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

well let let's do it so part two okay here's part two which george if you wanted the business ideas we did that five bang business ideas that was amazing i got like goosebumps from it this is part two we're gonna do some of your frameworks the biggest one i think the one that went the most viral is about high i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on on a road less travel you did a threat about one idea i think you 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 miss 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 were stuck in a third world prison cell and had to call somebody to break you out who would you calls and that's probably the most high agency person that you know so i mean thought experiment time now who who do you guys think of when i asked that question my friend jack smith that's a tough one i feel like i just go for the richest person i know because i'm like the money is gonna be the most valuable tool versus like a guy who's gonna break me out of my cell so steve bard that steve bard answer that question with prince william which i think it's not allowed so it can't be somebody who's like a royal family number but it has to be purely on merit well you know what the the meme you have in the tweet i think is a great visual of sam have you've seen the i don't know if you've seen the tweet but he basically one where where he tells you 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 the very first picture that he has and the tweet is basically two guys stranded on an island one guy and they have these like pieces of you know wood basically that they have from the from the from the island one guy is using the wood to spell help so that somebody if somebody flies over the the your boat sees help that they'll come save him and the other guy just made a made a boat out of the wood and the high agency is the guy who 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 they're they're looking for somebody to come and rescue them i i guess if i had to trim it debt like i think was 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 there's different things that go on but you can immediately plot that x y axis in your head of that you know of people that are like happening to life and people that life's happening to that and so why does the why does the idea of high agency matters so much to you said you've been thinking about for six six or seven years that's probably longer than your longest relationship tell me why you have why you have had such a long relationship with this concept i think it's the most under discussed 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 gray 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 that phrase and he he also says like can you describe you know a test is would you describe this person as an animal which say yeah he's he's an animal and if you could say man that guy 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 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 invert it which was what would be the opposite and it would be hap 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 agencies is probably not a sticky idea as much as it could be because it kinda kind of has four ideas in it which is one lo of control so i have control two intentional so they've thought about the direction that they want to go in three resourceful which is i'm incapable of getting the outcome and then four high bias fraction which is they've already fucking started the thing before these even listening to this podcast they're just constantly moving so those all things and it's i think it's not changeable it's sort of like telling people they should've have started a business before they had children it's like dude like we don't i don't like talking about that because like you can't fucking change that like you are where you are you know what i mean it's not particularly fun to talk about because i think that on you're you you have that scale already set i disagree i think go on tell me change my mind there's definitely some truth to what you say and also that's quite high agency reply right there's definitely some truth to what you say 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 these agency you could also increase their agency it's probably like muscle building this there's a genetic like 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 that went kind of viral about this where i said one small poker tell for if an employee is gonna 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 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 not the spending money part i noticed 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 yes i just send that over to me she's like i just did i'm like what and she will literally do it before the the words are done out of my mouth and she cannot help but taking action like her bias reaction is so high that it's almost annoying it's so high that you're like hey can we just 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 that they're she's like twelve people she's is literally like an entire team herself because she will make decisions very quickly she'll immediately implement and then she'll fix whatever is broken so quickly before the other person has even got out gotten out of bed and i think that that's it's a trait that i that i now look for in a hiring as well but you said something that's interesting you said it could be taught so how do you develop high agency emmett it 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 mid with meme algorithm of how would i make somebody low agency and then avoid that so if i was to make somebody lower in 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 it's much easier to spot in other people as well so i 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 favorite ones that i've told a you founders us 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 voice me the other day and goes i pre screen all candidates with that and it's said the best quality filter of potential people of potential high to people we on this podcast as a question i ask a bunch is 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 twelve thirteen years old what would i have seen would i have had any clues that you would become this kinda outlier type of person couple of people have said some pretty interesting answers so jess m who came on and jess m is a super impressive entrepreneur i think paul had said like you know the five most you know impressive or if he had to bed on five people in nyc it would have been like sam and the call and like j was one of five and she said like she's said like