In this episode of Impact Theory, I explore mindset with four guests who have achieved amazing things by gaining further insight into themselves. Tai Lopez Grinding and working hard and hustling is not what you optimize for. It's pain. Jay Williams My game had to change and I had to be open enough and vulnerable enough to accept the fact that my game had to be different in order for me to be effective.
David Bears don't let not knowing how prevent you from spending time getting additional clarity or imagining because that's actually what's required to happen in order for you to know how. Tim Grover Think about the times where everything was going wrong. What kept you going, that was your dark energy. The biggest thing I've learned, if I could be 18 again, I wish somebody had told me basically nobody knows what they're doing, even the adults.
You think you know, everybody's lost in the world of blindly and the blind. So the ultimate adventure to me is not just like bungee jumping or something like that going on. It's trying to get insight and see life as a puzzle. And your goal in life is to seek the adventures that piece the puzzle together so that at the end of your life you, like, kind of get get it.
You kind of get it. I feel like most people don't get what life is like. Think about it. What is life like?
Why do are we driven with some basic instincts? What's the purpose? You know, I like evolutionary psychology. So all these things have kind of led me down this bizarre place, and here I am with you.
All right, so I know that you actually have a definition of the good life around the four pillars. What are the four pillars and how does it play into everything? So, yeah, I always say health, wealth, love, happiness, like kind of in that order. If you're not healthy, you won't care about anything.
So I figured health is the trump card. And then the reason I put money second over love, it doesn't mean like, you should try to get rich before love. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a classic kind of way to be happy, there's five levels of mask. The bottom one is physiological or physical needs have to be met.
Food, shelter, water. The second one is safety. You have to feel safe. The third one is love.
And because if you don't have physical and safety right, you don't care about love. And if you don't believe me, look up the number one reason people get divorced. It's financial issues. So I just figured money doesn't bring happiness, but the Absence of money brings unhappiness.
This has been proven all over and over. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner, he said, you know, if you make less than 72 grand in America, he's found your happiness suffers because your stress goes up. So I figure you, you don't have to be wealthy. When I say wealthy, it doesn't necessarily mean like forgiveness.
It means you have to have your physical needs met and you have to have a margin of safety, some money in the bank account. If every paycheck you're freaked out, your love life is going to suffer. And then the top two of Maslow's hierarchy needs then become, you know, respect. And then the last one, the highest pinnacle is like a higher purpose, or people call it spiritual.
So health, wealth, and then love. And then if you get those three, that's how you get happiness. Like, happiness. There's so many books now about happiness.
There's a good one called Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Knight. But at the core thing to me, happiness is like soup. It's like if you make chick noodle soup but you forget the chicken, it's not chicken noodle soup. If you forget to put the broth in, it's just chicken and noodles.
If you forget the noodles. So that's what I mean. Like, happiness is a compilation of a whole bunch of stuff you do right? So I think I haven't found a better way to think about it.
So how do you go about, like, give some tactics? How do you tactically optimize for them? Do you attack them sequentially? Do you make real time calls about like, oh, I'm a little low on happiness or love or whatever?
Like, how do you play that? Yeah, well, like I said, I don't optimize for the last one. I try to get the first three right. Steve Jobs said he didn't want to be the richest man in the graveyard.
You know, do you want to be the richest man in the graveyard? I want to be the happiest man on the way to the graveyard. And some of that you have to postpone pleasure. A good investor is somebody who postponed present pleasure for future gain.
And you can do that. You work hard in the day. Some stuff's a pain in the butt. I built lots of, you know, businesses.
I know it is to be an entrepreneur. I'm saying I know that chess move. And what I'm telling you is two chest moves past that just move. Optimizing your life for hustling and grinding is like optimizing your life around going pee.
No pee is Something you have to do, it's not the goal. You don't go, woo, you know, my goal is hit the toilet seven times a day. No, but you have to do it to survive. So grinding and working hard and hustling is not what you optimize for.
It's pain. Why would you optimize for pain? But it is a necessity. And if you look at actual scientific explanation of what makes you successful, it is not just hard work.
