#212 - Why You Shouldn't Be A Slave to a 40 Hour Work Week
And a lion is the exact opposite. A lion sits, rests, it watches, it observes, it waits for an opportunity. Then when an opportunity comes, like the gazelles running across the field, the lion looks up, sprints after the gazelle.
Okay. We're here. All right. Let me tell you something. All right. You ready?
Yeah.
I saw a great tweet that got me thinking a lot and I've been reading a lot on this topic, so it was very good coincidence. So it's this guy named Dan Vasallo. He said, I'm convinced that working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks per year for 30 to 40 straight years is against our nature. Yet the most skilled, educated, and highly paid people I know tend to be unable to consider any other path that doesn't involve enduring this artificial lifestyle. Lifestyle. Do you, Shawn, agree or disagree? Uh, well, actually, let me phrase it differently. Yeah, do you, do you think that, that 40 hours, 50 hours a week for 50 years is outlandish? Like, where do you fall on that?
I totally agree with this. I think that the workweek concept is, um, suboptimal, somewhere between bogus and suboptimal. All right, so the Why do I think that? So first there's this assumption that's like we have linear output, that you come in 8 hours a day, all 8 hours are going to be roughly equal. Nobody says this, but it's just implied in the way that we work. You're expected to sort of be there for these hours. And then on top of that, there's like, well, cool, then Monday through Friday should be the same. And then you're working 50 weeks out of the year. They should all be roughly equal. And we know Anybody who does non-factory work, non-industrial work, if you're working with your brain, you're doing knowledge work, that workweek doesn't make any sense. And I think you kind of nerd out about the history of things, the history of the workweek, the history of the industrial revolution and shit like that. And it seems to me, and maybe I could be wrong here, but seems to me like this idea of the way we work where you go to a central place and then you work 8-hour shifts and you do that 5 days out of the week, and then you do that 50 weeks out of the year, and you do that for 30 years out of your career. That is like the industrial age. And it makes sense if you're actually working in a factory because you can sort of pick, pack, you know, you can sort of like do all these, like these physical tasks with a certain set of output and it can be measured. And like just the more hours you're there, the more output you're going to get. Whereas if you're a programmer or you're a designer or you're a product person or you're a marketer, you might have 1 hour where you just get this burst of creativity, of insight. And that hour was like the whole day's work. And it might take you a whole day to get to that point, but that hour was like the most valuable bit. So I think that the way people work today is we still work the schedule of a factory, but we don't work in factories anymore for the most part. So yeah, I totally disagree with— I totally agree with the tweet which disagrees with The Workweek.
So I'm reading a few things. The first thing that I, that I've read recently is this great book called The Science of Fear. And in it, he talks about the history of humans a little bit and how, uh, we look at fear and what we're afraid of isn't always logical. For example, when September 11th happened in 2001, in the year 2002, Flights went down as, uh, sorry, I should rephrase that actually. The less people traveled on an airplane, right? Because they were fearful. They were afraid to fly. Yet car wrecks the next year, 2002, went up significantly. So much so that had there been a terrorist attack and a plane went down every single week, uh, for a whole year, it actually would've been safer than driving. And we are incredibly fearful. And that's just one example. Another example— I'm paraphrasing here, I'm going to get some numbers wrong. How many people do you think die a year from shark bites?
Probably tiny, right? I don't know. Let's call it die every year. I think it's like sub-1000 is my guess.
So since the history of us recording this, the stat, which I believe was like 1880 or something like that, it's around 200 people ever. So a minuscule lifetime, lifetime. It's so shark bites happen each year, but something like 1 to 4 every year are, are you die. And yet we're incredibly fearful of that. And, and the reason I'm bringing this topic up is when I was reading this book, he has this great line. And again, I'm paraphrasing, but he says something like, if you look back, uh, of like the Homo sapiens, so like the, the kind of modern human. And if that, if, if it's a history book. Of what that is, of the life of that, of the history of the Homo sapiens. That book will be like 500 pages. And of the hunter-gatherer stage, that will be something like a paragraph. And this, since the, uh, industrial age, since, you know, whatever we just call modern, so let's just say like the last 1,000 years or so, that's going to be like 1 or 2 or 3 sentences, a paragraph, let's say. So to put— and, and the reason why this is important is the way that our emotions, the way that we live our life, it, we look at like, well, you know, for the last 100 years we've been doing this. It's like, well, actually for the last tens of thousands, the last millions of years, whatever, we've done something else. And to bridge that to this other book, Sapiens, have you read Sapiens?
No, but I feel like I have, cause everybody references it constantly. So I almost feel like I know it, but go ahead.
Yeah. It's like the tech bro, tech bro book. So I'm paraphrasing again.
We should explain it's the tech bro book because it's like, It's the book that's not about tech that all the tech bros like because it makes you look like you're more worldly because you know about humanity and like, you know, oh yeah, it's not just about tech. So it's not at all about tech.
So before, you know, cities emerge and things like, you know, capitalism as we know it kind of came into play, a lot of times like hunter-gatherers and then when the agricultural revolution came about, we were working like something like 20 hours a week. So we would work to get our food, we would work to take care of our family a little bit, but it was a lot of leisure time. And I find that to be kind of interesting that when I look at like guys like an Elon Musk, but for the record, I agree with what that tweet said, but I do agree that if you are going to build like these outlandish things, like an Elon Musk type of thing, it does give you a competitive advantage to work really, really, really hard. And regardless if you start anything, you got to work really hard. But I don't think that you need to do that for that actually that long. And I would actually say, I, this is a guess, I don't have insight. There's a world where you could be an Elon Musk and actually work 40 hours a week right now. But I was thinking, I've been thinking a lot and I'm gonna come a little bit more prepared next time. But the history of the work week, and I do think it's crazy to dedicate 60, 70 hours a week or whatever it is to work that's considered like hard work for like 40 years. 20 years. I think that's wild. I think it's crazy.
