we're going to talk about a mini thing so just be patient let's see first thing we should talk about is i was in for the first time, the nation of Turkey. If you didn't catch the stream on that, you can go watch the VOD, so I won't talk a lot about it. But that was very neat. Some people were worried about could they travel there safely.
absolutely turkey's perfectly safe it can be a little annoying if you're a woman traveling alone different expectations uh and i do think uh thank you sure clock homes for the prime sub and for the continuing five months i do think that um there is money to be made by going to the main square in turkey between the Hagia Sophia mosque formerly the Hagia Sophia church and the blue mosque and selling t-shirts that say in Turkish no thank you I already have a carpet
uh because there are a lot of people who it turns out have a store i would love to show it to you so that you too can have your own turkish carpet um the other fun story if you haven't seen it i always encourage people to join our discord um completely randomly unplanned my wife and i went to a restaurant
And as the pictures in Discord will show, while we were sitting at our table, somebody came over and said, Ethan? And it was Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch, who was there with his girlfriend. So yes, on a random night. two weeks ago on a random rooftop in istanbul uh i ran into image share who i worked for for three years at twitch and so yes small world um now of course i tried to figure out just how random was this like what are the odds so i travel obviously emmett travels
there's only a certain number of places you're going to go in the world probably like it could have been that we'd have met up in Johannesburg but Johannesburg is not as attractive a destination as Istanbul it's which in turn is probably not as common
as say um paris but then in istanbul this is like one of the best restaurants so the odds are pretty good that i would try that restaurant and he would try that restaurant anyway uh i would say we i decided that you know i thought this is like one in millions one in many millions um but i i concluded it was more like one in a hundred thousand something like that so the world is small but not as small as you'd think the other thing i'll share about this
i did a post hopefully all of you follow me on linkedin because i do a lot more posting there we're going to talk about that in just a second why that is but i did a post um when i was in istanbul I was with a friend from college and he's done very, very well in life. And even though I've had a lot of success, he's arguably more successful.
he built his own business he did very well with it he sold that business and so while he was there i was feeling kind of envious like here's a guy who's my same age went to my same college but he's done a lot better
and i was thinking through and i posted about how ridiculous it is to be comparing myself to someone else it's not by the way that i want him to do worse but i'm like well why didn't i do that well and i was starting to feel a little bit bad about myself and the post i made if you go read it is basically how dumb that is to get into the trap of even when you have a good life, making your life worse by comparing yourself to others. Like that's a shitty thing to do to yourself.
well the funny part of this that if you just read the post you wouldn't have gotten until i told this story about emmett is after i worked through this and i'm like you know this is stupid i shouldn't do this to myself and like made myself feel better by realizing like Judging myself compared to others is a dumb thing to do. It was that night I ran into Emmett.
Emmett is about a dozen years younger than I am and has done dozens of times better in life than I have. He built Twitch. He sold Twitch to Amazon. He is still CEO of Twitch. All before 40. uh so it was like uh karma worked right i tried to improve myself and i tried to share this lesson and help some other people with comparing themselves to others and then
If I'd have felt bad about this friend of mine who did pretty well, I'd have felt way worse running into Emmett. Instead, I was super happy to see him and we had a great evening. Yeah, so.
uh yeah and i i got lucky uh cram the gram says engineers are the cream of the cream yeah we when i chose engineering as a career it was not yet popular it was where just geeks went um my initials ethan evans happened to be ee and uh i was also in the school of electrical engineering and there was a joke that said you can't spell geek without double e in the middle and it applied even more so to me so
All right. So the next thing I want to cover real quick. Why have I been streaming less? It's simple. And I want to I have a message for this community that supports me. I am now going to stream only basically to stay connected with you. I don't have desire, although it's great. If one day this channel gets big, that'll be fantastic. But that's no longer a goal, and here's why. That post I made on Envy about being envious on LinkedIn has now reached like 120,000 people.
It's fantastic that about 60 of you are watching right now, but there is a definite difference in the reach of what I do between spending an hour or two hours chatting with 60 or 100 or 200 of you and even making a YouTube video. out of it and reaching a hundred and thousand people with linkedin posts that takes less time so i have to ask then why stream because what i want to do is reach people and help them with their careers
And so why stream? Because it's inefficient. But what I find is I love the Discord community. And the chats that happen there and the regulars who put in so much effort helping each other and giving sharing their ideas both with me and with others. And so. I'm going to stream here basically to stay in touch with you and help out that small discord community. But some of you in the past have actually said.
gee, I hesitate to tell other people about you because I want to keep you to myself because if you got big and famous, you wouldn't have time to answer our questions in Discord. Well, you're going to get your wish.
