Based Camp - My Wife's Insane Scheduling Fetish is Out of Control

00:00:00.000 and we feel a lot of shame in where we are, like we're able to enjoy the moment, but we're always

00:00:03.760 like, we're, this is not enough. Like we could be doing better. And to have a mindset where you are

00:00:08.400 constantly saying, how can I do better? A lot of people would say that that's toxic and it's bad

00:00:13.260 for your mental health. Whereas we've actually found that it's great and it contributes significantly

00:00:16.960 to our productiveness because when people instead are saying I'm enough, it's just enough. That's

00:00:22.640 always an excuse to do less and not more. Well, I mean, I really genuinely think the world,

00:00:27.180 I mean, more than that, I genuinely believe the world is sort of beginning to collapse around us.

00:00:32.020 We are heading towards an incredibly dark time as a civilization and that most people with agency or

00:00:38.880 the intelligence to fix this are not moving towards fixing it. There is a small group of people who are,

00:00:43.780 but what that basically means is that to a large extent, the future of our children and our

00:00:49.740 descendants depends on our ability to set up any sort of viable future for our species.

00:00:56.120 Like our personal ability to do that. Well, would you like to know more?

00:01:00.600 One of the things that causes me the most anxiety and you see this all the time is when we drive by

00:01:04.800 a giant office building and it's just packed with people and I cannot for the life of me

00:01:11.660 imagine what all these people are doing and businesses are starting to wake up to this

00:01:16.300 and just firing huge swaths of their employees because they realize, oh my gosh, we don't need them

00:01:22.040 because they're not really doing anything. And we've met people too who are like, yeah,

00:01:25.800 I don't do anything in my job. To pull on what she's saying here, when she looks at like a giant

00:01:31.320 office building, she's like, almost any company in the world can be run by like a hundred people.

00:01:36.680 So why is there a building with thousands of people? Honestly, I think most companies in the

00:01:42.780 world can easily be run by a team of 30 to 40 people.

00:01:46.000 With the exception, like imagine hospitals, that in-person staff you need to have.

00:01:49.820 Oh, no, no, no, no, no. So this is different. She's talking about office buildings.

00:01:53.240 Yeah, like Amazon buildings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the thing is that a philosophy

00:02:00.900 we have, a realization we've made is that the vast majority of people, and this is both from

00:02:05.540 seeing how organizations are run, but also just observing our friends, our family, colleagues,

00:02:09.940 et cetera, do extremely little. And then we know a couple, like a handful of people who are very

00:02:16.240 similar to us who are just insanely productive. But let's go on this.

00:02:21.660 So, so, and this is a, an episode that we are doing right before we're going to be in front of

00:02:25.800 4 million New Zealanders on, on their, one of their major TV shows. So we are exercising time

00:02:33.460 management right now because we had to set up all this equipment anyway, but it was a topic that was

00:02:39.320 spurred to us by an audience member who was like, how do you guys have time to like watch anime and

00:02:47.820 as another recent video did like read up on random fictional lore and all of that while also staying

00:02:55.660 as educated as you are and raising as many kids as you're raising and running a company. Oh, and

00:03:00.860 starting that school. Oh, and you do a podcast daily. I am surprised by us not getting more compliments

00:03:06.980 for that. Can even, I am a little impressed that we do 30 to 45 minutes every weekday and we keep

00:03:13.340 things pretty fresh. I mean, there's other YouTubers out there who, you know, they'll do the same topics

00:03:18.420 again and again and again, which is fairly easy to do. Whereas I really try to make an effort to never

00:03:24.540 tread the exact same ground twice, but to have a few like themes that were on the skirts of, but how do we

00:03:31.880 do this? Right? Like this is actually, I think an interesting question. There's a few ways that we do it,

00:03:36.580 right? And I'm going to go through them. The first is just be incredibly intentional about how you are

00:03:45.480 structuring your time. Here is an example. We have published five books. After we published the first

00:03:52.340 book, all the other books we published in pairs of two, where we would publish two books at a time.

