Crypto Scams, Dopamine Websites, Tasteful Slop & Vape Shop Energy - Rabbit Hole #6 - #1168

In this episode, we explore: The strange crypto honey traps that people are falling for. The rise of South Korea's fake shopping dopamine websites How to develop good taste in a world of slop. and much more… Guests Jack Butcher is an entrepreneur, designer, and digital artist. Shaan Puri is an entrepreneur, former CEO, podcaster and an angel investor. George Mack is a writer, marketer and entrepreneur. Sponsors: Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 6 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Why Britain Is Android and America Is iOS (02:11) Is Jean Phil an AI Crypto Scam? (12:32) Can You Really Trust Prediction Markets? (18:50) What Power Laws Make All Other Laws Irrelevant? (28:52) Why Competition Only Exists When You Believe You Can Win (36:46) Are Dopamine Websites Just Shopping Porn? (39:54) Why TV Shows Have to Keep Repeating the Plot (41:13) Why Detailed Movie Commentary Is So Popular (45:34) Could You Win Scrabble in a Language You Don’t Speak? (48:03) Do All Chickens Come From Just Two Types? (50:18) Is the Story Behind Art Better Than the Art Itself? (56:50) The Marketing Genius of Grey Goose (01:00:35) Can We Define ‘Taste’ and ‘Slop’? (01:06:36) Can AI Ever Be High Effort? (01:14:20) Is Everything Porn or a Casino? (01:20:02) Should Kids Be Allowed to Use Devices? (01:31:28) Are Brain Gyms on the Horizon? (01:34:03) Will Stupidity Become a Status Symbol? (01:36:13) Is the Moderate Left Becoming Less Cringe? (01:41:44) Are Heaven and Hell Like We Imagine? (01:47:59) Why Leaving Big Tips Is Worth It (01:54:09) How AI Can Be More Helpful Than We Think (02:00:07) The Secret to a Great Product-Market Fit (02:07:31) Where to Find the Guys Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What were you, what were you explaining about how Europe is like Android and America's like iOS?

• 0:05George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:06Shaan Puri?

  That's great. Let's start with that.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Fucking money.

• 0:10George Mack?

  It has a lot of better features in many ways.

• 0:13Shaan Puri?

  But iOS is just. Yeah.

• 0:16George Mack?

  Just works. It just works. Even the small one.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Pull this sucker in.

• 0:20George Mack?

  Was in.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  You going forward, you pull it toward you.

• 0:22George Mack?

  Oh, we was in.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  You're doing the same thing.

• 0:24George Mack?

  What do you mean, move it towards me?

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 0:26George Mack?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 0:29George Mack?

  Sorry, it's early. We was in Sicily, which was where the second series of White Lotus was filmed. And you're at this kind of beautiful extravagant Italian restaurants. And I flew into New York and we went to one of these kind of flip up franchise restaurants that are all over America right now. Like private equity clearly coming.

• 0:49Shaan Puri?

  Blank Street Coffee.

• 0:50George Mack?

  Yeah, and they go, you offer like three things and it's purely, we're going to get customers in and out, same ingredients, maximize the margins. But it's a strange thing about America that UK doesn't have this and Europe doesn't have this. Where you have people on staff that can't serve you, where they're like, they do the drinks. So they pour your drink and I go, can I order food as well? And they'll be like, oh, let me get the, the person who takes the orders. I'm like, this is really strange. But what was fascinating, the guy that did the waters was in the PE franchised American system, was better than any waiter I experienced in the whole of Italy. So it's just a difference of culture that exists.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Were you expected to tip in an American manner when you were there?

• 1:31George Mack?

  No.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  All right. So you get all of the advantages of American service without the burden of American tipping.

• 1:36George Mack?

  Exactly.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  That sounds like my dream.

• 1:38Shaan Puri?

  Big arbitrage.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  That sounds like my dream.

• 1:40George Mack?

  But I think, I think it's the tipping culture goes a long way. I think if you had to actually look at, one of the reasons why America is such an entrepreneurial culture is because, because of tipping, because you have millions of people that start as these mini entrepreneurs.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  They've gaslit you.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's what the word tip means, right? To ensure proper service. And so it's like, it has a function. It was meant to ensure proper service. And so the incentive worked.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  You're kidding me. That's not the etymology of that.

• 2:05Shaan Puri?

  That's what I was told.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  That's retroactive.

• 2:07Shaan Puri?

  I thought it'd be like a. Yeah, that might be a retro.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  I mean, it definitely works. All right, Jack, I've, I've been needing to ask you about this. What the fuck is happening with this Jean Phil guy?

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Oh, you know what? I'm actually not as, as clued up on this as I should be, but the, the initial, like analysis of that was this is like a completely unique, one of a kind person creating content in, was it on Instagram originally? Do you see it?

• 2:33Speaker 00

  I think so. It's on X. We got a ton of it on X.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  I think we've like, we've crossed the chat.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  You guys have seen this, right?

• 2:39Speaker 03

  I know none of this.

• 2:40Shaan Puri?

  I saw this yesterday.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Are you been an Android for too long?

• 2:43Shaan Puri?

  This is the whole thing.

• 2:56Shaan Puri?

  That's George at the private equity.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  That's you trying to get good service off a guy that's giving you water.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  And from this, he's like, doing a coin, but.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had, I, I'm actually, maybe I'm, maybe I'm ill informed in it, but he doesn't exist, does he?

• 3:11Shaan Puri?

  It's, he's AI, right?

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is AI.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  But the, but the initial launch of that, people assumed he was real for a long enough period of time for it to become this big thing. And yeah, there's infinite number of cryptocurrencies attached to his likeness that people are gambling upon.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Derivative content now where people are making like counterfeit AI of that AI. And it's, I guess, you know, you can say, do you own your own likeness, but do you own your AI's own likeness? Is much more of a difficult question.

• 3:41Shaan Puri?

  Fake Gucci bag of this guy.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, it's the fake Gucci bag of the fake Gucci bag. It's like, you've made a, you've made a mockery of my mockery.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  I don't know. Between this and Hunter Biden's laptop coin, um, well, it's not looking good, you think? It's really, really the world of crypto.

• 3:57George Mack?

  I'm holding diamond hands with my Melania coin, so it's wait and see. Yeah, that's wait and see.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Well, you know what's interesting? In the last like 24, 48 hours, there's this thing that's uh, taken over Twitter. Sean, you've probably been familiar enough with this, but the like, there's this mechanic, shall you say, in like crypto trading where people will try and get somebody to attach themselves to a coin that gets launched, right? It's like, it gets permissionlessly launched off the back of some conversation or trend. And then the person that started that trend uh, gets continually harassed to like attach themselves to it, basically. Like, say this guy had a Twitter account, somebody launches a coin, they'll be in the comments of that, everything he posts until he makes a decision one way or another to say.

• 4:41Shaan Puri?

  Just nagging.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  This is, yeah, this is, I'm attached to this or I'm not. And this, in the last couple of weeks, this uh, X money, you know, the like payment infrastructure on X. So in the US, you can, you can create an X money account, which allows you to like send and receive dollars. And now there's these sort of systems that have been built where people are permissionlessly sending the uh, proceeds of the trading volume of these coins to Twitter accounts.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  I saw someone talking about this.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  So in the last 24, 48 hours, you've seen like people that are just like opening their Twitter and being like.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  13, I got 13 grand.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have 70 grand sitting here because like I made this video and somebody like attached my name to it and then it became this.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  But those people are doing it as a honey trap or like a thin end of the wedge to try and reel them in. Ooh, imagine how much money you could get if you were properly involved with this. It's you liquidating your reputation.

• 5:36Shaan Puri?

  With a billion dollars, actually. The um, remember when like the dog coins, like Shiba Inu and all those dog coins? Yeah, it was Doge, it was Shiba. There's, people started creating more Doge coins, cause why not? And they realized, well, people's, your crypto wallet, like the, it's like your email address, it's public. Like people know, you can't, they can't take your money, but they can know where to send you money. And uh, so they just sent it to Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum. And they were like, look, it's in his wallet. He believes. And this is very early on. So people like, they just airdropped it to him. Cause it was worthless. They created it that night. And then the next morning they're like, Vitalik is all in on this.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Oh, it's the most like guerrilla form of charity. It's like aggressive guerrilla charity.

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  But what he did was brilliant. He actually turned it into charity. So it, the thing started to go up. He's like, and he, you know, he, instead of just being like, guys, I don't endorse this, this is bullshit. And then people are just like losing money on the way down too. He just donated it all to India and gave a billion dollars to like an Indian nonprofit. And that was the end of it. And so they, like a lot of good actually happened from one of these at the beginning.

• 6:38George Mack?

  So could you, if, if some, if somebody sends you um, you can't be, you can't reject it on, you can't set up a piece of code, which is like only transactions I've approved can come through.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  No, and that's, you know, guys, free money, not for me, thank you. But the like, the downstream effects of that is like tax return with like 10 million transactions for half a cent, because all of this stuff is like, I want to identify everybody that owns this thing. And then, and, and now you can do that with like one line of English prompt, right? Two or three years ago, it's like, there's actually some like technical lift to make this happen. Now it's just like, it's kind of like the, you know, dead internet, like you're interacting with like complete, like mirages of people. And now this is just like the cat, the, you know, horse has left the stable, whatever analogy you want to use.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  It's just like, how are we even going to begin to like wrangle this stuff? The amount of information that's just being, just exploding every second. And, and like weirdly, you have the, I guess you could make the argument that the AI can take, like handle it on the other end, like do the accounting of the like 10 trillion things that are happening every second and going straight to your address.

• 7:54George Mack?

  Or, or it all just goes back to cash. And you then get swing so far the other way.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  I'm very down for a cash based society again. As an ex club promoter, I love the idea of that. Cash Williamson.

• 8:05George Mack?

  I heard of a professional gambler who his hedge, cause in the UK, gambling proceeds are completely tax free. So there's uh, like some of the highest, if you look at the highest um, net worth in the UK, a lot of them are like, the lady who runs Bet365, but when you're actually a betting company, you pay tax. So one of the largest tax contributors in the UK is ironically a gambling company, probably a vaping company shortly followed.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:30George Mack?

  But if you're an actual gambler yourself, you don't pay anything on your proceeds. And somebody who made a fortune in gambling, um, he would create a lot of algorithms, like almost run like a hedge fund. But now because AI is caught up so much, he's now going a lot more old school where he will go to the specific sports matches of these semi pro games and notice who's at the bar drinking or who has certain friendships or who has like little bits of insider information that Claude can't pick up on. So I wonder if you have this kind of.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Have you seen, have you seen the, there's like clips of people at like baseball games or whatever with like multiple phones in their hand? And they're trying to like catch the result before it gets reported.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a slight delay. Arbitraging time.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, they like, they have to be, you know, like on millisecond delay to capture that like slight uh.

• 9:19George Mack?

  I'm sure there was a, a little while ago, maybe about five or 10 years ago, there was people in China doing this with football games, soccer games, that the amount of time, the duration was long enough that you could get a bet in and just arbitrage. Like I know what's going to happen and the exchange or whatever hasn't caught up to it, which is pretty fun. It's the human betting equivalent of moving your stock, your um, trading company closer down Manhattan toward where the actual exchange is.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a good, there was a good uh, uh, instance of this, like right when the poly market stuff came out originally for weather. And you could bet on like the temperature in Paris today.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Didn't some guy use a hairdryer? Did you see this?

• 9:59George Mack?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  It was, the, the, the bet was.

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  You got to pull, it's like CCTV footage of it. It's great.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Will, will the temperature in Paris?

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Like at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  At Charles de Gaulle Airport. Break, break uh, 20 degrees or 21 degrees Celsius. And um, the supposedly, someone went in with a lighter or a hairdryer, blew it. And if you look at the actual uh, temperature, it just goes flat, flat, flat, flat. Peaks, breaks 20 degrees, comes back down again, market closed.

• 10:27George Mack?

  Wow.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  So you are, we are moving back into the real world, like what cannot be manipulated by a computer? What is like more, yeah, what's outside the, basically the grasp, the purview, the territory purview of AI now? And like people are trying to almost like reverse engineer like pastoralism in some sort of a way like I can't, you can't influence the size of my watermelons this summer or something like that, you know?

• 10:50George Mack?

  Wow. Is there a thing around, when you're kind of being reflexive with polymarket and doing things like that? Is it legal? Is it illegal? Is it still very early days yet that they haven't quite figured it out?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Good question.

• 11:04Shaan Puri?

  It is, I think they like have to honor these and then they, they update their, cause it's not like the law. It's like how polymarket will resolve the bet and they have some rules on how they're going to resolve the bet. If you play within that, they, they are supposed to honor it now. They might, they might try not to and say, come, you know, you can sue us if you want the money. But it's not illegal to do that.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  They've got like a whatever enforcement and safety team or an enforcement and fairness team. I watched a documentary about polymarket and Kalshi and to be fair, they managed to get both of the CEOs on and they were talking about how it works and is it predatory and so on and so forth? Is it encouraging gambling? And it does cut to the enforcement and fairness team or whatever, and it's just four blokes sat around computers discussing whether or not like, so this hairdryer thing that happened, do we think that that's fair? It's like garage ethics, you know, it's like pub table philosophy debate, but with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line for people. Like there was that journalist who had said that a piece of debris that had landed in a Middle Eastern country

• 12:08Speaker 00

  was from a drone, not from a missile. And he started getting death threats from people who had made bets on polymarket, saying that a missile would land on this particular day, saying you need to change the story so that you say that it was a missile, because if you do, the market's going to close out in our favor. But if you don't, then we've lost all of this money. So the incentives now, it really is, it's perilously close to Black Mirror. What do you think happens with prediction market? Do you think they're just going to continue to happen? Or is there going to be some legislation that comes in and fucks it?

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  I think there's going to have to be legislation. I can't imagine that this just runs amok. I mean, the funny thing is like, they used to be, they used to present themselves as we are like the bearers of truth. Like let the markets say what's true, forget the mainstream media, blah, blah, blah. But it's now the volume is literally, I think like 98% sports betting. So it's like.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Even on polymarket?

• 12:58Shaan Puri?

  On, on both Kalshi, polymarket.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Which is why Novick with Sydney Sweeney makes so much sense.

• 13:02Shaan Puri?

  Especially now like football season, it's like insane. I gave, there's one guy who was a very prolific sports better back in the day. And kept in touch with this guy, you know, there's a group of these people that they kind of make their money in these arbitragey types of ways, very smart people, but they're, they're always playing this cat and mouse game, you know? So with the, when he was sports betting, it's like you get an edge and then the casino realizes what's going on, they shut you down. So you start giving money to Floyd Mayweather and celebrities as your beards to go bet. That works for a while, then that gets shut down. And then you move to the next thing, crypto, then you move to the next thing, this. And so now they're all like all in on polymarket. So I gave this guy a million dollars and he get, he said, he basically started producing 1% returns every day.

• 13:43Shaan Puri?

  And what he was doing, the short version of it is the way a lot of these sites work, people go in, they put 10 bucks and they want this like amazing like payout if these 15 different things happen. And the odds of those 15, you know, whatever, like the Cowboys will score the first touchdown and the national anthem goes this long and this happens.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  It's an Aker in the UK.

• 14:04Shaan Puri?

