ATHLLC1656406341

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.720 | - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks,

00:00:05.560 | a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

00:00:08.360 | I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm so excited you're here today

00:00:10.600 | for an in-person conversation with my good friend

00:00:13.440 | and second time guest, Sahil Bloom.

00:00:16.000 | He's one of my favorite writers,

00:00:17.560 | and the life lessons he shares online

00:00:19.360 | are some of the best I've come across,

00:00:21.520 | and his newsletter and Twitter are must follows.

00:00:24.140 | But today, I wanna focus on a specific topic

00:00:26.440 | he's written about more than just about anyone out there,

00:00:29.080 | and that's razors.

00:00:30.520 | No, not razors for shaving,

00:00:32.280 | but these simple guiding principles or rules of thumb

00:00:35.360 | that can help make decision-making so much easier.

00:00:38.160 | We're gonna talk about razors

00:00:39.160 | that'll help you make decisions

00:00:40.280 | with people and relationships,

00:00:42.120 | when you think about yourself,

00:00:43.820 | just general decision-making, whether it's work or home,

00:00:46.880 | and how you spend your time.

00:00:48.720 | There's a lot of great advice in this episode,

00:00:51.460 | and ever since reading Sahil's first post on the topic,

00:00:54.200 | I found myself using these razors regularly,

00:00:56.880 | and I'm sure they will add a ton of value to your life.

00:00:59.700 | So without further ado, let's jump in right after this.

00:01:03.280 | My fitness routine this year had a few rocky starts,

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00:02:29.300 | Zahil, thanks for being here.

00:02:32.460 | - I'm so happy to be doing this in person.

00:02:34.420 | - I don't do a lot of these in person.

00:02:35.500 | We're in New York City at Podstream,

00:02:37.100 | which I've never been to, but--

00:02:38.100 | - Right in the center of Times Square,

00:02:39.340 | but we are in a dark room between two ferns, as it were.

00:02:43.140 | - Yeah, we are.

00:02:43.980 | So much of what you've written online

00:02:45.980 | for the past few years has had a big impact on me,

00:02:48.300 | and every time I come into a conversation,

00:02:50.260 | I'm like, "Oh, there's so much."

00:02:51.400 | But I got this advice from someone recently about travel.

00:02:54.540 | They said, "Whenever you go to travel,

00:02:56.220 | "pretend like you're going to that city

00:02:58.360 | "a million times for the rest of your life,

00:02:59.600 | "and just don't feel like this is your last trip."

00:03:01.560 | So I'm gonna treat this conversation

00:03:02.520 | like it's not our last conversation on the show,

00:03:04.880 | so I don't have to cover everything.

00:03:06.780 | So I thought back to one of the first content of yours

00:03:09.360 | that I'd read, and it was all about razors,

00:03:10.880 | which at the time, I was like,

00:03:12.020 | "I don't even know what that is."

00:03:13.400 | And I felt like that would be a great place

00:03:15.520 | to start for this conversation.

00:03:17.400 | But like everyone else listening, I'm sure,

00:03:20.640 | people don't know what razors are.

00:03:22.100 | So can you talk a little bit about what they even are,

00:03:24.240 | and we can jump into why they're important?

00:03:25.700 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:03:26.600 | So it's not for shaving,

00:03:29.040 | would be the first thing I would start with, I suppose.

00:03:30.840 | I mean, a philosophical razor, the term is from philosophy,

00:03:35.160 | and basically the idea is that it's a rule of thumb

00:03:37.360 | or some sort of decision-making heuristic

00:03:39.440 | that allows you to cut through available options

00:03:42.040 | and make a decision.

00:03:43.040 | So the whole idea was like, in philosophy,

00:03:45.400 | you can take a razor and it allows you to strip away

00:03:48.320 | any of the unnecessary things

00:03:49.780 | in order to cut through the noise and just make a decision.

00:03:51.980 | So Occam's razor is the one that,

00:03:53.980 | if people know a single razor,

00:03:55.640 | Occam's razor is the thing they've heard of,

00:03:57.440 | and that's like the whole idea

00:03:58.560 | that basically simple is beautiful.

00:04:00.160 | It's like if you have a whole bunch of hypotheses,

00:04:03.160 | the one that requires the fewest assumptions

00:04:05.240 | is generally the one that is right

00:04:07.360 | if you're looking to decide which path

00:04:09.360 | you believe is the driver of some situation.

00:04:11.840 | So I've written a bunch about razors,

00:04:13.760 | and basically like extending the concept

00:04:16.040 | into a whole bunch of different realms.

00:04:17.460 | I think a lot about ways to simplify decision-making.

00:04:20.120 | It's always been something that I've liked.

00:04:21.560 | You're sort of similar to that,

00:04:22.720 | like life hacks are all sort of razors

00:04:25.200 | in their own way, shape, or form,

00:04:26.320 | like ways to make a decision, cut through things,

00:04:29.400 | that'll just simplify your life, hopefully,

00:04:30.920 | like tools in your toolkit.

00:04:32.200 | So that's been the kind of genesis

00:04:34.080 | of me writing about them in the past.

00:04:35.400 | - I think when it comes to my whole scope in life

00:04:37.600 | is like how do I optimize everything?

00:04:39.120 | I think one of the challenges you get into

00:04:40.840 | is there's just too much and you get overwhelmed.

00:04:43.680 | So for me, I love this idea of razors, rules of thumb,

00:04:47.280 | to just make some of it a little easier.

00:04:48.920 | - Yeah, although the risk is that you then

00:04:50.400 | have like a million razors,

00:04:51.680 | which would be the pushback against this,

00:04:53.200 | which is like, oh, I have a million razors,

00:04:54.780 | I can't remember a single one of them.

00:04:56.240 | So the way I always think about these things

00:04:58.280 | is like tools in your toolkit.

00:04:59.880 | You don't need to like know that you have

00:05:02.040 | all of those different wrenches

00:05:03.400 | or all those different things at every single point in time.

00:05:05.520 | You just need to like have your toolkit

00:05:07.640 | and be able to open it up and think about,

00:05:09.960 | okay, what applies to a situation at any point in time?

00:05:12.480 | And I don't expect anyone listening to go home

00:05:14.080 | and be like, oh, I got 17 razors to use in my life.

00:05:17.280 | I did try to bulk them into a couple categories

00:05:20.000 | 'cause I thought that might be helpful for people to think,

00:05:21.680 | okay, I need to make a decision on this thing.

00:05:24.200 | Is there something that might make this easier?

00:05:25.920 | So the first one I thought about was related to people,

00:05:28.360 | the optimist razor, which I consider myself an optimist,

00:05:30.840 | so I like this one.

00:05:31.940 | Let's start there and kind of go through a few people one

00:05:34.260 | and see where we get.

00:05:35.100 | - So the optimist razor is basically the idea

00:05:37.320 | that you should always default

00:05:40.000 | to trying to spend time with optimists.

00:05:41.860 | And if you have a choice between spending time

00:05:43.520 | with optimists and pessimists,

00:05:44.720 | you're always better off spending time with optimists.

00:05:46.800 | I originally came up with this during the period of COVID

00:05:50.320 | when there was a whole ton of pessimism out there

00:05:52.800 | around like, oh, the markets are going to hell,

00:05:55.000 | the economy's going to hell.

00:05:56.040 | And then there was like little shades of optimism

00:05:58.600 | and like kind of mid-2020 about,

00:06:01.280 | okay, but a lot of these things are happening X, Y, and Z

00:06:04.520 | that might be positive actually for the future.

00:06:06.480 | Like the Fed was printing trillions and trillions of dollars.

00:06:09.040 | And what I found was my initial skew was to pessimism.

00:06:12.720 | And I was like, oh, short the market,

00:06:14.160 | everything's going bad, everything's going bad.

00:06:16.120 | And really regretted that after a few months

00:06:18.580 | when I realized that the optimists

00:06:20.040 | were actually the ones that were getting rich

00:06:21.600 | by betting on things going well in that time period.

00:06:24.680 | And so I started just thinking about,

00:06:26.960 | well, there's this little heuristic

00:06:29.360 | that pessimists sound really smart,

00:06:33.040 | but optimists seem to be getting really rich.

00:06:36.120 | And it all of a sudden cemented in my mind like,

00:06:38.720 | okay, there's something to this.

00:06:40.040 | And really I want to be spending more time

00:06:42.080 | around optimists in general.

00:06:43.920 | - But it's not just about investing and making money.

00:06:46.440 | It can be just who you want to hang out with on the weekend.

00:06:48.640 | - Totally, that's why it applies so broadly to life.

00:06:51.080 | And when I took it beyond that, I just started thinking,

00:06:53.960 | like, who do you feel good when you're around?

00:06:55.820 | Just as a general rule of thumb,

00:06:57.280 | you're like, who do I get energy from?

00:06:59.640 | Who makes me happy and feel good to be around?

00:07:02.100 | And that tends to be optimists.

00:07:03.280 | Like again, pessimists, they sound smart

00:07:05.280 | and they have a lot of things and negativity, et cetera.

00:07:08.040 | But being around people that are positive

00:07:09.560 | and optimistic about the future,

00:07:10.920 | about what it looks like in any arena,

00:07:13.000 | just tends to feel better.

00:07:14.320 | And what I find is that good things happen

00:07:16.520 | when you spend time with optimists.

00:07:18.200 | They just have a better outlook on the future.

00:07:19.880 | And if you believe that energy attracts energy,

00:07:22.560 | optimists tend to attract good outcomes.

00:07:24.560 | - What about finding people to work with

00:07:27.440 | more than just hanging out?

00:07:28.560 | - And it applies to another kind of area

00:07:30.840 | that I've thought about, which is originally

00:07:33.080 | from Nassim Taleb, the author of "Black Swan."

00:07:37.280 | I forget what book it's in.

00:07:38.440 | It's either in "Skin in the Game" or "Antifragile,"

00:07:41.520 | where he talks about this whole thing of the surgeon

00:07:44.240 | and how you pick a surgeon.

00:07:45.440 | And so he tells this story of you're choosing

00:07:47.560 | between two surgeons who are of equal merit.

00:07:50.520 | Assume they both have the same track record

00:07:52.320 | of successful surgery, say.

00:07:53.840 | And one of them looks like this beautiful,

00:07:55.840 | polished Harvard Medical School credentialed surgeon,

00:07:59.560 | like perfect, clean cut, everything's good.

00:08:01.360 | And then the other one looks like a butcher.

00:08:03.480 | He's got blood all over him.

00:08:04.760 | He just doesn't look the part.

00:08:05.840 | He's big hands, whatever, big beard, scraggly.

00:08:09.120 | And his whole thing is that most people

00:08:11.560 | pick the nice, clean cut surgeon

00:08:14.160 | when what you should actually do

00:08:16.000 | is pick the one who doesn't look the part.

00:08:17.920 | And his logic is that the one who doesn't look the part

00:08:20.800 | has had to overcome not looking the part

00:08:23.120 | in order to get to where they are.

00:08:24.600 | And so if they have equal merit,

00:08:26.560 | that one is actually the better one

00:08:27.920 | because they've had to overcome not looking

00:08:30.360 | like they should all along the way

00:08:32.200 | in order to get to that level.

00:08:33.640 | And I've always thought that was another interesting way

00:08:35.760 | of thinking about who to work with

00:08:37.080 | because we do have all of these little biases

00:08:39.960 | and prejudices that are in our head

00:08:41.520 | and people that have managed to overcome all of those

00:08:44.080 | all along the way to get to where they are

00:08:46.080 | tend to be great, great people to work with.