Let me give you my, my, a couple of frameworks that I picked up along the way. First one from Tim Ferriss. So you go read 4-Hour Workweek and everybody who reads the 4-Hour Workweek gets what I call the 4-hour fever, which is right after you finish the book, actually even before you finish the book, when you're about halfway through, you're, it's like you're in a fever dream. You're reassessing every part of your life. You're like, oh yes, I've seen the light. I need to be doing things this way. Now I can't see the world the same way again, which is why it's such a great book and why it got so popular, was because it had that sort of red pill moment where you couldn't really go back to living in the same sort of fog you were living in before. And the thing about The 4-Hour Workweek, one thing he says is he points out that true wealth has very little to do with money. Money is an accounting scheme that we use to keep track of wealth. And true wealth comes into play of like, you have to take into account other factors. So Who is wealthier, a person in New York City making $500,000 a year or a person in Bali making $150,000 a year? Well, the person in New York, by traditional measures, would be doing 4 times better. But of course, if you go live that life, that's not the case, right? Because in New York, you have to pay— your cost of living is 3 or 4x. Your schools, you have to pay for private schools or whatever. Basically, your effective your effective wealth, which is basically a combination of how much free time you have and how much buying power you have, is lower than the person in Bali who's working half the time, making 4 times less, but also living in a place where the cost of living is 10 times less or whatever it is. And so he called that the new rich. Tim Ferriss called this the new rich. He basically is like, the new rich are people who have time, and the new rich are people who They don't— they're not tied to any location, they're not tied to any schedule. And they have— they're working in a way where they're earning just enough to hit their target. And their target is some amount of money that covers your life, life costs. And so they were basically— you're— you have a freedom number that you come up with where it's like, okay, once I'm earning this much and then the effective kind of like compounding of interest that I make off that money is going to cover my life burn, then I'm financially free. And he talked about how the way that people work today, which is like you work your ass off from age 20 to 65, right? So for this 45-year period, you work like crazy, you sacrifice time, you sacrifice travel, you sacrifice health because you're working so hard. And then basically once you turn 65, all of a sudden, okay, now it's time to retire and go do all the fun things, go travel now as a 65-year-old. And he points out, It's way more fun to travel now than it is when you're 65, right? Like, it's more fun to do things in your 20s and your 30s and not put off the fun until you're 65. And also, you know, why do we do this where we basically trade the first half of our life, you know, trading, you know, time for money, and then the second half of our life trying to give back money to get our time back? And that doesn't really make too much sense. So once I first heard that, I thought about, oh yeah, there is this lifestyle where you can be remote, right? Like, you're in— I don't even know where you are. You're in Brooklyn right now, something like that.
You're in New York, Manhattan.
You're in Manhattan now. It doesn't matter where you are, you can do your job. And so you have more freedom than the average person. It also is that you can work 3 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day. All that matters is what you get done. So it's not like a factory where you have to come in to work. So I think this is the new rich. And the last part of the new rich that he talks about is mini vacations, mini retirements. So instead of having one big fat retirement when you're 65, how do you have like little one, you know, 6-month, 1-year, 18-month sabbaticals that you take in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, rather than just putting it all off till the very end. So what do you think about that lifestyle first?
So that lifestyle is great and it's not actually anything new. Um, and, but we don't really assume that it's new. So I was out, I was at dinner. With this, I think, did I tell you about this? Uh, the guy who had a company in China?
Yes, you did.
So basically as a recap, there was a guy who I went with out to dinner with and he had 5,000-ish employees in China. And there was this debate at the dinner table of how China's going to kick America's ass. And this guy, this isn't me saying this, so don't give me flak. This guy was saying, I think that that's totally false. A lot of Americans think that, but the truth is, is that Americans probably work harder. Um, you know, we actually work really, really hard. Americans do, you know, it's, it's at our company, we would give 3 weeks, uh, time off. Most people did not take that entire 3-week time off. Um, most people would take like 10 days and that, that was just like, that's just my little, uh, example. But I actually think that Americans work incredibly hard compared to our peers throughout the world. Maybe not the hardest, but top tier. But And a lot of the guys who I like to read about, so for example, Joseph Kennedy is an example. Prior to him even making all of his wealth, he, Joe Kennedy was JFK's father. He was worth, he was like the 10th richest person in America at the time. So he was incredibly wealthy. And what he would do even prior to that is he would work really hard for 9 months and then chill for 3 months in Palm Beach in Florida. And this, he wasn't incredibly wealthy when he did it. And this is actually incredibly common. So you'd read about Andrew Carnegie taking a trip to Europe. Now, when you take a trip to Europe without a plane, that's a 6-month thing. And so that, that I— this, this idea of taking time off, it's not like— I mean, I'm citing—
