#653 - George Mack - Stop Wasting Your Life On Things That Don’t Matter

24:24And the question is, is where's the wheeled suitcases right now? It was one guy who comes along and goes, hold on, let's put some wheels on that. Jim Jeffery's has a great bit and he's new Netflix special where he says, feasibly Neil Armstrong as he was getting on the rockets, like was there carrying on his suitcases. And because one day we'll put a rocket on these without realizing. Okay, so again going back to questions, questions are the answers that you need. Where is the world suitcase right now? And that's a question that can keep you up at night. Where it's so obvious that everyone's just copying the crowd and being mimetic.

24:55So a lot of people will think I would be a 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, sort of matter of what situation you put them in, do they bend it? The dinner last night, he said, energy transference. So I had this essay I've never published, which is, so for friends, versus treadmill friends. and there's certain friends that I hang around with afterwards I need to rely on a sofa because they kind of drain you of the energy and then there's other friends that we mean you know what you hang around with them and you're like fuck, seven mile run, let's go, we overclock our brains.

25:40So I think a big thing that you'll see is energy transference. I always say that Steve from Diary of the 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 The bow -mind Steve could be in the London office, Manchester office, Berlin office, New York office, he's constantly jet -saying around. And I go, oh, I could just see from people's faces and how much energy was in the room. I got our Steve's here today. Without even seeing him. And I think that's like an often thing is, when they enter a room, the energy just completely changes.

26:11I think that's an often combination of high -age and sea individuals. You had weird teenage hobbies. Weird teenage hobbies is another one. So, I often hire for this. I can be the job interview. And if they mention a weird teenage hobby, I can't lean in quite a lot. which I probably shouldn't say publicly now, because now people are gonna start bringing those up. But when you're young, especially when you're a teenager, it's probably your most low agency state because you want to copy the crowd, you want to be mimetic of everybody around you. However, if you can at that age, whilst everyone else is going playing football or rugby, be super into yo -yoin, or super into football freestyle, or super into whatever it is.

26:49For me, that's a good sign, because if you can swim against the tide when you're 15, or the environment of people mocking you, so much easier as you're not all. It's so formative as well, right? A lot of the things that you do in later life are echoes of what you did when you were a kid. There's a really great study that I looked at that the music that you listen to between the ages of 11 and 15 imprints on you for the rest of your life. So that's why you have generations of music trends that go like I still love emo and post hardcore because I grew up in like the Hawthorne Heights and Blink 1 .8 to ERA.

27:20That was what I listened to, right? And then there'll be other people that I listened 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 golden question is, if you stuck in a third world prison or you stuck on an island, then you had to call someone to bail you out. Who would you call? And that alone will identify the most high agency person in your life.

27:49because 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 transfer and still be able to convince people or whatever the fuck, whatever plan you're going to have to put together. So I'd say that is probably the most impactful thing when predicting high agency. One that I see as well is immigrant mentality. So if somebody's moved from their hometown, quite a good sign, if someone's moved from their home country, even greater sign, and you then see these immigrants across, particularly America, right, who absolutely dominate, because if you can sit there and go, I'm in the wrong place.

28:34And so I have to acknowledge them 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. It doesn't mean that everybody who migrates is high agency but I'd say it's quite common. Not being able to predict people's opinions as well. I think is unusual. I have a friend of mine called Katty and I love hanging around with him because I don't know what he's going to say because he doesn't just line up with, oh, for example, like you'll have like the body builder who you'll stereotype them.

29:12You probably get this a little bit as well right people don't expect you to be in great shape for the model and then chat about neuroscience with a guy coming on and hold your own. So I love people when you can't fully predict their opinions or you have the beauty queen who's super into 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 astro -thysics. That's probably quite a high agency individual because they've clearly gone against what should be their default programming.

29:47Yeah, 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're just NPCs just downloading scripts. Well, there is somebody out there who falls into the perfect mold of, I am pro -life and I'm pro -gun and I'm pro -first amendment and I'm like small government and I'm like anti -immigration and I'm blah blah blah like you are the complete caricatures stereotype of the person that's from the right and there is the same from the person that's from the left but most people are so idiosyncratic that you should have something that doesn't fit should be this nice smooth circle except for those two bits you know what what's that doing there.

30:26Like why are you pro choice but pro gun or why are you like pro immigration but pro small government? Like why did those things go together? And when you find somebody that has a non -typical suite of beliefs, it's interesting because you think, oh you've arrived at this point on your own. This is one of the things I did this video about Sam Harris ages ago. three, four years ago, why Sam Harris is annoying everybody, it seems like he's continued like true to form over the last few years. But I have to respect what he's done with regards to that because he pays an unbelievably high price to hold the opinions that he does, which gives me a great amount of faith that he truly believes in them.

31:10It would be much easier for him to fold either one way or the other. You're like, how can it's very untipical to be pro -vax, but anti -woke, like anti -Trump, but also kind of anti -Biden. Like, you know, he just holds a suite of beliefs that whether you agree with them or not, and almost everybody disagrees with some of them, right? There's very few people that hold the exact same Sam Harris suite of beliefs that Sam Harris does. But the price that he pays to hold them is so high that for me, it's a reliable signal of authenticity because there are much easier routes to existing in the world than holding that odd conglomeration of views.

31:52It makes you think they've fought it through and I realised my favourite people who are tango around me now 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 high agency list was, are they mean to your face but nice behind your back? And you often don't see the people who are nice to your face and mean behind your back because by definition, you use this behind your back. So another concept we can come onto is hidden metrics, but on that specific thing, it is a hidden metric. You don't see people being rude behind your back.

32:25And I think often a good indication of somebody probably being nice behind your back is probably someone who's mean to your face. Well, at least you know that, and if not at least they're consistent. What people that are nice about other people who aren't there to your face. That's a good one or the inverse. Are they amazing friends, amazing friends needs to room and they go, oh, have you seen what they're wearing or have you seen XYZ? That's for me a sign of, 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're gossiping about, because what it tells you is that as soon as the scrutiny of the person that they're talking about is no longer there, they're going to be prepared to talk about you.

33:05I'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, frost all brick level. Yeah, it's dead. It's dead. Yeah. Um, but I, you know, it's my way of going about life that I'm like, okay, well, I guess I'm just going to like hold this secret for the fucking rest of time. It's exciting for me to have. One of the other ones as well I think is sending people niche content. Oh, going back to the root of urban story, I found that from one of the things, I talent I have that I can't really monetize it, I spot content creators really early on, going back to the beginning of the conversation, probably this until you're on the first ever episode.

33:51It took a while for that penny stock to find a boom, but it's doing well now, and there's a lot of other examples like that. And one of the low agency things is, Okay, this has six million views, therefore I will click on it. What I now do is I'll go in the Twitter feed, or the YouTube Explore feed, or whatever. And I look for things the algorithm is recommending me with very few views. And I click on that, and this nine out of ten times, it's absolutely a waste of time. But one out of ten, you'll tap into something that everybody else isn't tapping into. But by definition, that is the meme of seeing a crowd, like I created that meme of how to be productive, versus how to be creative, and everybody's queuing outside, how to be productive, but no one's queuing outside, how to be creative.

34:28But at a meta level, that's a concept, right, of what are the things that nobody's clicking on that will then potentially be big in the future. And you have to do that like a VC where you know 9 out of 10 of your bets are going to be completely incorrect. But like one out of 10 is clicking on a Bitcoin article in 2014. Yeah, like how many you've had what 30 million views on that verbist story I think on Twitter? Because whereas everyone else is just regurgitating the same shit versus if you can tap into other inputs, that was my big thing about creativity, the essay that went viral on that which is creative, the problem with creativity is people treat it like productivity where they just try and do the same thing harder versus trying to get as many different inputs into the system as possible.

35:03Now, YouTube, Explore page and all these things can just keep you in this hamster wheel. You need to try and break out and click on it. Because you're predictable. You need to try and break out and click on it. You need to try and break out and click on it. Search weird things and before you know it, you find some bizarre inputs that can either go one way or the other. Yeah. The niche content thing and looking for different ideas and where do they come from is a really interesting way to conceptualize productivity versus creativity. Really interesting idea to look at there is what's the work environment that you're doing this particular job in.

