Episode 100 SoloCast: Stories, Lessons, and Insights

Hello and welcome back to the Alchemist Library podcast. Today is a very special episode. It is episode 100 and it's a solo cast. It's just gonna be a reflection on the podcast, the lessons we've learned in this time period, some of the emotions that have come up through doing the show, things I've realized. So we're gonna see where this takes us and hopefully it turns out to be a good episode. And it's weird that we've done 100 episodes already. It seems like it was just yesterday where I filmed this first episode. And here we are, 100 episodes later and I think like 16 months or something like that Since then, and I'm grateful, I'm thankful. It's been a lot of fun and it's ironic. I'm filming this episode right now in my garage and it was where I was planning to film my first episode, but like 10 minutes before the recording started I realized the wifi wasn't strong enough, so I was like panicking and running back inside to record that first episode. So a bit full circle here, 99 episodes later. I don't think I've told you guys the story of how the podcast came to be and the weird coincidences that led me to this moment with you guys here right now. I was studying abroad in Madrid, spain. I was a junior in college and throughout college I really leaned on podcasts heavily. I made this commitment to myself, as during COVID so probably my freshman spring I made this commitment to myself to try to be better and to improve as a person and not to just be mindless with my life. And that path and doing the actions that that path required made me feel a bit isolated at times with the people around me and my peers at school and stuff. And I had incredible friends and people that I love super dearly, but we had different values and the things that they wanted to do and the things that they valued were very different from the things that I valued and things that I wanted to do. So that divide sparked me to feel a bit isolated and in that time of the three years between the spring of freshman year and the spring of my junior year, I leaned on podcasts heavily and that was they really became my best friends at that time period and it sounds like I was so lonely and isolated and I wasn't that way but the podcast and the guys like Joe Rogan and Chris Williamson and Mark Bell and Aubrey Marcus and Tim Ferriss these guys were the guys that I leaned on heavily in that time and we all know that quote. You're the sum of the five people you spend the most time with, and I looked around at that time period and saw that the five people in real life that I was spending the most time with my friends and acquaintances in college weren't the five people I wanted to be the sum of. So I outsourced that and I outsourced that to podcasts and made those five people that were, in my ear, the most podcasters. That was something that I'm eternally grateful for, and the wisdom and the knowledge of gain from that has been immensely impactful in my life. Just the things that you learn and the things you pick up on subconsciously. It's just, it accumulates over time. And there's a great quote from Tim Ferriss where he says the good shit sticks, and I think there's so much truth in that and we don't realize that it lodges into our subconscious in many ways. And to go back to the story here, when I'm in Madrid, it's the first time in my life where I'm a bit of my own person there's a quote from Jordan Peterson where he says you have to leave what you know to find out what you know, and I think the beauty and the wisdom in that quote is when you strip yourself of familiarity, you start to realize and come to the conclusions of what the things are that you actually like to do, or what the things that you feel called to do or that you end up doing when you're not in the same mundane routine, when you're in a foreign place and you don't know anybody and you're just doing things based on what you want to do, not what mom and dad want you to do or your friends want you to do. I mention that because I never really put any thought into having my own podcast and I had loved them so much and it was such a thing in my life that was so fundamental to who I was. At that time in my life I was listening to podcasts. It was like multiple episodes per day, had them on seemingly 24-7, and I was listening to a podcast and the guest of the show was Andy Triana and he was so insightful and so interesting and he was a guy that I was like I want to talk with this guy, I want to have a conversation with this guy, I want to pick his brain, and that desire was so strong. I was like shit. Maybe you should start a podcast. It sounds so cringy and corny. You should start a podcast because it seems like everyone has one nowadays. But that thought came to me of you should have a podcast and immediately I was hit with limiting beliefs. It was why would anyone want to listen to you? Why would any guest that you would want to have on the show want to come on your show? So when that came to me and I immediately dismissed it because of those limiting beliefs and I took those limiting beliefs in my head as fact. But then I finished this episode with Andy as the guest and I look at Andy's Instagram and when I went to follow him, we had all of these mutual followers and when I clicked on the people who were we were both following, it was all people from my gym and I went to like this small functional fitness gym and it turned out he was also a member there and we had the same personal trainer. So I was like, huh, I could probably get him on a podcast if I had a podcast because of our mutual friends. But then again the limiting beliefs came in. That's stupid. Blah, blah, blah. Why would he want to come on your show? It would be a waste of his time. So again it was dismissed. But I had that concept and