I'm the king.
Welcome to episode four sixty five of the
permaculture pimp cast where pimp stands
for permaculture is my passion.
The only pimp cast on this earth that
discusses permaculture prepared in this
practical living and sometimes even
prostitutes.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, good to be here with y'all.
Man, I'm really excited for this one.
Oh man,
it's always a good day when you can
get Jack Spierko on the program.
And we're going to come to him in
just a minute.
But hey,
before we get hopping and popping here,
y'all, tell everybody we're live.
Hit that thumbs up.
And, you know, holler if you hear me.
So, you know,
the powers that shouldn't be can go ahead
and start suppressing us like they always
do because they don't want this awesome
information getting out to folks like you.
All right.
Before we kick it in,
I want to I want to handle all
the housekeeping up front.
Sovereign Health Summit, y'all,
that's going to be October twenty seven
through the thirty first.
That's going to be out there in Harmony,
North Carolina.
We got Barbara O'Neill coming in and we
got a bunch of other awesome backup
dancers.
Tango Papa Charlie will get you five
percent off.
Also, everybody's always asking,
why do I wear these glasses?
Hey, y'all,
I was just down in El Salvador and
I was hanging out with the great Dr.
Jack Cruz.
In fact,
I spent a whole lot of time with
him.
The kind of time that people would kill
to have with this guy.
Anyway,
he's the one who made the world famous.
aware of what this blue light toxicity can
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Look, y'all,
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As a journeyman electrician for almost
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But here's what makes them special.
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Find me another transient voltage surge
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OK,
that's going to handle on the housekeeping
up front.
And I'm not going to fool around because
I got my man Jack Spierko.
Before I go to him, though, folks,
I say this every time he comes on
the program because it's true.
He's probably going to get bashful when I
say it, because just believe it or not,
he's extremely humble.
But Jack is always the smartest guy in
the room.
and he never feels the need to ever
tell anybody i say this every single time
and you just feel smarter being in the
same space with him whether virtually or
whether checking out his podcast survival
survival podcast which by the way if i'm
not mistaken i think i was introduced to
it
all the way back in oh eight and
jack was the one that introduced me to
permaculture so um he's been at this gig
a long long time and folks i say
it all the time on this show he
is without a doubt the best podcaster in
the business one of the best educators out
there and i'm telling you everybody is
going to be the beneficiary of his wisdom
today so if i could actually unclick that
mute button okay there we are jack how
you doing my man hey man thanks for
the great introduction i'll try to live up
to half of it
Bro, you can do it with, what,
half your brain tied behind your back.
It has been a while, though.
I mean, like you said, O.A.,
it's eighteen years.
We just celebrated eighteen years of the
show in June.
You deserve every year of it, man.
And I hope you keep on doing it
because it's, I mean,
you are a dynamo in that area.
And a lot of us are so blessed
to have you out there.
Before we get hopping and popping,
I didn't tell you when we were talking
prior to this,
I wanted to tell you here.
I was down in El Salvador.
I got invited to a party near Bitcoin
Beach.
Okay.
And there were a bunch of Australian
expats there.
And a couple of them asked me, Hey,
you ever heard of you're from,
you're from the States, mate.
And I said, yeah, you know,
I have a guy named Jack Spear.
And I just said, yeah, I know him.
I said,
he's been on my show a couple of
times.
And, uh, so anyway, they, yeah,
you got fans down in El Salvador that
are expats from Australia.
How about that?
It's,
it's crazy when you hear that and think
of, you know,
how I started with a recorder in my
car.
Um,
I don't know if you know who Vin
Armani is, but he lives in Saipan now.
And he was telling me recently that he
was talking to some girl on like the
other island that's part of the North
Mariana's.
And she was like, you know, Jack Spierko.
And I'm like, how?
And I guess, you know what?
That's a moment to sit back and kind
of thank Adam Curry.
Honestly, if you think about it,
like you and I, what we do.
without Adam's work all the way back in
the early two thousands probably wouldn't
be what it is today.
Like Adam Curry is the guy that created
podcasting in the form that we have today.
It's, it's,
it's pretty crazy that you can reach the
whole world, you know,
from what we're doing now.
Yeah, that's really something.
But man,
it just blows my mind where there was
only two people they brought up when I
was down there.
One was you and the other guy.
Well, actually three.
They brought up Dr. Jack Cruz,
who's down there.
And then they also brought up Sam Tripoli.
And yeah,
so you three guys were the only ones.
I was like, yeah, man.
I mean, they were like, you know,
pretty jazzed up.
I was like, yeah, dude,
he's a buddy of mine.
And they didn't believe me, man.
I had to break out my phone.
I showed them your number in my phone.
That was crazy.
I was like, dude, I got, yeah,
here's him.
Here's Sam Tripoli.
I don't have Jack, uh, Cruz,
but I got his wife here and it
was, it kind of,
so you were an icebreaker for me down
there in El Salvador.
I think it's just a blessing.
The whole thing is, I mean,
over the years, it's, it's,
it's pretty amazing, honestly.
Before we get down to it, Jack,
you sent me some pictures the other day
of your garden down there.
I just wanted to
I wanted to give everybody a heads up.
I didn't know if that video was available
for everybody on YouTube or whether that
was surprising.
But, man, folks, if you haven't seen it,
you need to go to his YouTube channel
and check this thing out, man.
You got trombocinos the size of my arm.
I mean,
what are you doing down there before?
Because this is largely a permaculture
podcast.
What is the special thing that you've done
out there that really makes this thing
hum?
So I have to say that it was
like this year, you know,
I've been on this property for thirteen
years.
The garden you're talking about has been
in place for about six.
And, you know, when I started out,
it was right before I started doing the
bioreactor compost.
So it's had about five years of that
and it's had about three years of biochar
being added to it and cover cropping.
And those three things seem to just kind
of kick over this year.
Like the soil that was in there was
pretty dead when it was initially put into
those beds.
It's what I could get my hands on.
I don't have soil here.
I have rock and I have about four
inches of really bad dirt on top of
that rock.
And that's all I've got.
And when you say that,
people think of like digging a hole and
you're pulling rocks out.
I don't mean that.
I mean like concrete slab limestone rock
is what's under my property.
And so I just had to use the
field earth that I could get and start
improving it.
And it's done really well.
And like my bricks readings on SAP last
year were like eleven, twelve,
which is really, really good.
Yeah.
But some of my bricks readings this year
have been like fourteen.
Wow.
Which there's a lot of people out there
going, I don't get it.
You get what I'm saying.
Like when you get into that level of
bricks on the sap of a plant,
you're getting into that level of like,
you know, you,
your plants survive two to three degrees
below freezing when they're not supposed
to,
because basically you have any freeze in
the sack with a little extra sugar and
your pest problems go to almost nothing.
Like,
The one thing I was happy to see
is that the black swallowtail still ate my
fennel.
Cause I was going to be bummed if
that went away.
Like that was the one negative possibly of
that.
And, uh, but otherwise like,
it's just been a crazy year.
Like you said, I got trouble.
She knows as big as your arm.
I got trouble.
She knows how to move my leg.
Wow.
Like I've, I've never,
I've got one out there.
I meant to cut it and bring it
in here,
even though we're really not supposed to,
that's not what we're scheduled to talk
about today.
But I've got one that honestly got,
if it was on the floor,
it'd be about that tall right now.
And the neck is like that.
Like I've just never seen anything quite
like what happened this year.
I've got tomatoes out of my, you know,
and I've also, I grow those,
I can't remember the actual name of the
plant.
They market them as Indian snake bean.
If you know the plant I'm talking about,
Baker kind of made it famous.
I've grown those every year for like the
past five years,
but I only get them in like September.
And it's because they're pollinated by
moths that I think are nocturnal because
they're really tiny flower.
Bees can't get into them.
I don't know if it's just our cooler
weather this year or what,
but I've got tons of them in the
spring this year.
