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- [00:00]
A
Your calendar or your time is the empirical record of your actual priorities. You ask people like, what are your priorities? And they say, oh, it's family or whatever it is. They have some optimistic thing that they say is their priority. And then if you follow up with and how much time did you spend on that in the last week, it's like, well, this week I was really busy. Clearly your actions and what you say are your priorities are not aligned. Getting married had the biggest impact on my productivity. It was about a 20 or 30 hour a week decrease in output and it definitely forces you to prioritize more. I'm actually in the process of writing an article. It's how I spent 17,784 hours working at levels for the last five years. It is an exact 15 minute increment allocation of my last five years.
- [00:56]
B
Okay, we're here with Sam Korkos, who's the founder of Levels. And Sam, aside from being a really interesting founder, is also just like kind of a human robot. I feel like he, the way he runs his life is incredibly unique. And I feel like Sam, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you're like a systems driven and hacks driven person who very much seems to abide by the Pareto principle.
- [01:23]
A
Yeah, I run Levels. My background is as a software developer. I try to be really intentional about how I spend my time. I think if I had to summarize it in one word, that would probably be it. We have a very limited amount of time on this earth and I found that for a large chunk of my life I was not using it particularly effectively. So I think knowing how you're spending your time and knowing what your priorities
- [01:46]
B
are super important and your time just got a lot more truncated. When you first logged in, I heard new. I think you have a newborn baby or a. How old are your.
- [01:55]
A
Yeah, he's 10 months now. Yeah, we had to quickly relocate because he started screaming, but that's how it goes.
- [02:02]
B
Right on. It's interesting. It's an odd phenomenon having children because I feel like I actually got a lot more productive when I had kids because it meant that my workday had to be packed into a smaller frame and. Yeah, how has it been for you?
- [02:15]
A
Getting married had the biggest impact on my productivity. It was about a 20 or 30 hour a week decrease in output. And then having a baby on top of that, decrease that by another 10 or 15 hours a week. So I'm down to about 50 hours a week, which is the lowest it's been since I was probably, I don't know, in my early 20s. It definitely forces you to prioritize more. It's, it's empirically made me less productive, but that's okay. I, I measure my time. I'm actually in the process of writing an article. It's like a perfect clickbaity title. It's how I spent 17,784 hours working at levels for the last five years.
- [02:55]
B
That's awesome.
- [02:56]
A
It is an exact 15 minute increment allocation of my last five years.
- [03:00]
B
After doing all that work to track your time, are you going to continue to do it like you've been doing it for a while? I assume that's a little bit annoying. What insights have you been able to glean from that that have actually been actionable and yeah. Are you going to continue to do that, go forward?
- [03:15]
A
One of the most valuable things is your, your calendar or your time is the empirical record of your actual priorities. I'm sure this has happened to you many times in your life. You ask people like, what are your priorities? And they say, oh, it's family or whatever it is. They have some optimistic thing that they say is their priority. And then if you follow up with and how much time did you spend on that in the last week, it's like, well, this week I was really busy. It's like, okay, well clearly your actions and what you say are your priorities are not aligned. The thing that I have found is the most helpful is if you keep track of how you're spending your time in your calendar, you can both proactively capacity plan and you can also retrospectively analyze what your time was actually spent on. And that just when, when you think that you have certain priorities like recruiting and you see that you're actually not spending as much time on it as you thought you were, it allows you to correct that behavior. Whereas if you just ambiguously think of these as your priority, it can just, it can linger forever.
- [04:21]
B
You know, a lot of people say that most people who are entrepreneurs have adhd, they're all over the place and then they build systems to control the chaos. Right. I would say I'm one of those people. Are you like that? Are you like spreading yourself too thin and chaos unless you use strict systems? Or are you more of a kind of command and control type?
