16 Wise Truths To Improve Your Life - George Mack

George Mack is a writer, marketer and entrepreneur. If our mind is an operating system, ideas are the apps we install to give us a greater understanding of the world. George is one of my favourite thinkers and today we get to go through 16 of the best ideas we've both discovered since the last time we spoke over 3 years ago. Expect to learn whether optimism is actually a scam, why it's so sexy to be cynical, why high agency people are the best ones to have in your life, what is the most interesting question of all time, the difference between treadmill friends and sofa friends, why most people die at 25 but aren't buried until they're 75, how to stop worrying about everyone else's opinions and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mentalmodels #psychology #humannature - 00:00 Is Optimism a Scam? 07:42 How to Reframe Cynicism 15:02 Why is it Important to Have High-Agency? 24:55 How to Spot High-Agency People 35:17 Productivity Vs Creativity 45:30 How Rick & Morty Taught George to Live a Great Life 55:31 Why You Shouldn’t Brag 59:00 The Lack of Authenticity on Instagram 1:02:00 The Key to Not Caring What People Think of You 1:06:32 Society is Ruled More by Chance than Conspiracy 1:09:31 Principles for Thinking More Long-Term 1:18:05 How to Know if You’re Early or Late to a Trend 1:23:49 What is Neglected by the Media but will be Talked about by Historians? 1:39:44 YouTube is the New TV 1:48:09 Learning from the Aviation Industry 1:52:28 Why Humans Listen to Music Repeatedly 1:56:12 The Milestone of 25-Years-Old 1:58:59 Where to Find George - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - 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?

  Today, we're going to go through some of the best ideas of all time.

• 0:02George Mack?

  Well, purely subjective, I have me and you, so who knows?

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  The best ideas that we're aware of.

• 0:08George Mack?

  Right now, that may change in 12 months.

• 0:10Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 0:11George Mack?

  But that's the beauty of it. It's an infinite game.

• 0:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so the first one, is optimism a scam? What's the skeptic?

• 0:16George Mack?

  Is it shut down the railways, shut down airlines, shut down electricity, shut down it all? It's all a scam. We need more nihilism. We need more pessimism. No, I, um, I wrote this essay called, is optimism a scam? And the pure thesis behind it was what you had about 20 years ago was The Secret, the book that came out. And it was this idea that you could just manifest things into reality. And the cynical skeptical crowd completely decided to destroy that idea. And I always use like, so there's three great examples of The Secret. So you've got one, which is Winston Churchill, when he was 19 years old, saying, "One day, this great city will be under attack. I will be the one that saves it." So that's like 50, 40, 40, 50 years before World War II.

• 1:00George Mack?

  You have Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, "I will become the greatest bodybuilder ever, and the greatest movie star, or the biggest movie star of the time." There's one which is from John Rockefeller as well, which is, "One day, I will be the richest man in the world." He said that to his bank teller, who like rejected him for a bank, apparently. So that's the kind of bull case for like ridiculous affirmations that manifest reality. But the problem with that is, for every Rockefeller, Schwarzenegger, Churchill, there's 10,000 delusional assholes that say these things, and they are backed up. So the skeptics are right there. And the problem that the optimism crowd has, in my opinion, it's a marketing problem. They've sold it, they've oversold it. And the best, the best put down ever was Dave Chappelle, where he's saying, "If The Secret was true, why aren't all the starving kids in Africa manifesting food?"

• 1:44George Mack?

  And you go, that's, that's the ultimate win, right? So optimism as a result has kind of struggled a few else. And the problem with optimism is, they've oversold the product, is my, is my thesis. So imagine if you sold creatine as human growth hormone. That's what I see people have done with optimism. So what we need to do is appeal to skeptics' language to kind of win the optimism game, which is... If you go to PubMed and search placebo effect, a hundred thousand results. Everybody in the scientific community acknowledges the power of the placebo effect. There's one study where it started in World War Two, I forgot the name of the doctor, where it was the US versus the Italians and there was loads of people, loads of soldiers, sorry, struggling and rather than give them morphine because he'd run out, he started giving them

• 2:29George Mack?

  salt water and they could go through surgery with it. So the placebo effect is something magical, it's something powerful. And therefore, I think you can use that a little bit to argue the skeptic's case for optimism. And ultimately, where I go down, this is what optimism is, is to improve one percent every single day. So this, have you heard of the cocktail party effect? Have I told you about that?

• 2:47Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 2:47George Mack?

  So the cocktail party effect is me and you sat here, like we've been in a few bars or restaurants at Terry's BBQ down the road, right? And the background noise is a blur. It's me and you chatting, blur, blur, blur, blur, blur. But if somebody says voodoo events, which is Chrissy's old events company, or mentions the northeast of England, or whatever it is, suddenly that background noise, what is that? You immediately tune into it. So right now, your brain is blurring out infinite inputs, millions of inputs that are happening right now, and you're focusing on what appeals to your reticular activating system. And I think the, the case for optimism is you're not going to manifest things into reality, but if you have a more optimistic frame, you're more likely to spot those opportunities. And I say, market optimism is a one percent improvement every single day, and then you'll

• 3:31George Mack?

  probably get more people to believe it. So I think that's the problem with optimism. It was oversold.

• 3:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the baby and bathwater got thrown out together.

• 3:38George Mack?

  Exactly. The fruit, yeah, I put that baby in bathwater meme, which is they throw the baby out, which is like useful optimism with a load of delusional, wishy thinking, Instagram quotes, bullshit, and that's the problem.

• 3:51Chris Williamson?

  Especially the first, kind of like eugenics, optimism's like eugenics, that the first iteration of really, really aggressive optimism came from Rhonda Burns, The Secret. This is the woman who said that the 2006

• 4:06Chris Williamson?

  Boxing Day tsunami that killed like tens of thousands of people, I think in Thailand, was due to the Thai people giving out bad vibes that like manifested and attracted this natural disaster.

• 4:20George Mack?

  It's like, it's like if you advertise creatine as going to fix everything, it's not. It's a small 1% improvement every day, but the actual difference is, is you may then have an opportunity that opens up that completely compounds. So I think James Clear has that graph where if you improve 0.1% every single day, if that compounds, that's a 36x improvement, 36x improvement in a year. That's the argument I think for optimism is 1% improvement every single day. And ultimately, society is getting better. I think it's important to repeat that point.

• 4:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, everybody's deluded, right? In one form or another, everybody has some type of delusion. As far as I can see, and both of us come from the north of the UK, this is like the fucking ground zero for cynicism, pessimism, skepticism, not necessarily coming from an intellectual place, but almost coming from a genetic place. It feels like there's a predisposition, the weather's grey, the people are grey, the mood is grey. So everybody has a degree of delusion, right? Why not have a delusion that benefits you? Like, if you're going to not be accurate necessarily, if you know that you're going to be inaccurate about the future and you know that you can't know everything, which

• 5:27Chris Williamson?

  is true, I don't think that erring on the side of things are going to get worse, especially given that every quantifiable metric available says that things are getting better. Yes. Is it difficult that we're dealing with the existential pain of life direction and all that stuff? Yeah, 100% I, I, I get that. And it's a luxurious position to be in to have an existential crisis because all of the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been sorted. So it's a challenge that very few people have had to deal with. So there's not any wisdom that's been archetypally passed down over generations because so few people got to the situation where they were safe from shelter and food and water and connection and blah, blah, meaning and all that stuff. So yeah, I understand it's a difficult challenge, but like, everything is getting better, which means that.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  Optimism, what looks like optimism is actually realism. And what looks like realism is actually like pessimism.

• 6:20George Mack?

  Yeah, I think anybody who follows me for a while, and the ones who haven't, and I have to describe this one, so this in audio, is there's this matrix, which is optimism and pessimism, and then low agency and high agency. And I feel that, yeah, if you have optimism with a low sense of agency, that that isn't valuable at all. But paired with high agency, I think that's one of the most beautiful things. There's this like one thing that I always come back to as well, which is this Steve Jobs email. I think I told you about this one where he sent to himself thirteen thirteen months before he died. It came out quite recently. And Steve Jobs wrote this to to himself. I grow little of the food I eat and the little I do grow. I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use.

• 7:05George Mack?

  I am protected by freedoms and laws. I did not conceive or legislate and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and I am totally dependent on them for my life and well being. The one guy who could have, A, could be very pessimistic in that scenario, but B, also rightly so, have a fucking ego. It's like that, I always come back to that whenever I feel quite pessimistic, I go, fuck, life's actually very, very good.

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  How do you reframe it yourself? So everybody has this draw toward cynicism, pessimism. It's cool to do it on the internet, somehow becomes sexy to be cynical because it's seen as like a signal of high intellect. How do you stop yourself tumbling down that rabbit hole?

• 7:59George Mack?

  It's a good question. I think one of them, I have this thing of like hardware versus software, which is. Most people think they have a software problem when they actually have a hardware problem. So if I'm finding myself thinking more cynically, thinking more negatively, I'll just try and fix the hardware. So it's like some kind of breathing exercise, sauna, run, exercise, eat well. My friend, Dicky, says that when he's tired or in that kind of emotional state, his goal of the day is just to make no decisions. So I just often a good night's sleep or whatever it is, try and fix it that way. That for me fixes about 95% of my software problems. And then the remaining 5%, which may be legitimate issues, are much easier to solve in that. So that's the first thing I'd say is fix hardware before you try and fix software.

• 8:41George Mack?

  And then I think it's a lot about who you're around. It's a lot about studying. Studying history is super important because you go, fuck, I could have been born in 1612.

• 8:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 8:50George Mack?

  Or I could have been part of World War II, which was a blink of an eye away. And when you actually look at it from a historical perspective, it's like, well, where's better than now? I don't think there is a better time than now.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I came up with this yesterday. I told you about the Alpha History Fantasy.

• 9:05George Mack?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 9:05Chris Williamson?

  So, uh, modern men who are angry at the world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe they would have done better in medieval times. They're somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1,373,582, whose favela was sacked and destroyed.

• 9:24George Mack?

  That would have been me.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you think you would have been cannon fodder peasant?

• 9:27George Mack?

  A hundred percent.

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, I think, um,

• 9:32Chris Williamson?

  Huberman's got this quote where he says, you cannot change the mind with the mind, you have to change it with the body. It's not strictly true because meditation is precisely changing the mind with the mind. But I think broadly it's true that most of the problems that people encounter are hardware problems rather than software problems. I learned this during COVID. For the first time in my entire life, I had a stable sleep and wake pattern. I went to bed and got up at the same time, seven days a week, for the first time since I was 18. And I was 32. So I'm like, right, okay, there's something to this. There's something to having a set routine. And I'd listen to, I'd sent it to you. I remember sending to you, uh, Matthew Walker on Rogan, being like, wow, look how important sleep is. Meanwhile, staying up until four in the morning, cashing up nightclubs like two or three nights a week.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  So you need to really sort of see it and feel it. Yes, on hardware problem. Also, I had this idea called the cynicism safety blanket.

• 10:22George Mack?

  I don't know that one.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  Fucking, I'm happy with this. So this is explaining why cynicism is incredibly trendy, especially in the modern world. Cynicism is a guarded response which sets yourself up against disappointment. Its role within the system is to protect you against experiencing anything bad. It is a preemptive strike against a perceived threat. If I tell myself that all women are bad, then I'm less likely to seek a relationship with women. And as a consequence, I'm never going to feel the pain of rejection. If I tell myself that everything is shit, or that things will never get better, then I'm excused of ever having to try at anything. It's more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism. The cope is framing hope as pathetic and embarrassing and optimism as delusion. It's sour grapes at an existential level.

• 11:08Chris Williamson?

  If everything sucks and everyone is horrible and the reality is disappointing and you know that for a fact, then it's the people acting like things that can be better that are dumb, delusional and the problem. The upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.

• 11:23George Mack?

  I also think that ties into the cocktail party effect, what we just spoke about, where if you have that cynical outlook and you have that pessimistic outlook. I mean, you can still win the lottery, of course, but you will, if there's so much sensory inputs that's trying to go into your brain, you will just see it more. You will see more of it. You'll end up down darker YouTube rabbit holes. You'll end up watching those things. You'll end up in those cesspits. So it's this kind of perpetual flywheel that then begins to compound.

• 11:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're looking, yeah, you're looking for evidence that confirms the worldview that you didn't want to have, but that you somehow have inculcated from being on the internet too much.

• 11:55George Mack?

  Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, he has this idea in one of his books where it's called the weed filter. And he used to think that if he smoked weed, people became way nicer to him. So he started smoking more and more weed and then he began to realise, actually, he was just more relaxed because he was so tight and stiff. That all of a sudden, his interaction with the world also has an effect on how they interact with him. When he was way more relaxed, people were then way more relaxed around him. It wasn't actually the weed and then he realised it wasn't actually the weed itself. It was purely the filter that he was viewing things through.

• 12:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's trying to push optimism is a tough, it's a, it's a really hard road.

• 12:32George Mack?

  I mean, I then like, going back to what we said earlier, you've done the hardware, software thing. It's more just looking around and just looking at the reality of the situation. And one of my favourite stories is, I forgot the writer who did it, but he tried to make a chicken sandwich from scratch. Have you heard this story? So he tried to create a chicken sandwich purely from scratch.

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  First principles sandwich.

• 12:50George Mack?

  First principles took him six months and cost him £1,500.

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so you had to grow the wheat or whatever that was ground up to make the flour to do the right.

• 12:59George Mack?

  Okay. You just, you just don't think about those things of how really, when you look at human beings, there's nothing actually that special about them. But the ability, A, to create ideas, which we spoke about to begin with, and then B, the ability to cooperate at scale. It's that thing about if you tried to create a pencil, you couldn't. No one knows how to create a pencil because the like fucking rubbers from here, the LEDs from here. No one knows it and that is quite beautiful. And you need optimistic people in order to be able to collaborate, to play those positive some games. It's so important. And listen, is it going to fix cancer if you've got cancer? Of course not. But like one of my favorite examples is Brian Armstrong, who used to do write down every single day, I will create a billion dollar company. Do I think that creating a billion dollar company? No, of course not. It was like hard work. He's probably ridiculous IQ. He's probably got a great network. He had the right idea. He went through Y company, had all those things. But could that have helped a little bit?

• 13:45George Mack?

