ATHLLC8706451138

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:01.880 | - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "All The Hacks,"

00:00:04.960 | a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

00:00:07.920 | I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am excited for today's episode

00:00:10.500 | because it's with my friend

00:00:11.880 | and now third time "All The Hacks" guest, Sahil Bloom.

00:00:15.040 | This time we're in person at the studio

00:00:17.380 | I built in my office,

00:00:18.760 | which has been so much fun to use

00:00:20.380 | for these in-person episodes.

00:00:22.040 | If you don't know Sahil, he's one of my favorite writers

00:00:24.600 | and the lessons he shares online

00:00:26.100 | are some of the best on the internet.

00:00:28.220 | So today we're gonna tackle an area

00:00:30.340 | he's written a lot about, paradoxes,

00:00:33.060 | which are seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statements

00:00:36.180 | that when investigated or explained

00:00:38.340 | may actually prove to be well-founded or true.

00:00:41.060 | I love this topic because I believe that so many

00:00:43.660 | of the most important truths in our life

00:00:45.580 | actually do appear contradictory

00:00:47.280 | or convoluted on the surface.

00:00:48.940 | We're not only gonna share some of our favorite paradoxes,

00:00:51.660 | but we'll also cover how you can turn these paradoxes

00:00:54.140 | to your advantage to live your best and most optimized life.

00:00:58.200 | Oh, and one quick update.

00:00:59.620 | Last week I shared that I was gonna put

00:01:01.140 | my personal 150,000 point welcome bonus referral link

00:01:04.500 | for the Amex Platinum in the show notes,

00:01:06.500 | except that it turns out I didn't have one like I thought.

00:01:09.420 | So I reached out to our amazing All The Hacks members

00:01:11.760 | and managed to find a few working links.

00:01:14.020 | So if you're looking for that bonus,

00:01:15.500 | you can find it at allthehacks.com/platinum.

00:01:18.820 | Going forward, I'm gonna solicit members

00:01:20.700 | for all their referral links

00:01:22.080 | whenever there are amazing offers

00:01:24.140 | and share them with you all.

00:01:25.740 | So stay tuned for the next one.

00:01:27.740 | And if you're interested in having your referral link

00:01:29.780 | be part of the rotation or just becoming a member,

00:01:32.540 | you can do that at allthehacks.com/join.

00:01:36.220 | Okay, I am so excited for this episode with Sahil.

00:01:39.060 | Let's get into it right after this.

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00:02:56.780 | - Sahil, thanks for being here.

00:03:00.500 | - Glad to be back, and in the new home studio even better.

00:03:04.020 | - I know, we're building the sauna out front,

00:03:05.780 | and the construction has been paused

00:03:07.420 | for two hours for us to record.

00:03:09.140 | - Next time I come here,

00:03:10.100 | I expect to do a sauna episode though.

00:03:12.260 | Sauna cold plunge?

00:03:13.460 | - Yeah, one too.

00:03:14.380 | The company building the sauna,

00:03:15.940 | everyone will hear about it later.

00:03:17.180 | It's called Haven Sauna, and it's gonna be really nice.

00:03:21.300 | They're doing really great work.

00:03:23.100 | But next time we'll do it.

00:03:24.820 | It's always trouble to narrow down the scope

00:03:26.540 | of these conversations,

00:03:27.660 | because you've written about so much,

00:03:29.860 | and I'm an avid reader of yours.

00:03:32.220 | But I was thinking about the topic today,

00:03:34.100 | and I thought there is one topic

00:03:36.580 | that you've written about on Twitter

00:03:37.900 | that has actually led to tremendous amazement

00:03:40.500 | of a lunch with a billionaire.

00:03:42.380 | So maybe we just start with what is that topic,

00:03:45.100 | and why should we talk about it?

00:03:46.700 | - So I think what you're alluding to,

00:03:48.420 | because it's the only one, is the topic of paradoxes.

00:03:51.300 | And the funny story around all of this,

00:03:53.380 | and the lunch with the billionaire story,

00:03:54.940 | goes back to, let's see, November of 2021,

00:03:58.820 | I wrote my first, this was like a Twitter thread,

00:04:02.780 | on the topic of paradoxes.

00:04:04.260 | So basically, a paradox is like a seemingly absurd

00:04:08.180 | or contradictory statement

00:04:09.820 | that once you actually dig into it and investigate it,

00:04:12.300 | may actually prove true.

00:04:13.420 | I wrote a sort of curation of like 20

00:04:16.140 | of my favorite paradoxes

00:04:17.580 | that I feel like I've come across in my own life,

00:04:19.340 | or that I've struggled with on a regular basis,

00:04:21.540 | and shared it.

00:04:22.380 | And it went pretty viral at the time,

00:04:24.300 | probably had like 60 or so thousand likes,

00:04:26.580 | reached tons of people, et cetera, went away.

00:04:28.820 | Just like most things do on Twitter,

00:04:30.740 | you know, it's kind of an ephemeral platform.

00:04:32.740 | Once something has like buzzed for 24 hours,

00:04:35.220 | it sort of disappears into the ether and it's gone forever.

00:04:37.940 | So fast forward to January, 2023,

00:04:40.580 | I am in India visiting my grandmother,

00:04:42.740 | and I wake up in the morning to a bunch of texts

00:04:45.340 | from friends saying like,

00:04:46.700 | "Whoa, Bill Ackman shared your tweet thread."

00:04:50.180 | So I expect like,

00:04:51.180 | "Oh, it's some recent thing that I've written, that's cool."

00:04:53.140 | I pop it open and I look,

00:04:54.540 | and he has quote tweeted this thread from November, 2021,

00:04:58.300 | saying, "A friend sent me this last week.

00:05:00.940 | It contains tons of wisdom, everyone should read it."

00:05:03.700 | And so I'm the big like shoot your shot guy.

00:05:05.740 | I talk about that a lot.

00:05:06.780 | Closed mouths don't get fed,

00:05:08.260 | it's like one of my mantras on life.

00:05:10.140 | So I reply to his tweet and say,

00:05:12.500 | "Thanks for sharing my work, Bill.

00:05:14.220 | We should get lunch in New York sometime on me."

00:05:16.900 | Kind of tongue in cheek, like he's a billionaire,

00:05:18.740 | I'm obviously not, I'll pay for lunch.

00:05:20.700 | And he replies and says, "Would love to do that."

00:05:22.780 | And so we DM, coordinate,

00:05:25.020 | and I ended up getting to have lunch with Bill Ackman

00:05:27.140 | as a result of this Twitter thread

00:05:28.500 | that I had written 18 months before, whatever it was.

00:05:31.460 | Unbelievable serendipity,

00:05:32.660 | and also a perfect example of the luck raiser,

00:05:34.900 | which I feel like we talked about on our last episode

00:05:37.180 | of expanding your luck surface area

00:05:39.260 | and how content is a great, great example of that.

00:05:41.980 | Like you put something out into the world

00:05:43.140 | and it's still creating lucky encounters for you

00:05:45.820 | 18 months into the future.

00:05:47.020 | So I can't promise that anyone listening

00:05:48.740 | is gonna be able to use this content

00:05:50.780 | to have lunch with a billionaire, but maybe, maybe.

00:05:54.180 | But I can promise that the value you get from it's tremendous

00:05:57.260 | because I've gotten it.

00:05:58.820 | So what I thought we'd do,

00:05:59.740 | similar to the last time when we talked about raisers,

00:06:01.900 | was just kind of run through

00:06:03.460 | what I thought were some of my favorites.

00:06:04.820 | If I miss some, you can bring them up.

00:06:06.460 | And I've kind of grouped them into a few categories.

00:06:08.780 | And so maybe talk really briefly why paradoxes,

00:06:11.380 | what attracted you to write about this?

00:06:13.340 | - Like for me, when I think about content more broadly

00:06:15.860 | and the content that I create,

00:06:17.980 | my whole goal is not to provide answers

00:06:21.260 | to questions for people.

00:06:22.620 | You know, I don't sit down and think

00:06:23.900 | that I am some unbelievably wise or intelligent person

00:06:27.220 | that has all the answers

00:06:28.260 | to how to live your life in a better way.

00:06:29.900 | What I do know is that I spend a lot of time

00:06:32.420 | thinking about problems and thinking about struggles

00:06:34.980 | that I've encountered in my own life

00:06:36.620 | and about tensions and balance points

00:06:38.860 | and all these different areas.

00:06:39.980 | Paradoxes contain a lot of that.

00:06:41.740 | Like when you think about something

00:06:43.060 | that looks on the surface one way,

00:06:44.500 | but in reality, it's another way,

00:06:46.060 | that's fundamentally what we're talking about here.

00:06:48.020 | And that's life.

00:06:48.860 | And so I thought the paradoxes piece and my writing on it

00:06:52.540 | was like a great encapsulation

00:06:54.380 | of how you actually encounter challenges

00:06:57.460 | and struggle in your own life.

00:06:58.860 | It's not about coming up with the right answer.

00:07:01.060 | It's about asking the right question

00:07:02.580 | and about struggling with it

00:07:03.940 | slightly better than you were previously.

00:07:06.100 | And so that's like,

00:07:06.940 | that's always been my attempt with writing about it.

00:07:08.900 | And hopefully what has come across

00:07:10.740 | and why it's resonated with people when I have.

00:07:12.900 | - It's funny, I think when you just started saying that,

00:07:14.900 | it made me click why I appreciate your content so much.

00:07:18.180 | What I do is actually probably the exact opposite.

00:07:20.100 | I'm like, I am going to do all the research

00:07:22.020 | on all the cell phone plans in the country,

00:07:24.420 | except for Xfinity Mobile,

00:07:25.860 | which a few of you have reached out and said,

00:07:27.380 | "Sorry, I left it off the list."

00:07:29.220 | I guess that my hatred of Comcast kind of came to fruition

00:07:32.300 | with the goal of like,

00:07:33.260 | can I narrow down all the information

00:07:35.060 | so you can actually just make a decision?

00:07:36.900 | And I think your style of content is like,

00:07:38.820 | let me give you a bunch of information

00:07:40.260 | that you can use to think differently.

00:07:41.860 | And maybe mine is that you can use to do differently.

00:07:44.660 | - I mean, your content,

00:07:45.900 | there's sort of like two areas, right?

00:07:47.380 | Your content is answerable.

00:07:49.420 | Like there is a specific answer that you can research

00:07:52.180 | and give someone the best answer to definitively

00:07:55.260 | the type of questions you are wrestling with.

00:07:57.060 | The questions I'm wrestling with are like,

00:07:59.260 | how to live your life better

00:08:00.900 | or how to live in a slightly healthier or wealthier way.

00:08:03.780 | And there's no one size fits all to that.

00:08:05.420 | I can research it all I want.

00:08:07.060 | I can go talk to like 90 year olds, 80 year olds,

00:08:09.340 | learn all that I can.

00:08:10.660 | But the reality is that everyone's life situation

00:08:12.700 | is different.

00:08:13.540 | Everyone's in a different season of their own life.

00:08:16.340 | And so what the correct answer for you at age 20,

00:08:18.820 | when you're starting out

00:08:19.660 | is not the correct answer for you at age 40 or may not be.

