#721 - George Mack - Why Can No One Think Rationally Anymore?

25:58And then when you view it like that, the whole leverage complexity, the reason why leverage is a bad meme is because you need other topics and other realizations from engineering to to understand it, which prevents it from spreading. But when you go, oh, Hong Go for Jeff Bezos on his yacht versus hardest working man in the world, you realize that in the 21st century, despite probably the PTSD from the education system, leverage is more important, but it's a shit meme. Sean Puri has this idea about what you work on is way more important than how hard you work. And he says, hard work is very overrated.

26:35And he's, I think he refers to himself, actively refers to himself as a successful lazy man. And he optimizes for laziness and frictionlessness. And yeah, it's the same, you know, the janitor or some guy that's working double or triple shifts. That amount of effort doesn't have an in -kind return to them, compared with somebody who is able to leverage code, or media, or labor, or capital, or even just picking the same amount of input that they've got with very limited leverage, but on a better task, a task that has more potential upside long -term. The key thing is to remove the conversation around hours' work that we had from school and just be inputs, outputs.

27:17So I have this number of inputs, what number of outputs am I getting, and remove the concept of hours' work to remove everything else on all of a sudden. that meme is a little bit stickier. Whether that's gonna be a kid's story or not, probably not, and it's without the title a bit, but I think to view leverage through that makes it an easier idea for people to understand. But the reason why leverage is a bad meme is because people don't have the engineering knowledge. It doesn't spread, which is why it's such a Silicon Valley concept. And I think this idea still hasn't fully rippled through society.

27:48Don't forget as well that exponentials and squares aren't something that the human brain is built to work out. It's like that. I want one piece of rice on the first square of the chess board and two pieces of rice on the second square of the chess board all the way up. By the time you get to the final square on the chess board, you've got more pieces of rice than there are fucking particles in the universe or something. We just don't deal well with exponentials, which means that leverage inherently, given that it's dealing with unfair multiplicatives, it's a multiplicative system rather than an additive system for the most part, it's this times this, not this plus this.

28:24It's just going to be tough to understand. You've got an idea, the best memes compress mass emotion into a simple, contagious concept like, okay, boomer or Karen, so I mean, well, first off look at okay, boomer. Who doesn't understand that? Two words, Karen, who doesn't understand that? Make America great again. who doesn't understand that. You can hate those memes, but it's compressed so much emotion. So let's say the okay Boomer one, it's compressed so much emotion of the millennial and Gen Z being spoken down to by the Boomer generation who have messed up a lot and it's completely compressed all that down and boom that spreads.

29:07Same with Karen, same with even the word make America great again. Like there's so much emotion. way more than it's forwards. Yes. It's way more than the constituent parts. Yes, yes, yes. And with memes, it's all, I forgot who said it. It's the idea of, I'm sorry I didn't write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time. Yes, yes, yes. The people look at it and go, oh, that's so unfair, I wrote this 10 ,000 word, I say that nobody ever read, but it versus this meme has spread. But you need to be able to optimize for that K factor, but you need to be able to compress as much emotion into that word for it to spread.

29:47Did the meme in just real complex used to be the purview of mainstream media were they ever creating memes effectively or is this a internet thing? Again, it's a little bit reflexive in the sense that they both interact right. So what RuPot Murdoch would put on the news would be because he kind of knew what people would like and then what people liked was kind of because what they saw on the news and there's this constant thing here. So Rupert Murdoch, or that generation of the meme industrial complex, their own everything, and could control the narrative. And I actually think it's ironic that they've made succession now, because they wouldn't have been able to make it 10 years ago, because he had so much power, right?

30:20First, it's now, it's like, we can do what we want. It would have seemed more like a documentary than a drama. And you can see why the mainstream media, dislike social media so much, because the mainstream media had the meme industrial complex, in that they could put ideas out there and control the narrative. Whereas now the meme industrial complex is essentially this bottom down approach of completely decentralized meritocracy to some extent. It's all the users rather than the gatekeepers that are creating it. And a few algorithm developers who know that these faceless, algorithm developers can meme architecture a little bit there and go, you know what, on YouTube now we actually prefer long form podcasts in the algorithm.

