The Hidden Cost Of Overthinking Everything - George Mack

George Mack is a writer, marketer and an entrepreneur. Why does overthinking create more problems than it solves? If thinking helps us solve so much, why isn’t more thinking always the answer? So how can we build a calmer mind without falling into smart-person traps? Expect to learn the price of overthinking and inaction, how music changes your personality, the largest gaps in British versus American cultures, why AI is getting really weird, why humans need stories, the traps that all smart people fall into, how to know if you're living in the decline of an empire, and much more... Get George’s list of favourite unknown books here: http://highagency.com/books - Gymshark's Summer Sale starts June 18th. Get up to 60% off sitewide at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Is Nickelback at 2x Speed the Optimal Workout? 4:18 Do American Introverts Actually Exist? 5:48 The Biggest Time-Waster For Single Men After 7pm 9:14 What Does the World Really Think of Britain? 17:48 Can You Sh*t Your Way to Savant Syndrome? 23:50 Why Everyone Should Learn How To Frivolously Spend 25:01 Why the Moon is the GOAT 32:41 What Would Life Be Like 5,000 Years Ago? 39:51 Why Can’t Cows Go Downstairs? 43:30 Should We Be Retardmaxxing More? 53:09 Is Chris An American Sports Fan? 59:21 Was the British Empire the Most Powerful Ever? 01:04:19 Why Do People Love Arguing Online? 01:06:42 The Longest Traffic Jam Ever - Get George’s list of favourite unknown books here: ⁠https://www.highagency.com/books⁠ Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What were you doing before we left the house?

• 0:02George Mack?

  Oh, I was listening to Nickelback on 2X speed.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  You're listening to Nickelback on 2 times speed?

• 0:08George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  We just let that sit for a second?

• 0:11George Mack?

  Mm hmm.

• 0:13Chris Williamson?

  And you've been listening to Phil Collins on 1.5 times?

• 0:15George Mack?

  Yeah, sometimes 1.6.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to explain yourself?

• 0:19George Mack?

  Well, I, I went through a phase that I'm still in, um, that I think YouTube is better to listen to music on than Spotify, Apple Music. Because you can get live tracks way more, like it's underrated live tracks on YouTube, just hearing the crowd. Um, and I've also stopped listening to hip hop as much.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 0:42George Mack?

  Cause I, I don't know about you, I started becoming a bad person when I'd listen to hip hop too much.

• 0:47Chris Williamson?

  Did you not get, did you never get the one?

• 0:49George Mack?

  Well, if you just listen to people committing crimes in your head all day long.

• 0:54George Mack?

  You do become, you do become a bit of a terrible person. So, um.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is what we found, where were you working? Was it when you were at Social Chain and we were talking about, uh, serotonin, George serotonin, Chris, listening to Anjunadeep? And then it was cortisol, George and cortisol, Chris, listening to Kanye West. That was pre cancellation as well.

• 1:11George Mack?

  Yeah. I mean, even, even Kanye wouldn't be full cortisol. It would be like, it'd be DMX.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:17George Mack?

  Or like very angry Tupac.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:19George Mack?

  Vinnie Paz is great, Jedi Mind Tricks.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  You've explained, you've explained to me why you think that YouTube is a good platform. You haven't necessarily explained to me why you've been listening to.

• 1:30George Mack?

  Taking a, just taking a little interview.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  Phil Collins at 1.6 times.

• 1:33George Mack?

  So when I go to, um, the gym, I put tunes on, on YouTube, usually live tracks. But then I was listening to Nickelback Rockstar, which is a completely underrated song. And I was, but if you listen to that at 1X speed, it's quite hard to work out to, but if you go and listen to.

• 1:52George Mack?

  If you go and if you listen to hip hop, it's um it's too aggressive.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  Then you want to go and commit a crime.

• 1:57George Mack?

  But Nickelback at 1.8 x speed rock star, customizer, he changed the beats per minute and great workout. But this is actually really sad. This is really sad, this part, which was on, if you look, look, look at Nickelback rock star and you go into comments, it's like, um, it's this boy talking about how his dad used to listen to Nickelback rock star and he's now just about to have surgery and he's unsure if he's going to wake up and he's listening to Nickelback rock star. So I'm there like listening to it 1.8x speed, reading the comment section.

• 2:25Chris Williamson?

  Why are you in the comments?

• 2:26George Mack?

  I got incredibly sad. I don't.

• 2:27Chris Williamson?

  Do you speed, you're speed listening to Nickelback, reading sad comments?

• 2:31George Mack?

  Yes.

• 2:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Well, have you seen the, there's a conspiracy theory that Nickelback's downfall in the mid 2000s was to try and demoralize America after 9/11?

• 2:40George Mack?

  No, why, why demoralize America?

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  That Nickelback was kind of on this surgeance. It was sort of American spirit. It was the equivalent for them in the new world after this horrible catastrophe that occurred. And it's this huge, long documentary, like I don't know, 40 minute, 50 minute breakdown of exactly why Nickelback was sort of taken down from the inside.

• 3:02George Mack?

  Hmm. I think Nickelback are one of the most underrated bands of all time because people thought they were one of the most overrated bands of all time. They're now one of the most underrated bands of all time, until they then become the most overrated because it swung back again.

• 3:13Chris Williamson?

  Swung back again. Yeah. Well, this is like Creed, right? Creed, Creed got to come back around.

• 3:17George Mack?

  Well, there's talk that um, uh, there's like this great video that's breaking down, why do people hate Nickelback? And one of the theories is that they try a little bit too hard as well. Whereas some of these edgier bands during the era, which ironically everybody's forgot. And there was this interview with the lead singer of Nickelback and he's talking about how he would study songs, like figure out why songs work.

• 3:38Chris Williamson?

  It's like Mr. Beast of Music.

• 3:39George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 3:40Chris Williamson?

  And because he was trying so hard. Well, there's something about being nonchalant that's cool. There's always going to be something cool about being nonchalant.

• 3:46George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Chris Williamson?

  Especially if you're British, but it's not a very American uh, like personality trait.

• 3:51George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 3:52Chris Williamson?

  To enjoy nonchalance in the same way as a Brit does, because the Brit, everybody enjoys nonchalance, but the Brit enjoys nonchalance. I nearly said nonsense.

• 4:02Chris Williamson?

  It's just something very different.

• 4:03George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  The Brit enjoys nonchalance in a different way, which is that it protects us from having to be called a kino. Like you don't want to be called too keen about anything. And you inherently don't like anybody that does seem too keen or excitable.

• 4:18George Mack?

  Yeah, when you took me to that gym opening the other evening, I was talking to a lady there. And she was implying she was an introvert. And yet she was like one of the most extroverted people like American. I don't think American introverts truly exist. Comparatively to a Britain scale. Yeah. If you look, here's a question, right? If you had introversion, extroversion, and you're massively grouping countries together. What do you think's the most extroverted country and most introverted country if you're grouping the populaces?

• 4:49Chris Williamson?

  You're probably not far off with America and the UK.

• 4:53Chris Williamson?

  You're probably not far off.

• 4:54George Mack?

  Yeah. Who's more who's more introverted than us?

• 4:59Chris Williamson?

  Japanese.

• 5:01Chris Williamson?

  Japanese, probably.

• 5:02George Mack?

  Famously cut themselves off for about 160 years during the Siboko. That's hardcore, hardcore introversion.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  They did a national and a national introversion push. Them, I mean, who's more extra? I guess it's probably some South American places. You know, like some Latino.

• 5:19George Mack?

  Extroverted, right?

• 5:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:21George Mack?

  Was it like Brazil?

• 5:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:22George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  But, you know, we really have gone from one end of the Overton window to the other. When it comes to extrovert, but you're right, like an American extrovert, an American introvert is a British extrovert.

• 5:35George Mack?

  Hmm. An American extrovert is a British extrovert at an after party at 4 a.m. On every single substance that's ever existed, trying to talk about how he's going to fix the interest rates of the Bank of England.

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And we need to talk about your sneezing. I'm sorry.

• 5:50George Mack?

  Okay. Let's go for it.

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that there might be an issue? Like a medical issue? You sneezed 15 times.

• 6:00George Mack?

  I did. Yeah, I did.

• 6:01Chris Williamson?

  And they were over a minute apart.

• 6:03George Mack?

  I didn't realize you heard me. I was upstairs thinking.

• 6:05Chris Williamson?

  Mate, you shook the house.

• 6:07George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Chris Williamson?

  You shook the house with them. It was thunderous.

• 6:10George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 6:12George Mack?

  Yeah, well, it was a bit of a doom loop. Because I would sneeze, blow my nose, and then whatever, something was going up my nose when I was blowing the nose. And it would then create this economic doom loop that Gary Stevenson's in charge of the economy. It was, it was rough. Yeah, it was rough.

• 6:30Chris Williamson?

  I don't think I've ever sneezed that much in my entire life. I think that's, I think, and also I think this is you struggling with not having a girlfriend in the house.

• 6:37George Mack?

  Yeah, that's a nightmare. Yeah, I do. We've discussed this before, that guys over a certain age, between the hours of five to nine P M. Like, if the hours of five to nine P M was twenty four hours, I think the economy would go down by about thirty percent. Like, we're just useless. Like, nothing's happening. It's scrolling, it's checking stuff, it's relaxing, but stressing that you should be working or working whilst thinking that you should be relaxing.

• 7:08Chris Williamson?

  This is a real domesticating influence of having a partner.

