The Uber Eats To OnlyFans Pipeline

In the second edition of this new experimental episode format, we explore: - If Kratom is more addictive than heroin - What the latest and greatest life hacks are - Who actually is the highest-earning athlete in history - and much more… Guests: - Gary Faust is a comedian and writer. - Shaan Puri is an entrepreneur, former CEO, podcaster and an angel investor. - George Mack is a writer, marketer and entrepreneur. - Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com⁠⁠ - 0:00 Peanuts in Coke… Is This a Good Idea? 2:19 The Most Ridiculous Paycheck in Sports History 5:53 Is the Mainstream Media Overhyped? 13:45 UK vs the Roman Empire: Who’s Actually Better? 16:31 Would Claude Beat Grok in a Fight? 17:38 Is the LGBTQ+ Acronym Getting Out of Hand? 23:42 Why No One Takes Mental Health Seriously Anymore 27:26 Is Kratom More Addictive Than Heroin? 38:19 What Can DNA Testing Reveal About You? 46:09 Do You Remember Every Porn Video You’ve Ever Watched? 49:18 The Ultimate Trick to Boost Uber Eats Tips 51:48 The Peak Bachelor Pad Setup 53:38 Are Norwegian Prisoners Living Better Than Us? 55:44 The Analyst Who Sounded the Alarm on Hormuz 01:00:20 Are Gay Relationships a CIA Strategy? 01:05:14 Is Flighty the Greatest Life Hack? 01:08:08 Can We Trust Studies Anymore? 01:12:17 Is California Trying to Bury Fraud? 01:18:04 Do Your Game Choices Define You? 01:23:13 Are Likes and Views Changing How We Consume Content? 01:34:19 Does Everyone in the UK Know the King? 01:40:05 Could a Dinner Have Stopped WWII? 01:41:55 FTX’s Painful Anthropic Fumble 01:47:53 Does Momentum Suffocate Talent? 01:52:28 What If Ja Rule Co-Founded Apple? 01:53:19 How Supernormal Stimuli Hijack Your Brain 01:59:23 The Burning Monk and the Extremes of the Human Mind 02:03:29 Why Everyone’s Dooming About AI 02:06:18 Could AI Replace Doctors? 02:11:19 The Craziest One-Day Price Move 02:13:07 Is AI Learning From Indian Factories? 02:17:12 Wait… His Dad’s in the Rock Hall of Fame?! - 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?

  George, you're a connoisseur of beverages. Would you say so? As you open another carbonated beverage. Well, gentlemen. Cheers. Oh, have you ever had full fat Coke with salted peanuts in it? No.

• 0:12Shaan Puri?

  I have not.

• 0:13Chris Williamson?

  Say less. Take a glass. Okay. Take a Coke, take a peanut. So there's a viral tweet that goes out about 30 years ago, I read in a Haruki Murakami essay that in America, it's popular to drink cola with peanuts in it. I just went, huh. And a long time passed since then, but I finally tried it. What the hell is this? It's ridiculously delicious. No kidding. It's at a level where I don't want to drink cola any other way anymore. So we are going to drink.

• 0:42Shaan Puri?

  Have you before? Or are we gonna find that?

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  I saved this. I saw that and I've been edging myself with fucking cola and peanuts since then. Is there an order you have to do this on? I think. Shit.

• 0:53Shaan Puri?

  That's crazy, right?

• 0:54Chris Williamson?

  Peanuts first. Peanuts first seems more insane. Yeah, it's like cereal. I've, I've, I've blown my load early. Hold on. Okay.

• 1:01Chris Williamson?

  Peanuts in Coke is the most accidentally perfect food pairings in history. The chemistry explains why this guy can't go back. Coca-Cola sits at pH 2.5, roughly the same acidity as stomach acid. What, what's awful about?

• 1:13Shaan Puri?

  We need to show the camera what this looks like. It does not look as good as that.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  But look at how much it's, look at how much it's fizzing. Anyway, there's a load of signs. Salt on the peanuts suppresses the bitter taste receptors on your tongue, which amplifies your perception of the sweetness you can, without adding a single gram of sugar. The carbonation does two things. CO2 dissolved in liquid forms carbonic acid, which, wait. So I think we need to leave it. So we're gonna, we're gonna have, we're gonna set this down. We'll come back to it. We'll come back to it in like, I don't know.

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  Honestly, the original Coke like this alone already would have blown my mind.

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Shaan Puri?

  I haven't had, have you like had this? This is like, this is kratom. This is actually kratom.

• 1:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Jared, you need, you need this. Don't forget. You're gonna have a high, high potency on yours unless you fill it up. Anyway, so this is, this is, you're a better connoisseur of beverages, especially sparkling ones. This is my.

• 2:01Shaan Puri?

  Should we take a starter sip?

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  No, I think we wait. I think we wait. We're gonna wait for a little bit and then come back to it. And this doesn't get you high or anything? Well, no. It's the only thing that you're interested in. He's no longer interested.

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, I'm interested in other things as well.

• 2:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay, all right. What does it do?

• 2:19Chris Williamson?

  Question. Question. Who do you think is the highest paid athlete of all time?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I know the answer to this.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well done.

• 2:28Shaan Puri?

  One year, all time?

• 2:30Chris Williamson?

  All time. All time, who's the highest paid athlete?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Um.

• 2:33George Mack?

  Michael Jordan.

• 2:34Shaan Puri?

  Ronaldo, Messi, they come to mind.

• 2:37Chris Williamson?

  Michael Jordan will be second.

• 2:39George Mack?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  Tiger Woods, third.

• 2:42George Mack?

  Joey Chasten.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  Arnold Palmer, Bonnie Blue, actually, it's probably, it depends what sport you're talking.

• 2:48George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49George Mack?

  Per, per competition.

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  Real endurance.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Can I throw in a guess out there?

• 2:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  There was a Roman chariot racer who allegedly made over a billion dollars.

• 2:59Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  You owes Poland, because you just, you just predicted what he was gonna say.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  History teacher.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, kratom does crazy things to your mind.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  Gaius Apuleius Diocles. So, Michael Jordan has earned 1.8 billion. Tiger Woods, 1.7 billion. Arnold Palmer, 1.4 billion. Jack Nicklaus, 1.2 billion.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Oh, it was 15 billion.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

  15 billion dollars in today's money. He basically won 35,863,120 sesteris. By some estimation, over 15 billion dollars in 2011.

• 3:34George Mack?

  And that's pure income from the sport? So I assume, because back then, there's probably no sponsorship.

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  No sponsorship, no.

• 3:40Shaan Puri?

  Not a shoe deal.

• 3:40George Mack?

  Hashtag ad, yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Shield deal?

• 3:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder who could have, I wonder who could have offset his Bode Seer budget?

• 3:48George Mack?

  Wow.

• 3:49Chris Williamson?

  15 billion, dude. And the tweet says, eat shit, Michael Jordan, you

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I saw that same thing. That's why I knew that.

• 3:59Chris Williamson?

  That's what I've, that's what I've contributed. That's what I've contributed.

• 4:01Shaan Puri?

  You did kind of ruin it by knowing the answer, but let that slide.

• 4:04Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 4:05Shaan Puri?

  Did you, do we have a photo of this guy? Because like?

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  Uh, just search that dude, Jared. The fucking Gaius Apuleius Diocles. I'm sure you can spell that.

• 4:12George Mack?

  Because it's, it's fascinating coming from the UK to the US and seeing how Europe is kind of criticized as being like a socialist place and the US is seen as this

• 4:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:23George Mack?

  capitalist place. Meanwhile, our sports are more, way more capitalist and you, I still don't understand how US sports work, where you have, because I went to go watch a Miami Heat game and I searched the guy's salaries and one guy's on like 50 million and then the rest are on like his entire salary combined, which is absurd.

• 4:41Shaan Puri?

  And he can't make more than that, it's capped.

• 4:43George Mack?

  Huh.

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  Which is un-American, right?

• 4:45George Mack?

  But yeah, why, why? And then you have the whole, um, like draft at the end of the season where whoever finished last gets rewarded the most. Like, it's the most un-American thing, yeah.

• 4:54Chris Williamson?

  It's very communist approach to this.

• 4:56George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  All right, should we drink this Coke?

• 4:57George Mack?

  Okay, let's go.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  It's been staring at me. All right, cheers, gentlemen.

• 4:59Shaan Puri?

  Cheers, cheers, cheers.

• 5:00George Mack?

  Fuck it.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 5:02George Mack?

  I fuck that, mate.

• 5:04George Mack?

  Fuck that.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Sweet and salty.

• 5:06Chris Williamson?

  Tastes quite a lot like Coke.

• 5:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, tastes like Coke, but then I ate the peanuts.

• 5:09George Mack?

  Yeah, it's the, um.

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  Which was nice.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  You know what it tastes like? Coke with peanuts.

• 5:15Shaan Puri?

  It did not change the flavor at all for me.

• 5:17Chris Williamson?

  It's less, um.

• 5:18Shaan Puri?

  Let it sit longer.

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  It's less different. May- maybe we need to.

• 5:20George Mack?

  I think it's more the aesthetic.

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you think that we're, we're, this is an art piece?

• 5:25George Mack?

  Yes, like even, even if you made a, um.

• 5:28Chris Williamson?

  It looks like what happens if you've eaten too much Mexican food.

• 5:30George Mack?

  Yeah, if you add the best Michelin's. Yes.

• 5:37Chris Williamson?

  Just looks so much like there's too much fucking.

• 5:41George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Shaan Puri?

  I do enjoy chewing while drinking Coke, so that's good. That's a positive.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna keep going with that.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, what if you? I mean, couldn't you choke on the peanuts?

• 5:51Chris Williamson?

  That's always a risk.

• 5:52George Mack?

  Yeah. I have a question for the group that I wanted to ask people on.

• 5:58George Mack?

  Bullish or bearish on certain trends? So I kind of want to know, um, trends that are big right now in society or aren't big right now that you think should be bigger. So just give me, um, things that people, uh, may be particularly, um, popular about right now that you think don't deserve to be and vice versa.

• 6:15Chris Williamson?

  Overpriced and underpriced.

• 6:16George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Chris Williamson?

  Okay, uh, there are things overhyped at the moment. I want to say AI, but then it's probably going to change the fucking world. I just feel sick of hearing about it.

• 6:26George Mack?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:27Chris Williamson?

  I'm kind of sick of hearing permanently about how it's going to be the end of everything or the beginning of everything.

• 6:32George Mack?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:32Chris Williamson?

  And there's no one that's in the middle. There's no one that's like, yeah, AI is pretty cool. It's people who are complete doomers or just like David Friedberg.

• 6:40George Mack?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:40Chris Williamson?

  Like, there's only two ends of the barbell.

• 6:42George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 6:42Chris Williamson?

  But I, I would quite like AI to chill out a little bit in terms of everyone talking about it.

• 6:47George Mack?

  Well, I guess we've never lived through a mania like this. I guess the nearest one would have been the internet. Crypto with NFTs was a little bit, but it was different.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  Crypto with NFTs was fucking hard, dude. That would have been top of my list.

• 6:59George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 7:00Shaan Puri?

  But I think a lot of sensible people were skeptical about NFTs for sure, aspects of crypto. Whereas I feel like. You know, AI right now, I mean, even the people who are doomers, they're not saying AI sucks. They're saying it's too powerful. It's either this is so powerful, life is going to be amazing. Or this is so powerful, life is like over for us. And nobody's really, nobody really like, hey, this is, ah, this is a flash in the pan. Like in the early internet, there's famous articles where it's like, the internet won't amount to anything. This is a fancy fax machine. There's, you know, there's articles you can go pull up now and mock people. I feel like with AI, we kind of all know.

• 7:41Chris Williamson?

  What about you? What do you think?

• 7:42George Mack?

  I'm getting really into metaverse real estate. It's, it's the place, now's the time to get in. So I'm buying up a lot of land. I've got a place next to Snoop Dogg.

• 7:50Chris Williamson?

  This feels a little bit like kicking a dead body whilst it's on the ground and saying that you killed it. Do you know what I mean? You can't say the metaverse is overhyped when it's already dead. You know that Simpsons meme where it's like, stop, stop, he's already dead.

• 8:04George Mack?

  Don't see you hanging a board, A, popping, do you? So there you go.

• 8:07Chris Williamson?

  Why do you talk about your crypto?

• 8:08George Mack?

  You know, here, here's actually a weird one that I was, I did all right on that toad. Did all right on that toad, baby. All right.

• 8:17George Mack?

  You can look it up on chain as well, actually. So there's no, there's no fraud there. There's no lies. You can, you can verify my NFT activity. Good stuff. You know, one that I'm weirdly, because I was thinking about, there's lots of stuff you could say where it's almost trite, right? So you go, AI is going to change the world. And it's like, most people will probably agree with that. So therefore it's kind of a neutral statement. And I was thinking, well, what are people, what's cliched to be bearish on right now? And then what's the bullish take for that? My two big ones are number one, the mainstream media. I'm ridiculously bullish in the next five years on the very, the mainstream media has, which is like the, oh, it's kind of like, don't go to college kind of statement. Whereas it's kind of saying almost the opposite now of go to college.

• 8:57George Mack?

  Mainstream media in particular, this is, it's almost like they have the highest value audience in the world. Because nobody I know listens to mainstream media, and that's kind of part of the joke, except Donald Trump, except Keir Starmer, except Macron. Like, we was at dinner the other night, won't say who, but it was somebody who used to work in the Cabinet in the UK. And one of my favorite questions to ask people, apart from that question previously, is when you meet somebody who knows a lot about the industry of, you've worked in this thing for ages, what do like laymans like me just not appreciate that's really fascinating on the inside? And he paused for a while to answer the question about what it's like being inside Number 10.

• 9:37George Mack?

  And the thing he reiterated was how much of the conversation is shifted by what's on the BBC or what's on the Guardian. And you kind of see this with Trump a little bit now when he'll address, he'll know like each news reporter by name. But it's like meanwhile, nobody reads this, nobody consumes this, but it still has such an impact on policy.

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  You've got little rivalries with, oh, that's such and such from the lame times or whatever. I'm like, what the f-

• 10:01George Mack?

  Yes. And likewise, in Number 10, the amount of reactionary time just goes to what's on the headlines, that nobody's reading really, apart from a few geriatric 65-year-olds. Therefore, there's still, it's kind of weirdly underpriced.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's, there's always going to be prestige in the mainstream media because there's a limited amount of time and a limited amount of space. Anybody can make a YouTube channel, which is awesome and subversive and rebellious and whatever. But also, that means anyone can make it. So there's no prestige associated with doing it. There's only 24 hours in the day on CBS. So if you get 15 minutes of that day, implicitly you're being given something. There's a kind of prestige with it. That being said, has anyone ever watched Discovery Life?

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever seen Discovery Life? Discovery Channel Life?

• 10:46George Mack?

  No.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  So I'm fucking training in the gym and there's so many different TV screens, brand new gym. So apparently everybody needs to watch, it's like a three-year-old playing Subway Surfer whilst watching TikTok at the same time. So fucking screens everywhere. And I'm looking over and there's a lovely lady on TV, black lady, like nicely dressed, floral, floral outfit thing. And she is having one of her own fingernails extracted from behind.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  Her own ear, like at 10 a.m. in the morning. Discovery Life is an American cable television network. The channel primarily focuses on reality programming, dealing with life events. It's programming targets, female audience, blah, blah. It is fucking medical emergencies at 10:00 in the morning. And I'm watching this like five inch long pair of tweezers extract this very nice lady's fingernail from behind her own fucking eardrum. I'm like, I'm trying to do bicep curls and it cut from that to the next one. And it was someone's ribs being punctured. Fucking 10:30 in the morning, only in America would it be like healthcare has become basically a competitive sport now that you can fucking broadcast on the internet.

• 12:01Chris Williamson?

  So I feel like this is the sort of thing you would have watched at an after party.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  No, I've never seen that.

• 12:07George Mack?

  I had this realization, I'm trying to find it now, but I wrote about it ages ago, which was, I was once similar to you in the gym, working out and the news was on. And it was just like, this number of people have died in Ukraine today. This number of people have died in Gaza today. And then take these pills. And I imagined it of like, if this was a bloke that was in the gym that was saying this, or it was a friend, I'd be like, I'm never speaking to you ever again. And it's like, when you begin to personalize it like that, it's just, you view it so differently.

• 12:43Chris Williamson?

  Except it would be a guy that was shouting it to the entire room.

• 12:46George Mack?

  Yes.

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

  He wouldn't even be saying it to you specifically. He'd just be saying, this black lady had her fingernail caught behind her eardrum. Do you want me to tell you about the lady that took it out of her?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Well, I work out at Planet Fitness, so we have people.

• 12:59Chris Williamson?

  You've actually seen this happen live?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's like hopeless people in there wigging out while we're, while we're all trying to get fit and it's good motivation.

• 13:09Chris Williamson?

  To be able to run away.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  And that's about all it is. It's a holy shit, I need to make more money and work out somewhere else.

• 13:13Shaan Puri?

  Is it Planet Fitness, like with your membership comes like free pizza or something?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Dude, yeah, yeah.

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

  Pizza slice station at the gym?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you don't get the pills, but you do get a tootsie roll. It is, it's embarrassing, dude. I, I need to get a different gym.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  I, dude, it's interesting that you say that, though, about being bullish on mainstream media, because they've basically have hit the basement in terms of really everything. So there's no way you could think they're gonna do worse, in my opinion.

• 13:43Shaan Puri?

  You couldn't be more bearish.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you're correct.

• 13:46George Mack?

  Well, I'll give you another, I'm hitting the basement right now. One that I would buy the shit out of is the United Kingdom. Everybody right now, the UK, literally, I think, yesterday, the news came out around. It's like the worst economic change in terms of the bond rating. Like, the doom and gloom around the UK is so strong right now. But you just go, it's with a goat.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, are you gonna say never bet against the UK?

• 14:08George Mack?

  No, no, no, long term, yes, long term, yes. Just from, just from, even if they do nothing again, just from a pure IP perspective, like, just what you have, like, I was getting in an argument today with Claude in the car. And sometimes I'll like bounce between Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok, that's my like hat.

• 14:23Chris Williamson?

  That's like, that's like when one of your side pieces won't put out.

• 14:30Chris Williamson?

