Jeff Bethke | To Hell with the Hustle and Learning to Schedule Time for What Matters

Audio Transcription

After a busy day, do you ever find yourself wondering where all of your time went? Have you ever felt like 80% of your day was spent doing mindless and meaningless tasks that really don’t matter and that probably don’t even need to be done? Well, on today’s show, bestselling author Jeff Bethke shares about how to reclaim your life and an overworked, overspent, and over connected world.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. Thrive nation. On today’s show we have a repeat guest, the man with the plan who is who is doing the interview today from Hawaii, a big Aloha out to you, Mr. Jefferson Bethke. Welcome back onto the thrive time show.

Hey, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

Okay. Real quick. The listeners out there who may have missed the first interview with you, who are all automatically jealous, therefore may maybe quasi resentful of the fact that you now live in Hawaii. Tell us about what inspired you to move out to that great location.

Yeah, it’s not as random as it sounds. My wife actually took a job out here after college and that was kind of the connecting point. Fell in love with that board, both from Washington state, Seattle people through and through. And so, um, we start having kids but kind of wanted to think about where best to raise a family. And Hawaii was where we chose.

Now you are an accomplished author, speaker. I know that millions of people out there know who you are, but for those who don’t know about you, could you share with everybody, I’m a little bit about your journey from the beginning to here and why you, I mean, because I think people need to know a little bit about your background.

Can we get into your new book? Yeah, for sure. So the main, I would say that kind of the connecting dots that most people, it helps most people is about seven, maybe eight years ago now, I wrote a viral, I wrote a poem and a video made a video called why I hate religion, but love Jesus. That went kind of crazy viral, no plan for it too, wasn’t thinking it was going to, it was just for kind of my friends and for fun. Um, and then that kind of turned my life upside down where I always care about talking about, um, Jesus or spiritual things and kind of people’s spiritual journeys. And that was the, um, uh, uh, kind of catalyst in, of what of when this happened. It allowed me to kind of step into that in a bigger way. And so yeah, for the last six or seven, eight years now because of that video have just kind of, uh, create videos, have a YouTube channel, write books, do podcast kind of anything that kind of comes out on the internet or other places.

And so you, um, you, you are a guy that I would say that you work hard, but yet you’ve written a new book called to hell with the hustle, reclaiming your life in an overworked, overspent, and over connected world. Um, talk to us about what first inspired you to write this book.

Yeah, I mean, I think the, the book is kind of really born out of my own personal journey. I think because of some of the things I just said. Me and my wife were kind of slung into, um, sometimes even more speedier version of work than most people do, which would be like internet based work. And then I’m kind of inundated with all these opportunities and things. And uh, I think even after, which are all good things. But I think even after going down that path, I started to notice like, Oh man, this isn’t kind of creating us or forming us into the people we want to be. What would it, uh, what’s the problem there? What’s, what, why is this not working? Um, and one of the more I started to dig around and think about it, I really realized there is kind of this, this cultural ethos of hustle and hurry, uh, that we usually prop up as a virtue is actually one of the things that’s really detrimental to our mental health, to our actual good deep work, um, to our families, to our marriages. And so, yeah, the book is kind of this manifesto of me kind of talking about the process in the beginning and then also like, man, what kind of people do we want to be? And then how do we get there because hustle isn’t it?

I think a lot of people are, um, unable to set boundaries. And I’ll just pick up myself for a second, but one of my brands that I own is called elephant in the room. It’s a men’s grooming lounge and we have five stores in three, three that we own ourselves in two franchises. And it seems like Jeff with four thousand five thousand members, usually one guy gets upset about every 100 haircuts. You know, the like the one, the 1% ratio. And when they complain, um, you know, they want to be responded to and I’ve just had to learn to set boundaries where, Hey, I’m just going to have to turn the phone off during set hours. For the entrepreneurs out there that operate with that sense of urgency, um, what advice would you give them for maybe, or principals would you give them to anchor their lives and, and, and to set these boundaries?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the main reasons is we have to realize that it actually is like hurting us. Like phone connectivity, emails, the pings, the vibrations, the apps. They’re actually kind of continually [inaudible].

