#817: 4-Hour Workweek Success Stories — Charlie Houpert on Building “Charisma on Command” to 10M+ Subscribers, From Charging $10 for Seminars to Making Millions, Living in Brazil, Critical Early Decisions, and The Secret to Freedom

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/9b13d83490e57eb6

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show where it is my job to interview and deconstruct how high performers do exactly what they do, how they arrived, where they are, the skills, the habits, the tools, everything that went into their journey to mastery of some type.
And
This episode
is an experiment. I've done this long ago, once or twice. People enjoyed it. So I am doing a four hour work week
Case study.
A success story
And this is a fun one.
Charlie Hoopt
is the guest name. You can spell his last name H-O-U-P-E-R-T. He is co-founder of Charisma on Command, a company that helps people develop confidence, charisma, and strong social skills. His journey
From step one.
is pretty fascinating. There are a lot of challenges along the way, ups and downs, and I think it mirrors the paths of many who have implemented the four hour work week, including sticking points. And some people don't overcome those, but he was able to problem solve
Or at least endure through some of them. So it's very, very instructive.
Now Charismon Command originally launched as a four hour work week inspired Muse
has since grown into one of the largest platforms for social skills and confidence training with more than 10 million YouTube subscribers worldwide and more than a billion views across its content in six languages. His flagship course, Charisma University, has guided more than thirty thousand members through practical steps
to become more magnetic. And I'll give you a teaser. It didn't just work out of the gate.
It didn't initially have that branding.
And there were many side alleys, many attempts
Example.
parkour VHS tapes instructional.
and a whole bunch of other stories and examples that I think people will enjoy. Charlie was once voted most likely to break out of his shell and began studying charisma to overcome his own social anxiety. He now explores the deeper roots of confidence through archetypal psychology, embody practices, and much more.
You can find Charisma on Command at YouTube.com slash charismoncommand, and you can find Charlie
At Charlie Hubert.
H O U P E R T at Charlie Hoopert on Instagram and X.
And now
Just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible before we get to a wide ranging conversation with Charlie.
Thanks for listening.
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At this altitude, I can run fly out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then also your personal question.
No se doye.
A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and those cellular.
Charlie.
Welcome to the show. Nice to be spending some time together.
And I thought we would start.
As you suggested, since I do not have
Much memory of this. That is not to say that I am
Too big for my britches. I think it was quite a while ago.
But how did we first meet in person?
Yes. This is not our first time meeting. No, it was a much larger moment in my life than in yours, I think. This is twenty eleven, twenty twelve.
I'm working as a management consultant in Washington, DC and
I have been a four hour workweek acolyte for probably six months. Like evangelical. Everyone needs to read this book. We're all entrepreneurs. I've sold nothing at this point. I've got no product, but everybody has to do this.
I'm out to dinner with my company. We've just completed this contract.
And sitting there facing the door.
And Tim Ferris walks in.
And
The blood drains
From my from my body. I go cold.
I'm working on being more gregarious. My boss sees he goes, What's wrong? I said
It's Tim Ferris. Tim Fair is here.
Like the boogeyman walked in. I told him and he goes the four hour guy.
Tim the rip. So I uh
You know, s I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Walked over to your table. This is on eighth street in D C
And yeah, I just said, you know, Hey Tim, Mr Tim, I don't know I want you to
I read your book and it's changed my life. This is even before it really changed my life. And I love your blog and it's just it was so
Right.
You turned and faced me and were very kind, you gave me far more attention than I had anticipated that I would get and asked some questions about what I was doing.
And at the time I was like fuck, I haven't actually made anything happen. So it's like you know, I'm working on this, that and the other thing.
Then excuse myself to go to the bathroom.
Where I was like, fuck you ruined it. And uh
Came back and uh didn't have an ask. This is an interesting learning for me. And it was just like Do you want to get coffee tomorrow? I don't even drink coffee. You're like sorry, I'm I'm in town, I'm just doing the four hour body, I've got some meetings tomorrow, so I can't do it and politely excused yourself.

But
For me that was
It was a number of things. It was like, Man, I wish that I was able to have that conversation in a way that created more connection between he and I.
And it was also it's funny to be sitting here now,'cause at the time I had this projected belief that if you would just feature my business in the muse, if you would just write about it on your blog, everything would be solved. You know, like units would start flying off the shelf and you know, I'd be taken care of forever. So it's really cool to be sitting here on the other side of that projection and get to chat.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay, D C I very rarely go to D C so I mean in in the
multiverse of other infinite possibilities.
It is pretty incredible that we met at all because I so rarely go to D C
And
I think you can also
probably cut yourself some slack in the sense that in those
conditions it's pretty hard.
to establish very quick rapport and connection. Oh yeah.
I I don't know, was I by myself or in a group?
You were by yourself. It was on a silver platter. Now, not to say, you know, I reflect and it's like you're in town for one day.
But
The idea that maybe there was something that could have been said to create that connection was the inception seed that just kept spinning in my internal safe for the next 10 years. All right. So let's double click on the management consulting.
And then how you became an ex management consultant or just the
Path itself. Because
I have seen interviews with you, and you talk about, of course.
various different things, charisma on command, charisma university, you have this topic area expertise.
And we'll probably uh touch on some of that.
What?
for a lot of my audience and for my own personal curiosity, I want to hear about your journey, right? Your personal journey.
Not necessarily
Focusing on
the content that
you're best at showcasing and I suspect we'll probably get to some of that. But
Looking back at the
early
Chronology is always fun for me because I remember, for instance,
And
I wanna not make this the Tim Ferris retrospective show, but that exact experience that you had with me, I have had many times with other people.
fumble out some accidental pig Latin and then I go to the bathroom I'm just like you idiot that could have been the sentence that changed your life and you fucked it up. So not to say that's what you said yourself, but certainly I have had those types of experiences. So let's go back to
Management consulting.
What was that experience like just paint a picture and then
I know this might seem like a lazy question, but just like take us forward.
From there.
Oh, every day it felt like a self betrayal. So I read the four hour work week.
when I was in grad school. And I was in grad school'cause I was a philosophy major as an undergrad and graduated
In two thousand nine, where not only were they not hiring philosophy nature, they weren't hiring anybody.
So hit out in business school for a year, wound up as a consultant because uh that's what you do when you don't know what you're supposed to do with your life. And
Every day putting on that suit felt like
a betrayal of myself, especially having read the four hour work week at that point.
And so there were these minor rebellions that I would stage. Like I had a faux hawk.
And I wouldn't cut it.
And I would put it down.

There were these subtle passive aggressive I let my shoes fall apart. I had my business shoes, but I wouldn't get new ones. They were like ratty and crappy.
And it was just these ways of like, This is not me. This is not right. And then I would come home from that.
After
sort of sneaking out as early as I could and I would write in just my own little journal about like
This is not what I want. I don't want this life. I don't want to be
The guy who is my boss, or the guy who is his boss.
And so it was in this period of time that I was
Noticing.
And experimenting with coming out of my shell at the same time. So I was able to make friends with
Not just my boss or his boss, but like I was got close with the president of the company.
And it was through just
Talking about the bars and clubs I was going to
Saturdays and he was vicariously, you know, we'd meet Monday morning, be like, So what'd you get into this weekend? And we had a little a little rapport there of you know, I remember the good old days type of a thing.
And so had that job, wasn't right, had our fruitful encounter, which didn't wind up selling anything. And at the time I was
My first business was a parkour training DVD.
I think I even used a service that you'd listed in the four hour work week to try to do it.
And was trying to get that off the ground, you know, selling it through Google AdWords very like
Step by step four hour work week. Like it could have been a chapter had it worked. And it was starting to go.
But it wasn't
It wasn't something I loved and I was struggling with it'cause my co founder and best friend was in New York. I was in Washington, D C.
How did you choose parkour at the time?
How did you decide on that? And were there any other
Candidates where it's like, Okay, here are the top four, we're gonna strike these out, we're going with parkour.
There was.
I did the little Venn diagram of what do I want that other people might be interested in. I just wrote all of my interests. I hadn't done parkour, but I liked Casino Royale. That was my level of exposure to parkour. One of the best intro sequences of any James Bond.
Yes.
So
The idea was, Oh wow, there's no parkour gyms. If there are, they're expensive. Maybe people would want to learn this. I would want to take a class.
And so went out, hired a guy that had done it, that never shot anything before
I mean, there's so many funny little stories. He chips his tooth the day before the shoot, so he's got this like lisp before the shoot and he can't remember more than a line. So we're we're we're saying lines to him as he's trying to teach Farcourt.
I think that's
Chopped this footage up into thirty five or forty minutes of like how to do a wall run, how to do a Kong, how to do all these things.
And made a D V D out of it from Trup Star. So the other things I mean, I can't remember what was on there, but it was very much
I was a little bit outside of myself and thinking what do other people want. I hadn't gotten to the scratch your own itch experience.
And what I experienced was that
Oh wow, we're actually selling enough DVDs to break even on AdWords and even a little bit of profit, which means if we did a follow up, we'd be totally in the black.
And I'm Follow up meaning you're selling to pre existing customers. Correct. If we'd made the advanced course. Or do you want personal coaching or something?
And I was completely deflated. I was like I can't
do this other thing in addition to my job that I don't love in order to get free of the job. So there was this recursive four hour work week mentality, which is like
Stop doing the thing that you don't want to do in order to get to the place that you want to be. Just do the thing that you want to do.
Although at the same time, just to play with that for a second.
The approach of moonlighting
just to dip your toe in the water, get a taste of the blood, whatever metaphor you want to use.
I think is actually pretty helpful.
in the sense that you don't have to act out of desperation, you still have a safety net of some type.
But then you can make an informed decision about whether or not you want to
Burn the ships, so to speak. Just my two cents.
It was an integral step. I very much agree with you. I needed the experience of disliking consulting and then the experience of disliking my side gig to go, okay, the next side gig
has to be something that I would do for free or am paying to do.
And so then it was, Okay, what am I spending money on? It's like well I go out
And
not to drink, to like talk to women and try to get them to like me and to make friends. And I put way more time, effort, attention into
studying how our interaction went. I can't tell you how many times I chatted with my best friend about like what if I said this? What if you know we were we were putting far too much energy relative to others into understanding people and how to connect better.
So
There was a transition of
My best friend and co founder was in New York, he was an investment banker, I was in D C, I was a consultant.
We would talk every day after work for an hour about the interactions we had
And I was just aching like I didn't have other friends in D C.
So I went to this president who I had been close to and there was this
moment where I was you know trying to get the side gig and trying to get a job in New York and I c it was I went to Skillshare and they didn't want to hire me and I went to all these companies they wouldn't hire me. I was taking weekend trips
And eventually my friend was like, Why don't you just quit?
And
Go to New York and figure it out.
There.
So having settled with that and done the fear setting exercises and what's the worst thing that can happen.
I came in and I made a pitch to my
President which was it's I mean a lot of four hour work week things, which is
Once it's already done, people get out of your way. So I was internally, I was like, This is done. I'm that we're not talking about if I'm going to New York.
So I sat down, I said, Hey
You guys have been really good to me. I appreciate it.
I just cannot
be in D C any longer. I feel socially
Like I'm missing something. I wanna be with my friends in New York.
But I want to transition in a way that is really good for you to repay the kindness that you guys have showed me, which was true.
And we sat there.
And he's like, You know what?
Let's work something out.
So he winds up saying instead of being an analyst, let's make you a
Contractor.
Except if you're a contractor.
The base rate that we pay contractors is twice as much as we pay analysts.
So we'd have to give you
Basically like a ninety percent raise.
In order to do it. But you'd have no job security and no health care. Month to month you could get fired.
So I'm like
Wait a second, I get to go to New York double my pay.
And no healthcare. This is incredible. So it worked out really well and I wound up
Keeping that job.
Working remotely from New York.
And making one trip every two weeks for a few months.
As I did this.
That's a pretty sweet bridge. Yeah.
At least for a while.
Oh, it was magical. And it was this showing up with
Hey, I love you, but here's what I have to do, and I'm open to something that works for both of us was really powerful. So let me ask you this for people who are listening and they might be thinking to themselves, like, hmm, that's a really interesting
bridge or just improvement quality of life. Also you got the income increase.
How did you plan for that?
Meeting.
Basically the pitch slash delivery.
that ended up in a remote work.
Agreement.
Step one was to
get clear that it was happening and I wasn't there to make him do anything. I wasn't trying to convince him to force it. So I was able to really come in
With the mentality of
I wanna show love to you. I wanna support you guys and take care of you and I'm willing to be flexible and I can stay another two weeks. But this is happening. So it was making sure that first and foremost I wasn't asking him to meet a need of mine. I'm gonna meet my needs
How can we work together?
Then it was literally rehearsing it. I ran through the conversation. This was not an outcome that I had ever planned. I thought it was like yes, I'd be willing to stay on for three more weeks and then come down and do touch points here and there, and I'm happy to get on the phone and talk to the person you have replacing me. But I really think it was the
preestablished relationship that we had plus
Me taking care of my needs and then saying what is best for you. Like I generally within these bounds, I want to do what's best for you.
And he came up with that solution. I didn't suggest it, which was
powerful and I've seen that same sort of
Dynamic play out many.
Many times in my life.
Yeah, for sure. And I think employees, well I know, oftentimes
It's been a few eons, but I've been an employee. Underestimate their own value or
Position.
And as a result, sometimes feel like they need to go hat in hand.
And expect.
Maybe the outcome to always fall in the boss's favor. But the fact of the matter is
In the boss's favor if you actually work hard.
And are a decent
let alone a very good performer. It is a huge pain in the ass to replace someone.
Yeah. It is. And for that reason, I think many people are surprised when they have some of these conversations, how often they're like, huh.
Wasn't even gonna ask for that and look what ended up coming my way.
You had all that money just lying around. Why don't you tell me? Let me open up this chest full of gold coins. Yeah. So then what happens?
You moved to New York?
So I go to New York.
And I
I'm splitting time now between what is this new business, which is called Kick Ass Academy. And this is my brilliant idea. I think we're gonna do
It's an academy, an online academy, where you learn how to live a kick ass life and it's about going out and it's heavily game influenced at this point. I've read Neil Strauss's The Game By Neil Strauss, yeah. Yes.
Great book. Controversial on a number of levels, but a really compelling
It's a compelling underdog.
Sort of hero's journey story. It's it's well written. And to a twenty three year old guy who has been socially restrained and I won the award for most likely to break out of a shell in college, which is like you're the shyest boy in our five hundred person class. Congratulations. To learn that there was something that I could say or do that would
Change.
the receptivity that I got from people was that was so powerful to see in the game. So those two books for our work week game are like really deeply influencing me.
I start
sharing some of these blog posts. Well actually first what happens is the government shuts down and that sweet contractor gig that I have.
disappears overnight. So I had like four ish months of like gravy and where I've been saving twice as much and then that happens.
So I'm in a three hundred ninety six square foot apartment, two bedroom.
In the lower east side.
Bathroom door hits the toilet when you open.
Yeah, I was gonna say, if we do the math on that square footage, it's not a lot.
Whole lot of space. No, no. I'm sleeping literally on a blow up mattress to save money. I'm eating chipotle and learning how to persuade them to give me more scoops in order to save money. I'm
Frugal beyond frugal at this point in my life. Start Airbnb being my own bedroom and then sleeping in like literally my God bless him, my co founder shares his queen size beds with me.
So that I can
take some nights and make a hundred bucks a night air beeping my bedroom.
And in the meantime, the beautiful thing is that everything that was taken from me pushes me to the next level of putting myself out there. So I'd had all of these writings that I'd been doing in DC about what I believed and what I thought and what I was learning about speaking with women and people, but I was too afraid to really share them.
So were any of those
Coping strategies that you ended up using, were any of those initially
In the fear setting.
Exercise. Oh yeah.
Those and others. It was I I mean I had play guitar and ask for dollars. That was farther down the list. It was learn how to make a basic drink and bartend.
Airbnb the bedroom. These were all
I had a list of things. So for people who have no context on this, just to set the table a little bit, fear setting
It's named that because it's a play on goal setting. But it's an exercise. You can find it at Tim.blog slash Ted. I also did a TED talk on it. So you don't have to buy anything. You can find it. But the basic gist is that you have something you're considering doing, quitting your job, moving to New York.
Getting married.
getting divorced, whatever it is. Then you write down all of your fears.
In as much detail as possible.
Right, because the more detailed, the more actionable and preventable, and it's sort of the nebulous misty fears that we never
put on paper or define that tend to be the most problematic. So you you make this list in excruciating detail of the worst things that could happen. Then there's another column, the next column.
You write down ways that you could try to prevent those things from happening.
And then in the
sort of damage control slash mitigation column, which is yet another column.
You ask yourself, if each of these things happened, what could I do to
limit the damage or get back on my feet, even if it takes me a while. And there's more to the exercise. There are other things, but in the mitigation,
Slash damage control.
column you would have something like Airbnb my own bed. Yeah. Airbnb my own bed. Sign up for a ton of credit cards to get the credit card miles and then convert to cash. I did a lot of things for fifty, sixty bucks.
Get a job at Chipotle so that you can eat the food that you're there and that takes care of food and money. You know? There was so I had a I had a lot of these and I ran through quite a few. Uh zeroed out my four oh one K in IRA and took the penalty at one point a little bit later down the line. So

