We were created by God, universe,

source, whatever. You know, someone wants to

categorize that as there was no mist. It was not a

mistake, right? We are not an aberration.

We are here for a reason. We are a part

of this symphony. Welcome to the King Within, a

podcast for men who seem to have it. All, yet feel like they're losing what

matters most. I'm Mike Salemi and I've been there. Successful on

paper, but disconnected on the inside. This isn't about grinding

harder. It's about mastering your emotions, leading with. Calm

strength, and rebuilding trust at home. Each week we dive into

real stories and tools for becoming the man your. Family runs towards,

not away from. Because you didn't build this life to lose yourself in it. This

is the King within. Let's do the work. Today's guest is

someone who's redefined how I think about business success and self love.

Animanian is the founder of Scale with Psychology. He's advised

over 50 executive teams, helped dozens of companies scale from

1 million to 100 million plus in revenue, and his work has

contributed to more than 2 billion in combined company exits. In

this conversation, we explore his core idea of getting paid to

exist, what that really means, and why constraint, not

hustle, is the doorway to freedom. You'll hear why

subtraction scales faster than additional, how to raise your floor

instead of chasing new ceilings, and the mindset shift that turns

work back into play. If you've ever felt stretched between ambition and

peace, this one's going to land. Follow the show and share with a friend

who's ready to build smarter, not harder. Let's dive in.

So funny just being at your place with Lee. One of the first things

I said to you was, man, if Lauren was here, she would feel so seen.

Yeah. Because as I looked in the. In the closet is like supplement

heaven. And that's not. That's not even. No,

there's more, actually. I ran out of space. And

then we had to like take

cupboards in the kitchen and repurpose them into

supplement storage. And then in the bathroom, underneath

the sink, there's an auxiliary,

you know, spillover section. Has

that always been your thing or just one of. One of your.

Yeah, I mean, not to the same levels

of excessiveness, but, you know, progressively.

It's an accumulative process. Yeah. I've

been kind of obsessed with. With

anything that

seems like a tool to

move the physical,

mental, emotional, you know,

energetic state

into one that's more conducive to

peak life. And so the peptides were

recent foray because with a lot of

this stuff, like with peptides, I had all this, you know, resistance with,

like, do I really want to jab myself with. Because I

hate needles. Oh, and you would never have thought. I mean.

Ani gave me some. Some nad and another one for the sinuses. Yeah, you're a

pro, bro. Yeah, and I. I wasn't a few weeks ago,

so. A few weeks ago? A few weeks ago, yeah.

Yeah, because I had. I had BPC157

in my fridge for two years.

And I had a couple of other things that

they. They were just in the fridge. And there was a.

There was a part of me that was just not ready to,

you know, jump into that. And

I started with bpc, which was. Great for the

tendons and ligaments and that sort of stuff. Well, it. Yeah, it depends

on how you use it, but it can be pretty much systemic

repair. It stands for body protection compound.

It's endogenously produced in the

intestines, so it's really good for gut health,

but it also repairs, you know, other, like, tissue systems.

And. Yeah, so I was like, a

grab, you know, like, all things. Like, first it was gradual, and then it was,

like, now I'm, you know, playing with five different

things. The thymuson one is interesting because

I, like, for last six

months, like, every time I get on a plane, I'll, like, come down with something

like, okay, I want to really play with ramping

up my immune system. And so before

leaving or when would that. Well, actually, now I'll start doing it

before leaving, but, you know, definitely

after just to

sidestep that. And so,

you know, we did the whole DNA testing

thing in Park City. We just got the results

back, actually. Oh. So that was interesting.

And what else? We just started working

with a functional health guy who's actually

very quickly, with like, couple of hundred dollars tests, figured out,

you know, what's happening. There's some

thing called msh, Melanocyte stimulating hormone,

which for both of us is like, super low,

which apparently indicates something. And

we both tested fairly high for mold and a couple

of other things. So it's like, you know,

this is one of those things where when we don't know what the root

cause is, then we're trying 50 different things, but

when we know actually exactly what's going on, then we don't need the 50

things. We can just do the one thing. And

so I think from a supplement perspective, that that's kind of a,

you know, like, I can see,

like Even with the, the DNA one they give

you, they have an option for 160 bucks a month, they'll

create supplements custom to your DNA.

So the stuff that you have some predisposition

to, so that can,

you know, cut the volume of

supplements pretty dramatically.

You know, And I think that is right there, the parallel or the

connection to at least how I've observed you. I mean, we've known each other

a little bit over, I don't know, a year, year and a half. Yeah,

we talked last Christmas. I remember I was outside.

Yeah, we had like a two hour, a deep, really deep

conversation. Deep. Yeah, I remember

that. I know exactly where I was at. There was, there was tears. There was.

Yeah, I mean, any. I mean, it also is a related side note,

anytime you can hop on a call with someone and go that deep, that quick,

there's just, I mean, ever since I've met you, man, there's just been a solid

connection and getting to really observe and then spend more time

with you. That piece of

getting to the root, that piece of efficiency,

that piece of when everything is in alignment,

everything flows so much smoother. And

really where I want to go for today is because you've been

just no short of a huge,

in a short amount of time, a huge mentor to me and teacher

in creating like, yes, on the business front for sure,

but creating a life that

kicks ass and also feels

really good and just for a bit of context. So

now you've got quite a bit of education out there, online education.

And you've got so many, many programs in your group, the

accelerator. But there was one

that literally. And I told you this story, I didn't tell it to you till

recently, but it's called the Dynamic Offer and

Unpack that. Or I'd love for you to, but you sent me that.

And you're like, hey, watch this for where you're at at the end of the,

the tears and all the things that we talk through and work through. And you

sent me that. And when I was watching, I was like, no way.

There is another way that doesn't feel so much

like force. That actually, like, I believe

I might have, even might sound weird to anybody listening, but I either went

to tears or almost went to tears watching. It was a business, like a business

video, but it was just so

dead on in alignment that I went down the

path of like, you have a Google Doc, which I don't even know how many

pages. Yeah. But after that I hand wrote

your entire transcript of that video by hand.

So I don't Even know, like 14, at least, single spaced by hand pages.

Wow. And that's how much it hit me that I really want to

kinesthetically, like, feel it. Because

mentally, emotionally, spiritually, whatever you wanna say. I was like, there's something here.

And it was such a. No exaggeration,

it might sound like a complete paradigm shift of what is possible for

me, for my family and how to do that. And so that's what

I wanna unpack today. And you've got. Well, I'll pause there and let you

chime in because I just spoke a lot there. Yeah, man. That's honestly, like

the exact reason why I'm so obsessed with

what I do. Because

I really

painstakingly, meticulously

try to deliver those

essentially, like red pills. Yeah.

Where, you know, the person still has the

sovereignty to choose whether they want to take it or not.

But if they choose to take it and they choose to

fully open to it, then

it opens the door to a completely different paradigm that we

can exist in and from.

And I think most people,

they don't have a reference point

for a paradigm that actually allows them to have it all.

I mean, I certainly didn't. You know, I grew up super poor. I watched my

dad work three jobs when I was a kid. You know, most

of my life growing up, he, you know, come home

at like 9pm, 10pm, 11pm, sometimes 2am

and he literally worked himself to death.

