Transcript of The Most Valuable Skill For Any Founder

i call it getting Ted lassoed now which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge but uh the American has 10x the agency or confidence and as a result they achieve five times more That was brilliant George you had an interesting career because you were at Social Chain early on So if people know Steve Bartlett from Diversio he was there early and then uh a couple weeks ago you came out with this thing It was called high agency.com Let let me give the background here George got obsessed with the way that the way that Nicola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon George fell in love with this idea of high agency He started tweeting about it started blogging about it He's like I'm going to write a the handbook on this thing He started making it like his sole focus for at least what six months George Well I'd say five years Five years is when I first started thinking about the idea when uh Eric Weinstein mentioned it and then I started writing about it I got advice that it would never take off as an idea Interestingly since we did our podcast last time and we discussed it the idea or the meme as a whole has become bigger and bigger and bigger I think by the way it's not five years When I Googled your name I Googled George Mack high agency You were tweeting about this in November of 2018 Oh seven So let's explain it in and the easy way to explain it We can put this visual up on on YouTube So high agency like the the meme that stands out to me is there's a dude deserted on an island and person there's two people Person A takes like the wood uh from the island and they try to spell the world word help and they're just sitting there hoping to waiting to be helped They're hoping somebody comes and saves them And then person B takes those letters and builds a a little raft and starts paddling themselves They start helping themselves And you know one is a higher agency version than another right The the guy who builds the boat and starts paddling is the higher agency version And so what's cool about this is you got obsessed with you got interested in the idea then you got obsessed with the idea then you committed to the idea and you started writing this thing and you told you were giving me updates saying you're writing this for a while And um Sam do you know the story of how he got high agency.com No because he did not own that domain It's actually a very high agency story Yeah So one of the things I have uh in the piece is an exercise that I do and I recommend it It's called turning into reality So the way most people kind of live in the 21st century is like this to-do list model where they empty short-term memory like what's caching in their memory and then they do that thing that day versus the turning to reality model is you think of a value that you want to hold or live up to and then you come up with ideas based off that So it's a much more creative way of living the to-do list So when I was actually writing the piece it's kind of like well you want to be the personal trainer who's in shape So I'd try and do some high agency stuff of like how could I potentially promote this So one of the things I was listing down as I do the turning to reality exercise was "What about if I just get high agency.com?" And I kind of look and it's like likely to be tens of thousands of dollars But I then started reaching out to a few different brokers a few little hacky people and we realized that high agency.com the person who' owned it for like 20 years I think it was an old agency and it was about to expire when we looked at the domain So we kind of sat there waited for the moment that it would expire and then it went into a little mini auction and nobody else online was aware of it It was me and a marijuana a cannabis marketing agency which makes sense Hi agency I hadn't thought of that Um and yeah managed to get it at like essentially for near near as free as a result So that's an example of the turning into reality And then when it came to actually promoting the piece I was like okay let's write down high agency and then what are ways that I can display that value for promoting it And I always go with my kind of facial muscles or if I start giggling at something I go "That's probably a good idea." And the one idea I had for promoting it was like "What if I take over Time Square for a blog post?" So I was like "Okay." I started giggling at that That sounded like my guts telling me that's the right direction to go Started cold emailing blasting people with obviously my background in advertising How could I set up favors and move things around And then for the day of the launch I took over on one time square with high agency got me this billboard high agency.com with my little Twitter icon taking over Times Square that day Dude that is awesome How many views did this article get so far or that day So I actually I think I I don't track I don't track any of that The one thing I do track is DMs and emails because I think again I've been in media for a while and I think one of the biggest uh issues that we face with modern media is people go off width metrics because what gets measured gets managed and it's so easy to see view count but it's so so for example if an episode gets a million views of yours that's great but if 10,000 people listen to it five times I would argue the latter is much better than the former but right now we don't have that many ways of measuring ing depth metrics So I prefer going off depth metrics which are quality of people that DM me um quality of people that email me And then one side effect that I did get is like once every two days somebody say it made them cry Uh which was not the intention at all So I I haven't paid attention to that I just look at the death metrics All right A few episodes ago I talked about something and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper into explain and that's what I'm about to do So I told you guys how I use chat GBT as a life coach or a thought partner And what I did was I uploaded all types of amazing information So I uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that I like issues going on in my personal life and businesses I uploaded so much information And so the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life like how should I respond to this email What's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing the audience showing you the software that I use to make this the information that I had chat GBT ask me all this stuff So it's super easy for you to use And like I said I use this like 10 or 20 times a day It's literally changed my life And so if you want that it's free There's a link below Just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes and I'll show you how I use it again 10 to 20 times a day Um all right So check it out The link is below in the description Back to the episode So I wanted to do a little thing which was like uh what are examples of extreme high agency that we've personally experienced Either something you did something you didn't do a friend uh somebody you admire anything like that I just wanted to kind of like quickly spitball what comes to mind So you weren't there on this podcast but I did a podcast with this guy Nick Mobre And Nick Moe's episode I don't know if it has the most views It is the most hardcore episode I've ever done on this podcast The guy I think the guy is the most impressive entrepreneur