  You pivot to another.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Holy shit, that's accurate.

• 14:32Chris Williamson?

  I went, I went to dad and he said, no, mom.

• 14:36George Mack?

  Well, I posed the question to Claude, and I'm interested in your guys' take on this, of who's had more, who's more impactful to the world, the Roman Empire or United Kingdom? And I think it's the United Kingdom, pound for pound, I think, pound for pound. We're one third the size of Texas. And like, who can, who, who's managed to do this level of output that we've managed to do? Which is a very un-British thing to say.

• 14:57Chris Williamson?

  Really living on fucking borrowed time, though, man.

• 14:58George Mack?

  No, not really, not really.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  When was the last thing we did that was cool?

• 15:02George Mack?

  Deep Mind, AI, like, the whole AI industry comes out of essentially London.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  How many people do you think know that?

• 15:08George Mack?

  This is it, we're basically the technical, the way of viewing UK to the US is like, we're the technical guy that makes no money and comes up with all the ideas, and then these guys are just great at sales and marketing. Like, you can do AI, essentially, the UK, you could do Tim Berners-Lee, the internet, you could do, I mean, I don't know if this is fully true, but, because maybe he's such a genius, that he thought this through, Bitcoin white paper written in British English, the correct English.

• 15:33Shaan Puri?

  Oh, come on, we don't know who he is.

• 15:35George Mack?

  We don't know who he is, but there's a little bit, there's a little bit of something that.

• 15:39Chris Williamson?

  All of a sudden, he did.

• 15:41George Mack?

  But like, if you look at, um, yeah, if you want to keep going back, I always had this thing of if God had, um, like top trumps of greatest country. And like each country tries to play their hand. It's, the UK is a very tough one to compete with.

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  Very dwindling though. Like when you think about what the market's trend is at the moment.

• 15:58George Mack?

  Newtonian physics still.

• 16:00Shaan Puri?

  He's been on mainstream.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking 500 years old.

• 16:03George Mack?

  But if you, I'm talking about the history of civilization, Roman Empire, what the Italians doing, but the Roman Empire still gets a lot of credit these days. But I just think, um, going back to the question, um, I'm bullish on the UK, um, just, just in terms of pure IP, um, and impact on the world.

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  But bullish would suggest that you'd invest in it.

• 16:21George Mack?

  Yes.

• 16:22Chris Williamson?

  What, with money?

• 16:24George Mack?

  I put it all into the metaverse. I've got the.

• 16:27Shaan Puri?

  Metaverse, CNN.

• 16:30George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  Bridgerton.

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:31Shaan Puri?

  What do you think about Claude?

• 16:33George Mack?

  What do you mean?

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  Do you like it?

• 16:34George Mack?

  The AI?

• 16:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 16:35George Mack?

  I personally think each, each different AI, slightly different. So I'll use, what, you might know if somebody's created this yet. What I want, and I kind of vibe did this, but I couldn't be bothered actually turning it into a product, which I just want a group chat. Where I can post something in there, they all reply, and then they roast one another back and forth.

• 16:51Chris Williamson?

  It's a GAN, isn't it? General Adversarial Network.

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  That's what that's called.

• 16:55Shaan Puri?

  Look at the big brain on credit. That was amazing.

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, big, big fucking, that's it. Um, uh, Jim O'Shaughnessy's got it for his super crazy fucking AI thing. And, uh, he said, yeah, they can get all of the different models to argue with each other behind the scenes and then whoever has the best answer for this one, does it?

• 17:12Shaan Puri?

  When you use Grok, they show it. So that if you use like heavy Grok or super Grok or whatever Elon calls it. You ask a question and Agent One pops up, he starts talking, I think what he wants to know is blah, blah, blah. Agent Two comes in, but. Right. Well, that wouldn't really be fully accurate. He should really be thinking about this. Agent Three, and it'll show up to. The thought process. Fifteen or sixteen agents, basically like.

• 17:30Chris Williamson?

  Within the same AI. What you're talking about is you want Claude arguing with ChatGPT, arguing with fucking Opus, arguing with.

• 17:37George Mack?

  Like literally a group chat.

• 17:38Chris Williamson?

  Jared, pull up that New York Post article that I sent you. Stressed Gen Z is carrying around anxiety bags with tools to calm their nerves. Hannah Fowles was spiraling. It'd been a grueling day at work. And by the time the 22 year old from Provo, Utah got home, panic was bubbling in her chest and thoughts raced as her cheeks flushed red. I was starting to get super overheated. I couldn't calm myself down, Fowles told the Post. Nothing that I normally do like breathing exercises or lying down in a dark room is working. Then she saw the bag.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  Just weeks earlier, Fowles and her therapist had put together a small grab and go kit filled with items to calm her when anxiety strikes. And she flicked on a small portable fan, letting the cool air wash over her face, pressed a cold pack to the back of her neck, while on the other hand, she gripped a spiky fidget toy, feeling its prongs stay into her palm as the panic began to ebb. Now, I know what you want to do. What you want to do is make fun of these people for having, look, how it's an EDC bug-out bag that like military guys have, but for Gen Z, Gen Z people, what I want to know, what I want to know is, what would be in your anxiety bag? Gary?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Well, I actually have one of those bags. It's called a bag of drugs, Chris. Thank you for asking me. Uh, yeah, just, uh...

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  Five grams of whole leaf kratom?

• 18:53Speaker 02

  We got kratom, we've got some amphetamines in there, we've got nootonics, we've got Valiums.

• 19:00Chris Williamson?

  Anxiety or just?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I'm just addicted to drugs.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Now, this is, this is, uh, what was the question? I don't think you should make fun of people like this, though, because it's not really their fault that they're being sort of conditioned to have this obsession with mental health. That's my theory.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  That's exactly, that's exactly what I said.

• 19:20Shaan Puri?

  Like, you take DEI. DEI starts from a good place. Hey, we should include more people, we should be more equitable, everyone should get a fair opportunity to shot. But then, these movements can get hijacked. And the movements can get hijacked and stretched into the point where it doesn't really resemble where it started. You guys see this thing with the Canadian politician who was using the LGBTQ acronym?

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  But it was like 14 letters long.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  It's, what is it, murdered and missing women and indigenous women and children, MM, MMISJ?

• 19:46Shaan Puri?

  Did you see this?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Uh-uh.

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  It's a full sentence long.

• 19:50Shaan Puri?

  No, listen to this. She's giving a press conference, and she stands there, and she just with a straight face says she wants to express her, like, you know, condolences or whatever to the MMIWG2SL, there's a number in there, 2SLGBTQQIA plus. And she just says that with a straight face. And then people were like, what the hell was all that? And it's like... Includes like murder victims, murderers.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  Murderers, missing women and children, indigenous people, like two spirit, the two is for two spirit, which is like, yeah. Double sources. A, A is in there, which is asexual. So here it is.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Holy shit, that's long.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  Was released, I was shocked to find out that Prime Minister Carney is cutting $7 billion between Indigenous Services Canada and Crown Indigenous Relations. They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIW G2S LGBTQIA+.

• 20:48George Mack?

  That's impressive, that's impressive.

• 20:49Chris Williamson?

  That was honestly great.

• 20:50George Mack?

  That's really actually, you.

• 20:51Chris Williamson?

  She runs it back.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Indigenous women across this country, indigenous women, girls to S LGBTQIA+?

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it's fucking wild.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  She's not reading off anything.

• 21:03Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 21:03Shaan Puri?

  That's off the dome.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's Eminem. She's like, she's like the fucking Harry Mack of coming up with acronyms. You know that dude that he's like, shout out three words and it's like umbrellas, steaks, shoes? And he like freestyle raps an entire thing about it.

• 21:19George Mack?

  The Jay-Z.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  And they're serious about this too. That's not even a joke.

• 21:21George Mack?

  You know.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  That's what's insane.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  It's not SNL.

• 21:23George Mack?

  But on, on your mental health point, if, this is why this, that it's, but I think what ends up happening is you end up with these swings, you can then have a swing so far the other way.

• 21:34Chris Williamson?

  Overcorrected.

• 21:35George Mack?

  Where it's like, I mean, everybody's known somebody who's taken their own life, right? Like it's a, that side of things is like serious.

• 21:39Chris Williamson?

  Totally.

• 21:40George Mack?

  The problem with a lot of these things is you get to like a lot of the root of human experiences, which is like, ironically, a little bit of that, but so much of it is around the language that we use. And within mental health, you bundled up so much that you bundled up 7 billion individuals and it's become such a black and white top. Whereas I always use the example, like diabetes is quite an interesting one, right? Because you have type one diabetes, which is a genuine medical condition that somebody's had from birth. And then you have type, type two diabetes, which is a little bit more, it's a lot more your choice and your environment. And it feels like you don't have that kind of nuance around that.

• 22:17Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna try and just speedrun my diabetes. This, this is getting better, by the way.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually.

• 22:23Chris Williamson?

  It's getting better. Try it again.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Coke on the nuts?

• 22:25Chris Williamson?

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• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  In studies, this supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying strong into your 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now, you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's timeline.com/modernd wisdom.

• 23:40Chris Williamson?

  And modern wisdom at checkout.

• 23:42George Mack?

  You do have like some of these language hacks that like exist. I always joke that like cybersecurity, nobody takes it serious as an industry because the naming is just awful. And the biggest thing the cybersecurity industry could do is no new technology. If they just branded it as CTIs, like taking it from STIs, like computer transmitted infections. All of a sudden, I'm like, I feel a little bit more

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Dirty.

• 24:04George Mack?

  about it. Likewise, the homeless problem right now, how many people who are homeless, is that the main cause? It's often it'll be some ironically, some serious mental health issue that's going on.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:14George Mack?

  So like the language that we use.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  I've interviewed so many homeless people, dude. Half of them want to be homeless and to be quite frank, I don't really blame them. If you want to go live in the woods, as long as you're not

• 24:24George Mack?

  Why would, why would somebody want to be, why would somebody want to be homeless?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Because they're not being tethered to this system that we're all living within that is currently kind of going down the drain. I mean, I don't, I don't really blame them. That thing that we just pulled up though, is exactly why people aren't taking mental health seriously anymore though, because there's a fucking in that, what's it called? The DSVM3 or whatever, there's a, there's a disease for everything.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  You know, like, for example, when I was growing up, I got diagnosed all sorts of shit, but really I was just a little asshole. And when you, when you start saying, I got ADHD or I'm bipolar, I got borderline, or you got this or that or whatever. You know, I got a, I got a crutch I can lean on for every single fucking shitty thing I do to somebody, which is awesome.

• 25:08Chris Williamson?

  There's a, there's a great, a great line that someone said to me, which was, mental health is both under diagnosed and over diagnosed. There's people who don't have it, that just live through it.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Dude.

• 25:18Chris Williamson?

  And don't know, and people who don't have it, that make it their entire personality.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  All the people that actually have serious mental health problems that I'm at least friends with are mostly undiagnosed. And they're just kind of, you know, wandering through life.

• 25:32Chris Williamson?

  Trying to make do.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, seriously.

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  I, I, I agree with you and I, I think it's easy to be like callous or whatever, like flippant about these, the people that have been diagnosed or self diagnosed or found their sort of mental health become more fragile. They don't want to be fucked. Like they don't, they don't want to be that fragile. They're just trying to hold on to some sense of certainty. And the certainty has now come from their diagnoses rather than their agency. Like they just can't make that thing happen. And they're in a world that seems to pedestalize. You know, I mean, there's even a trend on Instagram of people having their mental health maladies in their bio. You know, like chicks do like Jesus in bio or pronouns. It's, these are my maladies.

• 26:16Chris Williamson?

  Because that's where they're trying to find some sense of identity and they, I don't think they want that.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  It fucking sucks for those people.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  That's because, like I was saying, the same reason homeless people are like, yeah, I'm, I'm checked out of this thing. It's because they don't fit into the system really, because the system's just not working. You know, and I'm using this, this, uh, this system just as like a generality because. It is so massive, but when you have people that are like not fitting into it, they wanna find a community within the other people that are all Not fitting in as well. You know, I mean, it's the same reason why drug addicts all hang out together. And I think drug addiction is another thing that's misdiagnosed. Like, What do you mean misdiagnosed drug addiction? Like, I didn't, I guess I didn't say that well.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  People that are drug addicts, which can, I think, pretty much happen to anybody. Certain people are probably more predisposed to it, but people that are drug addicts get misdiagnosed as having some sort of mental health problem. But really, they're just on drugs and then off of drugs. They're withdrawing, then they're high again. Like when you kicked off at your video guy? Yeah, so the first thing I want to bring to the table for today is kratom.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Kratom is something I've been looking into because there's, I think, sort of an epidemic happening. And there's a video we got here that I can, I can have pulled up. This is the guy I'm working with who I wigged out on the other day because he didn't buy me $10 of kratom. And I quit the doc because of that. Yeah, this stuff's strong. Yeah. Like, so what he's talking about for, to contextualize all this is 7OH is seven hydroxymitrogene, which is one of the, I guess, we could just call it a chemical that's in here. I don't know the science behind it. We're gonna go actually interview a, like a chemist about this stuff. But basically, people are taking kratom, which is sold over the counter at gas stations and head shops. And there's even kratom shops.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  But it is a leaf that's from Southeast Asia that sort of mimics the effects of certain stimulants, but also opioids. It actually, your opioid receptors and SSRIs. And I think, I know a handful of people that have gotten very addicted to it. And they're saying that it is, the withdrawal is worse than heroin, which is Wow. pretty unbelievable, given that heroin withdrawal is horrendous. And that's it there? Yeah, man, I should have brought some for everybody.

• 28:50Shaan Puri?

  But you're just drinking that.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a lower dose than I was.

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  Like you're telling me it's like worse than heroin, but you're just.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  So, so here's the thing though. So there's a difference between, and I'm still in the process of figuring all this out. Um, and it, it literally, yeah. So I was drinking a bunch of this stuff every day for the past month. And then I sort of wigged out of my, my documentary partner. Because we got, yeah, it'll be in the doc, but there's, um, there's, we were at a head shop and I was like, hey dude, let's get some of this. Cratom, I want to test this stuff out. And there's these things, there's seven O H pills, which is. It's like, almost like Percocet, basically. And it's sold over the counter, which is nuts. I mean, I'm not, I'm not bashing it necessarily, but it's interesting. It's sort of the wild west of this drug. And it's not, it's not like it's a new thing. They tried banning this in 2016.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  The reason I'm bringing it up is because we're doing this documentary and I think that we're on the verge of potentially an epidemic with it. Yeah.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  This has been, I, I've seen this in Austin since I basically got here. So there's a few, uh, small glass vials, you know, like a five hour energy.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:55Chris Williamson?

  And there was a company that was making them and one of my friends had another guy who'd been addicted. He'd had whatever the addiction gene is addicted to every different drug throughout his entire life. There's even YouTube channels of these people and they'll say, which drug fucked my life up the most? And they'll just list every drug because they tried everything. They're like, well, coming off LSD was actually not that bad. But I had this period where I was on MDMA every single day for like two months. And that was really, really rough because my serotonin and da, da, da, da, da. And, uh, he said of all of the things that he tried, the hardest to get off of was kratom. And then he knew so much at six in the morning, the sunrise mini mart on whatever fucking South Lamaze Street or something. He was outside like waiting, like waiting for this.

• 30:38Chris Williamson?

  And then this company had taken their, uh, the kratom content without changing the bottling from five grams of whole leaf to two and a half. And he knew. And as soon as he had it, he was like, my fucking kratom's been stepped on. He felt like-

• 30:52Speaker 02

  From the mini mart?

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the sunrise mini mart, it's stepped on, it's whatever, the company that was making this, because these people aren't treating it like a supplement, that it's so psychoactive.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  And okay, the one thing I guess I didn't explain very well is that there's a difference between like the pure kratom leaf powder and the stuff that has the 70H in it, which is the synthesized version. But and the reason I didn't explain that very well is because it's kind of confusing. But kratom leaf itself, I mean, you can still get addicted to it, but the 70H stuff is what's fucking people up.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  For reference, just because I know some, somebody that's addicted to kratom is gonna watch this and be like, that son of a bitch blasphemed my kratom. So that is a-

• 31:32Chris Williamson?

  But the 70H is the really gnarly stuff.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's, I'm gonna get some of those pills and start taking them. But yeah, drinking kratom extract with the 70H in it is basically drinking liquid heroin.

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  What's it feel like?

• 31:43Speaker 02

  It's very interesting. It's very sneaky. So I was drinking it for a month before I really realized how high I was on it.

• 31:49Chris Williamson?

  Have you, you don't-

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Which is heroin. Oh, yeah. I'm from Ohio, dude.

• 31:53Chris Williamson?

  So, um, how, how do they, how do they compare like- 70H?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  H E R I O N.

• 32:01Chris Williamson?

  If you was, if you was personifying them as people, like, how do they, how do they compare the two?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  If it was a party. Kratom to heroin?

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I haven't done high levels of the 70H stuff yet, but comparatively, the kratom drinks that I've been drinking are called Club 13 150 MIT, MIT, which is metragenine. That's the, the drug, I guess. And I was drinking two of those a day, which is, it turns out it's a lot for that, but there's not a lot of 70H in it, from what I understand how it works. So I don't have the full scope yet for you, but I would say that heroin is, you know, you're, you're- You you get really high, you feel great, you get that warm feeling in your stomach. You've taken painkillers before, right?

• 32:44Chris Williamson?

  No, not really, no.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Okay, well, good on you, dude.

• 32:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  You're better than me.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, no, no, don't mean it that way.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Top of the moment.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  Are you are you conscious of the experience as you're doing it?

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know you're high. So the I guess the primary difference would be that when you when you take kratom, or when I have been, I've been, I I just didn't even realize how high I was on this stuff.

• 33:04Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Like, I was kind of just in a daze, but you get sort of that euphoric feeling. And I will say that in in low doses of it, it's sort of more of a stimulant. And then you take more and you're getting more of an opioid, you know, the the painkiller sedative.

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that interesting that the curve, how much you take almost inverts?

• 33:24Speaker 02

  It's a nuanced drug, and I've never really experienced that before, which was one of the things I was gonna say that's it's sort of sneaky. But the other thing is, and maybe this is just me, uh, but I didn't really grasp that I was high as hell on this stuff. And I was uh going in sort of thought loops about things, like we had to get like a video done, right? And I was just sort of pacing around my house, which I pace a lot already when I think or I'm on the phone. But I was just sort of going in these thought loops where I was repeating myself, like kind of even talking to myself.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  A little cyclosy?