- [04:41]
A
I have accepted that the, the forces of Twitter and social media and other things are just way more powerful than my ability to control my, my willpower. I don't have, I have a Twitter account. I don't even have my own password to my Twitter account. It's all, it's all buffered through admins. That's one maybe hack is if you find things in your life that are causing you problems, create buffers so that it's really annoying to do it. So like in order for me to access Twitter, I have to ask my EA to send me my password. And they're in the Philippines, so sometimes there's a delay of many hours and then I get it and they automatically cycle it every morning. So it's just really tedious. So I rarely do it. That just gives me that space to not have to think about it all the time. I've also been fully news sober for 11 years, which I think is another really positive way of just keeping that mental space. Whenever there are things that cause me problems or that I don't want to do in my life, I try to create as much of a buffer as possible.
- [05:45]
B
Yeah, it's been interesting. I've done something similar. I listened to a really fascinating interview with Dr. Anna Lemke that Huberman did. She wrote a book called Dopamine Nation and her background is in addiction and recovery.
- [05:58]
A
I've read that one.
- [05:58]
B
And she found that people struggling from video game addiction actually were able to recover in the same way that people with a drug addiction were. And so she basically says, treat yourself like an addict. You gotta have six weeks of sobriety effectively. And it has to be forced. You have to self bind. So if you're an alcoholic, don't keep alcohol in your cabinet. And so for me that meant like I blocked everything on my phone. I too don't have, you know, didn't have access to Twitter. I did a full dopamine detox. And then I'm the same way. I, I have. My girlfriend has my screen time passcode. Yeah, right. And she gives me shit whenever I ask for it. So I rarely ask for it. And it's worked out really well. So I interviewed you on stage for an event I did. And I just felt like every minute you're telling the audience a new kind of interesting little hack or 8020 thing. So I figured we'd just do a deep dive on that. And we both made a list of about 10 different hacks. So why don't we just start rolling on that? Do you want to share your first hack?
- [06:53]
A
The first one is like a health related hack, which is I sleep with silicon earplugs every night. They are earplugs that are made for sleeping. I can send you the link. But Max is the company. M A C K S makes really good ones. I found the phone ones are too uncomfortable when I'm sleeping and they fall out. Uh, but the silicone ones are amazing. And my sleep quality improved probably 20 to 30% just from using those. Cause I'm a very light sleeper. Like, even the slightest noise will wake me up.
- [07:24]
B
That's really cool. So we'll, we'll link all these products. By the way, I had a really interesting conversation with this researcher named Dr. Ashley Mason. I don't know if you're familiar with her work, but she's done this study where they take people who are incredibly depressed and they put them in saunas. Super high temperature saunas. They measure their body temperature and they get them to these extreme, almost feverish conditions. And they found that they can ameliorate depression symptoms for two to six weeks after every sauna session, which is fascinating. And so I funded some of that work. And it turned out that she used to run the sleep clinic at ucsf. And so I said to her, you know, I'm a sleep nerd. What's. What's kind of. What are some of the most important things that nobody knows about? And she. I was expecting her to tell me about some magic supplement or drug or something like that. And she said that most people sleep with a duvet that's just too damn hot. And. And so she linked me to this cotton blanket. It's like this really thin, woven cotton blanket. She said, buy two or three of these, jack your air conditioning up and get really cold before you go to bed. And then just as you get too cold, just layer these cotton blankets. And I. My sleep has been like. It's the difference between 30 minutes sleep latency and 5 minutes sleep latency. So I'll link those. They're awesome.
- [08:42]
A
Yeah. I'm also highly sensitive to temperature. I've. If it's like 75 degrees or higher in the room, I'm going to get just horrific sleep quality.
- [08:51]
B
Totally. Okay, what do you got next?
