The RETHiNK Podcast

Take a lean mouse and give it the gut bacteria of an obese mouse, and it doesn’t just get fat. It starts behaving like an obese mouse. It eats more. It steals food from its littermates. It stops getting on the exercise wheel. Every attribute transfers, not just the metabolic ones.
Do the same with a depressed mouse and a healthy one, and the healthy one becomes depressed. Run it in the other direction with humans — a non-depressed person’s microbiome into someone with depression — and the depression lifts.
Dr. Shawn Talbott has spent his career on what that means for the rest of us. He’s a nutritional biochemist, the author of Mental Fitness, and the man who was voted the World’s Fittest CEO. He came second one year and won it the next, which George gives him a hard time about.
His central argument is one most people have backwards. Everyone talks about the mind-body connection. Shawn gently corrects them: it’s body-mind, because the overwhelming majority of the signals determining how your brain performs are travelling upward from the body, not originating in your head. Ninety per cent of your serotonin is made in your gut. Around seventy per cent of your dopamine. Half your GABA. Roughly eighty per cent of your melatonin. Your brain problems, as he puts it, are usually gut-brain problems.
Shawn’s education and certification programs: https://doctalbott.comHis products, including Zenith and the stress chocolates: https://3waveswellness.com
Which leads to the part that will make some listeners uncomfortable. Monkey mind — the lily-padding between projects, ending the day exhausted with nothing shipped — is a problem most high performers solve with a stimulant. Shawn calls that fixing a brain problem with a sledgehammer. You buy a bit more focus and pay for it with sleep, heart palpitations, irritability, and the thing high performers can least afford to lose: the creativity and dot-connecting that nobody else in the room can do. He argues it’s a bad trade, and he explains what modulating blood sugar, circulation and blood vessel compliance does instead.
The conversation runs wider than supplements.
He walks through the three brains — head, gut, heart — and what each one sends. The gut sends biochemistry: neurotransmitters, cytokines, short chain fatty acids. The heart sends electrical signals, and when heart rate variability improves, that electrical change resonates with the brain. The axis itself is the communication network connecting them, which includes the vagus nerve you can activate right now by taking one deep breath.
There’s the 2018-2019 research on autistic children given nothing but a prebiotic fiber — a GOS in one study, a galactomannan in another — who showed better behaviour, fewer outbursts, less irritability, more eye contact, within six to twelve weeks. The only intervention was fiber.
George asks whether we’re being poisoned on purpose, and Shawn’s answer is more nuanced and more damning than a yes. He explains how food industry people he personally knows justify it to themselves, and why that justification collapses the moment anyone buys the family-size pack. There’s the yogurt that carries as much sugar as a Coke, the protein being bolted onto ultra-processed cereal bars because protein is the current buzzword, and the probiotics stamped on packaging wrapped around thirty grams of sugar.
And he’s refreshingly unimpressed with the biohacking industrial complex. He has a workbench of cast-offs at his retreat centre — devices with great billing that simply didn’t work. He’ll tell you what does: red light, hot-cold cycling, a few vagus nerve devices he names, a 67-degree bedroom and a room dark enough to be a cave. He has no morning routine to sell you and is openly sceptical of influencers who imply you need one. He gets up at six, feeds the dog, doesn’t eat until noon, exercises most days, and has what he calls a big ass salad for dinner. It sounds boring, he says, and so far it’s working.
The most useful few minutes are the ones on where to actually start. His answer isn’t his own supplement — he says so on the record — it’s fiber, starting slowly, and if you hate salads, starting with fruit instead. Then there’s the 30 plant challenge: thirty different plant foods inside seven days, which turns the produce aisle into an experiment. He also explains why the first three to five days of eating well can feel genuinely awful, and why that’s the part most people quit on.
It closes on manifesting, and Shawn’s take will annoy both camps. Thinking good thoughts at the universe and waiting for delivery is, in his words, total BS, and the research says so. But the act of manifesting does something real: it forces you to decide what actually matters, which lets you throw out the noise, which lets you focus consistently on the thing. The consistency is what moves you, not the wishing.
Also in here: cold plunging doesn’t do what you think it does, SIBO and why fasting keeps your microbiome where it belongs, why 16:8 gets you most of the benefit with the least pain, why there’s no such thing as one perfect microbiome but diversity beats everything, and what Shawn thinks is almost certainly going on at the elite end of endurance sport that no doping agency can detect.
