S1E60 · Wallace + Coop talk about things: Books, Binaural Beats, Learning, Psychedelics and other stuff

Hey squad, welcome to podcast day, week 60 of the Virtus Performance Podcast. Before I get stuck into today's episode, I'm sitting here with my good friend Simon Cooper. We've got some binaural beats, study music on in the background, if anyone sits down and reads or works or studies for an extended period of time and you're not getting on the binaural beats, then I would highly recommend it. Today's episode we're basically going to sit down, have a chat, talk some rubbish, a bit of a shoot the ship podcast, we don't really have a plan or direction, we're just going to talk about some stuff that's been happening.

If you enjoyed this episode or you have been enjoying these kind of random thoughts episodes in the past, please let us know, give us some feedback, throw some topics at us, we'll attack them and have a crack and see if we can learn some stuff. Without further ado, let's get stuck in. My personal and business goal is to be just a little bit better every day. I believe everyone, especially normal people, have a story to tell. The Virtus podcast exists to help us all find small ways of consistent improvement by discussing the journey and experiences of each of our guests.

Hey, how are you mate? G'day. What's happening? How are you? Good mate, very very good. It's been a pretty cruisey day. It has, it has. Up in Sydney. What are we here for? So we are here for a mastermind event, sort of like a conference being run by our business coaches, our mentors at the Alchemy Institute. If you're a business owner or gym owner, get around them, they've helped significantly. So just a week, a couple of days of learning, meeting some cool people, and just filling our club I guess. Yeah. Do some stuff for us.

Yeah, it's a good chance to, someone asked me the other day why I feel I get so much benefit out of these couple of days and I was thinking that it's because I get to get out of our normal environment and get out of our echo chamber and out of the normality that is work, even though I'm spending two days kind of deep into thinking and talking about work. It's kind of, it's a whole different environment and I'm in a whole different mindset. Yeah, it's a different perspective, I suppose, taking a step out of the

business and looking at it almost objectively and seeing what areas we can work on, what needs improvement, what are some things that we can start to implement to improve the experience of everyone in the gym and I guess add more value. Yeah, and I think it's, I don't know, it's kind of important for me to identify how much I actually enjoy being out of the environment, like, don't get me wrong, love the environment, but it's really easy for us to get stuck into the rat race, for lack of a better term, or the cycle of

waking up, doing your thing, going to work, getting home, having dinner, doing whatever you're doing and going to bed and then repeat, especially this time of the year, middle of winter, it's cold and everyone's not quite as happy as they usually are because there's no vitamin D, so you get stuck into that. Sun just makes everything better, right? The sun does make everything better. If you're not having your vitamin D supplements, get on it, probably important this time of the year. Need you, need you, Phil. Yeah, totally. Yeah, and we're sort of coming into the

time where we're starting to think about what's next for, leading into the warm weather, leading to summer, days are getting a bit longer, I suppose. Yeah, we're almost at the stage, like with work, with Virtus, where it's like, well shit, what's next? One of the areas of my life I'm really trying to put a lot of thought into is kind of being really happy with where I'm at, which I am, but also thriving for more and figure out what that actually is and what that looks like. And for me, that more isn't necessarily more things or more money or anything like that.

It's all around more connection, more fulfillment, more freedom to kind of spend the days and the weeks kind of doing things that do fill my cup like this, and it's really interesting talking to some of the other business owners that are real fresh in their business and maybe don't have a team behind them or things like that, and they've always had to shut the doors for two days to come up to Sydney, so we're in a pretty fortunate position that Mitch, Jess and Cam and Katie and Mum and the others are all able to get the ship afloat while we're up here.

Definitely. It's funny being in there and I still consider Virtus a young business and we're still growing and we're still kind of finding our feet, but talking to some of these guys who are something like one of these guys we met today, he hadn't even opened his doors yet. Yeah, it's insane. So it's funny talking to these guys and they're asking us for our opinions and what our thoughts are on certain things that they consider maybe us as experts at. Which is a scary thing to comprehend, but I guess very quickly you go from being a new business, which is maybe zero to six months old.

I still feel like we're a new business as well, but now we're coming up on three years in October and Mum sent me a photo from two years ago today and she just sent me the photo and didn't say anything. I said, "Yeah, that's gone quick," and she said, "That's exactly what I was thinking." It's pretty cool to look back like that. What has the biggest couple of changes been since maybe that one year mark, coming up to this three year mark, let's say in the business end for you personally? The biggest change is it feels like it's gone like that.

It feels like it was two days ago. I still remember our first birthday party and little things like that. Biggest changes, I think, is just the importance for me of ... I feel like I'm an adult now. It's a weird way of putting it, but when we hit that first year, a couple of weeks before our first birthday party, I moved into our first house with KP, which we're still living in. There you go, two years and we've upgraded the laundry almost, so we're getting there. Huzzah! Huzzah! I went into that, obviously became a sole director and had to run the team and made the decision 12 months on to move away from VFL footy.

It's been two years of making, not necessarily the easy decision, but the hard decision that I know are right, and trying ... I'm always going to fuck around and be a kid and take the piss out of most of the things I do, but trying to take that more ... I don't know if mature is the right word, but more calculated approach with a lot of things. I think it's definitely a mature thing to see something as something that you really want to do, but saying no, taking a step back and doing what's best for not just yourself, but for the business and the employees and the members in the business.

Yeah. Yeah, well that's it. I guess I've had the responsibility at the start, but it was more all around like, "Oh, let's have a crack. Whatever happens, happens." Yeah. If we fuck up and it doesn't work, then we've lost a bit of money, but that's it, but now all of the decisions that we make are ultimately the responsibility of having 10 staff whose livelihood rests on Virtus in certain ways, shapes, or different ways. Then you've got 100 or so consistent clients that I guess rely on us to provide a service which hopefully is the best part of their day, and then to have to deal with all of the extra added pressures ...

I don't know if pressure is the right word, just extra things that you've got to deal with, like paying a mortgage and maintaining a relationship and- Yeah, all the life stuff. ... friendships and all of those kind of things, it adds up pretty quick. I'm the last person that's ever going to say there's not enough time in the day because everyone gets 168 hours, but it's ... or a day, a week. In a week. In a week. Yeah. But I think it's really easy to get stuck into that mindset and start the poor me kind

of thing rather than it's just, "I've got these hours and I've got all of the situations that will be presented with me each day, and it's just how I deal with it that will determine where I get to." There's definitely a lot more planning now, a lot more strategy and trying to identify, "Okay, this is where we've been, this is where we are now, and this is where we want to get to." Yeah. Which is the exciting stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Going through some of the numbers stuff today. Yeah. It's kind of like tracking where we're at six, 12 months ago and where we're at now, being able to see decent growth, which is a cool thing.