Because I think the only reason I'm going to stream and stay on Discord is because I like the people who are part of that community. So if you haven't joined the Discord, this is your invitation. And if you come here and watch... you know this is now for you personally personally 60 of you but it's for you personally so that's why i'm going to stream now in return where you help me
is you help me get things done i bounce ideas off of you this is where i hone material for my book which we're going to talk about for a minute um this is where i learn and push myself from your questions because let's be honest another self-revolution i can be disconnected from reality and i hate that i'm not trying to be elitist or disconnected or isolated or any of that crap but there's some reality i was
talking to my wife earlier today and we were talking about a friend and that friend has a 15 year old and my wife was saying well she hasn't been we're talking about her going somewhere on a flight she said yeah she hasn't flown very much she probably hasn't been on a plane in six or seven years and for me that you know i fly somewhere for work
in the past or for work now or for pleasure several times a year and so the idea of someone not flying for six eight ten years or ever is foreign to me and i forget that that's actually more normal well many of you come from outside the U.S. and you serve as great grounding forces whether you're in the U.S. or elsewhere you're reminding me of what's
normal and different than what i'm used to as a retired executive so thank you that's what you do for me and i appreciate it all right so let's go on with stuff why did i start with talking about turkey someone in discord asked said they should do a stream on how do you get back into the flow of work after being on vacation because they find that after they've been on vacation it's hard to get back into work
And I have the same experience. It's hard to get back into work after you've been doing something, no work at all.
And I think that's a subset of the topic of motivation I want to talk about generally. Because look, let's be honest, all of us have trouble... doing all the things we think we must or should or or want to do we have all these aspirations and dreams and we end up netflix and chill um and there's a reason for that so okay so i have the same problem i had it when i was working i'd go on vacation for a week or whatever two weeks and i would come back and the first day back would be hell
because it's like oh my god i've been in meetings from 9 a.m and it's noon and it's time for a nap and a cocktail that's how vacation works oh wait it's not going to be that way it's five more hours of meetings and then email so how do you get back in well Interesting thing today. I don't have perfect answers on finding motivation. I have some ideas and I can discuss it and take questions.
Yeah, and somebody in chat saying they just had their honeymoon and currently getting back into the grind and it is tough. Here's the thing, right? All of us at some level are pleasure-seeking hedonists. And biologically, all of us at some level are wired to save energy. We're wired for laziness at a biological level. Because that conserves energy, it conserves food. Working is actually, if you look at the history of mankind, abnormal.
there's a book i'm going through right now i don't have a link to it uh but i'll put it in chat it's simply called behave and it's by robert i probably will spell this right sapolsky something like that it might be that's um he covers all sorts of things about why we do what we do but one of the most interesting things in behavioral science is hunter gatherers the sort of nomadic tribesmen that ate a little foraged a little killed a few things they actually worked
Their hours of labor per week were much less than farmers and much less than modern employees. So we're not wired to work. 40 50 60 hours a week uh yeah even comes online says hey guys let's check out some neuroendocrinology that's right did you come here for boring you know come on uh there's also some chemistry involved um so i think hitch has some good advice there in chat about listening but i'm gonna let that go for the moment so
We're wired to be lazy. So how do we get back into the grind? Well, recognizing... it's going to be a transition because on vacation you get closer to that hedonistic hunter-gatherer you sleep as much as you want you eat a nice breakfast maybe you do a thing couple things that you feel up to you eat some more you have a nice drink, you lay in the sun, you read a book, you're completely at ease. Transitioning back, this is important to doing a bunch of things you haven't chosen.
necessarily, is a big shift. And so specific advice on vacation, the only advice I have there is... be prepared for the fact it's going to be a shock and a grind for a few days and um motivate yourself to try to strive we've talked a lot about efficiency on other shows prioritization think about efficiency so that you can go back to working eight hours a day not 14 unless you choose to So, and yes, ADHD is a very common challenge. I actually have no idea.
if i am truly adhd i can only tell you a true story about it adhd wasn't really a thing when i was a kid it got diagnosed and made a diagnosis or in common usage after i was grown up and i bought a book because it sounded like maybe i'm kind of that way on adult adhd because at first it was thought it was only a children's condition and i could never get through the book
so i kept the book for 10 years always meaning to read it now it's gone somewhere but i thought you'd enjoy that story that's my adhd story um yeah we're going to talk about maslow's pyramid for motivation with chat here's the thing motivation isn't one thing in fact arguably if i ask you all to define motivation and feel free to try and chat you can go backwards to different things that give you motivation but
Arguably, the phrase be motivated or find your motivation has no direct meaning. It's really find what motivates you or be motivated by something. So the first thing I understand is motivation is probably more of a second order effect. OK, great. Where do you find it? Well, there's different types of motivation. There's what you must do. There's what you tell yourself you should do. And there's what you want to do. At the lowest level, motivation can be biological.