Right. And so I didn't really know

that. First of all, I didn't even know that I was operating

inside a paradigm. Right, because you were

in it. I was in it. I was like a fish in water

that doesn't know what water is. Because for a fish to know what water is,

the fish needs to know what's not water. Right. We need

contrast to make something distinct.

And if we don't even know the thing we're in, and

we don't have awareness of the fact that we're in the thing, then we

don't, or we don't even have the

conception that there can be some other thing.

And that's the deepest level of bondage that a human being can operate in.

And so first I had to actually realize that

there's other paradigms. And the fact that I was in one

and that paradigm was limiting in terms of

what I could experience in life. And most

paradigms are by definition. Because most

paradigms are optimized around one specific variable.

Right. So there's a paradigm where, you know, you work

your ass off and, you know, trade Your

time and energy for money. And,

you know, that can be considered a job or someone who has

a skill set. Like they're a photographer. And, you know, I have a friend

who's a freelance photographer, and, you know, that's a little bit

above that level. So let me

paint a framework, right? When we think

about wealth, right? When we think about

currencies, we have

essentially the thing that the exchange that most

people on the planet are engaged in is they're giving life

force, right? They're giving their energy and they're giving their

time, and they're exchanging it for a different

currency. And that currency typically is money,

right? And that's the default

paradigm that most people on the planet

operate inside of. But there's levels to the game, right? There's

levels to wealth. And so that's level

one, which is I get paid for my

time, and I get paid for

my time. And that's an example of, you know, someone who works at McDonald's.

They, whatever the minimum wage is, let's say it's $15 an hour. You know,

they're. They trade an hour of their life and a

bunch of life force and energy for

whatever. $15, let's say. And that's

the. The lowest level on the

totem pole. And, you know, these

people, they know society considers them

unskilled labor, right? So their

economic value comes from the volume of time that

they can give. And so in colloquial speak, we call

that trading time for money. Right? Right. Because it's like I got nothing

else, right? I'll show up at a construction site

and, you know, I'll. I'll put in six hours. And, you know, the

foreman at the end of the day just pulls out a wad of cash and

he's like, okay, here you go. And

when I use comparative language,

I don't mean that in a. It's less moral or less

ethical or less, you know, that anyone who

is at a lower level has any less worth. Right? We got to.

Also, there's a lot of nuance in this conversation that I'll unpack.

But worth is different from value.

We all have infinite worth. And the mathematical proof for that is

because we exist. And

the universe that we exist inside of

and that which we are, is a perfect

mathematical equation. And because

the. The algorithm, the equation, the

mathematical structure of the universe is perfect because it has to be for

all of this to exist in this way. The fact that, you know,

your 40 trillion cells, somehow independent of your

will, know to organize into your liver, into Your

heart and your kidneys, and somehow they know to, like, work with each other,

right? We can call that a miracle,

right? And the same thing with the moon

and the ocean and the birds and the trees

and, you know, all of life itself.

If someone has a penchant for the divine, we would

call that a miracle, right? It's a miracle that we

exist. It's a miracle that we're even having this conversation.

And, you know, I operate, I swing both ways

on the science side and the spiritual side. So. Because I don't

think those are actually different things, I think it's the same thing. And.

And so I call a miracle basically

perfect mathematics. So miracles are basically

mathematical perfection. And so

every human being has infinite worth. Why? Because they

exist. And because there are no mistakes

in the mathematics of the universe. And what that means is

everything has a place. So if something

exists, if you exist, you exist for a reason,

right? And that is fundamentally

what allows us to realize that there is a

mathematical proof for our infinite worth.

That's what allows us to realize that we belong,

right? That we were created by

God, universe, source, whatever. You know,

someone wants to categorize that as there

was no mist. It was not a mistake, right? We are not an

aberration. We are here for a reason.

We are a part of this symphony in this universe, this

uni verse, this one verse, one verse, one

soul which is perfect. That is a mathematically perfect

symphony made up of all of us, right? We're

not just a wave in the ocean. We're the entire ocean in the wave.

And so that is our worth. Our worth is infinite,

right? You look at a baby in the eyes, and it's pretty obvious,

but our value is not, right? Our value is not

equal and uniform because value

comes from something else, right?

And so that's why we have to disambiguate worth and value.

And there's many kinds of value, but in this case, we're talking about economic

value. And so in terms of economic value, then the

lowest level of the ladder is I can

produce value for someone else

by giving my time and energy.

I can get paid for my time. If I, you

know, spend 10 hours of my time, I'll get

paid, you know, a certain amount of money. Cool. The

level up from there is I get paid

for my skills. And so this is, you

know, my friend who's a photographer. Like, after

college, he, you know, got into photography and he

apprenticed with someone. He learned the skills of photography and

videography, and then he started getting booked for

weddings and, you know, other things. And now he's making,

he's making more because he

developed a skill that increased his value.

And that skill has a certain

value in the marketplace based on supply and demand.

And he was able to exchange his skills for

the currency of money, right? And

in most cases, he. It's a more favorable exchange

rate, right? You can make more when you have a skill than

if you don't have a skill and you're just giving your time. And

so, you know, he can work for less

time but make more money because he

has more leverage. Right? He's

leveraging something else, which is the skill,

Right. We leverage assets. So him learning

photography gives him, you know, this asset,

and so he doesn't have to trade as much of his time

to make a certain amount of money. Great.

So the next level up from there is I

don't just have time, I don't just have skills,

but I have the ability to manage and organize other people

with skills or other people with time.

So this is the, the manager of the McDonald's,

this is the, the director of the software

engineers, right? This is the, the

foreman. He's not carrying the, the bricks up

himself, but he's organizing, he's directing.

And at this level, people get paid

to organize, right? Paid to manage.

And this is sort of the essence of

the, the classical consulting company, right? Bunch

of consultants, like, consulting company will be like, okay,

we have access to all of these people with all of these skills and, and

we're going to sell their skills, right? And we're going to make more

money and we'll pay them out

and, you know, we'll get rich. Like McKinsey and

Bain and all these companies. Yep, yep, yep. Right,

cool. So that's, that's a level,

right? Then things get actually

really interesting because at this, at this level,

I'm still, There is still a good amount of time involved,

right? And if we want to have it all,

we also want to have more of our time

in our

domain. We want to have ownership over our

time, right. That is the only way we

can be free and sovereign when I don't have to

ask someone what I can do with my

time, right? Fundamentally, until then,

I'm basically a slave because I don't have

autonomy. And when I don't have autonomy,

all human suffering, a lot of human suffering is downstream of

that because then I don't have control over my life.

And that creates anxiety, right? Then I have to

numb that with alcohol and TV and social media and all these

things to avoid the fact that I'm

not free, which is a very painful

reality to confront. So anyway, the next

level from there becomes I can get

actually paid to think. And this is when

things get interesting, because now I'm actually decoupling from time. To time.

Because the thing that I'm trading

is not my time or energy, but

it's my ability to think, right?

