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Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
Who catfishes a city?
Is it even safe to snort human remains?
Is that the plot of Footloose?
I'm comedian Rory Scovel and I'm here to tell you Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast What Happened in Nashville tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him.
Gabe Ortiz is a cop.
His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
He was the head of this gang.
You going to push that line for the cause?
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle a dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew.
Listen to The Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
My sister was shot 22 times.
A police officer, right?
But what do you do when the monster is the man in blue?
This dude is the devil.
He'll hurt you.
This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law until we came together to take him down.
I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
I got you, I got you, I got you.
Listen to The Girlfriends Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
Hi, Kyle.
Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan?
Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link.
Thanks.
Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you.
Here's the link.
But there was no link.
There was no business plan.
I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet.
I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age.
Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people.
Check out the second season of my podcast Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, everybody.
I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back for another episode of the podcast.
It is so great to have you here back for another guest episode as we break down the psychology of our 20s.
One of my favorite things about running a podcast is that I get to just like have these hour-long conversations with people who have just done really cool, really unexpected things with their life.
Things that I can honestly say I don't think anybody else has ever done.
And today we have one of those people.
George Appling has a Harvard MBA.
He was the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and he now runs one of the world's largest renaissance fairs.
He runs a beer business.
He owns a ranch in Austin.
Between those two timelines he has also done a dozen of other really cool, interesting things, all because he understands this theory of matching your career path to your personality and your identity.
In fact, through his own work and his own research, he's actually identified the five types of careers people are drawn to and how we can use this theory to identify what we should be doing with our lives at this very moment.
I am so excited for you guys to hear our conversation.
I'm so excited to have him on the show.
Without further ado, George Appling, welcome to the psychology of your 20s.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you, Gemma, for having me.
Yeah.
I'm super excited about this one, as we were talking about before we started recording.
I've spoken to you for a little bit here, but can you tell the listeners about yourself and about what you do, what you like, who you are?
Sure.
My name's George.
I'm originally from a small town in Texas.
I had a kind of a regular career in business.
So I did strategy consulting for a long time at firms like McKinsey and Booz, and then I did cell phone distribution for a long time.
I ended up being the CEO of a billion-dollar company.
But then that kind of enabled me to do something completely different.
So I threw all that stuff away and decided to be a passionpreneur.
And so I've got a bunch of companies that I run that I'm deeply, deeply in love with.
The core of that is Sherwood Forest Fair.
You had mentioned a medieval thing that you guys do.
So I run a medieval theme park.
And so we run for Saturdays and Sundays in March and April and we have 177000 guests in 17 days, so over 10000 people a day.
And we're all Robin Hood all the time.
We're jousting and falconry and drinking meat and eating turkey legs.
So that's the core.
And then I've got a Robin Hood summer camp and a mead business which is fermented honey, an audio software company, an executive coaching business, and then i you know, i wrote a book that hit amazon number one.
It's about um, choosing the relationship between your passion and your work, and which is different than saying your work and your passion have to be the same thing.
There i've got five different choices in the book and it lays out a framework for you to pick the one that's right for you.
And I'm just kind of running around the country talking mostly to university students about the book.
So I know that's like the most complicated intro anyone's probably ever done, because I just do a lot of stuff.
I've got three kids and nine horses and, you know, I'm living my best life.
Okay, but I love that story because it shows that you can kind of do it all and have all these different areas of you being fulfilled.
As soon as you said me to business, I was like okay, this guy is Well actually.
As soon as you said Robin Hood and Renaissance Faire, I was like this guy is so cool.
And I love having guests on who have like a a change in their life and go from doing like the corporate thing to the passion thing, especially when they did that obviously not in their 20s and did it later in life and have become fulfilled through that.
This is what really drew me into your book and into what you have to say.
You have this really cool story.
You were a strategy consultant.
You were the ceo of a billion dollar company.
Now you have like what seems like the coolest profession ever.
Part of that change I'm sure for you was also discovering these five career paths and probably doing a lot of deep work within yourself to figure this out.
Can you tell people what these are, these five career paths you described?
Sure.
And these are.
I thought about these paths for years and years and years before putting them down into the book.
So, you know, I had that little, you know, that little app called Microsoft Note?
Yeah.
