Success Story with Scott D. Clary

just hurt my whole life you're a bad kid you're a bad kid if the kids can't play with me and it caused me to turn to drugs and alcohol all the stuff you told me you wanna achieve you literally said i will not allow myself to be happy until i do these things once you get close to that you're gonna make a new list dan mart from prison walls to boardroom rooms dan mart story is one of raw resilience he turned a troubled youth into an empire building scaling and exiting multiple saas before becoming one of the most sought after coaches for high performing founders it doesn't matter how many zeros are involved if you assign yourself worth to this external thing you can't win dude being a millionaire is being the person that knows how to create a million dollars worth of value glad that i got my money when i got it because if i got it sooner i probably would've lost it the creation step i'm at thinking of the problem i wanna solve in the world and designing the company gets involved in the business and i refined the business as a product itself and that's where i play author of buy back your time dan teaches leaders how to grow their businesses without sacrificing their health family or sanity he doesn't just build systems he builds a lifestyle and his mission is clear help you win back your time and your life most people think they are their thoughts and they're not you are not your thoughts you didn't even choose your thoughts if people truly understand what i'm saying hardest relationship to build most important relationship to build you with you high with sun so you teach entrepreneurs about buying back their time usually that's in a business context but i wanna understand a personal revelation about times value what was that first personal revelation i think it has to do with my kids i think you know what what's funny is that i got two boys they're eleven months apart irish twins that's what's it's called there it was wild didn't know when you talked about moving and the the the pod and all this stuff like in a two year period my wife and i moved from san francisco to canada that's where i grew up built a home moved built then decide to spec her new dream home build that she started a company i started company she got pregnant again like you understand then in a two year window it's fine as i went to see my doctor because i had a pain on my like am my back a little bit yeah and he goes what's going on you stressed out i said no he goes leaves comes back gives me this little you know package of pills as so what's that and he shows me on he pulled up his ipad searches and he shows me and goes this is what it would looked like if you didn't come see me and it was shingles and he goes tell me what's going on in your life and i said nothing must just start a new company moving back to canada oh my wife renee pregnant and he's just laughing he goes dude out of the top three biggest stress on in life it's moving changing jobs or having kids and you're doing all three and i was like oh he goes yeah man this is your body is telling you to slow down so i say that because what my first child brought into my life was not a sense of productivity on time was a sense of joint joy in that time there's a there's a difference man you know what i mean i don't exactly what you mean but i'm curious how you let yourself get so to stress and anxiety and not balancing time properly because that happens a lot and usually it takes this major life wake up moment before you realize that you've been running without really being conscious of how fast you're running for such a period of time for you it was shingles and a kid that was sort of the wake up moment but how did it get to that point i think because of the way i grew up and how chaotic that was i actually thought i was winning when my body was saying chill out but you what mean exactly what you mean yeah dude i i was i was you know this is my that at that time it would have been my third tech company sold the first two multimillion millionaire beautiful new wife like like my dad loves her like he literally every time he meets her he literally lives her in the eyes almost like grass her face and says thank you don't give up on him if you guys don't say together we you're we're keeping you no i'm just i'm kidding he does say that it hurts my feelings a little bit but and i think there was just this sense of what's normal it's kind of the the whole like had you know boiling in a frog i was in it i didn't know was abnormal i thought i was winning because what i'd had experienced before was so crazy that this felt normal and i didn't have a way honestly and i hate i'm not a fan of this word but i didn't have a self care routine i didn't have a a decompression strategy i didn't i didn't even know how it could be like i didn't know there was a way to produce without that level of pressure so i think that all entrepreneurs have these hyper addictive personalities and they get just a bit right just a bit putting it lightly and they can get addicted to and i'm i do want you to tell this audience who who the people that don't know your origin story what happened because that tees up exactly what i'm talking about but this hyper addictive personality i think that most entrepreneurs are one bad habit away from falling into alcoholism and drugs because the same type of personality that goes all in or nothing on anything is what allows you or most people to be successful at building it's the same adaptation and it's very scary because most people think that well i'm addicted to something that society looks at as positive but obviously not always the case no you bring up a good point and and i'll come back to my story i remember somebody said to me once peter was his name i gotta remember his last name but anyways he said he goes the difference between you mister productive wealthy you know entrepreneur type a driver dan and the homeless person on the side of the street is paper thin the difference said the only difference is you have figured out a positive adaptation to the response of trauma and that person hasn't and his name's chrome peter cro he's i think they called like the brain architect he just it's fascinating because he says this to me and then he didn't know my background he didn't know that as a teenager i struggled with addiction i ended up in juvenile attention twice i almost took my wife in high speed chase it took somebody you know when i was when i was weighing in in jail since an adult prison with a juvenile section it took a guard to pull me aside it's guy named brian to share with me what he saw in me like at this item adam sixteen seventeen and i honestly don't even feel like i deserve to breathe the air and breathe like self worth what is not even a work i didn't even have i literally thought i'll probably always get in trouble this is my life i should just accept it and maybe i maybe i should move on so brian sis me down and just tells me i didn't belong there and that was the beginning of the shift that was that like because prior to that because of everything i went through i just thought that's who i was i thought i was a bad kid like literally i just heard my whole life you're a bad kid you're a bad kid i mean neighbors can't play with like the kids can't play with me i gotta go hide in the woods they gotta pretend they're going to their neighbors like just my whole life is is was that was the belief and it caused me to turn to drugs and alcohol so the addiction was there luckily brian spoke belief and help me he planted to seed like it was the beginning of a journey it took me another probably decade to get successful but but also how do you define success and then the thing is is that success was built off of dark energy of not enough ness that was present so then it was like that's hard like that's that's the thing you can achieve but to what cost like my body was telling me you're stressed out and i'm like life is great so it's like why like and again it's it's it's a it's a response to the meaning i was giving it at the time and i think that's an interesting thought for people to to question how why are you like why are you at why are you acting like this you know like i remember one time this crazy story my friend you know he he's watching my content and he calls me up and he goes dude you said something that cracks me open i said what's that he goes he said for the last five years i've been struggling my business and what happened was is five years ago and he had young young kids like newborns maybe two year old and a one year older six month old he goes my business went through a dark time and i didn't have i didn't know what to do but i knew i had to work and you said something they said all the stuff that you want to achieve your nobody's asking you for this because what he did at that time five years prior is he asked his wife for permission he said i'm gonna i gotta go deal with this problem at work and i don't know how long it's gonna take me but what's gonna require me to be gone before the kids wake out and back after they go to bed and he shares with me for three years he didn't see his kids for three years he told himself this is what i gotta do and it kinda like there's a wild thing to me to hear but at the same time i totally understood what he didn't know any better and what i what he heard me say that cracked him open was when i explained to him when my i was in a relationship she left me and i'm sitting there trying to explain to her why i'm the way i am to create the future that i'm trying to create for us and she looks at me and she says i didn't ask you for any of this and he realized his wife and his kids never asked them for any of it how do we fall into these flywheel of success and i'm not thinking internally like for me and this is a thought while you think about that i'll i'll just sort of tell you how i feel about this so i'm i'm super cognizant of this is why i'm super aware of it because i have the luxury of interviewing super high performing people and you see them come out on the other side of success and it's not always what you aspire for you peep tool with hundred million five hundred million true billionaires and the you know four x wives and no relationship with their kids not a hard and fast rule obviously but it happens so i'm nowhere close to that and one day you know if the podcast goes as well but in the meantime does well i do well financially but there's a season in my life that i'm committing to right now where i'm putting in an excess amount of work for certain returns that i wanna have but i do know and you asked me for before we filmed and i do i have kids yet and i don't and i'm so aware of the fact that when i do have kids i don't wanna be operating and running at the pace that i'm running at right now but i'm aware of it so when we have kids i have to i have to be very specific about how much energy and effort i put towards certain things i don't think that many people have the luxury of seeing so many success how society would define a successful individual on the other side of a big financial win seeing them broken internally with the relationship spiritually mentally physically whatever so so i don't know how to teach this over to somebody else outside of just sort of like trying to repeat it again and again and again but if you have ideas i think that'd be very helpful so how do you not fall into this trap of putting more of yourself and more of yourself and more of yourself and having no end to that season it's awesome it's an awesome question and it's and it's one of those champagne problems right like everybody's like i'll take it yeah yeah sign me up billion dollars let's see what happens you know put me on the other side the truth is when i work with people i don't do a lot of private coaching but when i do nine figure guys very successful people the first meeting and i know what i'm doing i'm pulling them into my world i'm getting them excited about the future i'm trying to like so we get really clear i have a very specific vision process and and they walk away with a list and a vision the next call it's my favorite call because i then introduce them to this concept where they just created a list of rules that need to be true for them to feel enough that's all those things are all the stuff you told me you wanna achieve you literally said i will not allow myself to be happy feel fulfilled feel enough whatever word insert here whatever thing you're trying to fill until i do these things which we both know once you get close to that and you hire the next coach you're gonna make a new list i always go back to like tony robbins he has he tells this story i think at his business mastery program of a billionaire russian billionaire worth thirty seven billion dollars k envy of everybody in the country well known well liked well respected and public company and something happens and as stock goes down to twenty seven billion what does he do lays down on a train track and gets run over it's a real story real story search it google billionaire russian billionaire killed by a train why because it's it doesn't matter how many zeros are involved if you assign self worth to this external thing you'll you can't win dude like ever ever yeah it's the craziest thing and i get it because i went through it i felt it and i play with it even but again i can now i just have the privilege of awareness i see myself like you say how do i i know you you know you're what like that's the cool part about you you know so that's the here's what i let everybody know especially if you're you're a high achieve and you're listening to this there's probably a part of you that knows what your thing is you have an edge you have a you have an approach you're different everybody knows it you know it there's something about the way you look at the world that makes you you that you're if you're succeeding and the fear is that if you lose that that your edge goes away my invitation for you to consider because this is what's true with the people i work with you think the reason you're successful is because of that edge i'm telling you're sec successful in spite of that edge and if you actually work through it you have ten times more available to you but that's a scary prop you know what i'm saying scary oh yeah dude you're even i see you you're you're going but but but no this i got this because of that yeah and i actually think it's in spite of that what i've discovered again tactics how do you manage that idea so an example maybe you are great at selling and you jump on calls all the time and that's how you build your business so how do you remove that out of your formula yeah i mean most people's edge they'll call it selling they'll call it their their copy skills they'll call it their their leadership i'm the ceo i'm the vision maker they'll call it their their heart their kindness and whatever it is right their direct here's here's what i would encourage people to consider who you are today is not who you need to become to achieve what you want because if you were you'd have it period full stop you don't if people i i hope people get my life isn't a byproduct of a decision i made today my life is a byproduct of a decision i made six months ago a year ago four years ago the reason i made those decision is because an identity that i believed i could become and i knew i needed to become that version of me to bring those things into my life because if you're were actually given that you know this man it's said jim jim ron talk about this back in day said you should hope you don't be given a million dollars because if you're not a millionaire yet you'll lose it all people think having a million bucks makes you a millionaire my definition of a millionaire is not a person has a million dollars in bank count because any one of the people listen right now i can why you the money like i've been thinking about doing this because i think it'd be a great the deal obviously i you don't even have to do it because you look at lottery winners we just watched it happen with the pandemic yeah everybody got the money it ended up back in the same pockets period full stop so so that's that's the thing i want people to understand it's it's not the it's who you need to become to achieve and and and that's why i went for me i'd like have people get crystal clear on their vision and then make that silly list and i love this because here's the thing i teach them how to be crazy whole grateful enough at any moment right now from that place now we create that's the beautiful part from this place i'm not saying you know create because that a lot of people she's saying i should just hang on the beach and k combine and home i'm like no you were created to create your creators the human experience why you want a new new irr and you're inspired by people who have nice things and you don't live on the street you know you know what i mean like just accept it this is not a capitalism material thing this is just human experience but it's why we create and i wanna create from a place of abundance of pure creation a pure giving a pure enough a pure like and guess what those people that's your steve jobs that's your walt disney's that's your elon like what's driving he elon he don't need to do anything now he's just he's just living in this place of i just wanna build not from a place of not enough like there's not enough no like i almost i don't know what the numbers is and honestly i think it's different from for everybody because you have that thirty seven billion you know russian who killed himself lays down on the train track i think it's it's and and that's why it's so powerful the person who needs nothing is the most dangerous person in the world like you can't control literally the person who needs nothing from anybody is dangerous to everybody else competes against them in the same token if that person wakes up and they start building and creating because they don't need anything there's no emotional response to not initially achieving because to them there's no need to achieve again they're they're just like i'm in flow i'm in the process i'm creating this is this is bone this is crazy ass you know what i mean and that's where i just got to and it's my favorite thing to introduce people to what is the most important difference or distinction and how you build now outside of mindset what are the what is the thing that you did is it is it you build sop and that's how you structure your organization you bring more balance you focus on shutting off at a certain time like there's all these different ideas it's a great question i'm just scanning my brain trying to pattern match what i do before what i do now number one thing is i focus on building the organization as a product i don't get involved in the product so what happens is most people when they start a business that's the thing they sell they they honestly they do the thing they sell like they're they have a they help people get fit they're the trainer and then if you're lucky you know and i gotta plug my book because it is one that buy back your time is the process for getting out of the doing to the managing owning kind of face right if you're a trainer now of a sudden you own a gym and you have trainers the creation step i'm at is thinking of the problem i wanna solve in the world and then designing the company that attracts the talent that that gets involved in the business and i refine the business as a product itself and that's where i play when you talk to like people that have sold and exited their companies most of them when they're doing their next thing the first question they ask is who's gonna run this when richard branson decides to get into cruises right you got a virgin cruises his first question he didn't like go try he didn't start talking to ship makers and buying shit he said who's the numb this is larry i talked about this he said who's the number two at the number one company and he goes in hires the coo at carnival and ask them do you wanna be the ceo at virgin cruises he said wow yes and now all of a sudden he's got an organization he gets involved at the brand level right he shows up for the p stunt he's looking at it through that lens that's the biggest difference i always say when you start from zero you start bottom up if you're blessed to have success next time you do it you start top down and that is a hundred percent the difference and why is that beautiful it's a it's an easier energy it's not a grind it's not in the business it's not even on the business it's of the business it's like i'm designing the thing that everybody else plays and it's like i'm i'm like starting a new sport and i'm deciding how the sport works and i try this and all that didn't work the innings engines are too long or the bat i need to make like you know and literally oh you you attract you i mean i don't wanna sound cliche but you build the culture that attracts vision is a hundred percent vision yeah if you think about it two things have to be true you have to solve a big problem do you know why elon is so wealthy solves the biggest problem big do yeah the biggest problems stuff that's wild like i have in my office like because i i just it's so wild to me as i've been watching elon at zip two i'm a software guy so back in the zip two days to the the x his first company right yeah zip two sold that then he did x and then merge with paypal really and then over the years and i was in silicon valley so every once in a while you'd show up at a party or he'd show up at a dinner or whatever so he's around and then he does tesla and solar city and then the spacex and you just watch this person attack problems they're not even problems like humans didn't know they have a problem not being able to go be multi planetary he made up a problem because he's and and what happens is if you actually think about it is it his iq is it his work ethic could like think about what makes him is is his level of risk you know he's famous for saying i had a hundred and sixty million after i sold paypal i put a hundred here fifty you know what i mean most people wouldn't do that most people wouldn't look down at their personal net worth their cash position and say half here half there all you know what i mean like all in or stop no okay but guess what that's not it because risk so if you look at it the thing that makes him different is that he thinks bigger dude it's so if you think about this most people think their neighborhood they think they're street how big do i think compared to my neighborhood if you're successful a little bit successful you think your city are you're not thinking your street no you're not you're a city but even then that's limited super limited hopefully you get exposed to some mentor some people that say hey how about your your state yeah let's go nationwide elon doesn't even think the little blue dot that he lives on he goes galaxy that's wild that sweet is a success story partner now what does a future hold for business fiasco ask nine experts are gonna get ten answers bull market bear market rates will rise rates will fall honestly i just wish somebody would invent a crystal ball but until then over forty one thousand businesses have future proof their business with nets sweet by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one fluid dynamic platform with real time insights and forecasting you're peer into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next if i had needed this product this is what i would use whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions nets helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest opportunities and speaking of opportunity download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning the guide is free that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla indeed is a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidate fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring indeed is all you need stop struggling to get your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash clarity terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need but you have to balance that influence what i mean by that is that influence is good to help you think bigger but in terms of even people that mentor you you need multiple different types of mentors as well so you need people that are just beyond you like a couple years people are even at the same level as you i think people even teaching for me is my favorite form of mentorship because when i teach something then i understand all the gaps in my knowledge so you need this like this whole array but i think that people more often than not lock that really big thinking so they can fill all the other gaps just proof by their container i always say you can tell somebody psychological context how they think about themselves based on their container what's the exercise you do to even understand if you want to play that vague because not everybody wants to play that they do they don't wanna admit it if you're a human and you have a heartbeat you know you're meant for more like i will fight i will die on that it's just true if you're hearing my voice right now and you're listening to this podcast you know you are here to do something way bigger than what you're doing right now now making that decision is scary because it's probably gonna need some really tough conversations with people you love in your life and and obviously who you are today is not who you're gonna have to become to achieve that thing and all that is scary changes scary i get that but i'm if if today was your last day like it was your last breath i guarantee most people most people ninety nine point seven percent population would have massive regrets for not starting or creating or doing that thing so it's like do they wanna play at that level my philosophy is this you were created to expand i mean it's just the fact that you're human create what you can accomplish that's actually not your i don't believe it is my choice i don't know what i can do i just know the expansion is available to me and there's a part me that wants to do it and i can do it and it can be effortless see that's a part the store you tell yourself that makes it cms sounds hard and it's gonna crazy that's the x factor right because most people think sure i can i can do whatever i want i think listen especially listeners of this podcast are very aspirational and they do have big dreams to compare to probably ninety nine percent of the population but the issue is well if i build something that is if i'm a nine figure entrepreneur built multiple companies if i build anything meaningful that means sacrifices and all the of all the other areas of my life right but i know and i wanna talk about eventually how you've built a beautiful relationship you have a great all of it with your kids somebody body you buy yeah yeah i've seen your health journey dude like so you have it all i don't have it all i just have a direction that i'm on that demonstrates that there's a different way and i'm gonna be the first one to say i'm still trying to figure it all out but i can just tell you year over year there's obviously expansion i mean right now like i'm playing at the billion plus level over the next three years it's all modeled out it's it's not it's inevitable it's like one of those things where when you design it and it's and it's not like why do you wanna be that like i don't need to and if it doesn't happen i will i will lose zero sleep at night i just got i just literally just got back from five days in the woods by myself no devices in a van with me and my thoughts and i thought i was gonna go crazy before i did i was like i don't wanna do that i don't know if you've ever done that scott whatever but that's wow think about it not talking to another human that do the they go into a cage this spot yeah it was black okay yeah yeah so like to me as an ex i love people i love talking obviously like i i was like i don't wanna do that by the third day i fell in love with nature and myself that was a cool thing i really really you know what i mean like i love myself i didn't know what that meant and then i experienced it and it occurred to me because i had so much on day four day i dude i was supposed to be home at nine i didn't get back till noon i was driving around just they call it you know windshield therapy it was just beautiful and what i discovered for me and i and i wanna to invite people to understand it's available to everybody is that when you realize like it's kinda so the whole space into i don't wanna get into like is time real but if you take every human off of earth trees and birds don't think in time it's a man made construct and if you believe that you're you're more than just your body which we are then as i'm driving around i'm just laughing at how much i make meaning of stuff that is an illusion of importance that's everybody though i know and it's so cool once you realize it because then from that place you can actually go create massively because in one sense it doesn't matter in the other sense it does and it does it's say it's kinda crazy man that's kinda where i got so that's why like when you say what's difference about the way i used to build versus now it's i truly look at the exercise of creation of the thing without any need so i think it was ram dos said involve not attached i think that's the best way for me to explain beautiful line involve not attached we create it works out cool it doesn't also cool the other parts of your life that are non business so how do you make sure that those don't fall off i mean i have a rhythm of existence that involves all that that's just way i think about it i'm a big fan of momentum and i think when you're in momentum you should say a momentum right most people don't realize it so i have my own jet so have a plane and every i i remember the first time i was like with my pilot and buddy's like hey you're flying here you should pick me up i'm like alright looks at my plane land it and the pile explained to me that it costs the same amount of money to land and take off in jet fuel then to just get there i was like whoa he goes yeah dude he goes all the effort is taking off like if you think about the amount of fuel to burn to get even elon talks about a save velocity yeah oh yeah he's like oh getting into whatever atmosphere easy he's like getting out in the outer space ten times harder a hundred times harder same thing with the plane so momentum for me is so precious than when i'm in it right here right now i'm i'm with you not about anything else don't care about anything else we're we're doing this inflow that i've just continued to ask myself what is it about my life that allows me to have a rhythm of existence that allows me to stay in this on the personal side it's the sweat every day it's the workout k so like my whole philosophy is exhausted body team the mine i don't work out for the aesthetics i don't look out for the the physical part of it it's a bonus i work out for the cognitive side i call it my ability to pull vocabulary dude if i don't work out i can see that i'm not able to to pull the words i need when i need them and guess what i am a communicator everything i dream about the creation is through the words if you think about how fascinating that is nothing is built without words being said and most people never ask themselves am i good at words do i talk too much do i have a good economy of words when i communicate is it felt am i clear you can feel days when you're off dude i mean i do the same spelling find the words you're like in a story and you're like you know the i know the person's name's peter cro couldn't so you just feel like these micro moments when you for example on the fitness side take that into existence and all sudden you put that like for me it's sweat every day it's not the if the day ends with da y it's a day i work out so i have a lot of these things so that there are rhythms that and look i don't need perfection either i'm is again involved not attached if i miss a day zero i don't beat myself up and like oh my god so stupid or board like but like date nights with my wife we you do off sites all of it we do quarterly off sites we do couple retreats every year we do a personal development event as a as a fam like as a couple we i do stuff with my kids right we call board meetings because it's like surfboard board wake surfboard board like it's their board means they're fun and it's it's essentially a yesterday day with one of my one on one so i've got max my wife's got noah the next weekend we swap and people like oh my god is it the only time you do one on one's of people no you ding dong that's not i said i said that it's there yesterday it's not every day my child gets to choose to go spend whatever they want an arcade like and again it's not even designed for that is designed so that the end it this is my favorite part of my board me with my kids the end of the the hang we go for a meal and it's at that meal that i ask all the questions and concerns hey when they were little i would literally ask them hey man i'm just curious saying your friend's dads ever do anything to make you feel uncomfortable no what do you mean by that i don't know and we ever touch you mh you know what i mean you have a good relationship you have that can with them since they were five six seven and a another eleven twelve so it's not abnormal it's not like i come out of the left field with it it's literally just this beautiful moment that i cherish man my son noah got me so good the last one two of them ago we were doing like i always ask hey i wanna be a better dad for you and i know you'll never tell me how to be better but i would love for you just give me something you know so say you're the best i'm like i'm not i can't be the best i like hey he gave me i forget forgot what it was then he want he's like i want you to play video games with us i don't play video games i'm like alright i'll learn how to play roadblocks whatever it is and then and then he says to me it's really cool he goes well what can i do he's eleven i love this i said well since you're asking you know sometimes you you're really c with mama my his mom and when i try to like just cuddle with you sit next you on the couch and with my book and stuff you kinda elbow me and you push you know what i he's like like a guy and i said i just i would just love for you to hang up with me and cuddle me like i'm i sounds he's like okay so for the next ninety days so we do it every three months he he did it it i watched him so cute i watch them but check this out the next one we're sitting down we're talking and i said can i tell you something noah and he goes what's that i said i noticed that you tried and i said i i really love i love that you did that and he starts crying and i'm like do why are you crying and he goes you're crying and what i'm just like dude i i i can't believe the relationship i have with this kid like you know what so beautiful like i hope someday you have i did too i know what you you would want as a person yeah and you hope i'm like oh my gosh i'm so glad i read that book or i did that thing or i went to that seminar it's so the there's a bunch of stuff i do to maintain that rhythm of existence and it's and it's a it's it's an iterative process at the end of the day the only thing that matters when you die are your relationships are there people around you that love you i think people lose sight of that dude i heard do you know who sal priscilla is andy priscilla andy andy okay so andy first form his brother sal is his i think he's the ceo now first form he was the president for a while or he was like the division of set like he came in and worked his way up and then he's anyways he runs the company essentially and he was speaking on an event we're both speaking at and i watched his talk because i never seen him speak he doesn't speak a lot and he was talking about relationships and he was talking about the value of it and and this is more in the context of people around you k family yes but even teams because he he refers to his direct reports the guys i mean there there are like probably eight hundred million a year business now i visited their facility their warehouse i mean it is the culture is palatable it is on another level if you're a business person study first form follow sal go to his they have the i i'm actually speaking at this the saint louis summit with ben neumann go learn because he said something he goes you know people always asked me about the the guys he calls them the young the young guys or whatever he is a name for them and he goes these are my guys we build together we win together we lose together these are the ones these are the guys i chose there's eight of them now they're seven left these are the ones i'm gonna build with they're people to work for him yep there is direct reports his lieutenant is his team k and they're like ten years younger than him and he goes somebody asked him but like how does he think about his team to culture like because it's just it's crazy the the stuff they'll do for him he says who do you think is gonna carry the casket he goes if something happens to me who's gonna carry the casket and when i thought of that i was like i know those people in my life i don't think i've ever told them how much they mean to me in that one sentence change my whole frame because i think most people in business and i and i'll be honest with if you have fifteen years ago i didn't think that way i didn't value things to that level i was way too performance focus now i'm like hey if i gotta be better so that i can support you guys to be around because of the character you have the the trust i have with you because i know not only would you carry the casket you're gonna take care of renee and my boys let's go this is bigger than this you are a an ultra high performing individual you've hit all these financial milestones that most people would say you've killed it now you've built all these really strong relationships in your life with your wife your kids your beat your coworkers the people that work for you your friends your dad what do you think was the hardest relationship to build and what would be the lesson that you took from that well i mean the hardest relationship it's the one with yourself like i i i'm gonna i'm gonna introduce this and i'm gonna break people's brains when i say it but you gotta hear it when you talk to yourself there's the voice and there's the person that hears it and you have never shut the fuck up if you think about that scott never once in the history of you being aware and awake have you ever shut the fuck out it's fascinating to think talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk it doesn't stop it never stops and it's fascinating because for many people the way they talk to themselves if somebody verbally said what they're saying to themselves out loud they would punch the person in the face the shit you say to yourselves you say to yourself you would elbow them in the temple i i would punch if somebody said that to my wife you're dead you know what i'm saying i know exactly what you're saying so when you say what relationships been the hardest it's not business i mean it's literally understanding the difference there's the eye and the self and there's the the one is of the soul and who i am and the limitless of that and then there's the ego that wants to tell me how everything's not gonna work out and all that stuff and and the more i've i've done the work and studied that and created the separation and and could kind of like watch it once you i remember tell literally a ceo that runs one of my companies we're doing an off site and he asked me how do you deal with so much dah dah and i tell him i was like well i just i get really aware of like where this negative self talk comes from he's like what you mean negative self talk so well have you ever considered there's like and as soon as i shared that with them it's like i and then he's watching himself do it he's literally like oak he's like oh there i go again where'd that come from and i go that's the thing man is like most people think they are their thoughts and they're not i'm not my thoughts that's gonna like what are you talking about your not you are not your thoughts you didn't even choose your thoughts when you're driving down the street and you think to call somebody where that come from random so like if people truly understand what i'm saying hardest relationship to build most important relationship to build you with you i with self i just wanna take a second and thank cornbread bread ham for supporting today's episode now cornbread ham cbd gum have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit i don't use them every day just when i wanna unwind after those extra busy weeks but they're perfect for those moments when you wanna take the edge off and just find your balance really just shut off from work and what makes them special is how cornbread bread hand props them they only use a flower of usda organic plants that's the best part for the purest most potent experience no fillers no artificial fluff just clean full spectrum goodness and delicious watermelon berry and peach flavor keep them in my nice in for those moments when i just need a little extra help relaxing and i love how transparent they are too every batch is third party lab tested so you know exactly what you're getting and they put together a special offer for all success story podcast listeners all listeners can save thirty percent off their first order just head the cornbread hemp dot com slash success and use code success at checkout that's cornbread hemp dot com slash success code success for thirty percent off your first order of these amazing dummies the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now if you like success story you're gonna love other podcasts in the hubspot podcast network one of my personal favorites is i digress hosted by my boy troy sandwich each show is under thirty minutes i digress helps eliminate complexity complications and confusion in your business with frameworks and strategies to achieve true scalable and sustainable success if you're an entrepreneur building anything you need to listen to i digress this is one of the most useful business podcast trust me go do yourself a favor and listen to i digress wherever you get your podcasts it's interesting because the the more of a high performing attitude you have probably the worst self talk the worst you talk to yourself because you always are not good enough and you always haven't achieved what you wanna to and you don't even realize that you're moving your own goal posts because if you actually looked at what you've achieved over the past five years that five year ago version of you would be thrilled but you're never happy with it we spoke with this at the beginning i'm it i don't disagree with it i think you have to separate high performance because i actually as i studied the best in the world that's my favorite thing to do is just like model i'm like i'm dumb you succeeded what did you do let me see if that works for me and if you study even if steve jobs he definitely was that person then he leaves any he experiences next and he comes back and he's shared this there but i was a i needed to go through next to become the person to build apple he's like said this and i think what happens is that high performance negative self talk gets you an apple and a next it doesn't get you version two of apple the iphone apple i and i and i again you see all these people and you know what i'm talking about like the fucking can kill yourself and do it and go all in and a lot of them on social now which is so not my stock toxic the word yeah i think it's it's and they'll argue with me that's what's required again you think it's your edge i think you're successful in spite of because my gut tells me your creativity and inability to execute without the emotional trap that you keep fucking squirting out your mouth would actually get you more because you wouldn't have to resolve all the crap that you create under the guise of what i need them to know i mean serious it's like no you can actually create and be and execute without any of that there's no need and that's why i don't subscribe to it i just personally like i get it i understand it i've used it i've done full distance disarming man's man i have to go to some dark places in my head to get my feet to keep moving forward because every part of my being wants to fucking lay down i get that but guess what it's not required you can learn to do it without it and i think some of the top forming people like a branson and like a disney like a jobs like a whoever i think they they found that they got there i don't know if somebody taught them this like i don't think the ceo of spacex gives enough credit for her ability to probably create a framework to work with elon like i actually think she's the secret weapon i'm sure she is a hundred percent is probably not easy to work with elon no and she's smart enough yeah to explain to him problem again i'm making all this stuff i don't know i've never asked them i would love to someday because that's that to me is what unlocks true potential when you can create without creating emotional trap because of all the extra mind crap all the negative self talk to propel you forward all the not enough ness all of the the anger man just like i and again i'm going back to me i'm like going back to the twenty four year old version of me going god darn it i was mad at everybody gosh darn it i created from a place of just proven everybody wrong i was working hundred hour weeks just to grind to to because i needed to deserve it if i don't work i don't deserve success like all the weird shit i used to tell myself it's like a friend of mine he's like you know i don't feel like i deserve it he he his dad's wealthy and he has an opportunity to run this company goes i don't feel like i deserve it i didn't earn it what does that mean what would need to be true for you to feel like you deserved it let's talk about that because that's an interesting question what if nothing needs to be true will you allow yourself to just accept interesting idea i heard you speaking about this on ed podcast you're talking about opportunities presenting themselves and not taking advantage of it or not doing the work ahead of time so that you can receive can receive it but it is is it a matter of not doing the work ahead of time or is it a matter of you are self sa that opportunity because you don't feel like you're worth it so is it is it accolades and resume or is it actually just your own mind i think there's i mean the the the interesting part of anything one of my business partners matt he says all the time he thinks both things can be true because i oh my i like that idea yeah he goes he goes i'm like why did that person do that it's because of this he goes or because of this and he goes and the truth is both can be true at the same time and i'm like that's a good way to look at it so i think if somebody doesn't do the work because it's skill there is skills develop i'm not saying that you could wake up to if i handed you like i said if you're not a millionaire being a millionaire is being the person that knows how to create a million dollars worth of value so if i give you a million dollars and you don't know how to control i'm glad that i got my money when i got it because if i got it sooner probably i would lost it