Digital Social Hour
Erik Huberman: Why Most People Don’t Want to Work Hard Anymore... | DSH #1705
25 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the lie about hard work that many people believe?
I was taught and most of the people I know were taught that work really hard and you'll build a great life for yourself and now I feel like the general consensus amongst the next generation is not that. It's an over-emphasis on work-life balance and I'm sure a lot of people disagree with me but I think there is an over-emphasis on work-life balance versus working like
most won't so you can live like most can't which is more what I subscribe to and so you see that with kids coming out of college that they don't want to work that hard they're doing it to check the bill to pay the bills and not necessarily to create something of themselves to build something of themselves and so being the one that has to give them bad news that work is hard is not really the position I want to put ourselves in and so we're now letting people have a job or two before they come back
All right, guys, Eric Huberman back on the show. I can't believe it's been two years, man. Yeah.
Chapter 2: What separates the 1.8% who succeed from the 98% who don't?
Time flies. That's nuts.
Chapter 3: Why is work-life balance often misunderstood?
Yeah. We went pretty viral on that first one. Yeah.
And you're in a different room, different building.
Yeah.
Chapter 4: Why did Hawk Media decide to go fully in-office?
Upgrading here.
How to level up, man. Now you're an author too. Yeah, exactly.
Chapter 5: How can company culture be built without people-pleasing?
What was the inspiration for this book?
You know, it was thankfully just a friend of a friend that was a book marketer. I was at a party and he's like, hey, have you thought of writing a book? And I actually had worked on a book before that I didn't like how it turned out. So I never ended up publishing it. And I was like, yeah, I've thought about it. And we just sat there chatting about it. And I'd done a ton of speaking on marketing.
And frankly, with that point, we had probably marketed 3000 brands. Actually, we had. That's, I think, on the cover of the book. And I realized there's a lot of consistencies amongst all of these companies and what made them successful.
And so I was like, yeah, I kind of have this marketing framework we're running constantly that's working really well and synthesizing that and simplifying it so that people can actually understand sort of the basic modern marketing 101.
Chapter 6: Why is trust crucial in marketing and buying decisions?
would probably be what I'd do. And he's like, well, let's do it.
Chapter 7: How does monitoring health early impact long-term success?
And honestly taught me a method to writing the book that made it really easy to put together. And then I'd say the hard part was marketing it. And thankfully, it became a bestseller. It's now taught at Columbia, NYU, and soon to be my alma mater, University of Arizona. Let's go. And so the first two happened organically. And then I reached out to my alma mater and said, hey, guys, what the hell?
Let's get this going. But yeah, it's gone really well. We give it to our employees, our clients. It's just the way we look at modern marketing and what we think about it.
Was there a marketing framework that worked across all industries?
Yeah. And the framework is just awareness, nurturing, and trust. So how do you let new people know that your business actually exists? Then what do you do with that awareness that actually turns them into customers? And then how do you create trust, which 75% of people won't buy from a company they don't inherently trust. The other 25% call the early adopters.
So how do you reach the rest of them? How do you build that trust through third-party validation and creating a brand? And so it's all those details on how you build a successful marketing campaign.
Wow. I never realized how important trust was. 75%, you said. That's an Edelman study. That's really high. Yeah.
people have to trust the brands these days yeah no and it's not even these days it's just you know people human nature is to frankly usually wait for someone else to try that berry so you know it's not poisonous like it's just how people kind of work and so uh again there's those hard chargers that are going to go figure it out themselves you know we all have those friends that buy the are the first to buy that new car first to buy that new gadget and they exist most people are waiting to see how everyone else likes it marketing is interesting man because i i went to college for it and i feel like they don't teach it effectively there
No, I went to college for it, too. And thankfully, now I'm on the University of Arizona marketing board and they're doing some great things there. But yeah, I mean, when I was in college, I was a management major and I used to make fun of marketing majors being like, what do you guys do, draw pictures all day? Like, I don't understand what this marketing thing is.
So, you know, kind of goes to show you never know. My favorite professor was one of my marketing professors was actually a chemistry major. So like what you do in college and what you end up doing don't always equate. But yeah. Yeah, the perception of marketing versus the reality is very different.
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