Dan Koe: How to Get Ahead of 99% of People (Master Flow States & Focus)

You aren't bored. You just don't have a quest. Mihi Chicks Mihi, the dude who wrote flow to reach the flow state to reach the most optimal state of consciousness when there's no distinction between self and other when you're kind of just one with reality. The requirements for a task to like induce that state in you is a pattern I've noticed in successful people is that they physically worked very little. Right? When I talk about doing mode, I'm not talking about grinding 12 to 16 hours a day. As a one person business, 3.9 million that year, it's like music is liquid architecture. Architecture is frozen music. It's like you see the patterns of narrative and storytelling. It's everywhere.

>> Is AI making people dumb?

>> The last moat is taste, signal, trust, and narrative.

>> Changing their speech patterns to sound like chat GPT, and they're using M dashes in their writing unironically. You are beginning to speak like the machine that was trained to speak like you. If low consciousness people are programming the AI, >> then it's going to reinforce that even further. So if we think of critical thought as holding ideas in the realm of possibility without labeling them as true until further investigation, you're going to notice how your thinking decreases in quality. Have you actually looked up to the sky? Have you looked at the stars? Have you noticed the detail in the trees when you wash your hands? Have you noticed the water and the feeling when you eat food? Have you noticed the hint of rosemary? Have you noticed all these little details? Can you kind of zoom out and zoom in at will and pick apart and experience all of life in that sense? Right? Focus is kind of the vessel for experiencing life.

Okay, welcome back. Uh, sitting next to me here, I've got someone who I've looked up to for a long time in the online space and has inspired a lot of my writing personally. Uh, I wouldn't know how to introduce him because he's a man of many talents, and we'll get into being multi-dimensionally jacked shortly. Uh, but Dan, if you want to introduce yourself, what it is you do, uh, what you specialize in, and um, yeah, tell the people about yourself.

>> Yeah. I mean, whenever people ask like, "Oh, what do you do?" I tend to water it down and just say, "I'm a writer." to avoid getting into the conversation more.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh, but that's the main thing I like to do is just write. But today, writing isn't just about trying to be very eloquent or clever or philosophical to get a book out there. You do kind of have to perform on social media, having a newsletter, potentially writing books, but using it as a way to, I guess, inspire people at scale >> and building an audience doing so so that you can sustain that by creating valuable products and selling it. So, I'm a social media guy, but I call myself a writer.

>> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think writing is the fundamental thing beneath everything that you do, but I believe you obviously you write, you have your newsletter, you have your software business now and you have many other ventures that you're working on at the same time as well as all of your social media. So the thing that I found you on was when you were promoting the idea of the one person business. So I wanted to get more into that to to the people who are watching and you know I could definitely say and attribute a lot of my progress in going into content creation to towards your process of how to turn yourself into a oneperson business. So to give someone the rundown of what the idea is and how someone can implement it and why you think it's so important in the creator economy. Uh, I would love to hear your breakdown.

Yeah, there's never really been a time where an individual has had the ability to acquire so much leverage. Never in the past has there been a time where a single person can reach millions of people, be it online or even build a software with AI coming out right now or at least learn so much or have access to so much knowledge. So, in a nutshell, one person can do what a 10-person team used to be able to, right? Building a website when that first became a thing, I would assume, took a ton of money and a large team to do so. Now, I mean, 10 years ago, you had Squarespace and WordPress and other things and you can build that, but now you can do so much more. And in the future, as technology continues to advance, the individual will only gain more power. So, the oneperson business is just a concept. It's an idea to represent what online business today has become and to kind of attract people to it because there's so many problems that we could talk about with and I'm sure we will talk about with just how work is right now like a 9 to 5 job as cliche as it is to hate on that. We're not here to do that. But I would argue that most people that kind of just found themselves in the job market today aren't fulfilled. They aren't very purpose-driven. They kind of have that nagging feeling that they were meant for more. And I guess my goal with the whole one person business idea is to just expose more people to the potential of it and kind of get them to start working on it.

>> What inspired you to get into it? is I I think and you touched on many things there including AI which I'm going to get back around to but for context if you're comfortable sharing the scale in which you went from starting your one person business to where you got it up to with just writing.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, are you comfortable sharing that and where and you know how did that begin?

When I was a kid, I somehow became obsessed with the gym, right? I kind of looked around. I observed society and I saw that many people weren't in shape. They didn't seem healthy. They didn't seem happy. And I kind of connected those in my head to, okay, let's do the opposite of that. Let's start hitting the gym. And thankfully YouTube and MySpace were becoming a thing when I was growing up and when I was in middle school, high school. So whenever I would get home from school, I would just go and watch YouTube videos of people like Matt Ogus, Chris Lovado, the OG fitness crew, the OG Gym Shark crew actually. And they kind of became my role models. They became my digital family in a sense where I'd go and I absorbed the lessons from them and I'd go to the gym and I just really fell in love with that process. And over the years I I kind of always knew that I wanted to start a YouTube channel of all things and then like transitioned into writing. But uh, I tried various different YouTube topics from like talking head videos like a 16-year-old giving mindset advice. We like to clown on that today about how they aren't uh credible enough to do that, but I did it and it was a mistake and I learned a lot from it. But uh, then I got more into like the 10,000 calorie challenges and I even I didn't post this video, but I chugged a bottle of sugar-free maple syrup just cuz I thought it would gain attention. And I was in bed dying like that entire day. It was horrible. But beyond that, I tried like filming in the gym and other things. And then none of those really worked out, mostly because I didn't know what I was doing and I was kind of just trying to do something. And that led into uh discovering other potential online business models like drop shipping or e-commerce, freelancing, agency work, so on and so forth. And around that time, I kind of realized I just want to do something creative. If I want to create something, I want to have control over my work. And so I started trying all of those different business models and most of them didn't work out mainly because of shiny object syndrome. And I would spend three months building a website and then kind of just called it quits and never really tried to get customers. I would take e-commerce courses and learn about branding and copywriting and all these different things. And there came a point where I was doing an e-commerce business for blue light glasses. I was in like my fourth year of college, I believe. And I called my dad up and pitched him this idea of like, "Hey, Dad. Um, I took this course. I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to order these blue light glasses. I'm going to create an e-commerce store. I'm going to run Facebook ads. Will you loan me like a few thousand dollars to do this?" And at the time I was a broke kid splitting this big seven-bedroom fraternity house between seven guys, paying like $350 bucks a month per rent, working part-time at a print shop. And long story short, that didn't work out. I thought it was the bane of my existence to get a job. So I was working as hard as I could as to not get one. Uh, but the only logical option to kind of extend my runway was to get a job and I had taken college courses on like intro to web development and I had done web design in the past from creating the websites. So I decided okay, uh, I understand coding to a bit, maybe I'll just apply to some jobs. And I ended up getting a literally the first application. I got an entry-level web design job at a marketing agency and worked at that job for like eight months, I believe. But it was one of those jobs, those cushy desk jobs where you don't really have to do anything. I was just copy-pasting website templates for the clients and I would push back. I'd have like seven clients at a time would push back all of the work until the last minute and just copy-paste everything over and then the rest of the time I was scrolling Twitter. I was trying to reach out to like cold email people for freelancing and uh, like studying like, okay, how do I actually freelance correctly? And within that time, I learned a lot and I eventually made the freelance web design thing work enough so that I could leave the job. And then after that, I kind of realized as I was reading people's tweets, I'm like, I can write these too. Like I have this knowledge. I feel like it's not that hard to like format it in this specific way. And I started to notice the patterns of how people actually stop the scroll, grab the attention, lead into their product or service. And so I'm like, I can use this as a way to get more clients. And so I started uh doing that on Twitter and it kind of just worked, right? We can dig into that about how people struggle so much to grow on social media, but I had like all of these different experiences had compounded into me having this understanding of like, okay, I understand the game, so to say, and I can pull this lever to grow. And that's what happened. And uh, my freelance business was sustaining itself. But I realized I'm still working on projects I don't care about for people that I don't care about. And I kind of had this disdain for client work at this time. And so I'm like, okay, now I need to go into something else. What can I do? Digital products was the next logical option for me. And since we're on the topic of how I got into writing, that is kind of it. I started on Twitter. I really fell in love with short form. Then everyone's telling me to start a newsletter, so I did. And then it kind of just took off from there. And I realized that that's the base of my business is like three short form posts a day. Get that across all different platforms. One long form newsletter a week. Turn that into a YouTube video that goes on podcast as well. Quality over quantity. People don't really care if it's on all social all different social platforms. And now we're here after a lot of different products. But yeah.

