Rock Bottom Productions (Episode II) – Archetypes, Authenticity, Addiction, Adderall

I can’t remember when I first saw it, but I would say that it definitely one-shotted me. I hate that term; it doesn’t really sound right, but it’s true. Sometimes you see something and you recognize, “All right, the world is changing, and so I can either get right or I can get left.”

ARCHETYPES

A little background on that, that I think will kind of help you think about yourself: I think, as a personality type, I’m a reader and a writer. And I’ve learned this over and over and over again. I think the opposite type is like a listener speaker. When possible, I always prefer to write. When possible, I always prefer to read. And this was kind of brought to my attention in a sense over the years. You know, I think back to like bosses or PMs that I worked for, and it varied. I don’t know which the dominant sort of archetype is, whether it’s writer-reader or listener-speaker. I kind of feel like writer-reader is in the minority these days. You look at that chart, you look at where the world’s going, and everything’s video, everything’s short-form video.

And so I think it’s very tempting to write this off as like, “Oh, it’s the younger generation.” I’m not really sure that’s the case. I think it’s kind of just like a preference thing. But anyway, so I think back to bosses I’ve had where we would talk. Let’s say we talk about a stock, and we would talk for a little bit, and then my go-to was always like, “Look, give me like an hour or two. Let me sit down, get my thoughts together. I’ll write up an email, like I’ll put together a memo on this, and then that’ll be kind of like a starting point for us to have a real discussion about this.”

And probably half the PMs I’ve worked for, they work the exact same way. Like, they’re very sort of cerebral. Yeah, I don’t even know if introvert is the word for it. I feel like I’m not really—I enjoy my alone time, I enjoy reading, but you can kind of tell from my nature that I enjoy people’s company. One of the great mysteries of life is whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, and sometimes it becomes mixed because sometimes most introverted people are the ones who act most extroverted, whereas sometimes you see someone who appears to be an extrovert, whereas they really get their energy from being alone, and they want to just read books and write. And so I think I can come off as an extrovert, but I know that I get my recharging, my energy; I love just solitude and silence and being alone and reading and writing.

But anyway, so those PMs, those bosses, I got along with. But there were other ones I worked for, and I don’t think one was better than the other from like a talent perspective. I think there’s… you know, in markets, there’s a million different ways you can make money. But we would have… he would say, “Hey Greg, what do you think of XYZ?” And I’d say, “Well, you know, I can give you a good… let me give me some time to sit down and get my thoughts together.” He’s like, “No, no. Tell me now. I need to know now.”

And it wasn’t like, “Look, I understand some stuff is time-sensitive.” Sometimes you do need to know right then, like, you know, a headline comes out, it’s down 20%. You have to act in the moment. So that’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about where there’s no rush. They want you to take a look at some stock, get your thoughts together. And I’d be like, “Look, I can give you a good answer now, or I can give you a great answer if you just give me a little time to sort of sit down and think about it.”

And those types, always from the jump, you could just tell it wasn’t going to be a good fit. And I would know within like six to twelve months, “I don’t know who’s right.” I mean, technically he’s the boss, so he’s right. I’m supposed to play his game. He’s not going to play my game, right? He hired me. And so, but I could almost tell, as I got older especially, I could tell that the writing was kind of on the wall, in a sense, where our communication—nothing to do with really fundamental analysis or markets—just like our communication styles were polar opposites to the sense where we couldn’t really… it wasn’t going to be a good fit. The team wasn’t communicating effectively.

I kind of, even thinking back more broadly, if I think back to other guys on the team, I think you kind of had this dynamic of there are like talkers and there are writers. And if you’re working for a talker and you’re a writer, you know as well as I do that you could sit down and write an amazing email, an amazing memo, and you do it the right way where you’re not just rambling on. Like, front and center, as soon as he opens the email, bang, bang, bang, bang, three to four bullet points. “This is what this stuff email is about. This is the pitch. This is what I think this is worth. Here’s the numbers.” Blah, blah, blah.

So, not even like you’re past the point of, “Oh, you’re just not a good enough writer.” It’s a communication thing. And you see, at least I’ve seen over the years, you write these emails and they don’t get read. And it’s not a right or wrong thing. Some guys just don’t operate on that level. They want you, I guess, to do that stuff on your own time, but then by the time you get face to face with them, it should just be like you got that down pat. Should take twenty, thirty seconds.

And so I think I kind of eventually got to the point where I could do both. Why two-page memos are perfect (to me). But just personally, my own belief, I think Bezos has a great method in how he chose to run meetings at Amazon, where he said everything should be a two-page memo. I think that’s the perfect—I agree 100%, just from my own experience of like rights and wrongs—that’s the perfect… when you show up to a meeting and you have a two-page memo. I think that’s the perfect amount of compression. You could have a twenty-page, fifty-page deck behind it, but two pages, that should be enough. That’s a perfect length, perfect shortness of length, etc.

And so that stuck with me. And that’s kind of how I’ve always went through the business world. But look, some people don’t operate that way. And I don’t know if they’re right or wrong. Well, it’s not anyone’s place to say who’s right or wrong, which is kind of why this topic is one that interests me, and where I’m kind of… I don’t know if I have answers for you so much as, like, these days I find myself saying a lot that the greatest gift you can give another man is to help him think differently. So, I’m kind of just planting seeds in a way that might help you think about yourself, think about communication with others, think about the way you want to run a business, who you hire, things like that.

But even at other levels, right? Earlier this year, I published a book, Blind Spots. And I think, like, six months later, I was catching up with a buddy I went to business school with. Might have been three months later. I was like, “Oh, where’s the audiobook?” Like, he’s like, “What are you up to?” Like, “Man, I’ve been up to a lot.” Like, nothing good, tell the truth. But here’s, like, I wrote this book. I think you’ll enjoy it. Like, you’re kind of… there’s a guy that thinks very intellectually, knowledge of self, very, very much trying to better himself. One of these like relentless striver types who, if you’re built like that, you’re built like that. And if you’re not built like that, you think these people are annoying jerks and you hate being around them. And it just is what it is, right?

But I was like, you know, the book is very much about like change, changing yourself, figuring yourself out, figuring out your blind spots, as the title says. And so I sent it to him. He’s like, “Where’s the audiobook?” I’m like, “What do you mean where’s the audiobook?” Because like, I’ve had to again like erase this kind of… I don’t want to be condescending about this stuff. If the world is changing, if we’re in a world where people prefer video to text and people prefer listening to their darn books instead of reading them, right? Like, deep down I have this deeply held prior notion that when a writer writes something, there’s a lot of intricacy to the art, to the words they choose, to even the rhythm of the sentence. And it becomes completely different when you have someone reading it. And I think, again, it sounds condescending, but there’s a tweet I saw a long time ago where it’s like people who drink their vegetables—people who only have their vegetables when they’re like in a blender or smoothie or some sort of thing. They never eat their vegetables. They got to have them. And I think that stuck with me as like the best analogy for an audiobook.

