S10e12: Jake Reisch – Telling the Whole Story

Jake Reisch, a 2024 Hoffman Process graduate, is passionate about building impactful companies from the ground up. He's also an authentic speaker and storyteller, as you'll hear in this conversation with Jake and Sadie. At the heart of Jake's story is authenticity, courage, and a willingness to stay present to himself. At the start, Sadie asks Jake to share his bio - a seemingly quick and easy task. In Jake's case, though, he has realized that his bio and how he shares about himself and his life have radically changed since his time at the Hoffman Process. It was after completing the Process that things started to click for Jake. He found he could witness his patterns in real-time and consciously make different choices in his daily life. At one point, as he shares, he found himself publicly speaking about his experience in childhood. He told his audience about his mistakes when he was young and his successes as an adult, building very successful startups. Both were, and are, true. Jake then told his audience that in his successes, he'd been "leaning into the gifts that he was given that he just didn't know how to use when he was younger." Jake was able to share publicly all of himself and his history. He's found that sharing hard things with others permits them to share their hard things, too. That's how deep relationships become possible. One more thing about today's episode: as mentioned, Sadie Hannah, Hoffman teacher and coach, hosts this conversation with Jake. Sadie is our newest Hoffman Podcast host. She and Drew will share the role of host moving forward. Congratulations, Sadie! Thank you, Jake, for telling us your whole story. We hope you enjoy this authentic and intimate conversation with Jake and Sadie. More about Jake Reisch: Jake is a Forbes 30 Under 30 startup founder with a passion for building impactful companies from the ground up. He is currently the Executive Director at the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction while actively coaching and investing in high-potential, impact-oriented startup CEOs. He completed the Hoffman Process in March 2024. Jake currently lives in Panama City, Panama, with his wife Isabella and small dog Barry. Follow Jake on Instagram and LinkedIn. As mentioned in this episode: ADHD - Attention-deficit/hyperactivity Disorder Cornell University - Office of Entrepreneurship at Cornell Neurodivergent/Neurodiversity AeroFarms - Aeroponics EverSound Post-exit Founders Group on LinkedIn  

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Suddenly,
I was publicly
speaking about my whole experience
in childhood,
all the mistakes I made,
getting arrested.
I was not an angel. And I was
sharing that over the last ten years, I've
been building very successful
startups,
leaning into the gifts that I was given

(00:22):
that I just didn't know how to use
when I was younger. And so I got
to share fully with people
who I
was. And I think those were the moments
where it really clicked.
Hello, and welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a
podcast brought to you by the Hoffman Institute.
My name is Sadie Hanna. And in this
podcast, you'll hear real conversations and stories with

(00:45):
graduates about their courageous journey inward, and how
their love and light are living in the
world around them. Love's Everyday Radius.
Thank you for being here and welcome.
Hey everyone and welcome. I'm Sadie. I'm here
today with Jake Breisch.

(01:06):
Thank you so much for being here with
me. It's amazing to share this with you.
Wonderful.
A really interesting place to dive in is
as we were preparing for this,
we talked about bios,
and you're like, actually, my bio has changed
in some way. So maybe that's a good
place to begin.

(01:26):
Who are you? What do you do in
the world?
How has your bio changed over the past
couple of years?
Yeah. Well, it's,
it's funny that the first thing that comes
to mind, I think, for most when you
hear about a biography is, I think, especially
for Americans, is professional
because it's much of how we define our

(01:46):
lives. But I think
more recently, over the last year and change,
I've been thinking a lot about what it
means to truly
live into who I am more fully, and
I think Hoffman was part of that.
I guess I'll start with a little bit
of the context on, like, what created this
human,
which is, you know, I grew up in
small town Upstate New York, and I was

(02:08):
raised by two parents that were super altruistic
and very much box checkers.
Always got great grades, went to the top
schools,
first in their family to go to college,
and
I was the middle child. And when I
came along, I was a little different.
I got to high school,
and
I was the only Jewish kid in the