So Steve Jobs, he had this idea,

what if I can put a thousand songs in your pocket,

right? And that generated

hundreds of billions of dollars of economic value. The idea

probably came in a second, in a moment,

right? So that's where the beginning of

asymmetry is,

Right? Asymmetry is something that I'm

obsessed with more than almost anything else. Obsessed with

a lot of things, but that's. That's a big one, where

there is a disproportionate

relationship between my inputs and my outputs,

right? So that. Even that workshop that you were talking about, like,

I wrote every word, it, you know, took me a while to do that,

but then I could put it out and, you know, hundreds of

people have bought that and had some version

of that experience, and it's allowed me to change a lot of

lives. But I only created

that once, right? So there's

a disproportionate relationship between inputs and outputs.

So in that workshop, I wasn't really getting paid for my time.

I was getting paid to think. Right. Took me

decades to uncover these ideas and really

build this philosophy on not just how we can build

a business, what I call an economic engine around our energy,

right? An architecture around who we

are authentically, on the things that we're obsessed with,

naturally, on the ways in which

we deeply desire and enjoy creating value.

And how do I construct that in a way that allows me to get paid

to exist? Can I pause you right there? Yeah. Because that concept

right there, getting paid to exist, I mean, you've given,

I think, one of the hallmarks of

any great, as you say, marketer, even coach, but is

when you can articulate or someone can articulate the other

person's problems, challenges, experience, and put words to

them even better than they could. And that piece of getting

paid to exist, like, wait, let's just take a moment right

there and, like, breathe that in when you had first said that, and

then unpack that one, it made so much sense.

And in part, there has been along the way, and I'm still super early, but

there's been, you know, some micro resistances

because it's such a paradigm shift. Like,

wait, is this real? Is this possible? Am I allowed to

have this? Am I allowed? Do I deserve it? Am I allowed? That's. I'm

coming through that right now.

And the getting paid to exist, like one of the things. And please

extrapolate on this. But one of the things that you had gave voice to

was. And I've experienced it's not just seen it countless times

in the. Whether it's the self development space and fitness

space, but there's a push to

become a character. There's a push to become

a different version of you on social media or

on YouTube, to step into someone else and

embody a Persona. Now, maybe that works for comedians

and such, but at least for the life that I personally want to live, I

already know unconsciously there are so many masks that I wear

and don't even fucking know, you know? And so one of my

goals has been how can I live

more embodied of who I authentically am

in all areas. So the version of Mike that shows

up at the retreat, the version of Mike sitting with you here, the version of

Mike with my son or with my wife. Yeah, I do have a different

relationship with everybody, you know, and there's a different level of trust and

safety and history. And so, yeah, it's not the same

relationship with everybody, but in terms of the.

The stepping into another Persona to

promote something like, I don't

want that personally. And so when you brought up this

concept of getting paid to exist, that also

to my nervous system. Because you talk a lot about the nervous system in your

work to my nervous system. Immediately,

like, immediately with bringing that possibility into my

awareness and into my. Yeah, into my awareness, I

was like, no way. And so immediately I

noticed stress going down. Not because I started doing much different,

but just because a whole new possibility of being

in the world, of being with my family, of being in my business

now opened up. So unpack that. Like, what does that mean?

What could that look like? Getting paid to exist. Yeah.

So great timing. Because, you know, the

next level up from Paid to Think is actually getting paid to

exist. And that's the highest level of

leverage. Right. That's the highest level of asymmetry

where there is no

effort being expended, there

is no energy being drained,

there is no performance, there is no being created,

there's no character being played. There is no doing

things as a means to an end. Like, if I do this thing, then, you

know, I'll make money or people will like me. Then I can play,

then I can. Right? Yeah. It is

a state of.

Such deep Presence and ease and

authenticity, that

the person isn't just living in a flow state,

but their entire existence becomes

a state of flow, right?

And all the hallmarks of flow apply. So the

experience is autotelic, which means that I'm

not doing the thing for some reward in the future.

Like, people don't surf because, you know,

something will happen after they, you know, come

down from the wave or ski

or whatever. The experience is the reward.

And that's only possible when there's a deep level of focus

and a deep level of enjoyment and a deep level of aliveness

and simultaneously a deep level of ease. So

that is the most optimal state for a human being to exist in.

We're fully absorbed in the experience and

we're operating in a state of play, and we're not

accruing any strain doing the thing.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's the only way to play

this game of business, right? And play this game of life.

And that

place of radical authenticity

is the most. It's the only

zero entropy state for a human being.

Because everything else is a performance,

right? Everything else is a.

Is an attempt to manipulate

one's environment towards a certain outcome.

That can happen in a sales conversation. That can happen when

creating content on social media. That can happen when making

an offer. That can happen, you know, in any

domain of business, but also any domain of life,

right? And what I realized was that

for me to be not me is effortful.

And when I am separated from myself

and I don't know myself, which means I'm not clear on

my values, my principles, the core philosophy that

my life is built on, my ideals, my

constraints, my boundaries, my

wounding, my triggers, my shadow, my desires.

When I don't know those things, then I don't know who I am.

And if I don't know who I am, then I cannot construct the perfect

economic engine around my energy. Because

business is an amplification function on the

person. So if we're operating in a state of radical

coherence and resonance with ourselves and with our truth,

and we're living in alignment with our design,

we all incarnated for a reason,

right? We picked the curriculum that we received

growing up for a reason. Because we're here to

embody the opposite of that, that becomes our work in the world.

And, you know, I love helping

people become free because I,

you know, selected my curriculum to be the opposite of that.

And that, when it's extruded,

becomes the most beautiful way to exist because

it is a natural extension of who we are.

So this

idea of getting paid to exist is, you know,

probably the chief obsession. And

once someone begins to digest the paradigm, it just layers

upon layers, right? Because we have to first understand who we are.

We have to understand what we care about. We have to

understand what turns us on, what lights us up,

what we hate, what drains us.

Because the perfect business is one that energizes us more than

it drains us. The perfect relationship, the perfect marriage,

is one that energizes us more than it drains us.

Conflict, for example, is a drain function. So when

there's a lot of conflict in a relationship, you know, one or

both people will feel very drained. And

when we look at biological systems

in nature, when the

organism is losing more energy to its environment than

it's gaining, it will die and eventually the

species will go extinct. So anything

that survives in nature, let alone thrives,

figures out a way to gain more energy from its environment than it

loses energy to its environment. So in a simplistic way,

that's the, the hyena

that manages to, you know, find enough

scraps from the lion's hunting to feed it

and then is able to procreate and is able to feed its

cubs, or whatever the name is for

little hyenas, and then that

species can propagate, right? But this is the

architecture energetically for pretty much every complex

adaptive system. We are complex adaptive systems.

Our marriages and relationships are complex adaptive systems.

Our businesses are complex adaptive systems. And we're made up of

other complex adaptive systems, right? The biggest one being the

universe itself. Because your liver is a complex adaptive system.

It's complex because it behaves in

a very non simple way. It's got many

sub parts, and those subparts have a lot of

relationships between each other and

those sub components. And the

relationships between those sub components creates

a higher order of function.

It's like a system of systems. Exactly. Okay, so the cell

is one level of complexity, but a collection of cells

becomes a higher level and so on. And then it's your liver.

Now liver is, you know, orders of magnitude more

complex than the individual cell, right?

And then you keep going up and it forms you.

And then you keep going up and it forms, you know,

all of humanity and so on. So

that's the complex part. The adaptive part is that it's never

static. It's always in flux, right? It's

always a moving target because it's a dynamic system,

right? It's always reacting and being influenced by its environment.