so i think there's a part where you have to develop skills and that's why i think any challenge in your life is literally designed to get you ready to receive what you've been asking for and if people understood that that's how it worked and it's always worked that way and you've never ever gotten better without dealing with challenges you would literally you would look at challenges through the lens of gratitude like you you would you would be like oh cool and that's where i live i'm like oh worthy like i don't want little problems dude scott if you got little problems you know what you got a little life yeah it's it's it's actually that simple show me the size of your problems i can tell you the size of your life so i've always leaned in tried to lean in to the challenges knowing that this will get me ready to receive the thing i've been asking for and if i don't i won't receive it if i got it that's where you ask like or do you sell sabotage or i get it and i'm not prepared and i fumble right now the self sabotage is a real thing like most people oh man i had a i had one of my clients mark he's an architect and in like when he came to see he's was doing like a million and change a year and i was like dude you're way too like known you like you should be way bigger and he's like really and i was like millions not dude let's go to five next year like let's like let's say for i've i've never done i've been in this business seventeen years you know i think a million is good no no million sucks five is what you want you got i can see it you got it all there you're just literally just holding back he does five but by the ferraris love and life and pump form all i say to him is don't give it back i'm not giving it back why i it back i said don't give it back because that's the why are you saying that what who am i giving it back to mark i'm telling you ninety percent of people that grow that fast don't feel like they deserve it you might not even realize it and i don't wanna ask about your financial situation i don't even wanna ask about your business i'm just letting you know most people that grow that don't feel like they deserve will quickly sabotage themselves so manufacture a situation that cause them to fail it's not their fault and i've seen it happen over and over again what happened to mark two and a half million the next year i i can only tell them where the waters if they don't wanna drink the water i can shine light on the problem they don't wanna analyze like literally it was a mindset he had a two and a half million dollar identity and his thermostat was cool and i mean it's just i remember twelve months later i was like because i wasn't in around much and i asked them and he said you right now in the crazy part he's like well lisa's is not a million i'm like dude that's the problem yeah that's the exact problem when you don't think you deserve something you don't fight for it it's little it's that simple you either think you're worth it and you ask for it and you fight for it and if it drops below it you show up or you make up reasons you drag your feet you don't you know and it's it's literally just a personal decision about how you view the world i think that i i have i've always been so torn on this because i find internet thought leadership has always broken down into two camps it's the inspiration and the motivation and the mindset and then there's a people that are very tactical and to build anything meaningful you need both and you cannot be deficient in one or the other you will not achieve success and i think that all these ideas we could have spoken about very tactical how to build a business you know how to lower your c increase your lt tv whatever you wanna long all day long but this conversation if people can really lean in and understand what you're saying this is gonna change your life more than any how to increase your ro ads on your facebook ad or anything like that and and that's why like the whole like being first it's so important here here's a challenge of scott and you you teach people this and like you have to have the space to do it like it's i understand it's easy for me to sit here and go wow man you do the board needs of the kids and you do the seminars what your wife and you do a weekly meeting with your wife and you a couple of retreats and you have your all these people like where do i find time i'm drowning right now most people don't know how to let go that's like a big psychological thing is actually feeling like you deserve it let it go i mean most people that read my book then they go okay i hire an executive assistant i'm like how much time do you think that person buy oh know five hours a week i'm like then you didn't do it right you didn't know all the stuff you had to let go like i have i got a document it is forty two pages and honestly anybody wants it they can have a find me on instagram follow me that's my only thing i ask dan mart of mart it messaged me ea scott if you don't mention if you don't mention scott i'm not sending this this is only for gentleman's agreement yeah and i'll send you a directly to the google doc i think my assistant anne cleaned it up so my credit cards and all but like it's legit a document that just talks about like because to me i wanna challenge and people always i'll give away that but not this this is okay but not that you know and here's the test k men it a lot easier to deal with i asked my dad earlier and he laughed because i have no problem with that here's the test you're going on vacation you're traveling somebody else packs your bag you literally wake up grab the carry on and go to the airport could you do that what emotion would come up if you had to do that how crazy anxiety prone would you you know what i mean that to me the ten out of ten and everything else falls underneath and on top of you're actually going on vacation and your business doesn't go to shit either yeah all of it and i think most people just need the list to kind of audit themselves so i'll give everybody that if they want it please yeah that's great you've gone through a lot if you wanted to obviously your socials website all of that where do you wanna send people yeah dan mart dot com is the best place two l's in mart youtube we're almost had a million bananas we like in the last opt off yeah i we we did a hundred and twenty four million views last month across our channel congratulations yeah well eighteen months well ten years in the making eighteen months of deciding to go pro and an incredible team like sam was here just super cool if you had to leave i i i used to ask what would you tell your twenty year old self and that was like a fun little question you can answer that one but i actually changed that question because i thought it'd be a little bit more relevant and a little bit more impactful so you can only leave one lesson with your kids out of everything you've learned in your entire life what would that lesson be and why i mean i think about this often and i think it evolves and changes the thing i've been sharing with them recently literally yesterday is you will only receive what you desire for others well i lewis tell max the of other day you he's a little cap cut editor or he does video stuff and like i've never told him to do it i just like he just loves to do it just like just gets and he wants to get better and i said who else are you're helping well why would it i help other people i'm doing my own stuff max you will only receive what you desire for others you wanna be better you want your channel to grow trust me you start helping other people grow their channels your channel will grow i'd just gotta a trust have some face brother like this little dude like that's what that's been my truth the moment i stop being so selfish because that's really what it was that dark energy early days selfish selfish selfish take take take me me me look at me blah blah blah dude and i shifted it to how many people can i make rich how many millionaires can i create how many how many people can i serve how what's the potential of impact to if i how to how many people can i help get a bi vein like do you i'm hundred percent fitter because i decided to help other people get fit wealth head mindset like and i just think it's such a beautiful energetic place to live where you just say i wake up every day and ask myself a question how do i create more value for of everybody in my world than anybody else in their world i wanna be the person in their world that creates the most value for them and i just think that if i do that and show up every day and i teach my kids this everything else takes care of itself

in this lessons episode i'm gonna prove to you that your identity is the main thing preventing your success that advice that you've always been following know yourself find your authentic voice stay true to who you are this is systematically destroying your potential every time in your life when you said that's not me you've chosen limitation over opportunity and i'm gonna show you why the most successful people in history had no fixed identity at all and exactly how to stop being someone so you can start becoming anyone the situation demands the most successful people in history had no idea who they were benjamin franklin started as a candle son became a printer than a writer than a scientist than a diplomat than a founding father and at no point did he stalk to ask is this aligned with my authentic self he just became whatever the situation required now compare this to you you're paralyzed by whether a career change fits your identity or whether taking a risk feels authentic to who you are franklin would have laughed at your personality test results not because he was less self aware but because he understood something that you've forgotten identity is the enemy of achievement the moment you decide who you are you limit who you can become and we've been sold a lie we think having a strong sense of self is the foundation of success and fulfillment every single career coach life guru linkedin influencer tells you to quote unquote know your why or find your authentic voice or stay true to yourself but look closer at the people who actually achieve extraordinary things they have one trait in common they become whoever they need to be to solve the problem in front of them elon musk isn't protecting his identity as a car guy or a space guy he's solving transportation and he's making life multi planetary when paypal needed to exist he became a payments person when electric cars needed to happen he became a car person when space needed to be accessible he became a rocket person another example steve jobs steve jobs didn't have an identity crisis when he went from computers to phones tablets he wasn't worried about staying in his lane or whether these moves reflected his core values he succeeded and musk succeeded in all of these giants of industry these entrepreneurs that have changed the world and even non entrepreneurs they all succeeded because they weren't attached to being anyone in particular now there's a historical pattern to fluid greatness every transformational figure in history shared the same quality identity flexibility napoleon wasn't attached to being a soldier when he needed to become an emperor when circumstances changed he changed churchill hill wasn't limiting himself to being a military guy or a political guy he was a soldier than a journalist and a politician than a wartime leader than historian than a painter whatever the moment required leonardo vinci didn't choose between being an artist or an inventor or an engineer he was whatever curiosity demanded these people didn't succeed despite changing constantly they succeeded because they changed constantly but somewhere along the way we decided that consistency was a virtue and change was a crisis and we started to believe that successful people know themselves and stick to their strengths and we created this myth that authenticity means never evolving and this is exactly backwards and right now you're paying a price for your consistent identity that you don't even realize here's an example that promotion that you didn't apply for because management isn't really you well someone else is living in the house that that promotion would have bought or that business idea that you dismissed because you're not an entrepreneur someone else just launched it it changed their life or forget business what about that person that you attracted to but you didn't approach because you're not the type who makes the first move well right now they're building a life with someone who is willing to become that type and every time you say that's not me you're choosing your past over your future you are selecting a limitation over possibility and you're picking the comfort of self recognition over the discomfort of growth and the cruel part you call this authenticity and you feel virtuous about it and this has led us to have these modern identity prisons we have turned identity into this cage and we call it freedom because you spend years quote unquote finding yourself and then spend the rest of your life protecting what you found or you create a personal brand and then you become enslaved to maintaining it where you discover your passion and then you feel guilty about developing interest outside of it or you start to identify your core values and then you miss opportunities that don't obviously align with them and then what happens is the very thing that's supposed to liberate you is limiting you think about the last time that you faced a real emergency in your life so when your child was hurt you didn't wonder if being the caregiver aligned with your authentic self you just took care of them or when your startup was dying you didn't worry about whether cold calling customers was authentic to your introverted nature you just picked up the phone or when you're falling in love you didn't analyze whether vulnerability was consistent with your self image as the strong one you just opened your heart when survival was at stake identity becomes irrelevant you become whatever the situation demanded and you are more effective and you are more capable and you are more alive in those moments than you are when you're trying to be yourself the moments when you stop protecting your identity are the moments when you become the most powerful and modern psychology confirms this idea it confirms what franklin and many other great people knew intuitively identity rigidity is the enemy of adaptation people with fluid self concepts they're more resilient they're more creative they're more successful at navigating change compared to people who have these rigid identities they're more likely to become depressed when their circumstances has change they're more likely to miss opportunity that don't fit their self image and they're more likely to stay stuck in situations that no longer serve them so the research is very clear the stronger your attachment to being someone in particular the weaker your ability to become who you need to be yet we keep teaching people to find themselves and to know their identity as if these were keys to success rather than the barriers to it and this creates a massive opportunity cost to your fixed identity every moment you spend being yourself you're not being someone else who might be more useful or every opportunity you decline because it doesn't fit your identity you're choosing the past over the future every single time you say that's not me you're limiting your potential to whatever you've already been franklin understood this because when the situation called for diplomat he became the diplomat when it called for a scientist he became scientific when it called for a revolution he became revolutionary he didn't ask which of these is the real me he asked what does this situation need and that's why he helped create a nation instead of just creating a personal brand so you need to stop listening right now and you need to do this audit your identity understand what it's really costing you think of the last five opportunities you passed up the job you didn't apply for conversation you didn't have the risk you didn't take the person you didn't approach the idea that you didn't pursue and ask yourself how many of those decisions were actually based on practical concerns like timing or resources or just genuine lack of interest and then how many of them were based on some version of that's not me and that number is gonna some of you because you've been unconsciously filtering your entire life through this very narrow lens of who you think you are and it's blocking possibilities you can't even see your identity isn't protecting you it's imprison you so how do you achieve more by being less by being less you first i want you to become problem focused instead of identity focused so stop asking what should i do and start asking what needs to be done the first question filters opportunities through your existing identity second opens you to whatever role the situation requires next i want you to practice temporary expertise i want you to become intensely curious about whatever you're working on regardless of whether it's in your field franklin became an expert on electricity because the problem interested him not because he was a science person next please embrace strategic reinvent invention when your environment changes change with it don't cling to who you were when who you were wasn't who the situation needs i also want you to measure impact not authenticity you have to stop asking yourself does this feel like me and you have to start asking does this create value focus on results across every area of your life your job your business your relationship not whether the work expresses your authentic self and lastly collect evidence not identity so instead of deciding who you are collect evidence of what you can do i want you to let your capabilities expand beyond yourself concept and when you stop trying to be someone you become free to be anyone that that moment requires you can be gentle when gentleness serves you can be aggressive when aggression works you can create when creativity is needed and you can be analytical when an analysis would help you're not limited by your personality to type up your past experience yourself concept you become infinitely adaptable and it's not about being fake or losing your values it's about recognizing that your values can be expressed through infinite identities and your impact can be maximized by choosing the right identity for each situation franklin's values they never changed curiosity improvement service excellence but he expressed them through dozens of different roles over his lifetime the value stayed consistent the identity remained fluid now you have a choice after listening to this podcast you can keep protecting an identity that limits your potential or you can embrace the fluid adaptability that creates extraordinary lies you can keep asking who am i or you can start asking who do i need to become you can keep trying to be yourself or you can start being whoever life needs you to be the most successful and the most fulfilled people in history they always chose the second path everyone who's ever accomplished anything meaningful chose a second path because the first path leads to authentic mediocrity second leads to adaptive greatness i want you to stop being someone i want you to start becoming anyone because your identity isn't your foundation it's your limitation

hubspot is a success story partner now if you're an entrepreneur listen up because hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers if you are building a business you need to get hubspot why here's the perfect example moo house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content a problem that every single business in the world has but with a nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took thirty minutes to publish now breeze which is hubspot collection of ai tools help them right and optimize their content in a fraction of the time and the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site if you are ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com so sovereignty is about being unique to yourself being to yourself crypto has told us that there are other ways to bank if you're not happy with the way that the current system what if your passport wasn't a limitation but a strategy jeremy savory is the founder and ceo of savory and partners a global leader in citizenship by investment for over a decade he's helped high net worth individuals secure second passport ports unlock global freedom and build generational security across borders i look after a lot of high net worth people they don't have a problem with paint taxes they want to be part of society they have a problem with the where their taxes are being spent the more poor decisions being made by governments around the world more people are moving you just need to go where things are in your favor and that is taking advantage of the playing field that we're in and in the world trusted by royal families ceos in elite entrepreneurs jeremy isn't just selling paperwork he's rewriting the rule of what it means to belong in a world divided by borders he's in the business of building bridges the uae right now in the short term you need to be really careful about what you buy because you're either gonna get stuck with a dud or you're gonna find a gem nothing is as it seems there is so much in the poly domain there is so much in life that is not real but just understand that if you really wanna achieve something there is no other way to succeed than hard alright jeremy i want you to explain the concept of countries competing for capital and talent well let's use a a case in point here that it's nothing new that countries constantly send trade delegates to other parts of the world to position their country as the place where you wanna set up your your factory or your your business and so and they'll design incentives so they'll give you concessions on tax on duties moratorium on on on different matter on on other taxes you know they'll support you and sometimes even give you a bit of capital to start your business but today it's not just companies that get this is that individuals countries design programs residency programs citizenship programs and tax residency programs to be able to attract the world's best talent capital so you have since by investment programs residency by investment programs but you also have tax residue programs territorial tax where your low tax jurisdictions they design this so that they can really make it as attractive as possible for for all the best or the the high net worth but also the talent additional enormous when you describe what a sovereign citizen or a sovereign individual actually means because i i've heard that term being thrown around a lot just explain exec context for why somebody would be looking so let's tee up who the average person that consumes your content is it's probably somebody at least who listen to this show would be in the us and they're trying to figure out okay should i stay in the us should i live here my tax is very high i want to maybe reduce my tax burden i've heard of all these different programs you know everywhere in the world dubai in a variety of other places and then i hear this term sovereign individual or sovereign citizen what does that actually mean for that person so sovereignty is about being unique yourself having being to yourself so what's happening right now is people are finding that they don't really have that sense of sovereignty much like a country has a sense of sovereignty people are finding that they are and the covid has been a great example of this is that you could feel that you have complete agency in autonomy over your life and and you know do whatever you want to do but at any given moment a country could make a decision that would impact your your sovereignty that you know it could be d banking you for example it could be increasing taxes on you it could be starting a war in another country that means that you're unwelcome to invest in other countries if you're a russian giving a case in point if you're brexit if you're in the uk that you didn't want it to leave the european to have the the good agreement that you had with european union and and covid that you we felt that you were lockdown for three years in australia for example and increasingly governments are making decisions which odd that people are finding and not in your favor and people don't like that people don't like to feel that i i pay my taxes and i vote and i play my parts society but decisions are being made that have been taken out on my own hands and so people wanna be truly sovereign to themselves and so some one of the ways of doing is obtaining another nash nationality or obtaining a residency as a plan b or not putting their money totally in fiat i mean if anything the crypto has told us that there are other ways to bank if you're not happy with the way that the current system works and i see that the ai is also gonna be another way that really empowers us to be able to make decisions to be able to improve our quality of life i feel that we've got control over our lives and not the state i think a lot of people get angry because they feel like they don't really understand where their tax dollars go and if it actually benefits them and i would make the argument that if you are making a lot of money it's good to give back it's it's always good to support you know your your fellow human but i don't think that a lot of your tax actually benefits your life yeah i i look after a lot of high net worth people mass affluent evens so not even technically high net worth or even i a lot of halt ultra high net worth as well i don't think they reverse the paying taxes they don't have a problem with paying taxes they want to be part of society and the fabric of society and they want to be able to pay their fair share and bring everyone up with themselves they have a problem with the where their taxes are being spent and it's very subjective to say you're not paying enough tax so i pay too much you'll never win that argument they'll always be two sides to it and there's different parts of society where they'll say the should pay more the of saying well how much is is is enough i think it's more just there isn't any accountability in where the money is spent and you see with the doj experiment waste yes there's so much ways and i can tell many stories just from my own experience growing up in the uk where i i i mean it's it's always coming up in the news that you know somebody invested in entire councils or municipalities money in an investment i it was only because one civil servant got very friendly with another guy and then whatever happened and this isn't just in the uk it comes all around the world and unfortunately that i think is where a lot of people see where the problem is rather than people paying too much tax because if anything will show us right now is that you can squeeze a certain segment of society actually would squeeze all society because forty percent can start a lower bracket don't have to be ultra high net worth but it gets to the point where everyone's happy with twenty thirty forty forty five fifty fifty five and some country sixty percent when you get to this then eventually as we were talking about earlier people at that level of society that have the capability to pay that much money sixty percent and contribute not just six percent of their network for their wealthiest people sometimes is more than you know millions of people who pay ten percent but what happens is that those people at the more they're the higher they go up in society in terms of net worth or you know power they can just leave and that's what's happening and that's why we called our company millionaire air migrant because we're seeing the largest migration of millionaires in history twenty twenty four had the most elections and had the most flare ups in terms of war or unrest ever and so those both happen in the same year and so you can see just everybody is in a different place you're in a different place i'm in a different place i one is in a different place and there's a book called the sovereign individual so we're talking about that right now and i'm i'm reading that book again for the second time and it talks about where the future will take us and that governments will really struggle to keep people keep track of people whether they are whether to get their taxes from them because the borders are being broken down technology is enabling us cryptocurrency is enabling us travel wifi four g five g all of this is just helping people to be able to be a lot more mobile and they'll just go okay i can go and live in this country and then i'll tomorrow i'm go and move in this country and this is this is happening this is actually happening right now and the more government decisions poor decisions or unpopular decisions being made by governments around the world more people are moving i think that the the individual who does make exceptional amount of creates an exceptional amount of wealth creates an exceptional amount of value as well and that person you know elon is the person who's talking about government waste and do and out a you know sort of track where the money's is going which is a very very important objective but i think a lot of people look at the government and the ways and they think well if i kept more of my money i'm good at creating value in society i'm good at creating jobs and if i take x percent more of my money and my wealth not only can i build a bigger company but i can also you know contribute to philanthropic efforts i can i can do a lot more with my money and i can be sure that the money that i actually spend actually benefits versus is wasted that's i think that's a general entrepreneurship idea that they can probably do a better job with the money than the government can the a hundred percent yeah and and you know as you have a business and i have a a business when what we can tackle with the problems we back ourselves we took risks we understand a little bit of every single part of three sixty of the business the legal the recruitment tech sales marketing whatever it be and so we're just we just don't feel that the money is being spent but it comes back to the whole point where governments will say well we need to pay for the public sector because this does provide us with education health care and nobody's nobody's denying this it's more the fact that yes but we have a public sector and then we have a private sector but the private sector is about wealth creation right well private sector what we're either i employed or an employer in the private sector private sector contribute a lot to society that's actually the main things that contribute to society but what happens is that if you try and make if you try and limit or tax excessively those who really push themselves to innovate and create invent scale recruit people employ people and if they see that the hire go up the more will be hound penalized penalized and then unfortunately those people will leave and then also those people who want to start the journey are dis because they see that this is not a society therefore i'll leave as well and then what happens is that the public sector increases its scope increases its capacity and then you move towards socialism and you know some governments in in europe they you know public's in servants probably civil servants are essentially twenty to twenty five percent of the the the working population but this is now happening where that is just inevitably just gonna have to go up and then that's when you're gonna get to a socialism unfortunately when did you first explore the idea of a sovereign individual like at what point in in your life what was the inflection point i mean we can talk about you had an interesting upbringing in an interesting childhood but obviously that was way before you started to build out this business in this company so i'm more curious what was that inflection point that sort of opened your mind and it could've have been when you were i have no idea when it opened your mind to sort of seeing the world a little bit differently well i well from a young age i saw the world differently because obviously the way was brought up it was different to a lot of people i mean i my parents were deaf so at a young age i had to go to the bank with my father i had to meet with the insurance broker my father i had to go to the mechanic with my father you know i had to i was the interpreter you know for my mother as well at times but it meant that no one was telling me how the world works you know had to figure it out like you know normally everyone has a dad or a mom who is you know a school teacher or a banker or you know it could be any type of profession but my father was a as a carpenter and then became an interior designer and my mother you know was a housewife so there wasn't anyone teaching me any life lessons or definitely in business at all and so i the good thing about that is i see that looking back is it just made me an an outsider so nobody was telling me all this is how we do things this is the norms either societal norms it was more just i had it was a bank canvas so that was the early stages where like why do we do this why does it happen like that i would say it was probably what i realized is that the i had never really left the uk until later years until my teens and then every time i went to europe i saw wow is amazing there's another country it's exotic you know the the the food the culture the language and then every time i went there i realized that probably by chance that i ended up getting jobs that meant that i would have to be in those countries so i was a tour guide and then i worked in a in a theme park and then i you know i took odd jobs here and there and then i realized that there's all more opportunity on foreign shores so that's what gave me the the taste for adventure and then obviously as i traveled to africa asia south america and then ended up in the middle east which is where i really realized that you need to find your blue ocean as you know as business when we understand this and i was like hold on a minute i can this is where i see opportunity this is where there are less people with comparable skills at the time that i arrived which is my background is is real estate and you know it's a frontier market you know the brave people you know are the most successful and then i then that's how i i started things but it's only by taking risks it's only by getting out of our comfort zone there is a correlation i find between discomfort success right you we are a at least successful we're a cent when we're comfortable it's interesting because from an entrepreneur entrepreneurial perspective you always have to balance two ideas right in in the red ocean where most people play in the us that's it's red ocean a lot of the things that people are doing or building have already been done the market's already established so at least there's a little bit of a blueprint when you go after a blue ocean there's no blueprint you have to figure it out yourself and i think that when you can when you have the personality or whatever that x factor isn't being able to figure it out yourself then obviously you can succeed this as you have but when you think about the way that you've structured your life a lot of your life is blue ocean a lot of your life is doing things or guiding people to do things that have never done before what do you think is the personality that's allowed you to succeed in a blue ocean repeatedly or what is even the personality trade that you see in some of the people that you work with where you can literally pick up your life and leave everything you know and then build a new career a new business a new opportunity in a completely different part of the world because i think that that's whatever personality trait that is i i think that's an incredibly useful skill yeah i mean it's it's it's it's bravery it's fearless i mean you if if everyone else if you're in a country that is a developed market for example then there are high barriers to entry everyone else because everyone else is doing the same thing is it's not difficult to find someone you can do the same thing almost as well if not better than yourself when you go to other parts of the world there is a scarcity of of talent that is the same as you all the same as the the the talent that you have so using real estate as an analogy some of the best deals i've ever made in the investments i made were in countries where most people wouldn't even having read on holiday or were more complex or were more risky but essentially that's just the same thing as business it's just like if you do the same wherever everyone else is there's isn't really a lot of upside if you go where other people are not or people are scared to take risks mean i'll give you a good example as words when i was when i first moved to the dubai i was single and in dubai men outnumber women two to one probably even three to one you could argue we earn tax free and so everyone is earning more than they did back home which that type of quality of life or spending power suddenly makes everyone a little bit the ego gets effect should we say and so what i noticed is like okay this is not an easy place for me on the dating scene because people have i just arrived don't have much money people have more money than me and there's more men than women so this is not really work my favor and so what happened is i spoke to a friend of mine and he said let's go to where you're you going on holiday said i'm going to colombia and i was thinking normally people and then normally people would think well wow that's crazy like why do you want with columbia that's that's a dangerous place but for me i was thinking well why not you know let's just go there like what's worse gonna happen well the worst thing could happen is i found my future wife because when i went to colombia i think that everyone knows i think there was even a study that came out it's just like they ranked people's opinion of the most beautiful in a world and colombia came first and i can definitely you know whether my wife would like me to say it this but i definitely agree or she was from there right she was running you good but but she wants her to be the one not like no john only she was the last one she was the last one yeah she was the last one luckily she came with me so essentially i went to to columbia and i ended up marrying a woman that is just incredible like i i have know that it just on you know obviously we could be a little bit so superficial but as a person and her values and her family and the person she is is it i think a lot of my success i i credit to her even though she's not involved in the business but nobody was gonna go to colombia because i like you're crazy and they would say all the negative connotation that come with the columbia but guess what i came back and i found love and i i know people who still single going to dubai to this day and this is going about fifteen years you just need to go where things are in your favor and that is taking advantage of the playing field that we're in in in the world so i kind of understand what was the reason why you wanted to leave and why you wanted to sort of explore when you think about the average person that you work with what is the thing that prompts them to look outside of the country that they've been loyal to their entire life what don't think we can confuse loyalty to country with loyalty opportunity i think my clients are highly successful people if you can afford to be able to invest overseas invest a second nationality or a residency you know it's it's not a small amount of money and those people have proven that they're willing to take risks but what happens is that they have lost confidence in the governance of their country and they don't wanna be having all these assets and liabilities which they themselves you know sometimes inherit but largely let's say you you build an empire or you build a business and it's all from you taking your exams or you getting qualified or are you taking risks or you you know gambling with your own money to to to make money and then to find that everything you've built all the assets liabilities bank accounts properties holdings everything you have are all under one nationality which tomorrow that the that country could decide you know what we're gonna start tariffs against china or we are going to start a war that is gonna push oil price fuel prices up or we you know something that is something is out of your control they say you know what's they are they want to be able to have things in their control or at least a second a plan b at least at the my money is in another country least my gold is in another country at least you know my my you know i don't keep it on the hot wallet put it on the cold wallet they want things to be diversified they wanna be seeking opportunities that perennial curious about life but and sometimes they just know that i'm comfortable i need to push myself to to another level you know i don't like go into the gym but i know the outcome of it is i'm in better shape or the muscles grow or i don't wanna start a new business but i because i know that it will be a risk that i might not make work but if i do the the things will come from it and the thing is it's like they are sometimes they just don't wanna be in level of comfort they wanna don't wanna test themselves have you ever gotten pushed pushback from people that say you should be loyal to a country and loyal to a government and loyal to the the system that gave you the opportunity people don't say it to me but i imagine when i left the uk probably a few of my friends were saying you know oh okay you go to the dubai then by the way i i didn't like to buy before went i never even been to the country i literally just accepted a job and turned up the day after it was rama it all the parties have not a good time for to go had a five time ago way yeah i you know we respect to my you know to the people of the the region i would say all the bars were closed all the clubs were closed or if they were open they didn't serve alcohol and it was forty five degrees in summer and most people probably were said you know what isn't for me and go back home but i stuck it out and the rest this history but yeah people probably thought okay you're gonna go over there i'm not i'm not massive i'm not in favor of dubai i'm just objectively seeking all the opportunities that work for me so i love this so what what was the word you said you said arbitrage but what was the what did you call arbitrage arbitrage so explain that concept i like you you sort of at a rudimentary level mentioned like you're taking advantage of of where your skill sets or where the opportunity is and your your loyal to yourself but go go level deeper okay we'll let's use a case in point what is happening right now in the uk is really serious and as much as people are talking about it it's a lot worse because i am at the i'm very close to people who work in the high net worth space is there an enormous exodus of british nationals and foreign nationals leaving the uk because they have canceled the very the the non dom fiscal status which meant that for a minimal fee you could stay in the uk presiding presuming that you could show that your ties were elsewhere that you're only staying you know for inverted commas a temporary period of time they canceled this and now all those people where they did their calculation and they said people are gonna stay here and pay taxes on their global income whereas non dom status would mean that i don't i don't have to pay any money on the the income that i generate overseas foreign income and the uk like you stay here you pay taxes on what you in know vat and and anything that any business you're do in in the uk you get tax on but the condition is by put saying that you have a non done status you would say that all that foreign income you could receive it and it would not be taxed then they stop this taxes and this happened in the previous government the new government has doubled as has stuck with it as well and now what's happened is that all those people saying well the whole reason i was here was because you didn't tax me and because i like the uk the uk government calculated that if we just cancel that those people where they're gonna do go to some tiny island in the caribbean no they're not they're gonna stay in the uk and then they're gonna pay the the their taxes here so all that worldwide income will get taxed and all that money's is gonna come to us in the uk so they're a bait and switch yeah yeah and they said you got a grace period if you wanna leave and that's fine but now that all the money is gonna come here so they just a very granular simple calculation that was zero sum game that money's is not coming in now it's gonna come in because they said no one's gonna go live in i don't know grand cayman for example but what they didn't count on is the fact that those people are incredibly mobile they can afford to be anywhere they want and that other countries have programs that are just as attractive and so what happened is they go to italy where italy will charge you a lump sum of two hundred thousand euros a year plus it goes up depending on the size of your family and then everything you earn over and above from all your stocks or dividends or foreign properties or royalties do not get taxed all around the world and you just pay us two hundred thousand euros and then you just be on your way with you wanna live in milan or rome or sa or sicily or you know the ama coast if you want to is very popular with americans and so they're were like yep so i'm gonna go there so all the private equity professionals are moving to milan not all of them but the vast majority or they're gonna go to abu dhabi or they're go to the uae or they'll go to spain where spain has a similar program but you just pay twenty twenty five percent flat and then you can come here so why not live in barcelona sounds good i'll live in new york beautiful country and so they were just leaving and the uk's and the the figures just came out is that the economy is is now was it's technically into a recession right now and you could blame that on the tariffs you could blame it on you know poor you know managing of the the the government finances and and a number of things but i it's clearly but this is like a millionaire exodus yeah they all leaving yeah they'll leaving it they were going to some going to the us some are going to cyprus some are going to singapore but they'll leaving you've you can't you know i think the the thing that makes it even worse is that those people are leaving what makes it worse is compounded by the fact that now people are not gonna come to uk because it's like why i don't want that what why would i go and do that right i can there's there's a lot of other attractive countries where i can have a really good quality of life and that country will recognize that i made that money outside it's already probably getting taxed in that other country why would i pay the difference or or the same tax americans are actually moving to the uk now but i think that is not because it's so suddenly it's clearly not for a tax play it's just the americans attacks where they live anyway and so but they're leaving because they're not happy with the way that