that voice in my head is getting a bit stronger telling me maybe you should think about this, maybe you should think about starting a podcast. So, like I said before, I was in Spain at this time and I was traveling to England the next day, to London, and I download this podcast on the plan with Dan Co as the host, and analyze and optimize as the guest, which is also crazy, because now I've had both those guys on the podcast and they're two of my favorite people to converse with. And I listened to this episode and I'm infatuated by it. I love the concepts that are being presented. I think it's fascinating. They're talking about some corruption in the food space, some issues with seed oils and why they're bad for you and why sugar may not be the ultimate enemy in hell, blah, blah, blah. And it was so contradictory and different from the normal discourse that I had heard in the health conversation that I was fascinated. And again I had this similar thought of damn, I want to pick these guys brains. So again the thought pops into my head I want to start a podcast. And then I dismiss it again and I land in London and I get back to my hotel room and I'm getting ready to explore, I decide to check out the Analyze and Optimize YouTube channel. I realize that you know Analyze and Optimize are two people. So I realized in that one of the guys from Analyze and Optimize was the older brother of one of my middle school good friends. So I had that thought again of holy shit, I should start a podcast and I wrote down what I would name a podcast because I was starting to get excited. I was letting my brain for the first time run with the concept of having a podcast. I wrote down path through alchemy, path of alchemy, alchemy, this, alchemy, that, and the reason why I did that was because I thought it was such a strange coincidence that I had these two encounters two days in a row, kind of winking at me saying, hey, you should start a podcast. So I write this down and I'm a little excited and it's a beautiful 70 and sunny day in London which is a rarity, as anyone who knows London knows and I go for a run and I'm not like a huge runner, but I decided to go for a long run and I go for like a five-miler, which is a very long run for me, and running by this place and I stop and I see this beautiful, beautiful restaurant with like very cool architecture and this awesome logo, just this beautiful logo, and I don't see the name of the restaurant. I only see this beautiful logo. So I walk up to it because I'm interested and fascinated by it and I see that the name of the restaurant is called the Alchemist. So I'm taking a back a bit and the story of the Alchemist is a book that I had read about a year before this whole experience and I thought it was enjoyable, but I thought it was just kind of okay. It wasn't the story that spoke to me very deeply at the time, but, for those that know, it's about a young kid, who is about my age at the time, who's wandering through Spain as a shepherd, and it's about him listening to the sounds of the universe that are pointing him in the direction of his personal legend or just the his purpose in life, and so at that moment I really resonated with the story and it was a bit profound to see that stuff happen and then be like shit. Do I need to start a podcast? Do I believe in science from the universe? Is this like a thing that's actually pointing me in the direction I'm supposed to go? So I'm taking back and I think the first thought, the first thing that when I when I noticed this and starting to piece this together in my brain, is first emotion that comes up is fear. Fear Because, you know, I always cared about what other people thought. I always put a level of importance on being cool or being popular, being the guy that people thought was cool, and so I thought the concept of, like, being the guy with the podcast was a bit cringy and a bit like it wasn't that cool guy image that I had worked so hard to create. So I was fearful and I was feeling almost embarrassed to take the leap of faith and start a podcast and I wanted to do it deeply but I didn't want to do it because I was afraid. So then I start to continue on with my run and I have headphones on and I play a song, and the song I play is called On the Way by Russ, and this song is one of the songs that I had been kind of obsessed with at the time and obviously I'd like somewhat knew the lyrics, but the lyrics like it went in one ear and out the other until this moment when I'm listening to the song and I'm hearing what Russ is saying and he says I have the lyrics here in front of me. He says talk to myself in the universe. Eavesdrop, fresh out of faith, got a restock Life, got dramatic, made the beat stop. How to go back and reread the alchemist? Go on around the world like I'm backpacking. I've been running towards what I'm becoming. I'm on the way. I'm on the way. Got to pay attention to the signs and the omens. I ain't about to miss my moment. Got to keep moving, stand in motion. Jk Rowling this was written. This isn't magic. And for a little context of why I said the JK Rowling part is because I happen to be reading Harry Potter at the time as well. Who is the author? Jk Rowling is the author of Harry Potter. There was a lot of stuff pointing in that song, almost speaking to me very, very directly and an incredibly weird way, saying you got to listen to the signs, you got to listen to the omens. And then it also said you got to go reread the alchemist. So I was so consumed with fear and I didn't want to do it but I felt so strongly that I had to because of all of these things that were going on. So I said I compromised with myself and I said reread the book the alchemist and then decide. I reread the book the alchemist and I also listened to a podcast on alchemy from the Know Thyself show and it was