>> So, not too dissimilar from every single successful person I've spoken, >> right? They've had, you know, a series of failures so to say that have compounded into like you said the experience that's necessary to >> have that moment where everything clicked and for you it was began writing tweets which I find interesting because >> Naval recently said say true things in a new way. Something tweeted >> and >> you know there is nothing more to tweeting because there is no such thing as a new idea.

>> Oh, the the tweet say literally today uh and it was on the last podcast he did by himself. I love those but um, it's just say something true in an interesting way. That's it. Like you don't need any new or novel idea. Those help. Those are great but those are few and far between and you're not going to have those every day. It's literally just take what you think is true. What is what is a sound good idea? Even if it's from someone else, >> and say it from your perspective, either from the lens of your story, how does this apply to your life? Say it in a new way that causes it to click for a different level of development. Like if it's a very advanced, maybe philosophical idea. Dumb it down for a beginner. That's most of what my content is is like I love the spiritual, philosophical, really deep stuff, but I understand that that'll go over most people's heads and it'll make it'll make people think of me as some kind of like woo woo crazy dude. And so it's like I just make it practical because it is. And yeah. Yeah. And it's like that's kind of my entire brand at this point. It's like me taking the philosophical stuff, noting the patterns of like this applied to my life. I'm so deep in business right now. Let's bridge the two. How does how is philosophy and business very intertwined?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Because we spoke about the you know becoming an archetype and you have a very particular archetype in mind that you're trying to become and embody through your work and the bridging of spirituality and business and philosophy and not too dissimilar from me as well at the same time. But just for context for people who don't know in terms of your uh oneperson business, what did you manage to scale that to from you know just

>> Oh, right.

>> That was the question. Yeah. Yeah.

>> Uh, so I mean all of it started from zero. Uh, I mean I guess Twitter started from like 150 followers that were just like mutuals and other things. Like people ask like, oh, you you've only you say you've only been writing for 5 years. Why was your Twitter account created in 2011? It's like I didn't start a new account. And people get all wrapped up about that. But genuinely, I don't think you need to start a new account. But started from 150 mutual followers and as a one person business because now I have the software business which is a team. I have an editor. So my Danco business is just me, my editor, and he also doubles as support. Um, but we grew from that in 2019, 150 followers to um, I'd say it was like 80,000 on Twitter and it was about $50,000 a month with the offers that I had at the time, which was like part marketing consulting, part digital product. And Modern Mastery was becoming a thing at that time, the community I used to have. And then that's when we started to branch out and that's when I got into the flow of like, okay, a newsletter can turn into a YouTube video. I know that I'm going to have to do YouTube at some time, so let's just get started with that. Devin, my editor, was actually working at Carvana at the time and it was kind of like a Wolf of Wall Street moment. That's how it felt for me is like I went to him because we were living together. I just walked into his room one day and I'm like, "So, you don't like this support at Carvana [ __ ] right?" and he's like, "No." And I was like, "Okay, quit your job and come work for me." And he like thought about it for a day. And then he did exactly that. And now here we are. So, uh, as a one person business, it was about $50,000 a month, 80,000 followers on Twitter, and then as a two-person business, me and Devon, it's grown from that to now it's like 4.5 million followers across all platforms. And revenue fluctuates. Right now, I'm not making nearly as much as what I used to. The highest point in my business, I made uh, I believe the tax return said um $3.9 million that year.

>> And um, before that was $800,000. The year after that was about $2 million. Now it's hovering around like 1.5, but that's because focus is so split between the software and the other stuff. It's kind of like that peel black peel back or like pull the slingshot back so you can launch forward with the higher leverage stuff. So yeah, it really fluctuates.

>> We can certainly circle back to the point of focus cuz you you literally wrote a book called the art of focus. But I just think it's an amazing concept, the oneperson business because it shatters the idea that you need a huge team. And I guess it always depends on what you are optimizing for in terms of what you want your revenue to be.

>> Yeah. How much money you actually think is enough for you every month because I think a lot of people just think big business, big team and that's going to solve my problem.

>> So, nope.

>> Yeah, it never it's never that. So, you touched on AI and you're obviously huge on AI. You designed this incredible Human 3.0 OP prompt that I had me and a couple of my a couple of my friends go through and uh, it gave me some really interesting insights in terms of bottlenecks that I'm facing and it actually has helped me uh in terms of positioning myself better for the next quarter. So I think the question a lot of people are asking now the intelligent people anyway is AI making people dumb?

>> Oh, that's a big question to unpack. Let's start with I guess the purpose of AI. Not the purpose of AI but what a lot more people are afraid of which is like, okay, is it going to replace me and what does the future look like? Like the future we don't know what it's going to look like. We assume it's going to be this exponential curve of technology accelerating to a point where we either reach this utopia or catastrophic state of society. But in my eyes and from good perspectives and ideas that I've pulled from my own studies, I feel like AI solves utility so that humans can ascend to meaning. That's the big overarching pattern, right? Whether we reach this utopia or not of people having this high universal basic income and not having to work, money not really being a thing and then it's like, okay, where does meaning come from? Well, it's like that's what you get to focus on now. Um, but the thing with that, so AI solves utility so humans can ascend to meaning. Think of it like this where you hate long lines at the DMV. They have that in London. Every everyone hates long lines at the DMV just like government offices where it's very soulless. Like you're like, this should be automated. AI should take over the sector. I don't think anyone will argue with that. But uh, we also don't like certain things where utility or speed come into play. Like when you are at a fast food restaurant and it's just taking a long time. It's like, I thought this was supposed to be fast food. I'm kind of pissed off now. Like just give me my order. I I'm going to go to this self-checkout instead.

>> Yeah.

>> And people kind of prefer that to an extent. But on the other side, we'll travel across the world because we want a great dining experience. We will watch a football game or a baseball game or a movie and at the baseball game you'll just be on the edge of your seat like locked in in the ninth inning when the last batter it's like the game-winning home run. Um, so in my opinion, the last moat or the thing that humans are going to have to focus on in the near future and going into the future is taste, signal, trust, and narrative. Narrative being an important one and a one that I feel like a lot of people don't understand because the mind makes sense of the world in stories. That's just how we make sense of things, right? Like you you fit situations into the experience that you've accumulated over time. And that experience when tied together is a story. That's just how we make sense of things. That's what our mind loves. When we talk about the flow state, you're in this like climax of the story. When you're listening to a song, that's like an audible story. When you look at architecture, uh, some guy I forget his full name but goit he has a quote where it's like, music is liquid architecture, architecture is frozen music. It's like you see the patterns of narrative and storytelling. It's everywhere. And once you can see, I guess from that higher level, that systems level, that construct-aware level, it's very cool. It's kind of like mental masturbation, you just get to look around and kind of like be like, wow, I get to think on this super intellectual level. But that's just human nature is story. So, um, do I think creators are going to be replaced? No. If they create this narrative, AI can create any narrative, therefore any narrative it creates is not meaningful. Right? The human, the we focus in, we have AGI, artificial int artificial general intelligence that can do anything and create anything, but it doesn't really mean anything unless an individual person with this very unique mind does that thing.

Location change. Thank you, son. But the question was, is AI making people dumb? I think AI is going to make dumb people dumber and smart people smarter.

>> Just based on how they approach it, how they view it, and how they use it. Because the smart people, if they are truly smart, they're not going to allow it to make them dumb.

>> And to define dumb person, and that's kind of a bad way to put it, but uh, let's put it like this. So I like to think of like general development across all domains, mental, physical, spiritual, financial, they they tend to occur in like three major levels or three major stages. So when you study the nine stages of ego development or spiral dynamics, which are fairly well-researched um concepts or theories that kind of document and prove so to say that the mind evolves through predictable stages over time. When you look at those and you draw patterns between them, you you I came away with three levels and we can call those levels level one, two, and three. One being the conformist stage. Two being the individualist stage. Three being what I call the synthesis stage. The conformist stage. Level one is what we'll call low consciousness or dumb, so to say. Not necessarily low IQ, but in like how they act. When you talk to these people, it's like they're it's like you're talking to the TV or the news or what they last saw on social media responses.