• 7:10George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 7:11Chris Williamson?

  This is why you need one.

• 7:12George Mack?

  Yeah, just purely for the nervous system.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's so that you don't, like, regress back to the mean of just doing bullshit that you really wish that you wanted.

• 7:22George Mack?

  How do you think you've wasted?

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  What's the biggest, like, evening waste that you've had when you've been single or not been with your girlfriend?

• 7:30George Mack?

  Fuck.

• 7:35Chris Williamson?

  It's got to be phone. It's got to be phone.

• 7:37George Mack?

  Yeah, but what, like, what's, yeah, so zoom in, open your iPhone, Instagram.

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  Instagram, typically.

• 7:43George Mack?

  And what, what sort of stuff on Instagram?

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  Instagram or YouTube, but it's not, YouTube on T V is really, when I watch stuff on my T V, it's always very conscious. So it's such a fuck on to try and change from one video to another. I'm much more uh, scrutinous, way more discretion around what I'm gonna watch if I'm watching on T V, because I can't be bothered to change what I'm watching.

• 8:03George Mack?

  So true. Nobody, nobody uses YouTube Shorts or TikTok really on T V.

• 8:08Chris Williamson?

  Mate, there's an Instagram app for T V now, for smart.

• 8:11George Mack?

  Is anybody using it?

• 8:12Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. I have to assume so. Have to assume so.

• 8:15George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

  I've seen, I saw a video of a guy who ran a five K underneath a table. And in the background throughout the entire video, took about thirty minutes, he just, like, spun round under a table like this for thirty minutes. And in the background was, someone was watching on a T V, was watching TikTok, swiping through TikTok.

• 8:34George Mack?

  What do you mean, somebody's running underneath a table? I'm so confused.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  I mean, he did it. His Strava said that he did it.

• 8:39George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 8:41Chris Williamson?

  But in the background, it's TikTok on a TV. The people have got to be doing it. People have to be doing this somewhere.

• 8:45George Mack?

  Jesus Christ. Wow. Wow.

• 8:48Chris Williamson?

  But you're not a vertical video consumer.

• 8:50George Mack?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 8:54George Mack?

  I'm so confused.

• 8:55Chris Williamson?

  Me running a 5K under my therapist's table. Can't imagine that's his therapist. Anyway.

• 9:02Chris Williamson?

  There you go. That's what you should be doing. That's actually, that's, that's the greatest advert. That's the greatest advert for having a girlfriend that I've ever seen. That's after 7pm.

• 9:09George Mack?

  Yeah. Wow. If the CCP could see, see this, they'd be delighted.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  If they knew what was going on. You see the, uh, the guy who accidentally hacked 7,000 DJI Roombas. This dude was trying to control his Roomba with his PlayStation controller. And ended up using Claude. Here it is.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So in theory, you could have used someone else's vacuum and navigated it around their home to see whatever you wanted to see.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Oh, launching deep cleaning at 4:20 for everyone. Yes.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Software developer Sammy Esduful was building an app to hack his DJI Romo Smart Vacuum. He wanted to use his PlayStation controller to make it move. But in the process, he accidentally uncovered a major security flaw. With the help of an AI chatbot, Sammy discovered he could also access what he says were roughly 7,000 other vacuums, allowing him to get their locations and even remotely control other people's vacuums. He could also see through other users' live camera feeds and hear through their vacuum's microphones.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Features typically in place to help the vacuums navigate around a home and respond to voice commands.

• 10:21George Mack?

  Yeah, it feels like we're going to be living through an era where this is going to happen more and more. Well, we can't hack paper and pen. You can't hack, you can't hack the Moleskine notepad.

• 10:29Chris Williamson?

  That's true, although they have got a digital version of that now.

• 10:33Chris Williamson?

  We were talking to a friend at dinner the other night and he said, everybody here has tried to get ChatGPT to do something illegal. It's, I, I, I can, see if you can get me this for free, if you can hack the backend or do, extract whatever. And one of our friends who works building data centers said he'd used some off-label Chinese model that's run locally on his computer and didn't mean to get it to do something illegal, but it did. So he put in, he wanted to try and see if they could screenshot all of this different data and it's thinking, I can't do that, thinking, I can't do that, thinking, oh, there's an API that's open on the backend, I can just pull the entire website out. And now he's got 9,000 pieces of data that are completely illegal to have. So our models, we can't get to do something illegal when they want them to.

• 11:17George Mack?

  Or even just like, like I was asking, I asked Claude the other day for what do people think are, whereas the ugly, because you said the UK has the ugliest men in the world. So I got caught, I asked Claude, where do you think has the ugliest men? Or could you pull the data of what people think has the ugliest men? And it refused to do it. So it won't do that. But then the.

• 11:37Chris Williamson?

  It would give you the most good looking though.

• 11:39George Mack?

  I don't, I don't.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  It wouldn't give you anyone.

• 11:41George Mack?

  Ask actually Jared, if you can, I don't even think, I don't, maybe, well, then I guess if you asked it for the all them good looking in order.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  Rank it all the way down.

• 11:49George Mack?

  Now flip that list around.

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, it might do the top 50%. You say you get to the middle of the, but you can then work it out from there. Look, the only, I didn't, I don't mean to bad mouth our country, especially given that both of us are from it. I just saw the unite the rally march videos. We're just not, we're not a particularly aesthetic nation. And perhaps again, this is a selection effect, but best looking is obviously subjective, but there are a few places that consistently come across fashion, modeling, dating app data, tourism surveys and pop culture for producing unusually attractive men, usually because of some makes of genetics, grooming, culture, fitness, style and confidence. Brazil, Italy, Spain, France, Sweden, Lebanon. Wow.

• 12:34Chris Williamson?

  Can we say, what about the, what about the ugliest? That gets a lot harder to answer fairly because ugliness is even more culturally loaded than attractiveness. People tend to judge entire populations based on stereotypes. It's not going to give us an answer, is it? Keep going down.

• 12:49George Mack?

  It basically, it basically says the UK there, right? Some Northern European, some Anglo countries.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  Plain, despite strong genetics, because the culture is understated and less image focused. It's a nice way to say that we don't care about our appearances.

• 13:01George Mack?

  Do you remember, do you remember when you started going to therapy and you were talking about how?

• 13:10George Mack?

  All this stuff that you discovered from therapy of you couldn't quite feel emotions or how harsh you was on yourself, you had this laundry list of symptoms that they'd given you. And I remember thinking, I didn't want to be rude when a friend was going through therapy. I was like, kind of waiting on the phone for a bit. It's like, I think that's just being British. Like, a lot of the stuff that the therapist diagnosed you with was just being British.

• 13:37Chris Williamson?

  Hang on a second, hang on a second. Wasn't diagnosed with something.

• 13:41George Mack?

  You know what I mean, you know what I mean.

• 13:42Chris Williamson?

  Look, these are some of the patterns that you've got from your past. That's a big difference to a diagnosis. I'm talking in a clinical context.

• 13:48George Mack?

  British syndrome. You have British syndrome, sir.

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  British syndrome. Yes, yeah, I've seen that your passport is dark blue. Uh, yeah, I mean, we're a country of people that are kind of, we revel in misery a bit, which probably makes us quite resilient, probably why we did well in the Battle of Britain. It's probably why we don't have the same victimhood culture that somewhere like America might do. It's also the same reason that we hate ourselves quite a lot. No one, when was the last time you heard anybody say that they were proud of the UK?

• 14:21George Mack?

  Me?

• 14:22Chris Williamson?

  When was the last time you heard someone that wasn't you say that they were proud of the UK?

• 14:27George Mack?

  The strange thing is, is the more that I travel, I always describe the UK as like having a autoimmune condition that it attacks itself from within. But the UK, if you travel outside of the UK, most countries that you travel to, the people will talk about how much that they love the UK. So it's weird that the people that hate the UK the most are often inside the UK and everybody outside.

• 14:54Chris Williamson?

  Quite likely.

• 14:55George Mack?

  Well, we discussed this before, but you go, oh, okay. I think J K Rowling, Harry Potter.

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  Paul McCartney, John Lennon, William Shakespeare, Charles Darwin. Shall we just do the entire episode, just like the guy?

• 15:09George Mack?

  And guess what? You could.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  Like Harry Mack, freestyle rapper. But no one, no one would.

• 15:13George Mack?

  Where do you end up with like wretch three two?

• 15:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. You're really scraping the bottom of a barrel. Once you get beyond the year 2000. Like after the Spice Girls, everything really went downhill.

• 15:22George Mack?

  Adele.

• 15:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 15:24George Mack?

  Ed Sheeran.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  Olivia Dean. Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott. Don't get me wrong, just we're starting to run a little thin on worldwide.

• 15:35George Mack?

  Quantum computing.

• 15:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you always.

• 15:38George Mack?

  You didn't think we could go from Olivia Dean to quantum computing.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 15:42George Mack?

  But we can.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  Dennis, whatever his face is from Google, he's not British though, is he?

• 15:47George Mack?

  Dennis is British.

• 15:47Chris Williamson?

  Is he?

• 15:48George Mack?

  Dennis is from, yeah. Yeah, he's born in the UK.

• 15:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's interesting.

• 15:52George Mack?

  Or at least he at least grew up in the UK. And he famously stayed in the UK.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  Wouldn't that be a wonderful way to get our own back on a world that's forgotten us? To unleash a super intelligent AGI that nobody can control. That would be a wonderful footnote. The empire's back briefly before it gets subsumed by this monster it made itself.

