Mental Models 102 - The Decision Strikes Back | George Mack

I'm joined by long time friend of the show and all round great human George MacGill to re enter the world of Mental Models. Mental Models are tools you can use to improve your ability to effectively make decisions. Today we are upgrading our minds by thinking about thinking, as we delve into some of mine & George's favourite mental models from Jocko Willink, Paul Graham, Ben Bergeron, Navil Ravikant, Nassim Taleb, David Wong and many more. Extra Stuff: Follow George on Twitter - https://twitter.com/george__mack Rick & Morty & Roy - https://youtu.be/szzVlQ653as David Wong's Article - https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #MentalModels #Naval #JockoWillink - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00George Mack?

  Seventy to eighty years ago, we would have been in a world war. I could you imagine telling someone in the trenches, oh, I'm addicted to Instagram. Shut the, you know what I mean? Part of me is like, we go back to extreme ownership and personal responsibility. Log off, sign out.

• 0:17Chris Williamson?

  I get it.

• 0:17George Mack?

  Delete the app. You end up at a random uni and then the people who happen to be placed near you in halls. It's literally Susan on a Excel spreadsheet who randomly decides this. But it's mad to think the amount of Susans or Derek's that have designed people's best friends forever.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  Next one, availability bias.

• 0:35George Mack?

  Just chatting to one of the guys from work and there's some digested biscuits in the kitchen. And none of us like digested biscuits, but we're eating digested biscuits every single day because they're just there in the jar. And yet whatever's available to you, you've got to almost instill willpower to avoid it. Which means that given enough time, given enough lack of sleep, given enough X, Y, Z, you're probably going to give in at some point. So yeah, design the environment's key.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  The internet goes wild for George McGill back on modern wisdom. It's been a long time, man. Thank you so much for coming back on.

• 1:11George Mack?

  It's good to be back. You brought me out of my cave. It's good.

• 1:13Chris Williamson?

  I have indeed. A lot has changed since we were last here.

• 1:15George Mack?

  Yeah, a lot, a lot has changed for both parties, I imagine. Always changing.

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  You're down in London now? You were in Manchester last time you saw each other.

• 1:23George Mack?

  Down in London, a bit more expensive, but you get what you pay for.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you do. A lot of opportunities.

• 1:29George Mack?

  Yeah, it's, um, it's certainly very, very different. There's a really good Paul Graham essay called Cities and Ambition. Have you ever heard of it?

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:40George Mack?

  It's one of, one of my favourite ones of his. It's one of the reasons why I moved. And he says that every city sort of whispers something to you. Um, whether it's the sort of conversations that you overhear or, um, the people that you're around or the cars that drive past or the buildings that you see. You're constantly getting whispered to and you don't, you don't consciously notice it, but you pick up on it and, um. Because I've found that Paul Graham says that in New York, it's the constant whispering is make more money. And that's because every conversation you ever hear is how much money you're making. I made this this month. Whereas in LA, it's be more famous is what it's constantly whispering to you.

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  What's London?

• 2:21George Mack?

  Um, well, he says San Francisco is be um, uh, be more powerful in terms of they don't give a shit if you made like a billion dollars out. Um, if you've inherited a billion dollars, it's more about what you've done with London. Um, is it? Well, the thing about London is there's almost the little cities with little cities. But the minute we've been primarily based in Mayfair, have you been to Mayfair before?

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:43George Mack?

  It's like the, it's like the wealthiest part of like right next to Buckingham Palace.

• 2:47Chris Williamson?

  Maserati, Maserati, Lamborghini.

• 2:49George Mack?

  So what it whispers to me is I need to upgrade my fucking Vauxhall Corsa. That's the most, that's the thing I get the most, I probably need to get a new car. I keep thinking that guy, I need to get a new car. I've been driving that Vauxhall Corsa since.

• 3:00Chris Williamson?

  You don't drive that much.

• 3:01George Mack?

  I don't drive that much. No, I'm joking.

• 3:02Chris Williamson?

  Just rent, just rent a big dick one. Rent a fucking Maserati when you need it.

• 3:06George Mack?

  Yeah. Sack it off outside. Be an Instagram baller, that's the way to go.

• 3:09Chris Williamson?

  So the internet is ready and waiting, moist for some more mental models. Mental models one on one is the highest performing episode ever on Modern Wisdom. Massive shout out to Podcast Notes for supporting that episode. I mean, who spoke about it? James Clear replied to some of our tweets to do with it. Naval Ravikant got tagged in a load. So we got a little bit of pressure to make this one not shit. But we're gonna be fine. I've got an absolute belter to start you off with.

• 3:39George Mack?

  Let's go.

• 3:40Chris Williamson?

  And this is from Gabriel Weinberg's big book of mental models. Gabriel, if you're listening, I know that you're busy man, but I'm ready and waiting whenever you are. And this is a mental model from tennis.

• 3:53George Mack?

  Okay.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  The unforced error.

• 3:55George Mack?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:56Chris Williamson?

  So the concept is that you need to focus on being less wrong, not because of an external situation, but because of your own poor judgment or execution. So you've got to think about how making a bad first impression. That's your fault. Like if you didn't get ready, insufficient preparation, it's an unforced error. Touches a little bit on um some of the asymmetries we were talking about before. You're in a car crash because you were texting, unforced error.

• 4:25George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 4:25Chris Williamson?

  Like you've caused that situation. It wasn't, there wasn't some tornado that came out of somewhere and picked your car up and threw it to one side. This was an error that you caused. So you were talking previously about not aiming to be right all the time, just simply avoiding being wrong. And an unforced error is the most basic way that you can be wrong. But independent of all of the circumstances, you done fucked up.

• 4:52George Mack?

  And isn't the argument that, I forgot, I've done the complete tennis metaphor, but the amateurs make way more enforced errors than professionals, or it's something along those lines?

• 5:02Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna guess so.

• 5:02George Mack?

  Yeah. There's an interesting one that kind of ties into probably the hardest concepts to wrap your head around. You ever heard of that Jocko Willink, that extreme ownership? Where you just take ownership of every single thing that goes on in your life and it's always, you know, the famous good rant where he's, where he's one of those, um, one of the best videos on YouTube. If you're having like a shit day, I recommend it because it's just this, the hardest Navy SEAL. He's like the hard, he's like the hard Navy SEAL amongst hard Navy SEALs. You know what I mean? Where his mates go, fucking hell, he's intense.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:34George Mack?

  Um, so he's that guy, uh, the, what's the Bradley Cooper film, The American Sniper?

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:40George Mack?

  So Jocko, I think was that guy is um like commander essentially, or the boss. And he's talking about when he was in Iraq and people would come over to him um and say, hey, boss, we've not got enough machinery or we've not got X, Y, Z or things gone wrong. And he would just always reply with good, like no matter what, he goes, opportunity to work on this or opportunity to do that. And it's always something that he can control. Um, and he's obsessed with this concept of extreme ownership. And he tells, I think it's in his TED talk and in his book, where he talks about, because it's very, it's very well to let chat. In like a a nice little podcast about, oh, I've been doing X, Y, Z on my gym routine, on my meditation.

• 6:23George Mack?

  But when you're at war, I have so much more respect for somebody when they, if they're chatting about uh interesting concepts and you go, oh, I applied this at war. I go, oh, okay, I might listen now. Cause I go.

• 6:34Chris Williamson?

  Map versus terrain.

• 6:35George Mack?

  Yeah, and that's literally the fucking terrain, right? Literally.

• 6:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, Jocko's knee deep in terrain, face down in terrain.

• 6:43George Mack?

  Yeah, so he's up to his knees in terrain, yeah. So um he talks about how in Iraq, where you got uh where he says that he had some friendly fire go wrong. And it was his, in his troops that happened and I think it was an Iraqi soldier lost their life. Um because it was his sort of friendly Iraqi troops firing back at his own American troops and somebody died. And as a high up navy seal, that's one of the worst mistakes you can ever make. And the reason he ended up keeping his job is because he took one hundred percent blame over everything. And he was so impressed with how he managed to just take extreme ownership over it.

• 7:25George Mack?

  And it wasn't even, you can argue it wasn't even his fault, he he wasn't directly there. But he said, I I think there's certain things we could have done, there's certain things I could have prepared for. And you think about how much I do all the time, like little stuff where I'll be running late and I'll blame it on someone. You know what I mean? You blame it on something else and you go, like the concept of extreme ownership of everything that can go wrong is ultimately my fault. And even when it's not, it sometimes still helps to think that. Do you get what I mean? Cause there's so many stuff like where if you act, let's say you have two, I always go back to the thought experiment of two identical versions of yourselves. The one that takes extreme ownership over everything would just always outperform the one who didn't, right?

• 8:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, what's Jordan Peterson's main shtick been for the last couple of years? Rights versus responsibilities? And he says, you have two choices, either nothing matters or everything matters. And if you choose to say that everything matters, then you don't get to use the excuse that it was someone else's fault. It is always something that is within your control. And this touches on another point, Jocko Willink?

• 8:34George Mack?

  Mental model that you haven't done yet, anti-fragile. Yeah, that's um, that comes from Nassim Taleb, Nassim Taleb. Um, who wrote The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness and a few other interesting concepts. And the idea of anti-fragility is, let's say, for example, you have quite a, let's say you looked at this, like, glass here. This is by very nature, as we just found out in the kitchen earlier, when you fucking smashed the glass everywhere and I smacked my head on, so at the kitchen. Yeah. Behind the scenes, that will never get released. Yeah. Um, if you drop this on a concrete floor or a kitchen floor, as we saw then, it's fragile by its very, very nature.

• 9:14George Mack?

  In that when disorder happens, the whole thing basically disintegrates. So that's something that's fragile when disorder occurs, it breaks down. The contrast to that is what's one known as ro- robust, which is when you drop it on the floor, like a plastic cup, it sort of stays the same. It doesn't get worse, but it also doesn't get better. Mm hmm. So what Taleb sort of identified is there's nothing that's truly the opposite of fragility. Cause robust isn't the opposite of fragility, cause it stays the same. Minus one to zero. Exactly. Whereas the plus one would be something that's anti-fragile, that it gets stronger from disorder. So the most obvious example is your immune system, that you give it a little bit of tuberculosis and all of a sudden,

• 9:54George Mack?

  oh, it knows, it gets used to dealing with that and now it's much better at dealing with that. Whereas if you, if you prevent a child from sort of playing around in the mud and damaging a little bit of its immune system each time, you never grow. If you never exercise and put your body under stress, you never grow. So you, your body's almost an anti-fragile machine. Um, and the, the more disorder you give it, the more it adapts. Of course, it has a breaking point where you go, you can overstep the mark and you, you break your legs. Or whatever you do, but. Or you catch tuberculosis. Yeah, so they, you catch tuberculosis. But the concept of anti-fragility is a, is an interesting one because you, you see it all the time where you see two people go through very, very similar events.