so I don't think it's new, but I don't think it's common either, right? So there's something— I don't think it's common. It could be not new, and it's not common now. And that's why it's, I think, interesting now. And from my point of view, by the way, I think— so I lived in China for 2 years. I lived in Indonesia for a year. There's a bunch of different places that are kind of like more third-worldy and considered to be like, right now, I would say the popular opinion amongst our peers is that in China, people work a lot harder and they're advancing faster. US is all tangled up in its own mess, and it's also the soft generation and everybody gets a trophy and blah, blah, blah. There's all these complaints about the US. And I hope what your friend is saying is true, that America is not— America does work hard and is not going to be— not going to get its ass kicked by China. But I don't know what I saw when I lived there was the average person there works far harder and is much tougher. And the, like, the expectations of your rights and your leisure and your, like, the coddledness of employees is like night and day. Like, the average employee here lives like a king compared to the average employee in China or Indonesia, from what I saw. Which was two things. There were a lot of people in China that live in the rural areas, and then they come work in cities because that's what jobs are. And so extremely common practice is you literally leave your family. You have a kid, you leave your family, you go work in the city. Your grand— your parent. So the grandparent raises the kid. You send money back every week. You live in the city, you don't see your family, and then you go travel on occasional holidays or weekends back to the countryside to see your family. Like in the US, that would be considered sort of like, you know, slave labor almost. Like, that's not a common pattern in Indonesia and China. That was such a common pattern amongst the kind of like blue-collar class. And then in the white-collar class, they had this sort of like— I forgot what they call it— 996. It's like 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. You know, like I worked at a tech company. The average engineer came in at probably 10 a.m., you know, took a nice hour for lunch, you know, 2 hours later at noon, And then, you know, by 5 they were going to their, you know, going to the gym or going wherever they were going to go and they were gone. And oh, by the way, in between, you know, they got to sit with their triple monitor setup with their Bose headphones provided by the office, eating, you know, having Cheetos fed to them. So it's like, I do think that the American worker, from what I've seen, is a lot more coddled. But what I would say is that the average American has a much higher career focus than the average person in other countries I lived in. In Australia, I lived there and the quality of life was high and people might have worked about the same hours as the US, a little bit less, but it just wasn't as big of a part of their life was their career. In the US, I feel like career is like such a big thing in people's lives. Work is such a big part of your life. It's such a big part of your identity, your value in society, your value as a dating partner. You care about it. You're always trying to like move up. And in Australia, people were just way more chill about it. And I felt the same in Indonesia and in China. So even though somebody might work 14, 15 hours a day in pretty harsh conditions, they weren't like striving to like climb the ladder. That like climbing the ladder is a big thing in the US. I didn't see that in China, even for people that worked harder.
Now I think though, to wrap up this part, when we talk about work, we're talking about basically, um, for most of the listeners, we're talking about people who sit at a computer for 8 hours a day and that's what we're defining as work. Now I'm not saying, but when I say, so we're defining work as like doing something you don't necessarily want to do in exchange for money. Now, I actually think that you should work incredibly hard. If I define work as like, you should work out super hard. You should like run errands, you know, you should like handle family business.
You should also—
yeah. Well, yeah. You know, you gotta like, I think that you should have, like, I believe a lot of times you just have like structure around what you're doing and you should put a lot of effort and live You should live hard, kind of is the way that I think about it. You should do things like with intention, but I don't, I think that working 50 hours a week for 30 whatever years, when I think about it now, I'm like, that is crazy if you only live once. And I'm starting to read this book. I just ordered it. I don't even remember the name, but it's about a guy who goes and interviews elderly people, people in the, and people in the hospice who are about to die. And they talk about what they regret and things like that. And just reading the reviews of it has already changed my perspective slightly.
That's cool. I like that. Naval has a great one where he basically talks about this idea of most people work like cows when we should really work like lions. So I don't know if you've heard this framework, but it's a good one, which is a cow. If you watch a cow all day, a cow just stands in the grass slowly wagging its tail, just eating, grazing on the grass, neck down, slowly munching on grass, which is kind of like not the highest sort of like, you know, like it's not the most dense, nutritious food. And the cow just sits there, does that, has 4 stomachs to just sit there and digest grass. And so cows graze all day, 10 hours a day. And a lion is the exact opposite. A lion sits, rests, it watches, it observes, it waits for an opportunity. Then when an opportunity comes, like the gazelles running across the field, the lion looks up, sprints after the gazelle, like not walking, not jogging, sprints, catches the gazelle, feasts on the gazelle, which is like more dense nutrient, more value there, then celebrate, relax, rest, and get ready for the next sprint. And basically Naval's point is work like a lion. If you're a creative person or you want to be sort of wealthy, which is freedom and time working on stuff you love and creating a lot of value in the world, work like a lion, not like a cow. But if you look at the way the workweek is scheduled, it's a cow. It's a cow's workweek. The cow's workweek is go sit on this chair, neck down, Monday through Friday, 8 hours a day, leave for the weekend, come back, do it again. Do that 50 times in a row. That's the year. You know, congratulations. And if you have a bad week, That's a negative. We don't count the number of amazing weeks. We just count the number of not bad weeks. And so people work like cows. And so I think that that's a very useful frame of reference is to say, okay, because a lot of people who are high achievers, they're down to sprint. What they're not down to do is feast, celebrate, relax, rest, and wait for the next big opportunity because they have nervous energy. They're always just trying to do some— do more, do more, more, more, more, more. And we do more, more, more, more, more. You actually are working like a cow. Not like a lion.
Can we talk about Naval? So I want to hear, do you have any intel or insights on him that first of all, let's explain who this guy is. But I would like to hear some stories about him because I just read his— listened to his book. What was it called? The Naval Almanac.
Yeah, it was awesome. But I've never met the guy. I don't really know that many people that know him really have. Do you have any insights?
I don't know. I don't— I don't— I never met him. I've chatted with him once or twice, just briefly, very briefly, like a Twitter DM and once on Clubhouse. So for all intents and purposes, I don't know the guy. He doesn't know— put it better, he doesn't know me. I feel like I know him pretty well. He doesn't know me. Okay. But I do know some people who know him, and I've asked him.
Tell the background of who this guy is.