00:03:58.540 A lot of people can say, why would you do that? Why are you publishing two books at a time? And the answer

00:04:04.720 is, is because it saves a lot of time to do. It allows us to go out there and do the editing process

00:04:13.420 for both books at the same time. We're also saving money because we're buying a bulk discount on

00:04:18.140 editing, on cover design, on, you know, ad campaigns, on promotion tours. And it allows us to,

00:04:28.600 and every year create two of what I consider really high quality books. Now we stopped making books in

00:04:33.380 favor of the podcast for a while. We might go back to books eventually, but that's another thing was

00:04:38.300 the books that has been incredibly helpful is we could choose to do the vain thing, which is go,

00:04:44.040 go through a traditional publisher, but that adds a whole bunch of steps, which can add like literally

00:04:48.820 a year to the publication timeline, you know, of finding a, uh, what's the word? A publicist.

00:04:55.460 Yeah. Going through the traditional bureaucratic process. Yeah. And, and people are like, why

00:05:01.660 wouldn't you do that? Well, one, we can sell the books for cheaper if we don't do that. Two, we can

00:05:04.680 have all the money go to our nonprofit foundation. And three, it's much, much faster if what we are

00:05:10.520 aiming for is reach and not personal vanity. So, and that's how we taught the wall street journal

00:05:16.860 bestseller list was one of our books this year. Well, the nonfiction bestseller list, but a topic that

00:05:22.620 Simone does not think is that important to it, but I actually think is. No, I agree. It's important.

00:05:26.320 I agree. But we were both very productive before this happened. Is marriage. Marriage dramatically,

00:05:33.840 dramatically increases the amount of free time and individual. If you work together. And here's the

00:05:40.800 thing. I think many people, even some of the most productive people in the entire world believe that

00:05:45.800 relationships and marriage are actually a net drain on time. There are, there are very productive

00:05:50.420 people who are like, oh, you know, like it's hard for marriages because then I have to take time to

00:05:54.460 pay attention to them and take them out to dinner and, you know, you know, listen to them talk. And

00:06:01.080 that is, is I think what most people think about when they think about marriage. And that is not what

00:06:05.780 we're talking about. We do not do that at all in our marriage. There is no, oh, we had to take time

00:06:11.420 just for our relationship. Oh, Malcolm has to take time just to listen to me complain about things.

00:06:16.060 That is no, we only talk about work. We only work together. So I think, you know,

00:06:20.800 we can't define marriage as a traditional modern person's marriage, but more of the traditional

00:06:25.980 concept of what marriage was to begin with, which is a partnership in which the couple works together

00:06:31.080 toward a common aim. Right. Right. But I'd say like just simple things that you may not be fully

00:06:37.100 realizing how much time it's taking up. Dating. Friendship. Yeah. Oh, somebody's like,

00:06:42.700 what do you mean? Friendship. Yeah. You don't need friends when you're married. It's fucking

00:06:45.500 awesome. Like we have friends where we need them like utility friendships and help move our goals 0.97

00:06:50.360 for civilization and our kids forwards. But in terms of like personal indulgence friends that I have,

00:06:57.340 just so I'm not lonely, they become dramatically less useful when you have a mentally stimulating

00:07:04.280 partner that you're having. Like, I know all of the most mentally stimulating conversations I'm going

00:07:09.120 to have over any course of time are almost always going to be with my own wife. Oh, you know,

00:07:13.940 and that being the case, I don't need to go out and source that anymore, which removes one of the

00:07:18.360 primary reasons I would have historically socialized. You're also really lucky in that

00:07:22.900 your brother is one of the most intellectually incredible people we've ever met. And like,

00:07:27.300 you know, conversations with him are amazing too. Well, but hold on, we're going to talk about my

00:07:32.040 brother in just a second, because I think there's another thing we can take away from him.

