Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en and a lion is the exact opposite a lion sits rests it watches it observes it waits for an opportunity and then when opportunity comes like the you know the gazelles running across the field the lion looks up sprints after the gazelle i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back okay we’re here all right let me tell you something all right you ready yeah i saw a great tweet that got me thinking a lot and i’ve been reading a lot on this topic so it’s very a good coincidence so it’s this guy named dan vasalo he said i’m convinced that working 40 hours a week 50 weeks per year for 30 to 40 straight years is against our nature yet the most skilled educated and highly paid people i know tend to be unable to consider any other path that doesn’t involve enduring this artificial lifestyle do you sean agree or disagree uh well actually let me phrase it differently do you do you think that that 40 hours 50 hours a week for 50 years is outlandish like where do you fall on that i totally agree with this i think that the work week concept is um sub-optimal somewhere between bogus and sub-optimal all right so why do i think that so first there’s like this uh assumption that’s like we have linear output that uh you come in eight hours a day all eight hours are going to be roughly equal nobody says this but it’s just implied in the way that we work um you’re expected to sort of be there for these hours and then on top of that there’s like well cool then monday through friday should be the same and then you’re working 50 out 50 weeks out of the year that should be they should all be roughly equal like we know anybody who does non like factory work non-like industrial work if you’re working with your brain uh you’re doing knowledge work that work week doesn’t make any sense and i think you were you kind of like nerd out about the history of like the history of things the history of the work week the history of you know the industrial revolution and [ ] like that and it seems to me and maybe i could be wrong here but it seems to me like this idea of the way we work where you go to a central place and then you work eight hour shifts and you do that five days out of the week and then you do that 50 weeks out of the year and you do that for 30 years out of your career that is like the industrial age and it makes sense if you’re actually working in a factory because you can sort of uh pick pack you know you can sort of like do all the these like these physical tasks with a certain set of output and uh it can be measured and like just the more hours you’re there the more output you’re gonna get whereas if you’re a programmer or you’re a designer or you’re a you know a product person or you’re a marketer you might have one hour where you just get this burst of creativity of insight and that hour was like the whole day’s work and it might take you a whole day to get to that point but that hour was like the most valuable bit so i think that the way people work today is we still work the schedule of a factory but we don’t work in factories anymore for the most part so yeah i totally disagree with i totally agree with the tweet which disagrees with the work week so i’m reading a few things the first thing that i that i’ve read recently is this great book called the science of fear and in it he talks about the history of humans a little bit and how we look at fear and what we’re afraid of isn’t always logical for example when september 11th happened in 2001 in the year 2002 flights went down as uh sorry i should rephrase that actually the less people traveled on an airplane right because they were fearful they were afraid to fly yet car wrecks that next year 2002 went up significantly so much so that had there been a terrorist attack and a plane went down every single week uh for a whole year it actually would have been safer than driving and we are incredibly fearful and that’s just one example another example i’m paraphrasing here i’m going to get some numbers wrong how many people do you think die a year from shark bites probably tiny right uh i don’t know let’s call it die every year i think it’s like sub 1 000 that’s my guess so since the history of us recording this the stat which i believe was like 1880 or something like that it’s around 200 people ever so a minuscule lifetime like lifetime it’s so sharp bites happen each year but something like one to four every year are you you die and yet we’re incredibly fearful of that and and the reason i’m bringing this topic up is when i was reading this book he has this great line and again i’m paraphrasing but he says something like if you look back uh of like the homo sapiens so like the the kind of modern human and if that if it’s a history book of what that is of the life of that of the history of the homo sapien that book will be like 500 pages and of the hunter gatherer stage that will be something like a paragraph and this since the uh industrial age should you know whatever we just call modern so let’s just say like the last thousand years or so that’s gonna be like one or two or three sentences a paragraph let’s say sort of put and and the reason why this is important is the way that our our emotions the way that we live our life it we look at like well you know for the last hundred years we’ve been doing this it’s like well actually for the last tens of thousands the last millions of years whatever we’ve done something else and to to bridge that to this other book sapiens have you read sapiens no but i feel like i have because everybody references everyone so i almost feel like i know it but go ahead yeah it’s like the tech bro tech bro book so i’m paraphrasing again we should explain it’s the tech bro book because it’s like it’s the book that’s not about tech that all the tech bros like because it makes you look like you’re more worldly because you know about humanity and like you know oh yeah it’s not just about tech so it’s not all about it so before you know cities emerge and things like um uh you know capitalism as we know it kind of came into play um a lot of times like hunter-gatherers and then when the agricultural revolution came about we were working like something like 20 hours a week so we would work to get our food we would work to um take care of our family a little bit but it was a lot of leisure time and i find it to be kind of interesting that when i look at like guys like an elon musk but for the record i agree with what that per that tweet said but i do agree that if you are going to build like these outlandish things like an elon musk type of thing it does give you a competitive advantage to work really really really hard and regardless if you start anything you got to work really hard but i don’t think that you need to do that for that actually that long and i would actually say i this is a guess i i don’t have insight there’s a world where you could be an elon musk and actually work 40 hours a week right now