My First Million - The Top 0.1% Of Ideas I've Stumbled Upon On The Internet
Episode Date: August 31, 2024Episode 625: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) are back with George Mack ( https://x.com/george__mack) to talk about the best ideas he’s come across. �...�� Show Notes: (0:00) Spotting high agency people (26:12) The Kale phone vs the Cocaine phone (31:37) The obsessiveness of Lee Kuan Yew (37:34) Life as a Midwit meme (43:22) Work like a lion, not like a cow (51:52)The Buffett Coin — Links: • Get our business idea database here https://clickhubspot.com/mfm • Relentlessly Resourceful - https://paulgraham.com/relres.html • 3:1 Work Structure - https://science.drinklmnt.com/lmnt-at-work/lmnt-3-1-work-structure/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — 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 The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Well, let's do it.
So part two.
Okay, here's part two with George.
If you wanted the business ideas, we did that five banger business ideas.
That was amazing.
I got like goosebumps from it.
This is part two.
We're going to do some of your frameworks.
The biggest one, I think the one that went the most viral, is about high agency.
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 a road.
Let's travel.
You did a threat about one idea.
I think you framed it like one idea that has impacted my life the most is the
concept of high agency. Can you talk about what is high agency, why it matters, and how you spot
people with high agency? So high agency, something I've probably thought about for six to seven years.
And it's one of those topics when you search it, it's quite difficult to find online,
which is why I then just started writing about it to scratch my own itch. And the way I would describe
high agency is if you was stuck in a third world prison cell and had to call somebody to break you
out, who would you call? And that's probably.
be the most high agency person that you know. So, I mean, thought experiment time now, who do you
guys think of when I ask that question? My friend Jack Smith. That's a tough one. I feel like I would
just go for the richest person I know because I'm like, the money is going to be the most valuable
tool versus like a MacGyver who's going to break me out of my cell. So Steve Barlet answered
that question with Prince William, which I think is not allowed. So it can't be somebody who's like
a royal family member, but it has to be purely on merit.
Well, you know, the meme you have in the tweet, I think is a great visual of this.
Sam, have you seen the tweet?
I don't know if you've seen the tweet, but he basically has a one where he tells
he's like, if someone says something's impossible, a high agency person will think, well,
that's just a story you've told.
Now I'm going to overcome it versus a low agency person will be like, oh, that story is true.
I think that's a clue in it, but I'm talking about the very first picture that he has in the
tweet is basically two guys stranded on an island. One guy, and they have these pieces of, you know,
wood basically that they have from the, from the island. One guy is using the wood to spell help
so that somebody, if somebody flies over, they'll, your boat sees help that they'll come save him.
And the other guy just made a boat out of the wood. And the high agency is the guy who will make
the boat out of the wood. And most people just put out a sign for help and they're kind of the victim.
And they're looking for somebody to come and rescue them. I guess if I had to trim it out,
I think what's the advert for high agency that we spoke about last time would be high agency people or low agency people.
Are they happening to life or is life happening to them?
It's a spectrum, right?
Like the circumstances, there's different things that go on.
But you can immediately plot that X, Y axis in your head of people that you know of people that are like happening to life and people that life's happening to that.
And so why does the idea of high agency matter so much to you?
You said you've been thinking about for six or seven years.
That's probably longer than your longest relationship.
Tell me why you have had such a long relationship with this concept.
I think it's the most under-discessed personality trait,
and it's the most probably important personality trait.
And this most similar concept that I've seen online is,
have you seen Paul Graham's relentlessly resourceful?
Yeah, well, he just says, like, I've created YC,
I've now seen thousands of founders,
and if I think about the trait that is most valuable in founders,
it's not intelligence, it's not charisma,
It's not, you know, engineering prowess.
It's the, you know, the best founders are relentlessly resourceful.
And that phrase.
And he also says, like, can you describe, you know, a test is, would you describe this person
as an animal?
Would you say, yeah, he's an animal?
And if you can say, man, that guy's an absolute animal or she's an animal when it comes
to this, that's the sign of a winner.
And I think that's the output of a high agency person.
How do you describe them?
They're basically, they're an animal.
Yes.
And he has a great bit in there of inverting it, which was what would be the opposite?
opposite, and it would be hapless, which is probably a good case of life happening to them.
And I think there's a few, there's a four kind of tenants, I would say why high agency is
probably not a sticky idea as much as it could be, because it kind of has four ideas in it,
which is one, locus of control, so I have control, two, intentionalism.
So they've thought about the direction that they want to go in.
Three, resourcefulness, which is incapable of getting the outcome.
And then four, high bias for action, which is they've already fucking started the thing
before they've even listened to this podcast.
They're just constantly moving.
So those four things.
And I think it's not changeable.
It's sort of like telling people they should have started a business before they had
children.
It's like, dude, I don't like talking about that because like you can't fucking change
that.
Like you are what you are.
You know what I mean?
It's not particularly fun to talk about because I think that you have that scale already
set.
I disagree.
I think.
Go on.
Tell me.
Change my mind.
There's definitely some true.
to what you say, and also that's quite a high agency reply, right? There's definitely some truth
to what you say in that I think there is a little bit of a genetic component to it. But theoretically,
I think you could make somebody, you could reduce somebody's agency. Therefore, if you can
reduce somebody's agency, you could also increase their agency. It's probably like muscle building.
There's a genetic component to it, but I still think everybody can increase or decrease their agency
depending on the inputs that they put into the system. I had a tweet once that went kind of
viral about this where I said one small poker tell for if an employee is going to be great is if they're willing to spend money out of their own pocket to move faster. They're not doing it to impress you or to take one for the team and it's not the money that matters. It's that this person simply cannot stand being blocked or slowed down. Sharks die if they stop swimming. And I said this because we hired this woman in our business and she is so good. We've promoted her two times already in probably two years. She now basically runs a huge part of the business.
and she's awesome.
And one of the things that I noticed is that,
not the spending money part,
but I notice we'll be talking about an idea
and it looks like she's not listening
because she'll start like typing on her computer.
And then I'm like, yeah,
so just send that over to me.
She's like, I just did.
And I'm like, what?
And she will literally do it before the words are done out of my mouth.
And she cannot help but taking action.
Like her bias for action is so high that it's almost annoying.
It's so high that you're like,
hey, can we just talk first before you go,
finish the thing. But on balance, it is so much more valuable to have somebody who's that high
action because they just get more done. She's like 12 people. She is literally like an entire team
herself because she'll make decisions very quickly. She'll immediately implement it. And then she'll
fix whatever's broken so quickly before the other person has even gotten out of bed.
