Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is George Mack. He's a writer business owner and an entrepreneur. If our mind is an operating system, ideas are the apps that we installed to give us a greater understanding of the world. George is one of my favorite thinkers. And today, we get to go through 16 of the best ideas that we've both discovered since the last time that we spoke over three years ago, expect to learn where the optimism is actually a scam. Why it's so sexy to be cynical. Why High agency people are the best ones to have in your life.
What is the most interesting question of all time the difference between treadmill friends and so friends, why most people die at 25 but aren't buried until the 75, how to stop worrying about everyone else's opinions and much more the oh geez, amongst you will remember George as being one of the First episodes that went pretty big on YouTube and on audio and he has been an important part of my life for the last five years. He is currently away. Living in Dubai running this amazing amazing age.
See, and he's been in Austin with me for a full month. I love this guide a bit. I love his ideas. I love the way thinks I'll of his positivity. Yeah, there is so much to take away from this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend, there is so much in here. I think that can help people to reframe the way that they see the world and really upgrade their quality of life. So, yeah, get ready for this one. In other news, this episode is brought to you by, whoop, whoop is changing the game. When it comes to wearable tech, most humans have a desire to improve but
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But now, ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome George Mack.
Today, we're going to go through some of the best ideas of all time. Well, purely subjective. I have me. And you, so yeah, you know, my best ideas that we're aware of right now that may change into our, yes, directly, they would ask of you if it's an infinite game, okay? So the first one,
Is optimism a scam. What's the skeptic is to
shut down? The railways. Shut down. Airline shut down electricity. Shut down it all. It's all a scam. We need more nyla's and we need more pessimism. No I am. I wrote this essay called is optimism a scam and the pure thesis behind it was
What you had about 20 years ago was the secret, the book that came out and it was this idea that you could just manifest things into reality and the cynical skeptical crowd completely decided to destroy the idea. And I always use like the so there's three great examples of the secret. So you've got one, which is Winston Churchill. When he was 19 years old. Saying, one day this great City will be under attack. I will be the one that saves it. That's like 50, 40, 40, 50 years before, World War 2, you have Arnold Schwarzenegger saying
I will become the greatest bodybuilder ever, and the greatest movie star or the biggest movie star more time. There's one, which is from John Rockefeller as well, which is one day. I will be the richest man in the world. He said that to his bank teller who had rejected him for a bank apparently so that's the kind of ball case for like ridiculous affirmations that manifest reality. But the problem with that is for every Rockefeller Schwarzenegger church or there's 10,000 delusional assholes that say these things and they are backed up to the Skeptics are right there and the problem that the optimism crowd has in my opinion, it's a
Problem they've sold it. They've oversold it and the best. The best put down ever was Dave, Chappelle, where he's saying, if the secret was true, why aren't all the starving kids in Africa, manifesting food, and you go? That's, that's the ultimate win, right? So optimism as a result has kind of struggled a few out, and the problem with optimism is they've oversold. The product is my, is my thesis. So, imagine if you saw creatine as human growth hormone, that's what I see. People have done with optimism. So, what we need to do is appeal to Skeptics
Courage to kind of win the optimism game which is if you go to PubMed and search placebo effect, a hundred thousand results. Everybody in the scientific Community acknowledges, the power of the placebo effect. There's one study where it started in WWII. I forgot the name of the doctor where it was the u.s. versus the Italians. And there was loads of people loads of pretty Soldier, sorry struggling and rather than give the morphine, because he'd run out. He's not giving salt water and they could go through surgery a bit. So, the placebo effect is
Magical something powerful. And therefore I think you can use that a little bit to argue the Skeptics case for optimism and ultimately where I go down, this is what optimism is is to improve one percent every single day. So, there's have you heard of the cocktail party effect and I told you about that? No, so the cocktail party effect is me and you sat here, like, we've been in a few bars or restaurants at Terry's barbecue down the road, right? And the background noise is a blur. It's me and you tracking blur blur, blur blur blur. But if somebody says Voodoo event, which Christie's old events company or
it mentions the north east of England or whatever. It is suddenly that background noise, what is that? You immediately tune into it. So right now your brain is blurring out infinite inputs, millions of inputs that happening right now and you're focusing on what appeals to your reticular activating system. And I think the, the case for optimism is, you're not going to manifest into reality. But if you have a more optimistic frame, you're more likely to spot those opportunities and I say Market W, Ms. Mm. As a 1% Improvement every single day and then you'll probably get more people
Leave it so I think that's the problem with optimism. It
was oversold. Yeah, the baby and bathwater got thrown out together exactly the fruit. Yeah,
the I put that baby in battle. What I mean, which is they throw the baby out which is like, useful optimism with a load of delusional Wishy thinking Instagram quotes bullshit. And that's problem
especially the first kind of like Eugenics optimism's like Eugenics that the first iteration of really, really aggressive optimism came from Rhonda burns. The secret
This is the woman who said that the 2006 Boxing Day tsunami that killed, like tens of thousands of people, I think, in Thailand was due to the Thai. People, giving out bad vibes that like manifested and attracted this natural disaster.
And please like, it's like if you advertise creatine as going to fix everything, it's not it's a small one percent Improvement every day, but the actual difference is, is you may then have an opportunity that opens up the completely compounds. So I think James Clear has that
For if you improve, not point one percent every single day, if that compounds, that's a thirty-six improve 36x Improvement in a year, that's the argument. I think for optimism, it's 1% Improvement every single day and ultimately Human Society is getting better. I think it's important to repeat that
point. Well everybody's deluded right in one form or another everybody has some type of delusion as far as I can see. And both of us come from the north of the UK, this is like the fucking Ground Zero for cynicism pessimism.
Skepticism not necessarily coming from an intellectual place, but almost coming from a genetic place. It feels like there's a, predisposition, the weather's grader people are graded. Mood is gray, so everybody has a degree of delusion, right? Why not have a delusion that benefits? You like, if you're going to not be accurate necessarily, if you know that you're going to be inaccurate about the future? And you know, that you can't know everything, which is true. I don't think that
airing on the side of things are going to get worse, especially given that every quantifiable metrics available says, that things are getting better. Yes. Is it difficult to we're dealing with the existential pain of Life Direction and all that stuff yet, 100% II, get that. And it's a luxurious position to be in to have an existential crisis because all of the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been sorted. So it's a challenge that very few people have had to deal with. So there's not any wisdom that's been archetypal we passed down over Generations because so few people got to the situation where they were safe from.
Shelter and food, and water, and connection, and blah, blah, meaning and all that stuff. So, yeah, I understand it's a difficult challenge, but like, everything is getting better which means that
Optimism? What looks like optimism is actually. Real is. Mm-hmm. And what looks like realism is actually like pessimism. Yeah. I think
anybody who follows me for a while and the ones who haven't enough to describe this one's all this in visual audio is, there's this Matrix, which is optimism and pessimism and then low agency and high agency and I feel that. Yeah, if you have optimism with a low sense of agency that that isn't valuable at all but paired with high agency, I think that's one of the most beautiful things. There's this white one
Thing that I always come back to as well, which is this Steve Jobs, email thing I told you about this one where you sent to himself, 13, 13 months before he died. It came out quite recently and Steve Jobs, wrote this to himself. I grew a little of the food I eat and the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language. I did not invent or refine I did not discover the mathematics. I use I'm protected by freedoms and laws. I did not conceive or of or legislate and do not enforce or a Jew.
Okay, I am moved by music. I did not create myself when I needed medical attention. I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor object-oriented programming or most of the technology I work with, I love and admire my species living and dead and I am totally dependent on them for my life. And well-being, the one guy who could have a could be very pessimistic in that scenario. But B also rightly so have a fucking ego is sort like that. That I always come back to that whenever I feel quite pessimistic, I go, fuck,
Life's actually very very
good. How do you reframe it yourself? So everybody has this draw toward cynicism pessimism. It's called to do it on the internet. Somehow becomes sexy to be cynical because it's seen as like a signal of high intellect. How do you stop yourself tumbling down that rabbit
hole?
It's good question. I think one of them I have this thing of that Hardware versus software which is most people think they have a software problem when the actual Hardware problems. So, if I'm finding myself thinking more cynically thinking more negatively, I'll just try and fix the hardware, so it's like some kind of breathing exercise. So on a run exercise, eat. Well, my friend Dickey says that when he's tired or in that kind of emotional state, his goal of the day just to make no decisions. So I just often a good night's sleep or whatever it is.
Trying to fix it. That way, that for me, fix is about 95%, my software problems and then the remaining 5%, which may be legitimate issues are much easier to solve in that. So, that's the first thing I'd say is fix Hardware before you try and fix software. And then, I think it's a lot about who you're around. It's a lot about studying studying history, super important because you go fuck, I could have been born in 1612. Yeah, or I could have been part of World War Two, which was a blink of an eye our way. And when you actually look at it from a historical perspective, it's like, well, where's better than now?
I don't think
there is a better time than now. Yeah, I came up with this yesterday. I told you about the alpha history fantasy. Oh, yeah. So modern men who are angry at the world, they feel has rejected, them, mistakenly believed. They would have done better in medieval times. There's some how adamant that the chance of them being ganga's, Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon. Fodder peasant, number 1 million three, hundred seventy 3582 whose Favela was sacked and destroyed, I would have been me. You think he would have been cannon fodder peasant, 100%. Okay, well,
I think.
Humans got this quote where he says you cannot change the mind with the mind. You have to change it with the body. It's not strictly true. Because meditation is precisely changing the mind with the mind but I think broadly, it's true that most of the problems that people encounter our Hardware problems. Rather than software problems. I learned this during covid for the first time in my entire life. I had a stable sleep and wake pattern. I went to bed and got up at the same time, seven days a week for the first time since I was 18 and I was 32 some light, right? Okay, there's something to this. There's something to having a set routine and I
listen to, I'd sent it to you. I remember sending to you Matthew Walker on Rogan. I'm like, wow, would you look how important sleep is? Meanwhile, staying up until 4:00 in the morning. Cashing up nightclubs like two or three nights a week, so you need to really sort of see it and feel it. Yes, on Hardware problem. Also, I had this idea called the cynicism safety blanket. I don't know,
fucking I'm happy
with this. So, this is explaining why cynicism is incredibly trendy, especially in the modern world.
Cynicism is a guarded response, which set yourself up against disappointment, its role within the system is to protect you against experiencing anything bad. It is a preemptive strike against a perceived threat. If I tell myself that, all women are bad, then I'm less likely to seek relationship with women. And as a consequence, I'm never going to feel the pain of rejection. If I tell myself that everything is shit or that things will never get better than I'm excused of ever having to try at anything. It's more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism to cope.
Hope is framing hope as pathetic and embarrassing and optimism is delusion. It's sour, grapes at an existential level, if everything sucks and everyone is horrible, and the reality is disappointing. And you know, that for a fact, then it's the people acting like things that can be better, that are dumb, delusional, and the problem, the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. Hmm. And I also think that ties into the cocktail party effect. What we just spoke about where if you have that cynical Outlook and you have that pessimistic Outlook, you can still win the lottery.
But you will if there's so much sensory inputs that trying to go into your brain, you will just see it more, you will see more of it, you'll end up down darker, YouTube rabbit holes. You'll end up watching those things you'll end up in the assessment. So it's this kind of Perpetual flywheel that then Begins the
compound. Yeah, you're looking for ways. Yeah, you're looking for evidence that confirms the world view that you didn't want to have, but the you somehow have inculcated from being on the internet too much
Scott, Adams, their credit deal. But he has this idea in movies books called the weed filter. And he used to think that
That if he smoked weed, people became way nicer to him. So he started smoking more wheat and then he began to realize actually he was just more relaxed because he was so tight and stiff. The all of a sudden his interaction with the world also has an effect on how they interact with him, when he was way more relaxed people with them way more relaxed around him. It was actually, we only realized it was actually the word itself. It was purely the filter that it was viewing things
through Mmm. Yeah. It's trying to push optimism's a tough. It's a, it's a really hard.
Yeah, I mean I then like going back to Italy so you don't have to Hardware software. Think it's more just looking around. Just looking at the reality of the situation. One of my favorite stories is forgot the writer who did it, but he tried to make a chicken sandwich from scratch. Have you heard the story? So he but I fucked, you tried to create a chicken sandwich, purely from scratch. So the
first principle sandwich,
first principles talking six months in Boston, 1,500
pounds. Oh. So you had to grow the wheat, or whatever that was ground up to make the flower to do the right. Okay.
You just don't think about those things.