00:08:48.400 | - I don't know if you've ever done

00:08:49.400 | unconscious bias training,

00:08:51.400 | but it just kind of opens your eyes up to,

00:08:53.040 | oh, okay, even someone who might not think you have bias,

00:08:55.920 | you have bias for sure.

00:08:57.120 | - Yeah, I mean, the statistics on those things are insane.

00:08:59.400 | Like you can go on Google and just look one up

00:09:01.760 | and do one of the tests quickly

00:09:03.160 | and you can get a score on it.

00:09:04.560 | It's usually pretty shocking.

00:09:05.880 | - What about smart friends?

00:09:07.040 | - Again, like with people,

00:09:08.320 | the smart friends one is basically

00:09:11.280 | that if you have enough smart friends

00:09:13.600 | talking about something, you should take it seriously.

00:09:15.960 | And again, like a lot of these were for me

00:09:19.600 | derived from bad experiences,

00:09:21.560 | like where I didn't listen to this

00:09:23.080 | and then I came to regret it.

00:09:24.320 | Again, going back to early COVID,

00:09:25.720 | like all of these smart friends of mine

00:09:27.320 | were talking about Bored Ape Yacht Club

00:09:29.680 | as like a silly example,

00:09:30.640 | which maybe now it's like not as much of a thing,

00:09:32.480 | but at the time it was like this NFT project.

00:09:35.440 | I didn't understand what NFTs were,

00:09:36.560 | but I had all these friends that were talking about it.

00:09:38.680 | And I was like, dude, that sounds stupid.

00:09:40.320 | I'm just going to ignore this.

00:09:41.160 | Like, that sounds super dumb.

00:09:42.160 | But I had multiple friends saying it over and over again.

00:09:44.240 | If I had listened to them and done something about it,

00:09:47.840 | 12 months after that,

00:09:48.880 | I probably would have made like a million dollars

00:09:50.400 | off of just putting in a little bit of money

00:09:52.280 | into this thing.

00:09:53.120 | And so I developed a rule basically

00:09:54.760 | that was if three friends that I consider intelligent

00:09:56.880 | tell me about the same thing,

00:09:58.520 | I'm going to put like a little bit of skin into the game

00:10:00.560 | no matter what.

00:10:01.400 | Even if I'm not going to go deeper on it,

00:10:02.960 | it just like gives me kind of a hedge

00:10:04.960 | against looking like an idiot later on

00:10:06.720 | like I did with that one.

00:10:08.160 | But again, it's just another way of thinking about

00:10:11.600 | drafting off of the intelligence of your peer group.

00:10:14.960 | Like if you have smart people that are talking about things

00:10:17.300 | and you're in the circles with intelligent people

00:10:19.040 | that have domain expertise that goes beyond yours,

00:10:21.800 | listening to them and taking it seriously

00:10:23.860 | when there's enough density in a single idea

00:10:26.200 | is usually a good bet.

00:10:27.500 | Presumably they have to be excited about it

00:10:29.400 | or just talking about it.

00:10:30.360 | I think excited about it and domain experts.

00:10:32.880 | You don't want to have your like coder and engineer friends

00:10:36.240 | maybe like weighing in on like culture and fashion

00:10:39.140 | and being like, oh, I'm going to listen to them.

00:10:40.880 | You want it to be people like if they're in technology

00:10:43.160 | and they're weighing in on some new technology,

00:10:44.800 | like AI could be an example today.

00:10:46.800 | If you have a certain domain within AI

00:10:48.760 | that a bunch of your smart friends

00:10:50.240 | are really interested and excited about,

00:10:51.960 | it's worth taking seriously.

00:10:53.080 | It doesn't mean you have to invest in it or do something,

00:10:55.240 | but it's worth at least digging into it

00:10:56.640 | and trying to understand more

00:10:57.800 | 'cause it might be like an asymmetric bet on the future.

00:11:01.080 | - Right now I feel like this about AI,

00:11:03.340 | except I just don't know how to make that asymmetric bet

00:11:06.080 | or maybe it's not even asymmetric anymore

00:11:07.480 | because what is it like 100 million people

00:11:09.640 | are using ChatGPT at this point?

00:11:10.760 | - Is it really 100 million people?

00:11:11.960 | - Growth curve on ChatGPT, you can search it

00:11:14.160 | or I'll find the link and put in the show notes.

00:11:16.240 | It's like Instagram grew to 100 million users this fast

00:11:19.360 | and all this and you see these curves like this

00:11:21.040 | and then ChatGPT is just like a straight line.

00:11:22.720 | - Straight line up.

00:11:23.560 | I think I've seen that.

00:11:24.840 | I still just wonder with technology stuff like this,

00:11:27.800 | how much of it is that we're just in a bubble

00:11:29.680 | of sort of like semi-nerdy people on Twitter

00:11:32.520 | versus true mass proliferation of an idea.

00:11:36.320 | I honestly just don't know.

00:11:37.360 | I think ChatGPT has probably crossed the chasm,

00:11:39.380 | but I used to wonder that like with Web3 stuff,

00:11:42.520 | like if you go to like a normal person on the street,

00:11:44.480 | they're like, "What the hell's an NFT?"

00:11:45.640 | Right, and so like there clearly wasn't

00:11:47.600 | a mass proliferation of the idea.

00:11:49.720 | The utility of ChatGPT makes me believe

00:11:52.000 | that it is actually mass proliferating.

00:11:54.520 | - It's funny 'cause I had this experience this morning.

00:11:56.120 | I flew to New York today and I'm waiting for my bag

00:11:59.360 | to go through the metal detector

00:12:00.480 | and I hear three TSA agents talking about AI.

00:12:04.160 | And they're like, "Yo, I use this thing

00:12:05.880 | "and it creates song lyrics, it creates art."

00:12:08.960 | And I was like, "Okay."

00:12:10.480 | It's clearly crossed to the mainstream,

00:12:13.280 | but the use cases everyone's excited about

00:12:15.160 | are not necessarily use cases

00:12:16.720 | that I think will drive business.

00:12:18.320 | The challenge I have is it's something

00:12:20.600 | that I feel really passionate about being big

00:12:22.440 | and have no clue how to bet on.

00:12:24.760 | And there was a pretty good episode of the All In podcast

00:12:27.800 | where they were debating how to invest in this space.

00:12:30.400 | And these are some of the smartest investors in the world.

00:12:33.280 | And I can't remember which one said,

00:12:34.680 | "I still haven't invested."

00:12:35.920 | Because if you look at the early days

00:12:37.880 | of so many of these industries, even look at social,

00:12:40.520 | like the first few social networks actually didn't work out.

00:12:43.440 | And so I'm frustrated 'cause I feel like

00:12:45.960 | there's a there there,

00:12:47.080 | but I don't actually know what to do about it.

00:12:48.520 | - If you're gonna invest,

00:12:49.400 | you also have to separate it from hype cycle.

00:12:51.120 | Like normally TSA agents talking about it,

00:12:52.960 | I would say is like really peak hype cycle of something.

00:12:55.360 | And so hype cycle drives valuations.

00:12:57.760 | And so like I have this fund

00:12:58.880 | where I invest in early stage companies.

00:13:00.680 | And if you were to look at like the average deal

00:13:03.740 | that says they're an AI company right now,

00:13:05.800 | like the valuation at pre-seed or seed

00:13:07.520 | is like 25, $30 million,

00:13:09.240 | which is very, very hard to drive a return

00:13:11.800 | in the aggregate across an asset class.

00:13:13.800 | And that's what I struggle with is like

00:13:15.720 | they're benefiting from hype cycle on their early valuation,

00:13:18.460 | which hurts investors on the margin.

00:13:20.200 | And so it's tough.

00:13:21.400 | It's tough to like discern, okay, what's there,

00:13:23.760 | what's actually just gonna get eaten

00:13:25.360 | by whatever big company decides to do this.

00:13:27.480 | It's tricky.

00:13:28.320 | And most of them, by the way,

00:13:29.140 | are just doing like an open AI API call.

00:13:32.080 | They don't actually have anything internally

00:13:33.960 | or proprietary about it.

00:13:35.080 | And it's like, okay,

00:13:36.080 | you're just linking to another person's platform.

00:13:38.800 | - The number of companies that have pitched me a thing

00:13:40.620 | that's like, hey, we take a document

00:13:42.520 | and we give you answers on it.

00:13:43.540 | And I'm like, you're just monetizing this other API.

00:13:45.800 | - With like your own UI/UX.

00:13:47.240 | Although a lot of companies have been built

00:13:49.240 | in that general way in different areas

00:13:51.640 | where it's just like,

00:13:52.600 | oh, we link to whatever platform

00:13:54.080 | we're using their back end, so.

00:13:55.680 | - I'm not saying that company can't make money.

00:13:57.400 | I'm just skeptical in investing

00:13:58.660 | in anything at these valuations.

00:14:00.000 | - Totally.

00:14:00.820 | - But to come back to Razors,

00:14:01.660 | what do you do when someone comes to you with a crazy idea?

00:14:03.980 | - Oh man.

00:14:04.880 | So my favorite thing around crazy ideas is,

00:14:09.280 | I think it was Paul Graham, famous investor.

00:14:11.760 | He didn't actually frame it as a Razor.

00:14:13.020 | I turned it into a Razor,

00:14:14.000 | but he wrote this piece on what to do

00:14:16.080 | if someone comes to you with a crazy idea.

00:14:17.600 | And basically his thing boiled down to two questions

00:14:19.920 | to ask yourself, are they a domain expert?

00:14:22.280 | And do I know them to be a reasonable person?

00:14:24.560 | And if the answer to both of those things is yes,

00:14:27.260 | then you should probably take the idea seriously

00:14:29.360 | because it might be an asymmetric bet on the future.

00:14:31.720 | And I thought that was such an elegant way

00:14:33.160 | to think about this because it's very easy

00:14:35.920 | to write off crazy ideas.

00:14:37.120 | Like you hear something and you're like,

00:14:38.180 | you don't understand it.

00:14:39.020 | So you're just like, that sounds ridiculous.

00:14:41.200 | Like that seems ludicrous that that would ever happen

00:14:43.320 | or that the future would look like that.

00:14:44.940 | But if you slow down

00:14:45.780 | and you ask yourself those two questions,

00:14:47.480 | you can actually like totally deconstruct the entire problem.

00:14:50.600 | You're asking like, are they domain experts?

00:14:52.240 | So do they understand this thing

00:14:53.800 | that they're talking about?

00:14:54.840 | Like the area around this thing very, very well.

00:14:57.080 | If the answer is yes, move on to the next question,

00:14:59.000 | which is, are they a reasonable person

00:15:00.360 | or are they completely ridiculous?

00:15:01.880 | And if you know they're completely ridiculous,

00:15:03.240 | you're like, okay, maybe I'm gonna hesitate a little bit.

00:15:05.700 | But if they're not,

00:15:06.540 | if you know that they're like a reasonable person

00:15:08.320 | and that they do reasonable things,

00:15:10.180 | now you start to take the whole thing seriously

00:15:12.160 | a little bit based on those two.

00:15:13.640 | So I've always thought that that was like a really,

00:15:15.240 | really good way to cut through the noise on it.

00:15:17.320 | - I find that my instinct is often to be like,

00:15:19.800 | that's not right.

00:15:20.780 | - Totally.

00:15:21.620 | - I think that's most of our common instinct

00:15:22.920 | when we hear anything.

00:15:23.760 | - Especially 'cause I don't understand it.

00:15:25.280 | Like I'm not technical enough to know

00:15:27.080 | on most of these things.