And I would like type in notes for decades, you know I mean probably two decades, not three or four, but trying to kind of really congeal into what these paths are.
So there are five paths, and the paths are different ways that passion and work can relate to each other.
One is, of course, passion.
And that's where your passion and your work are the same thing now.
And I am typically talking to people in their 20s.
And so that path makes sense if you have the capability and the desire to monetize a passion, and your need for financial security is relatively low.
If all those things are true, then the passion now path makes sense for you.
There's the independent path where your passion and your work don't have anything to do with one another.
I think that tends to be the default path of humans where like the world will do that to you.
But in my framework, there's a certain set of conditions where that's the right thing for you.
And my belief is that if you choose the independent path and you say to yourself my passion and my work are not going to be the same thing, then you're going to be more productive and content and fulfilled because you decided, as opposed to letting the world decide, that for you.
There's the experiment path. which is typically for people who don't know what their passion is.
Experiment just means open yourself up to things, try a bunch of stuff.
It could be trying things in different geographies.
I spent most of a year in Melbourne, by the way.
It could be trying different functions in one organization.
It could be trying business versus government versus nonprofit.
It could be learning a new language.
It's whatever.
It's kind of exposing yourself to as much as possible to look for that spark.
That's the experiment path.
There's the money path, which, you know, we all know the, well, you did strategy consulting.
So you knew the friends who went to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley like they.
They had to have tons of money and they just weren't going to be able to calm down until that happened.
And so if your need for financial security is that high, it may be the right thing for you to do to go on a money path.
And then the last one is the balanced path.
And that's what I did.
And the balanced path is you go through a regular career, hopefully you love it.
And it's about building capabilities and wealth and reputation and network so that 5 10 15, 20 years later you switch to the passion path and your probability of success is higher.
So that's what I did, right?
I did all my strategy consulting and running cell phone distribution companies.
And so then, when I turned over to the passion path 16 years ago, I had savings and I had capabilities and I had reputation and network, and it made my chances of success higher.
So I love this framework because I think everyone kind of fits somewhere.
Do you think that, like with the passion path as well, that could be like the, like the volunteer path?
I guess, like people who sacrifice, like their whole mission in life is to do good for others?
Is that like where that one kind of fits in?
Well, I think it's a lot of different things.
So first off I'll back up and say I've got a pretty decent data set on people going through their framework and choosing the five paths.
So I think I'm at like over 3000 people have taken my little online tool.
It takes like five minutes and they choose.
And what's beautiful about the results is that the top one is balanced and it's at like 26, and the bottom one is a passion now, but it's like 16.
And so, you know, there's five paths.
If the world were distributed equally, they would be 20% each. but they're like 16 to 26 or something like they're each of the five paths really has an audience so i feel really good about the definitions to your question though about the passion path yeah there's a lot going on there so there are you know a lot of uh artists want to do that path where you you know i've got a friend named roxanne and she just wasn't going to be satisfied with the universe if she wasn't making music like that was it she's going to make music and and she realized The probability of financial success is very low.
And so she structured her life to be able to live frugally.
But she lives this brilliant life.
She lives in America and she will fly to Spain for a summer and put a hat in the street and play music and make 300 euro on day one.
And day two, she's a tourist.
And day three, she puts a hat down and plays music and makes 200 euro.
And day four, she's a tourist.
And she's done that over and over and over again.
But she's staying in a youth hostel for 20 euro a night, not 200 or more.
So if you're going to follow an arts path at a young age, you might make it big financially, but you probably won't.
And so you've got to get your head around being fulfilled without being rich.
But there's all sorts of things on the path.
When I talk to these university students all the time and I'll find people who they're just completely in love with cars.
And if they get to sell cars for a living, they're just over the moon.
That's it.
All they want to do is just sell cars and drive cars and play with cars and talk about cars.
Like, okay.
There's a lot of jobs where you can think about cars all day.
So it's a broader path than people would think.
In the nonprofit, you hit that.
There's a lot of people that do that.
There's a lot of people drawn to public service that would be on the passion path.
A lot of people in teaching are drawn to it by a genuine passion.
So it could be a lot of things.
Yeah.
See, this is the thing about the passion path that I always say to people, because I did the independent path for a long time, where I was like balancing this podcast and I worked as a consultant and I definitely burnt out.