(02:29):
school of 800 people.
I didn't know that other Jews existed at
that time. We're just different. We're just we're
just different humans here.
I was also ADHD.
Today, ADHD, I feel like, means something slightly
different because we're all so distracted by our
devices. But but back then, I was just
distinctly
and unusually

(02:50):
energetic and distracted and
hard for teachers to manage, and that that
started all the way in elementary.
I was diagnosed at nine,
and
that commenced, like, a eight year period where
I was in and out of the doctor's
office with my mother. They would always ask
me this question of,
so how are the meds working?

(03:11):
How's Jake doing? And I remember distinctly
that I would never answer that question.
My mother would answer that question,
and I just kind of accepted that that
was part of my life that it was
different. The most embarrassing thing that would happen
in school would be that I would forget
to take my meds
in the morning,
and I would

(03:31):
get I would see a call come in
to the classroom
in my first class. And as soon as
the ring happened,
I knew immediately, I thought, oh,
I forgot to take my meds, and my
father would be down there, and it would
just be mortifying to me. But that's, like,
just a little bit of the context of
me as a child.
My parents

(03:52):
were phenomenally loving and caring in the ways
that they knew, and I consider myself to
be super lucky.
But all of that context of being
super creative,
engaging,
very loving, I got a lot of that
from my father.
It just didn't fit well in public school,
so I had a lot of challenges, especially

(04:13):
in high school.
I got in actually quite a few fist
fights
because
being the only Jewish kid in rural New
York
was,
stimulated some interesting insults.
It was really painful then.
And as I look back now,
'35,
especially after Hoffman
and kinda seeing and uncovering

(04:34):
a lot of the patterns that I'll carry
forever,
seeing where they came from
and accepting that versus, you know, trying to
change myself or beating myself up for who
I am. I think that's a big part
of the change that I went through, I
mean, Hoffman particularly,
but
I had some struggles
post high school figuring out what I wanted
to do, but I ended up following my

(04:55):
parents footsteps
and going off to,
stereotypically,
from the office,
Cornell University.
And
getting there was actually another moment for me,
especially because I screwed off so much in
high school and got into so much trouble,
suddenly be at an Ivy League school with
more rule followers,

(05:16):
more box checkers.
The first thing I remember at Cornell was
how much I felt like I needed to
fake who I was
once again. So now I was transitioning from
being, like, you know, the cool kid in
high school trying to, you know, trying to
fit in, standing up for myself,
getting into a lot of trouble, smoking a
lot of weed. And then I was at

(05:36):
Cornell, and then I felt like I had
to do it all over again because I,
you know, by this point, I discovered that
I definitely didn't wanna just follow the path
of a lot of my peers from high
school and just, like, end up
staying in Geneva, New York, which is where
I was born.
And so I remember sitting in this info
session
around orientation
that was about, you know, consulting or investment

(05:57):
banking or something.
And the program I went to is, like,
just kinda siphoned kids off to these top
investment banking firms. I remember sitting there and
just feeling like, oh, respect, but these aren't
my people. Like, I don't feel like I
fit in here again either.
And by this point, I was just like
I knew what it could feel like to
be myself. I'd kinda experienced it in brief

(06:19):
moments where, like, people would appreciate
my energy and creativity, and I knew that
I didn't wanna end up back in a
place where
the career path I chose
slammed me right back into that box that
I was experiencing all through high school.
And so,
I went into
the office at entrepreneurship at Cornell,
and

(06:39):
I had, you know, been thinking about starting
businesses. My parents encouraged us to make our
own money,
and so I was always snow shoveling, lawn
mowing, hustling around the neighborhood, you know, finding
ways to buy whatever toy I wanted or
whatever. I was kind of excited at the
idea of of building a start up, and
so I got into that entrepreneurship at Cornell

(07:01):
program.
What's funny if I think back two years
prior,
I did the Hoffman process about a year
ago. If I think back
when I was kinda in the thick of
my career two, three years ago, all that
I just shared, I wouldn't have even shared
with the team members that I was working
most closely. I was hiding
that part of myself

(07:22):
because I was embarrassed
that when I was younger, I was screwing
up, that
I was medicated at an early age. I
was told I have a disability.
I was put in classes where I had
extra time for my test,
and the people in those classes generally had
a disability that for me felt different.