like this intro to what alchemy truly was. And this podcast was talking about spiritual alchemy and spiritual alchemy is this concept of. When people say alchemy, they think of turning lead into gold. But what the spiritual alchemist believed was in turning yourself from lead to gold, or having the ability to turn situations from lead to gold or, put in another way, turning bad situations into good situations. And that concept had resonated with me deeply. Because the reason why I got into all of this stuff and the reason why I was becoming the person I was becoming was because of a bad situation. I had an autoimmune skin condition that I was absolutely terrified of and was scared. It was going to control and ruin my life. And it was that pain and it was that bad situation of having this condition and just being on an island by myself, not even having not even my parents or my brother even know I was going through this. That was what created me into the person that was on the path towards trying to be great or trying to be better than the person I currently was. So I resonated with that spiritual alchemist concept. So I listened to that podcast and it was deeply impactful on me. And then I reread the book and it's a very short read and at that point I realized that there was no choice, there was no decision to be made. It was something I had to, and the addition of the alchemist that I had at the time. It was like the 20th anniversary copy and it had an updated intro from Paulo Coelho, who's the author of the book. He wrote that this is a true story and it's a story of my life, and so him saying this was essentially, this is essentially my story, told in Folk Tale, made me have even a deeper sense of this way I need to do, because, although the book is fiction, the concept is deeply profound. And so I reached out to a ton of people, a ton, a ton of guests, and at this time I thought it would be impossible to get guests, to get cool people on the show. I thought why would anyone want to listen to me? I need to be have hundreds of thousands of followers and a big listening audience to be able to attract anyone to the show. But then Brian Sanders God bless him. He had hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, the platform I reach out to him on, and he responded and I'm read what he said hey, ryan, I do like to support new podcasts, because that was me once I'm free around 10 or 10 30 am For interviews. So I mean I thought it would be impossible to get guests. But then here I was, having this guy who I had listened to in the past and In that first episode and I hit that, that moment of just pure presence, of listening to somebody talk and being having mistakes, being so high Because I had to respond and had something and I had to have something to say. It brought that flow stayed out of me. So I think the premise of me telling you guys all this stuff is because I think there's a few lessons to Repeat previous through that, and I think the first one is you're limiting beliefs are not reality and we hold them as truth until you take action despite them. And once you take action despite them, you start to realize that they're imaginary and that these things that you have in your head are, by no stretch of the imagination, fact. So that's one. And then two is finding something you're excited to work hard for, finding your flow, finding what that thing is for you. That is fun, to Be disciplined up, and we confuse discipline a lot as white knuckling things. We think about discipline as as misery in a way. And then, lastly, the science from the universe and the Direction things are pointing you in. I think about a lot of times being Delusional and the value in even if something may not be true is their value in still believing it anyway. So in the example of the science from the universe, but I think that this was just a weird Coincidence, that all this stuff happened, maybe, but because I was almost a bit delusional in the fact of believing in science from the universe and the universe pointing you in a certain way, it did point me in the same way and it pointed me towards a path that I now know, in hindsight, is the path I'm supposed to be on, because I say here, 99 episodes later, 100 episodes later, and I feel fulfilled, feel happy with this work that I'm doing and with where the podcast has taken me, the friendships it's created, the skills that it's cultivated within me. It runs deep and runs deep, and I'm just so grateful that I listened, even though the skeptic in me Thought it was Stupid to think that there was the science from the universe pointing in a certain direction, whatever it was like. Who cares? Who cares if it's really not? The belief in it is what's more important than the reality. So I wrote down a few lessons that I learned in the podcasting journey, and the first one extends back to what I was saying before about being embarrassed, the fact that I almost Didn't start the podcast because I was embarrassed of what other people would think. And it turns out, no one cares. No one cares. We're so programmed to be hyper concerned with the opinions of the people around us, but what you come to find out is most people are too wrapped up in their own shit to Really care that much about what you're doing. Just by being yourself and being authentic and doing what you actually want to do, it draws more people to you. Then it repels people from you and those that mind don't matter, and those that matter don't mind. The second one this extends to what I was talking about before and in terms of getting Brian Sanders on the episode. It's thinking big. I've had a few guests on the show that I probably shouldn't have had any business of having on the show, but the reason why I was able to get them is because I asked and it sounds so stupid and mundane, but I have friends