So it's just been a great year for
the garden.
Man, that's what I'm talking about, folks.
Like I said, go over there,
check it out.
This thing will absolutely blow your mind.
And like Jack said,
when you've got a bricks reading that
high, I mean,
you've got a bulletproof garden.
You really do.
I mean, I know it's true.
Alan Booker said that, like,
once you're there, like,
insects will just fly over your garden.
Yep.
Let's look down.
Nope, that's not for me.
It's human food, not insect food.
Yeah, but it didn't happen overnight.
Like you said, I mean,
it's been a work in progress.
You stay at it.
You know,
so many people reach out to me and
a number of others saying, well, you know,
they have two bad years of gardening and
then they just throw in the towel.
That's not what you can do.
I mean, you know, you're like you said,
you're I haven't been to your property,
but I know other people that have.
And I remember Nicholas Bertner saying,
you know, a while back, man,
he's all on rock over there.
I don't know how he's going to grow
anything.
Yeah.
He went wrong.
Yeah.
Well, that's awesome.
Just takes time.
Yep.
So we're going to hit.
Hey, folks,
if you remember the last time Jack was
on the show,
we were I can't remember if it was
the last time or the time before.
He just written a book called The Laws
of Life, had it on here,
got through it.
And I'm telling you what, folks,
it's a quick read,
but not in a way you think in
his first version.
It's a quick read because, number one,
it's.
When you're going through it,
if you read with the tri-focus method as
I do, you read faster anyway.
But honestly,
you can just devour that book because it's
information that just sings to you.
Now,
I don't have a copy of your second
one,
but I do know what's in the chapters.
But first off, I mean,
what inspired you to write the second,
you know,
Laws of Life Part Two instead of expanding
the first?
Or is this an extension of the first?
They're kind of a series now,
if you want to think of it that
way.
So that made it pretty easy to do.
So we got one and two.
um the fact that the first book hit
bestseller list on amazon in three
categories that that that kind of made it
where i wanted to make another book but
i wasn't done yet when i originally came
up with the idea for the first book
it was actually thirty laws and when i
started putting together the outline and
thinking about writing it i'm like oh it's
gonna be an encyclopedia
Like nobody's going to want to read that
much in a single book.
So I initially went fifteen and fifteen
and then there was one law I really
wanted to get in there.
So I became sixteen and then my OCD
kicked in.
And OK,
so we'll add two to the second book.
And so it was just kind of a
logical progression in the series.
And there's other things planned after
this, though.
Laws of Life might have a series,
but the next book won't be called that.
I just felt like I had more to
say about things to help people build a
better life.
I mean,
that's what my whole show has been built
on all these years.
You know,
we do a lot with permaculture and
homesteading and regenerative ag,
but that's just a piece of what we
do.
We teach entrepreneurship.
We teach money management.
We teach lifestyle design.
And, you know,
I've been asked over the years by
mainstream publishers, I mean, big time,
like New York City publishers to write
books.
And I've always turned them down, one,
because their terms always seem very
predatory,
but they also wanted to very much typecast
what I did.
They wanted a book on survivalism.
And once we started talking about it,
it became very clear,
not my version of it,
their version of it, you know,
the city's burning and whatnot.
I'm like, that's not what I teach.
You write the book.
Like, no, I don't know.
That's not what I do.
And so when I decided to write a
book,
I've been asked by my audience for years
and years to write books as well.
Everybody kind of expected it would either
be a book on like survivalism or urban
survivalism or something like that,
or like permaculture space.
But I've been able to build everything
that I've built based on the things in
these two books.
And I had a very successful career in
business before I walked away at the age
of thirty six.
And so I had hit the absolute top
of the corporate hierarchy by the time I
was thirty six years old.
I was in the C-suite.
I was a COO of a company and
a president and board member of a holding
company that that company was in at the
same time.
And I just didn't want to do it
anymore.
And that's when I launched Survival
Podcast.
And that's when I changed my life and
went in this direction.
But it wasn't like that life didn't teach
me anything.
And I look around and the hardest
questions I ask that come into me today
are not like, what do I plant?
Or what do I store?
Or what insulation do I use in my
off-grid cabin?
My hardest questions are things like,
how do I buy my first house?
I'm twenty-eight years old and I'm working
my face into the ground and I can't
figure it out.
How am I ever going to be able
to retire?
How do I build my life to a
point where I'm comfortable having kids?
know when people start those are hard
questions to answer right you don't google
an answer to that right like it's it's
not simple and to me every one of
those questions has a different answer
like depending on who asked it like five
people could ask verbatim the same
question and you you know my favorite
answer is always it depends so the things
that it depends on like you know what's
your risk tolerance all those things fill
into this
So the whole premise of the laws of
life books is these are not my laws.
Like I kind of call them that at
times,
but it's more of like a plucky joke
type thing.
Like if you remember,
remember the movie Tom Cruise was in
cocktail from the eighties.
Right.
And the guy that was like his bartender
mentor Coghlan,
he would say like Coghlan's laws.
It's kind of like that.
Like these are other people's laws.
Some of them are very well known.
Some of them I really kind of do.
claim kind of their genesis but you know
nine out of ten of them are out
there in one form another from somebody
else they're just things over the years
that i adopted
And what I want more than anything else
is for people to have success in their
own life.
And, you know,
for people that are tuning in today,
they're like they're twenty somethings and
early thirty somethings.
These are the ones who get the maddest
at me.
I want it for you more than you
do.
That's why you get pissed off at me.
Right.
Like the last interview I gave about this
book was with Tom Woods.
And, you know,
I've had several people from his audience
reach out.
Like all I got from you was pull
you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
And I'm like, well,
that's because that's what you're hearing.
It's not what I'm saying.
And my other question back to them has
always been, well,
but what do you want from me?
What do you want from a guy like
Billy?
What do you want from, you know,
I was on with Tom.
So what do you want from Tom?
Who do you tune into?
Do you want us to just commiserate with
you about how hard things are?
Or do you want a pathway to solutions?
And to me, that's what my books are.
They're pathway to solutions.
I'm actually developing right now two
courses,
two online courses and guidebooks for
these two books before I move on to
my next book in the series.
And as I dig through those,
the psychology and the neuroscience in
this stuff,
if you'll actually take that approach to
it, it's huge.
And I think that's the reason that people
get upset when you say certain things that
are in these books about how to handle
life and situations in life.
You're creating a mirror.
And that mirror causes them to look at
what they already know.
Because some of these laws,
people are like, well,
everybody knows that.
Yeah, but you're not living that way.
And a word that gets thrown around a
lot or a phrase that gets thrown around
a lot right now is cognitive dissonance,
right?
So everybody takes the one definition of
cognitive dissonance,
which is you have a belief and you
state your belief and somebody gives you
information counter to it and it's solid
information.
So it creates mental discomfort.
But there's a second side of cognitive
dissonance.
And that's when you are living counter to
your own beliefs and you know it,
but you won't admit it.
And it's underlying, it's underneath you.
I think that causes a lot of pain
and anxiety in younger people today.
And I wrote these as much for that
as for anything else.
I think, Jack,
I remember through the first book,
I remember going through that and I was
like, man,
and every single thing I was shaking my
head thinking, okay,
I can absolutely relate to that.
But I do find it curious,
I guess to a certain degree, I don't,
that you're getting a little bit of
pushback.
You and I are roughly the same age.
and you and i both remember the day
before there was an internet you know i
remember starting one of my first
businesses out of the army i had to
literally go door to door and hand out
flyers you know trifolds that i had to
have made to go you know advertise this
little insulation business that i started
my buddy and i we started this thing
while going through the electrical
apprenticeship at the same time and going
to college all at the same time and
we still made a successful business i
don't think it's ever been easier i mean
my wife and i just three days ago
came up with two million dollar ideas than
anybody could run with so i have a
hard time with the people out there that
are saying well i just can't do it
look y'all i'm in my mid-fifties so is
jack and i'm still out here swinging for
the fences so i don't want to hear
it
From all these people,
especially young people.