The thing with the passion path is, yeah, you're right.
You have to be okay to make no money for probably a long time slash ever.
And I've also found and I don't know if you found this as well do people who monetize their passion fall out of love with it for a little bit?
Or do you think that this path is really the one, that you just fall back in love with it time and time again?
I remember when the podcast became my full-time job.
You immediately love it less, because there's all this stuff wrapped up in financial security.
Have you found that in some of the interviews with some of the people you've spoken to?
Yes.
Yes, this is something I talk about in my university talks and in the book, that it's not unusual for a passion to dim when it becomes your livelihood.
That being said, I think there are variations in there.
And so the one I talk about a lot is painting.
It seems to happen a lot that when your passion is painting and you're bringing a vision of something beautiful in your mind to canvas with oil and then showing it to the world, you're just completely and utterly in love with it.
But when you're bringing someone else's vision uh to life on canvas with oil and you're getting paid for it and it has a deadline and they have critiques, it just sucks right.
It's just complete that you have to instantly hate it.
So painters, moving from doing it for love to doing it for money, I think has a pretty bad success rate.
And so like, that's the trick about the passion path is you got to, you know, two different thoughts.
One, you got to dig deep on the question of, do I really, really want to do this for a living?
You got to dig deep on that.
And the second thing to think about is the passion is something that typically lasts forever or decades, and it animates you.
It's kind of your reason for being.
I talk a lot about ikigai, which is a Japanese framework in the book.
And it's something that really gives you energy all the time.
And it can be distinguished from something that you really enjoy.
It can be distinguished from something that is pleasurable.
It can be distinguished from something you love, right?
It's something that is giving you energy and a driving force for hopefully ever.
So you got to dig deep on whether that's true.
I personally really relate to that.
People are always like, how can your passion be podcasting?
And I'm like, no, because since I was a kid, this is the medium that I loved.
I have these visceral memories, these very intense memories of listening to podcasts with my mom, listening to This American Life when I was a child, and being like this is amazing.
I love what they do with this.
And Yeah, it feels great that I found it so early.
What would you say to people who... Because this is my thought on this.
I feel like I have all these conversations, obviously, with people in their 20s.
A lot of people want to find their passion and their purpose as a means to fulfill them.
What would you say to people who are looking at their life and being like wait, I just don't have that.
I don't have it now.
Maybe I've never had anything like that.
Yeah, I'd say...
Three things.
If I can say, I've got to take notes now so I can remember all of my three things.
I'm going to talk about digging, breadth, and work.
So first, one of my favorite books for the last 10 years is Grit by Angela Duckworth.
And one of the things she talks about in there is that Passion is rarely, if ever, something you discover because you're sitting down and asking yourself the question what am I passionate about?
It just doesn't really work that way.
It tends to be a spark of something that gets you excited.
And then you start digging into it and you're like, oh, that's really interesting.
Oh, and you keep going and you keep going and you keep going.
So creating a passion in something tends to be a lot of work.
It tends to be digging and going deeper and putting time into it, putting energy into it, getting to know people into it, reading about it.
So passion is rarely a thunderstrike moment.
It's usually a process to figure that out.
So the first thing is That's my first suggestion is don't expect to find the passion by sitting there asking yourself, looking at the blue sky going, what am I passionate about?
You can do that.
And I've got a passion tree in my book to help you think about that.
But just bear in mind, it's probably going to take some work.
The second is, is breadth.
And it's this idea that it's.
There's an incredible breadth of things that a human being could be passionate about.
Podcast, Renaissance festivals, like this is going to be the weirdest thing you've ever heard.
I think I've just fell in love.
I think I'm passionate about analytical insight.
Meaning using math to solve a problem and coming up with something that no one else had come up with or that's hard to come up with.
I just love that.
And here's the example that's just the most boring thing you can imagine.
A long time ago, I built a supply curve and a demand curve for paraffin wax.
I had a Harvard MBA, and I'm making a lot of money.
And I was just jazzed by analytical insight.
So, Brett, you could be passionate about so many things.
And I mentioned cars and music.
I mean, it's really...
It's okay.
Like you can be passionate just about a lot of stuff.
So open yourself, open your mind.
And then the third thing, you know, work.
Yeah.
You might have to work at it to figure it out.
