July 18, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
57:49
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I think the stat is 78% of athletes go bankrupt within two years. | ||
| NFL players go bankrupt within two years after they retire. | ||
| And you think to yourself, like, you made all this money, how did you not be smarter with it? | ||
| Well, they never taught us in school how to manage our finances and how to save money and how to invest money. | ||
| They don't teach you these things when all you care about is sports. | ||
| So I didn't make that much money playing arena football. | ||
| I made $250 a week and we had food stamps. | ||
| I was living in Huntsville, Alabama and eating Chick-fil-A and whatever else I could eat from the food stamps. | ||
| And so there was no money that I saved. | ||
| My sister brought me in and let me crash at her house. | ||
| It was supposed to be for about a month. | ||
| A month turned into a year and a half and she gave me an incredible gift. | ||
| She said, "Okay, you gotta start paying rent." | ||
| After a year and a half. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| This is the Rubin Report and I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| Friendly reminder, guys, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that pesky notification bell so that you might just see our new videos when they come out. | ||
| And joining me today is a New York Times bestselling author, a business coach, and the host of the School of Greatness podcast, Lewis Howes. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| My man, thanks for having me. | ||
| I'm glad to have you here. | ||
| We gotta get some Some simple stuff out of the way before we do anything. | ||
| First off, I love that freaking jacket. | ||
| I almost bought that jacket. | ||
| I'm jealous about the jacket. | ||
| That's like Han Solo modern. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's clean, right? | ||
| It's clean. | ||
| I want that jacket. | ||
| Just a little touch of like, the accents are super clean. | ||
| You put anything in there? | ||
| I don't, no. | ||
| I should. | ||
| I've only worn this a few times, so I should probably wear more. | ||
| I put this on for you. | ||
| I knew you were gonna wear a jacket, and I normally just wear a black shirt, but I was like, let me wear something a little bit nicer. | ||
| We're an actual professional studio here. | ||
| I had to dress up for you. | ||
| Well, you got a pretty professional operation, too. | ||
| It's clean, it's clean. | ||
| I did your podcast in the midst of the lockdown. | ||
| It's the only live, in-person interview that I did in the whole thing. | ||
| We shook hands. | ||
| Well, we fist bumped and then we realized, let's just do it. | ||
| We actually shook hands. | ||
| And then we found out right afterwards that you hit the New York Times bestseller list for your big book. | ||
| It was in your studio that I found out. | ||
| The magic happens with us. | ||
| Two New York Times bestselling authors. | ||
| There we go, there we go. | ||
| Alright, there's a ton I want to talk to you about and I'm glad we're doing this because, you know, I do a lot of politics in here, I do a lot of culture wars and all that, but I think underneath all of that is a human thing that I think you are really excelling at at the moment. | ||
| So, before we get into that though, for the people that have no idea who you are, Who is Lewis Howes? | ||
| How the hell did he get that fancy jacket and what's he doing here? | ||
| I'm a human being on a quest to discover more of myself, how I can become better and how I can make a big impact on the people around me. | ||
| And I've always cared about human performance. | ||
| I've always just wanted to excel at the things I care about. | ||
| I think from an early age, I did it to try to prove people wrong because I felt unseen, unheard, unliked, unloved. | ||
| By everyone around me. | ||
| And even though that wasn't the truth, that's just how I felt. | ||
| My parents were there for me, my older siblings were there, but I just didn't feel like I fit in in a lot of ways. | ||
| And especially in school, I was very dyslexic. | ||
| If I even tried to read my own book, I'd probably struggle reading my own words that I wrote down just because... | ||
| I've always struggled with that, and I was in special needs classes for as long as I can remember. | ||
| During recess and lunch breaks in school, I would be with tutors. | ||
| So I didn't get to do a lot of the things that normal kids would do, and I just felt always insecure and insignificant in my abilities. | ||
| And that kind of stayed with me, and I'd use sports as my after-school kind of program to say, what can I do if school is something I struggle in, where in high school they would, I don't know if they did this in your high school, but they would actually rank us in our class on our report cards. | ||
| So I was always in the bottom four of the student class. | ||
| Like purely on grades? | ||
| They would say like, if you're 100 students, I was always 96 out of 100, or 100 out of 100, based on your GPA. | ||
| So I would always see that number in Dreddit. | ||
| Every quarter we would get our report card and I'd always see them on the bottom four. | ||
| I never broke out of the bottom four in school. | ||
| So it was just a very challenging time for me to think about. | ||
| And that's what we judged ourselves on in school growing up was like, who can read faster? | ||
| Who's smarter? | ||
| Who got A's and who got D's? | ||
| And so I use sports as my outlet to say I'm, you know, I'm going to become bigger, faster, and stronger than everyone else around me. | ||
| I'm going to show them that I'm worthy of love. | ||
| I'm worthy of their attention. | ||
| I'm worthy of being picked first, not being last. | ||
| And I just put my energy into that and made my dreams around that because I started to get really good at sports and that became kind of my mission until I got injured playing football. | ||
| Then sports ends and then that... Then my dream, my identity, you know, kind of Falls apart because I got injured playing arena football. | ||
| And I had, I mean this is in 2008 when the economy, it was the end of 2007. | ||
| The economy is crashing. | ||
| I remember I didn't have a college degree yet because I left early to go play football. | ||
| Tried to make the NFL. | ||
| Wasn't good enough to make it. | ||
| And I had no money. | ||
| I had college debt that I was trying to pay off. | ||
| I didn't have a job. | ||
| And I remember trying to go on LinkedIn to find jobs in 2007, 2008, and no one was hiring people without a college degree in 2008, let alone with master's degrees, they were having a hard time getting a job. | ||
| So I just remember saying to myself, what am I going to do? | ||
| I'm sleeping on my sister's couch at this time for a year and a half, trying to figure out, one, who am I? | ||
| I lost my dream. | ||
| I lost the ability to work out at this moment. | ||
| Everything I put my identity around to is gone. | ||
| I have no clue what to do next. | ||
| And this might be a first world problem, but for me, my identity was gone. | ||
| And I didn't know who I was in the world, or why I was even supposed to be here anymore. | ||
| How dark was that time? | ||
| Because you hear this with athletes all the time. | ||
| Major pro guys that, you know, they blow out the knee and it's over, and then... | ||
| You know, you find out that they're living on the streets five years later, all sorts of things. | ||
| I think the stat is 78% of athletes go bankrupt within two years. | ||
| NFL players go bankrupt within two years after they retire. | ||
| And you think to yourself, like, you made all this money, how did you not be smarter with it? | ||
| Well, they never taught us in school how to manage our finances and how to save money and how to invest money. | ||
| They don't teach you these things when all you care about is sports. | ||
| So I didn't make that much money playing arena football. | ||
| I made $250 a week and we had food stamps. | ||
| I was living in Huntsville, Alabama and eating Chick-fil-A and whatever else I could eat from the food stamps. | ||
| And so there's no money that I saved. | ||
| My sister brought me in and let me crash at her house. | ||
| It was supposed to be for about a month. | ||
| A month turned into a year and a half and she gave me an incredible gift. | ||
| She said, okay, you got to start paying rent after a year and a half. | ||
