The Most Valuable Skill For Any Founder

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/1ae0d6691d9a43f5

I love the show of Ted Lasso.
'Cause it's like an example of
I call getting Ted Lassowd now, which is when a Brit
Has
twice the intelligence or knowledge, but
Uh the American has
Ten X.
The agency or confidence.
And as a result, they achieve five times more. That was brilliant.
I put my law in it like my day song on the road
Travel never looked at the first time.
social chain early on.
So if people know Steve Bartlett from Divers Here, he was there early.
He then so now he has a he then created a successful marketing agency.
And then uh a couple of weeks ago you came out with this thing.
It was called high agency dot com.

George got obsessed with the way that the way that Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon
George fell in love with this idea of high agency. He started tweeting about it.
Start blogging about it. He's like, I'm gonna write up.
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, just it's not five years. When I Googled your name, I Googled George Mack High Agency. You were tweeting about this in November of two thousand eighteen.
Uh.
Seven.
So let's explain it in and the the easy way to explain it. We can put this visual up on on YouTube. So high agency, like the the the the meme that stands out to me.
Is there's a dude s deserted on an island.
And
Person and 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 bo 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, 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 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 dot com?
No. It's actually a very high agency story.
Yeah, so one of the things I I have uh
in the piece is an exercise that I do, and I recommend it. It's called turning bullshit into reality. So the way most people
kind of live in the twenty first centuries like this to do list model where they empty short term memory, like what's caching in their memory, and then they do that thing that day versus the turning bullshit to reality model is you think of a value that you want to hold or live up to, and then you come up with ideas based off that. So it's a much more creative way of living the to-do list.
So when I was actually writing the piece, it's kind of like 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 bullshit reality exercise was what about if I just get high agency dot com?
And I kind of look and it's like
Likely to be tens of thousands of dollars.
But I then started reaching out to
A few different brokers, a few little hacky people.
And
We realise that high agency dot com, the person that owned it for like
Twenty years, I think it was an old agency.
And it was about to expire.
When we looked at the domain.
So we kind of sat there.
waited for the moment that it would expire and then it went into a little mini auction and nobody else online was aware of it. It was me and a marijuana, a cannabis marketing agency, which makes sense. High agency. I hadn't thought of that. Um
And yeah, managed to get it at like essentially
for near near as free uh as a result. So that's an example of the turning bullshit 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, that I start giggling at that. That sounded like
My gut's 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 one time square with
High agency got me this billboard.
high agency dot 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
Okay, 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 ten thousand people
Listen to it.
Five times.
I would argue the latter
is much better than the former. But right now we don't have that many ways of measuring 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 will say it made them cry.
Which was not the intention at all. So I I haven't paid attention to that. I just look at the death metrics. So I 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 kinda like quickly
Spitball, what comes to mind?
So
You weren't there on this podcast, but I did a podcast with this guy, Nick Mowbray.
And Nick Mowbray'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
Seven hundred episodes, something like that. And he's a guy nobody's ever even heard of. I think this is like a Elon level entrepreneur.
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 the s 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 seventeen, eighteen years old and he's first
He goes door to door selling his his brother's like science fair project. So door to door 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 we're gonna produce thousands of units, we gotta like ramp production.
So they they said, Well, where do other toys get made? They get made in China.
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 moved to China to set up their factory and what I thought he meant was how everybody does it. You go to Ch China and you find a factory that already does this. That's the point of going to China.
He didn't even understand that. He's like, dude, to say I was naive is an understatement. He's like, We went to China
And then we just built a factory with wood but like by a river. We built a shed and that became our factory. And we
found Chinese people and we employed them in the in the factory. We created our own factory. It's like besides the point of like why you is is glamorizing it. It's like Hunt. Exactly. And then as they're pretty he's like, and by the way, worse product.
You know, everyone says, Oh, you know, product is everything. He's like, We had the worst product. We just couldn't even make it good. We were so bad at it. We just kept it slept in the thing for like years, lived off a dollar a day budget.
uh you know, eating like the cheapest ch Lina like food. They basically employ 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? Cause 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've replied. Great.
We'd love to tell you about our latest product. And then and finally, you know, they would s someone would crack it 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 twenty minutes.
And he used that to scrape in 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 uh
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 typer brand in the world right now is Rascals. He created that. And then he also created like the fastest growing uh hair care brand on TikTok. Like this guy's just prolific, right?
And I I just couldn't believe it. Uh and so th it just blew my mind. It showed me like there's so many levels of agency above where I'm at, I couldn't believe it.
George, do you think that crazy people like that are born, or 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 kinda call it the high agency spectrum. And I think
It there's definitely people who have genetic advantages. Belagi had a great uh line the other day of
Uh when we're going to be able to do
Communism ended.
we could uh the Soviets could discuss the profit for the first time. And he was talking about w 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 can imagine regardless of the
genetic roll the dice, it's possible to decrease somebody's agency.
Definitely.
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 of Ted Lasso.
'Cause it's like an example of
I call it getting Ted Lassso'd now, which is when a Brit
Has.
twice the intelligence or knowledge.
Um
But
Uh the American has
Ten X.
the agency or confidence.
And as a result, they achieve five times more. So 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 Americas 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 off at times. 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 tha that kinda reminds me of my British versus American friends.
There's a crazy stat around universities. So the top ten 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 at least a smart or at least the British sound smarter, we have that going for us. However, when it then comes to entrepreneurial output of those universities, America is like five times five times higher.
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 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 it was actually a pretty good insight, which was
You you pay attention to the you said the you said it in a very intellectual way. You're like I 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 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 Gebia 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 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
During the the four day event. There's like a conference.
And we'll give him Wi Fi, a small desk, a sleeping mat, and breakfast any every morning.
Huh.
And if it's hot with an X M H point at the end,
And he leaves it with that.
And so I I remember
Like pointing out that
I think any idea that ends with
That like genuinely you would be like ha
Like
If that's your genuine feel to 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.
'Cause I thought I might get cancelled, but then when I explain it, I think it kind of makes sense.
So
This is obviously the TikTok clip that gets me cancelled.
But then I'll explain. So don't clip it.
Essentially.
I think
Child labor.
Is underpriced.
Yeah.
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, 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 twenty thirty.
And I
Think
That's
That makes me giggle when I say it.
And I think it's true.
I think that is a very bold prediction. It doesn't even seem crazy. Dude, we had a guy on the podcast the other day who was seventeen years old.
Who had a business doing thirty million dollars a year in revenue. Yeah.
So I I have an idea, which is the next Y combinator.
Only invests between the age of eleven to eighteen years old.
First off, nobody's funding them.
Because they can't.
Um, you've got the home schooling boom right now. One of the criticisms beforehand.
Would be
They're in school, so they can't do it, but you're obviously seeing that the KOA. 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 has told me about Peter Thiel's uh Teal fellowship.
Yeah, and he was like he's
He's con he's gonna give you one hundred fifty thousand dollars to drop out of college and start a company. That was one of those it doesn't seem ridiculous. He was like I'll pay you to leave school, kids. That was it. And when he 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 people it will take ten years'cause 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 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 10 X D agency?
Another.
question I love'cause 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 were an absolute weirdo. Another example in there was around fentanyl 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 asked 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?'Cause it's a very hard question. It's a it's an important question. It's a it's worth pondering, but
It's not one where, you know, ten answers come to mind right away of
Wha what's largely ignored or like over over uh under reported today that will be
you know, historically important to historians in the future.
One funny one.
That if I was a historian this is really absurd.
But I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East.
Coming from the UK.
And
spent four to five years in Dubai.
And
One thing that's truly absurd.
About the West.
Is
Yeah.
In
The Middle East, whenever you go to the bathroom
There's like a
Ar spraying thing that you have.
In the West.
Everybody Yeah, a bit it's like a it's more like a showerhead kind of thing. So you get a Bidet, which is a separate mechanism, but it's like a little showerhead. I could go to the most remote
crazy location in the desert and they will have one.
What's it called?
What are they calling?
I I call it like an asprey. I don't I don't know what it's actually uh the official terminal talk to you about it when you're there. But th 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 Sovlin has this great bit, which is
Imagine if s a bird shot 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 fuck, man, I need to wash my hair. But meanwhile, this is going on in the West, en masse. And I think as an entrepreneurial 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. I imagine again, I think from ad first as well.
Have you seen Tushy?
No. Tushy's like an attachable bidet. It's like turns any
Dump toilet into a smart toilet type of thing.
I think they do extremely well. I think they're like north of a hundred million in revenue in uh 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's in the books of spoiler alert. It tells the story of a
A a father
Daughter
And mother. The mother leaves them.
And the father and daughter one day have this huge argument where
the f 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 five 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.
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 like 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 th there's a there's a example of in the UK.
There's a building called Grempel Tower. It was a horrific
accident that occurred where the whole building sat on fire. It was in a
Council of State.
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 six 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, uh, 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 you have you guys ever seen this, there's the nine eleven memory experiment.
What's that? 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 s I I don't have the studies in front of me, but there's a I remember learning about this that there was a a set of studies where people they went and they studied the memory accuracy.
Of people
Remembering nine eleven.
And
It was pretty shocking. There was like less than fifty percent of the details were accurate.
It was a combination of they had extreme confidence that their memories were accurate.
The memories actually were not accurate.
And then they don't not only do they not remember what happened, they actually didn't even remember how they felt. I think they had like logged at a certain 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 that you didn't even actually remember that properly.
And that
Your memories 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 kinda crazy when it comes to like the court system, for example. Like a lot of it's based on, you know, eyewitness testimony or somebody remembering certain details. But and what's funny is, Sean, is as you were describing that, I was thinking, Where was where was I at nine eleven? What was I doing? And then I'm also saying the second m the most common thing, which is
But I remember. Yeah. I'm I'm the exception. Ads don't work on me. That's what everyone's gonna say. They're they're gonna say but I remember that.
Oh, and by the way, w I told the story shown on here, I think how this one
this like prestigious journalist uh 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 re read 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 re read it and I'm like that's insane. I told myself the story that and I've said it publicly so many times. I even name dropped her once or twice.
It was wrong.
It was wrong. I d I didn't remember it correctly, and I'm I'm happy I didn't, but yeah, uh our memory's 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.
W what does that mean? Because what you're describing to me is like a philosophical philosophical like a like a mental framework. But it it actually seems like when you think about this, it's actually more tactical than that.
Yeah, it's incredibly
Tactical.
A post, I think
Two days ago that went really viral.
On pirate wires.
about how agency is the most important thing thanks to
By AI.
I think agency has always been one of the most important things. So I said it's probably
the most important idea of the twenty first century.
Or it might be. And if a British person says probably or might be.
It's almost like an American betting the house on it.
And
Uh in this part of it wise.
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 bitch.
to the algorithms these days. And I try and like find small ways to have
Agency
over the algorithm.
So like
Even I was like, Okay.
I reflected on my YouTube history. I 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 and 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
Eighty percent of them I regretted, ten percent I was neutral, and ten percent I enjoyed watching.
And then I looked at it.
And said, Okay.
What 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 thirty minutes long.
It was just a
Brain rot content, particularly under like five 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 ChatGPT to solve this problem, built a script, and now I call it the Kale algorithm. My YouTube does not show me any videos under thirty minutes. So this ability to to be able to manipulate your environment.
particularly I think with AI now, has only got bigger and bigger. So if there's agency
Everywhere. Everything is a s I don't know if you heard that phrase of everything's a skill issue. It's kinda like that for agency, like everything is just a
Agency problem.
Where else are you doing that in your life? So e even small things, just constantly each day.
Do I I recommend going back to the turning bullshit into reality. Just going through that list.
And then
operating from a creative model each day of how can I have agency and then applying it rather than going off the to do list model. So I mean

Anything from
Um writing down I want to learn.
I have always wanted to play Baker Street on the saxophone. I sat on the beach, I did turning bullshit 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 and 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 two thousand and ten on like a really weird niche blog. So there's a guy called um
Aaron
Schwartz.
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 it talks about a having a theory of action versus a theory of change. So he uses the example of
You want the United S uh 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 Spain's military.
What is
How can I do that? Or like why, why, why, how, how, how.
All the way down.
until you get to a concrete action that you can do today. Um I the piece is absolutely
Uh incredible. And I'm I think you mentioned to
Sean on the podcast the other day around how hard it can be to actually think from first principles, but using Aaron's framework, the blog post I really recommend checking out, is absolutely incredible.
Yeah, you you said on here, uh in 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 s 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 m remember I read something and I started changing
the words to
I choose to do this. I I think
I think Sean, did you actually say this? Or we I think we had 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 gonna change that word to choose.
Uh it's like 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 uh Tony Robbins event and he said it
Beautiful he goes.
You sh somebody was had set raised their hand, they said something, I should do this, you know, I know I should do this, but blah blah blah. But I just think that they should do the and they were
Saying it and he goes.
He goes, you're doing what a lot of people do.
You're shooting all over yourself. Just couldn't unhear it. He's like, people just shoot all over themselves. And I just from that moment on, it it literally
Viserily felt gross.
To say the word should.
Oh, I'm shooting all over my stuff 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, then 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.
Th there were 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.
Vibcode 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 of 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?
the the when you actually have that language itself or you have that meme those memes, it actually increases
the output of things. And then you begin to see th 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
І солнце соціалі.
And it hasn't been updated even as inflation's at a way up being a millionaire.
So
Like
I once watched a YouTube ad.
where they were talking in like a currency that's like one to ten. 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'cause 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 f I think Florence Scoville. And it's like actually kind of a hard book to read because it's one of those books that's written like
eighty years ago or something and it's just like too poetic to like actually grok nowadays.
But the whole idea is like your word is your wand, it's your magic wand and it shapes your reality exactly as you're describing.
And this applies to like
Yes, it applies to high agency, but I'll give you another example. So I tore my
Uh knee ligament.
Couple months ago.
So uh I've been recovering from it and I've been doing rehab.
And
My trainer who's like
M 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's always uses a different word so he'd be like

We're this not rehab. We're gonna renew. We're gonna refresh. We're gonna recharge. We're gonna he's like, We're gonna do something, we're gonna make that need better than it was before. And rehab already like implies some version of it's broken. We're gonna try to fix it.
versus he's like, All right, we're gonna rejuvenate this thing. We're gonna make your knee ten years younger than it would than it are than it currently is. How are we gonna do that?
It's 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 um 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 three months. I've n I'm ready to upgrade from my keyboard to like a legit piano.
More fun to play, feels better, et cetera.
And my birthday coming up. So the normal speed bar would be you kinda wait for your birthday. So you wait, but not a vi 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'em as stock, and then it's gonna take a few weeks to come and then it gets then you set a delivery date, then they show up.
And I basically set myself a challenge. I from the moment I had the idea.
I said
This inspiration is perishable.
Right, ideas are avocados. I'm I'm not gonna let this go Brown. I'm gonna do this thing right now.
And so I said, I wanna see how fast I could do this. I think the normal person, this would be like a two or three week project.
I'm gonna see if I can do this in twenty four 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 he I you know, I 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 guys and schedule a delivery for tomorrow. I'm gonna pick, but you schedule it right now because it's Friday.
And I want this delivered Saturday morning.
And
I made the whole thing happen and by eleven AM Saturday morning I had the piano in the room and I was playing it.
And I just feel like there's so many instances where if you break your speed bar in one area, you realize that like
In all areas, speed is negotiable.
that you can change the rate at which something's gonna happen in your business or in your personal life.
He he just said his his attention, his focus and his energy is his army.
How good is that? Is that what you just said? Go ahead, George.
You n 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 goes, how did he say it? He's like
I deployed an army of capital in my forties from my family to go kill and grow while I was asleep.
Dude, that's so good. That's so good.
George, who are examples that are not the Elon Muses of the world who you think represent high agency?
Can you give us a friend?

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.
Mm.
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.

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 Shering, the father of modern computing. And he has this crazy thing. So one of the things in the essay, one of my favorite by high agency aphorisms is
Just does it defy the laws of physics?
It's like a brain prompt whenever you're faced with a problem.
Does it defy the laws of physics?
And Claude Shannon.
And a guy Ed Forpe.
Wanted to hack Roulette.
So roulette is the example of the ultimate game of luck.
And
Claude Shannon and Ed Thought before the first ever mobile computer they created the first ever mobile computer that they had
In the shoe.
That would look at the
As the ball hit.
based off the probability and they hacked Roulette by managed to out compete the house by about thirty three percent. So I'd say Claude Shannon's awesome.
Sean, you should read Ed Thorpe's biography. One of the best biographies I've ever read.
Adding it to the list.
A man for market. So this guy, Ed Thorpe, he basically was a math guy. He was a math prodigy. He got sick of just making the wage that math teachers got. And so he said, I'm gonna invent a way to count cards. He did. So he invented count 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 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 he it's sort of like a force 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 gonna be super rich, and so I just decided to become one of his first investors and he went and started this thing called Berkshire Hathaway.
Uh
You know, and there's like ten or twenty stories like that where he was like, you know, I was just like poking around and I met this guy and I thought he was really smart. We stayed in touch and then he went and founded Apple. You know, like he's got like a ton of stories like that. Um, but who's the second person on your list?
Zip.
The second person on my list.
Is uh
Is it's a book.
By called c um
Don't tell me I can't.
By Cole Summers.
It's the most underrated business buck.
in the world, in my opinion. It's an hour long.
And it's written by a thirteen year old.
Who tells you the the uh 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 gonna go to school, we're gonna home school 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 he's sat there post surgery kind of
A little bit.
out of it.
And
He says Cole says to his dad
Dad, how do I get rich?
And
His dad says, I don't know, son, like maybe go watch Warren Buffett videos on YouTube. So the six year old starts watching Warren Buffett videos on YouTube and you listen to the audio book and you like taking notes of Oh my God, this kid's so smart, like the lessons he's taken from Charlie Munger.
And then at seven
I believe he starts his
first business that gets to a thousand dollars 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? Rap rabbit farming.
So he would breed rabbits and sell them. And sell them to restaurants.
So he took that to a thousand dollars per month. He then flipped a house and made I think like ten thousand dollars profit when he was uh ten years old. And it was like an abandoned house, right? It was like somebody's house that was just dilapidated, 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. It was like
There's potential here.
Yeah. He 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 zero percent tax.
So I think his book again.
Just to be clear.
Not maybe not every seven year old should have a P and L.
maybe eighty percent 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 uh by the way, this is one of those stories where he's still like fifteen or sixteen. This isn't like
No in the eighties.
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. No
That you must have lived the life that you 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 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 uh probably on a yacht right now. However, I I think
Even with hiring.
Yeah.
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 Palmalucky 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 shit 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 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 one 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, forty five minutes to an hour.
You could actually like give me a a a crash course in this thing because you have mastery over it.
And in doing so, you also see how somebody communicates when they know something.
So
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 d how that
that how how that operated in their company compared to how they know this.
And then 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 wanna be able to do that well.
Mm.
Yes, the phenomenal.
before we kinda wrap up, you had one thing here that really caught my eye.
Did you s first of all, you called your we were like what uh what ideas you want to talk about? You said I'm the Laird 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 under discussed antidepressant
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 I g kind of one 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.
Metro analysis is depression.
Yes.
what rank the highest in terms of uh alleviating the symptoms of depression.
Walking.
Yeah, working out m 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 uh according to this metro analysis uh had the greatest impact in alleviating depression. So I think there's potentially a headspace or a calm to be made that is dance.
Therapy.
That's amazing. Who knew?
Sam, I'd rather be depressed. When's the last time you dance, Sam? Never. I my wife all dude. When's the last time I literally not once in my life.
Have I been in a public place in a 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 beat men in in the Midwest. Don't cry, don't dance, and don't drink liquid out of straws. Okay, let's let's work backwards. You're in your thirties now. You're at a friend's wedding. You're just sitting down?
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 kinda suave. You probably would.
Of course so there's a barbell. So my girlfriend is an incredible dancer. She
been downstairs since she was like five.
It's what she does for a living. And I realize 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 carrying 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 cringies. So yeah, I uh I'm a big dancer.
I'm terrible.
But I'm a dancer.
All right, Sam.
Prom?
Did it's a prom?
No.
What did you do?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just sat. I I'm tell you, I don't do it. I'm 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's 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 the depressant, Sam.
Wow. Send me to Ukraine. 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. 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 kinda like it. But I also kinda I feel insecure about it. But then I do it anyways.
Um
I've never just taken the stance of like, nope amount.
Um
So no, I I don't think I'm gonna be dancing. Wha what was the second thing? The the next ADHD
Try to change the subject.
Next ADHD.
Um
Is
I think
So one great idea I heard for spotting trends is 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 Duolingo 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 gonna go down and down with time. A funny business idea that I think
Could work.
Is
So when I 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 fifty percent of this isn't anything to do with your childhood. It's just being British.
You're just overcoming.
And I think
There's something to be said around c essentially creating a
Duolingo.
The
Cures you of your nationality.
'Cause I think you're gonna have a barbell where you have everybody's like America for America, or it's like I'm a global citizen Balaji network state style. And you could then just localize everything. So oh imagine an advert campaign, I think, from the ad first. Oh, you're British. 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'cause 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 might be the market where it doesn't work.
Okay, so this like this works internationally. But you don't want to curve Americans of the self delusion that we have that everything is great and we're great and it's all gonna work out great.
That that uh pronoun 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 that kind of this meditation, like the deathbed regret meditation. And then at the end it's like what action are you gonna take today? And I thought this was the weirdest fucking shit I've ever created. And now it's big on TikTok. 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 Two.
About to go over the trenches.
Your
Brother has died.
Your mother's written letters, but you don't want to read them.
You d 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'll 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 uh who who's being forced to be a uh 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 Mabai in nineteen ninety two.
And it like sets up all these like crazy scenes. And then some of them are great. Like you woke up as an emperor
Uh in Rome.
And it shows the it shows from a P of uh your point of view of that person waking up in the morning and walking around. Have you guys seen this? Or it could be even like
You woke up as a kid in the Midwest in nineteen eighty two. Have you seen that, George?
Yes. So this is the put thinking from the Add 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 Mac on Twitter.
Album.
high agency
Dot com.
If you want to read the the full piece, um, anything adds add professor.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 l 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 very it's very rare. There's not a lot of people who could do that and you're one of them.
Thank you. Thank you, George. Likewise. You're the man.
Are you gonna become an American any time soon, by the way?
So I just landed.
Yesterday.
I just have my visa approved.
have moved from Dubai to the US purely because
I find when I'm in the US is the look raiser.
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. God bless ya. God bless America. Talk soon.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back