If that's true, construction workers would be the wealthiest people in the world. Waiters and bus boys. They work harder than the owner. The most scientific psychometric personality test is called hexaco.
It's more accurate than big five, which used to be. It's much more accurate than Myers, Briggs, INFJ, ENTP, all that stuff. So Hexaco tests you on 26 facets of your personality. And one was called conscientiousness.
And it's been proven over and over by scientists. Conscientiousness is the most correlated with business success. Define conscientiousness. So then it divides into four sub facets.
Organization, perfectionism, diligence, and prudence. So the real truth is hard work is 25% of the formula because diligence is known in common language as hard work. Okay? So if you just think diligence alone will get you success.
You're like a basketball player at a feature plan gives you free throws. You're seeing the best free throw shooters in the world. They're old, 70 year old men who shoot underhanded, but they don't play in the NBA because NBA is not all about free throws. So NBA is scoring defense, free throws maybe is one component, rebounding assistance, water component.
So the other three you have to get good at. The first one is perfectionism, people. You have to know how to double check your work. It's that simple.
It doesn't mean you're always a perfectionist, but it means when it's important. When you're a pilot of an airplane, double check before you go. If you get on a plane, you hear the pilots double checking the co pilot going, you know, hydraulics. And the guy goes, hydraulics.
And that's what planes don't crash. And it's called Six Sigma. It's three defects per million. Your goal in business and in life.
One of the important things is to make three mistakes per million transactions. And the only way you do that is by being a perfectionist in terms of double checks. So that's 25%. The next one is organization.
I can't tell you how much better my life is and anybody watching this will be. If you wake up every single day and you take 10 minutes. I have yellow notepads sitting all around my house. I got that from Bill Gates.
Bill Gates built Microsoft at 17 by locking himself in a hotel room with six yellow notepads. And he wrote out the whole basic code for dos and things. I built Microsoft. He became the richest man who had 18 years straight because he was organized enough to lock himself in a room and think through his day.
And so what I try to do and whenever I do this, I have a great day. Whenever I don't, I notice it. Be organized a little bit. 10 minutes.
I actually have this little couch thing outside my shower and I put a notepad by it. I take a shower. When I wake up, I walk over to it. I kind of sit there and I just write out.
I mean it can be a little three main projects you want to get done that day. So organization is the other 25%. So now and then you have diligence, which is hard work, hustle and perseverance. But the last one is the kicker.
And this is what I was talking about, the rewiring that has to happen. The last one is something called prudence. Scientists calls prudence. Prudence is the ability to make the right decision.
And I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs and non entrepreneurs, even me at times too. I'm not special. I'm lumping all of us in this because of our upbringing, society. Our goal is, let's say our goal is like that camera right there.
So let's assume that's north. So I have this compass in my brain and my goal is to go right there. Let's say it's a mile away, so north. What happens to society?
My upbringing in school wired my compass exactly backwards. So I think, let's say I can't see that camera, but I know I want to go north. So I pull out my compass and it points that way. So I just take off walking and I do it in an organized fashion.
I do it in a perfectionist manner. I'm perfecting my steps and my posture. I'm also working on, you know, hard work and hustle. Keep walking towards your goal.
Well, the truth is if you go south when you should go north, you could have gone one mile. But the Earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference. So you get to walk 24,000 miles and you'll come up on the backside and you will get your goal that's most entrepreneurs. The Average person takes 20 years to become a millionaire.
90% of businesses fail within the first five years. 80 to 90, depending on what statistic most people. I did the math once. The average American has $60,000 saved by the time they're about 60 years old.
So, so my answer, I did the math. You can do this with a simple financial calculator. Everybody in America, your parents, everybody you know, will be a millionaire if they live to 160. At 160 years old, you take 60 grand at age 60 and you give it a decent return on investment.
8%. You'll be a millionaire at 160. But the problem is, the great philosopher Aristotle, Socrates said, the problem is art is long, but life is short. The art of living and getting to your objective is long, but it doesn't have to be.
