Mental Models 104 - Bear Or Bull? | George Mack | Modern Wisdom Podcast 253

George Mack is a writer and a growth marketer. If you imagine your mind as an operating system, mental models are apps that you can install to give yourself extra functionality and improved decision making. Expect to learn about our brand new game Bear Or Bull, how you can use anchoring to get laid, why numeracy is a superpower, whether remote working is a blessing or a curse and much more... Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 83% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Follow George on Twitter - https://twitter.com/george__mack Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mentalmodels #georgemack #bullish - 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 - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.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?

  What's fascinating about Bezos is very similar to Musk in the sense that he has one guiding principle that every decision goes through. So for Bezos, it's just if it can enhance the customer experience, let's do it. Other than like profit margin, it's just long term, long term, long term. Will this enhance the customer experience? So he says this example of 10 years from now, will people say to me, I want slower deliveries and a higher cost? He's like, no, no, nobody's ever going to say that to me. They're always going to say, I love the fact that it's arrived next day. I love how cheap it is. Therefore, I double down on that. And then Elon Musk, as complex as an individual as he is, as intelligent he is, and how much he understands, every decision goes through, will this get me nearer to Mars

• 0:40George Mack?

  or not? Yes or no? And it's very like crazy how somebody as complex, sophisticated, nuances that has just one guiding thing that shapes every single decision. Like the scale they're at, like the decision you have to make is just, will this enhance customer experience? Or will this get me nearer to Mars? Yes or no?

• 1:01Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined all the way from Dubai by the man himself, Mr. George Mack. How are you?

• 1:08George Mack?

  I'm not too bad. I'm not too bad. How are you?

• 1:10Chris Williamson?

  I'm well. How could we not be well? On the 25th floor, this beautiful Dubai Marina apartment.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  There's worse places to do a podcast, isn't there?

• 1:19George Mack?

  Yeah, it's a contrast to Newcastle, Manchester, right?

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  Or Skype.

• 1:22George Mack?

  Strong contrast. Yeah, and it's all Skype, yeah.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  The year of Zoom finished up in Dubai. So yeah, not, not bad. Big year, 2020. A lot of stuff's happened. What's some of the main insights that you've realised in 2020?

• 1:35George Mack?

  That's a good question. I'm thinking obsessively about remote work and the effect that that has on location. I'm sure even the fact that we're here right now is quite a good little A B test of that. Proofs in the pudding. But it's going to be very, very interesting because we were saying like, are you bullish or bearish on people moving? Particularly at the UK, because the UK has very poor weather. And for me at the minute, I've been thinking, if I move abroad, what would the checklist be? Or if I want to work remote? As long as it has good weather, good time zone. And like relatively good economic, social activity. What does the UK have that that, you know what I mean? Like the UK for me is only viable for a few months of the year.

• 2:18George Mack?

  And it's going to be very interesting to see how many people leave en masse. Or if they do leave en masse.

• 2:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. And I think as well, that's probably not just going to be for the UK. Everyone thinks the place that they grew up, unless it's unbelievably good.

• 2:31George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 2:31Chris Williamson?

  Is probably a bit crap.

• 2:32George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, everyone's disparaging about their hometown, even if your hometown was Dubai Marina.

• 2:38George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 2:38Chris Williamson?

  It's just what you're used to. It's not cool or different anymore. So, yeah, I wonder whether you're going to get mass swapping populations from different countries.

• 2:47George Mack?

  I think once you've opened that door, even though I do think it will sort of pendulum will swim back to more and more office based stuff. Once you've opened that door, there's some people who are going to refuse to go back. It's a very, very interesting time to be living through. And whether, because you've got two thought processes that run in your head. You've got obviously A, the vaccine comes out, things go back to normal. But even then, you potentially got B, which is you have mass migration at levels you've never seen before. I, I was chatting to somebody in the property business and they said when Covid happened, they expected everything to come tumbling down. But actually they had the busiest two months that they've ever had. It was like the equivalent of a year. Because I've got this idea that I've been thinking about, which is you have throughout childhood, you've kind of got very clear events.

• 3:30George Mack?

  You've got primary school, you've got year one, you've got year two or grade one, grade two. And then you go in the UK, you've got GCSEs, you've got A levels, you've got your degree. But then in adulthood, all you've basically got is house, marriage, kids, death. But I think that Covid, Covid's now an event that exists. So like there's people who are like, oh, pre-Covid and then post-Covid. So it causes a lot of behaviour change. It's really fascinating to see.

• 3:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about what the UK's trying to do at the moment. They've called it a circuit breaker lockdown. Why have they called it a circuit breaker lockdown? It's because they're trying to create a, a jolt in the system, you know? They've just added another little module in, just a little bookmark. And you're, you're correct, people live their life in epochs. This is what I learned from Tucker Max. Live your life in epochs, you're the, the sports guy for you, like the football freestyler as a kid. You're the, the university student, you're the young entrepreneur, you're the young mother or father. You're the, the person who's in a relationship and, and retired somewhere. But you know what I mean? That's how we break our lives up. And you're correct, maybe this is going to be.

• 4:35Chris Williamson?

  One of those bookmarks in life for people. Um, yeah, well, you're totally right. I mean, we flew out here on three days notice to, well, we just decided on like 48 hours notice. Got a PCR test. You drove across Manchester to get a PCR test off some guy in a pair of tracksuit bottoms.

• 4:52George Mack?

  He shoved it down my throat. Yeah.

• 4:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he did. He did. You have to pay extra for that usually.

• 4:55George Mack?

  He did. Then he did the PCR.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  All right. So everybody is here for mental models. Big pressure. One, two and three were wildly successful online. What have you got for us today?

• 5:09George Mack?

  Yeah. Well, Rocky IV is my favourite film. So I'm a big fan of the fourth episode of Things. I thought it'd come with some heat. So late last night I was reading through Paul Charlie's Almanack, which is sort of Charlie Munger's collection of all his essays. And I originally found out this thing from Ben Francis, the guy who's the founder of Jim Shaw. I was watching one of his blogs and he said, within this book, Paul Charlie's Almanack, there's a less essay slash lecture on Coca-Cola that's like the best thing he's ever read. And it's sort of Charlie Munger, it says in the book afterwards that he kind of regretted doing it because nobody really understood it. Or it was too complex, or it was, it wasn't politically correct, or whatever. But when you go through it, it's like, Jesus Christ.

• 5:54George Mack?

  The context of this talk is Charlie basically says, if you're in 1884 and you have all the sort of base mental models or academic principles in place and a multimillionaire George Glocks comes along and he's got a competition countrywide and says, pitch me basically a new drinks beverage idea that if I give you $2 million in 1884, by I think 2024 or 2034, it will be worth 2 trillion. So how do you turn 2 million into, I believe, 2 trillion? And basically Charlie says, you could have predicted everything that Coca-Cola did and how it succeeded by just base level

• 6:39George Mack?

  mental models. So he goes through and goes like, okay, what's my checklist to begin with? How would I explain it to this millionaire to get investment? And what's fascinating about this is the context is Charlie owns Coca-Cola or like Berkshire Hathaway basically own Coca-Cola now. So you can tell that he's mentally gone through this and looked at every single moment.

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  The fundamentals of how this business is highly invested in, why it's being so effective. Yeah.

• 7:01George Mack?

  He basically says this is the issue of academia, they don't teach it like this. So he said, there's five things to go through when you're doing it. So number one, decide like a big no brainer question, the big no brainer stuff. Number two, use math to help explain the world. Number three, inversion, so think problems three in reverse. Number four, the best wisdom is sort of elementary academic wisdom. So he comes on to like classical conditioning, operant conditioning from psychology. And then number five, how do you get big Lola Poser effects where it's all these things tie together? So he says like, to begin with, like for the no brainer side of things. We are, we, we're never going to create something worth two trillion by selling some generic beverage. Therefore, we must make your name Coca-Cola.

