On Self Interest

2026.08.16

CLXV

[It's okay to be Selfish; The Autobahn; Box Jumping Your Walled Garden; You Can't buy my SaaS; Average Market Efficiency Enjoyer; Selfish Volunteering; Where am I, Anon?; A Glut of Dopamine; It's all incentives]

[It's okay to be Selfish]

This weeks reflection is clustered on incentive structures & self interest.

Perhaps it's a bit cynical, but I do believe we all tend to act in our best interest; even if we're volunteering to help other people, I don't think we'd be doing it if we didn't get something in return, even if it was just a good feeling.

As I've written about many moons ago, I think a lot of the difference between what we consider to be 'selfish' or not has more to do with time scales than it does with self interest. I can make business decisions that will result in less income immediately, but that I believe will result in more income later.

And, sometimes, as is the case with the Autobahn, letting people govern via their own self interest works wonders.

[The Autobahn]

I drove on the Autobahn last week, and quickly came to the conclusion that driving on the Autobahn is what driving should be like everywhere.

For many stretches of the German highway system, there are no speed limits.

You can just go as fast as you want.

On top of this, everyone truly respects the left lane to a shocking degree coming from America. If you are passing, you stay in the left lane. Otherwise, you get over. People tend to be aware of much faster vehicles approaching behind them and get over as quickly as possible.

I'm not certain of the causal relationship here - do the high speeds cause everyone to get back to the right lane faster? Or do the high speeds work only because people get over?

Regardless, it seems to be a quite efficient system. I was able to hit 110MPH. Perhaps my amygdala is not intact, but it felt entirely safe to me and my passengers. One of them actually requested I go faster…

Yeah, it’s much faster than I'd be accustomed to in the US. Perhaps it'd be more dangerous in a crash, but the system does let you self select into behavior aligned with your risk tolerances a lot more elegantly.

Interestingly enough, I didn’t see any of what I would call crazy or unsafe behavior. Everyone seems to be incentivized to self sort into the proper lane. The people who want to drive slowly don't want someone riding their ass, and the people ripping it don't want someone driving slowly to get in the way.

While we’re on the subject of speed limits, don't you think it's kind of stupid that in the US, there can be one stretch of highway with a 70MPH speed limit but everyone is 'going with the flow of traffic' at 85MPH and no one cares, but in another stretch or even the same stretch at a different time of day, 85MPH in a 70MPH zone can be a massive ticket?

In terms of the impact limits in the US have on actual driver behavior, I'd be lying if I asserted a causal relationship with any confidence. I can hazard a few conjectures though:

• Driver's going 5 over in the left lane feeling entitled to stay there - why should they let a criminal going 15 over break the law more than them?

• If I’m not expecting someone to come up on my rear at 120MPH, I might be less attentive in the left lane

• As a result of the above, speeders may get frustrated with slow left lane drivers and pass in the right lane, which is something I observed only once in Germany

While we're musing about incentives, let's go one level up - imagine how hard it would be to remove speed limits in the US, even if a bunch of people agreed on it? One of my biggest gripes with government is that their tends to be far less incentive to remove laws than there is to add them.

The build up makes the system less healthy, but hey, it gives more room for politicians to profit in the short term.

[Box Jumping Your Walled Garden]

Incentive structures shape the internet and what data can be accessed by who.

Some websites WANT to be scraped. They make it easy for you to write code that can visit them and get some specific data.

Think about a news site. If you publish news articles, you want other people to site them and quote you and link back to you. So, you might have what's called an RSS feed, which is basically an endpoint code can visit to get structured data. This means it's not so hard to write a script that automatically grab things like publication dates and urls and headlines for certain news sites.

It also means that if you write a script to grab these things, it probably won't break. Why would the news site change their RSS feed if they knew that the programs using it were the source of a lot of their traffic? This would be an expensive change to make!

The point is, these sites benefit from you grabbing their data to do things with it. Why would they make it hard?

On the other hand, you might be LinkedIn. Your entire business model is based on having users log in and spend time in your platform reading the data in the platform. That way, you can sell ads for them to see.

You'd also greatly benefit because you can sell products to other people (like sales nav & recruiter) that work a lot better when a bunch of people spend time logging into your website so other people can dm them. And, when you have the most accurate and quickly updating database of who works where and does what. So, really, you don't want ANYONE to scrape ANYTHING from your site, except maybe part of a post here or there that can make your appear higher in search results.

In terms of selfishness, it’s interesting to see that two difference incentive structures can lead to completely different behaviors for these sites.

[You Can't buy my SaaS]

For WhiteWhale, we discovered that one segment of our customers are staying for twice as long as another segment. This segment is any customer that already has a functioning outbound process, meaning they are already booking meetings via email or call or other proactive messaging. This was such and exciting and lovely conclusion Jack came to by looking at our retention data.

If we stop accepting money from new customers who would leave us faster, we will make less money in the short term.

However, if we only focus on the ones who already stay twice as long, we will make more money in the long term.

For one, the customers who are already staying longer get more value out of the product, anyway. Our data is really good at improving the outcome of their existing process, because their is not really a tool that helps them prioritize like we do. So, we get crazy, jaw dropping outcomes, like enterprise meetings booked in 24 hours and 3x’ing in response rates.

If a customer buys us hoping we get their outbound process from 0 to 1, though, it's not so good. It wastes both their time and ours.

Sometimes, it works, usually only when it is someone experienced, like an agency setting up a new outbound process for someone else. Or, if the client pays us more money to justify one of us to continue getting on the phone with them until something works.