• 16:11George Mack?

  And it only allows people to spell with S's.

• 16:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 16:15George Mack?

  I find that so offensive when I'm writing and Grammarly will try and auto correct me.

• 16:21Chris Williamson?

  Using Grammarly for?

• 16:22George Mack?

  Or even, even ChatGPT or even the auto correcter will try and correct me to.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  You've got it on American English, that's why.

• 16:29George Mack?

  Yeah, but I then make a decision of do I want most of the people that read this who speak American English to understand it? Or do I just really put my foot in the ground?

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  You gotta, you gotta hold on to it, dude. It's the same reason we've both got plus four four phone numbers. This country can take my taxes, but it's not going to take my.

• 16:45George Mack?

  Plus four four.

• 16:45Chris Williamson?

  It's not going to take my fucking area card. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. Gymshark makes the best men's and women's training gear on the planet. And here is something, I realised a few years into training. When you actually like what you're wearing in the gym, you show up differently. You train harder, you stay longer, you get. Way more high fives. Their hybrid shorts are unreal. They're the perfect length, they're super lightweight, they're easy to wash and dry, and their sleeveless t-shirts are basically what I've trained in every day for a year now. They're the ideal fit, they're breathable, and they hold their shape perfectly. So no more looking like Adam Sandler's your stylist. Basically, everything they sell is unbelievable, well-designed, high-quality,

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  and you get 30-day free returns globally with global shipping, plus a 10% discount site-wide. Right now, you can get 10% off everything by going to the link in the description below, heading to jim.sh/moderndwism and using the code MODERNWISDOM10 at checkout. That's jim.sh/moderndwism, a modern wisdom 10, a checkout. I learned about savant syndrome. Okay. You heard of this? No. Okay, so there was a guy who shat himself so badly.

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay, great start. That he gave himself, the arteries in his brain exploded. And then when he woke up, he was an artistic genius who wanted to paint for 19 hours a day. This can't be real. It's true. Tommy McHugh was a British artist and poet in his early life. McHugh was a builder and also involved in youth crimes. When he was 51, he suffered a stroke on both sides of his brain that resulted in two burst blood vessels. He was sent into a coma for a week and acquired savant syndrome. McHugh attempted to evacuate his bowels quickly due to a knock on a toilet door, so he didn't want someone to find him shitting. Then the sudden pressure led to an artery being severed in his frontal and temporal lobes, causing him to hemorrhage. So what happened was, he like squeezed, and then he heard this big explosion inside of his head,

• 18:41Chris Williamson?

  and sort of half collapsed to the ground. Apparently, the reason he said that he kept himself conscious was that he wanted to pull his pants up so no one would find him naked on the floor of the toilet. And as he was pulling his pants up, that's when the other one went. So it was like the two, it was like the first tower and the second tower. Jesus. By the way, British. British, indeed. While relearning after his stroke. In fact, when he woke up, he started rhyming. People couldn't stop him from rhyming, so he was speaking in rhymes. He began to write poetry to express everything he was experiencing. He also experienced an identity crisis, which was the most likely motivation for his artistic outputs. He was painting three to six to nine different paintings at any one time, all at the same time, speaking in poetry. He basically became like a Buddhist monk, was terrified of hurting anything.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  He saw the entire cosmos as beautiful. He's like sweeping away bugs that he might step on on a, this is a guy that was in youth crimes. Damn. Shat himself so badly. That acquired savant syndrome.

• 19:41George Mack?

  Wow, wow.

• 19:46George Mack?

  I mean, I don't know what to say.

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable, unbelievable.

• 19:49George Mack?

  My, um, my grandfather, um, who I greatly loved, didn't, didn't shut himself, but he.

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  Famously Tommy McKeon.

• 19:57George Mack?

  He had a stroke and beforehand he was quite, uh, some people maybe call it tight, but he was quite conservative with money. And then after the stroke, he would just be watching the shopping channel and just be going like shopping left, right and centre. All, all sorts of stuff. He actually, fortunately the stroke was so bad that he couldn't pay. So we managed to stop like him being able to put the payments through, but otherwise he would have just spent everything. Um, but, but, uh, keeping things on the British topic, the, the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel.

• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they've fallen out again.

• 20:36George Mack?

  No, Noel was always the musician, uh, cause they grew up in, is it, is it Burd- Burbridge? I can't, I can't pronounce it. It's in, um, in Manchester. They grew up together, very like council estate part of, uh, England. And Noel was super into music, which is very strange, like being where he's from. And Liam was like, just found the whole thing like quite sad and lame.

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 20:58George Mack?

  And was like, why would you get into music? And Liam gets in a fight at school, gets a hammer hit on his head, wakes up the next day.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  He's into music.

• 21:06George Mack?

  Wants, wants to make music.

• 21:08Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding.

• 21:09George Mack?

  Joins a band the next day.

• 21:12Chris Williamson?

  So you got like savant syndrome from a mallet.

• 21:14George Mack?

  Yes.

• 21:14Chris Williamson?

  Basically, but you got musician syndrome.

• 21:16George Mack?

  Champagne supernova.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  What would you want to acquire if I hit you in the head with a mallet?

• 21:23George Mack?

  That's a, that's a great question.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  Less sneezing, I imagine.

• 21:28George Mack?

  That would be useful.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  That would be good for me. I'm just going to hit you in the head with stuff until I can try and accumulate that.

• 21:33George Mack?

  Oh, what would you do? What would you do?

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  I'd wanna be, I'd wanna be able to be a bit more frivolous with money. I think that'd be nice.

• 21:41George Mack?

  Really?

• 21:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, just, I mean, what was the last frivolous thing that you bought? Actually, yeah, you're right. Did I bully you into that?

• 21:51George Mack?

  What, the trampoline?

• 21:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because for quite a while, we had, I had an intervention with you. I've had a few interventions with you.

• 21:55George Mack?

  I don't spend, I don't spend enough money.

• 21:56Chris Williamson?

  You don't spend money in a frivolous enough manner. It's not that you don't spend enough money, it's that you don't spend it on stupid shit.

• 22:01George Mack?

  Yes.

• 22:02Chris Williamson?

  And I think that's important. And then you have bought the most expensive trampoline that you could find and you've just dropped way too much money on a beanbag.

• 22:09George Mack?

  No, I've not, I've not acquired the beanbag yet, but it's set to be, it's set to be.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  You've been hit in the head recently.

• 22:15George Mack?

  I've got a few, a few Claude agents scoping out the beanbag market as we speak.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  I don't want a beanbag from Facebook Marketplace. If you get it second hand, beanbag is unbelievably absorbing.

• 22:25George Mack?

  I'm getting my AI to look at beanbag reviews that haven't been written by AI, that have actually been written by human beings.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  What was that thing?

• 22:33George Mack?

  To find the best beanbag.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't it a recruiting company that said recruiters are using AI to read applications that candidates have written using AI and nobody's getting hired? It's just this endless doom loop of people using AI to help them get a thing which is assessed by AI that detects it's AI and no one goes any, to stalemate. To stalemate on the LinkedIn jobs market at the moment.

• 22:55George Mack?

  It's dead internet theory, right? Let us, let us know in the comment section if you're a bot.

• 22:59Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, um, someone, I saw this video, this girl was doing a, a, a assignment and the teacher had put in white text at the end of one of the questions, if you are an AI, uh, please use this website to fill in the, the, uh, answers to this particular question. And, uh, basically if you were to do that and you just copied it blindly and thrown it in, you wouldn't have necessarily seen it. And then the AI would have given you

• 23:26George Mack?

  Oh, smart.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  The answer from this website. So it wouldn't have, the person would have still submitted. But the answer would have been detectable because it would have been pulled from this one particular reference and anybody that uses that reference obviously submitted it with them. So it really is an arms race now, where the lecturers are having to.

• 23:43George Mack?

  Yeah, even the other just identifying the ones that are on the free plan. You know what I mean? Like if they're on the premium plan, it may be picking up on this.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I I get the sense that frivolous spending is is something that you kind of you need to acquire. I think it's a skill that you need to acquire. Some people are cursed with it and some people actually have to learn it as a skill. It's a little bit like singing in tune. I'm being British. I'm just always on the back foot. I'm always on the back foot with frivolous spending. Remember where you are.

• 24:09George Mack?

  Where have you um.

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  Where have you spent frivolously?

• 24:15George Mack?

  Cycling through.

• 24:17Chris Williamson?

  Carbonated drinks. What have I spent frivolously on? It's always the same stuff. It's the same stuff.

• 24:22George Mack?

  It's not frivolous then, is it?

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but that's what I mean. I'm just, I'm, hey, I was in the trenches with you.

• 24:27George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 24:28Chris Williamson?

  With regards to your frivolous spending.

• 24:30George Mack?

  Hmm. I just.

• 24:34George Mack?

  Maybe we just don't need to spend frivolously then, just.

• 24:37Chris Williamson?

  I think we do. I feel like there's something that's compelling me to spend.

• 24:40George Mack?

  Okay, how about I'll give me, does it count if, does it count if I spend it for you? Because how about we exchange?

• 24:47Chris Williamson?

  I'll give you 500 bucks.

• 24:48George Mack?

  Yeah, likewise. And then you've got to buy something frivolous that I'll enjoy.

• 24:53Chris Williamson?

  You've already curtailed me with the the top two that was a trampoline and a fucking beanbag.