- [08:53]
A
The next one. This is like a very simple and tactical one that I found is really helpful. Maybe this ties into your previous question of am I naturally very disciplined or do I have issues with attention? One of my biggest challenges, which I've been working on, is staying present when I'm with somebody or just not thinking about other things that are happening when I'm with a person, out to dinner, doing anything. So what I do first thing in the morning, I set alarms for everything that I have that needs to change my attention throughout the day. So for every call, you actually, you heard my alarm going off for when I'm supposed to join this podcast. And that that way I know that whatever I'm doing, I don't need to check every 10 or 15 minutes, like, oh, am I missing something? Am I supposed to be doing something else? So when I'm out on a walk with somebody, people who have gone on walks with me know, like, at some point my alarm will go off and I'll say, oh, I have 15 minutes and then I have to do my next thing. So I set alarms to allow me to just be fully present so that I don't get distracted and pulled in different directions. And I'm also never late to meetings. So using alarms to give you that space to be present I found super helpful.
- [10:09]
B
That's so odd because I actually do that exact same thing. So every morning I wake up, I look at my calendar and I go, you know, hey, Siri, set a timer or set an alarm for this time. And I'll set multiple. Because, like, I'll be like, okay, this is really important. There's three alarms before it sequentially. But I was wondering if there's a way to automate that we should look into. Is there a way to make your phone, when it does the 15 minute Alar alert, maybe it makes a vibration or alarm or something?
- [10:36]
A
Yeah, somebody sent me. There's a. The new iOS has a thing called shortcuts, and somebody made a shortcut that pulls data from your Google calendar and sets alarms for all of those things. I found it to be a little bit too cumbersome, but this feels like a problem that'll get solved in the very near future for sure can be
- [10:53]
B
dangerous because, like, if you accidentally put like some reminder on your calendar, then you've got an alarm going off at the wrong time.
- [10:59]
A
Totally. I'd say another one is. It's another very basic, if you want to call it a hack, but audiobooks are such a hack to just increase consumption of really high quality information. When I, when I gave up the news in 2013, I just translated my news consumption time to audiobook consumption. And since then I've been able to do. I've averaged two books a week for the last 11 years, mostly through audiobooks. I put one in, I go for a walk, I get some movement in, I listen to a book. Over time, I got faster and faster. I can. Now most books I can do between 3 and 3 and a half x depending on the narrator, which turns out is actually about equivalent to how fast you read a book. If you're reading a physical book is about the equivalent of 3x in an audiobook. Wow. Yeah. So somebody smarter than me had this rule of thumb, which is you should only consume information that took the author a hundred times longer to write it than it takes you to consume it. And I think books are kind of the encapsulation of that. So optimizing for books as the format I found has been really positive.
- [12:12]
B
So I am a fellow new former news addict who's in recovery, you know, what did you call it? News sober. I'm a fellow news sober person and I found it fascinating. What I do now is I go, you know, a friend will tell me about some crazy thing that Trump has done or a scandal or whatever it is, and instead of reading what's the, you know, these little blips of maybe inaccurate information day to day, I'll wait a year and then I'll read the great book about it. And I find that such a more satisfying way to do it. And you actually get to see the zoomed out version and what you can learn from that news. And I, I agree. I've just, I found that reading long form, thoughtful work versus these little blips that are often inaccurate has made a big difference. One thing I've been doing because I also love consuming audio format stuff is for books that I don't necessarily want to read all of, or I just want to get the gist of. I've started importing them into a tool that Google created called NotebookLM. Have you used this?
- [13:15]
A
No.
- [13:16]
B
This is amazing. So Google basically has made a, a private holding place where you can upload PDF documents, Word documents files. And it will not train its broader LLM on you, but it'll make a customized LLM just on that topic. So you can upload. Let's say you're trying to learn about health and you choose five people who've written amazing books about health. You can say, summarize the key points of each of these books, or you can say, what do these people say about LDL cholesterol? What's the, what's the verdict across all of them? But what's really cool is it'll now generate a podcast so you can upload the PDF. So I just did this. My, my son's school had a book book club for parents doing the Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. And I didn't really want to read it, it was too long. And so I put it in notebooklm and on the drive to the book club, I listened to a 15 minute podcast summary and it actually creates a simulated conversation between two AIs that sound like NPR co hosts. Quite realistic to memorize all the key facts. It's amazing.