• 10:35George Mack?

  And some people say that's the best thing that ever happened to them and they compound as a result and they use that. Hmm. And then other people who did the exact same thing, it's the, the worst thing that ever happened. To them and yeah, I think becoming more anti fragile is it's difficult, but it's um some I need to get better at something that's very, very difficult today.

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  I think so. So some of the ideas that comes to mind, I saw a tweet earlier on hilarious tweet. Um, someone's five year old child had said to his mother, the reason he wasn't cleaning my room was because it was good for his immune response. And you're like, you clever little bastard.

• 11:12George Mack?

  Didn't he that.

• 11:12Chris Williamson?

  You fucking clever little bastard. They were like, like Joshua, why haven't you cleaned your room? Oh, it's good for my immune immune system. Fuck you, Joshua. Smart, woke little five year old bastard.

• 11:23George Mack?

  So uh, one like really good practical example I heard came from Josh Wolfe, who he's the uh, the founder of Looks Capital. Um, very, very, very clever guy. Um, he has quite a few mental models which you can go on to. But he talked about when he was deciding to invest in a certain company, um, which was nuclear cleanup. So cli- cleaning up uh, nuclear waste essentially. And he realized that it was an anti fragile decision in the sense that no matter what um, chaos occurred, it was upside for him. Because let's say, for example, the world carried on investing heavily in nuclear waste.

• 12:05George Mack?

  Well, at one point, there's going to be an accident, which means that there's going to be need for nuclear cleanup. Or if the world decides, you know what, we need less nuclear activity, therefore they need a nuclear clear up company essentially. So and as a result, obviously Fukushima happened and he made a lot, a lot of money.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  Was he prepped already for that?

• 12:22George Mack?

  Yeah, he was the only company that could that could deal with that. And not only did he make a lot of money, but he saved so much damage to the world as well. So. Um, so that's like that, that's a good example of where you apply it to to business in particular as well.

• 12:35Chris Williamson?

  Couple of good examples here where anti fragility has been applied in an athletic sense. Uh, and you can take this and adopt it for yourself in a very personal sense. Catherine David's daughter, CrossFit athlete, one of the fittest women on the planet, was the fittest woman on the planet a couple of times. I remember seeing an interview with her. Uh, as a part of Ben Bergeron's Chasing Excellence, fantastic book, highly recommended if you've not read it. Very easy, very narrative based, quick read. And she says, sometimes when people haven't had enough sleep, or they haven't prepped right for a day's training, they go into the gym and they've got a fetus mentality. And they say, well, I'm not feeling very good. I'm tired. I'm this, I'm that, I'm the other.

• 13:17Chris Williamson?

  Whereas she goes in and her mentality is this is an opportunity for me to train at suboptimal preparation. Uh, uh, scenario. So this is eh, the CrossFit Games last year, they didn't know, but they just got pulled out and put on the Wednesday. They didn't know there was going to be a Wednesday event out of nowhere. Then on the flight back, the plane was delayed. Everybody was like, everyone was going to get less sleep for the next day. And that was the one day that they were supposed to recover and blah, blah, blah. All of that, she's preparing herself for that. She leans into, she calls it leaning into discomfort as if you've invited it through the door. So she doesn't shy away from it. The same as if you put your hand on somebody's chest and you press against them. They press back, you press a bit harder and they press back a little bit more.

• 14:01Chris Williamson?

  And that's the kind of mindset that she's cultivated. You might want to talk about, uh, the, who was the guy from Josh Waitskin, Josh Waitskin and his reframing of his child's reign.

• 14:15George Mack?

  Oh, yeah. It's one of my favorite ones of, um.

• 14:19George Mack?

  I always think about when I do have a kid to touch wood someday, um, not some, someday soon, touch, touch wood again. Um, that'll bite me in the ass if it's not, um. The, the sort of lessons you want to apply. And I think obviously everybody's almost playing this weird,

• 14:37George Mack?

  quite meta Darwinian game. Obviously they're literally passing on their parents' DNA, um, by, by the nature of it. And everybody's passing on their parents' DNA and then they're passing on their parents' DNA. But you're also kind of passing on, okay, what was the stuff that my parents did right? What did I like about it? Obviously you need to do a little iOS update for the current generation. Cause obviously like these things weren't around back then. So now you've got to think of smartphone policies, right? But you try and take what your parents did right and then what. You parents could have or should have done as well.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  Imagine of ideas as well.

• 15:08George Mack?

  And the better childhood you have, the the more, the less stuff that you have to change, you just you just copy and paste over. Um. And and then you obviously look at ideas that you hear from other parents or other parenting stuff. And I've not really gone deep down the parenting realm yet.

• 15:20Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 15:20George Mack?

  Uh. Again, for uh hopefully for a while. But he talks about how when he uh his son was very, very young, um first few years of his life, the first thing that parents will do to change the locus of control of a child. And it's not a conscious thing, it's very, very subconscious. And it's the most, it's one of the most

• 15:44George Mack?

  consistent conversations you ever hear. Uh. Certainly, I don't know about other countries, but particularly in the UK of the conversation about the weather where it's, oh, weather's nice today, isn't it? And it's, yeah, it's great. And it's like this, which rarely happens over here. It's like weather's miserable today. It's like, yeah, the weather's miserable, isn't it? Um. And he noticed that parents would constantly have this conversation with their kids, whereas if the weather was bad outside, therefore oh, we should feel a bit rubbish and we should just stay in and play board games. And he realized that that is one of the first moments that a kid gets conditioned to have this low locus of control. And what he did instead was flip it on its head, which is whenever it's pissing it down outside.

• 16:26George Mack?

  Oh, look at how beautiful it is. And you could argue it is beautiful, right? There's rain coming down, there's storms and there's thunder. So the perspective is it definitely is beautiful. And let's go out and play in the rain. And then you condition the mind that, oh, whilst everybody else gets really upset about this moment. This is actually a moment to truly experience and appreciate. And I try and like now, when it's raining, I catch my, that that's one of the metaphors that's stuck in my head for the longest. Cause even if it's raining now, well. Fuck's sake.

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:55George Mack?

  Get my clothes on. First off, it's not that bad.

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  It's water.

• 16:58George Mack?

  Really, it's not that bad.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:00George Mack?

  Um, and yeah, and if you just say good, and I now look like a psychopath, because there's people in the rain who are like, fuck up like that. And I'm fucking buzzing, smiling, because I've got that metaphor in my head. Yeah.

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:10George Mack?

  And it just goes back to the Jocko Willink good thing as well, when everything's going. So this is a weird one. I've tried to practise a little bit of later is when everything's going bad, I say good. And when everything's going good, I start saying bad, because I know that psychologically, I sometimes take my, I might take my foot off the gas.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  So you, are you stood in the rain, like the guy at the end of Shawshank Redemption, crawling out of the pipe of shit, looking up and being like.

• 17:37George Mack?

  Yeah, basically. It was that whole day. Um, yeah, I'm just trying to think of some bad, like bad news, like, oh, your girlfriend's just broken up with you. Good. Opportunity to.

• 17:45Chris Williamson?

  She was a bitch.

• 17:45George Mack?

  Spend more, yeah, spend, spend more time with yourself. Um, but then when someone, oh, just, just made a hundred million pounds. Oh, bad. You might lose your ambition. You know what I mean? You've got to constantly have that.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  To, to fact check yourself.

• 17:55George Mack?

  Yeah, it's some weird zen paradox going on that constantly playing.

• 17:59Chris Williamson?

  Another goo- great example, actually, from a podcast earlier this year with Alex Hutchinson, who wrote the book Endure. So. This is the definition of anti-fragile, as far as I'm concerned. He's got elite performing athletes, varying degrees on the top end. Sat on a bike doing a V O two max test. They got a face mask on, which is controlling the air in and out of their lungs. And these guys are doing maths questions on an iPad while they're doing it. So they're at a fairly high heart rate. They're completing these maths questions on the iPad on the bike. So they don't actually need to think much. It's not a cognitively demanding task to exercise. Legs are just turning, but it is a cognitively demanding task they've got on the screen in front of them.

• 18:40Chris Williamson?

  Then they start to push their heart rate a little bit higher, a little bit higher, and get them really quite far up into the high percentages of their max. Then they restrict the air through the mask, so that it's like breathing through a straw or breathing at altitude. And the absolute best performers, obviously, a lot of people, their cognition drops. They're distracted, they feel uncomfortable. The absolute best performers get better at their maths problems when they restrict the air through the mouth. Because that's when they start to lean in to that discomfort, as if they've invited it through the door.

• 19:13George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 19:13Chris Williamson?

  And I just, I love, love that, that whole concept. You told me that story the first time I'm sat on my. The hairs are standing up on, on my arms, because I'm like. Fuck, that's so cool. These guys are in there at the peak of discomfort. And then someone turns the discomfort up more and they go, good. That's why I'm here. That's what I'm here to do. And you just think that is the difference. Another perfect example. We talked about passion in life. Steffi Graf, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, gets tested at twelve years old as part of, I think she's German, part of the German youth tennis programme. They test her and they're testing all of the athletes on two broad domains.

• 19:54Chris Williamson?

  First one is skill, mechanical skill. Second one is passion and inspiration to train. And she scores ten out of ten on both of them. So it's like, good fucking luck trying to beat her. Like, not only is she more talented than you, but she will outwork you and it won't even feel like work to her.

• 20:10George Mack?

  Hmm. Well, I just think it creates an individual like that.

• 20:13Chris Williamson?

  It's the.

• 20:14George Mack?

  Oh, yeah, it's like, it's.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  It's a perfect storm.

• 20:15George Mack?

  There's so many there, there's so many stuff in the algorithm. I definitely find the biggest influence in my output, general

• 20:26George Mack?

  awareness and, um, what's the correct, well, yeah, I'd just say output and the way I think is who I'm around. And I know that sounds fucking cliche, you sound like you're at some Tony Robbins seminar. You just have to get new friends, man. But, um, when you, I, I just find, I always use this thought experiment of pick the person, pick, imagine you again, identical, but we tweak two variables in these two parallel universes. One where you spend the most amount of time, or the person you spend the most amount of time with is the person you know, whether you know them in your actual real life, or you know them via, you follow them on Instagram, you see them on YouTube,

• 21:04George Mack?

  who is the most positive or has the best output work ethic, the way they think that you truly admire. You're around that individual the most. Let's say you have a guy like David Goggins and he's just constantly like going.