(07:43):
I'm only now able to actually
share all that
with comfort.
Yeah. I mean,
I felt different
is one thing, but it was also
and that's a problem
that needs to be fixed.
I can really relate to, and I think
a lot of people can also the experience
of trying to fit in whether it's the

(08:05):
high school
peers or in college. It's like, okay. Now
I'm gonna somehow try to be what everyone
else is or but knowing it doesn't quite
fit. I think that's
a really, not always human experience.
Thank you for having the courage to share
it and to lead with it.
What you start to realize

(08:27):
is that
when you
share
the things that you're at times the most
afraid of,
you give people permission to share
with you
the things that they're most afraid of. And
then suddenly, you know that person more fully,
and then suddenly, you have more connection
with that person, and then suddenly, you can

(08:47):
build a relationship that has just a different
level of depth.
I have to say, I think having traveled
the world, been fortunate enough to just be
in so many amazing places, and learned that
in The US, it's even more acute,
the desire to present
in a certain way
because that way is the quote unquote right

(09:08):
way to be,
and we all carry that. We carry that
for a long time. I carried it for
thirty three, thirty four years,
and it feels better to let that go.
So taking us back into that day you
walked into the office of entrepreneurship,
take us there. Oh, I immediately could tell
that these were my people. There was a

(09:29):
venture capitalist there, a couple other students that
were hacking on startup ideas, and I could
just tell that I was kind of around
some neurodivergent
people.
There was less khakis and suits
and a lot more casual, creative
people in general. So I ended up just
in that moment feeling appreciated for my energy

(09:51):
level and feeling like I don't have to,
like, act.
And this
woman, Deb Moshe, who I still keep in
touch with and know very well,
Zach Shulman, were incredibly helpful to to me
in, like, kinda gaining confidence. Like, they believed
in me. And I didn't usually get that
from
authority figures in education.
I usually got that like stay in your

(10:12):
seat. Don't forget to do your homework.
Make sure you're ready for that test tomorrow.
Why are you fidgeting so much? Why are
you cracking these jokes?
I was used to that. So that was
new.
If I take it from there, there was
a lot going on, but it was a
lot of the same while I was finishing
up at Cornell, which was I was just
trying to complete my classes

(10:33):
and trying to build a startup that I
felt like
had a meaningful impact on the world in
a positive way
that could stand the test of time
for my energy level. Because, like, by this
point, you know, as I'm getting ready to
exit Cornell, I'd done an internship with the
founder of a company called AeroFarms

(10:53):
who passed away just a few years back.
He was one of the early leaders in
aeroponic
farming systems. So it was like a social
impact startup, and I got to work side
by side with the CTO of that company.
It's become
massive.
Has nothing to do with anything I did.
That's for damn sure. But I got to
see how quirky he was, how special he
was, how obsessed he was. That was me.

(11:15):
I just gained energy from solving these problems,
and that really gave me a lot of
confidence that this was the career path for
me. As I was exiting Cornell, I
had just started
a company called Eversound.
The idea was
you know, we've got all these senior living
communities
all across the country. There's like 50,000 of

(11:37):
these
congregate living centers for older adults, dorms for
older adults. They've got different level of care.
Some of them are health care related. Some
of them
are just independent
living. But I had experience with a loved
one that a lot of these places
are really difficult to get socialization
for a number of reasons.