that's ever been on the podcast And we've done 700 episodes something like that And he's a guy nobody's ever even heard of I think this is like a Elon level entrepreneur um in terms of his level of agency And agency is like the perfect word to describe him So he he talks about basically like just this I'll give you the simple examples and I'll ramp to the to his most insane example So he's like uh he him and his brother want to start a toy company straight out of like high school basically And so he's 17 18 years old and he's first he goes doortodoor selling his his brother's like science fair project So doortodoor sale sales already like let's say level one agency right that takes agency to go do that every single day and he sells like thousands of units door to door Then he's like "Okay great How are we going to produce thousands of units We got to like ramp production." So they they said "Well where do other toys get made?" They get made in China So they just pick up and they move to China with no money They literally sleep on a sidewalk outside the airport on the first night And the funniest part is he's describing to me that they move to China to set up their factory And what I thought he meant was how everybody does it You go to China and you find a factory that already does this That's the point of going to China He didn't even understand that He's like "Dude to say I was naive is an understatement." He's like "We went to China and then we just built a factory with wood by like by a river We built a shed and that became our factory and we found Chinese people and we employed them in in the factory We created our own factory." It's like besides the point of like why you factory is is glamorizing it It's like Exactly And then as they're he's like and by the way worst product you know everybody says oh you know product is everything He's like we had the worst product We just couldn't even make it good We were so bad at it We just kept slept in the thing for like years Lived off a dollar a day budget Uh like you know eating like the cheapest you know like food They basically employed this Chinese woman from the village to make them rice every day He's like I was like so how did you get like distribution cuz they're everywhere They're in Walmart They're in every store And he goes I would email every buyer of every retail store in every geography every day That was my day He's like and eventually they were like dude we don't want it He's like ah so you're here You replied great would love to tell you about our latest product And and finally you know they would someone would crack and be like "All right just send me the sample." Or like "Look I'm going to the show Please stop emailing me If you're there I'll meet with you I'll give you 20 minutes." And he used that to scrape and claw So he just he's describing all of this his journey for him and his brother to bootstrap a toy company that became the biggest toy company in the world He made they make a billion dollars a year of profit the two brothers with no outside investors Then he's getting a uh he got his intestines removed or something like that He basically like he got a Crohn's disease or something like that I forgot what it was He had to go get like his like half his intestine removed or something like that While he's recovering on his like kind of sick bed he decides to go into a new space and he creates the world's most popular diaper brand The fastest selling diaper brand in the world right now is Rascals He created that And then he also created like the fastest growing hair brand on TikTok Like this guy's just prolific right And I I just couldn't believe it Uh and so it just blew my mind And it showed me like there's so many levels of agency above where I'm at I couldn't believe it George do you think that crazy people like that are born or do they learn it or can you learn it One thing uh like a model from cognitive behavioral therapy is black or white thinking So people will go is it nature or is it nurture And realistically it's probably somewhere on a spectrum Um that's what I kind of call it the high agency spectrum And I think there's definitely people who have genetic advantages Balaji had a great uh line the other day of uh when communism ended we could uh the Soviets could discuss profit for the first time and he was talking about when with wokeness ending maybe we can discuss genetics for the first time and I feel that yes genetics definitely plays a component but I would say that can then be quite a low agency for you to then just outsource it purely to your genetics So I think um it definitely plays a component but you can definitely have agency over your agency and I think the way I would uh immediately explain that is that it's possible to you could imagine regardless of their genetic roll the dice it's possible to decrease somebody's agency therefore it's possible to increase somebody's agency and I just look at it like the easiest example I look at is the difference between my British friends and my American friends Um I kind of I love the show Ted Lasso because it's like an example of I call it getting Ted Lassoed now which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge Um but uh the American has 10x the agency or confidence and as a result they achieve five times more So dude by the way I think I said that's that's brilliant And I think I've said on the podcast to my British friends the difference in American culture and British culture is watching the British office and the American office In the American office the guy always gets the girl Uh there's a little bit of laughing at each other but it's more like we're laughing together and it always ends well But in the British office it's kind of mean and like the guy does not get the girl often times and it actually ends sad The British show is more realistic and was less successful than than the American version of The Office too And but the Ted Lasso example is way better because it's it's so true that you like see this optimistic person and he's in a room full of haters And that's like that kind of reminds me of my British versus American friends There's a crazy stat around universities So the top 10 universities in the world I believe three are British and three are American So when you actually look at our intellect I think you could argue we're at least as smart or at least the British sound smarter We have that going for us However when it then comes to entrepreneurial output of those universities America is like five times five times higher Um even the example of uh deep uh a lot of the AI innovation came from the UK but then at the actual execution happens in the US So uh yeah it's I so to go back to your point I think using the UK versus the US as an example goes to show you've got similar wide distribution of genetics going on but a completely different output as a result you you said something that um we passed over but I thought was actually a pretty good insight which was you you pay attention to the you said you said it in a very intellectual way like pay attention to the facial muscles but really what you're saying was if it makes me laugh there's actually some merit in the idea right the idea that makes me giggle is the one I should double click into and I just thought have you seen this email that basically kickstarted uh Airbnb so Airbnb which today I don't know hundred billion dollar company or so the email that kicked it off is a public