  Possibly.

• 13:47Chris Williamson?

  Same with Churchill, same with Arnold. I would love to see the case for pessimism. But the only reason that I can see that pessimism would potentially be, the case that would be put forward would be that it protects people emotionally from the pain of failure. That's really the only thing. If you set your sights so low, you can never be disappointed by reality.

• 14:07George Mack?

  I mean, one of the things I'd, I'd kind of fork this conversation here is I do think there's, there's some utility to pessimism. And like that kind of George Orwellian double thing, like the ability to hold two ideas at the same time is so important. So if you can actually take a pessimistic frame and go, oh, what's the worst scenario that can happen here? It's that Tim Ferriss fear setting idea. I think that's super valuable as well. And the ability to constantly use optimism and pessimism when you need it. But I'd say on the whole, I think optimism's more useful. Likewise, if you can take a high agency frame when you need it, and also the ability to empathize with what the low agency version of this will be. The ability to operate in multiple mindsets, I think, super important. It's that George Fitzgerald quote, which is like, you can tell the, you can tell the mark of a first rate intellect by the ability to hold two thoughts, two opposing thoughts at the same time. And that's very rare these days. People either go to one end of the spectrum or the other.

• 14:52George Mack?

  And I'm often quite fucking obsessed with what's that third door?

• 14:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. If I go orthogonally.

• 14:57George Mack?

  Yeah, because this team's here, this team's here, what's that here?

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned it a couple of times today, one of mine in your favorite words, high agency.

• 15:05George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  Why are you so obsessed with high agency people? Why is it important?

• 15:14George Mack?

  Because it's applied optimism, I guess. Without it, nothing changes. And we was at dinner last night with Jared and we were saying, I asked him, for reference for the audience, he recruits that high level execs. And I asked him, what do all these guys have in common when you get to like that Uber level of big, big, big companies? And he said like energy transference. And high agency for me is a combination of energy transference, the ability to either just accept the story or change the story. And then you have this kind of debate, again, you can have these two thoughts in your head at the same time of the great man theory of history, or kind of things just happen societally and change that way. And again, I think there's truth to both, but ultimately, at the individual

• 15:59George Mack?

  level, having a sense of agency is extremely valuable. And these figures, like one of my favorite questions to ask is, what films aren't we making because we're too busy making Transformers 12? And if you actually look at all my work, it's often questions rather than answers. It's my favorite Oasis lyric is, questions are the answers you might need. And often in this platform, it's a guru platform, you can give these easy platitudes. I actually prefer to ask a question and then leave the open loop with the audience and then go, hey, here's my answer to the question. But then you may get, and hopefully we do, you get a lot of DMs from people going, actually, this is the story that they should be making instead of Transformers 12. Have you heard about this person? Have you heard about this person? Or have you heard about this story?

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're crowdsourcing the insights, right?

• 16:40George Mack?

  And I think that's such a better way, it goes back to what we said at the beginning, that's an infinite game, where if you try and go, I think X, Y, Z is true, and I have this guru insight of A, B, C, versus having a question of an open loop, those are questions that you can kind of answer over a career and still never answer. It's an infinite game.

• 16:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so high agency is the ability to change, to enact change. If it was to be in a single sentence, I would say it's that.

• 17:03George Mack?

  Yeah, I think low agency is life happening to you. High agency is you happening to life. I'd say that's the fundamental difference. And you'll know people who Life happens to them and then you know people who happen to life and ultimately it's a constant battle. You can have the most high agency put Steve Jobs who dies of pancreatic cancer. Obviously the stuff around the carrot juice and things like that, but but ultimately environments still have a factor, but it's the ability to have that double think and know, okay, well, I can still have the most amount of optimism, still the most amount of high agency and have an impact. Environments are still going to have a huge impact too.

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. So who are some of your favorite high agency humans throughout history?

• 17:37George Mack?

  Going back to what I said earlier, what films aren't Hollywood making right now because they're making Transformers 12 or Fast and Furious 15. The most underrated one in terms of how few people know and the most high agency individual is a guy called Rudolph Verba. So Rudolph Verba was in Auschwitz as a teenager. He was in a unique position where he was essentially in the operations of the train. So he would help Jews come off the trains, particularly women and children, and then they get exported to the gas chambers. One of the things like a meta principle I'd say today that I've kind of massively changed my mind the last 24 months is when you when you study history, you begin to understand things completely differently. So when I go into this Rudolph Verba story, the thing

• 18:18George Mack?

  that people don't appreciate is they view it in hindsight versus at the time, the Nazis didn't announce to people, hey, get on these trains and this is what's going to happen to you. That wasn't the case. And as a result, lots of other governments who were fighting the war against them didn't even know that was the case. There was a few people who suspected it was, but it's only in hindsight do we know that. So he then began to see, he was one of the few people that knew, who wasn't on the Nazis team, that could see this just killing machine that was happening. And, okay, so you can imagine here, talk about pessimism has every reason to be pessimistic. He's seeing the worst of humanity that's ever existed. Talk about agency. He's literally a prisoner. And if you try and escape Auschwitz, they will, they will just essentially, if they find you, they'll put out a three day dog squad, they will hunt you down and they will hang you in front of the everybody else

• 19:03George Mack?

  just to show what happens to you. So he teamed up with Alfred Wetzler. Actually, just to rewind for a second, but the most harrowing thing about his story going, why you, why he could be so pessimistic and so low agency is he meets a girl in the concentration camp called Alice Monk. And loses his virginity in the concentration camp and then she gets killed the next day in the gas chambers. And he kept seeing that. And again, talk about pessimism, talk about low agency, every single reason to be, but decided, you know what, fuck it, I'm going to try and escape. So he teamed up with Alfred Wetzler. And essentially, what they did was there was some wood just outside the camps that they hid under these barrels of wood. Boom, the Nazis, as they're counting in at the end, they go, where's four, four, zero,

• 19:45George Mack?

  seven, oh, because they take their names from them. So they just have numbers. Where are they? They released the, the dog squad. And they hid under these barrels of wood. The most high agency part of it, they cover themselves in gasoline and tobacco. So the Nazi dogs couldn't find them, even though they were right, literally on the perimeter. There's one point where they almost find them and he has a knife because he's about to take his own life. Okay, they don't find them. Three days goes by, they haven't aired, they've kind of stayed awake, they escape, they sprint as fast as they can, run all the way through Slovakia.

• 20:17Chris Williamson?

  Run through Slovakia.

• 20:19George Mack?

  In concentration camp uniforms, where everyone surrounding them, a Nazi sympathizers, because that's what they put in place, with no Google Maps, no Uber, no, no, no WhatsApp to chat to the, like the squad, you know what I mean? Like, this is like the most harrowing thing where, and if they get caught, killed immediately. Run, I think it's like a hundred and a hundred or so miles through, get all the way there. And then the most beautiful part is kind of the few things that happens afterwards. So, one, rather than writing incredibly emotional rapport, which he should have done, like they killed the girl he lost his virginity to, right, it's dark, he could tell them, like, they killed the girl I love. They wrote the most objective McKinsey like rapport of this killing machine that was Auschwitz.

• 21:02George Mack?

  And that people didn't believe him for quite a while. Again, rather than rest on his laurels, this guy goes and joins the Slovakian army. And they say, we're not going to give you a pistol, we'll give you a machine gun because of like the kind of guy you are, just based off this fucking story.

• 21:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we don't give boys like you pistols.

• 21:18George Mack?

  Yes, we give, we give them, uh, machine guns. So that's the kind of guy, again, just escape that, but he's back on the front line. The beautiful thing, well, there's the dark side and there's a beautiful side. But the dark side is, because going back to what I said earlier, people didn't understand what was happening at the time. It wasn't believed for a while until Churchill and the Pope ultimately got the report and then began to put more and more pressure on the Nazis. So it was a big fact that they recommend, they reckon, uh, they reckon he saved 200,000 lives just from his actions alone. After the war, he goes and lives in America. He's a lecturer at pharmacology. Basically, none of his students know the story of what he did. And the most beautiful thing, I found a YouTube video that has fifty six views on it,

• 21:59George Mack?

  where this guy who used to know him very well, said that everybody apart from Verba, who he knew that escaped or went through Auschwitz, Verba dressed insanely well, because he never wanted that freedom to be taken away from him ever again. So he's dressing like the most outlandish, amazing suits. And for me, talk about a film that is better than Transformers twelve, better than Fast and Furious eight. But nobody knows who, I mean, a few people do, but most people do not know who he is. And why isn't there a day named after him? It's, for me, it's insanity.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  The most high agency man of all time.

• 22:30George Mack?

  I think in terms of name to agency ratio.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Name to awareness.

• 22:35George Mack?

  It's Rudolph Verba for sure.

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  That's very cool. Yeah, the, I put Dick Fosbury in the TEDx talk that I did a few years ago. And I think that that's a good example as well. You know, someone who was being maligned in a very different way, but he was mocked, you know, to try and break the existing hegemony that was the scissor kick, I think, was the current one that people were using. And he was an engineer by trade. So he had analyzed what was happening with regards to center of gravity, how you could get yourself as low as possible. And yeah, he was laughed at by everybody. You know, he competed in the Olympics. I think it was maybe Japan or Korea or somewhere like that in the sixties when he did win.

• 23:20Chris Williamson?

  He had two different pairs of Nikes on. He didn't have the same pair of shoes. And he missed the opening ceremony because he wanted to go to a museum. So this guy was an unbelievable outlier, but he had the courage of his convictions. And I think that that's, that's one of the big differences.

• 23:34George Mack?

  It's that idea, which is if you was to go back to eighteen fifty and try and explain the concept of Wi-Fi, it would blow that, but it would not be seen as fashionable. But the idea exists. You just needed a combination of ideas, what we spoke about earlier, and then high agency individuals and humanity working together and compounding. So the question you then think is, but what is going to be Wi-Fi for us now? That a hundred years from now, however long it's going to be, oh, that was so obvious. One of my favorite examples, which is a much more base level, is wheeled suitcases. So before, I think it was nineteen seventies, everybody used to carry their suitcases everywhere. Eric Weinstein has that great bit of.

• 24:16George Mack?

  The smartest men at the time, the smartest physicists, used to get on the train or the plane carrying their suitcases. And the question is, is well, where's the wheeled suitcases right now? There's one guy who comes along and goes, hold on, let's put some wheels on that. Jim Jefferies has a great bit in his new Netflix special where he says, feasibly Neil Armstrong, as he was getting on the rockets, like was there carrying on his suitcases? And goes, one day we'll put a rocket on these without realising. Okay, it's so, and that's again, going back to questions, questions are the answers that you need. Where is the wheeled suitcase right now? And that's a question that can keep you up at night. Where it's so obvious, but everyone's just copying the crowd and being memetic.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  So a lot of people will think, I want to be high agency, I want to be around people that are high agency. How can you tell if your friends and the people that you hang with are high or low agency?

• 25:08George Mack?

  I think going back to what we mentioned earlier, which is, do they kind of bend the environment? So no matter what situation you put them in, do they bend it? The dinner last night, he said, energy transference. So I had this essay I've never published, which is sofa friends versus treadmill friends. And there's certain friends that I hang around with afterwards, I need to lie on a sofa, because they kind of drain you of that energy. And then there's other friends that we mean, you know, where you hang around with them and you're like, fuck, seven mile run, let's go, we overclock our brains. Yep. That's, so I think a big thing that you'll see is energy transference. I always say that Steve from Diary of a CEO, who I used to work at his company,

• 25:50George Mack?

  there was this thing where I would walk in the office in the morning and I'd open the door. And bear in mind, Steve could be in the London office, Manchester office, Berlin office, New York office. He's constantly jet setting around. And I go, I could just see from people's faces and how much energy was in the room. I go, oh, Steve's here today without even seeing him. And I think that's like an often thing is when they enter a room, the energy just completely changes. I think that's often a combination of high agency individuals.

• 26:14Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. You had weird teenage hobbies.

• 26:17George Mack?

  Weird teenage hobbies is another one. So. I often hire for this, like I can be in a job interview and if they mention a weird teenage hobby, I kind of lean in quite a lot, which I probably shouldn't say publicly now because now people are going to start bringing those up. But when you're young, especially when you're a teenager, it's probably your most low agency state because you want to copy the crowd, you want to be memetic of everybody around you. However, if you can, at that age, whilst everyone else is going playing football or rugby, be super into yo-yoing. Or super into football freestyle or super into whatever it is. For me, that's a good sign because if you can swim against the tide when you're 15 or the environment or people mocking you, it's so much easier as you're an adult.

• 26:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's so formative as well, right? A lot of the things that you do in later life are echoes of what you did when you were a kid. There's a really great study that I looked at, that the music that you listen to between the ages of 11 and 15 imprints on you for the rest of your life. So that's why you have generations of music trends that go like, I still love emo and post hardcore because I grew up in like the Hawthorn Heights and Blink 182 era. That was my, that was what I listened to, right? And then there'll be other people that'll listen to whatever it might be. God help the people that are growing up now like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B. But you've got the golden question as well, which is something that we've used. I think you might have spoken about this on the first ever episode that we did. What's, what's the golden question?

• 27:37George Mack?

  The golden question is, if you were stuck in a third world prison or you were stuck on an island, then you had to call someone to bail you out, who would you call? And that alone will identify the most high agency person in your life. Cause within that, you need a combination of, I mean, some kind of delusional optimism to be able to pull that off. You need some relentless kind of resourcefulness to try and operationalize that. And you're going to need to be, have that energy transference to be able to convince people or whatever the fuck, whatever plan you're going to have to put together. So I'd say that is probably the most impactful thing when predicting high agency. One that I see as well is immigrant mentality. So.

• 28:17George Mack?

  If somebody's moved from their hometown, quite a good sign. If someone's moved from their home country, even greater sign. And you then see these immigrants across particularly America, right, who absolutely dominate. Because if you can sit there and go, I'm in the wrong place. And so I have to acknowledge I'm in the wrong place. I have to admit, I think everybody else or the people around me, I disagree with their decision, at least for me. And to have the growth mindset to then operationalize a move and start from zero. That in itself is kind of quite a meta story. It doesn't mean that everybody who migrates is high agency, but I'd say it is quite common.

• 28:56Chris Williamson?

  Not being able to predict people's opinions as well, I think is a huge one.