was doing all of that, but as things got more and more dire and I'm going through my fear setting mitigation strategies
I am confronted with the fears that I have not written down, which is okay, it's time to put your writing out there.
So
Okay.
God, it's so funny. One of the big mistakes that I've make with the people that I love is I've tried to prevent
and hide from them and support them and not having to confront those horrible, harrowing entrepreneurial
moments of oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck this isn't working.
because it is in those moments of tension and pressure that something pops and you go fine.
I'll be honest and share what's on my heart because up until then
You're not gonna do it, or obviously gonna do it.
So what was the first kind of prototype version?
Uh
Post parkour entrepreneurship. Yeah. What was the V one? It's kickassacademy.com
And we are here to live a kick ass life and no one can stop us and like we will not be average. It's a twenty three year old manifesto about how all the people don't know how to do it, and I do. I know the way to do it. It's a regurgitated four hour work week plus my own iteration of the game thing. So
I write my blog post.
And I haven't shared any posts.
And I remember being in this tiny apartment.
With my hand hovering over publish.
And I'm I
Publish it on this blog post and I have to run out of the apartment and go down the street and, you know, just get away from the computer that I don't know houses the blog post now that it's on the internet.

And of course I come back and
Nobody's read it. And the a month later, nobody's read it. What was the first blog post, do you recall? Oh gosh, I wish I knew. I do not recall. I should have checked before this. It was all right, but it's some kind of how to how to thing. It's like
Seven roles for et cetera or Yeah, it might have been a how to. It might have been a declaration of one of my feelings when I was quitting the job and like this isn't what I want. It was not
Profound but it was
personal and tender to me. So it was very tough to receive criticism.
And I guess it is maybe I mean we'll get there.
Maybe not in terms of readership, but in terms of crossing the Rubicon from
Not publishing.
to publishing.
Hitting that button.
Oh my gosh.
Right. Psychologically. Yeah. Oh I'm willing to be seen is the emotional thing that is I think
for me has been the challenge endlessly in entrepreneurship, the way that I've chosen to do it.
So we got that post out and then nobody of course read it. And then the next step was okay, I'm going to promote this. I'm going to go to Reddit. I'm going to go to the forums that are most related. Every man should know. There was a Seduction subreddit. There was a New York City related subreddit. And I started posting my own things. And now
Comments start coming in. And so it's
Thank you, I like this, or don't promote your own stuff here. Or you know, now I'm actually dealing with feedback.
But the next stage was
Posting, posting.
I uh wrote a little short pamphlet book, but the real thing that actually started I think early you might even know I think you probably know him.
I hired Neville Madora.
for like a day of copywriting to help me
design the website.
And wound up with the first actionable real thing that I did was, okay, I've got people that read my blog. There's like, you know, thirty recurring viewers.
And I want to host an in person class that will talk about how to talk to a woman in the park in New York City, which is something that I'm doing with my friend going out and we're breaking it down and how did it go and all that kind of stuff.
So we rent out a room.
in one of these office buildings for like
Sixty bucks for an hour, an hour and a half, or something like that.
I go to the New York City subreddit, I give away five tickets.
They
Are sold. People like sold. People accept them. Right? They accept the five free seats. And then I sell the remaining five.
Seats for five or ten bucks. I think I might have sold them for ten bucks each.
And like an hour before the class we saw the last one. So we had ten people in this class.
Made fifty, lost sixty, plus cap fair, down fifteen bucks, whatever.
Go in and give a hour and a half presentation with a PowerPoint on, you know, this is what to wear, say, do, stand, here's how to deal with the fear that's gonna come up. If she rejects you, here's how to address that feeling, all of that sort of stuff.
It was just thrilling to do it, but afterwards
four of the ten people stayed after and were like
Do you do coaching? Do you guys do this? And the answer was
Uh now we do. Funny you should ask.
So it really had no
intention of
You know, there was not a business idea of there to be an upsell, but there was enough asking. So then it evolved into oh, now we're doing traditional what was around at the time.
dating coaching in New York City and we're finding our rates as we did that.
And
That was tough.
That's a gig where like
You're going out with a dude who's having the most
fearful experience of his life and he's paid you to encourage him and support him in facing that fear, which is
I'm going to go speak to that woman that I'm attracted to at the bar in the park.
Wherever.
And
It's not fun to like push someone to do something that they're really like they say they wanna do, but they're
They really.
grappling with.
And then you know, you go out and you show'em, yeah, y it could look like this. It could look like that.
So we did that for a while and we're charging I don't know a hundred bucks an hour as we did.
But
Again, something else that crept in, same thing with the parkour was
This wasn't the dream.
When I'd sat down and I'd done the fear setting, there's another piece of it, which is you write the ten out of ten upside.
Yeah. You assess the upside. If it works. If it works. What's the one to ten impact.
Positively if it fails.
What's the sort of transient
Most likely not permanent impact, right? Yes.
And so as we'd sat there and written in detail the ten out of ten upside, it was
Never you have a dating coaching business that is stressful in New York City. It was
You get to live on the beach.
with your friends, do work that you like when you like.
There was this idea which was silly that you would have a laptop
As you sat on the beach, that's ridiculous. It doesn't it's like a photo op, but it's not a good way to work. But I had that idea. I would drink caipirinas and I'd do it in Rio. That was like the romantic vision.
And so again I found myself having this thing that was working and
There wasn't
The ten out of ten.
Upside.
So I just want to pause for a second and just say that's where a lot of people get into trouble. Yeah. Right. Because they find something that is
Maybe not even thirty percent of the way.
to where they want to be. But it has a
Seductive.
traction. And there are certain financial realities. It's like, hey, if you need to pay your rent, yeah, you need to pay your rent.
But it's very easy for that to then become something that is a monster you feel.
you need to feed that you can't step away from. And in that case, right, with coaching, you're still trading time.
For money, right? At a per hour rate.
And in person in a place that isn't the most fun with guys that are having a challenging time. You know, like
If people want to get a really good laugh.
You can find it on my YouTube channel, but the
Tim Ferris experiment TV show episodes are all up there for free. And there's one, I think it's just called the dating episode, where a small world, Neil Strauss, is like sitting in a van with an earpiece trying to give me advice at the farmers market in San Francisco as I'm doing cold approaches.
Horrible horrible and horrifying
Beyond terrible. If people want to see what that looks like, knock yourselves out.
I
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I
Okay. So you decide that
The one on one coaching in person.
This is not the ten out of ten that you'd hope for. Yes.
And I think uh you know the experience. It's not a great model. It's really challenging, high intensity, uh doesn't create the level of transformation with reliability that you might hope, and people walk away feeling sometimes very stressed about it.
And so it was okay.
I don't know what it is, but I said Brazil with my friends, et cetera.
So again, I'm evangelical. I'm telling everybody I meet, have you read the gospel of Tim? Like this book, The Four Hour Work Week. You need to do it. Everyone's an entrepreneur. That was a mistake in learning it's not for everybody. I got that in time.
So I'm telling everybody and what happens is
One of the guys that attended that first class becomes a friend.
It's probably the most magnetic period of my life where I'm just talking about this ambition.
And what happens is not just my co founder and I, but six
people many of whom I've met in the last two months.
Quit their jobs.
With their schools.
And agree they were gonna move to Brazil in August of twenty thirteen.
How did Brazil specifically become the dream?
One, it's got great PR. Never been it. There's just this sense that Rio is this romantic, beautiful beach city vibe.
And
when my company let me go of them that contractor role, I immediately said, Okay, what's the upside of this? So I booked a flight to Brazil and met a friend who was traveling.
And I spent five weeks in Floripa.
And one week in Rio.
And in that week in Rio.
My friend had gone home, I was alone, and it was these experiences of being alone in a hostel, not knowing anybody, that uncomfortable feeling of like I want to go home, I want my friends, I want my bus, whatever.
But I
Stepped outside of myself.
Went to a co working space, met a guy, he invited me to stay with him and I
had one of those travel
magical adventures that culminated in meeting a beautiful Brazilian girl and having this fling that lasted a few days and she came and visited and I knew that had to figure in somehow.
So you know had
That romantic experience of I showed up
feeling empty and like and then and then I walked away with
Abundance and feeling wonderful.
Whirlwind transformation of the trip. Yeah. So it's like that's where I want to be.
So six other people.
Quit all their stuff. Yeah.
School job, whatever it might be.
Okay.
Well, there's ten total, six who lived together, and then four who lived in other places. All right.
Like in the same city.
And then what happens?
So we get there. Nobody speaks Portuguese. I speak Spanish and I'm negotiating rent.
Looking for a four bedroom where I can take they have maid's quarters in a lot of these places, so I have the tiny room because that's what I can afford, but anyway we
settle into a life in Brazil.
And my Spanish is converting to Portuguese as quickly as I can.