00:15:28.160 | And so when someone says something

00:15:29.440 | that sounds crazy to me about the future,

00:15:31.440 | what the future is gonna look like,

00:15:32.600 | what people are gonna be doing,

00:15:33.840 | my default is like, that's stupid.

00:15:35.800 | No, no way.

00:15:37.160 | And generally on like five or 10 year time horizons,

00:15:40.200 | anything I thought was stupid,

00:15:41.320 | I've been completely wrong about.

00:15:42.740 | Like if there were enough people talking about it,

00:15:44.020 | like e-sports, like someone said this to me,

00:15:45.960 | I don't know, it's probably 2009.

00:15:47.440 | Like when I got to college, someone was like,

00:15:48.760 | dude, e-sports is gonna be the next big thing.

00:15:50.520 | People are gonna fill stadiums

00:15:51.840 | watching people play video games.

00:15:53.120 | And I was like, you are an idiot.

00:15:55.160 | I'm not listening to you anymore.

00:15:56.360 | That was dumb.

00:15:57.240 | And again, if I had bet on that in some way,

00:15:59.880 | that would have turned out pretty well for me at the time.

00:16:01.880 | And so now my new default is like,

00:16:04.540 | I take anything any smart person says,

00:16:06.600 | at least remotely seriously.

00:16:08.160 | One of my razors was around like listening.

00:16:10.680 | And the whole idea was like,

00:16:12.080 | if someone says something

00:16:13.680 | that is very different from your beliefs,

00:16:15.920 | you should listen twice as much as you speak.

00:16:18.720 | And that applies to this type of thing

00:16:21.160 | with like new investment ideas

00:16:22.560 | or like ideas on what the future of technology looks like,

00:16:24.960 | just as much as political debates

00:16:26.560 | or anything that you're trying

00:16:27.660 | to kind of educate yourself on.

00:16:29.080 | Because generally our bias when we hear something

00:16:32.760 | that we don't agree with becomes,

00:16:35.800 | okay, I'm just gonna talk over them

00:16:37.440 | and I'm gonna tell them why they're wrong about this thing.

00:16:39.640 | But if you flip the script on that

00:16:41.080 | and you say like, I'm actually just gonna listen

00:16:42.600 | to a whole bunch and at least hear them out,

00:16:45.440 | usually you end up learning something.

00:16:46.960 | Even if you don't agree with them at the end, that's fine,

00:16:49.080 | but you end up learning something

00:16:50.400 | from how they're thinking about it.

00:16:52.160 | - Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be.

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00:19:24.540 | Well, also, I think one of your life hacks,

00:19:26.620 | so Zyla has this great PDF of 50 life hacks.

00:19:29.820 | If I remember right, it's trying to be interested,

00:19:33.060 | not interesting.

00:19:34.540 | Yeah, I mean, this is like a simple reframe,

00:19:37.100 | especially when you're young.

00:19:38.500 | I definitely fell into this trap

00:19:39.840 | when I first started my career.

00:19:41.380 | My whole thing was like, okay,

00:19:42.580 | if I'm gonna go to an event and I'm gonna talk to people,

00:19:44.780 | I really wanna be interesting.

00:19:46.100 | I wanna talk about all the interesting things I'm doing

00:19:48.600 | or the interesting things.

00:19:49.440 | The challenge is on the margin,

00:19:50.800 | most people are not that interesting at 22, at 25.

00:19:53.340 | Frankly, most people aren't interesting

00:19:55.540 | for the first 10 years of their career

00:19:56.780 | 'cause you just haven't done enough.

00:19:57.980 | There's not enough experiences in your life.

00:20:00.420 | And so my whole reframe around it

00:20:02.860 | is focus on being interested rather than interesting.

00:20:06.100 | And being interested means you're listening

00:20:08.380 | to people, it means you're asking follow-up questions,

00:20:10.500 | you're diving down the rabbit hole with them

00:20:12.500 | to learn more about why they think certain things

00:20:14.700 | or why they're interested in certain things.

00:20:16.940 | And when you do that, people want you around

00:20:19.260 | 'cause interested people are really fun to be around

00:20:21.980 | 'cause they're actually listening to you

00:20:23.100 | and they're actually asking follow-up questions.

00:20:24.820 | Most people at a cocktail event or at a party or whatever

00:20:28.300 | are just waiting for their turn to speak.

00:20:30.620 | You're talking to someone, having a conversation,

00:20:33.020 | and you see them sitting there and they're just like,

00:20:34.820 | mm, mm, mm, mm, and then as soon as you get done,

00:20:37.060 | you're like, ah, they jump in with their thing.

00:20:39.020 | And that's not a particularly fun conversation partner.

00:20:41.620 | So I just think it's a great way to stand out

00:20:43.860 | in conversations and to actually learn things

00:20:45.860 | when you're in them.

00:20:46.780 | - And it doesn't even have to be

00:20:47.780 | if you don't have anything interesting.

00:20:49.140 | It could just be to build more relationships.

00:20:50.820 | - Totally, I just think it's a good way

00:20:51.900 | to live life in general.

00:20:53.420 | You end up learning so much interesting stuff

00:20:55.420 | by just being interested.

00:20:57.100 | And paradoxically, being interested

00:20:59.860 | is how you become interesting

00:21:01.740 | because then you end up getting into those cool situations.

00:21:04.160 | You end up learning interesting things.

00:21:05.860 | And that's what you end up going

00:21:07.020 | and capitalizing on, working on, et cetera.

00:21:09.260 | - And how do you start that conversation?

00:21:10.420 | I think there was another life hack

00:21:11.380 | about just how to start the conversation to build it.

00:21:13.380 | - I just found myself in a lot of meetings

00:21:17.620 | or situations where I was way over my skis

00:21:20.580 | early in my career.

00:21:21.700 | I've always just been great about finding my way

00:21:24.580 | into weird situations that I don't belong in.

00:21:26.940 | Even this last weekend,

00:21:28.180 | I was at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting

00:21:29.820 | and I had a chance to talk to Bill Gates.

00:21:31.860 | In a situation like that, you're like,

00:21:33.020 | what am I possibly gonna have to offer

00:21:34.860 | or talk to Bill Gates about?

00:21:36.100 | I don't have anything possibly interesting

00:21:38.620 | that he would find interesting

00:21:39.980 | given who he has access to.

00:21:41.740 | So what I've found is that the best way

00:21:43.780 | to get someone like that talking

00:21:45.260 | in what would otherwise be a weird, clumsy,

00:21:47.320 | awkward situation is to ask them

00:21:48.980 | what they are most excited about in their life right now.

00:21:51.860 | And that can be personal or professional.

00:21:53.620 | They can take it however they want it.

00:21:55.300 | And normally, really successful people

00:21:57.460 | have something that they're fired up about

00:21:59.620 | at any point in time.

00:22:00.740 | And if you can get them talking about that,

00:22:02.580 | then it becomes really easy.

00:22:03.740 | The pressure's off you.

00:22:04.900 | They're excited.

00:22:05.740 | They're energetic about whatever it is

00:22:07.540 | that they're telling you about.

00:22:08.460 | And then you can just ask follow-up questions.

00:22:10.300 | You can just dig deeper on stuff,

00:22:11.820 | again, to being interested.

00:22:13.220 | And that becomes a much, much easier conversation

00:22:15.420 | with anyone.

00:22:16.700 | - And so what was Bill Gates interested in?

00:22:18.100 | - What was Bill Gates excited about?

00:22:20.020 | I actually don't know that I'm allowed

00:22:21.780 | to talk about the thing that he was excited about

00:22:24.460 | in public 'cause it was in a private setting.

00:22:25.940 | So I actually don't wanna share it.

00:22:27.100 | - Okay, but it was a fun conversation.

00:22:29.060 | - I mean, short, fun conversation.

00:22:30.660 | And you get someone that otherwise

00:22:32.620 | you would be like, "Hi," to, to talk for five minutes.

00:22:35.520 | That's like an amazing experience and opportunity.

00:22:37.580 | It was generally around climate technology,

00:22:39.700 | something that he's working on.

00:22:40.860 | - It's funny, I talked to Catherine Minchu

00:22:42.420 | who runs this company called The Muse,

00:22:43.820 | based in New York, and her power move

00:22:46.100 | in situations like this also,

00:22:47.540 | when you're talking to someone

00:22:48.380 | that's more senior than you,

00:22:50.580 | chances are that person is like,

00:22:51.600 | "When is this gonna end?"

00:22:52.700 | Like, yes, you can make them excited.

00:22:54.180 | She tries to be the one that always ends it first.

00:22:56.820 | She's like, "Oh, I'm gonna remember that person.

00:22:58.220 | "Like, I could talk to them again

00:22:59.660 | "because they didn't just sit here and dominate my time."

00:23:01.660 | - Oh, that's interesting.

00:23:02.620 | - She brought up a time where she was at some conference

00:23:04.900 | and she was talking to Elon,

00:23:06.500 | and in the middle of it, she's like,

00:23:07.560 | "Hey, you know what?

00:23:08.400 | "I gotta go, but it was really great to talk to you,"

00:23:10.060 | and just walked away.

00:23:10.900 | - That is a power move.

00:23:11.740 | - And she said it's made people that otherwise

00:23:14.540 | would be like, "When is this person

00:23:15.380 | "gonna leave this conference?"

00:23:16.780 | It just made it so much better.

00:23:18.060 | - Yeah, and it makes it less awkward

00:23:19.340 | for them to have to end it, too,

00:23:20.660 | like when you just do it.

00:23:21.820 | I also find, by the way, that following up

00:23:24.020 | and sending someone a book

00:23:25.260 | is one of the best life hacks in the world

00:23:27.380 | because all of these hyper, hyper successful people

00:23:30.900 | get sent so many fancy bottles of wine,

00:23:34.220 | expensive champagnes, expensive bottles of alcohol,

00:23:36.780 | like super nice gifts

00:23:38.740 | that you couldn't possibly spend enough money

00:23:40.620 | to send them something that would stand out,

00:23:42.500 | but if you send someone a book that really mattered to you

00:23:45.500 | with a handwritten note on personalized stationery

00:23:48.980 | of why you think it'll resonate with them

00:23:51.500 | and something from the conversation that you enjoyed,

00:23:53.940 | you'll always stand out in their mind.

00:23:55.980 | Forever, they'll remember that

00:23:57.300 | because no one really does that.

00:23:58.500 | It's such an old-fashioned thing,

00:24:00.040 | so it's a great, great way to stand out with people.

00:24:01.900 | - Is there a book you've gifted the most?

00:24:03.980 | - Yeah, "One Breath Becomes Air," by far.

00:24:06.420 | Like, probably 95% of the time,

00:24:08.740 | that's the book I share with people.

00:24:10.060 | If you've never read it, it's unbelievable.

00:24:11.460 | - I know, I haven't read it, I'm like, oh, man.

00:24:12.980 | - Oh, you haven't?

00:24:13.820 | - No. - Oh, my God.

00:24:14.660 | Yeah, well, it'll knock you out.

00:24:15.820 | I mean, if you read it,

00:24:16.660 | like I read it on a plane for the first time,

00:24:18.620 | and the last piece of it,

00:24:20.460 | I was like full-on crying on this flight,

00:24:23.340 | and the woman next to me had to ask if I was okay.

00:24:25.780 | So don't read it in a situation

00:24:27.820 | where you're not comfortable crying.

00:24:29.220 | - Okay.

00:24:30.060 | So to wrap up all of these kind of people-related razors,

00:24:32.900 | I wanna talk briefly about Hanlon's.

00:24:34.660 | - Hanlon's razor.

