Reaching the end of one road, Igor and Frank summarize and philosophize the story thus far and try to answer a few fundamental questions. Which isn’t always so easy. This conversation was recorded March 20, 2023
Transcript
Frank Ladies and gentlemen, episode 5 of Changing Careers with the good man Igor over in Brazil.
Igor Good afternoon, Igor. How are you today?
Frank Good afternoon, Frank. I’m really good. Happy to be talking to you again.
Igor The feeling is mutual. The feeling is mutual. I say this honestly because I find the story and the experiences that you’ve been sharing really interesting. And I’m just a little bit older than you, but I find myself still…
Frank Anyway, it doesn’t matter.
Igor It’s a good exercise. I was listening to a podcast episode maybe two or three months ago and I will send you so you can check that out. The guy wrote a book and the core message of the book… I didn’t read the book yet, but the core message is that you should write. You should kind of keep a list of your experience so you can remember those experiences and you can see more purpose in your life. And I never did that, of course, but I think those talks we have been doing, it’s been very useful in this sense as well because I’m remembering and I think, oh, actually my life was very good. So it’s a good exercise.
Frank It is. I have here my little black book.
Igor Oh, wow. Cool. That’s a good storyteller you had.
Frank Volume four or five. And this is what I say to my wife. I empty my brain and I just look for everything. It’s more work related, nothing really personal, but it’s work related. So and I find, yes, the simple process of writing one’s thoughts is so important. So because A, it gets it onto paper. It’s something tactile, you can touch it. And I have this special book, it’s actually really cheap. I think it’s under, what’s that, two euros fifty for one of these books, about 100 pages. Something special, but I’m terrified that the store that sells these little black books will actually no longer sell them. Because it has to be this kind of book. So I’m actually thinking that maybe I would just sort of buy a truckload of them and keep them stored somewhere in my office. When one is finished, I think automatically go to the next one. But writing and thinking and just journaling is such an enriching answer. So I can only recommend.
Igor And I’m sorry, I promise I will let you go to the team, but just a parenthesis. You showed me a notebook which you handwrite. And have you thought like how crazy this technology of writing is resilient? Because it was with us like maybe thousands of years before Christ. And this is still valuable today. I think this is the only technology, maybe besides fire, that we keep with us. It is still important in our daily life. Because people still go to nature, they go camping and do wild stuff, but they do it for fun. Writing is actually a very useful thing, still a very useful thing, even with all those technologies. That’s something I wonder sometimes.
Frank You have hit a very, very sore point and a very valid point. I can tell you that. So it’s 7 p.m. after 7 p.m. And I spent a lot of the afternoon processing questions with this ChatGBT thing, which all the world is talking about. Now, I’ve sort of used it as a thinking pad. I’ll pluck in the question, and it throws me out a couple of answers. And I can say they are good answers or bad answers. And I took the recording of copying all of this onto a Word document. And then this afternoon, probably about two hours ago, I started doing some rework and I got the message that the system has crashed.
Igor Oh, wow.
Frank And that really brings home the point that we can have all of this new fangled technology.
You can think about what you want. But the only way this book of mine is going to get destroyed is if this house goes up in flames.
Igor Yes.
Frank And even then, I still have a brain and I still sometimes use it when I have memories and I have experiences. And this is the seamless introduction to you. I have all of these experiences and, you know, they will always be with me. They may not be at the forefront of my brain, but they will sort of go back into some little box that’s stored in the brain. But there you are. You cannot forget these. And then we have the simple art of storytelling where people who are interested and curious about other people, and you can open a whole can of words there, we are curious about the lives of other people. And we want to know what they did and why they did it. We share this common experience. So while we are chatting here, you are probably thinking of things that you might have forgotten. And then a little prompt from me or a question or something happens and it triggers off this thinking and the response. And then the ability to express it in a fascinating, entertaining, engaging way. You could actually say, why the hell do we need all of this technology when in actual fact, the most intelligent thing that’s running around on this planet is the human being? And maybe we should actually focus on that. Yes, we can use the technology because it’d be a bit expensive to commute back and forth between Eastern France and Curitiba. I couldn’t handle that, but OK, so we use the technology there. But people, experiences, thinking, writing, living, the act of living a wholesome, meaningful life. I think that’s the future. The rest is just games and lots of people earning lots of money in the process.
