The Most Valuable Skill For Any Founder

i love to show of ted las because it's like an example of i call it getting ted las now which is when a brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge but the american has ten x the agency or confidence and as result there t five times more i feel like i brutal that was really i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel never looked george you had an interesting career because you were at social chain early on so if people don't steve bartlett from da here 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 high agency dot com let let me give the background here george got obsessed with the way the the way that nikola tesla fell in love with the pigeon george fell in love with this idea of high agency start tweeting about it start blogging bodies easy to come write the handbook on this thing he started making it like his sole focus for at least what six months george well i take 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 and we discussed it the idea or the meme as a whole has become bigger and bigger and bigger i think by the way just it's not five years when i googled your name i googled george mack high agency you were tweeting about this in november of two thousand eighteen seven so let's explain it and and the the easy way to explain it and we can put this visual up on on youtube so hi agency like the the the meme that stands out to me is there's a dude deserted on an island and person it is two people person a takes like the wood from the island and they try to spell the world word help and they're just sitting there were hoping to waiting to be helped they're hoping somebody comes and saves them and then person b takes those letters and builds a a little raft and starts pad themselves they start helping themselves and you know one is a higher agency version than another right the the guy who builds the boat starts pedal 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 that you committed the idea and you started writing this thing and you told you were giving me updates saying you're writing this for a while and sam do you know the story of how we got high agency dot com no because he did not own that domain mean it's actually a very high agency story yeah so one of the things i i have in the piece is an exercise that i do i recommend it it's called turning bo bullshit into reality so the way most people will kind of live in the twenty first centuries 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 bush 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 what you wanna 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 high agency dot 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 hack people and we realized that high agency dot com the person who owned it for like twenty 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 near as free as a result so that's an example of the turning bush bullshit into reality and then when it came to actually promoting the piece i like okay let's write down high agency and then what are ways that i can display that 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 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 the launch i took over one time square with high agency got me this billboard high agency dot com with my little twitter icon taking over time square a day dude that is awesome how many views of this article get so far or that day so i actually i think i 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 bottom media is people go off with 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 ten thousand 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 like once every two days some people say it made them cry which was not the attention at all so i 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 admire anything like that i just wanted to kinda like quickly spit all what comes to mind so you weren't there on this podcast but i did a podcast with this guy nick mow and nick mow episode don't know if it has the most views it is the most hardcore episode i've ever done on this podcast the guy i think the guy guy's the most impressive entrepreneur that's ever been on the podcast and we've done seven hundred 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 agent agencies he's like the perfect word to describe them so he he talks about basically like just this i'll give you the simple examples and i'll ramp to to his most insane example so he's like he him and his brother wanna start a toy company straight out of like high school basically and so he's seventeen eighteen years old and he's first he goes door to door selling his his brothers like science project so door to door sales already like let's say level one agency that takes agency to go do that every single day and he sells like thousands of units door door then he's like okay great how we're gonna produce thousands of units we gotta like ramp production so they they said well where do other toys get made they get made in china right so they just pick up and they moved 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 but like by a river we built a shed and that became our factory we found chinese people when we employed them in in the factory we created our own factory it's like besides the point of like bayou is is glam it is it hut and exactly and then as they're he's like by the way worse product you know everyone 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 how did you get like distribution because they're everywhere they're in walmart they're in every store he goes i would email every buyer of every retail store in every geography every day that was my day he's like eventually they were like dude we don't want it he's like oh so you're here you replied great would love to tell you about our latest product and and finally you know they would someone would crack and like alright 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 give you twenty minutes and he used that to scrape and claude so he just he's describing all of this his journey for him and his brother to bootstrap someone a toy company that became the biggest toy company in the world he made 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 basically like he got crohn's disease only that i forgot what was had to go get like his like it half his test and 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 hit the fastest selling diaper brand in the world right now is ras he created that and then he also created like the fastest growing hair care brand on tiktok like this guy is just prolific right and i 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 