The Top 0.1% Of Ideas I’ve Stumbled Upon On The Internet

0:00:04 Well, let’s do it. So part two. Okay, here’s part two with George. If you wanted the business ideas,
0:00:08 we did that five banger business ideas. That was amazing. I got like goosebumps from it.
0:00:12 This is part two, we’re gonna do some of your frameworks. The biggest one, I think the one
0:00:26 that went the most viral is about high agency. You did a thread about one idea. I think you
0:00:31 framed it like one idea that has impacted my life the most is the concept of high agency.
0:00:36 Can you talk about what is high agency, why it matters and how you spot people with high agency?
0:00:41 So high agency, something I’ve probably thought about for six to seven years. It’s one of those
0:00:46 topics when you search it, it’s quite difficult to find online, which is why I then just started
0:00:52 writing about it to scratch my own itch. And the way I would describe high agency is if you
0:00:57 was stuck in a third world prison cell and had to call somebody to break you out, who would you
0:01:03 call? And that’s probably the most high agency person that you know. So I mean, thought experiment
0:01:09 time now, who do you guys think of when I ask that question? My friend, Jack Smith.
0:01:17 That’s a tough one. I feel like I would just go for the richest person I know, because I’m like,
0:01:21 the money is going to be the most valuable tool versus like a MacGyver who’s going to break me out
0:01:26 of my cell. So Steve Barla answered that question with Prince William, which I think is not allowed.
0:01:31 So it can’t be somebody who’s like a royal family member, but it has to be purely on merit.
0:01:37 Well, you know what, the meme you have in the tweet, I think is a great visual of this. So
0:01:39 Sam, have you seen the tweet? I don’t know if you’ve seen the tweet, but he basically-
0:01:43 Is that the one where he tells you like, if someone says something’s impossible,
0:01:48 a high agency person will think, well, that’s just a story you’ve told. Now I’m going to overcome it
0:01:53 versus a low agency person will be like, oh, that story is true. I think that’s a clue in it,
0:01:57 but I’m talking about the very first picture that he has in the tweet is basically two guys
0:02:02 stranded on an island. One guy, and they have these like pieces of wood basically that they have
0:02:08 from the island. One guy is using the wood to spell help. So that somebody, if somebody flies over,
0:02:13 our boat sees help that they’ll come save him. And the other guy just made a boat out of the wood.
0:02:17 And the high agency is the guy who’ll make the boat out of the wood. And most people
0:02:21 just put out a sign for help, and they’re kind of the victim, and they’re looking for somebody to
0:02:25 come and rescue them. I guess if I had to trim it that like, I think what’s the advert for high
0:02:32 agency that we spoke about last time would be high agency people or low agency people,
0:02:37 are they happening to life or is life happening to them? It’s a spectrum, right? Like the
0:02:43 circumstances, there’s different things that go on, but you could immediately plot that x y axis
0:02:47 in your head of people that you know of people that are like happening to life and people that
0:02:53 life’s happening to that. All right, let’s take a quick break because I want to talk to you about
0:02:56 some new stuff that HubSpot has. Now, they let me freestyle this ad here. So I’m going to actually
0:03:01 tell you what I think is interesting. So they have this thing called the fall spotlight showing
0:03:04 all the new features that they released in the last few months. And the ones that stood out to me
0:03:09 were Breeze Intelligence. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but if you’re in HubSpot and you have,
0:03:14 let’s say a customer there, you can just basically add intelligence to that customer,
0:03:18 the estimated revenue for that company, how many employees it has, maybe their email address or
0:03:23 their location, if they’ve ever visited your page or not. And so you can enrich all of your data
0:03:27 automatically with one click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence. They actually acquired
0:03:31 a really cool company called Clearbit and it’s become Breeze, which is great because now it’s
0:03:35 built in. I always hated using two different tools to try to do this. Now it’s all in one place. And
0:03:40 so all the data you had about your customers now just got smarter. So check it out. You can actually
0:03:45 see all the stuff they released through the cool website. Go to hubspot.com/spotlight to see them
0:03:51 all and get the demos yourself. Back to this episode. And so why does the idea of high agency
0:03:53 matter so much to you? You said you’ve been thinking about it for six or seven years. That’s
0:03:58 probably longer than your longest relationship. Tell me why you have had such a long relationship
0:04:03 with this concept. I think it’s the most under discussed personality trait. And it’s the most
0:04:10 probably important personality trait. And this most similar concept that I’ve seen online is
0:04:14 have you seen Paul Graham’s Relentlessly Resourceful? Yeah, well, he just says like,
0:04:19 “I’ve created YC. I’ve now seen thousands of founders. And if I think about the trait
0:04:24 that is most valuable in founders, it’s not intelligence. It’s not charisma. It’s not,
0:04:29 you know, engineering prowess. It’s, you know, the best founders are relentlessly resourceful.”
0:04:34 And that phrase, and he also says like, “Can you describe, you know, a test is would you describe
0:04:39 this person as an animal?” Would you say, “Yeah, he’s an animal.” And if you could say, “Man,
0:04:43 that guy’s an absolute animal or she’s an animal when it comes to this, that’s the sign of a winner.”
0:04:47 And I think that’s the output of a high agency person. How do you describe them? They’re basically,
0:04:52 they’re an animal. Yes. And he has a great bit in there of inverting it, which was what would be
0:04:57 the opposite. And it would be hapless, which is probably a good case of life happening to them.
0:05:01 And I think there’s a few, there’s a four kind of tenants. I would say
0:05:05 why high agency is probably not a sticky idea as much as it could be because it kind of has four
0:05:12 ideas in it, which is one, locus of control. So I have control. Two, intentionalism. So they’ve
0:05:16 thought about the direction that they want to go in. Three, resourcefulness, which is incapable of
0:05:21 getting the outcome. And then four, high bias fraction, which is they’ve already fucking started
0:05:25 the thing before they’ve even listened to this podcast. They’re just constantly moving. So those
0:05:31 cool things. And that’s, I think it’s not changeable. It’s sort of like telling people,
0:05:35 they should have started a business before they had children. It’s like, dude,
0:05:37 like, we don’t, I don’t like talking about that because like, you can’t fucking change that.
0:05:42 Like you are what you are. You know what I mean? It’s not particularly fun to talk about because
0:05:51 I think that you have that scale already set. I disagree, I think. Go on. Tell me, change my mind.
0:05:55 There’s definitely some truth to what you say. And also that’s quite high agency reply, right?
0:05:59 There’s definitely some truth to what you say. And I think there’s a little bit of a genetic
0:06:04 component to it. But theoretically, I think you could make somebody, you could reduce somebody’s
0:06:08 agency. Therefore, if you can reduce somebody’s agency, you could also increase their agency.
0:06:14 It’s probably like muscle building. There’s a genetic like component to it. But I still think
0:06:18 everybody can increase or decrease their agency, depending on the inputs that they put into the
0:06:23 system. I had a tweet once that, that went kind of viral about this, where I said,
0:06:27 one small poker tell for if an employee is going to be great is if they’re willing to
0:06:32 spend money out of their own pocket to move faster. They’re not doing it to impress you
0:06:36 or to take one for the team. And it’s not the money that matters. It’s that this person simply
0:06:41 cannot stand being blocked or slowed down. Sharks die if they stop swimming. And I said this
0:06:48 because we hired this woman in our business and she is so good. We’ve promoted her two times already
0:06:53 in probably two years. She now basically runs a huge part of the business and she’s awesome. And
0:06:57 one of the things that I noticed is that not the, not the spending money part, but I noticed
0:07:01 we’ll be talking about an idea and it looks like she’s not listening because she’ll start
0:07:05 like typing on her computer. And then I’m like, yeah, so just send that over to me. She’s like,
0:07:11 I just did. And I’m like, what? And she will literally do it before the words are done out
0:07:16 of my mouth. And she cannot help but taking action. Like her bias for action is so high
0:07:22 that it’s almost annoying. It’s so high that you’re like, Hey, can we just talk first before you go
0:07:26 finish the thing? But on balance, it is so much more valuable to have somebody who’s that high
0:07:32 action because they just get more done that she’s like 12 people. She is literally like an entire
0:07:36 team herself because she’ll make decisions very quickly. She’ll immediately implement it. And
0:07:41 then she’ll fix whatever’s broken so quickly before the other person has even gotten out of bed.