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude. And I didn't realize that this was this drug was that strong because it's sold over the counter. And that's already, I already knew from a number of other people who have gotten addicted to it. Cause I did some, you know, put some feelers out there to talk to people. They already told me like, hey, be careful, you're gonna, it's gonna sneak up on you more so than you think.

• 34:16Chris Williamson?

  Are you scared as somebody who's pretty experienced with drugs? Are you scared of the potential of putting yourself into this particular, you're gonna try this 708 thing? And it's gonna be amazing for the doc and it's gonna teach you a lot and you're gonna be able to empathize with the people that are struggling with this. But you are putting your health and life on the line. I'm aware you've done it in other ways a lot, but like this, I don't know, it feels like a pretty big dice roll to do that. Is that something that you consider?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  No, I'm I'm not really worried about it. I mean, what's gonna happen? I'm gonna have to just.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  Detox?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean. I'm gonna go to Thailand and see where this stuff comes from now.

• 34:50George Mack?

  Okay.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Get the real.

• 34:52Chris Williamson?

  Jesus Christ, you're going to the, it's like going to Mordor and deciding to like fucking stare into the eye of Mount Doom.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll have the kratom shot in my hand as I'm looking into the eye of.

• 35:01Chris Williamson?

  Well, I've done it once.

• 35:02George Mack?

  I've done it once as well, when we was in Vegas.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Did you get energy from it?

• 35:05George Mack?

  So, well, my initial, my initial onboarding to kratom when you was doing the David Goggins podcast, ironically.

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  What were you doing? Kratom with David Goggins?

• 35:13George Mack?

  I was like, I do.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  Hey, why didn't we vlog that?

• 35:15George Mack?

  I was like.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  I did kratom.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Cruse of pull-ups, pussy.

• 35:17George Mack?

  So for context, I, at the time, like, this is how things change with time.

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  That was the week that we did mushrooms.

• 35:22George Mack?

  Yeah, and kratom was seen as, um, um, like a supplement, like it was seen as a nootropic at the time. That was how it was advertised to me.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  It wasn't looking like a drug.

• 35:30George Mack?

  I thought it was gonna be a study. I thought I could take it and I could work more.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  Mini Adderall.

• 35:32George Mack?

  And I remember like going, this is shit. But then I realized I had no more problems. I was like, on it, I've got no problems at all. I go, why do I always think I have problems? I actually have no problems.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Cause you're high, George.

• 35:43George Mack?

  And then I wanted to go.

• 35:46George Mack?

  And then I wanted to get some the next day.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Welcome to my world, buddy.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think I've got so few problems?

• 35:51George Mack?

  Yeah, it's weird how you go from no problems and then when it wears out, you've got so many problems.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then you're snapping at your producer and you're like, hey, fuck you, I quit. Was it $10 a kratom? Which is crazy embarrassing.

• 36:01Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean.

• 36:02George Mack?

  When did you do it?

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so I tried Feel Free, which is like this really, really popular company.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  And that's for the record, that's one of the companies that's being sort of put under the microscope as this is the not good.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  But then not using the 708, right? That's just whole leaf.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  I gotta look at that, you know what?

• 36:18Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure, yeah, pull it up. I'm pretty sure that the, this is whole leaf stuff. Anyway, um, I, this is forever ago. This is when I was living in the Airbnb on South Congress.

• 36:25George Mack?

  Okay.

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  When I first moved here. And everyone's doing it. Everyone's, it's, it's literally the in-school, mom, but everyone's doing it. And so I'm like, oh, well, fucking everyone's doing it. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna try this in the house. I'm gonna try half a bottle. I don't know, I can't remember whether it was five grams, two grams, whatever. Tried it and it just made me really anxious. Anxious and a little sick for like.

• 36:48Chris Williamson?

  An hour and a half, I watched some Peaky Blinders and I was like, that's not for me.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  And you just drank one bottle of it?

• 36:52Chris Williamson?

  Half a bottle. And I was like, that's not for me.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  So a lot of people get, uh, feel sick to their stomach after they drink it and throw up and stuff like that.

• 36:59Chris Williamson?

  It didn't, it didn't make me feel good. Me and Z did it again when we went to go and see a band, but we didn't realize you are not supposed to drink alcohol on it.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll make you blackout. Also, Feel Free has Kava in it too.

• 37:10Chris Williamson?

  Correct. But it's only in a little, it might be concentrate. Anyway, so I, I, I tried it, it didn't agree with me. There's like some things where I think, um, I get quite bad hangovers. I've always got bad hangovers, but they've gotten worse as I've got older. What you've got, if you were someone who doesn't get hangovers, Sonny Webster, Olympic weightlifter. I remember we once partied till four in the morning, four thirty in the morning and he'd set off to drive from Newcastle to Edinburgh, eight AM to go and do a seminar that started at ten thirty. He'd had four hours of sleep, drank more than me and was just up and doing things for the whole morning. And then went and gave an entire seminar and was just fine. I needed to stay in bed the whole day.

• 37:49Chris Williamson?

  There's some people for whom the cost versus the benefit, the fucking ratio is just super skewed. They're like, again, they're like the gog, they're the Bonnie Blue of being able to drink and keep going.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Dude, don't ever use Bonnie Blue as a reference.

• 38:05George Mack?

  You're very much the Virgin Mary of that.

• 38:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, I am, I am very much. Yeah, I'm the Lily Phillips. I can't take as many. And, uh, if, if that was like, if it was not so painful for me, the cost benefit analysis of drinking would be completely different. Like we did, both me and you have done a Intel X DNA, which by the way, this is the fucking sickest shit. Intel X DNA, a company that's based here in Austin, but you can do it anywhere in the US. He spit into a tube, not affiliated, I just think they're fucking sick. Spit into a tube, send it off, they'll give you your full allele genetic profile and they'll compare you to the population. Hey, you, uh, clear caffeine more slowly. You have a protective gene that's, uh, good for late onset Parkinson's.

• 38:48Chris Williamson?

  You have, uh, one which can be a risk for, uh, autism or for this or for that or for the other. And in loads of behavioral stuff like this has been associated with people.

• 38:58George Mack?

  Who have addictive personalities. So I have the the comt gene, which is a clear dopamine more slowly. That means that I don't deal with chaos and stress particularly well, but once I start doing something, I get completely fucking obsessed and I lock in and I can't stop. It's like literally one of the descriptions was may struggle to stop tasks once started. It's like just the the gene of an obsessive person.

• 39:21Shaan Puri?

  That sounds pretty cool.

• 39:22George Mack?

  What's sick is once you do, it's like three grand or something, maybe three grand.

• 39:25Shaan Puri?

  Around about that. It's expensive, but it's not cheap.

• 39:28George Mack?

  But it's like, they're never going to change. This is my genes and my genes.

• 39:31Shaan Puri?

  I always wonder with this, did did you learn things you didn't already know about yourself?

• 39:35George Mack?

  Yes, yes.

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  Because that first one you would know, like, yeah, I I don't handle this well, so but I do, I am able to obsess over tasks.

• 39:42George Mack?

  So I'll give you, so the way I viewed these intellect stuff, and it's like very early days, and they're only going to get better and better. Is have you heard about the Air Force study in the 1950s where they took like 600 Air Force pilots who were already male, certain height, certain build. And they tried to build like the average cockpit for all of them. They tried to make the perfect cockpit by aggregating all of the proportions of the pilots. And when they went to test this perfect cockpit that they built, it fit zero. Because essentially averages are completely bullshit. No one is average. Only, only, I think, so it was 12 things that they measured and only for only three of them hit 3%, so you can see it here.

• 40:24George Mack?

  And even that 3%, it's with a wide range. So the 3% that hit the range, for example, it would be between 5, 9 and 6 foot, like that level of range. So then they realized, and obviously it's so obvious now, but it's way better to just build a customizable cockpit. And I think we'll look back at everything, like how we've grown up around the way people talk about studies and magnesium and vitamin D and vitamin C is just absolute horseshit.

• 40:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 40:48George Mack?

  Because what Gary should take is very different to what I should take and likewise with Chris. So to give you some, to give you some concrete examples. One, I was in, I found out I was in the bottom 10% of magnesium absorption for my genetics. So I was like, oh, I've got to take way more than if I was to ask anything. I have a specific gene that I found, which was if I take, if I have surgery and they give me morphine, I'm very unlikely to wake up with a regular dose. It will probably kill me. So I've got to let doctors know that beforehand. I'm like, oh, that's already paid for the test. And then everything built on top of that.

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  That example.

• 41:23George Mack?

  Yeah. Sleeping, sleeping great.

• 41:27George Mack?

  So yeah, the specifics that you do learn is actually pretty fascinating because then everything gets built on top of.

• 41:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, let me give you this. The thing that it did for me, I didn't learn a tremendous amount that I didn't already know through experience, but it made all of my preferences feel way more legitimate.

• 41:42George Mack?

  Right. Give you permission.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because I'm like, oh, this is why I like deep house music, because it's quite calming. So one of the coolest things, both of us did it, put it into your L L M, put all of your labs in as well. And it gives a different context. The coolest thing that I did, kind of useless, but again, made me feel more legitimate with my life direction. It was like, I've just done it again now to my chat G P T project. Imagine you know nothing about me. Erase all of the information that you have exclusively based on my D N A genetic test. What sort of a person am I? And it comes back and it is fucking bang. Your baseline personality, high drive, high stress operator, your dopamine and stress genetics, com T A A, D B H, S L C, high baseline dopamine and adrenal tone, faster mental processing, strong pattern recognition, but low margin for stress before overload.

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  You become productive, intense, goal oriented, slightly on edge most of the time, but also prone to overthinking, easily tipped into anxiety and to sustained pressure, sensitive to uncertainty and social evaluation. This is not calm, content temperament. It is a perform or perish nervous system. And it just runs that for everything. Motivation pattern. I need to do off and on. I can't do constant low level stress. And I was like, I already knew this, right? Because you learn things about yourself. Both of us have zeroed in on doing meditation. Both of us have zeroed in on relatively early nights, even though both of us have been in previous industries that were way different. And I'm like, I kind of, club promotion should be fun. Like I should be in a chaotic environment. I should be in a highly unpredictable environment. But I didn't end up there. And I always felt a little bit off. And as I've zeroed in more and more.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  So what it did was, I think especially for people that are.

• 43:16Chris Williamson?

  Maybe looking for more justification about why they're in the lonely chapter. They're struggling to get through and they're like, fuck, like, why don't I fit in? Is there something wrong with me? Not at all. Like, this is just your predisposition.

• 43:26George Mack?

  Right.

• 43:26Chris Williamson?

  Now, the problem that you can have, and it's kind of cool that this isn't as widespread as it might be, exactly the same as once you have a name for it, you're gonna live by it. This could very much become destiny.

• 43:40George Mack?

  Right, comes both ways.

• 43:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:41George Mack?

  I'm way less intrigued in that kind of cold reading description. I'm way more interested in, like, it's like, oh, you know, it could have been like Virgo says this, right? But what I'm fascinated by is, so what's the strange thing? I, people have always said I'm very, very similar to my granddad. We have like similar hair. I like sometimes find myself like closing my eyes during meals and he did that. Like, those weird things.

• 44:03Chris Williamson?

  You did that at your birth on Monday.

• 44:05George Mack?

  And I did. And I then, I then put in the thing, I go, I asked the thing, I go, if I'm like trying to not die here, like, what are my most likely causes of death? And they go, well, your two biggest health concerns are one, glaucoma, so you'll just kind of gradually go blind, which won't kill you, or you'll die of a stroke. My granddad, glaucoma. Feel calm.

• 44:24Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say it.

• 44:26George Mack?

  And, um. And stroke. And stroke. Wow. Yeah, so, um, it's, if you've got the money, spend it.

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  It's sick and you can have it interpreted by clinician or whatever, but you can also just do it here. So I've just done the same thing. If I was likely to die, what are my most likely causes of death? Cardiovascular disease, chronic stress mediated breakdown. Ooh, that's exciting. Neurovascular neurological issues because of high signaling, environmental toxin sensitivity. I just fucking got popped by milk. They're gonna clone you. Yeah, that's true. That is for God, they don't need. See, I don't need a test like this to know how I'm gonna die.

• 44:57George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got agency over that, my friend. You've got agency over that.

• 45:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna have a heart attack, a drug induced heart attack while flying down the highway. Before we continue, as you're probably aware, I'm not a massive drinker, at least not anymore. But even if you too are not drinking, sometimes you just want something cold, frosty and tasty without the fear of a hangover the next day, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. Thank you very much. Their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing. They've got IPAs.

• 45:25George Mack?

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• 46:09Chris Williamson?

  I need to bring up something that you said at dinner the other evening.

• 46:11George Mack?

  Oh, well.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  Did you say that you think that people remember every porn video that they've ever watched?

• 46:17George Mack?

  No, it's this, it was a private dinner, but people had paid to be there and you've brought it up on the show. No, no, no. My, my thesis is like one big meta criticism I have of the US that nobody warned me about as a Brit is that the toilets in America, like I could be at like Dean's, like a very nice restaurant in Austin, I'd be having like an amazing chat about like Kierkegaard. I think about like Kierkegaard versus Aristotle and I'm like, sorry, let me just pop to the loos, rookie your Facebook. You go to the loos and in America, the cubicles, you can see people's feet in them. And the worst thing is there's like this slit in every single, and this is nationwide.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  You're in the women's.

• 47:02George Mack?

  You can be in the, you could be in the like a billionaire's like hotel and there's a slit there, which means they have unisex toilets, it's horrific. Like I don't even go in the unisex toilets for this reasons. You look, you can see people kind of just this carousel of them sat down squatting. And yeah, this whole idea that when you watch like graphic content, it stores in your brain forever. So I've just got thousands of men around Austin, just like there, like these carousels.

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  And then you went to the bathroom.

• 47:26George Mack?

  And this is supposed to be, this is supposed to be the number one country in the world. And like, this doesn't exist in Europe, this doesn't exist in the Middle East.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  You know what you could do? Do you remember those things like back in the day, the first, uh, those cycling cylinders? And you look through the slit and if you spin it, it makes a horse start to move? If you ran really quickly down a very long series of toilets.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  You're just looking at these different men at like stages of pooping.

• 47:52George Mack?

  It's horrific.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Dude, you know how I know that I'm watching too many graphic videos is because when you said there's a horse that starts to move, I heard there's a whore that starts to move.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  That's not good, man.

• 48:04George Mack?

  Jesus. Every time like I speak to a Brit or European now about coming to America and they think like there's going to be this chat about the economy, I go, this is the thing that I've got to warn you about. It's so surreal. And I think about this a lot. Like you were talking about like life hacks, like how much of life comes down to compartmentalization, which is why somebody made a great point the other day, why meditation apps often don't take off on phones, because you have your meditation up there, but then you have your strip club, you have.

• 48:28Chris Williamson?

  Gary does.

• 48:29George Mack?

  Yeah, all this kind of, all this stuff there. And with these bathrooms, you don't have any compartmentalization. I always say, imagine a house. So my friend lives in an 80 story apartment building and they're kind of sat there in his house. I go, if everything was glass right now, this would be horrific. But because you have compartmentalization, it has such an impact.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, your point is that you would be able to see one dude's taking a dump over there and another dude's banging his girlfriend right there.

• 48:59George Mack?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, literally just up there.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  But we've made these arbitrary walls around us and oh, this is the edge of my safe place and the beginning of yours.

• 49:07George Mack?

  Where we started, you were like, I have this thesis and then if you.

• 49:10Chris Williamson?

  Where did we even, what did we even talk about?

• 49:12Speaker 02

  You were talking about, somebody said something about porn or.

• 49:15George Mack?

  Yeah, you brought up. Storing graphic stuff in your brain.

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  Genetics, porn. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Question.

• 49:19George Mack?

  Go on.

• 49:19Chris Williamson?

  How do you feel about feet?

• 49:22George Mack?

  Not a fan.

• 49:23Chris Williamson?

  No?

• 49:24George Mack?

  Gross me out. Not a fan.

• 49:25Chris Williamson?

  How do you feel about feet?

• 49:26George Mack?

  Pretty much the same as Sean.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  How do you feel about?

• 49:28George Mack?

  I like a visceral.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Totally neutral.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  Feet neutral?

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  In what capacity are we talking about here?

• 49:34Chris Williamson?

  So there is a woman who does Uber Eats and has started including photos of her feet in the picture of the food drop off and her tips have gone up by a ton. So this is, I mean, as feet go, they're He said nice pedicure. They're perfectly fine, feet, but did not realize that this would blow up fast. And this is the OnlyFans pipeline. Like, as soon as you, as soon as you post something and start to get free money for it, you're like, well, if I put my Cash App in here, and if you scroll down a little bit more, she says, get a rotisserie chicken or a pedicure, first rotisserie chicken allowance. There we go. This is the fucking Uber Eats to OnlyFans pipeline that no one is talking about.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's like an old joke about, what's the, how long does it take for a, not a bottle service, a strip club waitress to become a stripper? Two weeks.

• 50:26Shaan Puri?

  You've never heard this?

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, basically, every, not every, but a lot of strip club bartenders or hosts, hostesses, they just end up becoming strippers. And maybe that's just a niche thing that I know because of my vices.

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  Ponchant for strip clubs.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess. Dude, I, I used to have, you know this, I think I've told you this, I used to have this pickup line when I would go to strip clubs where I'd be like, hey, you look just like my future ex-wife. And they'd be like, oh, ha, ha, ha, because they've heard that a thousand times. I'd be like, no, I'm just kidding. I'm like a horrible person. I've got a felony and I'm not allowed to see my son, so you don't want nothing to do with me. And just

• 51:05Shaan Puri?

  They lean in.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Every time.

• 51:06Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  It's crazy.

• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that the fucking craziest pickup line?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Not really. I mean, American women have been conditioned since the 50s to be into like the bad boy.

• 51:18Shaan Puri?

  I mean, first of all, it was a two-parter, so that already was sophistication I was not prepared for.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  Dude, unbelievable. That's Gary's, that's Gary's life hack, by the way.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. He asked me for a life hack, that's what I came up with.

