The Hidden Danger of Accepting Social Norms - George Mack

George Mack is a writer, marketer and entrepreneur. What are the most important questions of our time? Some search for the meaning of life. Others wonder how to leverage California’s gay subsidy. Both are equally valid, but one is definitely more interesting. So what are today’s biggest questions, and do any of the answers actually matter? Expect to learn if AI-generated stories can win awards, what qualifies for California’s gay certification program, who the chicken farmer who fooled Hitler was, why men aren’t great at receiving and expressing their emotions, why George is obsessed with Gymshark’s finances, the best lessons Chris and George have learned from this past year and much more… - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Who is Cristiano Ronaldo Named After? 3:13 Is This the Worst Walkout Song? 7:41 Should AI Be Winning Writing Awards? 12:46 Beckham vs Pitt: Who Do Women Prefer? 17:43 Do Trends in the East Always Translate to the West? 27:24 The Truth Behind California’s “Gay Certification” 32:02 How a Chicken Farmer Defeated Hitler 38:52 Is This the Greatest Civilian Hero Story? 45:37 Why We Experience Survivor’s Guilt 55:53 Are Men Homophobic or Femmephobic? 01:04:05 Why Cash Flow Cycles Matter More Than You Think 01:09:27 The Life Lessons You Come Back to Most 01:22:08 Where to Find George - 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?

  Speaking of football, do you know who Cristiano Ronaldo was named after?

• 0:04George Mack?

  Go on.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  You're a big fan of football. How do you know, one of the most famous, maybe the most famous player on the planet? Who do you think Cristiano Ronaldo was named after?

• 0:11George Mack?

  Well, it wouldn't be the Brazilian Ronaldo, because he was, they almost overlapped in terms of careers. Oh, is it Ronald Reagan?

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 0:20George Mack?

  Yes.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  Wow. My parents named me after Ronald Reagan because they both liked this name and thought it sounded strong Ronaldo, whose full name is Cristiano Ronaldo's. Dos Santos Aviero, said in a GQ cover story. I know that my father admired him. Ronaldo was born February 5th, 1985, while Reagan was still President of the United States. But according to Ronaldo, his dad, who was a fan long before then, told Riley that Reagan was his dad's favourite actor. That said, he wasn't too sure how the Republican leader would have felt about Ronaldo's outfit in the GQ cover that accompanied the article. Let's just say it's not very conservative. Now that we've got an image of the outfit that Ronaldo had.

• 1:01George Mack?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02Chris Williamson?

  Ronald Reagan.

• 1:04George Mack?

  I mean, identical, right? That's very much nominative determinism right there.

• 1:09Chris Williamson?

  I forgot, because I was, I was so, not being in America, too young for it as well. I forgot the fact that Reagan was an actor.

• 1:18George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  He was an actor beforehand. Was he in big movies and stuff? I believe so, yeah. Okay.

• 1:23George Mack?

  It's kind of the prequel to Trump in a lot of way. There's also, if you like footballers' names, there's a South American player called Osama Bin Laden, whose brother is, I believe, called Saddam Hussein.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  Can you search ChatGPT and is it V I N?

• 1:38George Mack?

  I think it's Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, two brothers in South America.

• 1:41Chris Williamson?

  This does sound too good to be true, and like you've been guzzumped by it.

• 1:45George Mack?

  Well, it's interesting, particularly like Brazilian names, they often decide their own name. So you've got Ronaldinho, Fred, Hulk, great name.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  Pepe?

• 1:58George Mack?

  Pepe. Well, Pepe's Portuguese, but they often just, unlike us, they just kind of, they don't often go with their own name.

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  There we go.

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  There was a Peruvian footballer named Osama Bin Laden. Jimenez Lopez, often written simply as Osama Bin Laden, very good. He attracted international attention because it sounds almost identical to Osama Bin Laden.

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  Actually, in Spanish, it's even closer because V and B are pronounced the same.

• 2:27Chris Williamson?

  Some unusual details have been widely reported. He said he was named after Osama Bin Laden. His brother is named Saddam Hussein, a Spanish spelling of Saddam Hussein. To avoid controversy, his jersey typically displays only Osama rather than Hussein.

• 2:45George Mack?

  Wow.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  I mean, I want to, I want to meet his parents.

• 2:48George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I want to know what they've been reading.

• 2:54George Mack?

  You can just do things, clearly. You can just do things.

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  You can just name your kid after the most famous terrorist of the 21st century. A year after 9/11, too. Oh, fucking hell, yes. Shit, that was done one year.

• 3:06George Mack?

  So really hopping on the bandwagon post.

• 3:10Chris Williamson?

  That's buying, that's buying Bitcoin while it's on a rip, isn't it?

• 3:12George Mack?

  Jesus Christ.

• 3:13Chris Williamson?

  What's that story of Rory McDonald's walkout music?

• 3:17George Mack?

  Oh, Rory McDonald, UFC fighter, used to walk out to some of the strangest songs.

• 3:26George Mack?

  And people would kind of laugh as he was walking out, like, why, why does he have such a weird niche in music? And it was, when it came out, he was interviewed, like, why are you playing out some of these super strange songs? It would mix from like classical music. It would also have, Jared, look it up, like the different Rory McDonald songs. And when they interviewed him, he was like, it's not me who's picking the songs, it's the UFC. Then they go to the UFC and say, Rory's saying you're picking the songs. And it's like, no, we text him before every single UFC. And when it actually got into it, they were texting his old phone number, which had been given to somebody. If you go on the, yeah, go on Reddit. So here's the song. So he has a violin orchestra.

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  Scroll down.

• 4:11George Mack?

  By Jorge Quintero. One More Road to Cross by DMX. Personal favourite, Can't Touch This by MC Hammer, UFC 133.

• 4:20Chris Williamson?

  Grew Up a Screw Up by Ludacris.

• 4:23George Mack?

  You, so you've got to think, he goes from light work, Lupe Fiasco, not bad song.

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  The fact he did We Found Love Twice in a Row.

• 4:33Chris Williamson?

  He came out to St Anger by Metallica twice in a row as well. He came out by 46 and 2 by Tool. That's a fucking slamming. And then Got the Life by, okay, but so. He says the UFC chooses, the UFC says he chooses. What's the truth?

• 4:48George Mack?

  Well, it was, somebody had his old phone number. So the UFC was texting it, and this person was obviously a UFC fan that was kind of in on the joke and just absolutely, went on a rampage for multiple years.

• 5:02George Mack?

  What would be the worst song to walk out to for you?

• 5:06Chris Williamson?

  For me?

• 5:07George Mack?

  Yeah. Or best?

• 5:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, when I came down the love lift for Take Me Out, my first dating show, I wanted Jamie Jones, Hungry for the Power, because at the time I thought I was really cool, because I'd just done the season in Ibiza. And everybody did remixes of it saying Hungry for the Powder.

• 5:24George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 5:24Chris Williamson?

  And I was like, oh, I'm fucking sick, man. I used to go to, I'm sniffing ketamine in Ibiza and that. And the producers looked at me and said, why have you got this very low energy, deep house track for the walkout? We're going to give you example, Love Kick Starts Again. Was that, okay, fair enough. So that's like, as you come down and everyone's doing this, clapping above their heads.

• 5:50George Mack?

  And the love kick starts again. Chris Williamson.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:55George Mack?

  Do you ever see?

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Single man reveal yourself. That's what it is.

• 5:58George Mack?

  Did you get, how did you perform? Did you get a date off Take Me Out?

• 6:01Chris Williamson?

  Did I get a date?

• 6:02George Mack?

  I don't know. I don't know. You might have got.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  Blackout. The bloke before me did.

• 6:06George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Chris Williamson?

  Everyone was backstage shitting themselves that they were going to get a blackout.

• 6:09George Mack?

  How did you, how did you fare?

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  I got on well. What was a deep conspiracy about Take Me Out, which for the American people is a kind of British staple dating show, the first of many dating shows for me. And the biggest fear that anybody had was that all of the girls would turn the lights off. But earlier in the season, because for every, every time that they don't go on a date, that's another week that they're on TV. So all of the girls were incentivised at the start of the season to hit their lights so that you didn't get this. And we were, I was episode two, so I was doing it on hard mode, mate. I was doing it on hard mode. Still had 11 girls to choose from at the end.

• 6:47George Mack?

  Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.

• 6:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:50George Mack?

  Yeah, the ITV producers of Take Me Out do not, have not read the almanac of Charlie Munger is my concern.

• 6:57Chris Williamson?

  What would you want to walk out to for a fight?

• 7:00George Mack?

  Take Me Out or a fight? Because I see them both as the same thing.

• 7:05George Mack?

  You've got to go, you've got, you know, you already know. I think you've got to go Big Phil.

• 7:10Chris Williamson?

  Which song?

• 7:11George Mack?

  Big Phil.

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  Dun dun dun dun.

• 7:13George Mack?

  I think in the, in the air tonight. Yeah, I'm, both my fighting music and my love making music.

• 7:18Chris Williamson?

  1.6, 1.6 speed? Yeah.

• 7:21George Mack?

  Well, yeah, 1.6 speed, depending on, depending on the opponent, both in the ring.

• 7:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so is it faster, is it faster for dating or faster for fighting?

• 7:29George Mack?