00:07:34.660 Interesting. But also it takes away the need for sex with strangers. You don't need to like, 0.96

00:07:39.880 this is such a time sink of you're a young guy. Sourcing sex, all of that. It's this huge, 0.99

00:07:45.560 huge waste of time. And you don't really realize how much time you've wasted on it until you freed

00:07:50.980 yourself from it. Even if you're paying for it. So I don't even think like the MGTOW,

00:07:54.400 I'll just pay for sex when I need it solution. Is that easy? Because you still have to source it. 0.64

00:07:58.100 You have to vet it. You have to book the time. You have to go and meet them somewhere.

00:08:01.440 And what if you're not doing that? I mean, think about all the ancillary things tied to those

00:08:05.940 pursuits, like working out more than you actually need to, to achieve your goals, you know, stuff

00:08:11.040 like that, like indolent waste of time that end up being utilized for this, but that then can end up

00:08:17.740 or, or hobbies that you pursue. Like, I remember I wanted to learn music at one point because I

00:08:23.420 thought it would get me laid. How many people learn something like learn a skill just to get laid?

00:08:31.440 Right. A lot. Like, so, so sex isn't just a time waste in and of itself. Like once you know,

00:08:37.320 you no longer need to pursue that, you get all of this time freed up. But something I wanted to

00:08:41.900 pull on was my brother. Can I, can I add one point about marriage that's really important

00:08:47.000 is it, it minimizes dependence on bureaucracy to a great extent. And this could also work if you,

00:08:53.300 for example, work with family. Um, but I think in, and by bureaucracy, I mean a lot of the office

00:08:59.580 theater and meetings and coordination and communication that has to take place when you're

00:09:04.740 working with a team of people or working within a larger, um, like churning machine. Like when you

00:09:10.380 work within a company, then everyone has to meet to get on the same page and everyone has to, you

00:09:14.480 know, socialize ideas and, and because we work together and we are ideologically aligned, you

00:09:21.640 don't have to invest time in making sure that I'm on board or making sure that I feel, you know,

00:09:28.040 like we're aligned or, or, you know, socializing ideas with me or anything like that. It's just very,

00:09:32.980 very efficient. Both of us are on the same page from the get go. And I can't emphasize how much time

00:09:37.660 that saves as well. So speaking of my brother, because this is really interesting. I think

00:09:45.680 people could see us and be like, you guys are holistically unique and how productive you're

00:09:50.720 able to be, but still consume as much pop media as you do. Oh, contraire. Oh, contraire. Yeah.

00:09:56.520 Simone, like what is my brother's like number one character trait? He's like a dictionary for

00:10:02.080 quotes and references and like constantly making them. And I absolutely love it.

00:10:06.260 I just had lunch with him today. And he added in a, an int quote that I didn't even know. And he

00:10:12.020 gave me this look. It was something like with the trees we're talking. Not too tasty.

00:10:16.440 Yeah. He's like, I don't read books because, you know, I read very slowly. So I only read when

00:10:20.540 somebody has something to say. And then he related it to this int quote and I didn't know what he was

00:10:25.620 talking about. And I got a mean scowl from him. How do you not know your talking quotes, you know,

00:10:31.680 off the top of your head, which I loved, but what it showed to me and what it reminded me

00:10:36.960 is that there are people who are even more productive than us potentially and know even

00:10:42.920 more random pop culture than us. And Malcolm is saying this because Malcolm's brother and his wife

00:10:48.400 are a power couple that works together, that coordinates incredibly closely and that achieves

00:10:54.800 insane amounts of things. So we are not an isolated case. They actually met before we did.

00:11:00.560 They met in college. Yeah. Yeah. Well done, Malcolm. And I, yeah, I think it cannot be

00:11:06.140 understated just how powerful this has been in both our success and their success.

00:11:11.700 Yeah. Well, and so now I'm going to give you the biggest secret of all of the secrets. Okay.

00:11:17.240 Hmm. So first I'll tell you what it's definitely not. It's not scheduling.