but um i was thinking i’ve been thinking a lot and i’m gonna come a little bit more prepared next time but the history of the work week and i do think it’s crazy to dedicate 60 70 hours a week or whatever it is to work that’s considered like hard work for like 40 years 20 years i think that’s wild i think it’s crazy let me give you my uh my a couple of frameworks that i picked up along the way first one from tim ferriss so here we go read four hour and everybody who reads the four hour work week gets what i call the four hour fever which is right after you finish the book actually even even before you finish the book when you’re about halfway through you’re it’s like you’re in a fever dream you’re reassessing every part of your life you’re like oh yes i’ve seen the light i need to be doing things this way now when i’m i can’t i can’t see the world the same way again which is why it’s such a great book and why it got so so popular was because it had that sort of red pill moment where where you couldn’t really go back to living in the same sort of fog you were living in before and the thing about the four hour work week one thing he says is he points out that you know true wealth is has not has very little to do with money money is an accounting scheme that we use to keep track of wealth and um and you know true wealth comes it comes into play of like you have to take into account other factors so who is wealthier a person in new york city making 500 000 a year or a person in bali making 150 000 a year well the person in new york by traditional measures would be doing you know four times better but um but of course you know if you if you go live that life that’s not the case right because in new york you have to pay your cost of living is three or four x your schools you have to pay for private schools or whatever um basically your your effective uh your effective wealth which is basically a combination of how much free time you have and how much like buying power you have um is lower than the person in bali who’s working you know half the time making four times less but also living in a place where the cost of living is ten times less or whatever it is and so he called that the new rich tim ferriss called this the new rich he basically is like the new rich are people who have time and the new rich are people who um you know they can they’re they don’t they’re not tied to any location they’re not tied to any schedule and um they have they’re working in a way where they’re earning just enough to hit their target and their target is some amount of money that covers your life life costs and so they um where basically you’re you have a freedom number that you come up with where it’s like okay once i’m earning this much and then the the effective kind of like compounding of interest that i make off that money is going to cover my life burn then i’m financially free and he talked about how like the way that people work today which is like you work your ass off for you know from age 20 to 65 right so for this like 45 year period you work like crazy you sacrifice time you sacrifice travel you sacrifice health because you’re working so hard and then basically once you turn 65 all of a sudden okay now it’s time to retire and go do all the fun things go travel now as a 65 year old and he points out like it’s way more fun to travel like now than it is when you’re 65 right like it’s more fun to do things in your 20s and your 30s and not put off the fun until you’re 65 and also um you know why do we do this where we basically trade the first half of our life you know trading you know time for money and then the second half of our life trying to give back money to get our time back and uh that doesn’t really make too much sense so once i first heard that i thought about oh yeah there is this where you can be remote right like you’re in i don’t know where you’re in brooklyn right now something like that you’re in new york manhattan you’re in manhattan now uh it doesn’t matter where you are you can do your job and so you have more freedom than the average person it also is that you can work three hours a day instead of eight hours a day all that matters is what you get done so it’s not like a factory we have to come in to work so i think this is the new rich and the last part of the new rich that he talks about is mini vacation many retirements so instead of having one big fat retirement when you’re 65 how do you have like little one you know six month one year 18-month sabbaticals that you take in your 20s your 30s your 40s your 50s rather than just putting it all off till the very end so what do you think about that lifestyle first so that lifestyle is great and it’s not actually anything new um and but we don’t really assume that it’s new so i was out i was at dinner with this i think did i tell you about this uh the guy who had a company in china yes you did so basically as a recap there was a guy who i went with out to dinner with and he had 5 000 ish employees in china and there was this debate at the dinner table of how china’s gonna kick america’s ass and this guy this isn’t me saying this so don’t get me flak this guy was saying i think that that’s totally false a lot of americans think that but the truth is is that americans probably work harder um you know we actually work really really hard americans do you know it’s it’s at our company we would give three weeks uh time off most people did not take that entire three week time off um most people would take like 10 days and that was just like that’s just my little uh example but i actually think that americans work incredibly hard compared to our peers throughout the world maybe not the hardest but top tier but in a lot of the guys who i like to read about so for example joseph kennedy’s an example prior to him even making all of his wealth joe kennedy was jfk’s father he um was worth he was like the 10th richest person in america at the time so he was incredibly wealthy and what he would do even prior to that is he would work really hard for nine months and then chill for three months uh in palm beach in florida and this he wasn’t incredibly wealthy when he did it and this is actually incredibly common so you’d read about andrew carnegie taking a trip to europe now when you take a trip to europe without a plane that’s a six-month thing and so that i this this idea of taking time off it’s not like i mean i’m exciting so i don’t think it’s new but i don’t think it’s common either right so there’s something i don’t think it’s combination and it’s not common now and that’s why it’s i think interesting now and from my point of view by the way i think so i lived in china for two years i lived in indonesia for a year i lived in a bunch of different places that are like kind of like more third worldly and considered to be like like right now i would say the popular popular uh opinion uh amongst like you know our peers is that china and china people work a lot harder and they’re more like sort of