So where are we? We were in Europe. We were in Serbia. You were exploring Europe in a manner of not the way many tourists would do it. You sort of jumped to high buildings and high-level areas and met lots of people. We had a great time. We got into one or two scrapes. And then it was time to think about returning back to the Western Hemisphere. And at the close of the last episode, you said something about a new dairy experience. Igor, the word is yours. What happened?
Igor Yeah, so by the time I was in Italy, which I told the story last episode, I was already thinking about finishing my trip in Europe because I was feeling lonely because I would meet people, but those people would be like, I would just meet them in a very short period. And I would see that they were living their lives and doing their stuff. And I was kind of lost in life. And also I was feeling the need to build something to myself and not being just a traveller. Like I don’t have anything against people who choose to travel and just travel, but I wanted, and I want to build something meaningful in my life.
So, I went back to Brazil. So I did a short trip in Portugal to run because at the time I was running a lot. I ran there and I came back to Brazil. And my plan when I decided to come back to Brazil was to study something totally different from dairy technology because the career opportunities in dairy technologies were and still are very limited in terms of what you can do.
Usually, just to let you know, in Brazil, at least when you study dairy technology, probably you go to live in a very small town because all the big factories are in small towns. You’re going to deal with a very limited number of people and your job will be to keep the productions in high quality and high productivity. So, it seems very boring, and it is boring. So at the time I didn’t want to live this kind of life and I was starting to think what I would do. I had many, many, many options in my mind at that time. But when I arrived in Brazil, it was happening a fair, like a dairy fair in the town where I lived and I studied. It’s a very important fair to this industry of dairy. And I went there just to meet my old colleagues, my old teachers and just to hang out. And I met a teacher who introduced me to a Brazilian guy, which at the time had a cheese factory in Boston, United States. So, we built some connections in the fair. He liked me and he invited me to work in his farm in the United States because I already had the visa. And he said, oh, come and work with me. Yeah, I don’t remember.
He would pay me something good, but not very good. But I didn’t know what to do. So I went with him to Boston and I spent one month there and didn’t work for a very… I’m telling the story now, it’s funny, but at the time I was very concerned because he was a Brazilian guy, very… How can… What’s the right word? Very… He didn’t mind to do wrong stuff. He wasn’t a criminal, but he always looked and thought about ways to do things in the correct manner to save money, don’t pay taxes and things like that.
Frank If I can interrupt you, I came across a term over the weekend. I’m going to probably totally mispronounce it. I spoke to Ismar about it this afternoon. Does that match the term?
Igor Yes, it’s like in English would be like the Brazilian’s manner. Yeah, the Brazilian’s little manner of doing things.
Frank Yeah, it’s very corrupt at the end of the day. So I think the word you’re looking for is corruption.
Igor Yeah, but in Brazil you have a word for that. It’s like someone who thinks he’s smarter than everyone. He’s not… He’s corrupt at the end of the day, but it’s almost funny the way those people are. I’m using Google Translate now and the Google Translate term is rascal. I don’t know this word, rascal.
Frank A rascal.
Igor A rascal, yeah.
Frank Yeah, you could do, but usually in my understanding, a rascal is usually a young boy who just gets up to a lot of mischief.
Igor Yeah, maybe.
Frank But I think in the business, in the adult business world, this person just tries some highly creative solutions to problems that he has.
Igor Yes, he’s a creative person. Yeah, just to give some context about this guy. He was like maybe 50 years old. He wasn’t young. Just to give some context, he had been living for 31 years in the United States and he didn’t speak English. That’s how smart this guy was. I still don’t know how, but he ended up owning a cheese factory in the United States without speaking English. So that’s him.