• 21:17Chris Williamson?

  Making you jump in ice.

• 21:18George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, just get in the fucking ice, man. Um, you've got that guy versus. The, everyone has one in their friendship circle, just a sloth. You know what I mean? He's constantly going, oh, he's not actually that good. He's only because he's this. Or, uh, yeah, yeah, they're rubbish. You know, that sort of individual who's constant, you, when you.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  Fixed mindset.

• 21:37George Mack?

  When you leave them, you feel, you feel like you've got an illness and go, fucking hell. I'm slower, I'm fatigued, I, I, life is worse as a result of that individual. And imagine you spend, again, the exact same, in your DNA, your genetics, your, your situation. One where you spend it with the, the best person, one where you spend it with the worst person. And after a year, those two people, as in your two opposing selves in these two universes. Suddenly some Rick and Morty shit happens and you fucking meet one another. Those are two different people.

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  Very much so. But it's, it's difficult, man, like. You are so much less in control of the people that you're around than you are of yourself. And I think that.

• 22:22George Mack?

  What do you mean?

• 22:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, I can't tell you, let's say that I spend every day with you for the next year. I can't tell you how to be. I can choose who I choose to be with, but I have a limited number of people that I can choose to be with. I don't know everybody. I don't know who is necessarily good for me. It takes me time to work out who's toxic and who's not. I also think that it's hard making friends when you're older.

• 22:44George Mack?

  That's true, that's true.

• 22:45Chris Williamson?

  No one ever talks about this because it sounds like some sort of like weird autistic social leper bullshit. But it's true, it's really, it is. Like, no one ever wants to say, I wish I had some new friends. I'm twenty five, thirty, thirty five, forty years old. Be really cool if I had some new friends or some different friends. And you think, well, hang on a second. People say all the time that they would love a partner. They can be single and love to have a partner that was like X and Y and Z. But we just assume that the social circle that we're in will have people come and go like the fucking tide. And we'll pick up some random ones. But what were we talking about in the last one?

• 23:28Chris Williamson?

  The most valuable asset of the twenty first century, as far as you were concerned, high agency. High agency people will seek out those friends. You know who I think's mega, mega high agency person? David Perrell.

• 23:42George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Chris Williamson?

  David Perrell told me on a podcast, he actively seeks out spending time with influencers off Instagram, spending time with comedians, spending time with intellectuals. He's always the dumbest person in the room in one of multiple domains and he keeps changing the domain.

• 23:58George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 23:59Chris Williamson?

  You're like, can you imagine what David fucking Perrell's phone book's like? Neil deGrasse Tyson, like, you know, it just.

• 24:06George Mack?

  You know, the weirdest moment it comes to the social stuff is that it it happens really early on at these weird look at the dice. Like, the classic example is in university or college when people, you end up at a random uni, sometimes you even choose that one, you stand up there. And then the people who happen to be placed near you in halls.

• 24:25Chris Williamson?

  Geographically.

• 24:26George Mack?

  It's literally Susan on a Excel spreadsheet who randomly decides this. But it's mad to think the amount of Susans or Derics.

• 24:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:35George Mack?

  That have designed people's best friends forever. And they automatically assume that, oh, we should have been best friends. But I always use this example. So one cool mental model to follow, because this then goes down a relationship tangent. But if you look at, and this comes from Josh Wolfe earlier with the the anti fragility stuff, is he has this great mental model of the directional arrows of progress. Where if you look at the the computer in the nineteen fifty's, it was the size of probably the house that we're in now in a university where there was maybe only a limited amount of them in the world and very, very few people could use them.

• 25:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 25:09George Mack?

  And then as decades go on and you get to nearer the the seventies, you have the the home computer and all of a sudden it's got smaller in size and but it's cheaper and it's more powerful.

• 25:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 25:19George Mack?

  And then you get the laptop, which we have here in the the a few decades gone by. Then the next few decades, you get the smartphone, it's even more smaller, it's even more compact. And now it sits in your pocket.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 25:31George Mack?

  And now you look at, now you've got the AirPods that now sit in your ears. So you see these directional arrows of progress. And I know the Toby Lucky, the Shopify CEO has a similar thing where he's trying to analyze future trends of following this directional arrow of progress. So you you can't predict the future, but you can assume computing as we know it or or hardware as we know it will continue to get smaller, more powerful, cheaper and nearer to our bodies. And obviously, everybody talks about the contact lens that's coming or whatever it's going to be. And I always apply this with. Um, relationships in that if you looked at our maybe great, great, great grandparents generation where you would, you might marry, um, well, if you let's say we go back to hunter

• 26:13George Mack?

  and gather times, you might just marry whoever you got assigned to in the tribe or whoever you had to fight Dave and see what happened or fight Jess and see what happened. And then obviously you go to our grandparents time where you would literally, if you wasn't married by eighteen or twenty one or whatever that little age window was, you was an outcast. And you would meet someone from your school or your next door neighbour, that was it. You've had someone from your school or your next door neighbour, who's it gonna be? So you had fifteen people to choose from.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:40George Mack?

  And then obviously, um, you have women coming into the workplace and you have the feminism movement and people would sort of delay marriage a little bit and you had a wider choice. You'd maybe meet people at work or you might meet them at a bar.

• 26:52Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:53George Mack?

  And then you have OkCupid that comes along. Um, so now you can meet people online, but it tends to be a bit of an older demographic. Then you have Tinder that comes along and there's more and more choice and you can co- you can meet, I, I know people now, I know more and more couples who are from different countries and go, how often would that have happened?

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:10George Mack?

  Fifty years ago, like, that is such a recent thing of the amount of, um, kids that are gonna be born who are gonna be dual nationality. So you're looking at the direction arrows of progress there of more choice, um, more people you're dating, you get to get more and more resources. And there's a, a novel called After On, great podcast as well.

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  Oh, Rob Reid.

• 27:29George Mack?

  Yeah, have you, you, have you listened to After On yet, the book?

• 27:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Oh, no, sorry, not the book, but the podcast.

• 27:34George Mack?

  Really good.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 27:35George Mack?

  So he has a scene, a bit he writes in that where the A I gets so good that it matches, it's like, imagine Tinder, but it's an A I that sorts it for you and picks a perfect person based off your interests, their personality, the way you like someone to look and the way that person likes someone to look. Cause you gotta realise. There's probably a thousand people out there who would be the best relationship you could ever imagine. And you've got to think ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of relationships, this sounds really an awful thing to say, but aren't probably the best relationship for that individual if you looked at it from a maybe a completely objective, so many simulations running at once.

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  We settle on the nearest best thing.

• 28:20George Mack?

  Yeah, basically, but I mean, it's getting better, but you're looking at direction, it's not at least it's not your school or your next door neighbour. You know what I mean? At least it's getting better, but you can imagine a scenario in the future where everybody meets that truly perfect individual, or if that exists.

• 28:34Chris Williamson?

  That would be, that would be interesting.

• 28:36George Mack?

  That's what Rob Reid's hypothesis is anyway.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Next one, availability bias.

• 28:40George Mack?

  Oh, yeah, this is, there's a hilarious example I have about this one, which is I went back when it was at Social Chain, um, they have a a Harry Potter fan page, it's like the biggest Harry Potter community in the world. I'm not a Harry Potter fan at all. But I was trying to do this morning meditation habit and I went upstairs in one of the rooms, trying to meditate there.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  I remember when he used to do this, wasn't the, the, the, is this the bit about the jigsaw?

• 29:06George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, so there's a Harry Potter jigsaw in the middle of the room. And I've, I've seen, I think I saw the first two Harry Potters and I dipped early. You know how for our generation, it was such a big thing. I couldn't give a shit about Harry Potter. Um, I've got a good friend Hannah who loves Harry Potter, so she's gonna hate me for that. But I couldn't give a shit about Harry Potter and I was sat there meditating, um, and I was just observing.

• 29:30Chris Williamson?

  Surrounded by.

• 29:31George Mack?

  Observing my own thoughts.

• 29:34George Mack?

  I just observed my own thoughts and I remember I just catch myself maybe five minutes in and I go, I wonder how Hermione and Ron felt about Harry being the face. I go, what, what am I thinking about here? Come back to, come back to your breathing, come back to your breathing. And then I go. I wonder what it's like being Daniel Radcliffe and that famous. It must have been crazy being that famous. And go, come back to you, come back to you.

• 29:55George Mack?

  I'm like, I wonder how J K Rowling managed to get that out. And I remember I closed meditation session going, I thought more about Harry Potter in the last twenty minutes than I had in my entire life, just because there's a fucking Harry Potter. So, like, at the minute, I'm chatting to, uh, one of the guys from work, and there's some digestive biscuits in the kitchen. And none of us like digestive biscuits, but we're eating digestive biscuits every single day because they're just there in the, in the jar, the seafree jar. Um, and yet whatever's available to you, um, you've got to almost instill willpower to avoid it. Which means that, given enough time, given enough lack of sleep, given enough X, Y, Z, you're probably going to give in at some point. So, yeah, design the environment's key.

• 30:37Chris Williamson?

  There's a, a really good example, again, Gabriel Weinberg. Uh, Sarah Lichtenstein did a study where people were asked about forty one leading causes of death, and they massively overestimated the risk of sensationalized types. So tornadoes, floods, botulism, or smallpox vaccines were fifty times overestimated. And stroke and diabetes were a hundred times underestimated.

• 31:09George Mack?

  Interesting.

• 31:10Chris Williamson?

  Because the availability bias of the news, and that links into filter bubble, of course, which is like a, a, a echo chamber that occurs due to this availability bias, that's reinforced by the algorithms that we see online, because what you agree with, you will tend to click on more, which then reinforces feeding you more of this stuff, because the system thinks, oh, he's clicking on that, therefore he wants to see more of that. But as Jordan Peterson says, be friends with people that want the best for you, doesn't mean with be friends that, with people who tell you what you want to hear. Very different. The kid always wants sweets, doesn't mean the kid, that sweets is always good for the kid.

• 31:46George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 31:47Chris Williamson?

  So the system constantly feeding you things that you agree with, isn't necessarily the best for you.

• 31:53George Mack?

  But the issue with that, and I have this, is that how do you then go about fixing this problem of social media? And this, obviously somebody knows the space quite well, um. That people will insist on, okay, well, Facebook needs to change its algorithms where it gives people content they don't want to see, but then they won't spend time on the platform. So it's it, I'm I'm looking at, if you look at Mark Zuckerberg, you kind of get your decisions a little bit. And I I look at it and go, because you've seen the the recent news about the um the American Senate where they want to basically have it installed in the app that once somebody scrolled so much they get cut off. And you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is some weird George Orwell shit. And you know, it's Nancy from Florida who who's heard about Instagram in an article and she's trying to enforce.