united states is right now so my contacts in in this space have said well there are quite a few americans coming but americans will square in everywhere they're going to portugal they're that's what i was gonna ask so you know your number one client now is is americans but am i'm canadian so i don't have global taxation so if i leave canada i'm not a resident of canada i have to pay my tax wherever i'm a resident but i don't owe canada anything anymore because i'm not i'm not living there but in the us very very different so if most of your if most of your clients are americans what's the advice to them to start to take advantage of of different tax breaks or different spots in the world because i think most americans realize that they're gonna be tax regardless of where they live so why would why would they be your number one client outside a political climate right like i mean like that's one reason that they may not want to stay here anymore they don't like trump and find they wanna go somewhere else but that's yeah well i'll i'll preface this and and say that obviously this is not advice i'm not a financial adviser what i am is i'm a a a businessman a self made businessman who took advantage of all the opportunities around the world i mean respect to my wife that i wouldn't wanna say that was part of the play but essentially you know i look around the world i know i have a team that advises all tax jurisdictions or residency jurisdictions permanent residence jurisdictions citizenship jurisdictions and real estate investment jurisdictions or even non real estate options and we just through my wide circle of ultra high net worth clients which i have we should be fifteen years i have a large i'd probably eleven thousand passports that we have issued or residency cards golden visas but you know that's that's a very good circle i mean enough to build a small private bank if you i mean a few people in private bank have told me that we have enough but from access to those people you understand you know opportunities and you i'm able to centralize it to a certain extent but to come back your point it's like if you're on american why would you want to leave and what the reasons you're leaving i would say that it's it's nothing that is unique to the us i'll tell you one story i was in lisbon well i'm actually a portuguese resident as well so i i i know firsthand why people move to portugal we've helped more than two hundred fifty families move to portugal with the golden visa d seven as well d two programs as well hr as well which are the the which is the fiscal status program so we've helped a lot of people in portugal and i met one chap and he was from the napa valley from the and he worked in downtown san francisco and i and he told me said jeremy it would take me about closer to two hours of driving to work and then i would come to work and then i would just see homelessness and things that that hurt my eyes have to step over people to go to starbucks it's not it's not nice i don't like to see it i'm all and it's not because i'm not trying to improve things i'm already paying fifty percent tax so he's it's not he felt sorry for those people differently but it's not like he he was paying zero percent and seeing poverty he was paying already fifty percent and yet still seeing this and then he would drive two hours back from home in his house on which you paid tax property taxes on the value his home which is you know on top of every other tax he's paying and then his daughter would come home from sue school and he would say howard i was school and he said oh we did active shooter drill today and then he just said you know what i pay all this money i spend all this time in traffic i see things which i feel like i'm already trying to pay enough to try and stop and help people other people around me and then i see that also my family is not safe and then he said i just went to portugal where i have a better tax status he still tax globally he he could pronounce if you wanted to but he doesn't want to and i i respect that but i don't pay any taxes the cost of living is much less i don't and i feel safe and people are very friendly and welcoming and more and more people are coming so i feel like my own community is coming with me as well so why wouldn't you want to do that no it didn't do you see a lot of americans renowned things citizenship as well it it's oh no it's it's it's the minority however it's increasing and the data is a bit behind from the us but it it is slowly ticking up here but i i think people are still wanna be patriotic we just because they wanna leave doesn't i mean they're any less patriotic i'm british but i also got my french national through descent and i have other national through investment and so on i don't feel any more or less i just understand that that is the way the world is going my wife's is colombia my kids have colombian passport if we move to spain we could get the spanish passport i think it's just and i want my kids to be proud of their colombian heritage and and i love the country i think it's a fantastic country and i wish more people would visit it with open eyes but essentially the world is going that way we are look where you are look where you you know your wife could be for another country your kids will be born in a country and you know if the uae would give grant and shipped then we would probably become ua citizens but i think it's fantastic it's just so interesting to me because you do want to you do want to respect the country that that gave you so much opportunity but i mean there's parts of this country that like you mentioned california right california has a gdp larger than some actual countries and again it's a lot of mismanagement of money and funds and i i was actually more curious just personally for a situation like that if you leave if you leave california and you go somewhere else in the world of course you owe federal tax for sure but could he not like stop over in florida and and claim florida residency and then reduce the the state tax and then go over so then yeah people people move to to florida i mean look we look at him because i'm trying to think because yes a global taxation for sure but if he's if he's abroad does he owe this is probably more of a a a cpa question yeah does he does he owe the the state tax california that he was he would do probably your fe the foreign and yeah some exclusion and he would do you know that paperwork and he he'd have to have a cpa in the us he'd have to have one in portugal so his his case is that americans are unique case there are two countries in the world that attacks their citizens this is the other one eritrea i don't i might sound so here i don't know no it's fine but you know i i have clients from eritrea and they've done passports with us you know they've we've helped them to get nationality so i've got the number of we've helped people to obtain a second nationality or residences as i mentioned it's in the thousands but but the only difference between those two countries is one country can enforce it in the other can't but i generally foresee that since citizenship based taxation will not be limited to united states in the coming years won't be in the next few years but france has already put started it's been going through the the parliament in the government last year i believe it was yeah last year where the french government is looking about housing a lot of money yeah why are they losing lots of money i mean they this so it's so interesting because if they just managed money properly less people felt the need to leave yeah than more wealth would stay in the country yeah but they're not so they're looking for a band aid solution to a problem that they're too scared to actually address them well i mean you could yeah you could expand that conversation to the fiscal deficit it's like people don't have a tough conversation so you know there's be beautiful bill that got camouflage by you know the harvard ban on foreign students it just kind of like a smokes screen you know because you've got now more fiscal spending which means you're gonna have more asset inflation which means that the younger generation of people are gonna find even owning own home or or any kind of wealth mobility social mobility is gonna be diminished because assets are going up i mean you can make in the last few years i made more money from buying a property and just leaving it than i actually did from my business i mean you know it's it's it's but that that's bad that's bad i know very bad the fact is you've got that and so what needs to happen is people need to take matters into their own hands and be a lot more mobile because i think the biggest misconception about what i do is that you know geo flagged theory or arbitrage or global citizens is the whole idea is that passports or residences is about geographic mobility i would i would say that it's not just that mobility it's wealth mobility it's about world creation it's about tax mitigation but it's also about social mobility as well and i i say this because i would not be where i am now in miami florida or where i was yesterday before yesterday in istanbul in turkey in the day two days before this in kenya in four days before that five days before was in dubai i wouldn't be doing any of this and because none of my my business or business is now is or any of the teams i've grown we have about seventy five people now in eight offices not and i have a very large portfolio in different countries none of and and a beautiful wife in the foreign country none of that would have happened if just stayed in the uk but by take by moving to another country noting the opportunity that was in that country in my case it was dubai but for somebody else it might be in paraguay or it might be in cyprus or wherever it may be and it could be a high tax jurisdiction it could be in canada for example but be able to go to that none of my situation would have come if i just stayed in the uk but i ended up moving to a country you talk about earlier how did i join the dots in a few things it's like well first of all changing time for out results so it's was rather getting paid for the hours i put in i get paid for the results and all my career that got greater and greater until you reach to the point was like what taxes is still eating away how do i manage the tax was one place but ua was also peg the dram is peg to the dollar which we normally get buying power okay recently now with the euro it's a different story but it's very powerful currency which allow me to invest in the uk and european properties at a a discounted rate because the dollar is stronger it would also mean that there was a concentration of wealth so you've got you know oil money you've got it's a headquarters it's a global headquarters it's a trade hub it's a transport hub and it gives me proximity to high net worth people and then from this you know you who's better to do business with high net worth people so but all of this came from and this is social mobility you know i i i i got you know social mobility came from me actually traveling to another country where opportunity nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if fiasco ask nine experts are gonna get ten answers bull market bear market rates will rise rates will fall 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dubai can make wealth how what kind of people entrepreneurs people looking to advance her career i know a friend he was an m and a lawyer in new york and he started working for a saudi company and he moved his whole life over there and he's doing it for a couple years and he's making probably netting plus minus a million dollars a year with very little tax he's gonna do like nothing and then he's gonna come back and then he'll you know have a nice little lump sum saved so a lot of different ways to look at wealth it's not just entrepreneurs it's career advancement but whatever but when people come to you and say hey listen i'm i'm down to move somewhere to improve my situation what is the advice you give them where how what are the ideas you have to think through well first of all for your friend there you said he's gonna do that for a couple of years i also thought i'd been into our cup it's great there's an expression in the dubai where we will say we're saying for two years and then it's seventeen years i've been there i don't think your friend will leave after two years it was the other taste of it no dubai is a millionaire magnet why because it is a forward thinking country in which it's it's very interesting and by the way it's not the only country you have singapore which is also william magna and you could say you know other countries probably to a lesser extent maybe but the difference in singapore in the uae which i think are the ones which are proven that if you've got a small pop a small indigenous population but with a how can i say this a tight control on how things should be done some things are tolerated and other things are not tolerated and people will talk ad nausea about oh but you don't have you know you know don't have any freedom and all that stuff it's just like i've i've i've only seen one fight in seventeen years in dubai one i see one a month back in the uk do you wanna day in miami right okay right so maybe i don't wanna see those things yeah you know i've been some i've seen people accidentally show me nudity twice accidentally and both times remind me by the way you don't see that in in the uae and maybe people don't wanna see people accidentally new for me it was a guy the other time was a woman but the alzheimer's was a guy but the thing is is just what the difference probably between singapore the uae is that in the uae there's an alignment between residents and and locals everyone everyone is truly happy that they're in there are not people in there gru about oh you know i don't really like it here i feel like i wanna be here everyone is aligned residents are just as happy because they feel safe they feel that the the country is looking off their best interest singapore i don't know so much i was at a a dinner with a few expat who'd had recently moved from singapore and they were seeing that job opportunities were getting limited because they felt that they their expat residency status was not being renewed because they wanted singapore to kinda take over those jobs that in the uae hasn't been happening and yet our expat outnumber the locals by nine to one eight to one and yet the the locals are you know happy that people are coming and creating what is you know look at how the dubai transformed on the in two decades and he's expanding to abu dhabi russell came now they're building the the wynn casino there's gonna be all of that going on at qatar to an degree or no kat no i don't i don't think so i think there's definitely there's definitely an economy there we have an office there but i think in a it's not it's not managing to get what dubai is doing saudi is looking to in a certain extent but i think it's it's a big country it's got a very large population and you need really a lot of buy in to make these these things happen but it's definitely making a lot of strides i've got a lot of friends moving into to saudi very happy they're earning good money there but yeah like for some people it's not for them i i know but by the way a minority i so minority knowledge of people i know who moved to ua and then went back of their own accord what i what i wanted to understand is for somebody listening to this i want them to understand based on what i'm working on right now is the move right for me and the reason i asked is because i think a lot of people listen to this show they are entrepreneurial like listen if you can go find a job that pays x amount dollars more and you you know don't have any commitments don't have any kids don't have any responsibilities in the us maybe just try it that's that's the that's the answer but i think the other cohort of people listen to the show are people that are building and they're wondering okay i'm gonna start a company is there an issue with me finding clients or finding investors if i go to dubai compared to if i wanna be an entrepreneur and go to silicon valley and i wanna start something in san francisco i mean if you're in the tech space then you know you can't rec compete silicon valley but it's not the only part of the word singapore is very good actually for for people in the text base is good place to inc incubator and startup up i think like mostly are us center in in their thinking yes and and if you if that works through that's great but sometimes it might be a bit crowded to trying to get a an in with somebody in silicon valley sometimes you might wanna go some another part of the world so you know singapore singapore is very friendly towards tech startups is a good place to inc the banking system is very robust and were well respected globally switzerland as well is very crypto friendly although the news that came out recently were was not good news about that they would have to d you know people involved in in crypto investment in switzerland that didn't go down too well but again you know it's switzerland and you know there's positives and negatives but yeah i think if you wanna start your business i mean everybody knows you just wanna be where the capital so whether the silicon valley uae singapore whichever what do you what is the what is the best way to live as a a sovereign individual how do you structure your life in terms of how you run your businesses even i mean if you have a family and kids like because you travel all over all the time so what's the advice for somebody wants to live a similar lifestyle to you i mean as you mentioned i've got kids now so i'm i'm i i saw travel extensively i actually take my kids with me three months a year so i travel all of or four of us i think that's very good though it gives them very expensive i can tell you i mean you know we we have songs coming up with us because i've got two kids who how can i put this very social yes you know we usually have to bring a a member of families so we're five that's five people traveling to many countries three months a year but for me it's it's what got me to where i am and so the more that i can have my kids getting a taste for that life i mean i'd never left i'd never even to any country other than france or spain until i was twenty years old my eldest son is eight and he's been to eighteen countries already but but he gets a taste of it he he knows a few words he knows about the the culture the food the museums you know it picks up a bit of the language so i think it's i think it's really important to be very aware of these things because the way the world is going right now we're meeting all different people from different parts of the world and if you can build some kind of commonality with them i found in business it really really helps when we talk about when we talk about sort of mitigating tax as much as possible i think that's something that everybody is interested into some degree you haven't and don't have to excuse me pay tax until twenty thirty three because of a a program in portugal so explain some of the you can explain the program that you're taking part in and some of the in some of the ways that you've structured and optimize like your tax your tax strategy but also other ideas and other ways to optimize tax strategy for people that again are okay leaving the us looking to move abroad and that can be anything from where you're living to how you sort of structure where your income goes etcetera etcetera and obviously this is not tax advice just to the the disclaimer is go speak to professional but i know that you've encountered probably a million in one different ways that you can structure your tax that you're still paying what you have to pay and then you're not paying what you don't well the first thing is if you're living in a high tax jurisdiction you're gonna have to leave if you wanna you know legally of reduce those taxes you can't just stay there put everything in a bb and then you know hope for the best so you need to do that but you have countries which are very attractive they have territorial attacks programs such as paraguay for example you know even philippines you can live in the philippines and then you can receive your pensions or passive income into the philippines tax free you've got i mean there's there's a lot of countries that you could look at doing panama another one so it really depends on that person myself personally we moved to portugal we did the portugal residency i invested in a in a fund there i bought a property there i i bought a small team there to handle our clients but also made friends there and i know all the best restaurants in town and the little tiny little fishermen places that are even better but i signed up for the non habit official residency program which is a fiscal status that gives me ten year exemption and but what you need to but the and by the way just to go a little bit off tangent with this one i that i have a tax freeze status i don't pay any income tax in the uae there is corporate tax now at nine percent but again you know there's certain bits and pieces to do with that but to come back to the portugal part is that that is a fiscal status that's valid for ten years so what what it means is that i renewed it just a year ago and so i have a tax exemption for the future so if i ever go back portal let's say the ua tomorrow and it it could happen in any country suddenly they say you know what now you need to pay taxes i've also got another tax free program that can take advantage which is valid till twenty thirty three so if you calculate when i moved to uae in two thousand eight up to two twenty thirty three i have not paid any income tax for twenty five years quarter of a century right so yes as much as i optimize my investments whether it's financial whether it's a at bricks and mortar it's also about optimizing the quality of life and yeah i would have a lot more money if i didn't travel or scuba dive or fly so much but that's my weak spot that's why where i like to spend my money but right now there are other places you can go a paraguay wise a place very easy to get a tax residency you can move there whether you wanna live there really depends on you but there's all these opportunities around the world you just need to be able to know which is the one that best suits you for your life staff for objectives i think also i think one people just need to know is that you're having a second password is not gonna fix your tax wear your resident or where your fiscal residency is your tax residency is and you need to calculate how many days you're gonna be because you can't say i live in the middle of the ocean well i was gonna ask like do you actually have to live in paraguay or any to these other locations for x period of time to claim tax as a rule of law yes you have to be there for a period of time but there are other countries which are a little bit what paraguay let's use paraguay paraguay is a place which is not the most probably strictly controlled countries should we say so people are are inch you know people look at paraguay where saying a place where i don't have to be there all the time and i could be moving freely around but there are other countries that are a lot stricter for example so yeah i as again like i have a team that takes care of that we have a team that kicks care of the citizenship and then i have a residency and i have another team that helps people to make money for investing overseas so i was in kenya with a few of my clients over there and they're just like you know if i do this real estate if i do this project if i'm invest in this what is my roi and i said on this one you're probably making which i thought was quite good as eight to ten percent but obviously you've got your capital growth which is another five percent and then you know you can create equity value another five percent and they're like you know what jeremy if you're not really getting twenty five percent roi in and kenya it's really a bad deal like you know you know it's yeah yeah there's people in the world for whom six seven percent is like amazing but as people in other parts of words i'm not making twenty five percent it's just it's not really that interesting for me and so what you need to do is try and get those people in those parts of the world to other parts of the world and just say looks look this opportunity gives you the roi because the reward is is correlated to the risk you're investing in africa is kenya but as long as you're comfortable with that and obviously some currency risk with the kenyan shi you know two three years you flip it you out you know your fifty percent up you're sixty percent up seventy percent that's remarkable that's amazing but but people that are again north america or us centric are not gonna think like that because first of all the okay so i put money to do dubai you and that was already like risky for me as somebody from canada right that was like a little bit stressful now i had i had somebody close who does a lot of investment in dubai so you know it didn't stress me out too too much but if somebody doesn't have that person or that team like your team no one's gonna put money into kenya like like you go tell you go tell your investment advisor you're gonna put money into kenya the fuck wrong with you i mean like guy what and what what email did you get that next you think it's gonna be a good idea what scam did you i've been investing i mean if you look at property i've investing for twenty three years i bought my first property when i was twenty three and then i bought a property in poland for a hundred percent mortgage at least you put any money down clear you do that you can do that oh yeah i did do that that was in two thousand and five of two thousand still have that well i saw the property a year ago and i still made i made money on it could've have made more but the problem was the hundred percent down came from swiss bank so when the g happened the fact the swiss francs went up and so it wasn't the best deal ever but the fact that at twenty my mid twenties i bought property in a foreign country which by the way i never in eighteen years but that would i didn't put anything down and made money doing it with no money down but nobody would do that in right mind at twenties and take a hundred percent you know swiss currency mortgage mortgage on a polish lotte property but i you know i bought i just bought an apartment in the tb georgia just this last week which would probably get us a annual eighty ninety percent return i'm buying a penthouse in med which even the lawyers were saying to me this is a complicated deal we should probably move on something else and they did out more than one occasion and each time i was like it's okay we're you know let's just move forward let's move forward and if the deal comes through it's gonna be an incredible deal but i do those things because i'm kind of gone past the vanilla stuff right now i do you ever been burned yeah yeah i got burned i got i got burn on one property to buy but as i always keep reminding myself is the times you get burnt at the other times you make money because you go through why you why didn't work what did you do wrong and you go all the way back and ever since i made that mistake on that one property i have gone back into dubai and done more deals bigger deals more complex deals more exotic deals and in some of them i've ten x my money what was the what was the thing that burnt you was it a a scam for no no it was oh sorry you're talking about that no i haven't had a i i haven't had a a fraud it was a i just bought a property without giving it the proper time and due diligence i didn't think about what i just i i was too busy on the company i was probably earning more money than i should at that age and so i was just reckless and i i see a lot of this with crypto clients actually i see there a lot of this they they make it so fast and so they spend it so fast and when it comes to something outside of crypto they generally get wiped out because you when you earn it too quickly you don't value it you don't do your d you don't you know you don't do your research but but yeah so i have i have lost money but no it wasn't i mean there's some crazy things in in dubai real estate but it hasn't it wasn't illegal or fraud anything like that but i have in all my real estate transactions in to dubai seen a lot of crazy crazy stuff it's a it's a fantastic market and with for you for doing that because not of people from north america buy in the ua uae i think they're the least represented by a segment in the whole world i think that will probably change and i'm gonna try and do my best to talk about it on my my podcast to explain how it works how to make money from an investor point of view because i'm not a broker and the the issue is everyone is only getting information from brokers but brokers are not gonna give you the the the nuts and bolts they're i'm not gonna give you the the ugly side of the story i can tell you the good the bad and the ugly and i think by the way the other reason why you did and i know you've done very well we were talking off camera how well you did on real estate i was with a realtor this morning in miami realtor every country i go to i talked to people in i real i wanna know what's going on because i'm always curious and he was like german got a multi family how home i can't remember i'm not far from here and we can we can probably get you seven cent net paid for upfront and the tenant is gonna airbnb arbitrage it and he's gonna do it and i was like great seven percent net net he said yes i was like that's that's okay that's interesting maybe i've got some time we're go and have a look how much is how much gonna borrow is a non res he said probably fifty percent okay what's the interest rate said seven percent seven percent seven percent you know what are you doing like you're just washing a face with the whole thing right just hoping for capital uplift was twenty twenty five any your capital uplift we've had obviously you know this big beautiful bill is gonna help inflate that that's why that's why nobody buys real estate in miami right now two ways to make money in real say right you have your appreciation yeah or you have your cash flow your and like nothing's really appreciating that much and interest is peeling your cash flow yeah so now it's like why am i putting money into miami exactly and then it was just like you know in the uae you can borrow four percent four percent and the durham the uae dram is peg to the dollar so you have stable current you don't know normally when you can get you know finance in a foreign country there is currency risk but you're peg to the dollar you're peg to the dollar but you're getting get four percent here you're getting the dollar at seven percent you get an roi alright at seven percent you are you're borrowing at four percent and then you can get yields of seven eight nine percent even ten percent and sometimes you can do more and then as we know leverage is the game the thing about the dubai that i don't think people really understand i think it's only because a lot of brokers and no sweat brokers i use some of the brokers they're really good ones but there's a lot of brokers don't who were who were i'm not joking one of them used to cut my hair like he's not real estate and in in the uae they don't understand that the best thing they should be talking about is rather than saying buying this our plan property buying this launch and everything you the most important thing that they are not telling their clients is very very simple and you're getting emerging market returns but with developed market financial rigidity so you're essentially getting lending from banks that have very high capital ratios right the ua banks now they're they're very robust a lot of them consolidated but you've got you've got emerging market returns with leverage at developed markets rates i mean it's an no brainer it's arbitrage is there anywhere else in the world where you can get that no not that i'm aware of i i really don't and even if i i i pretty much chat your beauty it right now i'd be very surprised to because somewhere else we can get that type of alright because by the way seven eight nine percent is pretty decent on real estate considering it is a passive asset class but that you can borrow it four percent and borrow at four percent not a fifty percent but up to eighty percent they didn't do it they don't do it now but you used to be able to borrow even on the closing costs which is your land registration fees and your broker fees they don't do that now and i think that was a bit excessive to be honest that you wanna go that far but getting up to eighty percent and then getting your rent to be paid your mortgage be paid by your rent and then you're also getting capital uplift on top of that we forget about the the yield you got capital uplift which is we saw i mean some the report came out it's like sixty percent some of the properties hundred percent i've got properties that went up two hundred percent you can't get that and and the still office opportunities today there's just that you have to look at be a bit more careful now so that was gonna be my follow so somebody okay so now the person is listening to this is graduated from trying to look outside the us now they are active investors and in dubai real estate this don't really cyber advice advice it's not real estate advice not not tax advice not financial advice not investment advice not real estate advice do your own research do you think that there is still opportunity in dubai because there is so much supply when do you think the man's going to run out this is a very important question and i think this needs to be nuanced because you know the way the world that we're in right now is headlines clickbait and you're either this or this in the short term you have to be and this is just someone who is someone who worked in real estate at very high level i work for sovereign wealth funds i work for you know government developers i work for international brokers i've done feasibility studies in africa and central asia it's someone who has bought over thirty properties in eleven countries the ua right now in the short term you need to be really careful about what you buy because you're either gonna get stuck with a dud or you're gonna find one a gem but and i have my own real estate analytics team and i have my own brokerage so that we can source stuff and i plus i have my network so i i i get send stuff you're gonna have to look at a variety of opportunities that are outside your traditional i'll just buying an department in downtown dubai you're gonna have to be really selective right now because there's a lot of stuff coming on online and if you don't do your calculations and you don't get the data you'll be you'll be really stuck with something the fit came out with a report saying that they estimate the property prices will correct not more than fifteen percent this year by the end of this year and by the beginning of twenty twenty six now when you see that it's not because all properties are gonna go down fifteen percent what's gonna happen is some properties won't go down so prime real estate you know your jewels in the crown that known you know people aren't gonna distress cell and some might go to five percent there might be a softening but what's gonna happen is that if that is the zeros and 5s then to get to fifteen we could be looking at twenty five percent and that will be probably apartments because there's as much as expat typically arrive and take apartments there's also a lot of apartments coming on stream but what i would say is that again you need to caveat it based on location view for elevation orientation a lot of other things but in the medium to long term it's still a place you to gotta buy you've i you genuinely feel that you where else can you put money into real estate that is gonna work for you now i'm buying in colombia and georgia and and other parts of the world that's not your cup of tea but but if you wanna have definitely with it from a leverage perspective but a country that is really putting itself on another level every five years in the global master plan people talk about dubai now like you would never have bought in into dubai twenty years ago ten years ago you're buying and there'll be more buying but it's not just what's happening in the uae which as i mentioned there is gonna be a lot of supply coming on it's the it's just like there will always be a buyer or a migrant an immigrant like me on under migrant moving to the uae as long as these decisions are being made around the world that are forcing quote unquote people to leave so the uk's or france saying they're gonna do citizenship based taxation or european decisions i mean europe is is is clear as in a bad state but but i also a good friend of mine said jeremy and he's not a real estate guy he actually i'm one of the people i advised for he's a he's a high net worth person and i advise his for his real estate he said jeremy a third of the world's population lives less than a four hour flight from to dubai wow so when you hear something like that and that you know that the ua is open for business anyone can buy cash crypto wire transfer no no restrictions on russians are the nationals like other countries there is no the the banking system is very much pro mortgage you know non resident finance you have the golden visa program which is historically the biggest the most popular residency program in history you have a golden i have a golden visa the seven ways you can get golden visa one reader say is only one of the options people don't know about that so that's just saying you know what let me just take this residency see my clients we did a an analysis of the data and we found that the the majority of our clients in their top if they had three properties or more one of those property in the world one of those properties within dubai this the other place it was was in london but now everyone is selling their properties in london i speak to all my clients let yeah was the third place with their country of birth which is normal right like you have of canadian property for example i'd have the uk and now i i see so you know and that was that that study was over five years ago before covid now i'd say that of those people those three the london one they're selling they might have some random place at sa slovakia but they will have at least one or two properties in the uae the and then i'll give you another anecdote i am french so i saw a property near monaco and i wanted to buy i said no brainer i have a french nationality i have significant you know income statement i have you know i have bank accounts in in europe and you know and i was yeah i wanna buy this property it was tiny it was like four hundred thousand euros okay not tiny but like it was a small amount of four hundred thousand euros just wanna get mortgage two hundred thousand euros when they show me the list of documents i had to provide to be out eligible for non resident finance i was like who is gonna do all of this work who is gonna do all of and i said listen if you can give me a ninety nine percent chance i'll get a approved of this i'll do it and he said and then he just turned around and said to be honest i don't think you should even bother because looking at your affordability and taking away x x x x x we probably won't give you a mortgage anyway so you won't let a foreign a french non resident with a good you know i'm i'm very low risk you know with a good financial capability buyer a property and then if i do you're gonna have to ask me to fill all this i'm not gonna do i'm gonna buy another property in the buy people buying to dubai because other countries not giving the opportunity i just wanna take a 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investing in dubai whether or not you are somebody that is actively looking to mitigate their tax situation abroad whether or not you are somebody that doesn't even have a passport i think the goal is to just like constantly be vigilant about the opportunities that like the world presents just be so curious dubai to me is such an interesting option and i'm think more people should look at it obviously we're invested in it but you mentioned something that i think would be interesting to unpack for the audience as well about golden visas and i'm sure there's a lot of different countries that have i've programs but that particular that particular visa because i know that it's trying to attract investment it's trying to attract influencers as well i don't know what the other five visas are but for somebody that is an entrepreneur or an influencer or a content creator or an investor maybe just give a rundown of what that golden visa does and this is just something that i know because i because i've put money into dubai and i spent some time there but it's a really really attractive visa yeah it's it's got a lot of benefits i mean it's not for everyone i'd say a golden user from greece or portugal it's much more attractive because you know portugal a case in point is that you can get residency status in portugal you only need to go for one week every every year and then after five years you gonna apply for a european citizenship very powerful european citizenship and without having to be a tax resident without having to physically be there that's a that's an absolute no brainer and that's what one of the reasons why it's so popular the uae and plus even during that period of time that you are the holder of that residency card you can travel freely within the eu so if you need a visa you don't need a visa now could you have a residency and if we go to the uae it would only give you obviously the residency of the united arab emirates the the advantage of it is that it's over the other residency status that you could have which is traditional regular in know employment visa employer visa is that you don't need to renew it every six months you don't have to travel in out every six months you just go once and when you go again or not for the next ten years it doesn't matter so you get a lot of flexibility what is really good about it is the fact that you feel a connection to that country and it's really smart that the ua really makes it very accessible to a lot of people because they want you to just go oh here you go here's something and you can do it through and change for deposit investment in the business by having a particular threshold of income and as you mentioned you can also get nominated so you know i was nominated so the government the uae nominated me because they probably saw that i have a a large portfolio of high net worth clients and so i was very grateful for that and it was it was you know again like you know it's nice to be getting something like this and so they would give it people off strategic value for example and this is really smart because what it does is it gives you something and you feel like okay me just check it out what can i do with it and it just slowly just makes you go okay well now i've got the residency it means that why don't we just stop in dubai next time why don't we just open a company why don't we just get a bank account why don't we just you know gonna spend a holidays there and it's very very smart and and it really works in terms of the the benefits aside from that i would say it's mainly just having a place that you could go to and stay indefinitely so if something happened to you and you're in a part of the world that was a little bit dangerous knowing that you had that residency you could just be there whether it was title to property or not is very attractive so a lot of clients have golden visas now i mean it's it's really an increasing number but yeah it will give you residency status so obviously you'd get res finance as opposed to non resident finance so you can start using that leverage to build your really estate portfolio in the uae which is one thing but i think it's i think it's more the benefits from the uae side more so than an actual consumer you know the consumer benefits aren't you know enormous other than those that are just mentioned but i think if it benefits the uae it also benefits the consumer as well because the better the uae does and you have a golden visa said the more you're gonna benefit from it yeah no and i think that one thing that you mentioned as well just because again a lot of the a lot of the audience there either investors or entrepreneurs or both i guess sort of two questions from that i'll i'll ask i guess just about for investors first when you do let's just let's just pick dubai and and uae as a as a as a place where people are aren't interested investing because i think they are and especially people that listen to this i've spoken about it in several times now what would be some of the strategies in terms of investment that are are smart investment strategies that are sort of more specific to the uae or dubai that maybe they would not be aware of if they'd only put money into real estate in the us before you mean investing property into dubai yes i think i a tough question i mean there's many different ways to make it happen but i can tell you i've done i've done airbnb arbitrage and done very well out of that i've done commercial properties i've done flips i've done c working i've done what else i've done renovations of offices i've done renovations of houses i've done short term let's i've done long term let's there's all different i mean i was even looking to land the other day for warehousing i mean it it you it's not just the sector i mean some sectors are probably more attractive right now i would say warehousing and commercial is you know villas and townhouse houses there's still some good opportunities what i would say is that let's say for example if i'm an investor and i saw that features coming out and saying that there is likely to be a correction of prices which there's a lot of pushback on this guess what mainly from brokers which is to expected but i would say that if there is a correction of fifteen percent then you will see some people who would have bought at the wrong time being maybe saying you know i'm a negative equity and i would like to offload or if is on a pay stage payment plan you know i think during the trump tariff got a lot of people cashing out of their investments that were getting margin called or somewhere else or there was people who just panicked and wanted to let go you just had to be there and you just see someone say you know what i'll just take you know eighty percent on the eighty percent on the dollar and i just walk away for now you could have caught something there i say if there is gonna be some kind of softening the brave people some people would say well i'm just gonna wait and see where we land but there'll be other people saying if i get someone who's just ready to walk it away from something because he cannot complete the next statement next installment you could take over that at a discount i've already started to see that you're starting to see that already there's a few people ready to sell less than what they paid for but you have to be careful there's those pitching it as selling below asking price but then you have to run the numbers and then you realize like they're not actually doing that that's what happens a lot of my clients they get