And
We
Are living it. We're there. It is the thing. We are going to the beach, throwing the American football, making friends. We've got a whiteboard every day. There's four questions. You know, did you do the social stretch that you wanted to do? Whether that's make a friend, speak to a woman you're attracted to, be kinder to the guy who serves you, a s, whatever it is, there was a social stretch.
Did you do your business stretch? Did you do your health stretch? And there was one more thing, which is like, did you do your own personal thing? For some people it was reach out to a family member. For some people it was learn the guitar. So it was like four things. We had this running whiteboard of who had done
Their growth thing that they need to do. That's cool.
I like that. Yeah.
And it was a really
Encouraging growth. If you tried and failed, it was high fives all around for
That year was just
Amazing. She didn't want to talk to you. So cool. Like welcome back into the fold. You are welcome here.
So we're doing that.
And from a business perspective.
So now all my income is gone because it was all
the thing and then it was in person coaching.
one or two people agree to switch to online coaching, but it's not enough.
And so
For a period.
The blog becomes online coaching.
Which is actually nicer because now instead of just going to a bar and speaking about
Did you talk to the girl? What to say? It's people that are calling in with questions about workplace scenarios. And so I'm you know, I'm speaking of guys older than me.
Using
Tony Robbins principles, essentially, to answer questions about experiences that I've only
barely had. But it's helpful because it's this Tony Robbins transformation process that I'm
helping with and using.
So
That
becomes a thing and after months of doing in person coaching and we you know there's a whole learning the sales process and being able to ask for money, these are all intermediate steps that had to happen.
I'll tell you a story about Tucker Max in here as well. But
I'll tell it now.
No time. Never boring. Yeah, never boring. So at the time there's this program, I think it was called Clarity or something, where it was you could pay people per minute for advice and they would get on the phone with you and
I don't know what Tucker was.
fifteen or twenty two per minute or something like that. I don't remember exactly.
And so
Said it I had no money. I was like, Okay, two hundred bucks, let's get this done in whatever, eight minutes, twelve minutes.
So
Call them up.
Say, Hey, can you help? We're having trouble.
Getting customers. Can you take a look at our business? What do you recommend? And he goes and he goes on to her
homepage. It's called Kickassacademy.com.
It's me and my co-founder. He's got hair down to his shoulders and he's wearing like a pink tank top, and I've got a neon green pink top and you know frizzy hair.
And he says, You guys look like douchebags. No one over the age of twenty six is gonna want to associate with this.
It was
So true. It wasn't packaged in a very digestible way, but in time, as I started to, you know, get other points of feedback, I was able to integrate that.
And there was a transition from, Oh wow.
What I realized is all the guys who had come with me, they were like
One of them was the captain of the Princeton football team when he was at Princeton. Like these were successful, cool dudes.
But they all had this thing where it's like they didn't really want it to be public that they were learning.
This kind of a thing.
And so we talked to him we're like, But you like us, but you don't want anyone to know what's going on. And we learned that, yeah, you know, I do wanna get better in my relationships and learn how to talk to women, but
I don't want to broadcast it that way, essentially. And I also care about work and I also care about friendships.
And so we did a bunch of interviews and I started tracking like what word are you comfortable with? Like what's the ten out of ten word that you're down for?
And I had a long list. It was lifestyle design confidence and charisma came back as like a nine or a nine point five out of ten.
And so I'm going through this marketing course, Evan Pagan's marketing step by step, oldie but a greatie. Excellent.
Yeah. I've been smart fella for a long time has been a smart fella. Oh yeah.
And
He's got this line that
The name of your company is the most important marketing decision you will ever make. And I realize that when I say kick ass academy to people, they think it's a dojo where you're gonna learn how to fight.
Yeah.
And so through this process, Ebon also says you want an alliteration that sticks in the head.
He loves alliteration. David D'Angelo double your dating. Double your dating, right?
And so
I've got alliteration, charisma. The thing that they want is they want to walk into a room and feel
like they do with their best friends. They want to feel comfortable, calm, collected, like they want to just be able to turn it on.
And so we're brainstorming and charisma on command comes in.
Switch the name of the blog, screw up the redirect so we lose all of our Google juice, whatever. But very quickly
Conversion's just
Nothing has changed and we start converting way better as a result of this. And this is converting to online coaching? This is at this point, I forget exactly where we are, but there's just more interest. People are commenting, like every metric of engagement is up. And the type of person Just with the rebrand. Just with
The rebranded, we took the long hair down a little bit and made it a little bit Okay, here we are, but we put on like a T shirt instead of a nineteen eighties Miami vibes. Exactly. Exactly.
Let me sprinkle in just l a little context on a few things you've said. So
One is
Tuckermax, for people who don't know the name. He wrote a number of books.
I believe his first mega best seller was I hope they serve beer in hell.
And
He was the
First person, actually I would say the only person in two thousand early two thousand seven.
I approach Tucker Max.
who was part of a panel at South by South West and I was like, Okay, there's this long line of people
I already know.
Tucker's pretty prickly.
Can be and very direct.
And I somehow heard through the grapevine that he was interested in jujitsu or something like that. And at the time I had been doing a lot of training.
So when I got up there, I was like, Oh, have you ever trained with so and so or so so and I used that as a wedge in.
And
He agreed to have coffee or lunch, I can't remember what it was, one of the two, and I gave him a early galley copy of the four hour work week.
And a day later or two days later, whenever we actually met up in person, he came in and he had a research assistant who was named Ryan Holliday.
who later went on to become a mega best selling author. Actually one of his books behind me somewhere here. And uh Tucker said, Okay.
Let me explain what's gonna happen. And he's like, I can't prepare you for it because nobody can prepare you for it. And he just went step by step and basically predicted.
the next year of my life. He's the only one who did that. Now Tucker at the time also
was
I think rightly considered.
a marketing genius and very good at promotion and positioning had at the time a massive community, which I believe was based on V Bulletin or something like that.
Wow so his vote of confidence, maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy on some level, but that's just a snapshot of Tucker.
Then you also mentioned interviewing people, and I want to emphasize that.
Interviewing
Various folks.
Because the thing that doesn't scale in the beginning often helps you to scale later. And
for people interested in how, for instance, like Brian Chesky and the founders of Airbnb applied that.
One of the very early Masters of Scale podcast episodes has one talking about doing the things that don't scale.
And that led to the rebrand.
At least on some level. A hundred percent.
You change the positioning and the branding, charismon command, and
Everything improves, right? All the metrics of the website improve.
And
In the meantime, though, you are still in the
Servants quarters.
In
Brazil. Yeah.
I'm in the servants' quarters. At this point, I contact the HR lady at my old company. I go, Hey, we had a four oh one K, right? She's like, Yeah, I was like
Can you
Drain that for me.
Like she's like, That's gonna come with a penalty. I was like, Don't worry, I have no income. So like my taxes won't be too much, I'll just pay the penalty. So I've I hit zero.
And then I get a little infusion of cash and I'm about to hit zero again. Like I'm I'm going to broke.
I am Airbnb being my bedroom.
Sleeping on a horrible couch.
I am teaching SAT tutoring.
to Brazilian high schoolers like I'm still doing the
mitigation strategies in order to make things work.
And in your mind at that time, if you remember, like what is your goal?
I have it.
Okay.
I I'm living it. This is the beautiful thing is I've I was reflecting. It was really wonderful. Thank you for having me. It was such a cool opportunity to reflect on this, and I was like
I had it.
That was it. I was broke and I was living it. And I I got a tattoo right before this. It's a paraphrase, it's right here. It's I don't need to flash the audience, but um it's a paraphrase of Thucydides that is
The secret to freedom is courage.
And he also says the secret to happiness is freedom. It's a paraphrase essentially of I think a quote in the Peloponnesian war. And
I was so happy, so broke.
So unable to feed myself and I have
Try to remind myself of
That is the secret. It's just like when you step into it and you're living it, nothing more needed to happen. I would have liked the business to do well and it eventually did, but I I was there.

