Pod Insights The School of Greatness 120 How to Manage the Digital World and Life Transitions with Baratunde Thurston About this episode "If you do it just to please the crowd, you'll lose yourself." - Baratunde Thurston If you enjoyed this episode, check out videos, show notes, and more at www.lewishowes.com/120. Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX
Transcript 10,873 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lewis Howes? This is episode number 120 with New York Times bestselling author Baratunde Thurston.
0:07 Lewis Howes? Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.
0:33 Lewis Howes? What is up everyone? Thank you so much for joining me on the School of Greatness podcast, the very first episode of the new year 2015. Welcome to the new year and thank you guys so much for joining me today. This episode is brought to you by onnit.com. Go check out onnit.com for some of the best human performance supplements and sports training gear in the world. The Rock just posted pictures of him using one of the kettlebells on Instagram the other day. A lot of top athletes and trainers are using their equipment and supplements for their athletes and for themselves. So go ahead, check out onnit.com. If you use the checkout code greatness, you get 10% off on all your supplements.
1:17 Lewis Howes? That's going to help you stay focused and on top of your game throughout the day in your business and life. Check out onnit.com for more. Now I wanted to bring you to my good friend Baratunde Thurston. For those who do not know Baratunde, he is a TV host and co-founder of Cultivated Wit. He wrote the New York Times bestselling book called How to Be Black and served for five years as the director for the news outlet, The Onion in New York City. When he's not delivering talks at gatherings such as the Tribeca Film Interactive, South by Southwest and TED, he writes a monthly back page column for Fast Company. Now in this interview, we dive in deep about a few different things, transitions.
2:02 Lewis Howes? One of the things, it's a new transition right now with the new year. So we talk about transitions. We also talk about getting unplugged and Baratunde is Very into tech and into media and has a big social media following, but for a month, he went completely off the grid, went unplugged. We talked about what that's like. We talked about the future of media online and a whole lot more. We uncover a lot of things here in this interview. So I'm very excited to bring you my good friend, the one and only Baratunde Thurston.
2:36 Lewis Howes? Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. I'm with my man Baratunde Thurston.
2:41 Speaker 01 I'm the greatest of all time. What's up?
2:44 Lewis Howes? The goat.
2:46 Speaker 01 Yo, it's good to be here, Louis.
2:47 Lewis Howes? Yeah, man. This is a long time in the making.
2:51 Speaker 01 Yes, it is.
2:51 Lewis Howes? Talking about having you on for like two years since I started.
2:53 Speaker 01 Since you started, actually, yeah.
2:54 Lewis Howes? It's like, we gotta get you on.
2:55 Speaker 01 I had to wait for you to perfect it, you know, like I didn't want to be a part of those rough early years.
3:01 Lewis Howes? We should be waiting for the rest of my life, man, because it's never gonna be.
3:04 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, perfection is a process.
3:06 Lewis Howes? It's never gonna be perfected, but uh, it's definitely gotten a lot better.
3:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:10 Lewis Howes? If I listen to the first five or 10 episodes, I'm like, oh, I can't even believe I put those out there.
3:14 Speaker 01 I feel that about my jokes and my first years in standup. This is like, nope, that wasn't funny at all.
3:19 Lewis Howes? But here's what's interesting, like, I could have been paralyzed by the thought of like, this needs to be perfect for me to put it out there. And I probably wouldn't have a podcast right now. So I'm glad I did.
3:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:30 Lewis Howes? And you just did a TV show.
3:31 Speaker 01 I did. And the, the, notice the verb tense.
3:34 Lewis Howes? Right, right.
3:35 Speaker 01 Did a TV show.
3:37 Lewis Howes? And you said you're actually grateful, you had a great experience with it. We talk about a little bit?
3:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I was, uh, I'm here in Los Angeles with you right now. I came out in October to join an existing show. The show was called Take Part Live. It's on a network called Pivot, which is owned by a company called Participant, which is a film company. They do documentaries on social issues. Jeff Skoll, who was one of the eBay early people and a billionaire, created the network because he wanted to. And make the world better through media. It's like social impact media.
4:08 Lewis Howes? Right.
4:08 Speaker 01 So I joined a show with Meghan McCain, John McCain's daughter, Jacob Soboroff, who was part of HuffPo Live before this. And we broke down the issues of the day. We debated them and we encouraged our audience to take some kind of social action, not just get all riled up. So I did about 40 episodes of that. And then the show was, shall we say, not continued.
4:26 Lewis Howes? Sure.
4:26 Speaker 01 AKA canceled.
4:28 Lewis Howes? But you said, we were just talking for the last couple of hours here on my balcony in the studio.
4:33 Speaker 01 It's a balcony that evokes reflection.
4:36 Lewis Howes? Right.
4:36 Speaker 01 And then confession.
4:37 Lewis Howes? I come out here every morning and I just like reflect, but luckily I'm usually by myself.
4:42 Speaker 01 Right.
4:42 Lewis Howes? So I don't have to confess anything.
4:43 Speaker 01 You should turn your mics on when you come out. Then you'll have like, that's a whole nother podcast.
4:46 Lewis Howes? That is.
4:47 Speaker 01 Louis's confessions from his balcony.
4:49 Lewis Howes? And I'm usually half naked out there. So it should be like naked.
4:52 Speaker 01 Video podcast.
4:53 Lewis Howes? Naked confessions.
4:54 Speaker 01 That's, you should get that. You should get that domain name. Yes.
4:57 Lewis Howes? Slash net. All right. So you, but we were talking about how you're actually grateful that no one saw it.
5:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. So part of the challenge with the, I guess the benefit and the challenge. So it's a new network that most people haven't heard of.
5:12 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
5:13 Speaker 01 That even the people who have access to it don't know they have access to it because it's a linear cable channel. They bought the documentary channel to be able to get into people's homes, but most people didn't know they had the documentary channel. So any new network struggles in its first year to be known for something.
5:27 Lewis Howes? Even owned.
5:28 Speaker 01 Yeah. And that's Oprah.
5:29 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
5:29 Speaker 01 Right. And then you can't just ride being Oprah. So this didn't have Oprah either, much as I like to think of myself as like a newer Oprah.
5:36 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
5:37 Speaker 01 And so it was, was actually quite a, was quite a fortunate thing sometimes to not be massively exposed, especially for me, because I was new to this type of television. Like I've been on TV a fair amount. I've hosted web series. I've hosted pre-recorded field pieces for Science Channel.
5:55 Lewis Howes? Edited things.
5:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I've done live as a guest. I've done cable news.
5:59 Lewis Howes? Where someone's asking you questions.
6:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I've done MSNBC, CNN. I'm just like, be me on an issue or two. But to actually be the co-host of a show and have to toss to commercials and ask the audience to tweet and to interview people in one block and talk about ISIS in another block. And there's just a lot more going on to have a producer in my ear.
6:17 Lewis Howes? That's challenging.
6:18 Speaker 01 So to talk.
6:19 Lewis Howes? Focus.
6:19 Speaker 01 Exactly. Like it's a very, it's a mentally challenging gig to do that for a full hour, four days a week.
6:26 Lewis Howes? You have to prepare every single day for.
