 How do you increase your focus? How do you communicate? How do you make decisions? How do you overcome your anxiety, right? These were the real problems and these become super exaggerated. What is up ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to another episode of Amir Approved. I am your host, Amir Rosic, the rolling R to the H. I got my good boy Rochem Fard in the studio here today. Him and I go way back and a quick little bio of him. He's a serial entrepreneur. Previously he co-founded TheRedPin.com and helped it and helped it to become one of Canada's 50 fastest growing tech startups. He raised tens of millions of dollars and got the team from zero to 160 strong in nine years. Good feat. Currently today though, he runs psychologycompass.com which he helps you on a journey of knowledge workers which reach peak mental performance through fully automated cognition coaching. That's a tongue twister. It is. I'm gonna be diving into psychology compass in a little bit but what I wanna start off on this podcast is your journey as an entrepreneur. Now I briefly know the history of TheRedPin. I didn't really dive in deep. I didn't ask you questions but general birds eye view, I get it. Before TheRedPin, were you running any startups or doing anything? Or was that kind of your first dive into the startup scene? First of all, thank you for having me on the show. I'm excited. It's my pleasure. No, I never had another business. I never, I don't even come from an entrepreneurial family. I worked at IBM for a few years. Well, I'll challenge you on that. Maybe it will be a hard challenge but I've thought a lot about it. I feel it. Your first generation immigrant. Yes. And your parents are from Iran. Yes. And then what did they do? My mom is a retired dentist. And I hear over there. She was a dentist. Okay. Which I guess is partially entrepreneurial. The reason I bring this up is like, I look at my parents, former Yugoslavia. And I look, the word entrepreneur irritates me because my parents' generation, at least from like, whether it may be from yours at Iran or from yours. You worked for yourself. There wasn't all these big corporations and enterprises. They had small family businesses. To some large extent, yeah. No, you're right. I mean, if you want to look at it like that, yes. I was never told that I was an entrepreneur. I didn't know that is for me until I stumbled on fourth year of university. So I'm a software engineer. This is 2006. What do you need? You have to. Ah, down town, yeah. I stumbled across TechCrunch, which was the only media that talked about tech. And I would not miss it. TechCrunch, Michael Errington, if you're listening to this, bro. That's right. Early shout out. Shout out to him for sure because there was literally nothing else out there talking about the tech startups. And I would not miss a single story. It was adrenaline times 10. And then my soundboard was who became my co-founder who was actually my first friend in Canada, Ali. So we went to the same high school. We went to the same university, so we knew each other for a good eight to 10 years. And because I kept reading these posts, new ideas, idea sex, it just emerged by permutations, to say the least, would bounce them off Ali. What do you think about this? What do you think about that for about a year while we graduated? And then we decided, let's start a company. And then we met a third co-founder and then the whole journey started from there. And part of it was also a little bit of a frustration because I worked at IBM for a few years while I was at school. First two years were super exciting and then it became super dull for me. And I felt like I needed the push. I didn't know it's entrepreneurship. I just felt like things take... You felt like there's something more. I felt like I spent too much time in my cubicle and things don't move too fast. Gotcha. I didn't know what the problem was. I was dealing with the symptoms of it. Gotcha. But I'll tell you an underlying reason if you want to hear about why an entrepreneur. This I've never shared, except for maybe two or three handful of people. My parents immigrated and everyone has their own kind of range of immigration stories and depth of emotions you go through and whatnot. But what I'm forever indebted to both my parents for literally in their 40s, giving up their careers, giving up their family, giving up their friends and trekking their ass over to this side of the world for my brother and I essentially. And for good or bad, that indebtedness was always running in the background in my head. And I felt like I have to not pay back, but give back however you can. And the reason it left was it because of Ayatollah Khomeini or? They left because there is more opportunities for your kids in summer. And they left when in the 70s, 80s? No, no, no, they left. We left in the 90s. Oh, way after, right? Way, way after. Cause that was seven, yeah, that's like 20 years after. Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, there are still challenges, but it wasn't right after revolution, it was well after it. But the point is they had to give a lot up and I look at it, I'm still, I have quite some time to my mid 40s and I think would I give everything up right now for anybody and just move somewhere else with a different language, different culture. And with my naivete in mind, I thought a lot about it. I'm like, how can I fast forward payback and kind of creating a more comfortable life for them? Cause I felt they were going through a very, very hard time as a consequence of immigration. And my naive mind convinced me that you have to get on a fast track and employment is not the way. And I always, I referred back to his thing, my dad once told me when I was a teenager, he said, North America, if you ever wanna get any earnings, you have to own your own business. And it was completely in passing, my dad doesn't speak much and that kind of came back to me and that whole, that stream of thought with a tech crunch kind of daily stimulation of all other entrepreneurs in the valley, building startups out of nothing in their backyards or in their garages or in their, whatever it is. And I felt like, well, all these guys have is a computer science degree and there's usually two of them. So I already have my partner in mind. That was, and I was hoping to get on a track to create that life for my parents, believe it or not, that was the underlying motivation to start the red bin. And we had no idea what the company's gonna be. We just said, let's start a startup. And it took us three months of full-time ideation and research to land on the red bin. And how did he land on it? We created the process, being engineers. The framework. Pretty much, and it was a very, kind of like very inefficient way, let's say, but essentially the three of us, co-founders, we were full-time on this idea, but our job was to go and come up with ideas, research them, find out who are the big players, kind of get a little bit of an understanding of it. And every week we would meet twice and exchange notes. And we wanted to land on something that all three of us are super stoked about. And I kid you not, I think we trashed about 300 ideas until we landed on real estate, which was funny because we all, the three of us had some real estate experience, buying or seeing or observing people buy and sell homes. And it was like a serendipitous moment to say the least. I always bring this up. I have a lot of Persian friends. I'm like, what is it with Persians in real estate? That's crazy, man. I know, especially in Toronto. I'm like, is it like you get like a certificate when you're born? I'm like, oh, you're Persian, here you go. Welcome to real estate. Right. It's, I mean, even real estate was never part of, in our families, not something that we talk a lot about. But it's just serendipitous, I guess. And I always looked at it from an engineering and a software standpoint, then the industry, per se. And funny enough, the name wasn't the red bin. No. First name was called the realty teller. And we were playing around with two things. Teller, like a bank teller, where someone provides you service about realty. And teller, like a fortune teller, where it can predict the future. And we went on with that name. We actually printed business cards with realty teller. And funny enough, while we were working on the beta, I think it was about a week or two before we were ready to launch our beta. And remember the old iPhones? The ones, like through GS and maybe the skinny ones. So my partner and CTO, we were sitting in a Starbucks and he pulls up the iPhone, he goes to the map and he searches for a location and press search. And he says, you see that red pin just dropped on the map? We should be called the red pin, because that's your red pin, that's your home on the map. And it was just instantly all of us are like, this makes a lot of sense. Phonetically, it's good too. Phonetically, it's good. It's easy to not mispronounce. Passes the bar test, the sticky bar test. Exactly. Unfortunately, the red pin was taken. So we had