And it's a system because, you know,

as Much as it looks like pure chaos, there is an implicate order

to it. And for us to have any

level of mastery over anything, first we have to derive the

implicate order. So we have to first understand

ourselves and understand what gives us

energy and what drains us energy, right?

What kind of vision fills us up and

pulls us forward? And what kind of a vision for life

or business actually causes our energy to drop?

And it feels like a slog and very effortful, very strenuous.

And if we organize every aspect of life in a

way that it gives us way more energy than it takes, then we

become successful from an evolutionary

perspective. And it's also something that

feels mathematically very elegant. So

that is sort of the mathematical way

of understanding what having it all means, right?

It's. I wake up and I feel excited. I feel turned on.

I have a ton of energy. I look at my wife and I feel so

in love, and I feel so grateful. And I thank

God every day that we found each other. And

when we spend time together, it just. My heart just blooms open,

and I just feel so in

love, right? And then when I

begin to do work, quote, unquote, work,

it feels like play. Because the thing that I'm

doing to generate an economic outcome

is something that I would do even if I wasn't, like, it's just who I

am, right? What I do is an extension of who I am. It

gives me joy to do it.

Like, after a call, you know, for the accelerator,

I'm more turned on, I'm more energized,

and I'm more lit up after,

you know, a few hours of that than before.

And then, you know, every other aspect

of my life, like my health, my. My friendships,

my relationships with family, my relationship with my

immediate environment, you know, all those

things, like my relationship with money, my

relationship with, you know, all of these things

mathematically gives me way more

energy than it takes from me.

And when that equation is

very meticulously constructed and it's

very elegant in its construction, that

experience is what I call having it all

right? And like anything else, that is, I think,

the ultimate masterpiece that any human being can take

on the. The desire and

responsibility to create and craft.

And it's. You know, I was in Florence

this summer, and,

you know, I saw the statue of David, and it's

much bigger than I thought it would be. Huge, Huge.

And it's extraordinary.

And when Michelangelo was asked, like, you know, how

did you. How did you do this? Because what I didn't realize, by the way,

with sculpting, because in the same hall

there's other sculptures. Some are half

finished.

First of all, what he said was, you know, I just

took away all the things that were not David.

So perfection is actually a result of

meticulous subtraction, not addition.

So when it comes to ourselves, what are we subtracting? Well, we're subtracting the

untruths, we're subtracting the illusions

and, you know, self doubt and not feeling worthy

and all this stuff. These are illusions. They're not real,

right? It's a fabrication. It's a construction of the mind. And so

he said, I took away. I saw the

block of marble and I took away everything that was not David. Now,

the crazy thing about that is that when you're subtracting

from a block of marble, you cannot make a mistake

if you take too much away. You got to start over,

right? And that, to me, just

illustrates the level of devotion

it takes for a human being to

construct a life that is so

maximally in resonance with who they are.

It's to construct, you know, what I call an economic engine.

Think of it like a business that. That is a perfect

reflection of the stuff that they feel really

excited, really turned on, really alive to do that also feels like play.

And to me, that's the most

fun, worthwhile endeavor that we can

select for ourselves. Because,

you know, what else are we doing, right? Why settle?

Why compromise? Because

there's, you know, people who are in crisis, and then there's people

who are surviving. Then there's people who

are, you know, a little further ahead. Life feels average.

Then there's people who create, you know, they like, no,

that's not enough. I want to create a good life.

And then some people, most people stop

there. And then a few people say, no, I want a great life,

right? And again, we come back to value, right? Because

value comes from doing something that is not

easy. So

when someone's fit and has, you know, a lot of

muscles, society kind of respects them, right? Sure.

They. There's an almost immediate kind of respect that's given

to them. And that happens because

there is a knowing that that person

held a certain amount of discomfort

to, you know, achieve that

physique. It's the same thing with successful

entrepreneurs. Society respects them. Most

of society, at least, depending on the entrepreneur,

because there's a recognition that that person has the ability to hold

discomfort. That person has the ability to delay

gratification. That person has the ability to control their impulses.

That person has the ability to Live and operate from

much longer time horizon, right? So the more,

um, I don't mean that in a, in this, in a, you

know, moral or any other

qualification way, but

the less money someone has, the smaller their time

horizon. The more money someone has, the longer the

time horizon. So the wealthiest people on the planet,

they're thinking in on a

four or five hundred year timeline, right.

What they're thinking about is how do I preserve and

multiply my capital? So my great, great, great, great,

great grandkids, right, Benefit,

right. And they're, they have all of these entity

structures and you know, ways in which they protect their

capital, build empires. The

poorest people, their time frame is usually minutes,

right? It's like, what am I going to do right now?

And then you have the full spectrum in between

and there's, you know, people who work jobs and make,

you know, let's say six figures a year, they

operate in months, maybe years.

You know, some of them think more long term, but those

people usually end up becoming more financially

successful and secure. Right? Because they're thinking in the future.

But most people, it's not that when we

have less money, we operate on a shorter time frame,

but it's because we operate on a shorter timeframe

that we have less money. Interesting. So broke people are broke

not because they're only focused on the present.

Right. But it is. And this is another paradigm by the

way. Right? Because time and money,

these are some of the most misunderstood things in society,

right? Everyone worships money and they devalue

time. But when you think about

it, the older you get, the less

time you have to live. So

time is actually deflationary. As in

the supply of time is steadily decreasing.

So the value of time, so basic economic supply

and demand, when supply drops and demand

stays the same, value has to go up,

right? Right. So the value of time

is actually steadily increasing the older we get as every moment passes.

But when we think about money like first of all, we

can't make money, right? So people,

even in language, don't really understand money because

we're not central banks. Where does money come from? Money comes

from central banks

which are not central or banks.

If you take the U.S. it's a private family owned business

that has been given the exclusive right to print

money. The way money is

printed, the way money is created is that they issue debt.

That's why we live in a debt based monetary system. So they create

money by creating debt, right? So we're not central

banks, so we can't make money. But central

banks Print money. Right.

So over 80% of all the money in circulation

was printed in the last five years.

So when central banks abuse their power and they keep

printing money, that's called inflation. Inflation

happens when the value of money goes down. Because look, the supply now

is doing the opposite of time. It's increasing exponentially,

but the demand stays the same, so the value has to drop.

And this happens in every, you know,

nation, nation, state. It's happening around the world.

So the value of money is decreasing,

the value of time is increasing. But most people

are trading an appreciating asset

for a depreciating. It's not even

an asset, it's actually a currency time. Right.

Money is currency. Time is actually the asset times.

Yeah, okay, right. So when

I think about this stuff, I actually,

you know, I trained myself to not think in terms of money, but think

in terms of time because that is actually the thing

that's most valuable. So it never made sense to me

that, you know, I give up all my time

to make money. So Parkinson's law.

If I don't create a constraint, then,

you know, let's say I'm open to working 12

hours a day. Right.

The work is going to take whatever space I give to it.

If you gave yourself 12 hours to do it, you would take 12 hours. Right.

Probably take me 15. Right. And

the other thing I realized was that all value comes from constraints.

So without constraints there's no value. Right. We only

value something when there is a sense of scarcity with it.

So if we could live

indefinitely, would we still appreciate

the ordinary moments? No,

because like I got all the time in the world.

