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- [00:00]
George Mai
I love the show Ted Lasso because it's like an example of, I call it getting Ted Lassoed now, which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge, but The American has 10x the agency or confidence, and as a result, they achieve five times more.
- [00:16]
Sam Parr
I feel like I can rule the world.
- [00:18]
Sean Puri
That was brilliant.
- [00:19]
Sam Parr
I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like, no days off on the road. Let's travel. Never.
- [00:25]
Sean Puri
Look, George, you got an interesting career because you were at social chain early on. So if people know Steve Bartlett from Divers here, he was there early. He then. So now he has. He then created a successful marketing agency.
- [00:38]
Steve Bartlett
And then a couple weeks ago, you came out with this thing. It was called high agency dot com.
- [00:45]
Sean Puri
Let me give the background here. George got obsessed with the way. The way that Nikola Tesla fell in love with a pigeon. George fell in love with this idea of high agency, started tweeting about it, started blogging about it. He's like, I'm writing the handbook on this thing. He started making it like his sole focus for at least, what, six months, George?
- [01:03]
George Mai
Well, I'd say five years. Five years is when I first started thinking about the idea, when Eric Weinstein mentioned it, and then I started writing about it, I got advice that it would never take off as an idea. Interestingly, since we did our podcast last time and we discussed it, the idea or the meme as a whole has become bigger and bigger and bigger.
- [01:21]
Steve Bartlett
I think, by the way, it's not five years. When I googled your name, I googled George Mai Agency. You were tweeting about this in November of 2018 oh7.
- [01:32]
Sean Puri
So let's explain it. And the easy way to explain it, we can put this visual up on. On YouTube. So high agency, like the. The meme that stands out to me is there's a dude deserted on an island, and person, there's two people. Person A takes, like the wood from the island, and they try to spell the word help. And they're just sitting there hoping to. Waiting to be helped. They're hoping somebody comes and saves them. And then person B takes those letters and builds a little raft and starts paddling themselves. They start helping themselves. And, you know, one is a higher agency version than another, right? The. The guy who builds the boat starts paddling is the higher agency version. And so what's cool about this is you got obsessed with it. You got interested in the idea, then you got obsessed with the idea, then you committed to the idea, and you started writing this thing and you Told you were giving me updates, saying you're writing this for a while. And Sam, do you know the story of how he got high agency.com?
- [02:24]
Steve Bartlett
No.
- [02:25]
Sean Puri
Because he did not own that domain. It's actually a very high agency story.
- [02:29]
George Mai
Yeah. So one of the things I have in the piece is an exercise that I do and I recommend it. It's called turning bullshit into reality. So the way most people kind of live in the 21st century is like this to do list model where they empty short term memory, like what's caching in their memory and then they do that thing that day. Versus the turning bullshit to reality model is you think of a value that you want to hold or live up to, and then you come up with ideas based off that. So it's a much more creative way of living the to do list. So when I was actually writing the piece, it's kind of like, well, you want to be the personal trainer who's in shape. So I'd try and do some high agency stuff of like, how could I potentially promote this? So one of the things I was listing down as I do the turning Bullshit to reality exercise was, what about if I just get high agency.com and I kind of look and it's like likely to be tens of thousands of dollars. But I then started reaching out to a few different brokers, a few little hacky people, and we realized that highagency.com, the person had owned it for like 20 years. I think it was an old agency. And it was about to expire when we looked at the domain. So we kind of sat there, waited for the moment that it would expire, and then it went into a little mini auction. And nobody else online was aware of it. It was me and a marijuana. A cannabis marketing agency, which makes sense high agency. I hadn't thought of that. And yeah, managed to get it at like essentially for near as free as a result. So that's an example of the turning bullshit into reality. And then when it came to actually promoting the piece, I was like, okay, let's write down high agency. And then what are ways that I can display that value for promoting it? And I always go with my kind of facial muscles or if I start giggling at something, I go, that's probably a good idea. And the one idea I had for promoting it was like, what if I take over Times Square for a blog post? So I was like, okay, I started giggling at that. That sounded like my gut's telling me that's the right direction to go. Started Cold emailing, blasting people. With obviously my background in advertising, how could I set up favors and move things around? And then for the day of the launch, I took over One Times Square with high agency. Got me this billboard, highagency.com with my little Twitter icon taking over Times Square that day.
- [04:35]
Steve Bartlett
Dude, that is awesome. How many views did this article get so far or that day?
- [04:40]
George Mai
So I actually, I think I don't track. I don't track any of that. The one thing I do track is DMs and emails because I think, again, I've been in media for a while and I think one of the biggest issues that we face with modern media is people go off width metrics because what gets measured gets managed. And it's so easy to see view count, but it's. So, for example, if an episode gets a million views of yours, that's great, but if 10,000 people listen to it five times, I would argue the latter is much better than the former. But right now we don't have that many ways of measuring depth metrics. So I prefer going off depth metrics, which are quality of people that DM me, quality of people that email me. And then one side effect that I did get is once every two days, somebody will say it made them cry, which was not the intention at all. So I haven't paid attention to that. I just look at the death metrics.
- [05:30]
Sean Puri
So I wanted to do a little thing which was like, what are examples of extreme high agency that we've personally experienced? Either something you did, something you didn't do, a friend, somebody you admire, anything like that. I just wanted to kind of like quickly spitball what comes to mind. So you weren't there on this podcast, but I did a podcast with this guy, Nick Mowbray. And Nick Mowbray's episode, I don't know if it has the most views, but it is the most hardcore episode I've ever done on this podcast. I think the guy is the most impressive entrepreneur that's ever been on the podcast. And we've done 700 episodes, something like that. And he's a guy nobody's ever even heard of. I think this is like a Elon level entrepreneur in terms of his level of agency. And agency is like the perfect word to describe him. So he, he talks about basically like just the. I'll give you the simple examples and I'll ramp to the. To his most insane example. So he's like, him and his brother want to start a toy company straight out of like high School, basically. And so he's 17, 18 years old, and he's first, he goes door to door selling his, his brother's like, science fair project. So door to door sales already, like, let's say level one agency, right? That takes agency to go do that every single day. And he sells like thousands of units door to door. Then he's like, okay, great. How are we going to produce thousands of units? We got to like ramp production. So they, they said, well, where do other toys get made? They get made in China. So they just pick up and they move to China with no money. They literally sleep on a sidewalk outside the airport on the first night. And the funniest part is he's describing to me that they moved to China to set up their factory. And what I thought he meant was how everybody does it. You go to China and you find a factory that already does this. That's the point of going to China. He didn't even understand that. He's like, dude, to say I was naive is an understatement. He's like, we went to China and then we just built a factory with wood, like, by a river. We built a shed and that became our factory. And we found Chinese people and we employed them in, in the factory. We created our own factory. It's like, besides the point of, like.
