In this episode, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss the concept of “high agency,” exploring its definition, why it matters, and how to identify it in others. They share personal anecdotes and thought experiments to illustrate how high-agency individuals navigate challenges and create opportunities, emphasizing that this trait can be developed and is a key indicator of success.
Topics: High Agency, Personal Development, Entrepreneurship, Success Mindset, Thought Experiments
Defining High Agency [00:00]
Shaan Puri: Well, let’s do it. So, part two. Okay, here’s part two with George. If you wanted the business ideas, we did that. Five banger business ideas. That was amazing. I got like goosebumps from it. This is part two, where we’re going to do some of your frameworks. The biggest one, I think the one that went the most viral, is about high agency.
Sam Parr: You did a thread about one idea. I think you framed it like, “One idea that has impacted my life the most is the concept of high agency.” Can you talk about what is high agency, why it matters, and how you spot people with high agency?
George: So, high agency is something I’ve probably thought about for six to seven years. It’s one of those topics when you search it, it’s quite difficult to find online, which is why I then just started writing about it to scratch my own itch. And the way I would describe high agency is, if you were stuck in a third-world prison cell and had to call somebody to break you out, who would you call? And that’s probably the most high-agency person that you know. So, I mean, thought experiment time now. Who do you guys think of when I ask that question?
Sam Parr: My friend Jack Smith.
George: Uh, that’s a tough one. I feel like I would just go for the richest person I know because I’m like, the money is going to be the most valuable tool versus like a MacGyver who’s going to break me out of my cell.
Shaan Puri: So, Steve Bartlett answered that question with Prince William, which I think is not allowed. So, it can’t be somebody who’s like a royal family member, but it has to be purely on merit.
The Meme of High Agency [01:32]
Sam Parr: Well, you know what, the the meme you have in the tweet, I think is a great visual of this. Sam, have you seen the tweet? I don’t know if you’ve seen the tweet, but he basically has…
George: Is that the one where, where he tells you 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.”
Sam Parr: I think that’s a clue in it, but I’m talking about the the very first picture that he has in 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, they’ll they’re a 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 will make the boat out of the wood, and most people just put out a sign for help and they’re kind of the victim and they’re they’re looking for somebody to come and rescue them.
George: I guess if I had to trim it down, like think what’s the advert for high agency that we spoke about last time, would be high-agency people or low-agency people, are they happening to life, or is life happening to them? It’s a spectrum, right? Like the circumstances, there’s there’s different things that go on, but you can immediately plot that X-Y axis in your head of people that you know of people that are like happening to life and people that life’s happening to them.
Why High Agency Matters [02:49]
Sam Parr: And so why does the why does the idea of high agency matter so much to you? You said you’ve been thinking about it for six or seven years. That’s probably longer than your longest relationship. Tell me why you have a why you have had such a long relationship with this concept.
George: 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 Graham’s “Relentlessly Resourceful”?
Sam Parr: Yeah, well, he just says like, “I 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, uh, you know, engineering prowess, it’s the, you know, the best founders are relentlessly resourceful.” And that that phrase, and he also says like, “Can you describe, you know, a test is, would you describe this person as an animal?” Would you say, “Yeah, he’s he’s an animal.” And if you can say, “Man, that guy’s an absolute animal,” or “She’s an animal” when it comes to this, that’s the sign of a winner. And I think that’s the the output of a high-agency person. How do you describe them? They’re basically, they’re an animal.
George: Yes. And he has a great bit in there of inverting it, which was, what would be the opposite? And it would be helpless, which is probably a good case of life happening to them. And I think there’s a few, there’s a four kind of tenants, I would say, why high agency is probably not a sticky idea as much as it could be, because it kind of has four ideas in it, which is: one, locus of control, so I have control; two, intentionalism, so they’ve thought about the direction that they want to go in; three, resourcefulness, which is I’m capable of getting the outcome; and then four, high bias for action, which is they’ve already fucking started the thing before they’ve even listened to this podcast. They’re just constantly moving. So those four things.
The “Unchangeable” Nature of High Agency [04:26]
Sam Parr: And that’s, I think it’s not changeable. It’s sort of like telling people, um, they should 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 what you are. Uh, you know what I mean? Um, it’s not particularly fun to talk about because I think that on you you you have that scale already set.
George: I disagree, I think.
Sam Parr: Go on. Tell me. Change my mind.
George: There’s definitely some truth to what you say, and also that’s quite a high-agency reply, right? There’s definitely some truth to what you say, and I think there is a little bit of a genetic component to it. But theoretically, I think you could make somebody, you could reduce somebody’s agency. Therefore, if you can reduce somebody’s agency, you could also increase their agency. It’s probably like muscle building. There’s 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.
The “Poker Tell” for High Agency [05:18]
Sam Parr: I had a tweet once that, um, that went kind of viral about this where I said, “One small poker tell for if an employee is going to be great is if they’re willing to spend money out of their own pocket to move faster.” They’re not doing it to impress you or to take one for the team, and it’s not the money that matters. It’s that this person simply cannot stand being blocked or slowed down. Sharks die if they stop swimming. And I said this because we hired this woman in our 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, but 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, “Yeah, so just send that over to me.” She’s like, “Yeah, I just did.” And 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 for action is so high that it’s almost annoying. Uh, it’s so high that you’re like, “Hey, can we just stop? 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. They’re she’s like 12 people. She is literally like an entire team herself because she will make decisions very quickly, she’ll immediately implement it, and then she’ll fix whatever’s broken so quickly before the other person has even got out of gotten out of bed. And I think that that’s a it’s a trait that I that I now look for in hiring as well. But you said something that’s interesting. You said it can be taught. So, how do you develop high agency?
