Tiny Tweaks to Radically Transform Your Body, Career, & Vitality (Without Drugs)

Nick Urban [00:00:02]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bio harmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span, things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Is your routine actually fueling your life or slowly wearing you down without you even noticing? Perhaps you wake up tired even when life looks good on paper. In this episode, Alex Feinberg walks us through the hidden traps in most people’s pursuit of health and success. We talk about the triple sevens club, how strategic rest is actually behind a lot of the world’s greatest successes, and why most people confuse movement with momentum. If you’re trying to win long term, this conversation just might shift how you think about energy, effort, and freedom.

Nick Urban [00:01:37]:
Our guest this week is Alex Feinberg. He’s a former professional baseball player, hedge fund analyst, Google executive, and entrepreneur. He uniquely has extended the economic principles that he learned at at Vanderbilt University beyond money and finance and into health, fitness, and performance management. In this interview, we unpack some of Alex’s unique mental models that you can use to simply gain unfair advantages in different domains in life. If you wanna check out his work, you can go to Feinbergsystems.com, f e I n b e r g systems Com, and he’s at alex fineberg one on most platforms. The show notes for this episode and everything we discuss where you can click those links will be at outlier.com/thenumber200andeleven. Since I know you’re gonna love these mental models, show this interview some love. Go ahead and hit that thumbs up.

Nick Urban [00:02:38]:
Subscribe wherever you are, and leave the show a rating and review. That’s how I continue finding and bringing to you thought provoking guests like Alex. Let’s dive in. Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Alex Feinberg [00:02:50]:
Thank you very much, Nick. Happy to be here.

Nick Urban [00:02:51]:
Today, we’re gonna dive into your world, and that is a controversial opinion that you hold, and I actually do too. And that is that energy is the new currency, and in some ways, it should be prioritized over material wealth and money. Will you unpack that for me and let me know what it is that you mean?

Alex Feinberg [00:03:12]:
Well, think about this. If you’re a rich person, do you think that it’s easier to make energy with money or to make money with energy? Anybody who has made any meaningful amount of wealth in their life knows that energy is a prerequisite to doing anything great in your life. But there’s plenty of people with money who lack energy and they lack the, the thirst for life that they might have had when they were younger men or women, and had much lower material wealth. So, we live in a society that worships money like a god, like a false idol, in part because money is necessary to buy things that people wanna sell you. So it’s much easier for me to sell you an expensive car or an expensive house remodel or an expensive watch than it is for me to sell you vitality. Vitality is something that is earned. Vitality is something that can be purchased, but it requires work on your end, whereas if you’re buying a car, all you need to be able to do is write a check, and the car is yours. And so health and vitality are the new status symbols that cannot be purchased with money, and unlike other status symbols, they actually help you make substantially more money with them.

Alex Feinberg [00:04:20]:
So if you’re a smart person, if you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I see energy as the new money as, you know, you and others are are coming along to.

Nick Urban [00:04:29]:
Beautiful. We will unpack that in a minute. But for people unfamiliar with your work, how did you get started in this?

Alex Feinberg [00:04:35]:
So I was a professional baseball player by trade. I went to Vanderbilt University. I majored in economics, and my economics background, did a number to help me create the mental models that I use to navigate the world, namely, a lot of the ways that I simplify everything and maximize return on minimal time and emotional investment is through using behavioral economic frameworks that I was both taught and developed as a student at Vanderbilt University, but my primary focus and passion was becoming the best athlete I could possibly be. Simultaneously at Vanderbilt, I realized that those who have health vitality, high energy, speak well, look good, they are given the inside track in life as if they even needed it, and they don’t. But when when people around you perceive that you have it all going, and the way that they’re going to abstract that idea is by how you look and how you communicate and how you come off, they tend to allow you to do a lot more things than those who are overweight, slow, sluggish, depressed. And so if you want an easy life, you should start with high energy, speaking well, looking good. And so even through, you know, the end of my professional baseball career, I realized that if I wanted to enter the corporate world and succeed to the best of my ability, I needed to project health and vitality. And so despite the fact that I was no longer being paid to be a professional athlete, I considered myself a professional trainer in the sense that I needed to get up early and train in the morning, and so I had elements of a professional athlete’s routine.

Alex Feinberg [00:06:12]:
You know, it didn’t take as long, but it it did require daily input. It did require focusing on diet. It did require focusing on my physical performance, which so many people in the working world don’t pay attention to. And so I ended up working at a hedge fund for a little bit, ended up deciding that the tech sector was gonna do really well, elevator pitched my way into Google using the health and vitality that I encourage so many of my followers to develop, and I had more progress in my in person elevator pitch than anybody could have with a thousand online applications because people saw my resume. My resume is 50% how I look and how I communicate, and 50% what you can read on a piece of paper. And a lot of people forget that when they wanna send their CV to somebody, you know, the most, the most impactful resume that you have, and the most easily verifiable resume that you have is your physical body and how you communicate and present yourself. And so working at Google for six years, I realized so many people were disconnected with their body. They didn’t understand the health signals or lack of health signals that their body was communicating to the world.

Alex Feinberg [00:07:17]:
As you got closer to positions of management, you started noticing more people looked tired, more people either looked overweight or underweight, more people lacked the, the health in their hair and nails that you would expect to see a healthy professional athlete, I noticed these things where so many people who are slaving away, selling their body for money, making that sacrifice to climb the corporate ladder, didn’t even realize the level of corporal depreciation that they were going that they were exposing themselves to in order to get that extra 50 per year. And living in California didn’t even make sense, because your standard of living going from a 250 to $300,000 income is basically the same. And so I saw so many people making trades that didn’t make sense, and I approached it with the, aggregate of my experience across multiple sectors, and it just made sense that to me, if you approach life a different way, I realized that if you prioritize a certain amount of things in training and diet that most people don’t realize are effectively the shortcuts, you can enjoy your entire fitness routine and your entire diet. You don’t really need to track everything as meticulously as everybody seems to make you think. You end up having more energy, you end up, having a brain that processes information at a substantially higher rate, and doors end up opening for you, one of which for me was an online audience that was eager to learn the approach that I took to eating thousands of calories of pizza burgers, fried chicken, and tacos, staying ripped year round, having high energy, and being able to have enough energy to escape my corporate job and ultimately become a successful online entrepreneur.

Nick Urban [00:08:55]:
Beautiful. There are a lot of ways I can take this. I wanna dig into your own lifestyle routine, the Pareto principle of, 80% or the 20% of things that give you 80% or more of the results, the cheat codes, if you will.