yeah basically i was kind of a grunt in school i wasn't that good at class i kinda 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 you know fourteen years old and we had s bulky come on this guy's built basically a billion dollar boot bootstrap business which is so unfathomable to to be able to do and somebody told me that you know they go ass sa eat about when he was a teenager and he hacked his school's system so he could just change his great like he was willing to do the work to hack into his school system to like 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 the 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 a few hours later to talk about his new business idea and i remember like him getting in trouble for controlling the street light 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 a one page application and in there so so every question in the yc application has to have earned its right to be there if you're on the one page 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 not literally hacked but like any real or any system in the real world that you have sort of gained in order to do it they because business a high predictor of relentlessly resourceful as we talked about george what's the answer for you like did you have weird teenage hobbies yeah my might not translate as well as from an american audience but my dad bet me i couldn't do ten hiccups ups with soccer ball and puberty had just hit it's so test testosterone in a assist by the way like so of a juggle with unstoppable okay gotcha some my dad bet me i couldn't do that ten pounds and test testosterone just hit like first bit of arm hair i remember thinking fuck our guy i'll prove him wrong so i trained and i trained and i trained and he he didn't call parenting hat by the way he didn't try and push me to do it he just bet me wherever i could do it and he made sure that he had to see me do it anyway ended up doing it and then i kept doing it more and more and i ended up been added adidas advert advocate for a fifa world cup i used to talk around doing tricks at different stadiums held like three unofficial world records for different tricks and things like that so i and ultimately i decided i went until lose my vagina so i stopped doing it but it was yeah really fun did it did it work giving it up still trying for some say yeah tend to work out that way same what of you did you have weird teenage hobbies yeah i i basically like the small predictable things like i i had an ebay store when i was twelve 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 too bad like i i was like a weirdo like i like i i enjoyed the stuff that i like now back when i was twelve years old you're like funny 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 you know what i mean like yeah i was in like that were you into anything you know when i first heard this i felt really bad because i was like i i did couldn't think of anything special than i did mon par o'brien was on the episode and he basically said there's a golden period he studied like i went to a house and got this whole wall of books on science 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 ten and then about nineteen 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 mh or great musicians like eight six he composed this first thing i like wow this is insane and i felt really bad because i was oh shit like too late for me right like what am i supposed do now i was kind of a normal kid pick and boo and in junior high like i i didn't do that but then i started thinking about it more and i'm 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 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 two k 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 and like all i did as i played franchise mode and i would simulate i was basically only a general manager so i would i would simulate the season then i do the draft i would scout all the prospects you wouldn't actually play like the like the no about it wasn't been tested so like i thought okay first i'm gonna build this great team and so i was just like a ceo base 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 playing with any of those players i would just simulate i would just do that for like a fantasy ten years and there was basically a fantasy gm which i guess is kind of like that's kind of what being a like a ceo or a business person is like you're just doing not far 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 that do you want me to give you the rest of the check for the highest people and you can see who in your life you done yeah we're 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 klein a low see 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 to treadmill you constantly 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 mind sam's like that for me my buddy sue is like that like i can't i can't hang out with sue 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 they they 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 was like hour we're so you know what i wanna do it's not a company i wanna create a podcast i wanna be tim ferris i wanna wake up and have a be in a million people's ear balls and that was like a thing that came to me when i worked myself into that state mh ben is kinda like that my business part of ben where he's yeah i'm like i could just i probably do call ben i think eight times a day on average you know so we just talk eight times at a day which now that i say it it sounds very weird but it feels very normal if i didn't have kids it probably be twenty times a day who are yours george who are yours probably three chris williamson from auto where we like just out all night we can just go and go and go and you guys are both similar like like where chris is like an you know in a good way he's like an academic where we're like he just like learns and then just teaches and i like i you i feel that way listen to his podcast so who's the second one data center from found this like he's just fucking if espresso was a human being it became fucking sen so that guy i'd add on that and then the third one my old boss steve bartlett who you who runs their ceo podcast i remember when steve were in the business he'd have an office in manchester london new york and i'd work in manchester office and steve is maybe there a court of the time in that office and what business is this is this this this was buck his marketing agency social check yeah okay 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 those three would be my three that's a great compliment how'd you get the job by the way why why did you join social chain he had a uni campbell that essentially the uk