And I think that that's a, it's a trait that I now look for in hiring as well. But you said
something that's interesting. You said it can be taught. So how do you develop high agency?
Emmett from Twitch has a flow chart that's really cool of like literally a question by question by question of how to develop somebody's agency with time.
I think I would use the midwit meme algorithm of how would I make somebody low agency and then avoid that.
So if I was to make somebody lower an agency, I would make them hyper general.
I would use no deadlines.
I would not break things down into step-by-step instructions.
So I would go through the list of how to make somebody low agency first and foremost and go through that.
I'd say it's much easier to spot in other people as well.
So I'd look at who are the most high agency people that you know and then trying to reverse engineer the values and behaviors they have,
then trying to analyze yourself because it loops back to the first episode where self-analysis is not that useful.
In terms of the job interview questions as well, Sean, like one of my,
my favorite ones that I've told a few founders and they go, this is awesome, of asking for weird
teenage hobbies. Because if they can go against the crowd when they're a teenager, so much easier
as an adult. It's tough, but it's easier. And I have one founder who voiced by me the other day,
and he goes, I pre-screen all candidates with that. And it's like the best quality filter of potential
people, of potential high-dangerousy people. We, on this podcast, it's a question I ask a bunch.
I say, you're awesome. Like, I'm so inspired by this right now. Well, if I had met you or I've been able to
to observe you when you were 12, 13 years old, what would I have seen? Would I have had any clues
that you would become this kind of outlier type of person? A couple people have said some pretty
interesting answers. So Jess Ma who came on and Jess Ma is a super impressive entrepreneur.
I think Paul Graham had said like, you know, the five most impressive or if you had to bet on five
people in YC, it would have been like Sam Alton and the Collison's and like Jess Ma was one of the five.
And she said like, yeah, basically I was kind of a runt in school. I wasn't that good at class.
I kind of got picked on and I was weird
but I created
like I liked gaming and I basically created a server farm
for my favorite game.
I started charging for it and I was making
basically like tens of thousands of dollars
renting out server space for this game
back when I was 14 years old
and we had Said bulky come on
this guy's built basically a billion dollar
bootstrapped business which is so
unfathomable to be able to do
and somebody told me that
they go ask Said about when he was a teenager
and he hacked his school's
system so he could just change his grade.
Like, he was willing to do the work to hack into his school system to be able to change his
grade versus just study for the thing and get a good grade.
And guess what?
That's also a guy who basically, like, found other growth hacks along the way to grow his
business incredibly fast without needing any capital.
I was with the guy this weekend and he's a friend and he told this story.
He's a new friend though, but he told the story about how he got in trouble when he was a
kid because he built this thing that allowed him to remote control a street light.
near his home. And then he goes on like a few hours later to talk about his new business idea.
And I remember like him getting in trouble for controlling the streetlight near his house
and how his mom like grounded him for three weeks. And I'm like, I'm in.
And by the way, YC has a one page application. And in there, so every question in the YC application
has to have earned its right to be there. If you're on the one page, it's only like seven questions.
One of the seven questions is tell us about a real world system that you've hacked for your benefit.
right that not literally hacked but like any real or any system in the real world that you have
sort of gamed in order to do it because that's a high predictor of relentlessly resourceful as we
talked about george what's the answer for you uh like did you have weird teenage hobbies
yeah my um it might not translate as well to an american audience but my dad bet me i couldn't
do 10 kickups with a soccer ball and puberty had just hit so testosterone is an assistant
What's a kickup, by the way?
So a juggle with a soccer ball.
Okay, gotcha.
So my dad bet me I couldn't do that at 10 pounds.
And testosterone just hit, like first bit of armpit hair.
And I remember thinking, fuck that guy.
I'll prove him wrong.
So I trained and I trained and I trained.
And he didn't call pairing a hack, by the way.
He didn't try and push me to do it.
He just bet me whether I could do it.
And he made sure that he had to see me do it.
Anyway, I ended up doing it.
And then I kept doing it more and more.
And I ended up in Adidas advert for a FIFA World Cup.
I used to tour around doing tricks at different stadiums,
held like three unofficial world records for different tricks and things like that.
So then ultimately I decided I wanted to lose my virginity,
so I stopped doing it.
But it was, yeah, really fun.
Did it work, giving it up?
Still trying, but someday it.
Tends to work out that way.
Sam, what about you?
Did you have weird teenage hobbies?
Yeah, I basically like the small predictable things like I had an eBay store when I was 12 or I remember in fourth grade.
Small or predictable.
Well, yeah.
Like I mean things that I think you would expect me to do knowing me.
I also like in fourth grade when I when we had to pick a book to do a book report on I did how to win friends and influence people.
Like I was like a weirdo.
Like I like I enjoyed the stuff that I like now back when I was 12.
years old.
That's amazing.
You're like, listen up class.
Dale Carnegie said that your own name is the most beautiful word in the English language.
So say it with me.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I was into like that.
Were you into anything?
You know, when I first heard this, I felt really bad because I was like, I couldn't
think of anything special that I did.
Monish Prabrae was on the episode and he basically said there's a golden period.
He studied like, I went to his house.
He's got this whole wall of books on.
and brain chemistry and all that neuroscience.
And he was basically like there's a like a golden decade,
basically between the ages of sort of like 10 and about 19 years old,
where the brain is optimal for specialization during that time.
And so if you look at the people who are great programmers,
they usually started programming very early on or great musicians, like age six.
He composed his first thing.
It's like, wow, this is insane.
And I felt really bad because I was like, oh, shit, like too late for me.
What am I supposed to do now?
I was just kind of a normal kid picking boogers.
and in junior high,
like I didn't do that.
But then I started thinking about it more
and I'm really thinking like,
was there anything?
And the one thing I did think of was,
a unique experience I had was like,
I was really into improv early on.
I didn't do it a ton,
but I did go to like our Texas state kind of finals
with like group improv.
It's basically me and my buddy
and we group improv,
which is kind of a podcast without a microphone.
Right?
Like that's what two people doing improv back and forth is.
And then I was in a couple of movies as a kid.
And so I kind of was doing this acting,
improv performing thing.
I think if there's anything,
that's what it was.
But I wasn't a lemonade stand,
kind of like eBay flipper type of guy.
The only other weird one I did was I used to play this game,
NBA 2K,
which is common.
But the uncommon thing was I never played the game.
So I didn't go in and I wasn't like dunking and shooting.
All I did as I played franchise mode.
And I would simulate.
I was basically only a general manager.
So I would simulate the season.
Then I would do the draft.
I would scout all the prospects.
So you wouldn't actually play like the like the,
the press the buttons and move the place.
