What Happened at the 1% Forum 2025 - Part 2
The uncomfortable side of chasing excellence - it eventually turns on your own beliefs.
Part 1 covered the external world - money, legal protection, real estate, publishing, AI, and the economics of attraction. If you missed it, go back and read it first.
Part 2 is different.
Day 2 of the 1% Forum went internal. My keynote, a molecular biologist who left the Mayo Clinic and never looked back, the man who runs the Unplugged Brotherhood, a software entrepreneur with a $66 million exit, and a closing session where I and Orion Taraban took questions from the floor for ninety minutes until they’d covered just about everything.
This is the blueprint work. The foundation underneath all the tactics.
The Anti-Fragility Blueprint
I gave this talk for the men in that room, and I’ll give you the condensed version here.
The central idea is Nassim Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility - not just surviving chaos, but being positioned so that chaos makes you stronger. Jeff Bezos didn’t just survive the 2008 recession or the COVID pandemic. He profited massively from both, because his business model was built to benefit from the disruption everyone else was trying to protect themselves from. That is the posture I want every man in my world to be building toward.
The blueprint has several layers.
Taxation and environment. Most men are passive about where they live and how they structure their finances, and it costs them enormously. Run as much of your life as legitimately possible through your business. Find an accountant who thinks outside the box, not one who tells you what you can’t do. “Forgiveness over permission” is the operating principle. Your assets don’t need to be where your ass is - understanding this one sentence changes how you think about almost every financial decision you make.
Maneuverability. This is the one that separates the men who have options from the men who are trapped. Multiple passports. Assets distributed across jurisdictions. The ability to pilot vehicles of different kinds - a plane, a boat, a motorcycle. A global network of fixers who can solve problems quickly when normal channels are unavailable or compromised. You cannot build maneuverability in a crisis. You build it before you need it, and then you hope you never need it.
Health resilience. TRT if your levels warrant it, done properly. Cold plunging. Intermittent fasting. Weighted vest walking. Inversion tables. The point is not any single protocol but the principle underneath them all: a man who is not physically capable in a chaotic scenario is a liability to everyone around him, including himself. That is the standard.
Women and family law. Never live in a way that looks like marriage to the state. I cited the Mike Lackner case - a man who never married and never cohabited, but was still ordered to pay $50,000 a month based on the lifestyle he had provided. The state will find a way to reach into your pocket if you give it the opening. Vet women for a minimum of eighteen months. Never share finances unless she earns more than you. Have children only in jurisdictions where shared custody is the default, not something you have to fight for.,
Government trends. Western governments are expanding. They will continue to expand. They will tax more, monitor more, and restrict more, and Canada - where I live - is the cautionary tale at the front of that line. This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition. The man who sees the direction of travel and positions accordingly is not pessimistic. He is prepared.
Black swan preparedness. Stores of value that exist outside the financial system. Alternate currencies. Skills that remain useful when complex systems fail. A network of men you trust completely. The scenarios that trigger this layer of preparedness may feel remote. They always do, right up until they don’t.
The talk closed with something I want to leave you with here. Leadership is not a title. It is not a position. Everything that is not working in your life - your relationships, your finances, your health, your community - is a leadership problem. “She’s not doing what you want her to do. It’s a leadership problem. It all comes back to you.” That framing is not comfortable, but it is liberating.
Dr. Anthony Jay - Everything You’ve Been Told About Your Body is Wrong
Dr. Anthony Jay is a molecular biologist and DNA/genetics expert who spent years doing autopsies at Boston University, ran stem cell research at the Mayo Clinic, and eventually left over a principled disagreement about vaccine mandates. He now runs a genetics consulting practice and has done DNA testing for U.S. Special Forces at Fort Bragg. He is the author of Estrogeneration.
His talk was two hours of demolishing medical conventional wisdom with the precision of a man who has spent his career reading the actual data rather than the pharmaceutical industry’s summary of it.
His foundational framework is simple: your body runs on one of two fuel sources, sugar or fat, and which one you’re running on determines almost everything about your energy, your hormones, your cognitive function, and your long-term health. “Sugar is dirty energy. It’s like a diesel truck with black smoke coming out. Fat burning is more clean energy. It’s like a Tesla. There’s no emissions.”