0:07:47 And I think that that’s a, it’s a trait that I that I now look for in hiring as well. But you
0:07:51 said something that’s interesting. You said it can be taught. So how do you develop high agency?
0:07:58 And it from Twitch has a flow chart. That’s really cool. I was like, literally a question by
0:08:04 question by question of how to develop somebody’s agency with time. I think I would use the Midwit
0:08:11 meme algorithm of how would I make somebody low agency and then avoid that. So if I was to make
0:08:18 somebody lower in agency, I would make them hyper general. I would use no deadlines. I would not
0:08:24 break things down into step by step instructions. So I would go through the list of how to make
0:08:29 somebody low agency first and foremost, and go through that. I’d say it’s much, it’s much easier
0:08:34 to spot in other people as well. So I look at who are the most high agency people that you know.
0:08:38 And then trying to reverse engineer the values and behaviors they have, then trying to analyze
0:08:44 yourself because it loops back to the first episode where self analysis is not that useful.
0:08:48 In terms of the job interview questions as well, Sean, like one of my favorite ones that I’ve told
0:08:53 a few founders, and they go, this is awesome, of asking for weird teenage hobbies, because if they
0:08:58 can go against the crowd when they’re a teenager, so much easier as an adult, tough, but it’s easier.
0:09:03 And I have one founder who voiced my mind the other day and goes, I pre screen all candidates
0:09:07 with that. And it’s like the best quality filter of potential people, of potential high
0:09:13 dangerous people. We on this podcast is the question I ask a bunch is I say, you’re awesome.
0:09:18 Like I’m so inspired by this right now. Well, if I had met you or I’ve been able to observe you
0:09:22 when you were 12, 13 years old, what would I have seen? Would I have had any clues that you would
0:09:26 become this kind of outlier type of person? A couple of people have said some pretty interesting
0:09:32 answers. So Jess Ma who came on and Jess Ma is a super impressive entrepreneur. I think Paul Graham
0:09:37 had said like, you know, the five most impressive or if you had to bet on five people in YC,
0:09:41 it would have been like Sam Altman, the Colissans and like Jess Ma was one of the five.
0:09:46 And she said like, she’s like, yeah, basically, I was kind of a runt in school. I wasn’t that good
0:09:53 at class. I kind of got picked on and I was weird. But I created like I liked gaming and I basically
0:09:57 created a server farm for my favorite game. I started charging for it and I was making basically
0:10:01 like tens of thousands of dollars renting out server space for this game back when I was,
0:10:06 you know, 14 years old. And we had Saeed Bulkie come on. This guy’s built basically a billion
0:10:13 dollar bootstrapped business, which is so unfathomable to be able to do. And somebody told me
0:10:18 that, you know, they go ask Saeed about when he was a teenager and he hacked his school’s system
0:10:22 so he could just change his grade. Like he was willing to do the work to hack into his school
0:10:26 system to like be able to change his grade versus just study for the thing and get a good grade.
0:10:30 And guess what? That’s also a guy who basically like found other growth hacks along the way to
0:10:35 grow his business incredibly fast without needing any capital. I was with a guy this weekend
0:10:39 and he’s a friend and he told this story. He’s a new friend though, but he told the story about
0:10:45 how he got in trouble when he was a kid because he built this thing that allowed him to remote
0:10:52 control a streetlight near his home. And then he goes on like a few hours later to talk about his
0:10:56 new business idea. And I remember like him getting in trouble for controlling the streetlight near
0:11:02 his house and how his mom like grounded him for three weeks and I’m like, I’m in. And by the way,
0:11:08 YC has a one-page application. And in there, so every question in the YC application has to
0:11:12 have earned its right to be there. If you’re on the one page, there’s only like seven questions.
0:11:16 One of the seven questions is, tell us about a real world system that you’ve hacked for your
0:11:21 benefit, right? Not literally hacked, but like any real, any system in the real world that you
0:11:26 have sort of gamed in order to do it because business is a high predictor of relentlessly resourceful
0:11:31 as we talked about. George, what’s the answer for you? Like, did you have weird teenage hobbies?
0:11:39 Yeah, it might not translate as well as an American audience, but my dad
0:11:46 bet me I could do 10 kick-ups with a soccer ball. And puberty had just hit. So Testosterone was an
0:11:51 assistant. What’s a kick-up, by the way? Like, so a juggle with a soccer ball. Okay, gotcha.
0:11:58 My dad bet me I couldn’t do that. 10 pounds. And Testosterone just hit, like, first bit of armpit
0:12:05 hair. And I remember thinking, “Fuck that guy. I’ll prove him wrong.” So I trained, and I trained,
0:12:10 and I trained. And he didn’t, cool pairing, by the way, he didn’t try and push me to do it. He just
0:12:15 bet me wherever I could do it. And he made sure that he had to see me do it. Anyway, I ended up
0:12:20 doing it. And then I kept doing it more and more. And I ended up being an Adidas advert for a FIFA
0:12:25 World Cup. I used to tour around doing tricks at different stadiums, held like three unofficial
0:12:29 world records for different trips and things like that. So then ultimately, I decided I
0:12:34 weren’t going to lose my virginity, so I stopped doing it. But it was, yeah, really fun.
0:12:38 Did it work? Giving it up? Still trying, but some day soon.
0:12:43 Tends to work out that way. Sam, what about you? Did you have weird teenage hobbies?
0:12:50 Yeah. I basically, like, small, predictable things. Like, I had an eBay store when I was 12,
0:12:53 or I remember in fourth grade… That’s not small or predictable.
0:12:59 Well, yeah, like, I mean, things that I think you would expect me to do, knowing me. I also, like,
0:13:03 in fourth grade, when we had to pick a book to do a book report on, I did How to Win Friends and
0:13:12 Influence People. Like, I was like a weirdo. I enjoyed the stuff that I like now, back when
0:13:23 I was 12 years old. You’re like, listen up, class. Dale Carnegie said that your own name is the most
0:13:30 beautiful word in the English language. So say it with me. Were you into anything?
0:13:35 You know, when I first heard this, I felt really bad because I was like, I couldn’t think of anything
0:13:39 special that I did. Monish Pabrai was on the episode, and he basically said there’s a golden
0:13:43 period. He studied, like, I went to his house. He’s got this whole wall of books on science and
0:13:48 brain chemistry and all that neuroscience. And he was basically like, there’s like a golden decade
0:13:54 basically between the ages of sort of like 10 and about 19 years old, where the brain is optimal
0:13:59 for specialization during that time. And so if you look at the people who are great programmers,
0:14:04 they usually started programming very early on. Or great musicians, like age six, he composed his
0:14:08 first thing. It’s like, wow, this is insane. And I felt really bad because I was like, oh,
0:14:11 shit, like too late for me, right? Like, well, what am I supposed to do now? I was just kind of
0:14:16 a normal kid picking boogers and in junior high, like I didn’t do that. But then I started thinking
0:14:19 about it more and I’m really thinking like, was there anything? And the one thing I did think of
0:14:25 was a unique experience I had was like, I was really into improv early on. I didn’t do it a ton,
0:14:29 but I did go to like our Texas state kind of finals with like group improv is basically me and my
0:14:34 buddy, and we were group improv, which is kind of a podcast without a microphone, right? Like,
0:14:40 that’s what two people doing improv back and forth is. And then I was in a couple of movies as a kid.
0:14:45 And so I kind of was doing this acting improv performing thing. I think if there’s anything,
0:14:50 that’s what it was. But I wasn’t a lemonade stand kind of like eBay flipper type of guy.
0:14:55 The only other weird one I did was I used to play this game NBA 2k, which is common. But the
0:15:01 uncommon thing was I never played the game. So I didn’t go in and I wasn’t like dunking and shooting
0:15:05 and like all I did is I played franchise mode. And I would simulate, I was basically only a general
0:15:10 manager. So I would simulate the season, then I would do the draft, I would scout all the prospects.