- [14:27]
A
That's really cool. I'm gonna have to check that out. That actually interestingly ties into the other note that I have, which is in the last. Basically since 4 omni came out, which has really, really good voice and conversational AI having really long conversations with GPT4OMNI about often highly complex or highly technical topics. And you can frame it as for things that are really technical and complex. You can say, look, I don't know anything about this topic. Start by explaining to this. Start, start by explaining this to me as somebody who knows nothing about physics. Like, please start from there and then you can dig into each one. And it's just, it is incredible how good it is at explaining things. If these tools did not exist, would have taken me months to understand. And now I can, I can understand what's important because it, it meets me at my level in hours. It's really, really incredible.
- [15:32]
B
It's amazing. Like the, you know when you're in that perfect kind of flow state where you're building, let's say you're coding or whatever and you always get stuck. Right. Suddenly you hit a bug or whatever it is. I think that the AI will basically polish over that. Like I've been doing. I've been using AI coding tools. Have you experimented with those at all?
- [15:53]
A
That's one of the things on my list that we're talking about.
- [15:56]
B
I'm not a, I'm not a developer. And I started using replit and which is kind of like the basic. Like if you're a real developer, you look at Repl it and laugh. But for me, I was able to go on and build a YouTube summarization tool. So in this same vein, like I wanted to be able to just paste a YouTube URL and then say, what's the gist? Or give me a detailed summary of this. And I was able to build it with just prompting. I don't know anything about coding. I built a whole Python app. It's pretty incredible.
- [16:23]
A
Yep. I. One of the items I had here is if you are a software developer and you're not using Cursor or some of these new AI tools, you are missing out. They are fucking awesome. There's no, there's like no way to exaggerate that statement. I try to get into the code base Two days a week. And I just really started embracing these fully about a week ago. This week in particular, I did Tuesday, Thursday and there was a project scoped optimistically for two weeks, probably would have taken longer. I had it completely done in two days and I'm already a pretty fast developer for this stuff. And the amount of leverage that you get is just insane. Every person that I talk to who writes software, if they are not using Cursor or some equivalent tool, you can easily double your productivity with like two hours of input time. It's incredible.
- [17:19]
B
What's crazy is that we're in the 56k modem phase.
- [17:23]
A
I know, right?
- [17:24]
B
So like, you know, using Replit, it's using GPT4.0 or 01 and it takes a long time, right? Because it's prompting the context window is. It's prompting every single file and then it's comparing them and it's going through it. It takes a minute or two to actually get back to you on anything. Once this is like real time, like the real time voice API. It's going to be crazy.
- [17:45]
A
I'm, I could not possibly be more excited for what that's going to, what that's going to bring us so far.
- [17:52]
B
As a developer, what do you feel? Because I am of two minds on one side, I was like, wow, this is so incredible that it's going to unlock so much creativity that my, my eight year old son will be able to build an app if he wants to. And then at the same time I go like, wait a minute, like that's where I started. Like I, I'm like a web designer and I love doing CSS style sheets. Is that just gone? Like, are we, like, are we elevator operators?
- [18:20]
A
Yeah, I think I, I have, I rarely lose bets and I have several outstanding bets with people on exactly this topic. I have the contrarian perspective maybe that I think there will be massively more software developers in five years than there are today. And I think the reason for that is that our definition of what that even means will change. We don't have junior developers on our team, but people from our growth team, people from our support team are now writing software that's in production. You go back 30 years, what a photographer meant is different than what it means today, right? It's not. Somebody might argue, well, there are fewer professional photographers. Is that actually true though? There is way more photography happening and people are being paid money for those photographs. There is probably several orders of magnitude more professional photography happening today. It's just no longer a specialized Dedicated skill. It's just like, there was probably a time when knowing how to use a spreadsheet was like, oh, you're the spreadsheet guy. And now it's just, everyone is expected to know this because the, the, the barrier to entry is so much lower.
