Best of This Week: March 11th

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to I'm put my all in it like my day's all on the road, less travel, never looking back. Hello and welcome to another episode of My First Million Best of the Week edition. This is Ben Wilson. Best of the week brings you some of the best moments from this week's past episodes, no new content, just revisiting the hits. This week we've got some great ones for you. First off, we've got Steph Smith joining Sam and Sean to discuss something that Sean calls the ABZ framework. and why you should just get started on whatever project you want to work on instead of overanalyzing, give it a listen.

Sam, I think you do this really well when people like I've seen people come to you and but they're like, Sam, I'm thinking of like starting this business and like i I wanna cover this topic and I wanna blog and and all this stuff and you're like, all right, like What's your first step? Or like you you'll be like Just right.

Or something like that. W just like simplifies to the like idiot Jedi, like just do the thing, not like over analyzing the like fifty startup articles this person. Dog. You just need to do th because Randy Jackson on'em. Well I get I just get frustrated. I think because I think that like I think that it's good so if like building a business is step zero to ten and ten is like you're this billionaire or like your vision has been achieved, you know, you you you own all this property, whatever that is, it's good to have number ten And then A lot of people are like all right. That's step number ten.

And then like steps three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, I gotta figure those out. In my mind, I'm like No, but the only thing that's important is ten and one. And one after you get done one, you'll figure out number two. Just but until you get to number two, don't even think about worrying about number three. It it's not important. Dude, I have I have the same exact thing. I I call it A B Z Literally like word for word your thing and I I I went on Jack's to Jack's community. He asked me to give a talk. And to his like uh visualized value community and I

This was the one thing I told them. I go. You you have you're at A, that's where you are. Z is the vision, it's the dream. It's good to have that. It's good to know what that is, right? That's like the North Star and like without that, you know, you don't really have the motivation or understand like what the hell you're trying to do. But where everyone gets paralyzed is they think they need to know a step B, C, D, E, F G, H, I, J and it's like

And then they get paralyzed or they start thinking about step D when they haven't even done Yeah, A to B yeah. And so I go, A B Z, it's all you ever need. It's like where you are, you gotta know that accurately. The next thing you need to do, you need to know that. And then you need to know the end vision. And everything else is irrelevant. Like Just do that. And so you just literally said the same thing with your own like

With numbers basically instead. Great minds think alike. I mean, that's exactly how I feel. Cause I every time I've ever had any bit of success, or even when I've like done something and it didn't work out. I just think that like if you j just start and you're gonna see so many things that you didn't even expect or realize were an opportunity. And or that weren't an opportunity. You're like, Oh, I thought this, it's actually way different, but that's cool, or that's not cool, we gotta quit. Uh, you know what I mean? And uh you just that's why you just have to do something. I get really frustrated with inaction.

All right, next up we've got a segment from our drunk ideas episode. On this one, Sean is talking about an idea that he calls the very long distance girlfriend. Alright. First idea is called very long distance girlfriend. Okay, so I had this idea.

Because I realized like I'm sitting there and me and my wife, we like to watch all these dating shows, right? So we watch Love is Blind, we watch The Bachelor. And you watch these shows and it's sort of like it's like the honeymoon period. And I I like I would say most people's homes are like ours. It's like The scene is this. On screen you see like two usually beautiful people.

Living some kind of fairy tale date. Um And then like one person's kind of like, you know, there's some drama, one person's being dramatic, or one person's unsure, and the other person's really good, or whatever. And then you and then if you if you zoomed out off the TV, you'd see a couch with usually a couple. sitting like six feet apart from each other'cause they're so sick of each other. Uh, you know, just like you know, in their sweats, not dressed up, with their you know, double chin, eating their popcorn and ch Cheetos and being like pointing at the screen and be like, Oh, she's not even that hot or like you know, Oh, he's you know, he's such a jerk and it's like

judging these relationships, right? But like there's something to this of why we like it, right? We like seeing these other relationships. But I also think It's like when we do that we we do that with UFC, it'd be like Oh, we should have tapped out. Yeah, dude, he's such a pussy. So weak. He looks scared. Yeah. Dude, he's so scared. That's why I don't like him. It's like Yeah, it's not confident. Oh my God, there's a spider in my room. So so so yeah, there's definitely like a judgy kinda there's a fun in judging it, but I would also say There's a fun in the sort of fairy tale. Like I think everybody, when you're watching these shows, you sort of put yourself in the shoes of either the person pursuing or the person being pursued. You know, you're the you're the damsel or you're the prince, whatever it is. So the the idea behind very long distance girlfriend is as follows.

