The Orlo: rewriting the rules

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Every nuance of the world around me is created by stories I tell myself.

(00:05):
I am a bundle of emotions telling stories, free to be exactly who I am in every moment.
I am emotion art, freedom, welcome.
The audio engineering and awesome music you're hearing are thanks to Buddy Anderson.

(00:27):
Check out his music on Spotify at From Another Mista and Angela Cook, keeping this thing rolling.
Thank you guys.
This is a conversation I had with Orlo Flock or The Orlo.
He's someone I knew briefly in my early army days, probably 2005, 2006, somewhere in there.

(00:53):
A lot of those circumstances are going to be talked about in the conversation, so I won't restate them here.
But I wanted to have a conversation with him because I remembered him as an honest and curious person who thought outside the box.
And since that level of authenticity is something I've been chasing for a while, I knew a conversation with him would be super instructional for me.

(01:19):
Also, I was just interested to see where his life has taken him, or rather where he has taken his life.
So he's currently down in Mexico and we had some interference digitally because it was over a phone call.
I tried to clean it up as much as I could, but there are some parts that are just difficult to understand.

(01:41):
I don't think the point is lost in any of it, though.
So if it's hard to understand, just keep listening for a couple of seconds and it'll tune back in.
So here is a little piece of joyful cosmology as seen by The Orlo.
Enjoy.
Welcome to Emotion Art.
Emotion Art, where we sit down and make art.

(02:03):
Emotion Art.
Creative energy moving outward in conscious expression of feeling.
Emotion Art.
Emotion.
Emotion because we are literally made of emotion.
Art because everything I do wants to be art.
Emotion Art.
Emotion feels.
Emotional.

(02:24):
It's all beautiful.
Emotion.
Emotion.
Emotion.
A space for emotional art.
Creative energy moving out in conscious expression.
Emotion.
An emotion art gallery.
This is Emotion Art.
You're welcome.

(02:46):
Hey there, man.
How are you doing?
Oh, not too bad.
Oh, you sound good on my end.
You got me good.
Yeah, you're very understandable.
That's what's important.
Are you on a microphone?
I'm on.
I'm in with HEC plus on.
OK.

(03:07):
Oh.
You know what?
Over the phone.
I'm doing that.
Yeah, perfect.
Over the phone connections.
Really, the only thing that goes wrong is if I talk over you, it mutes your sound out.
So I'm going to really try to avoid that even though it comes with my nature.
Sweet.
I'm excited to do this.
Heck yeah.
I was thinking about this.

(03:29):
It's been in the back of my head.
And I kind of actually want to flip the script a little bit on you at the beginning and hear
what you remember about me and then why you reached out to me all these years later.

(03:53):
What sparked that?
OK.
You couldn't have let in with a better thing for me.
I like the flip getting script because that keeps life interesting.
So I'm at this point where I'm actually really trying to figure out who I am in other people's
eyes.
And I know that your perspective is a specific direction.

(04:15):
But I met you at a very important or an interesting time in my life.
And that whole like military really trying to figure out who the ally was.
Yes.
And so I have my own recollection of who I am.
But I really am looking for like what other people saw, how other people saw me at that

(04:39):
point in my life.
And I'm actually planning on building like a questionnaire to send out to everyone who
has kind of known me fairly well and kind of like asked in like a group of questions
or just asking for a straight up story of who I am in their head.
And the reason is because I'm at this point where I kind of feel like I want to like teach

(05:03):
something but I don't really know what I have to teach.
But it would be very, it'd be great to hear that from other people's perspectives.
OK.
So you and I were medics in the army.
That's how we met as far as I remember.

(05:25):
And I guess I don't have to give fair warning about my crap memory, but life gets jumbled
up for me sometimes in the past.
You made a huge impression on me.
I probably didn't show it.
I don't know.
I remember going to your house or where you lived.
It was, you know, we had some drill or the other.
But you were just, what's the word?

(05:48):
You were different.
You were just very different.
So at your house, you had a breakfast sandwich maker on your counter.
I'd never experienced that before.
You could use a contraption on the counter to make eggs and meat and English muffin breakfast

(06:11):
sandwich, which is something that I love, but I always made it in a frying pan.
And so that you brought that out just like, oh, yeah, this is just the way you do this.
It's typified kind of how I saw you.
I believe you introduced me to the Rich Dad Poor Dad books.
I remember you telling stories.
And by the way, talking about telling stories, you not only saw the world differently, you're

(06:37):
always looking for the next hack and you were talking about it constantly.
And at that point, you didn't want to live a life where you exchanged your time for money.
I didn't know what it was back then, but there was something that was so intoxicating about
the way you saw the world and the way you talked about your job and the way you talked
about the books you read.
It was just enamoring.

(06:59):
So more recently, I started to go through, like maybe in the past, I gave up being a
Christian, I want to say it was more than 10 years ago.
And then I started listening to Alan Watts.
And just to oversimplify things, I started.
I started my transition process to go from the Judeo-Christian Western culture, raise

(07:23):
good Christian kids that are going to do the right thing and provide for their families
and just continue the cycle.
And then just realizing I didn't want to be part of that anymore.
Not that I don't want to take care of my kids and have a connected and a virtuous life.
Very much I want that, but I want to do it as myself, not as whatever version I was taught

(07:46):
to be.
So I saw that in you.
I saw that there was something different.
You were hungry for something different and you were looking.
So when I went through that transition process and I started to realize that the world around
me is nothing like I have ever thought it was, you were one of the first people that
popped into my head because I lost touch with you.
I've lost touch with most people in my life.

(08:08):
And also 10 years ago or so, I realized that I've had crippling imposter syndrome for my
entire life.
So I would have been terrified.
I would have been like, he has no reason to want to talk to me.
That's why I wouldn't have reached out to you before.
But once I realized that I'm actually a valuable person in and of myself and the people who

(08:32):
appreciate me for who I am or the people I want to talk to, I immediately knew I wanted
to talk to you because I felt the emotional similarity between the kinds of things you
were saying back then.
And back then, I mean, when was this?
This was, let's see, we deployed in 09.
So this would have been pre-09.
Yeah.
When did you join?

(08:53):
Oh, winter 04, I believe.
04, 05.
OK, yeah.
In Montana.
But when did you come to Oregon?
I've been to Oregon often all my whole life.
But I came to Oregon.
So I moved to Montana just kind of on a whim in, must have been 04.
And then by the end of 04, I had gotten recruited.

(09:16):
Oh.
And then, so after I went to basic training and then Fort Sam, that was six months.
So that would have been, you know, the middle of 2005.
I just moved back to Corvallis.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
So that was a little bit rambling.
And maybe it didn't fully answer everything you're looking for.
But how was that?
That's how I remember it too.

(09:38):
But I actually don't, I was thinking about it.
I don't actually remember you a whole lot.
Yeah, I got surprised.
What I remember about you is you were completely trustable.
You were incredibly intelligent.
You were kind of reserved.
And you were dependable.

(10:00):
But I also think that, I don't remember, but for some reason, I don't remember what the incident might be.
But it seems like we might have butted up at some point.
Did we? Do you remember?
I'm sure we did.
But I remember a lot of embarrassing situations.
Just having no idea how to be a leader and kind of getting thrown into E5 position and not knowing even how to be in the dang army.

(10:24):
I mean, I joined when I was in my 20s, and I'm just watching all these kids around me get turned into soup and then back into soldiers.
And I'm just like, this sucks.
But why is this so important?
Well, it's because they're kids. I get it now.
But I didn't know who I was or what to do.
I was a chameleon that grew up in the most ridiculous situations.

(10:46):
And so I was just trying to fit in.
And no part of me felt like I was succeeding.
So what do you like to be called?
Like, I think of you as Flock because in the army you were Flock.
Yep.
Who are you now?
Well, I am the Orlo.

(11:07):
I'm Orlo.
But I'm adaptable to EP.
I have lots of things.
Perfect.
And I'm not afraid of Minimo.
Perfect. Thank you for allowing the interruption.
Continue Orlo. The Orlo.
I love that.
So my family was like pioneers.
Like they came across on the Wobb Wagon train.

(11:30):
They're like the people that built like, you know, where City Hall is in Eugene,
they like cleared the ground and built the foundations.
Sweet.
Especially the central Valley area.
Yeah.
And that was a huge part of my family, you know,

(11:51):
because they were all very well-educated.
And they were in the army,
and my brother was in the army and he was in the army.
He had a big family.
And my, my big family was, it was pretty Norman Rockwell.
I mean, my grandmother was like the matriarch of the local church,
essentially. She didn't run the church, but she ran the church.

(12:14):
and like Thanksgiving was a massive ordeal and Christmas was a big deal, big families,
but it was also like the entire community, right? It was square dances. It was about
as Norman Rockwell as you could get. They were farmers and they were woodsmen and they

(12:34):
believed in hard work, you know? But first off, they were hunters. And if you wanted
to get like clout inside my family, you got that clout through hunter prowess. And I'm
not talking about like trophy hunting. I'm talking about like the ability to provide,

(12:56):
right? The silt reminds it. And then the other way to get clout in my family was storytelling.
So I grew up listening to storytelling, big game stories and folk stories. Like my nuclear
family was not so cozy. My mom was, she is and always has been essentially incapable

(13:23):
of being happy with status quo. My mom hasn't owned a car for more than six months in my
entire life. She's moved through multiple houses, multiple jobs, and she's not happy
with herself, not happy with relationships. She's not happy with the man in her life,

(13:44):
including my father, which essentially just meant like chaos, right?
Yes.
And on top of that, she is a people pleaser, which really just meant more chaos, right?
But she also taught me a lot. Like she had a big love of life and she would just go to

(14:12):
parties like unannounced, right? She had a little bit of a flair for like breaking social
customs. And she taught me that. My father, he recently died actually this last year.
He was probably the smartest man that I had ever met when it came to like earth sciences.

(14:35):
He was the kind of guy that you know, you'd point out like a shrew on the ground and he
would be the one that would say, oh, that's a new, outrageous gibs eye, you know, and
he knew it off the top of his head. He was actually world renowned in the birding world
because he actually had a golden eagle. And when they actually stopped the whole, when

(14:56):
they passed a law to you, couldn't have the white people, couldn't own eagles and couldn't
have eagles or birds of prey. He actually had a golden eagle at the time. It had multiple
other birds of prey that he was just grandfathered with. And so he kind of became this world
renowned guy in the bird world. But although he was never diagnosed with it, I'm almost

(15:23):
positive he was autistic. He was on the spectrum of some sort, right? Right. He was good at
everyday tasks, but he just couldn't tell when the person he was talking to was angry
with him or displeased with him or happy with him. He couldn't tell. He didn't know. He
didn't know who he was talking to emotionally. He was, he didn't, he didn't make an emotional

(15:47):
connection, right? He was a rock, but he wasn't their emotion.
Was that a generational thing? Do you believe? It's part of it, but I think my dad was...
Just before I lose that, when you say the, your big family, you talk about storytelling,
is that on your dad's side or your mom's side? Dad's side. Okay. Yeah. So mom's side, it's

(16:08):
pretty small. Okay. Perfect. And the reason I ask is because what I'm seeing is that you
got some powerful storytelling from your dad's side and some powerful breakout of the mold
from your mom's side, which just makes perfect sense. Anyway, go ahead.
Exactly. Yep. So when I was six years old, my mom and dad got a divorce, which I didn't

(16:31):
see coming at the time, but I think any other person in our lives actually saw it coming
for years, but I didn't because I was six. And it was like the golden child. I was like
a goody two shoes. Like I was the one that you could always depend on, right? I was like
the good little kid from Mayberry. Yes. And I resemble that.

(16:55):
When my mom and dad got divorced, I like, the way I dealt with it was I like jumbled
down on that. And I became more perfect and more yes. And I kind of created this like
self righteousness around it. And I want to bring up religion because I had just knowing

(17:23):
you a little bit, I have a feeling we may end up straining towards religion. So while
we're here in the backdrop, I'll kind of touch on it.
My mom was religious and ended up, she was like essentially a Baptist Christian. There
wasn't any big crazy kind of Christianity. It was really just kind of quiet, like do
the right thing, read your Bible. And then that kind of Christian, they didn't door knock

(17:47):
or anything a lot of the sites.
My dad would have called that mainstream Christian.
Yeah, that's perfect. My dad, it's funny. He was a Christian. If you asked him my whole
life, if you'd asked him, he'd say he was Christian. But he also was an extreme evolutionist.
And he was scientific kind of mind through and through. Skipping forward, later in my

(18:09):
life, I actually pinned him down and said, hey, like how do you put Christianity and
evolution? He had this super interesting, I don't know if you had Cain and Abel, Cain
slew Abel and then Cain was forced into the forest. And there, Cain took a wife and to

(18:30):
my father, the wife that Cain took was not a child of God, but was essentially a great
ape of some sort. And so, Cain lended his DNA, his godly DNA to this great ape and thus
created the homo sapiens that we are today. So, we're like half God half. And that's how

(18:54):
he rationalized it and he's never looked back. He didn't dig into it. He just go like, oh,
that's the rationalization. He just, if you ever question further than that, you just
didn't have an answer. So, that's, he was a Christian, but he never went to church and
he kind of hated church. Mostly now he just stated being in contact with a bunch of people
really, right? He didn't understand it. And so, he just stay away from it. So, as a kid,

(19:19):
I kind of had this choice of like, I could go to church with my mom to Sunday school
and eat cookies. That's kind of the way I thought of it. Or I could stay home with dad
and like garden and mow the lawn. And I tended to stay home with dad and mow the lawn, but
they were once in a while to go for cookies. But there was never a lot of pressure on me
to eat away. So, I never had any real connection to the church. I was kind of looking at it

(19:46):
more as a mom-looker. So, when I was 13, something big happened to me and it kind of started
the next chapter of my life. Before I go there, the lessons I kind of learned about myself
in this earlier chapter was mom's fire and passion and in a little bit of rule breaking,

(20:11):
like you said, my father's love of nature and his complete hands-off in this. Gave me
the curiosity and the freedom to explore and love nature. And that duality between my parents,
the hot and cold kind of left me, I knew it even then that I was really capable of connecting

(20:33):
people and reading them.
Because you had to, to stay safe.
I don't know. I never felt, I was never like unsafe. Like my father never hit me.
But emotionally safe, like to, because otherwise you don't know what's going on or what's going
to broadside you. I'm just guessing here.