00:11:21.020 Scheduling is useful. So if you look at my wife's schedule, which I'm going to post on the screen 0.87

00:11:25.620 here for one random. I need to approve that first to approve it, but she literally schedules every 0.95

00:11:31.980 single minute of her time, every minute. It is wild, but I would say I'm almost as efficient as you and I

00:11:40.820 schedule almost nothing. Yeah. No. So schedules are, are only the helpful for those who want to have a

00:11:47.720 schedule and they are not at all correlated with actual productivity. I know people who are very

00:11:53.180 close to me who schedule just as much as I do and they get nothing done. So there you go.

00:12:01.160 So let's talk about the actual key to all of this. And it is that you will get done the work that you

00:12:09.360 have set out for yourself, but it is, it is just. Yes. Yes. If you take on a lot of work and you

00:12:17.020 believe you can do it, um, so long as you are gradually increasing the amount of work that

00:12:22.500 you're taking on, you will find a way to complete it all. Right. And this was inspired to a great

00:12:27.600 extent by the research that found that when you give people a certain number of weeks, be it two weeks

00:12:33.240 or 12 weeks for a discrete task, people will take exactly the number of weeks allotted. So based on

00:12:40.340 that, our theory was, okay, then we're going to keep taking things on and keep fitting stuff in

00:12:45.360 until literally we can no longer continue to complete things. Because once we've reached that

00:12:50.180 level that we know we're actually at capacity. Whenever I have a free morning, like if I ever have

00:12:54.560 an actual free morning, I then say, okay, time to start a new major project. Yeah. Yeah.

00:12:59.320 You're always going to get free mornings. You see, this is the key thing with any

00:13:03.020 project, whether it's building out the school or the, these podcast recordings or something like

00:13:07.200 that. You know, there's always periods of waits. There's always periods of, okay, I have given this

00:13:12.860 task to somebody else and I'm waiting for it to come back to me. And these periods are when you get

00:13:18.820 the time to begin to overlap these projects with each other to get an enormous amount of productivity

00:13:24.000 out of the way. And here I, I will give the two, one of the biggest productivity gains you're

00:13:32.060 going to likely have in terms of its intention. One of the biggest productivity losses you're

00:13:35.980 likely going to have. Okay. The biggest, you're one of the biggest productivity gains an individual

00:13:41.380 can have. And one of the biggest virtues an individual can have in terms of productivity

00:13:44.740 is laziness. If you are, I'd call it ambitious laziness.

00:13:50.700 And this is not how I work, by the way, this is just one, one way to insane productivity.

00:13:54.980 Yes. It's my strategy for insane productivity, which we've seen this in other employees in a way

00:13:59.340 that's extremely impressive. So I always look for, well, you can describe it in me. You probably

00:14:04.480 can describe it better than I can. Well, it's, I, when I describe this in people, I use the virtue

00:14:09.100 coined by the church of the sub-genius referred to as slack, which basically means like achieving

00:14:15.320 a lot with, without doing pretty much anything. So like the more slack you have, the more you're

00:14:20.380 getting done without any effort. And the, the key to this, that, that I've observed as a not

00:14:26.220 lazy person to a fault is that lazy people who are also very clever will find ways to make all of

00:14:34.360 their action more efficient and more efficacious to avoid more work. So for example, we hired one

00:14:39.920 person who was, who, who preferred to be lazy in our business. And this actually caused some trouble

00:14:48.280 because he would get all his work done so quickly. And we, we gave him more work than anyone else in

00:14:52.880 our business. I'm not kidding you. Then at the end of the day, he'd come up to our office and he'd be

00:14:56.840 like, Hey, can I play video games for the rest of the day? And we'd be like, yeah, sure. And then

00:15:00.560 like, you know, other people in the office would come to us and be like, Hey, so-and-so's playing

00:15:03.240 video games. That's not okay. And we're like, actually, he just completed like five times as

00:15:06.560 much work as you did. So he's totally fine in doing that and get back to work. And that's the,

00:15:11.780 that's the thing is he found ways to automate his work. He found ways to scale his work. He found ways to,

00:15:16.140 every time we gave him more, he found ways to eliminate it and get more free time.