35:33So for instance, if you've ever walked into an artist studio, Zach in my house made his misses as an artist, right? So I go into the room where she does her art and there's stuff fucking everywhere. There's like vapes and there's there's there's a half done sketches and there'll be like a dog brush and there'll be like a Bluetooth speaker, but it's like upside down and it'll be canned. Also, it's chaos, it's fucking chaos. That is the place that you want to be. And there'll 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.

36:05No. 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 of a productivity is so all encompassing that I don't think many people in the modern world have ever looked at a problem and thought anything except for I need more productivity. Every single lock gets filled with the key of more focused, more productivity. The reason I can't do this is because I'm insufficiently attentive. Well sometimes and maybe even a lot of the time and this may be a comment on how replicable and almost formulaic a lot of people's jobs are now that, you know, many roles should be concerned about the forthcoming GPT revolution, but a lot of the time, okay, what's the creative angle to the thing that I'm trying to do?

36:58If you're trying to write a book, sometimes you need to sit down and just put your nose against the grindstone because you're not getting the stuff out. But if you're struggling with ideas, you're probably needing 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 onto education. Can't take you anywhere without you blasting the education system. So I think that's definitely a factor, but it goes back to that question of where is the wheel suitcases? Concerning asking that at a societal level, but even right now in your very life, like where is that simple solution that's so obvious?

37:37There'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 can dance down the training into a short period of time There's a coach that makes sure the programming is to it outsources everything that I need to do and I just just forgot that that was an option and then one day was walking past Barry's on the way to go to Flower Charles where we went for dinner last night thought 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 am I've got 50 minutes of training in I've done my morning routine and by 9 am I can be on a call having trained and done it all of my morning stuff and like wow Even if I'd been at home, it would have struggled to have been as efficient.

38:40So oddly, the creative solution has 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 the spinning wheel app on your iPhone. I just search spinning wheel app on the app store. And collect, going back to questions earlier, just collect great questions that you hear. Where's the wheel suitcase right now in my life? And as you collect more and more of those questions, things you hear on podcasts, things people say to you. Just spin that wheel before bed, leave it with your subconscious overnight, and then journal on that thing first thing before any inputs.

39:14Absolutely fantastic for coming out of ideas. Second biggest one is idea called sacoco. I believe it's how, I don't know if that's how you actually pronounce it, but I was sat in the moldies for a week without any inputs. And I came up with this idea, which is if you ask anybody where they want to travel, everybody, certainly I know all at 90 % say Japan. Why do people want to travel to Japan so much? But if you study the history of Japan, they practice Sakoko, I believe, again, probably butchering the pronunciation, where they close the borders for 250, 260 years. Anybody who tried to leave and come back killed, anybody who tried to enter killed.

39:52And as a result, while the rest of the world was trading ideas, it developed this crazy, insane, beautiful unique culture that where there's nowhere else in the rest of the world. And that's why people want to go and visit it because it's so creative and so new. Ah, because it wasn't Cosmopolitan, it didn't get diluted down by other cultures. Exactly. And then go back to the double think idea though, at the other end of a spectrum, is another tool which is that if you search on YouTube Swedish House Mafia, creating one, and it starts with them like tapping, like this, and they go all the way up to them, just jamming in a studio like three creative guys to creating one live in like the space of a minute it, the edit.

40:30And it's amazing. And you can see that you put three people in a room with no inputs from the outside world. And they just pickle ball or idea tennis their way to it. So I think spinning wheel helps. Time alone definitely helps on the longer the better, as well as getting some kind of idea camp with the smartest people you know, and just shutting that the world that way. We came up with similar ideas. I came up with anxiety costume. You came up with thinking What's thinking cost? Thinking cost everyone will relate to, which is this idea that your brain is a super computer. And you can try this, I'll give this as an experiment to anyone listening right now.

41:08Try and have two thoughts at the same time. And maybe there's the elite IQ guys that me and you definitely are. And the Nicola Tesla is out there that could do it. But I can't have two thoughts at the same time. So in that in mind, you've got this weird thing where you have a supercomputer, but it can only one run one program at a time. Quite a quite a part. I've got the human brain paradox. And why this is interesting is when you have super dramatic, super negative people going back to what we said at the beginning where ideas are probably the most important thing. It's hard to think about the wheels on suitcases when when your girlfriend's around with you about XYZ or somebody in the WhatsApp chat kicking off.

41:52And 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 computer's RAM constantly. So there's an opportunity cost that exists for every single thought. So whenever you have a thought, there's trillions of other thoughts that you could be having, but because you're super computer can only run one program at a time, it's not having. So you've got to have a defense and an offense system that I think anyway.

42:24So the defense system is avoid dramatic people as much as you can. Paul Graham has my favourite essay ever, which is Life is Short. I read it whenever, even if anybody gets sick or anybody dies, and he kind of closes the whole thing off of relentlessly prune bullshit. So just get relentlessly prune bullshit whenever it gets in your life, prune it purely because there's a thinking cost to everything that you do, or every thought that you have. And also whenever, but 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.

42:54But then I can go to the thought, which is whenever you have a bullshit thought loop that happens, what is the opportunity cost of this thought? Like what is the wheels on suitcase that I could be thinking about instead? And then you kind of judo throw its momentum against it. So thinking cost is the idea that every cost, every thought has an opportunity cost and you should be hyper -vigilant to that. 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.

43:27The thing about inaction is that you're blind to it, do not make the assumption that inaction has no price. And this is the same thing that the thinking cost actually is the price that you pay, but it's so unseen, right? People are prepared to waste the peace of their own mind over and over and over and over 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 a hidden metric. So if you kind of zoom all the way out, I have a few fundamental questions.

44:06I keep going back to all my writing and then you kind of zoom a bit higher. And it's the optimism high agency thing. And if you actually zoom the highest point, which I've not actually written about just yet, which is kind of viewing everything going back to Rick and Morty's Royal, the video game of life, like a simulation hypothesis, but just thought that's more optimistic, more high agency, which is the video game hypothesis. And one of my fundamental things of this kind of religion slash philosophy is metrics are one of the most important things. And one of the reasons why people obsess over money is because money and your bank account is the best video game ever designed.

44:42It's multi -player, competing against other people. Oh, this person makes this much. I only make that much. Number going up, and as a result, things like peace of mind, which is a metric that we can't quite measure yet, but we all feel it. We only really begin to look at it when we're in rehab. Or when we have an anxiety attack on the bus into work. or whatever it is. And that's why I think Hidden Metrics, once you see it, well you never see it, but then once you kind of mentally see it, you begin to see it everywhere. Or Moses has that great bit of the Instagram model. You take the Instagram model.

45:12The visible metrics, quite clear, you get to post it on your Instagram, it's great, everyone thinks you're cool, but when you kind of lie in bed at night with somebody who you got, I have nothing in common with you at all. The damn Viserian problem. Yeah, I'm sure he's happy about it. You don't see the Hidden Metric. Yeah, why is it that you are such a fan of the Roy scene from Rick and Morty? It's the header on your Twitter and you've got a hoodie. You've got a custom printed hoodie that I met you on the way to Dubai. The custom mask as well during COVID -19 with Roy on as well. I think it's because it's the, like, one of my favorite things that I began to notice that was happening is you hit 25 and life goes mental.

45:54So up from zero to 25, everybody's on the same path pretty much. There's slight variance, but everyone has these guardrails of first year, second year, third year, high school, university. But then you hit 25 and there's so much variance that happens where I have friends that are selling NFTs for ridiculous amounts of money. I've got friends going to prison, I've got friends having a baby like there's so much variance that begins to happen and you begin to go fuck. 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 hypotheses is probably the best we've got and have fucking nihilistic isn't it?

46:30This idea that there's just infinite versions of me sat in a machine but if I can move back to like the video game hypotheses where I know I began to notice that the laziest people I know, the most nihilistic pessimistic low agency people I know, could sit and play a video game for 15 hours and be amazing at it. So I have this theory that video game designers know more about human psychology than 99 % of psychologists. The video game industry is bigger than music TV and entertainment combined. The amount they know about human psychology I think is fascinating. So the kind of Roy is just viewing life as a video game and trying to shift from first person shooter of me identifying with this to just third person.

47:10Whether it's true or not, probably not, it might not be a video again, but is it a useful belief to have probably? Yeah, I think depersonalizing a lot of things is good. Like that's one of Peterson's questions, right? Treat yourself like you are somebody you were responsible for helping. Treat your life like a character that you were responsible for playing. It's the same as Rogan's thing. Imagine that you're the hero of your own story. All of these, like what do all of these different ideas have in common? It takes a third person perspective. Depersonalize is a lot of the things that are going on to you because it's very difficult to give yourself, you're so embedded in the experience of being you and there's so much going on that clouds your ability to make good decisions.