  That's a great question. That's a great question. I think, no, I think, I think you probably want to slow it, slow it down a little bit for the, for the dating, 1.4.

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  Is that to make it feel like you've lasted longer?

• 7:39George Mack?

  Yes.

• 7:39Chris Williamson?

  Right. I need that. We were talking about AI in writing yesterday. One of the Commonwealth Short Story Prizes appears to have been awarded to an obviously AI-generated story. This is a relatively prestigious prize. The prize-winning stories all appeared in Granter Magazine, and the editor's response was basically a shrug. When asked whether it was AI-generated, AI concluded that it was almost certainly not produced unaided by a human. And a computer scientist claimed that the empty metaphors that often plague the prize-winning story and that plague all AI writing as well, they come from human-written fanfiction.

• 8:17Chris Williamson?

  So this is the source of a lot of the very strange, very clunky analogies that you see. So for instance, the rare phrase, the patience of a reptile, which appears in this allegedly AI-generated story, also occurs in a fanfiction based on the Japanese anime and manga Naruto. There's no way to be sure that the LLM sucked it up, spat it back out. But it's worth remembering that a meaningful amount of the text inside of these machines was written by people who were playing pretend with anime characters. So the reason being, if you were to take the total amount of time played, of people playing football globally,

• 8:57Chris Williamson?

  and you were to learn how to play football as a robot or an AI system by watching everybody on the planet play football, there are far more people that are bad at football than good at football.

• 9:07George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 9:07Chris Williamson?

  Therefore, you will learn to be quite bad at football. And this is the same thing with writing. If you think about how few books that are written get published, how little writing is made for a book, and how many books that are written are actually good and go on to sell anything. I don't think that there's that much of a weighting in terms of the LLM that

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  James Clear's Atomic Habits on Moby Dick is worth 10 million times that of an anime and manga blog.

• 9:38George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 9:39Chris Williamson?

  However, by sheer numbers, the amount of bad writing outnumbers the amount of good writing. So there's a sentence from that story. But a belly sound as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there. Pretty jarring. It's not really what you find in good writing. Don't worry, this might have been potentially drawn from a fanfiction webpage, The Fall of a Phoenix, where the original sentence was, he swallows a shout of pain, breathing heavily, his whole body trembling. Another sentence, his eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him. Eyes narrowed against the glare outside sounds like unnecessarily vain and ominous in a way that's unnecessary.

• 10:20Chris Williamson?

  The reason could be that it was drawn from a random horror blog, the original sentence being his eyes narrowed against the glare of the halogen strip lights. And speaking of the darker glare, whilst it is pretty common, it appears in another fanfiction story. So basically, the, you can't work out what's inside of an LLM's brain, which is probably for the best. But it's entirely possible that when you're prompted to write fiction, it's not scouring through the greatest works ever put together. It's looking at like random fanfiction manga and anime websites written by somebody at 2am who really shouldn't have been doing it.

• 10:55George Mack?

  Well, what makes sense there, and again, snapshot in time, six months, 12 months from now, this may be completely different. But what's interesting is, on a coding side of things, it's currently way more capable than the writing side. And I wonder if that's because code itself, there's a lot, it's a lot easier to come to an objective conclusion. So thing did compile, thing didn't compile, or thing did work, thing didn't work, button appeared, button didn't appear. Whereas with writing. It's so much more around taste. It's so much more subjective. So it's harder to almost give the feedback loop of success or failure.

• 11:36George Mack?

  But it's interesting that you wouldn't, that, that argument there, that you would just have the widest data set possible for writing versus having an LLM that's trained a lot more. But what would be interesting, in theory, that's quite easy to do.

• 11:52George Mack?

  So has anybody done that? Probably. But it's still, even when I've given it great writing, it can't, it can't, for whatever reason, repeat it. Maybe it's not been large enough.

• 12:02Chris Williamson?

  The physics that it's built on top of, it's not just here is good writing. It has to understand what each word inside of that writing means. And the way that it understands what the word inside of the writing is, is based on the bigger corpus that it has outside of it. So it's a little bit like saying, I've got Usain Bolt, but he's running into a 35 mile an hour headwind. Like regardless of how great the talent is that you're trying to push forward, I think that you're always going to be working against this. Now, it's got to be a relatively complex but simple, sorry, like arduous but simple solution to be like, just wade it toward great pieces of work.

• 12:35George Mack?

  It's not arduous, Chris. It's simple.

• 12:42Chris Williamson?

  Said like a true Roman senator.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  Question.

• 12:46George Mack?

  Question.

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  What man could get the most number of women on the planet to turn up at his house if he gave them the invite?

• 12:53George Mack?

  That's, philosophers have pondered this question for hundreds, if not thousands of years, Christopher. So the, the real philosophical insight that's plagued the industry is which man alive could post his address right now and have the largest line? Who do you, who do you go for?

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  You need international appeal.

• 13:20George Mack?

  Yep.

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  You probably need to skew a little bit older.

• 13:26George Mack?

  Bigger TAM.

• 13:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, you got to expand.

• 13:28George Mack?

  Especially with a declining population.

• 13:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, aging population. Aging population means that I think anyone under age 35 is probably going to struggle. Anyone under age 30 is really going to struggle and think that you're going to want as a mid 50s, 60s year old woman. I don't know whether, you probably do want to be ravaged by that, but I don't think you're going to go. The likelihood of you upping sticks and getting on the bus, getting on the 59 bus to go to wherever this person's address is. So my, my call for this, I think it's between Brad Pitt,

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  Leonardo DiCaprio.

• 14:07Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to think about who the pop star or rock star would be that would be up there. I bet somebody like a Drake would probably be able to do some damage.

• 14:16George Mack?

  Hmm. I don't think so.

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  He's done his damage. He has done a lot of damage.

• 14:20George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  But I think I, I would, I would put my money, I would say I would put my money on Brad Pitt. I think it's very hard to fight back against Brad.

• 14:26George Mack?

  Pitt and DiCaprio are very much the Intel or Microsoft in this moment in that I think 10 years ago, I think you're correct, but I think you've got to be looking at a little bit more blue chip. I think David Beckham is probably the apple stock here. Been around for a while, but I think Beckham still outperforms Pitt and DiCaprio. Cause I think Beckham's actually more global. Cause we've got to, you've got to be looking at, you've got to be looking at Africa. You've got to be looking at Southeast Asia.

• 14:52Chris Williamson?

  I'm always looking at Africa. Why, what, what was the last thing that David Beckham did that was globally recognized?

• 14:57George Mack?

  If you turned on the World Cup recently, he's on every single advert, my friend.

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that that is enough, right? I don't think.

• 15:05George Mack?

  But I also think D-Bex, um, D7 still has quite a clean, beautiful image, whereas a Brad Pitt doesn't. Pitt, no, definitely not. Um, I think less so as he's got older and DiCaprio seems to have.

• 15:19Chris Williamson?

  DiCaprio's really tanked his own stock price.

• 15:21George Mack?

  Intel, this is what I'm saying.

• 15:22Chris Williamson?

  Right. I understand. I understand. But I don't think, I don't think that you're right about David Beckham. I, I don't think that you're going to get, I don't think he's going to reach out into the Middle East in the way that Brad Pitt would. I think that you get, I think David Beckham is going to nail it in like East Asia. I think he's going to absolutely crush it because that kind of sport's crazy over there. I don't think.

• 15:44George Mack?

  You're joking me? With the Saudi league and the Qatar World Cup? I think, I think D-Bex is, is well known out there. And the English accent still goes a long way, my friend.

• 15:52Chris Williamson?

  That's, I just don't think he's done anything relevant for a long time.

• 15:54George Mack?

  Okay. We can agree to disagree. I do think.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  Who's an outside favorite?

• 15:58George Mack?

  I think Styles is very much the Nvidia of our moment. Yes.

• 16:03George Mack?

  It may fall. The market may collapse, but he is very much leading the charge.

• 16:08Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Timothy Chalamet is like ChatGPT or OpenAI. He's currently, he's currently private because he's in a committed long-term relationship.

• 16:15George Mack?

  D-Bex is as well. It's not, it's not necessarily about private or public stock here. It's just.

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  David Beckham was closer to SpaceX pre-IPO.

• 16:21George Mack?

  Yes, yes.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  Very established for quite a long time. A lot of investment from a variety of countries.

• 16:27George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  People really cared about his success. And then finally he's been able to cash out if he manages to break up with Victoria.

• 16:32George Mack?

  Hmm. Fascinating philosophical question.

• 16:35Chris Williamson?

  This is the most important question of our time. 95% of people don't get enough fibre, which is why Momentous built Fibre Plus. Because hitting your daily fibre target through food alone is actually kind of hard, even harder than your last toilet trip. Fibre isn't just a digestion thing. It's the foundation of your gut health, which drives how well you absorb nutrients, how stable your energy is and how quickly you recover. If your gut isn't dialed, everything else you're doing is working at a fraction of its potential. Fibre Plus is a three-in-one formula built to address digestion, gut barrier strength and blood sugar stability all at once. That's why I plan to make my next big dump Momentous.

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they'll give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. 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/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Dopamine websites are becoming a new trend in South Korea. These services let users endlessly browse food delivery menus, read reviews, fill shopping carts and even track a courier. The only catch, you can't actually place an order.