31:01Boom. And that just completely shifts things. So it's weird how you've got these kind of faceless algorithm creators now and these face creators The own the meme industrial complex the last memes or most of the memes that you see that come out of mainstream media Accidental memes so it's a guy trying to propose to his wife a baseball game or something that gets wiped out by a security guard or something. It's not it's never Something that is designed to be funny it's always the byproduct of something that was supposed to be something else, which has come through in that way. I've also got this idea about how, if you want to be able to predict the future, look at a current cultural movement or mean that hasn't had the inverse already made.

31:43So, 2020 COVID gets released. That summer, everyone has to stay in the house. 2021, Megan, the stallion, starts talking about Hot Girl Summer. Last year, you weren't able to be free and liberated. therefore this year you can be your best self, you can glam up, go out with the girls, sleep with the guy, et cetera. 2022 is Ferrell Girl Summer, which is treat yourself like an animal, don't wash, don't shave, just put baggy clothes on and don't take any care of yourself. Another version, pick a partistry comes out sort of late 20s, early 2010s, then you get that sanitized by me too, which is a counterculture movement in some regards, not just to that, but to other stuff, then you have red pill, then very quickly you have migtow and black pill that comes out of it.

32:32So if you want to predict the future of memes, look at a meme that's been created that hasn't had its inverse come out too, because every movement needs its counter movement in order to be able to balance it, because there is a market, there is a meme market for anything, which is not the thing which is currently popular. For every movement, there will always be. It's like the equal and opposite force thing. For every meme, there is an an opposite meme that comes out. Well, question for you is, what do you think is, you know, we had the chat last time of what is ignored by the media, but we'll be studied by historians.

33:04And what we're kind of saying there is what's a really important topic that hasn't had its full meme moment yet. Right, yeah. And what do you think of? What do you think of super important topics that just haven't like, haven't been meme - Correctly. That's a really really cool. What haven't caught on yet, a will catch on. What ideas sound crazy today? But five, 10 years from now, I'll be like, oh yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, I think a lot of individual personalities. So this seems to be a very effective way to get memes to move. You know, like the meme of the Sigma male, which is kind of the guy who steps outside of the hierarchy.

33:43I don't think that there's very many good memes for women. I don't think that there's been many archetypes. Most of them are like derogatory in a lot of ways. So like, you know, like the Karen, the party girl, the like Dubai yacht chick There's not many there that I think are like almost aspirational in a way and maybe this speaks to female personality and disposition that they don't You know, I don't know about girls, but Guys would happily have like he man or the rock or whatever on a bedroom post wall But girls would also a lot of the time have guys like some hot But singer, I don't know whether girls use role models and aspirational, admirable figures.

34:25If you went into a teenage girls bedroom and had a post from Jordan Peterson quotes on the wall, you'd think, let's take you off to psychotherapy. So yeah, certainly individuals in some ways, like memes for aspirational memes for girls. I think that there's a massive market for them. What about you? you. This is, I think, one of the most important topics, but it's so ugly and boring. And I even work with, like, I'm fearsome of saying this because I can just feel people like skipping to the next YouTube chapter as soon as I say this, but give me like a minute to just say it. And it's even the word now, right?

35:01You're going to go, right? Cyber crime, right? It's just like nobody takes it seriously, but it's so fucking important. And just to maybe give a bit of a story that's going to help with this. Have you heard of the Bangladeshi bank heist? No. Now we're talking, right? This is going to blow your mind. And again, it doesn't sound good right now, but it's going to be good. So the biggest bank robbery in history was, I think it's about $60 million in Brazil in about 2015, 2016. We've cybercrime recently. They almost hacked $1 billion from the Bangladeshi bank using the Swift system, right? the context that year, the Bangladesh GDP was like 230 billion.