47:57That 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 is dead, therefore what's the point? Why do we do anything? But with a video game, you're not replaying it for any reason, but it's just a fucking game. And I feel there's so much to be unpacked about video game psychology that can get implied. But the biggest thing, or certainly one of the biggest things, is this concept of metrics. When you have a clear metric that people can optimize, what's that? The Cobra effect, wherein the bridge started offering Indians money for Cobra's, because there was such a big problem with them and then they started breeding them.

48:33So you could know what a better version of that is. It was to do with rats, another 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 it. So you, Q for Boy has that concept of paramedics where you have two metrics. So if you have a customer support team and you say, hey, decrease the fraud rate, well then they start treating every single customer like a potential fraudsters. Yeah, you may achieve that goal, but every customer hates you forever.

49:04Good hard. Good hard. Yes, you need to balance that with an opposing So going back to like the money video game, which is a great video game, but if you could then have peace of mind as an opposing metric, and I wonder if you could literally visualize peace of mind as a dashboard that you could see every single day, I think the impact that would have on people's lives would be so significant. 100%. I mean, you know, this is what people fundamentally don't understand about Hormosi is that he finds peace of mind through doing business. So I didn't understand it until I really, really drilled deep with him.

49:37And 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 don't have theory of mind to understand what it would be like to be Alex or 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 than you can through children.

50:13Well, I challenge you that people don't, can't empathize with that. Maybe they just haven't added frame to them correctly where people can always think of a game they play that's so addictive that they end up playing for the sake of playing for the rest of the What was some of yours? You've got your brothers, like professional eSports player. Yeah, yeah, he was very, very good. So I saw that first hand, but for me, I think football freestyle was my thing right, so I'd train four hours every single night and do that and then decided I actually want to lose my virginity at one point, so I stopped doing that.

50:38So when you have something that you're just doing purely for the sake of doing, I mean, you're doing this with the podcast, right? We spoke last night and I said, you're the only person I know that would have stuck it as long as you did without the metric, really. But you was playing it purely for the sake of playing it, but your metric, so the difference, your metric wasn't the subscribers or the view count really part of it for sure, but I knew if it was, you would have quit. But it was purely an infinite game that you was playing. And because it was such a well -designed video game for you, then it keeps playing.

51:08It's the biggest piece of advice for people that ask about, I want to start a podcast, like what should I do or how should I begin or what's your piece of advice. And like, if you don't enjoy it, don't do it. because you are not, it's going to take you 150 episodes to earn anything. It's going to take you 400 episodes before you're probably, unless you've got an existing platform, it's going to take you 400 episodes before anybody really cares about what you're doing. It's going to take so long, and that's weekly. An idea I have with that is pricing things in. So I think it's a hedge fund term where you kind of price in upcoming events, and when you're starting new things like that, So when I take you e -foiling which people don't know it's like a electronic surfing everyone saw Mark Zuckerberg go viral of it which is one of my funny videos.

51:52You don't even mean DJ Khaled. DJ Khaled, drop that clip in there Dean. So with that one big thing I've now recognized because I always take new people with me. I'll say to them I go you're going to fall off 50 times before you get good at this. Versus if they don't, if they come at it with just oh I'm going to be good at this immediately and then they start falling off it immediately rocks their self -esteem whereas if you say hey They're going to be 50 times before you get good it Mr. Beast says that as well with YouTube He goes just make 100 videos and then and then we'll chat Yeah, and I think you've got a constantly pricing things.

52:21I've got okay It's going to take me 12 months in the gym before I see anything and if you price that and I always like really conservative Pricing in because that's he say five and jeppes So it's got to be podcast and you get it at episode two hundred and twelve you feel great But if they go in with a mindset of well level one it's going to work Therefore, but again, I structure all my Apple notes to do this so like for the every single day It's the most linden thing I've done for years is level one thought dump don't have everything I've got to do today. Level two, decide on the levels. And boom, I'm already feeling good and every project I do will be designed like that, because just me writing down what I've got to do, I've already hit level, and I can feel that momentum growing versus if it's like, have a successful day, I'm constantly trying to play level 32 and failing.

52:59So again, it goes back to that. So how do you, given what you've suggested there is essentially to price in difficulty and to also kind of have low expectations of success, how does that marry with the skeptics guide to optimism. What, you go back to that 1 % every day? It goes back to the secret is bullshit. Like you're not going to immediately change things, you're going to need to combine optimism, combine agency. But the most important thing is infinite games that you can play for the sake of playing them. That's exactly the thing with Hormosi. At least the impression I have of him, he's doing it like a game and he wants to do this until he dies.

53:34And that's why he can keep playing and keep compounding exactly the same with you with this podcast, which is why you didn't quit. It's going to be very difficult to be beaten by somebody that isn't having fun if you are. Right? Like what's that? Tiago Forte, it's incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's having fun. So that was thinking cost, which was yours. Anxiety cost was similar, but a little bit more acute, a bit more short term. This is what I'd come up with. So as you identified, you can only have one thought at a time. And by making any kind of decision inevitably, you're going to cut off some of the potential wasted thoughts thinking about that undone task.

54:19So let's say every single morning when you wake up, you're 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. This is the interest rate constantly. Yeah. Every single time that you think, I need to meditate today, I need to meditate today, I need to meditate today, could have been, that's wasted thinking cost or anxiety cost as I called it, that you could have fixed by simply meditating when you woke up.

54:58And 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 not only his the other thing, not only do you get to gain, not thinking about the thing and being anxiously concerned that you still need to do it, you also get to sort of bask in this beautiful self -righteous glow from your high horse of productivity because you went out and you fistfucked it first thing in the morning. It's perfect. So next stuff, razors, both massive fans of razors, you did a super thread and one of the, I've selected some of my favourites, I've added in some of mine as well.

55:38The first one, bragging razor. If someone brags about their successor happiness, assume it's half what they claim. If someone downplays their successor happiness, assume it's double what they claim, the map is not the terrain. 100 % and there's obviously acceptance to the rule but I think that's quite a consistent rule that I see. When I hear someone particularly if it's money or if it's things like that when they're bragging over it they are probably don't really believe this but if someone's kind of playing it down and there's a few subtle tells it's the classic midwit meme right you've got the probably my favorite meme of all time which is the low IQ guy in the left the kind of midwit in the middle and the super high IQ guy there where the low So like you guys says, I'm the guy on the left.

56:21The 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 trying high, the wealth, where it's the kind of people who are like, the money to it crowd them, screenshot their 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's signaling so hard, it's probably a sign that they don't have them. We were in a location in Austin over the weekend, and a gentleman came up to us and one of the first sentences out of his mouth was 1500 people in the world have started a $1 billion business.

57:00I'm one of them. Like, now I believe you even less now. Anyone who's seen Carl Pilkin since bullshit, I think. You wanted to go, shh, bullshit. Yeah, I think what it kind of suggests when somebody does steam in and start with achievements first is any kind of bragging basically suggests to us. It's a low status, very easy to fake signal of authenticity, right? Like a hard signal of authenticity would just be show me a bank balance or show me your capacity. Someone telling you how smart they are is way less reliable of a signal than someone having a conversation with you that flows perfectly and you think, holy fuck, like that's really cool.

57:52So, yeah, 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.

58:33And that allows everyone to bypass the bragging razor because your friend bigs up your best achievements, but again, it's a reliable adjudicator, presumably. I'm not going to lie about what he's got a 17 inch penis and I'm pretty sure that he's got the world high jump record and he's like the first man on the moon, like I'm not going to say that, right? I'm going to say the things reliably that people can assume. So next one, I love this one. Instagram razor, when you see a photo of an influencer looking attractive on Instagram, assume that there were 99 worst variations of that photo you haven't seen, they just picked the best one.

59:10100 % and me and Josh, my business partner, when we travel around, will be in sometimes very nice restaurants and we see the beautiful couple. I don't think it's them necessary, but they're kind of Tommy Fury, Molly May looking couple, not referring to them. And he's just kind of staring into the distance and she'll be there just going through her phone of like infinite photos of her and then on this girl trying to find the right filter. One of the biggest repels I 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 now realized you it's the classic where's the sausage made and you've got to realize that everything on Instagram that you see is absolute.