Uh, uh, um, I think, um,

I’m just cutting off our attention span lower and lower, our ability to focus and, and these are the, that’s the, and so what it’s doing is it’s cutting off our ability to do any type of deep, deep, meaningful work because a lot of us are just kind of putting out fires or responding, um, and not kind of intentionally crafting the life we want. And so it’s hard to, because we don’t have any more hours in a day than someone 200 years ago did. But what we do have is we have a lot more people being able to reach us in those 24 hours. So like we don’t get to make more time. So the only other answer to that then is that we have to be able to say no more than people did 200 years ago if we’re even gonna have any semblance of kind of sanity.

And so yeah, I think being able to actually understand, you’re know first year to understand your why and then once you understand your why, then you really have to craft a really ruthless know gently and compassionately, but so that you can actually then the things that are most important because what happens is to urgent is not always the important. And so then what will happen as well, kind of start sacrificing our marriage, our family, our kids, sometimes the most meaningful work we should be doing a on the alter of kind of these things that are more just a urgent.

Now you, you, you just said something that’s a pretty powerful thing. You said the urgent is not always the most important. Could you give an example of, from your life of where something may seem urgent to somebody on the outside, but it’s not necessarily an important as it relates to your why or your,

your family’s goals? Yeah, good question. I’m not sure I can think of one on the fly. We’re here in the minute, but yeah, I mean just, I think there’s like emails as the one, I feel like it’s very easy for a, when someone needs something, just even some, you know, and I work in internet work, some design file or some link or some answer that realistically like probably if maybe like, let’s say you go off the grid for two weeks on accident or you’re on vacation or whatever, like they probably could survive without, but there’s something about our tones and knowing that we can reach people faster that then ups our sense of urgency when we’re writing people. And so I think that’s a really big one. And I think, yeah, I think email and phone is honestly, it’s created to feel urgent. It’s literally like someone is in a laboratory basically, right? Kind of thinking. The engineers are thinking, how can we make this feel urgent? Because if we can make it feel urgent than it’ll feel important in a pseudo way. And then they’ll look at it, swipe pickup, and then they make billions of more dollars. So you really have to understand kind of the, the, the, the, the rat race we’re in, in the hamster wheel, we’re kind of running in and then you can kind of then opt out of that.

I’m going to, I’m going to tell you a joke. Uh, Jeff Bethke, little confession from about, uh, I’d say about seven or eight years ago before I figured this out, um, my wife and I, we used to, I used to travel down to nada speaking events. And I remember after one of the events, my wife got up to use the restroom. And so I did the unthinkable. Jeff. I picked up my phone and I checked my message. So she comes back from, you know, go to the restroom, whatever. And I am now mentally not present, but I was physically present. You know what I’m saying? And, and I remember that look, she gave me that death look that said, if you do that again, I’m going to slap you around kind of thing. So I put the phone down, I hit the airplane mode, we had a great dinner.

And then that night we’ll just say, we went out, we went to the hotel, it was bout Chicka wow. Wow. Time Jeff. So my wife, she says, I’m going to go, you know, do the things that women do sometimes and she’s doing those things. And then I get another message that again, mentally throws off my game. You know what I’m saying, Jeff? And then at that point we had the talk and she’s like, you’ve got to turn off the phone. You can’t constantly be reachable. I realized we just had a conference, but we’re on a hot date right now. And you’ve interrupted. You’ve been interrupted the entire time. But you know, after a conference, these thousands of attendees all wanted to reach out to me via email or leave reviews and either they weren’t texting me directly. I’m seeing the reviews coming in, I’m seeing feedback. Do you know what I’m saying man? I mean,