- [07:28]
Steve Bartlett
Why factory is glamorizing it. It's like, hut.
- [07:31]
Sean Puri
Exactly. And then as they're. He's like, and by the way, worst product. You know, everyone says, oh, you know, product is everything. He's like, we had the worst product. We just couldn't even make it good. We were so bad at it, we just kept it. Slept in the thing for like years. Lived off a dollar a day budget, you know, eating like the cheapest, like, food. They basically employed this Chinese woman from the village to make them rice every day. He's like. I was like, so how did you get, like, distribution? Because they're everywhere. They're in Walmart, they're in every store. And he goes, I would email every buyer of every retail store in every geography every day. That was my day. He's like. And eventually they were like, dude, we don't want it. He's like, ah, so you're here. You've replied, great. We'd love to tell you about our latest product. And finally, you know, they would. Someone would crack and be like, all right, just send me the sample. Or like, look, I'm going to the show. Please stop emailing me. If you're there, I'll meet with You. I'll give you 20 minutes. And he used that to scrape and Claude. So he just. He's describing all of this, his journey for him and his brother to bootstrap a toy company that became the biggest toy company in the world. He made. They make a billion dollars a year of profit, the two brothers, with no outside investors. Then he's getting a. He got his intestines removed or something like that. He basically, like, he got Crohn's disease or something like that. I forgot what it was. He had to go get, like, his, like, half his intestine removed or something like that. While he's recovering on his, like, kind of sick bed, he decides to go into a new space, and he creates the world's most popular diaper brand. The fastest selling diaper brand in the world right now is Rascals. He created that. And then he also created, like, the fastest growing hair care brand on TikTok. Like, this guy's just prolific, right? And I just couldn't believe it. And so it just blew my mind. It showed me, like, there's so many levels of agency above where I'm at. I couldn't believe it.
- [09:11]
Steve Bartlett
George, do you think that crazy people like that are born, or did they learn it, or can you learn it?
- [09:16]
George Mai
One thing, like a model from cognitive behavioral therapy is black or white thinking. So people will go, is it nature or is it nurture? And realistically, it's probably somewhere on a spectrum. That's what I kind of call it, the high agency spectrum. And I think there's definitely people who have genetic advantages. Balaji had a great line the other day of when communism ended, the Soviets could discuss profit for the first time. And he was talking about, with wokeness ending, maybe we can discuss genetics for the first time. And I feel that, yes, genetics definitely plays a component, but I would say that can then be quite a low agency for you to then just outsource it purely to your genetics. So I think it definitely plays a component, but you can definitely have agency over your agency. And I think the way I would immediately explain that is that it's possible to. You could imagine, regardless of the genetic roll of the dice, it's possible to decrease somebody's agency, therefore it's possible to increase somebody's agency. And I just look at it like, the easiest example I look at is the difference between my British friends and my American friends. I love the show Ted Lasso because it's like an example of. I call it getting Ted Lassoed now, which is when a British has twice the intelligence or knowledge, but The American has 10x the agency or confidence, and as a result, they achieve five times more. So, dude, by the way, I think.
- [10:43]
Steve Bartlett
I said that's brilliant. And I think I've said on the podcast to my British friends, the difference in American culture and British culture is watching the British Office and the American office. In the American office, the guy always gets the girl. There's a little bit of laughing at each other, but it's more like we're laughing together and it always ends well. But in the British Office, it's kind of mean and like, the guy does not get the girl. Oftentimes it actually ends sad.
- [11:08]
Sean Puri
The British show is more realistic and was less successful than the American version of the Office too.
- [11:14]
Steve Bartlett
But the TED Lasso example is way better because it's so true that you, like, see this optimistic person and he's in a room full of haters, and that's like. That kind of reminds me of my British versus American friends.
- [11:27]
George Mai
There's a crazy stat around universities. So the top 10 universities in the world, I believe three are British and three are American. So when you actually look at our intellect, I think you could argue we're at least as smart, or at least the British sound smarter. We have that going for us. However, when it then comes to entrepreneurial output, of those universities, America is like five times higher. Even the example of deep. A lot of the AI innovation came from the uk, but then the actual execution happens in the us so. Yeah, so to go back to your point, I think using the UK versus the US as an example goes to show you've got similar wide distribution of genetics going on, but a completely different output as a result.
- [12:08]
Sean Puri
You said something that we passed over, but I thought it was actually a pretty good insight, which was. You pay attention to. You said it in a very intellectual way, like I pay attention to the facial muscles. But really what you're saying was if it makes me laugh, there's actually some merit in the idea, right?
- [12:21]
Steve Bartlett
The.
- [12:21]
Sean Puri
The idea that makes me giggle is the one I should double click into. And I just thought, have you seen this email that basically kickstarted Airbnb? So Airbnb, which today, I don't know, hundred billion dollar company or so the email that kicked it off is a public email you can read, and it's from Joe Gabbia and he's. He's emailing Brian and he goes, brian, I thought of a way to make a few bucks again. Becomes $100 billion company thought a way to make a few bucks turning our place into a designer's bed and breakfast. We could let young designers come into town and crash at our place during the the four day event. There's like a conference and we'll give him wi fi, a small desk, a sleeping mat and breakfast any every morning. Ha. And he puts ha with an exclamation point at the end. Joe. And he leaves it with that.
- [13:05]
Steve Bartlett
That's such a good email that it sounds fake.
- [13:07]
Sean Puri
And so I, I remember like pointing out that I think any idea that ends with that, like genuinely you would be like ha. Like if that's your genuine feel at the end of it. There's a lot of potential in those types of ideas.
- [13:21]
George Mai
My one that I was afraid for saying for a while because I thought I might get canceled. But then when I explain it, I think it kind of makes sense. So this is obviously the TikTok clip that gets me canceled, but then I'll explain. So don't clip it. Essentially, I think child labor is underpriced. Let me explain. Obviously the classic child labor that we see in the world now is truly atrocious, horrific and anybody involved in that, I wish them hell. However, we went through a model of children working for example in the uk, cleaning chimneys. And obviously then that got completely outlawed, largely got outlawed across the world. But I think now there will be thanks to AI and the teaching collapse. I think I've always said for a while and I think AI has now accelerated. This is that you'll see the first teenage, first self made teenage billionaire by the end, by 2030. And I think that that makes me giggle when I say it. And I think it's true.