00:24:35.500 | Never attribute to malice

00:24:37.540 | what could otherwise be attributed to stupidity,

00:24:40.220 | is the way that that is typically put.

00:24:41.860 | So basically, the idea is if someone does something,

00:24:45.100 | we have this tendency to say,

00:24:47.140 | wow, they're acting maliciously,

00:24:48.460 | they're acting negatively towards me

00:24:49.980 | or towards other people, whatever,

00:24:51.540 | and we should never do that

00:24:52.980 | if stupidity is a potential argument.

00:24:55.740 | So it's like the whole idea

00:24:56.900 | that we give people too much credit

00:24:58.140 | for being malicious actors,

00:24:59.660 | when in reality, they might just be ignorant or dumb

00:25:02.300 | or unintelligent, et cetera.

00:25:04.460 | This is a great one for Twitter.

00:25:06.300 | In general, it's like you read people

00:25:08.140 | sending mean comments or saying things,

00:25:09.940 | and you're like, oh, they're acting so maliciously,

00:25:12.060 | and they're acting in such a bad-faith way,

00:25:14.100 | when sometimes you can just chalk it up

00:25:16.460 | to them being ignorant or stupid.

00:25:18.780 | - Is this similar to assume best intent

00:25:21.140 | or in the ballpark?

00:25:22.580 | 'Cause I feel like that's one I use a lot.

00:25:24.740 | - Yeah, I'd say it's similar.

00:25:27.080 | Maybe, yeah, assume best intent

00:25:28.740 | is probably a nicer way of saying this.

00:25:30.260 | I just always found Hanlon's Razor to be really funny,

00:25:32.460 | 'cause it's just like if you are finding

00:25:35.520 | that you're thinking someone is acting

00:25:37.300 | in some bad, nefarious, calculating way,

00:25:39.660 | sometimes it's just that they're just not intelligent.

00:25:42.360 | - You've written multiple posts

00:25:45.780 | with lots of Razors in lots of forms.

00:25:47.980 | I tried to pull some from the old posts,

00:25:49.660 | some from the new posts,

00:25:50.980 | and that was a lot of things

00:25:51.820 | related to interactions with people.

00:25:53.540 | And I'll link to those posts in the show notes.

00:25:55.540 | What I like is that in a lot of those posts,

00:25:57.640 | you say, "Hey, use this when you're deciding

00:25:59.620 | "who to hang out with.

00:26:00.460 | "Use this when."

00:26:01.540 | And so we can link there

00:26:02.900 | if you wanna recap from this conversation.

00:26:05.020 | The other area that you alluded to at the beginning

00:26:07.080 | is making decisions,

00:26:07.940 | which I think is something that, when optimized,

00:26:10.880 | can really save you time,

00:26:12.180 | because I know myself and a lot of people listening

00:26:14.840 | spend a lot of time making decisions,

00:26:16.340 | trying to get to the optimal outcome.

00:26:18.380 | So let's talk about a few of these decision-making ones.

00:26:22.220 | Let's start with the arena.

00:26:24.180 | - The arena.

00:26:25.160 | - This all comes from "The Man in the Arena,"

00:26:27.100 | Teddy Roosevelt's speech of it's the person in the arena

00:26:30.420 | that really counts.

00:26:31.700 | And my whole operating principle around this

00:26:35.300 | is that you should always try to put yourself in the arena.

00:26:38.540 | And that takes on different forms

00:26:41.420 | in different areas of life.

00:26:42.940 | But basically, don't sit on the sidelines

00:26:45.220 | and sling rocks at people that are out there doing things.

00:26:47.620 | And so if you have a choice of two paths

00:26:50.380 | of how to operate,

00:26:51.680 | you should put yourself in the vulnerable position

00:26:53.700 | in the arena,

00:26:54.540 | because that's where you end up having

00:26:56.220 | the high upside things happen.

00:26:57.700 | That's where real growth occurs

00:26:59.500 | and where you end up having those wins, et cetera.

00:27:02.240 | You can't really win long-term by sitting on the sidelines,

00:27:05.380 | especially not sitting on the sidelines

00:27:06.820 | throwing rocks at people that are out there.

00:27:08.820 | - And you said this is the one

00:27:09.860 | you feel the most strong about in one of these posts.

00:27:12.540 | Have you seen a lot of personal wins from playing this?

00:27:14.500 | - Yeah, I mean, I think that it's the most wins,

00:27:17.900 | but it's also the most emotionally draining

00:27:20.520 | and trying sometimes,

00:27:21.620 | because by putting yourself in the arena,

00:27:23.040 | you're exposing yourself to the whole lot of people out there

00:27:25.740 | that do just wanna sling rocks from the sidelines.

00:27:27.700 | I mean, you've seen it, right?

00:27:28.540 | Like we're sitting here, you're producing this podcast,

00:27:31.100 | you've been creating this for a long time,

00:27:32.660 | you share everything publicly, it's out and about.

00:27:35.100 | There are gonna be people that don't like it,

00:27:36.680 | that criticize it, et cetera.

00:27:38.060 | That's not fun.

00:27:39.140 | You're like me, you're a very positive, optimistic person,

00:27:41.460 | you're happy, you generally are just a good, positive guy.

00:27:45.420 | And when there's random people out there

00:27:47.260 | that are reading your stuff or engaging with your stuff

00:27:49.500 | and are like, I hate Chris, he's awful,

00:27:51.420 | what a bad person, et cetera,

00:27:52.900 | it's a weird feeling where someone doesn't know you

00:27:55.120 | and they're engaging that way.

00:27:56.520 | But you've gotten so much upside

00:27:58.480 | from putting yourself in the arena

00:27:59.480 | and just consistently putting things out there.

00:28:01.800 | So I think it's like,

00:28:03.200 | you have to be able to have thick skin and take it

00:28:05.680 | when you're gonna be putting yourself in the arena,

00:28:07.360 | but that's where the real wins actually end up happening.

00:28:10.120 | So for me, with my platform,

00:28:11.760 | with anything I'm putting out there,

00:28:13.040 | you're constantly putting your neck on the line

00:28:14.920 | and exposing yourself to it.

00:28:16.320 | And when you're sharing ideas publicly,

00:28:18.820 | that's like a very vulnerable state to put yourself in.

00:28:21.560 | The same thing applies to working in a corporate job.

00:28:24.320 | If you're gonna put your ideas on the line with your boss

00:28:27.440 | or with your team or however you're gonna do it,

00:28:29.800 | it's very easy to just sit back

00:28:31.440 | and let other people do that.

00:28:33.520 | But that's not how you're gonna end up progressing

00:28:35.320 | and making it to the next level of whatever you wanna do.

00:28:37.960 | - Any tips for how you take that negative feedback?

00:28:40.720 | I feel like I'm fortunate

00:28:41.880 | because I don't love that podcasts

00:28:44.320 | are such a one-way medium.

00:28:45.640 | It's so much more effort to be like,

00:28:47.440 | oh, I was listening to something cool.

00:28:48.640 | Now I'm gonna go find that person's contact,

00:28:50.480 | send them a note.

00:28:51.440 | So I tend to get pretty positive feedback

00:28:53.320 | because it's people that were pretty excited

00:28:55.040 | about what happened and send an email and I reply to them.

00:28:57.640 | I know you reply to a lot of,

00:28:59.040 | if not all the emails you get.

00:29:01.160 | But a friend of mine posted

00:29:02.040 | on like the close Instagram thing this morning.

00:29:04.080 | She posted something online.

00:29:05.080 | She's like, I'm just having a bad day.

00:29:06.200 | And she posted a picture of Ben and Jerry's.

00:29:07.800 | She's like, I'm having ice cream.

00:29:09.640 | She posted photos on her close friends

00:29:11.600 | of all the DMs she got.

00:29:12.680 | And people were like,

00:29:13.520 | I can't believe you would promote a brand like that.

00:29:15.880 | Or like, can't you eat healthier ice cream?

00:29:17.760 | And I was just like,

00:29:19.280 | like the internet can be a mean place.

00:29:21.320 | Especially social media,

00:29:22.880 | which I don't spend a lot of time on

00:29:25.040 | as much as I do recording.

00:29:26.760 | But I know a lot of people have probably faced this,

00:29:28.320 | whether it's at work, throwing out a bad idea.

00:29:29.960 | How do you take that?

00:29:30.840 | 'Cause I'm sure you've gotten a lot of it.

00:29:32.440 | - I think defaulting to empathy

00:29:34.240 | is the single healthiest and best way

00:29:36.840 | that I've found to combat negativity.

00:29:39.080 | Basically, when someone says something super negative

00:29:43.040 | on the internet to someone that they don't know,

00:29:45.840 | it's pretty fair to assume that that person

00:29:47.800 | is not in a happy place in their life.

00:29:50.000 | Have you seen Legally Blonde?

00:29:51.160 | This is going to be an embarrassing reference.

00:29:52.680 | In the movie Legally Blonde,

00:29:53.840 | she's like, happy people just don't kill their husbands.

00:29:55.840 | They just don't.

00:29:56.680 | I think about that with happy people on the internet.

00:29:58.200 | Like happy people just don't comment mean things

00:30:00.800 | to other people's posts on the internet.

00:30:02.320 | They just don't.

00:30:03.160 | Like, it's just not a thing that you would think to do.

00:30:04.720 | Like, you're a happy guy.

00:30:05.560 | I don't think you would think to go

00:30:06.720 | and like attack someone that you don't know on the internet.

00:30:09.200 | It's just not a thing you would do.

00:30:10.680 | And so I tend to think that when someone attacks you

00:30:12.520 | with negativity, there's usually something

00:30:15.000 | that's going on in their life that's tough.

00:30:17.600 | And we don't know what that is.

00:30:19.000 | And we're not behind that person's eyes.

00:30:20.560 | And so I try to default to empathy

00:30:22.280 | when I read something like that.

00:30:23.120 | I'm just like, oh, that person's having a tough day

00:30:25.080 | or the person is in a tough spot for whatever reason

00:30:28.520 | and not get all wound up about it.

00:30:30.200 | I never engage or fight back on that kind of stuff.

00:30:33.240 | 'Cause again, it's like,

00:30:34.200 | I'm not going to convince them they're wrong.

00:30:35.780 | I'm not going to make their life better or change it.

00:30:38.600 | And so there's no point.

00:30:40.880 | - Back to some of the career stuff.

00:30:42.520 | What about when you're faced with trying to decide

00:30:44.840 | between two paths you could take at work?

00:30:47.640 | - So this is one from Naval that I really like

00:30:50.280 | where he talks about making uphill decisions,

00:30:52.760 | I think is the way that he phrases it,

00:30:54.520 | which is basically when you choose between two paths,

00:30:56.720 | you should choose the path that is harder in the short-term

00:30:59.960 | because those tend to be the paths

00:31:01.840 | that work out better in the long-term.

00:31:03.480 | So it's like the whole short phrase of hard choices now,

00:31:07.120 | easy choices later, easy choices now, hard choices later.

00:31:10.360 | And I think it's an interesting,

00:31:11.360 | although nuanced one, to be totally honest,

00:31:13.320 | as I've thought more about this one over time,

00:31:15.000 | because sometimes choosing the hard path

00:31:18.120 | means that you're not allowing yourself the time

00:31:22.140 | to think about whether there's an easier way to do it.

00:31:24.600 | Like Tim Ferriss, who I know we both really like his work,

00:31:26.880 | talks about often, like, what if this were easy?

00:31:29.600 | What would this look like if this were easy?