Alex Feinberg [00:09:09]:
Sure. So a lot of people don’t realize that gym training is not about how much you sweat, not about how sore you got, not about how hard it was. People who don’t focus on fitness for eleven months out of the year and then decide in January they wanna turn it around, generally approach getting fit like they have a penance to pay, and rather than trying to do the right things, they wanna do the things that hurt the most. And if it doesn’t work, they think it’s because they’re not hurting enough. And, obviously, there’s sustainability issues with that, in addition to the fact that you’re trying to get good at the wrong thing. And so so many people fail because they prioritize getting the wrong things right. Prioritizing getting the right things right in fitness means you are training for intensity, and that doesn’t mean your first workout, because if you haven’t worked out for twelve months, and you go try to do a very intense workout, you have a high injury risk. But, you know, after a a multi month foundation process is built, you want to prioritize training for explosiveness, training for speed, and that could be on an assault bike.

Alex Feinberg [00:10:10]:
It doesn’t need to be running, and training for strength. And so if you train to be an athlete that forces you to have a higher VO two max, It forces you to get stronger, which will lead to more lean body mass. And what is underappreciated is it also regulates your hormones so that you are very plausibly less hungry training at an intense capacity than you were when you were not training in an intense capacity, your hunger signals are more likely to be accurate. And if you pair that with a protein dominant real food diet consumed when you were hungry until you were full, most men, particularly men with athletic backgrounds, will end up having better results than if they were following a very carefully structured macro tracking plan that robotically required them to wake up at 6AM to train, and do it until they feel burned out, and then keep pushing even when their body wasn’t responding to it. You know, if you listen to your body, your body can perform at a lot higher capacity than if you don’t listen to your body. And so listening to your body, eating protein dominant real food, and training for athletic performance are the cheat codes, are the North Star that most people would experience substantially better results if they simply focused on those.

Nick Urban [00:11:29]:
Do you have any other cheat codes for the other domains of health and wellness, say, rest and recovery or the other ones?

Alex Feinberg [00:11:36]:
Yeah. So I because of my background as an athlete, I look at moving forward, like, forward momentum very differently than people who have not played sports. So if you think about a pitcher, if you think about a hitter, if you think about throwing a punch, most people think about the forward movement. Right? You’re throwing the ball forward. You’re taking a swing forward. You’re throwing a punch forward. But if you actually think about how you’re going to perform these athletic movements to your greatest capacity, you have to go back before you go forward. You have to retract your your hand or arm before you punch.

Alex Feinberg [00:12:13]:
You have to load the weight on your back foot before you throw. You have to load the weight on your back foot before you swing. And it’s very common in our society to only focus on the proactive things that you do, rather than the rest and recuperation, the backwards things that you do. It it’s almost like an Eastern philosophy. In fact, it probably is an Eastern philosophy that says, you need balance. In order for the momentum to swing in the direction you want, you need to have the momentum swing in the direction that seems unreasonable or seems impractical, but that allows you to rest, that allows you to recover. Because greatness is not achieved simply by pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. You need to have a pull to balance the push.

Alex Feinberg [00:12:58]:
And so what people don’t realize, particularly as they’re younger, is that if they are continuing to run on five, six hours of sleep, four hours of sleep, right, you can do more the next day, but what you’re working on will likely be, not selected as appropriately. Your decision making process won’t be as good. And so a lot of times when people get them in trouble in life and in business, it’s because the decisions that they make aren’t good. And so no matter how effectively they tried to execute on it, if you’re trying to execute on a bad game plan, you’re probably not going to succeed. And the way you avoid bad game plans is you don’t let yourself get into downward spiraling scenarios, which are commonly catalyzed by skipping on recovery, skipping on rest, believing that you’re gonna accomplish more by doing rather than recuperating.

Nick Urban [00:13:52]:
Is that related to what you call the kingpin mental model?

Alex Feinberg [00:13:56]:
Well, the kingpin mental model is how you massively simplify your life. So most high performing people are used to going through to do lists and just getting a bunch of things done. And a lot of them commonly feel overwhelmed, because there’s an infinite amount of things to get done, and you will not get them done every single day. And so rather than focus on trying to get 30 things done that burn you out, right, at the end of those at the end of 20, because you’re never gonna get 30 done, it’s better to focus on the fewest, highest leverage things that you can do that will result in other things being done passively. So anybody who wants to build financial wealth understands the benefit of passive income. If you make money in your sleep, that’s a lot easier than making money while you work. What people don’t realize is your actions can also be passive too. So I mentioned, intense training like an athlete, and I mentioned that when you train intensely like an athlete, your appetite tends to auto regulate.

Alex Feinberg [00:14:55]:
So tell me which e what which is easier. You do a non intense workout, a hard workout, but it’s not intense, meaning you’re not lifting as heavy as you could, possibly because you’re not resting enough in between sets and resting enough in between workouts. And then you’re forcing yourself to follow a structured diet that has very specific macro proportions that you need to eat and not exceed on a daily basis. Is that easier than training for speed, training for power, training for strength? And then realizing that when you do those things, your appetite tends to auto regulate, so the amount of food that you eat actually will frequently align with what your body needs. By extension, you’re trying to get one thing right, but you end up getting the diet portion right as well. Right? So I would rather steer my clients or steer myself into the direction where we’re getting one thing right, but by extension, we’re getting two or three things right, rather than giving anybody a checklist of multiple things to get right because that tends to emotionally and cognitively overload people, and they’re more likely to drop the multiple balls they perceive to have in the air.

Nick Urban [00:15:57]:
So would you say that intense training, like an athlete, is the one number one kingpin or lead domino to focus on and then everything else downstream of that?

Alex Feinberg [00:16:07]:
Even before that, don’t eat when you’re not hungry. Eat protein dominant real food when you are hungry. Right? And people don’t realize if you eat too much, you have less energy. Right? People need to eat food to have energy, but if you eat too much food, you have less energy. So if you simply focus on protein dominant real food, when you’re hungry until you’re full, that’s for most people. Obviously, if you have blood sugar issues, you’re diabetic, you know, that advice isn’t probably gonna work for you. But for a majority of the population, if you focus on eating protein dominant real food only when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full, and you happen to be able to pair that with an intense training program, but even if you just focus on the diet portion first, you’re going to experience better energy. You’re probably gonna end up losing some unwanted pounds if you’re carrying them, and then you’re gonna feel more energized and more excited to add effort, add investment to the portfolio that you’re already creating.

Alex Feinberg [00:16:58]:
Because if you want people to work hard, their effort needs to be rewarded. You can’t tell people to do something, have it not yield results, and then expect them to increase their investment later. Right? Every action you take needs to yield benefits. Otherwise, I, as a coach, am gonna lose you. You, as an individual, are going to burn out. Right? So you need to focus on activities that matter. This is one reason why I think that losing, despite the the many lessons that it can teach you, the most common lesson that losing teaches people is that, you know, they learn learned helplessness is that it it would have been better if I didn’t even try. And so as a coach, as a consultant, as a guide, as a mentor, it’s my responsibility to create a program that incentivizes the people I’m instructing to continue to put the effort in.

