My Wife's Insane Scheduling Fetish is Out of Control
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about the importance of being intentional about your time, and why we should all be intentional about our time. We talk about how we manage to stay productive, and how we try to make the most of the time we do have.
Transcript
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and we feel a lot of shame in where we are, like we're able to enjoy the moment, but we're always
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like, we're, this is not enough. Like we could be doing better. And to have a mindset where you are
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constantly saying, how can I do better? A lot of people would say that that's toxic and it's bad
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for your mental health. Whereas we've actually found that it's great and it contributes significantly
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to our productiveness because when people instead are saying I'm enough, it's just enough. That's
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always an excuse to do less and not more. Well, I mean, I really genuinely think the world,
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I mean, more than that, I genuinely believe the world is sort of beginning to collapse around us.
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We are heading towards an incredibly dark time as a civilization and that most people with agency or
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the intelligence to fix this are not moving towards fixing it. There is a small group of people who are,
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but what that basically means is that to a large extent, the future of our children and our
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descendants depends on our ability to set up any sort of viable future for our species.
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Like our personal ability to do that. Well, would you like to know more?
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One of the things that causes me the most anxiety and you see this all the time is when we drive by
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a giant office building and it's just packed with people and I cannot for the life of me
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imagine what all these people are doing and businesses are starting to wake up to this
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and just firing huge swaths of their employees because they realize, oh my gosh, we don't need them
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because they're not really doing anything. And we've met people too who are like, yeah,
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I don't do anything in my job. To pull on what she's saying here, when she looks at like a giant
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office building, she's like, almost any company in the world can be run by like a hundred people.
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So why is there a building with thousands of people? Honestly, I think most companies in the
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world can easily be run by a team of 30 to 40 people.
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With the exception, like imagine hospitals, that in-person staff you need to have.
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Oh, no, no, no, no, no. So this is different. She's talking about office buildings.
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Yeah, like Amazon buildings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the thing is that a philosophy
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we have, a realization we've made is that the vast majority of people, and this is both from
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seeing how organizations are run, but also just observing our friends, our family, colleagues,
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et cetera, do extremely little. And then we know a couple, like a handful of people who are very
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similar to us who are just insanely productive. But let's go on this.
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So, so, and this is a, an episode that we are doing right before we're going to be in front of
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4 million New Zealanders on, on their, one of their major TV shows. So we are exercising time
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management right now because we had to set up all this equipment anyway, but it was a topic that was
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spurred to us by an audience member who was like, how do you guys have time to like watch anime and
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as another recent video did like read up on random fictional lore and all of that while also staying
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as educated as you are and raising as many kids as you're raising and running a company. Oh, and
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starting that school. Oh, and you do a podcast daily. I am surprised by us not getting more compliments
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for that. Can even, I am a little impressed that we do 30 to 45 minutes every weekday and we keep
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things pretty fresh. I mean, there's other YouTubers out there who, you know, they'll do the same topics
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again and again and again, which is fairly easy to do. Whereas I really try to make an effort to never
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tread the exact same ground twice, but to have a few like themes that were on the skirts of, but how do we
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do this? Right? Like this is actually, I think an interesting question. There's a few ways that we do it,
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right? And I'm going to go through them. The first is just be incredibly intentional about how you are
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structuring your time. Here is an example. We have published five books. After we published the first
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book, all the other books we published in pairs of two, where we would publish two books at a time.
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A lot of people can say, why would you do that? Why are you publishing two books at a time? And the answer
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is, is because it saves a lot of time to do. It allows us to go out there and do the editing process
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for both books at the same time. We're also saving money because we're buying a bulk discount on
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editing, on cover design, on, you know, ad campaigns, on promotion tours. And it allows us to,
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and every year create two of what I consider really high quality books. Now we stopped making books in
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favor of the podcast for a while. We might go back to books eventually, but that's another thing was
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the books that has been incredibly helpful is we could choose to do the vain thing, which is go,
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go through a traditional publisher, but that adds a whole bunch of steps, which can add like literally
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a year to the publication timeline, you know, of finding a, uh, what's the word? A publicist.