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  So if we're emailing on WhatsApp.

• 32:41George Mack?

  Yeah, that that that exact sort of shit. But I I think about this a bit, and I thought there's there's two ways to potentially fix this problem. Um. First one is that instead of trying to fix a a heroin problem, look at the needles. So instead of trying to stop the heroin going around, the social media addiction, let's look at the needles, which is the smartphones. The the app um Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, et cetera, are never going to fix the problem because that we'll come on to this in a second, but that's their incentives, that's their business model, they're never going to stop doing it. McDonald's aren't going to start selling kale. I'm I'm sure they have, but it was horrific, I imagine, right? I nearly did it for a PR bid. But they're they're never going to be their full product of kale, it's going to be greasy fries and a greasy burger, because that's what people go there for, and that's what they're incentivized to do, and that's what their business model is.

• 33:24George Mack?

  So instead, the people who have the power are Apple and Google, who own Android, obviously. So what you need to do, they've recently released a screen time stuff, but why isn't it that people can't? Let's say you flip, I call it the ultimate judo move, where you flip social media or the mental models that social media have about the way they've conditioned people on its head. And with the screen time stuff, you create a social network, where I can see out of my friends who spent the most amount, or the least amount of time on Instagram, and it's ranked with them at the top of the leaderboard. And that would be quite a cool feature. And then the final one they should do is if it's decide, if it's decide, oh, I think they should do. Um. Is if it's decided that these things are bad for people's mental health, okay, well, let's tax them.

• 34:07George Mack?

  Uh, five percent or ten percent, whatever that tax is agreed to be, which will be billions of dollars, and instead of. Focusing it on government bodies that don't have a clue what they're gonna do, just do an X Prize where, okay, whichever top twenty entrepreneurs come up with a solution that's falsifiable by science in terms of helping people's mental health. They get the funding, they get the funding, and you filter the money away from these uh things that are arguably damaging people's mental health into these companies and and then you, Facebook can carry on being Facebook, Instagram can carry on being Instagram, Snapchat can carry on being Snapchat, but people have the control in terms of they can customize their own screen time way more, play games that way, and the money's getting filtered into these mental health startups.

• 34:47Chris Williamson?

  I like the analogy about the needle and the and the drug, because it's the delivery mechanism, isn't it, through the phone. I would love to see the relative time on site desktop versus mobile now. Because I think previously, uh the last time I checked, it was like eighty five percent mobile. I bet that's even gone up. I bet that's gone up more, I bet it's like ninety, ninety five percent. And that's not to say that the desktop version of the apps isn't that good, it's just that the mobile version is so overwhelmingly addictive. And convenient that people can't get around it.

• 35:18George Mack?

  This is my thing about the sort of antisocial social network is what, um it needs, it needs again a PR stuff, as most of my stuff, it needs a naming stuff. But basically, uh what so a lot of the social networks do is almost have these takes our relationships and puts them in this weird little digital stuff, this little hierarchy going on. Whereas being on Instagram for five hours a day. If you heard someone, if you watched me doing that, it's quite a sad thing. And if that was in the leaderboard and you go, oh, and Dave knew that everyone else was looking, you went, you spent five hours on Instagram today, you actually look like a bit of a loser. And you can fl- you can actually use the biases that these social media outlets have used on the whole of humanity. And just full on judo move, yeah, use the momentum against them, yeah.

• 36:02Chris Williamson?

  There's a, an interesting app, I can't remember the name of it, I'll find it and put it in the show notes, where you pick a time. That you're not going to be on your phone for, and it plants a tree. And the longer time that you pick that you're not going to be on for, the bigger the tree grows. And you add friends, it's kind of like a game, social networking game. And then if you pick your phone up during the time that you promised you weren't going to be on it, your tree dies. You've got a dead tree. And it's a game between you and your friends to see who can get the biggest orchard.

• 36:34George Mack?

  Okay.

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  And it's all animated and the trees look cool and at Christmas it changes into Christmas trees. So that's kind of similar to what you're talking about there. But you're right, I don't know, there needs to be some real innovation when it comes to the problem of social media at the moment. Because it's getting to that stage now where I think it's a little bit more than just people looking at it and going, oh, that's an interesting problem. People spend too much time on their phones. You've got children growing up now who've got iPads at two years old. What does that actually do? Like when you've got someone who is conditioned to a screen this far from their face, with the dopamine drops that you get, and most people aren't potentially going to be armed with

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  seventy-four minute long blog posts, like some of the stuff that gets posted in the Modern Wisdom in a Circle. That's how to reduce notifications, turn your screen grayscale, like all this sort of stuff. That's a lot of time from a young age to be conditioned to something that we've never, ever, ever had before. You were discussing earlier on, what would happen if someone did MDMA twice a week for an entire year? What would that do to the synapses in their brain? Well, what does it do to someone's brain who's using this sort of technology from a young age? I know you're a tech optimist, so you're skeptical of this sort of stuff.

• 37:50George Mack?

  Yeah, and I do like, because I always think it's so easy with a lot of this stuff to focus on the negatives because they're so overwhelming. But let's look at how many people have become millionaires or been able to run their own business because of these platforms. Let's look at how many people, like I think seventy percent, obviously it's completely a stat I've overheard someone else say. But I imagine it's around about that of something like seventy percent of relationships. And now started on the internet, the amount of. WhatsApp group chats, I I think it's a crazy stat, which is the age of people coming out of the closet. Um homosexual people, whether gay or lesbian or or whatever they want to identify as, has significantly gone down.

• 38:34George Mack?

  Because they can find similar examples like them and join a Reddit community.

• 38:40Chris Williamson?

  It's all grinder.

• 38:41George Mack?

  It's what I mean.

• 38:41Chris Williamson?

  It's grinder.

• 38:42George Mack?

  But what I but so I I'm just going. No, but hold on, we we was chatting earlier about.

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  Grinder.

• 38:47George Mack?

  Gr- grinder, yeah, because that's that's where me and Chris obviously met. And uh which I was saying earlier, the setup here does look like a adult adult film set. But um Chris is casting couch, but basically what we're saying earlier is seventy to eighty years ago. Um have I got that right? Yeah, roughly.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  Love it more.

• 39:07George Mack?

  Roughly, um.

• 39:08Chris Williamson?

  Conscripture.

• 39:09George Mack?

  Yeah, we we would have been in a world war in the trenches and. Realistically, we probably would have died um or would have seen stuff that. If I would have seen a film of right now, I'd probably be still having nightmares of it twelve months later. So part I can't, I could you imagine telling someone in the trenches? Oh, I'm addicted to Instagram. Shut the, you know what I mean?

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  I so I get it.

• 39:38George Mack?

  So I I have, I part of me is like, we go back to extreme ownership and personal responsibility. Log off, sign out.

• 39:45Chris Williamson?

  I get it.

• 39:45George Mack?

  Delete the app. I get it if you're underage and that sort of stuff. Yes, that's a different question. But what we seem as a uh uh our condition as humanity, so this is one of my mental models that I thought about a lot, which is. I call it zeit salmas. So it's a crossover of the current zeitgeist and outsiders. So we kind of forget. We kind of, every generation assumes that their problems are the worst there is and forgets about the fact that we are just a. A blink in humanity's history, but we're also connected to all these previous generations. We don't really realise it. And our generation is chatting about social media addiction, whereas I think it was my great granddad.

• 40:25George Mack?

  Where who um was a doctor, my dad was saying, and he was, I think it was World War One. I forgot which battle line it was that. And so many people were dying on the battlefield. He ran out and was just rescuing bodies for hours and hours and then. And I'm fucking complaining about Instagram stories. Do you know what I mean? I don't. So I think you've got to take a wider frame in this. And of course, there's some stuff we can do and we can look at the X prizes, the stuff you mentioned earlier. But come on, because if we fix the Instagram problem, people start moaning about some hours. I know I'm sounding like a 50s dad right now.

• 40:57Chris Williamson?

  I get it, man. So I mean, first off, I think you need to be careful because everything that you say will be used on the internet. And if you don't continue to brand well, Zeit Selmers, which to me, to me, sounds like sparkling water, is going to be quoted by people on the internet.

• 41:14George Mack?

  If a guy works in marketing, I'm going to be doing a horrific.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, anybody wants to rebrand some of Georgie's mental models, please, for the love of God, get in touch because they're terrible. But yeah, I get what you mean. I had a brief discussion with Theo and Eve from Social Chain, the same day that we had our mental models 101 chat. In that discussion, I said exactly the same thing as you. However, as society progresses, the fidelity and resolution with which we look at our wellbeing has to advance as well. It's no good saying a hundred years ago, you'd have been in the trenches, because it is not a hundred years ago. The advancement of wellbeing of humanity as a whole requires us to continue to look at this with a finer and finer viewpoint. We need to continue. Okay, just because it's not as bad as it was, doesn't mean it's as good as it can be.

• 42:01George Mack?

  I get that, yeah.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  And it's a, I, I, I get what you mean. I do. I appreciate.

• 42:06George Mack?

  There's somewhere between, I think, what both of us are saying, there's some happy medium there. Um, I think of a slightly tangent note that as society continues progressing, um, because we face an issue now, too much of abundance. That's what all our problems are. We've got too much information, we've got too much food that's making us fat, you know what I mean? We've got too many things going on. Life's too good that as a result, we're kind of like a heroin addict who's got everything, constantly getting everything as a result, ends up feeling nothing. And I think that we'll see richer and richer, sorry, as society gets richer and richer, people start paying weirdly for negative experiences. You see it now with like the likes of Tummoor and how big people like half marathons and I'm seeing marathons more and more or meditation retreats and,

• 42:52George Mack?

  um, ultimately, I think. May, would it come down to a scenario where, I was wondering, would I pay for this or where, imagine a crazy V R scenario where I could go and be for five minutes, see what it was really like.

• 43:05George Mack?

  No, but let's say I could see what it was like in the trenches and I could see that and I go, oh, and I take that off and there's a result going back to contrast to the last one. Oh, fucking hell, it's so good. Like, life is so good. I could have been fighting a war. And eh, we don't, we forget how, again, I don't wanna sound like Tony Robbins here, but we forget, and I don't, I don't really do it for Tony, but um. We forget how bad it's been throughout so much of human history. Uh, because the issue is everyone else is around you is a born now. So you know, you don't get to see day from the trenches. We go, how, how was your day, mate? He goes, I've just been here. Echo chamber, availability bias, contrast. But that's why I'd say the most important thing on the sort of V R front to watch.