Frank That is quite a feat because you have to at least submit some form of documentation to set up your company. You have to speak with your suppliers. You have to speak with your customers. Okay.
Igor Yeah, it’s still a great feat, but what happened is that Boston has the biggest Brazilian community outside Brazil. So he had friends, he had clients, but all Brazilians. And his wife helped him with the paperwork. But this is still surprising. Like 31 years, there’s plenty of opportunity. But anyway, I went there and it was very crazy because I spent one month there. So my job was to create a very specific kind of cheese because all of the customers of this guy were Brazilians. And we have a very popular cheese here in Brazil that you only will find in Brazil. It’s Cualho. The name doesn’t matter, but it’s a very specific cheese here in Brazil. And he wanted to produce this cheese there because the Brazilians customers were asking for this kind of cheese. And no one would produce because it’s a little bit difficult, it’s a little bit expensive, et cetera, et cetera. And my job was to make this kind of cheese.
Frank And you of course have lots of experience in cheese making.
Igor Yeah, actually not in cheese making because so far, I have worked in dairy farms. So I had experience farming cows and things like that. But I could remember most of the things like I had books. It was easy and I made a lot of cheese, this kind of cheese there. This kind of cheese and butter as well, just out of curiosity. That was my job. But this guy, he would do everything wrong legally speaking about the factory. And I was started to be very concerned about my visa situation because three or four times in one month, like in the last week I was there, which I decided to stop working to this guy. We received three visits from the federal, I don’t know which the government department, but like the federal guys inspected the factory. So they would inspect the factory and we received three visits in one week. And we had to hide equipment, hide products. It was very dangerous stuff. So I started to be very concerned about my situation because I thought, oh, if they get me here, I don’t know. Like the factory is not mine, but maybe I will not be able to come back to United States if I want. Maybe my name will be dirty and those kinds of things. So I told him that I didn’t want to work anymore for him. He was fine as well because we wouldn’t get along very well at the end of the day.
Then I came back to Brazil, and I was completely lost in terms of what I wanted to do. And on that time, a friend of mine who already had invited me to work with his agency here where I live today, he invited me again and he said, oh, come here. I don’t have much money to pay you because the agency was very small. But if you can come here and work with us and maybe help us figure out ways to make the business grow. And I always like to write a lot. And so, I had been always a good writer because I just liked to read and write. So, I started doing freelance jobs for writing and working for this agency from my friend. And, that’s how I stepped into marketing and it was very unpredictable.
I didn’t expect and I just went because I had literally nothing to do. I didn’t want to travel more. I didn’t want to work with dairy. I wanted to study something, but I didn’t know what. So that’s how I landed on the marketing ecosystem.
Frank Okay, right. Not an easy picture to unpick here, but let’s start. So how long, how many months or actually years, how long were you actually on the road for? You left Brazil to go to Becky. You went to Canada. You went to Europe. That was seven months. So that’s 18. So you must have been away probably just under two years.
Igor Yes, from Brazil. Yes. It was actually like the timeline. I went to the United States. I spent one year, exactly one year. I went back to Brazil and spent one month here. Then I went to the United States. No, Canada. I’m sorry. So I spent seven months in Canada plus seven months in Europe. Then I came back to Brazil and I spent one month again here before going to Boston. So 12 plus 14 plus one is 27 months. So just over three years you were around. Okay. That’s more than one month in between all of this.
Frank How old when you went to California and how old when you came back to Brazil from Boston?
Igor So I went to California. I was 21. And when I came back, I think I was 25, maybe 24, maybe 25.
Frank Okay. All right. So if you sort of look at all of this. So you went to California and I think we can all safely say that you were incredibly, incredibly lucky to have landed on the farm run by Becky and her family, because I think that really gave you a good launching. That was serendipity at its best. You went to Canada. It was not the positive experience worldwide, but it was a positive experience in your own personal development, because you started your fitness running or you did your 100 mile run, etc, etc. And then you went to Europe, and this is where it gets interesting, because you used social media to rally the forces in order to find real life people that you could find in beds to sleep on.