But, more often than not, clients who don’t have working outbound have a hard time getting their outbound to work at all. Because so many different things can go wrong to make outbound work, like contact data, deliverability, sequence length, and even their underlying product and offer, it's really hard to pin down what the real problem is.

These people, who are looking for anyway to make their outbound work, may then ask us for features that a million other tools already handle just fine and quite efficiently. They do this because they hope it will give them a breakthrough they need to solve a problem our tool isn’t designed to solve!

On the other hand, if the customer already is getting results, it means that they have some combination of the other variables that are working well enough. Then, we can be responsible for changing a couple things (which accounts they target TODAY, and helping them sometimes alter message they send them), and a lot more commonly show lift. The other variables are frozen.

By disqualifying the customers without outbound yet, we're better aligning our incentives with the customers as a whole.

We are long term greedy. Counterintuitively, we will make more money in the long run by saying no in the short run.

[Average Market Efficiency Enjoyer]

I get great joy from purchasing items in one place, and then having them be magically worth more in another place.

Hence, I bought some amount of wine in Munich to bring it back to the states with me.

I hardly even drink - I've had maybe 8 alcoholic beverages in the last 12 months, 5 of which were this week while I was selecting what wine to procure.

I don't like buying wine in foreign countries because I drink a lot... I do it for the love of the game. Even if the wine weren't to appreciate, and just held value, I would still be making a profitable trade; with free checked bags I otherwise never use, I basically get to delete the 'transaction' fee (international shipping and handling).

This, along with the knowledge that I achieved 'the trade', is enough for me to lug a box of wine around a European city.

Alas, 5 of the 7 bottles I bought were lost; the package was broke when the airline I'm traveling on didn't respect the 'fragile' mark on it before I even left the first airport.

When the baggage handler boarded the plane to inform me, 3 older Canadian women around me were more indignant on my behalf than I was. Sure, I'm annoyed; I'd rather not have had to waste the 15 minutes making a claim for the damage, and I’d rather physically have the wine. That said, it'd waste even more of my time if I spent bandwidth being pissed about it.

Really, it's all part of the game. Rather than a put option, I have my good old friends the Montreal Convention, photographic evidence of packing, the fact that some of the bottles are simply not for sale in the us, and an airline worker who accepted my luggage knowing it was wine and marking it fragile with me, all at my disposal.

In other words, I'll still turn a profit on this trade, yet.

This is without mentioning the two most expensive bottles are stowed away elsewhere; we'll see if they're around by the time I make it stateside.

Dopamine from ‘winning’ is enough to drive me to do all of this.

[Selfish Volunteering]

This year, I joined a program where I could help special needs individuals do things like lift weights. I volunteered with the program for about 5 months, and will rejoin when it resumes in the fall.

Why does one volunteer for something like this?

There are some simple reasons, like it's fun, I get to lift while I do it, I get to learn more about the human condition and experience from people who I otherwise would not regularly (if ever) find occasion to interact with (for a severely curious person, this reason is bigger than you think), and it just generaly helps you see the humanity in everyone.

It's also selfish, too. The Golden Rule - do onto others as you'd have done onto you. If I was special needs, I would hope I would be treated like this, too.

Tangentially, I really really don't like the argument that some make about the best thing you can do for the world is make a ton of money then give it all away when you die. I think this:

1. Understates the importance of doing things that positively impact people today. Helping even one person achieve something they couldn't do on their own is really, really valuable.

2. Gives you a license to violate all sorts of ethics in the name of some greater, vaguer good in the future (why is it so bad that I mass produce and sell vapes if I'm to give all the money away to some foundation when I'm dead?).

Logic aside, it feels good to help other people. Go do something nice for someone.

[Where am I, Anon?]

Even when writing this blog, I leave out extraneous details that give you more information about me.

I told you I was in Vienna & Greece after I left Vienna & Greece. I didn't tell you I was going to Bavaria until I was on a plane out of Germany. I didn't tell you how much I spent on the wine above. I’ve hidden the pictures of my best friends in the photo below.

Exact & timely information doesn't add so much to the story I'm telling; it just makes your picture of me more exact and clear.

I'm not actually incentivized to tell you more, and I don't think you should feel that you are either. I really don't like the idea of parents posting photos of their children on the internet; once I have children, why would I let anyone know anything identifying about them?

Perhaps I am too paranoid, or perhaps it is common to underestimate the magnitude of one's digital footprint. Already, you can know so much about me via this writing; what do I gain by sharing anything more?

I don't like the argument that so much is already out there about me, either. That doesn't mean I should intentionally give more.

More privacy is more valuable to me than anything I’d get by sharing more details, especially in the longer term.

[A Glut of Dopamine]

Finally, another stab at our information age.

We have such an easy abundance of cheap dopamine. Sugar, nicotine, alcohal, tv, phone, short form content, porn, drugs, video games, movies, etc etc.

Some of these, of course, are more intrinsically bad than others, while some of them only become problematic in excess.

This is the rub, though: if it's all so cheap & free with no end insight, why would you ever stop indulging? You can make it all the way to the end while continuing to be consumed by some combination of these, and be just fine.

The incentive to not live and die by these vices is all slightly longer term: the feeling you get at the end of a run, or after reading a book, or solving a hard problem, or having a meaningful or hard conversation with someone you love.

This is the good news: all you have to do to not be consumed by these vices is to extend your timescale just a tad.

If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe - I’m here each week, rambling about who knows what.

[It's all incentives]

No grand idea or conclusion today, just some observations of where incentives play in to life, and some pining for the glory of the Autobahn.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being selfish; I actually think that most interesting ethical systems and decision criteria just help us put selfishness out on a longer time scale.

Live Deeply,