Alex Feinberg [00:17:45]:
We need to remind ourselves that the effort that we give matters. And so this is one reason why I prefer that people diversify the dopamine that they source in their lives. If people are overly focused on the dopamine that they get from their work, and their work is unpredictable, you know, you can make 50 phone calls in one day and get no sales, as an example, if you’re in sales. You go to the gym, you feel like you got something done, and you your effort needs to remind you that your effort is worth it. You need to be constantly reminded that the juice is worth the squeeze. Otherwise, you’re gonna stop squeezing those fruits. And in order to succeed in life, you gotta figure out a way to stay in the game, figure out a mindset that will keep you working consistently until eventually something unpredictably lucky happens and you don’t have to work as hard.

Nick Urban [00:18:31]:
Yeah. I’m with you on that. I used to work out in the evening because I’m considerably stronger then, but then I started shifting that towards the morning block instead, and it sets up my day to just after I accomplish that, I feel better. I’m more productive. It’s, like, seven in the morning, eight in the morning. I already have gotten a win. The day just is much smoother versus when I push it in the evening. So because of that consistent dopamine by getting in, having a good workout, or even a mediocre workout, I still leave feeling much better than I did if I was to shift it later or just skip it altogether because I didn’t have time.

Alex Feinberg [00:19:05]:
Absolutely. And your sleep is probably better too if you do it in the morning. Because if you train hard at night, you know, your adrenaline, you’re hungrier, your stress stress hormones are gonna be higher, your adrenaline’s gonna be a little bit higher, and so you could have a great workout at 5PM, but when you’re trying to go to sleep at ten or eleven, like, you’re having trouble shutting down. And so the purpose of a workout is never the singular workout, unless you are an elite athlete who is performing for a single event. But for 99% of the population, the purpose of your workout isn’t a single workout. It is the aggregate of workouts that you do, and that requires that you rest and recover, so that you can do another workout next day, day after that. And so you can’t lose sight of what the purpose of you being in the gym is. It’s not so you can be a professional weightlifter.

Alex Feinberg [00:19:52]:
It’s so you can be, a competent professional.

Nick Urban [00:19:55]:
Yeah. And what’s your take on the idea of, like, if you push you redline too much in the gym, you’re predisposing yourself to a higher risk of injury, and therefore, you might not have the consistency, the longevity of it because your potential for injury down the line goes way higher. Would you recommend just, like, working with someone that helps you make sure you’re obviously having the right form and everything, but then also fighting the the sweet spot between pushing too hard so that there’s no reps left in the tank and your injury risk versus somewhere a little before that?

Alex Feinberg [00:20:27]:
Sure. So your injury risk will dramatically increase as you get closer to failure and your form breaks down. Now if your form sucks and you can get hurt, like, no matter what, if you’re poorly hydrated, you know, I know people who have slipped discs deadlifting a 35 pounds. I know a former NFL linebacker who threw his back out deadlifting a 35 pounds in the morning. Right? Where, I mean, he was squatting three times that when he was playing in the NFL. And so, you know, if you think about training, you can, in theory, be hurt doing anything. And so it’s important that you stay hydrated, you sleep well, and that you warm up appropriately. But after doing all those things, it’s also important to shut your movements down as your form starts to break down.

Alex Feinberg [00:21:13]:
So for me, at 38, soon to be 39 years old, if I’m doing squats, if I’m doing dead lifts, I permit myself to have one, one rep that is a notch below perfect, and that doesn’t mean it’s a bad rep. It just means it is a notch below perfect, because that means that my form is breaking down. I could probably bang out two more reps after that, but they would not be quality reps. Those are gonna be high injury potential reps. So you wanna be training, to where you are close to failure, because if you don’t get close to failure and most people don’t actually get close to failure, you’re not gonna be giving your body the stimulus that it needs to restructure your endocrine system, so that you’re getting the signals that are necessary to build muscle and lose fat. But if you’re going too close to the sun, you’re gonna get burned. And so, you know, part of finding a good coach, or part of, you know, having a good network of people to work with and keep you in check, is that you’re getting appropriately close to the sun, but you’re not getting so close that you get burned.

Nick Urban [00:22:15]:
And eventually with practice, you can figure out where that threshold is for yourself, and over time it might fluctuate depending on how you sleep, where you are in life, your work obligations, your other stressors, and all that.

Alex Feinberg [00:22:26]:
Yeah. And it does change. Right? So how close you can get to the sun is different at twenty eighth, then thirty eighth, then forty eighth, then ’58, and it’s also different by week and by month and by day. You know, as you mentioned, how you sleep, your other stressors, and so you’re never gonna be completely injury free in the gym. I’ll tweak things, you know, in a minor level two, three times a year. You know, oh, my adductor, you know, it’s just a grade three strain, means I gotta go light for a few weeks. Oh, you know, something, you know, some muscle, you know, didn’t fire properly. I kinda strained it.

Alex Feinberg [00:23:00]:
You know, but six, seven, eight weeks where I’m going at 80%, instead of 95%, alright, that’s fine. So you don’t wanna think that you can be a % healthy no matter what as you get older. You wanna avoid things that will take you out of the gym. You know, grade one, grade grade two strains, you know, and so, you know, you know, things that are, that are going to require surgery, and I think I quoted the grade three and grade one wrong, but what I meant is I have low grade strains, that, you know, require a mild modification of my training, but not to the point where I, you know, need to go see a physical therapist or get get surgery from them. Those are the things that you wanna avoid, when you’re training in the gym.

Nick Urban [00:23:43]:
Yeah. And also, I’ve seen a lot of people doing some of the high intensity, prolonged group fitness classes that are just like HIIT, but it lasts for forty five minutes, an hour, hour and a half. And I think for a lot of people that’s going to be too much, and they should really be focusing more on what’s appropriate for their unique biology.

Alex Feinberg [00:24:03]:
Yeah. And that has to do with the commercialization of fitness. And so people like classes. Right? So the goal of a of a gym is is not to get people healthier, it’s to make money. Right? And so, if you wanna make money, you need to offer people things that they like. People like being able to fit their workouts in in under sixty minutes. People like the feeling of sweating a lot and getting sore and doing something that is hard. And so, you can accomplish a lot of these things and train multiple people at the same time, which, gives you more leverage on the wages that you pay your instructor.

Alex Feinberg [00:24:37]:
If you have classes. Okay? Classes are not built for the trainee, classes are built for the gym owner. And so as a consumer, you have to realize a lot of the options that have been made available to you, are made available to you because they’re profitable for the person selling them. That doesn’t mean that they’re the best option for you. And so once you realize that the thing that is best for you might not be the thing that is easily accessible, you open the door to actually getting more return on your time if you follow a workout plan that’s more intelligently constructed.

Nick Urban [00:25:12]:
I don’t know if you see this when you work with high achievers, but it was definitely the case for myself as well. And that is when I am training, I want to do more and I want to push myself and I want to really feel like I beat myself up and that’s like the sign of a good workout. But a lot of my physical growth and I guess like personal evolution has come through from doing less and obviously doing that less with more intention, better, if not impeccable form, and accepting that a lot of the other health gains are gonna come outside of the gym.

