Why You Never Give Up
HOST
All right, so I'm going to refer back to a tweet that I just put out which was something to the effect of if you want to be a folk hero and you want to be someone who's remembered, it's. It's painstakingly clear that there has to be some inevitable showdown with some evil, malevolent forces in life. If things are going too even keel and your path to success is too linear and it's too crispy and it's too polished. Men inevitably come to a point where they resent the success because men are built to be warriors and men are built to go to places in their mind to stretch the end limits of their imagination, of their capability, of their talent that other men have not done previously.
And all men innately have this. This property and this quality. And if you deny it, you pay double and double in blood and tears later. So I'm going to tell you a story.
So my whole stick, right, like my whole thesis, everything that I have built content wise constellates around the central premise that if you're going to be big and strong and powerful, then eventually and healthy and immaculately healthy, then eventually you have to hurl yourself into the gauntlet and start spending the out of that. Because inevitably, on the path to success, if you're trying to do extraordinary things, let's say you're trying to make eight figures, you're trying to make heaps of money, you're on a mission, you have a team, you got people counting on you. You inevitably, you're going to have to sacrifice everything that you love that's near and dear to you to make those things come true. It's just a fact.
You're going to have to be in a very imbalanced state for a long stretch of time in order to smash through the barriers that are requisite in order to meet those, those achievements. So come June this year, I'm gearing up for one of the biggest sports betting runs of my entire career. I got an army. Of risk takers behind me that I built from hand.
Motherfuckers who are going in headlong, bayonets out, we're going into the fucking trenches. And we are trying to basically exploit these books all across the world for as much money as possible using an arbitrage system. So some of it's gambling, but most of it is extremely systematized, extremely intelligent, backed by proprietary data. And we're doing arbitrage, right?
So we're looking for discrepancies in market prices and we're we're entering plays and exiting plays under our own free will. So I'm gearing up and then the miraculous June crash comes and half of my investors, half of my team gets wiped the out during that Luna fiasco. So one of my right hand men, a guy who's been rocking with me for about six years on my team, he gets absolutely pulverized, he gets scorched for I want to say like 7 million. He's suicidal, I'm mentoring him, he's calling me every day looking for consolation.
I'm coaching him, I'm trying to get his mind right, trying to get him back in the game. A couple other guys lost a couple million. These guys are flipping the out, right? And I'm even keel because we're.
The run has already started and I just lost like 70 of my horses, right? But the show must go on. So I'm trying to rally. These dudes are calling me.
They're blistering, they're so distraught, they're besides themselves, they can't sleep. Now I've been through numerous financial crises in my life. Numerous, more than, more than a common man should ever subject themselves, themselves to. So I have a lot of experience with dealing with tumultuous victories and I also have a lot of experience with, with dealing with tumultuous defeats.
And so I'm just basically there for morale. These dudes are calling me because they're really, at the end of the day, they're looking for me just to kind of gauge where I'm at mentally, to see if we can proceed. And I'm. A show must go on till, till oblivion comes.
I. There's zero chance that no matter what obstacle comes my way, that I'm ever gonna back down. Especially when I have conviction and faith. And I know from past experience that no matter what I've ever been dealt in my life, no matter how shitty the cards, I've always figured a way out.
So I'm getting these guys strapped in and I'm like, dude, it's way too late. We're already geared in, we're going on the run. So right around this time I'm. I'm getting phone calls, hundreds of calls a day.
Two o' clock in the morning, three o' clock in the morning. I got partners in Canada, I got partners in the uk, France, are banging my phone lines looking for comfort. And I'm. I'm literally a babysitter.
I'm babying because I. Because these are my people and I care about them. Dearly and I'm trying to get them back in the game. So we're firing extremely egregious sums of money at the books.
And there's a very strange omen in life that revolves around health. And right around this time, the June crash hits. I'm drinking like a gallon of raw milk a day and, and I'm, I'm doing, I'm training hard and I'm, I'm, I'm back, I'm back in Olympic lifting. I'm snatching every day, I'm doing power cleans, I'm doing all the power lifts.
And every morning I wake up, I'm breaking out in these atrocious, abominable hives all over my body, the most itchy welts, red like grapefruit sized welts just all over my skin. And I've never had skin problems my entire life till I turned 35. So I turned 35 in July. It's right around my birthday and I'm just waking up.