00:15:19.820 Give him some big amount of work and then he'd build a program to automate it. Or

00:15:23.520 you give me some amount of work and I outsource it on Upwork. You know, I'm like, fuck it. I can 1.00

00:15:28.140 outsource this. You know, I, I know how much I, and, and, and there's always a path to do this

00:15:34.000 typically, but it requires a level of self-agency combined with this laziness. A, I don't want to do

00:15:42.300 this. And I believe I can figure out how to get something to do this for me for an extremely low

00:15:48.720 cost. Yeah. Whether it's somebody in a developing country or a, a program that I created. And so

00:15:55.460 this is, this is this form of, of work that allows for incredible productivity. Now with my wife,

00:16:02.900 she does a completely different form of work that leads to enormous productivity. This form of work 1.00

00:16:08.300 is to just literally never take breaks. Yeah. Just brute force everything. So, so when I say never

00:16:15.700 take breaks, if you are somebody like my wife, this may seem unremarkable, but she is able to

00:16:20.720 literally work from, you know, when, when she starts working like 9am until the end of the day,

00:16:28.420 come on 5 30am. You wake up at 5 30. Yeah. And then we take the break to do the kids. So 5 30am to

00:16:34.280 5 30 PM. Right. So that's when she's working between and literally not take a single self

00:16:42.140 indulgent break, not stop to browse the internet, not stop to watch something as a little reward to

00:16:49.340 herself. I cannot do that. And most people I know cannot do that. Not easily. I mean, I'm sure I

00:16:55.860 could have, I really pushed myself to, but it's just my sin, right? I don't do that.

00:17:00.780 It's just how you work. And I work differently and that's the best.

00:17:04.200 But it allows for enormous brute force productivity. But what's really interesting

00:17:07.940 is the types of jobs that most of us are good at have very little overlap because of these two

00:17:12.680 styles of work. Yeah. He's good at clever work and I'm good at dumb work, which is very convenient

00:17:16.700 because every, every business, every individual has to do a mixture of dumb and clever work. But 0.95

00:17:23.240 because we work together as a couple, he does all the clever work and I do all the dumb work and we 0.92

00:17:27.160 both get it all done. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, hold on. I, I, I, where were they going? Oh yes. But 0.81

00:17:35.740 then there's another thing that can really eat at a person's, oh, I was seeing the positive and the

00:17:41.020 negative thing. So the positive thing is laziness. The negative thing is socialization, friendliness.

00:17:47.920 Nothing destroys our work schedule like an event.

00:17:50.960 Yeah. Yeah. Travel or events. Yeah. You know, us having to do a party, us having to do a, anything

00:17:58.160 like that really slows us down. The extent to which you are losing productive hours through

00:18:04.220 interaction with other humans almost cannot be overstated. Because it's not just the, the event

00:18:11.180 itself. It's getting there. It's getting back. It's coordinating with everyone. It's the, it's the

00:18:15.680 choices. It's the followup. It's yeah. There's so much that goes into it. Well, and if you getting

00:18:21.620 fried. So, you know, if you go out to a party one night, at least if you're like us, you're likely to

00:18:27.320 be unproductive the next day. And one of the ways that we are able to be as productive as we are able

00:18:32.620 to be is because we really, really focus on understanding our bodies and our brains and we

00:18:38.980 build work schedules that work for them. Yeah. For example, you wake up every morning at 2 30 AM

00:18:44.960 or 2 AM and then you work until maybe five or 6 AM, take a very short nap before we get our kids up

00:18:50.860 and then, you know, take your second work session. And that enables you to spend a huge chunk of your

00:18:56.040 working day working during a time when nobody in our general work time zone is going to be bothering

00:19:00.900 you. And it's absolutely brilliant, but most people don't work that way, even though they probably

00:19:04.520 work really well that way, because they just wouldn't ever think to wake up at 2 AM.