George: Emmett from Twitch has a flowchart that’s really cool of like literally a question-by-question-by-question of how to develop somebody’s agency with time. I think I would use the Midwit meme algorithm of how would I make somebody low agency and then avoid that. So, if I was to make somebody lower in agency, I would make them hyper-general. I would use no deadlines. I would not break things down into step-by-step instructions. Um, 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’d look at who are the most high-agency people that you know, and then trying to reverse engineer the values and behaviors they have, then trying to analyze yourself because it loops back to the first episode where self-analysis um 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 few founders and they go, “This is awesome,” of asking for weird teenage hobbies. Because if they can go against the crowd when they’re a teenager, so much easier as an adult. It’s tough, but it’s easier. And I have one founder who voice memoed me the other day and goes, “I pre-screen all candidates with that,” and it’s like the best quality filter of potential people, of potential high-agency people.
The “Weird Teenage Hobby” Filter [08:08]
Sam Parr: We, on this podcast, it’s a question I ask a bunch. I say, “You’re awesome, like I’m so inspired by this right now. Well, if I had met you or I’d been able to to observe you when you were 12, 13 years old, what would I have seen? Would I have had any clues that you would become this kind of outlier type of person?” A couple of people have said some pretty interesting answers. So, uh, Jess Ma, who came on, and Jess Ma is a super impressive entrepreneur. I think Paul Graham had said like, you know, the five most, you know, impressive, or if he had to bet on five people in YC, it would have been like Sam Altman, the Collisons, and like Jess Ma was one of the five. And she said like, she’s like, “Yeah, basically I was kind of a runt in school. I wasn’t that good at class. I kind of got picked on and I was weird, but I created like I liked gaming and I basically created a server farm for my favorite game. I started charging for it, and I was making basically like tens of thousands of dollars renting out server space for this game back when I was, you know, 14 years old.” And we had Said Bolki come on. This guy’s built basically a billion-dollar bootstrapped business, which is so unfathomable to to be able to do. And somebody told me that, you know, they go, “Ask Said about when he was a teenager and he hacked his school’s system so he could just change his grade.” Like, he was willing to do the work to hack into his school system to 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.
Shaan Puri: I was with a guy this weekend and he’s a friend and he um told this story. He’s a new friend though, but he told a 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.”
The “One-Page” YC Application [10:11]
Sam Parr: 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, there’s only like seven questions. One of the seven questions is, “Tell us about a real-world system that you’ve hacked for your benefit,” right? That not not literally hacked, but like any real world any system in the real world that you have sort of gained in order to do it. They because because that’s a high predictor of relentlessly resourceful, as we talked about.
The “Trends” Newsletter & HubSpot [10:27]
Sam Parr: All right, guys, really quick. So back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called Trends. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and we created this sort of playbook for researching different companies and ideas and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses. Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. So they took this playbook that we developed and we gave to our analysts and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. And it breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends, for spotting different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly. It’s pretty awesome that they took this internal document that we had for teaching our analysts how to do this into a tool and are giving it away for free that anyone can download. So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and you want to find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea they exist, this is the ultimate guide. So, if you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now, back to the show.
Weird Teenage Hobbies (Continued) [11:19]
Sam Parr: George, what’s the answer for you? Uh, like, did you have weird teenage hobbies?
George: Yeah, my um, it might not translate as well to an American audience, but my dad bet me I couldn’t do 10 kick-ups with a soccer ball. And puberty had just hit. So testosterone was in the system. What’s a kick-up, by the way? Like, so a juggle with a soccer ball. Okay, gotcha. So my dad bet me I couldn’t do that. Uh, 10 pounds. And testosterone had just hit, like first bit of armpit hair. And I remember thinking, “Fuck that guy. I’ll prove him wrong.” So I trained and I trained and I trained and he he didn’t, cool parenting hack by the way. He didn’t try and push me to do it. He just bet me whether I could do it. And he made sure that he had to see me do it. Anyway, I ended up doing it and then I kept doing it more and more and I ended up in an Adidas advert for a FIFA World Cup. I used to tour around doing tricks at different stadiums, held like three unofficial world records for different tricks and things like that. So, and then ultimately I decided I wanted to lose my virginity, so I stopped doing it. Um, but it was uh, yeah, really fun.
Sam Parr: Did it did it work? Giving it up?
George: Still trying, but some days. Yeah. Tends to work out that way.
Sam Parr: Sam, what about you? Did you have weird teenage hobbies?
George: Uh, yeah, I I basically like small predictable things. Like I I had an eBay store when I was 12. Or I remember in fourth grade, Small or predictable? Well, yeah, like I mean things that I think you would expect me to do knowing me. Um, 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, you’re too good. Like, I was like a weirdo. Like, I I liked I I enjoyed the stuff that I like now back when I was 12 years old. That’s amazing. You’re like, “Listen up class, Dale Carnegie has said that your own name is the most beautiful word in the English language. So say it with me.” You know what I mean? Like Yeah, I was into like that. Were you into anything?
Sam Parr: You know, when I first heard this, I felt really bad because I was like, I could I did couldn’t think of anything special that I did. Monish Pabrai was on the episode and he basically said there’s a golden period. He studied like, I went to his house, he has 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 10 and about 19 years old where the brain is optimal for specialization during that time. And so, if you look at the people who are great programmers, they usually started programming very early on, or great musicians, like age six, he composed his first thing. It’s like, “Wow, this is insane.” And I felt really bad because I was like, “Oh shit, like too late for me, right? Like what what am I supposed to do now?” I was just kind of a normal kid picking boogers in in junior high. Like, I I didn’t do that. But then I started thinking about it more and I really thinking like, “Was there anything?” And the one thing I did think of was, um, 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 was basically me and my buddy and we were 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 2K, which is common, but the uncommon thing was I never played the game. So I didn’t go in and I wasn’t like dunking and shooting and like all I did is 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 would do the draft, I would scout all the prospects. Wait, so you wouldn’t actually play like the like the press the buttons and No, it wasn’t intentional. Like I thought, “Okay, first I’m going to build this great team.” And so I was just like a CEO basically. I was like, free agency and trades and scouting and finding diamonds in the rough. But I got so addicted to that. I never ended up playing with any of those players. I would just simulate. I would just do that for like It’s a fantasy league. 10 years and there I 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 that part, you’re not actually doing the work. So, but my honest answer was like, I was not like elite at any of those things, whereas I think the people who really excel, they tend to show that brilliance early on and become like oddly good at something. Their obsession takes over them. I don’t think I personally had that.