Sure. I'm definitely not a numbers person, but being able to look at those numbers and go, "Oh, cool." I can see trends with when I had a week off to do something like this or if I had my big trip where I had seven weeks off, how it affected the business and what kind of levers next time. If I was to do something similar, I might need a push or pull to mitigate some of those changes. Yeah, definitely. I think that's things that we can start planning for moving forward, anticipating the ups and downs of memberships and cash flow and all that other business stuff.

Yeah. I just put it in my brain. It's like in the business stuff. I was like, "What do you do with your day?" I'm like, "Well, I coach in the mornings. I go have coffee and then I deal with the business stuff for a couple of hours and then I might edit some podcasts, upload some podcast stuff." I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean by the business stuff?" I'm like, "I don't know. I'm going to do spreadsheets and numbers and profit and loss and payroll and tax, all that stuff." Yeah. I know. It's really interesting to see how my ...

My days have changed slightly, but it's more around what my intention is for that day. I've kind of felt personally I've been a little bit of a slump for the last maybe five, six weeks without really realizing it or without it being a big slump. It was just kind of like I find that most of the time I find it really easy to sit down and talk about what's going well, what's not, where are we headed, what do we want to get to. Yeah. Over the last couple of weeks, I've just been like, "No, I don't really know what I need to do."

Yeah. I think that ... I find that sometimes. I like assessing what's gone well, assessing what hasn't been done, been gone well. I like looking forward and creating strategy and looking at the vision and discussing ways in which we can add value and decide where we want to be in 12 months, but it's the present which we sometimes almost neglect. We strategize and plan as much as we want, but if we're not like ticking the legs over day to day, if we're not doing the small things that are going to get us to where we want to be, then it's not going to happen.

They're just like those little filly cup things, right? Yeah. Even work, work-wise, if I'm not creating content to put on the blog or if I'm not posting things in the Virtus family, then that stuff's just not going to get done, which is a simple thing to say. If I don't do it, it's not going to get done. Yeah, of course, but that means we're not going to be growing and moving forward. Yeah, and it's one of Drew who was presenting today, one of his things he says, which is one of my favorites, is it's really easy to do it, but it's really easy not to.

It's like with all of those little areas of our life, whether it's been that extra little bit of time with KP or that two minutes before I leave the house in the morning making the bed or cleaning up the desk or whatever it is after a meeting, it's really easy to do it, but it's really easy not to. When you get stuck in the habit of not doing it, it becomes easier and easier to not do it and it becomes harder and harder to actually do it. I caught myself the other day, I was about to walk out of our room, and I noticed the bed wasn't made.

I was like, "Oh, the bed's not made. It's fine." I was about to walk out the door and I was like, "No, go to the bed. You did it? Yeah, of course I did. This is like the small standards that you need to uphold. You can uphold the standards every day for a year and then not do it for a week and you've kind of fallen off the wagon. It's a really simple thing. One of the things I maybe do once a week is make the bed because I'm up early. I'll jump out of bed, tuck KP in and leave and then Sundays might be the day where KP is up before me or a Thursday.

Actually, it's always Thursday because that's my sleeping day where I'll get up maybe half an hour, an hour after KP. Thursday night, I'm all, "You didn't make the bed again." I'm like, "Shit, I've got to sort that out." Gosh darn it. It's one of those, what's the opposite of habit? It's a non-habit because I don't do it often, I forget about it. I'm sure there's a technical term. But on that little wins and goal setting thing, one of the things we try and celebrate with our clients is the importance of setting those little wins and little goals.

I know you just read the book The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, which a bunch of people have suggested to it. What was the main, we watched a couple of little YouTube videos on that last night. What was your main takeaway from that book? I'll give you a brief rundown of what it was about first. I'll give you my biggest takeaway. Actually, I'll give you a bit of a context as well. I finished reading Sapiens, another fantastic book. Shout out. Don't have a shout out, but we're in Sydney. Damn it. I finished reading Sapiens, which

is all about, it's a brief history of mankind from when we evolved from apes to the present time and about how culture evolved and we introduced money and language and religion and all these different factors that define our society now. That was about how culture was developed. The Code of the Extraordinary Mind was about how to break free of these old, these old dogmatic beliefs that are essentially not valid anymore or they're just not, what's the word I'm trying to, they're extinct. So these, it's about how to form your own beliefs, tread your own path. It's fantastic.

It goes through about how to set goals the right way, about how to not attach your happiness to goals, about how to not delay happiness. This is about how to not, that video was talking about how to not attach your happiness to like big audacious goals, but attach your happiness to like little achievable goals, right? And almost attach your happiness to the feelings that these goals bring. That's not the physical goal itself. Like if I wanted to, my goal is to own a Ferrari. I'm not going to attach my happiness to own the Ferrari. I want to attach my happiness to the feeling of accomplishment of earning it.

And that can be brought about in other ways, not just by owning the Ferrari. It can be like buying a new book or like earning something else. What makes you feel like most accomplished? Like day to day, like I don't mean, you know, 30 years when you've got a family and you've got lots of little coops and little salians running around. Shout out to him. I think doing what I set out to do or achieving what I set out to accomplish or achieve that day. I've got my, so every day I do my journaling in the morning.

I set out my minimums, which are my minimum expectations or standards that I want to accomplish every day. And these are just small things that I know that if I tick that box, then it will mean I'm moving towards being the best version of myself that day. So drinking three litres of water, eating three good quality meals, having a cold shower in the morning, journaling, all this little stuff, which by the end of the day, if I've ticked off, usually I probably tick off about six or seven. If I know that I've done that, then that's a win for me.

If you don't hit all of them, do you feel like you've failed or you just like, do you feel like... I don't feel like I've failed. I mean, if I hit all 10, that's a perfect day. And that means that I've taken time out of my day to hit all these things. So what's a win for you? Is it six, seven? To be honest, I don't even set a win or a loss to these. It's just these are the things that made me to do. If I don't hit them, that's fine. Because some days I'm not going to hit them.

Some days, if I'm flat out at uni or if I'm flat out working, then I might not have the opportunity to have a good quality lunch or I might not have time to have a nap if I've not slept very well the night before. And someone that we both follow, Alex Schaffen, calls that failing gracefully. And that's setting these big goals and falling short of them, but being okay with it. And normally I'm not okay with that, I suppose. I want to achieve the things that I set out to achieve. You're okay with it on those daily goals.

These daily things are just little things that are bonuses nearly. That failing gracefully thing, it's something I've resonated with really heavily because it's a little area of my life that I always overshoot or I overset goals. So I always try to do too much in too short of time. Say I want to grow Alberta's family by 50 members over the next six months, where in 50 members, six months, there's a lot of new members. But if I can help improve all the members we've got, then add two a month for the next six months, then there's well over 50 members that we're looking after.

And then that's much more achievable one. And it's not like I'm lowering my standards, we're still helping just as many people. But it's making sure that the way I talk to myself around that goal is positive and it's going to reinforce that positive behavior. Or it's like, I want to read 100 books this year, but I get through 60, I've failed because I'm 40 books short. But if I set it as, even though I'm 40 books short, I've still read 60 books. But I'm probably not going to feel as good as if I said, you know what, I'm going to read 40 books this year.