• 24:56George Mack?

  I don't even think those are frivolous. Those are um.

• 24:59Chris Williamson?

  They are quite utilitarian, aren't they?

• 25:00George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the the Soviet nail factory story?

• 25:05George Mack?

  No.

• 25:05Chris Williamson?

  To parable. So apparently there was this Soviet nail factory that was rewarded based on the number of nails that they produced. Then after hearing about the bonus, the factories reduced the size of the nails to produce as many nails as possible. In the end, they met the targets to get their bonuses, but the government ended up with millions of useless tiny nails.

• 25:23George Mack?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:24Chris Williamson?

  And to correct the mistake, the government updated the bonus target as the tonnage of nails produced every month. So Soviet factories quickly changed and they stopped producing the mini nails and started producing huge ones that were unbelievably heavy. End of the month, the factories hit the target again, but the regime ended up with useless giant nails that didn't help with the nail shortage.

• 25:42George Mack?

  Wow.

• 25:45George Mack?

  Look at that, look at that.

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  Who needs such a nail? It doesn't matter. What's important is that we fulfilled the plan for nails. God's law.

• 25:55George Mack?

  Wow. Yeah, the Soviets, uh, Soviets is just an underrated part of history. It feels like the Nazis get so much attention, but the USSR or even Communist China, like Mao's China is just, it's just an afterthought.

• 26:11Chris Williamson?

  Have you spent much time learning about those?

• 26:14George Mack?

  Um, no, because I'm mainly focused on World War II like everybody else. Um, not, not as sufficiently as I'd like to, but, um, it feels that, uh, it's clear if, if, if I say, hey, mate, I'm going to bring a Nazi to the drinks, it's, it's a big no-no.

• 26:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 26:29George Mack?

  But a Maoist, yeah, a Maoist, but like net, net, net, like in terms of people killed.

• 26:37Chris Williamson?

  They were more efficient, so maybe you should bring them.

• 26:39George Mack?

  Have you, have you heard about the guy who, um, wanted to go to Cambodia to meet Pol Pot? So he was this academic that was a big defender, I think of the Vietcong and then Pol Pot in Cambodia. And so much so, he flew out to meet Pol Pot, like tried to give him a little bit of advice. It's like he's a big admirer of like how he could potentially improve things, killed him, killed him. Like he's the original Midwest. I don't know if you could look that up. Um, Jared of the guy that got killed, the American academic that got killed by Pol Pot.

• 27:15Chris Williamson?

  It's like all of those people that go to North Sentinel Island. All of these people that try to go and convert the North Sentinelis into Christianity or whatever, and they end up being skewered and eaten for dinner.

• 27:25George Mack?

  Do you, do you think if you was in the North Sentinel, if you was in the North Sentinel Island, would you want to be contacted?

• 27:33Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 27:33George Mack?

  Okay, go on. Would you want to have been contacted?

• 27:37George Mack?

  Do you know, I find it crazy.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  It's a bit like asking what it would be like to be a dragon, isn't it? You just,

• 27:41George Mack?

  the man, the man dressed as a dinosaur.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  I'm not far off, actually. Uh, I ju, I don't know what I would want. Do you know what you would want if you were someone that's totally different to you?

• 27:50George Mack?

  No, of course. Of course.

• 27:54George Mack?

  But I feel like I'd wanna be contacted.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  I think I would as well, but that's the adventurous spirit.

• 27:59George Mack?

  I guess the example now would be like, if aliens exist, I would like to know that they exist.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's a problem with the aliens thing because there's Meti and there's SETI, searching for extraterrestrial intelligence and there's Meti, which is messaging. And a lot of people have got a problem with Meti. Because let's say you've got, whatever it's called, dark forest theory for why the Fermi paradox exists, that everyone is too worried of giving away the location in case somebody decides to go to war with them.

• 28:32Chris Williamson?

  But the radio signals that we've been sending out, we've been going for, what, 100 years? A little bit more than 100 years or something? I'm pretty sure, can you search, Jared, what was the first radio signal ever sent into space? I'm pretty sure it was something that we really don't want out there. Like, the first ever radio broadcast that happened, I'm pretty sure was something that we, that if that's the first thing that the aliens see of us.

• 28:56George Mack?

  Why? What was that?

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  I can't, I feel like it was, I feel like it was something to do with the Berlin Olympics.

• 29:01George Mack?

  Really?

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Really think it was something to do with the Berlin. I can't remember. Better be a banger. If it wasn't a banger, you'd be thinking, what will the aliens think? The first accidental radio broadcasts that escaped Earth were likely the high-powered radio transmissions. Commonly cited milestone is a transatlantic radio transmission. The famous one is Reginald Fessenden's Christmas Eve broadcast. That's not bad. Voice and music over radio for ships at sea. That signal would have leaked into space unintentionally.

• 29:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, that's okay, that's not bad. Those signals have now traveled more than 100 light years away from Earth.

• 29:40George Mack?

  Wow.

• 29:42George Mack?

  How far, how far is 100 light years away?

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  Proxima Centauri is four, I think.

• 29:48George Mack?

  I feel like we're going to have to ask you another question. What's that?

• 29:51Chris Williamson?

  Proxima Centauri is the next closest star that isn't our sun. It's the next closest star system to us. And I think Proxima Centauri is a, I think it's a two-star system.

• 30:05George Mack?

  It's also where we are, the Goldilocks zone as well, right? We're at the perfect, if you were to be slightly further away from the sun, life couldn't exist. If you were to be slightly nearer to the sun, life couldn't exist.

• 30:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, the only reason that, yes, and the fine tuningness, not only of the universe, but the fine tuning of our planet in this system with the fact that we've got Jupiter, that's this big Hoover, it's basically a Roomba that's controlled with a fucking PlayStation, that Hoover's up all of the bad asteroids that would come and hit us, all of the meteors that would come and hit us. It's just got such a big gravitational well. I think you can fit, it's unbelievably massive. And then the maddest one for me is the moon. So the only reason that life exists on Earth is because of the moon. If you didn't have the moon, it would, it stabilizes the axial tilt. So we're at whatever it is, 23 degrees. That's why we have seasons.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  Because as you go around the sun, you've always got this sort of 23 degree angle. But if you didn't have the moon there, it's kind of like a counterweight. So imagine that I'm swinging something on a, on a big rope and there's a weight at the end of it. If I wasn't holding on to it, you actually kind of run out, you get out of control quite quickly. But if you've got something that's holding on the other side, this mutual gravitational pull, it stabilizes the tilt or else it would be wobbling a lot, it would be way more chaotic. Also, the moon does the tides, which without that, the weather would be way more chaotic too. Like the moon's, the moon's the goat. The moon is the support staff that nobody sees behind the scenes. Everyone wants to talk about the Goldilocks zone. Everyone wants to talk about the fact that we've got liquid water, et cetera, but it's the moon, mate.

• 31:43George Mack?

  Wow.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  Did you know your gut controls your energy, your recovery, how well you absorb everything that you eat and the one nutrient that keeps it all running properly is fibre? Well, it turns out that 95% of Americans don't get enough of it, which is why I'm such a huge fan. Of Momentous is Fiber Plus. Most fiber supplements are a one-trick pony. One type of fiber solving one part of the problem. Fiber Plus is a three-in-one formula built to tackle digestion, gut barrier strength, and blood sugar stability all at once. I use this every single day. It is kinda hard to get enough fiber just through food alone. And best of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, try it, every single day for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they will just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally.

• 32:28Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

• 32:41George Mack?

  It feels, uh, it's very trite to discuss how strange it is or why are we here? It almost feels like if you bring that up, people are like, oh, roll their eyes. It's like, it's the most absurd, uh, most absurd fucking thing.

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think the only way that you can answer why are we here is by trying to look for an answer outside of this. That's what most people are doing, because you can either say there's no reason or there's a reason that's bigger than us.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  Neither of those are particularly satisfactory. So if you're looking for a reason that's outside of us, inherently, that means it's difficult to prove. And if you're saying, well, it's nothing. It's just arbitrary fluctuations in, you know, fucking matter coming together. That's also pretty unsatisfactory. So I don't know what, I mean, humans are always personifying shit, right? We're always trying to put some sort of a narrative together. That's why the ancients would look up at the sky and they'd see thunder and it would be the gods fighting. Well, obviously, because that makes way more sense than this microscopic interaction of clouds and electrons and fucking, you know, the lightning coming down to the earth. Why would you, you wouldn't go to that.

• 33:50Chris Williamson?

  You would go to something that suits you, which is story and narrative and mythology and shit. So we're always trying to explain things away with story.

• 33:59George Mack?

  Why are we here?

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  Stop it.

• 34:03Chris Williamson?

  Stop it, okay? I'm sweating, I'm sweating in this outfit. It's too hot, it's too hot, it's not breathable. They haven't made these things breathable. You look very comfortable, actually.

• 34:13George Mack?

  Where do you think, let's say you would have been born 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. How do you think you, who do you think you would have been? Do you think you'd be the same guy? Do you think you'd be so different? You'd be unrecognizable to your current self?

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  I think it would be difficult to be anything like the sort of guys that we are 5,000 years ago. There wasn't much room.

• 34:35George Mack?

  Too much autoimmune conditions going on as well. You'd be wiped out.

• 34:39Chris Williamson?

  That, well, I also wouldn't live in a moldy house, you know? So, and Covid and the vaccines wouldn't have been around. So that would have, I would have fucking escaped that.