35:47So think with GDP as well, it's movement of money. It's not total money. If Chris sends George 10 and I send it back, booboo booboo, that acts towards the GDP, but it's just us exchanging money. So imagine taking one billion dollars like that from a developing country immediately. And the only reason that fate, the only reason this isn't, there will be, I think, within five to 10 years, there will be a Covid -like moment. Do you remember pandemics before Covid? It was like bird flu, swine flu. You just be like, oh, the sun's just trying to get clicks and things like that. I remember I used to tell people about Covid in January, February.

36:20I won't say who, but they used to call me conspiracy George for bringing up Covid. And now obviously pandemics are taken very seriously, but there will be a 9 -11 or a Covid -like moment for cyber where things get very, very dark, very fast. I think the Bangladesh, you bank heist is only a tiny example of that where you go from $60 million robbery in person to $1 billion overnight. And the only reason why it failed is because the hackers that were working on this system, so they emailed, they sent an email with a CV application. The person at the bank clicks on the CV, infects everything. They're working on it for a year.

36:54They time it perfectly during the New Year's holidays. Everything about this height has gone perfect. Bear in mind this bank would only move about 300 K -round. The Swift system, so it goes to the Federal Reserve in America, because they seized one billion and they're like, yeah, sure. So it's like the security systems weren't in place at the only reason it failed is because two things. One, they had a typo for the addresses. So literally, it didn't fail because of the amount, it failed because of human error. Human error, and it was a really basic English spelling that they made a mistake. And then two, the bank in the Philippines, they were sending it to, was called Jupiter Street, and Jupiter was a company associated with Iranian money laundering.

37:31So it just happened to flag in the system. Otherwise, it would have gone through. Both of which were human beings. A billion would have been taken from Bangladesh, like one of the poorest countries in the world, like that. And the impact that has, and you then begin to realize, what happens at one point when certain airlines get attacked, certain banking systems get attacked, and we're so relaxed, but because I say the word cyber security, and only 3 % of the audience have carried on right now, but it's so boring. But we need stronger memes around it, because it's such an important topic. Yeah.

37:59Yeah, wasn't it? You told me some story about the salary that was offered for the British head of cybersecurity. So the head of cybersecurity in the UK, we spoke about this last time, got offered a salary or like on LinkedIn jobs. It was 55 to 65 K pounds for the UK. $30 ,000, $80 ,000. Yeah, which, listen, it's obviously a great income for most of the world, but for the head of cybersecurity. When you're dealing with hackers that are trying to steal $1 billion. Yeah. Yeah. It's just evidently something that's... That's specifically, I'm going to guess, a governmental problem because I'm going to presume the head of cybersecurity at Facebook is paid an ungodly amount of money because they are already red -pilled on just how big of a deal this is.

38:53But if Facebook goes down, it's obviously a big issue, but if government systems go down, a lot worse. If the emotion caused by the meme is greater than the friction of spreading it, you've cracked the meme algorithm. It's exactly that. That is an example of a simple but not easy truth. That is all memes. Does the emotion outweigh the friction of spreading it? If so, you've created that positive one number that it begins to spread, spread, spread, spread, spread. It's so simple. You've got one in here that's the same as mine. The easiest way to predict the next meme is to look at the current memes and bet on countermeams appearing.

39:33You take that from me. You better have done. Potentially. That was my idea. The fastest growing companies in the next ten years will have a chief meme office are working for them directly or indirectly. If you look at all these fast growing consumer businesses, they either have a chief meme officer in house. So you can think of these influencers celebrities that are creating a McGregor with proper 12, the McGregor meme and all the kind of sub memes that he creates around him, food or fuck is that guy, etc., etc. Then product there, all they'll have memes working through them indirectly that they'll So like we was chatting about Maric Health.