0:15:14 So you wouldn’t actually play like the like the. No, it wasn’t intentional. Like I thought, okay,
0:15:18 first I’m going to build this great team. And so I was just like a CEO basically. I was like,
0:15:23 free agency and trades and scouting and finding diamonds in the rough. But I got so addicted
0:15:27 to that I never ended up playing with any of those players. I would just simulate, I would just do
0:15:31 that for like 10 years. And there I was basically a fantasy GM, which I guess is kind of like,
0:15:36 that’s kind of what being a like a CEO or a business person is. Like you’re just doing that
0:15:39 part. You’re not actually doing the work. So but my honest answer was like, I was not like elite
0:15:44 at any of those things. Whereas I think the people who really excel, they tend to show that
0:15:49 brilliance early on and become like oddly good at something. Their obsession takes over them. I
0:15:53 don’t think I personally had that. I love that. Do you want me to give you the rest of the chat?
0:15:56 It’s for the high agency people and you can see who in your life you know? Yeah, weird teenage
0:16:01 hobbies. What else you got? Energy distortion field. So if you meet with them when you’re tired
0:16:05 and defeated, you leave the real ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with Max Incline.
0:16:09 And low agency people do the opposite. So this is the kind of idea of treadmill friends.
0:16:12 Afterwards, you’ve got so much energy, you need to go on a treadmill, you can’t sleep.
0:16:16 Then you have like sofa friends who you need to lie down after hanging out with them.
0:16:19 Who’s like the treadmill friends in your guy’s life that comes to mind?
0:16:25 Sam’s like that for me. My buddy, Sully, is like that. I can’t hang out with Sully.
0:16:29 And literally our hangout tends to be we walk for like four hours talking.
0:16:33 Because we almost have to burn off the energy. That’s like the excitement of the ideas and the
0:16:38 stories that we’re sharing while we’re doing it. That’s how this podcast got created. It was on
0:16:41 a four hour walk with him. And I was like, you know what I really want? I was like hour through.
0:16:43 I was like, you know what I really want to do? It’s not a company. I want to create a podcast.
0:16:47 I want to beat Tim Ferriss. I want to wake up and have him be in a million people’s
0:16:50 ear balls. And that was like a thing that came to me when I worked myself into that state.
0:16:54 Ben is kind of like that. My business partner, Ben, where he’s like,
0:16:57 I could just, I probably do call Ben, I think eight times a day on average.
0:17:01 You know, so we just talk eight times a day, which now that I say it sounds very weird,
0:17:04 but it feels very normal. If I didn’t have kids, it’d probably be 20 times a day.
0:17:06 Who are yours, George? Who are yours?
0:17:13 Probably three. Chris, Williamson from Modern Wisdom. We’re like just out all night.
0:17:18 We can just go and go and go. And you guys are both similar, like where Chris is like an,
0:17:23 you know, in a good way. He’s like an academic where like, he just like learns and then just
0:17:27 teaches. And I like, you know, I feel that way listening to his podcast. So who’s the second one?
0:17:32 David Senra from Founders. He’s just fucking, if espresso was a human being,
0:17:38 the big David fucking Senra. So that guy, I doubt on that. And then the third one, my old boss,
0:17:44 Steve Bartler, who runs the Diver’s CEO podcast. I remember when Steve was running the business,
0:17:48 he’d have an office in Manchester, London, New York, and I’d work in the Manchester office.
0:17:51 And Steve was maybe there a court of the time in that office.
0:17:53 And what business is this? Is this this?
0:17:59 This was back at his marketing agency, Social Check. Yeah. And I would open the door and I’d
0:18:04 know if Steve was in that day without seeing him, just off the energy in the room of everybody
0:18:07 else’s vibe. So those, those three would be my three.
0:18:11 That’s a great compliment. How’d you get the job, by the way? Why did you join Social Chain?
0:18:16 He had a unique angle that essentially the UK, you mentioned earlier, the UK is the sixth largest
0:18:19 economy in the world. It’s not. London’s the sixth largest economy in the world. And then there’s a
0:18:24 very, very poor list of cities and towns attached to it. So he based himself in Manchester and just
0:18:28 market himself well and just sucked up all the talent that was in Manchester, which is,
0:18:31 which is where I was. Do you want the next one?
0:18:32 Yeah, keep going.
0:18:36 You can never guess their opinions. So it was the boxer that writes poetry,
0:18:40 the advertiser obsessed with the history of war, the beauty queen who reads Nietzsche.
0:18:44 If their beliefs don’t line up with their stereotypes, they have exercised agency.
0:18:49 So when you give them an opinion on ABC, do they fit in a box or do they often surprise
0:18:52 you that they’ve fought things through? Right. Anybody who pop up?
0:18:53 What you’re saying is basically they’re non-cliché.
0:18:58 So like we just had Jack Smith on the podcast. I think Jack is one of these type of independent
0:19:05 thinkers where he’s like a successful, smart tech guy, you know, almost like has like a more of an
0:19:10 engineer’s brain. But then he came on and was talking about this like woo, woo energy system
0:19:16 that healing and healing through energy using colors in a screw in a room that he sat in
0:19:20 and how it cured his like whatever. I’m like, Jeff, you’re too smart for this.
0:19:23 And I never know how he’s going to reply to certain stuff.
0:19:25 Right. Like I’ll explain something to him. And I’m like,
0:19:30 I think you’re going to be too smart to believe this, but you’re open to learning more.
0:19:32 That’s, that’s wild to me.
0:19:33 Or even what he’s going to do his next move, right?
0:19:36 It’s Silicon Valley. You sell your company. There’s two paths.
0:19:39 I think they take you to a room and they’re like, Hey, here’s two boxes.
0:19:43 Would you like to become a VC? The vest, the vest is under this box.
0:19:47 Or you’re a founder and you’re now your next thing is going to be AI health care or whatever.
0:19:52 Like it’s like cliche. Whereas Jack, after he sold his company, he’s like spent a year in his
0:19:57 garage building like the most ergonomic chair he could think of. It’s like you couldn’t guess
0:20:00 what the guy’s going to do next. He was total non-cliché in that sense.
0:20:06 I like it. The next one, immigrant mentality. If they move from their hometown, that’s a good
0:20:10 sign. If they move from their home country, that’s an even greater sign because it takes
0:20:14 agency to spot you in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalize a move and a growth
0:20:18 mindset to start from zero in a new location. Dude, that’s a great point. That’s a great point.
0:20:22 And I’ve moved around to like nine different countries. So I think I win.
0:20:26 And that’s kind of like what you’re saying about America about, you know, sometimes we,
0:20:29 we started out as a, as a country of immigrants. And that’s maybe one of the reasons why we kind
0:20:34 of have outplated coverage a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. What’s, what’s the Keith Reboy? It’s like
0:20:39 the people you hire are the company you build. It’s the same thing for countries. It’s like if
0:20:44 the initial seed population was a bunch of crazy risk takers who were willing to get on a boat and
0:20:50 go to a new land to like establish it from scratch, you’re going to create a population of, you know,
0:20:55 people who have that same mentality. The way I’ve thought about America, the way I’ve narrowed
0:20:59 it down is if you look at what makes human beings special, if you have one human being in a jungle,
0:21:04 it’s the one of the worst animals ever. And we’re just going to get destroyed.
0:21:11 If you put 500 of us, we, you just introduced a master predator that the world’s, that forest,
0:21:16 that jungle has never seen before because we can cooperate. And America is that on steroids,
0:21:21 because when you go there, the enthusiasm, the energy, the agency, sometimes the IQ isn’t there.
0:21:27 I’d probably argue Osbritz might be slightly smarter, no offense. However, you’ve got those
0:21:31 things. It means you could have an idea. It’s like, yeah, great idea. Let’s do it. Just the
0:21:36 bias to optimism, the bias to action. Whereas you have the Brit who’s, I don’t think that’ll work
0:21:42 because of ABC. That’s why America is the best because you can cooperate faster than any country,
0:21:48 in my opinion. The Doritos Locos Taco did not come from pessimism. All right. That’s only,
0:21:52 and that is a uniquely American idea. You would never, that idea could not have been born in any
0:21:59 other country. I love it. Last two, last two. They send you niche content. So low agency people
0:22:03 look at the social engagement of content before dealing its quality. High agency people just
0:22:08 look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early. And the final one means to your face
0:22:12 but nice behind your back. So the social incentives is to be nice to people’s faces and gossip behind
0:22:17 their backs. Whereas the high agency people, they do the opposite. Where’d you get that one from?