00:31:31.160 | And I think it's a really important question

00:31:33.080 | to constantly ask yourself,

00:31:34.640 | like, is there actually an easy mode

00:31:36.360 | that I can play this game on that I'm just ignoring

00:31:38.840 | because I'm like taking pride in doing it the hard way?

00:31:41.580 | And as someone who's like sort of a recovering

00:31:44.260 | hustle culture bro from back in the day in finance,

00:31:47.460 | I often missed the easy mode way of playing the game

00:31:50.900 | because I was so prideful about playing the hard way.

00:31:54.940 | And so I think this like uphill decision one

00:31:57.060 | is actually a nuanced one I need to think about more

00:31:59.360 | and that people should think about more

00:32:01.500 | of any time you're doing something

00:32:03.420 | and it feels hard and difficult,

00:32:05.180 | you should pause and ask yourself,

00:32:06.880 | is there actually an easy mode?

00:32:08.260 | Like, is there an easy way that I can do this

00:32:10.940 | that I'm just missing out on

00:32:12.100 | because I'm grinding away in the way that I am?

00:32:14.700 | - I sometimes think there's both easy

00:32:17.460 | and I sometimes think that gets caught up in like cheaper,

00:32:21.220 | especially in a world of trying to optimize your life

00:32:23.700 | and your money and you're like,

00:32:24.540 | oh, well, this is the cheapest way,

00:32:25.580 | so I should do it this way.

00:32:27.100 | - Give me an example of that.

00:32:28.420 | - I've just talked about this on another episode.

00:32:29.940 | I don't know if it will have aired at this point,

00:32:31.540 | but my wife and I are talking about our children

00:32:33.460 | and we have a daughter who's about to be three.

00:32:35.420 | You'll learn this in a couple of years.

00:32:37.360 | And she had this stint where she would just get out of bed

00:32:41.800 | after going to bed and she'd say, run out the door,

00:32:43.760 | open the door and say, I have to go to the bathroom.

00:32:45.520 | I need a stuffed animal.

00:32:46.360 | Like she would just get out of bed constantly.

00:32:48.560 | And my wife and I are like, okay, what do you do?

00:32:50.240 | You go on the internet and there's a bajillion people

00:32:52.880 | who have an opinion about what to do.

00:32:54.600 | And it's hard to figure out what the right thing is.

00:32:56.160 | So it's like, what's your manifesto?

00:32:57.980 | Like, who do I trust?

00:32:59.600 | When it came to a lot of early decision stuff,

00:33:01.960 | we just went to Emily Oster,

00:33:03.240 | who's written a few books about parenting.

00:33:05.000 | And she's like, this is what you need to know

00:33:06.360 | about the expecting phase, the baby phase.

00:33:08.800 | But I didn't have something from her for this.

00:33:10.640 | And my wife was like, well, I really like the content

00:33:12.520 | that this company called Big Little Feelings puts out.

00:33:15.400 | And I believe we use their course for potty training.

00:33:18.680 | My wife's just like, I really like how they teach

00:33:20.680 | what they believe in.

00:33:21.620 | So she took their course.

00:33:22.760 | It was 30 bucks or something.

00:33:24.320 | She's like, we have this other course, it's $100.

00:33:26.600 | And she was like, do you think it's worth spending $100

00:33:29.420 | to get a source I really trust database

00:33:32.320 | of like how to handle every toddler scenario?

00:33:35.760 | And I was like, well, what's the alternative?

00:33:37.400 | So what we did was we were like, well, one alternative.

00:33:39.120 | So I just asked ChatGPT.

00:33:40.240 | I was like, what should I do with that?

00:33:41.800 | Answer was like, okay, it was surprisingly good.

00:33:44.680 | But it was like, do we wanna go do a bunch of research

00:33:46.120 | or just trust this thing?

00:33:47.600 | And so a part of my mind was spinning saying,

00:33:49.640 | well, I could go find the answer.

00:33:52.400 | Like the answer exists on the internet, it's all this work.

00:33:54.320 | And it's the cheaper one.

00:33:55.840 | So I was both taking this uphill battle

00:33:57.960 | of like the hard work of me deciding

00:34:00.000 | what the right answer is, but also the cheaper answer.

00:34:02.200 | But my wife asked me, and this time she was

00:34:03.720 | in this situation I usually am,

00:34:05.040 | which is like, she's saying I wanna do all the work.

00:34:07.640 | And what I learned is it was really easy for me

00:34:09.800 | to make a different decision when it wasn't for me.

00:34:12.120 | When I put a little bit of emotion in it,

00:34:13.440 | I was like, just buy the thing.

00:34:14.720 | No problem.

00:34:15.560 | It was an easy decision for me, but for her,

00:34:18.280 | it felt so hard 'cause she was like,

00:34:19.520 | well, I could do this research.

00:34:20.520 | I could do it.

00:34:21.340 | And maybe I'd learn more.

00:34:22.880 | - So cheap is not always cheap.

00:34:24.640 | Like the thing I've always found is that

00:34:26.320 | the thing I think is cheaper is generally more expensive.

00:34:29.040 | And I find this with everything.

00:34:30.440 | This is like me not being frugal too,

00:34:32.420 | but I've always been big on just like,

00:34:34.840 | my wife would ask, like we were getting our new house

00:34:37.160 | here in New York and she's like, what furniture?

00:34:39.720 | Like there's this furniture or there's a really nice,

00:34:41.600 | like this furniture.

00:34:42.440 | And I was like, just get the nice one.

00:34:43.920 | 'Cause like, you're gonna have it.

00:34:45.520 | And like getting the cheap furniture sounds good

00:34:47.840 | when you get it and it's like 50% cheaper,

00:34:50.360 | but when it breaks, like we got cheap outdoor furniture

00:34:52.920 | and really nice indoor furniture.

00:34:54.220 | Well, the outdoor furniture after one winter in New York

00:34:56.480 | now looks like crap and I'm gonna have to buy

00:34:58.240 | new outdoor furniture.

00:34:59.240 | Now I'm gonna have to get the nice outdoor furniture

00:35:01.000 | so this doesn't happen again

00:35:02.040 | 'cause I don't wanna replace it every year.

00:35:03.200 | Would have been better off just getting the nice one

00:35:04.960 | and taking care of it and doing that.

00:35:06.440 | And so I've generally found that the thing

00:35:08.420 | that is like the cheap way of doing it,

00:35:10.240 | like spending tons of time on chat,

00:35:11.960 | GPT researching all this stuff.

00:35:13.400 | Well, now I have the headache of having to like

00:35:15.040 | synthesize all of this stuff that I've found

00:35:17.120 | and convince my wife 'cause it's like what I found

00:35:19.480 | and she didn't find it.

00:35:20.540 | I just would have been better off buying the course

00:35:22.480 | and spending whatever it costs

00:35:23.720 | because it would have saved me so much time

00:35:25.240 | and so much stress.

00:35:26.220 | - So nothing makes me happier.

00:35:27.200 | And you're an example of this,

00:35:28.700 | of finding someone who's done all the research

00:35:30.600 | to come up with a bunch of,

00:35:31.560 | I'm not gonna go research what my razors should be.

00:35:33.840 | I'm just gonna take your list of razors

00:35:35.360 | and be like, I'm gonna use this.

00:35:36.200 | - That's how I feel about hacks with you.

00:35:37.920 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:38.760 | So that's my gift is optimizing life.

00:35:41.280 | - There you go. - Yours is synthesizing.

00:35:42.800 | - Synthesizing razors. - I guess it's kind of

00:35:44.320 | a similar thing.

00:35:45.160 | You've got business advice, personal advice.

00:35:47.640 | It's different advice, just maybe not as focused

00:35:50.120 | on deals and travel and optimization.

00:35:52.800 | But when it comes to decisions,

00:35:54.640 | there was another one about rare opportunities.

00:35:57.380 | - This is an interesting one

00:35:58.360 | 'cause I heard this for the first time

00:35:59.520 | from the founders, two of three partners

00:36:03.120 | at the first firm that I worked at.

00:36:04.920 | And basically, they were two younger guys

00:36:08.480 | who spun out from their prior firm

00:36:11.140 | with one of the founders of that prior firm

00:36:12.920 | to start a new one.

00:36:13.880 | And they were like 30 when they spun out

00:36:15.960 | and got to be co-founders of this new private equity fund.

00:36:18.520 | And I asked them how they thought about that decision.

00:36:20.720 | And the way that he said it was,

00:36:23.040 | there are certain opportunities in life

00:36:26.540 | that you get, on average, zero to one time in your life.

00:36:31.540 | The average person gets zero to one.

00:36:34.900 | And so if you're one of the lucky people

00:36:36.540 | that gets that one chance, that one opportunity

00:36:39.060 | for this really rare opportunity, you have to jump at it.

00:36:41.940 | And he was like, starting your own private equity fund

00:36:44.740 | is an opportunity that you get zero to one times

00:36:47.100 | in your life.

00:36:47.940 | And so the fact that he was getting it,

00:36:48.900 | he was like, I have to go do this.

00:36:50.080 | Even though he was on the safe track,

00:36:51.580 | doing really well at his prior firm.

00:36:53.540 | And I remember registering that as very, very interesting.

00:36:56.000 | And then when I was thinking about my own opportunity

00:36:58.620 | to go and kind of build this ecosystem

00:37:00.420 | and the thing that I was working on,

00:37:02.260 | it was a really key factor in me deciding

00:37:04.300 | to kind of go all in and do it.

00:37:05.720 | Because I felt like, okay, I might get one chance

00:37:07.980 | to do this unique thing while I'm on a growth curve

00:37:11.080 | and things are going well,

00:37:12.460 | and there's all this stuff happening in the world.

00:37:14.420 | Like, this might be my one chance

00:37:15.780 | to go do the interesting thing.

00:37:16.860 | 'Cause if I don't, then I'm gonna have like,

00:37:18.820 | all this gravity around what I've been doing,

00:37:21.020 | and it's gonna have built, and we're gonna have kids,

00:37:22.860 | and it's gonna be much more challenging.

00:37:24.020 | So here's my rare opportunity that has popped up,

00:37:26.840 | and I need to just jump at it.

00:37:28.560 | And I think it is like a really good framework

00:37:30.580 | for thinking about those unique moments in life.

00:37:33.800 | Just like being able to pause,

00:37:35.100 | recognize when you're having that unique chance,

00:37:37.880 | and to just sort of throw caution to the wind and jump at it.

00:37:40.880 | - And I think not overthinking the reasons not to do it.

00:37:44.280 | So I look back, I was in college,

00:37:45.800 | and I won't go into the whole life story,

00:37:47.640 | but I didn't know what I wanted to do.

00:37:48.880 | I didn't even realize that you were supposed

00:37:50.720 | to plan your job so far in advance.

00:37:53.000 | So I was like springing at the end,

00:37:54.560 | like I gotta go get a job, I gotta do this quickly.

00:37:56.640 | And I got an opportunity to work

00:37:57.960 | at an investment bank in New York called Allen & Company.

00:38:00.160 | Kind of like weird, small, boutique bank.

00:38:02.400 | - I know it.

00:38:03.240 | - But the only job they offered was an internship.

00:38:05.280 | At the time, I was like one month

00:38:06.620 | into even knowing what investment bank was.

00:38:08.520 | And I only went down that path

00:38:09.640 | 'cause I asked my friends who were well more prepared,

00:38:11.680 | said, "What's the best job you can get out of college

00:38:13.580 | "in American investment banking?"

00:38:14.420 | I was like, "Well, I guess I should do that.

00:38:15.620 | "I don't know what I wanna do."