And I don't know if you guys have ever dealt with any kind of skin rashes, but itching is a thousand times worse than pain. Like I would rather be steel toe boot kicked in the face than have to deal with 24 hours of just constant malignant, pernicious itching, which is what was happening. And I had a suspicion that I was having an allergic reaction to the milk, to the dairy, because I changed my purveyor and I started going with this different company. There was like a small batch boutique company of raw milk.
And I'm just breaking out in these welts. So I'm super up because I'm a guy who, I don't deal with health shit until it's like the last resort. Like I ain't going to a doctor, I ain't looking for consultations. I'll just mentally power through any kind of health shit until it gets real fucking bad, until it's so unbearable I have no choice.
And so I'm just powering through mentally. And I didn't take stock into how this was just affecting my decision making my, my overall life, my overall just constitution was just being worn the down by, by these hives that I was breaking out in literally every day. And it was a 24 hour. They would disappear for an hour and then come back in these very intense flare ups.
And I could feel the flare ups. And so I'm just ignoring it because I got a mission and I got guys to take care of and I got a rally, a crew, and we're Firing hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. Now get this. When you are on the heroic crucible and you are doing things and you are defying the norm, and you're bucking trends and you're doing things that nobody could.
Could believe, and your story is so unfathomable and so unbelievable that a normal person would look at this and they'd say, there's no chance this is true. Even if they could fucking see what you were doing, they would not believe that what you're about to pull off is possible. Right? And I'm on the saddle, I'm gearing up for this, and I go through a 60 day straight period two months in a row.
I am firing every belt of ammo in my capacity. I'm ripping up the. The carpet, I'm ripping into the walls, and basically strip mining the copper at this point to keep my guys together. We're all firing in unison and we are getting absolutely annihilated.
I'm talking like the type of annihilation where you would want to tap out. After about three days of this, it was dreadful. We were firing from morning till night and we couldn't hit a thing. I'm going to bed every single night, back at zero.
And then in the morning, I gotta get a little bit of sleep, wake up and redeploy a bunch of fresh capital and fire at it again. And I'm sticking to my script. I'm sticking to my script because in my past experience, if I stick to my script and I stick to my system, I have prevailed every year for over a decade. So I'm like, all right, well, I get.
I guess it's one of those. It's one of these statistically improbable times that we're just gonna have to barrel through. And after about the second week of just ruthless effort, I mean, I am so concentrated, so focused. I'm on the phone with guys all across the world, conference calls.
Everyone's got their laptops open. We're. We're putting on a clinic super intellectual system we're deploying here, and we are trying to exploit the. Out of the market.
And the books were just making adjustments and they were whooping our asses. And my guys were ready to tap out. They were like, dude, I don't know how much longer we can go. And I was like, what the are you talking about?
We. There's, there's. We crossed the Rubicon. We already deployed so much capital.
We ain't retreating now. Now we had to double down and go even Harder. And we. And we'll make adjustments on the fly.
We'll do what we got to do, but we, we definitely ain't backing down because I'm not walking away from a fight. So after a lot of coaxing and goading and talking back and forth, they're like, all right, we're gonna strap in for another week. Another week goes by. Every night, every morning I wake up, I gotta deal with the haunted memories of the night before, of just getting and assaulted, just absolutely annihilated by the books, right?
And it's just happening every day. And I got this girl with me and I got the hives, and she's tending to my wounds every day. She's. Sometimes she's.
I'm sitting on the couch working and she's scratching me, like literally scratching my whole body with her nails for like three or four hours. She's just like doing everything in her power to try to help me be relaxed, calm down. She's making me bone broth, cooking me steaks, and just 24 hour nursing and care while I am just getting absolutely fucking hammered. And like I said, two months goes by.
Two straight months. I do not end in the green. A single day. A single day for two months.
You can't make that up. Stephen King, Tom Clancy, there's no authority on the face of the planet that could write something as unbelievable as the run that I had just gone on. It does. It made zero sense.
None of the plays we were doing were degenerate. They were extremely systematized. Just the books got smarter than us on this particular run. And if you know anything about betting or markets, it's a game of cat and mouse.