6:28 Speaker 01 And every day it's different. Every day is different. One day we're talking about, you know, rehabilitated neighborhoods and artisanal foods. The next day we're talking about international terrorism. We'll be talking about religion and then we're talking about teenagers and date rape. Like there's, the news is the news and you can plan some of what happens, but then other things just happen.
6:49 Lewis Howes? Sure.
6:49 Speaker 01 And you gotta respond to that without looking like an idiot.
6:51 Lewis Howes? Right.
6:52 Speaker 01 So there was this, anyway, all that's a long way of saying, I sometimes was like a little frustrated because I like, if I express something, I want the world to hear it. But it was also kind of nice, especially as a newbie in this realm, to be on a little quieter spot.
7:06 Lewis Howes? Because you're allowed to make some mistakes.
7:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:08 Lewis Howes? And you don't have to feel bad about it because not the whole world, you weren't on the Tonight Show every day.
7:12 Speaker 01 Right. That would have been a much more public way to learn. Yeah. Yeah.
7:17 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
7:17 Speaker 01 And there's something, I mean, I think there's even the way the internet works in terms of exposing early art, you know, to an audience before it's ready. Stand up, you know, I, I started in stand up in 2002 before Twitter, before any sort of public recording of things. People didn't have phones with cameras built in. So I was able to fail quietly.
7:39 Lewis Howes? Without everyone seeing you.
7:40 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then, and get better. Like quiet failure is so important.
7:44 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
7:44 Speaker 01 Because if you stumble out loud, that's people's only impression of you and we're very quick to judge. And like, oh, he's not funny. He'll never make it. It's like, actually, a lot of never makes it eventually do make it. And that eventually is, is, it needs to be baked in in some way. So I am grateful. I'm not saying I'm happy that the network is small. I'm not trying to diss the network, but I am saying for me especially, who was just there for two and a half months, it was, it was a good gig.
8:12 Lewis Howes? Great learning space.
8:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:13 Lewis Howes? Now, when I first, I'm trying to think about when I first, not met you, I'll talk about that in a second. When I first heard about you, I believe was 2000, you'll have to remember the date of the timeframe.
8:24 Speaker 01 Two thousand eight, I think it was swine flu. Oh, yeah, that was two thousand nine. Two thousand nine. Yeah. Someone tweeted a video of yours. Yeah. Doing like a speech or a stand up. Yeah. About swine flu. Yeah. And it was hilarious. Thank you, sir. Can you talk about? Yeah, no, that was. For people that don't remember swine flu. So the swine flu H one N one influenza virus. That's. It was all over the news for a while. Yeah, there was a big scare back in roughly April of two thousand nine and it was on the front pages of all the news sites and people were buying masks and really worried, am I gonna get swine flu was like Ebola. Yeah. Right, but bigger. It was big. Some interesting ways. And so I was inspired, I was working at the Onion at the time. Yeah. I was the head of digital there and I was leading political coverage.
9:08 Speaker 01 And I thought, what if I could create a kind of satirical swine flu account? And I personified the swine flu as an. Twitter account. As a Twitter account, as an angry piglet. And the thing that I don't know that that didn't come across in that talk because that talk was kind of in character. Uh huh. I really thought about it, right, as a performance piece. I'm like, okay, this is like, I want to develop this character. So who does the swine flu swallow, uh, follow on Twitter? What is his attitude? What is his gender? What is his use of profanity? What? So this is a condescending, highly profane, highly confident and arrogant piglet seeking revenge on all of humanity. For bacon and ham hocks. Oh, my gosh. Centuries, millennia of abuse.
9:53 Speaker 01 And then I got to work and I just treated this character I as a Twitter user. And followed people and trolled them online and followed folks who were afraid of the swine flu. Oh, my God. And and tweeted at that. Especially because I knew that that mechanics at Twitter, and it still works this way, but especially back then it was so special. Yes. When someone follows you, you get an email. So these people who were afraid of the swine flu were getting an email saying you are now being followed by the swine flu.
10:20 Lewis Howes? That was it. It wasn't at swine flu. Was that taken already?
10:23 Speaker 01 It was the underscore swine underscore flu, but the proper name
10:26 Lewis Howes? The swine flu.
10:26 Speaker 01 Was just the swine flu.
10:27 Lewis Howes? Wow.
10:27 Speaker 01 So they were, there was like, it was a new way to deliver a joke.
10:30 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
10:31 Speaker 01 And I was like, I wasn't even there for the delivery, really. Like, I set it up on Twitter and it landed in your inbox.
10:36 Lewis Howes? If only there was a video of everyone who opened it.
10:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean NSA knows, right? They got the webcams on all of us. Maybe Apple knows. Who knows what they're doing with FaceTime footage, but that was for me hilarious. Like, I made myself laugh. I did it for me.
10:52 Lewis Howes? Every day.
10:52 Speaker 01 And I've maintained, I didn't publicly acknowledge that I was behind it.
10:56 Lewis Howes? Until you made the speech or?
10:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, until I talked. The talk was like my coming out party and I got interviewed by Huffington Post in character.
11:03 Lewis Howes? Wow.
11:04 Speaker 01 For that, Al Roker followed me, Mitt Romney followed me.
11:07 Lewis Howes? That's amazing.
11:07 Speaker 01 It was a glorious two-week experiment.
11:11 Lewis Howes? Two-week and then it was like, swine flu is over.
11:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, and there was an early, it was an early version of these personified, like satirical fake accounts. You know, you had BP Global PR after the oil spill.
11:22 Lewis Howes? Sure.
11:22 Speaker 01 That would come later. The Bronx Zoo Snake or something. It was like, somebody created one for that. Mayor Emanuel. So all the, and now everybody creates 50 different Twitter accounts the moment anything happens anywhere in the world, right? But back then, this is six, five years ago.
11:38 Lewis Howes? Twitter started in 2007 or something.
11:41 Speaker 01 Twitter started in 06.
11:42 Lewis Howes? 06, yeah.
11:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I got on in 07 in March for South by Southwest.
11:46 Lewis Howes? Yep.
11:47 Speaker 01 And I was always just trying to figure out, okay, how else can I be funny? Like, that might have been an interesting stand-up bit, but it was a far more interesting Twitter character.
11:54 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
11:55 Speaker 01 So.
11:55 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
11:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, that, that, that one case is how I think about everything.
12:00 Lewis Howes? Wow.
12:00 Speaker 01 Where I was like, what's a new way to interact? What's a new way to express this idea?
12:05 Lewis Howes? Interesting, man. Yeah, there's been such a transition over the years of social media and online marketing, everything. And I first started getting into the online marketing world in 2009, so it was right around when I just got into it.
12:17 Speaker 01 I, I was, basically it's because of the swine flu. So you're welcome.
12:20 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
12:20 Speaker 01 And all your listeners know that swine flu gets credit for bringing fluids.
12:24 Lewis Howes? The school of greatest to the world.
12:26 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:27 Lewis Howes? And there's just been a, you know, every year, there's a huge transition for who has like the power, the social media power, which platforms are the biggest. And like back then it was Twitter. And I don't really feel like Twitter is, I feel like it's shifting so much. Why do you think there are so many shifts online in the last five to seven years? And what do you think is going to happen over the next five years?