00:19:08.540 Start working. No. And, but I know I work better at that time. And so I work my schedule around

00:19:14.620 working at that time, but I work from a treadmill desk because I cannot, I cannot focus if I'm

00:19:20.720 sitting down, like I'm having an anxiety attack by sitting down every time we do this podcast.

00:19:24.440 Yeah. Well, it's like, if I go out to, well, and this is an important thing with my wife. So like

00:19:28.180 staying fit and working, she literally works from a treadmill desk or from a, an elliptical desk,

00:19:33.460 which is what she used to work at. And so how many hours a day would you say you're working out on

00:19:37.960 average given average five hours? So about five hours a day. And that is not an exaggeration at

00:19:44.700 all. So not only is she working, but she is also exercising about five hours a day. And this is how

00:19:51.180 you can overlap things. So when people say, how do you watch so much like anime and stuff like that?

00:19:57.560 It is because I have that on in the background while I am doing productive things that are

00:20:04.560 mindless, like spreadsheet tasks, like some sorts of email tasks. That is how I watch so much is

00:20:11.740 because I overlap that. And I also always overlap in my entertainment. So I never play a video game

00:20:17.740 without a show on in the background. I have a few hours a day that I set aside for pure recreation

00:20:22.600 every day. You like make it maximum recreation, maximum recreation. I am drinking. You're drinking

00:20:27.860 something every orifice. It's just like, Oh, and I have my kids typically playing with me during those

00:20:34.800 times as well. Climbing all over you too. It's like everything it's everything at once. But I really,

00:20:39.380 I really think that there's something to be said for that. One of the reasons indeed why we are so

00:20:42.720 productive is because we double things up all the time. For example, every business trip is a,

00:20:47.460 is another honeymoon, you know, like every, every, you know, family time is, is a billion other

00:20:52.540 things. Like whenever I'm with the kids, I'm constantly cleaning. So the house is getting

00:20:56.700 cleaner and I'm spending time with the kids and the kids are learning really valuable skills about

00:21:00.800 house cleaning and discipline. And, you know, when I'm, when I'm working, I'm also exercising.

00:21:05.360 And, and most people seem to just set aside very separate times for all that. Like this is when I'm

00:21:10.060 doing my relationship romantic time. This is when I'm doing my kid time. This is when I'm doing my

00:21:15.360 exercise time. And they like go to a gym. I think another really big portion of our life,

00:21:19.100 and this is a product of privilege for sure. Not everyone is able to do this,

00:21:22.240 but the fact that we do not commute and we also travel very little is a really, really big deal

00:21:27.560 in that we, we, we don't have to commute to an office. We thankfully don't have to travel a lot

00:21:33.140 for work. We don't have to commute for our kids now, which is something we're trying to wipe off

00:21:35.840 our schedule. Yeah. Basically like anything that has us traveling, like wasting time in a car,

00:21:40.460 which also, I mean, every time you get in a car, you are putting your life at risk. You know,

00:21:44.120 like everyone gets worried about airplanes and other nonsense when like the top thing that they're doing

00:21:47.760 every day that could kill them is getting in a car. And we also, even with grocery shopping,

00:21:53.040 we, we go to a big box grocery store, we buy giant amounts of things. And then we don't need to go

00:21:58.200 that frequently to a grocery store. Well, rummaging is also a major problem for people. And this is

00:22:03.180 something that I would talk about where it's when somebody is doing something, the classic rummaging

00:22:08.920 behavior I would say is once we asked my dad, like, what are you doing right now? He goes,

00:22:12.880 I'm unpacking and repacking the bags. Get the bags a little bit more tight. This is just completely

00:22:20.540 indolent activities. Yeah. And it is so easy to lose. People, yeah, you can spend an entire day

00:22:27.000 rummaging where you're just like shuffling things around or, you know, it takes you like three hours

00:22:32.180 to get showered and drink your coffee. Like the, and we know there are plenty of people in our lives