The “Rest Ethic” [14:36]
Sam Parr: I love that. Do you want me to give you the rest of the checklist for the high-agency people and you can see who in your life you know?
George: Yeah, weird teenage hobbies. What else you got?
Sam Parr: Energy distortion field. So, if you meet with them when you’re tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline. And low-agency people do the opposite. So this is the kind of idea of treadmill friends. Afterwards, you’ve got so much energy, you need to go on a treadmill, you can’t sleep. Then you have like sofa friends who you need to lie down after hanging out with them. Who’s like the treadmill friends in your guys’ life that comes to mind?
Sam Parr: Uh, Sam’s like that for me. My buddy Suli is like that. Like I can’t I can’t hang out with Suli and literally our hangout tends to be we walk for like four hours talking. Uh, because we almost have to burn off the energy that’s like the the excitement of the ideas and the stories that we’re sharing while we’re doing it. Um, that’s how this podcast got created. It was on a four-hour walk with him and I was like, “You know what I really want?” It was like hour three. I was like, “You know what I really want to do? It’s not a company. I want to create a podcast. I want to be Tim Ferriss. I want to wake up and have a be in a million people’s earballs.” And that was like a thing that came to me when I worked myself into that state. Uh, Ben is kind of like that, my business partner Ben, where he’s like, 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 in a day, which now that I say it, it sounds very weird, but it feels very normal. If I didn’t have kids, it’d probably be 20 times a day.
George: Who who are yours, George? Who are yours?
George: Uh, probably three. Uh, Chris Williamson from Modern Wisdom, where we like just out all night, we can just go and go and go.
Sam Parr: And you guys are both similar, like where Chris is like an, you know, in a good way, he’s like an academic where like he just like learns and then just teaches and I like I you know, I feel that way listening to his podcast. So, who’s the second one?
George: David Senra from Founders. Like he’s just fucking, like if espresso was a human being, it’d be named fucking Senra. So that guy, I’d add on there. And then the third one, my old boss, um, Steve Bartlett, who you who runs the Diary of a CEO podcast. I remember when Steve was running the business, he’d have an office in Manchester, London, New York, and I’d work in the Manchester office. And Steve was maybe there a quarter of the time in that office.
Sam Parr: And what business is this? Is this the This was back at his marketing agency, Social Chain, yeah. Okay. 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.
Sam Parr: That’s a great compliment. How’d you get the job, by the way? Why why did you join Social Chain?
George: He had a unique angle that essentially the UK, you mentioned earlier, the UK is the the sixth-largest economy in the world. It’s not. London’s the sixth-largest economy in the world, and then there’s a very, very poor list of cities and towns attached to it. So he based himself in Manchester and just marketed himself well and just sucked up all the talent that was in Manchester, which is which is where I was.
Sam Parr: Do you want the next one?
George: Yeah, keep going.
Sam Parr: You can never guess their opinions. So whether it’s the boxer, the writes poetry, the advertiser obsessed with the history of war, the beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don’t line up with their stereotypes, they’ve exercised agency. So when you give them an opinion on ABC, do they fit in a box or do they often surprise you that they’ve thought things through? Anybody who pop up?
Sam Parr: What you’re saying is basically they’re non-cliché. So like, we just had Jack Smith on the podcast. I think Jack is one of these type of independent thinkers where he’s like a successful, smart tech guy, you know, almost like has like a more of an engineer’s brain. But then he came on and was talking about this like woo-woo energy system, healing 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 going to reply to certain stuff. Right. Like, I’ll explain something to him and I’m like, “I think you’re going to be too smart to believe this, but you’re open to learning more.” That’s that’s wild to me.
Sam Parr: Or even what he’s going to do, his next move, right? It’s Silicon Valley. You sell your company, there’s two paths. 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 going to be AI, healthcare, or whatever. Like it’s like cliché. 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 you couldn’t guess what the guy’s going to do next. He was total non-cliché in that sense.
George: I like it. The next uh one, uh immigrant mentality. If they move from their hometown, that’s a good sign. If they move from their home country, that’s an even greater sign. Because it takes agency to spot you’re in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalize a move, and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.
Sam Parr: 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.
Sam Parr: And that’s kind of like what you’re saying about America, about uh, 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 uh outplayed our coverage a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, the what’s the what’s the Keith Rabois? It’s like the the the people you hire are the company you build. So it’s the same thing for countries. It’s like if the initial seed population was a bunch of crazy risk-takers who were willing to get on a boat and go to a new land to like establish it from scratch, you’re going to create a population of, you know, people who have that that same mentality.
George: The way I’ve thought about America, the way I’ve narrowed it down is, if you look at what makes human beings special, if you have one human being in a jungle, it’s the one of the worst animals ever. Like we’re just going to get destroyed. If you put 500 of us, we’ve you’ve just introduced a master predator that the the world, 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, but I’d probably argue us Brits might be slightly smarter, no offense. However, you’ve got those things, and it means you come up with an idea and it’s like, “Yeah, great idea. Let’s do it.” Like just the bias to optimism, the bias to action, whereas you have the Brits who’s, “Uh, I don’t think that’ll work because of ABC.” That’s why America’s the best because you can cooperate faster than any country, in my opinion.
Sam Parr: The the the Doritos Locos Taco did not come from pessimism. All right? That that that’s only an that is a uniquely American idea. You would never that idea could not have been born in any other country.
