Best of This Week: March 11th

yeah i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a try never looking back hello and welcome to another episode of my first million best of the week edition this is ben wilson best of the week brings you some of the best moments from this week's past episodes no new content just revisiting the hits this week we've got some great ones for you first off we've got seth smith joining sam and sean to discuss something that sean calls the a b z framework and why you should just get started on whatever project you want to work on instead of over analyzing give it a listen sam i think you do this really well when people like i've seen people to you but they're like sam i'm thinking of like starting this business and like i wanna cover this topic and i wanna blog and and all this stuff and you're like alright like what's your first step or like you you'll be like just right or something like that which just like simplifies to the like idiot jedi like just do the thing not like over analyzing the like fifty startup articles samsung darling dog you just needed to he goes randy jackson on them well i if i just get frustrated i think because i think that like i think that it's good so if like building a business is step zero to ten and ten is like you're this billionaire or like your vision has been achieved you know you you you own all this property whatever that it is it's good to have number ten and then a lot of people are like alright that's step number ten and then like steps three four five six seven eight nine i gotta figure those out in my mind i'm like no well it's the only thing that's important is ten and one and one after you get done with one you'll figure out number two just but until you get to number two don't even think about worrying about number three it's not important dude i have have the same eject thing i i call it a b z it literally like word for word your thing and i i i went on jack's to jack's community he asked me to give a talk and to his like visualize value community and i this was the one thing i told them i go you you have you're at a that's where you are z is the vision it's the dream it's good to have that it's good to know what that is right that's like the north star and like without that you know you don't really have the motivation i everyone really understand like what the hell you're trying to do but wherever everyone everybody gets paralyzed they think they need to know a step b c d e f g h i and it's like and then they get paralyzed or they start thinking about step d when they haven't even done you know a to b and so i go a b z it's all you ever it's like where you are you gotta know that accurately the next thing you need to do you need to know that and then you need to know the envision and everything else is irrelevant like just do that and so you just literally said the same thing with your own like with numbers basically instead it's it's awesome great great minds thing mean that's exactly how i feel because every time i've ever had any bit of success or even when i've like done something and it didn't work out i just think that like if you just start and you're gonna see so many things that you didn't even expect or realize were an opportunity and or that weren't an opportunity you're like oh i thought this it's actually way different but that's cool or that's not cool we gotta quit you know what i mean and you just that's why you just have to do something i get really frustrated with in action alright next up we've got a segment from our drunk ideas episode on this one sean is talking about an idea that he calls the very long distance girlfriend alright first idea is called very long distance grill okay so i had this idea because i realized like i'm sitting there and me and my wife we like to watch all these dating shows right so we watch all of his blind we watch the bachelor and you watch these shows and this sort of like it's like the honeymoon period and i like i would say most people's homes are like ours it's like the scene is this on screen you see like two usually beautiful people living some kind of fairy tale date and then like one person's kind of like you know there's some drama one person's being dramatic or one person's unsure and the other person's really good or whatever and then you and if you if you zoomed out off the tv you'd see a couch with usually a couple sitting like six feet apart from each other because they're so sick of each other you know this like you know in their sweats not dressed up with their you know double chin eating their popcorn and it cheetos and be like pointing to at screen and to be like she's not even that hot or like you he's you know he's such a jerk and it's like judging these relationships right but like there's something to this of why we like it right like seeing these other relationships but i also think it's like when we do that we we do that with you saved like oh he shouldn't have tapped out yeah dude he's such a pussy like dude he's so weak he looks scared yeah dude he's so scared that's why i like because he's scared it's like yeah it's not got it oh my god there's a spider in my room you know like so so so yeah there's definitely like a j there's a fun in judging it but i would also say there's a fun in the sort of fairy tale i think everybody when you're watching these shows you sort of put yourself in the shoes of either the person pursuing or the person being pursued you know you're you're the dams or you're the prince whatever it is so the the idea behind very long distance girlfriend is as follows it's a service or app i think it's just a service i think it's just a a text message this is a phone number you put in your address book and we give you the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend you're never gonna meet with this person it's not even the intention it's just somebody who's gonna treat you perfectly because they're paid to do it and so so it's like prostitution it's like what's pros a to somebody who's paid to love to love you right to make love to you but that's a lot not i don't wanna cross that line that's a lot of work so this is like you know how tinder made dating easier because you don't have to like go date everybody just sort of swipe and ride easily on your phone it kinda gave you this like flirting hit but you didn't have to go out put in a lot effort so here's what you would get if you if you sign up for very long very long distance girlfriend this there's gonna be a person that pretends to be your girlfriend they're gonna text you they're gonna ask you how you're dumped doing they're gonna be emotionally there for you they're gonna text baby photos of themselves they're gonna i can say that they want you you're gonna be like oh my god i'm i'm this person wants me they're never gonna na you they're never gonna get mad at you they're never gonna get jealous they're never gonna do any of the things that real human beings do and that are the downsides of relationships only the upside none of the downside so for girls you're gonna get prince charming on the other side he's gonna be complimentary he's gonna be thoughtful he's gonna be there for you and for for guys you're gonna get sort of what you want as the perfect girlfriend and we're just gonna hire call centers very of of just dudes