Alex Feinberg [00:25:46]:
Exactly. So a lot of people need to do kind of the opposite of what their intuition tells them. So 97% of people, nine 95% of people are gonna be too lazy to be in shape. Their intuition tells them to rest when they should really be training. Those people should be training. You know, if they feel sore, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter that you feel sore, just do it. But for the two, three, four percent of people who train, who are not in that bucket, they tend to over train.

Alex Feinberg [00:26:10]:
They tend to train too much. These are the people who I love working with, because they’ll do anything I tell them to do, and it’s much easier for me to get results from them by telling them to do less than by telling a lazy person that he needs to do more. And so, working with these people very commonly, I work with professional athletes all the way down to entrepreneurs, who are hardworking individuals who didn’t realize that at 40 or 45, 50 years old, they could get in the best shape of their lives by doing less. The the best, use cases or the best testimonials that I’ve gotten are from people who look at the training that I give them, and their initial reaction is, there’s no way this is gonna work. It’s way too easy with some expletives in there. And then three months later, you know, they’re starting to see their abs again that they haven’t seen in twenty years with much less effort than ever before, and then they start to re understand or reimagine what it is and what’s required to be in great shape. It’s a lot easier than they had imagined prior to working with me. It just required that they get the right things right, namely rest and recovery.

Nick Urban [00:27:15]:
Alex, I wanna go back to the other energy cheat codes. They’re perhaps part of your routine or things that you tend to implement with clients. Other, perhaps, mental models or things that you find universally or generally helpful.

Alex Feinberg [00:27:30]:
Yeah. So most people in our society are focused on linear progress. They think that the more they do, the more successful they’re gonna be. And life can trick us because on a short term basis, that tends to be true. If I get ten hours of work done today versus eight, I will have a greater, benefit from that tomorrow or a week from now than today. What people don’t realize is if you put that phone down an hour earlier, maybe you get an hour less work done, but your brain is gonna shut down, an hour earlier, you’re gonna get more restful sleep, and then the quality of work that you do the following day is going to be higher. Ultimately, in our economy, we are evolving to a winner take all system. In fact, we’re already there, and it’s gonna get even worse.

Alex Feinberg [00:28:21]:
You’re not gonna win by doing more work than the next person. You’re going to win by doing a higher quality job, better work, more creative work than the next person. And that means you need to get your brain in a rested state to where it can perform work that nobody else can compete with. So many people are gonna line up to work ten, twelve, fourteen hour days, believing that that’s what they need to do to out compete you. And if you wanna try to do more hours than them, go for it. But I don’t think it’s gonna be successful. If if everybody’s zigging, you gotta zag. If everybody’s working more, you gotta work smarter.

Alex Feinberg [00:28:59]:
You have to continually offer a differentiated product or service if you wanna stay in business, and oftentimes that means doing less while your intuition tells you to do more so that the work you do do is competitively differentiated and a superior product to the competition.

Nick Urban [00:29:17]:
I’m glad you’re saying that. I recorded a podcast earlier today, and it was the same idea. And I keep hearing that same theme coming up, which means that it’s the trend that people are starting to move towards, which is a great thing. And a lot of the most prolific inventors and thinkers throughout history didn’t come up with their major breakthroughs when they were head down focused on the task in hour ten of it. It was more like when they stopped, when they were either in that theta dream like state or they’re on a walk with no technology, nothing, and they just an idea came to them right then. So the downtime and recovery and relaxation is crucial to actually do less and accomplish more.

Alex Feinberg [00:29:56]:
That’s right. We’re not machines. And if you think about how our education system molds us, it molds us to be machines. But as machines become more prolific, and as AI becomes more prolific, we’re gonna realize that you’ll never be as good of a of a machine as a machine is. All you can do is be a human. And so, you can play a losing game by trying to mechanize everything that you do, but you’re gonna get out competed by a script, you’re gonna get out competed by a robot. And so, the only way that you’re gonna keep your head above water is by doing the things that the robots can’t do, which means you’re optimizing for quality and not quantity.

Nick Urban [00:30:33]:
How else what are the other models we can use, implement into our days or weeks or overall routines to help us play that different game?

Alex Feinberg [00:30:41]:
I think it’s important for us to redefine what wealth is. You know, most people when they’re young, they have energy, but they have no money. When they’re old, they have money, but they have no energy. And you’re really only thriving in life when you have both. And so what you need to do is understand that balance is the best way for you to have it all, and you can have it all. If you’re willing to stop worshiping false idols, if you’re willing to stop believing that, you know, getting another $3,000,000 is gonna dramatically change your life if you already have $3,000,000. Like, basically, you need to triple your net worth for your financial position to substantially change. And so if you’re making all these sacrifices, time with your family, focus on your body, so that you can get your net worth 10%, twenty % higher, like, that’s a losing trade.

Alex Feinberg [00:31:34]:
And and so if you want to be happy, if you wanna succeed in life, you need to embrace balance because everything has diminishing marginal returns. Right? You know, I tell people, you should try to be in the triple sing triple, sevens club. Triple sevens club meaning, you have 7 figures liquid, because when you have 7 figures liquid, you know, you’re getting probably 90% of the benefit financially, that you would have an 8 figures liquid, and that you’re not you shouldn’t be stressed out over paying bills. You’re still looking to amass more, but you’re kind of reaching the point where where you’re at the diminishing, frontier. You’re at the efficient frontier, where you’re getting diminishing marginal returns of, additional income. Simultaneously, you should be able to sleep seven hours per day. People say eight hours per day, but if you actually look at, mortality curves, people who sleep seven hours a day on average have the, the highest longevity. Now that’s gonna be individually dependent.

Alex Feinberg [00:32:34]:
Some people only need six, some people do actually need eight, but most people should be targeting seven hours per day. You’ll feel great, especially if you haven’t been sleeping seven hours per day as an adult sleeping seven hours per day. And then the last one is being able to run a seven minute mile. Now it might be better, from a health standpoint, if your VO two max was high enough for you to run a six minute mile, but you’re having, you know, like the seven figure, liquid, net worth side, you have 90% of the benefit of running a six minute mile if you run a seven minute mile, and it’s gonna be a lot more attainable for you to run a seven minute mile than a six minute mile. And so understanding that everything needs to work in balance if you wish to, get maximum marginal returns on your effort. Joining the triple seven club is going to be, the gateway to you really feeling untouchable in life. And so that’s kind of been the the framework that I am, you know, sharing with a lot of my clients and a lot of my followers, is we’re happiest with balance. If you’re not in the Triple Sevens Club, let’s target getting you there.