12:48 Speaker 01 So the shifts have always happened. They're happening faster because the places that we're building are cheap to build, cheap to grow. So there was, there was a shift from eight tracks to cassettes. There was a shift from black and white to color TV, but it took massive capital investment in years of promotion and marketing experimentation to move a whole population from one place to the other. Now that happens overnight, almost literally overnight. So, and it's because it's all bits and bytes and they're cheaper to manipulate. So there's no difference between Instagram and Twitter technically. It's all zeros and ones.
13:26 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
13:26 Speaker 01 So the manifestation of it is the same. And when it costs nothing relatively speaking to move and to create, we are a lot more, we're a lot less attached or we're attached for far briefer periods of time. So I think the why is a, is a technical why. I think it's, um, it's frustrating actually to think for me, when things move that quickly, it's there becomes this like hyperactive gold rush mentality around everything.
13:56 Lewis Howes? Sure.
13:56 Speaker 01 And so I'm
13:57 Lewis Howes? We gotta get it now. We gotta get it now.
13:59 Speaker 01 I'm re, I'm watching Deadwood right now, which is a, a series about the gold rush.
14:03 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
14:04 Speaker 01 And if you could think of something as massive as the Western gold rush happening every six months and a whole population physically jumping.
14:14 Lewis Howes? Hundreds of millions of people.
14:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. To, to the Western United States, now to Brazil, now to the Arctic. Now, I mean, it's insane. And so there's gotta, I'm trying to maintain a sense of inner peace around all this stuff and not bet on platforms and make the latest things because it feels so ephemeral. Cause after you bet on it, even if you hit it big, it's like it could be gone in a moment. Yeah. And you have to build something that has that change built into it. You know, I've given a ton of talks about social media in part because of the swine flu. Wow. The swine flu earned me speaking. Credibility. Right. And being at the Onion and writing books and a lot of other things, but that example still has some resonance for like how to be authentic. Interesting. Ironically, because I was lying, but I was authentic to the character. Sure.
14:56 Speaker 01 Of this flu. And people ask me, they'll say things like, yo, I hear, I hear 2015 is gonna be the year of video. Wasn't that like 2010? And I'm just, first of all, just listen to yourself. Or the year of mobile. Yeah. It's like moving images have always been powerful in human history. Yeah, exactly. Whether we could record them and transcode them as quickly or not is different. And you know, is it Snapchat years, is it Vine years, is it the year of Bebo? Like Bebo just blew up in my life in the past three weeks. I don't even know what Bebo is. Bebo was a youth oriented social network that was based over in the UK. Now it's reimagined itself as a mobile messaging app. That creates avatars around you. So when you hashtag with your friends, like it manipulates your avatar to visually enact the emotion.
15:41 Speaker 01 Like the Sims of mobile. Yeah. It's like you are the emoji.
15:45 Speaker 01 And so, I don't know, maybe that'll last four weeks. Who knows? Crazy. So, so where I see things going in the next five years, there's like what I hope happens and what I think happens. Yeah. What I think happens is that we continue our spiral of gold rush mentality around kind of, oh, people move here. Basically kids run from their grandparents, right? They leave Facebook, they go to Instagram. Well grandma's on Instagram and I'm gonna go over to this thing. Wow. So a lot of it is just like youth looking for the new version of the mall to escape old people. Right? That is so much of this movement and it's cool kids, right? Defining cool by scarcity is cool. If everybody's doing it, it can't be cool. So we gotta get off of it once everyone's on it.
16:25 Speaker 01 Exactly. So I think we'll continue this like accelerating hop of chasing cool, but the dollars follow faster. Cause Subway finds it and they buy it out and they do some kind of stunt, you know, it's like, oh, now Subway's on Vine. Subway's on Vine. How cool can it be? It's not, yeah. So. So we gotta get on Snapchat and now Snapchat's not cool. Now it's something else. So I think that's part of it, but there's, there's gotta be some diminishing returns to the leaping. And I don't know if it- For who? The brands or for the people leaving? I think both. I think we, certainly I have limited endurance for this constant motion. I mean, for 18 months, I didn't have a permanent home in New York. Until February this year, I was kind of on the road. I was Airbnb-ing. I was couch surfing with friends. February 2014.
17:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was, I was Craigslist-ing it and I was house-sitting and whatnot. And it was novel. The first six months were really exciting. I was like, ooh, I don't live in the West Village. Now I'm living in Williamsburg. Now I'm living in the East Village. I'm on a couch in there. I'm in a king and a queen. Now I'm in a building with an elevator. Now I'm in a fifth floor walk-up. And it's, there's something really exciting about the discovery and the exploration and the journey. But at a certain point, I needed a home. Yeah. And I signed a lease. You gotta chill. Yeah, and I needed something recognizable. For a lot of people, that's Facebook, right? They've just paused on this Ferris wheel. I'm gonna keep mixing the metaphor on this roulette wheel. There's like, I'm gonna stick with number Facebook because I know it. Most of my friends are here and that's cool.
17:53 Speaker 01 Email still works for the vast majority of people. Text messaging, that's not going anywhere. And yeah, where else it ends up, there will be new things. There will be new things. But what I hope happen, this goes from like expectation to hope. I hope that we get a different sense of ownership as users about all the stuff that we create that's attached to these ephemeral networks. What do you mean? We're producing a lot of media in terms of photos and text messages and video clips. We are revealing a lot about ourselves in terms of content, but also in terms of our networks. Like you and I are friends on Instagram and on Facebook. We follow each other on Twitter. We're in each other's phone books. LinkedIn.
18:36 Speaker 01 These platforms know that we're important to each other. Sure. We should know that too. And that should be portable in a way that is somehow held hostage by the LinkedIn's of the world and the Gmail's of the world and the whoever the, I'm not picking on those guys in particular. But I think we've got a really weird balance in the relationship now. Where the majority of what makes Facebook, Facebook is us, not Facebook. And if we start to shift to a world where the connections and the media, which are all us, without any of that, these platforms are stupid, they're literally dumb, then the shift from one place to the other will be less painful because we'll already have it.
19:17 Speaker 01 And so when you think about NSA, think about the Sony hack, think about things that have been in the news a lot lately. If users had their own data, right, if we had a trusted place to keep it or we kept it ourselves, then it wouldn't be so costly, so painful, so ridiculous to jump from one service to the other. Or to, you know, when their terms don't line up or when they get hacked or whatever the reason is. Or because you don't feel like, because you don't like the color blue and Facebook is totally blue. Right. Where's my pink social network? How come Facebook doesn't let me make it pink? Right.
19:45 Speaker 01 So I think more user control is what I hope for in the next five years. Customizing your experience. Yeah, then it becomes less of what will the geniuses at Platform X dream up for me? Right. Because we are handing over. It's kind of like bringing back MySpace in a sense where you get to customize some of the things that you have. Yeah, there, I think customization is a part of it. I think ownership is a more powerful term to throw around it. Because right now, we're all just, it's almost like we're serfs, you know, or, and not quite slaves. And I don't want to use like extreme language, but I feel like we're, we're waiting, right? We're waiting for some genius somewhere to rescue us. Cool. You know, give me the new phone, give me the new social platform. It's going to be cool and hot.
20:29 Speaker 01 It's gonna, it's gonna, you know what it's gonna do is gonna loop videos for three seconds, then play them in reverse for seven seconds, then do a staticky sort of seizure inducing, you know, drum beat, kind of like a drum and bass thing, and then end up with a question mark. But that's gonna be the new hot thing. I don't know. Anything is possible.
