OZAN VAROL ｜ Unlock Your Genius
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
Words per Minute
186.25867
Summary
In this episode, former rocket scientist and law professor Ozan Varol joins me to talk about how to unlock and awaken the genius buried deep within ourselves. We also talk about the power of going what he refers to as off-menu, finding more awe in our lives, and the birth of a new man.
Transcript
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Every single one of us has genius inside of us, some lying dormant for years and even decades.
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And with our greatest potential trapped deep beneath the surface of our day-to-day lives,
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we live, as Thoreau famously said, quiet lives of desperation. I know from personal experience
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how difficult and deflating that can be. My guest today, former rocket scientist and law professor
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Ozan Varol, is on the podcast today to talk about how to unlock and awaken the genius buried deep
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within ourselves. We also talk about the power of going what he refers to as off menu, finding more
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awe in our lives, the death of our former selves and the birth of a new man, why we all need to
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exercise a bit more skeptical curiosity and how to become extraordinary men. You're a man of action.
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You live life to the fullest, embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path. When life knocks
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you down, you get back up one more time, every time. You are not easily deterred, defeated, rugged,
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resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become at the end
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of the day. And after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man. Gentlemen, what is going
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on today? My name is Ryan Michler. I'm the host and the founder of the Order of Man podcast and
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movement. Welcome here and welcome back. Glad you're tuning in. And I don't really care how long
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you've been with us. If this is your first episode or your, I think we're almost to the
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thousand episodes now of the podcast over eight years, I'm still as grateful and glad that you're
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here because you know what? We need more men in this fight. We need men to help battle against the
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current culture and society that says that men are less than or not needed or even dangerous or
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destructive or toxic. We need more men to stand up, to lead their families, lead their businesses,
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lead their communities, and be the kind of men that we're capable of becoming. And that's what
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this podcast is dedicated to. We do that by interviewing incredible men like Ozan and other
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individuals, guys like Jocko Willink and Terry Cruz and Matthew McConaughey and Ben Shapiro and Andy
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Frisilla and Grant Cardone and Tim Kennedy and Tim Tebow and all of the other 400 and whatever, 50 or so
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men that we've had on this podcast. And I just want to thank you for tuning in because we wouldn't get
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that if there wasn't anybody who's listening. And there are a lot of you who are listening
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and more importantly, applying the information that these guys are teaching and imparting upon
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us. Guys, real quick, before I get into the conversation, the Iron Council, our exclusive
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brotherhood is open. I just encourage you to go watch the video and learn a little bit more about
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what it's about and see if it's for you. I cannot tell you how many guys I hear from who want to
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connect with other like-minded men, other men that they can fight in this battle with,
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walk shoulder to shoulder with and improve their lives because of accountability, but also to help
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hold other men accountable. And isn't that what we do? The men in our corner, the people in our
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corner, we call them to rise, to lift up, to stand up and be better than they once were. We do that for
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other people. We need people to do that for us. So check it out at orderofman.com slash Iron Council.
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I'll talk a little bit more about it later in the conversation, but for now, let me introduce you to
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Ozan. As I said earlier, a former rocket scientist. He actually worked on NASA missions and a former
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law professor. He left academia to pursue a career as a writer and a public speaker. He actually left
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academia after he received tenure. So we talk a little bit about that and the concept of tenure,
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which is an interesting concept. You'll hear that in the podcast. Since then, he's been teaching people
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how to live a life past the status quo. He is the author of Think Like a Rocket Scientist. I actually
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had him on the podcast years ago to discuss that book. And of course, his latest book, Awaken Your
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Genius, which is sure to become a bestseller. He's delivered keynotes to Microsoft and Intel and GE,
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Google X, and so many other powerful organizations. And he really is making a name for himself
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as he shares his mission and passion to help people unlock their potential.
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Ozan, what's up, brother? Great to have you back on the podcast.
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Yeah, I really enjoyed our first conversation. And when you reached out and you said you had a
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new book coming out, I think it's over your left shoulder there, Awaken Your Genius.
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Yeah, very excited for you. Your first book was great. And I know that the audience, the guys that
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were listening really resonated with your messaging and the way you share it and deliver. And
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obviously, the nice thing about the message coming from you is that you are very educated.
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You're very credible. You're literally a rocket scientist. You're a law professor. Come on now.
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It's got some weight behind it. And I like that.
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Thanks. I appreciate that. Actually, and we can talk about this if you like,
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but I'm no longer a law professor. I left that. Yeah, I left academia in 2021. Shortly after I
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got tenure, I just realized that academia was no longer for me. Like this career that I once loved,
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I absolutely love teaching, just had come to the end of its natural life. I just wasn't learning
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and growing. And I decided to leave my tenured position in academia, which my colleagues thought
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that I was out of my mind because tenure means, you know, you've got, it's the ultimate safety net.
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You've got a guaranteed paycheck for life, but you've made a curiosity, but my curiosity was
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pulling me in a different direction. So I left academia to write books and speak to audiences full
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time. What, what do you, I want to get into that, but what do you think about the concept of tenure,
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I can see the reasoning behind it, which is that, you know, you should be free to speak your mind
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as an academic without the possibility of getting fired, hanging out for your head for what you say.
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But, and this is a really important, but it's got really significant downsides, which is that like,
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once people get tenure, a lot of them just let go, you know, complacency sets in like, you know,
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you set this really difficult goal for yourself, you achieved it, and then people become really
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complacent. And so I ended up seeing this in, in the various institutions I taught in, you know,
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people will get tenure and then they stick around for decades and they're no longer good professors.
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Like they, they should have quit a long time ago, but because it's so comfortable,
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it's so easy. People don't leave and it's large in a large part because of tenure.
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Yeah. Interesting. I, I personally, from the outside, I, I've always just taken issue with it
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because of what you just said, that it's no longer about your performance and the way that you show
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up. It's more about protecting your own to a degree is the way I viewed it. Again, I'm looking
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at it from the outside looking in, but I had never considered that it is beneficial in that it allows
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some protection of speech. It seems like in academia that the opposite is actually true.
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That if you happen to stand on the wrong side of the aisle, you will get blasted and ostracized
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more so than any other time. I imagine in the world of academia, because the whole concept to me is to
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explore ideas. And that means to consider ideas that you don't necessarily agree with.
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Yeah, exactly. Uh, I totally agree with that, especially, and this is true regardless of the
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type of academic institution you're in, but especially I taught in law school, especially
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for lawyers. It's so important for them to be exposed to all different perspectives because,
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you know, they're going to be, even if you don't agree with it, these people are going to be on the
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opposing side. You need to know what they're thinking. You need to be able to engage with them.
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And that is completely lacking and things have gotten so much worse in the past few years. And
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actually, I mean, that's one of the reasons why I decided to leave is that that free exchange of
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ideas wasn't happening in the classroom and people with views that weren't mainstream were being
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chastised. And so you're only hearing one side of the argument. So the classroom discussions were not
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nearly as interesting as they used to be when I first started teaching 10 years ago. And that was one
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of the reasons why I decided to leave. Well, and you are still teaching, you know, and that's the
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beauty of, of the environment that we live in now is that you don't have to go through those
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traditional routes and avenues that we would have had to have done 50, 60, 70, a hundred years ago.
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Now you can start a business. You can author a book. You can build your own platform. You can have
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your own media outlets like podcasting, and you can be just as big, if not bigger and have a wider reach
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than you might be able to in a classroom environment.
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Yeah, that's exactly right. There's so much value in going off menu. I think, you know,
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for the reasons you mentioned for decades, people have been being required to basically to like
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contort themselves, Tetris themselves into shape to fit other boxes that other people have created.