If you're hungry, if you don't have food, eventually your hunger will motivate you to try to get food. Same with thirst. Same with sleep. If you deprive people of sleep enough, they will start trying to do anything to sleep, and eventually their body will sleep whether you're poking them with a sharp stick or not. Things can drive your motivation, 100%. Yes, emotions can drive. Probably.
root word motivation and emotion some smart person in chat can figure it out but probably those have the same root you can go check somebody let us know i do think emotions can drive motivation motivation is something that gives you either a material or spiritual contentment or satisfaction maybe um so
what we're seeing in chat is the debate over what is motivation and where does it come from does it come from emotions does it come from intellect it probably can come some from both and there's different types of it there's stuff you need biologically meeting needs there's stuff you're told to do so if you have a job once you've accepted a job which is a lot of us then you get told to do stuff
and some of it you may not want to do i have you know if you've ever watched office space oh i have to file a tps report which i believe is a complete waste of time but i must do it i have to file an expense report i have to file a status report I may have zero intrinsic motivation to do it but because it's part of my job in air quotes I must do it. Then there's the stuff we tell ourselves we should do.
I should eat better. I should lose weight. I should read more books that are good for me. I should call my mom. I should, should, should.
we should on ourselves and that's a different type of motivation where on the one hand we sort of agree with it but on the other hand we don't really want to do it it's like something we falls into this middle ground of intellectual belief usually but emotional or energetic resistance so trying to find the middle ground between those is hard or what to do about it and then the last thing are the things you just purely want to do
I want to learn about this topic. I want to be influential. I want to make money. I want to find a spouse or a partner. These are things I want, and I truly do want them. It's not that I feel I should find a partner. It's that I want to. It's not that I feel I should make money. I want to. None of these divisions is perfectly clear because if you don't have any money, you're going to have trouble eating. So they get mixed together.
I think the point is there's different categories and we need to address them slightly differently. I'm going to take just a minute and quickly look at chat because you guys are writing some interesting stuff and then I'll come back to this.
uh my motivation came from frustration i got motivated to get in tech based on how dumb tech was well that's okay yep so frustrations and emotion essentially motivation in general regardless of the type of act of need to meet a requirement um this is a good question can you be universally motivated so a lot of you i know have listened to jocko willink um from extreme ownership
And he seems or professes to just be full of motivation for everything. Whatever he's going to do, he's going to do it 100%. If he's going to go to the bathroom, he's going to do it the best anyone ever has. If he's going to do sit-ups or push-ups or pull-ups, he's going to kill it.
a business class to a bunch of people on how to take over the world make a ton of money he's gonna kill that too i wonder where that's from i think it's a habit i don't know this but i think he's just so conditioned himself to go go go that whatever he puts in front of himself he's going to go a thousand miles an hour and it's at this point
he's built a muscle or a habit where everything he takes on is get up at 5 a.m and go uh which god bless him the dude's super successful more successful than i am if you can do that and there is something to building a habit right uh one of the problems we were just talking about vacation
is you get out of the habit of working and so work the grind of work seems hard because you've just broken the habit once you're back in the daily grind of get up get to work, work eight, 10 hours, whatever it is, you know, read your email, please your boss, deliver the stuff.
habits and patterns are easier there's less friction because the body and the mind are used to it i recently and i shared a little bit of this on discord i'm working on a new project i can't talk about everything about the project yet but i've been putting in more hours of work since i got back from turkey than i have put in
in recent weeks certainly while i was on vacation in turkey but even before that i am experiencing a little bit about that needing to train a habit now luckily the project i'm working on is exciting enough to me to overcome the oh my gosh i'm gonna actually sit at my computer and work all day uh yes top secret project confirmed that's right and it's fun that's what makes it fun is i'm working on something that i think ultimately will be
a lot of value to this community and others all right so we've broken down that motivation has different levels stuff you have to do stuff you should do stuff you want to do we can try to address them separately um because interestingly there's stuff you need to do that you actively don't want to do i do not like you've all heard this before i do not like mowing lawns
Sometimes the grass grows and there's no one else to do it and I have to cut the damn lawn. There's other things that you can have to do that you hate. how do you find the motivation to do that because it's not what you want it's not self-empowerment it's but we have to find the motivation to do it conversely in a complete other direction there's stuff we really want to do And we can't find the motivation to do it. So this is a big topic. How do we deal with it? Well...