(20:54):
Okay.
No, no, you're right. I wanted to be like the blameless good kid, right? And so that
meant in every area, I had to kind of fit into wherever crevice there was, right? I
would just mold myself into that world. And that made me capable of like understanding

(21:16):
the emotions of people, I guess. And that bigger family gave me that love of self-reliance
and a work ethic. And it gave me a little glimpse of what I, in my later life, I wanted
for a family.
How did you avoid becoming an unbalanced codependent? Like becoming such a chameleon that you had

(21:41):
no will of your own that you didn't even know? Because even when I knew you, I don't, I didn't,
I at least I didn't see any of that in you.
Well that's, that's what's about to happen.
Oh, I'm getting ahead of the story.
No, no, no. The problem that I had in my life with that who I was, was entirely dependent
on what other people, how other people's beauty.

(22:04):
Yes.
There wasn't any self in me. I was entirely external, like forces me to be who I was.
I was like 13. I don't know how old I was, probably like fifth or sixth grade. I don't
even remember the incident, but now after the divorce, I had become this kind of like

(22:26):
super tight rule following this whole self-righteous tool.
Yep.
And worse than that, you know, I kind of look back, I'm like disgusted with who I was, but
I was 13. I give myself a lot of room, but I now know that I was utilizing the rules
to my own advantage, right? To look good. I was like tattling on other kids to look

(22:51):
good. And I remember like kind of building strategies on how to like use the rules to
favor me. And that led to an incident. Once again, I don't remember the actual, what actually
happened, but I essentially had tattled on somebody and they had broken the rules. But

(23:14):
the actual act of tattling on the person was immoral.
And I wish I knew what the actual, what it was, but I knew that the act of tattling on
this kid was actually a worse thing in the world than what the kid had done. Right? And
I remember people just hating it for me. But I recognized it clear as day because I was

(23:42):
this perfect kid. I was in my perfect clean room and I was actually cleaning a bookshelf.
Like what 13 year old kid cleans a bookshelf. I was cleaning a bookshelf and getting all
the dust off of it. And I was beating myself up over this whole thing. And I just realized
that I fucking hated myself. And I like stopped cleaning the shelf mid-shelves. And I actually,

(24:09):
it was the first time that I ever remember essentially like self-auditing. Right?
Can you just give like a quick little description of what you mean by self-audit?
I guess it's the first time I looked at myself, like as if I was holding up a mirror and looking
at myself and like, I see just who the hell are you?

(24:30):
Okay. So when you say self-audit, what I'm feeling is it's the first time you actually
step back and looked at yourself from the outside. Tried to look at yourself through
other people's eyes. Okay.
You and why are you here? It wasn't that fleshed out at the time. I was 13, but it was just
like, what the fuck are you doing?

(24:50):
You're right that most people don't do that at 13. Do you think that it was just the embarrassment
of that situation was intense enough? Like what triggered you to actually look at yourself
from the outside? Cause you know, your mind has an uncanny ability to twist the facts
to look like something else. What do you attribute that to?

(25:10):
I don't know. It's hard to say. I'd like to say that I think something else would have
gotten me there at some point anyway, because I do remember that time in my life. And I
kind of remember being, I remember multiple times being an asshole and like not actually
liking myself afterwards. And it was just that one that like, there was the straw that
broke the camel's back, so to speak. So from there, I kind of just stopped that in my head.

(25:37):
It was just like, you're going to stop. And I just started at questioning every rule.
And it came back to this situation, right? I was like, the actual act of following the
rule was less moral than what was happening in the real world. There's a first time that
I'd recognize that as well. And so I started questioning every rule. And to clarify, I

(26:02):
wasn't like aggressively opposing every rule. I was just questioning. If it suited me, I
would follow it. But if I was going to get in trouble or it was going to be someone's
going to get hurt or there's a lot of rules that make sense, right?
Yes.
Yeah. So I would follow the rules that made sense. And if it weren't, I would just not.

(26:23):
And I kind of started into like a default of not follow all soft rules, right? Like
if it was a soft rule, I would just not follow it. And so, over the next, I don't know,
a couple, two or three years, I kind of turned this shit like stinky, dirty, easygoing, goofy

(26:46):
kid that was always late for everything. I kind of in the same time, I started playing
with humor, right? So I dealt with uncomfortability with humor.
Okay.
With that kid, he became even more of a chameleon, right? So now I was just, I was fitting in

(27:07):
now because I could realize that I could fit in because the self-righteous kid couldn't
fit in into social groups, but now I was fitting into social groups, right?
Yeah.
And I was still, when I was talking to an adult, if someone in charge, I would still
chameleon in. I was just taking like, I was being water. I was just taking path of least
resistance, right? But all of the time, the inside me was watching the reactions. I was

(27:33):
aware of what I was doing, but the crazy part is I got almost zero reaction from all of
the adults in my life, right? My mom was, she was divorced. My dad had custody of us.
So she was too far out in our life. My dad, once again, was emotionally just not tuned
in and the teachers were too busy being teachers. Sometimes they'd come up to me and say, hey,

(27:59):
you can't work here a little bit, but they wouldn't push. I think they just were like,
well, we must be going through a hard time and they just left it, right?
And to my friends, it was a welcome change to the people that I loved and spent time
with every day. So that was good. But to me, it was this vast, advanced change, right?

(28:21):
And I just, it made me go, holy fuck, I can be anything I fucking want to be.
Yes.
So I don't know, like I was kind of like this dirty, stinky kid for like, I don't know,
three years or something. But then, you know, when I was 16, 17, like there was like girls,
these creatures from another planet.

(28:44):
Yep.
And I realized that I kind of wanted one of them. And I also realized that being a dirty,
stinky kid wasn't going to cut it. So I swung like a pendulum to the other end of the spectrum.
And then once again, no one even noticed except for me and close, few of my close friends,
like, oh, you're kind of getting kind of cleaned yourself. We've got a haircut, you know, and

(29:07):
I tried that on for, I don't know, year or so and got some girls. And then I realized
that I was a little too tight, right? And then I swung like a pendulum back the other
way and became too loose again, and then too tight and then too loose. And some point,
the pendulums, it didn't stop. It's still swinging today a little bit, but it narrowed

(29:30):
in on me, right? Who I am. They got honed during this time, like who I was. And now
I was like this good-natured, cheery kid that didn't give a fuck about your silly rule and
was still dealing with uncomfort through humor, which turns out to be a pretty good way to

(29:54):
deal with things when you're in high school. You meet you a lot of friends. Other things
that were happening in my life at this time were like, I didn't really ever get any money
from my parents after I was like 13 years old. So I had a ton of jobs and I learned
that I loved working, but I also learned that I hated the loss of freedom that came with

(30:17):
it. But there was a truth from my forebears, right? That you have to work hard. That's
the only way to get ahead.
Have to do the work.
You have to do the work. That's how you, that's the only way.
Yes.
I got involved in Boy Scouts. So the woodsman ship that I got out of Boy Scout, mine was
the woodsman ship that I got from my family and the hunting and all of that living in

(30:41):
the woods. Like I was in a hunting when I was six months old.
Wow.
All of that, it gave me like an immense amount of self-reliance. And I kind of, from very
early as I remember actually, I was working for Les Schwab and I was working with this
guy who fucking, he threw his back out and was crippled for months because he was throwing

(31:02):
a tire and it just spun into a pile of like flesh on the floor. He broke his back multiple
times. And I just remember thinking, well, this is not for me. At the same time, I kind
of hadn't seen in the back of my head like, Hey, if you ever hate this so much, you can

(31:24):
just, you have the capability to just go in the woods and just live a good life. And I
was reading books at the time. I was reading a lot of like literature and one of them,
there's a book called the River Y. It's like Kitcher and meets him out in the hand and
anything he's like, fuck it. He just goes out and he goes fishing and he lives a beautiful

(31:44):
life. So that kind of captivated my imagination. So I was like, well, you know, if push comes
to shove, I can just go live in the woods. And because I was not focused on what other
people wanted me to be focused on, like I didn't have to be a good student anymore.
You know, I didn't have to do all the things because I didn't fucking follow the rules.

(32:09):
It left me capable of like doing the things that I loved, which was, you know, acting,
acting like, and those types of things. And those gave me the capability and the courage
to be in front of an audience and home that reap the crowdedness. And those along with
the humor and the self reliance gave me like a certain audacity that I didn't realize was

(32:36):
going to be such an important part of my life at the time. But now I see that as a huge
piece of me was that audacity, right? That whole just kind of big, gregarious, goofy
ass character that I kind of was putting on, but it was truly me.
Did it kind of feel like you were sometimes doing things you didn't necessarily want to

(32:58):
be doing as you search for yourself, but you did not feel stuck because you had this reliance
in yourself, this knowledge that you could make it no matter what your situation, even
just lost in the woods. So it made the walking through the difficult things easier. That's
kind of what I'm putting together from what you're saying.
Yeah. It was kind of like the bumpers went up at the bowling. Yes. Yes. Okay. I love

(33:25):
that analogy. So it's still like the same chapter, but now the whole high school thing
kind of came to the end. And all of my friends, my friends were super smart, beautiful people,
but they all had these fucking plans. They all wanted to be doctors and lawyers or engineers.

(33:46):
Even the lazy ones were like, you know, extremely talented musicians and stuff like that. And
I didn't have, well, nothing. I didn't have any grades and I didn't even apply for college.
And I wouldn't even graduate high school except for my girlfriend's mom, who happened to be
the English teacher, kind of walked me in the basement to finish my senior project.

(34:09):
But I was the only guy to graduate in high school and it wasn't for her. And I saw that
she was, you know, it was for my own good, at least decided it was for my own good. So
I didn't dislike that. So, but I graduated high school, but I didn't have really anything
to go after that. So a buddy and I, we stayed for like a year in Pranville and essentially

(34:36):
played video games and stayed up all night and didn't do anything. And then one day we
got the wild hair, we were going to move to the big city, like Eugene. And this is like
huge, a huge fucking thing in my head. And it was huge. None of my friends, none of my
family, my people ever in praying to Lord and people say in praying to Lord, they never

(34:57):
leave. So it was just being kind of crazy, like, we're going to go out and do this crazy
thing. We moved to Eugene and at some point my mother, she was dating some guy and he
was kind of a big wig, like a stockbroker guy and they had bought tickets to go to Belize
and the stock market was crashing, so he won't stay back. And so they rushed to get

(35:21):
me a emergency passport and a few days later I was on a plane to Belize for the first time
out of the country. And that, that had a huge effect on me and that I, it just really made
me realize that this is a big fucking world. It's full of really interesting, crazy ideas

(35:46):
that I didn't even know existed. And I knew that I had a taste for them. I didn't really
know what I was seeking anymore. But it gave me a glimpse of what I wanted in the world.
There was something big, but the problem was, this was money. In order to travel, you needed
to have some way to make money in the process. So I kind of created this new goal, which

(36:08):
was to start traveling. I wanted to travel out of the country every single year. Even
if it was just across the border and back, it didn't matter. And it didn't even matter
what border, as long as I left the United States once a year. So it kind of started
this process of me working, saving, and then traveling. And so I started traveling through

(36:29):
a lot of central and South America and just loving every minute and other places too,
but mostly in central and South America. And I had always been in love with National Geographic.
I came across an article that basically said that in every National Geographic expedition,
they needed to have a medic with them. Like in they're going into the deep dark places

(36:54):
in the world, right? They had to have a medic. It was usually a military medic. And that
planted a seed in my head. I wasn't afraid of the military. So I have this reoccurring
thing that happens in my life. And that's, I kind of feel stuck. I typically do like
something big and crazy. Because it just breaks everything and breaks all the molds and forces

(37:20):
me out of things. Right? And so I decided I was going to join the military. And I saw
I was going to join the Marines actually at Corbett. And this is all with the goal to
get into the National Geographic. A friend of mine actually convinced me to join the
National Guard. And I was like, Oh, well, oh, and the other perk was I was free college,

(37:42):
right? Because I still had this looming thing, like, what's your career going to be young
Mac? You know, because I've been kind of gallivanting around the world and not not had any like
pathway into the future. You have to pick your work. Exactly. So I was like, well, I
go through the military and I'll get free school. Right? So I ended up joining the National

(38:03):
Guard. And I just found that the military was so fucking easy. It was like a big game.
And I immediately, because I was in that whole rule era of my life, I immediately learned
which rules were helpful and enforced on a day to day basis and which rules I could slide
on. And then I came back from basic in AIT and that's when I was working at TART. It's

(38:27):
an undercover for security, as you said. And yeah, so I would just spend all my time in
the electronics department reading essentially. And it started with me just reading sci-fi.
And then I read all the sci-fi and then there are the purple book of me was I knew with
rich debt court. And that is going to start the next chapter of my life. Really. So this

(38:52):
section of my life, like 13 years old to like 23 years old was essentially all about questioning
your rules. And I also found that not only were some of them not relevant, some rules
were actually engineered to harm me. The rule follower. Right? Yes. And I also learned that

(39:13):
people as a whole don't give a flying fuck what you're doing from moment to moment. Yes.
The people that you meet in the street, it's very unlikely you'll ever fucking meet anyone
again. Right? Yes. And so you don't have to live for anyone else and you don't stand out
by being someone else. In fact, you get noticed by being authentically you. Yes. Because above

(39:37):
all else, the world craves that which is unique. Exactly. And I think I learned that in this
early time. Yeah. And it was a freedom. Yeah. That I don't think most people at my age,
23 had really and I actually learned it probably earlier. I mean, I heard you start learning

(39:58):
it at 13. Yeah. And that self-reliance also like it's instrumental in allowing me to be
out like you said, take risks. The big problem in my life still though was like money. Right?
Which brings us to Rich Dad Poor Dad. If any of your listeners haven't read, you better
hurry up. You know, when I was a kid, there was only you did hard work and you saved money.