pete you spent an earlier the uk are 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 market himself well and just sucked up all the talent that was in manchester which is which is where i was do you all the next one yeah keep it going you can never guess their opinions so it's the box of the rights poetry tree the advertiser were obsessed with the history of war the beauty queen who reads nietzsche if their beliefs line that with des stereotypes they've have exercised agency so when you give them an opinion on abc do they fit in a box or do they often surprise you but they fault things through right anybody who pop up what you're saying is basically they're non cliche like and 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 a more of an engineer's brain but then he came on and was talking about this like woo woo energy system healing and healing through energy using colors in a 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 gonna reply to certain stuff right like i'll explain something to him and i'm like i think you're gonna be too smart to believe this but you're open to learning more that's that's wild it's to me or even what he's gonna do is next move right is silicon valley you sell your company there's two paths you you're i think they they take you to a room and they're like hey here's two boxes would you like to become a vc the vest the vest is under this box or you're a founder and you're now your next thing is gonna be ai health care or whatever like it's like cliche whereas jack after he sold his company he's like spent a year in his garage building like the most ergonomic chair he could think of it's like you you could you couldn't guess what the guy gonna do next he was total non cliche in that sense i like it the next one immigrant mentality if they moved from their hometown that's a good sign if they moved from their home country that's an even greater sign because it takes agency to spot you in the wrong place resourceful for us 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 i win and that's kind of like what you're saying about america about you know sometimes we we started out as a as a country of immigrants and that's maybe one of the reasons why we kind of have the seed coverage a little bit yeah yeah they what's what's the keith boys like the the the people you hire are the company you build it's 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 like establish it from scratch you're gonna create a population of you know people who have that 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 that the one of the worst animals ever and we're just gonna get destroyed if you put five hundred of us we've you've just introduced a master predator the 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 quite i'd probably argue as brits might be sp smarter no offense however you've got those things it means you quote have an idea it's like yeah great idea let's do it but just the bias to optimism the bias to action whereas you have the brett who's i don't think that'll work because of abc b that's why america is the best because you can cooperate faster than any country my opinion the the the doritos lo taco did not come from pessimism alright that that's only and that is a uniquely american idea you would never that idea could not have been born in any other country i love it last two last tube they send you niche content so low agency people look at the social engagement of content before dealing its quality high agency people just look at the content they spot upcoming trends very early and the final one means to your face but nice behind your backs so the social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip it behind their backs whereas the high agency people they do the opposite where'd did you get that one from what are my friends lewis who's just i know that he'll just say the the honest thing to my face all the fucking time and it's so useful to have a friend like that whereas the low agents agency basically whenever someone's going against incentives oh the age agency that requires to go against incentives i've written this i often don't go against incentives even though i know incentives are no agency are still for the daniel cannon think to start the conversation so to go against the social incentives of pain i'll say 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 to gossip it behind your back to do the opposite and swim extreme beauty agency you're very philosophical which i think is cool and it's almost like you have a business just to justify the re just to pay just to give you an excuse to spend time reading and thinking of you're like your own patron basically you're like cool i fund myself to sit in a room and and think of ideas and then invert them and then think about them again and then you know write them down and share them with the world like do you do you even like capitalism i love well i love compressing ideas so which is why that i like advertising because i can use that skill that i have to compress things down i always love down sw nigga biography where he made all his money for real estate so we could do whatever the fuck one with he's acting career and i think is slightly underrated didn't up tim as did you know i offered to invest in george's business and i was like i'll invest fair terms i'll blow this thing up we grow this baby like crazy and he was like that's all good but there's one problem if this grows i'm gonna have to like it's gonna suck me more towards that and i actually wanna be all in the business of ideas i don't want this to become you know bigger and more made you so much more that may respect him so much more right i was like again it's that's a high agency thing to do right to be able can you say no to money like can you say no to money might be like another thing to just add on your list how many times have you said no to money 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 lunch room schools out everybody leaves it's just the twenty kids who got in trouble that day you to sit in silence and do nothing and they they see you kinda like every other chair diagonal that you can't really you could talk to somebody but you it's not very easy to you can't whisper it's you have to be a little loud and it's me and it's the weirdest kid in our school does the kid who had hair down to his waste and he always wore these like weird tat shirts and he was just a weirdo and i saw 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 wanna mess with i was bored right i'm in d you you have two hours to do nothing and i see on the floor of the lunch room there's like a grape that was like from lunch hours earlier and