• 43:46George Mack?

  My favourite cliff of all time. Everybody who I sent it to, you guys, it's changed me. It's the best, like, thr- three minutes or two minutes. Yeah, Roy, if Roy from Rick and Morty, um. In the show notes below, go watch it, fantastic. Just don't go back to the carpet store is all I'll say. Do not go back to the carpet store. I actually, so one of the things, I don't really, you, you might know this, uh, it's not in my new places when I was in Manchester. Above where I got changed is Roy falling off in the final scene where he falls off, breaks his back and dies, and it's the Roy score all over. And I, I catch myself playing that, like, Tim Urban talks about this from Wait But Why, and you go, realistically, this is just a video game.

• 44:32George Mack?

  Like, what we're playing is just a video game. You, what are you? Like, and this sounds really weird, but you just wait, you're just born one day and you're this fucking shaven chimp and you, you take care, I've got an iPhone and I do da, da, da. But then at the end, it just, eh, you die and it's, uh, depending on, I guess, your, your religion and stuff, but I'd say you just die and it's like the all over or you, or you certainly won't remember much in the next life. So it's just a video game. Um. And I think watching that Roy clip quite regularly, everyone who watches it goes, oh, fuck, that's what life basically, we're just playing a game of Roy.

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  Um. So Roy, for the people that are listening, Roy is a scene from Rick and Morty. Uh, Morty goes into a virtual reality game where he's born, becomes an NFL player, lives the life of this guy called Roy, then he dies at the end, comes back out, but he's lived this whole life, right? Comes back out and Rick then does a like analysis of how he played, how he played the game. And it, you're totally right, it is that

• 45:33Chris Williamson?

  the ability to view things with that broad perspective and to take yourself out of the situation is a big part of it. So what I want to move on to is, I can't remember what we did last time, but let's quickly go through Hanlon's razor, Occam's razor, and then let's do McGill's razor. Yet again, internet. If we can find something to rebrand it with, then please feel free.

• 45:55George Mack?

  So I guess, uh, Occam's razor is probably the most like well-known one from philosophy of if in doubt, you go with the, i- if you're presented with two similar arguments, um, and you can't make your mind upon which one, you go with the most simplest solution or you, the reason why it's called a razor is because you lean towards it. People often, I, I think, and again, I might not know this well enough, but people often think, no, therefore the simplest solution is always the answer. No, no, no. You assume the simplest solution is the answer, but then you work from there and you look for counter evidence, et cetera. But you assume that, whereas Hanlon's razor is another version of that where if you're, let's say somebody's pissed you off.

• 46:36George Mack?

  Um, and you have equal evidence, was it out of malice or was it out of them not just thinking?

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  Do not attribute to, uh, malice what can be afforded to stupidity.

• 46:46George Mack?

  Exactly. So, uh, Hanlon's razor is just assume that it was down to their stupidity or it was down to their negative thinking, it wasn't because they're a bad person. And then the razor I have, um, is if presented with two situations, choose the one and that will bring about the most amount of luck. And I'd say this is, if I had to give, I always say, every episode, if I had to pick one minute or one, then I'll pick a different one each fucking episode.

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's fine.

• 47:16George Mack?

  But this, I guess, I, I guess as I get older, these things change, right? And I'd say in terms of actual.

• 47:24George Mack?

  Output towards me and what I do and I get I don't think I've done anything particularly special yet um or in general. In that this one by far has the most amount of impact. So I'll get I'll give like more practical examples of this. So. Uh quite recently, um a guy was messaging me and we're supposed to go for a drink and he was like, oh, should we go? Oh, should we go for a drink tonight or should we delay it? And I was like going, I remember just caught myself and I was going. What's gonna bring about the most luck here? Me going and sitting at home and just chilling out and doing nothing. Or going for a drink or a like minded guy I've never met before um. And seeing what happens. And of course I was like, well, definitely the latter is. But even though naturally I was going, I just I'm tired. I wanna go home.

• 48:06George Mack?

  It's like, okay, let's just put the luckiest option. As a result, lots of stuff came off the back of that um. And constantly looking for where, okay, I've got two potential decision trees to go down here. Which one do I think is gonna bring about the most amount of luck? And constantly doing that. One of my favourite examples is my my mates. James and Reese where they were at a Drake concert. Hmm. And the MEN, uh th- those two guys are massive Drake fans and. They were both in the toilet. So my mate James is proper into like sneakers, he's one of the sneaker heads. And he sees a a massive guy in the toilets and he says, mate, I love your shoes. And he just just randomly compliments a stranger. And he gets chatting. Hand on penis. Chat hand on penis. Was he hand on penis? They were doing the whole, the uh the cross. There were hands on each other's penis.

• 48:51George Mack?

  Of course, of course. Um and I've been up to a point there. Sorry. But uh so yeah, they are complimenting him on his shoes and they get chatting back and forth. Anyway, that guy turned out to be Drake's DJ. And he goes, do you wanna come back VIP with us and hang around with Drake and like Kevin De Bruyne and Paul Pogba and Odell Beckham Junior? And they went out with. Like the A-list of the A-list of the A-list. I'm not saying that's something that you wanna aspire to, but um. That's a fucking cool story, right? And a great night. And as a result, whenever Drake comes to town, they text that DJ and he sorts them out. And you go, that just came down to. Compliment the guy in his shoes. Mm hmm. I know, but let's say you were sat there and sometimes people don't wanna chat to a stranger or certainly don't wanna compliment a stranger. But what's gonna bring about the most amount of luck? Me just keeping that thought in my head, it's not gonna bring about that much luck. Whereas if I go, hey mate, like this, da da da da.

• 49:36George Mack?

  Of course, you might just say, all right, mate, cheers, bye, be a dick, you've not lost anything. But the potential amount of luck that's constantly exist, and I I always think about it, and you only see this stuff backwards is that. You know, the whole sliding doors phenomenon where you look back and you go, oh, if I would have gone out that night where I ended up meeting my.

• 49:55Chris Williamson?

  This would have happened.

• 49:56George Mack?

  The mother of my kids.

• 49:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:57George Mack?

  Imagine if I would have just gone outside at home that night.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 49:59George Mack?

  So we're constantly having these sliding doors, even as we're chatting right now, there's sliding doors moments going on. But you don't see them at the time, you can only see them looking backwards.

• 50:08Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 50:08George Mack?

  So the sliding doors are invisible when you go through them.

• 50:11Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 50:11George Mack?

  But constantly visible when you look back.

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:13George Mack?

  And I think the only, I really say so much of it comes down to luck, therefore just having some default raises in place of going. What do I think is going to bring about the most amount of luck here and just doing that.

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 50:23George Mack?

  Um, it's something I'm trying to get better at anyway.

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  I think it's a really, it's something that I'm thinking about a lot after the podcast I did with Laura Vanderkam, which I thought was really insightful. If you haven't listened to it yet, I highly recommend that you go and see it. Um, time management expert, and she talks about the fact that the present self is spoiled like a petulant child. We have three selves in this life, the future self, the past self and the present self. But as you've said, when the present self comes around, you're actually thinking, oh, I'm tired, it's cold outside, I've had a long day, I've done this, that and the other. Staying in bed and reading or watching Netflix or not doing the thing which involves more action. Your body will always resort to inertia or the path of least resistance.

• 51:06George Mack?

  Um.

• 51:06Chris Williamson?

  Over that of one which requires more effort. And I think seeking out, going back to what we were talking about before, extreme ownership, leaning into discomfort. All of these things um are gelling together in a way that's, I think, actually better than mental models one on one. Um, but they're they're all linked together. If you find a point where you think, well, hang on a second, am I going to really appreciate me making this effort for me tomorrow when I look back? Because if you hadn't sent me that message a year ago.

• 51:37George Mack?

  Yes.

• 51:38Chris Williamson?

  We wouldn't be mates.

• 51:38George Mack?

  That's the issue.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Done all of these cool things, perfect.

• 51:41George Mack?

  I remember, just to put in there, I remember I sat there, um, uh, thinking, oh, she hasn't sent that message, and I was like. There's genuinely about three second pauses to go, should I message that guy? I say, yeah, fuck it, what's coming, I must look. And I did it. And that's literally why we're chatting right now. So yeah, that's weird, isn't it?

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  Asymmetry is going back to to the um mental models from the last episode, um talking about that, about the fact that.

• 52:02George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Chris Williamson?

  Action.

• 52:03George Mack?

  Upside so huge.

• 52:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, action is almost always going to result in that. So talk to the girl at the bar like, and again, a concept from pick apart history. Like, assume attraction is a really good way to go about things because it just encourages.

• 52:17George Mack?

  When you assume they're attracted to you.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes, just always assume attraction. Reason being that it will encourage you into action as opposed to into inertia.

• 52:27George Mack?

  Which is the natural state.

• 52:28Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 52:28George Mack?

  Yeah, I think, yeah, if you just ask yourself what's gonna bring about the best Roy score at the end of the day.

• 52:34Chris Williamson?

  What's the highest, let me get the highest fucking Roy score.

• 52:37George Mack?

  And I've got this weird meme I make Josh now and ever I see her, which is go like, how's your Roy score getting up? And that's how he catch you up now. And it's true. And he gives you that frame going, shit, this is just a fucking game.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  Fucking Roy score. So I've got one that you might not know. Have you heard of third story? Have you heard of this?

• 52:50George Mack?

  No, maybe.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So third story, you can imagine that in any normal situation, you have your point of view, my point of view. But then you'd also have a third point of view, which would actually be from someone outside of the situation, looking at both. A lot of the time, people will discuss um the fact that you want to see things from someone else's perspective. We don't just need to see that because that might not actually be the best place to see this from.

• 53:18Chris Williamson?

  The totally impartial observer probably has the best view of both. Now, we spoke, we we spoke at length about uh how much we love John Peterson and Sam Harris's approach to the beginning of their debate together, when they steel manned each other's arguments. And is it Warren Buffett who says he refuses to have a position on anything?

• 53:42George Mack?

  Charlie Munger, yeah.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Charlie Munger says.

• 53:44George Mack?

  Refuses, I think he says he refuses to have a position on anything unless he can state the other side better than the other side can. Basically, it's what it is. And I think he calls that his iron discipline. Um and that that catches me a lot is where I'll have an opinion on something. And I'll keep researching my side of the opinion, keep going over it and over it and over it. I've not even looked at the other side and it kind of holds you accountable of not chatting about something. The other day I was having a chat with a mate, I'm maybe strategising at work. And I go, I catch myself, like a proper Charlie Munger moment. Um, where we was talking about a certain market that we should look at potentially investing in. And I go, you know what, I actually think that's a, I go, I actually don't have an opinion.