Yeah, which is, you know, I love that book Grit as well.
And a study that I always tell people about is that, more than intelligence, pure intelligence, more than emotional intelligence, more than anything, grit is the biggest predictor of success.
In passion, in intellectual pursuit, in money, in improving your skill.
They have done this huge study that looks at this and they are like what makes the best people the best?
Because Taylor Swift isn't the best vocalist.
And like.
There are certain athletes who don't actually have the best physique for their sport and yet they become incredibly successful because they just want to work for it.
So I love that you mentioned that book.
It's like definitely required reading if you like the podcast.
Yeah, I love that book.
Also, I love your Taylor Swift example because the one I use is Ed Sheeran.
If you listen to his music at 16, it's kind of awful.
And he just worked and worked and worked.
And now he's one of the biggest stars in the world.
Yeah.
And he's written so many songs.
And also, I feel like he talks a lot about how he doesn't have this face for commercial music.
And he kind of makes fun of himself.
And it's like yeah, but the work and the care and the love for it definitely comes through and makes people believe in what you're doing as well.
I want to shift gears.
We've talked about passion a lot, because I think that's often the path that a lot of people in their twenties care about.
But the one I'm particularly drawn to talking about here is the experiment path.
Now, am I, am I correct in saying this is the least popular in your research?
I think that is right.
I think I mean I could pull it up, but yeah, I think that is in it's in last place.
But you know, like I said, each of these paths really has an audience.
Yeah.
And so the experiment path, it's basically to kind of paraphrase what you said before.
This is like for people who are keen to just try different things and to be a woodworker one day, a tax accountant, the next maybe a birdwatcher.
I'm thinking about my uncle who definitely loves the experiment path.
Why do you think, firstly, do you think this is an important path for people to be on in their 20s?
And why do you think maybe people shy away from it?
Yeah, one thing you said was you felt drawn to experiment.
I think in my mind, the experiment path is it's a choice you make, and it typically is a choice you make because you don't know what your passion is and you're going to go find it.
And while you're going to find it, you're going to build skills.
You're going to meet new people.
You're going to see new places.
You're going to understand new industries, right?
And you're just going to go try stuff.
And I think it's a beautiful thing to do for people in their 20s.
And I'll tell you my favorite example, Matthew McConaughey, who roughly everyone in the world loves.
Yeah.
He's here in Austin where I am.
He did, this is a really neat segue for me and you.
So Matthew McConaughey is from Austin and he did his experiment path in Australia.
So when he was very young, like 18 years old, he went and spent a year in Australia.
It's in his biography called Greenlights.
And he did like six fundamentally different jobs in Australia, just completely different stuff.
Like, you know, law clerk and engine mechanic and lifeguard.
And I'm just making these things up.
And probably like fruit picking.
Yeah, it was just, he just did these completely different jobs.
And the point was to just sort of open your mind to all of the things that exist in this world.
And that's something I'd like to.
I'll plant this seed and maybe we'll have a separate conversation, or I need to write an article about this.
And this is something I feel really strongly about now, because I have a 17 year old daughter and she's applying to college now-ish, in the next, you know one two, three months.
And what the universities are telling her is convince us that you know what you're passionate about and that you're going to major in it, and that you're going to graduate and that you're going to get a job in that field.
And I just think that's such a disservice.
How the hell is a 17-year-old supposed to know that?
Some of them do, but I think most of them don't.
And so now there's this industry of consultants who are teaching 17 year olds how to pretend to universities that they know what they're passionate about.
It's awful.
And so I think what?
Because by definition, at that age you haven't seen, You don't know what strategy, consulting is right.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so many things in the world.
I like to look around me and think you know, somebody specializes in how to make monitors or ice machines.
I mean, like all these things.
And you don't know that yet.
You've got to go into the world and see all these things that are being done to find that spark of something you might love.
And so like insisting that at 17 you're supposed to know that, I think, is a real disservice to young people.
It's something I hear about all the time where it's like what you're meant to decide.
Like your brain is still a decade away from maturation.
You haven't had any kind of really truly independent experiences.
You've probably only seen 0.002% of the world.
And they're like, cool, lock yourself into this path, strap yourself in.
And if you're not happy...
Well, quitting that, that's a sign of failure.