First thing I've talked about before, I've talked about this paper before. You can Google it. It's an HBR Harvard Business Review. I'll see if I can find the link real quick. I know I can. Called Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time. So being motivated is in part having enough energy. Manage your energy, not your time. This is a five minute read on Harvard Business Review.
um some of you have read it before it's definitely worth rereading um if you've read it and if you haven't read it you can read it anyway it's a five minute read there's the link That article just talks about we get suckered into time management, trying to make more time. And a better call is having the energy to do the most important things.
so we could talk about prioritization we won't talk about that but if you want to be able to motivate yourself either for things you have to do but don't want to or things you want to do and don't have to having good health decent exercise good nutrition enough sleep these are all enablers they put you in a position to have the opportunity and energy to be motivated the second thing
is rewards what are you going to get out of doing this well if you have to do something the only thing you really get out of it is being done with it and why ever it had to be done is now over this is one of the reasons why i struggle with mowing grass because it's never really over you mow the grass and the damn shit grows again um and so it's never really done you can't like put a stake through the heart of that vampire So. And I really want to. I don't have that choice. But.
for stuff you have to do at least you get it over with and yes obis i'm with you my big three are mowing grass doing dishes and doing laundry Because dishes always get dirty again, laundry always gets dirty again, and grass grows again. And they seem like, if you know the reference, they seem like Don Quixote.
and sancho panza tilting at windmills it's the definition of quixotic from don quixote and it's the thing that will never make any sense or get done and i find it wild that somehow the whole world has decided that big grass lawns are how we should live so that we can put collectively do the math sometime you want to have fun do the math on how many
hundreds of millions of hours go into lawn care and arguably this is um for people who don't enjoy lawns which i actually think is a lot of people the lost human productivity keeping lawns pretty would change the world all by itself um this is like if all that time went into inventing things or charity
different world but somehow as a collective society and this would be its own interesting study we've decided that houses shouldn't have weeds they should have pretty grass manicured decoration and millions perhaps billions of hours maintaining that is a reasonable cost it's makes humans weird right PMA Dota, thank you for the resub. Yeah. All right. Let's see. Let's keep going.
i admit that a great garden with beautiful flowers looks really good i admit that i'm just not the person to create that um you know And this is another point on motivation. One way to increase your intrinsic apparent, your apparent intrinsic motivation is to find tasks that... align with your motivation my wife who's moderating right now is no doubt listening to me once again rant about lawn care
Which she likes. She likes a pretty lawn and gets joy from doing some of it and gets more value from seeing it than I do. So it's easier for her to do yard work than for me because she reaps a reward from it. The beauty and the satisfaction in seeing it be nice is more powerful to her than it is to me. Well, coming back to this point of motivation and what motivates you and how to sustain motivation.
finding things that align with what give you intrinsic value is one of the tools so we talked about energy we talked about some rewards what motivates me well short-term chocolate I actually have a drawer down here with a stash of chocolate so I can motivate or reward myself within long arm's reach at any moment. Second, though, it motivates me.
long-term intellectual stimulation i enjoy thought puzzles i enjoy figuring things out and the reward of like having a new thought and thinking like wow i solved that problem or i came to an answer for me so giving me tasks or aligning my work with stuff where i'm gonna feel that intrinsic reward i stream here for example i said why am i gonna do this stream for now i like talking to this community i like meeting new people i think our discord community is super cool we have a very active um
person in the discord from Venezuela we have a sometimes active person from Singapore we have some people from Scandinavia geeky um we have people from all over the world I get to meet people from all over the world uh we have uh a number of people and for me that's rewarding like i get to learn i've learned a ton about venezuela some of it's depressing like that it would be fucking crazy for me to go there because i probably would be kidnapped
But I didn't know that. And so I get to see this inside view of Venezuela. And I get to see inside views of other countries. So for me, the motivation. to stream is to make those friends and learn that stuff well you can see me being excited obviously it's a lot easier to be motivated to do stuff if you're excited um
Kidnap insurance is going up rapidly. I don't think that's a real thing. I'm sure somebody sells it to you, but I'm not sure it does any good. I know there's this idea that some SWAT team is going to come get you. So I get this 100% real. It's sold. I wonder if it's 100% real. Anybody ever gets unkidnapped because they have it. Your fiance sells it. Wow.