That was basically your problem. You just didn’t have any way to stay. So, we used social media to find somebody and again, serendipity played an enormous role here. And you met the Parkour crowd because you were in Parkour.
You had a couple of interesting adventures that put you to Germany. So again, you met some good people, some interesting people, shall we say it diplomatically. And then you sort of started to feel lonely. Interesting word in all of this context. And then you came back to Brazil and you met this interesting character with his interesting farm in Boston. And there are two things that come to mind. You have a lot of experience. Had you actually learnt something in the two years you were working and doing all of these experiences?
Because maybe you were also lucky in the fact that this Brazilian cheese maker saw something in you and said, wow, this is a person that has not enough experience, a life experience. And I can use him for my purposes as long as it lasts, because I know that deep down I’m not a good, honest businessman in Massachusetts. And that the Food and Drug Administration paid him three visits in one week. It would be interesting to know he still got his factory, but that’s a different story.
So I’m looking at words. What words am I looking at? I’m looking at experience. I’m looking at people. In the chat before we went on air, we talked about curiosity, being prepared for spontaneity and pulling the grip cord if it doesn’t work. There’s a picture here, but I don’t quite see it. Can you clarify it for me?
Igor Well, I think something that really was really important in all those experiences was the fact of me being open to the experience was very important. Because even before travelling, I can remember as a kid, not as a kid, but as a teenager when I started to deal with parkour. Now, it’s totally different, but at the time I was practicing, there are two sentences in French, because parkour originates in French. That kind of sums up. I’m shy to try to speak, them in French, so I use English. So, the first one is like, “be strong, to be useful.” That’s the first sentence.
The other one is like, “be and last”.
So those are the core sentences of parkour, old school parkour. Which means that everyone who grew up in this environment, seeked, to be extremely strong and resilient. Really crazy stuff. We would train from 10pm to 8am the next day without stop. People would get sick, throw up. It was crazy things. Our goal was to be strong, a strong person. Physically speaking and emotionally speaking. So this phase of my life kind of built on me not only the physical capabilities, but the philosophy of enduring anything. So in all those experiences, I was, and I think I’m still like that, I hope at least, very confident that I will be able to deal with anything that happened with me. So I was always very open to those experiences.
And along the way I have met people who wasn’t like that. Maybe because they didn’t experience parkour as I did. I don’t know the reasons, but they were very close to the experience because they were afraid, maybe they were lazy, I don’t know. But this openness to the experience I think made me go through all those things. And not only have fun and experience life as it has to be experienced, but also to learn. So I think this, I don’t know how to frame the phrase, but being open to experience, that’s something that was always with me. And if I hadn’t these characteristics, probably 90% of those stories wouldn’t exist. Because for example, when I was in France, in Paris, I was very comfortable, but I seek to do volunteer. When I was doing volunteer, I was thinking the next experience and I was running. So before going to Brazil, I went to Portugal to run 100 miles. And again, I hadn’t to do that. I was just open to the experience. I
Frank It’s an interesting thought. I’m going to provoke you here for a minute. There is, of course, when you were on your travels, you were, of course, extremely light. You basically didn’t have much more with you than what you could carry on your shoulders.
Igor No, I just had a backpack.
Frank Exactly. Yeah. And of course, if you compare that image of you then to what you have now, the question is, as you grow older and as you accumulate stuff, whether it’s good stuff or not, it’s neither here or there, but as you accumulate stuff and a house or an apartment or furniture and all of this thing, can you still be mentally fit and open to new experiences? The reason being you have more to lose or at least you think you have more to lose and then you become more risk-inverse unless, of course, you are self-employed and maybe that’s the link to other things. But if I look at some of the people that I deal with on a daily basis, they are afraid of doing something because they could lose what they have built up over a number of years. So, it’s the fear of losing.