20:48 Lewis Howes? So many different things.
20:49 Speaker 01 But I want us to be more active.
20:52 Lewis Howes? What is it, what is it we're all doing with all these different social networks and devices? And what is it we're all trying to do with all this information?
21:02 Speaker 01 We're trying to be loved. We're trying to be affirmed so much of it. We're trying to be seen and heard and acknowledged. Like me, love me, heart me, thumbs me up, re-whatever me. And we are trying to replace, in some cases, a lot of what, especially in American society, has been lost, human connection. Right? We have these little existences, like for years we wanted to like be independent and individuals and then we got it and it sucked.
21:30 Lewis Howes? Yeah, right?
21:31 Speaker 01 Oh, what is this, what is this feeling I'm having? Loneliness.
21:35 Lewis Howes? Depression.
21:37 Speaker 01 Meaningless, you know, success.
21:39 Lewis Howes? Unfulfilled.
21:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, unfulfilled progress.
21:42 Lewis Howes? Lots of money, but no one around.
21:44 Speaker 01 So I think so many of us are just trying to be heard, within that, trying to be loved, trying to be seen, trying to be acknowledged.
21:54 Speaker 01 And then we are, there's another part of this, which is relevance. Right? There's a fear that we're gonna, we're gonna slip behind, we're gonna lose something, that the world is moving away from us. And I don't want that to happen. I want to keep up, I want to catch up. And technology is not just technology anymore. It's everything. It's the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ and the way you talk to your family.
22:17 Lewis Howes? It's like the pulse on the world.
22:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a Xerox PARC thing. It's not in some lab somewhere in quote unquote Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley, it's just everything.
22:28 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
22:28 Speaker 01 And so I think, you know, I've encountered people who, I did the show for the Science Channel many years ago, five years ago, called The Future Of. And it was just, that was the name, Popular Sciences: Future Of. And I went around the world interviewing scientists, getting to play with their gadgets and talking about the meaning of whatever they were up to, whether it's drones or tanks that drive themselves, which is basically a tank drone, or remote sex capabilities, or new ways of diagnosing disease. And I would run into people on the street who watched that show and watched Discovery in general, because they feel like they, they need to keep up.
23:00 Lewis Howes? Sure.
23:00 Speaker 01 It's part of their continuing education.
23:02 Lewis Howes? Yeah, yeah.
23:02 Speaker 01 Right? As a relevant. Person, citizen, labor, or whatever. And I think there's some fun in it, too. It's not all super heavy. I think it's just like something to do while we wait in line at the grocery store.
23:13 Lewis Howes? Right, right. Interesting.
23:14 Speaker 01 Or in traffic, which you shouldn't do.
23:16 Lewis Howes? Now, you took a 30 day hiatus from technology, right? There was like cover of fast company.
23:21 Speaker 01 Twenty, twenty five days.
23:22 Lewis Howes? Twenty five days.
23:23 Speaker 01 From social media.
23:23 Lewis Howes? Social media.
23:24 Speaker 01 Not from all technology.
23:25 Lewis Howes? You saw your phone.
23:25 Speaker 01 I like toilets.
23:26 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
23:27 Speaker 01 I like fire, which is really good technology.
23:30 Lewis Howes? Sure, sure, sure. But I mean, from, did you have a phone?
23:32 Speaker 01 I did keep my phone.
23:33 Lewis Howes? But you didn't have any social media accounts on there?
23:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I kept, I let myself text.
23:38 Lewis Howes? That's it.
23:38 Speaker 01 And.
23:39 Lewis Howes? Email? No email.
23:39 Speaker 01 No email.
23:40 Lewis Howes? Wow.
23:40 Speaker 01 Which is so good.
23:41 Lewis Howes? Amazing.
23:42 Speaker 01 So good.
23:43 Lewis Howes? What came up for you during those 25 days? What did you experience? What did you notice about yourself? What did you notice about everyone else?
23:48 Speaker 01 Louis, I experienced people. They were these other objects out in the world. They're a lot like us. They're called human beings.
23:55 Lewis Howes? Wow.
23:56 Speaker 01 And I saw them everywhere because I was looking up.
23:59 Lewis Howes? Wow.
24:00 Speaker 01 And not down into a glowing rectangle. It was, I think I breathed more. I think there's something about being engaged with a keyboard and a screen that shallows the breath because there's anticipation, right? There's thought of receiving or sending something. So you're like, oh, is this, whether it's a tweet or a text or an email message.
24:20 Lewis Howes? Holding your breath constantly throughout the day.
24:21 Speaker 01 And I think I just took a lot more deep breaths when I didn't care. And it wasn't, it was like so many weeks of not caring for me. At least some people have gone a whole year doing things like this. I could not do that.
24:32 Lewis Howes? Right.
24:33 Speaker 01 I probably could. I wouldn't choose to do that. That would be too damaging to the rest of my life. I need to be connected to live, speaking of keeping up with things. So that came up. Um, I talked to people. Like I would go to a bar and because I couldn't escape the bar through my phone, which was my normal thing.
24:51 Lewis Howes? Down when there was a moment of silence, you couldn't just, when you're waiting for something.
24:54 Speaker 01 I filled the space with what was, whatever was around me.
24:57 Lewis Howes? With real connection.
24:58 Speaker 01 As opposed to what was through the screen. And I don't want to say that every interaction through a screen isn't real. I think we're beyond that, too. I think there are romantic relationships and meaningful family connection and. Exposure to ideas that happen through a phone. But there's just something really beautiful about the in-room 3D IRL connection, the in-real-life connection. Yeah. So that that came up. And and the biggest, two of the biggest things that came up, I didn't need to be as on as I thought I did.
25:27 Lewis Howes? What do you mean?
25:28 Speaker 01 I had created, subconsciously, internal pressure on myself to always be online. Always got to be posting something funny. I have this comedic background. I got to always be funny about things. Got to know all the news all the time. I got to retweet things that matter because it matters. And it turns out, I'm OK if I don't do that constantly.
25:47 Lewis Howes? Wow.
25:47 Speaker 01 And the world is OK. Basically, I'm not that important.
25:51 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
25:52 Speaker 01 And it's humbling to be like, oh, you know what? The internet went on without me.
25:55 Lewis Howes? Yeah, people got their news without me.
25:58 Speaker 01 I wasn't this key connection. It's not like I broke the internet by opting out for a few weeks and villages burned and children wailed and
26:06 Lewis Howes? Where is Barrett?
26:06 Speaker 01 Mothers memented, you know, it was nothing. There were a few, when I came back, moments like, oh, we missed you. But it was a vast, vast minority.
26:15 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
26:16 Speaker 01 It's like, people move on.
26:17 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
26:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:19 Lewis Howes? What did you learn about your health during that time?
26:22 Speaker 01 Um.
26:23 Lewis Howes? Did you notice anything about your health? Did you get?
26:25 Speaker 01 I walked, I was in New York for this period, and I walked a lot. And I saw more of the city, and I just felt physically more present in it. I cooked a lot. This also happened over vacation. So I had some luxury afforded that I wasn't doing this in the middle of like tax season or some other urgent business time. It wasn't that. It was December. No one cares in December. People kind of assume that you're not going to be as responsive. So that was cool. But the breathing was good, and I just had more space. I think probably I had more time. To fill, not with messages. Here's the other thing, I mentioned, I said there were two things and I forgot to mention the second one.