And then hit 60, like, that was a cool year. That's actually one of the goals. So when I was away, I was in Bali recently. And it was sort of a good opportunity for me to reassess on the goals that I set out at the start of the year, sort of midway through 2018, thought I would just sort of assess where I was at and reset any goals that I needed to. And reading books is actually one of them. I wanted to, I think I wanted to hit 26 books, so one every two weeks. And I think I was just short of halfway there, but realized that I wasn't going to hit it.

And that made me reassess. I'm a bit lower. And I'm still going to try and hit that 26. But if I don't, then that's fine. Picture books, mate. Just load up on like, the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar. It's a classic. The Rainbow Fish, I think it's called. That was a pretty good one. Spot. Rainbow Serpent, I'm thinking. There's a Rainbow Fish one, isn't there? What else we got? Those are all the picture books in my memory at the moment. I wanted to dig out the... When did you start, like, when did you start loving reading? I loved reading primary school.

Because I know you froth on it now. Yeah, I used to froth on it big time. Like, I would get home from school and sit on the couch. This is like Harry Potter era. Sit on the couch and just read until dinnertime, and then go to bed and read more. And then probably when I started uni, I sort of lost... Well, maybe even like, towards the end of high school. So maybe, I didn't lose the love for it, but I just lost the routine of reading regularly. And I think with uni as well, we're always reading and studying for uni.

For another purpose, yeah. Yeah, so it's not... Takes the fun out of it, maybe a little bit. But probably in England, I... Did you go to England? Yeah, I went to England. Look, that's another story for another time. But I sort of found a love for it again, loaded up on a few books. And then coming back here as well, with you obviously diving in, has been a big catalyst as well. Yeah, I've got that addictive personality where I like something and then decide to do all of it. Yeah. Let's... Do all the books. Yeah. Let's hope I never, never jumped onto heroin because I'm in trouble.

Shit. But I think, yeah, I don't know. The book thing is kind of interesting because I felt like fell out of love with it for a long period of time. And then I... Actually, I probably... I reckon when I was maybe early... I was about to say like early before teens. What's that when you're like five to ten? Five to ten. Yeah. Late single digits. When I was late single digits, back in the day. Is there even a word for that? No, I don't know. I think I'm making stuff up. I need to read more books.

But I remember Nana got me onto... Oh, like she was an English teacher, or is, or was. She's a teacher. So she had a heap of books at her place and every time we'd go visit her and Pa, she'd either give us a couple or we'd read them. And that's kind of like my earliest memory of loving books. I can remember Enid Blyton books I used to love when I was a kid. The Faraway Tree? Faraway Tree, yeah. Actually, one of my earliest memories of reading was in grade two. So our teacher would read The Faraway Tree.

That's cool. In front of us. And then, because I love reading so much, I volunteered to get up and read in front of the class. Oh, what a kid. Yeah. Nerd. That was... Teacher's Perks. That's super cool, though. But yeah, that's like one of my earliest memories of reading and like being comfortable reading and just like voluntarily getting up and doing it. Yeah, and I was... Like when I was a kid, I was always really good at English. Like I don't know whether I would have been anyway, but it was like, apart from PE, it was always my favorite subject.

Yeah. Like English and... Throughout high school. Throughout primary school and high school. Cool. And I reckon that's because I used to read so much when I was a kid. So you just... Like comprehension comes to you naturally when you're reading at every extra second that you have. Yeah. And then in high school, we obviously had the books we had to read and I did like advanced English and all that kind of stuff. But it probably wasn't until a couple of years ago where I'm like, "I'm going to get back into reading," bought a couple of books, never read them.

And then, I don't know, something just clicked. At the end of last year, I was just like... Maybe, yeah, middle of the end of last year, I was just like, "Got to start reading again." Do you know what it was that made you... I don't know. I've always been pretty hungry for learning, to learn. And I guess, obviously, through high school and through... Look, mom would probably say I wasn't hungry to learn in high school, which is fair enough. I was probably more worried about footy and stuff. Priorities, right? Yeah. And then uni was probably fairly similar.

I learned cool stuff, but would get most of my interesting learning done on either YouTube or training or bodybuilding books. And then, obviously, uni finished, dove into the business world and read a few books about business. And then, yeah, middle of last year, it was probably my 18-month anniversary of listening to a lot of Joe Rogan podcasts and diving into long-form storytelling and conversation that way. So, I think that was probably a stepping stone to get me back into reading. And then, I've just gone stupid the last six months. But, yeah, I don't know, it's cool 'cause it forces me to have time where I'm not thinking.

Even though you're thinking and reading and learning, you're not stuck in your head and you're not scrolling Facebook and you're not worried about the things you're not doing. You're just immersed in a story or... Do you read that many fictional books? I have been... I go through stages of reading some other... Load up on personal development for a period of time that it might be load up on. And it's funny 'cause all personal development books are all about how you can help other people and how you can make an impact. So, the word personal development is really interesting.

What's it like to tell how do you stimulate as much growth for you, which then allows you to give back to others? Yeah, yeah. 'Cause people think of personal development as self-help, where it's just like, "Well, why wouldn't you wanna improve yourself?" Yeah, I don't know why there's a stigma around that. I don't know. It's really interesting. But then I'll go through some business books and I'll dive into them. And I'm getting better at knowing what I feel like reading. I had a month where I pretty much just solely read autobiographies, which I guess you could say is both personal development and business combined 'cause most of the guys books I'm reading are business owners.

But, yeah, now I've jumped into George Orwell and... What are you reading now? I'm reading 1984, George Orwell, which is a heavy book. What a read. It's a... Yeah, I'm only 100 pages in, but it's one of those books that I think most people read at school that we didn't do it at school. Yeah. I think I did that. It must have been year 12. It seems like the kind of book that would be a VCE book, not a middle school book. I read... So we read Animal Farm in year 10, I think. Yeah, nice. See, I read that a couple of...

Maybe a month and a half ago. And that was a really interesting look at, I guess, power and how it changes your beliefs and desires and things like that. And it's a cool little history book as well, really, 'cause it's about Cold War, right? Yeah. Like communists, the free world, almost. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And it's about... For me, it's about the importance of knowing what you set out to do in the first place. And obviously, there's some of the same themes kind of carry across into 1984, but it's all around how easy it is to get indoctrinated into a system where you don't necessarily believe in it, but then you almost forget or lose what you thought beforehand.

Uh-huh. It becomes the new normal. Yeah, new normal, yeah. Obviously, I started reading this book a couple of days ago, 'cause I'm currently juggling two books, which is against my rule, but I'm doing it anyway, so deal with it. But I was thinking yesterday, and it's just like, this is how people get stuck in situations where they aren't necessarily happy or they're not thriving because they just get used to doing something that they kinda don't like, and then they just get used to it, and it becomes new normal, whether it's a job you don't like or friendship that's not serving you anymore or a relationship or something like that.