• 7:42George Mack?

  Cause he says the like, if you called it like George Glotzy's drink, like you need, in order to get global appeal, you need a name that appeals globally is the first thing. So this will require developing a product having universal appeal because it harnesses powerful elementary forces. The next thing he goes on to, he goes on to a few more no brainers, but uses maths to explain the world. And this is one of the things I probably struggle with because maths is, I think the way they teach it in school makes you think it's very, very boring. But when you actually understand that maths is the only thing that's probably true. When you really think about it. And I, I like, I work in obviously the D to C e-commerce space, which has blown up right now. And I'll have calls with founders each week about like how they want to scale things.

• 8:27George Mack?

  And everybody's very, very clear about their like brand values and their brand guidelines very often. And this vision that they have, nobody knows their margins, nobody knows their, nobody knows their LTV, nobody knows the scale they have to hit. Why do you think that is? Two fold, one, I think people, or some people just naturally ignore numbers from bad experiences at school. And then two, numbers.

• 8:52George Mack?

  Is reality and I think we try and avoid reality where we can as well.

• 8:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder how much of it perhaps is just that you can wing brand values and marketing and creative ideas. If you turn up to a meeting and you don't know your LTV or you don't know your bottom line, you can't just make it up. Like it's either there or it's not there. There is no in between, whereas you can turn up to a brand meeting and be like, right, brand values and just.

• 9:21George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:22Chris Williamson?

  Create something on the spot. So I think the charlatans, the charlatans get found out much more with that. So what's next?

• 9:30George Mack?

  So on that, so just to just to sort of hit the the math side of things home is so he says here, on average, so if we had to get to three trillion, we can guess reasonably by twenty thirty four, there will be about eight billion beverage consumers in the world. So on the yeah, on the numerical fluency, he then breaks down, looking at Coca Cola's business model, sort of the opposite I was saying there where it's all brand guidelines. So if he's thinking of how do we get to two trillion by twenty thirty four, he breaks down the whole market, so understands the total addressable market. So on, so on average, each consumer will be much more prosperous in real terms than the average consumer of eighteen eighty four. Each consumer is composed mostly of water and must ingest about sixty four ounces of water per day. This is eight eight ounce servings.

• 10:15George Mack?

  Therefore, if our new beverage and can flavor and otherwise improve only twenty five percent of ingested water worldwide, we can occupy half of that new market. Therefore, he breaks down the numbers, we can sell two point nine trillion eight ounces servings in twenty thirty four. And if we can net four cents per serving, we will earn a hundred and seventeen billion dollars annually, which will equate to a net, the business value of two trillion. So though that numerical fluency, that like the base numeracy that people have, I'd say.

• 10:49George Mack?

  People talk about what's the modern numeracy. I don't think there is a modern numeracy because it doesn't exist. Modern numeracy is the modern numeracy, if that makes sense, because we very rarely ever think in numbers. As a result.

• 11:01Chris Williamson?

  It seems there that you're deciding the direction of where you're going to lay some paving. With that value, you can't hit the number that you want. And all of the other stuff, the taste, the marketing, everything else. That's the traffic signs, that's the road markings, that's the particular way that you manage the traffic. But in terms of road, this is what we need to hit. This is where we're starting, that's where we need to finish. How can we apply that to something which is a little bit less abstract than a billion trillion dollar drinks brand?

• 11:33George Mack?

  So well, there's a good example, one of my favorite ones that again, it's so easy to notice thing and sometimes hard to implement it because you just catch yourself, you're on bullshit. Of um, Kiefer Boy, uh, who were, I think he's taken more companies public than anybody ever. He's part of the PayPal mafia. I think he was involved at YouTube, LinkedIn, Square, a lot of companies, really good follow on Twitter. And he did a talk at Stanford called How to Operate. And he says, the biggest thing with like elite level CEOs that he does, like the biggest breakthrough exercises, he'll say, what's like your priorities at the minute? And they'll say, number one priority is recruitment. Number two priority is marketing and sales. And then number three is X, Y, Z. And he goes, cool.

• 12:18George Mack?

  So he gets them to write their priorities down and then he gets them to track their time for a week. And then at the end of the week goes through and just purely like on a numerical basis, it goes, so recruitment was your number one priority. Yeah, 5% of your time was allocated to that. So I think even time, just as a way of measuring things is something that you very, very rarely use.

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  How would you class the model that we're talking about here then?

• 12:42George Mack?

  So I mean, how you describe as a model is just basic numeracy, like basic arithmetic, like taking principles from mathematics and applying it. Because so few people apply basic arithmetic. And I find that when I chat to. People who are starting brands online, the biggest difference is that there's always one person who uses basic numeracy. And if they don't, if there's not one there. In the team. It it it never works. It never works. It's guaranteed to fail. Because it makes sense because that is, if you're trying to build a successful business, it's underpinned by numbers. And if you don't even look at fucking numbers, you may get a few edge cases, like

• 13:25George Mack?

  where it's like a Kylie Jenner, but even then, I imagine she's got a guy or a girl who's crunching the numbers. Yeah. What's next? What we got next? So then, just moving through that, he then talks about like operant and classical conditioning. So if you was looking at, he says it's how you can explain Coca Cola. So you've gone through the numeracy, you've gone through the no brainer questions. And then let's look at like the operant slash classical conditioning that you use. So number one from an opera conditioning, which is basically rewarding people for behaviours. And then classical conditioning is sort of Pavlov's dogs. So when they associate a certain thing. So what's fascinating when like looking at Pavlovian conditioning, he talks about

• 14:05George Mack?

  why, and this is interesting, he says you should not let anybody have the name cola. Because as soon as you do, you lose that association with your brand. So other people can start having it. They can hop on your classical conditioning. And it's, he does numerous points in here that Coca Cola broke, and how they almost ruined it. So another example is when Coca Cola changed their recipe. And he's Charlie Munger lost his shit about it, I think. And he was like, almost killed the company, he argues. He said the two things you can't do in the speech, looking at it from classical conditioning, is one, let anybody have the trademark Coca Cola, which is why they enforce it so hard. But even then, you've got like roller cola, and you've got all these knockoffs. And you've got to

• 14:45George Mack?

  think the damage that's done to their their business model is huge. And then changing the recipe, like a recipe that people have built up and associated over the years of having this reward, having this reward, the damage that can do. And then you understand like, how interesting slash nuanced Coca Cola's business is via classical conditioning. So. They they used, he talks about in the speech of you want something that never has a negative feedback loop. You want something that can never have negative classical conditioning. So with a good example of of that, or maybe even negative operant conditioning is you start drinking the drink and the more you drink it, the more sick you get of the drink. But cola removes all sort of taste memories, built to remove all taste memory. So people can drink it like water and just keep ingesting it, keep ingesting it.

• 15:29George Mack?

  So that's part of one of his principles for how it can become so big is that you can never get sort of a negative operant conditioning loop going or a negative classical conditioning loop going. So it's just constant positive reinforcement. And then he breaks down, okay, using classical conditioning, using operant conditioning. Do we go for a hot drink or do we go for a cold drink? And he basically looks at the world, going back to numbers, looks at the world and says it's much easier to provide something that cools people down. Therefore, go for a cold drink because on average, people want something that cools them down rather than heats them up. And the people will drink Coca-Cola in the morning. But hot drinks, people tend to drink at certain periods, whereas the cooling effect, people then associate, so when you're hot and you drink Coca-Cola, you have that cooling effect.

• 16:12George Mack?

  You associate it with something positive. So it's just fascinating that seeing all these principles intertwine. And he even gives examples with the trademark and with the um the almost changing the recipe as ways where Coca-Cola almost fucked up, but their business model is so good. Based on these mental models and these principles, they they still are getting there slash have got there.

• 16:32Chris Williamson?

  Do you think, how much of this do you think was thought through and how much of it is emergent and look?