0:22:23 One of my friends, Louis, who’s just, I know that he’ll just say the, the honest thing to my face
0:22:30 all the fucking time. And it’s so useful to have a friend like that. Whereas the low agency, basically
0:22:37 whenever someone’s going against incentives, the agency that requires to go against incentives.
0:22:41 I’ve written this, I often don’t go against incentives. And even though I know incentives,
0:22:44 I know agency, I still fall for it. It’s the Daniel Kahneman thing at the start of the conversation.
0:22:49 So to go against the social incentives of pain, I’ll say a rude thing to your face that you need,
0:22:54 social pain. And also when you’re not there, there’s no benefit. Actually all the benefits to cost
0:22:59 it behind your back to do the opposite and swim upstream. You need agency. You’re very philosophical,
0:23:04 which I think is cool. And it’s almost like you have a business just to justify the read, just to
0:23:09 just to give you an excuse to spend time reading and thinking. You’re like your own patron,
0:23:15 basically you’re like, cool. Can I fund myself to sit in a room and, and think of ideas and then
0:23:18 invert them and then think about them again and then, you know, write them down and share them
0:23:23 with the world. Like, do you, do you even like capitalism? I love, well, I love compressing
0:23:28 ideas. So which is why that I like advertising, because I can use that skill that I have to
0:23:31 compress things down. I always loved Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biography where he made
0:23:35 all his money for real estate. So he could do whatever the fuck he wanted with his acting career.
0:23:40 And I think it’s slightly underrated doing that. Sam, did you know I offered to invest in George’s
0:23:45 business and I was like, I’ll invest fair terms. I’ll blow this thing up. We grow this baby like
0:23:51 crazy. And he was like, that’s all good, but there’s one problem. If this grows, I’m going to have to
0:23:55 like, it’s going to suck me more towards that. And I actually want to be all in the business of
0:24:00 ideas. I don’t want this to become, you know, bigger and more. Which made you want it so much
0:24:05 more. I made me respect him so much more. Right. I was like, again, it’s that’s a high agency thing
0:24:10 to do, right? To be able to, can you say no to money? Like, can you say no to money might be
0:24:14 like another thing to just add on your list. How many times have you said no to money? I’ve told
0:24:18 the story in the podcast before, but you may not have heard it. The highest agency moment of my life
0:24:25 was I was in sixth grade, I think. I got put in detention after school. And our detention was you
0:24:29 go to the lunchroom, school’s out, everybody leaves. It’s just the 20 kids who got in trouble that
0:24:35 day. You have to sit in silence and do nothing. And they see they see to kind of like every other
0:24:39 chair diagonal so that you can’t really you can talk to somebody, but you it’s not very easy to
0:24:44 you can’t whisper you have to be a little bit loud. And it’s me and it’s the weirdest kid in our
0:24:48 school. There’s a kid who had hair down to his waist. And he always wore these like weird tattered
0:24:53 shirts. And he was just a weirdo. And I saw and people used to pick on him. And so I’m sitting
0:24:57 there and I’m kind of a bully. And I wanted to pick on him a little bit. I just want to mess
0:25:01 with him. I was bored, right? I’m in D hall. You have two hours to do nothing. And I see on
0:25:06 the floor of the lunchroom, there’s like a grape that was like from lunch hours earlier. And it’s
0:25:10 like nasty. It’s on the floor of a little kids lunchroom. And it’s like got hair on it, whatever.
0:25:15 And I just whispered to him. And I was just like, yo, I’ll give you a dollar if you eat that grape.
0:25:21 He looks down. He’s like a dollar. I was yeah. And then he reaches down and I’m like, oh my god,
0:25:27 he’s fell for what he’s going for. This is insane. He picks it up. And he eats the grape. And I’m
0:25:32 like grossed out. My mind is blown. I can’t believe you do it. I’m like, all right, deal’s a deal.
0:25:38 I get out my wallet. I take a dollar. I hand it to him. And then he took the dollar and he ate it.
0:25:47 I could not believe it. Damn. This was like 22 years ago or something. I still remember it vividly.
0:25:53 And I just thought that was the biggest no fucks given moment I have ever, probably still to this
0:25:59 day in my life of like, you know, F you, F your money, F the grape. I am going to like,
0:26:03 he just ate the dollar. I couldn’t believe it. No upside in it. But he sent an absolute message
0:26:12 to my core. I love it. That’s ridiculous. Where do you want to go from here, Sean?
0:26:16 You got a couple other cool like lifestyle things you do. So do you want to talk about
0:26:19 the kale phone? Because I think this is like something that might be helpful for people.
0:26:25 What is the kale phone method that you do? Yeah. So again, talking about sticky ideas.
0:26:30 So let me pull it up. So I’ve got them here. Actually, I have my cocaine phone and I have my
0:26:35 kale phone. So I ended up in, I wrote about this and then I ended up on Fox news where it was like
0:26:42 Trump, Biden, and then George map cocaine, kale phone. And essentially what I realized is there’s
0:26:46 two things that are presented to you in modern society as people get more and more addicted
0:26:52 to their phones. There’s one, be a phone monkey and just be on your phone all day and deal with
0:26:58 the cortisol and all the stress and mental fatigue that everyone’s facing is option one.
0:27:05 Option two is just give up on the phone, put it away for a week, have the digital detox and
0:27:10 benefits of that are, yeah, you feel mentally clear, you feel incredible, you’re coming up with
0:27:16 creative ideas. But if your mum goes to hospital, how’s she going to get hold of you? Or if you’re
0:27:20 out and about and you need an Uber, like, fuck, I can’t get an Uber. Or if I want to use Apple
0:27:26 Notes to write down ideas, I can’t do that. So I realized that that society presented was either
0:27:31 the smartphone addict or the phoneless Luddite and actually the somewhere in between, which is
0:27:38 the cocaine and kale phone. So the kale phone is like all serotonin apps that make you feel good.
0:27:45 So audible notes, Uber, Google Maps, stuff that you need for necessities as well. Maybe an emergency
0:27:48 number for your mum, wife, business partner, if they need to get a hold of you. So you have
0:27:52 that peace of mind when you’re not on your cocaine phone, that they can still get a hold of me,
0:28:00 worst case scenario, somebody dies, then cocaine phone, everything, Slack, WhatsApp, TikTok, Facebook,
0:28:05 Instagram, let’s go crazy, put the cocaine phone in the drawer, check it when you need to check it,
0:28:09 then use the kale phone when you’re out and about for a walk. Single best thing I’ve probably done
0:28:13 for my mental health and everybody who tries it, a lot of people who try it write to me and go,
0:28:18 “This is a game changer.” What is the actual other phone? Is it just an Android phone? What did
0:28:23 you do for the other phone? Is it just two iPhones? Just another iPhone. But do you have
0:28:28 your SIM cards? How do you do the number? Yeah. I have two SIM cards, so I have a different number
0:28:33 in the kale phone than the cocaine phone. I got it, okay. Only drawback is that they basically
0:28:36 have to have a second phone line and people have to know to reach you there when you need it.
0:28:42 But it’s only your mom, wife, maybe. That’s the only people who really need that. It’s just for
0:28:45 the peace of mind that most of the time they would, and the only time they’re going to do is when
0:28:48 somebody’s at a hospital. But it’s having that peace of mind that therefore I don’t need to check
0:28:53 the cocaine phone for that incident. Sean, let me ask you a question. Be honest about this,
0:28:58 and I’ll answer it, and I’ll be honest too. Do your parents still pay for your cell phone bill?