So
At this time I'm getting everything that I want in a degree, but also I'm running out of money and I'm planning airline points to get back home.
So
What happens is we get this course
It's from Clay Collins and it's about pre selling an online course. And at the point I've done so much coaching that I'm actually getting tired of saying the same types of things over and over again. Now now it's just happening
The uh
Skype at the time.
А та сам та Воршоп.
Mm-hmm.
So each stage is important. Like so I'm dialing it in until I get bored of like okay, this is what works, this is what creates transformation, but now my role is just robotic at this point. It's not as dynamic as I'd like it to be.
So given that I can do it once and be done, maybe I should just make an online course.
Thank God for this pre-selling thing though, because it runs you through this process. At this time I've been posting on the blog, I think we have five thousand people on the email list.
And
I follow this template, which is something like hey
Guys.
I was about to go into a cave and make this online course and I remembered that that's stupid because I'm making it for you. So before I sit down to record it, I just wanna know what is the biggest problem you're facing related to charisma?
If you reply to me, I'm gonna make the whole course, but I'm gonna make a piece of it for free that I'm just gonna give everyone who replies.
So they come in, they give me all their answers.
Step two.
You take all of those things, you bucket them and categorize them.
And you put'em into like radio buttons ranking things in one of those survey monkeys, whatever you want.
Say hey guys, thank you so much for writing in.
I think I have the top things. If you would just vote on which one you most want me to actually make the free piece on.
That would help me to decide which piece to make for you.
So then I get back and the first thing it was
How to make an amazing first impression.
How to feel unshakably confident.
How to have a conversation that flows effortlessly, how to tell great stories.
How to have body language that's magnetic, and how to be a good leader.
And in that order is what they ranked them. You know, number one, first impression, number two, confidence. So I get this.
And they just gave me the outline of my course in addition
to all of the specific
Phrases, questions, things that
Well need to be answered.
So I say, hey guys, I'm making a course. It's gonna cover these things. First impressions, how to be unstakably confident, effortless, you know, all this stuff. It's going to sell for eventually I think I started it at eight hundred, we lower it to six hundred, but it's gonna sell for eight hundred bucks.
You can get it for five hundred dollars, but here's the catch.
One, you're gonna have to do a one on one call with me.
Right, which is exactly what they wanna do. Two, there's gonna be group interaction throughout the whole time. And three, I really want your feedback throughout the course so that I'm building it.
Exactly to be what you want.
And so we offer twenty five seats like this and
That's the most money. We make twelve thousand five hundred dollars. We sell out.
People are stoked.
And for us it's
Oh wow, I was gonna make this course and what I learned
Now each week
I get on a call. I
Talk to several people one on one.
And I develop the content that I then send to them and they give their questions and it's this iterative interactive thing over six weeks.
And they with their questions.
completely reshape the course I thought I was gonna make.
I thought I was gonna make a course about all these advanced tips and tricks and of course
If you've done something for a while, you always overlook the beginning.
phases, you overlook the fear, you overlook all of those things. So we focus way more on getting through that.
And the course as a result.
It's tailored to where my average audience member is, right? The guys that I
wanted to work with that I'd started filtering by calling the company Charisma on Command.
And I have all these surveys that have language that then become the sales page on the back end. So like, do you want to walk into a room and be the guy that people instantly notice and that they're drawn to magnetically? Like that's phrases that they wrote.
in their descriptions of what they were asking for and wanted.
So on the back end of this.
I have my outline, I have my course, I've gone through it.
And so now I can go record this thing.
And offer it on the website.
So all of a sudden these blog posts which had nothing to sell to
Have something
to sell to. So now like actual money can start coming into the business.
While I sleep. So we're selling this course, we're getting
You know, one a day or one every other day.
That's gonna pay for your servants quarter's rent at the very least. Yeah, and correct. For sure. And much more at that even at that rate. Yeah. So my four hundred fifty dollar a month rent becomes affordable. Right. I don't I like I don't have to Airbnb my bed. And at this point, we pop back, we go to Las Vegas, we're flipping
When summer hits the northern hemisphere, we go home. When it hits Brazil, we go back to
Brazil. And so we're just like chasing summer basically in six to eight month increments. Vegas, Brazil, Vancouver, Brazil.
Columbia.
Where are you from originally?
Pennsylvania.
Didn't go back to the Pan Vegas. Okay, so how did you choose Vegas?
We
Exit Brazil the first time right before the world cup.
Great opportunity to air B and B the last month of Rent, get some money coming. It was great.
And so
Go back to Pennsylvania'cause I need a car.
That's where I've left my car.
And plan to drive out to Los Angeles.
Drive across the country in three days, spend one night in Vegas.
Like that was a lot of fun.
A Vichy played at XS. Let's try it again.
Say two nights. Say three nights.
Stay there for
Ten months. I don't know. A year. It was
Good food. It was really fun. We were at the time really enjoying going out. We were able to meet and talk to people and do the whole song and dance.
And so we wound up getting uh
off campus student housing, which is the only place that had like four cheap bedrooms in Vegas for a year.
outside of UNLV and were in Vegas for that period. So it just stayed.
I'm curious.
What was the durability of that first course or the
learnings in that first course. Yeah.
In other words.
How much of a an annuity has that been, whether it's or was it?
in revenue or just in terms of
core pieces of curriculum.
I mean numbers over ten million.
For sure.
So I've re recorded it and I've gotten a little bit better background and you know they fix the sound and one time I was traveling and so there was a new place every time. So I've re recorded it four times.
And I've tried to change pieces that I didn't like, but that structure
Remains. The sales page remains with minor tweaks. It's not great, but it has been
Almost ten years, if not ten years at this point. That's incredible. Yeah. Amazing. And it's
Because it's the problems are very similar.
It w it was built off of core human
Problems that are
durable and addressable. And interestingly, the refund rate
has not changed over the time. Like it's doesn't seem to be working less for the people who buy it and apply it.
There's still a sizable refund rate because it's a go at your own pace online course and we have a very flexible refund policy.
It hasn't hasn't
Increase. So
I'd like to re record it again. Yeah.
I'd love to do one more re recording, but
Same thing, keep it going, is how I feel.
This is might seem like a small detail, but I'm sure folks will be interested. What platform
Or software do you use to serve the course?
What's the back end, or maybe it's very explicitly through
Some type of
platform that provides this.
I'm sure there's better options now, but we've kinda got on and so with there's inertia. It's just a WordPress with some plugins. There was a wish list member plugin which was caught at the time and has, you know, since sort of been depreciated. And so we're rolling off of that. Sam cart is the cart. It was one of the only carts at the time that let you do
Payment plans. Now it's like everybody will let you do a payment plan.
But for our needs, those were the two. So it was a SAMCart cart to a WordPress site with a gated
content thing that hooked into Sam Cart.
Yeah, makes sense. Yeah.
So the course starts
Working.
At least to the extent that you just described it, which was
selling one a day or every other day.
You then get to Las Vegas.
When do things
really start to ramp or when do things start to change.
So
I can afford
Not
Main city US rent at this point. I can live in Vegas. I can't live in New York. I can't live in LA. That's where we're at.
At one point, I think it's when I'm in Columbia.
I had a list of like try LinkedIn, try Twitter, and the third was try YouTube. And I have that piece of paper somewhere. It has a question mark. YouTube question mark?
Ha ha
Oh man, people would love to see that given the size of your presence.
YouTube question mark. Yeah. And so I had no idea. So I post on LinkedIn. I post on Twitter and I put a video on YouTube. Now to be fair, I put several videos on one YouTube channel that was me on the beach in Rio with the wind whipping past the lapel mic and just y y that didn't

But I do one video on YouTube that is me analyzing a Bill Clinton
debate and it w it was like a c one of those community debates where he approaches an audience member and I talked about the power of his eye contact.
in that video.
And I didn't look at it for six months. One day I found that piece of paper. I was like, I should review to see how these things did.
I go to LinkedIn and I've got nobody's followed me and I go to Twitter, nobody cares.
And on YouTube there's a hundred thousand views and I have like seven thousand subscribers or three thousand something like on this YouTube channel and I haven't even looked at it.
That was mind bending.
And I had no no call to action, so I it had no way to hit me other than I had to like log into the YouTube platform. Which I hadn't done.
So I think it was twenty sixteen.
I st did a few videos at the end of twenty fifteen, but by twenty sixteen I made the commitment that once a week, every week, I would release one YouTube video.
And the first ones, this was I'd read Essentialism and it was like just do the thing.
Great book. Amazing. Greg McCuen. So good. So good. Read it. Read it four times. Need to read it again. Like Yeah. I have a piece of artwork downstairs in this house that Greg McEwen recommended to me called The Listener. People can check it out. It's a great
Reminder, but not to interrupt. So you read Essentialism. Excellent book. I recommend it as well.
He's got one story about Herbie that stuck with me so long.
I'm setting up to do these YouTube videos once a week and they're tedious and I don't like doing'em and I don't want to. And I read Reading Essentialism and he tells a story about a boy scout troop that was taking a hike and they're trying to get to their destination, but they've got one
A little bit of a pudgy guy named Herbie and he's having a hard time with his pack and they're falling behind schedule.
So they don't know what to do.
Herbie's slow, he's holding up the hole. Slow.
So they realise that if they take
Herb's pack and they redistribute it amongst some of the adults and the kids that can handle it.
The whole troop is able to go double time and get to where they need to do and get back.
On time. So the question is
Is there one friction point in your process that makes the thing unfun or miserable? And can you spend whatever money or do whatever you need to do to
Stop this.
So the breakthrough was I hated setting up the camera.
And so I didn't do it immediately, but the next place that we got, I said it must have an extra bedroom. I don't care. I will pay for the extra bedroom. I need to be able to leave this camera up.
And oh my God, that changed it. It was like being able to walk in, press play, and do it.
versus fifteen minutes of focus. Oh my God, it was terrible.
That was a breakthrough.
Yeah, the Herbie parable, I believe, originated in manufacturing, specifically when you have like a serial or a linear production process.
where if there's a machine in the middle or a lack of inventory at point X that causes that type of slowdown.
You need to figure it out, AKA.
Herbia, but it can be applied to so many different things.
And in your case video production. Yeah.
I love watching your work'cause you so often remind me that there's emotional herpes of like I don't enjoy this, so I don't want to do it. And so the question of what if this were ten times enjoyable? What if I had to have fun?
Doing this.
Those are always the herbies for me. It's always I don't like this thing. It's okay, what if you were only allowed to do the thing that you like? It's like Oh, well then I'd do a lot more of it and I could see some results.
So
We start making these YouTube videos. I do a big one at the beginning that is
In January of maybe twenty sixteen, I do a video that says I think Donald Trump's gonna be the president. Here's why.
Yeah, I'm watching his debates. Scott Adams is before me on this.
But
I'm watching debates, I see the same thing.
That starts to pick up.
Other videos are going, I'm analyzing Con McGregor and I r think it was from it was January or February or March of that year.
The business tripled.
And then I think it tripled again within like two months.
And is that due to the success of that video?
of the videos.
I got it. Yeah. Yes. So I'm doing
Donald Trump.
Connor McGregor taking Game of Thrones characters, we can talk about fame jacking if you want.
Yeah, let's talk about it.
Let me ask you intermediate question, just to interrupt my own
That's rate of questioning.
Which is how did your call to action or flow
change? Like did the funnel change now that people are finding you on YouTube? Yes. And was it just a link in a description? Or how did the actual
Business.
Funnel.
Function. So it's evolved, and I'm gonna take you up to present day to answer the question. So at first it was, hey guys, if you like this, leave a comment, subscribe. I wasn't thinking
about I guess so subscribers, which was okay, fine. Then it was okay, you need a tripwire. And the idea in online marketing is that there's this
Uh low cost product.
That you wanna get people onto your email list, give them a taste of something, and then they can buy your low cost product and then they'll buy your larger product. So we set up this online funnel that was
By the way, if you like that video and you want to know how to make a great first impression, here's a free piece of content that's like four minutes long on the basics of how to do it.
You get that content, it's four minutes of how to do it, and then it's one minute of Hey, do you want help implementing this buy a section of this larger Charisma University course.
And then when you're in that, at the end of that, okay, so now you know how to make a great first impression. Do you want to know
All this other stuff. So it's standard
Online marketing. Give'em a piece, offer them more. Give'em another piece, offer them more. Solve a problem.
offer them help with the next problem.
And for those astute listeners, you may
Remember that.
How to make a first impression.
was straight from the interviews and then the survey monkey rankings. Yes. Right. Correct.
Which is, for instance, even after writing five books, I have one in my mind that I would like to work on sometime soon, but I think the way I'm going to approach it is actually going back to the origins of the four hour work week.
And I will maybe add a place like UT Austin.
In
an entrepreneurship or business class to workshop it. Right. Teach it for a semester and you learn really quickly.
What works and what does not work. Yeah. When you have an audience, whether it's the one on one interviews.
And something that you collate and then rank or having an audience who's unlikely to give you kind of courtesy claps. So TBD, but I asked you about the funnel.
But what else would you like to say about that, if anything, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, well the funnel has evolved. I think it's worth saying that.
There's so many sacred cows of
Everything, online marketing. This is how you do it.
What I've since seen is that
These videos without intending to be, they're mini webinars. They're ten minutes of content. I don't need to take everybody through this multi-step funnel. Here's a small thing. So what we started doing.
A breakthrough a few years later was just, do you want to buy our six hundred dollar course? Here's some testimonials. And so that was a four accent conversions of just being like
Everyone who's watched our videos has at this point watched ten of them and they don't need to be drip fed this
thing they need to be offered
Jab, jab, jab, bit Gary Van Derchuck calls it right hook. It's like, dude, we've been jabbing for years at this point. Like,
Offer them the product. Don't offer them
The email list.
So that was a huge
huge increase to our thing was when I realized, oh, we've been just giving value consistently. We don't need to do
the same game that somebody who's doing paid ads would do, who is just totally cold traffic and you don't know them at all. Yeah, if they walk into the Ferrari dealership, you're allowed to sell them a Fry. You don't have to let them walk out with the brochure. Yes. Yes, please. Okay, we got them on our email list. These are great leads. Call them back. Yeah. So that was that the
Fame jacking was something that is worth mentioning, which is
It's since changed, but
In order to get traction.
on some of these social media platforms, you need something that hooks people and your my face in front of a white wall ain't it.
That's not gonna fly for me.
So what we found was if I can comment on
Somebody that is known Con McGregor.
John Snow from Game of Thrones, how does Tyrion Lannister what sort of principles is he applying even though it's a work of fiction?
We were able to take a Game of Thrones fan and by the end of it make them a Charismon command fan.
And so we were able to start fishing in all of these pools that I was interested like we were break doing breakdowns of the Marvel actors and why their interviews were so fun, or like how come this viral moment where Robert Downey Junior gets in a TIFF with an interviewer, what can you learn about it?
So
It's called that fame jacking, which is basically look, there's someone else who is famous. You start with them on the thumbnail, you speak to a broad problem.
How to deal with a rude person.
By the end they become
Not just a Robert Downey Junior fan, but a Charismon Command fan. That was sort of the goal. And that helped a tremendous amount of growth.
You said it's changed. Is that an algorithmic change? Because I see that playbook being used. Yeah.
A fair amount still on YouTube.
But
How has the game changed?
What I see is that in short form content, there isn't the decision to click. There is only what captures attention. And so there's many things that capture attention. One is Robert Downey Jr., a guy who you know.
But another is
But can you walk up these sticky stairs on Mr. Beast thing, or like what it looks like to run with ten thousand dollars. So
You actually don't have to sell the click on the short form content in the same way, and just the meta people have realized. I think this is what's beautiful about YouTube.
There's these incredible titles that are like I went to every state's Airbnb, or I sat in a circle for thirty-six hours, or I gave a homeless man 10K.
At the time in YouTube it was still kind of
there was this sacred cow belief that it had to look like what you titled a blog article. How to do something in seven steps, like, you know, six things, list of blog titles. And I think YouTube has started to really find its own
formatting identity which is not
What had
traditionally worked with blogs and maybe blogs will start picking it up from YouTube. But I see that
You don't need to do fame jacking in order to succeed in the same way. There's many other avenues in order to do it.
I
Want to touch on
Maybe a few expansions of that just briefly for folks. So you might recall back in the day, this is let's just say maybe even pre Evan Pagan and so on.
If you were to look at
different types of online marketing. A standard operating procedure was long sales letters with lots of yellow highlights.
And that was how you did it. Period. That was the scripture.
of online marketing. But lo and behold, that isn't the only way to do things. And in fact, you can approach it completely differently. Now if you go through almost any
Website now.
that sells software as a service.
You'll see
Somewhere on
The product comparison.
or on the checkout portion when you're selecting features or plans.
They'll have three options.
The middle will say most popular, right? There's a very cheap one with
half the features you need. There's a super expensive one that
Only two percent are ever gonna consider. And then there's most popular in the middle.
And
While the presentation changes, I would say there are a few takeaways. Number one is
You can always experiment.
And break the rules.
Number two is there's certain things that don't tend to change that.
Much. So you can still look at caples on advertising for copy editing. You can look at old print advertisements from
Ogil V, you can uh
Read, for instance.
Influence.
So there're certain things you can study.
Like if drawing is learning how to see, sure, you might have a crayon, a pencil.
A paintbrush.
piece of charcoal.
But those are tools that
can be adapted based on certain base principles.
Then you can feel free once you have a
an understanding of some of these core fundamental
Concepts
Then you can experiment to your heart's content, right? And you can start to break stuff.
I don't know. I mean, a lot of it because platforms have so much value capture and are so powerful now.
I mean if they do decide they want to promote X, Y, or Z and they have a template for making you conform to that, then I would imagine
There's a decent amount of pressure to be pushed in that direction, lest your
videos or tweets.
Whatever tweet is called on X.
Or whatever it might be.
Now you mentioned shorts.
or shorter clips not needing
Maybe the type of cell.
To be watched.
ostensibly because of shorter duration. Do you see much of a conversion from shorter clips to
viewing of longer clips or subscribers. I don't know which metric is the one that matters.
But I'm curious. We ran a little experiment. I have not put a lot of energy into shorts because the answer was there's a couple of things.
So your first point I'm gonna come to shorts.
With all of those Ogil Vs, whatever, what I've found is that if you take
the tried and true ways of doing it and you run it through your own value system.
And you don't allow for things that don't align with yourself. So I'll just give you for instance.
We used to do discounts'cause that was what you were that's what you do. You do a discount. And I got an email from a guy who was like, Hey, I love your stuff, but like
Last week my friend who didn't buy your thing and was on your email list for thirty days got offered
this thing for four hundred dollars and I bought it immediately for six hundred.
And I realized that we were in a way we were penalizing our most strident, ardent
Willing customers for not sitting on the fence and offering discounts down the line.
So made the decision to chop off discounts, it hurt the business by twenty percent.
But
You
get an audience of people that has a different degree of
Trust with you.
And so all of these rules, like you can win short term by doing a lot of different things. You can do clickbait titles, you do all sorts of things, but you're establishing a relationship with every business decision. So I find that like running all of those things through the center is helpful. So when it comes to shorts.
One of them is
I don't really like shorts. I find that I've never really gotten tremendous amount of value from a short.
I've gotten value from view to videos, blog posts, videos, all sorts of things. But
I don't connect with them, so I haven't
Pushed shorts. We did a few experiments.
And what I found for the way that we do things is no, that we didn't see. We got a ton of subscribers, but we didn't see
a strong connection between
long form and short form and