• 16:37George Mack?

  Good question. Well, he argues that you could have thought it through. And I guess that's why he invested in this.

• 16:40Chris Williamson?

  Cause he's post talking the shit out of it.

• 16:42George Mack?

  He is post talking the shit about it. But his basic argument is is these elementary principles still exist. So even now, like let's say for example, you're sitting down and trying to come up with certain ideas. Using those fundamentals will still be incredibly better. Whether you can come up with Coca-Cola, obviously there's so much luck involved. And so, I mean, you're gonna you've got to go through the whole talk and you see how much nuance there is to the way he's thinking about it. But I would say those elementary principles of mathematics. Stuff like that you shouldn't avoid, he's saying like, we should always avoid letting people have our trademark, letting people do this. Classical conditioning, operant conditioning. If you actually then begin to look at so many different brands, you just see these fundamental principles beneath them.

• 17:26Chris Williamson?

  One of the interesting stories that I had about Coca-Cola was, I remember the world's first portable water distillation unit, about three times the size of a refrigerator. And they were trying to look at different ways to get clean water, it was this philanthropist guy, engineer, and they were looking at different ways to get it to people and they were thinking like, how on earth are we supposed to deliver something like this of this size to the backwaters of Africa, to places where there's no roads? And as they're there, they're sat outside of a little kiosk cafe, you know, like a classic sort of third world cafe type thing, it's just plastic chairs.

• 18:11Chris Williamson?

  And they looked and it's got Coca-Cola branding above it. They're like Coca-Cola has access to give people Coke where they can't get clean water. Hmm. And that really is just notoriety. It's interesting when you think about that, when you really zoom out, you realise that the world isn't that big. It's massive from an individual perspective, but from a market perspective, like, there's only one Coca-Cola. Pepsi are also big and there's other drinks brands that are large, like Red Bull and stuff, but no one's Coca-Cola. Hmm. And there's only seven billion people. You can't, there's no room for another Coca-Cola until you kill that one off. You couldn't have two running in parallel, but you could imagine another universe in which there's an earth with thirty-five billion people on.

• 18:55Chris Williamson?

  Is there room for competition? Do you know what I mean? Hmm. Um, but yeah, that's, that's interesting. One of the mental models that we haven't spoken about yet is anchoring. Yeah. And I'm a big fan of anchoring. And I was reading not long ago about, it was from Rob Henderson's newsletter, about how people can use anchoring to get laid. So can you explain what anchoring is first? And then I'll...

• 19:20George Mack?

  Anchoring, um, we, I think we mentioned it the other day when we was chatting, actually, like this example, oh yeah, in business negotiation of sort of almost stating a cer- apparently Trump says this a lot in the art of the deal, so he'll state like a a price that's super high to begin with, which means that then when he, let's say for example, he wants five million, he will state ten million, because now he's anchored them around ten million, so when they barter down to five million, his actual price, he's anchored it to this ten, that they feel like they've got a deal, but he's got what he wanted, whereas if he came in at five, maybe they'd say one, because you realise a lot of these negotiation stuff is just people putting their finger in the air. Mm-hmm.

• 19:59George Mack?

  And then, I mean, that ties quite, a slight fork on the idea is this idea of like, reflexivity and how much do you know what reflexivity is, the model there? I think George Soros, he's like, obviously the huge, like, people go mental about. He's the guy behind everything bad, isn't he? He is, um, Alex Jones's arch nemesis, right? In Alex Jones's head, maybe he isn't the real one as well, right? I don't know. So, but he has a very good essay on reflexivity, um, and the best example I got from reflexivity is, let's say you have two stand-up comedians, you have one stand-up comedian that um, that tells a joke, another stand-up comedian that tells a joke, I saw almost a parallel universe.

• 20:37George Mack?

  One where he immediately apologises for the joke afterwards, going, oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that, and the other one who just kind of laughs it through and moves on to the next one, Dave Chappelle style. Even though they've told the exact same joke, and they're the exact same person, the exact same environment, the exact same crowd, how they react to it influences the way the crowd reacts, and you can then see that a lot, so I found that, like, if I have a friend who's, um, let's say they've broken up with somebody, and they're like really depressed about it, then up, then like I start reacting to that, if that makes sense. And then I'm like, thinking about them more da da. But if they're just like super, you're just kind of constantly looking at other people's facial expressions.

• 21:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So that's more like a psychological mimetic anchoring.

• 21:23George Mack?

  Exactly.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  In body language. That's really interesting. I hadn't even thought about that. But my favorite example of anchoring is that everyone that owns a restaurant should have quite a high price platter as one of the first things that people see when they look on the menu. So some sort of special appetizer, sharing platter deal thing at the top. And if you say that that's forty five pounds.

• 21:46George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  The starter that's eleven quid but should be eight, actually looks like a great deal. So there's a famous example from The Economist that many people listening may be familiar with, where they play around with prices and you see by changing nothing other than the anchor, you can increase the value of the customer by like fifty percent, which is mad. And the example that Rob Henderson gave, which again is a psychology one, I suppose, is you can use anchoring to look more attractive when you're going out dating. So what you want to do, his argument is, is find a friend that looks kind of similar to you, but is uglier. And the reason for that is that people will use them.

• 22:28George Mack?

  Is that why you hang around with me?

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  They, they will look at them and you as within the same league, you know? Like if someone was to say, this is how much the appetizer is, but that car over there is worth this much money. That kind of doesn't really work. You're not anchoring within the same category. So if you go out with an Asian friend who's like, any, pick your attractiveness level. It's like, well, I can't, you don't look Asian. Like, so there's no point in doing it. So yes, if you want to get laid, find a friend who looks a bit like you, but is uglier. And you can do that. And also, there's, I've got some buddies, and I'm sure that you do as well, who will decide to go to live music events.

• 23:15George Mack?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:16Chris Williamson?

  Like, go to gigs because they look like a knockoff version of the artist.

• 23:20George Mack?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, um, that only helps if then the crowd that you find attractive is that. So like, my issue with that is, my crowd would be like the busted, McFly side of things. Yeah, it's not, it's not my, not my type, really.

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no. Interesting. What about next?

• 23:38George Mack?

  Power laws. So I wanted to get this up. Hence, I was on my phone just then. So power laws comes from statistics. Um, and I'm not going to try and go through like the actual like, um, equation side of things. But a power law essentially is, it's kind of like the way you can explain monopolies. They're basically, what's the, um, the line from the, uh, film where it's like first prize is a, what is it? Like, um, first prize is a car of some sort, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize, you're fired. So like, Facebook's a good example of that, where basically a, a power law is something where, um, the more you win, the more you win. So it's like a nonlinear relationship. So, um,

• 24:21George Mack?

  for example, uh, the best example of a power law I've found is all the, you're seeing it now to some extent where all the wealth, like, look at Jeff Bezos as a power law. Like, the more wealth he has, the more wealth he's getting. And you can easily end up in a scenario where Jeff Bezos has like fifty percent of, of the world, right? Because he just keeps compounding year after year, and he's compounding on the compounding. It's like, who can keep up? And like, a weird nuanced one. So I've done a lot previously in social media and, um, like different brands, marketing, et cetera. And you'll see with social media managers, I have this thing where ninety-five percent of them shouldn't get paid. They're useless. They don't add any value. If anything, sometimes they're just taking up your payroll. They're posting out an Instagram post that nobody fucking sees apart from them and you.

• 25:05George Mack?

  Right? It's just useless. But for, um, like, five percent of the social media managers, or maybe one percent of the social media managers, like, we saw one recently with like Tesco, where it was like saying, um, if you can quote tweet this and get zero likes, we'll give you a free meal. And obviously, everybody's trying to quote it, can't do it.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  When we checked yesterday after about twelve hours, I think it was on a hundred and thirty thousand quote tweets.

• 25:29George Mack?

