You're about to experience my honest review of Owen Cook and both his main YouTube channel and his Owen Cook Free Tour channel. I've been watching a lot of his videos lately. He's a self-help, personal development, dating, and how-to-sell-on-social-media kind of figure, somebody a lot like me, a social media influencer. He's got some really interesting stories and a lot of overlap with me, and I want to share the main lessons I've learned from watching about 10 or 20 hours of his free seminar videos.
I've never bought any of his courses, because I almost never buy courses that cost hundreds of dollars. I bought a couple before and they were utterly worthless, so I generally stick to just watching YouTube videos. He's got some really interesting talks in his videos. If you go through them, there's a lot of material on money, on how to make people chase you instead of giving your energy away to them, on dating and relationships, and tips about health.
Breaking the stress-and-coping cycle
One of the things I've found useful in his videos is to look at yourself and make sure you are not stuck in a stress-and-coping-mechanism cycle. That's where you're doing things that stress you out, like going to a job you hate, or staying in a relationship that sucks, or otherwise wasting your time and your life away. And then you go into all these coping mechanisms, like drinking, drugs, video games, watching TV, and overeating. You blow your whole life spending your time in those stress-coping-mechanism cycles.
This is clearly a guy who has a lot in common with me, someone who is unplugged from the matrix, out there sharing, being himself, taking the mask off. I've enjoyed a lot of his seminars because they're funny. He's really engaging. He's had a much different life from me in many respects. From what he's described, he's lived this really extravagant lifestyle at a surprisingly affordable cost, having big parties in LA, traveling the world, and dating all these different women. That is exciting, that's fun. There are lots of things, though, where my approach is to resonate with what fits, take what I can, and leave the rest.
Take responsibility and offer your biggest value
What I find really helpful in his mindset is the focus on personal responsibility: take responsibility for your life, get clear on the big value you have to offer the world, and get to work delivering it.
I was listening to one of his talks, and it motivated me to start offering an entire day with me on my website instead of just doing coaching calls. At the time I'd actually taken my one-on-one calls down, even though a lot of you have really enjoyed those. I realized that spending a whole day with me isn't something the masses would be interested in, but there are people out there who would love it. So I started offering that after listening to his videos. It's about tapping into the biggest value you can potentially offer the world. What skill are you really good at? For me, I'm very effective at teaching. I can learn something and teach it rapidly. I can quickly make a YouTube video and upload it, which is why I'm cranking out four YouTube videos a day across my eight different channels. I'm also very effective at talking with people one-on-one. I'm grateful that listening to Owen's videos helped me see something else I could offer.
Why I won't sell high-priced courses
One area where I differ from him is selling courses for hundreds of dollars and more. I've personally found that buying expensive courses rarely pays off. The best course I ever took was called How I Make $1,000 a Day on Udemy. I took it completely for free with a coupon, although I could have bought it for just $10, and that was the course where I made the most money and learned the most valuable things. I stay away from selling high-priced courses.
He's made a lot of his money, it looks like, by selling online courses, and he's selling one now for hundreds of dollars. I've found those courses are almost never worth it. Maybe I'll try his, if there's anybody I'd be interested in. But I don't think selling courses like that is a very good business model for most people. Here's my filter: if you can't teach it to me for free on YouTube, I certainly don't want to buy your online course; and if you can teach it to me for free on YouTube, I don't need to buy your online course. What I find really valuable is actually talking with somebody.
He does a lot of life coaching, from what he's said, and charges thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars for people to work with him. He was talking about turning down clients who only wanted to pay $60,000. I've heard a bunch of people you might think of as really successful, social media influencers and the like, and I've consistently noticed that the norm among them is to get a lot of coaching, to work with others, and to be accountable to others. If you want to go deeper on how I think about coaching, content, and building a real online business, I keep that conversation going over in my Life playlist, and you're always welcome to come work on this with me directly.
Take inventory and stop wasting your life
So the big thing he teaches is personal responsibility, which means taking ownership of your own actions. Another thing that caught me from one of his recent videos is that you need to take inventory of your life and how you're spending each moment, and stop wasting your life. Things like video games, TV, alcohol, drugs, and poisoning your body by eating a bunch of extra food. You don't have that much time in this life.