(40:23):
In fact, the only two pieces of advice my father ever gave me about money was to save
and to not spend more money than you ever made. Right? You didn't have a credit card.
You paid with cash or check, you know, the checkbook in the back. And the narrow that
whole book down the radical idea in it is that money is not some magical thing that

(40:43):
you are born into. Right? That money is a tool. And I had never actually given that
much thought to money. Money is no, you're evil. That's what everyone said. You don't
have too much money. You're a bad guy. Right? Yep. And so, I just realized that I've been
carrying around this tool, small one the whole time, but I had been using it like a hammer

(41:04):
when I should have been using it with finesse, like a scalpel. Right? And so, coming out
of reading that book, I mean, right off the bat, everyone I talked to, you know, said
it wasn't gonna work, that it was just total bullshit.
Yep. I self doubted myself and I started doing a little of my own research and I was like,
holy shit, I think this is like a real thing. And pretty soon I could clearly see a path

(41:28):
to financial freedom, which was my box, through businesses and real estate. And the other
thing that that book did, not directly, but indirectly, was it called into this, into
my mind, the whole hard work, save, don't spend mentality, wrong. In fact, they were

(41:49):
worse than wrong. They were actually harmful to me. They were the opposite of what I should
be.
And the best way to stay inside of that system is to see it that way. Yes.
Exactly. And I was in this whole question all rules kind of thing for the last 10 years.
And now I'm like, oh, but it's more than just the rules. It's like my internal rules, right?

(42:14):
Because that was a foundational thing, right? It was like, I never even questioned it. It
was like, you had to say, you had to work hard to save money. It was like, it was built
to end. And then it was eroded and washed away to see when I read this book. And then
I started looking at the rest of my foundation. I started thinking, holy shit, not only can
they be questioned, but I need to start seriously questioning every thing that I think. And

(42:40):
so I started reading voraciously. And as soon as you start reading voraciously, there's
all sorts of ideas that are just, when you come from a small town, they just, they just
blow your socks off, right? You're just like, how could even anyone think about that kind
of stuff? Right? Yes. You start to change. Yeah, exactly. I just started, I started really

(43:02):
digging deep about literally everything single I saw. And you know, the symptom of that is
I started to sound like a complete fucking crook to a lot of people, but quietly that
kind of led me into, I'd never been a drug kid. I'd always been a good kid. I mean, I
tried pot, I drank a little bit, but I just didn't have any need or want to try, you know,

(43:28):
any quote unquote hard drug. Yes. But then I, I ended up with some buddies and they ended
up taking some mushrooms and some acid and it slowed the whole fucking world down and
it made my brain, first time I did it. It was all actually a lot like traveling the
world, right? It gave me a sense of connection to the world around me. And it just allowed

(43:55):
my brain to be open to so much more of the world. Just open. It just opened me. And I
knew that I could trust myself to play with these ideas and not fuck anything up. Does
that make sense? It makes incredible sense to me because I have quite a bit of experience

(44:19):
with mushrooms, less so with acid, but I've tried it. The question is, how did it do that?
Like these are just very general terms about it opened my mind up and I know exactly what
you're talking about, but why did it open your mind up? How did it open? What was your
experience? Kind of so hard to say. Because I hear people talking about it in all different

(44:40):
sorts of ways. Some people say it's almost like they're saying that there's little fairies
that live in the mushrooms and the whisper stuff to you. And, and so I'm just wondering
in your experience and your emotions, what are the mechanics even of it? My experience
was essentially like just being extremely connected on an energetic level with everything,

(45:02):
right? And it was a company with almost a body high that allowed to essentially like
float above the ground as I was walking. Made me feel like a part of the universe.
Okay. Like a part as in you didn't know where you ended and the rest of everything else
began. It just was all became one thing. Okay. And it was also a glimpse of something that

(45:26):
I'm, you know, where I'm at now, which is like that I am that tree. Yes. It's almost
like you've synthesized that seeing yourself as part of everything outside of the mushroom
experience. Well, I hadn't at the time. I don't think I spent a lot of time really considering
that at the time, but what, what that did outside of the experience was it reinforced

(45:53):
this kind of recent quest that I was on. There is so much to learn that like, I just don't
know anything. I have to dig and really, really learn about the world. Because I was at that
time that I just realized that I don't fucking know anything about the world. I don't know
who the fuck I am. And I don't know. I don't know why I am. I don't know anything. And

(46:20):
not in a scary sad way, but in an exciting, serious way.
Okay. So it's not like you were exploring because you're like, I have to learn. I have
to learn this stuff or something bad. It was like, what the heck is all of this? This is
fascinating. I can't stop myself from wanting to learn. Yes. Okay. So not too long after,

(46:41):
I think still before I met you or maybe about the time that I met you, there was a financial
crash again. The funny thing is, is now I'm super tuned in with financial crashes. I know
what it was all over as a time and Target actually, they bought me out of my contract.

(47:01):
They had to fire me. They couldn't fire me. Apparently there was some kind of something
they made them. So they had paid me like $6,000, which was a shit ton of money to me at the
time. And at the same time, I got like a million, the second half of my Sion bullets, which
was like 4,000. So I had like this money all of a sudden and I didn't have a job and I

(47:23):
started a business, actually a brewery there in New Chief. I'm not going to get too deep
into it, but during that time, it started me down a path of entrepreneurial shit, really
learning like how money works and how I can contribute to the world. And I had this plan

(47:44):
to like save up and buy real estate. So yeah, so that was the time that I met you.
You were always talking about going to the brewing shop and stuff like that. I didn't
remember that until you said that. And I do not remember you ever mentioning any sort
of hallucinogenics or drugs that I can remember.

(48:06):
So I kept it, especially in the military, I kept it pretty well. When I was in the military,
I only did mushrooms and LSD because they wouldn't show up on the drug tests. Although
every single time we got a drug test, man, I would just sweat bullets for that.
And you're especially not going to talk about that around somebody who appears to be quite

(48:30):
reserved and you can't really get necessarily get a feel for.
But I think if we'd have had that conversation, I'd have probably had that conversation.
And I would have judged the hell out of you. So I'm really glad that that, because I was
definitely more upright than you. I was more holy than you for sure.

(48:50):
So this was kind of towards the end of this chapter, I was like, I was just stuck in the
mud and I didn't know why. But I had like, oh, I have a lot of friends that were just
like, when you didn't understand who the fuck I was. I couldn't really anyone in the military
about it.
We you know, like even my close friends, you know, they didn't have any problems with the

(49:14):
psychedelics, but I couldn't talk to them about business or like, like you said, these
hacks, these idea hacks that I was kind of coming up with.
And really digging into myself. They either just didn't get it or I couldn't convince.
Yeah, it's never going to work. What are you doing?
He's just talking to a brick wall that he's didn't. They were just trying to do their

(49:38):
thing. You know, it didn't spark the same thing in them.
And at the same time, I was with this girl who we've been together for quite a few years.
And she had this goal that she wanted to be married by the age of 30. She had like, she's
like, I have to be married by the age of 30. She was actually older than me, I think. And

(50:00):
she was coming up on her 30th birthday. And I didn't really think I loved her, but I also
had no fucking clue what being in love with someone meant really.
But I was like, also, I do love her and I'm not getting married to her. I'm just being
an asshole, right? And if I don't love her and I get married to her, well, I mean, that's

(50:25):
what she wants. And once again, I didn't care too much about the rules about the whole thing.
And I'm sure as hell didn't give a fuck what the state followed out it. We have really
tied religion back into it, but I also didn't really give a fuck the religious aspects of
it. I just saw the marriage was a piece of paper, essentially that could be broken at
any moment. It was about this time that we found out

(50:47):
that we were going to Iraq. And so I was like, well, fuck it, stop being an asshole or a
lilt and just marry this girl. So I married this girl just before we went to Iraq. I sold
the business that I had to a friend and I left. Which brings us really kind of to the

(51:09):
end of this chapter in the way that I think about it in my head. You know, from the age
of 23 to 29, I essentially learned that I could be a money magician, right? And I learned
that ideas are always fluid and that they can be changed with intent and that all of

(51:31):
the ideas in the world need to be questioned. And that the world is masked and super connected
and needs to be explored. And my box right then was these kind of shitty relationships
and a lack of momentum that they kind of foster. So I went to Iraq and the first half of Iraq,

(51:57):
I was doing convoys. I was just like, just shitty job. Whole crew underneath me, you
know? And that's what I did every single day.
That's a medic.
That's a medic, yep. And I don't know if you remember Ramirez, but Ramirez was running
the combat hospital.
He was our PA.
Yeah. And he was running the BAMF-C for your listeners, that'd be the MASH hospital. Way

(52:23):
less fun shenanigans.
Headquarters.
Headquarters. And Sergeant Ramirez jumped off of our contacts and he broke his leg.
And so he was getting shipped out of the country. And so it kind of left me and I could call
the guys.
And we essentially had to step into this role, which was how much higher ranked than us.

(52:44):
We still had four or five guys. And I was also in control, like running. And I was still
the main medic for one of the companies at the time. And my guys were just fucking ran
to the ragged. There was just not enough medics to go around this view, probably. Well, I

(53:04):
remember. And they were just literally they'd get out of a conic. So they'd been on for
18 hours and they would start out of the truck, get in another truck and just go to sleep
in the back and sleep for hours. They're just constantly in the back of the trucks.
And headquarters, the leadership post, like where they get all the fancy paint stuff and

(53:26):
all that planning and all that stuff. They decided that we, that the medics were going
to man the desk at this post from like 12 a.m. to like 3 a.m. every night. And of course,
it went down to my guys, but I could just tell that my guys just could do it. Right.
And so I kind of had this posh job at the BAMC. And so I was still working all hours

(53:52):
a day. But, you know, I got to go home and I got to go to the chow hall every night.
And so I started volunteering for the sessions. And I, you know, I'm guarding this brick building
as well they am. You can't fall asleep because the only people to walk through that door
are full bird carols or general. Hell, the president of the United States got to walk
through that door. And so you couldn't fall asleep. You had to be aware. You had to be

(54:17):
aware and you're sitting at a desk. Probe 38. And the first night I did a whole bunch
of doodles and thought, well, fuck, I need to get something next time. And I went to
one of the, you know, where the handoff shit there on the base and they had a library and
they had a book that was called Atlas Shrugged. And I had seen the book in my past, but I

(54:40):
didn't know where I seen it. It was actually later found that it was like my friend's mother's
library I seen it. But I picked up that book and I took it to this post and got settled
in and I cracked it open and it was a profound set. Up until this time, I had all these ideas

(55:00):
swirling around in my head, but I didn't really trust them completely because I had this idea
also that there are so much to learn in the world that I couldn't, that all of the ideas
were kind of soft rules. They were all things that could change literally in a moment, but

(55:25):
I kind of fleshed out this like group of rules that I was trusting myself with, but they
were all written in a really light pencil, right? Like I can just erase them and put
them in.
You were not attached to any of them. I wasn't attached to any of them. Even though I had
like a core group of rules that I'd had for a long, long time and Atlas Shrugged made

(55:50):
me break my pencil in half and start writing pet. Not only did it echo these ideas that
I had been forming on my own for years, but it presented them in a simpler and more elegant

(56:12):
way. And it drove, it drove to a deep, deep, deep self trust of my own person, right? And
that self trust gave me a new press of life. It's like I've been driving a Ferrari with

(56:36):
a parking brake on my whole life, right? And I just took it, just got, just got rid of
the parking. And not only that, but it, it allowed me to realize that this, this nimbly
bimly group of rules that I had kind of been hodgeposing together all my life was not just

(56:57):
a group of rules. It was this word that they threw around in my high school called philosophy.
It was, it was a philosophy, right? And that meant that it wasn't just a group of rules.
It was a lens on how you could look at the entire world. And right off the bat, there's

(57:21):
a character, you've read it, right? I have on your recommendation. Finally, I read it.
I've been having that book recommended. My family very much likes that book and it's
been recommending me my whole life. There you go. Yep. So there's a main character
in that book that's reared in and reared in lives a moral life, right? He's a guy that

(57:44):
he works hard and he does the right thing. Yes. But he allows people in his life, his
wife and his mother to live by another set of rules, rules that are not more. And he
spent the whole book going, well, it doesn't matter. I can just blast through this, right?