Most men are stuck burning sugar and have been their entire lives. Becoming fat-adapted takes roughly three months of disciplined dietary change, and the other side of it - the sustained, clean, crash-free energy state - is genuinely different. He cited Zach Bitter running a hundred-mile world record at a 7:48 per mile pace while nose-breathing as proof of what a fully fat-adapted metabolism looks like under extreme load. He cited Mike McKnight running 118 miles on zero calories. These are not outliers. They are demonstrations of a capability that exists in every human body that hasn’t been systematically suppressed by a diet of constant carbohydrate loading.
His recommended protocol: skip breakfast (black coffee only, no sugar), eat a carnivore lunch with zero carbohydrates for sustained afternoon energy, and have carbohydrates at dinner to raise serotonin for sleep quality and mood regulation. A six to eight hour feeding window daily. A twenty-four hour fast once a month. A three-day fast once a year.
On blood markers, he was specific: fasting glucose below 85 in American units (4.7 in European), triglycerides below 85 (1.0 European), testosterone above 500 with 700 as the real target. He spent considerable time on testosterone, including a story that got one of the biggest reactions of the weekend: while he was being given bureaucratic resistance trying to obtain milligrams of testosterone for legitimate research, a colleague across the hall ordered a kilogram of cyanide - and nobody cared. “Pharmaceutical companies do not like testosterone.” That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business model.
On estrogen disruption, his advice was practical and immediate: stop drinking liquids from plastic containers. Avoid fragrances - they are endocrine disruptors. Don’t trust BPA-free labels, because BPS, the substitute, is equally problematic. The xeno-estrogens accumulating in the modern male body are a direct contributor to testosterone resistance - a state where your body produces adequate testosterone but cannot utilize it effectively because the receptor sites are occupied by synthetic estrogen compounds.
His supplement recommendations: Vitamin D3 taken with K2 (not without it - K2 directs calcium to bones rather than arteries), zinc as an underrated testosterone booster, and magnesium glycinate before bed for sleep quality. Not magnesium citrate - that is a laxative.
On stem cells, he presented hyperbaric oxygen chambers as one of the most cost-effective interventions available. A single session can double your circulating stem cells. Eight sessions can increase them twenty-fold. The cost is roughly $200 per session. Compare that to IV stem cell injections at $20,000 to $40,000, using donor cells from people whose health you know nothing about - what he called, memorably, “McDonald’s stem cells.”
He closed with the LDL cholesterol paradigm, which he dismantled entirely using his own autopsy findings: vegans with textbook-low LDL numbers and massive arterial plaque. The normal range for LDL was lowered from 300 to 200 not because the science changed, but because lowering the threshold put millions of additional patients into the statin market. “You can’t be normal in our culture today. You can’t be normal with your blood sugar. You can’t be normal with your triglycerides. You can’t be normal with your testosterone.” Being normal is the problem.
Ori Staub - Software is the Purest Form of Leverage Ever Invented
Ori Staub has never held a traditional job. He has spent over twenty-five years building software companies in the SaaS space. His company Serviceway - field service management software for the hazardous and industrial waste sector - was acquired for $66 million. His forum talk was a masterclass in how to think about software as a business model, and it applied whether you are a developer or have never written a line of code in your life.
His opening claim framed everything that followed: “Software is the purest form of leverage ever invented.” Zero marginal costs. Global reach from day one. Eighty percent gross margins. Recurring revenue. No inventory, no logistics, no physical constraints. Eight of the top ten S&P 500 companies are software-leveraged. The model is not a trend. It is the dominant structure of value creation in the modern economy.
His framework for identifying software opportunities is a two-by-two matrix of problem complexity versus problem frequency. High complexity and high frequency is where the multi-billion dollar outcomes live - AWS, Salesforce, Stripe. Low complexity and high frequency enables viral consumer SaaS - Slack, Calendly. High complexity and low frequency is deep enterprise. Low complexity and low frequency is where you don’t want to be. The question to ask about any business idea is where it sits on that matrix.
His methodology starts not with a solution but with pain. “Start with pain, not solution.” Human motivation is driven more powerfully by avoiding pain than by seeking pleasure, and the best software products solve an acute, recurring problem that the customer is already trying to solve badly - usually with a spreadsheet they hate. “Every great SaaS I’ve ever built was a spreadsheet someone hated.”