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  There are also virtual smoke breaks where users join anonymous chat rooms and socialize with strangers, recreating the feeling of taking a break without smoking a single cigarette. The idea is simple. Get the familiar dopamine hit without spending money, smoking or giving in to other impulsive habits.

• 18:11George Mack?

  I saw that and I think the argument, they, a, a big argument you'll see online is this behaviour is happening in Asia. Therefore it's going to downstream happen in the West. And I think it's a little bit of a coin toss. Sometimes Asia is ahead of us. But sometimes it's just such a different culture. So I think it was, I forgot which Facebook product manager was talking about how they'd release a new feature and they'd test it often in the Philippines. And there'd be this crazy reaction and they go, we have to launch this new feature immediately. And the amount of times they'll then test it on the West or anywhere else in the world and it wouldn't work. So he actually banned doing tests or stopped doing tests for a lot of features in the Philippines.

• 18:56George Mack?

  Because their phone usage is so different to ours. They spend so much more time on their phones than any other part of the world. So it's just.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  Why is that?

• 19:04George Mack?

  Where, where is it like a, a human thing that these people are just ahead versus where is it just a cultural thing? Have you ever, have you ever come across Montaigne's lists?

• 19:14Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 19:14George Mack?

  Do you know who Montaigne is?

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  Philosopher?

• 19:17George Mack?

  Yeah. So French, uh, French philosopher would be fascinating to hear his, uh, perspectives on the, um, the old Q debate. But Montaigne used to have lists that he would keep of what different cultures thought were acceptable throughout history. Just so he could remind himself that this whole thing is largely made up. It's largely social contagion. So some of my like favorite from Montaigne's lists. So one, where it's normal to grow out your hair on the right side of your body, but shave everything on the left. Where white teeth is deemed as unattractive, so they purposely get their teeth blacker and blacker and blacker. Where at a certain age, you're supposed to kill your own father. When you and your father hit a certain age, you say goodbye.

• 20:03George Mack?

  Another one on Montaigne's lists are when at a funeral, you're supposed to chop up the dead, grind them to a pulp, pour it into wine and then drink them on the day of the funeral. And a final one, one for you actually, Christopher, because I'm sure you've attended many events like this, which is certain cultures for their weddings, the success of a wedding was judged by how many of the groom's friends could sleep with the bride, which I know is actually quite common in, in the North East of England, but.

• 20:36Chris Williamson?

  That's only if they're family.

• 20:37George Mack?

  So Montaigne kept these lists to himself, like more and more and more and more examples like that, just to hold a mirror up to himself and the times that he's in.

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  So he's collecting weird cultures, cultures that we would find strange and that their norms are different to ours. In an attempt to try and highlight, hey, whatever it is that you think is normal is just consensus because of where you are. And if you were to be somewhere else, your consensus would be totally different.

• 21:01George Mack?

  Yes. Do you want, I'll tell you what, do you want a list of, I, I was thinking, okay, let's say Montaigne came back today. I was writing this chapter recently. So let's say Montaigne came back today and was like, well, what's normal today? So normal consumes 17 teaspoons of sugar per day. Normal has a hundred and four thousand, 755 dollars in debt. Normal is 30 pounds overweight, Ozempic pending. Normal averages less than 4,000 steps per day. Normal spends 90,000 hours of their life at work disengaged. Normal stays indoors for 22.3 hours per day. Normal spends more time on the toilet than exercising.

• 21:46George Mack?

  Normal hasn't finished a book in the last 12 months. Normal experiences under 10 minutes per day in silence. Normal will spend 20 years of their life watching TV or scrolling social media.

• 21:58Chris Williamson?

  Under 10 minutes a day in, in silence and more time on the toilet than exercising.

• 22:07George Mack?

  Averages. But then there's always a criticism around averages that you end up netting it out. But when you begin to look at, oh, is this is just what's accepted today? And maybe tomorrow weddings will be back that you like to attend.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  In the 1830s in Massachusetts, beards were so uncommon and strange that a man named Joseph Parker was mocked and shunned for wearing one. Assassins tried to forcibly shave him, but he fought them off with a knife and was imprisoned for assault. He refused to pay his fine or court fees, so he remained in prison for over a year. And this at least gave him the excuse to create an all time classic tombstone.

• 22:42George Mack?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:46Chris Williamson?

  The right to a full beard is honored by the grave of a man who was attacked and jailed due to his facial hair.

• 22:51George Mack?

  Wow.

• 22:52Chris Williamson?

  Talk about norms, mate.

• 22:53George Mack?

  That's a great beard.

• 22:57George Mack?

  On the, the, one of the things that everybody kind of has discussed in the marketing space for ages is that live streaming will become normal in the West because it's normal in the East.

• 23:10George Mack?

  But I'm yet to see like live shopping where people sit there for hours and hours per day. I'm yet to see that fully take off.

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, it depends what you mean, because live streaming, uh, kick, Twitch, obviously that's.

• 23:22George Mack?

  Live streaming, yes. But actual live shopping, sorry.

• 23:24Chris Williamson?

  Live shopping, different. Um.

• 23:28Chris Williamson?

  I R L streaming feels, I don't know whether they've got that in, I bet they don't have that in Asia. You know, the I R L stuff where people are walking about, sometimes causing nuisance and doing predator stings and I imagine that they don't because a good bit of Asia feels like it's got honor culture, where you don't want to disrupt. I mean, you've seen the Japanese subways, the Japanese tube. And I've been on the phone to a friend who lives in Japan and he'll warn me while he's on the side of the subway, waiting at the terminal. And then the, he'll tell me, look, I'm just about to get on and he won't say anything. He won't respond to me on the phone. He won't even whisper. So I'll be talking to him for three minutes without him being able to respond.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  And then he'll get off and he'll talk back to me. Like that's how, and he's not native Irish. And that's how much reverence people have, just complete silence. So they're playing your drill rap on the back of the bus. Not that, not even whispering, not even talking to each other.

• 24:32George Mack?

  Wow.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that crazy? Do you know that?

• 24:34George Mack?

  I didn't know that. It's interesting how much of who you think you are is just postcode.

• 24:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's so much of its ecology, right? I mean, and that's the reason why changing your environment has such a big impact on your life. If you, both me and you changed gyms over the last six months, and that made a massive impact. I just, a, a different routine didn't change me as a person, but it changed the way that my day was shaped. Like, oh, actually, my routine is largely built around some of the other things I already do. And if I change where I go and do them, that alters, maybe having the office, having the office in the studio, that's made a massive difference as well. So what do you think from stuff that's happened in Asia that has prophetically come across to America?

• 25:19George Mack?

  Ooh.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  A Labubus Asian? They look like they are.

• 25:27George Mack?

  What's a Labubu?

• 25:28Chris Williamson?

  It's these little stuffed animals. They were, it was the Dubai chocolate of the stuffed animal world. And people were queuing up for ages to get a key ring and.

• 25:35George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  And. Collect those.

• 25:39George Mack?

  It's funny how we're being in the West, we talk about Asia. The same way, I always find it absurd when somebody talks about Europe. Obviously Brexit means Brexit, so we're no longer in Europe.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 25:50George Mack?

  But the, the idea that Asia is this place or Africa is this place.

• 25:56Chris Williamson?

  Being absolutely massive.

• 25:57George Mack?

  Yes. And the.

• 25:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to Europe. What the fuck does that mean? But because we're so far away, we don't think of Asia as being anything different than this one big hegemon.

• 26:07George Mack?

  And there seems to be a recurring memetic trend throughout geography, which is you think two places, because they're next door neighbor, are very similar to one another or get on with one another. But historically, it is the, the opposite.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:19George Mack?

  I laugh whenever I interact with the French, that we are.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Twenty three miles away.

• 26:24George Mack?

  So different, so fundamentally different. I could, it's actually hard to find a culture as different to Britain in Europe, I would say.

• 26:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:36George Mack?

  Than the French.

• 26:37Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 26:37George Mack?

  And we're next door neighbors.

• 26:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we are. But I mean, speaking as somebody that's dressed as an ex Italian, essentially, you would, you would know, you would know, you would understand. Yeah, I, uh, I didn't know about the Asian thing. I definitely know that there's a lot of stuff that goes on over there that doesn't happen over here. You can buy used period pants in vending machines. I saw Craig Jones do this on a blog.

• 27:01George Mack?

  Oh, no.

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  Like, some ladies had menstruated through her pants and then you can buy them in a little, it comes in a little pokeball like that. And it's in a specially sealed bag inside of a pokeball. So.

• 27:13George Mack?

  I don't think that's taking off in the West anytime soon.

• 27:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there are certain areas that are resisting globalization. It's kind of impressive. California's gay certification. California is pressuring public utilities to award $633 million in special contracts to LGBT owned firms. To qualify, residents must go through the state's official gay certification program and face up to a year in jail if they're not gay enough. By 2022, California Public Utilities Commission established a goal for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state certified LGBT businesses. 0.5% of procurement in 2021, 1% in 23, 1.5% in 24 and beyond. If large

• 28:00Chris Williamson?

  CPUC regulated utilities meet these goals in 2024, they would have sent $633 million to LGBT owned firms. The scheme raises an obvious question. How does a business qualify as officially gay?