That's a sign that you don't have a willingness or you don't have grit or you don't have discipline.
And my sister is also 17 and I was talking to her about it and I was like my best advice is to just choose whatever you care about the most right now and then just take as many electives as possible, travel as much as possible.
Like i went to university, i did economics and politics.
I really do not talk about that now, but it was just the experience of being around like-minded people who cared about things that also really like pushed me to that point.
This kind of segues into my next question, which is why do you think people feel such a pressure again to choose something, to say this is who I am and to maybe never walk away from it?
Is that something that you've seen a lot of people do maybe in later decades of their life?
Sure.
So just to wrap on that last question of the experiment path, I think it's much better advice to do what Matthew McConaughey did.
Go to Australia and do six jobs for a year.
People almost call it a gap year.
Go expose yourself to the world, because you might find something else that you can be passionate about.
You might find your passion.
You might just You might fall in love.
I mean, whatever you got to get your get out there.
Right.
Yeah.
You know.
So I'm a big fan of exposing yourself to the world, doing a gap year, all that kind of thing, as opposed to pretending that you know what you're passionate about.
So why do people feel pressured to declare their passion early on?
So from a university point of view, there is this really understandable but ultimately sad rationale.
So the universities in the United States, and it's probably not different in Australia, but I don't know.
I know it's true here.
They're very focused on rising up in the rankings.
You know, like Forbes and U.S.
News and World Report, these magazines will rank universities.
And those rankings are based on metrics.
And the metrics include things like graduation rate or like percentage of people I don't wanna say kids people who graduate in four or five years.
Percentage of people who have a job within three months after graduation.
Average starting salary.
And it turns out for at least the best universities.
If you pick those people who are 17 years old and they do know what they're passionate about they do better on those metrics, right.
They're more likely to graduate because they're studying something they like.
They're more likely to get a job because they're passionate about it.
And they're more likely to get paid well down the line because they're doing something they're passionate about.
So, from a good university point of view, you're creating this incentive for people to lie to you because you really want those people right.
You want those 17-year-olds who know exactly what they want.
That's who you want because they're going to drive your numbers up.
So it's this really sort of perverse incentive that that's become the predominant message to very young people.
You got to do what you're passionate about and you don't.
I think telling someone that their work and their passion has to be the same thing is a mistake, because it's not true.
For me, I'm running a bunch of businesses.
I would probably be failing if I tried to do that at 20 years old.
I had to do 20 years of, and it wasn't paying dues.
I loved what I was doing, but I learned so much and I got financial security so that I started to follow my passion.
I had a much higher probability of success because I had all these capabilities and I had the ability to fund scaling up some of my companies.
So I think telling 20 somethings you should work at what you're passionate about now, I think is a mistake.
I think that's true for 20% of them.
I'm looking at it now.
Literally you have the data.
I'm looking at it right here.
Yeah.
And additionally, I just think that it's like, I always say this to people.
Firstly, I loved what you just told me about the universities.
I had no idea that that was the case.
But anytime someone says you should be doing this, know that the should benefits them.
If someone is so hell-bent on getting you to do something a certain way, there's an ulterior motive, always.
And secondly, like I get all of these questions from people being like I don't know what I want to do with my life,
You have so much time to figure it out.
Like you genuinely do.
I love surrounding myself with examples of people who just pivot and shift later in life and who just do really cool things.
And it's like all it's this hindsight, right?
All of these little All these little things like actually contribute to this final goal.
So we are going to take a short break here.
But when we return, I do want to talk about what occurs when people are pursuing their ideal career path, and how you can determine it and why again, people feel so much pressure to have it all figured out.
So stay with us.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast What Happened in Nashville tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight, and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you.
From smartless media, campsite media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist.
And me, Rory Scovel comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city?
And meet some memorable antiheroes.
There are thousands of angry, horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How could I not follow him?
Honestly, I gotta follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.
Two brothers, one devout household, two radically different paths.
Gabe Ortiz became one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in Texas.
32 years total law enforcement experience.
But his brother Larry, he stayed behind and built an entirely different legacy.
He was the head of this gang, and nobody was going to tell him what to do.
You're going to push that line for the cause took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry is murdered, Gabe is forced to confront the past he tried to leave behind and uncover secrets he never saw coming.