(58:09):
I'm a powerful individual, but it was actually him allowing them to lead shitty lives around
him that ended up being ultimately his destruction. And it became crystal clear to me that I needed
to remove certain people in my life. Also, that book gave me a deep self accountability

(58:35):
and it forced the destruction of the victim in me. So that the person who would blame
anything on anyone else, right? It allowed me the ability to just seek that part of me
out in every corner of the me being, and it's taken me years, but I burned the shit out

(59:00):
of that guy. He doesn't exist. Well, he probably does. He's probably in there working in some
corners, but every single time he pops up, I go on another destructive rampage. Time
to change everything. Let's go. Yep. Yep. Yes. And it allowed me to see that self-reliance

(59:22):
and my self sovereignty could be destroyed by dependencies on other people. Yes. And
gave me a new unbridled freedom that I could be a whole person. Yes. It gave me the ability
to say, I don't fucking need, not from a, from powerful, well, it was powerful, but

(59:49):
not from. Well, it sounds like, it sounds like narcissism. Like you don't need anything.
Like you don't want anybody. I am enough for myself and I don't need anybody. So fuck you
all. That's what people hear when I use those words. Yeah. But it's not that it's actually
the opposite. The opposite. Because I don't need you. I allow you can be any fucking thing

(01:00:12):
you want. And I get to just mean I'm going to stay around. But, but if I do stay around
you, it's because I just purely appreciate you only can, yeah, I can only do that because
I don't need you. Exactly. Yes. You can say I am in love with that, with you without first
being able to say I am. Yes. Right. And, and if you don't, I think what you're saying is

(01:00:38):
if you don't know who I is, then that whole sentence is a lie. And if you're something
you need outside of yourself, then you can't possibly know fully who you are. So I don't
know. I'm getting a little abstract there, but you know what I'm saying. So when I came
back from Iraq, I started stripping people like barnacles off my shit. And it was a rough

(01:01:04):
time. It was a time that I broke some hearts. Yes. I divorced my wife. I mean, I wasn't
mean about it. I just stopped calling people that I realized just were, they were dragging
me down. It's like you're a fighter jet and you've got like garbage cans attached to your
wings with duct tape, right? I just started cutting the duct tape garbage cans off. Okay.

(01:01:25):
So those garbage cans, right? Like I'm guessing that these were mostly pointed at people who
you didn't feel like could accept you as you went through all these changes that just simply
liked you for you, but wanted to see, wanted you to be a particular version of yourself.
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And garbage cans, I shouldn't have used garbage cans. I didn't see them

(01:01:48):
as garbage cans. Sure. They were just people in my life that they wanted me to be the version
of me that I was in their head. Right? Yes. And I have a, for some reason I was still
catering to that. And it gave me the ability with the people that I really deeply cared
for to just go, Nope, I'm this is me. And you have to either accept me or, or don't.

(01:02:12):
And that's okay too. Were you afraid you were becoming a narcissist? No, no, never. I, I
don't feel me. I'm always more narcissistic. Because you're human. What you're describing
is finding boundaries. You're describing, realizing that you get to be whoever you want

(01:02:34):
to be and you're never going to be able to satisfy whatever one wants anyway. So in the
process of finding boundaries, everyone in your life is going in some way or the other
going to tell you you're unbalanced, you're becoming a narcissist, you're an asshole.
You don't care about anyone. You're, you're a lone wolf, you know, and it's all slung
at you and stuff. So how did you deal? How did all that make you feel? Or how did you

(01:02:56):
deal with that? For the most part, I think it was pretty, pretty easy. The people that
were really close to me, like my mother, it was hard for her actually because she, she
really wanted me to be the good kid that I was. And I was still a good kid, but I also,
I wasn't a yes man anymore. I was a, you know, like she's like, you should really come to

(01:03:19):
my, you know, my niece's kid's birthday party or something. And I'm like, no, I'm not going
to be there. Like it just didn't appeal to me at all. But she thought that I should do
it from like some family duty or she has a lot of, a lot of ideas around duty to God,
but especially family. Yes. Yes. And I was like, no, if it makes sense for me, then yes,

(01:03:43):
I'm there. But if it doesn't make sense for me, I'm just, I'm just not going to do it.
You've had to do the work or how else are you going to be safe emotionally? How else
are you not going to be left alone? Essentially stopped self-sacrificing. Yeah. Is what I
did. And, and it was hard for some people. The majority of people in my life though,

(01:04:03):
it wasn't that hard. I saw with my wife, I saw it like clear as day and it was, it was
not hard at all. I mean, it was actually painless because what it did was it freed her up to
be who the hell she wanted. Yes. Oh my goodness. We were both living this fucking lie. Yes.
So we, it was hard. It's hard to tear off that bandaid, but it was the right thing.

(01:04:24):
I knew it and she didn't know it at the time. And I think, I don't know, I'm not going to
put words in her mouth. Right. But this was also, you know, the time that I came out of
the military. So the divorce, I moved to Portland and I love starting from scratch. Right. And

(01:04:45):
that's, and that's what it gave me. I kind of moved away from all of my, the people I
hung out with on a day to day basis. I moved jobs. I was still doing the same thing, but
I moved jobs and I was out with the military. Like I kind of just a bunch of things changed
all at the same time. And I became our new me. I was allowed to be my new self. New worldview,

(01:05:08):
new setting. Yep. Makes sense. Exactly. And so I started really digging into real estate
and, and learning how to buy a house. And I actually got my first duplex. I had just
got it under contract actually. And I was like, feeling pretty good about myself. It'd
been probably six months since I'd been out of the divorce. And I realized that I had

(01:05:31):
kind of very few friends. I was super happy with the friends I had, but I had kind of
very few friends. Right. And I decided I wanted like a girl. Yes. And at the time, because
I was working for security, I couldn't, you have to actually sign a contract that you
said he couldn't date any of the people that you worked with. You know, crushed every woman

(01:05:54):
that I knew at the time. And I wasn't going to date my housemates, you know. And so I
was like, wow, what am I going to do? Like, am I going to go to a bar and try to pick
up a woman? You know, and that felt kind of sleazy to me. And so this was right when these
internet dating apps like became the thing. And this is long before Tinder and swipe left,

(01:06:21):
swipe right. I went to one that was called K-Cupid. Yes. I remember that name. These
were dating apps. They made profiles about what books you liked, movies you liked. And
then it gave you a quiver arrow and it tried to match you. But it was an algorithm that

(01:06:41):
was, you know, 2000 and said the algorithms were not very good. But I got to avoid all
of that because I built this kind of stupid profile. They were completely using no correct
data. Like I said that I was 3,700 years old reincarnation of, you know, 50 different people.

(01:07:05):
Oh man. Just to see what it was like. And then I realized that there's a search bar.
And then you could just type in like green eyes and it would bring up all the girls in
Portland with green eyes. And I was like, oh shit, this is like Google, but for single

(01:07:28):
women. I was like, what is my, here's a dating tip to all of you single people out of there.
But I was like, what, how do I use this? How do I leverage this? And so I had literally just
hit, you know, go on my profile and I was like, well, I wonder if like what ties me to another

(01:07:53):
person. And I just had this new thinking my wife called philosophy. And so you put your fever
books in. So I just typed in Atlas Shrugged into the search engine and it brought up like 30 women
in the Portland area and 20 of them hated Atlas Shrugged so much that they put it in their profile.

(01:08:16):
And there were that left 10 women that liked Atlas Shrugged. I just literally clicked on the
prettiest one and I wrote her a message and I said, Hey, the whole internet thing says that
we might not be horrible for each other. Tell me it's wrong. And, and she wrote back,
no, it might not be wrong, but I don't do this whole internet dating thing. We have to

(01:08:41):
meet in real life. And I was like, great, let's do it. And we ended up, she picked the spot and it was
a Frank Sinatra dress up place. And I went on a date with her and we shut down three or four bars
that night and we talked philosophy and science and nature and everything all fucking night.

(01:09:08):
And, and then I married. She, she was like that, that's talking about my current wife,
was the mother of my three children. And she is, she is essentially, I would make her an entire

(01:09:28):
chapter in my life, except that she's a moving, she's, she's with me through multiple parts of it.
Right. She's the culmination of everything that I've striven towards in my life.
She is younger than me, but she has the clearest, most reasoning brain that I've ever met.

(01:09:52):
She's a perfect sounding board. Like I can just, I don't, she didn't even have to say anything. I
can just say something right. That's like going on in my head and just, just based off of like
her facial tick, when I say it, I'm like, oh, that's not right. I'm like, I'm not going to say
when I say it, I'm like, oh, that's not gonna work. Oh yeah. That's, that's going to work.

(01:10:17):
Right. She's a perfect sounding court. Yes. How long have you guys been together? And she's a,
we got, we started dating right after we got from so well, 2000 and started dating her. So,
so these are all things that you're saying after more than a decade together.
That's incredible. So what I'm hearing from this is if you want to have a truly fulfilling

(01:10:42):
relationship, you've got to figure out how to say no to everybody. Yep. And, and, and she's got to
be able to say no to everyone too. Yes. Because she, she already been down that road. She has,
right. She has, you know, she has a willpower that I will, I will work the rest of my life trying to

(01:11:08):
achieve. Like she's the kind of person that's like, I'm going to stop smoking. And then she
will just fucking stop smoking. Or she will say, I'm going to stop eating dairy products. And she
will eat dairy products for the rest of her life. Someone slips it in her food. Okay. She probably
struggles with it, but you're never going to see the struggle. She has, she has a willpower that is

(01:11:31):
crazy. She is unafraid of pointing out the moment that someone begins to live in a way that's
inconsistent with their own beliefs. She's honest. She is, she is pure true. Which is so refreshing.
And she has the most, her moral compass always points to true North. It's like, you know,

(01:12:00):
sometimes super enlightening. There's an example where like, brainstorming, like what businesses
we wanted to build. And we were talking about, we were actually at one point talking about,
wanting to build like a second hand store in Portland. And I was like, Hey, and we have like

(01:12:22):
kind of snacks and stuff, you know, just like kind of a grab and go section. People could, you know,
grab some snacks and food. And she's like, yeah, you know, like, like healthy snacks. And I was
like, yeah, healthy snacks. I'm like, but you know, healthy snacks, they'll turn fast. They have a
short expiration date. You know, we'd have like coke and stuff like that too. And she's like, no,

(01:12:43):
no, we won't. And I was like, well, I mean, why not? Like I don't drink coke. People want to buy it.
You don't drink. Yeah. People want to buy it. It's not my job to decide what other people buy and
sell in the world. Like you can, if you want to go destroy your life, that's fine. And she's like,
yeah, that is fine, but I'm not going to be the one that sells it to you. And I just like,

(01:13:07):
holy shit. Yeah. Yeah. Once you hear it put that way, it's just like, oh, obviously I,
that would be, feel like a compromise. Yeah, exactly. It is a compromise. And she's so good
at just like finding that every single time. It's amazing. She's amazing. I kind of get the most
refreshing like in the playground of the world. I get the feeling that you really like this girl.

(01:13:32):
Yes. So before Kay, I compared myself to other people. And she's the one that taught me to compare
myself to me. Like, no, I just was toying with this new idea of Alice Shrugged being old person,

(01:13:54):
but she's the one that actually taught me how to be badgers. And I was like, oh,
I'm going to teach her how to be badgers. It's only to my own ideals, my own standards,
and to find my own truths. Yes. And someone that's going to stand toe to toe with you and
challenge you, is there anything more valuable? Yeah. If you see anything that's like, she's

(01:14:17):
just like, well, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, if she doesn't belt, she will, but she's never
going to walk away. When I talked about that victim, right? She is the one that has really
taught me that little tiny lies, even to yourself, those are the things that are toxic and kill you.

(01:14:42):
Those are where all disease comes from. Those little tiny eyes. On another note,
we're also like kind of a power team. I'm the dreamer. Okay. And she's the doer.
So one of the first arguments we'd ever had was she had in her head that she never wanted to

(01:15:06):
own a business. She never wanted to be a leader of people because she felt that she couldn't,
lady. She felt like being a object of it meant you don't control other people. Yes. And I'm not 100%
sure. I can't say that. That's how I had to. That's why she didn't want that. But it's nice

(01:15:28):
to say that she didn't want to be a leader. And she also never wanted to be, she never wanted to
own real estate. She saw it as a destruction of her freedom, her freedom to move. And she
moved. Like it ties her to a spot. Yeah. And so we had this, we just have built this really

(01:15:49):
beautiful communication and this ability to challenge each other on all sorts of aspects.
I would like to say that I'm on her as much as she's taught me. We learn from each other,
constantly. Even today, we both have a book in hand, in bed. She actually, for me, it's almost
always audio books, but she's like actual pages, turner books. Every book we have, we're kind of

(01:16:16):
sharing to me, the ideas that we have, any of those, even today. And we had just moved into a
new home. So a second property for me, and this is 2014. We had made this goal that we were going to
build a business, have decided on what business we were going to start by the end of 2014.

(01:16:41):
And a few weeks or a few months later, we found out that she was pregnant with our first child.
And we all of a sudden were like, holy shit. We had this like, for lack of a better term,
like come to Jesus moment over a table. We can't go build a business. We need to double down,

(01:17:05):
make money, do traditional thing. And then because we were both had this audacity, we kind of were
like, no, that means we have nine months to pick what business we are going to make and build it.
And we decided on a yoga studio. She taught necromania, hot yoga. And so we decided on a

(01:17:26):
yoga studio and we just started going. And actually early on in this whole thing, we ended up
going to like a lunch or dinner, like sushi dinner with some people. And there was a guy,
a Japanese guy. He was a friend of a friend at this parting. English was the second language to him.
He said, you need to do later now. He meant do now later. Right. And everyone kind of giggled

(01:17:53):
about it at the table. But they and I had this moment where we just went like our mouth was open.
We just looked at each other and just kind of at the same time without any words, we just both
recognized the profoundity of do later now. And it became our, I guess our slogan for like that year.

