Marcio Goncalves Swine Veterinarian and amateur productivity hacker

About this episode

Marcio Goncalves, a Brazilian-trained swine veterinarian turned podcaster/conference-organizer (SwineIt), joins Vance for a wide-ranging conversation that starts with pigs and quickly pivots to Marcio's real passion: personal productivity and small-business operating systems. Marcio credits his obsessive weekly-meeting discipline and business philosophy to two books, Traction and The E-Myth Revisited, and describes running his remote, several-person team (some members he's never met in person) with strict task ownership, deadlines, and a rating system for meeting quality. A major throughline is the value of unsolicited negative feedback — both men share stories of mentors who told them uncomfortable truths (Vance's mentor commenting on his dress and weight; Marcio's frustration at Brazilian bosses who wouldn't give him constructive criticism) and agree this kind of directness accelerates growth and friendship. They swap productivity hacks: Vance's 6-9pm phone-free family window (inspired by Jared Holst) and no-sound-notifications policy; Marcio's removal of the email app from his phone (checking once daily) and turning off social notifications years ago. Both reflect on the parasocial "fake mentor" phenomenon (Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, David Goggins) and how people eventually "transcend" needing a given influencer's message. The conversation closes on structural differences between small and large organizations — Vance's application of Price's Law (a small fraction of workers do most of the work, an effect that gets worse at scale) and how HR/legal regulation forces large corporations into standardized, less discerning hiring, whereas small businesses can hand-select for personality and initiative (Marcio's hiring process requires a one-minute video and personality test with a hard deadline, itself a filter for reliability).

“Two books that really shaped my thinking [are] Traction by Gino Wickman and the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber... if the business doesn't run without you, you have a job, not a business. And that's the worst job in the world because you are working for a lunatic.”

“Corporations are really held back by HR laws... you get to a certain size and the government starts regulating your rules... they start saying you're not allowed to test X, Y, Z... so you don't get to hand-select people because corporations are trying to avoid lawsuits.”

“Progress, not perfection... bias for action [is] one of Amazon's values... just get, do it and do it. Because a lot of times we get paralyzed because we wanna be perfect and we want the universe to align.”

Key moments

• ~8%: Traction and The E-Myth Revisited as Marcio's foundational business-systems texts; "if the business doesn't run without you, you have a job, not a business."
• ~14%: The weekly one-hour team meeting structure (good news → KPIs → task review → meeting rating) as an antidote to constant-Slack-contact illusion of alignment.
• ~22%: Mutual appreciation for blunt, unsolicited feedback — Vance's mentor's dress/weight critique story; Marcio's frustration with Brazilian workplace praise-only culture.
• ~44%: Talking to real (non-family) customers before monetizing — "would you buy this? Not your mom."
• ~52%: HR law and legal liability as the reason large corporations can't hand-select talent the way small businesses can.
• ~58%: Digital-attention discipline — Vance's phone-free 6-9pm window; Marcio's removal of the email app; both cite The Social Dilemma.
• ~70%: The parasocial "fake mentor" discussion — Wes Watson, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, and "transcending" an influencer once their message has been internalized.
• ~87%: Price's Law and the "nails on the ground" work ethic — self-directed initiative as what makes an employee rare and valuable.

Notable quotes

“If you don't stop and think, you don't have the big picture... a weekly meeting on the business, one hour, I think it's crucial.”

“He rebuked me a little bit... hey man, let's just have a regular conversation as opposed to you putting me on a pedestal.”

“You need to talk to the customer and get that verbal transaction... it doesn't have to be your wife, she's gonna buy whatever you do.”

“Corporations are really held back by HR laws... you don't get to hand-select people because corporations are trying to avoid lawsuits.”