I'm sure that somebody else could make that happen.
Even though that was the way the wave was going.
That's not the way that my wave breaks. That was not a particular trend I was interested in.
Yeah, I think to date I would say
And I'm sure my team would have additional thoughts, but I don't think we've seen any
correlation next to no impact whatsoever on short
Form
Success and by success I mean some of our shorts of that
Hundred million views? Mm-hmm.
And then the impact on the long form interview that it was cut from literally
Imperceptible. Wow. You could not see an impact.
And yeah.
It's like well.
Is that now a necessary survival slash distribution tactic? I'm not qualified to say, but
Also do not feel
compelled to focus on clips. We do surface clips.
from longer interviews.
But I I do sometimes wonder.
If it's to the detriment.
Uh
the audience that I most like to cultivate, which is an audience
Who recognizes
You cannot achieve any level of mastery.
Nor can you retain anything effectively. If
All of your information is consumed in ten second increments. Not evolved to do it. Doesn't work that way. I totally agree. I'm so curious for you.
What do you want from the podcast these days? Like'cause
It seems to me, and I'm sure you've g headed this many times, like, look, I've done it. I've got I'm safe. I've I can survive with the money that I have. What is success for you at this point?
the podcast, you know, I've thought, especially with the ten year anniversary not too long ago and
hitting some major milestones.
In terms of
Total downloads and listens and so on. I thought, well
If I were gonna pack up my tent
And move on. This would be a decent time to do it.
However.
I suppose for myself I just realized, well
Even if I weren't recording.
conversations, I would still be having these conversations.
And
Therefore for

For the cost of
A microphone.
And using an online service to record a podcast with some basic I mean, it's not fancy lighting as anyone can tell if they're watching me right now.
But for the minimal cost of production.
Especially when you consider that a lot of these conversations I would be having would be via Zoom or FaceTime video.
I might be walking around outside.
having this conversation, but I could also have a headset on where I'm recording.
So the the the lifestyle inconvenience to me of recording the conversations I would have otherwise is close to zero.
And I would say success is
Having thought provoking conversations.
Ideally I learn something.
or feel something from those conversations, maybe both.
And then I get to share them because the origin of the podcast, I mean, it's easy for me to forget, but I mean there are a lot of factors that contributed to it in two thousand fourteen, but one of them was
I was living in the Bay Area in San Francisco at the time.
And
I was having
The most incredible conversations with brilliant people.
Uh at least people I thought were brilliant. The density of intelligence there is so high. I mean though there are a lot of issues as well, but
It just seems like such a shame that
Not too dissimilar.
I mean, it's slightly different, but it's closer than people might realize where
It's like you're doing the one on one coaching. It's like, yeah, it's good to help one person, but then if I want to convey this to a second person, let alone like two hundred people.
I have to repeat it.
And for me these conversations were like
sand through the fingers, right? That I could not in any way convey to someone else. And I was like, well
Let me just try to record some of these, which is why the first ten to fifteen were with friends of mine also.
to make the lift as light as possible. And I feel like
I would definitely miss.
recording because I would let's just say I quit the podcast today. Next week I would have an amazing conversation with someone and be like, God. I'd be like
You know, it's so selfish of me not to
Just
click record on an iPhone with a half decent headset to record this thing.
Because
Fuck, you know, it's a real privilege to have.
access to the network that I have access to. And which doesn't mean
By the way, that
Everyone's gonna know.
Every person I talk to, I prefer strongly if they don't.
But
Success to me right now is it's it's honestly scratching my own itch. It's like, for instance, I mean, I'm thinking of potentially compiling
A whole lot of four hour work week related case studies.
Because
very early, very early in my entrepreneurial journey. And I'm not recommending people go buy this book. I think it's out of print anyway, but Entrepreneur Magazine had this
Book called Young Millionaires.
And it was like two to three pages profile of each young millionaire, which meant somewhere between twenty and thirty five, I guess suppose.
And it was like how much it cost
To start the business. Like
Two hundred dollars, you know how much they made last year in revenue, next year estimated revenue.
type of business and it ranged from like pest control to crime scene cleanup to to yeah pretty gnarly to cosmetics.
to forestry. It was like the range and scope was so
Inspiring to me.
That the magic of that and the impact that it had on my psyche, I didn't take it and apply it right away, I was too young.
But seeing that it was possible has made me think about assembling
Yeah, effectively a book that would be like the
Wow. Oh I love that. I love that.
Right.
I got chills.
I love that. Oh my God.
Because
With the four hour work week, it's like in the beginning and even now.
Understandably with a title like that. People are like, Yeah, bullshit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like you work more than four hours a week. I'm like I'm not just gonna like I'm not just gonna lay outside
Staring at the grass, rubbing cocoa butter on my stomach. I like building things and I like having these kind of conversations. But there's so many other
Types of pushback.
In the early stages.
Keeping in mind I've revised
the four hour work week, but the last time I did it was two thousand nine.
And the principles really apply. The frameworks still all apply. The technology, forget about it, like almost all outdated, but that doesn't matter. If you grasp the principles, then you can find the methods.
But a lot of the types of pushback that people would say, Oh, well, it's easy for a single guy, like I'm a single mom, or I have four kids, or
I'm in a different country, or I'm in this
struggling economy or
Fill in the blank for every possible excuse that I have heard.
I have received a case study from someone who fits that exact profile.
Who figured it out?

So the idea that I could collect those
In some fashion, in a compendium.
Just seems
A, like it would be so much fun and so gratifying for me after almost twenty years of this book being out.
And
Therefore.
As always.
Us having this conversation is a way for me to feel into that.
And to be like, okay, like what aspects of this
Like you said, when I mentioned the book that like chills, like, okay, what pieces of it I'm like
Okay. I get an extra big smile.
So big that my earpiece keeps falling out. I also have also have I have swimmer's ear, so my my canal's on my right ear. So it just keeps falling out.
But
That's a very long answer to your question, but success for me with the podcast.
is just recording conversations that I would want to have anyway, which
For a
successful podcasts.
Is
Maybe harder than people would
Realize.
So hard.
Because if you want protect
Traction, distribution.
And audience size.
And ideally grow it.
That is
More and more every day being dictated by platforms.
With priorities that are not the same as your priorities.
And
If you really double click on that, look at it, study audience capture as well.
Almost every financial incentive would push you to break that rule.
And choose
Guests based on
The number of Oprah moments or salacious clips you can pull from an interview?

that you can then use on the platforms to drive some type of growth engine, although growth for
What end is an open question. A lot of people make YouTube work, but
In my particular case, I'm just not really video first, so it's never been
particularly a strong performing compared to
Audio it requires
Constant
Revisitation.
Two
Instill the habit.
Of me only having conversations with people I would want to have a conversation with. Yep.
Right? Because Oh my God.
Yeah.'Cause if I could have like on some
completely off the wall.
lawmaker or
I could have on who knows. I could step on a bunch of third rails politically speaking, right? I could pull from current events and
light off some audio and video dynamite with talking about the Middle East. There are many things that I could do which would get a lot more attention.
Than me finding like a Japanese sword maker who no one has ever heard of.
But
When you start to put on a mask.
Adopting practices that are not of your own invention, but because you're complying with incentives.
The concern is not that it just ends up
Hollowing you out inside because that can happen.
the risk is that you actually become the mask you're wearing.
And that those behaviors change how you think.
And change your own beliefs.
Which I think is inevitable.
on some level. So in any case it's
Probably more than
Either of us bargained for.
No.
Oh goodness, I've wrestled with this endlessly and I absolutely hit a period where I felt like to a degree I allowed that audience
So at first it was I wanted to make this video. I think what Bill Clinton does with his eyes is so fascinating. I think it's so interesting that Donald Trump is probably gonna be president and like I love Game of Thrones.
And then it was
Well you guys want more Game of Thrones videos, let me do another Game of Thrones character. You know, like will you guys really like that one?
And what you're describing to me is not just a business struggle. It is a legitimate emotional spiritual struggle to be like, do I choose myself in the face of the world offering me?
All of this temptation to be something else.
And
There were periods where the answer to that is like
I compromise. And it's like you know, I didn't
Kill anyone or do any but I made the video that I didn't really wanna make and it did really well. And then okay, well g gotta make another one.