• 28:59George Mack?

  I have a friend of mine called Catty, and I love hanging around with him because I don't know what he's going to say. Because I like, he doesn't just line up with, oh, for example, like you'll have like the bodybuilder who you'll stereotype them. You probably get this a little bit as well, right? People don't expect you to be in great shape, former model, and then chat about neuroscience with a guy coming on and hold your own. So I love people when you can't fully predict their opinions. Or you have the beauty queen who's super into Nietzsche, or the marketer who's obsessed with the history of war. Whenever someone just falls into that obvious stereotype, makes you think that they haven't thought about things. But when they go, hold on a second, like you was on Love Island, but you're super into chatting about astrophysics. That's probably quite a high agency individual

• 29:43George Mack?

  because they've, they've clearly gone against what should be their default programming.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if you know one opinion that somebody holds, and from it, you can accurately predict everything else that they believe, they're probably not a serious thinker.

• 29:55George Mack?

  They're just NPCs, just downloading scripts.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, there is somebody out there who falls into the perfect mold of, I am pro-life, and I'm pro-gun, and I'm pro-first amendment, and I'm like, small government, and I'm like, anti-immigration, and I'm blah, blah, blah. Like, you are the complete caricature stereotype of the person that's from the right, and there is the same from the person that's from the left. But most people are so idiosyncratic that you should have something that doesn't fit. Should be this nice, smooth circle, except for those two bits. You're like, what's that doing there? Like, why are you pro-choice but pro-gun? Or why are you like, pro-immigration but pro-small government? Like, why did those things go together? And when you find somebody that has a non-typical suite of beliefs.

• 30:44Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting because you think, oh, you've arrived at this point on your own. This is one of the things, I did this video about Sam Harris ages ago, three, four years ago. Why Sam Harris is annoying everybody, it seems like he's like continued like true to form over the last few years. But I have to respect what he's done with regards to that because he pays an unbelievably high price to hold the opinions that he does. Which gives me a great amount of faith that he truly believes in them. It would be much easier for him to fold either one way or the other. Like, how can, it's very untypical to be pro-vax but anti-woke. Like, anti-Trump but also kind of anti-Biden.

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  Like, you know, he just holds a suite of beliefs that whether you agree with them or not, and almost everybody disagrees with some of them, right? There's very few people that hold the exact same Sam Harris suite of beliefs that Sam Harris does. But the price that he pays to hold them is so high. That for me, it's a reliable signal of authenticity. Because there are much easier routes to existing in the world than holding that odd conglomeration of views.

• 31:51George Mack?

  Hmm, it makes you think they've thought it through. And I realize the favorite, my favorite people to hang around with now, I don't have to agree with them on anything. But have they thought things through? I find that fascinating. And then do they update their beliefs? The other one on the high agency list was.

• 32:06George Mack?

  Are they mean to your face, but nice behind your back? And you often don't see the people who are nice to your face and mean behind your back, because by definition, it's behind your back. So another concept we can come onto is hidden metrics. But on that specific thing, it is a hidden metric. You don't see people being rude behind your back. And I think often a good indication of somebody probably being nice behind your back is probably someone who's mean to your face. Well, at least you know that, and if not, at least they're consistent.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  What people that are nice about other people who aren't there to your face.

• 32:36George Mack?

  That's a good, that's a good one. Or the inverse, are they? Amazing friend, amazing friend leaves the room and they go, oh, have you seen what they're wearing? Or have you seen X, Y, Z? That's for me, a sign of like, it takes a lot of agency to go against gossiping, which is one of the most innate human things.

• 32:52Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Being a gossip tells you as much about the person who is gossiping as it does about the person that they're gossiping about. Because what it tells you is that as soon as the scrutiny of the person that they're talking about is no longer there, they're going to be prepared to talk about you. I've said before, like the stuff that is on this phone would break the internet for weeks, for weeks, dude. I have shit on there, which is like.

• 33:17George Mack?

  Ross Ulbricht level, Dread Pirate Roberts.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  It's from DPR.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  But I, you know, I, it's my way of going about life that I'm like, okay, well, I guess I'm just gonna like, hold this secret for the fucking rest of time. It's exciting for me to have, like, one of the other ones as well, I think, is sending people niche content.

• 33:38George Mack?

  Oh, my, this one, going back to the Rudolph Verba story. I found that from one of the things, talents I have that I can't really monetize it. I spot content creators really early on, going back to the beginning of the conversation, probably listens to you on the first ever episode. It took, took a while for that stock, that penny stock to finally boom, but it's doing well now, right? And there's a lot of other examples like that. And one of the low agency things is, okay, this has six million views, therefore I will click on it. What I now do is I'll go in the Twitter feed or the YouTube explore feed or whatever. And I look for things the algorithm is recommending me with a, like, very few views. And I click on that and this nine out of 10 times is absolutely a waste of time. But one out of 10, you'll tap into something that everybody else isn't tapping into. But by definition, that is the meme of seeing a crowd, like, uh, the, I created that meme of like, how to be productive versus how to be creative.

• 34:23George Mack?

  And everybody's queuing outside how to be productive, but no one's queuing outside how to be creative. But at a meta level, that's a concept, right? Of what are the things that nobody's clicking on that will then? Potentially be big in the future and you have to do that like a VC where you know nine out of 10 of your bets are going to be completely incorrect, but one out of 10 is clicking on a Bitcoin article in 2014.

• 34:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like how many you've had, what 30 million views on that Verba story, I think on Twitter.

• 34:46George Mack?

  Because whereas everyone else is then just regurgitating the same shit versus if you can tap into other inputs, that was my big thing about creativity, the essay that went viral on that, which is creative, the problem with creativity is people treat it like productivity, where they just try and do the same thing harder versus try and get as many different inputs into the system as possible. And now YouTube explore page and all these things can just keep you in this hamster wheel versus you need to try and break out.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  Because you're predictable.

• 35:10George Mack?

  And search weird things and before you know it, you find some bizarre inputs that can either go one way or the other.

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it the niche content thing and looking for different ideas and where do they come from is a really interesting way to conceptualize productivity versus creativity. Really interesting idea to look at there is what's the work environment that you're doing this particular job in? So for instance, if you've ever walked into an artist's studio, Zach, my housemate, his missus is an artist, right? So I go into the room where she does her art and there's stuff fucking everywhere. There's like vapes and there's, there's, there's half done sketches and there'll be like a dog brush and there'll be like a Bluetooth speaker, but it's like upside down and there'll be can also it's chaos, fucking chaos. That is the place that you want to be and there'll be books and all sorts of other stuff. That's

• 36:01Chris Williamson?

  the place that you want to be if you want creative ideas. It's not the place you want to be in if you're doing your taxes.

• 36:05George Mack?

  No.

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  When you're doing your taxes, you want to be a nice clean desk. You want to have all of your stuff in front of you. You don't have any distractions. And yeah, the obsession that people have over productivity is so all encompassing that I don't think many people in the modern world have ever looked at a problem and thought anything except for I need more productivity. Every single lock gets filled with the key of more focus, more productivity. The reason I can't do this is because I'm insufficiently attentive. Well, sometimes, and maybe even a lot of the time, and this may be a comment on how replicable and almost formulaic a lot of people's jobs are now that, you know, many roles should

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  be concerned about the forthcoming GPT revolution, but. A lot of the time, okay, what's the creative angle to the thing that I'm trying to do? If you're trying to write a book, sometimes you need to sit down and just put your nose against the grindstone because you're not getting the stuff out. But if you're struggling with ideas, you probably need to go for a fucking walk.

• 37:07George Mack?

  Yes, but we come from an institutionalized system, which is the education system, which was designed to create factory workers.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  Wondered when we would get onto education. Can't take you anywhere without you blasting the education system.

• 37:20George Mack?

  I think that's definitely a factor, but it goes back to that question of where is the wheeled suitcases? I'm constantly asking that at a societal level, but even right now in your very life, like where is that simple solution that's so obvious that's just staring you in the face, but because you're trying to be so productive, you can't quite see it.

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so a good example for me, I've started doing Barry's Bootcamp first thing in the morning. I've been telling you about this. I've been struggling with motivation to train consistently. I can train on a weekend with friends, but training on my own is getting way, way harder. And I think it's because I'm under a fair bit of pressure with the show. And I've known for a very long time that classes for me externalize my motivation. They give me a time that I need to be there. They condense down the training into a short period of time. There's a coach that makes sure the programming is done. It outsources everything that I need to do. And I just forgot that that was an option. And then one day was walking past Barry's on the way to go to Flower Child, where we went for dinner last night, thought I should, I should book in to go there. Sure enough, signed up online and I've been to tons and tons of classes now.

• 38:23Chris Williamson?

  And by eight 30 a.m., I've got 50 minutes of training in. I've done my morning routine and by nine a.m. I can be on a call, having trained and done all of my morning stuff. I'm like, wow, even if I'd been at home, it would have, I would have struggled to have been as efficient. So oddly, the creative solution has opened up a degree of productivity as well.

• 38:43George Mack?

  The three biggest things I found for coming up with creative ideas are, one, you can get this spinning wheel app on your iPhone. I just search spinning wheel app on the App Store and collect, going back to questions earlier, just collect great questions that you hear, like where's the wheeled suitcase right now in my life? And as you collect more and more of those questions, things you hear on podcasts, things people say to you, just spin that wheel before bed. Leave it with your subconscious overnight and then journal on that thing first thing before any any inputs. Absolutely fantastic for coming up with ideas. Second biggest one is this idea called Sakoko, I believe it how I don't know if that's how you actually pronounce it. But I was sat in the Maldives for a week without any inputs and I came up with this idea, which is

• 39:28George Mack?

  if you ask anybody where they want to travel, everybody, certainly I know, or like 90% say Japan. Why is Japan's, why do people want to travel to Japan so much? But if you study the history of Japan, they practiced Sakoko, I believe, again, probably butchering the pronunciation, where they closed the borders for 250, 260 years. Anybody who tried to leave and come back, killed. Anybody who tried to enter, killed. And as a result, whilst the rest of the world was trading ideas, it developed this crazy, insane, beautiful, unique culture that where there's nowhere else in the rest of the world. And that's why people want to go and visit it because it's so creative and so new.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  Ah, because it wasn't cosmopolitan. It didn't get diluted down by other cultures.

• 40:10George Mack?

  Exactly. And then go back to the double think idea, though. At the other end of the spectrum is another tool, which is that if you search on YouTube Swedish House Mafia, creating one, and it starts with them like tapping like this. And they go all the way up to them just jamming in a studio like three creative guys to creating one live in like the space of a minute of the edit. And it's amazing. And you can see like you put three people in a room with no inputs from the outside world and they just pickleball or idea tennis their way to it. So I think spinning wheel helps. Time alone definitely helps and the longer the better, as well as getting some kind of idea camp with the smartest people you know and just and shutting out the world that way.

• 40:50Chris Williamson?

  We came up with similar ideas. I came up with anxiety cost and you came up with thinking cost. What's thinking cost?

• 40:56George Mack?

  Thinking cost, everyone will relate to, which is this idea that your brain is a supercomputer.

• 41:04George Mack?

  But and you can try this, I'll give this as an experiment to anyone listening right now. Try and have two thoughts at the same time. And maybe there's the elite IQ guys that me and you definitely are. And the Nikola Teslas out there that could do it. But I can't have two thoughts at the same time. So with that in mind, you've got this weird thing where you have a supercomputer, but it can only one run one program at a time. Quite a quite a part of the human brain paradox. And why this is interesting is when you have super dramatic, super negative people, going back to what we said at the beginning where ideas are probably the most important thing. It's hard to think about the wheels on suitcases when

• 41:46George Mack?

  your girlfriends ram with you about X, Y, Z, or somebody in the WhatsApp chat kicking off. And you and then because what people don't see, which is a hidden metric, but everybody has it. Well, I know I have it. So I think everybody else has it, which is when those events happen. Then when you're in the shower, it's running and it's just eating away that super cube. Supercomputer's ram constantly. So there's an opportunity cost that exists for every single thought. So whenever you have a thought, there's trillions of other thoughts that you could be having. But because your supercomputer can only run one program at a time, it's not having. So you've got to have a defense and an offense system that I think anyway. So the defense system is avoid dramatic people as much as you can. Paul Graham has my favorite essay ever, which is life is short.

• 42:31George Mack?

  And I read it whenever either anybody gets sick or anybody dies. And he kind of closes the whole thing off of like relentlessly prune bullshit. So just get relentlessly prune bullshit whenever it gets in your life, prune it. Purely because there's a thinking cost to everything that you do or every thought that you have. And also whenever, but inevitably what will happen is you will still have those dramatic loops that get in there. You can't have a complete defense against them. But then anchor the thought, which is whenever you have a bullshit thought loop that happens. What is the opportunity cost of this thought? Like, what is the wheels on suitcase that I could be thinking about instead? And then you kind of judo throw its momentum against it. So thinking cost is the idea that every cost, every thought has an opportunity cost and you should be hyper vigilant to that.

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Peterson said the first time I ever brought him on the show about the price that you pay for inaction. Contemplate the price you pay for inaction. You're already in a little hell. You know perfectly well it's going to get worse. The thing about inaction is that you're blind to it. Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price. And this is the same thing that the thinking cost actually is the price that you pay. But it's so unseen, right? People are prepared to waste the peace of their own mind over and over and over and over again in order to not make a difficult decision because the difficult decision feels more real. But peace of mind is one of the key desires that almost everybody should be striving toward.

• 43:59George Mack?

  The problem with peace of mind is it's a hidden metric. So if you kind of zoom all the way out, I have a few fundamental questions I keep going back to with all my writing. And then you kind of zoom a bit higher and it's the optimism, high agency thing. And if you actually zoom the highest point, which I've not actually written about just yet, which is kind of viewing everything going back to Rick and Morty's Roy or the video game of life, like this simulation hypotheses, but just forked, that's more optimistic, more high agency, which is the video game hypotheses. And one of my fundamental things of this kind of religion slash philosophy is metrics are one of the most important things. And one of the reasons why people obsess over money is because money and your bank account is the best video game ever designed.

• 44:41George Mack?