Nick Urban [00:33:38]:
So say I come at you and I have a bunch of things going on. I’m spread thin, which is semi true. How do you recommend people go about simplifying and, like, figuring out where to cut so that they can progress in other areas?

Alex Feinberg [00:33:53]:
Number one, most people feel overwhelmed professionally, and that’s because most people professionally are providing commoditized services. And so if you’re providing a commoditized service, the only thing you can compete on is price and volume, and so you’re you’re getting pointed down a road of doing more things, and you can’t have time efficiency doing more things. It’s hard to. You can, but you it’s hard to. And so what I try to have my clients do is understand what is your unique selling point? What can you offer to the market that nobody else can? And let’s double down on that, because the only way that you’re going to make more money with less work is by really focusing in on your unique selling point, so you can expand your profit margins. Most people don’t realize that, effectively, monopolies are the only firms that sustainably make money, and you can have a monopoly if you’re selling something that your competition can’t sell. But that’s gonna be heavily dependent on your particular expertise, your particular talent, what you can bring to the market. And so we need to figure out what path can you run where nobody can’t chase you nobody can chase you.

Alex Feinberg [00:35:00]:
Right? That’s the first way we free up your time professionally. In the way the way we free up your time in fitness is like you mentioned, we wanna get you training earlier in the day, so you’re more productive with your hours after your workout. We can probably have you training less because most people don’t need to train that much when they’re training with proper intensity. And, you know, we’ll find that again, as you mentioned, the more downtime you have to let your brain wander in a dream like state, the better ideas you get, the more likely you are to stumble across something that can be or expand upon your existing point of differentiation. So you can end up working less. Right? Pay attention to lazy successful people. Right? Most people are opposed to paying attention to lazy successful people because they think they got lucky, but realistically, maybe they got lucky, maybe they’re cheating, maybe they’re doing something illegal, or maybe they have figured out how to accomplish a challenging thing more easily by focusing on high leverage action points. Right? So 50% of lazy successful people that you see will be your best teachers in helping you identify what the highest leverage action items should be if you wanna succeed in your domain.

Alex Feinberg [00:36:14]:
So pay attention to them because they are cheat codes.

Nick Urban [00:36:17]:
That is a great tip. And to actually implement that, would you look at the person, notice their outputs, notice how they’re spending their time, notice who they’re surrounding themselves with, and what would that actually look like in practice?

Alex Feinberg [00:36:30]:
It means seeing people that do things quote unquote wrong according to experts, but they have good results, chances are they’re actually doing something right, and chances are the experts are wrong about what they need to get right. And so, anytime a paradigm shifts, it’s shifted by somebody who’s willing to trade getting what experts think is necessary, forgetting what they think is necessary. That’s what geniuses do. Geniuses can reorient the playing field. They can reconnect the dots and shift the the important dots away from what the standard presently is and towards what the standard will be. That requires them showcasing how silly it is to focus on what everybody else is doing, and allowing the pendulum to shift to focus on what they’re doing, and then that’s gonna last for a number of years until the pendulum shifts away from what they’re doing into into what somebody who can better connect the dots, and and be more efficient with the energy that they, that they expend, and be more efficient in chasing the highest leverage items that are necessary to succeed.

Nick Urban [00:37:39]:
Yeah. So it’s looking at what they’re doing, identifying where they’re they’re cutting against the grain, deciding if it’s something that you would want to follow suit on, or at least test out, and then implementing it, if it makes sense.

Alex Feinberg [00:37:53]:
Exactly. You have to you have to be open minded. Right? Most people, your brain is gonna default into protecting your own ego and saying, oh, these guys got lucky. Well, you can think that, but you’re never gonna learn. Right? So if you wanna get better, you have to be, very crudely aware of this guy is doing less work than me, and he’s having better results. Why? It’s not because he’s getting lucky, it’s not because he’s cheating, it’s not because he was born on third base. It’s because he’s prioritizing things that matter, and I’m not. So how can I learn from him? That’s the only way I’m gonna get better.

Nick Urban [00:38:30]:
Is that how you approach learning new things in general fast?

Alex Feinberg [00:38:34]:
No. I actually don’t learn faster necessarily than other people. I learn by doing, and so I learn with less effort. Right? So there’s learning fast, and there’s learning with less effort. I try to optimize for learning with less effort, because effort is actually, a more desirable commodity than time. We will run out of the desire to get better before we run out of the time that we have to get better, And so if you can learn something by doing, that is going to save you a substantial amount of effort. Now with AI, AI is actually forcing me to reorient the way that I learn, because AI can actually cut down a lot of the learning steps that I would normally do by trial and error. Right? And so as I try to be the most efficient person I possibly can be, rather than jumping out and playing with with something with my hands and figuring it out on the go, I’m actually relying on AI models on LLMs to help, give me a starting framework upon which I can then go play in a sandbox.

Alex Feinberg [00:39:36]:
So it’s a combination. You know, you need to be able to, you know, have decent guidance to where you’re starting with with the right, pieces on the board. But then you also need to be able to learn as you go, which tends to require less effort than methodically planning everything out.

Nick Urban [00:39:53]:
Yeah. I like using AI as, like, a digital sparring partner, where you can really figure out what you’re missing. There’s gaps in your knowledge base, and what the other conflicting, contrasting side says, and then coming to some reconciliation point between the two.

Alex Feinberg [00:40:11]:
Absolutely. And, you know, I tell a lot of my clients that if you’re not integrating AI into how you work and how your business operates, your competition is. And so, it’s something that everybody needs to be, integrating into their lives. AI is like computers in the nineteen eighties. If you don’t use them, you’re gonna get out competed by the people who do. So, you know, use them because, you can’t use it everywhere and you shouldn’t, but you need to understand where you can use it, where you cannot, and how you can use it best.

Nick Urban [00:40:37]:
Mhmm. And it’s not just for entrepreneurs and executives. It’s really for everyone because in the workforce, the workers who are actually implementing it into their routines, whether they’re working for someone else or for themselves, they’re the ones who are gonna have that advantage.

Alex Feinberg [00:40:52]:
Yeah. Try getting a job without a computer, without ever having worked with a computer. Right? You’re it’s not gonna work out very well for you. And so AI is is gonna be this generation’s computers. Like, you just need to learn how how it works.

Nick Urban [00:41:06]:
You mentioned energy, and it wasn’t willpower, but how do you go about conserving the resources? Do you have any processes to do, like, an audit or something to figure out where you’re perhaps extending yourself when you shouldn’t be?

Alex Feinberg [00:41:20]:
Well, you have to pay attention to your mood. Right? You should be aware of if you’re burning out. So if you’re if you’re consistently feeling like you’re burning out, that is a sign of either you’re in the beginning phases of a project where it’s gonna suck. Right? Anytime you’re starting something new, the first ninety days feels like you’re losing, and so that’s something you need to be aware of. That that can’t really be remediated. You need to just get over that and ignore yourself, because in in that particular situation, what your mind is telling you is wrong and should be ignored. But if you’re not in that type of situation, and you’re just kind of feeling, unmotivated to continue, you need to mix it up. You’re probably gonna benefit more from a day off or day out in nature, than you are from doing the same thing that didn’t yield progress yesterday.