(11:58):
One reason being there just aren't the best
activities.
There isn't a lot going on in general.
The other reason is hearing loss, people not
being able to communicate
with one another.
The approach that we took was unusual, which
was we provided both assistive listening technology and
live

(12:18):
on demand programs that were streamed to a
community for therapeutic recreational
programs. So virtual travel and bingo and all
sorts of fun games, and that kinda commenced
a eight year
journey where all I did was work.
All I had going on was work. I
was able to actually

(12:38):
put all of my
processing
of why I am the way I am,
like, who am I truly. I put all
of that on hold because all I was
doing was building a company.
Your patterns definitely come up. But after a
while, I I realized it was holding me
back, and I started doing some work on
it. But I wasn't truly able to get
into
meaningful steps forward being the the person I

(13:01):
wanted to be until
I had the space to disconnect.
But even the fact that I chose
building a company and
wanting to be
validated as, quote, unquote, successful
for my parents. I want to prove to
them that, like, hey. I know I screwed
up a lot in high school,
but
look at me now.

(13:23):
I've made it. I've built a company. You
know? And it it was a source of
motivation for me. It certainly was, but not
always
the best source of motivation because
if your whole identity is tied up in
something like that, during the down moments, those
moments were so,
so deep,
so far down because if the business failed,

(13:43):
then guess what I was again? I was
a bad kid again.
I failed.
And what I think the business
allowed me to do
was
escape
from what I needed to process and avoid
it altogether.
Because anytime something would come up, I could
just be like, oh, yes. Sorry. I'm busy.

(14:04):
I gotta I gotta do this. If I
had social anxiety or something, I will always
use that excuse. If I was spending time
with family and it was really bring up
a lot of stuff for me, easy. I
go and I send emails for the next
three hours. And everyone would respect that. It
was my escape. I just defined my whole
life by it.
What I really love is
the through line of I felt different and

(14:28):
isolated,
and I've created this amazing product that helps
people feel connected.
That really was like, oh, how cool.
It's an interesting reframing.
I had a partner in this, Matt Reiners,
who one of my best friends growing up,
he and I were, like, perfectly complimentary.
He was always the one out there externally

(14:51):
at the trade shows, working with communities. I
did a lot of that too toward the
beginning, but, like, I was
for sure
most comfortable kinda staying siloed,
working behind the scenes and and making sure
that we were hiring the best people and
kinda setting the culture and the tone. Still,
at that point, I I had a lot
of social anxiety. One way to look at

(15:12):
it is I think a lot of members
of my team at Eversound,
if they stumble upon this or if we
catch up anytime soon where I share more
about myself,
they would probably be able to perceive,
they look back at my leadership that sometimes
it probably felt a little forced,
Sometimes it probably didn't feel fully me because

(15:35):
part of this is also just being a
young entrepreneur where you have to fake so
much. There are many times where I felt
like I think this is what they say
when this kind of thing happens, and it's
almost a caricature.
Suddenly being a startup CEO and struggling with
what I struggled with, it's almost a caricature
of what I was going through before
to try and present as a good kid.

(15:57):
Now I just have a whole lot of
eyes.
We ended up raising, you know, tens of
millions of dollars for this startup and hiring
a hundred plus team members, and and there
was a lot of responsibility,
and there was a lot of people to
fake it for.
There's a lot there for me. So here
you are. Stakes are

(16:17):
high. Lots of people depending on you.
Your sense of worthiness of I'm good. I'm
not the bad kid,
riding on it as well in the more
vulnerable moments, and
eight years of work, work, work, work that
allowed you to not quite look at it.
So, ultimately,
we know that somewhere in the middle of
this story, you do the process.