But like, in all things, I’m at the point now: I don’t watch TV. I don’t really—I don’t watch movies. I don’t watch Netflix. If you send me a podcast, I’m not going to listen to it. I’m going to go—I’m going to go look for the transcripts immediately. And I let people know this. I’m like, “Bro, this is… I don’t know, it might be a shortcoming of mine, but if I’m listening to an hour-long podcast, my attention wanders. I’m not going to catch all of it. Nor do I—nor in general do I think that in any hour-long podcast or any hour-long video, even, not all that stuff’s going to be interesting to me.” Whereas with a transcript… I guess podcast vs. transcript – processing information efficiently. I’ve kind of just over the years, from having developed like a… I think in equity research especially, you have to develop an ability to intake massive amounts of information being thrown at you every day and quickly discern what matters, because 99% of that stuff you can pay no attention to. But the art is in figuring out, “Okay, here’s the 1%, and I need to read this stuff ten times,” versus like you have three hundred emails in your inbox each morning and try to figure out what do I actually got to read?

And so I think you kind of develop… I think it was kind of a good skill set for my personality. I’ve always been kind of a quick reader and able to pull out what matters very quickly. And so the career kind of worked for who I am. But like, so I just—I just know off the bat, I’ve never listened to an audiobook. I can never… I would—I would feel like I’m insulting—I would feel like I’m insulting the writer. Because you know, even like, I went ahead and had an audiobook made for mine. It’s not—it doesn’t cost that much money. You can—you could hire someone to go and read it for you. I wanted to do it myself, but then you need like real equipment. You can’t just have AirPods. You got to—you got to have like a real studio mic. I think I probably would have messed it up. So maybe next time, maybe next whatever I write next, I’ll—I’ll try to do it in my own voice. I think that’s—that’s actually the most rewarding. I think people always enjoy, whether it’s like Matthew McConaughey or whoever’s, whatever the book of the day is, having the actual author.

But again, like, that whole experience, right? This is—this is a guy I went to business school with, highly, highly intelligent, way smarter than me. And I just—I guess I’m always blown away by how many highly intelligent, educated, white-collar types don’t read books to begin with. And so I can never look down on someone for preferring an audiobook, ’cause even an audiobook is better than 99.9% of the things that they could be doing with their time. So I’m never going to—I’m never going to set up going, “You’re wrong for that.” It’s just different—different styles, different communication styles.

So, hopefully that helps you for like personality type, in terms of like what’s better, written versus video. I think just one thing… I guess the other kind of be a great writer AND speaker genesis for all this for me is when you look back through history of like who your role models are, right? And hopefully this is something you’ve at least like given some thought to. But whether it’s like a Caesar or Napoleon, it could be a Roosevelt, it could be a Churchill. But these guys are all great writers, great speakers. There are no—no holes in their game, right? You got to have it all. And so I think, like, to go through your life being like, “Oh, I’m just going to—you say I’m going to play to my strengths and just be a good writer.” But I think I would much rather just put in the time to become well-rounded, like able to do anything.

I think especially for me, a lot of it is I—I foresee circumstances where, like, maybe I’m going back and forth with someone and a light bulb goes off in my head that’s like, “Yo, this would—this would be much easier addressed through a video. Let me just hop—let me just hop online and speak for five minutes.” That’ll be much quicker than us going back and forth. And so there are certain topics that I think are more amenable to speaking versus writing. What those topics are is kind of like an ongoing something I think about which I guess is kind of why I’m what topics are more amenable to speaking vs writing? doing this video in the first place.

Look, I’ve sat down and tried to write about this, but I find myself going in circles, and there’s no real—I don’t have the answer yet. And I don’t think there is an answer. I think all the questions worth asking don’t have answers. That’s one thing I’ve kind of learned about life. But the first video I did was actually about books, right? Ten books that changed my worldview. ‘Cause I sat down, I started writing it, and it didn’t sound right. First off, it was going to—it was going to end up way too darn long. I was talking about books – AI preview—going to end up writing a book about ten books that changed my worldview.

But I think, especially with books, there’s like—there’s certain… the online communication world has changed, and not just with AI, which I think is super important, but the way—the way people talk about books online most of the time is done in a way to make them seem smart or sound—make them be perceived as smart, especially once you start getting into like deeper, philosophical stuff, or like books that are, you know, whether it’s like War and Peace—like a book that’s like really long. You quickly lose sight of whether the guy actually knows what he’s talking about or how genuine he is with the recommendation versus like, “Oh, I just want to sound like I read Tolstoy.” You know, at a certain point, hopefully, whoever you are, you’re past the point of trying to read books to impress people. Like, it’s read book—read books to read books.

You know, I think my best—one of my best friends—people who read books to say they read books vs people who READ BOOKS—we don’t even really ask, “What are you reading?” anymore. Like, he’s—he’s… I recommend him the Seneca book, which is not that long, and he’s been reading it for three months, right? I’m like… he’s like, “Dude, I’m reading it again.” Like, things that I’m reading, and I found myself doing that over and over, too. Like, I’ve—if someone were to ask me what I’m reading right now, there’s a very good chance it’s a book that I read six months ago and that I thought about. Like, in praise of Erasmus – In Praise of Folly. This isn’t—this isn’t one of the ones that I’m talking—that I wanted to talk about today.

But Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, I finished that about three weeks ago. Halfway through, I knew I was like, “I’m going to have to reread this.” Like, “This is incredible. This is—this is an amazing book.” This is—it—it delivers. But I—I knew I was like, “All right, I’m—I’m gonna have to get to the end of this and like see what it’s all about…”

…about the big picture and then go back and read it.” You know, the first time through, you really don’t… I’m not even really retaining most of the book, right?

But anyway, so books were something that I thought were very amenable to video versus text. And I The AI angle and the commoditization of online discourse think the AI angle of this, which I think is very, very important, too, and kind of again, amenable to video… Whether you whether you feel like doing the work or not, whether you feel like standing up in front of the camera and talking… online discourse has become commoditized in a lot of ways.

AUTHENTICITY

I was just saying to a buddy yesterday, business writing no longer exists. It’s—Business writing is dead and no longer exists—dead. Like every book that that was written on business writing you can throw in the trash because AI and LLMs, I guess, like neutered it or destroyed it. But it’s at the point now where like some guy, you know, could be like a kid in a hut in the middle of nowhere in Nepal, and because of ChatGPT, he can write a better English business email just like that than you can.

And so when you go online, when you go on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever, whichever site you frequent… I’m just—I’m at this point, I’m only Twitter. Like, I don’t have—I don’t have it in me to be on multiple social media platforms. And it makes it like… I’m on them, but I’m not—I’m not really there. Like, whenever someone reaches out to me, I’m just like, “Just email me or DM me on Twitter,” ’cause otherwise I’m not really checking all these things. I just don’t… I’ve gotten such a low return on my time for these things that I only have room for one, and even then, it makes it easier to, like, turn it on and off.

So, but with—with—with what’s happened with the commoditization of everything, I think, whether you want to believe it’s a necessity or not, the value of authenticity and of having a real human like a face behind the name, right? Like, I would say, on one hand, you could say it’s a bonus, but if you wanted to argue with me and say, like, “Look, it’s become a necessity,” bro, I’m not going to push back on that. I think—I think whoever… if you wanted to make that argument and say you are going to get lost in the crowd unless you are able to put a face to the name and speak in your own voice.