00:38:17.080 | And they were like, "Allen & Company's,

00:38:18.560 | "it's not like one of the places you could just get a job."

00:38:21.160 | Kind of had this mystique and allure.

00:38:23.200 | And I was like, "Do I take an internship?

00:38:25.560 | "Not a full-time job, just an internship

00:38:27.320 | "and see where it goes."

00:38:28.920 | But everyone was telling me like,

00:38:30.040 | "This is a rare opportunity.

00:38:31.380 | "You don't usually get an offer

00:38:32.780 | "from a company that's so secretive and cool."

00:38:35.080 | - Especially when you don't know what investment banking is.

00:38:37.520 | - I mean, I had read my bulk guide.

00:38:39.560 | I don't know if the bulk guide still exists,

00:38:41.080 | but back then it was like, there was this book.

00:38:42.560 | It's like, read this and you understand the industry.

00:38:44.640 | So I took that, that was one.

00:38:46.100 | I feel like starting a podcast was one.

00:38:48.200 | There've been a handful of times

00:38:49.260 | where I've quit a job to go do a thing

00:38:51.120 | or I don't know, we traveled around the world

00:38:53.400 | 'cause we were like, "This is a window to do it."

00:38:55.120 | So I love that one.

00:38:56.800 | How would that connect to minimizing regret

00:38:59.000 | on these rare opportunities?

00:39:00.560 | - Yeah, I mean, the regret minimization framework,

00:39:02.240 | I think the first time Bezos talked about this

00:39:04.680 | was in an interview with Walter Isaacson.

00:39:07.840 | It might be like 1996, like way, way back interview.

00:39:11.640 | Basically, we're like super nerdy Bezos,

00:39:13.720 | not jacked out of his mind Bezos that we have today.

00:39:16.640 | Like really nerdy Bezos is talking about

00:39:18.440 | how he made the decision to leave D.E. Shaw.

00:39:21.000 | This relates directly to the rare opportunity, by the way.

00:39:24.160 | Leave D.E. Shaw, which is like this famous quant hedge fund

00:39:27.920 | where he was making tons of money

00:39:29.160 | and like on a very certain path

00:39:31.200 | to make tens of millions of dollars in his life.

00:39:33.680 | Amazing, amazing outcome in career, top 0.01% life.

00:39:37.720 | Leave that to go start a bookstore on the internet,

00:39:40.020 | which makes no sense.

00:39:41.100 | Again, like crazy ideas going back

00:39:42.840 | to connected to other raisers.

00:39:44.360 | And his whole thing was zoom forward to the future.

00:39:48.160 | Think about like your 80 year old self,

00:39:49.960 | looking back on this decision,

00:39:51.400 | will you regret not doing it?

00:39:54.040 | And if the answer is yes, then you should do it.

00:39:56.920 | And so that's what he did.

00:39:57.960 | So he thought like,

00:39:58.800 | will I regret not taking this opportunity

00:40:00.840 | and going after this?

00:40:02.020 | And the answer was yes.

00:40:03.320 | And so he left and started Amazon.

00:40:05.160 | And now we all get packages in 24 hours

00:40:07.360 | from drones that are dropping them off.

00:40:08.880 | I mean, I think it's like a brilliant general way

00:40:10.860 | of thinking about this.

00:40:11.700 | I've often thought about it in both directions.

00:40:13.800 | You're like, okay, you know,

00:40:15.360 | what would your 80 year old self say about this decision?

00:40:18.000 | Also, what would your 10 year old self say

00:40:19.740 | about this decision?

00:40:20.880 | And the reason I think that one's good

00:40:22.320 | is because like your 80 year old self

00:40:23.800 | really cares about the compounding

00:40:26.520 | of the decisions you make today.

00:40:28.000 | And like how any decision you're making today

00:40:30.120 | is going to compound into the future.

00:40:31.600 | But your 10 year old self also reminds you

00:40:33.360 | to like not take shit too seriously along the way.

00:40:36.040 | You're probably like this too.

00:40:37.120 | You're an optimizer, right?

00:40:38.160 | You're thinking through every decision.

00:40:39.540 | You're really thoughtful.

00:40:40.380 | You're like constantly trying to get little bits of ROI

00:40:43.160 | out of everything you're doing.

00:40:44.360 | That's great.

00:40:45.200 | I think there's a lot of value that can be gleaned from that.

00:40:47.240 | At the same time, sometimes you just need to like

00:40:49.080 | have some fun and not think about razors

00:40:51.640 | and not think about hacks and just like go have a beer

00:40:54.360 | and like sit on the couch and not take advantage

00:40:56.420 | of whatever time you're wasting by doing that.

00:40:59.120 | And I think that that always helps.

00:41:00.680 | I call it the young and old test.

00:41:02.360 | It's like you think about the decision as a 10 year old

00:41:04.840 | and as an 80 year old and then sort of like

00:41:06.440 | meet in the middle.

00:41:07.320 | You know, the Bezos thing, like it ties directly

00:41:09.640 | to the rare opportunity.

00:41:10.880 | It's like you have this one potential opportunity

00:41:13.880 | in your whole life to go do this thing

00:41:15.520 | and you should capitalize on it.

00:41:17.280 | And to your point on making these decisions

00:41:19.520 | without thinking too much about them,

00:41:21.000 | I've often thought about that as a concept,

00:41:23.480 | which is like big decisions, paradoxically,

00:41:27.480 | I find are better made quickly versus slowly.

00:41:30.680 | And there's this like desire when you have

00:41:32.140 | a big, big decision, you're like, okay,

00:41:33.760 | I'm gonna sit down and make this big chart of pros and cons

00:41:36.440 | and spend all this time thinking through them.

00:41:38.260 | What I tend to find is that your instinct actually

00:41:40.720 | is usually pretty good.

00:41:42.040 | And sometimes you just need to like open the door,

00:41:45.020 | jump out and like hope you packed your parachute

00:41:47.200 | really well.

00:41:48.040 | I think it ends up making for much better outcomes.

00:41:50.880 | You don't waste so much time.

00:41:52.380 | - I did an episode recently, I haven't aired it yet,

00:41:54.820 | where I had a performance coach come in

00:41:57.840 | and we picked a topic and we just recorded the session.

00:42:01.040 | And the topic was, I struggle so often

00:42:04.320 | of like over optimizations.

00:42:05.760 | Like I have all these decisions to make.

00:42:07.440 | And what he actually broke down through

00:42:09.240 | this interesting conversation using tactics

00:42:11.640 | that we later in the episode talked about,

00:42:13.520 | the tactics he was using was that a lot of times

00:42:16.980 | most decisions are made emotionally,

00:42:18.920 | but you don't think that in the moment.

00:42:20.460 | Talking about big decisions, it's like you wanna like

00:42:22.420 | make your pro and con list, analyze everything.

00:42:25.020 | And he's like, you need to stop and not just reflect,

00:42:28.500 | but maybe get outside and force yourself

00:42:30.260 | into a different state because the emotional decision

00:42:33.240 | might actually be the easy way.

00:42:34.580 | He was basically trying to teach me that this thing

00:42:37.020 | that we often think of as like our gut decision

00:42:39.260 | might actually be more of like an emotional decision.

00:42:41.980 | We talked about this exact example I used about my wife

00:42:44.320 | and this course, and he was like,

00:42:45.400 | it was so easy for you to make that decision

00:42:47.600 | 'cause you were thinking about it emotionally.

00:42:48.960 | You weren't in the middle of doing the research.

00:42:51.280 | And so my new thing is whenever I'm in the middle

00:42:53.440 | of trying to make a decision, big or small,

00:42:55.560 | I try to pause and then get myself out of the research phase

00:42:59.740 | not pause and look at my options,

00:43:02.560 | pause and look at my spreadsheet,

00:43:04.440 | but pause and like go outside for 10 minutes

00:43:06.800 | and just think about like, what's the right decision here?

00:43:08.800 | And sometimes it just comes to you.

00:43:10.400 | It doesn't come to you when you're looking at the data.

00:43:12.740 | It comes to you when you think like,

00:43:13.740 | what would the right decision here be?

00:43:15.740 | - It's interesting.

00:43:16.580 | I mean, my reflection is just,

00:43:17.860 | I've never made a single pro con list

00:43:20.260 | that actually swayed my decision.

00:43:21.700 | Like in a movie, they make the pro con list

00:43:24.340 | and then they look at the list and like the pros are like,

00:43:26.380 | there's 30 of them and the cons, there's like three.

00:43:28.380 | And you're like, oh, okay, it's clearly a pro.

00:43:30.980 | But like, that's never happened to me in real life.

00:43:32.900 | What ends up happening is I just like sit there

00:43:34.620 | and stare at something that looks relatively balanced

00:43:37.220 | and then you just end up making the decision anyway.

00:43:39.020 | It's not like it actually helped me think it through.

00:43:40.860 | So I go back and forth.

00:43:42.240 | I'm like you, right?

00:43:43.160 | Like I have all these frameworks

00:43:44.880 | and mental models and razors,

00:43:46.680 | but it's not like I'm sitting going through a checklist

00:43:48.840 | of them when I'm going and making decisions.

00:43:50.400 | It's sort of, again, things that are in sort

00:43:52.480 | of your mental toolkit that you're generally thinking about.

00:43:55.160 | But like to go back to one, like the optimist razor,

00:43:57.880 | it's not like I'm thinking like, okay,

00:43:59.240 | well, Chris invited me to do a podcast

00:44:01.360 | and Chris is an optimist.

00:44:02.620 | So I should, okay, by this decision-making,

00:44:05.000 | I'm gonna go spend time with Chris.

00:44:06.220 | It's just like ways to live your life

00:44:08.240 | that you just generally are trying to be around optimists

00:44:10.680 | or whatever it is.

00:44:11.640 | I try to avoid being mechanical

00:44:13.480 | about how all this stuff gets implemented.

00:44:15.240 | It's just like general rules and ideas

00:44:17.800 | that you have floating around your brain

00:44:19.360 | that you're kind of applying to how you live life

00:44:21.120 | on a daily basis.

00:44:22.360 | - I really like that.

00:44:23.280 | I was thinking maybe you had the contact sorted

00:44:25.440 | by optimist score.

00:44:26.480 | - Yeah, yeah, optimist score, Chris, 7.2.

00:44:29.880 | So, okay, we're doing the podcast.

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00:47:27.000 | I just wanna thank you quick for listening to

00:47:29.160 | and supporting the show.

00:47:30.660 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

00:47:33.480 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals,

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00:47:44.720 | Okay, so we're not gonna spend all of our time

00:47:46.800 | optimizing every decision we make,

00:47:48.640 | going through these rubrics every time we do anything.

00:47:51.360 | Let's talk a little bit about how we spend our time

00:47:53.880 | and how we choose what to do with our time.

00:47:56.480 | So one of the things I know you value is serendipity.

00:47:59.080 | - I have this concept of luck surface area

00:48:02.240 | that I've probably adapted from people

00:48:04.440 | that have talked about it over a period of time.

00:48:06.440 | The first time I ever heard, I think it was serendipity,

00:48:09.340 | was this guy Tim Brown, who was the CEO of IDEO,

00:48:12.400 | the big design firm.

00:48:14.040 | And he talked about the whole idea

00:48:15.840 | of engineered serendipity, that you could create luck.

00:48:18.920 | And it was the first time I had ever heard of it.

00:48:20.480 | This was probably back in 2010 or something like that,

00:48:24.320 | I was in college, and it always stuck with me.

00:48:26.840 | So I've recently been thinking about luck surface area,

00:48:29.460 | like the whole idea that you can actually expand

00:48:31.940 | your surface area for having lucky things happen to you.