00:08:22.500 | And so my whole perspective is like,

00:08:24.820 | I always need to navigate and avoid being like

00:08:29.020 | overly definitive and providing an answer

00:08:31.260 | and reconcile the fact that I'm 32.

00:08:34.140 | Like I don't have all the answers.

00:08:35.420 | I'm not a 95 year old old wise monk

00:08:38.140 | living in the mountains of the Himalayas

00:08:39.700 | telling you that I've like learned the secret to life.

00:08:42.340 | What I do know is that I spend a whole lot of time

00:08:44.260 | thinking about these things

00:08:45.460 | and that I have a way where I can sort of disseminate them

00:08:48.540 | and hopefully like a clear and concise way

00:08:50.660 | that helps people navigate them in their own lives.

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00:11:22.660 | At the risk of taking too much advice,

00:11:24.260 | let's jump into the paradoxes,

00:11:25.900 | let's talk about the advice paradox.

00:11:27.380 | Good transition.

00:11:28.220 | Yeah, I feel like advice isn't what it might seem.

00:11:30.500 | Yeah, I mean, the advice paradox is the idea

00:11:33.500 | that we all get and receive a whole lot of advice

00:11:37.780 | over the course of our lives.

00:11:38.960 | Most of it is complete garbage.

00:11:41.820 | And the more advice you take,

00:11:44.540 | the less well-informed you actually are.

00:11:48.060 | And this is something that's counterintuitive.

00:11:49.980 | You think like, "Oh, I'm just starting out in my life.

00:11:51.900 | "I need to go and get tons of advice

00:11:53.500 | "from all these different people."

00:11:54.660 | And the reality is that for them,

00:11:56.900 | most of their maps that they're going to provide you with,

00:11:59.900 | the advice that they provide you being the map,

00:12:02.180 | are not going to match the terrain of your life.

00:12:04.860 | Your life is fundamentally very different

00:12:06.780 | than whatever it is you're going to encounter.

00:12:08.380 | Nassim Taleb talks about this idea of the noise bottleneck

00:12:11.700 | in some of his work, which basically says that

00:12:14.540 | you assume that by consuming more,

00:12:16.740 | you're going to get more signal as a result.

00:12:19.780 | But the reality is that by consuming more,

00:12:22.060 | and in this case, consuming more advice,

00:12:24.340 | the ratio of noise to signal actually increases over time.

00:12:28.740 | And so what you're left with is a worse idea

00:12:31.100 | of what the overall answer is.

00:12:33.660 | And I really feel that way with advice.

00:12:35.380 | When you go out and get too much advice,

00:12:37.060 | you get too many different perspectives,

00:12:38.940 | you actually leave feeling like,

00:12:40.740 | "Oh my God, I'm completely overwhelmed,

00:12:42.460 | "and I have no idea what the answer is to this problem."

00:12:44.980 | And so the real key then is figuring out

00:12:47.780 | how to take some of the signal

00:12:50.020 | from what you get out in the world,

00:12:51.820 | narrow down to the things that are really high signal

00:12:53.820 | and the people that are really providing

00:12:55.620 | the tightest and crispest, if that's a word, advice,

00:12:58.460 | and leave all the noise, you know,

00:12:59.860 | get rid of all that other noise

00:13:01.300 | that might exist in the world.

00:13:02.540 | - So is it more about seeking less advice

00:13:04.940 | or more about when you seek that advice,

00:13:07.220 | knowing how to process what you learn?

00:13:08.700 | - I think it's both.

00:13:09.660 | On the seeking less advice,

00:13:11.540 | that really comes from curating who you seek out for advice.

00:13:15.380 | Seeking advice from people who have really experienced

00:13:18.860 | the thing that you are going through

00:13:20.380 | or have navigated in the way that you want to navigate it,

00:13:22.940 | narrowing it down to just those people is really important.

00:13:26.060 | And then realizing that no one has

00:13:27.780 | the ultimate answer for you.

00:13:29.300 | If I want to go start a business,

00:13:30.620 | I can't just go to Elon Musk and assume

00:13:32.980 | that he's going to have the perfect advice for me

00:13:35.020 | in my career where I am, right?

00:13:36.460 | Because survivorship bias plays a role.

00:13:38.940 | He might've just gotten lucky.

00:13:40.260 | - And he and you are very different people.

00:13:41.580 | - Yeah, and you know, very, very different people

00:13:43.660 | and want different things

00:13:44.740 | and have different balance points in our life.

00:13:46.260 | And there's so many differences.

00:13:47.460 | And yet most people, when they go to do that,

00:13:49.620 | they go read a bunch of books on business and say like,

00:13:53.100 | "Oh, well, Elon Musk bet it all

00:13:55.020 | "after he sold his shares in PayPal

00:13:57.500 | "and like pushed all the chips back in the table

00:13:59.460 | "and it worked out for him.

00:14:00.300 | "Now he's the richest man in the world.

00:14:01.220 | "So I'm going to just keep betting it all."

00:14:02.820 | And then you go bankrupt and you wonder why.

00:14:04.820 | So, you know, survivorship bias plays a real role

00:14:07.220 | in how advice is given.

00:14:08.620 | Like we take advice from the victors

00:14:10.700 | and that's a dangerous thing too.

00:14:12.260 | It's funny 'cause we're both working on books

00:14:14.460 | and mine is kind of at the highest level principles

00:14:17.860 | for better outcomes.

00:14:19.260 | And the first one is that conventional wisdom sucks.

00:14:22.260 | And I think when I think about the advice paradox,

00:14:24.460 | I think about conventional wisdom.

00:14:26.380 | And I think the most common piece of conventional wisdom

00:14:29.620 | that I hear so many people talk about

00:14:31.420 | when it comes to money and wealth

00:14:32.820 | is that real estate is the best way to build wealth.

00:14:35.460 | I'm sure you've heard this.

00:14:36.620 | Maybe people in your family believe it.

00:14:39.100 | And for me, it's like, it is a way

00:14:41.900 | and it happened to have worked for someone.

00:14:43.780 | And then they translate that it to being the best.

00:14:46.980 | But who knows if they actually did the research

00:14:48.500 | ahead of time to pick that consciously

00:14:50.660 | or if it's just the thing that worked.

00:14:52.220 | Conventional wisdom is an interesting thing.

00:14:53.940 | It's sort of like all of these like,

00:14:55.900 | have you heard of Chesterton's fence?

00:14:57.620 | Like this idea that if you don't know why a fence is there,

00:15:02.020 | you should figure out why it's there

00:15:03.620 | before tearing it down.

00:15:05.100 | I think about that a lot with things like this

00:15:06.700 | because so like the example is like,

00:15:08.860 | there's this fence and you think it's really stupid

00:15:11.020 | that it's there and you go tear it down

00:15:12.940 | because you can't figure out why it's there.

00:15:14.540 | It might've been that it was holding back

00:15:15.980 | a whole bunch of wolves that you didn't know existed

00:15:18.740 | because the fence was holding it back

00:15:20.140 | and then you go tear it down and your whole town

00:15:21.820 | gets eaten by a bunch of wolves that are let in.

00:15:24.020 | And so like with stuff like this,

00:15:25.460 | like with conventional wisdom,

00:15:27.020 | I just always seek to figure out why is it there?

00:15:29.980 | Like before saying that it doesn't work

00:15:31.980 | or that it's incorrect, I wanna know like,

00:15:34.340 | well, what created the situation

00:15:36.020 | where that became conventional wisdom?

00:15:38.020 | So like before you dispel the notion, figure out why.

00:15:41.260 | And then it might be that it was incorrect.

00:15:43.020 | With Chesterton's fence, the whole idea is like,

00:15:44.980 | no one puts up a fence just for the fun of it.

00:15:47.980 | So they put it up for a reason.

00:15:49.380 | You need to figure out why before you go and tear it down.

00:15:52.140 | - It's funny, I chose conventional wisdom sucks,

00:15:54.020 | not conventional wisdom is wrong.

00:15:56.060 | Intentionally, 'cause I'm like,

00:15:57.220 | it just sucks that people often give it

00:15:59.940 | as if it should apply to everyone.

00:16:02.020 | It's not that it's wrong.

00:16:02.900 | It's just that you might not be in the same situation

00:16:05.220 | as your parents were.

00:16:06.420 | And so their advice might not apply.

00:16:08.260 | - And most people blindly give it

00:16:09.740 | because it's repeated ad nauseum.

00:16:11.260 | And so most people will continue to perpetuate

00:16:14.100 | whatever the conventional wisdom is

00:16:15.500 | because it's easy to do

00:16:16.820 | without actually having thought about it

00:16:18.700 | on a first principles basis.

00:16:20.140 | And so when you ask them like,

00:16:21.460 | well, why should I own real estate?

00:16:23.300 | And they go to start explaining it,

00:16:24.940 | it's like the emperor has no clothes.

00:16:26.340 | There's nothing underneath the surface of that question

00:16:28.540 | when you ask them.

00:16:29.380 | So we're in the topic of life.

00:16:31.220 | Let's talk about the opportunity paradox,

00:16:33.220 | which funny enough, as I read through,

00:16:34.900 | you've written about paradoxes multiple times,

00:16:36.620 | used to be called the say no paradox has evolved.

00:16:40.340 | It's the evolution of probably of my writing,

00:16:42.460 | 'cause I think the opportunity paradox

00:16:43.940 | has a better ring to it than say no.

00:16:45.900 | The idea here with the opportunity paradox

00:16:48.540 | is you need to take on less to accomplish more.

00:16:51.780 | So when I was young and probably when you were young,

00:16:54.260 | probably a lot of your listeners,

00:16:55.660 | you assume that you need to just take on every single thing.

00:16:58.420 | If you want to accomplish great things,

00:17:00.060 | you need to just say yes to things

00:17:01.460 | over and over and over again.

00:17:02.780 | I think that is true to an extent early in your life

00:17:05.260 | because saying yes expands your luck surface area,

00:17:07.820 | you get exposed to different things out there.

00:17:09.780 | But at a certain point,

00:17:11.060 | what you really need to do is take on less

00:17:12.900 | and you need to take on less but better

00:17:15.380 | to use the Greg McKeown thing from essentialism.

00:17:18.460 | And this is like a really core trait

00:17:20.660 | of how you actually go deeper,

00:17:21.900 | how you identify what are those asymmetric opportunities

00:17:24.700 | that exist and how you pursue those only.

00:17:27.700 | There's another paradox, you have the boredom paradox,

00:17:29.380 | which I kind of feel like might fit into

00:17:32.220 | if you have extra time because you haven't filled your day.

00:17:35.500 | Would you say that these kind of pair well?

00:17:37.500 | Around all of these, it's sort of free time is a good thing.

00:17:40.500 | This is like one of what I would consider

00:17:42.180 | the most significant lies we've all been told,

00:17:44.300 | which is that free time is bad.

00:17:46.500 | The reality in my mind is that free time

00:17:48.780 | is a call option on future interesting opportunities.

00:17:52.300 | What I mean by that is that when you have free time

00:17:54.340 | in your schedule, you have the headspace

00:17:56.460 | and you have the actual time and bandwidth

00:17:58.660 | to go pursue the really high upside,

00:18:00.980 | asymmetric opportunities that come into your life.

00:18:03.260 | If your day is just back to back meetings,

00:18:05.700 | chock full from start to finish,

00:18:07.660 | where are you gonna pursue the interesting thing

00:18:09.380 | that might come your way?