| So that push finally got me to say, okay, I need to learn. | ||
| If I'm not going to go get a job somewhere, I started truck driving for $250 a week. | ||
| I was driving Napa car auto parts for six hours a day. | ||
| $250 was your sweet spot. | ||
| $250 was my sweet spot. | ||
| I couldn't break that limit. | ||
| So I was like, how do I get past this? | ||
| And at the same time, I was also reaching out to people on LinkedIn, trying to find mentors. | ||
| I was just trying to interview people personally and ask them questions about how do I achieve anything after sports? | ||
| I just had no clue how to do it. | ||
| And she gave me a great gift. | ||
| She said, you've got to start helping and contributing to the rent. | ||
| And I didn't know what I was going to do. | ||
| I really was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. | ||
| But I applied for a job on LinkedIn. | ||
| I found a sports marketing job because I eventually graduated and applied for a sports marketing job. | ||
| And I got an interview. | ||
| My first ever interview that I got, applying for a job. | ||
| And for whatever reason, I had my one nice sport jacket from my college, I dressed up, and I'm leaving the house, my sister's house, I open the door to walk out to the street, and I can't take a step out of the house. | ||
| For whatever reason, I'm unable to actually leave the house and shut the door behind me. | ||
| Because for whatever, I was either so egotistical at the moment, or just believed in myself so much that I was like, if I go to this interview, I'm going to get the interview. | ||
| And I'm going to get the job. | ||
| And they're going to hire me, because I'm going to be so convincing that they're going to need me. | ||
| And then I'm going to stay here for two, three years, and I'm not going to enjoy what I'm doing. | ||
| And then I'm going to feel trapped and stuck, and I just didn't want to go down that route. | ||
| So that gave me the courage to say, okay, I need to go figure out how to make money on my own because I've never made a dime. | ||
| I wasn't this entrepreneurial kid doing lemonade stands and selling baseball cards and making shoe accessories or whatever in school. | ||
| I was just trying to play sports. | ||
| And so I had no entrepreneurial bone in my body, but the necessity to just survive | ||
| and be able to contribute to rent and pay for my own food as a 24 year old at the time, | ||
| 25 year old, became a parent. | ||
| And that was the push that I needed. | ||
| And so I left my sister's house, moved to my brother's place and started paying him, | ||
|
unidentified
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$250. | |
| $250 a month in rent. | ||
| And stayed there for about six months. | ||
| And for whatever reason, that investment, even though it was $250, was a way for me to think, OK, how do I make $500 a month so I can get a month ahead? | ||
| How do I make $1,000 a month? | ||
| It just started getting me thinking differently because I was forced to. | ||
| And that was 2009. | ||
| And here we are now. | ||
| And then it's been an interesting 11 years. | ||
| It's been an interesting journey. | ||
| So you mentioned some of the growing up stuff and self-esteem, so I know it's not the most fun thing to talk about in the world. | ||
| But you were molested when you were five years old. | ||
| Can you just break it down a little bit? | ||
| Because I think it does sort of frame a lot of the way you look at the world, obviously. | ||
| Well, one in six men have been sexually abused in some way in America, which I had no clue about these statistics until I started to open up about my sexual abuse and started to research it. | ||
| I just thought I was the only boy that had ever been abused and therefore I was worthless. | ||
| I was helpless. | ||
| And if people actually knew this about me, they would never love me. | ||
| They would never accept me. | ||
| People would laugh at me and make fun of me. | ||
| That was the fear inside. | ||
| And I think we talked about this a little bit where, you know, I can't imagine what it's like being gay, coming out, the fear that you might have if there's a lot of pressure against you, but I think we can understand each other in that sense of like, something you're afraid to share people, where you don't think you'll be accepted. | ||
| That's where I felt. | ||
| And I felt like When I was five I was sexually abused and when I was eight my brother went to prison for four and a half years. | ||
| So I would go visit a prison visiting room every weekend. | ||
| I remember walking in the first time and just being so intimidated and scared. | ||
| And we were the only white family there. | ||
| There was a lot of black and Mexican Latino families in the visiting room seeing the inmates. | ||
| And I remember thinking to myself, after many months, I would get to talk to some of these inmates. | ||
| And just, I was a curious eight-year-old. | ||
| I would just go say hi to people. | ||
| And I was like, these inmates are really nice. | ||
| You know, they're very kind. | ||
| They're sitting here praying. | ||
| They're with their families. | ||
| They're having good conversations. | ||
| Like, it made me think differently about inmates. | ||
| Now, some of them had done really bad things, were murderers and drug dealers and things like that. | ||
| But, it got me thinking about different perspectives of life. | ||
| However, I wasn't allowed to have friends during those four years because the neighborhood kids weren't allowed to hang out with me. | ||
| So, I was in a white neighborhood and having my brother go to prison The parents wouldn't allow their kids to hang out with me. | ||
| I wasn't sure what you meant there, yeah. | ||
| So I was sexually abused and then I just felt like I was never enough. | ||
| I was kind of picked on in school for my dyslexia and learning abilities. | ||
| My brother was in prison for four and a half years, so just the neighborhood talk, don't hang out with Louis, he's a bad apple also. | ||
| So it's just like, why is this all happening? | ||
| And I think that Made me question a lot of why I was even alive. | ||
| And I would get in trouble in school and say, you know, I wish I were dead. | ||
| I would say this all the time to the principal. | ||
| I wish I were dead. | ||
| I wish I wasn't here. | ||
| And so I think I was just always on a journey of trying to figure out, like, what's the purpose of my life? | ||
| What's the meaning of everyone's life? | ||
| How do we find a place where we can love ourselves, accept ourselves for who we are, what we've been through? | ||
| And how can we discover what our gifts, our purposes, our dreams, and figure out a way to make them come true. | ||
| That's been kind of my journey. | ||
| So a lot of that works at the adult level, but for the five-year-old going through this, how long did it last and how did you come out about that, so to speak? | ||
| I think it lasted, oh yeah, it lasted 25 years of having the story of the sexual abuse in my mind every single day, like replaying the movie of it happening every single day. | ||
| But also kind of deflecting it a lot, too, and just saying, OK, it wasn't that big of a deal. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| It happened. | ||
| I'm going to move on. | ||
| Don't be such a wuss. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| It's not a big deal. | ||
| And when I was 30, I was at the height of a lot of things in my career. | ||
| Built and sold a business for seven figures. | ||
| I had started getting accomplishments and awards as a business entrepreneur. | ||
| You know, I'd played professional football. | ||
| I was on the USA national handball team trying to make the Olympics, running a business, starting this podcast. | ||
| Like, things were happening for my career and on an accomplishment level. | ||
| But the more success I achieved, the more unfulfilled I felt inside. | ||
| And I didn't understand why. | ||
| I just thought, okay, I'm not doing enough. | ||
| I need to go achieve more. | ||
| And I had also moved to L.A. | ||
| from New York City for a girl. | ||
| And in a relationship I was in, and then we didn't work out really quickly. | ||
| The day I moved here, she broke up with me. | ||
| And it was just kind of like... The day you got here? | ||
| The day I landed, she kind of like sabotaged it and she was scared. | ||
| And we got back together and tried to make it work, but it was like an emotional rollercoaster. | ||