- [19:28]
B
To me, it's like imovie, right? I remember when imovie came out and my dad was like, oh my God. Like, I remember shooting 35 millimeter film and cutting it and putting all together. And now my kids, with a little beta cam or whatever, can. Our FireWire camera can just make this great movie. But I think the difference here is there's no video camera, right? Like, you can just. I, we. One of our businesses is a, a fashion agency. So they, they work with like, Burberry and all these huge fashion brands to do campaigns. And often a lot of the photography, they end up doing it with AI. They might, they might take a photo of a person, but they're putting in an AI backdrop. And when they're doing mood boards, they would have previously shot photos. And, and so to me, I go, well, is that a world where you need fewer photographers? And yes, everyone's becoming a photographer because they're doing the creative act. But does the job change? And how does it change? I find it so fascinating, and I just can't pin down where I'm at in terms of the analogy, because I agree with you. Like, you know, you could look at Excel when it came out and say, well, there's going to be fewer accountants. And that's not been the case. Right. But this is a very, this is a, a compounding improvement that's going to keep improving every, every minute, basically.
- [20:46]
A
Yeah. And I think the nature of these sorts of things is it's almost always a definitional problem. There might be fewer accountants, but I tell you what, there is a lot more accounting happening. There is massively more accounting happening because computers can do this infinitely for free, effectively. And so there may, there may be fewer people who have their job title as accountants or certified as accountants with whatever licenses are necessary, but the ability to do accounting is now much, much simpler.
- [21:18]
B
I wonder what that means for software companies. So, for example, like if I have a software company where, let's say it does like a utility thing, right? So it fills out a form or whatever it is. If my software costs $29 a month, you just choose it. It does what you need, whatever you pay the $29, there's a certain subset of people that will say, well, fuck that. I'm not paying this guy $29. I'm gonna go build this myself using cursor. And then they do. I wonder what that does to the price of software over time, right? Because anytime there's more competition, I always like to say the sexier the business and the more accessible it is to start, the lower the margins, right? The reason why restaurants are bad businesses is everyone wants to start a restaurant. The reason why, you know, asbestos remediation is a good business is because nobody wakes up out of their MBA class and says I'm going to go start an asbestos business. Right? And I just think it's going to really change things. I just don't know in what way.
- [22:18]
A
There's a couple of specific examples here. One from history and one from yesterday. Somebody friend of mine, she's non technical and she was mentioning how she's paying a lot of money to a service that basically aggregates data from different websites. It's basically she's paying money to a web scraper company and like seeing how much she's paying them, their margins are really good. And I explained to her I don't think you realize how easy it is to build a web scraper using these tools. Now within five minutes of opening up a computer, I had a functioning web scraper for her. Once people realize how easy it is to do some of these basics of software, I think it's going to be incredible how much leverage you get. The example from history, which you probably know because it's a famous case study, is around when, when ATMs were first being integrated into the world and everyone was panicked, like what are all the cashiers going to do at the banks? Because that's their main job is to like hey, I want to withdraw $50. And then they like count it out for you and they give it to you. That's why everyone was waiting in line. There are more people doing that job in banks now than there were before ATMs because now instead of doing this like really low value task of like shuffling money around, they're able to do higher value tasks. So every person that you employ can add more value to the company. So that's, that's really what I anticipate is going to happen. Every person is now instead of being able to add, you know, 5% or 20% a value in, above what they're making in terms of their salary, maybe every person now adds a hundred percent, 200% above the value.
- [24:01]
B
I see that and I remember when Wealthfront came out and you know, e trade was the first where I was like, oh, do I really need a stockbroker? But then Wealthfront basically said, look, the thing that your stockbroker was doing, building a diversified portfolio and setting your risk and all that kind of stuff, it's all done. And yet there's still all these guys in suits who are wealth managers. And the reason for that is because people have relationships with humans, they trust humans and they got a guy, you know, it's the guy at the golf course that they like and they give him the money or whatever and he basically just says Wealthfront behind the scenes, just very inefficiently. I think it's quite possible that we are able to have relationships with digital humans, right? So I mean like you, you have a relationship with ChatGPT because you go on walks and you talk to her, right? Soon she's going to know everything about you and she's going to start interacting with you almost like a friend that you trust. And I believe that pretty soon in the next five years you're going to be able to go on FaceTime and have a full on FaceTime call just like the way you and I are, and have a call with your digital wealth manager who's a digital person. And I do wonder, does that change things? Does that really eliminate those bank tellers and all that kind of stuff? Because it's really just about eye contact and you know, simulating. You know, it's like we're like, you know, like they, they with animals, they'll just like replace the mom with like a 30 watt light bulb that warms the babies and they're like satisfied by that. We are so stupid compared to the super intelligence that it'll be able to do the equivalent.