  Parlay, yeah. So like, as you go, the more you go, the better the payout. So 10 could be two grand and the guy's happy and he's, he's going to enjoy watching the game more. But the real odds of that happening are like two million to one and you're paying 2,000. And so you can just be the market. So like all these quant firms like Jane Street and whatever, like, not Jane Street, like more like Jump Street, like smaller quant firms, instead of betting, instead of playing Wall Street market maker, they're going on these prediction markets and they, they take action from people who want to do this. So the platform is not the house. You can kind of go be the house and bet and like take the action for these people. If you think the odds are a million to one and this guy's willing to take the bet for a thousand to one, you just picked up like all the spread of that actual event happening. It's pretty amazing.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  You know, I, I think is like an underappreciated thing about the like takeoff of prediction markets is like how legible they made betting, like split it into two percentages. Like when we're growing up, you look at.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Five to one.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Oh, what's 13 to two, that this horse is going to win this, or if this game is going to have a goal in this minute, it's going to be this, and this is just like.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  Show me a fucking graph.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  And it's a market that you have a position in, in real time, right? And I think like maybe 10 years ago, these, like growing up in the UK, betting is just like, it was around like, there's a betting shop on every corner before.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Every shithouse village has.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  And America is like.

• 15:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we're like Mormons. And now we're married and we're like, wow, we can have sex.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  It's like giving alcohol to the Native Americans.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  It is, yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Totally evolutionarily novel stimulus.

• 15:38George Mack?

  Well, I do, I do think there's a place for a hedge fund that just uses polymarket and Kalshi and just shorts America in international sports. Because like, do you not remember in the World Cup when the USA was playing Belgium? And you could tell like no, Americans don't really give a shit about soccer, but because the World Cup was a thing, they'd get into it. And it's like, Belgium has Courtois goals, one of the best goalkeepers of all time. Kevin De Bruyne in like attacking midfield is one of the best players of all time and America were like 63%.

• 16:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Shaan Puri?

  That is like naive.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Right. Okay. So you're saying you need to bet against like a national pride?

• 16:15George Mack?

  I think I could become George Soros by just looking at any sport that America isn't good at, just looking at them betting against it.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Because they've got such blue sky vision.

• 16:22George Mack?

  Yes.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  America's a delusionally optimistic. What's your line? That the British affliction is cynicism and the American affliction is bullshit?

• 16:28George Mack?

  Yes.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Like you can just bet against the bullshit?

• 16:31George Mack?

  Yes. And then, yeah, or if an American says how well their business is doing, probably half the revenue, five about that. But if a Brit says how badly it's doing, probably think it's about twice as good as it is saying. It's a good rule of thumb.

• 16:45Shaan Puri?

  Did you see the, the NFL controversy, the hypocrisy that just happened? Like the, like the Dallas Cowboys player, he scores a touchdown and his celebration was he took the football and he like, like kind of made it look like he's shotgunning a beer. So they clamp down and they find him, you know, whatever, $30,000 or whatever it is.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  For the celebration?

• 17:03Shaan Puri?

  For the celebration. And people on Twitter are like, I can't, I'm so glad they did this. I can't believe they're going to promote this on the NFL brought to you by DraftKings. They showed this on the Bud Light Jumbotron and there's children in the audience. And then literally the, as the guy was giving the press conference, like apologizing, the background of the step and repeat banner is Bud Light as the presenting sponsor of the Dallas Cowboys.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  It's this weird blend of like complete libertarian market freedom and like puritanism at the same, like this, these two things coming together. It is kind of amazing. It really is. It's just young. It's just what happens when you're, when you're kind of a teenage country, which is sort of what America is. And it's like, oh yeah, like maybe I should get a tattoo. I thought I should get, I should get an eyebrow piercing.

• 17:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  An eyebrow piercing would be cool. Like we should make a guy from reality TV, the president. Wouldn't that be sick?

• 17:57Shaan Puri?

  Right. This is American Pie, like the American Pie era.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  American Pie, yeah.

• 18:01George Mack?

  It is, to go back to Jack's point around the numbers, just changing it, the impact it has. But also just the, you know, the Russell conjugation idea of Chris sweats, Jack glows, Sean perspires. And you've said the same thing, but it sounds great for Jack and not as good for you two. And it feels that.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Winnie the Pooh meme.

• 18:22George Mack?

  Which was the Winnie the Pooh meme?

• 18:23Speaker 00

  You know, where he's like with the monocle in the bottom and he's like.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Like I have a paper round, I do media distribution.

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 18:34George Mack?

  Betting, betting exchange, prediction market.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:37George Mack?

  Oh, you've gone from like basement sofa masturbator to.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  To quant.

• 18:41George Mack?

  Quant hedge fund.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Refined.

• 18:43Shaan Puri?

  Refined. It's the Mayo Aoli rebrand. Like, you know, I can't believe that they pulled this off, the sports betting to prediction market.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  What have you got, G? You've been, we haven't been together for two months, basically.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  I know. So we have this idea of blue brain, which is similar to being blue balls. But it's when you and your friend haven't been together for long enough that you've accumulated loads of shit that you want to talk about. So what have you been blue braining me with?

• 19:07George Mack?

  A little question, actually.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Question.

• 19:08George Mack?

  And I'll, I can kind of talk through one of my answers for it, but one of the things I was thinking about is what is a power law in a thing that if you neglect it, everything else is irrelevant?

• 19:19Shaan Puri?

  What is a power law?

• 19:21George Mack?

  Yeah, so like, for example, I'll give you my realization was, um, went through the whole classic arc eight years ago, when the whole big, big sleep came on the scene around the average person is significantly underslept and all the-

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Matthew Walker revolution.

• 19:37George Mack?

  Yeah, the, and I think the peak of it was when, um, Matthew Walker did like the eight part series on sleep with Huberman. And I joked that my friend, uh, Quinny, who's like, never overthinks anything after four beers, um, just saying, just shut your eyes lad, will sleep better than anybody who listens to that podcast. And the power law, and I think Matthew and Huberman probably actually agree, that the power law I took from sleep was all the other stuff like, um, temperature control, um, wind down routines is ultimately the first thing is the more you try to sleep, the worse you will sleep. And therefore, anything else that's stacked on top of that, without taking that serious, is completely wiped out. So the, if

• 20:21George Mack?

  you don't take that serious, or anything that you do after that cancels it out. Um, and I think a lot about that power law, that is like, oh, sometimes in life, you've got to think about, it's a little bit the midwit meme, but the power law wipes everything else out.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Mm hmm, mm hmm. If you get this one thing right, or if you get this one thing wrong,

• 20:39George Mack?

  Yes.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  everything else becomes irrelevant.

• 20:41George Mack?

  And lots of people, there's this whole trend right now, that people have gone down the whole, uh, trying to improve their sleep, and ironically ended up insomnia, which is like trying to end, like, improve your margin by 10%, and you've gone bankrupt. It's like you've gone backwards. Like, a lot of people that have got into this sleep science stuff have actually gone backwards, because what they'll do is, they'll have, and this is what happened to me, is I'll think that I had one night where I slept eight hours and I felt great. And I go, oh, I'm a person that sleeps eight hours. It's like, no, the previous night I slept five, and then I slept eight that night to overcompensate, so I felt great. Now I started having this meme in my head that I need to sleep eight hours per night. So I'd then go, right, if I need to be up at six, I'll go to bed at 10, and I'll get into bed awake,

• 21:22George Mack?

  which is the single worst thing you can do for your sleep, to just lie there and go, why am I not going to sleep yet? Why am I not going to sleep yet? And then you end up waking up, I know you've had this at times, when you wake up at 3am, and then you'll be ruminating about this whole sleep thing. And it's just like this absolute doom, because you've neglected the power law.

• 21:40Speaker 00

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• 22:23Speaker 00

  inside of your body. And right now, you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below, or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom.

• 22:39George Mack?

  Me and you have been through the wringer when it comes to sleep. An equivalent that I, the first one that comes to mind for me is around training, which is that you can try to optimize absolutely everything, but ultimately, if you're not training hard, everything else doesn't matter. You can have the perfect sets, reps, form, the right amount of protein consumption, but ultimately, you need to stress the system. And the best way to work out if you're stressing the system is whether or not it is stressful, i.e. is it hard? Uh, so I trained with Sam Soulek, do you know who that guy is?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:08George Mack?

  Fucking jacked, 24, 25 year old guy, just got married, like, animal. All he does is train hard. His one criteria for when he's in the gym is like, did I fuck myself up? And you could argue, maybe he swung a little bit far on the non-science based way, but he has a physique that is suggestive that training hard is pretty fucking good, as long as you can recover from it. So yeah, the, one of the ones that I would think is you can optimize your intra-workout protein window with predigested whey and the right amount of maltadextrin to shuttle the carbs into the muscle and all the rest of it. But like, if you didn't train hard, if there weren't a few sets in there where you felt like, oh, fuck, like, I really don't know if I can get through this, everything else kind of doesn't

• 23:51George Mack?

  matter. And you can probably fix a lot, you can also paper over a lot of cracks, which is the same, like, if you just don't stress about sleep, and have like, a principle of, I should probably be in bed for around about eight hours-ish, cold, dark, quiet, if I can, whatever. If you don't stress about sleep, your sleep is probably good. Like, if you don't stress about all of the other macronutrient adjacent things, and you just work on training hard, you'll cover more of the bases than maybe any other one thing.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:18George Mack?

  So that would be something that I think is kind of similar.

• 24:21Shaan Puri?

  Jack, have you heard his, uh, his blue light glasses sleep story where you're-

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Please, take it from the top, take it from the top.

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Incredible story.

• 24:29George Mack?

  This is, um-

• 24:30Shaan Puri?

  Have you heard this or no?

• 24:31George Mack?

  This is like, this is a few years ago. So when I'm like, peak, okay, oh, so I can, I can become the best sleeper in the world, right? So like, this is peak optimization window, like, six years ago. And so I've gone like, right, well, if I just start stacking more, I'm gonna sleep even better. So I've got like, the full on nonce red light glasses on. I've got the wind down routine of like, no stimulation before bed. I've got all my magnesium L-theanine shit that I'm taking. And this is with my ex-girlfriend, lovely girl. And, uh, I'm doing this, I mean, I think I'm like brushing my teeth in the dark, like that. And she obviously whistles in, da, da, da, da, da, hits the lights in the bathroom, ah!

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Diabolical.

• 25:13George Mack?

  Blinded like that, going, oh god, why have you done that? And then I'm like, laying in bed, like, five minutes later, she's already asleep. And I'm just lay there like, seething. And I go, oh, like, midwit meme.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%. My, my, my answer is gonna be basically the same as Chris's, but in a different world is like the planning versus the doing in any, like, commercial endeavor, right? Where you're sitting down, making notes about what people are gonna like, like, what line are people gonna respond to, how they, it's like, just ship the thing, and then see, the market will tell you immediately what it thinks. And you can get stuck in that loop forever. One of my favorite tweets of my own in the last few weeks was-

• 25:53George Mack?

  I love citing myself.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  This is, well, this is many years of pain condensed into one sentence. It's like, if you want real feedback, add a buy button.

• 26:01George Mack?

  Oh, so great. What's that line?

• 26:04Shaan Puri?

  That was actually a pretty good tweet. All right.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 26:06George Mack?

  Uh, second only to, uh, moving from theory to practice will always cost you status. It's another one of yours.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like that one to the, uh, just the, and it's referring to the same thing where it's like, okay, I'm, I can have this like, beautiful, architected idea or theory on paper, or, and even, made even worse now by your $20 a month super intelligence collaborator that's telling you everything you do is phenomenal, you know, sent from the divine, you're, you're a genius. And then you put it out as crickets. And the only thing that gives you like, any kind of information to improve it is putting it out and getting crickets, or getting, you know, whatever kind of feedback you get. And, uh, yeah, midwit meme. Actually made a midwit meme, maybe it was probably back in,

• 26:50Speaker 03

  probably five years ago, which is the, um, you know, do a risk assessment, like, convene with everybody on your team and talk about this, this and this. And then it's like, just post the thing, just post the thing on either side. And, uh, it remains true to this day. Same idea as just go to the gym.

• 27:08George Mack?

  Market doesn't lie.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Dude.

• 27:10Shaan Puri?

  What's yours? Do you have any? Uh, well, I have a health one that was like a real, a lived example. Uh, I was at a conference, and like, they had like a lunch break. So we're sitting at a table. It's me and this guy, and now both of us had been trying to lose weight. And we were talking about, how's it going? Oh, you look great. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, I'm not so bad myself, did a little progress. And people were like, oh, so like, what do you do? And now, it's basically like, it's like a scene from Silicon Valley. It's like this, the stupidest trope we fell into where, uh, you know, he's talking about how he bought a Dexa machine. Like, he bought his own Dexa scanner for like, whatever, six grand or 16 grand, whatever it is. I'm not sure for what, but he's like, yeah, I bought that, and I did this, and I do this, and I'm taking this peptide, I'm doing this thing and this. And so he's like, talking about it. I'm

• 27:53Shaan Puri?

  like, yeah, well, you know, but the thing about Dexa is, and I'm like, it's not as accurate as, you know, doing this other thing. So we're both talking, and we talked for like, 42 minutes. No, like, well, just 45 minutes. Last three minutes, uh, I look over, and this is a very fit guy who's just been sitting at the corner. He's like, you know, one of the guy's girlfriends is like, Spencer, what do you do? He's like, um, you know, I love surfing, so I just surf like, a lot. I surf all the time. It's really fun. And he just keeps getting pretty good shape. And I was like, oh, shit, we just midwitted all over this table. I apologize about the Dexa and all these other things we were talking about. It's like, wait, it's probably as simple as, you know, find an activity like surfing that you love, and you're gonna have a great time and be in great shape by default. And like, shut up. Like, all the other stuff, just shut up about it.

• 28:37George Mack?

  My dad had a good one growing up, all the gear and no idea. You ever heard that one?

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, but it's all of the idea and none of the action. Or as Luke, my co-founder at Newtonic says, all fart, no poo.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  More accessible.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Timeless wisdom.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  It's all part of the proof. Mark, have you got that diagram? So I don't know whether you made this, but that idea that you're talking about, I did, I came across this this morning. Is it, did you make this?

• 29:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Can you take us through that? This is one of the best things I've ever seen and I loved it being resurfaced.

• 29:06Shaan Puri?

  I'll tell you the story of this. I'm at a Tony Robbins event and on day two, Tony doesn't perform anymore, which I didn't know. So you go to Tony Robbins, he does day one, you're, it's amazing. You show up for day two, they're like, by the way, Tony's been doing this for 40 years. His vocal cords are shredded. He just did 15 hours on stage yesterday. So he takes the second day off, he comes back the third day. So this other guy gets up there and he does like a warm up game. So he's like, we're gonna play Simon Says. And like, as if being at a Tony Robbins self-help seminar was not already like, you know, humiliating enough, now we're playing Simon Says with 5,000 people in an auditorium. But, you know, I'm at the event, so let's play along. So he said, yeah, stand up. He said, everybody stands up. And he starts playing Simon Says. And I like, part of me is just like, this is kind of stupid, but let me give it a shot.

• 29:49Shaan Puri?

  I, um, so within five minutes, the game is over, which is kind of amazing. Out of 5,000 people, like the game ends very quickly. There's like just four people left at the end. And he calls them up on stage and I'm like, dude, we don't need to hear their victory speech. It was Simon Says, it's no big deal. And he, he brought up a very interesting point. He goes, uh, okay, you guys won. He goes, let me ask you a question. For the people in the crowd, when I said we're gonna play Simon Says and you looked around, saw 5,000 people stand up, how many of you believed you were going to win Simon Says? And he's like, stay standing if you believed you were gonna win. And already, like 80, 90% of the people sat down. Like, we just, we didn't, we didn't care. We didn't think. It just seemed unlikely. And so he goes, um,

• 30:29Shaan Puri?

  these four people were only competing against these 32 people. He's like, so, you know, yeah. And he, and when I saw that, I was like, wow, that's actually a pretty good parallel for life. So I wrote this blog post much later, which is, in any endeavor, let's say there's, you know, a thousand people, the first half, too afraid to try. They won't put the buy button on the tweet, because they don't want to find out the answer.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Nobody wants to know.