- [14:27]
Steve Bartlett
I think that is a very bold prediction. It doesn't even seem crazy, dude. We had a guy on the podcast the other day who was 17 years old who had a business doing $30 million a year in revenue.
- [14:37]
George Mai
Yeah. So I have an idea which is the next Y Combinator only invests because between the age of 11 to 18 years old. First off, nobody's funding them because they can't. You've got the homeschooling boom right now. One of the criticisms beforehand would be they're in school so they can't do it. But you're obviously seeing that decay away as well as how would adults take them seriously? But now with smaller teams and the ability to hide behind a cartoon or whatever, I think now is the time that we will see it.
- [15:07]
Steve Bartlett
When Sean first told me about, I think it was on this podcast. Sean or I Forget when. But you or someone told me about Peter Thiel's Teal Fellowship. Yeah. And he was like, he's, he's, he's going to give you $150,000 to drop out of college and start a company. That was one of those, it doesn't.
- [15:24]
Sean Puri
Seem ridiculous, the opposite of stay in school kids. He was like, I'll pay you to leave school kids. That was.
- [15:30]
Steve Bartlett
And when he. And when that idea came out, I felt the same thing where it was like, that's insane. Wait, why? You can't do that. And then it like everyone goes through like the same mental model, although some people it will take 10 years because they'll see the results nowadays. But like other people like me, it took me like a few weeks where I'm like, that's crazy. And then it's like, that's crazy, right? And like you like, like is this crazy? Oh, this is actually kind of awesome.
- [15:52]
Sean Puri
And then, you know, Ethereum comes out of that and Figma comes out of that and a bunch of like, you know, kind of multibillion dollar industry changing companies come out of it.
- [16:01]
George Mai
On the topic of high agency and how it relates to all of this that we're discussing right now, so one great question is, what would I do if I had 10x the agency? Another question I love because you guys obviously talk about ideas and opportunities that are coming up, but to zoom out and then give people the agency to think about how to actually come up with the ideas and opportunities themselves. One of my favorite questions is what is ignored or neglected by the media that will be studied by historians.
- [16:29]
Steve Bartlett
What's a historical example?
- [16:32]
George Mai
So I did a post 2 years ago on this topic that went really viral and even if you look at some of the things in there, so a good example will be like microplastics, it's slowly bubbling up now, it's reaching the media. But if you discussed that two to three years ago, you was an absolute weirdo. Another example in there was around Fentanyl that I put in the post and at the time it was seen as like absurd or crazy or there wasn't that many people discussing it and now it's way bigger. So I think there's countless examples of this media historian gap that exists. There's a great book called the Sovereign Individual and they have a line in that that always stuck with me, which is they're talking about the fall of the Roman Empire and it's quite easy to point to the date of when the Roman Empire fell. But if you actually went at the time and asked people, when did the Roman Empire fall or fell? There was no big announcement. There was no, hey, guys, the Empire has fallen. It likely a lot of people didn't admit it till like 100 years later. So they point to this case that if CNN existed during the fall of the Roman Empire, on the day it fell, they wouldn't have announced it would have fallen. But it just takes people a while. I think that's a big high agency trait, is essentially just if you wait for the news, you'll be wrong or late.
- [17:48]
Sean Puri
Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. Do you have suspicions of what an idea like that would be today? Because it's a very hard question. It's an important question. It's worth pondering, but it's not one where 10 answers come to mind right away of what's largely ignored or underreported today that will be historically important to historians in the future.
- [18:09]
George Mai
One funny one, that if I was a historian, this is really absurd, but I've spent a lot of time in the Middle east coming from the UK and spent four to five years in Dubai. And one thing that's truly absurd about the west is in the Middle east, whenever you go to the bathroom, there's like a ass spraying thing that you have in the West. Every day, everybody. Yeah, it's like. It's more like a shower head kind of thing. So you get a bidet, which is a separate mechanism, but it's like a little shower head. I could go to the most remote crazy location in the desert and they will have one. I've never.
- [18:49]
Steve Bartlett
What's it called? There's like a. What are they called?
- [18:52]
George Mai
I actually, I call it like a R Sprite. I don't. I don't know what it's actually the official terminology.
- [18:56]
Sean Puri
There's no one to talk to you about it when you're there.
- [18:58]
George Mai
But this is the problem, right, is that there's. In the west, there's almost not really a good naming mechanism for it. And the fact that Rory Suvlin has this great bit which is imagine if a bird shat on your head. And I go, oh, Sam Sian, here's a dry piece of paper to wipe it off. You go, what the fuck, man? I need to wash my hair. But meanwhile, this is going on in the west on Mass. And I think as an entrepreneurial opportunity, change, changing the frame around that. I think it's a billion dollar opportunity if you partnered with a plumbing company or something like that. Imagine again I think first as well.
- [19:30]
Sean Puri
Have you seen Tushy?
- [19:32]
George Mai
No.
- [19:33]
Sean Puri
Tushy's like an attachable bidet. It's like turns any dumb toilet into a smart toilet type of thing. I think they do extremely well. I think they're like north of 100 million in revenue targeting the American market. But I'm with you, dude, that's just the tip of the iceberg. All right, you're right that it will seem crazy in hindsight.
- [19:52]
George Mai
Another example of what's ignored or neglected by the media that will be studied by historians is I think we're going through a seismic shift now that's similar to when writing first came online. So there's a great sci fi book by a guy called Ted Chang and it's one of his short stories, and he tells a scenario which is possible. Now, this technology already exists where you have essentially always on recording technology. So some people, they record their whole life. So you can kind of see it now with Twitch streamers. Right. And why this is fascinating is the impact this then has on memory. So in the books of Spoiler Alert, it tells the story of a father, daughter and mother. The mother leaves them without saying goodbye, essentially. And the father and daughter one day have this huge argument where the daughter says to the father, I wish you'd just leave. Like, mum, I hate you. And it haunts the father to that very day. And after about five years, they slowly build their relationship. And the father doesn't have access to one of these recording devices, but his daughter does. And one day he needs access to go through her memory log. So he's asked her for access, she shares it with him, and as he's going through it, that file pops up and he goes, oh, shit. Like, this is one of the biggest emotional moments of my life. He presses play on it and the recording shows that he completely misremembered the event. It was him that said it to her. And it's this idea that essentially all our memories are completely bollocks. It's completely made up, it's pretty much all artificial. And how does that change when we essentially have recordings of everything? I think that will be a big, big thing that historians will begin to look at of we completely then like the shift that we had when we started writing for the first time, that's going to be a huge shift as a result as well.