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an LGBT organization attesting to their sexual preferences, proof that a newspaper identified them as LGBT, or three letters from personal contacts written on company letterhead attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who falsely represent their business as gay face up to a year in county jail. Supplier Clearinghouse also accepts gay certification letters from the National LGBTQ plus and allied Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has its own list of accepted documents, including

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. As it states on its website, certification is a journey, not a destination.

• 29:07George Mack?

  Wow.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  Think you'd be able to pull off getting California's gay certification to receive 633 million dollars?

• 29:13George Mack?

  What, so what percentage do you need?

• 29:15Chris Williamson?

  To be gay?

• 29:16George Mack?

  Yes.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  You need to be gay. You don't, it's not a percent.

• 29:19George Mack?

  So it's not a recruitment percentage?

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 29:22George Mack?

  Oh, okay.

• 29:23Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 29:23George Mack?

  So you have to hit, if you have a certain level that you get the funding?

• 29:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Yep. Exactly. But you also need to be gay to unlock it. So what, if you're not gay, you don't get it. And if you're not big enough, you don't get it. But if you're big enough, they need to be finding sufficiently diverse. So these companies, actually, one of the best ways to do this would be to hire, this is an incentive, to hire C suite executives that are gay.

• 29:46George Mack?

  Damn.

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  It would unlock an awful lot of CPUC funding in California.

• 29:50George Mack?

  Damn.

• 29:51Chris Williamson?

  And you face a year in county jail.

• 29:53George Mack?

  That's, that's real, that's real founder mode right there. Like, if you're willing to.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  Take it up the ass.

• 29:58George Mack?

  To, yeah.

• 30:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. If you're going to power bottom your way to the.

• 30:01George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 30:04George Mack?

  You either get fucked by investors or get fucked by.

• 30:07Chris Williamson?

  Someone else.

• 30:08George Mack?

  Craig.

• 30:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, look, it's gonna, it's, it's, it's, I don't know, man, the, the whole.

• 30:13George Mack?

  Is that real? Is that all real?

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  That's real. That's literally, that's the brand. I'm not going to lie to you.

• 30:17George Mack?

  I know, I know.

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  Why would I lie to you? Where'd I get this from? Cityjournal.com. There it is. Inside California's gay certification program, the state is pressuring utilities to award 633 million in contracts to LGBT businesses. Interesting. The tip of the spear for LGBT diversity is energy and utilities.

• 30:36George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 30:37Chris Williamson?

  Contracts for state certified gay owned businesses.

• 30:41Chris Williamson?

  You get arbitrage the hell out of this. You know, people say, how much would it, how much would you have to pay to be gay? If the number is less than 633 million dollars, your quid's in.

• 30:51George Mack?

  Damn.

• 30:52Chris Williamson?

  What else? What else you got? You got some stuff? Do you bring anything from home?

• 30:55George Mack?

  Yeah, go on. Do I have some stuff as always? Um.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my bag of cash is getting in the way. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Jim Shark and Skims and ALO and Neutonic, which is why I partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, you didn't get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff bullshit on the backend. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product. And Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you actually came here to do, designing and selling the thing that you love.

• 31:46Chris Williamson?

  So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Neutonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com/modernwisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com/modernwisdom.

• 32:03George Mack?

  Story of a Spanish chicken farmer called Juan Poyol. So it's 1941, start of World War I. And he's essentially a failure his entire life. So he's been a chicken farmer, a manager of a one-star hotel before bankruptcy. And he's after a new job with a tremendous CV. So he's walking along the streets of Madrid, takes a right, goes into the British Embassy and says, I want a job at MI5 to help out and spy on the Nazis. And MI5 or the Embassy sort of say, okay, how about you put that in writing and we'll

• 32:45George Mack?

  come back to you, which is the British way of saying, get the fuck out. So he leaves the building, comes back, walks across, goes into the Embassy, says, I want a job with MI5. They ask him to leave, tries again.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  He just like walks across the street and turns around.

• 33:03George Mack?

  No, these are multiple like future events. So he keeps coming back. Fourth time, he's walking along and he decides, he walks up the steps, but this time he goes into the German Embassy and he goes, I hate the Brits. I want a job for the Nazis to spy on Britain. And the Nazis are eyeing him up and he talks about his love for the Führer, the love for the Third Reich and how much he hates his new inspired hatred for Great Britain. And the Nazis end up training him up, giving him little tasks and he keeps proving himself, learns how invisible ink works, ends up recruiting multiple agents inside of Great Britain.

• 33:46George Mack?

  So he builds his way up and then he walks back, the street of Madrid, goes to the British Embassy and says, I now want a job at MI5 because I'm one of the most valuable spies for the Nazis. So he got rejected, rejected, rejected and was like, okay, I'll take matters into my own hands. So he then becomes the most valuable spy for Britain during World War II. He builds up a network of 27 sub-agents inside of Britain that the Nazis believe are true, but it's all his own imagination, all these different agents that he would create stories from that they were doing.

• 34:27George Mack?

  So much so, when he arrived, the MI5 called him Garbo because Garbo at the time was the most famous actress in the world.

• 34:35Chris Williamson?

  Greta Garbo.

• 34:36George Mack?

  Yes. So named after, for his acting skills. So Juan Poyol, the Spanish chicken farmer, the most important moment in World War II was D-Day. So as D-Day was happening, Juan gave so much fake information. He convinced them that D-Day was going to happen in Calais. So Hitler and Himmler were getting these reports from Juan.

• 35:02George Mack?

  They thought the war was going to happen in Calais, so they sent some of their most important armies to Calais. Then the D-Day happens. And Juan was so convincing, even with his fake reports that Hitler gave him the Iron Cross. So he's the only agent to get both an Iron Cross from Hitler and an MBE from.

• 35:24Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 35:25George Mack?

  Yeah. And do you know what's tragic though? So they say that when it comes to D-Day, the most important day of World War II, the three most important people were Eisenhower, who looked after the US, I think Montgomery, who looked after the Great Britain and Juan Poyol, the Spanish chicken farmer. Those are the three most important people in D-Day in terms of the impact. But this guy who gets these double awards ends up dying in 1949, Mozambique to malaria. And in the 1980s, three of the agents that worked with him in MI5 are sat at a bar. So they're all in their like late 80s now and they're talking about the war.

• 36:06George Mack?

  They're in this former little intelligence pub and they're chatting about the war and having a few drinks. And they have this kind of confused look on their faces, this old guy is walking towards them.

• 36:21George Mack?

  And they get more and more confused with their face. And then this 80-year-old man who's a MI5 spy breaks down in tears, crying. And they go, it can't be, you're supposed to be dead. So his final last act was to fake his own death in 1949. And he lived in a bookstore in Venezuela. So the Nazis would never know where he was.

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  That's insane.

• 36:52George Mack?

  Spanish chicken farmer.

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  Was he really worried about Nazi retribution in 1949?

• 36:56George Mack?

  Yes.

• 36:57Chris Williamson?

  Were the Nazis still going around and chasing people in the 50s?

• 36:59George Mack?

  Ironically, even though he's in Venezuela, there was a lot of Nazis in South America.

• 37:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but if he'd not gone to fucking Venezuela, he got supposedly caught malaria in Africa.

• 37:07George Mack?

  There's still a lot.

• 37:08Chris Williamson?

  Where's Mozambique?

• 37:09George Mack?

  Mozambique is, I think, West Africa.

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 37:12George Mack?

  But in 1949 or even onwards, there was, first off, we're viewing history through hindsight. At the time, there was still millions of Germans that served for the Nazis that were still alive. Yeah, there was lots of Nazis afterwards.

• 37:25Chris Williamson?

  And they would have wanted retribution for people that had, I guess I don't know.

• 37:29George Mack?

  The most impactful man during D-Day, who was a double agent that gave them all this false information, if there's one person, they're going to try and kill.

• 37:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true. I guess I don't know what happened in Germany after they lost. I don't know how quickly everybody capitulated.

• 37:43George Mack?

  Well, there was this, I was listening to Finn vs. History and they was talking about how in, when, after the Nazis commit the Holocaust, I think they were banned for the World Cup or from like international games for four years. But when Liverpool had the incident in Juventus where loads of fans died, they were banned for six years. And it's like, it's not, doesn't scale.

• 38:03Chris Williamson?

  Quite evenly.

• 38:04George Mack?

  Doesn't scale accordingly.

• 38:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a, I mean, unbelievable amount of agency. I suppose to be a guy that wants a job so badly that you take the opposite job to get the first job, it's just as well that he really did want to work for MI5. Cause if he didn't, he would have just been a great asset to the Nazis.

• 38:24George Mack?

  But it's having that, that level of theory of mind of, okay, I've been rejected from something. What does this person want that would make me completely invaluable? Cause I think there's this kind of myth that, oh, if you've been rejected, just keep going and they're idiots versus can you get inside of their head and think how they think?

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I think, um,

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  is it time to push or is it time to pivot is kind of the age old question, but he did both. Right? He pivoted into a new one. All right. So that's your story time. This is a new segment, a new segment on our episode, Storytime. My story time. Shavash Karapetian, you familiar with Shavash Karapetian?

• 39:01George Mack?

  No.