email you can read and it's from Joe Gabia and he's he's emailing Brian and he goes "Brian I thought of a way to make a few bucks." Again becomes a hundred billion dollar company Thought a way to make a few bucks turning our place into a designer's bed and breakfast We could let young designers come into town and crash at our place during the the 4-day event There's like a conference and we'll give them Wi-Fi a small desk a sleeping mat and breakfast any every morning Ha And he puts ha with an exclamation point at the end Joe And he he leaves it with that such a good email that it sounds fake And so I I remember like pointing out that I think any idea that ends with that like genuinely you would to be like like if that's your genuine feel to the end of it there's a lot of potential in those types of ideas I my one that I was afraid for saying for a while cuz I thought I might get cancelled but then when I explain it I think it kind of makes sense So this is obviously the Tik Tok clip that gets me cancelled but then I'll explain so don't clip it Essentially I think child labor is underpriced Let me explain Obviously the classic child labor that we see in the world now is truly atrocious horrific and anybody involved in that I wish them um hell However we went through a a model of um children working for example in the UK uh cleaning uh chimneys and obviously then that got completely outlawed It largely got outlawed across the world But I think now there will be thanks to AI and the teaching collapse I think I've always said for a while and I think AI's now accelerated this is that you'll see the first teenage first self-made teenage billionaire by the end by 2030 And I think that that's makes me giggle when I say it and I think it's true I think that is a very bold prediction It doesn't even seem crazy Dude we had a guy on the podcast the other day who was 17 years old who had a business doing $30 million a year in revenue Yeah So I I have an idea which is the next Y Combinator only invests between the age of 11 to 18 years old First off nobody's funding them because they can't Um you've got the homeschooling boom right now One of the criticisms beforehand would be they're in school so they can't do it but you're obviously seeing that decay away as well as how would adults take them seriously but now with smaller teams and the ability to hide behind a cartoon or whatever Um I think now is the time that we will see it When Sean first told me about I think it was on this podcast Sean or I forget when but you or someone told me about Peter Teal's uh Teal Fellowship Yeah and he was like he's he's con he's going to give you $150,000 to drop out of college and start a company That was one of those it doesn't seem ridiculous The opposite of stay in school kids He was like I'll pay you to leave school kids That was and when and when that idea came out I felt the same thing where it was like that's insane Wait what You can't do that And then it like everyone goes through like the same mental model Although some some people it will take 10 years cuz they'll see the results nowadays Uh but like other people like me it took me like a few weeks where I'm like that's crazy And then it's like that's crazy right And then like like ask like is this crazy Oh this is actually kind of awesome And then you know Ethereum comes out of that and Figma comes out of that and a bunch of like you know kind of multi-billion dollar industry changing companies come out of it On the topic of high agency and how it relates to all of this that we're discussing right now So one great question is what would I do if I had 10x the agency Another question I love because you guys obviously talk about ideas and opportunities that are coming up but to like zoom out and then give people the agency to think about how to actually come up with the ideas and opportunities themselves One of my favorite questions is what is ignored or neglected by the media that will be studied by historians What's a historical example So I did a post two years ago on this topic that went really viral And even if you look at some of the things in there so a good example will be like microplastics It's kind of it's slowly bubbling up now It's reaching the media but if you discussed that two to three years ago you was an absolute weirdo Another example in there was around fentinel that I put in the post and at the time it was seen as like absurd or crazy or there wasn't that many people discussing it and now it's way bigger So I think there's there's countless examples of this media uh historian gap that exists There's a great book um called The Sovereign Individual and they have a line in that that always stuck with me which is they're talking about the fall of the Roman Empire and it's quite easy to point to the date of when the Roman Empire fell But if you actually went at the time and ask people when did the Roman Empire fall or fell there was no big announcement There was no "Hey guys the empire has fallen." Um it likely a lot of people didn't admit it till like a hundred years later So they point to this case that if CNN existed during the fall of the Roman Empire on the day it fell they wouldn't have announced it would have fallen But it just takes people a while I think that's a big high agency trait is essentially just if you wait for the news you'll be wrong or late Yeah that's a great point That's a great point Do you have suspicions of what an idea like that would be today Because it's a very hard question It's a it's an important question It's a it's worth pondering but it's not one where you know 10 answers come to mind right away of what what's largely ignored or like over over under reportported today that will be you know historically important to historians in the future One funny one that if I was a historian this is really absurd but I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East coming from the UK and spent four to five years in Dubai And one thing that's truly absurd about the West is in the Middle East whenever you go to the bathroom there's like a ass spraying thing that you have In the West everybody Yeah It's like a It's more like a shower head kind of thing So you get a bday which is a separate mechanism but it's like a little shower head I could go to the most remote crazy location of the desert and they will have one I've never What's it called just like a what do they call I actually I I call it like a rsp sprite I don't I don't know what it's actually the official term you talk to about it when you're there but this is the problem right is that there's in the west there's almost not really a good naming mechanism for it um and the fact that Rory Sland has this great bit which is imagine if a bird shat on your head um and I go oh Sam Sean uh here's a dry piece of paper to wipe it off you go what the man I need to wash my hair but meanwhile this is going on in the west on mass and I as an entrepreneur opportunity change changing the frame around that Um I think it's a billion dollar opportunity if you partnered with a plumbing company or something like that Imagine again I think first as well Have you seen Tushy No Tushi's like an attachable bedet It's like turns any dumb toilet into a smart toilet type of thing I think they do extremely well I think they're like north of 100 million in revenue in you know targeting the American market But I I I'm with you dude That's just the tip of the iceberg All right You're you're right that