like they’re advancing faster they’re you know us is all tangled up in its own mess and this is also the soft generation and everybody gets a trophy there’s all these complaints about the us and uh i hope what your friend is saying is true um that america’s not america does work hard and is not going to be not going to get its ass kicked by china but i don’t know what i saw when i lived there was the average person there works far harder and is much tougher and the like the expectations of your rights and your leisure um and your like the coddledness of employees is like night and day like uh the average employee here lives like a king compared to the average employee in china or indonesia from what i saw which was two things there were a lot of people in china they live in the rural areas and then they come work in cities because that’s what jobs are and so extremely common practices you literally leave your family you have a kid you leave your family you go work in the city your gran you’re a parent so the grandparent raises the kid you send money back every week you live in the city you don’t see your family and then you go travel on occasional holidays or weekends back to the countryside to see your family like in the u.s that would be considered sort of like you know slave labor almost like that’s not a common pattern in indonesia and china that was such a common pattern amongst the kind of like blue collar class and then in the white collar class they had this sort of like i forgot what they call it 996 it’s like 9 a.m to 9 00 p.m six days a week you know like i worked at a tech company the average engineer came in at probably 10 a.m uh you know took a nice hour for lunch uh you know two hours later at noon and then you know by five they were going to their you know going to the gym or going wherever they were gonna go and they were gone and uh oh by the way in between you know they got to sit with their triple monitor set up with their bose headphones provided by the office eating you know having cheetos fed to them so it’s like i do think that the american worker from what i’ve seen is a lot more coddled but what i would say is that the average american has a much higher career focus than the average person in other countries i lived in in australia i lived there and this quality of life was high and people might have worked about the same hours as the us a little bit less but it just wasn’t as big of a part of their life was their career in the us i feel like career is like such a big thing in people’s lives work is such a big part of your life it’s such a big part of your identity your value in society your value as a dating partner you like care about you’re always trying to like move up and in australia people were just way more chill about it and i felt the same in indonesia and in china so even though somebody might work 14 15 hours a day in pretty harsh conditions they weren’t like striving to like climb the ladder and that like climbing the ladder is a big thing in the u.s i didn’t see that in china even for people that worked harder now i think though to wrap up this part when we talk about work we’re talking about basically for most the listeners we’re talking about people who sit at a computer for eight hours a day and that’s what we’re defining as work now i’m not saying but when i say so we’re defining work as like doing something you don’t necessarily want to do in exchange for money now i actually think that you should work incredibly hard if i define work as like you should work out super hard you should like run errands you know you should like handle family business you should also it’s hard yeah well yeah you know you got to like i i think that you should have like i i believe a lot of times you should have like structure around what you’re doing and you should put a lot of effort and live you should live hard kind of as is the way that i think about it you should do things like with intention but i don’t i think that working 50 hours a week for 30 whatever years when i think about it now i’m like that is crazy if you only live once um and i’m starting to read this book um i just ordered it i don’t remember the name but uh it’s about a guy who goes and interviews elderly people people in the and people in the hospice who are about to die and they talk about what they regret and things like that and uh just reading the reviews of it has like already changed my perspective slightly that’s that’s cool i like that uh naval has a great one where he basically talks about this like idea of you know most people work like cows when we should really work like lions so i don’t know if you’ve heard this framework but it’s a good one which is a cow if you watch a cow all day a cow just stands in the grass slowly wagging its tail just eating grazing on the grass neck down slowly munching on grass which is kind of like not the highest sort of like you know like it’s not the most dense nutritious you know food and the cow just sits there does that it has four stomachs to just sit there and digest grass and so cows graze all day 10 hours a day and uh and a lion is the exact opposite a lion sits opportunity comes like the gazelles running across the field sprints after the gazelle like not not walking not not jogging sprints catches the gazelle feasts on the gazelle which is like more dense nutrient more more value there then celebrate relax rest and get ready for the next sprint and basically neval’s point is work like a lion like if you’re if you’re a creative person or you want to be sort of wealthy which is freedom and time working on stuff you love and creating a lot of value in the world um work like a lion not like a cow but if you look at the way the work week is scheduled it’s a cow it’s a cow’s work week the cows work week is go sit on this chair neck down monday through friday eight hours a day leave for the weekend come back do it again do that 50 times in a row that’s the year you know congratulations and if you have a bad week that’s that’s a negative we don’t count the number of amazing weeks we just count the number of not bad weeks and um and so people work like cows and so i think that that’s a very useful frame of reference is to say okay because because a lot of people who are high achievers they’re down to sprint what they’re not down to do is feast celebrate relax rest and wait for the next big opportunity because they have nervous energy they’re always just trying to do some do more do more more more and when you do more more more you actually are working like a cow not like a lion can we talk about naval so do i want to hear do you have any intel or insights on him that first of all let’s explain who this guy is but i would like to hear some stories about him because i just read his uh listened to his book what was it called the naval’s almanac the valmanak yeah it was awesome but i’ve never met the guy i don’t really know that many people that know him really have do you have any insights on i