Basically, I'll go back a little bit further. So he's a He's an Indian guy. He grows up somewhere in New York, not wealthy. I think single mother, wasn't really like him and his brother. Wasn't really like a sort of glamorous lifestyle or whatever growing up. Grows up, thinks he wants to be a scientist, sort of decides, okay, actually I'm more interested in the business side of things, or I have more of a knack for business and ends up early on in the dot-com boom, creates a site called ePinions, which is like a website for, I think it was reviews and opinions on products. I believe it was sort of like Yelp-ish., but more for, I think, products than for, for, you know, locations. So Crazy Opinions, opinions actually works, but some shit goes down. I don't know the full backstory, but like, you know, the important part is opinions kind of was working and then, you know, it's still, it's not around today, so it didn't fully work. But, uh, he got kind of screwed by his VCs. So he gets screwed by his VCs, gets screwed out of what he was owed. Uh, you know, that puts a chip on his shoulder.
Basically, I think what happened is that he left the company or disagreed with his co-founder. The VCs took the side of his co-founder and they bought back some of his shares, or they told him they were worthless and we sold them for very little. But then eventually, I believe they either went public or they were bought by a company that goes public, and it becomes a financial success for a little while at least.
And he didn't get what— he didn't get the win that he would have otherwise been owed out of that. He felt like he was screwed over by his VCs. And then he said, well, why was I screwed? You know, I think the good part here is he took some accountability for it, said, okay, they may have acted poorly, but I put myself in a position where they could act poorly, where they could legally act poorly towards me. And so that got him very interested in this idea of term sheets and contracts and the deal documents that go into when an investor invests in a company, because he was a founder. And as most founders, like, investor wants you, okay, great. They do this this is their day job, is doing deals, investing in companies. They hand you a piece of paper that says, hey, and they tell you, oh, it's all standard. And you say, okay, shit, if it's standard, it's standard. I don't know, some of this stuff looks kind of scary, but I don't know how to push back. I don't know if they say this is standard. Okay, whatever. You sign the document and you don't really fully understand until things go sideways. And as they say with all deals, deals are written, contracts are written for the worst case scenario, not the best case scenario.. And the worst case scenario is like, you know, you found a breakup or whatever, you get kicked out of the company. What do you owe? And so he creates Venture Hacks. Venture Hacks is basically a, you know, sort of like demystified version of term sheets. So he basically starts writing down, hey, founders, here's what you need to know about raising money. Here's how the process works. Here's what the— yeah, here's what the terms are you should know. Here's the fucked up terms you should avoid. Here's the good VCs, you know, that sort of thing. So he's just putting out a blog with no clear— like, it's not like a business he started necessarily, but he puts out a blog. I think it became a book at some point, and he keeps investing in the kind of like— he's in the game still. He's playing the startup game still. Next thing he does is he creates AngelList, which starts off as very simple. Oh, hey, founders, I helped you figure out the dynamics of raising money, the deal terms, but that doesn't actually help you go get investors. So why don't we do this? I know 100 angel investors., if you want to raise money, this is a list of angels, angel list. Uh, here's a list of angel investors and I'll just send out 3 or 4 good startups every week to this list and then that'll help you get funded. And so it starts off as an email-first product, ends up becoming full like platform and network, basically LinkedIn for the startup community. And now it's a multi-billion dollar, $2 or $3 billion at least company that is, you know, the best place to go, you know, list your startup, get, uh, raise money,. If you're an investor, I use it for my rolling fund, so I use it as the back office to launch a fund. If you're an engineer, you can use it to go get a job. It's like all the different transactions that need to happen in the startup world, whether it's hiring, whether it's raising money or it's investing money, AngelList does it. So that's the long story short on him. Along the way, invests as an angel investor in Twitter, in Uber, in Postmates. Does extremely well as an angel investor. During that time.
Probably a billionaire at this point.
Yeah, I don't think a billionaire. I would say no, but stupid money for sure, right? Like hundreds of millionaires for sure. And I think the reason why a lot of people like him, there's a lot of guys in Silicon Valley that have that story, right? I created a company. It's definitely exceptional to create a billion dollar company or to angel invest in Uber and Twitter and Postmates. Multiple billion-dollar companies at the earliest rounds. That's clearly impressive. But Naval stands apart not for that. He stands apart because he has an extreme clarity of thought and wisdom that he shares on both Twitter, his podcast, The Naval Podcast. And he's kind of like a philosopher about both life as well as business. And that's, I think, why he's built this cult following.
And when he started this philosophy shtick, um, he got mocked. So basically Naval builds AngelList, it starts becoming quite successful. It actually took a while. I think now it's going to be just the biggest thing ever. I mean, when I see how it works now, I'm a customer. It's going to be huge. And he starts this Twitter shtick where he tweets one-line tweets that at the time was not very popular. Now everyone does it, but it's like he'll just do a one-sentence tweet.
We call them fortune cookie tweets. Yes.
And, you know, they're silly, but like, they're useful. And people would kind of mock him at first. Now he went on Joe Rogan and people start looking at him as this, like, Tony Robbins-esque guru. And he blows up.
And regardless, I think it's the other way around. I think he got on Joe Rogan because people already started to feel that way about him. I mean, the stuff he put out, one thread particularly that just went nuts, which was called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky. If you're going to go read one Twitter thread today, go read that one. And that was a bit more— that's like original wisdom. There's original content. The internet already lacks original content. Forget original content. Original wisdom is very hard to come by. Anytime I think of something wise, I'll tweet it out and then somebody will say, yeah, that's what Yogi Berra said back in 1940 or something like that. I'm like, okay, great. I wasn't trying to rip him off. This is an independent realization I've had. By making mistakes in my life, but I found it so hard to really have original wisdom. He genuinely has original wisdom. And of course, many things he says are packaged and repackaged from philosophers that he follows and stuff he tried. But at the end of the day, he's putting together sort of like an original set of philosophy, a set of ideas that come together as a philosophy.