  Exactly, so this is, and then you you think about the individual behind that, the value that they provide. They they should probably get a ten x raise in their salary. So all the all the distribution goes right towards the end of the the scale, if that makes sense. So that's what like a power law is, and it's very interesting that, yeah, the the higher up you get, the more the rewards are. So even if you look at like a sport like the UFC, like the difference on salary between Conor McGregor and somebody ten places down from him. It's so astronomical, but the difference in skill actually isn't that high. But it's, yeah, it's fascinating to see how these power laws play out. It's why in Silicon Valley, they always talk about like, how can you get a monopoly?

• 26:12George Mack?

  If you get a monopoly, you you you own the world, basically.

• 26:16Chris Williamson?

  How can people utilise that? Is it just a case of moving quickly?

• 26:22George Mack?

  That's a good question. I would say, one, probably do something that, um, it's hard to give like specific advice for everybody without having so much nuance to their their their situation. But um, I think from a power law perspective, finding out what you sort of super unique to you. And then doubling down on that, because you if you can come top one percent of something, the fact the returns are so so great and so high. That's where I think the focus should probably lie.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  I think that makes sense. We were talking about this the other day, that um, the difference between the person that comes first in the hundred metres and everybody else in terms of effort, actual time is not a lot, but in terms of impact is an awful lot. And when you get to the far-flung reaches of performance, we spoke about Coca-Cola. Like, once you've got that distribution network, you compound on compounding. So, yeah, I like, uh.

• 27:17George Mack?

  Well, because you've got to think then they can get a few of models of, they can get uh more network effects. So more and more people, the more word of mouth marketing you have, the more word of mouth marketing you get. The more um Coca-Cola bottles you can produce, the cheaper your margins get. So it's like how, as soon as those power laws begin to kick in, you can get cheaper advertising, cheaper products, higher quality.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  More scale.

• 27:38George Mack?

  Everything, everything, and it's just nobody can keep up at that stage.

• 27:41Chris Williamson?

  Do you um, do you think that there's a?

• 27:48Chris Williamson?

  There is a challenge in a society where we're trying to bring up people. We're trying to have more not, we're trying to have fewer have-nots and everybody be part of the haves. Is there an issue with that with power laws? Because inevitably you're going to end up with winners and everybody else.

• 28:07George Mack?

  Well, I was hearing Alex Beck of YouTube talking about, he's very libertarian, very entrepreneurial. And he was like saying, I can hate Jeff Bezos because he's going to create a scenario where the rest of the world extremely resent the rich. Because if you actually, if you look at his style, he's obviously not paying any tax. He's got around that and you're going to have a buildup of people really hating him, but he's untouchable. I try and get Jeff Bezos, he's got everything around him, he's got armed guards, you can't get near him. So they end up going for the moderately rich, which is where he is, right? And that's where.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  The Jeff Bezos avatar.

• 28:39George Mack?

  Exactly. So, and that's who gets screwed with tax. That's who gets screwed with everything else. So, yeah, it's, um, it's a fascinating argument of where government should intervene versus where they shouldn't intervene. Like the whole libertarian debate versus the sort of Keynesian debate. It's a fascinating, even now, like you, I think you look at, I thought a lot about this of you, because of COVID and everything else that was inevitably happening. Even if you don't fully buy into the whole AI debate, there's obviously going to be some jobs that are automated. And for me, I'd be fascinated to see, again, I'm not, I don't know the numbers, so I'm probably going void on my previous point. But if the government offered a stimulus right now to, let's say you took the top 50 job shortages, software engineering, UX engineering,

• 29:24George Mack?

  everything that's going to be very, very future-proofed and there's going to be more demand for it in the future. And offering a stimulus for people to drop out of their current job to retrain for a year or 18 months and pay them and pay the company to do it. Of course, there's a, there's a hit in terms of taxpayer money there, but the value to that economy over time would be, I wonder if one country did that, would they be the world's leading economy 30 years from now? Because you've taken, because right now, let's say, for example, you're doing a regular job that may get automated soon. If you want to drop out and become a UX engineer, you've either got to do it in your own time, take huge financial risk. Um, and that, as soon as you get to a certain age, that's just almost unfathomable for most people. So offering that pre-built in would be very, very interesting.

• 30:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you think Amazon should be broken up? Is it too big?

• 30:10George Mack?

  Fuck knows. I think one of the fascinating ones is sort of John Rockefeller's biography. And you begin to learn about that, how they they they broke up his businesses. I think because of the power of distribution, they're going to end up where they own everything. But what's interesting from this Charlie talk, he says, when you go through the inversion list, one of the things, so stuff you should avoid is to avoid envy. And he says that the psychology textbooks, if you go through them, there's there's nothing on envy. Like, which is crazy, because in the Bible, it's like one of the first things, thou shall not envy, and how big of a thing envy is. And he says the way to kind of get around envy is to deserve it. So people are a lot less resentful if you have like a world-class quality product.

• 30:52George Mack?

  So he says in here, third, with such with so much success coming. So when he's talking about Coca-Cola's thing, we must avoid bad effects from envy, given a prominent place in the Ten Commandments, because envy is so much a part of human nature. The best way to avoid envy, recognized by Aristotle, is to plainly deserve the success we get. Therefore, we will be fanatic about product quality, quality of product presentation, and reasonableness of prices, considering the harmless pleasure it will provide. And Amazon have kind of done that. So they still get a lot of envy, a lot of resentment, a lot of hatred. But nobody's boycotting them.

• 31:26Chris Williamson?

  From people from people who are messaging off phones charged by wires they bought on Amazon.

• 31:31George Mack?

  Exactly. And then and then they're going on to Twitter or they're going on to Instagram complaining about it on an A W F server, right? So it's that that's the thing about everybody I know who resents Amazon for like the tax added things and how much they're monopolizing everything, still uses them. So it's kind of, yeah, I I don't know. It's a very interesting question.

• 31:54Chris Williamson?

  I've watched a really, we both have watched some interesting Amazon documentaries over the last few months. And I started to see just how beastly their operation is. And you realize that there's probably going to come a point pretty soon where that growth and the amount of impact that they have, especially when they start to ramp up automated delivery, perhaps with drones or with driverless cars, that you'd be able to do. One hour delivery, remote warehouse to customer without anyone intervening.

• 32:29George Mack?

  Well, the craziest thing about Amazon is that AWS was, or still is, profitable, as profitable or more profitable than Amazon. And nobody really knows what AWS is. So that's another business.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  What is Amazon Web Services?

• 32:44George Mack?

  Amazon Web Services. So anybody, almost like Netflix, for example, will use Amazon Web Services. You can imagine the amount of bandwidth that they, they, they flow through, right? So, and that, that's Bezos. Again, what's fascinating about Bezos is very similar to Musk in the sense that I think people can get so complex with it, and I understand why, but, and obviously these, these two are geniuses that not everybody can imitate or mimic. But he has one guiding principle that every decision goes through. So for Bezos, it's just, we just care about the customer. That's all. If it can enhance the customer experience, let's do it. Basically, if you look at every decision Amazon make, if you go back through the book,

• 33:25George Mack?

  The Everything Store, every decision he makes is, will this enhance the customer experience? Rather than like profit margin, it's just long-term, long-term, long-term. Will this enhance the customer experience? So he says this example of 10 years from now, will people say to me, I want slower deliveries and a higher cost? And he's like, no, no, nobody's ever going to say that to me. They're always going to say, I love the fact that it's arrived next day. I love how cheap it is, therefore I double down on that. And then Elon Musk, there's an interview on Lex Friedman's show, where I forgot who it is that worked with him, and he said that Elon Musk, for as complex as an individual as he is, as intelligent he is, and how much he understands, every decision goes through, will this get me nearer to Mars or not? Yes or no?

• 34:09George Mack?