It's long if your compass is backwards. So the whole point of what I was saying about adventure at the beginning is I'm trying to take myself and point it to the true north. And you have to learn that from books and mentors and life experience and listening and finding in person mentors and all those things. They help adjust your compass.
And most people are going to get what they want just about 40 years longer in Beverly Hills, trust me. You go downtown Beverly Hills, there's other people. Like, I like to collect cars. It's not so much.
I've always liked cars. It's not a materialistic show off thing like a lot of people think. My grandma said, I love cars. When I was one, I used to try to turn the car on the garage you go to downtown Beverly Hills full of Ferrari.
The most Ferraris per capita in anywhere in the world. Every one of the guys is 80 or 90. Why you want a Ferrari at 80 or 90? You want a walker.
You get old, we gotta walk you into your. And then you're getting in a Ferrari. You know how dumb you look to me at 90, you want to be playing with your grandkids. And I wondered like, why the heck is everybody 90 in this town excluding people who inherit their money from their dad.
But, and I realize we're set up for failure because we think we're going north, but we're going south. That's why 50% of people who get married, divorced, 80% of businesses fail. That's why 30% of Americans are on some form of antidepressant medication. That's why 60, 70% of people are overweight.
I mean, in a way we're kind of. But are there like Key principles, though, that you can use to turn that compass so north actually points north. Yes. First one is just like Alcoholics Anonymous.
Admit you're lost. And that one's hard for people. You tell people, even for me, sometimes I want to think I'm smart and I got it all figured out. And sometimes I'm like, wait a second, I'm still lost.
And that the acquiescence, the admittance of the fact that you're still lost, it gets you on track a lot faster. So if you're watching this and you feel lost, it's better to just sit down and be like, I'm lost. Because the day you admit you're lost is the day you allow yourself to be found by people who can give you a tip. But what's the equivalent of that?
Because obviously if you're entrepreneur, nobody's looking for you, so that's the way who is they are. You go to Barnes and Noble, people selling their books, they're looking for you as a customer. So read, read. I mean, the fact that people argue with me on this reading thing and people argue with me about mentors.
No, just use your own gut feeling. Is that how you learn English when you're two years old? You use your gut feeling to start conjugating verbs? No, you learn from other people.
You learn manners, you learn language. You learn all things valuable. You learn to drive from another person, so it doesn't make sense. You learn life.
So books are just the mentors who maybe are dead now. You wanna learn about Steve Jobs ain't alive to teach you, but you can learn through accumulated wisdom. And that's what trust me, I meet very few powerful businessmen I've ever met. Don't read a lot.
Warren Buffett. Why? Thinks the best businessman by far in the world. Yes.
He has 75 companies that he pretty much runs 200 billion in revenue. He reads eight hours a day. He reads 600. He said he slowed down his old age.
He only reads 500 pages a day. Bill Gates goes on reading vacations. Mark Zuckerberg just started a reading once a week book club on Facebook and already got a couple million followers. And now with audiobooks, there's no excuse.
You got YouTube videos. Let this thing run in the background. And it's better if you can find it. I mean, better than books is in person.
That's why I do podcasts. Trauma's on my podcast. You're a smart dude. I learned from you like I learned from you today.
I like your angle on how to get in physical Locations. If you launch a physical product you want to get in stores, don't be thirsty. Like I said, Casanova said, be a flame out the moth, let them come to you. And that's what you did with Quest.
And now you sell 1.5 million bars a day. That's good. So if you can pick up one gold nugget, whether from in person mentor, whether from a book, you become very wealthy in knowledge very quickly. One nugget a day.
Point of it today, it's like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner said, step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily fast spurts. But you have to prepare for the fast spurts by learning step by step. So when the day comes and I launch a physical product, I will hopefully be smart enough and humble enough to be like, I gotta sit down. I've never launched a company that did 1.5 million bars.
I can download in one conversation with you. Like you want to become like a supercomputer. You just download smart crap from smart people and you pick and choose. Like some people are like, ty, don't agree with everything you say.