0:29:04 I pay them back, all right? My dad tells me the amount. It’s a family plan. I’ve been on it for a
0:29:12 long time. Can I change it with keeping my number? That’s too much work. Save. I am also on my family
0:29:16 plan. And so George, when you’re talking about getting a new cell phone, I’m like, “Shout out to
0:29:20 everybody who’s on their family plan right now. Shout out to everybody whose dad is paying their
0:29:24 phone bill.” It’s all we have. That’s our last connection. That’s the last cord that gets cut
0:29:30 between you and your parents is the phone plan. I don’t even know how to, like, I’ve never gotten,
0:29:34 like, I’ve always had to call my mother, like, “Hey, my phone broke. I’m going to go buy one.
0:29:38 Will you tell AT&T? They got to put it on, like, the plan.” So when you sold the hustle,
0:29:42 she didn’t go get your own fucking phone plate. She carried on going. It’s not a money thing.
0:29:49 Fair play. Well, there we go. It’s not fair play. I don’t know. I don’t like,
0:29:53 you’re using that word like I think it should be used. Especially if you text your mom saying,
0:29:56 “I need to get a cocaine phone.” It’s probably not going to go down too well as well.
0:30:00 I thought, Sean, I thought you would have also been on yours.
0:30:04 Yeah, for sure. Dude, my wife feels it’s like almost like a sign of disrespect that I didn’t
0:30:09 create like a new family plan with us as the core family unit. I’m like, “Look, it’s just a hassle.
0:30:14 Don’t read more into it than what it is. I’m just lazy, okay?”
0:30:20 There’s this episode on, like, Ellen DeGeneres where she’s asking Bill Gates, like, “Let’s see
0:30:25 if you know how much a gallon of milk costs.” Because you’re so out of touch. When you talk
0:30:29 to me about a cell phone plan, I’m like, “I don’t know, five bucks? 100 bucks?”
0:30:34 That’s like $23, right? Say it with the phone plate. I’m like, “I don’t know,
0:30:40 a thousand? I don’t know. I have no idea.” George, are there any drawbacks or in practice?
0:30:45 Let’s say I wanted to go do this because the idea is really sticky. It’s really viral. Even if you
0:30:50 never did it, it just sounds cool. But you actually… Let me verify. You actually live this way.
0:30:57 Before you answer it, I got to run. I got to run. I’ll leave all my stuff up. I had a 130.
0:31:01 I’ll see you soon. So you actually live this way. You actually have the two phones.
0:31:08 Yeah. I’ve done it for three and a bit years. Whenever I doubt it, I’ve had incidents where
0:31:14 I’ve lost one phone or had an issue with signal in a certain country. When you go back to that
0:31:20 lifestyle of waking up and downloading social media as your first input into your brain
0:31:28 or messaging apps, you only realize it by a contrast of how destructive I think it that is
0:31:33 for the creator, particularly for people who are creative people or ideas people. Downloading
0:31:38 whatever the worst loose headline is immediately into your consciousness. And particularly if you
0:31:44 then use your phone as your alarm clock as well. I’ve experienced it by a contrast. It’s so toxic.
0:31:49 I can’t deal with it. I want to ask you about Lee Kuan Yew, somebody who’s been on my list of
0:31:53 people I want to go deep dive into. Sounds like you’ve read a bit about him or studied him a
0:32:02 little bit. What is the learnings from Lee Kuan Yew? So Lee Kuan Yew was the leader of Singapore.
0:32:10 During his reign, he took Singapore from essentially being a third world country with a lot of
0:32:15 problems. And you’ve got China and Japan on your doorstep, which historically not the friendliest
0:32:20 people to have on your doorstep. And obviously part of the British rule, part of the British
0:32:27 Empire went from there to one of the best financial hubs in the world. But he ran the country like
0:32:35 a CEO. And one of my favorite anecdotes about Lee Kuan Yew is how he used to obsess about the
0:32:40 airport onboarding experience. And it’s interesting. You see such obvious ideas and startups and you go,
0:32:45 “Why don’t countries just take this?” The onboarding experience or the conversion rate
0:32:53 optimization of a landing page or a website or an advert versus when you arrive at the airport,
0:32:59 what’s the airport like? What are the cues like? The immigration cues like? What are the bathrooms
0:33:04 like? How clean are things? What’s the first few miles from the airport to the city? Lee Kuan Yew
0:33:09 used to obsess over everything, would be changing the rooms, would be cleaning things up, would be
0:33:14 inspecting regularly, seeing how quick things were because he knew that that is talented people
0:33:18 coming for the first time. And Debye does this incredibly well. You go there for the first time
0:33:23 and you go, “Oh, wow. They’ve looked to everybody else’s onboarding experience and 5x this.” Immediately
0:33:30 having those magic moments like designing Facebook or designing Asana within the first few minutes
0:33:33 of entering and leaving the airport because you’re going to think it’s like a stand-up
0:33:37 comedian. The first thing is you arrive and the last thing is you leave. So he used to obsess over
0:33:43 that. And I remember I went to Austin Airport. And as you go up to get an Uber, you’ve got to go
0:33:47 for like three different car pops and your phone signal goes out and you’re sweating. I remember
0:33:50 thinking to myself, “What do you call you?” You’re treated like a criminal. If you try to get an Uber
0:33:53 in an American airport, you’re treated like a criminal. It’s like, “Oh, if you’re going to do a
0:33:58 drug deal, then go to the third parking garage, fourth floor, behind the fence. That’s where you
0:34:02 can go get picked up if you’re going to be an asshole.” Yeah. I remember being there going,
0:34:05 “Leak when you would fucking hate this.” And I remember going, “That’s a wit.” I go, “I’ve been
0:34:08 nowhere to keep without that thought walking through Austin Airport.” Leak when you was rolling
0:34:13 over in his grave right now. So that’s interesting because I remember when I was in my teens,
0:34:17 I went to the Singapore. We went to Singapore. And if you haven’t been, the Singaporean airport
0:34:23 is like a mall. It’s like an experience. They have a fitness facility. They have like a movie
0:34:27 theater. There’s like, it is just a beautiful place. Everything is clean. There’s tons of
0:34:33 comfortable seating. It is not like a pain the way that most airport experiences are. And I
0:34:36 remember just noting that and being like, “Oh, that’s weird. Why is Singapore’s airport so good?”
0:34:41 So it’s very interesting that he thought about it as a first impression onboarding experience.
0:34:46 Now, is that just a cool story? Did that pay off in some way? Did the immigration rate go up?
0:34:49 Or what changed from that? Or what are the things that he did to actually
0:34:54 turn the country around? What were the big levers that he pulled? So onboarding is one. What really
0:35:01 worked? A trotting, talented immigration is the single biggest thing from my understanding
0:35:05 of Singapore’s story that they did. And part of that, obviously, is the onboarding. And if you
0:35:10 look at it, Singapore has essentially no natural resources. So it’s not blessed with Saudi Arabia’s
0:35:18 oil or LA’s beauty necessarily, but just a trotting as many talented immigrants. The specifics
0:35:22 around the economics as well, I don’t know as much on but around taxation and things like that.
0:35:27 But it’s just a wild case study. I know Charlie Mungut is obsessed with Lee Kuan Yew. He has the
0:35:33 story of Lee Kuan Yew. We were talking about mating earlier. Lee Kuan Yew, rather than marrying
0:35:38 the hottest girl in his class, picked the only girl in his class that performed better than him.
0:35:43 But he was the most elite university at Singapore. He married the lady who’s the only one who was
0:35:49 smarter than him. So very odd peculiar individual. There’s another thing he did was around air
0:35:53 conditioning, right? Didn’t he do a big push for having AC in the country?
0:35:58 Yeah, I saw that recently. I think it was Busy Peter levels on Twitter that was breaking that
0:36:01 down. Yeah, he was obsessed with getting air conditioning because he was convinced it was
0:36:07 key to the economic success. Yeah, so there was an interview with him. I’m reading an article now
0:36:11 from Vox. So basically, there’s an interview with him and he said, “Was there anything else besides
0:36:16 multicultural tolerance that enabled Singapore’s success?” And his answer was air conditioning.