• 39:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so 1976 in Yerevan and there's a trolley bus carrying around about 90 passengers. We don't know what happened. Some people say that the driver of the bus had a heart attack. Some people say that he was having an altercation with a passenger on board. Whatever happened, crashed into a reservoir, Yerevan. The bus sank roughly 10 meters or 30 feet to the bottom, freezing murky water. There's a 23-year-old man who's training with his brother nearby, Shavash Karapetian. And without giving it much thought, jumps into the water and ordered his brother to help him from the shore. He said, it was scary at first. It was so loud as if a bomb went off. I almost drowned several times.

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  I could imagine the agony of those 92 people and I knew how they would die. The thing was, Karapetian wasn't an ordinary bystander. He was a 17-time world champion and 11-time world record holder in Finn swimming. He was one of the best underwater swimmers on earth. Immediately dives into the water to help. Visibility is basically zero because the reservoir is full of mud and sewage and debris as well. Obviously the bus has gone in, so it's kicked up all of this silt. It's basically impossible to see. So he swims down into the dark, locates the bus. He called it a traveling coffin for all of these 92 people. He kicks the rear window in underwater to get inside, dives down, dive after dive,

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  holds his breath, finds trap passenger, drags him back to the surface, hands them to the rescuers and his brother in a rowboat, goes straight back down again. Reportedly made dozens of dives over around about 20 minutes and physically pulled out about 37 people. 20 of them survived. During one dive, he accidentally grabbed a leather seat cushion instead of a passenger because his visibility was so poor. It'd be one of these old school buses that would have had movable cushions and he grabbed this, this leather cushion and brought it up, thinking it was maybe a small human. He later said that this one decision haunted him for years because he believed someone may have died while he carried up the cushion instead. Karapetian was hospitalized along with the victims of the accident because he'd lacerated

• 41:13Chris Williamson?

  all of his legs, all of his body from going through the broken glass, from breaking the glass himself. Septic fever, double-sided pneumonia and nervous prostration had doctors fighting for his life for over a month. When he was finally discharged, Shavash went back to practice, but swimming underwater echoed painfully in his lungs. But he wouldn't give up without having one final medal. So during the next championship that he swam in a haze, still wasn't in any way back to full capacity. His brother, Camo, ran along the side of the pool, ready to jump in in case he suddenly lost consciousness, but he came in first and set another world record without even realizing that he'd done it at the time. He was so delirious. But the rescue that he'd done of the bus destroyed his athletic career.

• 41:57Chris Williamson?

  Broken glass shredded his legs, polluted water had caused severe pneumonia and sepsis he couldn't recover from. And he spent all of those weeks plus then months critically ill and then recovering. Soviet authorities initially downplayed the story, so it remained relatively unknown for years. And today, the rescue is considered one of the greatest acts of civilian heroism ever recorded. Jesus Christ. That's him. Thick Russian. Karapetian. Yeah, yeah, like a serious Russian guy. That's him there in just a pair of pants and everybody else is trying to pull it up. Wow.

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that insane?

• 42:30George Mack?

  Wow.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  There's an award. Jared, ask a bald friend. What's the name of the award that's given to people who risk their lives for strangers?

• 42:43Speaker 02

  The award you're likely thinking of is the Carnegie Medal. It's given to civilians who risk their lives to save or attempt to save strangers.

• 42:50Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything interesting about the demographics of the people who've been given that award?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  There are some patterns worth noting. The Carnegie Hero Fund, which awards the medal, has found that recipients come from all walks of life. Age, gender and background vary widely.

• 43:05Chris Williamson?

  That's not interesting.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Historically, men have been the majority of recipients, but women have also been recognized.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

  How many men, how many men won?

• 43:12Speaker 02

  The Carnegie Hero Fund has awarded thousands of people since its inception in 1904.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  It's so fucking wild.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Historically, the majority have been men.

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  What's the percentage of men that have won the Carnegie Award?

• 43:25Speaker 02

  The Carnegie Hero Fund reports that historically about 90% of recipients have been.

• 43:32Chris Williamson?

  All right, shut up. I, I just, I.

• 43:37Chris Williamson?

  Whatever happened in 2020 continues to carry over now. Do you know what I mean? Like California thinks that the most important thing to do with its utilities is not give people cheap and reliable energy, but to make sure that the diversity of the sexuality of the people who own the companies is important. And you, fucking 5.5. Need to have a chat with someone about you. Anyway, that Carapetian, I, I love that story. I think it's fucking awesome. And what was the kind of kicker is the fact that you know that he was, he made such a personal sacrifice, but then also was ravaged by the fact that he picked up a fucking cushion, having gone down 37 times. And one time he made a mistake in pitch blackness when he couldn't see. Now, what's the likelihood that the guy that's running on the side of the road with his brother?

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  Like, he's got his pants on. He's got the, he's got the, how, he's the, the number one fin swimmer, deep sea swimmer in the world. 17 times, 11 world records.

• 44:35George Mack?

  Tragic.

• 44:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:35George Mack?

  Tragic.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. 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 bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path 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.

• 45:19Chris 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.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's r p strength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout.

• 45:37George Mack?

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting how often that is the case where you'll have these acts of great heroism that don't have 100% success rate. And then the individual spends so much time looping on that.

• 45:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, that's survivor guilt, I suppose, right?

• 45:53George Mack?

  I've known some people who've done some incredible things, like in the police or firework, for example. And it's the same thing. They don't ruminate on the, the heroism, it's the, it's the one.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  The mistakes that they made.

• 46:05George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the people they could have saved. I wonder what that's for. I guess that adaptively, it's trying to get you to focus on,

• 46:15Chris Williamson?

  this is something pro-social that you could have done if you'd been more prepared, more skillful.

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  Therefore, in future, you need to, you need to adapt your, your approach so that this doesn't happen again. Maybe that's the reason for survivor guilt. Actually, Jared, just type it in, chat GPT. What is the reason? What is the adaptive reason for survivor guilt? Or adaptive explanation for survivor guilt? Because the only thing that I can think of is that it's supposed to try and guide your future behavior. So that, well, I mean, fucking Bluetooth came up as a thousand-year-old Norse god or something like that. So fuck knows if we're going to find out.

• 46:59Chris Williamson?

  What is the adaptive explanation? From evolutionary or adaptive perspective, survivor guilt can be understood as a by-product of mechanism to help humans maintain social bonds, cooperation and group cohesion. Okay, so my hypothesis is looking good so far. Basic idea is that in ancestral environments, humans survive and reproduce largely through belonging to a group. One person benefited while others suffered, there were often social consequences. So the inverse of that, okay. Maintaining group cohesion, if you survive a dangerous event while close allies did not, feeling distress rather than indifference signals. Oh, that's cool. So because if something bad happens and you were one of the few that survived, if you show that you feel distress as opposed to indifference, it reinforces to everybody else that you weren't selfish and an asshole, that you actually regret the fact that they died and that you didn't.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  I am still a part of the group. I didn't take it all for myself. I didn't just swim out the back of the bus myself, I really did try. Reciprocal altruism and fairness mechanisms, they've got strong intuitions. When we receive an unexpected benefit relative to others, even when we did nothing wrong, our minds may interpret the situation as a violation of fairness expectations. Survivor guilt may arise from the same psychological machinery that makes people pretty uncomfortable receiving disproportionate rewards. Okay. Motivation to help survivors. Yep. Okay, so it encourages caring for bereaved families, supporting injured group members. Counterfactual learning. Humans are unusually prone to imagining alternative outcomes. The counterfactual helps us learn from near misses and dangerous situations. Dude, don't fucking test me on evolutionary theory, okay? Don't test the Hamburglar on evolutionary theory.

• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  My intuitions are strong. Costly signal of commitment as well, grief and function, you can't fake it. That's an interesting one. So that's the, the reason. Why would it be the case that when you're sad or distressed or overwhelmed with negative emotion, that the same thing your eyes do to make sure that your eyes stay lubricated would go into overdrive? Why do we cry? Like, what's the reason for crying? And one of the adaptive explanations for this, which is pretty fascinating, is it's such a costly signal to do because the most important sense you have is your eyes. And if you're prepared to fill them with water to say how much I've been hurt or how much I'm suffering,

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  you're in an unbelievably vulnerable position. You can't fight, you can't see, you can't defend yourself. Tears are coming out and you can't fully operate. This is how much I'm in pain. I'm in so much pain that I'm essentially exposing my neck to you. So how do you then factor in tears of joy? Why do we cry out of joy? I did ask this question. So it could be a spandrel, which is just a crossover between the two, but it could just be the same thing. It could be a very costly signal. Hey, look at how much I love this thing that's happening. I am here, collective effervescence, me and the group, we are one, I experienced this thing with you too.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  And I do think when it comes to sort of emotions, sadness, like peak joy, joyful experiences, beautiful experiences and sad or sort of dreadful experiences. They kind of have this same, like part of the pitch of the, of the chord that they play is kind of similar, right? It's like an outside of the body, at least when I, when I experience stuff that's like really intense, whether it's good or bad, I always feel it sort of across the top of my shoulders, my traps. And like, sort of, everything feels like it lifts up a little bit if I'm being delivered bad news by somebody or if there's something that's really beautiful happening. It always feels like I'm sort of being lifted a bit. So there seems to be similarities, resonance between those two.

• 50:38George Mack?