offers and then we just we just run the numbers on it has dubai because they've they've launched all these visas have they created any programs to support entrepreneurs have they any created any programs to support people that are building incubation any sort of any sort of networks that you're aware of that's something that i haven't really looked into i'm sure there are there's a lot of different visas now and i would say that ua i'm sure they probably do because they're really pro growth and they really want people to set up there you'll see that a lot of companies are moving the headquarters there so we've got bin moving there obviously that's not a startup up but it tells you the path they're going into the financial center doubling now in size they just reach capacity i would there's also a lot of networking hubs a lot of c working places a lot of communities for startup up entrepreneurs and i think actually if there is a softening of the real estate market it's gonna be a win for the uae and it's gonna be a win for in entrepreneurs and people just starting their their journey because what it will do is it will pull down the the rent price it will stop the market from being so hot and make rents affordable which brings more people and allows people to you know choose the ua as as a destination to start so i i see that from a a positive side of things because rent is high because there's so much demand and because there's so many people moving there so what would be interesting because obviously you've built a very successful business but just because of your clientele you deal with heads of state i think you've met like eleven of them thirteen thirteen of thirteen and you deal with high net worth ultra high net worth so when you look back at your own journey and some of the people that you work with and you and you deal with on a day to day how do you think different when you when it comes to building a business building wealth how do they think different yeah i've met so many interesting people it's really i miss it's really some that just just an hour and their time you'd learn something you get a a contact you get insight at the top at the highest level which i would either apply my personal life or am my investing life i mean i tried to think off top of my head but you know i've been in in intimate surroundings with top top top athletes billionaires finance guys crypto guys highly successful people all types of people all different walks of life and you know you you get to see a little bit their mentality by the way not all people who have money also are successful people i think it's it's important before you know because i you know as a father with two young boys the there's a lot i think everyone is cognizant that there's a lot of pressure on young men to be x or y and if you're not then you're a failure i mean my life wasn't easy growing up it was not easy having you know deaf parents and nobody and a school there you know you wanna be the one who's got their parents for example just like you wanna be the one that is too fat too tall too spotty whatever is i i'm just gonna blend in the school and knowing one wants to get the attention but unfortunately in life i've met people who just got lucky i mean i've met guys who right play right place right time or people who act on behalf of somebody who doesn't wanna be visible in some of these emerging markets africa for example where it's just like okay you know i i think i smell bullshit much much better people come in and they're like oh this guy oh i see someone on the social media i've got this got this so i meet people in dubai i can i can i'm really good because i i i know know what real world is because if you're gonna afford to invest half a million euros in in a passport or a hundred thousand dollars or two sometimes we've done two three four million dollars you've been around real wealth and you understand how real wealth moves and so when you see other people and the way they behave you can kinda assess out much faster so that that's been really helpful for me but yeah something sometimes people the right place right sometimes is inherited young people right now who wanna start the journey will not succeed because they are not patient why do we have rich kids because it means that they inherited it from somebody else so if it inherited it it means their parents must have done it in the fifties or six these or even further back i've met three four four generation wealthy indians in in eastern africa for example or in the caribbean or lebanese families there's a hundred years of wealth but because they go around and say this is my life somebody's who's just starting now with like ten thousand pounds ten thousand dollars it's going on my god i'm not wealthy it's like no some you just but you can get wealthy if you just live below your means right you've got cal deficit deficit so just what is the financial equivalent it's just live below your means don't go out and buy silly things that you can't afford on credit at you know eighteen nineteen percent so money accrue compounds over time you just need to make sure that it works you strip you sweat it as much as you can be diversified this is another thing i've noticed with my clients they don't have they'll and this is actually something i apply in my own life is i get really really really really good at one thing specifically and then maybe a second at max but no one's really good at six things so and i talk about that in a either in business sense but if i was to be really really good in skills i would be really good at two three things and then those are not i'd make sure that i was friends with doing business with or recruited someone who's really really good in those areas and then i'd make sure that i knew just enough to make sure that i know if this person is good or not always on top of the game no i try and learn everything to a rudimentary degree myself when it comes to building a business i think that most good operators and entrepreneurs they do learn a little bit of everything to start and to your point then they figure out what they're good at what they're not i mean i'll learn you know how to code a basic website how to write good copy had basic graphic design you know what does a p and l look like how to hire the right person sales marketing etcetera etcetera and then you can call bullshit on when you're hiring somebody and they say they do something or not and that's how you hire well and they think that's probably one of the most useful skills just being able to jump into something being able to learn it to a very basic level and then hiring somebody that's exceptional lot of world class at it if you it's not your sort of zone of genius or core competency it's just like lit like letting them run with it and and most good entrepreneurs again this show i listen to and sit down with i interview incredible entrepreneurs they all did everything they won there was something glamorous about the companies that they built they all figured out everything and then they hired out the best people to help them yeah i think at a at a basic basic level what really helped me was from a very young age figuring out how money works and how people works i think from i definitely know r i pulled that was the first book that i read which is the same for a lot of people second one i can't remember but i think it was something about a book of tells or something which is how to know body you know probably because i grew up with their parents but you know how people behave and how people act and why people act as such and it i think a case in point is that you know i i in part of my portfolio i have different asset classes and have different banks and so on but one of the guys i work with is a tax called day trader and he makes me alpha returns it takes alpha risk and gets alpha returns and and i would know a lot of people would either just run away i i've told people is what he does and people just run them mark like no i'm not like that sounds crazy because he gets really really good returns for me but it's because they're scared of the risk was like if you don't want risk you go for really low risk and could put it in a bond or an etf and then don't complain and then but then you run away when i show someone who can do it but this chap here so what happens is that when the trump tariffs came along the banks are well with investment banks private banks they'll like sorry were down five ten percent wherever was in the early days for everything you know bounce back up and he was up five percent whenever everyone was down and i said well why did you do that he said well he clearly is not of he's clearly the he's the way that he's thinking is not logical therefore i don't trade in the markets because i take high risk high leverage to do things but i need to kinda know where we are before i take these calculations and so he said the minute he said he was gonna put tariffs on china what was it the first time hundred and forty five hundred percent he was like this is not logical this is this is a part of a a wider game so i can't be part of the markets and it's just stepped out and what happens he went at five percent and then conversely when i think it's was just about a few weeks ago he he lost me a lot of money like a really a lot of money i mean i'm still up up up fantastically but he lost me a lot of money and i was like but why wow that's a that's a really big loss why did you lose this he said the market is not acting logical and i said would do you mean he said the truck the the tariffs are in place the the tariffs are here the economic signals are not gonna look good we are you know companies are having to pivot companies are gonna be sitting on the sidelines waiting not hiring not recruiting he said the figures are bad and he explained you know don't wanna quote it but he was explaining a few things he said but retail investors are russian back in and buying the dip and buying the dip but we're pretty much where we were and yet the economic fundamentals don't look good and he said i got wiped out by the retail investors retail investors don't think logically because retail investors are you know let's be honest like kids on on phones buying stuff and saw a guy who's extremely sophisticated in signals and buying and and everything who's clearly at the top of his game otherwise was wanna give him many money and and other people wouldn't give money gets it wrong and loses a lot of money because other people are buying things that be on logical sense so what this comes back to is the fact that the illogical things have negative effects on us but it is just a society to win we i a lot of things are happening that don't make a lot of sense correct but to a point that you alluded to earlier having a healthy relationship with risk and leaning in regardless is how people win correct so all the people and i'm curious what your take on this is but that gentleman as well as all the people that you work with who are high net worth ultra high net worth have succeeded not been given a hand out are not trust fund kids but have made the money themselves they all have a really healthy relationship with risk yeah so that that trader yes the market is illogical right now and and he lost a lot of money in the short term but his relationship with risk over the long term will allow him to win yeah same like every entrepreneur that's made any amount of money building something from scratch betting on yourself there's an inherent risk with that but over a period of time if you take that risk repeatedly eventually it will work out yeah it will you're doing but only because you're doing what the majority of people won't do so it comes out to the blue ocean red ocean you know if you do risk we are the expression creatures of comfort is there for a reason is because we like comfort we're reversed to risk you know this is a guy who i put money with and when i've introduced to other people who have also money they felt uncomfortable with him because he was saying things which you shouldn't actually say to people and i was like well if you wanna and he they just said yeah i don't know man i just i don't feel like that comfortable with him i was like if you want you can't get unorthodox returns with orthodox investing right there is a correlation if you wanna meet a private banker and they all wear this with this private banker suit the dark blue suit with the light blue shirt shirt and he will sit with you new drive bmw seven series you're gonna get orthodox returns because he is orthodox but if you want unorthodox unorthodox returns you've gotta do unorthodox things so it could be buying warehouses in in kenya it could be buying you know commercial property in colombia whatever it may be but you're gonna have to do the you're gonna have to go to places what other people don't wanna go but that's a life lesson right like if you want an unorthodox life if you want a life that is better than ninety nine point nine nine percent of people you have to take unorthodox action that's that's that's what people have such a a tough time understanding they want the outcome they don't want they don't wanna take the rest they don't want to be uncomfortable on the journey there but they also have resilience because if you take risks you won't get it right all the time i've got i've got things wrong you've got things wrong people get things wrong it's how you how you react to it and you accept that it was that it was part of the process and that you move on because i know a lot of people who lost a lot of money and just said i'm never doing it again and just went in something safer every time i've lost money i've just gone back in because the lesson is learned you know what to do this time and therefore by theory as long as you don't go straight back into the fire knowing it's insane usually come out of it and i i have a lot of you know and and that's what happens right you you need a resilience you you need to be you need to understand that you will get slapped i mean i've i've done i've been i'm still at my age still doing you know driving to milan of nowhere getting off flights in the middle of the morning because i understand that you will get being denied and being rejected is just part of the verb journey if you think about a lesson that you've learned over your life or your career a lesson that you wouldn't want anyone else to have to go through but has been very valuable for you so think of well while building the business what would be something that happened sort of a low point that would hopefully teach someone who's listening a lesson that i i've had i've had a lot of low points i've had a lot of i'll tell you a funny low point which is really odd but it is a another thing there is a lot of imitation in business you'll see that a lot of people copied there's lot copycat and i think it's good also to copy other people because you know sometimes if it's working then just do it the same thing i think just put your own what's the word your own style on it your own personal touch don't i'm just completely copy but there was a moment when i started the business and it was the early days i couldn't afford an office so i asked a friend of mine could i sub lease an office from you he about about five thousand square foot office something like this and i said could i rent from you sub from you around four hundred square foot so about as big as this studio right and i could only fit three out a push people in there and he said yeah sure no problem and so what happens he was doing a business that was kind of related to perfume somehow and there was some display shelves and there was a reception in the middle and so what happened is that i would pay him the rent and he would and the reception is i tell listen if there's a client coming from me you tell them you you give me the sign and then you tell them yes it's for for jeremy and then you take them through to to the boardroom and i'll come and join you and he was like she was like no problem and then what happened was that his because they were selling perfume the room smell really nice but what happens before client come either me or my colleague who's now my coo we'd have to go and take the perfume boxes from the display cabinets and hide it so people would need to come in and just say hold on i'm looking to invest in the second parcel and an intangible they cost three hundred four hundred thousand dollars and i'm there's perfume on display on the on their thing so we took it away but people still came and just went your office was really nice i like well you know we try and you know try and make it present and i we'd have to pull up this roll up which said our company name and then take it down when the people came from the perfume this a true startup up but this is a true start this real start i mean startup story is the best and then it gets weirder because what happens is that he was reporting to the the the head office i think was in singapore and he says to the the guy the guy is like oh you know so what's going on with this office why are we we sub leasing it and he said i was just a friend of mine i'm just helping out he's starting his business was like okay how is he doing he said it seems to be doing really well because he started with one and now he's like three four you know even asked him to take a bit more space he's like what's he doing he said oh he's doing he's helping people to obtain a second nationality and he's like okay that sounds a bit dodgy and he's like no it's legitimate it's legal he you know he has all you know and i can see that people are getting the past them and it seems to be words getting around town and so the guy goes that sounds like a really good idea we should probably do the same thing and he said okay boss whatever you wanna do so they set up a second possible company as well and then with his millions and millions of millions he started running google ad campaigns and he started doing events and seminars he hired about eight salespeople people hardcore salespeople people who all just moved in and just start hitting the phones and getting with the inbound leaders and c leads and i was like are you serious like is is this really happening right now in the same office that we are we are now two possible companies in the same office and you know it was a rule it was a real low point because it was just like it's hard enough trying to fight completely the competition as is without having to go to office with your competition and we just out outlast him and he just you know they just stopped it and they moved on different things we end up getting our own office at around twelve hundred thirteen hundred square feet in the end you know big times i think but it was really really tough because you know the bank account was going down and it was really tough to you know every client was a win or a loss for that month or that quarter yeah but yeah that i mean having a competitor in the same office that you are physically in is is a new one i know if you were gonna give you know based on your experience and building how how many years have you've been in this game now fifteen fifteen years fifteen years and i mean like that's it's a great testament to what it actually takes to build something meaningful like it takes a significant amount of time but if you stay in the game you'll find a way to make it successful but if you're were gonna give one piece of advice to an entrepreneur who who's just starting out because you've been a lot of advice about how to position yourself strategically globally but just for that person is just starting out in their in their business and they're starting from scratch and they're you know learning from what you've built what would that piece of advice be i think there there was a swiss guy he gave me i think probably my first or third or second or fifth file like just when i starting out and he said so and he's swiss so you don't understand where this come from he said there's two things in life you need to keep your word and keep your time and he said that that's all you need just a word in your time and you can see the time thing is like okay be pun don't be late nobody likes that in any this society you know french people are attend twenty minutes late you know in middle east gets a bit worse and in africa sometimes gonna show up right but but the time thing yes i think you know there's some things that will never change in business but yeah keep your word is very important i would also under i would also say karma is really underrated i think that if if where i am today i think a lot of it is just constantly doing the right thing constantly doing the good thing and it will come back around it's it's i just think that's something that is important to consider i think you should yeah i think keep your word and keep your time you just never know when it's gonna come back and repay you i want to i wanna make sure that people know where they can connect with you if they want to learn more about what you're working i know like listen you're building at your youtube channel now you're putting out a ton of content i'm excited to see i'm excited to see your your you know your audience and and your message sort to grow but where can people connect with you if they want to first of all they wanna actually do business yeah but also all the different social handles that you wanna send people to okay so look if you just want to have a second password a second charity a second residency whatever it may be savory partners is the fifteen year old six times government six government licensed agency that is accredited with six international governments and you know five hundred you know two hundred google reviews and and so on and that's that's the company that i started and is is a very big player in this in industry and we're very well recognized that comes with limitations so i set up millionaire migrant the the reason being is that if there's a lot of things i wanna have more bandwidth to kind of cover topics from my own personal stories lessons i've learned from my clients it's a more of a personal type of journey things about investing overseas which is not relative to citizenship and residency many many things egg just gives me more freedom to cover more topics that's millionaire migrant so i think on instagram is millionaire dot migrant because i got millionaire migrant my personal handle and then they've rejecting somehow some i'm shut out so there's millionaire dot migrant we'll put it on the sonos too yeah yeah yeah so millionaire migrant on youtube recently started it seems to be getting a lot of traction on particular topics so yeah that's that's where to to find me i chose that because people are taking no mad and expat and you know those sound like really cool things and i just saw you know what i'm a migrant right you know i i'm an immigrant i'm an immigrant i'm a migrant so you know that's it is what it is i know just it because i think people just listen everybody everybody who's thinking about how to better their life how to change countries how to lower their tax burden how to look for new job opportunity where to build a business all of it is about it's about wealth it's about wealth fortunately happy yeah it's and when i say well i i'm yeah for sure the financial wealth but where should i raise my family so that they're safe where should i raise my family so that we have the access to the best health care so that we can be physically okay where you know where can we avoid conflict where can we avoid whatever so everybody's looking to live this their best life their their highest quality of life and and that is the true definition of wealth and success and i think that it's na to pursue any definition of success and think that you can achieve it or in the most optimal way by just staying in one spot because to truly achieve success yes the us offers a lot of great but there's a lot of other options outside the us as well where you can i mean in terms of health care in terms of safety whatever that metric is nothing is given yeah yeah last thing that i like to ask because you've given over a wealth and knowledge i know you have you have two kids and the way that i like to frame it is if you could just pass on one lesson the most important lesson that you've learned over your entire life in your entire career and the one thing that really stands out what would that lesson be that you wanna pass on to your kids and why nothing is nothing is as it seems there is so much in the public domain there is so much in life that is not real that is misrepresented that is p to be something else you know i've met over a thousand multimillion millionaires billionaires elite athletes heads of states i've sat in rooms with them discuss many things with all all these people literally at the top of whatever you know enterprise or public or or private whatever it may be and it's not what you think it is it's really the games played very different it is not politicians act to be like this or famous people are meant to be like this you know i i've seen their bank statements i've seen their bank accounts i've seen their assets i've seen i've sat with them and see how they behave you know i've had some of the biggest football players in the world who look all bling and and you know get on private jets when i sit in the room politely get a chair for me and let me to to sit down shake by the hand turn up on time you or or you know politicians that would say or we're doing this then i see they're doing something else or so called multimillion millionaires online have ten thousand dollars in a bank account it nothing is as it seems so the as a young person starting out and that's for my kids the first time the thing i would tell them is that if anything we have as a family right now it just came from hard work and nobody likes to hear that nobody likes to hear that you need to do hard work everyone wants to hear a hack a shortcut or you know this this shit coin here or this mem coin here everyone wants to because that's what people want and yet they do that because they see people online have this and that i know those people online do not have that money the car is rented the house is rented the clothes are rented the the private jet is stationary the whole thing is fake and the first thing told that as long as you block out and understand that you can't take any of this at face value the most successful you will be because then you won't have to worry about all this background noise you won't have to compare yourself with this or that or the other thing just do you and but just understand that if you really wanna achieve something there is no other way to succeed than hard work and i and one of the motto i live by is to to suffer to succeed if you're not suffering then there's really nothing at the end of it right because if you're not suffering there isn't there isn't anything there not nobody ever got anywhere without some kind of suffering

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transitioning into investing one one last thought or question with silly benz because obviously achieved massive scale how do you decide as an entrepreneur when you wanna hold on to something versus when you want to sell it because i know that when you have that kind of scale you're getting offers from private equity or or strategic buyers so what's the words of wisdom based on your experiences as to what you should do should you start with the exited in mind should you hold on to the business long term should you sell it at the right time this is a very personal answer because everybody has different opinions about this how do you think through these ideas i don't think anyone should buy or acquire a business solely with the exit in mind but i do believe once you scale a business and it's life changing money for your family in your future you should always take the bird in hand so let's talk silly bands when it was at the height and i was getting all these offers that you talk about they were pretty substantial thirty five fifty sixty million dollars and i said no to all of them because i felt i could take it from a hundred million to two hundred million to two who knows what when you were making when you sixty thirty fifty sixty million was it like a 1x x revenue that you were getting off or is that or was it like multiples it was like a two or a three hour that's not okay sorry i thought i thought you were like a sixty five million revenue sixty five million dollar off okay so you're getting them no it was like a two three x multi it's not bad so for me now it's different i think if you're starting out and you build something meaningful you should stay the course long enough that where the exit is life changing money in bird in hand one thing that i learned was silly bands and thereafter is that i invested too freely after silly bands into too many startups and i went backwards financially for a little while and that was something that i learned and would never do again so i think it's important for people to understand if you build a cool company and you can sell it for a real dollar amount and move on and really figure out the next phase of your life whether it's retirement getting in shape or whatever it may be you should do it because you're not always gonna be able to sustain growth no matter what your business model is and what type of business so if you can sell it for a meaningful dollar amount i would sell it the peak was two hundred million right was that or was that was that over a period of time over a period of time oh that was over a period of time so you rejected are you upset you rejected offers i'm not upset that i rejected some of these offers because it got me here i wouldn't be in this seat if i sold silly bands for sixty five million or fifty five million or a hundred million dollars because i wouldn't have went on to continue to build more and more companies i probably would have bought a beach house bought a couple more cars and then just retired and it did angel investing and never built anything so for me i really enjoy the building process i like taking the idea from napkin to being online to being in retail stores into seeing that success especially when i can bring others along the way like recently we just launched a puzzle company paragon puzzles and i did that with elizabeth and she really wanted to do something in the puzzle space she's a big puzzle so i did that and i love seeing that process from her brain to my brain from napkin to in stores and now it's starting to grow and get popular and that is the coolest thing that i get to do every single day other than educating people i love that i i absolutely love that i mean it you're you you have such a good mindset around like sort of your life story and i think it's important because a lot of people they don't realize everything happens for a reason and even not selling happens for a reason and ultimately ultimately not selling could be more help you be more financially in the long term because now you made some investments and we can talk about why a good business operator doesn't always mean they're a good investor that's also a thing that i there that could be a whole episode for sure but that that forced you to figure out okay what's next in life and and you've done that like very very well yeah like i don't think that if you had a a sixty five million dollar exit would you be on tiktok i i have no idea probably not probably not you never saw tom from myspace again no he's he's gone he's gone on he's literally filming birds in the yucatan somewhere and nobody's ever seen him again because he has all this money so yeah i think me not exiting silly bands me going through all the trial and error and failure sent silly bands has made me what i am today and i think it has helped me craft being such a good educator because i've done it all and i'm able to then extract all the good points and bad points from all of that experience to be able to help others because i have people right now that have ten thousand dollars to their name and i have people that have ten million twenty million to their name but everyone needs help along the way yeah and and using that that you know that point is a segue just because you're good at building a business doesn't mean you're good at investing so all your most of your content right now is around investing in finance so what happened when you made some money and this happens to happen to me happen to a lot of my friends as well they start they make a little bit of money and you start to go into angel investing and you have no idea what you're doing and then you lose most of it yeah and what has actually happened in in my case and a lot of my friends as well we just stay away from angel investing and now we're just go to to real estate and stocks and maybe a little bit of stock picking because like i don't i'm not good at betting on the jo and figuring out like pre revenue if a company is gonna hit and i think that when you have a little bit of money it's exciting to try all these new ways to invest but i outside i have one friend who is like actually an angel investor probably does fifty sixty angel investments a year outside of that i know people that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars that suck at it and they've stayed pretty much away from it right and i won't i won't name names of one time particulars with several several hundred million dollars and he will not write a check more than fifty thousand dollars because every time he does he loses his money so he's just like what's the point and then he just started going to section eight real estate because it was just like it was an easier it was an easier investment opportunity that didn't blow up every single because time try to do it well that's one of the biggest parts of my message when it comes to investing in general build your base yeah then start diversifying because a lot of people wanna start out they get their first twenty thousand dollars they wanna go buy a house they wanna go buy a duplex and flip it you have no idea how to do it if you don't have a partner that knows how to do it don't do it because it is not the right strategy for me i think people generally should build their base whether their base is a hundred thousand two hundred thousand five hundred thousand dollars so that way they have compound interest doing its job in building wealth while you sleep after that then start diversifying maybe get into real estate try house hacking get a couple duplex build that up start building a portfolio there but when you get to the phase of wanting to angel invest whether it's through big platforms and startups or uncle bills restaurant yeah you have to understand that in many instances like your very wealthy friend money has a way of making people think they're smart and it's really funny to me because we talk about people that are very wealthy with their boring businesses and i think it is one of the greatest ways to build wealth is through boring businesses and right now you know there's so many businesses and these you know boomer owners that don't have exit strategies so for them they're willing to just lock the doors and walk away they've got their millions of dollars they've got their house paid off and that is the huge that is the biggest opportunity i think in entrepreneurship right now is buying these established businesses you can get owner financing there's a lot of different ways creatively to take over these businesses add in modern technology modern sales strategies and really make a lot of money but i think the main thing with venture investing and i do it now too keep your check sizes small like you said fifty thousand my check size used to range between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand now i'm twenty five to fifty thousand on my checks i'm actually gonna leave here and go do a wire for a very important company in the human robotic space and but i think that is the key take more shots in your investing like that because you're gonna have you know i have this thesis thesis that if you're gonna invest in ten venture deals five or six of them are gonna go to zero yeah two of them are gonna do okay you just need one that gets you that fifty or hundred or more x and that's where all the money and wealth is built but don't start out doing that kind of investing i think too many people start too early in that type of investing and a lot of them are gonna go to zero because like you said they don't know how bet on the jo they don't know what's gonna scale and a lot of these high flying companies take years and years to become liquid and become profitable and a lot of people don't understand that when they're investing in these types of deals we introduce these deals in the rich habits network in our private community all the time and i always reiterate to people do not invest this money if you expect it to be liquid anytime soon because some people think fucked up yeah they can invest in a startup or invest in an apartment building and they're gonna be able to get their money back or see a return in a year it doesn't work that way so i just always make sure that i share the good side of everything we do but also the downsides but also just give people a proper understanding because everyone wants to build financial freedom but they don't know how to do it and and you're gonna make mistakes a along the way so i think it's important to not go too fast in things you don't know just what is it fig ai yep that's yeah yeah yeah so yep so so one of my friends i can name him because i'm sure he's very proud of it so so shane ne do you know him yep okay so he put in money at like a three hundred million dollar evaluation valuation he's been he's been like on the figure ai yeah no i for a long time yeah and now the valuation well i can't say no no but the the brett brett ad cox is a very impressive guy very very impressive guy yeah he's great but i mean he has a track record so this is his third i think if i'm not mistaken second our third is second gonna third one of the companies you took public which is like a anyway point aviation company archer aviation very very impressive guy now that company is blowing up but i don't think i don't think many people have that luck when they're putting their checking and and the bigger issue is not in my opinion at least the bigger issue is not the person that has the ability to write two hundred and fifty or five hundred thousand dollar checks it's the person who is pulling in a two hundred to three hundred thousand dollar per year salary and they and they're in you know they're maybe they're in intact maybe but they're like oh angel investing is sexy let me start writing twenty five thousand dollar but that then it's a significant amount of their money yeah that they're putting in and they're putting in money into this pre revenue on you know pre revenue early stage startup nothing's proven out first time founder because they don't they've never done it before right as opposed to putting money into something a little bit more secure and i think that that's the biggest issue that i have with angel investing because just because you're pulling in a good salary or even if you had a say you had a ten million dollar exit in in you know a state with high taxes well you have like what five million after that right ten millions on paper great great exit amazing amazing exit but you can you can burn through that money very quickly if you think that you're a good investor just because you were good at building a business well a lot of people and most entrepreneurs especially male entrepreneurs they all think that they're a lot better at it than they are and it takes many many years to learn it i mean even you admit that you made some mistakes and angel investing i've had a lot of zeros in angel investing but now i've learned rather than getting in you know day one where it's the idea and the concept and i'm one of the first five investors i'm much more happy getting in at a hundred two hundred three hundred million dollars on a com on a company that's having a meteor rise because then i am not betting on a concept i'm betting on a product that has already tried and true and usually built out and so i think that's an important aspect of understanding where you're getting into the company as a process and understanding where that company can go from a market cap in the future and that's why i'm betting big right now on humanoid robotics nuclear and still kind of the second phase of ai which to me i believe is the software side of ai and the application side of ai and that's where most of my money is gonna go in the next three to five years thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

hubspot is a success story partner now if you're an entrepreneur listen up because hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers if you are building a business you need to get hubspot why here's the perfect example moo house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content a problem that every single business in the world has but with a nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took thirty minutes to publish now breeze which is hubspot collection of ai tools help them right and optimize their content in a fraction of the time and the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site if you are ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com in this lessons episode explore how novelty and mental challenge protect the brain from cognitive decline learn how trying new activities builds neural pathways that delayed dementia learn why staying socially and mentally active is more powerful than relying on diet or supplements and learn how ulysses contracts help us beat temptation and make better decisions for our future selves one more one more thought and question on memory and sort of brain health and brain optimization i've i've spoken to stephen ko who does a lot of work on flow state and he's written lot several books have done how many and he was speaking about activities that ward off alzheimer's and dementia and i don't know about the science behind it he's he has a lot of conviction that certain kinds of activities can ward off alzheimer's dementia is there anything that is studied or proven to ward off alzheimer's dementia if that's something that's in your family he was mentioning if i remember correctly he mentioned that tennis was one of the most beneficial activities because it's cognitive and physical at the same time which apparently is something that is not prevalent in in many other sports i don't know where i think he's on research on this but regardless in your studies have you found anything like that to be the case where any sort of activity prevents cognitive decline maybe any foods any anything at all really i'll tell you the whole the whole thing comes down to challenging your brain with with novelty so the key is and and and you can fit anything you want in here including tennis but the key is if you are an expert tennis player then playing tennis in your sixties or something is not gonna benefit you the thing that'll benefit you is to not play tennis but to start something else that you've never done before that you're terrible at that you need to learn how to do that's the thing and this is true across whatever it is whether it's i don't know people always ask me about su or you know with saline or whatever the thing is it's gotta be something that's challenging what you always want to do but especially if your brain is getting closer to cognitive impairment is put yourself between the levels of frustrating but achievable so you're taking on a new task let's say you've never done su before then that's cool you start su you don't know what you're doing you're putting a lot of effort into it the point is what that's doing in the brain is building new roadway your you're making new things happening with your synapses that you haven't done before as soon as you get good into roku then you have to drop that and pick up something else like tenants like whatever the new thing is you haven't done but the key is the challenge and that's where you always want to be and weirdly that's actually our best thing that we know about for you know for dementia is is challenging the brain obviously there's lots of pharmaceutical work going on and other things like that as far as foods go i i don't think there's anything that's particularly convincing about that if one already has a balanced diet i don't think there's some magical new food that one can do there but the key is to constantly build new roadway and bridges in the brain there was a study that's been going on for i think like thirty years now called the religious order study and this is on nuns who live in con in the chicago area who all agreed that they would donate their brains upon their death and so over the years different nuns of of passed away and donated their brains and the brains have been autopsy and the the stunning result from the study is that a number of these nuns actually had alzheimer's disease their brains were ravaged you know molecular you can see this in the tissue the tissue is degraded their brain tissue but even though they had alzheimer's disease they they didn't show the cognitive deficits that that one would expect and this came as a giant surprise but the reason is because these women live in these con till the day they die and in these con they have chores and responsibilities they have this very active social life and you know when you have an active social life you're you're arguing people fighting with people and you know getting along with people and whatever it's we sometimes say in the field that there's nothing is hard for the brain as other people and so it's constant challenger constantly keeping their brains active and as a result even though their brands are d generating they are they're building these new roadway compare this to people who retire and don't have that kind of challenge and sit at home alone and watch television on the couch that's a very different thing that's happening as their brain tissue degenerate there's no new roadway being built and that's why you can see the cognitive correlates of the degeneration that's fascinating so retiring very retiring with no activity no no learning new skills no socializing very bad for your brain i would even it's interesting but i guess by virtue of what you just said flow state is is great for productivity and for work but it's actually useless for preventing cognitive decline which is ironic because everybody keeps trying to how do i get flow state how do i you know how do i optimize my four hours in the morning where nothing distract me and i'm completely in the zone that that's exactly right you got it that what what's funny is brains are always in this middle state where they're trying to balance novelty and familiarity so if you're doing too much novelty it's tough and the brain really wants to just be before for example i just returned from an eight day you hike in spain pilgrimage lungs community santiago and you know each night you're sleeping in a different little in and then you walk fifteen miles in the next place so and and when i came home just a couple days ago i really just wanted to be in my bed because i thought oh it's familiar and i wanna be in this bed for several nights and instead of a different one each night so it's it's tough when you've got too much novelty but the key thing that you just wanna make sure you're always avoiding is too much familiarity and you're exactly right in the flow state you're saying okay this is something i've trained my brain on and it knows exactly what to do and i don't have to challenge it and think about something new here so you don't want too much of that what would you say that are some some common habits that are really damaging to either our brains health or just brain's potential yeah i mean so many things that that we all do obviously you know diet is one unless people think about it what's cool what what i think is neat is that just over the course of my lifetime so far i i feel like i've seen a real change in the way that society thinks about diet now but maybe i'm wrong maybe people just talk about this on social media about eating clean and then they don't actually do who knows but i think some people try and maybe probably that it's true too to be honest you know what i find interesting i i see these these weight lifting videos on on youtube and i i watch these things and i try to implement some new techniques and whatever these things all have you know millions or tens of millions of views and i think that's awesome that so many people are watching this thing about like you the five vest you know back exercises are five best buy are i think hey that's so great that so many people are watching this but what i don't know is how that translates in other words do people are there millions people watching it that not doing it i'd but i'm not certain anyway as far as things that we do obviously it or it feels to me anyway that there's been a lot more emphasis about sleep and this is massively important one thing that i feel like i've seen a change on as well is alcohol consumption which is related to the sleep issue it's become more socially cool to not drink alcohol which is a great idea right because alcohol and among other things disrupts your sleep and so at least in the circles that we spin in a lot of people are not drinking in a way that let's say our parents generation everybody drank so i think that's a that's a really cool hack that's been happening socially you know and obviously one generation ago everyone would smoke cigarettes and there were these ads you know nine out of ten physicians recommend camel brand of cigarettes or something it's crazy to look back at those sorts of ads but anyway so these are all sorts of bad habits that people are are working on to my mind one of the main interesting challenges in life is that we all have temptation that we in our long term thinking self would rather not give into whether that's drugs or alcohol or some people have gambling or some people have sex addictions or whatever the issue is that people have when they're when they're really in a moment of sober thinking about who do i want to be in the world they're hug they're on a hike they think okay i i don't wanna do that anymore the question is how do you get yourself to actually not do it because we are very different people at different times and when you're faced with the temptation you're probably going to do it and so my one of my deep interests and this is actually my my next book is on something called the ulysses contract which is how we make deals with ourselves through time the listeners may remember the story of o also knows ulysses who is coming home from the trojan war and realized he was gonna pass the island of the sirens and and he really wanted to hear their songs but of course he knew that like any mortal man their their song would seduce the the whole ship to to come crash into the rocks and everyone would drown so what he did is he filled his sailor his you know sailors ears with beeswax and he had them lash him to the mas so that he could hear the siren song but he couldn't do anything about it because he instructed them i want you to go straight and just ignore me if i'm screaming and yelling the point is the the ulysses of sound mind who was you know tens of miles from the island knew that the future ulysses who who would be right next to the island would behave badly what he was doing is making sure that when faced with temptation the future wouldn't wouldn't behave badly so what i find very interesting is how we can make ulysses contracts in our own lives to make sure that you know for example we show up at the gym one way to do that is to tell your friend you'll you'll meet him there at you know nine am and if you tell your friend you'll meet him there then you wake copy maybe feel a little lazy you feel like skipping i can't because he's gonna be there so then you show up so that's a very simple way of making you ulysses contract for people who are trying to you know battle drug or alcohol addictions there are all these things you can do like make sure you never carry more than twenty dollars in your pocket because if somebody offers you drugs on street you'll say oh shoot i don't have money or for an alcoholic the important thing is to clear all the alcohol out of the house because even if you think okay look i've i know what to do i'm not gonna drink this thing if it's there you'll drink it at some point so there are all kinds of things if we think about ourselves as creatures through time who are not the same person in all moments i think this is a very powerful hack to to help our future behavior thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