George: I love it. Last two, last two. Uh, they send you niche content. So low-agency people look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High-agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early. And the final one, mean to your face but nice behind your back. So the social incentive is to be nice to people’s faces and gossip behind their backs, whereas the high-agency people, they do the opposite.
Sam Parr: Where’d you get that one from?
George: One of my friends, Lewis, who’s just, I know 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. Um, whereas the low-agency like you just basically whenever someone’s going against incentives, oh, the agency that requires to go against incentives. I’ve written this, I often don’t go against incentives. Even though I know incentives, I know agency, I still fall for it. It’s the Daniel Kahneman thing that started the conversation. So to go against the social incentives of pain, I’ll say a rude thing to your face that you need, social pain, and also when you’re not there, there’s no benefit. Actually, all the benefit is to gossip behind your back. To do the opposite, to swim upstream, you need agency.
Sam Parr: 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 all day. You’re like your own patron, basically. You’re like, “Cool, can 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.”
Sam Parr: Like, do you do you even like capitalism?
George: I love Well, I love compressing ideas, which is why that I like advertising, because I can use that skill that I have to compress things down. I always love Donald Schwarzenegger’s biography where he made all his money for real estate so he could do whatever the fuck he wanted with his acting career. And I think it’s slightly underrated that dynamic.
Sam Parr: Sam, 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, um, “That’s all good, but there’s one problem. If this grows, I’m going to have to like, it’s going to suck me more towards that, and I actually want to be all in the business of ideas. I don’t want this to become, you know, bigger and more Which made you want it so much more. That made me respect him so much more, right? I was like, again, it’s that’s a high-agency thing to do, right? To be able to Can you say no to money? Like, can you say no to money? Might be like another thing to just add on your list. How many times have you said no to money? Yeah, I’ve I’ve told the story on the podcast before, but you may not have heard it. The highest agency moment of my life was I was in sixth grade, I think. I got put in detention after school, and our detention was you go to the lunchroom, school’s out, everybody leaves, it’s just the 20 kids who got in trouble that day, and you just sit in silence and do nothing. And they they seat you kind of like every other chair diagonal so that you can’t really you can talk to somebody, but you it’s not very easy to you can’t whisper. You have to be a little bit loud. And it’s me and it’s the weirdest kid in our school. There’s a kid who had hair down to his waist and he always wore these like weird tattered shirts, and he was just a weirdo. And I saw uh and people used to pick on him. And so I’m sitting there and I’m kind of a bully and I wanted to pick on him a little bit and I just wanted to mess with him. I was bored, right? I’m in D-hall, you you have two hours to do nothing. And I see on the floor of the lunchroom, there’s like a grape that was like from lunch hours earlier and it’s like nasty. It’s on the floor of a kid’s lunchroom and it’s like got hair on it or whatever. And I just whispered to him and I was just like, “Yo, I’ll give you a dollar if you eat that grape.” And he looks down and he’s like, “A dollar?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And then he reaches down and I’m like, “Oh my god, he’s fell for it. He’s going for it. This is insane.” He picks it up and he eats the grape and I’m like grossed out. My mind is blown. I can’t believe he did it. I’m like, “All right, deal’s a deal.” I get get out my wallet, I take a dollar, I hand it to him, and then he took the dollar and he ate it. Wow. I could not believe it. Damn. This was like 22 years ago or something. I I still remember it vividly. And I just thought that was the biggest no-fucks-given moment I have ever, probably still to this day in my life, of like, you know, “F you, F your money, F the grape. I am going to like, he just ate the dollar. I couldn’t believe it. No upside in it. But he sent an absolute message to my core. I love it. That’s ridiculous. Um, where do you want to go from here, Sean?
Sam Parr: Uh, you got a couple other cool like lifestyle things you do. So, do you want to talk about the kale phone? Because I think this is like something something that might be helpful for people. What is the kale phone method that you do?
George: 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 ended up on Fox News where it was like Trump, Biden, and then George Mack cocaine kale phone. And essentially, what I realized is there’s two things that are presented to you in modern society as people get more and more addicted to their phones. There’s one, be a phone monkey and just be on your phone all day and deal with the cortisol and all the stress and mental fatigue that everyone’s 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’s she going to get a hold of you? Or if you’re out and about and you need an Uber, like, fuck, I can’t get an Uber. Or if I want to 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 phoneless Luddite. And actually, there’s somewhere in between, which is the cocaine and kale phone. So the kale phone is like all serotonin apps that make you feel good. So Audible, Notes, Uber, Google Maps, stuff that you need for necessities as well. Maybe an emergency number for your mom, wife, business partner, if they need to get a hold of you. So you have that peace of mind when you’re not on your cocaine phone, that they can still get a hold of me, worst-case scenario if somebody dies. Then cocaine phone, everything, Slack, 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 rapping about for a walk. Single best thing I’ve probably done for like my mental health and everybody who tries it or a lot of people who try it write to me and go, “This is a game changer.”
Sam Parr: What is the actual other phone? Is it a just like an Android phone? What what did you do for the other phone? Is it just two iPhones?
George: Just another iPhone.
Sam Parr: But do you have two SIM cards? How do you do the number? Yeah.
George: I have two SIM cards, so I have a different number in the kale phone than the cocaine phone.
Sam Parr: Oh, got it. Okay. Only drawback is that they basically have to have a second phone line and people have to know to to reach you there when you need it. But It’s only your mom, wife, maybe. Yeah, that’s the only people who really need that. And it’s just for the peace of mind that most of the time they would, and the the only time they’re going to do is when somebody’s in hospital. But it’s having that peace of mind that therefore I don’t need to check the cocaine phone for that incident.
