My First Million - The Most Valuable Skill For Any Founder

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Episode 703: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to George Mack ( https://x.com/george__mack ) about high agency.  — Links: • Steal Sam's guide to turn ChatGPT into your Executive Coach: https://clickhubspot.com/wec • High Agency - https://www.highagency.com/  • Nick Mowbray episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pHcxoZ0j9A  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

I love to show Ted Lasso because it's like an example of, I call it getting Ted Lassoed now, which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge, but the American has 10X the agency or confidence, and as a result, they achieve five times more. That was brilliant. George, you got an interesting career because you were at social chain early on. So if people know, Steve Bartlett from Divers He was there early. He then, so now he has, he then created a successful marketing agency.

And then a couple weeks ago, you came out with this thing. It was called highagency.com. Let me give the background here. George got obsessed with the way that Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon, George fell in love with this idea of high agency. He started tweeting about it, started blogging about it. He's like, I'm going to write a handbook on this thing. He started making it like his soul,

focus for at least what, six months, George? Well, I'd say five years. Five years is when I first started thinking about the idea when Eric Weinstein mentioned it. And then I started writing about it. I got advice that it would never take off as an idea. Interestingly, since we did our podcast last time when we discussed it, the idea or the meme as a whole has become bigger and bigger and bigger. I think...

By the way, it's not five years. When I googled your name, I googled George Mack High Agency, you were tweeting about this in November of 2018. seven. So let's explain it and the easy way to explain it we can put this visual up on YouTube. So high agency,

like the meme that stands out to me is there's a dude deserted on an island and person, it's two people. Person A takes like the wood from the island and they try to spell the word help

and they're just sitting there waiting to be helped. They're hoping somebody comes and saves them. And then person B takes those letters and builds a little raft and starts paddling themselves. They start helping themselves. And, you know, one is a higher agency version than another, right? The guy who builds the boat and starts paddling is the higher agency version.

And so what's cool about this is you got obsessed with, you got interested in the idea, then you got obsessed with the idea, then you committed to the idea and you started writing this thing and you were giving me updates saying you're writing this for a while. And Sam, do you know the story of how he got highagency.com? No. Because he did not own that domain. It's actually a very high agency story. Yeah, so one of the things I have in the piece is an exercise that I do, and I recommend it, it's called turning bullshit into reality.

So the way most people kind of live in the 21st century is like this to-do list model where they empty short-term memory, like what's caching in their memory, and then they do that thing that day. Versus the turning bullshit to reality model is you think of a value that you want to hold or live up to, and then you come up with ideas based off that. So it's a much more creative way of living the to-do list. So when I was actually writing the piece, it's kind of like, well, you want to be the personal trainer who's in shape. So I'd try and do some high agency stuff of like, how could I potentially promote this? So one of the things I was listing down as I do the turning bullshit to reality exercise was, what about if I just get highagency.com? And I kind of look and it's like likely to be tens of thousands of dollars. But I then started reaching out to a few different brokers, a few little hacky people.

And we realized that highagency.com, the person had owned it for like 20 years. I think it was an old agency. and it was about to expire when we looked at the domain. So we kind of sat there, waited for the moment that it would expire, and then it went into a little mini auction, and nobody else online was aware of it. It was me and a marijuana, a cannabis marketing agency, which makes sense.

High agency, I hadn't thought of that. And, yeah, managed to get it at, like, essentially, for near as free as a result. So that's an example of the turning bullshit into reality. And then when it came to actually promoting the piece, I was like, okay, let's write down high agency, and then what are ways that I can display that about? value for promoting it. And I always go with my kind of facial muscles or if I start giggling at

something, I go, that's probably a good idea. And the one idea I had for promoting it was like, what if I take over Times Square for a blog post? So I was like, okay, that I started giggling at that. That sounded like my guts telling me that's the right direction to go. Started cold emailing, blasting people with obviously my background in advertising. How could I set up favors and move things around. And then for the day of the launch, I took over one time square with high agency, got me this billboard, highagency.com, with my little Twitter icon taking over time square that day. Dude, that is awesome. How many views did this article get so far or that day? So I actually, I think I don't track. I don't track any of that. The one thing I do track is DMs and emails. Because I think,

again, I've been in media for a while. And I think one of the biggest issues that we face with modern media is people go off width metrics because what gets measured, gets managed and it's so easy to see view count. But it's, so for example, if an episode gets a million views of yours, that's great. But if 10,000 people listen to it five times, I would argue the latter is much better than the former.

But right now we don't have that many ways of measuring death metrics. So I prefer going off debt metrics, which are quality of people that DM me, quality of people that email me. And then one side effect that I did get is once every two days, somebody will say it made them cry, which was not the intention at all.

So I haven't paid attention to that. I just look at the death metrics. So I wanted to do a little thing, which was like, what are examples of extreme high agency that we've personally experienced, either something you did, something you didn't do, a friend, somebody you admire, anything like that. I just wanted to kind of like quickly spitball, what comes to mind. So you weren't there on this podcast, but I did a podcast with this guy, Nick Mowbray. and Nick Mowbray's episode.

I don't know if it has the most views. It is the most hardcore episode I've ever done on this podcast. I think the guy is the most impressive entrepreneur that's ever been on the podcast. And we've done 700 episodes, something like that. And he's a guy nobody's ever even heard of. I think this is like a Elon level entrepreneur in terms of his level of agency. And agency is like the perfect word to describe him. So he talks about basically like just the, I'll give you the simple examples and I'll ramp to

to his most insane example. So he's like, him and his brother want to start a toy company straight out of like high school, basically. And so he's 17, 18 years old. And he's first, he goes door to door selling his, his brother's like science fair project. So door to door sales already like, let's say level one agency, right? That takes agency to go do that every single day. And he sells like thousands of units door to door.