to settle for the red pin. And that's how the name changed from realty teller to the red pin. And so what was your next step after that? Next step was chaos and mistakes. We, this is going- I should be like a title of your book, Chaos and Mistakes. I like that. If you're not gonna use it, I'll take it. So just so to give context, this is in 2008, 2009. We started it in 2008, but there were no playbooks like it is today about startups like people didn't understand and define series seed money, series A, blah, blah, blah. And you're starting this right during the collapse too. Totally. We are, we have no education about it per se. There's not a lot of ecosystems around it. So there are no accelerators, incubators and VCs and whatnot. So we're just making all the mistakes. And essentially that turned into a four year, four and a half year journey of bootstrapping. And it's funny, my partner and I, we built the first version of the red pin. We programmed it together. But while you guys are bootstrapping, are you guys work like side hustling? Cause obviously you gotta keep the lights on. So I'll tell you how we managed to make ends meet if that's what. Which only worked, I think, because we all didn't want to quit. And we were hopeful. So we came up with this rule between the three of us. We had to give the company 50 hours a week. And that was, we had the, it was like- Collectively or each? Each, gotcha. Each person. We agreed on it. We shook hands on it. And what that translated to, we started work at 10 a.m. till 8 p.m. That was non-negotiable. But you end up working till 1 a.m. And I'll go into that in a bit, but for five days. And for me, I got very lucky. I got a side gig at U of D working in the Education and Technology Department. And little did I know who I was working under, which was, his name is Jim Slotta. To this day, he's a good friend, although he's 20 years, my senior, but I've learned a ton from him. So he, just to give you context on the environment, it was, he was Canada's research chair of education and technology. He had about 20 PhD students under him and he had a couple of software engineers helping build the technological environments for these PhD students to run their experiments, gather their data and write their papers. Got it. So it was a very unique environment. And you were building that. We were building these, these were experiments. So you would build throwaway experiments that would run for three weeks. A PhD student would gather the data, you were on to the next project. Very good. So I was working 50 hours on the red bin, 24 hours on the side, just to make ends meet, staying at home. Parents were super supportive, of course, for about four and a half years until we managed to raise our first round. And I can tell you that story, because that's also- Yeah, you mentioned that. Yeah, please do. It's a pretty non-conventional story because there were no VCs, there were no accelerators. So about, let's say three and a half years and almost four years, we decided to finally, for the first time, get an office because we were making some revenue and we kind of got tired of constantly working out of Starbucks's or each other's homes and whatnot. Doing some shopping at Ikea for the new office and it's at the end of the shopping, the truck is loaded and you go for the famous hot dog. So we grab our hot dogs at Ikea, all in moving gear, eating our hot dog and sitting on the ledge of the truck at the back and we're like, let's take a photo for memories. Tap on this guy's shoulder, we're like, dude, can you please take a photo of us? The door of the truck is open. So he takes a photo, he says, are you guys a startup? We said, yeah. He says, are you guys looking for money? He said, yeah. He turns out to be the president of Indigo. Wow. And- What are the chances? They had just put aside, so it was under the Trilogy Fund, which is by Jerry Schwartz, Heather Reisman and Joel Silver. And they had just put the money, literally had decided to invest. They hadn't been around before, they had invested in only one or two companies, maybe, but it wasn't that easy. We didn't get a check right away. It was, from that date, it took about six months of due diligence of going very deep into everything until we raised our close to $3 million. It seems about right. A lot of people, they try to compare to the Valley. The Valley's an own eco chamber, but traditionally speaking, you go to anywhere else, that's on average six months. Oh yeah. Do you deliver your lawyers back and forth until the money hits your bank? Give or take, it's six months. We just had the serendipitous luck of not having to go through the wringer of pitching and whatnot. That's crazy. It's coincidental, obviously, right? But still. It's a good story. The great story. In hindsight. Yeah. But yeah, and then we raised $3 million, which was, to this date, it's still pretty big, but it was a pretty large round in 2012 for Canada. And given there were a lot, so we kind of skipped the seed round and we bootstrapped our way by simply SEO, which we can talk about how we did it and kind of what the techniques were, if it's interesting. But we went from a team of, I think we were around at that time five people. Within a year we went to a team of 30. Wow. And then the year later to 90, which in hindsight I learned it wasn't a smart move. Yeah, like how did you handle the growth? Like the biggest problem I see with, I have, I know two people in Canada that have, I've had significant growth companies in the last three years. They've gone from me just knowing then what a team of two to them having teams of 300. And I see the chaos internally. I see it firsthand. And I'm like too quick, too fast, too many. No direction, chaos, too many cooks in the kitchen. Yeah. I don't even know how you manage people like that or even have like a vision on where to go. You're just way too many people. And I couldn't even know, I'm like, what the fuck you guys all doing? It's the same. I mean, I resonate that and you should, it's during that growth process and we'll get to this in probably in a little bit later, but the initial pain points that led to psychology compass started emerging. Hmm. Right? Your own personal pains. Pains, which is people think you have a bunch of money in the bank, problems get solved and you just spend then good quality people come and fix problems. And, but what I was constantly reminded, and especially the moment we crossed the 15, 20 employee mark and it was just as we grew, it became more exaggerated is that my day-to-day challenges, I realized they were cognitively true. So I realized to your point earlier is how do you increase your focus? How do you communicate? How do you make decisions? How do you overcome your anxieties? Right? These were the real problems and these become super exaggerated because you're right. None, nobody has had that experience to manage a team of 100, let's say, or in your friend's case, 300. I can't, I mean, one person can't. Even four people, none of them have had. Well, there's ratios, one to seven, I think it is. Right? Usually one to seven, one to 10 is maximum direct reports, but the point is usually when you're an entrepreneur and you're in your 20s, you haven't managed a team of 10, 20, 30, right? And you're put in that position and at the same time, you're supposed to uncover something new in an industry that has been around. And you're in a very highly regulated also self-interested industry that doesn't wanna be disrupted like any industry. For example, Uber and the taxi and here you are trying to disrupt the real estate industry. Highly controlled. Correct. Highly monopolized. Some people would even argue and I can tell you how we navigated those because you're dead on. And we played, I think, a part in the changes that recently took place which I'm very excited about in the regulation space. Oh yeah, for real estate broker, right? For the sold information. Ah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Sold information, we can get into it if you like, but finally sold information is available to the public. Good. And it was gated for years and we were in court fighting for it. And who is it, like MLS? MLS? Are they private or public company? So it's hard to say if it's an organization where every realtor is a member of it. So you- A co-op, okay, kind of. A little bit. So every realtor pays a monthly fee, every brokerage essentially, to be part of that ecosystem, which means you can list your listings there because if you don't get your listings there, you don't have access. And MLS is the organization that was fighting against this data being released. And they were saying it's against privacy. And then the competition, initially they weren't even giving the listing data, let alone the sold data. So the competition bureau, in Canada we have about 100 real estate boards underneath MLS. The biggest one is the Toronto real estate board or TREP for short. And usually when TREP takes the lead, most other boards follow suit. But the competition bureau came down and said, Toronto real estate