27:07 Speaker 01 How hard it was technically to pull all the switches required to unplug.
27:12 Lewis Howes? To like delete the apps off your phone.
27:15 Speaker 01 To turn off notifications, which you still kind of have to do one at a time. There's no master switch that that users can control, which they leave me the hell alone. You have to tell each of them, would you please leave me alone? Would you please leave me alone? Would you please? And anytime a human being is forced to do a repetitive action. I'm like, that's why we created technology, right?
27:34 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
27:34 Speaker 01 So why am I pressing the same button 50 times in a row? There should be an app for that. It should be built into that. So it also exposed to me the level, the way just say no doesn't work. It didn't work for drugs in the eighties and it doesn't work for social media and technology today. Because we're not empowered to simply say no. It's technically not simple to just say no.
27:58 Lewis Howes? A lot of pressure.
27:59 Speaker 01 It takes a couple of hours. And that's like a real, it's tedious, it's annoying. And so you might as well, and every app you install, like it asks you all these questions. You're like, yeah, sure, whatever. Okay, okay, okay. And until you want to not hear from that app, it doesn't matter. But the moment you decide, I don't want you to know where I am. I don't want you to interrupt my dinner. Then without sort of turning your phone off completely, which is a pretty dramatic move. If you still want to make a call.
28:26 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
28:27 Speaker 01 Or get a text message. So there's a lot of little things, I feel like there's a, we've, we've been treated as children in, in how a lot of these services, they don't trust us.
28:35 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
28:35 Speaker 01 To make the grown up decision and that didn't, wasn't revealed as clearly to me until I tried to leave. And then they're like, oh, you're not going anywhere. It's the mob, basically.
28:45 Lewis Howes? Interesting. What do you think would happen if the whole world shut down from technology for 30 days?
28:52 Speaker 01 Oh, people would lose their ever loving shit.
28:56 Lewis Howes? I mean, literally 10 years ago. It wasn't one in 10 years ago, we didn't have cell phones.
29:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:02 Lewis Howes? Really like.
29:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then most people.
29:03 Lewis Howes? Most people don't have cell phones, smartphones, let's say.
29:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:06 Lewis Howes? Maybe it's 15 years ago when I was in high school, I got my first cellphone when I was a junior and I was 17. And I was the only, I was the first kid in my class to have a cellphone.
29:13 Speaker 01 Oh, look at you.
29:14 Lewis Howes? I was like, you know.
29:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, cutting edge house.
29:17 Lewis Howes? It was a little flip phone, you know.
29:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:20 Lewis Howes? But, um, you know, what would it be like now, since we've had it for the last 10, 15 years and everyone's been used to it? What would be different now if everyone's like, all right, go back to the way it was without this?
29:30 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't know if we could, I mean, I think.
29:33 Lewis Howes? Think we could function as humans?
29:35 Speaker 01 Not in the immediate aftermath. I think in the immediate, well, let me, let me think about that.
29:40 Lewis Howes? Just had TV and radio.
29:41 Speaker 01 Let me think about that. So Hurricane Sandy. Hit New York two years ago, um, and a few months from when we're recording right now.
29:49 Lewis Howes? It was a big one.
29:49 Speaker 01 It was huge.
29:50 Lewis Howes? Shut down the half the city, right?
29:51 Speaker 01 And it blacked out, power.
29:53 Lewis Howes? The north side of.
29:53 Speaker 01 Cell phones, southern Manhattan.
29:55 Lewis Howes? Southern Manhattan, yeah.
29:56 Speaker 01 Uh, was dark and it was creepy and it was eerie. It was like a city should never be this dark. It's, cities are, in my experience and all, anyone who's alive today, your experience is cities equal light. And I didn't realize that until.
30:09 Lewis Howes? Energy.
30:09 Speaker 01 Manhattan was deadly dark, like, except for flashlights.
30:13 Lewis Howes? Cold too, or no, was it cold?
30:15 Speaker 01 Uh, it was chilly. It was around Halloween, so it wasn't freezing thankfully. And they, they got most of the power back to most people before the real, like icy weather came. But people got by.
30:25 Lewis Howes? No, the refrigerators didn't work.
30:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, people, I'm, I'm going to a restaurant that was just cooking all its burgers and selling them for cheap or giving them away because the meat was gonna go bad.
30:34 Lewis Howes? Wow.
30:34 Speaker 01 Cause you couldn't assume. And it was like, oh, this is like olden days. You gotta salt this and hang it up in the window. It was, it was some old prospector type stuff. And we're not, I think we're so distant, you know, from a lot of the things that make our world work now.
30:48 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
30:49 Speaker 01 Like, there's just a button that we push. We have no idea what happens on the other side of that button.
30:52 Lewis Howes? Yeah, right?
30:53 Speaker 01 And so you take that button away and it's like, where, how do I, how do, can I, how do I use the bathroom?
30:59 Lewis Howes? Shower, how do I brush my teeth?
31:01 Speaker 01 How do I eat? You know, how, where do I find food?
31:04 Lewis Howes? Food, yeah.
31:05 Speaker 01 Cooking, acquiring the food, like, we just go to the grocery store. Maybe we go to the farmer's market if we're like really close to nature.
31:11 Lewis Howes? We're like hipsters.
31:12 Speaker 01 But we're still going, there's an intermediary which grew it and transported it for us. Who knows where a farm is? Most people don't know where they'd find food. You're gonna just grab some leaves off the side of the road? That's not food.
31:23 Lewis Howes? Yeah, right.
31:24 Speaker 01 So I think we would just be stunned. And we would face a stupor of just like denial. This isn't happening. We'd like try to lower our use for a little bit.
31:35 Lewis Howes? Will we blame the government or, or, you know, blame whoever's gonna fix it?
31:39 Speaker 01 We probably blame North Korea slash ISIS slash Walmart. You know, some combination of those three. And then I think, you know, if it had really sunk in, then we would start to reforge connection. You know, and figure it out. Yeah, people would figure it out. We're resilient, man. We've been through.
31:56 Lewis Howes? Sure.
31:57 Speaker 01 Like, we've survived our own attempted genocides time and time again, whether nuclear or machete based. We've had plagues and meteors hit the planet. So I think we'd make it. I don't think losing power, for example, is gonna be the thing that does in the human race.
32:14 Lewis Howes? Right, right.
32:15 Speaker 01 Because we've had so much other stuff. But I think we'll lose a lot and a lot of ugly will come out.
32:20 Lewis Howes? We lost technology here.
32:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think there'd be a lot of, you know, there'd be roving bands. It's getting real dark up in here, Louis. This is some post apocalyptic, basically zombie, you know, World War Z type scenario that I'm painting here.
32:32 Lewis Howes? Right, right. Let's just say 30 days for the whole world.
32:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:36 Lewis Howes? Not forever.
32:37 Speaker 01 I'm obsessed with shows like that. I remember this TV show called Jericho many years ago about these like simultaneous nuclear explosions that took out most major American cities. In a small town in Iowa called Jericho, coincidentally, was kind of cut off from the world and trying to make it.
32:52 Lewis Howes? Wow.