0:36:20 Air conditioning was a most important invention for us. And basically, I think that if you look
0:36:25 at countries, like my parents, they grew up in India. And India is so hot that during the day,
0:36:30 during your brain’s most productive hours, they take a three-hour period where you just stay inside,
0:36:35 you just try to sleep. And you can’t even try to sleep because it’s so hot. So you’re just laying
0:36:41 in a cot with a fan trying to cool down because you can’t be outside. You can’t really be productive
0:36:46 in thinking right now. You just have to wait out the heat. My assistant is in the Philippines and
0:36:49 one of the things that she always talks about is they would have these heat waves and it’s super
0:36:54 hard for her to work because she flipped her schedule. She works in the evening, her time,
0:36:57 which is daytime, my time. And I was like, “Man, is that really inconvenient for you? How does that
0:37:01 work for your lifestyle?” She’s like, “Well, of course, it takes some adjusting.” But one of the
0:37:05 big things is I don’t have to deal with the heat because I sleep during the day when it’s really
0:37:10 hot and I wake up in the evening when it’s cooler and that’s when I work and I feel better that way.
0:37:15 It’s also, by the way, why so many great engineers come from the Nordic regions
0:37:20 because those are places where it’s too cold to go outside, too dark to go to, it’s dark all the
0:37:24 time. And so they just stay inside the program and they just code on computers because there’s not
0:37:29 really better options out there and they develop this amazing engineering talent because during
0:37:32 their formative years, they just stay inside a bunch of time and what’s the best thing to do
0:37:36 when you’re inside? Play on the computer, play video games and learn to program.
0:37:40 Just second and third, all the consequences everywhere you look, crazy.
0:37:41 Yeah, exactly, exactly.
0:37:50 So here’s the deal. I made most of my money from a newsletter business. It was called The Hustle
0:37:55 and it was a daily newsletter at scale to millions of subscribers and it was the greatest business
0:38:00 on earth. The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees and only three of them were
0:38:05 actually doing any writing. The other employees were growing the newsletter, building out the tech
0:38:10 for the platform and selling ads and honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt. Today’s episode is
0:38:16 brought to you by Beehive. They are a platform that is built exactly for this. If you want to
0:38:20 grow your newsletter, if you want to monetize a newsletter, they do all of the stuff that I had
0:38:28 to hire dozens of employees to do. So check it out, beehive.com. That’s b-e-e-h-i-i-v.com.
0:38:36 Do you have any other of the key frameworks that really, I don’t know, shifted the way you think
0:38:41 or you keep seeing pop up that you don’t think most people appreciate? I’d say there’s two.
0:38:49 One is probably mine and yours favorite meme, Shah of the Midwit meme, which just refuses to
0:38:56 die. It’s like a fine wine. It gets better with age and realizing how often I’ve been the guy in
0:39:03 the middle over the years and then trying to come up with solutions to not be the guy in the middle
0:39:08 and then realizing… Do you have any canonical examples of the Midwit meme of you in the middle
0:39:16 that you could think of, just personal attacks on your psyche? Yes. One was when I started to get
0:39:23 really obsessed with sleep when I was like 20, 21. I’d have everything sleep optimized. Matthew
0:39:28 Walker had just been on Joe Rogan. So I’ve got the 10-step checklist routine. I’ve got the supplements.
0:39:33 I’ve got everything. And I’m there doing the whole two-hour wind-down routine, no screens before
0:39:39 bed, red light glasses on. I’m brushing my teeth in the dark. And my girlfriend at the time comes
0:39:46 in and hits the lights, minutes before bed, blinds me. So I’m completely blinded. I like
0:39:51 getting out. The first row we ever had was that I was like, “What are you doing?” And I was sat there
0:39:58 in bed. Of course, on the left or on the right, she’s immediately fallen asleep within two minutes
0:40:02 without doing any of the shit I was doing. I’m stuck there for an hour afterwards, like shaking
0:40:09 with adrenaline about how angry/blitzed I was. And I realized, oh, shit. A lot of sleep, for example,
0:40:14 they had a phase of insomnia. And a lot of sleep is… The more you think about sleep, the more
0:40:19 pressure you put on sleep, the worse the sleep is, which is why a lot of these… If I was the CMO
0:40:23 of Woop or Aura, the one thing I would suggest them to do, like coming in as a product thing,
0:40:29 would be to never allow you to know the next day’s score. Because this is actually probably
0:40:33 one of the most toxic things I think we’ll see for sleep. But people checking their sleep as
0:40:37 well as going to sleep thinking about what score they’re going to get is the opposite of what you
0:40:42 want. That’s literally creating an insomniac cycle. Versus a week later, having a summary of the
0:40:46 previous week when you’re detaching the results, probably useful. But the next day is particularly
0:40:52 bad. So that’s a midway area. That’s a great one. I think one of the studies about what makes people
0:40:58 unhappy or depressed or suicidal. One of the strongest signals is this idea of rumination,
0:41:04 which is almost like an obsessive thought loop about yourself and your thoughts.
0:41:09 And so once you get in that thought loop, it is very, very difficult to get out. It’s also why
0:41:12 one of the easiest hacks to feeling better about yourself is to simply just go help other people.
0:41:20 It is the over-focus on yourself and your own condition is what creates your own poor conditions.
0:41:26 And it’s the same reason my trainer says this thing. He goes, whatever you feel you lack,
0:41:30 that’s exactly what you got to give. You feel you lack respect. You got disrespected.
0:41:35 Go give respect. You feel like you lack money. Go give money. And literally just flipping the
0:41:40 mindset of like, I lack to like, I have enough so I can give, breaks this thought loop of like,
0:41:46 worry and anxiety around certain topics and sleep is the same way. Health is the same way
0:41:50 where you could literally become like manic about your own health. And you’re stressing
0:41:54 yourself out, which decreases your health. And I think a lot of people fall under this trap with
0:41:59 therapy and with self-improvement, where they get addicted to the medicine. And it creates
0:42:03 too much thoughts about yourself. The happiest people are the ones who are,
0:42:08 that are not doing this like extreme introspection all the time.
0:42:15 Yes. The single, the sink, because I noticed that when it came to decisions, let’s say,
0:42:19 the people probably got this right now, like big decision, do I move to the city or stay to the
0:42:25 city? Do I quit this thing or carry on doing this thing? I would have this thing in my head where
0:42:30 it would play the, if I thought about moving to the city, it would play the worst case scenario of
0:42:33 that in my head, like the amygdala would fire. And then I think about the other thing and the
0:42:38 amygdala would fire and play the worst case scenario. And as a result, paralysis analysis,
0:42:42 just kick the cat. I’d make the decision to not make the decision. And one of the biggest bits
0:42:47 of advice I got was stop thinking about making decisions and start thinking about making experiments.
0:42:50 Because I realized there was decisions I was procrastinating on for two years that I could
0:42:54 have done both of them 10 times over in the time spent thinking about the thing.
0:43:00 Yeah, that’s a great one. Sam has a nice little one on this called a worry time,
0:43:04 which is once he thinks something is worthy of an experiment or worthy of trying,
0:43:09 right, which is a big difference between your words there, right? Experimenting with something,
0:43:14 I’m going to try this out very different than I’m going to do this. I have to do this. This is my
0:43:19 new thing. I choose this. So giving himself a little bit of grace there by saying I’m going to
0:43:23 try an experiment, but he says he schedules his worry time. So he says, cool. What I don’t want
0:43:28 to do is make this decision and then reassess it daily and worry about it every single day.
0:43:32 Worry about, is it working? Is it going to work? Am I good enough? Is this right? Is
0:43:36 this wrong? Am I making a mistake here? He’s like, so I schedule it. I’ll put it on Sunday.
0:43:40 I’ll literally pull it on the calendar. I’ll put 30 minutes. That’s my worry time. And so I know
0:43:44 I’m going to worry about this on Sunday. I don’t need to worry about it today. For now,
0:43:49 I just need to do it. I have my scheduled worry time because I think when you don’t decide when
0:43:53 you’re going to worry about it, you worry about it all the time because you’re almost worried that
0:43:59 you’re never going to assess it. And I found that to be a great hack is to schedule the worry time.