• 30:51Shaan Puri?

  They don't want to pay that price of status for going and doing. Then you have the people who are the dabblers. They'll give up within three attempts. And, uh, they'll say, we tried it, it doesn't work. And so they'll, they'll tell you a great story. Then you have the people that are doing it, but they're moving so slowly, they've effectively lost all momentum. You got the people at the end who get distracted by a shiny object. And then finally it's you and one other dude at the end. And like, competition, the idea that the world is so saturated, so competitive, like people get, you get fed this idea. I just don't actually believe it's true. And like Charlie Munger has this, has this phrase, which he says, take a simple idea and take it seriously. And it is shocking how few people will take a simple idea and take it seriously. Like, I would say your career slash Instagram account is what? Like, you literally take a-

• 31:36Speaker 03

  One idea.

• 31:37Shaan Puri?

  You started off with like, Naval said some dope shit. Let me just try to make a black and white, dots and lines, like, you know, like pen and paper drawing of that idea. But you took it seriously. You did it better than anyone else would do it. And like, suddenly-

• 31:52Speaker 00

  And you did it first. You moved quick enough to do it first, too.

• 31:55Shaan Puri?

  It might have felt that way. I bet there's other people like that were quoting him, repackaging him, but you did it differently and you're talented. I'm not trying to take away from that, but like, my point is, you can get so far ahead with a very simple idea. Change the direction of your life, you know, in, in a way. And you have a million followers and all these great things, but everybody would tell you, it's too noisy, too complicated.

• 32:16Shaan Puri?

  Podcasting is so competitive, right? Like, it's, it's all so competitive. Everything's so competitive. It's like, well, it's not really when you realize the distribution of attitudes in the human population.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  I know a guy won a surfboard off a Sprite can when we were in, uh, high school.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Sounds like the beginning of a J from the Inbetweeners. He was the only person who sent in.

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  No way.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:36Shaan Puri?

  I have a friend-

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Every, every can of Sprite for six months or however long they run a campaign in the UK.

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  One bloke.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  And he's like, I can't believe I won. And whoever the like marketing, I was like, yeah, you're the only person who-

• 32:46Shaan Puri?

  My buddy Dan in college did this. He would always, he won like six or seven things. Uh, you know, the sandwich shop, Spicy Pickle, they have a mascot. Guess who won the mascot naming contest? Dan won it. He named him Spy C Pickle. It's a spy themed pickle. He wins lifetime supply of spicy pickle. He won a lifetime supply of stride gum. He was like, hey, let's go audition for Price is Right right now. And then we went and we both got casted on the show. And it's unbelievable, like, most people just aren't even trying to do any of these things. And he just believed in himself enough to like shoot a shot. Like, he just shoots a shot like, you know, more often than anyone else. And I can name six of the wins. He's probably done a thousand others that I don't even know about. But he just, he tries because he, I don't know, he didn't really overthink it. He just does it. But I think it's because nobody else is even doing it.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Isn't that great? Like, doesn't that just make accessing success and cool shit in life feel so much more within reach?

• 33:37George Mack?

  Well, because the, the, uh, devil's advocate position or the alternative that I think Sean's going against is, it'll be the classic statistic approach of, well, actually, 90% of businesses go bust in the first year. And it's like, yeah, because they did it for a week. Or it's only when you actually zoom into the statistics. Whenever you have like vague statistics, but you actually zoom in, um, it reveals a lot more. And you, and it's that pale idea of, um, you're not a lottery ticket.

• 34:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 34:04George Mack?

  Like, it's not just a evenly distributed, just based off a random chance. There is some form of control that's going on.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  In the same way as if Bill Gates walks into a football stadium, everyone on average becomes a millionaire.

• 34:16George Mack?

  Nice.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  This is the failure equivalent of that.

• 34:19George Mack?

  Right.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  There's a stat around.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  I think you misattributed a great quote to me once about, uh, podcasts, like how many podcasts you need to do to be in the top 1%. Okay. I read it on Reddit somewhere and I think I told you and then I've, I think I get tagged. I get tagged as the-

• 34:33Shaan Puri?

  You've inspired millions.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the 10% that do, 90% of those don't make it past episode 20. So by doing 21 podcasts during the top percentile of all podcasts is ever, quote, Jack Butcher.

• 34:48Shaan Puri?

  Wayne Gretzky.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Quote Reddit.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:51George Mack?

  Chris Williamson quote Jack Butcher quote Reddit.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the fucking-

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Inspired a lot of people to start podcasts.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  It's a human centipede, but just like the guy at the front is, no one knows who he is.

• 35:00George Mack?

  It's like that, um, that quote around, uh, Albert Einstein, um, what compound interest is the, what the seventh, eighth front of the world, sorry. And, uh, it's then pointed out-

• 35:10Shaan Puri?

  The seventh is Niagara Falls or something.

• 35:11George Mack?

  Yeah. Was then pointed out that Einstein didn't actually say that, uh, it's in Zero to One. Einstein didn't actually say that, but Einstein's brand is so powerful that even posthumously, he's getting random quotes given to him.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Churchillian drift. Churchillian drift is great, great. Over time, quotes that don't get attributed to anyone get attributed to Churchill or Einstein. What you want, I think-

• 35:29George Mack?

  That's compound interest.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  The ultimate version of great brand for anybody that's supposed to be like a public smart person is to have such gravitas that unattributed quotes get assumed. I think it was Sean Puri that once said-

• 35:42Shaan Puri?

  One day.

• 35:43Speaker 00

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• 36:26Speaker 00

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• 36:46Shaan Puri?

  Have you guys, uh, done any non-shopping lately? Have you done any, any never arrive shopping?

• 36:52Speaker 00

  I heard about that.

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  Dopamine websites. Yeah, these are crazy. Have you seen this? Okay, we've all seen it. Maybe I should.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  I haven't seen it in action. I haven't seen it. I've heard about it, but I haven't seen it in action.

• 37:01Shaan Puri?

  I went and actually used it. Uh, it's surprisingly a little less, I think there's room for improvement in this, but that concept is basically what porn did for sex, the South Koreans have figured out to do for everything else. And so they're doing it for shopping.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Because they've already got a birth rate so low that sex is pointless.

• 37:17Shaan Puri?

  Well, like this, so basically they have these food delivery apps where you can go and you can order. So this is Food Never Comes. You go and you install the app. So I had, I had the app and I went and I started shopping at all these restaurants that don't exist. And I started picking dishes that I'm never gonna eat.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ, it's pop-ups. They've got Chrome extensions.

• 37:33Shaan Puri?

  I paid for expedited shipping for a product that's never gonna ship. And then, at the end of the day, I got the satisfaction of shopping without ever having to pay a cent. And so the makers of Food Never Comes have now released, um, like the, like, uh, Travel Never Comes or something like that. It's basically like-

• 37:51Speaker 00

  You can shop for a holiday that you're never gonna go on.

• 37:52Shaan Puri?

  You plan a vacation, uh, that never, that doesn't cost you a cent, because you're not gonna go on it. And this is actually apparently quite popular in South Korea.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Trip Never Leaves, it's at the top. Book the trip, skip the airport.

• 38:03George Mack?

  I would way rather have a Shopify store that's just going up. So I look at it, I've made 5 million today. And then I'm getting offers from like private equity companies.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Business never sells.

• 38:12George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Business never sells.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  There was a, there was an app where-

• 38:15Shaan Puri?

  A livestream one?

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  That's crazy. Have you seen that? Where you can like, it's a simulator, a live stream with like thousands of followers.

• 38:23Shaan Puri?

  Speed where your chat is going nuts, the hearts are flying up.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Guys have used this to pull chicks in clubs, right?

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fucking crazy. There's another one, I think it was, uh, South Korea as well, where you could go for a smoke break, an imaginary smoke break with coworkers, but you didn't smoke and you didn't have coworkers.

• 38:40Shaan Puri?

  So what did you do?

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Like, well, it was to do, it was fake smoke breaking. Like, you just went out to whatever the local, like the, the, uh, gangway out front and got to hang out. It was like a break from your own life, but you were doing it on the internet.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  There's a few of these come out, like, video games that people have built with the new tools that make it easy for anybody to make a video game. Like, easy, I shouldn't say that, but more accessible. Where there's like monotony built into this stuff. And there's like, there's one, Watching Paint Dry was one of them, like-

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Getting needles out of a haystack.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Needle from the haystack was another one where like literally-

• 39:13Speaker 00

  One by one.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Waving through this thing forever. Or like, there was a nine to five simulator I saw as well.

• 39:19Shaan Puri?

  Dad, what did you do when you were younger?

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I was talking to someone about this the other day. It's like, the dopamine, like the speed of dopamine on the computer games that we grew up on versus now, is like, I used to play RuneScape when I was a kid.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Me too.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  It's just like, click, click. Like, you'd sit there for hours and like the input output was so low bandwidth compared to like a fortnight or something.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  That you, like, in comparison, that's like meditation now.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  We were having this conversation about the amount-

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Transcendental RuneScape.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Fire it up, man. Fire it up.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  We were talking about the exposition, the increased exposition that's needed in TV shows now. What was the word that was used? It's not exposition, piloting, piloting. It's called piloting. Okay, so it's really important. We need to make sure that we've got the rock salt in the shotgun. You got it right? Cool. Okay. Three minutes later, they're about to go into the bank and it's like, don't forget the rock salt in the shotgun. And then the rock salt in the shotgun becomes a pivotable part because someone forgot to do it and then they kill someone or whatever. But you need to continually restate the premise because people are double screening or they're not paying attention quite so much. And the same thing's true. I think that there's a study. Mark, see if we can chat GPT. This

• 40:33Speaker 00

  might be outside of its realm, but go big dick pro. What are the number of cuts in each Fast and Furious movie? And I'm sure that the total volume of cuts has gone up over time. So

• 40:46Shaan Puri?

  It's like the Big Mac index of attention. It's like Fast and Furious is the perfect index of people's attention because it'll be around forever.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  It's been, when was the first Fast and Furious? 20 years ago? 15 years ago?

• 40:56Speaker 03

  Had to be 20.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then it was just two guys, drag strip racing. And now they're firing cars off ramps into helicopters that, you know,

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Faster and furious.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  More fast and more furious. Yeah, exactly. And more racially diverse as well, which I think is important. This may take a little bit of time.

• 41:13Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen the guy who's building his empire off of Fast and Furious deep cuts? The guy on Instagram who basically he's just a sommelier of Fast and Furious. So he'll be like, he's just sitting and he's complete, his character's amazing. He's so deadpan. He'll be like, top five key tosses in Fast and Furious. Let's take it from the top. Then classic left hand toss, no look catch. Number four, we have this.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Take a simple idea.

• 41:37Shaan Puri?

  But he's doing it on every minor thing that could happen.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Didn't you do one about like best beer chinks or something?

• 41:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Corona swings in Fast and Furious. And he's exploded.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Let's get him up. Let's make him more famous.

• 41:50Shaan Puri?

  I mean, I binged his stuff. I was like, this is honestly like

• 41:52Speaker 03

  You gotta get niche. You gotta get niche with that. It's incredible.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  Anyone that loves anything that much?

• 41:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Or is that good at anything? There's these dudes called Crown Cinema, the O is missing. And they do the most obsessive deep dives into movies. It's a little bit more expertise. It's not like flippant around something that's kind of a bit silly. But the most incredible breakdowns of like Shutter Island or Inception and like the best explanation of a million things that you didn't notice. Even if someone's like, yeah, Inception's one of my favorite movies. I get it. Like Christopher Nolan's a bit of a genius or whatever. And you go, oh, I was, I thought I was at level four. I'm actually at level one and a half. And there's all of this shit below. And they're so great. But this is your theory that content on the internet now needs to be either one end of the barbell, like completely

• 42:41Speaker 00

  simple, it's a hang with the boys, or it's the best, the absolute best. And there'll always be room for better.

• 42:47Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  But there'll always be room for more relatable. And the middle, all of the stuff in the middle is where you go. Yeah, it's where you go to die.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Have you seen those two lads that do the commentator overlays? Like they're, they're like, it's like breaking the fourth wall. They'll show the sports clip, one top, at the top of the screen. And then the two of them, they'll film themselves as if they were the commentators announcing that part of the game. You haven't seen this?

• 43:12Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Okay. If you can find it.

• 43:13Shaan Puri?

  It is weird that we just

• 43:15Speaker 03

  And you're coasting off this thing that people have already seen that is like, you know, has this so much cultural relevance and power. And then they like put their own layer.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Pre-tested content.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  It's like reaction videos, you know, like a new song comes out and you like somebody's take on it. It feels like where things are.

• 43:32Shaan Puri?

  But it's just their enthusiasm that just draws you in again. Did you guys see this guy, speaking of like, somebody else's obsession and passion, even if you have zero interest in the subject sucks you in. And you guys see the number one Scrabble guy in the world?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  No.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 43:47Shaan Puri?

  Oh my God. I watched this like 30 minute documentary on YouTube about this guy. And I don't care about Scrabble. Did you find it?

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's called Shep mates. S H E P.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Shep mates. Oh God, they really, they've got dressed as well. They've put the wool and hat on and everything.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Boys are gonna love this. Okay, all right.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Oh, they're like legit good. Yeah. The guy in the background is the best. He's like,

• 44:41Speaker 03

  They haven't got any pinned ones, but go down.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  But they're voiceovering it. So it's not them doing it themselves.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  So they're like remembering, this is Australian football for some reason.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  Layers of Inception.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  You keep nostalgia association.

• 44:51Shaan Puri?

  Try and find like a World Cup one or something. That looks pretty good.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  It's not even in their own language.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  So much work they put in.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  The old one eye.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  They've just got infinite, infinite supply of stuff.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  That is really great arbitrage. Every, all, all success is arbitrage, isn't it? In one form or another.

• 45:32Shaan Puri?

  It's so good. But this, I gotta tell you about the Scrabble guys. Unbelievable story. So the claim is this, this guy is better at Scrabble than anyone is at any game compared to their peers. So the gap between him and everybody else is bigger than Magnus and everybody in chess, Jordan and everyone in basketball. And so if you watch this thing, the story's crazy. This guy doesn't play Scrabble till he's 28 years old. And now he's like, you know, world champion so many times over. But not only is he the world champion in like US Scrabble, he then won the UK championship, which is like oddly has 50,000 words difference that you can't use and you can't use.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 46:11Shaan Puri?

  Then they were like, okay, great. You're just the best at Scrabble. No big deal. So he goes and he wins the Spanish and French also, despite not knowing how to speak the language. He is literally like such a mental dictionary that he studied the language and he can beat the best players from those countries who've been playing since they were children and are fluent in that language. And he defeats all of them. And so he won it in France. He couldn't even at the acceptance speech, he couldn't say like, thank you so much. So he's like, can you just tell them thank you? But he just dominated the competition. And you could see all these guys who their whole life, they've been playing. And it's like, it's like the guy who, you know, lost to AI in Go. And they were just like, my life is meaningless.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  This guy's crazy. Ben's kid with maths, but for Scrabble. He's a fucking savant.

• 46:58Shaan Puri?

  You should put up a picture. He looks exactly like you would expect as well.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Nigel Richards.