- [21:45]
Sean Puri
Have you seen the Black Mirror episode about this? They did a version of this on Black Mirror as well.
- [21:51]
George Mai
Oh, really? Well, there's an example of in the uk, there's a Building called Grenville Tower. It was a horrific accident that occurred where the whole building set on fire. It was in a council estate and loads of people died. And on the day, there was this weird case of a baby getting dropped from the top floor all the way down and somebody catching it. And it went crazy viral at the time. And a load of eyewitness testimony came out saying that they saw it. And when it. The classic physicists, about six months later, after the emotion had calmed down around the event, was like, hold on. If you drop a baby from that high to there, like, the physics of this, I've got a bit of doubt about it. And when they actually digged into the memories of it, a lot of it was just artificial memories that people had created. So I'm pretty fascinated by devices like that that come online. And I think part of society will go for it and the other part of society will not go for it, but it just completely changes who you are. When you no longer have a story of your memories, you actually have the full log.
- [22:50]
Sean Puri
Yeah, there's a famous experiment, I don't know. Have you guys ever seen this? There's a 911 memory experiment.
- [22:56]
Steve Bartlett
What's that?
- [22:57]
George Mai
No.
- [22:57]
Sean Puri
So they basically. People feel like you really remember those important traumatic days. You know, there's the even phrases in the language like, I'll never forget where I was, or I'll never forget how I felt when I saw that. And there's actually a set of. I don't have the studies in front of me, but there's a. I remember learning about this, that there was a set of studies where people, they went and they studied the memory accuracy of people remembering 9 11, and it was pretty shocking. It was like less than 50% of the details were accurate. It was a combination of they had extreme confidence that their memories were accurate. Their memories actually were not accurate. And then they don't. Not only do they not remember what happened, they actually didn't even remember how they felt. I think they had like, logged at a certain, like, early on, they logged how they had felt and then they measured three years later. And then many years later, trying to remember how you felt and you didn't even actually remember that properly, and that your memories basically converge towards like a shared narrative rather than what actually happened. And so there's. And all these terms for flashbulb memories, there's all these, like, terms for that describe how poor human memory actually is, which is like, kind of crazy when it comes to, like the court system, for example. Like a lot of it's based on, you know, eyewitness testimony or somebody remembering certain details. But.
- [24:12]
Steve Bartlett
And what's funny is, Sean, is as you were describing that I was thinking, where. Where was I at 9, 11, what was I doing? And then I'm also saying the second most common thing, which is.
- [24:20]
Sean Puri
But I remember. Yeah, I'm the exception. Ads don't work on me.
- [24:25]
Steve Bartlett
That's what everyone's gonna say. They're. They're gonna say. But I remember that. Oh, and by the way, I told this story shown on here, I think how this one, this, like, prestigious journalist, I asked her to come and freelance for the Hustle, and she wrote a letter back to me and she says, like, that's cute. Thanks. And like, it drove, like, eight years of, like, success for me. Because I was like, I'm gonna prove this freaking jerk wrong. She was so dismissive of. Dismissive of me. I went back and reread the email. She was super nice. Like, she didn't say, that's cute. She said, like, I'm honored. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I'm too busy right now. But, you know, good luck with your new endeavor. Like, I went and reread it and I'm like, that's insane. I told myself the story and I said it publicly so many times, I even name draft her once or twice. It was wrong. It was wrong. I didn't remember it correctly, and I'm happy I didn't. But, yeah, our memory is crap. What about George? About. You had stuff in here about, like, looking for business ideas through a high agency lens, but also building software. That's high agency. What does that mean? Because what you're describing to me is like a philosophical. Philosophical, like, Like a mental framework. But it actually seems like when you think about this, it's actually more tactical than that.
- [25:40]
George Mai
Yeah, it's incredibly tactical. There was a post, I think, two days ago that went really viral on pirate wires about how agency is the most important thing thanks to AI. I think agency has always been one of the most important things. So I said, it's probably the most important idea of the 21st century. Or it might be. And if a British person says probably or might be, it's almost like an American betting the house on it. And in this pirate wires post, they spoke about how now, thanks to AI and large language models, the exponential or the leverage that you get on agency as a result is so much bigger and you just then begin to look at it. So a small case of high agency for me is I started getting bored of being bullied by algorithms. I feel like everybody is just a bitch to the algorithms these days. And I try and, like, find small ways to have agency over the algorithm. So, like, even I was like, okay. I reflected on my YouTube history. I literally, I recommend everybody do it. It's one of the weirdest exercises. Talk about memory is you go on YouTube and then you press history. And I just scrolled through the videos and I was like, okay, which ones of these do I. Am I glad that I watched? In hindsight, which ones am I kind of neutral about? And then which ones would I say I regretted? And I said, I think it was about 80% of them I regretted, 10% I was neutral, and 10% I enjoyed watching. And then I looked at it and said, okay, what do the ones that I like have in common? And then what do the ones that I don't like also have in common? And the single biggest thing of where I thought I wasted my time was content under 30 minutes long. Because it was just brain rock content. Particularly under like, five minutes long. Like a Coffeezilla reaction of Logan. Paul's done this crazy crypto pump and dump, and I just click on it and then I'm in this, like, vortex and going back to the memory thing. I've completely forgotten this. So I was like, okay, how about I just work with ChatGPT to solve this problem, built a script, and now I call it the kale algorithm. My YouTube does not show me any videos under 30 minutes. So this ability to be able to manipulate your environment, particularly I think with AI now has only got bigger and bigger. So there's agency everywhere. Everything is a. I don't know if you heard that phrase of everything's a skill issue. It's kind of like that for agency. Like, everything is just a agency problem.
- [27:57]
Steve Bartlett
Where else are you doing that in your life?