Of how really when you look at human beings is nothing actually that special about them. But the ability a to create ideas, which we spoke about to begin with, and then be the ability to cooperate at scale. Is that thing about if you try to create a pencil, you couldn't no one knows how to create a pencil because the like, fucking rubbers from here. The LEDs from here, no, one knows it. And that is quite beautiful. And you need optimistic people in order to be able to collaborate to play those positive, some games. It's so important. And listen, is it going to fix cancer? If you've got cancer, of course not. But like one of my favorite examples is Brian Armstrong who used to do
Write down every single day. I will create a billion-dollar company do I think that create a billion-dollar company? No, of course not. I was like hard work, he's probably ridiculous IQ. He's probably got a great Network, he had the right idea. He went through y combinator had all those things but could that have helped a little bit possibly?
I would love to
see the case for pessimism but the only reason that I can see that pessimism would potentially be the case. That would be put forward would be that it protects people emotionally from the pain of failure. That's really the only thing if you set your sights so low you can never be disappointed by reality.
I mean, one of the things I'd kind of thought this conversation here is I do think there's some utility to pessimism and like that kind of George Orwell and double thing. I the ability to
Hold two ideas at the same time is so important. So if you can actually take a pessimistic frame and go out, what's worse scenario, that can happen here. Is that Tim Ferriss fear setting idea. I think that's super valuable as well and the ability to constantly use optimism and pessimism when you need it. But I'd say on the whole I think, optimism's more useful. I likewise if you can take a high agency frame when you need it and also the ability to empathize with what the low agency version of this will be the ability to operate in multiple mindsets. I think super important that George Fitzgerald quote, which is like you can tell the
You can tell the mark of a first-rate intellect by the ability to hold two thoughts, two, opposing thoughts at the same time and that's very rare these days. People even go to one end of the spectrum or the other, and I'm often quite fucking obsessed with. What's that third door?
Yeah. Well, if I go orthogonally. Yeah.
Because this teams here, this teams here, what's that here,
you've mentioned it a couple of times today. One of mine in your favorite word's High agency. Yeah. Why are you so obsessed with high Edge and see people? Why is it important
Because it's applied optimism. I guess, without it. Nothing changes. And we was at dinner last night with Jared. And we was saying, so I asked, he for reference for the audience, he recruits that high-level execs, and I asked him, what do all these guys have in common? When you get to like that, you birth level of big, big big companies and he said, like, energy transference and
high Agency for me, is
a combination of energy transference, the ability to
Eva just accept the story or change the story and then you have this kind of debate. Again, you can have these two thoughts in your head at the same time of the great man theory of history
or kind of things just happen society and change that way. And again I think there's truth truth to both but ultimately the it the individual level having a sense of agencies extremely valuable and these figures that one of my favorite questions to ask is what films, aren't we making? Because we're too, busy making Transformers 12. And eventually all my work is often questions rather than answers. It's my
Basis. Lyric is questions. Are the answers? You might need an often in this platform. It's a guru platform. You can give these easy platitudes. I actually prefer to ask a question and then leave that open loop with the audience and then go. Hey, here's my answer to the question but then you may get and hopefully we do you get a little DMS from people can actually this is the story that they should be making instead of Transformers 12. Have you heard about this person? Have you heard about this person or you heard about this story or
the your crowdsourcing the insights. Exactly.
And that I think that's such a better way. It goes back to what we said at the beginning. That's an infinite game.
And where if you try and go, I think XY dad's true and I have this Guru in sight of ABC versus having a question of an open-loop, those are questions that you can kind of answer over a career and still never answer its infinite game.
Okay. So high agency is the ability to change that to enact change. If it was to be in a single sentence, I would say
to that. Yeah, I think low agency is life happening to you. Hi agency. Is you happening to life? I'd say that's the fundamental difference and you'll know people who life happens to them. And then, you know, people who happen to
And ultimately, it's a constant battle. You can have the most high agency, put Steve, Jobs, who dies of pancreatic cancer, obviously the stuff around the carrot juice and things like that, but, but ultimate environment still have a factor but it's the ability to have that doublethink and no. Okay. Well, I can still have the most amount of optimism Stood, Still the most about high agency and have an impact environment. Still gonna have a huge impact to.
Hmm. So who are some of your favorite High agency humans throughout
history going back to what I said earlier, what films aren't Hollywood making right now because they're making Transformers 12 or fast and furious 15.
The most underrated one in terms of how few people know, and the most high agency, individual is a guy called Rudolph Ferber. So, Rudolph Ferber was in our switch. As a teenager, he was in a unique position where he was essentially in the operations of the train. So he would help Jews come off the trains, particularly women and children. And then they get exported to the gas Chambers. One of the things like I'm a principal and today today that I've kind of massively change our mind. Our last 24 months is when you when you
History, you
begin to understand things completely differently. So, when I go into this Rudolph, Urban Story, the thing that people don't appreciate, is they view it in hindsight versus at the time, the Nazis didn't announce the people, hey, get on these trains and this is what's gonna happen to you, that wasn't the case. And as a result, lots of other governments who were fighting the war against them, didn't even know that was the case, there was a few people who suspected it was, but it's only in hindsight. Do we know that? So he then began to see, he was one of the few people that knew who wasn't on the Nazis team that could see this just killing machine that was happening.
And okay, so you can imagine here. Talk about pessimism has every reason to be pessimistic, he's seeing the worst of humanity has ever existed. Talk about agency. He's literally a prisoner and if you try and Escape out, which they will, they will just essentially, if they find you, they'll put a three-day dog Squad. They will hunt you down and they will hang you in front of the everybody else. Just to show what happens to you. So he teamed up with Alfred wetzler, actually, just a rewind for a second about the hot most harrowing thing about his story. Going, why he could be so pessimistic and solo agency.
Is he meets a girl in the concentration camp called Alice Monk and loses his virginity in the concentration camp and then she gets killed the next day in the gas Chambers and he kept seeing that and again talk about pessimism. Talk about their agency every single reason to be. But decided you know what, fuck it I'm going to try and Escape so he teamed up with Alfred wetzler and essentially what they did was there was some would just outside the camps that they hid under these barrels of would Boom, the Nazis as they're counting in at the end.
Yo, where's for 40 70? Because they take their names from them. So they just have numbers. Where are they? They released the dog Squad and they hid under these barrels of world, the most high agency part of it. They cover themselves in gasoline and tobacco. So the Nazi dogs, couldn't find them, even though they were right. Literally on the perimeter, there's one point where they almost find them in. He has a knife because he's about to take his own life. Okay? They don't find him three days goes by. They haven't are they've kind of stayed awake. They escape they Sprint as fast as they can.
Run all the way through Slovakia No goo
run through Slovakian
in concentration camp uniforms where everyone and surrounding them a Nazi sympathizers, because that's what they put in place with no Google Maps. No, Uber no fight. No, no, no WhatsApp to chat to the like the squad, you know? I mean like this is like the most harrowing thing where and if they get caught killed immediately run. I think it's like a hundred and a hundred or so Miles through. Get all the way there. And then the most beautiful part is kind of the few things.
That happens afterwards. So one rather than write an incredibly emotional report, which you should have done that, they killed the girl. He lost his virginity to rights is dark. He could tell them, like, they killed the girl, I love, they wrote the most objective McKinsey, like report of this killing machine that was Auschwitz and that people didn't believe him for quite a while. Again, rather than rest on his Laurels, this guy goes and joins the Slovakian Army and they say we're not going to give you a pistol, will give you a machine gun because of like the
And if God you are just based on his fucking
story. Yeah. We don't give boys like you pistols. Yes, we give we give
them machine guns. So that's the kind of guy again just escaped that but he's back on the front line. The beautiful thing. Well there's a dark side, there's a beautiful side but the dark side is because going back to what I said earlier. People didn't understand what was happening at the time. It wasn't believed for a while until Churchill and the pope Altima T got the report and then began to put more and more pressure on the Nazis. So it was a big factor. The recommend the raccoon. They reckon he saved
200,000 lives just from his actions alone after the war he goes and lives in America is electorate farmer lectures pharmacology. Basically, none of his students know the story of what he did. But in the most beautiful thing, I found a YouTube video that has 56 for use on it, where this guy who used to know him very well, said that everybody apart from verba, who he knew that escaped or went through, Auschwitz. Further dressed in say me. Well, because he never wanted that freedom to be taken away from him ever again. So, he dressing like the most,
Landish amazing suits and for me, talk about a film that it's better than Transformers, 12 better than Fast and Furious a but nobody knows who. I mean, I few people do, but most people do not know who he is and why isn't there a day named after him? It's for me, it's
Insanity. The most high agency man of all time. I
think in terms of name to agency
ratio, name to awareness. It's rude offer before. Sure. That's very cool. Yeah, the I put dick Fosbury in the tedx talk that I did a few years ago and I think that that's a good example as well. You
No, someone who was being maligned in a very different way, but he was marked, you know, to try and break the existing hegemony. That was the Civic. The scissor kick, I think was the current one that people were using and he was an engineer by trade, so he had analyzed, what was happening with regards to center of gravity? How he could get yourself as low as possible? And yeah, he was laughed at by everybody. You know, he competed in the Olympics, I think it was
Maybe Japan or Korea or someone like that in the 60s when he did win, he had two different pairs of Nikes on. He didn't have the same pair of shoes and he missed the opening ceremonies. He wanted to go to a museum. So this guy was an unbelievable outlier, but he had the courage of his convictions and I think that that's the that's one of the big
differences. It's that idea which is if you was to go back to 1850 and try and explain the concept of Wi-Fi, it would blow their but it would not be seen.
As favorable but that idea exists. You just needed a combination of ideas, what we spoke about earlier and then High agency, individuals and Humanity working together and compounding. So the question you then think is but what is going to be Wi-Fi for us? Now, they're a hundred years from now. However, long it's gonna be hard. That was so obvious. That one of my favorite examples, which have much more base. Level is wheeled suitcases. So before I think it was 1970s everybody used to carry their suitcases everywhere.
Don't worry sometimes that great bit of the smartest men at the time, the smartest physicists used to get on the train or the plane carrying their suitcases. And the question is, is where's the Wheeled suitcase is right now? There's one guy who comes along and goes, hold on, let's put some wheels on that. Jim Jefferies has a great bit in his new Netflix special, where he says feasibly Neil Armstrong as he was getting on the Rockets. It was, they're carrying on
his foot because one
day we'll put a rocket on these realize it.
Okay, so Joe and that's again, going back to questions, questions, or the answers that you need. Where is the Wheeled suitcase right now? And that's the question. I can keep you up at night, where it's so obvious, but everyone's just copying the crowd and be a memetic.
So a lot of people will think I would be high agency. I want to be around people that are high agency. How can you tell if your friends and the people that you hang with are high or low
agency?
I think going back to what we mentioned earlier, which is do they kind of bend the environment? So no matter what situation, you put them into, they bend it the dinner. Last night he said energy transference. So I read this essay, I've never pulled before published which is so for friends versus treadmill friends. And there's certain friends that I hang around with afterwards. I need to lie on a sofa because they kind of drain you of that energy. And then there's other friends that we mean you know what, you hang around with them, you like fuck
Seven mile, run, that's go. We overclock our brains. Yeah, that's so I think a big thing that you'll see is energy transference. I always say that Steve, from Diary of a CEO who I used to work at his company. There was this thing where I would walk in the office in the morning, and I'd open the door and bear in mind. Steve could be in the London office. Manchester office building office. New York office is constantly jet-setting around and go, I could just see from people's faces and how much energy was in the room at our Steve's here today, without even seeing him. And I think that's
Like a often thing is when they enter a room, the energy, just completely changes. I think that's often combination of high agency
individuals. Hmm. You had weird teenage Hobbies. We had seen a job is another one. So
I often hire for this like I'm in a job interview and if they mention a weird teenage hobby, I kind of leaned in quite a lot, which I probably should say publicly now because now people are going to start bringing those up but when you're young then it went especially when you're a teenager. It's probably your low most low Agency State because you want to copy the crowd, you want to be mimetic of everybody around you.
However, if you can at that age, what everyone else is going playing football or rugby be super into yo-yoing or super into football freestyle or super into whatever it is for me that's a good sign because if you can swim against the tide When You're 15 or the environment or people mocking you so much easier if you're not okay
with so formative as well. Write a lot of the things that you do in later life or Echoes of what you did when you were a kid at this really great study that I looked at that the music that you listen to between the ages of 11 and 15 imprint
Tony for the rest of your life. So that's why you have generations of Music trends that go, like, I still love emo and post-hardcore because I grew up in like the Hawthorne Heights and Blink-182 era. That was my, that was what I listen to, right? And then there'll be other people that listen to whatever it might be, God, help the people that are growing up now like Megan D Stallion and cardi B. But you've got the golden question as well which is something that we've used. I think you might have spoken about this on the first ever episode that we did. What's the golden question? The go?