• 54:25George Mack?

  And then I started thinking about the other side and I go, I actually don't know this subject well enough.

• 54:28Chris Williamson?

  We just want to sound clever, don't we? So much, man, and I.

• 54:32George Mack?

  But then we talked about earlier of the benefit of identifying publicly as an idiot. Like, anybody ever listening to this, watching to this, please know that I am an imbecile. And I say that mainly for myself, because we was chatting about earlier of when you, you recently, and I'm sure people who have heard the podcast a lot. You chat a lot about the benefits you got from Romwood and now you've done a bit of a U-turn on that. Uh, the, uh, whip band, you've done a bit of a U-turn on that, right? And once you go out there shouting out, I am an X, or I'm a Republican, I am a Democrat, I'm a smart person. Um, I'm a, whatever you want to do, whenever you have those labels, it's then very hard to.

• 55:12George Mack?

  Once you've said it out loud to everyone, to then pivot and do a U-turn, and often because people don't want to be seen as being a hypocrite. But I admire people so much more, once they've been so gung ho, gung ho on something and they go the other way. Like people who've been in like Scientology or the, um, who the, what's the church in America that shouts at soldiers' funerals? And they, and they leave and they go against their whole family, like the ability to go against your identity, which I think is the hardest thing to do. Is so impressive, which is why I always identify as an idiot, because if I identify as an idiot, then when I do stupid stuff.

• 55:49Chris Williamson?

  It's like the minimum viable, minimum viable product to be, to be a thinker, isn't it?

• 55:54George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Chris Williamson?

  Like what is the lowest grade entry that I can have? Lowest barriers to entry, idiot. And I think, you know, from, from my perspective, this is something that I touched on earlier with you and I haven't thought this before. But mercifully, one of the advantages of being a podcast host, and this is where Rogan gets it so correct. Is that you don't actually ever end up being the smartest person in the room. It's very rare that Rogan's the smartest person in the room on whatever the topic is, maybe MMA sometimes, maybe comedy sometimes. But even in that, he might be sat across from Francis Nganu. You know, oh, he's a bit better at MMA than you are. Maybe not his knowledge, maybe some nuance of that Rogan's better. Or he might be sat across from Brian Callan, you're like, well, who's the better comedian? That's up for debate, et cetera, et cetera.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  The advantage of being someone who is in the middle of a lot of other people. And then presents that information in the way that a podcast host does is that you're never expected to actually be the like paragon of knowledge within an area. You're just a mere simulacrum representation of what everyone else has been. And that actually allows you to hold much less concrete views because everybody appreciates that really all you are is just a little reflection of all the people you've been exposed to. But that's all that anyone is. The only difference is when someone makes their identity about it.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  Aubrey Marcus, when you talk about how much you love polyamory, look at the comments on Aubrey Marcus's breakup video with his wife, Whitney, talking about how they're transitioning their relationship. And polyamory is still the way to go. And by the way, if you want to find out what happened, tune into Whitney's podcast this Wednesday on blah, blah, blah. And the people in the comments are going, man, say it how it is. Say that polyamory was a bad, a bad decision. And say that you're breaking up, not transitioning. But those guys have planted the flag in the ground so hard. And maybe they do still believe this, but when you've been so

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  forthcoming with talking about Whitney's off to go and see her boyfriend in Texas to get railed off some guy who's the 24 year old stallion or some shit from Austin. Yeah. And you're like, right, after you've done that, where'd you go from there? It's very difficult to allow that identity to simmer back down again and for you to actually say, do you know what it is? Might have been wrong.

• 58:17George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 58:18Chris Williamson?

  And there's a, there's a mental model that I've been thinking about for a little bit called the self-serving bias. Where you uh often have self-serving reasons for your own actions and behaviour, but when you're observing others, you uh ex- excuse it as part of their intrinsic, intrinsic nature. So I cut someone up in traffic. It's because I'm in a rush. Someone else cuts me off. In traffic, it's because they're a cunt.

• 58:40George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  I can see, and that is a part uh uh due to a different view perspective, obviously, the fact that you can only see what's inside your own head, not someone else's. But you still do that. It's called the fundamental attribution error. When you attribute others' behaviours to their motivations rather than to external factors. Someone cuts you up in traffic, they might have been in a rush, you say twat. But when it's about yourself, you always have the excuse, self-serving bias.

• 59:08George Mack?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's very, very difficult to um. I don't know, did we speak about this last time about the Warren Buffett who you'd invest in, who you'd thought, did we chat about it last time? I don't remember that. So, yeah, being able to look at yourself as a as a third party, and I find it very, very difficult if you actually try. I don't think it's possible to do that. The way I find it most useful is to look at other people, look at stuff that I like or or or might disagree, not in terms of like a very judgmental thing, they need to stop doing that, but something I don't like personally. And then go, oh, when do I do that stuff? Or what do I like? And I go, oh, how can I do more of that stuff? And actually, you can almost flip that weird bias that we have in our head that we can see other people so clearly.

• 59:51George Mack?

  By looking at other people, looking at mistakes they're making, and assume you're making the mistake that they're making, the where actually is that? And try and hunt it down that way. I feel that most of these cognitive biases and stuff, rather than trying to fight them, which is what a lot of people seem to do as soon as they get in that that whole psychological ra- like rabbit hole. Rather than trying to fight them, just use them. Like, so again, if you realise, okay, whatever I identify as, um it's going to be very, very difficult for me to break that, rather than trying to break that. And going, oh, no, I'm the guy who can defy his identity. No, don't do that. Why don't you just identify as what you actually want to use and use those weird little cognitive biases

• 1:00:33George Mack?

  as a way forward? And I think that's the most meta mental model thing I found is rather than trying to fix your own cognitive biases, of course, you want to almost play defence where you have to.

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  You want to be aware of them.

• 1:00:43George Mack?

  Yeah, you want to be aware of them, even though you probably can't be that aware, just use them, like use certain stuff, realise that you're a shaved chimp with millions of years of evolution and you you're probably not going to write rewrite the programme in yourself and yeah, just go for the highest Roy score.

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think certainly, for instance, we're talking about the difficulty in retraining your identity. Let's say, whatever mental model you want to choose that to come up with. Why not say, I'm a happy person, I'm a positive person, tell your friends. If you tell your friends, I'm a happy person, I'm a positive person. You're you're now socially accountable to your mate. Hang on, I thought you said you were a happy person, a a like positive person. Oh shit, that's something that I want, that is pretty much indefensibly a good idea for me to do. Like, where where are you gonna go from there? And you you want to continue to do that.

• 1:01:33George Mack?

  So I spent, I was the, when I was younger, I was fascinated by like discipline and pushing myself. And I found that I could perform, the only time I stuck at habits for six months and could pick up a new habit every single month. We're gonna have an app called Habit Share, where every month I'd have various different friends would say, okay, I'm doing this habit this month. What are you gonna do? Loser buys dinner at the end of the month. And Habit Share, they can see if you check in that day, you get push notifications when they check in. And you're directly competing against one another. And I didn't, I didn't, all of a sudden, I didn't need any wheel path, I didn't need any discipline. I just used the cognitive bias of of being asked what other people are thinking about me, because again, we're social creatures. Rather than try and fight that, let's just use that.

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  I mean, for the listeners at home, I was getting sent screenshots of your Habit Share thing, and I'm not even on Habit Share. You were showing it off to me.

• 1:02:20George Mack?

  Yeah, I was, oh yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:21Chris Williamson?

  Big dick in it to me. Um, so a couple of things that have been floating around in my head recently, so anchoring, which is kind of a little bit like first impressions matter. So where someone posits a price for you when you begin, you then make everything else relative to that. There's a really good example about economist pricing. Have you heard this one?

• 1:02:40George Mack?

  No.

• 1:02:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. So let me run you through this. So, um. In Predictably Irrational, there's an example from the Economist's pricing strategy, okay? So, three options to subscribe. Have you heard this one?

• 1:02:52George Mack?

  Economist thing, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:54Chris Williamson?

  Three options to subscribe. Web only is fifty nine dollars, print only is a hundred and twenty five dollars. Print and web, hundred and twenty five dollars.

• 1:03:03George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Chris Williamson?

  The split is web only, sixteen percent of people purchased. Print only, zero percent, print and web, eighty four percent. Now, if you remove the print and web option, sixty eight percent instead of sixteen by web only and thirty two percent instead of eighty four by, uh, print. So by adding in an option which means nothing, you anchor people's prices in a different way. And this relates to something that I'm going to butcher the example, so please send me the proper study. But the concept is still solid.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  Endoscopies were getting done on people and they judged the relative amount of discomfort someone was going to be in by the amount of movement. That's apparently a fairly good metric for how much discomfort there's going to be. More movement equals more pain. Hmm. People went through this particular endoscopy and were asked to rate their overall pain afterwards. Now, in one iteration, the pain was at a lower rate, let's call it four out of ten for almost all, but at the very end rose up to around about a seven. In another iteration, the experiment was actually extended. So the, um, operation was longer, but finished at a two instead of a seven. Hmm.

• 1:04:27Chris Williamson?

  So overall, the second version, second iteration of this experiment was more total discomfort. It was longer. Uh, I think there was actually potentially like a five out of ten throughout, five or a six throughout instead of a four, but then dropped to a two.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  Ask the patients to rate their relative pain at the end of it. Overwhelmingly, the patients that finished a lower pain score. Much fewer bad memories, much lower pain rating, even though through every objective measure, it should have been higher. And there's a, a quote I remember seeing online that talks about if you care about your child and they're going through an operation that they can feel, this is something that you want to happen. Because despite the fact that through every objective measure, your child will go through more pain, that pain is transient, but the memory is forever and what they will remember will be less pain. And that to me is something that I think about a lot.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Final memories or final impressions matter. The same way that first impressions matter, final impressions matter as well. So, perfect example, one of the guys that I'm coaching, Sam, eh, recently got sent out to some random coun- country to go and train a sales team. Literally two days notice, right mate, drop your life, you've got to go out to Istanbul somewhere.