Alex Feinberg [00:42:08]:
A lot of people don’t realize that they’re likely vitamin d deficient, particularly people who are in offices from nine to five. You’re not getting natural vitamin d. You’re not outside at a time where your body can, you know, turn UVB exposure to vitamin d. And so your mood is going to be downstream from your vitamin D deficiency if you have one, and your effort is gonna be downstream from your mood, and your desire to continue is gonna be downstream from your effort and mood. And so if you wanna hack all of them, you need to figure out, like, where am I being depleted? How am I, how does my blood work? Am I am I deficient in vitamin d? Am I deficient in any other vitamins? Do I need to modify my diet or sun exposure so that my body is performing optimally, so that my thoughts and feelings and emotions are where I want them to be, so the best people wanna spend time around me, so I can continue to get good ideas presented to me and have good people working for me? And so it’s no secret that people who are high energy and smiling all the time are more successful than those who aren’t, but what’s possibly less well understood is that is the catalyst for success. That is the magnet that draws people to you. People are not smiling because they’re successful. They’re successful because they’re smiling.

Alex Feinberg [00:43:24]:
And so let’s not put the, the cart before the horse. We need to figure out how can we get you in a good mood, so that success will follow you.

Nick Urban [00:43:34]:
Yeah. And like you’re saying, it’s all linked. You get good rest, you recover, you get time in nature, in the sun, your mood’s gonna naturally improve a bit. You have a good workout, it’ll improve, and then also just being aware of that, cognizant and smiling and feeling better.

Alex Feinberg [00:43:48]:
Absolutely.

Nick Urban [00:43:49]:
Okay. What else to build energy now? I’m I’m getting excited about implementing this more into my own routine, and I get that it’s equally as important to be subtracting the things that are draining as it is to be adding perhaps more important. Are there any big additions that make sense?

Alex Feinberg [00:44:05]:
Well, you have to look at caffeine like an interest bearing loan. Right? So a lot of people drink caffeine so they can have more energy, and it does give you more energy initially, but it comes at interest that you have to pay later on. And so what I started doing over the last year is, I don’t really consume caffeine anymore. I have, decaf coffee, and I have, my preferred decaf coffee that is devoid of the nasty chemicals that most decaf coffee includes, to decaffeinate the coffee beans. You know, maybe I’ll have a diet coke, maybe I’ll have some iced tea, but I’m never having fully loaded coffee. I’m never having energy drinks. All those things do is get you amped up so you can crash later, and they affect your sleep because caffeine has a six to seven hour half life. So if you have two cups of coffee at 10AM, and you’re trying to go to sleep at 11PM, you still have a half of cup of coffee in your system as if you drink a half cup of coffee at 10:30PM.

Alex Feinberg [00:44:58]:
And so if you’re not getting restful sleep, there’s a good chance it’s because you have too many stimulants in your body. And so just like I mentioned with my example about punching, throwing, hitting a baseball, resting and recovering, to have more energy, you need to be experimenting with things that that don’t speed you up. Right? Slow down so you can speed up. Rest so you can recover. Take fewer stimulants so you have higher energy.

Nick Urban [00:45:23]:
Yeah. According to Sean Wells, if you’re a slow caffeine metabolizer, it can last, like, up to ten hours for one half life.

Alex Feinberg [00:45:31]:
That’s true.

Nick Urban [00:45:32]:
Do you use any other ingredients or supplements that, like, support the energy levels and the body in a more holistic, non depleting way?

Alex Feinberg [00:45:41]:
Zinc and magnesium. As our soil quality has eroded over the, last century or so, most Americans are going to be deficient in magnesium, which has a slew of downstream neurological effects that I would leave to a neurologist to articulate. But most people should be supplementing magnesium, Zinc as well. So those are the main supplements that that I will take. And I’ll experiment with other things here and there, taurine, l theanine, but magnesium and zinc are the main ones.

Nick Urban [00:46:15]:
The original nootropic cognitive enhancing stack was just caffeine or coffee and a little bit of L theanine to smooth out the effects and reduce the impact on sleep.

Alex Feinberg [00:46:26]:
Yeah. And so I I consume drinks with both. You know, my friend Tommy runs a company, Ramp Health, and and they have a a B4 drink that includes L theanine in it. And so you can check that out if you wanna experiment with that.

Nick Urban [00:46:38]:
Nice. Do you do any, like, brain cognition enhancing practices, resilience training, like, biofeedback, anything like that, or do you find it to be unnecessary?

Alex Feinberg [00:46:48]:
Sleep and high intensity cardio. Right? Sleep will obviously allow your brain to, become enhanced. High intensity cardio forces you to ignore signals of, of pain and distraction, and adversity, so that you can you can do it better. And when you track it, you know how well you did relative to your personal record. You can’t do it well on low sleep. You can’t do it well when you aren’t recovered, and you can’t do it well if you aren’t able to overcome pain and adversity. In addition to that, I’m starting to experiment with, hyperbaric sessions. I’m gonna start experimenting with floating, and then also, you know, a a various, range of, you know, sound type treatments that, you know, I’m not advanced enough on that to where I say everybody needs to do this, but these are all modalities that interest me at a cellular level, and that I think are probably the the next, big breakthrough that, my clients and I might be making to get our energy levels higher.

Nick Urban [00:47:49]:
Yeah. Interesting you mentioned those. I was just at the Health Optimization Summit here in Austin last weekend, and there were a lot of those modalities around. And I would venture to say, if unless you’re experiencing, like, a chronic issue, the things we’ve discussed so far today will be more impactful. And once you master these, like, energy keys and the strategic laziness, if you will, then adding those things on top can be, like, an extra little boost that’s non a non depleting boost boost, if you will. Yeah. I agree. What else is important to understand about this world? Perhaps any controversial takes?

Alex Feinberg [00:48:25]:
Well, I think religion is important. I think, ultimately, if we, you know, if we don’t have a God that we can, look to, then we end up becoming our own God. And we don’t have the capacity to handle the anxiety that comes with being our own god. And so I think a lot of the reasons why people who are very smart, have issues with anxiety or issues with depression is because they’re taking on the responsibilities of a deity that they can’t actually handle. And so the human brain has a spot for God in it. There hasn’t been a successful society in the history of mankind that has, been atheist, or has has ignored, the existence of God or gods. And so when you try to to take on the responsibilities of God, you learn your mortality very quickly. There’s a reason why people who are highly educated are much more inclined to be dependent on SSRIs or, you know, anti depression, anti anxiety medication.

Alex Feinberg [00:49:26]:
And so, you know, if you want a cheat code that I didn’t invent and has been around for thousands of years, go to church.