it's like nasty it's on the floor of a look kids lunch him and it's like got hair on or whatever and i just whispered to him and i was just like y i'll give you a dollar if you eat that great hey what's down he's like a dollar i yeah and then he reaches down and i'm like oh my god he's fell full he's going for this is insane he picks it up and he eats the grape and i'm like grossed out my mind is blown and i can't believe you do i'm like alright deals a deal i get get out my wallet i take a dollar i handed it to him and then he took the dollar and he ate it wow i could believe it down this was like twenty two years ago or something i i still remember it vividly and i just thought that was the biggest no given moment i have ever probably still to this day in my life of like you know f you f your money after the grape i am going 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 know that that's ridiculous where do you wanna go from here sean you got a couple other cool like lifestyle things you do so do you wanna talk about the tail phone because i think this is like someone that me 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 it i ended up on fox news where it was like trump biden and then george mack cocaine k 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 folks 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 facing 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 mom goes to hospital how she gonna get hold of you or if you're out and about and you need an uber like a fuck i can't get a uber or if i wanna use apple notes to write down ideas i can't do that so i realized that that what society presented was either the smartphone addict or the phone list lu and actually the somewhere in between which is the cocaine and cal so the kale 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 somebody dies then cocaine phone every fit sla 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 to like my mental health when everybody who tries it or a lot of people who try right me and god this is a game changer what is the actual other phone is it a just like an android phone what what would you do for the other phone is it just two iphones just another but do you have two sim cards how do you do the number yeah i have two sim cards so i have a different number in the k phone and than the cocaine foot oh got it okay only drawback is that they basically 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 white maybe that's the only people who really need that but it's just for the peace of mind that most of the time they would and the the only time they're go do is when somebody's is a hospital but it's having that peace of mind that therefore i don't need to check the cocaine phone for that into that sean let me ask you your a question be honest about this and i'll answer it and i'll be honest too are do your parents still pay for your yourself home bill i pay them back alright my dad tells me the amount it's a family plan open on it for a long time i this same dave dude this and i change it with keeping my number that's too much work save i have also on my family plan and so george when you're talking about getting a new cell phone honestly like to everybody who's on their family plan right now shout up to who's dad own bill it's all we have that's our last connection that's the last cord that gets cut between you and your parents is the dog's down plan i don't even know how to like i've never gotten like i've like like i've always had to call my mother like hey my phone broke i'm gonna go buy one we tell at and t they gotta put it dog like the the plan what so when you sold the hospital she didn't go go get you and talking phone platt she carried on it it's not a money thing fair well there we go it's not fair play i don't know i i i i don't like use that word like i think it should be used especially yeah he text your a mom saying i need to get a cocaine phone is probably only gonna go down too well as well so i i thought sean i thought you would have also a bit on yours yeah yeah for sure dude it 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 i'm like look it's just a it's just a hassle okay i'm not this don't read more into it than what it is do you know just lazy okay there's this episode on on like el d generous which she's asking bill gates like let's see if you know how much a gallon on of mill cost like because you know you're you're so out of dodge and so when you talk to me about a cell phone plan i'm like i don't know five bucks otter bucks i go look like twenty three dollars right yeah should say with the phone line i'm like i don't know a thousand i don't know i i have no idea so george are there any drawbacks or like 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 this let me verify you actually live this way before you answer i i gotta run i gotta run i'll leave my i'll leave all my stuff i had a a one thirty i'll see you soon see so you actually live this way you actually have the two phones yeah it i've done it for three and a bit years and whenever i doubt it 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 you real out you only realize it by a contrast of how disruptive i think it that is for the crate particularly for people who were created people or ideas people like downloading whatever the worst lose headline is and immediately me into your consciousness and particularly if you then use your photos as your alarm clock as well it's i it's i've experienced it by contrast it's so toxic i can't deal with that i wanna ask you about lee you somebody who's been on my list of people i wanna go deep dive into sounds like you've read a bit about it them or studied them a little bit what is the learnings from lee so lee was the leader of singapore during his reign he went he took singapore from essentially being a third world country with a lot of problems and you've got china in japan on your doorstep which historically not the friend people 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 and it does about lee you is how they used to ob obsessed about the airport onboarding experience and it's interesting you see you see such obvious ideas and startups and you go why don't countries just take this at the onboarding experience or the conversion rate optimization of a landing page or a website or an ad 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 cleaner things what's the first few miles from the airport to the city lee k you used to ob over everything would be changing the roots 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 looked at everybody else's onboarding experience and five this immediately having those magic moments like designing