Sam Parr: Sean, let me ask you a question. I’m going to be honest about this and I’ll answer it and I’ll be honest, too. Are you do your parents still pay for your cell phone bill? I pay them back, all right? My dad tells me the amount. It’s a family plan. We’ve been on it for a long time. I I’m the same, dude. I don’t change it with keeping my number. That’s too much work. Same. I am also on my family plan. And so George, when you’re talking about getting a new cell phone, I’m like, “Shout out to everybody who’s on their family plan right now. Shout out to everybody whose dad is paying their phone bill. It’s all we have. That’s our last connection. That’s the last cord that gets cut between you and your parents is the family plan.” I don’t even know how to like I’ve never gotten like a like a like I’ve always had to call my mother like, “Hey, my phone broke, I’m going to go buy one. Will you tell AT&T they got to put it on like the the plan?” So when you sold the Hustle, you didn’t go go get your own fucking phone plan. You carried on going. It’s not a money thing. I’m like, “Well, there we go.” It’s not fair play. I don’t know. I I I don’t think you’re using that word like I think it should be used. Uh, especially if you yeah, if you text your mom saying, “I need to get a cocaine phone,” it’s probably not going to go down too well as well. I I thought Sean, I thought you would have also been on yours. Yeah, I am for sure. Dude, my wife feels it’s like almost like a sign of disrespect that I didn’t create like a new family plan with us as the core family unit. And I’m like, “Look, it’s just a it’s just a hassle, okay? I’m not don’t read more into it than what it is.” You know, I’m just lazy, okay? There’s this episode on uh on like Ellen DeGeneres where she’s asking Bill Gates, like, “Let’s see if you know how much a gallon of milk costs.” Like, cuz you know, you’re so out of touch. And so when you talk to me about a cell phone plan, I’m like, I don’t know, five bucks, 100 bucks. I I have no idea. Yeah, he was like, “You know, that’s like $23, right?” Yeah, same with the phone plan. I’m like, “I don’t know, 1,000? Uh, I don’t know. I have no idea.”
Sam Parr: So George, are there any drawbacks or like in practice? Let’s say I wanted to go do this, because the idea is really sticky, it’s really viral. Even if you never did it, it’s just like sounds cool. But you actually, let me verify, you actually live this way. Before you answer, I I got to run. I got to run. I’ll leave my I’ll leave all my stuff up. I had a 1:30. I’ll see you soon. See you.
George: So you actually live this way. You actually have the two phones. Yeah. I’ve done it for three and a bit years. And whenever I doubt it, so I’ve had incidents where I’ve lost one phone or had an issue with signal in a certain country. And when you go back to that lifestyle of waking up and downloading social media as your first input into your brain, or messaging apps, you you realize you only realize it by a contrast of how destructive I think that is for the creative, particularly for people who are creative people or ideas people. Like downloading whatever the worst news headline is immediately into your consciousness, and particularly if you then use your phone as your alarm clock as well. It’s I think it’s I’ve experienced it by contrast, it’s so toxic. I can’t deal with it.
Sam Parr: I want to ask you about Lee Kuan Yew. Somebody who’s been on my list of people I want to go deep dive into. Sounds like you’ve read a bit about him or studied him a little bit. What is the learnings from Lee Kuan Yew?
George: So Lee Kuan Yew 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 and Japan on your doorstep, which historically not the friendliest uh people to have on your doorstep. And obviously part of the British rule, part of the British Empire, went from there to one of the best financial hubs in the world. But he ran the country like a CEO. And one of my favorite anecdotes about Lee Kuan Yew is how they used to obsess about the airport onboarding experience. And it’s interesting, you see you see such obvious ideas in startups and you go, “Why don’t countries just take this?” The onboarding experience or the conversion rate optimization of a landing page or a website or an advert versus the when you arrive at the airport, what’s the airport like? What are the queues like? The immigration queues like? What are the bathrooms like? How clean are things? What’s the first few miles from the airport to the city? Lee Kuan Yew used to obsess over everything, would be changing the routes, 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 5x this. Immediately having those magic moments, like designing Facebook or designing Asana within the first few minutes of entering and leaving the airport, because it’s the first you’re going to think it’s like a stand-up comedian. The first thing is you arrive and the last thing is you leave. So he used to obsess over that. And I remember I went to Austin Airport and as you go up to get an Uber, you’ve got to go through like three different car parks and your phone signal goes out and you’re sweating. I remember thinking to myself, I don’t You’re treated like a criminal. If you try to get an Uber in an American airport, you’re treated like a criminal. It’s like, “Oh, if you’re going to do a drug deal, then go to the third parking garage, fourth floor, behind the fence, that’s where you can go get picked up if you’re going to be an asshole.” Yeah, I remember I remember like being there going, “Lee Kuan Yew would fucking hate this.” And I remember going that’s a weird I got nobody people about that thought walking through Austin Airport, so Lee Kuan Yew is 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 Singaporean airport is like a mall. It’s like an experience. Like they have like a fitness facility, they have like a movie theater, there’s like it is just a beautiful place. Everything is clean, there’s tons of comfortable seating. It is not like a pain the way that most airport experiences are. And I remember just noting that and being like, “Oh, that’s weird. Why is Singapore’s airport so good?” So it’s very interesting that he thought about it as a first impression onboarding experience. Now, like is that just a cool 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, turn the country around? You know, what were the big levers that he pulled? So onboarding is one. What what really worked? Attracting talented immigration is the single biggest the single biggest thing from my understanding of Singapore’s 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’s oil or like a hell’s 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 Munger is obsessed with Lee Kuan Yew. He has this story of Lee Kuan Yew, we were talking about mating earlier. Lee Kuan Yew, rather than marrying the hottest girl in his class, picked the only girl in his class that performed better than him. And he was at the most like elite university in Singapore. He married the lady who’s the only one who was smarter than him. So very odd, peculiar individual. Uh, there’s another thing he did was around air conditioning, right? Didn’t he do like an ace a big push for ace having AC in the country? Yeah, I saw that recently. I think it was Peter Levels on Twitter that was breaking that down. Yeah, he was obsessed with getting air conditioning because he was convinced it was key to the economic success. Yeah, like he was