  And it's very like crazy how somebody as complex, sophisticated, nuanced as that, has just one guiding thing that shapes every single decision, whereas a lot of us are like, oh, I've got this part of my life, I've got this part of my life, I've got this interest, I've got this. Whereas for those two, at the scale they're at, the amount of decisions you have to make is just, will this enhance customer experience or will this get me nearer to Mars? Yes or no?

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, it makes for, when you've got a chaotic world with an awful lot of different decisions, you need a simple guiding principle. And I wonder whether.

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  In a world with far too much stimulation and people with poorly defined goals, goals that they've adopted from their family, from their culture, from what they think they should want. It's not surprising that people struggle with decision making. Because the single guiding principle that they have isn't theirs and there's 40 of them.

• 35:05George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:06Chris Williamson?

  They're being pulled in a million different directions, which comes back to direction over speed, right? Or just have a direct, before you even think about speed, just get a direction. And yet, that's a that's a really interesting insight. I wonder how people can try and find a guiding principle in their life. You know, it's too trite to say, just do what makes you happy, you know? Like you just sit and masturbate at home all day.

• 35:34George Mack?

  Maybe that's your guiding principle, right?

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic, that we were, yeah. What else have we got?

• 35:39George Mack?

  So, this is one I've made up. I don't think we've been through it before. We may have done. So, it's called opportunity cost blindness, so OCB, play on sort of OCD. Where, this is really hard to explain without experiencing it, but just how blind we are to the amount of opportunity cost there is. So, often when I found, I mean, I've not had that many relationships, but when you're in a relationship, it's either them or single, them or single, them or single. And it's so hard to actually realise that it's them or single, or eight billion other people. So, it's so, but it's so hard to know that opportunity. Same with jobs, like we'll know certain people where

• 36:21George Mack?

  they're miserable in a job and it's either, okay, job or leave job and unemployed, job or leave job. So, there's only one opportunity cost, but they forget how much there is. Because it's like the law of large numbers. I think we really struggle, or I really struggle, to just comprehend how much else exists. And you can only see the options that are available to you. And you already realise in hindsight, when you go, fuck it, I was like this job for four years and I was like having this argument with my boss every single day in the shower. How much, now I'm in this other opportunity, how laughable that was and how serious I took that, because you don't even comprehend the amount of opportunity out there. So I think almost having a filter of, I right now do not, I've got such opportunity cost blindness,

• 37:05George Mack?

  I cannot even fathom how much opportunity there is out there. And to start from that base level filter is probably a smart thing to do, which is tough, it's very tough.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  It's reassuring, you know, when you've got a difficult decision in front of you. But how many times have people obsessed over what they're going to, I don't know, I'm scared about breaking up with a relationship that I know is wrong, or leaving a job that I don't enjoy, or moving to a new city, or retraining, starting, whatever it might be. And then as soon as you do, you realise, oh, hang on, like, there's so many more paths down here. I just thought it was this or that. For instance, our trip away to Dubai, we decided to take a trip away. I'm like, oh, God, like, I don't know whether I should go, there's all of this stuff, and you meet a little bit of resistance. But once you overcome that initial inertia, you realise once you're out here that the one thing that you had written as go to Dubai

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  during lockdown, actually consists of a million different other routes that are in there. So, yeah, we certainly bundled together blocks of opportunities into individual sections, which can make for a, make for a more simplistic worldview in a way that blinds us.

• 38:20George Mack?

  Well, I think even, I was chatting to a guy called Adam Townsend on Twitter, and he's got some fantastic stuff on this. And he talks about how we're so addicted to work. Like, you almost get over that, he said, I just need to take three months out. And you just completely realise, like, there's just so much more there, but you need the time and the space, and often different opportunities. Like, since being out here, we were just saying that, how you're just in a different news cycle. You don't even realise that you're constantly, this news cycle is just in your software, just running all the time. It's just, I don't know about you, but when you have, like, dodgy software on your laptop, and you only realise.

• 39:02George Mack?

  Perks the dark web. So you've got all these dodgy stuff and it's just eating your bandwidth, but you don't know it until you're out of it. And I do think there's so much opportunity cost blindness that even if you can pre-build in like, okay, I'm not sure if I want to break up with somebody. Let's just do like three weeks over here with my friend, building these A B tests. So like, okay, if I try this, what happens here? If I try this, what happens here? Scott Adams has this hilarious bit of, I fucking love Scott Adams. He, he says, um, in his book, the mistake people make with seeking jobs is they wait till they're unhappy in their job to seek it. And the odds of the perfect job existing when you're ready for it is actually quite slim. So he says, as soon as, uh, you should always be looking at new jobs, like just schedule in like a day or week to just go,

• 39:45George Mack?

  is there a new job? Does it pay better? Does it have all this? Cause you know what? The perfect job for you might be within two months of starting this job. And he says that that's the key that got him up the corporate ladder before he went off and did cartooning. He, he would just constantly be like, what's the best paying job or what's the best ROI for me personally? And not wait until they're unhappy. Cause it's so true. Like people will wait three, four years and they go, right, I'm at breaking point. So psychologically they're done. And now you're searching for new jobs and you've got a two week window to do it. And the chances of that two week window being perfect for you, um, it's going to be slim.

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting how we map our model of relationships onto jobs? So in a relationship, it would be frowned upon to still be flicking through Tinder and Hinge whilst you're in a relationship. Because, well, you know, if this goes wrong, I, I, you know, what, what if something better comes along? You can't really do that. And I think people treat their jobs, the level of loyalty that they have to their job in a way like that. Um, and I'm not sure because as a business owner, I want my employees to be loyal. But as a growth minded individual, I want everybody to maximize their happiness and utility. And.

• 40:59Chris Williamson?

  I think if you're a boss, it's probably not a bad idea for your staff not to be doing that because your turnover is going to be significantly lower. But as a human, I think, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 41:10George Mack?

  Well, being able to get that, solve the principal agent problem, which is another mental model of how do you get agents to act like a principal? How do you get them to pay?

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference?

• 41:18George Mack?

  Well, a principal is somebody who sort of owns it and has direct skin in the game by the performance of the thing and has so much care over it. Um, so somebody who owns the business, if it performs, they make more money. If it doesn't, they lose a lot of money. Um, whereas an agent could just be somebody who's nine to five on the clock. I get paid regardless of performance, pretty much. I've just got to do the bare minimum to get away with it. Um, and being able to, how do you shift agents to principals? So I think the Val says, he, he works with like, he always wants to work with one person. So rather than work in like a huge agency, it's like, how can I just work with one person? Because if they're directly responsible, it's so much more difficult to sort of shriek responsibility.

• 42:00George Mack?

  Whereas if ten people in the room, it's like, oh, this might be that bit's that guy's job, that bit's that. So it means the total thing, the outcome of it. There's a load of agents who like, don't really have any personal ownership over it. Whereas if I'm working directly with Chris and it fails, it's Chris's fault. And if it succeeds, it's Chris's, it's Chris's success. So it had been able to solve that principle, which is why so many startups give equity. I've seen people who, even though the equity game, yeah, there may be a few percent of them win, like ninety five, ninety nine, never make anything. People who will justify working crazy hours because they have one percent of the business.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 42:36George Mack?

  So being able to pivot that to a principal mindset is a very interesting thing.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  What mental model do you wish that more of your friends and family knew?

• 42:47George Mack?

  I don't know, I don't, wouldn't want to put something on. Friends and family, um, I guess in versions, they stop hanging out with me. No, I don't know. Yeah. So that's a really tough one. I guess it's so, that's the issue I have with even like a lot of podcasts and a lot of advice is it's just so fucking nuanced and so subjective to the individual. I think you're seeing this with diets now, right? I know people who, who have nuts and they die.

• 43:18Chris Williamson?

  Johnny.

• 43:19George Mack?