it will seem crazy in hindsight Another example of what's ignored or neglected by the media that will be studied by historians is I think we're going through a seismic shift now that's similar to when writing first came online So there's a a great sci-fi book uh by a guy called Ted Chang and it's one of his short stories and he tells a scenario which is possible now this technology already exists where you have essentially always on recording technology So some people they record their whole life So you can kind of see it now with Twitch streamers right And why this is fascinating is the impact this then has on memory So it in the books of spoiler alert it tells the story of a a a father daughter and mother The mother earth leaves them without saying goodbye essentially and the father and daughter one day have this huge argument where the uh the daughter says to the father I wish you'd just leave like mom um I hate you and it haunts the father to that very day Um and after about 5 years they slowly build their relationship and the father doesn't have access to one of these recording devices but his daughter does and one day he needs access to go through her memory log So he's he's asked her for access She shares it with him and as he's going through it that file pops up and he goes "Oh shit." Like this is one of the biggest emotional moments of my life Like he presses play on it and the recording shows that he completely misremembered the event It was him that said it to her And it's this idea that essentially all our memories are completely bollocks It's completely made up It's pretty much all artificial Um and how does that change when we essentially have recordings of everything I think that will be a big thing that historians will begin to begin to look at of we completely then like the shift that we had when we started writing for the first time That's going to be a huge shift as a result as well Have you seen the Black Mirror episode about this They did a uh they did a version of this on Black Mirror as well Oh really Well there's a there's a example of in the UK there's a building called Grenville Tower It was a horrific accident that occurred where the whole building set on fire It was in a council estate and loads of people died And on the day there was this weird case of a baby getting dropped from the top floor all the way down and somebody catching it And it went crazy viral at the time and a load of eyewitness testimony came out saying that they saw it And when it the like classic physicists about 6 months later after the emotion had calmed down around the event was like "Hold on If you drop a baby from that high to there like the physics of this I've got a bit of doubt about it And when they actually digged into the memories of it a lot of it was just artificial memories that people had created So I'm pretty fascinated by devices like that that come online And I think part of society will go for it and the other part of society will not go for it But it just completely changes who you are when you no longer have a story of your memories You actually have the full log Yeah There's a famous experiment I don't know if Have you guys ever seen this There's the 911 memory experiment What's that No So they basically um people feel like you really remember those important traumatic days You know there's the even phrases in the language like I'll never forget where I was or I'll never forget how I felt when I saw that And there's actually a set of I don't have the studies in front of me but there's I remember learning about this that there was a set of studies where people they went and they studied the memory accuracy of people remembering 9/11 And it was pretty shocking And it was like less than 50% of the details were accurate It was a combination of they had extreme confidence that their memories were accurate Their memories actually were not accurate and then they don't not only did they not remember what happened they actually didn't even remember how they felt I think they had like logged at a c like early on they logged how they had felt and then they measured three years later and then many years later trying to remember how you felt and you didn't even actually remember that properly and that your memories basically converge towards like a shared narrative rather than what actually happened and so there's and all these terms for flashbulb memories there's all these like terms for that describe how poor human memory actually is which is like kind of crazy when it comes to like the court system for example like a lot of it's based on you eyewitness testimony or somebody remembering certain details But and what's funny is Sean is as you were describing that I was thinking where where was I at 911 What was I doing And then I'm also saying the second most common thing which is but I remember Yeah Yeah I'm I'm the exception Ads don't work on me That's what everyone's going to say They're going to say but I remember that Oh and by the way I told the story Sean on here I think how this one this like prestigious journalist I asked her to come and freelance for the hustle Um and she wrote a letter back to me and she says like "That's cute Thanks." And like it drove like eight years of like success for me because I was like "I'm gonna prove this freaking jerk wrong." She was so dismissive of dismissive of me I went back and reread the email She was super nice Like she didn't say that's cute She said like "I'm honored Thank you so much for thinking of me I'm too busy right now but uh you know good luck in your with your new endeavor." Like I I went and reread it and I'm like that's insane I told myself the story that and I said it publicly so many times I even name dropped her once or twice It was wrong It was wrong I I didn't remember it correctly and I'm I'm happy I didn't But yeah our memor is crap What about um George about you you had stuff in here about like looking for business ideas through a high agency lens but also building software that's high agency What does that mean Because what you're describing to me is like a philosoph philosophical like like a mental framework but it it actually seems like when you think about this it's actually more tactical than that Yeah it's incredibly tactical There was a post I think two days ago that went really viral on pirate wires about how agency is the most important thing thanks to like AI I think agency has always been one of the most important things So I said it's probably the most important idea of the 21st century or it might be And if a British person says probably or might be it's almost like an American betting their house on it And uh in this pirate wires post they spoke about how well now thanks to AI and large language models the uh exponential or like the leverage that you get on agency as a result is is so much bigger And you just then begin to look at it So like a small case of like high agency for me is I started getting bored of being bullied by algorithms I feel like everybody is just a to the algorithms these days and I try and like find small ways to have agency over the algorithm So like even I was like okay I reflected on my YouTube history I literally I recommend everybody do it It's one of the weirdest exercises Talk about memory is you go on YouTube and then you press history And I just scrolled through the videos I was like "Okay which ones of these do I am I glad that I watched in hindsight Which ones am I kind of