00:18:10.220 | You're just gonna have to say no to it

00:18:11.380 | because you literally don't have time

00:18:13.180 | and you don't have the headspace to think about it.

00:18:14.820 | I think about that all the time when I'm stressed

00:18:16.700 | 'cause I'm running from thing to thing to thing.

00:18:18.700 | My response when I see a text or an email

00:18:21.060 | that might offer me something or ask me to do something

00:18:23.740 | is like default no, because I'm overwhelmed.

00:18:26.020 | I'm stressed and I just wanna get things out of the way.

00:18:28.020 | Arthur Brooks calls it ventilating your schedule,

00:18:30.740 | like breathing some air into your schedule

00:18:32.900 | is a great way to spark creativity

00:18:34.900 | so that you can actually go and identify

00:18:37.060 | what those asymmetric opportunities are.

00:18:39.180 | The things where one unit of input

00:18:41.420 | is creating 10, 100, 1,000 X units of output.

00:18:44.900 | - And if you don't have a thing to come back to boredom,

00:18:47.700 | it's like actually being bored can be valuable.

00:18:50.700 | - Yeah, I mean, look at, this is a silly example.

00:18:53.100 | Look at how Lionel Messi plays soccer.

00:18:55.900 | Watch him on a soccer field.

00:18:57.060 | This is one of the things that announcers

00:18:58.580 | have bemoaned about him throughout his career.

00:19:00.300 | He walks around the pitch all the time

00:19:02.860 | and to the untrained eye, it looks like he's bored.

00:19:05.860 | I mean, during the World Cup final,

00:19:08.180 | he's like walking around in the latter seconds of that match,

00:19:11.540 | just like sort of aimlessly looking around

00:19:13.420 | and walking around.

00:19:14.740 | And then all of a sudden he bursts into action

00:19:17.140 | and deploys all of his energy into a single moment

00:19:19.780 | where he knows there isn't 1,000 X upside potential

00:19:23.580 | in that moment and scores one of the game winning goals.

00:19:26.260 | And that is like the perfect example to me.

00:19:27.940 | You can be bored and then really deploy all of your energy

00:19:31.500 | into those 1,000 X opportunities

00:19:33.380 | that offer that asymmetric upside.

00:19:35.580 | - Also watching Lionel Messi not moving around

00:19:39.940 | probably fits into the effort paradox as well,

00:19:42.340 | because I think he knows what he's doing.

00:19:44.020 | - Yes, he definitely knows what he's doing.

00:19:45.740 | - And maybe as we hit each one, feel free to recap them.

00:19:48.540 | - Yeah, but he definitely knows what he's doing.

00:19:50.140 | The effort paradox, athletes are the best with this one.

00:19:52.640 | So I totally agree with you.

00:19:53.620 | The effort paradox is the idea that you have to put in

00:19:56.500 | more effort in order for something to appear effortless.

00:20:00.460 | The idea that effortless, elegant performances

00:20:04.320 | are really just the result of thousands and thousands

00:20:07.300 | of hours of effortful practice.

00:20:09.820 | Watching Roger Federer play tennis in his prime,

00:20:12.580 | if you're a tennis fan, is a perfect example of this.

00:20:14.620 | Like his strokes just look completely effortless,

00:20:17.300 | but they're the result of thousands and thousands of hours

00:20:19.580 | of compounded, effortful practice.

00:20:22.020 | There's this phrase, which I might butcher

00:20:25.080 | the pronunciation of, sprezzatura,

00:20:27.380 | which is an Italian phrase,

00:20:28.680 | I think from like the 15th century,

00:20:30.660 | a guy by the name of Baldassare Castiglione

00:20:33.580 | who wrote this book called The Book of the Courtier.

00:20:36.340 | And the whole book was about how to be an ideal courtier,

00:20:39.580 | like a person of the court in these royal courts.

00:20:41.900 | And he basically said that an ideal courtier

00:20:44.100 | should walk with a sprezzatura,

00:20:46.420 | which he defines as like a studied nonchalance,

00:20:49.700 | meaning it appears effortless,

00:20:52.140 | but there is a studied element to it.

00:20:53.900 | Like you've worked so hard to make something appear

00:20:56.140 | effortless in the way that you walk.

00:20:58.020 | And that is the goal that all of us are pursuing.

00:21:00.300 | That's like reaching that level

00:21:01.820 | of unconscious competence in something

00:21:04.300 | where you can just do it and make it appear

00:21:06.100 | completely effortless to do the thing.

00:21:08.420 | That's kind of the pursuit that we're all on

00:21:10.300 | in whatever our field or craft is,

00:21:11.980 | is to reach that level of elegance in the way that we move.

00:21:14.860 | - I mean, I don't know if you've seen Free Solo,

00:21:16.500 | but my sport that I've done. - Yeah, of course.

00:21:17.340 | He's a perfect example of it.

00:21:18.620 | - I've rock climbed for a long time,

00:21:20.300 | and the ability to make rock climbing look natural

00:21:23.780 | is so much practice.

00:21:25.500 | And it's also a great sport to take someone

00:21:28.620 | who is very, very in shape,

00:21:30.900 | but has never been rock climbing,

00:21:32.620 | if you want to feel good about yourself.

00:21:34.500 | - So you're going to take me rock climbing sometime?

00:21:36.500 | I get invited to do a lot of rock climbing,

00:21:38.460 | and I always hesitate because it scares me.

00:21:40.380 | But Alex Honnold is someone that I would love to meet someday

00:21:43.020 | because just the way that his mind works around these things

00:21:45.540 | is just fascinating.

00:21:46.660 | - A venture firm that I raised money from

00:21:48.460 | had a private event with Alex Honnold a couple of weeks ago,

00:21:50.780 | and it was really awesome to have like a small group,

00:21:54.460 | non-recorded closed door conversation.

00:21:57.100 | He is a fascinating individual.

00:21:59.140 | - The cinematography in that movie is otherworldly.

00:22:02.780 | I think it was Jimmy Lee, or no, it's Jimmy Chan.

00:22:06.180 | Jimmy Chan is the guy that does it,

00:22:07.980 | who's an unbelievable climber himself.

00:22:10.220 | You know, and for the whole team

00:22:11.180 | to be able to actually get those shots,

00:22:12.540 | unbelievable climbers, yeah, that movie's incredible.

00:22:15.100 | - I just assume people have seen it,

00:22:16.460 | but if you haven't, strong, strong recommendation.

00:22:18.460 | - Drop everything.

00:22:19.300 | It's like a drop everything and watch that movie.

00:22:21.220 | Unless you're like terribly afraid of heights,

00:22:22.980 | in which case you might get kind of triggered by it.

00:22:25.180 | - I took a friend of mine rock climbing once.

00:22:27.260 | There's probably some paradox or lesson in this.

00:22:29.660 | I assumed that he would know that climbing gear is safe,

00:22:34.340 | but he'd never been climbing.

00:22:35.500 | And so we were in Australia,

00:22:37.180 | and we did a five-pitch climb in the Blue Mountains,

00:22:39.900 | which is basically--

00:22:40.740 | - What does five-pitch mean?

00:22:41.580 | - Five-pitch is you climb up,

00:22:43.420 | and then you pull your gear and your ropes,

00:22:45.180 | and then you climb again.

00:22:46.020 | - Okay, there's like five stages.

00:22:46.860 | - So there's like five stages.

00:22:47.700 | And this is where you're like setting your gear in the rock.

00:22:50.740 | Like you're taking a thing, pushing it between a crack,

00:22:53.580 | and trusting that it will hold you.

00:22:55.340 | Having done it myself, I'm like, yeah, that works.

00:22:57.740 | My friend had never rock climbed,

00:22:58.780 | and we weren't doing necessarily a hard climb.

00:23:00.540 | If we were in a gym,

00:23:01.500 | it would have been a walk in the park for everyone.

00:23:04.100 | But we're like up on this wall,

00:23:05.420 | and it never crossed my mind

00:23:06.820 | that he might not trust all of this stuff.

00:23:09.540 | And I just remember by the end, I had a GoPro on.

00:23:12.340 | He was just cursing me.

00:23:13.540 | He was so mad, but there's nothing he could do

00:23:15.900 | 'cause we're halfway up the wall.

00:23:17.500 | There's just no option.

00:23:18.780 | - I mean, I'm kind of with your friend on this.

00:23:20.540 | Like on all of these things,

00:23:22.340 | I'm not like a big risk taker in general.

00:23:24.540 | So like when I have friends that do these kinds of things,

00:23:26.980 | I'm like, dude, you have kids.

00:23:27.940 | Why are you doing that?

00:23:28.780 | Like, you know, even scuba diving.

00:23:30.420 | I'm like, dude, why are you scuba diving?

00:23:31.700 | Don't scuba dive.

00:23:32.540 | Just like go snorkeling.

00:23:33.900 | You're on the top of the water.

00:23:34.980 | You're totally fine.

00:23:35.820 | Like do you really need to get into the fishes environment

00:23:38.260 | and like be down there in their house?

00:23:39.740 | Like they don't want you there either.

00:23:40.860 | Just chill on the top.

00:23:41.980 | You don't have like a pressurized tank of oxygen

00:23:44.540 | on your back.

00:23:45.380 | Like you're totally fine if something goes wrong.

00:23:47.380 | I never understood why people wanna go do these things.

00:23:49.940 | - It's funny.

00:23:50.780 | Scuba diving for me actually was one where

00:23:52.540 | I just feel like if you do it enough,

00:23:54.420 | I just kind of, I mean, get bored with it, I guess.

00:23:56.340 | It's like, oh, I've seen a lot of these things.

00:23:57.940 | So it's fallen off.

00:23:59.140 | - Yeah.

00:23:59.980 | Then you're like, oh, well now I need to scuba dive

00:24:01.300 | in like shark chummed waters.

00:24:03.060 | Like, so now I need to go do this.

00:24:04.340 | It's like, okay, well, then if you get bit by a shark,

00:24:06.940 | I'm not gonna feel bad for you if you decided to go do that.

00:24:09.940 | - I will put an endorsement in,

00:24:11.400 | which you probably won't take.

00:24:12.860 | In Hawaii, there is pelagic shark diving

00:24:15.900 | where it's just snorkeling with sharks.

00:24:18.340 | So you're kind of free diving and snorkeling

00:24:20.420 | in the shark's environment with a marine biologist

00:24:23.780 | who knows what they're doing.

00:24:24.860 | But it's like--

00:24:25.700 | - What do you mean they know what they're doing?

00:24:27.380 | Like they're gonna wrestle the shark if the shark comes?

00:24:30.100 | Like that makes no sense.

00:24:31.180 | Why would you, just to see a shark?

00:24:33.700 | - It was actually really fascinating

00:24:34.940 | because it was kind of like go get a lesson about sharks

00:24:38.180 | and be in their environment.

00:24:40.060 | And I guess it's not control, right?

00:24:42.660 | You're in the water with the shark.

00:24:43.940 | - Like what do you do if the shark just comes at you?

00:24:45.820 | You just try to run away?

00:24:47.180 | Like you're swimming.

00:24:48.820 | - She had like a pole.

00:24:50.220 | - Oh, that's really gonna stop a shark.

00:24:51.760 | That sounds great.