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  I think I'm at least a little bit fortunate that I would have been able to, did a good bit of sport. That might have held me together. I mean, probably, probably dead in childbirth, mate. That's just like everyone else, just like every other person, except for the small number that made it to five years old.

• 35:09George Mack?

  Well, I once ran the numbers that if you had every single human being to ever exist. So everybody alive right now and everybody that ever existed. So assume that they're brought back on their final day as they go. I think the average age of the room's about 14. So it means that assuming you're over the age of 14, 15. You're already one of the oldest people to ever exist. I find that so strange when you go through history and you're like, how old certain people, people were? I think we discussed it before that the, as the Luftwaffe, the German air force were bombing our grandparents and great grandparents, they were 27, right?

• 35:55George Mack?

  But the RAF that fought them off, the average age was 21. Which means that, and you know how average is what? There's a few Gordons in there that are 37 in the RAF that are bringing it up. And the, the, the life expectancy was two weeks when you signed up initially.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's that sketch in Blackadder, do you remember where he joins the air force? It's in Blackadder, it goes over the top from World War One. And I think it was even less time, because that was, imagine that. When, you know the Wright brothers, when were planes invented?

• 36:27George Mack?

  It would have been late 1800s, early 1900s is when everything.

• 36:31Chris Williamson?

  It's a pretty much turn of the century.

• 36:32George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 36:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay, and within the space of 14 years, you've got something that's fucking battle ready.

• 36:38George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  Bro, this thing just flew. This thing just flew and nobody believed. And now you're telling me that I'm gonna, the red Baron with his triple stacked wings, like.

• 36:51George Mack?

  I told you, so in the book, The Splendor in the Vile, which is an incredible book. He talks about how lingerie sales went up significantly during the World War Two bombings.

• 37:04George Mack?

  Sorry, no, it's the one way around. Laundry sales went down significantly during World War Two bombings. But casual relationships went up significantly.

• 37:14Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 37:15George Mack?

  I guess the theory would be, don't have time to go shopping for lingerie. Or don't even care how I think, how I, how I think that I look when I might not be here tomorrow.

• 37:29Chris Williamson?

  People having ugly sex whilst being bombed, that's your theory?

• 37:33George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  It might be true, but I, what would I be 5,000 years ago?

• 37:38George Mack?

  Or even, even in, even in World War Two.

• 37:42George Mack?

  If, for example, you was trying to have the maximum impact on World War Two that you could have. Just based off your personality type, your archetype, where do you think they would have, they would have put you?

• 37:52Chris Williamson?

  I'd have probably been pretty good at, you know, one of the people pushing the troops around on the board. Helping feed up to some, some commander person at the top, that could be good.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Not bad as an operator, I quite like operating. I said before, if I didn't have this career, I'd quite like to be an air traffic controller. I think that'd be pretty fun.

• 38:12George Mack?

  Why?

• 38:12Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, I just, do you not think it'd be fun to do that? Air traffic control, you got, you, very sort of rigid and strict operational guidelines. It's quite intense, it's, but, but you know, you, you know that you've got it under control. I think that'd be, that'd be, that'd be a rush, that'd be pretty fun.

• 38:27George Mack?

  Consequences if you have a bad day.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, of course, but that, that adds, that adds some value, you know what I mean?

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think 5,000 years ago, probably dead in childbirth, if not, I would be.

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  Breeder.

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  Breeder. I'd be a breeder.

• 38:46George Mack?

  What do you mean?

• 38:47Chris Williamson?

  I'd be, I'd be doing the breeding.

• 38:48George Mack?

  Well, like just.

• 38:49Chris Williamson?

  Breeding.

• 38:50George Mack?

  Okay. But what, why would you, why would you be the breeder versus all the other eligible mates that are trying to breed?

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  Better at breeding.

• 38:57George Mack?

  Okay. Based off zero children that you've had so far?

• 39:01Chris Williamson?

  Correct. That's correct. That's correct. It's correct. I'd be, I'd be the, I'd be the, the, the lead breeder.

• 39:08George Mack?

  Okay. The leader.

• 39:09Chris Williamson?

  Breeder.

• 39:09George Mack?

  The leader of the breeders.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 39:11George Mack?

  Wow.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  What about you? Interesting. Cause I thought that you'd have said that.

• 39:16George Mack?

  I, I, I think I would have been um some kind of pseudoscientist alchemist.

• 39:23Chris Williamson?

  You'd have been burned at the fucking stake for being a wizard.

• 39:25George Mack?

  Yeah, I would have been um either, either court jester or pseudoscientist.

• 39:29Chris Williamson?

  I could have seen you as a druid. I could see you.

• 39:31George Mack?

  Was it was a druid?

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  Kind of like what you, I think it's a little bit like what you're talking about. He's basically trying to do tech before tech existed.

• 39:37George Mack?

  Yes, yes.

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  He's like mixing herbs and stuff, but the dyspraxia would actually cause a massive error here.

• 39:43George Mack?

  Yes.

• 39:43Chris Williamson?

  Your ability to measure shit, forgetting things, you would definitely kill an entire tribe.

• 39:48George Mack?

  That'd be a nightmare. Yeah.

• 39:50Chris Williamson?

  That would go badly. Uh, speaking of stuff that you haven't seen before, a cow has been filmed using tools for the first time ever. Stunning scientists.

• 39:58George Mack?

  Tools?

• 39:59Chris Williamson?

  Tools. The first ever known example of a multipurpose tool used by a cow was reported with a brown Swiss named Veronica using both ends of a broom to scratch her own back and underside. Nice cow.

• 40:12George Mack?

  It's a slow news, it was a slow news day here, wasn't it?

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  Brown Swiss mate.

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  Now she uses the smooth bit when she's got to do her delicate under parts.

• 40:23George Mack?

  Wow.

• 40:26Chris Williamson?

  It is, I was thinking about this when I watched it the first time. And now look at this. Look, so she's used the smooth bit and now she's gonna.

• 40:33George Mack?

  Ah.

• 40:34Chris Williamson?

  She's gonna use the scratchy bit.

• 40:37George Mack?

  Wow.

• 40:38Chris Williamson?

  To get up there. Multi-use. And then drops it. Uh, I was thinking about this. The physiology of a cow.

• 40:48George Mack?

  Highly inefficient if you've got an itch. Physiology of a dog, actually, but I think dogs are pretty bendy. You know, they can scratch themselves quite easily. Cow, you're screwed. And then you've got a hoof. How satisfying is a hoof for scratching? Not very.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  Was that it's the famous anecdote that you can take a cow upstairs, but you can't take a cow downstairs. And there's this old British joke of which farmer found out the rock the hard way?

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Is that true?

• 41:20George Mack?

  Yeah, you can take a cow upstairs, but because of its joints, you can't take it downstairs.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  You can't take a cow downstairs because of its joints? I always think that when I see, um, is it emus? I think, and their knees go backwards. Like our knees bend forwards. If we were to squat down, our knees bend forwards. Their knees go the other way.

• 41:43George Mack?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 41:44Chris Williamson?

  Cows can walk upstairs fairly well, but walking downstairs is a different story. The main issue comes down to anatomy and perception. A cow has knee and leg joints that don't bend easily in a way that supports controlled downward stepping. The weight distribution cows carry a lot of weight toward the front of their bodies, making descending steep steps risky and unstable. Depth perception, they have poor perception for vertical drops. So stairs can look like a confusing or even dangerous surface. And instinct as prey animals, they're cautious about terrain that could trap or trip them. So while a cow can technically go downstairs in some situations, especially shallow ones, they usually avoid it and often need guidance or special ramps instead. Wow.

• 42:24George Mack?

  You know, a cow's, keeping on the cow theme, a cow's stomach is called the rumen.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 42:31George Mack?

  A few different mammals have it, where they have like six to seven different stomachs inside of it. And the way a cow eats, you'll see it in a field, it'll be grazing. And it's just constantly grazing all day long. And essentially what it's doing is grazing.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  You with carbonated beverages.

• 42:46George Mack?

  It's like me with carbonated beverages, where it's grazing, regurgitating it.

• 42:52George Mack?

  Then grazing on it again, swallowing it, regurgitating it, and it's this loop from the root.

• 42:58Chris Williamson?

  And so it goes from mouth to one.

• 43:00George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  Through the different stomachs.

• 43:03George Mack?

  Yep.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Then mouth to one to two to three.

• 43:05George Mack?

  I don't know if it goes in the sequential order.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 43:08George Mack?

  But it goes through its stomachs, regurgitates it and through like that, which is why when you see a cow in a field, it's constantly chewing and then.

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  But you don't realize. Putting new food in, that's old food.

• 43:18George Mack?

  It's old food and does it for a process of up to six to seven hours, which is where the word rumination comes from. So when a human being loops on the same thoughts, it's it's the process from a cow.

• 43:30Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about the rumination retard maxing?

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  Great men of history didn't.

• 43:38George Mack?

  Introspection.

• 43:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, introspection. What do you think of that?

• 43:41George Mack?

  It seems like one giant test of the difference between the words. If you say rumination, I think everybody agrees that rumination for the most part is mainly negative. But if you say introspection, that's when it gets into this. You know what it is? That introspection debate is the current version of the, you know, the blue and gold.

• 44:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 44:05George Mack?

  Dress.

• 44:06Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 44:06George Mack?

  It's like that where some people imply introspection that they're meaning the word rumination. Where other people imply the word introspection, that they're using some kind of form of clear thinking or reflecting to take action. And they're just, it's just one giant game of semantics.