don’t know i i don’t i never met him uh i’ve chatted with him once or twice just briefly very very very very briefly like a twitter dm and once on a clubhouse so so for all intents and purposes i don’t i don’t know the guy he doesn’t know put it better he doesn’t know me i feel like i know him pretty well he doesn’t know me okay um but i do know some people who know him i’ve asked him to tell the background tell the background of who this guy is uh basically i i’ll go back a little bit further so so he uh immigrated he’s a he’s an indian guy he grows up in in somewhere in new york uh not wealthy i think single mother you know wasn’t really like you know him and his brother there wasn’t really like a sort of glamorous lifestyle whatever growing up uh grows up thinks he wants to be a scientist sort of decides okay actually i’m more interested in the business side of things or i have more of a knack for business and ends up early on in the dot com boom creates a site called epinions which is like a website for i think it was reviews and opinions on on products i believe it was sort of like yelpish um but more for i think products than for for you know locations so crazy opinions opinions actually works but some [ ] goes down i don’t know the full backstory but like you know the the important parts is opinions kind of kind of was working and then you know it’s still it’s not around today so it didn’t fully work but uh he got kind of screwed by his vcs so he gets screwed by his vcs gets screwed out of what he was owed uh you know that puts a ship chip on his shoulder basically i think what happened is that he left the company or disagreed with his co-founder the vcs took the side of his co-founder and they bought back some of his shares or they told them they were worthless so we sold them for very little but then eventually i believe they either went public or they were bought by a company that goes public and it becomes a financial success for a little while at least right and he didn’t get what he didn’t get the win that he would have otherwise been owed out of that he felt like he was screwed over by his vcs and then he said well why was i screwed you know i think the good partiers took some accountability for it said okay they may have acted poorly but i put myself in a position where they could act poorly where they could legally act poorly towards me and so he that that got him very interested in this idea of term sheets and contracts and the the deal documents that go into when an investor invest in a company cause he was the founder and as most founders like investor wants you okay great they know they do this this is their day job is doing deals investing in companies they hand you a piece of paper that says hey and they tell you oh it’s all standard and you say okay [ ] if it’s standard it’s standard i don’t know this some of this stuff looks kind of scary but like i don’t know i don’t know how to push back i don’t know if they say this is standard okay whatever you sign the document and uh you don’t really fully understand until you know uh until things go sideways and as they say with all deals you know deals are written you know contracts are written for the worst case scenario not the best case scenario and uh and the worst case scenario is like you know you found a breakup or or whatever you get kicked out of the company what are you owed and so he creates venture hacks venture hacks is basically a you know sort of like demystified version of term sheets so he basically starts writing down hey founders here’s what you need to know about raising money here’s how the process here’s what the yeah here’s what the terms are you should know here’s the [ ] up terms you should avoid here’s the good vcs you know that sort of thing so you just put out a blog with no clear like it’s not like a business he started necessarily but he puts out a blog i think it became a book at some point and he keeps investing in the kind of like he’s in the game still he’s playing he’s playing the startup game still next thing he does is he creates angel list which starts off as very simple oh hey founders i helped you figure out the dynamics of raising money the deal terms but that doesn’t actually help you go get investors so why don’t we do this i know 100 angel investors if you want to raise money this is a list of angels angel list uh here’s a list of angel investors and i’ll just send out three or four good startups every week to this list and then that’ll help you get funded and so it starts off as an email first product ends up becoming full like platform and network basically linkedin for the startup community and now it’s a multi-billion dollar two or three billion dollar at least company that is you know the best place to go you know list your startup get raise money if you’re an investor that’s like i use it for my rolling fund so i use it as the back office to launch a fund if you’re an engineer you can use it to go get a job it’s like all all the all the um different transactions that need to happen in the startup world whether it’s hiring whether it’s raising money or it’s it’s investing money angelus does it so that’s the that’s the long story short on him along the way invests as an angel investor in twitter in uber in postmates does extremely well as an angel investor uh during that time probably a billionaire at this point yeah i don’t think a billionaire i would i would say no but uh but you know stupid money for sure right like uh uh you know hundreds of millionaire for sure and i think the reason why a lot of people like him there’s a lot of guys in silicon valley that have that story right i created a company it sounds it’s definitely exceptional to create a billion dollar company or to angel invest in uber and twitter and postmates and multiple billion dollar companies at the earliest rounds that’s clearly impressive but naval stands apart not for that he stands apart because he has an extreme uh clarity of thought and wisdom that he shares on both twitter his podcast this is the naval podcast and uh and he’s kind of like a philosopher about both life as well as business and and that’s why he’s built this cult following and when he started this philosophy schtick um he got mocked so basically naval builds angelus it starts becoming quite successful it actually took a while i think now it’s going to be just the biggest thing ever i mean when i see how it works now i’m a customer it’s going to be huge he starts this twitter stick where he tweets one line tweets that at the time was not very popular now everyone does it but it’s like he’ll just do a one sentence tweet we call them fortune cookie tweets yes and you know they’re silly but like they’re useful and people would kind of mock him at first now he went on joe rogan and people start looking at him as this like tony robbins s like guru and he blows up and regardless i think it’s the other way around i think he got on joe rogan because people already started to feel that