| And this whole kind of next six months was kind of another re-identity, trying to figure out, who am I? | ||
| What am I doing here? | ||
| What's happening in this relationship? | ||
| I just sold this business. | ||
| And I just started getting angry all the time. | ||
| I didn't know why I was so angry. | ||
| But this was kind of a common theme throughout my life of being triggered when I felt taken advantage of or abused in any situation, whether it be a personal relationship, a business partnership, a friendship, a family member. | ||
| If I felt like someone was abusing me, it would trigger me and I didn't understand why. | ||
| And I remember my friend Matt, who's here right now. | ||
| We started playing basketball a lot together on the pickup courts in the mean streets of Beverly Hills. | ||
| I'm sure I've played on those streets. | ||
| Super mean streets of West Hollywood, actually. | ||
| You probably know what I'm talking about. | ||
| San Vicente Park. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| And we would play three, four times a week. | ||
| And for whatever reason, I would get really aggressive at the smallest amount of Trash talk, right? | ||
| Some 20-year-old punk would be like, oh, this and this about your mom or whatever. | ||
| And I would be so aggressive back towards them. | ||
| I would scream at them. | ||
| I would get in their face. | ||
| I would shove people. | ||
| I would try to impose my intimidation will against everyone on the court because I felt under attack constantly. | ||
| I didn't know how to, like, manage it. | ||
| And one day I got in a pretty bad fight on the basketball court, or actually got in a fist fight, you know. | ||
| with another guy, and remember at the end of it, this is right across from a police station. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, oh, literally. | |
| You know what I'm talking about, literally across the street. | ||
| It's on the other side of the street, yeah. | ||
| And I remember thinking to myself, we probably played together at some point. | ||
| We might have, yeah. | ||
| Because I used to play there all the time. | ||
| I might have punched you in the face for that. | ||
| No, I'm just kidding. | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| I don't trash talk that much. | ||
| No, yeah, sure. | ||
| I let the play speak for itself. | ||
| You're just dropping threes all day. | ||
| I remember Matt was like, you know, get out of here because People are making threats about, like, I'm going to go to my car. | ||
| People were saying crazy stuff about what they were going to do to me after this. | ||
| And I remember being like, looking at the police station, being like, I could lose everything for something stupid. | ||
| Getting into a fight as a 30-year-old man. | ||
| Like, what am I doing? | ||
| It's a basketball game. | ||
| We're trying to have fun here. | ||
| And I remember running back to my home and looking in the mirror and just shaking. | ||
| I was just shaking. | ||
| I was like wiping off like the blood on my knuckles. | ||
| I was just like looking myself in the eye for the first time in a long time and I couldn't recognize myself. | ||
| And I was just like, who are you? | ||
| Who are you and what are you doing and what is wrong with you? | ||
| And just looking myself in the eyes and asking myself those questions was a big eye-opener for me, because I don't think we do this enough. | ||
| I don't think we ask ourselves, who are we? | ||
| What am I doing? | ||
| What is my mission? | ||
| Am I doing everything I can do? | ||
| Do you think that's the most fundamental question? | ||
| I mean, for all the people you've interviewed and talked to and coached and all that, that that right there, is it more than anything else? | ||
| I think the great individuals in the world are clear on their vision. | ||
| And they know exactly what they want and why they want it. | ||
| I didn't know what I wanted and why I wanted it. | ||
| I knew I wanted to prove people wrong. | ||
| I wanted to look good. | ||
| I wanted to be right. | ||
| I wanted to make money. | ||
| I wanted to be successful. | ||
| But it wasn't for a greater purpose. | ||
| It was for me to look good and to prove the... | ||
| The person who sexually abused me wrong, to prove the kids that laughed at me when I was reading aloud in class wrong, to prove the kids that picked me last in a sport wrong. | ||
| It was always to prove people wrong. | ||
| Not to lift others up. | ||
| And it's really challenging to constantly want to tear someone else down and other people down. | ||
| It's exhausting constantly doing this. | ||
| You're seeing this in the political space right now where people are just attacking each other. | ||
| I'm like, it's kind of exhausting at the end of the night to just like go to sleep when you're that much rage and anger towards something else. | ||
| And I'm all for Fighting for what you believe in and fighting for a great cause and fighting for equality and all these things. | ||
| But to aggressively want to prove others wrong, in my opinion, is a painful act. | ||
| And I'd rather just focus on a vision and try to lift others up with you in that vision. | ||
| So I think that's what a lot of people have that I've interviewed. | ||
| The great ones find a clear vision. | ||
| They accept themselves fully. | ||
| They know they're not perfect because none of us are. | ||
| They have come to acceptance with their past, the wrongs they've done, the things that they're not proud of. | ||
| But they've accepted it and they've moved towards something greater than just seeking success. | ||
| Because success is all about us. | ||
| Greatness is about others. | ||
| Success is about what I can do for myself to look good. | ||
| Greatness is what I can do for other people to lift them up. | ||
| And I think that's when you transition from just accomplishing something as a great athlete towards transitioning into something greater or accomplishing as a great business leader towards how can I truly serve my employees, serve my clients and customers and then serve the world around me. | ||
| And I think that's the difference between success and greatness. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| Pretty solid segue for about 30 reasons to get to a little bit of your chat with Kobe Bryant because I think it encapsulates so much of what you're talking about. | ||
| So I watched it again this morning and we talked about it when I was on your show and I hadn't seen the interview yet of you and Kobe. | ||
| And what I said to you in that interview was, that this was just a few weeks after he died, is that it felt like it was a rip in the universe. | ||
| Because it's hard to fathom, putting aside the tragedy of all the other people and his daughter of course. | ||
| But those aren't public people that we know, but of course it's as equal a tragedy, obviously. | ||
| But there was something about Kobe that it was like, I told you, I was watching sports, you know, the Spectrum Lakers channel the day before, and I saw him, and he was just being interviewed, and he's in a suit, and he's got the beard, and he looks really sharp, and I was like, man, that guy's just living his best life. | ||
| That was literally the day before. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It feels like a rip in the universe when someone who's doing all of the things that you just described, who has reached the pinnacle of their sport but then flourished after and started this basketball academy and a gajillion other things, then disappears from the earth. | ||
| So, can you just talk a little bit about what it was like to sit down with Kobe and What taught you, and did he have all of those pieces? | ||
| Because literally just everything that you just laid out right there, that's what he was talking about in the interview. | ||
| And you could see it was real. | ||
| There was no BS behind it. | ||
| He really could. | ||
| It was a powerful experience. | ||
| The whole setup of it was powerful. | ||
| We booked the interview the day before, so I didn't really have much time to prep, which was probably a good thing for me, because I didn't have like two weeks to think about, I've got Kobe. | ||
| It was like, we literally booked it at 6 p.m. | ||
| I think the night before, and then I was there at 6 a.m. | ||
| the next morning in his office in the OC. | ||
| And I remember the most powerful thing he taught me was not what he said, but his example. | ||
| And what I mean by that is when we got to his office, I think it was probably around 6.15, 6.30, the interview was at 8 o'clock, and I knew I was, the publicist was like, you got 20 minutes. | ||