hubspot is a success story partner now if you're an entrepreneur listen up because hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers if you are building a business you need to get hubspot why here's the perfect example moo house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content a problem that every single business in the world has but with a nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took thirty minutes to publish now breeze which is hubspot collection of ai tools help them right and optimize their content in a fraction of the time and the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site if you are ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com the superhero leadership podcast is a success story partner now what does it take to lead like a superhero you're gonna find out on the superhero leadership podcast it's hosted by marvel's former ceo and legendary turnaround expert peter k each week peter is joined by top performers from business media and beyond leaders who have mastered the art of impact resilience and together they explore peter's thirty two leadership essentials revealing what it really takes to rise inspire and lead with purpose if you wanna level up your leadership this is your blueprint search for superhero leadership wherever you get your when i was a senior in high school everyone knew me as a candy mac i go to costco i'd buy three hundred dollars a candy and like flip it for five hundred dollars a next day that's why i thought i was gonna go into business there's a very strong scientific argument evolutionary argument that by our orientation is to focus more in the future he spent six months in silence meditating fourteen hours a day no phone no books just him in his mind corey mascara is one of the world's most sought after mindfulness teachers but he didn't start that way what should life look like compared to probably what ninety nine point nine nine percent of people who are listening to this are living right now for most people it really starts with slowing down enough to be able to be connected to the being that is doing all of doing the more you do the more there is knowing and clarity of what to do in a given moment and there's actually like a pulse that can guide your life from a monk in be to a mindset coach for fortune five hundred company corey has dedicated his life to helping people master the inner game of focus clarity and deep self awareness he's taught at columbia he's written best selling books he doesn't preach he practices and what he teaches could change your life i think for a lot of people they've learned to mistrust themselves the future doesn't exist in the future in the past doesn't exist in the past they're all arising from the present moment corey i'm really happier here i just want to sort of set a baseline and ask you what does mindfulness mean to you this might be a corny answer but in many ways i i think of mindfulness as an an act love it's it's a love affair with your life so many of us for obvious reasons are just very easily swept into automatic pilot sometimes caught up in things that we enjoy doing but a lot of times just caught up in the grind of life and the invitation into mindfulness and when you start getting into this work is really like reclaiming your life and seeing like in any moment it is it is here this is it this moment is it and if i miss it it it's gone and that's okay because it's there's this one right now that i can wake up to but what does it mean to not get caught in this trap of thinking once everything comes together then i can start appreciating my life then i can relax then i'll be happy the belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence is the reason we miss our lives and mindfulness is an invitation back into the recognition that all we have is right now i feel intuitively like this is a modern a modern phenomenon a modern issue where we are living constantly in the future or maybe even in the past worrying or have anxiety about what's come or what happened and i think that we probably spend the least amount of time in the present i don't know if that's a correct assumption you can tell me do you feel like this is a the the stress of what's to come as a modern invention or are humans sort of genetically or historically coded to always worry about what's to come and whenever we try and focus on the present we're actually pushing back against the way that we were built well there's a very strong scientific argument evolutionary argument that our orientation is to focus more in the future the psychologist doctor martin sal he wrote a book called homo prospect which is making the argument that at our core we are future thinking beings our unique capacity is to imagine a future that hasn't yet happened and then organize resources to help bring that future to reality no other animals or or that we're aware of or and maybe this has changed in recent years our understanding but like have that same capacity to do that to imagine a future that doesn't exist and then create it so i would argue that at our core that is that is more a capacity than to just be present we can also talk about in a bit how they're not necessarily contradictory because anything anything the the future doesn't exist in the future in the past doesn't exist in the past they just exist they're all arising from the present moment and so where so many people get stuck with meditation and mindfulness is they they think they shouldn't have these thoughts about future in the past and then they end up judging themselves for having those thoughts and then judging themselves or judging themselves and they're just like i suck at meditation why don't even try so the big thing is like make space for all of that but when like when i as someone engaged in this work like i have to have future thoughts all the time i have a kid now and we had a like plan for his future we have to save money and i have a teaching business as well so i'm i'm planning things the the question always for me is like it's the thought about the future that's pulling me into the future is it coming from a place of fear anxiety trying to get safety and control or is it coming from a place in me that is more free and spacious and i i'm often tracking like the the the decisions that i make that inform especially big things that i do with my life i i really don't want them to have the resonance of being a decision i i almost want them to have the resonance of being a receiving as if i'm just like relaxing into myself in the deepest most spacious place in myself and then seeing like what arises from that place when i'm not acting out of fear anxiety and worry of like am i gonna be okay and many people think that when i do that like if i just meditate and i let go of everything related to the future in the past that i'm just gonna dev dissolve into a puddle of nothingness and i'm not gonna get anything done that's not true like you're you there's energy that moves through you and even the most awakened and enlightened state right that has to expresses itself through your body and through your mind it just expresses itself differently than the energy of what do i have to do to get safety praise love and connection and so the the exploration of what it means to build a life from presence and even like from the resonance of wholeness and happiness rather than emptiness pain and desperation is really the exploration of how do i rest in that most spacious wear place and myself and then listen for what wants to come through and then use the resource of me my human capacity and agency to help usher assure that into existence so that's a way that we we blend this work of presence and mindfulness with our capacity to create a beautiful life but we wanna create that life on the foundation of the place in us that is already whole rather than the the place in us that feels empty and if we do the latter this is where you get people who build businesses to try to get a sense of worth and praise because they have a a wound that their dad didn't love them or their mom didn't love them unless they work super hard so they're constantly just playing out that pattern and then you build an entire empire that's on the foundation of pain and not actually coming from the truth of you or a a place in you that really gives you joy it's just helping to protect you from having to feel the trigger of that discomfort and not of not feeling good enough so yes well the the first response to the original question is like no i i i think our actual state is to be future thinking are we more do we have more hooks to get caught in that future thinking now in a negative way yes the psychologist of alberto so as we experience more stimulation in one week than our ancestors experienced in their entire lives which is not too hard to think about even just like in the context of what i'm looking at right now i have a screen i have a ring light there's sounds in the background like most things around me are artificially built versus like being in the forest so instead of having like one lion that you're contending with every couple of weeks like it's just constant certainly coming at you and there's so many things for the mind to get hooked on to addicted to get addicted to and that i think creates a lot of noise that makes it difficult to parse like what are the thoughts that are actually gonna that are future related that are coming from a place of presence and rooted ness and my inherent wholeness and which ones are just coming from my mind attaching to things that it's scared of or or craving in my environment and i'm building my life from there my question really is when we look into the future and say we're ambitious and we want to build a company wanna be an entrepreneur we want to i don't know think about all the things people get excited about they want to be in better shape they want to be in a great relationship they want to get a promotion at work is there a way to tell if those things are being driven from a place of fear or true happiness and excitement because that to me would be the and maybe maybe you have to do the work maybe you have to look inside and and be more mindful and to meditate to truly know but i think that people that are bought into intimate bot into meditation already and i say that meaning that some people don't do it just to be very candid and some people don't do it is there a signal they should look for when they think about how they operate through their day that should be a sign hey i'm not doing this i'm not doing this trauma free i'm doing this from a place of hurt or a wound or something that i don't quite understand and that is a great signal for me to maybe look inside be you know alone with my thoughts a little bit more is there something that people can sort of tap into that helps them understand why they're doing the things you're doing and if it's in a positive way or a negative way if that makes sense yeah i'll give you a a few things the first is you can ask yourself the question what comes up for me when i think about not doing this if it is a motivation coming from a wound mo health is here to help you start your weight loss journey with caring personalized support meet one on one with board certified obesity doctors and registered diet who truly listen and understand your unique needs eligible patients can access affordable gl one medications delivered right to their door each month no insurance no problem mo health accepts fsa and hsa making care accessible and affordable and with twenty four seven customer service you'll never feel alone on your path to better health get started with mo health today take the free quiz at join mo dot com and use code audio forty at checkout for forty dollars off your first month of membership that's join m o c h i dot com with promo code audio forty this new year why not let audible expand your life by listening explore over one million audiobooks books podcast and exclusive audible originals that'll inspire and motivate you tap into your well being with advice and insight from leading professionals and experts on better health relationships career finance investing and more maybe you wanna to kick a bad habit or start a good one if you're interested in learning how to master your emotions and hearing scientifically backed advice for using your emotions as a tool may i suggest shift by psychologist and best seller author doctor ethan cross trust me listening on audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself start listening today when you sign up for a free thirty day trial at audible dot com slash one that's audible dot com slash one you will probably notice a lot of fear arise in your system and it will be loud and anxious and buzzing it will almost have like a the resonance of survival in it like no you need to do this that is typically what could be referred to as a protective part of you that developed a belief emotional and behavior around who you need to be and what you need to do in order to get certain needs met and so when you confront that part with the question well what if we just didn't do that it will usually come online in a loud way and convince you why you need to and it will it has very clever ways for doing that but the thing you want to track is does it bring a lot of noise is it really trying to convince me does it make me feel very scared if i weren't to do this that is one in general telltale way to know that this is coming from something that is guarding a lot of pain another thing you can start to do just to get a sense of like what is the resonance of things and motivations that arise from the place in me that is rounded happy excited inspired versus the place in me that's scared and control fearful is to just track throughout the day the moments where you feel most grounded most present most connected and most loved maybe it's a walk in nature maybe it's when you're with your partner maybe it's like a few a few moments like while you're in the bathroom at work and nobody needs anything from you and just like you don't have the fear in your system that's coming online that's constantly gripping and telling you what to do when that subside you just pay attention to how does my system orient in those moments what do i think about what do i desire where does my energy want to go and then throughout the day track what are the moments when i'm most stressful where i feel the most amount of fear what is my system orient to in those moments what does it think about what does it feel what behaviors tend to come online as a pattern and you'll start to see typically that there's a difference there than in my most relaxed state just like oh i i feel more possibility like i feel a draw to start that business in my more fearful state i feel like no i i i really just have to stay in this job or like your patterns of control come online in a big way and it feels very compelling and convincing in the early stages of decipher this you're just trying to sense that there is a difference there because most of it when we're living on autopilot it just feels like noise a thought is a thought is a thought there's not a thought coming from wisdom there's not a thought coming from fear it's just noise in the system a lot of a different emotion sometimes they're happy sometimes they're not and same with sensation in our body so this is a way that you can start to break down the category of like oh yeah when my system is relax when i do feel good this is what wants to come through and when i'm helping people try to figure this out or what it means to like build a life that is not only an extension of your wholeness but also allows you to live in a space that reinforces you being in that place so what does you know in your mind what should life look like compared to probably what ninety nine point nine nine percent of people who are listening to this are living right now i think for most people it really starts with slowing down enough to be able to be connected to the being that is doing all of the doing which is a little tri but most people have not slowed down enough to even realize that there's someone and some space behind all of the action and behind even the decision making most of us are playing out long standing patterns that were motivated by things that happened in our family or that we caught in the media things we had to do to survive or to get love connection within our family or ideas that we latched onto to in like our teenage years or in college of what will give us success and happiness and so the one of the first things to do with that is just asking like where is that voice coming from the voice that's telling me that like i wanna start a business so it's like okay well is that yours or is that did you watch a gary v video and you got excited because he had money and it's just like yeah that seems cool and and maybe it's a combination of both like sometimes we can get caught in meme desire which is a renee art idea where we like desire what other people desire and and then we can use that to whiteboard our own desires oh that seems interesting let me kinda dabble on that for a little bit and see if there's a connection there we don't always have this deep like yes to everything but if you're just in the automatic authenticity of like this is what i'm supposed to do without ever checking like why am i doing this and what is the belief that i'm gonna get on the other side of this then that's where you can just like put your head down for years and and build a castle that actually turns out to be a prison so that would be right to that question of like what's the main thing that or the thing that i would hope for for people and i'm trying to invite them into is really just that that inquiry with themselves like why am i doing what i'm doing in the first place where are these beliefs coming from and are they actually in service with my deepest needs and desires and then from there i mean it it's you know i'm i'm really agnostic to what people's life looks like i i just i really trust here's the thing if you take the perspective that you are fundamentally whole that there is a place within you that has inherent joy fulfillment confidence clarity and inner knowing then your personal growth journey and even how you build your life is going to be about subtracting the beliefs and the patterns that were put in place telling you who you needed to be in order to get those things it will be an unwinding back into that core self if you have the fundamental belief that you are inherently broken then your path is going to be about adding new beliefs and emotions and patterns that create some ideal version of you because at the core you're broken so you gotta you gotta get all of that stuff my direct experience is that we are fundamentally whole i didn't come out with that in like a mystical way i wasn't trying to be spiritual with it it was all built on first principles i paid attention to my experience and meditation i saw that there was a place in me that was watching my thoughts watching my emotions watching everything moving through my experience that i typically took as me and i got really curious about that what is that place and what is it like when i dwell there and does nothing happen when i dwell there do i dissolve into a puddle of nothingness and nothing it turns out no it turns out like you can actually rest there and the more you do the more there is an innate confidence the more there is any like knowing and clarity of what to do in a given moment and there's actually like a pulse that can guide your life i'm i'm fully in alignment with you i think that the entire i just wrote a piece about this last week the entire self help industry is convincing people that they're broken and they have to add have to add on add on add on add on this tactic add on this you know principle add on whatever but i really love the way you phrase that i think that this is a much healthier because it's impossible to like if if you think that you're broken i don't care how much you add on you'll never consider yourself to be whole you'll get addicted with self improvement and self development that's that's the issue mh it just there's no end your personal growth becomes a distraction and it becomes it becomes an attempt to not feel something and you can do that four years and you can get really good at it like you can just you could build a great life on that foundation but when you get quiet and when you get still or when that life gets confronted in some way you will always have to come back to that place in you that's terrified to just be yourself and this is why blaze pascal the philosopher said all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone it's just like until we can do that we are going to be motivated by the most hurt parts of ourselves nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts are gonna get ten answers bull market bear market rates will rise rates will fall honestly i just wish somebody would invent a crystal ball but until then over forty one thousand businesses have future proof their business with nets sweet by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one fluid dynamic platform with real time insights and forecasting you're peer into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next if i had needed this product this is what i would use whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions nets helps 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hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need well this is so i thought about this a lot and i think that i think that you have a significant amount of responsibility and why i say that is because society is becoming more secular and we're moving away from traditional religion and we move away from religion humans inherit there's a reason why religion is at one point in history very popular and i mean still isn't you know obviously religion is still very popular but not as much as it used to be it's because humans crave understanding right they crave understanding they crave they crave community they crave being part of something bigger than themselves and they sort of also want to understand how to navigate life and i think religion checked a lot of those boxes and when we move away from religion into a more secular society i think that people feel lost and they feel confused i think they feel like i don't know how to navigate the most difficult parts of my life and religion gave sort of like a rule book or a guide book for that that i don't think was perfectly replaced and now you have people that are looking towards self help and they're looking towards astrology and they're also looking towards mindfulness and meditation people are just trying to figure out how to navigate life and i think the way that you teach it is a very healthy way where i think there's i'm sure some of your peers and you'll never name names which is a fine thing but i think there's some people that operate in the self help space i don't even know if you consider yourself to be operating in that space i think that some people operate in that space without really understanding the responsibility that they have and i think that this is why it's such an issue with self help because the constant addition i think to your point when all those the all those ideas that you've added on and adopted because again you think that you're quote unquote broken which i believe you're not but if you've would if you've added on all those ideas and then eventually those ideas are challenged and you don't have community you don't have religion you don't have a traditional version of god you don't believe that you're enough that's a very trauma thought to deal with and i think that that's why we have all time high depression and anxiety and there's a lot of issues in society to stem from people believing like they're not enough and not knowing how to explore that they are enough and i think that this is what you do very well and i think that a lot of people that would consider themselves your peers may not do it so well because they don't understand that responsibility that those are my two cents on on where people are right now in society but i think as beautifully said makes me curious as well like how how did you come to this recognition or this maybe like innate sense of wholeness it's a really good question i think i think because when i've trusted myself even if it hasn't you if i've trusted myself i've always found that i figured it out i i i i trust i trust my own i don't wanna make it sound too cold but i trust how my own competency i trust my ability to navigate situations not from a perspective of i need to always succeed but if something doesn't succeed i trust myself that my that i'll be able to navigate the next thing and i'll be just fine that's a lot of trust in yourself also there's like in the capacity for life to life to hold you like through those in between moments at like you're you're really re t you you're you feel very t to something deeper within you even if it doesn't seem super deep and my experience is like a lot of people don't have that and i i think you know something interesting here to even make this more secular to bridge it there's there's a psychologist named richard schwartz he's the founder of this modality called internal family systems and he worked with people like with a lot of trauma and what he found like for example he might be working with someone who right had like a a serious shrinking addiction and and he found himself saying and point like i i wanna talk to the part of you that's drinking the part of you that wants to drink and that's where he started to see that oh they're like fractal in our psychology that come online to that organize our behavior how we emo and how we think in order to get certain needs met and he saw this just across the board people with bo people who were cutting like they all had a part that would come in and almost like mas as their as like who they were their voice of reason telling them what to do but he also found and this was most interesting to me that anytime he was able to get those parts to soften and relax their grip there was a kind of presence behind it that was the same across the board for every single person it was all characterized he calls them the eight seas like that that space had an innate clarity creativity courage compassion what were some of the other ones courage i said yeah anyway that i found it so interesting that you know this is psychologist doing this work but finding that when when people weren't gripped by their trauma there was a consistency with everyone he was working with that kind of illuminated who they were and that to me like from even the more spiritual perspective really gives more credence to the idea that maybe one there's a deeper place within all of us that can hold our life that has wisdom and two maybe that deeper place is is interconnected if we all can kind of touch into it and it has a similar similar qualities and a similar resonance so i think for a lot of people they've learned to mist mistrust themselves you seem to have a lot of trust in yourself and i've gone through different periods of that in my life but i think a lot of also just my upbringing and my parents helped and instill a certain trust in me but for many people they've learned to mist mistrust their thoughts their emotions their sensations and instead of using that to go deeper and really figure out oh maybe this is because certain thoughts i was acting on were coming from a a painful place in me or maybe because the things i did at a certain point in time were just out of my control and they were painful but that doesn't mean that i was bad instead of doing that inquiry they just go i can't trust anything going on in me so i just have to listen to what other people say when you were back in college correct when you first started meditating you went from trying to impress a girl to spending six months in be so maybe just for people who don't know your story just please explain how you how you got into personally meditation but also i i will eventually try and figure out i find i find what you did in bur and you were i guess a monk for a period of time for six months i wanna understand everything about that those spiritual practices that you know that can help us that can impact us and really just you know i'm sure their quality of life even though they probably have no material goods compared to the average person in the us is exponentially higher that's my assumption anyways so just tee up a little bit about how you first and this is years ago obviously understood the power of mindfulness and meditation after that i guess that girl didn't work out you got that right and it would this all been great but at the time it it was very painful and yeah so i i didn't get into this work for any noble reasons i saw the pretty girl dent walking down the street and i wanted to talk to her i wasn't in another relationship but so yeah that was my college girlfriend and she she was way more of a hippie than me i wasn't a hippie at all i thought i was gonna go into finance i had an internship lined up on wall street always liked business but there was something like really earthy and crunchy granola about her that i think spoke to parts of me that i was like she's a good person and i want to impress her so i started meditating because she was into it then two weeks after that she broke up with me i don't think it was because of the meditation but so there's no there was no happy ending to meditate and you get the girl but the different happy ending was that the the pain of that breakout because that was it was very hard the pain of it caused me to actually take the meditation more seriously and it because it was the first time that i was seeing i could actually create some relief from my inner world just by focusing on it differently and i i really didn't know what i was doing at the time i was just lie my dorm bed put my hands on my belly and just try to focus on my breath and think inhale exhale inhale exhale and every time my mind i would wander i'd come back to it but just just the stabilization of my attention this is like basic it's not this is like people do this in psychology now i was just like can you focus on one thing like make that a practice that that stabilization of my mind allowed me to not be so caught in the torment of the mental fluctuations of thoughts and the emotional fluctuations in my body and it it was like i was zooming out from it and the more i i zoomed out the more i was just in the spacious place of observation and that was very compelling to me it simultaneously coincided with my first like quarter life crisis where you know i was it was an economics major we took this trip to the new york stock exchange to meet with this big wig multi billionaire hedge fund manager and and everyone said this is a guy you wanna meet this is where you wanna get this is what success looks like and i remember going there and and he gave a talk and then it just sucked my soul out of my body and know it's nothing against him because a guy coulda have just been having a bad day or might have had a colonoscopy before he came in the room so i'm not saying he's miserable and i'm not saying all people in finance are miserable but that particular experience really made me ask myself you know if that's not what i wanna do then what is it that i want to do and everything to that question was reducing to like i i just wanna be happy those weren't the first order responses the the first responses where like well i i wanna make money just why do you wanna make money then you know i'll have more freedom on vacations what will that do be more relaxed what will that do then be happy what else do you want oh i wanna be married well why do you wanna be married so said you know give me connection well will that do well that'll make me happier i wanna have kids well what will that do give me meaning that'll make me happy so everything was just reducing to that and i had an i was paying attention at had enough life under my belt like twenty one years to see that i knew lots of people with all of those things who were not just not happy but many of them were miserable like people just getting divorce left and right people who were having kids and like resent their kids people had tons of money and were not fulfilled at all and so i the main thing i'll give myself at that point is that like i had enough humility to know to think to catch the thought that said well it'll be different for me like i'll know how to be happy if i have money i'll know how to make the relationship where it's like well maybe check yourself on that buddy now because i'm sure all these people thought the same thing and that just got me really in in saturated with this idea of maybe i should figure out what is happiness at core and try to reverse engineer my life around that and what would it look like to cultivate a contentment that was not so contingent upon external variables and that's what really pulled me deeper into this path and i was doing fifteen minutes a day of meditation throughout my like my junior and senior year of college and my mind you know as i was sleeping better my stress was las had like a an anchor of peace that was new and my mind just you know my super type a personality says like well you know doing it for fifteen minutes a what would happen if you did it fifteen hours a day and so i i found i found that that type a his dream version of a monastery where you can just go there and and do this all day long and and that was bur this place called pin rama with this teacher named sai who was just notorious in his how un he was in his demand of students to be working diligently to try to attain enlightenment i had no idea what enlightenment was at the time i didn't really even like care about it that much i just wanted to understand the mind and i knew meditation was a way to understand the mind i didn't care about buddhism i didn't care about wearing robes i didn't care about being a monk i didn't care about spirituality in fact most of it turned being off the idea of having to like bow it just like and or anything that seemed mystical i found out pretty quickly that that buddhism in that and that work is like a very inherently non mystical it it is all built on first principles of just observing the nature of reality it's like okay everything is permanent have you ever had a thought that lasted forever no have you ever had an emotion that lasted no have you ever a sensation okay given that all of these things are fluctuating what happens when you grasp at something that fluctuates well i get angry when it passes cool what happens when you grasp by something that's negative when it when it fluctuates well it eventually passes so i create tension when i grasp but then i have more tension when it leaves it's just like okay interesting so maybe there's something about how you're relating to that experience that is conditioning suffering versus happiness the whole like practice and all the wisdom of it is just built on paying attention to the reality of your experience and shifting your relationship based on first principles so that was compelling to me and i just wanted to do that as much as i possibly could and i was twenty two years old i had the time to do it i deferred fifty thousand dollars worth the college loan so i could and and i dove in for six months and the only reason i became a monk while i was there because you don't have to be a monk and you could do this as a lay person was because it was so painful so physically painful in those first couple of weeks that i felt like i needed another layer of accountability and i thought that if i shaved my heads shaved my head and wore robes it would really force me to stay there and to take it more seriously and then i developed a deep reverence for what it means to ward and to take robes and to commit your life to this to this work but it was it was a temporary donation that six and a half month silent retreat no reading no writing no listening to music no contact with the outside world no speaking and you have to do a minimum of fourteen hours of meditation each day you wake up at three am you go to bed around nine or ten pm two meals five thirty am ten thirty am and you're doing a combination of what's sitting meditation for an hour and then walking meditation which is as very slow back and forth walking that you do like ten feet each direction kinda look like a zombie and if you go to these places and you see people doing this like your first response is like oh man i am i'm i gotta get out of like this is night of the living dead and but if once you figure out what's going on you see that people what you're doing is you're training you're training your attention to be able to see that who you are is much deeper much more vast and has so much more inherent happiness than attaching to the fluctuating thoughts or emotions or sensations that were typically just unconsciously driven through our life around when you're in that moment and you're meditating fourteen hours a day and there's other peers friends c monks i don't know what you call them but other people that are they happy is there fulfillment is there true fulfillment i know everyone's trying to achieve enlightenment but what is when somebody lives a life like that is it significantly better than what the average person lives every single day i often i've reflected on that for myself like am i happier now than i was when i was there there's one response to that quest question and which is no there were states of peace and bliss and interconnectedness and joy and lightness and freedom that i don't know if i'll ever touch again to that degree in this life however when i was coming to the end of that retreat i asked myself a handful of times like should i stay right it this is so profound i am i am touching things in my experience that i didn't know where possible and it and i could feel the nobility in in the pursuit of taking this deeper and deeper and then potentially like maybe sharing it one day but when i asked my question is it time to leave like the response was yes and when i've asked myself many times since returning which was about thirteen years ago like should i go back the answer was no should i be a ren the answer was no i i had dreams for years where i was sitting in a monastery meditating and i would have this awareness of oh i have to do a speaking engagement but i was i was in bur and it spoke to this like existential conundrum that i was in do i stay here and meditate or do i go back to do the speaking engagement or the workshop which was this like dichotomy of worlds that i was living in like the ren world that hits something so deep in me and this like very real world engagement and i wrestled with that for years now i just have a lot of trust in the flow of where my life is going i can still see the reality of being a ren and the joy and the fulfillment that would come from it and yes there are there's a level of peace that you experience in this work that you just you you can't get in the same way like in front of a computer and and like being engaged in so much of what we're doing throughout the day and the drama of the day so i know that to be true but the deeper thing i trust is this this inner compass that is directing my life saying like this is what's next and then when i check as deeply as i can should i do that and the answer is no there's a comfort in just surrendering to that i my my karma or dha as they recall in these traditions like a deeper purpose does not feel like it is to be there it actually feels like it is to be more engaged in the world and to be teaching what i'm sharing and and so there is a relaxation and ease in feeling like i am in the flow of that that i don't believe i would have if i was there even though other metrics on the happiness scale would be would be improved so yes are these people happy the ones who commit their lives in ways that many of us can't even comprehend and does that mean that's what we should do no i just wanna take a second and thank cornbread bread ham for supporting today's episode now cornbread ham cbd gum have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit i don't use them every day just when i wanna unwind after those extra busy weeks but they're perfect for those moments when you wanna take the edge off and just find your balance really just shut off from work and what makes them special is how cornbread bread hemp props them they only use a flower of usda organic hand plants that's the best part for the purest most potent experience no fillers no artificial fluff just clean full spectrum goodness in delicious watermelon berry and peach flavor i keep them in my nights stand for those moments when i just need a little extra help relaxing and i love how transparent they 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favor and listen to i digress wherever you get your podcasts so we spoke a little bit about once you are able to receive as opposed to react so you receive decisions you receive life choices that serve you best and not serving fear or scarcity or someone else's will how do you balance that with ambition how do you how do you because those without understanding seem like two conflicting two conflicting ideas ambition means you're aggressively going after and i know you touched on this at the beginning but i want you to go just a little bit deeper if somebody can understand okay so i still would love to accomplish stuff but how do i do it from like the right place or the right mindset or if that makes sense yeah i think that's the toughest that's the toughest idea for somebody who is an a type personality to comprehend how did how is there a duality how how are two things true at the same time it's tough it's a very tough thing because and that's because of the fact that the world enforces it to will it forces it it enforces fear it enforces status it enforces all the things that are actually not healthy so that's how we that's that's that's what we know so how do we legally escape