It wasn't intentional. Like I thought, okay, first I'm going to build this great team.
And so I was just like a CEO basically.
I was like free agency and trades and scouting and finding diamonds in the rough.
But I got so addicted to that.
I never ended up playing with any of those players.
I would just simulate.
I would just do that for like.
It's a fantasy league.
10 years in there.
I was basically a fantasy GM, which I guess is kind of like, that's kind of what being
like a CEO or a business person is.
Like you're just doing that part.
You're not actually doing the work.
So, but my honest answer was like I was not like elite at any of those things.
Whereas I think the.
people who really excel, they tend to show that brilliance early on and become like oddly good at
something. Their obsession takes over them. I don't think I personally had that. I love it.
Do you want me to give you the rest of the checklist for the high agency people and you can see who
in your life you know? Yeah, weird teenage hobbies. What else you got? Energy distortion field.
So if you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the rear ready to run a marathon
on a treadmill with max incline. A low agency people do the opposite. So this is the kind of idea of
treadmill friends. Afterwards, you've got so much energy. You need to go on a treadmill. You can
sleep. Then you have like sofa friends who you need to lie down after hanging out with them.
Who's like the treadmill friends in your guy's life that comes to my.
Sam's like that for me. My buddy Suli is like that. I can't I can't hang out with Sully and
literally our hangout tends to be we walk for like four hours talking because we almost
have to burn off the energy that's like the excitement of the ideas and the stories that we're
sharing while we're doing it. That's how this podcast got created. It was on a four hour walk with
him and I was like, you know what I really want? It was like hour three. I was
you know what I really want to do? It's not a company. I want to create a podcast. I want to be Tim Ferriss. I want to wake up and be in a million people's earballs. And that was like a thing that came to me when I worked myself into that state. Ben is kind of like that. My business part of Ben where he's like I could just, I probably do call Ben. I think eight times a day on average. So we just talk eight times in a day. Now that I say it sounds very weird, but it feels very normal. If I didn't have kids, it'd probably be 20 times a day. Who are yours, George? Who are yours? Probably three. Chris Williamson from Model Wisdom.
We're, like, just out all night.
We can just go and go and go.
And you guys are both similar, like, where Chris is like an, in a good way.
He's like an academic where like he just like learns and then just teaches.
And I like, you know, I feel that way listening to his podcast.
So who's the second one?
David Senra from founders.
He's just fucking if espresso was a human being, the big David fucking Senra.
So that guy, I'd add on that.
And then the third one, my old boss, Steve Bartlett, who runs the Diary of CEO podcast,
I remember when Steve was running the business, he'd have an office in Manchester, London, New York,
and I'd work in the Manchester office.
And Steve was maybe there a quarter of the time in that office.
And what business is this?
This was back at his marketing agency, social check.
Yeah.
And I would open the door and I'd know if Steve was in that day without seeing him just off
the energy in the room of everybody else's vibe.
So those three would be my three.
That's a great compliment.
How did you get the job, by the way?
Why did you join Social Chain?
He had a Uni Campbell that essentially the UK, you mentioned earlier, the UK is the sixth largest economy in the world. It's not. London's the sixth largest economy in the world. And then there's a very, very poor list of cities and towns attached to it. So he based himself in Manchester and just marketed himself well and just sucked up all the talent that was in Manchester, which is where I was. Do you want the next one? Yeah, keep going. You can never guess their opinions. So ever it's the boxer that writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war, the beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If they're beliefs,
don't line up with their stereotypes. They've exercised agency. So when you give them an opinion on
ABC, do they fit in a box or do they often surprise you that they've fought things through?
Anybody who pop up? What you're saying is basically they're non-clay. So like we just had Jack
Smith on the podcast. I think Jack is one of these type of independent thinkers where he's like a
successful, smart tech guy, you know, almost like has like more of an engineer's brain.
But then he came on and was talking about this like woo-woo energy system, that healing,
healing through energy
using colors in a room
that he sat in and how it cured
his like whatever I'm like
Jack you're too smart for this
and I never know how he's going to reply
to certain stuff
I'll explain something to him
and I'm like I think you're going to be too smart
to believe this but you're open
to learning more that's that's wild
to me or even what he's going to do his next move
right is Silicon Valley you sell your company
there's two paths I think they take you to a room
and they're like hey here's two boxes
would you like to become a BC
The vest is under this box, or you're a founder and your next thing is going to be AI,
healthcare or whatever.
It's like, cliche.
Whereas Jack, after he sold his company, he was like spent a year in his garage building
like the most ergonomic chair he could think of.
It's like you couldn't guess what the guy's going to do next.
He was total non-clay in that sense.
I like it.
The next one, immigrant mentality.
If they'd move from their hometown, that's a good sign.
If they'd move from their home country, that's an even greater sign because it takes agency
to spot you're in the wrong place,
resourcefulness to operationalize a move,
and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.
Dude, that's a great point.
That's a great point.
And I've moved around to like nine different countries,
so I think I win.
And that's kind of like what you're saying about America,
about, you know,
sometimes we started out as a country of immigrants,
and that's maybe one of the reasons why we kind of have
outplayed our coverage a little bit.
Yeah.
What's the Keith R Boy?
It's like the people you hire are the company you build.
It's the same thing for countries.
It's like if the initial seed,
population was a bunch of crazy risk takers who were willing to get on a boat and go to a new
land to establish it from scratch, you're going to create a population of people who have that
same mentality. The way I've thought about America, the way I've narrowed it down is if you
look at what makes human being special, if you have one human being in a jungle, it's one of
the worst animals ever, and we're just going to get destroyed. If you put 500 of us, you just
introduced a master predator, the Welch, that forest, that jungle has never seen before,
because we can cooperate. And America is that on steroids. Because when you go there,
the enthusiasm, the energy, the agency, sometimes the IQ isn't there. I'd probably argue,
those brits might be smart, no offense. However, you've got those things. It means you could have
an idea. It's like, yeah, great idea. Let's do it. Just the bias to optimism, the bias to action,
whereas you have the Brit who's, I don't think that'll work because of ABC.
That's why America's the best because you can cooperate faster than any country, my opinion.
The Doritos Locos Taco did not come from pessimism.
That is a uniquely American idea.
That idea could not have been born in any other country.
I love that.
Last two.
They send you niche content.
So low agency people look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality.
High agency people just look at the content.
They spot upcoming trends very early.
and the final one, mean to your face, but nice behind your back.
So the social incentives is to be nice to people's face and gossip behind their backs,
whereas the high agency people, they do the opposite.
Where did you get that one from?