00:24:52.900 | That sounds like fun.

00:24:53.740 | - In this case, there was one shark and she's like,

00:24:55.100 | well, there's one shark with a lazy eye.

00:24:57.060 | It's very docile.

00:24:58.180 | If it comes towards you, don't be too worried.

00:25:00.620 | And so--

00:25:01.460 | - It's got a lazy eye.

00:25:02.500 | - So this shark would swim near people

00:25:03.980 | and she'd just kind of like bop it on the nose

00:25:05.620 | and it would swim away.

00:25:06.460 | But I thought, you probably won't take me up on it,

00:25:08.580 | but it's on either the Big Island or Maui.

00:25:10.580 | I can't remember which island.

00:25:11.500 | I'll put a link in the show notes.

00:25:12.860 | But we did this shark and it was amazing.

00:25:14.580 | - I'm just gonna stick to watching National Geographic.

00:25:16.660 | I'm gonna get my like Apple Vision+ immersive experience.

00:25:20.220 | It'll basically be like I was in the water with you guys,

00:25:23.020 | except without the shark potentially eating me.

00:25:25.540 | - Okay, fair.

00:25:26.460 | - Let's get back on track.

00:25:28.140 | Let's go to the talking paradox.

00:25:30.260 | I have a couple anecdotes here that came up recently.

00:25:32.380 | - All right. - Go for it.

00:25:33.220 | - Basic idea with the talking paradox

00:25:35.140 | is if you want your ideas to be heard,

00:25:38.100 | you should listen twice as much as you speak.

00:25:41.220 | And again, it's counter to what you would think,

00:25:44.220 | which is the more I talk,

00:25:46.220 | the more I push my ideas out there.

00:25:47.900 | If I'm in a room, I need to be the loudest one.

00:25:49.900 | I need to get my ideas heard, completely counter to that.

00:25:52.980 | The people that you actually listen to the most

00:25:55.300 | are the people that listen a whole lot.

00:25:57.860 | When they do speak, it is incredibly pointed,

00:26:00.700 | interesting, insightful speaking.

00:26:02.900 | There's some quote, I'm gonna forget who it is.

00:26:04.980 | Maybe it's Epictetus.

00:26:06.460 | You have two ears and one mouth.

00:26:08.220 | You need to use them accordingly.

00:26:09.700 | And it's very true.

00:26:10.660 | Something that I think of a lot in group events,

00:26:13.620 | at retreats, at different things that I go to.

00:26:16.180 | The person that I inevitably leave being most impressed by

00:26:19.780 | is the person who said very few words,

00:26:22.260 | but when they did speak, it was unbelievably poignant.

00:26:25.580 | - There was a partner at Google Ventures, Joe Krause,

00:26:27.780 | who's one of the, I guess I'll call him,

00:26:29.540 | wisest people I know.

00:26:31.460 | And he had this thing where he didn't talk much.

00:26:33.540 | And then when he did, right before,

00:26:35.140 | he'd kind of put his hands together like this,

00:26:37.060 | and we'd all be sitting in the room.

00:26:38.580 | - That's like a common thread, by the way.

00:26:40.100 | I feel like they always are like, okay.

00:26:42.180 | It's like the Yoda.

00:26:43.100 | - And I just remember we were all sitting around the room,

00:26:44.540 | and then all of a sudden you'd see Joe put his hands up,

00:26:46.340 | and I would be like, quiet down and listen intently.

00:26:49.140 | And I'm curious.

00:26:50.460 | I feel like this should be a goal for mine.

00:26:51.820 | I guess being a podcaster makes it hard to be like,

00:26:53.540 | oh, I should talk less.

00:26:54.380 | But do you feel like you do this well?

00:26:56.060 | And if so, how much are you thinking

00:26:58.700 | about what you're saying?

00:26:59.700 | Because to go back to Arthur Brooks,

00:27:00.980 | he has this whole concept of crystallized intelligence.

00:27:03.020 | And as you grow in your professional life,

00:27:05.260 | you've built up such a wealth of knowledge.

00:27:07.220 | I feel like sometimes it can be easy

00:27:09.500 | to just speak off the cuff.

00:27:10.860 | Do you have any tips for kind of restraining

00:27:13.660 | to really hone and focus when you kind of know the answer,

00:27:16.660 | but if you took a minute, you could piece together

00:27:18.740 | an even more profound response?

00:27:20.580 | - To answer your first question,

00:27:21.980 | I think I'm improving at it,

00:27:23.860 | but it doesn't come natural to me.

00:27:25.500 | I'm a storyteller naturally.

00:27:26.780 | I love telling stories, embellishing stories,

00:27:29.700 | like in locker rooms, like that was always my thing.

00:27:31.460 | I was like always the loud one in that way.

00:27:33.540 | And I need to force myself to go into

00:27:36.380 | what I call listen mode,

00:27:37.820 | which is like when you're around people,

00:27:39.380 | especially people that have different views than you,

00:27:42.020 | you really need to make an effort

00:27:43.180 | to listen twice as much as you speak.

00:27:45.140 | And it's really hard to do,

00:27:46.140 | 'cause when someone says something you don't agree with,

00:27:48.020 | your first reaction is like,

00:27:49.340 | let me jump in there and contest it.

00:27:50.780 | Let me tell you why you're wrong, et cetera.

00:27:52.660 | And you learn a whole lot more about the world,

00:27:54.540 | about yourself, about the other person,

00:27:56.780 | by defaulting to listening in those situations,

00:27:59.420 | because no one believes something for no reason.

00:28:01.940 | When someone has a belief, when someone has a perspective,

00:28:04.300 | when there's a fence sitting there,

00:28:05.700 | there's always a reason that the fence is there.

00:28:07.660 | So I think it's something that

00:28:09.220 | I definitely need to improve on.

00:28:10.300 | I think we all probably need to improve on.

00:28:12.460 | Your second question on ways and tips and heuristics,

00:28:16.380 | I think that it's just that.

00:28:17.740 | When you're in a situation and you're listening,

00:28:20.260 | actually make sure you're listening to the person,

00:28:21.860 | not formulating your response in the moment.

00:28:24.180 | I think there's a point in time

00:28:25.980 | when you've kind of gotten the gist

00:28:27.500 | of what someone is saying.

00:28:28.620 | When you turn to, okay, now I'm listening,

00:28:30.660 | but I'm also creating the narrative

00:28:32.260 | of what I'm gonna say in my mind.

00:28:33.980 | But it's usually later than you think.

00:28:35.540 | Most people, I think, stop listening very, very quickly

00:28:38.180 | in someone's dialogue.

00:28:39.100 | Like even when we're having a podcast conversation,

00:28:41.420 | you notice, if you start becoming aware of it,

00:28:43.860 | at what point in the person speaking

00:28:45.860 | are you starting to think about

00:28:46.860 | what you're gonna say next?

00:28:47.700 | Like you right now, you're probably thinking about like,

00:28:49.380 | okay, what am I gonna say next?

00:28:50.740 | Because it's the natural way that a conversation goes.

00:28:53.220 | Learning to like uncomfortably push that back a little bit

00:28:56.780 | and listen a little bit longer,

00:28:58.580 | I find that you learn a lot more from the other person.

00:29:00.740 | And then as a result,

00:29:01.940 | you end up coming up with more insightful responses

00:29:04.020 | that sort of drive conversations forward.

00:29:06.340 | Sometimes when you're in the moment like this,

00:29:08.180 | I'm not always the best at listening

00:29:10.180 | 'cause I'm trying to plan the conversation

00:29:11.780 | and it's a little bit my responsibility and job even.

00:29:14.860 | But there's a Stanford professor, Matt Abrahams,

00:29:17.300 | his episode will be coming out.

00:29:18.580 | By the time you hear this, you'll have heard it,

00:29:20.340 | but it comes out, I think next week.

00:29:22.300 | And he's written a bunch of books on impromptu speaking

00:29:25.220 | and how to become more natural at it.

00:29:27.340 | And by becoming more natural at it,

00:29:29.400 | you can feel more confident pushing back the point

00:29:32.260 | at which you start thinking of what you're gonna say.

00:29:34.060 | - That's interesting.

00:29:34.900 | I read an article recently

00:29:37.180 | on ways to become a better conversationalist,

00:29:40.420 | which I thought was really interesting

00:29:41.460 | because it's such an important trait,

00:29:43.940 | being a good conversationalist,

00:29:45.420 | that you don't really ever study, read about, think about.

00:29:48.940 | And it was written by an improv,

00:29:50.820 | like a person that is an expert at improv,

00:29:53.260 | which is an unbelievable skill.

00:29:54.620 | Like if you've never done it,

00:29:55.900 | gone to an improv class, et cetera,

00:29:57.380 | it's a great way to get better at public speaking,

00:29:59.540 | to get better at conversations, et cetera.

00:30:01.500 | And what he talks about, like his mental model,

00:30:03.660 | his framework for improving as a conversationalist,

00:30:06.980 | it's all about creating what he calls doorknobs

00:30:10.260 | in conversations.

00:30:11.420 | You say something that is a doorknob

00:30:13.620 | that someone else can open and walk through.

00:30:15.500 | Like you're not asking them necessarily a direct question,

00:30:18.420 | but you're making statements that are inviting someone

00:30:20.860 | to open the doorknob and walk through the door.

00:30:23.540 | The article is great,

00:30:24.380 | we should link to it in the show notes,

00:30:25.460 | but it's got a whole bunch of really interesting examples

00:30:28.140 | of that, like in an improv context

00:30:30.020 | of how you create a doorknob

00:30:31.140 | rather than just like making a statement

00:30:33.180 | or doing something that closes off a conversation.

00:30:35.660 | - It's funny 'cause it might be the same person,

00:30:37.140 | I don't remember the name,

00:30:38.500 | but after I did this interview with Matt,

00:30:40.620 | he sent me a list and he was like,

00:30:41.460 | "Here are a few people

00:30:42.300 | that I think would be great for your show."

00:30:43.140 | And I was like, gosh, all of the topics,

00:30:45.340 | and mainly 'cause they're mostly other Stanford professors

00:30:47.580 | in his department, where one of them was about improv,

00:30:50.340 | they were all kind of related to conversational skills.

00:30:53.220 | And I was like, gosh, I don't know if I'm gonna have

00:30:54.740 | four conversational skill episodes in a quarter,

00:30:58.140 | but I don't know, it's really important.

00:31:00.300 | So I'm like, I'm definitely gonna line 'em up.

00:31:01.820 | So keep an eye out for at least one more in the future.

00:31:04.820 | - I mean, improv, it's something I wish I had done

00:31:07.860 | at a younger age.

00:31:08.700 | Like I wish I had done an improv class in college.

00:31:11.380 | Maybe this is very rare,

00:31:13.340 | but it was a required class in my middle school.

00:31:16.660 | So everyone in my middle school-

00:31:17.500 | - We had drama, actually, we had to do drama.

00:31:19.940 | - Yeah, I think, maybe it was drama,

00:31:21.820 | but I remember playing like park bench.

00:31:23.900 | If you ever played park bench, the improv,

00:31:25.620 | I don't know what you even call, skit?

00:31:26.940 | I don't know what, exercise?

00:31:28.340 | We would play it in school.

00:31:29.660 | I feel like this about a lot of education.