| I think she originally said you got 15 minutes, but I was like, please give me 20, right? | ||
| When I ask two questions, we get there, and the assistant opens the door for us, And there's a big office space in Orange County. | ||
| And she says, here's where we normally film. | ||
| But in my mind, I was like, that doesn't really look that good. | ||
| Can I look around the office and see if there's another spot we can set up our cameras? | ||
| So we walk through the office and we go down kind of this long hall with conference rooms on each side of the hallway with glass windows. | ||
| So you can see inside the conference rooms. | ||
| And then it walks down into another big open space. | ||
| of more office chairs and things like that. | ||
| We walk down. | ||
| I see the other room. | ||
| I'm like, eh, I don't really like anything here. | ||
| Let's go back to the original space. | ||
| So we walk back through the glass hallway, and the last window on the left, I see the lights are off. | ||
| In the back of the room, probably 20, 30 feet back, I see a shadow of a man like this looking up, just looking up at the ceiling. | ||
| And no computer screen was on, there was no phone in his hand, and I look real quick, double take, and I see it's Kobe sitting there, like this, just looking up. | ||
| This is 6.15 in the morning. | ||
| And I'm thinking, our interview's not until 8, and I'm thinking to myself, I ask the assistant, I go, is that Kobe? | ||
| She goes, yeah. | ||
| And I go, what's he doing here so early? | ||
| Like, this is his company, this is his space, why is he here? | ||
| She goes, he's been here for almost an hour, and he was at the gym with his daughter, the one who passed away, at 4 a.m. | ||
| Working out with her. | ||
| And he comes here, he's always the first one here. | ||
| And he's always the most prepared. | ||
| And I'll go... | ||
| Just that moment alone of seeing Kobe as a shadow looking up, and I can only imagine he was visualizing his dream. | ||
| He was going over his game film for the day. | ||
| He was planning what he was going to be talking about. | ||
| There was an interview with me afterwards with Lil Wayne who was there. | ||
| So they were setting up another part. | ||
| It was kind of a surreal just morning. | ||
| Lil Wayne and all his bodyguards and this whole crew is there. | ||
| I'm there with one person setting up our three cameras and we're like, hey, you know. | ||
| And I was just like, this is surreal. | ||
| And about an hour, about 15 minutes before our interview, so for another hour, hour and a half, the lights are off in this room. | ||
| And now people started to come in around 8.30 in the office, and so there's some activity happening. | ||
| And I'm sitting there in the chair, just kind of waiting, just trying to like, be ready. | ||
| I don't know, is he going to come out early? | ||
| Is he coming out on time? | ||
| I don't know what's happening. | ||
| He ends up coming out probably two minutes before Eight o'clock, the start time. | ||
| And the publicist gave me a bunch of papers of everything not to ask him. | ||
| A list of things you cannot talk about, from his past, to his parents, to all these things. | ||
| Like, don't mention this, don't mention this. | ||
| I mean, a list. | ||
| I've never had this before. | ||
| And so, I know to myself, I've got two minutes to connect with arguably the greatest of all time, who's just won an Oscar as well, by the way. | ||
| Two minutes to connect before our 20 minute interview, right? | ||
| What am I gonna say? | ||
| And hopefully he doesn't, you know when you meet people that are really famous and you're inspired by them and you meet them and you're like, gosh, I'm really let down by them? | ||
| They say never meet your heroes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this guy was the complete opposite. | ||
| He was, right away came up to me, gave me a big handshake and was just like, hey, thank you so much for being here. | ||
| It really means a lot to me. | ||
| We're trying to get the message out about our podcast. | ||
| Like, thank you for taking the time. | ||
| Looked me in the eyes. | ||
| First thing I said to him was like, I just want to say thank you. | ||
| I work with, I'm friends with a lot of Olympians, and all of them say that during the last couple Olympics, you were the most giving athlete, that you would show up to other sporting events, that you would take photos with everyone in the, you know, in the village, and during lunches, that you were just so kind and giving. | ||
| So as a USA handball player, I want to thank you for how you show up during those times. | ||
| And right away he goes, you play handball? | ||
| And I go, yeah, I love handball. | ||
| And he goes, I love handball. | ||
| Playing it in Italy growing up, that's all I did as a fun activity. | ||
| And I go, amazing! | ||
| Yeah, it's such a great sport. | ||
| I wish we had it here in the USA more. | ||
| And then I mentioned a couple of people we had in common, and he's like, man, those guys are my brothers. | ||
| Like, I love that. | ||
| I'm glad we have some good connections. | ||
| And I said one more thing, I said, You know, your team has told me what not to share and what not to talk about. | ||
| Is there anything else off limits that I shouldn't talk about? | ||
| And he said, rip that up, ask me anything you want, take as long as you want. | ||
| So I was only supposed to have 20 minutes. | ||
| I think we went 40 or 45. | ||
| And I tried to be respectful because the publicist kept saying, like, wrap it up in the background. | ||
| And I was like, OK, let me be respectful. | ||
| But even the last few questions he answered where he was talking about, like, his whole mission was to tell great stories. | ||
| And him talking about love and family, for me, it was really inspiring. | ||
| Not only the words he says, but his example. | ||
| He isn't just saying work hard. | ||
| And Outwork, everyone, he's actually showed me as an example. | ||
| I didn't know if he was going to see me seeing him that morning. | ||
| Like, he didn't think I was going to walk past his office because I wasn't supposed to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he was there. | ||
| And just that example of, I don't get there to my place 30 minutes before my interviews, right? | ||
| You, I guess, I mean, you come in when you're ready, but it's like, just that example of hard work shows why he was so great and that was inspiring to me. | ||
| Isn't it interesting that, you know, they say the same thing about Michael Jordan. | ||
| He outworked everybody. | ||
| He practiced the hardest. | ||
| Like, you'd think that every athlete would be like, oh, that's the obvious way to do it. | ||
| Or forget athletes, that all of us in our lives would be like, oh, you want to be the best at what you do? | ||
| You got to work the hardest. | ||
| You got to show up first and you got to leave last and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And yet 99.999% of us don't do it, even though You look at the guys that you admire most, and they're the ones doing it. | ||
| It's a big sacrifice. | ||
| It's a lot of time and a lot of energy, and you have to give up so much to go all in on one thing. | ||
| So I know why it's hard to do. | ||
| I mean, it's like, he was up at 4 a.m. | ||
| working out with his daughter, and then he was at the office at 5.30 or whatever it was, or 6 or whatever it was, and it's like, it's a sacrifice. | ||
| We'd much rather be comfortable and sleep more, and watch Netflix more. | ||
| I like watching Netflix. | ||
| It's not easy to be great. | ||
| It's very challenging. | ||
| The commitment, the consistency over time. | ||
| And that's one of the things Kobe said. | ||
| He's just like, it's simple math. | ||
| I just put in double the hours as everyone else when I was a teenager. | ||
| It's the first year he started playing basketball at summer camp. | ||
| He didn't score one point in this whole like summer, in this tournament that he played in. | ||
| And then he started doing double the hours and the next year he was like the highest scorer. | ||
| He was like, it was simple math. | ||
| I wasn't more talented. | ||
| I simply put in more hours. | ||
| It's a good transition to something else that he said that I think is interesting where he talked, you were asking him about when he was sort of hitting his stride. | ||