40:11This isn't a plug, but you obviously, your testosterone numbers go in through the roof and the human mean people chatting about optimization and I guess they do have Derek running it, but still riding that mean movement. If they were to do it five to 10 years, from 10 years ago, it probably wouldn't have the impact that it's happening, but now chief meme officer indirectly or directly, boom. Yeah, it's, I think, I learned about this word, But you're glowing. You taught me about that a while ago, Zach taught me about it and then Mark won't shut up about it as well. You know what that is? Like when someone looks like a federal plant and they're putting across information that is to persuade the populace, but people can see through the fact that they're actually doing it on behalf of the CIA.

40:56X CIA agent says that CIA isn't actually listening to your phone calls. Make you're glowing. Right? That's the sort of shit that they'll say. But I think people are skeptical now even of memes. Perfect, perfect, perfect example. Did you see what Jim Shark did with Francis and Garnou where we broke that door? Switch it out, get the orange boy in there. Oh, here we go. You see where Francis and Garnou broke a door? No, right. So Jim Shark, like Fed a video onto Reddit, it that they created of CCTV, a person that was supposed to be Francis and Garno, didn't turn out to be him. Breaking the door of a corner shop, the glass door that was closed.

41:46Yes, yes, right. And they staged it, created it, used a stunt double instead of Francis for the bit where the glass breaks put Francis back in, had him get shouted at by this fake shopkeeper in In a fake shop front, Fed it using a burner account onto Reddit, and then Reddit got picked up by Twitter, and then from Twitter it got picked up and signal boosted. And some people saw through it like this looks like it because he's wearing Gymshark. This looks like a plant from Gymshark or whatever, but for the most part, made headlines, papers picked up on it, all the rest of it. So yeah, the, how do you say, the like contrived mean complex or the manipulated mean complex, like the MMC is something that everyone's skeptical about.

42:31I look at each platform now like a meme information highway, and each one produces different memes just due to the constraints of it. So the memes that get produced from TikTok are quite unique and correct. Yeah, they don't export particularly well. Yeah, whereas people that come out of YouTube, like yourself, slightly different. What's interesting though is most memes that get created, you go back and it's reddit, it's full -chan, maybe bits of Twitter. And it goes down the meme information highways and then ends up at LinkedIn. I wonder. All roads lead to boomer face. Yeah, yeah, what's that message from parents?

43:06I wonder whether one of the reasons that fortune and Reddit work particularly well is our written memes the most robust of all. Because you can turn something that works on written into video, into spoken, but the reverse isn't necessarily true. Like, there was that one of the dude drinking, was he drinking like ocean fresh cranberry juice whilst skateboarding down the street listening to Led Zeppelin or something? It's like some song from some band. And then this song's now number one across the world because there's one dude skateboarding whilst drinking cranberry juice or something. Fucking, sales of cranberry juice went through the roof and he's now the ambassador for fucking ocean fresh or something.

43:47That doesn't necessarily translate across onto written word, but most written word memes can be translated across and do get used. Potentially, but I think another factor to, so you know, have you heard the law of polluza effect? It's where you stack multiple biases. When you have multiple biases. So on that specific point, I think you've got that, but it's not just that, it's also the fact that most people on there are pseononymous and anonymous, which means they can just see the overton window here and go, I'm gonna go through it. I'm gonna go through here. And then ultimately, it's the memes that shift the overton window with time.

44:19But the ability for them to be pseudonomous and anonymous and then create something that they can they can go into territories that right now The the meme industrial complex won't touch and then they push it through I had this idea about how There is a lot of derogation of mainstream media at the moment, you know like mainstream media is dying and No one really cares about it anymore and it's all about independent media and so all about YouTube and podcasts and stuff like that But what you do forget is that there is still quite a lot of status associated with going on mainstream media because it's a scarce resource.

44:54Right? There is an unlimited number of YouTube videos that everybody can upload. There's no status or prestige associated with uploading a YouTube video, getting lots of subscribers or getting lots of plays or having lots of followers on TikTok or whatever. But anyone that's got an iPhone can work Twitter or work TikTok or work YouTube, but there's only 200 Dr. Phil guests per year, right? So because it's inherently a scarce resource, there is still value and prestige associated with it because of the selection effect. Oh, you've had to be pre -selected. It's like the fucking Hunger Games, right?