• 1:05:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay, cool, gets out then, has three weeks of chaos. And he's speaking to me about four days before he's gonna leave and he's like, well, what do you think that I should do? And I was like, what personally I think you should do is treat yourself as nicely as you can for the final two days of your holiday. Find the prettiest spot in Istanbul, take yourself out for a dinner, find some good music, do something cool, spend a little bit of money, buy yourself a nice pair of trainers, do something. And then when you come back, you are going to lean your memory towards all of the nice, final finishing moments that you had on that trip. And hopefully it'll help you to forget that. So that's a really nice way to

• 1:06:36Chris Williamson?

  help to either double down on a nice experience or to mitigate a bad one, is to try and really finish it off with something that's good.

• 1:06:45George Mack?

  So that's standard comedy one on one. You start off with your second best joke and then you finish with your best joke. Cause that is just, yeah, it's what standard comedians always do. That makes a lot of sense. Um. One weird one, which I've been thinking about for a while and I'm not smart enough to really flesh this one out, but we'll give it a go.

• 1:07:01Chris Williamson?

  Crack it out, come on.

• 1:07:02George Mack?

  Which is orthogonal thought. Um, which is when you come at something from a completely different angle to somebody else. So this comes from primarily Eric Weinstein, um, and he talks about two particular examples. Um, one, which is the, uh, I forgot the guy, but he was on the Japanese table, table, table tennis team. Um, and he was one of the worst players on there.

• 1:07:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:07:30George Mack?

  And I think, I'm not sure how many decades ago it was, but he decided to put foam on his bat. Everybody else was playing with these wooden bats and he puts foam as we know it now, like on the table tennis. And he would destroy everyone and he beat everybody around, became the. The best in the world at the time, um, just from, you've got to think he could have spent hours training, like oh, ten thousand hours and probably still wouldn't even make the team.

• 1:07:54Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:55George Mack?

  But instead, sitting at home and coming at it from a completely different perspective.

• 1:08:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:00George Mack?

  And just putting foam on the bat.

• 1:08:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:02George Mack?

  And then nobody could compete with him. It's the same with, um, you know, the Fosby flop with the high jump.

• 1:08:06Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:07George Mack?

  Everybody else used to do it, um, face first, essentially, jump over that way. Whereas he came at it with this weird angle. And obviously people mocked him for a while.

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:16George Mack?

  But it was a way more efficient and effective way of doing it. And then there's a, another great example of the whole suitcase on wheels stuff, that suitcase on wheels didn't, didn't really exist till like the eighties, or whenever it was, it was a certain pilot that launched it. And you've got to think everybody was carrying around suitcases. Nobody thought to put fucking suitcases on wheels.

• 1:08:39Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:40George Mack?

  And, and then one guy does it, and then that's the norm. And I'm fascinated by when you take a perspective that often, there's X or there's Y, there's X or there's Y, there's the, that, um, Robert, um, Hanson, uh, the evolutionary biologist, um, and physicist, he chats about this example of like immigration, which is obviously a very, very, uh, hotly contested topic, one which is way above my pay grade, and I don't really have many opinions on. But he chats about how you have, um, the Democrat side, which is obviously very, very pro-immigration. And you have the Republican side, which is very, very anti-immigration, and they're just constantly in this tug of war against each other. And instead of having this tug of war game came coming on, he says, come at it from an all, yeah, all fag and all perspective,

• 1:09:24George Mack?

  and you pull it from the middle. So for example, what about if you could, every American, um, had their citizenship? And it was worth X. So let's say it was worth a hundred thousand dollars. Um, which meant that they could sell it on to an immigrant who wanted to come into the, the country and they could move out that way.

• 1:09:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:43George Mack?

  And all of a sudden, you, you fixed a lot of the problems there. And of course, that might not be the right or wrong solution, but all of a sudden,

• 1:09:49Chris Williamson?

  It is an orthogonal point of view.

• 1:09:50George Mack?

  He's come at it from a completely different vector.

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  On a, on a side point to that, I podcasted with Robin Hanson just after he released Elephant in the Brain, and asked him about orthogonal thinking, and he was really tired that day.

• 1:10:01George Mack?

  Oh, really?

• 1:10:02Chris Williamson?

  And he didn't have a clue what I was on.

• 1:10:03George Mack?

  Oh, really?

• 1:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Review that had asked it as well. I was like, I've got a cracking question here, Robbie. Right. What do you think about orthogonal thinking? And he was fucking knackered. And he was like, oh, I'm not really too sure about that one, man.

• 1:10:16George Mack?

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. Talking about the Fosbury flop and different ways of doing athletics.

• 1:10:23George Mack?

  Go on.

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  Um, one of the first people, maybe the first, but definitely one of the first people to ever swim the English Channel. So he was a British, potentially army officer, quite high up in the, in the armed forces. And he did it wearing sheepskin wool, covered in goose fat, drinking whiskey because it would keep him warm. And he did the whole thing breaststroke. And when he was asked, why did you not do the front crawl? Because the front crawl had been invented, but recently before, so not very long before. You know what his answer was? It would be unbecoming of a gentleman to put my head under the water.

• 1:11:08George Mack?

  Wow.

• 1:11:09Chris Williamson?

  So he did the whole English Channel, fucking breaststroke. I love that story. It would be unbecoming of a gentleman to put my head under the water.

• 1:11:18George Mack?

  Wow. Yes, it's a different time.

• 1:11:20Chris Williamson?

  It was a better time, man. When, when, when men wouldn't put their head under the water.

• 1:11:25George Mack?

  So on the, the orthogonal thought point, um, one thing that's particularly interesting, it ties into, you know, the Peter Thiel question of what do you believe to be true that the rest of the world disagrees with you on? Um, a very, very like contrarian question that I've yet to hear anybody answer.

• 1:11:47Chris Williamson?

  With real good stuff.

• 1:11:48George Mack?

  Yeah, with real vigour. Or if they have, it's creeping me out. And I guess that's the point of it because it's so socially.

• 1:11:53Chris Williamson?

  So here we go.

• 1:11:54George Mack?

  Against the, the grain.

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  To the listeners at home, give us a tweet at Chris Will X and at George underscore underscore M A C K.

• 1:12:03George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Chris Williamson?

  And answer this question as best you can.

• 1:12:07George Mack?

  What do you believe to be true that the rest of the world disagrees with you on? Um, so like a good example, like I know often what people will do in that scenario, they'll go of the education systems backwards, or um, obviously a few years ago, they said we should legalize gay marriage. You know, realistically, if you actually asked most of society, they all actually agree with these statements nowadays. Um, a good example would have been twenty years ago, saying, I actually think that the the way the college education system is going is backwards. And obviously Peter Thiel did that and was proven proven right. Um, but trying to have, or for example, in two thousand and nine, um,

• 1:12:46George Mack?

  or two thousand and eight, when Satoshi I guess made Bitcoin, of saying, oh, I think Bitcoin will be this new global digital currency. Saying it now is go, yeah, no shit, Shu Alak. Saying it back then would have been a truly contrarian state. And you know it's contrarian when everybody looks at you like you're an absolute weirdo. But if it's the issue with that, though, is that contrarians just go either end of the of the spectrum. They're either geniuses that are remembered throughout history, or they're writing their own name on a wall in shits. You know what I mean, man?

• 1:13:19George Mack?

  Like, and that's the issue with it, that you don't know who, cause um,

• 1:13:22Chris Williamson?

  I'm definitely in the latter camp.

• 1:13:24George Mack?

  Navalny talks about it where he says that um, in San Francisco, you've got to be polite to everyone because that weird kid in the hoodie might be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And with contrarians, you you never know that. Because if some if somebody would have been pitching Bitcoin to you, and I I know it happened to me, I watched um, a YouTube video and I was I was tired and didn't finish it, I was like, eh, probably nothing.

• 1:13:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:47George Mack?

  Um, and trying to pitch those those contrarian ideas that in hindsight, everyone will look back and go, that was so obvious. Yeah, that was an absolute no brainer. But at the time, because I, realistically, ninety nine percent of people. Listening or people in general, if they was around when uh pre Galileo, they would have believed the world was the centre of the universe. And if if anybody would try to argue with them, they would have thought they were an idiot.

• 1:14:19Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:19George Mack?

  And I'm always trying to think now, what fifty years from now will we think is ridiculous?

• 1:14:25Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:26George Mack?

  Um, and I also then try and think, okay, more of a personal note, what if I look back on my behaviour five years ago and find it really cringey? What five years, what five years from now will I find cringey?

• 1:14:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, anyone who doesn't look back on their behaviour five years ago and find it cringey.

• 1:14:43George Mack?

  No, but the issue, so this is the I O S update on that. Of course, that's true. But the thing is that people forget is that what you're doing right now. People, you sorry, you will find cringey five years from now. And you're almost going to come out from the frame and go, oh shit. There's going to be stuff that I'm doing right now that's going to be horrific five years from now. And the same way, and there's a large part of society. What are we doing that fifty years from now? We're going to go, your grandkids are going to go, you used to do that. Like you used to eat meat. Again, that's a contentious issue.

• 1:15:11Chris Williamson?

  Meat's meat's one of the ones that I think.

• 1:15:12George Mack?

  Yeah, particularly with the factory farming stuff. So trying to take a perspective of fifty to a hundred years from now. I uh, one of my favourite examples is when they do a themed sort of fancy dress party

• 1:15:24Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:25George Mack?

  of of us, it's going to be a load of people like not chatting to each other in a room, like with their fucking high posture, just texting each other. I reckon that's what those themed parties are going to be like.

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  You reckon?

• 1:15:37George Mack?

  Yeah, because there will be different communication methods by learning it. This weird constant, you have to, you look at like uh the Neuralink stuff that um Elon Musk's doing. This idea that we're okay, and this goes back to orthogonal four. Before the whole Neuralink stuff came along, would you have thought that actually it would make way more sense if I could just zap it from my brain to your brain? No, you assume it's a keyboard, this is the quickest way to do it.

• 1:16:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04George Mack?

  But if you ever actually count how long it takes you to text via a keyboard, it's so long, but because everybody else is doing it.

• 1:16:10Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:11George Mack?

  You assume it's the norm, you're the you're the sheep, you you follow the crowd and um. The one of the favourite mental models that Tim, I took from Tim Urban, and it's the screensaver on my laptop, which is the cook versus the chef. Have you heard of that one?

• 1:16:24Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:16:24George Mack?

  So a, people often assume maybe a cook and the chef are the same thing, but there's a there's a fine, fine difference is what Tim Urban argue uh argues. In that cook. Gets a recipe that's been made and makes it.

• 1:16:37Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:37George Mack?