neutral about And then which ones would I say I regretted?" And I said I think it was about 80% of them I regretted 10% I was neutral and 10% I enjoyed watching And then I looked at it and said "Okay what do the ones that I like have in common And then what do the ones that I don't like also have in common And the single biggest thing of where I thought I wasted my time was content under 30 minutes long because it was just brain rock content particularly under like 5 minutes long like a Coffeezilla reaction of Logan Paul's done this crazy crypto pump and dump and I just click on it and then I'm in this like vortex And going back to the memory thing I've completely forgotten this So I was like okay how about I just work with chat GPT to solve this problem Built a script and now I call it the Kale algorithm my YouTube does not show me any videos under 30 minutes So this ability to to be able to manipulate your environment particularly I think with AI now has only got bigger and bigger So there's agency everywhere Everything is a I don't know if you heard that phrase of everything's a skill issue It's kind of like that for agency like everything is just a agency problem Where else are you doing that in your life So even small things just constantly each day do like I recommend going back to the turning into reality just going through that list and then operating from a creative model each day of how can I have agency and then applying it rather than going off the to-do list model So I mean anything from um writing down I want to learn I have always wanted to play Baker Street on the saxophone I was sat on the beach I did turning into reality I've wanted to learn Baker Street on the saxophone My girlfriend says why don't you do it There's nothing more embarrassing than a girl saying "Why don't you do it?" So I just then ordered a saxophone taught myself Baker Street on the saxophone So just coming at it from a very simple model of write down the value then ways you can display it then do the thing There's an amazing article that went viral the other day you know it's a good article when it's from like 2010 on like a really weird niche blog So there's a guy called um Aaron Schwarz who you probably heard of He was the Reddit co-founder who tragically took his own life and he has this amazing blog which goes to your point there Sam of like how do you actually turn this tactically and it talks about a having a theory of action versus a theory of change So he uses the example of you want the United States to decrease their military spending So a theory of action would be I'm a blogger therefore I'm going to write blog posts about this thing Whereas a theory of change is essentially where you go okay um I want to decrease the United States military What is how can I do that Or like why why why how how all the way down until you get to a concrete action that you can do today Um I the piece is absolutely uh incredible and I I think you mentioned to Sean on the podcast the other day around how hard it can be to actually think from first principles but using Aaron's framework the blog post I really recommend checking out is absolutely incredible Yeah You you said on here uh and when we asked what you want to talk about you said something about how uh you think that language kind of controls people uh a lot I think you said language shapes the world around us And I was thinking about that and I actually I made a change recently where I was thinking like I I have a problem where I I will compare myself to other people a lot and I would say like I should be doing this or I should be at this place and I remember I read something and I started changing the words to I choose to do this I I think I think Sean did you actually say this or I think we had some I think we had someone on the podcast where it was like it changed my thinking where it's like I'm gonna say instead of I should I'm going to change that word to choose Uh it's like what what am I going to choose to do Uh not I should be doing X Y and X Y and Z I was at a Tony Robbins event and he said it beautifully He goes somebody was had raised their hand and they said something I should do this you know I know I should do this but blah blah blah but I just think that they should do that And they were saying it and he goes he goes you're doing what a lot of people do You're all over yourself I just couldn't unhear it He's like people just shood all over themselves And I just from that moment on it it literally viscerally felt gross to say the word should I'm all over myself right now And I just couldn't do it anymore Language is a great example of low agency So the amount of times that we'll wait for a word to find us rather than trying to create words ourselves So that's why I felt high agency was quite a meta thing where when I discovered that word it actually changed the way I viewed reality So one way of viewing reality is reality happens and you have words to describe it Another way to view it is you use words and then that kind of edits uh reality So it's a a kind of a a double-edged sword Good examples of that would be fake news So fake news there was words beforehand that never really caught off There was like yellow journalism there was truthy news But then when fake news came along you have a clearer way of viewing reality A great example right now is the term vibe coding Vibe code The only thing that's probably done more than LLMs for vibe coding is the actual meme itself of vibe coding So high agency is another example What is vibe coding by the way I I I I still don't know what the difference between vibe coding and coding is just you basically a non-technical person prompting an LLM and getting them to code it for them That's vibe coding All right Got it And you're saying what that the when you actually have that language itself or you have that mean those means it actually increases the output of things and then you begin to see language uh can have such a impact everywhere I'm actually fascinated by on the topic of the show the millionaire meme So the concept of a millionaire is so impactful to society and it hasn't been updated even as inflation's et being a millionaire So like I once watched a YouTube ad where they were talking in like a currency that's like 1 to 10 and he was talking about making his first million but it still exists even as like the inflation's kicked in And I'm fascinated to see what replaces that There's a there's this great book from back in the day that I've never read because it's one of those books where the t the cover tells you the whole story You can literally read the cover you can have the epiphany and you can move on And it's called Your Word is Your Wand It's by I think Florence Scoville And it's like actually kind of a hard book to read cuz it's one of these books that's written like 80 years ago or something and it's just like too poetic to like actually gro nowadays But the whole idea is like your word is your wand is your magic wand and it shapes your reality exactly as you're describing and this applies to like yes it applies to high agency but I'll give you another example So I tore my uh knee ligament a couple months ago So uh I've been recovering from it and I've been doing rehab and my trainer who's like he's like the black belt in mindset that I get to work out with every every day And so he he never uses the word rehab and I'm he always uses a different word So he'd be like he's like all right let's get