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But now, yeah, we're living in a world where we can have this conversation. I'm in Portland,
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you're in Utah. You've got an incredible audience. And so it's so much easier now to say, okay,
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what do I actually want from life? And to go for that. And if it doesn't exist for you to actually
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create it, to say like, this is possible and I can do this. And this memory popped to mind,
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so I'll share it with you. I was a freshman in college. I was just starting out. And I remember
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looking through the course catalog at like the available majors to figure out what I should major in.
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And none of the majors appealed to me. Like I wanted a combination of astronomy, physics and
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geology. And there wasn't anything that captured what I wanted to study. And I remember thinking,
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oh, I wonder if I could go off menu. Like, I wonder if I could create my own major. So I
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trekked to the registrar's office and I was like, hey, here's what I'm thinking. Like none of these
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appeal to me. Can I create my own thing? And the answer surprisingly was yes. There was this like
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little known program that allowed a select group of freshmen to create their own major. I applied and
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was accepted. But that lesson really stuck with me since that time. Like there's so much value in
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saying, none of these options appeal to me. This is what I want. Raising your hand and asking for it.
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Yeah, that's amazing. That's a great example of taking initiative. And like you said, going off menu.
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I haven't heard that before. But that is valuable. I think that's a lot of what we've done here with
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order of man, even, you know, it's like, I want to have these conversations. Great. So do that.
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And then you can see how successful something like this has become. What was the major that you,
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what did you call it? Or how would you describe the major?
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Yeah, I would describe it as astrophysics, which doesn't even really capture what I did,
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but that's the closest. It was like a combination of astronomy, physics. And I wanted to add in some
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geology in there because I was really interested in exploration of other planets. And so being able
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to have that knowledge of geology would also be helpful. And if I remember correctly, you worked
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with NASA on some space exploration projects. Yeah. When I was in college, I worked for a Cornell-NASA
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partnership called the Mars Exploration Rovers Project that sent two rovers to Mars back in 2003
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called Spirit and Opportunity. So I worked on the operations team for those for four years.
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Amazing experience. We had designed the rovers to last for 90 days. And one of the two opportunity,
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and I still get goosebumps every time I say this, one of the two rovers opportunity
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ended up roving the red planet for over 14 years into its 90 day lifetime. Yeah. Pretty incredible.
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Do you think that we'll see anytime soon having a man on Mars and then even to some degree beginning
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to colonize it? I certainly hope so. I think, you know, one of the things that's been lacking from
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our lives is the emotion awe. Like there's anxiety in the news, there's stress at work.
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People are really starving for awe. And if you look back at like the Apollo program and how people
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felt in the 60s, especially when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and took his giant leap for mankind,
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everyone was captivated by awe. And everyone's, I think, in terms of what they thought they could
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achieve in life, that bar was raised a little bit because we really did the impossible.
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And I think landing someone on Mars would have a similar effect. So I'm rooting for that in part
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for that reason. Two, it also, you know, helps development of these ancillary technologies that
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we can then use at home. And like it gets us into the habit of applying moonshot thinking,
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right? So putting a person on Mars seems like impossible, but one day that impossible will
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become possible. And it will happen because a number of people will choose to go off menu
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to ask questions that haven't been asked before, challenge assumptions that everyone else took for
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granted. Like I'll give you an example. One of the assumptions that was really deeply embedded in
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rocket science was this assumption that rockets could not be reused. So rockets that delivered their
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cargo into orbit would burn up in the atmosphere or plunge into the ocean, requiring an entirely new
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rocket to be built. Now imagine for a moment doing that with commercial flights. Like I'm in Portland
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right now. I fly to Utah where you are. People deplane, someone steps up to the plane and just like
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torches it, just lights it on fire. Sounds ridiculous, but that's what we did for rockets for decades.
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And actually the price of a modern rocket is about the same as a Boeing 737,
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but commercial flights are so much cheaper because airplanes unlike rockets can be reused over and
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over and over again. And so SpaceX is on their way to changing that though. We now have a landing pad
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next to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. And it's in part because they have this really
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audacious goal of landing people on Mars one day, colonizing Mars one day at a fraction of the cost
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that it would normally take. And so it's forcing them to go off menu. It's forcing them to question
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assumptions and it's forcing them to reimagine the status quo in ways that are now bringing,
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they're on their way to bringing the cost of space flight by a factor of like 40, which is pretty
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incredible. It is. You said that a modern rocket chip is about the same cost as a modern Boeing 747.
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Is that a modern rocket? Yeah. I would never have imagined that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But just the
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fact that you can reuse it. Yeah. Well, I think that speaks to your book too, is, is awakening your
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genius. Uh, you talk about people living in this status quo, just kind of getting by overly sedated,
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but yet like bombarded with nonsense and information that doesn't matter. And we've just
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turned into almost like living zombies. It seems like, and I know, I know I was there in my financial
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planning practice. That was me. I was very successful in my financial planning practice.
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Family dynamic was pretty solid. Income was good. And yet I hated it. Yeah. I was, I was kind of
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miserable. I was like, Oh, I'd get calls from clients and I'd look at the phone and I'm like,
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Oh, I have to talk to this person about these things. And it wasn't that person necessarily.
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It was the conversation I didn't want to have, but that's pretty much describes just about
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everybody. It seems like. Yeah, exactly. And I'm curious what prompted you to leave?
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Well, I was a, uh, a fiduciary. So in the financial world, if you're a fiduciary, you have a,
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uh, a obligation, a responsibility to do what's in your client's best interest. And when I make
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agreements, I I'm serious about those agreements. So as I agreed to be a fiduciary, not all financial
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people are fiduciaries. I was because of the licensing I had, uh, when I made that agreement,
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I was serious about that. And I got to a point when I saw a call and the client called me and I
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knew that they wanted to change their portfolio around or whatever. And I just wasn't interested
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in doing it. And I knew at that point, I'm like, I'm not being a fiduciary. Like I'm not doing what's
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in my client's best interest. What would be in my client's best interest is for me to tell them to
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find a different advisor. And so I had started order of man and I was excited about it and decided to
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put a few more chips in that basket. And this is where we are now.
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Yeah. I love that. And there's really interesting parallels between that story and the story of me
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leaving academia, um, which is why I asked about it. And it was, it was similar. I had this moment
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where I would get up in front of the classroom normally, and I would be so excited to teach.
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Like I'm so engaged, so excited to, to teach constitutional law, which is what I taught
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for nearly 10 years. And there was a moment back in, I think like 2017, it was shortly after I got
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tenure. I stood up in front of the classroom again, and my whole body sank. Like my chest,
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my shoulders collapsed, my chest sank. It was that feeling of like, oh, like not again. Like,
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I can't believe I'm about to teach this same class in the same way that I've taught before,
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not again. And I owe it to these students, uh, to have me replaced by someone who's actually
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excited to be here. Um, who's actually going to feel the same excitement that I felt for the amount
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of time that I taught. And it's time for me to go to do something else. And I didn't quit blindly
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and like jump into this next life without trying, just like you, I had already started writing on
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the side. Um, and it was only after my last book think like a rocket scientist came out and achieved
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success that I felt comfortable leaving academia. So I tried these like different potential futures.
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I had experimented with a few different paths and a number of them failed. And then writing and
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speaking was, uh, paying off. I was enjoying it. There was an audience for it. And once that clicked,
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that's when I decided to leave. What did your colleagues have to say? I know you talked a little
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bit about you leaving after tenure, but I imagine that these are individuals and no, no negative judgment
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when I say this, but these are individuals who like structure. These are probably individuals who,
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uh, love the fact that they have a full-time job going out there and taking risks as entrepreneurs.
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Isn't something I think is in their wheelhouse necessarily. And so I imagine there was a lot
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of pushback from your colleagues, uh, with you going out and writing to make money. And now you're
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an entrepreneur. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, no, exactly. And there was no missing words.
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Like so many of them said, you are making the biggest mistake of your life. Like you are about
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to become a star scholar in your field and you are going to throw away everything that you worked so
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hard to build. Uh, and I heard that same message from so many different people and it made it harder
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for me, but I kept coming back to this idea of like, look, this is no longer aligned with who I am.