Wow. Right. I have till infinity.

I'm immortal. So the value of any individual

moments just plummets. Right.

So when supply is infinite, value zero.

Right. So if I can, you know, I

used to live in New York and you know, the Lower east side

in a five block radius, there's like

400amazing restaurants, coffee shops and

cafes. So if it's all around me, if it's,

you know, in abundant supply, I don't value

it. Right. It's like just there.

So all value gets created from constraints,

but we fail to realize this, so we don't constrain our most valuable

asset, which is time. So a core

thing going to connect it back to getting paid to exist.

We have to, if we want to get paid to exist, we have to

operate from constraints.

And you know, one of the constraints I like is

working four hours a day, four days a week.

Does that mean every week you Know, as soon as I hit

like 16 hours, I

stop. No, but it's a guideline, right?

So I think of there's growth seasons and then

there's maintenance seasons. Like this summer when we were in Europe,

I was maintenance mode. And, you know, my,

my threshold was six, five to

six hours a week. That's how much I'm working right now.

I feel like I'm in a growth phase and, you know, I'm not.

I'm going to relax that constraint. But all value comes

from constraints. So if we're willing to work as much as

it's needed, we're actually

sabotaging our ability to make the kind of money we want

because we're devaluing ourselves

fundamentally. So when we constrain the supply of the thing,

that constraint actually forces a level of

creativity, right? And that forces

a recalculation of value. The value

we receive is equivalent to the value we

hold ourselves in, right? Because reality

is a mirror. It's a hologram. So the value that

comes to us in the form of money is a perfect

reflection of the value that we see in ourselves.

And that's why, you know, to come back to one of the things we started

with, which is worth, is different from value, right?

Value comes from holding discomfort. Value

comes from doing hard things. Because, you know,

if everyone was 6%

body fat, tons of muscle mass, like

perfect proportions, perfect physique, would we, as a

society value being fit? Hmm, probably

not everyone's fit. Like, what's the big deal?

What's so special about you? But if no one's fit,

or most people are obese, but there's a few people

who meticulously craft their physique, right?

We see them as valuable, but

society sees them as valuable because they saw themselves

as valuable enough to invest in

themselves and create constraints. Maybe it

was a constraint of I'm not going to eat more than, you know, 1800

calories, maybe it was a constraint that

I'm going to have an hour every day, minimum or 90 minutes, where I'm going

to work out. So I got to figure out how to manage my life

and so on, right? So in

business, the entrepreneurs who actually,

you know, scale is a word I'll use, but most

people also don't really understand that word because,

you know, it's relative. It's like, what are you scaling? The way

most entrepreneurs think about scaling is just more.

Yeah, right. Like, I'm gonna work more, I'm gonna hire more people,

I'm gonna spend more on ads, right? I mean, that's,

that's the exact thing that feel so

out of alignment for me because

I mean, I have, I mean to each their own and

I have almost no to

no desire to have a large team

to. I would love

and am loving growing into having the most lean,

efficient, joy filled line

of my work calling that

allows me abundance of time, energy, freedom

to serve the utmost people in the world and also

serve myself and serve my family. I don't want

inventory, I don't want fucking shipping labels.

I don't want, you know, teams or people

following me around. That's just not the

life that I want to live. And yet when you look outside,

the vast majority of what I've heard and what

you're going to hear is largely like that's the way

to do it. And so when I've heard,

I didn't even think of it till really right now. I don't know if I've

got too much against the word scale but I think what I've seen in that

regard has left a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't want to do it just because I'm quote supposed to do it. And

so what I found and in those ways in some way, shape or

form, I've sabotaged it. Yeah. Or I've worked because I'll work

right. My dad is an immigrant, like what was modeled. So like

that comes easy. And I've always felt like this

can't just be the only way just because the

vast majority of everyone that I see is doing it and on the

surface celebrating it, it's not for me or I don't

want it to be. And so. Yeah, continue. Yeah. And so, you

know, first that's a very astute observation that you,

you see the sabotage pop up because

when we are out of alignment and

success in one area jeopardizes another area that we value,

we will engage in sabotage

consciously or unconsciously. Like I had, there's one founder I was working with,

tech startup, they were doing well,

they were growing and you know, he was

fairly technical. So he, you know,

one of his, one of the paradigms he was living in, it was that,

you know, he has to be really involved with support

because the business that they were running was one of those like high stakes

technology companies where if something goes down then clients

are going to lose a lot of money and big problem.

So his, his adaptive response

to that pattern was you know,

control. So he would sleep with his

phone next to his head

on with ringer on, full volume

and slack would be going off all night

because he had, you know, clients all around the world.

And so first, like, obviously, you can

imagine what his sleep was like and what that did

to his body, his health, his mental state, all. All those things.

But it was becoming a huge issue in his marriage.

And one of the things we identified early on was

the subconscious contract. So when he

came to me, they had been stuck at the same revenue level

for, I think, four quarters. And he was really starting

to question himself, like, if he had what it takes because,

you know, they'd done well, but he could see

what the potential was for the business. Like, they

weren't, you know, they weren't even scratching the surface.

And. One of the early sort

of epiphanies and insights he had was when I

laid this all out, and I was like, so if this business

blows up, like, if we 3x in the next year,

like, are you still going to have a marriage?

And he looks at me, he's like, I don't think so. I think my wife's

gonna leave me. So he was

constraining the growth of the business

because he was subconsciously trying to

protect his marriage. That's why, you know,

coming back to complex adaptive systems, the business is not an

isolated subsystem. It has to. The only way

to succeed is to have it all. Because if the business growing doesn't

make your marriage better, you're doing it wrong.

If the business growing comes at the cost of your health, you're doing

it wrong. There was one founder I work with.

You know, we just closed a $26 million

round with a private equity firm. He still has,

he still owns big chunk of the company. So he's going to eventually exit for

like, 4 or $500 million. But in the process,

he ran himself into the ground. Lost hearing in one year,

like, just from stress and just pushing his body.

And, you know, it's come at a cost,

right? And so I see this a lot,

right? And I call this a lack of harmony or a lack of

coherence across these systems. And so

it's really not possible for any one part

of their life to thrive when that part thriving

basically jeopardizes a different part, right?

And so when we

think about scale, most people misunderstand

scale because they. What they actually mean is growth,

right? Because growth comes via addition, but

scale actually comes from subtraction,

at least the way I define it, right? Growth

is indiscriminate. Like, I'm just going to double the. The

amount of leads coming in. And we're, we're going to grow,

Right? Right. I'm going to hire more salespeople and we're

going to grow. The problem is growth

requires a greater amount of entropy

to be digested and a higher level of organization

and order to be created for it to be

sustainable. That usually ends up

falling on the founder. If you have a

solo, a one person business or, you know, a relatively small

business, it's basically going to be on you. Right.

And it's going to be held by your nervous system.

And most people, what happens is when they try to grow or they try to

grow really fast, they cannot digest

the growth. So the faster they

grow, the faster they drop back, sometimes

below where they were in the first place. So

67% of the companies who end up on the

Inc. 500 within two years

have either shrunk dramatically or have gone out of business.

No way. Yeah. So. Because most people actually cannot

handle that kind of growth. Wow. So the way

I, you know, think about engineering

exponential growth in a business is actually through subtraction.