ready He'll be like "This is not rehab We're going to renew We're going to refresh We're going to recharge We're going to He's like "We're going to do something We're going to make that knee better than it was before." And rehab already like implies some version of it's broken We're going to try to fix it Versus he's like "All right we're going to rejuvenate this thing We're going to make your knee 10 years younger than it would than it than it currently is How are we going to do that?" And literally when you change the word you change the method right Like the what you say changes the how you do it And you just see this over and over and over again in small ways in business And like another version of this that I've seen u that I've done recently is like intentionally breaking your speed bar So we all have a certain clock speed a certain speed with which we operate things And a good exercise is to just break what break the speed barrier of what you think is possible for any given task So it could be very small It could be you're doing the dishes and you have the the silverware and you normally put it away at a certain rate but try to break your speed bar Like see how fast you could do that thing Or this piano that I got here I had this idea of like I want to have uh I've been practicing the piano for 3 months I've I'm ready to upgrade from my keyboard to like a legit piano It's more fun to play feels better etc And my birthday's coming up So the normal speed bar would be you kind of wait for your birthday So you wait not a not a very high agency thing to do and then you get it and then you maybe get it but then you get it on back order because these are you know they don't have them in stock and then it's going to take a few weeks to come and then it gets then you set a delivery date and then they show up and I basically set myself a challenge I from the moment I had the idea I said this inspiration is perishable right Ideas are avocados I'm not going to let this go brown I'm going to do this thing right now and so I said I want to see how fast I could do this I think the normal person this would be like a 2 or 3 week project I'm going to see if I could do this in 24 hours and sure enough I like just mobilized my own army of like my resources my focus my intention towards making that one thing happen And it was crazy like the store was closed but I found the owner I called him and I said "Would you come and open the store I'm ready to buy a piano right now." The guy comes and he opens the store for me And then I you know instead of just playing the piano trying to figure out which which of these pianos is better I said "I need to know first which pianos you have in stock in the warehouse that could get delivered tomorrow And in fact while I'm looking I want you to call the delivery guy and schedule a delivery for tomorrow I'm going to pick but you schedule it right now cuz it's Friday and I want this delivered Saturday morning And I made the whole thing happen And by 11:00 a.m Saturday morning I had the piano in the room and I was playing it And I just feel like there's so many instances where if you break your speed bar in one area you realize that like in all areas speed is negotiable that you can change the rate at which something's going to happen in your business or in your personal life He he just said his his attention his focus and his energy is his army How good is that Is that what you just said Yeah Go ahead George Well you got a military and air force You need a little one for each one That's beautiful Yeah Let's go March Right Uh Scott Galloway had a great version of this He go what did he how did he say it He's like I deployed an army of capital in my 40s from my family to go kill and grow while I was asleep Dude that's so good That's so good George who are examples that are not the Elon Musk's of the world who you think represent high agency Can you give us a friend Because I think that the best way to get high agency is to just hang out with a high agency person because you'll realize how unacceptable your low agency thoughts are around them You'll feel embarrassed by it And so being around high agency people is the fastest way to become more high agency yourself Well the question I always come back to is who would you call when you're stuck in a third world jail cell That's how you identify the highest agency person that you know Two that come to mind There's one called Shannon who is probably one of the most underrated individuals that exist He literally created information theory which is he took the idea from philosophy where you have ones and zeros in logic and applied that to computing and created information theory which literally creates everything that we're doing right now basically the father him and um Alan Shuring the father of modern computing and he has this crazy thing so one of the things in the essay one of my favorite like high agency apherisms is just does it defy the laws of physics it's like a brain prompt whenever you faced with a problem does it defy the laws of physics and Claude Shannon and a guy called Ed Thorp wanted to hack roulette so roulette is the example of the ultimate game of luck and Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp before the first ever mobile computer they created the first ever mobile computer that they had in their shoe that would look at the as the ball hit based off the probability and they hacked roulette but I managed to out compete the house by about 33% So I'd say called Shannon's awesome Sean you should read Ed Thorp's biography one of the best biographies I've ever read adding it to the list a man for market So this guy Ed Thorp he basically was a math guy he was a math prodigy he got sick of just making the wage that math teachers got and so he said I'm going to invent a way to count cards he did So he invented card counting Uh he made a lot of money And then he was like you know I don't really like being in casinos all the time Like it's not good for my family And the mafia or not the mafia the um uh the the casinos started getting on his case And he was he was like I don't want them to like break my hand in the back door in the back room because I'm counting cards And so he eventually got into finance and he started the uh uh one of the first ever hedge funds and you know became a billionaire that way And he tells stories and he's it's sort of like a Forest Gump story like he tells a story about how he met this he's like I met this young man who had these really good ideas and I knew this guy was going to be super rich and so I just decided to become one of his first investors and he went and started this thing called Birkshshire Hathaway uh like like you know and there's like 10 or 20 stories like that where he was like you know I was just like poking around and I met this guy and I thought he was really smart and we stayed in touch and then he went and founded Apple you know like he's got like a ton of stories like that Um but who's the second person on your list The the second person on my list is uh is it's a book by called um Don't Tell Me I Can't by Cole Summers It's the most underrated business book in the world in my opinion It's an hour long and it's written by a 13-year-old who tells the story Is this the the unschooling guy The unschooling guy Yeah So when he is uh I think four or five him and his parents see these kids outside causing havoc and saying some nasty things And he's from a very poor