In question is, if you was stuck in a third-world prison or you stuck on an island and you had to call someone to bail you out, who would you call? And that alone will identify the most high agency person in your life because within that you need a combination of, I mean, some kind of delusional optimism, to be able to pull that off. You need some Relentless kind of resourcefulness to try and operationalize that, and you're going to need to be have that energy transference to be able to convince people or whatever the fuck you
Whatever plan you're gonna have to put together so and say that is probably the most impactful thing when predicting High agency one that I see as well is immigrant mentality. So if somebody's moved from their Hometown, quite a good sign. If someone's moved from their home country even greater sign. And you then see these like immigrants across particular America, right? Who absolutely dominate because if you can sit there and go, I'm in the wrong place.
And so I have to acknowledge Him in the wrong place. I have to admit, I think everybody else or the people around me. I disagree with their decision at least for me and to have the growth mindset to, then operationalize a move and start from zero, that of in itself, is kind of quite a meta story doesn't mean that every everybody who migrates is high agency, but I'd say it is quite common, not being able to predict people's opinions as well. I think is a huge one. I have a friend of mine called Katie and I love hanging around with him because I don't know what he's
I'm to say because I like he doesn't just line up with 0, for example, like you have like the bodybuilder who your stereotype them, you probably get this a little bit as well, right? People don't expect you to be in great shape for model and then chat about Neuroscience with a guy coming on and hold your own. So, I look people, when you can't fully predict their opinions or you have the beauty queen who's super into nature or the marketer who's obsessed with the history of War. Whenever someone just falls into that obvious stereotype makes you think that they haven't thought about
Things. But when they go, hold on a second like you was on love Island. But you're super into Chang about astrophysics, I go that's probably quite High agency individual because they've clearly going against what should be their default programming?
Yeah, if you know one opinion that somebody holds and from it, you can accurately predict everything else that they believe they're probably not a serious
thinker. They just they just NPC's just downloading
scripts but there is somebody out there who falls into the perfect mold of I am pro-life.
I don't pro-gun and a First Amendment and I'm like small government and I'm like anti-immigration and I'm blah, blah blah. Like you are. The complete caricature. Stereotype of the person. That's from the right in there is the same from the person that's from the left. But most people are so idiosyncratic that you should have something that doesn't fit, should be this nice smooth Circle except for those two bits you lat. What's that doing there? Like why are you pro-choice? But pro-gun or why are you like pro-immigration? But
A small government. Like why did those things go together? And when you find somebody that has a non-typical suite of beliefs? It's interesting because you think you've arrived at this point on your own. This is one of the things I did this video about Sam Harris ages ago. 34 years ago why some Harris is annoying, everybody. It seems like he's like continued like true to form of the last few years. But I have to respect what he's done with regards to that because he pays an unbelievably
High price to hold the opinions that he does, which gives me a great amount of faith that he truly believes in them. It would be much easier for him to fold either one way or the other, he like, how can you it's very untypical to be probe acts, but anti woke like anti-trump but also kind of antibody didn't like, you know, he just holds a suite of beliefs that whether you agree with them or not and almost everybody disagrees with some of them, right? There's very few people that hold the exact same
Sam Harris Suite of belief that somehow has studs but the price that he pays to hold them is so high that for me it's a reliable signal of authenticity because there are much easier routes to existing in the world than holding that odd conglomeration of views. Mmm,
it makes you think, they've thought it through and I realized the favorite, my favorite people to hang around and I don't have to agree with them on anything, but have they fought things through, I find that fascinating and then do they update their beliefs the other one on the highway agencies.
List was.
Are they means your face but nice behind your back and you often don't see the people who are nice to your face. I mean, behind your back because by definition you this band you back. So another concept increments was hidden metrics, but on that specific thing is a hidden metric. You don't see, people being rude and you about. And I think often a good indication of somebody probably being nice behind your back is probably someone who's means your face. Well, at least, you know that, and if not, at least they're consistent,
what people that are nice about other people who aren't there.
They're to your face.
That's a good that's a good one or the inverse are they amazing friend amazing friendlies to room and they go obviously what they're wearing or you seen X Y Zed? That's for me a sign of like it takes a lot of agency to go against gossiping which is one of the most innate human things.
Correct. Being a gossip tells you as much about the person who is gossiping as it does about the person that they gossiping about because what it tells you is that as soon as the scrutiny of the person that they're talking about is no longer there, they're going to be prepared to talk about you.
I've said before, like the stuff that is on this phone would break the internet for weeks for weeks, dude, I have shit on there, which is like
cross orbit, level, and pirate Roberts. It's dead DPR.
But you know, it's my way of going about life that I'm like, okay well I guess I'm just gonna like hold this secret for the fucking rest of time. That's exciting for me to have like
One of the other ones as well I think is sending people Niche content. Oh my, that's
what going back to the rule of urban story. I found that from one of the things I talent, I have that I can't really monetize the ice block content creators really early on going back. To begin the conversation. Probably listen to you on the first ever episode. It took a while for that stock, that penny stock to finally move is doing well, no. Right. There's a lot of other examples like that. And one of the low agency things is, okay, this has six million views. Therefore, I will click on it. What I know do is I'll go in the Twitter feed or YouTube.
Whatever. And I look for things the algorithm is recommending me with like a very few views and I click on that and this 9 out of 10 times. It's absolutely a waste of time but one out of 10 you'll tap into something that everybody else isn't tapping into but by definition that is the meme of seeing a crowd like the create that me about how to be productive assets, how to be creative and everybody's queuing outside how to be productive but no one's queuing outside how to be creative, but meta-level that's a concept right? Of what are the things that nobody's clicking on that will then potentially be big in the future and you have to
Do that like a VC where, you know, nine out of ten of your bets are going to be completely incorrect but I'm on an attorney's. Clicking on a Bitcoin article in
2014. Yeah. Like how many, you've heard what 30 million views on that verba story, I think on Twitter?
Because, whereas everyone else isn't regurgitating the same ship which is if you can tap into other inputs. That was my big thing about creativity, the essay that went viral on that which is creative. The problem with creativity is people, treat it like productivity where they just try and do the same thing harder versus try and get as many different inputs into the system as possible. And now YouTube explore page.
All these things can just keep you in this hamster wheel. This is you need to try and break out because you're
predictable. Yeah. And search weird
things and before you know it you find some bizarre inputs
that can either go one way or the other. Yeah, it's the niche content thing and looking for different ideas and where do they come from? Is a really interesting way to conceptualize productivity versus creativity. Really interesting idea to look at there is what's a work environment that you're doing this particular job in. So for instance if you've ever walked into an
Artist studio. Zach my housemate, his missus is an artist, right? So I go into the room where she does her art and there's stuff fucking everywhere, there's like Vapes and as there's half done sketches and they'll be like a dog brush and they'll be like a Bluetooth speaker but it's like upside down and they'll be can't also its chaos fucking chaos. That is the place that you want to be and the be books and all sorts of other stuff. That's the place that you want to be. If you want creative ideas, it's not the place you want to be in. If you're doing your taxes.
Know when you're doing your taxes, you want to be a nice clean desk? You want to have all of your stuff in front of you? You don't have any distractions. And yeah, the obsession that people have over productivity is so all encompassing the, I don't think many people in the modern world have ever looked at a problem and thought anything except for, I need more productivity, every single lock gets filled with the key of more focus, more productivity. The reason I can't do this is because I'm
Gently attentive. Well sometimes and maybe even a lot of the time and this may be a comment on how replicable and almost formulaic a lot of people's jobs are now that, you know, many roles should be concerned about the forthcoming GPT Revolution, but a lot of the time. Okay where's what's the creative angle to the thing that I'm trying to do? If you're trying to write a book, sometimes you need to sit down and just put your nose against the grindstone because you're not getting the stuff out. But if you're struggling,
Ideas. You probably need to go for a fucking walk.
Yes. But we come from an institutionalized system, which is the education system, which was designed to create
factory work, wondered when we would get on to education, can't take you anywhere without you blasting. The education
system. I think that's, that's definitely a factor, but it's goes back to that. Question of, where is the wheel suitcases on Sony? Asking that a societal level, but even right now in your very life, like, where is that? Simple,
A solution that's so obvious. There's just staring you in the face but because you're trying to be so productive, you can't quite see it.
Yeah. So a good example for me, I've started doing Barry's Bootcamp first thing in the morning. I've been telling you about this, I've been struggling with motivation to train. Consistently, I can train on a weekend with friends, but training on my own is getting way way harder and I think it's because I'm under a fair bit of pressure with the show and I've known for a very long time. The classes for me, externalize my motivation, they give me a time that I need to be there. They condense down the training into a short period of
Time does a coach that make sure the programming is to it out sources, everything that I need to do and I just forgot that that was an option and then one day was walking past berries, on the way to go to flower child. Where we went for dinner, last night. Thought I should? I should book in to go there. Sure enough, signed up online and I've been to tons and tons of classes now and by 8:30 a.m. I've got 50 minutes of training in. I've done my morning routine and by 9:00 a.m. I can be on a call having trained and done all of my morning stuff. Am I?
Wow, even if I'd been home, it would have, I would have struggled to have been as efficient. So oddly, the creative solution is opened up a degree of productivity as well.
The three biggest things I found for coming up with creative ideas are one. You can get this spinning wheel app on your iPhone. I just searched Spinning Wheel app on the App Store and collect going back to questions. Early, just collect great questions that you here. Like, where's the Wheeled suitcase right now in my life. And as you collect more and more those questions.
You have a podcast things. People say to you, just spin that wheel before bed, leave it with your subconscious overnight and then journal on that thing. First thing before any, any inputs absolute fantastic for coming out of ideas. Second biggest one is its idea called success, a cocoa. I believe it. How I know that's how you actually pronounce it, but I was sat in the Maldives for a week without any inputs. And I came up with this idea, which is the, if you ask anybody where they want to travel, everybody certainly I know all that. 90% say Japan.
Why is Japan's, why do people to travel to Japan so much but if you study the history of Japan, they practice the cocoa. I believe again. Probably butchering the pronunciation where they closed the borders for 250, 260 years, anybody who tried to leave and come back killed anybody who tried to enter killed. And as a result, whilst the rest of the world was trading ideas, it developed this crazy, insane, beautiful unique culture that work, there's nowhere else in the rest of the world and that's why people want to go and visit it because it's so creative. And so
new
Because it wasn't Cosmopolitan. It didn't get diluted down by other cultures that
and then go back to the doublethink idea, though, at the other end of the spectrum, is another tool, which is the if you search on YouTube, Swedish House Mafia, creating one, and it starts with them like tapping like this. And they go all the way up to them. Just jamming in a studio. I3 creative guys to creating one live in like the space of a minute at the edit and it's amazing. And you can see like you put three people in a room with no input from the outside world and they just
First pickleball, or idea tennis their way to it. So I think Spinning Wheel helps time alone, definitely helps in the longer, the better as well as getting some kind of ID account with the smartest people. You know? And just
ensuring that the word that way we came up with similar ideas. I came up with anxiety costume, you came up with thinking cost, what's thinking cast
thinking cost everyone will relate to, which is this idea that your brain is a supercomputer
But and you can try this. I'll give this as an experiment to anyone listening right now. Try and have two thoughts at the same time and maybe there's the elite IQ guys that me and you definitely on and the Nikola Tesla is out there that could do it but I can't have two thoughts at the same time. So with that in mind you've got this weird thing where you have a supercomputer but it can only one run one program at a time quite a quite a pack like the human brain Paradox and why this is interesting is when you have super dramatic
Super - people going back to what we said at the beginning, where ideas are probably the most important thing. It's hard to think about the wheels on suitcases, when your girlfriend's around with you about X Y Zed, or somebody in the WhatsApp chat kicking off and then because what people don't see which is a hidden metric but everybody has it. Well, I know I have it. So I think everybody else has it, which is when those events happen, then when you're in the shower it's running and it's just eating away that super cute super
A computer's Ram constantly. So there's a opportunity cost that exists for every single thought. So whenever you have a thought there's trillions of the thoughts that you could be having but because your supercomputer can only run one program at a time it's not having. So you've got to have a defense and offense system that I think anyway so the defense system is avoid dramatic people as much as you can. Paul Graham has my favorite essay over which is life is short and I read it. Whenever if anybody gets sick or
Dies and he kind of closes the whole thing off of like relentlessly prune bullshit. So just get relentlessly, prune bullshit. Whenever it gets your life, prune it purely because there's a thinking cost everything that you do every thought that you have. And also whenever but I never see what will happen is, you will still have those dramatic Loops that get in there. You can't have a complete defense against them but then anchor the thought, which is whenever you have a bullshit for Loop that happens. What is the opportunity cost of this thought? Like, what is the wheels on suitcase that I could be thinking about it?
Stead and then you kind of Judo throw its momentum against it. So thinking cost is the idea that every cost every thought has an opportunity cost and you should be hyper-vigilant to that.