It's a service or app. I think it's just a service. I think it's just a te a text message. This is a phone number you put in your address but And we give you the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend. You're never gonna meet with this person. It's not even the intention. It's just somebody who's gonna treat you

Perfectly because they're paid to do it. And so so it's like Prostitution. It's like a pr what's a prostitute? A prostitute is somebody who's paid to love to love you, right? To make love to you. But that's a lot I don't want to cross that line. That's a lot of work. So this is like you know how Tinder made dating easier'cause you don't have to like go date everybody, you just sort of swipe left and right easily on your phone. It kind of gave you this like flirting hit, but you didn't have to go out, put in a lot of effort. So here's what you would get if you if you sign up for very long, very long distance girlfriend.

There's there's gonna be a person that pretends to be your girlfriend. They're gonna text you, they're gonna ask how you're doing, they're gonna be emotionally there for you, they're gonna text you maybe photos of themselves, they're gonna like you say that they want you, you're gonna be like, Oh my God, I'm I'm this person wants me. They're never gonna nag you. They're never gonna uh get mad at you. They're never gonna get jealous. They're never gonna do any of the things that real human beings do when that are the downsides of relationships, only the upside.

None of the downside. So for girls, you're gonna get Prince Charming on the other side. He's gonna be complimentary, he's gonna be thoughtful, he's gonna be there for you. Uh, and for for guys you're gonna get sort of what you want as the perfect girlfriend. And we're just gonna hire call centers very of Of just dudes. And they're gonna behave as your very long distance boyfriend or girlfriend. All right, give me your give me your ratings. I'm gonna start with Sam.

I give that a ten. I I think that uh I I think that's great to be honest. I think that th surely that like if we went to adult friendfinder.com or something like that, is that what they do? What is adult friendfinder? What is that like like webcam or You're asking the wrong guy. I don't follow these trick questions. I have no idea. Um Yeah, I mean this is brilliant. How many friends do you have who you've only met via texting and you've like I've I've got like a bunch of friends who I've only ever texted Yeah, exactly. I've

Now most of my life is people I only text with. Maybe I knew them before. There's a bunch of people that are like I don't know, just through Twitter or through, you know, the podcast or through friends of friends, we get in a group chat together. I know their personality, they're cool. Like that's my actual friend, even though I never met them. Or even heard their voice or talked to them like

Your voice. And in fact, I have no desire to really meet them. Like I don't want to go out of my way to go like hang out with them. I'm getting all the benefits that I want out of just the text. Yeah, so anyway, I have a lot of friends like that and I consider them to be really close friends. I I I I I can't tell you how tall they are or what their voice sounds like, but I love'em. And so because of that I'm in. What do you think, Ben? I give it a one.

It sounds diabolical. It sounds evil. A one zero or Just a one. A one zero. A big slow roll for a ten. There's this genre of idea of Sean business idea that essentially is I went and watched an episode of Black Mirror and said, Actually, that's a good idea. And this is one of those are good ideas. Yeah. That's like Where do you think they're getting their ideas? They go to the great idea pile and then they take a great idea and they say, Okay, let's put this to a logical extreme where it actually turns bad. Yeah. Like have you m remember that remember that TV show in Disney called Smart Home?

Where uh the the the it's like a smart home. It's like Alexa before Alexa. Yeah. Yeah. So great idea. Yeah. And The smart home ended up being the mom and the wife. So it kinda is like what we're describing now. So I think that like Yeah, I haven't watched her. I think her is something like this. It's like a voice assistant that he kinda falls in love with. I haven't seen that.

But again, it's not even about falling in love. It's just, dude, it's fun to get Certain types of text messages. Right. It's fun to get a a funny ch text from a friend. It's fun to get something interesting texted to you. That's kinda what the hustle does. The hustle just sends me some interesting stuff every morning. The Milk Road tries to do that. Here's some interesting crypto stuff, right? Where your friend But I'm not really your friend.