and people who are also podcasters who Never ask those people because they feel like they are out of their league. But by simply thinking big, you end up playing big. And then some of these other takeaways I wanted to bring up was some conversational things, because when you do a hundred podcasts, you become a better conversationalist, you're able to listen better and you're able to keep conversations going. So the first one is using reminds me of thinking, and what this means is when you're following up to Someone finishing telling a story or giving an insight and you're just thinking to yourself what does this remind me of? Maybe a story that it reminds you of, or an insight that it reminds you of, and what this does is it, instead of it feeling like a real interview style combo. Using this way of thinking allows things to Move in weird directions, fun directions and for conversation to not feel so. Interviewee. This is something that Joe Rogan does really really well, and through studying him is what made me Realize the importance of doing this and made me start to do it more and more and then. So the second one would just be mirroring this is a pretty popular one which is just repeating back Some key words that the person said, to give them permission to talk longer. So for most people, they feel a bit uncomfortable Talking for five minutes plus without letting the other person get their fill. By just giving them a couple keywords back at them, you give them permission to elaborate further. So I really like to do this when what the person is saying is really interesting to me. So what I'll do is, if they're saying telling a story and they say, yeah, my 20s are really hard for me, blah, blah, blah, they go into a story about it. I Said, wow, that must have been really difficult for you in that time period, and Then just saying that, and then that just gives them permission to elaborate on that story and to keep going with what they were saying. That's just a very simple one. It's really easy to do. It helps build rapport, makes them feel really heard and again just gets away from that like interviewee style of a lack of flow in conversation, and really what I tried to do as a host is is create flow and make it not feel like it's this thing of Me interviewing them. I want it to feel like more of a conversation, and both those things do a really good job of Making that happen. And then so the third one would be, using hypothetical questions If you had a school, what would the curriculum be if you won the lottery? What would you spend your money on if? If they made you president, what would you do? Putting people in situations that they probably would actually never be in, but allowing them to answer it. One it's really fun, like everyone loves answering questions like this and to it it's. It gives you a really good insight into somebody's mind and until the way they think about things in the way that, the things that they value, and so that's just a really fun one that that people love to answer and makes for for fun conversation. So the fourth one this one simple is laughing easily, and you don't want to fake this, you don't want to be fake laughing, but Allowing yourself to laugh. This one has a very similar effect to mirroring. It gives people permission to keep going and make some feel like You're enjoying what they're saying, makes them feel good about themselves, and it puts people at ease and and gives them permission to continue going on that, what they're saying, and then five. This is one that I love to use. I use quite often when I run out of things to say in conversation, which is revival questions. So I like to have like two or three questions in the back of my pocket that for when the first and finishes talking and I don't have anything to say, I could return back to and Use those to revitalize the conversation. If you could have a conversation with your 21 year old self, what would that conversation look like? If you were to go back and have a conversation with yourself at that moment, whatever they were talking about, what would you say? Things like this just simple questions really just puts you at ease and allows you and gives you permission to be more present in conversation instead of having to feel like obligated to be thinking of what you're going to say next when they are talking. This just really allows you to be more present in conversation and to not feel the need of panicking when they're talking and you don't know what to say next. And then, lastly, this would be listening. Listening is an art. Listening is a skill. I think it's the most important one, because if you're able to keep with that skill, you're able to get to the essence of people, you're able to just break through, and none of these other things work if you don't listen. So listening is really the fundamental pillar that if you don't do that, all these other ones fall apart on. So all of that had written down. For this, I so appreciate anyone who's ever taken the time to listen to an Alchemist Library podcast. Getting feedback from you guys, getting DMs from you guys, always puts a smile on my face, always makes me feel like what I'm doing is actually worth it, because I get so much intrinsic value from doing the podcast. To see that I'm not alone in the value that I feel the podcast is creating means a ton to me. So if you enjoy the show, please reach out on Instagram, twitter, whatever it may be, and let me know. But I'm just grateful, guys, and I'm going to continue to try my best to make this a show that has great guests on and that is always filled with great conversations and that one that you can turn on any episode and give value and enjoy. It's weird that we're 100 episodes in and just so much love, so much gratitude, and catch you guys on Thursday with another episode. Peace.