did they learn it or can you learn it one thing like a model for 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 call it the high agency spectrum and i think it there's definitely people who have genetic advantages bella largely had a great line of a day of when communism amended we could the soviets could discuss profit for the first time and he was talking about where with woken 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 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 the genetic role 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 like 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 las because it's like an example of i call it getting ted las now which is when a brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge but the american has ten x the agency or confidence and as result they achieve five times more so by the way i think i said that's let'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 in 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 kinda of mean and like the guy does not get the girl off at times it actually ends sad the british show is more realistic and was less successful than the the american conversion of the office too and but the ted lasso example is way better because it's 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 that kind of reminds me my british versus american friends there's a crazy start around universities so the top ten universities in the world i believe three of british and three are american so when you actually look at our intellect i think you could argue 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 five times higher even the example of deep a lot the ai innovation came from the uk but then that the actual execution happens in the us so yet i 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 you said something that we passed over but i thought it was actually a pretty good insight which was you you pay attention to the you said said it in a very installation intellectually like a pictures of 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 i just thought have you seen this email that basically kick started airbnb so airbnb which today i don't know hundred billion dollar company or so the email that kicked it off is a public email you can read and it's from joe ga and he's he's emailing brian and he goes brian i thought of a way to make a few bucks again becomes a hundred billion dollar company thought way to make a few bucks turning our place into a designers bed and breakfast we could let young designers come into town and crash at our place during the the four day event there's like a conference and we'll give them wifi f a small desk a sleeping mat and breakfast any every morning and if it's hot with that point at the end joe and he he leaves it with that did such a good email that it sounds fake and so i 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 it there's a lot of potential in those types of ideas i my one that i was afraid for saying for a while because i thought i might get canceled but then when i explain it i think it kind of makes sense so this is obviously the tiktok clip that gets me canceled but then i'll explain so don't clip it essentially i think child labor is under priced let me explain obviously the classic child labor 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 a model of children working for example in the uk cleaning chimney and obviously then that got completely outlawed it 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 twenty thirty 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 did we had a guy on the podcast the other day who was seventeen years old who had a business doing thirty million dollars a year in revenue yeah so i i have an idea which is the next y comb only invest between the age of eleven to eighteen 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're obviously seeing that the k way as well as howard 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 he was on this podcast cash or but i forget when but you or someone told me about peter till teal fellowship yeah and he was like he's he's can he's gonna give you a hundred fifty thousand dollars to drop out of college and start a company that was one of the it doesn't seem ridiculous opposite of staying in school kids he was like out i'll pay you to leave school kids that was 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 everyone goes to like the same mental model although some some people it will take ten years because they'll see the results nowadays but like other people like me it took me like a few weeks from i'm like that's crazy and then it's like that's crazy right and like like i like is this crazy oh this is actually kind of awesome like and then you know ethereum comes out of that and fig 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 ten x the 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 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 micro plastics it's kind of it's slowly bubbling up now it's reaching the media but if you discuss that two to three years ago you was an absolute weirdo another example in there was around fentanyl that i put in the poster 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 ass people when did the roman empire fall or fell there was no big announcement there was no hey guys the empire was fallen it likely a lot of people didn't admit it to like a hundred 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 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 a it's an important question it's a it's worth pondering but it's not one where you know ten answers come to mind right away of what what's largely ignored or like over over under reported today that will be you know 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 ars spraying thing that you have in the west everybody yeah a it's like a it's more like a shower head kind of things that you get a bid day which is a separate mechanism but it's like a little shower head i could go to the most remote crazy location of the desert and they will have one i've called there's like what what are they ashley i i call it like a ars spray i don't i don't know what it's actually at the official terms talk about it what you're there but this this is the color of my is that there's in the west there's almost not really a good naming mechanism for 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 about man i need to wash my hair but meanwhile this is going on in the west on masse and i think as an entrepreneurial opportunity change 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 