• 51:32Shaan Puri?

  Jesus Christ.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  What if you got some fucking notes app? I don't want to hear about that.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Then tell me about your Claude, your Claude project instructions. I want to know how to pick up a hooker.

• 51:45Chris Williamson?

  I don't even want to do one now.

• 51:48Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the subreddit Male Living Spaces?

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Yes, it's funny.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking brilliant. So this is a subreddit where guys post their bedrooms and their living spaces that they've sort of designed. It's sort of peak bachelor, like solo D Gen life. And the photos are just fucking absolutely spectacular. This one, this first one, this guy's got a lat pulldown machine and a TV.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  The face, Patrick Bateman. Honestly, this looks, have you ever seen Mr. Beast's office? It looks exactly like this. He has a bedroom in the office with a bench press right next to it, just like that.

• 52:27Chris Williamson?

  The woman to fucking.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Stormtrooper?

• 52:29Chris Williamson?

  Stormtrooper.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 52:34Chris Williamson?

  There's a U shaped couch around just a huge TV. It's like literally you couldn't get in there without hitting the TV.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  It's not even a hung on the wall.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  The reason is because he's wanting to get a big couch, but he needs to get in the door. So the door won't open. He can't fit the couch and the TV in without not being able to open the door. That's the only way he could have. That's actually some fucking Marie Kondo shit.

• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  Transparent fucking blow up doll. This one's fucking great. It's an industrial container with a single deck chair in the middle.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  What's the camping chair pointing at?

• 53:08Shaan Puri?

  That's the living room.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, that is. That's the cuck chair for when I'm crushing shit. Go to the next one. This is you, Gary.

• 53:17Chris Williamson?

  It's a bedside table made out of just raw breeze blocks.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, when I was growing up, my dad actually had our old box TV on a set of cinder blocks for a period of time. The divorce hit him hard.

• 53:29Shaan Puri?

  It works as drawers too.

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it does work as drawers?

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 53:36Shaan Puri?

  It's a bottle of kratom in every piece of it.

• 53:38Chris Williamson?

  Is it a flat in London or a prison in Norway? Have you seen that? Was it not halls of residence? Was it not British halls of residence?

• 53:45Speaker 02

  I think there's a few, I think there's a few different ones.

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

  Prison in Norway or halls of residence in the UK, I think was it. And yeah, it's because the fucking quality of the prisons in some Scandi countries are unbelievable.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Dude, yeah, I've seen those. That pisses me the fuck off.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  What, that Norwegians are living in Norwegian criminals?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  The people in prison in Norway are doing much better than me. It really irritates me. I'm dead serious because like, you know, I've been known to commit a crime or two. And if I get arrested and go to prison, I'm like. It just is.

• 54:17Shaan Puri?

  If you get arrested here.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude. I mean, I'm a part of me is like, man, maybe I should just go to Norway and like

• 54:22Shaan Puri?

  hedge your bets.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Get in a shootout or something. I don't know. Like that. You met. You guys remember that movie, um, Heat?

• 54:30Shaan Puri?

  I haven't seen it.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  The Lea, um, Robert De Niro film? De Niro, Pacino, um, uh, Val Kilmer. Yeah. I think Danny Trejo is even in it, but like the, there's just that old like, you know, every guy's like dream way they they're gonna go out is just basically robbing a bank and getting in a shootout. Or maybe that's just the people I hang out with, but are you familiar with this?

• 54:52Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, no.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Well, are you know what I'm talking about? You ever seen those memes or those?

• 54:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the dream.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just like going out in a blaze of glory, basically. And then or like dying out in like the, you know, like that, that picture of, uh, Gosling bleeding out in the snow.

• 55:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Like the dream, dream, snow bleed out spot. Anyways, I just, uh, I'm like, man, I'd rather just do that.

• 55:12Shaan Puri?

  A Pinterest board of these?

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Well, it's like, it's like I go to Norway and I get into a, a, a, some sort of criminal enterprise. What's the worst thing that happens to me? I get to live better than I'm living here. That's just where my mind goes. Uh, you know, but.

• 55:26Shaan Puri?

  The inverse smarter, not harder.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  The inverse El Salvador. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, dude. Holy shit. Well, I think the crimes that are being committed in El Salvador are probably dramatically worse than in Norway. You know, they were like chopping people up into pieces and stuff. But.

• 55:45Shaan Puri?

  Did you follow this, uh, Citrini analyst number three story?

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Um, no.

• 55:50Shaan Puri?

  You didn't see this?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 55:51Shaan Puri?

  Have you guys heard about this analyst number three?

• 55:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 55:53Shaan Puri?

  What's this? Uh, dude, this is amazing. This is just like a guy doing a legendary thing. So the Strait of Hormuz is blocked and there's the war part of it, but then there's the financial part of it. You've seen like oil prices going up, down, the markets are swinging. And so there's this research firm called Citrini. They do like, they basically do research reports, sell them to hedge funds. And so the hedge fund guys want information. If they get better information than they're getting from the news or from the, you know, the newspaper the next day, that's worth, you know, millions and millions of dollars to them. So Satriani, they're trying to figure out what the hell's going on with this blockade. And so this guy has this idea, high agency story here for you. One of the guys in the office is like, what if I just go? And they're like, what do you mean, where you go? He's like, what if I just go to the, to the straight? And I'll just count the boats.

• 56:38Shaan Puri?

  Like, what do you mean, he's like, I'll just see like how many are going through and we'll know if it's like blocked. Cause basically there are people trying to figure out, is it blocked? Is it not blocked? And the gasoline, crude oil prices were going parabolic and then they were freshing day, day over day. And so they had to figure out what was going on. So this guy, basically one of their analysts, they call him analyst number three. And he wrote this field blog, so just, I see this. It goes, and I read this and this sucked me into the story. He goes, the front desk informed me, there was two gentlemen from the CID downstairs to ask me questions. CID in the Gulf is like the CIA. I checked my phone in a safe, grabbed the burner, um, because they had seen tweets about analyst number three. Thanks a lot, James. And then it says, I went downstairs in my pajamas and slippers. There, there's a piece, piece of op sec you learn when, when you're an Arab speaker. If things is sticky, you only speak English because Arabic opens the door you don't want opened.

• 57:22Shaan Puri?

  The positivity that you're a spy, a sympathizer, blah, blah, blah, basically play dumb. So I'll go downstairs and I say, hello, guys, how are you? I speak English. The hotel receptionist, the same man I've been chatting with in Arabic all day, turned to the agents and goes, this guy speaks perfect Arabic. And so the, this guy blogged his entire thing. So he basically left the US, went to the Middle East. They show his briefcase of like what he took. It's, it's, it's pretty hilarious. So this is what he took for his field trip. His anxiety body. He's got two, two zins. He, he brought cigars. Uh, he brought, you know, packed clothes and then he had a, like a, a pair of Meta recording glasses. And so he goes, and this guy makes it all the way. So he, he gets to like Oman, he bribes a guy, they bring him in and they're like, he's crossing the thing. They're like, you're not trying to do any journalism or anything, are you?

• 58:07Shaan Puri?

  He's like journalism, no, I'm, I'm an adventurer explorer. You crazy? And they're like, they check his bag. They don't notice that the Ray-Bans are the glasses one, are the camera ones? He gets through. He bribes this guy to take him on a mini, like a paddle boat to get into the straight. And he has footage of himself on the straight, smoking a cigar, watching like the oil, one of the oil tankers that got attacked and counting the other boats. And he realized that the, all the mainstream media. Was reporting that the straight was closed. He's like, dude, I'm here. I see them. I see them going through. It's not fully closed. And if they were figuring out what was going on, it turns out like actually the Iranians were checking like, are you, if you're not US affiliated and you brought, you pay us a toll, we'll let you through. And that's why like, there hadn't been this huge oil shock because actually the tankers are getting through.

• 58:52Shaan Puri?

  But nobody knew, everybody was using these like, the tracking data from the boats, but he's like,

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Some of the boats aren't going to be tracked.

• 58:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they're just like, hey, hey, watch this. They just turn it off. Like, we don't want to be tracked. They don't want us saying that we're going through, so no problem. Turn that shit off. And they would go through. And so this is this epic story of this guy who made it back. He got thrown in, he got like thrown in jail for a couple of days and he like got out and, uh, you know,

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Because of the CIA?

• 59:15Shaan Puri?

  No, he's just part of a research.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  No, no, because he got caught because of.

• 59:19Shaan Puri?

  They held him and they were like, we're gonna check you out.

• 59:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 59:22Shaan Puri?

  And then they couldn't find anything.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  CID is the Middle Eastern equivalent of the CIA.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, gotcha.

• 59:27Chris Williamson?

  And they, they popped in that actually, that bag is the male equivalent of an anxiety bag.

• 59:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's what I said.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  That's what he said.

• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  A, a, a full pack of Cubans, two Zins and a pair of pants. Uh, yeah.

• 59:37Shaan Puri?

  Don't trust, verify.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, that is basically someone using dark tourism to benefit from a capitalist way. Similar to Lord Miles. Do you see that Lord Miles got called out by Coffeezilla?

• 59:50Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. Wow.

• 59:51Chris Williamson?

  So Lord Miles has done some kind of rug pull that's to do with him and polymarket. That he was gonna do a, a 40 day fast. And that he bet just before he got picked up by the police, the local police of wherever he was. Someone had put a huge position that he was going to lose. And it turns out if you trace that wallet back, it's somebody that knows him. And then he thinks that he put the bet on and then got the police to go and it was like a fucking mess. But anyway, that guy might as well be Lord Miles.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Well, speaking of the Gulf CIA, I, uh, I got a story about a time I accidentally did a, a CIA field strategy, so to speak, if you guys want to hear it. When I was in college in Santa Barbara, my buddy and I were absolutely hammered, just wasted out of our minds. And we had just run from a cab and, uh, some other shenanigans had occurred. And we got back to my, my apartment, which was on the second floor of, of the spot, but it was on a hill. So it, out the window was like a huge, um, it was, it was like probably. 60 yards to a pavement, to a parking lot behind a Chase Bank.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  And we were hammered and we were at this place, the electricity had gone out, so all the food in the fridge was bad. And it smelled like shit. So we just started throwing it all out the window because we thought it was funny. And then we started throwing bottles out the window and then like some furniture and stuff. And somebody, somebody called the police and we're sitting there, we're all fucked up and we just hear doo doo doo doo. Santa Barbara Police, open up. And we're like, oh, fuck dude, we, the cops. And he looks at me and he's like, dude, get naked. And I was like, what? He was like, trust me. And I was like, alright. So we get butt naked and I'm like, oh, we're definitely going to fucking jail. So I, I immediately went to the bathroom because taking a shit in jail sucks. So I was like, I'm gonna go force out a turd. Wow. So I'm in the bathroom and all I hear is this like thump noise.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  And then I hear the door open. I hear it creak like and it's just a cop and he goes, what the fuck? What are you doing? And I hear, I hear like feet stumble around. And, and then I hear my buddy go, sorry, officer, I must have forgotten my pants. And the cops are like, what the fuck are you talking about? And they're like, put some fucking clothes on. So the cops come grab me and Naked. And they realize, well, they thought, they realized that we were two gay dudes in an argument. So we faked a homosexual domestic violence situation. And they were like, they were like, oh shit, these are two gay dudes. And yeah. So they just ended up making us go clean it up because they felt, they felt bad because they thought that.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Well, and my buddy was a lot bigger than me too. So now I'm realizing telling this story that they probably thought I was just getting beat up by this guy. But anyways, um, so years later, uh, I've told this story a couple of times before to people and you know, it's funny, haha. But years later, I find out from this guy, Jack. Karaku CIA dude?

• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  That this is like an old CIA strategy that they employ all the time. I didn't even know. Play the, play the video here.

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  Headquarters says, we want you to pretend that you're gay. I said, oh, come on. We really need the information. You gotta pretend that you're gay. I said, okay, I'll do it. I'll do it for Uncle Sam. So I called and I said, hey, I have two tickets to this show and I was hoping maybe you'd be free. Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards. He said, yeah, I'd love to. So we get to the show. He thoroughly enjoyed it and we go for sushi afterward and we go out again and he says, why don't you go over to my place some night and I'll, I'll make dinner. I said, great. So I go over to his place. He made a lovely dinner and then I thought, well, I have to invite him to my place. So I told him, what, you're gonna have to like get out. So Sheila, I made dinner. I removed all the pictures of us together and we had just gotten married. So we had like our wedding picture up and everything. At the dinner, he leaned in to kiss me and I instinctively backed off and he said, oh my God, I'm sorry. I thought you're gay.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  And I said, oh no, I am gay. I'm not into hairy guys. And he's like, oh, okay. I said, I'm sorry. I think you're great. I'm, I'm not feeling it. He goes, no.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  And I think there's another, there's, I don't remember if it was him, but there was another person who used an example of faking they were gay to like get out of trouble. But yeah, just that's another life hack for you.

• 1:04:02Chris Williamson?

  Just get naked.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Chris Williamson?

  I mean, could you not just appear gay rather than be naked? Cause who fights naked?

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Two gay dudes banging.

• 1:04:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay, okay. The idea that you were so small that they thought, this guy's a world renowned power bottom. I can't believe I'm getting, he's getting fucking pounded from every angle.

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  God, yeah, it's, uh, yeah, it's not a good look looking back on it.

• 1:04:27Chris Williamson?

  Why have you got trash in your truck?

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Well, I got another life hack for you, Chris. Um, remember to take out your trash cans. I, yeah, I got a couple of bags of garbage in the back of my truck that he commented on when I pulled up. And, um, he's like, why do you have like four bags of garbage? And I was like, well, I forgot to take out the trash two weeks in a row. So there's just a bunch of.

• 1:04:48Chris Williamson?

  Use it in the bed of your truck.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Carry it around?

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  As additional.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just in the bed of the truck.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  Surplus.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  There's a dumpster behind a movie theater that I'm gonna go throw it out in after this, actually. Thanks for reminding me.

• 1:04:58Chris Williamson?

  Welcome.

• 1:04:59Shaan Puri?

  You could do a full season, three months like that.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  With just 20 bags of trash in the truck?

• 1:05:04Shaan Puri?

  So you have three life hacks. That's pretty good.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, three life hacks.

• 1:05:07Shaan Puri?

  You do it for all of us.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  One Israeli conspiracy and I'm addicted to kratom. That's what I'm bringing to the table today.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  Did you have a life hack?

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 1:05:16Shaan Puri?

  Oh, go on.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, you know, the first ever series that I did on the show was life hacks. So there's like a thousand that I've got to pick from. But the one that I've been using the most, especially because I just got back from tour, it was in Australia, New Zealand and Bali, is an app called Flighty. So Flighty connects with your email. And when you book flights, it automatically pulls it over and it tells you everything that's going on with your flight. What gate you're going out of, where your plane is inbound, where it's going to go, when you're on the journey as well. It also tracks everything because it pre-downloads the map. So that when you're flying in the air, even without wifi, it knows sort of how long the journey is going to be. Can give you information about what the wait time is going to be like at your future destination, connection times, gate to gate, what carousel your baggage is going to be at.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  It lives in just a little island at the top, you know, the floating island thing at the top of your iPhone. And it just fucking rules, dude. Like the number of times that there's been some last minute bullshit change. And because I'm not watching the board or I've got my AirPods in, you're just in and out of doing your thing. You, it's just on your phone. It's quicker than the app. There was one flight that got diverted from Austin because of gale force winds, got diverted to Houston. And I was recording with Andrew Schultz that day. It's like, fuck, like I need to get back. This bed not be laid, blah, blah, blah. And I thought it was great. And then the plane just did whoop like that, took up again as it was coming in to land. And I was like, oh, it must be coming back around for another one. Before the pilot even came over the tannoy, it updated and said like, you're now basically you're landing in Houston. And I was like, oh.

• 1:06:43George Mack?

  So in some ways it can be disappointing before everybody else knows. But it's fucking great flighty and it's like 30 bucks a year. And you can have friends on it as well. You can add friends flights to it. So if you've got a, your missus is flying in, you don't need to do it. It's, it's fucking epic.

• 1:06:57Chris Williamson?

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• 1:07:39Chris Williamson?

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• 1:08:08George Mack?

  My, my, uh, my life hack at the minute is, um, it's more kind of a philosophical stance to some extent, I think of a lot of gibberish that comes up where it's probably in the last 20 years, there's this particular discourse that happens online, but also in books where you'll see, we'll make a point and then they'll go, so this study says, or studies say. And I think what happens for me for a while now. Previously, I would default to whatever this person's about to say now is completely true. But often, my new default is whatever this person is about to say now is complete horseshit. Because first off, my friend Billy made this great point of, do you know

• 1:08:50George Mack?

  anybody who's been in a study? Have you actually ever inspected a lot of these studies? So I think previously, what people used to do, nine out of 10 times, they would believe the study's true, and one out of 10 is gibberish. I actually think the policy's much better the other way, that nine out of 10 studies that you hear about, particularly psychological studies, guess what? Physics doesn't need a study. Physics goes. Here's how it works. And you want to always opt, like, it's kind of the Deutsch argument, you always want to go for good explanations, rather than studies of psych grads with people that had a specific hypothesis they wanted to confirm beforehand. And you'll often see these things that go viral on Twitter that get four million views. There's like 15 participants of like college males that are then making like, then the Daily Mail covers it, the Telegraph covers it.

• 1:09:31Chris Williamson?

  Huge sweeping generalizations.

• 1:09:32George Mack?

  It's one giant scam. The other one is, my favorite one is, science says, or science-backed, or trust the science. And my new default is, if somebody says this, they're about to say something that's completely unscientific. Because by definition, oh, sorry about that. By definition, if something is science-backed, I didn't invest, there we go. If something is science, if something is-

• 1:09:56Chris Williamson?

  Fucking Newtonics has research-backed ingredients on the side of it.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  Research quite a little bit. I can say firsthand, this shit definitely works.

• 1:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Go off Adderall.

• 1:10:05George Mack?

  Well, I guess the question is, but then actually investigate what the research is essentially saying, which most of us, we just default to, this is true.

• 1:10:11Chris Williamson?