Listen & subscribe:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOTApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich
More Rethink material: https://skool.com/rethinkGet the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooksDownload the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com

Yanik Silver had everything the scoreboard asks for. Money coming in, an Aston Martin in the driveway, one of the best reputations in internet marketing, a wonderful family. From the outside, a man who had it figured out.
Then he sat down with his journal and asked himself whether he’d be happy doing the same thing ten years from now.
The honest answer was no. What he did next cost him the car, a seminar business he’d built over a decade, and roughly four hundred thousand dollars before his wife sat him down and asked what on earth was going on.
Yanik is one of the genuine originals. His family came over from Russia when he was three. He was telemarketing for his father’s medical equipment business at fourteen, and at sixteen the only way to get a car was cold-calling fifty-year-old doctors — a skinny teenager with no business being on the phone, learning to make strangers say yes. One of those doctors handed him a Jay Abraham tape, and the lights came on. He helped turn his father’s regional operation into a national one by writing ads his dad was certain nobody would read, which then returned a thousand per cent.
Years later he went to bed with a single question: how do I create a fully automatic website that makes me money while I sleep and is genuinely valuable to people? He woke at three in the morning with Instant Sales Letters. Within a couple of months he was tracking six figures, with no technical ability whatsoever — a point he’s still happy to make.
He founded the Underground, which ran for ten years and brought unknown operators who were quietly killing it online onto a stage most of them were terrified to stand on. George co-founded the Underground mastermind with him, so this conversation carries two decades of history in it.
Then came the part nobody puts on a sales page.
Yanik shut it all down — the Underground, the connected mastermind, several other things — because he wanted everything pointing at Maverick, the idea he’d built around making more, having more fun and giving more back. The first trip was Baja dune buggy racing with remarkable entrepreneurs and a charity component attached. He mispriced it and lost forty thousand dollars, and shrugged it off as an investment. The losses kept going. He sold the Aston Martin to keep things moving, and he’s candid about what that did to him, because for a lot of men the car and the identity are not separable things.
What makes this episode worth your time is what he found on the other side of that.
His argument is that depression, frustration and annoyance are not problems to push away. They’re information — the signal that you’re off the path. He sees the same arc constantly in successful entrepreneurs he works with: they reach what they thought was the thing, discover it isn’t, and only then begin the harder work of finding out who they actually are. Most first businesses, he reckons, are built running away from something rather than toward it. His framework for the repair is head, heart, higher purpose and happy inner child, in alignment, and he’s honest that it took him years of scrambling to assemble the pieces.
There’s a lot of practical craft in here too. He’s taught journaling for years and he gives away the method: put a real question at the top of a page, answer it, then answer it again, and again — the first responses are pedestrian, and the good ones arrive four or five deep. Then switch to your non-dominant hand and see what else surfaces. He keeps a running note of good questions on his phone, because the question determines the answer. Several of his favourites are in the episode, including what would I do even if I knew it would fail, and the one he uses for partnerships: who else has even more to gain than I do from this succeeding?
He also explains where his contrarian streak came from. The Underground existed because he asked what the opposite of everyone else would look like. George’s summit business came from the same shape of question: what is everyone scared to do for other people, and what’s the one thing everyone wants that nobody will do for them?
And then there’s the Cosmic Journal, which started as a hundred-day art challenge he turned into a hundred and eight days, one hand-drawn illustrated page each night. Around day fifty he started opening it at random and reading it like an oracle. He carried the little black Moleskine around showing friends until one of them offered to pay to publish it. It’s now out through Hay House.
The second half of the conversation goes somewhere less expected — cycles of consciousness, the great year, what he calls the cosmic alarm clock, and the question of what you’d do with twelve months left to complete your mission. Yanik’s answer to the legacy question is the quietest thing he says: plant one seed a day, light one more sun, and call that a good day.
Find Yanik’s daily illustration work at https://1000sunsparks.comThe Cosmic Journal is on Amazon and through Hay HouseMore on his work at https://maverick1000.com
Listen & subscribe:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOTApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich
More Rethink material: https://skool.com/rethinkGet the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooksDownload the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com

Scott Picken was seventeen when his father went bankrupt.
The man had done everything the system asks of you. School, university, chartered accountant, financial director of a listed company. He followed the instructions exactly, and it ended the way it ended. His son has spent the thirty years since working from the assumption that the instructions were wrong.