00:31:31.240 | There's all these things that I was exposed to

00:31:33.140 | in middle school, high school, elementary school,

00:31:35.100 | that looking back, I'm like,

00:31:36.820 | why didn't I like really appreciate what I was doing?

00:31:39.180 | At the time, I was like, oh, this is silly.

00:31:40.700 | And now I'm like, ah, improv, I should have practiced more.

00:31:43.140 | - That was what I was gonna say is like,

00:31:45.300 | I think we had that too.

00:31:46.340 | We had drama and we had to do stuff like that.

00:31:48.540 | But I, and I'm sure all of my classmates,

00:31:51.780 | were at the time so insecure and so self-conscious

00:31:55.900 | that you basically don't take advantage of it.

00:31:57.740 | Like you're not actually building the skill

00:31:59.260 | 'cause you're so worried about other people judging you

00:32:01.380 | and laughing at you.

00:32:02.220 | I probably had a bunch of zits on my face

00:32:03.940 | and I was probably like, you know,

00:32:05.480 | trying to hide from some cute girl that was in the class.

00:32:07.660 | I didn't want to embarrass myself.

00:32:09.220 | And, you know, you're like suffering

00:32:10.660 | from the ultimate spotlight effect at that age

00:32:12.660 | where you just assume that everyone is staring at you

00:32:14.740 | when in reality, everyone is just worried about themselves

00:32:17.300 | in that same moment.

00:32:18.260 | But like, I would love to go take an improv class now.

00:32:20.620 | Now I might think about doing it.

00:32:22.020 | I'm sure New York has some of the best improv classes

00:32:24.580 | in the world.

00:32:25.420 | I think it'd be really fun at this age

00:32:26.580 | where I'm like secure enough to not really care

00:32:28.980 | if I'm embarrassing and bad at it.

00:32:31.180 | - I went to a conference last week in Hawaii

00:32:33.500 | and it was atypical in that it was not

00:32:35.980 | your standard conference with keynotes

00:32:37.740 | and that kind of stuff.

00:32:38.760 | And their thing, which was,

00:32:40.460 | there's this thing called The Game.

00:32:42.080 | And the best I'd describe it is like scavenger hunt

00:32:44.900 | meets escape room in groups of five.

00:32:47.420 | And, you know, you kind of get to know people

00:32:49.300 | and you do all these kind of mental challenging exercises.

00:32:51.860 | But it'd be interesting at the next kind of conference,

00:32:54.220 | summit, off-site-y, mastermind, whatever you call it,

00:32:57.220 | to just have an improv person come and do a class.

00:33:00.060 | I don't know.

00:33:00.900 | I know you go to a lot of these events.

00:33:01.740 | - Yeah. - You probably host

00:33:02.560 | some of them. - Yeah.

00:33:03.400 | - That's maybe a-- - That is a cool idea.

00:33:04.900 | I like that a lot.

00:33:05.740 | - I expect an invite.

00:33:06.780 | - Yeah, you're in.

00:33:08.040 | Working full-time and raising two kids

00:33:12.080 | can often lead to some stressful situations.

00:33:15.000 | But recently I've been taking the advice I got

00:33:17.160 | from comedian Kevin Hart on dropping little tidbits

00:33:19.960 | of comedy to release some of that stress and tension.

00:33:23.120 | And so far, so good.

00:33:24.760 | And while I haven't actually ever even met Kevin Hart,

00:33:27.480 | when I was taking his class on using humor

00:33:29.480 | to make your mark, I really felt like I got to know him

00:33:32.060 | and what's behind a lot of his success.

00:33:34.320 | And I did it all from the comfort of my own home

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00:35:52.280 | I just wanna thank you, Quik,

00:35:55.100 | for listening to and supporting the show.

00:35:57.380 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

00:36:00.220 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals,

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00:36:11.380 | So speaking of that conference I went to,

00:36:14.580 | let's talk about the productivity paradox

00:36:16.160 | because I thought a lot about this in a session I led.

00:36:18.860 | So this is all grounded in Parkinson's law,

00:36:21.120 | which is the idea that work expands

00:36:24.100 | to fill the time allotted for its completion.

00:36:26.820 | Basically, when you leave something open-ended

00:36:30.780 | and you have the whole day to do it,

00:36:32.020 | it'll take you the whole day to do it.

00:36:33.620 | And if you bucket it into a single hour,

00:36:35.520 | you'll find a way to get it done in a single hour.

00:36:37.940 | The most classic example of this

00:36:39.740 | in our modern work context, I would say, is email.

00:36:43.420 | If you allow it to happen,

00:36:44.780 | you will spend the entire day emailing.

00:36:47.360 | I spent a lot of my life doing this.

00:36:48.740 | Like the early years of my career,

00:36:49.820 | email would just take the entire day.

00:36:51.580 | Or if you batch email into a single hour

00:36:54.340 | and you're like, "I need to get through

00:36:55.180 | "my entire inbox in this hour," you will get that done.

00:36:58.500 | And so the productivity paradox

00:37:00.440 | is basically grounded in that exact idea.

00:37:03.720 | Less time, you become actually more productive

00:37:06.140 | when you can work less and actually get more done.

00:37:09.060 | There was a whole session at this conference,

00:37:10.500 | so it wasn't keynotes,

00:37:11.380 | it was kind of user-generated conversations,

00:37:13.080 | but about productivity, that was one.

00:37:15.020 | And then there was another one where

00:37:17.060 | I led this talk about the concept of die with zero,

00:37:20.120 | focusing on net fulfillment,

00:37:21.580 | how to prioritize things in your life.

00:37:23.540 | And someone said, "Oh, sometimes during the day,

00:37:25.700 | "if I need some creativity or I just need a break,

00:37:27.780 | "I'll just go mountain biking."

00:37:28.860 | And someone's like, "Well, how do you just take

00:37:29.780 | "two hours off in the middle of the day?"

00:37:31.380 | And we talked about, it turns out that

00:37:33.460 | if you take two hours out of your day,

00:37:35.260 | you can usually just get all the stuff done anyways.

00:37:37.840 | - Tim Ferriss, I would say, revolutionized this idea

00:37:41.560 | with 4-Hour Workweek because he was the first person

00:37:44.260 | that just put on paper the idea of,

00:37:46.500 | "If you could only work for an hour the entire week,

00:37:49.500 | "what would you do and how would you get it done?"

00:37:51.580 | He has mastered the art of asking

00:37:53.780 | the seemingly absurd question that forces you

00:37:56.220 | to scrub away assumptions that you might have had

00:37:59.200 | about your work.

00:38:00.040 | And I actually went through that exercise.

00:38:01.980 | I really thought like, "Okay, if I could only work

00:38:03.940 | "for four hours a day, I used to work 12 hours a day

00:38:08.420 | "at a minimum when I was working in private equity.

00:38:10.660 | "If I could only work for two hours a day,

00:38:12.180 | "if I could only work for four hours a day,

00:38:13.820 | "what would I do and how would I continue to make

00:38:15.880 | "just as much, if not more money doing it?"

00:38:18.740 | And what you realize is that you're spending time

00:38:21.220 | on a lot of things that you could either delegate,

00:38:23.260 | delete from your life, outsource, whatever,

00:38:25.460 | and really focus on the things

00:38:26.660 | that are really moving the needle.

00:38:28.300 | And that's what you would do if you only had two hours.

00:38:30.300 | Like, gun to your head, if you only had two hours,

00:38:32.140 | what would you do?

00:38:32.980 | He recently asked one that was,

00:38:35.280 | "If you had to accomplish your 10-year goals

00:38:37.720 | "in the next six months, what would you do

00:38:40.360 | "and how would you do it?"

00:38:41.520 | And that's another one where it's like,

00:38:42.900 | "Okay, all of these assumptions I've had

00:38:45.120 | "for the long-term nature of anything,

00:38:47.200 | "how do I scrub those away and just think about

00:38:49.040 | "what would have to change in my life?

00:38:51.280 | "What constraints would have to be removed?

00:38:52.800 | "What environments would have to be changed

00:38:54.240 | "for me to go unbelievable, like monk mode,

00:38:56.500 | "sprint on this given thing?"

00:38:58.440 | I just think it's worthwhile to ask yourself those questions

00:39:01.080 | to continue improving the overall flow

00:39:03.160 | of what your life looks like.

00:39:04.640 | - You mentioned, Tim, I'll give a shout out

00:39:06.480 | to an episode he recently did with Sam Korkos from Levels.

00:39:11.200 | He is like the master delegator, optimizer, being efficient.

00:39:15.400 | I would argue that episode is like a masterclass

00:39:17.520 | in all productivity.

00:39:19.000 | Is that the guy that has his day scheduled

00:39:21.360 | down to the minute, where it's like,

00:39:23.160 | you look at his schedule and it's from 6.17 to 6.22,

00:39:27.400 | brush teeth?

00:39:28.240 | - I don't think he actually is that.

00:39:30.020 | I think he's more focused on, "How do I achieve this task?

00:39:34.960 | "Where do I put it in the day?

00:39:35.980 | "How many hours do I spend on it?

00:39:37.200 | "How do I delegate it to someone else?

00:39:38.980 | "What's a system for that?"

00:39:40.260 | Lots of notion, lots of loom.

00:39:42.280 | Maybe the most power user of loom in the world,

00:39:45.120 | based on that episode.

00:39:46.320 | So we'll link to that in the show notes.

00:39:47.880 | But on the note of moving fast,

00:39:49.560 | this monk mode, get everything done,

00:39:51.160 | I think the common assumption is,

00:39:52.800 | well, if you need to do that,

00:39:53.620 | you just need to not stop and just go.

00:39:56.320 | But you have the speed paradox,

00:39:57.420 | which says the opposite might be true.

00:39:58.800 | - The speed paradox actually goes hand in hand here,

00:40:01.160 | which is almost like a meta paradox.

00:40:03.440 | You would assume that it doesn't.

00:40:04.560 | The speed paradox is sometimes you have to slow down

00:40:07.520 | in order to speed up, move slow to move fast.

00:40:10.440 | And there's this common, I think it's like Navy SEALs maybe,

00:40:13.920 | or it's a military phrase that's like,

00:40:15.600 | "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."

00:40:18.040 | And that's the ethos of this paradox.

00:40:20.080 | The basic idea here though, when you slow down,

00:40:22.920 | slowing down is what allows you to identify

00:40:25.520 | the high upside, high leverage opportunities

00:40:27.800 | that you should deploy your effort into.

00:40:30.320 | Lionel Messi, slowing down and walking around the pitch

00:40:33.120 | is what allows him to have the vision

00:40:35.240 | to see those moments where he should deploy

00:40:37.360 | all of his effort.

00:40:38.200 | If he was busy sprinting around

00:40:40.180 | in a million different directions,

00:40:41.360 | huffing and puffing at an 190 beat per minute heart rate,

00:40:44.440 | he wouldn't be able to identify those opportunities

00:40:47.320 | 'cause his plane of vision

00:40:48.160 | would be shifting all over the place.

00:40:49.360 | His head would be bobbing all over the place.

00:40:50.880 | It would be really hard to see it.

00:40:52.120 | And so when you slow down, your vision gets really clear

00:40:55.280 | and you're able to actually identify

00:40:56.960 | where those things exist.

00:40:58.300 | - So fascinating.