It's really easy to get stuck into it or get stuck in it and not pull yourself out. Yeah, definitely. That's what the code of the extraordinary mind touches on as well, about how these outdated beliefs may not be serving you anymore or they've been taught to you or they've been introduced into your life because it's just been passed down from parents and friends and school. And everyone's doing their best, right? But I find when you get to mid-20s and rolling into the second half of my 20s now, you start to realize that no one's got a fucking clue what they're doing.

Everyone kind of thinks they know what they're doing, but at the end of the day, everyone's just having a crack and trying to do the right thing. That's the thing as well. There's only so much that you can change your question. This is a thought that occurred to me earlier. We were talking about schooling before, listening to a talk about schooling and the question that I ask is, do you think schooling will ever change from what it is now? Will high school, for example, ever be voluntary? The systems that govern our society now are so set in stone.

We go to school when we're six years old. Because it's what we've always done, always done, we've done for at least a little while. And it's so outrageous to even think that it can be changed. Go to school when we're six until we're 18 years old and then we either go into university or go into a job. And then we work at that job until we're 60 years old and then we retire. Keep God watch. Keep God watch. Then you're in your twilight years and you, I don't know, do the things that you wish you'd done when you were 20.

Buy a caravan, drive around a bit, die. I don't know, that part of life scares the hell out of me in terms of, or that, maybe not that part of life, but that path. That path scares me. It scares me that we might go through life without doing things that we wanted to do. Or living a life that was predetermined by us and we didn't have any say in how we... You got to think as like, you know, the whole like, oh, that's just a cliche kind of thing that comes up, but I'm like, well, cliche is a cliche is for a reason.

So, so we've got to have followed these paths or this path for a reason. Like whether it's because it's easiest or because, you know, obviously, you know, like early twenties or like late teens, you're like, I'm never going to settle down. Like I'm never going to have kids or stuff and then like your priorities and your thought patterns and things like that change when you get older and you're like, maybe I do want kids now. Like maybe I do want to settle down and get a white picket fence and buy a Range Rover and, you know, go to the beach on Saturdays and things like that.

Like maybe that does become what you want. So it's really easy to sit here at 26 and kind of look at it and go, well, I don't want any of that, but maybe I'll get to 32 and just want a couple of kids and just want to settle down and do that. But then again, maybe I won't. But back on the school thing, like it's really easy just to do things because that's the way they're done. And I'm not going to dive into the topic because nowhere near intelligent enough to actually think about it properly, but I've dived into a little bit of like stuff on freewheel over the last like couple of months.

I read Sam Harris's book, Freewheel, and listened to a few debates between like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson and yeah, those guys, Richard Dawkins and a few of those guys. And it's really cool to hear, I guess, intellectuals discuss freewheel. And one of Christopher Hitchens quotes that he said in one of the debates, I'll never forget. It's just like, well, I always get asked the freewheel question, but whether or not I believe in it, I don't have a choice. And like that's like, it's really interesting because I try and look at it as we don't have freewheel because and they've done studies that show that our brain reacts to a decision before we actually make the decision.

So we actually have that impulse that shows what we're going to do before we actually consciously know. So it's like, well, how much of it is actually freewheel? So I tend to believe there isn't freewheel, but we have a bandwidth where we can still make decisions. Yeah, I agree with that. I think, coming back to society's path that's already been laid out for us, that's the life that we are probably going to live. And like you said, we have a, there's boundaries to how much, how far we can push that, I guess. And we can

choose, we can make certain decisions of what that path is going to look like, but we're still going to end it up in the same spot. I look at it like one of those choose your own adventure, like Goosebumps books. Good. So like that's, this is an analogy that I was kind of, I started writing it like a little article on, but it confused me too much to actually keep going. But so basically like our life is like a choose your own adventure Goosebumps book. You're eventually going to get to the end, you're going to die and whatever happens after that, who knows.

But on the way, like all of your available decisions are already made for you. You just have to choose whether it's option A, B, B or C, but you do that. Obviously a Goosebumps book, you've got a finite amount of times you can do it, but in life you've got still a finite amount of times, but significantly more than if you're reading a book. So every day you kind of, you know, do you go through door one, door two, door three repeatedly over and over for your whole life and all of those decisions. But do you think even those decisions are predetermined by the path that we've led up to that point?

Yeah, 100%. Like Sapiens, book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari that you mentioned before is one that kind of solidified that idea in my head that so many traits, character traits and personality traits and things that we feel as though make us who we are are determined by human history. And you know, the reason why we do certain things and we act certain ways and we say certain things and we believe certain things are because that was what was determined, you know, a couple of hundred thousand whatever years ago. Yeah. It's like in our DNA almost. Yeah, well it is.

It is like it's five million, how many million years of humans been around? Five hundred million years or something? I don't know. I don't know. Like humans, single celled organisms, whatever. We're all fish by the way. We watched a cool little TED Talk last night on we're all fish so Google that. What were we talking about? About DNA, about pretty turnpiles. Like one of the things that was really interesting was and I'm going to butcher this, I'm going to get it wrong but one of the rulers of Rome, it might have been Caesar, it might have been Marcus Aurelius, I can't even remember but they decided like it was his decision to make Christianity like the Constantine.

It was his decision to make Christianity the overarching. In the year 300 AD. Tell me you know that. Yeah, 300 AD? Yeah, good. So in 300 AD he decided to make Christianity the ruling religion right? So if that wasn't a decision made by a single person in one single year at one point in time then every year after that would have been different in some way like it's almost. That's a bizarre thought. The butterfly effect on a historical scale. Definitely. So it's, but then it like makes you think okay so everything up from single celled organism to now has got us to here.

So what are the things that we can do as humans to slightly alter the future for everyone else? If someone, and that's one of millions of examples but if someone can make a decision like that to change the course of human history for a grand statement like. Well that's the thing, we don't know if we, if the actions that we take today will have that impact. Yeah. We could, I don't know, be, we could attend a rally in support for women's rights or something and that could be the biggest deciding factor in laws that change and then change how society is governed like in 100 years.