board, you have to release the data, the listings to all other brokerages because you have a monopoly over it. And you got to allow other brokerages to innovate on how they display the listing. This is the day that people have forgotten, but listings on a map were not a thing in Canada. It was considered the most innovative thing. And that's where we started with the red bin. We actually put listings on a map. But so the day the competition bureau won that case was sometime in mid-2012. We were actually ID 001 to tap into those listings and kind of showcase resale listings in a different form or fashion. And over the years, competition bureau started pushing further on the Toronto real estate board and saying, now you got to release sold data. And in that effort, we were a big ally of these guys, which was kind of ironic because we're a Toronto real estate board member and contributing on a monthly fee. But at the same time in court, we're standing on the opposite side and arguing for why the information should be opened up. It took a couple of years of going back and forth in court, but finally the ruling was in favor of competition bureau and now a lot of good sites are out there. Well, I even know why you have to be on analysts. If I want to sell a property, why do I have to put it up there? I don't. It's just where all the other agents are and the agents bring their clients. It's just... There's so many aggregate sites these are, like ZOLO is another aggregate site and like... ZOLO came because the data started getting unlocked, right? As long as you have access to the data, you can do magic. And that's exactly why, like how Sigma is focused on sold data right now. And one of the co-founders used to work at the Red Pen. He was one of our top realtors, was also a good friend of mine, but that's kind of like new ideas are emerging out of that space. And I'm kind of obviously removed from that space by now, but I observe it and I'm excited to see the changes coming. So when did you leave the Red Pen? I decided to step down from the day-to-day operation in late 2016. Okay. I was on the board for another 10 months or so. And then I decided to fully remove myself because I just didn't agree with the direction the company was going. I initially didn't agree. That's why I stepped down. But then I really didn't agree. And I decided to come off the board and so did my co-founders and... Well, good on you for like listening to yourself and realizing what you care. I wanna say care about the direction you wanna take. Yeah, cause you know, I mean technology is that hard. I've learned about myself. I didn't care so much about the industry. I cared about what technology can do to change that industry. And the moment I felt like we're not going to innovate on the technology front and we're trying to more and more to better on shorter term goals. Yeah, short term is not a long term thinking. Short term goals usually in the business context translate into marketing and sales strategies. Quick cash in the door. It's less risky, but it's also more predictable but also smaller gains. Tech is where you go up all in, build something new, it could totally flop on you but it could totally put you five years ahead of the curve with the competition. So we had a lot of ideas on that front but because when you have the ideas and you can't necessarily execute on them, I don't know, the inner conviction slowly, the flames start to die out. And that's kind of when I felt like it's time to leave and so did my business partner in RCTO. The same time, yeah. Okay, and so when did Psychology Compass start? I took a, so Psychology Compass was always in the background and there were a couple other business ideas that were in the background in my head. Hadn't done anything on them. Hadn't, it was just mulling it over and trying to see how you planned it out. I said, between a couple ideas that were competing, I said I need a time off to figure out which one of this because I know these 10 years are seven, 10 year long. You can, it's not a quick stint, you jump into it and get out of it. Took a three month break, travel, which is very common. Yeah, I saw it on Instagram, you're traveling everywhere. I was, I literally traveled. I was documenting everything. You're actually even going to hostels too. I was, I was staying in hostels at times but I finally, it was during the travel that it became consolidated in my head. The Psychology Compass is the thing that I have the highest, the deepest conviction for. The day I came back, I went back to a coffee shop when I started. I didn't even give myself a day and it was in the dead of winter in Toronto. In December of 2016. But why psychology? Like what's the premise behind it? So going back six years before the company started, which is when we were growing the red pin, and I realized that most of my challenges are cognitively driven. It's in my head. It's literally how do I cope with my anxiety? How do I overcome self-doubt? How do I build my resilience? My solution back six years back was I started reading a lot of self-help books. I listened to a ton of podcasts. This is when podcasts weren't cool yet. I know we're on one, which is exciting. But I used to listen to about two hours of podcasts every single day of the week, just absorbing as much as I can. But the challenge was I, it was a very just in case learning versus a just in time learning. So it was, let me learn this thing maybe in two years I'm gonna need it. Then I started to talk to a lot of my peers who were building similar businesses and essentially opening the kimono in front of them and saying, look, these are my challenges. And they would unanimously, I learned that everyone deals with the flavor of these. It's just the assortment you carry with you is very different. And my next question was, so how do you cope with these issues? And the answer were the same. Have you read this self-help book? Have you listened to this podcast? Have you read this medium article, et cetera? So it wasn't a very centralized place that you go to. And when I decided to build Psychology Compass, I wanted to build that single destination where knowledge workers go to reach their peak mental performance. And to break that down into, the company is built based on three core pillars. And those are very important because compared to what else might be out there. Number one, everything we offer comes directly from the heart of research in psychology and neuroscience. And it's actually every word is written by a PhD in psychology and neuroscience in the team. So we want everything to be rooted in science. The second pillar is that we want everything to be pragmatic and practical. So translating the very descriptive nature of science to something very prescriptive. So that's example, of course. Let's say, I'll give you a simple one because it's easy for everyone to do, but it's highly effective and I'll explain the science behind it. Overcoming your anxiety, you can do that by activating your salary response. You're like, huh? The first time I heard it, I chuckled. Until I was given the research. So here's what happens in the brain and why, for example, chewing on gum or sipping on citrus water when you're anxious. Citrus. Citrus water. It calms your nerves. Interesting. So this is what's happening in the brain. We all have experienced our mouth drying up when we get anxious. Because of the brain's evolution, the amygdala picks up that dried mouth as a signal and it has excellent pattern matching, so to say, from the past evolution. And it says, there's something dangerous happening here. So I got to go into fight or flight mode because the mouth is dried up. It picks up that pattern as danger and it starts producing cortisol in the brain. So what you're doing, you're essentially physiologically tricking the brain by activating the salary response to say, look, nothing is threatening me. The brain picks up that new pattern and says, slow down the amount of cortisol but it's going in the brain, right? So these are things that are coming from the heart of science and it's validated by multiple papers, multiple institutions, very different experiments and I'll give you more if you're interested in different dimensions. More examples, man, let's do this. Sure. So improving focus. Okay. And this also is also an edible form but not everything is you have to eat or consume, right? But in order to improve your focus, you can chew on peppermint gum. You can improve your focus by up to 67%. Now. Peppermint gum. Peppermint gum. So what does that happen? There is research in biochemistry and then there's research in neuroscience which got to the same conclusion completely differently. The biochemists in two series of research, they found that the act of chewing carries more blood to your brain which in turn carries more oxygen to your brain. Other research shows that peppermint has the same impact. Peppermint causes more blood flowing to your brain so when you chew on peppermint gum, it has a double effect. So that's the, and when more blood comes to the brain, more oxygen