He also talks about realizing you already are dead, that you are an immortal, bigger being and you don't have to really worry about death. That's something I'm big into. At the same time, the lives in these bodies are very short. Many of us, myself included, have wasted tens of thousands of hours dumping them into pointless quests, achievements, competition, and video games. Watching his videos was one thing that helped me finally look at my video gaming and say this has to stop. Never again. No more wasting my time playing video games.
Sure, your mind will always go looking for exceptions, but sitting there playing video games by yourself, or streaming them, or trying to be a professional gamer, 99.9% of the time that's a waste of time. It's a coping mechanism, and it's something I don't ever want to do again. His videos were helpful for me to snap out of that, and I've written more about why I treat video games like alcohol now.
Out-of-the-box thinking and not getting sick
What's inspiring is listening to his out-of-the-box thinking. I love hearing people who think differently. He was talking in a recent video about how he hasn't been sick in 12 years, and that was very useful for me, because I have not been sick in almost two years. Here's somebody I'm looking at who hasn't been sick in 12 years, and I haven't been sick a single day in almost two years, and I know exactly why I got sick last time. So I'm really excited, because I definitely could go 12 years; he went 12 years, and therefore I can too.
Owen talks a lot about how the masses are often in what he calls a "derp" state, just being victims or bots, running constant stress-coping mechanisms. The secret is to get out of that, and the way to do it is to take responsibility for your life and audit it. What am I doing that's really valuable, that gives me energy, that excites me, that gives me enthusiasm? You can tell just listening to Owen's energy that he's a very high-energy guy.
To me, it looks like he kind of overdoes it a bit and goes maybe a little too hard on his talks, and from what he's said, he's worn his voice out doing that. I aim for a constant balance. I want to go every single day. I don't want to push my voice so hard that I wear it out; I'm happy to push it a little, but I want to be able to get up here and make videos every single day and still go hard. I want to give what I've got to give.
I agree with him a lot: if you're doing stuff that you love, you'll constantly move from one thing that excites you and gives you energy to another. The key is to cut out the stuff that drains you, whether that's a job, a relationship, drugs, alcohol, video games, or TV. This is not to say you can never play a video game or watch TV. It's about how much time you're putting into that stuff versus how much time you're putting into the things you love that are playful, fun, and joyful. Get as much time in that as possible, and cut the rest.
For me, what I do really well is making live teaching videos for YouTube. I can film four videos in an hour or two, put them out, and teach very effectively. What I've been inspired to do from watching his videos is make all kinds of online courses, and then put all of them free on YouTube. If you want my mentoring and coaching, you can schedule that, but I'm going to give you all the information and never sell you the information itself. That's what I can do, and that's where I'm at.
Pay attention to your diet
Owen talks about the importance of paying attention to your diet. If you're dumping toxic stuff into your body, it's logical that you're going to stress your body out and make it sick. You still want to take pleasure in eating your food, but you can have one bite of meat and take pleasure in it, versus eating a hamburger and five other things and meat all in one day. That's drastically different.
Make your life 1% better, one decision at a time
Do one big thing every day to push your life forward, plus one big thing a month and one big thing a year. If you can do that, you'll be able to do a lot of other things, and you just make your life 1% better. In one of his recent videos, he talks about evaluating everything you're doing in terms of whether it's making your life 1% better or 1% worse.
For me, every time I took a drink of alcohol, it was making my life 1% worse. After 11 years of taking a bunch of drinks, all of a sudden my life was in this horrible place and I didn't even know how I got there. Every time you decide to take a drink, you're pushing your life further and further down. And every day you stay sober and go to Alcoholics Anonymous, you're making your life a little bit better and a little bit better. We get frustrated and stuck trying to dig ourselves out of a hole; you can feel frustrated, hopeless, and stuck once you've fallen in. The hope comes when you realize that if you'll just eat in a way that leaves you feeling 1% better, go to meetings, get out there and help people, connect, and go travel somewhere, it adds up. If you want the full story of that climb, I shared it in going from a hopeless alcoholic to 10 years happily sober.
Scarcity, presence, and taking your life for granted
Something else that stuck with me is when Owen Cook talks about the scarcity element: if you live somewhere with all these beautiful things around you, you just take them for granted. He was talking about how lots of people haven't even gone to see the beautiful things near them, like the Redwood Forest in California, even though they live an hour or a couple of hours' drive away. They say, "Oh, I don't have time, I'm too busy," and yet they spend all this time on their phone every day, just messing around and wasting their life. And then even when people do go out there, they get their phone out, and all they do is live through their phone.