My dad had a whole other life that we never knew about.
Like, my mom started screaming my dad's name, and I just heard one gunshot.
The Brothers Ortiz is a gripping true story about faith, family and how two lives can drift so far apart and collide in the most devastating way.
Listen to The Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
I just fell and started screaming.
If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way.
I said things to y'all 22 times.
The police, right?
But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of?
This dude is the devil.
He's a snake.
He'll hurt you.
I got you, I got you, I got you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends Untouchable.
Detective Roger Golubsky spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing Black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence.
This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Golubsky, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to The Girlfriends Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
But there was no link.
There was no business plan.
It's not his fault.
I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet.
My name is Evan Ratliff.
I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO, Sam Aldman
There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.
I got to thinking, could I be that one person?
I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.
This season on Shell Game.
I'm trying to build a real company with a real product, run by fake people.
Oh, hey, Evan.
Good to have you join us.
I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses.
Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is my next big line of questioning for you.
So, just as a little revision for people who we did talk about it right at the top of the episode, the five career paths are independent money passion, experiment and balanced.
How do people identify which one of these is right for them right now?
Is there like a feeling?
Is there a state of mind, a state of flow that they can kind of look out for?
Well, I think choosing one of the five paths is about this framework that I have in my book.
It sounds complicated, but it's a four by three matrix.
But just to explore those two axes for a second, the Y axis is, can I monetize a passion?
And I've got four answers to that.
Yes, now.
Yes, later.
I don't know, which typically means I don't know what my passion is.
And no, I cannot monetize the passion.
And I like to joke that if your only passion is smoking pot and playing video games, the answer might be no.
And then I've got this professor, friend of mine, who says you can monetize both smoking pot and playing video games.
I was going to say.
I know it's crazy these days.
Being in the pot business and being in a video game business, but smoking pot and playing video games, that's really hard to monetize.
And then the X axis is need for financial security, high, medium, low.
And I've got in the tool and in the book.
There's like these 10 questions and you score them one to 10 and you add it up and it tells you whether you're high, medium or low.
And so then the five paths are plotted on that matrix.
So you figure out which square you're in, and it will say, this is the right path for you.
And for most of them, there's a choice of one or two.
And then it really narrows it down.
A couple of easy examples.
If the answer to the question can I monetize a passion?
If the answer is yes, now and your need for financial security is low, well then the answer is the passion passed.
Why would you not?
If you have the capability and the desire to monetize a passion now and you're not worried about money, go for it.
Conversely, if your need for financial security is high and like you're just, you're not going to be comfortable until you got a financial cushion that is going to push you toward the money path.
If you don't know what your passion is, that's going to push you to the experiment path.
And so you go through the framework and it'll help you pick one of the five.
See, I like this.
This is the kind of stuff that my mind really enjoys is frameworks, data, and the evidence.
And I feel like that's what a lot of people are looking for is like I don't need to know exactly what I'm going to do, but I do want to know what kind of general steps I should take.
I do have a question about the people who are really focused on the money path.
Is there some maybe personality aspect or maybe cultural theme that you've noticed for the people who are quite focused on gaining financial security or finding a lot of financial success in their work?
Yeah, I think it's not a personality type from a psychology point of view.
It's not like a big five thing or an MBTI thing.
I think it's a family history thing.
So I'll tell you the exemplar I use, who's a guy I respect a lot.
He's a podcaster now.
His name is Scott Galloway.
Have you heard of Scott Galloway?
You know what?
I feel like I have.
He's a big influencer and he was a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.
Very, very popular.
And he's my exemplar for the money path.
And I'll tell you how he got there.
How he got there is three things.
One is he grew up very poor.
And he had this experience.
And he was in the northern part of the U.S.
I don't remember if it's Wisconsin or Michigan or whatever.
One of those places where it gets cold.
It doesn't really get cold here in Texas and he, he lost his, his uh coat.
And he was afraid to tell his mother that he lost his coat because he knew that the 30 to replace it was would be really painful.
She didn't tell her, so then he came home from school one day and it's you know 20 degrees outside and he's shivering and red and his mother's like Where's your coat, man?
And he had to say that he lost it.
And that kind of scarred him a little bit.