And he has this fund now that you can join, but in order to join it, so he charges crazy fees.
I think more. If you go to, he's got, it's a syndicate and a rolling fund and you could actually see what they are. You could read 'em, but they're significantly higher than normal. And he recently had a meeting for his syndicate members. I had a friend who went and he said something like, I'm no longer going to do B2B software because even though it's like a surefire way to make money, It's just boring to me. And now I'm only going to invest in things like space and things that are these moonshot crazy ideas. What do you see what the fees are?
Uh, I'm looking now. I don't see the fees. I think maybe I have to like find the docs, but I'd be surprised if it was that, that crazy. I think I would bet he takes a higher carry than fee, but, but that's what it is.
Sorry, sorry. When I say fee, uh, I wasn't meaning management fee.
I was meaning like, uh, one is, have you heard his theory on the like kind of back to the workweek thing. Let's connect these two ideas. So he's got this theory on the future of work. Have you heard what he says about this? No. So basically he says, okay, two things. He's like, one, the size of the firm is shrinking. So we've seen companies, the big companies today are all like tens of thousands of employees. And then you start to see these outliers where it's like, oh, Instagram, when it sold for $1 billion, was at 13 people. That was kind of amazing for 13 people. And really, they hired 5 of them in the last few months. So it really was like 8 people created a billion-dollar company. And there was a prediction that soon, if not already, a one-person company will create a billion-dollar— one person can create a billion dollars of enterprise value. And we're all kind of looking around waiting for that exact scenario. And I think Bitcoin is one of the closest, where Satoshi basically created a multihundred billion dollar thing. And it's like not only one person, well, it's most likely one person, but we don't even know who the person is. It's kind of amazing. No company, there's no CEO, no chief marketing officer, whatever. So he started observing that the size of the firm is shrinking in general and that people work their best in these small ragtag teams. And so what he thinks is the future is what I'll call the Ocean's Eleven way of working. So Ocean's Eleven, what is it? One person, George Clooney, identifies, we're robbing this bank, right? We're robbing this casino. This is, this is the next target. Person 1 basically sends out the bat signal. They text out the trusted group of people who all have a unique set of skills and says, hey, we have our next target. They say, cool. They read the brief. The brief basically says, here's this casino. It has all this money. They have these jewels. We're going to go rob the bank. Here's how we're going to do it. And you're going to be, hey, you know, like Asian gymnast guy, you're going to be responsible for going through the laser wires and hey, pickpocket guy, Matt Damon, you're going to go pickpocket the boss and get the key. And basically this is how work is going to work. So what he thinks is going to happen is you're going to have either independent or small teams of people, let's say you and let's say the 4 key people who built The Hustle, that you could basically get a text message on your phone that gives you the next mission, and either you as the leader are coming up with that mission, or somebody else puts out the mission out into the universe, says, hey, we want somebody to build, you know, the hustle for Bitcoin, right? And you could basically say, boom, accept. I accept the job. And then that fans out to the 4 people you trust. You guys get together and you do this sprint for like 9 weeks building the foundation there. You collect your jackpot of money, you split the, you split the winnings, you get the most, and then, you know, Steph gets the next most and Trung gets the next most or whatever., and then you all go your way again until the next mission hits. And he basically feels that this is how things are going to work, more like Mission: Impossible or Ocean's Eleven field agents that basically take missions when they want. The mission has a set bounty. The bounty gets— you get completed, you rate and review each other, right? I review the task giver, the brief giver. They review me as the agent, and then we go on our way. And we see this with Uber drivers today, but it hasn't shifted into creative knowledge work. But that's his That's— I'm paraphrasing or I'm kind of extrapolating from what he said, but I think that's what he thinks the future looks like. What do you think of that?
I think that that applies to a lot of things, but not everything. I think that for the people listening to this podcast, it will apply to a lot of their work. But at the end of the day, I need someone to come pick up my trash every single day or every once a week. You know what I mean? I need some type of consistency. And I think that Naval and—
The robots will be doing that.
Maybe, but someone's got to be in my street, dude.
The driver— there is a driver in the thing, but the guy drives up to the house. This huge claw arm comes, grabs my trash can like it's a toy in one of those claw games at the thing, dumps the trash into the thing, puts it back down, and he just keeps driving. The guy doesn't get out. Soon that guy's not going to need to be there. It's just going to be a computer driving that whole thing.
So there's this fruit stand on the corner of where I'm staying right now. And it's two guys who run it. They work 12 hours. They— it's 12 hours. So one, one person does the one 12 hours, the next, and it's open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's crazy. And so you can go and buy a pair at 3 AM on this corner. It's wild. And I think a lot of New York is like that, you know. In San Francisco, everything closes at like 1.
It never sleeps.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that for a lot of, uh, stuff, that unfortunately is going to be necessary. Although I don't know if it's necessary, but people are going to continue doing it that way. But what you're talking about for intellectual work or for work that requires coding or blogging or something where you can build it once and sell many times, I think that is a great way to do it. Not only do I think it's a great way, an effective way to do it, I think it's significantly more fun.