  Johnny, yeah, shout out Johnny. Whereas I have nuts and I'm fine. It's like, so then to have like one of, which one kind of mental models, because you can take different things from each discipline and apply it. But when it's like, you should do X or you should 10 X, right? I just think that's bollocks because it's so subjective and nuanced to the individual. Like, and then we chatted about this previously, like even the word entrepreneur, I have an issue with it because there's so much like microcosms within entrepreneurship. Joe Rogan is so different to Jeff Bezos. If you put Jeff Bezos in Joe Rogan's shoes, it would flop. If you put Joe Rogan in Jeff Bezos shoes, it would win.

• 43:54George Mack?

  But we're told these two people are still entrepreneurs. For me, it feels like it's so different. There's so much subjectivity out in the world that I think the only thing when it comes to advice is to look at, again, the fundamental principles, the fundamental foundations. So Gary Vee has that, the dirt and the clouds. The clouds are these big mental models and the dirt is so specific and tactical to your field. That somebody like me going chatting to a machine learning engineer or chatting to somebody in physical retail, it's just like, yeah, there's a few overlying principles that may help, like compound interest, power laws, da, da, da, da. But there's so much subjectivity to each individual that I think is so neglected by self-improvement and the self-help sector.

• 44:35George Mack?

  Cause it's as nuanced as your diet. It's as nuanced as your genetic code, I think.

• 44:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The, what everybody's trying to do is find a.

• 44:45Chris Williamson?

  Commonality that permits one piece of advice to fit many, like one size fits all advice, right? But I would say, I certainly think that a lot of my friends and family would do with contrast. Like, I thi- I think there's very few people.

• 45:02George Mack?

  Well, I'd rather talk about myself, I, cause I always feel that as soon as I, you start talking about somebody else, you don't know them as well as yourself. Whereas at least I know me very well. And I think that you, you can easily be in a situation where you give other people advice. And you're just so detached from it. You see it like so much online. I just think it's.

• 45:18Chris Williamson?

  What mental model do you wish that you could implement?

• 45:20George Mack?

  Oh, that's a bad question. Um, leverage, leverage, cause I'm a workaholic by trade, like, like. So like my, when I was like eleven, my dad bet me up and do ten kick ups with a football. I then spent five years training five hours a day doing kick ups with a football. If anything, it was a great.

• 45:37Chris Williamson?

  Ten?

• 45:38George Mack?

  To do ten.

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  Five hours to get ten.

• 45:39George Mack?

  I got, I got a lot, I got a lot better. Um, so I started, that came like as a little mini job when I was younger, but that taught me that power of working hard and growth mindset. So it was super valuable in that respect. But it also means that I will then try and do a hundred responsibilities and I won't understand necessarily the power of leverage as much. So having more people working for you, having more code working for you, having more media working for you is a, uh, an unbelievable tool that I'm only beginning to wrap my head around.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  What was that quote that you gave me about lazy people make the best employees because they'll find shortcuts to do work?

• 46:19George Mack?

  Exactly. So you, that, that's the part, like, I, I've said this before. If I could, you know what, talk about friends and family, I wouldn't give them my any advice or that's how I think it's so nuanced to them. The only thing I'd say is get working knowledge of Zapier. If you have, if you have, and the reason why it's because of leverage.

• 46:36Chris Williamson?

  Short notice, Zapier.

• 46:37George Mack?

  I think Zapier, if you, if, again, going back to government stimulus is, if Zapier said, we will pay for your five day lead to learn Zapier. If the government said that. The value to the economy would be the amount of people who right now are going on emails, copying something, putting it in a Google sheet or going from a Facebook ad and putting it into a different document. All Zapier is, is every major app connected. And this isn't a sponsorship, by the way, I do this for free.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:01George Mack?

  Connected. I genuinely think if you taught people about no-code skill, the ability to automate things and almost become like a, like a developer of eighteen months in like the space of three days, the productivity for the economy would be amazing. And the first time you have a Zapier thing that works for you and you can just see this flowing, like we could be like now I've got Zap's running. It's the best thing ever. I know once our chat's done, it's going to have taken a hundred people from different Facebook ads and it's already automated and sent them an email. Whereas previously I'd have to go in, get the CSV, send that. So Zapier for me, in terms of an applied mental model of leverage, is the best thing for somebody who can't code.

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. That is really, really interesting. I um. I like, I was taught this by my first ever boss of an events company, is outsourcing. I know that Naval's a big fan of if something costs you less than your hourly rate to do it, then either outsource it or just throw it away.

• 48:00George Mack?

  Yeah, I think that's a great nuanced point. If it's the hourly rate type of things, but sometimes I will see it with certain businesses that I work with, where they outsource too much and then they become, they become foreign to it and they just trust people who say they're experts at it. Like one of the best D two C guys I've met, a guy called Danny Book on Twitter, he said to me, he went into direct to consumer and decided to do all the ads himself. Obviously, he outsourced like learning and he does hire consultants to come in and train them. But he said, this is the most fundamental part of the business. I'm not outsourcing it. Whereas I've seen so many other businesses, it's just like, this is the most fundamental part of our business, boom, pass it over there. So it's really interesting like how that balance between outsourcing, but also how do you not get bullshitted by the people you've outsourced to?

• 48:44George Mack?

  So you almost need enough base level knowledge and maybe that's like applied mental models for like knowing basic numeracy. So when they say certain things to you, you can check things off. But that's an issue that Charlie talks about, that you need these fundamental mental models in place. Because if you do outsource, you need to be able to have enough knowledge of that field to be able to call bullshit. Otherwise, you can just, somebody can sound smart and just trick you.

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how many people lie on the side of the spectrum where they outsource too much versus how many lie on the side of the spectrum where they do too much. I would say, based on my experience, more people are on the latter and that might be a selection effect from the type of friends that I've got. But workaholics, people from a classic working class background, they will tend to look to save money where they can. And on top of that, I think the neuroticism that you have, the fear of something not being done correctly and the time investment it takes to teach someone how to be George Mack dot doc X.

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  Like, writing that manifesto is such a huge hurdle to overcome. And you think, right, okay, I could do that and automate my life, but I'd have to take three months off of my life to do that. And I see so commonly in business, like one of the most frequent bits of advice that I give people is, you should not be doing that. That's not your job. That was your job seven months ago or seven years ago. And for some reason, you're still doing, you're still replying to the Instagram DMs. Or you're still dealing with the level two customer inquiries over email. Like, the first person that it gets up level two is you after the person that deals with the customers. Like, no, that's not your job.

• 50:31George Mack?

  Was there one specific thing for you where, that you maybe held on for too long and then delegated it? And you was like, oh my God, I can't believe how good this is.

• 50:38Chris Williamson?

  Everything in my business.

• 50:40George Mack?

  Any specific, was there one thing where it clicked and you was like?

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  So the main, the main one, the most stupid thing that I used to do was set up the nightclub on a Saturday morning. So I didn't miss a Saturday at my first weekly event, Voodoo, for 204 weeks. So just shy of four years. And the only reason I missed like the 205th was because I had a... Chest infection that had me bed back like strapped to the bed, bed bound. Other than that, hungover, fresh, ill, what every different iteration of life for four years. I was there outside the same club for four years and I used to spend my Saturday morning into afternoon, eleven till two or three, setting up the club.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  And that was just hanging up inflatables. Anyone who's ever been to a nightclub and noticed the extra decor. Most of that, make sure the decks are right, do a sound check, piss off. You could have paid a couple of students thirty quid each. They would have got more value out of it because they need the thirty quid more than I need to lose three hours of my time. And I would have retained, because I was working every night as well. But for some reason, I was terrified that the cable ties were going to be put on wrongly. Oh, well, if the cable tie isn't that way. And it it came from a catastrophic mindset. That I presumed if the cable ties were on wrong, that would be the beginning of the avalanche that collapsed the business. It's born out of working in an industry which is very fickle, very, very fast moving.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  Everyone knows what it's like, like the the cool spot to go to last week is. Nobody even goes there. This is like Covid just hits one venue at once and everybody dissipates. And that creates a level of ambient anxiety that pervades through the the source code of the industry. And that was maybe uh made worse by my own um personality. And when all of that got piled together, yeah, I I struggled to let go of so much stuff. Setting up the venue was one of them. Doing the accounts was another one. I didn't need to sit and watch the accounts. Oh, my God, here's another one. So we used to have the way that the guest list was set up for our events. I used to take the plus number, so George Mack plus three.