about first as well have you seen tu no ta like an attach bid day 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 a hundred million in revenue in you know targeting the american market but i i i'm with you dude that's just the tip of the iceberg right you're 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 a great sci book by a guy called ted chang and it's one of your 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 you it's in the books of spoiler alert it tells the story of a a 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 the daughter says to the father i wish you just leave like mom i hate you and it haunt the father to that very day and after about five years they slowly build their relationship and the father doesn't have access to on his recording devices but his daughter does and one day he needs access to go through her memory logs so he's he's asked the 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 mis remembered the event it was him that said it to her and it's this idea that essentially all our memories are completely bo it's completely made up it's like 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 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 is they did a they did a version of this on black mirror as well oh really well there's a there's a example of in the uk there's a building called g tower it was a horrific accident that occurred where the whole building sat fire it was in a council of 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 eye witnessed testimony when he came out the saying that they saw it and when it the like classic physicists about six months later after the emotion had calm down around the event was like hold on if you drop a baby from that high to there like the physics of this i've got a bit of doubt about it and when they actually dig into the memories of it a lot of it was just artificial memories that people had created so i'm pretty fascinated by was 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'd no longer have a story of your memories you actually have the full log yeah there's a famous experiment i don't know if have you guys ever seen this there's the nine eleven memory experiment what's so 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 i i don't have the studies in front of me but there's i remember learning about this that there was a a set of studies where people they went and they study the memory accuracy of people remembering nine eleven and it was pretty shocking it was like less than fifty percent of the details were accurate it was a combination of they had extreme confidence that their memories were accurate the memories actually were not accurate and then they don't not only did 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 it you didn't even actually remember that properly and that your memory is basically converge towards like a shared narrative rather than what actually happened and so there's and all these terms for flash bulb memories there's all these like terms for that describe how poor human memory actually is which is like kinda crazy when it comes to like the court system for example like a lot of it's based on you know i witnessed miss testimony or somebody remembering certain details but and what's funny is sean is as you were describing that i was thinking where where was nine eleven what was i doing and then i'm also saying the second most common thing which is but i remember yeah i'm on the exception ads don't on that's what everyone's gonna say they're they i would 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 letter her back to me and she says like that's cute thanks right and like it drove like eight years of like success me because i was i'm gonna prove this freaking jerk wrong she was so dismissive 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 in your with your new and indefinitely like i i went reread i'm like that's insane i told myself the story that and i've said it publicly so many times i even named after her once or twice it was wrong it was wrong i i didn't remember correctly and i'm i'm happy didn't but yeah our memory crap what about george about you 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 what does that mean because what you're describing to me is like a philosophical philosophical like a like a mental framework but it 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 the twenty first century or it might be and if a british person says probably 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 is so much bigger and you just then begin to look it so like a small case of like 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 like find small ways to have agency over the algorithm so like even i was like okay i reflected on my youtube history i'll literally i recommend everybody do it it's one of the weirdest exercises talk about memory is you go in youtube and then you press history and i just scrolled through the videos and i 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 regret and i said i think it was about eighty percent of them i regretted ten percent i was neutral and ten percent i enjoyed watching and then i looked at it and said okay what are the ones that i like having common and then what are the ones that i don't like also having common and the single biggest thing of where i thought i wasted my time was content under thirty minutes long because it was just brain rock content particularly under like five minutes long late a coffee z 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 them everything i've completely forgotten this so i was like okay how about i just work with chat gp to solve this problem built a script and now i call it the k algorithm my youtube does not show me any videos under thirty minutes so this ability to to be able to manipulate your environment particularly i think with ai now has only got bigger and bigger so this agency everywhere everything is a sit i know if you heard that phrase of everything a skill issue it's kinda like that for agency like everything is just an agency problem what else are you doing that in your life so even small things just constantly each day do i recommend going back to the turning bush 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 sa phone i was sat on the beach i did turning bo bullshit into reality i've wanted to learn baker street on the sa phone 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 the sa and talk myself baker street on the sa phone 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 two thousand and ten on like a really weird niche block