I actually—I think, again, you can look at that chart that—that—that we looked at before, or just use your own judgment, you know, and you can—you can see exactly what I’m talking about, where even some of the guys who—who I enjoy reading on Twitter or whatnot… like, I see—I see taking shortcuts on twitter – LLM people taking shortcuts—I’ll see, and like, you know—you know if we’re friends or not, ’cause we—if we’re friends, like, we DM all the time, and so I’m talking to you. I’m not really—I’m not really coming at you sideways, but I see people do this stuff all the time, and I got to call it out. I gotta call out the BS.

Or like, you start—you see people start in their own voice and end in their own voice, but somewhere in the middle, right? Like, maybe they tried to write too much. You see some language in there that was—that was LLM generated, and you know, and it just—it people don’t talk like that. I can’t put it any better than that.

And I’m very low on the AI scale. In terms of being able to, like, I just don’t use it as much as I should. I’m behind the eight-ball, and I’m okay with that. I’ll speed up, but I’m moving very, very slowly, kind of for these reasons that we’re talking about here, where I don’t want to become overly reliant on it. I don’t want to lose… you know, the importance of a strong authorial voice. One of the only things I have going for me is, just from—from being really disciplined and diligent on writing a lot, I’ve—I’ve developed… people can kind of tell when something’s written by me. Like, my friends have said, “Look, you have a very—you’ve developed a very strong authorial voice, where the way you talk and the way you write, they connect.”

I think what’s amazing is, like, does that mean you’re a good writer? No. I think, ’cause that level took me probably ten—ten years, and that is just the entry to the game, right? If you read like a really amazing writer, they have the voice, but then they’re amazing writers. So I would say, like, realistically, I’m probably thirty years away from putting out something worth a damn in the writing arena, right? Right?

Like, everything—everything in my life I filter through two lenses now: through trading markets and through writing. And they’re actually very similar in a lot of ways. I filter life thru two lenses – trading markets and writing – how the two are similar – skillset probably another—I could probably go off on a different tangent here, but I’ll save it for another time. But they both require the same skill set. They actually—they’re both a lot about taking risk. And they’re both about maintaining your independent critical thinking.

And I think what really—what really makes them—what really separates the great from the good in them is kind of like a deep knowledge of human nature, of knowledge of self, and a very fine, finely honed, I guess I would say, like, BS detector. But when you read, like, really great writers, they pick up—they pick up on these little nuances of—of human interaction that you just don’t see anywhere else, or where you—where you stop and you pause and you’re like, “Oh my god, like, that is expressed so perfectly.” Like, you put words to something, you found words for something that no one has found words for before. And that’s what makes you an amazing writer. Like, an amazing writer makes you say, “I’m not alone.”

Right? And so, like, I don’t want to go off into too much of a tangent on writing, just because I know that I could get lost for three hours. But I do—I do think, most importantly, like, in the AI age, I have—I have more thoughts that I’ve written that I’m still trying to get together on the value of authenticity and on how like I—I keep thinking of AI as like a wave that keeps rising and rising and rising and rising, and it gets to the point where, like, you don’t know—it’s wild, bro—you don’t know who’s human. You don’t know who—you don’t know who you’re dealing with, and that’s already the point we’re at, and it’s only going to get worse.

You know, there are even accounts on like—on—on finance Twitter who, like, I think they’re human, but I don’t know. Like, “Bro, you—you sound awfully stiff or robotic a lot of the time,” right? Like, and that’s only going to get worse, where you don’t know—you don’t know if it’s human or not, right?

So, I would just say to whoever’s listening to this, like, really, I think it’ll take you a lot farther in life if you pay very close attention to like—like your authenticity and like what makes you you. And don’t worry so much about putting out like grammatically perfect or like impressive vocabulary in your sentences. I think it’s much, much better to just put yourself out there raw. Like, have… you know, don’t—don’t—don’t like put in spelling errors or like, don’t do it in ChatGPT and then like unwind it. Like, bro, put—put it out there. Like, I don’t—I—I don’t know how to put it any better than that. Like, some ideas you can’t put words to. There’s—there’s just like an energy where you’re reading it and you’re like, “No, bro.” Like, “I can’t explain why. I can’t point to—I can’t point to one word and be like, ‘No, that’s like an AI word.'” But I’m just reading. I’m like, “Yo, like, this isn’t you. I’ve read enough of you to know you. This ain’t you. You’re trying to sneak in some AI text.” Like, “Don’t do—Are you going to lose everyone’s respect and credibility?” Not really. But like, at the same time, yeah. ‘Cause like, you know, you got to be real careful with how you—how you use this technology.

And this is why I’m kind of moving slowly. Like, I have a feeling that as someone who tries to become a better writer… I’m not going to call myself a writer. I write a lot. I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’m like very much a student of the game. But in terms of how AI can improve writing? vast and underexplored area I think that’s another like kind of very vast, underexplored area that someone more experienced and more intelligent than me could put words to.

So, hopefully that helps you think at least a little bit about these two arenas, like speaking—speaking versus writing, listening, reading—and like what arena might be better for both, and then kind of also like how you want to go about it, right?

So, it’s funny, one of my buddies was—was making fun of me for the videos I put up before. He’s like, “Bro, why are you—why are you standing up? Why you against—why you against the wall?” I’m like, “Look, man, like, the—I didn’t even think about it. I guess I still have blind spots because the way that I first started speaking, I guess, is in 2021—2022. I was doing a lot of volunteer work. I was teaching English as a second language. I did that job for a year, and like, first off, it was—it was amazing. I no longer have any fear of public speaking, but like, you’re—you’re up, you’re standing up in front of a room of people, and you got to come in there prepared. You know, class might be like an hour, hour and a half, two hours, and like, if they’re good students, they’re going to raise their hand. But sometimes—sometimes people just don’t—they’re not going to raise their hand. And so you have to be prepared to go in there and just speak and like not even really mess up. If you mess up, you’re going to lose them, right? Then you’re a bad teacher. But you got to be ready to just like catch yourself in the moment.”

And so I look at a lot of what video content is now, where you have this sort of short-form TikTok content where you have all these different cuts, right? Like, you see the way—you see—I’m not even familiar enough with the terminology, but you can tell the way that people film videos is it’ll be like a five-second clip, five-second clip, five-second clip, five-second clip, and they do like two hundred of those and stitch them all together. And to—like, that’s good for what it is, but is that applicable in the real world? Not at all, bro. Like, no matter what it is that you’re doing in the real world, whether it’s like, you know, there’s different types of public speaking, and again, I’m not a rehearsed enough speaker to be able to like break that all down, but there’s teaching, which I know a little bit about. Then there’s like you get in front of an auditorium of people, and you have like a rehearsed speech, it’s like ten-minute speech. You might have a note card with some bullet points. You might have a teleprompter. There’s that. And then there’s like strictly like internet—the style that people are doing with—with like all the—with the cuts and all that.

But like, is that applicable to the real world? Is that going to help you in the real world? Is that going to help you in a business setting? Is that going to help you in a teacher setting? I don’t think it is.

And so the thing you learn once you start—like, I remember when I first started trying to write my first book, I was—I was really confused on like, “Am I doing this right? Like, is this how a book is supposed to go?” And I got in touch with an editor through a friend, and I was like, “Hey, like, am I doing this right?” He’s like, “Bro, like, there is no right.” There’s no right way to do a lot of things once you get in there. Like, when it comes to either recording a video, writing a book, there is no right way.