Then he's like, okay, great. How are we going to produce thousands of units? We got to like ramp production. So they said, well, where do other toys get made? they get made in China. So they just pick up and they move to China with no money. They literally sleep on a sidewalk outside the airport on the first night. And the funniest part is he's describing to me that they moved to China to set up their factory. And what I thought he meant was how everybody does it. You go to China and you find a factory that already does this. That's the point of going to China.

He didn't even understand that. He's like, dude, to say I was naive is an understatement. He's like, we went to China. And then we just built a factory with wood by like by a river. We built. a shed and that became our factory and we found Chinese people when we employed them in the factory. We created our own factory. It's like besides the point of like why you would even do that. Factory is glamorizing it. It's like hot. Exactly. And then

he's like and by the way, worst product. You know, everybody says, oh, you know, product is everything. He's like we had the worst product. We just couldn't even make it good. We were so bad at it. We just kept it. Slept in the thing for like years, lived off a dollar a day budget. Like, you know, eating like the cheapest like food. They basically employed this Chinese woman from the village to make them rice every day.

he's like, I was like, so how did you get like distribution? Because they're everywhere. They're in Walmart. They're in every store. And he goes, I would email every buyer of every retail store in every geography, every day. That was my day. He's like, and eventually they were like, dude, we don't want it. He's like, ah, so you're here.

You replied. Great. We'd love to tell you about our latest product. And finally, you know, they would, someone would crack and be like, all right, just let me the sample. Or like, look, I'm going to the show. Please stop emailing me. If you're there, I'll meet with you.

I'll give you 20 minutes. and he used that to scrape and clawed. So he's describing all of this, his journey for him and his brother to bootstrap a toy company that became the biggest toy company in the world. They make a billion dollars a year of profit, the two brothers with no outside investors. Then he's getting a,

he got his intestines removed or something like that. He basically got a Crohn's disease or something like that. I forgot what it was. He had to go get like half his intestine removed or something like that. While he's recovering on his like kind of sick bed, he decides to go into a new space and he creates the world's most popular diaper brand

and the fastest selling diaper brand in the world right now is rascals. He created that. And then he also created like the fastest growing hair care brand on TikTok. Like this guy's just prolific, right? And I just couldn't believe it. And so it just blew my mind.

It showed me like there's so many levels of agency above where I'm at. I couldn't believe it. George, do you think that crazy people like that are born or do they learn it or can you learn it? One thing, like a model from cognitive behavioral therapy, is black or white thinking. So people will go, is it nature or is it nurture? And realistically, it's probably somewhere on a spectrum.

That's what I kind of call it the high agency spectrum. I think there's definitely people who have genetic advantages. Belagio had a great line the other day of when communism ended, the Soviets could discuss profit for the first time. And he was talking about with wokeness ending, maybe we can discuss genetics. for the first time. And I feel that, yes, genetics definitely plays a component, but I would say that can then be quite a low agency for you to then just outsource it purely to your genetics. So I think it definitely plays a component, but you can definitely have agency over your agency. And I think the way I would immediately explain that is that it's possible to, you could imagine,

regardless of their genetic role of the dice, it's possible to decrease somebody's agency. Therefore, it's possible to increase somebody's agency. And I just look at it. it. The easiest example I look at is the difference between my British friends and my American friends. I kind of, I love to show Ted Lasso because it's like an example of, I call it getting Ted Lassoed now, which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge, but the American has 10x the agency or confidence, and as a result, they achieve five times more. So, by the way, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. And I think I've said, that's brilliant. And I think I've said on the podcast to my British friends, the difference in American culture and British culture

is watching the British office and the American office. In the American office, the guy always gets the girl. There's a little bit of laughing at each other, but it's more like we're laughing together and it always ends well. But in the British office, it's kind of mean and like the guy does not get the girl oftentimes. It actually ends sad. The British show is more realistic and was less successful than the American version of the office too. But the Ted Lassso, example is way better because it's so true that you like see this optimistic person and he's in a room full of haters. And that's like that kind of reminds me my British versus American friends. There's a crazy stat around universities. So the top 10 universities in the world, I believe

three are British and three are American. So when you actually look at our intellect, I think you could argue we're at least a smart or at least the British sound smarter. We have that going for us. However, when it then comes to entrepreneurial output of those universities, America is like five times higher. Even the example of deep, a lot of the AI innovation came from the UK, but then that the actual execution happens in the US. So yeah, so to go back to your point, I think using the UK versus the US as an example goes to show you've got similar wide distribution of genetics going on, but a completely

different output as a result. You said something that we passed over, but I thought it was actually a pretty good insight, which was you pay attention to the, you said it in a very interesting. intellectual, like a pitchist with the facial muscles. But really what you're saying was, if it makes me laugh, there's actually some merit in the idea, right? The idea that makes me giggle is the one I should double click into. And I just thought, have you seen this email that basically kick started Airbnb? So Airbnb, which today, I don't know, $100 billion company or so, the email that kicked it off is a public email you can read. And it's from Joe Gabia and he's emailing

Brian. And he goes, Brian, I thought of a way to make a few bucks again, becomes a hundred billion company. Thought a way to make a few bucks, turning our place into a designer's bed and breakfast. We could let young designers come into town and crash at our place during the four-day event. There's like a conference. And we'll give them Wi-Fi, a small desk, a sleeping mat and breakfast every morning. Ha! And if it's hot with an exclamation point at the end, Joe. And he leaves it with that.

That's such a good email that it sounds fake. And so I remember like pointing out that I think any idea that ends with that like genuinely you would be like, Like, if that's your genuine field to end of it, there's a lot of potential in those types of ideas. My one that I was afraid for saying for a while, because I thought I might get cancelled, but then when I explain it, I think it kind of makes sense. So this is obviously the TikTok clip that gets me cancelled. But then I'll explain. So don't clip it. Essentially, I think child labor is underpriced.