I'm like, good. I don't agree with everything I said. Like a year later I'm like, wait, I was wrong. I actually saw the people who win.
They're not smarter, they just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now on business, psychology, leadership, books that have already changed how the best operators think. And everyone you haven't read is a gap between you and the people who have. This is a bandwidth problem, not a discipline problem.
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That's I n c-o g n I.com impact and use code impact. Very intriguing piece of content that you did where somebody was trolling you on Twitter and in a move that confused the shit out of me, you decided to call him on Skype or whatever. Let's. Let's debate live right now.
And you did. And you kept asking him a question that I thought was so spot on, which he kept refusing to answer, but it was, hey, you're engaging with me. I'm creating all this content about how I've done what I've done, and instead of going, huh, you actually have done something that's pretty interesting. You're heckling me instead of being intrigued by my results.
Yes. And that to me, is very interesting. And that. That, like, switch in people's minds is either on or off.
Either they look at somebody else and they go, whoa, this guy's doing something right? Like, holy hell. Or they try to find a reason to shut you down, not listen to you, discredit you, whatever the case may be. I thought that was pretty interesting.
Talk to us a little bit about that. How often do you see that in people? And do you ever see that mentality in people who are successful? Like Drake says, if you don't have haters, you're going to pop it.
So welcome to the world. You want to pop, you can get hate. It's interesting. This is fascinates me.
The more successful, beyond my wildest dreams of my success, the more they ask me questions. Last time I saw Elon Musk. I've had some very interesting conversations with this guy. He's one of the smartest guys I've ever met.
Elon Musk. We've talked. I'm not a close friend of his by any means, but we've talked. He goes to the same things.
He loves Hollywood. He's always at red carpet things. I go to. So we're in the bathroom and he comes in.
I said, hey, you know Elon, we talked about books last time. He goes, oh, yeah, I remember. You're the social media guy. He goes, I got a question for you, man.
Do you think I should use Snapchat to grow Tesla? So I was like, okay. He goes, I know you know about Snapchat. Tell me.
So I start talking to him. 20 minutes later, it was Game of Thrones premiere six. And I go, what do you think? After I gave my long diatribe, he goes, I think you're wrong, but thank you.
And then he walked off. And I was like, this guy is so smart. I realize you talk about Checkmate. I was an idiot because I should have flipped the conversation to get him to teach me.
For 20 minute, he walked in the room knowing what he knew, I knew what I knew. But he. I gave him all my jewels and he walked away with them like a smart guy. I see people making fun of the Kardashians.
I'm like, you're making one of the Kardashians. Look, Kylie Jenner, the youngest Kardashian in the last 18 months, has done $400 million in revenue on lipstick kits and various makeup things with Kylie Cosmetics. Put that in perspective. L', Oreal, Maybelline, massive brands.
It took them 50 years as an organization with thousands of employees. To do what Kylie Jenner did by herself at 20. At 18, you're going to laugh at the Kardashians. Do you have to agree with everything the Kardashians?
No, but like Abraham Lincoln said, I learned from everybody, even though sometimes it's what not to do. How did that notion of you have to be crazy to be great find its way into your mind first? I've seen it on a multitude of levels. You know, it was really funny.
My rookie year, you get so damn excited because you're playing against these guys and you've been dreaming of playing against your entire life, right? You actually crossed over Jordan, right? Well, yeah, I did. Even though he dropped multiple buckets on me and then told me how he was gonna do, which is impressive because he was four years old.
It still pisses me off to this day. I don't know if you can tell, but I remember we were playing against the Lakers, Tom, and we were out here in la, and I always try to outwork people, right? That's just how I beat my mark. So the game was at seven.
I was like, you know what? I'm gonna come to the Staples Center. This one, Lakers at Kobe and Shack, okay? This is like the championship Lakers.
So now I'll get there at 3 o'. Clock. I want to make sure I make 400 made shots before I go back into the room. And I sit in this on and I get ready for the game.