  It's multi multiplayer competing against other people. Oh, this person makes this much. I only make that much number going up. And as a result, things like peace of mind, which is a metric that we can't quite measure yet, but we all feel it. We only really begin to look at it when we're in rehab or when we have an anxiety attack on the bus into work or whatever it is. And that's why I think hidden metrics, once you see it, well, you never see it. But then once you kind of mentally see it, you begin to see it everywhere. Or Mozzy has that great bit of the Instagram model. You take the Instagram model, the metric, the visible metric is quite clear, right? You get to post it on your Instagram. It's great. Everyone thinks you're cool. But when you kind of lie in bed at night with somebody who you got, I have nothing in common with you at all.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  The Dan Bilzerian problem.

• 45:23George Mack?

  See that. Yeah, I'm sure he's happy, but you don't see the hidden metric.

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. Why, uh, why is it that you are such a fan of the Roy scene from Rick and Morty? It's the header on your Twitter and you've got a hoodie, you've got a custom printed hoodie that I met you on the way to Dubai.

• 45:43George Mack?

  Custom mask as well during COVID with Roy on as well. I, I think it's because it's the, like, so one of my favorite things that I began to notice that was happening is you hit 25 and life goes mental. So up from zero to 25, everybody's on the same path, pretty much. There's a slight variance, but everyone has these guardrails of first year, second year, third year, um, high school, university. But then you hit 25 and there's so much variance that happens where I have friends that are selling NFTs for ridiculous amounts of money. I've got friends going to prison. I've got friends having a baby. Like, there's so much variance that begins to happen and you begin to go, fuck, like, religion is quite a useful tool, but as a lot of people who are atheist, agnostic, there's nothing out there that quite exists.

• 46:26George Mack?

  And the simulation hypothesis is probably the best we've got and that's fucking nihilistic, isn't it? Like this idea that there's just infinite versions of me sat in a machine. But if I can move that to like the video game hypotheses where I know, I began to notice that the laziest people I know, the most nihilistic, pessimistic, low agency people I know, could sit and play a video game for 15 hours and be amazing at it. So I have this theory that video game designers know more about human psychology than 99% of psychologists. The video game industry is bigger than music, TV and entertainment combined. The amount they know about human psychology, I think is fascinating. So the kind of Roy is, is just viewing life as a video game

• 47:05George Mack?

  and trying to shift from first person shooter of me identifying with this to just third person. Whether it's true or not, probably not. It might not be a video game, but is it a useful belief to have? Probably.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think depersonalizing a lot of things is good. Like, that's one of Peterson's questions, right? Um, like, treat yourself like you are somebody you are responsible for helping. Like, treat your life like a character that you are responsible for playing. It's the same as Rogan's thing. Uh, imagine that you're the hero of your own story. You know, all of these, like, what, what do all of these different ideas have in common? It takes a third person perspective. It depersonalizes a lot of the things that are going on to you because it's very difficult to give yourself, you're so embedded in the experience of being you. And there's so much going on that clouds your ability to make good decisions.

• 47:57Chris Williamson?

  That actually being able to have a third person perspective is probably about as close to a superpower as you can be.

• 48:02George Mack?

  And gamification, like people talk about God is dead, therefore what's the point? Why do we do anything? But with a video game, you're not really playing it for any reason, but it's just a fucking game. And I feel that there's so much to be unpacked about video game psychology that can get implied. But the biggest thing, or certainly one of the biggest things is this concept of metrics. When you have a clear metric that people can optimize, what's like the Cobra effect? Wherein the Brits started offering Indians money for Cobras because there was such a big problem with them. And then they started breeding them. So you've got to be super careful.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  You know what a better version of that is? It was to do with rats, another country that had a massive problem with rats. And what they said was that they would pay people to bring in rat tails. What they realized was that there was thousands and thousands of tailless rats running all over the city.

• 48:49George Mack?

  So that, so that's it. So Kiefer Boy has that concept of perimetrics where you have two metrics. So if you have a customer support team and you say, hey, increase, decrease the fraud rate. Well, then they start treating every single customer like a potential fraud. So yeah, you may achieve that goal, but every customer hates you forever.

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  Good heart, good hearts, Laura.

• 49:05George Mack?

  Yes, you need to balance that with an opposing metric. So going back to like the money video game, which is a great video game. But if you could then have peace of mind as an opposing metric. And I wonder if you could literally visualize peace of mind as a dashboard that you could see every single day. I think the impact that would have on people's lives would be so significant.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  A hundred percent. I mean, you know, this is what people fundamentally don't understand about Hormozzi is that he finds peace of mind through doing business. So, and I didn't understand it until I really, really drilled, drilled deep with him. And he may be lying to me and I don't know, but like at least what he says is that he finds his most peace when he's chasing money. So for him, money and peace are the same thing. But because most people don't have that particular opinion when it comes to their work, they can't, they don't have theory of mind to understand what it would be like to be Alex Hormozi. Like, what would it be like for your work and the most peaceful thing that you do to align to the point where you and your partner believe that not having kids is a smarter idea?

• 50:07Chris Williamson?

  Because you can literally serve the world better through legacy through a company than you can through children.

• 50:13George Mack?

  Well, I challenge you that people don't, can't empathize with that. They maybe just haven't had it framed to them correctly where people can always think of a game they played that's so addictive that they end up playing for the sake of playing.

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  What was some of, what was some of yours? Do you ever get addicted? You've got your brothers, like professional esports player.

• 50:29George Mack?

  He was very, very good. So I saw that firsthand, but for me, football freestyle was my thing, right? So I'd train four hours every single night and do that. And then decided I actually want to lose my virginity at one point. So I stopped doing that. Um, so when you have something that you're just doing purely for the sake of doing, I mean, you're doing this with the podcast, right? We spoke last night and I said, you're the only person I know that would have stuck at it as long as you did without the metric, really. But you was playing it purely for the sake of playing it, but your metric, it's a difference. Your metric wasn't the subscribers or the view count really part of it for sure. But I knew if it was, you would have quit, but it was purely an infinite game that you was playing. And because it was such a well-designed video game for you, then it keeps going.

• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  The biggest, uh, the biggest piece of advice for people that ask about, you know, I want to start a podcast, like what should I do or how should I begin or, you know, but what's your piece of advice? And like, if you don't enjoy it, don't do it because you are not, it's going to take you 150 episodes to earn anything. It's going to take you 400 episodes before you're probably, unless you're got an existing platform, it's going to take you 400 episodes before anybody really cares about what you're doing. It's going to take so long and that's weekly.

• 51:35George Mack?

  An idea I have with that is pricing things in. So I, I think it's a hedge fund term where you kind of price in upcoming events. And when you're starting new things like that. So when I take you efoiling, which people don't know, it's like a electronic surfing. Everyone saw Mark Zuckerberg go viral, which is one of my funniest video games.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  Don't you mean DJ Khalid?

• 51:53George Mack?

  DJ Khalid, drop that clip in there, Dean. Um, so with that, one big thing I've now recognized, because I always take new people with me. I'll say to them, I go, you're going to fall off 50 times before you get good at this versus if they don't, if they come at it with just, oh, I'm gonna. I'm going to be good at this immediately and then they start falling off. It immediately rocks their self-esteem. Whereas if you say, hey, there're going to be 50 times before you get good at it. Mr. B says that as well with YouTube. He goes, just make 100 videos and then, and then we'll chat. Yeah. And I think you've got to constantly price in things. I've got, okay, it's going to take me 12 months in the gym before I see anything. And if you price that, and I always like really conservative pricing in, because that's how you say 500 episodes, you've got to do your podcast and you get it at episode 212, you feel great. But if they go in with a mindset of, well, level one, it's going to work. Therefore, but

• 52:36George Mack?

  again, I, I structure all my Apple notes to do lists. So like for the every single day, it's the most Lindy thing I've done for years is level one, thought dump, dump everything I've got to do today. Level two, decide on the levels and boom, I'm already feeling good. And every project I do will be designed like that because just me writing down what I've got to do, I've already hit a level and I can feel that momentum growing versus if it's like, have a successful day. I'm constantly trying to play level 32 and failing. So again, it goes back to that.

• 53:01Chris Williamson?

  How do you, given that what you've suggested there is essentially to price in difficulty and to also kind of have low expectations of success. How does that marry with the skeptic's guide to optimism?

• 53:14George Mack?

  Well, it goes back to that 1% every day. It, it goes back to the secret is bullshit. Like you're not going to immediately change things. You're going to need to combine optimism, combine agency. But the most important thing is infinite games that you can play for the sake of playing them. That goes, that's exactly the thing with Hormozzi, at least the impression I have of him, he's, he's doing it like a game and he wants to do this until he dies. And that's why he can keep playing and keep compounding exactly the same of you with this podcast, which is why you didn't quit.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  It's going to be very difficult to be beaten by somebody that isn't having fun if you are. Yeah. Right. Like what's that? Tiago Forte, it's incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's having fun. Yeah. So I, that was thinking cost, which was yours. Anxiety cost was similar, but a little bit more acute, a bit more short term. This is what I'd come up with. So as you identified, you can only have one thought at a time and by making any kind of decision, inevitably you're going to.

• 54:13Chris Williamson?

  Cut off some of the potential wasted thoughts, thinking about that undone task. So let's say every single morning when you wake up, your daily to do resets, right? I need to walk the dog and meditate and take a shit and speak to my mum or whatever it is that you do every single day, right? There are certain things that you do every single day. The longer that you wait to do those things, the more time is taken up thinking about the fact that you haven't yet done those things, which is an argument for front-loading stuff into your morning, right?

• 54:41George Mack?

  Versus the interest rate constantly.

• 54:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Every single time that you think, I need to meditate today, I need to meditate today, I need to meditate today, could have been, that's wasted thinking cost or anxiety cost, as I called it, that you could have fixed by simply meditating when you woke up. And looking at your day, not only through ebbs and flows of energy, but also in terms of what captures a lot of my thought, what causes me stress? How can I get that so that it's? And not only, here's the other thing, not only do you get to gain not thinking about the thing and being anxiously concerned that you still need to do it, you also get to sort of bask in this beautiful self-righteous glow from your high horse of productivity because you went out and you fist fucked it first thing in the morning. It's perfect.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  So next stuff, razors, both massive fans of razors. You did a super thread and one of the, I've selected some of my favourites, I've added in some of mine as well. The first one, bragging razor, if someone brags about their success or happiness, assume it's half what they claim. If someone downplays their success or happiness, assume it's double what they claim. The map is not the terrain.

• 55:52George Mack?

  A hundred percent. And there's obviously exceptions to the rule, but I think that's quite a consistent rule that I see. When I hear someone, particularly if it's money or if it's things like that, when they're bragging overtly, I'm, ah, probably don't really believe this. But if someone's kind of playing it down and there's a few subtle tells, it's the classic midwitt meme, right? You've got the, probably my favourite meme of all time, which is the low IQ guy on the left, the kind of midwitt in the middle and the super high IQ guy there, where the low IQ guy says, I'm the guy on the left, the guy in the middle says, I'm the guy on the right, and the guy on the right says, I'm the guy on the left. So, and you see this with wealth as well, you see the... Super rich, try and hide their welfare is it's the kind of people who are like the money Twitter

• 56:33George Mack?

  crowd that screenshot the Shopify store and things like that, whereas why are you trying to signal that? When you're trying to overtly signal, you're probably trying to compensate for something. Again, there's exceptions to the rule. But when someone's signaling so hard, it's probably a sign that they don't have.

• 56:48Chris Williamson?

  We were in, we were in a location in Austin over the weekend and a gentleman came up to us and one of the first sentences out of his mouth was 1500 people in the world have started a $1 billion business. I'm one of them. Now I believe even less now.

• 57:04George Mack?

  Anyone who's seen Carl Pilkington's bullshit man.

• 57:07Chris Williamson?

  He wanted to go, bullshit. Yeah, I, I think what it kind of suggests when somebody does steam in and start with achievements first is any kind of bragging basically suggests to us it's a low status, very easy to fake signal of authenticity, right? Like a hard signal of authenticity would just be show me a bank balance or show me your capacity. Someone telling you how smart they are is way less reliable of a signal than someone having a conversation with you

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  that flows perfectly and you think holy fuck, like that's really cool. So yeah, I, you know, we're into personality quirks here around people's desire to be seen and their needs for validation from the world around them. But I think generally the bragging razor of thinking if I want to come across well, allowing my achievements to arise as a byproduct of someone asking me about what I do. This is another thing that happens in in Austin that I had to introduce you to, which is. Since I've been here, when you join a new group at a party or a gathering or whatever, and you get introduced by the one person that you probably do know in that circle, they usually tell the group what you do.

• 58:33Chris Williamson?

  And that allows everyone to bypass the bragging razor because your friend bigs up your best achievements. But again, it's a reliable adjudicator, presumably. I'm not going to lie about what, you know, he's got a 17 inch penis and I'm pretty sure that he's got the world high jump record. And he's like the first man on the moon. Like, I'm not going to say that, right? I'm going to say the things reliably that that people can can assume. So next one, I love this one. Instagram razor, when you see a photo of an influencer looking attractive on Instagram, assume that there were 99 worst variations of that photo you haven't seen. They just picked the best one.

• 59:10George Mack?

  Hundred percent. And me and Josh, my business partner, when we travel around, we'll be in sometimes very nice restaurants. And we see the beautiful couple. Like, I don't think it's them necessarily, but the kind of Tommy Fury, Molly May looking couple, not referring to them. And he's just kind of there staring into the distance and she'll be there just going through her phone of like infinite photos of her. And then I

• 59:35Chris Williamson?

  On this girl trying to find the right filter.

• 59:36George Mack?

  One of the biggest red pills I had recently was where I was at a bar and then I looked over and there's a girl on a photo of herself. And she was face tuning it live in real time. And I now realized you it's the classic, where's the sausage made? And you've got to realize that everything on Instagram that you see is absolute. It's just, it's just not true. It's the metaverse. It really is the metaverse. Everyone's an emoji character, completely edited. It's bizarre.

• 1:00:00Chris Williamson?

  I love the fact that you have to assume as well that this is the best option out of what everybody had. And especially if it's someone that's got a pretty well curated Instagram feed. But I suppose that's one of the advantages of as you get to a particular level with creating content online, you don't even know what's going out. It's, you know, the spin the wheel thing. I have no idea what video goes out each day. Like the shorts team finds things that they love. And sometimes I go, oh, this bit with Mark Norman was really fun. Like, you should maybe put that out. But they treat me like a child, like they've got a strategy and they know what they're doing. So I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I guess I'll just like fucking close your eyes and put your hand in the celebrations ten and pull out today. It's a bounty tomorrow, it's a Malteser.