Let me explain. Obviously, the classic child labour that we see in the world now is truly atrocious, horrific, and anybody involved in that, I wish them hell. However, we went through a model of children working, for example, in the UK, cleaning chimneys. And obviously, then that got completely outlawed, largely got outlawed across the world. But I think now there will be, thanks to AI and the teaching collapse, I think I've always said for a while, and I think AI has now accelerated this, is that you'll see the first

teenage, first self-made teenage billionaire by the end, by 2030. And I think that, that makes me giggle when I say it, and I think it's true. I think that is a very bold prediction. It doesn't even seem crazy. Dude, we had a guy on the podcast the other day

who was 17 years old, who had a business doing $30 million a year in revenue. Yeah. So I have an idea, which is the next Y Combinator, only invests between the age of 11 to 18 years old. First off, nobody's funding them because they can't. You've got the homeschooling boom right now.

One of the criticisms beforehand would be they're in school so they can't do it, but you obviously seeing that decay away, as well as how would adults take them seriously? But now with smaller teams and the ability to hide behind a cartoon or whatever, I think now is the time that we will see it. When Sean first told me about, I think it was on this podcast, Sean, or I forget when, but you or someone told me about Peter Teal's, uh, Teal Fellowship. Yeah. And he was like, he's, he's going to give you $150,000 to drop out of college and start a

company. That was one of those, it doesn't seem ridiculous now. It's the opposite of stay in school kids. He was like, I'll pay you to leave school kids. That was his idea. And when he's, and when that idea came out, I felt the same thing where it was like, that's insane. Wait, why? You can't do that. And then it, like, everyone goes to like the same mental model, although some people it will take 10 years because they'll see the results nowadays. But like other people like me, it took me like a few weeks.

I'm like, that's crazy. And then it's like, that's crazy, right? And like you like ask, like, is this crazy? Oh, this is actually kind of awesome. And then, you know, Ethereum comes out of that and Figma comes out of that and a bunch of like, you know, kind of multi-billion dollar industry changing companies

come out of it. On the topic of high agency and how it relates to all of this that we're discussing right now. So one great question is, what would I do if I had 10xD agency? Another question I love, because you guys obviously talk about ideas and opportunities that are coming up, but to like zoom out and then give people the agency to think about how to actually come up with the ideas and opportunities themselves. One of my favorite questions is what is ignored or neglected by the media that will be studied by historians?

What's a historical example? So I did a post two years ago on this topic that went really viral. And even if you look at some of the things in there, so a good example will be like microplastics. It's kind of, it's slowly bubbling up now. It's reaching the media. But if you discussed that two to three years ago, you was an absolute weirdo. Another example in there was around fentanyl that I put in the post. And at the time, it was seen as like absurd or crazy or there wasn't that many people discussing it.

And now it's way bigger. So I think there's, there's countless examples of this media historian gap that exists. There's a great book called The Sovereign Individual, and they have a line in that that always stuck with me, which is they're talking about the fall of the Roman Empire. And it's quite easy to point to the date of when the Roman Empire fell. But if you actually went at the time and asked people, when did the Roman Empire fall or fell,

there was no big announcement. There was no, hey, guys, the empire has fallen. It likely a lot of people didn't admit it until like 100 years later. So they point to this case that if CNN existed, during the fall of the Roman Empire. On the day it fell, they wouldn't have announced it would have fallen. But it just takes people a while. I think that's a big high agency trait,

is essentially just if you wait for the news, you'll be wrong or late. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. Do you have suspicions of what an idea like that would be today? Because it's a very hard question. It's an important question. It's worth pondering,

but it's not one where 10 answers come to mind right away of what's largely ignored or underreported today that will be historically important to historians in the future. One funny one that if I was a historian, this is really absurd, but I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East coming from the UK and spent four to five years in Dubai. And one thing that's truly absurd about the West is in the Middle East, whenever you go to the bathroom, there's like a arse-spraying thing.

that you have. In the West, everybody, yeah, it's like, it's more like a showerhead kind of thing. So, you get a bidet, which is a separate mechanism, but it's like a little showerhead. I could go to the most remote, crazy location in the desert and they will have one. I've yet to see one. What's it just like a, what do they call? I actually, I call it like an arsprae. I don't, I don't know what is actually the official terminology. There's no one to talk to about it when you're there. This is the problem right is that there's, in the West, there's almost not really a good naming mechanism before it. And the fact that Rory Sutherland has this great bit, which is, imagine if a bird shot on your head. And I go, oh, Sam, Sean, here's a dry piece of paper to wipe it off.

You go, what the fuck, man, I need to wash my hair. But meanwhile, this is going on in the West en masse. And I think as an entrepreneurial opportunity, changing the frame around that, I think it's a billion dollar opportunity if you partnered with a plumbing company or something like that. Imagine, again, I think from the ad first as well. Have you seen Tushy? No. Tushy's like an attachable bidet. It's like turns any dumb toilet into a smart toilet type of thing. I think they do extremely well.

I think they're like north of $100 million in revenue targeting the American market. But I'm with you, dude. That's just the tip of the iceberg, all right? You're right that it will seem crazy in hindsight. Another example of what's ignored or neglected by the media that will be studied by historians is I think we're going through a seismic shift now. that's similar to when writing first came online. So there's a great sci-fi book by a guy called Ted Chang,

and it's one of his short stories, and he tells a scenario, which is possible now, this technology already exists, where you have essentially always on recording technology. So some people, they record their whole life. So you can kind of see it now with Twitch streamers, right?