yeah, I think it’s true. I mean it’s a, it’s a fallacy and a lie that we, we can kind of be that we can kind of go in and out seamlessly of like our attention to like the phone or the person in front of us and stuff like that. Realistically, like you’re only able to give kind of a certain thing, your focus one thing, right? Multitasking is kind of a fallacy and a lie. Um, and I think Cal Newport and some others have actually pointed to that with data and science, um, where it realistically, it’s actually just bad, bad work and it takes a lot of time for you to kind of rebuild up focus and get in the flow every time you transfer. And I think that’s true even with relationships like that. The, the, the, the, the metaphor stands true for not just like actual work you should be doing, but then like, yeah, your phone and then a relationship right in front of you.

You can only be present and one of those, and there’s a lag time when the transfer between those two that then becomes dead time. If you trying to refocus that you and your actually trained from the phone to be more micro segmented and more fragmented in that moment, which then hurts relationships. So I think, yeah, we just have to understand and pick. We have to be like, Hey, if I’m here, I’m here and I’m pissed because when you’re on your phone, you are somewhere else. And that’s where we have to, we have to think because that’s a device in our hands that it’s just like we’re right here. No, no. If there was people on that screen and you’re interacting with people, that means you’re with them wherever they are in the world, you’re talking to them, you’re having a conversation with them, you’re connected with them.

And that’s why I’m not demonizing social media on the phones. They’re awesome. Right. Like, I can connect with people, I can email people, I can. It’s really cool. But that means you’re not then with the person in front of you. So we make, we have a ton of boundaries where like, yeah, our phone doesn’t come out for date nights. I leave it in the car. Even just the other day when we went to church, I leave it at home. Like I think it’s like I don’t, I’m almost trying to see how much I can not have it around me. I think it’s actually kind of ridiculous that we all think it has to be in our pocket all the time. And there was a time very recently where a phone used to be attached to a wall and you couldn’t put it in your pocket.

And so I think we obviously have seen and can show that, that you could probably get by without it. Well, I’m not going to try to paint you into a corner with asking you specific, uh, people that live by these rules. But, um, Paul Graham is one of my, uh, favorite entrepreneurs out there. He’s the guy behind Airbnb and Dropbox and read it. And Paul was also the guy who invented the via web, which is the modern internet shopping cart that he sold to Yahoo back in the day. And Paul talks specifically about how he just, he does not keep a phone on him. And I have found this, uh, Jeff as I’ve interviewed more and more billionaires with a B in millionaires with an M, it seems as though the more successful people, people are, the more intentional they are with where they spend their time.

And the less often their phone is on, which seems kind of counterintuitive, you know what I mean? When you’re interviewing Wolfgang puck or John Maxwell, you would assume that these guys must be, Oh wow, these guys must be on the phone all the time. Jeff, working at Twitter, working at baby LinkedIn, working at Facebook, just email, you know, but, but no, they have their push notifications turned off. They’ve got their phone away from them and when we’re doing the interview, they’re very present. And when they’re, wherever they are present, they’re always mentally and physically present. Where’s the biggest struggle that people have? You think when they’re going to listen to this message and you say, no phone on date nights, leave the phone at home when you’re at church, where, where do you predict the biggest pushback to be? Or maybe where, where has been your biggest struggle with this?

Um, I mean, I think first of all, it’s like an incremental practice. You have to learn and kind of get better at it because the phone has psychologically and physiologically kind of been wired into us. So then it has to physiologically be wired out of us. It’s not something that you can tend to do overnight. So it’s a practice where you learn the discipline. But I think, yeah, most people usually tend to get really kind of, uh, push back pretty hard on like, well, what about an emergency? Or what about X? And it’s like, well, yeah. And those are things to be wise about, but you also can’t craft your life around the 1.01% chance of something happening. You can’t craft the 99% around the 1% that’s just not how life is. Right. And the same way, like I live in Hawaii, you know, there’s maybe 10 or 11 shark attacks a year, but if you do the math, you know, 6 million tourists coming in a year, how many times they get into the ocean per year.