- [25:39]
A
Yeah, it reminds me, I was talking to a friend recently, he has really mixed emotions about this. He has a high school age daughter. She was having some conflicts with her friends in high school and she was telling her dad about it and how she explained the situation to ChatGPT, asked for like steps that she should take to try to resolve this. It gave her some very good advice. And the reason why my friend was so torn over this is that when she explained the situation and the steps that chatgpt suggested, he was like, that's definitely better than what I would have said. So this is kind of concerning. I don't know, it's, this is a good outcome, but I don't know how I feel about that.
- [26:24]
B
Well, it's interesting because it's, there's this great, maybe apocryphal story about Elon Musk arguing with Larry Page from Google and they're debating the risks of AI and stuff. And Larry Page says, elon, you're specious, right? And there's this interesting argument that if AI replaces humanity or replaces some of these human connections, what does it matter if we're all just as happy? Like if I have an AI girlfriend and an AI therapist and an AI friend and I'm happy. I mean, there's a loneliness epidemic, right? There's all these old people sitting in old folks homes, lonely. They won't be lonely anymore. That is a world of abundance. But it's a weird world of abundance. It's almost like we're all drinking Soylent or something. You know, it's a bit odd. Let's go back to the hacks.
- [27:12]
A
This is another really meta point. But having less stuff is a pretty big hack. There's never been a goal of being a minimalist, but I think, I think I qualify as that at this point. I have three shirts, I have one pair of pants. Everything I have can fit in a fairly small backpack. The reason why this is such a hack is one, it doesn't cost very much money. So that's nice. But the biggest thing really is the mental overhead, which is non existent. There has, there has never been a time in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years when I thought, oh, I wonder, did I bring that thing? Because I only have a finite number of things and they're all in my backpack all the time. If I was to go on a trip for the weekend to Napa or I'm permanently relocating to Mexico, I bring the same stuff and it's fine. You don't have to worry about things breaking. I remember my cousin Matt, when he, he sold his house and started renting again for the first time in many years. Just the, the he's like, I don't have a list of things that have to be fixed now. It's so nice just not having to deal with that. It's just, it's really, it's really a hack for mental health.
- [28:22]
B
Yeah. I found that, you know, that old trope of the things you own end up owning you is very true, definitely. And I, I, yeah, I've been a maximalist, right. So I see interesting stuff online, some gadget, I buy it. I, you know, want to, you know, buy new clothes once a year. I have a big house with all these things that I wanted. And I find that it really does eat me alive where I walk into My home. And it's a place of stress because I realize that I need to take that car in to get. To go to the mechanic and I need to fix that thing in my kitchen, et cetera. What were you like before and was this. Is this thing you are already doing or this is a process you went through?
- [29:00]
A
I have definitely never been a maximalist. I will say that it was more of a. It was an organic process. There. There was never a point where I thought to myself, I should try to be a minimalist. It was more like I would have stuff, I would realize that it was stressing me out and I would just say, do I even need this thing? And then I would get rid of it, and then my life would be better. So it was sort of an organic process of really narrowing down what was the minimum. There's also something I wish I could remember who I stole this from. There's a lot of people who. They talk about decision fatigue, which may or may not be a real thing. I will say there's definitely something to be said for having a finite amount of time. And it is remarkable to me how much time people I know spend arguing over what they're going to eat. Or like, we go to a restaurant and they spend like 10 minutes looking over the menu. It's like, we're going to a good restaurant. Everything on this menu is probably going to be good. If you probably just did menu roulette and pick something at random, it's going to be fine. Maybe I just don't have super strong preferences about these things, but if you just compound that of like three meals a day, let's assume two of them require thought, and you spend 10 minutes of thought on each one. You're spending 20 minutes a day deciding what to eat. What are we doing?