And why this is fascinating is the impact this then has on memory, So it's in the books of spoiler alert, it tells the story of a father, daughter, and mother. The mother leaves them without saying goodbye essentially. And the father and daughter one day have this huge argument where the daughter says to the father, I wish you'd just leave like mom, I hate you. And it haunts the father to that very day. And after about five years, they slowly build their relationship. And the father doesn't have access to all these recording devices, but his daughter does.

And one day he needs access to go through her memory log. So he's asked her for access. She shares it with him. And as he's going through it, that file pops up. And he goes, oh, shit, like, this is one of the biggest emotional moments of my life. Like, he presses play on it. And the recording shows that he completely misremembered the event. It was him that said it to her.

And it's this idea that essentially all our memories are completely bullocks. It's completely made up. It's pretty much all artificial. And how does that change? when we essentially have recordings of everything. I think that will be a big thing that historians will begin to look at of we completely then, like the shift that we had

when we started writing for the first time, that's going to be a huge shift as a result as well. Have you seen the Black Mirror episode about this? They did a version of this on Black Mirror as well. Oh, really? Well, there's an example of in the UK, there's a building called Grenfell Tower. It was a horrific accident that occurred

where the whole building sat on fire, it was in a council estate, and loads of people died. And on the day, there was this weird case of a baby getting dropped from the top floor all the way down and somebody catching it. And it went crazy viral at the time, and a load of eyewitness testimony came out saying that they saw it. And when it, the classic physicist about six months later after the emotion had calmed down around the event was like, hold on, if you drop a baby from that high to there, like, the first, physics of this, I've got a bit of doubt about it. And when they actually digged into the memories of it, a lot of it was just artificial memories that people had created. So I'm pretty fascinated by devices like that that come online.

And I think part of society will go for it and the other part of society will not go for it. But it just completely changes who you are when you no longer have a story of your memories. You actually have the full log. Yeah, there's a famous experiment. Have you guys ever seen this? There's a 9-11 memory experiment? What's that?

No. They basically, people, feel like you really remember those important traumatic days. You know, there's the, even phrases in the language, like, I'll never forget where I was, or I'll never forget how I felt when I saw that. And there's actually a set of, I don't have the studies in front of me, but there's, I remember learning about this, that there was a set of studies where people, they went and they studied the memory accuracy of people remembering 9-11.

And it was pretty shocking. It was like less than 50% of the details were accurate. It was a combination of they had extreme confidence that their memories were accurate. Their memories actually were not accurate. And then they don't, not only do they not remember what happened, they actually didn't even remember how they felt. I think they had like logged at a, like early on. They logged how they had felt.

And then they measured three years later and then many years later trying to remember how you felt and you didn't even actually remember that properly. And that your memories basically converge towards like a shared narrative rather than what actually happened. And so there's, and all these terms for a flashback. bulb memories. There's all these like terms for that describe how poor human memory actually is, which is like kind of crazy when it comes to like the court system, for example, like a lot of it's based on, you know, eyewitness testimony or somebody remembering certain details.

And what's funny is, Sean, is as you were describing that, I was thinking, where was I at 9-11? What was I doing? And then I'm also saying the second most common thing, which is, but I remember. Yeah, I'm the exception. Ads don't work on me. That's what everyone's going to say. They're going to say, but I remember that. Oh, and by the way, I told the story shown on here. I think how this one, this like prestigious journalist, I asked her to come in freelance for The Hustle. And she wrote a letter back to me and she says like, that's cute. Thanks.

And like it drove like eight years of like success for me because I was like, I'm going to prove this freaking jerk wrong. She was so dismissive of me. I went back and reread the email. She was super nice. Like she didn't say that's cute She said like I'm honored Thank you so much for thinking of me I'm too busy right now

But you know good luck with your new indefinitely I went and read it and I'm like That's insane I told myself the story And I said it publicly so many times I even named dropped her once or twice It was wrong it was wrong I didn't remember it correctly And I'm happy I didn't but yeah

Our memory is crap What about George about You had stuff in here about like looking for business ideas through a high agency lens, but also building software that's high agency. What does that mean? Because what you're describing to me is like a philosophical, like a mental framework. But it actually seems like when you think about this is actually more tactical than that. Yeah, it's incredibly tactical. There was a post, I think, two days ago that went really viral on pirate wires about how agency is the most important thing, thanks to

by AI, I think agency has always been one of the most important things. So I said it's probably the most important idea of a 21st century, or it might be. And if a British person says probably or might be, it's almost like an American betting the house on it. And in this pirate wires post, they spoke about how now thanks to AI and large language models, the exponential or like the leverage that you get on agency as a result is so much bigger. And you just then begin to look at it. So like a small case of high agency for me is I started getting bored of being bullied by algorithms. I feel like everybody is just a bitch to the algorithms these days. And I try and find small ways to have agency over the algorithm. So like even I said, okay, I reflected on my YouTube history. I

recommend everybody do it. It's one of the weirdest exercises, talk about memory, is you go on YouTube and then you press history. And I just scrolled through the videos. And I was like, okay, which ones of these do I, am I glad that I watched in hindsight? Which ones am I kind of neutral about? And then which ones would I say I regretted? And I said, I think it was about 80% of them. I regretted, 10% I was neutral and 10% I enjoyed watching. And then I looked at it and said, okay, what do the ones that I like have in common?