So, you know, get in the car, get to the gym, get there. And as I'm walking onto the court, who do I see? I see Kobe Bryant already working out. And I'm like, okay, that's kind of cool.
It's Kobe. What's up, Kobe? You know? And so I put my sneakers on and you ever get lost in what you do where you end up like, wait, it's been an hour and a half.
I got it. I'm here, I'm in it. So once I set my foot across that line, I started working out. And so I worked out for a good hour, hour and a half.
And when I came off after I was done, I sat down and of course I still hear the ball bouncing. I looked down like, this guy's guy's still working out. He was working out for, like, it looks like he's using a dead swipe when I got here, and he's still going. And it's not like his moves are nonchalant or lazy.
He's doing, like, game moves. You know, I sit there and I unlist my shoes and I'm like, oh, my, how long this goes? I sit there and watch. No, 25 minutes.
And he got done. I said, okay. I think I said, enough. Go play it.
You know, come back, get in this on and get ready for a game. That game, he drops 40 on us, okay? And after the game's over, I'm like, I have to ask this guy. I have to understand, like, why.
Why he works like that. So I'm like, hey, Kobe, like, why. Why were you in the gym for so long? He's like, cause I saw you come in, and I wanted you to know that it doesn't matter how hard you work, that I'm willing to work harder than you.
Wow. And he's like, don't hold. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying I respect you as a person.
You just. You inspire me to be better. And it was the first time I started to see this level of competitiveness where I said, I need to start doing more. Wow.
And everybody I've been around in my life who's been uber successful, I'm talking monetarily, even tell them spiritually. My girlfriend said something to me that really inspires me. Okay. Because I think as I.
As I got lost into my career and I want to jump into the server, as I got lost into my TV career, I had a tendency to put all my energy and my time into that almost to make up for what I felt like I lost before. Okay. And she said, you know, if you were to allocate a percentage of the energy that you put into your career into yourself and learning more about yourself and learning more about yourself in relationships, you'll be successful. And it was the first time I'd said that and said, wow, it's really powerful because I think a lot of people, when you get started addressing other things, you get mentally tired, Right?
When I address tv, I don't get mentally tired. It's just what I do. Right? But when there's an unknown something that you haven't felt like you mastered, I'm unsure about it.
When it gets frustrating, like, who are you going to be? Are you gonna be a person that woiles in yourself? Pity. Are you gonna be a person that says, you know what?
Okay, I did this wrong. I did that wrong, but how can I be better? And I think that's what I talk about. That relentless mentality to want to be better at just life in general.
How hilarious that you would use the word relentless. So you and I have a mutual, deep friend for you. I'm sure. And a very strong acquaintance for me in Tim Grover, somebody who's had a massive impact on my life, but obviously pales in comparison to what he's done for you.
Talk to me about Tim, his notion of being relentless, what that means to you, and your own willingness to endure an ungodly amount of suffering. That would be an understatement with Tim. First off, he is brilliant. He's beyond brilliant.
And it wasn't the physical part that was arduous. It was. It was the mental. And just to sense the station, he was the guy that trained you post injury.
When it's like, I'm really serious about this, I'm all the way. I go to the best of the best in Broker. Yeah. And, you know, Tim had trained Michael Jordan, he trained Kobe Bryant.
But I think a lot of people get lost in the fact that he trained them physically. He trained these guys mentally, too. And I know for me, you know, my leg, I have atrophy on the outside of my left leg, okay? This muscle here, since I lost my nerve, it's going away and I drop it.
So my game had to change. And very much like life here, you're doing One thing that 21 is different than when you're 35 years old, right? And I had to be open enough and vulnerable. Vulnerable enough to accept the fact that my game had to be different in order for me to be effective.
But like I said earlier, it's so hard when you. My brain sees things in my body before. I guess this is a gift of being athletes. That caliber, right?
I see it's gone, right? If I bring the ball down the court and there's a screen coming, you know, to your right, and you glance, or if I see your eye glance, within that split second, I'm gone. Because I see, take your eye off of me. So now, since my game's changed at 21 years old, now sudden, that first step is like, it's molasses.