>> Exactly. Yeah. They're kind of reacting. They're not really thinking when they try to think. They are kind of like bouncing around in their mind within these very confined walls of the software that was >> uh put into their head. Right? If we think of >> uh when you're born, you kind of start from this blank slate. But this blank slate you can think of as like a new computer or new operating system that you just got that has an empty hard drive. And when you are young, you are very impressionable for obvious reasons because you need to survive. You need to learn how to survive. If you don't learn how to survive, if you don't adopt the values and the beliefs and the ideas of the culture that you were raised in, then bad things can happen to you. Like if you don't obey your parents, so to say. And if those parents are also low consciousness and haven't chose to develop themselves or their cognition or their mind, then you're going to adopt naturally their beliefs and ideas. And if you don't, they're going to be in this reactive state to where they may kick you out of the house. Um, you're going to get punished in some way. And you don't want that to happen. So you're going to conform. Right? Now, if people don't go through these stages of development or reach the individualist or synthesis stage, so to say, or in expand their consciousness or cognition or whatever synonym you want to use to describe that, then you end up being this 50-year-old with the emotional maturity of a 15-year-old.

>> And you can see that everywhere, right? It's not hard to observe that especially on social media. You have direct access to it every time you open your phone. And that's a kind of liberating thing is you can observe that, identify that, and be like, okay, this person isn't telling the truth >> broadly speaking, and that makes it a lot easier to navigate the social landscape and AI. But in that conformist stage where you're not trying to seek truth, you're not trying to understand an idea. You're trying to confirm your own beliefs so that you can survive and so that you can stay the same because it's painful to change. When those people use AI, that's what they're going to use it for.

>> They're going to be asking questions. They're going to get the sycophantic response of uh like, "Oh, amazing idea. You should look more into that." Like you take a person who writes the most insane thing possible into AI then having AI say, "Amazing idea." Like no pushback at all or no trying to like push them to view it from a different light, which is also difficult because if low consciousness people are programming the AI >> then it's going to reinforce that even further. >> And higher >> clearer thinkers will be able to see through that and tell it not to do that or to just disregard it and see through the noise. Right? I talked about uh the last moes being trust, signal, narrative, taste. Signal is one of those things because as information becomes more and more available, which happened on the internet and now even more so with AI, you have anything at your fingertips. You have to filter through so much noise. You can't outsource authority or authority to the AI as if it is this all-knowing being.

>> Yeah.

>> Right. We can talk about how it comes into play in content creation, but I like to use this comparison where you can go into AI and you can be like, "Hey, write me a viral YouTube script." and it may do pretty well, but what that person doesn't understand is that what makes someone do well on social media or on YouTube or in writing is how they've developed that skill over time and how they've overcome failures and how those failures have kind of sculpted their process into being so unique to them that other people can't replicate it. Right? So if you were to take just look at the YouTube scene, right? You have Alex Hormozi, you have Ali Abdaal, you have these gaming channels that I don't know much about. You have these news channels, you have everything else. They all go viral, but you can't pin it down to one specific type of script or one specific idea or one specific process. They all have this unique process that they have created over time, >> I guess.

Authenticity.

>> Authenticity. And Exactly. So that brings us back to, okay, how do the smart people use AI? >> They do the thing. They still get really good at it. They still understand it. And you take Alex Hormozi and you give him AI and he's going to put his mind, his process as a prompt >> into AI and then he's going to be able to, I guess, document his creative process in words and have the AI do very similar to him.

>> Yeah. So, Alex Hormozi, Ali Abdaal, someone else, all of them using AI are going to do it in such a different way that isn't as simple as, hey, write this viral YouTube script for me. Now, take that and I encourage you to think through this is how does that apply to every other area of your life.

M. Yeah, I think it's a great point because it's no different to I guess how people surround themselves in their friendship groups in real life because a lower consciousness person, let's say versus a higher consciousness person, the lower person would be in an echo chamber with their friends and I guess it's the same concept in using AI at the same time, right? And there was a recent study that I think it was you that highlighted it, but Sam Altman even said in an interview that there's been a recent uptick in people changing their speech patterns to sound like ChatGPT and they're using M-dashes unironically, you know, and it's just by automation. So what do you think the the consequences of that are in terms of going forward?

>> I think the quote that you used in your newsletter was that you are beginning to speak like the machine that was learned that was trained to speak like you.

>> Yeah, man. Um, I feel like at least today, I don't get like upset or reactive about many things. Uh, but one of the things that I do like that instantly turns me off is when you see AI patterns like on social media. It's like I'm watching this video >> and it's really good and I'm immersed in it and then they say the line, "It's not this, it's this."

>> And I'm just like, >> you just ruined this entire video for me. And it's like, it's still a good idea. And I believe that. I believe that like AI can still come up with incredible ideas that are very helpful, but once I see that it's like instant turnoff cuz it's like >> like you didn't do this yourself and there's something there. I don't know what it is and I shouldn't care that much because then it doesn't really matter. But to the point of like your your language conforming to the people, places, things, or technology that you use is kind of just like a it's a tell that you aren't thinking critically about things.

>> Yeah. Like you are taking the idea for what it is.

>> You're storing that in your mind without. So if we think of critical thought as holding ideas in the realm of possibility without labeling them as true until further investigation, that's kind of like if your mind or your personality or your identity is this web of beliefs and ideas that compose it and that starts to show like physically via language or I guess audibly via language, it's not a good sign and you're going to notice how your thinking decreases in quality. And when it comes to thinking, the thing that leads to better decisions, you're going to have difficulty making the decisions that lead to the life you want.

>> Yeah, I I completely agree because, you know, Henry Ford said that thinking is the hardest task there is. That's why so few people engage in it, you know. So, I always return back to that. And I think critical thinking is the core component of or the foundation of any progress, any sort of progress in your life, right? And I guess using AI, it's more so about the art of prompt engineering because often times it's not the answer that reveals, you know, your next insights, it's the asking good questions. And I think that's what feeds into into making good prompts. So, how would you suggest just as a TLDR using AI uh as we wrap this point up uh to actually benefit you so you don't become conditioned by it at the same time?

>> That one's rough cuz it's that's mostly downstream of developing yourself and like taking on risk and >> uh experiencing failure and iterating and having a goal that you set for yourself and so on and so forth. Um, but if I were to give advice on how to practice maybe thinking, maybe prompt engineering is don't let AI do something for you one until you can do it yourself, until you can accurately document it step by step. Um, I'm kind of grateful where AI came around when I had already seen some I had developed some kind of skill.

>> Yeah.

>> So when I finally like realized, oh, I can just take my process and kind of give it to AI so I can like bounce ideas >> against myself and my own process.

>> Um, I wrote out, I didn't, I tried writing out like, hey, write a tweet for me. Didn't really do anything. And then I kind of realized that I can get a lot more specific. So I got more specific and I'm like, "Okay, you have to write a hook like this. You have to write the body like this. You have to write the ending like this. Here's an example. Okay, now try." Okay, that was better.

>> But that isn't the only kind of tweet I write. So I took like 10 of my best tweets and then I like looked at each one. I started writing the prompt and I just wrote this like had to be like 2,000-word prompt of exactly how to replicate each of these tweet patterns with the examples in there. A list of instructions like general instructions and then nuances as to what to do, what to avoid, what not to do. Because as you send that prompt, you notice, okay, here's the result. I don't like this part. Okay, refine the initial prompt. Tell it not to do that. Okay, that didn't lead to anything better. Okay, how do I refine this? So what my process for prompt engineering? Now let's use the tweet example. You can do newsletters, you can do Facebook ads, you can do ways of thinking like you can create a thought partner, whatever it is. For tweets specifically, I would take five really good tweets. And this helps you learn as well. I don't think AI is like making people dumber who are trying to do things >> which is kind of contradicting myself, but if you see and ingest more good writing, then you learn how to kind of adopt that skill faster and you get learn how to one get results faster so you can get feedback faster so you can iterate faster. It's more of a process, right? Not just like accepting the result and then moving on and not improving the skill further. So, what I would recommend doing >> is as you're scrolling on Twitter or social media or whatever it is, and you find a tweet or writing style or idea that you really like, copy-paste that tweet or write out the script from the reel, whatever it is, get five of those really good ideas that you would eventually want your writing to mimic. Right? You paste those into an AI chat and you say, "I want you to like give me a comprehensive all-out breakdown of how these were written, the writing style, the psychological tactics behind them. Um, why they work, what the writing, just give me a detailed guide, teach me how to replicate this."

It'll give you this really detailed thing. You read that and now you're reading this like tailored course to you in a sense on how to write this kind of writing that you want to write.