59:53It's just not true, it's the Metaverse, it really is the Metaverse. Everyone's an animated character, completely edited, 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 and especially if it's someone that's got a pretty well curated Instagram feed. I suppose that's one of the advantages of as you get to a particular level with creating content online, you don't even know what's going out. It's, you know, the spin the wheel thing. I have no idea what video goes out each day. Like the short steam finds things that they love and sometimes they'll be like, oh, this bit with Mark Norman was really fun.

1:00:26Like you should maybe put that out, but they treat me like a child. like they've got a strategy and they know what they're doing. So I'm like, oh okay, well I guess that's just like I can close your eyes and put your hand in the celebrations 10 and pull out our today to bounty tomorrow. It's a multi -ser a good razor as well kind of related to this is both these razors are trying to avoid signals and then trying to actually study the noise oh, like not not the noise, sorry, but the actual thing. So Metagames I think are super important because you can learn a lot. So I have this rule which is If I want to work with a personal trainer, I want the personal trainer to be an insane shape.

1:01:04That's way better than any marketing spiel he can give for me. If I see a SaaS product which is selling landing page software, I want when I click on their landing page for that software to be incredible. The landing page should look, if you're the landing page software guy and your landing page is great, that's a sign. One of my favorite, one of my heroes throughout history in a marketing space is David Oglevy. and David Oglevy, I forgot which magazine it was, they wrote a headline which is, is David Oglevy a genius? Question mark. And Oglevy was a great marker because the way he marked himself, he replied to that headline by getting his lawyer to sue them for the question mark.

1:01:41Or at least that's the story that he released. And I go, even within that, you can see how good he is at market. He doesn't have to say what he's done there is genius. So whenever you can study these meta games, which is not what people say, what they do or how they carry themselves is super, super important. Mmm, narcissism, narcissism, razor. 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 that's when you realize everybody else has a separate video game that they're playing.

1:02:12And you're just, they're too busy. When you're thinking about them and you're worried about them, assume the amount of thought you give to other people they're giving to you. And then you realize how delusional that is. One of my friends was chatting about envy recently and he was talking about how he wants to get rid of envy as a thing. I mean, one thing that's useful with envy is to realize that there's somebody out there who's so envious of you, who probably checks your Instagram, checks for these things and constantly is thinking about you. And when you view it through that friend, you're Jesus, that's really bad.

1:02:42I'm actually not that worthwhile 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. Is this the one? Did you see that story about Churchill that I posted of the young guy who was showing around the houses of Parliament? No. This was good. So a The young MP was being shown around Parliament by Winston Churchill.

1:03:14As he wandered through the halls and offices, he asked questions about how the building was put together. Churchill obliged and gave the young man advice on how this world worked. Upon entering the House of Commons Chamber, Churchill's new friends started referring to the MPs on the other bench he's as the enemy. Churchill reportedly said, that's the opposition dear boy, the enemy's behind you. And what I loved about that was it became, obviously what he's talking about is the fact that like the people who you need to be concerned about are the ones that are on your team, because you have something that they want.

1:03:44That's the opposition. You know that they're out to get you. It's the people behind you that are the snakes that 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 in difference to all of our existence. Right? No, not a blind blink. And I imagine that this is one of the reasons why when we get to look at the night sky, it fills us with a degree of dread and awe and insignificance that I think is very important to keep our ego small, to 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.

1:04:34You 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. Have you even nodded as Goggin said something similar on the podcast? There are degrees to how it can be useful to see to be alert to threats out there and to have resilience ready for things that are difficult to occur in the world, but the world's fucking indifference to you. The world doesn't care. And personifying it and creating an enemy out of the world, I think, is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It's like it needs to be turned inward. You are the person that knows all of your weaknesses.

1:05:11You 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's just a tool. It doesn't care about you. There are some people out there who genuinely have enemies, right? But it's a rarefied strata of people and they've done something. To the swindler. To the swindler.

1:05:48Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think so there's the nihilistic that it could be framed as Nalesty pessimistic, which is, or nobody cares about you, and therefore, so I was the fucking point then. But it goes back to the root opening of the conversation, which is ideas are probably more important than people. The concept of electricity is so important, or the idea of critical thinking, or whatever it is. This is why ideas are so much more important, and you can find, as an atheist or an agnostic, you can find God to some extent in these ideas, is something that's way bigger than you that can last way longer than you that is so so damn important.

1:06:26There was one that I came up with and this is my first one I'm adding it into the mix which you'll have seen before. Shultz's Razer do not attribute to group group conspiracy that which can be explained by cancellation anxiety. So that's a fucking great one. There's the Cummings Razer as well which kind of forks on the idea which is But largely, one of my favorite followers on Twitter tweeted out, why doesn't every government in the world have a dashboard? So you can see how well they're doing. You can debate over the core metrics. You can debate how you measure them and maybe have different parties and things like that.

1:07:01But all the core measurements, number of homeless people on the street, obesity rates, def rate, why don't we have a BBC 5 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 from a right -hand man, retweeted that and said, and I call this Cummings Razor, which is whenever you get confused by politicians or you think it's some great conspiracy theory, it's basically this, which is Cummings wrote, I can confirm at the time Boris does not have a dashboard that he checks every day. It's not run by it like a CEO. He just reacts to newspaper stories that come in each day if everybody saw this, they'd sell everything and flee.

1:07:37And that's a fundamental problem is, yeah, there's Actually a lot of malice that's going on is just a complete lack of strategy, design, everything. Gwinder 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 other idea called compensatory control. Do you remember I taught you about this age as an age as ago? So compensatory control. So it's rich, another Richard Chotten here. So he was talking about how people that were very early on before there was reason to believe that it was a lab leak.

1:08:19People were attributing to global conspiracy, the fact that we had this pandemic that was released. Like the people that were right weren't right because they were educated, they were right because they were closing their eyes and throwing it at a dartboard if they were right at all. Compensatory control. When we feel uncertain, when randomness intrudes upon our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way. Superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need. It is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces. This is why, for some, it makes more sense to believe we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the chance mutation in a silly little microbe.

1:08:56We just want to personify, see what it is, that personification again as well. And one of the big reasons is that the world is chaotic. We try to bring order to that chaos by personifying it. So many different things that we could do. What should we focus on? Where should I put my time? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Please just tell me if I'm doing it right. And as soon as you can create a narrative, it's no longer random chaos. Oh, there's a story. It's like Harry Potter or it's like succession or it's like pretty little liars. Going back to what we said earlier, now you can never guess their opinions for our high agency people.

1:09:32One 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't, but some 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 team's opinion, what is it? And you just see a crumble. A lot of the mongers raise it up. It's like steam running something. You just completely see a crumble. And a lot of them will go, well, there is no argument for it. And it's that we'll therefore, this is why that's such a, that is the most insane perspective that totally disregards the

1:10:10fundamental 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 2 plus 2 equals 4, you can no longer unsee the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 4 until somebody convinces you of something else Like you don't get to choose to be convinced, right? You just are it just happens now You can refuse to listen to things you can be boneheaded around stuff But once you're convinced that's it. It's game over so understanding That if you were that person you would have that belief as well I don't mean in a we have no free -world 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.

1:10:56I learned this from Gwinder as well. He's coming back on a couple of weeks. Regerian Rathoric. So it's kind of like the... What's the dialogue method that the Greek philosopher came up with? Is it Aristotle or people are going to be screaming into their iPods. Anyway, there's this like the Socratic method. Fuck for that. Regiering rhetorics 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.

1:11:34It's like, you know, the earth being flat like, could you maybe think that it could be due to this? Could it maybe due to that? Could it maybe and you try to guide somebody toward an outcome, reguring rhetoric seems to be less biased. It's got less of an agenda to it. And yeah, I love that as an outcome because you're like, I just want to find out. I just want to know. I want to know what that person believes because if I believed it, I would be convinced too. Yeah, leaning in with curiosity versus like immediate judgment is, sometimes you may change your mind. And I feel you can see that at like a political level or a societal level, but then you zoom in all the way at the micro and you everyone come right to this where go on search facebook .com if you're old enough and Click on your old profile and go back five years and you'll cringe for whatever reason You will you will cringe whether it's the outfit you wore the person you was dating the opinions that you had And if you have if you want cringing then you then you definitely should be because you aren't involved as human being However, you then have to price in back in out five years from now What am I gonna be thinking and that's one of the things if you can start skipping ahead to that question now this is waiting the five years, maybe you actually get to that point in a year or two.

