Paul Ollinger
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Paul Ollinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
that are generally like things that happened to me or some observation I'll make in the world, and I'll tie it back to some lesson, right? It's secular sermons, if you will, that have some potty jokes and are pretty damn funny if I've achieved my goals. And so what I'll do is say, here's 50 essays I've written over the last however many years, right?
Well, there you go, right? Curb your enthusiasm, but with a It's something like that. It's something like that. And you feed it, you upload what you've written and say, this is my voice. And I'm interested in writing about, take an item from the news, like tariffs. And I'm not looking to state a point of view on tariffs.
I'm just saying, give me some thoughts on what's a point of view on tariffs that's interesting. Or I think this is, you know, I think I want to write about tariffs. Give me three examples of why tariffs could be good or tariffs could be bad. Just to start the mental exercise of getting things going. And then, you know, I think what's one thing that AI is really good for in writing is editing.
I'll spend a few hours writing something and I'll take, you know, an 800 word draft or whatever it is and upload it to multiple different GPTs and say, tell me how I can make this better. Can I make it shorter? Can I add more examples? Can I use better language? Am I repeating words? Things like that. It's an editor. It's a really effective editor. It's not perfect, but it's very, very effective.
And so when I actually take it to my human editor at some point, I'm not wasting his time. I'm giving him a very well-polished draft. And he always has things that he can help me improve. But everything gets better because I've done the work with something to help me think through getting it to 95% before I get it to 100%. Does that make sense?
It can't quite. It's not there yet. I mean, it will get there. It will get there. Look, I was having this conversation with a comedian, a very smart, very smart, very funny comedian named Zain Sharif in Atlanta today. And Zane, what I love about him is he writes beautiful, well-crafted jokes.
And we were both lamenting how, you know, the crowd work videos are what Instagram and TikTok, you know, what their algorithms promote just because that's who knows why.
Matt Rife, exactly. And we both acknowledge Matt Rife's success and that Matt Rife works hard, but that's not the kind of comedy that either of us wants to do. Plus, he's 10 times better looking than either of us, so screw Matt Rife. But we're sitting there and I think there could be
AI could completely obliterate us and make us completely unnecessary comedically, or it might inspire in people a reinvestment and a deeper interest in bespoke goods, in handcrafted, hand-woven comedy.
Look, I don't think you can succeed if you lack sincerity. And people taking shortcuts is still very transparent. We'll see how that changes over time.
Uh, I maybe don't leave Facebook in 2011. Maybe don't do that. Build time machine is what you tell them. Maybe stick around for three or four more years. Um, you know, look, my life has worked out. Uh, I have a wife who loves me, who my love, and I live with my kids who tolerate me. Um, so, so I'm, I'm doing very, very well. I've, you know, I, I think it was great. And it,
is around 27 and this is not a coincidence. I think I started to become a better person. I think it's because my brain was done, you know, fully growing. But I think around that time, 26, 27, I was starting to go like, oh, if, if, if I want to be successful, I need to work hard. And if I work hard in general, on average, Keteris Paribus, all else equal good things happen. And so.
I, you know, I think sometimes those are lessons, especially guys just have to learn. You can hear your dad can beat you over the head with all this advice and even your dad's friends who maybe you'll listen. I, you know, I've got, I'm sure you've got your friends who you talk to my kid and just, you know, and, and you'll ask your friend, will you talk to my kid?
Cause my kid won't listen to me and your kid won't listen to you. And maybe we can help each other out. But some of these things, young people just have to learn on their own. And I hope that young people are still learning 24, 25, whatever. If you work hard, all else equal, good things will happen.
I think Epictetus said something like that. Your willingness to fail is a key to your success. If you're worried about looking stupid, you're never going to try anything that you're not already good at, which means you're never going to grow.
I. You know, when the market took a dive that first week of COVID, we were on spring break in very nice circumstances in the Caribbean. And I remember looking, you know, and seeing our net worth go down by whatever, 30% in a week. And I thought to myself, I guess I'll get a job. You know, like, I think that I...
if we lost 50% of what we had tomorrow, you know, God forbid, I think we'd be okay because I mean, I'd go find something worth doing and I'd try to do, I'd do the best job I possibly could.
Um, and you know, the thing I didn't, the reason I chose to chase this stream is because I wanted to avoid the deathbed regret of, of wanting to know the answer to the question, what would happen if I gave it my all? Now I haven't given it my all yet and I'm going to keep giving it my all, but I've given it everything I've had up to this point to about 98 and a half percent.
And so, you know, if I'm pretty close to having an answer to what would happen if I gave it my all and you know what happens, you get a lot better. You learn a lot. You meet a lot of interesting people. You get to do the thing. And the reward for trying and giving it your all is the doing of the thing. Rewards past that are not guaranteed, especially in the creative arts.
And yes, the harder you work, the more likely you are to succeed. The more focused you are, the more likely you are to succeed. But in the end, the reward is getting better at something you care about.
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