  So I read Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History, everyone needs to subscribe on Substack, fucking rules. And he posted today, there was a wonderful one-two part of Living Fossils that Rob Kurzpan does, and Experimental History had these two things about the replication crisis. And Adam's entire point is that psychological theories don't ever be killed, they just become embarrassing. So, power posing-

• 1:10:36Chris Williamson?

  Been completely disproven, but has now just been sort of retconned into it's like expansive posture, science and stuff. They've just renamed it. Uh, growth mindset, total bullshit, totally does not replicate. Uh, ego depletion, like willpower stuff, total, total bullshit, does not replicate, but.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  What about retard maxing?

• 1:10:54Chris Williamson?

  Retard maxing actually is at the forefront of cutting psychological science.

• 1:10:58Shaan Puri?

  If it doesn't replicate, do a 360.

• 1:11:01Chris Williamson?

  Moonwalk out of there.

• 1:11:03George Mack?

  The problem with the replication stuff is that it goes back to the conversation we had around genetics that actually, some of this stuff may work for certain people depending on their specific genetics. What you may have is 10%, it really, really works for, and 90% it doesn't do anything, which is a way more fascinating conversation. But as soon as you just default to, it feels like I have a point that disagrees with Gary now, and I'm just gonna say, well, studies say, and I've won, and there's never any like critical conversation around, well, can you explain the specific variables here that causes this outcome? It's just studies say, I'll let me tell you about this study.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  Increased, increased skepticism. Is that what you're saying as a?

• 1:11:38George Mack?

  Yes, as a whole, as a whole.

• 1:11:39Chris Williamson?

  Including around those.

• 1:11:40George Mack?

  All the way up. I mean.

• 1:11:41Shaan Puri?

  I think the other side of that, the life hack is use this all the time because there's for every one George who's skeptical. What percent out of a hundred people, how many have your stance?

• 1:11:50George Mack?

  Oh, um, it's the other way. Yeah.

• 1:11:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's gonna be 99. So actually like the hack is.

• 1:11:54George Mack?

  Well, there's actually.

• 1:11:55Shaan Puri?

  Just start saying studies say.

• 1:11:55George Mack?

  There's actually a study about this.

• 1:11:56Shaan Puri?

  Even when there's no study at all, and everybody will take you very seriously.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  It's similar to how people reference mainstream media, even though, like you said with the, the straight.

• 1:12:04Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  How there were still ships going through there and the media was saying that they weren't.

• 1:12:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  It's the same thing, right? Where there, where somebody, instead of referencing a study, they're like, well, Fox News said, or CNN or whatever bullshit people.

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  Appeal to social authority.

• 1:12:16George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Dude, speaking of which, that, that actually ties into the other thing I sent you. Uh, did you guys hear about the stop Nick Shirley act in California? Dude, this is crazy. So there was, um.

• 1:12:28Chris Williamson?

  Cause he's trying to do the same thing he did in Minnesota and California, right?

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  He needs to do that in Puerto Rico, dude. Seriously.

• 1:12:34Chris Williamson?

  If you could list the places.

• 1:12:36Shaan Puri?

  So California has this act now?

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  Who's? This is it. This is the bill right here. They basically put, put together this legislation that says, it's called the Stop Nick Shirley Act.

• 1:12:47Shaan Puri?

  Is this like a draft?

• 1:12:48Chris Williamson?

  Existing law prohibits a person, business or association from knowingly, publicly posting, or publicly disclosing or distributing on internet websites or on social media the personal information or image of any designated healthcare services, patient, provider, or assistant or other individuals residing at the same home address with the intent to incite a third person to cause imminent great bodily harm to the person identified in the posting or display, or to a co-resident of that person as specified, or to threaten the person identified in the posting or display, or a co-resident of that person as specified.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  So it's basically an extreme fascist bill that they're trying to pass to prevent people from exposing fraud.

• 1:13:26Chris Williamson?

  So you think that they're getting out ahead of having exposed in California what was exposed in Minnesota? And by making it essentially this kind of investigational league?

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's of interest to me, given all the, the financial stuff I've exposed down in Puerto Rico, but the, if you strap like that and map it on to freedom of speech as a whole, this is a big problem. I mean, I, I don't know what.

• 1:13:56Chris Williamson?

  This shit is fucking gnarly, dude. Having to read this thing, like the, here we go.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  This guy, yeah, he explains it a little bit better here. It warns that it would restrict the release of investigative videos and impose penalties on watchdogs who expose fraud. It's a, I mean, I don't really believe in the two-party system. I think they're all just too, everybody's full of shit, but it is a Democrat that put this out, and of course, there's the backlash from this guy's probably a Republican.

• 1:14:21Shaan Puri?

  So it sounds like what they're saying is when he exposes the Somali learning centers, that then creates sort of hostile potential violence against the Somali people. So in order to protect threats of violence against immigrants, here's this act.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Which is totally like a load of bullshit, because the real way you would protect from somebody being harassed like that is to stop the fraud in the first place from happening.

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, or just separately prevent like violence in the way that we prevent assault.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, or I mean, I'm just saying that, yeah, there's a number of other ways to handle it. But yeah, it's crazy, right?

• 1:14:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  I um, I was looking at this the other day, I'm, I'm kind of interested in how it plays out, you know?

• 1:15:03Chris Williamson?

  You're, you're, you do a lot of investigative journalism, right? You were down in Palisades almost immediately after the fire, exposing a ton of stuff around FEMA. Uh, you've done the Puerto Rico thing. What are the like big ones have you done recently?

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  Um, well, after going to Puerto Rico, I, I kind of uh, was, I shelved the, the deep dive investigations because it's so much work to look through all the, just everything, dude. It was also really, it was fucked up, man. Like people in Puerto Rico don't have, we, we met a guy who doesn't have a fucking roof still. He hasn't had electricity for eight years. It's crazy, dude. I, you gotta watch it. I don't know if I ever sent it to you.

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  You didn't send me this one.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's um, it's insane. I, I, in theory, I mean, I can give you the, the layout real fast. Basically in 2016, Congress with Obama's approval, signed off on a financial board that more or less acts like the shadow government of Puerto Rico now. And they've funneled around $2 billion of taxpayer money, Puerto Rican taxpayer money, off the island to Wall Street consultants, executives, attorneys to consult on the bankruptcy down there because the whole island is bankrupt. And part of that process is to resolve the PREPA bankruptcy, which is the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the government power company.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  And then it was privatized with this company, Luma, and yada, yada, yada. The power is horribly unreliable down there. It's one of the most expensive in the entire country. And uh, they're basically having money funneled.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Off the island, like, and they're all more or less connected to Wall Street, but it's crazy. And the reason I bring that up in relation to this is because,

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  you know, the Somali and daycare thing, sure, there's, there's some, some stuff going on there, but Puerto Rico has been basically getting shit on forever. And I think this is possibly an even worse situation that's going on down there. And they just revoked some transparency act down there too recently in the past like four or five months.

• 1:17:06Shaan Puri?

  They're gonna try and get out ahead of people that are doing investigative journalism.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  I mean, that's what it seems like to me. They don't want, they want it to be more difficult for people to, FOIA request stuff essentially. Like, one of the things they revoked on the transparency act down there in Puerto Rico was, when you, when you request information, it doesn't show who you are specifically, right? To, to the, to the people that you're requesting it from, but they, they're changing that so that they can see. So they'll be like, oh, Gary Faust, the guy that's been talking a bunch of shit about us is requesting this information. We're gonna, you know, deny that.

• 1:17:39Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  It's crazy, but this is similar to that. And I think this is actually a-

• 1:17:42Shaan Puri?

  Branded as the transparency act, because who can, who can say that?

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Well, it was, it was existing legislation that was put into place.

• 1:17:48Shaan Puri?

  Equals good.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, they're, yeah. But yeah, this is, this is crazy. I don't even know what else to say about it because not much has transpired. But in my field of work, I mean,

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  that would, that would basically prevent me from doing my job.

• 1:18:04Shaan Puri?

  I have a quote that I love. This is a little more positive. I feel like we've had some, some conspiracies, some darkness, some, some getting in trouble. I want to bring a little, little positivity here. All right. So, saw this quote from Blake McCosky, who created Tom's shoes. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but he has this, he's like, I've had this on the wall of every office. He says, "A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to determine if he is working or playing to him. He always appears to be doing both." And I just like, that to me has just been a very useful-

• 1:18:47Shaan Puri?

  Um, I don't know, guidepost or like, oh yeah, like that is the highest calling. If you yourself basically don't differentiate between your work and your play or you know, are you, is this, uh, is this something that you have to do or you should do or you want to do, the more those blend together and the less you sort of bucket things, I think the more you solve the problem of balance that I think nobody feels like they have. And so I just thought this was awesome and I'm going to put this up in my office wall.

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, this seems similar to what Michael was talking about of the childlike thing. Remember on the first episode that we did and he was said, be quoted some scripture. He said, be childlike, my children or some, some, something like that. I think one of the problems that you have is working for yourself sounds great because it sounds like choose whenever you want to work. But for most people, what it results in being is just work all the time because there's no one to tell you to stop. And a great idea to think about, if this doesn't feel like play to me, scrutinize it and maybe try and get rid of whatever I can from this particular area of my life. But when you're compelled by, oh, well, I just want to be more, we're more successful

• 1:19:57Chris Williamson?

  and more well-known, that is rewarding in and of itself, but it's not the type of reward that you want. So you need to almost be skeptical and discerning in the rewards that you get too. This feels like play, but it might actually be just shallow juvenile status seeking, or it might be me, uh, playing at the game of accumulating money when I already have enough. It's that line from James Clear where he says, um, if you already live a good lifestyle and you sacrifice it in order to make more money, by definition, it's a bad trade.

• 1:20:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  And I think sometimes you, people are bad at distinguishing determining what is and is not play, what is and is not just more like limbic rewards. That makes sense.

• 1:20:39Shaan Puri?

  So there's, there's this book that talks, uh, that I'm reading, it talks exactly about this called The Score. You guys ever heard of this book? It's basically, um, it's this guy who's a full, he's a philosophy professor, but he's, he loved games growing up. He always plays games as he, he uses games as this analogy. And I think in general, uh, a far more important thing in life than being a good player is picking a good game. Uh, because it's very easy to be, you know, you were talking about Joey Chestnut earlier, right? Um, and like, you know,

• 1:21:04Chris Williamson?

  The philosopher Joey Chestnut.

• 1:21:06Shaan Puri?

  No knock on him, but like just generally choosing to be a competitive eater, it's not the best game to play in life, right? Like you could choose many things to try to be great at. There are some that are better and worse. Every game comes with a scoreboard. The scoreboard is very unique in that it basically programs you, rewires your mind for what you now want. The game dictates what you want. Uh, right. Because it says that's how you win. This is the scoreboard. So therefore I've.

• 1:21:31George Mack?

  Your behavior changes appropriately.

• 1:21:33Shaan Puri?

  And then it tells you who you need, and then it changes your identity. Who do you need to be to win this game? So you play Call of Duty? Better be a psychopathic murderer, right? You gotta be ruthless. You play charades, you better be a team player, a great communicator. You play poker, you better be, uh, great at the art of deception. And so the game you choose will not only just choose for you what you want. It'll choose your motivation. It'll end up dictating your identity. Who do you need to be to win that game? So he talks about like, you know, he was a, he was, became a philosopher or philosophy professor. Cause he loved answering the big questions about life. That's what got him into it. Then he got there and he realized there's a ranking system for the, the professors nationwide. And how do you go up to, so he's a competitive person by nature, like many of us are.

• 1:22:15Shaan Puri?

  So he started trying to win the game. Now he had a scoreboard. The scoreboard said, in order to get more points, you have to write more peer reviewed published articles about these niche topics. So then he spends two years winning that game and then basically feeling miserable because he's like, this is not what he enjoys about philosophy. So he made himself miserable, winning the game. And he talks about how there's something called value capture. Value capture is basically when the game gives you the metric that, um, is super simplified, easy to digest, but it may not have been what you wanted out of this. Um, so for example, in like, like you, we're, you're, we're on YouTube, right? YouTube gives you one big score, views. You can make a life-changing episode that gets half the views of another episode, but it doesn't know how to measure life change. It just measures views.

• 1:22:59Shaan Puri?

  And it's going to keep giving you that metric. And I mean, let's be honest, how many YouTubers don't just respond to views, right? Like it's like a very, very powerful motivation. Um, cause it's in your face. Everybody sees it. And that's the scoreboard that determines success or failure in that game.

• 1:23:12George Mack?

  Hmm. I go, I mean, we've, we've like spoke about this at hours and.

• 1:23:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. This is one of our favorite fucking, you hit one of our trap, trap cards.

• 1:23:19George Mack?

  Like there's a weirdly part of the, um, thoughts I was thinking about this week was going down like how, is you know that Marshall McQ online that we like shape our tools and our shoot, our tools shape us? It's a great example of Nietzsche. Nietzsche used to write by a hand and then his eyesight began to go. So he started to write in a typewriter. And he's writing completely changed. He went way shorter, way punchier. Like he almost completely changed as an individual and. I've been thinking about that with a lot of these tools where, so I would like one of my life hacks at the minute is what I call boom scrolling. So rather than doom scrolling, I go on a treadmill at like 15 incline, three in. I've got share, believe on loop playing. I'm spinning around. I'm having a fucking great, I'm just sending links to people.

• 1:24:00Chris Williamson?

  If you, if you are either in his contacts, high on the top of his list of iMessage contacts recently, because he's got massive recency bias. So he only sends it to the people that he can see. And if you're in lifetime on South Lamar and you walk downstairs and you see him, it's you with something from the eighties, some hair metal or like some like big pop star from the eighties and he's just furiously sending fucking links to people.

• 1:24:23George Mack?

  That's how social media, I think, is supposed to be consumed. If you're at 130 beats per minute.

• 1:24:26George Mack?

  That's how it's supposed to be. Yeah. If you're at 130 heart, like heart rate per minute, you just like forget about like all the like new stuff goes and I'm just in like these holes, like finding stuff. But one of the reflections.

• 1:24:36Chris Williamson?

  You've managed to find a social media flow state.

• 1:24:38George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, the flow state for social media. Boom scrolling, it's, it's coming back. So one of my, one of my actual realizations when I was in this high was

• 1:24:48George Mack?

  one thing you, when you become, when you're in like a flow state or when you're more mindful, you begin like the, a lot of meditators describe it as the frame rate of reality completely slows down. So it's kind of like going from a, a standard definition TV to a HD where everything's a bit clearer. Everything's a bit slower. And I started to notice this thing in my head that I was really embarrassed about, that when I would scroll, I'd see a tweet or I'd see a post and there's this little thing in me that just looks at the views it gets. And then like determines if I'm going to consume it or my reaction beforehand. And it's almost like, imagine what we've created for this memetic algorithm. Imagine before you ever heard like a piece of music or you ever tasted a bit of food. It's like like people clapping or people going, no shit. That's your whole, you don't actually ever experience social media content.

• 1:25:34George Mack?

  So one of the two big changes I'd like to see is one, could I just turn off all engagement metrics? And I'd be fascinated to run a study and compare the two and see like the, the impact that that would have. And then the second one, because I've thought a lot about this, which is your point Sean, around the depth metrics, that it's very hard for us to measure depth. It's very easy for us to measure width is. Right now, one of the problems with social media is you can only kind of pay with a like. Like, that's the currency, which, and then I, if you have a thought experiment, if you imagine the world where the only currency was one dot, like a one dollar bill, and you can't pay more than one dollar. What would you have? The dollar store theory. You'd have dollar store everywhere. Means you wouldn't have Michelin star restaurants, you wouldn't have like luxury brands, you wouldn't have all these stuff that you'd,

• 1:26:17George Mack?

  those are actually shit examples because I hate them, but you know, stuff that you would actually want to pay more money for. And I thought even just as simple as like Y X don't just implement like a golden like. Well, I only have one per week. It's completely meaningless, but I have one per week and I press it. And then I can also go on the golden like feed. I can go, this is the thing that Sean says out of everything he's consumed this week is the best. I think the change you would have in terms of content would be huge.

• 1:26:40Chris Williamson?

  The worst thing is that you, you proposed this to me over dinner, what, five years ago or something probably? And I was like fucking stupid idea. And then YouTube brought in hype. We've seen hype.

• 1:26:49George Mack?

  No, what is that?

• 1:26:50Chris Williamson?

  If you're a channel with under a hundred thousand subscribers, you as a user are allowed, I think you're allocated about a thousand hype points per week. And you can only spend it on videos that are high performing. I think it might be videos over a hundred K on channels less than a hundred K, something like that. But it's uh, like non-fungible, the, the limited, right? So the Bitcoin of your likes.

• 1:27:11George Mack?

  Right.

• 1:27:11Chris Williamson?

  And it's fucking great. And I find myself

• 1:27:13George Mack?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:27:14Chris Williamson?

  using it on videos that I really want to, um, here's a small creator that's nailed it with some great documentary explaining why the whole, the straight of Hormuz is hard to get through, whatever the fuck. And I'm like, I wanted to send the, the hype thing. Uh, Michael Smoke is, had one video that broke through and I wanted to do it for his thing. So, yes, you're right. Other thing, McNamara fallacy. You familiar with that?

• 1:27:33George Mack?

  No.

• 1:27:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so uh, McNamara was the guy that was in charge of working out what was going on with the troops in the Vietnam war. And his issue was that he was measuring the wrong uh, metrics. So the McNamara fallacy or quantitative fallacy is the mistake of making decisions based solely on metrics while ignoring qualitative or measurable factors. Named after U S Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, it assumes that if something cannot be easily measured, it is not important or does not exist. So the issue that the McNamara fallacy has Was that enemy body count metric is to taken to be a precise and objective measure of the success or failure of the Vietnam War, but it wasn't at all. It was domestic casualties, domestic injuries. And the far more important, what's the vibe?

• 1:28:18Chris Williamson?

  What's the tone?

• 1:28:19Shaan Puri?

  The morale.

• 1:28:20Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:28:20Shaan Puri?

  The soul.

• 1:28:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, precisely. So the line is, we end up intending to measure what matters, but instead what we can measure just ends up mattering.

• 1:28:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Chris Williamson?

  And everything else is disregarded. So you could, like I say, how obviously golden like idea, like, is there any ways you guys are like for yourselves? Whether it's for the actual platforms themselves or just for you as an individual have found a way out of this?