>> And then once you have that, then you take it and you say, "Okay, I want to turn this into a prompt. I want it to be phase one. You're going to quiz me on what ideas I want to write about, who my target audience is, um, what I want it to sound like, so on and so forth. And then you're going to take those and you're going to turn them into you're going to use this guide that you created to turn them into tweets, >> right?

>> And if you want to throw on a bonus, it's like break down why you think these would work >> and what could maybe be improved. And then every time you throw ideas into there or converse with it, >> you start to understand deeper and deeper about why things may work or why they may not. And then you can even use it when you post it and then it doesn't get you anywhere, paste that into AI and be like, why didn't this gain any traction? And a lot of time it's usually not the writing, it's your ability to get the writing in front of more people, not rely on the algorithm.

>> Yeah. I mean, that's a great breakdown because I think essentially what you're saying is create a sparring partner, not a tour guide, like someone not to take you through, but someone that you can uh talk to and iterate ideas through.

Yeah, I I would say that for when you're trying to think or ideate. When you're trying to actually do something, think of it as training an employee.

>> Okay. Okay.

>> Because that's kind of what you're doing. It's like you tell it to do something.

>> It's not up to your quality. Yeah.

>> Okay.

>> Do this better next time.

>> They actually do it.

>> Uh, okay, this wasn't that good. Don't do this. Okay, that was good. You just iterate, >> right? Um, that's what I like to think of prompts as right now is like employees that listen very well, >> but they're not human. So, they can only do so much and you need to create a bunch of different very hyper-specific employees for specific processes.

>> That's a great that's a great way to wrap it up. I think uh one of the ideas that have has stuck with me for the longest time in your writing and in your videos has been this idea of gamifying life and that's a way to you know a mental model to think about life and how you can start at level one and you know work your way through obstacles and I'd love for you to walk me through that idea and how it applied to you and why you think it's such a useful mental model to to apply to anyone who's on any sort of journey of building something.

I'll I'll answer that question like this. You aren't bored. You just don't have a quest. To break that down, a quest. And why we find video games so addictive or so enjoyable is because there's an end goal obvious. There's a sense of challenge and there's a progression of skill. Both the skill and challenge. to kind of match each other, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the dude who wrote Flow, if you know anything about flow psychology, you know who Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is. But one of his main findings was that to reach the flow state, to reach the most optimal state of consciousness to just like when there's no distinction between self and other when you're kind of just one with reality flowing through it, there's no worry in your mind. It's just deeply enjoyable. He found that those things happen when you're deeply engaged in reality itself, but that usually comes in the form of an activity or a task. The requirements for a task to like induce that state in you is for the challenge to be let's say like just above your skill level, like 5%. So you know you're doing something that's like stretching what you think is possible. It's like the the person in the Olympics trying to reach a gold medal. It's like they know they're like right there. They know they can maybe do it. They've practiced all of their life to get to that point. They start going down the hill. Boom. Mind shuts off. They're in it, right?

Unless they're not in that state or unless they're like overthinking or thinking too far out or they're the enemies of the flow state or is um self-consciousness. So thinking about yourself or kind of boredom in a sense. So anxiety and boredom. Boredom is more like outward focus of like I could be doing something better. Like this task isn't very stimulating to me right now. In video games, they're usually just this progression of quests, right? Each quest has a goal. That goal has a specific level of challenge. You choose to play that game, which is an important point because most of the games we play, if you think of everything as a game, we're not choosing to do it or we kind of have to do it or we're forced to do it. Mhm.

So, you have the goal. The goal has a certain level of challenge and since there's the progression from like level one to level two to level three and you can't do certain quests or go to certain parts of the map until you reach a certain level or gain a certain amount of experience, you're limited. You don't have very many options. It's like you do the level one quest and you have the skills, the traits, the abilities, the gold, uh, everything that allows you to do that and it stretches your abilities and it's kind of challenging and it's fun. It keeps you immersed. It's not like you're level 10 in World of Warcraft going around killing level one monsters cuz like that just gets boring, right? And then you want to go do something else. But it's not so hard where you go you're level 10 and you fight a level 100 dragon. Is you you just get one shot and that's not fun either. So it's like you have to find that perfect match of okay, where am I now in my development?

What do I actually want to do? What is a goal of mine that I choose to do? If that goal seems too intimidating, too far out there, then break it down into okay, what is a sub-goal that would lead to that goal? So, I have this greater vision, but I also have clarity on how to at least take one step to reach level two. And if you solely focus on that, if you stop trying to be a level one that's focused on level 100 tasks or just thinking that far out into the future, and overwhelming yourself, getting anxiety, worrying about how you haven't gotten very far in life yet, you're not going to make progress doing that. M

So that's the reason why I think that's such a good model to view the world through is because if you are bored or anxious, that can usually be remedied by just thinking of what goal would I choose to do. If that's too far out, break it down into a goal that you can actually do right now. From there, you kind of know what to do and you just have to do it. It's learning and doing. You have to learn how to reach that sub-goal and then you have to do the things that take you there. And when you engage in that and when you aren't so focused on this overwhelming thing, usually it's pretty easy to do that. A lot of people struggle to get started because they just overwhelm themselves with all of these different potentials and possibilities and don't focus on like, let's call it a one-month goal that they can actually do. M

It's a great way of putting it because I think whenever you're faced with the inevitable problem, whether it's in your business or even in your own self-development journey, there might be a roadblock that you hit. I think learning to look at it and reframing it as an obstacle instead of just a a hard stop definitely helps you adjust the way that you respond to that information. Right.

>> Yeah. So, one of the things I think a lot of people fail to do or they're not even aware of uh they're aware of the fact that this is something that they should do is reprogramming their mind and and uninstalling the unconscious narratives that have like been running in their mind and directing their lives. You know that Carl Jung quote, you know, let the unconscious make the unconscious conscious or direct your life and you'll call it fate. Uh, I think one of the things that stand out to me about your writing specifically is that you're teaching people how to think again or think on another level or multi-dimensionally. How do you, bit of a meta question, but think about thinking now versus a few years ago?

It's always questioning.

>> Um, I know. It's sad. A lot of the best ideas have become cliche. Like all the platitudes that you all the quotes, the little fortune cookie advice that used to be so good. Like that was the pinnacle of wisdom is now just brushed under the rug and is overlooked.

>> And I get it. There's some where I see an idea and I'm like, I've heard that before. Not worth it. It just doesn't register. And it's kind of unfortunate in my eyes. Question everything has become one of those.

That's arguably the most important thing you can do, right? You hear "question everything." It's like, "Dude, I've heard that from 20 different people. It doesn't even—it doesn't read. It's not novel, right? So, it doesn't stick in my head anymore."

"No, you're questioning 'question everything.'"

"Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. And it leads to a decent insight."

"Uh, but that's the thing is if you want to reach any form of insight, which is like this avalanche of understanding in your head once you—you know what insight feels like. It's that 'aha' moment. If you haven't reached one of those in the past week, the only way you reach them is through questioning."

"And so it's difficult to do when you're really stuck in this doing mode, right? This survival mode, very stressed-out state. You know what that feels like too, right? You're very overwhelmed and it's like you're in that low consciousness state. The thing about level one, two, and three thinking is that they aren't permanent stages. Like, you reside in one mostly. But if you have a knife to your throat, then you're going to go into that level one stressed-out, overwhelmed survival state and you're only going to be thinking about how do I get this thing away from me or like, 'I'm going to die.'"

"And then maybe you go to like this level four thinking where you're just like, you see everything. But, um, maybe there's something there like, put yourself into such a stressful situation that you are forced to, like, you have to think differently in order to get out of that."

"Yeah. I think that's the role of like false deadlines sometimes. Yeah."

"You know, when you have no real—especially as an entrepreneur, I'm sure yourself as well, you don't really have a deadline or someone to answer to. So you have to create some sort of false deadline with a real consequence. Yeah. You know, and that can force you into, like you said, next-level thinking."

"One, one thing I—I know money isn't really a hot topic, but people like to make it seem like it is with like, 'Money's evil,' you know, all those, all those cliches you've heard before."

"Yeah."

"I do think money can serve a very good purpose of facilitating growth in that way, right? If you are somewhat successful, simulating being broke is a very good, like, pressure, right? Because you're challenging your identity. You're this great successful person. But if now you have no money in your bank account, you have to get back to that point. You have to do something greater, right?"