Jack,
we had a couple of apprentices out here.
Somebody asked me to bring them on.
And one of them was twenty.
The other was fresh out of high school.
We're walking up the side of this mountain
and I got a bucket in each hand
of water.
And you know how heavy that is.
And I got these two clowns behind me.
One of them shows in Velcro shoes and
a fanny pack.
And he's out here carrying some pig food
up this mountain.
And every other step, he's like, man,
this is hard.
This is hard.
I said, hey, kid.
You're young enough almost to be my
grandson.
I'd rather carry fifty, forty, forty,
fifty pounds of of pig feed than,
you know,
that much water times to sloshing around
in a bucket.
Yeah.
But you're the old man.
They should have been like, hey,
we got this right.
Exactly.
But the whole time, you know,
and then so when we were all said
and done,
kind of got myself together and tell this
little as Phil Marchi.
I'm like, hey, so what do you think?
Farm life for you?
Says, I don't know, man.
I just don't feel like I can make...
And then the other kid chimes in.
Both of them are saying, and I'm like,
okay, look, kids,
here's a couple of jars of honey.
Get on the first thing smoking.
I think it lasted two hours.
They were supposed to be here eight.
I sent them on the first thing smoking
going down the road,
but I find it curious that everybody's
giving you a little bit of...
And they probably will,
even with this interview as well,
they're giving you a little bit of grief
over this when it's never been easier to
be a success, at least in my view.
There's never been more opportunity.
Some things are hard.
And I think I say that right out
of the gate in the second book,
that if you're twenty five years old to
thirty five years old today or even a
little bit younger,
you live in a world that's a conundrum.
Um.
Things because of the way we manage our
monetary system more than any other reason
on some levels are harder.
If you take a standard, get a job,
go to work, do your thing,
it will take you quite a number of
years longer to buy your first house today
than it did when you and I were
like, you know, twenty five years old.
It just it just does.
So we you and I can't sit back
and say nothing is harder than it was
when we were young.
However,
there's more opportunity than there's ever
been.
Right.
The fact that like you think about this,
like if you move to a new,
if you were a twenty five year old
kid,
you move to a new town right now.
You can start making money tomorrow.
You can deliver shit for Amazon.
You can go to Rover and dog sit
people.
You can do Uber.
You can do Uber each.
You can do DoorDash.
You can do TaskRabbit and throw sheds
together for people like I'm not saying
you're going to get rich doing it.
I'm saying just the fact that you can
land anywhere.
and begin making income the next day, bro,
you and I didn't have that.
Not that easily anyway, right?
There's ways you could do it,
but it wasn't like that.
The other thing I think has happened is,
and this is, we have to,
if we're going to poke these young people,
we also have to be honest about what's
not their fault, right?
So they have been the kind of the
magnum opus of,
of the establishment's propaganda machine,
right?
Like they tried to do it to us.
They did a pretty good job of the
generation between us and they really had
it perfected.
And it all started back with our parents,
the boomers in the seventies and late
sixties when they took over academia doing
this.
And they have convinced each generation
it's the one befores.
fault.
So it's all our fault.
Us Gen Xers who are now boomers in
the mind of the millennials and the Gen
Xers, we're all boomers, right?
We're either one of them or a boomer.
And they talk about this time when guys
like you and me, Billy,
and certainly the boomers,
we could just go buy a house on
one income and raise three kids and it
was easy.
Y'all are talking about eight years ago.
Y'all are talking about the nineteen
forties after the Second World War up
until about nineteen sixty.
A boomer,
the oldest boomer today in nineteen sixty
was fifteen years old.
How much say do you have in the
world?
when you're fifteen years old.
I'll give you the answer, zero.
You have zero say in that,
except for your own world,
you have zero say in the world.
So this fantasy they have and this
animosity they have because they can't see
how they're going to become a homeowner
about this kind of leave it to beaver
world,
That's what it was.
It was in the leave it to beaver
years that life was like that.
Your parents didn't live that way, folks,
and your grandparents didn't live that
way.
Your great grandparents did.
My parents maybe, but like Billy and I,
our grandparents,
they were young adults during that period.
And yes, it's harder, but yes,
it's easier.
And that is kind of a catch-twenty-two
that you're in.
The thing is,
what worked for them won't work for you.
But what will work for you is so
much more abundant than what they had that
was available for them.
Like you said,
multi-million dollar ideas like that.
But there's like a chapter in this book,
too.
You know what the idea is worth?
Zero without execution.
There you go.
If you can't execute and like what you
learn as you get older.
The problem isn't an idea.
It's filtering out and getting down to one
that you can commit to and fully
committing to it.
Touche, man.
Right on the money.
Now,
let's go ahead and educate some of these
people out here because there's something
in your chapter one that really just
jumped out at me right off the bat.
And I was like, boy,
I got this right and wrong all at
the same time.
And you call it do what you hate
first and do it like you love it.
Now, I got half of that equation right.
Yeah.
I always, I mean,
every single day I try to,
every day there's a systematic thing that
has to get done.
And then, you know,
I got to play freestyle and put out
fires and do all the other things like
everybody else.
But I got to say,
when I looked at that,
I had something of a eureka moment, Jack,
just like I told you in your last
book.
This is the benefit of a book, y'all.
This is what Joel Salatin talks about all
the time.
Find me one book.
where you don't walk away with at least
a hundred dollar idea out of it.
And this one is a thousand dollar idea
if you ask me.
So Jack, why don't you,
if you don't mind,
I know you don't mind getting into it,
but I got the first half of that
equation right,
but I got the other one wrong.
Break that down for us.
So the concept is,
That first of all systems have more power
than willpower ever will so you're you're
former military like me,
so you know that you bring people into
the military.
And you have to be able to put
them into situations they're going to be
very difficult you're gonna have to know
there's a minimum level of performance.
right?
So you create a system around that.
You don't bring everybody in.
Like people see, you know,
if you've never been in the military,
you see like basic training and
everybody's getting yelled at and
everything.
And I think that people get this idea
that they just yell at you until you
decide you're going to do it.
And that's not how that works.
Like there's systems of management and
operations in place and you train someone
to that level and that system.
And then the system does the majority of
the work because when Reveille goes off,
you get the fuck out of bed and
you get
to your formation on time and when you're
told to move you move so your buddy
doesn't get shot right that's the power of
systems this is not a military book i'm
just trying to like use an analogy here
so if you put a system in place
in an area where willpower is weak you
go further
And that system is we look at everything
every day that we have to do.
And we say,
what are the things that if I don't
do this,
something horrible is going to happen.
All right.
And then we look at the things like
this really does need to get done today.
And then it'd be nice if this gets
done today.
And there's your A, B and C categories.
And in each category,
your tiebreaker of what goes first is do
you want to do it?
And the thing you do not want to
do if it's an A,
like something's going to die or I'm going
to get fired,
I'm going to lose an account,
it just became one A.
And the thing that has to happen,
but you kind of want to do it,
it's two A. Now it's a system.
Now it's a system.
Once it becomes a system,
Then the system runs the show.
Now you are the orchestra, you know,
you're kind of the conductor of the
orchestra here.
You're the one that decides that.
And we were talking earlier about
pushback.
And I think one of the biggest problems
people have with the whole mindset of what
I'm trying to bring out with these books
is I'm making you your own mentor,
which is absolutely terrifying if you
think about it.
Imagine you call me up, Billy,
and you say, Jack,
I want you to be my mentor.
And I say, okay,
and then you're all happy about it.
It turns out I'm telepathic.
And every time you try to lie to
me, not only do I know you're lying,
I know exactly how you're lying.
I know how that story when you were
five years old didn't actually happen.
I know exactly what happened.
I know exactly what you were thinking when
you didn't get out of bed this morning.