1:12:39The worst thing is, man, when you do this game, which both of us have done lots, right? What in five years time is the wheels on the suitcase of my life that I should be looking at right now, where 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, 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, it's the same pattern, it's the same, Wayskin 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.

1:13:26And yeah, the actual specific mistake may change, but it could even just be the fact that I keep thinking I figured out the answer. So you go, you look back yourself five years I will thank fuck I figured it out now, but you've not priced in the five years from now you're gonna go oh thank fuck I've actually figured it out now, but it's the same thing each time going back to the seco co thing I had this the weirdest one again a lot of alone time can both be great but also very bad I think it's my greatest idea on my worst idea yet I thought about turning into a guided meditation which is meditation you can kind of observe yourself but as Atheas agnostics, people who don't have an immediate religion to fall into, they don't have really any alternative to prayer And I really like the kind of Jeff Bezos, deafbed, minimization framework as well as the kind of Roy It's just a video game and I came up with this thing.

1:14:16I was just sat there with no phone and 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 70 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 took over, if all your pessimism took over, if all your low agency took over, if all your isolating yourself from your friends and and bitching about people, everything that you can think about your worst version of yourself took over, you're in a care home where there's fucking cockroaches on the floor and the nurses never come in to see you.

1:15:08And as you stumble around, you're just repeating all the mistakes that you've made in your head, repeating all them and physically feel that emotion. And then as you're feeling that intensity, you get a knock on the door. You move over with your Zimmer frame and your hips that feel like you've just run a marathon than the day before and standing back as you open the door is the absolute best version of yourself. For whatever reason, he's lean. He's like, he's got none of the injury issues. He's just like RFK. Yeah, he's built RFK and he's prime. He's on all the creativity, right? He looks fantastic and he pulls up an iPad and he plays you all the fucking amazing memories where the best version of you took over and you feel that emotion to such an extreme intensity of that envy that you have for the best version of yourself.

1:15:55And you look over and there's a clock on the wall and there's just five minutes ticking. It's how long you've got left to live and the emotion then intensifies. But before the 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? I'll give you one on your bank account. It was okay, let's do it. Let's do the trade. However, you have to give you one thing today that you're going to show the best version and write that down and and then actually action it. And I started doing that as like fucking hell, almost got like crying in a Starbucks one day.

1:16:25So you put an information hazard warning before posting that online, which I think is probably worthwhile. It's pretty intense thing to do. Are there any realizations, are there any changes that you've made from that that aren't so personal that you can share?

1:16:44Yes, 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 longer period of time, video games that I can set up that compound out as well. So I've kind of changed a lot of the way I think the way I operate the way I work around. Much more long -term isn't it? Much more long -term isn't because that's where all the games are. That's what you said to me last night of, if anybody with a bit of talent, a bit of IQ, you a bit of everything, sticks out something for five years, like you did.

1:17:19Like, playing the video game without the scoreboard going up, but stick it, and then boom, the compounding game happens. Like, what percentage of your audiences come in the last 12 months? Like 90%. More. That's insane, right? It's so hard for people that come from going back to the education system, an education system like that to comprehend how things compound all of a sudden, but when you can zoom out and play those long -term games, they can compound. And the beautiful thing is going back to it is even if your podcast never took off, even if this thing never worked out and it's still me and you Just making another round of this I'm in love It's going to be a lot of spocking back I'm just kidding, you still had fun Which is kind of beautiful, so if you can find a game that you can play forever A, you'll probably end up making a lot of money and then be worse, 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 or linked in our Facebook, you're definitely late.

1:18:13Yeah, that's a confirmation. I try and think quite a lot about future trends. And as a result, you end up going back to what I said, it's VC bets, nine out of 10, I'll be wrong, but one out of 10, I'll be right. And the biggest thing I have is the amount of trends I've 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'll be like, what's that chat, telegram chat, things like that. And you can literally see it slowly go all the way through and then hits peak mainstream when it's on Facebook or when it's on LinkedIn. Dude, I did this the other day.

1:18:44This was from this week's newsletter and I think I told you about this one too. The parental cloud gauge? I don't know this one. Do you know how I know when a news story has reached genuine mainstream significance? It's not when it trends on Twitter or hits daytime news or lands on front pages. It's when my dad messages me on Facebook about it. I see your colleague Mr. Rogan has been in the news again. He also sent me one toward the back end of last year saying that Andrew Tate spelled T -A -I -T. That Andrew Tate's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? And I was like, oh God, Tate, you've really gone full mainstream now.

1:19:21That's a good full of fun. I think as well, one thing I've taken since a book called The Sovereign Individual, which is a fantastic book, predicts a lot of future trends and they have within that, which is this concept that if the Roman Empire fell, which is like 476 AD or whatever, They didn't acknowledge it at the time. It wasn't people going around the Roman Empire's fell. 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.

1:19:53And 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 it'll be 70 to 80 years afterwards historians will declare, oh, it's when X happened that it ended. And that's the reason why you really can't outsource things to the news because if you wait for the news to tell you You'll even 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 lags reality by one to two years. There's a lot of psychological fallout from a rapid -changing status and This kind of relates to the what will you and five years think about you today?

1:20:26What did they wish that you had known? One 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 and 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 working on personal growth. They're trying to become better people every single day, which is beautiful, but it's very unstabilizing. very, very un -stabilizing because within the space what's that?

1:21:02Every seven years, every single cell in your body has changed, right? It's the ship of theseus idea that you can replace each individual plank on this ship, and after long enough, is it the same ship? And there's also a way that girl breakup meme pages have used this to be like, girl, don't worry, after seven years, there won't be a cell in your body left that was around when you were with him. 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 lags reality by one to two years, it's really, really tough.

1:21:35Okay. So who's me? What does it mean to be me? Right? What does it mean to be me? Like who am I? Am I the me that I aspire to be? Am I the me that I am now? Am I the me? Like it's a very, very destabilizing world to be in and I think that trying to future prove 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 the more rules of formal raises that you can just have, the more useful that is. Brian Johnson, the which one? Good point. The I, here's a point.

1:22:15I don't know a single name that has more people in the public eye attached to it than Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson, singer of ACDC. Brian Johnson guy that started to optimize stop me. I forgot about him, didn't you? Brian Johnson, hey guys, Brian here. Brian Johnson, the liver king. Brian Johnson, the longevity expert. In the marketing space, that's what we call an SEO warfare. I wonder about the long -jevig expert where he has the 4pm Brian or 5pm Brian. Yeah, he's fired him. He doesn't know he'll make a decision. But I think the more rules of funds that you can have, it simplifies things. And then I actually think the ultimate hack we've been speaking about a lot while they've been here is who you are around.

1:23:00I don't know if that's the kind of oldest Dale Carnegie trope, but the memetic 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 biases. Don't tell Shane Parish. Cognitive biases. I think you'll agree, which is cognitive biases are pessimistic and low -agency versus you can actually just reframe them. Same way you take the simulation hypotheses and end up the video game hypothesis. You can reframe them up to the optimism high -agency stack and it's cognitive superpowers. So you can just move things like, so Mimesis.

1:23:31Everybody talks about Mimesis often in a negative frame. You just copy your dust -eyes from other people and there's some truth to that and some beauty to that. But also, you can I can actually use that as a point of talk. I mean, maybe a lot of these things have actually been designed, not as cognitive biases, but things that are very... Hyperbolic discounting. Well, you've managed to reverse that. What's the name that you've given to the study by historians' question? Have you named it yet? Oh, what is ignored by... Have you named that? Yeah, so what is ignored by the media that will be studied by historians?

1:24:02And then people point out, well, there was just one example where the media mentioned the whole thing of it is they're like the media historian gap. So what is super prominent? So what is not prominent in the media right now that I think will be humanlessly Portion up by history and there's so many thing when you begin against another question It's another open loop that you leave at the audience and Versus like oh, this is the thing. Here's my I've got a list of ten the headline death gap The headline death gap. So this is a image. Maybe Dean can whack it on the screen of what headlines say Will cause your death or what they focus on versus what will and obviously Terrorism is like off the charts, things like that are off the charts versus heart disease, get almost no mention in the media and it is absolutely humongous.