there's a guy called them aaron schwartz who you probably heard of he was the reddit cofounder who tragically took his own life he has this amazing blog which goes to your point there sam like how do you actually turn this tactically so and it it talks about a 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 bend 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 i the piece is absolutely incredible and i'm 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 framework the blog post i really recommend checking out is absolutely incredible yeah you you said on here and and when we ask what you wanna talk about you said something about how you think that language kinda 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 i have a problem where i 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 i think i think sean did you actually say this or we i think we had think we had someone on the podcast where it was like it changed my thinking where it's like i'm gonna say instead of i should i'm gonna change that word to choose it's like what am what am going to choose to do not i should be doing x y x y and z was that a tony robbins event entity he said it beautifully he goes somebody was had set razor their hand they said something i should do this you know i 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 just couldn't un herein he's like people just should all over themselves and i just from that moment on it it literally visceral felt gross to say the word should i'm shitting all over myself phone 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 matter 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 a kind of a a double edged sword good examples of that would be fake news so fake news there was words beforehand han that never really caught off it was like the yellow journalism there was truth 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 vibe code the only thing that's probably done more then l m's for vibe coding is the actual meme itself of vibe coding so high agencies another example what is vibe coding by the way i i i i still don't know what the difference between vibe coding and coding is just you basically a non technical person prompting an l and getting them to code it for them that's five coating alright got it and you're saying what the the when you actually have that language itself or you have that mean those means 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 the millionaire is so impactful to society and it hasn't been updated even as inflation at way away at being a millionaire so like i once sw a youtube bad where they were talking in like a currency that's like one to ten who's was talking about making his first million but it still exists even as the inflation kicked in and i'm fascinated to see what replaces that there's there's this great book from back of the day that i've never read because it's one of those books where the tie the cover tell you the whole story you could literally read the cover you could have the epiphany and you could move on and it's called your word as your wand it's by i think florence sc and it's like actually kind of a hard book to read because it's always books us written like eighty years ago or something and it's just like too poetic to like actually g nowadays but the whole idea is like your word is your wand it's your magic wand and it shapes your reality exactly as you're describing and this applies to like yes it applies a high agency but i'll give you another example so i tore my knee l 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 he never uses the word rehab and i'm like he's always uses a different words so he'll be like he's like alright let's get ready listen he'll be like we're is not rehab we're gonna renew we're gonna refresh we're gonna recharge we're gonna he's like we're gonna do something we're gonna make that need better than it was before and rehab already like imply some version of it's broken we're gonna try to fix it versus he's like alright we're gonna rejuvenate this thing we're gonna make your knee ten years younger than it would then it than it currently is how we're gonna do that and literally when you change the word you change the method right like the what you say changes to how you do it and that 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 what 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 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 wanna have i've been practicing the piano for three months i've i'm ready to upgrade from my keyboard to like legit piano it's more fun to play feels better etcetera and my birthday is coming up so the normal speed bar would be you kinda wait for your birthday so you wait but not of a 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 these you know they don't have them in stock and then it's gonna take a few weeks to come and then it gets then you set a delivery date then they show up and i basically set myself a challenge i from the moment i had the idea i said this inspiration is perishable right ideas are avocados i i'm not gonna let this go brown i'm gonna do this thing right now and so i said i wanna see how fast i could do this i think the normal person this would be like a two or three week project i'm gonna see if i could do this in twenty four hours and sure enough 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 them 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 piano better i said i didn't to know first which piano you have in stock in the warehouse that couldn't 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 gonna pick but you schedule it right now because it's friday and i want this delivery saturday morning and i made the whole thing happen by eleven am 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 gonna happen in your business or in your personal life he he just said his his attention his focus and his energy is his army how good is that is that what you just said yeah go ahead george well you you got a military and air force you need a little one for each one and that's beautiful yeah let's go march right scott gal had a great version of this he what do how did he say he's like i deployed an army of capital in my forties 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 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 agencies is to just hang out with a highest person because you'll realize how unacceptable your low agency thoughts are around them you'll feel embarrassed by it and so being around highest of people is the fastest way to become more high of yourself well the question i always come back to is who would