| And he talks about this moment where Shaq is injured for like eight games and he scored I think 40, over 40 in eight straight games or something like that. | ||
| And then Phil Jackson calls him into the office when Shaq comes back and basically is like, Now you gotta tone it down, because now Shaq is back, and the East plays different, so when we get to the finals, we're gonna have to do this differently. | ||
| And you'd think that he would just be like, no, we're winning like crazy. | ||
| I'm dominating. | ||
| I'm better than Shaq, and we don't even need Shaq. | ||
| They have their own problems later. | ||
| But he basically was like, yeah, so I listened to the mentor. | ||
| That's what I wanted to get to, because you talk a lot about mentorship. | ||
| He listened to the mentor, in this case Phil Jackson, who had already done this with Jordan, and he dialed it back, and then of course they end up winning a championship. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, I think the coaches and mentors of my life have been instrumental towards my success. | ||
| Through every stage, from my parents being mentors and coaches, to my older siblings, Teachers and coaches in school. | ||
| Do you sense we have a major lack of that right now? | ||
| I mean, one of the things I keep saying on Twitter and every time I'm on TV now is it seems like we don't have a lot of adults in the room. | ||
| Not at an individual level, of course, there are mentors. | ||
| And we talked about, I wrote a whole chapter about Jordan Peterson in my book. | ||
| So it's not that these people don't exist, but it seems like in the public sphere, we don't have a lot of people right now that you can look to and be like, oh, they're modeling something that is the way I wanna be, something like that. | ||
| I think it's hard to have the courage to reach out to mentors in the first place and to identify like, okay, The Rock. | ||
| I would love The Rock to be my mentor, right? | ||
| Or Jordan Peterson for a young adult who's like, I'd love for Jordan Peterson to be my mentor and get in touch with him. | ||
| It may seem intimidating to reach out to someone. | ||
| How do I get in touch with them? | ||
| Luckily, Jordan Peterson has a great book that you can be mentored by his talks online, his podcast. | ||
| You can go to his tours. | ||
| You can learn enough from someone's book to hopefully implement it and learn from their example of what they're doing. | ||
| I really look at my model as Oprah meets The Rock meets LeBron James. | ||
| And I'm trying to say, okay, I want to learn from each one of those and create my own model of success for my mission, my purpose. | ||
| I feel like I'm a blend of all three. | ||
| I've got the athlete in LeBron James, obviously not as half as good an athlete as him, but that Ohio brand that wanted to give back to schools. | ||
| We donate a lot of money to build schools for kids in different countries. | ||
| So I see that model as, like, I'm a USA handball player. | ||
| I see The Rock as a former professional football player who's now into entertainment. | ||
| I played football, I was a former pro, now into kind of entertainment. | ||
| And then Oprah, who just is a curator and facilitator of ideas and people. | ||
| And that's what I'm doing as well. | ||
| So I try to find my mentors, even though I've never met any of them. | ||
| I try to find them and model them, but I have lots of coaches that I pay for in business, | ||
| relationships, my fitness and health, and just life. For me, I'm such a huge advocate of coaching. | ||
| Coaching is what Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James all talk about is the key to what | ||
| made them great athletes in school to now as professional athletes. | ||
| You cannot win in sports, in business, and in life without having great mentorship and coaches. | ||
| I just don't think you can. | ||
| You can get Far, but I don't think you can sustain that success over time without consistent mentorship and guidance. | ||
| That's just my belief. | ||
| So I had Burgess Owen on a couple weeks ago who's a former NFL player and he's now running for Congress in Utah. | ||
| And he actually talked about a lot of the similar things. | ||
| And one of the things I asked him was, do you think there's a connection between being a professional athlete and someone that can compete at an elite level and then someone that can be a success on the other side because you're just using those disciplines? | ||
| You obviously agree with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think there's a lot of great athletes who can transition and then others who stay stuck in their past identity. | ||
| They say, I'm going to live off the past dream that I had, me as a great athlete, I'm going to live off the money. | ||
| Where Kobe said, okay, I've got all this money, I can retire now. | ||
| But he said, I want to do something great with my life in the next chapter. | ||
| 20 seasons playing in the NBA. | ||
| What I want to do now, I want to tell great stories because that's what's going to change the world. | ||
| Me not being a great athlete anymore is going to change the world. | ||
| Me creating content to tell stories that reaches kids, young adults, adults, that's what will change people's belief in themselves and the world. | ||
| So I think his ability to say, I'm going to use these disciplines in my business and figure it out. | ||
| He also had coaches and partners in his business that helped him and guided him. | ||
| And I think that's the key. | ||
| A lot of guys don't transition with great coaching afterwards. | ||
| And you've got to seek out coaches and mentors constantly. | ||
| Because we're always facing new chapters. | ||
| You've got your business model right now, but I know you've got big goals and big plans ahead. | ||
| When you launched your book and you didn't have a book before, you probably seeked out other authors and said, hey, what should I do here? | ||
| Jordan, tell me how you sold a million copies in six months, right? | ||
| What was the plan? | ||
| What was the strategy? | ||
| You're seeking mentors. | ||
| Whether you're officially paying for coaches or not, you're seeking it at every stage. | ||
| That's what makes you a great success. | ||
| I described in the chapter about Jordan, he was an accidental mentor. | ||
| We just started doing stuff together and then I was like, holy cow, this guy, he's changing the world right in front of me and I have the honor of being that close to this thing? | ||
| You've got access. | ||
| Every night, right? | ||
| For how long? | ||
| A year, two years? | ||
| Like a year and a half. | ||
| And the crazy part for me was that he never once went backwards on one of those rules. | ||
| I never saw the guy not live up to the things he was talking about. | ||
| How much of this stuff do you think is sort of hardwired in the way people are born | ||
| versus learned? | ||
| Because like on the Kobe level, I always think about Tim Duncan who retired | ||
| the same year Kobe did. | ||
| You know, he won five championships himself, but he was quiet. | ||
| He didn't know anything about him. | ||
| I can't even picture him showboating or yelling. | ||
| You can barely hear his voice. | ||
| I've seen him be interviewed a million times, but like Kobe, you can hear his voice. | ||
| He clearly worked hard. | ||
| He was a total pro, the whole thing. | ||
| Even the way he retired, like Kobe's retirement, it was very public. | ||
| It was a show, it was a performance. | ||
| It was like Kareem, it was a show. | ||
| Mom out, drop the mic, everything, yeah. | ||
| The whole thing, like everywhere he went, it was like, this is Kobe's last night in Philadelphia, | ||
| Kobe's, where Tim Duncan, again, the same thing, like all the success, all that stuff, the great numbers, | ||
| but just kinda just was like quiet about the whole thing. | ||
| How much of just like the, all of it, do you think is just hard wiring versus | ||
| Environment, yeah. - behavior and environment and everything else? | ||
| I think it's a little bit of both because, you know, I don't think I would've been | ||
| a great athlete had I not felt abused all the time. | ||
| So I think my environment of sexual abuse, feeling left behind, feeling made fun of in school, | ||
| being picked last on the sports, in fourth grade I was picked last on the sports team. | ||
| Over girls. | ||
| And that was probably the most humiliating time as a fourth grader of being like, okay, we're in a recess here on the playground, and there was a dodgeball game that our class was going to do. | ||