I don't know. Things like, things like that don't, I guess we can't underestimate the small things that we, the small actions that we take day to day. Yeah and it's that like whole insignificance argument like whether we're just part of a giant web or a giant machine or whether we're actually you know. We're in a simulation. We're in a simulation maybe if Elon Musk is correct and if he could stop calling people pedophiles that'd be great. Yeah it's a bit rude. Not important though, not important to the, off topic, to what we're talking about but

I don't know, if you're going to be an eccentric billionaire with, who's trying to take us to Mars, you know, got to say some, say some things to some people to piss them off maybe. How bloody cool is that cave rescue by the way? Amazing. I thought it was going to have a not very happy ending. Yeah it seemed that way. But he somehow did it. Yeah I don't know, I'm sure everyone listening would not have lived under a rock, pun intended, for a couple, too soon, for a couple weeks, too soon. It would not

have lived under a rock for a couple weeks and to see hundreds of people get together to formulate a way to rescue those 13 Thai kids out of the cave was pretty, pretty cool. Yeah very cool. Pretty amazing how, you know, like we talk about Constantine making a big decision like that the Australian doctor, who's also a diver, who made a decision to go and help. Yeah. Because I was reading, I think there were two Australians that went over. Yeah two over, they went over together, they were planning a trip to the Nullarbor or something like that, so they were literally 45 minutes away from leaving and they got the call to jump on a plane.

That's sick. And head over and then for them to kind of oversee the health of the kids while the Thai and British and Australian Navy SEALs and all the divers figured out a way to get them out was pretty cool. That sort of restores your faith in humanity a little bit. Yeah. That people can set aside. Good job humans. Yeah. I mean people are inherently good. Good. I think. Yeah. I agree, I agree. Like some people are just cunts. Wow strong language. Put that on a t-shirt. Strong language for the first day of the evening.

But I agree, like some majority of the population are just trying to do their best with the hand they've been dealt to make the best of a situation, whether it's good or bad or whatever. I think yeah, I think even people who make bad decisions or people who are, I was going to say evil but evil is a strong word. What constitutes a bad decision though? That's what I was going to say. It could be in the service of something good. Yeah. Like someone might rob a grocery store to feed their family. Like it's a crime.

Yeah. But. But they're doing it for a bigger purpose. To serve other people. Yeah. Then yeah you wonder like how many decisions were made or how many reactions or actions were taken to lead to that point. Yeah. Like you know, because you never hear about the little things that led to that. You hear about the person taking outrageous action to to justify the means. But you know, do you think in someone with that the ends justifies the means? Like if you're doing it for family or whatever. I don't think it's my place to say really. I think, I mean, I haven't experienced those sort of hardships that would force me to those, those extreme measures.

I mean, I, I, I feel for those sort of those people and I think if I was in their shoes, then maybe I'll do something similar. But at the same time we live in a society, we live in a, a community where we're governed by these rules and laws that dictate how we have to behave. And if we behave, if we break those laws or break those rules, then we have to pay the consequences for that. That's how it is. Like, yeah, unless we all, we didn't necessarily sign up for it. No, unless we all question those rules as a collective, then they're not going to change.

Yeah. It was like, to go back to Sapiens, it's like, well, all these things we've just kind of agreed on. Yeah. There's collective figments of our imagination. Like money isn't, like doesn't have any value. No, it's a bit of paper with something printed on it. Yeah. But unless, you know, if enough people agree that it holds value, then it's going to hold value. Like, yeah, that's how currency fluctuates. Yeah. People decide how much this is worth. It's a bit of paper's worth. Yeah, exactly. So it's, you know, then it becomes a, it becomes one of those things where it depends on like, it's environmental just as much as it's consequential on whatever's actually happening.

So, you know, those rules are rules until they're not. Like, look at medical marijuana being, or medical marijuana being legalized in so many states in the US. And just like, why does it have the need to be legalized? Well, because at some point, people decided that this is bad, this is evil. Yeah. And decided that we didn't want it or didn't need it or, yeah, so it's. Damn sixties. The bloody sixties. But then, like, you look at, you know, that whole like, well alcohol's a drug thing. Well, yeah, it is. And it was also illegal. And then they changed their mind.

So like, alcohol, the prohibition of alcohol in like the twenties. Like, I don't know. So it's, it's really interesting. How did they, why did they decide that alcohol was, was allowed to become legal and then things like marijuana and psychedelics and things were banned? Good question. I'm just googling why it ended. Good. So, so alcohol prohibition was from 1920 to 1933. So for 13 years, alcohol was illegal. Yeah. I'm pretty sure. I don't know if it was in Australia. I don't think so. Australians wouldn't allow that sort of thing. What brought prohibition to the end? Well, the thirties, that would have been just before the start of the amendment to the constitution.

Yeah, that was '39. That's not going to happen in six years. We can get two and a half Olympics in. One and a half Olympics made. Mississippi ended prohibition in 1966. Yeah. Yeah. Fun fact. How prohibition was repealed. Cool. So just cause it was unpopular by the looks of things. So that's really interesting. Cause then obviously like in the 19, was the sixties when like Nixon came in and came in, Nixon decided to ban like all of those, those drugs. Yeah. Well, yeah, like in the sixties, Timothy Leary, who was like one of the founding fathers of psychedelics, he, Richard Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America or the world?

America. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and like psychedelics then were, were obviously shown to, um, to help with a variety of different, um, mental illnesses and things like that. And obviously now they're, you know, 1999, they started kind of resurfacing in the, in the literature. And then 2006, there was a couple of studies and, um, now they're being used in treatment for things like depression and anxiety and yeah. And um, addiction and, and it's, um, yeah, it's pretty, pretty crazy that like, cause they're just substances, right? They're just compounds that we call certain things and use for certain things that, um, them in itself aren't evil.

They're just understood, understood. Yeah. Yeah. They're just used for different purposes. Like we look at coffee and it's like, well, this is the greatest thing in the world, but all it is is a chemical compound that our body reacts to a certain way. So, um, yeah, so it's really interesting. Like there was with the, the cave story that we're talking about before, like the kids were sedated, um, and reports said they were sedated with ketamine. Everyone's like this massive uproar around ketamine being used on kids. It's horse tranquilizer. Well, yes, like maybe it's used to tranquilize horses in some aspects, but then it's also used as an aesthetic in other aspects.

And yeah, there's also used in like warfare for like medical tool kits for soldiers. Yeah. Yeah. And it's used to treat, starting to being used to treat depression and, um, as well. So, I don't know, it's really interesting to see the legalization of these things that were just decided by certain governments or certain people to be, to be evil. Um, see it starting to take a, have a new kind of light to it. Um, yeah, cause I don't know, like that stuff interests me a lot because obviously, um, like one of the books I'm reading

at the moment now is How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan and like Michael Pollan's one of the most influential authors of all time. And he's, um, he's written all these books around food and how foods process and, um, and you know, different ways of eating and things like that. And to have someone who's, I guess, respected or revered like that, um, jump onto the, the psychedelic strain, like it kind of makes you take notice a little bit. Like obviously a lot of the people that I look up to, like guys like Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss and Aubrey Marcus, um, have kind of been banging on about it for a little while.

And you know, like um, as I have been like as anti-drugs as they come for most of my life, but then you kind of start to question like why and like what, what is constituted as a drug? And it's kind of like that line between legal and illegal is really interesting to me because it's, you know, alcohol obviously was illegal. And then, you know, maybe 20 years we'll look at alcohol prohibition and alcohol is probably one of the most dangerous drugs out there because it's abused so much. And is that because it's legal? Because it is legal?