The locals like the chance, like the statistical chance of like actually getting bit by a shark is ridiculously low, way lower than even car crash in some of these other things. And so if I didn’t get in the ocean to go swim because a shark attack might happen, that would be ridiculous. I’d be crafting my life around kind of an irrational fear. And so I think sometimes that’s the thing that people need to realize is like, Oh, you might miss an email, you might miss this, but statistically like, that’s not on your side, right? It’s on your side to actually understand that. Um, man, like you’ll be okay, he’ll survive. You’re not that needed. You don’t need to talk. You don’t, you know, you’re not, you’re not that I’m special. Like, that’s what I tell myself. Like I know like I’m not that awesome I got on, people don’t need to talk to me or care about me or, I mean I’m, I want to believe in myself, but I’m saying that like, yeah, like I’m not, there’s something about always feeling needed here. What I’m trying to say that gives us a false sense of like power and that we’re really special and I think that’s where a lot of times we don’t want to talk about that part.

Now you, you, you are a guy that, uh, in your books, you’re, you’re very transparent. I understand you had kind of a wake up call that led you to write this book or was maybe part of the inspiration. Um, could you share with us about the wake up call?

Yeah, I mean I was kind of, I kind of alluded to it earlier, but basically our marriage just in our, in our life and work and it’s, everything got to the point, nothing so drastic, but a wake up call point where I was just like, Oh yeah, start getting to the point of like, Oh man, there’s, there’s a lot of tension here and just burn out. Like we’re not, I’m waking up every day and I’m kind of fried, you know, our marriages are having a lot of tension cause we’re arguing about this and commitment and all that stuff. And I realized, man, we were basically living a life that was just responding to everything. Like we meaning like we weren’t actually crafting the life we wanted and living intentionally. We were just doing all the things we thought we should be doing. And that’s like a very quick recipe for disaster.

How long have you and your wife been married as of the date of this recording? Uh, I think just about seven years. And, uh, you guys do a little a, a show together sometimes, you know, you’re up there on YouTube all the time doing your uh, uh, a kind of a vlog together, you know, kind of a podcast together. Um, what’s your working relationship with her and how have you two worked together to, uh, to hell with the hustle, you know, how have you, what are, have you guys did, did she first bring up, there’s a problem. Did you bring it up as a problem? Did you talk through it together to talk to me about your working relationship and how you guys each came to this conclusion together?

Yeah. Well I think especially for the married people out there, I think you just, we started to realize, man, like we’re not two people going to opposite ways, but were the way for this marriage to be the best is when we work as a team and to work as a team means you really welcome everyone’s strengths so that you become a more well rounded team. And I think a lot of times marriages, sometimes we’ll look at each other as opposites and the part that there may be, you know, and you say, Oh, you’re not fast enough for me or you’re not making decisions quick enough for me and this. But the team part would say, Oh yeah, you actually really balanced my quickness by being more thoughtful and methodical. We’re going to put those together and try to really live in the tension. And so I think, yeah, that’s how we kind of have tried to live in this is by welcoming all the assets about our strengths to help mitigate against our weaknesses.

And then what that does is then that allows us to then live intentionally and kind of with a more focused cause. That’s really what it comes down to is, again, like I said earlier, a lot of people just aren’t living with focus and intentionality. But when you realize that, when you understand that man, you get to kind of, um, choose the life you want and not like, you know, not in like the pseudo ridiculous self-help way of like, you know, choose this and it will become true and all that. But no, I’m not saying that. But you get to live every single day with a focus and a mission and a purpose that you kind of can put yourself on. And I think that really, really matters. You know, Jeff Bethke, the other day I was playing basketball with one of my friends, uh, Andy math when he played division one basketball at oral Roberts university, a Christian school in Oklahoma who’s six foot five big muscular guy.