So how would you make this transit, this comparison between how you were then with literally a backpack and nothing more to where you are now and still being open to experiences as you have and will show when you build your own country?
Igor Yes. Well, first of all, I’m still very minimalist, so I don’t have that much stuff.
Frank And I think that’s my theory. Of course, I don’t know, and maybe each person, it’s very unique how this relation to things are formed. But my theory is that people feel very attached to things because they see themselves through those things. So, they identify themselves with those things.
So, to be more specific, thinking rationally about that, if it was a case of risk like economic risk, financial risk, rich people wouldn’t be attached to anything because rich people can buy everything anytime, right?
But that’s not the case. Rich people, most of the times, are the most attached people to things. So, I don’t think that financial or economic risk has a play on that unless you are very poor, of course. So, it makes sense to be attached to things, but most of the case, it’s not.
So my theory is that when you have a car in Brazil and Latin America in general, people relate a lot with cars, men, like male people. A car is a status symbol, and it’s very clear. There is no intention to hide this. Everyone wants to have a specific kind of car because it’s a status thing. So when you have a car, I’m using car as an example just to like the dead kiss matters. When you have a car, actually, and you don’t want to open yourself to experience because you feel losing that car, I don’t think people fear losing the economic value of this car. I think they fear losing this part of themselves because I’m not this kind of person, but I know and I’m sure you know as well that, oh, I am the guy who has a Ferrari. I am the guy who has this beautiful house. I am the guy who has this artwork of my house.
This makes part of my personality, and that’s something I, for many reasons, I never related myself to things. I always related myself to personal characteristics. So, I always, now I deal with that better. After therapy and like the fact of growing up, you realize a lot of things. But when I was young, I really loved to have physical accomplishments because it was part of my personality.
So Igor was the guy who could jump higher. Igor was the guy who could do a flip. Igor was the guy who ran 100 miles. So, I think it’s like the relation to things, not the risk of losing the things that play a role in this kind of fear people have. And this happens through job as well. So when I sold my company, something I had to do a lot, that I wouldn’t be more a businessman. So it wasn’t so easy in this part because it was part of my personality.
So who was Igor if not a businessman? So it took some time to understand how it goes on my brain.
Frank The magic word in all of this is status. As you accumulate physical and financial wealth, your perceived status increases. People say the man has achieved something because it’s physical. You can see it. Whereas the mental achievements, the ability to run 100 miles, 160 kilometres, there might be a newspaper article about it, there might be a couple of pictures. But you don’t see it. It’s nothing tactile.
Igor And even like friends, you know, because at that time I always thought that my status among my friends was based on those accomplishments. So, I always wanted to keep more accomplishments. So I would keep my status, you know.
Frank Without actually knowing how the story unfolds later, but there seems to be almost a contradiction in that your personal values of status being minimalist, of being who you are and not what you have, almost contradicts any job in marketing because marketing actually fuels status.
You tell companies to do this so that they can sell more products, whether they are consumer products or business to business or whatever, but you are this minimalist person telling companies to do something that you don’t actually will sell all of them. We’ll keep that thought for later. It’s an interesting contradiction.
The guiding principle in all of these stories that you’ve said, the guiding principle for me has been that of people. And as we progress into an increasingly technological environment, we seem to be losing sight of the fact that people are pretty, pretty important. And that we’re talking about artificial intelligence and this image of robots dominating society as its science fiction books is becoming more and more prevalent.
You yourself have posted on LinkedIn several comments about the importance of forcing yourself, not forcing yourself, but actively approaching people to build relationships, to interact with people, not to interact with technology, but to interact with people and to be curious. I heard a sentence somewhere, “I am fascinated by the people I don’t know yet.”