Years later, Scott found a block of forty-eight apartments in Wimbledon, trading at a sixty per cent discount, cash flow positive from day one. A genuine no-brainer, except for the ten million pounds. He could not get anyone to work together. Everyone he knew was still thinking one apartment at a time. That frustration became Wealth Migrate, which launched in 2013, did its first American commercial deal the following year — sixteen million dollars, eighty-five investors across five continents — and has since facilitated $1.3 billion in deals across England, Europe, America, Australia and South Africa.
Scott runs the Investments pillar inside Rethink Academy, and this is the long conversation Paul has been wanting to have with him on tape.
Scott’s material and the six pillars framework: https://skool.com/rethink
The thesis is one most entrepreneurs will resist. Scott argues that the traits which built your business — decisiveness, speed, backing your own judgement, acting while others deliberate — are close to the exact opposite of what works in investing. You don’t hesitate to hire an accountant because you know you’re not one. Investing deserves the same honesty, and most business owners never extend it that far. Paul backs him up with a pattern he says he’s watched play out across a high double-digit number of entrepreneurs he knows personally: made millions, lost millions, made them again, lost them again. The thing that let them make it is the thing that takes it away.
His own version of that lesson cost him in escalating instalments. Thirty thousand lost in the stock market in 2009. Three hundred thousand in property. Then three million. Same mistake each time, multiplied by ten, until the pattern was impossible to ignore.
There’s a lot in here you can act on immediately.
Scott lays out the benchmark numbers plainly: six to eight per cent annual cash-on-cash income, thirteen to fourteen per cent total return including capital growth, and the rule of 72 for working out how long your money takes to double. He explains what a family office actually is and why it used to require $250 million to access, how multi-family offices dropped that to ten or fifty million about thirty years ago, and what the platforms have done to it since — his own minimums went from $100,000 to $10,000 to $1,000 and now sit at ten dollars. He walks through the PAID framework — partners, access, information, diversification — and the six pillars their family office uses for portfolio construction, which he offers to share.
He’s also candid about what hasn’t worked. He thought structured notes were bulletproof; a tech note with PayPal in it came back at thirty-five cents on the dollar. He launched his own cryptocurrency in 2017, raised serious money, and watched regulators kill security tokens while banks cut off wallet access — then discovered that when he did offer crypto payment into real estate, ninety-nine per cent of investors still chose traditional. He believed he could close the wealth gap by democratising access, and found that giving people entry for free changed almost nothing, which is why he ended up building an education arm instead.
The stretch that will stay with you is Paul’s.
In 2015 he put well over a million dollars into Fun Financial Freedom, an animated programme teaching children and teenagers about business and money. He got into a private school in Monaco. He could not get into an ordinary one. And when the programme started working — when twelve- and fourteen-year-olds began out-earning their parents, five and ten thousand a month — the reaction got worse, not better. Parents asked him how they were supposed to control a child with that kind of money. Sharon Lechter, who co-wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, told him she’d been hitting the same wall for forty years. His own summary: people arrived at his talks worried their kids wouldn’t have jobs, and left worried their kids would make too much money. Faced with that, they froze and did nothing. He broke the first rule in business, he says. He built something people need instead of something people want.
Elsewhere: why credit card debt at seventeen to twenty-four per cent makes the invest-or-repay question trivial, and why the mortgage version is genuinely arguable. Why Scott walked past the mountain bikers making four to ten per cent a month in crypto and five per cent a week day trading, and what happened to both groups. What $10,000 left alone in the S&P since 1980 is worth today, and what it’s worth if you miss the best fifty days. What people in Venezuela actually chose when offered Bitcoin, gold or dollars. Why Tony Robbins has spent this year pushing private equity, and the illiquidity nobody mentions alongside it. And the unrealised gains tax proposals surfacing in several countries, which would quietly break compounding for anyone holding an appreciating asset.
Scott closes on the part he says has changed in thirty years. You could once blame your government, your schooling, where you were born. The information is in your hands now. The blame has nowhere left to go.
Listen & subscribe:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOTApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich
More Rethink material: https://skool.com/rethinkGet the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooksDownload the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com

Mark Anastasi was seven thousand pounds in debt and living in an abandoned building on Earls Court Road, two doors from the tube station, windows smashed out and boarded over with plywood, about twenty homeless people sharing the place. He'd just been fired from a telesales job for marching in and demanding they double his salary. He was eight years into a depression. Not long before, he'd taken too many sleeping pills trying to get a few hours' rest between twelve-hour security shifts and his university classes, and had very nearly not woken up.