And I burnt out.
I had to step away for years and didn't make videos for years because I
believed that I hated making videos and what I learned was that
I hated losing my creative well as I chased
Approval and views.
And
More.
So let's talk about the timeline on that.
You
are let's see. Let me see if all if these are lining up. So you're in Vegas.
You begin to make these videos which you enjoyed making about Bill Clinton, about I suppose Bill Clinton came, maybe even prior to that. But
using to use your term fame jacking. So
Jon Snow.
Real characters or otherwise, Keanu Reeves.
Maybe counter raise came later, but in any case
Those videos start to do very well.
You
Realize that you can offer the higher priced
Products up front.
Or reasonably soon with testimonials and you get conversion, you don't have to lead someone through a twelve step process.
And
I suppose what I'm wondering is what does the trajectory look like from there and how long was it before you decided?
I just can't do this.
I need to take a break.
It's so funny.
You know this. There's two lines. There's the line of when you've created the value.
Which is like I created the value sleeping on the couch in Brazil. And then there's the line of when the the money starts coming in.
And so there's a delay.
So you're creating the value and then the money comes in later.
But there's also a delay on the back side, which is you stop.
creating the value, but the money up and this is every
Cash cow business, you know, that starts
cannibalizing itself and not treating customers well, but it's still when Marvel makes the next sequel to Marvel movie and it does well and they don't realize that they're eating their own future.
So
I would say the flip for me was twenty eighteen to when it shifted from
I personally want to make these videos and I'm excited and I'm learning something in every video to
Oh, I've learned what makes them clap.
And now I want more claps.
I want more clapping. The money was secondary, but it's like oh they like it. They love me. Right. Every video bigger.
So that was a few years after starting the channel?
At that point.
Yes, and I've been doing it weekly. There was an authentic drive to do it weekly that's then slowly shifted and it became I don't want to do this and then it was I definitely can't do this and
I at the time.
So many other things were going on in my life. We can go into it or not, but
There was a moment
probably in twenty eighteen where I needed to have a conversation with my co founder.
That said, Hey, I think we're no longer in alignment.
with this business. Like I've been driving the growth with these videos. Your projects have not
succeeded in the same way, not for the sake of money, but for the sake of honesty.
We have to have a talk about our fifty fifty split.
But
Money was never the drive. The drive was always be with my friends in Brazil. And so I didn't
Care but there was a
As my own inability to have sincere authentic conflict
crept into the business.
It cascaded downwards.
So
I'm avoiding
having a difficult conversation with my co founder, we hire somebody else to cover that up.
Turns out years later that we hire somebody who fabricated a bunch of stuff and stole money from the business and all of it was just from this
Core pattern of not wanting
To
Face.
the problem and just wanting to squint at it and say, Everything's good. You know, every like the money's coming in, people like it, et cetera.
And so what happened was and again, I was so happy, broke in Brazil, sleeping on the ground, unable to afford food.
And then I had the experience, the cliched one of I've made more money than I've ever made.
Everybody wants more. They think it's all great, and I feel
Like shit.
I feel awful.
And then I have a breakup.
Right before my thirtieth birthday.
And
I'm gonna collapse some things. We can go into anything. I am invited to an ayahuasca retreat. I have been, you know, having these issues that have not surfaced.
I don't smoke weed, I don't drink, I've I'm straight edge, but fuck it. I'll give it a try.
I go head first into this ayahuasca experience with no idea what's coming.
And that starts what has now been a seven year process of completely turning my life upside down and having to face everything that I hadn't
Looked at.
Which was of course these things in the business, but even more importantly.
the patterns of avoidance and people pleasing and seeking that had
Yeah.
birth in my childhood.
And so
Happy to touch on all of that. I know it's a broad spanning
Yeah, no, there's we could spend probably two hours on
Six different facets of that. Let's start with
Coming back to the secret to freedom is courage, right?
Like was there a catalyzing event? Was there a book you read?
How did you go from
Squinting at the problem?
Because this is
I would say shockingly calm, but it's not shocking because I see it so often.
Co founder.
Challenges. Co-founder splits. These happen all the time.
And
When you have
It's particularly challenging in a situation where you have some
accepted fifty-fifty division because there's no real tiebreaker. It gets even more complicated when you have like governance and board of directors and all that kind of stuff, but
I mean, almost no relationship is fifty fifty.
It would be weird if it was. It'd be so weird. Actually that clip I mentioned that got a hundred million plus views, it was Renee Brown talking about how marriage is never fifty fifty.

And
I would say
The question for me that I'm sure people are wondering is how did you go from
The conflict avoidant.
Kind of people pleasing.
maybe fear based, who knows, kind of squinting at the problem, hiring people to try to paper it over, et cetera, et cetera.
Two
having whatever come to Jesus conversation presumably you guys had.
Yeah.
How did that happen?
It took years and the catalyst was not the business because the sacred center of it for me was never money. It was the friendship. And I was
acting out a pattern to try to keep things good with us. And he was doing his half of that pattern.
T.
Keep things.
Good in the way that we thought.
To do it, which was let's not
address this and it was on me to address it'cause I was the one that was beginning to be
Frustrated, resentful, subtly trying to influence, change, encourage.
Coach, you know, everything other than say, This isn't working.
For me.
And how did I do that? It was a multi
year process of
Facing brick by brick.
Those familial patterns of like I'm afraid you won't love me if
I say that I'm upset with you.
Like I'm afraid that
You won't love me if I take what I think is my fair share.
I'm afraid that I'll be alone and
I hear it in my voice. Like that I still
carry that in me.
And if you look at the business.
Charisma on command, even like the how to make Tim like you in a conversation, how to make somebody like there is this
founding belief that if I could just communicate clearly enough, do more, say more, be more, that
connection would just happen.
How did you decide?
It was time.
Right, like what did it look like to go from doing the work with all these modalities to all right.
Game time.
Oh god.
Again it was pieces. It was first it was oblique conversations.
This isn't feeling great. And then seeing what I got back and then it was more confrontational and
The essential was I did not know how to have a boundary and tried to negotiate boundaries endlessly with people that I loved instead of saying, I love you, but like pass this line is not okay with me and I will not comply.
It was well Can't you see why that would be fair for me to to have this perspective?
So
If there was a shift.
І вас те бійна в єз.
I had started to develop a therapeutic relationship with a therapist and a number of friendships.
Where I was
being met in ways that I did not think were possible and to not use therapy language like
I felt that people
Wanted to hear.
the ways in which I was upset with them or angry and wanted to repair in ways that actually
Didn't just paper over the problem, but felt good.
And when I

That
possibility. I was like, holy shit, this can happen. Let me bring myself. That was not the result of my conversation with my co-founder. It did not
go that way and knowing that it existed now.
And then not getting it there.
made it like okay, this is no longer working, we need to separate.
And so what happened was
First it was with the friendship, but secondarily with the business. It was tough for me to come back to to say
I don't
want you to make videos anymore for the business. I don't feel that they're aligned with what I want to say.
I made videos for I don't know the first three ish years and then got burned out and was like, Will you please step in?
And
always didn't want to look at the videos. You know, like whatever the money's coming in I don't wanna see. And when I
I actually had to sit down and literally watch them.
And not that there's anything objectively wrong with them, but they weren't aligned with what felt right for
me and I had completely abdicated that responsibility.
of saying this doesn't feel
Good.
Confronting that I felt so evil and awful and bad for having that perspective. Like I was being too cruel or too mean, but I had to become more grounded in
Not saying that you shouldn't make videos ever. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do this, but this doesn't work for me. So we just paused literally making videos on the channel for one year.
Business starts too.
Nose dive, right? Like not immediately, but the videos don't get views forever. Business falls off twenty percent, thirty percent, fifty percent.
And it was again a question of like which it wasn't a
game. It was I just don't feel good about
That
And so through that process
We were talking about the future of the business.
And would I buy, would he sell, we couldn't find an agreement on who would do what.
And
I can talk about the negotiation if you want, but we finally settled on
I'm gonna buy the business all out.
I'll pay you for the piece and
you'll have no restrictions. You can make any sort of content that you want on any other channel, but this is gonna go
I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna give you cash. And honestly it was
It's what both of us wanted. I think the thing that we didn't acknowledge is that we had fundamentally different drives, whereas mine was more
Creative expression and his was more financial security.
And that
Split.
It's very tough.
You know, it just doesn't.
align well when especially what you when what you said I did not feel he has a different opinion that we were
Equally contributing to the financial success of the business.
So yeah, it was hiring he more importantly than the business split was that it was my best friend and we're not
That anymore.
It was going through the ringer. It was Dark Night of the Soul type.
Challenges.
So grateful for it.
And it was painful as hell.
To to
Experience.
Yeah, I'm sorry you guys experienced that. I would say that
In theory.
Sometimes in practice.
If everything's going perfectly. Fifty fifty informally agreed upon.
Sounds great.
Right. But in practice it can be very challenging and
If you were to do this again, if you were to partner with someone else, let's just say that it actually made sense. Someone came to you with.
channel then equal number of subscribers are like hey let's join forces I think we can 3x and let's just say that conformed with your artistic
Expression and what you want to do.
I would imagine you would have some type of
Partnership agreement.
That
Can function as a prenup in the sense that you would have a termination clause, right?
Where it spells out.

what happens in the case of a split.
Which is an area where also conflict avoidant folks get themselves into long term trouble. Not saying you, but like in general. I've I've been mistaken. They get themselves into long term trouble because they want to avoid the short term discomfort of talking about the ingredients that would go into such an agreement.
And man, oh man.
Yeah, it can get really, really, really messy. Like a pro prenup is always cleaner than a postnup. Yeah. In business and in life.
Where do things stand?
Now.
With the business.
So I'm making monthly payments to him. We agreed drawn a fixed sum that I would pay over a period of time.
I am sole owner and it's exactly what I want. The business for me
Always has been the crucible of emotional growth. Like from the moment where am I going to press publish on this thing to am I going to do
private coaching or am I gonna s move to Brazil? And it's always been
The question of
Can you hold your center in the face of temptation not to?
There's a long period where
with my relationship with him, I lost it. I lost my center, and that's not his fault.
But
God, it's so amazing. I come back and I step into this audience capture moment where like I want to prove myself that I still got it, that I can do it.
Except I don't wanna make the old bangers that I used to. I don't wanna like throw fastballs down the middle to
the that part of the bell curve any longer. And so
I'm facing
Continually.
The challenges of
Letting go of my ego of the guy who
you know, did it. And having
the business that is authentic to me and I have not sort of through it.
Even in preparation for this conversation, half of me wants to sit
and dial in my story so that I'm perfect and I nail it and I, you know, it hit that hit that punchline. And the other half of me is like
Dude, going empty, going.
Going going empty. Yeah.
I like rough draft.
Yeah. Rough draft, right? More than like finish sixty minute comedy special on Netflix. Exactly.
Yeah, Ted Talk. Welcome.
Yeah, I uh
I appreciate the uh
Vulnerability and the candor and I am gonna ask you
At some point I'm just gonna plant the seed because
I'll let it germinate a bit, which is other critical decisions that you made.
In your entrepreneurial journey.
Could be anything. Could be a tiny detail that ended up making a big difference. Could be
Anything at all?
Like other decisions or milestones that were really important. I'll buy some time though. Sure. So do you still recommend I've actually never read this book, but Six Pillars of Self Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon.
So good. Now I haven't read it in maybe seven or eight years.
Maybe longer.
But
If you do read it and you're uh crunch for time.
You can skip to the chapters on the pillars. He's got some preparation on what self esteem is and the history of it, but if you haven't worked on your self esteem at all, it's the first stop.
to go to. If you have more experience, you might be more familiar with it.
Mm.
And
What should people
Expect.
to gain from this. How did you find this book in the first place?
Goodness.
That Tucker Max message board was a lot of the books that I w that was where I found the game, and it might have been Six Pillars Self Esteem as well.
I think it was through something like that.
And I got
into you know, it's like a nineteen seventies psychology personal development book, but it's
Perennial.
What people can expect
There's these exercises that people are discovering the power of, which is sentence completions exercise. So it'll run you through each chapter and talk about
how personal responsibility is a critical element of self esteem or whatever. But then it has at the end, it's got