I'm just sending you some cool stuff. You like getting that message. But that's for the work part of our life. What about the personal side? Ben, are you telling me You would I mean, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say no. But let me just put it out there anyways. You're telling me you would not wanna be getting text

From A woman who's so into you and it's not cheating. You're never gonna do anything. It's not even a real person. You're never gonna see him. Nothing like that. Especially if you're single, right? Like I'm not talking about like we're all I think we're all married men, right? So so it's not for us. This is for twenty five year old me, not

Thirty. I don't know how old I am. Thirty four year old me. Yeah. I uh obviously we're not the the target demographic, all of us, because we're all married. Uh yeah. But

Having said that, like even if it was just like a as a f as a a friend type of thing I like I already have actual friends that I don't text back. The last thing I need is That's literally just a person to not text back.

I don't need n another one of those in my life. But Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Maybe it's a bad idea. But no no no, as a as a business idea, of course it's a good idea. Of course it's like this has money making potential. As a thing that is good for humans, you know that's that's why I gave it a one. Uh oh I'm not I'm not in the I just felt like I had to be the conscience here. I had that one person had to be like Sean, no this is Okay, okay.

It's good. Uh yeah, you know, if you want good things you should uh You know, go eat your vegetables, work out, you know, wake up and pray, do all the things, right? Like that's cool. Don't invest in Russian companies. Yeah, don't invest in Russian companies. Don't have the very long distance girlfriend service for nineteen ninety nine a month. Don't um you know don't use TikTok. Don't do any of the things that you do, probably.

All right, and last up we're throwing it back over to Steph Smith. Who talks about using secret puzzles to recruit top talent. From the CIA to the NSA to Google and other top tech companies. It's an interesting strategy. And one that Sean actually has some experience with. Give it a listen.

Uh, I guess related to companies hiring, so you guys know mischief, right? It's this like company that does these crazy stunts. They're on I think stunt number seventy and I

Uh their latest stunt I thought was really interesting and relates to this idea of just like creative hiring. So if you scroll down tell tell me about what mischief is. I don't entirely get it. Because they raised funding, but when you explain what they are, I'm like who what grown adult would trust this child with money? It's like South Park or Saturday Night Live. It's a weekly Show. It's like a weekly sketch.

Uh but it's just done through code. They make a website instead of like a video making a joke. They make a website that's a joke. Yeah. But is it does it make money? I think it does. I don't know how much they've made. They've raised Three and a half million dollars. So I don't know like you're saying, I don't know who those investors are, what they're looking from mischief, but

Just to give like two examples. So one of them recently was I think it's like called Tuntine. I don't know w why it's call that, but basically it's called The game of death online which You sign up. You get an account.

And You pay ten dollars to join the game and all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive. The last person who stays alive, gets all the money. So it's just kind of like these silly, quirky games, but r the last one they did was They also do like commentary through their game. So it was a commentary on

uh in this case the MSAT. So they got people to pay fifth dollars to take the M Sot and the higher score when It's basically like a a their version of the SATs. Um and the person who got the tie score won the entire pot. So they didn't actually have that many people did it. They had five hundred people on the pod or have talked about on the pod, which is

You know The power of like crowd sourcing To develop some new technology, they put out some competition, and that. Tensive.

attract more interesting people than you know if they hire a bunch of recruiters to go, you know, find the people in theory they're looking for. The example I think you're thinking about is They were trying to figure out some like Were they trying to like decode some protein or something that helped with this AIDS um medication and they like turned it into a video game and they'd spent ten years trying to solve it and then like a bunch of video gamers got it done in like three weeks.

Yeah. Well there's the SpaceX what's the SpaceX challenge? The one that everyone knows. Um X Prize? It's just like the That's not from SpaceX. Yeah, but there's also a version of that where they basically just put out the bounty and then let people let anybody sort of enter to to try to win. Okay, there's a I feel like there's another one that SpaceX does, but in any case, like What I'm getting at is

All of I mean, we work for HubSpot. There's all these companies that are trying to attract like quote unquote top talent. And they're doing it in a way that In most cases, like true top talent, like Are you gonna want to be like DM'd on LinkedIn and go through like a traditional interview process like

In most cases no. And so My question is why isn't there like a really Like mischief style. recruiting agency that puts out these challenges that

smartest people on the internet are like stoked to solve. Just f out of like sheer pride. that um they then can funnel potentially into these companies. Maybe it's the case that these people just like would never want to work for these larger companies, but I just wonder why there isn't a more creative Route to recruiting. I have something for you. So this is one of the very first articles the Hustle ever wrote. I don't even know if you can Google it anymore. It was literally like

We wrote it like two weeks after starting. And it was about my friend named Max. And if you go uh Google uh Ben the Hustle Google interview. Or the hustle secret Google interview. So my friend Max was teaching himself sometimes I I don't I gotta remember all the details. This was like six years ago. He he was uh learning uh some type of coding. Some type of language. It was and it was like a rare language. And he was typing in all these things on Google, like what does blank mean? How do you do blank? And after a while His scrome browser like went like looked like the Matrix and it said, You look like you might belong to one of us. And it and it he says, We've noticed that you've been Googling a lot about this type of language and we are hiring for that.