see now this is the kind of shit we could learn about this is what's that is a whole other story but i would well that's what it is right unkidnapped released whatever you want to call it i don't know rewards are usually story based for people so bottom line is for motivation trying to align yourself to stuff you find intrinsically rewarding i say this all the time make your work your passion find some you know have have do work you're passionate about
Well, this is where it comes from, right? So what about that Bitcoin hit list stuff? Yeah, I have no idea what that's about. Don't merchant ships have a... Yeah, I bet merchant ships have stuff too. Lloyd's of London famously would like insure anything, right? They insured Marilyn Monroe's legs and all kinds of other assets that were like, really, you can insure this?
okay bottom line um where's another place i find motivation working with others So another tool you can use, whether it's something you must do or you want to do or you should do, I find disappointing others displeases me and seeing them happy and getting a result pleases me.
So one of the reasons like I do this show is you guys like it and you talk to me about it and you come into the discord and you reward me through your presence. I reward you as best I can by doing the shows and trying to challenge you. So the bottom line conclusion here is I don't have a perfect answer for your motivation. I will say this. This came up in our Discord today. One of the people was grousing.
that he has a team and he's busted his ass on a project for the last few weeks and none of his team members really stepped up to support him. And there are people he manages and people he's trying to show them the way to a better career. and they kind of yawned and went home and couldn't give a shit they did their work by the way they just didn't do extra work well uh the point there is
What motivates him excelling in his career doesn't necessarily motivate all of his team members. Two things. First. Most people are deathly lazy. They can't find any motivation. This community, because you listen to me talk about career success, is self-selected. Every time I do a stream, we have 80 people watching roughly. But my stats will show like 500, 600 people.
came and went during the show there's like 40 of you who show up right away and are here from the minute i come on to the minute i leave and then there's 40 more who drift in and stay and then there's like 500 who come in watch for some amount of time 10 seconds or a minute or three minutes and they're like well that guy's a tool i'm out of here he's got nothing you know he's not talking about games whatever so
Most people, this audience is self-selected for people who give a shit. Most people don't. They wanna earn a little money and go have sex or go have a drink or go have a nap or go play games or go watch YouTube. or something else. They want to reduce pain. Their lives suck, they're unhappy, and they want to reduce pain. There's another set, and these can be some of this person's worker.
workers, they simply have other motives. They want to earn their money and invest their time in their family or invest their time in their church or invest their time in politics or in a sport. So making more money. and excelling in their career they're not against it it just isn't their highest motivation they're not lazy they're highly motivated but they're highly motivated towards something outside of work
So this leader who's wondering why his team members aren't stepping up, there's three possibilities and he really only controls one. Possibility one is these people are motivated, but they're motivated by something besides work. They want to go home to their families because they believe their highest calling is to spend time with their kids. Possibility two is that they're unmotivated, right? They are fundamentally not.
they've never found anything that they want to excel at and so they're just trying to subsist they have personal pain that they're trying to medicate and i medicate my pain by drinking, by taking drugs, by sleeping a lot, by zoning out to TV, by playing games, whatever. And thing number three is the only one he controls.
They're people who have the possibility of being motivated and wanting to work more. They care about career, but somehow his message of how to do that and why to do that has not yet connected with them.
But it helps to understand most people fall into one of those other two categories. And that doesn't mean they're bad people necessarily. It just means... looking for everyone to be motivated on any given task is not going to happen um if you want to see this in a different domain just look at political topics Take a moment and consider what is your most important political topic. Person X should be the ruler, leader, president, premier.
Prime Minister, whatever person Y should, person X should not, person Y should not. We need to save the whales. We need to have equal rights. We need to lower taxes. We need to find alternative energy. We need fill in the blank. pick your issue i always liked uh somebody once said nuke the gay whales for jesus and i thought that was the ultimate like combined cause um
Whatever your cause is, realize everybody else has a different cause. And so they're not necessarily against your cause, whether it's... rights or freedom or politics or who's the leader or the planet or this side or the other they simply have something else they think is more important and so they're not against your cause necessarily although they might be they just aren't interested
Because when they look at it, they're like, where you're going in the afterlife is the most important thing. The most important thing I can do is raise my children to go to the right afterlife and try to convince you to come with me. And you're like, meh, afterlife, that doesn't even exist. We need to work on this life. We need to work on the planet, the pets, the abuse of power, the inequities, whatever. Do I qualify a lot?