Because subtraction is actually the only exponential function.

Right. Subtraction is multiplicative.

So if I can take the same business

and I can remove things, maybe it's.

Instead of marketing across five channels, we're only focusing on one channel.

Instead of serving these five different sub

avatars, we're only going to focus on this one avatar.

Right. Instead of competing with, you know, with this

half a dozen set of products, we're actually going to just pick the

one that drives the most value that we can charge the most

for. Right? So it's actually

a creative mathematical problem

versus what, how most people approach it, which is I want more,

so I'm going to do more, right? I'm going to hire more,

I'm going to spend more. The issue with all of that is that it's just

not sustainable. Right? And to me,

if it's not sustainable, then it's actually not scalable

because it's just temporary. Right. The biggest gains in business

come long tail. It's compounding. When

someone's in the game for 10 years, they're going to win,

Right. They just have to stay in the game long enough. Right. So

speed and sustainability in business are actually inversely related.

Most people optimize for speed because that's what

the ego wants because they're trying to outrun

their self judgment and self criticism.

But if they actually optimize for sustainability,

they'll actually make way more money,

have a much better time doing it, and the business will actually

grow in harmony. With all the other aspects

of their life. And you know, we can think about this in terms of

floors and ceilings, right? Most people are focused on raising the ceiling,

which is, you know, last month was my biggest month.

And you know, let's say I make

100 grand last month. The ego says, okay,

we got to do 150 this month. Then the following month's like,

oh, okay, we got to do 200, right? Because we got to

keep going. So most people, they try to

raise their ceiling, but actually

if we focus on sustainability, what we want to do is

raise our floor, which is

okay. In the last 12 months, our worst month was, let's say

18k. We had an 18k month, we had a

22k month. We. And there were a few 50 and 60k months.

Like this year. Can we just raise our floor.

Wow. To 30k? What would it take for our new

floor to be 30k? What's the hygiene? What are the systems

like? What are the, you know, places we can gain efficiency? What, like,

how do I raise the floor? Because maximum

achievability is not the same as

maximum maintainability. So if I keep trying to

hit top speed and keep trying to,

you know, outdo the top speed every next month,

what happens is that I'm not going to be able to sustain that

and I'm putting myself at a much greater risk for a

crash. And now the caveat to all this is like,

some speed is a useful variable in certain

kinds of businesses. Like if you've raised, you know, $50 million

from VC, you got a big war chest as a

tight window of opportunity in the market. Actually, the

intelligent thing is to go for it and just,

you know, buy growth at all

costs. Now that's not true for most people,

right? Like, especially on the expertise based

service business side. Like, most

businesses are never going to exit. And so

when people who

are building or running or growing a business

that's not designed to be exitable follow the

strategies, the rhetoric and the

scaling paradigms from people who

run very different kinds of businesses, have very different goals.

There's usually a mismatch and it takes them in the opposite direction

of everything that they actually value. And that's how you end up

with the person who's like, oh, why are you working so hard? So I can

spend time with my kid. How much time are you actually spending with your kid?

Barely any. Right?

Because there's no constraint. Now if that

person actually got honest, they were like, okay, what are my values?

Time with my kid, time with my wife. Like, you know, I want to really

enjoy what I'm doing. And they reorganized their business

so that they could actually serve and be in harmony with

the values that they hold every single day.

They'll actually get way more energy and way more motivation,

way more juice and excitement and passion,

that in the smaller amount of time that they

allow themselves, they're actually going to be way more effective.

They'll think way more creatively. And in most

cases, they will actually outperform the version of

themselves who's willing to sacrifice everything

for scale, which is. There's that word

again. There was something that you said around,

and I'd love to take it here. You had

to learn to train yourself. You said those specific words. Now,

for me, that, like, that language really

vibes. Like, that's just how my mind works. That's my background. I would

imagine a lot of guys, too. Like, the training

aspect is something I can really grasp.

And largely what I'm hearing is what you trained yourself

and what I've experienced from you as well, from personal experience. But what you train

people on is how to think.

Like, that's what you're really training. Yeah. And

that piece of the constraint. Because even now, like, I've done

a little bit of this, but I've done it as a I. In terms of

creating boundaries in work, for example. Yeah. Like,

unless it's. Unless it's a special case

or special example, I do my

fucking best. Like, 5:30 is like cut

off time. PM, dinner with the family, unless it's a special thing.

Weekends too, unless it's, you know, I'm traveling these three weeks, so

there's. It's a bit off, but that.

I mean, we've had a conversation. My income has only

increased. My income has only increased.

Paradoxically, I'm still working a fair bit. But paradoxically,

the less that I'm working. And so the challenge that I want to give or

the invitation, challenge, whatever you want to say that I want to give myself is

like, what if I really set a cap?

Like 10 to four, six hours? Yeah.

What could happen? Like, what would I need to. How

creative would I get? You know, when we do movement stuff, especially

when I would work with kids, it would create

constraints. So, like, imagine it's a crawling thing. Okay, everyone's

crawling on all fours. We're going to this thing. But then I'd sort out,

okay, you can only crawl with one hand. So two feet, one

hand. And normally you would think they would be

more limited, but where you would see them go in their

Creativity and what they would unlock and what they'd be like, whoa.

So that piece on constraint. Because I would love now, as we talk about

what is the actionable thing in terms of, I mean, just even

this being in someone's awareness, I think hopefully

will be paradigm shifting. But how

does someone start training themselves to start

thinking in this way? Yeah, I think movements

are really great parallel there because,

you know, even a very

simple activity like doing

movement exploration, where let's

say one hand and two feet have to be touching the ground

and like, you're like trying to figure out like, how you can move through

space. The thing

that happens in, in that situation is that

actually neurologically we fully engage

because in an unconstrained

scenario, the brain actually does not need to

work, doesn't need to be on. It's on

autopilot, right? There's a certain

anatomical comfort in the

absence of constraint. So it

gets lazy, right? And so

we basically get to dissociate and not be present

in the absence of constraints.

And in business, what that means is we actually don't make good

decisions, right? Because the job

of a, of a CEO is

I think of it actually more like cao, which is Chief

Allocation Officer. Because

the job of a CEO is

to allocate time,

energy, money and attention.

Those are the four currencies, two

activities that produce hopefully

a much greater return on that investment,

right? So we're always facing this

problem of how do I allocate finite

resources for

hopefully an infinite return or a near

infinite return? Because

the way I think about this scaling is basically

going From I put 10 units of energy and

time. Let's say I put, use a composite,

I put 10 units of resources and

I get 50 units back. Let's say that's what happened this

year. Next year

I want to put 10 units in and get 100 units

back, right? So

what we're actually looking for is a greater

return on our investment of resources.

The way we allocate resources is by making decisions.

So the results we experience in business are directly

proportional to the quality of our decision making,

right? So how much money I make and

how stressful it is and how it feels and what I have to give up

in exchange is a direct function of the decisions I'm making

in terms of allocating my finite resources, right?