- [30:19]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. There's that great Buddhist quote. I think it's all suffering comes from attachment.
- [30:25]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [30:26]
B
And I love the idea of being so compact and saying, Look, I've got $2,000 worth of kit and that's it. And I could lose everything. And as long as I've got that kit, I'm totally fine. And I'm curious to see how that evolves over time, you know, with kids and, you know, all these things. But, yeah, I. I've really observed that having more stuff has actually made me much less happy.
- [30:51]
A
This one is, like, highly specific, but I have found that it's really helpful is I've learned a lot from reading about Jensen Huang's management style from Nvidia so this is maybe only specific to CEOs or people in similar positions. He has something like 60 direct reports, which by everyone current thinking on this is terrible and it's a disaster. And everyone should just have eight direct reports. And then it's like one manager for every eight direct reports. And you just stamp that out infinitely. One of the things that I learned about it is the relationship that you have with your direct reports doesn't have to be the same at every company at every level. I've changed my management style towards the people that I work with from. It used to be more of a mentorship oriented reporting structure and now it is much more decision oriented. So we have blocked time for one on ones, but they get canceled if there's no agenda. The goal of those calls is to solve problems, to unblock people. The reason why Jensen does it is he said by having 60 direct reports, he has eliminated something like six or seven layers of the company in total. Like the whole company has just shrunk by seven layers, which is insane. But you can kind of see how that happens. And so I really, I don't really like the management style that is assumed, which is you have to do one hour weekly, one on ones with every person. You have to like, we're a team, not a family at levels. And so being really explicit about that, I think it's been generally very positive. It doesn't work for every manager in every type of situation. The guy who runs support on our team, Chris, has more of a mentorship style which works super, super well for his team. Whatever the conventional wisdom is on how these relationships need to work within a company. You don't have to just assume that they're correct and you can try different things.
- [32:50]
B
That's really interesting. I love the idea of cutting down on bureaucracy. I will say you're talking to someone who's been traumatized by having 40 direct reports. So at Tiny, we have about. Actually probably 50 when I think about it. So yeah, at Tiny we have about 35 or 40 different CEOs because we have all these different companies. And effectively what I realized about CEOs is when you buy their. When you buy a company and you're the CEO of the holding company, they always want to talk to you. They go, I did a deal with you and you're the CEO and I'm an important CEO, so I want to talk to the other big important CEO. And they refused. Whenever I would try and say talk to my CEO or talk to the HR person, they'd always get offended because CEOs want to talk CEO to CEO. And I really struggled with it because what I found was there would be long periods of quiet because really all we were negotiating was, like, incentives and like, agreeing on strategy or like, crises or whatever. But then when it rained at port and it would be like, all of a sudden I'd have five different CEOs all wanting to negotiate complex comp packages at the same time. And frankly, I just couldn't keep it all in my head at the same time. And so I've really struggled with that. But I'm impressed by people who can pull it off. And maybe he can pull it off by saying, I only do one thing, I only resolve problems. And you're only going to bring me, you know, path one, path two, path three, and then we'll brainstorm if there's additional paths. I think that would work. But when it comes to, like, comp and being holistic, I imagine that would be a bit of a nightmare. Yeah.
- [34:27]
A
And I imagine for different industries, like, I had a very similar conversation with somebody who runs an investment fund that has a lot of LPs, and she said, I would love to be able to have that type of relationship, but they demand that they talk to me and only me. And so I end up spending a lot more of my time, basically, people managing all of my lp. Some of them just seem like they're bored and want someone to talk to. And like, you just have to talk to them for like two hours. And I think it's.