- [27:59]
George Mai
So even small things, just constantly, each day, do I recommend going back to the Turning Bullshit Into Reality? Just going through that list and then operating from a creative model each day of how can I have agency? And then applying it rather than going off the to do list model. So, I mean, anything from writing down, I want to learn. I have always wanted to play Baker street on the saxophone. I sat on the beach. I did Turning Bullshit Into Reality. I've wanted to learn Baker street on the saxophone. My girlfriend says, why don't you do it? There's nothing more embarrassing than a girl saying, why don't you do it? So I just then ordered a saxophone, taught myself Baker street on the saxophone. So just coming at it from a very simple model of write down the value, then ways you can display it, then do the thing. There's an amazing article that went viral the other day. You know it's a good article when it's from like 2010 on like a really weird niche blog. So there's a guy called Aaron Schwartz who you probably heard of, he was the Reddit co founder who tragically took his own life. And he has this amazing blog which goes to your point there, Sam, of like, how do you actually turn this tactically? And it talks about having a theory of action versus a theory of change. So he uses the example of you want the United States to decrease their military spending. So a theory of action would be, I'm a blogger, therefore I'm going to write blog posts about this thing. Whereas a theory of change is essentially where you go, okay, I want to decrease the United spends military. How can I do that? Or like, why, why, why, how, how, how? All the way down until you get to a concrete action that you can do today. The piece is absolutely incredible. And I think you mentioned to Sean on the podcast the other day around how hard it can be to actually think from first principles, but using Aaron's framework. The blog post I really recommend checking out is absolutely incredible.
- [29:53]
Steve Bartlett
Yeah, you said on here, and when we asked what you want to talk about, you said something about how you think that language kind of controls people a lot. I think you said, language shapes the world around us. And I was thinking about that and I actually, I made a change recently where I was thinking like, I, I have a problem where I, I will compare myself to other people a lot and I would say like, I should be doing this or I should be at this place. And I remember I read something and I started changing the words to I choose to do this. I, I think, I think, Sean, did you actually say this? Or we, I think we had. So I think we had someone on the podcast where it was like, it changed my thinking. Whereas, like, I'm gonna say instead of I should, I'm going to change that word to choose. It's like, what, what am I going to choose to do? Not I should be doing X, Y and X, Y and Z. I was.
- [30:43]
Sean Puri
At a Tony Robbins event and he said it beautifully. He goes, somebody was, had raised their hand, they said something, I should do this. You know, I know I should do this, but blah, blah, blah. But I just think that they should do this. And they were saying it. And he goes, he goes, you're doing what a lot of people do, you're shooting all over yourself. I just couldn't unhear it. He's like, people just should all over themselves. And I just from that moment on literally viscerally felt gross to say the word should. I'm shoulding all over myself right now. And I just couldn't do it anymore.
- [31:15]
George Mai
Language is a great example of low agency. So the amount of times that we'll wait for a word to find us rather than trying to create words ourselves. So that's why I felt high agency was quite a meta thing where when I discovered that word it actually changed the way I viewed reality. So one way of viewing reality is reality happens, then you have words to describe it. Another way to view it is you use words and then that kind of edits reality. So it's kind of a double edged sword. Good examples of that would be fake news. So fake news, there was words beforehand that never really caught off. There was like yellow journalism, there was truthy news. But then when fake news came along, you have a clearer way of viewing reality. A great example right now is the term Vibe coding. Vibe code. The only thing that's probably done more than LLMs for vibe coding is the actual meme itself of vibe coding. So high agency is another example.
- [32:13]
Steve Bartlett
What is vibe coding, by the way? I still don't know what the difference between vibe coding and coding is.
- [32:19]
George Mai
Just basically a non technical person prompting an LLM and getting them to code it for them.
- [32:25]
Steve Bartlett
That's vibe coding. All right, got it. And you're saying what?
- [32:28]
George Mai
When you actually have that language itself or you have those memes, it actually increases the output of things and then you begin to see language can have such an impact everywhere. I'm actually fascinated by, on the topic of the show, the Millionaire meme. So the concept of a millionaire is so impactful to society and it hasn't been updated even as inflation's ate away at being a millionaire. So I once watched a YouTube ad where they were talking in a currency that's like 1 to 10 and he was talking about making his first million. But it still exists even as the inflation's kicked in. And I'm fascinated to see what replaces that.
- [33:07]
Sean Puri
There's this great book from back in the day that I've never read because it's one of those books where the COVID tells you the whole story. You can literally read the COVID you can have the epiphany and you can move on. And it's called you'd word is your wand. It's by, I think, Florence Scoville. And it's actually kind of a hard book to read because it's one of these books that's written 80 years ago or something, and it's just too poetic to actually grok nowadays. But the whole idea is like, your word is your wand. It's your magic wand, and it shapes your reality exactly as you're describing. And this applies to. Yes, it applies to high agency, but I'll give you another example. So I tore my knee ligament a couple months ago, so I've been recovering from it, and I've been doing rehab. And my trainer, who's like. He's like the black belt in mindset that I get to work out with every day. And so he never uses the word rehab, and he always uses a different word. So he'd be like. He's like, all right, let's get ready, let's. He'll be like, this is not rehab. We're going to renew. We're going to refresh, we're going to recharge, we're going to. He's like, we're going to do something. We're going to make that knee better than it was before. And rehab already, like, implies some version of it's broken. We're going to try to fix it. Versus he's like, all right, we're going to rejuvenate this thing. We're going to make your knee 10 years younger than it would. Than it. Than it currently is. How are we going to do that? It's literally when you change the word, you change the method, right? Like the. What you say changes the. How you do it. And you just see this over and over and over again in small ways in business. And, like, another version of this that I've seen that I've done recently is, like, intentionally breaking your speed bar. So we all have a certain clock speed, a certain speed with which we operate things. And a good exercise is to just break what. Break the speed barrier of what you think is possible for any given task. So it could be very small. It could be you're doing the dishes and you have the. The silverware, and you normally put it away at a certain rate, but try to break your speed bar. Like, see how fast you could do that thing. Or this piano that I got here, I had this idea of, like, I want to have. I've been practicing the piano for three months. I've. I'm ready to upgrade from my keyboard to, like, a legit piano. It's more fun to play, feels better, etc. And my birthday's coming up, so the normal speed bar would be you kind of wait for your birthday. So you wait. Not a. Not a very high agency thing to do. And then you get it, and then you maybe get it, but then you get it on backorder because these are, you know, they don't have them in stock. And then it's going to take a few weeks to come and then it gets. Then you set a delivery date, then they show up. And I basically set myself a challenge. I, from the moment I had the idea, I said this inspiration is perishable, right? Ideas are avocados. I'm not going to let this go Brown. I'm going to do this thing right now. And so I said, I want to see how fast I could do this. I think the normal person, this would be like a two or three week project. I'm going to see if I could do this in 24 hours. And sure enough, I like just mobilized my own army of my resources, my focus, my intention towards making that one thing happen. And it was crazy. The store was closed. But I found the owner. I called him and I said, would you come and open the store? I'm ready to buy a piano right now. The guy comes and he opens the store for me. And then instead of just playing the piano, trying to figure out which of these pianos better, I said, I need to know first which pianos you have in stock in the warehouse that could get delivered tomorrow. And in fact, while I'm looking, I want you to call the delivery guys and schedule a delivery for tomorrow. I'm going to pick, but you schedule it right now because it's Friday and I want this delivered Saturday morning. And I made the whole thing happen. And by 11am Saturday morning, I had the piano in the room and I was playing it. And I just feel like there's so many instances where if you break your speed bar in one area, you realize that like in all areas, speed is negotiable, that you can change the rate at which something's going to happen in your business or in your personal life.