I can’t remember where I found it or where it was, but let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about people and what you learned about the two and a half years, the two years that we spent running around the world, literally running around the world. How would you sum up your experience with people so that whoever is listening can say,
Igor yeah, that’s pretty good. I could do that as well. Yes. And it’s important to say that at the time I had no idea about those stuffs. So everything I have been talking, I realized like maybe a few years ago, and I am still realizing it’s like that because I like to point that out because when we tell those kinds of things, it seems like everything is very obvious and everything is black and white from the beginning, but I believe it’s a process and understanding it’s a process makes things very easy because when you have the expectations to have everything figured out without a process, you tend to be unhappy. So every time I’m going to tell something regarding lessons, I like to say, oh, it’s a process. It’s not something that just happened to me. And well, I think, yes, everything I told was related to people. And I think that it’s hard to experience anything without like I think everything we experience life is just possible to experience through people, even if you don’t know that, because I can’t like if you do exercise and I’m sure there are some someone wrote about that, some philosopher, but it’s hard to imagine it. Like if you live alone, like if there is only you in the planet, like what motivations, besides the physical one, the physiological ones, would you have to experience anything?
What would be the motivation? So if I want to climb a mountain, I want to like maybe go with someone to experience this of someone or I want to go. So to tell someone there is a very that’s a very cool documentary that it’s about climbing. The name is Free Solo. Like it’s like one of the best documentaries ever because the story itself is fascinating. It’s about one guy who climbed an unbelievable rock in the United States. Like you should watch that. Seriously, it’s amazing. The name is Free Solo and it won the Oscar, by the way, in 2019 maybe. This documentary is interesting because like this story about this guy who climbed a very unbelievable thing without any equipment and something that brought my attention. Like it’s not obvious on the documentary. That’s something I concluded because how the documentary is built on the story of this guy,how he’s amazing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like he spent five hours climbing a really high rock, really high rock. The name is El Capitan in California, in Yosemite Park.
So he spent five hours climbing. It’s very stressful. He has no equipment. He go there five hours if he’s licked his dice, really. And when he got up there, what’s the first thing he do?
What would you guess?
Frank I hate to think. He probably sit and enjoyed the view.
Igor No, he called his girlfriend. So he just lived this amazing experience. Unbelievable. Just he did that in history and he shared it with his girlfriend. For me, this sums up everything. I can’t imagine myself and I would bet that no one is capable of that, of being motivated to experience stuff besides physiological stuff, like going to the bathroom, things like that, if not to share with people.
Another good example, it’s a very classic one of the guy, I forgot the name of the book now, but the guy who went to Alaska to live in the wildness. It’s a very popular story.
Frank I can’t think of myself. Into the Wild. There’s the book and there’s the movie, right?
Igor Yeah. And I don’t know if you remember or if you ever watched it, but he goes to the wildness. He gets in trouble. He get excitement. And there’s two important scenes in the movie, especially. The first one is when he’s traveling. He’s not in Alaska yet, but he is getting rides to go to Alaska. And then he meets someone. He meets a guy who works in a farm, a very common guy. And he starts to talk about how people are terrible, that society is terrible. Everyone just wants to get the advantage of you. And it’s a very… I will send you on WhatsApp again. And the guy who he’s telling bad things about society, he looks at this young guy in the eye and he asks, who are you talking about? People are very nice. Look around. Everyone is very nice. That’s an important scene.
And the second one is before he getting a buzz, I will do a spoiler because it’s a very common story. So he got lost. He’s hungry. He’s dying. And the last sentence he writes in his diary is happiness is only real when it’s shared.
So that’s my take on that. Maybe you’re not being able to formulate more in details, but my take is you are only able to experience things and motivated to experience things because there are people in the world, even if you don’t realize that.
Like an Instagrammer, a YouTuber, they are motivated to do that because they know people are going to watch. That’s my take on this.
Frank There’s something that I’m a little positive about and I’m being perfectly honest here. I was eight years old when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I was living in Australia at the time. It was 11 o’clock in the morning, local time. And we didn’t have a TV, but friends of my parents did.