One of my friends Lewis who's just, I know he'll just say the honest thing to my face all the fucking time.
And it's so useful to have a friend like that.
Whereas the low agency, basically whenever someone's going against incentives,
Oh, the agency that requires to go against incentives.
I've written this.
I often don't go against incentives.
Even though I know incentives, I know agency, I still fall for it.
It's the Daniel Kahneman's the start the conversation.
So to go against the social incentives of pain, I'll say a rude thing to your face that you need, social pain.
And also, when you're not there, there's no benefit.
Actually, all the benefits is to gossip behind your back.
To do the opposite and swim upstream, you need agency.
You're very philosophical, which I think is cool.
and it's almost like you have a business
just to justify the,
just to give you an excuse
to spend time reading and thinking all that.
You're like your own patron basically.
You're like, cool, can I fund myself
to sit in a room and
think of ideas and then invert them
and then think about them again and then
write them down and share them with the world?
Do you even like capitalism?
I love, well, I love
compressing ideas, which is why that I like advertising
because I can use that skill that I have
to compress things down.
I always love down.
Donald Schwarzenegger's biography where he made all his money for real estate so he could do whatever
the fuck he wanted with his acting career. And I think it's slightly underrated doing that.
Sam, did you know, I offered to invest in Georgia's business. And I was like, I'll invest,
fair terms. I'll blow this thing up. We can grow this baby like crazy. And he was like,
that's all good. But there's one problem. If this grows, I'm going to have to, like, it's going to
suck me more towards that. And I actually want to be all in the business of ideas. I don't want
this to become, you know, bigger and more work. Which made you want it.
much more.
I made me respect him so much more, right?
I was like, again, that's a high agency thing to do, right?
To be able to, can you say no to money?
Like, can you say no to money?
It might be like another thing to just add on your list.
How many times have you said no to money?
I've told the story in the podcast before, but you may not have heard it.
The highest agency moment of my life was I was in sixth grade, I think.
I got put in detention after school.
And our detention was you go to the lunchroom, schools out, everybody leaves.
It's just the 20 kids who got in trouble that day.
You just sit in silence and do nothing.
And they see you kind of like every other chair diagonal so that you can't really,
you can talk to somebody, but it's not very easy to,
you can't whisper.
You have to be a little bit loud.
And it's me and it's the weirdest kid in our school.
There's a kid who had hair down to his waist.
And he always wore these like weird tattered shirts.
And he was just a weirdo.
And people used to pick on him.
And so I'm sitting there and I'm kind of a bully.
And I wanted to pick on him a little bit.
And I just wanted to mess with him.
I was bored, right?
I'm in D.
you have two hours to do nothing.
And I see on the floor of the lunchroom,
there's like a grape that was like from lunch hours earlier.
And it's like nasty.
It's on the floor of a kid's lunchroom and it's like got hair on or whatever.
And I just whispered to him.
And I was just like, yo, I'll give you a dollar if you eat that grape.
And he looks down.
He's like a dollar?
I was yeah.
And then he reaches down.
And I'm like, oh my God.
He's fell for it.
He's going for it.
This is insane.
He picks it up.
And he eats the grape.
And I'm like grossed down.
my mind is blown. I can't believe you do it. I'm like, all right, deal's a deal. I get out my wallet.
I take a dollar. I hand it to him. And then he took the dollar and he ate it.
I could not believe it. Damn. This was like 22 years ago or something. I still remember it vividly.
And I just thought that was the biggest no fucks given moment I have ever probably still to this day
in my life of like, you know, F you. F your money. F the grape. I am going to
to like he just ate the dollar.
I couldn't believe it.
No upside in it.
But he sent an absolute message to my core.
I love that.
That's ridiculous.
Where do you want to go from here, Sean?
You got a couple other cool lifestyle things you do.
So do you want to talk about the kale phone?
Because I think this is like something that might be helpful for people.
What is the kale phone method that you do?
Yeah.
So again, talking about sticky ideas.
So let me pull it up.
So I've got them here, actually.
I have my cocaine phone and I have my kale phone.
So I ended up in, I wrote about this and then I ended up on Fox News where it was like Trump,
Biden and then George Matt cocaine, kale phone.
And essentially what I realized is there's two things that are presented to you in modern
society as people get more and more addicted to their phones.
There's one, be a phone monkey and just be on your phone all day and deal with the cortisol
and all the stress and mental fatigue that everyone's face.
is option one.
Option two is just give up on the phone,
put it away for a week,
have the digital detox.
And benefits of that are,
yeah, you feel mentally clear,
you feel incredible,
you're coming up with creative ideas,
but if your mung goes to hospital,
how's she going to get a hold of you?
Or if you're out and about and you need an Uber,
like,
oh, fuck, I can't get an Uber.
Or if I want to use Apple nodes
to write down ideas, I can't do that.
So I realized that what society presented
was either the smartphone addict
or the phoneless Luddite.
And actually, there's somewhere in between,
which is the cocaine and kale phone.
So the kale phone is like all serotonin apps
that make you feel good.
So audible, notes, Uber, Google Maps,
stuff that you need for necessities as well.
Maybe an emergency number for your mom,
wife, business partner,
if they need to get a hold of you.
So you have that peace of mind
when you're not on your cocaine phone,
that they can still get a hold of me,
worst case scenario, if somebody dies,
then cocaine phone, everything.
it. Slag, WhatsApp, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, let's go crazy. Put the cocaine phone in the drawer,
check it when you need to check it, then use the kale phone when you're wrapping about for a walk.
Single best thing I've probably done for like my mental health and everybody who tries it,
a lot of people who try it right to me and go, this is a game changer. What is the actual other phone?
Is it just an Android phone? What does you do for the other phone? Is it just two iPhones?
Just another ice done. But do you have two SIM cards? How do you do the number? Yeah.
I have two SIM cards. So I have two SIM cards. So I have.
have a different number in the kale phone than the cocaine phone.
Got it.
Only drawback is that.
They basically have to have a second phone line and people have to know to reach you there
when you need it.
But it's only your mom-wife, maybe.
That's the only people who really need that.
And it's just for the peace of mind that most of the time they would.
And the only time they're going to do is when somebody's at hospital.
But it's having that peace of mind that, therefore I don't need to check the cocaine
phone for that incident.
Sean, let me ask you a question.
Be honest about this and I'll answer it and I'll be honest too.
do your parents still pay for your cell phone bill
I pay them back all right
my dad tells me the amount
it's a family plan
you've been on it for a long time
I have changed it
can I change it with keeping my number
that's too much work
same I am also on my family plan
and so George when you're talking about getting a new cell phone
honestly shout out to everybody
who's on their family plan right now
shout out to everybody whose dad is paying their phone bill
it's all we have that's our last connection
that's the last cord that gets cut between you and your parents
It's just the phone plan.