32:52 Speaker 01 Trying to get information and ration and, you know, be self sustaining in this little community. And tensions flared and relationships buckled and, you know, it was like a network drama.
33:02 Lewis Howes? Interesting.
33:02 Speaker 01 And with Skeet Ulrich. And I really liked it because I want to know what people think happens when we lose something. Yeah.
33:10 Lewis Howes? Interesting. I'm curious to talk about transitions because you're going through a lot of transitions. You've been going through a lot of transitions since I've known you. Your life has been a living transition.
33:21 Speaker 01 I'm in a transition from life, from birth to death.
33:24 Lewis Howes? You, yeah, I mean, I guess we're always in transition, but you've had a lot of different things happen in the last four years. Since we first met, which was at our favorite restaurant in New York City, Delicatessen. Prince and Sullivan.
33:35 Speaker 01 Lafayette.
33:36 Lewis Howes? Lafayette and Prince, sorry.
33:38 Speaker 01 Apparently it's my favorite.
33:39 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
33:40 Speaker 01 You don't even know where it is.
33:40 Lewis Howes? I lived on that next block over.
33:42 Speaker 01 I'm snitching, y'all.
33:42 Lewis Howes? On Sullivan.
33:45 Lewis Howes? And I love that corner right there.
33:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:47 Lewis Howes? The bookstore in the next corner.
33:48 Speaker 01 Good views on that corner.
33:49 Lewis Howes? Very good views. Anyways, but you've been going through transition constantly.
33:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:55 Lewis Howes? I guess we all have, but I want to know about, you're in transition right now and you're in transition from where you're going to live.
34:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:02 Lewis Howes? New York and LA, transition from this TV show, transitioning into potentially doing other media things, maybe podcasts, maybe more books, maybe who knows.
34:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:10 Lewis Howes? Your own TV show. What's it like? What do you, since you've been in this transition for four years, always from one thing to the next? And social media is constantly transitioning.
34:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:21 Lewis Howes? From the new hot things and people are moving from platform to platform. How does one best handle transitions? It's also a new year coming up. How do, how do you handle it so well? Uh, what comes up for you when you're going through transition? Do you feel like, oh, I don't know what to do with my life because nothing's happening right now? Cause I know there's probably some people listening who are like, I don't know what to do next.
34:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
34:43 Lewis Howes? Or I'm stuck or I just lost my job or I'm quitting. Now what do I do? What are some insights you can give people on staying positive or finding like
34:52 Speaker 01 So yeah.
34:53 Lewis Howes? A home base for yourself in transition or
34:56 Speaker 01 Got it.
34:56 Lewis Howes? Having a vision for what you want. Talk about that.
34:59 Speaker 01 Uh, so what you've asked me will fill three books.
35:02 Lewis Howes? Perfect.
35:03 Speaker 01 By the way, apparently I have my next thing, which is answering Lewis's questions by Barrington Day Thursday.
35:08 Lewis Howes? I mean, you've had a lot of transition though, like
35:09 Speaker 01 No, I have.
35:10 Lewis Howes? From The Onion to your own Cultivated Wit, from comedy to, you know, shows.
35:14 Speaker 01 Five years ago, I got divorced.
35:16 Lewis Howes? Right.
35:16 Speaker 01 All right. Massive transition.
35:18 Lewis Howes? Transition.
35:19 Speaker 01 I moved to Brooklyn. I wrote a book. People read it. Uh, the book's called How to Be Black. I don't know if that ever came up for those who are like, don't know everything about my life. I don't assume you do. I left The Onion. I started a business called Cultivated Wit. I moved again to nowhere and then back to Brooklyn. And then I came out to LA and did this TV show and then this OTV show. And the business Cultivated Wit's been growing along the way, but morphing constantly
35:44 Lewis Howes? Mm hmm.
35:44 Speaker 01 in a better direction with more people, uh, but still morphing. So.
35:50 Lewis Howes? It's always been transitioning.
35:51 Speaker 01 It has. And I think there's, there's probably two or three types that I can get to. One is the transition of momentum. Right, when I decided to write a book, that created a certain path. Right, I got to research, I got to interview people, got to fly around, got to promote it, got to go in. That that led to me speaking and getting on planes a lot. A lot of the transitions in life followed pretty naturally. So it didn't feel any pressure. It felt like I'm on a in a river. And I'm just going with the flow. Right. Right, and like, oh, now you're going to this village. Now there's a canyon. Now there's it's night and you can see beautiful stars. Now you're in the rapid and you fell off the boat. Now you get back in the boat, but you're still moving. When I came out here, the summer of 2014, had so many question marks.
36:35 Speaker 01 I didn't know if I was going to get the job offer for this TV show. I didn't know. If when I would have to be here with initially, they were they're like, two weeks, can you be here in two weeks? I'm just like, that's insane. Right. Like, I have a whole life, several lives, actually, that need some kind of resolution. I can't just leave my business in a lurch. I have an apartment. I got plants that need water. Right. You know, like, I'm pro-life for my plants, man. And and so. I and I was in a relationship at the time, too. And so that was transitioning and in a really positive direction then. And I got really stressed out. Because the the combination of uncertainties, even I couldn't handle. And I got a lot of practice at handling. Uncertainty.
37:19 Speaker 01 Uncertainties and change. My mom's passed away. I had a concussion. I've had third degree burns. I had friends commit suicide. Like, there's been a lot of drama around my life, even as charmed as my life has generally been. Yeah. Right, because a lot of that stuff's been right around me and sometimes right in my heart. But I've made it through. I felt like I have some level of resilience. But even then, the summer, I was overwhelmed with change. Yeah. Combined with uncertainty. Mm hmm. Because I'm like, what am I supposed to do? And then I get out here. And, you know, I'm no longer in the relationship I was in with the show or with this person and. I have found a level of calm and use the word love and I've used it earlier too. And I think that's a part of it. I think about love in a couple of ways.
38:03 Speaker 01 I think about, you know, love that one wants, love that one needs, love that one deserves. And the overlap of those three types of love is a sweet spot, right? Want, need and deserve. Parallel to that, kind of a layer above that is the direction of love. Outward from me to the world. I'm loving another person. I'm loving the world through my work. I'm putting love into my writing or whatever. It's like giving, giving, giving a lot of self sacrifice in that, a lot of staying up late at night. Sure. Powered by some sense of love and affection and even duty. Then there's love outside in, right? It's fans clapping, it's retweets, it's your mother or your sister or your brother. And then there's the internal, right?
38:46 Speaker 01 Love for oneself, by oneself, the most important. And so in the transition I'm in now, I'm not frenzied. I am as calm as I've ever been. You seem calm. And I'm solid. I feel grounded. I'm 37 now. I've lived a few decades, so I know a lot more about myself than I did. Sure. You know, 30 years ago, 20 and 10 years ago. And so my focus is less on how do I answer these questions that fill my calendar? And it's more of how do I love myself? Hmm. Through the uncertainty, because it's always going to be there. And there are a lot of things that may happen that I'm not in charge of. Right. So how do I be the best version of me in the midst of all that? So how does one do that?
39:31 Speaker 01 How does one love themselves? So here's what I've been doing. When transition's happening or when things aren't going the way they want them to go. I'm, uh, I'm doing a couple of things. One, I've made a physical commitment to myself. I'm sweating every day. You're in good shape, man. I'm feeling really good. You look younger.