1:24:45I have this bit that you did with Peter Atia where the mortality gap between smoking and non -smoking. Smoker and non -smoker is 40 % the mortality gap between the bottom 25 % of exercise fitness and the top 2 % is 400%. So here's a question for you, an open loop for you. Where is the great pro -exercise campaigns right now? If it's 10X or however much X the difference, and if we can save that many lives, because I collect the best ads of all time, and there's one in there which is like smoking, and there's actually studying on smoking ads that the US government did, and it's saved millions of lives they expect.

1:25:23So where's the pro -exercise campaigns? They don't exist. They should exist. Based off that, purely off that data alone, they should exist on mass. The interesting, the reason that the question is interesting, and I've called it a max -tale question because Peter Teele's question of what do you believe that most people, is it most people would find a parent and most people would disagree with? It's like yeah, what do you believe that everybody else essentially disagrees with you on it? Right. I feel that in extra, again like everything I'm a fucking budget versioner, much budget version of Teele.

1:25:50Peter Teele, not even as gay. No, no. Who knows the night's showing, right? So on that point, yeah, the media historian gap and then you begin to see it everywhere. It was more like a point of annoyance where I just see these things and go, why is that not getting discussed? And it goes back to opportunity cost as well where what are the things that we aren't Discussing because we're focused on things like that the more important things fast and furious turn 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 We've had that 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 or not, which is also true.

1:26:35Like, you know, John Peterson, 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, right, 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, right? Cultural memes act the same way that genetic genes do, too.

1:27:21But there's something that happens on the opposite side of the fence that it causes the effective cultural memes that stick around are good at triggering a response from the other side. They trigger an antibody response, which further propagates the meme because it lends more credence to it. Now sometimes I suppose the opposing side could keep on battering away to the point where it gets destroyed. I think the word woke and the word politically correct are two good examples of that. That comedians used it to It was so quickly turned from non -ironic to ironic and mocked through satire that no one uses the word woke in a non -ironic way anymore.

1:28:00Everyone 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 that game by pushing more attention toward what they're doing, you do... It's like a hydra, it just chop one of the heads off and it grows too more. If you look at the root structure of the conversation today, if you actually zoom out, it's constant gaps. You've got the media historian gap, you've got the thinking cost gap, the gap between what I should be thinking about versus that.

1:28:39The beautiful things 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? What's the media focusing on? These are 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, that's one of the new data model versus, hey, here's the answer. I would love to create a page of some kind of, I guess it can just happen in the comments, but it would be great for you to put a page out. What isn't neglected by the media, but will be studied by historians.

1:29:13If you crowdsource that. Yeah. 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. There's another one that I have at the minute, which is what problems aren't we solving because capitalism can't solve them. What length? I think we spoke about this one cyberbullying. I think that's a really difficult problem for capitalism to solve. Because the incentives are lying to get people to be online. Yeah, yeah, that's a real difficult one and I think therefore you've got to maybe have some kind of ex -price 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 when marketing is better than the product The the secret or optimism exactly that and I one thing I'd leave for the audience to I'd recommend I always recommend this my friend Julian Shapiro sent me yet, which is this documentary searching for sugar man You've still not seen yet have you that angers me to know no end.

1:30:10Sorry. Watch that tonight So searching for Sugarman, 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 LVS. He sold hundreds of thousands of records, and everyone in South Africa was like, it 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 fucking incredible product people think this idea Oh, you just build it.

1:30:58They will come if you have an incredible product But no, that's did that's the importance sometimes of marketing if you don't actually Market someone who's in talent as him you end up with somebody like Rodriguez where they have the most talent I'll give you one of the most talented artists of his generation who never truly took off. Apart from he had that little winning South Africa, but he never took off elsewhere. Tell me about Kanye West's market research. Oh, it's my favorite one. So this is what I call the Olsen thermometer. So there's this going back to finding niche content on the internet.

1:31:26There's this Diplo animation where Diplo is chatting about. He gets called up to Kat by Kanye to work on it. I'd argue probably one of his best albums, which is Watch the Throw in Him and Jay -Z. and he goes in the studio, he's producing beats, and he looks over, and you're saying, you're your artist friend, that's like, e -sigs everywhere, and there's things on the floor. In Kanye's studio, there's just the Olsen twins, and Diplos out, why are Mary Katen Ashley here? Mary Katen Ashley Olsen. And Kanye says, oh, they're my thermometer for what white girls like music. So I just play tunes and see what they like.

1:31:59And I go, obviously that's the most Kanye thing ever, but it's also genius, which is when you have, have, and 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's the... Ignored by the media, we studied by historians. Yeah, I think that the number of men who reported having zero close friends in 1990 was 3 % in 2020 was 15%. People are starting to talk about it with young girls. There's this recent study that came out, I think it's like 60 % of teenage girls in America say that they have persistent or constant feelings of hopelessness.

1:32:42It's just the most brutal, I would love to see the study and actually break down what's going on. Global millionaire migration, what's that? Yeah, the US went from I think 10 ,000 millionaires, net migration to like 1500, which is like an 85 % drop, really quick. In the UK, it's now a net loss, whereas elsewhere, Australia, the UAE, I think Canada has gone up. So that's definitely thing that just doesn't really get talked about like, why is this happening? Again, another one is Japan's homeless rate. Why does Japan have so few homeless people relative to the rest of the world? They might be lying with their statistics, who knows?

1:33:16But it's so low. It's insanely low. A lot of the reasons that when you actually watch documentaries about it, is these gaming cafes. So that's one question to us. So they live in gaming cafes? Living gaming cafes. So the people who would be homeless, like this kind of like a bed and a chair and they play games, which is obviously a terrible outcome, but is it better than somebody sleeping on the streets? Good question to post. Another one that I think will become bigger with the next election cycle, which 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, every kind of, you have that unbundling, then bundling effect.

1:33:48Everything's just merging on this kind of TikTokization of real shorts, but even Reddit, even Twitter's now going on video. And you're going to see this Spotify. Spotify. Amazon. So all you back in the day you needed to create something for LinkedIn and then something for this and it meant actually going viral Was so much harder whereas now it's actually never been easier to go viral because the same clip Because every platform is bundling together can go on mass viral and I don't think they priced in How quicker people are going to get famous? Yeah, that's looking at content strategy There's certainly different audiences that it resonates with so Just because something that's 916 vertical we put stuff that But reliably does well on Instagram that falls flat on its ass on TikTok.

1:34:31Animation videos reliably do well on Instagram. Can't even get off the ground on YouTube. No one cares. So there is, although the format of the platform may be the same, the physics that drive it are different. But I wouldn't be surprised if over time those begin to merge more and more together. Another thing on this specific topic is I have one point in the essay of Don't Ignore India. I think India is possibly the most fascinating country right now, which particularly is a British and American media doesn't really get focused on that much. So Indians are now the number one population in the world.

1:35:07Over taking China this year or last year, they export more in software engineering than Saudi Arabia does in oil. So there's so much going on there. They're the number one users of every single social media platform. So no one uses a WhatsApp, no one uses a Facebook, no one uses Instagram, no one uses YouTube, which means that if you're going to be creating things online They're going to be there. Like India and also India bear mind obviously previous at the British Empire where India was a colony of Britain Has now flipped 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 gonna go that was a bigger thing.

1:35:41Yeah An interesting insight that I learned from a couple of tech YouTube friends with massive channels When they do expensive like Apple devices, their RPM and their CPM per thousand on add sense on the back end of YouTube is very high. If they do cheap Android devices, turns and turns of Indians watch it and that drives through the floor. And Android's huge there, yeah. Yeah. Also Ali Abdahl talks about Ali's from some subcontinental heritage. and when he does book summaries, his book summaries are often listened to or watched by people from India, but it drives his CPM through the floor. So he's like, he needs to balance revenue with...

1:36:24But again, 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 short people. Yeah, and you know, put a little pin that one and skillless people in the developed world because all the money is going to flow out And you again that will be something that will be spoke about five years from now as all this money flows out to what But I do cause the ascending world and the descending world as a better model versus develops and developing world. A teal to met meritocracy. It's 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 CPM's in India will get higher.