you call when you're stuck in a third jail sale that's how you identify the highest agency person that you know you 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 one's 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 ensuring the father of modern computing and he has this crazy thing so one of the things in the essay on my favorite like high agency app is just does it defy the laws of physics so it's like a brain prompt whenever you faced with a problem does it defy the laws of physics and claude shannon and a guy called ed four wanted to hack ro app so ro is the example of the ultimate game of luck and claude shannon and ed 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 bowl hit based off the probability and they hack crew at by managed to out complete the house by about thirty three percent so i'd say claude shannon awesome sean you should read ed biography one of the best biographies i've ever read adding it to the list a man for market so this guy ed thor he basically was a math guy he was a math prodigy he got sick of just making the wage that math teachers got and so he said i'm gonna invent a way to count cards he did so we invented count 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 casinos started getting on his case and he was he was like i don't want them to like break my hand the back in the back because i'm counting cards and so he eventually got to finance and he started the 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 gum story like he tells a story about how he met this he's like i met this young man who had these really good ideas and i knew this guy was gonna be super rich and so i just decided to become one of his first investors and he went and started this thing called berkshire hathaway was so like like you know in like ten or twenty 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 is is a book by called don't tell me i can't by call 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 thirteen year old who tells the story the the un guy the un schooling 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 gonna go to school we're gonna homeschool you and unfortunately his father who served in the military who supposed to be his teacher ends up having to have multiple surgeries and one day he goes to his dad who you could just imagine and 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 more and buffett videos on youtube so this six year old starts watching warren buffett videos in youtube and you listen to the audiobook and you like taking notes so if i only got this kid so smart by the lessons he's taken from charlie mu and then at seven i believe he starts his first business that gets to a thousand dollars profit per month he acquire a vehicle using his parents license when he's like was the business what was the seven year old's business ra rabbit farm so he would breed rabbits and sell them and sell them to restaurants so he took that to a thousand dollars per month he then flipped a house and made i think like ten thousand dollars profit when he was ten years old and it was like at the house right it was like somebody's house that was just d 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 the profit of of flipping this basically he didn't even like buy home to flip it he he just found a unused home and was like there's potential here yeah he he's incredible he tells the story when he's meeting over seven year olds for the first time or he's at like scouts with his friends and they're talking about what they learned that day and they're going yeah i was looking at pluto is it a planet is what they were teaching as at school i know whenever like i care about this and he goes 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 maybe not every seven year old should have p and l maybe eighty percent of them should but not every seven year old should have a p and l but it's he completely reframe my reality of what a child can do what and by the way this is one of those stories where he's still like fifteen or sixteen this isn't like no in the eighties like the he's a kid yeah he unfortunately passed away which is really really sad wow like a surfing or something right yeah i think he i i don't know the ins and outs of it of tragic obviously but absolutely incredible no that you might still at the life that he lived you have this thing in your post you said how to how to spot high agency people in 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 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 it i i kind of wish my dad met me i couldn't code him i would be probably on a yacht right now alright however what i think even with hiring at my best hires that i've placed pretty much all line up in that criteria that they are have weird interesting hobbies isolating listening to an interview with palmer 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 mime 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 that we used to ask what were you a what's something you were generally obsessed with so like basically you were obsessed with at point where it actually negatively affected the quality of your life like you you were too obsessed with something but you did it anyways and it's usually a video game or a hobby like this or 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 on unprepared like you just know it so well you spent so much time on it that if i gave you you know forty five minutes to an hour you could actually like give me a a 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 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 that how 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 teller 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 wanna be able to do that well gas before we kinda wrap up you had one thing here that really caught my eye did you first of all you called your we were like what what ideas you wanna talk about you said i'm the lair 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 anti depress 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 he's ignored by the media that will be studied by historians so there was a study that came out in terms of depression could i don't know if you've seen it is depression guess what ranked the highest in terms of all the symptoms of depression walking yeah working out of physical house so as part of that that was the big breakthrough that came out which was the exercise ranked more according to this this analysis then r i's the number one however significantly more than exercise cognitive behavioral therapy higher than yoga higher than tai chi was dancing dance therapy why