Now it's kind of like,
I don't know if I really want this
dude as my mentor.
When you build systems and you put
somebody in charge as their own mentor,
the natural resistance comes from the fact
that you know you can't bullshit yourself.
Now you can,
if you just live life loosely like
everybody does,
but if you get into a tight structure
and you hold yourself to a standard,
and one of the quotes in the book
that I really love is,
the standard that you walk by is the
standard that you accept.
And that's what I've adopted in my life
because as organized as I seem when it
comes to all the crap on my farm
and all, stuff gets laying at places.
So like that became one of my things
that goes in my kind of my daily
review, my daily practice.
And, you know,
now when I walk by something slaying
there,
I just hear Dave Morrison was the guy
that said that.
And I hear that in my head and
like, damn it,
now I have to do it.
And that's what you're doing.
You're getting tied into that.
But with this idea of doing what you
hate first,
the story I tell in the book about
this,
this is an honest to God true story.
When I was really young,
it's in my early twenties,
I got my first really good sales position
in telecom.
And the way you make money in sales,
especially back then,
the internet existed,
but not the way it did today.
You couldn't just throw out lead ladders
and stuff like that, right?
You made your money in sales by cold
calling.
No one wants a cold call.
Cold call sucks.
Cold calling is for every ten calls you
make,
literally getting told to F off nine times
and probably being told nicely to F off
once.
So you got to make twenty and then
you'll get one where you get a toehold
and that'll get you to the next level
in the chain.
And then for every ten of those,
you're going to get told to F off
nine times.
So it's about thirty times of being told
to go do horrible things to yourself
before you get one that even possibly
leads somewhere.
if you don't do it the whole thing
falls apart now the problem for me in
that was i'm a systems thinker and i
like to design things and i had a
lot of experience already at actually
running jobs so i was not just a
sales guy i was a sales guy to
pull project manager in when i was putting
a bid together and say can we redesign
this save the customer money well why
would you want to do that so we
get the job
So we're the one bringing that.
So I love that.
I love sitting down with a customer.
I love negotiating.
I love closing.
I love getting into that room when I
was sitting around a conference table that
I couldn't afford,
let alone the building they were in and
talking to these people and bringing and
winning them over by sheer force of will
and logic and presentation.
I loved all that.
I hated cold calling.
But the way you got to do all
the other stuff was cold calling.
So here's the dumb, doofus thing I did.
sitting in the gym one day i'm working
out i look at myself in the mirror
i got my lifting gloves on i got
my shirt i'm all cut i'm sweating i'm
in that point of a workout where like
you're hurting but it feels good and i'm
like i'll kick anybody's ass right now i'm
like that's what you need so i went
back to my office i put a mirror
up on my wall and i would take
my dress shirt off i had to wear
to work and put a t-shirt on
And I'd stand in front of that mirror
with a headset on, tied to my phone,
plugged into a desk.
That's how long ago this is,
with my call sheet for the day.
And my first two hours every day,
I called and called.
That sounds juvenile, right?
And you get in there pretending he's
working out.
Yeah, well, in nine months,
I did two and a half million dollars
worth of sales for a company that had
never done more than four and a half
million in a year.
Wow.
Because the system was more powerful than
the world.
It's easy to say, well,
I'm going to do this.
But once you put a system over top
of the concept and then you hold yourself
to the system, everything changes.
It doesn't change overnight.
And we've been on here now for thirty
one minutes and we've covered one law.
Right.
So there's a lot more to it than
that.
But that's the mindset that I'm coming
from with what I'm trying to teach people
in these books.
That's fantastic.
You know, the next one,
there's something about that book and this
one, too, where everything,
every title of every chapter jumps off the
page to me personally.
I don't know if it's because my age
or, you know, that we folks,
if you don't know,
there's so much overlap with me and Jack.
We both grew up in Pennsylvania.
We went to the same part in the
Army.
And then, you know, do pretty much this,
you know,
a similar type of thing this day.
It's like there's a lot of overlap.
So I keep getting freaked out every time
I look at some of your titles here.
And when I went through that last book,
because I'm like, good night, man,
I see it this way.
And then I get a eureka moment and
say, oh, my goodness,
this next one applies to something that
happened just a couple of weeks ago.
And I really would like for you to
go into that a little bit more, too.
It's the next chapter.
Everyone's an expert at a few things.
Reason I'm saying this.
I was speaking at a conference down in
Alabama,
I want to say a couple of years
ago.
And I can't even begin to tell you
how many people were coming up to me
asking me, hey,
how can I make money doing this?
And they all think they got to be
on YouTube.
And I'm like, folks,
you don't realize I don't make my money
through YouTube.
They don't pay me anything.
I make my money different ways.
So I asked this one guy, I said,
what do you do?
What do you do for fun?
What do you love?
What can you do that you can monetize?
And...
He's telling me, well, you know,
I like to bang on tin and make
different things.
I'm like, okay,
you ever thought about making a shovel?
You ever thought about making,
because I got one that I bought from
Tractor Supply.
The tines on the pitchfork broke the first
day.
The shovel handle,
I got it in the back of the
truck right now, Jack.
The shovel handle,
which was supposed to be hickory, busted,
and you ain't breaking no shovel handle
made out of hickory the first day or
first week or whatever.
That one's been a month.
So anyway,
there's planned obsolescence built into
all this stuff.
So I tell this guy, hey,
you ever thought about making a broad
fork,
a specialized broad fork that actually
works?
And then you ever look into the work
of Victor Schauberger?
You ever thought about making some of this
stuff out of copper?
And he's like, wow, wow, wow.
I said, I'll tell you what,
you send me a prototype of anything you
make and I'll give it a shot.
And I'll tell you what,
if it works and it's legit,
I'll let everybody in the world know about
it.
Haven't heard a word from that guy.
Now,
that's one of I don't even know how
many people, but this guy was really,
really good.
He even had pictures of some of the
stuff he made,
but he never did anything with it.
Like you said,
ideation without execution amounts to
nothing.
Yeah,
if you're going to have ideas without
execution, we might as well, like,
my idea is a warp drive, right?
Time machine, you know?
A pill that makes your dog not shed,
right?
If the idea matters, then go there, right?
There's a chapter on that too.
But on the genius thing, right?
I was going,
I know he ain't had time to read
the whole damn book because I just sent
it to him today because I flaked out,
didn't send it to you two weeks ago
when you asked me to be on the
show like I should have.
I thought you were going to,
like so much overlap,
going to tell the exact same story from
the chapter.
But what I talk about in the chapter
where I've noticed that people are
geniuses is at conferences and prepper
gatherings and things like that.
And this is what happens.
I know you've seen this happen.
You're, you know,
especially indoors because people can hear
better.
So you're at like some conference or
whatever.
You're kind of in the back of the
room or the hallway behind it or whatever.
And, you know, you talk to somebody.
I always try to talk to everybody.
I mean,
you know that I make a real effort,
especially people that don't know me,
because that's even better because then
it's just the dude talking to you.
and i always follow like just basic
networking things to get people talking
like and people like it's hard to talk
to people at a conference who are you
where'd you come from what what what's
most interesting here right and you're
talking about them so they start talking
so you start talking to them and you
get the kind of like the him and
han and just here to learn and whatever
but then you find one thing
They know,
like your guy with metal work or whatever.
And all of a sudden,
you just start asking them questions about
that.
And see,
nobody's ever done this for them before.
And they don't know
They don't realize how smart they are
because the only people they talk to about
that are all their buddies that are like
nerds for that thing together, right?
So everybody knows a little bit about it
and then they all combine what they know
so they all learn more and they all
think they're about the same and they
think everybody knows this,
but they don't.
And you find something that they have that
knowledge and a passion for and they start
talking about it.
Really?
Well, how's that work?
And all of a sudden you start feeling,
you don't even see it at first.
You just feel people behind you.
You get that kind of, you know,
that sense that you have that there's
somebody.