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This is not aligned with the path I want to pursue. And regardless of the external noise,
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regardless of what people are telling me, I know in my heart of hearts that this is the right path.
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And so I'm going to take it. And I don't, I'd rather disappoint other people around me.
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And I'd rather lose friends and colleagues as I did than to disappoint myself, lose myself and lose
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who I am. That's much more important to me. Even if this path fails, I can look back and say,
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I did the principal thing. I did what I thought was the right thing to do, not what other people
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thought I should be doing. So for every one of you, there's probably a hundred people that are
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in despair, that are not happy with their life. They're going through the motions
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and they know it. And yet they're letting the, the noise and the distractions and the,
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the naysayers, they are letting them get the better of those people. So why, why you? And
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somebody who might be listening, he's like, I know I'm in a dead end job. Like, how do I get free of
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this? How do I break free of this? Yeah. And that's actually one of the reasons why I wrote
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Awaken Your Genius is to talk to people just, just like that. I think there was a couple of things.
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So number one, and actually most people aren't even aware that they're living in this world,
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you know, stuck in a job that they don't necessarily love because they've suppressed
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all of those signals. A part of themselves is aware of it, but they are so focused externally,
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so focused on what other people are saying and doing that often they're not even aware
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that they are stuck. So I think number one, self-reflection and self-awareness is,
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is extremely important. I mean, one of my regular practices is I journal every morning
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and it's this like thought dump, whatever is in my head, whatever kept me up at night,
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thought patterns, both positive and negative. I just write down and then I have a regular practice
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of reviewing them. So I'll go back and like, look at what I said a year ago, six months ago,
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and three months ago, because you often forget. But when you do that review process,
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then you begin to spot trends. You begin to say, oh my God, wow, this pattern has been there for a
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year now or two years now, it becomes harder to ignore it. So it all begins with, I think,
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self-awareness and self-reflection. Because most of us just go through life, not even like,
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one of the most difficult questions for people to answer is, what do you want? Like, what do you
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really want? It's such a simple question, but you ask that to someone, most people will be stumped.
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Most people don't know what they want. Most people don't know what they want because again,
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we're like growing up in the education system, particularly, we're told what we should want.
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We're told what we should be thinking. We're told that these are the questions that you should be
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curious about. And so we go through life, not knowing what we really think, who we really are,
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what we really want. So I think it all begins there is like, and only you can figure this out
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for yourself. Only you can answer that question of what do you want? What do you really want? But
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it's important to sit with that for a while and see what comes up that that's got to be the starting
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point. So if I ask you that question, how do you answer that question? Yeah, I would answer that
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question by saying what I want is to help wake people up, to help them reimagine themselves and
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reimagine the world around them. That's my purpose in life. And it's clear to me, at least right now,
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right? By the way, this might change 10 years from now, right? But that is what I want right now.
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And I do that through the books I write, through the speeches I give, through conversations like
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this. And that is what I want. That's currently my North Star. But again, that might shift 10 years
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from now. I think it actually should shift. Yeah. I think when people have visions or start
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answering those questions, some fear they have is that they're pigeonholing themselves into this path
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and they don't give themselves permission to deviate from it. So it's like when you were
00:24:04.900
talking about journaling, I imagine, and I'd like to hear from you, if you go back and you read
00:24:10.060
something, you're like, that's dumb. Or I was an idiot. Or that's not important to me. Why in the
00:24:17.360
world was that important to me then? Do you have experiences like that?
00:24:20.540
Oh my God. All the time. All the time. And by the way, when I journal, like 90% of what comes out is
00:24:26.140
junk. It's just stuff that's been cluttering my head. And then I go back and I, yeah, I look back
00:24:30.600
on like what I thought I wanted two years ago, three years ago. I'm like, is this the same person?
00:24:37.560
You know? And so think about that. But yet a lot of people will say, well, as you know, say,
00:24:43.520
let's say you're 40 years old. As a 27-year-old, I made the decision to go to law school.
00:24:49.160
And so I'm going to stick to that path, even though I have changed as a person,
00:24:55.820
even though that path is not what I want any longer. You have so little in common with the
00:25:02.440
27-year-old version of you. So then why should you stick to the choices that that person made?
00:25:08.660
Like, those are the choices you made back then. It's a different person. You're a completely different
00:25:12.660
person now. So you should be able to pick a different path forward. There's this Buddhist
00:25:18.500
parable that I share in Awaken Your Genius about this man who has to cross this raging river.
00:25:26.200
And so he builds a raft. He gets on the raft. He crosses the river safely to the other side.
00:25:31.540
He then picks up the raft. He walks into the forest and he's trying to walk, but the raft keeps
00:25:37.540
snagging in the trees and like impeding his forward progress. But he refuses to let go of the raft.
00:25:43.760
He says, I built this. Like, it saved my life. I'm not going to let it go. But to survive today,
00:25:51.520
he has to let go of the raft that saved his life yesterday. And I think of ourselves in the same
00:25:57.840
way too. Like the career choices we made that brought us to where we are today. The relationships
00:26:02.940
that brought us to where we are today. Patterns of behavior that got you to where you are today.
00:26:08.340
Some of these will not only stop serving you, but will actually be like the raft in that parable and
00:26:14.320
will start getting in your way. And unless you drop them, unless you examine your life and say,
00:26:21.800
okay, what rafts am I carrying around that served me well in the past, but they're now getting in
00:26:27.020
your way, you're going to get in your own way and will impede your forward progress. There is so much
00:26:33.520
value in letting go of things. I think people tend to focus on like, what can I add to my life?
00:26:39.740
What else can I do? But we don't ask the same question with subtractions. What can I let go of?
00:26:46.020
What can I remove? Because there is birth and death, like life lives on lives. And there is so much
00:26:53.520
value in saying thank you to that raft and letting it go and letting what's dying serve as fertilizer
00:27:00.920
for what's coming alive. Yeah. That was one of the most intriguing parts of the book is because
00:27:06.120
very rarely do people talk about, I think it's, if I remember right, it's titled that part is the
00:27:10.880
death, right? Yeah. And very rarely do you see these types of self-development, self-help books
00:27:16.800
talk about the death and letting things go and getting rid of that. It's always do this and do
00:27:21.380
that and use this structure and use this system, which is good, but you got to make room for that.