It's non existent, right? So now am I willing to say I'm not that fast anymore? I have to work you into the screen. I have to take my time.
I have to take him off shoulder to shoulder. I have to use my body more to create separation. Hey, my jump shot wasn't the best. I have to be a better shooter because I don't have that explosion anymore.
And a lot of people say, hey, that seems pretty easy. But to mentally accept that I'm a different person now is. And to help other people see a different person was Challenging. And the major part that was the most difficult was seeing myself.
So as an athlete, I was used to people looking at me in a state of awe. Right? And it was something you kind of thrive for you work your entire life for. So when the kid or when somebody was coming up to me like, oh my God, Tom, your show is amazing, right?
And you're used to that affirmation of what you do. You're like, alright, it's worth me putting the time. Whereas that look for me changed. And that look really made me depressed too, because it was from my God, you're amazing to look of.
Oh my God, I'm so sorry. Or what happened or used to be that guy before you messed up. People don't say things maliciously. They say things more so because it's awkward and they want to start a conversation.
And those things would drive me insane. And Tim forced me to talk to him about those things. It's the first time I started having conversations. I've been like, on the court, I was on the court doing a drill and he's like, you have drop foot.
And all of a sudden I attack the drill a bit more and you know, next drill, you see that guy, you were good. And I get more shots. So he started to find ways to motivate me and started taking anger out of the equation for me too. And that was a.
That was a hell of a first step in the process of me rebuilding who I was as a person. So I'm wearing this shirt in particular for you because there are people that know how to leverage the darkness. There are people that know how to leverage the anger. Tim is definitely one of them.
You said you've always played better angry. What was your mental talk in those times where the level of pain, which you go into great detail, but the level of pain was like I was squeamish just reading about it. I mean, just crazy. I can imagine, I guess what he was talking.
I mean, when you have to do years of that campaign is nuts. So what are you doing, like self talk? How are you harnessing like the dark side? Like how did you tap into that?
Did you work on that? Was that something that's part of the game plan? Well, we had conversations about different things, which obviously, you know, for me at the time I was 23 years old, right. So it was the first time I was even having conversations.
And to a degree, you know, I think this comes from being at a school like Duke, when you're always, you're always, you know, in the face of the media. You learn how to say the right thing. Right. Okay.
You don't give people your honest feedback. You kind of give them the rhetoric. And I think even when I started going through therapy, I had a lot, a lot of rhetoric. Right.
Because I don't want to. I don't want to face it. I have. You had a bad dream and you wake up and you're married, right?
Yes. And you see your wife and you're like, okay, that was a dream. Right? Right.
I think for a long time, for two or three years, I thought I was living a fucked up dream. And I kept waiting to wake up. Kept waiting to wake up. Tim was the first person that forced me to talk, to talk, just to talk.
And it's amazing when you just open your mouth and you start saying how you really feel about stuff. I mean, think about how many people really say how they feel. Virtually nobody. Exactly.
I think Tim was the first person I actually started to have, like, full, transparent, transparent conversations with. I was like, I don't like the person I was. He's like, what do you mean? I was like, I cheated a lot.
My girlfriend. I lied a ton. I was consumed by money. I used to gamble.
I never gambled. Um, you know, I always say things just because there's right things to say, not that I was maliciously a bad person. Right. I just never even thought about what my actions were.
I was too busy moving and Tim forced me to stop. And I still stop myself to this day. And you stop yourself from focusing on who you don't want to be and focusing on who you do want to be. I just.
I press pause in life sometimes, and I think it helps. I recalibrate to try to get out of an obsessive thought. Yes. Or just, you know, even get out of funks, whatever it may be.
I'm a firm believer in that you have to find balance in life. Right. So there are going to be times where your journey's gonna be down here, and it's gonna be tough. And same with things.
Get high. You know, you signing a deal or, you know, you have to keep things in perspective. And I think sometimes when I stop, I force myself to assess, okay, where are the benefits? You know, where are the negatives?