00:22:37.820 who like spend hours doing stuff that should only take you five to 10 minutes. So there, I think

00:22:45.320 that's the really interesting thing is, you know, people like to virtue signal about being really

00:22:48.840 busy, especially in the United States. Like I'm so stressed. I'm so busy. Oh my gosh, there's so much

00:22:52.680 going on. You can be busy to the nines and stressed to the nines and get absolutely nothing meaningful

00:22:58.280 done. And I really hate when people try to virtue signal their stress or busyness, because that just

00:23:02.880 to me signals poor time management to me, that's, that's someone saying I'm incompetent and I'm

00:23:09.440 virtue signaling. And those are two things that I just absolutely can't stand. And this is something

00:23:13.280 with office life, right? When I used to work in an office, those are the least productive years of

00:23:17.960 my life. Cause I could get almost nothing done. I really just sat in the office and listened to

00:23:22.540 lectures on tape and did all your work at home, right? Actual work at home. Yeah. I can't work when I feel

00:23:27.420 like there's somebody like looking over my back, like interrupting you or interrupting me. It feels

00:23:33.200 like I'm in a, like a threatening environment, right? You know, and I imagine, and this is where I coined

00:23:37.960 the term office theater, which is actually a term that we made up that is now taught at Stanford

00:23:41.280 Business School, which is fantastic, which basically is this whole category of things that people do to

00:23:48.800 look like they're working that don't actually produce any productivity, but that are important to

00:23:54.960 some fragile minded manager's ego, to some individuals. They go and they're like, well,

00:24:00.560 if I'm doing these things, if I'm showing up early, if I'm staying late, if I'm looking busy all day,

00:24:05.820 then I am working and I should be promoted. Yeah. Like Japanese culture, I think is the epitome of 1.00

00:24:10.860 office theater. And that like, you know, you have to go out drinking, you have to leave after your boss,

00:24:15.040 you have to arrive before your boss, all these sorts of crazy things that are really just for like

00:24:19.060 virtue signaling status hierarchies. But we really have gotten the, so a couple of things. One,

00:24:25.080 when we first acquired our business, our investors were really insistent about all this weird office

00:24:30.000 theater stuff. Like you need to have these offices and do this stuff with the offices and all this

00:24:34.080 stuff in person. Finally, the pandemic comes. We drop our offices immediately because we're not idiots

00:24:39.780 and productivity skyrockets. And that was finally like that. It took a literal pandemic. The world was 0.98

00:24:46.160 falling apart for us to have a chance to even make a pitch to our investors that offices are not an

00:24:51.220 efficient thing from a money standpoint or from a human capital standpoint. And though we also point

00:24:56.680 out that like basically remote work and self-directed work only works for A players. If you're a BRC player,

00:25:02.880 like, you know, you're, you're not going to have really good employees. So I understand if you have

00:25:05.560 really mediocre employees, you kind of need to crack a whip, but why hire mediocre employees when you

00:25:09.780 not have AI? And there's other types of systems you can use to oversee really employees,

00:25:14.220 like redundancy and emails, like one of every 10 emails gets read by another employee and they get

00:25:18.700 punished for this. Really employees. It's about the oversight. It's not about being in an office

00:25:22.840 and there are cheaper ways to enact oversight than an office itself. Yeah. However, I mean, as,

00:25:28.100 as some studies have shown when you do have sort of a controlled natural trial of people working from

00:25:34.300 home versus people working in the office at the same business, those who are in the office advance

00:25:39.100 more. And that's because they're spending, well, really wasting more time and company money schmoozing.

00:25:43.640 Well, office theater works, right? It works in moving you up within a company,

00:25:48.520 but it is not useful to the company itself. Exactly.

00:25:52.020 And, you know, hopefully we can get better through AI and stuff like that is recognizing

00:25:55.700 individuals that are rising through the ranks through office theater versus individuals who are

00:26:00.940 productive and have high leadership capacity, which I think has very little overlap. You know,

00:26:05.480 these are usually the entrepreneurial individuals who are looking to, you know, leave the company

00:26:10.020 and, and, and do whatever, right. It's a lot of it, but this, this talk has been fantastic. And as a

00:26:15.920 very good use of time, we're going to wrap up a little early here, unless you had any final thoughts.

