How To Get Everything You Ever Wanted & More

Host: Today we called it the “podcasting booty call” — we come together for an intense three hours, then disappear for six months until one of us texts the other. I want to walk through the best lessons I've learned from you over the last few months.

Guest: Great. Let's go.

High standards, "control freaks," and perfectionism

Host: You said, "Control freak is a word people with low standards use to describe people with high standards." Expand on that.

Guest: People hear "control freak" and assume it's an emotional problem. Too often it's actually care. I want things done right the first time. If a vision exists in my head, and the execution doesn't match it, then it isn't what I imagined. People on the outside will throw stones — call you micromanaging or picky — because they hope slapping a label on you will change your behavior.

What I've learned is to build defenses against that pressure. When someone calls you a control freak, answer: Yes — I want it done right. It will save pain later. Either way we're going to execute. If you have the will to see it through, it's less painful to do it correctly upfront than to do it three or four times before it finally meets your standard.

High standards aren't some eccentricity; they're an accumulation of tiny improvements. There aren't silver bullets. There are hundreds of golden "B-B-Bs" — tiny, specific optimizations: packaging weight, color, how it looks on a shelf, how a name appears on a hat. People who only check boxes won't do that work. The people who obsess over details are the ones who create products people love.

Host: You framed this as art — artists make work for themselves, commercial teams make work for an audience.

Guest: Exactly. The best art is made for the artist. Commercial work often tries to serve an imagined audience and ends up rinsing and recycling things that solve nobody’s problems. When you make it for yourself, you're selfish in the moment — but you actually make it for everyone who thinks like you. There's a non-trivial minority who share your exact problems and tastes.

I spent months on projects where a missing hyphen was printed on a million cans. That cost me sleep and social comfort, but it's why the product held up. For a long time I felt ashamed to be labeled picky, but I now realize that not succumbing to those standards is probably one of the only reasons I’ve had any success.

Host: People say "perfectionism is procrastination."

Guest: Most people who claim perfectionism are procrastinators. True perfectionists feel sick until it’s done — they work. Procrastinators use "perfectionist" as a socially acceptable excuse to do nothing. But also, pick your battles: you can't be obsessive about everything. Choose the highest-contribution areas where perfection matters and be ruthless there.

Host: Practically, how did that manifest when you launched your book?

Guest: I practiced my presentation three times a day for 30 days. I did 100 full run-throughs — recorded myself, edited, practiced again. When I went live to half a million people, it looked natural. People called me a "natural," but there was a hundredfold repetition behind it. The difference between good and masterpiece is often in the next 95 repetitions.

Volume, learning, and avoiding repeated mistakes

Host: You often emphasize volume — make lots of work.

Guest: Volume negates luck. There's a pottery-class parable: two classes — one told to make one perfect pot, the other to make the most pots possible. At the end of the term, the high-volume class produced more and better pots. Repetition gives you perspective. The first ten or twenty attempts make you better; the following 980 are where mastery is formed.

Learning is "same condition, new behavior." If you face the same situation and do the same thing, you haven't learned. Intelligence is not exposure to information — it's a change in behavior after new conditions. If you listen to every podcast available but apply nothing, you learned nothing. The key is dragging things out of memory and applying them.

Host: How do you avoid the trap of consuming advice without change?

Guest: Tim Ferriss's filter helps: what stuck with you? What did you go to bed thinking about? Screenshot that, do it, and then don't consume more until you apply it. When I read a book, I don't read another until I do everything in that one. That gave me permission to stop drowning in information and start doing.

Host: So volume and iteration trump the perfect, single play.

Guest: Yes. If you want to be excellent, do a lot of work and learn from it. You brute-force your way to competence. A thousand podcasts and you’ll be damn good at podcasts. Trying to be lucky and produce one perfect work without context is guessing.

"There are no silver bullets — only hundreds of tiny improvements."
"If you have the will, it's less painful to do something right the first time."
"Volume negates luck."