(01:18:17):
Like it was just like, do later now, just boom, just go, like don't make it perfect. Just do it.
Don't make it perfect. Just make it happen. So I love that. The next nine months was,
there was so much growth. We leaned a lot on my personal experience of being an entrepreneur
before, but I was never like a real entrepreneur. Right. I was a kid building a business that failed.

(01:18:42):
Yeah. Right. But now the business that we were getting into was a $6,000 a month lease, which was
three times my monthly salary on a huge property on a main thoroughfare in Portland. Just the
furnace alone was in my thousand dollars. And that's before we did anything. So we did a whole

(01:19:07):
lot of growing up in that. And it was one of the most beautiful times in my life. Now looking back
hard, it's just so exciting, fun and like spit balling ideas and just, just growing up. We just
like turned into adults, right. These little kids that just figured out how to do this thing with no

(01:19:31):
real help, you know, reading books and just going. And we ended up finding all the money and by
figuring out how to advertise and how to hire for sale and how to trace staff and kind of monetize
ideas, plan events and all the scheduling and coordinating. And I mean, we were, it was $180,000

(01:19:52):
bill. But it worked and it took us like six months before we broke even something like that. But we
learned how to like crunch the numbers and how to improve our business. We learned a lot of like
spreadsheet, hospitality. And two and a half years into that business, I was able to quit my day job

(01:20:22):
because I was supporting the family, you know, at that time. And it was, it was actually right after
we had had our second baby and we had this little rinky-dink house. We were just loving every minute
of it. It was just like work, work, work hard, hard, hard with little tiny kids, you know, up all night

(01:20:43):
and cook and puke and, and giggle. And then, and then the next day just doing it all again. And it
was, it was beautiful. That will continue as I quit my day job and I got into real estate and I started
doing like investing and just really learning how to hustle. And through that, through the real

(01:21:07):
estate aspect, I really learned how money moves. I'll say statewide level, but really a city-wide
level. Portland's the biggest city in Oregon. So really if it's moving in Portland, it's kind of
essentially how the whole state moves. And it allowed me to kind of understand the, the, the

(01:21:27):
contracts and the law. After doing that for like two years, I kind of felt like we were two ships
because she was kind of running the yoga business and I was kind of running the real estate business.
And she was kind of starting to struggle running the yoga business. Even though I was there for,
I was, you know, in there doing things as well. But, and I was doing the real estate, but I didn't

(01:21:54):
have the doer K. I didn't have her doing all of that. So we kind of were running two separate
businesses. We were like two ships drifting apart. We just needed to like pull it all back in and
refocus. And we were, it was kind of putting a little stress on the household, especially the
two kids. And so we went all back in on, on the yoga studio. And after about a year at that, we

(01:22:20):
were in this spot where we were just ready to knock it out of the park. You know, like I,
I had on my to-do list, the number one thing on my to-do list was bigger on how to get the
Yoma studio ready for sale. Cause we had this kind of dream to, to sell the yoga studio and

(01:22:43):
like travel the world with kids. That's what we kind of want to do.
And like, literally, if you look at back my to-do list for March of 2020, that was the number one
priority. But March of 2020 was the two weeks to black the curb, right? COVID. Yes. And so

(01:23:06):
we were forced, so Yoda studios, because God forbid you were helping people, you know, if you were a
bar, you could stay open. You were a store, you could stay open. You were a restaurant, you could
stay open for certain hours, but if you were on a yoga studio, no, no fucking way. Right? There's

(01:23:29):
not even, you couldn't even, you couldn't even build a plan that like, this is how we won't let
anyone cough up. You couldn't stay open. Right? You couldn't even stay open in an outside space.
So we just shut right in two weeks, during the two months. And we built out an online platform.

(01:23:52):
We, it was a big flurry of work trying to learn how to build an online platform. And we did.
But COVID just kept going, right? Six more months through the summer. We just,
I mean, it was actually a beautiful summer because we were just, got you young kids.
We were out at Sabeata on skate, like literally every day. I mean, having children

(01:24:20):
really allows you to live in the present. You know, it really allows you to focus on
a little tiny shit and enjoy it and love it. So even though we were like both wondering what
the fuck was, you know, we were going to do, we were also having this kind of beautiful time.

(01:24:40):
I don't know if you remember in September of 2020, there was like a big fucking fire.
I hope I just realized I'm cussing. I like cussing. No, that's absolutely okay.
Cussing, I think cussing fits into anything that is open emotionally because it just has a lot of
emotional weight. Yeah. So in September, there was a big fire and it just laid flat over court.

(01:25:06):
And it got to the point that you couldn't even, you couldn't even see across the road.
And I had a two year old time. He was, that was Ishika and he was, he was a big fan of the
show. And he was, he was a big fan of the show. And he was, he was a big fan of the show. And I
had a two year old time. He was, that was Ishika and he was coughing, started to hack and cough.

(01:25:29):
Right. And I was like, we got to get out of here. And so we booked an Airbnb actually out in the
middle of Easter, Oregon, still on a farm somewhere. And I, the day before we left,
it was going to be two days later, the day before we left, I called the gal on the Airbnb. She was
the entire C award. And so I was like, F it, we're out. Right. I called Kay. I was like,

(01:25:55):
we just got, I found the cheapest flight out of America. And it was to the only place in the world
that was open, which was Mexico. It was Guadalajara. And we like literally from the time I,
we made the decision to go to the time we were on an airplane was two rounds. Like we, they was like
booking an Airbnb as we were taxing on the great run. And it was super fun and fresh.

(01:26:23):
And he went to Guadalajara. And I was like, what, we need to do this more. Like that was really,
right. And then we came back to the States and we were going to be allowed to reopen
the open studio in November or actually it was late October. We opened in November and then

(01:26:46):
late November, they forced us to close again, even though we'd spent like probably $10,000 just in the
bringing sure that everything was touchless and making sure that there was, you know,
like see glass everywhere and everyone and signs up everywhere to stop COVID. They still shut us

(01:27:06):
down again. But this time instead of like leading us on, they did the whole, it used to be like,
two months for going. This time they were like, well, it's going to be sometime next year.
So this is November of 2020. And I mean, the amount of money that we had, we were just
in need for savings. All, a huge amount of our income went away. Not all of it, but a huge amount

(01:27:32):
of our way, but our bills stayed exactly the same. And we sat and you know, like 2 AM one time,
we were just like, what are we going to do? We decided, I had actually just read it in our lease
that I could, I found a way out of our lease, which is a 10 year lease and get out. And actually

(01:27:54):
that whole real estate section like was super helpful because I got to shoot contracts.
And so I found like way out of our contract and I was like, where we can leave,
is we could sell our house, you know, but if we sold our house, what are we going to do? We couldn't
move to like Beaverton, you know, or move to where to Prine mill back to Prine. No,

(01:28:17):
no. It was like, if we're going to move out of Portland, why don't we move out of state?
And they're like, well, if we're going to move out of state, why don't we just fucking go,
right? And start over. And so that night we were like, okay. So that was late November. We bought
it, plenty tickets for Cancun, Mexico to go to Playa del Carmen. We'd never been there,

(01:28:41):
but it was the only place it was over. We bought tickets for January 23rd. And then there was this
mad rush of just selling everything in the studio, closing out all our affairs. And I got a little
Rubbermaid tote full of like photo albums and shit like that. And I handed them off to my buddy,

(01:29:03):
he couldn't be patient. And then night before we flew out, we just got the kids all together. We
filled some soup cases and we closed them out. The next morning we flew out, just left everything in
our house. The day after that, I had a real estate agent come in and he did an estate sale on
everything, everything in our house. Like, you know, we'll bring stickers on everything. And the

(01:29:27):
next day they went to Bird Queen, the next day they took pictures and it was up, the house was up on
the market. And we were living in an Airbnb in Playa del Carmen. And that brings us to the end
that chapter of my life. That's Joel, 29 to 39 years old.

(01:29:50):
How did you put it? The money-making genius years?
And I'm, I do not want to interrupt your narrative so we can answer it later, but I'm curious,
what are some examples of that? When you were just like, like, what did that realization look like?
Because I'm out here kind of having a lot of these same realizations and just being like,
I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in the system. I'm just not going to do it. I know

(01:30:13):
there's a better way. I don't know yet how to get there. I'm starting to get some pretty good
ideas, but money does always end up being the clincher. And so I'm curious, what are some
of the things that you love in the world that you just love, inherit? And you can build a business
around that because there's some people in this world that don't want it. Or for us, the case of

(01:30:34):
the hot yoga thing, I think, is that you're just going to have to have a lot of money to do it.
And you're going to have to have a lot of money to do it. And so I'm curious,
how did that look for you? But you've kind of explained some of it, I think.
Right. Or for us, the case of the hot yoga studio, it's something that I can do that all day long.

(01:30:54):
There's nothing is the most moral thing in the world. We have seen like literally thousands and
thousands of people that had come to our doors with every problem in the world with broken legs
and bad knees and bad shoulders or messed up back or scoliosis or, you know, lymph issues or

(01:31:18):
internal body issues or depression or can't sleep at night or can't eat correctly. All like the whole
gamut of human suffering has walked through our doors. And I've seen it mixed with hot yoga.
And this isn't going to be an advertisement for Bikram yoga, but Bikram yoga, the reason we've

(01:31:40):
devoted 10 years of my life to it is it is one of the purest, most amazing things on earth.
It's not just that it fixes your body and your guts and your systems. It also fixes you. Right.
Or question, it doesn't fix you, you fix you, but it gives you the environment to do it.

(01:32:05):
It's hard and it's hot and it's super uncomfortable by design. And while you're going through it,
you have to look yourself in the face in a mirror while you're going through all the
bullshit internal stripes and you telling yourself you can't do it and that Victor rearing its head

(01:32:32):
over and over and over again, you have to look yourself in the face. So once again,
I don't want to turn any commercial for Bikram yoga, but it's, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a really big fan
of hearing why somebody found or how somebody found healing in the, in the ways and the modalities

(01:32:53):
that they found it. You found healing there, you offer that healing to the world. And to me that's,
what are we going to find that's more worth promoting? Please.
Exactly. And the funny thing is, is for me, so I've found Bikram yoga because when I met Kay,
she was doing a 90 day challenge. She was doing it every day for nine days. And I,

(01:33:17):
and to be completely honest, I just wanted to get into her pants. The only way I could spend
any time out of a Bikram yoga class. When I did so, I don't know, I don't know what your
experience with exercise was as a kid. Right. But for me, it was never good. Right. And then I joined

(01:33:37):
the military and exercise was literally on a, right. Doing push-ups was, you did push-ups,
we could get fucked up. Right. And so it was something, you know, that I had never really
faced. It was something that I had never really done YouTube. I was digging all sorts of stuff,

(01:33:58):
but this is one that was one of those truths that I had, I did look at. And the funny thing about
yoga, Bikram yoga is it's super challenging, which is something that I needed. Like I think my ego
needed. Right. But at the same time, it was the first time I ever did exercise and it wasn't a

(01:34:20):
chore. The hardest part was walking in the door. And then once you go in the door, this like person
just talks at you straight for 90 minutes. And if you want to lay down and lay down, you want to
drink water, you can drink water. But I know that I'm not going to. Right. But even if you do,
you're going to get the benefit. And there has been times about like when I'm sick or I'm injured,

(01:34:44):
I'll just come in and I'll literally sleep in the class for 90 minutes. And the knowing that you're
in a room full of people trying to make themselves better. Wow. Yes. To go back to your question as
far as like businesses, it doesn't really matter. Like it can be anything. The ingredients are that

(01:35:08):
you love it and that other people don't always love it. And that or you're providing something
out of service better than the next person. And then the next ingredient is figuring out how to
like systematize it. That's a whole different ballgame. That second part of the time that

(01:35:28):
we were before COVID, we were systematizing, creating strong standard operating procedures
for everything you did. That's like business 201. You don't need to start there. You just need to
build it. And then systems will come. Because you're just going to really, you know, you do
something, somebody tired, you're like, okay, we got to do this. The way it repeats itself.

(01:35:50):
Like do later now. Yeah. Yes. Right. You got to figure out how to replace yourself with a high
school kid. And if you can replace yourself on the high school kid, will you pass the test on that
thing? Now figure out how to replace yourself, all the other functions of your business with high
school kids. Once you've got that done, you've got a business. Yeah. A real business. You know,

(01:36:14):
it's not a job anymore. And there's many different ways to do business and many different types of
businesses. But what I'm gleaning from that in the nugget of the answer is number one,
you're never going to figure it out until you figure out who you are. So number one, you got
to figure out who you are. Then once you know that you're going to start to figure out what you really

(01:36:36):
like to do, just your personal passion, the thing you came here to do. And then when you're doing
that, the money making is just going to come from it. It's just going to flow from it.
To fail. That has to be part of it before it. Right. Yes. After you find out who you are.