Nick Urban [00:49:33]:
Interesting. And it definitely also has a lot of other biological benefits such as the strong community in addition to, like, I think recognizing your own, like you’re saying, mortality, and that there’s a force of some kind, whatever you want to call it, bigger than yourself helps filter things and helps reduce the overwhelm of making mistakes and not necessarily knowing the right path. Right.

Alex Feinberg [00:49:58]:
Absolutely.

Nick Urban [00:49:59]:
So if someone comes to you, this is not medical advice, of course. This is for entertainment purposes only. But if someone comes to you and they have, or they worry and fear the future, we call it anxiety, are there any things, any like frameworks or models that are helpful for them?

Alex Feinberg [00:50:16]:
Well, it depends on what their, you know, theistic background is. A lot of people went to church when they were younger and stopped going as life got busy. And so you wanna remind people, like, what’s important to you? What constitutes a win? And, and make sure that their actions are aligned with what constitutes wins for them. Everything I do, that’s really transformative for my clients is gonna be individual specific. Specific. And so, you know, I can’t tell you to go to church if I know that you’re just not gonna believe, anything that’s there. But I can I can start pointing you down the the road of believing that if you think you’re you’re your own God, you know, you’re the price you pay is very similar to the hell that the Bible tells you that you’re going to, when when you ignore the first commandment? Right? And now, you might not have, an afterlife to, to pay it in, but you’re paying it in your life on earth. And so one of the things that I think about heaven and hell is that it’s not something that happens to you after you die.

Alex Feinberg [00:51:19]:
It’s something that happens to you on earth, and it is showcased based on how you live, and how you live is downstream from what you believe. And so the closer you are to living in accordance with biblical principles, the more likely you are to be happy and and experience heaven on earth. And the further you get away from that, and the further you get towards wealth worshiping, and believing you believing that you are your own God, and worshiping false idols, you’ll you’ll feel the anxiety, you’ll feel the depression, you’ll feel, you know, the the status, you’ll be very status conscious, and you’ll be in a constant state of threat. And I can’t think of a more accurate description of a hell on earth than constantly being anxious, constantly feeling threatened, constantly feeling like you’re dealing with scarcity, constantly worried about losing what you have. And so that ends up happening if you end up living, with principles that are antithetical to, you know, what’s what’s preached, in mainstream religions like Christianity.

Nick Urban [00:52:22]:
Yeah. And it’s a lot more volatile too. A lot of ups and downs, and it’s hard to go back to what you were saying earlier, to have that smile, that high energy when it can all shift at a moment’s notice.

Alex Feinberg [00:52:33]:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Nick Urban [00:52:35]:
Alex, how did you come to your mental models? Because obviously, you’ve been doing this for a while and you’ve really thought through some of these and applied them, not just intellectual thought, but application. What’s been your process there?

Alex Feinberg [00:52:49]:
Well, I mean, I went to school as an atheist, and I went to school at Vanderbilt in Nashville, where most of my teammates were Christian, and I majored in economics, but I was also an athlete. And I think one thing that smart people do is when they experience cognitive dissonance, namely, when what they see doesn’t match with their preconceived notions, they don’t think that it’s random. They don’t think that it’s luck. They try to deconstruct and then reconstruct more accurate mental models to describe what they’re seeing around them. And so, when I was on the baseball field, I saw a lot of irrational behavior that was rewarded by good productivity. The best teammates I had, the best players I played with were irrational. Right? Most people made everybody makes irrational consumer decisions. People want things that aren’t rational.

Alex Feinberg [00:53:37]:
And so if I wanted to better understand the world, I had to understand human irrationality. I had to understand the right side of people’s brains and the right side of my own brain. And if I wanted to perform at the highest level I could possibly perform, I needed to leverage my own irrationality. You know, I’ve, recently gotten into, you know, comment debates with, Ray Dalio, on some of his LinkedIn posts, because he says that, you know, you wanna be extremely logical and rational and understand the risks that you’re taking all the time, and I think that might be true if you wanna manage a multi billion dollar hedge fund. But if you look at the most successful people, they are irrationally confident. There’s a reason why Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley have gambling problems. Right? Because do you want to put a guy at the free throw line when the time has run out, who has a rational belief and a rational way of interacting with the world and rationally knows that if he misses this shot, then he’s gonna be seen as the goat and not in a good way, but like the bad way? And, you know, he might not have his contract renewed, or do you want the guy who’s completely ignorant of all that and just focused on how great he is at the line? Like, you want the latter. Unfortunately, the latter is more likely to get into trouble at the roulette table, in a casino, but these traits made them great.

Alex Feinberg [00:54:54]:
And so you have to harness a rationality in your professional life if you want to be able to compete with machines and compete with other people who are perhaps a little bit more rational than you. So all of my life experience kinda seeing things that people didn’t see as an SSE athlete, as a professional athlete, being associated with very high performers on the baseball field, and financial services, and at Google, forced me to continually deconstruct my own assumptions and rebuild mental models that were increasingly accurate as time went on. And obviously, you know, the goal was to make my life better, and I was able to do that. And by extension, I was able to make other people’s lives better too by sharing these mental models with them.

Nick Urban [00:55:36]:
And so your mental models really get closer to the first principles, the axioms, and they are consistent between the people who are maybe not average, but people who are high average and the high performers and elite performers. Is that what you’re saying?

Alex Feinberg [00:55:53]:
That’s right. Most of the advice you see online is for average people. It’s hustle porn. It’s telling you that you can be great if you just do more. It’s David Goggins, Jocko Jocko Wilnick b s. And you’re not gonna be more successful waking up at 04:30 if you haven’t been successful waking up at six. That hustle porn is for people who are so lazy, that if they just incorporate 10% of something that they’re never gonna do, they’re gonna go in the right direction. But what hardworking people will realize is that they’re often going to be more successful by by going in the opposite direction of that, and they’ve taken these initial guiding posts a little bit too literally.

Alex Feinberg [00:56:32]:
So as a type a individual, you cannot be consuming hustle porn because it’s gonna push you in the direction that you’ve already gone too far in.

Nick Urban [00:56:39]:
Further out of balance.

Alex Feinberg [00:56:40]:
Yeah. Exactly.

Nick Urban [00:56:41]:
I wanna push back on one of your ideas a little bit because I think that my own understanding could be lacking here. I had teammates in college on my rugby team who were really good in the classroom and on the field, but they wouldn’t necessarily do their homework. They wouldn’t necessarily study. They somehow just made it all happen. And if I was to emulate that, emulate them, I’m not sure it would have turned out the same for me. So what about the, like, the either genetic gifts? I don’t like calling it genetic, but, like, other, like, personality or characteristic differences?