Well, I've had this realization, which is like, okay, my grandfather worked essentially, I think he worked in like an explosive factory, basically like a bomb factory. And so, hey, animation guys, start here. Okay. Grandfather works in an explosives factory, bomb factory, and he goes to work and basically wears a hard hat. He wears his glasses, his goggles, and he's operating like machinery, heavy machinery. That's like his day to day. Then his son, which is only like, you know, 30 years younger than him, does a job that to my grandfather would seem like, what do you mean this is work? Where's your hard hat? Where's the factory? Where's the danger? Where's the What? You're not standing 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day on the line. Like, what are you doing? Because my dad carried a briefcase into an office, went to a cubicle, sat down at a desktop computer, and essentially wrote roughly like, you know, emails, memos, and then went and flew on a plane to go meet a customer, shook their hand, cut a deal, signed a piece of paper, and then carried that piece of paper back with them. And then my dad looks at me And he's like, you call this work? What are you doing here? Like, you know, this is now again, 30 years later and work is now again, an unrecognizable shift. He looks at me and he says, you just sit in front of your laptop on your couch or you'll go, you'll go travel. It doesn't even matter. You can just sit with your little phone and do your whole job. And so I, you know, I sit with my laptop basically and I just talk to other people through video chat. I don't even need to get on a phone or I'll create content, you know, as my thing or I'm a programmer.. And then if I think about my daughter, right, my daughter, Blush, she's 2 years old right now. When she works, I'm sure it's going to look like something completely unrecognizable and basically looks like leisure to her. Like from my point of view, because I'm like, dude, back in my day I had to sit at my laptop and type, type, type, type, type. And she's going to be like, oh yeah, we just use our voice assistants. And I'm just like, I have a drone that follows me around and it's creating content for my channel and I have 1,000 subscribers and that's my payment, that's my income. Is my 1,000 subscribers watching me on my drone vlog or whatever the hell like the future is going to look like? It's hard to predict. My grandfather never could have predicted that his son would do what he does. My dad would have never thought that I do what I do. That means I'm unlikely to be able to predict what my kids are going to do 30 years from now. That gets me both excited but also makes me think, oh, I need to plan for something a little more radical than what just feels like a bit further progression from where we are today.
So I'll give you— this is a little tangent, but, uh, and Robert, Robert Greene's, uh, is one of my favorite authors, and he's a historian a little bit. And he wrote about how, you know how this idea of like how our parents always complain about young people, they don't under— understand this or that.
Hard work.
Yeah. Yeah. And we'll say the same thing about people younger than us. So some of the earliest writings that we've discovered of language, of the written language, not just pictures, but, uh, words, uh, on walls or whatever. Yeah. It was people complaining about how the kids don't— I swear to God, this is what he was— and he like gives this wonderful example. He's like, in fact, this is like so common that some of the earliest works we've ever been able to read, it's about complaining about how they're nervous about the future because the young people don't understand something.
Dude, that's so funny. First of all, first of all, someone's lying because I've heard the Bitcoin people are all like, oh, you know, the earliest writings on cave walls were just accounting systems, people keeping a ledger. A balance of who owes what. And then I've heard people who are like, if your shtick is like storytelling, it's like, you know, the earliest things in cave walls are stories passed down from generation. They're telling stories. Bedtime stories essentially were written on the walls. And now this guy's like saying something else. I actually believe yours. Yours seems to be honestly the most believable.
I am talking about the written, like, words. You could be talking about numbers and the other person could be talking about pictures. I'm talking about words. But hey, I'm just paraphrasing Robert Greene.
I'm just going to use that because no one fucking knows. And so I'm just going to owe whatever it might like. I'm teaching a writing course right now. It's like, did you know that the first writing ever actually happened before people ate? It's like, what? That can't be right. That doesn't make sense. Yeah. And the first writing was about writing. It's like, buy my course.
I'm just saying, that's what I read about Robert Greene.
What do you think? I wouldn't be surprised if basically my daughter, when she worked, she never went into an office. She's using something that's even more lightweight than a phone. It's a watch. Or it's a contact lens to see her information that she works with people who she doesn't know their identity and they don't know hers. It's more like a game. It's like she's like BB433 and she has like a 5-star rating and her rate is X coins. That's how she earns her money. And basically she works whenever she wants and she basically every morning can wake up and see a list of available missions to go contribute to. Like, I can see that being the future, even though that sounds like a video game today. I think that the jobs of the future feel like probably will look more like games than what we do today.
So there's this, uh, I forget who said it, but someone once said, um, like what I'll look at what rich Silicon Valley people do in their free time. And that's what a lot of the world will do in 10 years.
And I think this is slightly different. Chris Dixon said, What the nerds in Silicon Valley do on the weekends is what everybody will be doing on their weekdays eventually.
Yeah. And I think if I remember correctly, he might have been referring to like LSD or psychedelic drug use.
I think it was like many hobbies. It's like, oh, 3D printing, cryptocurrency, like whatever the— whatever the— whatever, like your engineer friends are doing for fun on Friday, Saturday, like outside of their job. That's the thing to bet on. Those are the things that become things.
And I think you could say the same for people who are incredibly wealthy. And let me give you an example. So we had this guy on the podcast named Mark— what do you say his last name? Lori. Mark Lori founded this company called Jet.com. He bought a basketball team, definitely a billionaire. And when we were doing the podcast, it looked a little funny, like the way he was moving his hands, I couldn't exactly tell what was going on. And then afterwards he told us that he wasn't using his computer and he basically was standing up and he had his iPhone on a big old tripod. And he sent us a picture of it. And I tweeted out about how I actually don't think that a lot of people are going to be using laptops. I think that, um, I've talked to a bunch of people. I think Gary Vaynerchuk's one of them. Uh, Jack Dorsey's another one. Mark Lore is another one. And they run these huge companies and they've created massive amounts of wealth. And Mark Lore said, I haven't touched a computer in years. And of course that is something that you pretty much, you kind of have to be pretty wealthy in order to do that. Or like a social media, like influencer or something like a Jake Paul type of person. Um, but I do think that in 10, 20, 30, 40 years, this idea of having a laptop and a computer, I think is going to be that we're not going to do that. We're going to do it all from some type of much very small handheld device.