And you look and there's people and
they're listening and they're keying in on
this dude.
And so you egg him on a little
bit more and you start taking half step
backwards.
And the group coalesces.
Next thing you know,
there's just twenty people asking this
dude questions.
He's got more attention than the dude they
paid ten grand to stand at the front
of the room and talk.
And you just let it go and kind
of ease away so that people don't think
they're interrupting something.
You go find that dude later and you're
like, hey, man,
if I talk to the event organizer,
would you like to speak at this event
next year?
And they're like, oh, man,
what would I talk about?
I can't do a presentation.
You just did a presentation for forty
people in the back of the room.
Well, that wasn't a presentation.
I was just talking about what I know.
That's what a presentation.
Now,
they almost never take the opportunity
when you try to give it to them.
But when I see that happen,
I think the untapped genius in the average
person is unbelievable what's there.
And that same person,
when they're complaining about their
position in life,
will talk about their potential and talk
about how if I only had an opportunity,
but they want their opportunity kind of
presented to them in a very on-ramp
friendly way.
They want a job.
They want somebody to give them an
opportunity.
No one, folks,
is going to give you crap.
Even when it feels like they gave it
to you,
it was just because you earned it and
you didn't know it.
Like these movies where some billionaire
comes along and looks at the poor guy
in the street picking his fingernails and
goes, hey,
I'm going to give you a job selling
stocks.
That's not reality.
That's Hollywood.
It might make entertaining TV,
but you get what you take in life.
And that might sound predatory,
and I do not mean it predatory.
There are things that it's okay for you
to take, and opportunity is one of them.
Bro, I couldn't have said that any better.
You know,
I'm going to go off script a little
bit.
Well, there is no script.
I will just say this because I've seen
it in you more than once.
You know,
one thing that I always admired from you
when you would go to these events is
–
people with your notoriety usually go up
there they do the presentation and then
they're like casper the friendly ghost you
don't see him anymore i noticed and i
learned that from you and i i'd said
it to my son before i said you
notice man this dude's been up here
talking all day
on stage, and then he gets off stage,
and then you're over here talking with
people on the ground.
So, I mean,
that was one thing I've noticed from you
that I haven't seen in a whole lot
of people of your caliber.
They usually – you don't see them there,
and they just – you and Joel Salatin
are pretty much the only ones I know.
There's one more guy,
but I'm not going to mention him.
There's only three of you guys that have
ever stuck around and are proactively out
there trying to –
I've seen you do similar things just like
that.
You know, people,
I think they almost certainly knew who you
were,
but you don't make yourself disappear at
these things, man.
I always wondered how did you do that?
Because there's always that one guy that
wears you down to a nub.
How did you manage to do that?
I have some techniques I use.
The guy that wears me down to a
nub,
I always try to have somebody with me
that I can kind of give a signal
to that will somebody need you because
there is those people that you just,
you can't stop.
And, and part of that is like,
it might not even be a person's annoying
or whatever.
It's just like,
There's hundreds of people here.
Right.
If I spend eight hours with you,
then I don't get to spend like a
lot in your time.
So having that kind of backup or like
somebody will call you or somebody will
come over and, hey,
the event organizer needs you.
And we just kind of have a prearranged
signal like that.
So I'm not going to say that never
happens, but it's not that common.
It's, you know,
having once or twice at an event that's
a multi-day event.
But the other thing that I've always done
is if it's not like a hotel where
I have a room,
like when I do John's thing or whatever,
like I need a place where I can
go for ten minutes.
Like with John, I got that spot upstairs.
If I can cut out for ten minutes
and just breathe,
if my wife's not with me,
give her a call.
If my wife is with me,
spend ten minutes with her,
have a drink or a snack or something,
check some email, zone out.
I can go right back in and I
can do it all day long.
I can't do it all day long nonstop.
When I first started and I was trying
to build the notoriety that I have now,
I would do it and I'd force myself
through it.
And all it did by the end of
the day,
then I started being nasty to people and
like having to like, shut yourself,
go have a final drink, go to bed.
And what I learned over the years was
just have those strategic breaks and then
have that person that's there with you
that can, um,
shut that down because what will happen,
usually if you get somebody that's really
excited and you've done what you can to
help them and they just aren't done yet.
The last one I had was a person
that, you know,
she's going to get all this investment
money to do this thing.
And I won't explain it,
but I just thought it was a really
terrible idea.
Yeah.
and that you were going to possibly get
the money and end up in debt for
the rest of your life.
And you didn't really know what you were
doing.
And it needed to be tested in a
small modular thing first.
And that's as much as I'll explain about
it.
And she wasn't going to accept that
answer.
Well, I don't have another one, right?
You're not by force of will going to
get me to tell you,
I agree with your dumb idea, right?
So like that was a person where I
had to kind of call in the third
party to pull me out of it.
But I feel like when we go do
these things, Bill,
if all we do is show up,
throw up and leave,
then the reason people come to these
events is to meet people.
And like, I'm going to go meet so-and-so.
And the fact that even one person would
feel that way about me is already a
blessing.
And then the thought that they would show
up and they don't get to talk to
me is
That just like,
so then everything I'm about is crap at
that point if I haven't done that.
Now, if I don't know,
if you don't come up to me and
talk to me and I'm making myself
available, I can't control that.
But what I can control is making sure
I'm available to the people that spent
their money and their time to come meet
me.
And I'd throw this out for anybody that
might be listening that it's of that
level.
If you're not doing that when you go
to events, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Right.
Like just I understand sometimes because
like Joel really is good about it.
Like you mentioned Saladin,
but I've seen him show up and leave.
But, you know,
it turned out later that like that's
because that's all he could do.
He could like I want you to come
here.
Well, I can,
but I'm going to have to come in.
You know, I'll talk.
I'll be there for a couple hours and
I have to go to this other thing
I'm already committed to.
But if he's available, he stays there.
He's a great example and actually features
in my book pretty heavily with a story
I heard him tell at a event.
No, I'm right there with you.
It's just going to be that person.
I can think of two in particular where
I'm trying, like you said,
I don't need to be going long.
I just need to be in my own
head for a little while and not speak
and give my voice a break.
But then when I say, hey,
I got to run to the bathroom and
he says, I'll go with you.
I'm like, hold on, Jack.
You got to slow down a little bit.
That has happened.
Or out in the woods, you know,
in John's place,
I think the first time there wasn't a
place to go kind of escape for a
moment or two just to kind of collect
yourself.
So I went out in the woods and
the backside of his property got way out
there where nobody could find me.
And I was like, OK, because, you know,
as well as I do,
you won't even have an opportunity to eat.
You can't even,
it's all you can do just to take
a drink off the water bottle.
I go out there and then I'm sitting
there minding my own business,
trying to eat whatever it was I was
eating.
And then next thing I hear this rustling,
oh, there you are.
I'm like, oh, good night, man.
Wasn't I clear what I was doing?
When I did,
when Diego Footer did Permaculture Voices,
the first year I did that,
I literally had a dude asking me,
can I ask you a question?
And I'm standing at a urinal.
I'm like, not while I pee, man.
I'm pretty easy,
but I'm going to set this boundary.
So the other side of that is, well,
what if you went and no one cared?
So I'm not going to complain about it.
Right.
I might make a joke about it or
whatever.
I'm not going to complain about it because
that would be bad if I went to
an event and I was a speaker at
the event.
And not only when I got there,
no one wanted to talk to me,
but when I got done talking,
nobody wanted to talk to me.
I would feel like, well,
I must not be making a difference.
So, you know,
my takeaway from this for anybody
listening,
if you're ever at a thing where I'm
at and you want to talk to me,
come talk to me,
but not while I pee.
I think that's a reasonable boundary.
Or if I tell you, hey, man,
I'll talk to you in a bit.
I got to go do something.
You know, I might be at that.
It might not have nothing to do with
you.
I might be at that moment where somebody
just wore me out and I need five
minutes.