00:27:26.640
One of the hard things or one of the things that I struggle with, and I alluded to it earlier,
00:27:31.220
when I make a commitment, I mean that. I didn't make that commitment flippantly. I actually meant
00:27:38.740
it. And even if I didn't mean it at the time, because I made the commitment, I feel bound and
00:27:45.100
obligated to follow through with it, which has served me well in a lot of ways. But also I have a hard
00:27:50.500
time letting things go. I have a hard time letting the relationships go that no longer serve its
00:27:57.600
purpose. I have a hard time letting go of even certain activities that I know are not good for
00:28:05.000
me. I have a hard time because I don't know if it's just stubbornness or just loyalty or somewhere
00:28:11.520
in between. I don't know what it is, but that's a really hard thing for me to do. I imagine it is
00:28:15.780
for a lot of other guys as well. For sure. Yeah. And I think it's also partially because we hear
00:28:20.780
this message of like, uh, quitters never win. Winners never quit. Grits, perseverance, all of
00:28:29.060
which is important. And some people need more grit. Some people need more perseverance in their lives,
00:28:33.860
but other people need less in some areas. Like other people need less grit. Other people need to quit
00:28:40.140
things that are no longer working for them because trying to do the same thing over and over again and
00:28:45.580
not succeeding, uh, it's a sign that maybe you shouldn't be doing that thing or a commitment
00:28:51.720
you made to say becoming a lawyer 10 years ago or becoming a financial planner 10 years ago may have
00:28:57.800
been the right commitment and the right choice at the time, but it, it is no longer. Um, and the only
00:29:03.800
way to figure that out is to do that self-reflection that we talked about and also say, look, like that was
00:29:10.300
the right commitment to make at the time. So it's not like you made a mistake, right? Like that was
00:29:15.520
the right decision to make at the time, but you're a different person now and you want to go on a
00:29:21.520
different direction. And there's so much value in honoring that too. I don't, so I've done, I don't
00:29:27.860
know, 440 podcast interviews. I think at this point, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say some
00:29:34.500
people need less grit, but I don't think you're wrong. Like I actually think that's probably it's
00:29:41.240
just hard headedness at some point and it's not helping you and it's not helping other people
00:29:45.620
around you. I'm, I'm processing this as I'm saying it, cause this is, this part of the message is for
00:29:51.300
me. So I'm, I'm processing this right now. So one thing I get hung up on at times is, you know,
00:29:58.940
you hear a lot about self-reflection. You need to reflect, you need to reflect, but, and I agree
00:30:04.420
with that, but I think sometimes it gets stuck in the reflection process. And so cool. You've
00:30:11.240
reflected. Awesome. How do you take that out of your head or off paper and actually apply it in the
00:30:17.780
real world? Yeah. Great question. Um, and I think the next step, so after you've done some self-reflection,
00:30:25.200
the only way to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work, the only way to
00:30:31.720
figure out whether you're truly going to enjoy something and not enjoy something, it's not doing
00:30:37.600
pros and cons the list. It's not thinking and thinking and thinking it's actually going and
00:30:41.980
doing the thing. Uh, so experimenting like a curious scientist might. So I'll give you an example from my
00:30:47.440
life. When I decided that academia was no longer the path for me, I took a while. Actually, it was
00:30:54.840
probably two years where I experimented with different potential futures. Right. And so, and I'll
00:31:01.200
share with you what I did. So writing and speaking wasn't the first path I picked. Initially, I was
00:31:06.560
like, oh, you know, I'm a law professor. I did really well in law school. Law students really
00:31:11.840
struggle because there's no guidance to them on like how to do well on the finals. Let me create an
00:31:16.920
online course on tailored towards law students on how to succeed on their final exams. Um, did not
00:31:24.760
love putting it together and it didn't find an audience because of failure. It just, you know,
00:31:29.200
a couple of people bought, bought the online course, but it just never took off even though
00:31:33.340
I tried really hard. So that path, that experiment failed. Um, I tried then coaching. Uh, so I was
00:31:40.840
really into productivity at the time. And so I started this coaching business on the side, helping
00:31:45.740
attorneys, uh, who tend to be extremely busy and frantic, get their lives back. So help them be more
00:31:52.700
productive. Also did not enjoy that. Um, I did actually have some clients. I feel like if I had,
00:31:59.360
if the voice inside of me said, oh, great perseverance, you need to keep walking this
00:32:03.640
path because you started it and ignoring the signals coming from within me, which was like,
00:32:09.620
this is not the right path for you. Like talking one-on-one with someone for an hour and then hearing
00:32:15.000
the same problems over and over and over again from the same person. And you can tell they're just not
00:32:20.140
going to change because they're so stuck in their world is not for you. And even though that was
00:32:26.660
relatively successful, I ended up ending that experiment because it was clear it wasn't aligned
00:32:31.920
for me. Uh, so then I tried writing, I started a blog and I had a podcast at the time and I really
00:32:39.460
enjoyed writing. And then an audience started to form. People started to share what I wrote. Uh,
00:32:45.260
and then that grew and grew and grew and eventually culminated in a dream book deal. Uh, the book
00:32:52.100
came out in 2020 and, and did really well. And that gave me freedom to say, okay, like this is
00:32:57.980
the path. This is definitely what I want because I'm alive when I write and speak to people about
00:33:03.320
these topics and there's an audience for them. That experiment succeeded. I now feel comfortable
00:33:08.600
leaving academia and going down this path instead. But I only found that out by actually going out into
00:33:14.540
the real world and, and trying and seeing what works and what doesn't. Yeah, that's powerful.
00:33:19.500
We, you and I actually have a lot of similarities because this podcast was born from another podcast.
00:33:25.160
So people will often say, Oh, you know, Ryan, you have a great podcast and it's been successful and
00:33:29.200
I want to have a successful podcast. I'm like, well, this, this isn't my first go around either.
00:33:33.300
I had another podcast before this, it was called wealth anatomy. And it was a podcast dedicated to
00:33:39.120
giving, uh, medical professionals. Cause that was mostly my clientele, um, financial advice.
00:33:44.960
So it was called wealth anatomy and I did it to build, uh, another marketing component of my business
00:33:51.160
to pick up new clients and realized very, very quickly. I love the medium of podcasting.
00:33:56.840
I didn't love the conversation. So I think I did 20 plus episodes, somewhere right in there
00:34:02.960
and I quit, you know, so to speak and said, okay, well, what did I learn? Well, I learned I like
00:34:09.480
podcasting, so I'd like to keep doing that, but I need to change the conversation. And that's it.
00:34:15.320
That is a moment where, you know, contrary to what I just said a minute ago about quitting,
00:34:19.160
that is a moment where I was wise enough to say, okay, I'm not going to bang my head against the wall.
00:34:24.760
Let's pivot and see what we can do with that. Yeah. I love that example. Uh, and I want to say
00:34:29.640
two things. Number one is you mentioned learning, which is so important, right? So for a failed
00:34:35.960
experiment, it's so important to look back because it's not a waste of time, but you're going to learn
00:34:40.560
and failure is never a waste if you learn something from it. So you're looking, we can look back on a
00:34:45.280
failed experiment and say, like the subject matter wasn't right, but I love podcasting. What a valuable
00:34:50.120
lesson to learn. And then to bring to your, your next thing. Like same for me, the putting together
00:34:55.760
the online course and the coaching program taught me invaluable lessons in copywriting and marketing,
00:35:01.360
which I didn't know anything about beforehand. And I could take that, then apply it to the marketing
00:35:06.420
of my book now and like marketing and my keynotes. Uh, so that mindset of learning and looking back and
00:35:11.540
on failures with that, uh, learning lenses is really, really important. Um, and I forgot the
00:35:19.700
second thing I was going to say, so we'll leave it at that, but yeah, but that's a really important
00:35:24.260
reflective lens. Man, let me step away from that conversation very, very quickly. We'll get back
00:35:29.600
to it in a minute. Um, I told you that I was going to tell you a little bit more about the iron
00:35:32.720
council. We are shutting it down soon. Enrollment that is not the iron council, but enrollment into the
00:35:38.260
iron council. So if you're interested in banding with other incredible men who want to, as I said
00:35:44.060
earlier, fight in this battle of life alongside you, then make sure to join as soon as possible.