I don't even know how to, like, I've never gotten, like a, like, I've always had to call my mother, like, hey, my phone broke.
I'm going to go buy one.
When you tell AT&T, they got to put it on, like, the plan.
So when you sold the hustle, she didn't go, go get your own fucking phone plan.
She carried on going.
It's not a money thing.
Fair play.
Well, there you go.
It's not fair play.
I don't know.
I don't think you're using that word like I think it should be used.
Especially, yeah, he texts your mom saying I need to get a cocaine phone.
is probably not going to go down too well as well.
I thought, Sean,
I thought you would have also been on yours.
Yeah, for sure.
Dude, my wife feels it's like almost like a sign of disrespect
that I didn't create like a new family plan
with us as the core family unit.
And I'm like, look, it's just a hassle.
Okay, I'm not,
don't read more into it than what it is.
I'm just lazy, okay?
There's this episode on like Ellen DeGeneres
where she's asking Bill Gates.
Like, let's see if you know how much a gallon of milk costs.
Like, because, you know, you're so out of touch.
And so when you talk to me about a cell phone plan, I'm like, I don't know, five bucks, a hundred bucks.
He was like, nope, that's like $23, right?
Same with the phone plane.
I'm like, I don't know, a thousand.
I don't know.
I have no idea.
So, George, are there any drawbacks or like in practice?
Let's say I wanted to go do this because the idea is really sticky.
It's really viral.
Even if you never did it, it's just like sounds cool.
But you actually, let me verify.
You actually live this way.
Before you answer, I got to run.
I got to run. I'll leave all my stuff up. I had a 130. I'll see you soon. So you actually live
this way. You actually have the two phones. Yeah, I've done it for three and a bit years. And whenever
I doubt it, so I've had incidents where I've lost one phone or had an issue with signal in a certain
country. And when you go back to that lifestyle of waking up and downloading social media as
your first input into your brain or messaging apps, you only realize it by a contrast of how
destructive, I think that is, particularly for people who are created people or ideas, people,
like downloading whatever the worst lose headline is and immediately into your consciousness.
And particularly if you even use your phone as your alarm clock as well, it's, I think it's,
I've experienced it by a contrast, it's so toxic. I can't deal with it.
I want to ask you about Lee Kuan Yu, somebody who's been on my list,
of people I want to go deep dive into.
Sounds like you've read a bit about him
or studied him a little bit.
What is the learnings from Li Kuan Yu?
So, Li Kuan Yu was the leader of Singapore.
During his reign,
he took Singapore from essentially being a third world country
with a lot of problems.
And you've got China and Japan on your doorstep,
which historically not the friendliest people to have on your doorstep.
and obviously part of the British rule, part of the British Empire, went from there to one of the best
financial hubs in the world. But he ran the country like a CEO. And one of my favorite
anecdotes about LequonU is how he used to obsess about the airport onboarding experience.
And it's interesting. You see such obvious ideas in startups and you go, why don't countries
just take this? The onboarding experience of the conversion rate optimization of a landowner
page or a website or an advert versus the when you arrive at the airport, what's the airport
like? What are the cues like? The immigration cues like? What are the bathrooms like? How clean
things? What's the first few miles from the airport to the city? Lecoigneur used to obsess over
everything. Would be changing the roofs. Would be cleaning things up. Would be inspecting regularly,
seeing how quick things were because he knew that that is talented people coming for the first time.
and Dubai does this incredibly well.
You go there for the first time and you go, oh, wow,
they look to everybody else's onboarding experience and 5X this.
Immediately having those magic moments like designing Facebook or designing Asana
within the first few minutes of entering and leaving the airport.
Because you're going to think it's like a stand-up comedian.
The first thing as you arrive and the last thing as you leave.
So he used to obsess over that.
And I remember I went to Austin Airport.
And as you go up, to get an Uber, you've got to go through three different car parks
and your phone signal goes out and you're sweating.
I remember thinking to myself,
you're treated like a criminal.
If you try to get an Uber and an American airport,
you're treated like a criminal.
It's like, oh, if you're going to do a drug deal,
then go to the third parking garage,
fourth floor, behind the fence.
That's where you can go get picked up
if you're going to be an asshole.
Yeah, I remember, I remember like being there,
going to Leekwon You would fucking hate this.
And I remember going, that's a weird.
I go, I know many people about that of Thor walking through Austin Airport.
Lequon U is rolling over in his grave right now.
So that's interesting because I remember when I was in my teens,
I went to the Singapore, we went to
Singapore and if you haven't been, the Singaporean
airport is like a mall.
It's like an experience. Like they have
like a fitness facility. They have like a
movie theater. There's like, it is just
a beautiful place. Everything is clean.
There's tons of comfortable seating.
It is not like a pain
the way that most airport experiences are.
And I remember just noting that and be like, oh, that's weird.
Why is Singapore's airport so good? So it's
very interesting that he thought about it as a
first impression onboarding
experience. Now, like, is that just
a cool store? Did that pay off in some way? Like, did the immigration rate go up? Or, like,
what, what changed from that? Or what are the things that he did to actually, like, you know,
turn the country around? What were the big levers that he pulled? So onboarding is one. What really
worked? A trotting, talented immigration is the single biggest thing from my understanding of
Singapore story that they did. And part of that, obviously, is the onboarding. And if you look at it,
Singapore has essentially no natural resources. So it's not blessed with Saudi Arabia's oil or, like,
LA's beauty necessarily, but just attracting as many talented immigrants. The specifics around
the economics as well, I don't know as much on, but around taxation and things like that,
but it's just a wild case study. I know Charlie Munger is obsessed with Likuan Yew. He has the story
of Likuan Yew, we're talking about mating earlier. Leekuan Yew, rather than marrying the hottest girl
in his class, pick the only girl in his class that performed better than him. And he was
at the most elite university at Singapore. He married the lady who's the only one who
was smarter than him. So very odd, peculiar individual.
There's another thing he did was around air conditioning, right? Didn't he do like a big push for
having AC in the country? Yeah, I saw that recently. I think he was supposed to Peter
levels on Twitter that was breaking that down. Yeah, he was obsessed with getting air conditioning
because he was convinced it was key to the economic success. Yeah, like he was basically,
so there was an interview with him? I'm reading an article now from Vox. So basically,
this interview with him and they said, was there anything else besides multicultural tolerance that
enabled Singapore success? And his answer was air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important
invention for us. And basically, I think that if you look at countries like, you know, my parents
they grew up in India, and India is so hot that during the day, during like your brain's most kind of
productive hours, they take like a three hour period where you just stay inside, you just try to sleep.