If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today, blank.
And the idea is that you can write or speak
Just free like if I took five percent more responsibility for myself today, I would eat healthy. If I took five percent more responsibility for myself today, I would
Whatever it's like.
is that is honest for you in that thing.
And if you go through these, usually like the fifth, sixth, one, you're just like
Oh damn. And so some of them were
I would have talked to that girl at Whole Foods and it was ah crap. There was one there was a woman who I dated who I had seen her and then I went back and then I did my pillars of self esteem.
And I went, Oh crap. And I walked back to Whole Foods and I said, I had to talk to you. I went home and wrote my sentences and If I had more courage, if I had five percent more courage, I would have asked you on a date and
That became a a relationship.
Yeah, it's that sort of stuff.
She's a slow shopper. No, no, she was she worked at Hull Foods. She was she was at the counter. Yeah, yeah. She's wearing leg braces. She was identifiable. She was easily trackable. Got it. Okay.
Amazing. All right. So we will link to that in the show notes.
This is what I was curious about.
What was the last psychiatrist blog?
Oh my gosh. You don't know this? No.
Never heard of it.
To me, he is the secret godfather of bloggers on the internet. Like a lot of the people that you might have liked from crack dot com or whatever.
He wrote. It was a pseudonym. People think they know who he is. He's likely a psychologist or psychiatrist.
And he has incredibly
Thought provoking stuff.
Now, if you read it you're gonna go, Well that doesn't make sense and that's kind of a leap, but it
Is
Very thought provoking in reading it. And at the time he stopped writing in like twenty thirteen or something. But the old posts are still up.
I don't even know if the old websites somebody's cataloged them'cause there's an internet fandom around it.
But if I could give you some
Basic things.
I think the maintenance of certification exam is fetish. Ten extra seconds would have saved True Detective's finale. Okay, he's got all sorts of random stuff. Oh, he's all over the place.
Yeah, two thousand fourteen looks like the last post.
He discusses how advertising doesn't just condition you what you want, it conditions how you learn what to want.
So
As an example, people will watch
A Lexus commercial.
And they'll think, I didn't fall for that. I don't want to buy a Lexus.
And his point is, yeah, but you think that that's what a pretty woman looks like, the woman who moves towards the Lexus.
And so
He's got a couple of maxims which are interesting, which is if you see it, it's for you.
Meaning like if you're consuming a piece of advertising and you think it's not impacting you.
It's been split test to make it to your eyeballs. And yes, technically there's a chance that you're resisting, but it is teaching you how a watch is a status symbol. And maybe you don't think you need a Patek Philippe, but you learned that this is what money looks like because the background has a bookshelf. And now you think that books are what make people want things. So he talks about
How two things have happened.
We've one, lost the ability to self reference internally our desires, which is exactly in line with what we were talking about. It's all
Mimetic desire. What do you want that you want that you want that I can't find my own wanting in it?
And he talks about how we have become deeply narcissistic.
Collectively as a society.
We see
our own reflection and image everywhere. And many people do not have the capacity to genuinely love and encounter.
Another.
It's just
what my wife says about me, what my kids say about me, that sort of a
A thing.
Alright, so that is just the last psychiatrist dot com.
All right.
Let's come back to
critical decisions or they don't have to be critical, important decisions.
If you were basically teaching a class.
About
your entrepreneurial journey, a seminar, and you were highlighting some of the things that actually really made a difference.
Maybe they looked small at the time. Maybe they looked really big at the time.
Anything else come to mind that we have not yet discussed?
So a lot of them we have. So if you allow me to to run through the ones'cause maybe I'll find something new. So if I really go to critical decisions.
There were all of the early ones about
This isn't my ten out of ten, and I'm willing to let it go.
That was
repeated throughout the business.
There was this phase.
of making videos where I'd read essentialism and it became
Yet.
everything out of my way so that I can do this thing.
And that was
Rocket ship.
Growth. It was like
Let shit go awry. Problems are arising.
Do not
Come to me.
balance there that I haven't quite figured out because what happens is a lot of little things go wrong, but the net
Of me making these videos.
absolutely obliterates and cancels them out.
And
There comes a compounding bill when you've
Just hired that person and just let that culture persist and it becomes it at some point needs to be addressed, which is what eventually did need to happen with the company. But there was a period of just like
Rocket ship growth by letting small problems accrue.
There was getting that extra room was really big.
So that I could film.
For the video. Handling the Herbie.
Handling my Herpes.
There was the rebranding.
Rebranding early.
Yeah, the course, the building, the course.
Here's one.
There was
Between V three and V four.
I went to J. Abraham.
He had a private coaching thing. He's one of these old school business coaches. He's super old school. He has a great book on joint ventures. I haven't read it in more than a decade.
But all the myriad forms that joint partnerships and joint ventures can take.
Pretty wild. Yeah. Some of the negotiating gambites and kind of guerrilla marketing and partnership approaches. Yeah. Jay Abraham.
So
I have private coaching with Jay Abraham.
And he asks me
Who's the person you most want to take your course? I say Tim Ferris.
Or Tony Robbins.
And he says, If Tim Ferris found your course and took it right now, how would you feel? I went, I don't want him to. And so he said, That's a problem. I said, Well, it's not good enough. He said, Make it good enough.
So I went back
That's a cool exercise.
Yeah. So I went back
and filmed it. And I still, you know, have insecurities and this and that, but I did my best effort to make it okay for Tim for you.
And
When it was done.
The next video that I made I spoke about it and I said
At the end of the video I said
This is the best I can do. This is the greatest thing that I can possibly make for you guys on this topic and conversions.
Exploded.
And every ad read after that.
had a significantly higher like two ex or more
Lift.
In conversions.
And we started getting more testimonials and it was
This like
If you don't believe in it fully.
you you're gonna sell it with hesitancy. So being able to tell the truth
And the truth was not
This is the greatest thing in the world. It's this is my absolute best. If you like this blog
This is the best I can offer you.
And at this point, the truth is it's no longer true. I feel like I can do something better now. So I need to
Go back.
Do it again.
And then be able to honestly say
This is the best.
I can do. And I'm sure that that will have the same
impact because I subtly
Shy away from selling from
offering the thing that I don't fully believe in. So that was a big one.
It's tough. I don't know how to parse it out, but this plus adding testimonials was a 4X conversion lift when we started adding those at the end. So we used to have
Our call to action. It was a ten minute video.
And then like, hey if you wanna buy Christmas University, it does this, it does this, it does this, it's does you know, it's got all this, here's what's in it.
And then it became Yeah, do you want to buy Charisma University? Here's what somebody said about it.
This helped me get a promotion. It did this. Here's what somebody else said about it. I got a girlfriend. Here's what somebody else said about it. And they were just literally
photo comments that people had left in the comment section or emails that they sent in and that combined with the
I care about this more was a four X total conversion lift, which was huge.
There was the avoidance was something that I had to pay for on the back end. The avoidance of conflict.
And I think this is one
I didn't know how to just allow people to know that I was disappointed or upset or hurt or angry. I had to fix everything very, very quickly. A lot of people pleasey tendencies.
those compounding over time created a lot of issues.
There was
not firing the person who wound up stealing, I knew that I needed to. There was a lot of like not firings that were huge.
And then there was the walking away and the returning.
Which was really, really important. And they were both honest. The one was like, I'd rather not have this thing send me money than post videos that I don't feel aligned with, which made me like, Oh my God. When you do stuff that isn't aligned for money, it signals such a lack of self belief and self love.
This is in the six pillars of self esteem book. Like when you start
trading your beliefs for cash or approval. You're just sending a signal that I can't be relied on to be myself and be safe and earn.
But when you do things that are detrimental to income.
Like not offering a discount.
Like saying I don't want these videos to go up, not to punish anyone, but just because it doesn't feel aligned.
I have felt every time where I've dropped into that this
Power.
arises in me. And so that was like, oh holy shit. I felt like a beggar in a weird way. I'm making all this money, but I'm like feeling unsafe that I need to beg for more and ride the coattails of this thing that I built that I can no longer do. And as soon as I said I don't want this, I felt a surge of like, oh fuck, I have more to say. I have
More to contribute.
So that was huge.
And then
in the negotiation.
The big moment.
Was two things.
We'd been at deadlock for like two years. I made him an offer, it was nowhere near what he wanted. Like we were just not able to meet. There were two things that happened.
One was
We're starting to get into these circular spirals of things aren't working.
And I paused and I said
Hey, it sounds like you're really scared.
And we just talked about our feelings and the fallout of the friendship and
That
fears that we both had.
And
acknowledging the emotional intensity of this
That was essential. Like pretending that this was a business transaction that we were like
That's a lie. That's not what was going on here. We were both really afraid.
And speaking to that and bringing it to light moves things tremendously. And then the second one
was honestly going to him and saying
I am willing to sell the business.
I'm willing to sell it, but I need one thing, which is I need a f no non compete. I need the ability to go and make anything that I want.
Anywhere.
And that moved us from I'm trying to buy from him, he wants more money, I don't want to give him the money to, okay, make me an offer.
He made me an offer then for that and I said I'll give you twenty percent more than that and it was done deal over. And it was that yeah.
Was there anything in particular that led to those two
Call them breakthroughs. I don't think they're
After two year impasse, I think that wording is appropriate.
Oh totally.
What contributed to those two things?
Joe Hudson.
I have to give a huge shout out. Have you spoken to Joe?
I have spoken to Joe. Joe I actually just
featured a tweet storm.