• 47:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this guy. And so like, his first tournament, he rode his bike 222 miles to get to it, won and then like rode home. It's unbelievable. And the clips, I'm watching clips and they're like, all right, he gets these letters and they're like C H D. Oh, he's going to be able to play children. That's going to be a very nice score. We're excited about children. And then he, they're like, he's pausing. Why is he pausing? What could he be thinking? Nigel, what do you have up your sleeve? And then he'll go, chlorine. And they're like, and they're like, lose their mind.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  I want, I want the guys that did the commentary to go over the top with the Scrabble thing.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  We have it. Yeah.

• 47:40George Mack?

  I love looking at anything that exists and you think it's shallow. And as soon as you meet somebody who's an expert, you go, there's depth. So even Scrabble, even Scrabble, I never thought there'd be this level at Scrabble. Even, even wooden tables, there'll be a person out there in the world that could talk about wooden tables for a depth that you've never discovered. I saw the thing recently. Have you seen the thing around the two types of chicken? You see this?

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. There's basically every single chicken on the planet is one of two different.

• 48:13George Mack?

  So again, I've been eating chicken my entire life. I've never thought that deeply about it. But it's, but I just literally pulled it up then.

• 48:20Shaan Puri?

  Can you sleep for you?

• 48:21George Mack?

  Yeah. In, basically it was dozens of breeders of different types of chicken. And it's shrunken all the way down to Cobb, Vantrez, owned by Tyson, and Avagen, owned by Germans EU group. Their flagship products, the Cobb 500 and the Ross 308. And we basically got rid of all of the different variations of chicken. It's, I assume it's kind of like

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Genetically, there's only two chickens.

• 48:44George Mack?

  It's almost like there's only poodle and rottweiler. We've kind of slowly, because these chickens, whether it's to do with the fatness and how we eat them, and the amount of these chickens, the line was something around if, oh, these are two, yeah, this is the Cobb 500, a Cobb 500. Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  I'm a massive fan of the Cobb 500. Yeah. I'm a big Cobb 500 guy.

• 49:04George Mack?

  But

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, how quickly they grow.

• 49:06George Mack?

  Somebody was saying that if you was to just look at the kind of biodiversity of Earth as an alien, you just see the number of chicken skulls. Cause we're getting through millions of the, I'm sorry, trillions of these Cobb 500 a year.

• 49:18Speaker 00

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• 50:02Speaker 00

  with global shipping and a 10% discount site-wide. So get that 10% discount by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 at checkout. That's gym.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at checkout. Where I thought this, I was walking to the gym the other day and there was a ton of birds sat on a lamppost. Lots of birds. Where are all of the dead animals?

• 50:28Shaan Puri?

  That's a great question.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Where, cause there's loads of animals that I see that are alive and almost none that I see that are dead. But the dead ones have to go, the live ones end up dead somehow.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Get ingested by something else.

• 50:39Shaan Puri?

  Where are all the vultures then that are eating them, right?

• 50:41Speaker 00

  But like, okay, so, okay, but a fox is eating the skulls of squirrels?

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Where's all the squirrel skulls?

• 50:46Speaker 03

  They eat skulls. I think they just.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Like a python.

• 50:49George Mack?

  I've got an Instagram page.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  I think they just, I think they just, they, they're not like.

• 50:53George Mack?

  Just house.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Using a knife and fork.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  They just house the whole animal?

• 50:56Speaker 03

  But it's, um, it.

• 50:57Shaan Puri?

  I can't tell if you're just saying it confidently or you know the answer.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  I mean, it must be.

• 51:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's okay. I thought it was like a service. Surely it's this.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  But my dog, okay, my dog will like, if it found a carcass in the garden, it's just gonna eat it.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Gone.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like feral animals will definitely do that.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  But I don't see.

• 51:14George Mack?

  What I love though, and you can do this.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Raccoon.

• 51:16George Mack?

  There will be, there'll be a guy or a woman out there who's spent twenty thousand hours around animal decomposition. And they'll be the person of Scrabble for this. And I love, I told Chris this one before, but whenever I meet somebody who's an expert in any industry of, I'll often come at them with my questions of like, so what's happening here? And they kind of answer my layman shit. But my favorite question now is to just go, what's the most fascinating thing that people like me don't appreciate? But keeps, that you think is the most intriguing thing? And it's like a fucking hole.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Such a banger. It's such a banger question.

• 51:49George Mack?

  What do you think about that for like art? That like laymans like me, Chris or Sean don't really think about, but is actually really intriguing to people in the industry?

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Well, my particular strand of art that happens on the internet primarily. I think some of the, some of the stuff that's underappreciated that about that is like the mechanisms underneath the images. So like, this is not going to be interesting to anyone listening probably that has no like inherent interest in this. But the, um, the idea that so much of art history is actually about like what happened around the art versus the art itself. Like, why is the Mona Lisa incredibly famous? It was stolen a bunch of times and there's like all of this like cultural lore around these pieces. Another thing, uh, another great one is the, the Last Supper.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Like, why is the Last Supper one of the most famous images in the world? Is it because it's an amazing image and it depicts this like piece of Western culture that everybody refers to as like, you know, in an inception moment? Or is it because the printing infrastructure at the time, the, the aspect ratio of it was perfect to reproduce that? And it's that, like, that's, that's like one of the biggest contributing factors to why that image is so, uh, like notorious. Because it could be reproduced at scale because of the vast majority of printers were operated in that aspect ratio. So it's like, it's always something like, you know, you misattribute the, the, the, the significance of something to like, it's, be careful how I say this, like it's inherent value versus like.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  The story.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  The environment around it that produced the story. I just read this thing this morning. It was like, you've seen this like new biological, uh, breakthrough or research around like, if you put a, sorry, if you put an old heart into a young body, it gets younger. The organ gets younger. And like the macro observation there is like, the environment is more important than the single variable. And it sort of reminds me of that. It's like, all the story and the lore and like the great artists in the world today and, and previously. Either you like manufacture the narrative yourself while you're alive or something amazing happens. And then you're like attributed, you know, his, the vic, what was it like? The, the winner writes the story or the history.

• 54:15Shaan Puri?

  History's written by women.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  And so many artist careers are defined by like amazing storytellers and like stewards of their work where they've been able to. What, the Senra did an amazing readout of a biography of, um, the guy that inspired, um, I forget, it's like huge art dealer today, but there was like an art dealer of a previous generation who like rent these mansions in England, put paintings up on the walls and then bring like a Vanderbilt and like a competing business person of that era and then have them like see each other in the driveway. And then he come in and be like, uh, yeah, no, he's, he's pretty interested in it. He said he's gonna go back and just get the money together.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  And it's like, oh, I have to have it now, you know, it's like the memetic games that people have been able to build.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  We did that in nightclubs. If we had the two biggest tables, if you go into a nightclub, there will be one table typically, which is only available, it's usually behind the DJ booth. It's the most expensive table in a club. Classic super club Vegas style thing. Maybe it's even above the DJ booth in an area that's only accessible through security and stuff like that. And that's why Dana White is on New Year's Eve having a scrap with his wife or whatever. And then there's a couple of other tables that are kind of the top middle ones. They will always be opposite another table. And that's where you put the guys that are the ones that have actually got the small man syndrome. And you put them opposite each other. One gets a, a bottle, a, a delivery service, which is fifteen grand. And then the other ones are like, they got the one, they got the one with the motorcycle.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  They got the one where the guy comes out on the motorcycle and they go, well, I mean, in fact, the one that's twenty grand, you got like, they dress up as nuns. And they come out of that and it's like, get the fucking nun one dude. And then they're like, yo, they just, they just dogged us on that thing. Like get the, like, and you jump up, up, up, up, up, up, up.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Like it's an auction bidding service for attention inside of a nightclub. And you leave, the number of times that we left events, three in the morning, lights come up, everyone folks off. And you look at the table and there's unopened bottles of champagne. There's bottles of vodka that never canesers, four and a half liter, six liter bottles of stuff. And you're like, they've had a tenth of this. And by the way, very, very high, uh, expenditure bottles of liquor and champagne. The most expensive part of it is the bottle, not the contents of the bottle. Like it is much more expensive to produce the glass that that goes into, cause it's such a low volume and it's so thick and it's so da, da, da, da. And the consuming just this tiny, tiny amount of it.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  Memetic tax.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is, it is, it is. It's, it's small man tax.

• 56:48Shaan Puri?

  Damn. This is, that's, that's kind of the story of Grey Goose. Do you guys know this backstory of Grey Goose? Uh, the, the guy who started Grey Goose is such a legend. He, um, he first, uh, popularized, uh, Jägermeister. But the like, it basically all started because of a like fight in the family. So I think like, he married this woman, she's great. Her father was in the spirits business. And then they have a falling out and he basically gets kicked out of the family business. But in a sort of memetic rivalry with the father, he decides like, not only will I be successful, I will be successful in the spirits business. So he's walking around town, he's thinking like, what's the entryway? Like I have no experience, no contacts, like pretty competitive saturated market. What am I gonna do?

• 57:31Shaan Puri?

  And he sees this like German group of, uh, you know, older people and they were drinking something in like a small thing, like a little tiny shot glass. But they're like sipping it and he's, what is this? And they were like, oh, it's Jägermeister. It's a sort of aperitif. It's like an after dinner, like sort of thing that you sip on. And it's like, it's almost like tastes medicinal if you, you know, had Jäger. And so he, he goes and starts reading about it and he's like, okay, uh, no, good news is, uh, bad news is it tastes bad. And nobody really cares about an after dinner sipping, you know, liquor. He's like, but the good news is the rights are available because nobody wants this after dinner thing. So he gets the rights to it and he realizes like, I have to create the story around this. So he's like, he gives it to some people to taste it. He's like, you know, this liquor has some pretty special properties.

• 58:16Shaan Puri?

  Can you figure out what they are? Like, I'm curious. And he just lets people just brainstorm what it might be. And someone's like, I think this is kind of like an aphrodisiac. They come back and he's like, sure is. So he starts, he starts promoting it that way. And so he goes to bars. He's like, oh, it's for young people. So he goes to like college towns and then he's like, it's aphrodisiac. He starts putting like newspaper clippings in the urinals that are like banned aphrodisiac from Europe. Makes its way to, to the US. Parents warn of its effectiveness, whatever. Uh, you know, the doctors swear that this happens. And then he starts hiring like hot nurses to like inject, like, like shoot it into your mouth. And like, it's this med, it's this medicine. And he turns it into like this whole thing. So he wins with Jäger. And then when he's in his seventies, he's like, you know what I'm gonna do? Co-found a new startup and he decides I'm gonna go for vodka.

• 59:01Shaan Puri?

  And his process to create Grey Goose was go find me the highest priced bottle of vodka. What is it? They're like, oh, it's absolute. He's like, what's it priced? He's like, great. We're fifty percent more than that. That's thing number one, we know. He goes, thing two, uh, we wanna be top shelf. So he's like, we need a, how big is the shelf, uh, height? We need to be taller than that. So the only place you could put it is the top shelf. Um, it has to sit up there. So he designs the bottle and they're like, uh, okay, we're working on the bottle. We don't even have the vodka. He's like, don't worry, we're gonna get the vodka. Go to France and get the vodka. They're like vodka's made in Russia. He's like, yeah, but who wants that dirty Russian vodka? Imagine French vodka. And they're like, okay. He's like, go find me some French vodka. And so they go find it. And that was basically how he created Grey Goose was those three elements, working backwards and creating it.

• 59:45Shaan Puri?

  Uh, it's, it's really wild. This guy lived a wild life. This guy Sydney Frank, like he was, he got so old, but he just loved having a good time. He loved golfing. So when he couldn't golf, he would just pay four pro golfers to like golf on his behalf. And they would like, kind of carry him, wheelchair him out onto the course. And he would like fly private with these guys. They would just have a good time. But like, all the videos of him are like, kind of like, even in his nineties, being carried into the car, having a great time. This guy lived a big life.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, there is someone having their fifth hour of conversations about their business plan with ChatGPT today.

• 1:00:19Shaan Puri?

  But, but that's kind of that, where does, like, how deep does it go? It's like, well, the mar, marketing will like disillusion you, right? Cause you realize like all these everyday products that are so popular. The psychology underneath them was crazy.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  The rabbit hole goes deep, deep, deep, deep. Um, I, well, on this like topic, uh, I've been thinking more about of, there's two, the two words of twenty twenty six. I think, and they're almost, it's kind of David Foster Wallace, the fish can't see the water anymore. But the two words that are thrown around constantly, taste and slop. And I'm fascinated.

• 1:00:54George Mack?

  By these two words and how little discussion there is around these two words. And taste in particular is a word that you can just, you can say, and I get to, I get to say how high status I am by going. The thing that's really important in twenty twenty six is taste and you fucking peasants don't have any fucking taste. And slops like the inverse of that where somebody can just say the word slop now. With no definition of what, why they mean slop. It's kind of like in a less emotionally charged way, but like the word racist or sexist that you can just throw it around now. You throw it around willy nilly, you can band it around the office willy nilly. And nobody knows exactly what it is. And there's a great essay, George Orwell's Politics and the English Language.

• 1:01:37George Mack?

  And he talks about how there's these new turns of phrase, like as a writer, you can just put in there at the end of the day. Or just turns of phrase which can just signal that I think people will like this. And I can seem smart, but there's no depth to this at all. And I'm fascinated by, cause Jack, you're somebody who I'd say has like what people would describe as taste. But I've been fascinated by how do you actually develop that muscle? And there's a wonderful exercise I got from my friend Billy, where it's like, it's always very simple, Billy Oppenheimer. And he has this thing called what I like about what I like. Where whenever he sees something that he likes, he will just capture it, put in his phone and then. Try and explain to himself why he likes it.

• 1:02:20George Mack?

  And then I created a what I dislike about what I dislike. And then when I see something I don't like, I'll capture it and write it down. And then you also have like a little swipe file to go through when you're doing it. But I'm just fascinated by right now, these two words in particular that everybody's using them and nobody defines it.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Can you find, there's a quote by Ira Glass. It's like, if you put Ira Glass.

• 1:02:43Shaan Puri?

  Taste gap.

• 1:02:44George Mack?

  Taste gap, I think it's called.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Taste gap. It's like a one paragraph definition of like, having taste means you will always be dissatisfied with what you produce.

• 1:02:53George Mack?

  This quote is from the American author Ira Glass. Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste, but there is this gap. For the first couple of years, you make stuff. It's just not that good. It's trying to be good. It has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game is still killer and your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We go through this. And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you've got to know it's normal. And the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.

• 1:03:35George Mack?

  It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took too long to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's going to take a while. It's normal to take a while. You've just got to fight your way through it.

• 1:03:52Shaan Puri?

  Damn, bang.

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  There is ship at what the, I can't remember. I think it was Shane Parrish who said, like, maybe Tiago Forte, like. Procrastination is bad because it stops you from doing stuff, but it's mostly bad because it stops you from shipping work at a volume sufficiently enough to. Work out what works. Like if you don't ever, it's your thing about, I'd rather be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and right.

• 1:04:17George Mack?

  Yeah, I'd rather be, I'd rather be an idiot than a coward.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Because if you don't ever put stuff out, or if you only put stuff out when you know that it's going to work, you haven't actually learned all that much. That learning a lot means, okay, I've got a big sample set. I've thrown a lot of stuff out. But I mean, the shortest thing, at least for me, like taste is the ability to discern between good and not good. And yeah, I would like, I would pair up the slop comment with basically your outsourcing taste. I think that's what people are trying to refer to when they use the word slop. It's like, there is. A lacking intention in the output and a lot of people think that that is like, if any tool that has like. An incredible amount of power was used, you're giving up some agency. And I think that's like the.

• 1:05:02Shaan Puri?

  Done without taste. I think slop is done without taste.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  And, and like the way that these things are trained, it's like the Claude, there's like textbook. Like little marks on there that if you did not guide this with a certain amount of intention, it's just going to show up every time.