If you think about all the books you’ve ever read, like, they have chapters for the most part. Some of them don’t. And that’s it. That’s the only common thread. There’s no—you can really go whichever direction you want with it. And I think really like what makes the greatest books of all time great is the author just walked his own path. Like, Shakespeare wasn’t trying to be like someone else. And whoever was trying to be like Shakespeare, we don’t know who they are. All we know is the guys who—guys and girls who went off in their own path and kind of defined their own niche.

I think that applies for video, too, where even here, like, I’m sitting here, there’s a bunch of things I want to talk about, none of which have anything to do with—with—with one another. And so I’m sitting there, I’m like, “Heck, like, how do I square this circle?” I think, at least with video, what you can do is there are timestamps, right? And so you can see, “Here’s kind of different chapters of what this dude is going to talk about.”

And even though I don’t really watch, like, if I see that on the feed, even though I’m not big on video, if I see one thing jump out at me, I’m gonna be like, and he says like, “Oh yeah, go to minute 14, minute 14, 30 seconds in,” and it’s kind of marked off as being two minutes long, like, I’mma tune in. I’m going to go watch that. And then if I really like the way that the—that the person presents themselves, like, maybe I’ll listen to the other sections, right?

So, to me, just this—just me speaking like intuitively from like what I would want, which in general tends to be a pretty good sense for you’re never going to get what YOU want is a pretty good guide for what others will want what everyone else wants, but no matter who you are and what you’re into, you’re not alone. There’s a whole bunch of people out there who are interested in the same things you are.

And so I always think that when it comes to reading or writing or putting out anything really, like, any—even a tweet, you got to think like, “What would I want?” And you can start from that, and I think you’ll always find that you find an audience as long as you deliver it correctly.

So, those are the main points I wanted to make on writing and reading. And so, true to form, we’re going to switch gears completely.

ADDICTION

I want to talk real addiction, there’s a need for a voice in the room on Adderall quick about addiction—kind of all kinds—but the one that I really feel there’s a need for a voice in the room is on Adderall addiction.

And I would say that I don’t—I’m not sure that it’s one that I have any more or less experience with than any other drug. Like, I really like to drink. I really liked—I really like smoking weed. I love smoking cigs. I love doing blow. I love doing ecstasy. And I took a lot of, and I kind of quit all these things simultaneously. So, it’s not—it’s not like the only reason… I don’t want to make it sound like I’m like an Adderall story anymore than I was like anything else.

But I can just kind of tell, like, the reason why it—it stands out to me is, like, can I really add a lot to the discourse when it comes to alcohol? No, I don’t think so. I think—I think people much—it’s pretty fleshed out. And same for like cocaine, like, what can I really add? Like, ecstasy, what can I really add? I think these are pretty—these are pretty well-covered territory. But Adderall, I think it is something that is getting worse and worse, kind of quietly.

I suspect that a lot of people I know struggle with it and don’t really talk about it, and they’re kind of… it’s one of those things. It’s like, I guess—I don’t know if it’s like the elephant in the room, but I just—my spidey senses are pretty good for issues like this. Where like, I look around a room, and I ask “What are people not talking about?” Right? Like, I’m going right there. Like, that’s—that’s—someone’s got to do it.

And so, same thing for also generationally, right? I’m almost forty, but I think, whereas when I was coming up, and this applies for all industries—this is not just because I came from the finance industry does not mean that it’s finance-specific—I spent a lot of time around all industries, whether it be tech, whether it be like art, and it’s everywhere, bro. Like, it’s—it’s everywhere I’ve lived, and it applies to all addiction, really. Like, I’ve been around guys with hundreds of millions of dollars, I’ve been around people in jail, and all these people—addiction is completely the same everywhere you go. And that’s why it’s such a fascinating topic to me, and one that’s wide open, one that doesn’t—addiction and habits are two sides of the same coin – must understand – “you are your habits.”—really have answers. But also one that I think is just you have to understand, first off, because it dovetails with habits. And habits really, again, that’s all you got. Like, discipline and habits are life. It’s the meaning of life. You are—you are your habits. If you show me what your habits are today, I will tell you who you’re going to be in six months and twelve months, right?

You show me a one-week schedule of your life laid out hour by hour, and like the discipline with which you stick to these things. If there is any discipline at all, I’m going to tell you exactly where you’re going, bro. And like, if you have no… ’cause I’ve been on both sides of this. Like, in my life, I’ve developed self-discipline. I’ve lost self-discipline. And a lot of the things that I’ve written pretty much has to do with this topic, just because I think life comes back to this.

But really, addiction and habits are kind of—you could say they’re the same. And so the one thing I will say when it comes to addiction, on—especially talking about addiction, is that there’s very like—there’s AA and there’s NA, and they’re the same, really. I think they’re the same sort of textbooks. Some of the things I say may not jive with what they say, and I don’t want to get attacked. I’ve dealt with people who like AA and NA are very like culty, and so if I say something that goes against them, like, go with them. They’ve helped millions of people out of—out of addiction, and I’m some random guy on the internet. I—I don’t really—I don’t really, you know, if you’re—if you’re stuck between one or the other. But mostly, I don’t want to get attacked.

Like, some of the stuff I said, like, “No, like, you’re not—you’re not working the program,” right? And there—there’s details that just like some things worked for me, some didn’t. And like, I never—like, even once I kind of decided, “Forget it, I’m going this path.” You know, some of the best advice that I even got came from friends who really never even drank or did—did drugs. They was just like, “No, like, don’t—don’t focus on making this like your—don’t—don’t be thinking every single day about drinking and drugs and how you’re like a recovering this or recovering that. Instead, just make your new identity. Be someone completely new in terms of your habits and your lifestyle.”

And that worked for me. And I think—I actually think I’ve tweeted about something like this before: making a new identity, habits, lifestyle vs building up a dam that bursts. Where I really believe that if you wake up every day and you’re thinking like, “Oh, I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m a recovering drug pill head, coke addict, whatever it is.” No, no. I’m not—any condescension that sounds like it’s coming from my voice is directed at me, you know? I understand the way this works goes.

But I really think that if you keep focusing on the negative, you build up a dam in your head, and eventually that thing bursts. And I think it’s much cleaner to kind of view your life in the sense that your life is a book, and what’s in the past is written and cannot be changed. And so you can’t change what—you can’t change what was in the past. Past has happened, bro. That part of your life has been written. You could try to do revisionist history stuff, but that’s not going to work.

Like, once you die—once you die and your entire life comes to the surface, as you see, if you read a lot of biographies, like, man, like, people who try to be something in their life, but when you die, bro, all that truth comes to the surface. All the letters, especially now—now that everything’s on paper, all the texts, all the emails, you know, you can’t really—you can’t really fake. If you believe in God, this is why—this is why I said like, I, in another tweet I had before, like, you got to believe in—believe you got to conduct yourself according to God and according to what they’ll say about you 200 years from now, ’cause there ain’t no secrets. You can try—you can try to keep secrets now, bro, but it’s all going to come to light eventually. And so you might as well start conducting yourself that way now.

But when it comes to addiction and—and bad habits, which I think are kind of… I don’t know if those are synonymous. To me, they—to me, they have a lot in common. Addiction and bad habits, right? Like, I go to the gym every morning, seven days a week. Do I have an addiction to the gym? No. Like, most of the time I don’t want to go. That’s a good habit, right?