39:47 Lewis Howes? Even though you got a frigging manly beard on right now.
39:49 Speaker 01 Thank you, thank you very much, yes.
39:51 Lewis Howes? You're like the youngest I've seen you.
39:52 Speaker 01 I'm, I'm content. I am doing a common, I'm doing a little cardio workout every morning that takes five minutes and explodes my lungs.
40:00 Lewis Howes? Wow.
40:01 Speaker 01 I'm doing about an hour to hour and a half of yoga every day.
40:04 Lewis Howes? Wow.
40:04 Speaker 01 And that's really pushing my body in places. It exposes weakness.
40:08 Lewis Howes? How's your mobility now and fights about it?
40:10 Speaker 01 It's in, it's increasing, but I'm also, I've just found where my tightness is. And more different classes I listen to through podcasts or physically go to, I'm like, oh, I'm really good at this thing. I am not so open in this part of my body.
40:24 Lewis Howes? Sure.
40:25 Speaker 01 And I'm really honestly trying to breathe. Um, LA is a great place to explore the outdoors in December.
40:32 Lewis Howes? Yeah, great hiking and.
40:33 Speaker 01 I'm treating myself to nice food. I'm cooking. I'm going to the farmer's market. I'm just trying to take care of myself and, and meditate a bit as well to try to bolster the spiritual, not just the physical. So there's, I don't know what that looks like for everybody, but for me, it meant a very conscious commitment to myself in the midst of all this.
40:51 Lewis Howes? How important is this self-love for you or for anyone?
40:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:55 Lewis Howes? In terms of up to doing, doing big things in the world and having big visions and transitioning from thing to thing and being uncertain about the future. How important is this self-love? Do you think for everyone else as well as yourself?
41:06 Speaker 01 Look, I, I think it's critical because the outside world is inconsistent. And out of our hands. One moment they love you and they could be your nuclear family. They could be your spouse. They could be tens of thousands of adoring readers or viewers or whatever the game or customers. And that can turn.
41:29 Lewis Howes? You can mess up or something.
41:30 Speaker 01 You can miss say something. You can be a horrible guest on a thing and look stupid. Like there's a lot of, or someone could decide to attack you out of nowhere that based on nothing that you did, based on a misinterpretation. So, living at the pleasure of external forces is not ideal. It's a risky way. And it actually you reminded me by asking me this, something my mother used to always say when she saw me going into the world of performing. She said, Remember why you're doing it. Don't just do it to please the crowd. Cause if you do it just to please the crowd, you'll lose yourself. Cause you'll define yourself by their pleasure. And pleasure and tastes change. So the, the idea of getting grounded and getting good with oneself.
42:16 Speaker 01 There's a more consistent power in that.
42:20 Lewis Howes? Sure.
42:20 Speaker 01 And I think it comes across, you know, externally too, whether in an individual intimate sort of way, or in a professional sales and follower count sort of way.
42:29 Lewis Howes? Sure.
42:29 Speaker 01 And it's, I'm not, I'm not promising, look, this is, this is not the secret. This is not me saying, if you just breathe deeply 10 times a day and eat kale and do downward dog for 17 seconds, you'll triple your Instagram likes. Like that's not, I don't know. Maybe you will not, maybe your sales will go down, but I think the, the larger point is that even if your sales go down, your sense of self doesn't go down with it. And that's super much, much more important.
42:59 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
42:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:59 Lewis Howes? Why do you, do you do what you do? Why are you up to what you're doing then?
43:04 Speaker 01 I, I care a lot about the world. And I have found some ways of communicating largely through humor, heavily through language, that help people understand what's going on. Sometimes it's a column, sometimes it's a stand-up bit, sometimes it's a tweet, sometimes it's some kind of imagery. But I think I am here to translate. And I am here to help people understand, get engaged and connected with, with some unique talents that I've developed slash been granted. So I do it because I know how and because I feel called to. And because I think I have a unique perspective to bring to the field of people also doing that thing.
43:48 Lewis Howes? When did you know that you could translate this type of message for people? Was it when you're in middle school or high school? Was it when you're at Harvard? Was it at the Onion? When did you realize like, oh, I've got this talent, this skill, something that I'm able to connect with people in a way so they understand it differently?
44:06 Speaker 01 There've been different moments over time. I wasn't into comedy much when I was a kid. I was mostly just like righteous and like politicized. That got channeled more through humor because it's like, oh, this probably works a little better than stridency. And condescension, like people, yeah, people respond better to a joke than like, you're wrong.
44:27 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
44:28 Speaker 01 But I do recall doing a show in Boston where I started doing stand up. I lived in Boston for 12 years and I did a New Year's Eve show, First Nights, which is like, most cities put on some kind of non-alcoholic celebration and they call it First Nights. I did a show, a guy named Tony V put me on. He's an awesome guy. He's been in a lot of films and he's very, very funny and more importantly in this moment, kind and generous. So he let me open for him in front of 2,000 people.
44:56 Lewis Howes? Oh.
44:57 Speaker 01 Twice, like two shows back to back in the round. So we're in a circular stage in the middle of, surrounded by 2,000 people. So there's no escape.
45:04 Lewis Howes? That's cool.
45:04 Speaker 01 There's no backstage to run off.
45:06 Lewis Howes? You can't put your wall in the back of the wall.
45:07 Speaker 01 No, you can't lean on anything except yourself and sort of the crowd's response and energy. And I did some joke about Israel Palestine issue that was a very lefty kind of joke and, and played well in Boston. And an Israeli guy came up to me afterwards. And he was like, you know, where I'm from, people don't make jokes like that. And I'm really glad you did. And it's important that you keep saying what you're saying. And I was like, that's great. That's, that's an endorsement from someone who wasn't even the target. I remember this is a similar story, but I think these two get at the why of, of keep, of the continuing work that I'm trying to do here. I went to the Republican National Convention in 2012.
45:52 Speaker 01 I decided to count black people when I was there.
45:55 Lewis Howes? Wow.
45:55 Speaker 01 I used the hashtag Negro spotting. It was a playful game. And I updated the count intermittently throughout the days. I'm like Negro spotting 67, just spotted this dude. I would take pictures with black people. You're number 102. And um, three or four, five, maybe five. In my mind, it was 50, but I think in reality it was like five black dudes came up to me in the Tampa Convention Center. And they're like, yo, are you that brother counting black people at the convention? And I was like, oh shit, here we go. It's about to be a fight with some black Republicans. And they, they're like, I was like, yeah. And like, that was so funny, dude. And then broke the tension. And one of them, he and I started talking. Cause I really wanted to know what it was like to be a black Republican.
46:38 Speaker 01 I, it's foreign to me. You're an alien. I don't understand how your brain works.
46:41 Lewis Howes? Yeah, yeah.
46:42 Speaker 01 In the age of like Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who hates America and voter, you know, ID laws. How can you be black and align yourself with that party? So I started having a conversation with this dude. And it was so good. I turned on my recorder. I'm like, we're putting this on the podcast. And I have a podcast on SoundCloud, sort of loose and unofficial, and it's still promoted up there. So he ran Black Outreach for George W. Bush and for the McCain campaign.
47:09 Lewis Howes? Wow.
