bothering me, this piece of legislation.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  And for a variety of reasons, some of which we've discussed, I talked to my wife and my son, sort of casually. I said, "Well, I'm gonna make these videos, see what happens."

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Famous last words.

• 30:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. Yeah, man. Look, it's resonated. It will continue to resonate. You are, you have an extraordinary ability to translate what people are feeling into the actions they need to take to get out of it. It is not a mistake that you are a very practiced clinical psychologist that is able to scale what you were doing one-on-one now to the many. It's extraordinary, and I think it's really had an impact on society. My fantasy is-

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I loved being a clinician. It was a great job. You know, I really loved it. There was nothing better than intense conversations about how to make things better when both partners in the conversation are fully committed to that. It's such fun to produce incremental improvement, sometimes more than incremental, you know, collaboratively. There's nothing better than that. I loved doing my lecture tour because it was that on a large scale. It was, I talked to Dave Rubin about that this week because, of course, he was long on the tour. And it was such, it was so perfect to be talking to people about making things

• 32:02Speaker 01

  better and to have everyone, at least in that moment, fully on board with the idea. You couldn't, you couldn't ask for anything better than that. It was great. And to have the support I've had from people, it just stuns me, you know. I think it's actually traumatic to have that much support.

• 32:21Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting. Why traumatic?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  It's not easy to know what to do with, you know, the cheers of a million people.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  It's overwhelming. It's dangerous.

• 32:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Dangerous because it can seep into your identity, or?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  This is probably not directly relevant, but I don't know. You know, I've thought a lot about Hitler. You know, was it his arrogance or his humility that led him to be the savior so-called of Germany? He had millions of people cheering for him. How could you not think you were right?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  How could you possibly think you weren't right?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  And so there's danger in that.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  You know, I don't think I've

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I don't think I've unfairly benefited from it.

• 33:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Money, success, fame, all that stuff is irrelevant. What matters is how you think about yourself when you're by yourself. And I want to know what you think about in terms of self-identity, how we construct our sense of self, and then how we leverage that to move through the world in a way that makes sense.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  So

• 33:49Speaker 01

  identity to me is something that's practical.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  It's, it's, your identity is a, uh, it's like a dramatic role that you play out in the world. And while playing that out, it has to furnish you with a life. And what that means is that it has to be, it means that it has to be negotiated with other people.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And when you're a very young child and you first start to play with who you are, you live in a fantasy world and according to some developmental psychologists at least, particularly this is grounded in the theories of Piaget, that very young children, two or three, are quite egocentric in their play. They play according to their own rules. And so they're not social yet until they're three or four.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Which means that they have their own goals in mind. And then they erect a little fictional world around those goals. And then they play out the role within that fictional world, and that's pretend play. And when they get to be about three or four and they start playing with other kids, they have to bring their worlds together and negotiate. Because both children have to want to play. And so that means identity has to expand beyond its egocentric focus and increasingly be negotiated in the social world. I studied developmental psychology for a long time, especially in relationship to the regulation of aggression.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And most children learn to regulate their aggression between the ages of two and four. Now, for example, for instance, there's a subset of children, mostly male, who are very aggressive at the age of two, comparatively speaking. They bite, kick, fight, hit, and steal. That's the definition of aggressive. And almost all those children are socialized out of that by the time they're four, although a small proportion aren't, and they tend to be long-term antisocial children and then criminal adults. It's very, very difficult for that to be rectified, if it isn't rectified by four. What happens with most children is they learn to move beyond their egocentric presuppositions

• 36:07Speaker 01

  and include other children in the play. And so they start to negotiate their roles. And identity is, a sophisticated identity, is a negotiated role. And so it's not appropriate for anyone to...

• 36:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Negotiated with who?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  With everyone. With everyone. And of course, you know this is the case, because if you, if you, well, first of all, if you're a child and you want friends, then you can't insist that only your game be played. So I'll give you an example. There's been observational studies of children in playgrounds. So imagine there's a group of children together. Let's say they're six or seven years old, and they're playing helicopter. So they've got their erasers out, and they're buzzing around in the helicopters. Okay, so they've already established the ground rules. They've got together, and they laid out the drama. They say, "Well, let's play helicopter." And maybe there's four or five suggestions, but the group develops a consensus

• 37:06Speaker 01

  that helicopter's the fun game. And let's make our erasers into helicopters. I don't have an eraser. Well, you can use your pencil, and it can be a long helicopter. So everybody gets a role, and everybody's happy about it. Otherwise, play won't continue, right? Everybody has to be happy, or play won't continue. And so then the little drama organizes itself and the kids play helicopter. And there's consequences of that that play out like a story. And then maybe another kid comes along and he's got an eraser and a pencil in his bag. And he wants to play helicopter too. And if he's a socially sophisticated kid, he'll hang around the outside of the little game and watch. And then he'll take out his eraser and maybe start making buzzing noises with it.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  And when he can see that there's an opening in the play situation, he'll swoop in and maybe he'll get integrated. It's like when you're at a cocktail party and you hear a conversation and you're hovering around the edge. You wait for an opening and then you say something that's germane to the topic. And if you're sophisticated enough and the people are friendly enough, then it'll open and you'll be allowed in. Now, even popular kids often get rebuffed when they try to enter an already structured game. Unpopular kids don't watch what's going on and then they come along and try to impose their game on the entire group. And then they have a tantrum if they don't get let in.

• 38:31Tom Bilyeu?

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• 39:34Tom Bilyeu?

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• 40:04Speaker 01

  And so that's a good example of how identity is negotiated at the earliest stages.

• 40:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, that feels to me something, it feels very different than what I would think of as identity. So I'm going to try to put this in context of what I see as the major movements of your work and what makes you so powerful. Tell me where I go astray. So I look at your two books and I'm literally just paraphrasing from what you said, that they're basically the yin and yang. So you have chaos on one hand and you have order on the other. Both will tend towards tyranny. And as far as I can tell, and this is why I do not understand why people are pushing back on you, why there's so much bizarre backlash, is the moral of your story is, hey, everybody, guess what? You need to find this balance between the two. If you only exist in the creative potential, it ends up being all chaos all the time.

• 40:53Tom Bilyeu?

  If you only exist in the conservatism, the things that are already there and working, they will tend towards tyranny, solidify and cease to be useful and die. And so now it's this game and you do this brilliant explanation of what happens in a city that shows exactly this with artists. And if you can walk us through that and tell me if, if the identity of the artist, if that's what you're trying to get at with identity? Because I'm understanding what you're saying in terms of, okay, in that moment, we're negotiating, but there's a grander sense of who we become that is, seems to me to be a negotiation with the world. So collectively, everybody else, but also a negotiation with how I want to feel about myself when I'm alone.

• 41:36Tom Bilyeu?

  And the things that I think are right, the things that I think are wrong.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that, okay, well, that's very complicated. So I'll walk it through. So as you pointed out, I'm going to hold up these books. So this is the new book. Beyond order. And it does concentrate on pathologies of structure. And the previous book, which is Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. And the the underlying presupposition there is that in our phenomenological landscape, so that's the world as we experience it, complete with emotions and motivations and dreams. So the full range of human experience, including the subjective and the objective, let's say, can broadly be broken into two domains. And one is the domain of things that are beyond our grasp and reach. And that's the unknown. The unknown emerges.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  When the unknown emerges, you tend to experience anxiety. And then there's the the known. And I define the known very specifically and very carefully. The known is the place you are when what you're doing produces the results you want. And I say want because that brings motivation and emotion into the game. So you're motivated to pursue something. You pursue it and what you want happens. Not only do you get what you want, but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions. Now, if you, you know, imagine that you're, you know, you're lonely and you approach a young woman in a in a social situation,

• 43:07Speaker 01

  attempting to make some contact with her. You you want to alleviate your loneliness. And so you hope you make a good impression. And you tell a joke, let's say, in a relatively awkward manner, and you get rebuffed. Then you feel you you you're no longer where you control. You're no longer where you exercise control. And that brings up all sorts of specters immediately. It's like, well, why were you rebuffed? Well, maybe all women are to be despised. That's one theory. Maybe there's something deeply wrong with you. Maybe you're having an off day. Maybe it wasn't a very good joke. And so when you don't get what you want, then a landscape of question emerge, questions emerge.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity, from the trivial, oh, I told the joke wrong, to the profound, there's nothing desirable about me and I'll be alone for the rest of my life. Now, you asked about identity and I used the example of a child's game. But I could go through an identity. And so I do this particularly in Maps of Meaning. And so, for example, let's say I'm sitting typing. Okay, we could decompose my identity. So at the highest level of resolution, I'm moving my fingers. And so that could be my identity. I'm the thing that moves its fingers. And then, slightly, at a slightly broader level than that, I'm typing words. And at a broader level, I'm typing phrases and thinking them up. And then sentences.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And then paragraphs. And then chapters. And then, let's say, full papers or books. That's a productive unit. So I'm the author of a book or the author of a paper. That's an identity. But then that's nested inside, for me, it would be nested inside being a clinical psychologist, being a professor, being a good citizen. And then that's nested inside something that's even broader than that. And I would say that that's nested inside a cultural heroism. And I don't mean that specific to me. I mean that for everyone. That's the outermost level, whether you're playing out the role of hero or adversary, say. That's the highest possible level of identity.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  That's the level at which fundamental morality is adjudicated. And there isn't really anything beyond. Outside that is, it's beyond us. It's the transcendent itself. And you're all of those at any one time. You're all of those levels of identity. But those are all practical, right? So those are the roles that you're playing in the world. All of those are a consequence of who you are. But in interplay, like in this situation with the child, all of that's negotiated with other people. And so if you have a functional identity, you see, if you have a functional identity, when you act it out in the world, then you get what you want and need.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  And if an identity doesn't do that, well, then you should, you either retool your identity or you retool the world.