"Um, and it can be the opposite way around. If you don't have very much money, you can put yourself in a situation where you have to earn more. Like, I kind of discovered this just by being stupid is I, after COVID and before I hired on my editor, like within that time frame, uh, we were both living in separate places. I was kind of just getting tired of like feeling stagnant and, uh, he was living in a situation where he didn't like either. And I was like, 'Dude, let's just move into this apartment, right? I'll pay for most of it.' And I, I knew I had already like been doing kind of well in business, but I, I wasn't able to afford that."

"And so I signed the lease on an apartment that was kind of double what I could afford. And since I was so used to paying like $350 a month for rent, it's like, that stung, right? Like, 'That's not me.'"

"And so I was kind of putting myself, it's like putting a goldfish into a bigger tank so that it can grow to like fit that size."

"And then it's like, 'Okay, well, now I have to focus on making money.'"

"Yeah. And people see that and look at you and they're like, 'Why are you so focused on this like shallow, meaningless pursuit?' It's like, it's more than that to me. It's like it's the one thing that is allowing me to like reach this new level of development."

"So yeah, I have a friend that lives like that. He, and he calls it living on offensive mode and, and props to him because every time he does it, he puts himself in an uncomfortable situation whether it's going to Bali with $300 in his pocket and then coming back, coming out of it with, you know, making 15k a month, or going to live in, in, you know, the FLLAS for 3 months, which he actually did. Um, yeah, it's, and I take a lot of inspiration from that, like living more offensively. And I think that is basically what you're saying, right? Like putting yourself in those environments where you're forced to grow."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. And on the topic of thinking and being in that box of thinking, I think it was Mihi or it might have been yourself that said that anxiety and boredom are like, that's what that's the root of psychic entropy. But on the other side of that, I also think this idea of boredom is the place where creativity is also born."

"What do you think about that? And how do you think they they correlate? Because, yeah."

"There's a whole idea about, you know, Alan Watts talks about this. He says, 'You take seriously what the gods made for fun, which is why you suffer.' And I do think that boredom and embracing that boredom, being present or hyper-present, hyper-aware is where my best creative insights come from."

"Yeah, this is something I've been toying around with in my head that I can't fully articulate yet, but, um, people want things to be the same. They don't want things to change. So they keep looking for this one answer, this one concept, this one framework that they can stick to and get results for life. But what they don't realize is that that's kind of like the description of a 9-to-5 that you're unfulfilled in. Right? It's doing the same thing without an increase in challenge, without these highs and lows, without the story that makes life meaningful. There's no struggle. There's no climax. There's no bottom of the barrel, like bottom of the ocean, like crap, my life is over, and then coming back from that. That's where the meaning is."

"So, I really, I like both sides. I like the idea of like super success-oriented, superficial, make a ton of money, buy a bunch of cars, get the mansion, do whatever you need to do. But then on the other hand, stop, rest, be in the now, appreciate life. It's that contrast. Yeah. Right. And you have to decide when those are best for you. I do feel like many people today do not experience true boredom."

"They're mostly bored. They're bored of not experiencing euphoria because that's what they're so used to. And they attribute that to like, okay, well, euphoria is this highest form of like feeling that I get right now. I need to sustain more of that unconsciously. So they scroll and they do whatever else. We can go into about how cheap dopamine is taking over the world and, whatever it may be. But I do think there is room for both. You need the being and the doing and the balance of those is what makes life meaningful. So when it comes to being bored, usually I think you deploy that after a season of like intense achievement orientation. On the other hand, if you have been bored and not doing anything for too long, then you can easily get stuck in a rut and just like, 'I don't know.' What the mindset is like, kind of the new age mindset of, 'I'm going to go off and live in the woods and I'm just going to meditate all day and do this.' And it's like, that sounds great. If that's your purpose, then great. But I do think you're going to get truly bored of it. Not like a, a nice bored, but, uh, you're going to."

"My problem with that is I feel like a lot of people that are hyper-fixated on like the now or just the being state, the way of water rather than the way of fire, rather than both, right? Like the con—the middle way is both of those things integrated. It's not just the way of water. But, um, when people get like, when that becomes their ideology, their frame, the thing that they're all about, the permanent, the thing that they're making permanent in their mind, it makes them like, close themselves off to an entirely different dimension of reality, right? And they're living in this like, I know we talk about how psychological time is an illusion and how there is no past or there is no future. But there is like, that's a part of thinking. That's a part of being human, right? If you don't think for the future, if you don't correct mistakes from the past, then you're living like an automaton, which is what Alan Watts would say. You're kind of living the life of an NPC."

"Um, we have a way of tying this back to like living off in the woods. You're subjecting, you're willfully subjecting yourself, potentially unconsciously subjecting yourself to a lot of unnecessary pain that you're only going to try to remedy with a band-aid, right? We think of being or the now as like the one true solution to worry or overwhelm or all these negative thoughts and emotions. But if you don't solve the problem that is actually causing those things in today's culture, today's society, the world that you live in, which a lot of the time is money, then you're going to have a difficult time staying out of that survival mode."

"Yeah."

"I mean, you're going to be homeless."

"It's, it's, uh, still escapism."

"Yeah. And I'm, we're talking about the extremes, right? Like a healthy balance. If you're just extreme, like you literally look homeless, but it's okay because you've mastered one part of your mind. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm talking about is there are other things that you can master and it's deeply enjoyable to do those things."

"I, I completely agree and I think a lot of modern-day spirituality is is, uh, and I guess being, the whole concept of being present, is aimlessness and escapism masquerading as spirituality. I don't think they actually, you know, so like you said, the middle way is the integration of both. It's the."

"So, what I do is I micro-dose boredom essentially every day, you know, whole concept."

"Yeah. So, I'll have a—that's a Danco concept. I'll have like a 15 or 20-minute period of boredom and the insights that arrive from that is, uh, what, what I'll act on. Before that, I'll have my intense sprint. And I think I think that's, you know, it's been working for me, but I'm just curious to to hear about, you know, your concept. It sounds like you're more of a, a season of going all in and then a season of of boredom."

"Yeah. I mean, I, I kind of naturally fall into them, right? Like if you're continuing to try to achieve more and more and more, eventually you take on so much to the point where it's like, you just have to either bear that weight and hope that something good comes of it. Yeah. But or you realize like the quality of all of these projects are now gonna suffer because I'm taking on so much. And so it's like, I have to cut back in some way and I have to regain what allows me to do the quality work, right?"

"That's another important thing to note, is that the, the productivity mode, let's call it the doing mode, is only as good as your being mode. Right? Like the, at least in my eyes, when you're doing something that demands that you have creative ideas, you need those spa—you need the space for those creative ideas to emerge so that comes during the rest, during the boredom, during whatever it is and, um."

"Something I talked about recently is like a pattern I've noticed in successful people who didn't waste their life is that they physically worked very little, right? When I talk about doing mode, I'm not talking about grinding 12 to 18 hours a day. That's not my style. It's other people's style. It can be deeply enjoyable. Nuance aside."

"Yeah."

"Those people, like Nikola Tesla, a lot of them worked in their mind just at all times while they were bored, while they were walking, while they Charles Darwin wrote 19 books working 3 to 4 hours a day. That's insane."

"Very few people have that level of output. Alex Hormozi doesn't have that level of output. Maybe he does, in terms of content, but you get what I mean. You can make a massive impact on the world. You can create the theory of evolution with 3 to 4 hours of work a day, being able to live this restful life, being able to spend a lot of time with your family, play games with them at night like Darwin did, go on these walks. Like there is a way to balance all of that. Not in the, balance not in the way of like everything becomes stable, equilibrium. It's the intensity. It's the climax and the bottom of the ocean. And in between the journey between those two things is where the greatness is born."

"That's a great way of putting it. I think it segues perfectly into what I wanted to touch on is because you talked about that 3 to 4 hours a day could put you miles ahead. But it's what you do those 3 to 4 hours and how you really dial your focus in in those 3 to 4 hours versus 10 hours of scattered work, you know, throughout the day and that's not moving the needle. So you wrote a small book, The Art of Focus, which is phenomenal, by the way, amazing writing. Uh, how, if you had to talk about focus and one of the things you said was that it exists on a spectrum, focus and productivity exists on a spectrum, which is a new concept I hadn't heard of before."

"Uh, where did you find how did you find that insight and how do you dial your focus for those, uh, you know, 3 to 4 hours?"

"Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. If you are and you're resonating with some of the mental models and concepts that I'm talking about with Dan here, then you will love this. I've recently put together a short handbook called The Self-Mastery Playbook. It's a guide to high performance. Whether you're a founder or a creator, it pays to know how to access deep flow states consistently, how to execute on your ideas, how to create an identity that actually sticks, how to regulate your nervous system, and ultimately how to get out of your own way. The process I cover inside includes a complete A to Z on how to rebuild your internal world as well as your outer execution systems. It's something my one-to-one clients pay me tens of thousands of dollars for, but you can get your copy of the handbook today for just $9 in the first link in the description below. And if you don't love it and you don't like any of the ideas, then you have a 100% money-back guarantee. Also, I am always asked, what books do I read? What do I recommend reading? So, what I went and did is put together a list of 100 books that transformed my life personally. You can get that completely for free in the description below. So you can download that and let me know what you end up reading. And if you are enjoying this conversation, then please do me a favor and subscribe to this channel. I have many more episodes coming out this year. And go and check out all my other episodes I've had with my previous guests after you finish this one, of course. But those links will be in the description for you below. Anyway, let's get back to the conversation."

"So, it's kind of funny how I like came up with the focus concept where I had this book that I wanted to write and it was mostly just going to be this list of all of my, what I think are my best ideas. Uh, and I wanted to create a book out of those. And so once I wrote down what all of those ideas would be, then I kind of created this like, 'Okay, how can I package this up in a way that is useful for other people or that will kind of grab their attention?' I've talked about focus before. A lot of my topics have done really well like on that. So I'm like, 'Hmm, there's The Art of Impossible, there's this other book, there's this other book, The Art of Focus,' that sounds interesting. People love the focus topic, but let's like now take all of the big ideas that I've had and spend them under that lens and try to create this narrative between them."

"So when I was thinking about this work and rest dichotomy, I kind of noticed a pattern in focus. Like I, I kind of just, 'Okay, this book is called Art of Focus. How do I relate it to that?' And then that kind of brought the insight of, 'Oh, those are two different states of focus, right? It's very narrow attention on work or doing mode, and then like an open state of attention or open focus, which is like the being mode or the rest or whatever it is, and you see reality through a different lens when you're doing that.'"

"Um, so that's kind of what I mean by the spectrum of focus is it's, you can feel it right now where you are on that spectrum. Are you very, are you locked in, very task-oriented? Are you very open? And how much are you open? Are you like physically? Is one way of testing it like, how far does your focus go out? Are you in a group situation? Are you at peace in one area and just like, you can hear the detailed sounds over there in the mountains or something of that nature? Are you, have you actually looked up to the sky in the last 10 years of your life and actually been like, 'Wow, that's actually kind of crazy.' Have you looked at the stars? Have you noticed the detail in the trees when you wash your hands? Have you noticed the, like, water and the feeling when you eat food? Have you noticed the hint of rosemary? Have you noticed all these little details? Can you kind of zoom out and zoom in at will and pick apart and experience all of life in that sense? Right. Focus is kind of the vessel for experiencing life."

"H—that that's a beautiful way of putting it. And I think it's the art of noticing. And, uh, it's, it's something that has to be trained, of course. And it's something that I'm actively training within myself. And actually building in the process of building something that trains people's awareness. But how do you dial yourself back in when you lose yourself in those moments, you know, like, let's say you have those three hours where you need to dial in."

"Yeah. How do you bring yourself back or your personal process of bringing yourself back?"

"Maybe the book should have been The Art of Noticing because it's just that, like, you, you have to notice it. And once you notice it, then that awareness kind of—awareness is curative. So it tends to fix itself. Maybe not immediately, but over time because if you truly notice or you truly become aware, then you understand the problem and you know that problem's painful and you know you don't want to do that again. And if you're aware that the reason you're not doing that is excuses and justification, then those things kind of fall through the floor as well. So it's like, 'Okay, now I just do this.'"

"So, uh, if you're too deep into that work or doing mode, then you have to notice it. How is it impacting my life? Um, when your wife or your friend tells you that you seem different, look inward and notice like, 'Okay, do is that a bad thing?' Cuz it doesn't have to be. Yeah. Or is he right? And should I make that change?"

"If you're too far in the being mode and you're on the verge of being homeless, then notice, is this actually what I want? And if that's what you want, cool. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to take that experience away from you or that potential mistake away from you. That's one thing I'm actually pretty big on is like not taking mistakes away from people."

"Yeah."

"Because they are doing what they want."

"Right. A side tangent there and an idea I really like to think about because I think it is helpful is the way you do what you want is just by doing what you want. Like the, I guess if we were to put it in a quote, it's, 'Do what you want in a direction you choose,' and then you will hit, you will experience a mistake, and then from there, if you actually notice the mistake and register it as a mistake, then you'll course-correct in the right direction, then you won't want what you used to want. What you want will evolve."

"Right."

"Right. So if you do what you want, buy the car, make a ton of money, do the things that people tell you not to do, get arrested, I don't care. Like, like, yeah, that's bad advice, but if you actually register it as a mistake, you're going to course-correct in the right direction towards something. And then it's like, 'Okay, now I want to do this. I've experienced all the bad things in life. Now I want this.' And then you go through that and you're like, 'Okay, well, I didn't want that either.' And then you keep going. And then you keep going. But as people say, it's not about the outcome, it's about the journey."

"If you do that, you just get to go through this perpetual enjoyable journey with all of these different lessons and experiences. And that's how you gain the wisdom to kind of slowly and slowly live this higher quality of life."

"So you, you may not be able to get what you want right now or ever because it's always going to change. And that's, that doesn't have to be seen as like this nihilistic thing. That's a beautiful thing. The art of contrast, I guess, as well, you know, because the contrast provides you the insights. And, uh, are there any focus on productivity hacks that you actually believe in?"

"Yes, one to three lever-moving tasks a day in a specific time block."

"Right? And those things, the, the keyword there is lever-moving because it, it seems very obvious to me, and that may sound arrogant. It may seem obvious to you too, but when people like come to us and they say, 'I've been doing this, but I'm not getting the result.' And in my head, it's like, 'Well, one, do it better, or two, you're doing it wrong.'"

"Yeah."

"Or like, you just don't understand it yet. It's like, 'Oh, well, I can't grow. I've been posting for 10 days on social media and I can't grow.' And then you look at their account and you know exactly why. But it's hard to, like, you can't pass that intangible lesson off to people or just like, there's nothing you can really say that will take them from level one to level 10. They have to go about that on their own. So the best thing you can do to make progress is to just be able to one, understand that it's a skill issue, and two, how do I acquire that skill, which is usually just learning, practice, and understanding that you can always improve what you're doing."

"I like that. And most of, I guess, what what it comes down to is, uh, earned secrets. This idea of earned secrecy. I heard it on the Founders podcast and I think it's something that you can't teach because, like you said, it is an intangible nuance that only registers for you and it's hard for you to articulate something like that."

"Yeah. I mean, think of how you come to it, right? Like in order to earn that secret, like think about it because it's hard to like make physical or illustrate, but it's like, you as a person interpret the world in this such a unique way that is specific to your conditioning and the beliefs that you have and how you just perceive situations and what you pull from them, right? You and I both read the same book. We're going to come away with it with different ideas that we thought were the most impactful, or you may not like the book. I may like the book. It may change my life. You may write a one-star review for it."

"Right? So, it's like, my earned secret comes from my unique mind progressing through this storyline, through the levels of the game. And once I reach level 50, this rare loot is going to drop. I'm going to pick that up. But nobody else that is doing the dungeon with me in this metaphorical game is going to get that. Like, that's mine. And you're going to have to go through all of this trial and error, all of these different dungeons and quests and everything else to try to get that secret, too."

"And I can't pass it off to you, mostly. One, oh, it depends, right? If you're the right level, if you can actually wear the armor by the requirements of the game, then it's yours. If you're a level one, I can't even like give that to you, right? There's, you can't even use it. I'm going to give it to you. It's going to sit in your bag. You can maybe sell it for gold, but then you're like, a person who created a course that hasn't actually done the thing, and then you get called a scammer, right? It's like there's so many parallels between this, but that's kind of what earned secrets is to me is like, only you can acquire them. And you trying to get them from other people as a shortcut just is not going to work. And the sooner you know that it's not going to work and you stop searching for that one thing that's just going to make you a success."