about emotional intelligence that Sam Altman had retweeted at one point. Just shared that in my newsletter, I think one week ago, maybe two weeks ago. Yeah. So Joe Hudson, you should explain though to folks who don't know the name who he is.
Joe's awesome.
You know, it's funny, I gotta I have to acknowledge this. It was Father's Day last
Sunday. And I'm was making the joke. I'm like, I'm meeting all my dads in one week. It's my dad and Tim Ferris and Joe Hudson is gonna be here in two days. And it's for me it's a significant thing'cause the truth is, and I told you, I had a ton of projections onto you. You know, like if Tim helps me, it'll save me. And I had the same thing with Joe'cause Joe's work was it's d also deeply important to me.
And so it's just really cool to like, you know, drop some of the projections and meet the people.
So all my dads. Joe Hudson's my third dad. He's great. He has a thing called art of accomplishment and he
Acknowledges the emotional aspect.
of business and not only acknowledges it, but points to the fact that if you ignore it
You will either not
Do as well as you could, or you will do as exceedingly well and feel that
empty, burnt out thing that awaits everybody who
trades the inner asset for the external one.
So his work was extremely helpful. I'd gone through his courses and he offered me because we'd been in contact.
a private coaching session because I'd help them with some YouTube stuff.
And on that.
He literally suggested he said
Offer to sell.
Like, are you willing to sell?
And I was like
Then make the offer. Do a shotgun deal where you guys both write a number on a piece of paper.
And the person who is willing to spend more will take it. So just knowing that I had that, I brought that to my co founder and said, look, I'm willing to make a binding agreement about this where I'm genuinely willing to buy or sell.
It was that shift of like
It was I needed to buy. He was like, Well give me more and when it's like look, I don't need to buy but
Let's get our way out of this thing, his number.
Came down.
Essentially is what happened. And there was one final thing.
That was
I based on
loving advice from people who were supporting me had wanted to buy the business out of net revenue, which is to say
with safety valves on. If it doesn't perform, I don't have to pay you.
And that we couldn't find a number for. It just didn't feel good.
And I
had a number come through, a literal number that like came to me and was like, That's way more than I've been offering him and he said no.
And the next follow up was yeah,'cause you're gonna take all the risk.
And I felt.
A surge of fear and then that
self-belief energy come back in like, oh my God, yes, I want the risk. I don't want this if it works. I want this through rain or shine, good or bad. Like let me pay the price for not succeeding.
And I'll take you back to one.
It was the burning the boats that finally made the business work at every stage. It was taking the steps that got me
to not have the contracting job to move to Brazil. I'm committed.
I care about this enough.
to suffer and hurt if this doesn't work out, right? And so that
was also huge in that and it was huge at the beginning of the business.
Yeah, what a story.
Yeah, I'm consistently
Amazed. It happens to me all the time, my own life too, but how
A single conversation
Or
A dream or
I mean, literally this has happened to me when I've had a fever and I've just been sick in bed where
You're looking at something.
And then suddenly say a Joe Hudson's like, Well, why don't you just do the opposite of what you were considering? And you're just like
Oh shit. Yeah, why don't I do that? Like
It's this
revelatory experience of an off menu option suddenly.
Seeming obviously.
Available and viable.
And
It's like when someone offers you a
A or B, look for C type of situation. Mm-hmm.
And it's so easy to say that and it sounds trite and cliched and
Even as
I would like to think at least how much practice I have at trying to test assumptions. Or I I am testing assumptions, testing assumptions and always looking for side entrances and these
Off menu options.
Still there are these moments where you're blind to what is hiding in plain sight.
And
It's fun to hear that Joe is one of the unlocks.
For part of that.
And by the way, I have to say, if you're here watching this, I can't imagine you have it, but if you haven't read the four hour work, it's the entire thing is like
It's that energy. And I actually think what people are buying from me is that energy in the social realm. There's a third option, which is connect. The magic is available. And I think for our work week is like magic is available in your career.
Yeah, totally.
I've been asked so many times, as you would imagine, by
Publishers.
To
Go back and kind of
Fine tune, rewrite.
that book and I don't want to touch it.
Mm.
I mean, I appreciate you saying that. It somehow captured lightning in a bottle and I'm like, look.
I'm forty-seven right now.
I wrote that when I was twenty nine.
And
Sure if I read it now, there's a little bit of chest puffing and there's shit in it where I'm like, Oh my God, it makes me face bubble a little bit.
But
For whatever reason
That book has just stood the test of time, at least over twenty years, or close to it.
And resonated with people from so many different age brackets.
going from fifteen all the way up to retiree, I don't want to touch it. And
To your point though, fundamentally it's about
calling into question all the basic assumptions of career retirement.
Slave, save, retire, right? The deferred life plan.
And
looking for alternatives that you can effectively prove
Or
If not realistic, at least possible.
vis-a-vis these case studies that are already in the book, which and the vast majority of those case studies pre-dated the publication of the book. So
I do myself also, I mean, I think that's a byproduct of enjoying books that do that on some level, right? Let my people go surfing. I think this is the title of the book by Ivan Chinard. I remember reading books by
Ricardo Semler and Sprantson, right, losing my virginity.
Where
It's like okay.
Everyone says an airline is suicide.
He workshopped it in a sense because a flight got canceled. He walked around with like a a sign at an airport offering charters. And then once he had people booked for a charter, he chartered a flight somewhere and then figured out how to work with I think it was a Boeing at the time.
to effectively cap his downside.
So that's
His losses were
Contained, but the upside was
attractive. And
You look at how he structured some of these deals and it's like
Oh yeah.
It wouldn't have occurred to me that that was possible, but of course when you have someone like that who is scrappy and also
Had the
life experience of having to
Pick himself up by his bootstraps and work with next to no money.
It's like oh wow.
You just had to ask and you had to know.
the right way to ask in these
Apparent miracles can happen. It's just wild.
So we'll see. Maybe I'll put together that book of case studies. I think it'd be fun.
Can I ask a question about that?
Yeah.
I ask because
I have a conflicting relationship with my earlier work. Like this course is ten years old. I look at it, I
Ah, that g this exactly what we said. That that braggadocious ass
He's not caveating it enough.
There's this.
Boldness that you can only have in your twenties of this is how the world works, right? You haven't been smashed before. But
There's something beautiful about that as well, that like only a twenty nine year old can write this book with this much punch and pizzazz and clarity. So I'm curious what your relationship is with
that version of yourself. And I'm also curious
What is it like to receive gratitude for that? Do you feel that it's able to land? Does it hit? Does it matter? I struggle with
Some of this as well.
I have never been good at receiving
I shouldn't say good. I
Have never been particularly
skilled or natural at receiving
Praise.
Or
compliments or anything like that. And who knows all the reasons. I mean, there probably many I'm not even aware of, but I think in part
There were certain things that I adopted really early on.
As
core beliefs. Like look, the good stuff takes care of itself. You just have to fix what's
not working, which by the way is not true in a lot of cases.
It can be true in a limited sense.
for certain things, but it's a very uh Faustian bargain of a philosophy to
live with, but I believe that for a long time. So if in sports coach wanted to give me a pat on the back, I would be like, Yeah, that's great. But like that's already working. So help me fix the stuff that's not working. So I was always
Which is not to say that I
never responded depository enforcement.
But like little
Scooby snacks, tiny bits of positive reinforcement, and say language learning was very important, but I often got that reinforcement through the process itself, not from
Anyone else.
And
That is
That being
receiving praise. So I would say I'm very grateful.
I do practice gratitude and I journal a lot on things I am grateful for and
I basically r have run through
Some type of gratitude list.
And also asking myself, you know.
Is this a good day to die?
when I take off in plans, take off in land and plans.
Just as an exercise, I'm kinda like, Okay.
This is the last rodeo as far as
Travel goes like how do I feel about what I'm doing right now?
And then
Assuming that it's
positive, even if not running through some level of gratitude. So I would like to think of myself as a very grateful person.
But I still struggle.
With
Receiving.
Compliments and praise.
Yeah, what about other people grateful for you? I can be really deeply appreciative, but it doesn't I think there's also a deep rooted fear of
Becoming
self absorbed or arrogant or overweighting my importance in the large scale cosmic order of things, which is effectively zero, right? I would like to remind myself.
Which I don't think is a real risk, but nonetheless that fear is there. So I think that's also a maybe uh
byproduct, the allowing it to glance off of me, but maybe not fully land is I think a consequence of that as well.
It's like God, you don't have to go very far. Open your laptop and go anywhere online and like ninety-nine percent of people out there, this is I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration, but are just saying
Things with the
Utmost confidence and self importance.
And it doesn't seem to help them and it doesn't seem to help anyone else, ultimately, right? It kinda the tends to end in tears. So
I love to say I don't know.
particularly and that would be another reason why I like having these conversations.
Because
There's a lot more that I don't know than what I know.
And then
That was a long riff on the gratitude piece. In terms of relating to my earlier self
I think it's probably harder for you with video.
Mm.
You know what I mean? I think it's probably a lot harder for you to video. Video is incredibly unforgiving.
And
Video also has so many different components that feed into the end product. You've got
camera, you've got framing, you've got lighting, you've got editing, you've got
Your
stage presence, so to speak, and performance. You have body language. There's so many different elements on top of the scripting or not scripting, but the actual delivery of whatever the content happens to be. Set design depending on what you're doing. I mean there's so much that goes into it. Whereas with
Print on
A page.

I would say
I still feel very proud of the writing in the four hour work week. I mean I
killed myself over that book.
and took the writing itself very, very, very seriously. So
I think it
I mean, I hate to say this, but it may even be crisper and tighter than my writing now. So I feel good about the writing.
And a presentation, the teaching of the concepts.
Which was
Based largely on
Many, many, many, many guest lectures.
That
Print it when I was invited back by one of my professors to
speak to an entrepreneurship class. So that's how I workshopped.
that particular book.
There are small pieces where I'm just like, Oh God. You know, the kind of chest beating confidence and
flamboyance maybe of some of the examples.
And at the same time.
I think that
Some of that
Irrational.
Maybe exuberance.
Is
really effectively
Infectious.
within the context of that book. I think for me at that time, keep in mind it's a few that was
However many years.
Not that many, really. I mean, we're talking five or six years after, for my purposes in lifestyle design, cracking the code or at least figuring out elimination and automation and all these various things to an extent that seemed very unusual at the time.
I was still really high.
on that experience and
You can't be a lukewarm evangelist.
Or
lukewarm teacher. I didn't really view myself as an evangelist, but
The harder the subject is, the more enthusiastic you better be, or at least enthusiastic and effective as a teacher.
If the subject matter takes care of itself.
Then
There are lots of ways that you can perhaps compromise or or not be up to snuff, but entrepreneurship is a full contact sport, as you know.
And you know the chapter that
that I think gets the least attention.
If I were to expand something.
That I would expand is the filling the void chapter at the end.
People miss that. And it's so important. It's like look, if you just create a lot of empty space in terms of time.
Humans are not really design just to be idle.
And
I mean go spend some time with any
reasonably
Intact.
kind of hunter-gatherer society that might have some plantains and cassava or something like that.
And you'll see, yes, they do rest quite a bit, but they're also by and large very active.
might be just household stuff, might be chores, might be
any number of duties, church, et cetera, especially these days. But idle hands or the devil's workshop applies to the mind as well. So for mental health.
I think that that chapter is particularly important and maybe
maybe could have been positioned a little bit differently to underscore it, but that's the type of chapter also that
Number one.
Most readers don't assume they're gonna have to deal with because they're like, Well, that's like once you've won the race.
I'll worry about that once I've won the race.
Unfortunately.
If you build a
Business and a machine.
to serve lifestyle, but then it becomes inverted. It's not exactly straightforward or it's certainly not pain free to fix it at the 11th hour after the fact. So
I relate to the book well.
It is funny to me when I look back at some of the tech recommendations and I'm like, Oh my God, this is just like going to the natural history museum and seeing dinosaur bones. I mean these most of these are completely extinct.
Yeah, I'm wrestling with that. It's
An ability to look back at myself, have all the thoughts that you said, which is Ugh Ugh, but also
love that part. Like holy shit, that guy brought me here.
On the entrepreneurial journey, are there any other books that you would recommend?
Two.
The mini Charlie.
Or someone out there who is doesn't have to be YouTube specific, but if you just had you could only recommend a handful of books, they don't need to be.
business books per se, but they can be. Are there any other books that
Stick out to you.
Khalil Gabron the Prophet. Yes.
Excellent. Yeah, excellent. Have that downstairs.
That is it. Yeah.
Easy to read.
You can read it in small segments.
Why that book for you?
You know, it's been a minute since I've read it, but I was just like
I'm in that zone of what moved me. I was like, Oh, that book brought me to tears many, many times.
There are just deep
Truths about
Life. Increasingly I'm into that archetypal mythic
Pseudo religious stuff, not because of any doctrine, but because of the way that it moves me.
That's just an example of like a twentieth century
Classic tome.
Not even a tome, it's a pamphlet, essentially. It's like a hundred pages, maybe. Hundred and twenty at most.
Yeah.
Running lean helped a lot with the interviews. It's not like the most fun read, but it helped me set up those interviews that I did that
identify the the stuff in the business. Running lean. Running lean. There's you could probably find many books on the topic, but it's a lean startup thing and it just has two sections. Here's the big takeaway. There's two interviews that you do. You do one interview that is about
the customer and one interview that is about your product. So the first interview is not do you like this, do you want this? It's
What are you bothered by? What are you trying to make happen? What isn't working for you? Where are you hanging out? You know, like and then the second one is, Hey, I've got this idea for you. Does that solve the problems that you identified and it helps you run through those? So that was really important back in the day.
What were the other ones? Back in the day, influence by Cialdini was
Huge. Outstanding book. Still.
Classic. Still Dale Carnegie, still
Classic.
Which Dale Carnegie?
For me it was how to win friends and influence people was the one there's ways in which I go to it. And then let me think of ones that have touched me or moved me more today. I've got Poetry by Hafis, which
That hits the part of me that is coming.
More active today.
I love Martha Beck. I saw your interview with her. She's got several books.
Her interview with you is honestly great though. Like it I think it does a lot of the work that you might want to take from some of her books, so I'd recommend that.
Let me see real quick.
Brandon Sanderson's in here. I know he was on. That was a great interview as well. Yeah, he was fun. So good.
Yeah, I'll leave it there.
Yeah, let's not drown people.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's plenty to start with and
Essentialism, I'll reiterate that one. It is a really good read. And if you combine that with
Richard Cosh's book, The Eighty Twenty Principle.
Those two will take you a long way.
Mm-hmm. A really, really long way.
Well, Charlie, we have covered a hell of a lot of ground here. I did it. Yeah. Is
They're
Anything else?
That
You would like to
Mention or point people to? Where can people find all things, Charlie, online?
Charisma on Command YouTube channel. If you're interested in the course, it's Charisma University, you should be able to just type it in and it'll take you to our sales page.
And I you know, just
I know it's it didn't hit, but I spent a lot of time and money. I made a D show on YouTube, which was a D
I dressed up, I wore a cape, I got my friend who does a Trump impression to be a character that
His name Tumpi, he's great.
That's called Improv and Dragons.
Don't expect it to explode, but if that's your thing and you wanna if you wanna have a sh a quick laugh, you can check that out as well. Who what is your character?
So my character was I called him Sigmund because I was doing a a riff on Sigmund Freud, Carl Hume. So h Sigmund and his brother Carl, he was a druid.
I see an elf.
I I forget exactly what his race was. Oh no, he's a Kalashtar, which is a
F one of those weird
Kalistar, that must be a new one. Yeah.
They have these dream lives. And so for me, I was having dreams and I was like, Okay, I wanna just infuse this with psychoanalysis and I'm gonna give them a German accent and I'm gonna lean lean into this.
So we had we had a good time with that. And one day I hope I hope to actually get people to watch it. Uh
Amazing.
Alright, man. Well well I I I think we can begin to wind to a close here. Any uh last
Comments or remarks, recommendations, anything at all you'd like to share with my audience?
Anything else?
If I had a billboard.
I have to answer my Tim Ferris question. Yeah, let's do it.
I thought about this.
I was like, in the moment I'll find it. What is it?
Don't think, feel. And I know that's counterintuitive to a lot of people, but uh lately that's been
My guiding principle is uh

Feel my heart, feel my gut.
Think from my mind and and try to find some union of the three to move forward.
Yeah, dig it. Dig it. I'm sure Joe would like that.
And
I'll give a shameless plug. Diana Chapman.
Interview on uh Tim Ferris show for people who want to check it out.
Maybe a framework or two to try to calibrate to learn how to do that. She's a very good teacher.
And I suppose we'll
We'll cap it there, man. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Really had a lot of fun.
And uh for everybody listening.
As always, we'll link to everything in the show notes at Tim.blog slash
Podcast. Not too many Charlie's on the podcast. So if you just search Charlie. Yeah, Charlie Hone. Charlie Hohn might pop up on the blog, but otherwise.
Charlie Hooper will be the one and only.
And
Until next time.
As always.
B.
Just a bit kinder than necessary, not just to others, but to yourself.
And thanks. Tuning in.
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