| It was probably 30 kids in our class, maybe 40 kids. | ||
| Call it half men, half women, right? | ||
| And I remember there was two captains of the game, and both the captains were picking one at a time, right? | ||
| You pick your top athlete. | ||
| And they picked all the guys, and then I was the last boy standing. | ||
| And then they start picking girls one by one. | ||
| And then they pick the last girl. | ||
| This is like a girl who's... | ||
| You know, and glasses, and like, no athletic bone in her body. | ||
| And they pick her, and they don't even pick me. | ||
| I mean, this is right out of a movie. | ||
| So they don't even pick me. | ||
| I'm just by default the last person that goes on the last team. | ||
| And I'm thinking to myself, I know I'm not the worst athlete here. | ||
| This is fourth grade. | ||
| And I remember being like, these experiences that we have shape us, and they shaped me into saying, never again am I going to feel this humiliated. | ||
| In that moment, I remember saying, never again am I going to be picked last. | ||
| I am going to the gym every day after school, and I'm going to stay there until my mom calls me home to eat dinner, and just work out, and play basketball, and play this sport. | ||
| That drove me, that experience. | ||
| You know, I don't know if you have similar experiences in your life where maybe you felt neglected or felt like taken advantage of or felt, you know, unjust because of whatever that made you say, I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna prove you wrong. | ||
| And that drive, I think Kobe had a lot of that drive where he wanted to prove people wrong as well. | ||
| And then it transitions to, okay, this doesn't work for me anymore. | ||
| This energy worked to a certain point of achieving, but I still feel empty, why? | ||
| And that's where I had that kind of moment when I was 30. | ||
| I was like, I'm achieving a lot, I've got money, I've got success, but why am I feeling alone? | ||
| Why do I feel so angry still? | ||
| Like, shouldn't I feel happier? | ||
| And that's what allowed me to reflect. | ||
| And I went to a... I started doing a lot of work on myself. | ||
| I started reaching out to therapists, coaches, mentors, spiritual guides, going to workshops. | ||
| And during that time of a workshop, a lot of people were opening up about their past. | ||
| And I remember the workshop trainer facilitator was like, we are going to be moving forward, it was after about a few days of this workshop, he said we're going to be moving forward to get clear about what we want to create for our future. | ||
| But in order to get clear about our mission and our future and to be able to tackle it with our full energy, we must clear the past and forgive ourselves or forgive anything that's happened in the past. | ||
| Otherwise, we're going to be holding on to this weight that's dragging us down. | ||
| And I remember sitting there thinking to myself, huh, I feel like I've addressed everything in my past. | ||
| I've talked about my brother being in prison and what that felt like. | ||
| I've talked about being picked on and bullied in school. | ||
| I've talked about just my parents arguing and them getting a divorce just like everyone else in the room. | ||
| Nothing's new here. | ||
| I feel like everyone's gone through similar experiences, so I don't know what else to talk about. | ||
| And then the memory of being sexually abused went in my mind. | ||
| And I thought to myself, why have I never shared this with anyone in 25 years? | ||
| Why have I kept this in and been afraid to talk about it? | ||
| And for whatever reason, the environment of the moment, the workshop, and people opening up, I was like, if I don't share this now, I'll probably never share this or go to my grave. | ||
| So I just stood up in front of the room, and I remember I couldn't look up at anyone in their eyes. | ||
| I was so ashamed of what I was about to say. | ||
| So I just looked down at the carpet, And I just walked through the entire event. | ||
| You know, when I was five years old, I was at the babysitter's. | ||
| The babysitter had a son, a late teenager, and he took me to the bathroom and he raped me. | ||
| And I just shared the story for the first time. | ||
| And I remember sitting down, the whole room's silent. | ||
| I think people were just in shock to see a straight white male who's this jock-looking athlete, big guy, strong guy, you know, probably had a little bit of an ego. | ||
| Showing up during that time, share that story. | ||
| Because I never heard, personally, I never heard another story of a man being sexually abused. | ||
| Whether I was not allowing myself to read it, or see it, or I didn't see stories on TV, or I didn't see people, especially athletes, opening up about this publicly online. | ||
| I just never saw it. | ||
| I remember sitting down after sharing this. | ||
| For whatever reason, right when I sat down, I just started erupting with tears and emotion. | ||
| And there were two women on each side of me who, they're crying, they're hugging me, I'm ashamed, I'm embarrassed. | ||
| I run out of the room. | ||
| Run out of the room, out of the building, in this conference room, and I go outside and I'm like, I'm not going back in there. | ||
| There's no way I could go look at these people again, now that they know the worst part of me, the thing I'm most ashamed of, the thing I'm most embarrassed of, the thing I feel the weakest about. | ||
| How would anyone ever actually accept me, like me, or love me after this moment? | ||
| And probably one of the most memorable and beautiful moments of my life is what happened next. | ||
| I felt a tap on my shoulder a few minutes later. | ||
| I'm crying outside by myself, hand up against the wall. | ||
| I'm like, I don't want anyone to look at me. | ||
| I'm so embarrassed. | ||
| I feel a tap on my shoulder and I turn around and it's this big, big guy, guy bigger than me, older than me, probably in his late 50s. | ||
| He looks me straight in the eyes, puts his hand around my shoulder and he said, you're my hero. | ||
| This happened to me when I was 13. | ||
| My wife doesn't know. | ||
| I've got three kids. | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| I've never had the courage to do what you just did in this moment. | ||
| And it's... I felt like a prisoner my entire life holding this in. | ||
| I'm gonna go tell my wife. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| One by one, the men from the room all came out. | ||
| And they all shared stories with me. | ||
| You know, a lot of the men were sexually abused. | ||
| The men who weren't sexually abused had something else, some other challenge that they were faced with that they were unwilling to share because they were embarrassed by or shamed. | ||
| And that was a big wake-up call for me where I realized, man, men in general don't have really a safe place to share their shame. | ||
| And it's what made me want to go down a path of like researching, like, how many men has this happened to? | ||
| And I found one in six men are sexually abused. | ||
| It's one in four for women. | ||
| Obviously women face it a lot more. | ||
| But as I started to write my next book about this called The Mask of Masculinity, I said, you know, men A lot of the men in the world are causing a lot of the pain in the world. | ||
| This is where you see some of our leaders angry a lot. | ||
| And in my mind, some of them are not looking for solutions to heal. | ||
| They're looking to create more harm, more war, more fighting, more anger. | ||
| And I said, if men started to heal their past, they would be much more loving and find better solutions, in my opinion. | ||
| And I remember going on tour about my book, and I would get about 50-50 of the room, men and women, to show up. | ||
| And I'd say, hey, just show of hands for the women. | ||
| How many of you women in the room talk about your feelings, you know, once a week with girlfriends? | ||
| You talk about your marriage issues, your body image issues, your career, or whatever's happening with your family. | ||
| You talk about your stuff. | ||
| All the women raise their hand once a week, right? | ||
| And I go, leave your hand up, women, if you do this every day. | ||
| You're on the phone with a girlfriend, you're at lunch, you're having tea, whatever it is, and they're like, yep, this is every day we talk about our stuff. | ||
| And I go for the men in the room. | ||
| Couple hundred men in the room. | ||