You got to adjust to the books. And then once you start kicking their ass, they make adjustments and they start whooping your ass. It's a constant back and forth barn burner, throwing haymakers, trading punches, right? So I'm just absorbing ridiculous sums of damage.
And so are my guys. My guys. It's almost like I'm in the desert and there's horses tipped over in the sand with flies buzzing around their corpse. And I'm slapping the horse, telling them to get the up because we got 40 miles to go.
You gotta. You, you gotta drink a little bit of fucking water. You got to make a push. And the horses are just tipped over.
They ain't even responding because everyone's just been brutalized by the fucking market. The other thing too was in June, is that the market was so volatile, all my bets were deployed in Ethereum. And so When I would hedge a bet and guarantee myself profit, sometimes the market would tank 20% while I was hedged. So not only would I lose the hedge, I would lose the other side too.
So I'd get double fucked. And we're just, like, trying to ameliorate the conditions, trying to stick through it every day. It's maximum push to the brink. I can't even go to the gym because when I go to the gym, it's sweltering heat in the gym.
And something about the heat would just make these welts so irascible that the welts would, like, spring up, like. Like, almost, I want to say, like, 2 inches off of my skin. So I'm in the gym trying to lift big weights while I feel absolutely terrible. I'm in absolute misery, Maximum pain, maximum dread.
But I'm trying to lift because when you're in these moments, you can't ever back down from the obligations and responsibilities that made you successful in the first place. So I had every excuse in the book not to show up at the gym, right? Like, my hair was shaggy, I was unshaven, I was unkempt. I was wearing the same fucking hoodie, like, a week in a row.
I was showering, like, once every three days. I was a mess because all I gave a was about the mission. We're trying to make eight figures profit shared between, like, five guys. I'm going all in, and there's nothing that's gonna tear me down and get me off of this mission.
So I'm going in there and I'm trying to lift. And the welts, the itchiness is so despicable that I would have to, like, cut my session short. And like I said, it started to really grind me down to the bone mentally. I'm just being worn down because I'm trying to ignore this issue in the back of my head that I know keeps coming up, and I just keep pretending it doesn't exist.
I'm like, I'm just gonna power through because I'm certain once I'm successful at the end of this run, I guarantee you this clears up. Because it's all connected. The body, mind, the omens, the things that happen surrounding bad health. Like, it's all connected.
You know what I mean? Like, when you're in great salubrity and your cup is filled with perfect health, typically that's a really good sign. It's auspicious as to the other things that are happening in your life. But when you have even a minor health issue and you ignore it and you deny its existence.
It metastasizes into other, like, abstract domains of your life, like business. And so it gets to a point where I'm just getting sucker punched every day so bad. And I keep coming back for more because I just know that if I can rally my troops and we can get through this, that we are going to have the greatest score that I've ever had in my career. I just know it.
I don't know how I know it. It's inexplicable. It's ineffable. But there was something really deep, like, almost written in my DNA.
I'm like, I just know that we're taking a beating now, but the miracles on the other side, and this is where 99.9 of people are just going to wave the white flag and tap out, because no human being would want to withstand being fraught with just the most demonic statistical improbabilities on a daily basis. And it got to the point where the girl was so close to me every day. She was, she was. She was witnessing what was going on.
She was telling me straight up, she's like, you're cursed. She's like, you're cursed. She's like, I'm gonna smudge your house. I was like, whatever the that means.
I was like, do what you got to do. So she literally gets some, like, incense and, and starts, like, doing these rituals in my house. It was hilarious because I don't believe in any of that. But I was like, at this point, I'm so beaten down, I'm beaten to a bloody pulp.
I'm willing to try anything. So she's smudging the house down. She's telling me I'm cursed. And when she told me I was cursed, I had an epiphany when she said that.
And I was like, this is absolutely not the case. I was like, I'm not cursed. I'm anointed. I'm anointed.
I'm the hero in my own story right now. I'm going for glory. I'm in the thick of the battle. I'm in the heart of the matter.
I'm not cursed. Every great man on any kind of mission, if you're trying to succeed at anything that's in improbable or extraordinary, you are going to clash with the archons, with the emanations of the pleroma, with. You're gonna. You're gonna clash with these darker forces.