• 1:05:16George Mack?

  And my, my like rebuttal or the next level that I think exists is that's fine. And to say slop when you see slop is fine, but that is slop. So you just, I just call that slop slop. So if you're going to say.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  Your criticism is also unoriginal.

• 1:05:29George Mack?

  If you're going to say slop, tell me why.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32George Mack?

  Explain specifically.

• 1:05:33Shaan Puri?

  On your list. You said you have a list now of like things, why I dislike what I dislike or why like, give us something.

• 1:05:37George Mack?

  Put it up. Hold on one second.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  It's interesting around the, this is seen as low effort, cause that John Mark guy. Broke the fucking internet. The first one of him where he's shadow boxing and he's just like, he's sort of doing like a little dance. But everyone was completely mystified by this guy, like there's so much aura. Until you found out it was AI. So that, okay, so. There's something, the same thing, but finding out, I mean, if you watch Hoog or Fern or any of these big explainer YouTube channels. I love their documentaries. I think that they're great. They put a disclaimer at the very start that says, all of our animation is done by humans.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Because they need to show effort upfront, because the gap in terms of output, like finished article is. Difficult to determine for us. So what I have to do is basically say, even if you can't tell, the proof of work is there. To show that we put a lot of effort into making this.

• 1:06:36George Mack?

  Did I send you the gossip goblin thing? The Love Island thing? Now go on. Can you find gossip goblin on, on Instagram?

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  Name. What is it?

• 1:06:46George Mack?

  This is like AI film and it's like, you're not going to mistake it for not being AI film, but the level of craft is absolutely unbelievable.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  Right. And so they're, they're taking something that people would typically see as low effort and slop, but pushing it to its absolute limit.

• 1:07:02George Mack?

  And I would say they're putting in like a level of effort in the production that you would associate with like. Any kind of like S tier Hollywood production studio you'll see in these outputs, like.

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  So like, what kind of birds are you into love? You like them all sexy and stuff? I, well, all types, yeah. I love all birds, girls, but yeah, if I had to pick, I'd say I like the pretty ones when they look all sexy and stuff. Oh, you're calling me fit? You're so sweet. Potsy, you nasty slag. How could you? Gordo's my man. Welcome to Lover's Lagoon. What now? So where Nero Cradle's finest, flirtiest and feistiest singles fight, fornicate and find love. So come on and take your hand out of your pants and let's go meet the cast.

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  Been a rough year, not gonna lie. Me hairline wobbled, my corset got nipped and the gooning got bad, real bad.

• 1:07:54Speaker 05

  But I've locked in now and I'm ready to stop Jester maxing and start mugging, bro. I'm a proper gent. I treat every bird like a princess and her father like an absolute king. Manners cost nothing, sweetheart.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  I mean, it's even got.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  I wouldn't say I'm full of myself, but I'm the fittest sort here, aren't I? It's just maths, isn't it?

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  Don't know really.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  Nice villa though, yeah? I'm a romantic, I am. When a fella pulls out a chair for me or opens a door, boom. Me fanny flutters and I'm already planning our babies' names, yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  What's crazy is this is such a strong, like.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  Except for him, I was about to say, what I was about to say was. The ability to distill stereotypes, like British stereotypes, each of those is an archetype that exists. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. Are people ever going to say this is AI? This is something which is typically low effort, but you've done it in a way which is high effort, therefore I'm going to give you. I think there's so much ick around AI generally that you're never really going to, no matter how good you.

• 1:09:02Shaan Puri?

  Short term.

• 1:09:03George Mack?

  Yeah, I just, I agree.

• 1:09:04Shaan Puri?

  I think there will be always like the new organic or free range is like handmade, is you know, it's. Human made. Basically they're gonna, there's gonna be a word for this. Like, you know, I think Rory was talking about how like horsepower. Became a phrase because they needed to describe the speed of something and they could only describe it relative to.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  In the units of something previous.

• 1:09:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and horsepower was needed and like, I think the AI industry needs its version of horsepower. It's like, it needs to.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  It needs its prediction markets.

• 1:09:32Shaan Puri?

  Cause like these evals are also complicated. Nobody knows what the hell, how, which one's better or not. It should just be IQ, right? They need to come up with a, a number that's like, we got ninety nine, they have ninety eight.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  Supreme intelligence. You see the poll, the Trump poll.

• 1:09:46Shaan Puri?

  The rebrand. Oh yeah, he's trying.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  He's trying, but I don't.

• 1:09:48Shaan Puri?

  He's ahead of the game, a savant.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. He was trying to name it something else instead.

• 1:09:53Shaan Puri?

  Supreme intelligence.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  Supreme was one and then the other one was.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  I can't remember.

• 1:09:58George Mack?

  He wanted to call it ASI, but the problem is that ASI means artificial superintelligence, which is the thing that everyone's worried about.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it wasn't super. It was, it was supreme and then it was like superior. I forget, but there's like three words.

• 1:10:09George Mack?

  The artificial. I think the big thing is the artificial. Which makes sense. It's not the best branding.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  I mean, he knows his branding, yeah.

• 1:10:16George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  Interesting. What was your list?

• 1:10:18George Mack?

  Um, my thingy's not working. Carry on without me.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Machine intelligence was another one that I've like, but again, that has the like, we're getting replaced.

• 1:10:25George Mack?

  What's this? Here's a.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  Is that a gram?

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  New pickle. What do you think?

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Woohoo. Very nice. Look at that. Picked them up from the deli yesterday. Good coloring. That's dill and the brine is something called mustard seed. It's very cool baitment, but that's nothing. Look at this. That is really nice. Half sour with garlic brine.

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  What do you think?

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  Nice. That is really super. How do nitwit like you get so tasteful? I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's pickle to mine. But wait, you ain't seen nothing yet.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Barrel cured, whole peppercorn, extra crisp. Impressive. Very nice.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Let's see Paul Allen's pickle.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  I want to know how they put the pickles away.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  Look at that subtle olive coloring, the tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God. It even has little bumps.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Something wrong, Patrick? You're sweating. Jesus fucking, yeah, it is over. It is so, it is so close to being over. Uh, I had, uh, speaking of tasteful, Alex Wang in Crocs.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Do you see this?

• 1:12:14Shaan Puri?

  I, I didn't, I did look at the breakdown and the breakdown of the breakdown.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  This one?

• 1:12:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  Yep. So Metta's chief AI officer Alexander Wang stole the show at Meta Connect by wearing a pair of camo Crocs and a camo T-shirt. Let's have a look.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Just dress for the job you want, dude. It is so true.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  And keep going.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  Meta invested $60 billion into the metaverse, almost ran out of business, then Zuck hired the camo Crocs intern and suddenly everything's fixed. And he's just replied and said, Gen Z riser.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  He had to fact check it.

• 1:12:45Shaan Puri?

  He's on a heater right now.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, well, I have seen, I mean, as speaking as a man that really, really fucking likes Crocs. In some airports, you're not allowed to wear them on the escalators.

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  Because you know, at the end of an escalator where there's sort of like the teeth of the, the combs come together. Sometimes people's feet get stuck. And if you've got this in sport mode and you're, this starts getting eaten, like people have like really injured themselves. Yeah. They just ripped your own foot apart from this, but uh, that's why sport mode is only to be used in extreme circumstances. That's my piece of advice.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  From a avid croc wearer, got to be careful. In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps and weights that you need to do, everything. So all that you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP app could wipe your ass for you, it probably would. And it adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing.

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a massive difference. And if you're serious about training, it'll do the same for you too. Right now you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below, heading to rpstrength.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/ModernWisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Little micro essay I was going to send you boys about, um, the convergent, or everything is either porn or a casino. Let me try and find it.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  This is your idea that the UK is peak vape, vape shop energy.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a, the number of vape shops and betting shops when I was back is truly absurd. Yeah, it's not a great indicator, is it?

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  Show me your high street and I'll show you country.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  This is it. The, the, the, um, the Twitter handle is K T R I V S. And the article, the article is called, Everything is Goona Casino.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  The head, the ability to write good headlines since Substack and Twitter articles have come around. Here we go.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  Everything is Goona Casino.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, this is it. When I read Jason's tweet on the weekend, I was so viscerally yucked. The last thing you want to see is a middle-aged man who could be your father tweeting about Goona content on the timeline. Jason at Sydney Sweeney launches an OnlyFans competitor and she's instantly the world's richest woman. I don't agree with this thesis here, but that's a convo for another day. It seems like if you're a builder right now, you have two options, creating Goona slop or building a casino. And if you're feeling ambitious and want real PMF, what's PMF?

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  Product market.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  You have some, you have some combination of both. 50 cent. The saying goes, sex sells. This is not a new concept. Advertisers, marketers, record labels and notable rappers have been pushing this agenda on us since the beginning of time. I vividly remember watching music videos as a child with 50 cent and these video vixens dancing in the background. Back when music videos were still a thing, you couldn't find one without hot women. The formula is quite simple. Find a product, find a hot person and create an ad with both pictured and boom, you have people's attention. This was what virality looked like before we had manufactured algorithms and influencers doing the work for us on TikTok. Tom Ford took the concept very literally in his iconic 2007 campaign for Tom Ford for Men.

• 1:16:14Speaker 00

  The ads were considered too sexy. Magazines refused to run them, yet they're still one of the clearest and most iconic examples of sex selling to date. Tom Ford in 2000.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  It's pretty long, but if you go down, there's a, there's a two by two matrix that I think will, uh,

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Illustrate.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  Will illustrate, but it's obviously based off the, on the back of the Sydney Sweeney stuff, but this is.

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  I have seen this. Okay. So it's a, a matrix pornography to not pornography on the Y axis. Casino to not casino on the X axis.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  And then maybe the next couple of paragraphs will sum it up, but.

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  I love how Grindr is off the charts.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  But this is a great meme too, yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  On one side, it's poly marketing. On the other side, it's OnlyFans. It seems like the modern man's brain has been fried and this has all been turned into a weird slot machine lab rat experiment gone wrong. The future seems dark, but there are two directions we can go in. I'm hopeful we can start course correcting if it's not already too late. Everyone has a responsibility in the future they build. I'll leave you here with a quote from one of my colleagues. When you're working in crypto, real bravery is refusing to build the slot machine. If you can build anything, what's worth building? Be brave. Are you tempted to build the slot machine? You work in crypto.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, there's a very fine line between like the frictionless commerce component and the just like pure speculation.

• 1:17:31Shaan Puri?

  Well, you could always just get away with it and be like, it's a commentary on the state of things.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  I think.

• 1:17:35Shaan Puri?

  You have a free pass.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think that what's interesting about like crypto art specifically and its relationship to like the quote unquote real art world is like money, attention.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  Like the manufacturing of attention around work in the traditional art world is the same thing is happening, just at like a slower pace. You know, like the idea that what we talked about an hour ago or so, the, the way you put an artist's work into the spotlight is by increasing demand around it and sort of structuring a market around it. And what crypto art has done is like somewhat democratized the ability for you to do that and like get collectors to participate in your work. And, uh, yeah, I feel like there have been in the last eight, nine years that this has been happening. There's like,

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  I strongly believe there's already work in crypto that will be the most valuable artwork that has existed ever. Already is potentially, but you know, CryptoPunks.

• 1:18:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  Familiar with them. Like, if you think about like a portrait in a traditional sense, like, uh, um, like the Da Vinci Salvador Monday sold for 450 million bucks in 2021, I think to like a sheik or some, like someone in the UAE. And if you like extrapolate that or you sort of marry that up to like a CryptoPunks as an analogy, if a CryptoPunk is a hundred thousand dollars, one of them, and you think of it as one project or one object, that collection is worth a billion dollars and it's liquid. Like you could buy and sell one right now for that price. If the Salvador Monday came back to market, would it sell for a billion dollars? Maybe. But these things are eight years old.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  Already.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I, I like, I have a, yeah, I have a strong belief in it to the point where like I've, you know, pivoted a lot of my work into that world despite it being a like reputationally

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  fraught environment for sure. But like, it's a, it's a very real thing in, in, in some pockets and corners. But because of the permissionless nature of it, it's like anything. It's like, you're going to get 99% carnage, slop, whatever you want to call it. Like you bring the barrier down and it's, it's, uh, you get what you expect.

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  Hmm. You know, one of the two things I wanted to ask you guys kind of related to that article just then is two, you've got four kids, three kids. And there's this whole very much pessimism right now around devices and casinos or porn and, and addiction and all this sort of stuff. But you two are like very kind of optimistic, a little bit more nuanced of all my friends. How are you thinking about kids with devices and using all these things as well as like education as a whole, like bringing kids into this? Cause people are making out like it's the worst time ever to be alive, which I disagree with, but it's this kind of media narrative.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  To be what age? To be like a kid?

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  I think to be like a college age kid right now would be very hard, but I think like.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  I would agree.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  I think the like growing pains.

• 1:20:44Shaan Puri?

  I don't understand.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  Like if you've committed to being taught whatever discipline in the like traditional way it's being taught and.

• 1:20:53Shaan Puri?

  What was your major?

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  Graphic communication, it was called.

• 1:20:57Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow. Okay. That's pretty spot on. What did you do?

• 1:21:00Speaker 00

  Philosophy.

• 1:21:01Shaan Puri?

  Philosophy?

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Two business degrees.

• 1:21:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay. All right. Maybe you guys all used your degrees. I, I was biology. I didn't use my degree. I don't know. I don't know almost anyone that like in my life that, that.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  I guess I'm talking about.

• 1:21:12Shaan Puri?

  The thing they studied turned out to be what they did with the rest of their life. Cause you, you know, you're told to pick when you're 17, eight, in the, in the US, you major your freshman year of college. So you're 17 or 18 years old and you pick a track.

• 1:21:24Speaker 00

  Hey, person that was only recently a child, decide the rest of the direction your life's going to go in.

• 1:21:29Shaan Puri?

  This is the arranged marriage of like.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess, I guess that's a good point. I think maybe it is like, should push you more in the direction of like, I want to do philosophy or I want to study literature or like the, you know, go into.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  To study.

• 1:21:43Shaan Puri?

  I think there's a whole set of attitudes that might be true, but don't serve you. And it's better to just reject them, meaning, uh, you know, you could think of, uh, this, this like a breakup. Is a breakup the end or the beginning? You could argue either way. One of them's gonna serve you if you see this as the beginning, the beginning of the next chapter, where I really understand what I want. I'm gonna find the right person and I'm gonna be better because of all this. Or is it the end, which is what most people default to. And so it's like, if you, I think it's kind of what you were talking about earlier of, you know, what's a thing that if you, if you got that wrong, kind of doesn't matter what else you do. It's. Think if your attitude is the worst time ever to be alive or to be a kid or to be a college graduate, it's like, good luck with the rest of that paragraph, because your opening sentence screwed you, you know? So it's like, you really have no choice but to just say,

• 1:22:25Shaan Puri?

  it's the best time ever to be a college student. Why? And then start brainstorming from there and then use that. Like, actually, it's one of the ideas that I, I was pretty interested in recently was, uh, I read this Substack about strong links versus weak link theory. I was like, oh, what does that mean? And so what the guy argues, he's like, there are plenty of systems in the world where you really have to focus on the weak link of the system. So he's like, uh, airport security. You're only as good as your weakest link. Um, jet engine design, always good to your weakest link. Food safety. It's like, you have to be, so there's a whole set of systems that the incentive and the important thing is to focus on your weakest link and make it better. He's like, but then, and so, and a lot of people, we even say that you're only as good as your weakest link. But so you just think that applies to everything. It's like, but there's a whole set of things

• 1:23:10Shaan Puri?

  that are the exact opposite. It's strong link theory. So he's like, music. Let's say you get, you know, an artist album, you know, like the Beatles. The Beatles have made like whatever a thousand songs. Even people who are like, I love the Beatles can name, you know, a dozen off the top of their head. And so like, for a musician, it doesn't really matter how many bad songs you make. The only bad thing matters is that you make one banger song, right? Did you get any strong links in your thread? And so strong links apply to all these other things. Science is actually very interesting. He was like, the scientific community is like so uptight about publishing papers and like replication, all this that they've focused so much on weak links, meaning the, the smartest people believe what you should do is try to disqualify as much bad, I, bad theories, bad hypotheses as you can.