00:35:49.980
Look, life is hard at times. It's challenging. And without men in your corner to help you navigate
00:35:55.220
the difficulties of life, you're frankly, you're making it harder than it needs to be. So don't make
00:36:01.780
yourself into a martyr. You don't have to sacrifice yourself on this, this altar of life,
00:36:07.680
rise up against whatever you're dealing with and against also what society claims about men
00:36:13.520
and make yourself into something more. We have the tools, the systems, the frameworks,
00:36:18.980
the network, all of the things that you need to help you do just that. And all it takes is for you
00:36:23.800
to join us, band with us and get yourself in the game with other men who are in this fight with
00:36:28.980
you. You can do that at order of man.com slash iron council. Again, that's order of man.com
00:36:34.920
slash iron council. Do that right after the show, because we are shutting down registration,
00:36:39.080
but for now we'll get back to it with those on. I I'm actually really glad that you use the term
00:36:45.180
failure. And in a couple of times, as you were sharing some of your stories, you said, I failed
00:36:48.540
at that. And, and I already know people on it like, well, you didn't fail because you learned. I'm like,
00:36:53.660
well, you learned, but you also failed. And I think that's okay. It's so strange to me that we have
00:37:00.100
this infatuation with trying to reframe what happened to fit and make ourselves feel more
00:37:05.680
comfortable about it. And so we give failure more weight than it deserves by renaming it something,
00:37:13.260
by changing it to first attempt in learning. No, you failed, which means you did not achieve your
00:37:19.200
objective. That's all it means, right? It's not final. It's not the end. It doesn't mean you're an
00:37:24.100
idiot. It doesn't mean you're less than or unworthy of success. It just means you did not achieve your
00:37:29.580
objective. Good. Now, what are you going to do? That's it. Exactly. We need to take this concept
00:37:35.300
of failure off of this scary pedestal that we put it on and just realize, yeah, failure is part of life
00:37:40.220
and take your lumps, learn from them, and then do something better next time. Yeah. And if you look
00:37:46.720
across human history, every single breakthrough is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Meaning it goes
00:37:55.000
like this. It's try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, succeed. That's it. That's been my life. It's just
00:38:04.220
a series of trials and failures. And then something will succeed. And I'll double down on that. I'll
00:38:10.700
lean into that. And then once I stop learning and growing, I go doing something else. And the cycle
00:38:17.160
repeats itself, right? Try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, succeed. I think part of the reason why,
00:38:23.140
and this is the other thing that I was going to say that came back, part of the reason why people
00:38:28.780
are afraid of failure is because of comparison to their role models and idols. So someone can look
00:38:37.520
at the podcast you built, Brian, and be really intimidated by that, right? And say like, there's
00:38:43.880
no way I can have the same audience that he has or record 400 plus episodes like he did. But they're
00:38:50.560
comparing your ends to their beginning. Like they're just starting out and not realizing that
00:38:57.260
they took you a really long time to get to where you are. And you had this other podcast before that
00:39:01.720
failed. That didn't work. And then you pivoted. And so people aren't seeing this, especially this
00:39:06.960
day and age where we're seeing curated, perfect portrayals of people's deeply imperfect lives.
00:39:12.800
People aren't seeing the earlier versions, the, you know, the earlier versions of that standup
00:39:18.840
comedy routine that would make, that will like get booze from the audience or like with Awaken Your
00:39:25.180
Genius. Like I, this went through, this is two years of work distilled into 200 pages and it's been
00:39:32.300
edited and edited and edited by several capable hands over and over again. You're seeing the final
00:39:38.300
product, not the earlier versions that would make any self-respecting writer cringe. Um, so I think
00:39:44.260
it's important for people to talk about the failures they've had in their lives and to open up just so
00:39:48.480
people can realize, look, it, it takes a really long time to get here. Uh, and you can't compare where
00:39:54.800
you're beginning with where you are now, Ryan, or where I am as a writer. Um, the, you know, if you've
00:40:01.440
ever seen a, a rocket take off in like the first 60 seconds, it looks like nothing is happening,
00:40:09.280
right? It's like, you're, there's immense thrust, but the rocket is barely moving at like the first
00:40:16.580
minute. It's like barely moving. And so if you look, if you took a snapshot of that, you might
00:40:20.220
think the rocket is going to fail. Like there's no way this thing is going to launch out of the
00:40:24.480
atmosphere, but progress becomes visible only when you zoom out and you see the rocket's trajectory.
00:40:28.660
And so I think at the beginning, things are going to feel hard and heavy because they are heavy.
00:40:35.040
Like you're just starting out now and you're going to have a lot of failures and, uh, you can't
00:40:40.180
compare yourselves to, to rockets that have already achieved escape velocity. You're just starting out.
00:40:45.820
It's just physics. It's just physics. Uh, you know, in addition to that, I would add one more thing to
00:40:51.700
that. You said you're comparing your beginning to somebody else's end. I also think you're comparing
00:40:56.120
your beginning to somebody's inaccurate representation of their current reality.
00:41:02.580
You know, people are, people are making for, for this podcast. I already know, uh, because people
00:41:08.280
message me and, and, and I know that their interpretation is that I have things all figured
00:41:11.940
out and that everything is seamless. And you know, I've got the, the, the golden touch, everything I
00:41:17.800
touch turns to gold. And then if you look at just a little bit deeper, like look, look at where I'm
00:41:23.500
podcasting. Like I've, like I've got this white wall, like that outlet is open. Like this is not
00:41:28.440
ideal. Right. And it's not as clean as everybody thinks it is or makes it out to be. And I think it
00:41:35.240
is important that we realize when we're looking around that we're seeing an inaccurate representation
00:41:41.840
of where people are. I think it's good to look at what other people are doing. So you can create
00:41:47.100
some possibility and hope in your mind. But if you're trying to compare your worth or the way you're
00:41:52.560
doing it to somebody else, it is just inaccurate on all fronts.
00:41:57.780
Absolutely. And I think social media has exacerbated that trend because it reduces the
00:42:03.900
distance between you and your idols. And so, as you said, Ryan, not only are you comparing your
00:42:08.760
beginning to someone's end, but you're actually comparing it to someone's inaccurate representation
00:42:12.860
of the end that you're being exposed to over and over and over again. You know, every time you
00:42:18.100
pull up Instagram, you're seeing that inaccurate representation. And so then it's creating this
00:42:23.320
message in your mind of like, oh, like they've got it all figured out. Everything they touch
00:42:27.660
turns to gold. There is no way I can have what they're having. And so one of the things I talk
00:42:33.120
about in the book is I call detox, but really being intentional about what you expose yourself
00:42:39.580
to, the frequency with which you expose yourself to it, social media being one of them. And like,
00:42:47.420
from my perspective, it's not because of, I'm not active on social media. I do have a social media
00:42:53.000
profile, but I just don't post anything. And it's not because of discipline that I figured out like,
00:42:59.460
okay, this isn't, this isn't, I'm going to stop myself from doing this. It's by being aware that
00:43:05.780
anytime I go on Twitter, it makes me neurotic or anytime I go on Facebook, it makes me feel like
00:43:13.680
I'm reliving the worst parts of middle school or like Instagram usually makes me feel less than.
00:43:20.740
And so if you do an experiment and say, okay, like pause this conversation for 10 minutes,
00:43:25.800
go check your favorite sources of distraction and then come back. How do you actually feel like
00:43:31.220
check in with yourself and how do you feel? Do you feel alive and excited and energized or are you
00:43:37.720
feeling this low level stress and anxiety that's like lurking in the background? And in many cases,
00:43:45.140
that's what happens with me. And so knowing that that's going to be the effect of me reaching for
00:43:49.720
my smartphone and scrolling for a half hour, it just becomes easier to dial down and focus your
00:43:57.220
attention on what actually matters. Look, before you said that, I was going to say the exact same
00:44:03.840
thing. I've been a lot less active specifically on, on Instagram is where I spend a lot of my social
00:44:08.540
media time, but I've been a lot less active and I didn't realize how crummy I feel by scrolling
00:44:14.820
through Instagram because I was doing it every day, all day. And because I do it less and some days I
00:44:20.080
don't, yesterday, I don't even think I got on there at all. I do it less. And so I noticed that when I do
00:44:26.060
actually get on social media very quickly, anxiety goes up, comparison goes up. I feel
00:44:33.500
like I'm not accomplishing things. Um, I feel less than all because of this little device that,
00:44:42.200
that we are conditioned to use. And I didn't even know how horrible it was. You know, it's, it's,
00:44:48.280
it's like somebody, uh, not drinking alcohol, you know, they, they drink and they drink and they drink
00:44:53.740
and they drink and they get so accustomed to it. They stop drinking and they go have another drink
00:44:56.980
and they're like, that is horrible. Right? Yeah. It's poison. And the only way that you can realize
00:45:04.040
how horrible it is, is to detox from it for a while because you become accustomed to feeling
00:45:10.480
horrible. And you think, well, this is just life. This is just how people feel. No, it's not normal.