(16:38):
How did you get there? Well, there was
a moment actually when
toward the middle of building Eversound, so maybe
four years in, we are starting to scale
out. We moved too quickly, and I hired
too many people, and I had to let
handful of people go. And I didn't handle
it well. I didn't really know what I
was doing. Then suddenly, I had, of course,

(17:00):
them upset with me.
The decision to do was very very obvious,
but hard to understand for a team that
felt like family. And suddenly, I had a
lot of people that I truly cared about
that did not like me anymore, that despise
me is what it felt like. And I
had this full blown breakdown.
I called my mother and I was I
remember exactly where I was. I was crying

(17:20):
because
it was one of the lowest moments I'd
ever had.
And I didn't know why it was so
triggering. Like, you're a startup CEO. You gotta
make tough decisions, like, not everybody's gonna like
you. I've been being told that all along,
but
this was the moment where it came true.
And I was like, man, why why can't
I handle that? Why is that so difficult
for me? And in that moment, I kinda
realized there was there's a lot that I

(17:42):
need to process post
Eversound. And so
when we were acquired in
2023,
that was the hardest six months of my
life leading up to the acquisition,
Never worked so hard in my life. And
then suddenly,
it's over. You go from, like, hundred hour
weeks to,
you know, transactions closed. There's a lot of
integration. But that was when I immediately turned

(18:05):
my eyes toward, okay.
It's time to take care of myself.
It's time
to to find the best way to
learn who I am underneath, and I joined
this group. It was called the post exit
founders group.
A friend of mine posted in that group,
said that she had done the Hoffman process.

(18:25):
And I hadn't even heard of it at
that point, but I was looking for a
retreat. I did a couple weekend
meditation retreats in Sedona.
They didn't click for me. I was doing
a lot of personal
coaching,
but then I heard about the Hoffman process.
And the biggest thing that stood out for
me was that I wouldn't have my phone
for seven days guaranteed.

(18:47):
Actually, I had two requirements. One was that
phones would be taken away, and two, that
I could hide all of my work. I
didn't wanna talk about work at all, period,
full stop. I didn't wanna have that continue
to cloud. And I think that was because
one of the retreats I did in Sedona
asked what people did,
and

(19:07):
I shared that I was very high level.
But there was a financial advisor in the
group, and so I felt immediately
the relationship changed with that person where, like,
I could tell that they were perceiving
certain things about me and wanting to to
get close, not because they wanted to know
who I was. So that's how that requirement
ended up being part of it. And then

(19:28):
I did my Hoffman process in
March of twenty twenty four.
By that time, I'd finished all responsibilities
with the acquirer,
and I was just ready to full force
dive in.
I'm sure
we all experience
this need to present ourselves
in a certain way and feeling underneath. Like,

(19:49):
imposter syndrome is
widely talked about
professionally and just in general.
But I think there's something
really
impactful
for both the people you encounter
in the future and for yourself
to let as much of that
shell.
I think of it kind of as a

(20:09):
shell that you have
around you that you just want with each
passing year to just, like, shed a little
bit more of that shell
because it feels so good, and
the world responds in really positive ways.
And I think that's part of what I
experienced while
at the Hoffman process was that I felt
this level of depth with other people

(20:31):
that was
in some ways really new to me.
And I kinda gave myself permission to be
all the components of what kinda make up
Jake and not hide from it by having
a professional identity that's
easy to hide with. I go back to
that moment you described about walking into the
office of entrepreneurship

(20:52):
and
this sense of
maybe it's okay
to show different parts of me, or maybe
it's okay
to engage with this
that's different than how I've always tried to,
like, force myself to be.
Is there a moment
that you remember that stands out

(21:14):
where you gave yourself that permission?
Within the Hoffman process,
I think what I noticed as I shared
things
with people that I hadn't shared before and
noticed
a much
different reaction.
Like, I had like a physical fear of
kinda letting people fully in because of how

(21:36):
that could impact me, whether I would be
safe or not.
As I let people in, noticing that the
response was actually
inarguably
positive.
There was no difficulty in reading
the emotions in the room and the depth
of the relationship. It was
just very obviously