(01:37:00):
Right. Well, yeah. I don't know if it's got to stack that way. No. Okay.
It's going to be part of it. I mean, still do, do, do tomorrow today. Yeah. I got you.
In this section, you know, what did I learn? I learned that, that you have to break your

(01:37:23):
dependencies from other people. Right. You have to be whole to have an unbridled freedom.
Yes. And that is self-toxic to lie to yourself.
I had to trust myself before I trusted anyone else. And then I learned a shit ton about building

(01:37:48):
businesses and community. Something that I didn't, well, something that I right at the end realized
was a problem. And that's that I had a dependent, I had, you know, I thought I had broken all these
other dependencies as I had a dependency on the government. Right. I had a dependency on my
government allowing me to, to continue running a business. What I thought was like something not

(01:38:12):
take away. Right. Now I realized they could, they did. So the new chapter, this is a chapter
that I'm in right now. And it started when you flew down to, where did you say? Mexico. Playa.
We're in Playa del Carmen. Playa del Karma. Carmen. Carmen. Carmen. San Diego.

(01:38:36):
Well, you may not be able to tell, but I didn't really learn geography in school or go to school.
I mean, it's a small town. It's not a lot of people. It is fairly well known in travel world,
but like where I'd never been, I'd been to the little town up the beach once for a retreat,

(01:38:57):
but I had never, I'd never spent any time like lived here. I didn't know.
It's perfect. She's not perfect. She's like a layman. So she, are you French and Italian?
She grew up in Southern California. She can understand Hebrew and pieces of other languages.
So, so she was definitely like the, the mate when we hit the ground, she was the one that did all

(01:39:22):
the talking for sure. We found ourselves in this like, this new place. And I was like,
we're in this new place. We've got kids with us. We got, we have way less money,
but we also have gotten rid of all of our bills. But I know that we're going to sell the houses.

(01:39:42):
So we're going to have some money coming in. Right. And our plan was, we didn't have a plan.
Plan was to sit on the beach for two weeks, decompress a little, and make a plan. Right.
That we didn't have. Planned El Karno was a bustling place at the time. And we started
getting into parties. We really had interesting people. We realized very early on that Planned

(01:40:07):
El Karno, it was this vortex of people that had been escaping the governments of the world.
So all the people that were like, fuck this shit, I'm out. There was only one place that was open
in the world. That was Mexico. And the only people that could do that, that had the capability of

(01:40:27):
doing that were interesting individuals. So we would go to like, we literally would get invited
to, we got invited to this like a house party. Guy's house never didn't know anyone. We had no
nothing better to do. So like, fine. We'd go to a house party, but you're saying you go to a house
party and you'd think you go to a house party in Corvallis or in Uchi. The conversations you're

(01:40:51):
going to have that house party, unless it's like a complete fluke of the world, you might end up
making like a good strong connection. You might have fun, but you're probably just going to scrape
the surface. It's going to be pretty shallow conversation all around. I mean, those are

(01:41:11):
intelligent, beautiful people, but they just, they're living in a small bubble, right? But
these parties here, I very quickly learned that you, like you gotta watch, is the person you're
talking to isn't that a clerk from a store. He's the guy that builds, you know, digital
currencies for the country of Bhutan. And the other guy that's in the circle is one of the leaders

(01:41:36):
of security at Google. The guy over there, you know, is some kind of fintech guy out that runs
a venture capital, Silicon Valley. And I've had myself in conversations that not only were not
shallow, but like I literally was like, I don't know what the fuck you guys are talking about.
Like the conversation was just like slipping over my head, like just a little banter. Like someone

(01:42:04):
made a comment and three people would laugh and I'm like, like they're speaking a different
language, but we're speaking English. Are you saying that all of a sudden you were the dumbest
guy in the room? Yeah, yeah, everywhere, right? And, you know, I could still meet, I could still
meet them. I could still have a conversation with them. But I just realized that I had slipped into

(01:42:26):
a world where they weren't living in podunk, primed to the Lord of it, right? These were people
that were already world travelers, a lot of them, and had a much bigger outlook of the world than I
did. Well connected and knew a lot of things. Yeah, exactly. But at the same time, they were

(01:42:49):
extremely humble, beautiful people, right? In fact, I would say that I met some of my favorite,
definitely lifelong friends in the first couple of weeks that we were here at Blythe. So after
like the first few weeks there, we, you know, we had that plan. We were going to go figure it out.

(01:43:10):
Tay ended up going down like a path to start coaching. She kind of built a business,
working off of another business, coaching yoga studios worldwide to increase their bottom line
because we figured that stuff out. We knew it, right? Yes. That was in the process of selling
all of our stateside assets and being a band. But while we did that, we were traveling throughout

(01:43:36):
Mexico because, because once again, it was the only place in the world that was really open at
the time, looking for our place. And we looked all over, but I mean, you can't say we looked
everywhere because dude, Mexico is fucking huge. Mexico is huge. It's huge. It's so crazy that I
ever had the small version of Mexico in my head because it's massive. But we were looking for

(01:44:01):
like schools and looking at prices and stuff to do. And the weird thing is I found myself,
I would call myself homesick, but I wasn't homesick for Oregon. I was homesick for Blythe
Del Carmen, this weird vortex, super hustle, right? Wow. And so we came back. He was doing
full-time coaching and I started spending more time in these circles of people. And we just

(01:44:27):
dropped the kids into a full Spanish school and they were like 100% fluid in six months.
They don't even have an accent, you know, at all. And I had the cash out of our house,
which wasn't a lot, but it was, you know, it was a chump I needed to do something with.
And I had been learning through these people, these super smart guys about digital currencies.

(01:44:53):
And I started slowly at first to invest in Bitcoin. And that really opened my eyes. So
learning about Bitcoin is counterintuitive to everything that I learned about the world.
Because Bitcoin is essentially a type of, or lack of a better word, money, right? It's essentially

(01:45:18):
a money and it's a money that's competing against the US dollar, right? And I'm not going to dig
and I'm not going to dig deep into the specifics about it, but Bitcoin is a much better version
of that dollar, of that money. And it will replace all currencies in the world over the course of the

(01:45:41):
next 18. But in order to get to that spot, to make that statement, it sent me down a huge,
huge rollercoaster ride of how the world works from a macro scale, like the geopolitical circus,

(01:46:02):
including the COVID, including how all money works, including how war works, including how
people deal with their everyday stuff and how that affects me on an everyday basis.
And what it also allowed me to do was Bitcoin, I realized, was the key to making it so that those

(01:46:28):
connections, a war in Israel or some kind of active aggression by a government on its people
in Canada, Bitcoin was the tool that gives me separation from those. And I just come through

(01:46:49):
this giant ordeal about realizing that the government itself, my location was what broke
my little beautiful boat beforehand, right? And so that disconnection with a government
and now building businesses that are disconnected from a place has given us a beautiful nimbleness

(01:47:15):
that I couldn't have fathomed 10 years ago, five years ago. I couldn't wrap my brain around
the ability to be as nimble and disconnected, but at any time being able to reengage anywhere
I want. And the keys to that were the building that online business and Bitcoin, which is a

(01:47:39):
digital currency. How does digital currency help to separate you from governments? What are the
mechanics of that? Oh man, this is this year's a rattle. This is the old politics. But let's just
do the super short version. Yeah, in short, I'm trying to figure out, trying to distill that.

(01:48:01):
What I'm actually saying is I'd like to do that podcast. I'd like to have that conversation.
I don't know if I'm the guy, but for my level, you sure are.
Every dollar that you have right now, right? You don't really have control of it because you have
a dollar in your pocket. But the thing is, is as you're looking at your dollar in your pocket,

(01:48:25):
the government is literally printing a trillion new dollars every what? 70 days now.
Yeah. So with every dollar that they print, your dollar is shrinking. It's like a piece of ice
that's melting. There's no freezer. You can't fix it. It's just at some point, you know,

(01:48:46):
you just a little tiny piece of ice and you won't be able to do anything with it. It's just melting.
And it's melting at a huge exponential rate. The heat just got, when COVID happened,
the heat got turned up to a crazy amount. Right? And I don't know the number off the top of my head,
but we should look this up. It's like 40% of all the money that's ever been created

(01:49:08):
throughout the American history has been planted in the last eight years.
And every dollar printed has a direct effect on the value of every other dollar.
Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And so Bitcoin is the opposite. Bitcoin is a,
there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins. It is actually deflationary in that the only thing

(01:49:30):
that can ever change with it is that you could lose your Bitcoin. Because if you lose your Bitcoin,
you can't call a thing and say, hey, I forgot my password. It's just gone. Yeah. Right? You have
to have some self-accountability in it. It's your money. But that self-accountability is a massive
freedom. There's no middle. No one has the key to your little bank vault except for you. And it's

(01:49:56):
more nimble than the dollar. I mean, think about this. If you had a friend, who lived in Australia,
and you needed to send them $5, right? It would be faster for you to book a flight to Australia,
go to the ATM, pull out $5, get on the flight to Australia, wander around Australia and hand it to

(01:50:20):
him in person than it would be for a bank to send it to him. Yes. Think about that. It's crazy.
Of course, now you have Venmo and stuff like that. But yeah. Well, we know, but Venmo has to go,
you can't even do that. It's like crossing an international border. Oh, I see what you're saying.
I've never tried to do it internationally. Okay. That makes sense. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.

(01:50:42):
So that's what I'm saying. It's all like governments control everything that you do.
You don't even see it. You don't know how much they're controlling it until you're out of that
system. And while that might not be a terrible thing, right? I mean, like, no, it's not going
to really affect. Here's the thing. Over the course of the next 10 years, it will affect you

(01:51:02):
way, way more. What all of these, so I told you that there's people working on digital currencies
for Bhutan and for China and for all these other countries, they're working on it for America.
All these countries, all the major countries in the world are building
digital currencies. They're building a new dollar. It's called a CBDC. You can look it up,

(01:51:25):
dig into it. But what essentially it is, is it's programmable money. They're going to figure out
some way to force a CBDC on you. They're going to tell you, it's for your own good. It's like,
build money, and it's super easy to use. And here's how you're going to do it. They might not even,
they might just force employers to go use only CBDCs and then start eradicating the standing dollar.

(01:51:50):
But what happens is now you have a dollar that exists in a wallet, quote unquote wallet on your
phone, which is exactly how Bitcoin works. They're literally taking the technology from Bitcoin.
Probably to fight against it. Yeah, definitely. Except they're changing it to have absolute control
over your money. So right now, if they all like you, they can figure out ways. So like block your

(01:52:16):
bank and cash stop your bank account or something, but they can't control every transaction.
Right. But the CBDC, what will happen is because it's like completely programmable. So they don't
like that you... It doesn't matter what it is. Whatever the new thing is of Capitol Hill, you

(01:52:36):
get someone who is extreme right, and they don't like transgender people. They can just literally
find all transgender people and just decide that their money is worth as much as it was.
Right. Or that every transaction that they have costs 1.01% of the transaction that every other

(01:52:56):
person is going through. Or it's the opposite. It's a race thing, or maybe it's only aimed at
the rich. People in the left get involved in it. They're aiming at the rich. And now all the rich
people, they have to pay 1.5% for every transaction. So the difference between the Bitcoin digital
currency and this governmental digital currencies that are being developed is that for some reason,

(01:53:24):
governments are not able to control Bitcoin, or at least not to the same extent.
So Bitcoin is completely uncontrollable. Bitcoin is complete free will. The person that built
Bitcoin, built it in a way that it was distributed over millions of computers. And the only way that

(01:53:44):
you can make a change to Bitcoin, or the way that it works, is to get 51% of those millions of
computers to all work against their rational self-interest and change Bitcoin. It's actually
even harder to not get into the specifics. It's basically impossible to even make a change in

(01:54:05):
Bitcoin. And even if you were to make a change in Bitcoin, you could change it for 10 minutes,
and it would just self-correct. And the reason it's impossible is because it's
completely crowdsourced. Yes. Right. It'd be like saying, you can't use the H key on your keyboard
from now on out. You just can't do, maybe because someone could just Jerry Rigan HT. You can't shut

(01:54:28):
it off. The only way they could kill it is to kill the internet itself. Interesting. And they
would be unwilling to do that because all of their systems were on air.
All of their systems were on air. Okay. That makes sense.
Even if you could kill, like, let's say you just shut the internet down for 10 years. The thing is,

(01:54:49):
is two people with two cell phones could bump Bluetooth Bitcoin back and forth while that
internet was down. As long as there's two devices that have storage, can connect in any way, then
you have Bitcoin. It exists. So it would basically take a worldwide EMP
that could destroy every electronic circuit is what it would truly take to kill Bitcoin

(01:55:13):
or get it under control. And the person that coined, once it was up and running,
he is called Shytoshi Nakamoto. He just popped smoke and bash straight out of the matrix.
He just disappeared. Nobody knows who he is. He's one of the richest. He is still alive,

(01:55:36):
which many people doubt. He is like one of the richest people in the world because he owns like
a million Bitcoin. It's like, yeah, it's crazy, which is like $90 billion. See, or $90 trillion
right now. So it is uncontrolled and no one can control it. Right. And it will always be that way.

(01:56:00):
And it's fast. So here's the thing about Bitcoin. Think about 1990, right? And think about the
advent of the internet. You live through that, right? And people were like, oh, this is going
to change the way that we communicate with each other. Which is like the biggest understatement

(01:56:21):
of a hundred years. The internet revolutionized the way that we conceived the world around us.
From entertainment to education to communities to everything. Bitcoin is to the financial world,
and meaning literally everything that money touches, which is literally everything.