- [35:00]
B
I recently had a. We have. We have a fund that has LPs in it. Then we have a public company and I had an investor say, oh, I was upset that, you know, you didn't call me personally. And I just had to tell him. I was like, look, man, like, there's a hundred or more major shareholders. And if I did that with every single person, like, I wouldn't be able to buy companies or do all the, you know, you invested in me for a reason because of what I'm doing. And so it's really a challenge. Right, because there's so much of this tied up in ego where it's like, I want to feel important. I want to know I can get the attention of the other, you know, top dog. But in doing so, they're actually, like, ruining their own investment by distracting the person. It's a. It's a really fascinating problem. And I see it over and over again because especially with LPs and investors, it's not that busy. For them. Right. So they love to talk to you and, you know, get a deep dive on the business.
- [35:53]
A
Another one that is very circumstance specific, but has been incredible. We had a baby about 10 months ago and just before that we moved in with another couple, two of our friends in San Francisco who also have a baby of the same age. So we have a double baby house going on. And it is amazing. I.
- [36:17]
B
That is one of those things that I feel like every guy loves the idea of. And every, at least in my friend group, all the guys were like, I want to live in a commune. Or like y' all like live side by side. And all the wives are like totally anti. How did you. Was it pre existing friends or how did you do that?
- [36:34]
A
They were pre existing friends. I will say my wife was initially opposed to it and it was one of those, hon, you just have to trust me. Let's give this a shot. And like, she can't imagine any other way to do this at this point. It is just so amazing, the just having people around, being able to. Especially in the very early days when my wife was like terribly sleep deprived, just having people around and being socialized and not feeling isolated, it is. It's a thing that feels like it should be the default and probably was for hundreds of thousands of years. I think the new way that we do it, which is like isolated suburban houses, is actually probably more the outlier than having a community of people raising kids.
- [37:24]
B
100%. I couldn't agree more. I. I found the way that we raise kids now is very. It feels very wrong. The time where I enjoy parenting the most is when we come together with other families. So when my boys were little, we had another couple and we would constantly just have them over for dinner because it was easier. The kids would go off and play and the parents could all bitch about parenting and how hard it is and how tired you are or whatever. And it really got us through. And I really think it's. It's a kind of a sad thing that we're doing it in such an unnatural way. So that. That's so cool that you're doing that. I've never heard of anyone else doing that.
- [38:00]
A
Yeah. The last one I have is another very tactical one, which is meal prep. Having healthy food around is a huge hack in terms of how I feel throughout the day. It's like going to the fridge and only seeing like packaged foods around is. It's so much nicer when you have packages. I. I order a big Costco delivery every week and we get like a bunch of vegetables, a bunch of meat. We do stews. We spend a couple hours doing these, like, huge batch processes of food. We also have four people, plus nannies, plus two babies in the house. So we batch process a ton of food in a couple hours in these giant pots. We store it all and then we have food for the week. And it's all super healthy. It saves so much time, mental overhead, and just keeps things super healthy. So that's. If you. If you learn how to use the tools, like oven trays, giant pots, if you learn recipes that you can do with those tools really, really efficiently, you'd be shocked at first of all how cheap it is. It is insanely cheap to make healthy food if you do it at reasonable scale. And also how much nicer it is to just have healthy food available all the time.
- [39:16]
B
That's so cool. I love that. Well, I actually, we kind of winged it here, but I like this format. That was really fun. Yeah, it was nice to just pound through a bunch of this stuff and hopefully people got something from it. We're going to link all these things in the show notes. If anyone's curious, they can just look in the show notes for links. And Sam, where can people find you
- [39:34]
A
online on Twitter or X amcorkos. You'll be send me a note there. My. My EA will see it if your
- [39:42]
B
EA allows you to see it. Yeah, Right on. Awesome, man. Thanks so much for doing this. I appreciate you doing it while you're so busy with little kids.
- [39:48]
A
Yeah, all good.
- [39:49]
B
Okay. See you later. All right.
- [39:51]
A
See y.