He walked through the Serviceway origin story as a live demonstration of the methodology. He heard about inefficiencies in septic system management at a bar conversation in Caesar’s Palace. Before building anything, he spent three days riding a septic truck to understand the actual workflow. He built routing and job management software, converted customers at three to ten times the price of what they were paying before, expanded into adjacent verticals, and exited at $66 million in six years. The idea was ordinary. The execution was not. “80% of business success is execution. It’s not genius.”
His product development framework: build a minimum lovable product - not a minimum viable product, but something people genuinely love using - measure everything, learn from retention rather than acquisition, and ship on two-week sprint cycles. “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version, you shipped too late.” The market will tell you what the product needs to be. You cannot know it from the inside.
He closed with a line that landed differently than most things said at the forum, because it came from a man who has actually built and sold something significant: “Vision without execution is hallucination.” There is no shortage of men with ideas. There is a shortage of men who show up on the two-week sprint cadence and ship the thing. That gap is where the $66 million exits live.
Orion Taraban - The Q&A Nobody Wanted to End
The joint Q&A between myself and Orion Taraban lasted ninety minutes and it could have gone three hours without running out of material. This is the session that the men who were in that room still talk about.
Taraban opened by telling the Coolidge effect story - President Calvin Coolidge visiting a farm, his wife observing a rooster mating with multiple hens and asking the farmer to make sure the President knew about it, and Coolidge asking whether the rooster mated with the same hen every time. The answer was no. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.” The biological reality of male novelty-seeking, laid out in a story that is over a century old and still completely accurate.
The conversation moved to life chapters. Taraban framed his most important decision as leaving a “B-minus life” in New York acting at twenty-eight to start over in San Francisco as a psychologist. He called the process “dreaming at high resolution” - not vague aspiration but precise, detailed vision of a specific life you want to be living. “We cannot underestimate what we can accomplish in eight years, but we only have eight chapters.” If you are in your thirties, you have four or five chapters left. What are you building in this one?
I shared my parallel story: fired at thirty, multimillionaire within six years. I’ve told bits and pieces of this story across a thousand videos. In that room, in conversation with Taraban, the version he told had a texture it doesn’t have in the edited format.
On indirect communication, Taraban shared something he learned from studying women that most men never think to apply. Women default to indirect communication - the embedded request, the implied need, the statement that contains an ask. “It’s cold in here” is not a weather report. It is a request to change the temperature, delivered through a statement that allows the woman to maintain plausible deniability about asking. Men who learn to communicate this way - who learn to lead conversations toward outcomes without issuing direct commands - are dramatically more effective in every domain, not just with women.
On monogamy, Taraban made the point that has been at the center of his work for years: “Any woman that I would give an exclusive commitment to wouldn’t need the exclusive commitment in order to stay.” If the commitment is the thing keeping her in the relationship, the relationship is already in trouble. What you want is a woman who is there because she wants to be there, and who would keep choosing you regardless of whether a contract existed. The commitment, when it comes, is a reflection of what’s already true. It is not the thing that makes it true.
I added the frame I have been teaching for years in the language I use with my audience: women should always feel replaceable. Not as cruelty. As reality. A man who has genuine options and knows it carries himself differently from a man who doesn’t. Women feel that difference. They respond to it.
On contempt, both men converged on the same signal. “Contempt is the clock that ticks down to the end of any kind of relationship.” Not disagreement, not conflict, not even anger - those are all signs of investment. Contempt is the signal that the investment is gone. In a relationship, in a community, in a business partnership - when contempt appears, the end is already written. The only question is how long it takes to arrive.
They closed with a line from Taraban that I want to leave you with, because it is the cleanest summary of everything both men were saying across the entire forum: “You can’t love with the expectation to be loved back. That makes love a transactable good, and so now, it’s no longer love.” The same principle applies to respect, to trust, to loyalty. You give it because you are the kind of man who gives it. Not as a transaction. Not as a strategy. As a standard.
The Closing Panel - Burn the Ships, Raise Good Kids, and Cut the Seed Oils
The final session brought all the speakers together on stage for an open Q&A. What followed was part health clinic, part parenting seminar, part entrepreneurship masterclass, and entirely unrepeatable.