00:40:59.140 | Speed is actually something I've been thinking a lot about,

00:41:01.960 | especially when I was running a company.

00:41:03.080 | 'Cause like the name of the game in venture-backed startups

00:41:05.440 | is like move fast.

00:41:07.120 | And there's a guy named James Currier

00:41:08.920 | who has an investment fund called NFX.

00:41:12.120 | He's one of the smartest people I know.

00:41:13.920 | And his blog is pure written gold, in my opinion,

00:41:17.440 | if you're running a company.

00:41:18.680 | And he gave this talk once,

00:41:20.000 | and I'm so disappointed it wasn't recorded,

00:41:22.180 | but about speed.

00:41:23.560 | And there were a few things that he pointed out.

00:41:26.400 | A lot of it is fear.

00:41:27.800 | The reason that you sometimes can't move as fast as you want

00:41:30.160 | is that you're just not sure how it will work.

00:41:32.600 | And then once you get over that fear, things get unlocked.

00:41:35.200 | And I think Roger Bannister

00:41:36.280 | is the example everyone always gives,

00:41:38.040 | which is no one ever ran a four-minute mile.

00:41:40.400 | 1954, Roger Bannister runs a four-minute mile.

00:41:43.280 | And I think within three months,

00:41:45.480 | eight more people could do it.

00:41:46.720 | It's like they didn't think it was possible.

00:41:48.240 | It just hadn't even crossed their mind.

00:41:49.520 | Was it fear?

00:41:50.360 | Was it something else?

00:41:51.240 | They just didn't believe it was possible.

00:41:53.320 | One of his tips was simplify everything.

00:41:56.160 | And so in this slowing down phase before moving fast,

00:41:59.360 | and some of these examples are maybe business only,

00:42:01.820 | but he's like simplify every contract you use with a vendor.

00:42:05.000 | Don't write custom things.

00:42:06.360 | Say this is what we're using, budgeting.

00:42:08.400 | Create a simple budgeting process.

00:42:10.460 | But for health, an example I'll use,

00:42:13.160 | which I think slowing down to speed up is,

00:42:15.680 | if you wanna really focus on health, slow down,

00:42:18.600 | think how do I just make my meals very simple?

00:42:21.440 | How do I make it incredibly easy for me to not be unhealthy?

00:42:25.680 | And that takes some foresight,

00:42:27.000 | what you stock in your pantry,

00:42:28.280 | how you do your shopping, how you do your meal prep.

00:42:30.040 | But then it actually makes it really easy

00:42:32.000 | to quickly be on track with food goals.

00:42:34.720 | So there was just so much in that talk.

00:42:36.800 | If I could turn that into a podcast,

00:42:39.320 | I'm going through in my mind

00:42:40.540 | all the things that he talked about.

00:42:42.200 | The best example he gave,

00:42:43.280 | which was so fascinating about mindset,

00:42:45.200 | 'cause he said mind is literally everything

00:42:47.160 | when it comes to moving fast.

00:42:48.160 | So if you need to slow down to recalibrate your mind,

00:42:50.920 | but he was working at a software company

00:42:52.080 | that made video games.

00:42:53.560 | And he asked, he had a team of 40,

00:42:55.920 | and they said it takes two years to make a video game.

00:42:58.160 | That was the operating assumption.

00:43:00.160 | And he said, we're gonna ship a video game in 21 days.

00:43:03.720 | And 38 of the 40 people were like, no.

00:43:05.700 | And two of them were like, we could try.

00:43:08.160 | And he was like, great, this game looks great.

00:43:10.960 | I don't know, I think it was like a Facebook,

00:43:12.300 | back in the day with Facebook games.

00:43:14.160 | They just copied someone else's game.

00:43:16.500 | But these two engineers,

00:43:17.840 | and slowly over the 21 days, people came on.

00:43:20.240 | They actually did it.

00:43:21.360 | And at the end, they were like,

00:43:23.880 | we did this thing that everyone on the team

00:43:25.280 | thought would take two years, we did it in 21 days.

00:43:27.120 | Now the funny part of the story

00:43:28.360 | is I believe they got a cease and desist

00:43:29.840 | like immediately after from the company they copied.

00:43:33.340 | But it didn't matter, because as soon as he finished,

00:43:36.900 | they said, great, we'll shut that game down.

00:43:38.400 | Now my entire team knows we can build a game in 21 days.

00:43:41.340 | We can go build our own original thing.

00:43:43.120 | We don't have to worry about that.

00:43:44.620 | Those 38 people thought it was impossible.

00:43:46.800 | And so sometimes you just have to train yourself

00:43:50.480 | or test yourself or push past that point

00:43:52.840 | at which you don't believe it's possible.

00:43:54.400 | And that takes some slowing down and some forethought.

00:43:56.480 | - That's a great story.

00:43:57.760 | - I have a lot of thoughts on speed

00:43:59.280 | and how valuable it can be,

00:44:01.800 | and how just running straight into it

00:44:03.720 | might not be the best answer.

00:44:04.960 | - Yeah, and it's a broader metaphor for life.

00:44:06.720 | There's the idea of work like a lion,

00:44:08.720 | like sprint, rest, and repeat.

00:44:10.840 | And the rest is just as important as the sprint.

00:44:13.760 | And that's a piece that most people lose sight of

00:44:16.600 | is you have to have the rest

00:44:18.960 | in order for the sprint to be as efficient as possible.

00:44:21.440 | If you don't have the rest,

00:44:22.400 | then your sprint is gonna be a jog.

00:44:24.080 | And most people in most work cultures default to a jog,

00:44:28.080 | where you're just sort of grazing throughout the day.

00:44:30.080 | Naval has talked about this, and it's really true.

00:44:32.560 | And so figuring out a way to align your overall life,

00:44:36.040 | professionally, personally, health, physically,

00:44:38.640 | all of these different areas

00:44:40.120 | into much more of a sprint and then rest system

00:44:43.360 | is much more efficient for actually driving progress.

00:44:47.520 | - And to go back, we started with the advice paradox.

00:44:49.800 | And yes, much advice might not be helpful,

00:44:52.840 | but for a lot of scenarios in things you wanna sprint on,

00:44:56.440 | there are probably some people whose advice is very relevant.

00:45:00.080 | And so whether you're building something at a company

00:45:02.640 | or you're trying to dial in your health,

00:45:04.440 | not taking the time during that slowdown phase

00:45:07.360 | to seek out, okay,

00:45:09.200 | is there someone who's done a very similar thing?

00:45:11.120 | Is there a playbook for it?

00:45:12.480 | Is there an answer out there

00:45:13.800 | so I don't have to solve every problem myself

00:45:16.960 | is something that I like to do

00:45:18.600 | in that kind of slowdown before sprint mode.

00:45:21.280 | And so it could be as simple as,

00:45:23.600 | okay, if I just sprint into fitness,

00:45:27.340 | I don't even know what I would do right now.

00:45:28.540 | But if I paused and said,

00:45:29.680 | okay, is there someone who could design a workout regimen

00:45:32.080 | or someone who just has already designed one

00:45:33.680 | and published it on the internet?

00:45:34.840 | Or a friend that could just tell me something to do

00:45:37.320 | so that I didn't spend all this time swirling around what?

00:45:40.800 | If you solve the what in advance

00:45:42.680 | during your wind down kind of slowdown time,

00:45:45.320 | you can execute much, much faster.

00:45:47.600 | The flip side to it,

00:45:48.800 | which you need to be aware of,

00:45:50.400 | is that sometimes slowing down

00:45:52.680 | and doing all of that kind of research and evaluation

00:45:55.600 | is like procrastination in disguise.

00:45:58.320 | Like with fitness, you would say,

00:45:59.760 | okay, well, let me slow down

00:46:01.200 | and figure out the right fitness and health regimen.

00:46:03.320 | And I'm gonna construct the best plan.

00:46:05.280 | And the reality is kind of like the midwit meme

00:46:08.000 | where like in the middle, they're like,

00:46:09.200 | I'm gonna develop a two-tiered functional

00:46:12.360 | strength training program that involves hypertrophy

00:46:14.840 | and all these middling things.

00:46:16.560 | And then on the two ends of the midwit meme,

00:46:18.760 | it's like, move your body for 30 minutes a day.

00:46:21.840 | And you just do that.

00:46:22.800 | And so sometimes you just need to watch out

00:46:24.480 | for the fact that you're not slowing down

00:46:26.720 | as a means to procrastinate and like,

00:46:28.600 | oh, I need the perfect system.

00:46:29.800 | Well, you just need to start moving

00:46:31.320 | and you can figure it out as you go.

00:46:32.800 | And so balancing those, which again,

00:46:34.760 | are in like a little bit of tension is an important thing.

00:46:37.920 | - In this talk that we had about Die With Zero

00:46:40.520 | and focusing on fulfillment, it was interesting.

00:46:42.200 | There were kind of two camps.

00:46:43.800 | Somehow the discussion came up of like taking a year off

00:46:46.480 | and traveling with your family.

00:46:48.200 | And two people had done this successfully.

00:46:50.640 | One of them went to Europe with their kids

00:46:52.560 | and the other one, I can't remember,

00:46:54.160 | took a sabbatical and did something.

00:46:55.840 | And then the other half of the room was like,

00:46:57.360 | I don't know how to do that.

00:46:58.240 | Like that seems impossible, I've tried.

00:47:00.720 | And what was interesting was we ended up having

00:47:04.640 | this long conversation about why people don't set

00:47:07.760 | personal goals and deadlines and structure

00:47:10.760 | their personal ambitions like they would professional.

00:47:14.400 | We've all, almost everyone listening, you and I,

00:47:16.720 | we've all been in a workplace where we're like, wow,

00:47:19.080 | here's a thing that needs to be delivered by a date.

00:47:21.480 | What are we gonna do?

00:47:22.400 | Well, we're gonna make sure this gets done in the first week

00:47:24.720 | and then we're gonna delegate this thing

00:47:26.200 | and this person has four days to do it.

00:47:28.240 | And then we sit down with our family and we're like,

00:47:30.000 | well, we wanna go on a trip to Europe.

00:47:31.840 | It's like, cool, we'll talk about that next week.

00:47:34.040 | Like you just don't set up these kind of milestones

00:47:36.760 | and structure and I won't go as far as to call them OKRs,

00:47:39.760 | but we just don't have a lot of process

00:47:41.040 | around our personal goals.

00:47:43.120 | And so I think it was an episode I did with Ben Nempton,

00:47:46.960 | who has written this book called "The Bucket List Journal",

00:47:49.200 | had this crazy bucket list story, really fascinating guy.

00:47:53.400 | And he was like, people just need to set goals.

00:47:55.440 | Like what's the next step I'm gonna take

00:47:57.320 | towards this personal goal?

00:47:59.180 | And so I think when it comes to procrastination,

00:48:02.080 | especially with health and personal stuff,

00:48:04.440 | you can slow down, I'm all for slowing down,

00:48:06.680 | but to help yourself not get caught in that procrastination

00:48:10.040 | and never make progress, set a goal, set a deadline,

00:48:13.120 | which we never do personally.

00:48:14.320 | - Yeah, my book is going to have that incorporated

00:48:17.480 | as like in each of these domains.

00:48:18.880 | And my book is gonna be called "The Five Types of Wealth".