yeah sometimes i don't know usually i think i just roll them out there it's fun but i do try to like stay within the terms of service so be aware that when you're trying to motivate people you can only motivate people who are open to your cause whether that's a work cause or another cause um let the whales live in peace i do i want to i am the law on twitch um you can really only motivate vertically up and down is that what that's interesting cram the gram
all right so i've talked a lot about this i want to see what cram the gram has to say and then i want to talk about a few other things to like uh that'll be interesting i'm going to talk a little bit about new world by the way for those of you that'll be fun i may do a whole separate show on it Because I think people would enjoy hearing about New World from the inside. I think you can motivate horizontally, but up and all at once. You can only motivate up and all at once.
all right so what's the bottom line of motivation here's the bottom line if you want to accomplish more you better spend some time thinking about how to make it easy for you to find the energy It's way too easy to procrastinate. It's way too easy to do anything but work. It's way too easy to not invest in yourself, to spend time reading books, studying, whatever.
and it's because we're lazy human animals the ape in us wants to lay around get fat and eat bananas so if you want to fight the ape you need to fight the ape by figuring out how your own motivation works and how you can trigger it whether that's rewards changing your job to have more things that are intrinsically satisfying to you building the muscle of just being disciplined, it is worth it to you to figure out how to trigger your own motivation.
And why do I bother to say this? Because I found this project that I'm working on, I'm not ready to talk about. And it was super motivational to me. And so now I'm working hard every day, but I only look. I say I'm working hard. To my wife, it looks like I'm spending a lot of time on the computer working. To me, it's fun. I'm excited to do it because I'm learning.
I'm helping another person and I'm being challenged intellectually on topics I like and I'm accomplishing goals. So I found something that sparks me internally. And so I generate what looks like work to others. But it's free to me. Similarly, when I mow the damn lawn, I mow it for my wife. I don't really care, but I know it's important to her. And so I can do it to help her.
and that can feel good to me because i like to do nice things for her and so finding things that allow you to get tasks done whether they're things that you must do should do or want to do finding those things that trigger use is enough i'll stand up powered up about this find those triggers and figure out how to use them and you'll get more done with less mental energy less yes preach it to you less mental energy less pain so that's the end of the motivation talk all right
things that motivate you don't pay much well you look around for them right there is a way to turn almost anything into money i truly believe that all right um what are you drinking windy city there it is you can find out anytime with the drink command um update on the mentorship network This would be a good closing topic for motivation. As some of you know, six months ago, we started out to build a mentorship network and we ran a pilot.
and we got a bunch of people together. We got a dozen mentors. We got 40 mentees. We ran a pilot. Pretty much everybody loved it. The mentees got some value. The mentors got some value, and we said, okay, we need to build some software to scale this.
Well, that process is dragging on. It may never complete. It may, I hope it will. The developers are still working on it and some of them will hear this broadcast, might even be here and say, hey, wait a minute, I'm working on that. Well, great, please complete it. But I just want to update you. It's all dragging on. And this goes exactly to the challenge of volunteers. It's very easy for someone, and we had some of this, people to volunteer and say, I want to help.
But when it comes to actually taking their time and doing any work, they don't do it. Now, some of them do. And I'm not maligning anybody who did work. But we also had some people drop out and say, you know, I thought about it. I really don't want to do this. It's much easier to say you're interested in something than to put in your time.
Second, I have not chased around the volunteers myself. I haven't reached out to the mall and robbed them and been like, hey, Joe, hey, Fred, you're amazing. I just need this from you. I haven't done that. I've decided, you know, if the community wants this, the community will create it. And if they don't want it, that's okay. I hope that the community members who volunteered follow through and complete it.
And I still support it, but I've made a decision I'm not going to like twist arms or try and shame people. And so if this broadcast where I talk about some people completing work and some don't sounds like I'm shaming them, I really am not trying to do that.
Okay, so the update is... it'll happen when it happens it's still moving slowly and we will see meanwhile if you're waiting for it you'll have to be patient we did set up a discord channel where you can ask people to be your mentor as like a one-off manual way in the meantime And I know some people have volunteered to mentor there. JBR, thank you, by the way. Praise is a huge motivator for me where he says, I think that's really true. Feedback.
doing things that help others and then having them acknowledge either the quality or the value of your work that's what praise is right praise is someone saying either good job or thank you i guess praise and appreciation are slightly different but both of those feedback from other humans the lazy ape that wants to eat bananas still cares about what other lazy apes around him think
and so that lazy ape will get up and do something if the other apes want him to so one minute manager is good it's a great book All right. What else do I want to talk about? YouTube, we've been behind putting out YouTube videos. We're going to get back on that. Probably it's happening in parallel to me doing this talk. And last, I'm not going to go deep into this, but it'll be fun for another show. Right now, let me check.