basically so there was an interview with him. I’m I’m reading an article now uh from Vox. So basically this interview with him and he said, “Was there anything else besides multicultural tolerance that enabled Singapore success?” And his answer was, “Air conditioning.” Air conditioning was the most important invention for us. And basically, I think that if you look at countries, like you know, my parents, they grew up in India, and India is so hot that during the day, during like your brain’s most kind of productive hours, they take like a three-hour period where you just stay inside, you just try to sleep. And you’re even even you can’t even try to sleep because it’s like so hot. So you’re just like laying in a cot with like, you know, a fan trying to cool down because you can’t be outside, you can’t really be productive in thinking right now. You just have to wait out the heat. You know, my assistant is in the Philippines and one of the things that she always talks about is like they would have these heat waves and it’s like super hard for her to work. Cuz 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 have 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. Too dark to go it’s like dark all the time. And so they just stay inside and they program and they just code on computers because there’s not really better options out there and they develop this like amazing engineering talent because during their formative years, they just stay inside a bunch of time and what’s the best thing to do when you’re inside? It’s like play on the computer, play video games and um, you know, learn to learn to program. The second and third order consequences everywhere you look. It’s crazy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. Do you have any other of the like kind of key frameworks that really, I don’t know, shifted the way you think or you keep seeing pop up that you don’t think most people appreciate? I’d say there’s two. One is probably mine and yours favorite meme, Shar, of the the Midwit meme, which just refuses to die. It just it’s like a fine wine. It gets better with age. And realizing how often I’ve been the guy in the middle over the years. And then trying to come up with solutions to not be the guy in the middle and then realizing Do you have any uh canonical examples of the Midwit meme of you in the middle um that you can think of? Like just personal attacks on your psyche? Yes. Um, one was when I started to get really obsessed with sleep uh when I was like 20, 21. And I’d have everything sleep optimized. Matthew Walker had just been on Joe Rogan, so I’ve got the 10-step checklist routine, I’ve got the supplements, I’ve got everything, and I’m there doing the whole like two-hour wind-down routine, no screens before bed, red light glasses on, and brushing my teeth in the dark. And my girlfriend at the time comes in and like hits the lights like minutes before bed, like blinds me. So I’m completely blinded. And I like getting I like the first row we ever had was that. I was like, “What are you doing?” And I was sat there in bed. So she’s a me, of course, the like on the left or on the right, she’s immediately fallen asleep within two minutes without doing any of the shit I was doing. I’m sat there for an hour afterwards like shaking with adrenaline of like how angry/ blitzed I was. And I realized, “Oh shit, a lot of sleep, for example, I had a phase of insomnia, and a lot of sleep is the more you think about sleep, the more pressure you put on sleep, the worse the sleep is, which is why a lot of these If I was if I was the CMO of Whoop or Oura, the one thing I would suggest them to do, like coming in as a product thing, would be to never allow you to know the next day’s score. Because this I this this is actually probably one of the most toxic things I think we’ll see for sleep, of people checking their sleep as well as going to sleep thinking about what score they’re going to get. It’s the opposite of what you want. That’s literally creating an insomniac cycle versus a week later having a summary of the previous week when you’re detached from the results, probably useful. But the next day is particularly bad. So that’s a midwit area. That’s a great one. I think one of the studies about what makes people unhappy or depressed or suicidal, like one of the strongest signals is this idea of rumination, which is like almost like a uh 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 overfocus on yourself and your own condition is what creates your own poor conditions. And um, you know, the it’s the same reason my my trainer says this thing, he goes, um, “Whatever you feel you lack, that’s exactly what you got to give.” You feel you lack respect, you got disrespected, go give respect. You feel like you lack money, go give money. And and and literally just flipping the mindset of like, “I lack” to like “I have enough so that 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. And I think a lot of people fall into this trap with therapy and with self-improvement where they get addicted to the medicine and it creates um too much thoughts about yourself. You know, the happiest people are the ones who are, you know, that are not doing this like extreme introspection all the time. Yes. The single the sing because I noticed that when it came to decisions, let’s say, people probably got this right now like big decision, do I move to the city or stay to the city? Do I quit this thing or carry on doing this thing? I would have this thing in my head where it would play the if I thought about moving to the city, it would play the worst-case scenario of that in my head, like the amygdala would fire. And then I’d think about the other thing and the amygdala would fire and play the worst-case scenario. And as a result, paralysis, analysis, just kick the can, I’d make the decision to not make the decision. And one of the biggest bits of advice I got was, “Stop thinking about making decisions and start thinking about making experiments.” Because I realized there was decisions I was procrastinating on for two years that I could have done both of them 10 times over in the time spent thinking about the thing. Mhm. Yeah, that’s that’s a great one. Sam has a nice little one on this called uh “Worry Time,” which is once he thinks something is worthy of an experiment or worthy of trying, right? Which is a big difference between your your your words there, right? Experimenting with something, “I’m going to try this out,” very different than “I’m going to do this.” I have to do this. This is my new my new thing. I I choose this. So giving himself a little bit of grace there by saying, “I’m going to try an experiment.” But he says he schedules his worry time. So he says, “Cool, what I don’t want to do is make this decision and then reassess it daily and worry about it every single day. Worry about is it working? Is it going to work? Am I good enough? Is this is this right? Is this wrong? Am I making a mistake here?” He’s like, “So I schedule it. I’ll put it on Sunday. I’ll literally pull it on the calendar. I’ll put 30 minutes. That’s my worry time.” And so I know, I’m going to worry about this on Sunday. I don’t need to worry about it today. For now, I just need to do it. I have my scheduled worry time. Because I think when you don’t decide when you’re going to worry about it, you worry about it all the time because you’re almost worried that you’re never that you’re never going to assess it. And I found that to be a great hack is to to schedule the worry time. My trainer says, it’s like when you plant a seed to grow a plant, the next day, if you come and dig it up and you go look at it, “Are you growing yet? Is it working?” You’re actually destroying the the seed’s ability to actually grow. Like, plant the seed and don’t just dig it up every day and stare at it and wonder why it’s not working. Carry on, water it, give it sunlight. That’s all you really need to do from there. 