00:48:34.800 | And how you do that is by, again,

00:48:36.760 | putting yourself out there.

00:48:37.760 | It's like, you don't get lucky

00:48:39.360 | sitting on the couch watching Netflix at home.

00:48:41.580 | You get lucky by being out, engaging with people,

00:48:44.340 | meeting new people, publishing your work,

00:48:46.760 | putting things out there into the world

00:48:48.560 | and seeing what can bounce off of it

00:48:50.520 | and the connections that can be made.

00:48:52.720 | And so my whole idea with the luck razor

00:48:55.040 | or with the serendipity razor is,

00:48:57.600 | you should always try to expand your luck surface area.

00:49:00.280 | Like if you're gonna choose two paths,

00:49:02.000 | like a decision to make between staying in

00:49:03.800 | and watching Netflix on a given evening

00:49:06.000 | or going to that opportunity, the dinner,

00:49:08.800 | the meeting, the people, whatever it is,

00:49:11.240 | or to publish something publicly

00:49:12.760 | rather than to just have it sit in your journal,

00:49:15.640 | you should take the path

00:49:16.600 | that has the larger luck surface area.

00:49:18.480 | I think this applies mostly when you're trying

00:49:21.000 | to expand your luck surface area

00:49:22.440 | earlier in your life and in your career.

00:49:24.720 | Once you've done that and you've figured out

00:49:26.840 | where the ripest opportunities are,

00:49:28.280 | then you can start going deep and you can narrow it.

00:49:30.240 | Like for instance, today, I would probably choose

00:49:33.080 | to sit at home and relax and spend time

00:49:35.240 | with my wife and son rather than going out

00:49:37.480 | and about to some big event.

00:49:38.480 | 'Cause I don't really feel like I'm trying

00:49:40.080 | to get lucky on things anymore.

00:49:41.560 | I've sort of figured out where my luck has come from

00:49:44.120 | and now I'm just going down and digging deeper

00:49:46.220 | into that area, into that hole.

00:49:48.000 | But early on, expanding your luck surface area

00:49:50.640 | in any way, shape or form early in your life and career,

00:49:53.480 | I think is important.

00:49:54.640 | - I wanna come back to how we do spend our time.

00:49:57.440 | But let's say you are going out

00:49:59.160 | and I'm gonna kind of tee up one other razor,

00:50:01.060 | which is there's two rooms.

00:50:02.160 | How do you pick which one to go to?

00:50:03.520 | - The one where you're gonna be the dumbest one in the room.

00:50:05.640 | Always, always.

00:50:06.720 | This is like a common thing that people say is like,

00:50:09.080 | if you're the smartest person in the room,

00:50:10.480 | you're in the wrong room.

00:50:11.760 | And I really do believe that.

00:50:13.640 | Like putting yourself in uncomfortable positions

00:50:15.900 | where everyone is smarter than you

00:50:18.040 | tends to lead to really interesting things.

00:50:20.120 | Especially when you pair it with some of the stuff

00:50:21.760 | we talked about earlier,

00:50:22.720 | of like good ways to get those kind of people talking,

00:50:25.440 | good ways to think about how you can be valuable to them,

00:50:28.160 | how you can stick out in their minds,

00:50:29.800 | like walking away from the conversation.

00:50:31.400 | Like you said, I like that one a lot.

00:50:32.700 | I'm gonna steal that.

00:50:33.680 | Sending people books, et cetera.

00:50:35.640 | Just getting into rooms

00:50:36.640 | where you feel a little bit uncomfortable,

00:50:38.520 | that's where you end up having the most growth come.

00:50:40.800 | - I love just walking up to a table of people.

00:50:42.840 | I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking,

00:50:44.720 | like let me just listen and it's super uncomfortable.

00:50:47.400 | - Yeah, it is super uncomfortable.

00:50:48.960 | And you could do it in a weird way.

00:50:50.480 | But in the right environment,

00:50:52.480 | I think it's wildly interesting.

00:50:54.560 | - Yeah, I'm going to this event

00:50:56.040 | in Santa Barbara in a couple weeks.

00:50:58.480 | And there's a lot of wildly successful people

00:51:00.920 | that it looks like are gonna be there.

00:51:02.200 | And I literally don't know a single person.

00:51:04.540 | And today I was like,

00:51:06.740 | man, it's gonna be really hard to go and do this.

00:51:09.840 | 'Cause I don't even have like a wingman.

00:51:11.080 | Like I don't have like a friend who's like my guy

00:51:13.060 | that I can like go around with,

00:51:14.200 | or girl that I can go around with.

00:51:15.340 | I literally don't know anyone.

00:51:16.800 | And I feel like a total imposter going to this event

00:51:19.280 | because everyone is CEOs,

00:51:21.000 | like really, really impressive people.

00:51:22.880 | I had to like snap myself out of it and just say like,

00:51:25.080 | oh, what a cool opportunity to just be in this room.

00:51:27.000 | You can just go listen to people

00:51:28.360 | and add value in some other way other than talking.

00:51:30.920 | I'm excited for it now.

00:51:32.100 | - But I wanna come back finally to where we spend our time.

00:51:35.320 | And you have a Time Billionaire Razor,

00:51:36.780 | but you actually did a really great post about this

00:51:38.840 | and looked at some data on how we spend time.

00:51:41.100 | So maybe let's end talking about how we spend our time

00:51:43.540 | and how that's evolved for you.

00:51:45.000 | - This is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart.

00:51:46.920 | You have young kids.

00:51:47.940 | I have a, I guess by the time this comes out,

00:51:50.400 | he will be one.

00:51:51.320 | And I have thought about time more in the last year

00:51:56.060 | than I had my entire life.

00:51:57.600 | Part of that is because when you have a young kid,

00:52:01.320 | you all of a sudden start measuring time in weeks

00:52:05.200 | and months, which you never really do otherwise.

00:52:08.200 | Like people ask you how old the kid is

00:52:09.440 | and you say like six weeks or nine weeks

00:52:11.240 | or 12 weeks, whatever.

00:52:12.520 | I've never thought about the passage of weeks

00:52:14.500 | as a passage of time in the past.

00:52:15.920 | It's just like another week.

00:52:17.440 | A lot of people have now seen that like life calendar,

00:52:19.680 | like Memento Mori calendar,

00:52:21.080 | where it's 52 rows across and it's 80 rows down.

00:52:23.680 | So it represents your entire life.

00:52:25.160 | Every row is a year and the 80 rows is your life.

00:52:28.120 | And you fill in black every week that goes by.

00:52:30.320 | So you can literally see the passage of your life,

00:52:32.240 | passage of time.

00:52:33.660 | So I've been thinking about this stuff more and more

00:52:35.760 | over the course of the last year.

00:52:37.440 | And I came across this American Time Use Survey data set

00:52:41.300 | that I think it was Our World and Data

00:52:43.820 | kind of crunched together to look at how we spend time

00:52:46.560 | over the course of our lives

00:52:47.800 | and specifically who we spend it with.

00:52:50.040 | They had kind of combined it into a single chart

00:52:52.840 | of all of these lines,

00:52:54.000 | like how much time you spend with your children,

00:52:55.700 | how much time you spend with your parents,

00:52:56.960 | how much time you spend with friends,

00:52:57.960 | coworkers, alone, et cetera.

00:52:59.840 | I went in and downloaded the data

00:53:01.960 | and split it out into individual charts

00:53:03.700 | that you could really see like each line

00:53:05.680 | and kind of the curvature of each line.

00:53:07.640 | And it was an unbelievably powerful image

00:53:10.800 | when you look at them individually, especially with kids,

00:53:13.220 | how you like basically spend all of your time with them

00:53:16.520 | during this like very short window of their life

00:53:19.000 | and then you falls off a cliff.

00:53:20.460 | And the reverse of that is with your parents,

00:53:23.120 | you spend almost all of your time with them

00:53:25.200 | over the first 18 years of your life

00:53:26.800 | and then it just goes like this

00:53:28.000 | and you're not spending time for the rest of your life.

00:53:30.480 | And so it just brought to the fore

00:53:33.240 | all of these really difficult conversations,

00:53:36.360 | but also sort of empowering ones

00:53:38.760 | for who you spend your time with,

00:53:40.100 | who you want to be spending your time with

00:53:41.920 | and how you want to sort of change the curves as it were

00:53:45.080 | over the course of your life.

00:53:46.880 | - And so have you made changes in the last year

00:53:49.440 | as a result of thinking about this?

00:53:51.400 | - Yeah, I mean, the biggest change we made

00:53:52.960 | was in May, 2021, where we picked up our life

00:53:55.920 | and sold our house in California,

00:53:57.560 | bought a house in New York

00:53:59.260 | and moved to be closer to my parents

00:54:01.160 | and to my wife's parents.

00:54:02.440 | And that was based on the initial realization

00:54:04.360 | of how little time we had left with our parents,

00:54:06.460 | not because they're particularly old or sick, knock on wood,

00:54:09.480 | but just based on math.

00:54:10.920 | And their age, our age,

00:54:12.600 | how often we were seeing them about once a year.

00:54:14.760 | And now I see my parents at least a few times a month.

00:54:18.200 | They're like a big, big part of my son's life,

00:54:20.560 | similar with my wife's parents.

00:54:22.040 | They're constantly around and it makes a huge difference.

00:54:25.120 | And it makes them so happy too,

00:54:26.720 | to be a part of our lives, to be a part of our son's life.

00:54:29.220 | So that was a huge life change.

00:54:31.400 | And then the kids one is the biggest for me

00:54:33.200 | in terms of what it's done in the last year.

00:54:34.880 | This friend of mine, Kay,

00:54:36.680 | who has talked about the magic window,

00:54:38.780 | I think he calls it or the magic years,

00:54:40.360 | which is like this 10 year period of time

00:54:42.960 | where you are your kid's favorite person in the world.

00:54:45.960 | And once they're older than 10,

00:54:47.940 | there are other people that fill that role.

00:54:49.480 | They have best friends, they have girlfriends, boyfriends,

00:54:51.840 | they get married, they're going to have kids,

00:54:53.560 | like they're going to go on and live their entire life

00:54:55.960 | where you as their parent are not really

00:54:57.960 | like the central figure and actor.

00:55:00.480 | But during this 10 year window, you are.

00:55:02.620 | And they love you more than anyone else in the world.

00:55:05.480 | Yet we live in a culture where traditionally,

00:55:07.880 | those are the years where you're also working the most

00:55:09.760 | and like trying to make the most of your life

00:55:11.480 | and of your career.

00:55:12.320 | We were talking about this earlier,

00:55:13.280 | like your life is really good,

00:55:14.880 | but you also want more from your career

00:55:17.520 | or from businesses you're building.

00:55:18.960 | How do you balance those two?

00:55:20.200 | Because anything you decide to do or take on

00:55:23.160 | is a direct trade off of time with your kids.

00:55:25.480 | If you're going to be grinding on some business

00:55:27.280 | or project or working,

00:55:28.880 | that's just time away that you could be spending with them.

00:55:31.720 | And so how do you figure out and find the balance of that?

00:55:34.420 | I've been thinking about that more and more and more.

00:55:37.360 | And being home during this like first year of my kid's life

00:55:40.320 | and getting to spend tons of time with him

00:55:41.880 | and really build a bond with him is meaningful to me.

00:55:45.640 | - And so does that mean saying no

00:55:46.920 | to a lot more professional things?

00:55:48.800 | - I mean, like I say no to 99% of opportunities

00:55:51.620 | that come my way.