at least earlier today new world was the top game on steam it had displaced uh i'm gonna pull up the stats it had displaced uh call of duty for the most played game um Yeah, it still is. I just pulled up public steam data. And right now, New World has 781,000 concurrent players. CSGO has 628,000. So there's 150,000 more people playing New World.
csgo so uh somebody says it looks like two weeks and it's gonna die out maybe perhaps even probably uh somebody else hit says he's pretty meh about it um hey look Right now, I'm told by people who have dug more deeply into the data, New World is among the five most successful game launches in Steam history. by raw number of people who've chosen to buy it and use it that may be true that may be false i'm told it's true i believe it's true if it dies out in two weeks that's still
Absolutely remarkable. But what I find fun is I watch this property develop over a very long period. I don't know when Amazon first acknowledged New World, and I'm not going to get into the dates. of exactly how long we've been working on it you'd have to go from when it was first talked about the point is many years and many struggles and bezos acknowledged that in his tweets about it um but it's fascinating sometime
probably soon, I'll try to do a talk about what I can say publicly about the creation of that property. And I think... the interesting thing to take away is perseverance. That game, Amazon could have killed working on games so many times. amazon could have stopped when crucible was a flop right as many of you love games know amazon launched a game you know whatever a year 18 months ago they're totally tanked
They had games before that. Five years ago, I went to TwitchCon and we were demoing a game that we thought we were gonna launch called Breakaway. Breakaway was like a MOBA.
arena type game sort of it was like halfway between a sport and a moba it never flew um so we had our first you know people talk about crucible because memories are short and some of you are young but um breakaway was years ago and that cratered too i don't know if i can talk about lord of the rings i know some about it um you know amazon uh
had some relationship and i can't say more about with the lord of the rings property um there's a lot going on there i don't know how much is public i'd have to look into it but yeah it's a Bottom line is here's the point. Seeing shit through is really powerful and sticking with stuff after setbacks. This is all very hard. Companies do it poorly.
one of the lessons you can take away from amazon is they stuck with it this is interesting when my wife and i ran into emmet and his girlfriend in istanbul we talked about new world And specifically, he said something really interesting. Amazon spent, obviously, many years of development, many failed games, a lot of money building games. Tons and tons of money. And so on the one level.
No matter how much New World sells, it can probably never directly, individually, alone as New World, pay back all the investment Amazon has made in making various games. Now, maybe it can. Again, I'm not revealing financials. I'm just saying a lot of failed games, one successful game. I don't know if that first successful game can pay back all the bills. But what Emmett said looking at it is he said...
Hey, if you can teach a giant company a new skill, what is that worth? So if you take a company that's a success engine like Amazon. And you can teach it how to make creative products, which it's never really done before, right? Selling stuff, prime, selling stuff in boxes, not creative. Difficult. inventive, a logistical nightmare, but not an art. Similarly, AWS creating servers all over the world, incredibly difficult, scaled technology, revolutionary.
and was a new skill for Amazon also. So managing retail, then managing IT, new skill. Now you have a third skill. Amazon's taken two shots at learning that skill. The number one shot. was studios making movies making tv and they've had success there i wouldn't say amazon yet has like well they don't have a quote-unquote game of thrones but they have a lot of shows now that are pretty popular and do pretty well
um and they've won some awards and lots of viewership so they're getting closer they now have a top five game in this one metric it may not stay top five i'm not arguing that some people think it'll flame out maybe you're right maybe you're wrong lots of people are worried about that um but If they have learned how to build creative arts, that arguably is worth whatever you've spent, even if you won't make the money back on this game.
across all the games that didn't work if you've learned a new skill and you've taught a company of amazon's size how to do it the world is now different um If you look, Jeff Bezos tweeted. He tweeted two stories. One story was the current story. New World's great. Lots of people are playing it. It's a big success. Amazon has a hit. Then he tweeted a story from eight months ago, and that story from eight months ago said.
amazon sucks they're good at all kinds of stuff but they've never made a video game they're never gonna make a video game they're led by an idiot it was a personal send-up of my old boss mike frizzini this article it basically said this guy's so dumb he's never going to succeed he's a tyrant he's a terrible manager he's this that and the other his kids read it who are teenagers and he had to explain to them like yeah this is the part of being a public figure like people attack you
But it literally said like, this guy's a fucking idiot and he's wasted a ton of money and Amazon is doomed. It's doomed for lots of reasons. But this idiot at the helm is one of the reasons. That was eight months ago. Now there's New World. How quickly fortunes can change is lesson one. And Jeff calls that out. If you look, there's these two articles only eight months apart. And one of them is Amazon is doomed and it's led by an idiot. And the other one is look at Amazon's wild success.