100%. One guy who’s completely changed my thinking and you should have him on the show, like absolute machine of a founder that goes under the radar. You know Element, the electrolyte company? Uh, oh, LMNT, like the Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So like great, like they 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 there was bears nearby and I’m terrified of bears as as you wouldn’t be as a fucking human being. But then with James is there, I’m like, “Oh, James is there like, he’ll handle it, it’s fine, like he’ll deal with it.” And his way, like they managed to scale the way they have, and he’s wrote about this publicly, that he does three weeks on, one week off, three week on, one week off. So you know the whole one of your aphorisms on the Val aphorisms of sprint like a sprint like a lion, don’t grace like a cow. And the real I realized with his philosophy what he’s doing there is he has that one-week assessment period to because I know it’s that when I went on holiday, the first three days, I would be um it would take me to the fourth day to switch off. And I think he’s baked that in his schedule. First three days have fun, then the following three days he’s assessing the OKRs, reviewing the numbers, looking at the experiments, plotting out the next three weeks, and then that following three weeks is just a hardcore sprint. And he’s completely redone the work. And it makes sense that we just downloaded this work week philosophy from industrial age versus really thinking about it. And he’s managed to do that for himself and his whole leadership team, whilst the company’s growing like bananas, and it’s factoring in that worry time. Um, it makes so much more sense. I love that. Uh, yeah, I think that’s great. Actually makes me think, you know, Monday through Friday, you know, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Why, right? Even though I’m my own boss, I’m in my own house and my schedule is a little bit different, I suppose I 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. Uh because I probably just I started with the the normal, you know, 52 weeks in a year, you’re going to work Monday through Friday, you’re going to take your weekends off and then you’re going to have two weeks, three weeks of vacation somewhere in the between. And then I just tweaked that versus first principles. Like, okay, what if I didn’t even know that, what would I have designed? How would I be working? And uh 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 want to keep funding. Uh, you know, is is that. And the realization I had from his schedule of that three to one is the rewards of working like a lion have never been higher. Like with leverage and code and internet businesses. The ease of grazing like a cow has never been easier. Goes back to the cocaine kale phone, like so much shit going on, like there’s always the busy trap you can end up in. And you’ve got this weird period of time right now where the rewards of this have never been higher, but the actual act of doing it has never been harder. And his philosophy of three week on, one week off, I would encourage everybody to just search 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 uh 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 want to work like a lion, not a 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 going to run around randomly or chase like small insects. They look for a worthy a worthy challenge, a worthy prey. And when they see the gazelle, then they sprint as hard as they can. They don’t walk, they take massive action, they move with speed. They catch it, they feast, they celebrate, and then they rest and reassess and wait for the next challenge. Whereas a cow stands in the field, slowly walking around all day, grazing on this low nutritional, you know, density grass all day. Of course, they’re animals, that’s how they that’s what they need to eat. That’s fine. But in terms of uh working, a lot of us work more like the cow. We sit at our desk eight hours a day, minimal, you know, kind of like some low simmer of productivity, and then we don’t have the juice to sprint, nor do we feel confident and secure enough to rest, 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’re a UFC guy, right? Did you ever see that interview with Conor McGregor after he lost his fight to Nate Diaz? Um, do you remember this era where he was on his rise, he’s going to fight Nate Diaz, and this was probably the first opponent that he was favored against. So he was supposed to, you know, he was supposed to get crushed by Aldo. He he he he uh um, you know, and but he beats Aldo. He was supposed to get beat by Mendez, a wrestler. That’s his kryptonite. He beats Mendez. And then it’s Nate Diaz. Oh, here’s a guy, he’s lost half his fights, won half his fights, you know, he’s not a champion. McGregor has proven everybody wrong. You’re certainly going to beat Diaz. And instead, he goes and he loses. And the one reason he lost was his cardio was really poor. He had miscalculated his training and he he ran out of gas. And so when he went back to the lab and he’s rested and reassessed and tried to figure out what to do next, he said this great line. He goes, “Yeah, I hired this coach.” And they go, “So you’re training a lot more now, right? To have more cardio, like you’re doing more, more, more.” He goes, “No, actually, it was about doing less.” He goes, “The thing was I was never resting my body.” The analogy my 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.” Uh because you’re never resting. You’re always doing stuff. You’re overtraining 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 up, you know, winning the winning the next fight just a couple months later and his cardio had had improved in that that most most people thought in that two months, you can’t really improve your cardio that much, but he did and he was able to win that fight. Uh I always thought that was a wonderful example of this kind of like 3-2-1 sort of philosophy, but not in business, but in, you know, sports. Yeah, have it. My friend called it rest ethic. That’s like, ah, that’s the sticky idea that it needed to be compressed. He talks about his subconscious as he’s like technical co-founder. So like, believe the ideas of his subconscious. And yeah, I think we’ll see more and more focus in that area as leverage gets higher and higher and realizing that there’s no such thing as overworking, there’s just under resting. There’s no such thing as overworking, there’s only under resting. What do you do to rest besides sleep? I’m trying to think of anything that’s non-basic. Well, that’s okay if it’s basic. I’m I’m into simple things that work. If it’s just I go for walks, that’s great. I mean, honest answer would be kale phone in the morning, so I’m detached from immediate inputs coming through, having a bit of intentionality, saunas. 