Dr. Jay dominated the health portion and the room was grateful for it. On stem cells, he repeated and expanded his recommendation for hyperbaric oxygen chambers, contrasting the $200 per session cost against $20,000 to $40,000 for IV stem cell injections using donor cells of unknown quality. On sunscreen, he advised against it entirely unless zinc-based - conventional sunscreen chemicals are endocrine disruptors - and traced conventional sunburn risk back to seed oils skewing the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, which the ancestral diet maintained at roughly 4:1 and which the modern Western diet has pushed to 20:1. On thyroid, he recommended Armour Thyroid - derived from pigs, bioidentical to human thyroid hormone - over Synthroid and levothyroxine, which are synthetic versions the medical system defaults to because they are more profitable, not because they work better.
On parenting, the panel converged on a few things. Chris Kelly’s contribution was about presence: get on the floor at your child’s level, be a guide rather than a controller, be genuinely there rather than physically present while mentally elsewhere. If you punish the truth, all you get is lies. Children who learn that honesty has consequences learn to hide things. That is not a parenting strategy. It is a way of raising strangers.
Dr. Jay homeschools his kids, prioritizes outdoor activity and what he described as gun training, and made the point that has been documented extensively but rarely stated directly: “Sugar is cocaine for children’s emotional regulation.” The behavioral problems, the attention deficits, the emotional dysregulation that has become normalized in children - these are not inevitable features of childhood. They are the downstream effects of a diet that has been industrialized in ways that are profitable for food companies and destructive for developing brains.
The entrepreneurship portion of the panel centered on each speaker’s “burn the ships” moment - the point of no return where they committed fully and eliminated the fallback option. Dr. Jay leaving the Mayo Clinic over vaccine mandate disagreements. I myself being laid off. Peter Holmquist leaving the fish factory in Norway. Ori Staub choosing never to hold a job in the first place.
The pattern across all of them: the decision to burn the ships was not made from a position of certainty. It was made from a position of clarity about what they were not willing to keep doing. That is a different thing, and it is a more honest account of how these decisions actually happen than the retrospective narratives usually suggest.
Taraban had the final word on the cultural moment we are in, and it was characteristically precise. He framed the current experimentation with non-traditional relationship structures as children taking tentative first steps after the failure of traditional marriage for 55% of the population. They do not yet know what they are building. “Unsuccessful experiments tend to die out.” The structures that serve human nature and human flourishing will survive. The ones that don’t will not. We do not need to argue about which is which. We only need to wait.
In Conclusion
Two days. Top experts operating at the level they are describing. Men who have built something real.
The through-line across both days, and across all the speakers, was something nobody said explicitly but everybody demonstrated: the men on that stage did not get where they are by optimizing for comfort. Every one of them has a story of a moment where the comfortable option was available and they chose the harder one instead. Not because they were fearless. Because they were clear about what they were building and willing to pay the price the building required.
That is the 1% in the 1% Forum. Not income percentile. Not social status. The percentage of men who, when given the choice between the comfortable option and the one that actually moves them forward, consistently choose the latter.
The full presentations from the 1% Forum 2025 are available inside the School of Unplugging. Every talk, unedited, with the material that didn’t make it into these two articles. If what you read here hit home, that is where the rest of it lives.
2027 tickets are available now here.
The Cold, Hard Truth
Never forget:
Anti-fragility is not a philosophy. It is a construction project. Multiple passports, distributed assets, physical capability, a network of fixers, and a clear-eyed view of where governments are heading. Build it before you need it.
You are running on either sugar or fat. If you do not know which one, you are running on sugar. Three months of disciplined dietary change is the price of admission to the other side. The men who have made that transition describe it as one of the most significant upgrades of their lives.
Comfort is the enemy of growth. Not inconvenience - comfort. The voluntary hard thing is what builds the capacity to handle the involuntary hard thing. There is no other way to build it.
Software is leverage. If you are building a business and you are not thinking about how software applies to your model, you are leaving the most powerful scaling mechanism in the history of commerce on the table.
Women should always feel replaceable. Not as a game. As a reality. A man with genuine options carries himself differently, and that difference is felt before it is understood.
Contempt is the clock. When it appears - in a relationship, in a community, in a business partnership - the end is already written. Watch for it early. Act on it when you see it.
The decision to burn the ships is never made from certainty. It is made from clarity about what you are no longer willing to keep doing. That distinction matters.
Peace.
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