• 46:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Your conception of the world?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Well, if you're retooling your conception of the world, then you're retooling yourself. No, you can actually, I mean, what a revolutionary does is try to bring the world into alignment with their theory. Yes, literally. Well, and we all do that to some degree because we are practical engineers, you know? I mean, not only do we perceive the world, but we also interact with it so that it does manifest itself in accordance with our desires. There's limits, obviously, to how far you can go or how far you should go with that. You know, and what are the limits? Well, there's practical limits. Nature won't do what you want it to unless you're very sophisticated

• 46:58Speaker 01

  in your, in your application of your knowledge and other people will object. So now you might say, well, you should forge forward regardless of their objection. And, you know, there are circumstances under which that's true. But generally speaking, that's not a very good idea. It certainly doesn't make you popular as a child. And so that brings up one other issue. I would also say, and this, I developed this idea quite a bit in the new book.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  You go from egocentrism as a child, you have to go through this period where you're socialized as a child and adolescent. And that really means that you allow your identity to be molded and shaped by the group. And, you know, you think about how important peers, friends and peers are to children and adolescents. You know, your mother will say, when you're a teenager, "Well, if Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you too?" And you say, "Well, no," but the real answer is, "Well, probably." If all your friends are there taunting you, you would in fact jump off the bridge. And not only that, generally speaking, you should. Because it's your duty, it's your developmental duty as a child and a teenager

• 48:15Speaker 01

  to take your...

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Your isolated self and turn it into a functioning social unit. Now, you could say, well, Peterson wants everybody to be a functional social unit, a robot, you know, a cog in the wheel. And I would say, well, that isn't where development stops. It has to go through that period before you can emerge as a genuine individual, which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them. But not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual. Those are not the same thing. And there's plenty of attempt to confuse the two things because it's much better if you can't

• 49:00Speaker 01

  follow the rules to view yourself as an avant-garde revolutionary than as a failure. And it's not like I don't know that that social molding crushes. Obviously, it crushes, and everyone feels that. These are existential problems. Everyone deals with the tyranny of culture and the fact that it does want you to be a certain way and not other ways, and those ways might not be in keeping with the deepest elements of your nature. Well, tough luck for you, because you're also the beneficiary of culture. And so you have to offer it your pound of flesh. Now, you shouldn't do that at the expense of your soul, but you shouldn't stay an immature

• 49:45Speaker 01

  child either.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  And so this notion of identity that we're being fed is very, very, it's very thin.

• 49:54Tom Bilyeu?

  What are we being fed? Be very specific.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Well, there is the idea, for example, that your identity is whatever you say it is and that everyone else has to go along with that. No, that isn't how it works, partly because no one even knows how to go along with it. Like, let's say, just for example, that you're a gender non-binary.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  What am I supposed to do? About that? Man, I don't know, I hardly know what to do if the rules are already there. So let's say, I grow up, I wanna be a heterosexual male. I wanna find a woman. Fall in love with her. Raise a family. Have children, have grandchildren. That's a game. I know the rules to it. Not well, because everyone's a failure at that, you know, it's very difficult, but at least you kinda know what the the goal is, and so does the person you're with. Well, you leap out of that, which is already terribly difficult, you leap out of that into completely unknown territory, saying,

• 51:03Speaker 01

  that I'm presenting yourself as something other than those categories, leaves everyone around you and you completely bereft of direction.

• 51:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me put it in words that I get from your material. So, what I heard you just say, tell me if I'm wrong, is part of the negotiation that we do from the time we are little kids and figuring out that play, we're up on the bridge, we jump maybe because we want to, you know, fit in with our peer group. It, there is a sense of order to that. Now, you've been very careful, and it would drive me crazy if people responded to this interview as if you have not already illustrated that it is the balance between two opposing forces. But, so, we need enough order so that somebody can find their way through the world. And that many, I think a big part of the reason that your work has resonated so profoundly with people is, they're, excuse me, they are left in a world where they don't know how to

• 51:58Tom Bilyeu?

  move forward in a way that serves them spiritually, practically as well for sure. And so, hey, everybody.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Both of those, both of those practically shades into spiritually as you move up into the broader reaches of identity.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  You know, and look, this, this, see, one of the things, I really laid this out in Maps of Meaning. It took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion. So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world, and what you want doesn't happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action. And the reason for that is, you've wandered too far away from the campfire. And now you're in the forest, and maybe you're naked. And so what do you do then? And the answer is, well, you don't know what to do. So what do you do when you don't want, know what to do? And the answer is, you prepare to do everything.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  And the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically. Like, it hurts you. And there's, there's an immense physiological literature detailing the, the cost of, of, of exactly that kind of response. And so people need, people and animals, the, people stay where what they do has the results they want. That's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions. Is because you know that, for example, even in small ways, let's say you're a country music aficionado, and you're hanging around with your cowboy-hatted buddies, and you throw on a tape. And everyone says, "Great tunes, man." And you, you know, you're happy about that.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  But, you know, you throw on a piece by Tchaikovsky, and you're, you're in a different subculture, and who the hell are you? And people, the people in your group will say, "Man, who listens to music like that?" And like, that's a trivial example in some sense, but I, I believe it's one that everyone can resonate to. We like, we, it's very hard on us not to be where we know what's, we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that. We hate that, and no wonder. So, and then, you know, there are, there are varying degrees of that, obviously. You can really be where you don't know what's going to happen, or you can only be there to some degree. But, by and large...

• 54:27Speaker 01

  By and large, we're conservative creatures, even if we're liberal in temperament. There is not, we can't tolerate that much uncertainty. And you might ask, "Well, why?" And the answer is, "Well, because you can be hurt, pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious, and you can die." So it's no wonder you're sensitive, or very sensitive to negative emotion. And so, our identities, functional identity regulates your emotion. But you do that in concert with other people. In the first chapter of the new book, Beyond Order, the rule is, "Don't casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement." That's that balance again.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  I make the case that most of your sanity is socially distributed. And what I mean by that is, well, let's say that you know how to behave. You're well-socialized, you can play with others. Now, I said already in this conversation, if you didn't learn to play with others between the time you were two and four, you will never learn.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  And psychologists have beat their heads against the wall trying to rehabilitate antisocial children. They can't do it after the age of four.

• 55:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that because areas of the brain just don't develop?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Well, it seems to be partly because the kids fall farther and farther behind. So let's say, you make the leap from egocentric dependence on your mother at two and three, to immersion in a peer group. Well, then, you pick peers that are at your same developmental level, and you chase each other up the developmental ladder. And the longer you're out of that, the farther you fall behind. And so, you know, kids, five-year-old kids, might come across another five-year-old kid who tends to cry too much if they don't get their way. And they'll say, "We don't want to play with the baby." And what they're saying is, "We have to find someone who's at our developmental level, shares our developmental horizon,

• 56:28Speaker 01

  so that we can mutually scaffold our further development." Now, they're not going to say that, obviously, but that's the situation. And kids test each other out when they first meet, so do adults. "Game, game, game, game, can you play? Are you playing at the same level as me? I'm playing my game at the level that will further my development." Can you play along with me? If not, well, maybe you're lower in status and I can pull you up as a mentor. Maybe you're higher in status and I can learn from you, but if you're a peer, we can play together. Anyways, if you're acceptable to your peers, and you behave well, they'll accept you. And then they tell you all the time if you're acting appropriately.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  You know, if your jokes are funny, if you're dominating the conversation, if you're bringing something of value to the table. And all you have to do is pay attention to the social cues, and you'll keep yourself regulated.

• 57:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, I want to dive in here and I'm going to see if I'm tracking all of this, because I'm putting this in a larger context of this really matters, and it applies directly to something that's happening in the world. It seems to me that you don't dive into things unless they have real relevance. So, is it fair to define identity as the self-narrative that emerges from nearly infinite number of interactions with other people and nature itself?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Well, I would say yes, but that gets to the point, it's so broad, it's almost, it starts to lack definition.

• 58:00Tom Bilyeu?

  So I can take it finer than that. I'm trying to sort of find the borders, and then I will work in. Okay, so if we're, if we still remain true at that point, then having, in the book, you walk through a lot of some of the people that you've done psychoanalysis with, and so we get a lot of insights into the actual people that you're dealing with, and how people can begin to tell themselves a narrative that is very dysfunctional. And you help them out, I don't want to say easily, because that sounds like it cheavens it, but pretty straightforward, in helping them reframe. And framing is something I'm obsessed with. And so our identity is based on this, it's a self-narrative that we tell ourselves, based on the interactions we have with other people and nature,

• 58:43Tom Bilyeu?

  such that we begin to solidify a set of behaviors that makes sense for us based on the goals that we want to achieve and where we're trying to go. Am I still good?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yes, well, you improved your definition by adding the behavioral element, because I would say the fundamental element of identity is what you act out. On top of that, there's the story that you tell.

• 59:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Do I have to be consciously aware of it?

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Well, you're consciously aware of some of it, not of other elements of it. You can't be consciously aware of everything you do.

• 59:13Tom Bilyeu?

  And does the conscious and conscious alike make up my identity as you define it?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Your identity is the story you tell about your actions in the world, but it's also your actions in the world.

• 59:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, now, why, why does my identity, and I assume as I understand it, why does my identity as I understand it matter to the course of my life?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Because it's the, it's the structure of the, it's, it's the structure from which the plans that you implement in the world originates. And you're always acting in the world. You have problems to solve all the time. And you have to solve, you have, you have to solve, there's all sorts of problems you have to solve to stay alive, and you have to solve them for today. But you have to solve them in a way that works for today, that doesn't screw up tomorrow too bad, and leaves next week intact, and next month, and next year, and so there's a continuum of you. So that's another, see, that's the other reason why your identity can't just be you.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Because, or how you feel right now, because you're not only who you are right now and how you feel right now. You're this strange entity that exists right now, but that already existed in the past, and that is going to repeat itself into the future. And so you're actually a community of individuals stretched out across time. And the plans that you implement have to be beneficial for that entire community of individuals. And it's going to be the case that there isn't much difference between you acting properly with regards to your extended temporal self, and you acting properly in relationship to other people.

• 1:01:00Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  So you're stuck with society, just because you know that there's a future, you're stuck with society, even if you're solipsistic. Right? If you think you're the only conscious, consciousness that there is. There's still the fact that you have duration across time, and that, you know, you have to take into account what the consequence for your actions is going to be on the 50-year-old Tom, and the 80-year-old Tom. And so...

• 1:01:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Now here's a question. Do you think that there's something that has pathologized the creation of useful identities in today's culture?