way about him that’s what i mean the stuff you put out one thread particularly that that just went nuts which was called how to get rich without getting lucky if you’re gonna go read one twitter thread today go go read that one um and that was a bit more i mean that’s that’s like original wisdom or you know there’s original content the internet already lacks original content forget original content original wisdom is very hard to come by anytime i think i think of something wise i’ll tweet it out and then somebody will say yeah you know that’s what uh you know that’s what yogi berra said back in 1940 or something like that i’m like okay great i wasn’t trying to rip him off like i this is a independent realization i’ve had by making mistakes in my life um but it’s i found it so hard to really have original wisdom he genuinely has original wisdom and of course many things he says are packaged and repackaged from philosophers that he follows and stuff he tried but uh at the end of the day you know he’s putting together sort of like an original uh set of philosophy a set of ideas that come together as a philosophy and he has this fund now that you can join but in order to join it so he charges crazy fees uh you can go on more i think more if you go to uh he’s got it’s a syndicate and a rolling fund and you could actually see what they are you could read them but they’re significantly higher than normal and he recently had a meeting for his syndicate members i had a friend who went and he said something like i’m no longer going to do b2b software because even though it’s like a surefire way to make money it’s just boring to me and now i’m only going to invest in things like space and things that are these moonshot crazy ideas what do you see where these are uh i’m looking now i don’t see the fees i think maybe i have to like find the docs but i’d be surprised if it was that crazy i think i would bet he takes a higher carry than fee but that’s what it is all right sorry when i say fee uh i wasn’t meaning management fee so let me tell you two things uh one is have you heard his theory on the like kind of back to the work week thing like let’s connect these two ideas so he’s got this theory on like the future of work have you have you heard what he says about this no so basically he says like okay um two things he’s like one the size of the firm is shrinking so we’ve seen like you know companies the big companies today are all like tens of thousands of employees and then you start to see like these outliers where it’s like oh instagram when it sold for a billion dollars was at 13 people right like that was kind of amazing for 13 people and really they hired five of them like in the last few months so it really was like eight people created a billion dollar company and there was a prediction that like soon if not already a one-person company will create a billion dollar uh one person can create a billion dollars of enterprise value and we’re all kind of like looking around waiting for that exact scenario um and i think bitcoin is one of the closest where satoshi basically created a multi-hundred billion dollar thing and it’s like not only one person well it’s most likely one person but we don’t even know who the person is kind of amazing no company there’s no no ceo no no chief marketing officer whatever so he started observing that like the size of the firm is shrinking in general and that people work their best in these like small rag tag um and so what he what he thinks is the future is what i’ll call like the ocean’s 11 way of working so ocean’s 11 what is it one person george clooney identifies we’re robbing this bank right we’re robbing this casino this is this is the next target uh what person one basically sends out the bat signal they text out the trusted group people who all have a unique set of skills and says hey we have our next target they say cool they read the brief the brief basically says here’s this casino it has all this money uh they have these jewels we’re gonna go rob the bank here’s how we’re gonna do it and you’re gonna you’re gonna be hey you know like asian gymnast guy you’re gonna be responsible for going through the laser wires and hey pickpocket guy matt damon you’re going to go pickpocket the the the the boss you know and get the key and basically this is how work is going to work so what he thinks is going to happen is you’re going to have either independent or small teams of people let’s say you and let’s say the four key people who built the hustle that you could basically get a text message on your phone that gives you the next mission and either you or as the leader are coming up with that mission or somebody else puts out the mission out to the universe says hey we want somebody to build you know the hustle for bitcoin right and you could basically say boom accept i accept the job and then that fans out to the four people you trust you guys get together and you do this sprint for like nine weeks building the foundation there you collect your jackpot of money you split the you split the winnings you get the most and then you know steph gets the next most and trung gets the next most or whatever and then uh and then you all go your way again until the next mission hits and he basically feels that this is how things are going to work more like you know mission impossible or ocean’s 11 field agents that basically take missions when they want the mission has a set bounty the bounty gets you know you get completed you get you rate and review each other right i review the task giver the brief giver they review me as the as the agent and then we go on our way and we see this with like uber drivers today but it hasn’t shifted into like creative knowledge work but that’s his that’s i’m paraphrasing or i’m kind of extrapolating for what he said but i think that’s what he thinks the future looks like what do you think of that i think that that applies to a lot of things but not everything i think that for the people listening to those podcasts it will apply to a lot of their work but at the end of the day i need someone to come pick up my trash every single day or every once a week you know what i mean i need some type of consistency and i think that naval and well the robots will be doing that maybe but sometimes already in my street dude the driver there is a driver in the thing but the guy drives up to the house this huge claw arm comes grabs my trash can like it’s a toy and in one of those claw games at the thing dumps the trash on into the thing puts it back down and he just keeps driving guy doesn’t get out soon that guy’s not gonna need to be there it’s just gonna be computer driving that that whole thing so there’s this fruit stand on the corner of where i’m staying right now and it’s two guys who run it they work 12 out they it’s 12 hours so one one person does the one 12 hours the next and it’s open 24 hours a day seven days a week it’s crazy and so you can go and buy a pair at 3am on this corner it’s