the matrix right yeah no i love the question but i have thought about it a bunch so let's i wanna backtrack to one thing that i i think is worth flushing out a bit the the idea of right like thoughts coming from a place of receiving and or also just like which thoughts should i follow and which thoughts should i let go especially like when you're an entrepreneur i'm i'm sure many people who run businesses are just like very busy hear that and be like yeah it's totally impractical to be doing that with with every thought like checking and it's completely true it's impractical in my own life i would just like not get anything done if i was asking like do i want coffee or tea you right now and it's just like should i take care of the baby do i feel the pulse to take care of the no you just take care of the fucking baby so like there's most of my life i would describe it as right that wells spring that i talked about like sometimes we dig down and that like that just has a current and most of the thoughts that are rising in that current are just happening kind of inflow and i might be wrestling with them and you have to make complicated decisions we're making you know we're redoing our website right now so we we just have to like get in there and wrestle with the weeds and but there's not there's not a checking constantly of like is this coming from intuitive knowing because it's held within the container of alignment like i know this is the work that i want to be doing i know it's all happening from an extension of alignment i think a lot of like the periods where we really have to where we do that deeper discernment is often when we hit a block where that flow stops and we actually we don't know which where to make the decision from within us and sometimes that can like trouble us into a multi year journey where we unwind a lot of our psychology that was doing things from fear and other times it's just like you know a few a few minutes where we have to check and drop and beneath some of the the noise of our mind and go oh okay like this actually feels more aligned so that's that's the first thing just the recognition that like for me i have always been a type a personality like when i was when i was five years old i was just like taking stuff from all over my house and having a garage sale on the you the front lawn for the kids on the block because i was fascinated with the idea that you can make money doing that when i was a senior in high everyone knew me as a candy man because i would go to costco i'd buy three hundred dollars a candy and like flip it for five hundred dollars a next day like i'm just i i've liked that and that's why i thought i was gonna go into business and then i went into this whole spiritual work and it it took me into a place of myself that i had never accessed before got me really interested in questions around fulfillment and peace and there was a desire to build my life from that place but i still need to make money right i i chose not to do the month thing so like alright you're not gonna be a month that means like you're gonna have to you gotta pay off those loans if you wanna have a family you're gonna need to support and so i had to figure out a way for that to express itself in the relative three dimensional world and that that meant like building a website having corey mascara dot com when i just spent like six months trying to go beyond and even like personal identity so those things are are tough inner reckoning my experience was that the ambition was still there it was just expressing itself in a different way it now wanted to express itself through this work and there was energy to do that and i'd have to watch myself still like because i have a human brain and i'm not enlightened like as i would be going through it and making more money sometimes mist taking the money for the happiness or like doing the work from the place of wanting to make more money and i check myself when i was like too much in the spreadsheet of trying to optimize the numbers rather than optimizing the work itself so i'm not my my state of evolution and all of this is not above any of that yet and most of my friends who are teachers who were like very deep teachers we all navigate the same stuff but there's enough awareness now to check when it's coming from this place yes so that's the the key thing is just to be able to have enough awareness to slow down and and check and sometimes you don't know and that's what will often like those periods i call like the spiritual waiting room where you don't feel energy for what you're doing anymore and you don't yet know what's supposed to come next and those are periods where you are getting cooked trying to figure out so it's like yeah i i i just can't do this people pleasing pattern anymore i don't have the desire to build anymore i would describe those as as sacred experiences because something in you is unwinding and trying to reconnect to a place where there is natural energy and yes sometimes those stages come at very inconvenient times and where you can actually like if you gotta make money like you might not be able to honor it fully so that's where you're like you gotta show up you gotta do the work you gotta push yourself and you use extra will to sometimes get through those periods you take as an as much rest as you can but don't abandon this deeper thing that's coming up because it threatens a life that you built on fear and control that that is how you will put the final nail and the coffin of your piece and your fulfillment so the the how do again how do we navigate the ambition with this this exploration and connecting to wholeness there's energy there at the core of you way more than you realize and it's possible that as you let go of things that you were doing from a place of trying to impress people or trying to fix unresolved wound with your parent that your motivations might shift and that's where i just have a very deep trust in life and always think that that is worth following wherever it takes you because it's coming from you being deeply t to yourself you start to meditate you want to be more mindful i i need i know it's a very basic question but from somebody who does this for living and teaches it i need to know where people should start where i should start with with meditation because i can tell you right now as i'm sure most people that are especially to this show the second you pause for a moment i can guarantee you the thoughts that flood in unless i really really work are not thoughts of you know am i am i an alignment you know what happened when i was a kid that's informing my decisions the thoughts that flood in are all the things that i have to do that i've been putting off that that ironically are not serving me right now but now i have forced myself to pause so all the other anxieties and stresses and things that have built up over the past you know thirty forty years are now flooding my mind so how do i actually silence my mind which i'm assuming is the goal of meditation so that i can think about the thoughts that will actually move the needle forward in terms of fulfillment and happiness and alignment yeah so interestingly the first step is to not try to silence the thoughts because that that's like trying to stop the ocean from waving so it is in the nature of the mind think about even any one anytime someone's tried to meditate who's listening to this it's not like you sat down and said you know i'm gonna have five minutes of really thinking about all the ways my life can crumble i'm gonna have like three minutes of just really be braid myself for being a terrible human i it it's just it's just a arising you didn't ask it to arise you can't point to any any points like any agent point in that that shows for that thought to arise so that's a recognition of wisdom and where people get so hung up in this is the judgment they take on top of the thoughts that are arising and that's where you get these thought spirals of like i knew this wouldn't work for me i know i'm not good at this i have eighty a adhd ocd some other three letter word and you abandon the practice altogether so if you view meditation instead as like an open meadow where you're gonna let the cattle run through you're gonna let like the the clouds in the sky movie you're gonna let gust of winds you're gonna like let the weather pattern shift but you're just creating an open as much of an open space to observe all of this in a grounded open space that changes things entirely and and this is where i get frustrated any anytime like you know classically you get it when someone goes through a yoga studio and they're lying in s os at the end and the teacher says like alright i just sit down and and clear your mind like that tends to be more anxiety inducing than anything because everyone's just confronted with the reality that they can't do that so and my time in bur right that was like three thousand plus hours of meditation straight the longest i went without having a thought was maybe like forty eight seconds so if you're sitting there and you're frustrated that you're thinking during your meditation maybe cut yourself some slack because the piece that's gonna come from it is not going to be stopping the thoughts it's going to be having the capacity to allow thoughts to come and go without creating such an emotional storyline around it so like throughout the day i if like if someone's starting a practice there's so many ways to start but let's just say you wanna take ten minutes just to explore being still i just used to being an autopilot pushing pushing pushing the resonance of stillness feels uncomfortable you're really just making the goal to be like i'm i'm creating the container of stillness so that instead of every impulse and urge that typically comes up that makes me want to react i'm just gonna practice watching that and relaxing my body so that i'm not reinforcing these patterns of reactivity in my system and with that in mind every thought every urge really becomes an opportunity like becomes the practice itself it becomes the muscle that you're strengthening because you're like oh yeah most of these thoughts anytime they arise i usually trigger another thought or it triggers a behavior so what's it like to get the opportunity to work with this thought that's like i really want a cookie right now so like cool look at that there can be a thought if i want this and i can relax my body around it i can just watch it wow who's watching this did i think that thought of wanting a cookie no it just came up that's so interesting and like there's an an observer to that so you kinda just get fascinated and ent by this experience that there's content moving through you and there's a bigger you that's holding at all and the awareness of your pain is not in pain the awareness of your fear is not fearful the awareness of your boredom is not bored so just the the desire to get to know that space within you will take you so far on this path and it's a much different orientation then sit down and clear my mind which is very goal oriented it and will never happen anyway instead just become ent by the idea that there's something bigger than your thoughts and that can happen as simply as you know if you wanna just keep a very basic structure to your meditation we're just like i'm just gonna give myself one single thing to focus on the breath maybe place a hand on my belly i was just gonna feel an inhale and feel an exhale anytime i notice a thought come up i'm just gonna watch the thought as if i were watching clouds pass through the sky and then i'm gently gonna invite my attention back to the breath and let's see if i can do that three times in a row and then if i do it three times a row can i try to do it another three times and if my mind gets caught up in a thought which it always will instead of me using that as fodder for more self hatred can i use it as an opportunity to create more ease and even compassion so you you are like training your relationship to yourself you're reprogram your relationship to yourself on a moment to moment basis and most of us type a like entrepreneurs or just anyone who's kind of achievement oriented in life we bring that conditioning into the meditation we're like i'm gonna be the best damn medi ever done this and then the mind wander and you're just like what's wrong with me i suck so like recognize you cannot be yourself into peace and you're not going to shift any of that so let it be your opportunity to watch the pattern that arises and maybe replace it with a different pattern if you do that ten minutes a day well it'll start to trickle them to the other moments of your day and it just really bit builds its own momentum you mentioned one of the lines that you mentioned if you want to let go you first need to fall in love with the part of you that is holding on so explain what this this quote means you have to fall in love with the part of you that is holding on so this is i think going a little bit deeper because you understand now and i'm assuming the goal of letting go is to not let the thought have power over you anymore that is the goal of i'm assuming you tell me i'm i'm just assuming but if i want to let go that means that i i've i've passively observed the thought i realize it exists i'm understanding that it's not serving me anymore maybe i don't have to take action to some degree but how do i like let go of that thought and this whole piece of falling in love what does that mean well let's talk about letting go like more in the day to day life and then i'll talk about it in meditation like many of have things we want to let go of past relationship even like a an inner critic my experience is that there's a paradox to letting go a semantic paradox to letting go which is that you have to first move closer to the thing that you're trying to move away from i often use this prop chinese finger trap for those watching for those listening i'm putting around my fingers so if you think of like the classic chinese finger trap the more you pull away the more it grips tightly and the it can just create frustration pull pull pull grip the only way that you get out of this trap is you actually move closer and by moving closer it starts to expand and create space so the parts of you that are holding on are the same they don't want to hurt you the part of you that's terrified to let go part of you that's terrified to move on they have a positive intention there's maybe some reality that they don't want to face some emotion that they're protecting you from having to feel some fantasy about what life could be that if they were to fully let go and release that fantasy would collapse and they might feel hopeless so many of us when we want to let go have one foot pressing on the gas just let go it's good for you you should be able to and another part that's subconsciously pressing on the brake and that's the part that's stuck in the the finger trap and so where does love come in well fear is the thing that is keeping that part of you stuck fear is saying you don't like go because then you'll have to feel something uncomfortable or that dream that we had won't come to fruition how do you soften fear well the opposite of the resonance of fear we could say is love at least one of the opposite and so this is where fall in love with the part of you that's holding on in order to let go comes in we wanna move closer to that part that's grip and ask it well one just acknowledge it it's like hey like i i trust that you're doing something here positively i trust that there's a positive intention what are you trying to protect me from what do you fear what happen if we were to let go what do you fear we would have to feel if we were to release our grip on this well like that's a loving conversation it's a compassionate conversation it's the opposite of saying what's wrong with you why can't you just move on so this is the moving closer than like the idea falling in love is just like an exaggerated version of it but it's it's getting intimately connected to the the places in you that are running your life but maybe doing it from a disconnected way or an outdated way and usually these are young parts that are scared that you'll lose connection safety praise love if you do release so we have to get closer to them ask them what their positive intention is ask them what they fear would happen if they were to let go and then reassure them like hey that makes sense i get that end like we have the resources to be with those emotions now i we're we're not thirteen years old anymore and it might be tricky initially but we'll get through it or sometimes you realize like oh i actually don't have the inner resources that would be a lot if i were to release that fully and the holding on is protecting me from having to unravel some big thing that i'm actually not able to confront the main thing yeah but eventually eventually eventually eventually yes eventually always think speaking to in the context of just like you got a lot going on in your life and you realize like the holding on to the inner critic is that if if you let go of the inner critic it's gonna bring up all of this mommy daddy stuff and just like i don't have the the potential so let me just kinda use this for a little bit and come back to this when i have some space because sometimes you unravel these things and it's like oh there there's a a latent trauma there that needs some time to be addressed but the the main thing is you're you're you're getting more intimately connected with yourself and creating a companionship and not creating this experience of one foot on the gas one foot on the brake and so in meditation in that context right it doesn't look as significant as this we're we're just talking about letting go of a thought you might i i just like to smile at the thought when the thought arises it's just like man meditation is so boring why am i doing this instead of trying in to say like hey you should like this corey said it's good for you just like yeah meditation is kinda boring you you wanna keep going it's like i don't know let's just try it and that's just like a more loving interaction and and that is even by doing that you're already creating a mind that is more enjoyable to inhabit it just for people in the audience again that are that a type high performing individual i just want if if you can just to leave some additional ideas or thoughts or maybe you know things that they're gonna encounter when they start to go down this path and they start to look inside what are some things that they should be aware of just so they're not surprised or they're not they're not sort of taken back by what happens when they start to look inside and spend some more time along with themselves yeah one thing you're just gonna notice that your mind's probably busy and that can often get apologized i hope you can also view it as in many ways like the superpower that it's been for you and like all the like even if the external world you built was built on a foundation of not feeling worthy enough or like i have to do this in order to feel like get praise and acceptance i it's still impressive and we can still give like a deep bow and of gratitude to the parts of us that we're able to come online and do this so we don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water so when you notice these things come up in a very busy mind and it's just like man it kinda feels like a mess in here that's where you just like can pause and you could smile like yeah let's let's work through what we want to maybe soften or shift and also let's look at like all the ways that it served us in a positive way and maybe this is representing another chapter where something gets to deepen and we get to explore a new thread of interest and the other thing is yeah like as you go deeper into this work you're just gonna have more awareness around places in your life that where you feel stuck or where there's some difficulty letting go some of it might be easy and other things might feel really big my encouragement is always to just have a lot of patience with yourself i've been doing this work now for fifteen years and i i just hit pockets of stuff stuff i'm navigating with my wife stuff i'm just navigating internally that just like take months and and even when i was we didn't get into we'll save this for another podcast but the story of like how i ended up proposing to my wife after five years of not being able to discern is this decision coming from truth or is it coming from fear right that that was there was a five year process of not really knowing what to do feeling pulled in one direction feeling pulled in another direction and not knowing how to discern that but after those five years and letting myself cook in that something in me just opened in a beautiful and deep way and so you're gonna have these periods that we can just refer to as the cri stage you're not the caterpillar anymore you're not yet the butterfly and it's cliche and tri but it's true and in those periods you i really just will invite you to surrender the caterpillar doesn't know what's coming it just knows that everything it once depended on previously is no longer there and that there's a a deeper design at play and i think when we find ourselves in these periods where we're confronted where we don't actually know what to follow on what the next step is that's where we we just wanna soften and let go and trust that maybe there's a deeper intelligence that can guide this can you just give everybody who's who's listening to for the first time just a rundown of where they can connect with you some of the resources you have out for people if they wanna you know go down the rabbit hole into your world learn i know that you actually teach this for a living surprised so just where should people go and connect with you yeah the best place like most of my teaching is on instagram so you can follow me there at corey mascara that's you know ninety percent of my teachings are free i also have a a free meditation in my highlights on that profile so that one is about cultivating more of an inner friendship i think that'll be relevant to a lot of people listening and if anyone's just navigating a big transition wants help letting go feels like they need to reconnect to that place and then that's whole and not leading life from fear then i have a course called the the thirty day fresh start course and that's my flagship program that'll just walk you through day by day with a short teaching and a short meditation on like really reconnecting to yourself and making it through maybe a difficult transition so that can be found on my website corey mascara dot com or in my instagram profile amazing okay i'll put all those links in the show notes the last question that i'd like to ask everybody you know you've you've experienced a lot you've you've grown a lot you've also taught over a lot on this podcast but if you had to take all the wisdom maybe just a thought that's top of mind for today but all the wisdom that you've learned over your life and you wanted to pass on just one lesson to your children because it was the most important lesson the one that's most relevant to you right now what would that lesson be and why there is an energetic law to surrender you get back all that you're willing to let go it might take a different form it might not be what your mind originally wanted but you will be filled to the extent that you are willing to release you will touch life to the extent you allow yourself to be cracked open

mo health is here to help you start your weight loss journey with caring personalized support meet one on one with board certified obesity doctors and registered diet who truly listen and understand your unique needs eligible patients can access affordable gl one medications delivered right to their door each month no insurance no problem mo health accepts fsa and hsa making care accessible and affordable and with twenty four seven customer service you'll never feel alone on your path to better health get started with mo health today take the free quiz at join mo dot com and use code audio forty at checkout for forty dollars off your first month of membership that's join m o c h i dot com with promo code audio forty in this lessons episode explore how a journey from food science to longevity research reveals unexpected connections between what we eat and how we age learn how scientific tools used in food labs can apply to genetics and space research discover the truth behind food myths and the role moderation plays in health and understand how bacteria bio films and even bean sprouts are influencing the future of dna protection in human longevity but you have a very interesting life i'm just gonna say that because we're gonna go through it and your life is actually very all the different things that you've done but at this point what what is your what is your what is your passion what kind of science you care about after a four year undergrad and food science you do your master's in food science food science so now you love phd and food science so it makes a lot of sense that you're probably gonna figure out how to have a career in food science when you go through everything you have your phd and then you're going to your post doc and also food science know longevity longevity pharma genetics what does that mean like what kind of job is food science what are you what are you saw solving for humanity with food science so every single thing people drink from that water or any food they touch a food scientist has worked on it and food science in my opinion is one of the most applied sciences you can go for because your your goal is to make something that everyone will eat or touch so you could be in food micro food safety product design or developing you know cookies or chips or the next snack bar or healthy foods or you can be food engineering so actually working on the machines that make the food processing in the food processing plants it's phenomenal i think you know based on my experience of what i know being on the board of a department a few other things it's one of the most underappreciated jobs at one of the highest job placement rates in general because everyone needs to eat we have finite land the population keeps growing so somehow we have to provide food for all the people while we're losing resources and food science is an interesting thing so originally i was gonna be professor so i started teaching at boston university when i was twenty three that's young no yeah it's pretty young yeah so i was teaching classes in the graduate undergraduate for in the department of health sciences at boston university my goal was after graduate my phd go there full time and and teach there but the opportunity harvard came up and what made you switch from food sciences to longevity that was an opportunity so i was doing my phd and i remember i got a phone call boston area quotes i thought was be you pick it up and this is guy davis sinclair from harvard medical school he's a big deal i had no idea who he was and he's like hey kyle i read some of your papers you're the only person in the world doing this type of work how will you come to my lab and work on this when you don't want your phd and what he was asking me to do was in the wheelhouse of what i did so like let me step back like you know how math is like a universal language science is the same thing like even though i'm in food science all the techniques that i learned in use can be applied to all other sciences whether it's running protein gels or sequencing or doing enzyme assays yeah i applied it for like in my bean sprouts but all those techniques i could use in the ear of genetics and longevity so even though it seems like a big stretch scientifically my the toolbox i had fit like a glove so i decide to go there was there ever a point in your career when you went back and used some of the food science oh all the time all the time so believe or not cosmetics are very similar to food a lot of the ingredients and cosmetics of food ingredients so you making em emotions or delivery systems or stability even the cadence of creating things and the business sense for margins and production scale timelines kinda mirror that of the food industry so i use it all the time believe we or not what we're spending so much time studying food and food science what are some i would say scary unnerving things about the food that we eat that people don't quite know there's a few things i'm in the the mindset of moderation is key so yeah there's some negative attributes to foods maybe some of the pre conservatives or the color but everything in moderation you know should balance out fine it's even like a few mcdonald's like fast food like eating it now and then isn't gonna destroy you but having a moderation mindset is is good my biggest thing pet peeve is like kind of the marketing side where people will market things as like the the the cure for something or help alleviate something and the science is there but it's not science that's actually been proven out as rigorously as some people think well i see it so where i'm going with this is people speak a lot about seed oils oh yeah that's people speak a lot about why they feel every time they go to europe they lose weight and they feel healthier versus when they're in the us obviously pass the aside and plus you like every second fitness guru on instagram has their own view about food and what you should eat in this diet in that diet but not many people are scientific yeah and i'm curious what actually holds weight or what actually is true outside of just some you know instagram influencer spout off the latest trend so like seed oils and other things that a pro inflammatory things that drive inflammation you know inflammation is bad inflammation causes a lot of problems but there are a lot of other things that are inflammatory as well like my favorite is like you know i don't wanna eat you know seed oil or something but i'll go drink alcohol every night you what i mean it's like you have to and in the it has to be a whole lifestyle change right and even some diets like paleo diets or or some of these other things they're not necessarily sustainable for a long period of time they're good to cut weight or they're good to like you know get you feel good for a little bit but you can't live on those your whole life it's difficult so like i always say like moderation and try to stick within the two thousand calorie twenty five hundred count because that alone that would sleep in good hydration will make you feel amazing because a lot of people don't realize how many calories are actually taking in and if you try to stick with the two thousand calorie or twenty five hundred calorie whatever you wanna do we'd be like wow i actually like can't eat the snacks or the chips so the things that i go to all the time but there is one you know things to say to whole whole foods or minimally process foods we get a lot of fiber or a lot of nutrients right nothing will replace those it's just our biology and how fast things absorb how you feel after glycine index things like that that impact your feelings is part of the work that food scientists do and and i guess this i i it's not like a conspiracy but it sounds like something that is a little bit nefarious like including ingredients and foods that make them addictive is that so i guess i i'm gonna say no like it's not intentional but food is designed for what to sell yeah right like if you're a food company and your goal is to sell you wanna make foods that people want and people want certain foods because we're biologically designed to want high calorie foods because back when we were in the caves we didn't know when we were eat yeah so we we have that craving for high calorie foods like high fat and stuff like that because we wanna pack on as much as we can but now with our sedentary lifestyle you know all these different things it's kinda counteract are now still craving the same foods but we don't move and everything's accessible right i can go down to the store and buy a bag of chips for ninety nine cents that's amazing that's great you know so it's a different you have to look at all facets you were working with bean sprouts yeah yeah so bean sprouts i think they've sort of carried through all of your work because what i'm looking at here they impact you your work with david saint clair they also impact some of the things that you did in space with nasa whole so so talk to me about bean sprouts and this is work were doing when you were still in school yeah so at my phd was all about beans sprouts of all things but bean sprouts are incredibly dirty and i say dirty as they have a lot of bacteria a lot of bacteria on bean sprouts and they're minimally processed which means you know if you have some food blown pathogens on there and you eat them raw you get sick so one of the things around bean sprouts is bacterial bio films and these are basically structures that bacteria builds like on your teeth you know like you don't brush your teeth and scrape it like the stuff that's a bacterial bio film the same thing happens on produce on beans sprouts same thing happened to meet happens in the international space station the water systems same thing happens with some of the stuff we're working with with with david with and i was trying to figure out how to stop them and so i developed a novel or disinfectant yeah it's this is patented where i would make spontaneous nano motions of carver crawl oil it's like essential oil and we basically disinfect beans sprouts and seeds to make them safer we actually went and pitch this to commercial it but the manufacturing process and the overall like a cost per unit was just a little too high for farmers to really adopt because the margins on bean sprouts are like razor thin like you're not making a lot so adding you know an extra ten cents per production kills kills yeah so but the technology was sounding great it just was an example of something that wasn't commercially viable because the economics didn't plan out so how do you take that into longevity research so one of the so there's another technology i was working on which a bunch of these enzymes and these enzymes break broke down components of bacterial bio and there's one specific part that broke down dna and believe it or not bacterial bio are held together by extraneous dna so dna that bacteria releasing and acts like a glue so longevity wise the organisms that this came from are called extreme file so these are organisms that live in extreme environments and this one organism was able to grow at fifty five degrees centigrade that's like a hundred thirty five hundred thirty seven degrees fahrenheit and why david was interested was how can this organism survives for a long time without taking on a bunch of mutations in mutating and dying right so we're looking at like dna repair mechanisms and the enzymes associated with it because what longevity damage to your dna accelerates the aging process and this is something called the epi drift where over time all the environmental stuff we get exposed to whether it's food pollution sunlight makes these damages over time we're eventually we were not what we used to be in this of cancer so we were trying to figure out how we can hijack these ex files and use them to protect ourselves and understand aging and that led to another patent that ended up burning us into the bio defense space which is a whole of a here we go thanks was there was there anything that you discover that is currently used commercially yeah yeah so the enzymes are used in some of our commercial products like face cl toner or stuff like that no the commercial okay okay and then the stuff from space is using sunscreen and stuff like that but the delivery system that hasn't been licensed or incorporated but the tech the fundamentals around the technology are being incorporated in other areas well i meant like in terms of dna protection yeah so so not commercially used but in a lot of research for whether it's astronauts health on the way to mars not how of that get that's one of the things okay one of the things yeah so i wouldn't say it's not on the market but it's the foundation for a lot of research now that's moving forward in space when you when you when you patent these like very novel technologies or is that the right work technologies the what's the path from when you start working on it until somebody can go by it and then use it for themselves for whatever longevity practice so it depends on the type of product right so for example with the space ingredient which we can will cover we proved it in lab we did all the clinical testing we submit it for a patent but then we have to go from a test tube to scale right like doing something in the lab is great but if you can't scale it to the masses it's useless so then you have to scale that and then once that scale then you gotta put it in product and then you gotta to scale the products you gotta test think goes to market so for like the ingredients for a lot of the products we have maybe three four years may five years depending on how complex it is the the space ingredient that was when you say space and ingredient just to clarify that solves the dna protecting ingredient that one that's sun protection and some protection and dna protection dna activation that's one of yeah that's one of them yeah six five years give or take thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

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in the room obviously obviously it's easier said than done to have something negative happen to you and just realize that this could be a blessing right it's just it's nice to talk about it on podcast but when people come to you and they're going through shifts in their life what is the thing that they have to or what did you have to lean on to make it through the most difficult parts of the difficult times what is the thing after is it is it god is it self belief is it what it is the the most important idea then we'll unpack that a little bit yeah so obviously for me as a man of faith it's gonna be god but i i wanna make sure that i curtail that with some flexibility and by that i mean god is the source but he also leads you as the scripture says to paths right that psalms twenty three he leads you through paths of righteousness so so you still have human responsibility in every shift in your life you see because like and i'm gonna be talking about i've got a minister here in california today and i'm talking about the four stages of a miracle and every one of them required human responsibility so whether you're a person of faith or whether you're agnostic whether you're an atheist because there are still ways to scale and make money and and make shifts in life without god i'm not saying that i believe the outcomes are gonna be a pro but there are a lot of people in the world who have tons of money and and never read the bible right so so when you when you when you boil it down oh to what does it take to make it through the the the physical aspect of life human responsibility that that there is no mystical formula not even for those of us who believe in god we don't just lift our heads and say hey god you know send a million dollars and it just comes out of the sink where we turn the water on you're still gonna have to put the axe to the grind you still gotta work you still you still have to believe you still have to be self motivated you still have to be self driven you still have to navigate life's transitions you still have to be resilient you still have to find purpose and none of that is either existent or nonexistent existent because i'm a man of faith so when you activate the question what do i tell people i don't care what you believe in these are things you're gonna have to do these are things you're gonna have to do there is it a you know a a christian dollar bill and a muslim dollar bill you what i mean good point you know there is it there is a buddhist resilience and a agnostic resilience you just have to be a resilient person and then you add faith on it the size of a emotional seed and then you can move mountains do you think that some people this this will be a a question i guess for people that are are very religious do you think that sometimes you see people using religion as a crutch as opposed to having all of the other components in navigating hard times you think it has to be this beautiful balance of i think it has that's a great question i think it has to be a beautiful balance and when when i hear you say the word crunch i i would summarize it by saying that i think that there are some folks who use their relationship with god as a way of not having to show up with them themselves right so it's like hey god i've give an example there's a miracle in the bible man that been land on the bed for thirty eight years there are some who would use their relationship with god to say hey god come and pick me up off of this bed i've been here for thirty eight years but the story says that jesus tells the man pick up your bed and walk human responsibility so even though god was there god didn't pick him up nor did he pick up the bed he told him to pick up the bed because god has to make sure that we have the faith to drive the resilience and the purpose to to continue to move even in moments where we cannot feel him so yes i think a lot of folks will use their relationship with god to be an end all b all but and i know it'll be a controversial statement but i can go through scott i can go through every miracle in the bible and prove that human responsibility was necessary okay let's take the one that everybody knows jesus just turns water wine but what does he tell them he says go and bring the water to me human responsibility he didn't bring the water to the you go bring the water me and then i'll do it the man who was blind god tells him you have to go wash your eyes in the pool the man who had the hand that was atrophy god says you got to stress forth your hand the woman who had the issue of blood she went twelve years trusting doctors until she got to jesus and he says to her hey do you wanna be male she says to herself if i could just touch the him of his garment see human responsibility if i could touch the him of his garment i'll be may hope oh there is a human component no matter what your faith is to all transition resilience breakthrough and purpose there is always a human component that's necessary i i love that i think that's such an important message too i think that before we even get further what we were even just talking about before we press record you know you mentioned that this book the shift this is a a re release of a book that you put out you said four years ago and you've written other i mean you've written other books since and i thought that was an interesting story how you know people will bring you some of the other books you've written another they'll go to a book signing from one of the other books but then they'll bring you this book gonna be like this changed my life like please sign this you know this has been incredible so i think that it's interesting to touch on sort of the anatomy of what a shift is why it's so important why this idea resonates with so many people i'm sure you have i'm sure you have a couple thoughts because there's something about the idea of a shift of going through these massive transformative moments in your life that is so powerful that literally out of all the incredible work you do people i still say hey this was the book they had the most impact on my life why do you think that is yeah because i think that the one thing that is inevitable in all of our lives we won't all be rich we won't all be poor we won't all be born black we won't all be born white we won't all be a affluent we won't all be struggling everybody won't be fit everybody won't be not fit but we all we'll go through a transition i don't i don't care what spectrum you fall you you could live in the heels of hollywood or you can live on the streets of gary indiana where i came from you're going to go through a shift so embracing change as as as opposed to resisting change is the emphasis that the books put on because change is inevitable but but not only is it inevitable it's necessary it's necessary the the tree can't spare sea forever right the oak tree can't stay in acorn forever if you stay in the original form of which you were planted you'll never flourish until what you were meant to be so in this book i'm encouraging the readers to lean into the shift rather than to resist it one of my mentors tells me a story about his brother who when he was younger used to ride motorcycles and his wife used to ride motorcycles with them and you probably know scott like when you are on the back of a bike or motorcycle with somebody you have to lean the same direction as them oh you know my wife and i will go jet and she like the water so i'm going left as she's leaning right and i'm like no babe you gotta you gotta lean with me this way because if you don't lean with the turn you'll tip it it's same way with life if you don't lean into the change if you don't lean into the turn then you're gonna tip the boat and you have to trust that every season has a purpose and you gotta lean into it it it makes sense it's very scary when you're living it what what do people why do people not lean into it like this is a this is a i love this idea this you know the get out of your comfort zone you have to go through these these hard periods of your life to get on the of everything worth doing is on the other side of a you know hard work hard conversation something all all these ideas are so powerful yet people still shy away from them their entire life so these ideas these ideas people know them they know that there's gonna be change in shifts in their life but for some reason we negotiate with ourselves we negotiate with ourselves until we die so there is a huge mental block when somebody stays in a job or a relationship or in a circumstance does not serve them quite literally until they're no longer on this earth what is this block what what's what's going on yeah i think there's are several blocks that's a a question that i can see a lego amount of legos it could be the block of you know impostor syndrome it could it could be the block of ina and insecurity it can be the block of character personality so none of us have the same block but here's the deal i get that question all the time people say yeah but it's hard it was hard for the person who did it it's it is hard and that's why everybody doesn't do it it is hard and that's why everybody doesn't reach it it is hard which is why they are all stars in basketball and people who sit at the end of the intervention have to cheer we all are born within an an incredible amount of talent right for those of us and i'm i'm not talking about people who were born with and god blessed with the severity of a handicap right are are something that holds them back i'm talking about folks who can actually function psychologically in their everyday life without the assistance of you know medical attention obviously we understand that there are some folks in life who have been disadvantaged but if you and everybody's watches social media now there are folks who were born this disadvantage who've gotten the slightest edge on folks who don't have disadvantages i mean i can't think of the guy's name he spoke for me one time i wish i could think of he has no legs nick nick santa nick spoke from me at a conference and literally he's from florida i know him wow incredible he inspired me so much nick i never i never met nick i just saw him online and had our team to reach out to him this guy is an ten speaker like he's everywhere around the world he somehow thought it kind enough to come to our church and sp sat on the edge of a step at our stage with no a partial arm and toward the room upside down and is quite honestly making huge amounts of money right now speaking all over the world who literally could have said i have no arms and so i'm not gonna do anything that's what i mean by leaning into the ship he took what he had he leaned into it and he made something of himself folks listening today i understand his heart and i don't think scott nor i saying bad disease but what we are saying is you can do it and how we know you can do it is because somebody with the same set of circumstances or the lack thereof that you have they did it thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