How can I turn this negative into a positive? All right, let me make sure that I don't get too high and I continue to keep my head down and work harder because I want to achieve more. If it's not for me, for people that work for me, or for my girlfriend or My mom deserves better. So I try to find that one thing because I'm very goal oriented that I need to work towards.
And once I achieve that, it's another goal and I don't want it to ever stop because that's what life should be. Agreed. Do you think of yourself as young or old? I'm old.
Interesting. I've lived a life that has been different. Not for better or for worse. It's just I feel like I'm old soul let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building.
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So I'm reading your story. You want to make a comeback. And because the way the book is told, I didn't know if you make a comeback or not. Right?
So I don't follow sports. So I didn't know like, does this guy like go back to the NBA and crush it? He's like super famous now. Or.
Or do you not. And there's no hints of it in the beginning of the book, so it's like unfolding for me in real time. And then when you don't make it and there's the second attempt at suicide. But I know that like you're.
I have the framework of what you do post basketball. So I didn't know if it was basketball injury, basketball in the post or just basketball injury in the post. But I know what you do post. I'm like, okay, this works out somewhere.
Like at some point he gets back on track. And I am utterly convinced that. And I don't believe things happen for a reason. By the way, which I know you and I are diametrically opposed on that.
So, yeah, I don't believe. But I believe that there's so much meaning and power to be taken from anything that happens. So to me, looking at like, okay, I watch this kid. Nobody gives him enough accolades for how good he's getting.
And he actually understands the nature of getting good. It's about practicing, it's about showing up, it's about putting the work. It's about doing more than other people are willing to do. He goes to college at Duke, not impressed with himself in his first season, but, oh, dear God.
Kills himself over the summer to really get spectacular. Comes back, crushes it. Could have gone direct to the NBA. Feels a sense of obligation.
I think it's beautiful. And, you know, there's no question you could have made more money by going into the NBA. Financially, maybe that was a better decision. But imagining you at the podium and everyone's like, begging you for another year, and you give it to them, and I think it's fucking beautiful, man.
I think that was a gift to that town. It's why your jersey now hangs in the rafters. Like, you did something beautiful for that organization. I think it's incredible.
You do that. You go into the NBA, it's all turning shit. People are smoking weed, like, before games there. It's like a total mess.
You're becoming somebody you don't want to be. But by the end of the season, you figured out and crushed the last 19 games, if I'm not mistaken. And everybody's like, whoa, the person you're becoming, you're about to become an All Star. And then, like, it's a f ing movie.
That's the moment that you have the accident. You have to rebuild. You've already talked about that, but your mind has been consistent through everything. Okay?
The vast majority of humanity. If I take your life and I just take a million people and I crush them through that, like, the percentage of people that come to the other side is virtually none. So for you, like, it's the way that I think of the universities. The inner cities consume most of the people that it touches.
And they either literally die young or they just go and do nothing. But every now and then, you get Jay Z and you go, God, for the right person, like this pressure cooker is. It's the pressure that makes the diamond, right? So because, A, I think that I'm going to live forever, truly, and I understand a lot of things have to happen that's be true.
I extend that to you. You're even younger than I am. So you're gonna live forever. It's gonna be amazing.
So now I wanna see. Okay, I know what this guy's been through. I know the diamond that his mind has become, like, what awaits all of us on the other side of that. So that's why I was freaking out reading the book.
When you're. When you literally try to cut through the word belief and can't, by the way, what. Do you set huge goals for yourself now? Yes, every day.
And let me address one other thing that you said I find fascinating because I think it's epidemic within our culture, you know, in American culture. It's so funny. Like, the comeback, right? When I was.
I wanted to write my book, I got turned down by multiple publishing agencies. And you're like, well, like, you didn't come back. Right? You know, and I think that's like the American.
Like the American scope of how we look at things. They come back and crush it. And that's a comeback story. I'm like, shit.
Like, I came back mentally, right? Like, that's a story. That's a story that should be cherished for younger kids out there, for older people out there. Doesn't matter.