Of course it's built into the game. And I just thought it was an interesting way that she framed it, because I realized that every hero has to not only battle evil, but you have to vanquish it. And it did feel like I was cursed because I was like, there's just nobody on earth right now that is. That is probably going through what I'm going through.
There's no. There's no shot someone's running this bad. You could blindfold a capuchin, a capuchin monkey, and he could throw a dart at a board, and that would make better picks than I am. And I'm using data, and I'm actually doing it intelligently.
Some off the street, some bum absolutely would have been on a better run than I was during this time. So it was just harrowing to just wake up and go through it every day. Especially with the. With the burgeoning health issue that just kept getting worse.
The hives were insane, and I just kept drinking milk. So finally I'm just fed up with the health issue. And I'm like, I'm not going to a doctor because I don't trust what they have to say. So I'm just going to start eliminating dairy, See what happens.
So I eliminate dairy for like a week. Bang, bang, the hives are gone. So I discovered I had a dairy allergy, which is very bizarre because I'm 35, I've been drinking milk for 10 years. I've never had an allergic reaction to dairy.
And then it dawned on me that something that was interesting that I never believed was they say that your body changes every seven years, right? Like, your body goes through, like a recon. Re. Reconstitution.
Well, sure enough, the math checks out. 7 times 5, right? So I'm 35, body goes through a severe change. All of a sudden, I'm allergic to milk. So I cut that out.
Hives are starting to go away. I wake up one morning near the end of summer, and I'm still in the grips of just this absolute madness. And my guys are cleaving on for dear life, looking for some hope, looking for a prayer. And every day I'm just whipping the horses because I'm like, guys, we can't.
You don't understand. It gets to a certain point where you've invested so much blood, sweat and tears. You have so much blood equity. Like, my grizzle is now invested into this.
This is no longer about money. This is my soul, my humanity. I have dedicated every waking fiber to making sure that we all come out of this winners. And I will not stop until we come out of this.
And so they're just saddling up every day. Just off of the strength of my will, I'm putting on my back, and my legs are broken, and I'm still walking, and everyone wants to quit. And I'm like, guys, like, quitting is no longer an option. We've crossed the Rubicon.
The point of no return. Like, when you're deeply invested in a mission and success, like, there does come a point where you've put so much into it that you're either gonna fail, win, or die trying. Like, one of the. One of the.
One of the. Really? One of the two. You're gonna die trying or you're gonna make it.
And my past experience tells me I ain't ever died yet, so I'm gonna win. So we're chugging along, we're plugging. These are pulling capital out of the sky, liquidating everything, chucking into this. All of a sudden, the nose on the plane starts to tip upward, and we're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.
Things are starting to click now. The books kind of look like they're on the ropes. Things are turning around. The underdog's coming back.
And I'm. And I'm waking up in the morning. I'm like, look. You see what's going on?
We're starting to. Here's. Here it is. Here's the light you've been looking for.
So we gear down, and there was one particular morning where I woke up, and I live on a lake, and I walked outside on my patio, and the water is five feet from me, and I'm staring at the water, and the sky is, like this very strange sherbert color, and everything is placid. Birds are chirping. Things are so still. I'm looking at, like, butterflies and monarch butterflies are, like, floating and zinging through my plants, and.
And I'm just looking around, and I'm like, I. There was a shift, and I couldn't explain what the shift was. It was. It was almost supernatural and almost metaphysical.
I could just tell by the weather, the weather change, that the. The curse, whatever, the. I had just been going through, whatever evil had just been lifted, the veil was lifted, and I was being shown a better path. I was being shown the entry into the light.
It was something in the air. It smelled crispy. I felt like I got my health back. I was like, my health bar was at 100.
My. My thoughts were crystal clear, and I'm just staring at the water, and I'm like, God, the Weather is so interesting because sometimes there's a certain day, there's a certain scent and it's so subtle and you don't understand why it's such a beautiful day. You don't know why it's so thick. Glorious to be alive that day.
It's just everything feels in sync and it feels perfect. And this was one of those mornings and I knew the tides had turned. And sure enough, the tides turned and we slowly started to pull up out of it. And we're pulling up out of it, we're pulling up out of it.