Maybe. But is it because it's a consumable product that's marketed to the nth degree? Maybe like, um, or is it just because like anything you've got to tailor your, tailor you're used to, to suit what it is you're taking? Like, you know, one could argue that rather than alcohol being one of the worst drugs for you, like Mars bars are the worst drug. Look, to be honest, now I was just trying to think of a consumable product, but like if I eat Mars bars every day for the next 10 months, like only Mars bars, or if I have a beer every day for the next 10 months, which one do you think is going to have a worse outcome?

Like I'm not going to be in Great Nick either way, either way. But like, I wonder if your body can survive on just Mars bars. My guess would be yes. It's just fat in it. There's just no micronutrients. No. Maybe my hair would fall out, but I think it'd be okay. I don't know. But it's an interesting one, right? Like how, how, um, yeah. What's our definition of a drug in this day and age where more and more of what we call illicit substances with quotation marks, uh, becoming, uh, becoming legal and there's more and more studies coming out showing that they have potential to be used as treatment for like mental illness and yeah, and other, um, disorders.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I remember, I used to love Dr. Carl. It was probably my first podcast I got into was Dr. Carl. Um, so shout out to the great man, if he's listening. Um, one of the things I remember him saying in one of his podcasts was everything is a poison. What matters is the dose. It's obviously like, yeah, like whether it's a drug or whether it's a poison, whatever, like cyanide, cyanide and apples. A tiny little bit. Um, like, you know, we can overdose on water, like little things like that

where you kind of, it checks your belief system or I guess like assumptions that you make about certain things where it's, um, where it's okay, well maybe this isn't, this thing is a good or bad or it's, it's just, it's indifferent because what matters is how we actually utilize it. Um, and like one of the things that it's kind of been really interesting to me over the last couple of months has been the use of things like psychedelics for a spiritual use rather than, um, rather than like medical use. Um, like one of the papers

that I remember them, Michael Pollard talked about in, um, talked about in his book, um, was, I think it was called, and I'm probably going to butcher this, but it was called psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. And like, that was like a double blind placebo controlled like study from like 2006. So it's legit. Um, by Roland something, I can't remember the guy's name. Um, I only put the book down yesterday, like part of the book down yesterday, so I really should remember that. But Roland Griffiths, I think anyway, no one's going to know who that is unless you read the book.

Um, but obviously I'm talking about, um, doing it in a controlled setting and, and with, um, like synthetic psilocybin and how those kind of mystical experiences or spiritual experience or experiences or whatever way you want to actually like look at it, how it can actually, um, improve someone's life or improve someone's quality of life by changing the way they think. Um, spirituality is a funny one. Yeah. Cause there's even a sapience touches on this as well, but there's a growing movement toward being spiritual rather than religious. Yeah. And being spiritual doesn't mean that you believe

in a higher power or you believe in um, believe in religion itself, but you, I don't even know what you would describe as spiritual, like being spiritual. It's like you have a, you have a, I don't know if understanding is the right word, but you have a, an appreciation for what you don't know. Yeah. Or what, yeah, what can't be known. Yeah. So the potential of like the human mind and like, you know, obviously having seen or heard people that I respect talk about these subjects, like you listen to Tim Ferriss or Michael Pollard or,

or Remarkis or Joe Rogan, like talk about their experiences and it's like, they can't even put it into words and the words they use is just like love and connection and all those kinds of things. And it's just like, well, how much extra is out there that we don't actually know about? And you know, one of the books that I was telling you about before, it's called Proof of Heaven. I can't remember the guy's name who wrote it, but I'm sure if you just Google Proof of Heaven, you'll find it. But it's about a neuroscientist

who I think he contracts with meningitis and he's in a coma for a significant period of time and then comes out of the coma and kind of talks about these vivid experiences. I don't know if experiences would be the word, but these vivid like visualizations and dreams and hallucinations and things like that, that he like can only really link it to a higher power or I think he calls that feeling like it or om or om. He calls it om. Yeah. So obviously things like that are really interesting and that connection to whatever other levels of consciousness there are.

Yeah. Well, that's like the expansion of human consciousness, which psychedelics, I think, is exploring more of how to access those sort of unlocked areas of your brain and your mind, which we have no understanding of. Yeah. Well, one of the diagrams in the book is it shows like the connections from different parts of your brain. And I think we'll post that up somewhere because that is awesome. Yeah. I think it was talking about like a part of your brain, a part of your brain stem and another part of your brain, like basically switches off and stops doing its job during these experiences.

So all of these different parts of your brain that don't usually communicate with each other start building, um, building connection and linking each other. And what is it that, um, switches off? I can't remember. Yeah. Um, I'd have to, I'd have to have another look at the book, but, um, some parts switches off, which allows all these other connections to opens the gates for all these other connections to just like proliferate throughout your brain. I think like people who have been through that experience and, um, they use the, like, use the term, like that's your ego disappearing and switching off for that period of time.

Um, and that, like, that's something that really interests me, that like loss of ego, that separation from ego and self and, and that, I guess, uh, surrender to whatever is out there and not trying to use ego to kind of protect yourself or, or something like that. Um, yeah. So I think, yeah, that is super interesting to explore and it's a way, like I think I was reading something the other day that the, uh, the effects on your brain of classic psychedelics is similar to that of, um, like the lifetime meditators. So people who have meditated for like 30 years, like have clocked 10,000 hours meditating.

Yeah. So know how to like get into a meditative stage. Tim Ferriss talks about that. Yeah. I think it was in Tim Ferriss' podcast with Michael Pollan and the, they can enter these sort of altered states of consciousness almost. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. I don't know. It's like 30 years meditating for an hour a day or do it in four hours with the help, with some help. Yeah. Like it's, I don't know. It's an interesting one. I kind of look at it as, so we've got, um, five senses, right? If we were to take away

one of those senses and have never had it like, and then to be able to, uh, explore it again or explore it for the first time and to like, if you'd never touched anything in your life and you didn't know the touch existed, you didn't know it was a thing and your brain couldn't, couldn't comprehend that touch was a thing. And then you were, one day you woke up and you're able to touch things and feel things and have those experiences and have that, that sensation, like how different your life would be. Like it's going from, it's almost like if you have four to five, it's going from 80% to a hundred percent.

Like it's adding this whole extra element to who you are and what you feel and what you do and how your body can experience things. I kind of look at and from like obviously reading and listening and hearing, um, accounts, like it's almost like that is a, that's what they, the sensation they, they feel for that period of time. Yeah. We were talking about this earlier. We were talking about how it's discovering the full potential of the human experience. And like we are, we are potentially looking through, we are looking through life through a keyhole in a, a house full of, with a thousand rooms.

