From Bible-Belt town to living and then escaping the American Dream, Conner Moore can now be found exploring consciousness, making podcasts, lifting heavy, and changing lives at Onnit – a company dedicated to Total Human Optimization. After his first business venture as a gym owner began to fall apart, Conner found himself cleaning the gym listening to Alan Watts and starting to wonder if there wasn't more to life than he'd been led to believe. Three months of living hand-to-mouth, combined with some powerful psychedelic experiences, changed his perspective on the world, which he shares with raw honesty in this interview.

After several exchanges online, Jon met up with Conner in Austin, Texas, to get down to the business of life, identity, pleasure, struggle, profanity, and going for your win – whatever that may be. This was a beautifully easy conversation to have: deep but fun, with a lot of cool insights along the way.

We talk about the different stories we tell about ourselves as we go through life; reinventing ourselves, but never quite leaving the old pieces behind. We get into how psychedelics led Conner to better know himself and take a step back and really assess where he was in life; and we discuss how to take control while remaining in the flow of your life.

Conner's about to launch his own podcast – The Pleasure Monkey Podcast – so we chatted about finding your voice and then the confidence to share it without feeling like you're an egotist. We also demolish the 'everything happens for a reason' cliché to find something more meaningful and realistic; we explore how to become comfortable with pain, risk and uncertainty; and we think about how it's precisely in moments of instability that we need to completely let go of the storylines we cling to.

Oh, and Jon gets triggered by gratitude, while Conner announces his future publication, The Douchebag Manifesto. How can you resist?

What We Get Into:

• Conner's greatest accomplishment
• ...and his greatest fear
• Sacrificing stability
• Getting conned in his first business venture
• The 3 components to finding success in any field
• 'Networking' the natural way
• Starting a podcast and finding your voice
• How to feel like you deserve to succeed
• Not attaching yourself to end-goals and missing the point of the game
• How to love bad dates
• Love, loss, and how to learn and grow from them
• Turning experience into ways to help others
• Not retreating into your Fear Cave
• Responding rather than reacting
• Stress spirals and how to avoid them
• Why you should pretend you're on a podcast at least once a week

Find Conner:

• On Instagram
• On Facebook

Mentioned in the Interview:

• Onnit and its CEO, Aubrey Marcus
• Aubrey Marcus's Go For Your Win course
• Not getting caught out when people play to your fantasies
• Ryan Holidays excellent books, The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy – check out our article on Ego here!
• Onnit's Total Human Optimization Podcast
• Conner's quote about not being entitled to the fruits of your labour, but to its lessons seems to have come from the Bhagavad Gita
• Pema Chödrön's books, The Places That Scare You and Comfortable With Uncertainty
• Conner's deep and enlightening conversation with Cory Allen on The Astral Hustle, #67
• Mark Manson's excellent book, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck
• Sarah Knight's The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Giving A Fuck