• 1:28:49Shaan Puri?

  There was one I heard, I didn't do this, but Hormozzi had a thing with this where he starts getting popular on YouTube. And then he hires a team and they're like, hey, let's, let's punch this up. Let's do this video. Let's do this video. Oh, people will love this. Do what you're eating, do what you, how you guys met, do this. And he started as a business channel and then he's doing everything. And of course, things that are, you know, there's not a lot of people who want to understand how to do better cold calls in sales, right? Like that's a super niche topic, but like, don't be broke is a bigger topic. And then bigger than that is going to be harsh truths about being a man, whatever, right? Like, so those are pop, those get two million views. So why make those shitty 20,000 views about, you know, how to, how to improve your sales funnel or whatever? But he realized like, well, what was my mission?

• 1:29:32Shaan Puri?

  My mission was like, I'm like, I love business. I want to share what I know about business. And so what he did was he started selling his book for 99 cents. And he put it in his bio, right? So he's basically just used the assumption of instead of measuring the success of these videos based on views, let's just measure it on book sales. It's like presumably only a business person, the type of people I'm making Honda for would buy a business book about sales or about a hundred million dollar offers. Only somebody who liked the video and trusted me more from this video would go and convert. So it's like, let me create my own. Like, it's like people who do their own sampling, like their own polling. Like, I don't know if you heard about this before the election, but there was a guy who did the, who made a huge bet on Polly market that Trump was gonna, gonna win.

• 1:30:17Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if you guys remember this, this French guy made like $50 million. And the reason why was the mainstream media polls were showing like a neck and neck race. And he did. Of what's called like something like the friends and neighbors poll, you can pull this up Jared, but like, I think their premise was if you ask people who they're gonna vote for, they'll tell you, but like, some people hedge and there was like closeted Trump voters. But if you ask them, who do you think your neighbor's gonna vote for? They'll give you a different question, a different answer.

• 1:30:42Chris Williamson?

  This is like the Keynesian beauty contest.

• 1:30:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so he used the data from, he commissioned his own poll, which cost him like a few hundred thousand dollars or whatever. And he ended up making forty or fifty million dollars on a bet. Cause he understood the actual probability of success was far different than the, the priced odds on these markets, on these markets.

• 1:31:00Chris Williamson?

  So what you're saying that Alex did was he found a metric that was more important and more accurate than all of the other metrics.

• 1:31:07Shaan Puri?

  He brought his own, he brought his own metric to YouTube, which he had to hack around, right? To figure out how to do.

• 1:31:11Chris Williamson?

  James, James Smith does this. So he's got his business channel, which is the, the, the other thing. He basically shut down his main one, which has got half a million subs. And he'll put a video up that gets 20,000 plays and make $50,000. Because the people that go on to that video are precisely his target market at a high conversion. And they've, they've got some special tracking link that's for each different video. So he knows, oh, this one video, because it's only this link in that one video. And it's pinned in the comments or whatever it might be. And he can, he's now optimizing for the outcome that he wants.

• 1:31:45Shaan Puri?

  That makes sense.

• 1:31:45Chris Williamson?

  Now, the problem is that you then start to optimize for book sales. And what optimizing for book sales, like, cause you're always optimizing for something. Unless you're optimizing for vibe or optimizing for feeling. And that's what the, you know, to break the fourth wall, that's the reason that I wanted to do this. I don't know if these episodes will ever be bigger than me sitting down with McConaughey. I think they've kind of weirdly got the legs to be. But the reason I wanted to do it is because I thought it would be fun. And I think the optimizing for your, your, the quote on the wall of your man, or the childlike joy, or the, you know, good hang vibe.

• 1:32:18George Mack?

  It's, yeah, knowing when to use metrics, when to avoid them. And then also, then you said then about studies, like how much of this is you? And then how much of this is the wider?

• 1:32:25Shaan Puri?

  I have to give you credit. You did this. When you released your high agency thing, I was the one who went on similar web and looked at the traffic to your blog. I was like, dude, there's a million people have read your blog. You're like, really? I'm like, don't, what are your analytics saying? That's what similar web is like. I didn't have Google analytics in.

• 1:32:39George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Shaan Puri?

  I was like, you're a marketing guy. How do you not have it in? You intentionally didn't have it in.

• 1:32:44George Mack?

  Yes. Well, even that bit of advice there of like, do a blog post, like blog, like blog posts are essentially the UK or the mainstream media. You know what I mean? Like, it's like the ultimate, like

• 1:32:52Shaan Puri?

  Undervalued.

• 1:32:53George Mack?

  Undervalued, um, like, don't do it. You can't link to it. And at that time, Twitter completely shadow banned links. But then, yeah, I think doing something fundamentally different, and this is the challenge of when do you know? And I struggle with this a lot. When you're a bit of a weird guy, which fucking all four of us are probably, right? When do you know that you're kind of on to something? You're on the edge or when are you just a bit batshit mentally? And that, and knowing that is a fucking, that's why you've got to have good friends, I think. As well as sometimes just balls and you make mistakes.

• 1:33:22Shaan Puri?

  No, no, you just ignore, you just always assume you're on to something.

• 1:33:25Chris Williamson?

  Put the glasses, put your glasses on and hope for the best.

• 1:33:27Shaan Puri?

  Assume you're on to something. That's what I do. Delusional. Delulu is the

• 1:33:29George Mack?

  This is the difference. That's our GDP gap right there.

• 1:33:32Chris Williamson?

  This side of the table and this side of the table.

• 1:33:33Shaan Puri?

  That's the GDP gap right there.

• 1:33:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35Shaan Puri?

  He's gonna tell you if you're on to something. Come on. Really? Really? It is.

• 1:33:39Chris Williamson?

  It is.

• 1:33:39Shaan Puri?

  I'm always on to something. That's what I'm saying, dude.

• 1:33:42George Mack?

  Next thing you know, I'm gonna

• 1:33:43Chris Williamson?

  Maybe I'll wait two decades.

• 1:33:44George Mack?

  That's a metacratic society where we've got an old school aristocratic society.

• 1:33:49Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. We've been handed down. And also the other thing is that we can't raise out of our status. You're going to be middle class for the rest of your life in the eyes of British people. I'm going to be working class for the rest of my life in the eyes of British people. It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter how many plays I get, how much money I make. When I go back home, they know where I went to school. They know what postcode my parents lived in. They know what my accent's like. It's like, I think that that puts a kind of cap on how much people think that they, how, how big their dreams should be and how much faith they should have in themselves. This is, Alan de Botton talked about this. He's like, People that come from in the UK working class backgrounds, they're probably not going to try and rock the boat because that's not their place. It's not your place to do that. America's like nascent. It's a fucking two years old, right? In the grand scheme

• 1:34:34Chris Williamson?

  of things. We've got a thousand years of uninterrupted, uninvaded history, right? Apart from some planes in fucking like August of 1940. That's it, right? And then fucking Rudolph Hess, when he decided to try and land in Scotland. Do you know that story? Rudolph Hess.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 1:34:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh, oh gee, do you want to tell it?

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  You tell it better than me.

• 1:34:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so Rudolph Hess was one of the.

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  That was the most English shit ever.

• 1:34:57Chris Williamson?

  Inner.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  You want to tell it?

• 1:34:59Chris Williamson?

  No, you tell it better than me.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  Crack on.

• 1:35:05Chris Williamson?

  Rudolph Hess was a German fighter ace in World War One, and he then becomes one of the inner circle for Hitler in World War Two. He starts to slowly lose favor toward the end of the war. I think 43, 44, he starts to lose favor with Hitler, and he sees himself being shunted to the side a little bit. So he decides that he's going to do something courageous and heroic that's going to save the war and also bring him back into the inner circle with regards to Hitler. Because he's got this sort of win, this group of sycophants around him. He's got Himmler, he's got Goebbels, all of these guys that are around him. And Rudolph Hess has been shunted out to the side. So Hess gets a

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

  two-seat plane, one of the long-range bomber planes that the Germans were using. He gets it modified so that it can be flown by one person as opposed to two. He gets additional fuel tanks strapped to it, and he flies it without telling anybody in the middle of the night from Germany over to Scotland because he once met some aristocratic Scottish nobleman and thinks because he's got this perspective of Brits, that it's all one Renaissance Bridgerton novel, that he is going to know Winston Churchill and the King, and he's going to be able to, or the Queen, and is going to be able to petition Britain to have an armistice,

• 1:36:29Chris Williamson?

  to put down their arms. So. He leaves a note for the Fuhrer and leaves a note for his wife and just sets off. Now, he doesn't know where he is when he gets to Scotland because it's dark. By the time he gets to Scotland, it's dark and he can't see where he wanted to land. He can't see the fucking palace or the house of this nobleman. So he just pulls the ejector seat, lands in a farmer's field, lands in a farmer's field. Very quickly gets picked up by the British military. They find out this is the fourth ranking Nazi in the entire Reich. Immediately take him into custody, doesn't get to see the king, doesn't get to see the queen, doesn't get to see anybody. Doesn't get to see anybody at all, doesn't get anywhere close to the nobleman he meant to go out in there and see.

• 1:37:11Chris Williamson?

  However, the British now have the fourth ranking Nazi in the world and Hitler is furious. Absolutely fucking furious, like apoplectic apparently. And it just goes to show, I think, like first off, the weird incentives and the way that people respond to a tight sphere of a social circle with power struggles that keep on going on. It causes people to do crazy, being in a relationship with a hot, cold girlfriend, right? You're just doing fucking insane things. You're like throwing rocks at her window, holding a boombox with a mixtape. And then the next day, you're naked, fucking getting, you know, being beaten up by her or whatever.

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  I told you that story in confidence.

• 1:37:54Chris Williamson?

  The other thing is that people still have this kind of archaic interpretation of what British life is like, especially back in the day.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  He should have done a 360 and then moonwalked out of there.

• 1:38:07George Mack?

  Have you ever heard of the story of Churchill and Hitler getting dinner?

• 1:38:11Chris Williamson?

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• 1:38:55Chris Williamson?

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• 1:39:22George Mack?

  Early 30s Churchill's very much out of the the picture. And Hitler's on the come up. So I think he's just, he's either just became Chancellor, he's just about to come Chancellor. And one of the fascinating things that you, when you really study history is how blurry it is at the time. So I always use the example of the Roman Empire of you can, I think it's like four, seven, six A D is when the Roman Empire fell. But if you ask, well, when did the people recognize it fell? And it's a bit like, huh. The same with the British Empire, like when did the British Empire fall? It's like, huh, like you could point to some parts of World War One, you could go further back. You could go to World War Two, you could go to the 60s, 70s, whenever you want to go to it. When do people actually recognize the thing? It's always later.

• 1:40:04George Mack?

  And even like Hitler, like Churchill, who obviously ends up becoming Hitler's like nemesis, was intrigued by a dinner with him. So there was this guy called Ernst Putzi Hengelsvegan. You can probably search that one, Jared. And good luck. And he, um, he, he was like a socialite in Germany who wanted to arrange the meeting. And Churchill basically said, listen, he was really concerned about communism at the time, but he was also concerned with Hitler's antisemitism. So Putzi says, well, come through, I'll introduce you to Adolf, you guys will get on really well. Churchill turns up, he's got his whole family there and kind of chatting to Putzi. He's still not here, still not here. So they kind of have dinner. Hitler's not there and Churchill's like, where is he? So Putzi goes, leave it with me. So Hitler famously lives in an apartment building in Berlin.

• 1:40:49George Mack?

  So he goes to his apartment building. Shit, you know, Hitler's there just shaving his mustache. So he's just shaving his mustache at the time. You've got it. That's the thing about his mustache, like there's a lot of work that goes into that thing. So he's shaving the mustache and he goes, Winston Churchill, very important British politician wants to meet you. And he's like, what am I going to say to him? What am I going to say? I have no interest in talking to that guy. And Putzy like argues with him for ages and he goes, right, I'll come. So he goes back, tells Churchill, Churchill, he's found me sit there. Hitler never comes. So Putzy says, I'll settle you up the next day. Sets up another dinner. Hitler never comes. And it's like those moments of history that if those two met, because famously, I didn't realise this until I was reading about it recently, that Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler.

• 1:41:32George Mack?

  He flew over to Germany and he was impressed. Do this, give us a handshake. He was impressed by the handshake because Hitler does these double handshakes. And he was drawn in by his charisma and believed, oh, this guy will never invade. Um, but it's just this fascinating counterfactual that if Adolf and Winston met, what would have happened?

• 1:41:47Chris Williamson?

  What year was that?

• 1:41:48George Mack?

  I want to say thirty one, thirty two, around about then.

• 1:41:53Chris Williamson?

  Fuck. Yeah, that's so cool. Uh, have you seen the Forbes under thirty, under thirty fraud list?

• 1:42:01George Mack?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:42:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's crazy. Jared?

• 1:42:04Shaan Puri?

  How long is it now?

• 1:42:05Chris Williamson?

  Um, so it's just, this stinks of you two. This is really something, this is kind of just a gift for you two. Um, but this is the thirty under thirty fraud watch list. So if we scroll down a little bit and you hover over Sam Bankman Fried, you'll see incarcerated Terraform Labs, incarcerated Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos incarcerated. We'll keep going down. There we go. Time served for Martin Scurely. Um, and if you go, if you go to the black bit where it's like redacted, just scroll over the black text. The real numbers were three hundred thousand, that's it. Sold a student loan app to JP Morgan for one, a hundred and seventy five million, claimed four point two five million users. The real number was three hundred thousand and she hired a data scientist to fabricate the rest. JP Morgan bought it anyway, then noticed, oops.

• 1:42:48Chris Williamson?

  If we go all the way down to the bottom, there's actually a risk list. So this is people who've been on the thirty under thirty, it's like a, a, how would you say? Prototypical algorithm that looks at some of the hype around the market. So these are companies that they think is going to be likely to be on the fraud list. So I don't know, any sphere cursor, do you know what that is?

• 1:43:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, cursor is super legit. I would say cursor is super legit, but uh,

• 1:43:15Chris Williamson?

  They're not going to come for you.

• 1:43:16George Mack?

  The, the crazy one is Sam Bankman Fried, it came out today.

• 1:43:19Chris Williamson?

  Polymarket there? Oh, shame.

• 1:43:21George Mack?

  Sam Bamford freed, it came out today that um, the shares FTX, so Sam Bamford free put an investment in Anthropic that owns Claude.

• 1:43:28Chris Williamson?

  It would have gotten them out of the.

• 1:43:30George Mack?

  It was, it's something like that.

• 1:43:31Shaan Puri?

  No, it's like sixty billion dollars.

• 1:43:33George Mack?

  Sixty billion, which Coinbase's were fifty billion or something like that. So it's um, but the.

• 1:43:37Shaan Puri?

  FTX at its peak was thirty. So basically, he's one of the, had he not gone to jail for fraud and had not been using.

• 1:43:43Chris Williamson?

  Would have been one of the richest people on the planet.

• 1:43:45Shaan Puri?

  And he would have been seen as one of the best investors in the world because he was early in Solani, he was early in this.

• 1:43:51Chris Williamson?

  Do they still have that position or did they have to liquidate the position?

• 1:43:54Shaan Puri?

  No, that's the sad part. When they did the bankruptcy, they bring in this guy, he's a famous guy, he did the Enron bankruptcy, something like, something Rice or something, I forget what his name is. He's got a cool, cool sounding name. They bring him in. So what do they do? They immediately like freeze all payments, they like have like a protocol of bankruptcy. And so one of the things is they take all these illiquid shares and they say, we need to sell them. And they sell them at this huge discount right away into the market.

• 1:44:17Chris Williamson?

  My god.

• 1:44:18Shaan Puri?

  Um, and so they sold the whole lot.

• 1:44:20Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what they sold it for?

• 1:44:21Shaan Puri?

  So they sold the whole lot for like, I think like a billion dollars of, like a billion dollars of all the investments that he had made. And so it was like a fraction of whatever it was like worth essentially. And uh, just the one Anthropic position alone is a sixty billion dollar position.

• 1:44:35Chris Williamson?

  Paid off all of the.

• 1:44:36George Mack?

  Oh, multiple times, many times.

• 1:44:38Chris Williamson?

  So all of the people who were missing money, had they have just helped, when was the FTX thing? Three years ago?

• 1:44:44Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, something like that, maybe.

• 1:44:45Chris Williamson?

  Had they have held, had they have held the FTX position in Anthropic, simply for what, thousand days, thousand more, even let's say it was like they did it, it was last year, it would have been three years. That would have cleared off everybody's debts. Everybody would have got their money back.

• 1:44:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. Well, you got screwed because if, let's say you held Bitcoin in FTX, you did nothing wrong. You bought Bitcoin on this exchange, you think you have Bitcoin. In reality, FTX either didn't buy the Bitcoin, just took your cash, they showed you, you own ten Bitcoin, but you didn't, they never bought the Bitcoin, they just took the cash and did something with it. Or you did have Bitcoin and they went and used it again for their own slush fund of investing, uh, which they were not supposed to do. Now. Even when the bankruptcy happened and it's like, oh, you're gonna get paid out. You got paid out based on the Bitcoin price when it happened. Not the fact that Bitcoin was up three, four, five X since then.

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  Why, why is that?

• 1:45:36Shaan Puri?

  It was like the, it's the way that I guess the bankruptcy process works. I don't know the technicality of the way that they, that they did it. And so you had this money that should have been appreciating that was locked up. And then you get paid on the four years ago price or whatever it was the day, the day that it, that it happened is, is pretty bad.

• 1:45:52Chris Williamson?

  Sean, your knowledge of fucking niche business stuff, dude, is terrifying. It's like George for random historical facts.

• 1:46:00Shaan Puri?

  There's a, there's a Galloway did something cool with this. Have you heard what he did? So when the bankruptcy happened and people, um, every, every, so like for me, I had some cash. FTX was one of our sponsors. They gave, they gave us a bunch of money. They gave us like a hundred, 200 grand to write an, one article about them on the milk road. And we actually wrote it and I wrote in the thing, I was like, yeah, there's this, uh, weird relationship between FTX, which everybody thinks is the best company in the world right now. And Alameda Research, his like hedge fund. And it's like, it's unclear, the relationship, it's, it's a bit of a

• 1:46:33Chris Williamson?