• 1:00:38George Mack?

  A good razor as well, kind of related to this is both these razors are trying to avoid signals and then trying to actually study the noise, like not the noise, sorry, but the actual thing. So meta games, I think, are super important because you can learn a lot. So I have this rule, which is if I want to work with a personal trainer, I want the personal trainer to be in insane shape. And that's way better than any marketing spiel he can give for me. If I see a SaaS product, which is selling landing page software, I want when I click on their landing page for that software to be incredible. I like the landing page should look, if you're, if you're the landing page software guy and your landing page isn't great, that's a sign. One of my favorite, one of my heroes for history in

• 1:01:22George Mack?

  a marketing space is David Ogilvy. And David Ogilvy, I forgot which magazine it was, they wrote a headline, which is, is David Ogilvy a genius? Question mark. And Ogilvy was a great marketer because the way he marketed himself, he replied to that headline by getting his lawyer to sue them for the question mark. Or at least that's the story that he released. And go, even within that, you can see how good he is at market. He doesn't have to say like what he's done there is genius. So whenever you can study these meta games, which is not what people say, what they do, or how they carry themselves is super, super important.

• 1:01:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Narcissism, narcissism razor. If you're worried about people's opinions, remember they are too busy worrying about other people's opinions of them. Ninety nine percent of the time, you're an extra in someone else's movie.

• 1:02:07George Mack?

  Yeah. And then that's when you realize everybody else has a separate video game that they're playing. And you're just, they're too busy. When you're thinking about them and you're worried about them, assume the amount of thought you give to other people they're giving to you. And then you realize how delusional that is. One of my friends was chatting about envy recently and he was talking about how he wants to get rid of envy as a thing. And one thing that's useful with envy is to realize that there's somebody out there who's. So envious of you, who probably checks your Instagram, checks all these things and constantly is thinking about you. And when you view it through that frame, you go, Jesus, that's really bad. I'm actually not that worthwhile being envious of. And you realise, oh shit, everybody else thinks the way I think.

• 1:02:47George Mack?

  And that then enables you to go to like third person shooter and begin to zoom out and just see, oh, I'm not that important.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  No, there's that quote of, um, we would care far less about what other people thought of us if we realised how rarely they did.

• 1:03:01George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  Um, there's this other one, did you see that story about Churchill that I posted of the young guy? He was showing around the Houses of Parliament. This was good. So a young MP was being shown around Parliament by Winston Churchill. As he wandered through the halls and offices, he asked questions about how the building was put together. Churchill obliged and gave the young man advice on how this world worked. Upon entering the House of Commons chamber, Churchill's new friends started referring to the MPs on the other benches as the enemy. Churchill reportedly said, that's the opposition, dear boy, the enemy's behind you. And what I loved about that was it became, obviously what he's talking about is the fact that like the people who you need to be concerned about are the ones that are on your team. Because you have something that they want. That's the opposition. You know that they're out to get you.

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  It's the people behind you that are the snakes that'll stab you in the back. But figuratively or symbolically, I think that I love that story because it reminds us that we are our own worst enemy. Most of the time that we see the world as being some sort of adversary that is trying to do things against us. The world gives zero fucks about you. The world doesn't care less. Literally the entire universe is indifferent to all of our existence. Right? No, not a blind blink. And I imagine that this is one of the reasons why when we get to look at the night sky, it fills us with a degree of dread and awe and insignificance. That I think is very important to keep our ego small, to realise that everything's just going to keep on turning. But also. This goes back to the cynicism skepticism thing.

• 1:04:30Chris Williamson?

  You can personify the world as being a thing. You know, you hear people say stuff like this, like, you know, the world is an evil and mean place and it will try and break you down. I've even nodded as Goggins said something similar on the podcast. And I, there are degrees to how it can be useful to see, to be alert to threats out there and to have resilience ready for things that are difficult to occur in the world. But the world's fucking indifferent to you. The world doesn't care. And personifying it and creating a, an enemy out of the world, I think, is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It's like, it needs to be turned inward. You are the person that knows all of your weaknesses. You can say the most disgusting, terrible things to yourself.

• 1:05:14Chris Williamson?

  You know, all of the trigger points that you should go through. You chastise yourself for falling short, even though you've tried your hardest. Like, you are your own worst enemy. There will never be anybody that can be as brutal to you as you can to yourself. Realizing that helps you to ameliorate this adversarial view of the world. The world's just a tool.

• 1:05:35George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't care about you. There are some people out there who genuinely have enemies, right? But it's a rarified strata of people and they've done something.

• 1:05:46George Mack?

  Tinder Swindler.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  Tinder Swindler, yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:48George Mack?

  Well, I think, so there's the nihilistic version of that, or it could be framed as nihilistic, pessimistic, which is, well, nobody cares about you. And therefore, well, what's the fucking point then? But it goes back to the root opening of the conversation, which is, ideas are probably more important than people. The concept of electricity is so important, or the idea of critical thinking, or whatever it is, this is why ideas are so much more important. And you can find, as an atheist or an agnostic, you can find God, to some extent, in these ideas, or something that's way bigger than you, that can last way longer than you, that is so, so damn important.

• 1:06:27Chris Williamson?

  There was a, one that I came up with, and this is my, my first one, I'm adding it into the mix, which you'll have seen before. Schultz's razor, "Do not attribute to group conspiracy that which can be explained by cancellation anxiety."

• 1:06:39George Mack?

  So that, that's a fucking great one. There's, there's the Cummings razor as well, which kind of forks on the idea, which is, Bellagio, one of my favorite followers on Twitter, tweeted out. Why don't, why doesn't every government in the world have a dashboard? So you can see how well they're doing is, well, think of the core, and you could debate over the core metrics. You can even debate how you measure them and maybe have different parties and things like that. But all the core measurements, number of homeless people on the street, obesity rates, death rate. Why, why don't we have a BBC five channel where you can just tune in like a CEO checking their dashboard? And we don't operate that way. And Dominic Cummings, Boris's former right hand man, retweeted that and said, and I call this Cummings, Cummings razor, which is whenever you get confused by politicians or you think it's some great conspiracy theory.

• 1:07:22George Mack?

  It's basically this, which is Cummings wrote, I can confirm at the time Boris does not have a dashboard that he checks every day. It's not run by like a CEO. He just reacts to newspaper stories that come in each day. If everybody saw this, they'd sell everything and flee. And that's a fundamental problem is, yeah, there's not actually a lot of malice that's going on. It's just a complete lack of strategy, design, everything.

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  Gwenda had a post today that was money. The idea of sinister elites controlling everything is popular because it's more comforting than the truth that even our leaders don't know what they're doing and society is ruled mostly by chance. So good. There was this, this other idea called compensatory control. Do you remember I, I taught you about this ages and ages ago? Compensatory control. So it's rich, another Richard Shotten here. So he was talking about how people that were very early on, before there was reason to believe that it was a lab leak. People were attributing to global conspiracy, the fact that we had this pandemic that was released. Like the people that were right, weren't right because they were educated.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  They were right because they were closing their eyes and throwing it at a dartboard if they're right at all. Compensatory control. When we feel uncertain, when randomness intrudes upon our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way. Superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need. It is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces. This is why for some it makes more sense to believe we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the chance mutation in a silly little microbe.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  We just want to personify, you see what I mean? It's that personification again as well. And one of the big reasons is that the world is chaotic. We try to bring order to that chaos by personifying it. So many different things that we could do. What should we focus on? Where should I put my time? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Please just tell me if I'm doing it right. And as soon as you can create a narrative, it's no longer random chaos. Oh, there's a story. It's like Harry Potter, or it's like Succession, or it's like Pretty Little Liars.

• 1:09:28George Mack?

  Going back to what we said earlier, you can never guess their opinions for high agency people. One of the things I love is as soon as somebody kind of, and I can be guilty of this as well, I'm sure you can, but someone kind of steamrolls with their identity belief or whatever their team sport is, it's just, if you had to give the best version of the other team's opinion, what is it? And you just see it crumble.

• 1:09:50Chris Williamson?

  Is that Mungus razor?

• 1:09:52George Mack?

  Yeah, it's like steel lining something, you just completely see it crumble. And a lot of them will go, well, there is no argument for it. And it's, well, therefore, this is.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  Why did, why did that's such a, that is the most insane perspective that totally disregards the

• 1:10:10Chris Williamson?

  fundamental way that humans work. If you believe the same things that your opponent believed, you would be convinced by it too.

• 1:10:18Chris Williamson?

  As soon as you can be convinced that two plus two equals four, you can no longer unsee the fact that two plus two equals four, until somebody convinces you of something else. You don't get to choose to be convinced, right? You just are, it just happens. Now you can refuse to listen to things, you can be boneheaded around stuff, but once you're convinced, that's it, it's game over. So, understanding that if you were that person, you would have that belief as well. I don't mean in a, we have no free will determinism type scenario, that their particular suite of understandings and worldview perspective has resulted in them believing this thing, which is counter to what you believe. I learned this from Gwinder as well, he's coming back on in a couple of weeks, uh, Rogerian rhetoric. So it's kind of like the, um,

• 1:11:05Chris Williamson?

  what's the dialogue method that the Greek philosopher came up with? Was it Aristotle? Or, people are going to be screaming into their AirPods. Anyway, there's this like, the Socratic method, fuck for that.

• 1:11:19Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Raja Rani Rhetoric is kind of a little bit like the Socratic method, but it's more investigative. So you're almost trying to work out, just trying to work out what's true through asking questions. And there isn't, Socratic method seems to be more like asking questions so that this person arrives at the outcome that you want them to. It's like, you know, the earth being flat, like, could you maybe think that it could be due to this? Could it maybe due to that? Could it maybe? And you try to guide somebody toward an outcome. Raja Rani Rhetoric seems to be less biased. It's got less of a, um, an agenda to it. And, uh, yeah, I, I, I love that as a, as an outcome because you're like, I just want to find out. I just want to know, I want to know what that person believes because if I believed it, I would be convinced too.

• 1:12:00George Mack?

  Yeah. Leaning in with curiosity versus like immediate judgment is, and sometimes you may change your mind. And I feel you can see that at like a political level or a societal level, but then you zoom in all the way at the micro. And you, everyone can relate to this where go on, search facebook.com if you're old enough. And click on your old profile and go back five years and you'll cringe. For whatever reason, you will, you will cringe, whether it's the outfit you wore, the person you was dating, the opinions that you had. And if you have, if you aren't cringing, then you, you definitely should be because you haven't evolved as a human being. However, you then have to prize in, fucking hell, five years from now, what am I going to be thinking? And that's one of the things, if you can start skipping ahead to that question now versus waiting the five years, maybe you actually get to that point in a year or two.

• 1:12:39Chris Williamson?

  Worst thing is, man, when you do this game, which both of us have done lots, right? What in five years' time is the wheels on the suitcase of my life that I should be looking at right now? Where are the blindingly obvious changes that I need to make that I'm going to wish that I did earlier? That I'm going to wish that I committed myself to. If you do the game of what do I wish that me 10 years ago changed, uh, altered, did? Adjusted in terms of texture of existence or the way that I perceive the world. Lots of those are still going to be the same ones that you need to do now for 10 years' time.

• 1:13:14George Mack?

  Yeah. Like it's the same pattern. It's the same, Wastin has the idea of bridging the gap where the mistake he made five years ago. It could, it'll be a theme of something that will keep occurring. And yeah, the actual specific mistake may change, but it could even just be the fact that I keep thinking I figured out the answer. So you go, you look back at yourself five years and go, well, fuck, I figured it out now. But you've not priced in the five years from now, you're gonna go, oh, fuck, I've actually figured it out now. And it's the same thing each time. Going back to the Sekoko thing, I had this, the weirdest one. Again, a lot of alone time can both be great, but also very bad.

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  Preaching to the choir.

• 1:13:52George Mack?

  I don't know where this idea is. I think it's either my greatest idea or my worst idea yet. I've thought about turning it into a guided meditation, which is,

• 1:14:00George Mack?

  meditation's useful, you can kind of observe yourself. But as atheists, agnostics, people who don't have an immediate religion to fall into, they don't have really any alternative to prayer. And I really like the kind of Jeff Bezos deathbed minimization framework, as well as the kind of Roy, it's just a video game. And I came up with this thing. I was just sat there with no phone, no nothing, my mind's just wandering. And a little bit of Christmas carol thrown in there where you calm your breathing and you skip ahead 70 years in the future. And you kind of go, fuck, you take off the VR headset and you now, as you are now, listening to this podcast was just a complete VR trip. You're actually 85 years old and you're in the worst care home imaginable. And as your eyes slowly open, you begin to realize,

• 1:14:46George Mack?

  and you try and embody this and feel the emotion, that you're you if all your worst traits took over, if all your pessimism took over, if all your low agency took over, if all your isolating yourself from your friends and bitching about people, everything that you can think about your worst version of yourself took over, you're in a care home where there's fucking cockroaches on the floor and the nurses never come in to see you. And as you stumble around, you're just repeating all the mistakes that you've made in your head, repeating all them and like physically feel that emotion. And then as you're feeling that intensity. You get a knock on the door, you move over with your Zimmerfrän and your hips that feel like you've just run a marathon the day before.

• 1:15:28George Mack?

  And standing back as you open the door is the absolute best version of yourself. And for whatever reason, he's he's lean. He's like, he's got none of the injury issues.

• 1:15:36Chris Williamson?

  Built like RFK.

• 1:15:38George Mack?

  Yeah, he's built like RFK and he's prime. He's on all the creatine, right? He looks fantastic and he pulls up an iPad and he plays you all the fucking amazing memories where the best version of you took over. And you feel that emotion to such an extreme intensity of that envy that you have for the best version of yourself. And you look over and there's a clock on the wall and there's just five minutes ticking. It's how long you've got left to live and the emotion then intensifies. But before the the best version of yourself, before the RFK version of yourself walks out, he says, okay. If I could give you the ability to go back in time now, what would you do? I'd give you all my money in my bank account. He goes, okay, let's do it. Let's do the trade. However, you have to give me one thing today. That you're gonna show the best version and write that down and then actually action it. And I started doing that. I was like, fucking hell.