  There's two, there's two visuals, Jared, if you could pull them up. There's one of how emotion feels in the body. I don't know if you've seen this one where it's like.

• 50:46Chris Williamson?

  All the map.

• 50:46George Mack?

  Heat map?

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:47George Mack?

  And there's all.

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  Heat map of emotions.

• 50:49George Mack?

  Yeah, there's also the topography of tears. How different types of tears look under a microscope and they're slightly different.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 50:58George Mack?

  It's this artist. Yeah, this artist produced it where, so.

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  Top left.

• 51:04George Mack?

  So here is, yeah, how emotions at least feel in the body, which kind of makes sense.

• 51:11Chris Williamson?

  But is that a map? Mapping emotions, so is that self-report?

• 51:14George Mack?

  I think this is more self-report of how it, how it feels.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so anger, anger seems pretty right. So anger is sort of above the, like, upper chest, arms and hands a lot, lower face a lot and head.

• 51:27George Mack?

  And if you start with neutral on the right, so you kind of see, okay, this is neutral. And then you compare that to all the different ones.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  Surprise is definitely a lot in the head, that's cool. Sadness is kind of in the middle of the chest, happiness sort of everywhere. Disgust, definitely in the stomach. So disgust, disgust and anxiety, both in the stomach the most, that would make sense. Cause disgust is a pathogen rejection. Fear, middle of the chest, I think that seems quite right. Interesting that happiness is basically just tuned down love. Depression's cool, the depression, it says here, it's just sort of a, a low energy state or on the extremities as opposed to anxiety. And I would agree with that. I think anxiety is a much more active version of depression. Contempt, like existing exclusively in the head is pretty cool.

• 52:16Chris Williamson?

  Pride, so the swelling in the chest makes sense. Shame, the cheeks, that's people get embarrassed. And envy, sort of little bit of head and some heart. That's actually, would you disagree with any of those?

• 52:30George Mack?

  I think, I think it feels, it feels accurate as trying to be neutral right now. Could you search topography of tears, please, Jared? This was done by, I think, an artist that made this.

• 52:47Chris Williamson?

  Uh, go to that video, that Instagram video. Let's just see what this, uh, what this lady's got to say. Third one.

• 52:53Chris Williamson?

  Click and open.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  That your tears look different underneath a microscope depending on the emotion that you're experiencing. This project was called the topography of tears by Rosalind Fisher. She's a photographer and what they did is they looked at tears underneath a microscope. And you will see that depending on what these participants were experiencing, their tears look different. This is tears of laughter versus tears of change, tears of grief versus tears from cutting onions.

• 53:18Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Tears when someone is experiencing a moment of catharsis, whereas someone is experiencing a moment of change. I'm a therapist and I often show this to my clients because I think it gives a really good demonstration that crying is actually really important at times to release certain things from our body. And being able to see that our tears actually look different depending on what we're experiencing, I think really demonstrates that really well. Did you know?

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  Insane. That's cool. I want to know what the. Fuck it. Just ask Jared. Ask ChatGPT from the topography of tears.

• 53:54Chris Williamson?

  Study.

• 53:57Chris Williamson?

  What are the differences in the structure of tears or why are they there? Cause I want to know what, what is inside of the tear that's different. Is it more salt content? Is it like, what, how much shit's in tears? But I guess maybe you could have, you could, I don't know, is cortisol in the blood that leaks into the tears, but surely. Tears are kind of like sperm produced in advance and then released. Uh, there are three main categories, basal tears, constantly produced to lubricate the eyes, reflex tears produced in response to irritants, psychonions and emotional tears.

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  Key biochemical difference, here we go, is that emotional tears contain higher concentrations of certain proteins and hormones, including prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, stress-related hormone. Leu encafeolin, a natural pain relieving peptide, differences in minerals such as potassium and manganese. When tear dries on a slide, these dissolved substances crystallize into different patterns.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  Wow. There isn't a simple one-to-one mapping of grief, grief always looks like X and joy always looks like Y. The patterns vary considerably, even within the same emotional category. The amount of ratios of protein salts, hormones and other biochem. I didn't realize that you had that much. Obviously you can cry for different reasons. If I start cutting an onion in front of you. Or if you're in pain, or if you're feeling something, or if you're just lubricating your eyes.

• 55:18George Mack?

  Testosterone tears as well. The higher, the higher T that you have, the, the completely different.

• 55:23Chris Williamson?

  That's Greg.

• 55:23George Mack?

  That's what, yeah.

• 55:25Chris Williamson?

  Greg Levecq's tears from bloom are actually a protein shake.

• 55:30Chris Williamson?

  For the people that don't know, Greg Levecq has got 2,000 nanograms per deciliter of testosterone.

• 55:37George Mack?

  Yeah, Greg's tears.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  That's actually in this bag. It's not money. It's just Greg's next testosterone.

• 55:43George Mack?

  You pull up Greg's tears, they're just fucking training.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. They've got, they've vascular tears. Uh, yeah, yeah. It's a. The emotions thing's been interesting. Uh, trying to navigate this over the last 18 months or so. I still think kind of interested in what the, the conversation around men showing emotions is, obviously I've talked about it a lot, like everyone's talked about it a lot. But, uh, one of the interesting wrinkles that I learned about was, I don't think that men are particularly good at receiving other men's emotions. That we often talk about guys need to open up more, look at all of the people that are taking their own lives, whatever it is, however many men per minute or men per day are doing this.

• 56:26Chris Williamson?

  You need to open up, but a lot of the time, if a guy does that on the internet, it's not just women. That are unaccommodating to a guy that's maybe crying or feeling bad or seeming a little weak. Like guys, I would guess on average are actually more. Discarding, men are less accommodating of other men's sad emotions than women are. And a lot of the time, these would be the same men that would say something to the effect of, wow, it would do men's mental health in a state, like nobody really cares that much. You go, okay, so which one is it? Because if you're not prepared to hold your boy, like while he's going through a hard time, you don't also really get to say, we need to talk about men's mental health more.

• 57:10Chris Williamson?

  You need to put where your, like your emotions where your mouth is, so to speak.

• 57:15George Mack?

  My natural thought, at least from my experiences, I don't expect friends to be these pure mixed martial artists. That have everything across the board. So I know if, let's say for example, I want to break down tears, there's certain people who I will, who I'd speak to. And then there's other friends where if I, you know what I mean, want to fucking pull it together, I'll speak to them. So this, like having a little bit more of a decentralized on-chain friend base. I just, I just think, yeah, I think expecting the, the person who helps you to pull it together to then also be the person that's perfect with your emotions. It's hard to have that.

• 57:52Chris Williamson?

  I agree, but if it's the person who, uh, is saying, we need to have better resources for men's mental health, but they're also not being accommodating. That just seems like a kind of hypocrisy to me. And this is from, uh, uh, Men are Good, Tom Golden's thing. And, um, it makes sense because what you basically have as a, like, I think that it takes a lot of work for guys to get over their sort of visceral ache of other men's sad emotions. Uh, this is a price that's maybe not seen by. Women, or it's also hidden by men, but if there's a guy who's able to sit and hold, like Charlie Hoopat, for instance, or Connor Beaton, or Joe Hudson, or Dr. K. Uh, these are people that are trained professionally to be able to do this, obviously.

• 58:33Chris Williamson?

  The fact that they can sit, they've had to get over a lot of their programming because your programming as a man is, if I'm around another guy. Who doesn't seem to be able to hold it together emotionally, he's an unreliable ally. How do I know that when we go on our next hunt or when the tribe from the next valley comes and tries to attack us, that he's actually going to be able to hold it together? How do I know that he's going to break down in tears? This is the same reason, this is spicy one. I need to put a second fucking pair of glasses on for this. William Costello taught me that most homophobia in men isn't homophobia, it's femophobia. So we're actually. The disgust mechanism that gets turned on or the aversion that some men have to seeing gay men, isn't necessarily about the gayness.

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  It's about the femininity that is being presented by a man. And that's the same mechanism. The unreliable ally, if this guy doesn't seem to be showing the typical masculine, uh, uh, sort of. Control, conquer, aggression, 10 toes forward energy that I expect from other guys. What happens when there is some sort of altercation or issue in future that we need to, to step in on? So yeah, femophobia, homophobia is like kind of interesting.

• 59:49George Mack?

  I immediately think of who's the most masculine gay man in the world. Who then breaks that, who creates a paradox?

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  Tell me, who's the most masculine gay man that you know?

• 59:59George Mack?

  I don't know. I'm usually multiple drinks deep at the time.

• 1:00:07Chris Williamson?

  That is a fucking great question.

• 1:00:15Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the tech bro people, I, I, would you look at Peter Thiel and guess gay?

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  I don't think I'd look at him and guess gay.

• 1:00:25George Mack?

  He was in the closet for a long time until.

• 1:00:27Chris Williamson?

  Gorka. Yeah, yeah. With the Hulk Hogan thing. By the way, uh, if you need a new listen on Audible of a very old, relatively old book. Ryan Holiday's book, Conspiracy, guy that's written a lot about stoicism. Books on stoicism are good. This one's his best one by a distance. So fucking good. Have you ever, you've, tell me you've read it.

• 1:00:45George Mack?

  A while ago.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking amazing. It's so fantastic.

• 1:00:49George Mack?