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think each person can judge that for themselves to some degree. I mean, the more functional your identity, the better regulated your emotion. The more positive emotion, the less negative emotion. Certainly, negative emotion doesn't rise to an intolerable level. If you're fortunate, your identity is well constructed. I think that any insistence that identity is something other than a pragmatic set of actions, let's say, that orient you properly in the world is sufficiently sparse so that it isn't going to solve the problems that have to be solved.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  So I might insist, I'm whoever I think I am at the moment, and if you were polite, you would go along with that. And to some degree, I would be right. We do that when we allow people to save face. But if I'm right, we go along with their presuppositions, presumptions. We don't call them on their mischief. And a certain amount of that's polite. But that doesn't alleviate the necessity for me of adopting a role that other people find valuable. Otherwise, what the hell do I have to trade? And you might say, well, why should I have to trade? Well, if you can live all by yourself, then you don't have to trade.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  But if you can't, you have to bring something of value to the table. And you can't insist on its value.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Humans are not intended to decline. Decline is hugely painful because happiness comes from progress. Unhappiness comes from regress. And when you feel that something is harder than it used to be... So it's interesting, you know, you see this, the decline in the fluid intelligence curve we just talked about. If you're really a striver, and that's who I'm working with, I'm working with people who want to make the most with their lives. If you look, if you never do anything with your life, you're not going to know it's over. You're not going to have this big crisis at the end of your life because you never did anything. And I was like, I watched a lot of TV, awesome. It's like, I can still do that.

• 1:03:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Don't you think their whole life is a crisis?

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Not really.

• 1:03:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  No, no, not really. No, no, no, no, for sure. I mean, well, here's the thing. It depends on what you mean by happiness and what a good life is. You know, I want my life as a striver, but I also recognize that it's not normal in many ways. To strive? Not to strive to the extent that you have. But is that what you mean by it's not normal? Yeah, and it creates problems. I mean, you rain hell on yourself. Yep. When you're actually doing the stuff that you've done. And there's a lot of ways that you could have had a much easier life, a much more relaxing life, a life with greater peace. Yeah, for sure. So that's all I mean. It's not a very profound point in that way. But when I, you know, when I was, when things were going poorly and I was deeply unhappy because I was in a state of regress. My wife said, "You're unhappy. You just need to quit."

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  And I said, "That's insane." I mean, like, one can't just walk away. But of course. And she said, "Yes, you can. Absolutely, you can. Do anything you want." I said, "We'll be poor." She said, "We're already poor."

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  You know, how do you know? You know, it's, you know, multiplying by zero is still zero. And, uh, and so we did. We just, we bailed. You know, we went to, we left Barcelona. We moved to Boca Raton, Florida, where nobody knew us. I took a pretty easy teaching job and I started studying by correspondence at night. Nobody knew I was doing it. She had a minimum wage job. She spoke very poor English, had not graduated from high school. Um, and so was learning English and making, you know, six bucks an hour or whatever it was. And I was getting paid to teach the French horn while secretly working on my bachelor's degree at night to build my, to rebuild the person that I was. And then finished that, went on to, and started my PhD, which is what I really thought I needed to do.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  And that took me a little, I came here to Los Angeles, as a matter of fact, to study at the Rand Graduate School in Santa Monica. And then I learned a new trade. I learned, I actually learned who I was as a person again for the first time. But it was like four years of, you know, it was weird. I couldn't, I remember trying to sign a check during that time and I couldn't replicate my own signature. And it turns out that that's actually quite frequent when people are in this period of liminality between phases of their life that their handwriting will change.

• 1:06:00Tom Bilyeu?

  What?

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's actually a common occurrence. I didn't know. I'm like, I'm trying to sign a check for the bank. And it's like, I'm sorry, Mr. Brooks, this is not the right signature.

• 1:06:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it? Is it because there's a subconscious part of you that's like, I'm not that person anymore?

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  It's I don't. It's it's not well understood, but there's a the the neurophysiology of a lot of this stuff is we're just starting to understand. There's no doubt something that where these things are connected, where your sense of yourself is somehow connected to to, you know, these motor skills in a particular way. I couldn't replicate my own signature sufficiently. I got like rejected by the bank for cashing a check into my own account at one point. I'm like, my, my, my early dementia? I mean, what early stage something? What's going on here? And what it was, was I was in this profound state of liminality, which in retrospect was this just fertile period. You know, I tell the story in the book. It's a place that you and I both know as Pacific Northwest guys. There's a place called Lincoln City in Oregon.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  That's you're near just north of Newport. And I used to go there because my aunt was the receptionist at the hotel and she had she lived in a trailer near the beach and it was like this bliss. I used to go there and I remember the first time I was trying to fish off the rocks in in Lincoln City, Oregon. I was catching nothing. This old guy lived in a shack is watching me and he comes up and says, kid, I've been I've been watching you. You know, today he'd be arrested, but and and I said, he said, you're not catching anything, right? I said, no. He says, because you're doing it wrong. You can't catch any fish unless it's a falling tide. That's when the tide is going out very quickly. Rushing out between the rocks. And I'm like, well, all the fish are gone, right? He says, no, no, no, you'll see. It's stirring up the plankton. The fish go crazy. It's happening in 45 minutes. He has his fishing pole. We throw our we throw our lines in

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  and we're pulling them out by, you know, by the tens. It's unbelievable. And afterward, he's feeling sort of philosophically, he lights up a cigarette on the rocks. I'm 11 or something. And he says, hey, kid, you know, during a falling tide, you can only make one mistake. I said, what's that? He said, not having your line in the water. And I have learned this, that the time between the tides of your life, the falling tide of your life, looks like you're losing everything. Get your line in the water, because that's the most fertile period of your life.

• 1:08:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So what does it mean to have your line in the water?

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  You must try new things. You must be fully alive. You must try everything you possibly can.

• 1:08:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I need you to define fully alive.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  To be, to, to wake up each day and to live that day full of possibility. Not to nurse your wounds, not to waste your time, not to try to do things that you used to do. To be fully alive is to be alive to the new set of experiences that's, that's coming across the transom. That's super important, because during this time of liminality, there's, by the way, there's a lot of research on this. This is not just an anecdote about, you know, this kid fishing in Oregon. This is, there's a lot of research that shows that this time between periods in your life, what's, there's a guy named Bruce Feiler, who's, who writes a book about transitions. And he said during these life quakes, you know, if your, if your spouse just left you, that's a fertile period for you to learn new things.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  If you, you know, you've lost somebody to death, if you've, if you're, if you're going through chemotherapy, for example, this is, and you're, and you're very afraid.

• 1:09:10Tom Bilyeu?

  You've just been through a pandemic.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  For example, for example, if you, during the pandemic, many people find that despite the fact that they hated it and were insecure and it was horrible, that their lives transformed for the good. That, in terms of what we're talking about here, the two curves, fluid and crystallized intelligence, that period between the two, where you're, you're declining in one and the other's increasing, but you don't know how to get on it, or even what it means, that's your most fertile period. That's when things are, can be absolutely magic. They're not gonna be fun. You might not be happy, but that's when magic can happen. So tell me about this then, because this happened to you. You've been in periods between, you've got, you're successful, but you're miserable.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  And so you had to change. What was the time between the tides for you? What happened?

• 1:10:01Tom Bilyeu?

  You have a concept that resonates with me profoundly, which is that suffering is sacred. You have to do it well, though. And I think there's a few key things that you have to recognize. And when you were telling your story about your wife, A, I don't even know who I would be without my wife. And as I think so, for a period, my wife and I now, I would say, are in very A traditional gender roles. But in the beginning of our marriage, it was very traditional, in a way that was profoundly transformative. So much of the way that she tried to express herself in the world was through me. So she was a stay-at-home wife, but very shrewd, very sharp, and would push me to be better.

• 1:10:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And was beyond supportive when things were not going well for me. And in a very similar vein of like, I don't care if we're poor. I want to see you happy. That's all that matters to me. And so when I was profoundly unhappy, I would come home and I would say, don't ask me about my day. I don't want to think about it. I have to separate myself from that. And so finally, it got to the point where she was like, look, this is starting to damage our marriage. And so I'm gonna need you to work less, to figure something out, whatever. And so that's when I went in and decided I was gonna quit and we were gonna move to a small town in Greece. And I was gonna write again. She's Greek. And it was, I was gonna do that which made me feel alive.

• 1:11:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that was the refrain. I want to feel alive again. I want to feel alive again. And so I knew what that felt like, because I had pursued my art so fervently for years. And it made me feel some kind of way. And so I recognized the decline, was able to associate it with, well, you're just trying to get rich. You've made money. It hasn't changed. So there's something here that you fundamentally misunderstood about the world. And my, I guess, liminal thing had been, it had been going on for a while. Because when I left film school and did not understand how to break into the film industry, that was a devastating period. And I would just lay on the floor. And I couldn't afford to furnish my apartment and I would, the, the Plenty of room to lie down.

• 1:12:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, like polarity was not lost on me. I could feel like that cheap nylon carpet that you get in cheap apartments. And it would leave like an imprint on my face because I would just lay on the floor. And I'm like, this is so ridiculous. And I started reading about the brain. And I don't remember where that insight came from, maybe something I picked up in college. I don't know, but I was like, I need to learn about how the brain works. And so it's late nineties and brain plasticity is being debated. And it wasn't, there wasn't an answer. Some people were like, yes, it's real. Other people were like, no, it's not. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to act as if it's true because that's so much more hopeful. And so I didn't know the Einstein quote back then, but the quote of the most important decision

• 1:13:00Tom Bilyeu?

  anybody will make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe. And me deciding that I lived in a world where brain plasticity was real was me saying I live in a friendly universe.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:11Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I started trying to get better and I was teaching at the time. And so I'm teaching film and I start noticing I can make the students films better. If I can make their films better, because by this point I believe I have no talent. That's a whole part of the story. So I believe I'm completely talentless. I thought I was born with talent. I clearly was not. I don't know how to break into the industry I'm going to teach because those that can do and those that can't teach. But I'm reading about the brain, brain plasticity. I'm helping the students make their films better. And I have a question in my mind, which is, well, if I can make their films better, why can't I make my own better? I was like, maybe I could. And so that gives me the hope that I need to be fully alive, to start approaching things

• 1:13:54Tom Bilyeu?

  with, hey, maybe I just need to get better and I can work on this. And I had read the Tao Te Ching when I was 16, which plants some very profound seeds in my mind, which I will now call a growth mindset. But back then, like, I didn't really understand how to put them to use in my life. But I start putting them to use in my life. I start getting better at filmmaking. And you couple that with my wife being just incredibly encouraging, not afraid to be poor, wanting to see me happy. Um, and, and that was when I went in and as I said before, we started rolling, I went into my partners and I quit. And I said, look, I can't keep pursuing money anymore. And so, I don't know, my version of having my, um, my line in the water was.

