The Problem with Getting Advice for Your Business

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]How do you know what you don't know?

[00:00:02]This ignorance debt that you talk about.

[00:00:03]>> Oh yeah. Um, it's a really good question. I mean, I spent the I spent I spend all the time and all the money that I have to try and solve ignorance debt. And so I don't I don't know if there's a solution besides like trying to talk to people who are ahead of you who can help you look around corners and being it's it's I think I think advice is one of the hardest things to even think about because so much advice is wrong because people lack context right or they have misaligned incentives which is huge.

[00:00:34]Either they lack lack context, they lack confidence or lack incentive. And if you have any of those three that are off the advice is not necessarily good. And so and that's it's common to have one of at least one of those three off. And so it's like advice is so tough. Um because at some points like you have to have a a a parallel kind of engine that's like I have to be willing to take advice but I have to run it through some sort of filter that I'm responsible for which you know typically be some sort of you know first principles reasoning of like does this make sense given the the things that I absolutely know to be true. Um and a lot of people can't bridge that gap. And so there are some people actually do have maxed out um execution. But the problem is they change direction so quickly because they will just listen to different people who give them different advice that's conflicting. And not because anybody has bad intentions, but just because they either aren't competent enough or they don't have enough context or both.

[00:01:20]>> And human beings are wired, they learn from people with higher social status.

[00:01:25]They look somebody >> Yeah.

[00:01:27]>> achieve some kind of skill and they listen to that person.

[00:01:30]>> Tell me about that. And how does that act as a guide to contextualize >> information?

[00:01:37]So really interesting question. Um because it's so I think it's it's like what so I think many people give advice some people's advice is listened to more than others which we could latter up to like some people have more influence than others and then it's then what then what are the things that create influence that make your advice more likely to be followed than others and so you have status which is somebody who who is controlling reinforcers. So if you have money, you have fame, you have something that other people want and you control that, then that gives you status in any in any situation, right? Like if you're a bartender in the bar, you have status because you control scarce resource. As soon as you walk out of the bar, your status disappears. But right in the bar, you have power or excuse me, status. Um you've got credibility, which is that you've said something that would occur and then it does occur. Uh you have uh power, which is say do correspondence, which essentially like if I say, "Hey, follow this recipe and this is going to happen and it's a good thing." and then someone follows the recipe and then that happens then they're more likely to adhere to instruction uh later and then finally of likeness which is uh how similar are we like I'll tell you a story so I had um so we had a small event at our headquarters and uh there was a a a logging company like loggers like lumberjacks and the guy comes up to me the guy who's running it and he's like dude I've grown this thing from you know uh $2 million a year to 13.9 million in the last four years just listening exclusively to your content Um, and I was like, "That's awesome."

[00:03:05]And he said, "Um, is there any way we can get a picture?" And so, um, I was I was before I like had a chance to answer, um, he said, just because, um, you have a hardcore following in the logging community. And I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "We're all Mosy Nation." But it was like it was like dead serious. And I remember thinking about that and I was like, "Well, that makes sense." I was like, "I look and dress like this." I was like I have such similar likeness you like just like I have that as a baseline and then that's like for the whole community and then the other three above that it's like do I control some sort of you know reinforces they want which might be fame or money sure I've got that then it's like okay have I done did he do things that I told [snorts] him to do and good things happened yes so I had power that was checked off and so it's like you can look through that as your litmus test to how much how much people or a specific person will adhere to your directives um based on that criteria And that's kind of how I like reverse engineer that of like okay how much influence do I have in a given context >> and there's a fifth column which is truly first principles thinkers being able to take in information that you're giving apply kind of pattern matching to their own experience and saying this guy knows what he's talking about.

[00:04:17]>> Yeah. I see this as just like this is the psychology side, the soft human side of human behavior. And then there's the physics that's kind of like the art and the science. Like then there's the physics side of like well if we want to boil water and we want to boil water at 100° it's not going to happen. So like if that's what was required to get this water over there and it has to be boiling it's only 100 like it's not going to happen >> because I found it really interesting and par almost paradoxical the your mosy nation in Silicon Valley is mostly the super successful entrepreneurs and the billionaire venture capitalists and the reason my theory for that is they're able to appreciate your first principles thinking despite maybe a a pattern matching [laughter] that does not match the Evan Spiegel and the Mark Zuckerberg. It is something that we've seen, me and my partner Curtis see it all the time.

[00:05:07]>> The smartest people are like, "Yeah, I love I love Herozi. I listen to all this stuff." And the other people are inadvertently saying, "Well, I don't love the titles. I don't love the packaging.

[00:05:16]>> Like, it doesn't pattern match to what I think is is a great first principle."

[00:05:21]>> Well, that just made my day. So, great.

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