I, I, I totally agree. Uh, can I tell you a fear story, a random thing that happened to me? I, uh, I was in my backyard yesterday or two days ago and I, um, I was my, we have this little like, so we have a pool, and then there's like this little hill that's kind of like, um, it's like there's a bunch of greenery or whatever. And so it's like a little path in the backyard. You can just walk in a circle. And my daughter loves to do it. So I'm walking with her and we're walking and I'm kind of on my phone and she's walking like 2 steps ahead of me. And every 3 steps she just reaches down to pick something up, a flower, a rock, a pebble. Well, it doesn't matter. Dirt. Like she just likes to pick stuff up. And so she reaches down to pick up something and I just hear this like this hiss. I just hear like, sss. And I'm like, I'm like, I don't really. And then I hear like a rattle. I just hear like, and I'm like, I grab her, I pull her towards me and I look and right like 6 inches in front of her is an enormous 4-foot rattlesnake. And it is staring at her, hissing at her. His little black tongue is like flickering at my daughter. And I'm like, I'm like, holy shit. And I'm like, I'm like, oh shit. And then she goes, oh shit. And then I'm like, oh no. You see that? And so then I like, I take her like 6 feet away and I'm looking at it and he stays still. And I'm like, you know, a different part of me wakes up. I think a part of me that you try intentionally to wake up a lot, which is like kind of like your, your like survival instinct, your like primal instinct.
You're like, kill or be killed, baby.
This is real shit. Like, I know you like to tap into that. This is real shit. Like, whether you're like, all right, I'm going to go box somebody and get hit and see what that feels like. I'm going to do this endurance race to see what it feels like to almost die on this mountain. I don't do all that shit, right? I look for, like, where's the couch? And so seeing this tapped into that part of me. And so I'm like, oh, shit. And so I'm looking at him, he's looking at me. I'm like, okay. So I get my daughter out of there, but I'm also like, I need to get rid of the snake. What am I going to do? And so I call whoever I call the. I call the animal control service, pest control or whatever, animal control. And they're like, oh no, we don't do snakes anymore. We stopped that like 6 months ago or something. We only do domestic animals. I'm like, okay, shit, who do I call? I called a pest control guy. They're all booked up and they're like, oh, we can get out to you on Wednesday. I'm like, dude, this snake is going to move around between now and Wednesday. And if we can't find them, that just means I can't go in my backyard at this point. This is like a 4-foot rattlesnake that is like hissing at me right now..
And did you know anyone with a gun?
Even if I knew someone with a gun, I wouldn't be like, hey, come shoot this snake in the head. Like, it just seems like—
no, that seems like—
like, that's not the way you get rid of snakes. You aim at their little tiny head and you shoot it. That's insane.
It's not that hard. I mean, I've got friends that they— yeah, when you find a snake, you shoot it.
So, okay, so that didn't come to mind for me. But I also live in a neighborhood where it's all just like old white rich people. And so my neighbors are all like 80. So I'm like, okay, this is not going to going to go over super well. They're not going to help me out. So then I call this little museum. I'm like, hey, you guys are a museum nearby. I'm like, you— they're like wildlife museums. They have real animals there. I'm like, you guys want a snake? I got a snake for you. Come pick this up. Right? And they're like, actually, there's a guy, this guy Jim, who will do this for you. And all the other guys are quoting me like $800, $1,000 to come remove this snake. And I'm like, dude, you could charge any amount of money to remove a rattlesnake and it's going to basically get accepted. And so I'm like, all right, whatever. And they're like, this guy Jim can do it. I'm going to call him right now. They three-way him into the call. He's like, hey, oh, you got a rattlesnake? He gets excited. He's like, I can get there in 30 minutes. I'm driving out of the city. And I'm like, okay, like, how much does this cost? He's like, oh, this is free. I love doing this. What? So this guy comes over. I just— I don't even know what the point of the story is. An amazing thing that happened. So this guy comes over. He's got this long beard, looks like Dumbledore, basically. And he's like, oh yeah, he's like excited to see the snake. He tells— first he tells me, watch the snake, don't lose the snake. So for 30 minutes, I sit there 10 feet away from the snake, just in the heat. It's 100 degrees outside. I'm just sitting there facing off with the snake. I don't have my phone, I don't have anything. And I'm just staring at this thing the whole time. If you want to learn to meditate, find a rattlesnake and stare at it for 30 minutes. Unbelievable meditative state. So guy shows up, he's got a tiny stick with him, basically like a little tiny claw. It's like— and he goes up to the snake, no fear, just starts like moving stuff out of the way near the snake. He's like trying to get a good look at it. And he grabs the snake with his thing, almost loses it twice. Then he grabs— he finally gets it. He's like, you got a bucket? And I'm like, bro, you should have said this ahead of time. Like, no, I don't have a bucket. Let me go find— I go get an Amazon box. He's holding the snake in midair. It's like winding around like crazy, hissing like crazy. We put it in this box, we tape it up. He's like, can you just hold this tape down? I'm like, bro, you don't understand how big of a pussy I am. Like, this— you— I know it's safe, it's in the box, but like, I don't want to touch the box.