• 1:14:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Knowing I wanted to feel alive, believing that if I went and did the thing that I wanted to do, that I would get better at it, and that if I got good enough, I couldn't be denied.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:50Tom Bilyeu?

  And so the old Steve Martin quote, this would have been, it would have been like 28, 29.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  29, so you're really on your fluid intelligence curve in a big way.

• 1:14:57Tom Bilyeu?

  But not feeling it. So I have struggled my entire life. Have you seen Amadeus?

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, for sure.

• 1:15:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so Soliari, laments to God, "Why did you make me..." Oh my God, you're a musician, this will resonate with you. "Why did you make me just good enough to realize I'll never be as good as Mozart? Why couldn't you have made me like just another person in the crowd that can appreciate what he does? But you had to make me just good enough that I want to be that good, and I realize I never will be." That's how I have felt my entire life. I've always had friends that were just enough smarter than me, that I was like, "Damn, I'm never gonna be that smart." And so I always tried to find a different lane, and in the beginning it was being funny. And so for a long time, I wanted to be a stand-up comic, but it was all self-deprecating because I had low self-esteem. I would just make fun of myself all day, which only reinforced my low self-esteem.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:15:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And so while I was very funny, it didn't feel good, and so ultimately end up rejecting that. But yeah, so at the height of my fluid intelligence, I did not feel intelligent. I felt the exact opposite.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  And you were getting tons of material success, thus helping you to understand later on, as you, as you increased in wisdom, that if you take the instrumentality of money and make it your intrinsic focus, you're destined for misery.

• 1:16:12Tom Bilyeu?

  No doubt.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  Now, this is an interesting, you know, insight that we can take back to ancient times, but St. Thomas Aquinas in 1265 writes his Summa Theologica, the seminal text of Western philosophy, you know, forget just the theology, just Western philosophy. And in it, he talks about this very interesting thing. He says that man, mankind, humankind, we'd say today, has four idols. You pursue, everybody pursues one or more of four idols, and he calls them the substitutes for God, because his supposition is that, that we all want God, but God is extremely inconvenient. A lot of one-sided conversation. And a ton of rules. So we look for substitutes that have kind of these divine characteristics. The problem is they're 180 degrees off God. They're money, power, pleasure, and fame.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Fame, he says, honor, which is has different connotations. I have a son who's a marine who serves with honor. That's not what we mean. We're talking about admiration and the of other people of you, which is which is people want that or or just prestige. Or maybe fame, you know, some people actually want to be famous, but let's just call it money, power, pleasure, and fame. Everybody, you know, I play this game. What's my idol? And I'll ask people, not what's your actual idol, but what is not your idol? You know, of these four, money, power, pleasure, fame, what's the one that least attracts you that you could get rid of with total impunity? You don't care. And then we'll we'll start eliminating and we're going to find your idol is the whole thing.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Now, the interesting thing about that is that what he says is not that you'll go to hell if you do that. He says you'll be unhappy if you don't recognize the idol. If you don't recognize the idols in your life, the trouble is the limbic system of your brain, mother nature, that tyrant tells you that you'll actually be happy if you get your idol. And so you chase it and you chase it. You can't quite figure out what you're gonna do if you get it. Like Tom's gonna get hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. What are you gonna do with that money that you would actually like? And you can't quite figure out. Well, yeah, because if you if you articulate it, you know, if I say you'll buy a yacht. And you're like, I don't, that sounds like kind of a hassle to have a yacht. Maybe it sounds good, but not that good, right?

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  The real reason you want that is because you want admiration, because you want the the validation of what it represents of you to you. You want this transference of social comparison you've always done with other people. You want to actually feel the thing that you felt for others about yourself. That's what the idols do. That's the nasty switcheroo. That's the that's the despotism of this of of mistaking the intrinsic good for the instrumentality. That's why Thomas Aquinas was so astute in what he was talking about here. So when he would play this game.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  We see what is actually holding us back and you experienced this. Absolutely, you were chasing the thing, chasing the thing and chasing the thing, getting more and more and more miserable. Because you're actually getting closer and closer to your idol and realizing it will not realize one single thing that you needed for your unhappiness. It had no intrinsic worth. Look, there's nothing about money, by the way. The research on money is very clear that it doesn't actually ever bring happiness. It lowers unhappiness, which are processed in different hemispheres of the of the brain. Happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're not, they're different experiences. And what happens is at low levels, money will lower unhappiness. So when I could finally go to the dentist, I felt better. The trouble is, I don't know how to do the sums inside my brain.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  I just knew I felt better. And we always mistake lower unhappiness for higher happiness. And so early on, you're like, wow, I went from, from, you know, fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars a year and I felt better. I actually felt better about myself. I was able to eliminate some of these sources of, of, you know, misery, so I'm happier. And so you get into the pattern early on, you wire your brain. When you're a young person, working your way up the ladder, more money feel better. That means more happiness. And you realize that going from two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand dollars is not doing it. Not because it's not a big enough jump, apparently. So you go and you go and you go and you go and you go and you're basically just chasing a lure. It's a real tyranny.

• 1:20:25Tom Bilyeu?

  No doubt.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  And that's what you experienced. And that's why you're miserable, right? Because you couldn't get there from here.

• 1:20:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting, yes. I put different words to it and I'm curious to see what you think about this. So I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint. So we have directives in our brain that there is going to be a sense of dis-ease if you don't do certain things. I think that deep and profound unhappiness can come from pursuing the wrong thing. So that you're spending your time doing things that just, they rob you of energy instead of giving you energy. But I also think that people end up profoundly unhappy by not doing things that nature wants them to do.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:21:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And I think one of the things that nature wants us to do, and so just not doing it will be a problem, is work really hard to turn your potential into skill set.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if things come easily to you, even though you're on top of the world and everybody else admires you and wants to be you, that there will be a sense of dis-ease for you because you're not working hard.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  It doesn't feel meritorious.

• 1:21:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, nature has to find a proxy, right? So, nature wants you to have children, so it makes sure that sex is intensely pleasurable. But that's really just a proxy for have kids. So, that I find really interesting, that that nature is working in these weird proxies. So people end up like, you think you're supposed to do one thing, chase money, power, fame, whatever. You're like, why does this suck? But all of those things actually do have utility. And so, the thing with money is, people are always going to pursue it. The thing with fame is, people are always going to pursue it. Why? Because it actually has utility. So, money for instance, is more powerful than people think, not less, but it isn't what you've been told.

• 1:22:04Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's never, what myself and everyone else included is trying to do is feel better about themselves.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:11Tom Bilyeu?

  It won't help with that. It cannot touch your self-esteem, and that's like the biggest like mindfuck ever.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  Your wife won't love you more. Your children won't respect you more when you have more money, exactly.

• 1:22:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And more troubling, you won't respect you more.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:22:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Which is ultimately the, because other people will. Like, people treat me differently because I have some micro fame and because I have money.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  And it's actually troubling too. Because when you know somebody is instrumentalizing you, when you know somebody's objectifying you because of this outside characteristic, it makes you profoundly uncomfortable.

• 1:22:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  People hate that, you know, it's the one thing where we will allow people to objectify us. You're well-known, you're successful, and people will be nice to you because of that. And deep down, you know that they, they, they don't love you.

• 1:22:55Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not how it plays out in my head.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  How does it play out in your head?

• 1:22:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That I have no ability to be vulnerable around them.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I see. For sure, but that's the same part of self-objective, that's the same part of objectification. And if, when you're objectified, you can't be a full person. There's another interesting thing that might actually apply. You're a creative. You're fundamentally a creative. When you were doing your work, you were thrown off the creative process. Now, why is creativity intensely pleasurable? You've read the work of Michai Chiksentz-Michai, the great social psychologist who wrote a book, a very famous book called Flow. F-L-O-W, flow. And what it talks about is how minutes, how hours turn to minutes of sheer pleasure when you're in this flow state. When you're doing something that you can master. It's not too easy.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  It requires your ability, but you can master it because of your skill. And you can get into this groove. Creatives must create. If creatives are not creating, they will be miserable because they can't attain a flow state. It's very possible, Tom, that when you were in this part of your career, you needed to create. You wanted to quit and go to Greece to do creation. You were basically craving that. It's like you had no protein in your diet for a year or something. And it's like, I don't know, I just can't stop thinking about peanut butter. Because you were craving this macronutrient in your psyche. And you were never getting a flow state. And if you're denied the flow state that uniquely comes to you through creativity, you're going to be practically suicidal.

• 1:24:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it was definitely a rough period. That's interesting. I've never thought about it as being intrinsically a reflection of the pleasurable ability of flow. But you might be right. It's just, I feel alive. That is the right word. I feel alive when I'm creating. I am never happier than when I'm creating.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  It's amazing. People who are fundamentally creatives, look, same thing. When I retired as a CEO and I came back to writing, speaking, and teaching, I'm a new man. I'm a new man for the past three years. It's extraordinary.

• 1:24:53Tom Bilyeu?

  You said something a while ago. I didn't want to interrupt you, but I want to go back to it now. You said you rediscovered yourself.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Tom Bilyeu?

  What does that mean? Like, you need a sense of identity? Is that a question? Or part of this, like is when you say you rediscovered, is it a self narrative?

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  It's you. You know who you deeply are as a person. You're acquainted with yourself. You're acquainted with your true self. And just as with people who are around you, you can, you can create a, an identity that's actually not authentic. You can create an identity yourself that's not authentic. You can be giving yourself a self narrative. That's not true to actually who you are as a person.