"Yeah. I, I, I guess this, uh, someone told me that it's better to learn from people who are only two to three years ahead of where you are versus 10 or 15 years ahead. Uh, because the insights are a lot closer to the mistakes you're making right now, you know. So, um, in, in terms of your, your spiritual journey, I'm just really interested because you have had, you touch on it a lot in, in your work, but it's not the forefront of your work. It's one of the things that makes you multi-dimensionally jacked. Actually, let's segue into that because I believe that's one of your best ideas. What does it mean to be multi-dimensionally jacked as a concept?"

"I'd reframe that by saying, what does it mean to be spiritual?"

"Mhm. And I think that that is, I think that spirituality, when we look at it clearly and what all of the practices and actions and everything else leads to, it's shedding the limits on your potential. So in terms of development or reaching your potential, it's like you learn and acquire skills to remove specific limits so that you can grow further, your mind can expand further. You're not as stuck in this conditioning that you were kind of raised in from year zero to year 20 of your life and you go forward like that. But the concept of being multi-dimensionally jacked kind of stems from me as a kid. I don't know where this desire came from, but I just wanted to max out all the stats. Maybe it was the video game, right? Maybe that's why that's such a cool concept to me is if you play long enough and smart enough, you don't have to be a specialist."

"We can go into that if we want to. But for being multi-dimensionally jacked, I think there's like three, four major domains of life, which is mind, body, spirit, business or, uh, mind, body, spirit, vocation. It's personal interior world, which is your mind and I guess thinking about your thoughts or how you view the world, that's mind. Body is kind of personal exterior world, so your habits, behaviors, appearance, etc. So two perspectives there. Then there's the collective internal world, which is culture, shared beliefs, kind of religion in a sense. Um, how you relate to other people, how two minds mesh, two plus minds mesh. The vocation quadrant is kind of the collective exterior world, which is how you interact with society. What's your job? What's your purpose? Um, it's like systems, so the economy and other things like that."

"This is Ken Wilber's AQAL model, right?"

"Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Exactly. Like for each category, the way that I like to think of that model or being able to develop through that model. And for more context, when we talk about level one, two, and three thinking, we can think of that applying. So, if you create like this three concentric circles, it looks like a bullseye. And then you cut that into four. So you have the four quadrants of mind, body, spirit, vocation. Then like that's how you level up, right? And if you plot points along that to kind of map your own development, you can see, 'Okay, I'm level two in mind, level one in body, level three in spirit, level four, I mean level one in vocation,' something like that. And the issue that I see there is like if you're level three in spirit but everywhere else you're not, you're very developed in the spiritual domain, you're like a monk or, um, just a spiritual teacher of some form, but you may have a frail and unhealthy body. And that could be due to cultural things or just a lack of education or kind of, uh, conforming to like what food is available to you, so on and so forth. In the vocation domain, you may not even be contributing to society in really any way. You may be living off in the woods, so to say. Uh, that, and those things in and of themselves, when you're a lower level of development in any of those domains, that's when problems are more likely to occur and when you aren't going to really see a solution to solve them. Or you're going to try to solve them with the domain that you have more expertise in. So the very spiritual guy is going to have this frail body and the problems that come from that, or they're going to try to solve it from a more, like, contemplative point of view. They're going to, like, overcome the liver problems so that they don't worry about it, but it's still going to be a problem and potentially lead to something bad in the future where if you were to learn about the body, proper nutrition, maybe proper exercise or training, then you have a much better way of solving that problem. So when you do quote unquote adopt this archetype of becoming multi-dimensionally jacked, you sustainably increase your quality of life because you have more holistic solutions to problems, right? Cuz you're not going to have a life without problems, right? There's going to be money problems, health problems, mental problems, collective spiritual problems, and those in my eyes are best solved within their own respective domains. But they do cross over, right? So the more developed you are in all of those things, the more they unlock one another."

"Yeah."

"Right. So, uh, being more developed in the spiritual and health body domain in some way is going to impact your success in the vocation, or let's say business or work domain because you're going to have more energy. You're going to have a more commanding appearance. You're going to be able to think things through and contemplate on a much deeper level thanks to the high level of spiritual development. Um, but if you were to solely focus on the business route, you're going to become that like sleazy salesman, yeah, Wolf of Wall Street on a yacht, and a lot of the problems in the relationship problems he gets left for dead by in the movie."

"Yeah."

"Um, he has terrible friends. Like, a lot of his life isn't taken care of. But people look at that and they're like, 'I want that so bad' because it just seems like a cool and interesting life to live, which it is, but it could have been a much better life if he had focused on those or given at least some attention to those other areas of development. I think you're right. It definitely crosses over and I think a good example of multi-being multi-dimensionally jacked is understanding that like for me, when I first began in business, someone told me that business is just a personal growth engine in disguise."

"Yeah."

"And, you know, that's the perfect way of putting it. I think every problem I faced within my business eventually I realized, 'Oh, I faced this before when I was in different domains.' So, I want to, I'm curious to hear your thought on how to harmonize logic and intuition because you sound like a very logical guy and the way that you kind of break things down into systems and mental models and the way you think about things, but you also have the element of using your intuition and being bored and whatnot. What's, do you ever think about how you harmonize them?"

"I think they both go hand in hand like as you get better because the intuition also solidifies the logic, right? I feel like I was more of that intuitive, go with the flow, not really go with the flow, but more like gut decision-making when I was younger. And that to me is kind of to like prove or unearth some kind of process that could work. And the more you do that, I feel like naturally the more logical you become, but you also tune your intuition that way because when you do grow and get results in certain domains of your life, you can, that that feeds into your intuition obviously because you've course-corrected. You have so many data points. You're like an AI that's been trained for 10 years that when it has to go and accomplish a task, it's like, you just know what to do. You don't have to be logical about it. You just know, right? And then you can't sometimes you can't even explain yourself, uh, because it is a gut feeling, but that gut feeling gets more, it's like a missile seeking the right target just automatically because it's been trained so much to do that."

"So would you say that all logic is just intuition?"

"Oh man."

"Because the more I think about it, I think that logic is my way of rationalizing or understanding what my intuition is trying to tell me."

"Yeah, that makes sense. But you can live by intuition and absolutely destroy your life."

"Yeah. But then is it your intuition or is it, is it hijacked?"

"That's a good point. Um, definitely hijacked. But I think it goes back to the kind of like cybernetic process of doing what you want. Just trial and error in general where you can do what you want. You can do the quote unquote bad things that you desire to do. You're not going to die. You're some, probably nothing bad is going to happen to you to an extent. Like, be as dumb as you want, but that's how you make the mistake and then that's how you correct the mistake if you notice the mistake. That's the biggest thing is just being able to notice mistakes you've made. I guess one good practice for people because they're difficult to notice in the moment, right? You never really do something and then immediately register it as as a mistake. Yeah, it all, 90% of the time comes from reflection. So if you don't have that process of questioning or reflection as a whole or just thinking about like my past, what happened and what do I not want to happen again and then making a better decision the next time. If you don't do that, then that is kind of the definition of living unconsciously."

"Yeah. Yeah. So just on reflection quickly then, what is your process of reflection? Do you, do you journal, you meditate? I know you're a big walker. Uh, what's your go-to and what do you think is the most helpful for you?"

"Yeah, I think in order to reflect best, you need some kind of project or goal to apply what you learn to, because like if you're not, if you don't have an aim for the future, then you can't adjust that aim. Yeah, if that makes sense. Like if you're just sitting and not doing anything and reflecting, you don't have a way of solidifying that. You don't have a way of putting it into practice. You don't have a way of turning it into experience. So applied knowledge is wisdom. Yeah. Essentially."

"Yeah. Yeah."

"Um, so I feel like it happens when you are dead set on achieving some kind of goal because if you want to achieve it, you have to learn from your mistakes or else you won't reach it to an extent, right? Like it depends, that's if you continuously have a goal to pursue, right? I kind of believe, I wouldn't say believe, I like to think through the teleological model of just how reality works, right? I don't think that having always having this big hairy goal or purpose is a bad thing, right? In being in the pursuit of a goal, I think is just what humans are meant to do. They're goal-oriented creatures. That doesn't negate being or rest because being or rest is like a part of achieving the goal, right? We all have a purpose. We're all in this grand system. And once you lose that connection or don't have that goal that you're pursuing next, you kind of start to get lost and you start to get trapped in like that entropy cycle, right? Because you don't have that way to keep your mind ordered."