facebook or designing asana within the first few minutes of entering and leaving the airport because it's the you gotta think it's like a standard comedian the first thing is you arrive and the last thing that you leap so he used to assess over that and i remember i went to austin airport and as you go up to get a uber you've gotta go for three different car and your phone signal goes out and you're sweating i remember thinking to myself i don't you're with criminal if you try trying to get an uber and an american airport you're treated like a criminal like oh if you're gonna 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 gonna be an asshole yeah i remember i remember like being there go leak when you would fucking hate this and i remember that that's a win i gotta i know to about that phone walking through us now paula so lee news rolling over in his grave right now so so that's interesting because i remember when i was in my teens i went to the singapore we we went to singapore and this if you haven't been the singapore and airport it's 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 i remember noting that being be like oh that's weird why is singapore 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 story did that pay off in some way like did the immigration rate go up or like what what changed from that or what what are the things that he did to actually like you know turned the country around you know what were the big levers that he pulled so onboarding is one what what really worked a attracting talented immigration is the single biggest the single biggest thing from my understanding of single post story that they did and part of that obviously is the onboarding and if you look at it singapore hasn't essentially no natural resources so it's not blessed with saudi arabia oil or like l la beauty necessarily but just attracting as many talented immigrants the specifics around the economics as well i 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 mu is obsessively you he has the story of l you we're talking about mating earlier l you rather than marrying the hottest girl at his class picked the only girl in his class that performed better than him but he was at the most like 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 nothing he did was around air conditioning right they need to do like an ace a big push for ace having ac in the country yeah i saw that recently i think he was supposed pizza levels on with twitter that was breaking that down yet when he was obsessed with getting air conditioning because he was convinced it was key to the and i'll make success yeah like he was basically so there was a interview with them him i'm i'm reading an article now from v so basically was interview with him and they said was there anything else besides multicultural tolerance that enabled singapore for 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 grip 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 c 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 was talking to about i 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 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 to deal with the heat because i sleep during the day when it's really hot and i wake up at the in the evening when it's cooler and that's when i work and i 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 they too dark to go to it's like dark all the time and so they just stay inside the program and they just code on computers because it's not really better options out there and they developed 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 like play on the computer play video games and you know learn to learn to program to second and third all the consequences everywhere you look crazy 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 this too wong is probably mine in yours favorite meme shah of the the mid with meme which just doug refuses to die he just 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 out of solutions to not be the guy in the middle and then realizing you have any canonical examples of the mid wit meme of you in the middle that you could think of like just for personal attacks on your psyche yes one was when i started to get really obsessed with sleep when i was like twenty twenty one and i'd have everything sleep optimized matthew walker had just been on joe rogan so i've got the ten step checklist routine above the supplements i've put everything and i'm there doing the whole like two hour wind down routine no screens before bed red light glasses on and brushing my teeth in the dark and my girlfriend at a time comes in and like hits the lights like minutes before bed like blinds me so completely blinded i like getting out i like the first row we ever had with was that i what are you doing and i was sat there in bed so she's a of course the 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 stuff there for an hour afterwards like shaking with adrenaline like how angry slash blitz i was and i realized oh shit a lot of sleep for example it had a phase of insomnia and a lot of sleep is the more you think about sleep the more pressure you put and sleep the worst to sleep is which is why a lot of these if i was if i was the cmo of wu or or 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 besides this this is actually probably one of the most toxic things i think we'll see for sleep but 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 insomnia act cycle versus a week later having a summary of the previous week when you're detached the results probably useful but the next day is particularly bad so that's a mid 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 rum illumination 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 over focus on yourself and your own condition is what creates your own poor conditions and you know the it's the same reason my trainer says this thing it goes whatever you feel you lack that's exactly what you gotta give you feel you lack respect you got disrespect go give respect you feel like you lack money go give money yeah and literally just flipping the mindset of like i lacked 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 be become like manic about your own health and you're stressing yourself out which decreases your health but i think that 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 intros intersection 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 state 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 just moving to the city it play the worst case scenario of that in my head like they amygdala delivered fire and then i think about the other thing and the amygdala delivered fire and play