And then fast forward, you know, 15 years, he was in his twenties. he was doing well but his mother got cancer and there were some treatments that they could have tried if they had money and they didn't and that scarred him again and so he decided he had to be rich and so he went into investment banking and he went to morgan stanley and he did the get rich thing um and i you know one could argue see he wasn't on the balance path Because in the balance path, you may be building wealth, but it's with an eye towards switching to the passion path later.
What he did, though, is he got so wealthy that he got off of the money path.
And now I think he's on the passion path.
He's a podcaster and an influencer, and he's trying to do some good for the world.
But he was on the money path because that was not the goal.
He kind of figured that out later.
And I thought it's really important for people on the money path is in my opinion, there's two different views on high wealth.
One view is more is better.
And the other view is enough is enough.
And I'm very convinced and I should do this survey somehow that the more is better people are much less happy than the enough is enough people.
Because the more is better people, they never stop from the money path.
They keep going.
They're like hamsters on a wheel.
They just can't get off.
The enough is enough people, they can get off of the money path.
Yeah.
And they can switch to the passion path when they think okay, I mean, like Scott Galloway's net worth is over 100 million.
You can't spend that much money.
You have to wake up and try to spend that much money.
So he's an enough is enough person.
So now he's doing stuff that he thinks is good for the world.
You know how you mentioned that you want to do a study on this.
Do you know the term the hedonic treadmill?
Yeah, that's like the rat in the wheel is.
You buy something new and six months later, or six weeks later, it doesn't bring you happiness anymore.
It's just normal.
And they've done all these studies.
Well, they haven't done a lot.
But there's a particularly famous one about people who win the lottery and people who get paralyzed.
That I've talked about on the podcast before.
And you would expect, like, if I make all this money, my life is going to change.
But then, of course, it actually goes back to a relatively stable level.
And I would assume that people who are like the more more, more people – their only hit is coming from gaining wealth, and so they're on this like hedonic treadmill of like okay, when I get here I'll be happy, and they think that they're an enough is enough person, but they're not.
They are actually a more is more person.
Be so interesting to see, like the distinction between, like the psychological drivers behind these people and like yeah, because I
Yeah, it would be fascinating to disaggregate wealthy people into more is better and enough is enough and then test that against their happiness and their fulfillment and their productivity and their relationships with friends and family and their physical health.
Because I would bet that the enough is enough people score better on a lot of life outcomes than the more is better people.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Totally, because it's also like they can relax at some stage and they can give back.
And we know that generosity and pro-social spending is like super empowering, which kind of brings me to this next question that I have, which is specifically for people in their 20s.
How do you recommend we handle comparison within our career path?
So, seeing people make more money than us, seeing people know what their passion is, seeing people being able to monetize their passion,
How do we how do we manage that?
You have to just not do it, right?
You have to not do it.
Social comparison is just useless.
And so I'll give you two kind of thoughts.
One is a good friend of mine is a professor of business strategy at Texas A&M.
And his saying that he says all the time is, today is a good day to be better than I was yesterday.
He just says it all the time.
And then I've got a buddy.
He's one of the best full contact jousters in the world.
It's his thing, right?
It's his passion.
And he says, you know, I'm not competing with anyone.
I'm competing to be better than I was yesterday.
And so then here's what might be a tip.
It comes from Atomic Habits by James Clear.
And it's this mathematical reality that 1.0 raised to the 365th power is 1.0.
1.01.
So 1% more raised to the 365th power is 37%.
37 versus one.
So if you can get 1% better every day, you're going to be 37 times better at the end of the year.
And maybe 1% every day is too much, but get 1% better every month or every quarter or every year.
And that's all you really need to do.
Know, screw what everybody else is doing, get one percent better.
And i i'm sure you've seen that work.
I've seen that work like i'm running a half marathon on the weekend.
I couldn't run three k's when i first at the start of the year and it's just also committing to being Slow and steady and understanding.
And if you're a frequent listener of the podcast, you will know this analogy.
Comparison is not a ladder.
It is a circle.
We often assume that it's like oh, there's someone who's better than me, and there's someone who's better than them.
And there's someone at the very top who has everything.
Actually, you're comparing yourself to Jill, who's comparing herself to Joe, who's comparing herself himself, to Michael, who's comparing himself to you.
Every single person has something that someone else does not have.