comes to the brain and oxygen is a responsible for your focus. So the more, if you have lack of oxygen, your brain just has a hard time focusing. This is the biochemist side. The neuroscientists, they do their tests with FMRIs and scanning the brain and so on. What I'm hearing is, is a business opportunity here. Creating. To create gums. Focus gums. Everyone. I'm gonna trademark you now, focusgum.com. Right. With a little bit nicotine in there too. With our tagline. With our tropic effect. Chew on your focus. Ah, I like that. A billion dollar business right there. But the neuroscientists do FMRIs and by scanning the brain, they notice that the act of chewing is a small enough distraction for the brain for it to not look for another distraction. Completely different finding, completely different strategy, similar findings. But it's very easy. So I tell that to founders in Toronto. I've told this to guys running incubators and accelerators and I kid you not, the next day or three days later, they would send me a long email saying, not that I only tried and it worked for me. I bought packs of peppermint gum and put it on everybody's desk. Right. So we always try to find these kind of techniques from science that are very novel, that someone like you who is very well read, who cares a lot about mental peak performance, it's innate in you to, and you've never come across it on a Google search. Do you have any examples of, so the examples you gave me are examples of adding things in your system, in your routine. The next question is, do you have examples of things to subtract? Yes. So another module, so every cognitive function in psychology compass usually translates to a module of itself. Because what I like, what I like, and I started to cut you off, what I like about psychology compass, you're taking the theoretical. Yes. So scientific theoretical from psychology, neuroscience, biochemistry, behavioral economics. They're all together. Yes. They're all interlaced together. And then theory aside, it's good to theorize. Yes. And it's cool that you can replicate it within a study. Yes. But obviously for me, I'm a practical human being. Yes. I'm like, what can I fucking do right now? For exactly. And that's the goal here, right? Not only that, I would add a second layer which we care about and I think you care about, not only what can I do now, which is the practical side, how can I measure the impact on me? Yeah, quantitative. Quantitative, which is the third pillar we're built on. So research-driven, practical, and with an ROI feedback loop. Because the joke I say, imagine you were on a diet and you didn't have a scale. So you had to go in front of the mirror and see if the diet is working. Right? If you can, if your measurement is subjective, it doesn't work. The same thing goes with the mind. We don't necessarily have a scale that everybody is accustomed to. So we built that scale as well. But to your earlier question, is there things that you can subtract? Yes. So we have all of these cognitive functions in the brain, ability to focus, communication skills, overcoming anxiety, et cetera. One of these cognitive functions is decision-making, which you do a lot of it. And believe it or not, in research, and this is something that resonates with me as well, because we all have some default decision-making frameworks that we fall onto. Oh yeah, we're reactive as opposed to responsive. It's an instant. Robotic. A robotic? Yeah. It's because some of us, sometimes we fall into a default decision-making framework that is correct for that problem. Correct. But a lot of times we just fall on our default, not knowing the type of problem, right? So I'll give you a decision-making framework for a certain kind of problem, which is, I'm sure you've been in this situation many times, which is, let's say you have multiple options to choose from, but you must only choose one. You cannot choose two. And it's a little bit of an unknown territory. So an example, a good example, let's say you wanna do a marketing campaign to acquire a bunch of users. You can do it on Facebook, you can do it on Google, you can do SEO, you can do it on Reddit, but you can only choose one. And there's so many other variables in your mind that are competing with each other. Which one has the biggest reach? Which one has the most targeting? Which one has the lowest cost, right? So how do you make that decision? So research is fun. Like I'm usually a victim in this situation because my default decision-making framework is analytical. It's the computer science brain saying, get all the parameters, create this massive spreadsheet, build a formula, and then you'll figure out the thing. Or the opposite, just close your eyes and throw it against the wall. Everybody has their default. Research finds in this situation, because you can only choose one, pick the most important variable for the campaign that is important. So you might say, the most important thing is cost. I don't care about scalability, I don't care about focus on the demographics of the user. I just return on ad spend, that's all you care about, yeah. And say, I'll go, I'll choose the option that meets that single variable the best. And research shows that that ends up being the best decision you can make. So these are in terms of removing, so you remove a layer of complexity in your decision-making and scientifically you end up at a more efficient result. You ever heard of the 33% rule? No, tell me. They've used it in dating before too and they've used it in decision-making, but it's not binary as in 100 as you mentioned. But basically they found it's like a power law curve. Okay. Where it's, and it is a subjective decision. So it's, you can't, it's not really objective, maybe in the back end for some data, but I'll give you example like real estate, like you're buying a house, here's a good example, you're buying a house and you've seen seven house and maybe you have another seven left to go, so 14 houses. Research shows after you've hit the 33% of viewing or options, your best bet is done in there. You don't need more data. I can say that is true from a practical observation in the real estate mode. The example you said, I don't know the science, but I think that's very true. They've used this in dating, they've used this in many different scenarios. Probably our biases kick in that we say, is there something better? In dating that happens all the time, right? You see a single flaw in your mate, you say, is there someone who doesn't have that flaw? And you become blind to all the other possible flaws. And it goes to the thing of paralysis by analysis. Exactly, and these are the things that science has discovered a lot of it. So I think the 21st century is the century of the mind. I think, and I'll give you a deeper why I think that, and I feel like I'm sure you know very well from your past that like in the past 15 years we went through this revolution, evolution, however you want to call it, but revolution on the physical body, the different diets, the different exercise routines, it's been the rage, right? There's all of these different programs, whether it's keto diet or bulletproof coffee or this and that, right? And I feel like the next 15, 20 years is about the mind. The analogy I see is going back to the 80s, I feel like the computers, we went through a hardware revolution until we discovered software and realized it's not about making the semiconductor smaller and smaller and smaller, the magic is in the software world. And to me the analogy is always the physical body is the hardware revolution, but we are in an age where we use the mind more than any time and the information flow demands us to use our mind all the time and that's why we're dealing with all these symptoms that are mentally driven. I think though from an evolutionary aspect we can't cope with tech yet. We are not evolved to cope with this 24 seven, staring at this motherfucker 24 seven, we can't cope, one I'm in the camp of, it's not healthy for you whatsoever. I think that's exactly what it is. We are not used to information overload. We don't know how to ignore information. We don't know how to focus on what's important to us, right? We don't even know when to stop. It took us a few decades to realize in the factories, which was very physically driven, people kind of burn out and break down after 40 hours of being in the factory. It wasn't a default mode, right? In Europe, places like that, they're even pushing these numbers lower. Oh, I realized too when there's many studies done on this for focus and optimization. The whole schedule nine to five and 40, that's factory work. Exactly. And it's not for performance. Like you look at the mind they've shown in studies, 90 minutes sprints is a... Exactly. It's like a bell curve, but roughly 90 minutes sprints of what you can focus on. It's a diminishing return after that. Exactly. You're carrying it on your screen and whatever you're doing, you're not really doing anything. Which is another lesson. Chunk your days into 90 minute slots. Yes. And give yourself a half hour