• 1:16:23George Mack?

  Almost got like crying in a Starbucks one day.

• 1:16:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you want, you you put an information hazard warning before posting that online, which I think is probably worthwhile. It's a pretty intense thing to do. Are there any realizations? Are there any changes that you've made from that that aren't so personal that you can share?

• 1:16:43George Mack?

  Yes, I I think really just thinking in much longer time horizons. So thinking, okay, well, if I go to that eighty, ninety year old self.

• 1:16:54George Mack?

  I really wanna play games that I can play forever or that I can play for a long period of time, that are video games that I can set up. That compound out as well. So I've kind of changed a lot of the way I think, the way I operate, the way I work around.

• 1:17:08Chris Williamson?

  Much more long-termism view.

• 1:17:09George Mack?

  Much more long-termism because that's where all the that's where all the gains, that's what you said to me last night of. If anybody with a bit of talent, a bit of IQ, a bit of everything, sticks out something for five years like you did. Like playing the video game without the scoreboard going up, but stick it and then boom. The compounding game happens. Like what percentage of your audience has come in the last twelve months? Like ninety percent?

• 1:17:28Chris Williamson?

  More.

• 1:17:29George Mack?

  That's insane, right? It's so hard for people that come from a going back to the education system, an education system like that to comprehend. How things compound all of a sudden, but when you can zoom out and play those long term games, they can compound. And the beautiful thing is, going back to it, is even if your podcast never took off, even if this thing never worked out, and it's still me and you, just making another episode.

• 1:17:52Chris Williamson?

  Doing this.

• 1:17:53George Mack?

  We still have to go, that was fucking fantastic. You still had fun, which is the kind of beauty, say, if you can find a game that you can play forever, A, you'll probably end up making a lot of money. And then B, worst case scenario, if you don't, at least it's, it's, it's a fun video game anyway.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  The early late razor, if it's a talking point on Reddit or Twitter, you might be early. If it's a talking point on LinkedIn or Facebook, you're definitely late.

• 1:18:13George Mack?

  Yeah, that's a confirmation. There's a, I, I try and think quite a lot about future trends. And as a result, you end up going back to what I said earlier, it's VC bets nine out of 10 will be wrong, but one out of 10 will be right. And the biggest thing I have is the amount of trends I spotted that came via Twitter and how far ahead you can live by living on the right Reddit, the right Twitters. And even now, it'll be like WhatsApp chats, Telegram chats, things like that. And you can literally see it slowly go all the way through and then hits peak mainstream when it's on Facebook or when it's on LinkedIn.

• 1:18:42Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I did this the other day. This was from this week's newsletter. And I think I told you about this one too. The parental clout gauge.

• 1:18:52George Mack?

  I didn't know this one.

• 1:18:53Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how I know when a news story has reached genuine mainstream significance? It's not when it trends on Twitter or hits daytime news or lands on front pages. It's when my dad messages me on Facebook about it. I see your colleague, Mr. Rogan has been in the news again. He also sent me one toward the back end of last year saying that Andrew Tate, spelled T A I T, that Andrew Tate's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? And I was like, oh God, Tate, you've really gone full mainstream now.

• 1:19:21George Mack?

  That's, that's a good form of, I think as well, one thing I've taken, so there's a book called The Sovereign Individual, which is a fantastic book, predicted a lot of future trends. And they have within that, which is this concept that if the Roman, when the Roman Empire fell, which I think is in like four, seven, six A D or whenever.

• 1:19:38George Mack?

  They didn't acknowledge it at the time. It wasn't people going around the Roman empires fell. It was only with the historians glazed that we could acknowledge, oh, that's when the Roman Empire will fall. And this idea, I don't think the American Empire is ending by any stretch of the imagination. But one day, I assume it will end. And the concept that you think you'll go on CNN one day and they'll go, oh, by the way, today, the American Empire ended. No, what will happen is it'll be 70 to 80 years afterwards, historians will declare, oh, it's when X happened that it ended. And that's the reason why you really can't outsource things to the news. Because if you wait for the news to tell you, you either be late or you'll be wrong.

• 1:20:09Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about how this reflects and works for the personal as well. I learned this from Mark Manson. Identity likes reality by one to two years. There's a lot of psychological fallout from a rapid change in status. And this kind of relates to the what will you in five years think about you today? What do they wish that you had known? Only in retrospect, do our lives make sense a lot of the times. That quote about the funny thing about life is that it needs to be lived forward, but it only makes sense in reverse. And identity likes reality by one to two years means that you are permanently, permanently playing catch up, especially if you have big changes in lifestyle and personal growth. You know, everybody that's listening to this podcast is is working on personal growth.

• 1:20:53Chris Williamson?

  They're trying to become better people every single day, which is beautiful, but it's very unstabilizing, very, very unstabilizing. Because, you know, within the space, what's that? Every seven years, every single cell in your body has changed, right? It's the ship of Theseus idea that you can replace each individual plank on this ship. And after long enough, like, is it the same ship? And there's also a way that girl breakup meme pages have used this to be like, girl, don't worry. After seven years, there won't be a cell in your body left that was around when you were with him. Which is actually kind of a nice way to think about it, I suppose, if you're trying to get over a bad breakup. But it's very destabilizing to have all of this stuff happening, right? And especially if identity likes reality by one to two years, it's really, really tough. Okay, so who's

• 1:21:37Chris Williamson?

  me? What does it mean to be me? Right? What does it mean to be me? Like, who am I? Am I the me that I aspire to be? Am I the me that I am now? Am I the me? Like, it's a very, very destabilizing world to be in. And I think that trying to future proof yourself by thinking carefully, by reflecting carefully on on what it is that

• 1:22:00Chris Williamson?

  What the universal rules are that you're trying to follow, I think is a much safer way to go about things.

• 1:22:04George Mack?

  Yeah, I think, I think the more rules of thumb and raises that you can just have, the more useful that is. Brian Johnson, the.

• 1:22:11Chris Williamson?

  Which one?

• 1:22:12George Mack?

  Good, good, good point. The.

• 1:22:13Chris Williamson?

  I, I, here's a point. I don't know a single name that has more people in the public eye attached to it than Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson, singer of ACDC. Brian Johnson guy that started optimized.me. Forgot about him, didn't you? Brian Johnson. Hey guys, Brian here. Um, Brian Johnson, the Liver King. Brian Johnson, the longevity expert.

• 1:22:38George Mack?

  In, in the marketing space, that's what we call an SEO warfare.

• 1:22:43George Mack?

  I want about the longevity expert where he has the 4pm. Is it 4pm Brian or 5pm Brian?

• 1:22:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49George Mack?

  Where he just, he's fired him. He doesn't let him make a decision. But yeah, I think the more rules of thumbs that you can have, it simplifies things. And then I actually think the ultimate hack we've been speaking about a lot whilst I've been here is who you are around. I know that's the kind of oldest Dale Carnegie trope, but the memetic forces. I, I wrote this essay a while ago, which is cognitive biases are a bit of a scam. Or they've been sold incorrectly. So cognitive.

• 1:23:13Chris Williamson?

  Don't tell Shane Parrish.

• 1:23:14George Mack?

  Cognitive biases, I think you'll agree, which is cognitive biases are pessimistic and low agency versus you can actually just reframe them. Same way you take the simulation hypotheses and then the video game hypotheses. You can reframe them up to the optimism, high agency stack and it's cognitive superpowers. So you can just move things like, so mimesis, everybody talks about mimesis often in a negative frame. Oh, you just copy your desires from other people and there's, there's some truth to that and some beauty to that. But also you can actually use that as a fucking tool. And maybe a lot of these things have actually been designed, not as cognitive biases, but things that are.

• 1:23:46Chris Williamson?

  Hyperbolic discounting, where you've managed to reverse that. What's the name that you've given to the study by historians question? Have you named it yet?

• 1:23:54George Mack?

  Oh, the, the, what is ignored by.

• 1:23:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Have you named that?

• 1:23:57George Mack?

  Yeah. So what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians? And then people point out, well, there was this one example where the media mentioned this, the whole thing of it is like the media historian gap. So what is super prominent? So what is not prominent in the media right now that I think will be humongously portioned up by history? And there's so many things. When you begin, again, it's another question. It's another open loop that you leave with the audience and. Versus like, oh, this is the thing. Here's my answer.

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  I've got a list of 10. The headline death gap.

• 1:24:28George Mack?

  The headline death gap. So this is an image, maybe Dean can whack it on the screen of what headlines say will cause your death or what they focus on versus what will. And obviously terrorism is like off the charts, things like that are off the charts versus heart disease gets almost no mention in the media and it is absolutely humongous. I have this bit that you did with Peter Attia where the, is it the mortality gap between smoking and non-smoking?

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  Smoker and a non-smoker is 40%. The mortality gap between the bottom 25% of exercise fitness and the top 2% is 400%.

• 1:25:00George Mack?

  So here's a question for you, an open loop for you. Where is the, where's the great pro exercise campaigns right now? If it's, if it's 10x or however much x the difference and if we can save that many lives, because I collect like the best ads of all time. And there's one in there, which is like smoking and there's an actual study on smoking ads that the US government did. It saved millions of lives, they expect. So where's the pro exercise campaigns? They don't exist. Based off that, based off purely off that data alone, they should exist on mass.

• 1:25:30Chris Williamson?

  The interesting, the reason that the question is interesting, and I've, I've called it a Max Thiel question, because Peter Thiel's question of what do you believe that most people, is it most people would find abhorrent and most people would disagree with?

• 1:25:42George Mack?

  It's like, yeah, what, what do you believe that everybody else essentially disagrees with you on?

• 1:25:45Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:25:45George Mack?

  Which I feels like, again, like everything, I'm a fucking budget version of, much budget version of.

• 1:25:49Chris Williamson?

  Peter Thiel, yeah, not even as gay.

• 1:25:53George Mack?

  Who knows, the night's young, right? So on that point, yeah, the media historian gap, and then you begin to see it everywhere. It was more like a point of annoyance where I just see these things and go, why is that not getting discussed? And it goes back to opportunity cost as well, where what are the things that we aren't discussing because we're focused on things like that, the more important things?

• 1:26:10Chris Williamson?

  Fast and Furious 10.

• 1:26:11George Mack?

  Fast and Furious 10.

• 1:26:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, we've said this, actually, this is an interesting one. I used to say five years ago, most of the greatest minds of the 21st century have had their time working out how to get people to click on ads. But that changed about three years ago to many of the greatest minds of the 21st century have had their time taken up arguing about whether men are men and women are women or not, which is also true. Like, you know, Jordan Peterson, very formative for me during my intellectual awakening from man-child to adult infant and

• 1:26:46Chris Williamson?

  I love his insights around the existential pain of living. I don't go to him for insights around Sports Illustrated models. There's just better things. And the weird thing about some of the ideologies that have captured attention of the opposite side. So you understand about how

• 1:27:05Chris Williamson?

  cultural memes are also evolved too, right? That the ones that are built to propagate and to be continued are the ones that stick around. And there are other ones that don't, right? Cultural memes act the same way that genetic genes do too. But there's something that happens on the opposite side of the fence that it causes the effective cultural memes that stick around are good at triggering a response from the other side. They trigger an antibody response, which further propagates the meme because it lends more credence to it. Now, sometimes I suppose the opposing side could keep on battering away to the point where it gets destroyed. I think the word woke and the word politically correct are two good examples of that, that comedians used it to

• 1:27:51Chris Williamson?

  it was so quickly turned from non-ironic to ironic and mocked through satire that no one uses the word woke in a non-ironic way anymore. Everyone that uses it is using it as a piss take. So there are ways that you can repurpose it. There's not an argument to never push back against bad ideology. But it is an argument to realize that if you start to play the game of the other side, whatever side you're on and whichever side you hate, if you begin to play their game by pushing more attention toward what they're doing, you do, uh, it's like a Hydra, it like just chop one of the heads off and it grows two more.

• 1:28:25George Mack?

  Well, if you look at kind of the root structure of the conversation today, if you actually zoom out, it's constant gaps, right? So you've got the media historian gap, you've got the thinking cost gap, the gap between what I should be thinking about versus that. And the beautiful thing is that these are questions are the answers that you need. These are questions that you can kind of explore. The Transformers Fast and Furious gap, right? What's the media focusing on?

• 1:28:52George Mack?

  There's questions that you can kind of explore for a lifetime as well as it's quite a decentralized thing. It's the audience can then participate.

• 1:29:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean.

• 1:29:00George Mack?

  Constantly update that model versus, hey, here's the answer.

• 1:29:02Chris Williamson?

  I would love to create a page of some kind. I guess it can just happen in the comments, but it would be great for you to put a page out. What is neglected by the media but will be studied by historians? If you crowdsourced that.

• 1:29:14George Mack?

  Yeah, that'd be that'd be a fascinating one. And then you can obviously retrospectively see it throughout time as well. There's so many of those gap. That is another one that I two that I have at the minute, which is what problems can't cap what problems aren't we solving because capitalism can't solve them.

• 1:29:31Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 1:29:32George Mack?

  I think I think so. We spoke about this one cyberbullying. I think that's a really difficult problem for capitalism to solve.

• 1:29:39Chris Williamson?

  Because the incentives aligned to get people to be online.

• 1:29:41George Mack?

  Yeah, that's a real difficult one. And I think therefore you've got you've got to maybe have some kind of X prize idea or something outside the box for that. I have another one, which is like the the product marketing gap, which is most people think they hate marketing, but they don't. They just hate it when marketing is better than the product.

• 1:29:57Chris Williamson?

  The the secret or optimism?

• 1:29:59George Mack?

  Exactly that. And I one thing I'd leave for the audience to I'd recommend. I always recommend this. My friend Julian Shapiro sent me it, which is this documentary Searching for Sugar Man. You've still not seen it, have you?

• 1:30:09Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:30:09George Mack?

  That angers me. So no, no, and.

• 1:30:10Chris Williamson?

  Sorry.

• 1:30:10George Mack?