the worst case scenario and as a result paralysis analysis just kick the cat i'd make the decisions to not make the decision and one of the biggest best advice i got was stop thinking about making decisions and start thinking about making experiments because i realized there was decisions i procrastinate on for two years that i could have done both of them ten times over and the time spent thinking about the thing mh yeah that's that's a great one sam has a nice little one on this called a worry time which is once he thinks something is worthy of an experiment or worthy of trying right what's a big difference between your your your words there right experimenting with something i'm gonna try this out very different than i'm gonna do this i have to do this this is my new my new thing i i choose this so giving himself a little bit of grace there by saying i'm a try experiment but he says he schedules his worry time so he says cool what i don't wanna do is make this decision and then reassess it daily and worry about it every single day worry about is it working is it gonna work am i good enough is this is this right is this wrong and 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 thirty minutes that's my worry time and so i know i'm gonna 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 gonna worry about it you worry about it all the time because you're almost worried that you're never that you're never gonna assess it and found that to be a great hack it's to 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 it are you growing yet is it working you're actually destroying the plant the seeds 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 a hundred percent one guy who's completely changed my thinking and you should have him on the show like absolutely machine of a founder that goes under the radar you know element the electrolyte company no element elementary like the yeah so like great like they're were in five years they're growing like banana numbers like hundreds of millions met james the founder talk about high agency we were camping and it was bears nearby and i'm terrified of bears as as he wouldn't be as a party theory but number changes is i have james is there like he'll i is fine like that he'll deal that and his way like it managed to scale the way they have and he's wrote about this publicly if he does three weeks on one week off three week on one week off so you know the whole one of your on the ballot of sprint like a or sprint like a lion don't race like a account and the real i realized with his philosophy what he's doing there is he has that one week assessment period to because you i noticed it's that when i went a holiday the first three days i would be it would take me to the four day switch off and i think he's bank on his schedule first three days have fun then the following three days he's assessing the o hours reviewing the numbers looking at the experiments plotting out the next three weeks and then that following three weeks is just a hardcore cost sprint and he's completely redo redone the work and it makes sense that we just downloaded this work 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 companies growing like bananas that is factoring in that worry time it makes so much more sense i love that yeah i think that's right actually makes me think you monday through friday you know eight am to five pm why right even though i'm my own boss i'm in my own house and my schedule is a little bit different i i 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 the normal you know fifty two weeks in a year you're gonna work monday through friday you're gonna take your weekends off and then you're gonna have two weeks three weeks of vacation somewhere in the between and then i just tweaked that versus first principles like okay what 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 you know 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 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 you know super fun so that's that's the luxury i wanna keep funding you know is 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 i with leverage in 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 like there's always the busy trap you can end up it 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 i would encourage everybody to just search element 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 the lion versus the cow so the people haven't heard it the the the phrase is is you know you wanna work like a lion that cow the way a lion works is they they first just wait and they look for prey right they're just observing they're looking for an opportunity they're not just gonna run around randomly or chase like small insects they look for a worthy a worthy challenge worthy prey and when they see the gaze 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 nutrition 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 kinda like some low simmer of productivity and then we don't have the juice to sprint nor do we feel confident secure enough to rest reassess to celebrate we just sort of feel this anxiety to be constantly you know sort of on and sort of on is a problem you you're a u right you ever see that interview with conor mcgregor after he lost his fight to nate diaz you do you remember this era where he was on his rise he's gonna fight nate diaz and this was probably the first opponent that he was favored against he's supposed to you know he was supposed to get crushed by aldo he he he you know and but he beats all though he's supposed to get beat by mend of wrestler that's his k he beats mend and then it's state diaz oh here's a guy he's lost half his fights one half fights you know he's not a champion mac mcgregor has proven everybody wrong you're certainly gonna beat the s and instead he goes and he loses and the one reason he lost was his cardio was really poor he had missed calculated his training and he he ran out of gas and so when he went back to the lab and he's rested in reassess and try 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 and more and more he goes no actually it was about doing less he goes the thing was i was never resting my body the analogy my my trainer gave me was you're like a 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 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 you know winning the winning the next fight just a couple months later and his cardio had had improved in that that no disposable 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 week but not in business but in you know sports yeah have it my friend called it rest ethic it's like that's the sticky idea that it needed to be compressed