and they're gonna behave as your very long distance boyfriend and a girlfriend alright give me your give me your ratings i'm gonna start with sam to give that a ten i i think that i i think that's great to be honest i think that surely that like if we went to adult friend finder dot com or something like that is that what they do what is adult friend finder what is that like like webcam or you're asking the wrong guy i i don't questions so i have no idea yeah i mean this is brilliant how many friends do you have who you've only met via texting and you've like i've i've got like a bunch of friends who have i've only ever texted yeah exactly i now most of my life is people i only text with maybe i knew them before there's a bunch of people that are like i don't know just through twitter or through you know the podcast or through friends or friends we get in a group chat together i know their personality they're cool like that's my actual friend even though i never met them so why i even heard their voice or talk to them like through voice and in fact i have no desire to really meet them like i don't wanna go out of my way to go like say hang out with them i'm getting all the benefits that i want out of just the tech yeah so anyway i have a lot of friends like that and i consider there'd be really close friends i i i i i can't tell you how tall they are what their voice sounds like but i love them and so because of that i'm in what do you think ben i give it a one it sounds dia it sounds even a one zero or oh just a one a one zero a sound a a slow role for a ten yeah there there's this genre of idea of sean business idea that essentially is i went and watched an episode of black mirror and said actually that's a good idea and this is one of the just all but that's a great idea are good idea yeah that's it that's where do you think they're getting their ideas they go to the great idea pile and then they take a great idea and they say okay let's put this to a logical extreme where it actually turns bad yeah like have you remember that remember that tv show in disney called smart home where the the the it's like a smart home it's like a alexa or yeah yeah walks a great idea yeah and the smart home ended up being the mom and the wife so it kinda is like what we're describing now so i think the like yeah i have watched her i think her is something this it's like a voice assistant that he kinda falls in love i haven't seen that but again it's not even a fall in love it's just dude it's fun to get certain direct to text messages right it's fun to get a a a funny check text from a friend it's fun to get the interesting text to you that's kinda what the hustle does the hustle just sends me some interesting stuff every morning the milk tries that here's some interesting crypto stuff right we're your friend but i'm not really your friend i'm just sending you some cool stuff you like getting that message but that's for the work part of our life what about the personal side ben are you telling me you would i mean i know what you're gonna say you're gonna say no but let me just put it out there anyways you're telling me but you would not wanna be getting text from a woman who's so into you and it's not cheating you're never gonna do anything it's not even a real person you're never gonna see him nothing like that especially if you're single right like i'm not talking about like we're all i think we're all married ben right so so it's not for us this is for twenty five year old me not thirty i don't know hole i'm thirty four year old me yeah i obviously we're not the target demographic all of us because we're all married yeah but having said that like even if it was just like as a as a a friend type thing i like i already have actual friend that i don't text back the last thing i need is another thing that's literally just a person to not text back i don't need another one of those in my life but okay fair enough fred maybe it's not idea but no as a as a business idea of course it's a good idea of course it's like this has money making potential as a thing that is good for humans you know that's that's why i gave it a one oh i'm not i'm not in the i know know i just felt like i have human conscience here i had that one person had to be like sean no no this is okay okay it's good you you know on the of the devil you're the angel on the shoulders we have to be there yin and yang that's how it works that's good yeah you know if you want good things you should you know go eat your vegetables work out you know wake up and pray do all the things right like that's cool don't invest in russian companies yeah don't invest in russian companies don't have the very long distance girlfriend service for nineteen ninety nine a month don't you know don't use tiktok don't do any of the things that you do probably alright and last up we're throwing it back over to seth smith who talks about using secret puzzles to recruit top talent from the cia to the nsa to google and other top tech companies it's an interesting strategy and one that sean actually has some experience with give it a listen i guess related to companies hiring so you guys know mischief right it's this like company that does these crazy stunt they're on i think stunt number seventy and i they're latest stunt i thought was really interesting and relates to this idea of just like creative hiring so if you scroll down tell me about what mischief is i don't entirely get it because they raised funding but when you explain what they are like who what grown adult would trust this child all the morning it's like south saturday live it's a weekly show it's like a weekly sketch but it's just done through code they make a website instead of like a video making a joke they make a website that's joke yeah but is it exactly does it make money i think it does i don't know how much they've made they've raised three and a half million dollars so i don't know like you're saying i don't know who those investors are what they're looking from mischief but just to give like two examples so one of them recently was i think it's like called tan and i don't know why it's called that but basically it's called the game of death online which you sign up you didn't account and you pay ten dollars to join the game and all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive and the last person who stays alive gets all the money so it's just kind of like these silly quirky games but the last one they did was they also do like commentary through their game so it was a commentary on in this case the msa sat so they got people to pay fifty dollars to take the msa sat and the highest score when it's basically like a a their version of the sat and the person who got the highest score won the entire pod so they didn't actually have that many people did it they had five hundred people who did it but it reminded me of something you guys talk about on the pod have talked about on the pod which is you know the power of like crowds sourcing things like spacex if they want to develop some new technology they put out some competition and that tends to attract more interesting people than you know if they hire a bunch of recruiters to go you know find the people in theory they're looking for and example example i think you're thinking about is they were trying to figure