wild and i think a lot of new york is like that you know in san francisco everything closes at like one it never sleeps yeah yeah yeah and i think that for a lot of uh stuff that unfortunately is going to be necessary although i don’t know if it’s necessary but people are going to continue doing it that way but what you’re talking about for intellectual work or for work that requires um you know coding or blogging or something where you can build it once and sell many times i think that is a great way to do it not only do i think it’s a great way and effective way to do it i think it’s significantly more fun well i’ve had this realization which is like okay my grandfather my grandfather worked essentially i think he worked in like an explosive factory basically like a bomb factory and so you know hey animation guys start here okay grandfather works in a in a explosion explosives factor bomb factory and he goes to work he basically wears a hard hat he wears his glasses his goggles and um and he’s operating like machinery heavy machinery that’s like his day-to-day then his son which is only like you know 30 years younger than him does a job that to my grandfather would seem like what do you mean this is work where’s your where’s your hard hat where’s the factory where’s the danger where’s the what you’re not standing 12 hours a day if you’re 14 hours a day on the line like what are you doing because my dad carried a briefcase into an office went to a cubicle sat down at a desktop computer and essentially wrote roughly like you know emails memos and then you know flew on a plane to go meet a customer shook their hand cut a deal signed a piece of paper and then carried that piece of paper back with them and then my dad looks at me and he’s you call this work what are you doing here like you know this is now again 30 years later and work is now again an unrecognizable shift he looks at me and he says you just sit in front of your laptop on your couch or you’ll go you’ll go travel it doesn’t matter you can just sit with your little phone and do your whole job and so i you know i sit with my laptop basically and i just talk to other people through video chat i don’t even need to get on a phone or i’ll create content you know as my thing or i’m a programmer then if i think about my daughter right my daughter blush she’s two years old right now when she works i’m sure it’s going to look like something completely unrecognizable and basically looks like leisure to her like to from my point of view because i’m like dude back in my day i had to sit at my laptop and type type type type and she’s going to be like oh yeah we just use our voice assistants and i’m just like i have a drone that follows me around and it’s creating content for my channel and i have a thousand subscribers and that’s my payment that’s my income is my thousand subscribers watching me on my drone vlog or whatever the hell like the future is going to look like it’s hard to predict my grandfather never could have predicted that his son would do what he does my dad would have never thought that i do what i do that means i’m unlikely to be able to predict what my kids are going to do 30 years from now that gets me both excited but also makes me think oh i need to plan for something a little more radical than what just feels like a bit further progression from where we are today so i’ll give you this is a little tangent but uh and robert robert green’s uh is one of my favorite authors and he’s a historian a little bit and he wrote about how you know how this idea of like how our parents always complain about young people they don’t understand this or that hard work yeah yeah and we’ll say the same thing about people younger than us so some of the earliest writings that we’ve discovered of language of the written language not just pictures but uh words uh on walls or whatever it was people complaining about how the kids don’t i swear to god this is what he was like this wonderful example he’s like in fact this is like so common that some of the earliest works we’ve ever been able to read it’s about complaining about how they’re nervous about the future because the young people don’t understand something dude that’s so funny uh first of all first of all someone’s lying because i’ve heard the bitcoin people are all like oh you know the earliest writings on cave walls were just accounting systems people keeping a ledger a balance of who owes what and then i’ve heard people who are like if your stick is like storytelling it’s like you know the earliest things in cave walls or stories passed down from genera they’re telling stories bedtime stories essentially we’re written on the walls and now this guy’s like saying something else i actually believe yours yours seems like to be honestly the most beautiful i am talking about the written line like words you’re could be talking about numbers and the other person could be talking about pictures i’m talking about like words but hey i’m i’m just paraphrasing robert i’m just gonna use that because no one [ ] knows and so i’m just gonna whatever it might like i’m teaching a writing course right now it’s like did you know that the first writing ever actually happened before people ate it’s like what that can’t be right that doesn’t make sense yeah and the first writing was about writing it’s by my course i i’m just saying that’s what i wrote about what do you think that like i i wouldn’t be surprised if basically my daughter when she worked she never went into an office she’s using something that’s even more lightweight than a phone it’s a watch or it’s a contact lens to see her her information that she works with people who she doesn’t know their identity and she they don’t know hers it’s more like a game it’s like she’s you know like bb433 and she has like a five-star rating and her out her rate is you know x coins uh you know that’s how she earns her money and basically she works whenever she wants and she like basically every every morning can wake up and see a list of available missions to go contribute to like i can see that being the future even though that sounds like a video game today i think that the jobs of the future feel like probably will look more like games than than what what we do today so there’s this uh i forget who said it but someone once said um like what what i i’ll look at what rich silicon valley people do in their free time and that’s what a lot of the world will do in 10 years and i think this slightly different chris dickson said what the nerds in silicon valley do on the weekends is what everybody will be doing on their weekdays eventually yeah and i think if i remember correctly he might have been referring to like lsd or psychedelic drug use i i think it was like many hobbies it’s like oh 3d printing cryptocurrency like whatever whatever the whatever like your engineer friends are doing for fun on friday saturday like outside of their job that’s the thing to bet on those are the things that become things