E238: Acting Fast and Slow

Why are we wired to chase quick wins instead of lasting breakthroughs—and how can investors reprogram that bias? In this third solo episode, David Weisburd unpacks the neuroscience of decision-making and how understanding dopamine can dramatically change the way you operate as an investor, founder, or builder. Drawing on insights from his conversation with Dave Fontenot of HF0, David explains why long-term rewards (“slow dopamine”) create compounding advantages while short-term hits (“fast dopamine”) destroy focus. He shares tactical strategies for building “monk mode” systems that protect deep work, how to avoid the illusion of productivity, and why the most valuable ideas require discomfort and delay before payoff. This episode is about rewiring your brain for compounding—not con

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  I've been reflecting about the podcast that just came out with Dave Fauntler, the founder of HF0. And after interviewing Dave, it's dramatically changed the way that me and my business partner Curtis conduct our business, so much so that we have constructed our day in a way to allow for long periods of uninterrupted work, which means both from a scheduling standpoint, also physically, there's days that me and Curtis work from different locations so as not to be tempted to interrupt each other over short-term needs and things that might interrupt with long-term flow.

• 0:43David Weisburd?

  And I decided to dust up

• 0:48David Weisburd?

  what I learned in my master's in psychology about fast versus slow dopamine. The technical word for fast dopamine or immediate reward loop is phasic dopamine release. So this is what happens when you get a like or somebody messages you or you get a burst of dopamine. This oftentimes leads to addictive behaviors, most famously at casinos. People get these kind of fast dopamine releases. The second type is called slow dopamine, which is the long-term reward circle, which is the tonic dopamine release.

• 1:31David Weisburd?

  If you look at a two by two matrix, the things that are important and non-urgent, this is what that is. The two by two part of the matrix that is important and non-urgent is the slow dopamine release and just so critical because those are the 10x boosters and the real unlocks in your business. Dave Fauntler talks about this in terms of the pace of realizations. Just to give you some context, Dave and HF0 have had 11 batches of 10 companies, 110 companies. They have a hit rate that exceeds Sequoia in terms of being able to pick winners. And what's even crazier about it is oftentimes these companies will come in with

• 2:14David Weisburd?

  half a million or a million dollars in ARR in week zero and by week 12, get to 10 million ARR. And to get a breakdown of how that works and how that's even humanly possible, watch the full episode with Dave Fauntler. What's necessary part of this is two aspects. One is, we talk about in the interview about the ability to go into monk mode, to be locked in the basement and just focused on, in his case, coding, but in working on a long-term project. Again, something that is super important and non-urgent. Upstream of even that, even working on the most important thing, is understanding the temptations and the difference between this phasic burst,

• 2:57David Weisburd?

  the fast dopamine and the tonic baseline, which is the slow dopamine.

• 3:03David Weisburd?

  When you look at human behavior, it's dictated by the subconscious processes until we take the time to learn about these subconscious processes so that they become conscious. And on a conscious level is where we could actually affect them. So I think it's really important to understand that we, as human beings, as Homo sapiens, are wired to select for these fast dopamine, immediate reward cycles. Taken to extremes, you have a junkie on the street that only knows how to have fast rewards and ends up being a drug addict. And then on the opposite extreme, you have the surgeon that goes through undergrad, then goes through four years of medical school,

• 3:45David Weisburd?

  then goes through three years of residency, then does a year of specialty. The ability to really defer the reward, the long-term reward loop, is what differentiates these two opposite ends of the spectrum. That could be taken both on a career aspect, but also within projects, within what you're doing. It's so important to be aware of this temptation, to take that small win, to respond back to that email, to check off that next checkbox. We get that super fast dopamine release. We're literally neurobiologically wired, where that actually does not align with the business goals. The business is actually driven by the slow dopamine, the long-term rewards cycles.

• 4:28David Weisburd?

  Step one is understanding that we have such a bias for that. Step two is starting the day with a question, which is if I could do one thing today, one long-term project that would make everything else pale in comparison, or significantly less important, what would that one thing be? And oftentimes, it's these long-term projects. When I interviewed Ryan Hoover, who started Product Hunt, he looks at a lot of his problems not as processes to run, but as products to build. He has these products that automate a lot of his life. And although that seems obvious, and why doesn't everybody do it? The reason is these products oftentimes take weeks to build.

• 5:09David Weisburd?

  So something might take two weeks to build that would technically solve a 45-minute process. The reason it's so effective and so scalable for Ryan is because that 45-minute process might be something that he wants to run two, three times a day. So the break even on the two weeks to build, even if it's he himself building that product, which is the least efficient way to do it. If you do that twice a day and an hour and a half, that break even in 60 days. So after two months, everything's gravy. So you have a process running for three, four years. You have two months you pay for upfront, and then you have five years and 10 months of scalability and of efficiency.

• 5:52David Weisburd?

  And that's assuming that he himself does the product, which is the least efficient way to do that, of course. Acting in this way, which I call acting slow versus fast, which is a play on Thinking Fast and Slow by a book by Daniel Kahneman, which I recommend, is something that sounds easy, but is, again, extremely difficult to do because we are neurobiologically wired, from an evolutionary standpoint, not to do this.

• 6:21David Weisburd?

  But as I mentioned, unlike other primates and like apes and like other animals, the thing that differentiates humans is our ability to make the subconscious conscious and to effect that change at the conscious level. So although we are not wired to do that, we're also potentially not wired to wear clothes, but we wear clothes. So it is something that can be changed. And once focused on this, this is where De Fontenot and HF0 sees these 20x returns on revenue in 12 weeks. That's the dramatic upside that you could achieve when you think in this manner. Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow, also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's

• 7:06David Weisburd?

  analytics. Thank you for your support.