• 1:25:28Tom Bilyeu?

  What does it mean who you are, what you're good at, what you love?

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  It generally speaking, has to do with being in the zone of what you actually love to do and what you appreciate most in your life. When you're in line with your own values, when you're living according to your own values. So Jung would have put it this way, Carl Jung. He, his definition of his understanding of happiness was that you need to understand your own values, what you value, what you think is proper and correct and moral. And if you know what that is and can articulate it and live according to that, you will be happy. If you

• 1:25:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you agree with that?

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  I think it's actually, there's a lot of truth to that because you know, you have to figure out what you think, what your model of the world actually is. What you think truth is. And then living in accord with your own values, with your own integrity is, is really critically important. Because when people live outside that groove, they're, they're never in equilibrium. They're just never, the problem is that they're not comfortable. They're not comfortable in their own skin. And I've noticed this, you know, I was working, you know, it was, it was, it was good being the president of a think tank. I was lucky to be president of a think tank. I believed in the work, but it wasn't who I was. And so I was kind of out of my groove for 10 years, 10 and a half years. And when I started going, when I went back to writing and speaking and teaching and doing creative work, I said,

• 1:26:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that always who you were? Or was that because you switched into crystal?

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  No, it's always who I was always a creative, you know, as a kid, I was painting and writing and composing music. And I just always wanted to be, I was a creativity is the most important thing in my life or curiosity and creativity. Are the, are the most important thing that I can, not most important thing in my life, the most important thing that I can do. And when I'm actually happiest and when I was managing a large workforce, managing a lot of creatives to their best selves. I mean, it was, they had certainly creative moments to it, to be sure, but it wasn't comfortable to me. And when I, my second curve, which was much more crystallized intelligence is a lot, also a lot more creative. So I was kind of out of equilibrium for a long time during that period as well, which compounds the problem of my declining fluid intelligence.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  Also not being in a creative role, but it's just so much better. I mean, I I teach at a great university, which I love. I write for a magazine every week about things that I'm really interested in. I get to talk to you about it. This is, well, beats working.

• 1:27:44Tom Bilyeu?

  So true. For some reason, I was just thinking today, like, I was pacing, listening to you, and I was like, I'm technically working right now.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  Weird.

• 1:27:53Tom Bilyeu?

  I was like, this is cool.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  It is super cool. And, you know, there are people that I've met, it's interesting, you know, I talk to lawyers who don't feel like they're working. I talked to a guy who's putting in cabinets in my house, and, and he's super into putting in cabinets. He loves making cabinets. He was talking about all the details and he's so proud of his work. And I say, do you, do you, do you like your work? And he said, it doesn't feel like work? You know, I went on a fishing expedition, deep sea fishing expedition with my son Carlos. We, we, he loves to fish, we go fishing. And, uh, and the guy says, every morning I wake up and he says, today I'm going fishing.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  And so this is what we all need to find. I mean, we need to, each person, because we have the blessing of living in an economy where you can do a lot of different things. Um, the problem is that people chase these extrinsic lures, the money, power, pleasure and fame, and they get out of the groove of what they're supposed to do. And then they wonder why they're unhappy.

• 1:28:55Tom Bilyeu?

  What are some habits that I can easily incorporate into my daily life to accomplish fulfillment?

• 1:29:02Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, here's the important thing to understand about fulfillment, is that it is a process and there is a formula, what I call the fulfillment formula, the aptly named. And the way that it works is this, first, I want you to understand that there are these imperatives in your brain, given to you by evolution, and you are going to be emotionally rewarded for doing certain things and emotionally punished for not doing other things. And that's where fulfillment comes in. When you put yourself in an evolutionary context, you're gonna understand why the formula is what the formula is. So I'll quickly give you the formula and then explain it in context. So the formula goes like this. You're gonna work really hard to gain a set of skills

• 1:29:45Tom Bilyeu?

  that allow you to serve not only yourself, but other people. Okay? Now, why is that the formula? So first of all, it's very important to understand that growing up on the plains of the savanna, you would have had to work really hard to stay alive, to feed your family. So you had to face tremendous danger, massive obstacles. And so, nature only has two ways to get you moving, and that is pleasure and pain. Punishment, reward. So when it wants behavior, it's going to reward that by making it feel amazing. And if it doesn't want behavior, then it's going to make sure that if you're engaging in it, it sucks. And if it wants you to do something and you don't do it, that will also suck.

• 1:30:29Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is where pleasure and pain come in and where you have to really understand why this cycle is so deeply embedded in your brain. So because, from an evolutionary standpoint, working hard was necessary for survival, then working hard has to feel good. And conversely, if you're not working hard, then you're gonna feel a deep sense of unease. So that's why I say that the first step in the fulfillment formula is that you're gonna have to work really hard to gain a set of skills. Now, the reason that you're working hard is because if you don't work hard, even now, in a modern context where you can probably get away without putting that much time and effort into something, the reason that fulfillment is going to demand it

• 1:31:13Tom Bilyeu?

  is because from an evolutionary standpoint, you needed to have that embedded in your brain, the directive to work hard to accomplish these things. So working hard really is its own reward, Dad. Something that he used to tell me all the time when I was a kid, and he's absolutely right. It is truly ingrained in us, even though we sometimes fight and don't want to do it, and we also have the impulse to chill and lay on the couch. But if you're not working hard, you will feel a deep sense of unease. Alright, so we're gonna work hard to gain a set of skills. Now, the set of skills is really about serving the group. So, we know that humans are a creature that leverages culture.

• 1:31:55Tom Bilyeu?

  So, so many other animals are hardwired. And so, a horse, when it's born, 20 minutes later, it's doing all the things that a horse can do. But humans are different than that. So, we take this long period of gestation, followed by this long infancy. And in all of that, we are going through these different phases of development. And around the ages of 11 to 15, you go into this drinking deeply from the culture moment, where it's not just about your environment anymore. It's about the actual culture and taking in that information. So, you're gonna gain a set of skills that matter to you and matter to the group. Okay, and that's the part of culture. So, you're working really hard to gain the set of skills that matter to you and the group. Something that's exciting to you.

• 1:32:40Tom Bilyeu?

  You just enjoy doing it. That's very important for fulfillment. And then, it allows you to serve not only yourself, but the group. Because we're a social creature, we of course need to be rewarded for doing things for the group. And we're going to be punished for not doing things for the group in our own minds. Okay, that's very important. If you're not contributing to the group, you will have this sense of meaninglessness. And this is where meaning and purpose come in. I'm doing something not just for myself, but for other people. It is ingrained in your mind to do that. Okay, so you get this set of skills. Now, this is where passion comes in. You wanna be developing a set of skills that you're deeply passionate about. But understand, passion also is a process. So, you start with something you find interesting. You engage with it.

• 1:33:23Tom Bilyeu?

  If the more you engage with it, the more fascinating it becomes, then we're gonna go down the Process of gaining actual mastery, doing the boring, difficult, repetitive tasks required to truly master that thing in a way that the group values. Now, when you do that, you get into a passion feedback loop, even though it is boring and difficult at times. As you get better at this thing that matters to the group, the group gives you feedback, and that feedback, when it's positive, feels wonderful. Thank you for whatever your contribution is. Oh, my gosh, it really matters. It's amazing. Thank you so much. Which makes you want to do more, which you know to get that feedback more, you're gonna need to go get better at that thing. And that's how you get people in these virtuous cycles. You're working really hard to gain a set of skills

• 1:34:07Tom Bilyeu?

  that gets the group excited about your contributions, which make you feel good about yourself, which make you want to get even better at that thing so that you can contribute even more to the group. And that is fulfillment. There's all this meaning and purpose behind it. You're doing it to serve other people. It's bigger than yourself. And now you get the neurochemical cocktail that you've been looking for by doing that formula. That's fulfillment. Fail to optimize for fulfillment at your own peril.

• 1:34:36Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, next question. Can you shed some light on how to be still in times of chaos and focus on working towards fulfillment? First of all, I want to acknowledge that chaos can be very difficult to deal with. And it requires a lot of emotional management, and you've got to be able to do many things. Quite frankly, it is gonna be a whole grab egg of tricks, my friends, for you to get through and get on the other side of that chaos. All right, first things first. Meditation is gonna be huge, okay? Just at a physiological level, you've got to get that background radiation down to zero. Now, this can be very difficult when you're in the middle of something and you really feel like you're fighting for your life. But you need to make time for that. This is a physiological process. By getting into that calm and creative state,

• 1:35:21Tom Bilyeu?

  you're going to find answers that you otherwise wouldn't see. So we need to get out of that panic mode and into calm, creative problem solving. Now, remember, action cures all. So we've got this fulfillment thing that we're chasing. We've got the fulfillment formula. We know exactly what we need to do. We're in the middle of the chaos, and the thing that's going to solve for that, meditation. So we're thinking calmly and clearly. But also having a plan of attack and then going after it. So there's been really cool studies done by Andrew Huberman and other people about how lateral eye movement can actually pull you out of that stressed and anxious state because what it's doing is it's mimicking you moving forward.

• 1:36:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And moving forward on these evolutionary timeframes, we've been rewarded for that because it means that you're confronting your problem. You're working hard. You're dealing with the saber-toothed tiger, the warring tribe, the just need to go out and hunt, whatever. You're dealing with it. And since nature only has pleasure and pain, if you're dealing with it, nature's going to make sure to give you some pleasure on that. And conversely, if you're trying to hide from it, that's not going to feel great and you're going to really spiral. It is crazy to me how taking action and getting into problem-solving mode immediately shifts me out of anxiety. It is absolutely profound. So that's going to be a big part of this. And when you're doing that in the context of the fulfillment formula, now you know that this is going to be something you're working really hard to gain, that set of

• 1:36:50Tom Bilyeu?

  skills that serve not only yourself but other people. So you're thinking about other people. You're thinking about service. And that has a way of really helping you get through the chaos because it's giving you the emotional energy to have the stamina to fight through to get to the other side. And as I think it was Churchill that said, "If you're going through hell, keep going." But keep going armed with meaning and purpose around how you're contributing to the group, around getting these skills, around being in problem-solving mode, and around taking action because that is going to be the thing that cures all. And then don't forget, sleep hygiene, very important, meditation important, keep your diet right, don't tell yourself a negative story, don't allow yourself to loop in defeat,

• 1:37:34Tom Bilyeu?

  find people that can elevate you, find people that will, in a very real, skills-based way, help you see the path forward and help you hold on to the only belief that matters, that you can figure this out.