And then what do the ones that I don't like also have in common? And the single biggest thing of where I thought I wasted my time was content under 30 minutes long. Because it was just brain rock content, particularly under like, five minutes long, like a coffee zilla reaction of Logan Paul's done this crazy crypto pump and dump and I just click on it and then I'm in this like vortex and going back to the memory thing, I've completely forgotten this. So I was like, okay, how about I just work with chat GPT to solve this problem, built a script and now I call it the kale algorithm. My YouTube does not show me any videos under 30 minutes. So this ability to be able to manipulate your environment, particularly I think

with AI now has only got bigger and bigger. So there's agency everywhere. Everything is I don't have you heard that phrase of everything's a skill issue. It's kind of like that for agency. Like everything is just a agency problem. Where else are you doing that in your life? So even small things. Just constantly each day, I recommend going back to the turning bullshit into reality, just going through that list and then operating from a creative model each day of how can I have agency

and then applying it rather than going off the to do list model. So, I mean, anything from writing down, I want to learn. I have always wanted to play Baker Street on the saxophone. I sat on the beach. I did turning bullshit into reality. I wanted to learn Baker Street on the saxophone. My girlfriend says, why don't you do it? There's nothing more embarrassing than a girl saying, why don't you do it? So I just then ordered a saxophone, taught myself Baker Street on the saxophone. So just coming at it from a very simple model of write down the value, then ways you can display it, then do the thing. There's an amazing article that went viral the other day. You know it's a good article when it's from like 2010 on like a really weird niche blog. So there's a guy called Aaron Schwartz. who you probably heard of. He was the Reddit co-founder who tragically took his own life. And he has this amazing blog,

which goes to your point there, Sam, of like, how do you actually turn this tactically? And it talks about having a theory of action versus a theory of change. So he uses the example of you want the United States to decrease their military spending.

So a theory of action would be, I'm a blogger, therefore I'm going to write blog posts about this thing. whereas a theory of change is essentially where you go, okay, I want to decrease the United Spence military. What is, how can I do that? Or like, why, why, why, how, how, how, all the way down until you get to a concrete action that you can do today. The piece is absolutely incredible. And I think you mentioned to Sean on the podcast the other day around how hard it can be to actually think from first principles.

But using Aaron's framework, the blog post, I really recommend checking out. is absolutely incredible. Yeah, you said on here, and when we asked what you want to talk about, you said something about how you think that language kind of controls people a lot. I think you said language shapes the world around us. And I was thinking about that. And I actually, I made a change recently where I was thinking, like, I have a problem where I will compare myself to other people a lot.

And I would say, like, I should be doing this or I should be at this place. And I remember I read something and I started changing the words to, I choose to do this. I think, I think Sean, did you actually say this? I think we had someone on the podcast where it was like, it changed my thinking, where it's like, I'm going to say, instead of I should, I'm going to change that word to choose. It's like, what am I going to choose to do? Not I should be doing X, Y, and Z. I was at a Tony Robbins event and he said it beautifully.

He goes, somebody was, had raised their hand. They said something, I should do this. You know, I should do this, but blah, blah, blah, but I just think that they should do that. And they were saying it. And he goes, he goes, you're doing what a lot of people do. You're shitting all over yourself. I just couldn't unhear it. He's like, people just should all over themselves.

And I just, from that moment on, it literally viscerally felt gross to say the word should. I'm shitting all over myself right now. And I just couldn't do it anymore. Language is a great example of low agency. So the amount of times that we'll wait for a word to find us rather than trying to create words ourselves. So that's why I felt high agency was quite a meta thing where when I discovered that word,

it actually changed the way I viewed reality. So one way of viewing reality is reality happens and you have words to describe it. Another way to view it is you use words and then that kind of edits reality. So it's a kind of a double-edged sword. Good examples of that would be fake news. So fake news, there was words beforehand that never really caught off.

It was like yellow journalism. There was truthy news. But then when fake news came along, you have a clearer way of viewing reality. A great example right now is the term vibe coding. The only thing that's probably done more than LLMs for vibe coding is the actual meme itself of vibe coding. So high agency is another example of that. What is vibe coding, by the way? I still don't know what the difference between vibe coding and coding is.

just you basically a non-technical person prompting an LLM and getting them to code it for them. That's five coding. All right. Got it. And you're saying what? When you actually have that language itself or you have those memes, it actually increases the output of things. And then you begin to see language can have such a impact everywhere. I'm actually fascinated by on the topic of the show, the millionaire meme.

So the concept of a millionaire is so impactful to society. and it hasn't been updated even as inflation's etoway at being a millionaire. So, like, I once watched a YouTube ad where they were talking in, like, a currency that's, like, one to ten. And he was talking about making his first million. But it still exists, even as, like, the inflations kicked in. And I'm fascinated to see what replaces that. There's a, there's this great book from back of the day that I've never read because

it's one of those books where the cover tells you the whole story. You can literally read the cover. You can have the epiphany and you could move on. And it's called Your Word is Your Wand. It's by, I think, Florence Scoville. And it's actually kind of a hard book to read because it's one of these books that's written like 80 years ago or something. And it's just like too poetic to like actually grok nowadays.

But the whole idea is like, your word is your wand, is your magic wand. And it shapes your reality exactly as you're describing. And this applies to like, yes, it applies to high agency, but I'll give you another example. So I tore my knee ligament a couple months ago. So I've been recovering from it and I've been doing rehab. and my trainer who's like, he's like the black belt in mindset that I get to work out with every, every day. And so he never uses the word rehab. And he's always uses the different words.

So he'll be like, he's like, all right, let's get ready. He'll be like, this is not rehab. We're going to renew. We're going to refresh. We're going to recharge. We're going to. He's like, we're going to do something. We're going to make that need better than it was before.

And rehab already like implies some version of it's broken. We're going to try to fix it. versus he's like, all right, we're going to rejuvenate this thing. We're going to make your knee 10 years younger than it, than it currently is. How are we going to do that? It's literally when you change the word, you change the method, right? Like the what you say changes the how you do it. And you just see this over and over and over again in small ways in business.