out some like when they trying to like decode some protein or something that helped with this aids medication and they like turn it into a video game and they'd spent ten years trying to solve it and then like a bunch of video gamers got it down in like three weeks yeah well there's the spacex what's what's the spacex challenge the one that everyone knows about price it's just like they're that's not from space yeah but there's also yeah that's like a a version of that where they basically just put out the bounty and then let people let anybody sort of enter to try to win okay there's a i feel like there's another one that spacex us but in any case like what i'm getting at is all i mean we work for hubspot there's all these companies that are trying to attract like quote unquote top talent and they're doing it in a way that in most cases like true top talent like are you gonna want to be like dm on linkedin and go through like a traditional in interview process like in most cases no and so my question is why isn't there like a really like mischief style recruiting agency that puts out these challenges that the smartest people in the internet are like stoked to solve just out of the cheer pride that they then can funnel potentially into these companies maybe it's the case that these people just like would never wanna work for these larger companies but i just wonder why they're isn't a more creative route i have something recruiting i have something for you so this is one of the very first articles the hustle ever wrote i don't even know if you can google it anymore it was literally like we wrote it like two weeks after starting and it was about my friend named max and if you go google ben the hustle google interview or the hustle secret google interview so my friend max was teaching himself something i i i gotta remember all the details this was like six years ago he he was learning some type of coding some type of language it was and it was like a rare language and he was typing in all these things on google like what does blank mean how do you do blank and after a while his his chrome browser like went like look like the matrix that it said you look like you might belong to one of us and and it it says we've noticed that you've been googling a lot about this type of language and we are hiring for that would you be interested in applying here that's amazing and very few people ever saw this but we wrote an article about this this article got seen by millions of people what's it say ben what was the language google has a secret interview process and it landed me a job that's that one and he ended up working there and it worked it worked and it was wide that's dope and you know only google could do that because they own the browser in the search engine but but what if you were just like what what if there was just like a app that just sat on your computer that basically tracked everything you did i know sounds great but like gave you job opportunities based on what you do on your computer right like if it knows that stuff is in all these different like subreddit and it's and she's like looking at google trends and all the stuff that's like a signal for what type of person you are like it's actually like a much higher quality signal in theory then any job interview you could do where you're just trying to like present yourself as a certain way versus what what you actually do on the internet right like oh you spend a lot of time in excel or what you actually do in your computer it's like you spend a lot of time in excel you know so we've seen we've seen what your capabilities are okay if doing macros as an excel you could probably qualify for certain types of jobs it's so i wonder if there's like a thing you could do like for college students it's like hey put this on your computer and like do you want your first job out of college like we'll we'll help figure out what that job should be we'll help get you like a job opportunity just by putting this like tracker on your computer sounds very not i the yeah i mean i know it's always like oh tracking everything on your computer thing but the reason i thought of this is because i watched the q on documentary and in it they have if you guys heard of like ci three three zero one no no no it it's they covered it in the documentary but basically it was like the epitome of these like crazy online puzzles i think there's been three of them the first two were solved the third one still has not been solved and they are like you know there's there's like a picture online and there's like a message and encrypted in that message there's a bunch of numbers and then you have to know to like go to another website and put it in the point is a lot of people thought that this was actually a recruitment tool for like either nsa or the cia and so i was like man there should be something maybe not that crazy but something like that online for companies doing those i did this in college we found this website and it was like you know it said something like vague thing it was like the game has only begun but have you realized it like have you realized that it's begun yet and it's like you have to like right click view source and then in the source code there's a url you go to that url and then it downloads an audio file you listen to the audio file it sounds like nothing you listen to it backwards all of a sudden it gives you coordinates you go to those coordinates on a map the map lin legion and it was like a fifty part game like mister game and me my got totally obsessed with this we spent like hours and hours and hours calls i don't remember what them to get named this is what i can call college this was like fifteen years ago but like the i remember at the end the the last puzzle we could never solve and i think the guy just made an un unfavorable puzzle like i just think there was no solution and his name was mister wiggle or mister sq or some shit like that and he he had this puzzle that was like the ensemble thing at the end but it was so much fun and actually now that i think about it that is actually a great like filter and barometer for who might be good at certain times of types of work like the pro type of person that would do that for fun and solve that problem i would love to hire that person right because i know what could you could you be like there's this off like if you're that game maker mister wiggle or whatever like could you like do that as a service for a variety of companies and like make these games like hey we're gonna try and find you but i bet it's like hey i bet we'll we're gonna do this thing this in this thing and i bet you we're gonna get you twenty new applicants every month yeah to silly games but they're gonna be high high quality applicants totally i also think there's an element where like as i said as if you're top talent you're getting a dm from someone on linkedin you're like i'm just gonna ignore this but if you played a game and at the end of that game it's like you are part of like point o zero one percent that solve this game like i feel like that would be so much more compelling and maybe they still are like nah i'm never gonna work for an enterprise okay that's it for this week thanks so much for listening we'll see you all next week bye i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back