And so I think you can kind of—and—and I—I have a little bit of… I don’t know if it’s like distaste, but like whenever someone—whenever someone cleans up their life and starts going to the gym every morning, they’re like, “Oh, like, now he’s—now he’s just like addicted to this.” It’s like, “No, it’s not how it works.” That’s not how it works at all. You’re trying to replace your bad habits with good ones.

Like, I’m not every single—like, I’m in the gym probably 4:30 almost every morning. I would say every morning. I’ve—I’ve been—I’ve been real good for like months on end now, but I don’t want to go. I’m not addicted to this routine. I wake up every morning, and I want to go back to bed. You know, if I wake up and it’s 4:15 and I see my alarm’s about to go off, I’m thinking like, “Ugh,” you know? My mind is—is my mind is thinking of ways that I can like not go. And I’ve kind of eventually, your discipline just becomes stronger than your desire, I guess, is the way to say it.

But in terms of your life being a book, right? So—so to keep focusing… You can’t focus on what’s been written. All you can do is really focus on what you write today and kind of what the rest of your life looks like. And at any point, you can decide that the way you’re living your life… you can—you can really wake up any single morning, and whatever’s been written in the past, or however you lived your life before, you can throw all that away. Like, you’re not a—you’re not a passive observer to your life. I hate—I hate seeing people go about their life that way.

And so, at least from the perspective of addiction, you can—you can say—you can wake up and say, “Okay, I’m going to write a new—I’m start writing new chapters. Like, I’m—I’m—I don’t like the way that I’m living my life. I’m not getting the results that I want. I’m not living the life that I want. I’m not the man that I want to be. Whatever I’m doing is not working.” And your mind will tell you that. That’s really, I think, a lot of time what depression is. Depression is like your mind telling you like, “Bro, like, something ain’t right. You’re doing something—you’re doing something wrong.”

And so, as you go forward living a new life, I think to keep going back to your past, be like, “Oh, like, I’m recovering this, I’m recovering that. Like, I was an alcoholic. I was a lousy drug addict, a convicted felon, a cokehead, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t think you’re doing yourself any favors. I think you’re leaving yourself stuck in the past. And I think that kind—that mindset prevents you from moving forward.

And everything I just said runs directly counter to I think how like AA and NA operate. So like, if the two—if when in doubt, listen to them. You know, like, they have like sponsors. You go to meetings, and like, you’ve like everything’s about your identity is really that you’re a recovering alcoholic. And I have—I have very good friends who—who live, you know, they—they—they work the program. And so I’m not going to say that I’m right and they’re wrong. Probably they’re right and I’m wrong.

You know, I think what they would say to me is like, “Oh, like, you’re probably going to mess up—relapse. You’re probably—you’re probably going to forget where you came from, and you’re going to go to a bar and you’re going to think you got it made and you’re going to start boozing.” And like, at this point, bro, it’s been like five years—going on five years. And so, like, but see, that’s the point. Like, I—I forgot. Like, I don’t even—I don’t even think about it. Like, I just—I look back—I look back at who I was, and that person is just like dead and buried.

Like, I have—I have a very strong distaste in my mouth for a lot of the things that I used to do and a lot of the ways I used to operate. And that in itself—I think that sickness, that level of like… you feel it in your mouth—like, how like self—like a like a healthy amount of self-loathing and self-disgust are what motivate sustainable change, not external stimulus. Healthy—healthy self-loathing, healthy amount of self-disgust, I think, is what not only motivates change, but, you know, change has to happen like every day. You have to stay motivated every single day of your entire life with no external stimulus, right?

And so that—what that is what I think is the only way that people really change and like stay changed.

So, before I go too far from Adderall, here’s what I’ll say. For me personally, I got diagnosed… I think I’m ADHD. I guess you can probably tell if ADHD is a thing. Again, like, I find myself here, I’m probably going against medical academia, whatever it is. There’s a lot of concepts that I’m just not sure on. I think at a certain point you stop caring about like labels and like diagnoses, and you’re just like, “Look, I am who I am, and I got to darn deal with this situation, and I don’t want to be on drugs.”

I’ve—I’ve found personally, having been sober for years on end, you—you attain like a clarity of mind that you never really want to give up. And it only becomes apparent how messed up you are once you’ve been sober for… it takes a long time. I really hate to—to be the bearer of bad news, but, you know, a lot of people think like, “Oh, I’m not going to drink this weekend, so I’ll be cool on Monday.” Bro, if you’ve been drinking and doing drugs for—for years, it takes probably three to six months for you to get your head right. And to get your emotions right, to get your sleep right, to get your like—your body changes.

And only then, once you’ve made it there, you’re like, “Damn, bro.” Like, “I—I can never go back. I can’t.” Like, you really feel like in a lot of ways you just started living your life for the first time.

And I got to share something that many, many years ago a therapist told me, probably back when she was telling me that I had a drug problem. But she said that when you stop drinking and doing drugs, you revert mentally to the age that you were when you first started using. And bro, that is such a cold truth dagger. And it’s true. Like, I hate—I hate—I’m sorry. I’m sorry to like white pill you or black pill you or whatever—whatever sobriety pill, whatever the analogy I just hit you with. But that idea is true, bro, ’cause—and for me, like, you know, I was fourteen, maybe I really started getting drunk up all the time. Like, you know, my dad was sick, like, I knew he was going to die, and I was coping with it just by getting messed up all the time. And that continued for a very long time, you know, until the situation hit the fan.

Like, someone who—someone who drinks and does drugs never really quits on their own. Like, they got to—they got to hit rock bottom. But that—that really is how it feels. Like, I think if you ask anyone who’s been sober for a while, they’re like, “Yeah, like, I’m in many ways like I really feel like I—this is the first time I’ve really known myself,” ’cause it’s very—it’s very—how people go through decades of their life never being “sober” once—easy to go through life, especially if you’re in a big city, kind of just like doing what everyone else is doing.

And like, you can go through decades of your life never being sober at once. Meaning, you wake up, you take Adderall, you go to work, you get home, you got to take the edge off, you have a drink, smoke some weed, you go to bed, you do that again. All of a sudden it’s Friday night, you got to go out with the boys and like from Friday to Sunday, like, it’s on. You know, that’s how it is in Manhattan, at least. I think probably like in Chicago, a lot of cities, it’s like that. You know, out in—out in California, they’re a little bit healthier. But—but I don’t know, you know, again, like, I lived in California for a bit, like, they’re just—they’re just doing different drugs.

They’re not drinking so much, but you go out and like people are doing—it’s not even designer drugs. I’m just like, “Bro, what the heck are you doing?” You know, instead of doing like—like I’m California sober, I just do shrooms every weekend. I got out there, and they had this—a buddy had like a saline nasal spray, and the thing was filled with coke. And he’s like, “Oh yeah, we do this. We do it this way ’cause it still gets you high but it doesn’t mess up your nose.” I was like, “This is the most California thing I’ve ever heard, bro. Like, this—this what you guys consider—consider healthy.”

That’s how I talk about like guys are California sober. Like, “Oh yeah, like, I don’t drink.” It’s like, “I’ve just been doing shrooms every weekend instead.” I’m like, “Bro, you’re not—you’re not.” It’s the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard about in my life, but it’s not my place to—to talk.