background and they decide you know what we're not going to go to school We're going to homeschool you And unfortunately his father who served in the military who's supposed to be his teacher ends up uh having to have multiple surgeries And one day he goes to his dad who you can just imagine is sat there postsurgery kind of a little bit out of it And he says Cole says to his dad "Dad how do I get rich?" And his dad says "I don't know son Like maybe go watch Warren Buffett videos on YouTube." So this six-year-old starts watching Warren Buffett videos on YouTube And you listen to the audio book and you're like taking notes of "Oh my god this kid's so smart like the lessons he's taken from Charlie Ma." And then at seven I believe he starts his first business that gets to $1,000 profit per month He acquires a vehicle using his parents license when he's like What was the business What was the seven-year-old's business Rabbit farming So he would breed rabbits and sell them and sell them to restaurants So he took that to $1,000 per month He then flipped a house and made I think like $10,000 profit when he was uh 10 years old It was like an abandoned house right It was like somebody's house that was just dilapitated They weren't doing anything with it He just says "Hey if I just like if I do all the work then can I you know share in the profit of of flipping this?" Basically he he didn't even like buy a home to flip it He he just found a unused home and was like "There's potential here." Yeah He's incredible He tells this story um when he's meeting other seven-year-olds for the first time or he's at like scouts with his friends and they're talking about what they learned that day and they're going "Yeah I was looking at Pluto Is it a planet?" is what they were teaching us at school I don't know whenever like I care about this and he goes "Oh I was looking into how Amazon manages to pay 0% tax just using the internet." So I think his book again just to be clear not may not not every seven-year-old should have a P&L Maybe 80% of them should but not every seven-year-old should have a P&L Um but it's he completely reframed my reality of what a child can do What And by the way this is one of those stories where he's still like 15 or 16 This isn't like No in the 80s Yeah He unfortunately passed away which is really really sad Wow like a surfing accident or something right Yeah I think it I I don't know the ins and outs of it Um tragic obviously but absolutely incredible that he managed to live the life that he lived You have this thing uh in your post you said how to how to spot high agency people and number one you wrote was weird teenage hobbies Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures True If they can go against the crowd as a teenager they can go against the crowd as an adult And that is that would that be yours Your weird teenage hobby was an obsession with juggling Yes Uh it I I kind of wish my dad bet me I couldn't code I would be probably on a yacht right now However I I think even with hiring my best hires that I've placed pretty much all line up in that criteria that they are have weird interesting hobbies I was listening to an interview with Palmer Lucky chatting about this and he I mean it kind of hints to some kind of intrinsic motivation as well as the ability to go against like wider mimetic forces that kind of is a good indicator So it's a very good interview question like tell me about the weird you did growing up Yeah I have a I have a variation of that We used to ask what were you uh uh what's something you were degenerately obsessed with So like basically you were obsessed with it to the point where it actually negatively affected the quality of your life like you you were too obsessed with something but you did it anyways and it's usually a video game or a hobby like this or a collecting uh you know type of thing and um and then there's a I forgot who it was some famous investor they had this uh other question they asked with it which was what's something you could give a 1-hour talk on right now unprepared like you just know it so well you spent so much time on it that if I gave you you know 45 minutes to an hour you could actually like give me a a crash course in this thing because you have mastery over And in doing so you also see how somebody communicates when they know something So uh it it does sort of two things It gives you a relative bar So if that's the thing you know best and then you compare it to the things they've been telling you about you realize oh that resume was a little shaky They don't really know how they how that that how how that operated in their company compared to how they know this And secondly it tells you how their communication skills are right Can they actually break something down simply for somebody and then build up from there intuitively like are they a good storyteller are they a good communicator or not And that doesn't need you're not you don't need that for every job but for a number of things like you know for being a CEO or being a marketer like you want to be able to do that well Yeah So phenomenal Before we kind of wrap up you had one thing here that really caught my eye Did you first of all you called your We were like what uh what ideas you want to talk about You said I'm the layered Hamilton of surfing the internet I thought that was actually hilarious Um and you said you just put one line in here and you said uh the number one underdisussed anti-depressant Um which I'm curious about And then you also said the next ADHD What are you referring to for those two things Yeah So two kind of what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians So there was a study that came out in terms of depression Could I don't know if you've seen it metronalysis of depression Guess what ranked the highest in terms of uh alleviating the symptoms of depression walking yeah working out move physical exercise So as part of that that was the big breakthrough that came out which was that uh exercise ranked more according to this this analysis than SSRIs The number one however significantly more than exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy higher than yoga higher than Tai Chi was dancing Dance therapy outperformed exercise significantly dance according to this meta analysis uh had the greatest impact in alleviating depression So I think there's potentially a headsp space or a calm to be made that is dance therapy Dude that's amazing Who knew Sam was I'd rather be depressed When's the last time you danced Sam Never I My wife My wife's the last time dude I have literally not once in my life have I been in a public place and I in the Midwest you don't cry and you don't dance That's what men don't do And you don't drink liquids out of a straw Those are the three rules of being men in in the Midwest Don't cry don't dance and don't drink liquid out of straws You're Okay let's let's work backwards You're in your 30s now You're at a friend's wedding You're just sitting down just holding down the fort at the table making sure the purses don't get stolen What What are you doing Yes Yes I am not dancing Okay Wait George would you dance at a wedding I mean you're kind of suave You probably would Of course So there's a barbell So my girlfriend is an incredible dancer She been dancer since she was like five It's what she does for a living And I realized there's a barbell when it comes to dance You either want to be the best dancer on the dance floor or the worst dancer on the dance floor Like just letting loose and not caring full on David Brent style It's the person in the middle who's either doesn't want to get on the dance floor or he's kind of half moving that is the cringest So yeah I uh I'm a big dancer I'm terrible but I'm a dancer All right Sam Prom Did you dance at prom No What'd you do Sat I just sat I I'm telling you I don't do it on a date Wow It's horrible That's That's like you know how people say like public speaking is the biggest fear Mine's dancing Public dancing Yeah Public dancing is definitely a bigger fear than public speaking for me Yeah Public dancing is pretty tough And plus I don't drink So like if I were if I were drunk then I could probably get away with it But like sober dancing as a grown man is probably like the the scariest thing one can do I'd rather go to war Wow Send me to Ukraine Right Yeah I'd rather get deployed in Baghdad than have to dance at a wedding Put that on a bumper sticker Think about this We could do this together man We can overcome this You could Wait so you're fearful of this too Uh yeah But not like you Like I I I if I'm at a thing I do it But I hate it But I do it But I kind of like it But I also kind of feel insecure about it but then I do it anyways Um I've never just taken the stance of like nope I'm out Um so no I I don't think I'm going to be dancing What What was the second thing The the next ADHD We've trying to change the subject Can't even think about dancing The next ADHD um is I think so one great idea I heard for spotting trends This came from Chris Williamson is when a new trend is coming bet on a counter trend occurring So one trend that you're seeing right now is a rise in like nationalism like people America for America um Canada for Canada China for China and one funny idea I have is so dualingo is obviously huge where people go and understand languages However AI is almost making that irrelevant I think learning a language is probably the skill of it is going to go down and down with time A funny business idea that I think could work is so when I'd speak to Chris um he would talk to me about his therapy sessions and all these revelations he's getting from therapy and I said to him I go I think 50% of this isn't anything to do with your childhood It's just being British Like you're just overcoming what it means to be British And I think there's something to be said around essentially creating a dual lingo that cures you of your nationality because I think you're going to have a barbell where you have everybody's like America for America or it's like I'm a global citizen baji network state style and you could then just localize everything So oh imagine an advert campaign I think from the advert Oh you're British um I bet you can't take compliments Uh I bet you have a lot of self-doubt and it's like yes yes yes help fix being British or if you're American uh you don't know anything in Europe You you don't like you just call Africa one big blob like let's remove that syndrome for you because you actually realize everybody is very self-conscious of their own country So that's one of my ideas that I think will be the new kind of pathology that people have around themselves The American one sounded awesome to me That's America for you That might be the market where it doesn't work Okay so this this works internationally But you don't want to cure Americans of the self-d delusion that we have that everything is great and we're great and it's all going to work out great That that paranoia that we have is is very very helpful to us If you just if you rob us of that we get worse One of my big regrets against being British is I've been early to a lot of things but then maybe didn't have the conviction Maybe it goes back to what you mentioned earlier Sam And I came up with this idea ages ago where I would like visualize um myself on my deathbed and I'd be there there's nobody there I'm at the worst version of myself Then I get a knock on the door and it's the best version of myself and it's a kind of this meditation like the deathbed regret meditation and then at the end it's like what action you going to take today and I thought this was the weirdest I'd ever created and now it's big on Tik Tok It's like a my friend was showing me it's a viral trend of these girls doing these exercise that I originally came up with and I think there's something in like hardship as a service So bet on a trend going the other way which is life is so good compared to modern uh compared to historical standards that people want more hardship in their life So I'd potentially create an app which would be a negative visualization So every day you plug it in and you are in World War II about to go over the trenches Your brother has died Your mother's written letters but you don't want to read them you don't have no way of contacting your wife and you're about to go over into the trenches and then you wake up and all of a sudden my life now is incredible So I think negative visualization is a tool from stoicism but I think there's probably a a billion dollar idea in a product a product you could build out of that Yeah dude Have you guys seen this thing Um I I'll have to send it to you It's on Instagram and it's a page and the guy uses AI and the headline will be you woke up as a slave who's going to be in who who's being forced to be a gladiator in Rome or you've woken up as a laborer in Egypt building the pyramids or you've woken up in a slum in Mumbai in 1992 and it like sets up all these like crazy scenes and then some of them are great like you woke up as an emperor uh in Rome and it shows this it shows from a PO your point of view of that person waking up in the morning and walking around Have you guys seen this Or or it could be even like you woke up as a kid in the Midwest in 1982 Have you seen that George Yes So this is the thinking from the ad first model You can already picture the ads there It then runs to a monthly subscription and you do that as your morning meditation and it replaces just observing your thoughts It's more a negative contrasting tool to make people feel better about themselves George thanks for coming on Where should people follow Twitter Twitter's the best spot Yeah Twitter's the best spot George Mack on Twitter Um high agency.com if you want to read the the full piece Um anything adds adprofessor.com as well And yeah that's that's everything You're awesome dude Every every conversation we have with you is is amazing you're a great thinker and um you really have a gift for making ideas that are let's say outside of the kind of the zone of conventional thinking and then making them sticky and memorable and kind of worth considering So I think there's it's very rare There's not a lot of people who could do that and you're one of them Thank you Thank you George You're the man Are you gonna become an American anytime soon by the way So I just landed yesterday I just had my visa approved have moved from Dubai to the US purely because I find when I'm in the US it's the look razor you're way more likely to be lucky serendipitous I don't think the quality of life here is as bad as actually is in the rest of the world now but look uh so much more significantly so yes I'm a proud Ted Lasso welcome to the tribe brother you're in Welcome to Texas I'll get you some cowboy boots and a hat and uh thanks for being here thanks for coming on the pod bless you God bless America talk And that's