1:37:01Also, it's going to drive populist uprisings more and more. If you, we need stronger borders, okay, please try and police your virtual borders for a workforce. You've got this cohort of 7 million prime working aged 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. 50 % of that time is either on prescription drugs or smoking weed from the 7 million man cohort. 7 million out of 330 million isn't much, but when you look at capable men within that age bracket, it's actually a massive proportion.

1:37:45Huge, 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 what's 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 No, it's a sea, it's a sea for China And yeah, that's true actually, but they're a literally about to overtake the G7 in terms of Economic size. It's like the G7s going down like down relative to global GDP and that's going like that And again, these will be things that they will not talk about in the news that going back to the Roman Empire point earlier.

1:38:26Nobody says Roman Empire is for them. It's the historians that say that. So the historian frame is so much more useful. But again, you can see going back to what I said earlier. There's the way I think it's probably sometimes you end up visualizing with things that you better have 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. Yes, the future you are looking back. Exactly the same. I think my two, certainly at the moment will be that population collapse. Yes, a big one.

1:38:57I brought about that one. That's a huge one. Absolutely massive. I keep hopping on about it. It's an interesting, it's not even necessarily ignored by the media. It's disincentivized to be spoken about by the media because it runs counter to a climate change narrative that this is what we should be focused on. AI risk, I think is still now largely in the public scene as like a, you know, but I can get it to tell me the recipe or I can get it to tell me five interesting stories about Winston Churchill. And yeah, you can, but I mean, if the people that are concerned, if like Elie Zayukowski's right, then there is no, there's going to be no historians in the future to be able to worry about what happened in the past in any case, so it doesn't really matter.

1:39:42It's going to be all paper clips. YouTube is the new TV. Yeah, this is a crazy stat and one of my new favorite things when I see a viral YouTuber, I go in the comment section and the amount of times I'll say, hey, X, I'm a 15 -year -old and I love your business content. It's just flooded and if you actually see, you can find the image I post on Twitter where YouTube now, it's something like 25 % of kids say they spend almost all their time or such a significant proportion of their time on YouTube. And you're seeing this wall that play out to the attention, to an economy where you have centralized major studios, so Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, all these, which is kind of top down.

1:40:24We 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 completely decentralized, and I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube ultimately, I think they'll both win, but I think YouTube will eat more and more of the attention market. I'm pretty sure that the amount of time spent on TikTok, last year versus Netflix. Netflix watch time. Let's see. I did not mean that. Watch time. Insider intelligence predicts that users over the age of 18 will spend an average of 48 minutes per day on TikTok this year compared with 48 .7 minutes for YouTube.

1:41:05Netflix still within the leader at 62 minutes. So it's like 58 minutes a day on TikTok, 48 minutes a day on YouTube, 62 minutes a day on Netflix. That's for people over the age of 18, right? So under the age of 18 is probably going to be pivoted a lot. That's like, that's that's three hours of your day. Here's an interesting one, right? The number of hours that people have in the day hasn't changed, but the number of the amount of time that people spend on online platforms has, that time has to be squeezed from somewhere. You don't just get to create this time from nothing. So when people talk about, you know, what have been the massive changes, why is why the discourse is this way in the mental health and all of the rest of the stuff.

1:41:44Look at it as a hardware problem as opposed to a software problem. Is it the globalist conspiracy? Is it the Eastrigeons in the water and the stuff? It 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 or one hour a day. and now it's including work, it's probably closer to 10. So let's go back to the beginning of the conversation, optimism agency, right? So if you look at when the smartphone first launched, it was Magic Pocket Computer. Wow, how incredible this is that I get this fucking thing that sits in my pocket and I can reach anybody, do anything, I can watch Richard Feynman lectures whenever I want.

1:42:26I can go on Stanford University, I can chat to somebody in India just sat here right now, like that is fucking incredible. 10 years later, brain killing device. What's gone wrong? We've gone all the way from the optimism, high agency, all the way down to pessimism, low agency. And the number one, which I never thought would be my most popular essay in terms of when I meet people that they want to talk about. Going back to the third door, like what is the thing that no one's discussing? Is I call it the smartphone paradox. So right now there's two things people are presented with smartphones. Either one, be a phone addict who's addicted to it 12 hours a day, every single day, refreshing it.

1:43:02And yeah, you get the upsides of constant optionality and things like that, but you're stuck to your phone all day, or you've got the phoneless lullaby who leaves his phone at home, or leaves a phone at home, which is great, but you can't get any Uber anywhere. If you've got an idea, you can't use your notes. If your mum's ill, you don't find out until four weeks later. And so you have the two version means like the phoneless lullaby, 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 wheel suitcase right now?

1:43:32And 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 addicted to, what about this? So on the kale phone, essentially, is all the positive optimistic apps, notes, Google Maps, utilitarian, Uber, audible, Kindle. And it's sometimes so boring. I just can't even be asked checking it. And if anybody wants to get in touch, I've got like a few emergency contacts that have this number. So I still have, if anything kicks off, I've still got that. And then on my cocaine phone, it's wild.

1:44:07TikTok, 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 watch out my cocaine phone to like one or two PM in the afternoon, it completely resets my baseline. So then when I use the cocaine one, I'm bored of it. That is too much, I have to buy an hour, and I want to go back. That single piece alone, I get people writing to me weekly saying this thing's completely changed. I call that the Smartphone paradox and it goes back to, you can go, oh, Apple, when are they going to fix this? It takes off its evil. It's like, oh, you can take it into your own hands and design some wheels.

1:44:45The bottom line is that you need to take control of your own technology. I would go as far as to say that my relationship with technology has probably been the most consistent challenge that I've had to fight with over the last decade. It's something every single year when I look at my annual review that no matter how disciplined that being, I always want to be more disciplined and I always see it as a challenge. I was think, I could have what it should have done better with that. But I'm cocaine -cale and then a third one as well. I've got three. Yeah, cat, cat, me and phone. I've been rolling with that for a long time.

1:45:18And that's been a big, do not have social media on the main phone. It's the most, and the beauty of that is you get the upsides of, you get the upsides of having the phone, all the craziness of social media finding like random stories, what we chatting about earlier, but all the upsides of having peace of mind and being able to detach and mindfulness. I think, all the bull in podcasts. Yeah, podcasts, notes, everything you can think of, being able to get an Uber somewhere, all the basics. And again, society presents these two extreme that you render a spectrum, but there's always a third door that exists.

1:45:48The scale of farmer marketing. Yeah, that's a big one. Again, going back to someone who fucking loves advertising, loves collecting the best adival time, only US and New Zealand are allowed to run farmer -suitical advertising. I can't quote the exact ones, but I think it's MSNBC, two of a big news networks in the US. They're biggest advertisers, farmer -suitical companies. But it goes back to my point earlier, which is, okay, that's true, that's the thing that exists should that exist, that's open for debate, that's an open question. But where are the iconic exercise campaigns? If we know that it can have a fucking 500 % increase taken somebody from the bottom 25 % of exercise to the top 2%, where are those campaigns and why aren't the government investing in them?

1:46:28I put out a thing of if any government wants to reverse DM me and I'll help. Well speaking of the M's, yeah. So speaking about government investment, you've got the great technical act. Yes, so this is one of my favorite ones, which is talk about ignored by the media, studied by historians. The the UK government posted a job role for the head of cybersecurity for the UK government and the proposed salary was £55 ,000, which again for a lot of people there's a lot of money don't get me wrong but for the head of cybersecurity, how is that possible? But when you think about your job is in cybersecurity and the number one Floor that all cyber systems have is the human element every single hacker Fundamentally is a human hacker first not a computer hacker almost to everybody I think it's called soft hacking or something like that where they're trying to look for the human element in If this guy is a girl is getting 57 ,000 pounds per year So, like, how many Bitcoin do you think that a rogue nation has to be able to bribe that person?

1:47:38There's your vector of attack. And two things I've been really focused on the last kind of 20 more, 24 months is traveling and studying different cultures because you ain't got a lot of Japan have so few homeless people or how can you get UK's doing this but meanwhile in Singapore, they pay the average politicians something like $750 ,000 and they have KPIs based off how well the country's performing. So study different cultures, travel a lot, and you begin to see those gaps as well as when you study history. You begin to go, you begin to take a historian's frame to the present moment. How incredible modern aviation is.

1:48:11This is the wildest one. And 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 going to die today. I go, I take what has been taken off, especially because I run about how modern aviation is. I go, it would 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 runs about how amazing aviation is will die on a flight. So here's two stats. I think it's 2021. The number of deaths on an airline in 2021 was around about 120 to 180, depending on the statistics you look at.