  Watch that tonight. So Searching for Sugar Man, spoiler alert, is about a musician who was more talented than Bob Dylan. Everyone who worked with him was like, this guy's incredible. He's going to be the next big thing. And he just disappeared. There's rumors that he set himself on fire. What happened to this guy? And meanwhile, in South Africa, his music became a big thing during the apartheid. He was bigger than Elvis. He sold hundreds of thousands of records. And everyone in South Africa was like, he was he was an icon. But everyone thought he died or whatever. Turns out, the guy was just a builder on a building site for the rest of his life. And it's only thanks to the internet beginning to start that he realizes that he was the superstar in South Africa. And I call it

• 1:30:53George Mack?

  the Rodriguez effect, which is when you have a fucking incredible product, people think this idea, oh, if you just build it, they will come. If you have an incredible product. But no, that's the that's the importance sometimes of marketing. If you don't actually market someone who's as talented as him, you end up with somebody like Rodriguez, where they have the most talented, arguably one of the most talented artists of his generation. Who never truly took off, apart from he had that little win in South Africa, but he never took off elsewhere.

• 1:31:15Chris Williamson?

  Tell me about Kanye West's market research.

• 1:31:17George Mack?

  Oh, it's my favorite one. So this is what I call the Olsen thermometer. So there's this, going back to finding niche content on the internet. There's this Diplo animation where Diplo is chatting about, he gets called up to by Kanye to work on, I'd argue probably one of his best albums, which is Watch the Throne, him and Jay-Z. And he goes in the studio, he's producing beats and he looks over and you're saying your artist friend does like e-cigs everywhere and there's things on the floor. In Kanye's studio, there's just the Olsen twins and Diplo's like, why, why are Mary Kate and Ashley here? Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen? And Kanye says, oh, they're my thermometer for what white girls like music. So I just play tunes and see what they like.

• 1:31:59George Mack?

  And I go, obviously that's the most Kanye thing ever, but it's also genius, which is when you have. And when you're creating something for yourself, it's really easy. But when you're creating something for different demographics, having an Olsen thermometer in the room is very, very useful.

• 1:32:13Chris Williamson?

  The friendship recession, another one that the.

• 1:32:16George Mack?

  Ignored by the media, well studied by historians.

• 1:32:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, the number of men who reported having zero close friends in 1990 was 3%. In 2020 was 15%. Um, the, I mean, people are starting to talk about it with young girls. There's this recent study that came out, I think it's like 60% of teenage girls in America say that they have persistent or constant feelings of hopelessness. Like, it's just the most brutal. I would love to see the study and actually break down what's going on. Um, global millionaire migration, what's that?

• 1:32:48George Mack?

  Yeah, there's, the US went from, I think, 10,000 millionaires net migration to like 1500, which is like an 85% drop really quick. Um, and the UK is now at a net loss, whereas elsewhere, Australia, the UAE. I think Canada has gone up. So that's definitely thing that just doesn't really get talked about like, why is this happening? Again, another one is Japan's homeless rate. Why does Japan have so few homeless people relative to the rest of the world? They might be lying with their statistics. Who knows? But it's so, it's so low. It's insanely low. A lot of the reasons that when you actually watch documentaries about it is these gaming cafes. So that's one question to.

• 1:33:23Chris Williamson?

  So they live in gaming cafes?

• 1:33:25George Mack?

  Living gaming cafes.

• 1:33:26Chris Williamson?

  Why do they sleep?

• 1:33:26George Mack?

  The people who would be homeless, like this kind of like a bed and a chair and they play games, which is obviously a terrible outcome. But is it better than somebody sleeping on the streets? Good question to pose. Another one that I think will become bigger with the next election cycle, which you already take advantage of this. It's something I call the great social media merge. So I got this idea from Mr. Beast, which is every platform for the first time ever is kind of, you have that unbundling then bundling effect. Everything's just merging on this kind of TikTokization of reels, shorts, but even Reddit, even Twitter is now going on video. And you're going to see this.

• 1:33:56Chris Williamson?

  Spotify, Amazon.

• 1:33:58George Mack?

  So all you, back in the day, you needed to create something for LinkedIn and then something for this. And it meant actually going viral was so much harder, whereas now it's actually never been easier to go viral because the same clip, because every platform is bundling together can go on mass viral. And I don't think they priced in how quick are people are going to get famous?

• 1:34:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's looking at content strategy. There's certainly different audiences that it resonates with. So just because something that's nine, 16 vertical, we put stuff that reliably does well on Instagram that falls flat on its ass on TikTok. Animation videos reliably do well on Instagram. Can't even get off the ground on YouTube. No one cares. So there is, although the format of the platform may be the same, the physics that drive it are different.

• 1:34:47George Mack?

  Different, but I wouldn't be surprised if over time those begin to merge more and more together. Another thing on this specific topic is I have one point in the essay of don't ignore India. I think India is possibly the most fascinating country right now, which particularly is a a British and American media doesn't really get focused on that much. So Indians are now the number one population in the world. Overtaking China this year or last year, they export more in software engineering than Saudi Arabia does in oil. So there's so much going on there. They're the number one users of every single social media platform. So number one users of WhatsApp, number one users of Facebook, number one users of Instagram, number one users of YouTube. Which means that if you're going to be creating things online, they're going to be there. India and also India, bear in mind, obviously previously the British Empire where India was a colony of Britain.

• 1:35:32George Mack?

  Has now flipped. So India's economy the other last year overtook the UK. And again, that's barely discussed, but 20 years from now, we're going to go, that was a big event.

• 1:35:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, an interesting insight that I learned from a couple of tech YouTube friends with massive channels. When they do expensive like Apple devices, their RPM and their CPM per thousand on AdSense on the backend of YouTube is very high. If they do cheap Android devices, tons and tons of Indians watch it and that drives through the floor.

• 1:36:03George Mack?

  Android's huge there, yeah.

• 1:36:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Also Ali Abdaal talks about Ali's from some subcontinental heritage. And when he does book summaries, his book summaries are often listened to or watched by people from India. But it drives his CPM through the floor. So he's like, he needs to balance revenue with.

• 1:36:24George Mack?

  But again, I think, I think you're going to see, I know we spoke about this a long time ago, where remote work was the best thing ever to happen to skilled people in the developing world.

• 1:36:35Chris Williamson?

  And short people.

• 1:36:36George Mack?

  Yeah, I'll pin that one and skillless people in the developed world. Because all the money is going to flow out and again, that will be something that will be spoke about five years from now. As all this money flows out to what Blige calls the ascending world and the descending world as a better model versus developed and developing world.

• 1:36:53Chris Williamson?

  It's the ultimate meritocracy.

• 1:36:54George Mack?

  It's the ultimate meritocracy, but what will happen is people will not like that. Because you'll see all this money flow and then all of a sudden the CPMs in India will get higher and higher and higher.

• 1:37:02Chris Williamson?

  It's, it's going to drive populist uprisings more and more, you know, if you, we need stronger borders. Okay, please try and police your virtual borders for a workforce. Like you've got this cohort of seven million prime working age men between the ages of 22 and 50 who are not working. They're not in education, employment or training, NEETS. They spend a few thousand hours on average per year playing video games. 50% of that time is either on prescription drugs or smoking weed. From this seven million man cohort, seven million out of three hundred and thirty million isn't much, but when you look at capable men within that age bracket, it's actually a massive proportion, huge, huge number.

• 1:37:48Chris Williamson?

  If those people aren't going to work, there is a vacuum that will be filled by other workers from elsewhere.

• 1:37:54George Mack?

  Another one on this is literally this point of what's neglected or what's ignored by the media will be studied by historians is the BRICS. So if you combine the BRICS, so like Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and I think UAE as well.

• 1:38:07Chris Williamson?

  What's the K?

• 1:38:09George Mack?

  It's a C, it's a C for China. And yeah, that's true, actually. But they're literally about to overtake the G seven in terms of economic size. It's like the G seven's going down, like down relative to global GDP and that's going like that. And again, these will be things that they will not talk about in the news. Going back to the Roman Empire point earlier, nobody says Roman Empire has fallen. It's the historians that say that. So the historian frame is so much more useful. But again, you can see, going back to what I said earlier, there's the way I think, or it's probably sometimes you end up visualizing where things are better, as we discussed earlier, but there's a lot of root structures and themes there of these gaps of taking the historian's perspective, both at the societal level and also at the individual level.

• 1:38:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes, the future you, right? Looking back.

• 1:38:49George Mack?

  Exactly the same.

• 1:38:50Chris Williamson?

  Uh, I think my two, my two certainly at the moment will be that population collapse.

• 1:38:57George Mack?

  That's a big one. I brought about that one. That's a huge one.

• 1:38:59Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely massive. I keep harping on about it. It's an interesting, it's not even necessarily ignored by the media. It's disincentivized to be spoken about by the media because it runs counter to a climate change narrative that this is what we should be focused on. AI risk, I think, is still now largely in the public, seen as like a, you know, but I can get it to tell me the recipe or I can get it to tell me five interesting stories about Winston Churchill. And yeah, you can, but I mean, if the people that are concerned, if like Eliud Zayukowski is right, then.

• 1:39:37Chris Williamson?

  There is no, there's going to be no historians in the future to be able to worry about what happened in the past in any case. So it doesn't really matter. It's going to be all paper clips. YouTube is the new TV.

• 1:39:46George Mack?

  Yeah, this is a crazy stat. And one of my new favorite things, when I see a viral YouTuber, I go in the comment section and the amount of times they'll say, hey, X, I'm a 15 year old and I love your business content. It's just flooded. And if you actually see, you can find the image I posted on Twitter where YouTube now is something like 25% of kids say they spend almost all their time or such a significant proportion of their time on YouTube. And you're then seeing this war that play out to the attention economy where you have like centralized major studios. So Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, all these, which is kind of top down. We pay billions for ideas for the best directors in the world and we create that versus bottom

• 1:40:28George Mack?

  up, which is like YouTube, anyone can go viral. It's completely decentralized. And I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube ultimately, I think they'll both win, but I think YouTube will eat more and more of the attention market.

• 1:40:39Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure that the amount of time spent on TikTok last year versus Netflix, Netflix watch time. Let's see. I did not mean that. Watch time.

• 1:40:57Chris Williamson?

  Insider Intelligence predicts that users over the age of 18 will spend an average of 58 minutes per day on TikTok this year compared with 48.7 minutes for YouTube. Netflix still within the leader at 62 minutes. So it's like 58 minutes a day on TikTok, 48 minutes a day on YouTube, 62 minutes a day on Netflix. That's for people over the age of 18, right? So under the age of 18 is probably going to be pivoted a lot. That's, that's, that's three hours of your day. Here's an interesting one, right? The number of hours that people have in the day hasn't changed, but the number of, the amount of time that people spend on online platforms has, that time has to be squeezed from somewhere. You don't just get to create this time from nothing. So when people talk about, you know, what have been the massive changes, why is, why the discourse is

• 1:41:41Chris Williamson?

  this way and the mental health and all of the rest of this stuff, look at it as a hardware problem as opposed to a software problem. Is it the globalist conspiracy? Is it the estrogens in the water and the stuff? It might contribute to it a little bit. Maybe it's the fact that.

• 1:41:56Chris Williamson?

  Twenty five years ago, the total amount of screen time that people spent was probably on average like two hours, one hour a day. And now it's including work, it's probably closer to ten.

• 1:42:07George Mack?

  So let but let's go back to the beginning of the conversation, optimism agency, right? So if you look at when the smartphone first launched, it was magic pocket computer. Wow, how incredible this is that I get this fucking thing that sits in my pocket and I can reach anybody, do anything. I can watch Richard Feynman lectures whenever I want. I could go on Stanford University. I can I can chat to somebody in India just sat here right now. That is fucking incredible. Ten years later, brain killing device. What's what's gone wrong? We've gone all the way from the optimism, high agency, all the way down to pessimism, low agency. And the number one, which I never thought would be my most popular essay in terms of when I meet people that they want to talk about, going back to the third door, like, what is the thing that no one's discussing, is I call it the

• 1:42:51George Mack?

  smartphone paradox. So right now, there's two things people are presented with smartphones. Either one, be a phone addict who's addicted to it 12 hours a day, every single day, refreshing it. And yeah, you get the upsides of constant optionality and things like that, but you're stuck to your phone all day. Or you've got the phoneless Luddite who leaves his phone at home or leaves a phone at home, which is great. But you can't get an Uber anywhere. If you've got an idea, you can't use your notes. If your mum's ill, you don't find out until four weeks later. And so you have, I have the two version memes, like the phoneless Luddite, and then the phone addict, which is the two options that have been presented by society right now. And then I was like, okay, well, where's the where's the wheeled suitcase right now? And I came up with the cocaine phone and the kale phone. So this

• 1:43:36George Mack?

  is my cocaine phone here. This is my kale phone here. And rather than have a phone you're addicted to, or no phone that you're addicted to, what about this? So on the kale phone, essentially, is all the positive optimistic apps, notes, Google Maps, utilitarian, Uber, Audible, Kindle. And it's sometimes so boring, I just can't even be arsed checking it. And if anybody wants to get in touch, I've got like a few emergency contacts that have this number. So I still have, if anything kicks off, I've still got that. And then on my cocaine phone, it's wild. TikTok, Instagram, everything on there. And what's really interesting about this is, when I spend all my time on my kale phone, so I usually won't check my cocaine phone till like one or two PM in the afternoon.

• 1:44:20George Mack?

  It completely resets my baseline. So then when I use the cocaine one, I'm bored of it. I've got it. It's too much after about an hour and I want to go back. And that single piece alone, I get people writing to me weekly saying this thing's like completely changed it. So I call that the smartphone paradox and it goes back to, well, you can kind of go, oh, well, Apple, when are they going to fix this? Or TikTok's evil. It's like, or you can, you can take it into your own hands and design some wheels in the suitcase.

• 1:44:45Chris Williamson?

  The bottom line is that you need to take control of your own technology. I would, I would go as far as to say that like my relationship with technology has probably been the most consistent challenge that I've had to fight with over the last decade. Right. It's something every single year when I look at my annual review that no matter how disciplined I've been, I always want to be more disciplined and I always see it as a, a challenge. I always think I could have, would have, should have done better with that. Um, but I'm cocaine kale and then a third one as well, right? Like I've got three and

• 1:45:13George Mack?

  Cat phone.

• 1:45:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Cat, ketamine phone. Um, I've been rolling with that for a long time and that's been a, a big, do not have social media on the main phone.