Alex Feinberg [00:57:15]:
Well, Well, your assumption is that it’s a genetic gift. Maybe that’s true. Right? But that’s most people’s assumptions in the beginning, and they’re not doing the the deep digging to figure out what that is. Right? If they’re able to learn faster in the classroom, they’re probably approaching learning differently than you. So I’ll give an example. Right? I graduated with honors as an economics major at Vanderbilt. I didn’t study very much compared to my classmates because I didn’t have time. You know, spending so much time as an athlete that I just didn’t have time to to read all the economic textbooks.

Alex Feinberg [00:57:52]:
But I was able to consolidate my effort because I learned the frameworks. Right? I didn’t memorize anything in my textbooks, and a lot of the people who I was taking tests against did memorize the textbooks. So it saved me a lot of time realizing that, you know what? I have time to mem to learn a framework. I don’t have time to memorize the textbook. So it’s possible that these guys are actually just taking a more efficient approach to learning, than you were. And so you have to really try to understand, like, how are you able to to solve this problem with substantially less effort than me? If you haven’t actually taken time to to pick apart and unbuild and rebuild their cognitive engine, you don’t know why they’re able to be more efficient than you. But simply taking the time to do that will result in you being more efficient yourself.

Nick Urban [00:58:40]:
Yeah. I like that. And now that you say that, I reflect on my own experience and I realize that when I was in season, I had a quarter of the time I actually got my best grades. So it’s not merely a matter of it’s not a function of just studying more and getting better grades as a result. There’s other components that cause the effect that I wasn’t aware of.

Alex Feinberg [00:59:02]:
Yes. There you go. That’s performance coaching.

Nick Urban [00:59:05]:
Yeah. Because like you were saying earlier, a lot of the what looks like random or luck effects are really just the result of one or more causes that we haven’t been able to link together and understand.

Alex Feinberg [00:59:19]:
Absolutely.

Nick Urban [00:59:20]:
Awesome. Well, Alex, this has been really fun and enlightening. If people want to check out your work, to connect with you personally, and perhaps to work with you, how do they go about that?

Alex Feinberg [00:59:30]:
So you can find me on all the major social networks, alex Feinberg one, f e I n b e r g one, alex Feinberg one on x, formerly Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and then you can also go to my website, Feinbergsystems.com. You can click on the upper right hand tab if you want to learn more about performance coaching. If you are a high performer, I am very confident that after fifteen to twenty minutes talking to you, I can get you in into a yes or no answer of whether I can take you to the next level. And so if you have twenty minutes to invest in an exploratory call, we can figure out if we can make that substantially worth your time. Feinbergsystems.com or alex Feinberg one, my DMs are open on socials.

Nick Urban [01:00:14]:
Couple more questions for you before we part ways today. What three teachers have had the biggest impact on your life and work?

Alex Feinberg [01:00:21]:
Oh, that’s interesting. So, I mean, I can name people, but a lot of them are mentors of mine. So, my one of my high school baseball coaches, Sal. Sal was an entrepreneur. I didn’t realize when I was 16, 17, 18 years old, that people could make money in if they weren’t, athletes or entertainers. Even though I grew up in a reasonably well off community, I just didn’t understand that you could make a million dollars a year as a business owner. And so, having him tell me that, Alex, you’re not gonna be an employee when you get older, you’re gonna run your own business, you’re not wired like an employee, you can’t have somebody tell you what to do. If I didn’t have him feeding me that, then I probably would have listened to my parents, who are preaching kind of the opposite in, direction, which is get a job, just take any job, do what your company wants, and hold on to that job, which a lot of a lot of parents will will tell their kids.

Alex Feinberg [01:01:11]:
So I think, you know, I mentor Sal in high school, pushed me a long way. The first guy that I worked for Well, actually, okay. So my my second coach, coach Corbin at Vanderbilt University, had a tremendous amount of, impact on me because of how charismatic he was, and how he was able to use storytelling, and, you know, strong diction, good vocabulary, being in good shape to be able to get the most out of all of his interactions in life. He was able to give people compliments, know everybody’s name, and, you know, he had, the the world at his fingertips simply by doing a lot of the things that Dale Carnegie preaches in real life. He was able to build a, a leading national championship contending program, from basically, the seller dwellers of the SCC. And so seeing him in a leadership capacity, every day for four years, was really better than any MBA could could do, as far as teaching leadership to individuals. So I would say, you know, Coach Corbin at Vanderbilt was was number two. And then number three, my my first boss, when I was working at the hedge fund, Bill, you know, he taught me to question what governments were doing, what central banks were doing.

Alex Feinberg [01:02:28]:
He taught me to really focus on the the fact that you’re not going to be anything but a slave, if you have a regular job and you rely on a company to promote you. And he might not have told me that, directly, but he he turned me on to a lot of information that ultimately resulted in me coming to that conclusion. And so these three men, I think, really steered me, in the direction of entrepreneurship. Some overtly, some covertly, but I wouldn’t be where I am today had it not been for their influence.

Nick Urban [01:03:02]:
Are there any public figures that if people want to learn more about your way of thinking, or other resources they can check out to dive more into this world that you’d recommend?

Alex Feinberg [01:03:12]:
Well, I mean, I I’d like to think that a lot of the thoughts that I have, they’ve been stated by other people. You know, people I’ll say some idea, and people will say, oh, you know, so and so wrote that in this book five years ago, or five hundred years ago. I learned these things by living. So if you wanna learn more about the principles, like follow my YouTube channel, follow me on on x, follow me on Instagram, DM me. Like, actually, get in touch with me. You can talk to me and learn more about the things that I think, and I can tell you exactly how they apply to your life. So that’s something that 2025 technology allows us to do. You know, ten, twenty years ago, if you saw a good author or somebody intelligent online, you just be searching for more of the content that he created, but now you can actually go out and interact with that person.

Alex Feinberg [01:03:58]:
So if you think my frameworks are interesting, let’s chat, and let’s see how they can be applied to your life.

Nick Urban [01:04:03]:
Finally, the last one. What is one thing that your tribe does not know about you?

Alex Feinberg [01:04:08]:
Oh, that’s interesting. I probably, doubt myself more than, a lot of people realize. And, you know, part of the reason why I’m able to come up with a lot of the frameworks that I come up with, is I have had to, you know, come up with tools to manage my own anxiety, so I could perform at a high level. And so despite the fact that I’m accomplished in a number of areas, the reason why I’m able to prescribe all of these actions, courses of action for others is because I’ve had to put a lot of work in into managing, you know, my own stress levels and my own anxiety.

Nick Urban [01:04:40]:
Thanks for sharing that. It definitely humanizes you a little bit.

Alex Feinberg [01:04:43]:
Yeah. Well, you bet, Nick.

Nick Urban [01:04:44]:
Well, Alex, thanks for joining in the podcast. It’s been a blast chatting with you today and discussing this world of energy as a currency and high performance in general.

Alex Feinberg [01:04:53]:
Thanks, Nick. It was awesome.

Nick Urban [01:04:55]:
Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their health span. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outlier.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.