47:10 Speaker 01 Um, and we talked for 20 minutes. And it was respectful and it was funny and it was real and we disagreed strongly. And it was great. And I was like, oh yeah. Now, if I had just showed up as an activist, you know, protesting the RNC, how come you don't have any black people here? Or it kept in my corner, right? Kept the comfortable people and ideas that I'm very familiar with. I would have never met this guy.
47:36 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
47:37 Speaker 01 I only met him because of a joke, a joke that he played along with.
47:41 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
47:41 Speaker 01 And then we engaged in something a little deeper.
47:44 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
47:45 Speaker 01 That's those moments like that, there's a series of them, but those two stand out. And one was in like my second or third year of stand up and one was just quite recently. And they're the same story.
47:56 Lewis Howes? Uh, interesting.
47:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
47:57 Lewis Howes? Interesting. Well, I want to get you back on at some point, but I want to, I want to wrap things up here in a moment. I'm going to ask you a couple of last questions.
48:04 Speaker 01 Okay.
48:04 Lewis Howes? One is what are you most grateful for this whole year?
48:08 Speaker 01 Ah, that's really easy and really hard.
48:14 Speaker 01 But it's very, it's very obvious. I'm grateful for love this year. I, I fell in love this year and it didn't last, but I'm grateful that I could feel that. I think I, when I was in a nine year relationship in my marriage that resulted in a marriage and then it ended. That's a big blow.
48:33 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
48:34 Speaker 01 And the circumstances don't matter. It's just a big blow.
48:37 Lewis Howes? And I met you right after you divorced. It was like during or right at the end of it or something.
48:41 Speaker 01 Just the tail end of it. I mean, the swine flu talk that I gave was like within three weeks of that. I almost didn't give the talk.
48:49 Lewis Howes? Wow.
48:49 Speaker 01 Because I was so wrecked that I didn't, and that was my first public appearance since the divorce. Might've even been 10 days. I'd have to check Google Calendar. They know everything. They know where my feelings were, where my heart was, where my, my metro pass was. So yeah, that was, that was really hard to, to mount the stage because I didn't feel confident. And confidence is a prerequisite for me to present on a stage. I'm like, I know all this material. This is me. And I felt wrecked because I had no confidence in myself because my marriage had just fallen apart. So fast forward five years and I was able to love again. I am so grateful for that.
49:25 Lewis Howes? That's cool.
49:25 Speaker 01 And.
49:26 Lewis Howes? I see that.
49:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's, it's the most beautiful. I think it's contributed to my sense of like centeredness and self-love. It's like, oh yeah, I do, I am deserving.
49:35 Lewis Howes? Yeah.
49:35 Speaker 01 Of love. I need love. I want love and I can provide it, you know, not just through another person.
49:41 Lewis Howes? Very cool.
49:42 Speaker 01 My, my gratitude, love.
49:44 Lewis Howes? I like that.
49:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:45 Lewis Howes? Before I ask you the final question, I want to acknowledge you, Baratunde, for one, being an awesome friend. I want to acknowledge you for that. I think we've had some great conversations over the last four years and even here we've been all over the world and always find a way to reconnect.
49:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:00 Lewis Howes? So I'm, I want to acknowledge you for being a great friend. I acknowledge you for sticking through everything, through all these tough transitions you've had. I also want to acknowledge you for your creativity. I think you're one of the most creative individuals I've ever met and the courage you have to put your neck on the line, to talk about what you stand for and what matters to you and what you want other people to hear about what matters as well.
50:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:25 Lewis Howes? So I want to acknowledge you for that creativity, for the courage. And I want to acknowledge you for allowing yourself to open up to love and receive love again. I think it's really powerful and I think it's powerful that others get to see that they get to open up to it as well.
50:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:40 Lewis Howes? So, thank you for being someone who can
50:43 Speaker 01 Thank you.
50:44 Lewis Howes? show others that.
50:44 Speaker 01 Yeah. Wow. I am near tears, just so the audience can hear, but I'm, they're not gonna flow, but they're on the edge. Thank you, Lewis.
50:51 Lewis Howes? Of course, brother.
50:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:52 Lewis Howes? Final question. It's what I ask everyone.
50:54 Speaker 01 What'd I have for breakfast?
50:57 Lewis Howes? I saw that on Instagram.
51:00 Lewis Howes? What's your definition of greatness?
51:02 Speaker 01 Oh, I should have seen this one coming.
51:05 Lewis Howes? Mm-hmm.
51:06 Speaker 01 My definition of greatness involves, it's like a recipe.
51:10 Lewis Howes? Hmm.
51:10 Speaker 01 It involves a level of truth combined with power and a little bit of love. I think whether it's athletic greatness, political greatness, creative greatness, I think greatness is the act of channeling something very effectively. And it could be John Nash with his equations. He's channeling a universal truth through math in a way that hadn't quite been done before and it's great. So it's, there's, it's truth meets power and love.
51:43 Lewis Howes? Baratunde Thirston, thanks so much for coming on, man. I appreciate you.
51:46 Speaker 01 Thank you, Lewis. Oh.
51:55 Lewis Howes? And there you guys have it. Hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure to check out lewishouse.com/120 for 120. That's lewishouse.com/120 for all the different show notes, the links to go check out and say hi to Baratunde. Make sure to follow him online, everywhere that he's online. And also for some other videos of his talks and his website, all that good stuff about Baratunde, his Book is all available at LewisHowes.com/120. Now, do me a favor. If you enjoyed this interview, if you found value from it, go ahead and send this to a friend in an email. Again, LewisHowes.com/120. Just send an email to a friend of yours, say, "Hey, I was listening to this podcast. I had this really cool guy on. Check it out." It's LewisHowes.com/120.
52:38 Lewis Howes? That would really help me get the message out about the School of Greatness. We just broke ground on 500,000 downloads in the month of December. So, we're looking to take this to a million downloads by middle of 2015. And the only way it's going to happen is with your help. So, if each person sends one email intro to one or two friends about an episode they like, it's going to continue to help get the message out there and grow the School of Greatness podcast. Got some big things coming up this month and the next couple of months. We've got the School of Greatness Academy relaunching. We've had hundreds of entrepreneurs go through the last six-month program. We're reopening it up from popular demand. Got a lot of people who are on the waitlist. So, if you're interested in taking your business to a whole new level this year,
53:23 Lewis Howes? if you're interested in also figuring out how to have the lifestyle that you want and to build a business around your lifestyle, not just be a prisoner to working constantly to make money, but to have your perfect day every single day and make the money you want to make around doing what you love. If that speaks to you, if you're up for that game this year, then go to SchoolOfGreatness.com. There will be a little place to sign up for the waiting list. So, make sure to go to SchoolOfGreatness.com, sign up for the waiting list. We're going to be sending you an email very shortly about when it's being released. You'll have to apply to get in, so there'll be some information you'll have to fill out to get accepted. So, make sure to put an email that you want to get, receive a message from me from,
54:07 Lewis Howes? that you can get it, and get ready to apply because we don't accept everyone. We want to make sure it's very curated and quality people that are committed to taking action and making it a great year. So, SchoolOfGreatness.com, LewisHowes.com/120. Thank you, guys, for all that you do. Thank you for, Bear Tounay, for coming on. You guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do- Something Great.
54:50 Lewis Howes? ...
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