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Yeah. Going through the traditional bureaucratic process. Yeah. And, and people are like, why
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wouldn't you do that? Well, one, we can sell the books for cheaper if we don't do that. Two, we can
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have all the money go to our nonprofit foundation. And three, it's much, much faster if what we are
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aiming for is reach and not personal vanity. So, and that's how we taught the wall street journal
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bestseller list was one of our books this year. Well, the nonfiction bestseller list, but a topic that
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Simone does not think is that important to it, but I actually think is. No, I agree. It's important.
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I agree. But we were both very productive before this happened. Is marriage. Marriage dramatically,
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dramatically increases the amount of free time and individual. If you work together. And here's the
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thing. I think many people, even some of the most productive people in the entire world believe that
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relationships and marriage are actually a net drain on time. There are, there are very productive
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people who are like, oh, you know, like it's hard for marriages because then I have to take time to
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pay attention to them and take them out to dinner and, you know, you know, listen to them talk. And
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that is, is I think what most people think about when they think about marriage. And that is not what
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we're talking about. We do not do that at all in our marriage. There is no, oh, we had to take time
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just for our relationship. Oh, Malcolm has to take time just to listen to me complain about things.
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That is no, we only talk about work. We only work together. So I think, you know,
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we can't define marriage as a traditional modern person's marriage, but more of the traditional
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concept of what marriage was to begin with, which is a partnership in which the couple works together
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toward a common aim. Right. Right. But I'd say like just simple things that you may not be fully
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realizing how much time it's taking up. Dating. Friendship. Yeah. Oh, somebody's like,
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what do you mean? Friendship. Yeah. You don't need friends when you're married. It's fucking
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awesome. Like we have friends where we need them like utility friendships and help move our goals
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for civilization and our kids forwards. But in terms of like personal indulgence friends that I have,
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just so I'm not lonely, they become dramatically less useful when you have a mentally stimulating
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partner that you're having. Like, I know all of the most mentally stimulating conversations I'm going
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to have over any course of time are almost always going to be with my own wife. Oh, you know,
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and that being the case, I don't need to go out and source that anymore, which removes one of the
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primary reasons I would have historically socialized. You're also really lucky in that
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your brother is one of the most intellectually incredible people we've ever met. And like,
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you know, conversations with him are amazing too. Well, but hold on, we're going to talk about my
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brother in just a second, because I think there's another thing we can take away from him.
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Interesting. But also it takes away the need for sex with strangers. You don't need to like,
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this is such a time sink of you're a young guy. Sourcing sex, all of that. It's this huge,
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huge waste of time. And you don't really realize how much time you've wasted on it until you freed
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yourself from it. Even if you're paying for it. So I don't even think like the MGTOW,
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I'll just pay for sex when I need it solution. Is that easy? Because you still have to source it.
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You have to vet it. You have to book the time. You have to go and meet them somewhere.
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And what if you're not doing that? I mean, think about all the ancillary things tied to those
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pursuits, like working out more than you actually need to, to achieve your goals, you know, stuff
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like that, like indolent waste of time that end up being utilized for this, but that then can end up
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or, or hobbies that you pursue. Like, I remember I wanted to learn music at one point because I
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thought it would get me laid. How many people learn something like learn a skill just to get laid?
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Right. A lot. Like, so, so sex isn't just a time waste in and of itself. Like once you know,
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you no longer need to pursue that, you get all of this time freed up. But something I wanted to
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pull on was my brother. Can I, can I add one point about marriage that's really important
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is it, it minimizes dependence on bureaucracy to a great extent. And this could also work if you,
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for example, work with family. Um, but I think in, and by bureaucracy, I mean a lot of the office
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theater and meetings and coordination and communication that has to take place when you're
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working with a team of people or working within a larger, um, like churning machine. Like when you
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work within a company, then everyone has to meet to get on the same page and everyone has to, you
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know, socialize ideas and, and because we work together and we are ideologically aligned, you
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don't have to invest time in making sure that I'm on board or making sure that I feel, you know,
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like we're aligned or, or, you know, socializing ideas with me or anything like that. It's just very,
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very efficient. Both of us are on the same page from the get go. And I can't emphasize how much time
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that saves as well. So speaking of my brother, because this is really interesting. I think
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people could see us and be like, you guys are holistically unique and how productive you're
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able to be, but still consume as much pop media as you do. Oh, contraire. Oh, contraire. Yeah.