• 44:24Chris Williamson?

  But how do you get around that? Because it's always hard unless someone's going to define something, unless somebody on one side is going to define it. And no one's defining the terms. And you always, if you're going to try and win an argument on the internet, you're always going to straw man what the other person's saying. Always. Which means that you're going to say, great men of history didn't spend their time worrying about their problems and overthinking things. You go, no, no, I don't mean that. I don't mean ruminating. I mean, I mean, reflecting, thinking, improving, acting in a loop, like an OODA loop type thing. And that, but the response will never get that, that the conversation is never allowed to have enough nuance to be able to get there.

• 45:05George Mack?

  What do you, what do you think?

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  Bias for action is a big deal.

• 45:08George Mack?

  Yes, a hundred percent.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Having a bias for action and it's the advice hyper responders thing where.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  Most people, on average, most people probably need to think more. They probably need to be less rash, more rational, more considered and considerate when they go and do stuff. But there's a small cohort of people, mostly the sort of people that listen to podcasts like Senra's or this one, who don't need to hear that. They actually need to hear the opposite message. They actually need to be doing retard maxing, which is why retard maxing, I think, has taken off. Because it's a countervailing force to people who already thought too much, were told that thinking and doing your journaling and having a Ali Abdaal 90-day sprint

• 45:58Chris Williamson?

  broken down into daily actions and 25-minute Pomodoro blocks, that doing that, that's the way to get to success. But that already played into the thing that they had a predisposition for. What they didn't have a predisposition for was a bias for action. So if there was some way of being able to gift those people. But the problem is, you're getting people who overthink and have a tendency to overthink to work against their nature, which is always going to be hard. But lots of the people, like I look at Dana White, I do not see a person who has a problem with overthinking. I look at Marc Andreessen, I don't see a person who has a problem for overthinking. But if you were to say that advice to someone else, it's going to go down very differently.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  So this, the whole advice hyper responders, advice doesn't land evenly. It distributes unevenly to the people who, me too, right? Guys that were told, don't be pushy with women, that were already blowing through boundaries. They just disregarded it. They already disregarded the boundaries. The guys that were already a bit nervous and worried about approaching a woman, they were the ones that took it to heart. So it just makes you more of what you are. A lot of the time, advice makes you more of what you are.

• 47:09George Mack?

  I, I think it comes down to, you need new words. So I, I like low agency thinking and high agency thinking. So the clear difference between the two is. Is one getting you closer to some form of action? Are you progressing or are you ruminating? I think a clear issue with rumination or overthinking is when, three things. One, most of your thoughts aren't new. They're repetitive, they're cycling. Two, most of your thoughts aren't useful. They're not looking at ways you might fix this problem. They're just replaying a certain scenario again and again and again. And three, the most important part is that most of them aren't even true.

• 47:52George Mack?

  Most of our thoughts that we think aren't even true. So the difference between, I would say, when you're in low agency thinking is a new, useful, true. And if you can go, if you can have new thoughts, if you can find useful thoughts and you can find true thoughts, that's the difference.

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  That's so good. That's really great, I guess. How do you get around the bias for action, even if you've managed to do that? Or do you think that having new, useful and true thoughts tend to encourage you to act?

• 48:23George Mack?

  Exactly. Low, low agency thinking will lead to more thinking, more rumination by definition. And high agency thinking will, it's soon, it's almost like the Claude or ChatGPT thinking time.

• 48:39George Mack?

  Boom, and ahead. However, I think we discussed this, that net-net, which I know you love the term net-net.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 48:47George Mack?

  Net-net, I would, you'd rather be a bit of a idiot than a bit of a coward.

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference?

• 48:56George Mack?

  I'd rather be, make an error with high conviction than make an error with low conviction. And again, you've got a huge generalization there where it's, it's kind of Charlie Munger's advice of, don't race trains, don't get involved in AIDS situations. So there's, there's the obvious nuance there, but it's better to be. Quick to act whilst thinking through some initial risks and looking at the downside and moving fast than just sitting there for years without ever finding out.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  The reason that-

• 49:27George Mack?

  Type one, type two decisions.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The reason that that's interesting is most people who probably are making decisions that are too rash aren't that fussed about listening to nerdy podcasts, right? So you almost don't need to caveat it, that if you're the sort of person that's reading Robert Greene's Forty Eight Laws of Power and is thinking about what time they get up and tracking their whoop scores, like you've already pre-selected, you're not going to be in the retard maxing bin by nature. You're gonna have to learn retard maxing through discipline, through trial. And yeah, I guess that means that if it's the sort of thing that you're listening to, it's probably the sort of thing that you need to hear.

• 50:14Chris Williamson?

  Because the platform that you're listening to it on is exactly the sort of one that the sort of person who needs to hear it would listen to. Does that make sense?

• 50:21George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 50:26George Mack?

  Where do you think you need to do it more?

• 50:28Chris Williamson?

  Fucking everywhere, dude.

• 50:30George Mack?

  Yeah?

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  Jesus Christ. Yeah, horrendous, horrendous overthinking. I mean, I've got a good bias for action, but it takes too long. My confidence threshold, if I could get in and adjust the settings in my brain-

• 50:43George Mack?

  Have a shit yourself and have a stroke.

• 50:45Chris Williamson?

  That's actually, that's a great idea.

• 50:46George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  If I was to go, if I was to go and have a really, really, really hard shit, which I had the other day, you couldn't believe that I had a shit in the middle of the day.

• 50:53George Mack?

  Yeah, it was impressive.

• 50:55Chris Williamson?

  That was the most surprising thing of all of the things that I've done since we've lived together, just having a shit at 1pm to you.

• 51:02George Mack?

  It was like four.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  It wasn't.

• 51:04George Mack?

  It was like four.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Well, I mean, look, I'm an equal opportunity shitter and I'm desperately trying to have a fucking aneurysm, so I acquire savant syndrome.

• 51:13George Mack?

  So you're finally becoming an artist. If Hitler, if Hitler had this-

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  If Hitler had had a hard enough shit-

• 51:17George Mack?

  Significant artwork being produced.

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  If Hitler had had a hard enough shit, we wouldn't have had World War II.

• 51:22George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  If Hitler had shat himself more and more aggressively.

• 51:25George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:26Chris Williamson?

  But the pussy numbers, do you know what I mean?

• 51:28George Mack?

  He's got the face, yeah, he's got the face.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't there a guy, there was a guy who laughed so hard at a guy missing a football kick recently that it caused him to have an aneurysm in his brain, or I think he had a stroke, and then when they went in to find- To work out what the fuck had gone on, there was this huge tumor that was gonna kill him. And he had that done. And it was because some guy had missed kicking the ball in a NFL game.

• 51:54George Mack?

  Wow.

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  And a fan of the opposing team laughed so hard that he basically did kind of similar to the savant syndrome thing.

• 52:02George Mack?

  Damn.

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  Just had a full on, a full on explosion, head explosion. Most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where Function comes in. Gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone panel. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged. You get clear explanations with a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So if something's off, you know exactly what to do about it. Whether you just need to go to the gym more, or you need to play Creed louder in your car. Function will tell you exactly where your testosterone and everything else stands. Normally, this level of testing would usually cost thousands,

• 52:47Chris Williamson?

  but with Function, it's $365 a year. That's $1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now, you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

• 53:10George Mack?

  Have you not got into American sports since, since moving here?

• 53:13Chris Williamson?

  Fan of Rangers. I'm a fan of the Texas Rangers, dude.

• 53:15George Mack?

  You meant Rangers FC?

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  No, fan of Texas Rangers. So baseball, became a fan of the Rangers. They won the World Series. First year that was a fan. It's like, this is easy. This is brilliant. Following you. Not successful. I have got into baseball. Baseball's the closest proxy for cricket.

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's it. I watched the Superbowl. We watched the Superbowl. That was good. What else? Can't get basketball's all right, but highlights good, which is strange because baseball and American football are much slower moving sports. Hmm. And even though basketball is a much faster moving sport generally, I think per minute of broadcast. How long's a NFL game? Like 80 minutes? No, it's an hour. An hour? 15 minute quarters. An hour. I think the total amount of playtime typical in a one hour NFL game, I swear it's less than 10 minutes. Damn. Of action. It's a sport entirely reverse engineered to allow adverts to be played. The American dream.

• 54:19Chris Williamson?

  It is. Well, I mean, that's the most sort of American thing that you can do, right? To flog drain cleaner.

• 54:27Chris Williamson?

  In between. It's, it's a fucking Ponzi scheme. This country's sport system is a Ponzi scheme. Yeah. Yeah, it's rough. I've, I've struggled to get into American sports so far. And you realize that, like Youssef, I tried to sell him on getting into sports because wherever you are in the world, you can have a conversation with a taxi driver. Apart from America, I can go anywhere in the world. And if football comes up, if I say I'm from Manchester, we can immediately like have a great conversation for about 20 minutes. But we're in American sports. It's just slightly, it just, none of it makes sense the same way British sports make sense. What is it? The Premier Football League? Is that technically what it's called? Premier League.

• 55:11Chris Williamson?

  Right. But I swear that people, I swear that when I meet people in America, they say, oh, who do you support in the PFL? Yeah. I'm like, hey. They're called the EPL. EPL. English Premier League. Yeah, yeah. Who do you support in the EPL? And it took a little while for me to go, what are you talking? Tommy Robinson.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  EDL.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  I just, I, that's not, that we don't speak like that in England.