• 1:37:51Tom Bilyeu?

  What are some action steps I can take right away to train my mind to not go after easy pleasures and happiness? And instead, seek the gratification that comes from fulfillment? Alright. The great news is, all you have to do is recognize the truth of the human condition. And the truth of the human condition is that chasing momentary happiness won't fulfill you. That's literally what I wanted to say. And I'm not, because we're talking about fulfillment, I won't use a just recursive loop, but that really is true. All of that stuff is so transient. What makes fulfillment interesting is that it is this far more stabilizing neurochemical state.

• 1:38:35Tom Bilyeu?

  So, your brain is constantly checking in with you, making sure on a subconscious level that you're doing the things that you need to do to be of service to the group, to be of service to yourself, to make sure that you're taking care of yourself and your family and your loved ones and your tribe, okay? So there's this subconscious record-keeping going on, and that's exactly what's happening. That's why you sometimes will feel the unease in your body before consciously you know what's going on. And you feel it, ah, there's something off. You need to take the time to identify what it is to be able to articulate it in a single nice crispy sentence, so you can figure out exactly what it is that you need to do to move forward.

• 1:39:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, now, once you understand that that is just the nature of the game, that going after these momentary things will be exactly that, it's gonna be momentary, it's gonna fade, you're gonna have a sense of unease, you're not going to be in the shape that you want emotionally. Once I know, oh, going down that road is not going to leave me in the emotional state that I want to be in, then it's very easy to go, well, this one might be a little bit more difficult, it might take more sustained effort, but it yields these tremendous results. So, the example that I always give is eating junk food. I love junk food. And truly love it, by the way. It is, it gives me a drug-like high. It is so fun to eat sugary foods.

• 1:40:02Tom Bilyeu?

  The problem is that, especially as I get older, it hurts, literally, after the fact. My joints will hurt, I won't sleep as well. I wake up the next day and it's just like I have like a slight hangover. It's literally what it feels like. And because I know that that's the outcome, it's like, well, on the times where I don't mind and it's like, well, I'm gonna, you know, enjoy this drug-like thing for a minute. I'll sort of walk a fine line, have some fun here, suffer a little tomorrow. But on balance, maybe I come out a little bit ahead on the happiness. But if I try to do it two days in a row, forget it, three days in a row, it really starts to be like a real problem. So even over the holidays now, when I let myself off of, you know, the hook with all of my normal disciplines and all of that,

• 1:40:46Tom Bilyeu?

  even then now, I keep myself in check just because I don't like the way that it feels. So, once you understand, oh, I can do this thing over here and feel really good, or I can do this thing over here, it's very momentary, it's very transient, it doesn't last, I kinda, you know, I'm not where I want to be and I begin to ask myself questions like, what am I doing with my life? So just knowing that to me, fulfillment is much longer in duration, it's much more resilient. I can be fulfilled even when things are hard, even when things aren't going my way, even when it's difficult. In fact, the fulfillment I get from contributing to the group is the very thing that inoculates me from the hard times, being able to knock me all the way down. Because on those moments where you're just beleaguered and you're getting it from all sides and it just seems like

• 1:41:29Tom Bilyeu?

  everything is crashing on you at once. In those moments, you're gonna cling to what you're doing to help other people. And nature will ensure that that is going to make you feel way, way better. All right. How do you become fulfillment-driven versus achievement-driven when everywhere around you see people and society running for the ladder?

• 1:41:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. One, I want to acknowledge the power of success. Success is amazing. And winning at the game in a way that's recognized by your peers is always going to feel good. So, understand that you don't have to be, you know, Mother Teresa in order to

• 1:42:15Tom Bilyeu?

  be worthwhile and to love yourself. It's okay to want some success. And honestly, if we really look at Mother Teresa, I'm betting that to her it really mattered to succeed in a way that was deeply meaningful. And she certainly seemed to be trying to reach as many people as humanly possible. And so, if we can look at someone like that and say, "Well, that was a worthwhile endeavor", then what we're really saying is, as long as the way in which you're contributing is meaningful, then that's like the double whammy of you should absolutely feel good about that. So, we've got two things. One, it's okay to want to be successful. I want to be successful, even more successful than I've been.

• 1:42:58Tom Bilyeu?

  I want to scale and touch just an untold number of lives. And I don't feel badly about that. I love that. It makes me want to go out and help more people. Now, I don't think that everybody should pursue scale in the way that I pursue scale. It certainly has its own complications. But if you know that about yourself and you want to play on that level and you're willing to pursue it, knowing you may never get there, right? I may never get where I want to go. But I love striving to play at that scale. So, when you are looking at it from that perspective, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It becomes toxic when you're aiming yourself at something that isn't helping you, or it's only helping you, and it isn't helping other people.

• 1:43:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And that, again, just going back to this idea of you're a social creature with evolutionary imperatives to help contribute to the group. And when you're not doing that, you will automatically feel a sense of unease, that there's something missing. So, I say, do both. Very cool to pursue like the, the big, grand rewards, whatever it is that you want, but make sure that you're doing that in the context of something that serves other people as well. If you're doing that and trying to pursue fulfillment at the... The grandest level that makes sense for you and your personality? I say, go for it. So you don't need to artificially downplay yourself or try to be small. Like, go crazy, be bombastic, be big, do your thing, go as hard as you want.

• 1:44:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Just make sure that it's in service of something that is honorable.

• 1:44:32Tom Bilyeu?

  That's it. All right. What are ways I can recognize when I am fulfilled, especially when I am still in the middle of my journey? All right, so one, this is about taking time to catalog the things we're grateful for. Just really stopping to either journal or think through, what is it that I'm doing? What's my goal? How am I attempting to contribute to the group? Am I actually contributing to the group? And then you can use David Goggins' idea of the cookie jar, where it's like you remember the times where you meaningfully impacted somebody. You did something, you got amazing feedback, it really helped somebody out, it was aligned with, you know, what your goal is.

• 1:45:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Then those are the things that you put into that memory bank. And you pull on those when things are getting hard and you remember, yo, I did this thing. I can do more things, I can push harder, go farther, help more people, whatever the case may be. And so as you think about that and you recognize you're not where you want to be yet, but you're focusing on the ways in which you've already contributed, that's going to give you the energy that you need to keep pushing through. And ultimately, you have to be honest with yourself about whether or not you are fulfilled at this moment, because it isn't something that you're going to be able to talk yourself into.

• 1:45:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Because maybe you're not, maybe you're not feeling your contributions, maybe you're not doing things in a way that's joyful. I talk about goals need to be two things, exciting and honorable. Okay, so if honorable is that it helps not only yourself but other people, don't forget about the exciting part. You've got to be just amped up, you've got to be doing something that you want to do. For instance. Is it possible that I could help more people by doing something other than building Impact Theory? It's entirely possible. But Impact Theory is what I love doing on a daily basis. I love doing content like this. I love the people that I get to meet, the people that I get to interview. I love the idea of building film and TV and NFTs. Like, all of that stuff for me is absolutely thrilling. I love it.

• 1:46:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Maybe I shouldn't, but I love it. And because it's so exciting for me, I have handcrafted my life to make the biggest contribution to the tribe, if you will, that I can, but doing things that I love and want to be the best in the world at. So if you're not doing that, then all of this might feel empty. Or you might be serving the group in a way that's sort of by rote. Instead of, and this is a great example, I'm almost certain this was Toyota. So Toyota was trying to encourage their employees to do charity work. And they found that people were going to soup kitchens and helping feed the homeless. And it was nice, but the people at Toyota felt like they weren't really leveraging their unique skillset.

• 1:47:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is why I say fulfillment is about working really hard on a set of skills that matter to you and allow you to serve the group. So you go down this, that passion loop of getting, gaining true mastery of something that gets you positive feedback. So what Toyota's employees ended up doing was going and making the soup kitchen more efficient so that they could feed more hungry people faster. And that made them feel extraordinarily good. So figuring out why it is exactly that it's coming up for you that you might not be feeling fulfilled. So one, you might not be doing the right things, so making sure that you're following the fulfillment formula. And then two, making sure that you have that meaning and purpose. You know why you're doing what you're doing.

• 1:48:09Tom Bilyeu?

  You feel connected to the people that you're serving. It's a big deal. At Impact Theory, every team meeting, we go through and read something that somebody from the community has written, explaining how Impact Theory has touched their lives. It's incredibly important to us to re-ground ourselves around the people that we're actually serving. So that can be an important thing to just take that time. What are you doing that is helping, that's moving the needle? You know, circle around it. Write it down, like really focus on that thing and internalize it. And that should help. Alright, everybody. Fulfillment is one of the most important things. I'm telling you, the punchline of life, the very thing that you were trying to optimize for is very simply fulfillment done in a joyful manner. Fulfillment and joy.

• 1:48:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Fulfillment and joy. That really is the key. It isn't the grand success, so there's nothing wrong with chasing that. It isn't accolades, it isn't money, it isn't fame, it's none of those things. It is truly working really hard to gain a set of skills that you care about, that allow you to serve not only yourself, but other people, towards an end that excites you.

• 1:49:18Speaker 03

  Well, I think there's a through line of change as a thing that's a constant in our lives. There's change that we choose. We've become fed up with the status quo or normal, being okay with being okay. We decide that we're gonna finally create the courageous first steps in making that change a thing that gets us closer to who we're meant to be, or the version of what becoming looks like for us. And then there's the change that chooses us, in that we think we have some control, that illusion is a thing that we can connect to, until we wake up one day and there's a diagnosis, there's a job that no longer exists, a relationship that ends.