He had Peterson said the first time I ever brought him on the show about the price that you pay for an action contemplate. The price, you pay for an action you're already in a little hell, you know, perfectly. Well it's going to get worse. The thing about inaction is that you're blind to it, do not make the assumption that in action has no price. And this is
The same thing that the thinking cost actually is the price that you pay, but it's so unseen, right? People are prepared to waste the piece of their own mind over, and over, and over, and over again. In order to not make a difficult decision because the difficult decision feels more real. But peace of mind is one of the key desires that almost everybody should be striving
toward the problem, with peace of mind is it's hidden metric. So if you kind of
Zoom all the way out. I have a few fundamental questions. I keep going back to who am I writing? And then you kind of Zoom a bit higher. It's the optimism High agency thing. And if you actually Zoom the highest point, which I'm not actually written about just yet which is kind of viewing. Everything going back to Rick and Morty's. Royal the video game of life like this, a simulation hypothesis, but just forked, that's more optimistic, more High agency, which is the video game hypothesis. And one of my fundamental things of this kind of religion, / philosophy is metrics, are one of the most important things.
And one of the reasons why people obsess over money is because money and your bank account is the best video game ever designed. It's multi multi player compete against other people, or this person, makes this much. I only make that much number going up. And as a result things, like peace of mind, which is a metric that we can't quite measure yet, but we all feel it. We only really begin to look at it. When were in rehab or when we have an anxiety attack on the bus into work, or whatever it is, and that's why I think hidden metrics.
Once you see it, but you never see it. But then, once you kind of mentally see it, you begin to see it everywhere. Almost has that great bit of the Instagram model, you think the Instagram model the metric? The visible matter, it's quite clear, right? You get to post it on your Instagram. It's gray. Everyone thinks you're cool. But when you kind of lie in bed at night with somebody, he got I have nothing in common with you at all.
The Dan Bilzerian problem.
Yeah, the time. I'm sure he's happy but you don't see, the hidden metric.
Mmm. Yeah. Why? Why is it that you are such a
Of the Roy seen from Rick and Morty. It's the header on your Twitter and you've got a hoodie. You got a custom printed hoodie that I met you on the way to
Dubai because the mask as well during covid-19 as well. I think it's because it's the knit, like, it's one of my favorite things that I began to notice that was happening, is you hit 25. And life goes mental. So up from 0 to 25, everybody's on the same path. Pretty much. This is the slight variance, but everyone has these guardrails of first year. Second year third,
Third year, high school University but then you hit 25 and the such variants that happens where I have friends that are selling and ftes for ridiculous amounts of money. I've got friends going to prison, I've got friends having a baby. Like there's so much variance that begins to happen and you're going to go fuck like religion is quite a useful tool. But as a lot of people who are atheist agnostic, there's nothing out there that quite exists and the simulation hypothesis is probably the best we've got, it has fucking nihilistic, isn't it? Like so, I did this just infinite versions of me, sat in a machine but if I can move
That's like the video game hypotheses. Where I know I began to notice that the laziest people, I know the most nihilistic pessimistic low agency people. I know could sit and play a video game for 15 hours and be amazing at it. So, I have this theory, that video game designers know more about human psychology than 99% of psychologists. The video game industry is bigger than music TV and entertainment combined the amount, they know about human psychology, I think is fascinating. So what kind of Royer's is just viewing?
Life as a video game and trying to shift from first person shooter of me identifying, with this to just third person whether it's true or not, probably know it might not be a video game but is it useful bleed to have probably? Yeah, I think d. Personalizing a lot of things is good like that's one of Peterson's questions, right? Like treat yourself like you are somebody. You were responsible for helping. I treat your life like a character that you was responsible for playing to same as Rogen's thing. Imagine that you're the hero of your own story, you know, all of these like what what do all of these different?
And ideas have in common, it takes a third person perspective. Depersonalize has a lot of the things that are going on to you because three difficult to give yourself your so embedded in the experience of being you. And there's so much going on that clouds, your ability to make good decisions.
The actually being able to have a third-person perspective is probably about as close to a superpower as you can be
and gamification. Like people talk about God, he's dead. Therefore what's the point? Why do we do anything? But with a video game, you're not really playing it for any reason but it's just a fun game and I feel that there's so much to be unpacked about video games psychology that can get implied. But the biggest thing or certainly, one of the biggest things is this concept of metrics when you have a clear metric that people can optimize. What's that? The Cobra effect?
We're in the British started offering Indians money for cobras because there was such a big problem with them and then they started breeding them. So you
gotta know what, you know what, a better version of that is what it was to do with rats and other country. They had a massive problem with rats. And what they said was that they would pay people to bring in rat tails, what they realized was that there was thousands and thousands of tailless rats running all over the city. So that's so that's its
you keep your boy has that concept of parametric's what you have two metrics. So if you have a customer support team and you say, hey,
Increase or decrease the fraud rate will then they start treating every single customer. Like a potential for Auditors. Yeah, you may achieve that goal but every customer hates you forever.
Good hard but Hearts, Laura's. Yes. You
need to balance that with an opposing metric. So going back to like the money video game, she's great video game but if you could then have peace of mind as an opposing mattrick and I wonder if you could literally visualize Peace of Mind as a dashboard, that you can see every single day, I think the impact that would have on people's lives would be so significant
100%. I mean, you know, this is what people fundamentally
really don't understand about homos e is that he finds Peace of Mind through doing business. So and I didn't understand it until I really really drill drill deep with him and he may be lying to me, and I don't know. But like at least what he says is that he finds his most peace when he's chasing money. So for him money and peace are the same thing but because most people don't have that particular opinion. When it comes to their work, they can't they don't have theory of mind to understand what it would be like to be
Mosey. Like what would it be like for your work? And the most peaceful thing that you do to align to the point where you and your partner? Believe that not having kids is a smarter idea because you can literally serve the world better through Legacy through a company. Then you can through children,
I'll challenge you. That people don't can't empathize with that. They maybe just haven't had it framed to them correctly, where people can always think of a game. They played that so addictive, that they end up playing for the sake of
playing. What was some of? What was some of yours? You have to get addicted, you've got
Our brothers are like professional. Esports player
is very, very good for saw that firsthand, but for me, I bet football freestyle was my thing, right side train for hours, every single night and do that and then decided that she wanted to lose my virginity at one point I stopped doing that. So when you have something that you're just doing, purely for the sake of do, I mean you're doing this with a podcast right? We spoke last night and I said you're the only person I know that would have stuck it as long as you did without the metric really but he was playing it purely for the sake of playing at, but your metric so difference, your
It wasn't the subscribers or the view count. Really part of it for sure but I knew if it was you would have quit. But it was purely an infinite game that he was playing and because it was such a well-designed video game for you. Then it keeps
going our biggest the biggest piece of advice for people that asked about you know, I want to start a podcast. Like what should I do? How should I begin? Or you know what what's your piece of advice? And like if you don't enjoy it, don't do it because you are not. It's going to take you. 150 episodes to earn anything. It's going to take you four hundred episodes before your
Probably, unless you're got an existing platforms can take you, four hundred episodes before. Anybody really cares about what you're doing, it's going to take so long and that's weekly.
An idea I have with that is pricing things in. So I think it's a hedge fund turn where you kind of price in upcoming events and when you're starting new, things like that. So when I take U E4 language, people don't know, it's like a electronic surfing, everyone saw Mark, Zuckerberg go viral which is one of my funniest
video, you don't mean DJ, Khaled DJ. Khaled drop that clicking. They're doing.
So with that one, big thing. I've now recognize could always take new people with me. I'll say to them. I go, you're going to fall off 50 times before you get good at this versus. If they don't, if they come at it with just, oh I'm going to, I'm going to be good at this immediately and then they start falling off. It merely rocks their self-esteem. Whereas if you say hey I'm gonna be 50 times before you get good at mr. B says that as well with YouTube. You guys just make under videos and then and then we'll chat. Yeah
and I think you've got to constantly pricing things. I've got okay. It's going to take me 12 months in the gym before I see anything. If
you price that and I always like really
conservative price.
Icing in because that's how you say 500 episodes, got to your podcast and you get
a episode 212, you feel great. But if they go in with the mindset of well, level 1 it's going to work. Therefore but again I structure all my Apple nodes to do list select for the every single day. It's the most linear thing I've done for years is level one thought dump dump everything. I've got to do today, level to decide on the levels. And boom, I'm already feeling good. And every project I do will be designed like that because just me writing down, what I've got to do. I've already had level and I can feel that momentum growing versus, if it's like have a
Cecil day, I'm constantly trying to play level 32 and failing so again it goes back to that.
So how do you given that? What you've suggested there is essentially to price in difficulty and to also kind of have low expectations of success. How does that Mary with the Skeptics Guide to
optimism? But he goes back to that 1% every day. It goes back to the secret is bullshit, that you're not going to immediately change. Things are going to need to combine optimism combined agency. But the most important thing is infinite games that you can play for the sake of playing them.
That goes exactly the thing or mozi. But these the impression I have of them. He's, he's doing it like a game and he'd want to do this until he dies, and that's why he can keep playing and keep compounding exactly the same of you with this podcast, which is
why you didn't quit. It's gonna be very difficult to be beaten by somebody that isn't having fun if you are. Yeah. Right like what's that Tiago Forte? It's incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's having fun. Yeah, so I that was thinking cost which was yours anxiety cost was similar, but a little bit.
It more acute a bit more short-term. This is what I'd come up with. So as you identified you can only have one thought at a time and by making any kind of decision inevitably you're going to
Cut off some of the potential wasted thoughts thinking about that undone tasks. So let's say every single morning, when you wake up your daily to-do resets, right? I need to walk the dog and meditate and take a shit and speak to my mom or whatever it is that you do every single day. Right? There are certain things that you do every single day. The longer that you wait to do those things. The more time is taken up thinking about the fact that you haven't yet, done those things which is an argument for front loading stuff into your morning.
Right. This is the interest rate constantly. Yeah, I'm to
repay every single time that you think I need to meditate today. I need to meditate today. I need to meditate today could have been. That's wasted thinking cost or anxiety cost. As I called it that you could have fixed by simply meditating. When you woke up and looking at your day, not only through Ebbs and flows of energy. But also in terms of what captures a lot of my thought, what causes me stress, how can I get that? So that it's an not only his, the other thing.
Only do you get to gain. Not thinking about the thing in being anxiously concerned that you still need to do it. You also get to sort of bask in this. Beautiful self-righteous glow from your high horse of productivity because you went out and you fist fucked it first thing in the morning. It's perfect. So next of razors, both massive fans of razors
You did a super thread. I'm one of the I've selected some of my favorites. I've added in some of mine as well. The first one, bragging, razor, if someone brags about the success or happiness assume, it's half what they claim? If someone downplays the success or happiness assume, it's double what they claim. The map is not the
terrain.
100%, And there's obviously exceptions to the rule, but I think that's quite a consistent rule that I see when I hear someone particularly, if it's money. You're of, it's things like that when they're bragging of early. And we're probably not believe this. But if someone's kind of playing it down as a few subtle towels, it's the classic mid with me, right? You've got the probably my favorite meme of all time, which is the low IQ guy in the left kind of Midway in the middle. And the super high IQ guy there, where the low IQ guy says, I'm the guy on the left.
The guy in the middle says, I'm the guy on the right, and the guy on the right says, I'm the guy on the left. So, and you see this with wealth as well. You see the super-rich try and hide their welfare is. It's the kind of people who were flipped like the money to a crowd, no money screenshot, the Shopify store and things like that, where it's why are you trying to signal that when you're trying to overtly signal? You're probably trying to compensate for something again. There's exceptions to the rule, but when someone signalling so hard, it's probably a sign that they don't have. You were, in fact, we were in a location.
And Austin over the weekend and a Gentleman came up to us. And one of the first sentence is out of his mouth is 1,500 people in the world have started. 1 billion dollar business. I'm one of them now, I believe you even less.
Now anyone who's seen Karl pilkington's bullshit, like you wanted to come bullshit?
Yeah, I think what it kind of suggests when somebody does steam in and start with a
Achievements first is any kind of bragging, basically suggests to us? It's a low status, very easy to fake signal of authenticity, right? Like a hard signal of authenticity, would just be show me a bank balance or Show. Me Your Capacity is someone telling you how smart they are. Is way less reliable of a signal than someone having a conversation with you, that flows perfectly and you think holy fuck like that's
Really cool. So yeah you know we're into personality quirks here around people's desire to be seen and their needs for validation from the world around them. But I think generally the bragging razor of thinking if I want to come across well allowing my achievements to arise as a byproduct of someone asking me about what I do. This is another thing that happens in Austin that I had to introduce you to which is
Since I've been here, when you join a new group at a party, or a gathering or whatever, and you get introduced by the one person that you probably do know, in that Circle, they usually tell the group what you do. And that allows everyone to bypass the bragging razor because your friend Biggs up your best achievements. But again, it's a reliable adjudicator. Presumably not going to lie about what. Oh you know, he's got a 17 inch penis and I'm pretty sure that he's got the world High.