• 52:49Chris Williamson?

  I used to take the plus number and put it in another column. Why? Why on earth, like, I don't need a fully justified number column. It makes no difference. It's being seen by one guy on the front door and that guy's me. But I don't need to do this, but I would take a guest list with three hundred names, four hundred names, doing fifteen hundred people a night. And I'd be going through, I wouldn't have done a macro for it. I wouldn't have like automated it. I would do it manually. And it took until that one day and I was like, what am I doing? So that very much, I think, is sweating the small stuff and obsessing over things without perspective. One of the problems of being an entrepreneur or a business person or someone that has a hobby that you care about is when you're this close to it, when you are in the dirt,

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  very hard to get perspective and look at where should I be, where am I adding the most value, right?

• 53:37George Mack?

  Opportunity cost blindness again, isn't it really? Like you don't have the ability to step out. And it's interesting that the reason why, the only reason it happened to you is because you said, what, you ended up in hospital, you got ill. It's crazy that you get to the stage, but imagine if that never happened, you'd probably still be doing it, right? You're probably, you're probably going to be here right now, like, it's, it's weird. It's very weird. So maybe the, the nuance between what I'm saying of don't delegate too much, what you're saying, people need to delegate more is, and there's that, I think, I don't know if it's Parrish or about who, but if it involves judgment or creativity or and it's the highest priority thing, then have one hundred percent obsessive ownership over it. And if it's something that doesn't involve that, if it's just like manual tasks or stuff that you can train somebody for, then it outsells immediately.

• 54:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot this year is mental masturbation. So I think people who enjoy the mental models world can often become too cerebral around finding their solutions for it. You can think that all the answers to your questions just lie at the bottom of being able to recite poor Charlie's Almanack.

• 54:42George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  And that's.

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  Compliance and the ability to deploy that actually makes all of the difference. It is multiplying by zero if you're not able to do it. So how can people that are listening, perhaps, you know, fourth episode deep in this particular series. Have you got any ways that you ensure that you don't just mentally jerk off with this sort of stuff? And that you actually try and apply it?

• 55:05George Mack?

  So hard again without knowing like.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  But how do you do it?

• 55:07George Mack?

  So subjective. It's a good question. It's definitely somewhere I've got a lot better at.

• 55:13George Mack?

  I think, I think it's much easier when you've committed to certain things and then there's people that hold you accountable to them. So if it's just you working alone on a project, it's much harder. I think as soon as you're like quite public about you're working at something or you've got a partner to be working on something. Or you've got employees you have to do it for, then. Anyway, you can't just go like, all right, guys, I want to turn up to the Monday morning meeting because I'm going to go and read for five hours. Like you've got to then maybe schedule your reading for a certain time, but then you have to execute. So I think that's great. And then I think going back to numbers as well, I think. You just can't shoot numbers. So if, for example. You, I guess you'll know this better than me, but in like the gym side of things, you can't shoot the numbers.

• 55:52George Mack?

  So if the numbers aren't changing, i.e. whatever your metric is, whatever you decide on as your metrics, whether that's money or whether that's, I don't know, weights lifted in a gym or whether it's calories consumed or whether it's number of times I'm seeing.

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  Revenue, top line sales.

• 56:08George Mack?

  Whatever you can basically, I know this sounds very like people. You can sometimes over quantify life. I'd say on the most part, people don't do it enough. So if you quantify things and it doesn't improve, start changing variables. And I think that's it. Again, you don't, the whole, the whole thing about that answer there, like the whole mental masturbation. If you then start mentally masturbating over the answer, it's just a fucking.

• 56:30Chris Williamson?

  Endless cycle.

• 56:31George Mack?

  Just a hamster and a thing. So I think get a number of a thing that you want to change and throw variables in. Does the, does it change? If not, why change the variable again? And just keep doing that and then just keep a track of that number. So it's very simple. Has the revenue gone up? Has my time spent on this activity gone up? Has my Elo score at chess.com gone up?

• 56:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, has it?

• 56:51George Mack?

  It has indeed.

• 56:52Chris Williamson?

  Nice, nice. Right, we are going to play a game of bull or bear. And bull or bear is something we've been doing in our WhatsApp chat for a little while, which is where one of the guys will post. Anything and everyone will reply with an emoji, bull or bear. So you can play, you can play along at home. Uh, bull or bear, faith in the voting system.

• 57:13George Mack?

  Oh, look, um, faith in the voting system. So, oh, that's a really hard, I'm bear on the way it currently is. I'm bull on the way, my way is where it's.

• 57:23Chris Williamson?

  What's your solution?

• 57:24George Mack?

  So, well, I've thought about this. Talk about an elephant in the room. 2020 will be remembered as the year where pens and paper were redundant unless it was deciding the most powerful person in the world. Or people counting numbers repetitively on low wage jobs were redundant unless it was deciding the election. Imagine if you go to your bank and let's say you have twenty thousand pounds in your bank, ten thou-, let's say you have ten thousand pounds in your bank. And you go, how much money do I have in my bank? Rather than having it automated by computers and robots doing it for you. It's a guy in the back room who goes, right, give me, give me overnight. And he goes there, pound coin, by pound coin going, oh, one pound, one pound, one pound. Oh, ten p, ten p, ten p. And he comes back with that number. That number will be false.

• 58:07George Mack?

  There's no way about that, whether you're a Trump fan or Biden fan or whoever you, I don't know, whatever country you're from. Having the system of people counting things and it being done by pen and paper is fucking ludicrous. It is mental because it's, no matter your side, it is wrong. Uh, like the number will be wrong.

• 58:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:25George Mack?

  Because when they recount it, it's always a number.

• 58:26Chris Williamson?

  The only reason it could be right is by the errors on one side fixing the errors on another. Like if you, if you somehow, one in a billion trillion chance, they were all correct. It wouldn't be because they were accurately counted. It's because lapses on one side would end up. So what's your solution?

• 58:42George Mack?

  Um, blockchain. So it's, it's so obvious, right? You can just, everyone has an encrypted key. If you submit it, therefore you can go, you can, everybody can go back and see there. It's stored in a blockchain. Nobody can interfere with it. The amount of votes that will go up as a result of it because people can do it from their smartphone rather than having to go to a polling station and capture something. You can't cheat. There's no, it's very hard for electoral fraud to happen. Obviously, whether the technology's there, you have to be able to do it. The issue is very few governments and they're, they're so backwards in their thinking. But that seems inevitable. Why? It seems so inevitable after this year that you can't have pen and paper any. Why is pen and paper involved? Why are humans still counting numbers? It's ridiculous.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  So let's say that pen and paper gets disbanded.

• 59:26George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 59:27Chris Williamson?

  But blockchain doesn't get brought in. Are you bearish or bullish then?

• 59:30George Mack?

  That's good. I mean, so if you wanna go down a rabbit hole, the best guy content is called a guy called George Hops. And he hacks into, he's the first guy, I think, to hack into the iPhone, the first guy to hack into the Sony PlayStation. So he'll hack into anything and he'll show examples of how easy it is to hack into your iPhone. Just turn your camera on and start recording you. He can hack into, he shows how you can hack into cars. So if you think the government's IT team, bear in mind like in the UK, the government NHS is the largest buyer of fax machines in the world. How backwards they are, I reckon even either of it of HTML five hours on Code Academy could probably hack into it.

• 1:00:11George Mack?