Rattlesnake, I mean, and that'll kill you, right? It'll kill—
it can kill you. I was asking, I was like, dude, you just went up to it with no fear. And he's like, not the fastest guy. I was like, you're kind of slow. Like, you weren't— the snake was moving way faster than you. Like, you weren't afraid? He's like, nah, I've done this for years. I love snakes. He's like, I'm only afraid of, like, you know, mountain lions or something. And he's like, he's— I was like, but they do attack. He's like, no. He's like, they rattle as a defense mechanism. They're trying to get you to go away, right? Like a predator would not rattle at its prey to scare it away. It's more of a defensive thing. I'm like, okay, that makes sense. And anyway, so he takes it away, puts it in his car. Literally, his sister's in the car. She's just been in the car the whole time. And I'm like, dude, you're out here? Like, he's like, yeah, I was at her house. I was staying at her house when you called. So I just brought my sister over and the sister's like, oh God, does the snake have to come with us? And he's like, yeah, of course. And he takes it to some mountain and he lets it go. And I'm like, I'm like, you just do this for fun? He's like, I love animals. And I go, I go, yeah, I'm trying to find small talk with this guy. I don't have anything in common with this person. I'm like, my wife's a vegan. That's the best I could come up with. He goes, he goes, oh, I've been a vegan since 1956 or something like that. What? And I was like, was it even a term then? He goes, no, there was no No term for vegan, but I just live that way. And I was like, wow, I just— I don't know why I'm telling the story. I was just blown away by this guy's, like, authenticity and also just the, like, quality of this person's, like, beliefs and actions, how congruent they were and how selfless they were. Like, we— this is like kind of like a money-minded podcast. It's all about opportunities and like taking advantage of the situation and coming up with the scheme. And this guy was like on the polar opposite. This guy was like, I love this thing. I'm passionate about this. I do this for fun. I live this lifestyle and I live it not for the money or not because it's cool, not because it's in vogue. Like, I was just kind of blown away by this guy and I just needed to share that story.
Have you seen the documentary?
Have you seen the documentary of Burt's Bees?
No. There's a documentary about it.
It's awesome. It's on Netflix. I don't know if it is anymore, but Basically, you know Burt's Bees, you know, the, the chapstick, shampoo. I think they make all that.
Yeah, of course.
You know how there's an old guy on it? That's Burt, right?
No, I didn't know that. I thought it might be like a Kentucky Fried Chicken situation.
Well, that was a real guy too. Um, you didn't know that the Colonel's a real guy?
I knew he was real, but they, they made a character, right? It's like, oh yeah.
Yeah. So Burt was like the, the character, but he's a real guy. He's alive still. I think if he died, he must've been recently, but he's, he's still around. And he would, he had a, he had bees, so he was a beekeeper and he was kind of this like mountain man type of guy who lived maybe in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, somewhere up east where he lived in the woods kind of. And he tended bees and this entrepreneurial woman met him and was like, hey, I'm going to turn your bees into, or your honey into, or your hive, I'm going to use this beeswax to turn it into chapstick. And it turned into one thing and eventually she sold it for like $200 million. And he made like close to nothing. He made very little money, but the company would— who bought it? Maybe Nabisco, one of these huge conglomerates. They ship him around to Japan, to Europe as like the spokesperson because people just want to see who Bird is. And he's a real guy. And they were asking him in the documentary, who, like, are you upset? He goes, no, I don't want that money. I just want to go to bed when the sun goes down and I want to wake up when the sun comes up and I just want to do whatever I want in between and not talk to anyone. I'm happy. And he's a real character. Are you looking him up now?
I'm looking it up. Okay, I have some info here. So company starts 1991. Burt owned a third of the company. Quimby owned the other two-thirds.
He didn't get paid, though.
Yeah. So Burt's Bees is now worth over $1 billion, but he only got $4 million when she sold it off for $173 million. She gave him $4 million when she sold it for $173 million. The company still pays him an undisclosed amount for his likeness and name, but he sort of missed out on— he would have been owed much more as far as this deal goes. I don't know why it says he owned one-third and then only got $4 million out of the $173 million, but whatever. Also, two things. Unfortunately, Bert passed away at 80.
Like, recently then?
Yeah. So that was 2015. So that's pretty recently. And, and also this guy looks identical almost to the guy I was describing. So yeah, I'm glad you came up with this guy when I was telling my story because they look very, very similar.
It's great. And anyway, I don't know where we're going with this, but there is something to be said for these people that are just happy without much. There's also this other show I've been watching on Hulu about these guys who live on the land, like There's this guy who wears like rawhide, like jacket and pants, and I've been watching it on Hulu and he just lives, he just, he's like, he lives like a Native American, like in your, in your head, like the, like cowboys and Indians type where they just like follow the food and they follow the seasons. And it does seem quite pleasant. So maybe this less than 40-hour workweek thing, we're onto something here.
Well, there's this like quote, which is basically I don't know who said this, or I don't know if anyone said this, but basically a lot of people want to learn from podcasts like us. Like, they want success. And success is getting what you want. And then happiness is wanting what you get and practice both. Like, don't just practice the getting what you want because that's a never-ending, you know, you're on the mountain of more and you'll never, you'll never get to the top of that mountain. And getting what you want or wanting what you get is, you know, that's gratitude, right? And so you want to be you want to master both of those. And if you could really only pick one, it would be wanting what you get more so than getting what you want.
Or as Naval says, I believe he says desire is torture or something like that.
Suffering.
Desire is suffering.
That's a Buddhist philosophy that when you want something, you're making a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get it, which I don't know if I actually believe that. I actually don't believe that, I would say, but it is kind of a Buddhist principle. Desire is suffering.
Well, maybe we should end there, huh?
Leave them suffering for more. All right, we're out of here.