What he did inside that squat is the reason this episode exists.
He got hold of a journal and finally ran the exercises he'd learned at a seminar and never actually done. He set a goal of two thousand pounds a month, double anything he'd ever earned. He identified forty-four limiting beliefs he'd absorbed about money, most of them some version of rich people are evil, that's why we have none. He wrote out a hundred reasons he had to hit that number — fifty for the pleasure it would bring, fifty for the pain it would spare him. Then he brainstormed a hundred ways how.
Idea number ninety-three was a man he'd once sat beside at a seminar who sold an ebook about bronchitis.
This one is personal for Paul. Mark was his first ever mentor — they met in Dublin in 2009, where Mark was one of about ten speakers, and that conversation is the reason Paul left his corporate job and built everything that followed. Twenty-six episodes in, this is the man at the start of the thread.
Mark's new software, Prosperity Power: https://wealthmagnetics.comFor the 1111 programme discussed in this episode, email support@rethinkacademy.com
Mark walks the whole arc. The payphone call to a stranger in Yorkshire asking to be mentored, and the four steps that stranger gave him in about ninety seconds. Twenty-eight days surviving on seven or eight credit cards while the banks kept quietly raising his limits by three hundred pounds at a time. Sixteen-hour days in an internet cafe with a floppy disc, writing his first ebook on alkalising the body. The $67 notification he assumed was spam. Five sales a day inside a week — $330 a day coming in while he was still sleeping in the squat, on about eight dollars a day of ad spend. Thirty more ebooks that summer, $2.4 million in sales, and Inspired Seminars out of the proceeds.
Then Paul tells his half, and it's the funniest stretch of the episode. Twitter had just launched a 300-follow daily cap, so he opened seven accounts instead of one and showed up at Mark's London event with seven thousand followers he'd accumulated in seven days. The account that performed best used a photo of his sister's dog, Mary. The second best was a stock cheerleader. The account with a photo of Paul himself came dead last — which, as he notes now, was his first real marketing lesson.
What follows is a masterclass in tough-love mentoring. The deadpan "all right, Mother Teresa" that punctured Paul's objection to promoting products he hadn't personally tested. The moment Mark pointed at the software on Paul's work laptop and asked why he wasn't promoting the thing he was already using and already getting results from. The argument over handing out bank details that ends with the line Paul still repeats: the only thing anyone can do with your account number is put money into it. He woke up on his aunt's floor the next morning to $44.20 from two buyers in New Zealand. By month four he'd matched his corporate salary. Then it doubled. Then it doubled again.
Mark's own story takes a stranger turn. In September 2005 he started flashing a subliminal affirmation on his screen — I earn £40,000 a month — while actually earning about fifteen. Four and a half months later he had a breakthrough month of £43,000, except the final £3,000 sale was refunded, which left him at exactly forty thousand. So he changed the number to a hundred thousand, which he says he neither believed nor particularly wanted. That month he did £150,000 in two days, and the year came in at £1.16 million.
The back half is where the conversation changes temperature. Mark has spent twenty-two years teaching entrepreneurship and he opens up the question that's bothered him the whole time: why does roughly eight percent of a seminar room ever act on what they paid for, no matter how much training, coaching or hand-holding you give them? His answer, after running a medicinal cannabis company that went under and starting again from zero in 2020, is that information was never the bottleneck. He gets into the 1111 programme he now represents, what a Canadian clinic owner told him about patients whose consciousness kept rebuilding the illness her treatments had cleared, and why he thinks CEOs who ran on ego and intellect are about to find that insufficient.
He's also refreshingly unsentimental where you'd expect him to go soft. When George puts the hardest version of the question to him — what do you say to the single mother working three jobs who hasn't got the luxury of thinking about purpose — Mark doesn't reach for visualisation. He reaches for the exercises he did in the squat, and he's blunt about his suspicion that Bitcoin, lockdown and now AI have bred a generation waiting for money to arrive without value going out first. He starts each day with one question: how may I serve?
Paul lands the closing idea, and it's the one that will sting. If your balance sheet is negative, you've taken more than you've given. Not as an insult — as a diagnostic.
One more thing: Paul and George are launching a second, shorter episode each week — a debrief on the interview plus what's actually going on in their lives and businesses. First one drops alongside this.