And you're even, even, you can't even try to sleep because it's like so hot. So you're just like
laying in a cot with like, you know, fan trying to cool down because you can't be outside.
You can't really be productive in thinking right now.
You just have to wait out the heat.
You know, my assistant is in the Philippines.
And one of the things that she always talks about was like, they would have these heat waves.
And it's like super hard for her to work because she flipped her schedule.
She works in the evening, her time, which is daytime my time.
And I was like, man, is that really inconvenient for you?
Like how does that work for your lifestyle?
She's like, well, you know, of course it takes some adjusting.
But one of the big things is I don't have to deal with the heat because I sleep during
the day when it's really hot and I wake up in the evening when it's cooler and that's when I work
and I feel better that way. It's also by the way why so many great engineers come from like the
Nordic regions because those are places where it's like too cold to go outside. Too dark to go.
It's like dark all the time. And so they just stay inside the program and they just code on computers
because there's not really better options out there. And they develop this like amazing engineering
talent because during their formative years, they just stay inside a bunch of time and what's the
best thing to do when you're inside? It's like play on the computer, play video games and
you know, learn to program.
Just second and third order consequences everywhere you look.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Do you have any other of the, like, kind of key frameworks that really, I don't know,
shifted the way you think or you keep seeing pop up that you don't think most people appreciate?
I'd say there's two.
One is probably mine and yours favorite meme, shawl of the midwit meme,
which just does refuses to die.
It's like a fine wine.
It gets better with age.
and realizing how often that been the guy in the middle over the years
and then trying to come up of solutions to not be the guy in the middle
and then realizing.
Do you have any canonical examples of the midwit meme of you in the middle
that you can think of like just personal attacks on your psyche?
Yes.
One was when I started to get really obsessed with sleep around like 20, 21.
want and I'd have everything sleep optimized.
Matthew Walker had just been on Joe Rogan, so I've got the 10-step checklist routine.
I've got the supplements.
I've got everything.
And I'm there doing the whole like two-hour wind-down routine.
There's screens before bed, red light glasses on and brushing my teeth in the dark.
And my girlfriend at the time comes in and like hits the lights, like minutes before bed,
like blinds me.
So I'm completely blinded.
I like getting out.
I like the first row we ever had was that.
I say, what are you doing?
and I was sat there in bed.
So she's, of course, like on the left or on the right,
she's immediately falling asleep within two minutes without doing any of the shit I was doing.
I'm stuck there for an hour afterwards, like shaking with adrenaline of like how angry
slash blitzed I was.
And I realized, oh shit, a lot of sleep, for example, they had a phase of insomnia.
And a lot of sleep is the more you think about sleep, the more pressure you put on sleep,
the worst the sleep is, which is why a lot of these, if I was, if I was, if I was the
CMO of Whoop or ORA, the one thing I would suggest them to do, like coming in as a product thing,
would be to never allow you to know the next day's score. Because this is actually probably
one of the most toxic things I think we'll see for sleep, of people checking their sleep,
as well as going to sleep, thinking about what score they're going to get is the opposite of what
you want. That's literally creating an insomniac cycle versus a week later having a summary of the
previous week when you're detached from the results, probably useful. But the next day is
particularly bad. So that's a midway area.
That's a great one. I think one of the studies about what makes people unhappy or depressed or suicidal, like one of the strongest signals is this idea of rumination, which is like almost like a obsessive thought loop about yourself and your thoughts. And so once you get in that thought loop, it is very, very difficult to get out. It's also why one of the easiest hacks to feeling better about yourself is to simply just go help other people. Like it is the over focus on yourself and your own condition is what,
creates your own poor conditions.
And it's the same reason my trainer says this thing.
He goes, whatever you feel you lack, that's exactly what you got to give.
You feel you lack respect.
You got disrespected.
Go give respect.
You feel like you lack money.
Go give money.
And literally just flipping the mindset of like I lack to like I have enough so I can give
breaks this thought loop of like worry and anxiety around certain topics.
And sleep is the same way.
Health is the same way where you could literally become like,
manic about your own health, and you're stressing yourself out, which decreases your health.
And I think a lot of people fall under this trap with therapy and with self-improvement,
where they get addicted to the medicine. And it creates too much thoughts about yourself.
You know, the happiest people are the ones who are, you know, that are not doing this,
like, extreme introspection all the time. Yes. The single, the sink, because I noticed that
when it came to decisions, let's say, people probably got this right now, like big decision.
do I move to the city or stay to the city? Do I quit this thing or carry on doing this thing?
I would have this thing in my head where it would play the, if I thought about moving to the city,
it would play the worst case scenario of that in my head, like the amygdala would fire.
And then I'd think about the other thing and the amygdala would fire and play the worst case scenario.
And as a result, paralysis, analysis, just kick the cat.
I'd make the decision to not make the decision.
And one of the biggest bits of advice I got was stop thinking about making decisions and start thinking about making experiments.
because I realized there was decisions I was procrastinating on for two years.
I could have done both of them 10 times over and the time spent thinking about the thing.
Yeah, that's a great one.
Sam has a nice little one on this called worry time, which is once he thinks something
is worthy of an experiment or worthy of trying, right, which is a big difference between
your words there, right, experimenting with something, I'm going to try this out,
very different than I'm going to do this.
I have to do this.
This is my new thing.
I choose this.
So giving himself a little bit of grace there by saying, I'm going to try it experiment.
But he says he schedules his worry time.
So he says, cool.
What I don't want to do is make this decision and then reassess it daily and worry about it every single day.
Worry about is it working?
Is it going to work?
Am I good enough?
Is this right?
Is this wrong?
I'm making a mistake here.
He's like, so I schedule it.
I'll put it on Sunday.
I'll literally pull it on the calendar.
I'll put 30 minutes.
That's my worry time.
And so I know I'm going to worry about this on Sunday.
I don't need to worry about it today.
For now, I just need to do it.
I have my scheduled worry time.
Because I think when you don't decide when you're going to worry about it,
you worry about it all the time because you're almost worried that you're never,
that you're never going to assess it.
And I found that to be a great hack is to schedule the worry time.
My trainer says, it's like when you plant a seed to grow a plant,
the next day, if you come and dig it up and you go look at it, are you growing yet?
Is it working?
You're actually destroying the seed's ability to actually grow.
Like, plant the seed and don't just dig it up every day and stare at it and wonder why it's not working.
Carry on. Water it. Give it sunlight. That's all you really need to do from there.