00:45:16.020
You should not feel like that. Something is making you feel like that. And in this case,
00:45:19.700
social media is, is the culprit. Yeah, exactly. And also ask yourself, like when I reach for my
00:45:27.280
smartphone, it's usually because like, what, what am I trying to do? What need am I trying to fulfill?
00:45:33.780
And it's usually some unmet desire for excitement, adventure, novelty, like something that,
00:45:40.560
that I can be, yeah, excited about or, or energized by it. Not only does social media not
00:45:48.280
fulfill those desires, it ends up making you feel worse, but it also means that you're actually not
00:45:54.180
finding healthy sources of excitement and adventure in your life. Like if you could set, if you say,
00:46:00.200
okay, I have this unmet need for adventure and excitement. It's not being fulfilled by social
00:46:05.700
media. It's actually making me feel worse than before. How do I actually fulfill those needs? Like,
00:46:10.520
what can I do with my life to add more excitement and adventure into it? Like what hobbies can I pick up?
00:46:15.480
Where can I travel to? Or maybe it's because the career path you picked isn't no longer the right
00:46:20.340
one for you or wasn't the right one for you from the start. What else can I do with my life?
00:46:24.620
But you end up beginning to ask yourself those questions. Once you realize that you've got these
00:46:29.160
unmet needs, social media isn't filling them. So then you can now go and say, okay, I want to do
00:46:34.640
something else to, to fulfill those needs. Yeah. One of the things that is for me, I think you're right.
00:46:39.780
One of the things I've identified is it's a really nice form of escapism for me. Yeah. You know, I
00:46:45.840
might, I might be having a difficult day or, you know, things aren't working the way I'd like them
00:46:51.380
to in certain areas of my life. And so rather than just addressing those issues correctly in a healthy
00:46:56.980
environment and way, like, let me just zone out here, you know? And so you get on social media and
00:47:03.620
you're like, okay, cool. And then you come back and you realize the problems are worse than when you left
00:47:07.480
them because you never addressed them in the right way. And I've caught myself wondering, man,
00:47:12.140
if I'm trying to escape from my current reality, you know, what is so bad about my life that makes
00:47:18.500
me feel like I have to escape from, and the answer isn't to escape. The answer is to change my life.
00:47:25.080
So I don't feel like I have to escape from it. Yeah. You know, but that takes, that takes work and
00:47:30.580
effort though. I don't, I want to be lazy. For sure. And if you look, and if you do want to be
00:47:37.180
lazy, it can be as simple as, you know, like for me, sometimes it's not that I want to escape my
00:47:42.540
life. It's that like, I've been looking at my computer for the past two hours and I need an
00:47:48.240
escape. And the escape isn't like picking up a smartphone and scrolling through it is not an
00:47:53.000
escape from that. Right. I'm like, I'm looking at another screen. Yeah. Yeah. We're fortunate to
00:47:58.580
live in the woods and we have a hot tub outside. And so the thing I do now for escape is to go walk
00:48:03.520
outside, uh, for, you know, half an hour into the woods, listen to the birds, take in the trees,
00:48:09.220
take in nature, or go sit in my hot tub, you know, no, no audio book, nothing. It's just me and my
00:48:14.660
thoughts and just like breathing in the fresh air, taking in the surroundings. And that is for me an
00:48:21.060
escape. And it's a small one, but man, like I feel so much more energized or going and working out.
00:48:27.040
I feel so much more energized doing that escape than, than the escape that is really not an escape
00:48:33.820
into your smartphone. Yeah. Well, that, that segues nice into what I want to do address. You've
00:48:38.820
got, you've got five, I think five different parts of this book, maybe six, I can't remember right
00:48:43.140
offhand. And, and we've talked a lot about the death, but there was another section that really
00:48:47.860
intrigued me. And that was this concept of the inner journey. Because again, I think a lot of books
00:48:53.220
and information out there is focused on the external, which you do talk about as well.
00:48:57.520
It's like, you know, change your environment, go work out, lose weight, have that difficult
00:49:02.720
conversation, go, go try jujitsu, which is something people make fun of. Cause, cause I say it quite
00:49:07.160
often and, and there's truth to all of that, but at some point you can only change the external so much.
00:49:14.300
And then you're just running around, running away from things when there's some deeper work that needs
00:49:20.420
to be done. So will you talk about what that inner journey looks like and why it's important?
00:49:25.340
Yeah. Um, let me, let me begin that answer with a story that I tell in the book about Johnny Cash.
00:49:34.900
Uh, so in 1954, Johnny Cash walks into the audition room at some records. And at the time he's a nobody,
00:49:41.960
he's like playing gospel songs at night with two of his friends, but his main job is to sell
00:49:46.800
appliances door to door. He's broke his marriages and ruins. And so he walks into the audition room
00:49:52.760
and he picks a gospel song for his audition because that's what he knows best. And in 1954,
00:49:58.240
gospel was all the rage. So everyone else is, everyone else around them is singing gospel.
00:50:03.080
The audition doesn't go as he plans. So as he begins to sing this dreary gospel song,
00:50:08.640
the record label owner, uh, Sam Phillips pretends to be interested for about 20 seconds before
00:50:14.180
interrupting Cash. And he says, we've already heard that song a hundred times, just like that.
00:50:21.980
Just like how you sang it. The song he says is the same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day
00:50:27.480
about your peace within and how it's real and how you're going to shout it.
00:50:31.760
He looks at Cash and he says, sing something different. Like sing something real, sing something
00:50:39.380
you felt because that's the kind of song that people want to hear. That's the kind of song
00:50:44.640
that truly saves people. He says, it's got nothing to do with believing in God. It has to do with
00:50:50.220
believing in yourself. And that rant, Joel's Cash out of his conformist, let me sing you some good
00:50:56.520
old gospel attitude. He collects himself. He starts strumming his guitar and he starts playing the
00:51:03.460
Folsom Prison Blues and that deep, distinctive voice of his. And in that moment, he stops trying
00:51:09.880
to become a gospel singer and he becomes Johnny Cash. All because he rejects the tendency to conform,
00:51:18.240
to copy and paste what all the gospel singers are doing. He goes on in this inner journey and pulls
00:51:24.320
out this genius within him that had been waiting to be awakened, which is the Folsom Prison Blues.
00:51:28.980
Um, and most of us wouldn't dare do what he did and did in that audition room, right? Because we're
00:51:34.720
like following the herd makes it safe. Would rather fail collectively singing the same gospel song that
00:51:39.840
everybody else is singing than risk failing individually. Um, so that, I think that's why
00:51:45.240
it's so important. We all have this wisdom within us, this genius within us waiting to be awakened.
00:51:51.040
And if you don't claim your own Folsom Prison Blues, nobody else can. Like that is going to be lost both
00:51:57.100
to you and to the world. And the other part of it is we notice things because of contrast, right? So
00:52:05.540
something stands out because it's different from what surrounds it. If there is no contrast,
00:52:11.680
no anomaly, no fingerprints, no idiosyncrasy, you become invisible. You become the background.
00:52:19.580
Um, it's only by figuring out what your useful idiosyncrasies are, what makes you different
00:52:26.180
in a useful way from other people that you can become extraordinary. Um, and so one of the things
00:52:33.520
that I talk about in that inner journey section is like discovering what those useful idiosyncrasies
00:52:38.900
are for you. Like what are the basic Lego blocks of your talents, interests, and preferences
00:52:45.480
that make you different in a useful way from other people. And that's really hard to do in part because
00:52:52.440
at some point in your life, you were probably shamed for having those differences. And so you'll learn
00:52:59.780
to suppress them, right? So you'll learn to blend into the background. Like what makes you, what makes,
00:53:05.360
what could make you really extraordinary now probably made you weird or different growing up. So you learn
00:53:10.920
to suppress them. You learn to conceal those basic Lego blocks. And so the inner journey is about going
00:53:16.580
back and figuring out what those Lego blocks are so that you can then build yourself, um, in a different
00:53:22.780
way, in a more aligned way from scratch. So one of my, my own basic Lego blocks has been storytelling.