So if I actually become better at resource allocation,

then I have an opportunity because my, my,

my resources are finite, right? I only have 24 hours a day,

like, and I don't think anyone's working 24 hours a day, every single day,

right? And so my time is finite. I have

finite energy because there's only so

much juice I have. Even if I eat more food and inject

myself with NAD every five minutes, still only certain

amount of energy I have, right? And

there's a certain amount of attention I have because if

I, you know, I can focus, let's say five hours at a stretch, but

eventually I'm going to get fatigued. Now I can augment

my resources by buying more resources. Like I can hire someone

now I have their energy to allocate. That's what having a team is.

But a team is just an amplification of the founder

for all these reasons. So

resources are finite, right? But the

optionality I have in terms of what are the things I can allocate those

resources towards is infinite because I can do

literally anything. I could spend all of today making TikTok

videos, or I could send an email to my list,

or I could build an asset like a lead

magnet or some sort of, you know, customer acquisition

offer. Like, I can do whatever I want with my time.

I can also choose to, you know, not do anything and just

scroll social media. So I have infinite

optionality, right? But I have finite

resources, so I have to

get better at allocating those resources.

And when I do that, then

I see an increase in the energy that I'm getting back

from my environment, which is people paying me money,

people having goodwill towards my brand,

right? That could be testimonials and reviews and referrals,

retention, right? So

that's the fundamental game. Now to play that

game, I have to constrain

my inputs. Because when I constrain my

inputs, let's say I'm used to working 10 hours a day. Yeah. And I

hear this episode, and then I'm like, okay, I'm going to only work five hours

a day. Now I have to figure out

how to get the same return or a better return for

those five hours. Which means that I'm probably going to choose

different things to work on. Things that are higher

leverage, right? Things that give me a much bigger

return, ideally an exponential return. Because

not every task is created equal. Some things

you can think of as like $10 an hour tasks. Some are

$100 an hour, some are $1,000 an hour. But

there are things that are $10,000 an hour task, right?

So if I focus on the metric of my effective hourly rate,

which is for every hour, how much money am I making?

Which, like you just divide the total amount of money you make by the Total

amount of hours you work in that time, you get your effectively

effective hourly rate. And if I just focus on increasing that,

to increase that, I'm going to have to get more

discerning and exercise better judgment at what

I'm working on. Right. So

by changing what I'm working on, I can get a much better

return on a smaller unit of time. And this

brings me to the other big thing that I think could be useful for people.

If you're listening to this, you are an entrepreneur. You know, you

want to make more money. I want to say something that's going to sound really

weird. Don't try to make more money.

It's actually pretty stupid to try and make more

money. And I'll explain why,

And I'm being provocative deliberately

is actually way more useful and

intelligent to increase the velocity of money

versus increase the volume of money.

So the way most people approach this is, okay, let's say I make

$200,000 a year, right? And next year I want to

make more. Let's say I want to make $400,000 a year. So this person

is going to be like, okay, this is what my business looks like now.

This is how much money I made. This is what I'm doing.

How do I go from 200 to $400,000 a year?

Right. That frame

is going to inform their thinking and their decision making and their execution.

Right. Naturally, to go from 200 to 400, do

you think their mind is going to think about, well, what else I can, can

I do? Absolutely. What else should I do? Like, what

are there things that, you know, I

can sell that I'm currently not selling?

Like, other parts of my audience I'm not monetizing. Like, it's really

like, what more can I do? Absolutely. Right, yeah. That's how I go from

200 to 400. Yep.

What I, what I teach is don't try to go

from 200 to 400 between this year and next year.

See if you can make the same 200 in half the time.

Right? So instead of next year, the goal is, how do I make

400k this year? It's actually, how do I make 200k in

six months? So first of all,

if someone's already made 200k in a year, their

psychological relationship with that number is very normalized,

Right. They are someone who makes 200k.

So tangent on this is, you know, people who make

a million dollars a year make a million dollars a year because

there are people who make million dollars a year.

Right. An athlete is an athlete, because

their identity is that of an athlete,

right? We do what we are.

It's most natural for us to do what we are.

So if someone's already making 200k,

their system is fully congruent with making

200k. Yep. It's much easier to

ask the question, okay, how do I make 200k in half the time?

And that's another constraint, right. That also forces

a recomputation in the system and

forces a level of creativity.

Because now to figure out, like, okay, how do I do this and how do

I make the same money in half the time? And if someone cracks

that, then what? Effectively what's

going to happen is they're going to make 400k next year,

but they'll have gone about it in a totally different way.

Right? And these are just a

couple of examples of how, you know, the

most people, they don't really hit their goals, or

hitting their goals come at a huge cost because of the way they

think, right? Because of the way they approach

and construct their reality. And, you know, I don't know who

said this, but the quality of our life is directly proportional to the quality

of questions we ask, right? And so

most people are struggling or not living the life

they want because they're not asking the right questions. And

the, the challenge with this is that when we don't

even know that we're not asking the right question, we have no way of

asking the right question. Right? Because again,

going full circle, the first step is awareness

of self. Like, I have to actually know where I am, I have to locate

where I am, which requires me to

be brutally honest with myself. And most people

can't be brutally honest because they're afraid of their own judgment,

right? So they avoid the truth that literally don't make

eye contact with themselves in the mirror. So they're

distancing from themselves. And that,

you know, really compromises their ability to actually create

the outcomes that they want. And the solution to

this is one of my other principles, which is truth is love.

And a corollary to that which is anything that can be

destroyed by the truth must be.

So my salvation, my freedom, my sovereignty,

lies in my ability to confront

the truth as directly as possible,

as unflinchingly as possible, which is only possible

when I'm not bracing for my own

judgment. So I have to be

so clean in my energy, with myself,

in my relationship to myself, that I can be with

truth as much as possible, because that's how the system

gets feedback from itself. And then when we

get that feedback. We can actually iterate on how we're

thinking and what we're doing and how we're, what paradigm we're operating in.

And then we can test something else and then

that'll generate some feedback and then the system

learns and gets better over time. Because learning is not

consuming information. Learning in my world

is different behavior, same stimulus, different response.

Most people are just looping, right? But

they want a different outcome.

Consuming, consuming, consuming information. Yet their life doesn't look any different.

Exactly, exactly. Or you

know, they're doing, because human beings are very mimetic.

So it's like I go on YouTube and you know, what is this person saying

I should do based on what they did? Like, if we

adopt someone else's thinking instead

of thinking critically for ourselves, then,

you know, we're warping and distorting the signal.

Because what source are we plugging into,

right? Is it the dude with the tank top and big biceps on

YouTube or am I plugging into my

wisdom, my intuition, my inner knowing,

right? Like I can't build my

masterpiece when I'm connected

to someone else's source,

right? Because I want my business to feel like a custom fit suit

that's made of sweatpan material,

right? That's what being paid to exist means. Like, I'm

fully at ease and I'm fully alive,

right? And so we don't put constraints because we're trying to avoid

working, but we put constraints because

efficiency is love. If I

truly love myself, I will maximize joy in my life.

If I truly love myself, I will spend as much time as I can doing

the thing that makes me feel the most alive.

If I truly love myself, then I will

be as potent as possible with the finite resources I have.

Like, I'm not going to be wasteful, right? I'm not going to take myself for

granted. And that's why all economic value we create

on the outside comes from how

much value we ascribe to ourselves on the inside.

If I see myself as valuable, if I see my own value,

then I will make the decisions. I'll hold the

beliefs, I'll have the thoughts, I'll take the actions

that will then cause that value to be reflected back to me from the

world, right?