| I say, put your hand up if you talk once a month with one man about your marriage issues, your body image issues, your career stuff, your insecurities, your fears, your doubts. | ||
| Maybe a couple hands go up. | ||
| And I go, are you guys part of a church group that does this once a month with 30 men to talk about this in a safe space? | ||
| And they're like, yeah. | ||
| Pretty much everywhere I went around the country. | ||
| And I said, women, Who had your hands up? | ||
| Imagine a world where you never shared any of this. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Where you kept it in a deep place inside of your heart and your soul and you never talked to a girlfriend about this. | ||
| You never felt you could share anything because you'd be shamed, you'd be made fun of, you'd be called names, you'd be picked on, you'd be punched in the face maybe if you shared some of these things. | ||
| Just imagine. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying it's right what men have done or what they do in bad situations. | ||
| I'm not saying any of these things are justified. | ||
| Just imagine the pain and suffering that some men feel if they feel like they can never share certain shames. | ||
| And I want to create a world where men can find a safe confidant or something where they can share more frequently their pain. | ||
| Because I feel like that pain is causing pain in the world when they don't share it. | ||
| It's been an interesting journey. | ||
| Well, it's so interesting to hear you say that because I think we touched on this a little bit when I was on your show, but one of the things that people would say about Jordan all the time, and especially when we were on tour, they would say, it's all angry young men who are showing up to his shows. | ||
| Now, first off, that just wasn't true demographically. | ||
| It was usually about 60-40 male to female, but that's a pretty decent mix. | ||
| And it was black people, and white people, and gay people, straight people, and all that. | ||
| But I always thought the criticism was so odd, because even if it was 100% angry, white, that was the other one, they were white too, which also wasn't true, but let's say it was 100% angry, young, white men, well, if his message was empowering them, if his message was freeing them, if his message was doing actually everything that you just described, well then that would be spectacular. | ||
| And yet it was framed as if you talked Even if you talk to these people, just by these people showing up to a place together, that that somehow is evil, which then just feeds the narrative that they've already got in their heads. | ||
| Yeah, I think for me, I think I talked about this briefly with you, I don't know if it was on our show or off camera, that I remember during my first book, I think it was, I was on Ellen and then I was on Glenn Beck within a 24-hour window. | ||
| And I remember people being like, how could you go on Glenn Beck? | ||
| I think Glenn Beck's a nice guy. | ||
| I like his stuff, but if you're one way and you're not thinking that way, then there might be controversy. | ||
| And I remember saying to myself, just like Jordan Peterson, his book's incredible. | ||
| He has great principles. | ||
| I love his book. | ||
| And I'm trying to just help humanity. | ||
| I don't care what you believe, what you think is right and wrong, I'm trying to lift people up and give them tools to empower themselves to live in peace. | ||
| To live in power and to inspire people around them. | ||
| And I think that's our mission. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I don't want to do straight up politics with you. | |
| I did not get an essay book of the things that you won't talk about, but I don't want to do politics with you because I think it's a good escape. | ||
| This is metapolitics in a way. | ||
| But in a time like we live in right now where politics seems crazy, everyone's trying to destroy each other, all of those things, Do you have any tricks that you use for yourself or that you've recommended to other people to scale back? | ||
| I mean, one of the things I try to show people is that your worldview just can't be political. | ||
| You know, if your worldview is just politics, you're always doing this. | ||
| You've got blinders on and you need a much bigger philosophical, religious, Whatever it is, whatever your worldview is, it needs to be much wider. | ||
| Do you have any tricks? | ||
| Because it seems like everyone, everywhere, and I know I'm sort of self-selected into this thing, because when anyone sees me at the store, they want to talk politics with me, but I do sense people, it's making people crazier. | ||
| It's making people angrier. | ||
| You know, they just released this big study about how depressed people are right now. | ||
| I remember when I started being an entrepreneur, after leaving my brother's, I pay $2.50 a month from my brother's place to have a room from his place, right? | ||
| And I started making enough money to get an apartment for $4.95 a month. | ||
| And it was the scariest thing to write a check for $4.95, because I was like, I don't know how I'm going to pay this next month. | ||
| But I got the cheapest apartment I could in Columbus, Ohio. | ||
| And I didn't have a car at the time, so I was walking everywhere. | ||
| And I remember saying to myself, I'm not going to get a TV. | ||
| In the first few years, I didn't have a TV and I just focused on my mission and my vision, which was creation, which was getting customers and sales and adding value to those customers and clients. | ||
| And not having a TV was a big blessing. | ||
| I love movies and I love TV, so I would go to the movies all the time, but I wouldn't allow myself to browse and see chaos on a screen until midnight and then go to sleep with nightmares from the chaos. | ||
| So, personally, I try to... I remember I had Marianne Williamson on my show, and I told her, you know, I really don't watch the news. | ||
| And she goes, that's... you need to watch the news. | ||
| Like, you need to be informed, especially as, like, a white male. | ||
| You need to know what's happening in the world. | ||
| But you can get the news from different places. | ||
| I don't need to watch the TV to get the news. | ||
| I can check, you know, Apple News or whatever, or get someone to tweet me something and check it out. | ||
| And people are going to tell you the news no matter what. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You can't really escape the news. | ||
| I try to focus on... I truly believe that when I focus on giving to people in service, I'm a happier human being. | ||
| And research has backed science of happiness that when you're in contribution to someone else, whether it's opening the door, buying a coffee, having a conversation, listening to someone when they're going through something, Doing charity work, whatever it may be, that makes you the happiest when we're giving to others. | ||
| So when we're focused on self and what we don't have, suffering is the result of obsessive self-centric thinking. | ||
| So when I'm thinking in the news, this is not working in my favor, I need to, this is an outrage, or I'm not happy about this because it's not helping me, you're going to be unhappy. | ||
| And I'm not saying you shouldn't fight for what you want and have things to change, sure, but If you want to be happier, focus on other people. | ||
| Focus on service. | ||
| And also, don't watch the news. | ||
| And as media companies ourselves, we want people to watch us. | ||
| But I think focus on things that bring you joy. | ||
| I think as adults, we don't play enough. | ||
| In my studio, I've got a Frisbee, and we love to work hard. | ||
| Our team works hard, but I'll grab Matt, our COO, my friend, and I'll say, We need five minutes just to throw the frisbee. | ||
| We need to play. | ||
| Who plays anymore? | ||
| Especially if you can't go outside, you can't do this. | ||
| Who's playing? | ||
| Well, I'm chasing a one-year-old dog. | ||
| Exactly, right? | ||
| But I'm like a big advocate of play over watching TV. | ||
| Go do something fun. | ||
| I went out to... I've been in LA for 8 years. | ||
| How long have you been here? | ||
| About 8 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
8 years? | |
| Yeah, 7 and a half years. | ||
| Literally, 2 days ago, the first time I went to Franklin Canyon Lake or Park. | ||
| Have you been to this place? | ||
| I don't even know what that is. | ||
| This is 10 minutes from here. | ||
| It's a lake. | ||
| And nature of like a hundred acres in the middle of LA where you can't see the city. | ||