00:53:33.000
You know, ever since I learned how to read and write, I remember, um, getting on my grandfather's
00:53:40.860
old typewriter and I would write stories. I had like started this magazine. I would just sit there
00:53:45.820
and like write screenplays, right. There's actually a typewriter over my shoulder here for that reason
00:53:50.440
to like, remember that, that beginning and that theme, that basic Lego block has been there all along.
00:53:57.220
It's changed ways, like the way I apply it. So as a lawyer, I was telling stories on behalf of my
00:54:02.580
clients. As a law professor, I was teaching these big required first year classes filled with students
00:54:08.200
who didn't want to be in the room. So I had to tell captivating stories to engage them. Now I tell
00:54:13.900
stories as part of my books and like speeches to, to captivate people because we're storytelling
00:54:19.240
creatures. People often remember the story. I like you'll, if you're listening to this, you'll probably
00:54:24.560
remember the Johnny Cash story. You might forget like the principle behind it, but you'll forget,
00:54:29.540
you'll remember the story, which means you'll remember as a result, the, the, the idea behind
00:54:35.020
it. And so the, the way that I create or the recipe has changed over time, but the ingredients
00:54:42.220
storytelling has, has remained the same. So then you can, once you figure out what those
00:54:47.840
Lego blocks are, you can like build different things with it and explore potential futures,
00:54:53.200
Are there some ways that you would suggest somebody do that? Because, you know, I think
00:54:59.380
about the success that we've had. I know that, I know that I'm different. Like I know there's
00:55:06.080
something about the way that we're showing up or our messaging or, or something that I'm
00:55:12.020
doing is working. Cause I look around and I see a lot of similar things that aren't having
00:55:15.700
the same level of success that we are. So I know there's something different, but it's
00:55:20.400
hard to put your finger on. I don't, I don't, I can't tell you what it is. I can't say, well,
00:55:24.560
it's because of this. And I don't, I don't know why it is, but I know that it exists.
00:55:29.220
So how does somebody discover that and start to figure out what those, you call them Lego
00:55:35.400
Yeah. Uh, I talk about a number of different ways in the book, but one of them came to mind.
00:55:39.540
So I'm going to share that, uh, you ask other people, uh, you ask other people who know you.
00:55:45.480
And so if you ask me, Ryan, I mean, and we've only had two conversations, what do you think
00:55:52.740
makes me different? Uh, and I can tell you having done probably hundreds of podcast interviews
00:55:58.320
like this, what makes you different is your honesty, your candor, the way you lean in the
00:56:06.340
way you engage. Uh, like I, I, again, I've done so many interviews, but I remember my conversation
00:56:12.180
with you because of that. Um, and so, and that's my perspective and, you know, different members of
00:56:19.200
your audience might have different reasons for tuning in, but asking other people who have engaged
00:56:24.740
with you before, like, what do you think my, what do you think makes me different? What do you think,
00:56:29.380
what am I bringing in here that others aren't, uh, there'll be a mirror for you. So they'll be able
00:56:35.020
to point out what, what you might miss. And so asking your, your, your friends, your, your partner,
00:56:41.580
your significant other, whatever it might be. Uh, that question is a really powerful way of
00:56:45.860
identifying some of those Lego blocks. Yeah, I think it is interesting. You know, um,
00:56:52.640
years ago I was 18 or 19 years old and I was about to go to basic training and I was training with some
00:56:57.960
of my guys in the national guard before we went to basic training. And one of them gave us some really
00:57:02.000
poignant advice for the situation. And he said, just blend in, you don't want to fall behind.
00:57:09.740
You don't want to pull too far ahead. And that's what I did. And, you know, me and a couple of
00:57:15.080
buddies who got that advice and follow that advice were pretty successful with basic training and in
00:57:18.820
the, in the military in general. And I think that's really good advice. If you, if you want to train
00:57:26.680
people to follow orders and to follow the status quo and to look the same as everybody else,
00:57:32.000
and do it all the same way and standardize the process. I think that's really good advice. If
00:57:36.660
that's what you're after. Uh, but I realized very quickly, I don't want to blend in. Yeah. I don't,
00:57:43.020
I don't want to do it like everybody else. I want to stand out. And the reason I want to stand out
00:57:48.080
is because I want to serve people. You know, you go back to the question about what do you want?
00:57:53.240
I've been thinking about that for myself. Like, I've, I don't know that I've ever asked that
00:57:56.700
or answered that. Uh, and I think as you were saying that the thought that came to me was
00:58:01.760
I want to raise righteous and capable kids and I want to help men with their lives.
00:58:11.160
That's it. Like if I take everything else away, that's what I want to do. And there's a lot of
00:58:14.840
ways that I can go about doing that. And a lot of things I need to do for myself in order to be
00:58:18.680
capable of doing that. But I think if you start with that, then you can start thinking about how
00:58:25.580
you're going to do it differently than everybody else and, and go on a different vein. But there's
00:58:30.020
also a problem. I was going to ask you about this. There's also a challenge in that you can blaze your
00:58:35.300
own path. And I think there's value in that, but also there's the concept of not reinventing the
00:58:40.180
wheel. So how do you justify that, that dichotomy? You know, you think about it in,
00:58:45.660
with physics, it's like, okay, well, there are certain principles that we should follow,
00:58:51.600
but we don't know which ones they are and which ones we can bend the rules a little bit on.
00:58:55.680
Right. Yeah. Yeah. True. I think, you know, it all goes back to experimentation. Try it. Right. So
00:59:02.500
you can say, okay, I'm going to, so let's take your example for podcasts were around when you started
00:59:08.800
your podcast. Right. And so you're taking something that's been done before it, or like for me,
00:59:13.180
books have been around for a long time. So I'm going to write a book, but I'm going to do it in a,
00:59:18.340
the medium is there. And I'm going to pick a medium that people have been, you know, using for
00:59:24.460
thousands of years, but I'm going to do it in a different way. I'm going to do it in a slightly
00:59:30.020
different way. That's true to who I am that leans into my useful idiosyncrasies than other books out
00:59:37.040
there. So this book is actually very different than my last one. The chapters are shorter. There's so
00:59:42.980
much more storytelling in the book. There's actually some poetry in the book too, just
00:59:47.660
because I was like, Oh wow. Like I can make this point with a five line poem. That's going to be
00:59:52.640
so clear, so much more easier to understand than a 10,000 word chapter. I could have said to myself,
00:59:58.760
Oh wow. Like you're not supposed to do that. You're not a poet. You're not this and that. I'm like,
01:00:03.100
you know what? That came up. And it resonated with the, like the reviewers of the book. I was like,
01:00:09.260
yep. That's going to end up in the book, even though that's not what the author of a serious
01:00:15.280
nonfiction book is supposed to do. Uh, so you're blending word counts. Yeah, exactly. Uh, you're
01:00:22.780
blending, you're blending it. You're blending, you're taking what's worked before same medium,
01:00:27.060
but you're adding your own voice, your own genius, your own useful idiosyncrasy to it.
01:00:32.420
Yeah. It's powerful. Well, I wanted to ask you about one other concept because this one really
01:00:37.040
resonated with me and it's in the, the, um, the section of the outer journey and you talk about
01:00:41.980
detecting bullshit. Yes. And I think it's important obviously that we detect it and we know what's
01:00:48.520
real and what isn't in other people, but also in our, in ourselves, because we tend to lie to
01:00:53.440
ourselves. So I'm curious what you say about that. Yeah. Let me begin with the second part first.