• 1:23:55Shaan Puri?

  Versus realizing that like, all we care about in science is actually breakthroughs that improve human lives, which only come when you are actually just scanning for the strong link that actually works. Versus focusing on like, you know, negating any possible bad, bad paper. Um, and it's like, oh yeah, that's actually kind of true. And you need to know which game you're in to be able to optimize for, you know? So like, I think it's kind of the same thing, like in, you know, college students or whoever it is that are trying to figure out what to do. Like you can't, you, you have to find the strong link theory of what you're doing and like, oh, now I can do that. Well, that changes everything for me. And even if these other nine things don't, are now not going my way. This one is enough to make up for the other nine that are now against me.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  I, I agree with the like agency component at the individual level. I suppose my comment is like the curriculum at the university moving fast enough to be like, hey, guy, this exists now. How can we rethink it? Or is it like, we've been teaching it the way, this way for this long and we're gonna continue to do that? That's the like muddy water, but if you're in the position to be like, actually, you know, I see this as like, whatever I'm doing, I can actually fulfill my university obligations in.

• 1:25:02Shaan Puri?

  That's why Alpha School, the idea of it is so great, because they were like, what if, like, how long does school actually take? Like, how long do you need to, to learn every day? And if the number is the same as it was 50 years ago, like, what the hell? Now, I talked to a dentist. He's like, it's crazy that dental school is still the same exact amount of time. How is it possible that we train people the exact amount of time? Nothing has improved in our training ability? We got the internet, we got computers, we got zero.

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  Like learning the map around town.

• 1:25:31Shaan Puri?

  That's insane, like.

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  And it costs more.

• 1:25:33Shaan Puri?

  And it costs more. Yeah. It's like, obviously the incentive is keep you there, charge you as much as you can. Like versus the opposite, whereas Alpha School is like, all right, if the students were only on the, like, learning two hours a day, what could you teach? How, how well could you teach them two hours? And it turns out like, they do two grades of progress in every one year with only two hours a day. So you're using whatever, one fourth the time and making double the progress. So it's crazy.

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  How you, if you go down an age to like younger ages, how are you two thinking about devices and education for kids?

• 1:26:04Speaker 00

  We have zero devices. Zero. No TV, no device at this age.

• 1:26:08Shaan Puri?

  Would you like to meet my nanny, my pacifier, my? If I'm at a restaurant, I'm trying to like have a conversation with my wife, like, okay, take the phone, play a game. I play, I play a lot of video games with my kids. Um, I think that's like part of it is I use it with them. Like, I will not give them social media, because I know like how if my brain cannot resist the social temptations of trying to be seen as popular on social media and just consuming, like consuming, consuming, consuming, because it's no chance. They have, they stand no chance. So like, to me, I'm like, that's cigarettes. I'm not gonna give my kid total cigarettes. But I have myself plus met so many people that played a lot of video games growing up.

• 1:26:47Shaan Puri?

  And like, you get a lot of benefits. Like, I played a lot of poker growing up. It's not really the most like, my mom wasn't that happy. It's kind of a degenerate activity, but you do gain a lot if you're able to like control the dose. So I think it's like, you know, you gotta control the dose, but everybody's got a different dose. Some people think an hour a week is a lot.

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  There's a study that I saw this morning on X that's going around. It's trending at the moment. Mark, you might be able to pull this up. It's a number of brain scans based on how many hours per day people use, might be screens or it might be social media. Less than one versus one to two versus three to four versus four and over. And, uh, it, it just, I think everybody is concerned about what it does to kids. The thing that I would be most worried about, that I think I would find most difficult if I was at university now, I left university 15 years ago. So I was in uni for quite a while. I was in uni for half a decade. And, um, during that time, Facebook was around. Uh, and it'd been around since 2006 and I left in like 2011, something like that. Uh, but it wasn't compelling. I still was on a BlackBerry.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  I think the level of distractibility over the last decade and a half has gone up through the roof. And not only that, but now you have to not use the equivalent of the empty processed calories cognitively of relying on AI. So even if you can focus on your work, there is now always this permanent shortcut that's there, which is a simulacrum of you learning, but at least based on most of the studies, it was that one that came out of Harvard or somewhere in Boston, I think, that suggests people that are students that are using AI retain so much less information, et cetera, et cetera. I know that this is, this will be triggering all of your techno optimist.

• 1:28:24George Mack?

  No, no, no. I was gonna, I was gonna build on your argument for a second.

• 1:28:27Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:28:28George Mack?

  Yeah, I was gonna build on it. So, um, uh, you remember the old school, um, uh, in brain imaging of black cabs in London, people that learned to black cab drive and they had to remember it for about three years.

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  Structural changes in the brain.

• 1:28:40George Mack?

  Structurally changes the location of the brain. But what's fascinating, I've always, I would like to fund this is.

• 1:28:45Shaan Puri?

  Follow up.

• 1:28:45George Mack?

  Well, not just follow up, but Uber drivers in theory are doing as many miles driving around, maybe even more. But I, I would be willing to bet there's almost, uh, no structural change or a, a tiny percentage comparatively to the black cab drivers. Within that, there's something quite fascinating, because it seems to be

• 1:29:07George Mack?

  the big thing for change at the brain level is the risk of failure. And if you, if you ask the AI something and there's no risk of failure, even I think the one, one thing I'll do now when I'm asking Claude or I'm asking ChatGPT something is to just ask it, pause, try and think my own answer and then contrast and compare versus purely.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  I think, I, I don't know why the risk of failure maybe, but friction is pretty much.

• 1:29:33George Mack?

  What's the difference between friction and risk of failure? What do you mean?

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  Uh, you, something can be difficult and you can still know that it would go well. I think that it, it's the difficulty, it's the removal of the difficulty. Like learning the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, being able to remember something isn't to do with failure, it's to do with friction.

• 1:29:50George Mack?

  Could you elaborate a little bit more?

• 1:29:51Shaan Puri?

  That, like doing the rep.

• 1:29:52George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:29:53Shaan Puri?

  Whether it was like.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  If you reread, if you reread a page, but you could like reread the wrong page or something, that wouldn't change how much you retained. What changes how much you retain is, are you self-testing? Are you closing the book and trying to recall what's on the page? Or are you just reading it over and over and over again? So maybe the failure thing plays into that.

• 1:30:09George Mack?

  In that, like knowing, I think the friction helps, but then if you fail, you're significantly more likely to remember, which makes sense because of the pain that's associated.

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  Motivating force.

• 1:30:18George Mack?

  Yes. Failure is friction.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  This might be a stupid distinction, but like the cost of failure, like not knowing where you're going as a tax driver is like bankruptcy.

• 1:30:27George Mack?

  Right.

• 1:30:28Speaker 00

  You know, like the, like, if you can put yourself in a position where like, if I don't know this, I can't perform said function. But even at university now, it's like, if you're studying a certain topic, like I can produce the materials that I've been asked to produce. The vast majority of people are just gonna go that route. I had a, I did this film like earlier this year with a lady who teaches film at a university in Hong Kong. And she's like, I can't stop the students just submitting like 80 pages of bullshit coming out, that comes out of an LLM. And I was like, why didn't you just tell them to submit the prompt? Just cut all of this out and just be like.

• 1:31:06Shaan Puri?

  Whoever writes the best prompt, but they're just gonna, they're gonna prompt for the prompt.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  Just grade the prompt.

• 1:31:11Shaan Puri?

  There's no, there's no end to it.

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  But they'll still prompt for the prompt. But then I said, okay, grade it with the LLM then.

• 1:31:17Shaan Puri?

  You put the, you make the student the grader. So you give the student five LLM outputs and they have to just tell you which one is the best and why.

• 1:31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:24Shaan Puri?

  And then that forces them to at least have taste, judgment and how, to have to think. Do you guys think there's gonna be like brain gyms? Like, you know, um, there weren't gyms when we all worked and did manual labor.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 1:31:37Shaan Puri?

  Like the idea of like coming home from the field and maybe like, let me just get a quick pump. That wasn't a thing. It's like, I just slogged in the field all day. It's when we all stopped slogging in the fields and the mines that we had to like, we're just sitting all day. We had to come up with a place to go to go pick up heavy objects and put them back down. Is that what's gonna happen? Like, are we going to brain gyms where?

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  Artificial cognitive friction.

• 1:31:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like you go do Sudoku and shit. And like, you're, it's like, oh yeah, yeah. They lock up the device and you have to get an hour in. I'm like, man, I got such a good brain pump today. You know what I mean? Is that what's gonna happen?

• 1:32:08Speaker 00

  That's a great point. That, but there isn't as much, uh, bottle service upside to the brain gym. It's true. And also you can't see. You get on me? My, my big theory about the gym, about why it's so popular for a lot of people, especially bodybuilding.

• 1:32:21Shaan Puri?

  You need belts, like jujitsu or something like that.

• 1:32:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:23Shaan Puri?

  You need some other like.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  I grade it.

• 1:32:25Shaan Puri?

  Bandanas.

• 1:32:27Shaan Puri?

  The Karate Kid of Sudoku.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  That guy thinks.

• 1:32:30Shaan Puri?

  That guy fucking thinks, man.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:32:33Shaan Puri?

  I've heard he thinks. Yeah.

• 1:32:34Speaker 00

  The advantage of going to the gym is that you get a pump, which is a preview of what you will be like if you keep doing it. You don't have to say, it's not the same when you try to learn Italian. During the process of doing your Italian class or Duolingo or whatever, you're not briefly six months progressed in Italian.

• 1:32:50Shaan Puri?

  No, you do a puzzle. I do a puzzle. I feel absolutely dopamine when I solve a little slider puzzle.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  I understand, but that's not the same as when you go into the gym, you lift something and you're like, if I keep going, I will walk around looking like I do now, having just finished my training session with a pump in six months.

• 1:33:06Shaan Puri?

  Bro, this is your experience at the gym. My experience at the gym is wildly different to yours.

• 1:33:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:33:11Shaan Puri?

  You have this euphoric experience, like this is who I am. I feel great.

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  I'm becoming myself.

• 1:33:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I go to the gym and I look at myself. I'm like, oh my God, what? Can somebody turn the mirror around? What's going on?

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  But the like, regardless of how you experience it, the projection, like the utility that my physique is gonna give me is gonna be way higher than the the utility of one IQ point in a world where intelligence is free.

• 1:33:35Shaan Puri?

  But people meditate.

• 1:33:36Speaker 03

  Not many people, or pretend to.

• 1:33:38Shaan Puri?

  Or they want to, they try to, they say they do.

• 1:33:42Speaker 00

  Well, you could have it, if you could actually MRI or scan your brain. As soon as that becomes more, that could become the flex. I'm like, jeez, have you seen Chatsimint?

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  And it might be, it might be like the, you know, the January gym signups with the brain gym. It might be just purely, you know, the direct debit coming out. Makes you feel good about wanting to increase the, increase the capacity.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  Exactly. There was a, did you ever use that Muse headband? Back in the day, Me, John and you, you suffer on it. Have you seen this? So it was a E, EG?

• 1:34:12Speaker 03

  EKG.

• 1:34:12Speaker 00

  EKG brain thing. So kind of like a headband.

• 1:34:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is it. Forge the skill of attention, measure, track and improve your most valuable asset. Used by NASA Harvard and over a thousand plus researchers, lab trained on a billion minutes of data. Yeah, so this is focus, see when your mind drifts, train it back. Endurance, train mental stamina with FNIRS sleep. Uh, oh wow, they've really tuned this thing up. So back in the day, the Muse two, the top right thing was what we used to use. That thing, that was what we used to use, which was for meditation. And you would put this on and it would have little bird sounds when you were like locked in. No, when you were locked in, the sound would get louder as you were more distracted.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  And then as your brain waves quiet, I have no idea if this is even possible. I don't even know if it worked. We were all adamant, this is gonna be the fix for my meditation technique and do all the rest of it. But yeah, you can see the active, neutral, calm. And yeah.

• 1:35:12Shaan Puri?

  Also easy.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  What was your quote? All the gear and?

• 1:35:13Speaker 00

  No idea.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's easy to not be distracted when anybody attractive will leave the room.

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  Aye.

• 1:35:22Speaker 00

  Unless you have a colored robe.

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  It's a black belt.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  I don't think there's, I don't think there's much overlap, unfortunately. Yeah, I like intellect has not been a, it's like very unusual for it to be like primarily

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

  sought after.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  sought after. Think like the, the, the outcomes of intellect are more.

• 1:35:42Shaan Puri?

  But maybe that shifts, like, wasn't it back in the day, like being fat was attractive? Cause it was a signal of wealth. And then like that changed as we got abundant and then, you know. What's it, do you think that maybe now, maybe it's my time?

• 1:35:54Speaker 00

  Are you gonna be so? Are you saying that being stupid in future could be a signal of high status? That you have to think so little because all of this, your army of AI agents are just thinking on your behalf. Oh my God, he must have a ChatGPT pro membership. Like he's, he's, he's so post-money. He's so post-economic.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  Post-economic.

• 1:36:13Speaker 00

  Little quicker, quicker question.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  Question.

• 1:36:15Speaker 00

  Question. Um, what's an idea you've changed your mind upon in the last 12, 24, six, three months? Just something you, you used to hold quite strongly or you no longer hold?

• 1:36:32Shaan Puri?

  An idea you've changed your mind on?

• 1:36:33Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:34Shaan Puri?

  Do you have one to lead us off, warm us up?

• 1:36:36Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:36:36Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:36:37Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 1:36:38Shaan Puri?

  All right. Thank you.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  You've got to give us a little, a little time.

• 1:36:41Speaker 00

  What process we've got.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  The longer you sit in silence, the more sophisticated what you're about to say sounds is a.

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  Definitely sounds, but not necessarily is.

• 1:36:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 00

  But it's all about appearances, Christopher. But I benefit from low expectations.

• 1:36:56Speaker 03

  Um, what the fuck have I changed my mind on?

• 1:37:00Shaan Puri?

  I think I just had it all right.

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a big one.

• 1:37:04Shaan Puri?

  I'm not a good guy to ask.

• 1:37:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's still right. It doesn't have to be something big. It could be something small. Uh, something that is relatively, it's just a bit surprising from like a cultural perspective is I, I think that there is increasing like cool alpha available in being a moderate Democrat, like a moderate left-leaning person at the moment. I think that the, the swing that you see, yeah, maybe people don't like the 5am call to prayer in New York from Mamdani. And like, maybe his optics are a bit bad. And maybe he's like a faux socialist. And maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a little bit whatever. But like, all of these people are like normalizing their memes in a way that isn't being mocked.