  Whereas a chef creates his own recipe. And that's the difference between just following, okay, texting is the quickest way I can do this. That's what a cook does, because cooks just follow what everyone else is doing. Whereas a chef thinks about it and goes, actually, if I had to design this recipe, if I had to get a message from my head to Chris's head the quickest, what would it be? And it'd be literally thinking, just like that. And it'd be quicker than this, quicker than the speed of light. So loo- looking at it from a cook's perspective and a chef's perspective, and then it comes back. These things always loop round in that then Tim Urban argues that if you're a chef,

• 1:17:14George Mack?

  explore various different recipes, ta- ta- um, test it, taste test it, goes, oh, that's a bit shit. That's a bit rubbish. And of course, most of the time, you're gonna look like you're doing worse than a cook, because they've already got a predefined route. But when a chef does win, they win big and ultimately you're playing a fucking game of Roy anyway.

• 1:17:30Chris Williamson?

  It is just Roy, man. And I was, I've been searching around to try and find this quote. I finally found it. Changing your habits often requires you to change your tribe. Each tribe has a sh- a set of shared experiences. Behaviors that conform to the shared expectations are attractive. Behaviors that conflict with the shared expectations are unattractive. It's hard to go against the group. James Clear, Tommy Havertz.

• 1:17:54George Mack?

  So what do you think will be the, the look back on fifty, two hundred years?

• 1:17:57Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right about that. I think um, jeans that lads in Newcastle wear, I think they're probably, they've got to be pretty high up.

• 1:18:07George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Chris Williamson?

  Tight girl jeans. I'm not sure, man. I mean, the, the defining characteristics right now, you don't know how quick things are gonna move. Like, what's the paradigm gonna shift on? Are we still going to be looking at a political system similar to the one that we've got now? Like, is, is that really what's gonna continue? Is it gonna evolve? Or is it just going to be more of the same? We can presume that technology will change, but politics actually hasn't seen any big dynamic changes or shifts in terms of the way that they're deployed. Still a general public vote, et cetera, et cetera. Like, it, it requires a large movement to occur.

• 1:18:50Chris Williamson?

  And because of the way that those things happen, they're often unforeseen up until the point in which they do happen. Like. Going the other way, like what was going to change from fifty years ago until in fifty years' time, considering that now, who could have predicted Facebook? Who could have predicted the internet? Like, you don't know that these things are going to happen and you just end up post post talking the shit out of it if you do.

• 1:19:15George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:16Chris Williamson?

  Like.

• 1:19:16George Mack?

  You know that narrative fallacy where you retrospectively explain it and you have this beautiful image in your head, um, it's a guy called Brad Stone who wrote, um, The Everyday Store, um, it's about Amazon and Jeff Bezos and describes the story of Jeff Bezos and what happened to Amazon. And apparently Jeff was a bit reluctant to do it. And when he first sat down with Brad Stone, he basically said, how are you going to avoid the narrative fallacy? How are you gonna not make it look back that I had this perfect plan to begin with and it all and it all executed exactly as I had it planned and not retrospectively ignore factors like luck and experimentation and failure that went on? I mean, it's, yeah, we always look back and just tell ourselves a story.

• 1:20:02Chris Williamson?

  Before we finish, I wondered if you wanted to give us a short breakdown on your favourite blog post of all time?

• 1:20:09George Mack?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:20:11Chris Williamson?

  You wanna do it?

• 1:20:12George Mack?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:20:13Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 1:20:14George Mack?

  Um.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  This will be linked in the show notes below.

• 1:20:17George Mack?

  It's one of the worst titles, it's very clickbaity, but I think the actual content of it, um, it's, I think it's Six Harsh Truths to Make You a Better Person, or one of those lines, um, I think it's David Wong who wrote it.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:20:30George Mack?

  Um, and he has, you, you do it, I think you might do a better job than me.

• 1:20:35Chris Williamson?

  So, the blog post basically talks, the, the synopsis of it is, you are what you can present to society and society is only bothered in what it can get from you. That's the main truth. And the first example is, imagine that you're walking on the street with a loved one and a car comes along, hits your lover, they're lying on the floor bleeding and you're screaming for someone who has some. Medical experience, a person comes over and kneels down next to them and you ask them. You're laughing already and you ask them, um, oh, fantastic. Are you a doctor?

• 1:21:18Chris Williamson?

  This person turns to you and starts telling you about how they're a good father, how they're always trustworthy and how they're never late for work. And you go, oh, hang on a second. I didn't, I didn't ask you about that. What I said was, do you have some medical experience? And this person begins to get a little bit irritated now. They say, well, no, you, you, you're not listening to me. I'm a very good person and I, I always, I always stick to my promises and I'm always true to my virtue and my, my kids really love me. And you say, screaming at them, look, I do not care about your values or your virtues. Tell me whether or not you can save my dying partner on the street. And the analogy that he uses is society is the dying man on the street.

• 1:22:03Chris Williamson?

  And you are the person standing over them, holding a penknife in a desperate attempt to try and bring them back to life. All that society is concerned about is what you can produce. Do you want to elaborate?

• 1:22:15George Mack?

  Yeah, um, I think, uh, going back to Paul Graham, which we started off with, he has, I think he used to have it on people Y C's wars or his own wars, which is. Make something people want, because he would have so many young entrepreneurs who would come through with these ideas of how they're going to change the world and. They would always fail that fundamental thing of they're not making something that people want. Like, nobody actually wants his idea. If I look at any ideas I've had or friends have had, it's the reason why it often fails is because they've, they've sort of kept themselves in their own bubble. And they've not actually gone and found out if this is actually what people want. And then again, you've almost got to apply that same thing to yourself. Instead of just, there's a great clip, uh, from Glenn Gary, uh, Glenn Ross, I think it is.

• 1:22:57George Mack?

  Um, by Alec Baldwin. I think he's only here for eight, nine minutes. He won an Oscar for that performance. And he just says, um, nice guy, I don't give a shit. Go home and play with your kids. Um, and, and that sounds brutal. It, it sounds horrific, but it's almost objective. Of somebody who's never met you before, looking at you objectively going, what can you do for me? And people see that as a very, very, almost a dark and negative world. Um, but I actually think it's, it's, it's the way we operate. We're always constantly looking at making society better. And the, the reason why, I always use the analogy that. Um, that sale, that sorry, networking in particular, again, if you talk about contrarian opinions,

• 1:23:39George Mack?

  and this is a bit nuanced, but networking can be largely, I think, overrated by a certain sort of individual. Um, who very, very like nice and charismatic and can chat a good game and has read a, a, a few books, but there's no substance to anything they've ever, they've ever done. Um, there, there's nothing on their actual rap sheet of go, I can, oh, I can code this. Or I know how to build a sales team like this, or I've achieved uh, this many uh, things at CrossFit this week, or whatever it is, right? Um, we always just wanna be liked for being a nice guy, but everyone's a fucking nice guy.

• 1:24:21Chris Williamson?

  It's extreme ownership again, isn't it? Going back to, to the Navy SEAL stuff. Another great point that one comes up with in that article is where he talks about people believing that they deserve a good partner. And they say, well, look at how trustworthy I am and I'm really caring and I, you know, I've got a good job and I've got stable income and this, that and the other. And in the blog post, he says, so fucking what? That is what you need to get you through the door. And there is a guy out there who has everything you have and he can play the fucking guitar.

• 1:24:55George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, David, you, you got it, man. Like, there is a guy out there who has every talent that you have. And he can play the fucking guitar.

• 1:25:08George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  How are you gonna compete with a man that can play the guitar? I, I, I think you are right. It is a.

• 1:25:14George Mack?

  But he, what's he great, he's had a, he has a nuanced point in that, um, he says that what you do or what you've done is actually a real reflection of who you are. Do you get what I mean? Whereas if, if who you are is all you are, you've not produced anything, then actually it wasn't what you are. That's all the bollocks, right? What you produce is ultimately a reflection of what your, your thoughts are. It's that whole slightly weird thing of, oh, if somebody's, oh, let's say there's, there's a hurricane that's gone on. I, I, I'll pray for those people. Of course, I think a lot of people who do that, uh, uh.

• 1:25:49Chris Williamson?

  Trying to do something good.

• 1:25:49George Mack?

  Yeah, they're trying to do some good, but. That's you can if you actually do something as well, wow, that's that's where the real power is.

• 1:25:56Chris Williamson?

  Well.

• 1:25:57George Mack?

  And of course you can pray and do it at the same time, but fucking hell.

• 1:25:59Chris Williamson?

  What what were we saying earlier on about the path of least resistance, about inertia as opposed to movement? Like, you are right. I think it's it's not a very softly, softly approach. I bet if um some of the Navy SEALs read that blog post, I bet they would agree with it. Guys that are forced into action, guys that have to do things first. Um, it's not a very sentimental way to view things. But I would struggle to see how looking at output first, what are the things? What are the explicit, tangible, objective measures by which I have represented my value in the real world?

• 1:26:44Chris Williamson?

  If you use those, I struggle to see how life comes at you with things that you're going to be unprepared for. Or at least I think you give yourself the best chance of being robust or anti-fragile enough to deal with them.

• 1:26:59George Mack?

  Yeah, because we we can all edit our Instagram photos to look like successful entrepreneurs. But your P and L sheet is what actually matters, right? And that's that's the difference. And I guess that's what David actually happens. What?

• 1:27:13Chris Williamson?

  Roy score.

• 1:27:14George Mack?

  Roy score. I guess that's that's a good way to uh to end on. Um, it's just a it's just a game. There's a great bit as well, similar to the Roy score bit of um. You've seen the Bill Hicks bit, it's just a ride. It's very, very similar to um the Roy score of where you can end up going down lots of different rabbit holes and thinking very, very deeply about stuff. But once you realise, we've got a very, very limited time on this earth. And a hundred years from now, no one will probably remember your name. Um, yeah.

• 1:27:45Chris Williamson?

  Man, it's been fantastic again. I hope that everyone that has tuned in has enjoyed it. Mental mod is one or two. We have finished.

• 1:27:52George Mack?

  Yeah, you got me out my cave, mate. You forced me out my cave.

• 1:27:54Chris Williamson?

  I know, all the way from London to Newcastle to come and record a podcast. Um.

• 1:28:00Chris Williamson?

  Where are people gonna find you? George underscore M A C K on Twitter. I'm gonna force them to tweet at you so that you're forced to reply. Because you're too polite to not reply to people, but you're not on Twitter at the moment because you're too busy working. Fitting 200 hour work weeks into one in a 100 hour week. Just avoiding the carpet store, one day at a time. Good man. Thank you very much for tuning in. Please like, share, subscribe, all that good stuff. I do appreciate it every time that you do. At Chriswell X on all social media. If you've got any questions. At George underscore underscore Mac on Twitter as well. Thank you very much, man. Bye. Peace.