So we drove around there and watched this thing happen. And we were two kids and another friend. We stood in contact all this time later. We were inspired by this moon landing to the degree that in the town that we lived in, in Adelaide, in South Australia, there was this thing they called the foothills, this mountain range at the edge of the city. So, the city is on the coast. You have the city and then you have these hills coming up behind them. And totally unaware of any planning, financing or whatever.
We wanted to build a rocket launching pad, maybe 15 miles away from home. And we were going to shoot rockets into the sky. Elon Musk wasn’t even born then. And somehow these big things inspired us and we wanted to follow the footsteps. Whether we could or we couldn’t is a different story. And I find when I look at and we were looking up and when you see the kids are today running around, they were looking down, looking at their phones and pressing buttons with their thumbs.
And I’m just sort of wondering if this sense of curiosity, this sense of human interaction, that we’ve lost it because of social media and the internet, etc. But the irony of social media is it’s all about sharing on a private level. A grandmother wants to, sorry, a mother wants to share the latest picture of her child with her own mother. So, the grandmother gets a picture of the child doing something or the endless pictures of cats being shared around the world.
So I’m wondering and for me there is a contradiction. We’ve lost the vision to see the big things.
Yes, we look down and we’re still sharing something. And we’re more concerned about, you know, we get excited about the latest smartphone coming from Samsung or from Apple. We will spend endless hours and lots of words describing something that’s six inches in diameter, is flat and has a design picture that looks really good. I don’t see it anymore. For me, I’m lost. So maybe you can help me.
We’re looking down and experiencing and getting excited about technology and we’re sharing and we’ve lost the big picture. Am I wrong here or why am I on this one?
Igor Yeah, that’s a difficult question. I think and I have no idea if it’s right, but I think like people are experiencing more things because of social media and technology. So, I don’t think like the kids and maybe teenagers. It’s not the case because teenagers are different by nature. But I don’t think kids are less curious or less excited about things. I don’t think. Maybe I’m wrong. I think what’s happening is that like everything is so overstimulated that like how I view it happens, like you get excited about something, you work on that, you get very happy, you share with friends, then you go to the next thing. Like now it’s happening in seconds because you share the video, get excited. Now it’s boring. So, you have to share again. So, when you start to work on something, some Chinese kid in the other part of the world do 10 times better than you.
So I think it’s everything very overstimulated. So I think the challenge is that people like don’t like are not getting they get a lot of stimulus, so they get bored faster and it’s a challenge for many reasons.
But I think kids, at least the kids I have in my surroundings that there aren’t much, but they feel what I have. I see them very curious. They are very smart. I don’t think the technology being cell phone or social media is doing harm on themselves. I think the use of those technologies in the big picture, it’s a huge problem, but I don’t think it kills their curiosity. But maybe I’m wrong.
For example, now with Tesla, with SpaceX, with sports, everything gets in your cell phone. People get very excited, but very shortly they are not excited anymore because they are looking for the next thing. I think this is the problem. I think the excitement is still there.
Frank It’s a link between what you experienced and the excitement that you experienced as well. I mean, you were running around Milan trying to find this address. It was frustrating. Now you tell the story as an exciting experience. I mean, the time probably wasn’t, but a couple of years down the road and it’s like, yeah, I don’t think you want to do it again. And I don’t think I have to do it again because then I have a technology that will help me. But the question is, what do we have to do today to generate excitement in a more natural world and not in a world that is, okay, if a kid in China does not win, it’s beamed around the world within milliseconds.
I think we’re losing this contact to any natural environment, says one who was only 60.
Igor Yeah, there is this good, he’s very popular right now. I’m trying to remember his name, but he’s a biologist from Stanford. And he goes to the Joe Rogan Lex Fridman podcast. He has some hair. He’s very popular. I was listening to the podcast earlier and I forgot his name. Well, I don’t remember.
Frank I would put it in the links.