100%. One guy who's completely changed my thinking and you should have him on the show,
like absolute machine of a founder that goes under the radar. Do you know Element,
the Electrolite company? Oh, LMNT? Like the...
Yeah. So like, in five years they're growing like banana numbers, like hundreds of millions,
met James the founder, talked about high agency. We were camping and there was bears nearby.
And I'm terrified of bears as you wouldn't be as a fucking human being.
But no, James is there.
I have James is there.
Like, he'll have it. It's fine.
Like, he'll deal with it.
And his way, like, they've managed to scale the way they have.
And he wrote about this publicly.
He does three weeks on, one week off.
Three week on, one week off.
So you know the whole one of your aphorisms or Naval aphorisms of sprint like a lion,
don't raise like a cow?
And I realized with his philosophy, what he's doing there is he has that one week
assessment period to, because I noticed that when I went in a holiday,
the first three days, I would be.
it would take me to the fourth day to switch off.
And I think he's made on his schedule.
First three days, have fun.
Then the following three days, he's assessing the OKRs, reviewing the numbers,
looking at the experiments, plotting out the next three weeks.
And then that following three weeks is just a hardcore sprint.
And he's completely redone the work.
And it makes sense that we just downloaded this workweek philosophy
from industrial age versus really thinking about it.
And he's managed to do that for himself and his whole leadership team,
whilst the company's growing like bananas.
And it's factoring in that worry time.
It makes so much more sense.
I love that.
Yeah, I think that's great.
It actually makes me think, you know, Monday through Friday, you know, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Why, right?
Even though I'm my own boss, I'm in my own house and my schedule is a little bit different,
I suppose, I believe, I suspect that it is not as different as it should be
to what actually would be the most beneficial to me in my life to both my creativity,
but also my enjoyment of my life.
Because I probably just, I started with the normal, you know,
52 weeks in a year, you're going to work Monday through Friday,
you're going to take your weekends off
and then you're going to have two weeks,
three weeks of vacation somewhere in the between.
And then I just tweaked that
versus first principles like,
okay, if I didn't even know that,
what would I have designed?
How would I be working?
And I bet there's probably even more I can do on that front,
which obviously is a bit of a luxury to have,
but it's also an intentional thing.
Like some people's goal
was to have fancy cars and,
and, you know,
go to festivals and all this stuff.
That wasn't my dream.
My dream was total control of my time.
have a lifestyle that I truly enjoy
that is like super fun.
So that's the luxury I want to keep funding
is that.
The realization I had from his schedule
of that three to one is
the rewards of working like a lion
have never been higher
with leverage and code and internet businesses.
The ease of grazing like a cow
has never been easier.
Going back to the cocaine, kale phone,
like so much shit going on.
There's always the busy trap
you can end up in. And you've got this weird period of time right now where the rewards of this
have never been higher, but the actual act of doing it has never been harder. And his philosophy of three
week on one week off, I would encourage everybody to just search Ellen three to one. He wrote an essay on
it. You should have him on the show. He's phenomenal. And the fact they've done it whilst also
growing as aggressively as they have for the whole leadership team and they all take a week out to be
creative and come up with new ideas when they come back is phenomenal. Yeah, that's pretty awesome.
By the way, the thing you just said about the lion versus the cow, so the people haven't heard it, the phrase is, you know, you want to work like a lion, not a cow.
The way a lion works is they first just wait and they look for prey, right?
They're just observing.
They're looking for an opportunity.
They're not just going to run around randomly or chase like small insects.
They look for a worthy, a worthy challenge, a worthy prey.
And when they see the gazelle, then they sprint as hard as they can.
They don't walk.
They take massive action.
They move with speed.
they catch it, they feast, they celebrate, and then they rest and reassess and wait for the next challenge.
Whereas a cow stands in the field, slowly walking around all day, grazing on this low nutritional,
you know, density grass all day. Of course, they're animals. That's how they, that's what they need
to eat. That's fine. But in terms of working, a lot of us work more like the cow. We sit at our desk,
eight hours a day, minimal, you know, kind of like some low simmer of productivity. And then we don't
have the juice to sprint, nor do we feel confident and secure enough to,
rest, reassessed to celebrate,
we just sort of feel this anxiety to be constantly
sort of on and sort of on
as a problem. You're a UFC guy, right?
Did you ever see that interview with
Connor McGregor after he
lost his fight to Nate Diaz?
Do you remember this era where
he was on his rise, he's going to
fight Nate Diaz, and this was probably
the first opponent that he was favored against.
So he was supposed to, you know, he was
supposed to get crushed by Aldo.
But he beats Aldo. He's supposed to
get beat by Mendez, a wrestler. That's his
Cryptonite. He beats Mendez. And then it's Nate Diaz. Oh, here's a guy. He's lost half his
fights, one half's fights. He's not a champion. McGregor has proven everybody wrong. You're certainly
going to beat Diaz. And instead, he goes and he loses. And the one reason he lost was his cardio was
was really poor. He had miscalculated his training and he ran out of gas. And so when he went back
to the lab and he's rested and reassess and tried to figure out what to do next, he said this great
line. He goes, yeah, I hired this coach. And they go, so you're training a lot more now, right? To have
more cardio, like you're doing more, more, more.
He goes, no, actually it was about doing less.
He goes, the thing was, I was never resting my body.
The analogy my trainer gave me was, you're like a light bulb that's always flickering.
You're just at a dim level, and you're never turning off and you're never really bright
because you're never resting.
You're always doing stuff.
You're over-training, and you're never giving your body a chance to recuperate.
And so because of that, your training is never peaking.
You're never actually shining really bright, nor is the switch ever going off.
So that's what they changed.
Then he came back and he ended up winning the next fight just a couple months later,
and his cardio had improved in that.
Most people thought in that two months, you can't really improve your cardio that much,
but he did and he was able to win that fight.
I always thought that was a wonderful example of this kind of like three to one sort of philosophy,
but not in business, but in sports.
You have it.
My friend called it rest ethic.
It's like, ah, that's the sticky idea that it needed to be.
be compressed. He talks about his subconscious as he's like technical co-founder.
So he's believing ideas of his subconscious. And yeah, I think we'll see more and more
focus in that area as leverage gets higher and higher. And realizing that there's no such
thing as overworking, there's just underresting. There's no such thing as overworking
that's only under resting. What do you do to rest besides sleep? I'm trying to think of anything
that's non-basic. Well, that's okay if it's basic. I'm into simple things that work. If
just I go for walks. That's great.
I mean, honest answer would be
K-L phone in the morning.
So I'm detached from immediate inputs
coming through, having a bit of intentionality.