He’s, he’s almost, yay. He is 40 now. He’s 40 years old, but he’s built like Richard Jefferson from the NBA or something. Just, just jacked Jeff and I’m playing that guy to 21 in the pool. We’re playing basketball in my swimming pool or playing to 21. Yeah, it is Jeff. Whenever you lose, you gotta run it back right away. You just gotta hurry up, run it back. And I’m just getting destroyed. I’m not getting close, I’m getting destroyed. And I was in that moment and uh, one of the people at my house said it was so fun watching you two men who are both in your forties or almost in your forties playing basketball, being entirely present, you know, just been fully engrossed in that game. Cause you don’t see that today very much on basketball courts or in backyards. And people are constantly looking down at their phone.

And I think that’s a sad, a sad thing. Can you talk to us about the embracing the things that really matter and maybe in maybe if you could define for us what really does matter in life and then, yeah, but it doesn’t matter. I think you have to just really center relationships. You know, I think a lot of us are looking in our cause work is a lot more, um, how can I say, the feedback loop on work is a lot stronger. Meaning like we see quickly, um, and we get affirmation quickly based on the results. But relationships are a lot messier like that. They, the, the richness and the depth of relationship is not this feedback loop that hits us every day, but it’s more this meaningful kind of like soft touch that you, that builds and is like compound interest as you go forward. And so I would say yeah, I understand that relationships are the most important. Um, and kind of center those and then put things like technology and some of these more kind of noisier things around us on the fringes cause we make technology center right. Um, and that intimacy really is key. Like the relationships with people who actually really know you, who you are, what your like, um, how to help you and living in community. And I think those things are kind of the most important things. And then everything flows really healthily. Out of that.

What a are meaningless tasks in your mind, what are, what are a few meaningless tasks that maybe you go, Hey listen here you are definitely caught up in the hustle and you need to say to hell with the hustle if this is how you spend your day. Cause right now, I mean psychology today is showing that the average American is now spending over 11 hours a day on their smartphone, consuming media or interacting with it. Uh, what are a few of the meaningless tasks you would encourage our listeners to avoid?

Um, yeah, I mean I think phone time is a huge one. Um, I think, um, a bunch, I think even work stuff can kind of be like that even if it seems even for some other person would be really meaningful. It can be really meaningless to you because I think you have to understand like what are you created to do and carve to do. I think anytime you’re trying to do something that you think other people want you to do it, but you don’t ever have never thought through it on why you should do it, then that’s fairly meaningless in my opinion because that’s not a goal or a reason. You should live for something in life. And so that’s one. Um, I would say, yeah, anytime you’re doing something that just, anytime you’re doing something that feels like you’re burning out. So if you’re ever starting to feel like, man, I’m, why am like kind of where you get to the end of it and you go, what did I just do? Why did I just do that? That’s always a really helpful barometer. And then that tends to happen more than we think. And so I’d say that one for sure too.

Uh, did you grow up playing Oregon trail? Are you old enough to have played Oregon trail? Yeah, that’s a good game. Oh man. Do you define that as a meaningless task if an adult man or woman around here is playing Oregon trail for 12 hours in a day? What do you think about that? Yeah,

I mean I guess it depends, right? Cause then if it’s stuff Fortnite guy who just won, you know, $3 million or whatever, then it kind of depends. So I think that’s why it’s kind of so subjective, but it matters with like focus. Like he clearly, the guy who just won the video game championship for fortnight clearly was living a very, he doesn’t get there or win that unless he’s insanely focused on, uh, on a, on a vision and a mission. But yeah, most of us that’s pretty meaningless.

