Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en you’re successful in terms of career and traditional sense of successful you’re a good friend you normally come on a lot but you just tweeted how you kind of like took off for all of August and you kind of bailed because you’re kind of having a meltdown in which we all have had before like a digital overload meltdown uh and you just bailed right totally it was it was really uh it was bad I mean it’s interesting to think about like I think this happened to everyone over covid like their life just shifted in a weird way um and my life just became crappy over covid which is weird because I had this amazing year like we took a business public we raised a big fund we got to work with all these interesting people we bought some great businesses I didn’t die of covid like all these great things happened and yet I was totally miserable um and when I look at it when I kind of zoom out my old day I don’t know if you guys you guys know but I live in Victoria Canada and I didn’t even have an office so I actually like just working out of cafes I would just go to the same Cafe every day uh and I’d sit there with headphones on three or four of my friends would always work there so it’s kind of like cheers there’s always like interesting people to talk to and my day was just broken up into a bunch of chunks so any given day I wouldn’t really be on the computer or in one place for more than an hour or two and my day went from that to sitting in a house on my computer all day on zoom and doing email and it just kind of made me miserable and so I I am you know when I look at like what I love about business I don’t actually love you know doing business is great doing strategy coming up with ideas all that kind of stuff but the cool thing about business is you get to meet interesting people like business is just a hack right so like if you’re interested in health you figure out like a health business you suddenly can meet all the most interesting people in that World um and I’m an extrovert so so anyway it just I was totally bummed and I started um you know going on Twitter a lot because I was craving socializing um I and I I went from like 20 000 followers to 170 000 followers so I got totally hooked into that and like a good day would be like I have a viral tweet or I go on your podcast or something something exciting happens a bad day would be I say something on Twitter I get dunked on I got misunderstood or it doesn’t do well like what a ridiculous thing like I’d tweet and it would only get like 50 likes instead of 5 000 likes that would like throw my day off so I got to a point where I was just like Jesus Christ like this is totally ridiculous I’m thinking about Twitter constantly I’m checking Twitter constantly and on top of that I’m you know email uh you know checking stats stocks uh if I went to the bathroom without my phone I feel like I feel I feel like I was gonna freak out constantly listening to audiobooks constantly listening to podcasts no silence so I just like hit this weird Breaking Point August 1st where I woke up and I was like I’m not stoked to get her to bed I’m not depressed objectively everything is fine I’m like I’m just like I have like anhedania like I’m just not excited about anything so I just said [ ] it I’m just gonna what what what’s that word you just said that was a good one yeah it means like an inability to feel pleasure right like nothing nothing would get me pumped nothing would give me a hit like you know you know when you like you’re always you go on Netflix you’re like scrolling endlessly for the perfect thing you just can’t find it that’s how my life felt and so I basically you know it’s the middle August I live in British Columbia it’s super beautiful and so I just said to my wife you know what I’m out for the next month let’s just go off to our cabin we’ll you know we’ll go on some trips and I’m just gonna totally check out and I said a couple rules for myself I was like no phone no email no computer no podcasts uh no phone calls no social media no news I couldn’t even read non-fiction business books right so it’s pretty extreme and I put on my Apple watch which has you know cellular so I was like okay if there’s an emergency I can get a phone call and I put my phone in a drawer and I just disappeared I went up to my cabin and hung out with my kids and honestly for the first like three or four days it felt like there was like a bug in my brain like I was just like so like like something I I itch I couldn’t scratch like just so irritable as being a huge [ ] uh I was like slapping my pocket every five seconds to check stuff I’d be sitting on the beach with my kids and I’d constantly be like oh I need to text this to a friend I gotta I gotta take a photo of this right so it’s really weird horrible withdrawal but then after like three or four days I was like holy crap like this is really interesting I started reading fiction books and just sitting for hours uh you know enjoying a sunset taking a silent Drive doing all this stuff and I think it’s kind of like if you eat junk food all the time like you’re drinking Coke and having burgers and stuff all the time and then you eat broccoli it doesn’t taste that good your brain is primed for like these extreme flavors and then if you switch to broccoli you know you don’t eat those things for a month then you eat broccoli broccoli is like orgasmic it’s amazing and so anyway I did this for four weeks and I was feeling really good and I came back to life like I kind of reintroduced myself into society and started going out and working and stuff and it was really bizarre like I you know would listen to a song that was playing in a cafe and it’d be like the greatest song I’ve ever heard I’d read some random article and it would be like fascinating and I’d just be completely uh like just you know engage with it um and then problems I had to solve that would have pissed me off like seemed like no problem when I was excited to solve them and I was kind of going like man why why did that work like what was it about that and at the same time like around then I started listening to podcasts again and I listened to this podcast by Andrew huberman huberman lab which I’m sure you guys have listened to he’s amazing yeah he’s uh he’s coming on the podcast oh amazing that’s that’s awesome so he did this deep dive on addiction and he did it with this woman Anna Lemke who’s a Stanford addiction doctor and I was like oh this will be interesting it’ll be about like heroin addiction or something and how they treat alcoholism so I’ll start listening to it those other people who have those other bad problems it’s fun it’s fun to read about them totally I was like I was like oh this will be you know maybe philanthropic you know I can help fund the heroin Addiction Center in Victoria or something so anyway and as I listen I just go like oh my God like you know this is not this is universal like basically the chemical of dopamine the neurotransmitter is the thing that makes you feel craving and pleasure when you do things and it motivates you to do things and I realized you know basically like she said you know something along the lines of if you eat chocolate cake once a month it tastes amazing and you don’t really crave it that much you don’t really think about it that much it’s very pleasurable if you eat it once a week you know it’s still enjoyable but it sounds good and you start having cravings you start wanting chocolate cake if you eat it every day your brain literally craves it and you’re in pain until you eat it and when you eat it it’s not even that enjoyable it just makes the pain go away for a little bit and she Compares that to like heroin addiction or anything and so you know here we all are we’re stimulating ourselves with social media 24 7. we’re constantly taking these hits and the hits become less and less enjoyable and she talked about you know she’s at Stanford so she’s treating students and she talks about these kids that would come in and they’re addicted to social media and video games and they have no motivation and so she said look I basically recommend a dopamine fast for four weeks they can’t do any of that stuff they gotta go walk in silence Drive in silence have Quiet Moments not avoid those things and I realized that you know I’d basically done that uh for myself and that’s why I felt better and I you know I was an addict it’s crazy [Music] laughs