Now we're stacking. Now we're stacking. Now we're stacking. Now the books are scrambling because the books know when they're dealing with a sharp player and they're starting to make wild adjustments and, and we're laughing, we're laughing, we're toasting our glasses, we're linking up, we're eating steaks, we're starting.
The smiles are coming back again because we know we got them this time. We know we got these motherfuckers pinned until the next time when they get us. But the point is, is that when I was dealing with, honest to God, the most Thonian underworld dark forces you could possibly in your wildest imagination conjure up, never for one second did I have the audacity or arrogance or hubris to take it personal and fall into self pity and say woe is me. Even though I had every excuse to say woe is me.
But it never broke through, it never seeped through my frontal lobe because I would just shoot those thoughts out of the sky. You know how I always say that the value in thinking is knowing what thoughts not to think is shooting down creeping thoughts of doubt and fear before they even enter the mainframe, before they even enter the control room. You're shooting that out of the sky like a anti defense missile system. That's the mindset of a killer.
That's the mindset of a winner. You don't even let the negativity penetrate. Nothing was gonna bring me down. And I was almost brought to my knees.
I pushed my health and jeopardized myself to a place that I never even thought possible. But how the do you know what you're capable of if you never test it? If you never go to these places in your mind, if you never test what your body and mind is actually capable of, what your spirit is capable of, when you subject it to the ungodly wrath of pressure, you have no clue what you can really do and overcome. And I doubled down and I tripled down and I doubled down and it didn't even make sense.
I had no indications. No indications in my life were telling me I had no green flags. It was red flags everywhere, telling me, dude, you have to stop. And it just shows you that successful men, extraordinary men, impress upon the world.
The world doesn't dictate, Jack. You are the dictator. You are in charge of moving molecules and changing physics and altering the corporate forces of humanity, other people's lives. You're the orchestrator, you're the maestro.
That's just what it is. But you have to be willing to be in the hot seat. And I was just taking it, taking it on the chin every day like Muhammad Ali just getting blasted. And you know what?
I found ways to enjoy the process. During the time, as miserable and dreadful as it was for those two straight months of just getting slaughtered, I found little moments of strength when I'd be sitting outside on my patio late at night, looking at the water, looking at the reflection of the moon on the water and smoking a cigarette, just in peace, wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, just relaxing, just thinking that this is all going to be a blip on the radar screen. None of it's gonna matter. Two months from now, I'll be looking back at these times, laughing, with a great story to tell.
I found glimmers of inspiration in the thick of it. And that's what kept me going, is just those moments of pause, the pause that refreshes where you're just. You put everything into perspective and you're like, you know what? I've been through way worse than this.
Numbers can't kill you. It's money. Numbers can't kill you. And I'm after big sums of money, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That's my mission. I want to be rich as a. And so my point is also to circle back, is that you gotta lead from the front, because my. The guys that I'm working with, they saw me literally destroy every thing in my life to make this happen, to get us out of the hole, destroy myself, clobber myself, put sacrifice myself on the altar, because I don't ask other grown men to do something I'm not willing to do.
If I'm bringing you in, you bet your ass. I'm on the front taking the shots, too. And that's the only ethical way to do business, is if you're. If.
If your people. If you're going down, your people are going down with you. But if you're going up, they're going up with you too. That's just how it works.
That's brotherhood, that's loyalty. That's the virtues everyone wants to talk about on Twitter. But most people don't want to take the punishment. They want to hide and they want to cower and they don't want to actually deal with it up front.
And honest to God, I had meteor showers raining down on me every minute of every single day. My phone was going off. I had to jump out of bed at 1am when I was. When I was sleep deprived and I literally couldn't even see straight.
I was waking up in the morning, I was wobbling. I couldn't walk in a straight line. I would have failed one of those fucking DUI tests where they tell you to walk a straight line. And I was substance free.
I couldn't even walk in a straight line. I was so up mentally, I was shrouded in darkness. And somehow I just kept wobbling, limping. With a little bit of swagger and a little bit of gusto and a little bit of moxie.
That shit will get you through every fucking time, man. Every fucking time. You call upon your past experience, you know you've been through worse. Of course I'm going to get through this one.
I've never lost, I've never failed. It's never fucking happened. So this time was not going to be any fucking different.