The Exchanges

Q describe, you know, a test is, would you describe this person as an animal? Would you say, yeah, he's, he's an animal. And if you can say, man, that guy's an absolute animal, or she's an animal when it comes to this, That's the sign of a winner. And I think that's the, the output of a high agency person. How do you describe them? They're basically, they're an animal.

A Yes. And he has a great bit in there of inverting it, which was what would be the opposite? And it would be hapless, which is probably a good case of life happening to them. And I think there's a few, there's a four kind of tenants, I would say, why high agency is probably not a sticky idea as much as it could be, because it kind of has four ideas in it, which is one, locus of control. So I have control. Two, intentionalism. So they've thought about the direction that they want to go in. Three, resourcefulness, which is I'm capable of getting the outcome. And then four, high bias for action, which is they've already fucking started the thing before they've even listened to this podcast. They're just constantly moving. So those four things.

AI assessment note: “four kind of tenants... locus of control... intentionalism... resourcefulness... high bias for action”

Q with, you got interested in the idea, then you got obsessed with the idea, then you Committed to the idea and you started writing this thing and you told you were giving me updates saying you're writing this for a while. And, um, Sam, do you know the story of how he got high agency.com? No, because he did not own that domain. It's actually a very high agency story.

A Yeah, so one of the things I have, uh, in the piece is an exercise that I do. 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 highagency.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 that 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 …

AI assessment note: “waited for the moment that it would expire, and then it went into a little mini auction”

Q I want to ask you about Lee Kuan Yew. Somebody who's been on my list of people I want to go deep dive into. Sounds like you've read a bit about him or studied him a little bit. What is the learnings from Lee Kuan Yew?

A So Lee Kuan Yew was the leader of Singapore. During his reign, he went, he took Singapore from essentially being a third world country with a lot of problems. And you've got China and Japan on your doorstep, which historically not the friendliest, uh, people to have on your doorstep. And obviously part of the British rule, part of the British empire went from there to one of the best financial hubs in the world, but he ran the country like a CEO. And one of my favorite anecdotes about Lee Kuan Yew is how he used to obsess about the airport onboarding experience. And it's interesting. You see, You see such obvious ideas in startups, and you go, why don't countries just take this? The onboarding experience, or the conversion rate optimization of a landing page, or a website, or an advert, versus the, when you arrive at the airport, what's the airport like? What are the queues like? The immigration queues like? What are the bathrooms like? How clean are things? What's the first few miles from the airport to the city? Lee Kuan Yew used to obsess over everything, would be changing the routes, Would be cleaning things up, would be inspecting regularly, seeing how quick things were, because he knew that that is talented people coming for the first time. And Dubai does this incredibly well. You go there for the first time and you go, oh, wow, they've looked at everybody else's onboardi…

AI assessment note: “he ran the country like a CEO. And one of my favorite anecdotes”

Q It's on YouTube, or how'd you see it?

A I think I originally saw it on YouTube. There's a few write-ups as well, and he's given a talk, and the kids in the class ask him how to be, the cliche how to be successful thing. And rather than like listing dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, back or how to, I think it's how to be rich essentially. And rather than listing the cliche thing back, he says, as a thought experiment, look around at the people in the class right now. And if you could invest in them and get 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life, who would it be and why? So I mean, you could probably think of lots of people, people at home can probably think of lots of people. And you think about it, and you go, okay, I'd definitely invest in Jim, or I'd definitely invest in Mike. And then he goes, and then ask yourself, why? What is it that that person does, the values that they have, the behaviors that they have? And you can then see, we spoke at the first episode about, it's so hard to see in yourself, but it's so easy to see in other people. So you're kind of hacking the self-awareness bias of like, you trying to ruminate and improve yourself is probably midwit wasted effort. But looking at other people, you can see immediately that And then you can try and get your values that way. And then he flips the experiment around and goes, if you have to shore people in your life, so you take 10% of their losses, who woul…

AI assessment note: “I think I originally saw it on YouTube. There's a few write-ups as well”

Q George, do you think that crazy people like that are born? Or do they learn it? Or can you learn it?

A 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. Um, that's what I kind of call it, the high agency spectrum. I think there's definitely people who have genetic advantages. Balaji had a great, uh, line the other day of, uh, when communism ended, we could, uh, the Soviets could discuss profit for the first time. And he was talking about where with wokeness ending, maybe we can discuss genetics for the first time. And I feel that yes, genetics definitely plays a component, but I would say that can then be quite a low agency for you to then just outsource it purely to your genetics. So I think, um, it definitely plays a component, but you can definitely have agency over your agency. And I think the way I would, uh, immediately explain that is that it's possible to, you could imagine, regardless of the genetic role 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. Um, I kind of, I love to show Ted Lasso, because it's like an example of, I call it getting Ted Lasso'd now, which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge, um, but, uh, the Amer…

AI assessment note: “realistically, it's probably somewhere on a spectrum... genetics definitely plays a component”

Q didn't, but yeah, our memory's crap. What about, um, 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 a, like a mental framework. But it actually seems like when you think about this, it's actually more tactical than that.

A 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, like, 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 their house on it. And, uh, in this Pirate Wires, Post, they spoke about how now thanks to AI and large language models, the, uh, exponential or like the leverage that you get on agency as a result is, is so much bigger. And you just then begin to look at it. So like a small case of like high agency for me is I started getting bored of being bullied by algorithms. I feel like everybody is just a bitch to the algorithms these days. And I try and like find small ways to have agency Over the algorithm. So like, even, I was like, ok. I reflected on my YouTube history. I literally, I recommend everybody do it. It's one of the weirdest exercises. Talk about memory. You go on YouTube, and then you press history. And I just scrolled through the videos. I was like, ok, 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 w…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it's incredibly tactical. There was a post, I think, two days ago”