and i think you could say the same for people who are incredibly wealthy and let me give you an example so we have this guy in the podcast named mark uh why do you say his last name laurie mark laurie founded this company called jet.com um he bought a basketball team definitely a billionaire and when we were doing the podcast it looked a little funny like the way he was moving his hands i couldn’t exactly tell what was going on and then afterwards he told us that he wasn’t using his computer and he basically was standing up and he had his iphone on a big old tripod and he sent us a picture of it and i tweeted out about how i actually don’t think that a lot of people are going to be using laptops i think that um i’ve talked to a bunch of people i think gary vaynerchuk’s one of them uh jack dorsey’s another one mark lory is another one and they run these huge companies and they’ve created massive amounts of wealth and mark lori said i haven’t touched a computer in years and of course that is something that you pretty much you kind of have to be pretty wealthy in order to do that or like a social media like influencer or something like a jake paul type of person um but i do think that in 10 20 30 40 years this idea of having a laptop and a computer i think is gonna be we’re not gonna do that we’re going to do it all from some type of much very small handheld device i i totally agree uh can i tell you a fear story a random thing that happened to me i uh i was in my backyard yesterday or two days ago and i um i was my we have this little like so we have a pool and then there’s like this little hill that’s kind of like um it’s like there’s a bunch of greenery or whatever and so it’s like a little path in the backyard you can just walk in a circle and my daughter loves to do it so i’m walking with her and we’re walking and i’m kind of on my phone and she’s walking like two steps ahead of me and every three steps she just reaches down to pick something up a flower a rock a pebble it doesn’t matter it’s dirt like she just likes to pick stuff up so she reaches down to pick up something and i just hear this like this hiss i just hear like and i’m like and i’m like uh i don’t really and then i hear like a rattle i just hear like like and i’m like i grab her i pull her towards me and i look and right like six inches in front of her is a enormous four-foot rattlesnake and it is staring at her hissing at her his little black tongue is like flickering at my daughter and i’m like i’m like oh holy [ ] and i’m like i’m like oh [ ] and then she goes oh [ ] and then i’m like oh no then i like i take her like six feet away and i’m looking at it and he stays still and i’m like you know a different part of me wakes up i think a part of me that you try intentionally to wake up a lot which is like kind of like your your like survival instinct you’re like primal instinct you’re like hillary clinton this is real [ ] like i know you like to tap into that this is real [ ] like whether you’re like all right i’m gonna go box somebody and get hit and feel see what that feels like i’m gonna do this endurance race to see what it feels like to almost die on this mountain i don’t do all that [ ] right i look for like you know where’s the where’s the where’s the couch and and so seeing this tapped into that part of me and so i’m like oh [ ] um and so i’m looking at him he’s looking at me and i’m like okay so i get my daughter out of there but i’m also i need to get rid of the snake what am i gonna do and so i call whoever i call the i call the animal control server and pest control or whatever animal control and they’re like oh no we don’t do snakes anymore we stopped at like you know six months ago or something we only do domestic animals i’m like okay [ ] who do i call i call the pest control guy they’re all booked up and they’re like oh we can get down to you on wednesday i’m like dude this snake is gonna move around between now and wednesday and if we can’t find him that just means like i can’t go in my backyard at this point this is like a four foot rattlesnake uh that is kissing at me right now and um did you know anyone with a gun uh even if i knew someone with a gun i wouldn’t be like hey come shoot this snake in the head like it just seems no that seems like that’s about the way you give it to snakes you you aim at their little tiny you know head and you shoot it yeah that’s insane it’s not that hard i mean i’ve got friends that they uh yeah when you find a snake you shoot it so okay so that didn’t come to mind for me but uh i also live in a neighborhood where like it’s all just like old white rich people and so like my neighbors are all like 80. so i’m like okay this is not gonna this is not gonna go over super well they’re not gonna help me out so then i call um so i call this little museum i’m like hey you guys are a museum uh nearby i’m like you like wildlife museums they have like real animals there i’m like you guys want a snake i got a snake for you come pick this up right um and they’re like actually there’s a guy this guy jim who will do this for you and all the other guys are quoting me like 800 thousand dollars to come remove this snake and i’m like dude you could charge any amount of money to remove a rattlesnake and it’s gonna basically get accepted um and so i’m like all right whatever and they’re like this guy jim can do it i’m gonna call him right now they three-way him into the call he’s like hey oh you got a rattlesnake he gets excited he’s like i can get there in 30 minutes i’m driving out of the city and i’m like okay like how much does this cost he’s like oh this is free i love doing this and so this guy comes over i just i don’t even know what the point of the story is an amazing thing that happened so this guy comes over he’s got this long beard looks like dumbledore basically and he’s like uh oh yeah he’s like excited to see the snake he tells first he tells me watch the snake don’t lose the snake so for 30 minutes i sit there 10 feet away from the snake just in the heat it’s 100 degrees outside i’m just sitting there facing off with the snake i don’t have my phone i don’t have anything and i’m just staring at this thing the whole time that if you want to learn to meditate find a rattlesnake and stare at it for 30 minutes unbelievable meditative state so guy shows up he’s got a tiny stick with him basically like a little tiny claw it’s like and he goes up to the snake no fear just starts like moving stuff out of the way near the snake he’s like trying to get a good look at it and um he grabs the snake with his thing almost loses it twice then he grabs he finally gets it and he’s like you got a bucket and i’m like bro you should have said this ahead of time like no i don’t have a bucket let me go find i go get an amazon box he’s holding the snake in midair it’s like winding around like crazy hissing like crazy we put in this box we tape it up he’s like can you just hold this tape down i’m like bro you don’t understand how big of a [ ] i