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  So like AOC breaks off her engagement, freezes her eggs, starts live streaming it. Yeah, people are like, well, this hypocrisy here because there were free vasectomies outside of the DNC last year. And like, you know, you don't really seem to care about birth rates and ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. But like, pretty quickly, it was like, yeah, but she looks hot in yoga clothes. You know, like she became her own meme a little bit and people, like she's got her place within the culture. And the same thing with Mamdani. Like, I think if you were to go two years ago, right, just before the 24 election, on the left, it was all about mockery, woke-ism, overreach, all of this stuff. And when I see, when I sort of track the world of left versus right, now when you think about what the right are talking about, it feels very boomer-y

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  because it feels out of touch. Because it's like, are you still bringing up like this thing about? Have we not already done the like, oh, woke people and progressive stuff? Like, it just feels like beating a dead horse. So, um, at least the positioning of people that are left of center now, that are moderate, not the insane ones, um, I think is less cringe to be associated with and seems to be like culturally more, except you're seeing more left-leaning comedians that are doing more left-leaning jokes. Like, uh, Mike Rice and Vittorio from the UK, both like, you know, uh, um, Jacob and Jake from Screen Raw. That's just the UK, right? And then you come over here and there's like a variety like Trevor Noah.

• 1:39:09Speaker 00

  These guys are more widely accepted. Not that Trevor's been like, he's a fucking superstar, obviously. But that, that was like a, not me changing my mind, but something that I've noticed as a cultural switch.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  Do you think that because whatever is sexy, cool, rock and roll is counter power, counter culture?

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  To a degree. It's, it's always sexier to be outside of the tent pissing on it than inside of the tent fighting against each other. Like you've seen the right has fractured itself into oblivion now because they're in power. Uh, and the left is like counterculture and they're pushing back against this thing. I also think that a good chunk of it is just Trump has not exactly showered himself in glory. He's maybe showered himself in something else. It's just not, it, it's such a face plant after face plant against the fundamental principles that lots of people wanted him for and white people want to get him in. And it's like all of this crossover and like people that were never, like never woken being like anti-Trump now, or at least like Trump skeptical, Trump adjacent, Trump skeptical adjacent. That's just like, I don't know. It's interesting for me to watch that because we really had a period, right?

• 1:40:10Speaker 00

  Of ascendancy in terms of progressiveness and the pushback against that, which was kind of like the atheism of the mid 2010s. Like atheism from like the 2000s into the mid 2010s was religion's kind of stupid man. And like, I'm like rational and stuff. And you've got like lesswrong.com and, you know, like the rationalist movement, long-termism, like, you know, scientism comes through. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and stuff. And then quite quickly that pivots to like, hmm, maybe quite a lot of baby got thrown out with that bath water. I'm not so sure that that was a great idea. And Latin mass is now the most descendant new type of religious service, even though no one, literally no one speaks the language that it's being spoken in. I think that's actually a feature, not a bug. I think the reason that people like it is that their scientism and their rationality

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  isn't able to get in the way of the experience. Because they're not, you know, they can't scrutinize or be skeptical or cynical or whatever about how it's working. And that, that swing, that same sort of sense, well, like the cool kid rational position was always to be, well, you know, there's like two types of, there's men and there's women. And like, these people are silly, whatever. And now that it's just less cool to still be beating that drum. Not that the fundamental, but it's like the fundamental principle has been accepted. And now we're looking at, okay, well, what's next? Like, is there a different way to do that? And I think, uh, people that assume that a like right-wing slam dunk in 28 is a certainty. Uh, I think that that's, that there's a potential for a really fucking huge upset for, for all of those people.

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  So that's at least something that I've noticed over the last.

• 1:41:41George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:42Shaan Puri?

  That's a good answer. I thought of one.

• 1:41:45George Mack?

  Go on.

• 1:41:45Shaan Puri?

  It's kind of like this. So what I changed my mind on about a very, like you were talking about religion. I'm not a very religious person. I posted a tweet the other day that I just said, do you believe in God, yes or no? And what do you think my like Twitter audience answered that?

• 1:41:58George Mack?

  Hmm.

• 1:41:59Shaan Puri?

  Percentage said yes.

• 1:42:00George Mack?

  I'd say thirty five percent.

• 1:42:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, forty.

• 1:42:04Shaan Puri?

  Thirty, forty.

• 1:42:05Speaker 00

  I was gonna go sixty.

• 1:42:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're close. It was like seventy five percent. Said yes. I was pretty stunned by that. Seventy four, yeah, seventy four percent said yes.

• 1:42:14Speaker 00

  Three thousand votes as well.

• 1:42:15Shaan Puri?

  Three thousand votes, which is like my audience is, I would have guessed leaned a different way.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:20Shaan Puri?

  And I've bumped into a lot of people, specifically, there was a guy who came on the podcast that was talking about, he had studied and read

• 1:42:30Shaan Puri?

  of people who had had near death encounters, N D Es. And so it was somebody who died for fifteen minutes and was resuscitated. Or it was like, you know, they were out and they were on the brink and then they came back. And it's like, not a lot of these people, but they're fascinating. So people go study like, what'd you see? What happened? And one of the interesting things that he says is commonly it's like alien spottings where different people say the same thing. They, you all say it flew this way, like that's, how did you guys all coordinate that answer? So the thing that popped up was this idea of your life flashes before your eyes, but not in the traditional sense. So when people say that, oh, you know, my life flashed before my eyes, they think you're watching some replay of your life or highlight reel of your life, all the key moments of your life.

• 1:43:14Shaan Puri?

  And actually, what these people say is the opposite, that basically

• 1:43:20Shaan Puri?

  you see the events of your life, but from the point of view of the other person in the scene. Like, so if you're having a conversation, if I was having a conversation with you, when I, I would see the same conversation, but from your perspective. And it brings up this like really interesting idea of what is heaven and hell? So like, imagine you had left people these amazing encounters with you and you'd left them feeling good. Then it would look, it would feel like heaven. Cause you would get this replay, this barrage of the wonderful impact you had on all these other people. And if you were an asshole, you would feel, you would see yourself and feel from their point of view.

• 1:43:56Speaker 00

  How you might.

• 1:43:56Shaan Puri?

  How you made them feel. And it's karma, but like productized. It's like the actual like manifestation to like the shot version of karma, where you had to blitz through and experience that. And it would feel like hell. And so like, I haven't looked into it. I haven't gone red. Like he mentioned a couple of books and what I'm gonna go read. But it was the first time the idea of heaven and hell didn't feel like a thing that I would tell my kids to scare them into behaving well. It was like, if that actually does, it does happen. And I've experienced things like deja vu that I can't explain. I'm like, I've, I've viscerally felt this. I don't know what the science is, but that shit has happened to me many times. So this idea of like your life flash before your eyes or seeing something like, you know, very quickly in this like weird lucid dreaming type of way. I've kind of experienced that in deja vu.

• 1:44:41Shaan Puri?

  If that's what happens when you die, and I just kind of, I almost like the idea of this like visual karma, you know, this, this blitz through your life. And again, it's kind of like, I don't know if it's true or not, but it definitely serves me if I believed that that was, if I kept that thought in mind as I walk through life. It's a very different thing than the me centered version of like, who am I? What was my life? How is this going? What are all the best things I did? Like, it's such a like amateur looking way of thinking about life versus this other way.

• 1:45:08George Mack?

  Question. Who do you know that you think would experience the most heaven at the end of their life? If that was the sort of experience that?

• 1:45:21Shaan Puri?

  I've told you, I told you yesterday about my, my friend Ramon. You know Ramon? Ramon is like, this absolute like gem of a guy. He's this single father. He's like the best friend to any of us. Like, just shows up for everybody. Yeah, almost to a literal extent, my, my buddy had a baby and he heard that they were going to labor and like, just bought, before he could even think, just bought a plane ticket, came down, showed up at the hospital. Like, and was just like with gifts and like had, you know, they were like, hey, we're like still, you know, she's kind of still naked. Like, he goes to their house and just like decorates, you know, he's just like an incredible friend. He's, I was telling Chris, like, he not only coached like his kids' sports team, but even when his kid kind of graduated, he was such a good coach that the community, like he kind of realized like, if I, if I don't do this, nobody's really step up.

• 1:46:06Shaan Puri?

  So he just kept coaching other kids for no reason. He's just constantly been that guy for other people. And I told Chris, this idea of greatness is not accomplishing something great, it's being great. Just like showing up and being great, right here in this situation with the barista, with the old lady in line, with this, with that. And I think that if it was like, if you flashed a million of those small things, it'd be like those flip books where any one page looks like nothing. But the whole thing, when you see it, you're like, wow, that was incredible. And I think his life would look like that.

• 1:46:34George Mack?

  Wow. If I had to guess, he has like quite high theory of mind. So he could probably think how Sean thinks. Or is that kind of theory of mine, it seems to come online around about four or five? So I'm sure you guys have experienced this when you're watching the TV. So there's a three year old in the room, the three year old will happily walk in front of the TV. And they genuinely can't comprehend that your views aren't the same. Like their world is the worldview. And there's something about four or five that it comes online. But what was interesting, I look at theory of mind kind of like writing, because writing comes online about four or five. And most forty two year olds have a higher theory of mind than a five year old. But also William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth at forty two.

• 1:47:17George Mack?

  So like, there's like, it can still keep on like compounding. And I think like a lot of people with theory, like most forty two year olds will have a better theory of mind than a five year old. But they kind of might think, and it's so easy to fall into that barista is this kind of automaton.

• 1:47:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:47:32George Mack?

  That's getting in the way of my life. It's messed up the coffee. Oh no, this person was up till three AM last night.

• 1:47:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:47:38George Mack?

  I rent overdue and trying to see the world. Not only is, not only are you a little bit more empathetic, it's actually a more accurate worldview. You kind of move to like the earth being the center of the universe to know where the earth is. And not only is that actually humbling, which is kind of the whole grateful blah, blah, blah shit. But it's actually the accurate model of physics.

• 1:47:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:47:55George Mack?

  Therefore, you're more likely to make more accurate predictions as well.

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just on that one life hack that I've never actually thought about properly, but is, I've just like reverse engineered from the last couple of years of life. Every so often leaving an absurdly big tip, if you can afford it, is I think about the times that I've done that. I still think about them now, not in a very gratuitous way. There was one time that I, I know you've got a story from Dubai when you left Dubai, which kind of inspired this. I was in New York on tour last year and this lady came in and she was talking to us about how she'd basically finished the night shift and it was ten AM, ten thirty AM.

• 1:48:40Speaker 00

  And this was the, the double shift, but going from night to day as opposed to from day to night. And we left like, I left a very big tip and I was like, just can we make sure that it goes to the person that was the server? I did it before a podcast a couple of years ago in Florida when I was near Chris Bumstead's house in a Denny's. So the guy was just like so great and, and, and, you know, really, really lovely guy. That just as a life hack generally, I'm aware this is not as big as maybe getting on a plane and going and decorating somebody's house. And it is kind of transactional and flippant. It doesn't still require that much emotional involvement. But if you're on the path to learning to be a better, more pro-social human, I think this is a good, hey, like if you can do a thirty percent or a hundred percent tip on, on a meal, like

• 1:49:25Speaker 00

  that, I like the idea of that more than I like the idea of regularly doing twenty five percent tips.

• 1:49:31Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:49:32Speaker 00

  Because the impact of that is going to be so much more.

• 1:49:34Shaan Puri?

  So this is crazy. You said that, like even when I was just trying to explain, like it's like, try to explain why Gandhi is great. It's like, um, hold on, I don't try and pick random examples. I can't even think of it. But last night, we're hanging out, we're on this boys' trip. And so for the boy's trip, each guy kind of contributed one segment of the trip. So it's like, I was like, oh, we're gonna go do this. One guy's like, we're gonna go to a Muay Thai gym and spar each other. We're gonna go to this, to Barton Springs and go swim, whatever. And so one of the things he did extra, he was like, he brought a thousand dollars of cash. And he's like, you know, this is a thing that I do with my son. And he's like, you know, maybe once every couple of weeks, we'll go get some cash at the ATM. And he's like, I just want him to learn like the joy of giving. And so he's like, we spend the rest of the day, we start in the morning.

• 1:50:14Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, we spend the rest of the day, like trying to figure out how we can give this to like light anybody up to really like make a difference in anybody's life that we see. And he's like, sometimes we just go buy dog food and we give it away to the dogs in the shelter. Sometimes we pay for groceries and just, we stay here till, till it runs out, but like, you know, whatever. And he's like, you know, I just do this because I want my son to learn that. But I was his son yesterday where he's like, you know, he hands us the money. And I'm like, it was, this is the hardest part. It was harder than sparring was figuring out how to do this. It was like a lot of pressure.

• 1:50:45Speaker 00

  How do I give this?

• 1:50:46Shaan Puri?

  How do I give this? And how do I do it well? And how do I do it like actually with some grace and some poise and not like make the other person feel weird? And how do I get over my own hesitations? Like this is literally his money he's handing to me. It's for this purpose, but I'm like, oh no, not that. Something better than that. They're not gonna use it well. It's like, what the hell's wrong with me, right? Like building this muscle, I really haven't used in this way. So I totally agree. And you know, we ended up where we took the like, you know, the bike, pedicab things at night. So we're like cruising around Austin. And the woman happened, we kind of already given some of the money away, whatever. But she was like, she was telling us like, you know, she had lost her job and she's like, yeah. So I just started doing this. It's like, I don't really have a better idea yet, but like, all right, I'll get on this bike and I'll pedal and I'll think while I'm pedaling and I'll enjoy, I'll meet some cool people.

• 1:51:28Shaan Puri?

  And so, you know, it was so fulfilling just to give a little bit and give without hesitation. But you're, you're right, like.

• 1:51:36Shaan Puri?

  That's a very practical way to do this thing that like, sounds good in theory, to like, be a good person. Okay, but how? It's like, well, here's like, different moments, different ways. And it's like, such a simple one, anyone can access.

• 1:51:47Speaker 00

  Can you tell that story of when you left Dubai? I don't think you've ever told this publicly.

• 1:51:51George Mack?

  Cause it's one of those weird ones. Um, but when I was in, um, I was leaving, I was in Dubai for a few months. I was leaving for the summer. And whilst I was there, I was in this hotel building and there was a gym next door. And I'd walk to the gym each day and there was a guy on like the parking attendant, who I would see each day. You know, some people, you get like a nod, he would give me like a salute each time. It's like a different thing each time. And we never spoke to another, but every day I'd walk to the gym, I'd see him, I'd give him a wave. And he'd give me like that, or he'd give me a different salute. And I'd just say, this guy, I'd always have a bad Zoom call or something could go wrong. I'd see this guy, I go, this is great. We did it for months. We never spoke, but I'd just do it. I mean, I need to give that guy a tip before I go.

• 1:52:31George Mack?

  And I was, uh, on, in bed on my final night and I was watching, um, Liam Neeson Taken. And my flight was in six hours. It's the wrong film to watch when your flight is in six hours, cause I'm fucking wired. I'm like, I want to be Liam Neeson. I'm like, oh shit. I go, I forgot to give him this guy the tip. I'm like, am I gonna leave? A flight in six hours. Am I gonna go and leave to go and give this guy the tip? My, yes, I am. So I get an Uber, pull it up. I don't even know if he's gonna be on the shift. It's like 11:00 PM. So I get an Uber, wait for the Uber to come, gets delayed, the Uber gets cancelled. Another Uber comes. I'm like, right, my flight's like five hours now. Getting an Uber, 20 minutes down to go and see this old gym I used to go to, to see if this guy's there. And I'm wandering around, there's loads of people at bars and nightclubs. I'm like, okay, I'm literally just trying to find this guy.

• 1:53:16George Mack?

  I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking. And I go, I see him. And I go, right. And I go to the cash machine. And I got out, cause at the time I didn't have a crazy amount of money. And I was like, okay, I'm just gonna give him that. So I walk over to him and go, I know we never speak, but you give me a lovely salute every single day. Here you go. I shake his hand and walk away. And immediately someone's behind me. And then, uh, he's, um, uh, I'm getting an Uber back. So he hasn't even really looked at the money.