What I realized is that I want to make sure I consider that in my own life. There are so many restaurants I haven't eaten at. My wife and I just stayed at the Don CeSar hotel, which is only 30 minutes away. My wife has wanted to stay there her whole life. The last time she said that, I was like, "Eh, that's stupid, it's right there, we could just sleep at home." This time, after listening to his videos, I said, "Yes, let's go stay there." It was such a valuable experience. It broke my mind out of the usual habitual thinking. It surrounded me with people of wealth, and I was feeling some financial insecurity, and that actually helped me get the idea to ask for help and to ask for advice.
Money, identity, and the Rolex test
Owen talks a lot about money. He was talking about how, if you go around saying, "Oh, this guy has a Rolex, what a jerk, that's a way overpriced watch," you're also kind of saying, "Hey, I don't identify with having enough money where I could buy a Rolex and it wouldn't be a big deal." That got through to me, because I go around and do that. My wife and I were just talking about a lady having a $12,000 purse when we went out to dinner at the Don CeSar. I asked my wife, "How much money would you have to have before the $12,000 purse felt reasonable?" She said, "None, it's always unreasonable." And I thought, well, I might enjoy having a $25,000 gold necklace. I think that'd be cool; I'd just wear it sometimes. I bought a new pair of shoes yesterday. If you're comfortable having money, and if it's fun, and your identity isn't anchored on "I'm not one of those people," it changes how you move through the world.
Not all wealthy people are villains
Another thing Owen got through to me on is how he's interacting with lots of people who have money. We often have this idea that wealthy people are all jerks who rip others off. There certainly are wealthy people who operate like parasites, like demons, like the devil, who strictly use other people like batteries to get huge amounts of wealth so they can exploit and dominate. But there are other people who are truly loving, caring, and joyous, who've gotten money because they've served and given a lot to others. I'd love to throw myself in that class.
He's also shared the frustration a lot of people with money feel when they try to help: you give people money and they just blow it. He said lots of times people with money are very frustrated that they can't even do any good with it, because they give money to a friend who's broke, and the friend pisses all the money away and is broke again, and then on top of that they're mad that you won't give them more. It's like Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson's book, where he buys somebody a car, and the friend comes back with, "F you, 50, why didn't you give me a house? You got this other person a house, why did I just get a car?" That's why it's so important to take responsibility for your own life.
Surround yourself with masterminds
He also talks about being around people who have what you want. You want a community around you, which is why you want coaches and a mastermind group. In fact you want to be part of many mastermind groups: groups that are a level below you, where you're there to help people and lift them up; groups on your level, where you're all peers; and groups where you're the newbie trying to get lifted up.
Alcoholics Anonymous serves all of this for me. I go to some AA groups where I'm one of the veterans lifting other people up, with 10 years sober helping newcomers. I go to some meetings where I'm in the middle, with most people about where I'm at. And I go to others where I'm a baby, with people 40-plus years sober that I'm learning from. I've seen the power of masterminds in my own life, and I'm planning to get another mastermind group going for everybody who's heavily invested online in business, making money, and personal growth, people like me that I can help and serve. I had a great mastermind before and I let it go, so I want to bring that back. If that's you, you can join me and the rest of the family and we'll build it together.
Most people talk about freedom, but real freedom is beyond even the idea of freedom or security. Most people actually want a comfortable jail cell, and true freedom can be scary.
Where Owen and I differ on dating
One area where Owen Cook and I differ greatly is his outlook on dating and relationships. He's dated a whole lot and built all these dating courses and products. My philosophy is that I want to have a great relationship with one person. It's much easier to have a great relationship with one person, and there's a ton of growth available in that, compared to trying to date all these different people.
That's something I got from knowing people in their seventies who've dated a whole bunch. They've told me, "Jerry, basically all women and all men are the same. Yes, there are little differences, but if you can make a wonderful relationship with one woman, that'll generally be far superior to dating many different women." I've come to believe that relationships are the greatest form of wealth. So that's what I'm into: take what somebody has to offer that you want, and leave or ignore the rest. You have to be careful, though, because if you're listening to somebody a lot, you tend to absorb all of their thinking, and you have to screen some of that out. You can hear more of how I think about all of this in my Dating playlist.
So that's my review of Owen Cook and the Owen Cook Free Tour. I like to review the things I'm consuming, books, YouTube channels, products I'm using, so that I remember them and can share them with you. If you found this useful, take what serves you, leave the rest, and put it to work in your own life.