And like another version of this that I've seen that I've done recently is like intentionally breaking your speed bar. So we all have a certain clock speed, a certain speed with which we operate things. and a good exercise is to just break the speed barrier of what you think is possible for any given task. So it could be very small. It could be you're doing the dishes and you have the silverware and you normally put it away at a certain rate, but try to break your speed bar. Like see how fast you could do that thing or this piano that I got here. I had this idea of like, I want to have, I've been practicing the piano for three months. I'm ready to upgrade from my keyboard

to like a legit piano. It's more fun to play, feels better, et cetera. And my birthday coming up. So the normal speed bar would be you kind of wait for your birthday. So you wait, not a very high agency thing to do. And then you get it. And then you maybe get it, but then you get it on back order because they don't have them in stock. And then it's going to take a few weeks to come. And then it gets, then you set a delivery date and they show up. And I basically set myself a challenge. From the moment I had the idea, I said, this inspiration is perishable, right? Ideas are avocados. I'm not going to let this go brown. I'm going to do this thing right now. And so I said, I want to see how fast I could do this. I think the normal person, this would be like

two or three week project. I'm going to see if I can do this in 24 hours. And sure enough, I like just mobilize my own army of like my resources, my focus, my intention towards making that one thing happen. And it was crazy. Like the store was closed, but I found the owner. I called him and I said, would you come and open the store? I'm ready to buy a piano right now. The guy comes and he opens the store for me. And then I, you know, instead of just playing the piano, trying to figure out which, which of these pianos better, I said, I didn't know first which pianos you have in stock in the warehouse that could get delivered tomorrow. And in fact, while I'm looking, I want you to call the delivery guys and schedule a delivery

for tomorrow. I'm going to pick, but you schedule it right now because it's Friday and I want this delivered Saturday morning. And I made the whole thing happen. And by 11 a.m. Saturday morning, I had the piano in the room and I was playing it. And I just feel like there's so many instances where if you break your speed bar in one area, you realize that like in all areas, speed is negotiable, that you could change the

rate at which something's going to happen in your business. or in your personal life. He just said his attention, his focus, and his energy is his army. How good is that? Is that what you just said? Yeah. Go ahead, George. You got a military and air force.

You need a little one for each one. That's beautiful. Yeah, let's go. March, right? Scott Galloway had a great version of this. He goes, how did he say it? He's like, I deployed an army of capital in my 40s from my family to go kill and grow while I was asleep.

Dude, that's so good. That's so good. George, who are examples that are not the Elon Musk's of the world who you think represent high agency? Can you give us a friend? Because I think that the best way to get high agency is to just hang out with a high agency person because you'll realize how unacceptable your low agency thoughts are around them. You'll feel embarrassed by it. And so being around high agency people is the fastest way to become more high agency yourself.

Well, the question I always come back to is who would you call when you're stuck in a third world jail sale? that's how you identify the highest agency person that you know. Two that come to mind. There's one called Shannon who is probably one of the most underrated individuals that exist. He literally created information theory, which is he took the idea from philosophy, where you have ones and zeros in logic and applied that to computing and created information theory, which literally creates everything that we're doing right now.

basically the father, him and Alan Shuring, the father of modern computing, and he has this crazy thing. So one of the things in the essay, one of my favorite high agency aphorisms is, just does it defy the laws of physics? It's like a brain prompt whenever you face with a problem, does it defy the laws of physics? And Claude Shannon and a guy called Ed Thorpe wanted to hack Roulette. So roulette is the example of the ultimate game of luck. And Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe before the first ever mobile computer, they created the first ever mobile computer. that they had in their shoe that would look at the

as the ball hit based off the probability and they hacked roulette by managed to outcompete their house by about 33%. So I'd say Claude Shannon's awesome. Sean, you should read Ed Thorpe's biography. One of the best biographies I've ever read.

Adding it to the list. A man for market. So this guy, Ed Thorpe, he basically was a math guy. He was a math prodigy. He got sick at just making the wage that math teachers got. And so he said, I'm going to invent a way

to count cards. He did. So he invented card. counting. He made a lot of money. And then he was like, you know, I don't really like being in casinos all the time. Like, it's not good for my family. And the mafia, or not the mafia, the, the, the, the casinos started getting on his case. And he was like, I don't want them to like break my hand in the back door in the back room because I'm counting cards. And so he eventually got into finance. And he started the, uh, one of the first ever hedge funds and, you know, became a billionaire that way.

And he tells stories. And he's, it's sort of like a Forrest Gump story. Like he tells a story about how He's like, I met this young man who had these really good ideas and I knew this guy was going to be super rich. And so I decided to become one of his first investors and he went and started this thing called Berkshire Hathaway. Like, you know, and there's like 10 or 20 stories like that where he was like, you know, I was just like poking around and I met this guy. And I thought he was really smart. We stayed in touch. And then he went and founded Apple. You know, like he's got like a ton of stories like that.

But who's the second person on your list? The second person on my list is a book by called Don't Tell Me I Can't by Cole Summers. It's the most underrated business book in the world, in my opinion. It's an hour long and it's written by a 13 year old who tells the story. Is this the unschooling guy? The unschooling guy, yeah. So when he is I think four or five, him and his parents see these kids outside causing havoc and saying some nasty things.

And he's from a very poor background. And they decide, you know what, we're not going to go to school. We're going to homeschool you. And unfortunately, his father who served in the military, who's supposed to be his teacher, ends up having to have multiple surgeries. And one day he goes to his dad, who you can just imagine he's sat there post-surgery, kind of a little bit out of it. And he says, Cole says to his dad, dad, how do I get rich?

And his dad says, I don't know, son, like maybe go watch Warren Buffett videos on YouTube. So this six-year-old starts watching Warren Buffett videos on YouTube. And you listen to the audio book and you like taking notes of like, oh my God, this kid's so smart, like the lessons he's taken from Charlie Munger. And then at seven, I believe he starts his first business that gets to a thousand dollars profit per month. He acquires a vehicle using his parents' license when he's like nine or ten. What was the business? What was the seven-year-old's business? rabbit farming.