00:48:21.460 | It's going to track your life across

00:48:23.760 | what I view as the five types of wealth.

00:48:25.400 | And within each section, it helps you actually identify

00:48:27.800 | what are your goals and what are your anti-goals

00:48:29.900 | around those, each type of wealth,

00:48:32.300 | so that you can go and do that.

00:48:33.480 | You can actually create a plan

00:48:34.700 | and actually make progress on these things.

00:48:36.740 | - Can I try to guess the five?

00:48:38.040 | - No, we don't want to do it now.

00:48:39.180 | I don't want to reveal all this before the book.

00:48:42.040 | - When it comes to making progress in life,

00:48:44.100 | we'll not talk about what types of wealth

00:48:45.660 | we want to accumulate in our life,

00:48:47.500 | but there is a lot of distraction.

00:48:49.000 | And so I think you had two things

00:48:50.920 | that actually came up a little bit

00:48:52.160 | in that interview Tim did with Sam

00:48:54.320 | about things that can just get in the way of everything.

00:48:57.060 | So let's talk about social media and news.

00:48:58.740 | - Both near and dear to my heart for different reasons.

00:49:01.260 | So the social media paradox,

00:49:03.940 | or you could call it the connectedness paradox,

00:49:06.220 | is this idea that we have more connectedness

00:49:11.220 | than ever before, and yet we feel less connected

00:49:14.900 | to those around us simultaneously.

00:49:17.260 | There was a viral video several years ago of "Look Up".

00:49:20.780 | It's like people just looking down at their phones all day

00:49:22.980 | and looking down at screens,

00:49:24.220 | and they forget to look up at the people

00:49:25.660 | that are sitting right in front of them.

00:49:27.580 | And it's a really sad thing.

00:49:29.220 | If you go walk around in New York City,

00:49:31.180 | you're weird if you look at someone and smile

00:49:33.300 | and say hello.

00:49:34.140 | And if you think 20 years ago, that was what you did.

00:49:36.580 | You walked around, you tipped your hat at people.

00:49:38.580 | That was the way that people lived,

00:49:40.220 | and you actually interacted with people face-to-face.

00:49:42.220 | Today, a young person that's trying to date

00:49:44.780 | doesn't know how to go up to someone

00:49:46.100 | and talk to them in a bar, in a restaurant,

00:49:47.940 | or wherever they are.

00:49:48.780 | They know how to swipe on their phone

00:49:50.640 | in order to meet people.

00:49:51.800 | And it's a really, really powerful trend.

00:49:54.100 | And what I think is happening now

00:49:56.340 | is the pendulum swings.

00:49:57.660 | And so you have this environment

00:49:59.420 | where everything is through your phones

00:50:01.700 | and through your interactions

00:50:02.660 | and digital, social media, et cetera.

00:50:04.740 | And you have this swing that comes back towards,

00:50:07.420 | in real life, real human connection.

00:50:10.060 | And it's interesting to watch,

00:50:11.100 | and it's interesting to observe,

00:50:12.300 | especially with the rise of AI.

00:50:14.100 | - And so is the lesson,

00:50:16.740 | think about it differently or do it less?

00:50:18.580 | - The lesson is put your damn phone down more often.

00:50:21.220 | And this is coming from someone who,

00:50:22.820 | for work, quote unquote,

00:50:24.500 | has to spend a lot of time on social media,

00:50:26.260 | but I really need to make a concerted effort

00:50:28.300 | on a daily basis to put my phone down

00:50:30.440 | and to be present, in particular,

00:50:32.020 | with my wife and with my son.

00:50:33.340 | Because it's very easy when you are so connected there

00:50:35.800 | and when the dopamine drip is so clear

00:50:37.620 | that comes from those things

00:50:39.100 | to just keep your phone on you

00:50:40.180 | and keep checking, keep pulling it out,

00:50:41.540 | keep looking at the thing.

00:50:42.700 | And that's what they're designed for.

00:50:44.240 | Like these social media platforms

00:50:46.320 | and social media is a drug.

00:50:47.980 | And it's a really effective drug

00:50:49.580 | because it continuously feeds you

00:50:50.960 | with these tiny little drips of dopamine

00:50:52.520 | that make you want to keep coming back.

00:50:53.980 | And we need to find a way to disconnect from that

00:50:56.660 | in order to connect with the people around us.

00:50:58.980 | - Have you ever experimented

00:51:00.300 | with just deleting the apps from your phone

00:51:01.980 | and only doing it on the computer or?

00:51:03.860 | - I've tried.

00:51:04.700 | It never has made that much of a difference for me.

00:51:07.060 | Honestly, like because a lot of my work is through my phone,

00:51:10.900 | I like being able to have access to it.

00:51:12.860 | I've tried all the different apps

00:51:14.700 | that kind of restrict your time.

00:51:16.100 | The iPhone now has like a pretty good interface

00:51:18.600 | for restricting the amount of time

00:51:19.900 | you spend on an app during a day.

00:51:21.780 | It requires the discipline to actually stick to it

00:51:24.180 | when you've hit the total by, you know,

00:51:25.980 | earlier in the day to actually stick to it.

00:51:27.780 | But I've been able to create a system that works for me,

00:51:29.660 | which is basically a phone gets put down

00:51:31.220 | at a certain time in the evening and that's it.

00:51:33.300 | You know, it's down.

00:51:34.140 | - And what about news?

00:51:34.960 | - So the news paradox is the idea

00:51:37.020 | that the more news you consume,

00:51:39.060 | the less well-informed you are.

00:51:41.060 | This tends to be a somewhat controversial topic

00:51:43.860 | when you talk about it or share it.

00:51:45.700 | Typically, like you get a lot of people

00:51:46.980 | that actually work in media just saying you're an idiot

00:51:49.220 | or that's incorrect.

00:51:50.340 | This goes back to the noise bottleneck

00:51:52.140 | that I talked about to Leb's idea at the beginning

00:51:54.660 | that as you consume more and more news,

00:51:56.700 | you're actually getting a higher ratio of noise to signal.

00:51:59.780 | And so your overall understanding of the issue

00:52:02.620 | or of the world actually becomes worse

00:52:04.820 | despite the fact that you're consuming more,

00:52:06.540 | which you wouldn't expect.

00:52:07.900 | I have personally found

00:52:09.220 | that my life has improved dramatically

00:52:11.500 | since I've dramatically reduced the amount of news I consume

00:52:15.300 | and I'm talking like I cold turkey

00:52:17.260 | probably reduced my news consumption by like 95%,

00:52:20.620 | maybe like two years ago.

00:52:22.180 | And I feel happier.

00:52:24.260 | I like have heavily curated my news sources

00:52:26.460 | to where I read one or two things.

00:52:28.300 | And I just know that I understand

00:52:30.060 | at least like a foundational level about the world.

00:52:32.020 | If I wanna go deeper on an issue, I can do that.

00:52:34.780 | I know where to do it and how to do it.

00:52:36.500 | But I don't feel like I'm hit by the barrage

00:52:38.520 | of like breaking news, urgent, blah, blah, blah,

00:52:40.740 | whatever all the things are on a daily basis.

00:52:42.940 | And I actively avoid following

00:52:45.100 | and consuming from those accounts on Twitter

00:52:47.260 | or on any of the relevant platforms.

00:52:49.140 | - So how do you use that 5% that's left?

00:52:51.140 | - How do I use it?

00:52:51.980 | - Yeah, you say, well, now I've bound my news consumption

00:52:54.460 | to a small amount.

00:52:55.740 | Is it reading people who do a good job summarizing?

00:52:58.700 | Is it specific sources?

00:53:00.220 | - I think Axios does a great job

00:53:01.980 | as one of the platforms that is really good,

00:53:03.840 | but it's basically like one hit per day

00:53:05.660 | of like you're getting the basics

00:53:07.260 | of the things that are happening in the world

00:53:08.800 | and in any different arena you're interested in.

00:53:11.620 | And then from there, if you wanna go deeper on something,

00:53:13.460 | like if you think as the heuristic that I've seen

00:53:15.740 | that I think is useful,

00:53:16.580 | like is something going to be relevant a month from now?

00:53:18.620 | And if so, you should probably try to know more about it.

00:53:21.260 | Most of the news that we see on a daily basis

00:53:23.740 | is not relevant more than like an hour later.

00:53:26.360 | And everything is labeled as breaking news.

00:53:28.300 | Nothing is breaking news if everything is breaking news.

00:53:30.860 | And they use it to get clicks.

00:53:32.560 | I totally understand how media works.

00:53:34.060 | So I totally get it and I get the incentives.

00:53:35.980 | I get why they operate the way they do.

00:53:38.380 | I just don't wanna be hit by it and polluted by it

00:53:41.340 | in the way that I think.

00:53:42.380 | If I was going to like get crazy mentally connected

00:53:45.940 | to every single news story that came my way

00:53:47.780 | during the day, I would have no time to think

00:53:49.300 | about things that I actually care about.

00:53:51.040 | And so I just try to actively avoid it.

00:53:52.880 | News often also follows the productivity paradox.

00:53:56.660 | And if you turned on CNN,

00:53:59.500 | and not to knock any particular news channel,

00:54:01.340 | but you could watch a specific piece of content

00:54:05.560 | for three hours and you're not gonna get

00:54:07.820 | three hours of knowledge.

00:54:09.180 | Sometimes I find myself thinking,

00:54:11.380 | ooh, I'm gonna just consume this thing

00:54:12.980 | that might take a long time and then just pausing.

00:54:15.180 | I think one of the ones for me is

00:54:16.860 | anytime Apple does a keynote.

00:54:18.540 | And yes, there's some excitement about it,

00:54:20.540 | but I find that I'm like, ooh, I wanna watch the keynote.

00:54:22.700 | And I know it's gonna be an hour.

00:54:24.100 | I also know I could read the summary of the keynote

00:54:25.820 | at the end in 10 minutes or five minutes

00:54:28.620 | and I catch myself and I feel like anytime

00:54:31.140 | you put the news on TV or you could just fall

00:54:34.940 | into this trap of somehow they can make

00:54:37.540 | a five minute piece expand and fill two hours

00:54:41.140 | and it can be mind numbing.

00:54:43.140 | I mean, this is the whole thing with CNBC.

00:54:45.060 | It's like financial news, right?

00:54:46.620 | Where no one is making a return by picking stocks.

00:54:50.100 | Most hedge funds aren't making alpha

00:54:52.440 | and their entire job is to do that.

00:54:54.120 | So like you as a person sitting at home

00:54:56.460 | should probably not be spending your time picking stocks

00:54:58.980 | if that's not like your exclusive job

00:55:01.020 | and you're one of the best in the world at it.

00:55:02.320 | You probably shouldn't.

00:55:03.160 | It's not a great allocation of resources and time.

00:55:05.580 | And yet CNBC the entire day, 24 hours a day

00:55:09.180 | has people jumping on, trotting up there

00:55:11.460 | and talking about stocks that they're interested in

00:55:13.580 | and stock picks.

00:55:14.620 | There's this story that I've heard

00:55:16.140 | of someone getting asked this,

00:55:17.260 | like how can you possibly do this?

00:55:19.060 | Like Kramer's on for all these hours.

00:55:20.460 | He has all these terrible stock picks

00:55:22.000 | and you need to reframe it as it's entertainment.