(21:57):
a new level of depth.
If I think about the moments where I
I found myself feeling
most,
most resurrected,
most, like, fully authentic, if I think about
those moments, the majority of them actually came
slowly in the months after
because as you're coming out of the program,
you you feel amazing. You're riding

(22:18):
this wave of new insights, and you've learned
about why you have these tendencies, these patterns
to do certain things that cause you pain
or cause others pain, but you just can't
help it, and then you beat yourself up
for having done it again, and the cycle
just repeats over and over.
You start to just kinda watch that in

(22:39):
in the third person
looking at the events taking place with a
little less judgment.
Last year,
after the process,
I had a really special
experience
that more or less united
both of my identities
in a really public way, which was
part of my story coming out of high

(23:01):
school that I actually didn't share in the
beginning. I wasn't sure whether I would share,
but I'm gonna share it.
My parents sent me off to boarding school
for my last year of high school. Before
boarding school,
I went to a wilderness program. So I
lived in the woods for
seven weeks straight
because my parents found me with a big
bag of weed in my room. They were,

(23:21):
you know, very straight edge. It was unacceptable.
There wasn't a single person
in my entire company that knew that I
had trouble when I was in high school
that I was like I'm sure they knew
I was kinda crazy. I'm sure plenty of
them could have guessed I was ADHD, but
I just didn't share any of this part
of me. And then
in
last year,

(23:41):
I got connected with a company.
I was brought in as an interim CEO
of one of the largest
behavioral health companies.
The space had gotten clobbered
because there was a lot of mistreatment
of youth. There was a lot of issues
they called the troubled teen industry.
I saw it from a different vantage point
because I know that that program was what

(24:03):
also helped me snap out of it and
wanna like get my life together when I
was younger. So suddenly,
I was
publicly
speaking about my whole experience
in childhood,
all the mistakes I made,
getting arrested.
I was not an angel,
and I was sharing that
by the way, over the last ten years,

(24:25):
I've been building very successful
startups,
leaning into the gifts that I was given
that I just didn't know how to use
when I was younger. And so I get
to share fully with people
who I was,
and I think those were the moments where
it really clicked.
It clicked some at Hoffman,
but
more so in the months that come,

(24:48):
it gave me permission
to step more fully into who I am
and see how people respond
in a professional setting.
Sadly,
we didn't see a path for the behavioral
health company, and so that interim CEO role
didn't last,
but I get a lot out of my

(25:09):
experience doing that, bringing myself together.
Prior to
Jake feeling a bit like an imposter
to
a keynote
sharing
publicly
some of your challenges
and bringing that into your professional life, how
did people respond?
After the decision was made to not proceed

(25:31):
forward, the company wouldn't wouldn't continue on. I
actually had a
an actual keynote presentation for
a large therapeutic conference,
and there were several hundred people there.
Yeah. I used to be so nervous for
those presentations. My gosh.
I feel like I'd have to force so
much. I do all this prep. I rehearse
like crazy. For this presentation, I threw together

(25:52):
a slide deck on a plane and then
just went up and just like told my
story, and
the response
was overwhelmingly positive.
I am still getting
emails and outreach
of people who
are looking
for support, and I think I was able
to make a lot of impact in a
short amount of time.

(26:13):
And and it's also kinda what
spun me into what I'm focused on right
now, which is I'm I'm incubating a few
mental health startups and trying to find better
ways of supporting
neurodivergent
people in many cases with the resources that
they need to feel just more themselves in
general.
If you were to summarize,

(26:34):
what was responsible
for
your ability
to be yourself and share
your story in a more vulnerable way?
I think
the time at Hoffman
gave me, like, a full lens into the
complexity
of myself
and
both the reality that I can't have the

(26:54):
strengths that I have that I'm grateful for
without also having the weaknesses and the patterns
that I have. They're part of the same
person, and they're always gonna be part of
that same person. And so
you kinda wanna just be a little bit
more forgiving, and
I think that gave me permission
to accept the negative parts of my upbringing
and what I took from that and