So he would breed rabbits and sell them. And sell them to restaurants. So he took that to $1,000 per month. He then flipped a house and made, I think, like $10,000 profit when he was 10 years old. And he tells the story. It was like an abandoned house, right? It was like somebody's house that was just dilapidated. They weren't doing anything with it.

He just says, hey, if I just like, if I do all the work, then can I, you know, share in the profit of flipping this, basically? He didn't even buy a home to flip it. He just found a unused home and was like, There's potential here. He's incredible. He tells this story when he's meeting other seven-year-olds for the first time, or he's at like scouts with his friends. And they're talking about what they learn that day.

And they're going, yeah, I was looking at Pluto. Is it a planet? Is what they were teaching at school? I don't know whenever, like, I care about this. And he goes, oh, I was looking into how Amazon manages to pay zero percent tax, just using the internet. So I think his book, again, just to be clear, Not every seven-year-old should have a P&L.

Maybe 80% of them should, but not every seven-year-old should have a P&L. But he completely reframed my reality of what a child can do. What? And by the way, this is one of those stories where he's still like 15 or 16. This isn't like in the 80s. He's a kid. Yeah, he unfortunately passed away, which is really, really sad.

Wow. Like a surfing accident or something, right? Yeah, I think he, I don't know the ins and hours. of it. Tragic, obviously, but absolutely incredible that he managed to live the life that he lived. You have this thing in your post. You said how to spot high agency people. And number one, you wrote was weird teenage hobbies. Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. True. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult. And that is that, would that be yours? Your weird teenage hobby was an obsession with

juggling. Yes. I kind of wish my dad bet me I could encode. I would be probably on a yacht right now. However, I think even with hiring at my best hires that I've placed pretty much all line up in that criteria that they have weird, interesting hobbies. I was listening to an interview with Palmer Lucky chatting about this. And he, I mean, it kind of hints to some kind of intrinsic motivation as well as the ability to go against like wider mimetic forces that kind of is a good indicator. So it's a very good interview question. Like tell me about the weird shit you did growing up. Yeah, I have a I have a variation of that. We used to ask what were you a, what's something you were degenerately obsessed with? So like basically you were obsessed with at a point where it actually negatively

affected the quality of your life. Like you were too obsessed with something, but you did it anyways. And it's usually a video game or a hobby like this or a collecting, you know, type of thing. And And then there's a, I forgot who it was, some famous investor, they had this other question they asked with it, which was, what's something you could give a one hour talk on right now, unprepared? Like, you just know it so well. You spent so much time on it that if I gave you, you know, 45 minutes to an hour, you could actually like give me a crash course in this thing because you have mastery over it.

And in doing so, you also see how somebody communicates when they know something. So it does sort of two things. It gives you a relative bar. So if that's the thing you know. best. And then you compare it to the things they've been telling you about, you realize, oh, that resume was a little shaky. They don't really know how they, how that, how that operated in their company compared to how they know this. And secondly, it tells you how their communication skills are, right? Can they actually break something down simply for somebody and then build up from

there intuitively? Like, are they a good storyteller? They're a good communicator or not. And that doesn't need, you're not, you don't need that for every job, but for a number of things like, you know, for being a CEO or being a marketer, like you want to be able to do that well. Yeah, so phenomenal. Before we kind of wrap up, you had one thing here that really caught my eye. Did you, first of all, you called your, we were like, what ideas you were to talk about? You said, I'm the layered Hamilton of surfing the internet. I thought that was actually hilarious.

And you said, you just put one line in here and you said, the number one under-discussed antidepressant, which I'm curious about. And then you also said, the next ADHD. What are you referring to for those two things? Yeah, so two, like kind of. what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians. So there was a study that came out in terms of depression. I don't know if you've seen it. Metronalysis is depression.

Guess what rank the highest in terms of alleviating the symptoms of depression? Walking. Yeah, working out physical exercise. So as part of that, that was the big breakthrough that came out, which was that exercise ranked more according to this analysis than SSRIs. the number one, however, significantly more than exercise, a cognitive behavioral therapy, higher than yoga, higher than Tai Chi, was dancing.

Dance therapy, outperformed exercise significantly. Dance, according to this meta-analysis, had the greatest impact in alleviating depression. So I think there's potentially a headspace or a calm to be made that is dance therapy. That's amazing. Who knew? I'd rather be depressed. When's the last time you dance, Sam?

Never. My wife, my wife. No, no. When's the last time? Dude, I have literally not once in my life. Have I been in a public place? In the Midwest, you don't cry and you don't dance. That's what men don't do.

And you don't drink liquids out of a straw. Those are the three rules of being men in the Midwest. Don't cry, don't dance, and don't drink liquid out of straws. Okay, let's work backwards. You're in the 30s now. You're at a friend's wedding. You're just sitting down, holding down the fort at the table, making sure the purses don't get stolen?

What are you doing? Yes. Yes. I am not dancing. Wait, George, would you dance at a wedding? I mean, you're kind of suave. You probably would. Of course.

So there's a barbell. So my girlfriend is an incredible dancer. She's been dancer since she was like five. That's what she does for a living. And I realize there's a barbell when it comes to dance. You even want to be the best dancer on the dance floor or the worst dancer on the dance floor, like just letting loose and not care of. full on David Brent style.

It's the person in the middle who's either doesn't want to get on the dance floor or he's kind of half moving that is the cringest. So yeah, I'm a big dancer. I'm terrible, but I'm a dancer. All right, Sam, prom? Did you dance at prom?

No. What did you do? Sat. I just sat. I'm telling you, I don't do it. What a date. Wow. It's horrible.