| It's literally in the middle of Mulholland Drive. | ||
| I've never heard of this place. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| I saw a photo of it on Instagram. | ||
| We got a lake? | ||
| We got a lake and like ducks and turtles and everything. | ||
| And I went there on Sunday with my girlfriend and our dog and it was just like we're in nature. | ||
| We're hanging out. | ||
| I'm not watching TV. | ||
| I'm not on social media. | ||
| I'm a big salsa dancer. | ||
| I love salsa. | ||
| Really? | ||
| For 15 years I've been salsa dancing around the world. | ||
| I play guitar. | ||
| I like to play sports, workout. | ||
| I'm just like, go do something that's going to contribute and benefit your life and contribute and benefit someone else's life. | ||
| When you do those things, you're going to be a better person. | ||
| I'm learning Spanish. | ||
| I'm trying all these different things that get me away from the train wreck of the news. | ||
| So that's what I recommend. | ||
| Don't obsess yourself into what's not working for you. | ||
| Go be the change. | ||
| Do you sense that right now, because of Corona, because of protests, because everything is so seemingly chaotic, that people are becoming more receptive to the type of stuff you're talking about? | ||
| Because I can just, for me, like, I started gardening since we started doing this. | ||
| I'll show you when we get out of here. | ||
| We've got a ton of, we're growing a ton of great stuff out there. | ||
| I don't know, carrots, I got tomatoes, I got cucumbers, I got zucchini, I got broccoli, peppers, but I started doing that. | ||
| I'm cooking a lot more. | ||
| David usually cooks a ton, but now I'm barbecuing all the time, and I'm refining some skills. | ||
| I think there's a unique opportunity in this mess to either come out of it more skilled, more refined, more passionate about what you do, or maybe realize that what you were doing before isn't what you want to do, or all that stuff. | ||
| Versus some people that I think are just gonna have slogged through it and not really thought about their life critically enough, and then they'll just be on the other side and the world will be different. | ||
| I'm on both sides here. | ||
| If you need to take a pause and rest for these last three months because you've been go, go, go, go, go, non-stop for 10 years and you had never taken a pause in your life, this is the most beautiful time for you to sit around and do nothing and read a book and lounge and not hustle. | ||
| So for some people, I think that is what you need. | ||
| And personally, my philosophy is I feel like this is what the world needed in general is for us to take a pause with technology being so fast, with us on social media, Most people are on their phones six, seven, eight hours a day and a lot of it's social media. | ||
| It's like, what are we consuming our time with? | ||
| It's not what we're supposed to be doing all day. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it's not making us happier. | ||
| It's not making us happier, it's making us more neurotic. | ||
| Like, I need more likes, I need more follows, I need to know what's happening in the news. | ||
| It's just, it's craziness. | ||
| And so for some, I think, don't do anything and that's what you need. | ||
| You need to reevaluate why your life isn't working. | ||
| I'm seeing so many people, I'm not sure if you're seeing this, a lot of big personalities are posting, we're getting a divorce. | ||
| We're going through a breakup. | ||
| You're finally evaluating your relationship. | ||
| You're trapped in the house with someone every minute for three months. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can't hide. | |
| Do I like this guy? | ||
| You can't escape anymore. | ||
| So I think people are getting clear on what they want because they haven't been clear for a long time. | ||
| Maybe partly, but not fully. | ||
| So for some people, you need a pause. | ||
| You need a break. | ||
| You need to evaluate. | ||
| You need to take inventory of everything in your life and create a new game plan moving forward. | ||
| You need to find some coaches and mentors and have a game plan and go take action. | ||
| For other people, I'm kind of in the middle. | ||
| I feel like I've hustled more in my business. | ||
| I've hired more people. | ||
| I've been like more creative than ever. | ||
| But I'm also going to the park and relaxing with my girlfriend and my dog on the weekends, which I would never do. | ||
| And I'm taking that time to be in nature. | ||
| So I feel like I'm trying to do both and balance my personal life, but then work going kind of all in and getting clearer. | ||
| Like what does our audience need right now? | ||
| What does our customers need? | ||
| What do they need from the next five to ten years if this doesn't change? | ||
| So I'm a little in the middle and I have empathy for both sides, but I think if you can rediscover what you want to do in your life and who you want to become, whether you take action on it now or just discover it now, that's what we should be doing. | ||
| How do you decide how much stuff to put out there in the midst of all this? | ||
| Because a lot of what you're talking about is to ease up on this stuff, go live your life, get out there in nature. | ||
| et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I think I mentioned to you last time, like people say to me, | ||
| Dave, why don't you do an interview every day? | ||
| Do five interviews a week, do seven interviews a week. | ||
| And we do one or two, and then I obviously do some other stuff. | ||
| And it's not for a lack of time, but it really in many ways is for a respect of my audience. | ||
| Of people's time. | ||
| Yeah, like it's 'cause I, it's like if you listen to me, | ||
| then hopefully you listen to one of your episodes. | ||
| Maybe you listen to Sam Harris or Joe Rogan or whatever. | ||
| It's like, I want you to, that's great. | ||
| If you give a couple hours a week to this stuff, that's fantastic. | ||
| But I don't want you to give 40 hours of your week. | ||
| I don't even want you to give 20 hours of your week to this. | ||
| I think it's important what we're doing, it's valuable what we're doing, but how do you decide what's enough and what's too much? | ||
| I look at it in three factors, one is like, What is my audience what I think my audience wants and my intuitive side of what they think they're gonna want or need | ||
| What works for me, personally? | ||
| I don't want to be on every day doing an interview either. | ||
| It's a lot of energy. | ||
| What personally works for my life, my lifestyle, my vision for the future? | ||
| And then what does the data say? | ||
| And I know you're probably very data-driven as well with your team at least. | ||
| You have to be. | ||
| You've got to be if you're in the media business. | ||
| So we're looking at how can we create content on certain platforms more and less on other platforms based on the data. | ||
| So I'm kind of thinking of those three things. | ||
| My personal energy and time. | ||
| Intuitively, what I think my audience needs, and what's the data saying, and we're making decisions based on that. | ||
| I think we did it all here. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I got one more, but I'm going to loosely quote a pretty decent interviewer. | ||
| What is greatness to you? | ||
| Greatness to me has changed over the years, and I think it will always evolve and change until we find kind of our true purpose and mission. | ||
| For me, currently in the moment, it's discovering your unique talents and gifts that you were born with, developing those in the pursuit of your dreams, and in that pursuit, making an impact on the people around you. | ||
| I think we do that. | ||
| We figure out who we are, what our talents are, and cultivate them. | ||
| We go pursue the thing that brings us a lot of joy, and we make other people happy and impacted around us in a positive way. | ||
| I feel like that's greatness. | ||
| Plus, we're in a great jacket. | ||
| That's it, man. | ||
| Let's get clean. | ||
| You have buyer's remorse now. | ||
| It's at Lewis Howes on Twitter. | ||
| If you'd like to be inspired, motivated, and educated by some of the most successful people around the world, check out the School of Greatness full episode playlist right over here. | ||
| And if you'd like to see Lewis Howes' interview with me, click right over here. |
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