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. Like having time to process things. Like it’s that Christopher Nolan thing of 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. Yeah, I started doing silent Sundays where basically I just on I put the phone in a box on Saturday and I won’t touch it all Sunday, which is a very small step, but when you do it, you realize the depth of the addiction because you start to have, you know, you’re padding your your pocket every three seconds or you’re going to the bathroom and you’re like, “What am I going to do?” How am I going to entertain myself in this like six-second walk to the restroom? That’s literally how extreme it is for me. Yeah, that’s crazy. It’s crazy that we’ve that that’s happening societal-wide and we’ve all it’s like caffeine. It’s what the real drugs are the real addictions are the one that’s probably just going completely under the radar because we never want to kick that thing. Yeah, the the the real the dangerous addictions are the ones that are socially acceptable. Yes. Well, Louis Louis CK has a cocaine he has a kale laptop apparently. He has one laptop, writing laptop that has no internet and it’s just a it’s just a text. It’s smart. Because you’re not going to be you’re not going to beat the world’s best data scientist when it comes to who who’ve ran all these AB tests. Meanwhile, you’ve woken up on five hours sleep with a little bit of a hangover and you think you’re going to win. You’re not going to win. Yeah. We’ll finish with this. What’s the what’s the how-to source your values? This is an idea I’ve never heard from you. What what is that? So I called this Buffett coin. It may need a stickier idea or a stickier meme behind it, but there’s this incredible talk, I think it’s Warren Buffett, University of Georgia. It’s my favorite idea of his that very few people have discussed. It’s on YouTube or I just 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 like how to be the cliché how to be successful thing. And rather than like listing back or how to I think it’s how to be rich essentially. And rather than listing the cliché thing back, he says, as a thought experiment, look around at the people in the class right now. And if you could invest in them and get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life, who would it be and why? So I mean, 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 go, “Okay, yeah, I’d definitely invest in Jim or I’d definitely invest in Mike.” And then he goes, and then ask yourself a why. What is it that that person does, the values that they have, the behaviors that they have? And you can then see, we spoke at the first episode about it’s so hard to see in yourself, but it’s so easy to see in other people. So you’re kind of hacking the self-awareness bias of like you trying to ruminate and improve yourself is probably midwit wasted effort, but looking at other people, you can see immediately and then you can try and get your values that way. And then he flips the experiment around and goes, “If you have to short people in your life, so you can take 10% of their losses, who would you, who would you take and why?” And then you have a list of values to go towards and a list of values to go against. What’s beautiful about that is, it’s not just money, you can apply that for health coin, you can apply that for happiness coin, but using that third third party awareness perspective is so much more useful than ruminating and analyzing yourself, at least I’ve found. I love that. I mean, so simple, right? It’s 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 would you bet on? You could pretty quickly a couple of names come to mind. Okay, great. Why? Why? Well, because they’re this, this and this. Cool, there’s your blueprint. You didn’t need the advice from Warren Buffett. Like the advice was literally hidden in plain sight in the people that you knew right around you. The blueprint was visible. They were like a walking blueprint of what to do or what not to do. I love that. I’ve tried to use that on the health side because health is probably the one area of my life that I and when I say health, I mean not being fat. Health is like a fancy way of saying it. I’m not trying to do fancy health. I’ve tried to be like, “Hey, I’m pretty fat. I should just be not fat and I should be fit instead of fat.” And so what I’ve realized was I was like, “Oh, all I simply need to do is just do the things that the fit people do.” So instead of searching for like which diet is best or which workout program should I be doing, what equipment should I It’s like, let’s just simplify. Who in my life is fit? And then simply what do they do? And find the delta between what I do and what they do. “Oh, okay, at night when I’m hungry, I’ll go grab a bag of chips from the pantry. At night when they’re hungry, they drink up a glass of water and they go to sleep.” Right? Or in the morning, you know, the first thing I do is I roll over, I check my phone, my laptop, I start working. What they do is they go work out first for 45 minutes and then they start working. Okay, good. I the blueprint is stupidly obvious. It’s right in front of me. You know, for example, my trainer came with me on a trip and so we all packed our bag. And when we all got there, we all look in the bag and he had a protein powder in there, he had a set of bands in there, and he had a little myofascial like ball, like a massage ball, so that when he got off the flight, he could quickly loosen up. And it’s just we looked at all of our bags, you know, business guys who are out of shape, we just didn’t even have the shit in the bag. And it’s not the tool, it’s just simply like it’s not like he had to think, “Ah, how am I going to be fit this weekend?” It’s simply a way of life for him. And so the the easiest question I have is what’s that I ask myself when I’m like in a situation is, “All right, sweet, what’s a fit guy like me doing in a situation like this?” Instead of “What should I do? What am I going to do? Am I going to do what should I order off DoorDash?” It’s “What’s a fit guy like me 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 can just watch and see what they do. And I think the key asterisks, the key asterisks I think he gives as well, is it has to be merit-based. So like, you can’t just pick the person with the billionaire dad or the ridiculous ab genetic Francis Ngannou style. The the better the returns, if you almost look at like a company, like the better returns on their start position, that you would bet on is probably the person to study the most. Like if it’s the super skinny guy, then you go, “I’d still bet 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 learn from. I love it. Dude, George, as I knew, this was amazing. Two parts, uh so good, so fun to talk to you, dude. This is why when I launched my new Good Friday, the email series that I started doing on my website, you were the first guy I reached out to because I love trading ideas with you and you are a just absolute fountain of insightful, interesting things that I think can help people’s lives. So thanks for coming on, man. Where should people follow you? Is Twitter the best place? Yeah, thank you for having me. Uh Twitter, go to George Mack, uh George_mack. Um newsletter, georgemack.com. And we’ve helped three different billion-dollar companies get their best performing ads. So if you need help with advertising as well, go to adprofessor.com. And yeah, thank you for having me, Sean. Awesome. See you soon, man.