the superhero leadership podcast is a success story partner now what does it take to lead like a superhero you're gonna find out on the superhero leadership podcast it's hosted by marvel's former ceo and legendary turnaround expert peter k each week peter is joined by top performers from business media and beyond leaders who have mastered the art of impact resilience and vision together they explore peter's thirty two leadership essentials revealing what it really takes to rise inspire and lead with purpose if you wanna level up your leadership this is your blueprint search for superhero leadership wherever you get your podcasts hubspot is a success story partner now if you're an entrepreneur listen up because hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers if you are building a business you need to get hubspot why here's the perfect example mo house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content a problem that every single business in the world has but with a nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took thirty minutes to publish now breeze which is hubspot collection of ai tools help them right and optimize their content in a fraction of the time and the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site if you are ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com why are we so reactive in today's date we're so focused on being busy that we forget to stop and plan when you get married you have a divorce plan whether you know it or not when you get married fifty percent first marriages in america and a divorce within seven years she's not just a lawyer she's the attorney people call when everything's on the michelle mayo o'neal is a powerhouse in the world of high stakes family law known for navigating the emotional and legal storms of divorce custody battles and complex asset disputes with unmatched clarity and strength average length of marriage in the us is seven years if you make a pass seven years you're beating the odds then you might need marriage insurance before you get married you've gotta talk about the money part because if you don't then you've got a problem from the very beginning of the marriage she's the founding partner of o'neil and her sharp strategy courtroom presence have made her a trusted voice for clients in the most critical moments of their lives when others hesitate michelle leans in and she's just getting started a lot of times you'll hear people say that money or finances is one of the biggest downfall falls of a marriage i don't necessarily believe i think that's the result of a lack of communication all that we have all that any of us have is time how we spend our time is really our michelle one of my favorite quotes that you've said i think it speaks to your work both within family law and divorce court as well as some of the work that you do with entrepreneurs and business owners that have to deal with these family law situations it's i'm negotiating my divorce before i ever got married and i love this quote because it speaks to the importance of being proactive so i think this is sort of just a a small little sample of how you think through life business success complicated situations when did you first realize how important it was to be proactive in anything in life i without really knowing that i was learning it i learned from my father my father was an entrepreneur he was i i think what now we would call a serial entrepreneur he owned a lot of different small businesses he owned record and tape stores back when we had records albums and cassette tapes he went through all of the different versions of music back in the seventies and eighties he owned a underground utility construction company lots of different small businesses but whenever i was young he would pose different business issues to me that he was dealing with and at the time i thought that he actually really wanted my input and maybe he did but now i know that he was probably educating me testing me teaching me how to think and teaching me how to think strategically he didn't use the word strategy or strategic thinking but he was teaching me how to parse information how to think through a problem and and think not just one move in front of your face but five moves down the board to analyze the ripple effects of what a decision would be to how it would affect the business and how it would affect the employees or the customers or you know whatever was going on in the business to the long range decision not just the short range decision and you know it was really a life lesson for me that he's taught me i don't know from a very young age elementary school junior high and it was something that you know both of my parents being entrepreneurs you know influenced me in decision making from you know boyfriend decisions little little girl drama decisions to you know we have this problem in our business and they would you know encourage me to participate in that decision making i think that first of all your dad's a smart guy for bringing you into into the the business discussions early on i appreciate that but i think that most people especially in today's age asia it seems like everybody's always reactive to everything and you your area of expertise is so diverse right because you spent i'm looking at your sort of your resume of family law which has like a hundred and seventy five apple appellate cases for supreme court arguments like you've you've been around the block you've done a couple things right but even in that you work with a whole bunch of business leaders and entrepreneurs high net worth ultra high net worth because either the people that are trying to figure out their lives and their relationships and whether or not it's in relationships or business i feel like a fair amount of people not everyone some people map out moves like a fair amount of people are quite reactive and they don't think five steps ahead and i think that that makes life just harder than it has to be whether or not it's in the business whether or not it's in your your home with your relationships what's why do we why are we still reactive why why why because it when you say it everyone's gonna thank yeah for sure it does make sense to plan the relationship it does make sense to negotiate i wanna i wanna know where that line came from i negotiated my divorce before i got married that's obviously a strategic mindset but why are we so reactive in today's day yeah know i think we're just so busy i think we are also so busy that we are focused on the next busy thing we're doing we're we're reacting to the next thing we're doing we're so focused on being busy that we forget to stop and plan and we don't take the time to stop and plan we whether it's whether it's your your marriage whether it's your your divorce whether it's your you know your year your life your business your kids lives what do you want for your children long term any of those topics we don't take the time to stop and have what we would technically call a strategic meeting but we don't have to call it that you know we we're just so busy reacting to life that we aren't being proactive and i think that my approach at least is that strategy is just a topic we're not talking enough about you know when you ask me about negotiating your divorce before you get married that comes from the concept of of planning your agreement and a lot of people think that agreements or just this taboo topic they are are somewhat super about prem agreements that you know that they are are are something that you know are very controversial and my reaction to that is you have life insurance yeah you have health insurance you have car insurance i mean it's kind business insurance yes business insurance it's kind of like marriage insurance you hope you don't need it yeah but you're you have when you get married you have a divorce plan whether you know it or not when you get married and that is the law of whatever state if you get divorced there is a there is a a plan for your divorce explain that what do you mean a divorce plan that's the law of the state there are laws that dick tight how your divorce is going to work if you get divorced all a agreement does is is let you control how your divorce is going to work versus how the law tells you your divorce is going to work so you know so it gives you some amount of of control over that and you can negotiate that in advance and if you want to have that kind of control great good for you if you don't and you wanna just let life happen to you then that's you're prerogative and and you can be reactive to it or you can be proactive to it and and and that's you know that's okay we can i i i had a mentor one time that called that ostrich dancing do you know what ostrich dancing is with i have no idea i've never heard that term before what's awesome that's because you're not from tech is so ostrich dancing is when you stick your head in the sand you have sand here in miami so you stick your head in the sand and you wiggle your rear end and you call it dancing so so that's that's basically ignoring reality right so you can you can do the ostrich dance and ignore reality and and reality is that you know in in marriage a first marriage fifty percent or so of first marriages in america and in divorce wow within seven years wow a second marriage about seventy five percent of those end in divorce is that because people are already used going through the first one i mean it's just the statistics is that is that are those numbers going up or down statistics say now those numbers are going down but not for the reasons that you think it's not because somehow people are more committed to marriage it's actually the opposite it's because young people now are actually less committed to marriage they're actually just not getting married oh jade that's not good either no no they're actually just more jade about marriage and they're shaking up they're not getting married because i've seen what happens with if their parents got divorced or and i'm sure that you see this because you deal with relationships but i can't imagine at the current environment of social media and i'm sure only fans and all these other all these other things that make it seem like the grass is greener on the other side i'm sure none of that helps either well it doesn't help it you know there there is a a movement away from religious beliefs moral moral beliefs those type of things so you know a lot of the concept of marriage based in religious beliefs so the young people aren't as committed to religious beliefs so they don't believe in that you know they don't necessarily believe in the longevity of a relationship so why get married if you're just gonna get divorced you know so so if we accept the reality that the unfortunate chances the statistics are against you and and the average length of marriage in the us is seven years so if you make it past seven years you're you're beating the odds then then you might need marriage insurance and that's where the pre and that's where the pre comes and so you know if you have those those difficult conversations front then then a divorce lawyer would tell you you're probably going to have you know a better chance of success rate in the long run and and and the way i look at it is you know you can negotiate that prem agreement you can set out the rules that will apply to you now we're not talking about you know the kids i've you you can read plenty of of of silly articles about silly things that people put in their agreements about you know well if you gain more than fifty pounds then you know then i get custody of the children are silly things like that that's not what we're talking about we're really talking about how to handle property how to handle you know separate property property we gather together you know alimony if if you're in a state that has that those type of things that we're handling money that's that's really what we're talking about and an the idea is let's talk about the money in advance and then let's put it in a drawer and move on with our life and hopefully never need it but if we get to this place where we need it we've already settled this and then we hopefully won't need the lawyers and we won't have to fight about it we will have already had the discussion about how we're gonna split up the money the property assets and the debts you know i'm curious why people are so hesitant about pre i guess it feels like there's not enough faith in the relationship is that generally what people say when their partner says i'd like to do a pre op i think if i think it just feels yucky whenever yucky is a a a lawyer your word right i think it just feels yucky whenever you're in love and you're getting married i think you've got hearts in your eyes and you're all in your fields you're in your emotion and to and and and and it's real easy to feel like marriage is all about the emotion and i think people fail in that moment to understand that marriage is not just an emotion it is a business that you know marriage is great and the feelings are great and yes it is an emotion and the emotion is very important to a marriage but marriage is also a business and the business aspect of the marriage the partnership aspect of the marriage it it cannot be understated the the the partnership aspect the business aspect the running the business of the marriage that cannot be understated and and that really is something that needs to be dealt with before you get married you've gotta talk about the money part because if you don't and you know you you get married and then all of a sudden after you're married you figure out that one spouse wants to live in the country and and raise chickens and the other spouse wants to live in a high rise in miami and build big businesses and and and and eventually own airplanes i mean that's two very different lives and two very different monetary aspects right then you've got a problem from the very beginning of the marriage so those are the type of things you've got to talk about in advance and you know and and working out that business aspect and working out your agreement you know that that leads to those conversations i'm curious you work with a whole bunch of high net worth ultra high net worth entrepreneurs an entrepreneurs seem to be more strategic than the average individual because if you aren't i don't think you can be a successful entrepreneur this has to be some point where you have to be at least a little bit strategic or your business is gonna isn't gonna last too long but unless you're just lucky but do you find that entrepreneurs put more thought or care the same amount of care they put into their business into their relationships or is there no correlation at all you know i think everybody falls into the trap of of approaching relationships with their heart and not as much their head so i i do wish that everybody would approach relationship a little bit more strategically but i think across the board whether it's businesses or or frankly litigation or relationships i think i think strategy is a an area that we all could use a little bit more of in our lives but but that's my approach to the world not necessarily everybody else's i wanna talk about how relationships can impact your business i think it's very important but just in terms of just touching on this topic there's a few a few more questions what are some of the biggest financial mistakes you see couples making when they enter into a a relationship i guess a marriage i mean i think not being on the same page with each other about your financial goals is one of one of the biggest mistakes you know you you're always gonna have a partner who's a vendor or a partner who's a saver you know and and that's that's somewhat natural but i think you have to have a a an agreement on financial goals you have to have an agreement on where we're headed and having those marriage meetings having you know the the the commonality of what what our goals are you know if you know if if we wanna save to go on a big trip or we wanna save to buy a big house or you know what are the goals that we're trying to achieve you know do we want our children to be in this private school or do we want a homeschool or you know what are those goals and those all of those type of goals have financial outcomes that you have to plan for and if you're not on the same page and you know one one spouse you know has a a very large spending budget and the other spouse thinks were saving to you know achieve some financial goal then that's gonna spell disaster and and a a lot of times you'll hear people say that that money or finances is one of the biggest downfall falls of a marriage which i don't necessarily believe i think that's the the result of a lack of communication and the communication is where that needs to start what's your perspective on on business partnerships between spouses do you think that's a smart idea or not you know i think that it can be a beautiful idea i think that it can turn into a very successful business because who knows you better you you eliminate the issue with trust abs absolutely you should yes healthy fingers if you if you don't you've got bigger problems but yeah no i mean i think that it can make for a very successful very beautiful business because right i mean who knows you better or who knows your strengths who knows your weaknesses who knows before you even open your mouth but you also have to very cleanly define the roles in the business and everybody gonna stay in their lane right you've gotta you've gotta know who's doing their this job and who's doing that job and then you also have to define those roles at home and so you know at at the office you know one person may be in charge maybe the ceo and the other person may be in charge of some job duties and everybody's gotta do their jobs and if and if somebody's not doing their jobs you've gotta be able to openly communicate about that without getting all in your fields and then at home somebody different may be the ceo at home and everybody's gotta stay in their lane but there again communication is the key to that it's always about communicate it's always about communication at the end of the day business life relationship everything over communicate communicate so you've had a a beautiful marriage yourself so you had an eighteen plus year of marriage we're going on nineteen okay so obviously you figured out some things that have worked out you know all of life is figuring it out but it's all about communication it is all about communication now i like understanding a little bit more about your story and obviously going on nineteen years you again figured it out something that's worked you drafted your own pre up but then you built in an expiration clause yeah explain that what does that mean for somebody who's trying to figure out just explain that first yeah so yeah so i drafted my own agreement and of course he had his own lawyer and and you didn't represent him no i did not i did not but i did draft our own my own agreement and and and he had his own lawyer to talk about it with him but i felt like for us what was right for us was that after it it was a ten year expiration but after ten years i felt like that was long enough for us to know that we'd had beaten me odds yeah and and that for me at that point you know the concept that what was mine was mine was his all that you know we ought been past that so that we were going to have kind of a everything is ours idea yeah you know so and and and and really once we kind of got past that ten years we couldn't even remember where the agreement was well that's the thing things change so much over a marriage and i'm curious that can be good and bad because you can set up a a pre agreement and then fast forward ten fifteen twenty years situations have changed and it may not be i think that actually i won't i won't bring up people into this podcast where i'm part of it it doesn't matter i i know celebrity couples where the pre up that was signed at the beginning wasn't really reflective of the situation that was the reality whatever years later right and and that and that can be one of the one of the problems with the pre up is that you know you can have these assets that you're identifying a separate property or you know that i exist at the time of the marriage and then life happens and things kind of roll forward and then nothing looks the same after a while and and so either you have to you have to update it which then can create stress in the marriage or resentment or you just have to kinda roll with it and figure it out later which doesn't really help anything you know so yeah i i mean so for me personally that's that's kind of what what it looked like was that you know as things rolled forward then you know nothing looked the same nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if fiasco ask nine experts are gonna get ten answers bull market bear market rates will rise rates will fall honestly i just wish somebody would invent a crystal ball but until then over forty one thousand businesses have future proof their business with nets sweet by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one fluid dynamic platform with real time insights and forecasting you're peer into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next if i had needed this product this is what i would use whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions nets suite helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest 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will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need and then what is the what is the issue with not having anything and a divorce happens and both people have been contributing and they've both purchased this is when lawyers get involved and this is when it gets expensive and ugly so what's the outcome when there's all of these shared resources and there's no plan in place well i mean it just you know the the reality is everybody has a agreement whether you know you do or not because if you don't have a agreement you have the existing law of the state that you end up getting divorced in because the law has some plan for your divorce you just don't know what the law is so you know when you get divorced the law says how your assets are going to be divided the problem is that then it you can fight over how the laws going to apply to your to your assets and how the law gonna divide it all and sometimes the law can be a little complex as to what that means and you know are we going to you know divide this asset or how much is that worth or you know am i entitled to some reimbursement claims or you know and and different states have different laws as to how that applies and some states have alimony you know we're sitting in florida florida has a hefty alimony clause texas does not have alimony hardly very very small alimony statute that very rarely comes into play so arguing where you get divorced is actually a part of the strategy yes i get many calls from men who live in florida who have very hefty alimony obligations that really wanna move to texas and try to get out from under them and i have to tell them like i'm sorry you you lived in florida when you got divorced there's no getting out from that you know so you know there that that again maybe is a strategy discussion that maybe we should have had earlier negotiating before you get married texas is a pretty good place to live if you have certain situations that's funny that's so funny and then the other thing that you you deal with and i'm sure that you hear a lot this man is the plan fallacy like where women don't think that they have to get a pre nut because they just assume that they're what what does that mean exactly well what i tell women is the man can't be the plan the man ain't the plan what i tell women is that they need to you know have their own strategy for making money and not marry for money because because if the average marriage is seven years then what gonna happen is if you marry for money the money the man with the money is eventually gonna leave you and marry somebody younger cute or sweet or prettier because us women we eventually age we don't we don't get to push a pause button and stay young forever so i i i try to tell women young women especially who who some of them think that they're just gonna you know be pretty and and skinny and fit and and find them a a a wealthy you know husband that that that may not be a very good long range strategy so i encourage the young women to get an education and have a backup plan to that because a man i plan also i mean i'm assuming that if they just think they're gonna get married and get a payout is that is it as simple as that like if a woman mar a man and like you know a year later he wants to divorce he doesn't give her half of everything he's ever made no because anything that i mean in any state doesn't matter which state any of the states everything that he had before the marriage belonged to him so at best whatever happened during the marriage she might be entitled to a portion of but that's it and yeah i mean you know there are some women who have had some sort of windfall happen from a short term marriage for marrying a a wealthy man but that's that's rare so yeah that i mean that's just not a good plan not not everyone it's gonna be a a mackenzie bezos right right and you know more often those wealthy men are gonna have very smart lawyers who are going to tell them to get good pre and and so the lifestyle while married may be very good but whenever you know something happens and the marriage go south you know the the the end result is going to be that that unfortunately the the women are gonna find themselves with a very different lifestyle after the divorce is over tell me tell me a story of one of the more ridiculous cases without naming names or dropping any particulars just something that would highlight the importance of everything that you're talking about if you don't do it this is what could happen yeah i you know i've seen i've seen cases where you know probably the more egregious type of hidden ass set cases are the you know super high net worth cases where there are offshore assets because they're you know now the government is getting smarter but there are ways to hide assets offshore where where it is difficult to trace and what i tell especially women who are like i know he's hiding assets well if he's hiding him from the tax return and the irs i have no greater power than the irs you know i'm i am not a better s than the irs so you know if he's not reporting it on his taxes i'm probably not gonna be able to find it either you know so you know unless you've got a lot of resources to pay me to you know go to yeah you know lie stein or the bahamas or something like that to go and and poke around i mean i i'm not gonna be able to find it either you know back back ten twenty years ago there were some things you could do on the internet to find assets but you know since nine eleven a lot of those got shut down right and so so now it's harder with all the technology we have it's harder to find hidden assets in twenty twenty that sounds backwards yeah it is harder it it actually is there used to be a little bit more s thing you could do on the internet before but with a lot of the internet security now that it is actually harder to find things yeah i mean you know public records are more available now but you can't find you know a lot of personal information that isn't actually public record so yeah so it's it's a little bit harder now makes sense and and tell me so if you if you end up leaving somebody for the entrepreneurs if they are c owners in a business are there things that they should be thinking about in regards to their business because wouldn't their spouse get part of a business and now they're sitting on the cap table of a business if they if the business is on before the marriage generally no yeah but a lot of times what we see is for example if the business is owned before the marriage then there's a marriage and then maybe there's some change in tax law and and the cpa says because of this change in tax law i recommend that you change your entity structure from this type of entity to this type of entity okay and they change the entity type during the marriage this could be if you go from like an llc to a to a c corp or something like that changes the characterization from the separate property to community property so then all of a sudden it's partly hers that's why mh and and i i mean literally i see this all the time and the cpa doesn't understand marital property law and the cpa has now basically created a situation where the wife has an entitlement to the business that the guy started twenty years ago and then now his partners are now partners with the wife she has shares in the business mh she can vote right yeah right and so you know what i what i wish at that point was that somebody had called me along the way and said hey michelle what do you think of this talk to me about some of the things that people don't do well in terms of strat around their business their growth give me a rundown of when somebody comes to you and you start to look you know behind the the veil and you start to see all the things that are going on what are some things that you wish more of your clients more of your entrepreneurial clients would pay attention to yeah i you know i think just just the first thing that comes to mind is that is that people tend to just be reactive you know in any time that you're in business you're always moving fast i mean at least you hope you are because you have a lot of business and you know you're hopefully being successful or trying to be successful and you're moving very fast and you're being reactive and that just creates a situation where you're not able to be you know planning or yeah and so you know what what i encourage people to do is just take that breath and think five moves ahead you know i call it fifth move thinking you know think about take that breath pry i call it practice the pause and i tell that to my lawyers i tell it's to my clients who are emotional in their divorce i tell it to my business owners you know just take a breath practice the pause you know don't react out of emotion practice the pause get your thoughts about you and react out of logic and then the fifth move thinking you know the next move right and then think about the ripple effect think about what the counter attack is gonna be and then think about what the long range effect is gonna be and then think about are we going to win the war not the battle right what's the ultimate goal not winning the battle and so that's a that's a litigation strategy that's a boardroom strategy that's a living room strategy you know what's your ultimate goal not what's the the short term goal and and so that like in my mind i call that that the fifth move strategy i love it oh i was gonna say i think that i think that most people think they're more strategic than they actually are because the second you get an email that pisses you off you're like immediate i gotta fix this right now you know you get an employee that screwed something up you get anything that happens it happens all the time and you just jump into the solution and that serves nobody and i think our i think our cell phones have made that problem and i wanna say worse worse in the right word i think our cell phones have made us more reactive because we can get an email at nine o'clock at night that can piss us off and and i know as a lawyer that happens to me i can get a email back from a lawyer on the other side of a case and it can piss me off at nine o'clock at night and man my thumbs start right you gotta be careful and i have to remind myself you know put the phone down walk away practice the pause think about the strategic response not the reactive response you know the strategy applies to everything there's not a single thing you do in business that you cannot pause and reflect on and think five moves ahead some of the things that i'm curious that i think entrepreneurs just from my personal experience miss the most i think they're not strategic about where the where they wanna build their business what kind of exit they wanna have what kind of milestones revenue milestones how big they wanna build this thing i think that they are not strategic about financial structure legal and exit i think that they just jump into sales and marketing and everything else is like well i'll figure it out eventually so do you see do you feel that more or less yeah i think i think in general it's that they don't know what their goal is they don't know what their target is they they don't know what they don't know where they're going you know if you don't know where you're going how do you know when you get there yeah you know and and right i mean you just you just jump to sales or marketing i mean we could always debate whether sales or marketing is more important but you know the but but but i would say you know whether sales or marketing is more important what i would tell you is that that knowing your goal and having a strategy of how to get there is the more important also and right i mean i think i think when when entrepreneurs are in the thick of it you know they're just being reactive instead of instead of having a plan and and you know having a plan for the marketing having a plan for the strategy and and having i mean you can call it the exit plan maybe it's not an exit i mean maybe maybe a lifestyle maybe maybe pass on to your kids or right right i mean maybe their end goal is you know right now maybe their target is is having enough money to buy plane so they don't have to you know sit next to some kid with a cold you know but that that sounds actually amazing i know right yeah that does sound amazing it does i got it alright when you think about setting sort of like your north star as an entrepreneur or even just like a north star in life because there's so many similarities between like all the all the lessons for entrepreneurship all the lessons for relationship all the lessons for like health goals and wellness goals they're all they're all kinda of the same i is not that much difference there really aren't i mean you know that's it's all relationships right i mean business i mean we can say business is different than marriage and i mean but it's may okay i mean maybe but but really it's all about building relationships yeah and you know nurturing those nurturing those relationships i mean it's you know whether it's business to business or or personal to personal you know it's really all about you know building the relationship and having the trust and and and there's just there's not that much difference and and you mentioned the health goals i mean you know another one of the lessons you know that i teach whether it's my my entrepreneur clients whether it's my my divorce clients or whether it's the young lawyers that i mentor you know another one of the the lessons that i teach is you know such your big goal and then focus on the small stuff and the example that i use about that is i've never been an athlete in my whole life ever but there was this point in life where i decided that i was going to be an athlete made a decision i am going to change my life and i'm going to be an athlete and i set a bowl for myself to run a half marathon and you know you don't run a half marathon by taking a big leap from the start line to the finish line it's not one giant leap right so so right so so it's a whole bunch of small steps and some of those steps you you get your runners high and you're like they're easy and you feel like you're running on the wind and then you get to about mile seven and it's painful it hurts you know and the the half marathon i did was on dirt and it was dusty and you feel like you've got like sand in your mouth and then i got to mile ten and i quit i was there was a bench i sat down and i was like i quit like i hurt my feet hurt i'm tired it's hot it was texas like it it sounds like i'm miserable day i was miserable i was thirsty i was hungry there was i'm like what in the world was i thinking like i i was i'm not an athlete i don't know what i was like there was nothing about this that was fun and i quit and then along came my coach she was behind me and she said what are you what what are you doing sitting down now i quit and she's like well okay but you know your car is up there by the finish line so you're eventually gonna have uber is not gonna pick you up down here you can't call uber you're gonna have to eventually get up she's like so all you gotta do is get up and all you gotta do right this minute is put one foot in front and then another foot in front like and so you know so i eventually got up and put one foot in front of the other and took one small step and then another small step and eventually got to the finish line and i wasn't last you know and so you know you don't you don't accomplish the big goal in one leap you accomplish it in small steps and those small steps like some of them are painful and some of them are great and some of them are numb you know but but they're all small steps and they don't feel good and you know they're all different steps but that's the thing if you have your north star you have your end you have your strategy to get there because you can't have a strategy if you don't have your end goal it's impossible so you don't even know where you're heading and then you take all all those different versions of steps i love that analogy but that's my point it's the same in business the same in a relationship the same in the fitness goals it's the same at anything that's right right some of the steps in the relationship are not gonna be fun that's right marriage is not all like it's not all hearts in your eyes that are all popping out like you know honeymoon phase yeah it's not after a period of time no i mean marriage is the same thing as that marathon like there's gonna be times in your marriage that you're gonna sit down and say i quit like i am done with you i am sick of you i am sick of your shit like i am sick like i'm done i don't wanna hear one more word out of you you know but then you you get up and you put one foot in front of the other you communicate you talk about it you remember wire you're together you remember your goals you remember you got kids like whatever it is and you keep going forward you know and same thing about your business i mean it it's all about relationships i just wanna take a second and thank cornbread bread ham for supporting today's episode now cornbread ham cbd gum have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit i don't use them every day just when i wanna unwind after those extra busy weeks but they're perfect for those moments when you wanna take the edge off and just find your balance really just shut off from work and what makes them special is how cornbread bread hand props them they only use a flower of usda organic hand plants that's the best part for the purest most potent experience no fillers no artificial fluff just clean full spectrum goodness and delicious watermelon berry and peach flavor i keep them in my nice in for those moments when i just need a little extra help relaxing and i love how transparent they are to every batch is third party lab tested so you know exactly what you're getting and they put together a special offer for all success story podcast listeners all listeners can save thirty percent off their first order just head the cornbread hemp dot com slash success and use code success at checkout that's cornbread hemp dot com slash success code success for thirty percent off your first order of these amazing dummies the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now if you like success story you're gonna love other podcasts in the hubspot podcast network one of my personal favorites is i digress hosted by my boy troy sand each show is under thirty minutes i digress helps eliminate complexity complications and confusion in your business with frameworks and strategies to achieve true scalable and sustainable success if you're an entrepreneur building anything you need to listen to i digress this is one of the most useful business podcast trust me go do yourself a favor and listen to i digress wherever you get your podcasts how do you choose that north star how do you choose that goal how do you know if it's a right goal because i think people always wanna set goals but it's like a buzz word and people don't even with you can say i have go i wanna make money that's why i start a business i wanna i wanna be married to you know to a beautiful from your beautiful woman i that's why i wanna get you know married i wanna have a family and and be with somebody who i love i wanna build a business and i want to you know achieve so many million dollars in revenue but i don't think those are concrete enough goals i think those are just their goals that someone else has told us so we should go after but they're not even our own personal goals and i think that not enough people do enough self work to figure out what their own goals are so before the strategy we already agreed that you have to figure out that goal and that north star that you're heading towards what's your advice for somebody to figure out what their true personal goals are in anything business life marriage whatever i think you have to do a lot of intros spectrum and a lot of work on yourself to know what it is that you ultimately want right because that's not you you can't set a goal based on what your parents told you to that you wanted or based on what society tells you you want you know your goal may be that that you wanna have a farm with fifty dogs that may be your goal and that's a perfectly okay goal or your goal may be that you wanna have a high rise penthouse in miami with a personal with a private jet like and that's a perfectly acceptable goal too but you have to look inside yourself and know what your you know personal things are what's important to you and only you can decide that for you you know for for you it may be having a situation where you can have the freedom and flexibility to have your kids home school or it may be that you wanna have the flexibility to travel internationally to world school your children you know different everybody has like the things that are important to them and they're gonna look different for everybody so you have to be emotionally astute enough to look intros prospective to know what's important to you and not be setting those goals based on what everybody else thinks is important and those goals can change you know based on different times in your life you know right now the goal may be this one thing you know when you're young hopefully it's to travel and see the world and be exposed to a lot of different things because you're young and you can but then you know when you get to be fifty or sixty maybe the goals are different you know and so those goals can change over time you know my advice to anybody is you know set big goals big goals like don't don't play small with your life even i think i have played too small with my life you know i look oh yeah i look back at my life and i think you know man i should have set goals that were way bigger for myself even as much as i know that i have your career you're not done yet that's good i love i know i'm not done and i'm setting big goals for myself right now but you know but i i still i look back and i think you know i still could have played bigger and i you know so even whenever i mentor young young women lawyers you know i i try to encourage them that if their goal isn't punching them in the stomach then it's not big enough if it's not scaring you to like if when you set that goal if you're not absolutely in the bathroom vomiting on yourself like it is not a big enough goal but what's your advice for somebody whose goals keep expanding and maybe their business partner or the romantic partner they're not expanding with you how do you navigate that i i would say that the answer is a little bit different depending on business partner versus romantic partner and you know business partners are a lot easier to to kind of move in and out of sure i've always thought that a business is partners like a marriage you know i've heard that saying before and i feel like it is i don't know i you know at least for me i think business partners are are made out of out of earthly relationships my purse small viewpoint is marriage partners are maybe a little bit more spiritual so so to me in my in my belief system i think business partners are a little bit easier to divorce marriage partners i i think for me at least in my belief system are a little bit more of a long term thing that are are that involved maybe god a little bit more yeah of course yeah so you know so i think that that the romantic partner maybe a little bit more of a of a complex question okay but still in both cases how do you bring them along for the ride or when do you know when you can no longer bring them along for the ride and under the under the assumption that you're gonna be putting a lot more work into the marriage than into a bad business partner that's fine i mean i think it comes back to communication i think when you've outgrown a business partner you just communicate about it and say you know i i think we're moving into different directions and you know i i've i've been called to go this other direction and you know i think that that we're just going to two places i always laugh when people say they can't balance the relationship with their business when you have somebody who built one of the biggest companies in the world who did it just fine and who's still happily married and speaks about the importance of his wife and his relationship and his success so that's one strategy always be dating always setting time aside what are some other ideas as you grow as a person as your goals grow as as you change assuming you're not changing for the worse you're changing for the better what do you what do you see works in terms of keeping couples together as you go through this sort of journey yeah look it's all about prioritization i mean that's the bottom line it's all about prioritization and and you know the life balance is such a topic right now for people especially women you know how do you balance at all how do you have life balance and you know life balance is kind of like a a stock portfolio you know when you're when you're at work be a hundred percent at work when you're at home