That's like, you know how people say, like public speaking is the biggest fear? Mine's dancing. Public dancing. Yeah. Public dancing is definitely a bigger fear than public speaking for me. Yeah, public dancing is pretty tough.

And plus, I don't drink. So, like, if I were drunk, then I could probably get away with it. But, like, sober dancing as a grown man is probably, like, the scariest thing one can do. I'd rather go to war. Wow. Send me to you great, right? Yeah, I'd rather get deployed in Baghdad than have to dance at a wedding. Wow.

But, dude, think about this. We could do this together, man. We could overcome this. Wait, so you're fearful of this too? Yeah, but not like you. Like, if I'm out of thing, I do it, but I hate it, but I do it. But I kind of like it. But I also kind of feel insecure about it.

But then I do it anyways. I've never just taken the stance of like, nope, I'm out. So no, I don't think I'm going to be dancing. What was the second thing? The next ADHD. We've tried to chase the subject. I can't even think about dancing. The next ADHD.

is, I think, so one great idea I heard for spotting trends, is came from Chris Williamson, is when a new trend is coming, bet on a counter trend occurring. So one trend that you're seeing right now is a rise in, like, nationalism, like people, America for America, Canada for Canada, China for China. And one funny idea I have is so duolingo is obviously huge

where people go and understand languages. However, AI is almost making that irrelevant. I think learning a language is probably the skill of it is going to go down and down with time. A funny business idea that I think could work is, so when I'd speak to Chris, he would talk me about his therapy sessions and all these revelations he's getting from therapy. And I said to him, I go, I think 50% of this isn't anything to do with your childhood. It's just being British. You're just overcoming what it means to be British.

And I think there's something to be said around essentially creating a duolingo that cures you of your nationality. Because I think you're going to have a barbell where you have everybody's like America for America or it's like I'm a global citizen Balaghi network state style. And you could then just localize everything. So imagine an advert campaign, I think from the ad first. Oh, you're British. I bet you can't take compliments. I bet you have a lot of self-doubt. And it's like, yes, yes, yes.

Help fix being British. Or if you're American, you don't know anything in Europe. You just call Africa one big blob. Like, let's remove that syndrome for you because you actually realize everybody is very self-conscious of their own country. So that's one of my ideas that I think will be the new kind of pathology that people have around themselves. American one sounded awesome to me. That's America for you. That might be the market where it doesn't work.

Okay, so this works internationally. But you don't want to cure our Americans of the self-delusion that we have, that everything is great and we're great, and it's all going to work out great. That pro-noia that we have is very, very helpful to us. If you rob us of that, we get worse. One of my big regrets against being British is I've been early to a lot of things, but then maybe didn't have the conviction. Maybe it goes back to what you mentioned earlier, Sam.

And I came up with this idea ages ago where I would visualize myself on my deathbed, and I'd be there, there's nobody there. I'm at the worst version of myself. then I get a knock on the door, and it's the best version of myself. And it's that kind of this meditation, like the deaf, bad regret meditation. And then at the end, it's like, what action are you going to take today? And I thought this was the weirdest fucking shit I've ever created. And now it's big on TikTok.

It's like my friend was showing me it's a viral trend of these girls doing these exercise that I originally came up with. And I think there's something in like hardship as a service. So bet on a trend going the other way, which is life is so good compared to modern, compared to historical standards, that people want more hardship in their life. So I'd potentially create an app, which would be a negative visualization. So every day you plug it in

and you are in World War II about to go over the trenches. Your brother has died. Your mother's written letters, but you don't want to read them. You have no way of contacting your wife and you're about to go over into the trenches. And then you wake up

and all of a sudden, my life now is incredible. So I think negative visualization is a tool from stoicism, but I think there's probably a billion dollar idea in a product, a product you could build out of that. Yeah. Dude, have you guys seen this thing? I'll have to send it to you. It's on Instagram and it's a page. And the guy uses AI and the headline will be you woke up as a slave who's going to be in who's being forced to be a gladiator in Rome. Or you've woken up as a laborer in Egypt building the pyramids.

or you've woken up in a slum in Mabai in 1992. And it like sets up all these like crazy scenes. And then some of them are great. Like you woke up as an emperor in Rome. And it shows this, it shows from your point of view of that person waking up in the morning and walking around. Have you guys seen this? Or it could be even like you woke up as a kid in the Midwest in 1982.

Have you seen that, George? Yes. So this is the thinking from the ad first model. You can already picture the ads there. It then runs to a monthly subscription. and you do that as your morning meditation. And it replaces just observing your thoughts. It's more a negative contrasting tool

to make people feel better about themselves. George, thanks for coming on. Where should people follow? Twitter is the best spot? Yeah, Twitter's the best spot. George Mack on Twitter. Highagency.com, if you want to read the full piece, anything adds, adprofessor.com as well.

And yeah, that's everything. You're awesome, dude. Every conversation we have with you is amazing. You're a great thinker. and you really have a gift for making ideas that are, let's say, outside of the kind of the zone of conventional thinking and then making them sticky and memorable and kind of worth considering. So I think it's very rare. There's not a lot of people who could do that, and you're one of them.

Thank you. Thank you, George. Likewise. You're the man. Are you going to become an American anytime soon, by the way? So I just landed yesterday. I just had my visa approved, I've moved from Dubai to the U.S., purely because I'm I find when I'm in the US is the look razor.

You're way more likely to be lucky serendipitous. I don't think the quality of life here is as better as actually is in the rest of the world now, but look so much more significantly. So yes, I'm a proud Ted Lassau. Welcome to the tribe, brother. You're in. Welcome to Texas. I'll get you some cowboy boots and a hat.

And thanks for being here. Thanks for coming on the pod. God bless you. God bless America. Talk soon. You are. I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to

I put my all in it like no days off On the road, let's travel, never looking back