• 1:53:42George Mack?

  He then, uh, carries on talking to the person who comes through. I'm waiting for this Uber and I go, I don't think he even saw what I've given him. And I go and like, walk back and he's just broken down, like in floods of tears. And we just fucking pug it out. And it was, I still think about that story. It still gives me goosebumps a bit. And it was like, I don't know, it was absurd amount of money, but it was, uh, it was in hindsight, I should have given more.

• 1:54:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:54:06Speaker 00

  I did, I love that story. I really do love that story. Change your mindy? Anything?

• 1:54:12Speaker 03

  Man, my stuff, this is not gonna be anywhere near as profound. When I was thinking about, when you first asked it, it was just all like tool, AI stuff that came to my head, like the, the last couple of weeks with us, like Muse rollout stuff, like what does everybody need an agent for? When, when like you're running and, and like building things every day and you're still running out of use cases? I think I changed my mind on how useful people are finding that stuff. It's not like I changed my mind, but it, it just turned out to be true that people are finding incredible utility from this stuff.

• 1:54:43Shaan Puri?

  I've not paid attention much to the Muse stuff. Is it, is it the?

• 1:54:48Speaker 03

  A Facebook built agent tool that connects to your Instagram or whatever else. And like instantly, instantly looks at your email and it's like, okay, you could be doing this, this and this. Did you know you've been paying for these subscriptions this long? And you could, you could like cancel this thing. You can enter this giveaway. You can, and I've got friends that are like messaging me about like, this thing just did like all of these amazing things for me. And my, my, you know, my technology bias from two months ago will be like, oh, this is just like, nobody's gonna find a use case for this. And they just, the, the crocs, the croc, the croc, uh,

• 1:55:24Speaker 00

  Dump that an Asian guy with a mullet, dude. That's the lesson.

• 1:55:27Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, I've been, I was a, I was a pessimist on, uh, like how useful that would be.

• 1:55:32Shaan Puri?

  You know, one interesting thing about that, I gave it to my wife and my wife's not really like an early adopter of tech, you know, if I tell her to download an app. The, uh, like not Muse, but Instinct, it's like the same thing. It's like, uh, this Instinct is like the hot, like, startup version of this. And then Facebook's trying to do it. It's like back when Snapchat came out and Facebook was trying to copy it. And so I gave her access and I was like, hey, just use this like it's an assistant. It can do anything. Watch, just like, tell it to go ask if you, if the state of California owes you any money. And then it like comes back two minutes later. It's like, yeah, you actually owed $2,000. Uh, would you like me to file the claim? And it'll just get a check mailed to you. And she's like, yes. So, you know, it's like, I'm just trying to show her, I'm like, watch this.

• 1:56:10Speaker 00

  And that actually works?

• 1:56:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. Everybody should do that. It's auto prompt. You should just, that should be the onboarding. It's like, just ask this question, cause almost all of us are owed money in some back way.

• 1:56:20Speaker 00

  What was she owed from?

• 1:56:21Shaan Puri?

  It'll be like a tax state refund. It'll be like a franchise board thing. It'll be, you know.

• 1:56:26Speaker 00

  So you had to load files in and can do some.

• 1:56:28Speaker 03

  No, you literally just say login with Gmail and it'll just rip through.

• 1:56:31Shaan Puri?

  Or it'll just take your name and it'll go search in these databases and it'll just look up like, oh yeah.

• 1:56:35Speaker 00

  You know, you can do this. This is fucking insane.

• 1:56:38Shaan Puri?

  So that's like an easy one. But like, you know, I was like, oh, watch this. Like, you keep asking me all these bullshit questions. Just ask this, like, uh, hey, what time is the soccer game on Sunday? And where is it? We're gonna have time to go from there to there between. It's like, well, yeah, it has your calendar. It knows exactly where the soccer game is, gonna tell you. And then it's gonna actually recommend, like, that morning, it'll be like, don't forget to pack the red jerseys because soccer today, we're away. You know, it's like shit like that. So we did our, like, it helped my wife plan, uh, my daughter's birthday party. And then she, so I, I was trying to like sell her on the utility. I'm like, look how useful this is. Try this, try this, try this. She's liking it. And then, uh, after the birthday party, she goes, okay, I'm blown away. I go, well, it helped you plan it? She goes, no, look. And Instinct had texted her, um, how was the birthday party? I hope it was awesome. With like a heart emoji.

• 1:57:23Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, and she's like, that's amazing. Like so thoughtful. And I was like, oh shit, that's gonna be a whole other dimension to this. Like the supportive boyfriend DNA that none of us who are building this shit, think about really at all. But the people who do, it makes a big difference to check in and be like, like, I have a friend who's gave it to their mother-in-law. And they connected to like their bank account and everything. Cause they're like, this is awesome. I could do so much. And they connected to a bank account that had $0 in the like checking account. And, um, it just goes, it's okay. I'm like, and it just gave her like a little pep talk. It's like, I, it's okay. Like, I, that's okay. No problem. Like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And she was like, I love this. I really love this. This is actually like, uh, this is actually like a no judgment. Always, always there.

• 1:58:08Speaker 03

  People don't, people don't do hard things because you don't, you have to face somebody that you don't know to talk about.

• 1:58:14Speaker 00

  Facing the things that you're ashamed of or nervous about.

• 1:58:17Speaker 03

  Taxes and those kinds of like bills and things. I didn't do this form right.

• 1:58:21Speaker 00

  It also goes to show just how low the bar is for being a good friend.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Hmm, that's true.

• 1:58:27Speaker 00

  Right. That, that, something that all of us agree hallucinates and can randomly break out to, into Mandarin during a conversation with Piers Morgan or whatever. Like, there's lots of flaws in this and it's hardly like super duper, and you know, emotionally tuned in. Is able to do something that emotionally lots of people feel is lacking in their life. So holy fuck. Like, maybe it wasn't that we need to be able to automate managing your calendar. It's just that not enough people say, you've done a good job today, mate, and giving you a pat on the back, even if it's digitally. That's like, yeah, that's kind of sad, but also I guess kind of great.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  Do you know Shane Mack?

• 1:59:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:06Speaker 03

  He started a company years ago.

• 1:59:08Speaker 00

  My dad.

• 1:59:09Speaker 03

  Huh?

• 1:59:09Speaker 00

  Carry on.

• 1:59:09Speaker 03

  He started a company years ago, based on, um, something he did for his employees at the time, which was like, I think they had a great year or something. He wanted to like give bonuses to everybody. Like, what do I get them? And he got everybody an assistant.

• 1:59:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:59:23Speaker 03

  So he'd get like 10 assistants and like have them like split across the staff. And it's like, it's like, it's the best response to anything I ever, ever did for my employees. And then he ended up founding a company off that, which was, um, uh, military spouses as assistants.

• 1:59:40Shaan Puri?

  So a husband is deployed, wife is here, wants something to do from home, part-time, military wife assistance. Yeah, it's, it's a great.

• 1:59:48Speaker 00

  Presumably as well.

• 1:59:49Shaan Puri?

  Squared away, I think.

• 1:59:50Speaker 00

  A fucking operator, like a serious operator too. Like, you're not gonna be in a relationship with a guy that flies fighter jets.

• 1:59:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:59:55Speaker 00

  And not be like competent at home. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, it's so good. Like derivative military, like just military adjacent people are better than most normal humans at trying to get shit done.

• 2:00:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:07Speaker 00

  What about, what have you changed your mind on?

• 2:00:10George Mack?

  Um, oh, one of them is, uh, like, I think a lot of people have this that come from advertising or marketing or sales. So if you kind of split the world into two people, you've got the engineers and you've got the, the people that sell it.

• 2:00:24Speaker 00

  Shape rotators and work cells.

• 2:00:25George Mack?

  And I think, and both of those people can run into two issues where they become the man with a hammer and they see everything through that. And particularly people that go through like a performance marketing hole, they end up just seeing the customer as something that clicks, something that gives them things. Um, and the big thing for me was really kind of going back to, well, what makes a good product and kind of forgetting advertising or marketing, the same way like someone who's learned kickboxing can kind of forget it, go and do jiu jitsu and then come back and you combine them. It's actually quite a useful combination. And for me, again, product market fit's one of those words where it's a little bit like taste. It's a little bit like, what, what is that? Um, and they'll be like, well, your MPS score, if your MPS score says

• 2:01:08George Mack?

  that 40% of people like hate the product, like what, I might, give me something like I can drop on my foot, like give me a tangible thing. And the big takeaway I had was, um, I got to know James from Element, um, who's one of the smartest entrepreneurs I know. And he's like, also annoyingly like a great human being. Like he's the loveliest guy. And, uh, we kind of worked together. I helped him like write a little project and we hung out for like five days. And I realized the realization about product market fit, which was that if James sat me down at the end of those five days and just said, George, can I bring that to you? Like, yeah, sure, mate. Of course. And he goes, I fucking hate you. He goes, if he said, I think this about your girlfriend. I think this about your mom. I think this about your family dog. I think it's all atrocious. I hate your

• 2:01:51George Mack?

  country. I'd be kind of sat there for like four days going, that was one of the worst experiences in my whole life. But come Friday, I'd be back on drink element.com ordering the watermelon salt because the product's that good. And that's my realization that product mark, like true product market fit is, could you like fuck everything up and people would still buy from you? And the big lesson I actually had from a marketing lens was about five, six years ago, you'll probably know this, Sean. There was a moment in time that everyone's forgotten about now, where Apple released this new iOS change that was supposed to impact Facebook ads post the whole Cambridge analytica stuff. And it's just a storm in a teacup felt everything at the time and now everybody forgets it. But it was this idea that Facebook ads are going to die and all these businesses are

• 2:02:33George Mack?

  going to close down. And so many advertisers were furious. This is an example of antitrust. This is an example of monopoly. This is an example of abuses of power. How could Apple be allowed to do this? And the US government isn't doing anything. That's what all the advertisers were saying. And I didn't see one. I didn't see one give up their iPhone. I was like, that's product market fit.

• 2:02:56Speaker 00

  It's so good that I'll buy it in spite of hate.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's like the Amazon box phenomenon. You know that? It's like complain about Amazon's business practices, but have like 10 boxes show up at your house every day.

• 2:03:06Shaan Puri?

  Actually Buffett used this. So Buffett made the biggest gains of Buffett's life was, uh, the best investment he ever made was his Apple investment, like six years ago or something like that, which is crazy because Apple's so obvious. It's not like he found some obscure company called in the, in Nebraska that nobody's ever heard of. He just literally looked at Apple, which was like the third biggest company in the world at the time or whatever, and just put a huge check into it and grossed like this huge return. And this is like, the iPhone had come out 10 years prior. Like it was no surprise. And they were like, you know, Warren, you never invest in tech usually. In fact, you were really good friends with Bill Gates and you famously didn't invest in Microsoft, even though he told you to and others did. And you've said like, I just didn't understand it. He

• 2:03:49Shaan Puri?

  goes, oh yeah, because Apple's, it's not about tech. It's about brand and it's about product. He goes, and so Warren is famous for, he would go like kind of stand in a store and he would ask people questions. So like one of his other wins was American Express when they had this big crisis, like there was a big fraud that happened and American Express had like, American Express had lent this guy a bunch of money because he said he had like a salad oil dressing. And then like later they opened up the barrels and there was just sea water inside. And they were like, oh shit, we lent this guy all this money and there's no salad oil to like collateralize. And he stood in a store and watched people swiping and he talked to the cashier. He's like, do you like distrust if somebody's going to use American Express now? They're like, American Express? That's, that's like, of course. I like, I trust American Express with my, it's always going to go through. So he

• 2:04:33Shaan Puri?

  realized people were mispricing it. Same thing with Apple. He was like, um, if you have somebody with an iPhone, um, there isn't, like, you have to pry it from their dead, lifeless fingers to get them to switch by default. And he's like, that is a unbelievable thing. They have unbelievable pricing power. And so he made all his money just by like talking to people that I, who were iPhone users and realizing the extent of the, uh, the switching cost to them mentally in their head.

• 2:04:57Speaker 00

  Forget even how much you might hate the person that's doing it. Cause Kanye West is like the canonical example of that. Like how many ways can you put both feet in your mouth over a decade's period and then still sell out stadiums and have bangers? People will listen to his music in spite of hating him and still not be able to not like it.

• 2:05:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:05:16Speaker 00

  Um, but the thing with Apple that's really impressive is they've even torpedoed their own product. But the keyboard makes me feel like I've got cerebral palsy. Like I can't type on the keyboard. The keyboard's gone to fuck. Uh, Siri has gotten worse.

• 2:05:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:30Speaker 00

  As far as I can see, over the last sort of five to 10 years, uh, the Apple intelligence thing was a complete flop. I hate the liquid glass. Like I hate that, but they had so much headroom.

• 2:05:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:05:40Speaker 00

  And the integration is so good. The fact that I can have my notes here on this and like everything, my passwords are, it's so perfectly put together in the ecosystem that even with doing that, and we've talked about this as well, that there's the inertia of having vestigial past love for someone, a creator that releases a course and then just face plants over and over again, like the creator equivalent of a Kanye West. And you're like, fuck, I guess I'll still listen to them. I guess I'll still watch their stuff because there's just so much goodwill that's brought up. And it's interesting, like how big is the bank account of this person that they can continue to withdraw from socially?

• 2:06:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:06:17Speaker 00

  Before they get into negative equity. And it's like, some people essentially just have an infinite money glitch, an infinite social money glitch. And there's no amount of foot in mouthing that they can do that doesn't cause them to like.

• 2:06:29Shaan Puri?

  Didn't Trump even say this? He's like, I could walk down Fifth Street and take out a gun and shoot somebody in the head and they would still love me. He said something like this, right? Like when he, in his first campaign, it was like a crazy statement.

• 2:06:40Speaker 00

  Dana, Dana White's got plot armor in the same way. Like who else can get into a, a domestic altercation in public with their wife?

• 2:06:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:06:47Speaker 00

  And just then whatever, the next day or the day after, just own it and be like, wasn't me at my best, wasn't her at our best, spoken to our sons about it, you know, lover, blah, blah, blah. And then next day he's like, right. So UFC two or three. And you're like, oh my God, this guy's just got a lot of self-awareness, which is Alex O'Connor's idea that you can get away with anything on the internet if you're sufficiently self-aware. Um, Brian Johnson can get away with anything on the internet as long as he's sufficiently self-aware. Mike O'Hern is the same thing.

• 2:07:17Shaan Puri?

  It's like, do you think Trump is self-aware?

• 2:07:19Speaker 00

  Uh, that's different. I think that's conviction. That's conviction and congruence.

• 2:07:23Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. It's a barbell. Either zero self-awareness or self-awareness.

• 2:07:31Speaker 00

  Hey, boys, I love you all. Where should people go to keep, you've got a new project out?

• 2:07:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:36Speaker 00

  Where should people go?

• 2:07:36Speaker 03

  Just go to Twitter. Jack Butcher on Twitter, please.

• 2:07:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:07:40Shaan Puri?

  Get off Twitter, social media, go read a book. Good book. I recommend it's Think on These Things by Krishnamurti. It's a good book.

• 2:07:47Speaker 00

  Heck yeah.

• 2:07:47George Mack?

  If you like good books, um, pieagency.com forward slash books, all my favorite books.

• 2:07:52Speaker 00

  Boys, I love you. This is fucking awesome. This stuff rolls. And that's it.

• 2:07:55George Mack?

  Let's go.

• 2:07:55Speaker 00

  Thank you. Goodbye, my beauties. Blam, blam. Dude.

• 2:07:59George Mack?

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.