break in between them and do focus. That gives you the highest output. Chunking's the best. Chunking. And at the end of the day, you realize you can only have probably three, maybe four chunks in a day. That's it. And then you're done. You're done, bro. Call it a day. Call it a day. And go rejuvenate that battery that you exhausted. And get some fucking sleep, man. I can't believe how people like don't appreciate sleep. That's another module we're working on. How do you sleep better? Thank God. It's about to go out. Is that the aura ring? No, everyone thinks so. It's a vitally ring, which is... What the fuck is a vitally ring? It's the jewelers from Toronto. Oh, no, no, no, no. Ryerson guys, yeah. Oh yeah? Good, yeah. I just liked it aesthetically. It looks like an aura ring, yeah. A lot of people ask me that question. No, but I think sleep is crucial and it's really undervalued. Because the three common problems I see with, at least in the entrepreneur world, they either can't fall asleep, they wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall asleep, they sleep for eight hours, but wake up tired as hell. These are the three very common symptoms I'm seeing. And people don't realize how much magic happens during sleep. Your subconscious gets consolidated. You clean your amyloid plaque. There's a lot of... Your glial cells are refurbished. And people feel like they're just useless and not utilitarian of their body and they feel like they're missing out. We're sleeping so little today. If you look at circa 1960s, I believe, we were sleeping on average, I think it's like 10 hours. Well, science says you need, I mean, let's get a little bit into the science for those people who are not familiar with your circadian rhythms. Essentially, a sleep cycle takes 90 minutes. Yeah, and we fluctuate from stage two to stage five, so in and out of REM sleep. Exactly, but in 90 minutes, you do a full cycle. Correct. So research says every individual needs, per day, seven and a half to... So it's five to six cycles. So seven and a half, yeah. So people are on a scale, right? Yeah, you're right. There's like roughly three phenotypes you know of. It's like owl, lark, and hummingbird. Exactly. And so there's a bell curve, like each of them has their own phenotypical expression. That was a circadian clock, yeah. But people have to respect that. Minimum you need seven and a half hours and if you think you need six hours, I mean, yeah, you can function, but you're not at your optimal and you're gonna have a lot of long-term deficits, right? I can down three hamburgers on McDonald's right now. I'll send it, I'll put in the show notes though. It's not the first of its kind. They've had it before, but they're showing that just one interrupted night of good REM sleep causes you to have cravings for bad foods the next day. Exactly. It's a domino effect. And it's like a focus comes out of it, anxiety comes and people are not, unfortunately, we are not taught how to be self-aware because when you're self-aware, you pick up on a lot of these cues. When you have a bad night of sleep, you realize maybe you're hard to get along with, right? Maybe you realize you might be hopeless, right? All of these things, if we care about betterment, better the present. I'm a fucking pig if I don't sleep properly. I just eat. Oh, interesting. I become very impatient, which is they're both bad one way or another for us, right? So it's with psychology compass, it's all about these different cognitive functions and the plethora of knowledge that research has found but never crossed the walled garden of academia in a lay person's understanding and turn into highly practical stuff that people can put to good to use and most importantly, being able to measure its impacts on you because how do you go about that? Like how do you, so if I'm using psychology compass or anything, in regards to optimizing my mental frameworks, how do I quantify that? So first of all, remember, none of these are silver bullets that you take a pill and you're good. It's habit change, micro habits, right? It's just like a good diet. It's just like a good exercise routine, right? You can't go and lift triple the amount you can lift and, you know, it goes against neuroscience too. When you do multiple things or new habits, if you're trying to do multiple new habits, you're doomed to fail from the get go. It becomes very hard to maintain and the underlying science why micro habits work, now that's the best news about neuroscience. So we measure individuals across these cognitive functions and we can score them out of a hundred on a percentile scale. So the good news is that everybody can score a hundred out of a hundred. Now, why is that? It's because of the neuroplasticity of the brain, right? The brain is malleable. The science knows it and with these micro habits, you're firing neurons in a different way and you're essentially changing the physiological structure of your brain, which makes it innate, makes it second nature, makes you be more focused, et cetera, right? How do you do it? So it's through micro habits. How do you measure it? There are numerous ways of measurement. So let's rewind. What are micro habits, if people are wondering? So micro habits could be chunking. So you look at your calendar. Most people's calendars is what I call, is you're playing Tetris. They squeeze another half an hour in there. Oh my God, I squeezed another slot, right? But when you do chunking, ahead of time in the week, you know that you're gonna have four chunks a day, let's say at the max, maybe three, 90 minutes, with a good half an hour between them. Yeah, the buffer, yeah. And you respect that half an hour. Guess what, on week five, you naturally will do that. So that's how you do like one example of micro habit that helps focus, right? You can do micro habits for sleep. Micro habits would be sleep at the same time. Create the same sleeping environment to sleep better, right? All of these have their own requirements and slowly you can get there, right? You don't wanna have every checkbox tech, right? But science, how do you measure it? Meaning, how do I know if I'm less anxious after I do X number of lessons for two and a half months? Yeah. There is always the self-reported methodology, right? And people always say, what if I lie? And yeah, that question mark is always there, like can I report falsely? Can I report on a good day? And all of a sudden I'm not anxious, so I report, right? So there is questions, it's not perfect. Depending on different cognitive functions, there are specific tests for them. So they're not universal tests for focus, anxiety, et cetera. But let's say for focus, one category of assessments is very digital. They make you, they almost create an interactive environment. Feels like a little simple game that you have to find the green dot among the blue dots and it keeps moving. So they see how quickly it can focus, the reaction time, right? So there are mechanisms that are, nothing is bulletproof. So people have to not expect a black and white situation. It's not like you go on a scale, it's not as simple as measuring my weight. I am 65 kilograms today and it's 65, no matter what scale I go on, right? But me being customer number one of the product and needing something to make me improve for years and learning, but the sleep you can quantify like this. Sleep is one of the things that you feel it a lot more, but I even feel like I'm more in charge of my days and my feelings and my routine. And I'm like, what I can output in four, five hours is a lot, a lot more meaningful and significant than what I would be able to do seven years, right? So you will notice a lot of those outcomes, but in terms of measurement, those are the mechanisms that are in science and we try to deploy some of them. So how do we get more people involved or how about this question? There's different archetypical frameworks of human beings. You have self-starters, you have people to follow people where everyone's in their own kind of model. And if you look at the bell curve, it's probably like, I don't know, maybe like one to 2% of the population in the world are self-starters. Where Raheim will give me psychology compass, I will log in and do my thing and I'm building systems. Then there's arrest. How do we create better systems where we can then, I wanna say nurture, but understand every human being is different. The problem with a lot of systems, whether it's like, oh, I have this cool program or I'm a coach or I got this new framework, they come from a perspective of everyone's the same like a robot, which is not true. No, it's not true. Everyone's different. Everyone is very different. Which is a massive opportunity for businesses to look into. I think billions are left on the table from this. It's like they treat everybody the same. That's why what you're saying is so true. That's why behavioral change is such a hard game. Oh, fuck. Right? We're all in a behavioral change game in these kind of manners, right? We're not building accounting software for accountants who are used to a