- [36:45]
Steve Bartlett
He just said his attention, his focus and his energy is his army. How good is that? Is that what you just said? Yeah, go ahead, George.
- [36:55]
George Mai
You got a military, an air force. You need a little one for each one. That's beautiful.
- [36:59]
Sean Puri
Yeah, let's go. March, right? Scott Galloway had a great version of this. He goes, how did he say it? He's like, I deployed an army of capital in my 40s for my family to go kill and grow while I was asleep.
- [37:12]
Steve Bartlett
Dude, that's so good. That's so good. George, who are examples that are not the Elon Musk of the world? Who you think represent high agency?
- [37:21]
Sean Puri
Can you give us a friend? Because I think that the best way to get high agency is to just hang out with a high agency person. Because you'll realize how unacceptable your low agency thoughts are around them. You'll feel embarrassed by it. And so being around high agency people is the fastest way to become more high agency yourself.
- [37:38]
George Mai
Well, the question I always come back to is who would you call when you're stuck in a third world jail cell? That's how you identify the highest agency person that you know. Two that come to mind. There's one, Claude Shannon, who is probably one of the most underrated individuals that exist. He literally created information theory, which is, he took the idea from philosophy, where you have ones and zeros in logic, and applied that to computing and created information theory, which literally creates everything that we're doing right now. Basically, the father, him and Alan Turing, the father of modern computing. And he has this crazy thing. So one of the things in the essay, one of my favorite high agency aphorisms is just, does it defy the laws of physics? It's like a brain prompt. Whenever you're faced with a problem, does it defy the laws of physics? And Claude Shannon and a guy called Ed Thorpe wanted to hack roulette. So roulette is the example of the ultimate game of luck. And Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe, before the first ever mobile computer, they created the first ever mobile computer that they had in their shoe that would look at the. As the ball hit based off the probability. And they hacked roulette by managing to outcompete the house by about 33%. So I'd say Claude Shannon's awesome.
- [38:51]
Steve Bartlett
Sean, you should read Ed Thorpe's biography, one of the best biographies I've ever read.
- [38:55]
Sean Puri
Adding it to the list.
- [38:56]
Steve Bartlett
A man for market. So this guy, Ed Thorp, he basically was a math guy. He was a math prodigy. He got sick of just making the wage that math teachers got. And so he said, I'm going to invent a way to count cards. He did. So he invented card counting. He made a lot of money. And then he was like, you know, I don't really like being in casinos all the time. Like, it's not good for my family. And the mafia or not the Mafia, the, the, the casinos started getting on his case and he Was he was like, I don't want them to like break my hand in the back, in the back room because I'm counting cards. And so he eventually got into finance and he started the, one of the first ever hedge funds and you know, became a billionaire that way. And he tells stories and he's. It's sort of like a Forrest Gump story. Like he tells a story about how he met this. He's like, I met this young man who had these really good ideas and I knew this guy was going to be super rich and so I decided to become one of his first investors. And he went and started this thing called Berkshire Hathaway. Like, like, you know, and there's like 10 or 20 stories like that where he was like, you know, I was just like poking around and I met this guy and I thought he was really smart. We stayed in touch and then he went and founded Apple, you know, like, he's got like a ton of stories like that but. Who's the second person on your list?
- [40:06]
George Mai
The second person on my list is a book called Don't Tell me I Can't by Cole Summers. It's the most underrated business book in the world, in my opinion. It's an hour long and it's written by a 13 year old who tells the story.
- [40:25]
Sean Puri
Is this the unschooling guy?
- [40:28]
George Mai
The unschooling guy, yeah. So when he is, I think four or five, him and his parents see these kids outside causing havoc and saying some nasty things. And he's from a very poor background and they decide, you know what, we're not going to go to school, we're going to homeschool you. And unfortunately his father, who served in the military, who's supposed to be his teacher, ends up having to have multiple surgeries. And one day he goes to his dad, who you could just imagine he's sat there post surgery, kind of a little bit out of it. And he says, Cole says to his dad, dad, how do I get rich? And his dad says, I don't know, son. Like maybe go watch Warren Buffett videos on YouTube. So this six year old starts watching Warren Buffett videos on YouTube and you listen to the audiobook and you're like taking notes of like, oh my God, this kid's so smart. Like the lessons he's taken from Charlie Munger. And then at 7, I believe he starts his first business that gets to $1,000 profit per month. He acquires a vehicle using his parents license when he's like 9 years old.
- [41:31]
Steve Bartlett
What was the business, what was the 7 year old's business?
- [41:33]
George Mai
Rabbit farming.
- [41:36]
Steve Bartlett
So he would breed rabbits and sell.
- [41:38]
George Mai
Them and sell them to restaurants. So he took that to a thousand dollars per month. He then flipped a house and made I think like $10,000 profit when he was 10 years old.
- [41:46]
Sean Puri
And it was like an abandoned house, right? It was like somebody's house that was just dilapidated. They weren't doing anything with it. If I just like, if I do all the work, then can I share in the profit of flipping this? Basically, he didn't even buy a home to flip it. He just found a unused home and was like, there's potential here.
- [42:06]
George Mai
He's incredible. He tells this story when he's meeting other 7 year olds for the first time or he's scouts with his friends and they're talking about what they learned that day and they're going, yeah, I was looking at Pluto. Is it a planet? Is what they were teaching us at school. I don't know, whenever I care about this. And he goes, oh, I was looking into how Amazon manages to pay 0% tax just using the Internet. So I think his book, again, just to be clear, not every 7 year old should have a P&L. Maybe 80% of them should, but not every 7 year old should have a P and L. But he completely reframed my reality of what a child can do.
- [42:46]
Steve Bartlett
What? And by the way, this is one of those stories where he's still like 15 or 16. This isn't like.
- [42:52]
George Mai
No.
- [42:52]
Steve Bartlett
In the 80s like before he's a kid.