And I think with sobriety and addiction in general, you really got to—you keep your mouth shut, ’cause sobriety superiority is a real thing. Whether you believe that or not, you are always going to be perceived as thinking you’re better than the other guy. So, I really don’t talk about this topic ever. This is probably—this is probably like one of the few times I’ll talk about on the phone to a buddy or face to face. And I’ll write about it, but I almost never address people in—in conversation. And if they’re talking about—if—if this comes up, I just sit there quietly ’cause no one wants to feel like they’re making—no one wants to feel like they’re wrong for what they’re doing, for drinking, for doing drugs, whatever it is.

ADDERALL

And so I guess the way I’ll wrap this up, the Adderall part, is that I was twenty-one. Started out twenty milligrams a day, forty milligrams a day. Time goes on, like, you eventually got to the max, which I think is—was fifty at the time. I think it’s sixty now. I think they bumped it up.

And for twelve years, I was like fine. Never—never abused it. Like, I guess on the weekends, you know, you go out, people are—people are staying out late partying, and there’s definitely Adderall getting passed around. But in terms of like having it mess up your life, you know, only like a drug addict will understand like the way that I just said it, where it’s like, “Yeah, you’re abusing drugs, but like, you’re not really—you’re recreationally abusing them on the weekends, but like, you’re not an addict.” But you kind of understand like where—what I’m getting at.

And for me, it was really once I left and went to start my own business. That was when if you don’t have the self-discipline required to like set set your own schedule and set your own structure, how a lack of self-discipline and structure gets you in trouble as an entrepreneur—that’s when you’re going to run into trouble, right? And I found very quickly… it was fine at first, but it was only like once things started going wrong, and I was like, “Heck, I got to work more to work my way out of this,” which is just like a—that in itself is a sign that that should be like a red flag that you’re kind of your habits are messed up. But all of a sudden, like, you’re staying up late. All of a sudden it’s 2 a.m. You’re like, “Shoot, like, I’m not going to bed. I’m wired. I’m on a shitload of stimulants.” So you take another, and all of a sudden you’ve been up for days on end.

That, I think, is really where you get in a lot of trouble. That’s what got me in a lot of trouble, at least. But that’s why I think there’s absolutely room for someone out there to… I’m thinking of a football game where you come running out off the field waving the flag, bro. Like, this—this is wide open. Like, someone really needs to be—this needs to be brought into the discourse. This needs to be like destigmatized. This needs to be talked about. This is just like way too big of a problem.

Me personally, I’m happy to kind of contribute my own experience, but in terms of being like the flag bearer, it’s not really true to my own story, right? Like, I was staying up on end. I was staying up for days and making bad decisions, but it wasn’t Adderall that did that. That was me. Like, I—I—I would say—I don’t know if I would say I had preconceived plans, but like, I had bad intentions, and Adderall simply gave me the fuel to stay up and fulfill those bad intentions.

But like, I could almost tell very quickly that if I start going in this direction, the narrative—people love stories and narratives like, “Oh, like, this guy took too much Adderall and like ruined his life, and now he’s out there like being the flag bearer, blah, blah, blah.” That’s not true. That’s not true who I am, you know?

And so I’m happy to speak up. Like, I think I would say my—my problems with drugs were pretty well distributed. I was very diversified, I guess you could say. And so I don’t think I’m—and I guess in—in one sense it was—I was kind of lucky that that made it easier to kind of put everything down at the same time, which is actually how it played out. Like, “You’re either doing everything,” and I say, “Done—I’m not doing anything anymore.” Everything kind of got cured at the same time, like, this, the urge for self-destruction.

And so finally, like, after I got—after I got rid of all the illegal substances, then worked my way off all prescription and the cigarettes. And now I’m at the point where it’s just caffeine. And I—I think a lot about whether I should get rid of that or not, just so I can be completely raw dog.

But with Adderall—visualizing the plight of the adderall-dependent office worker—this is—this is the scenario that I see in my head a lot, where I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for the typical office job worker. Where I can speak most specifically to finance. I know for a fact like the reason why—why I got the script in the first place ’cause I know that like I could tell as soon as I started working in the industry that the—the level of detail and precision required I didn’t have. I can’t build perfect models for twelve hours on end.

And I think this applies to banking, probably applies for all like sales and trading, definitely applies for investment management. But I just knew, bro, like, “I can’t—I’m going to mess this up. I need to be on point.” And so then like Adderall helped me do perfect work. Helped me knock out the CFA in two, two and a half years. Probably helped me knock out—knock—knock out the took the GMAT, got a 640, then took—took it again, got a 710, got into business school. Like, it fueled all that.

This is why this is such a like difficult nuance topic, because, being completely real, there’s a lot of things I accomplished in my life that I don’t think I would have accomplished without stimulants. And so it’s been very—it’s very tricky. The way out is very, very tricky.

And this is why I have a lot of sympathy for people, because this—to go back to the office worker scenario I laid out—you have someone who’s in a job that they’re taking Adderall just to survive, and they know that without the Adderall they’re useless. And so like, they’re in a position where they want to—they like… I think a lot of people like want to get off the train, you know? They recognize like what it’s done—what it does to mess up your sleep, mess up your appetite, mess with your stress.

Like, I think a lot of people, at least for me, like, at a certain point, I was like, “Bro, I don’t—I’m sick of needing to take drugs to—to function.” And it’s actually, of all people, my mother actually said it really well. ‘Cause after—after I got off all this stuff, I went to my mom. I was like, “Yeah, like, I always felt like I needed Adderall to do—to do my job.” And “what if you got a job that didn’t require you to take Adderall?” She’s like, “What if you got a job that didn’t require me to take Adderall?” I was like, “Damn, that’s like—most insightful way of looking at it that I can think of.”

And so the reason why I have sympathy for people is you’re in a position where to back—to get out of the sort of cycle you’re in… because also like, I think it’s pretty common that if you’re taking Adderall, you’re—you get prescribed downers, right? I think a lot of times Xanax to say, “Oh, like, the come down from the Adderall is too harsh, and it’s preventing me from sleeping well. Can you—can you prescribe me something so I can come down at the end of the day?” So you get Xanax. Then all of a sudden, this is what I mean by you’re never sober, right? You wake up, you’re on a lot of stimulants all day, like a gerbil running in your own cage. You get home, you need another drug to take the edge off so you can go to bed.

And I swear, bro, this cycle will slowly destabilize you. This cycle will slowly, I don’t want to say drive you insane, but drive you insane. I don’t—if I can put it any better than that, ’cause you’re—you’re—you have no equilibrium. You’re just constantly… And this is how the majority of Americans operate, by the way. That’s why—that’s why—that’s why I feel like I almost have to speak up on this. Like, it just—it doesn’t—it doesn’t seem right that this is like—that this is sort of just silently the way things are.

I think it—I think it breeds a lot of people who are afraid to speak the truth, but like, they don’t want to be seen by their boss. They don’t want to be seen by their employees or by their co-workers or whatever as someone who is only useful with stimulants.