• 1:45:21George Mack?

  It's the, it's the most, and the beauty of that is you get the upsides of, you get the upsides of having the phone, all the craziness of social media, finding like random stories, what we're chatting about earlier. But all the upsides of having peace of mind and being able to detach and mindfulness. I think

• 1:45:35Chris Williamson?

  Audible and podcasts.

• 1:45:36George Mack?

  Yeah. Podcast notes, everything you can think of, being able to get an Uber somewhere, all the basics. And again, society presents these two extremes at your end of the spectrum, but there's always a third door that exists.

• 1:45:48Chris Williamson?

  The scale of pharma marketing.

• 1:45:50George Mack?

  Yeah, that's a big one. Um, again, going back to, as someone who fucking loves advertising, loves collecting the best ads of all time. Only US and New Zealand are allowed to run pharmaceutical advertising. I can't quote the exact ones. I think it's MSNBC. Two other big, big news networks in the US, their biggest advertisers are pharmaceutical companies. But it goes back to my point earlier, which is, okay. That's true. That's the thing that exists. Should that exist? That's open for debate. That's an open question. But where are the iconic exercise campaigns? If we know that it can have a fucking 500% increase, taking somebody from the bottom 25% of exercise to the top 2%, where are those campaigns? And why aren't the government investing in them? I put out a thing of if any government wants to invest, DM me and I'll help.

• 1:46:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, speaking

• 1:46:32George Mack?

  I need DMs yet, so.

• 1:46:33Chris Williamson?

  Speaking about government investment, you've got the great tech neglect.

• 1:46:36George Mack?

  Yeah, so this is one of my favorite ones, which is talk about ignored by the media, studied by historians. The UK government posted a job role for the head of cybersecurity for the UK government, and the proposed salary was £55,000, which, again, for a lot of people is a lot of money, don't get me wrong, but for the head of cybersecurity, how is that? How? How is that possible?

• 1:47:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, when you think about your job is in cybersecurity and the number one flaw that all cyber systems have is the human element. Every single hacker fundamentally is a human hacker first, not a computer hacker. Almost everybody, I think it's called soft hacking or something like that, where they're trying to look for the human element in. If this guy is or girl is getting £57,000 per year, like, how many Bitcoin do you think that a rogue nation has to be able to bribe that person? There's your vector of attack.

• 1:47:39George Mack?

  Yep. And two things I've been really focused on the last kind of 12, 20 more, 24 months is travelling and studying different cultures, because you can go, oh, why does Japan have so few homeless people? Or how come the UK is doing this? But meanwhile, in Singapore, they pay the average politician something like $750,000, and they have KPIs based off how well the country's performing. So study different cultures, travel a lot, and you begin to see those gaps, as well as when you study history, you begin to go, you begin to take a historian's frame to the present moment.

• 1:48:09Chris Williamson?

  How incredible modern aviation is.

• 1:48:11George Mack?

  This is the wildest one. And I, every time I get on an airplane, even when I flew here, I always say to myself, I go, and this is even a gratitude hack, I go, I'm gonna die today. I go, I take, as we're taking off, especially because I rant about how modern aviation is, I go, it'd be the most ironic death.

• 1:48:25Chris Williamson?

  For the pro-modern aviation guy.

• 1:48:27George Mack?

  Elon Musk says that of the most entertaining outcome will happen of the guy that rants about how amazing aviation is will die on a flight. So here's two stats, I think it's 2021, the number of deaths on a airline in 2021 was around about 120 to 180, depending on the statistics you look at. The number of car deaths was around about 1.1 million. So, and think about how much more dangerous an airplane taking off is. And that is completely neglected. I think probably because it's a positive story and we don't want to focus on it, or we just take it for granted, the same way we take the sewage system for granted, the same way we take electricity system for granted, all these great ideas we take for granted. And then we focus on all the nonsense with the opportunity costs that we have.

• 1:49:14George Mack?

  It's humongous that we don't think about how wonderful modern aviation is.

• 1:49:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, we have this threat detection system, right? And we also have a smoke detector principle, which is, it is far better for us to assume that something bad is going to go wrong and it not happen than us assume that something is going to go well and that not occur. Like, there is a bus, bush that shakes over the far side, I can either be scared because it might be a line and run away, and it might be a liner, it might not. But the cost of me running away is relatively low. The cost of me being eaten is very high. So we always have this negativity bias, it's inbuilt into us. It is your job to swim upstream against that. And stats like that, I think are very, very important to remind you, like the, I mean, what's the chance of you dying in the car on route to the airport compared with this?

• 1:49:53George Mack?

  That's it. They say the most dangerous thing about a flight is the drive to the airport.

• 1:49:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, the, I remember it's in Matthew Walker's book where he talks about how the number of doctors that have done, I think it's surgeons, the number of doctors or surgeons that have worked 12-hour shifts in a hospital that upon their drive home, crash and then get taken back to their own hospital to be worked on because of how sleep deprived they are.

• 1:50:22George Mack?

  Wow. I think I there's a book called Black Box Thinking, which I recommend, which studies the aviation industry where they compare. Well, why are airline deaths going down so much? Meanwhile, hospital deaths are going up so much. And he has a few interesting hypotheses about cultural things. And with a black box, they literally observe once a plane crashes, what happens? It records it. And because often the people are dead, there's no ego involved. So they can objectively assess it. But the lessons from the aviation industry should be applied everywhere. And this ties into the next point, which is what happened to ticker tape parades? At ticker tape parades, Peter Thiel has this great point where they used to be huge. People would go out in the street and applaud JFK, applaud these great individuals. And they started off in the 1910s, became super popular all the way up to the

• 1:51:07George Mack?

  1970s, and then just slowly fade away. The last iconic individual really was Nelson Mandela in 1990, New York. After that is a few sports teams, not individuals, collectives, a few nurses, and a few things like that. But what happened to that? My thesis is, is like, where's the ticker tape parade for the Wright brothers? Or where's the day off for the Wright brothers? Because fucking hell, you think about how talk about high agency individuals.

• 1:51:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, no one can agree on any cultural heroes anymore. There is nobody.

• 1:51:37George Mack?

  There's nothing Wright brothers are up for debate?

• 1:51:39Chris Williamson?

  But new ones. Like, you're not going to throw a ticker tape parade for the Wright brothers now, are you? You know, try and think of who do you think is the most unobjectionable person? Maybe The Rock? He probably doesn't do badly.

• 1:51:55George Mack?

  And even then, he probably scores like 51 to 49 in the polls.

• 1:51:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, he did put his foot in it to do with, I think, he maybe it was a race thing, and maybe it was a trans thing a few years ago. So, yeah, the when the Overton window has become so highly constrained, and when concept creepers occurred to the point where everybody will find something that they can justifiably be insulted by, there are landmines everywhere for somebody to step on.

• 1:52:25George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Chris Williamson?

  And, yeah, there's

• 1:52:27George Mack?

  A question I have for you that I was thinking about on the way down. We're talking about history a lot here. And studying history has given me such a fantastic frame about these things. Why is it so music is a specific thing where people consume a lot of music from the past, even to this day, like on the way down, I love Christopher Cross, Ride Like the Wind, one of my favorite songs from multiple decades ago. You think of ACDC, Michael Jackson, all these amazing artists that are still relevant today and people still consume the music today versus with social media, people, David Perel has that concept of the never ending now, people only consume content the last 24 hours. When you, probably most people listening to that, listening to this still apply this, but imagine if you applied that to music where all you could

• 1:53:09George Mack?

  listen to was the Island Boys, like the music that's been made to the literary today, it'd be terrible, but why do we do that for information consumption? I've not quite figured that out

• 1:53:17Chris Williamson?

  yet. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think what we go to for music and what we go to for the other types of content that we consume are very different things. We go to music for a vibe, to put ourselves into a particular kind of emotional state a lot of the time.

• 1:53:37Chris Williamson?

  Music seems to be a lot more Lindy because there are universal laws. No one's going back, I always say this about Shapiro's channel, you know, Ben's got this rapidly growing channel and he's been very, very successful on YouTube and in podcasting and all the rest of it. No one's going back and listening to Ben Shapiro's mid 2020 podcast episodes because they're inherently about the, yes, they're about the last 24 hours.

• 1:54:00George Mack?

  But there's so much in history that is relevant or so much amazing content out there that is relevant. So on Perel, he has this other concept of the paradox of abundance, where right now, you've never seen more people in, the obesity levels are off the charts, another thing that probably ignored by the media, studied by historians, off the charts. But also the number of Greek, people that like Greek gods is also off the charts. You have this weird, either the barbell, like either extremes. And I think the exact true of information consumption, I posted this thing the other day of like the paradox of abundance of YouTube, you can, going back to the smartphone paradox as well, you can use YouTube to search Richard Feynman lecture, Charlie Munger, the history of World War II.

• 1:54:43George Mack?

  How did Winston Churchill prepare his speeches? Or you can search World Star Hip Hop Fights or the Island Boys. And that paradox of abundance exists.

• 1:54:51Chris Williamson?

  There's this really cool quote, another Guinda one here that says, "The combination of the digital age constantly exposing us to new outrages and cultural elites constantly creating new outrages out of nothing has skyrocketed the number of outrages we now face. In a world prickling with provocations, we cannot let our sensitivities run free. If we allow ourselves to be goaded by every invisible and visible indignation, we will endlessly be distracted from our goals and easily controlled by emotional manipulators like trolls, disinformation agents and demagogues. I block the easily outraged because they're the foot soldiers of the mob who in the old days would have lynched people over neighbourhood rumours. Those without self-control are seen controlled by others. Those without self-control are soon controlled by others.

• 1:55:33Chris Williamson?

  They're the useful idiots of ideologues, the tools of tyranny." So with that, I think you just show that everybody has a thing that they can find, which is reprehensible, that the person that they're talking, that they're looking at has done, which is why the ticker tape parade thing has stopped. Who can everybody agree on as being a hero? And if you don't have any cultural icons that you can hold up, it's very difficult to rally around. Like, if you tried to hold a ticker tape parade for pretty much anybody, there would be an equally sized anti-parade for the same thing, which is fucking insane. And also, I guess, goes back to the pessimism bias. Most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75. Why?

• 1:56:17George Mack?

  This references what we were chatting about earlier, where at 25,

• 1:56:23George Mack?

  zero to 25, before that, is a beautiful design video game. It's like grade one, grade two, grade three, grade four, grade five, or year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, if you're English. And you kind of progress up like a beautiful milestone every single year, through high school, through college. And you, all of a sudden, at 25, those milestones just become marriage, which is obviously might be on the decline, mortgage. Funerals of loved ones.

• 1:56:51Chris Williamson?

  Kids.

• 1:56:52George Mack?

  Kids and then your own funeral. So like the amount of mile, you go from like a milestone so regularly to almost non-existent. And big thing I have of reasons why I think it happens is one, lack of milestones.

• 1:57:05Chris Williamson?

  Institutionalization.

• 1:57:07George Mack?

  Institutionalization, because people go from the education system where they kind of sat there all day, eighteen, eighteen years, asking to go to the toilet. And then they just go and fucking thrown out in the wild like a prisoner. And as a result, people really struggle to adapt to that. Um, I also think people just don't really care about adults. I think it's quite sad. Um.

• 1:57:25Chris Williamson?

  They haven't got any support groups.

• 1:57:27George Mack?

  They haven't got any support groups. So the time spent with family, time spent with friends, even coworkers ultimately goes down towards the end. Um, so you factor in all those things.

• 1:57:36Chris Williamson?

  Plus that parenting switch thing.

• 1:57:37George Mack?

  Uh, yeah. So there's the parenting switch as well, which is you go from being the care, you go from having your caregivers there your entire life, supporting you, supporting you, supporting you. And again, going back to milestones, all of a sudden, then one day you get a phone call and you're their caregiver or they're not even here. So it just immediately switches on you and all those things begin to stack up, which is super depressing, super like pessimistic, which maybe we end on that note, like super nihilistic end. But no, actually, the the optimistic answer I wrote about, which is a few solutions for that, which is one, create regular milestones. So I'll try and split the year into quarters now, which is enough time to sprint at things, but also then have a week off, completely reflect and then rebuild the plan. So then you have like four milestones per year. Two, um, try and schedule things in with friends regularly,

• 1:58:23George Mack?

  family regularly, whole like you can use, you use your Google calendar for like weekly meetings with people at work. You can use it for friends. You can use it for family as well. Three, I think we also have a lack of religion in current society. And we've kind of thrown the baby out with the baffle or a lot of atheists look down on it, but those regular rituals, a thing bigger than you that you're working on, so important to have. So try and take Sabbaths, uh, fasting, things like that. You can take quite a lot from religion. And all of a sudden, you can then begin to not die at twenty five, which I think is a huge, huge problem. It's a silent problem as well.

• 1:58:56Chris Williamson?

  George Mack, ladies and gentlemen, dudes, I love you. I'm really, really glad that you came to see me in Austin. What should people do if they want to check out more of your writing? You're one of the quickest growing guys on Twitter at the moment. Where should they go?

• 1:59:08George Mack?

  Yeah, a few things. So. I put together all the best ideas and resources I found at george-mac.com. So you can just get that there completely for free and I kind of update it with time and then I'll send a weekly newsletter related to that. You can also just literally go to george-mac at Twitter. And then there's also a load of great ads, which is kind of under, right now, the current URL is marketingplug.com, but that will change, but you'll still be relevant when people, when people hear this. Before we go though, one thing I'd like to say, just to break the fourth wall for the audience. Me and you were sat on a beach a few years ago now, and you remember what you said to me? You said, if I can get to 100,000 subscribers, da, da, da, da, da. And hopefully now we'll be at the million mark.

• 1:59:51George Mack?

  And the big thing I've learned as a Brit touring America is there's a lot we can take from Americans and vice versa. They are super complimentary to their friends, which we are often quite like mocking of each other, quite insulted to each other. But proud of you, man, you absolutely smashed it. And I think for a lot of listeners out there, you set an example of an infinite game that you keep, that you keep sticking at. And boom, 6% of the audience has come in the last 12 months. What a compounding game, man, and thank you for having me.

• 2:00:14Chris Williamson?

  My pleasure, man. We're going to keep on doing it together.