  What's the plot? It's around Hulk Hogan.

• 1:00:51Chris Williamson?

  So, um, Peter Thiel gets ousted by, uh, Gorka. I think it's Gorka's subsidiary company. I can't remember what it's called. Um, that was reporting on Silicon Valley and, uh. I swear the headline was something like Peter Thiel's gay as shit people. And, uh, at this point, he still wasn't out about the fact that he is. And he held on to this for maybe five or six years. And he's building this case behind the scenes and he recruits this guy called, uh, Mr. A. Mr. A was this operator that came to him who was just going to be able, like a legal expert, uh, Machiavellian conniving sort of guy.

• 1:01:35Chris Williamson?

  And they start to look for ways to take down this company. And then the Hulk Hogan sex tape happens. And during the trial for the Hulk Hogan sex tape, it turns out that, uh, Terry Balaio, Hulk Hogan's just got like infinity money. He's got the best lawyers. He's got, he just can drive this thing into the ground to keep on taking Gorka down. It turns out that Peter Thiel uses the.

• 1:02:02George Mack?

  Hulk Hogan sex tape as a way to get back at the organisation and reporters that ousted him as gay like nearly 10 years ago by the time that this thing happens. And revenge is a dish best served cold is no better epitomised by any other story than that. A decade of just sitting on it and seething and having, you know, this huge secret that you've kept as a very public person who's early into Facebook and supporting like conservative candidates and yeah. It's widely discussed, the evil nature of social media or the ills of social media that exist today. And a lot of people hark back to this previous long gone era where you're from, but the where

• 1:02:45George Mack?

  I am from, no, not, not quite there just yet. But the golden, the thing people forget about the golden era that they're harking back to is the shit. We always forget the shit. And even the journalist standards that used to exist, the amount of journalists, particularly British press, that would pay people to sleep with people, then report the stories. This was a regular thing in journalism in the UK. Even numerous football players, athletes, they'd have to be constantly wary of, does this person actually like me? Or has a well-known British publication, who I shart name because they're still going,

• 1:03:28George Mack?

  is paying, or they may pay somebody to approach me, is using it as a story. That was a thing. That was why, that was common.

• 1:03:35Chris Williamson?

  A honeypot type scenario.

• 1:03:38George Mack?

  Should be a crime.

• 1:03:39Chris Williamson?

  And that was, was that, is that legal? Was that legal?

• 1:03:44George Mack?

  I, I don't know.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  But guess what's the difference between a kiss and tell and pay and a pay and kiss and tell? Like the order of the money is the only thing that's different here.

• 1:03:56George Mack?

  Yep. Depends when the invoice technically gets cleared. Always comes down to finance.

• 1:04:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it depends if you've got a negative cash, cash flow conversion cycle. Do you want to explain why you were so obsessed with Jim Shark's negative cash flow conversion?

• 1:04:08George Mack?

  No, no, no, no. First off, we.

• 1:04:12Chris Williamson?

  Don't defend yourself.

• 1:04:14George Mack?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:04:15Chris Williamson?

  Stop defending yourself.

• 1:04:16George Mack?

  So for people who want to know what a cash flow conversion cycle is, which is approximately about 1% of people listening, I'll get through it fast. Essentially, a cash flow conversion cycle is when you get the money. So let's say, for example, Chris is running New Tonic. He'll pay a manufacturer to make this beautiful drink. Then he will obviously sell it to potentially supermarkets, big stores around the UK. There's a crunch period of, well, how much credit can I get with manufacturers? And then how much credit can I get with the supermarkets? Because if you, if you have to pay your manufacturers today for stock that will arrive in three months, and then the supermarket doesn't pay you for three months, that's what's, like to, I think, a positive cash flow conversion cycle.

• 1:05:01George Mack?

  So a negative cash flow conversion cycle is when you get the, you almost have delayed for the manufacturers and then you can sell right away, which is a lot of what e-commerce companies do. So I was once at a bar in Manchester, talking to my friend about negative cash flow conversion cycles. And we saw these like.

• 1:05:17Chris Williamson?

  Just repelling any woman within a five meter radius.

• 1:05:20George Mack?

  Well, no, no, no. We saw, we saw these group of girls like look over and like say hello. And I had a girlfriend at the time, so I wasn't, wasn't going to do anything. But I just started laughing at the thought of, if only they could hear, they would be repulsed.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, we've done that. Was it a Summer of Loud Festival last year in the amphitheatre, the Georgia amphitheatre here in Austin? And we were backstage and we got all the cool passes and there were all of these like cool metal chicks walking around. And then a couple came over and sat down next to us. What the fuck were we talking about? I swear it was something like this. There was some debate that we were having and these girls sat down from a distance. And we had a couple of our kind of like super chatty mates with us. Keegan was with us, right? Who's essentially like proper Roman Adonis, not you, La.

• 1:06:03George Mack?

  The Chad's Chad.

• 1:06:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's the Chad's Chad. And these women come over and obviously look thinking, what are they going to be talking about? It's going to be so cool and sexy. And they came over and they were talking about how we all come from a conversion rate optimisation background. And the blended NCPA of our Facebook ads manager could be doing with a little bit of improvement. Well, tell me, how many are split testing on the backend? It's interesting. I'm not sure if Opus 5.5 is actually going to be as good as people expect. And they just slowly over time got this look of, it's probably, it wasn't boredom, it was closer to disgust. It was like watching somebody desecrate a beautiful temple. Because what they saw was this amazing potential in Keegan, this beautiful man. But the way that he was handling himself and what he was talking about.

• 1:06:48George Mack?

  The biggest takeaway I always get whenever I'm on a friend's birthday or a bachelor party, there'll be a moment where I'll just start chuckling to myself. The, often it will be, somebody might have a girlfriend, like one of the guys in the, will have like a new relationship where she's been like really wary about him going to this birthday party or bachelor party. Meanwhile, it's me in a one hour debate at dinner, talking about whether Ruud van Nistelrooy was a better footballer than Thierry Henry. Like that's what they don't see. Or like Jim, Jim Shark's negative cash flow conversion cycle. I think if a lot of guys, girlfriends or wives could see, that they have this imagination that there's going to be all this chaos and these girls that are coming over and the strip club.

• 1:07:32George Mack?

  Meanwhile, it's usually a Google sheet or Excel formulas.

• 1:07:35Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's us trying to track down that guy that bought the cigars and opened up the Strait of Hormuz by sneaking himself in, into the middle of Iran. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wonder if it might be inverse, it might be the fact that the guys that you don't think are getting up to naughty shit while they're away probably are.

• 1:07:55George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:07:56Chris Williamson?

  And the guys that you don't think are getting, the guys that you think are getting up to it aren't, they're the ones that are talking about how they come from a conversion rate optimisation background. Yeah, very, very important. By the way, if you're coming to the UK and Ireland tour later this year, I'm going to be bringing some of you up on stage to answer your questions. So if you've got a question or a story that you think would be worth me talking about, you can go to chriswilliamson.live/questions and give me your questions and I'll be picking the best ones and you can join me on tour. So. 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.

• 1:08:41Chris Williamson?

  Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged and you get clear explanations with a personalised 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, 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

• 1:09:26Chris Williamson?

  at checkout.

• 1:09:27George Mack?

  Little question for you.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:09:29George Mack?

  I can't pronounce this word, but I'm going to give it a go. Have you heard of, I think it's hypo, hypo manetta?

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:09:39George Mack?

  So I got it from my friend Henrik Carlsen, who has this wonderful Substack. And during my era, the either ancient Greek or Roman era, it's very different to what it was today. So we have this kind of bombardment of new information. We're constantly scrolling social media. I'm sure you have this where you'll see this amazing pithy tweet or you'll read something incredible and your life's going to change forever after from this point onwards. And then three months later, you see the thing again, you go, I completely forgot about that. And it had no impact at all. So what the ancient Greeks or the Romans used to do would be, they would have a book of all these insights that they'd collected. And each morning, they would think of a problem that they're facing and they would go and

• 1:10:24George Mack?

  meditate on the specific passage or the specific quote. So what I was actually, this is where my question.

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  Question.

• 1:10:32George Mack?

  Question kicks in is, let's say you was to have that little notepad, notebook of lessons that you often forget or simply just wish that you took more seriously, that you would look at each day, what is on your list?

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  So what is, what are the most known but not followed?

• 1:10:59George Mack?

  Not necessarily not followed by other people. It could just be, or it could even be followed by yourself, just not as much. You always underpriced this lesson. You wish you took it more seriously.

• 1:11:15Chris Williamson?

  Something like no amount of worrying is going to make any difference to what happens. Some lesson along those lines, because worrying is very addictive. It's very addictive because it feels like making progress. Homosy, once, when I started doing investing, he gave me this really wonderful piece of advice on a call. And he said, the most dangerous calls in all of business are just calling to connect. Would just love to, would just love to explain the business to you. So, because they have all of the trappings of doing work and making progress, but never result in work being done. You need to join that sequence further down the line, once more scrutiny is being done.

• 1:11:58Chris Williamson?