process. It's just an easier process, right? It's a behavioral change. I always joke. I say we are in the business of behavioral change, which is hard, right? So how do you do it? How do we do it? Let me say that at least there's probably a lot of amazing ways that people have discovered and we don't know of yet, but number one, you have to be able to measure it. No one would follow a diet if they didn't have a scale. They never had asked us to scale, right? It's just the feedback loop, incremental feedback loop is one of the things that people say, oh, it works a little bit. Number two, make the action part which you talked about earlier very easy to do. Like chewing on peppermint gum doesn't have a cognitive load. Doesn't require a budget. Doesn't require a time. That's why a lot of people opt into we're all lazy. We always want the shortest path of kind of... Well, there's a reason why we're lazy. Survival mechanism. It's survival, exactly. You want to rule out the noise. You have to conserve energy, man. Exactly, right? So we try to give people things that are easy to implement subconsciously. Three, I think we all flock to novel ideas more. So if you tell me I'm stressed and I say, breathe, you might say, get the hell out of here. Fuck off. I've heard this, right? Now there's a lot of signs about how to breathe and how it calms your nerves. But if I say, how about chewing on some peppermint gum? You might say, oh, I've never heard of that. You lean in. So novelty is some of the things that people care about. And that's why guys like, I don't know, people talk about Wim Hof, the culture. Yeah, that's right. All of a sudden everybody's like, oh, I'm going to try a cold shower because it's easy to do. You just turn the hot water down. It's quick. And you see if it works or not. Does it feel, and you know it's very novel. It's instant feedback, man. It's instant feedback. After like a 45 second to a minute cold shower, you walk out like, oof. Like why does bulletproof coffee become a sensation, right? Because it's easy to make it. I still call blasphemy a bulletproof coffee. I'm not a fan, but it's definitely been marketed well. I love coffee. Black. No butter in it. No butter in it, please. But I think it's, that's the kind of things. But at the end of the day, the person has to want to improve. So the one big criticism I have about North American approach to almost any industry is that we only take action when the symptoms emerge. We're only talking about mental space because so many people are on a Prozac. So many people are dealing with massive anxiety and depression, right? So whereas if we took a little bit of a preventative approach, like most Europeans do in their healthcare systems, there is a lot you can do to prevent. So a lot of entrepreneurs, you've experienced, you've seen this firsthand is like, they wait till they burn out. And I literally mean burnout, that they can't function anymore to say, okay, now I need to go and like reset the bar on my life and like some of my routines versus, they don't sleep healthy every day, every night to prevent that burnout, right? So we haven't been taught to think on the preventative scale. And if this is the scale of mental kind of spectrum for different individuals, let's call this end the mental health, which is when the clinicians come into play, when the therapists come into play, when I just can't help myself. So give me some Prozac to get back on my feet, give me a therapist so I can build some good habits and feel good about myself. There's the guys in the middle who's about mental wellbeing, meaning I'm not suffering, but I'm gonna try to maintain it or in a physical analogy, I don't have a six pack, but I also don't wanna get obese and eat all the carbs I can get. And then there's this extreme of the scale, which is the peak performers. It's the guy who goes to the gym and builds a six pack in the physical world. There are guys who are building physical kind of mind that has six packs in their brains, right? Mental six pack mind, yeah. Right? It's like Josh Waitzkin is one of those guys that a lot of people know of him, right? Is he supposed to do it again? Oh, he's written a bunch. You're talking about the learning? The art of learning? The art of learning, fuck. It's a very good book. The audible is good because he's an narrator. It's a great book because he has such a very different backgrounds. Like he's a martial arts expert, exactly. And he draws lines between learnings in one in the other space, which again makes it very novel when he talks about playing chess is like martial arts. And he tells you how they're connected and how he's learned. One interesting thing he did, which is something I'm predicting it's gonna be, I think you can see a fucking lot of it coming up is he, I think he's in New Mexico or Costa Rica. He went hiding, man. He didn't like clear up his mind and make his environment conducive to success. Because for me, I don't believe in free will. I don't believe in willpower. I believe in environment dictates how you behave. And creating a proper environment is the easiest, fastest way for success. It's what you're talking about is utilizing nature. Yeah, like even for myself. Like, you know where I live. Exactly the street I live on. Like, I wake up all I hear. Construction. Right away, my brain is like, I'm already stressed. I can't even fucking control it. I'm stressed already. Exactly. And that's the, you know, it's funny. That's, if you don't mind, it's a very common stream in philosophy, which is a lot of philosophers going back, talk about let nature lead you versus human beings taking advantage of nature for themselves, which is very short term. Nature is the best teacher. Like we've shown, there's really good scientific literature on the Japanese have a word for it. It's called force bathing. Ah, yes. Yes. Like I used to live in Kelowna for four years. And I live in a paradise. Now there's pros and cons from the economic perspective, but from the aesthetic and beauty perspective. And I was staring at deer walking up to me on a weekly basis, bird sanctuary beside me, beautiful emerald lake, rocky mountains, big green trees everywhere. It's like, ah. And funny enough in that environment, your finances aren't such a big issue as we make it up here in North America. You can be happy with a book in your hand listening to the birds. You don't need much more, right? And I'm not going to be surprised. Let's put it on the table now. In five to 10 years, people are going to talk about unfortunately, they're going to say things like, I'm on an anxiety diet. I'm on a focus diet. I'm not going to be surprised because the mind is going through so many strenuous situations that we're forgetting where we feel are best, right? We think building a hundred million, $200 million company gives a satisfaction. I agree. But even like people who aren't building a business, just a day to day living, wake up this. Exactly. That's how they wake up. They need so much dopamine to just, yeah. And I hate the word thank God is Friday. Oh fuck, TGI fuck me too. It's like what happened to the rest of the six days, right? It's a double-edged sword. It's difficult because everybody has a different situation they're in. You may be in a situation where you are providing, you're the provider for the family, house, food, et cetera. It's not by choice you're saying. Everything's yes and no. It is theoretically your choice, like you chose to be in that situation. But to what degree did that choice come from the fact that maybe the really reason why you're in that situation is because of all these other factors that you couldn't control. There's many factors you can't control in your life that puts you in a situation. Now what I would love to see in the future and I think Psychology Compass can help with this is the best way to solve problems is asking better questions. We don't have really good insights from the famous, it's from the book, but also the movie, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What was this question? The question was what's the secret to the universe or what's the meaning of human life? And the supercomputer says it's like 42 or 47. But the moral of the story is like you ask a really stupid question. You get a stupid answer. Like a stupid, stupid question. Like question has no merit whatsoever. Ask better questions. And so you're in this position of like, shit, like I need to provide for my family. I can't just quit my job and I'm stressed to fucking to the max. Now most human beings, they look at their situation in a binary mode. Meaning I have option A or option B. When in reality you have option A, B, C, D, E, S, G. Many different shades of gray. And we need to ask ourselves better questions to figure out what are the means that we have to create right now to get to the end. And so we'll use this person as example. We'll call him Charlie. And Charlie is, you know, he's making good money but he's a provider of his house. And you can't just tell Charlie to quit. He has a daughter, he has a wife. How is all this stuff, right? So