But I'll come back around.
I will talk to you.
Yeah, folks,
I've seen it with my own two eyes.
He does it.
He's one of the few that actually do
that.
There's so many people that go to these
things, and because of their notoriety,
they get out there, do their thing,
get off the stage,
and then you don't see them again.
And I've seen it with my own two
eyes.
Jack is very accessible and one of the
most curious people you'll ever meet.
So, Jack, I do want to ask you,
between the first book and the second,
of all these –
I know there's a number of laws out
there, but for you personally,
which law would you say was the hardest
for you to come by but thoroughly learned?
So it would actually be from the first
book.
And it is to only take the advice
of people who are proven competent in the
area they're giving the advice in.
And it's not because you don't know it.
It's because especially as you're coming
up in the world,
you have all these things you want to
do.
And so when you spill out your idea
to somebody that you want to do,
and they're like,
I don't think you should do it,
or I don't think you should do it
that way, you don't want to hear that.
And if you're following that law,
which totally comes out of Richest Man in
Babylon, that's where I lifted it from.
I would say that's where I've lifted the
altered version from.
So the genesis of that law is from
my father.
And he said,
never take the advice of anybody on
anything unless they're doing better than
you.
And as I got a little older,
a little more temperance in me,
I know that's kind of egotistical because
what does that mean?
Like, you know,
are you a better podcaster than me?
Maybe not.
But if you're way better at writing and
you give me advice on writing,
I'm going to take that.
So my version became only take the advice
of people who are doing better at you
in the thing they're giving you advice on.
And then I eventually realized even that's
arrogant.
What does that mean?
If somebody's competent,
even if you are in every measurable way
succeeding beyond them,
they can still know things you don't.
In fact,
one of the reasons old businesses get
knocked off by new businesses is a new
entrepreneur grabs everything that's
available and throws everything at the
wall to see what sticks from technology
standpoint.
And the person that's been around for
eighteen years like me knows what's worked
to get me there.
And so something new comes along,
I may not pick it up.
I try not to be that person because
of the curiosity thing that you noted
earlier.
But I would say that's the hardest one
advice, not because you don't know it,
but because if you follow the law,
as soon as I identify that the person
is competent in the area they're giving
advice, now I have to listen to it.
I don't have to follow it.
But since now I've created that system
overriding me,
and let's say it's advice on business,
and I'm talking to someone who's built
multiple successful businesses.
Well,
even if I don't like what they're saying,
I need to shut up and listen.
And then they don't know what I know.
They don't know my risk tolerance.
They don't know all the other things that
I've gathered on that initiative,
but they know things and I need to
at least listen to them.
And I would also say of all the
laws of all thirty two laws,
if you learn that one,
you'll learn the other thirty one by
accident because sooner or later you're
going to run along somebody that knows
what to do there.
Right.
So finding people who are competent,
seeking their advice and their guidance
and then adapting it, not obeying it,
adapting it to your life.
Like, you know,
you don't go obey in another human unless,
you know, you have a contract with them.
Like they say,
do this job and you agree to do
it.
But when it comes to how you manage
your life, you take their advice,
you adapt it and you integrate it.
And that is,
The smarter you are,
the harder that is to fully accept because
sometimes you have to listen to people
that legitimately maybe you have a higher
IQ than them,
but they're right because they know that
one thing better than you do.
And once you develop that humility,
then you can become almost unstoppable
because I promise you,
if you're willing to be humble and seek
out someone who knows something you don't,
there's somebody that knows that thing
that's willing to talk to you.
And that advice is generally free and you
probably don't need it from somebody
that's an influencer or well-known.
All you need is someone that's proven
competent in that space.
And the other dangerous thing,
we have this thing called the halo effect.
And that's just,
I've gotten a more in the neuroscience
behind this understanding that like if,
if Billy Bond is really smart at
permaculture,
That doesn't mean that he's really smart
at programming algorithms for artificial
intelligence.
Those two things are not the same thing.
So what we tend to do in our
lives is we find people that are really
smart.
We ask them for advice about things we
actually know they don't know anything
about.
Because if they say, go for it,
then we can tell the rest of our
friends and family, hey,
Uncle Dan said to do it.
He's a genius.
But maybe Uncle Dan's an aerospace
engineer.
And maybe he's a really great one,
but you want to go into the real
estate business.
He doesn't know anything about real
estate.
So that halo effect can really hurt us.
It's not about just seeking the advice of
people who are smart,
but have competence in the area.
That's one of the most difficult things to
accept.
You know, I couldn't agree more there.
You know,
I got a doctor in my family.
He's very well known.
Highly.
He's got more degrees in a thermometer,
but has no common sense when it comes
to Jack, you know,
as well as I do.
Would you ever put is there a situation
where you would ever put layers in zone
five in a permaculture system?
no no you put the wires there right
you know you're pretty darn you seem
pretty competent as a doctor but this same
doctor was putting his his chickens in
zone five and then wondering why the
coyotes are killing them down in texas and
he's doing everything backwards so where
they live there you go it's
But it goes right back to what you
said.
I mean,
you may be an authority in this one
thing, but like you said,
you may be a walking nincompoop concerning
other things.
Let me hit you on this other chapter
before we come down to a close here.
But I really love this one.
That's why I can't wait to read the
book.
And we're going to find out from Jack
here in a moment, folks,
where you can find it.
But I love this one more,
but I'd love you to dig into it
a little bit because I know this to
be axiomatically true,
that success comes from effort,
and once it starts, it compounds.
So, I mean, this is,
I often say that a war,
you don't win a war in miles,
you win it in inches.
But there are points when you're at a
war for a while,
you can advance more than a few inches
at a time.
You might get feet.
But yeah, break that one down for us,
Jack.
Sure.
And this is great because it actually lets
me go back to that conference.
I was talking about Joel selling that.
So I was speaking at Free State,
the Free State Projects.
I can't remember what they call it now,
the winter thing they do every year.
And Joel was there speaking as well.
And he talked about how when he was
very early on in his career as a
farmer, he had just taken over the land.
their car died.
And this was like a terminal disease,
not fixing the car.
And they have no vehicle.
And Joel's a tough dude, man.
He's a really nice guy,
but he's a tough farmer, you know.
And his voice cracked a little bit as
he's telling this story.
And he's talking about how this one day,
he just doesn't know what they're going to
do.
And here comes two cars driving out to
his place.
And one's kind of an older,
beat up old Cadillac.
Guy gets out of the Cadillac,
walks up to him, hands him the keys.
says, I don't need this car anymore.
I heard you need a car.
Take the car.
And Joel's like, bro,
I don't take things for nothing.
Guy says, look, I don't need the car.
It's not worth very much.
I don't need money and I don't need
the car.
I need to buy what you're producing.
And if you can't produce it,
I can't buy it.
So this is more important to me
than the few hundred bucks I get for
this piece of crap car.
For you,
this car is how you keep doing your
business.
I won't take no for an answer.
He just turned around, walked away,
got another car and left.
He said they're holding the keys, right?
There's kind of no way to turn that
down.
And he took that, you know,
and he might not have been standing on
that stage of that day to tell that
story if that story didn't happen.
Now, ironically,
and I tell this story in the book,
too,
I ended up in a similar short-term
situation.
When I first came down here to Texas,
I threw a timing belt on six-thirty-five.
Now, you know Dallas-Fort Worth.
Six-thirty-five at rush hour?
Not the place you want that to happen.
I'm in lane two, slightly uphill grade.
No timing belt.
Car don't go.
You're a mechanic.
Fix it.
Not without a timing belt and a set
of tools.
That's not happening.
It's not going.
I start pushing this car uphill.
I got people flying by me blowing the
horn.
Wow.
I'm thinking,
what do y'all want me to do?
Break into a sprint?
I'm pushing a car by myself uphill.
Some redneck in a big-ass truck with big
push bars pulls up behind me.
Get in.