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  And in a world where I had as the pillar, one of the biggest pillars of my identity, husband to Rachel, the change choosing me in this, the end of our marriage, was something that I now didn't know who I was in the absence of not being who I'd been. And in a world where we were also working together, that identity of what I did and what I thought I'd do for the rest of my life was something that in a single swoop was pulled out and now required that I, in having been handed this blank piece of paper, go through the work of trying to fill out what next looked like.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  And I say in the book, and I've said it plenty of times, it's both parts exhilarating and terrifying. At the beginning, it's way more terrifying than it is exhilarating. But that's part of what courage ends up being a required ingredient for turning the terrifying into the exhilarating because when you realize, oh, there is no control, there's only the way that we respond to the circumstances that life presents. Or the way that we in choosing change manufacture new events or a new road, a new map that we ultimately end up sailing off of, that still, because it ends up being different than something

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  we've previously been familiar with, or got in the hang of, or have comfort with, requires courage to step into it.

• 1:51:30Tom Bilyeu?

  It's the whole idea of having to lose things first, I find really interesting. And I don't know if, I remember when Fight Club came out and the way that it felt and the sort of, I don't know, it made me feel more attached to it, but I lived in the building that he, in the beginning, he showcases and he describes the building and all that. I don't know if he intentionally took it from the brochure, but it's so specific to how they marketed that building, and my guess is that he did.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And so he's describing a building I actually lived in, in like all the, you know, ways about how modernity has sort of trapped us in this thing, and then he blows it up. And so there was a sense of, I don't know, it was a real cultural moment. And you going through a divorce so publicly has that same kind of interesting ring of like, and now let me show you the process of building up. So if Fight Club takes a far darker look at, you know, that the process of creative destruction, your life and the book specifically is this really interesting take on the beautiful side of creative, or the creative opportunities that come from destruction.

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Walk me through, like, as things are falling down around you, I'm sure your first instinct is to try to hold it together. When did you first get the sense of maybe actually letting this fall down is the right place to start?

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  It took a while, to be honest, because I initially was very much in this, well, let's do the work to fix it. Can we, is there some way that we can keep this thing that has been put on the table from happening? And it was evident very early on, oh, this is a decision that has been made. There is no negotiating, as it were. And acceptance was a thing that took time for me. And, and the reality was, in part, one of the first casualties in my life was my imagination. Because I, in this thing that I didn't think could happen, having happened, the vision that I'd had for so long of what the rest of my life would look like,

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  and who I'd be with, and where we'd live, and the way that we do work, it being gone made my ability to see, what is, not even five years from now, what is a year from now? I just, I had a compromised imagination. It was gone.

• 1:53:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And you had a sense of that loss?

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. No, I was acutely aware of this inability for me to forecast anything beyond what was now a survival, survival mode of sorts of, I just got to get through tomorrow. Like, I was in deep grief, just deep grief. And in that sadness of now letting go of what I'd previously thought things might look like, I was trying to find something that I might connect to that would allow me to recultivate or respark that imagination. And the place I had to start, to be honest, was really getting intimate with my fear. Because most of why my imagination had been lost

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  was because there were so much fear around trying to figure out something that I'd never contemplated.

• 1:54:46Tom Bilyeu?

  So that becomes like a screaming voice in your head that stops you from seeing things?

• 1:54:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, I ended up having this conversation with fear, where I was trying to understand, what is it? What are the things that are inside?

• 1:54:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And the reason you feel the need to have this conversation is it's ever-present and you don't like it?

• 1:55:03Speaker 03

  It's ever-present, and it is 100% inhibitor from me being able to see anything hope-filled. It's, it's hard for me to see the exhilarating part of the choose-your-own-adventure narrative that I am suggesting I believe exists, but I can't connect to.

• 1:55:22Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, so sit me down in that moment. So... You, so I've known you before divorce, through divorce, after divorce. And there's no doubt that we all sort of present things to the world. But you, from the outside, you handled it extraordinarily well. And that doesn't mean that you didn't process grief and cry and all that. But it's really interesting. I think, having read the book, I'm gonna step back. You are intriguing to me because you don't see yourself the way that I see you. And while there's no doubt that you know yourself better than I know you,

• 1:56:03Tom Bilyeu?

  the thing that you've had to like fight and claw to earn your own respect around is, from the outside, so self-evidently impressive about you. So in the book, you're like, I mean, built through courage. Like, you know, you've got to step outside your comfort zone, but I'm the guy that always gets trapped by my comfort zone. No, you're not. You're the guy that, for whatever reason, is constantly able to reinvent, reinvent, reinvent. Like, when I hear you describe what you did in the corporate world, how many times you took different jobs and just said yes before you knew what was going on. But every time, it's hard for you, which makes you, in my opinion, the right person to write the user's manual on how to get through this. So now, as we sit down with you in that fear, I want to know how, because most people, they're lost in that forever. Okay, I've known plenty of people, they get divorced,

• 1:56:48Tom Bilyeu?

  and 25 years later, they're still stewing in that same space they were two months after the divorce. You've already made some pretty extraordinary leaps, begun to put things back together. But if you sit me down in that moment of fear, where you can't see anything hope-filled, what's the first thing that you grab a hold of that allows you to begin to construct a context for how to move forward?

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  The first thing was truly getting to a place of acceptance. Right? Like, I was in denial that this was even happening. It felt like I was in the upside-down, that like, the matrix is a thing now. Like, is this the simulation? I've, in some ways, at the beginning, convinced myself that there was the possibility that this wasn't even real.

• 1:57:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, because it just, it didn't make sense. And then, I got to a place of, no, no, no, this is real. You have the responsibility to parent these four kids. You have the responsibility to show up for your life. How are you gonna do it? And the thing, the question I started asking was, what did I need to just become the version of who I'd hoped to be 90 days from now? Right? Like, the first thing I had to do was really shrink the window of my forward-looking vision casting, where I'd been a person doing five and 10 years, here's where I'm gonna be, and I could just, like, a movie playing in my head, describe what it was gonna look like.

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  I needed to understand, what did I need to do today to get myself just 90 days into the future? And for me, it ended up going through the question of health. How might I, in the five dimensions that I've identified as being important for me in health, mental, emotional, spiritual, relational, and physical health, how might I have two or three things for each of those dimensions of health every day that might become part of my routine and part of what ends up being my set of habits that will allow me to create just enough inertia from this now standing still, I describe a sailboat in the book, that is waiting for wind. Right? Like, okay, I gotta at least build the sail.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  I gotta put it up, so that when the wind starts to come, I'm actually prepared to move forward. And so for me, it was, alright, what do I need in my mental health? Well, I needed to see professional freaking help on the regular. I mean, I was talking to a therapist a couple times a week, because I didn't understand why I was thinking what I was thinking, why I was feeling what I was feeling, and that interaction created a little bit of inertia.

• 1:59:30Tom Bilyeu?

  You didn't understand it, or it was erratic? One minute, I can make it, the next minute, no, I'm never going to?

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  Both, both. I didn't understand the way that the voice in my head was being so critical of not having had this thing that was so important work out. I'm just an achiever by nature. I've had success in career, I've had success in a whole host of things, and yet, I couldn't, at the time, see that my marriage not working out wasn't a success. My marriage was a success. It just was the end of my marriage in what had been, or the end of our relationship in what had been, as we've now transitioned into something new. But at the beginning, I saw it as a failure, that I somehow had failed. And I was really, as I'm sitting with my therapist

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  or having a conversation through podcasts or books with myself, trying to understand, what could you have done differently? Or what are you meant to learn from this? And some of that work, yep, would allow me just a little breadcrumb. Now I'm taking one step closer to an answer that over what now is almost two years' worth of time, had me really come to appreciate, I am who I have become, not in spite of what happened, but because of what happened. And that as much as I had this bold declaration at the end of 2019, 2020 is going to be my best year ever. I have publicly declared that 45 was the year of my life, that I was waiting for this best year to happen.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  And what I couldn't appreciate then, that I see so clearly now, is that I was not ever going to be the person who could dictate the conditions that would bring my best forward. Right? And so, yeah, if in some ways, I brought on some of what ends up happening in 2020, I apologize for the pandemic and anything else I may have been responsible for. I don't think that for real. But I also, right? Like, I prayed that certain things that happened would never have happened, and I was doing so at the expense of how that cause and effect relationship produced the best. I wouldn't have been brought to my knees in a way that brought me closer to my spiritual walk. I wouldn't have had the way

• 2:01:47Speaker 03

  that this divorce created closeness with my kids, the kind of a relationship that comes out of it. I wouldn't have spent the kind of time in physical transformation, really.

• 2:01:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Which your physical transformation is crazy.

• 2:01:59Speaker 03

  Well, no, thank you. But like, it is, you know, moving my body and pushing myself to do things physically has been an exercise in showing myself that I can do things that go beyond what I believed myself to be capable of. So that I could take that experience in the physical realm and believe it in the mental and emotional realm. Oh, you can also handle things mentally, you can handle things emotionally that go wildly beyond what you believed yourself to be capable of because you now have proof, you have evidence in this other part of your life.

• 2:02:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Body transformation is the most underutilized mental transformation tool ever. And the number of people that I've seen, whether it's in business, whether it's, you know, in something like a divorce or your career, whatever, where when you show yourself that you can set an intention, go and lift a progressively heavier weight and your body actually changes, you look different, you feel different, and you can actually pick up heavier things, like there's something that goes on of like, oh, what if the same thing is happening in my mind? You can't see it in such a tangible way, but when you go through a physical transformation like that, it really does leave you with something truly profound.

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is something too. I describe myself as a recovering fixed mindset person, and yet the attribution of growth in a gym or inside of the physical realm was never anything that I would have indicted myself for not being good because I was not already someone who could lift a certain amount of weight. But the ability to connect dots and see, oh, yeah, you can continue to grow in the space. You can grow, whether it's muscle, or endurance, or stamina, recovery, all these things have been things that have changed the way that I think about growth in every aspect of my life, not just the physical realm, which is part of why it's so powerful.

• 2:03:47Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, so you, things are crumbling down around you, we're in grief, we can no longer attach to hope, and we realize, okay, I have these five pillars in my life. And in the book, you have a really great quote that I think is what all this is hanging on, which is, "The antidote to fear is a plan." And I thought that was brilliant. It's absolutely true. The same idea I sum up by saying that action cures all. If I'm super anxious about something, all I need to do is start dealing with the problem head on, like just go start actually executing against it. Because it's that, it does that same thing. It puts your brain in a problem solving mode instead of a just looping over that it is a problem. All right, so we're there, we recognize that the antidote to all of this is going to be

• 2:04:32Tom Bilyeu?

  getting a plan. We chunk our life, life up into pieces, and we start putting goals in each of those areas.