So resting is not just napping.
Resting is not having a thousand inputs
coming into your brain at all hours of the day.
Exactly. Like having time to
process things.
It's that Christopher Nullo thing of him not having a smartphone.
I think there's probably
if everybody's addicted to their smartphones right now,
there's probably a little bit of alpha.
in not being as addicted to your smartphone.
Yeah, I started doing silent Sundays
where basically I put the phone in a box on Saturday
and I won't touch it all Sunday,
which is a very small step.
But when you do it, you realize the depth of the addiction
because you start to have, you know,
you're patting your pocket every three seconds
or you're going to the bathroom and you're like,
what am I going to do?
How am I going to entertain myself
in this like six-second walk to the restroom?
That's literally how extreme it is for me.
Yeah, that's crazy.
It's crazy that we've,
that's happening, society,
are wide and with all, it's like caffeine.
The real drugs are the real addictions of the one that's probably just going completely
under the radar because we never want to kick that thing.
Yeah, the real, the dangerous addictions are the ones that are socially acceptable.
Yes.
Well, Louis C.K has a cocaine.
He has a KL laptop, apparently.
He has one laptop, writing laptop that has no internet and it's just a, it's just a test.
It's smart.
Because you're not going to be, you're not going to be the world's best data scientist when it
comes to who you've ran all these AB tests. Meanwhile, you've woken up on five hours suite with a
little bit of a handover and you think you're going to win, you're not going to win.
Yeah. Well, finish with this. What's the how to source your values? This is an idea I've
never heard from you. What is that? So I called this Buffett coined. It may need a stickier
idea or a stickier mean behind it. But there's this incredible talk. I think it's Warren Buffett
at the University of Georgia. It's my favorite idea of his that very few people have discussed.
It's on YouTube? How'd you see it?
I think I originally saw it on YouTube.
There's a few write-ups as well.
And he's given a talk.
And the kids in the class ask him how to be, the cliche, how to be successful thing.
And rather than listing da-da-da-da-da-da back or how to, I think it's how to be rich, essentially.
And rather than listening the cliche thing back, he says, as a thought experiment, look around at the people in the class right now.
and if you could invest in them and get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life,
who would it be and why?
So immediate shine, you could probably think of lots of people.
People at home can probably think of lots of people.
And you think about it and you go, okay, I'd definitely invest in Jim or I'd definitely invest in Mike.
And then he goes, and then ask yourself why?
What isn't that that person does the values that they have, the behaviors that they have?
And you can then see, we spoke at the first episode about it's so hard to see in
yourself, but it's so easy to see in other people. So you're kind of hacking the self-awareness
bias of like you're trying to ruminate and improve yourself is probably midwit wasted effort,
but looking at other people, you can see immediately. And then you can try and get your values
that way. And then he flips the experiment around and goes, if you have to shore people in your
life, so you take 10% of their losses, who would you take and why? And then you have a list
of values to go towards a list of values to go against. What's beautiful about that is,
it's not just money. You can apply that for health coin. You can apply. You can apply.
up for happiness coin, but using that third party awareness perspective is so much more useful
than ruminate and granulizing yourself, at least I've found. I love that. It's so simple, right?
It's like the answer becomes incredibly clear as soon as you ask that question. If you take
wealth or you take happiness and it's who is your bet on, you could pretty quickly a couple of names
come to mind. Okay, great. Why? Why? Well, because they're this, this and this. Cool. There's
blueprint. You didn't need the advice from Warren Buffett. The advice was literally hidden in plain sight
in the people that you knew right around you. The blueprint was visible. They were like a walking
blueprint of what to do or what not to do. I love that. I've tried to use that on the health side
because health is probably the one area of my life that I, and when I say health, I mean,
not being fat. Health is like a fancy way of saying it. I'm not trying to do fancy health. I've tried
to be like, hey, I'm pretty fat. I should just be not fat and I should be fit.
instead of fat. And so what I realized was, I was like, oh, all I simply need to do is just do
the things that the fit people do. So instead of searching for like, which diet is best or which
workout program should I be doing, what equipment should I? It's like, let's just simplify who in my
life is fit. And then simply, what do they do and find the delta between what I do and what they do.
Oh, okay, at night when I'm hungry, I'll grab a bag of chips from the pantry. At night when they're
hungry, they drink a glass of water, and they go to sleep. Or in the morning, you know,
the first thing I do is I roll over. I check my phone, my laptop, I start working. What they do
is they go work out first for 45 minutes and then they start working. Okay, good. The blueprint
is stupidly obvious. It's right in front of me. You know, for example, my trainer came with me on a
trip. And so we all packed our bag. And when we all got there, we all look at it in the bag. And he had
a protein powder in there. He had a set of bands in there. And he had a little myofascia like ball
like a massage ball so that when he got off the flight,
he could quickly loosen up.
And it's just,
we looked at all of our bags,
you know,
business guys who were out of shape,
we just didn't even have the shit in the bag.
And it's not the tool.
It's just simply like,
it's not like he had to think,
how am I going to be fit this weekend?
It's simply a way of life for him.
And so the easiest question I have is,
what's that I ask myself when I'm like in a situation,
all right,
sweet,
what's a fit guy like me doing in a situation like this?
Instead of what should I do,
what am I going to do?
am I going to do what should I order off door dash?
What's a fake guy like me order at a time like this?
And the answer is a lot easier when I simply think of what does a person who already has the
outcome I want?
How do they approach the same situation?
And luckily, there's enough people around me in my life where I could just watch and see
what they do.
And I think the key asterisk, the key estricks that he gives as well, is it has to be merit-based.
So, like, you can't just pick the person with a billionaire dad or the ridiculous
ab genetic Francis Ngarno style.
The better the returns, if you almost look at like a company,
the better returns on their start position that you would bet on is probably the person to study the most.
If it's the super skinny guy that you'd go, I'd still bet on his fitness coin,
or if it's the guy from the worst background, but you'd still bet on his finance coin,
those are the real values you can learn from.
I love it.
Dude, George, as I knew, this was amazing.
Two parts.
So good.
So fun to talk to you, dude.
This is why when I launched my new Good Friday, the email series that I started doing on my website,
you were the first guy I reached out to because I love trading ideas with you and you are a
just absolute fountain of insightful, interesting things that I think can help people's lives.
So thanks for coming on, man.
Where should people follow you?
Is Twitter the best plate?
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Twitter, go to George Mac, George underscore Mac, newsletter at georgeback.com.
And we've helped three different billion-dollar companies get their best performing ads.
So if you'd help with advertising as well, go to adprofessor.com.
and yeah thank you for having this john awesome
you soon man