- [42:55]
George Mai
Yeah, he unfortunately passed away, which is really, really sad.
- [42:58]
Sean Puri
Wow, like a surfing accident or something, right?
- [43:01]
George Mai
Yeah, I think, I don't know the ins and outs of it. Tragic, obviously, but absolutely incredible that he might still live the life that he lived.
- [43:13]
Steve Bartlett
New York City Founders, if you've listened to my first million before, you know, I've got this company called Hampton. And Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs. A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton. We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it's amazing. But the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your board of advisors for your life and for your business. And it's life changing. Now to the folks in New York City, I'm building a in real life core group in New York City. And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does 3 million in revenue or you've raised 3 million in funding. Or you've started and sold a company for at least $10 million, then you are eligible to apply. So go to joinhampton.com and apply. I'm going to be reviewing all of the applications myself. So put that you heard about this on mfm so I know to give you a little extra love. Now back to the show.
- [44:06]
Sean Puri
You have this thing in your post. You said how to, how to spot high agency people. And number one you wrote was weird teenage hobbies. Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. True. If they can go against, against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult. And that is that. Would that be yours? Your weird teenage hobby was an obsession with juggling.
- [44:28]
George Mai
Yes. I kind of wish my dad bet me I couldn't code. I would be probably on a yacht right now. However, I think even with hiring my best hires that I've placed pretty much all line up in that criteria that they have weird, interesting hobbies. I was listening to an interview with Palmer Luckey chatting about this and it kind of hints to some kind of intrinsic motivation as well as the ability to go against wider mimetic forces. That kind of is a good indicator. So it's a very good interview question. Like, tell me about the weird shit you did growing up.
- [45:05]
Sean Puri
Yeah, I have a variation of that. We used to ask what were you. What's something you were degenerately obsessed with? So like basically you were obsessed with it to the point where it actually negatively affected the quality of your life. Like you were too obsessed with something, but you did it anyways. And it's usually a video game or a hobby like this, or collecting, you know, type of thing. And, and then there's a. I forgot who it was. Some famous investor. They had this other question they asked with it, which was what's something you could give a one hour talk on right now unprepared? Like, you just know it so well. You spent so much time on it that if I gave you, you know, 45 minutes to an hour, you could actually like give me a crash course in this thing. Because you have mastery over it. And in doing so, you also see how somebody communicates when they know something. So, uh, it, it does sort of two things. It gives you a relative bar. So if that's the thing you know best, and then you compare it to the things they've been telling you about, you realize, oh, that resume was a little shaky. They don't really know how they, how that, that, how, how that operated in their company compared to how they know this. And secondly, it tells you how their communication skills are. Right. Can they actually break something down simply for somebody and then build up from there intuitively? Like, are they a good storyteller, they're a good communicator or not? And that doesn't need. You're not, you don't need that for every job, but for a number of things, like, you know, for being a CEO or being a marketer, like you want to be able to do that well.
- [46:27]
George Mai
Yeah. So phenomenal.
- [46:28]
Steve Bartlett
Before we kind of wrap up, you had one thing here that really caught my eye. Did you? So first of all, you called your. We were like, what, what ideas you want to talk about. You said, I'm the Laird Hamilton of surfing the Internet. I thought that was actually hilarious. And you said, you just put one line in here and you said the number one under discussed antidepressant, which I'm curious about. And then you also said the next adhd. What are you referring to for those two things?
- [46:53]
George Mai
Yeah, so two kind of what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians. So there was a study that came out in terms of depression. I don't know if you've seen it. Metro analysis of depression. Guess what ranked the highest in terms of alleviating the symptoms of depression?
- [47:11]
Sean Puri
Walking.
- [47:12]
Steve Bartlett
Yeah. Working out, physical exercise.
- [47:15]
George Mai
So as part of that, that was the big breakthrough that came out, which was that exercise ranked more according to this analysis than SSRIs. The number one, however, significantly more than exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy, higher than yoga, higher than Tai chi, was dancing. Dance therapy outperformed exercise significantly. Dance, according to this meta analysis, had the greatest impact in alleviating depression. So I think there's potentially a headspace or a calm to be made that is dance therapy.
- [47:49]
Sean Puri
That's amazing. Who knew? Sam?
- [47:52]
Steve Bartlett
I'd rather be depressed.
- [47:57]
Sean Puri
When's the last time you danced, Sam?
- [47:59]
Steve Bartlett
Never. My wife. No, dude.
- [48:02]
Sean Puri
When's the last time, dude?
- [48:05]
Steve Bartlett
Literally, not once in my life have I been in a public place. And in the Midwest, you don't cry and you don't dance. That's what men don't do. And you don't drink liquids out of a straw. Those are the three rules of being men in, in the Midwest, don't cry, don't dance, and don't drink liquid out of straws.
- [48:21]
Sean Puri
You're. Okay, let's. Let's work backwards. You're in your 30s now. You're at a friend's wedding. You're just sitting down, holding down the Fort at the table, making sure the purses don't get stolen. What are you doing?
- [48:30]
Steve Bartlett
Yes. Yes. I am not dancing.
- [48:32]
Sean Puri
Okay.
- [48:33]
Steve Bartlett
Wait, George, would you dance at a wedding? I mean, you're kind of suave. You probably would.
- [48:38]
George Mai
Of course. So there's a barbell. So my girlfriend is an incredible dancer. She's been dancer since she was, like, five. That's what she does for a living. And I realized there's a barbell. When it comes to dance, you either want to be the best dancer on the dance floor or the worst dancer on the dance floor. Like, just letting loose and not caring. Full on David Brent style. It's the person in the middle who either doesn't want to get on the dance floor or is kind of half moving that is the cringiest. So, yeah, I. I'm a big dancer. I'm terrible, but I'm a dancer.
- [49:04]
Sean Puri
All right. Sam, Prom dance at prom.
- [49:08]
Steve Bartlett
No.
- [49:09]
Sean Puri
What you do?
- [49:12]
Steve Bartlett
Sat. I just sat. I. I'm telling you, I don't do it.
- [49:14]
Sean Puri
What a date.
- [49:16]
Steve Bartlett
Wow. It's horrible. That's. That's like. You know how people say, like, public speaking is the biggest fear? Mine's dancing.
- [49:21]
Sean Puri
Public dancing. Yeah. Public dancing is definitely a bigger fear than public speaking for me.