01:00:58.660
Uh, so I mentioned, I, you know, I journal on a regular basis when I first started journaling,
01:01:03.960
it was so interesting. I found myself lying to myself. No one else was reading my journal,
01:01:11.400
but going back to your comment of like, for example, reframing failure as something else
01:01:16.340
other than calling it a failure, I would write these curated stories and there were stories
01:01:23.260
about what happened instead of actually telling what happened. Uh, I was fooling myself and Richard
01:01:30.060
Feynman has that quote. I love, he says, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and
01:01:36.040
you are the easiest person to fool. Uh, it's so easy to lie to yourself and to fool yourself.
01:01:41.600
And so I think one is just, Oh, being aware of that tendency. And then just saying, look,
01:01:47.380
my, this is my private account. I'm going to be brutally honest here. Uh, because I'm doing this
01:01:53.060
for my own sake and the only way that I can learn and grow is if I'm being honest with myself,
01:01:59.080
exactly what I'm thinking, writing it down, no curated account, no one else is going to be
01:02:03.460
reading it. So who cares? Uh, so that, that part of it is, is that, and then in terms of detecting
01:02:08.300
bullshit from external sources and the, the, the tendency to not detect bullshit, to just like hit the
01:02:16.800
retweet button, just reading the headline of something has become so common that you will be
01:02:24.880
able to see what other people don't see. You'll be able to discover what other people don't discover.
01:02:31.560
If you begin to exercise some curious skepticism in your life. So I call it curious skepticism for a
01:02:38.120
reason because skepticism by itself isn't enough because it's easy to say that's bullshit. Uh, it's
01:02:45.000
easy to shoot down other people's ideas. It is much harder to exercise skepticism in a more
01:02:50.560
constructive way. And so skeptical curiosity, sort of like acting like a scientist in the world
01:02:57.040
and being open-minded to all ideas, even those that seem wrong or controversial at first
01:03:03.560
and being equally skeptical of them. Um, so what does that look like? I'll give you an example that
01:03:09.600
I also cover in Awaken Your Genius about the, one of the two Mars rovers I worked on. So Opportunity
01:03:15.560
died after over 14 years into its 90 day lifetime. And shortly after it died, a journalist tweeted that
01:03:24.640
the rover's final words were, my battery is low and it's getting dark. So he said, these are the
01:03:32.220
rover's final words and he tweeted it out. Millions of people hit the retweet button, a chorus of media
01:03:39.360
outlets, like published stories about the rover's supposed final transmission, all without pausing,
01:03:47.620
reflecting, bothering to ask, like, how does a remote controlled space robot spit out fully
01:03:53.820
formed English sentences to like tug at people's heartstrings? Uh, and you know what actually the
01:04:00.060
story's false? Uh, what actually happened was at the end of the day, the rover sent a bunch of
01:04:06.080
routine code to earth that reported among other things, the outside light reading and its power
01:04:10.720
levels. And then a journalist who didn't let facts get in the way of a good story, took that random
01:04:16.420
code, a part of that random code, paraphrased it into English and tweeted to the world that these are
01:04:21.260
the rover's final words. Um, so if you are exercising skeptical curiosity, you would read that
01:04:29.860
headline and first of all, click through to the story and ask yourself, like, how does the reporter
01:04:35.920
know what the rover said? And that will lead to additional questions like, well, how does a rover,
01:04:41.660
a Martian rover communicate with earth in the first place? Does it use fully formed English sentences?
01:04:47.200
How do we know what the rover is doing at any moment? And questions like that are guided both by
01:04:53.440
skepticism of the reporter's claim, but more importantly, by curiosity about the underlying truth.
01:04:58.920
Like you're trying to figure out how this thing actually works. And questions like that are going
01:05:03.420
to lead you to places that few other people dare go and reveal gems that few others see.
01:05:10.320
Yeah. I would have assumed that NASA had some AI technology before the rest of us did.
01:05:17.220
You know, their batteries are getting low and that it's getting dark outside.
01:05:22.380
NASA surprisingly is resistant to change in so many ways. And so the computers they're using are,
01:05:28.920
totally outdated. I think they're going to be the last adopters of AI technology.
01:05:34.800
I think that probably happens when you have bloated organizations that don't
01:05:40.540
produce a product on their own, you know? So there's some opportunity for excess, you know,
01:05:50.200
and not changing. So, well, Hey, I've, I've loved this conversation. It's been awesome.
01:05:55.600
Um, I didn't get a chance to read the entire book, but you sent it over to me and I've gone through it.
01:06:00.640
I'm excited now to dig in even more excited than I was previous to our conversation. Uh, why don't
01:06:05.300
you let the guys know where to pick up a copy of the book? I think it's available for pre-order now
01:06:10.340
it's going to be out in the next week or two, and then where to connect with you to learn more about
01:06:13.740
yourself and what you're doing. Yeah, exactly. So the book comes out on April 11th. Um, so it'll be out in
01:06:19.660
about two weeks from when this conversation is released, but if you order it now, if you go over
01:06:24.480
to geniusbook.net, you will be able to, when you pre-order it from that link, you'll be able to get
01:06:32.500
a special bonus. It's a mini video course course with 10 life-changing insights from the book that
01:06:39.520
you can watch in less than 30 minutes. And you'll be able to apply those insights in your life right
01:06:44.140
away. So you can get that by heading over to geniusbook.net. And if you'd like to keep in
01:06:50.060
touch with me, uh, as I said, I'm not active on social media. So the only way to do that is through
01:06:55.080
my email list. I have an email that goes out every Thursday to over 45,000 people. And it shares one
01:07:02.060
big idea that you can read in three minutes or less. And you can sign up for that in one of two ways.
01:07:07.920
Either you can text my first name, O-Z-A-N, Ozan, to 55444, or you can head over to my website,
01:07:17.280
which is ozanvarol.com. So that's O-Z-A-N, V as a vector, A-R-O-L.com.
01:07:24.460
Excellent. We'll sync it all up. Ozan, I appreciate our conversations and your insight. I'm going to
01:07:29.060
apply a lot of this. I'm going to go back and listen to this one. Not, not only because I like
01:07:32.620
the sound of my own voice, but because there's actually some information in here that I need to go
01:07:36.920
into a little bit deeper and apply in my own life. So I appreciate you. Thanks for joining
01:07:41.760
me again. Yeah. Thank you so much, Ryan, for having me back. Always a pleasure chatting with you.
01:07:46.960
There you go, guys. My conversation with the one and only Ozan Varol. I hope you enjoyed it.
01:07:51.260
I really, really enjoyed my first conversation with him. And when he reached out about his newest book,
01:07:55.900
I thought, man, because I enjoyed that conversation so much, I wanted to have him back on. So I hope
01:08:01.860
you'll pick up a copy of the book. As I said in the interview at the time of the recording,
01:08:05.660
I hadn't read it, but it is an incredible book. I did go through as much as I could before our
01:08:11.420
conversation. And I knew based on his previous works that it would be powerful and it is powerful.
01:08:16.660
So pick up a copy of the book, connect with him on the gram, take a snapshot right now, real quick of,
01:08:22.700
of you listening to this podcast on your phone or wherever you're listening, post it up on,
01:08:27.600
on Instagram, tag me, tag Ozan, let guys know what you're listening to. And then take a look at the
01:08:32.840
iron council. Again, if it's not for you, no worries, but it might be. And if you've been
01:08:36.920
on the fence or don't know what it is, or haven't heard about it and head to order a man.com slash
01:08:41.400
iron council to learn more, watch a quick video and see if it's a good fit for you. I think that
01:08:46.760
it will be, but I'll leave that to you. All right, guys, uh, we'll be back, uh, tomorrow for our
01:08:53.060
asking anything until then go out there, take action, become the man you are meant to be.
01:08:57.940
Thank you for listening to the order of man podcast. You're ready to take charge of your
01:09:02.060
life and be more of the man you were meant to be. We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.