You have to come back and do what you did before and do it exponentially better. You have to come back better as a person and really value that process. That's a comeback. That's.
That should be an American story. So, yeah, I think my goals are a little outlandish for myself. I want to own my own media network one day. That's why.
That's okay. This is like Godson, right? Like, you know, I have a two bedroom apartment in New York. I, you know, my mom comes in, unfortunately, there's a.
There's a big camera room and there's lights. And she's like. She's like, are you filming me while I sleep? And I was like, no.
But now I make. Cause it's really interesting content, you know, But I think about, hey, how can I. How can I be bigger and better? And I think right now, how can I break outside this mold of just being a college basketball analyst?
That's how I got my foot in the door. Tv. But I'm impacted with the process of TV because, as you know, it's amazing when you have to be vulnerable to talk about issues that a lot of people aren't willing to talk about. There's something special about that.
So if that's me having conversations with, you know, somebody, I'm interviewing Or me being lost in, you know, telling dialogue. I love it. Like, I. It's my passion.
It's my new basketball court. I've heard you talk a lot about the idea that basically whatever happens is what is meant to happen. And in terms of the leverage of coaching somebody like me, that would never work because I don't believe in an omniscient God. So I'm like, there are just too many things where the outcome is just bad.
It's. It was all bad. But I think you're very right that you can always reframe it and find something good out of it. So you can find something good out of terminal childhood cancer, Right?
But I would say objectively that one falls into my human suffering bucket. I'm gonna say no, that's just pretty bad. You can learn something from it. No question.
You can reframe it. Absolutely true. So how are you able to have a breakthrough with somebody who is an adult who, like me, doesn't believe that everything happens for a reason? Like, is it just reframing?
Are there other tools? Like, what do you lean on? Yeah. So what do you believe in?
In other words, in your context, in the container that you've created, because you're creating it, right? Like we don't know if there's a God. We call it the universe, but that's just language, right? We just make up names for shit.
So the question would be, now go back to Einstein, if he actually said it, which I think he did, which is, you know, the most important decision you make is whether from your hostile universe. So that perspective is a belief in how the human being, technology works. In other words, whatever you believe because of the way this whole structure and system works and how meaning and creates emotion and neurobiological chemical cascades in your body, right? Like all this stuff, like in that sense, without even getting really woo, you're creating a reality, right?
So then the question would be, what do you believe in drives everything? Because, you know, for me, I look at more as a mathematics. I don't. I use the word God.
But what I believe is that intelligence itself, right? Unbound intelligence is all there is. And that unbound intelligence, when you say is all there is, what do you mean? Like the very fabric of space time?
Sure. Like if you talk about space time or the ether, or the Hindus called the Akasha or the fifth element, or in the beginning there was a thing, right? For me, it's intelligence and it's mathematical and it's expression. And so I believe in math, right?
If you go back to, like, Euclidean geometry, right, There's a very, like, kind of spiritual concept around all these things. And looking at things like sacred geometry and how something is expressing itself and these really deep, sophisticatedly intelligent patterns, right? Which one could suggest is just chaotic. Like, it's the way that this all unfolded.
It had to unfold this way because it was the only way it could all work. Or it's supremely intelligent. So the first thing I want to do is understand what do you believe? So that then we can have this conversation within that context.
So what do you believe? I believe purely in evolution. So whether that is divinely started or not, because I will be the first, there's something that I don't understand, and it is something big, and it leaves me in awe and wonderment. And so I am deeply moved by the mysteries of the cosmos.
Like, that shit, to me is so beautiful. And so the states of awe or compassion or connectedness or like, you don't have the picture that I'm in, man. It's just. I don't think that one.
I don't think that what makes this experience beautiful or even useful is that it is all happening exactly as it was meant to happen. I feel like, hey, something put the expansion of the universe, the expansion species started, and it all has to obey the laws of physics. Okay, cool. So now operating within that, I find so much power in going, how does the mind work?
So what is it that I can grab hold of? What are the levers? What are the dials? I don't need them to be divine, inspired, and they certainly can be.