So why not open the door and explore the rooms if there's a possibility that there is so much more to discover. Yeah. And I don't like, I don't want to keep banging on about the psychedelic thing, but obviously it's a book that I've like a book and, um, a lot of podcasts I've been listening to lately and we've been talking about a little bit, um, like how interesting it is. But, um, one of the experiments that, um, scientists use to determine the addictiveness of certain drugs is they have, um, they have, I think they use mice or rats, um, and they have a button they can press to give them a certain substance.

So for example, it might be cocaine or something like that. And in these, in these experiments that the mouse, the mice, whether they can press a button to give themselves food or they can give them a button to press the cocaine button, they'll continuously press the cocaine button until they die. Um, because they're like giving themselves that little burst of pleasure and then again and again and again, and they'll go for that before all other bodily needs and functions. Um, and the same, I think it was the same thing for heroin and the same thing for, yeah, maybe sugar or something for sugar or similar sugar.

But then like your psilocybin or your LSD, they do it once and they don't touch it. Um, and you know, that's, that's really, that's really, really interesting. And it, it also talked about the importance of environment, um, in something like that. So when the, when the mice or rats or whatever it was, we're given, we're given a nicer cage with other mice and, um, and a nice environment with food and all of the other things and create like a really, um, bountiful environment, they didn't touch the cocaine. So I guess it like, um, I think

it might've been Rogan that was talking about how important like environment is in all of these situations and taking these substances or, um, or just in life, like how important the environment is. And when you're in a shitty setting and you're shooting environment, how much that can impact your reaction or your, um, your like feeling around, um, or your experiences. Um, yeah. Which is, which is kind of, kind of interesting. What book were you reading tonight? So I'm reading a book called Shapeshifting by John Perkins. He's written another book, which I know you've read called Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

Yes. It's, uh, it's basically a really simple book to tell us why the world's fucked up. So like Economic Hitman, you can Google it and there's a couple of little short videos of him talking about how he's kind of, how Economic Hitman have kind of ruined the world. But long story short, um, the US would find, and I'm sure other countries are doing it or have done it. Um, but the US would find a country, uh, for example, Ecuador that have significant natural resources. They'd come in and give that country a big loan, um, for, you know, obviously development in, in that area, infrastructure and things like that.

And then the company obviously with the big loan would be unable to pay, pay back the debt. So they'd renege on the loan and then the US would bail them out for significant discounts on all the resources. Yeah. So that obviously like, so they bring all the oil companies in and they load up on all the oil for, for next to nothing. Um, and like he talks about how like the Iraq war, so obviously like it happened in Iran and Ecuador and a bunch of South American countries and a bunch of Middle Eastern countries and

the Iraq war is because they kind of started fighting back and they wouldn't, um, I can't remember what he, what he said, but they wouldn't actually like start, they didn't want to repay the loans or stuff like that. So they started fighting back. So then the US sent in the military rather than their jackals as he calls them or economic hit man. So yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty heavy. It talks about how capitalism, like a certain arm of capitalism is just ruining the world. Yeah, that's the thing. There's nothing wrong with capitalism itself. Uh, it's just this like almost like an extremism, extreme form of capitalism where the economic hit man and just looking at the bottom line.

Yeah, it's pretty heavy. And it's like he talks about like this, like he's obviously employed by another company, but basically doing the bidding of the CIA and stuff like that. Like it's, it's a crazy book. Like it's one of those books where you're like, how is this guy still alive? Um, with all the people that he's obviously talking about and all the organisations and stuff, but then it's just like, well, the book's out there, but you know, nothing's changing apart from it being on the Virtus podcast. No one really cares. So I don't know. It's, it's interesting, but yeah, shape shifting cause it's his follow up book.

Yeah. He's written a few books about shape shifting and about like shamanism and it's a, it's a funny book. I'm about the same, about a hundred pages through. Uh, it's really, it's a, it's a funny book cause I'm still trying to decide whether he's using shape shifting as in transforming himself into another being an animal or a tree or, or anything. Trying to decide whether he's using it as a metaphor if he's actually trying to turn himself in, transform himself into these things. It's gotta be a metaphor, right? I think, well, I think so, but

he's, he's visiting, it's told it as a story and he's visiting all these different shamans and, um, and priests and medicine men and they're talking as if this is a real thing. Yeah. So I'm sort of, I'm excited to see where it goes. Yeah. Um, and how it can, like storytelling, right? Yeah. So he's just telling stories about how he, how he's visited all these, um, different shamans and, and people and these different sort of traditional cultures which believe in shape shifting and how it's as a force for understanding your environment and connecting with the natural world and about how wrong today's society is and how we don't have those connections anymore.

Yeah. And then he touches on the, um, economic hitman, like that world, how it's such a stark, so far, this comparison. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So I'm super interested to see where this goes. I've sort of, when, when we went on this trip, I just said to Locke, pick me a book, any book and, um, come with this one. So I can't, I'm coming in with no expectations really, but yeah, um, I'm excited. Should be good. Yeah. Um, I'm looking forward to reading at some point. It's on the ever-growing, I've got like a three tier system for books I need to read.

It's like the must read the kind I want to read. And then the was suggested but I'll eventually get to. So it's definitely, it's definitely on there. And it's, it's one of those books that, yeah, I don't know, it really interests me that I guess connection to the natural environment. Like it's cool to read things like about grounding and about getting back in touch with, with, you know, just nature in general. I think the biggest takeaway from it so far and that I think I'm going to have is just to like, and this is one

of my mantras for this year is just to be present and to, uh, I guess appreciate, have gratitude, appreciate the small things and yeah, connect with the natural world, connect with people rather than, uh, being plugged in all the time. Yeah. I say as I check my phone, um, I, yeah, it's, I don't know, it's something that I've kind of make it an intention or a, um, something I, I've, I'm lucky enough to love. So I do kind of naturally as I get outside and yeah, we're super lucky where we live. Yeah. The peninsula is perfect for it.

And like, um, we went for a walk today through Sydney and, um, the concrete jungle, but it was cool to walk through the or past the tannic gardens and see a bunch of red trees and stuff like that. But, um, I think if you, one of the things that I've been trying to do at work lately is if I'm like feeling stuck on something or feeling like I'm not getting anything done or feeling anxious or frustrated about a certain, a certain thing or, or, you know, something that we're, we're working on and I feel like I'm just not getting through.

I'll go out the back. Um, which if anyone's been inverted, so we've got a big park out the back and I'll just go for a walk. Um, and you know, 15, 20 minutes later, you either forget what you, you were worried about or you find a solution really quick. One of the things that Sally Anne and I would love to do is just to go for a walk down the beach or just go down to the lookout and just hang out there, just chat, like leave our phones at home. Yeah. Uh, like it just gives you such, I don't know, like clarity maybe.