(01:56:49):
Yes. Bitcoin is to that, the way that the internet was to communication and education and
and education and entertainment and communities. Interesting. And it's, it's, it's like literally
saved me years to like kind of wrap my head around it, but it is the single most, it is the most

(01:57:13):
important thing in the world today. It feels, yeah, it feels really important to me, but it also feels
extremely daunting because my brain recoils at all of the technical information that you have to
wade through in order to get a worldview that includes a good understanding of bit currency.

(01:57:35):
The thing about it though, is you don't actually have to know anything.
That's the most beautiful thing about it. You don't have to know anything.
Nothing. Literally nothing. If you, if you, you have to know that you want it and that,
and you also need to know that if you get some, don't lose it. And that's not barred. You just

(01:57:57):
write it down. If you had bought, you know, a hundred dollars with a Bitcoin back in 2014,
and then just forgot that it existed and then, you know, opened your drawer with your little
pastode, you know, here in 2024, you would be a multimillionaire. Yeah. Because of deflation

(01:58:19):
specifically. Yeah, exactly. Wow. I mean, there's this funny story that back in 2012, like I bought,
well, I don't even know, I don't know this story, but he ended up buying two pieces for like 280
Bitcoin or something like that. And now those 280 Bitcoin, you could buy like 20 houses with.

(01:58:42):
Or an island. Yeah. So, to hand it made sense at the time that that's how much it was worth in
fiat, regular dollars today. But I would just say, you know, do research if you want and learn about
it because it is an exciting, interesting ride. And that ride itself, that knowledge, the seeking

(01:59:05):
of that knowledge has learned immensely from. Yes. But you don't have to know any of that to invest
with Bitcoin. You just have to buy it today, yesterday. But isn't there a lot of different
Bitcoins? Like, I've just heard so many stories about, oh, most people get into Bitcoin and invest
in something that is affordable and then it just loses all of its value. Or are you talking about

(01:59:26):
one specific one? No. So you're talking, you just, you just mishmash the words. Sweet. So you're
talking about crypto. Oh, you're right. And there are billions of cryptocurrencies. There's only one
Bitcoin. Gotcha. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. Yeah. It's the first one. All of the other ones

(01:59:47):
are kind of, it came after. Okay. And they all, they all have their places, but none of them are
decentralized and all of them can be stopped. And 99% of them are garbage. I get it now. Bitcoin
is not. In my mind, crypto, Bitcoin, like it's all just kind of different names for the same thing.

(02:00:08):
So I appreciate that clarity. It all feels so much easier now. Yeah. I am super interested. And you
recommend, you recommended a book to me that I'll admit I have not read yet. Bitcoin, Hard Money You
Can't Fuck With, I would guess is probably the one I read about. That's it. Yep. Yep. It's important.

(02:00:29):
So that little ride of Bitcoin is now placed. So we still own a yoga. We actually built a yoga
studio here in Mexico, mostly because we love the yoga and we love the impact that it has
on people. And we were tired of doing yoga in our level cramped bedroom. So we still own a yoga

(02:00:49):
studio, but it's not really to make money. It's mostly just like a thing to do that we love.
And it forced us, it forced us out of our shell a little tiny bit, but I'll admit it was like,
when we were building this studio, I kind of was like hoping to like chase the dragon a little,
to like get me out of my little comfort zone because it's where I love to live. It's outside

(02:01:16):
of my comfort bubble. Yes. And building a new business in a country that I don't know,
a language that I don't understand, and all the rules and regulations and traditions and
things that I don't understand. I thought that was going to do it, but it didn't scratch my itch.
So that brings us to the like present. I've kind of learned that things don't really turn out the

(02:01:43):
way that my little plan was supposed to be. And that's better. And I learned that it's hard to see
when you have a dependency on a place or a government, but it's a dependency that they
take advantage of every chance they get. And once you are out of it and are seeing it,

(02:02:06):
now I see it in everything, how governments take advantage of people. And it's not just
the US government, but that's the one that I'm most familiar with. And I also had dependency on
stuff, right? We didn't really talk about it, but when we got rid of literally everything

(02:02:30):
and stripped down to just literally a suitcase, it was all that we had, you know, two suitcases,
and it was the most free thing in the world. Oh my God. Kay and I were just talking the other day,
I think because we haven't been here for years now and we are starting to accumulate shit again.
And we're actually going to build a tradition, a new tradition in our house. We haven't springed

(02:02:54):
on the kids yet. We haven't kind of worked out the details. But what we're going to do
is we're going to tell them that we're going to act like we're going to move. We're going to literally
do the same thing. We're going to put suitcases on the floor. We're going to say, put everything
you love into that suitcase, everything that you want into that suitcase, and we're going to go

(02:03:14):
get in the car. And we'll just like go to the beach and have company come in and just get rid
of everything, donate the rest, like get rid of it or something. We haven't worked out the detail
of how to get rid of everything. And we'll probably stick with a few, you know, we have like a
Linamix blender, which we would never care in an airplane, we might keep, you know, like little
things like that. Furniture to make the house livable. Like all the stuff in the junk drawer

(02:03:40):
is gone. There's no scotch tape anymore. We got to start over. Right? So that's something that
we're actually going to work on. I love the idea. I mean, there's a version of that, but I mean,
we're thinking a lot about purging as well. And it's overwhelming, especially when you have kids,
stuff, even if you're just a human, stuff just piles up. So I love this idea. Exactly. So that's

(02:04:06):
something where we sound that there is freedom that we don't want to get rid of. Like the Great
Depression is still influencing the way that I think about shit. And I didn't always do the
Great Depression, but my grandma, I'm like, oh, we'll just keep this little box. We're going to
keep it because it's maybe super useful something in the future. Right? Since shit is garbage. You

(02:04:31):
know, going back to that barnacles on the side of your shit, that box is my new barnacle that I'm
stripping off. It slows you down. So we're constantly, I was always shooting for being
rooted and straw. And now a focus in my life is to be flexible and nimble. Yes. Your whole worldview

(02:04:57):
has changed again. I heard a worldview shift happen when you started talking about Bitcoin.
I feel like that awareness of Bitcoin and that subsequent research shifted your worldview again.
Yeah, it did. But really it's all kind of wrapped in with COVID because when it's except that

(02:05:17):
dependency on the government, like couldn't have come to this spot that I had at Coin, if I hadn't
been like literally shoved out of like a scene. Like there were, there's the building that we were
in, it stayed empty until like three months, four months ago. Wow. Because what are you going to do?

(02:05:40):
You can't, it's so hard to build a small business now in those spaces and every small business like
well, what happens if they just close this down? You have a drop of a hat. Right? So we do, I
actually almost bought that building. That's a huge bullet dodge. Yeah. Bullet dodged. Awesome.
And now the money thing has like solved itself. Like now I'm in this spot that I'm like,

(02:06:08):
the hell am I doing? Right? It's almost like a midlife crisis. Like in Hollywood,
in Hollywood, I'd have went out and bought a convertible and started hooking up with young
girls. Right? Yeah. That's not what it is. It's just me. Now I'm turning back in and I'm like,
now I'm turning back in and I'm starting to go through me. And my belief in the stems again,

(02:06:33):
was a super, super fine tooth scalpel comb. So I'm in this interesting place where I've,
I've learned this freedom of rules and the freedom to be authentically me and the freedom of self
reliance and the freedom to choose who I spend pying with and the freedom to create money if I
need to and to reinvent my operating software and the freedom to live in my own true self

(02:07:03):
and the freedom of dependencies, except for the kids, which I enjoy and the freedom of location.
And now a new, a new freedom of time. So I, I checked all the boxes that I thought I needed
to check. I'm now I'm looking for new boxes. I don't know what, I don't know. It's like I'm a kid

(02:07:34):
that was born in a pilotless fighter jet. And somehow I managed to keep it from crashing into
the mountains and the oceans. And then I not only did that, but I kind of started to learn how to
steer and kind of control it a little bit. And I just recently figured out how the autopilot
function worked. And now I'm like, leaned back and I'm looking at the dashboard with all of its bells

(02:07:59):
and its whistles and wondering what all these other buttons and switches do. And the cynic in me wants
to just leave it alone, just say, you know, stop fiddling with stuff. But the curious part of me
wants to start flipping switches and see what this baby can do. So right now that's what I'm doing.

(02:08:21):
I'm looking, I'm listening to the world a lot. And I'm spending a lot of time focusing on being
a really, really good father, which is kind of hard to do when your nose is at the grindstone.
Yes. Yes. I spend a lot of time. We play a lot. I try every day. It's super hard, but I try.

(02:08:47):
I learned a long time ago when I was a young dad, someone said, hey, just spend 10 minutes a day,
eyeball to eyeball with your kids. Like let them lead for 10 minutes. It doesn't matter what it is.
If you're having tea, you're having tea. If you're throwing balls, you're throwing balls. It doesn't

(02:09:07):
matter. They lead and you just, you're their playmate for 10 minutes. And so I try to do that.
Now, oh, we've had another kid too. So we had a third kid here in Mexico and he's two years old.
So now we got a nine year old coming up on the sixth birthday and just turned two. And we play
a shit ton of board games. This is really fun. And I try, it doesn't happen every day, but I try to,

(02:09:33):
you know, I live with the ocean in paradise. I might as well, I try to get in the ocean for
10 minutes a day and like take a dip and connect with the earth, with the ocean. And I actually,
it sounds kind of funny, but I like having a conversation every day. I have a conversation
with the ocean. Like almost like it's a mentor. We just, I'm quiet and I just listen, right?

(02:09:57):
Or sometimes the ocean is angry and I listen to it, you know, and sometimes the ocean is playful
and I play with it. I listen. I'm practicing right now what I call, well, for like in my head,
I call it radical presence. Like it started out like once a day or once, twice a day, I would try

(02:10:20):
to like just stop for, you know, 20 seconds and like just feel the sensations on my skin,
feel the wind blowing on me, smell the air, taste whatever's on my tongue, whether it's like a sour
taste of not having eaten a wok thai pork or whatever, especially I try to do it while I'm

(02:10:44):
eating, to listen to the sounds around me, to really go through the whole gamut of sensations,
only for a few seconds, just really take it like a snapshot, right? A moment to just really
completely feel and see and smell and taste the world around me for just a moment. And with that,

(02:11:07):
coming back to that whole mushroom sting, right? That bigger sense, that connection,
that connection to feel like the inside of me, like what am I feeling? Do I have obtained me
at all? Was there a hitch in my giddy up over here or anything? And how am I connected outward?

(02:11:27):
Right? And I don't dwell. I just literally just try to feel and that it's a muscle I'm learning.
It's hard to do. Dude, it's so hard. I think some people just do this naturally, but I don't.
And so what's that? Some muscle that I have to flex and I have to flex it over and over and

(02:11:48):
it's getting easier. So now I'm getting into where I do it probably, let's say for 15 minutes. And
instead of being 20 seconds, it's four seconds, or three seconds. And it's funny, I listened to
all your podcasts actually, and something that's kind of struck me, you were talking to your dad
and how he was talking. He was a young man. He started not wearing shoes because he wanted to

(02:12:14):
toughen up his feet. And the funny thing is, is I have recently stopped wearing shoes,
not completely, but I am now not wearing shoes most of the time. And the reason is,
is because it's the opposite. It's a good reminder to feel the earth.

(02:12:35):
Interesting. I want to feel more. I'm doing a ton of meditation and breath work. I'm still doing
those like body hacks, but now it's aimed at my health and the way that I like, it's aimed at
the fundamentals of who I am, my body. So straight up breathing. How do I breathe?

(02:12:59):
Is it going to be done differently? How do I eat going to be done differently? I'm doing,
I'm toying with fasting, all sorts of other fasting, the way I eat, the way I
sleep. I'm learning to play the fiddle and the guitar and the ukulele. I'm playing with Spanish.

(02:13:23):
I've always loved language, so I'm playing that, you know, that Spanish, the word enjoy is
disfroating, which it literally means to take the fruit out of, like you say, take the fruit out of
that toy, like enjoy that toy. So descriptive. Yeah. That's one of the things I love about
Smith. Well, actually, you know, the funny thing is, is when you start stepping into a different

(02:13:47):
language, I, when I was a kid, I noticed a lot of like really interesting things about language,
but at some point they kind of dried up. Yeah. But now it's real welcoming. This was like
turned on a circuit in my head and now I play, there's so many fun things with English that I
just never even noticed. So I guess what I'm doing is I'm like, I'm still reading a lot. I read

(02:14:12):
existential kink and oh, I love that book. The books that you recommended me,
the book I recommended to you, the or all of what's the name of Almanac, the
the ball about that. Right. So I'm still like digging. I'm digging costs of me,
but I'm finding that I read so many of them. I'm not getting the impact that I had when I was

(02:14:38):
younger. I'm learning less. Yes. Because like I said, I'm now I've written all these rules in pen,
you know, yes. And they're rules that I trust and I live by. And I'm like, nope, it's not it. It
might be a truth for someone else, but it's not. It's not true for me. Right. But when it's something
that interests me, I have the time to embrace it fully. And I'm and I once again, I'm trying

(02:15:01):
on these ideas and I'm playing with them a little bit. And if they work, then they work. And if they
don't work, then they don't work. Right. One of the things that I recently read about a guy,
this is back in the seventies, he went into a cave. He the experiment was he was going to go in there,
but he was out any time and he was going to live for, I think, a month. And he had he had exercise

(02:15:27):
equipment, he had food, he had everything he needed. And he had a radio. And every morning when he
woke up, he would get up and he would make an announcement on the radio and say, he woke up.
And when he decided to have breakfast, he would have you would have his breakfast. And then he
would have his lunch. He re-reported all of it as he went. And then when he got tired, he went to bed

(02:15:47):
and he reported the whole time. But once again, he had no clock, he had nothing to tell him the time.
And there was no sun that came up or that. So he had the only the only thing you go by was how long
it took to chew, how long it took to whatever. And they started finding out that he started like

(02:16:08):
his day started getting longer. Right. So they started out just like, you know,
10 or 15 minutes. But it got to the point that he was awake for like 18 or 20 hours.
And then you go to sleep for three or four hours and wake up and think that he slept all right.
And he started again. And so we called him at, you know, 3am and be like, huh, kind of wake up,

(02:16:30):
I'm up, make breakfast. And then that cycle kept on going. He kept doing 18 hour days and would sleep
for just a couple of hours at night. And every day he had count for 160. And he had learned how
to do it to a metronome before he went at one, two, three, four, exactly 60 seconds. You almost get

(02:16:55):
it every single time. But towards the end of it, he was, I don't remember the exact number,
but he was basically, it would take him like two and a half or three minutes to count to 60.
His time was literally slowing down. Right. And by the time we, when he got to like day 14,
and they came in and said, well, your month's up, he was so, so completely confused. Wow. Right.