Listen & subscribe:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOTApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich
Get the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooksDownload the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com

Jim Gale spent two years reading everything he could find about what's going wrong with the world's food, water and energy, and it nearly broke him. He'd just had his first two daughters. He was living in Costa Rica with money in the bank and nothing to do, and the more he learned the worse it got.
Then he read one sentence from Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture: though the problems of our world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
He sobbed. That was eighteen years ago, and he's spent every year since working on the simple half of that sentence.
Jim's résumé reads strangely on paper. Four-time All-American wrestler. Lived in forty-seven countries. At twenty-nine he wrote down a goal to retire inside three years with three million dollars; four years later the mortgage company he'd started was doing $1.3 billion in revenue and he bought a boat and lived on the ocean until boredom got him. He now lives completely off-grid on a private 430-acre lake outside Orlando, surrounded by three hundred species of food-producing plants, and describes his primary job as steward of the land.
Jim's nonprofit, entirely open source — no patents, no NDAs: https://originsreclaimed.orgWant a food forest designed for your own property: https://foodforestabundance.com
The best idea in this episode is a reversal. The billionaires building bunkers and hiring private security have it exactly backwards, Jim argues, because a fortress full of food is a target and nothing else. The better play is to become the seed of abundance for everyone around you — produce thousands of plant starts and a surplus you give away, until your neighbors are feeding their neighbors and you're the goose laying the golden eggs rather than the man with something worth taking. Security through generosity. It costs less and it scales.
What follows is the most practical hour on growing food you'll hear this year.
You need far less land than you think. A family in California produces six thousand pounds of food a year on a tenth of an acre. On a quarter acre you can run four chickens, a small aquaponics setup, roof water catchment, solar, and a full food forest without crowding any of it.
Jim walks through the seven-layer structure that makes that possible: roots and tubers underground, the herbaceous and ground-cover layer, shrubs, understory and overstory fruit and nut trees, with vines climbing through all of it. In a single thirty-by-thirty patch you're not harvesting one layer of food, you're harvesting seven. And every fence you own, he points out, is already a trellis you haven't used yet — passion fruit, dragon fruit, grapes grow in nearly every zone.
He makes a case for perennials over annuals that reframes the whole exercise. Annuals are a yearly transaction. The avocado tree he planted two years ago has already produced thirty-six avocados, will produce a hundred and fifty, has tripled in nursery value by not dying, and will still be feeding his great-grandchildren. There's a good stretch on repairing poisoned ground with living microbial inoculants that consume heavy metals and synthetics and leave behind bioavailable nutrients, and a direct answer to the cold-climate objection, drawn from his mother's childhood on a Minnesota farmhouse with an outhouse, no running water, and nine hundred chickens.
For anyone who doesn't own land, he's full of routes in. Print a one-page vision of what you'd do with a hundred feet by ten and take it to older farmers, most of whom are already uneasy about how their land is behaving. Offer suburban homeowners a garden in their yard on a fifty-fifty split of the harvest. Look up what Ron Finley did with the strip between the sidewalk and the road in Los Angeles. Jim's view is that you'll collect ten noes and then a yes, and the act of doing it is itself the most healing part.
The piece he's most excited about is a school. Origins Reclaimed Academy has elementary students propagating plants daily and running the business side of it — social media, local supply chain, the lot. They knocked on four retail doors in St. Cloud and all four agreed to stock what the students grow, on a fifty-fifty revenue split, which means the students and their families end up with their food needs met plus income. A senior high opens in January with twelve places, and this episode is the first public announcement of it.
One note on the rest. Jim has built his homestead outside the system in ways most people won't and probably shouldn't — without building permits, without paying property tax, under a philosophy he describes as lawful rather than legal — and he tells the story of the county official who turned up at his gate. He says plainly on the record that he makes no guarantees and doesn't suggest anyone copy him. Take that stretch as one man's account of choices he's made and lives with, not as a plan. The growing is the part you can start tomorrow.
The bunker builders are preparing for the day the food runs out. Jim is preparing for the day his neighbors don't have to ask.
Nothing in this episode is legal, tax or financial advice. Permit, property tax and HOA rules vary by state and county — check yours before acting on anything discussed here.