0:44:04 My trainer says it’s like when you plant a seed to grow a plant, the next day, if you come and dig
0:44:08 it up and you go look at it, are you growing yet? Is it working? You’re actually destroying the seed’s
0:44:14 ability to actually grow. Plant the seed and don’t just dig it up every day and stare at it and wonder
0:44:17 why it’s not working. Carry on. Water it. Give it sunlight. That’s all you really need to do from
0:44:22 there. 100%. One guy who’s completely changed my thinking and you should have him on the show,
0:44:26 like absolute machine of a founder that goes under the radar. Do you know Element, the electrolyte
0:44:34 company? Oh, Element. Yeah. So, in five years, they’re growing like banana numbers, like hundreds
0:44:39 of millions. James, the founder, talked about high agency. We were camping and there was bears
0:44:44 nearby and I’m terrified of bears as you wouldn’t be as a fucking human being. But no, James is there.
0:44:48 I’m like, “If James is there, he’ll handle it. It’s fine. He’ll deal with it.” And his way,
0:44:51 like they managed to scale the way they have. And he’s wrote about this publicly.
0:44:58 He does three weeks on, one week off. Three week on, one week off. So, you know, the whole
0:45:04 one of your aphorisms or Neval aphorisms of sprint like a lion, don’t race like a cow.
0:45:08 And I realized with his philosophy, what he’s doing there is he has that one week assessment
0:45:13 period. Because I noticed that when I went on the holiday, the first three days, I would be,
0:45:17 it would take me to the fourth day to switch off. And I think he’s begged on his schedule.
0:45:21 First three days have fun. Then the following three days, he’s assessing the OKRs, reviewing
0:45:26 the numbers, looking at the experiments, plotting out the next three weeks. And then that following
0:45:30 three weeks is just a hardcore sprint. And he’s completely redone the work. And it makes sense
0:45:34 that we just downloaded this work week philosophy from industrial age versus really thinking about
0:45:38 it. And he’s managed to do that for himself and his whole leadership team, whilst the company’s
0:45:43 growing like bananas. And it’s factoring in that worry time. It makes so much more sense.
0:45:47 I love that. Yeah, I think that’s great. It actually makes me think, you know, Monday through
0:45:53 Friday, you know, 8am to 5pm. Why? Right? Even though I’m my own boss, I’m in my own house,
0:45:58 and my schedule is a little bit different. I suppose, I believe, I suspect that it is not
0:46:03 as different as it should be to what actually would be the most beneficial to me in my life,
0:46:07 to both my creativity, but also my enjoyment of my life. Because I probably just,
0:46:12 I started with the normal, you know, 52 weeks in a year, you’re going to work Monday through Friday,
0:46:15 you’re going to take your weekends off, and then you’re going to have two weeks, three weeks of
0:46:20 vacation somewhere in the between. And then I just tweaked that versus first principles, like,
0:46:25 okay, what, if I didn’t even know that, what would I have designed? How would I be working?
0:46:29 And I bet there’s probably even more I can do on that front, which obviously is, you know,
0:46:34 a bit of a luxury to have, but it’s also an intentional thing. Like, some people’s goal
0:46:40 was to have fancy cars and, you know, go to festivals and all this stuff. That wasn’t my
0:46:45 dream. My dream was total control of my time, have a lifestyle that I truly enjoy that is,
0:46:50 like, you know, super fun. So that’s, that’s the luxury I want to keep funding, you know, is that.
0:46:57 The realization I had from his schedule of that three to one is the rewards of working like a lion
0:47:05 have never been higher, like with leverage and code and internet businesses. The ease of grazing
0:47:10 like a cow has never been easier. Going back to the cocaine, kale foam, like so much shit going on,
0:47:15 like, there’s always the busy trap you can end up in. And you’ve got this weird period of time
0:47:19 right now where the rewards of this have never been higher, but the actual act of doing it has
0:47:24 never been harder. And his philosophy of three week on one week off, I would encourage everybody to
0:47:27 just search element three to one, he wrote an essay on it, you should have him on the show,
0:47:31 he’s phenomenal. And the fact they’ve done it whilst also growing as aggressively as they have
0:47:35 for the whole leadership team, and they all take a week out to be creative and come up with new
0:47:40 ideas when they come back is phenomenal. Yeah, that’s pretty awesome. By the way, the thing you
0:47:46 just said about the, the lion versus the cow, so the people haven’t heard it, the phrase is,
0:47:50 you know, you want to work like a lion, not a cow. The way a lion works is they,
0:47:54 they first just wait and they look for prey, right? They’re just observing. They’re looking for an
0:47:59 opportunity. They’re not just going to run around randomly or chase like small insects. They look
0:48:05 for a worthy, a worthy challenge, worthy prey. And when they see the gazelle, then they sprint as
0:48:10 hard as they can. They don’t walk, they take massive action, they move with speed, they catch it,
0:48:15 they feast, they celebrate, and then they rest and reassess and wait for the next challenge.
0:48:20 Whereas a cow stands in the field, slowly walking around all day grazing on this low
0:48:24 nutritional, you know, density grass all day. Of course, they’re animals, that’s how they,
0:48:29 that’s what they need to eat. That’s fine. But in terms of working, a lot of us work more like
0:48:33 the cow. We sit at our desk eight hours a day, minimal, you know, kind of like some low simmer
0:48:39 of productivity. And then we don’t have the juice to sprint. Nor do we feel confident, secure enough
0:48:44 to rest, reassess, to celebrate. We just sort of feel this anxiety to be constantly, you know,
0:48:49 sort of on and sort of on as a problem. You’re a UFC guy, right? Did you ever see that interview
0:48:55 with Conor McGregor after he lost his fight to Nate Diaz? Do you remember this era where
0:49:00 he was on his rise? He’s going to fight Nate Diaz. And this was probably the first opponent
0:49:04 that he was favored against. So he was supposed to, you know, he was supposed to get crushed by
0:49:08 Aldo. He, you know, and, but he beats Aldo. He’s supposed to get beat by Mendez, a wrestler. That’s
0:49:12 his kryptonite. He beats Mendez. And then it’s Nate Diaz. Oh, here’s a guy he’s lost half his
0:49:17 fights, one half’s fights. You know, he’s not a champion. McGregor has proven everybody wrong.
0:49:21 You’re certainly going to beat Diaz. And instead he goes and he loses. And the one reason he lost
0:49:27 was his cardio was really poor. He had miscalculated his training and he ran out of gas. And so
0:49:31 when he went back to the lab and he’s rested and reassessed and tried to figure out what to do
0:49:36 next, he said this great line. He goes, yeah, I hired this coach. And they go, so you’re training
0:49:40 a lot more now, right? To have more cardio, like you’re doing more and more and more. He goes,
0:49:45 no, actually it was about doing less. He goes, the thing was I was never resting my body. The
0:49:52 analogy my trainer gave me was you’re like a light bulb that’s always flickering.
0:49:55 You’re just at a dim level and you’re never turning off and you’re never really bright
0:50:00 because you’re never resting. You’re always doing stuff. You’re over-training
0:50:04 and you’re never giving your body a chance to recuperate. And so because of that,
0:50:08 your training is never peaking. You’re never actually shining really bright,
0:50:12 nor is the switch ever going off. So that’s what they changed. Then he came back and he ended up,
0:50:16 you know, winning the next fight just a couple months later and his cardio had improved
0:50:20 in that, most people thought in that two months you can’t really improve your
0:50:24 cardio that much, but he did and he was able to win that fight. I always thought that was a
0:50:28 wonderful example of this kind of like three-to-one sort of philosophy, but not in business but in,
0:50:35 you know, sports. My friend called it rest ethic. It’s like, ah, that’s the sticky idea that it
0:50:39 needed to be compressed. He talks about his subconscious as he’s like technical co-founder.
0:50:46 So he’s leaving ideas of his subconscious. And yeah, I think we’ll see more and more
0:50:50 focus in that area as leverage gets higher and higher and realizing that there’s no such
0:50:56 thing as overworking. There’s just under resting. There’s no such thing as overworking that’s only
0:51:01 under resting. What do you do to rest beside sleep? I’m trying to think of anything that’s non-basic.
0:51:06 Well, that’s okay if it’s basic. I’m into simple things that work. If it’s just I go for walks,
0:51:12 that’s great. I mean, honest answer would be kale phone in the morning. Goodbye. So I’m detached from
0:51:18 immediate inputs coming through having a bit of intentionality. So resting is not just napping.