  So I'm pretty bearish on that unless they bring the best people in. So I still think it's gonna be a shit show for a while, yeah.

• 1:00:17Chris Williamson?

  That's not great. Brian Rose, London mayor, bear or bull?

• 1:00:20George Mack?

  Massive bull, yeah, massive bull.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  Are you? Are you really?

• 1:00:23George Mack?

  I don't know. I think it's third favourite in, I know you're probably, but I, I mean, I, yeah, I don't really have an opinion. I'd probably say bull.

• 1:00:30Chris Williamson?

  Kanye twenty twenty four, bearable?

• 1:00:37George Mack?

  Bear because he'll have to be, if he could win Republican or Democrat, then I'm, I'm a bit bull. Cause then he might go Trump, but I think he'll have to be independent. I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The thing about Kanye is that going on Rogan and getting asked hard questions and then sitting in silence for thirty seconds. Like, so many people are seduced by artistic capacity in one domain and presuming that it means genius across them all. Like, there's not that many polymaths out there and they're, they're kind of like bizarrely, they're quite easy to spot. Like you hear Eric speak and you're like.

• 1:01:15George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:16Chris Williamson?

  He'll, he'll move seamlessly from cephalopods to classical Latin music to like complex physics to whatever. Stephen Wolfram, you'll hear him move between crazy different areas. It comes back to that kind of blagging it mentality.

• 1:01:31George Mack?

  Fashion's very easy to blag as well. Like, fashion is, it's built on, like, it's built on reflectivity. It's just how people react to things. So. Yeah, I, I listen to that Rogan thing and my mind's a pendulum of genius, madman. It would just switch, it would just switch back and forth. It's so hard to say, right? It's so hard to knock his success at the same time.

• 1:01:48Chris Williamson?

  Bearable sex robots?

• 1:01:51George Mack?

  Um, personal or, or society?

• 1:01:54Chris Williamson?

  Wait, give, give us both of them.

• 1:01:57George Mack?

  I mean, probably, probably bull, I think, is the way it ends up as costs go down. The only thing that I can see, the only thing that happens potentially before then is the printing viruses, I think is probably inevitable.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you get a virtual sexually transmitted infection.

• 1:02:16George Mack?

  No, no, no, I think we could just get killed off before then. But then again, if we do have a printed virus scenario where, so George Hotz.

• 1:02:22Chris Williamson?

  We talk, is this a nanotechnology thing?

• 1:02:24George Mack?

  Well, I was listening to George Hotz, so he does this five hour Python stream where he's just coding things. And he's just like the most intense man ever. And he's talking about, he'll pull up Google really fast and he goes, how many base pairs are in the coronavirus? 10,000 base pairs. He goes, how much does it cost to print a base pair? And it's like $3. He goes, so it would cost me $30,000 to start printing the coronavirus. Could you imagine where the future of technology is going to be? And he just kind of looks at the camera like that. I'm like, oh, fuck, yeah, he's so right, isn't he? Like, if the 3D printing technology is going to go down, you can access the genomes of all these things and just take the base pairs.

• 1:02:54George Mack?

  But then again, if we all keep doing these pandemic lockdowns, then sex robots are going to.

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

  Sex robots are going to. One of the interesting things I read, it's Jeffrey Miller's other half, the woman who's scientist on, sentientist on Twitter. And she was talking about how in a society, an increase in freely available sexual satisfaction actually turns down sexual assaults and overall aggression. And the reason for that is that most of the sexual assaults are born out of people feeling like they can't win in the normal game. But by gaming the system, like, it doesn't matter that you couldn't win in the real world, but you get to win in the fake world and that doesn't fix it.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  It's like, we're able to hack into our own programming stuff fairly easily. And that's one of them.

• 1:03:48George Mack?

  Watch a movie and see how that works, yeah.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  Porn does exactly the same thing. Final one, remote working for the majority of a workforce.

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  Let's consider here, before you go into it, people who need contact around others, who require that working environment.

• 1:04:10George Mack?

  Tough. I'm thinking about this like hiring and you'll be hired. So on one hand, if you hire remote, you have access to so much more talent and sometimes at a more affordable price. So I said, remote work is the best thing possible to happen to talented people in the developing world and the worst thing possible to happen to talentless people in the developed world. Because like, there's so many things where there's somebody in another side of the world that can do it for a quarter of the price, ten X the work ethic and five X the brains. So I'm pretty bullish on it, certainly for the developing world and the wonders it's going to do of flowing money out there. But I do have concerns that for people who are talentless in the develop- oh, I know

• 1:04:55George Mack?

  talentless is a strong word, but aren't as skilled in the developed world, what that does for them.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  Competitive versus uncompetitive.

• 1:05:01George Mack?

  Yeah, so I think it's the pendulum's going to obviously shift a bit further back to where it was, but it's never going to go back that way. Just because there's some people who I know that will refuse to take a job that is in an office now.

• 1:05:12Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 1:05:12George Mack?

  Yeah, there's definitely people who will. Um, I think the ideal, there's talk about this where like these big tech companies who are shutting down their offices and now just having like wee workspaces that people can drop in, do meetings, but then they live around the city. I think that's probably more likely. But I said this when, um, when all these tech companies started working from home, I go, that's a hacker's fucking dream. Like, because now you've got so many people at home Wi-Fi's and Alexa devices that you can hack into. And then you look at the Twitter hack that happened, they're all working from home. And the, it came, I remember at the time it's going, definitely something to do with working.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  You know where it came from?

• 1:05:45George Mack?

  Three months later, it's a couple of kids, right? Um, but it came from, I think, um, obviously it's the classic, they're pretending to be security and they got in that way. But they said that it was way easier because of the fact they were working from home. So if you want a trillion dollar idea, cybersecurity for remote work.

• 1:06:00Chris Williamson?

  Christ. Yeah, I mean, what, what the, the level of security that you have that gets built into offices, that's part of the thing that people don't realise that you just presume your office is the brick walls, the air conditioning and the cafeteria downstairs. But it's not, it's all of the infrastructure that permits you to do your work in a secure way as well. The log stuff that's got cloud storage, it's constantly updating, that, you know, yeah, you, you really correct. It's terrifying.

• 1:06:32Chris Williamson?

  There's probably some industries in which remote working just needs to, but let's not, let's not decentralise the Pentagon, you know? Let's not have the nuclear football be available on an app on like Trump or Biden's phone or something like that. Yeah, man. Well, look, that was awesome, dude. I'm so glad that you're out here with me. I'm really happy to go through this as well. I think if people are keen, I reckon that we can do some much longer episodes playing Bear or Bull.

• 1:07:01George Mack?

  Bear or Bull 101.

• 1:07:03Chris Williamson?

  Get some submissions through.

• 1:07:05George Mack?

  If you're Bull on Bear or Bull, send the, send the, if you're Bear, just send the Bear emoji.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's it. Uh, where should people go? They want to check out your stuff and also what you're doing now, people might want to know where, what's happening in your life. Give us the elevator pitch.

• 1:07:19George Mack?

  Yeah, so mainly blockchain sex robots.

• 1:07:24George Mack?

  No, so, um, if you want to find me, Twitter's usually the best place, I'm on there a little bit, and it's George underscore underscore M A C K. Um, and then in terms of myself, primarily e-commerce, D to C agency, so paid social, Shopify builds, customer acquisition, text message, SMS, and then looking at our own products as well. So if you've got products, you want to scale or you just want to have a conversation, that's that.

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  Peace, dudes. It's always a pleasure to have you here. Thank you to everybody for tuning in. Let us know about Bear or Bull. I think it's a really cool idea and I want to do more of them and it's funny. And yeah, we're gonna grab another coffee, a little bit of sun, do an afternoon of work.

• 1:08:01George Mack?

  Good for us.

• 1:08:02Chris Williamson?

  Peace.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  With great power, comes great deniability.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only appears October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Under 17.00 without parent.