Yeah. Clarity is a good word. But even if it's not, like if you don't actually figure anything out, like it just gives you a release and like you get that, you get that like endorphin rush from like feeling the sand between your toes or like looking out of the ocean or anything like that. And I think that we can't, you know, you know, like we all go, go, go all the time. Um, important to take a step back and being intentional with like leaving your phone at home, like it's so easy to just have it with you all the time.

And you know, I've definitely identified the last couple of months I've been way worse than I've been for probably like six, 12 months. Um, yeah. So I have been over the last like week or two, I've been trying to put it, put it aside or leave it in the glove box or go somewhere and actually be present. And you know, it's always going to be a battle because phones are something that we need. Yeah. I mean, there's always things demanding our attention. We do need for a bunch of different things. Totally. I think the trick is being able to be present enough and be mindful enough to just put it away for a small period of time.

And then you can actually enjoy everything around you rather than just looking at your freaking phone. Um, but in saying that, it does, does feel good to, uh, people are going to hate you for that, by the way. Gotta enjoy a nice glass of red while we podcast. Just while you enjoy hearing in your ears while you're listening to a podcast. Um, but yeah, there's so many like different apps and different things trying to grab our attention. Now it's just, it's got to separate from it and just get outside even if it's raining. Let's do it.

Nothing better than sometimes walking the road. Definitely. Definitely. Um, yeah. Good for me. So, uh, let's finish off. Yeah. What are you excited for over the next six months closing out 2018? Jesus. Um, see we'll talk like one of the things we were asked to write down today was what we're excited for. And um, and it's weird. Like I'm almost not excited for anything if that makes it like in a good way. Like I'm, I know that we're going to, pardon me, we're going to keep trying to, trying to grow the team and trying to grow impact and help more people at work.

Like I know where I know I'm hopefully going to go on a little holiday with KP. I know I'm going to be able to read and learn and listen and do all those kinds of things. Like we've got a couple of, we've got to like a couple of days retreat intensive with, with our coaches in, in a three or four weeks that we'll go to up in Byron and kind of escape for like, I'm excited for like footy finals and um, the rest of the year for footy and like all those little things, but there's no like, like big magical answer.

It's just, I'm just excited for day to day. Yeah. Um, like I'm excited to finish my book and start another one. Like I'm excited to send my weekly email tomorrow. Like I'm excited for whatever tomorrow's mastermind brings. Yeah. So I had to fly home and actually know I'm really excited for Sunday morning. I get to go to a indoor plant sale. You're all about the indoor plants, personality. Yeah. But at least now I'm channeling my indoor, my indoor, my obsessive personality to things like indoor plants. Something healthy. Yeah. So I'm going to turn my office into a jungle.

What about you? What are you excited for? Uh, yeah, I like what you said about just looking for the little things. Um, well, it's not just your answer. Yeah. I'm excited for, I potentially have a study tour to Europe in November, which will be a super cool. That'll be a two week sort of intensive unit. And then I'll do a couple of weeks just travel around that. Yeah, that'd be nice. Which would be cool. So, and Sally-Ann will hopefully come over as well for a little bit. She's bloody better. She better. And my brother Tim will be in Europe around the same time.

So it'd be cool to catch up with him. Be honest. Uh, other than that, I mean, I've got the, we've got the retreat in a few weeks in Byron, which I'm really looking forward to. It's really easy to like look forward and just go like, Oh, we've got all this stuff coming up, but like, we've also got 22 days or something between now and the Byron stuff where we can do so much cool stuff. Yeah. I mean, it's all the little stuff that I'm really looking forward to. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into my little routine of, of, um, hitting my minimums.

And I start back at uni next week. So I'll have that constant challenge of balancing uni and work, which will be hard at the time, but I'm kind of looking forward to it as well. Uh, all the, like, one of the things I love that Drew said today was not about, was like back when he was earning 300 bucks a week, it was hard. And now it's like, it's not easier. It's harder, but he's just gotten better and gotten more and more responsibility, more able to deal with the difficult, difficult stuff and the difficult times.

And I think that's kind of like, I don't know if I've spoken about it in the podcast, but my new mantra is just transcend yesterday. Yeah. So it's just about being better equipped to deal with all the better equipped to enjoy all the fun stuff and all the magical stuff and all the cool, cool things that we get to do, but then better equipped to deal with all of the hardships and the, and the roadblocks and the, and the bumps along the way. Um, that allows you to like, the highs are higher and like some of the lowest lows are low, but you get to enjoy every day for what it is.

Yeah, definitely. And you're always growing, you're always growing and adapting to your changing circumstance. Like you, you grow to fill out the space. Um, so like I'm looking forward to challenging ourselves a bit over the next six months and trying new things with Virtus, uh, and pushing the boundaries a little bit on what we can achieve. Yeah. Um, I think doing that while being really intentional with like the day to day. Yeah. Making people better. Yeah. Which is making ourselves better. Yeah. I'm starting archery in a couple of weeks. That's cool. Yeah. Why? It's super cool.

Why? Cause I want to learn how to shoot a bow and arrow really accurately. If you're listening to Ted Nugent on Joe Rogan, it's very interesting. Cool. That's all I'm going to say. Finish off, one book suggestion for everyone that's listening. Like if like any book you've ever read, if like, and like, I don't believe that everyone should read the same books cause you know, everyone's different. But if what's the book that I'm going to change the question. What's the book that's most impacted you and that you like still remember how it made you feel or what it made you feel?

So the one that immediately comes to mind is Sapiens. Nice. Because I, I do genuinely believe that everyone should read it. You know, he, um, meditates two hours a day, an hour in the morning, hour at night. That's awesome. Fun fact. And he said he wouldn't have been able to write Sapiens and Homo Deus, which is the sequel. So meditate doing that. Yeah. I got no time for that, mate. A few hours a week. Yeah. So Sapiens a week. Yeah. He's got 154 hour week. We'll call you asleep. That's cool. So Sapiens. Yeah. Sapiens. I just think it was so, so interesting.

It gives me such perspective on where we are today as a society and a collective community. Uh, I just find I keep coming back to it and keep recounting the little stories and analogies that he writes about. So yeah, I think that, and saying that it was a book that I read last month. So not this month. So, uh, it's definitely the forefront of my mind at the moment. Nice. Very good book. Um, the alchemist. Oh, I swear you're going to say principles by Ray Dalio, but I had to change it up. Hey, the alchemist. Great book.

I was thinking about that the other day actually. Yeah. I think it's the alchemist, my best way of describing it if you haven't read it is it's a book that you should read once a year. Um, it's just a really, I say simple, but it's complex in a bunch of different ways, but it's like a basic, a simple story that you should stay on the path no matter what. And like keep taking step after step, left foot, right foot to get to where you want to go. Like it's never going to be like growth or

improvement or progress is never going to be linear, but it's all about finding or finding just experiencing things and just letting the road take its course. Cause if you're, you know, things, things always happen for a reason. Um, the right school is the way. Yeah. The obstacle is the way. Yeah. There you go. It's good. On that note, good for you. It's great to chat.