am like this you i know it’s safe it’s in the box but like i don’t want to touch the box rattles i mean and that will kill you right it’ll ki it can kill you i i was asking i was like dude you just went up to no fear and he’s like not the fastest guy i was like you’re kind of slow like you’re the snake was moving way faster than you like you weren’t afraid he’s like no i’ve done this for years i love snakes he’s like i’m only afraid of like you know mountain lions or something and he’s like um he’s i was like but they do attack he’s like no he’s like they rattle as a defense mechanism they’re trying to get you to go away right like a predator would not rattle at its prey to scare it away it’s more of a defensive thing i’m like okay that makes sense and um anyway so he takes it away he puts it in his car literally his sister’s in the car she’s just been in the car the whole time and i’m like dude you’re out here like he’s like yeah i was at her house i was staying at her house when you called so i just brought my sister over and the sister’s like oh god does the snake have to come with us and he’s like yeah of course and he takes it to some mountain and he lets it go and i’m like i’m like you just do this for funny i love animals and i go i go oh yeah i’m trying to find small talk with this guy i don’t have anything in common with this person i’m like my wife’s a vegan that’s the best i can come up with and he goes because oh i’ve been a vegan since 1956 or something like that what i was like was it even a term then he goes no there was no no term for vegan but i just lived that way and i was like wow i just i don’t know why i’m telling the story i was just blown away by this guy’s like authenticity and also just the like quality of this person’s like beliefs and uh actions how congruent they were and how selfless they were like we this is like kind of like a money-minded podcast it’s all about opportunities and like taking advantage of the situation and coming up with the scheme and this guy was like on the polar opposite this guy was like i love this thing i’m passionate about this i do this for fun um i live this lifestyle and i live it not for the money or not for because it’s cool not because it’s in vogue like i was just kind of blown away by this guy and i just needed to share that story have you seen the documentary shout out to you jim hale have you seen the documentary of burt’s bees no there’s a documentary about it it’s awesome i it’s on netflix uh i don’t know if it is anymore but basically you know burt’s bees you know the the chapstick shampoo i think the baby oh yeah of course you know how there’s an old guy on it that’s bert right no i didn’t know that i thought it might be like a kentucky fried chicken situation well i was a real guy too um you didn’t know that the colonel’s a real guy i knew he’s real but they they made a character right it’s like oh yeah yeah so bert was like the character but he’s a real guy he’s alive still i think if he died he must have been recently but he’s he’s still around and he uh would be he had a he had bees so he was a beekeeper and he was kind of this like mountain man type of guy who lived uh maybe in new hampshire rhode island somewhere up east where he lived in in the woods kind of and he tended bees and this entrepreneurial woman met him and i was like hey i’m going to turn your bees into or your honey into or your hive i’m going to use this beeswax to turn it into chapstick and it turned into one thing and eventually she sold it for like 200 million dollars and he made like close to nothing he made very little money but the company uh would who bought it maybe nabisco one of these huge conglomerates they ship them around to japan to uh europe as like the spokesperson because people just want to see who byrd is and he’s a real guy and they were asking him in the documentary who uh like are you upset he goes no i don’t want that money i just want to go to bed when the sun goes down and i want to wake up when the sun comes up and i just want to do whatever i want in between and not talk to anyone i’m happy he’s a real character are you are you looking them up now yeah i’m looking it up okay i have some info here so company starts 1991. bert owned a third of the company quimby owned the other two thirds [Music] he didn’t get paid though yeah so so bert’s bees is now worth over one billion but he only got four million when she sold it off for 173 million she gave him 4 million when he when she sold it for 173 million uh this the company still pays him an undisclosed amount for his likeness and name um but you know he he sort of missed out on on he would have been owed you know much more um as far as as far as this deal goes i don’t know why it says he owned one third and then only got four million out of the 173 but whatever also two things unfortunately bert has bert passed away at 80. um like recently then yeah so that was 2015. so that that’s pretty recently and also this guy looks identical almost to the guy i was describing so yeah i’m glad you came up with this guy when i was telling my story because they look very very similar it’s great and uh anyway i don’t know where we’re going with this but there is something to be said for these people that are just happy without much there’s also this other show i’ve been watching on hulu about these guys who live on the land like there’s this guy who wears like rawhide like jacket and pants and i’ve been watching on hulu and he just lives he just he’s like he lives like a native american like in your in your head like the like cowboys and indians types where they just like follow the food and they follow the seasons and it does seem quite pleasant so maybe this uh less than 40 hour work week thing we’re onto something here well there’s this like um quote which is basically uh i don’t know who said this or i don’t know if anyone said this but basically a lot of people want to learn from podcasts like us like they want success and success is getting what you want and then happiness is wanting what you get practice both like don’t just practice the getting what you want because that’s a never-ending you know you’re on the mountain of more and you’ll never you’ll never get to the top of that mountain and uh getting what you want or wanting what you get is is you know that’s gratitude right and so you want to be you want to master both of those and if you could really only pick one it would be wanting what you get more so than getting what you want or as naval says uh i believe he says desire is torture or something like that desires buddhist philosophy that uh when you want something you’re you’re making a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get it which i don’t know if i actually believe that i actually i actually don’t believe that i would say but it is a kind of a buddhist principle desire suffering well maybe we should end there huh leave them suffering for more all right we’re out of here travel never looking back