what does Charlie do? Charlie just continues what he's doing. And for him it's bleak because he doesn't see any other options. Where else can he get a job? He's getting paid 100K, six-figure salary. Well, the problem is Charlie doesn't have proper mental frameworks or models to ask better questions. Better questions for sure, better understanding. I feel like you're right about mental frameworks. I mean, mental frameworks go beyond Charlie's life. They go how societies are structured, right? And what you said is very true also when you look at the lineage of philosophy. Like we've, which is fascinating that since Plato, almost every philosopher has thought in duality. So in a framework that it's option A and there's option B, which is dualism. And you're always trying to transcend from the worst place to the next one. Whether it's religion, all Abrahamic religions are talking about you're transcending from this world to the next world, which is evergreen, et cetera. You go into all the philosophers is the same thing. Until now we're talking about the post-structuralists, post-modernists, like Gilles Deleuze, right? They are talking about maybe philosophy should be about, is about not about this duality and transcendence, it's about frameworks to understand the chaos of life. The chaos has happened, but we need frameworks to understand them better. And back to Charlie's life and preventative methodology. Like, yes, Charlie has a family, Charlie is used to making 100K, Charlie has a car, but let's go back to how Charlie got to that. If you take a little bit of a preventative method, before you buy that house, you think hard. If you want to think about it, you have to understand a little bit more about personal finance, how that works. If you understood about the hedonic adaptation of the brand, hedonic treadmill, to realize there's no end, you want more gradual progress, as opposed to $10 million in my bank today and I'll be the happiest. And people who say that, they just don't know about the hedonic treadmill. This is why in Hinduism and Buddhism, they're like, how the fuck do I escape this vicious cycle? Because whether you believe in reincarnation or not, cycle, I think cyclical is like, I'm gonna have to repeat this for a billion years and never end. I'm out now. Check me out. Meditate, figure it out, I'm fucking leaving this shit right now. So people don't know about these inner wiring of themselves, which hedonic adaptation is built into all of us. Whatever I get, I want more at a very small future, like a short future from now, right? So when you have that understanding, you ask better questions, you learn about these things, but we actually have a lot more knowledge in the world than most people have access to or know how to ask. Because probably what knowledge is the labeling of knowledge. We have data, right? Same thing, I can go to any website, I can go to PubMed. I got more power, my palm over here than King of England did a hundred years ago, right here. Like even the early 2000s, this has more power than a computer. Like this is a fucking super come. This thing is ridiculously strong. Yeah. Build data. I haven't integrated it. I don't know how it applies to me. The thing is like what scientists need to understand and neuroscience gets it, I think so. But there's also, there's a reason why religion is so powerful is there's a myth aspect. How does this apply to me? How do I integrate this data into my ethos, into my mythology? Because right now it means nothing to me whatsoever. It doesn't... It's a foreign knowledge. Exactly. You need to, I want to say evolve it, but it needs to be a chimera. You need to figure out how you take this information, whether it's like benefits in neuroscience or benefits of sleeping, X, Y and Z. How do we wrap this up and how do we integrate it into my mythological belief system? This is a problem where we have in religion today. Religion hasn't updated its mythological relevance to be relevant with modern day science and society. Its living has lived, its model of thinking is based on 1500 years ago. That's the fundamental, it's not religion itself that's the problem. It's a fact that then it hasn't updated itself whatsoever. The APIs are still old. Well, they're pre-API. There's no API socket whatsoever. And you're dead on. I mean, you look at mythology, like the best way to transfer that has been through stories, storytelling. Number one invention of human beings. And that's why mythologies were so strong because essentially, and it's always put in the hero's journey. Like the hero would come, battle the dragon of the time, slay the dragon. Now the hero has to come back till it's called the story so that the knowledge gets transferred, right? But the thing with the myth or the stories, the stories are narratives. And narratives create our reality and perception of how we perceive the world. And this we get in the science of cognitive biases, et cetera, lists of them. It's like we're discovering new ones all the time and they stack against each other, so forth and so forth. So these are narratives. We're creating, there's that crazy theory of a biocentrism, or we're creating reality as we perceive it. Yes. Like this doesn't exist. There's no reality. It's just how you perceive it. In real time. Yeah. And it's through your five senses. Yeah. And when you distill it to such simple terms, you're like, oh, I understand how what I've manufactured of my life and my narrative and just like, no, it's just your arbitrary version of it. And sometimes it's very freeing because can we go into psychedelics? That's the most interesting. Psychedelics, meditation, breathing. I've done holotropic breathing, kind of like the Wim Hof. Yeah, yeah. The first time I did it, I wanna say I was scared, but I was hesitant. Because it could go wrong if you're... Yeah, I've never felt because I'm pretty much hyperventilating at that point. It is. And at the point I'm getting fucking dizzy as fuck. And I'm like, am I gonna continue? I'm like, no one's babysitting me right now. That's the thing. And I'm like, fuck it. I'll do it anyway. Just do it anyway. And like, I straight out tripped out for like 25 seconds. Well, I perceive it's 25 seconds. It is. And you know, it's psychedelics is just the fast forward way to it. But Sufism, meditation, Buddhism, they got to it very inorganic ways. Sufism, you have the... The dance, right? So there are so many ways to get to those states of mind. But back to that narrative, like what I wanted to highlight from research on psychedelics is, you know, there is, they call it the hero dose, which is a good chunk of psilocybin that they give you on their supervision and whatnot. And they've done it in the College of London of research and whatnot, which is about reputable organization around research and psychedelics is that you experienced that thing called the ego dissolution, right? Which is an ego. A lot of people colloquially understand ego as that guy who's too full of himself, which is not the scientific explanation of ego. The ego is essentially social, cultural constructs that are imposed on us, which create that narrative in our heads. My narrative might be, I am a founder... The ego is just software in your head. That's it. Exactly, right? Which is not necessarily, it's not truth. And it's how you perceive it. And it's not good or bad either. It's just literally software. It could move you in one direction or another. It's just could be a bad direction or a very... I'm glad you were... Yes, I disdain when people say ego is this... Macho guy. Macho bullshit. I'm like, you really don't get it. Which is how it's colloquially been presented, right? But the point, I think what you're saying is important is like how you perceive the world creates that ego. Like how my parents have reinforced certain values in my head. That's my ego. You also have epigenetical factors. Where you have traits and characters passed down, which you can't control whatsoever. Like you're born that way. It's almost a hardware defect now. Yeah, for sure. So I think when people realize that, I think it becomes a very empowering way to say, look, what I'm perceiving is not necessarily me. It's not how the world is. It's, I can change that, right? And I think we need to understand these things better to define a better self, define a better society for ourselves, et cetera, and escape it a little bit. And that's why I always go back to these ancient wisdoms, whether it's the East Asian, Buddhism, or it's the Sufism, or it's philosophy that has tested through time and time. I always feel like there is some true north in their compass that I can't possibly discover in my lifespan. I might as well lean on something that has been tested for a thousand years and still has some truth that people flock over. It's a little bit of a shortcut. Yeah, and there's ways to even approach that where you don't necessarily have to partake in psychedelics, nor if you have an adversion to any of these Eastern type of philosophies, is like simple stuff I recommend for people is I challenge yourself. Like