0:51:24 Resting is not having a thousand inputs coming into your brain at all hours of the day. Exactly.
0:51:29 Like having time to process things, like was that Christopher Nolan thing of him not having a
0:51:33 smartphone? I think there’s probably, whilst if everybody’s addicted to their smartphones right
0:51:37 now, there’s probably a little bit of alpha and not being as addicted to your smartphone.
0:51:42 Yeah. I started doing Silent Sundays where basically I just put the phone in a box on
0:51:47 Saturday and I won’t touch it all Sunday, which is a very small step. But when you do it, you
0:51:51 realize the depth of the addiction because you start to have, you know, you’re patting your
0:51:54 pocket every three seconds or you’re going to the bathroom and you’re like, what am I going to do?
0:51:58 How am I going to entertain myself in this like six second walk to the restroom?
0:52:03 That’s literally how extreme it is for me. Yeah, that’s crazy. It’s crazy that we’ve
0:52:10 got that. That’s happening societal wide and with all, it’s like caffeine. It’s the real
0:52:14 drugs are the real addictions of the one that’s probably just going completely under the radar
0:52:18 because we never want to kick that thing. Yeah. The real, the dangerous addictions are the ones
0:52:24 that are socially acceptable. Yes. Well, Louis CK has a cocaine, he has a kale laptop apparently.
0:52:28 He has one laptop, writing laptop that has no internet and it’s just a, it’s just a text.
0:52:31 It’s a typewriter. It’s smart because you’re not going to be, you’re not going to be the
0:52:35 world’s best data scientist when it comes to who have run all these A/B tests. Meanwhile,
0:52:40 you’ve woken up on five hours sleep with a little bit of a hand over and you think you’re going to
0:52:45 win. You’re not going to win. Yeah. Well, finish with this. What’s the, what’s the how to source
0:52:50 your values? This is an idea I’ve never heard from you. What is that? So I called this Buffett
0:52:55 Coint. It may need a stickier idea or a stickier meme behind it, but there’s this incredible talk.
0:52:59 I think it’s Warren Buffett at the University of Georgia. It’s my favorite idea of his that
0:53:03 very few people have discussed. It’s on YouTube. How’d you see it? I think I originally saw it
0:53:12 on YouTube. There’s a few write ups as well. And he’s given a talk and the kids in the class ask him
0:53:16 how to be, the cliche how to be successful thing. And rather than like listing,
0:53:22 da, da, da, da, da, back or how to, I think it’s how to be rich essentially. And rather
0:53:26 than listing the cliche thing back, he says, as a thought experiment, look around at the people
0:53:32 in the class right now. And if you could invest in them and get 10% of their earnings for the
0:53:36 rest of their life, who would it be and why? So immediate shine, you could probably think of
0:53:41 lots of people, people at home can probably think of lots of people. And you think about it.
0:53:45 And you go, okay, I definitely invest in Jim or I definitely invest in Mike. And then he goes,
0:53:50 and then ask yourself, why, what isn’t that that person does the values that they have,
0:53:56 the behaviors that they have? And you can then see, we spoke at the first episode about it’s
0:54:00 so hard to see in yourself, but it’s so easy to see in other people. So you’re kind of hacking
0:54:05 the self awareness bias of like you trying to bruminate and improve yourself is probably
0:54:09 mid-wasted effort. But looking at other people, you can see immediately. And then you can try
0:54:13 and get your values that way. And then he flips the experiment around and goes, if you have to
0:54:20 show people in your life, so you take 10% of their losses, who would you, who would you take and why?
0:54:23 And then you have a list of values to go towards a list of values to go against. What’s beautiful
0:54:28 about that is it’s not just money, you can apply that for health coin, you can apply that for happiness
0:54:35 coin, but using that third party awareness perspective is so much more useful than ruminating
0:54:39 and granularizing yourself. At least I’ve found. I love that. It’s so simple, right? It’s like the
0:54:46 answer, the answer becomes incredibly clear as soon as you ask that question. You know, who, if you
0:54:52 take, you know, wealth or you take happiness and it’s who would you bet on? You could pretty quickly,
0:54:57 a couple of names come to mind. Okay, great. Why? Why? Well, because there are this, this and this.
0:55:00 Cool. There’s your blueprint. You didn’t need the advice from Warren Buffet. Like the advice was
0:55:05 literally hidden in plain sight in the people that you knew right around you. The blueprint was
0:55:11 visible. They were like a walking blueprint of what to do or what not to do. I love that. I’ve
0:55:15 tried to use that on the health side because health is probably the one area of my life that I,
0:55:20 and when I say health, I mean not being fat. Health is like a fancy way of saying it. I’m not
0:55:26 trying to do fancy health. I’ve tried to be like, Hey, I’m pretty fat. I should just be not fat.
0:55:30 And I should be fit instead of fat. And so what I realized was I was like, Oh,
0:55:34 all I simply need to do is just do the things that the fit people do.
0:55:40 So instead of searching for like, which diet is best or which workout program should I be
0:55:44 doing? What equipment should I, it’s like, let’s just simplify who in my life is fit. And then
0:55:50 simply what do they do and find the delta between what I do and what they do. Oh, okay. At night,
0:55:53 when I’m hungry, I’ll go grab a bag of chips from the pantry. At night, when they’re hungry,
0:55:58 they drink a glass of water and they go to sleep. Right. Or in the morning, you know,
0:56:02 the first thing I do is I roll over, I check my phone, my laptop, I start working. What they do
0:56:07 is they go work out first for 45 minutes. And then they start working. Okay, good. Like the
0:56:12 balloon print is stupidly obvious. It’s right in front of me. You know, for example, my trainer
0:56:17 came with me on a trip. And so we all packed our bag. And when we all got there, we all look
0:56:22 at the bag and he had a protein powder in there. He had a set of bands in there and he had a little
0:56:26 myofascial like ball, like a massage ball, so that when he got off the flight, he could quickly
0:56:30 loosen up. And it’s just, we looked at all of our bags, you know, business guys who were out of shape,
0:56:34 we just didn’t even have the shit in the bag. And it’s not the tool, it’s just simply like,
0:56:39 it’s not like he had to think, ah, how am I going to be fit this weekend? It’s simply a way of life
0:56:44 for him. And so the easiest question I have is what’s, is that I ask myself when I’m like in
0:56:49 situations. All right, sweet, what’s a fit guy like me doing in a situation like this? Instead of
0:56:54 what should I do? What am I going to do? Am I going to do? What should I order off door dashes?
0:56:58 What’s a fit guy like me order at a time like this? And the answer is a lot easier when I
0:57:02 simply think of what, what does a person who already has the outcome I want? How do they
0:57:06 approach the same situation? And luckily, there’s enough people around me, around me in my life
0:57:11 where I can just watch and see what they do. And I think the key asterisk, the key asterisk that
0:57:16 he gives as well, is it has to be merit based. So like, you can’t just pick the person with the
0:57:23 billionaire dad or the ridiculous, ab genetic Franciscan garden style, the better the returns,
0:57:27 if you almost look at like a company, like the better returns on their start position,
0:57:31 that you would bet on is probably the person to study the most. Like it was the super skinny guy
0:57:36 that you go, I’d still bet on his fitness coin. Or if it’s the guy from the worst background,
0:57:39 but you’d still bet on his finance coin, those are the real values you can learn from.
0:57:47 I love it. So George, as I knew, this was amazing, two parts, so good, so fun to talk to you, dude.
0:57:50 This is why when I launched my new Good Friday, the email series that I started doing on my
0:57:55 website, you were the first guy I reached out to because I love trading ideas with you and you
0:58:01 are a just absolute fountain of insightful, interesting things that I think can help people’s
0:58:04 lives. So thanks for coming on, man. Where should people follow you? Is Twitter the best place?
0:58:09 Yeah, thank you for having me. Twitter, go to George Mac, George underscore underscore Mac,
0:58:15 newsletter George back.com. And we’ve helped three different billion dollar companies get
0:58:19 their best performing ads. So if you’d help advertising as well, go to add professor.com.
0:58:26 And yeah, thank you for having us, John. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what
0:58:34 I want to put my all in it like days on the road. Let’s travel never looking back.
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