he talks about his subconscious as he's like technical c cofounder so completely the ideas of your 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 things over working there's just under resting there's no such thing is over working is only under resting what do you do to besides sleep i'm trying to think of anything that's non basic well that's okay if it's basic i'm i'm into simple things that work if it's just i go for walks that's great on it i mean our would be kale in the morning by so i'm detached from immediate inputs coming through having a bit of intentional so so resting is not just napping resting is not having a thousand inputs coming into your brain at all all hours of the day exactly they having time to process things like it's that christopher nolan thing that him not having a smartphone i think there's prob whilst 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 foot yeah i started doing silent sundays we're basically i just 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 your patti your your pocket every three seconds or you're going to the bathroom and you're like what am i gonna do i how am i gonna 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 the that's happening societal is wide and with all it's like caffeine it's what it the real drugs are the real addictions are the ones that's probably just going completely into the radar because we never wanna kick that thing yeah the the the real the dangerous addictions are the ones that are socially acceptable yes well louie louis ck k has a cocaine he has a k laptop apparently he has one laptop writing laptop that has no internet and it's just a it's just a text it's to text it's smart because you're not gonna be you're not going to be the world's best data scientist when it comes to who who've ran all these ab b tests meanwhile you woken up on five hours sweet with a little bit a handover and you think you're going to win you're not better word yeah well we'll finish with this what's the what's the how to source your values is this is an idea i've never heard from you what is that so i called this buffet coin it may need a stickier idea or a stickier mean behind it but there's this incredible talk i think it's warren buffett university of georgia it's my favorite idea of is that very few people discuss it's on youtube how'd i 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 i'd rather than like listing da back or how to i think it's how to be rich essentially and rather listening the cliche back he says but as a thought experiment look around at the people in the class right now and if you could invest in them and get ten percent of their earnings for the rest of their life who would it be and why so immediate sean 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're argue definitely invest in gm are definitely best in mike and then he goes and then ask just help 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 other people so you're kind of hacking the self awareness bias of like you're trying to and improve yourself is probably mid wasted effort but looking at other people you can see immediately and then you can try and get your values that way and then you'd flips the experiment around in those if you have to show people in your life so you take ten percent of the losses who would you who would you take and why and then you have a list of values to go towards a list of values to go gets what's beautiful about that is it's not just money you can apply that for health coin you can apply that for happiness coin but using that third perk third party awareness perspective is so much more useful than rum and g yourself at least found i love that it was so simple right it's like the answer the answer becomes incredibly clear as soon as you ask that question you know who if if you take you know 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 what what why well because they're this this cool there's your blueprint you didn't need the advice more warren and buffett like the advice was literally hidden in plain sight in the people that you knew right around you the blueprint was visible they are 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 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 shut 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 go grab a bag of chips from the pantry at night when they're hungry to drink a glass of water and they go to sleep alright 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 forty five minutes and then they start working okay good i like the balloon 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 in bag and he had a protein powder there he had a set of bands in there and he had a little maya fa like ball like a massage ball that when he got off the fight he could quickly loosen up and it's just we looked at all of our bags you know business guys 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 he it's not like he had to think how am i gonna be fit this weekend it's simply a way of life for him and so the the easiest question i have what's that i asked myself when i'm like in a situations alright sweet what's a fit guy like me doing in a situation like this instead of what should i do what am i gonna i gonna do what i order a door dash a fake guy i like me to order at a time like this and the answer is a lot easier when i simply think of what 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 my around me in my life where i could just watch and see what they do and i think the key the key setting you gives as well is it has to be merit based so like you can't just pick the person with the billionaire ad or the ridiculous ab genetic frances garden style did the better the returns if you almost looking at like a company like the better returns on their start position that you would bet on is probably the person study the most i guess it's the super skinny guy that you go i'd still be on his fitness coin or if it's the the guy from the worst background but you'd still bet on his finance coin those are the real values you can nuts 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 one 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 calling on where should people follow you is twitter the best plate yeah thank you for having me twitter go to george mack george underscore underscore newsletter george back dot com and we've helped three different billion dollar companies get their best performing ads so if you help advertising as well good to add professor dot com and yeah thank you having sean awesome you soon i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days all on a travel never 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