Record and he's like the first man on the moon. Like, I'm not gonna say that, right? I'm going to say the things reliably that people can can assume. So, next one, I love this one instagram razor. When you see a photo of an influencer looking attractive on Instagram assume that there were 99 worse, variations of that photo. You haven't seen. They just pick the
best, one hundred percent and me and Josh my business partner. When we travel around will be in sometimes very nice restaurants and we see the Beautiful
Couple cut. Like I don't think it's they're necessary but the kind of Tommy Fury. Molly May looking couple not referring to them and he's just kind of there staring into the distance and she'll be there. Just going through her phone of like, infinite photos of her. And then I
on visco trying to find the right. Felt on the biggest, Red Bulls
had recently was where I was at bar and then I looked over and there's a girl on a photo of herself and she was face tuning. It live in real time and I realized you it's the classic where's the sausage made? And you're going to realize that
Everything on Instagram that you see is absolute. It's just, it's just not true, it's the matter of us. It really is the matter of us, Everyone's an emoji characters, completely edited. It's it's bizarre.
I love the fact that you have to assume as well that this is the best option out of what everybody had an especially if it's someone that's got a pretty well curated Instagram feed but I suppose that's one of the advantages of as you get to a particular level with creating content online. You don't even know what's going out. It's, you know, the spin, the wheel thing, I have no idea.
Video goes out each day like the shorts, team finds things that they love, and sometimes I do this bit with Mark, Normand was really fun like you should maybe put that out but they treat me like a child like they've got a strategy and they know what they're doing. So I'm like, okay well I guess that's just like a fucking close your eyes and put your hand in here, celebrations turn and pull out our today to Bounty tomorrow. It's a malteser
a good razor as well kind of related to. This is both. These razors are trying to avoid signals and then try and actually study the noise also,
I like not the noise sorry but the actual thing. So Meta games I think are super important because you can learn a lot. So I have this rule which is
if I want to work with personal trainer, I want the personal trainer to be an insane shape and that's way better than any marketing Spiel he can give for me. If I see a SAS product, which is selling landing page software. I want when I click on their landing page for that software to be incredible. I like the landing page should look at. If you're if you're the landing page software guy and your landing page isn't great. That's a sign. One of my favorite, one of my heroes throughout history in a market. Space is David Ogilvy and David Ogilvy. I forgot. Which magazine it was the wrote headline, which is
David Ogilvy a genius question mark. And Ogilvie was a great marker because the way he Market himself, he replied to that headline by getting his lawyer, to sue them for the question. Mark, or at least that's the story that he released. I go even within that, you can see how good he is at Market, doesn't have to say like what he's done there is genius. So whenever you can study these matter games which is not what people say, what they do or how they carry themselves is super, super
important. Mmm, narcissism narcissism razor, if,
If you're worried about people's opinions, remember they are too busy worrying. About other people's opinions of them. 99% of the time, you're an extra in someone else's
movie. Yeah. And then that's when you realize everybody else has a separate video game that they're playing and you're just the too busy with when you're thinking about them and you're worried about them, assume the amount of thought you give to other people, they're giving to you. And then you realize how delusional that is, one of my friends was chatting about Envy recently and he was talking about how he wants to get rid of Envy as a thing. And one thing,
thing that's useful With Envy, is to realize that there's somebody out there who's
So envious of you who probably checked her Instagram checks, all these things and constantly is thinking about you. And when you view it through that friend, your Jesus, that's really bad. I'm actually not that were for being envious of and you realize, oh shit, everybody else thinks the way I think and that then enables you to go to like third-person shooter and begin to zoom out and just see. Oh, I'm not that important.
No, there's that quote of we would care far less about what other people thought of us, if we realized how rarely they did. Yeah, there's this other one. Did you see
See that story about Churchill that I posted of the young guy who was showing around the house of parliament, this was good. So a young MP was being shown around Parliament by Winston Churchill as he wandered through the halls and offices. He asked questions by the building was put together. Churchill, obliged and gave the young man advice on how this world worked upon entering the House of Commons chamber. Churchill's, new friends, started referring to the MPS on the other benches as the enemy Churchill. Reportedly said, that's the opposition. Dear Boy, the enemies behind you. And what I loved about that?
Was it became obviously ways talking about is the fact that like, the people who you need to be concerned about other ones that are on your team, because you have something that they want, that's the opposition. You know, that they're out to get you to the people behind you that the snakes will stab you in the back but figuratively or symbolically, I think that I love that story because it reminds us that we are Our Own Worst Enemy. Most of the time that we see the world as being some sort of adversary, that is trying to do things against us. The world gives
Zero fucks about you the world doesn't care less literally. The entire universe is indifferent to all of our existence, right? Nope. Not a blind blink. And I imagine that this is one of the reasons why when we get to look at the night sky fills us with a degree of dread and or and in significance that I think is very important to keep our egos small to realize that everything's just going to keep on turning. But also,
This goes back to the cynicism skepticism thing. You can personify the world as being a thing. You know, you hear people say stuff like this like you know the world is an evil and mean place and it will try and break you down. I've even nodded his Goggins, said, something similar on the podcast and I there are degrees to how it can be useful to see to be alert to threats out there and to have resilience ready for things that are difficult to occur in the world. The world's fucking indifferent to you, what?
And care and personifying it and creating a an enemy out of the world. I think is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It's like it needs to be turn inward. You are the person that knows all of your weaknesses, you can say, the most disgusting, terrible things to yourself, you know, all of the trigger points that you should go through. You chastise yourself for falling short even though you've tried your hardest like you are Your Own Worst Enemy, there will never be anybody, that can be as brutal to you as you can to yourself.
Realizing that.
Helps you to ameliorate this adversarial view of the world. The world is just a tool. It doesn't care about you. That there are some people out there who genuinely have enemies, right? But it's a rarefied strata of people and they've done something that swindler
Tinder swindler. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think so. There's the nihilistic version of that or it can be framed and Allison pessimistic which is all nobody cares about you. Therefore I said, well what's the point then? But it goes back to the
Root opening of the conversation which is ideas are probably more important than people. Like the concept of electricity is so important or the idea of critical thinking or whatever it is. This is what ideas are so much more important and you can find as a atheist or an agnostic, you can find God to some extent in these ideas or something. That's way bigger than you that can last way longer than you that is so. So damn
important, there was a one that I came up with this.
My first one, I'm adding it into the mix, which you have seen before? Schultz, is Razor, do not attribute to group at group conspiracy that, which can be explained, by cancellation anxiety. So,
that's a fucking great one. There's the Cummings razor as well, which kind of forks on the idea, which is Balaji one. My favorite followers on Twitter, tweeted out. Why don't, why doesn't every government in the world have a dashboard. So you can see how well they're doing is, what think of the Corvette and you could debate over the core metrics? You can debate how you measure them and maybe have different parties.
And things like that, but all the cool measurements. Number of homeless, people on the street, obesity rates, death ray, why don't? We have a BBC five channel where you can just tune in like a CEO checking their dashboard and we don't operate that way and Dominic Cummings. Boris is for my right-hand man retweeted that and said and I call this Cummings Cummings, razor, which is whenever you get confused by politicians or you think it's some great conspiracy theory, it's basically their switches Cummings wrote. I can confirm at the time. Boris does not have a dashboard that he checks every day. It's not run.
Bite like a CEO. He just reacts to newspaper stories that come in each day. If everybody saw this, then sell everything and fully and that's a fundamental problem is. Yeah, there's not actually a lot of malice that's going on. It's just a complete lack of strategy, design everything Gwenda. Had a post today that was money. The idea of sinister, Elites controlling, everything is popular because it's more comforting than the truth. That even our leaders. Don't know what they're doing. And Society is ruled mostly by chance.
So good. There was this this other idea called compensator e, controlled remember I taught you about this ages and ages ago, compensator e control, so it's Rich. Another, Richard shotton here. So I was talking about how people that were very early on before there was reason to believe that it was a lab leak. People were attributing to Global conspiracy. The fact that we had this pandemic that was released like the people that were right, weren't? Right? Because
Educated. They were right because they were closing their eyes and throwing it at a dartboard. If they write it all compensate, we control when we feel uncertain when Randomness, intrudes Upon Our Lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way, superstitions and conspiracy theories. Speak to this need, it is not easy to accept. It important events are shaped by random forces. This is why for some, it makes more sense to believe. We are threatened by the grand plans of Moline scientists than the chance mutation in a silly little microbe. Mmm.
We just want to personify, similarly, to that personification again as well. And one of the big reasons is that the world is chaotic. We try to bring order to that chaos by personifying it. So many different things that we could do. What should we focus on? Where should I put my time? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Please just tell me if I'm doing it right.
and as soon as you can create a narrative,
it's no longer random chaos. All there's a story it's like Harry Potter or it's like succession rights like Pretty Little Liars.
What going back to what we said earlier, now you can never guess their opinions for hydrogen. See people, one of the things I love is as soon as somebody kind of and I can be guilty of this as well, I'm sure you can. But someone kind of steam rolls with their identity belief or whatever their team sport is. It's just if you had to give the best version of the other teams opinion, what is it?
And you just see it crumble, a
lot of mongers mongers residex, it's like
stealing something, you just completely see it crumble and a loft inaudible. There is no argument for it and it's all there for. This is why
I did what I did. It's such a that is the most insane perspective, the totally disregards. The
Fundamental way that humans work. If you believe the same things that your opponent believed you would be convinced by it too. As soon as you can be convinced that two plus two equals four, you can no longer uncie the fact that two plus two equals four until somebody convinces you of something else that you don't get to choose to be convinced right? You just are it just happens. Now you can refuse to listen to things. You can be boneheaded around stuff but once you're convinced that it it's game over. So understanding
That if you were that person, you would have that belief as well. I don't mean in a, we have no free will determinism type scenario that their particular Suite of understandings and worldview. Perspective has resulted in them believing this thing which is counter to what you believe. I learned this from Gwenda as well. He's coming back on a couple of weeks rogerian rhetoric, so it's kind of like the
What's the dialogue method that the Greek philosopher came up with Aristotle or people going to be screaming into their iPods? Anyway, does this like the Socratic method? Fuck for that, rogerian rhetoric is kind of a little bit, like the Socratic method, but it's more investigative. So you're almost trying to work out, just trying to work out. What's true through asking questions? And there isn't Socratic method. Seems to be more like asking questions so that this person arrives at the outcome that you want them to take.
Like you know the Earth being flat like could you maybe think that it could be due to this could it may be due to that could it? Maybe and you try to guide somebody toward an outcome, rogerian rhetoric seems to be less biased, it's got less of a an agenda to it. And yeah I love that as an outcome because you like I just want to find out I just want to know, I want to know what that person believes because if I believed it I would be convinced to it
leaning in with curiosity versus like immediate judgment is in sometimes you make change
Mind and I feel you can see that like a political level or a societal level but then you zoom in all the way at the micro and you everyone can relate to this, where go on such facebook.com if you're old enough and click on your old profile and go back five years and you cringe for whatever reason you will you will cringe. Whether it's the outfit, you wore the person, you're dating the opinions that you had. And if you have if you arent cringy and then you dare, you definitely should because you're involved as human being. However, you then have to price in. Okay, now, five years from now,
What am I going to be thinking? And that's one of the thing if you can start, skipping ahead to that question. Now, this is waiting 25 years. Maybe you actually get to that point of view,
it was thing is, man, when you do this game, which both of us have done Lots, right. What, in five years time is The Wheels on the suitcase of my life that I should be looking at right now where are the blindingly obvious changes that I need to make that. I'm going to wish that I did earlier that I'm going to wish that I committed myself to. If you do the game of what do I wish that me 10 years ago changed?
And altered did adjusted in terms of texture of existence or the way that I perceive the world. Lots of those are still going to be the same ones that you need to do now for 10 years. Time like he
is the same pattern is the same way. Skin has that idea of Bridging the Gap, where the mistake he made five years ago, it'll be a theme of something that will keep occurring. And yeah, the actual specific mistake may change but it could even just be the fact that I keep thinking I figured out the answer.
Sir. So you go, you look like yourself five years and I will fax. Like, I figured out now but you've not priced in the five years from now, you're going to go off and fuck. I've actually figured out now but it's the same thing. Each time going back to the Seco thing. I had this, the weirdest one again, a lot of alone time can both be great but also vary by region to the quiet. Preacher didn't quite hear me where this idea is. I think my greatest idea. My worst idea I thought about turning into a guided meditation which is
Meditations useful. You can kind of observe yourself, but as atheists agnostics, people who don't have an immediate religion to fall into a, don't have really any alternative to prayer. And I really like the kind of Jeff Bezos, death Bears minimization framework as well as the kind of raw. It's just a video game and I came up with this thing. I just sat there with no phone, no, nothing. My mind's just wondering, and a little bit of Christmas Carol thrown in there. Where
You calm your breathing and you skip ahead seven years in the future and you kind of go fuck you take off the VR headset and you now as you are now listen to this podcast was just a complete VR trip, you're actually 85 years old and you're in the worst Care Home imaginable and as your eyes slowly open, you begin to realize then you try and embody this and feel the emotion that you're you. If all your worst traits to cope with all
a peasant pessimism took over it for your low agency took over. If all you're isolating yourself from your friends and bitching about people, everything that you can think about your worst version of yourself took over your in a care home where there's fucking cockroaches on the floor and the nurses never come in to see you. And as you stumble around, you just repeating all the mistakes that you've made in your head or repeating all them and like physically feel that emotion and then as you're feeling that intensity, you get a knock on the door.
Move over with your Zimmer frame and your hips that feel like you've just run a marathon the day before and standing back. As you open the door is the absolute best version of yourself and whatever reason he's lean. He's like he got none of the injury issues. He's
felt like RFK. He's
been at RFK in his prime. He's an all the Corinthian, right? He looks fantastic and he pulls up an iPad, only plays, you're the fucking amazing memories where the best version of you took over, and you feel that emotion to such an extreme intensity of that envy that you
You have for the best version of yourself and you look over, and there's a clock on the wall and there's just five minutes ticking. It's how long you've got left to live and the emotion that intensifies. But before the, the best version of yourself before the RFK version yourself walks out, he says, okay. If I could give you the ability to go back in time, now, what would you do to give you all my money? My bank account. It was okay, let's do it. Let's do the trade. However, you have to give me one thing today that you're going to show the best version and write that down and then actually action it. And I start doing that as like fucking out.
It's got like crying in a Starbucks one
day, you want, if you put an information Hazard warning before, posting them online, which I think is probably worthwhile is pretty intense thing to do either any realizations, are there any changes that you've made from that that on, so personal that you can share?
yes, I think really just thinking in much longer time Horizons so thinking okay if I go to that 80 90 year old self
I really want to play games that I can play Forever or that I can play for a long period of Time. The video games that I can set up the compound out as well. So I've kind of changed a lot of the way I think, the way I operate the way I work
around much more long-term, isn't it much
more long-term isn't because that's where all the, that's where all the games. That's what you said to me last night of, if anybody, with a bit of talent, a bit of IQ, a bit of everything sticks out, something for five years, like you did play in the video game, without the scoreboard, going up, but Stick it. And then
Umm, the compounding game happens like what percentage of your audience is coming. Last 12 months about 90% more. That's insane, right? It's so hard for people that come from a going back to the education system, and education system, like that to comprehend, how things compound all of a sudden. But when you can zoom out and play those long-term games, they can compound. And the beautiful thing is going back to, it is even if your podcast never took off, even if this thing never worked out and it's still me and you just making another
live in this mental block.
That was fucking but you still had fun, which is kind the kind of beauty. Say, if you can find a game that you can play Forever, hey, you probably end up making a lot of money and then Pete work. It's not if you don't at least, it's
a fun video game anyway. The early late razor, if it's a talking point on Reddit, or Twitter, you might be early if it's a talking point, a LinkedIn or Facebook, you're definitely late. Yeah, that's the confirmation, is
I try and think quite a lot about future Trends. And as a result, you end up going back to, I said, it's VC. B 9 out of 10 will be wrong, but one out of 10 will be right, and the biggest thing, I
Have is the amount of trans I spotted that came via Twitter and how far ahead you can live by living on the right? Reddit, the right. Twitter's, and even now it will be like, WhatsApp, chats telegram, chats, things like that, and you can literally see it slowly go all the way through, and then hit speak mainstream when it's on Facebook, or when it's on LinkedIn,
dude, I did this the other day, this was from this week's newsletter, and I think I told you about this one to the parental clout gauge.
I don't know this one. Do you know how I know when a new story has reached genuine mainstream significance? It's not when it turns on Twitter or hits daytime news or lands on front pages. It's when my dad message me messages me on Facebook about it, I see your colleague mr. Rogan has been in the news again. He also sent me one to what the back end of last year. Saying that Andrew Tate's Peltier. It that Andrew Tate's. A nasty piece of work, isn't he? And I was like, oh God take, you've really gone full mainstream now, but
that's that's a
if I think as well, one thing I taken to the book called The sovereign individual which is fantastic book predict a lot of future Trends and they have within that which is this concept that if the Roman Empire when the Roman Empire fell ginseng like 476 a.d. or whenever
They didn't acknowledge it at the time. It wasn't people going around. The Roman Empire's. Felt it was only with the historians glaze that we could acknowledge. Oh, that's when the Roman Empire will fall. And this idea, I don't think the American Empire is ending by any stretch of the imagination, but one day I assume it will end and the concept that you think you'll go on CNN one day and they'll go oh, by the way today the American Empire ended know what will happen is. I'll be 70 to 80 years afterwards historians with the claro. It's when X happened that it ended and that's the reason why you really can't Outsource things to the news because if you wait for the news to tell you
You will either be late or you'll
be wrong, thinking about how this reflect and works for the personal as well. I learned this from Mark Manson identity likes Reality by one to two years. There's a lot of psychological Fallout from a rapid change in status and this kind of relates to the what will you in five years? Think about you today? What do they wish that you had known only in retrospect? Do our lives? Make sense, a lot of the time so that quote about the funny thing about life is that it needs to be lived forward but it only makes sense.
In reverse and identity likes Reality by one to two years means that you are permanently permanently playing catch-up. Especially if you have big changes in lifestyle and personal growth, you know, everybody that's listening to this podcast is, is working on personal growth to trying to become better people every single day. She's beautiful, but it's very unstable izing very, very unstable izing because, you know, within the space. What's that every seven years, every single cell in your body has changed, right? The ship of Theseus idea that you can replace.
Each individual plank on this ship. And after long enough that is it the same ship and there's also a way that girl breakup meme Pages have used this to be like girl don't worry after 7 years there won't be a cell in your body left. It was around when you were with him she's actually kind of a nice way to think about it. I suppose if you're trying to get over a bad breakup but it's very destabilizing to have all of this stuff happening, right? And especially if identity likes Reality by one to two years, it's really, really tough. Okay so who's me
What does it mean to be me? Right? What does it mean to be me? Like, who am I the me that I aspire to be a, my, the me that I am now. Am I the meat? Like, it's a very, very destabilizing world to be in. And I think that trying to future-proof yourself by thinking carefully, by reflecting carefully on what it is that
What the universal rules are that you're trying to follow. I think is a much safer way to go about
things. Yeah, I think I think the more rules of fundraisers that you can just have the more useful that is Brian Johnson. The
Which one good
point. The here's a point, I don't know a single name that has more people in the public eye attached to it than Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson, singer of AC/DC. Brian Johnson. Guy that started optimized on me. Forgot about him. Didn't you Brian Johnson? Hey guys, Brian here. Brian Johnson, deliver King, Brian Johnson. The longevity expert
in the market space. That's what we call an SEO
Warfare.
Ha ha ha. What about the longevity expert where he has the 4 p.m.? Is it 4:00 p.m. Brian or five PM Brian? Yeah, see ya. He just he's fired him. He doesn't he make a decision? But yeah. I think the more rules of thumbs that you can have, it simplifies things. And then I actually thought about hack, we've been speaking about a lot once they've been here is who you are around and I know that's the kind of oldest Dale, Carnegie Trope but the mimetic forces I wrote this essay a while ago which is cognitive biases are a bit of a scam.
Or they've been sold incorrectly. So cognitive
gosh don't tell Shane Parish
cognitive bias is. I think you'll agree which is cognitive biases are pessimistic and low agency versus you can actually just reframe them saying, where you take the simulation hypothesis and end up with video game hypothesis. You can reframe them up to the optimism High Agency stock in its cognate superpowers. So you can just move things like. So mimesis, everybody talks about mimesis often a negative frame. I told you just copy your desires from other people on the some truth to that, and some beauty to that, but also, you can actually use that as a planning tool.
Maybe a lot of these things have actually been designed, not as cognitive biases but things that are
hyperbolic discounting. You've managed to reverse that by your meditation. The hyperbolic discounting has brought the future into the present. What's the name that you've given to the studied by historians question? Have you named it yet?
Oh, the what is
ignored by? I mean name
that. Yeah. So what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians and then people point out what it was is one example where the medium
Angeles. The whole thing of it is that the media historian Gap. So what is super prominent? So what is not prominent in the media right now that I think will be humongously portion up by history and there's so many think when you get again, it's another question. It's another open loop that you leave at the audience and versus like, oh this is the thing. That here's
my arse. I've got a, I've got a list of turn. The headline. Death Gap, the headline. Deathcap. So this is an image,
maybe Dinkum wacky on the screen of what headlines say
Will cause your death or what they focus on versus what. Well, and obviously terrorism is that off the charts. Things like that are off the charts versus heart disease, gets almost no, mention in the media, and it is absolutely humongous. I have this bit that you did with Pete ratty aware the is it, the mortality gap between smoking and non-smoking is smoker and a non smoker. It's 40%. The mortality gap between the bottom 25% of exercise fitness and the top 2% is four hundred percent. So, here's a question for you and open loop for you? Where is the, where's the girl?
It pro exercise campaigns right now. If it's if it's 10x or however, much X the difference. And if we can save that many lives, there's because I collect like the best ads of all time. And there's one in there which is a smoking and as actual study on smoking adds that the u.s. government did it saved millions of lives, they expect. So where's the pro exercise campaigns, they don't exist based on based off that based on Purely off that data alone, they should exist on mass
the interesting, the reason that the question is interesting and I've called it Max
He'll question, because Peter, thiel's question of, what do you believe that? Most people is it? Most people would find abhorrent and most people would disagree
with. It's like, yeah. What do you believe that? Everybody else essentially disagrees with you on your right? Yeah, I feels like an extra again. Like everything. I'm a fucking budget version of We're much more
budget version of tdt. Oh, yeah. Not even as gay.
Who knows? The night's young, right. So on that point yet the media historian got and then you begin to see everywhere. It was more like a point of the noyan. So I just see this thing like a, why is that not getting discussed and it goes back to opportunity cost as well.
What are the things that we aren't discussing because we're focused on things like that? The more important
things Fast and Furious turn Fast and Furious. Well, I mean we've said this actually, this is an interesting one. I used to say, five years ago, most of the greatest minds of the 21st century of had the time working out how to get people to click on ads. But that changed about three years ago to many of the greatest minds of the 21st century have had that time taken up arguing about whether men and men and women are women are not, which is
also true like, you know, Jordan Pederson, very formative for me during my intellectual Awakening from man child to adult infant and
I love his insights, around the existential pain of living, I don't go to him for insights around Sports Illustrated models.
There's just better things and the weird thing about some of the ideologies that have captured attention of the opposite side. So you understand about how cultural memes are also evolved to write that the ones that are built to propagate and to be continued to the ones that stick around. And there are other ones that don't write cultural memes act, the same way that genetic jeans do too. But there's something that happens on the
Outside of the fence that it causes the effective cultural memes that stick around are good at triggering us a response from the other side, they trigger an antibody response which further propagates the meme, because it lends more Credence to it. Now sometimes I suppose the opposing side could keep on battering away to the point where it gets destroyed. I think the word woke and the word politically correct, a two good examples of that. That comedians used it to it was so quickly turned from. Nah, nah.
Ironic too ironic and and mocked through satire that no one uses the word woke in non-ironic way anymore. Everyone that uses it is using it as a piss-take. So there are ways that you can repurpose it. It's not an argument to never push back against Bad ideology, but it is an argument to realize that if you start to play the game of the other side, whatever side you're on and whichever side you hate. If you begin to play their game by pushing more attention toward what they're doing, you do it's like a Hydra it like just chop one of the
Heads off. And it grows to
more. If you look at kind of the root structure, the conversation today, you've actually zoom out. It's constant gaps, right? So, you've got the media historian Gap. You've got the thinking cost Gap, the gap between what I should be thinking about this is that and the Beautiful Things Are is that these are questions, are the answers that you need. These are questions that you can kind of explore for the Transformers Fast and Furious Gap. Right? At what's the the media focusing on?
These questions that you can kind of explore for a lifetime as well as it's quite a decentralized thing. It's
the audience can then participate. Well I mean since your data model versus hey here's the answer, I would love to create a page of some kind, I guess it can just happen in the comments but it would be great for you to put a page out. What is neglected by the media, but will be studied by historians if you crowd-sourced that. Yeah. That would be, that would be a
fascinating one and then you can obviously retrospectively see it throughout time as well. There's so many of those gaps.
that is another one that I too that I have at the minute, which is
What problems can't cap. What problems aren't be solving because capitalism can't solve them. What like, I think, I think so. I, we spoke about this on cyberbullying. I think that's a really difficult problem for capitalism to
dissolve because the incentives aligned to get people to be
online. Yeah, that's a real difficult one and I think therefore you've got you've got to maybe have some kind of X prize idea or something outside the box for that. I have another one which is like the product marketing gap which is most people think they hate marketing. But they don't, they just hate it with marketing. Is better than the
Looked the secret or
optimism exact exactly that. And one thing I'd leave for the audience to I'd recommend always recommend this. My friend Julian Shapiro sent me at which is this documentary Searching for Sugar, Man, you've still not seen yet. Have you angers me to? No no, I'm sorry, watch that tonight. So Searching for Sugar Man. Spoiler alert is about a musician. Who was more talented than Bob Dylan. Everyone who worked with him was like, this guy's incredible. He's gonna be the next big thing and he just disappeared. There's rumors that he set himself on fire.
What happened to this guy? And meanwhile, in South Africa, his music became a big thing during the apartheid he was bigger than Elvis, he sold hundreds of thousands of records and everyone in South Africa was like he was, he was an icon, but everyone thought he died or whatever. Turns out the guy was just a builder on a building site for the rest of his life. And it's only thanks to the internet beginning to start that he realizes that he was the superstar in South Africa and I call it the Rodriguez effect which is when you have a
Incredible products. People think this idea of you just build it, they will come if you have incredible product but no that's the that's the important sometimes of market and if you don't actually Market someone who's in Talent as him, you end up with something like Rodriguez, where they have the most Talent, I'll give you one the most talented artists of his generation who never truly took off apart from. He had that little one in South Africa, but he never took off elsewhere.
Tell me about Kanye West's market research is my favorite one.
So this is what I call the Olson for monitor. So there's this going back to finding Niche content.
On the Internet. Is this Diplo animation where diplo's chatting about he gets called up to Cat by Kanye to work on. I'd argue probably the best albums which is Watch the Throne him and Jay-Z and he goes in the studio is producing beats and he looks over and you're saying earlier, your artist friend, I was like e-cigs everywhere and the things on the floor and can use Studio. There's just the Olsen twins and employers out. Why a Mary-Kate and Ashley here Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. And can you says oh they're my for monitor, for what?
White girls like music. So I just play tuned and see what they like. And I go obviously, that's the most can you thing ever? But it's also genius. Which is when you have an when you're creating something for yourself, it's really easy. But when you're creating something for different demographics, having an awesome thermometer in the room is very, very
useful, the Friendship recession, another one, that the
ignored by the media were studied by
historians. Yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, the number of men who reported having zero close friends in 1990 was 3%.
Aunt in 2020 was 15%. The I mean people are starting to talk about it with young girls, there's this recent study that came out. I think like 60% of teenage girls in America say that they have persistent or constant feelings of hopelessness. Like, it's just the most brutal. I would love to see the study and actually break down. What's going on global millionaire migration or to that?
Yeah, there's the u.s. went from. I think ten thousand millionaires, net, migration to like 1500 which like an 85 percent drop.
Click and the UK is now a net loss. Whereas elsewhere Australia, the UAE think Canada has gone up, so that's definitely think. That just doesn't really get talked about. Why is this happening again? Another one is Japan's homeless rate. Why does Japan have so few homeless people relative to the rest of the world? They might be lying with their statistics, who
knows? And it's so it's
so low. It's insanely low. A lot of the reasons that when you actually can watch documentaries about it, is these gaming cafes. So that that's one question. So they live in gaming can even get live in gaming, cafes.
He's like this little people who would be homeless like these kind of like a bed and a chair and they play games, which obviously a terrible outcome. But is it better than somebody sleeping on the streets? Good question. Suppose another one that I think will become bigger with the next election cycle, which were you already take advantage of? This, is something I call the great social media merge. So I got this idea from mr. Beast, which is every platform for the first time ever. He's kind of, you know, that unbundling than bundling effect. Everything's just merging on this kind of tick, tock ization of real shorts but even read it. Even Twitter's not going on video and you're going to see
This is modify Spotify
Amazon. So all you back in the day, you needed to create something for LinkedIn, then something for this. And it meant actually going viral is so much harder. Whereas now it's actually never been easier to go viral because the same clip because every platforms bundling together can go on mass fire and I don't think they priced in how quick our people are going to get famous.
Yeah, that's looking at content strategy, that's certainly different audiences that it resonates with. So just because something that's 9/16 vertical, we put stuff that
Reliably does well on Instagram that falls flat on its ass on Tick Tock animation videos. Reliably do well on Instagram can't even get off the ground on YouTube. No one cares. So there is although the format of the platform may be the same the physics, the drive it, a
different different but I wouldn't be surprised if over time those begin to merge more and more together. Another thing on this specific topic is I have one point in the essay of don't ignore India. I
In the face, possibly the most fascinating country right now which particularly as a British and American Media doesn't really get focused on that much. So Indians are now the number one population in the world that overtaking China this year or last year, they Explore More in software engineering than Saudi Arabia, has in oil. So there's so much going on there. They're the number one users of every single social media platform. So no one uses are what's happening when users of Facebook. And when you have Instagram, number one, use of YouTube which means that if you're going to be creating things online, they're going to be there.
India and also India bear in mind obviously previous at the British Empire where India was a colony of Britain as Now flip. So India's economy the other last year, over talk the UK and again that's barely discussed. But 20 years from now, we're going to go. That was a big event.
Yeah, an interesting Insight. I learned from a couple of tech YouTube friends with massive channels when they do expensive, like Apple devices there are p.m. and the CP empathy
And on AdSense, on the back end of YouTube is very high. If they do cheap, Android devices turns, in terms of Indians, watch it, and that drives through the floor, Androids huge. They are ya. Also Ali Abdel talks about Ali's from some sub-continental Heritage and when he does book summaries, his book summaries are often listened to or watched by people from India, but it drives his CPM through the floor. So it's like he needs to balance Revenue with again, I
think I
Think you're going to see. I know we spoke about it a long time ago, where remote work was the best thing ever to happen to Skilled people in the developing world and sure people are yeah. And, you know, quite a little pin that one and skill, those people in the developed world because all the money is going to flow out. And again, that will be something that will be spoke about five years from now as all this money flows out to what glad you called the ascending world and the descending world as a better model versus developed and developing world. The table timet. Meritocracy is the ultimate meritocracy. But
What will happen is people will not like that because you'll see all this money for and then all of a sudden, the the CPI and India will get higher.
And what I would say, it's going to drive populist Uprising to more and more, you know, if you we need stronger borders, okay, please try and police your virtual borders for a Workforce, like you've got this cohort of 7 million Prime working age men between the ages of 22 and 50 who are not working. They're not in education employment or training needs.
They spend a few thousand hours on average per year playing video games, fifty percent of that time is either on prescription drugs, or smoking weed from this 7 million, man, cohort, 7 million out of 330 million isn't much. But when you look at capable men, with in that age bracket, it's actually a massive proportion. Huge huge number
If those people aren't going to work, there is a vacuum that will be filled by other workers from elsewhere.
Another one on this is literally this point of what's neglected or was ignored by the media will be studied by historians is the bricks. So, if you combine the bricks so like, Brazil Russia, India, China, South Africa. And I think Korea, as well as the K, it's a see, it's the same China and yeah, that's true. Actually, but there are literally about to overtake the G7 in terms of economic size. It's like the
Going down like down relative to Global GDP and that's going like that. And again these will be things that they will not talk about the news. Going back to the Roman Empire Point earlier. Nobody says, Roman Empire has fallen, is the historians that say that. So the historian frame is so much more useful, but again, you can see going back to what I said earlier. There's the way I think or it's probably sometimes you end up visualizing with things about as we discussed earlier but there's a lot of root structures and themes. There of these gaps of taking the historians perspective, both at the societal level and also at the individual
level. Yeah.
Yes, the future you, right? Looking back the same. I think my too.
My tutu certainly at the moment will be that population collapse. That's a big one. I brought about that one. That's a huge one. Absolutely massive. Keep harping on about it. It's an interesting, it's not even necessarily ignored by the media. It's disincentivize to be spoken about by the media because it runs counter to a climate change narrative that this is what we should be focused. On AI risk, I think is still now largely in the public seen as like a well, you know, but I can get
it to tell me if the recipe or I can get it to tell me five, interesting stories about Winston Churchill and yeah, you can. But I mean in, if the people that are concerned, if like aliens are you cows keys, right? Then
There is no. We know there's going to be no historians in the future to be able to worry about what happened in the past, in any case. So it doesn't really matter. It's going to be all paper clips. YouTube is the new TV.
Yeah, this is a crazy start, and one of my new favorite things. When I see a viral YouTuber, I go in the comment section and the amount of times will say, hey X, I'm a fifteen-year-old and I love your business content or what? It's just flooded and if you actually see, you can find the image. I post on Twitter where YouTube now is something like 25%.
Out of kids, say they spend almost all their time or such a significant proportion of their time on YouTube. And your then, seeing this war that play out to the attention economy where you have like, centralized major Studios. So, Netflix Amazon Prime Disney or these, which is kind of top-down. We pay billions for ideas, but the best directors in the world and we create that versus bottom-up which is like YouTube. Anyone can go viral, it's be completely decentralized. And I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube ultimately I do.
They both win but I think you to believe more and more of the
attention market and pretty sure that the amount of time spent on Tick-Tock last year versus Netflix. Netflix watch time.
Let's see.
I did not mean that watch time Insider intelligence predicts that users over the age of 18 will spend an average of 42 58 minutes per day. And Tick-Tock this year compared with forty eight point seven minutes for YouTube or Netflix.
It's still within the, the leader at 62 minutes so it's like 58 minutes. A day on Tick-Tock 48 minutes a day on YouTube, 62 minutes a day on Netflix, that's for people. Over the age of 18 rights are under the age of 18 is probably going to be pivoted a lot. That's think that's. That's three hours of your day. Here's an interesting one. Write the number of hours that people have in the day hasn't changed but the number of the amount of time that people spend on online platforms, has that time has to be squeezed from somewhere. You don't just get to create this time from nothing.
And so when people talk about, you know, what had been the massive changes, why is why the discourse is this way in the mental health and all of the rest of the stuff? Look at it as a hardware problem. As opposed to a software problem is it, you need to globalist conspiracy. Is it the East regions in the water and the stuff? You might contribute to it a little bit. Maybe it's the fact that
25 years ago, the total amount of screen time that people spent was probably on average like two hours, one hour a day and now it's including work. It's probably closer to 10.
So let but let's go back to the beginning, the conversation optimism agency, right? So if you look at when the smartphone first launched, it was magic pocket computer. Wow. How incredible this is that I get this fucking thing that sits in my pocket and I can reach anybody do anything. I can watch Richard.
Fireman lectures whenever I want, I can go and Stanford unit. I can I can chat to somebody in India. Just sat here right now at that is fucking incredible. Ten Years Later, brain, killing device, what's what's going on? We've gone all the way from the optimism High agency, all the way down to pessimism low agency and the number one area which I never thought would be my most popular essay in terms of when I meet people that they want to talk about going back to the 3rd or like what is the thing that no one's discussing is? I call it the smartphone Paradox. So right now, there's two things people are presented
Smartphones Eva one be a phone addict. Who's addicted to it 12 hours a day every single day. Refreshing it and yeah you get the upsides of constant optionality and things like that but you're stuck to your phone all day or you've got the phone us. Luddite who leaves his phone at home or leaves her phone at home, which is great but you can't get anywhere anywhere. If you've got an idea, you can't use your notes. If your mum's ill, you don't find out until four weeks later. And you so you have the I have the two virgin means like the phoneless Lodi and then the phone addict.
Which is the two options that have been presented by Society right now. And then I was like, okay, well, where's the, where's the Wheeled suitcase right now and I came up with the cocaine phone and the kale phone. So, this is my cocaine phone here. This is my kale phone here and rather than have a phone you addicted to or no phone that you're addicted to what about this. So on the kale phone, essentially is all the positive optimistic apps notes, Google Maps. Utilitarian Uber audible Kindle and it's sometimes. So
And you can't even be are checking it and if anybody wants to get in touch, I've got like a few emergency contacts that have this number, so I still have anything kicks off. I've still got that. And then on my cocaine phone it's wild Tick-Tock Instagram everything on there. And what's really interesting about this is when I spend all my time on my kale phone so I usually won't check my cocaine phone till like 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon. It completely resets my Baseline. So then when I use the cocaine one, I'm I'm bored of it.
Her eyes too much out about an hour and I want to go back and that single piece alone, I get people writing to me weekly saying this thing's like completely changed. Its I call that smartphone Paradox. It goes back to what you can kind of got Hartwell apple. One of the going to fix this or thick socks evil, it's like or you can you can take it into your own hands and design some wheels and a
suitcase. The bottom line is that you need to take control of your own technology. I would I would go. As far as to say that like my relationship with technology has probably been the most consistent challenge that I've had to fight with over the last decade.
Right. It's something every single year and I look at my annual review that no matter how disciplined. I've been, I always want to be more disciplined, and I always see it as a challenge. I was thinking, I could have would have should have done better with that, but I'm cocaine kale. And then a third one as well, right? I've got three and other phone. Yeah, ketamine phone. I've been rolling with that for a long time and at that's been a big do not have social media on the main
phone. Is that it's the most and the beauty of that is you get the upside
As of you get the upsides of having the phone, all the craziness of social media finding like random stories, what we're talking about earlier, but all the upsides of having peace of mind and being able to detach and mindfulness. I think
inaudible and podcast.
Yeah, apple podcast notes, everything you can think of being able to get an Uber somewhere. I all the basics, and again, Society presents these two extremes, either end of the spectrum, but there's always a third door that exists the
scale of farmer
marketing. Yeah, it's a big one again. Going back to is someone who fucking loves advertising loves.
Cutting the best out of all time. Only us and New Zealand are allowed to run pharmaceutical advertising. I can't quote the exact ones. I think it's MSNBC to of a bigger big news networks. In the u.s. their biggest advertisers are pharmaceutical companies but it goes back to my point earlier, which is okay. That's true. That's the thing that exists should that exists that's open for debate. That's an open question, but where are the ICONic exercise campaigns? If we know that it can have a fucking 500% increase taken. So many from the bottom 25% of exercise to the top two percent.
Tent, where? Where are those campaigns? And why aren't the government investing in them? I put out thing of if any government wants to invest, DM me and I'll help.
Well, speaking of DMZ outside, speaking of go about government investment, you've got the great technical actor.
So this is one of my favorite ones which is talk about ignored by the media. Studied by historians the UK government posted a job role for the head of cybersecurity for the UK government. And the proposed salary was fifty-five, thousand pounds, which again,
A lot of people is a lot of money. Don't get me wrong, but for the head of cyber security, how is that? How
How's that possible?
But when you think about your job is in cybersecurity and the number one floor, that all cider systems have is the human element every single hacker fundamentally as a human hacker first, not a computer hacker, almost everybody. I think it's called Soft hacking or something like that, where they try and look for the human element in. If this guy is a girl is getting fifty seven thousand pounds per year. Like how many Bitcoin do you think that a row?
Rogue nation has to be able to bribe that person. There's your vector of
attack and two things I've been really focused on the last kind of talk to anymore. 24 months is traveling and studying different cultures because you can go. Why does Japan have so few homeless people? Or how come you get? UK is doing this. But meanwhile in Singapore they pay the average politicians something like seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and they have kpis based off how well the country's performing. So study different cultures travel, a lot, and you begin to see those gaps, as well. As when you study history, you begin to go.
Begin to take a historians frame to the present moment.
How incredible modern Aviation is. This is the wildest one.
And I, every time I get on an airplane, even when I flew here, I always say to myself. I go and this is even a gratitude hack. I go I'm gonna die today. I got I took, was we taking off? Especially because I rant about how modern Aviation is. I got to be the most ironic death
for the pro modern Aviation guy. Elon
Musk says that of the most entertaining outcome will happen of the guy that rants about how amazing Aviation is will die on a flight. So,
Here's two stats. I think it's 20 21 the number of deaths on a airline in 2021, which are round about 120 to 180 depending on the statistics. You look at the number of car deaths was around about 1.1 million so and think about how much more dangerous and airplane taking off is, and that is completely neglected. I think probably cuz it's a positive store and we don't want to focus on it or we just take it for granted the same way we take the sewage system for granted the
Same way, we take electricity system for granted. All these great ideas we take for granted and then we focus on all the nonsense with the opportunity cost that we have.
Is humongous that we don't think about how wonderful modern Aviation is. Well, we have
this threat detection system, right? And we also have a smoke detector principle which is it is far better for us to assume that something bad is going to go wrong and it not happen than us assume that something is going to go well and that not occur. Like there is a bus Bush that shakes over the far side, I can either be scared because it might be aligned and run away and it might be liner and might not but the cost of me running away is relatively low, the cost me being eaten is very high. So we always have this negativity bias.
Biases in built into us. It is your job to swim upstream against that and starts like that. I think a very, very important to remind you like the I mean, what's the chance of you dying in the car on route to the airport? Can that said, mostly
say the most dangerous thing about a fly is the drive to the airport?
Well, I mean the I remember, it's in Matthew Walker's book, where he talks about how the number of doctors that have done us. I think it's surgeons the number of doctors or surgeons that have worked 12-hour shift.
In a hospital that upon their drive home crash, and then get taken back to their own hospital to be worked on because of how sleep-deprived they
are. I think there's a book called Black Box thinking, which I recommend which studies the aviation industry where they compare will wire Airline deaths, going down so much. Meanwhile, hospital deaths are going up so much and he has a few interesting hypotheses about cultural things and with the black box they literally observe once a plane crashes. What happens? It records.
Is it and because often the people are dead, there's no ego involved and they can objectively assess it, but the lessons from the, aviation industry should be applied everywhere and this ties into the next point, which is what happened to ticker tape, parades a ticker-tape parades. Peter Thiel has this great point where they used to be huge. People would go out in the street and applaud JFK, applaud these great individuals and the push. It started off in the 1910s, became super popular all the way up to the 1970s and then just slowly fade away. The last iconic individual really was now
$1 in 1990 New York after that is a few sports teams, not individuals collectives, a few nurses and a few things like that. But what happens that my thesis is like where's the ticker-tape parade for the Wright brothers or where's the day off for the Wright brothers? Because so I can help you think about how talk about high agency individuals,
what? No one can agree on any cultural Heroes anymore. There is nobody
there from the Wright. Brothers are up for debate
but new ones like you're not going to throw a ticker-tape parade for the
The Wright Brothers now iater. I, you know, try and think of who do you think is the most unobjectionable person? May be the rock. He probably doesn't do badly.
And he even any probably smells like 51 to 49 in the apart of your
polls. You know, I'm sorry. I mean he did put his foot in it to do with. I think he maybe there's a race thing and maybe it was a trans thing a few years ago. So yeah, the when the Overton window has become so highly constrained.
End. And when concept creepers occurred to the point where everybody will find something that they can justifiably be insulted by, there are landmines everywhere for somebody to step on and yeah
there's a question I have for you that I was thinking about on the way down. We talk about history lot here and studying history is giving me such a fantastic frame about these things. Why is it? So music is a specific thing where people consume a lot of
Music from the past. Even to this day. Like, on the way down, I love Christopher Cross Ride. Like the Wind on my favorite songs from multiple decades ago you think of or AC/DC Michael Jackson at all these amazing artists that still relevant today and people still consume the music today versus with social media. People, David Pryor has that concept of The NeverEnding now, people only consume content last 24 hours. When you probably most people listening to that, this thing to this, still apply this but imagine if you apply that to music well or you could listen to of the island, boys.
Like the music that's been made to the literary today, it'd be terrible. But why do we do that for information consumption? I have not quite figured that out yet here. That's an interesting question. I think what we go to for music and what we go to for the other types of content that we consume a very different things, we go to music for a vibe to put ourselves into a particular, kind of emotional state, a lot of the time.
Music seems to be a lot more Lindy because there are universal laws, no one's going. But I always say this about Shapiro's Channel, you know, Ben's got is rapidly growing Channel, and he's been very very successful on YouTube and in podcasting and all the rest of it. No one's going back and listening to been, Shapiro's, mid 2020 podcast episodes because they're inherently about relevant. Yes, they're above the last 24 hours,
but there's so much in history that is relevant or so much amazing content out there that is relevant.
And so on parole. He has this other concept of the Paradox of abundance. Where right now you've never seen more people in the Obesity levels are off the charts and other thing I probably ignored by the media at study by historians off the charts. But also the number of Greek people that like, Greek gods is also off the charts. You have this weird evil barbell, a evil extremes. And I think the exact true of information consumption, I posted this thing the other day of like the Paradox of abundance of YouTube. You can go back to the
Paradox as well. You can use YouTube to search, Richard feinman lecture, Charlie Munger the history of World, War Two. How did Winston Churchill prepare his speeches? Or you can search WorldStarHipHop fights, or the island boys, and that Paradox of abundance
exists. There's this really cool quote, another Gwenda, one here that says, the combination of the digital age, constantly exposing us to new outrages and cultural Elites constantly creating new outrages out of nothing. Has skyrocketed the number of outrages we now face in a world prickling,
With provocations. We cannot let us sensitivities Run free. If we allow ourselves to be goaded by every invisible and visible indignation. Will endlessly be distracted from our goals and easily controlled by emotional manipulators, like trolls disinformation agents? And demagogues I block the easily outraged because they are the foot soldiers of the mob who in the old days would have lynched people over neighborhood. Rumors those without self-control as seen controlled by others, those without self-control as soon controlled by others that the useful idiots of ideologues.
Has the tools of tyranny.
So with that, I think you just show that.
Everybody has a thing that they can find, which is reprehensible that the person that they're talk that they're looking as done, which is why the ticker-tape parade thing is stopped. Who can everybody agree on this being a hero and if you don't have any cultural icons that you can hold up, it's very difficult to Rally around. Like, if you tried to hold a ticker-tape parade, for pretty much, anybody there would be an equally sized. Auntie parade for the same thing, which is fucking insane. And also I guess goes back to the pessimism bias.
Most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75. Why this reference is what we're talking about earlier. We're at 25.
02:25 before that is a beautiful design video game. It's like grade, 1 grade 2. Grade 3 grade for grade 5 or year, 1 year, 2 year, 3 year, 4 year, 5, if your English and you kind of progress up like a beautiful Milestone, every single year through High School through college and you all of a sudden a 25, those Milestones just become marriage, which is obviously, might be on the decline. Mortgage,
Funerals of loved ones, kids kids and then your own funeral. So I did the amount of Mi you go from like a milestone, so regularly, to almost non-existent and big thing. I have of reasons why I think it happens is one lack of Milestones institutionalization institutionalization. Because people go from the education system, where they kind of sit there all day, every 18, 18 years asking to go to the toilet and then they just go and fuck I'm thrown out in the wild like a prisoner.
And as a result, people really struggle to adapt to that. I also think people just don't really care about adults things, quite sad them really support group. They haven't got any support groups of the time, spent with family time, spent with friends, even co-workers ultimately goes down towards the end. So you factor in all those things, less, that parenting switch thing. Yes, it is, the pairing switch as well, which is you go from being The Keg, you go from having your caregivers, their your entire life support and you supporting your support and you and again, going back to Milestones, all of a sudden.
Then one day, you get a phone call and you're their caregiver or the not even here. So it just immediately switches on you and all those things begin to stack up which is super depressive super like pessimistic, but you go, maybe we end on that note. I super nihilistic and but no actually the the optimistic answer I wrote about which is a few solutions for that, which is one create regular Milestones. So I'll try and split the year into quarters now, which is enough time to Sprint of things, but also then have a week off, completely reflect and then rebuild the plan. So then you have like four Milestones per year to try
Try and schedule things in with friends, regularly family, regularly whole like you can use, use your Google calendar for like weekly meetings, with people at work, you can use it for friends, you can use it for family as well, three. I think we also have a lack of religion in current society and we've kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of atheists look down on it, but those regular rituals a thing bigger than you, that you're working on, so important to have. So try and take Sabbath's fasting things like that. You can take quite a lot from religion.
But all of a sudden you can then begin to not die at 25 which I think is a huge, huge problem. It's a silent problem as well.
George Mack ladies and gentlemen. Dude I love you. I'm really, really glad that you came to see me in Austin. What should people do if they want to check out more of your writing? You one of the quickest growing guys on Twitter at the moment. Where should they
go? Yes, you think so. I put together all the best ideas and resources. I found that George Dash back.com so you can just get that they're completely for free and I kind of updated with time and that and then
Send a Weekly Newsletter related to that. You can also just let you go to George dash dash back at Twitter and then there's also a load of great ads which is kind of under. Right now, the current URLs marketing plug.com but that will change but you'll still be relevant. When people when people hear this before we go, though, one thing, I'd like to say just to break the fourth wall for the audience. Me and you was sat on a beach, a few years ago now, and just remember what you said to me. You said, if I can get to 100,000 subscribers, did it?
Tada and hopefully now we'll be at the million Mark and the big thing I've learned as a Brit touring America is there's a lot we can take from Americans and vice versa. They supe complimentary to their friends which we are often quite like mocking of each other quite insulted to each other. But proud, you mind you absolute smashed it. And I think for a lot of listeners out there, you set an example of an infinite game that you keep that you keep sticking out and boom X percent of the audience is coming. Last 12 months? What compounding, a man? And thank you for having me
my pleasure, man, we're going to keep on doing it together.