(02:17:21):
Because he was on day 14. Yes. Like his whole world. Wow. Slown down. So that made me kind of
think about, I mean, the whole world is slower down here, but I'm trying to forcefully slow down.
The world isn't measured in money or in things that you accomplish or in anything else. The world

(02:17:49):
is measured in moments, in a glimpse of laughter and a knowing look from a kid or a wingman,
or a titter or a giggle or a cry. Right. It's a moment. That's how it's measured. And you
can live your whole life and not experience those. You can build walls around yourself and you can

(02:18:13):
go work in a cubicle and you can get by it and have almost none of them suffer when someone
accidentally bumps into your grocery store. Or you can manually go to the grocery store and
or you can manifest, you can hatch as many of those moments in to every waking hour as is possible.

(02:18:36):
And so that's what I'm trying to do right now. And it's not from a dark, scary place. I'm not-
You're not grasping. I'm not grasping and I'm not like, I'm afraid I'm going to die or anything.
I just I'm in this spot that I'm like, well, if I'm here, I'm going to enjoy it. Right.

(02:19:00):
I'm not going to waste my time on stupid shit. Right. If it doesn't immediately give me,
like, it's not something that I- So, hell yeah. Then I'm trying not to do that.
It used to be like I would was saying no a lot more. But now if it's not, fuck yes.

(02:19:24):
And I knew that concept a long time ago, but I tried to live by it. But now I'm
really trying to live by that. The idea of a legacy is bullshit.
Everything that you've said and done, your kids might hear and might remember for the
rest of their life after you've died. But then they'll die. And you might even have created

(02:19:51):
a strong legacy of family and the way that people interact in the world. But
on a long enough timeline, everyone's going to forget you. And all of the work that you've done
is going to turn to dust. And all the work that was based off of that is going to turn to dust.
And in an incredibly short amount of time, all of humanity will just be a dot, right? A smudge

(02:20:19):
on this crazy fucking universe, right? This whole universe has gone on for
billions and billions of years before you. And it might not even notice, it might not even
even been able to turn its head and see that humans existed before they blink out of existence.

(02:20:42):
And it will just be the universe for billions and billions of years on a flip side.
All right.
Reconnecting. I love technology.
Orlo? Oh, hey, I hear you now.
It's a sign from the universe.
Yeah, exactly. I don't even know where I was at.

(02:21:08):
So and what all of that narrative that you were just saying made me think of is
a past version of me would have heard utter bleakness in that. Like that sounds so depressing,
depending on your cosmology. Like when you see the world, when you see the universe as
something that is purposeful and is beautiful, not purposeful in a religious way, but just purposeful

(02:21:32):
in there's that fingerprint of creation on everything. It's the Alan Watts' joyful cosmology.
Right. Then everything that I heard you saying sounds like pure optimism to me,
because your point is, the whole point of it is be here now, experience the experiences
that are in front of you. Exactly.

(02:21:54):
Yep. And it's the most, it's so incredibly joyous.
Yes. Like get on your hands and knees with a two-year-old, you know, you know, front wall.
That is the most amazing thing in the world. That's it. That's where it's at.
Yes. That's freaking beautiful.

(02:22:18):
And I mean, money is the thing, right?
That's the problem. That's the block. That's the thing you need. And when you get on your knees
for this moment with a two-year-old, when you just be here now and you stop worrying about it,
the sense I'm getting is that you're going to start doing the things that you love to do.

(02:22:38):
You're going to bring something that only you can bring to the world
and you're going to get paid. It ain't going to be the way you think.
It's not going to be the way you expect or plan, but don't worry about it.
And you don't, you don't have to have any money to get on your hands and knees with a two-year-old.
Yes. Or talk to the ocean.

(02:23:01):
Right. That's another thing that's out of this.
Or the trees. I talk to the trees because I'm surrounded by them, but.
So the same thing, right? You don't have to, you can experience joy
anywhere. Yes. What I am fortunate for is that I have the freedom of my time
to do that essentially anytime I want. Right. But you can, that it's not required.

(02:23:23):
Yeah. If I was a kid now, knowing now what I know,
maybe I would have just gone out into the woods and built a cabin.
Go get a book.
Raised by wolves. The problem with that is it robs you of one of the most beautiful things in the world.
And that's humans in my opinion. And without other humans, you can never,

(02:23:48):
you would never have been able to come to see yourself when you were 13.
Exactly. Or start, start that journey, which obviously you are still on and an even more epic way,
because you're up there, you're in the woods, you're in the woods, you're in the woods,
you're in the woods, you're in the woods and you're in a world where you're on Kamak all night long,
and you're not going to make it all the time.

(02:24:10):
You're going to not make it all, you're going to kingdom come anymore.
You're a universe. If you're up more, be ق meeting the backup leadership and being like,
Hey, thank you. Which sun is it?
Let's make this while you're pretty sure you have the üç itself center in you.
Wait, what?
So, what I was saying. The reason it's interesting
for me to go live in 깬i first off is to make real decisions in it,

(02:24:31):
are.
I am both, right?
Exploring and listening.
But at the same time, I love building
things. I love,
I love helping and I love being part of communities and,

(02:24:52):
and tight.
I love being in the, in the hustle and the bustle and the flow.
And part of that for me is where I found the most beauty in that is when I'm in
the middle of it, when I'm running a business or I'm,
I'm building a thing that other people can get.

(02:25:13):
And so I am looking, you know,
I told you that I didn't get the endorphin rush that I was hoping for out of
this last business. Right? So now,
this and now the question is what is the next business?
But I'm not going to just go nimbly bimbly into another business.
This next business has to be something, it's going to have to be something big,

(02:25:36):
something, well, I don't know, big, big is not the right word.
It has to be something that is very, very true to me.
Organic is that, does that work?
Like springs forth out of you rather than your kind of architect, like being like,
okay, what am I going to do? I'm going to do this.
It should be organic, but it shouldn't be too organic.

(02:25:57):
Cause I, cause I want it to be something that seems,
I want it to be hard.
But you want it to come out of the questions you're asking yourself now.
Yeah. And the,
going back to the beginning when I asked you to, when I flipped the narrative on
you, part of who I'm, what I'm trying to learn is who I am to other people.

(02:26:19):
I know who I am. I know my thread.
I know my conscious thread, right?
But I want to see other perspectives.
So I don't, and I don't know exactly how I'm going to go about that,
but that's one of my goals. And I, for some reason,
I feel like, like that is one of the threads that,

(02:26:40):
that I need to see myself through other perspectives.
Another thread that's been happening is that I'm trying to learn,
that's been happening lately is this law of attraction that I always kind of,
I read books about the law of attraction years and years ago.
And I kind of like, and I tried it in my mind and I didn't like it,

(02:27:03):
but I have recently, like, I just keep,
if I'm thinking about a thing, it's just there.
Like Kay and I will be talking about something and it's just like, you know,
an ad pops up on Facebook or something like your phone's listening to you,
except it's not that it's like in real life, the person you're talking about,

(02:27:23):
you're thinking about like the night before the next day walks through your
door. Right? In completely random ways.
And it keeps spinning back on this interconnection
of the world. And I don't know if I'm going to build a business around this.
I doubt I will,
because that's not really my thing that I think that I can explain to the world.

(02:27:46):
But it's a thing that I'm super interested in.
And I don't know if I'll ever be able to pin that down.
Maybe that's just the thing that I chased for a while,
but it's something that just keeps happening.
I mean, you talked about getting into training or education or mentorship,
some version of that. I'm not sure exactly how you said it,
but that just reminds me about every book I read

(02:28:10):
where someone is explaining how they did it.
There's always the thread of if you want to learn something, teach it.
In a lot of your narrative, I'm like, you need to write a book,
like not because you have all this information to share with the world,
but because you are fucking curious and that's how you're going to scratch that
curious itch. I'm going to be watching with interest.

(02:28:31):
I'm glad to see where your life has come now.
And it's very much where the first time I thought of you, I was like,
I bet I know where his life has gone,
because I knew the questions you were asking and the curiosity and the energy
and the honesty that you were coming to it.
And it's just fantastic to hear the story and to see where you've gone.
And it's an inspiration to me because I started my intentional finding myself,

(02:28:56):
looking at myself much, much later, like age later than you did.
And so every time I hear a story of somebody who has been down some of the
roads that I'm trying to find, trying to walk down, it's just, I mean,
even if I don't learn anything, because the truth is you're a very different
person than me, I'm not going to do things the same way that any other person

(02:29:19):
has done them. I don't want to anymore, but it's just encouraging to hear
somebody else who's doing it.
And it was just like, whatever, I'm just going to, I'm going to figure out who I
am and I'm going to figure out how to be me in this moment.
I appreciate that.
And there are so many questions.
Oh, I'm sorry.
What did you say?

(02:29:40):
Oh, thank you for reaching out and reconnecting us.
Hell yes.
There are so many questions I've had, so many rabbit trails I've avoided,
because they had a feeling that this was, there was going to be a lot here,
you know, just a lot of time to kind of get, get caught up on who you are,
get that picture.
But in, in recording out of recording, I look forward to so many future

(02:30:00):
conversations with you as time allows life is busy in many ways for both of us.
But I look forward to it.
Me too.
If you were, because I mean, you talked about, you have a pretty good idea that
you're going to die and the universe is going to die.
Well, the universe, maybe not, but everyone's going to die.
So let's say that you're, you know, you're going to die tomorrow and you've got

(02:30:24):
one opportunity to say something that is going to make an impact.
What would you say?
Oh man.
I would just say, I love you.
I love it.
I have very few regrets.
I, I'd like to say that I have, that I haven't, you know, I haven't left

(02:30:44):
anything on the table.
Like I made a new year's resolution last year and it was like, it was basically
be more jumbled or right.
Be the guy that can walk into the craziest situation in the world and, and
be completely calm and cool about it.

(02:31:05):
And so every time that I do something that I regret, I often question, you
know, did that come from a fear or where, where does it come from?
Just like when I was 13 years old, I'm like, where did that, why did that come
from?
Why did that happen?
And I dig until I find it.

(02:31:28):
And if I can, sometimes I just have to like, just acknowledge it.
I just have to look at it and say, Oh, you're a fear that I didn't know I had.
Right.
And then they stopped being a fear.
Yes.
So I'm now at the point, if you were to ask me, if I had fears, I could say yes.

(02:31:50):
I could say no.
And they would both be true.
Yes.
What's your biggest fear?
Right from the gut.
You already said you don't have fear.
I got that.
But on the yes side.
Yeah.
Like losing my kid in a crowd or like it's like, it's going to be a completely

(02:32:11):
irrational fear.
Okay.
It'll be different in every moment.
And probably about your kids.
I guess fear would be to not be prepared or not understand something that I need to
understood.
And, and actually, if I was to pin a point of fear that has been a long-curing fear.

(02:32:31):
That I can't get rid of.
It's hard to say what the name is.
It's hard to name it.
I've seen the closest I've seen in like books that I've read is people talking about the
fear of like six being of succeeding.
Right.
I see.
And it's.
I.
That is not it.

(02:32:53):
Precisely.
Because I because I'm not afraid of success.
But.
Are you afraid of getting corrupted by success?
No.
Okay.
Not at all.
But it's a fear of.
I think it's a fear of too much velocity.
Like I feel like there's times in my life that I could have just.

(02:33:14):
Storm through the gates.
You know, but I, but I made a soft entrance because of fear.
Right.
And I ended up.
Bageling my way through.
But.
But in retrospect, I was like, why didn't I just do that?
Like strong and.
Powerful.
You afraid of speed wobbles.

(02:33:35):
Speed.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe I'm afraid of speed.
You're afraid to just fully streamline yourself.
On that skateboard, going down that hill, because.
You know, the speed wobbles are coming.
If you go too fast and then it feels out of control.
And then you don't know something.
I don't know.
That makes sense.
It's not a very.

(02:33:56):
Fun answer.
All the answers are fun because they, they show a snapshot of the person I'm talking to, which gives me a reaction, which shows me a snapshot of myself.
So I like that.
I really appreciate that you took this time late at night.
And it's it is late.
I'm tired.
I got to go to sleep because I got to get up early and I know you do the same.

(02:34:19):
So I just want to say thank you.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
It's one.
Time flies when you're talking about things that.
That charge you up.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, sir.
Yes.
Thank you.
We'll talk again soon.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.

(02:35:03):
Bye bye.

(02:35:33):
Bye bye.

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