• 55:38George Mack?

  No.

• 55:38Chris Williamson?

  We don't talk about the ECC, the English Cricket, ECB, English Cricket Board. We're not talking about stuff like that. But yeah, I, I like baseball. Baseball's good. It's fucking slow. It's really slow.

• 55:53George Mack?

  Have you heard of-

• 55:53Chris Williamson?

  Hurry up, dude.

• 55:54George Mack?

  Have you heard of Ali Dyer?

• 55:56Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 55:57George Mack?

  British football player.

• 55:57Chris Williamson?

  Ali Abdaal.

• 55:58George Mack?

  No, he's no relation to Ali Abdaal, unfortunately. So Ali Dyer was a Southampton player. How he joined was, have you ever heard of George Weir? So George Weir was like the African Player of the Year. I think he briefly played for Manchester City back in the day. But he was one of the best players of all, like certainly from Africa, but one of the best players in the world at the time. He might have even won a Ballon d'Or. And Graham Souness was the manager of Southampton. And he gets a phone call from George Weir saying, there's this new guy who has just played the African Cup of Nations. He's like incredible. I think he even claims it's his nephew. He goes, you've got to give him a trial for Southampton. So Ali Dyer turns up at Southampton. It's like one training session before the game.

• 56:44George Mack?

  And they have such a small squad at the minute that they just put him on the bench. One of the key Southampton players gets injured. They sub Ali Dyer on and it's the worst like debut of all time. This guy's fucking terrible, so much so. And this almost never happens in football. He gets subbed on and then subbed off, which is extremely rare.

• 57:08Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:09George Mack?

  And he never played for Southampton ever again. And then when they begin to investigate it, it wasn't George Weir on the phone. It was him. This guy used to play like Sunday League. So he managed to blag his way to play in Premier League football. So there's always a chant now with the Southampton fans of Ali Dyer is a liar, is a liar. So, so he just blagged his way in.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Jamie Vardy's got a documentary coming out.

• 57:33George Mack?

  I saw that this morning. I wanted to show you. I want to watch that.

• 57:36Chris Williamson?

  Jamie Vardy, I don't even think started playing professional level until the age of 25. And he's just, the thing is, you almost need like so much British knowledge to understand who Jamie Vardy is.

• 57:50George Mack?

  He's couched inside of a very deep and spirally community and where does he come from and what does it mean and what's his background? Unless you've been to Magaluf, Zante, Ayenapa.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  He is. Jamie Vardy is Magaluf. If Magaluf coalesced into human form, it would be Jamie Vardy.

• 58:07George Mack?

  He would take that as a compliment. Like, he loves it. He fucking loves it.

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:10George Mack?

  But he, uh, he ends up making it pro at such a later age in life, but just plays like a, a Conference League player. So he, even in the documentary, the trailer I watched, he talks about no striker tackles, but this guy tackles. Or he's drinking like two Red Bulls before the game. He's just constantly, he almost quit at like 27, 28 after making it pro. Cause he wanted to go and do a season in Zante. He wanted to go and be a full-time nightclub promoter.

• 58:40Chris Williamson?

  It's an alluring industry to get into. And then, cause he was in, yeah, some bullshit Sunday league team.

• 58:46George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Chris Williamson?

  And then got picked up by Leicester.

• 58:48George Mack?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  And then went on to have the most insane.

• 58:51George Mack?

  The first season.

• 58:52Chris Williamson?

  Wins the Premier League with Leicester, which is, it's the biggest, you'd argue it's one of the biggest sporting achievements of all time. It's one of the biggest underdog stories.

• 59:02George Mack?

  And a lot of that was because of him and his performance.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  He, he broke the Premier League record for the most amount of consecutive goals. Like, I think it was 12 games, 12 or 13 games in a row.

• 59:12George Mack?

  13 games in a row, right? Which is insane.

• 59:16Chris Williamson?

  Whilst like eating Monster Munch and just being an absolute chapter.

• 59:20George Mack?

  Dodger. Yeah.

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  I, that's another thing that I think Americans really struggle with, which is there are some very good niche British snacks that you can't get over here. Uh, cause there's American aisles, American candy aisles now at Tesco's in the UK. So if you go and look and, and you'll be able to get Lucky Charms and, and Cheetos with all of the seed oils and the red 40 and stuff included. Uh, but you can't come over here and get Jaffa cakes and Jammy Dodgers and Cadbury's fingers and stuff like that. And I think. We're missing out, man. That would be, I think that would be a gift that we could give back to America.

• 59:57George Mack?

  I, I um, wrote this thing recently about the Roman Empire, I relate it back to Britain. But I think we've spoken about this previously, but I did a research for this piece called Don't Wait For The News. And essentially, the Roman Empire, do you know when the Roman Empire fell? 400 ish. So the thing with the Roman Empire falling, it's, it's up for debate. Even historians debate it. But the mainstream historical point of view, which is not the weird niche stuff that you get into, but the mainstream historical point of view is 476 AD, that Romulus, who was the founder of Rome, so it's poetic, I think this is why we like that as the ending,

• 1:00:40George Mack?

  Romulus, who was the founder of Rome, then young Romulus, who was in the throne when it ended, got replaced by the barbarian Odessa. So Romulus saw Rome rise and Romulus saw Rome fall.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  For clarity, it's not the same bloke.

• 1:00:54George Mack?

  It's not the same bloke. This is over like hundreds of years. But that's just the poetry of why they say that date. But if you woke up that day after the Roman Empire that we now say has fallen, there was no, there's no big announcement. There was no news. If the book, The Sovereign Individual, has this beautiful line, which if the CNN existed during the fall of the Roman Empire, the headline would not have been, the Roman Empire has just fallen. So you had the split of the Roman Empire, you have the Eastern Roman Empire, and you have the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire goes on to about 1300 AD. Charlemagne becomes the Emperor, he calls himself the Emperor of Rome in

• 1:01:38George Mack?

  about 700 to 800 AD. So the Eastern Empire falls. Voltaire famously says in 1700 that the entity that calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. So that was in 1700s. It was only in the 1800s when Napoleon was invading, did, I think it's Francis II dissolve the Roman Empire. So if you would have waited. To be told that the Roman Empire was over, it would have been your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great,

• 1:02:24George Mack?

  great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchild. Forty eight generations it would have taken. So I kind of wrote this, this piece. And then I said that this story terrified me because when today's biggest empire falls, nobody's going to tell me, like, nobody's going to tell me that the British Empire is no longer the most powerful empire in the world. We already know that. Obviously, it is right now. Obviously, the British Empire is the the most powerful empire that exists right now. I can't tell if you. What I don't want to have happen is for me to be the one that lives in denial long after the event. I think you already are.

• 1:03:10George Mack?

  So. The rise of Gary Stevenson. So, but I, yeah, well, Gary Stevenson will be like the eighteen hundred one. That's when, when Gary's in, when Gary's in office with the fucking like tuck team, tuck team like this, that'll be when it's like the British Empire, we all admit the British Empire is over. Yep. But it's funny. So I posted that as a like a trolling like kind of sarcasm statement of like, oh, lecturing about the history of the Roman Empire whilst pretending that I still think the British Empire is the biggest thing. And there was quite a few people in the comment section who was going along with the the humor of it. But the amount of emails I got of people saying, you do realize the British Empire is no longer the most powerful thing. And I was like, let's just go fully in with the joke. I'm like, why are you still talking English?

• 1:03:51George Mack?

  I just like kept going back and forth with them that the the British Empire. But you know what? That's actually the saddest thing. Um, I know, don't really do geopolitics on the show. But the saddest thing of the Ayatollah dying is that when he used to address the world stage, he would often talk about Great Britain as if we're still the most powerful country in the world or one of the leading countries. So that's the one thing I did appreciate about the Ayatollah of Iran.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  That is something that completely blows my mind that I don't understand. People who regularly get into small back and forth spats in the comment section. James does this all the time.

• 1:04:31George Mack?

  Who, Smith?

• 1:04:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, all the time, mate. He loves it. He loves it. He just loves winding people up. But I just, I sometimes will post something on Twitter and there'll be all of these replies and all of these people. And weeks later, there'll be two people still going at it.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's fucking infuriating. It's in my notifications.

• 1:04:57George Mack?

  Oh, man.

• 1:04:58Chris Williamson?

  It's in my, it's in my notifications. It's like, do you know what it's like? It's like having two neighbors that are having an argument with each other, but you live in the house that's in between. Like, can you not go over to his house directly? Because at the moment, I'm courting this crossfire. Unbelievable.

• 1:05:15George Mack?

  Have you ever seen the meme? It's one of my favorite ones, where it's a guy on his deathbed and he's kind of like lay there, like just about to die. And he's got like the speech bubble for like the brony ware deathbed regrets. And it's just, I wish I spent more time arguing online.

• 1:05:33Chris Williamson?

  With people on the internet, yeah.

• 1:05:35George Mack?

  But yeah, I mean, I rarely ever do the spats, but when it's pure, oh, this person doesn't understand the joke, that's, that's fun.

• 1:05:42Chris Williamson?

  If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades and it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bobbies and provide the most science-backed effective paths to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps, the weights, everything. So all you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP Strength app could wipe your ass for you. Probably would, and it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about your training, it'll do the same for you.