00:26:20.500 Let's see any, any final tactical tips that you have just like rapid fire.

00:26:26.160 Well, I mean, focus on doing different types of work at different stages of your life. When you are young,

00:26:31.420 you are going to be at a stage of your life where you're doing a lot of rote work, like office work,

00:26:36.320 manual labor, stuff like that. Use that time to listen to lectures upon lectures upon lectures.

00:26:42.020 Yes.

00:26:42.400 Like one dream or something like that. That is when I did that. Another thing is while there are many

00:26:47.680 things that I think it's worth it to outsource. The one thing that I think a man should never really

00:26:51.700 outsource is manual labor around the house. I think performing a certain amount of manual labor

00:26:56.380 every week, whether it's, you know, whatever, whatever it is, mowing the lawn, cutting,

00:27:02.260 gardening, stuff like this, I think is really important just for sort of mental health.

00:27:07.740 Especially if you also, if you have kids, your kids need to see that their parents do that because

00:27:13.000 otherwise they're going to be like, that's a task for other people. And they're not going to like,

00:27:16.860 they're going to see themselves as above it, which is really toxic.

00:27:19.760 Yeah. We believe we have a belief in terms of fixing things in our house where

00:27:22.820 we hire somebody to fix something once, but I have to watch them fix it. So I understand how

00:27:28.920 they fix it so that I can fix it again. And that has saved us so much money. Just that policy of

00:27:34.360 data has to sit and watch whoever the repairman is and have them explain to me how they fix it.

00:27:39.680 Because usually with this stuff, it's not that hard. And then you learn the skill and then you

00:27:43.420 move forward. Anyway, love you to death, Simone.

00:27:46.660 I love you too.

00:27:47.980 You were going to say something. What were they?

00:27:49.120 Well, I would say it's also really like people say that it's really toxic, that you're just enough

00:27:56.800 or you should be satisfied with where you are. And I think that one thing that does make us really

00:28:00.360 productive is we are deeply uncomfortable with where we are and that we always feel like we're

00:28:04.160 behind and we feel a lot of shame in where we are. We're able to enjoy the moment, but we're always

00:28:09.100 like, this is not enough. We could be doing better. And to have a mindset where you are constantly

00:28:14.200 saying, how can I do better? A lot of people would say that that's toxic and it's bad for your

00:28:18.840 mental health. Whereas we've actually found that it's great and it contributes significantly to

00:28:22.500 our productiveness because when people instead are saying, I'm enough, it's just enough. That's

00:28:27.960 always an excuse to do less and not more.

00:28:30.380 Well, I mean, I really genuinely think the world, I mean, more than that, I genuinely believe the world

00:28:35.020 is sort of beginning to collapse around us. We are heading towards an incredibly dark time as a

00:28:39.300 civilization and that most people with agency or the intelligence to fix this are not moving towards

00:28:46.840 fixing it. There is a small group of people who are, but what that basically means is that to a

00:28:52.160 large extent, the future of our children and our descendants depends on our ability to set up any

00:28:59.020 sort of viable future for our species, like our personal ability to do that.

00:29:04.480 Well, and the future depends on those for whom the world is not good enough and for whom 1.00

00:29:08.300 their identities themselves, they're not good enough. And if you can choose to not matter and that's fine,

00:29:14.440 we're not asking everyone to matter, but we just believe that the future is going to be built by

00:29:18.940 those who are dissatisfied and who choose to change the world as a result.

00:29:22.500 All right. This has been fantastic. We got to hop on that New Zealand interview.

00:29:26.200 Love you, gorgeous.

00:29:27.100 Love you too.

Based Camp - December 04, 2023

My Wife's Insane Scheduling Fetish is Out of Control

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript