Mental Models 103 | George Mack | Modern Wisdom Podcast 178

Long time friend of the show and all round great human George Mack joins me today as we revisit the world of decision making. Mental Models are tools you can use to improve your ability to effectively make decisions. Today we are upgrading our minds as we delve into some of mine & George's favourite mental models from Warren Buffett, Nassim Taleb, Naval Ravikant, Winston Churchill, Tobias Lutke and many more. Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Follow George on Twitter - https://twitter.com/george__mack Sign Up to George's Newsletter - https://eepurl.com/g37gVL Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #mentalmodels #navalravikant #nassimtaleb - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00George Mack?

  I also think that you discard the wisdom of the past. So Taleb uses that example of the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. And not only do you discard the wisdom of the past, you also discard, and probably even more importantly, the wisdom and the value of the future. Let's say in 2009, somebody was talking to you about cryptocurrency. He was just so against the consensus. And if you have such a closed mind of where there's been studies so far, or where Goldman Sachs are putting their money, you're just always going to get average results because you're following the crowd. But you rarely ever get to see like specific knowledge, like the intricacies of like frontiers and nuance. And that's why I love hanging around with furious people because they'll tell you like the weirdest new thing that's happening.

• 0:49Chris Williamson?

  George McGill's long awaited return to Modern Wisdom. How are you, brother?

• 0:55George Mack?

  I'm good, I'm good. How are you?

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  Very, very well. The crowd has been anticipating this one for a long time. You feeling ready?

• 1:05George Mack?

  Yeah, as ready as you can be, I guess. Let's go.

• 1:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for sure. So my first question, you are currently the title holder of Modern Wisdom's most ever played episode. So just looking at the best played, you're first, then Dr. Eric Feigelding explaining about a global pandemic, two episodes with Morgan Housel, who used to write for The Motley Fool, Ben Greenfield, Brian McKenzie, then another episode with you, Derek Sivers, Jon Assaraf and Aubrey Marcus. So that that comes out the top 10. Why do you think our episode, our first one specifically, and then the second one, why do you think that resonated so hard?

• 1:45George Mack?

  Bot farms mainly, but bot farms everywhere. It's a two to three month operation involving about 10 to 20,000 pounds, VPNs, different IP addresses, because you need it all to come from like individual phones as well. But it was well worth the effort, yeah.

• 2:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because we also made our episode was the fourth best podcast of 2019 as voted by Podcast Notes audience. So the bot farm also useful for that as well.

• 2:18George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, they do. They do all sorts. I'm trying to now divers into politics as well. See how that goes.

• 2:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so let's say that someone hasn't listened to our first two episodes, which they should totally go back and check out. And let's say that they haven't. What is a mental model? Give us the Twitter bio description of mental models.

• 2:42George Mack?

  I always actually struggle with this one. I guess the way I view it is like metaphors, analogies, or just ways of taking principles from different disciplines and then almost trying to keep them in your own mental toolkit that you can, that you can apply. I just find it a fun way of trying to put together a world with trillions of different inputs.

• 3:06Chris Williamson?

  I get it. Yeah, I think the analogy you used on the first episode was if you think of your brain as the operating system, mental models are the different apps that you can install to give you functionality and to improve your decision making. And that's now, although it's copyrighted, George Mcguil 2019, I've been using that as like my, my onliner to. So let's get started. What have you been thinking about recently? What are you dropping on us today?

• 3:32George Mack?

  Yeah, I'm just, just thinking, I've got a few things here. So the one, I was trying to think what we haven't been through as well, so try and keep things a bit fresh.

• 3:40Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 3:41George Mack?

  Otherwise it's just, it's just a repeat, right? A repeat after a repeat. So the one that I've been thinking about a lot, just in general, because it, it comes so, it comes so difficult to me as a person. And maybe it was like a certain generation I was brought up upon of like leverage and what that like actually means, like the ability, the way I view leverage is similar to way, I think it's Peter Thiel talks about technology, which is the ability to do more with less. And that for me, of a generation who was brought up on YouTube videos, talking about 16 hour workdays and like hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, is a very hard concept to sort of wrap your head around.

• 4:26George Mack?

  And when it, when it started to begin to click for me, because I was always. I was always one of those people who want to talk about how hard they work and you realise a lot of that's just signalling, it's just bollocks, it's not actually achieving a result. Was the, it might still be up there, but there's something called Steve Jobs' lost tapes. Have you seen that?

• 4:44Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 4:45George Mack?

  It's fantastic. So it's an interview with Steve Jobs, I think, just before he goes back to Apple for the second time. I mean, like nineteen ninety-four, maybe. And the interview was lost for years. They only found it in like two thousand and sixteen, two thousand and fifty, around about then. And there's a bit in it where, I think he's used this metaphor elsewhere as well, but there's a bit in it where he talks about reading something when he was early on, like a study in Scientific America, where they looked at the efficiency of locomotion for all the animals.

• 5:22George Mack?

  And the, I think it was the condor, which is a bird that won, and the human being, which is the sort of, I don't know, we like to think of ourselves as probably the best animal on the planet, right? Look at all the shit we've done. We was ranked like around about a third way down the list. But what was interesting, Steve says that somebody had the genius to like test a human being on a bicycle. And a human being on a bicycle beat the condor, absolutely destroyed every single animal on there. And you realise that that's what human beings are, we're just toolmakers, right?

• 5:51Chris Williamson?

  Bro, that is so good. So the condor, what is condor type of bird? Is it like a big-legged bird or something?

• 5:57George Mack?

  It's a bird, yeah. It's like an eagle-looking bird. No, like, like a flying bird, like the old kind of birds.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's how leverage works by implementing tools. Because it enhances your ability, your natural abilities are then augmented.

• 6:16George Mack?

  And then bigger, Naval has like four forms of leverage that always stick with me. So you have, in terms of like modern, like more business side of things, you've got the traditional ones, which are like people leverage, i.e. Chris has a staff of fifty working for him. And therefore he can essentially put out the strategy, put out the systems, put out the products in place and then those. Fifty people provide a service or build things for him. Therefore, his outputs therefore then become even greater than his inputs. You have like financial leverage, which is like the Buffett style of things where you invest X and you get a return of Y. And you use your money as a form of leverage. So those are the two old school ones. But the two new ones, which are fascinating are

• 7:01George Mack?

  code based leverage, which is obviously powering like Skype as we speak right now, or any like, like you've got Shopify, you've got Amazon, all these forms of leverage where Jeff Bezos or Toby, who runs Shopify, aren't working harder than us. But they have code, they have machines, or in my case bots, working 24/7 for them. That works way harder. And then you've got the final one, which I guess is where you specialize in is like media leverage that rather than us just having this conversation and only us being able to hear in it, you have the ability now to be able to distribute it en masse to lots of people without putting in any extra work. There's no extra cost of replication for what you're doing.

• 7:42George Mack?

  So yeah, those are the four forms of leverage. And once you, once you actually look around and then any like business you go in, you go, oh shit, there's like people leverage, there's media leverage, there's code leverage. And you begin to see it everywhere. And it's fascinating.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  That's super cool. Yeah, you're totally correct. Everybody knows this, right? I guess there must be a network leverage as well. I don't know how that would fall in, but

• 8:02George Mack?

  It's another one.

• 8:04Chris Williamson?

  Someone saying, I love the Modern Wisdom Podcast. That host Chris is handsome and great. And then telling their friend.

• 8:11George Mack?

  One of my bots.

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but one of your bots, but one of your bots says that.

• 8:16Chris Williamson?

  That is not me putting in the work to source that new listener, right? The fact that that episode, that first episode between us, it's not had any paid ads behind it, but for some reason, because of the bots, it's done so well. And it's gone and done that. Also, to the people listening,

• 8:34Chris Williamson?

  it might be worth playing a game of either Naval Bingo or Buffett Bingo today.

• 8:39George Mack?

  And I'm Munga Bingo as well.

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  Munga Bingo, yeah. And I'm clocking up, I'm clocking up one for Naval and one for, one for Buffett so far. So how can people perhaps use leverage? You know, I'm not, I'm not Jeff Bezos. People listening ain't Jeff Bezos. Are there any ways that people can apply leverage, like just at a small scale or in an immediate sort of example in their life?

• 9:01George Mack?

  Um, I, I, I obviously it's so case specific to every individual. And I think sometimes an issue with ideas like this is that people try and like mass distribute it to everybody and it's, it's so case dependent. But I just think like looking at trying to reduce your inputs whilst also maximizing your outputs. So however that may be, right? Whether that's via media and you have a greater audience that way, or you hire people who you trust that then obviously work for you and then you can try and increase things that way. Um, I think, yeah, I think it's so subject specific, but I think the two ones that are only seem to be getting greater and greater are uh, media leverage and code leverage. But I also think like brand leverage. I was, uh,

• 9:47George Mack?

  I was watching an interview, the Rogan and Elon Musk interview.

• 9:50Chris Williamson?

  The new one?

• 9:51George Mack?

  The new one, the new one. And I caught myself like, obviously, I mean, you can, you, you end up on a Twitter game where you can find, I find it quite interesting where you find people who obviously think he's the, the, the smartest man ever. And then you have like the trolls or, or maybe rational critics, I don't know, who criticize various different things. But even I caught myself like falling into the brand where I'd listen to the interview and literally anything I, I'd hear him say, I was then trying to rationalize it into genius. And don't get me wrong, a lot of it probably is. But that power of like a brand and like he has, Oprah has, or even like the, the most controversial example where Trump has now, where people use these brands as a form of leverage and it works for them. And they can say something that if somebody else said, all of us, it can be interpreted as genius, or they get a second chance, or they have defenders for them just around a

• 10:35George Mack?

  like a brand, so to speak. And I think brands is another form of leverage that doesn't get discussed enough because it's, it's hard to pinpoint, it's hard to really explain, but we all like feel it.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  It's the icing on the cake which makes everyone presume that it's going to taste good before they even eat it. I think that's one way to look at it, right? That you, you see this cake and you're like, oh my God. Not only is this cake coming out of that bakery that I've eaten at before and everyone else eats at this bakery and they all think it's mint. And I've eaten there before and I think it's mint. And this cake looks so good. It's got all the trappings of the previous ones. But obviously, as you've hit on there, that can become kind of a little bit of a Trojan horse that delivers something that's got less substance. You hit it with a hammer and you find out it's hollow inside as opposed to filled with delicious jam and cream filling,

• 11:25Chris Williamson?

  which is what we want. You've touched on two things which link into, I haven't got that many points. This is a platform for you to do your thing and to drop some bombs. But I've got two things that link into what you've come up with there. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna give a couple of bits. We haven't done multiplied by zero yet. Have you heard of that mental model?

• 11:45George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, it's an interest, it's just, it's like, it's not really a complex model. It's a real simple, like, everybody, like, year three maths, I guess, knows that you can have 10 billion times 322 million, add 52 billion. But if you then take that number and multiply it by zero, you end up with zero. So I guess it's kind of Taleb's thing of like, try and avoid absolute ruin, try and avoid, yeah, that multiplier by zero, i.e. if you get caught as an athlete doing steroids, you're gone, basically.

• 12:26Chris Williamson?

  Regardless of talent, regardless of whatever's going on, yeah, identifies the weakest link in the chain. And no, no system is stronger than its weakest component, right? But the same could be made for, you have spent all your life working on longevity, you've been intermittent fasting, you've not been eating processed foods, you don't drink alcohol, you don't smoke, you don't do drugs. But one day you decide to drive without your seatbelt on and you get into a car crash. Like, you're very dead. You know, you were, you, it doesn't matter how healthy you are when you're very dead. And the same thing goes for you are working real hard on your finances, on liberating yourself so that you have freedom, so that

• 13:11Chris Williamson?

  you can pursue the things that you want, so that you don't have any financial burdens or any responsibilities, or whatever it might be. But upon one drunken night of unprotected sex, either you get pregnant or you get somebody pregnant. And then there is a very big burden that you need to pursue. You know, you go, you go to look after that. And it's like, okay. That's multiplying by zero, like doesn't matter all the good stuff, all the good stuff you've done in the past, there is something now which is such a large burden, maybe the, maybe it's not multiplying by zero for the kid, but it's definitely putting a very hard stop, you know, on a lot of the things that you, that you potentially had planned. And the point is that it wasn't something that was planned. So yeah, multiplied by zero is a really important one, I think, for people to just look at where the weakest links in

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  their chain are, right? Like, a lot of the time, we see this with productivity, people say, oh mate, I posted an image of AlphaBrain the other day, I don't take it that much, just a nootropic, and I got tons and tons of messages, bro, is this any good? Like, tell me like, you know, what, what are the sort of effects that I might try and get it? And it's expensive as hell. You've got to pay an import charge from on it in the US because they haven't sorted the, like, the customs tracking thing either. But if I post something up about Cal Newport's deep work, or doing Pomodoro's, or like a new productivity strategy, no one cares? And it's like, because that is the weakest link in their chain. And often, it's the one that shows kind of the most, the most discomfort is associated with it.

• 14:39George Mack?

  Yeah, it's, it's a similar, like, a bit of a model I've been thinking about lately as well, which is like, product versus marketing. As somebody who's a marketer or operates in the marketing world, you definitely, I don't know, I don't know if Dean can put it in, or we can attach it to the notes, but there's a recent, like, Google trends of like, the word best and the word cheap. And best is going like that, and cheap over time is just going like that. And I think that's a result of a huge, a huge focus on marketing and these like hacks and without fixing the product. Like, the best, I always use the best example of like, Fyre Festival for me is one of the, the most fascinating business cases where, as deceitful and arguably wrong what, well, definitely wrong what

• 15:24George Mack?

  he did, you cannot deny that guy was a genius marketer and a genius salesperson. And if you look at like great combos, if you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, you had Jobs, who obviously was a marketing genius, then you had Wozniak, who was a product genius. And obviously Jobs was like a product genius as well, but that combination of marketing and product is what made those guys so strong. And I find that If you have Ja Rule as your business partner and not so, I always wonder if he had a Steve Wozniak, how different would that Fire Festival have turned out? If he had like a Keith Roy who can like execute and focus on the operations and made that party happen, like maybe he would be a billionaire right now. Maybe he would be one of the best entrepreneurs of our generation. But the fact that he had Ja Rule,

• 16:08George Mack?

  I always wonder like if Steve Jobs had Ja Rule, how different would it have been?

• 16:13George Mack?

  Like I, if I had Ja Rule, fuck knows what I'd be doing. So I do sometimes wonder like, like the, the product and the marketing, because you see it more and more. Like what's fascinating, if you, one of the holes I've been down in quarantine is that Toby Lucky, who's like the Shopify CEO. I think he's such a honest, humble and like clear thinker. And what's fascinating is, as opposed sometimes, and I think wrongly by the media, Shopify and Amazon are where, Amazon are centralizing e-commerce and Shopify are decentralizing it and making it about the merchants. And people see Lucky and Bezos as almost two opposing figures, which I don't think is true.

• 16:53George Mack?

  And I think they both admit that. But if you look at their like shareholders' letters from like 2015 or even Bezos like 1999, it's always about two things. We don't care about short-term revenues. We don't care about all this marketing stuff. All we care about is long-term thinking and customer satisfaction. So even like Shopify, one thing in like growth marketing that brands will do, like if you was a growth marketer and you came in at Shopify early doors, one of the things you would have said to do is always have powered by Shopify on the store. Therefore, like MailChimp do this. So therefore, when somebody comes on the store and sees it, they'll go, oh, this is Shopify, I'll then use it. And as a result, Shopify would have a way bigger brand

• 17:35George Mack?

  because they basically power like over a hundred billion in e-commerce revenue. And there's so many people who don't know what Shopify is, who doesn't exist in this, but you know for a fact they've bought from a Shopify store. But Toby purposely, was so merchant focused, refused to have that powered by Shopify there. Because he knew that actually providing the merchants with as much value in the short term would provide so much more long-term value. So you put the product in that case before the marketing. And I think we're going to see a shift more and more towards that. I do think marketing is still super valuable, but. When you are so marketing focused, so hack focused, it only gets you so far. And I think that everybody cares more about the product at the end of the day.

• 18:19Chris Williamson?

  Even from just a non-financial viewpoint as well, there's more integrity associated with actually fulfilling the thing that you're saying that you're doing. If your company is there to enable the e-commerce provider, the e-commerce store to maximize everything that they do, like put your money where your mouth is, you know, like if you take your thumbnail watermark away and that makes an impact that actually makes the store look better, then really, if you're sticking to your values and that is your true values, regardless of what it does to revenue, you should be doing it, you know? And again, in this world of shareholder agreements and yearly annual reports and stuff like that,

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  that is the, it's going to stand out. Not only does it give you distinctiveness, but it genuinely should be more fulfilling to you. The only problem is when you've got shareholders whose desire for the bottom line outweighs that, I guess. You mentioned before as well, Fyre Festival, something I've been thinking about so much since I watched the documentary, which is phenomenal, is how seduced we all are by success, right? So that guy, who's the guy that, what was his name again?

• 19:33George Mack?

  Is it Billy something?

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  Billy McFarlane, that's it. So Billy McFarlane, the only reason that people slated him and that he's a crook and that he's trying to take advantage of people is because he failed. If he'd succeeded, even if he'd partially succeeded and it hadn't been a total nightmare, he would have been hailed as marketing genius, new Steve Jobs, this, that and the other. There would have been some people that said, I think this is a unfair way of doing marketing. I think that he's leveraging the lowest common denominator of influencer marketing and stuff like that. But had he have farted out a semi-successful festival, right? People would have said, oh my God, look at what this guy's achieved.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Look at how phenomenal the marketing was like next year is going to be insane because we are so seduced by the end product. It's success by any means, right? Everybody just cares about, okay, can, is this person the next hype train? Is this person the next Steve Jobs? Is this person the next whatever it might be? And um, yeah, I realized that the only reason that people slated him was because the festival failed. Really not because of his methods in getting there.

• 20:50George Mack?

  Mm hmm. I know, I kind of, I kind of get what you mean, but I think that then just goes back to the whole product and marketing thing that if you have the best CBO Facebook campaign where you have 10 ad sets structured perfectly. And you've used dynamic creative testing to A B test everything. And you're getting eight ROAs on a pair of jeans, but the, the jeans turn up and there's a fucking rip through the crotch part. People are going to be mad at you, right? And I think rightly so, right? If you've, if you've advertised a product that isn't, um, isn't good enough, like the, I think, I think that's almost a good thing, you know? I think that this focus on the product is, is super important. And I think it's the, going to be even a greater and greater focus in the next 10, 20 years.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  I would, I would agree. Also, there is a um, a model that I got introduced to by Richard Shotten. Who, uh, have you listened to that episode yet?

• 21:45George Mack?

  I listened to the first one. I've not listened to the second one.

• 21:47Chris Williamson?

  Good, because that means I can tell you this for the first time. So in a study, there was a number of different aphorisms that were given to people, like these sort of rules, right? And um, for instance, woes unite foes, right? That's one of them. But in another version of the study, they might have been told woes unite enemies. And what that indicated, and this was run over a number of different aphorisms, a number of different sentences. What it indicated was that people see rhyming sentences as more believable than ones that don't rhyme. And when they were asked in reflection, so.

• 22:29Chris Williamson?

  Why was it that you chose the this is the most believable one or whatever? They didn't, no one said like, oh, it was because it rhymed. And even they asked them, they were like, oh, so was it because it rhymed? No, no, no, it's got nothing to do with that. It's just, you know, I really feel like it connects with me and whatever it might be. But that wasn't the truth. When you control for everything, it wasn't the truth. It's because it rhymed. What that tells us is that mental fluency is associated with truthfulness.

• 22:56Chris Williamson?

  And that has such huge implications, right? You know, Grant Cardone is someone who's unbelievably fluent. The way he's able to deliver things with power and with conviction and all this sort of stuff. And yet there's entire websites dedicated to calling him out for some of the stuff that he does. Now, that's not to make a value call on whatever, whether it's it's true or false, how he operates his business. But you can't deny the fact that that is someone who is using mental fluency to augment their truthfulness. Right? And I think that that kind of links into what you're saying there with this kind of marketing first approach. Which again, hit it with a hammer, you find there's nothing inside. It's it's dangerous.

• 23:41George Mack?

  Yeah, I agree. It takes us to like a model I've been thinking about of late, which I kind of call like the linguistic matrix or like a linguistic red pill. And I realized that how much of your reality is just shaped by the words that you have available? And the ability to then put like placeholders on things. So even like a word that like Schrödinger Freud, for example, is a word that's, I think it's German. It's a very English thing of taking pleasure in somebody else's failure or pain. The ability to actually have that chunked into a word. Ability completely gives you an ability to understand reality slightly differently.

• 24:21George Mack?

  But I think if you look right now, like one thing I absolutely hate because it's just a team sport is that most modern politics. And If you really, if you, if you look at most of these like, uh, 280 character debates on Twitter, where there's just all caps and swear words and

• 24:37Chris Williamson?

  Clap emojis.

• 24:38George Mack?

  Calling anybody with ifs at the end or, yeah, it's just, it's the, both, both teams are exactly the same. And, um, one of the things that is often an issue is that there's a whole, if you can imagine, they've got this whole like Jenga tower that this is based on and they're sword fighting at the top and there's Jenga tower. But they still never, ever define the fundamental words that they're using. So like, sometimes they'll be debating about a specific word without actually defining it. Like even like two, two, like what examples I have that are not a political, but let's say the word like ego, for example, is an interesting one. Use it for so many different meanings that then to, I can then sometimes try and understand something.

• 25:17George Mack?

  But it's within the word ego, I've got five different meanings and I think it completely, uh, distorts my, my view of reality. So like people will use ego, for example, in the Kanye West sense of, um, like thinking that I'm the fucking man. And, uh, like, nobody can stop me, that style or like the Michael Jordan on the court style of ego. And then like the more like Buddhist Eckhart Tolle perspective of ego is the sense of self, the sense that you're, uh, an individual and you're not completely just an organism connected to all the billions of organisms out there. And I find that we actually should define the, the individual instances within that to even have a clear understanding of reality. Like one, one of them that's fascinating as well is the word entrepreneur.

• 26:00George Mack?

  Because the, within the word entrepreneur, there's so many different kinds of entrepreneurs. My favorite example is Joe Rogan, like talk about media leverage. He has, uh, maybe what, like four or five members of staff, like him, Jamie, and I'm sure he's got a few other people behind the scenes. Does like a hundred plus mil revenue from his podcast alone.

• 26:17Chris Williamson?

  You know, he doesn't even have a personal assistant.

• 26:20George Mack?

  Does he not?

• 26:20Chris Williamson?

  No, he said it on a podcast the other day. He says he refuses to have a personal assistant. He's like, fuck that. What do I need someone to just tell me when the, the train ticket's a book for? Tell me when my flight leaves. It's like, I'll book the flight myself, motherfucker. So funny.

• 26:33George Mack?

  That's probably why he's quite well connected to everything that's going on as well. I think that's probably be actually an advantage to him, but he, yeah, he has insane media leverage. But one of the things that you wouldn't be able to say about Joe is that he's like an entrepreneur, because as soon as you think of entrepreneur, you think of like, okay, I'll give him 10 grand, he'll flip it into 20 grand and he'll do all these sales. That's not roving in the slightest, like he's not a CEO, he's not that kind of guy. But he has a business worth over a hundred million dollars that employs a few members of staff with what, like 99% margins?

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  He's with no cost.

• 27:12George Mack?

  But there's an issue with that, that we need to then define the words within the words. Because we end up just keep chunking, chunking further and up and we, that's one of the reasons why I love Eric Weinstein, for example, because he just creates words all the time. And I find that you go through your whole life with like these words that have been given to you, rather than trying to actually create your own vocabulary based off what you're seeing in reality. You're always trying to outsource people to make words for you. It's really weird.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  I think this probably strikes at why so many people talk past each other online. When you think you've got differing points of view, you have two people that inherently want to disagree, so they're already looking for that disagreement perhaps. Then they're all excited and anxious and stuff for being online and typing away, smashing the keyboard. And then even the terms that they are using, that they are debating aren't agreed on. It's like, bro, you're never, you might as well be speaking different language. You know, you're never going to make that work. And this, I keep bringing this up, I'm going to do it again. If you have not read 1984, you have to go and read it, especially if you like the idea of what George is talking about here.

• 28:20Chris Williamson?

  I learned more from 1984 about the way that I operate than I have done from a lot of personal development, self-development books, right? And the thing that it taught me was that the ability to articulate words, the ability to put your thoughts into a noise that comes out of your mouth or into words that go down on paper is directly proportional to the quality of your thoughts. Like if you can't say it, it never takes form. And if it never takes form, it's no longer an actual concept. It's just a notion. You know, it's like the smell of the thing that you think. And you're like, oh, that's interesting. It's kind of a bit like that. So roll that forward.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  The implication is if you want better thoughts, you need a bigger vocabulary. The more words that you have at your disposal, genuinely, the better your, the quality of your thoughts is going to be. And this is why I've got such a love for language, right? And I adore picking up, bloviate, I discovered the other day, which I absolutely adore, which is kind of like someone that guffaws and talks a lot about, talks a lot about stuff without actually really saying anything, right? It's analogous to a ton of different words, but bloviate, I was like, that's cool. I now have a word that I can use for when someone is bloviating. But until I have that word, it's just a sense, or it's me having to use another word, which is analogous to that, it's a proxy for that, right?

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, not only does it, does it make life richer, but it genuinely improves the quality of your thoughts. So I'm a hundred percent on board with that.

• 29:54George Mack?

  Yeah, it's almost like rather than having all these like detailed lines of code, somebody's just put it into one function and then you can just execute on that. Like it's a much smoother, and if you look at the way, I'm not the guy to talk about software systems. But if you look at the way that they're making it easier and easier, and they're chunking and chunking people's previous work. So yeah, it makes sense that to be able to actually have a specific word as opposed to like a fluffy concept. And then words within those words is a much precise and clearer way of operating. Like one of the things I was thinking about, and this is a bit, a bit woolly, but I, the word time is itself quite deceptive and a bit of a proxy.

• 30:37George Mack?

  I think obviously a lot of people are in a weird situation right now where they reflect on how they spend their time day to day. And you'll talk about, oh, I, I, I work full time or I do X, Y, Z. But time is life, like that's what it is at the end of the day, but it's a proxy for the word life. And when you actually then like, think about, so you're doing a full time job that you hate. It's actually a full life job that you hate. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's your life, but I think time is itself like this weird proxy for the word life. And we almost, it's almost a lot more existentialist if you have to use the word life. And I think it's actually quite a useful tool to change those two words. Otherwise, time is like this, this thing that you have, like money, and it's not.

• 31:18George Mack?

  It's, it's just this, it's all you've got and it's slowly pouring away and it may end at any second, I guess. As depressing as that sounds.

• 31:26Chris Williamson?

  Hey man, if people don't want to be depressed, they should listen to a different podcast. Um, it's the one resource that you can't not spend as well, right? Like you can save money, you can save calories, can choose not to buy that coffee. You can choose not to eat that cake. You can't choose to not exist for the next hour. It's like that time's going to be spent, so you just better choose that you spend it as well as you can. Um, what have we got next? What's up next?

• 31:53George Mack?

  So one of the ones I've been thinking about, uh, because of everything that's going on, I imagine a lot of people have experienced it is like forcing functions. So something, it's almost, a lot of people talk about the wonders of freedom and the beauties of liberty. And I completely like agree and love freedom and love liberty. But sometimes without sounding like I'm a BDSM kind of guy.

• 32:17George Mack?

  There's some, uh, there's some, there's some beauty to having restricted freedom in the sense that, um, I always use the example, I know some lazy fuckers, like some really lazy people, including myself at times. But if they have to be at a job for nine AM, they will get up on time and they will attend. But as soon as that's taken away, they'll be getting up at one PM, they're getting up at two PM. And the only thing that's changed is of like a forcing function of what? Um, Daniel Gross is an example, uh, with, um, two examples. One with like a Y C demo day, like the ability, he says that a lot of Y combinators, uh, success, not success, but the reason, one of the beauties behind going through Y C is that you have a deadline at the end of it. And as a result.

• 33:01George Mack?

  The work just fits to that deadline. If that deadline didn't exist, it maybe takes two years, maybe takes three years. So that's like a hard forcing function. And he also says, like, one of the reasons why a lot of amazing technology, particularly in a defence space, comes out of Israel is because they have to, right? Like, you know what I mean? Like, in the, in the UK, like, there's no, or the US, there's not, there's not as much attack on your, like, land, or I don't want to say, yeah, uh, no imminent danger, shall we say. So that's one of the reasons why, like, Israel has such a forcing function, but Israel doesn't produce Snapchats of the world. It doesn't really produce Twitters of the world as a result, because they don't have, whereas when you have that more relaxed freedom, they tend to produce

• 33:42George Mack?

  that. But when you have a forcing function, um, it can produce some amazing things. Like, Peter Thiel was, like, even now, like, the amount of companies who would never have in a million years let their employees work from home have now been forced to do it. And they're going, actually, we don't need an office anymore. We're going to go full remote. Like, it's crazy as a result of this, like, forcing function that is a pandemic, I guess.

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Shout out to Chris Sparks, forcingfunction.com. Um, he's a, he's a, a big lover of that. So how do you actually define what a forcing function is?

• 34:16George Mack?

  I think it, I, I think it comes from, the actual model itself probably comes from programming of, it's something that you just can't, uh, you can't get past without doing a certain thing. Um, but then the way you obviously chunk that for other areas is almost, you're, you're forced to do a certain thing, basically, or, or the pain of not doing it, um, is way greater than the, the pain of, of putting it off. Um, so, is that even right? The pain of not, no, the pain of not doing it is way greater than the pain of, of doing it. So I think that's how I'd describe it. Or the pleasure of doing it is way greater than the pleasure of not doing it. So just real simple pleasure and pain incentives, which is another model, I guess.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I've been thinking about to do with that kind of forcing function and how it ties in is just Parkinson's law. I can't remember whether we brought this up last time and I don't even know if it classes as a mental model, but we're free flowing today. We can do what we want. Parkinson's law work expands to fill the time given for it. So it's the same reason that you don't do your university assignment until the night before. It's the same reason that the project that you need in for work requires an all night to be pulled. And I think using a forcing function like that, when you think about the YC days and things, it actually requires you to focus on what the minimum viable product is as well. Like if you know

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  that you've only got six weeks to complete this particular project for YC, you're not going to bother gesticulating for two weeks on whether the brand logo should be mostly red or mostly yellow. Like it's going to force you to focus on the things that move the needle. And when those degrees of freedom get expanded out, as you've identified right now, there's no boss telling you why you're not awake at 9am. What did you call it earlier on? A furloughpreneur?

• 36:11George Mack?

  Furloughpreneur, yeah.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  Which is just the best, the absolute best. When you don't have that, you don't have anybody who is the disciplinarian, who's telling you to do these things. You realise, oh, hang on. Actually, the only reason I was overcoming my own inertia was because of this structure, this buttress, this scaffolding that was layered around my life. And I think that those increased degrees of freedom are causing people a lot of, rightly so, they're causing people a lot of discomfort. As I've said on a number of different podcasts, I was taking a lot of pleasure in the beginning until I sort of checked myself and said, stop being a dick. I was taking a lot of pleasure with other people struggling to self-discipline. I was watching people suffer with the same

• 36:58Chris Williamson?

  challenge that I've faced as a self-independent entrepreneur for the last 13 years. I was like, oh, so hard working from home, isn't it? Can't imagine what that's like. And then I checked myself and I was like, hang on a fucking second, mate. Like you need to, let's be a little bit more empathetic here. Like you shouldn't be taking pleasure at the fact that other people have stepped into your nightmare, you know?

• 37:24Chris Williamson?

  So, but it's right, increased degrees of freedom, fewer forcing functions.

• 37:29George Mack?

  Yeah, it's, I just think that one of the things I always find actually like great content is whenever you hear somebody say like, when they, when they turn 30 or when they turn 40, when they turn 50 and it's even like the letter to their 20 year old self, 30 year old self, et cetera. One of the consistent themes seems to be like putting the proper things off or putting the things off that they should have done. And I think that for myself, something I probably don't do enough, but I think in, in general, a lot of the consistent themes when people talk about those regrets is that there wasn't enough forcing functions in place to actually get them to do it. It was always this pipe dream in the future. And I think that if we had more, sometimes restricted freedom in certain areas that we, we purposely do ourselves,

• 38:13George Mack?

  whether that's putting up like a, a just giving fund because you're going to run a marathon or whatever it is, it actually works. Even though whilst you're doing it, you kind of hate yourself for actually putting yourself through it. But at the end, you're always like, thank God I did that. Um, I think it's, it's a, it's a beautiful concept, even though it feels horrific at the time.

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  That's a really, a really, really clever way of putting it together, man. Yeah. I mean, the, everyone that's listening has, has decided to obsess over the things that don't matter because it's a form of procrastination on getting onto the stuff that actually does. And, you know, for me with this podcast, like I've, I'm, I still feel like I got it out early, like, you know, the start of 2018 by no one's estimations is early, but by now, like when you look at how many people are now bringing them out and how much more the podcast network is growing and stuff like that, it feels early, right? But at the time, I'd already messed around for six months. I'd spent six months, I'd gone through tons of different brands, I'd played with different, and then I came up with Modern Wisdom, like at 3am,

• 39:11Chris Williamson?

  woke up and was like, add this name. I was like, yes, finally got the name. Right now, onto the logo. And you're like, bro, like it doesn't matter. People want to tune in because of what you say, because of the content that you put out. Um, and in reflection now, I can say, pulling the pin on that and just deciding to do it and messing up with the audio, messing up with the video and not having support and not doing this correctly and doing all these problems, right? You're like, over time, right now, I am so glad that past me did that because present me is reaping all of the rewards and you just iterate over time. Um, what we got next? What else you got on the, on the menu?

• 39:52George Mack?

  Um, my, one of my favorite ones at the minute, and I love it when you have, because the thing about the models as well is that it's sometimes just a bit fluffy until you have like real world examples that you can rest it on. So global versus local maximum. Um, again, as I mentioned, I've been going down a bit of a, uh, Tobias Knucki, the Shopify CEO. And he uses a great example to explain the global versus local maximum, which I'll come on to, but it's basically local maximum. Local maximum is operating, so let's say, for example, um, it would be focusing on optimizing one specific variable.

• 40:29George Mack?

  Um, so that may be, uh, the, the focus on getting the best exhaust possible for your car, constantly trying to optimize one percent gains for the exhaust. When you realize you've not got a fucking steering wheel. So you've got to, you've got to sometimes, whereas that's, that's what the global maximum is of like looking like almost from an absolute objective perspective at the whole thing and then optimizing for that. So one of the entrepreneurs that doesn't get anywhere near enough um, attention because it's not sexy and you'll realize this, like, everybody knows who Mark Zuckerberg is, but nobody knows who the CEO of like Citibank is or Goldman, right? Like, because it's, it's way more B to B, it's not B to C. Um, but Malcolm McLean, do you know who Malcolm McLean is?

• 41:13Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 41:14George Mack?

  Um, so basically, he was the, he was the guy that basically came up with the idea of shipping containers. Um, he was a comic came at it, and this is where all often, uh, global maximum will come from. At the time, everybody was focused on getting faster and faster ships. So we could, uh, basically create globalization as we know it now, where you can get bananas from the other side of the world in January. Um, and they were getting faster and faster ships. And he was as a truck driver, it was one day on, um, I think it was Thanksgiving. Was sat there in nine hours with cargo on his back, waiting for people to get each individual box off and then back. And he says, why don't we just chunk it all together and you just take that off as a container?

• 41:56George Mack?

  And you can just place it on the ship and then you literally take, and then once the ship arrives, you can just take the one container, stick it onto, um, a train or rail and ship it that way. And everybody basically laughed at him and thought it was a ridiculous idea because they were optimized on getting each individual box off at the time. And for some context of like how, um, How good this idea was. At the time, it was six dollars a ton doing the previous method, and they was focused on the local maximum of trying to make the ships go faster. When he implemented what he did, it went down to sixteen cents a ton.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh my god.

• 42:35George Mack?

  So like, it goes to show, and also instead of like a week for them to load a ship, it was then eight hours for them to load a ship. So you think about him as an individual on the global maximum perspective, like the impact that has on the world is insane. Like every trade, everything imaginable, the fact there's not a day named after him goes to show that if you're not beat to see it, it's not sexy, you're rich and anonymous. But like for me, that is a perfect example. Now, I think, I think he's dead now, because this is like, I think, yeah, this is like the fifties when it began to come in place. I think he's dead now. But the Shopify CEO, he has a great example where he, Toby says

• 43:17George Mack?

  that when he gets asked in the interview, I think it's on the Knowledge Project, where he says, my whole goal as a, as the CEO is to assume right now that where we're at in modern day business, I'm at a six. Maybe the best company in the world is like a six. The key, the goal is to get it to a seven. And that's my life's mission, to get to a seven. So he's basically working on the assumption that he's always wrong. And it's kind of true. But if you look at sport, for example, if you look at football or soccer or whatever you want to call it, like the gap between the modern athletes and forty years ago is just huge. And you, but we, we weirdly have this thing at the time where we assume that

• 43:59George Mack?

  this is the best thing possible, that the iPhone is like, is never going to get better than this, but it always does. And I think the, the first thing to do is assume that everything's wrong and your goal is to be, to be less wrong. And I think that then helps with potentially getting a, nearer to a global maximum, if that makes sense.

• 44:19Chris Williamson?

  I love that concept, man. That's the first time that I've heard of it. It's kind of like a rate limiting step from chemistry as well, right? Like, which also ties into what we were talking about before, which is the weakest multiplied by zero. Like, you're only as strong as your weakest link.

• 44:35Chris Williamson?

  What did I have in my head there? I had one in my head. Oh, yeah. Can you do why it's important, why it's better to avoid failure than to face success? Or like, why, like, not being stupid is better than trying to be clever?

• 44:53George Mack?

  I can talk about it, but I can't necessarily do it in action. That's for sure. Yeah, I think, yeah, just, I guess, looking at, yeah, things that are going to take you down. It's something I've I struggle with. But again, it goes back to that multiplied by zero. And I think I think a model that's actually quite useful for identifying that. I've been playing since quarantine, been playing a ton of chess. I'm still shit, but I've been playing a ton. And there's cool, like, lessons that come from that. One, which is that your assumptions will, your assumptions is everything. And there's always the right move that was there. The same way with the shipping container. It wasn't like that idea didn't exist. It was just that people's assumptions

• 45:37George Mack?

  was that there was a better way to do it. They was focusing on the the local maximum rather than the global maximum. But there's a Gary Kasparov point, which Gary Kasparov was one of the best chess players of all time. And I think sometimes people extrapolate chess to life. And there's loads of lessons you can take, which I do think is partially true, but partially bollocks. But there are a few. And one of the ones that Kasparov has is the way he used to analyze his games. So let's say, for example, he made a mistake where he moved the bishop to E4. Most people would come at it from analyzing that move. So they would go, OK, I moved bishop to E4, and then I got in a trap, and I lost my bishop. Therefore,

• 46:17George Mack?

  never do bishop to E4. And instead, what Kasparov, the way he analyzed his game, and what he said was so different about his approach, was to not just analyze the move, but analyze the thinking behind the move. Like, what did I have for dinner that day? What was I thinking about at the time? What assumptions did I have in my head? And you have almost this system mindset, which is similar to systems versus goals, but looking at things in a much wider system. So like, Saffi Vakali talks about this, where he uses the example of, let's say, you come home and you argue with your wife, after like, a hard day's hard day's worth of work about the dishes, for example, like, almost thinking about the individual item, or the pawn to the bishop to E4, would be

• 47:04George Mack?

  Okay, I'm never going to bring up the dishes again, but instead actually try and think about what was the thinking before all that happened and you go, oh, actually, the cause of the mistake was me coming home from work tired and angry and I took it out on my wife. And the good thing, the genius thing about this is if you went from the perspective of, okay, let's not just use the, uh, let's never argue about the dishes again and rather instead focus about the let's not come home from work angry is that you prevent thousands of similar mistakes from happening rather than that just one. Again, that's an idea that is lovely in theory, but even harder to implement and I'm not perfect at it at all.

• 47:45Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's much more scalable, right? And we were talking about this before we started, where I was saying about strategies versus character. And the fact that a lot of strategies supplement for poor character traits, you know, like a strategy of only ever having three beers so that you never cheat on your wife is a strategy to ensure that you never cheat on your wife. But the character trait of being faithful to your wife is much more scalable, you know, regardless of how much alcohol you have. Now, that's not to say that you should still increase risk by having a bunch of booze when you're in a strip club or whatever it might be. Um, but the principle is the same. And I think it's kind of like this malignant side effect of the 21st century. And we contribute to this, I'm contributing to this and we're doing it right now,

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  that we give people these piecemeal solutions to what is a very global problem. It's like, if you work on your character, if you work on your values and your virtues, what is it that matters to you? What is the reason that you are here on this planet for? Like genuinely, as an existential, as terrible of an existential crisis inducing question as that is, like what is the reason for that? Because that, those values, those virtues, those, um, non-

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  Non-compromisable reasons for your existence are much more scalable than having a strategy about like the best way. I once read a book about how's the best to bring kids up there. Therefore, I'm going to follow this strategy. It's like, well, yeah, but where do you think that strategy came from? That strategy probably came from people who loved their kids and did the things that were right for their kids. So there's again, like that marketing versus product thing. There is a combination between the deployment of a strategy and what is the essence of the reason that the strategy exists? And can you combine the two? Can you deploy something which is effective and also have something to back it up?

• 49:43George Mack?

  It's yeah, it's it's it's much easier in theory and harder in practice. There's that quote, I don't know if it's Taliban, it might be Yogi Bear and Taliban uses it of in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. And I think this ties me on to another thing I've been thinking about of the, this is a model that comes from, I'm a fan of him. I even I think he steps sometimes, sometimes I don't always like his content, but I think on the whole, I think he's actually fantastic and there's a lot of good for the world, which is Gary Vee. And he has a concept called dirt and clouds, which I think I actually

• 50:23George Mack?

  like probably his best video, his best piece of content, which is the way he thinks about things is purely from a dirt and clouds perspective. So the way he defines that for himself is the cloud is like the high end vision and the high end principles and the high end character stuff we're talking about. So for him, I think it's buying like the New York Jets and providing like unreal value to the world. And his funeral, I think Gary talks about this, he wants more people at his funeral than any other funeral. That's how he defines every action by. And then the dirt for him is like the specific. Tactical things of, so for him, it'll be knowing that TikTok was a platform to get on before anybody else. And he was investing a load of time on that. Or the reason why Snapchat,

• 51:08George Mack?

  because he's got hands on. Similar to the way Rogan doesn't have a personal assistant that if you do have like a P A or with Gary, if he outsources it to everybody, like the junior employees, he's no longer in the dirt, he's no longer relevant and he loses touch through things. But the dirt and the clouds, so like the high end, top level theory, and then the pure execution, the pure action. And then he basically says, everything else in the middle, which is where you can so easily spend your time, is just absolute garbage. And it's much easier said than done. So obviously only focus on the dirt and the clouds. But the politics, the, the, the, the nonsense, just spending time, like doing passive things that you don't even enjoy, is, uh, is, is just pointless. But the actual dirt and the clouds

• 51:52George Mack?

  are the two, the two most important things.

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  Throwback to the first episode, grey area thinking, barbell strategy.

• 51:58George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Chris Williamson?

  Um, yeah. So you mentioned there, you, you couldn't work out whether it was Taleb, or whether it was Yogi Bear, or whatever it was. And I mentioned to you on the phone, I was gonna, I was gonna red pill you on this. Churchillian drift. Have you heard of it?

• 52:11George Mack?

  Oh, yeah. No.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 52:14George Mack?

  I've been waiting.

• 52:15Chris Williamson?

  Churchillian drift is the term coined by British writer Nigel Reese, which describes the widespread misattribution of quotes by obscure figures to more famous figures, usually of their time period. The term connotes the particular egregiousness of misattributions to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. And this is just so funny, they always slides up, right? It's never like John that has the ice cream van that came up with this thing. It's always like Taleb, or Naval, or there we go, another one for bingo. Um, it's always that. And, uh, I find myself doing it as well. There's that quote that keeps on being attributed

• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  to Aristotle, which is, um, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. And that's supposedly Aristotle, but then if you actually dig into the etymology of that particular quote, you find that there's quite a lot of criticism and skepticism around who came up with it. And Richard Shotten told me, I can't remember the website, I'll have to try and find it, that there's basically an equivalent of like ancestry.com but for quotes. And you can go back through the tree of where it first appeared. And then you'll see it slide, the Churchillian drift will occur over time as it gets attributed to like more

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  more and more famous people. But I think, again with that, that's probably, again, another kind of malignant side effect of the 21st century that we presume that people who are in positions of authority and in positions of power are the only ones that can deploy wisdom, you know?

• 53:58George Mack?

  On that, on that note, there's a bit in zero to one. This is, this is a exact quote, because I know he says this, Peter Thiel says that, uses that example where I think they talk about the quote, is it where it's apparently that Einstein said compound interest is the Yeah, eighth great wonder of the world. And obviously Thiel goes on that point and he says that actually it probably wasn't Einstein who said that, but he goes to say that Einstein's

• 54:29George Mack?

  was so good, like it's actually quite ironic that it obviously compounds after he dies that people are still misattributing quotes to him. So it goes to actually show that compound interest is the eight wonder of the world. But it's weird, but on that note though, like there is some weird like contagion that goes on where I find like I'll have ideas in my head about ways to behave or things that are true. And when I actually try and backtrace the source, I may have like overheard it on a podcast or my mate will say, oh, um, you know, the XYZ was created by this person. And then I just won't really think anything of it, but he acted really certain. And then I'll catch myself going, oh no, it was XYZ who created that, you know? And then sometimes I go, I've caught myself like sometimes making points and I go,

• 55:12George Mack?

  that might not be true actually. And I do sometimes have to call yourself out because you can easily, if somebody says stuff with enough confidence, you just pass it on. And then before you know it, it becomes, it becomes gospel. It's really weird.

• 55:23Chris Williamson?

  Mental fluency is associated with truthfulness, man. Say something with enough conviction and some.

• 55:30Chris Williamson?

  Minority of people will believe.

• 55:32George Mack?

  If you want, the best example of that is Frank Abengale.

• 55:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:38George Mack?

  So obviously Leonardo DiCaprio did a film on him, but there's a talk at Google, Frank Abengale, where he basically tells his whole story. It's actually quite emotional. He talks about his lack of dad. He's obviously turned his life around now where he works for the FBI. And if you want to talk about, you understand why he was the greatest con artist ever, just because of how well he, he speaks with absolutely no self doubt when he tells stories. It's crazy. I think he says like, uh, twice within the whole speech. It's incredible. It's just, this guy was pretending to be a pilot at the age of 16 or whatever, right? You can see why.

• 56:16Chris Williamson?

  So ballsy, man.

• 56:17George Mack?

  But the thing about, thing about that, sorry, I always had this interesting one, which is that the best con men, everybody does, there's documentaries on like who the best con men ever were. Realistically, there's probably, the best con men can't be in a documentary because still nobody knows who they are. This is weird, like survivorship bias, right? It's like the inverse.

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  That is a really, really.

• 56:36George Mack?

  Con man bias.

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, con man bias. What's next? What's next on the menu? What we got?

• 56:40George Mack?

  Um, so in terms of what I've got here, um, this is a bit of a weird one that I've been thinking about. Weinstein brought it up in the Rogan podcast about this concept of like kayfabe, which is again, one of them still struggling to wrap my head around, but we've seen it more and more. And it kind of goes on to what we're talking about then, about this weird contagion where professional wrestling is something that people know is fake, but people kind of still love it. And you're seeing it, I think you're seeing it at a political level with, with Trump that you seem to have, again, I don't want to go down a politics rabbit hole. So literally if I start chatting about politics more than 30 seconds, just jump in and change the topic. Uh, you have him, for example, where you have.

• 57:23George Mack?

  Some obviously have the like diehard believers, but you also have people who are his fans that know he's playing this weird game and that he's purposely saying things almost like from a marketing or a sales perspective. And people almost this kayfabe thing like almost applies to yourself. I find actually sometimes being irrational is actually a very rational strategy. So let's say, for example, this concept of resistance, which comes from like the War of Art book where Steven Pressfield says like procrastination is this external force that's trying to conquer you and defeat you. Of course, that's absolute bollocks, but I think interpreting it as true is actually an effective strategy. And there's probably nothing more. If something's effective, you could argue it's it. Maybe it's irrational, but maybe it's the rational thing to do and then it gets something done.

• 58:07George Mack?

  And you see it with professional athletes, like how many professional athletes are atheists? It's quite rare. And I think whether there's a God or there's not a God or what, probably believing that as you're about to go in an octagon and fight, or as you're about to go in a football pitch for a World Cup final, that God is on your side, having that placebo in place is actually probably very, very useful.

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

  So is that like a athlete Pascal's wager?

• 58:33George Mack?

  Kind of in a way like there's benefits. There's benefits of irrationality and we've seen it. We've seen it more and more like this blur between you see it with the the fire festival, this whole like fake it till you make it, but sometimes that becomes, and I think there's a there's a negative strain of it, which I think we need to avoid. But sometimes it can be used as a positive side of things of almost believing something irrationally, but it actually actually works as an effective measure.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean.

• 58:58George Mack?

  Hasty paranoid.

• 58:59Chris Williamson?

  It highlights. It highlights the fact that we are not perfectly rational beings. And the more that I read into evolutionary psychology and this book called Blind Sight by Prince Guman and Matt Johnson. Holy shit, man, like I had the guys on, they're just a small, just a couple of dudes. And it just shows how fallible we are. Our minds are completely just they're useless. The fact that we don't just get hit by open traffic is a miracle as far as I'm concerned.

• 59:33Chris Williamson?

  The more that you realise that, the more you realise that an irrational system trying to be fixed with rational solutions is probably not always going to work. And that when you add those two things together, you can manipulate the system into rationality by timesing irrationality by irrationality, as long as it's the right

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  levels of each, right? A quote from Shane Parrish, actually, which was put on his fs.blog newsletter, which kind of relates to what you're talking about there. "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem is mutated or disappeared. Often, it is still there as strong as it ever was." That's Donald Kingsbury.

• 1:00:25George Mack?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:00:27Chris Williamson?

  It's cool, isn't it? I think that kind of relates to a lot of what Jordan Peterson talks about as well, right? You know, he talks about these archetypes and these, these kind of meta themes that have been with us for years or millennia. And

• 1:00:40Chris Williamson?

  when you read anything that's ancient but classic, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, or you know, whatever it might be, you realise that the problems that you attribute as side effects of the 21st century are just inbuilt parts of our nature that everyone's been fighting with for forever. And I love, I really like that. And that's another Rory Sutherlandism, actually. There's one for bingo for Rory Sutherland, which is that he says,

• 1:01:13Chris Williamson?

  the opposite, what is it about the opposite of a good idea not always being the opposite of a bad idea also being a bad idea, or the opposite of a, I'm going to butcher this.

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Give me one second.

• 1:01:23George Mack?

  I know what you mean.

• 1:01:25Chris Williamson?

  This is Rory, I'm so sorry, bro. Here's me trying to, trying to quote you Rory, Sutherland, opposite of an idea. Let's see if this comes up. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. That's it. Don't design for average. It doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. Thanks Rory.

• 1:01:48George Mack?

  Yeah, but is it like a lot of, because it depends how you define rationality, but if you look at it almost as a, again, rationality might be one of those words that has numerous words within it that we chatted about earlier. But some of the the most rational people I know seem to end up with the most average or boring results. Whereas because by very definition, they're often like following the crowd's logic and everything that makes looks perfectly logical at the time. So going back to the box container example earlier, so I think actually being a bit weird, again, it's a bit of a barbell. It can either go horrifically bad or horrifically right.

• 1:02:27George Mack?

  And I think that the the religion in in professional sports is a is a perfect example of that. And I think we need more and more weird people. I think it's very, everybody seems to play this point scoring game now online. And I guess it's driven by like getting likes and getting more and more followers. That by very, but by very definition, you need people who go completely against everything that's currently there to actually get the the desire. Like if you look at like going back to the shipping container, the reason why that's there is because you had a very, very stubborn man who looked like an absolute idiot to a lot of people. And I think we've seen the death of that.

• 1:03:10George Mack?

  Weinstein talks about this, where we have a focus on excellence now, becoming the best at your craft, whereas we don't have that many rebels of people who actually go, that whole craft is a load of nonsense, we should be doing it this way instead. We should like the guy, the table tennis player, I think we chatted about this previously, who decided to put like foam on the on the bat. And as a result, he was like the worst player on the Japanese team and all of a sudden he was the best, the best of all time. Or you have like the Fosbury flop, the way now the high jump is now jumped as a result of him. But he was mocked for a while and obviously now everybody does it that way. And I think that with social media now, it's a bit harder to be a maverick, it's a bit harder to be a weirdo.

• 1:03:51George Mack?

  And I think we often chastise people for thinking differently, like even like Elon Musk, whatever criticisms or praise you have of him. A lot of people at the minute are going like, look how erratic and weird he is and they go, yeah, no shit. Like, do you not think it takes, imagine him like coming up the idea of building like a rocket company? It's clearly a weird individual, clearly like doesn't pick up on like social cues as much as other people, otherwise you don't get that result. So I do think irrationality obviously has its downsides, but a lot of people don't talk about its its upsides.

• 1:04:23Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. I don't know whether it's just the particular sliver of the world that I'm exposed to, but I'm not sure how much I agree with people kind of compromising themselves down to the lowest common denominator or popularity being kind of the the first thing that they search for. I see now an increasingly burgeoning underground movement of people who are fully embracing their true nature, as long as it's legal, and coming up with ideas which are contrarian and not being afraid to put them out online. Now, obviously, there's particular spheres within which this can be a little bit more challenging politics

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  or, I guess, rights as well, law, stuff like that. But in terms of worldviews, personal development strategies, things like that, you know, there's, there's a million different iterations and subcultures of things that you want. Like, if you wanted to spend a year in the desert with a piece of rope and a tarp and a bottle, a couple of bottles of water, there's probably out there a holiday company that would be able to do it for you and would keep supplying you with water or something like that, you know. And as the market starts to reward people who don't just want to do the status quo, I think

• 1:05:50Chris Williamson?

  that increasingly people will feel more and more empowered to be themselves. And this is why, I know you've got a particular soft spot for Eric Weinstein, and I'll let you riff on that a little bit if you want to about why you think that he's so good. But having someone like Rogan, who is kind of, on the surface, a very typical everyman, alpha bro, who has this ridiculous reach, him giving someone like Eric or Lex Friedman, right? Like, there's no way that Lex should have been on Rogan's podcast. He's been on, like, Five or six times in the last probably 18 months, maybe he's been on a ton. And now Lex has got his own ridiculously big podcast and he's getting cool people on and all this sort of stuff.

• 1:06:35Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, well, you know, Lex is definitely on the spectrum. I absolutely adore him. Lex, if you're listening, I'd love you to reply to my email. But he's great, but like, why him? You know, and then you have someone who who permits these subcultures to to rise to the surface. And the more that you have role models like that of people who are unapologetically just doing them. You know, like, just do your thing, sister. Like, you the more that you've got those people doing that. I think it sets a fantastic example for people moving forward.

• 1:07:10George Mack?

  The, yeah, I completely agree. I think that's one of the things that Rogan has done very well in the comedy space. But wider that he is the most probably positive sum man on the planet. Like, he's like the amount of people who owe careers to him and like incredibly talented people. And it's that he's done a lot of good for the world and that he's constantly bringing people up. But it's not this negative sum game because I think he quickly realised that attention is is everywhere. And there's seven billion people on the planet. So providing more and more positive sum, I think is better. A slightly nuanced note, though, is that, and even you may have this to some extent, you may try and be like the like the most, become the most enlightened version of yourself. But when you're under the name Chris Williamson and you have,

• 1:07:52George Mack?

  you still have your identity to protect, you're still always playing a bit of a, I at least I I know I have to, that you're only playing this bit of a weird ego game that you still have an identity protect to protect. And often the the best, going back to like either end of the spectrum, the best accounts on the internet, I'd say, and the worst accounts on the internet are often anonymous because they're then free to do things about their identity. And you have, let's say, you look at Satoshi Nakamoto, like, if the person who created Bitcoin was known, like, he would either be, God knows what would happen. I I there's a I imagine there's a purpose, a reason why he or she did that. And I think it's worked out quite well. We're saying we've got Jed McKenna, the writer.

• 1:08:33George Mack?

  I think there's something about anonymity at times that people want to banish from social medias because of the trolling that goes on, but I actually think it's an incredibly important thing in protecting people's identity and you can then be a bit weirder. And I think there's, I wouldn't be surprised if there's actually a lot of anonymous accounts out there of people who are very famous and well-known and they actually have sub-anonymous accounts as well.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  So allow them to play with different ideas in a sandbox as safe.

• 1:09:02George Mack?

  Going back to that, Eric has this weird thing where when he's doing his like 18-hour math sessions, trying to figure out the geometric patterns of the universe, he talks about it of what's the, what's the condition where you can just sometimes say the wrong words and swear a lot. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:09:21Chris Williamson?

  Tourette's.

• 1:09:22George Mack?

  Tourette's, yeah. So he calls it like voluntary Tourette's. So you'll sit by a room and himself and he'll just, this is the weirdest thing ever, but this is why he's great. He's so great.

• 1:09:30Chris Williamson?

  Eric doing an Eric.

• 1:09:33George Mack?

  He'll just say words he's not allowed to say out loud before he starts working and he's therefore like in the mindset of like just fully thinking different to everybody else. Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 1:09:45Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. What else? What else we got on the, or do you want to do an, do you want to riff on Eric for a bit or do you want to, do you want to go into something else?

• 1:09:54George Mack?

  No, I think, I think one of the points I wanted to go back to, I just have it written down, I was chatting to you, is that when we went back to the leverage thing as well, one of the points I didn't make at the end, which is what Steve Jobs says, which is, we go back to the whole bicycle, the human on the bicycle being the most effective thing, which is that the, the internet or the computer, I think he says the computer at the time, is the bicycle of the mind. And I think that's one of the most beautiful ways of understanding like leverage, of modern leverage. And I think that the, yeah, there's a lot of, with everything that's going on, there's going to be so many careers that come out of the internet. I'm just absolutely like fascinated by the space. It's beautiful to see.

• 1:10:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I agree, man. I think. It's going to be interesting to see what happens after this, you know, like it's all well and good having a global pandemic in a society that's in the early 1900s that can adapt a little bit of change, but not tons and certainly not globally. But when you have a site which is able to move as quickly as ours is now and has technology can do leverage, can have instant communication, you know, all that sort of stuff. The, uh, the pace of change, when change is forced upon it, kind of almost bounces back twice as hard, you know what I mean? It's like throwing the tennis ball at the wall and then the wall moving towards you like a tennis racket and whacking you back in the face with it. So I think that'll be really interesting.

• 1:11:24Chris Williamson?

  Tell you one thing, so this is only going to be probably for British people. This is just something to not even a mental model, but it was something I was thinking about the other day while I was in the Asda self-service thing. And I've seen tons of people complain, right? About how annoying the Asda self-service narrator lady is. So you can imagine if you're American, you're listening to this, you're in Costco or wherever it might be like Target or something and you're going through one of the self-service checkouts and in Asda, you're going to have to imagine this. So you're scanning your stuff and the lady's voice that says, thanks, that scan, now put it in the basking, uh, the bagging area is so quick and it does not stop, right? So you scan like, beep, thanks, that scan. And you're like, fuck, I don't want to hear it. And you're thinking, is this every single time?

• 1:12:08Chris Williamson?

  And you might have 40 items in your basket. For those of us that are AirPod pros aficionados, it kind of doesn't really matter so much. Turn that, turn that noise cancelling on, boy.

• 1:12:21Chris Williamson?

  It's super annoying. And what I realized was actually that, because you can cut it off if you're super quick. So that could be programmed in to ensure that people scan their stuff, put it in the bagging area as quickly as possible because they don't want to hear that lady's voice. I'm like, Asda, you smart, smart little guy. So clever.

• 1:12:45George Mack?

  Even within that, you've got two things. You've got like second, third order consequences that come of like bugs and stuff like that. And you have like the psychological versus the logical. Where, which is one of my favorite Rory Sutherland things, which I guess we briefly mentioned earlier, but how things are, you have the like engineering efficiency of like logic of one plus one equals two. But then you have this weird psychological irrational world that human beings operate under. I'm not sure if it's still true, but when the whole Corona thing happened, there were reports that like the Corona beer sales like plummeted.

• 1:13:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, bro, they're worth, they're worth, I think it's like a hundred million that they've gone down by. And Americans were surveyed and over a third of Americans said that they would not buy a Corona beer for fear of infection.

• 1:13:36George Mack?

  But this is one of the things that is purely psychological, like you can see like psycho logic that even like, I think the people who would say they wouldn't drink Corona anymore, because I reckon you've got two forms of consumers. You've got the ones who are like consciously like almost idiots who are like, yeah, I won't drink Corona. And then you've actually got a lot of people who for whatever reason, they just, they may be less likely to buy it.

• 1:13:56Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna get a Sol. I'm gonna fancy a, I fancy a Modelo now.

• 1:14:00George Mack?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:01Chris Williamson?

  There's no, there's no Modelo virus out there, is there?

• 1:14:04George Mack?

  But it's weird, but that's a, that's a thing, isn't it? And that like, you've seen that there where there's clearly no logic behind it. But in our heads, there is a form of logic. And I think that a rational community will often like just dismiss that as stupidity and idiocy. But I think it goes to show a lot about the way we think and the way we operate. It's really bizarre.

• 1:14:24Chris Williamson?

  We're also naturally risk averse creatures, right? And rightly so. When you see or when you learn the multiplied by zero mental model that we dropped earlier on, like it makes sense. It makes sense to have an existential fear of walking out of your door. It makes sense to double check that that condom doesn't have a hole in it. It makes sense to make sure that you're wearing your seatbelt, you know? Like, of course it does. And that again, it links into the quote from Shane Parrish, tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Like, that's why you have these things over time. And I spent my birthday this year in Athens. So I spent it cycling

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  around Athens, seeing the stoa poikle, which is where Zeno of Cithium created Stoicism. So Stoicism, stoa is like a sort of building veranda type thing. And it's the stoa, the stoa poikle is where Stoicism was created. So I'm walking through the gardens where Seneca and Plato would have walked, right? And Zeno of Cithium, which is like modern day Cyprus would have done as well. And I'm walking through there and I'm looking around and we went on this amazing tour. Anyone that goes to Athens, the mythology tour is fantastic. And you're looking at these ancient stoa's and buildings and you go see the Acropolis, right? And you go up and there's the Temple of Nike and the

• 1:15:54Chris Williamson?

  Parthenon and all that sort of stuff. And you're looking at the stories that are displayed in these huge sculptures and all the different, all the different elements that are parts of these stories. And you realise, you're like, hang on, so much of what they're talking about here are universal, universally applicable laws. The things which then maybe they were symbolic, perhaps there was something that was only believed in a very narrative sense. Everything was personified, right? Because it was stories. There wasn't certified fact checking, you know, there was no, what's that fact checking website for when people have rumours? Not Wikipedia, the other one?

• 1:16:37George Mack?

  I know, I know.

• 1:16:38Chris Williamson?

  Snopes, Snopes.

• 1:16:39George Mack?

  Yes.

• 1:16:40Chris Williamson?

  There's no, there's no like ancient Snopes or whatever, just a bunch of stone tablets that you can go through. But I was just walking through and it really, really made me appreciate standing on the top of the Acropolis, looking out over Athens, seeing all of this sort of beauty and wisdom, but symbolically. And I think in like a hyper rational society, what happens is that we discard the wisdom of the past. And like, there's been people around for a lot longer than you. And I know that there's value in science and I know that there's value in logical and reduction, like reductionist reasoning. But there's been a lot of minds working at this for a long time.

• 1:17:16George Mack?

  I also think that you mentioned then that you discard the wisdom of the past. I also think when you're so consensus focused or so Talib uses that example of the

• 1:17:28George Mack?

  absence of evidence is an evidence of absence. And you realize this, like people like quote, like, there's no study for that, bro. There's no study for that. And you've seen like with all the health prices going on, like how this thing's constantly changing. And people who were saying things three months ago are now wrong and now now that's wrong. And it's constantly changing. But I think to go back to the whole momentum model, so not only do you discard the wisdom of the past, you also discard, and probably even more importantly, or at least equally or significantly importantly, the the wisdom and the value of the future, of future trends as well. Because I think that, let's say, if in 2009, somebody was talking to you about cryptocurrencies, you go, what are you on about? Like, it was just so against the consensus.

• 1:18:12George Mack?

  And if you have such a closed mind of where there's been studies so far, or where Goldman Sachs are putting their money, you're like, you're just always going to get average results because you're following the crowd. And don't get me wrong, it may actually be a safe investment strategy. You may just get normal, you know what I mean? You never go to zero. So at least you at least you might be safe. But you you rarely ever get to see like specific knowledge, like the intricacies of like frontiers and nuance. And that's why I love hanging around with like curious people because you'll find that you will tell you like the weirdest new thing that's happening. So like an example of this would be, let's say you got into like Facebook marketing in 2010, when it was like seen as this like fab, like why you why would anybody advertise next to a farm bill thing

• 1:18:55George Mack?

  and a photo of like somebody's relationship status? That was such a weird thing. But if you would have been on that frontier and been that weirdo, that you had so much future value. And I think particularly for young people, like there's so much value on being on the edge of frontiers as opposed to going and as you've seen now, everything that's happened, like actually a job at Deloitte or a big consultancy firm might not be the most like the safest option, actually. It might the the the riskier option is often in taking like no risks. And I think the edge of. The edge of specific knowledge is fascinating. And I think that we have to be a bit weird to phrase it.

• 1:19:37Chris Williamson?

  I absolutely love that. I think as well, like we keep on harping on about it. And we did on the first one. And I created an entire video off the back of a quote about you. What you set me on thinking about weird people and the way that we are and stuff like that. But I really do hope that some of the things that we talk about do kind of give people the license to embrace their own uniqueness and their own individuality. And again, like this isn't for either of us to say, like, both of us know that we're just fallible, shaven chimps. Right. And that we're totally like, not, not even slightly actualized. And we haven't got a clue what's going on. But one of the things that I do know is true in this life is that your unique offering to this world is your power.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  Like, there is no one else by definition who has your life experiences and your genetic makeup and has inhabited all of the different space, the particular spatial coordinates that you have. It's impossible. It hasn't happened. Therefore, by synthesizing all of those things, by synthesizing the way you were brought up and your traumas and your predispositions and your fears and your joys and your successes and everything. By adding that together, that is your competitive advantage. That is how you move the needle in the world and in your own life.

• 1:20:48George Mack?

  So on that, like one of the my, going back to leverage a little bit is like the mental model of almost like a judo throw of like using something's own momentum against itself. And therefore you apply a lot less force. And the biggest thing, and certainly I've struggled with, and I think most people do with, you don't want to be out of the crowd. You don't want people to think you're weird. You don't want people to think you're a loser. It's just so socially conditioned and probably biologically programmed. But almost to flip that on its head and go to yourself, I almost have a razor in place, which is if people don't think you're weird, if people don't, aren't like snidely laughing about you a little bit, you're probably or most definitely not taking enough risks.

• 1:21:31George Mack?

  And that's fine. If you, if you just, if you just want to, if you just want to fit in, that's fine. But you almost have to reframe that to yourself to try and judo throw that social conditioning, that biological programming and go, if that's not happening, I'm by their very definition, I'm just fitting in with the crowd. I'm not taking any risks at all.

• 1:21:49Chris Williamson?

  So is that McGill's razor number two, the weirdness razor maybe?

• 1:21:53George Mack?

  Releasing more razors than Gillette at the minute.

• 1:21:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh, look at that mic drop. I love it. So there's this quote from Atomic Habits that James Clear's got. I always come back to this. Changing your habits often requires you to change your tribe. Each tribe has a set of shared expectations. Behaviors that conform to the shared expectations are attractive. Behaviors that conflict with the shared expectations are unattractive. It's hard to go against the group. Often changing your behaviors requires you to change your tribe. So a lot of the time now, and I'm a big sobriety advocate, right? And this is one of the things that I actually use. It's a razor technically that I use to work out whether your friends want the best for you and whether you should stay friends with them. It's like if when you start to enact behavior change and grow, your friends don't support you.

• 1:22:40Chris Williamson?

  Instead, they get triggered by the fact that their own shortcomings are being identified by your growth. You are in the wrong group of friends. Like the opportunity for you to do a podcast, the first thing that I think is fuck, I want to listen to that. I want to subscribe to that. I want to help you. We've been talking about how to do your audio, about what mic you need to buy, about what webcam you need to buy, all this sort of stuff, right? I want that for you because I don't feel threatened by your growth. I feel like if you were to grow, that it would not only grow me, but I just want the best for you, right? There's a lot of people out there who have friends that don't want the best for them.

• 1:23:22George Mack?

  Yeah, it's true. Or sometimes it's not even want the best for them, but their conditioning may be so different. Like I keep seeing great tweets of like, if you post, oh, I've just started my masters or I've just started another degree, like, or I've just graduated, which I think I swear, who doesn't graduate unless you drop out? Like, how do you fail a modern non-STEM degree is insane. Like it's harder to fail than it is to. Uh, but it is past white. If you post that on, I don't mean to like, like be too rude or anything. But if you post that on there with your certificate, like everybody gets hundreds of likes. And it's like this, every graduation day, there's this big thing about it.

• 1:24:03George Mack?

  But realistically, when you break it down to first principles, you've entered a horrific amount of debt to get a piece of paper, which I don't think is as meaningless as like the full college, anti-college or university people make out, because there's definitely like social value, et cetera, et cetera, that I think online courses have not been able to do yet. But if you then contrast that with when friends like say, I've just launched this new business and it gets like four likes and people will even like you, when people invite them to like the Facebook page, people even see the page and not like it. Like it's really weird, but I think that's because it's way seen outside the box to try and start something like that as opposed to, hey, I've got this degree. We've all got degrees that we like this, therefore we're all in this same matrix together and it all makes sense.

• 1:24:46George Mack?

  Cause if, if you've got it, I've got it, it's all working and let's ignore the debt.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah. So it's almost like, um, what's that thing when, when comedians aren't that funny, but they get the, the audience claps because they agree.

• 1:25:01Chris Williamson?

  So they don't, they say something that's like, you've got like a super sort of lefty crowd or whatever. And you say something that criticizes Trump, or you've got like a super righty crowd. And you say something that criticizes like Bernie or whatever, and it's not actually that funny, but it's just like.

• 1:25:16George Mack?

  Identity game, yeah.

• 1:25:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, kind of playing like that. And you're right. It's like the same thing. I had this tweet the other, a couple of months ago that hit the nail on the head about that, man. Like people need to gas their friends up more, like they have to do it. And there's no other alternative word for it. Gassing your friends up is exactly what the, the term should be, regardless of how colloquial or particular you want to be about it. If your buddies start up a business, like support them, it's fucking mad. How many people will share a new Rihanna X Puma collaboration video like, oh my God, yes, queen. And you're like, bro, your buddy just opened a coffee shop that's a mile away from your house and you've never been like, what, what are you doing?

• 1:25:58George Mack?

  I think two notes though, to judo throw that against itself is to almost, cause you. Is to then say for the person who, let's say, for example, you you're doing something yourself and then they're sharing Rihanna's new underwear, underwear range, right?

• 1:26:11Chris Williamson?

  Freudian Freudian slip there, George.

• 1:26:14George Mack?

  I didn't share myself, actually. But first, to do a break against itself and just, I imagine this is how I'd at least try and think, whether it's I can actually put it in practice is different of, okay, it's a good filter of actually who your friends are. So it's almost a positive thing in a sense. But I think I just think it so much of it comes down to, yeah, what's what's expected and what isn't expected and the the conditioning, conditioning that goes on. And it's it's really, yeah, really bizarre.

• 1:26:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man. Look, George, we made it, man. Mental models 103. Have you got anything else that you need to get off your chest before we finish?

• 1:26:52George Mack?

  No, I think I think that's that's pretty much it. I just, yeah, and I guess the biggest takeaway is if you can be a bit weirder and you can have people laugh at you more. And I think I say this out loud because it then tries to encourage me to do it a bit too. I think that the world would be a bit of a better place. It's probably it really, as cliche as that sounds.

• 1:27:12Chris Williamson?

  No, man, I absolutely agree. So what's your Twitter now? It keeps changing.

• 1:27:17George Mack?

  No, it's the stuff that says George Mac, George underscore underscore Mac.

• 1:27:22Chris Williamson?

  George underscore underscore Mac. You need to go and follow him. You're going to be tweeting, I'm sure, over the next few weeks as as more interesting stuff comes in. I've noticed enough enough regulation in your in your tweeting recently, a tiny little bit more.

• 1:27:34George Mack?

  Quarantine, a few more times, I think.

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know. So, yeah, thank you so much, man. You know, this, I absolutely do adore having you on and it makes me feel very gratified that you're number one. You know, we got all of these guys. There's no reason, apart from the bot farm, but there is no reason that you should be number one. You know, like, there's no reason, you're up against, like, the biggest guys on the planet, Douglas Murray, Robert Greene, five times New York Times bestselling author, and then just sat at the top is just some guy from the middle of the UK.

• 1:28:06George Mack?

  Who the fuck is that guy?

• 1:28:08Chris Williamson?

  Oh, the fuck is that guy? It's George, it's George underscore underscore Mac on Twitter. That's who it is, ladies and gentlemen. Look, man, thank you so much. I'm sure that we will be back with Mental Models 104. The link to George's Twitter and anything else that we find that's interesting will be linked in the show notes below. George, man, thank you.

• 1:28:28George Mack?

  Stay weird. Much love. See you later, Chris. Thank you for having me.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:29:05George Mack?

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled. You're freezing there. That's what...

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:29:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.