And all of this works because the universe is a perfect

mathematical equation. And that's actually where,

you know, it's both good news and bad news. Because the bad news is like,

I have to, you know, if every single thing that happens

in my reality is my creation, I'm in

agreement with that. I'm in a contract around

that, then, yeah, it's kind of all

on me. But it also gives me the

power and the agency to create whatever life I want.

So the, you know, it's the joke about entrepreneurship. Like the best thing about

entrepreneurship is that you, you're your own boss. The worst thing about entrepreneurship

is that you're your own boss.

Wow, brother. My goodness, I almost

got emotional there, that last piece.

Yeah, that really hits. That's why, you know,

I named the business scale with psychology, right? The kind of

tagline is scale with your mind, not with your time.

And this whole thing is a way to dog food the

ultimate medicine, which is to fall

in love with yourself. Right? Because that's the

source of all of it. Because

only when we truly love ourselves and we feel

truly connected to ourselves, when we truly see our value,

right? When we truly feel this devotional responsibility

for our own well being, for our own health, for our own ease,

would we even dare to conceive

a life that feels as good,

Right. Because human beings, and

entrepreneurs in particular, have a much greater capacity for pain than they do

for pleasure. Right. Their tolerance for

goodness is extremely limited

because all of us felt very constrained and didn't feel

free when we were young. That's why you ask any

entrepreneur, what's your number one value? Everyone says freedom, who

seeks freedom? People who felt the opposite.

Exactly. Yeah, right? Those well adjusted people,

they're not, you know, they're not entrepreneurs who are

like operating, you know, in this

tight grip. So

the only chance we have, the only chance we have

is to dissolve all the

illusions that keep us from recognizing

the miracle that we are.

And. Falling in love with ourselves over and over and over and over and

over again. Right. And

I can say this because the first time I tried to kill myself, I was

six years old, Right. Did not want to be

here.

And I

had to know that I had

to hold the opposite of

that to hold this

right. And our greatest adversity

becomes the seed of our greatest triumph of

our work in the world. Right? So.

I think this is by far the greatest gift we can

give ourselves. Because entrepreneurship is just, you

know, you know, how if you want to give a dog some medicine,

you put it in peanut butter. Yep.

So entrepreneurship is the greatest

journey towards self love and

enlightenment because it basically puts,

you know, everything right in front of our face,

often in a really visceral and tangible way.

And if we choose to engage with that material, then,

I mean, so much opens up.

But if, you know, if we build a great business and make a ton of

money. And we judge ourselves, we shame ourselves, we

feel separated from ourselves. We are

critical with ourselves. We're not enjoying ourselves.

Like, what's the point?

I was going to say money is just going to amplify that. Right.

It's an amplifier. Yeah. Of what's already inside. Yeah,

yeah. And that's a. That's a.

It's a Instagram cliche, but

it's really true, you know, because I've worked with people

like one of my clients, his business does $350 million

a year. Right. I have a few who work with

billionaires. Like, you know, people with

so much money that the average person cannot even

comprehend. Right. That level of wealth and

man, it. Money really is an amplifier

because when someone has that much money and on the

inside, they still don't really like themselves.

They can't really be with themselves without numbing, coping, distracting, avoiding

it. It's really. It really sucks because, you know,

for pretty much the whole population, everyone thinks like, when.

If I have a ton of money, most of my problems would go

away. And it's true. Money solves a lot

of problems. Right. It makes life much easier.

But when we still haven't

addressed a lot of the internal stuff, then it's.

It's really visceral because it's like money was supposed to fix all this.

It didn't. What do I do now?

And that's usually a very, you know, pivotal moment for someone.

And usually they've spent again going back to the mindset of things. They've

spent their whole life killing themselves. Yeah.

And then the time goes way down,

gets much more valuable. But then literally they make all the

money. But then usually they get sick. Yeah. Or they've already

lost the marriage, or their kids are already 22 years old

and out of the house. They can't really even enjoy them. So

it's a fucking mind there. So

it's an amplifier of that. But then also, if that's where

the North Star only is at all cost. And

that mindset, if I kill myself, then I'll finally be able to relax

or it just doesn't. I

haven't met really, you know, money. Yeah, I would agree. Money does

solve a lot of problems. However, that mindset is really what I

think is diminishing the sustainability to

your point, and the quality of life that we say that we're doing it for

right now. This is, you know, I'd

love for you to talk about. I mean, this is what you teach. This is

what you do. And to also see you, I mean, I didn't know you before

a year ago, but I know you've dabbled over the years

in relationship coaching and you've got still some of that involved. But to

really see you in your line of genius,

like the calls that you run are usually 90 minutes to two

hours. Sometimes they go way longer, you know, And I

say that just because to see. See you lit up like

it's a experience when you show up. And even this,

I mean, truly, I do believe, like this podcast is a really great,

not only representation of the philosophy, it is the philosophy you teach.

Yeah. And there's so much to that.

But to feel you showing up for the group in the way

that you do is also inspiring to me. So

what is it that you do from. You know, for someone who wants to

learn more, where could they find you? All that sort of stuff. Because this is.

If you're landing, if this is landing, any of this. Like, I'm looking at the

mic right now. If that's you listening. Yeah,

keep listening and re. Listen to this.

I've watched that offer video maybe five

times at least, and then handwrote the whole

thing because it landed at such a deep level, because it's

not just going back. It's not just business. There's no

separation or at least the life that I. It's an illusion to think that

there is. So when all of that, when all the boats

rise, even when I was competing, I'll keep this quick, but when I was competing,

especially at the end there,

part of the main reason why I competed was because

through a holistic philosophy, when I was

competing or training, because there was no

separation everywhere else, at least at the level of awareness that I had at

that time, I also knew that the way I was going to have to

love myself was going to also need to up level where I

invested my time, energy and money. The types of relationships that I said yes to,

the types of relationships I said no to, my level

of spiritual development, my level

of relational emotional depth and capacity. I

knew that if in the way that I wanted to do it,

that all boats would rise. That's honestly what.

Maybe I could say what excited me more, actually, much more

than actually winning. Like, I want to win for sure. I want to see what

I'm capable of, what my potential is. And I also

want not only myself at all levels to rise, but I also want

the people around me to do that too. So long way of

saying, you know, what are you up to? Where can people find you and.

Yeah,

Yeah. So the thing I love the most is

helping people scale their businesses

and build these economic engines

around who they are that allow them to get paid to

exist. And

it's the most

interesting, multi dimensional,

fascinating thing for me.

And, you know, it doesn't feel like

work. It's not a thing I do. It's who I am. And

it's, it's a, it's really a privilege for

me to be in this space

with people, people like you who are, you

know, crafting their masterpiece

and who are not willing to settle

for just a great business that makes great money,

who want to have it all, you know, who are looking

for mathematical perfection

at every level, every piece, every part,

every component of their life. Total integration,

total flow. And

yeah, that's, that's what I was put on the planet to do.

So if someone vibes

with, with all this, then, yeah, come find me.

I love it, man. Thank you so much for your time, for your wisdom, for

being a brother. I'm so excited for where we're

all going and everybody listening too. So you're in this

with us. So, Ani, thank you so much, man. I appreciate you very much. It's

an honor. Thank you.