(27:15):
be a little bit more myself and see
how people responded, and they responded positively.
We haven't even spoken yet
about where you are in your life now,
but you've made another big change that
feels a little
unpredictable, wild, maybe exciting about where you're living
now. I'd love to hear a little bit
about that. And, yes, where

(27:35):
is this permission to be yourself moving out
into the world from this point on?
What's funny, if I think about the experience
I had in between high school and college
in wilderness, like, at the time, I didn't
appreciate it for what it was. Like, I
was upset to be away from my friends
just like every kid would be. But, like,
after I kinda slowly saw the benefits of
it and just the insights that I would

(27:57):
have,
if I think about the impact that Hoffman
had and
in the year after
how
I've adjusted to being
a more full version
of myself
as a
leader,
as a
family member, as a friend,

(28:20):
as a
husband.
A lot of the story that
has played itself out in my head has
been this need to prove yourself
from a success
side in startups.
And
along the way, I just met this
magnificent woman who loved me unconditionally.
It just rocked my world,

(28:41):
and she so perfectly fit into my life.
I almost can't picture being able to
build a startup while not processing all the
stuff that I had from my childhood
without somebody like that along my side giving
me a different type of love
that was just completely unconditional. I didn't need
to fit into any boxes

(29:02):
to be a good kid. It's just really
worked and continues to.
Okay. Let's rewrite the bio right now.
Off the top of your head, two sentences,
three sentences.
If it's not all about the professional success,
if there's
unconditional love that has
changed you, if there's a permission for self,

(29:24):
if there's a connection to the little boy
inside of you that's part of your story,
what would it be?
I wonder if I'll ever have an answer
for that question
because it changes with such
frequency,
especially now as I'm going through this period
of reinvention. It changes with such frequency that

(29:46):
I almost
struggle to put a line in the sand
of kinda where I'm at
because it's more or less
these themes that have emerged.
For example,
I can be
incredibly
results oriented
and
dive deep into

(30:07):
what's the true source of this problem,
and it can intimidate people.
And
at my
core, at my center, like, who I truly
am,
I deeply desire connection
and to do good for other people,
and I think about that
often.
And I do little things,

(30:28):
especially for people
who I just appreciate
the difficulty of their life, and I know
that just a small little thing that no
one ever does for them will really make
them feel, but I I do those things
all the time because
I just get so much
from the connection
I immediately feel with that person.

(30:49):
It's funny doing this interview right now because
I am in this process of full blown
reinvention.
I just
moved after
ten years
in the Northeast
to Panama
with my wife to learn Spanish
fully.
I don't want any of that gringo Spanish.
Like, I wanna be full. I wanna talk

(31:10):
to someone. I want them to think that
I was raised in Panama.
And here we are indefinitely
living in Panama.
While I'm still working on the professional
projects, I still got some cool startups I'm
working with.
While I'm working on my marriage,
what it looks like
to be a not so busy

(31:32):
husband.
You know, what's funny about this interview is,
like,
realizing how little I've actually thought through a
lot of this stuff.
You said just a few minutes ago, I
find myself wanting to play a game.
When you said that, I wanted to interrupt
you and say, like, I find myself wanting
to do this whole interview over because I've
learned so much

(31:52):
just kind of replaying things
under a different set of circumstances. Like, I
never would have done an interview like this.
Like, I I mean, I've been increasingly uncomfortable
throughout this interview
because the further I go,
the more I have to go away from
the kind of shield
that keeps me safe, that I developed to
keep me safe when I was younger.

(32:13):
Thank you for being willing
to do this episode, to be willing to
be uncomfortable,
and for being present to yourself through the
whole thing.
Thanks for having me and for
allowing me the space to
learn more about myself
in ways I didn't exactly expect.
Yeah. Thank you.

(32:41):
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Razi Ingrassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves, in each other and in the world.

(33:03):
To find out more, please go to hoffmaninstitute.org.