"Yeah. It's kind of like that. And I like that. It's kind of like that Matthew McConaughey clip. I'm not sure if you've seen it when he won the Oscar and they asked him, he did a speech and they asked him when he was younger, who's your hero? And he said, 'Me. It's me 10 years from now.' And, you know, it got to 10 years later and they asked him again, also, 'Are you your hero yet?' And he said, 'Not even close. It's like, it's me 10 years from now.' And it's this endless pursuit of the next thing, you know. And the one thing I wrote about recently is that, uh, there is no finish line. Like there is, there's nowhere to arrive."

"Yeah. So I'm curious to hear your process on, or your, your thinking about the pursuit of a goal or the pursuit of wisdom or the pursuit of anything without attachment to the end goal."

"That's a tough one. I don't know if it's about attachment for me because I think it, I think being attached can fuel a lot of the process and you can learn a lot from being attached, right?"

"Oh, like how do you learn to not be attached if you haven't been attached?"

"Good point. Um, in terms of just pursuing things and whether or not, like, is there this end state? Is there whatever it is? Is there like a point where you stop and just enjoy life?"

"I don't think so. But I think that question is backwards. I don't think you can fully enjoy life when you're stagnant."

"Yeah."

"Right? People see it as if like work or the pursuit of a goal is some like taxing thing or something that like you just stop doing at some point. Like when people want to lose weight, they don't, they think they have to suffer in order to achieve that thing. They don't think that process can be deeply enjoyable. And since they're, they feel like they're suffering for this like six months that they are losing the weight, they just can't wait to go back to their old lifestyle. And that's the exact thing is like they don't realize that they have to adopt the lifestyle of their future self now, or else they're not going to retain whatever results they get because they're in this temporary identity. They haven't actually changed their behavior because they haven't changed their identity. So in my eyes, it's like, 'Okay, how do I cultivate this ideal lifestyle that brings maximum enjoyment to my life?' And if you were to focus on that, you would pursue goals simply because flow psychology and just experience, like experiencing it, you understand that that is the most enjoyable state to live in. Even if there is those lows, there is that struggle, once you get out the other side and you have that new point of view, you look back on that and you're like, 'I wouldn't have it any other way.'"

"Yeah, I completely agree. And again, I think it goes back to the idea of the spectrum. It's that you're not supposed to live in euphoria, nor depression, but you're supposed to experience the whole spectrum. I think."

"Yeah, it's a great way of putting it."

"One, one thing there, sorry."

"Yeah."

"Um, I feel like people get very locked in on eliminating negative emotions. It's like the only way the positive emotions can exist is with the negative emotion as an anchor. Like you think of, 'Oh, I want to be so happy.' Like that's the goal is like happiness. How do I achieve happiness? But like, would happiness make sense without sadness? Like if you never experienced the sad moment in your life, would you actually be happy? Right? Because you have nothing to compare to. It's like, maybe I feel a sense of well-being right now. Maybe I am quote unquote happy. But there again, there's no contrast. It's like, that's how reality is."

"I always feel weird saying that without explaining it. So just think of different examples, right? To kind of pull apart reality, right? When you have this, think of a tapestry. It's very beautiful on the front, but then when you flip it over, you have the ugly side. Um, you think of black and white next to each other, it's a distinction. Like, they're two different things. Yeah. Maybe sounding crazy right now, but sunset and moon rising."

"Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's the rhythm. It's the balance. It's the, whatever. It's the duality. Yeah. Everything is a duality. Yeah. And so with happiness, sadness, with positive emotions, negative emotions, if you try to eliminate one or repress one or just not experience one, then you're also not going to experience the other side and you're going to get stuck in this dangerous middle. But if you're to kind of embrace both, then you truly get to experience them. Who, who said that a negative emotion actually has to make you suffer?"

"You know what I mean? Like pain obviously can be deeply painful. But I don't know."

"It's about your relationship and position to it. Yeah. In perspective because like some people hate going to the gym, some people love it. Some people hate going on a run. Some people love it. Some people hate eating clean. Other people, they couldn't live any other way. And they, they suffer when they don't eat clean."

"Do you think they learn to love it?"

"Yes. In a way, it, I would say it's learning where it's more so that's who they are, right? I think discipline is a feature of identity where if I'm a bodybuilder and I'm kind of trained or I teach myself or I condition myself or my parents condition me to be a bodybuilder or a health nut, and that's all I know. If I were to travel to a new location and all they have to eat is McDonald's, like I'd be like, 'Get me out of here right now.' Like, I don't want to eat there. And when you're forced to eat there, then it's like, 'Oh, you, you feel like you're going against yourself.' It's not enjoyable. That's suffering. But most people see that as like the pinnacle of euphoria. It's like, 'Dang, I just want to order Sonic and throw on Netflix and that is like, that's the life. Grab my beer. That's the good life.' On the other hand, you have people who like have cultivated this identity where the good life is eating chicken and rice on a Saturday evening and staying in and working on their business, right?"

"Yeah. It's all individual, but you can actually mold that sense of identity to enjoy things that are going to lead to a beneficial future rather than a detrimental future."

"And I like how you touched on identity because I think, you know, it's something I write about as well is that there's always a lag between identity and reality. And it's that you're further ahead in real life than you are in, um, in your mind. I don't know if you think that way at the same, if you think that is true, but it's just something I've experienced myself. And then the way you close that gap is just through more aligned output and eventually you come to sort of an equilibrium where you are who you say you are."

"Kind of like flow state, right?"

"Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Getting back into flow states. But then the issue and the problem becomes when your whole identity is curated around one thing and then something challenges that identity. How do you move forward? Uh, when that happens, what do you think about that? What's an example?"

"So let's say you are the, the health and fitness guy and that's your whole entire life and you break your leg, right? You know, cuz I've seen it happen to like pro athletes or people I grew up with. H how do you navigate that?"

"Yeah."

"That's a good question."

"Take your time."

"That is incredible with."

"I'll say honestly, I don't know. But I think this is the biggest point is that there is a way to do something else and enjoy it as deeply, right? You just have to experiment until you find that thing. And sounds like cop-out advice, but just try not to let that setback dig you deeper into a hole to where it's very difficult to get yourself out. Right? The process of experimentation and finding that next thing can be enjoyable in and of itself. But I do think that is an individual journey because also thinking back on when people give advice to me when I'm in this like down point in my life, none of it registers. It's like, I, like maybe I ask for advice and then I listen to it and I'm like, 'Yeah, whatever, dude.' But I tend to always find my way out. Like if you really want to find your way out, I think you will."

"When those moments do occur, it's an opportunity for you to to see it. Yeah. To see it as perspective, to see it as an opportunity to reinvent yourself and to not have your identity too attached to to one thing. It helps to think of like life as a game where you could just think, 'Okay, what's the next quest?' But I do also think it's very worth thinking of life as just a story. And, um, the way that story takes place is like a book. So if you can think of like, 'Okay, where am I now in the book? I'm at the ending of the chapter. I'm at the point where it starts to get really dark, right? I just broke my leg. I've been doing this my entire life. Everything was going so well. I get to the end of this chapter. Boom. Legs gone. What's in the next chapter? I'll probably be down for a by chapter. I'm going to let myself get into this lower state. But then what happens next? You go on a journey. You start to discover yourself. You start to discover new things. You start to meet new people. You start to, uh, brainstorm these different opportunities. And then you get into this mission and then you get closer and closer to the climax and then boom, maybe not happily ever after, but you found that next thing."

"And so it's like, are you going to just stop, stop the story right there? Are you going to like, is the story even going to be interesting? Are you just going to wallow for the next 12 chapters until it, that's not how a story ends, right? Okay. So, it's like, are you going to limit the wallowing to one chapter or are you just going to let it go and drag the book on, lose a bunch of readers, so on and so forth until it doesn't matter anymore?"

"That's a great place to end. I think, uh, yeah, man. Oh, thank you for, for, for coming on. Thank you for all the writing and the things that you're putting out into the world. I genuinely think it's making, you know, it sounds cliché, but making people clearer thinkers and, and by default making it a better place to live in. So, I appreciate everything you do with your work and if you haven't, please go and subscribe to Dan's channel. Go to subscribe to his newsletters, buy his books, and, uh, keep updated with his software and whatnot. But I appreciate you coming on, bro."

"Thank you so much."

"Thank you for coming out."

"Yes, we lost all light, but we, we got it done. So, see you in the next one. And, uh, yeah, perfect."