when's the last time you went on an incredible hike in the mountains or you really challenge yourself or maybe you're into hunting. When's the last time you've gone in deep four or five days real hunting in the bush? Really challenging, like our DNA is made for this. Becomes alive. Yeah, you live in the moment. Like when's the last time you fucking did that? The living in the moment is key, right? It's just you almost lose track of time. It doesn't become this linear thing we're all used to which is past and future, but it's just present, right? But I think at least research of psychedelics, why psychedelics are, I think people are looking at is you can definitely go hunting for six days and feel a lot of it, but not everyone will do that. Or you can be a highly self-aware and not only meditate, but kind of not only close your eyes for a period of day and meditate, but like be self-aware throughout the day. But again, not everyone does that. Psychedelics are essentially the heightened version of you seeing that door that you can be in the present, right? That removes you from the narratives we create. It's just one way of getting to it. It's not the only way. I mean, you can become a Sufi, but it takes decades of practice. You can become a Tibetan monk, but it takes decades of practice and not everyone is cut out for it. And if I didn't mind those a monk for years, he said, fuck it, and you left. You came back here. A full-fledged monk, man. No, it's Leonard Cohen became a monk for five years. Was it real? Yeah, and there's a poem that I never forget him. He was writing a lot of poetry during that period, but he keeps going through the life as a monk and he closes the poem with, the only thing you don't need is a comb. And I love that. And it just tells you how difficult and arduous being a monk is. I would just find it boring. But that's the challenge of becoming a monk. It's just boring. Me too. If I look at human evolution, pre-Circa, the agricultural revolution. So let's rewind. 150 years, yeah? Past 10,000 years. Okay, pre-agricultural, okay. Yeah, pre, so past 10,000. Okay. And I look at what did our ancestors do? So acutely, they were in more harm than we were. That doesn't apply for everybody. Obviously, there's many, many places around the world right now who are in war-torn situations. But they never experienced that. So the people currently in war are experiencing way more stress, way more harm and more danger. But back in the day, the danger would be maybe from other tribes acutely. Other animals? Other animals. And that's acutely, that's not chronic. So this isn't on a day-to-day basis. This is sparsely throughout the history. And what did we have to do? We followed migration patterns of animals. We knew where the animals go. We understood our landscape and we've mastered our landscape because we're bipedal and we were, you know why we're actually good at hunting? No. We're endurance animals. Sweat. Oh, I see. And we can walk and we can run forever. I see. And we would injure or harm or poison an animal and just track it down to the give-up. I see. Interesting. Us and a horse, the next mammal, the sweats. The horse didn't sweat, we couldn't use it. Dogs don't sweat. Yeah, that's why they pant. Yeah, they pant, yeah. I don't, I forget, there's only a couple of mammals that sweat. I might be wrong, maybe just a horse, but it's interesting. Yeah. And so we, in that experience, we were pretty much nomadic. And so we had the experience of brand-news. Settings. Settings and stimulation, like aesthetics, visual. Yes. We saw different landscapes. The experience of walking the tribe. Yes. Traversing. The experience of hunting a new prey. These are brand-new, tangible experience that we had. You look at today, it's like, I said before the podcast, I'm like, one of my definitions of hell is if I ran a $300 million company, I had to show up to the same fucking office the rest of my life and take the same route to that. Shoot me now. That's my definition of hell. Same repetitive pattern day in, day out. Forget about it. Yes. Here we are. Here we are. And I think when the symptoms become so dramatic, we take action in North America, right? Currently in Canada, did you notice that every single day half a million of Canadian workers don't go show up to work because of mental reasons? Half a million every day. Every day. Holy shit. One out of three every short-term and long-term disability claim is mental that costs companies $20 billion just in Canada. Holy shit. Right? Which we probably haven't seen it because in startups it's less so, but that's an literally epidemic. Massive. Like think about it. How many people end up, like how many people are adults to go to work in Canada? Half a million don't show up every day. And I would say of those who show up, a lot of them are on the brinks of not showing up. You know, right? So I think the problem is we take, we're all in that place and that's why we take extreme actions. That's why we buy massive houses to patch that feeling, right? That's why we have to have a cottage to escape the nine to five Monday to Friday. I don't recommend it. Much work. Right? Too much work. And it's not as fun as you think. I had a lot of fun. I go there to fucking work. Exactly. Right? It's what you own ends up owning you, they say. Yeah. So try not to own too many. We're actually planning to rent it out completely starting this summer for the first time ever. It's, and I think we're gonna, I mean, for us, I feel like that's why travel is so valuable to people, right? You, there is a certain framework in North America that we're used to, right? And my analogy is simplifying it from my little travel that I've done is like I had a realization and I'm like, in North America, why are people so attached to their jobs? Yeah. Because everything is borrowed. A lot of places in the world, things are cash. There's no concept of a credit card. There's no concept of you can borrow 80% of your home's value from the bank and pay a lot, right? You pay cash. So here you're anchored. You have your car based on a lease. You have your house based on a mortgage. Your phone. People forget that, man. People don't buy the phones. Again, a $4,000 brand new phone, right? So, and what does the system do? The system anchors all of these loans on one thing, which is your job. So that becomes the single point of failure. If you fuck that up, everything else that's attached to it with a tight rope is gonna just relinquish itself, right? And that creates a void in your mind. That creates the fight or flight. And that's why we keep doing that same game. And that's why people die to go on a one week, two week Caribbean break to just do nothing, right? They have no bandwidth anymore to stimulate their brain and learn something new. We're like, why aren't people learning new languages, new instruments, new cultures, et cetera, because there is no bandwidth. We have so much cognitive load in our minds. We're fried. And we're just denying it because we feel like, oh, I'm a weak entity. If I admit that I am burned out, I just can't function that well, right? So I think 21st century is the century of the mind. I feel like we're gonna have amazing breakthroughs in terms of just like we discovered antibiotics. People forget that before antibiotics, people would die from drinking water from the wrong place. Something so simple of washing your hands before a surgeon goes to give birth. Exactly, right? Something so simple of washing your hands. So we will come across these nuggets and we will write note a knowledge worker, which believe it or not, we all know the white color and the blue color. The knowledge worker is the gold color. The gold color. Society, right? So which we are right now, right? Which essentially we use our mind to do the work we do, right? We are working if we have access to the laptop. We essentially, we don't understand when you should stop, when you should go on. Like we're just like, we're always on, so to say, right? But these things will self-correct themselves. We have to create better environments for ourselves and we have to take a more preventative measure I think in terms of avoiding all of these therapy sessions people need to have all of this medical because the medicine is not even a treatment. It's just tapers the pain until you get back on your feet. We haven't, it's just a painkiller until you can self-correct yourself. So the power is within you. Cool, man. That's a good. I think we'll leave it at that. Cheers. That's a great ending. Rahim, if people want to get ahold of you and know everything what you're doing with Psychology Compass, what's the best resource? The best resource. So my email is rahim at psychologycompass.com. You can get in touch there. Or Twitter is my first name. That helps. Thank you. All right, guys. If you enjoyed this episode, head over to iTunes. Leave a review. Every review helps the search engines. Also, if you're on YouTube, please leave a comment. I'd love to know your thoughts about this episode and stay tuned for the next episode, guys. Take care. Peace.