be a hundred percent at home and and you just have to put life in buckets you know in your stock portfolio you're not gonna have all one hundred percent high risk stocks yeah you're gonna have some of this and some of that and some of this and some of that and so you know that's how that's how your life should be you you can't be at work a hundred percent of every day you're not gonna be there twenty four seven i mean now are there gonna be some where you've got you know some big board meeting coming up or some big m and a thing or some big something where you've gotta be there and you've gotta be a hundred percent there and it's gonna take a lot of your time yes then you're gonna have the thing at home or the you know the kids choir concert that takes priority or the tuesday night date night that's priority and you've just got put your boundaries up around that you know and that deserves every bit of the same importance as the big deadline at work and you've just got to treat it that way and if you don't treat it that way then eventually that relationship will fail or the relationship with your children will fail you know if you don't put boundaries around what is it that's important to your child you know their their soccer game you know whatever that thing is you've gotta put the same importance and the same boundaries around that thing as you do around that very important thing at work and if you don't then that relationship will fail and you know and and that's just that's how it has to be and and it has to be the buckets you know and and and it just has to be a priority for you and and you know all that we have all that any of us have is time you know we can we can say that we have money money is just the barometer that we you know that we place here on earth with importance but what we really have is time and and we you know how we spend our time is really our wealth you know that's how our children judge our wealth that's how our spouses judge our wealth is based on our time so you know we all are given the same amount of time that's the that's the great equalization is our time so you know the the the guy that owns netflix you know the homeless guy on the corner you know we all that's the great equalization you know we all have the same amount of wealth because we have the same amount of time beyonce has the same twenty four hours in the day as you do as i do like we all are the same with the same twenty four hours and and that's the equal factor so you know so it's how you spend that time in your day so so equal that and that's how that's how you say what's important to you that's so such good advice i think that this is why i like when people take risk early on in their in their life when they're young because then they can afford to they can they can afford to not have as much balance they can say i'm not dating i'm not married yet enough kids i can put ninety five percent of myself into my business or my career but the issue is when that mindset doesn't just exist for a season of your life but it exists in perpetuity and that's when you get into trouble and that's when people end up going to you because they've maintained this imbalance for thirty years and people people the sad thing about divorce and relationships at break is is most people put so much energy and effort into trying to fix it for years before it ends up getting to the point where it's actually divorce and those are painful years very very painful years so i think it just being cognizant of where your priorities lie where your time everything you just said is so so important you know i think that i think that a a lot of people spend a lot more time you know in the in the catch they spend some much time and energy trying to catch it than and to keep it why is that why is that yeah do you know you have an idea i think i think the chase is more fun once you've got it you know it's not as much fun to try to keep it that's one it's the most important and that right that's i mean that is when it's more important but but it's also not as much of a challenger as much fun but and i think that's also maybe societal you know maybe we don't place as much importance or you know as much prioritization on on the keeping i i think we should i think i think that i think that you know maybe there's a little bit of moral and ethical decay and society i mean you see it you see the numbers in the data i don't think it's healthy yeah i and i think that outside you know can make an argument about why people get married don't get married but i think that by people not getting married and by not having families i don't think that people are more fulfilled being single i think that there's a lot of anxiety and depression about dating about finances about cost of living about what is my life gonna look like so i don't you know people push back against religion and people are more secular and people sort of in some you know parts of the world they pushed back against the sort of the nuclear family but i don't see the mental health of people that pushed back against that being any better at all well what about a year ago the surgeon general came out with a study that said that that post pandemic yeah that we are we are the lone in america that we have ever been that's odd mh post pandemic like coming out like we are we are not in the pandemic anymore now we're lone and we are lonely than we are have ever been and and and we can go out and socialize and you know be in restaurants and everything still but we are lone than we've ever been and we because that we don't somehow we are missing connection even after we can go out and and reconnect with each other and and to me that that study that came out really kind of emphasize that point that somehow we are missing something about how to actually connect with each other and and that that says so much just about friendships about marriages about you know what like we said businesses or relationships i mean just just about how to just connect i wanna i wanna ask a couple more questions about entrepreneurship money relationships because i think you have a front row view to a lot of this because you work in all these you you're like the perfect blend of person that deals with all this stuff at the same time so i i'm curious if you see and the entrepreneurs you work with are they more successful when they're with a spouse or a partner or are they more successful when they're single do you find there's any comm there's any trend between those two i think it just depends on the quality of the relationship you know if you're in a relationship that is bringing you down then i don't think that that suits your success in the business world i think that if you're in a relationship that is uplifting you and and good for you as a foundation then that helps you rise you know in your business so you know to me it it just so depends i think that if you're if your relationship at home is is bringing you down then you might be better off without that you know you your business world might be better off if you didn't have that bringing you down so i see a lot of my business clients you know they they may be more successful after their divorce because they're not having this weight bring them down at home that's then keeping them kind of weighted down at work and then post divorce they they then are kind of set for for rising after after they get divorced you know and then i have other of my business clients after they get divorced they may have you know a new a new marriage that is very good for them and sets them up to rise have one client in mind who got remarried after his divorce and the new marriage just is is got wind in his sale and he's just risen incredibly in his new marriage and has has been been very successful in his business after his new marriage i think about just in my life like when i get stressed out having like gina is an incredible you know better half to me and whenever i gets stressed out she's always the one who helps me realize that the problem is isn't as big of a problem as it really is and she helps me sort of take my mind off of work and she forces me to shut off sometimes and i can only imagine because i overthink everything i always overthink everything and if i didn't have that person and i don't have heard my life i i would probably be less effective i'd would probably be like this you know this anxiety stressed out mess so she's amazing but i think that if i had somebody in my life who was not as amazing and was arguing gas lighting whatever the bad behavior is obviously performance will go way down i wouldn't be able to function either because then your home is just full of trauma so yeah to your point like it can be a blessing or occurs it can be the best thing in the world for helping your success or it can destroy your entire business if you're not careful that's why picking the right person is so so so key yeah it's really really key when you think about sort of financial structure so for entrepreneurs entrepreneurs are building a business they're making some money say they're making more money than their spouse i'm assuming that it's not like usually a fifty fifty where both people are making the same amount one person making a lot more money than the other person what are some good financial best practices should they have a joint bank account should they not like what are you and they're in the marriage not they're not planning on divorcing yet hopefully never but what are just some best things that have worked really well for people that maybe don't divorce so i i think my recommendation is that that you always have joint funds i think that's good for a marriage to always have the joint funds i think that that when the couples that i've seen that has everything separated i think that just creates a mindset of separate that isn't good for the the the together ness so i always recommend that you that you have joint funds but i also always recommend that each spouse have their own account that that you know you have you can call it a a fund money or you know whatever you wanna call it but but their own fund money account that they can kind of have to spend on themselves you know that they can you know do their own thing with that they have their own you know right to spend on for for women whenever i counsel with my women clients i i call it their they're dress money account or whatever you know if they wanna go buy a new dress they can go by a new dress without asking permission yeah and you know you could call it golf fund or something for the man or whatever you know but i i think that it's important to have both so you know to have the account that is the marriage account that you have marriage meetings about that you that you jointly you know decide this is this is the budget this is how much housing we're gonna spend on this is you know whatever and then we each have our discretionary spending account and you might even have more accounts than that maybe you have your travel account you know we're gonna put this much money aside for travel you know maybe you have the kids private school account you know we're gonna have this much for private schooling and you know in in the budgeting there's a a book called profit first i think is the name of the book and you know they that's kind of applied to a business sense but you can apply that to a marriage you know where you have different buckets for different things and apply that to the marriage but i think the most important thing is that you have a bucket that is the bucket or or multiple buckets that we decide together how we're gonna spend but i think it's important that each spouse has kind of their own little bucket that they themselves by themselves can decide how they're gonna spend their bucket yeah that's and i think that out outside even though they have their own buckets and they have all these different accounts the goal is to have conversations about all the financial goals and how much money is gonna go where and and i'm assuming the best practice is always full transparency always yeah and even even in you know when things aren't going well in business i'm assuming that you also advocate for your telling your spouse right away always yes okay i figure i figured you don't because you know we always talk about okay what if there's something that's bad in the marriage you should address it right away but i feel like there's an entrepreneur who's not succeeding in business there's a little bit of shame so i feel like they would maybe hide that from their spouse if they're nervous about saying because they don't wanna seem like a failure right so say the business isn't going as well or a lawsuit or whatever million different bad things can happen in business when you don't tell your spouse that i can only imagine that that's never a good outcome well it's never a good outcome but if you don't trust your spouse with that you know with that downturn i mean that's the exact place that you should be able to trust your spouse you know with that you know things are going badly and and your spouse should be that that safe harbor for you now if if you're getting sued at your business because you slept with your secretary and you're getting sued for you know sexual harassment at the office that's a whole different set of problem a big set of problems it's a big set of problems and you're gonna have problems at home and at work yeah however you know assuming that it's a downturn in business because the economy is terrible and there's some tariffs coming i've got several clients you know that that are having some downturn in business because tariffs and you know they import their their their source materials and things like that you know that that should be where your safe harbor is you know that that you know we're gonna go through some tough times and we need to figure this out and you know conserve our resources and things like that that should be your safe harbor and that should be the place that you get that consolation but you shouldn't feel the shame at your home i mean if if you've got a good relationship what happens if you wanna take more risk and you haven't always been a risk taker say two people are are married and they're both working w two nine to five somebody wants go start a business how do you how do you manage that conversation with your spouse oh you know that happens pretty often i have no doubt that happened and then suppose like what are you are you talking about especially where you have one that wants to be more of a risk taker and the other is is wanting to not be a risk taker yeah and and that that can be you know that can be difficult and that's you know that's one place where you know one spouse just has to take the lead in the marriage and and say you know i'm i wanna make this decision for us and if it you know if it goes badly i'll i'll take the blame for it you know and and that's a place where you wanna have you know your safety net your financial safety net we've got this nest egg but you know i'm i wanna go forward with this idea a lot of times that happens for a spouse wants to leave a a paycheck job and and go and be an entrepreneur and that's you know that's risk and and sometimes you've just gotta go do it and and you've gotta trust each other yeah and and i think that the last sort of thought about entrepreneurship money relationships what do you do with your kids how do you set your kids up is there things that you should know about setting them up for success trusts funds i i don't know i don't have kids yet that's something i got figure out i'm asking you for me like if if i'm making money in my career and and i'm happily married we spoke about pre ups spoke about setting up the structure before we sort of say i do but what about you know the the family planning the legacy planning component it because you don't want kids to suffer because of a divorce and i think the kids do suffer because of divorce so what are the things that people shouldn't know you know i am i think that kids are resilient and they take the cues from the parents i've seen kids that suffer from divorce i've also seen kids that have resilience and do just fine i think that they always are going to take their cues from the parents the parents who fight and put their kids in the middle of their divorce you know they're the ones that are going to suffer the kids whose parents say you know we we can disagree as spouses but we are still going to be c parents you know those kids do just fine they adjust and they keep going you know i've had i've had clients who get divorced and lived down the street from each other had actually had had one set of of of folks who who bought the house where the the back alleys backed up to each other so the kids could just go from gate to gate and they shared custody and didn't fight over it and the kids just went where they wanted to go and they shared custody and it was just fine you know so you know the the the divorce itself is not the determining factor you know people who understand that that that ex spouse is still family yeah you know those children and those children's family is still your family you're going to be a family unit forever and and you're gonna raise those children together you know those children's family is still your family so the divorce does not have to be a nation for your children is there a financial safeguards that you should try and negotiate ahead of time for the kids or no you know i mean there there's the reality is that whoever you're always gonna be financially responsible for your children you know oh no i meant yeah no no that was not the that was not the question you'll always be financially responsible i meant in the pre nut phases or things that you should say hey regardless of what happens or the division of assets x amount should be allocated towards the children sure i mean you can set up in your prem agreement you can always set up trust in advance for the children if you have the financial means to do that in advance always always always always set up trust for the children five twenty nines if you can you know you know i would always do that first because you know it that pre planning for the children is never gonna go to waste you know and you know pre pre funding college tuition pre funding you know anything that you can into trust for the children is always gonna be better so that they're taking care of some michelle you've gone through so much and i appreciate everything you've taught the audience i want to i want to give them the opportunity to connect with you to follow you to sort of consume more of your yourself i know that you're gonna be putting it a lot more content maybe doing more of your own podcast who knows i'm like obviously i'm very bullish on podcast podcasts i hope that you put out some more of your own episodes but where can people go and connect with you if they want to learn more about what you're working on yeah the best place is social media at the michelle o'neil on any social media platform i'm mostly on instagram but on all the social media that's that's where you can find me amazing and i always like to ask this last question you've given a lot over to the audience but say you had to take your years of wisdom and you had still all the things that you've learned down to one thing and the lenses you have to pass this one pit this one bit and piece of information onto to your kids what would that one lesson be that one life lesson why is it so important and what would you pass on to your children i think the one life lesson that i would pass on to my children is the same lesson that my dad you know passed on to me hopefully a little more art than than how he passed it on to me but but that is to you know just to think five moves ahead all the time and and not be reactive to life you know to implement to implement fifth move thinking and and think five moves ahead of on the chess board play chest not checkers

hubspot is a success story partner now if you're an entrepreneur listen up because hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers if you are building a business you need to get hubspot why here's the perfect example moo house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content a problem that every single business in the world has but with a nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took thirty minutes to publish now breeze which is hubspot collection of ai tools help them right and optimize their content in a fraction of the time and the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site if you are ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com the superhero leadership podcast is a success story partner now what does it take to lead like a superhero you're gonna find out on the superhero leadership podcast it's hosted by marvel's former ceo and legendary turnaround expert peter k each week peter is joined by top performers from business media and beyond leaders who have mastered the art of impact resilience and together they explore peter's thirty two leadership essentials revealing what it really takes to rise inspire and lead with purpose if you wanna level up your leadership this is your blueprint search for superhero leadership wherever you get your podcasts in this lessons episode learn why betting on the right founder or ceo is the most important signal of long term business success discover how adaptability beats rigid planning and fast changing markets learn why great entrepreneurs do not always make great investors and understand how people not just products are at the core of every successful acquisition so one thing that i i find interesting is when somebody's been a great and they built the business and it's been acquired and then they have a whole bunch of money that they're sitting on they make a lot of investing the mistakes because a good entrepreneur doesn't always mean a good investor and now you've been doing it for thirty years you're not new to this but for somebody that looks at businesses i think there's lessons in this for an entrepreneur who's building and also investors looking at putting their you know money to the right business and betting on the right person what what should an on be thinking about what should an investor be looking for that you've seen sort of is a good signal for success well the number one thing is the person you're betting on everything is a jo bet and everything right i mean you you better know that the person that you are as leading that business has the attributes that i mentioned right they're entrepreneur entrepreneurial they've got a great idea it's incredible they know how to execute it and if they don't know how to execute that's okay but hire people that can execute yeah right make sure you put the right team in place that's gonna do it and you wanna meet that team but it's all a talking about but like when when meta right was falling apart and the stock went from if you remember from three hundred to eighty eight dollars i bought more i bought more for one reason i'm went this i think mark zuckerberg was an absolutely brilliant genius it was a jo bet for me and the fact that he changed the company's name from facebook to meta at the top he was at the top and he thought he needed to change the name to bring that business into the future how many entrepreneurs or ceos or company that are at the top have a trillion dollar business and feel the need to change the name of the company to bring it into the next century as you would call it yeah and i said to myself wow to me that told me everything about what that guy's thinking and it told me is he's not going anywhere yeah right that's another guy that like he's a ceo he created this is his whole life he's not going it because if he's out of there i don't wanna own that stock okay and so at the end of the day when i look at businesses i'm always looking at this so who is the ceo that's running that company that's the bet you're making that's where you see some businesses where somebody takes over this the thing that's going on and make chose it into the most unbelievable business that they could you know turn it into and that's the only thing you're betting on in my opinion there's a lot more obviously but that's the number one criteria for me is who's the ceo you know it's interesting because again you mentioned like the the five bought sold this business multiple times i've seen many times where you have this and and to sort of further your point there's always incredible founder ceo that builds a business and then it sold the private equity or it sold to a strategic buyer and then it goes to shit and east and it's because the person isn't there anymore well i sold the business of private equity okay before i sold it the last time okay so i told you about that business i bought it i sold it back i sold it in two thousand sixteen to private equity and then me and a private equity firm sold it again okay the private equity funnel i'll i'll name them because they're great is a stop point capital and they un always understood that they couldn't run the business they understood from the beginning who the guy is or girl is that's running that business okay and that's it and when we got an offer to sell it they said we'll own this business with you forever we don't care okay but if you wanna sell it we'll sell it to and again it's the same thing so you have private equity you have people that you know companies that buy businesses and the really smart part and not just giving these other example when i sold that business i had another offer for it that was more i chose to sell it to those guys because they've been around the block five hundred times i i knew they would make me more money on the second hit and they were gonna let me run that business how it needed to be run right and that's the other thing again they were making a jo bet it's like who's you know listen after douglas selma i got calls from you know other pro you know private equity funds that i did business within in the past and every one of them called me and said hey is there anything for us to do with you here they were making the jo better about me yeah was the same thing right that's all what it's about there's other things you have to diligence too but the number one thing again i had i had a thing on my family office website i don't think we have that website up anymore but it was a quote that i had and it said you can't do a good deal with a bad guy and you can't do a bad deal with a good guy and like the truth it's truth you're and you know why you can't do a bad deal with a good guy because ultimately businesses goes up down it's dynamic as this and that if you're doing it with the right person you'll figure it out you figure it out you'll adapt mo health is here to help you start your weight loss journey with caring personalized support meet one on one with board certified obesity doctors and registered diet patients who truly listen and understand your unique needs eligible patients can access affordable gl one medications delivered right to their door each month no insurance no problem mo health accepts fsa and hsa making care accessible and affordable and with twenty four seven customer service you'll never feel alone on your path to better health get started with mo health today take the free quiz at join mo dot com and use code audio forty at checkout for forty dollars off your first month of membership that's join m o c h i dot com with promo code audio forty this new year why not let audible expand your life by listening explore over one million audiobooks books podcast an exclusive audible originals that'll inspire and motivate you tap into your well being with advice and insight from leading professionals and experts on better health 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company you're not gonna come up with it all day one it's gonna like alright we're gonna put out this blueprint i got this great coo i've got this great cfo i've got this great product and here you go here's the plan for the future i've been at douglas element for nine weeks my business plan has changed fifteen times okay it may be different next week okay and what i mean by that is is that i keep learning new things i keep meeting new people i keep running across different things within the company and i adapt to it and if i said something to somebody two weeks ago and they and now i changed it and they call me i'm say but you said this brother i don't really care okay i'm gonna do what's right at the moment that it's there and if you're not a ceo that doesn't know how to adapt to current events the the wrong ceo and and you're running at the business with your ego because the only person that won't change is a person that's ego is in the way right so for us at douglas el our business plan maybe a little bit different and may a little var a little and maybe a little polished or it may be adjusted in another month or two months right now we're coming up with plans obviously we have plans we i think about plans every day we have a team that we think about what we wanna do with the business and i think generally we have a generalized blueprint of what we wanna look like but within that blueprint things may change some people may change some business plans maybe somebody brings us an unbelievable idea that we say you know what wow we haven't seen that before i'm not passing on that idea i wanna i wanna and maybe i implement that we were a piece of technology yeah that i think is transforming to our business and now we need to basically you know turn the wheel a little bit to the left that's what we're gonna do and we're gonna be dynamic and you know the business that i sold that we talked about it felt like a new business the day i sold it because we were always innovating we're always doing new things and douglas el is going to be an entrepreneurial mean lean innovative winner attitude business that's gonna be dynamic okay and do really interesting things beyond the forefront of our marquee real estate business with a name that is the best in the business and we have an amazing opportunity here and again we may look a little different than everybody else in twelve months or two years and we're excited about that no i think that first of all i think that you have the right i think the best ceos our entrepreneurs i truly do believe that i don't think that you can air drop an mba and be as good as ceo and mean is like a i'm sure there's some great ceos that do have the ivy league education but i think that entrepreneurs just how fast they think and how comfortable they are with radical ideas i think that's more and more who you're gonna have to see in that c suite because technology changes so fast world changes so fast you can't just be comfortable with an idea and set it and forget it i i don't think business exists like that anymore well it's interesting so i i met with a an engineering coding business you know technology developer a couple of weeks ago right and we started talking about building a piece of technology for us okay i did that before and one of my insurance businesses we built technology they told me it would take six to nine months to build it took two and a half years it ended up being great technology but the insurance business a different business in residential real estate the problem with building our own right now is by the time we finish building our own and conceptualize it and beta tested it it's probably gonna be obsolete okay and today there are so many companies out there building technology for residential real estate we don't need to build it we don't need to and it really goes along the lines of what you're saying right is that you wanna build and you wanna do all these things but the market is moving so fast that you know and listen we have competitors that wanna out and build expensive fortune the money building technology and we see their technology it's fine it's not groundbreaking anymore and may groundbreaking two years ago when they released it there's nothing groundbreaking about it you could buy it off the shelf today yeah so you know like you said things move so quickly if you're not willing to adapt as a ceo in business in real time it and when you do when you do make those acquisitions you have to make that you give that acquire company the air to breathe so you don't just s the innovation that made them who they are i see that happen a lot as well you acquire a company and then all of a sudden just corporate bullshit just destroys that entrepreneurial innovation that made that company so great most of the time when you see acquisitions and you know at that company i was with nlp while i was there we did four hundred acquisitions okay so you see every bet and again it gets back to who are you buying who is that person because you don't wanna buy a business and the people that built it created a great leave yeah of course like we don't we don't wanna buy a business right that the peep because we're buying a people business unless we buy a product you know so you wanna make sure that those people that you're buying are gonna stay and are motivated and like you said most let's douglas elm has bought other brokerage that were profitable before we bought them and now they're not okay well what went wrong there right did you buy the wrong entrepreneur did we put too much bureaucracy on them you know did we not innovate so for us if we're gonna look at an acquisition it's gonna be an acc from day one it's gonna add value you from both businesses right so let's say we pay a five multiple for something right we want our effective multiple post closing to be a two or three right because there are operating efficiencies we have the platform maybe they don't or maybe we've got redundancy some place and we're gonna fold them in and eliminate the redundancy so like you know those mathematical decisions and then again you have the people aspect of it too and that's why it's also important to take your time don't find a deal and like this is the greatest thing and rush to close it because the diligence period is an incredible period of time to find out about the people that you're dealing with people show themselves right so go through that like the interview process don't do one i i had one person in my life on the spot okay went in my insurance business and just so you know she was one of the best people i ever hired okay but that was lucky i think that was very lucky that was lucky my my process after that is like a five six seven eight nine or ten you know period of time you know to hire because you learn a lot in that process thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

hubspot is a success story partner now if you're an entrepreneur listen up because hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers if you are building a business you need to get hubspot why here's the perfect example moo house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content a problem that every single business in the world has but with a nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took thirty minutes to publish now breeze which is hubspot collection of ai tools help them right and optimize their content in a fraction of the time and the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site if you are ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com the superhero leadership podcast is a success story partner now what does it take to lead like a superhero you're gonna find out on the superhero leadership podcast it's hosted by marvel's former ceo and legendary turnaround expert peter k each week peter is joined by top performers from business media and beyond leaders who have mastered the art of impact resilience and vision together they explore peter's thirty two leadership essentials revealing what it really takes to rise inspire and lead with purpose if you wanna level up your leadership this is your blueprint search for superhero leadership wherever you get your podcasts in this lessons episode explore the journey from success without peace to healing through self awareness learn why un childhood wounds shape our adult lives learn how presence and mirror work can reconnect us to our true selves and learn why grounding nature and yoga our essential first steps toward lasting inner fulfillment so what happens when now you hear this idea and you're trying to reconcile this duality where you still want to be traditionally successful but you also want to have fulfillment in all the other areas of your life that you've neglected for the past say thirty years and you're like i don't i only know one way i only know how to bust my ass and have an okay relationship but i know how to make money that's right where where do i start where do i start healing yeah i think you i well i'll tell you why i started am i gonna die am am am am i gonna die never knowing real love am am i gonna die always having to achieve another goal am i going to die never knowing what piece is if i am i gonna die being disconnected from my partner am i gonna die feeling disconnected scott for my kids because love is love it's a frequency you know what i'm saying and so those were the questions that i started to ask myself and then you know when i started to become like really present to what was happening in my life i started to realize that everything in my life i can trace it backwards to what i did or didn't receive as a little boy as a little girl see because now that's the first step in healing the first step in healing is awareness it's that oh shit moment it's that moment where you finally understand time out i have been operating this entire time in my life as a wounded little boy or little girl sure i have nice toys nice cars nice stuff and i'm successful but deep inside i i'm afraid to look in the mirror or i'm afraid to look at my partner when i'm making love or i'm i'm afraid to be held or i'm afraid to calm down i'm i'm i'm on vacation all the time and my partner always complaining that i'm on the phone and like your brain justifies it because you're trying to give them a better life bullshit you ain't trying to give nobody shit you're trying to fulfill the parts of you that are missing you're you're trying to fill the void in you as a matter of fact i'll go as far as to say it the same way that a crack head smokes crack is the same way that you always have to have another goal i've thought a lot about this idea of it's slightly different but i think it ties into it when you don't have a god in your life in the traditional sense you replace something else with god and that can be work it can be some other advice like drinking or drugs i think this ties into it as well when you don't when you don't heal you numb that pain with something that society actually tells you is okay which is work well let's let's so that's the kicker the kicker is if i if if if i may i'm gonna take it a little bit deeper yeah the the kicker is that the three d world here here in earth the the the energy that rules the three d world is the masculine energy it's not the feminine right which is why we think god is a man at and which is why we are constantly up here in our heads always on the go go go well so what does the three d world do the three d world uplift and puts on a pedestal the people that are in the system and successful at the system right so we put on a pedestal people like did that that dude is bad messed up bad messed up but but but but we gladly have have been buying tickets in support but what but but he's successful so i wanna take a picture with him you wanna take a picture with darkness so what what what you wanna take a picture it because you are not awake and you don't understand what's actually happening right and so then here we are are we have a a a a world that is basically telling you hey listen everything that you've been looking for which what you've actually been looking for is the piece that you felt in your mother's womb that's what you've been looking for your entire life everything you've been looking for you will find it when you make more money or when you become more successful or when you have that car or when you have the partner when you have whatever you know and you know it takes that's when a spiritual awakening happens is when you when you finally get there like i did and you're like son of a gun i'm still not happy and that's where the journey began for me and that's where we take people about that process basically i have to take a second and thank northwest registered agent for supporting today's episode and now listen i know a lot of entrepreneurs listened to this show if you're an entrepreneur if you're building a business you have to listen if you want to get more when you're launching your next big idea northwest registered agent lets you establish your entire business identity in just ten clicks and ten minutes for nearly thirty years they've been the secret weapon for entrepreneurs who want to move fast while getting expert guidance for just thirty nine dollars plus state fees they'll handle your formation create a custom website and establish your local presence wherever your business takes you as an entrepreneur myself but i value most is their one stop business solution you get everything from formation paperwork to custom domains to trademark registration all in one easy to use account no more juggling all these multiple services or wasting time figuring out the legal stuff so don't wait protect your privacy build your brand and set up your business in just ten clicks and ten minutes visit northwest registered agent dot com slash success and start building something amazing get more with northwest registered agent at northwest registered agent dot com slash success mo health is here to help you start your weight loss journey with caring personalized support meet one on one with board certified obesity doctors and registered diet patients who truly listen and understand your unique needs eligible patients can access affordable gl one medications delivered right to their door each month no insurance no problem mo health accepts fsa and hsa making care accessible and affordable and with twenty four seven customer service you'll never feel alone on your path to better health get started with mo health today take the free quiz at join mo dot com and use code audio forty at checkout for forty dollars off your first month of membership that's join m o c h i dot com with promo code audio forty so part of what happened with your mother was facing death and facing the reality of death and you like you said the first question you ask yourself is do i wanna die this way so i think that even walking through your own journey is is hugely helpful to people that are gonna start on their own path even after listening to this or consuming their your content hopefully it doesn't take death and i mean i i do like the idea of stoic and sort of confronting your own death but hopefully it doesn't take that to get somebody to take the first step where do they start where did you start what's the first thing i i wanna i wanna reiterate something but but you see i think part of the healing process if you decide to take it this deep is healing your relationship with death because you have to understand that when you're afraid of death you're actually afraid to live because everything in life is all duality it's all one in the same so for example fear and love are actually the same it's just broken it's a strand of energy that is just broken right and so what happens is we as human beings we go we're shutting off this side of it so we're gonna go live on this side of it it's the same thing with life and death if someone is afraid of dying like by the way i once was what is actually happening is you're afraid to live as your authentic self this is really deep so then you get to grow into those parts of you in a deep deep way to experience wait a minute who am i really who am i really without the bullshit who am i really who would i have been if my mom would have known how to love me which by the way rewind there's no way she could have because her mom her mom died at thirteen days old so what i had been carrying my whole life was a feminine wound that like most of your listeners we've been carrying for generation upon generation upon generation and if you've ever heard of the terminology the one you get to become the one right you get to become the one that heals it so that it ends with you and it doesn't pass on to your children i know there's this movie called ends with you i never watched it i didn't wanna get into the the drum of the blake and all that stuff but it literally could and with you so listen where does it start i would say one of the most powerful practices that we can have is to look in the mirror and and and i'll tell you why because the eyes are connection right and the eyes are literally like the doorway to the soul so you'll notice like if you scroll down on my instagram i once did as well most successful people that are wounded internally are always wearing sunglasses why because they're afraid for you to see them that is the energetic picture this this is external i need something external to block me so that you don't see the real me because i'm afraid of you seeing the real me i'm afraid of you seen past the barrier and the illusion yeah and so the first thing i'd like to tell people is go look in the mirror because if you can't look at yourself you're never gonna be able to look at a partner you you never ever actually get if you can't see yourself you'll never be able to see someone else if you can't love yourself you'll never be able to love someone else and what i discovered i couldn't do it dude my mind was always racing i couldn't sit still a meditation and we'll go there in a second i couldn't look in the mirror because i was like i i just couldn't do it i was so scared and so anxious and so disconnected right and so that's a daily practice that you can do and then when you do you just send loving thoughts to yourself right you you send affirmations to yourself you send kind words and kind energy to yourself and and i wanna prepare your listener or get ready because emotion could start to come out and that's your body starting to release and purge out everything that you've been holding inside of you and so that's where that's a beautiful practice the second thing and i trust me listen never in my life i grew up in the ghetto i was around gangs i i i i i never in my life that i think i'd be this woo guy that's about to tell you what i'm about to tell you but go take your shoes off go sit on the grass go reconnect with the wind the sun nature there's a reason why you see feel so replenish when you get away away from all of the hoop and you go on vacation it's because you're reconnecting with nature which is mother earth which by the way is the mother right it's you reconnecting to the grounded ness of the mother we were never intended to walk around with shoes on it so that's a second thing that you can do and then the third is yoga i i can't stress this enough like it's it's really a beautiful practice because it it combines you to your body your mind your heart your breathing your soul it reconnect you with you and i was one of those guys at the beginning that i was like i'm not gonna do that shit like and now man it just it brings me back to me i'm gonna give a little plug my wife has a beautiful yoga app it's blessed yoga dot com it's free for seven days you can go try it up thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one