• 2:04:41Tom Bilyeu?

  The the cool thing about the Tyler Durden quote that you have in the book is that it it has this open ended question of if you can now do anything, what's the anything you want to do? So how did you begin to like, put that together? The whole vision that you'd had for, you know, forty five years is gone. What do you start to piece together and how do you do it?

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  So for me, there were two very, very big things that were somewhat of departure from who I'd been as a more pragmatic, practical person. I began, even though your introduction of me having been someone who's taken more chances or put myself out of my comfort zone is the greatest compliment and something I probably don't see enough in myself.

• 2:05:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:25Speaker 03

  I have been in a season of yes, like just radical yes, so that if opportunity presents itself for me to do something that I have not previously done, that might publicly embarrass me, that I will fail wildly and spectacularly at, for the opportunity to fail wildly and spectacularly at, I have just said yes.

• 2:05:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Why? When did that become a strategy?

• 2:05:48Speaker 03

  In part because of what was the byproduct of the learning of, you know, now that I can do anything, I, in being somewhat lost from who I am now that I'm not who I was, I had to go on something of a fact finding mission to rediscover who I'm going to be. And so, I mean, one of the questions that was a provocateur of the conversation around divorce was a simple, what do you like to do in your spare time? Which I should be able to answer. And yet, there were some codependent things that existed in our relationship.

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  There was some, there was some stuff that kept me from being as connected to myself. And so, the discovery of where passion might exist in my life, or where curiosity might exist in my life, became, well, there's only one way that I'm actually going to get to the bottom of it, and that's by just saying yes to a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna probably eliminate or disqualify a bunch of things that I am definitely not curious about or definitely don't have passion for. But I have to start by saying yes. So that was the first, that was the first big thing.

• 2:07:06Tom Bilyeu?

  The, really fast, I want to tie that to something you say in the book that I thought was really profound. So you talk about, you, you have to be very careful about how you frame something. And I forget the exact example you use in the book, but you're like, let me describe the same thing two different ways. Both are true, but one is like, you know, you failed at this thing and, you know, that set you back at work or whatever. But also, this is also true. From that thing, you learned this and that's what ended up giving you the promotion. And it's like, which one of those you want to focus on and tell yourself is really gonna determine your future? Tony Robbins has a really great quote where he says, "The quality of your questions will determine the quality of your life." And was there a conscious thing around that? Like, I need to ask a different question around,

• 2:07:51Tom Bilyeu?

  okay, I can look at this as everything has fallen apart, or I can look at this as this is now my opportunity to change who I am in a way that I find exciting.

• 2:08:03Speaker 03

  It's interesting because it actually ties to what my second thing was going to be, which was this conceit, this belief that good would come from it, which is hard to manufacture at the beginning when you're sitting at the bottom of a ditch of...

• 2:08:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Were you leaning on faith on that? Or was there something else that triggered that?

• 2:08:19Speaker 03

  Faith, yes, but not just like religious faith. But this was like belief that the things that I would need in the journey would present themselves along the way.

• 2:08:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Because that's just how life works?

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  No, because I believe that if you look for things, you find them. And I was at a place where I was desperate to find the evidence that good could still come from this. And so I went on the hunt for it. And when I, e- e- even as I'm, you know, Cal Ripken streak of crying on consecutive days in like, uh, you know, like, I, it was hard.

• 2:08:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Only old people get that reference.

• 2:08:59Speaker 03

  Well, I know.

• 2:09:00Tom Bilyeu?

  But, great reference.

• 2:09:01Speaker 03

  You know, like, I, I did have plenty of days where just getting out of bed felt like the win. And yet, I'd still start my day with gratitude, like finding the good that was already present despite the conditions that I was in was a way to just hack a little bit of how I might, because of that gratitude practice, go on the hunt for things to be grateful for. And so some of it was just this conceit of think, good things are going to come out of this. You will become something because of the post-traumatic growth that can come out of the hardest thing that you've ever experienced.

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  And it's, of course, way easier to say that and see that today than it was in real time. But I just had a little thing here, a little thing there. A text from a pastor that came every day for the first two months of the experience. Eleven really profound words. What small piece of sadness can I hold for you today? Right? He wasn't trying to diminish the pain and grief. He wasn't trying to even do anything more than just offer solidarity and some empathy for the fact that this is a shared experience kind of thing. I'll walk alongside you while you do it. But the fact that that showed up every day was just a reminder, some evidence of the things you need are going to show up when you need them along this journey.

• 2:10:26Speaker 03

  I'm out running and a new neighbor has happened to move in down the street. I had my head down. I was very emotional that day. I was not interested, like I got on a plane kind of thing. I don't want to talk to you in the seat next to me. And yet, I ran past him. I end up turning around to come back and introduce myself. And they ended up becoming part therapist, part comedy buddy, part guy who was showing up to barbecue every day when I was struggling to remind myself to eat. And they showed up right when I needed them. And so like.

• 2:11:01Tom Bilyeu?

  What made you turn around?

• 2:11:04Speaker 03

  To be honest, I don't know. I mean, like, it felt, now it feels more like a miracle. Like, oh, wow, I had no concept of what I was turning around for. I'm not, like, close necessarily to my neighbors generally. I live in the middle of nowhere, Texas, on a, you know, parcel of land where I can't see who's on either side of my house. And yet, on that day, for whatever reason, that was like, that was the instinct, that was the tug. There's a lot, a lot of, what I end up writing in the book is about trusting the voice, trusting, you know, whether it's Glennon Doyle's definition of knowing, or voice of God, or intuition,

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  or gut, but like, there've been plenty of times in these last two years where there was something that was tugging, and that was an intuition that had a sense of what was necessary for me to do that I didn't consciously have an appreciation for. And now that that voice was presenting itself, it was like, okay, I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna say yes to this, even though I don't know why.

• 2:12:08Tom Bilyeu?

  You've got one voice, so telling you you're a loser, everything is gone and lost, and another voice telling you to do something that ends up being good for you. How do you differentiate?

• 2:12:17Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I first have to give credit to a therapist that does work in self, right? In having lost identity, attempt to find someone who might help me find who I am. And I did this work inside of something called Internal Family Systems, where I am self, my voice of, inside of my head, or my emotions, are parts. And the way that I am able to then develop a relationship between self and these parts allows me to not be them. So the first part with the voice is, all right, you got a voice in your head, some of it's true, some of it's bullshit. Okay, how do you differentiate? Well, first, you have to say, I'm not the voice.

• 2:13:01Speaker 03

  That voice that's speaking is not me, I am the witness to the voice. In a very untethered soul Michael Singer kind of way, I am not the voice. I'm, I'm, I'm watching the voice, I'm listening to the voice. It's my job, then, as the listener, to do the investigative work of understanding which of the things that are being represented are real. Like, how many of them are fact-based, evidence-based? Is there any reason to question the voice? And a lot of the things inside of like why we believe what we believe, or why we do the things we do, come back to programming that the voice is echoing. And so if we were raised in a patriarchal society, or we were raised inside of a certain religious belief,

• 2:13:45Speaker 03

  or we have parents or family of origin that believe a certain way, that voice often is the echo of something that existed from when we're five years old. And the question that I have to go back and ask is, well, did the people who were the originators of that story have credibility? Like, do they have credibility generally? And oftentimes, they do. You believe things usually because they have come from someone of authority that's important in your life, that you love or crave love from, and that you, for whatever reason, have put on a pedestal or respect. But just because someone at some point in your life had credibility doesn't mean that they have credibility on that topic, or that there's even relevance necessarily for their opinion

• 2:14:29Speaker 03

  that maybe, right, I was born in seventy-five, my parents were good people, they meant well, a thing that they were programming into me when I was five in nineteen eighty may not have practical relative to when it was, you know, good then, application in twenty twenty-one. Likely doesn't. And going back and questioning if that story that was told then is still a credible story today is part of how, when you hear the voice, and that bullshit side of the voice is chirping, you get to go and ask, where did this voice come from? I'm not the voice, I'm the witness to it. And does it actually have a credible connection to anything that has practical application in my life today?

• 2:15:11Tom Bilyeu?

  And so utility becomes the guide as you're assessing all these different voices, basically?

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, utility, but also, and this will sound crazy, because when it was described to me as a thing to do, I thought it crazy, and then I just started doing it. I actually will name these feelings that I have and invite them to sit at an imaginary table inside of my psyche and have a conversation with them.

• 2:15:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And it works because you make them the other and not yourself?

• 2:15:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so as a, for example, I have anxiety as a thing that has... Clark. Clark, who is, you know, the opposite of Superman. I was gonna say, I have to ask. Of course, no, but yeah, Clark, who is the opposite of Superman is a thing. And I'm talking like situational anxiety, not clinical anxiety. Like when I get anxious, I used to try and mute the anxiety. I used to try and push it away. I would become a dick to people, whatever it was. I was not great with anxiety. And now Clark shows up. I get to sit Clark at this table, have this conversation. Clark, for what reason do you believe yourself to be here?

• 2:16:23Speaker 03

  And Clark, right, as a part inside of me, believes himself to be serving a helpful role. Right, so Clark doesn't realize he's a negative emotion. Clark thinks, ah, I'm here for a reason. And then my job as the observer of Clark having shown up is to sit him down at the table and ask, why, why are you here? And most often Clark shows up in my life because there is something in my life that has enough ambiguity around it that a simple plan, or even in some instances, a more complex plan, but a plan being applied in that ambiguous part of my life would give Clark permission to leave because his job in having drawn my focus to the area is done. He's here as a helper.

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  And so in a crazy way, not that like I celebrate anxious moments or Clark's arrival. I've changed the way I see Clark or anxiety as a negative thing and more as a clue. Oh, this is intel. Information is being presented to me and if I can sit down and have a conversation with it, I might get to the bottom of why he's here.

• 2:17:28Tom Bilyeu?

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