1:48:46The number of car deaths was around about 1 .1 million. And think about how much more dangerous an airplane taking off is. And that is completely neglected. I think probably because it's a positive story and we don't want to focus on it, or we just take it for granted, the same way we take the sewage system for granted, the same way we take electricity system for granted, all these great ideas we take for granted, and then we focus on all the nonsense with the opportunity costs that we have is humongous, that we don't think about how wonderful modern aviation is. Well, we have this threat detection system, right?

1:49:20And 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. Then us assume that something is going to go well and that not occur. Like there is a bus bus that shakes over the far side. I can either be scared because it might be aligned and run away and it might be a liner. It might not, but the cost of me running away is relatively low. The cost of me being eaten is very high. So we always have this negativity bias. It's inbuilt into us. It is your job to swim upstream against that. And stats like that, I think, are very, very important to remind you, what's the chance of you dying in the car on route to the airport?

1:49:54That's the most dangerous thing about a flight is the drive to the airport. Well, I remember it's in Matthew Walker's book where he talks about how the number of doctors that have done, I think it's surgeons, the number of doctors are surgeons that have worked 12 hour shifts in a hospital that upon their drive home crash and then get taken back to their own hospital to be worked on because of how sleep deprived they are. Wow, I think there's a book called Black Box Thinking which I recommend which studies the aviation industry where they compare well why airline deaths going down so much, meanwhile debt hospital deaths are going up so much and he has a few interesting hypotheses about cultural things and with a black box they literally observe.

1:50:40Once a plane crash is what happens, it records it. And because often the people are dead, there's no ego involved so they can object to the assess it. But the lessons from the aviation industry should be applied everywhere. And this ties into the next point which is what happened to ticker tape parades. At ticker tape parades, Peter Till has this great point where there used to be huge. People would go out in the street and applaud JFK, applaud these great individuals. And they, which 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 Nelson Mandela in 1990 in New York.

1:51:15After that is a few sports teams, not individuals, collectives, a few nurses and a few things like that. But what happened to that? My thesis is he's like, where's the ticker -take parade for the right brothers or where's the day off for the right brothers because he's talking how you think about how talk about high -agency individuals. Well, no one can agree on any cultural heroes anymore. There is nobody. They're from the right brothers aren't for debate. But new ones. Like, you're not going to throw a take a tape parade for the right brothers now. I, you know, trying to think of who do you think is the most unobjectionable person?

1:51:51Maybe the rock? He probably doesn't do badly. And he, even then, he probably scores like 51 to 49 in the polls. You know what I mean? He did put his foot in it to do with, I think, maybe it was a race thing, maybe it was a trans thing a few years ago. So, yeah, when the Overton window has become so highly constrained and when concept creep has 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... Question I have for you that I was thinking about on the way down. We're talking about history a lot here.

1:52:32And studying history has given me such a fantastic frame about these things. Why is it? So music is a specific thing where people consume a lot of music from the past, even to this day. Like on the way down, I love Christopher Cross, right? Like the win on my favorite songs from multiple decades ago. You think of AC DC, Michael Jackson, all these amazing artists that still relevant today. And people still consume the music today, versus with social media, people, David Proler has that concept of the never ending now, people only consume content in the last 24 hours. When you, probably most people listening to this, still apply this.

1:53:07But imagine if you applied that to music where all you could listen to was the island boys. Like the music that's been made to the literature today, it'd be terrible. But why do we do that for information consumption? I've not quite figured that out yet. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think what we go to for music and what we go to for the other types of content that we consume are very different things. We go to music for a vibe to put ourselves into a particular kind of emotional state a lot of the time. Music seems to be a lot more Lindy because there are universal laws. No one's going about, I always say this about Shapiro's channel.

1:53:45You know, Ben's got this rapidly growing channel and he's been very, very successful on YouTube and in podcasting and all the rest of it. No one's going back and listening to Ben Shapiro's mid -2020 podcast episodes because they're inherently about relevant. Yes, they're about the last 24 hours. But there's so much in history that is relevant or so much amazing content out there that is relevant. So on the prayer, he has this other concept of the paradox of abundance where right now you've never seen more people in the obesity levels are off the charts. Another thing are probably ignored by the media is to be by historians off the charts, but also the number of Greek people that like Greek gods is also off the charts.

1:54:24You have this weird barbell, like, evere 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 smartphone paradox as well. You can use YouTube to search Richard Feynman lecture, Charlie Munger, the history of World War II, how did Winston Churchill prepare his speeches, or you can search, words to hip -hop fights, or the island boys. And that paradox of abundance exists. There's this really cool quote, another goenda 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.

1:55:04In a world pricling with provocations, we cannot let our sensitivities room free. If we allow ourselves to be goaded by every invisible and visible indignation, we will endlessly be distracted from our goals and easily controlled by emotional manipulators like trolls, disinformation agents and demagogues. I block the easily outraged because they're the foot soldiers of the mob who in the old days would have lynched people over neighborhood rumours. Those without self control are seen controlled by others. Those without self control as soon controlled by others, they're the useful idiots of ideologues, the tools of tyranny.

1:55:38So 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 looking at has done, which is why the ticker tape parade thing has stopped. Who can everybody agree on as being a hero? And if you don't have any cultural icons that you can hold up, it's very difficult to rally around. like if you tried to hold a ticketate parade for pretty much anybody, there would be an equally sized anti -parade for the same thing, which is fucking insane. And also I guess goes back to the pessimism bias. Most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75.

1:56:16Why? This references what we were talking about earlier where at 25, zero to 25 before that is a beautiful design video game. It's like grade one, grade two, grade three, grade four, grade five, or year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, year five, year five, year five. If you're English, and you kind of progress up like a beautiful milestone every single year through high school, through college, and you, all of a sudden at 25, those milestones just become marriage, which is obviously might be on the decline, mortgage, funerals of loved ones, kids, kids and then your own funeral.

1:56:54So like the amount of mile you go from like a milestone so regularly to almost nonexistent 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 sat there all day, 18, 18 years, asking to go to the toilet and then they just go and fuck them 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, I think it's quite sad. I think support groups. They haven't got any support groups, so the time spent with family, time spent with friends, even co -workers ultimately goes down towards the end.

1:57:34So you factor in all those things? Plus that parenting switch thing. Yes, so there's the parenting switch as well, which is you go from having your caregivers there, your entire life support and you support and you support and you, and again, going back to milestones, and all of a sudden, then one day you get a phone call and you're there, caregiver, or they're not even here. So it just immediately switches on you and all those things begin to stack up, which is super depressing, super pessimistic, which maybe we end on that note, like super nihilistic and but no actually the optimistic answer I wrote about, which is a few solutions for that, which is one great regular milestone.

1:58:08So I'll try and split the year into quarters now, which is enough time to sprint at things, but also then have a week off completely reflect and then rebuild the plan. So then you have like four milestones per year to try and schedule things in with friends regularly Family regularly whole like you can use you use your Google calendar for like weekly meetings with people at work You can use it for friends. You can use it for family as well Three I think we also have a lack of religion in current society and we've kind of thrown the baby out with a baffle or a lot of atheists Look down on it, but those regular rituals I think bigger than you that you're working on so important to have so try and take sabbuffs fasting, things like that.

1:58:47You can take quite a lot from religion. And 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, dudes, I love you. I'm really, really glad that you came to see me in Austin. What should people do if they want to check out more of your writing? You're one of the quickest growing guys on Twitter at the moment. Where should they go? Yeah, a few things. So I put together all the best ideas and resources I found at George www .dashmac .com. So you can just get that there completely for free and I kind of update you with time and then I'll send a week news that are related to that.

1:59:21You can also just literally go to George Dash Dash Mac 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 hear this. Before we go though, one thing I'd like to say, just to break the fourth wall for the audience, me and you were sat on a beach a few years ago now. And you remember what you said to me, you said, if I can get to 100 ,000 subscribers, 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.

1:59:55They are super complimentary to their friends, which we are often quite like mocking of each other, quite insulted to each other, but probably a man you've absolutely smashed it. And I think for a lot of listeners out there, you set an example of an infinite game that you keep that you keep sticking out and boom, X percent of the audience has come the last 12 months, what a compounding game, and thank you for having me. My pleasure, man, we're going to keep on doing it together.