And so all I can say, and I wish I had like a better solution for anyone who’s struggling with this on how thinking about the path out to get out. The solution—and I have to do a lot of digging on myself, really—is you got to remove yourself. This is how you get out. And whether you’re willing to make the sacrifice or not, I can’t—I can’t answer that for you. But you really have to almost eject from whatever your current life situation is, whatever your career is. And you got to—you got to learn yourself. ‘Cause really, Adderall can make you do any job. Whatever the square—whatever the square hole is, you can find a way to—whoever you are, you can find a way to put the round peg in a square hole. That’s what Adderall does. It enables you to do horrifically boring jobs that like are almost undoable otherwise.

And that’s why America runs on meth. White collar meth is really what Adderall is. And so for you to zoom out and like restart like, “Damn, like, what am I actually good at?” Because you’re good at something. It probably isn’t what you’re—what you’re being like meth-ed out to do.

.But you really have to start over. Especially, I guess, for me, for better or worse, I have the founder/entrepreneur mindset, and I found that the way around this is always through delegation—through learning to hire and learning to outsource. And the tasks that—the tasks that you used to be like maniacally—you need drugs to do—like, farm that out. Find a way to deal with someone else.

Like, I found that I’m really… my strengths are probably like—I can do the math stuff, but not perfectly. But I think a lot of my strengths have really become clear as more like a—like a good communicator, good with people, right? That’s where, like, naturally, when I wake up with a clear head, I can really—I can deal with people like all—like pretty much all day, actually, without the—and I don’t want to be on stimulants, right?

‘Cause I’ve always found, whenever I was on Adderall, one of the things I hated is it turns you into a darn like robot. Like, something’s wrong with you. You know, you ever—you ever talk to someone on Adderall? Like, there’s no—they’ve lost all their personality. They’ve lost all their—there’s no creativity. They’ve lost like—you lose like some—some human part of your soul. And it’s awful.

And so that’s again why I have so much sympathy. Like, I think a lot of people struggle with this. I think a lot of people are silently fighting this battle alone. And so, do I have all the answers? Absolutely not, bro. Like, I’m—I have limited experience, but I’ve kind of just been around. And I, again, like, I have a nose for when something is messed up and no one’s talking about it. And for better or worse, you know, I’m—I’m outspoken, and I—I hate to say pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land, right?

For better or worse, like, I wish I was a settler. I want—I actually want some land. I’m sick of being a darn pioneer. I always—I always speak out, and I get criticized, and I’m just used to it. Just kind of who—like, how I’ve gone about my life. And you get people’s respect, but you also get a lot of blowback. Like, sometimes I really wish that—I work a lot on like keeping my mouth shut, not speaking out, not speaking out on things that is best left undisturbed.

But this is an issue where I think this is something that really needs more voices, more light shined on it, and if you don’t actively change the path you’re on, you will keep doing the same shit you are doing until the day you die. Kind of more attention paid on, “How do you get out of this mess?” if you’re someone who has kind of committed… ’cause—’cause the one thing I said—I think I wrote about this in Blind Spots—where, whatever path you’re on, if you don’t actively interfere with that path, you will keep doing the same stuff that you are doing until the day you die.

It’s very important. People don’t think long term enough about like their habits and their discipline. I’m telling you, bro, like, if you don’t—if you do not actively take control of your life, whatever it is you’re doing, you will keep doing this stuff until the day you die or until the day like you crash out, right?

Like, I can—I can only look back on my own path, like, all the drugs and—and—and drinking, all the like bad decisions I was making. And again, I wrote about this over and over in Blind Spots, where I was—I knew it was only going to end one of three ways: Hospital, jail cell, graveyard. That’s how every rock bottom—that’s how every rock bottom story ends.

So, for me, it was inevitable. Like, I don’t really… it’s strange, like, I don’t really have—it’s hard to have regrets about something that was inevitable, where you know you’re just going down—you’re just going down a path that’s completely wrong, and it’s going to end badly. And people, you know, people in my life like saw it, you know? And they just… I—I guess I should speak on one thing with addiction that’s very important, and then we’ll wrap this—we’ll wrap this video up for now, ’cause like I said, this is—this is stuff that I’ve written like a ton. I probably have hundreds of pages written about this, and I have a hard time tying it together and finding kind of like a conclusion. But I think it’s very amenable to video, because I’ve probably said fifteen or twenty things that I think about as lasers.

Like, I’ve—I’ve hit— I’ve probably hit you with fifteen or twenty lasers, and like, thirteen of them bounced off. But no matter who you are, bro, like, one or two of the things I said sunk in with you, and it’s going to stay with you. And I know that that’s just how life is. That’s how it is. And it’s different ones for different people.

But there’s something—I know there’s something I said here that is going to stick with you. You’re going to be in bed tonight, you’ll be like, “Ugh, like, truth nuked me,” you know? It’s like someone put a knife in me that I can’t get out. And that’s really like your—your conscience, or something—lasers, knives and truth nukes—something inside you telling you that you need to change the way you’re living, which you probably already knew deep down, but you kind of buried. And I’m kind of here like, “No, like, don’t—don’t do that, man. Like, don’t.” The thing I say to people a lot these days is like, “You can lie to the world, you can lie to me, but don’t darn lie to yourself.” That’s all I ask. You can lie to me about like how much you drink, about how many drugs you do. I’m not going to think I see you, ’cause like, I’ve seen around people.

It’s one of the things that people are most dishonest about is addiction, drinking, and drug use. I would say, if you talk to ninety-nine people—if you talk to a hundred people on the street and ask them to be honest about their drinking and drug use, ninety-nine percent of them are going to lie in your face. And it’s just like one of those things, like, we just—humans are very dishonest about. All addiction is is built on a web of lies, so to say.

And so, all addiction is built on a web of lies. Like, but that’s why I said, when I talk to people a lot of times, I’ll be, you know, I get a lot of DMs. I get a lot of like random emails from strangers. Like, I kind of find myself making—making friends without even… I’m not looking for new friends. I have really good friends. I don’t want more. I’ve learned to like keep my circle tight. I know who I can count on.

But I kind of find myself making friends accidentally, just like kind of like putting myself out there, and like relationships come in on the exact wavelength that I’m—that I’m putting out, which actually has turned out to be really rewarding. I think it’s actually like the most healthy foundation for a relationship is kind of not really rock bottom, but just like pain and struggle and trials you’re going through. True friendships are built on layers of struggle, and grow stronger through. That’s what real—to me, relationships are built on. Real, real durable, enduring friendships are built and founded on these layers of struggle and these waves and these tsunamis that we go through in life. And like, these waves that you surf, and great friendships find a way to become stronger in the face of struggle. They don’t—they don’t break, they become stronger.

It’s the one thing I’ve learned with addiction, and I’ll wrap this up on this point. What to do if you see someone struggling with addiction and going down the wrong path—if you know someone who’s really struggling and you see them going down the wrong path, there’s—there’s nothing you can do. And this is like—again, this is like—I wish this wasn’t the case. I—I deal extensively with this issue. Like, I’ve dealt with it myself. Like I said, I’ve been—I’ve seen it at all levels.

And a lot of times now, I get a phone call from people like, “Yo, like, you know a little bit about this problem. Like, I have, you know, a friend, a brother, a family member. What the heck do I do?” And the thing I’ve learned is like a lot of the things—like, the interventions—like, that stuff doesn’t work, because it goes back to all change comes from within, to what I said before. And I—I’ll put it a different way, which is that all change comes from within. All change has to come from within. All sustainable change has to come from within.