00:55:24.460 | Like we have 24 hours of programming that we need to fill

00:55:27.500 | and so we need entertaining people to be up there.

00:55:30.020 | And like a lot of news has become entertainment.

00:55:33.380 | It's no longer information.

00:55:34.700 | It's like they're trying to hook you.

00:55:36.320 | They're trying to keep you there and keep you entertained.

00:55:38.500 | And what's entertaining, but like blaring,

00:55:40.700 | breaking news in all red, bold fonts,

00:55:43.620 | sitting across the page.

00:55:44.860 | It's not entertaining for them to talk about

00:55:47.020 | the new speed bumps that were put in your city

00:55:49.500 | or Girl Scout cookie campaign that's going on.

00:55:52.360 | What's entertaining for them

00:55:53.620 | and what keeps people there is fear.

00:55:55.380 | It's like these many people got killed,

00:55:57.380 | this terrorist attack happened, this thing,

00:55:59.220 | like that's what's keeping people there.

00:56:00.900 | And it makes you think that the entire world

00:56:03.260 | is that's what's going on, right?

00:56:04.540 | There was this chart that was like

00:56:06.500 | comparing actual causes of death

00:56:08.700 | to causes of death talked about in the media side by side.

00:56:12.740 | And you look at it and like the actual causes of death

00:56:14.740 | was like heart disease, cancer, you know,

00:56:16.380 | like the actual things.

00:56:17.380 | And then when you look at the media one,

00:56:18.520 | it's like terrorism, crime, murders,

00:56:21.700 | like that was what it was.

00:56:23.140 | It was like inverse, like it was literally like,

00:56:25.020 | it was like a parody almost, but it was reality.

00:56:27.300 | And it's because what do they report on?

00:56:28.740 | It's the things that they think will get people to click

00:56:31.140 | and that will stick there and that's fear.

00:56:33.540 | And if you wanna live that way, consume more of that.

00:56:36.980 | - Yeah, I don't imagine the evening news

00:56:38.420 | focused on heart disease would be that exciting

00:56:40.340 | for the average person.

00:56:41.420 | - There was this old movie, like way back in the day,

00:56:43.860 | I think it might've been a Michael Moore movie.

00:56:45.660 | I feel like I saw it when I was 13 or 14.

00:56:47.220 | I think it was called "Bowling for Columbine"

00:56:49.020 | that politics aside on all of this stuff,

00:56:51.980 | there was just an interesting juxtaposition

00:56:53.660 | that I remember he did in it

00:56:55.100 | of like showing the news in Canada

00:56:56.940 | and then showing the news in the US.

00:56:58.780 | And the Canadian one, it was looking at like speed bumps

00:57:00.780 | or something that got put like painted differently in town.

00:57:03.260 | And then it showed the US one,

00:57:04.220 | which was all shootings and crime and all this stuff.

00:57:06.380 | So it was interesting.

00:57:07.420 | - I used to watch PBS News Hour

00:57:09.260 | because it was just a much more practical source of news.

00:57:12.780 | And then I was like,

00:57:13.620 | "Oh, then they put all the news in a podcast for an hour."

00:57:16.180 | I don't know where it dropped off in my routine,

00:57:17.980 | but it wasn't replaced by other news.

00:57:19.540 | So I guess maybe that's a good thing,

00:57:20.820 | but it didn't go into the fear mongering.

00:57:23.500 | - The other thing is there's a lot of opinion

00:57:25.940 | and not a lot of fact in news these days

00:57:28.460 | because it's entertainment,

00:57:29.780 | because that's what drives clicks

00:57:31.180 | and that's what drives the business model.

00:57:33.220 | And that's challenging because like a lot of these,

00:57:35.940 | it seems like a lot of these news stories,

00:57:37.980 | they're changing minute to minute.

00:57:39.380 | Like if you go look at the headline on one of their webpages

00:57:42.460 | when something happens, it's one thing,

00:57:43.980 | you go back an hour later and the headline

00:57:45.780 | and the entire spin on it has changed

00:57:47.740 | because some new information surfaced, whatever it was.

00:57:50.380 | And so it's actually hard to know at any point in time,

00:57:52.700 | like, okay, what am I getting?

00:57:54.300 | Like, is this real or is this biased in some way?

00:57:57.140 | Has this been hit by like a bunch of filters

00:57:59.340 | and like hierarchies, whatever it is,

00:58:01.900 | it's hard to figure out like where can you actually count

00:58:04.020 | on the news source.

00:58:05.140 | - So maybe we'll close out and put this all in perspective

00:58:07.700 | with the death paradox.

00:58:09.660 | - Oh.

00:58:10.500 | - Just to take like a hard turn.

00:58:11.860 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:12.700 | We're gonna end on a really bright,

00:58:13.940 | shiny, sunny rainbows note.

00:58:15.860 | - I think it kind of is.

00:58:17.260 | - It is, I agree.

00:58:18.300 | So memento mori is this idea of knowing your mortality.

00:58:23.300 | It originates from, I think the Roman empire

00:58:27.180 | where the returning conquering hero

00:58:29.860 | after a military campaign would be paraded

00:58:32.660 | through the cities with adoring fans cheering for them

00:58:35.860 | in this like golden chariot.

00:58:37.540 | And they would place a person behind the conquering hero,

00:58:41.300 | whispering in their ear, memento mori,

00:58:43.580 | which means like know your mortality,

00:58:45.580 | remember that you are mortal.

00:58:47.540 | And the whole idea is that you have to know your death

00:58:49.900 | in order to live your life.

00:58:51.500 | The idea is like, if you aren't aware of your own mortality,

00:58:55.660 | you expose yourself to a terrible thing

00:58:58.500 | and to terrible life.

00:59:00.100 | So I think about this a lot.

00:59:01.500 | There's these calendars that have become

00:59:03.020 | this like very viral trend.

00:59:04.420 | It's 52 rows across, like squares across,

00:59:07.420 | and there's 80 squares down.

00:59:08.740 | And the whole idea is that you shade one in

00:59:10.420 | every single week and you can actually see your own life

00:59:13.580 | going into black as you shade them in across your life.

00:59:16.900 | And for some people, that's really morbid.

00:59:19.260 | And for other people, it's really empowering

00:59:21.260 | to know that like every week matters.

00:59:23.460 | I mean, you can physically see the weeks going by

00:59:26.220 | in your life and that the weeks you're never going

00:59:28.300 | to get back, how precious time is with people.

00:59:31.300 | So it's something that I think about personally often,

00:59:33.820 | probably much more often now that I'm a father

00:59:35.780 | than before that, but something that I think everyone

00:59:38.340 | should reconcile a bit more in their life.

00:59:40.340 | - When you were talking about news, it's like,

00:59:42.060 | oh, do I want to cut out an hour here, here?

00:59:44.380 | I think when you start to really put into perspective

00:59:46.940 | how much time you have on this earth,

00:59:49.020 | is it 40,000 weeks or 4,000?

00:59:51.700 | - 4,000 weeks.

00:59:52.540 | - I have a 40,000.

00:59:53.380 | - There's a great book, by the way.

00:59:54.700 | I don't know, Oliver Berkman wrote "4,000 Weeks."

00:59:56.780 | - "4,000 Weeks."

00:59:57.620 | - Which is an incredible book on all of this stuff.

00:59:59.020 | - Yeah, and it just makes me think, you know,

01:00:00.620 | "Die With Zero" was a, they're all in the light of,

01:00:02.820 | we have this limited time, focus on how we use it,

01:00:06.980 | prioritize things that matter, don't let things

01:00:09.660 | that you don't care about fill your days.

01:00:11.740 | I feel like with that perspective, you could go back

01:00:14.940 | and think about a lot of these paradoxes

01:00:16.700 | and figure out the best way to apply them

01:00:19.260 | so that you're living a life that's truest

01:00:21.780 | to what you want, which unfortunately seems to be,

01:00:24.520 | not seems to be, is the most common regret

01:00:26.620 | most people have at the end of their life,

01:00:28.660 | is not living life true to what they wanted.

01:00:30.540 | - Yeah, not all time is created equal.

01:00:32.700 | I mean, you're in your 30s, I'm 32.

01:00:36.820 | This 10-year period relative to the 10-year period

01:00:40.020 | when I'm 80 is very, very different

01:00:42.260 | in terms of what I can do with my son,

01:00:44.580 | in terms of what I can do with my parents

01:00:46.140 | while they're still around, all of these different things.

01:00:48.020 | And so if you just wait, if you delay all satisfaction,

01:00:51.420 | if you continue to say, play the deferred happiness game

01:00:55.000 | of when I get to this much money

01:00:57.500 | or when I get this promotion or when I get whatever it is,

01:01:00.360 | then I'll be happy, what you're gonna find

01:01:02.420 | is that you're gonna keep saying that until you die.

01:01:04.560 | And until your kids are gone and they've moved off,

01:01:07.320 | they don't wanna hang out with you.

01:01:08.480 | And until your parents are gone and you're not able

01:01:10.600 | to hang out with them or spend time with them anymore.

01:01:13.080 | And that's a terrible thing.

01:01:14.240 | And it's really, really sad when that happens to people.

01:01:17.040 | - So I didn't mean to bring us to this place

01:01:18.820 | of thinking about death before the end,

01:01:21.200 | after we talk about the news, talking about death,

01:01:23.640 | but I think it's really valuable

01:01:25.160 | to put everything in perspective.

01:01:26.760 | - I agree.

01:01:27.600 | - Obviously, we'll put a link to the multiple paradoxes.

01:01:29.720 | I don't know how many there are in total,

01:01:30.720 | 'cause you wrote one with 10, 15, 120, there are a lot,

01:01:34.080 | but I'll link to a few of them in the show notes.

01:01:35.640 | We didn't get to all of them,

01:01:37.240 | but I think we hit on the ones

01:01:38.420 | that I was most excited to talk about.

01:01:40.640 | - Yeah, this was awesome.

01:01:41.480 | Really, really fun discussion.

01:01:42.680 | - Thanks for being here in person.

01:01:44.080 | - Love doing it.

01:01:44.920 | - Next time we'll have to do it in the sauna.

01:01:46.880 | It'll be a different conversation.

01:01:47.720 | - We'll do sauna cold plunge

01:01:48.880 | and we'll see who can last longer in the cold plunge.

01:01:50.920 | - We'll see.

01:01:51.760 | I need some practice.

01:01:52.580 | - That was amazing.

01:01:54.800 | I love recording with Sahil.

01:01:56.460 | He's such a wealth of knowledge

01:01:57.920 | and an all around great human.

01:01:59.720 | I highly recommend his newsletter.

01:02:01.160 | If you're not already subscribed,

01:02:02.560 | definitely check it out.

01:02:03.680 | It's linked in the show notes.

01:02:05.160 | And speaking of newsletters,

01:02:06.680 | the All The Hacks newsletter

01:02:07.840 | is getting an upgrade this year,

01:02:09.360 | and I'm gonna start sending out a summary

01:02:11.220 | of the best things I've found every week or two,

01:02:14.080 | whether that's deals, products, or interesting articles.

01:02:17.040 | So if you're not subscribed,

01:02:18.520 | head on over to allthehacks.com/email to sign up.

01:02:22.160 | Okay, that's it for this week.

01:02:23.720 | I will see you next week.

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