Would you be interested in applying here? That's amazing. And very few people ever saw this, but we wrote an article about this. This article got seen by millions of people. What what's it say, Ben? What was the language? Google has a secret interview process and it landed me a job. That's the headline. And and he ended up working there and it worked. It worked. And uh it was wild. That's dope. And you know, only Google can do that'cause they own the browser and the search engine, but

Uh, but what if you were just like what what if there was just like a app that just sat on your computer? That basically just tracked everything you did. I know. Sounds great. But like gave you job opportunities based on what you do on your computer. Right? Like if it knows that Steph is in all these different like subreddits and it's like and she's like looking at Google Trends and all this stuff. That's like a signal for what type of person you are, right? Like it's actually like m a much higher quality signal in theory. than any job interview you could do where you're just trying to like present yourself as a certain way.

versus like what you actually do on the internet. Right? Like oh you spend a lot of time in Excel or what you what you actually do on your computer. It's like You spent a lot of time in Excel. Yeah, so Uh we've seen the we've seen what your capabilities are. Okay, if you're doing macros in Excel, you could probably qualify for certain types of jobs. And so I wonder if there's like a thing you could do like for college students. It's like, hey, put this on your computer

And like, do you want your first job out of college? Like We'll we'll help figure out what that job should be. We'll help get you like a job opportunity. Uh just by putting this like tracker on your computer. Sounds very not even a little bit.

Yeah, I mean I know, it's always like a oh tracking everything on your computer thing, but The reason I thought of this is because I watched the QAnon documentary and in it they have have you guys heard of like Cicada 3301? No. No. No. It it's they covered it in the documentary, but basically it was like the epitome of these like crazy online puzzles. I think there's been three of them. The first two were solved, the third one still has not been solved. And they are like, you know, there's there's like a picture online and there's like a message and encrypted in that message, there's a

bunch of numbers and then you have to know to like go to another website and put it in. The point is A lot of people thought that this was actually a recruitment tool for like either the NSA or the CIA. And so I was like, man, there should be something, maybe not that crazy. But something like that online for a company. Did you guys do one of those? I did this in college. We Found this website.

And it was like you know, it said some like vague thing, it was like the game has only begun. But have you realized that like have you realized that it's begun yet? And it's like you have to like right click view source and in the source code, there's a URL. You go to that URL. And then it downloads an audio file. You listen to the audio file. Sounds like nothing. You listen to it backwards, all of a sudden it gives you coordinates. You go to those coordinates on a map. The map l leads you and it was like a

Fifty part. Game, like mystery game. And me and all my friends got totally obsessed with this. We spent Like Hours and hours and hours of case.

I don't remember what the n name this is back in college, this is like fifteen years ago, but like The um I remember at the end the the last puzzle. we could never solve. And I think the guy just made an unsolvable puzzle. Like I just think there was no solution. Uh and his name was Mr Wiggles or Mr Squiggles or some shit like that. And he um

He had this puzzle that was like the unsolvable thing at the end. But it was so much fun and actually Now that I think about it, that is actually a great like filter and barometer for who might be good at certain times of work of work. Like the pr the type of person that would Do that for fun and solve that problem.

I would love to hire that person, right? Because I know what could you Could you be like uh there's this aw like if you're that game maker, Mr. Wiggles or whatever, like could you like do that as a service for a variety of companies, uh and like make these games like hey we're gonna try and find you, but I bet it's like Hey, I bet we're we're gonna do this thing this and this thing, and I bet you we're gonna get you twenty new applicants every month. Yeah, yeah. But they're gonna be high h high quality applicants. Totally. I also think there's an element

Where, like, as I said, as if you're top talent, you're getting a DM from someone on LinkedIn, you're like, I'm just gonna ignore this. But if you played a game And at the end of that game it's like you are part of the like point oh oh one percent that solved this game, like I feel like that would be so much more compelling. And maybe they still are like nah, I'm never gonna work for an enterprise. Okay, that's it for this week. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you all next week.

Bye. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back

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