eight months. Second, you may have to put up with a ton of shit on the way to success. And the bigger you strive, the more you're going to take it. the more your critics will be personal angry critical vituperative every word you draw out i kind of like my position i'm Not a big enough fish to attract that. Herpanderp, have I read all the books I have behind me? Almost all of them. Let me see.
there's a whole shelf of dnd books down at the bottom i've read all of those many many times um it's just fun mostly that was a kid um have i read everything on these shelves most but not all some of this is my reading list of stuff i want to get to which is kind of this shelf here i've actually done something not a lot of people have done which is that's the bible i've actually read it cover to cover
um that's very rare actually it turns out uh what else is back there it's a fun question most of the books on this shelf here are ones i wish to read although i've read some of them so that's like my wish list i've read almost everything over there they're mostly on my recommended reading list now i mostly quote unquote read things by listening to them on audible so i think this year using audible
um and uh what um i've i've listened to like 17 complete books on audible a few of them are fiction that are fun to listen to Most of them are business or self-improvement. How many different books of religion have you read? I read a lot of commentary. Of course, the Old Testament covers... yeah is means i've read the hebrew religion i have not read most of the quran um i've read little parts of it yeah this stream is sponsored by audible you know um
audible is amazing uh i've coached some people from audible or worked with audible yeah it's an asset if you want to get better it's a huge asset we're not going to talk religion though um that's that's not a good topic other than to say i've actually read the whole thing which it's here's the thing i wish i wish no matter what religion you choose you'd actually at least read the book of the religion
many people here probably do most people unfortunately don't um that just seems weird to me like oh hey i'm gonna say my eternal fate hangs on this belief but read about it oh boy can't get to that i know that sounds critical i'm sorry um so audible yes it's harder to retain the information i think than reading on paper sometimes i listen to a book twice or even three times
that's still sometimes more efficient for me because you retain information better being exposed to it multiple times over a long duration so sometimes i'll listen to a book twice in a row more often i'll listen to it then go back and listen again a few of my favorite books um i've listened to three four or five times uh most books once is enough but like um
four hour work week tim ferris i've probably listened to three or four times um yeah and there's some other books i've done that as well leadership and self-deception which i'm always recommending i've listened to multiple times so all right uh you are a ceo in a penthouse drunk right now did you take a quail too early it's just what i have no oh you're responding to someone
got it um anyway all right cool we've talked about a ton new world we'll talk about some more some some other time uh somebody asked we can get a sneak peek no there's never any like not my department that would be fun but it would be fun i'll have to think about what i can talk about is there a story behind the alice and wonderland piece yes so uh i love this on multiple levels
When I worked at Twitch, they brought in this artist and decorated all over the office with this art. This is only one piece from the artist whose name I have no idea, but someone could probably find it.
and yeah i love you know alice obviously is contemplating should she go down the rabbit hole and so the uh it's matrix alice yes the red pill or the blue pill and i just love the subtlety of mixing Disney with the Matrix so well you know somebody says it's Matrix inspired maybe it's Disney inspired like you know uh what is who's the guy alice carroll right or who wrote alice in wonderland lewis carroll i think um
his he wrote the matrix in a way 150 years ago or whatever it is like the matrix is alice in wonderland inspired and with that I think I will thank you all. And we'll talk again soon. Ending message is the same as the beginning message. Find the things that allow you to get more done and lean into them.
join our discord follow me on linkedin i appreciate you all and the advice and feedback you give me there and i will keep doing these shows in order to hang out with the people who show up here so if you follow this channel and join the discord and come here You are a valued member of this community and you add a lot of value to my life. And I appreciate that very, very much. And so with that.
uh you'll see on my closing message my offline message this is hey when will the next show be i don't know be in the discord and you will know it will be whenever i have another good topic to talk about i will probably see if i think i can do an interesting show on the history of new world without revealing internal things i don't know if i can if i can i think it's a hot topic right now people would love it
and maximus thanks for showing up and resubscribing appreciate all the people who subscribe you never have to but it's always appreciated uh it's fun to see people subscribe because it's fun to see your months rack up and know that you're here for a long time So with that, I will let you all go have a great day.