And that person has something that you don't have.
And so understanding that, like you, are comparing based on a figment of your insecurity is you imagine their life as being amazing, because you aren't sure that your life is.
That was like the real key that unlocked it for me, where I was like okay, this is me just trying to sabotage me, using this person as like an excuse.
I love it.
I love what you're saying because this is all inside of you, right?
So you're better at running a half marathon this month than you were last month.
And I can see by the smile on your face you're taking pride in getting better at your goal of a half marathon.
You could be going, look at this person who can run a marathon every week.
They're so cool and I'm so bad, right?
I'm so envious because they're awesome.
That would be completely useless to you.
And think about how much happier you are as a human because your mindset is I'm better than I was last month, and that's great.
And you know what?
I'm going to get better next month too.
And I'm going to achieve this goal.
Like that's a really positive and productive mindset.
Speaking of advice, we have one, well, I have one final question for you.
We ask every single listener this question, which is what is one thing you wish you had known in your 20s?
One piece of advice that has nothing to do with what we talked about today.
Take care of your body.
And I'm going to give you the mathematical reason to take care of your body.
So there's this idea of maximum heart rate, which is 220 minus your age.
So if you're the math is easy for 20 years old, your maximum heart rate is 200.
So then there's all these correlations that are about to happen.
If you can get your heart rate to 60 of maximum, at least 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week.
That's the independent variable and you can do that on anything but 60 percent of maximum heart rate, which would be 120 beats per minute if you're 20 years old.
At least 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week.
Here come the correlations negatively correlated with heart disease, which is the number one killer.
Negatively correlated with cancer, which is the number two killer.
Negatively correlated with anxiety, depression and suicide attempts.
Positively correlated with longevity happiness IQ, sex appeal.
It's negatively correlated with all the worst things and positively correlated with all the best things.
I mean, think about happiness, longevity, and IQ.
What the hell else do you want?
And so when I make this impassioned plea to students, I'm like there is not a better case for a human being to do anything in this life than that case I just made you.
It is not possible to make a better case than that.
So please find that thing that you can do with your body.
And at my age, a brisk walk will do it, right?
Yeah.
Find that thing.
It might be tennis or swimming or weightlifting or it could do anything, right?
Whatever it is, find that thing.
Well, I love that advice.
I think that's like, no one's ever given it before either.
So that's always a good thing.
I love it.
And I just want to thank you again for coming on.
This conversation has honestly been so fun for me, which is always like a good way to end interviews.
And I just love what you're putting out into the world.
So yeah, I want to say a big thank you.
Where can people find you as well?
They can find me at georgeampling.com.
Cool.
And I'm going to leave a link in the description for George's book.
I know a lot of psychology students do listen to the podcast.
If you are interested in organizational psychology specifically, I think this is a good companion, especially if you want to practice, and you want to practice with people who are in emerging adulthood.
Great, great example of a book for that.
So again, George, thank you so much.
And thank you to everyone who has listened this far.
If you have made it this far, leave in the comment below what you think your current career path is.
Is it independent, money, passion, experiment or balanced?
Let's see if we can like match George's numbers here and match his experience. his statistics.
As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, leave a five-star review.
Make sure you are following along and following us on Instagram at That Psychology Podcast.
It's December guest month on the podcast, so we have some cool other guests coming in.
Make sure that you are following us to see who they are.
And until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself, and we will talk very soon.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
Who catfishes a city?
Is it even safe to snort human remains?
Is that the plot of Footloose?
I'm comedian Rory Scovel and I'm here to tell you Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast What Happened in Nashville tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to What Happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him.
Gabe Ortiz is a cop.
His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
He was the head of this gang.
You going to push that line for the cause?
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle a dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew.
Listen to The Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
My sister was shot 22 times.
A police officer, right?
But what do you do when the monster is the man in blue?
This dude is the devil.
He'll hurt you.
This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law until we came together to take him down.
I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
I got you, I got you, I got you.
Listen to The Girlfriends Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
Hi, Kyle.
Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan?
Just one page as a Google doc and send me the link.
Thanks.
Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you.
Here's the link.
But there was no link.
There was no business plan.
I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet.
I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age.
Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people.
Check out the second season of my podcast shell game on the I heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an I heart podcast guaranteed human.