outperformed exercise significantly dance according to this matter analysis had the greatest impact in alleviate depression and so i think there's potentially a head space or a calm to be made that is dance therapy dude that's amazing who knew same rather be doing when's the last time you dance sam never i my wife and my wife no no dude when's the last time dude i literally not once in my life have i been in a public place and in the midwest you don't cry and you don't dance that's what men don't do and you don't drink liquid out of the hold but those are the three rules of being men in in the midwest don't cry don't dance don't drink liquid without of straws you're okay let's let's work backwards you're in the thirties now you're at a friend's wedding you're just sitting down holding down the floor at the table making sure the person don't get stolen what are what are you doing yes yes so i am not dancing okay wait george would you dance at a wedding i mean you're kinda suave you probably walked oh cool so there's a barbell so my girlfriend is incredible down so she been dancer since she was like five it's what she does for a living and i realized 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 are not carrying full on david brent style it's the person in the middle who's either doesn't wanna get on the dance floor or he's kind of half moving that is the cri so yeah i i'm a big dancer i'm terrible but i'm a dancer alright it's sam prom dance a prom nope what'd did you do sat i just sat i i tell you i don't do it i date wow it's horrible that's that's like you know how people to say like public speaking is the biggest fear it 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 if i were drunk then i could probably get away with it but like sober dancing as a grown man is probably like the the scariest thing one can do i rather divorce some wow i meeting you crave right yeah i'd rather get deployed in baghdad did have the day it's at a wedding what that on a bumper seat think about this we could do this together man we can overcome this you can wait so you're fearful of this too yeah but not like it like i i i if i had a thing i do it but i hate it but i do it but i kinda like it but i also kinda feel insecure about it but then i do it anyways i've have never just taken the stance of like no amounts so no i i don't think i'm gonna be dancing what what was the second thing the the next adhd we've tried to wait to think about dancing next adhd is i think so one great idea i heard the spotting trends is came from chris williamson is when a new trend is coming bear on a counter trend occurring so one trend that you're seeing right now is a rise in like nationalism by people america for america canada for canada china for china and one funny idea i have is so duo 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 it is gonna go down and down with time a funny business idea that i think could work is so when i 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 fifty percent if this isn't anything to do with your childhood it's just being british like you're just overcoming what it means to be british and i think there's something to be said around essentially creating a duo lingo that cures you of your nationality because i think you're gonna have a barbell where you have everybody's like america for america or it's like i'm a global citizen and network state style and you could then just localize everything so oh 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 you don't like 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 asked them to be that's america that might be the it doesn't work okay so this week this works internationally but you don't want cure americans of the self delusion that we have that everything is great we're great and it's all gonna work out great that that a prone that we have is is very very helpful to us if you just 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 that maybe didn't have a conviction maybe goes back to what you mentioned earlier sam and i came up with this idea ages ago where i would like 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 like kind of his meditation like the deathbed regret meditation and then at the end it's like what action you're gonna take today and thought this was the weirdest fucking shit i'd i ever created and now it's big on tiktok it's like my friend was show me it's a viral trend at these girls doing these exercise the i 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 two about to go over the trenches your brother has died your mother's written letters but you don't want to read them you don't 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 of my life now is incredible so i think negative visualization is as tool from stoic but i think there's probably a 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 i'll 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 who's being forced to be a gladiator in rome or you've woken up as a labor in egypt building the pyramids or you've woken up in a slum in mumbai in nineteen ninety two 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 the it shows from a po your point of view of that person waking up in the morning and walking around have you guys seen this or and what could be even like you woke up as a kid in the midwest in nineteen eighty two have you seen that george yes so this is the put 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 people file our twitter twitter's is the best part yeah twitter is the best spot george mac on twitter high agency dot com if you want to read the the full piece anything adds add professor dot com as well and yeah that's that's everything you're awesome dude every every conversation we have with you is 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 kinda of worth considering so i think there's very 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 gonna be coming an american anytime soon by the way so i just landed yesterday i just have my visa approved have moved from dubai to the us purely because i find when i'm in the us is the look razor you're way more likely to be lucky so i don't think the quality of life here is as bad as actually it is in the rest of the world now but look so much more significantly so yes i a proud ted lasso welcome to the tribe brother you're in welcome to texas i'll get you some cowboy boots at the hat and thanks for being here thanks for coming to the pod god bless you god bless america talk soon that's cool y'all i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in and like the days off on a travel never looking back