Oh, I want to ask you about your, your personal schedule now. Now that you, um, in your, your bestselling author, uh, your, you have a ton of social media impact. There are many people, I think for you, you don’t care about as many followers as you care about how many people you’re impacting, how many people you’re helping, but you’re, you’re making an impact. What is your schedule now look like today, Mr. Jefferson Bethke D D do you wake up at, uh, you know, 1:00 AM and do you just grind until midnight every night? You go to bed at 9:00 PM, or you are you, what is your schedule? Look,

yeah, my schedule is a little unique and so for me, because I’m self employed, I try to really shape it around. Um, and we have little kids. I try to shape it around kind of centering the kids and how most we can, um, kind of make sure to get the most amount of time with them. And so yeah, I wake up pretty early, I wake up on four and we’ve got 4:00 AM probably half the week and 5:00 AM the other half of the week. Um, but that’s not, but I also am not a guy who thinks like, you know, burn the candle at both ends and all that. I go to bed at eight or 9:00 PM that’s hot. You go to bed at what time? Like I would say probably have to wake up, probably go to bed at eight. And if I stay up late, I go to bed at like nine, nine, 15.

Which is funny cause that’s only like an hour and a half past my kids. But that’s just works for us. Like cause I again, cause I’m intentionally trying to craft a life around what I’m trying to accomplish. And so then I’ve had to actually manipulate sleep. Not mainly manipulate it in the sense of like cheat it, but like, Hey, I just need, I need eight hours to function really well and healthily while I, let’s bump these eight hours a little earlier. And so, um, because I work really, really good early in the morning, the kids aren’t up yet, early, early in the morning, um, nothing good really happens at 10 or 11:00 PM or productive for me. So I just said, why would I not, you know, want to kind of back this all up. And so, yeah. So I’ll wake up really early and I’ll kind of work in a couple of blocks. I’ll usually, like all this book was all written probably from four to 8:00 AM, um, to hell with the hustle and most of them are.

And then I’ll kind of hang out, you know, hanging out with the family, have breakfast, chill, take a little break, and then I’ll kind of maybe, um, work a little bit more when they go down for nap in the middle of the day. And then, um, yeah. And so I’m still working probably, you know, eight, nine hours a day. But in kind of two or three blocks spread throughout the day. And then, yeah, and then the kids go down early at six 30, which is pretty early even for most kids. But again, we’re crafting again our family around what we want to accomplish and then I’ll hang out with my wife and make sure we get some time together for about an hour or two at night. And uh, yeah. And that, that, and we’ve, that’s been intentional because it kind of is taking us where we want to go, if that makes sense.

So you, you do you work from 4:00 AM to 8:00 AM or what are you doing from 4:00 AM to eight?

Yeah, that’s probably my most strongest work. I’m usually writing, doing any type of content creation. Cause again, for me, I’ve been trying to say I try to be sensitive to learning myself and I’ve learned that like I don’t write or I don’t produce anything very well. Uh, like past 10, 11:00 AM I start kind of having this fade. And so that’s a really good time for like emails and administrative work, right? Or planning or whatever. But the actual like writing the real hard like kind of stuff you need to really be all in for. I’m mostly laser focused the earlier I get up.

And do you, uh, do you work out of your house right now in Hawaii? Yeah. So do you have a view that looks out over Palm trees or do you decide to adjust your views that you’re looking over like a dumpster or tell us the view. I mean w what do you like to look as it, is it a dumpster? Is it, is it Palm trees? Is it ocean? Are you, are you, what are you looking at?

Yeah, well I’m in my office right now doing this podcast and yeah, it’s definitely, it’s our front. I look out towards our front yard and so I see a bunch of our neighbors and houses. But yeah, it’s mostly Palm trees and everyone’s yard.

Okay. Okay. Final questions for you, idiosyncrasies. Um, I’ll tell you this one. Your, your, any cynically just beautiful man. I don’t know if you’re doing a lot of coconut oil up there and Hawaii, if you’re doing a lot of fish oil, what’s going on here? A handsome guy, uh, your, your wife appears to, to be unable to see you though. She’s an attractive lady or handsome guy. You had a great family, beautiful family. Things are well, you smile a lot on camera. There’s just so many things that are weird about you. But what, what are you yo secrecy do you feel that makes you successful?