You can’t—you can’t have a friend or a family member be like, “Change, like, change! Like, I’m going to make sure that you change.” Not only does that not work, I actually think it’s—it pushes them the opposite direction. I think you can—I don’t know if—I don’t know if the relationship can get like damaged, but they’re—they’re going to just pull back from you. No one wants to be lectured. No one crashing out is the only way out wants to be told, “Hey, do this, do that, do—do this, that, and the third.”

And so really, I think—I wrote this in Blind Spots, but it’s really like the only way that someone gets out of these self-destructive feedback loops is they got to crash out. They got to crash out. And—and what you can hope for as someone who loves them is that they do it in a way that has no long-term consequences or minimal long-term consequences. Meaning like they don’t end up in the darn hospital. They don’t end up in jail. Like, they don’t die.

But I just—this problem is not age-specific, man. Like, you know, you could be—you could be—you could have a fifty-five, sixty-year-old guy who all of a sudden just goes off the darn rails. Grown-ass woman. Like, this kind of thing happens all the time. And there’s a lot of times where like, all you can do is pray to God. It’s so messed up.

Like, I’m not going to speak on specific situations, just because people put their trust in me, and I keep us confidential. And so, in the event that whoever’s—if you need someone to bounce ideas off, like, as you can tell, I don’t really have the answers. But I think for a lot of people, I found that just them being able to like unleash this wave of like repressed emotion, you can—you can like see the weight come off their shoulders. And so, I’m always happy—always happy to help however I can, even if it’s just like as a sounding board.

But I’ve seen enough situations now with drugs and addiction where it’s so darn hard. You know, I’m talking to like a really good friend. I’m like, “Bro, we have no—All we can do is pray and hope that there’s not a body. Like, hope that he doesn’t kill himself. Hope he doesn’t kill someone else. Hope he doesn’t hurt someone else. Hope he doesn’t go to darn prison. Hope he doesn’t go—hope he doesn’t like seriously injure himself. Hope he doesn’t like…” And it’s hard. It’s really, really hard.

This—this is another one—another one of these things where I can sit here and write all day, but a lot of times with writing, you want like a nice, neat conclusion, and with issues like this, bro, there really is no conclusion. This is one of the like deep mysteries of human nature.

You know, I say a lot like deep mysteries of human nature – we’ll explore the entire galaxy before we figure out addiction. We’re going to be—we’re going to be landing rockets upside down on freaking Alpha Centauri before we figure out the inner workings of the soul. Like, why people do what they do, you know? Oh, and that’s—I always find that so amusing. It’s the one that we’ve never figured out over thousands of years, and never will, right?

And so, I—I—I wish I had—I wish I had cleaner answers for you on any of this stuff. I kind of—same way I write about markets is I kind of like—I don’t have answers. I kind of just try to like throw a bunch of thoughts on the floor. Like, “Here, bro, like, I know there’s some value in here, but I’m going to respect your intelligence. I’m not going to—I’m not going to be the one to be like, ‘Do this, do this, do this, do this,’ ’cause I don’t really know. I have a lot of things I’m trying to figure out on my own.”

But I’m gonna throw a bunch of ideas on the floor. I’m gonna let you—I’m going to trust in your intelligence, and you can kind of go through the floor, pick out what applies to you.

And really, I think with—with addiction, what’s really tricky is that at some point in your life, first off, you got to come to grips with yourself. Like I said, don’t lie to yourself ever. But also, like, at some point in your life, man, you’re going to have a family member, you’re going to have a friend, could be your kid, you know, it could be your kid’s friend. But this problem is real, bro. Like, addiction is real. There’s no way around it.

And I think like, when you’re younger, you kind of turn a—you’re kind of like, “Never turn a blind eye to the uglier sides of life. everything is part of the Total Human Experience (T.H.E.) no.” Like, I—this is never going to be a part of my life. There’s a lot of the uglier sides of life that when you’re younger, you’re like, “No.” You know, “I’m never going to have to deal with that. Like, keep it away from me.”

But as you get older, man, like, everything—everything is all part of the Total Human Experience. I wish I had a better acronym for it, ’cause I want to put this in writing somewhere. Like, the T.H.E., Total Human Experience. I was very like the Universal Human Experience, where it’s like, “Bro, if it has happened to anyone in history, it can and probably will be a part of your life.” People, you know, getting freaking killed. Like, everything—the ugly sides of life will manifest themselves at some point in your life. And really, like, the message that most people aren’t ready to hear is that all these things are inside you. All the traits that—all the traits that puts people in jail, all the vices that drug addicts have, it’s in you somewhere, most—most—most likely you just don’t want to face it. But I can’t—I’m not going…

That’s something you have to come to on your own. I’m not going to be able to like pull that out at you. That’s what I’ll say.

Addiction for now. If there’s like more demand for this topic—ask a few people have really good questions—I’ll speak more on it. For now, we’ll do one book review, and then we’ll call it a day.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. So, I did the ten—the ten books that changed my worldview. Full disclosure, like, this was supposed to be in there. And I looked around—I looked around my bookshelf. It wasn’t there. I think I—I mailed my copy to a buddy. I was like, “Darn.” So, I grabbed a history book instead. History—history book is still good, important book, but full disclosure, like, this should have been top ten.

This—this is a much longer version of, you know, usually the book is like this big. I think you could read it online. It’s just—it’s a bunch of short maxims, like pithy sayings, but in terms of the—as a guide to human nature, this was written, I think, four hundred, four hundred fifty years ago. I find myself quoting it all the time because it’s—it’s a mirror into the ugly sides of human nature.

I think like the very first—very first maxim is: “Our virtues are nothing but vices disguised.” And like, the book is meant to—like, you read it. I can’t—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read this damn book, because you think about that, you think about it in yourself. You think about like that sort of principle in others, and you start thinking like, “Damn, like, what are—what are my virtues? What are my vices? And are they the same?” And like, “Are things that I’m claiming as virtues actually just me putting a pretty face on what like an ugly side of my—side of my nature is?”

And like, a lot of times this comes back to like Jung and like shadow work and figuring out like what—what darkness works within you. But I don’t know if I want to spoil it too much. Like, I would definitely— I would just say it’s a must-read. And you will find—you will find yourself reflecting on it over and over and over, because he—he looks—shines a light better than I think better than anyone I’ve ever read on sort of the nastier sides of ourselves that we don’t want to face.

And so I would say like, you know, I very rarely—if you—if you watch my last one about the ten—ten books that shame our worldview, some of them I was like more hesitant than others on like go out and buy this. You know, like Seneca, I said like, “Go out and buy it.” Like Pascal, you know, I don’t know. I don’t want to be—I don’t want to, like, these—these aren’t stock pitches. Like, I don’t really have my reputation riding on this recommendation. I don’t want to—I don’t want to send you down a rabbit hole. Buy a book, invest your time in it, and be like, “Oh, like, forget you, Blotnick. This book’s no good.” But this one, I would buy it. And like, don’t just read it online. Don’t just—I’m sure the PDF is online somewhere, but like, buy it, spend time, spend time reading it. I think it will very—it’ll very much help you know yourself and help you know human nature. And from there, all good things flow.

That’s all I got today from Rock Bottom Productions. God bless you all, and have a wonderful day.

Watch the video on YouTube at youtube.com/@gregoryblotnick.