  So you called this out?

• 1:46:34Shaan Puri?

  So I called that part. I'm not an investigative journalist. I wasn't gonna go, it's not my job to go figure that out. But I just noted like, hey, like, here's a bunch of really interesting things about them. Here's something that's unexplained. I don't, I don't fully know. It sounds a little bit sketch. And so we sent it to them. We're like, hey, we're ready to post. And they were like, uh, you need to take that part out.

• 1:46:51Chris Williamson?

  No fucking way.

• 1:46:51Shaan Puri?

  And so I was like, well, I think I'm not gonna take it out.

• 1:46:54Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:46:55Shaan Puri?

  And they were like, okay, uh, we'll get back to you. And they just never talked to me again. They never took the money back. They never asked for the money back. They just disappeared.

• 1:47:03Chris Williamson?

  And you never posted it?

• 1:47:04Shaan Puri?

  We never posted it. We were like, okay, I guess we'll just, I guess they'll get back to us. They just never did. And then it came out that that was like this link that was like a really problematic thing.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  That was their defensive way of handling that.

• 1:47:14Chris Williamson?

  Did you ever talk about, did you ever

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:47:16Chris Williamson?

  Bring up the fact that you presciently fucking accidentally just nudged the tripwire? You didn't fully break it, but you nudged the tripwire that was gonna cause like the biggest banking scandal of the last five years?

• 1:47:25George Mack?

  The Epstein girls, the, the two girls.

• 1:47:28Shaan Puri?

  But I'm like a dog setting it off. I wasn't really like clever in how I was doing it.

• 1:47:31Chris Williamson?

  You backed into, you moonwalked into

• 1:47:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was just like, hmm, that, that sounds weird. Is there an explanation for this? They're like, no. And I was like, okay, still sounds weird to me. That was it.

• 1:47:40George Mack?

  It's really interesting to consider, and it kind of links to the like study says, science says of, we just have this default bias of If people think this thing is successful, kind of, it's this giant game of Emperor's New Clothes.

• 1:47:52Chris Williamson?

  So true.

• 1:47:52George Mack?

  That exists.

• 1:47:53Chris Williamson?

  And one of the things that I've always had a bit of a problem with, maybe because I was such an unpopular kid, but the fact that talent isn't enough, momentum is more important for the most part, you know, we can let a lot of people get away with some pretty gnarly shit if it seems like they're crushing it. I always use this example of a Fyre Festival. Billy McFarlane from Fyre Festival, the festival was an entire catastrophe, multiple documentaries made about it, people are in basically FEMA shelters instead of the five-star huts that they were promised. Blink 182 doesn't turn up, people have got these like small cheese sandwiches, maybe they're going to be stranded on an island, there's not enough water, all the rest of it. But if Billy McFarlane had been able to put together a half-competent festival, just passable.

• 1:48:37George Mack?

  Right.

• 1:48:38Chris Williamson?

  He would have been hailed as a marketing genius. The orange square, all of that stuff was hugely influential. And this is because we will forgive almost every sin of someone's if they're successful. And in a meritocracy, this makes complete sense, right? If you are crushing it, that means I want to be around you, the blast radius of your success is so great. Fucking canonical, perfect example that happened two weeks ago, Kanye West. Kanye West just sold out SoFi Stadium two nights, right? And the stage show is fucking spectacular. All that anyone can talk about is how cool the production was, and he's got all of these guests coming on, it's fucking amazing. He hasn't exactly showered himself in glory over the last five years, right? It would be difficult for a musician to try

• 1:49:21Chris Williamson?

  and torpedo their own musical career more aggressively than Kanye West did. But homeboys got bangers.

• 1:49:28George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Chris Williamson?

  If you've got bangers, dude.

• 1:49:30George Mack?

  It's all forgiven.

• 1:49:31Chris Williamson?

  You can do whatever the fuck you want. And that's on one side, what happens with music, your pint and beauty, two things that hack the human brain so effectively that you will stay going back to the fucking crazy stripper girl because she's so hot, even though she's bad for you, you will listen to the person who put out literal Heil Hitler song fucking six months ago. Because he's got three and a half hour worth set of straight heaters. And the same thing is also true with momentum. If somebody seems to be crushing it, we'll just, we're, we're Sam Bankman Freed. He's playing fucking, what was he playing like fucking World of Warcraft or something?

• 1:50:12George Mack?

  During the meeting.

• 1:50:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, during, and he's like, oh my God, this guy's a fucking super genius. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Because any person would be scrutinized. But if you've got the right momentum, people are happy to just fucking shunt that to the side. And I've never liked it. And it goes to my theory about why. People say the only insults that hurt are the ones that you believe. And I don't think it's true. I think the insults that hurt the most are the ones that you know are untrue, but that you fear other people might believe. Because that's optics management. Because you have not only the unfairness, but you have the indignation of knowing that it isn't true. And this is the opposite side of the same dynamic that we're talking about here. You could put out something which is amazingly researched, a fantastic piece of work.

• 1:50:55Chris Williamson?

  But if other people say you're a bad guy, or that was done incorrectly, or we don't think he's cool. It's not going to get anywhere. But that can't happen with beauty because it hacks the human brain. It is so hard to say, you can say that girl or that guy that's very good looking, they're an asshole, they're this, they're that, and you go, yeah, but they're so fucking hot. The same with Kanye West. You can say he's an anti semi, we don't like him, he's crazy, he's addicted to nitrous. We don't, it's like, he's got fucking heaters, dude. And for as long as he's got heaters, it doesn't matter.

• 1:51:26George Mack?

  I do think, I do think music and beauty are unique in that regard. That the more successful you are as a musician, the more you can probably get away with more so than any other, any other realm.

• 1:51:37Chris Williamson?

  People can kid themselves into not liking something that is objectively good because they don't like the person putting it across in most art forms. If you don't like somebody on a podcast and they tell a really interesting story, you can convince yourself that it wasn't that interesting, other an asshole. Even comedy, someone can tell a joke and you can be like, nah, nah, wasn't that good? Wasn't that good? Didn't think it was that good. The same thing is not true for music. It is so penetrating emotionally to people. It fucking just cuts through your biases. It cuts through your defenses in a way that other art forms can't. And beauty, especially like female beauty for guys, is just, you can be the craziest,

• 1:52:18Chris Williamson?

  like total cluster B personality nightmare curse. If you're hot, guys are just gonna keep coming back.

• 1:52:26George Mack?

  Wait till you hear Epstein's SoundCloud. Um, you know, I, I always use the example with Billy McFarlane of like Steve, Steve Jobs is a little bit of a very, very different figure to Billy McFarlane, but we are distortion field, kind of makes things happen. Um, and like the counterfactual that like the ultimate thing that McFarlane did, or one of the big things is like his business partner, his co-founder was Ja Rule. And like I always want like the counterfactual if Steve Jobs's co-founder was Ja Rule rather than Steve Wozniak, like the McFarlane story is very, obviously it's on him for selecting Ja Rule. But if he would have selected a good operator, what would have happened?

• 1:53:03Chris Williamson?

  Question, question. What businesses would be made better by adding Ja Rule in?

• 1:53:12George Mack?

  That's a great question.

• 1:53:13Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen the old thing? What does Ja have to say about this?

• 1:53:16George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:16Shaan Puri?

  One of the all time old internet memes. There's a, there's a, a phrase that I've been very interested in recently called supernormal stimuli. Have you guys heard this?

• 1:53:27George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Shaan Puri?

  It's pretty fascinating. If you're really with this, you might be able to explain it.

• 1:53:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes, Skinnerian behaviorism stuff.

• 1:53:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's basically, there was a scientist, uh, back then, he won the Nobel Prize for this and what he studied was, he, he got famous because instead of doing studies in a lab, he just went out into the wild, was like, what do I observe is actually true? And then if I tweak a variable, can I just leave it in, in the real environment and see what happens? And so what he did was, uh, you know, birds, the core behavior of a bird is to sit on the egg, keep the egg warm. That's your baby. That's like the entire like Darwinian pressure is to keep this egg alive. So he goes, awesome, bird loves egg.

• 1:54:05Shaan Puri?

  Does bird love bigger egg? Does bird love pink egg? Bird love pink polka dot egg? So he started putting a fake bigger egg with bigger dots and bigger brighter colors. Put it next to it and guess what the bird does? Gets off its real egg and goes sits on the fake egg. Cause it's more stable hijack the brain. And so literally his point wasn't like, it's not like some rational pros and cons list decision. Bird just had a, a, a deep like, uh, part of his brain that you could just hijack by changing the to give a, what he calls a super normal stimulus. So even give him a bigger, bigger and he could just keep doing this up till the point where it's almost comical. The egg is so big that a bird finally, when he's like, I can't even sit on this egg. Okay. I guess that's too big, right? And like, you know, you walk around and you'll see people with crazy lip fillers and BBLs.

• 1:54:50Shaan Puri?

  And it's like, what is it? It's a super normal stimulus. It's the same thing is like, there's a way to hijack the mind, beauty, uh, color. If you go to the grocery store, what do the food companies do? They basically take your normal stimulus. So like, you know, the humans were evolved to like, we like salt because we need electrolytes. We like fat for a certain reason. We need certain things in our, in our diet. So they just said, well, what if I give you a lot of salt? What if I give you fucking Doritos cooler ranch? What if I give you triple, you know, triple pack Dorito loco taco, whatever. And you eventually get a super normal stimulus that you really can't like resist. Your body has this like extreme like pull towards it.

• 1:55:25Chris Williamson?

  You know, my favorite supernormal stimuli is hunter gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time. Wow. Because it is so unique. There's a, the process called orification. So orification is the design of texture of foods. And if you think about ancestrally, almost every food that you can think of is a single texture. Right? Meat cooked slimy ish a little bit. Yeah. Well, there we go. Supernormal stimuli with, let's see how this is getting on.

• 1:55:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Fuck that. Yeah, I'm out on this now.

• 1:55:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm still enjoying it. I think I'm hungry. Um, Oreos.

• 1:56:01Chris Williamson?

  Crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, fries. But what's interesting about the cheesecake thing is that you have fat with carbs and sugar, unbelievably rare. And you have sort of the crunchiness of the base. And you can tell I'm hungry and the like fluffiness of the top of the cheesecake. And they give these to hunter gatherers and these, their fucking minds are, it's a flavor explosion. But yeah, the, there's a really great one that I, I think it's beetles, a type of beetle, dung beetle perhaps, or some other beetle. They're attracted, they're sexually attracted to the shininess of the shell, the shininess of the top. But as glass bottles became prevalent, the beetle population was going down because the glass bottles were shinier and bigger than the beetles were.

• 1:56:45Chris Williamson?

  So they were driving themselves into extinction, not mating with each other and just mating with glass bottles. Because that was a supernormal stimuli. And what happens with the cosmetic surgery, the big lips, the big boobs thing? You get something called fisharian runaway. So fisharian runaway is this sort of recursive insane expansion of typically like sexually dimorphic traits, sexually provocative traits. And you end up with peacocks who've got tails so big that they can't move, with deer whose antlers are so large they can't lift their heads up and they die. With women who've got boobs that are so big that they end up with back pain. And you know, they're unable, let's say that you took it to the absolute extreme, you were

• 1:57:28Chris Williamson?

  no longer able to procreate the reason for that trait in the first place. But you'd done something that like destroyed your hips. And now it meant that you needed to have that hysterectomy and you couldn't have your, your uterus anymore. And now you've killed your chance at doing the thing by having it run away with itself. The same as some of those deers or rams where the size of their like antler things dig into their own head and kill them.

• 1:57:52George Mack?

  Oh yeah, I've seen that.

• 1:57:53Chris Williamson?

  Fucking molly.

• 1:57:55George Mack?

  Wow. It's funny how it's, it's kind of like a meta discourse where, you know, you're talking earlier about the platforms and the feedback loops. And then you end up like going so right, but that's kind of nature's.

• 1:58:05Chris Williamson?

  It could like.

• 1:58:06George Mack?

  Homegrown version.

• 1:58:07Chris Williamson?

  It's the same dynamic. That's what it's. What you've seen on social media is tapping into this exact dynamic. It's the same thing.

• 1:58:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Chris Williamson?

  It's just that you've had to replicate it digitally.

• 1:58:18Shaan Puri?

  There's a great tweet that this guy Jay Altos said, he said, "You pity the moth for confusing the lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world."

• 1:58:25Chris Williamson?

  Fucking slurs. It's one of the best, one of the best tweets of this year.

• 1:58:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:58:29Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:30Shaan Puri?

  But there is a solve, right? Cause like you hear this and you're like, oh great, we're fucked. It's like, no, what's, well, there's gotta be some sort of antidote to this. And what the interesting part was, the equation goes like this. It's basically how powerful is the stimulus? So the flavor of the food, the size of the feathers, whatever, versus your baseline norm, what you are used to. And the cool thing is basically like, there's this arms race where they keep escalating. So the more you do it, the more you get used to it, then you need a bigger stimulus and a bigger, you need a bigger tweet and a bigger TikTok and more views on the next video and you need a stronger flavor. But all you gotta do is basically detox for a very short amount of time and reset. Like if anybody's ever given up soda for like, you know, a couple of months or a couple of years.

• 1:59:04Chris Williamson?

  George has never done that.

• 1:59:06Shaan Puri?

  You, if you go back to it, it tastes like horrible. It's like so syrupy. It's too sweet. You can't handle it. But you used to drink eight Diet Cokes. And the reason why is because you, you can reset the denominator essentially, instead of trying to avoid the, the, the forces of, of, you know, commercialization that are trying to stimulate you.

• 1:59:23Chris Williamson?

  What's that, uh, Cook Fucius sub stack that me and you like? You see his staring at a wall experiment?

• 1:59:28Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 1:59:29Chris Williamson?

  So this guy's sub stack, it's pretty niche, but it's fucking.

• 1:59:33Shaan Puri?

  Well, Cook Fucius.

• 1:59:34Chris Williamson?

  Cook Fucius.

• 1:59:34Shaan Puri?

  He's great. He's great.

• 1:59:35Chris Williamson?

  Really well written. You would love it. Fucking great. I mean, George introduced me to him and now I'm, I'm pretty, he, he, his first post that I saw was, uh, I am Andrew Puberman. That was the first, that was the first blog post that I read from him.

• 1:59:48Shaan Puri?

  Subscribe.

• 1:59:50Chris Williamson?

  And, um, he's doing an experiment. He did an experiment, I think for 30 days where he stared at a wall for an hour. And this is kind of a twist on an ancient eastern practice, which I, I think Dr. K has got his clients to do as well. And after 20 minutes, some people are bursting to tears. Some people are screaming. They kind of go a little bit. Yeah. Because I, at least what I think is happening, their baseline of stimulus is so low, even if you're in the shower, you're doing stuff, even if you're going for a walk, things are moving past you, right? You're locomoting and you see the fucking world.

• 2:00:24Speaker 02

  But all they're doing is staring at a wall?

• 2:00:26Chris Williamson?

  Staring at a wall for an hour. I would, I, I mean, let's see.

• 2:00:28Speaker 02

  You know what would be, you know, it'd be an interesting test? Take people that have been to jail and compare them to people that haven't.

• 2:00:34Chris Williamson?

  Because.

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  That's basically what it still is. Dude, I was in fucking in school suspension when I was a teenager for like weeks on end and all I did was stare at a fucking wall. It didn't make me go crazy. That's just weird.

• 2:00:47Chris Williamson?

  I mean, present evidence may suggest otherwise.

• 2:00:49Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:00:50Shaan Puri?

  Says the man.

• 2:00:51Chris Williamson?

  It was just a fucking delayed onset, dude.

• 2:00:55George Mack?

  Wasn't it? There's um, there's a few, like the most, the most extreme versions of this you've got, um, I've never fully verified this one, but of uh monks who've meditated for such a significant period of time are in, I think it's like three standard deviations.

• 2:01:11Chris Williamson?

  Happiness.

• 2:01:12George Mack?

  Of happiness. So like then it's like the naught point naught naught naught naught naught one percent. My favorite, and I'm always a bit like, hmm, it's a bit of a study.

• 2:01:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18George Mack?

  But I'm like, fuck, this one's not a study of um, the guy who set himself on fire.

• 2:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:23George Mack?

  To protest the Vietnam War. I don't know if Jared, if you could pull that one up, um.

• 2:01:27Speaker 02

  The monk?

• 2:01:27George Mack?

  Yeah, the monk who set himself on fire, who just literally walks, walks out, sits in lotus position, sets himself on fire, doesn't grimace.

• 2:01:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:35George Mack?

  Blink or fudge. And at that moment, I was like, huh, maybe there is something to meditation.

• 2:01:40Shaan Puri?

  Studies don't need to show.

• 2:01:41George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, studies don't need to show.

• 2:01:42Chris Williamson?

  I think it's uh, I think it's Ken Burns Vietnam documentary that covers this really well.

• 2:01:48George Mack?

  You hear about his heart?

• 2:01:50Chris Williamson?

  Who's heart?

• 2:01:50George Mack?

  The guy. So this is like kind of a Buddhist, a Buddhist philosophy that, um, like a Buddhist part of the story, which was his heart didn't set on fire. So his heart was like kind of completely normal. His whole body went to crisps, but his heart was still there. I mean, I think you could check this, Jared, but I think in the cremation period, they tried to cremate his heart and it refused to burn. So it gets a very surreal, it could be a complete myth, but.

• 2:02:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:02:11George Mack?

  But any, when, as soon as I see this, any of my questions around what the human mind is capable of, um, goes out the window.

• 2:02:16Chris Williamson?

  Homeboy's sat in full lotus, just barbecuing anything around him. Yeah, that's crazy.

• 2:02:21George Mack?

  You can see the gasoline tank there.

• 2:02:23Shaan Puri?

  There's a guy who's trying the screen experiment. Have you seen this? The guy who's doing one year, no screens. He's trying to Brian Johnson, but just a no screen and he's scanning his brain before and after. It'll be very interesting.

• 2:02:33Chris Williamson?

  How far into it is he?

• 2:02:35Shaan Puri?

  Like a day. Like, right?

• 2:02:36Chris Williamson?

  He just started.

• 2:02:37Shaan Puri?

  He just stared at a wall.

• 2:02:40Chris Williamson?

  Fucking insane.

• 2:02:40Shaan Puri?