Igor His take on that is very interesting because he’s a biologist. And so he talks about the endorphin and stimulus and things like that. And what he tells, and I agree, is that now the problem of having this excitement, this compensation, it’s not the compensation itself, but we didn’t have to work to get this compensation. So we get very sensitive because if you don’t have to work to get some excitement, which is the natural way of things working, the next time you have to work, you think, oh, but the time before I didn’t have to work. So your threshold is very low for the desire to work to achieve something like dating. There is no motivation to go dating because young people are in their home masturbating all day long. So, it’s a good analogy. So, I think this is for everything. So what he says, and I agree, that there is no problem to have compensations, but you have to organize yourself to deserve this compensation so you don’t mess up your brain. So, okay, I want to scroll down social media. Okay, I have to organize myself to just do that before I accomplish something on my work.
If I want to eat sugary stuff, that’s no problem. According to him, that’s no problem. If you organize yourself and challenge yourself to deserve this, I think it’s a good way to dealing with this. It’s not easy, of course, and I don’t think it will get easier. I think we are kind of screwed up, but that’s the strategy for now.
Frank And we go back to the discussion we had in the episode about the difference between discipline and being organized.
Igor Yes, exactly. You can’t rely on discipline. You will not win.
Frank So you have to be organized. I think even all of this is what we’re talking about. At the end of the day, it’s an experience. And at some point you come out of it and then you book it to experience and then you do something else. So at the end of the day, everybody is focusing on whatever is happening in the internet. And then the circle of life just continues, and we move on and something else comes along. Anyway, so to wrap up this, you landed on your feet. And now we enter the story of your marketing time, which you were then 25. So doing a little bit of basic mathematics, you spent the next five, five and a half years starting as a copywriter to creating a marketing agency with 20 plus minus employees with 200 B2B customers. And at some point, you decided to throw it all in and do something else. As a teaser for the next, I don’t know how many episodes, just as a teaser, give us some project milestones along which we can orientate ourselves.
Igor Yeah, so next episode, I will dive into the marketing career and it will be interesting because we’re going to talk about experiences, we’re going to talk about people, but in a more business perspective, which is very interesting as well. And it’s not like there is a reason people are so workaholic today because there are a lot of excitement and a lot of danger and people. So it’s a more mental experience. However, it’s worth listening about that and hopefully get insights to navigate better.
Frank Yes, I know this workaholic scenario and I have my wife coming and saying, when are you going to finish? And then she will very diplomatically give me something to do, which hinders me to do what I want to do.
Igor Yeah, I know these tactics.
Frank And I see right through it so I can plan around it. And I suppose that brings up a whole issue of work-life balance. Cal Newport saying in one of his books, don’t follow your passion because that’s going to be Jean Baudelaire, etc. So we’re going to have a few things to discuss and chew over Igor. Thank you very much for your time once again. I’m sort of coming out of the discussion style thing that I’ve learned something, but I still need to think about it.
Igor Yes, I have the same feeling.
Frank So we’re wandering around in this maze and thinking, yeah, okay, let’s just have a glass of wine and just reflect on this and read the transcript when it’s published. Again, we come back to reading and writing. And when you read the text, it all becomes clear.
Igor Yeah, like they say that those are the more persistent knowledge when you have to work to acquire the knowledge. When it comes as a capsule, you don’t acquire the knowledge. So maybe we are in the right track. If there’s some knowledge on that, I think once we learn the knowledge, it will stick with us.
Frank Yeah, I saw on a short YouTube thingy a couple of weeks ago, one of these famous questions allegedly that Elon Musk says, but he has a … candidate interview. He wants to know what was your biggest problem and how did you solve it? And he could tell whether a person was lying or not because the person who could explain in great detail how he managed to solve the problem was telling the truth, not doing a textbook run of how the problem could have been solved in theory. Interesting.
Igor There’s this cool saying that I really like and I use a lot in my daily life. It’s a problem half understood, it’s a problem half solved.
Frank Indeed. So my problem is that I’m thirsty. So my throat understands it. Igor, thanks very much and see you next time.
Igor Thank you. See you. Bye bye.