I'll push you.
Hell yeah,
I'm going to get in and he's going
to push me.
He pushes me.
He gets out.
This is about ninety three.
He's got a cell phone,
one of the bricks.
So it's probably going to cost him three
bucks for me to make a two minute
phone call at the time.
He could make a call.
So I call my buddy,
tell him where I'm at.
He said, I give him this guy leaves.
Why do you stop?
If I'd sit sat on the back of
the truck, a trunk of the car,
he wouldn't stop.
The fact that I was in motion trying
is why he stopped.
And I can tell you that in every
point in my life that someone came along
and said, here, let me help you.
I was actively doing so.
And I'd never had it happen when I
was sitting around having a pity party for
myself.
And I'm not going to say that never
happened.
In fact, this microphone right here,
Billy, I need to get rid of it.
I won't throw it away even though it's
not working right anymore.
This microphone came to me in two thousand
ten when I started recording from a studio
because the first microphone I bought
sucked.
And the guy that was an audio engineer
sent me this microphone and he said,
I want your show to be better.
Now, if I'm not doing the show,
that doesn't happen.
And I'm going to tell you that there's
so many people out there that have so
much potential.
And I hear this all the time about,
you know, no one cares, no one helps,
no one offers, whatever.
You will find help in abundance in tiny
pieces along the way when you get in
motion.
And getting in motion,
I think we've so formulated the mind of
the youth to motion is go to school,
do what the teacher says, go to work,
do what the boss says.
That's not what I'm talking about.
There's a place for that, too.
But what I'm saying about getting ahead in
life is, well, I'll put it this way.
What is the answer you'll think you get
from the average person?
And I'm not going to pick on you
here.
It could be fifty that they have this
wild thing they want in their life,
that thing they want to do,
this big dream.
And they claim there's things in the way
of it.
And you say,
tell me three things you've done this week
to further that goal.
Most of them are going to tell you
what, if they're honest?
Nothing.
So this thing's so all important in your
life.
And if the government wasn't there or the
man wasn't in your way or you had
more money or whatever it was,
you'd be doing this thing.
But you've done the sum total of square
root of F all this week.
So how important is it to you really?
And it might be very important to you,
but how can anybody tell?
But when you start making progress,
Two things are going to happen.
One, people are going to help you.
And then there's another law in the book.
People are going to tell you to go
to hell.
When you actually start making progress,
you're going to get pushback.
And when you get pushback,
most people then kind of get really upset
about that.
Don't.
Who's ever made a difference in the world
that didn't get pushback?
Who ever made a difference in the world,
Billy, that didn't get haters?
I leave this laundry list of people in
the book in that chapter.
And it's like people like Steve Jobs,
Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Edison,
Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Henry Ford,
right?
And at the end of that list,
I'm like,
I guarantee you there's at least one name
on that list you hate.
And that proves my point.
You might not even know why you hate
him.
Gandhi's got haters.
Man's been dead since the fifties.
Right.
How much of an effect on your life
can a man that's been dead since nineteen
fifty two, I think, have not much,
but people still hate the guy.
There's in that chapter, I tell a story,
this lady,
I don't even know what her name is
or her handle.
I was on TikTok one day.
And I always like,
what are people doing that's successful?
I find this lady,
she's kind of like never really see her
face.
She's kind of see her hair.
You can tell she's probably like a forty
something soccer ball.
And she has this channel and all she
does is tumble rocks.
like courts and felt spar and tiger's eye
and stuff like that.
She puts it in a little, you know,
a little spinny thing and spins it and
ask people,
but three quarters of a million followers.
Wow.
Now,
how can you hate a nice middle-aged soccer
mom lady whose main people that follow her
are like homeschool moms and grandparents
doing stuff with their kids?
Lady has haters, bro.
She has haters.
And that's because she's making a
difference.
And this is when you talk about,
you don't understand why we get pushback
in some levels.
When you begin to make a difference and
a person sees that,
that is change and change is always
resisted.
And in some ways it's worse than like,
I'm sure you've been in on team,
you're working in the office and they hire
a new boss from outside.
Guy comes in, changes everything.
Everybody resists it.
Nobody,
even if what he does is what you
would do,
you don't like it because you kind of
found your groove and
And you learn to work that system and
now it's all being disrupted.
But that's exactly what that person is
supposed to do.
But in this instance where you got this
lady,
she's having this amazing success doing
something so simple.
The person who's bitter is going,
they don't think about it this way,
but they're really saying internally is,
well, why don't I have that?
Well,
the Chinese people that run TikTok must
have made her a success, right?
Maybe she's just really a really bubbly,
nice person who came up with a unique
niche and just kept doing something until
it worked.
And it's very hard for people to accept
that.
And so I think those two go really
well together, those two laws.
Jack,
I want to ask you one more thing
because you just opened up a whole other
can of worms in my head.
What do you say to those people out
there?
My family put the funk in dysfunctional.
So I'm asking this from that perspective.
What do you say to those people out
there on the heels of what you just
said there that
Where your biggest detractors are often
the people that are supposed to love you
most.
I don't know if you've ever been through
that, but I certainly have.
It's like, man, I'm out here, you know,
I'm the son of convicted felons.
And here I am knocking it out of
the park when, you know,
the highest expectation for me was
probably washing dishes and sing, sing.
So, um,
The fact that I'm doing something other,
it's funny the amount of hate that you'll
get.
But other people have written to me,
but what advice would you give to those
people?
Because honestly,
just because a family doesn't make them
good for you,
which means I keep my distance.
I don't go to family functions.
I don't do any of that stuff.
If you're not going,
we're not walking in the same direction.
I will limit my time with you.
But what do you say to those people
that may have, let's say,
a husband who's a detractor,
a wife that's a detractor, kids or uncles,
aunts, whatever.
What do you say to those people?
So the law in the book is actually
going to sound like it doesn't really
apply to this, but it does.
And I'm going to have to split this
into two because there's two different
ways this happens.
But the law is don't fight fair fight
to win.
And that sounds like the dirty and cheat.
And that whole chapter is on conflict
resolution.
It's probably the longest one in the book.
It probably takes thirty five minutes to
read just that chapter.
And I do go through things like, well,
what if somebody attacks you in a parking
lot?
They might get hurt really bad.
I'll just leave it at that.
But when that person is a parent,
the overbearing parent that's telling you,
hey, your job's okay for right now,
but you need more stability in your life.
And are you seeing anybody?
The classic thing.
But it's not what you were talking about.
I want to kind of break it up
because most people are dealing more with
the detrimental side
People are close to, you know, spouse,
parents, siblings, friends.
They mean well, but they're not helping.
Right.
If it's a parent, especially though,
if you say something like you always talk
to me like that or I'm grown up
now or whatever.
You've immediately disobeyed Sun Tzu and
the art of war saying, no, the time,
the place of battle, right?
Because now you've chosen your childhood
to argue with your parents over.
Good effing luck.
You're not winning that.
You have no chance.
And you've also said,
treat me like a child.
You invoked the time you were a child.
Therefore,
you've asked them to treat you like a
child.
Therefore, they're going to.
When you're in that sort of situation,
you need to conduct yourself like an
adult.
An adult doesn't say,
treat me like an adult.
Adults demand to be treated like adults by
acting like adults.
So when you respond to that parent and
say, look,
I understand what you're saying.
I know where you're coming from,
and I know it's a place of love.
And maybe you can't see it,
but I'm happy with what I'm doing right
now.
I have a plan,
and I want you to be proud of
me.
That's a hard thing to push back on
your kid with.
If one of my kids said that,
I'm like, oh, all right.
And so when I say don't fight fair,
I mean don't agree to the rules that
the other side never even agreed to.
Don't come up with this false sense of
obligation to engage in conflict that way.
Now, what you're talking about,
and this is when you were first asking
this, some of you don't know,
but apparently you do because we do have
this similarity.
my father's in a mental institution right
now.
