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…from the Ukraine right now and you might be trying to optimize virality of the PayPal button on eBay and this other guy might be trying to, you know, um, lower our, you know, processing fees with the banks, right? So everybody's assigned one problem and his thing was this. They go, well, you know, how do you get people to actually do that? Right? Because sounds good in theory, right? Focus is always a word everybody nods and agrees on, but we're all pretty bad at focus. So how did you get your teams to actually do it? And Peter Thiel's answer was, "Oh, if if they tried to talk to me about anything besides their problem, I would just simply walk out of the room." [laughter] And the non-verbal communication was pretty clear how I felt. [laughter] And and people were like, "Did he really do that?" And Keith, you know, Keith Rey was like, "Yeah, he would literally do that. He would if you tried to bring up anything else besides your problem, he would just turn around and he would just walk away." And then you got the signal of how important that was. And if you wanted to be valued by the CEO, you would stay on task of your problem. [laughter] >> He would just do like the autistic clump. Just you your feet just clmping away at the [laughter] door. >> Did you think he was wearing shoes? No chance that he was wearing shoes in that office. So, >> no, dude. He's a loafer guy. You cuz he's the type of guy where you just hear clamping around. I can tell. >> Focus is convex. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid exactly what that means, but it sounds very provocative and I've used it three times since. Um, the good news is nobody else I work with knows what it means either. [laughter] >> I don't know what this has to do with focus. That's what convex looks like. >> Explain a little bit. He goes, >> "If you are 80% focused on a task, that will only be half as good as if you were 90%." Meaning the jump from 80% focused to 90% focus will double your impact. And so you really want this the last mile of focus, the last level of ruthlessness about your focus will will double, you know, you'll get one or two more doubles in the output. Um, which kind of makes sense. Like if you look at any field, right? If you're the 80th percentile swimmer, nobody knows your name and you work at a tire company. If you're the 90th percent swimmer, you know, people in your county might know your name, but you still you manage the tire company. If you're the 99th percentile swimmer, you might, you know, be able to swim professionally, but if you're the 99.99999, right? Like the final, it's that last leg, you're Michael Phelps and, you know, you get all the gold medals and the millions of dollars and so on. And it's basically like your use of focus that the last mile of it, the last level of obsession is what gets you like a disproportionate amount of the rewards. >> So, what's point number um three or are we on four on Sean's hardcore >> [laughter] >> If this was a VHS tape, it would be labeled Shan Hardcore Part Two. [laughter] >> People would not be getting what they thought they were getting. >> Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks. >> CEO. [laughter] t would be labeled Shan Hardcore Part Two. [laughter] >> People would not be getting what they thought they were getting. >> Indian guy at his desk screaming about management hacks. >> CEO. [laughter] Put the O and CEO. Uh, all right. Here's what we got. What's left? I got I did one, two, three, four, five. I got five. I got three left. All right. Jack Welch, CEO of of GE, when you ran when you run a big company, it's very easy for, you know, all your children are sort of not equal. They're not loved equally, all the different business divisions. And GE was in very a bunch of different business divisions. And he had two simple rules when he was running GE. One was every division, you need to be number one or number two in your market. Otherwise, you have one year to fix it, sell it, or close it. That's it. we will trim the business divisions unless you can be number one or number two which is an incredible forcing function because it's a sort of Darwinian pressure to survive and the other Darwinian pressure he applied was every year Jack Welch would fire the bottom 10% performers in the company every year and so a a continuous culling of the herd which sounds I mean I'm sure people interpret that different way some people will think he's an for that when I first heard it I was like oh that's that doesn't sound that hardcore but then you go try do it. Go try to do that every year. It is incredibly difficult. Or go look at your own track record. How much low performance have you tolerated because you don't fire people until push really comes to shove. I think Jack Welch is I think he's controversial. We actually should do a deep dive one day on him because people say that he was a horrible CEO because if you look at like GE, it was kind of became this like amalgamation of like a bunch of like nonsense and it like owned a bunch of stuff that ended up not working out. But I don't know enough about Jack Walsh to know if that was his doing or what happened. But but I know that he was well loved as a leader. But at the same time, I hear smart people say the exact opposite about firing. Like Jensen from Nvidia, he was like he was like, "I'm going to smother you in greatness. I'm not going to fire you." Like it's so funny how great people, assuming they both are great, have different opinions on firing as I mean as well as everything else. Like total opposite, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. And you you will find that for for every single one of these, you will find people who are very successful doing the polar opposite, which is not meant to say that this is the way to be great. It's just meant to say, damn, I thought these stories were pretty hardcore, huh? That's really kind of all we're saying. And that there are it kind of pushes the boundaries of your thinking of what is acceptable, tolerable, and potentially um effective. You know, I think firing your low performers is a pretty, I would say, logical thing to do. Meaning, >> yeah, >> I could see why that works. [laughter] I could definitely see why that works. And I'm I'm in support of that one. But yeah, I think others, you know, like like I think Jensen said when he made eah, >> I could see why that works. [laughter] I could definitely see why that works. And I'm I'm in support of that one. But yeah, I think others, you know, like like I think Jensen said when he made that point, he was like, "Yeah, I don't fire them, but I turn up the intensity so much that you either become great or quit, right?" which is more of a sink or swim version of like, yeah, they quit instead of getting fired. But either way, you weed out the low performers one way or another. So, last two. Um, all right, I'm going to skip this last one. I'll tell you, I don't even really like it. The Ford CEO, this guy comes in, this guy Allen becomes the Ford CEO. They had just lost 17 billion last year, and he came in and they did like the business review where they go through all the different business like projects and how they're on track or off track. And it was like color coded like green is on track, yellow is at risk and red is off track and everything was green. And he's like guys we lost 17 billion last year. How was everything green? And he realized they had like a culture where you know people were sort of afraid to admit failure. And so he's like you can't be afraid. You you have to be honest. And so the next week they were all green again except for one was red. And he stood up and started clapping and uh changed the uh the culture around failure. And I was like it sounds a little bit like a Disney movie to me. Cool running >> Yeah. [laughter] So, I think we're going to think we're going to thumbs down Allan together here. >> Nice try, Alan. Consider me uninspired. Um, >> all right. The last one comes from Jimmy aka Mr. Beast, which was I think you were there when he described his cloning strategy, which we were like, "So, dude, how do you train your employees? They're all really young. Seems like they're all new. You're growing so fast. Like, do you have like I'm just curious like you don't you know, you never went to college or business school or anything like that. like what what do you do for your like kind of management? And he's like, "Oh, I just do cloning." And we're like, "That sounds illegal. What does that mean?" And he's like, "Well, if I hire you in one of like kind of the key roles, you just follow me everywhere. Like you literally shadow me every single place I go." And I think the guy who initially was doing it was like sleeping at the same house that he was in. Like it was like that that hardcore. Like from morning to night, like the guy I remember one guy he hired, he he was also Jimmy's alarm clock. like he would go wake him up and from the moment Jimmy woke up they were together till the moment Jimmy signed off to go to sleep and he would do that for 6 months and he's like by the end of 6 months you know exactly how I think cuz you've been with me every everywhere you know you saw every decision I made so essentially you're like a proxy for me like I can now be in two places at once because you know exactly what would Jimmy do in this situation and yeah cloning works great and I remember there was like a room full of CEOs like multi-billion dollar CEOs as he was telling us this who were…

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