- [49:25]
Steve Bartlett
Yeah, public dancing is pretty tough. And plus, I don't drink. So, like, if I were. If I were drunk, then I could probably get away with it. But, like, sober dancing as a grown man is probably, like, the. The scariest thing one can do. I'd rather go to war.
- [49:41]
Sean Puri
Send me to Ukraine, right?
- [49:42]
George Mai
Yeah.
- [49:42]
Steve Bartlett
I'd rather get deployed in Baghdad than have to dance at a wedding. Put that on a bumper sticker.
- [49:48]
Sean Puri
Think about this. We could do this together, man. We can overcome this. You could.
- [49:52]
Steve Bartlett
Wait, so you're fearful of this too?
- [49:54]
Sean Puri
Yeah, but not like you. Like, I. If I'm at a thing, I do it, but I hate it. But I do it. But I kind of like it. But I also kind of. I feel insecure about it, but then I do it anyways. I've never just taken the stance of, like, nope, I'm out.
- [50:09]
Steve Bartlett
So, no, I don't think I'm gonna be dancing. What was the second thing? The next adhd.
- [50:15]
George Mai
We've tried to change the subject.
- [50:17]
Sean Puri
Can't even think about dancing.
- [50:20]
George Mai
The next ADHD is, I think so. One great idea I heard for spotting trends, this came from Chris Williamson, is when a new trend is coming, bet on a counter trend occurring. So one trend that you're seeing right now is a rise in nationalism. People, America For America, Canada for Canada. China for China. And one funny idea I have is so duolingo is obviously huge where people go and understand languages. However, AI is almost making that irrelevant. I think learning a language is probably the skill of it is going to go down and down with time. A funny business idea that I think could work is so when I'd speak to Chris, he would talk to me about his therapy sessions and all these revelations he's getting from therapy. And I said to him, I go, I think 50% of this isn't anything to do with your childhood. It's just being British. You're just overcoming what it means to be British. And I think there's something to be said around essentially creating a duolingo that cures you of your nationality. Because I think you're going to have a barbell where you have everybody's like, america for America. Or it's like, I'm a global citizen, Balaji network, state style. And you could then just localize everything. So, oh, imagine an advert campaign, I think from the advert, oh, you're British. I bet you can't take compliments. I bet you have a lot of self doubt and it's like, yes, yes, yes, help fix being British. Or if you're American, you don't know anything in Europe, you just call Africa one big blob. Let's remove that syndrome for you. Because you actually realize everybody is very self conscious of their own country. So that's one of my ideas that I think will be the new kind of pathology that people have around themselves.
- [52:04]
Sean Puri
American one sounded awesome to me.
- [52:08]
George Mai
That's America for you. That might be the market where it doesn't work.
- [52:13]
Sean Puri
Okay, so this works internationally. But you don't want to cure Americans of the self delusion that we have that everything is great and we're great and it's all going to work out great. That pronoia that we have is very, very helpful to us. If you rob us of that, we get worse.
- [52:29]
George Mai
One of my big regrets against being British is I've been early to a lot of things but then maybe didn't have the conviction. Maybe it goes back to what you mentioned earlier. Sam and I came up with this idea ages ago where I would visualize myself on my deathbed and I'd be there, there's nobody there. I'm like the worst version of myself. Then I get a knock on the door and it's the best version of myself. And it's that kind of this meditation, like the deathbed regret Meditation. And then at the end, it's like, what action are you going to take today? And I thought this was the weirdest fucking shit I've ever created. And now it's big on TikTok. It's like my friend was showing me it's a viral trend of these girls doing these exercise that I originally came up with. And I think there's something in, like, hardship as a service. So bet on a trend going the other way, which is life is so good compared to historical standards that people want more hardship in their life. So I'd potentially create an app, which would be a negative visualization. So every day you plug it in and you are in World War II, about to go over the trenches. Your brother has died, your mother's written letters, but you don't want to read them. You have no way of contacting your wife, you're about to go over into the trenches, and then you wake up and all of a sudden, my life now is incredible. So I think negative visualization is a tool from stoicism, but I think there's probably a. A billion dollar idea in a product.
- [53:49]
Sean Puri
A product you could build out of that.
- [53:51]
Steve Bartlett
Yeah, dude, have you guys seen this thing? I. I'll have to send it to you. It's on Instagram and it's a page and the guy uses AI and the headline will be, you woke up as a slave. Who's going to be in who. Who's being forced to be a. A gladiator in Rome. Or you've woken up as a laborer in Egypt building the pyramids. Or you've woken up in a slum in Mumbai in 1992. And it, like, sets up all these, like, crazy scenes. And then some of them are great. Like, you woke up as an emperor in Rome and it shows this. It shows from a POV your point of view of that person waking up in the morning and walking around. Have you guys seen this? It could be even like, you woke up as a kid in the Midwest in 1982. Have you seen that, George?
- [54:36]
George Mai
Yes. So this is thinking from the ad first model. You can already picture the ads there. It then runs to a monthly subscription and you do that as your morning meditation. And it replaces just observing your thoughts. It's more a negative, contrasting tool to make people feel better about themselves.
- [54:48]
Sean Puri
George, thanks for coming on. Where should people follow Twitter? Twitter is the best spot.
- [54:53]
George Mai
Yeah, Twitter's the best spot, George. Mac on Twitter, highagency.com, if you want to read the full piece. Anything ads add professor.com as well. And yeah, that's. That's everything.
- [55:06]
Sean Puri
You're awesome, dude. Every. Every conversation we have with you is. Is amazing. You're a great thinker and you really have a gift for making ideas that are, let's say, outside of the kind of the zone of conventional thinking and then making them sticky and memorable and kind of worth considering. So I think there's very. It's very rare. There's not a lot of people who could do that, and you're one of them.
- [55:28]
George Mai
Thank you.
- [55:28]
Steve Bartlett
Thank you, George. You're the man. Are you going to become an American anytime soon, by the way?
- [55:33]
George Mai
So I just landed yesterday. I just had my visa approved. I've moved from Dubai to the US Purely because I find when I'm in the US it's the look raiser. You're way more likely to be lucky. Serendipitous. I don't think the quality of life here is as bad as actually it is in the rest of the world now, but luck so much more significantly so. Yes. I'm a proud Ted Lasso.
- [55:54]
Steve Bartlett
Welcome to the tribe, brother. You're in. Welcome to Texas. I'll get you some cowboy boots and a hat. And thanks for being here. Thanks for coming on the pod. God bless you. God bless America. Talk soon, y'all.
- [56:11]
Sam Parr
I feel like I could rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on a road let's travel never looking back.