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Simone, like what is my brother's like number one character trait? He's like a dictionary for
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quotes and references and like constantly making them. And I absolutely love it.
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I just had lunch with him today. And he added in a, an int quote that I didn't even know. And he
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gave me this look. It was something like with the trees we're talking. Not too tasty.
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Yeah. He's like, I don't read books because, you know, I read very slowly. So I only read when
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somebody has something to say. And then he related it to this int quote and I didn't know what he was
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talking about. And I got a mean scowl from him. How do you not know your talking quotes, you know,
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off the top of your head, which I loved, but what it showed to me and what it reminded me
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is that there are people who are even more productive than us potentially and know even
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more random pop culture than us. And Malcolm is saying this because Malcolm's brother and his wife
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are a power couple that works together, that coordinates incredibly closely and that achieves
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insane amounts of things. So we are not an isolated case. They actually met before we did.
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They met in college. Yeah. Yeah. Well done, Malcolm. And I, yeah, I think it cannot be
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understated just how powerful this has been in both our success and their success.
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Yeah. Well, and so now I'm going to give you the biggest secret of all of the secrets. Okay.
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Hmm. So first I'll tell you what it's definitely not. It's not scheduling.
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Scheduling is useful. So if you look at my wife's schedule, which I'm going to post on the screen
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here for one random. I need to approve that first to approve it, but she literally schedules every
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single minute of her time, every minute. It is wild, but I would say I'm almost as efficient as you and I
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schedule almost nothing. Yeah. No. So schedules are, are only the helpful for those who want to have a
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schedule and they are not at all correlated with actual productivity. I know people who are very
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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
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believe you can do it, um, so long as you are gradually increasing the amount of work that
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you're taking on, you will find a way to complete it all. Right. And this was inspired to a great
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extent by the research that found that when you give people a certain number of weeks, be it two weeks
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or 12 weeks for a discrete task, people will take exactly the number of weeks allotted. So based on
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that, our theory was, okay, then we're going to keep taking things on and keep fitting stuff in
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until literally we can no longer continue to complete things. Because once we've reached that
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level that we know we're actually at capacity. Whenever I have a free morning, like if I ever have
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an actual free morning, I then say, okay, time to start a new major project. Yeah. Yeah.
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You're always going to get free mornings. You see, this is the key thing with any
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project, whether it's building out the school or the, these podcast recordings or something like
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that. You know, there's always periods of waits. There's always periods of, okay, I have given this
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task to somebody else and I'm waiting for it to come back to me. And these periods are when you get
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the time to begin to overlap these projects with each other to get an enormous amount of productivity
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out of the way. And here I, I will give the two, one of the biggest productivity gains you're
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going to likely have in terms of its intention. One of the biggest productivity losses you're
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likely going to have. Okay. The biggest, you're one of the biggest productivity gains an individual
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can have. And one of the biggest virtues an individual can have in terms of productivity
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is laziness. If you are, I'd call it ambitious laziness.
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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
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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
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coined by the church of the sub-genius referred to as slack, which basically means like achieving
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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
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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
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because he would get all his work done so quickly. And we, we gave him more work than anyone else in
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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
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like, Hey, can I play video games for the rest of the day? And we'd be like, yeah, sure. And then
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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
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much work as you did. So he's totally fine in doing that and get back to work. And that's the,
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that's the thing is he found ways to automate his work. He found ways to scale his work. He found ways to,
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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
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you give me some amount of work and I outsource it on Upwork. You know, I'm like, fuck it. I can
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outsource this. You know, I, I know how much I, and, and, and there's always a path to do this
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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
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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
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
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literally work from, you know, when, when she starts working like 9am until the end of the day,
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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
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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
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herself. I cannot do that. And most people I know cannot do that. Not easily. I mean, I'm sure I
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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
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
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
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
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
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.
00:26:42.400
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.
00:27:47.980
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
00:28:30.380
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
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.