00:55:52.460 | And now, I mean, by virtue of the scale of my platform

00:55:55.580 | and how it's been growing,

00:55:57.560 | it's a lot of stuff and a lot of financial things

00:55:59.420 | that I'm just turning down out of hand.

00:56:01.760 | And for me, that's been a conscious decision

00:56:03.760 | of I don't actually particularly find myself motivated

00:56:07.080 | by money all that much.

00:56:07.960 | So I actually don't feel like I need much more money

00:56:10.000 | than I have today.

00:56:11.000 | And we have a great house and we like our life a lot.

00:56:13.800 | We're happy and I have tons of time at home

00:56:16.200 | and free time with my son.

00:56:17.480 | And I actually wouldn't change that much.

00:56:19.360 | Like if you offered to pay me today $50 million

00:56:22.880 | to work 80 hours a week this year, I would not do it.

00:56:25.780 | Full stop, like wouldn't even consider it.

00:56:27.640 | And that's a pretty empowering feeling

00:56:29.120 | when you realize the priorities and the trade-offs.

00:56:32.000 | But that, I mean, to me, just like really being ruthless

00:56:35.360 | about what my North star is and what I wanna focus on

00:56:39.520 | has been a pretty liberating thing

00:56:42.080 | and a really meaningful thing for me.

00:56:44.120 | - What do you think's helped you not wanna play

00:56:46.880 | Keeping Up With The Joneses,

00:56:47.960 | which I feel like many of our peers are still feeling that?

00:56:52.240 | - I think the biggest thing is avoiding

00:56:55.220 | the like when then psychology around this stuff.

00:56:57.900 | I saw a great clip of Dax Shepard

00:56:59.520 | recently talking about this

00:57:00.800 | and how he had all of the trappings

00:57:03.120 | that he thought were gonna make him happy and successful.

00:57:05.520 | And he had convinced himself all on the way

00:57:07.040 | that like, well, when that thing happened,

00:57:08.720 | then I'm gonna be happy and this will be great.

00:57:11.040 | And then he got that and he realized he was like suicidal

00:57:13.480 | and not happy at all.

00:57:14.720 | And so it was really liberating

00:57:16.120 | then on the backend of getting healed

00:57:17.800 | and treated for all of that to realize,

00:57:20.000 | oh, those external things

00:57:21.040 | aren't actually gonna ever make me happy.

00:57:22.700 | He saw it really viscerally.

00:57:24.200 | Most people never have that.

00:57:25.400 | You don't realize that all of those games

00:57:27.720 | you're playing in your mind,

00:57:28.660 | like, well, when I get to vice president or whatever,

00:57:31.580 | then I'll be happy

00:57:32.420 | and I'm gonna be making all this more money.

00:57:33.760 | Or when I get a million followers on whatever platform,

00:57:36.600 | then I'm gonna be really happy.

00:57:37.620 | I'm gonna have made it.

00:57:38.460 | Things are gonna be good.

00:57:39.480 | The reality is if you're looking for something external

00:57:42.480 | to be what creates your internal happiness,

00:57:44.920 | it's never gonna work out.

00:57:45.920 | Happiness is full on inside job.

00:57:48.520 | Like you have to be finding happiness from something

00:57:51.520 | that is a deeper meaning, deeper purpose, something internal.

00:57:54.440 | It can't be some external achievement

00:57:56.160 | because it just doesn't last.

00:57:57.260 | You just revert to whatever the next when is

00:58:00.120 | that you're gonna create.

00:58:01.560 | So for me personally,

00:58:02.540 | I've realized that I stepped off the treadmill

00:58:04.780 | around all those things.

00:58:05.620 | That doesn't mean that I don't want more

00:58:07.640 | because I am motivated by growth,

00:58:09.760 | but the growth is an internal thing versus an external thing.

00:58:13.420 | It's not, hey, I wanna like make X dollars

00:58:17.060 | or do this or that.

00:58:18.220 | It's like, I wanna feel like I'm getting better at things.

00:58:20.500 | And if that's getting better at being a dad, that's great.

00:58:22.780 | If that's getting better at running,

00:58:24.500 | 'cause I'm like really into running right now,

00:58:26.260 | then that's great.

00:58:27.100 | But it's not, I wanna get a better house

00:58:29.580 | and I wanna get a better car.

00:58:30.780 | And I wanna like, that guy got this, so I wanna do that.

00:58:33.740 | It's just turned everything internal in a much deeper way.

00:58:37.140 | - The way I describe it for me is I wanna feel pulled

00:58:39.420 | into things instead of pushed into things now.

00:58:42.120 | And so I had a friend who was like,

00:58:43.380 | I wanna start a company.

00:58:44.220 | I was like, why do you wanna start a company?

00:58:45.580 | You know, you started a company, you've done this,

00:58:47.000 | you've been successful.

00:58:48.100 | The more he thought about it, he was like, well,

00:58:49.860 | I feel like I don't know what I wanna do.

00:58:51.120 | And I was like, just wait till there's a thing

00:58:53.180 | that's pulling you towards it

00:58:54.900 | instead of trying to push yourself into it.

00:58:57.180 | That's what I try to look for,

00:58:58.340 | which is ultimately why I left.

00:58:59.740 | I was like, I just feel that I have to go do this full time.

00:59:02.940 | - Yeah, and the other way to think about it is,

00:59:05.260 | again, I think this is from Tim Ferriss.

00:59:07.500 | He has this question of what am I saying no to

00:59:09.660 | by saying yes to this?

00:59:11.460 | And I think about that constantly in the context of family

00:59:14.420 | and in the context of what my priorities are.

00:59:16.820 | I mean, like if my son is my number one priority

00:59:18.820 | in the world right now,

00:59:20.020 | then building a deep relationship with him

00:59:22.340 | over this next 10 years and really, really having

00:59:24.700 | that closeness and that bond,

00:59:27.420 | anytime some new opportunity comes along,

00:59:29.780 | I have to think that question through and think about,

00:59:31.700 | okay, what am I saying no to with him

00:59:33.740 | by saying yes to this?

00:59:34.780 | Like if some new travel comes up

00:59:36.700 | and someone wants me to go and speak at something

00:59:38.500 | and it's gonna require me being gone for a few weeks,

00:59:40.660 | what am I gonna miss?

00:59:41.640 | Like, what am I gonna be saying no to?

00:59:43.660 | And it might be $50,000 that someone wants me

00:59:45.780 | to come speak at something and they're gonna pay

00:59:48.100 | and it's gonna be this cool trip

00:59:49.140 | and I'm gonna get to go to this cool place.

00:59:50.700 | But if I'm missing his birthday party,

00:59:53.540 | like hell no, there's no amount of money

00:59:55.860 | you could pay me, right?

00:59:56.860 | And so really thinking that through

00:59:58.380 | and it might not be kids, maybe it's something else,

01:00:00.180 | maybe it's time with your family,

01:00:01.260 | maybe it's some hobby that you really enjoy

01:00:04.020 | or a trip with friends that you really wanted to take

01:00:06.540 | that you're gonna have to say no to

01:00:08.260 | because of some new work thing

01:00:09.660 | that you're gonna really have to dive into

01:00:11.080 | if you get the opportunity.

01:00:12.820 | Thinking through those trade-offs,

01:00:14.260 | I think is a really healthy thing to do,

01:00:16.600 | but it requires you to sit back

01:00:18.140 | and figure out what your priorities are.

01:00:20.540 | What are the core ways that you're gonna measure

01:00:22.660 | the success of your life at the end of the day?

01:00:25.020 | - That could be a whole nother episode,

01:00:26.100 | so we're not gonna go down that path.

01:00:27.740 | But I will say that my hack here is

01:00:29.540 | I took a lot of time to craft what I thought

01:00:31.940 | was like my perfect no email

01:00:34.860 | and then I made it a snippet

01:00:36.100 | so that I could just fire it off anytime

01:00:37.740 | and someone's like, "Hey, I really wanna talk

01:00:39.180 | "about this thing."

01:00:40.020 | And I'm like, "I'm heads down."

01:00:41.620 | I should probably just publish it

01:00:42.660 | 'cause people could steal it.

01:00:44.180 | It's like, "I'm really heads down,

01:00:45.200 | "focusing on stuff that's important.

01:00:46.720 | "Feel free to shoot me an email,

01:00:48.220 | "but not gonna have time to meet.

01:00:49.760 | "Really appreciate you reaching out.

01:00:51.100 | "It means a lot, thanks."

01:00:52.660 | - I do the same.

01:00:53.500 | And by making it easy, I use it so much more.

01:00:57.140 | And honestly, the difference between thinking about it

01:00:59.560 | and having it as like a keyboard shortcut level ease

01:01:03.220 | makes me send it so often and feel okay about it.

01:01:06.980 | And I got this from Derek Sivers who was like,

01:01:10.100 | "If you're always busy and you can never meet with anyone,

01:01:12.200 | "you're kind of projecting

01:01:13.440 | "that you can't prioritize your own time.

01:01:15.640 | "And if you leave free time in your calendar,

01:01:18.000 | "you're able to take advantage of things

01:01:20.100 | "when they happen that are really interesting."

01:01:21.980 | And so I'm trying to live by that.

01:01:24.420 | It's hard because especially when you're younger,

01:01:26.420 | it's like every opportunity

01:01:27.540 | could be more serendipity, more serendipity.

01:01:29.740 | But I feel like as we have families

01:01:31.540 | and we kind of understand our areas,

01:01:33.200 | you've got to really do it.

01:01:34.060 | So I appreciate you saying yes to this

01:01:36.920 | because there's always so much knowledge

01:01:38.940 | that gets dropped doing it.

01:01:40.340 | Where do you want to send people today

01:01:41.940 | who are listening and want to stay on top

01:01:43.420 | of what you're doing?

01:01:44.260 | - I guess my newsletter is probably the best.

01:01:45.900 | Sahobloom.com/newsletter

01:01:47.700 | takes you straight to the newsletter,

01:01:49.100 | but everything's on my website.

01:01:50.380 | - And then I'm on all social platforms @sahobloom.

01:01:53.180 | The virtue of having a weird name

01:01:54.700 | is you get your own handle.

01:01:56.580 | - Kind messages only.

01:01:57.740 | - Yeah, kind messages only.

01:01:59.260 | If you send me the mean ones, I won't reply,

01:02:00.780 | but I will feel empathy for you.

01:02:02.980 | - Amazing.

01:02:03.820 | Thank you so much for being here.

01:02:04.980 | - Awesome, thanks.

01:02:05.900 | - That was so great.

01:02:08.820 | And as much as traveling across the country

01:02:10.740 | takes a toll on you,

01:02:11.740 | I do really enjoy having some of these conversations

01:02:14.060 | in person.

01:02:14.900 | I really hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.

01:02:17.260 | So please let me know what you think

01:02:18.740 | or share any ideas you have for other guests,

01:02:21.140 | topics to explore or questions you have

01:02:23.700 | to chris@allthehacks.com.

01:02:25.860 | Also quick reminder to anyone looking to get

01:02:27.900 | that 80,000 points signup bonus

01:02:29.540 | on the Chase Sapphire Preferred.

01:02:31.140 | It is ending soon.

01:02:32.780 | So to learn more, head over to allthehacks.com/csp.

01:02:37.380 | Or if you're looking for any other cards

01:02:39.180 | and you wanna support me in the show,

01:02:41.060 | you can go to allthehacks.com/cards.

01:02:44.060 | All right, that's it for this week.

01:02:45.540 | See you next week.

01:02:46.540 | (upbeat music)

01:02:49.140 | (upbeat music)

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01:02:58.220 | (upbeat music)

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