Authenticity, copying, and being exceptional

Host: You also said, "Don't worry about people copying your work — they only copy what they can see, not why you did it."

Guest: Exactly. People copying the surface-level stuff don't understand the why. They benefit from the iteration you did, but they can't iterate further because they lack the trail of experiments that got you there. When an external condition changes, they won't adapt because they don't know the underlying dynamics.

Host: You've encountered bootleg versions of your systems in business.

Guest: I used to keep a list of people who tried to sell our playbook as their own. Ten years later, none of them exist at the scale we do. If you build your product on hundreds of tests and investments — we spent tens of thousands on experiments every two weeks — you create a barrier. Copycats can take the visible play, but they can't reproduce the pipeline of R&D behind it.

Host: How do you handle imitation emotionally?

Guest: Don't be upset. If people copy you, it means you were doing something valuable. Be more afraid of everyone stopping copying you — that's when you lost the cultural momentum. Getting upset about being copied is narcissistic: they can copy the "what" but not the "why."

Host: On authenticity — you made this point: people want to be spectacular but also normal.

Guest: It's a paradox. Normal equals average; exceptional equals different. You can't fit in and be exceptional simultaneously. When friends say "you've changed," it's because they don't know how to say "you've grown." Accept that growth will make others uncomfortable. Choose which discomfort you prefer: internal (playing a role to fit in) or external (being different and facing criticism).

Guest: A practical frame is protecting your passion. In the early days, you need to burn time. If you don't protect what keeps you going, you'll hate the thing when the time comes that it would have rewarded you most.

Quitting, persistence, and the "lonely" path

Host: You said, "How to get older without getting better? Keep relearning the same lesson."

Guest: If you keep making the same mistake, you aren't learning. Learning is "same condition, new behavior." If you're putting in inputs and outputs don't change, you're doing the wrong thing. Look for leading indicators — not just outcomes — to tell you you're on the right path. Decide in advance what you’re willing to sacrifice and use that as fuel.

Host: How do you decide between pushing through and pivoting?

Guest: I won't quit if no new information has come to light to change my original assumptions. Pushing is required when the underlying hypothesis still holds; pivoting is necessary when new data invalidates it. Language matters — I prefer "pivot" over "quit" because everything should be activity unless you stop entirely. Track leading indicators so you can keep taking steps even when outcomes are months or years away.

Host: You use a "problems we'd prefer" framework.

Guest: Yes. When making strategic choices, list the problems each path will create and ask, "Which of these problems do we prefer and are we equipped to deal with?" The path with manageable, preferrable problems is usually the one to take.

Host: You talked about embracing loneliness.

Guest: Being the exception means being lonely. Instead of bemoaning it, see it as evidence you're on the right path. Most people will cheer when you no longer need cheering. You have to be your own first fan: a slow clap that is just you. The path to exceptional is often very lonely early on. If you want to be exceptional, accept that you'll be misunderstood until the results justify the journey.

"You can't fit in and be exceptional. Pick one."
"You only learn when conditions are the same and behavior changes."
"The world belongs to those who can work without immediate results."

Reputation, cancellation, and responding to attacks

Host: There's a difference between becoming known and becoming respected. Don't let an algorithm convince you otherwise.

Guest: Respect is distinct from views. Chasing virality by pandering to algorithms often kills the soul. I'd rather create stuff that ten people love than produce viral hits that make me feel like Ronald McDonald.

When people try to cancel you, you have choices. You can disappear and agree to be canceled, or you can keep producing and be louder with the truth. Cancellation only sticks if you stop being public or platforms cut you off completely. If you keep publishing and your evidence is strong, you can recover or even grow.

Host: How do you respond to insults or false allegations?

Guest: If it's true, agree and improve. If it's false and harms reputation, you must respond with louder truth or with actions that demonstrate the truth. There's a playbook — make your actions ten times louder. One of my early mentors taught me only one person can be in the "angry boat." If everyone's angry at you, be angrier about fixing it or be louder by providing evidence and actions.