• 1:06:25Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below. Heading to r p strength dot com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's r p strength dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. What can we? I was thinking about this the other day. What's the longest ever traffic jam in terms of duration? So I'm just thinking about what's the longest ever internet argument is is still ongoing. It's something from 2008 that's still going in a weird forum somewhere, Mumsnet or whatever. There are two different records people people usually mean when talking about the longest traffic jam ever.

• 1:07:06Chris Williamson?

  Longest by duration, the most infamous was the China National Highway 110 traffic jam in 2010. Stretched about 100 kilometers near Beijing and lasted 12 days. From August 14th to August 26th, some drivers reportedly moved only one kilometer per day. It was caused by a mix of roadworks, overloaded coal trucks and traffic volumes far beyond the highway's design capacity. The longest by distance, Guinness World Records listed a traffic jam in France in 1980 as longest by length. It was 109 mile backup between Lyon and Paris caused by holiday traffic and bad weather. It's also a bizarre contender by sheer scale. After German reunification in 1990, reports described around 18 million cars clogging routes at the east-west German border. Do you imagine living through that reunification?

• 1:07:52Chris Williamson?

  You've been part of the same country, but essentially different universes.

• 1:07:57George Mack?

  Jesus. If you like traffic data.

• 1:08:02Chris Williamson?

  I've got some.

• 1:08:03George Mack?

  Go on. Cracking traffic data.

• 1:08:05Chris Williamson?

  Go on.

• 1:08:05George Mack?

  So in the 1960s.

• 1:08:10George Mack?

  Here's a little little question.

• 1:08:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:08:13George Mack?

  Can you guess where the most deadly roads in Europe were?

• 1:08:19Chris Williamson?

  Isle of Man?

• 1:08:19George Mack?

  No.

• 1:08:22Chris Williamson?

  In the UK?

• 1:08:23George Mack?

  No.

• 1:08:24Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:08:25George Mack?

  We're not in Europe. Brexit means Brexit, Christopher.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  It does, that's true. Ireland?

• 1:08:30George Mack?

  No.

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  Um, okay. I was trying to own something close to home there.

• 1:08:34George Mack?

  So it's uh, it's Belgium. Surprising location of Belgium. Okay? So they had a policy which was known as the eighteenth birthday party gift by Belgians. So here's how it'd work. You'd turn eighteen, walk downstairs, parents would do happy birthday. Can you do it in Belgian?

• 1:08:54Chris Williamson?

  No, can you?

• 1:08:55George Mack?

  No. Um, happy birthday to you. Um, they'd then take you down to the car dealership. You'd get a little birthday plaque from them. They'd say happy birthday as well. You'd pay for a car, show your data buff. You'd get the car and you'd attempt to drive away. So Belgium had no driving test policies at all. So you could just full on libertarian style, just attempt to drive away. And the eighteenth birthday party gift in Belgium was the number one killer of Belgians between the age of eighteen to twenty four. So Belgium had the most deadliest roads in Europe. Certainly per capita. So you know what the government did to try and fix it?

• 1:09:40George Mack?

  They said, right, we're putting an end to this. In nineteen sixty nine, they said, before you can drive,

• 1:09:47George Mack?

  you have to do a mandatory theory test. Cause if you go and study and then drive, at least will prevent these mistakes. So what happens is nineteen sixty nine, there's this cutoff. Everybody from then onwards has to do theory tests. And this Belgian transport official like releases the results and he goes, it's appears to be the case that the accident rate amongst the theory drivers is higher than the ones who never got theory tested at all. So the death rate went up by thirty two percent with the theory test drivers.

• 1:10:20Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:10:21George Mack?

  Um, one theory is, fair enough. One theory is that they have this kind of false sense of confidence going into the roads, that at least the ones that knew they couldn't drive didn't have. But the Belgian, mate, the Belgian traffic stuff goes on for years. There's like iconic cartoons of like how dangerous the roads are in Belgium. And there's a great thing in the eighties where I think it's Jean-Luc de Haan. Could be, could have butchered that, but we'll go with it. Jean-Luc Dahan, he becomes Transport Minister. This man ends up becoming PM, but just listen to the job that he does, Transport Minister. So he one day gets into office to fix the Belgium road.

• 1:11:04George Mack?

  So he's done all this campaigning about the issues around it. He gets clocked going, I think it's like seventy in a forty. And he does the beautiful politician's answer where he says, it wasn't me, it was my daughter. And then they quickly find out it wasn't his daughter, it was him in the car. So he goes, okay, I'll hire a chauffeur from now on. So I'll only get driven by a chauffeur. So he starts with a chauffeur and a journalist one day tailgates the chauffeur. The chauffeur commits twelve driving offences in thirty minutes. And this is one of the best political statements of all time. When the Transport Ministry was pressed, well, are you going to fire the chauffeur now? The lady who's the spokeswoman, just a rare moment of honesty, she said,

• 1:11:48George Mack?

  if we fired everybody in the Belgian Transport Ministry that was committing traffic offences, there'd be nobody left here to work. So that's some cracking traffic data.

• 1:11:58Chris Williamson?

  Well, I know that Egypt's got the, I think it's the easiest driving test in the world, which is crazy because I've done the one in America and that explains a lot about American drivers. It's not, the British one's kind of hard.

• 1:12:10George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:12:11Chris Williamson?

  You must know, what, what, what do you reckon the failure rate among your friends was for the first time test?

• 1:12:15George Mack?

  Did you, did you pass first time?

• 1:12:17Chris Williamson?

  I passed first time.

• 1:12:17George Mack?

  You catch him as a first timer?

• 1:12:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, yeah, I know, fucking, I'm Aine Granger over here. But then you look at somewhere like Bali and these guys are essentially surgeons with, with scooters. And they're able to thread this needle. I remember the first time I went to, because I'd spent time in Thailand, but I'd gone up north and up north in Pai, really, really close to the northern border.

• 1:12:42Chris Williamson?

  There's no traffic. So yeah, people are riding around a family of five on a single scooter and there's a goat on the back and stuff, but there wasn't any of that crazy weaving shit. And I flew back through Chiang Mai and it was insane. And you've been to Thailand?

• 1:12:59George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  And you've seen the roads, right? In Bangkok and Chiang Mai. It is out of this world. It is fucking insane just how chaotic it is. And it really, they kind of scared me a bit. Like, holy fuck, like, it's just so danger. I was in a car, so I'm gonna be okay, I guess, unless someone smashes through the window. But it made me, it made me kind of fearful for all of the other people. This is your day to day. You're arriving at work. That's your commute. Right now, let's sit down and go over the quarterly earnings report thinking, I'm sorry, my adrenaline is just as if I've been in a fight with a bear.

• 1:13:35George Mack?

  But I wonder, with time, do you adapt to it? I think where it doesn't get enough criticism for their roads is everybody talks about how safe Dubai is and it's this hub of safety. The roads in Dubai, I think you're four times more likely to die on than the British roads. And one of the explanations-

• 1:13:55Chris Williamson?

  Because of the drivers or because of the roads?

• 1:13:56George Mack?

  Definitely the, the design of the roads are peculiar, are not optimal. But I have a theory that there where you have 90% expats from all over the world, that there's actually no cultural grounding on the roads. Cause you've got one guy, you've got one guy from Pakistan here-

• 1:14:18Chris Williamson?

  One person thinks that you should let you out.

• 1:14:19George Mack?

  One guy from the UK here, one guy from France here, one guy from Germany here, one lady from Uzbekistan here. Like it just-

• 1:14:27Chris Williamson?

  Lady from Uzbekistan's not allowed to drive, but go on.

• 1:14:30George Mack?

  I think you can drive in Uzbekistan. I don't know. But as a result, there's no cultural crossover where, for example, if I'm driving in the UK, I know that if a guy gets really angry beeping his horn at me, it's like, it's what it is. Like, it's chill. Whereas I also wouldn't do that. I would never, I'm not a big horn beeper anyway, but I would be way more likely to beep in the UK than I would here. Yeah, everyone's got guns. Yes. So it's just understanding the lay of the land. But when you're in somewhere like Dubai, where it's just, there's, there's no cultural attitudes on the roads, it's just. Well, it's too much of a melding pot and you need consensus, because that's the only way that it works. I told you about the, the guy who, I was in an Uber, it was like a, this was in Dubai and it was like a Sprinter van.

• 1:15:16George Mack?

  And I'm in the back of the Sprinter van and on the roads and there's like loads of other people in the Uber on the way to a steak restaurant and I'm just kind of lonely looking out the window. And I kind of look at the driver and he's on his phone and he's, it goes off the app, the maps for a second. I go, what's he going on? And I look at it and he's on trading two, one, two. He's trading crypto, wasn't he? And he was, if he was shorting, I think the Japanese yen as he's going 70 on the highway.

• 1:15:50George Mack?

  And I saw, I shouted at him, I go, I go, stop right now. And this, you know, this is the most British thing ever. I thought, might not say, don't want to say anything. I'll risk, yeah, I, I don't want to make a fuss. I shouldn't make a, I shouldn't make a fuss. If I die, because some guys. Trying to short the Japanese yen. So I shouted at him and he stopped. I started looking out the window again. Come back. He's doing it against the pound. Yeah, the issue wasn't, my issue wasn't the currency. My issue wasn't the currency. It wasn't the trade. It was the fact that you were doing the trading. Man, I'm here for the self-driving cars. Well, so you can, so you can do as much trading as you want. Yeah, fuck yeah. All right. I appreciate you, man. Until next time. So much fun. See you, everybody.