  He finished all the things. It's like, I'm gonna avoid, yeah, this guy, David, David Danes. Today, I'm scanning my brain before I spend a year without screens. They expect brain function to change, but whether the structure self changes, nobody seems to know. And he's got his website where you could just like, you're gonna be able to see the updates of the results.

• 2:02:56Chris Williamson?

  Imagine how hard it would be to not, it's like not being exposed to fucking microplastics, dude. There's, I mean, he's, you know, he's gonna be, yeah, he's gonna be looking at the screen in an airport. He's gonna go to the gym and there's gonna be stuff around. So he's really.

• 2:03:08Shaan Puri?

  It applies to that too.

• 2:03:09George Mack?

  I assume no screens anywhere.

• 2:03:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's his goal.

• 2:03:12George Mack?

  I said, I assume he meant like phone TV, like personal screens.

• 2:03:14Chris Williamson?

  You mean, he's not gonna ever look at any.

• 2:03:17Shaan Puri?

  I think that's the intention.

• 2:03:18Speaker 02

  He's going Amish, is what it is.

• 2:03:20Shaan Puri?

  Come on.

• 2:03:20Speaker 02

  That's pretty cool.

• 2:03:21Shaan Puri?

  You gotta go all the way.

• 2:03:21Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna have to have fucking blinkers on.

• 2:03:24Shaan Puri?

  See, see if you can find the, the rules of the, of the challenge, but yeah, that's, it's pretty unreal.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  Hey, what was that quote you said, uh, maybe 10 minutes ago about the, the person that you look at the screen and it's reality?

• 2:03:36Shaan Puri?

  What did you say? Like, we, we laugh when the moth confuses, you know, a lamp for the moon, but here we are confusing the screen for the world.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  Okay, map that on to AI.

• 2:03:47Shaan Puri?

  What do you mean?

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

  Just, just, uh, in general, like what, like, I don't know, in 50 years, people are gonna be like, laughing at us because of whatever we were doing right now.

• 2:03:57Shaan Puri?

  Like, we're confusing AI for real intelligence? Or what do you mean?

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  I, I don't really know. I just, when you said that, it made me think of how AI is gonna be like, people are gonna laugh at us for, in 50 years for what we thought was good AI. That's what I thought of when you said that for some reason.

• 2:04:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that curve of technology.

• 2:04:14Speaker 02

  Like, they're gonna look at us right now, in 50 or 100 years, like, where the fucking moth that thinks the lamp is a, what, you get, you got.

• 2:04:22Shaan Puri?

  Did you guys watch the, the, you, you mentioned Demis? You mentioned Demis from, uh, Deep Mind. Did you watch the documentary?

• 2:04:28Chris Williamson?

  Oh, dude, it's so fun. Good.

• 2:04:30Shaan Puri?

  What is it? He, he's got this, uh, the guy who created Deep Mind, which kind of kicked off this whole AI wave. He has this documentary on Amazon, I think, called The Thinking Game?

• 2:04:39Chris Williamson?

  It's on YouTube now.

• 2:04:40Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it's on YouTube.

• 2:04:41Chris Williamson?

  It's on YouTube.

• 2:04:41Shaan Puri?

  It's so good. Highly recommend to anyone.

• 2:04:43Chris Williamson?

  Dennis, if you're, if you're listening, I want to bring you on the show. Reply to my emails.

• 2:04:46Shaan Puri?

  Dude, he's, he's, he's cool. He was like a six-year-old child prodigy, chess player, et cetera. But like, that moment of move 37 is just like, cheers, you know what I mean? I feel like that's like a turning point in human history was this move 37 moment.

• 2:05:00Chris Williamson?

  Basically, Google Deep Mind has, I mean, they seem to be. The most safety conscious, kind of very human approach to this AI race at the moment. Yes. But I don't know if, I mean, that the whole point of this, which is why Scott Alexander thinks that Anthropic is the Antichrist, because the Antichrist will come and make you think that they're not. So in this whole AI, that was a whole point that I had with Tristan Harris is everyone wants to cast aspersions at company like OpenAI, I don't like you because you did that. And I don't like Google because they did that. Or Grok, I don't like you because you did the whatever. It's like, hey, dude, it doesn't matter what somebody's stated fucking safety goals are.

• 2:05:45Chris Williamson?

  These guys are speed running through model development as quickly as possible. Right. And if they don't, they lose. Yeah. They lose. So just look at the incentives. Don't look at the fucking press release. Right. But yeah, the Anthropic Super Bowl ads were fucking hilarious. But don't click. And they decided not to do the thing for the Department of War and they did whatever stuff. It's like, dude, don't fucking like get lost in the source. These people are playing the exact same fucking game, just with slightly better PR. Yeah.

• 2:06:12George Mack?

  It does seem there's a huge Duma like narrative right now around AI that's becoming more and more popular.

• 2:06:16Chris Williamson?

  Listen to more Friedberg.

• 2:06:17George Mack?

  Yeah. To do. I mean, I from the wider question of what happens, I don't know. But from firsthand like experience, like for myself, I am, because the image models are getting so good now. I've had like a, like it's called subaromach dermatitis for about 10 years. Sometimes it gets so bad, I wouldn't want to like go outside like level bad. I just showed it to Gemini.

• 2:06:36Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean?

• 2:06:36George Mack?

  Um, so it's basically you're kind of like, there'll be a lot of people listening that have it. It affects like five to 10% of the population and your face will just break out and like really bad eczema. So I went to one doctor who basically got me a steroid cream and said, the reason why you have it is because of stress. It's like quite well known because of stress. I carried on, I started like meditating, like fixing my diet. I basically didn't eat sugar for like two years. And it calmed it down. I was like, oh, it's because of sugar. And then I saw a second doctor and she said, yeah, you're too stressed out. I'm like, fuck, I'm getting stressed out by you guys diagnosis that I'm stressed out. So she recommends another steroid cream. I end up. Tracking it for ages and I just uploaded the whole document to Gemini and he goes, oh no, just, just put Nizoral on your face. So anybody who has subatomic dermatitis, it fixes it for like 90% of people.

• 2:07:16Speaker 02

  And Nizoral is a medicine or it's like?

• 2:07:18George Mack?

  It's shampoo.

• 2:07:18Speaker 02

  It's a fucking shampoo.

• 2:07:19George Mack?

  Shampoo, you can get it for a few dollars.

• 2:07:21Speaker 02

  It's like Selson Blue.

• 2:07:21George Mack?

  And like, I've never had it ever again since. I've had 10 years, never had it ever again since. And that's just that. But these stories are like, it's not as, it's not as sexy as like the, the guy speaks to the LLM and decides to take his own life. It's like, not that that's like a obviously horrific story, if it's even fucking true, I don't know. Um, but like, I know just so many people whose like health is genuinely being like, revolutionized by these things. And it's just, we just have such an anchor towards negativity.

• 2:07:48Chris Williamson?

  Also, you, you're always going to push back against something, some new technological development.

• 2:07:52George Mack?

  Yes, it's, it's, it's the most recurring lesson throughout history. Like I was reading, cause I was fascinated by AI coming on. I was like, I want to go study the industrial revolution. What was fascinating at the time, you had two groups that came up. You had the Luddites, who would just basically go and smash the factories in. I'm sure this recently with Sam Altman having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house, um, a week ago. But then you also had the Romantics. So the Romantics would kind of pine about, and you kind of see this now of AI where it's like, they'll call things slop, which, which are, and there is, there's a, what you, you do want the Luddites and you do want the Romantics because they kind of act as, um, a balancing arc to, to the, uh, to the progression. But I think like net, net, most people alive today do not want to go back to pre-industrial revolution. They do not want,

• 2:08:33George Mack?

  like, the option is to go to Amish if you do want to. Like, that is available if you want to go Amish, but nobody does.

• 2:08:39Speaker 02

  I think AI is going to make people go fucking insane.

• 2:08:42George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they're, they're, we're getting to a point where.

• 2:08:46George Mack?

  I was gonna say, but pull it, Jared, if you can pull up the new thing, I don't know, um, the FT produced this, I don't know how true it is, but essentially they argue it's, um, it's making people less polarized immediately. Where social media was pushing people further to the left and the right, whereas AI, you can kind of already see with Grok now, they fact check people a lot more. So they're bringing a lot more people into the center. Why do you think it'll make people?

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  Because dude, it's, we're living in a post-truth age now. There's no way to determine what, what flavors.

• 2:09:08Chris Williamson?

  This is sweet whiskey. You want sweet whiskey?

• 2:09:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude.

• 2:09:11Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna have two toothpicks in? That's fucking nuts.

• 2:09:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm doubling down.

• 2:09:13Chris Williamson?

  Let's go.

• 2:09:13Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ. Well, um, there's a, well, I'm not using them to actually. Pick my teeth and just.

• 2:09:19Chris Williamson?

  No, but just you, you, you need so many stimulants that you've got one new tonic toothpick, one Zippix toothpick.

• 2:09:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, and I'm coming down off that kratom right now.

• 2:09:27George Mack?

  You're quiet.

• 2:09:29Speaker 02

  Slow motion. Uh, I think that deep fakes and maybe it's more so in America than other places, but after the Charlie Kirk assassination, there's all these conspiracy theories left and right about whether it was Israel did it or it's a hologram or if this guy was real. Like, there's all this crazy shit, right? And, um, nobody's going to be saying it's a something like, oh, this is a hologram or this was AI without the advent of AI being able to create deep fakes that are largely, I mean, look at it, look at boomers, dude, they believe all sorts of crazy shit. And we're like, fucking idiots.

• 2:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:04Speaker 02

  That's what I was kind of getting at, I guess, with what I was saying to you about that, that comment. But we're never going to know, I mean, ever what actually has happened with anything we know anymore.

• 2:10:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:14Speaker 02

  The truth is no longer even fucking matters because it can't be determined unless you experience it with your own five cents.

• 2:10:19George Mack?

  So there's, um, the great, uh, chapter in a book called The Beginning Infinity. And essentially his idea is what's called known as the precautionary principle, which is essentially the history of humanity is essentially problems. Like, we start like, even Great Britain, like where me and Chris are from, is just a, is this human concept? Like, it shouldn't exist. Like, we, in Great Britain, me and my family should fucking die of hypothermia. But because of like, we created central heating, we created clothing. But so we essentially have this whole arc of just problem solving, problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. And the problem that you then have ironically is that when a new problem comes along like this, is that you have what's known as the precautionary principle, which is we can see the problem, but we can't see the solution. But by definition, people, human beings can't forecast a solution because if we have the solution for it, we would implement and be worth trillionaires.

• 2:11:03Speaker 02

  And you would never, yeah.

• 2:11:04George Mack?

  But what you end up having is kind of seven billion people working towards, um, this potential problem. You saw it with COVID, like, I'm, I'm, I think it's very unsexy to say, but I'm pretty optimistic when it comes to humans' abilities to solve problems. I think, I think, I think like a lot of this stuff we can fix.

• 2:11:19Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of AI, did you see this Allbirds pivot?

• 2:11:22Speaker 02

  Oh, dude, it's insane.

• 2:11:23Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain for the class, please, what the fuck just happened?

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Allbirds, which was like a, uh, popular shoe amongst tech guys, at least. I don't know how popular it got outside of that, but it was like a niche shoe. It was like a wool sneaker.

• 2:11:35Shaan Puri?

  They were like, started small, became a public company, but then they started failing. And so like the stock has been going down for years. There, I think their last like, you know, they're at one point like a billion dollar company. They were like 50 million dollar company now. So the stock had been falling, falling, falling, falling, falling. And there was really no path. And so these guys bought it, I think. And I think what they did was they purchased it and they just pivoted to AI. And it's like, well, how does a shoe pivot AI? What does that mean? They're like, well, we raised all this debt. We're gonna buy GPUs and sell them. And the stock like as of this morning is soaring. I don't think this is a sustainable thing, but the stock is up by what?

• 2:12:08Chris Williamson?

  The company valued at around $4 billion at its peak, sold the intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for 39 million.

• 2:12:16Shaan Puri?

  39 million, yeah. And then they renamed it like what Free Bird or something. What did they name it?

• 2:12:19Chris Williamson?

  The shoe company had a market cap of 21 million on Tuesday, which climbed to 148 million on Wednesday. Just by saying, we do AI.

• 2:12:29Shaan Puri?

  The words, yeah. And then this happened during crypto. There was like a ICT company that was like, yeah, we're an ICT company, but we're a blockchain ICT company. And then there was, you know, there was tons of these companies. They would just change their name. They didn't even change the underlying business. They just changed the name to like, you know, blockchain motor controls. And then their stock would pop just because of stupidity.

• 2:12:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, the one day price move is 582%.

• 2:12:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's stupid. There's stupid things that happen. There's like, you know, the efficient market hypothesis. And then you hear this, right?

• 2:12:56George Mack?

  Yes, I saw somebody putting like the intelligent investor in the bin. It's like giving up on this, yeah.

• 2:13:02Shaan Puri?

  Speaking of, did you guys see, this kind of blew my mind. This is more in the kind of fear and doom stuff, but did you see the Indian, the Indian factory AI thing? Did you see this?

• 2:13:13Chris Williamson?

  Whether, whether training people with the cameras?

• 2:13:17Shaan Puri?

  Headset.

• 2:13:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, to fold clothes and shit.

• 2:13:19Shaan Puri?

  They're sewing shirts. They're just, they're basically folding towels. They're doing shirts, but there's giant factories now in India, where the primary function is you're paid to wear a head, like a head camera. And it just films you doing a task. And they're basically creating all the training data for the robots. Like the humans basically creating the training. Jared, pull this video up. It's just kind of striking when you see it. It's like, it feels like a Black Mirror episode.

• 2:13:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you know, do you know how Tesla made itself driving so good? Do you know how that, how it was trained?

• 2:13:50Shaan Puri?

  With a human?

• 2:13:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so.

• 2:13:53Shaan Puri?

  So these guys are just working and these guys have like neck pain and all this such as they're wearing this eight hours straight.

• 2:13:58Chris Williamson?

  Hey Sean.

• 2:14:00Shaan Puri?

  There's like a company, there's a company that's basically making a lot of money creating this data and selling it back to the AI, AI labs, which is pretty wild. And Elon, actually, he gave this interview, he said something that nobody really has talked about, but I thought was pretty batshit crazy. They're like, well, the next thing for Tesla is not cars, it's his robot. They're like, how are you going to train the robot to do all this stuff? You don't like for cars, you got the data because humans are driving the cars. So you were able to learn on millions and millions of miles. How are you going to do it with the robots? He's like, well, we're building this, I don't know, 100,000 square foot warehouse. And we're going to put 10,000 robots in there and they're going to self-play. So he's like, so, so if you, if you watch like how they trained the, the AI to beat like Go and chess.

• 2:14:44Shaan Puri?

  There was one way, which was you have grandmasters tell hard code rules. Okay, what's better than that? You train it on only grandmasters game, uh, game logs. And then they did this thing called Alpha Zero where they're like, we're just going to tell you the rules of chess. You play yourself 100,000 times, see what happens. And that became better than all of the other models with no, no data of uh, how to play chess or how to play Go. And so Alpha Zero was this huge breakthrough when, when DeepMind did it. So now Elon's trying to do the same thing with robots where he's like, yeah, we could do this where we get all the data from like human people like recordings. Or we could just create a warehouse where we tell them the, the objectives of the different stations. And then we let them just like fumble around trying to figure out like how did they use their arms and like eventually they're just going to figure out, I'm going to put 10,000 robots in this box.

• 2:15:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm like, I would pay so much money to watch this live stream.

• 2:15:36Chris Williamson?

  What was that? Was it Neo? Is that the at-home robot? What was the one that's made of kind of knitted?

• 2:15:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think Neo is the name of it.

• 2:15:42Chris Williamson?

  Neo, so this was an at-home assistance robot. There was two versions, you could buy it outright, you could rent it. I think to rent it was actually quite expensive. Was it $300 a month, something like that, $400 a month? And uh, someone videoed their Neo trying to close the dishwasher. And it looks like someone at the end of a party on too much ketamine trying to do the same thing. It's all sort of janky and it's coming down like, and it just cannot close this fucking dishwasher.

• 2:16:06Shaan Puri?

  That reminds me of iRobot.

• 2:16:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  You remember that, mate?

• 2:16:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Will Smith, classic.

• 2:16:10Speaker 02

  And then he has the live-in robot and he's like, I don't trust this fucking thing.

• 2:16:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, the way that the Tesla training data was done was that they took the top 5%, 1% of drivers and basically said, they're gonna drive on our behalf, because the self-training thing has to be harder when you're talking about the physical world. Yeah. Because the parameters of outcome, success and failure are way harder to work. Like, is this folded right? Like, there's a million ways that you could fold it. It turns out like, you know, it's one of those fucking origami. It's a swan, it's a goose. And you don't want that. It's nice and beautiful, but it doesn't fit the parameters right. So more oversight, or at least like a base training data of like, hey, here are some of the... Because what are the rules of the game of folding clothes? Right. Right, they're kind of... It's kind of strange to... But once you've got this raw training set, but this is the fight...

• 2:17:00Chris Williamson?

  This does feel a little bit like finishing off the champagne on the Titanic. You know, it's like we're going down. Yeah. And we'll just... On the way down, I'll make a little bit of extra money from doing this thing. To round out, George, good news about your dad.

• 2:17:19Chris Williamson?

  Phil Collins is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2026 inductee. There we go. Any idea what your dad said in response?

• 2:17:29Chris Williamson?

  Very British response, this. "Obviously, I'm pleased and honored to be inducted. It wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music." "Obviously, I'm pleased" sounds a little bit passive-aggressive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Took a while till 2026 to get this. "Obviously, I'm pleased and honored to be inducted." "Wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music." Boys, this has been fucking sick. Appreciate you all. All right. Unreal. Phil Collins, George's dad. Let's go. All right. Goodbye, everybody. I've never seen Phil Collins. Oh, you've never seen him? Wow. My first time ever seeing Phil Collins.

• 2:18:01Shaan Puri?

  Bro, so much fun.

• 2:18:03Speaker 02

  One last swig?

• 2:18:04Chris Williamson?

  Have it.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  I mean, this just...

• 2:18:05Chris Williamson?

  I gotta pee again.

• 2:18:07Speaker 06

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