Um, we actually kind of already mentioned, I was gonna say, yeah I did. I did. I go to bed really early and get up really early and not from the methodology of the people who say like, you know, burn the candle at both ends. That actually bothers me when people say like, you know, stay late or get up early and grind. And I’m like, no, I’m like, you, you can’t function well without eight to 10 hours of sleep. Like that’s been proven and that’s been shown. So I think that’s actually where I’m very idiosyncratic cause I believe the more sleep I get and the more rest I get, the actual then more productive I can actually be at work and yeah, I mean who else? What other 29 30 year old goes to bed at 8:00 PM that that’s probably my idiosyncratic syncratic NDIS now. Okay.

Okay. Your wife, does your wife work with you on the day to day in the business or do you have your day to day? But yeah, she’ll hop in and be and contribute and we kind of do it as a team, but I definitely take more of the lion’s share of the day to day workload part of it. Okay. Final two questions for you. Somebody out there as contemplating buying your book. You know, they’re going, gosh, what would a carpal tunnel and I, I could go to Amazon and click the button and I, I could do it. I, I could buy it to hell with the hustle, reclaiming your life in an overworked, overspent and over connected world. Or, or I could spend $23 on a cheese. I’m going to the grocery store, I could just buy some cheese and you know, get some good cheese and some expensive cheese. Why should somebody buy your book over some expensive cheese?

Well, it depends on the cheese cause honestly, if it was I love cheese and if it’s really good cheese, I would get the cheese instead of the book. But if it’s not the best of the best, the best, then maybe the book can kind of, uh, be a better impact. What I would say is, yeah, I mean I just think, um, I’m really excited about the book and I’m excited about the conversation. It’s starting and creating and I do think it’s a little singular and unique and that I’m trying to kind of blow the whistle and kind of say, Hey, let’s stop. Let’s pay attention. Let’s think about this more than most other books I’m seeing right now. And most of books are doing the opposite. And so I think a, yeah, if you want a book that’s not kind of um, uh, that you’re not hearing, uh, similar tones from and a lot of other books out right now, then yeah, I would love to have them check it out and then also let me know on social media too.

I’m active. I’d love to hear like kind of have a two way conversation there about it. Do you have a, uh, a favorite kind of cheese? Um, I’m a pretty big cheese lover in general. So yeah. Any type of the nicer cheeses that can go on like a shirt coutnry board. I obviously loved the, you know, I do pizzas with like Gorgonzola and blue cheese and pheta and goat cheese and all those. So yeah, that’s any, anything really. All I know on Amazon, when someone buys your book on Amazon, the profits are a lot less than if they buy them direct from you. If somebody buys the book direct from you, you know, for 50 bucks, will you throw in some Gouda cheese? If it may be shipped up from Maui, I would, but I probably would not turn out so good once it gets there.

Okay. Okay. Final question for you. We’ve got about a half million folks who listen to this podcast each and every month, many of which are self employed or want to be, um, as it relates to your new book or, or not. It’s the, the, the floor is yours. What is one message you want to share or a word of encouragement? What’s something you’d like to say to all the listeners today who have taken time out of their schedule to invest in listening to this show? I would say kind of the, the heart of the book. And that’s actually being encouraged. Not, don’t feel like you hear a bunch of, be like, I gotta stop this and stop that here. Actually, the encouragement that when you actually live a really methodical, slower life, it leads to a deeper, richer, more meaningful life. And that’s counterintuitive to our culture. But when you start stepping into that, the fruit starts showing. And so I would

just tell them to be encouraged with that. And understand that even though maybe people around them don’t understand it or don’t get it. Jeff Bethke, I appreciate you being with us on the show. I appreciate you for opening up about your knowledge of cheese, and I hope to do interview part three, or we can really get into the deep dive of you making pizzas at home, uh, how you and your wife and kids have managed the kiddos life in Hawaii. And, and I just, I love having you on the show. You have such great energy. Thank you for all the content that you’re putting out there. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Are you taking

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and now without any further ed two, three, boom.