My mother is still a drug addict and
she's in her seventies, right?
I mean,
my two sisters are complete disasters and
the rest of my family that were decent
people are all dead.
And I think there are times,
and I hate saying this because I don't
want to wish what I have or what
you have on anyone.
But the solution is I'm just not going
to do that.
I'm not.
And when people say, well,
they're still your mom or the senior dad,
Bro, I know you feel that way,
but I want you to think about the
worst people you can think of in the
world that you don't know personally,
but you know of,
like famous criminals or whatever.
And those people are all somebody's
brother, son, sister, mother, father.
And if that happens to be your familiar
relationship,
you have to stay at double arm's length.
And then you have to like,
I still try to put temperance in that.
If you can have a relationship that's not
going to drag you down,
you should do it.
But if you can't,
then you're better off without the
relationship.
And I know that sounds really hard and
really harsh.
But you get one life to live in
this continuum.
We can debate what happens after we die.
Some people believe in a simplistic
version.
Some people believe in more of a religious
version.
Some believe in reincarnation.
Some believe it's gone.
I don't care what it is.
For this path, for this pass,
you get one.
And you have to guard that and protect
that because the last law in the second
book is make the most of your dash.
And you can't make the most of your
dash trying to drag somebody along and
breathe for them and make them live the
best of their own dash.
And the big thing with that one, Billy,
is it doesn't say a really good use
of, right?
It's the most.
You need to make the most of what
the blessing you have been given as in
front of you.
That is unwritten,
and that is up to you to write
that.
And if you have people in your life
that are literally pulling you off that
ledge,
then you have to distance yourself from
them.
You can be decent to them.
You can be nice to them.
You can show up at Thanksgiving.
And if you don't eat cornbread stuffing
and mom made cornbread,
shut up and eat it.
It's one day a year, right?
You can go along and get along for
that.
But where you spend your time and how
you spend your time is so important.
And in the first book,
I talked about how somebody might have to
move across the country to change their
world.
And other people might just have to move
across the city.
But if you have people in your life
that are literally making you less than
you can be,
You need to separate from them on
somewhat.
It doesn't mean you never talk to them
again.
It doesn't mean you write them hate mail.
It doesn't mean you call the police on
them or whatever else you can come up
with or sue them or, you know,
MF them to their friends.
It just means you need space.
And it might be hard,
but I can tell you the best thing
I ever did for my life was leave
where I grew up.
Touche.
Folks, as I promised, I mean,
he's not the best in the business for
nothing.
And you got to check out the Survival
Podcast.
You got to get his books.
Speaking of which, Jack,
where does everybody go to get this latest
book?
And also, folks,
you need to get the first one.
I think you hit it out of the
park with the first one.
That one I did read.
This other one I will get around to.
Where can they get them?
So you can find everything you want to
about the books themselves and some of the
other stuff I do on this side of
the world at jackslaws.com.
Pretty easy to remember, jackslaws.com.
On the first book, just real quick,
the first book is now a second edition.
So this June,
I dropped a second edition of this book,
and it was because the second one made
me embarrassed of the first one.
It was such a better book that I
went back and not only did I fix
a lot of the technical problems that it
had, I completely changed it.
It's actually got twenty thousand more
words in it than it has.
And I added things like there are
framework formulas for every chapter that
actually walk you through the law.
There's also a chapter to still that's
like the top twenty percent of information
that came out of that chapter.
And then there's quotes and there's what I
call mental code rewrites.
So I want people to start thinking,
start thinking about your brain like
hardware.
And start thinking about everything you
tell yourself, everything you take in,
everything you read,
everything you associate with other people
of that's your software.
Right?
That's the code that works with the
hardware.
Cause your brain dude,
your brain can store so much information.
The most advanced stuff we have in a
data center right now to store the same
amount of information in your brain is
eight hundred pounds of equipment.
Eight hundred pounds to do what your three
pound brain does.
And that is only memory.
That's not processing capability.
That's nothing like that.
Your brain is like a Ferrari supercar that
you didn't get an operations manual for.
So I retrofitted these books to kind of
be like that operator's manual that you
were never given.
Because when you think back when Billy Jr.
was like, first got his driver's license,
right?
Would you have handed him the keys to
a Ferrari F-Forty?
Not at all.
No, because it would be dangerous.
Everybody's brain is more powerful than
that car.
And we're walking around and what we're
doing without this guidance,
and it doesn't have to be for me,
but somewhere you have to get this
guidance.
Your brain can be your best asset.
It can be your biggest enemy.
Every time you tell yourself you're not
good enough, you're writing code.
You're writing code into that hardware of
your brain.
You're writing processing.
And people are unaware of what they're
telling themselves.
So get a copy of both books.
And if you got the first one,
go ahead, invest in the second edition.
Stay tuned for the courses.
We'll probably have the course for the
first book out in about two weeks.
And then we'll have the other one out
by August.
Now,
where can they get a hold of the
courses?
Do they go to your website,
your regular website?
Because you have other courses as well.
And by the way, folks,
just a little hat tip.
I've talked about it before when Jack was
on talking about it before,
his one on composting and stuff.
It was basically everything I spent,
I think, between me, Michelle,
and –
William, and then going on further,
I think we spent somewhere in the
neighborhood of a fifteen thousand dollars
to give the information that he gives in
his course over there.
So you might want to look at a
bargain when you see it.
You got a number of other courses over
there, too,
for people that are interested.
So those are at home food systems,
the ones that are like
centric to permaculture and agriculture
and stuff like that.
Jack's Laws is where they'll find these
courses, jackslaws.com.
And we have our AI course for
entrepreneurs there.
And I think Tom and I just agreed
it's the first week of September.
We're going to drop another round of that
course.
We do that course in, it's a
And so we drop it on for sale
on a Monday.
It sells out that day and then we
start it on the following Monday and then
it runs five days a week.
And you can find you can pre-register for
that at JacksLaws.com.
And if you want to take that course,
the ones coming out for the books,
you can just sign up and take it.
The ones you're talking about,
you can sign up and take because of
the way we run that AI course,
Tom and I have to oversee that on
a daily basis.
We limit it to one hundred people around.
And that one's like three hundred bucks.
But the one you're talking about is like
sixty bucks.
Yeah.
And I do think that you'll learn as
much in that as you might spend in
thousands of dollars on other courses
because you
I don't know,
like just the way I do all this
stuff.
Can you charge more?
Yeah.
Can you make more money?
Yeah.
But what I want to do is help
as many people as I can.
So I try to make everything I do
relatively affordable.
And these courses from these books are
probably going to be forty, fifty bucks,
something like that.
And they're going to go into deeply into
the neuroscience behind this.
Um, and it is, they're long,
they're going to be six, sixteen laws,
sixteen weeks,
but they will transform who you are in
a very, very positive way.
Or I'm also have workbooks coming out and
those are going to be ten bucks.
You get the workbook and do it on
your own without the course.
It's up to you.
All of you people out there.
We got tons of homeschoolers that are in
this.
Look,
I can't think of a couple of better
books to put into your curriculum out
there.
It's going to pay in dividends down the
road.
I say fifteen and up, though, guys.
There's a few four-letter words in these,
just to be honest, right?
You know.
It's all good, man.
Yeah.
Well, Jack, I love it.
Okay, yeah, so we got a little bit.
There's nothing profane,
but there are some adult words.
Well, sometimes, you know,
that's necessary to make a point.
Certainly have no problem with that.
All right, y'all,
I want to thank my guests,
the great Jack Spierko from coming over
here and checking, you know,
getting us all squared away.
Look, y'all, get these books.
You're going to be glad you did.
Till next time, stay alert, stay alive.
Listen to the earth, they've got us.
The last seeds of the change.
Watch the world spin.
From the smallest sprout to the harmony
begin.
In the cycle of life,
where the magic's alive.
Turn it to the beat.
Feel the fire and thrive.
So much wisdom in the song.