  Like the first stage, second stage, this is why I think in order to end up in front of him to do acquisition.com, you're 10 stages deep into the circle of hell. And worrying kind of feels like the same thing, although it's not as conscious, you're not doing, because you think that it's going to, you forget, this is not moving my situation forward. No amount of anxiety is going to change the outcome. No amount of worrying is going to actually make a difference to anything that happens. And ultimately, all of your worries were a waste of time in any case.

• 1:12:27George Mack?

  There's a great book, the, like, book of stories of interviewing all people about their lives. And one of them, she said, what was one of your best lessons you ever had? And she goes, I had this like nightmare thing that I was ruminating on worrying about. So I called one of my friends and I tell her, I just kept spilling and telling everything that I'm worried about. And she goes, do you remember six months ago when you came to me about this nightmare worry that you had? And she names it back. She goes, no, I don't. And she goes, exactly. Just hung up. She goes, it was one of the best lessons of my life. I was like, oh, this thing is going to be here today and then gone tomorrow.

• 1:13:09George Mack?

  I also saw this humorous statistic, which was, they had people apparently with generalized anxiety disorder, put down their worries and then they tracked how many of them came true. And it was found that 91.6% didn't come true.

• 1:13:26Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:13:27George Mack?

  But if you have true anxiety, you start wondering, well, what about that? What about that remaining 8.4%?

• 1:13:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:35George Mack?

  That's, that's real anxiety right there.

• 1:13:38Chris Williamson?

  I'm in the 8.4%. I knew that I would be in the 8.4%.

• 1:13:41George Mack?

  There was another guy who helped Lewis Capaldi of anxiety. I think he wrote a book called Addicted to Anxiety. And he apparently once cured somebody of their anxiety, like removed a lot of the issues. And they rang them the next day saying, I'm anxious, where's my anxiety gone? It's like almost this addiction that exists.

• 1:14:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was talking to Joe Hudson yesterday and there's a bunch of stuff that's maybe exciting, or that is exciting that's happening. I shouldn't hedge the fact that this thing is maybe exciting. Bunch of stuff going on that's exciting. And I was like, I'm a little, I'm unsure how to navigate this preamble, this, the buildup toward the buildup. And he said, if I was your coach, obviously he is, it's like, if I was your coach, I would tell you that you need to work on your pleasure anxiety, which is that being excited about something in advance often feels an awful lot like anxiety. And they're very, very close. What would it be for you? What would the lesson be that you most repeatedly come back to?

• 1:14:40George Mack?

  Oh, you know, one would be David Ogilvy's line of, you think you're advertising to a standing army, but you are actually advertising to a moving parade.

• 1:14:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:54George Mack?

  So in the niche world of advertising, Ogilvy applies it in the sense that he would work with these huge brands. And these huge brands would be like, why are we still running this ad? I've seen it everywhere. And it's like, nobody else has seen things the way you've seen them. But what I love about that idea is, it's not just necessarily ad campaigns, it applies to, we constantly observe ourselves significantly more than anybody else is observing us. So it's this standing army versus moving parade.

• 1:15:16Chris Williamson?

  And how does that relate to you?

• 1:15:18George Mack?

  Well, okay. So like a little one, right? So I put together this list recently of all the best books that I've read and I'll post it out there, hi agency.com forward slash books for people listening. I'll post it out there and I will then think about, oh, I don't necessarily want to post it again, people have already seen it. But on the 17th post, somebody go, oh, I've just found this. And often it's the case that nobody has fucking seen it. It's always a moving parade. So that's one lesson.

• 1:15:49Chris Williamson?

  There's a legendary story in advertising circles about auto magnate Henry Ford. He had a layout of the company's latest print ad tacked to his wall, which he saw every time he came into his office. One day, he loudly announced that he was tired of the ad. It was high time to create a new one. But Mr. Ford, his assistant stammered, that hasn't even started running yet. It's only natural for a client to get tired of an ad long before its intended audience does. So how can you determine when it's time to change your campaign?

• 1:16:16George Mack?

  And they'll see this when, when, this is particularly British syndrome. I don't think Americans struggle with this as much, but when a Brit will do some new creative endeavor, do a business, do anything, they almost feel past the first initial ask to follow up. It's very un-British, Christopher.

• 1:16:37Chris Williamson?

  Were you friends with me when I made gas your friends up my tagline for a couple of years?

• 1:16:41George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:16:42Chris Williamson?

  That would have been at the start of our friendship.

• 1:16:43George Mack?

  I believe I was gassed.

• 1:16:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you were. You've actually been probably the most gassed of all of my friends about everything I've done. But yeah, I just had this line that if you support Rihanna's new single more than your friend's new business, you're a bad friend. It's so fucking true. Like gas your friends up, dude. Buy their shit, support them, share their work, tell them they're doing good. Like obviously don't encourage them to do something which is horrendous and give them feedback, but like, at the very least, you can support it. They've done something in their, buy the fucking ticket, go to the show, support your friends.

• 1:17:13George Mack?

  It's very memetic though, right? You kind of have, someone needs to begin. It's like having, it's like having an open emotionally intimate relationship until somebody opens up, it's difficult.

• 1:17:24Chris Williamson?

  No, I mean more that I think one of the reasons why you have less of that is that people see sometimes their friends weirdly as rivals, because they have more similarities in common with them.

• 1:17:36George Mack?

  Narcissism of small differences. Maybe, but I think, I think my point still stands, which is

• 1:17:45Chris Williamson?

  if you want your friends to support you more, a great way to do that is to start supporting your friends. Now, it's another Joe Hudsonism when it comes to communicating, that if you show up in your relationship differently, after about six, like very differently, there is a typical flow that you and your partner go through. They get to be the bully and you get to be the victim. Or they get to be the victim and you get to be the savior. There is a dance, a sort of tone or rhythm to the way that you communicate. And if, when that happens, you show up in a very different way, presumably a much more positive way, more regulated, more calm, more peaceful, more empathetic.

• 1:18:25Chris Williamson?

  It only takes seven times of you doing that, they'll notice after the first time. After the next few, they'll really notice. After about seven times, on average, he said, their pattern just can't continue. It's like playing tennis with the other person not hitting the ball back. So if you want to change the situation that you're in, the best thing to do is change your own behavior.

• 1:18:48George Mack?

  That's beautiful. It's cool. That would be on my list. What else would you have on your list?

• 1:18:57Chris Williamson?

  Your default choices are almost always wrong. Like if you don't step into your programming and just think a little, and this is where the rumination trap comes in, because you think, oh, thinking's good for me. Let's do an infinite amount. Let's do an infinite amount of it. No, it's like you need to do just a little bit. You need to practice something before you end up relying on instinct. At least that's, that's a lesson that keeps coming back to me, that most of your defaults are confused chemical signals coming from your body, or social norms, or paths of least resistance, or the way that you've dealt with past trauma.

• 1:19:41Chris Williamson?

  Almost all of those are not things that you consciously chosen.

• 1:19:45George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:19:46Chris Williamson?

  Like the things that you want aren't the things that you want to want. If you don't take some time designing your desires, you end up following the path that everyone else does. And like outsourcing your wisdom to the group is usually a bad idea.

• 1:20:00George Mack?

  Even what you said then around the questioning the first thought, assuming the first thought isn't necessarily you. I always go back to that wonderful meditation exercise of, what's the next thought going to be?

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you sit there, try it now, if anybody, where you sit there and you just ask yourself, I'm not going to think, but let's just see what the next thought appears is. You just become the watcher. And I find, when I did that for the first time, it was simply the Bayern Munich player, Iron Robin, cutting in on his left foot. And then it's like, huh, why is that there? I haven't thought of him in a long, long time. And you begin to realize a lot of it is just an automatic response.

• 1:20:46George Mack?

  What else do you like from meditation questions? I know that's one of your favorites. What are some of the other ones that have been really resonant with you?

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  The problem with talking about meditation is firstly, you're like a wanker.

• 1:21:03George Mack?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:21:04Chris Williamson?

  But.

• 1:21:05George Mack?

  It's very late for that.

• 1:21:09Chris Williamson?

  So that, you've got to, you've got to address that upfront. The second problem is, have you ever heard, there's this great line where, when, what happens is, learning meditation, it's kind of like learning Japanese, and then you go and tell everybody how wonderful it is, but you do so in Japanese. So that's why when you read anything about it, it almost doesn't make sense. A cool one is to try and turn awareness in on itself. Have you ever tried that? Where you think of your awareness and then you try and become aware of it. And it's almost like this mirror and you go, oh shit. That's quite scary.

• 1:21:47George Mack?

  That's one of Sam's like quick hit things, where you try and catch your own awareness quickly. It's kind of strange, because most of the time when you're doing any meditation or mindfulness, it's this evolving, it's slow, but this is more like trying to get an animal in a trap, except the animal is you and the trap is also you. Anyway, George Mack, ladies and gentlemen, love you all. Thank you very much for tuning in. Where should people go?

• 1:22:13Chris Williamson?

  Hi agency.com forward slash books. Read them.

• 1:22:17George Mack?

  Heck yeah. All right. Goodbye, my beauties.

• 1:22:20Chris Williamson?

  Dude, yes.

• 1:22:21George Mack?

  Let's go.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  Hi there, I am fully charged and here to tell you, Toy Story 5 is now on Disney Plus.

• 1:22:30Speaker 05

  It's been too long, cowboy.

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  Woody, Buzz and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part, it's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney Plus, rated PG.