Host: That fits your "state the facts and tell the truth" mantra.

Guest: Always. Say what you actually have done. Don't invent authority. If you do invent, you'll feel like an impostor. If you genuinely want credibility, build the facts that back your claim.

Optimization, maximization, and what to sacrifice

Host: There's tension between optimizing every input and being willing to be "violent" and maximize.

Guest: Over-optimization becomes superstition and fragility. If your system is too optimized — you must always get eight hours of perfect sleep, your exact morning routine — it's easy to break. I prefer maximizing the things that matter: be willing to overspend energy for long stretches to build leverage. That willingness to be violent in pursuit of an objective separates winners.

Host: But balance and happiness matter too.

Guest: They do. But you can't have everything. Oliver Burkeman calls it choosing what you'll suck at. Periodize life. Choose seasons: intense focus now, balance later. Decide what problems you prefer. If you want the outsized return, accept seasons of imbalance. Protect your passion at all costs — if you hate the thing you create early on, you'll likely quit before it yields outsized returns.

"Protect your passion. If you hate your craft early, you kill your future potential."
"The price of great character is a hard life; the price of an easy life is poor character."

Mindset: rejection, fear, and meaning over hedonic happiness

Host: You recommend a "100 days of rejection" exercise to desensitize shame and fear.

Guest: Rejection teaches you you're not going to die from being denied. If you can be in a bad mood for no reason, you can be in a good mood for no reason. Choose the state that helps you do the work. Most of our catastrophizing is mile-wide and inch-deep — it feels enormous until we step into it.

Host: What about happiness versus meaning?

Guest: There's a distinction between hedonic pleasure and meaning. Some people optimize for momentary comfort; others optimize for a life that, in retrospect, they are proud of. For me, meaning lasts longer. I gave myself permission to be unhappy during long seasons because the returns — memory dividends — were worth it. The things I’m most proud of required sacrifice and discomfort. If you prioritize happiness above all, you may never do something great.

Host: You also said, "If you haven't gotten what you want, you're not worthy of it — yet."

Guest: Harsh but useful. Better to admit you suck and improve than to pretend otherwise. Impostor syndrome often signals you're attempting something new — that's normal. Pretending to be a teacher when you're still a student is fraud. State the facts, build the evidence, and then teach.

Practical rules, final frameworks, and what’s next

Host: Quick practical framing: how do you choose to quit, pivot, or persist?

Guest: Define assumptions up front. Identify leading indicators that show the path is working. If those indicators exist, persist. If the data contradicts your initial hypothesis, pivot. Quitting is final — use "pivot" to keep activity and optionality.

Host: What are you working on next?

Guest: I'm investing energy into building an education platform — school.com — to enable people to teach useful skills and build communities. Education is broken: teachers are under-resourced, students are saddled with debt for irrelevant credentials. My bet is that giving people the tools to teach what matters will create large downstream value. I also run an investment vehicle; if anyone has a business to sell or scale, we're open.

Host: Any final notes?

Guest: A few hard axioms I live by: do the boring work, be willing to be unpopular, and protect the thing that keeps you going. If something is worth doing, it will be hard, and that hardness is not a flaw — it's the selection filter. Be the person who keeps clapping for yourself until other people notice.

Host: Thanks for coming on. This has been packed with frameworks and brutal, useful truth.

Guest: Thank you.

"Do the boring work — it's what makes you rich."
"If everyone is copying you, don't be upset; be afraid of when they stop."
"You only learn when you face the same condition and change your behavior."
"Protect your passion at all costs — if you hate what you create early on, you'll kill your future."
"State the facts and tell the truth; people respect evidence more than charisma."

Host: If you enjoyed this episode with Alex, check out the two-hour conversation I did with David Goggins — you'll find a lot of overlap in the themes here. Thanks for tuning in.