Listen & subscribe:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOTApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich
Get the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooksDownload the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com

Rich Schefren was in a funk. His business was losing money, he wasn't doing anything about it, and not doing anything about it was making the funk worse. Walking into his office that morning he spotted a report he'd written for clients fifteen years earlier — The Hidden Obstacles of Success, the most well-received thing he'd ever sent them — and thought: the man who wrote that was in better shape than I am right now.
He didn't want to read his own writing. Nobody does. So he loaded the file into ChatGPT and told it to play the other side of the report, the side asking the uncomfortable questions. He answered all of them. The next day he fixed the thing he'd been avoiding and the business started making money again.
Then he forgot it ever happened.
Seven months later he came across a prompt that asks ChatGPT to tell you what it has quietly worked out about you. He ran it on a whim and was floored by what came back — so much so that it took him a minute to work out where the material had come from. It was that one conversation. The machine had been holding the most honest picture of him in existence the whole time.
That's the thread of this episode, and Rich is the right person to pull on it. He's the guru to the gurus: the Internet Business Manifesto, the invention of the automated webinar, and early coaching work with Russell Brunson, Ryan Deiss and Mike Filsaime, among most of the other names you'd recognize. (If you heard Episode 15 with Mike, this is the man who coached him.) He's now spent a year and a half building what came out of that accident.
Find Rich's work at https://strategicprofits.com
He walks through the system itself — four phases, twenty-five multiple-choice questions a day, and a score for how well the AI can predict your own answers. The detail that sells it: on a normal personality test you get stuck between two options because one is true at home and the other is true at work, and you're forced to pick. Telling the AI about the conflict is better data, not worse. By the end it can give you your Enneagram, your Myers-Briggs and your Kolbe without you ever sitting the tests, and it gets them right.
Underneath that is the line worth the whole episode. AI knows everything about everything. The one thing it doesn't know is you — which is why every answer it gives you is generic. Ask it what Steve Jobs would tell you to do and it knows every presentation Jobs gave and every book written about him, and nothing whatsoever about the person asking. Close that second gap and the advice gets more specific than Jobs could have managed in person, because Jobs would never have known you that well either.
The most human stretch comes when Rich explains what triggered his own midlife crisis at forty-two. He'd built a business that didn't need him and a relationship that didn't need him, so he felt needed nowhere — and yet when he filled in one of those wheel-of-life exercises, he gave himself decent scores. He scored the business a nine. Why? Because it made more money than he'd expected and he only had to show up on Wednesdays. He scored the marriage an 8.5. Why? Because they never fought and she let him come and go as he pleased. Then he asked himself whether that was really a nine, or whether he'd been quietly shrinking every dream he had until the scores still looked good.
For the practically minded, there's a genuinely original discovery in here about prompting. Watching AI reason through his instructions, Rich noticed it swapping in different synonyms, and started wondering whether twenty words that mean roughly the same thing carry the same force to a machine reading precisely. They don't. Changing "analyze and optimize this deck" to "forensically dissect and strategically re-engineer this deck" produced a measurably better answer, with nothing else altered. He built a prompt that does nothing but upgrade the verbs, tested it against the best market-intelligence prompt a large company could buy, and it won.
He's also clear about who benefits. AI will take someone at zero and make them a four. But it's most dangerous in the hands of an expert — his daughter, a graphic artist on Madison Avenue, will out-prompt him forever, because she knows fifty ways to describe lighting and he knows two. His read is that this makes the world more winner-take-all, not less.
Which leads to the five minutes that should worry anyone selling anything. Thirty years ago commerce ran on proximity. Then it ran on relevance. Now it runs on recommendation, and when someone asks an AI who the best coach in your field is, they get three names instead of five thousand search results. Rich is honest that he has no solution to this. He calls it pain and agitate with no solve, and says it concerns him more than anything else. He also makes a case for universal basic income that he admits sits awkwardly with his own politics.
George pushes him on the obvious objection: if you load your entire psychological profile into a machine, what happens when the machine uses it on you? Rich's answer is uncomfortably honest, and it comes from having once owned a company that could identify an anonymous website visitor — name, address, credit score — for five cents.
And the closing advice costs nothing. Rich spent an afternoon in Nicaragua teaching his own mentor to use AI. Three times the man asked him a question, and three times Rich said: great question, ask it that. By the third time, he'd stopped asking Rich.
It started because he couldn't stand the sound of his own advice. Fifteen years later a machine read it back to him, and he listened.
Listen & subscribe:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOTApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich
Get the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooksDownload the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com