45:29So I think that But something that's probably not been priced in is first, that general scarce resource prestige associated with, still associated with mainstream media because it's a limited resource. And secondly, at the huge swath of boomer parents and people who aren't chronically online, who see Dr. Phil, you know, all of middle America, you know, that whole daytime TV thing, the loose women thing, like they still move culture. They just don't move culture in a way that we care about at the moment. There's this really interesting, just a side point, it's really interesting. Is it Liberty Mutual or someone that's this bank in America and they're playing it really well?

46:16It's like, we can't stop you from becoming your parents, but we might be able to help you invest and save. And all of the adverts are about like younger people than should be complaining about these particular problems, complaining about problems that are beyond their age, like someone who's parking over two parking spaces, and they're shaking their fists, kind of like their parents would do, or someone that's cutting the hedge too early in the morning or something, complaining about things their parents might have once complained about, but they're too young for it, and the point is, you're going to grow into complaining about the complaints that your parents have got, So let's say it's the Liberty Mutual or something.

46:52They're using the meme of OK Boomer as almost self -deprecating for us all to future project ourselves out into that. But yeah, mainstream media, scarce resource, what do you think?

47:06I can't think there's a little bit of a lot of polluter that exists as well. In the sense, yeah, it's a scarce resource. It still has a shadow of its former self. Like, even if I see a seven -year -old boxer, I know who that guy used to be and he could still, even if he's like, I could beat him up now, he still has that shadow of his former self. So I think it's that. It's interesting when I did the Fox News thing for the Kaelin cocaine phone, which followed like the most serious news stories that it was me in Amsterdam with sliders on my feet and like a blazer here chatting about that. Yeah, and that even though it probably got way less views than this or anything else that I've done was treated so differently because of the fact it was mainstream media.

47:48Yeah, there's this an idea called conceptual inertia, which is that it takes a long time for ideas to change even if the science does. I spoke to this, he's like a science historian, and he was talking about the development of science and then belief over time. So for instance, when you get the, like the geocentric, as opposed to the heliocentric view of the solar system, that it's not the earth that's at the center, it's the sun that's at the center. And when that happened, even though it was after a while, first off it was heretical, then it was exploratory, then it was proven, but tons and tons of the populace just hadn't come along for the ride.

48:32Ideas die one generation at a time, and it takes a good chunk of time for people to catch up and it's kind of the same with mainstream media, right? Not only are there still people around that hold mainstream media, like even I do to some degree, You see some person on fucking dancing with the stars and you're like, oh, well done for that person, even if I wouldn't want to do it. So not only is there still people around that are living that, but also even once they're gone, the echo of what they valued is still valued and it takes a little bit of time for this stuff to go away. On that point though, of ideas die one generation at a time.

49:06How do you, is there any way to speed that up? as we're, because technology is changing so much faster and faster now. You want an idea as Holocaust. But how do you deal with like GPT -3, GPT -4, and people being able to catch up with... I don't think there's a solution for it, mate. I think that humans run at the speed that they run at. I think you can overclock humans in the same way that you can overclock technology. You're just playing this game and we're going to move along. and what you end up with if you try and do it too quickly is you end up with firehousing, which is the problem of overloading people with information isn't that they start to believe one narrative increasingly more frequently.

49:49They begin to distrust all narratives overall because they just can't get the first it was this thing and then it's this thing. COVID, everybody during almost everybody during COVID, almost everybody during the last election, almost everybody during the fucking Israel Hamas war, which we're not talking about. Like, that is, it's this thing, and no, it's not. It's actually this thing. It wasn't them that did it, and then actually, yeah, it is those, and no, it's not your tactic where your story was wrong. And what people end up doing is just saying, all right, I check out. So the answer I've had for this is, if you look at something like, David Deutsch is beginning of infinity, which I think's an amazing idea, but the meme is tough.

50:26The problem that exists is, and we spoke about this before where five years ago, you cringet your former self, but what would have probably have sped that up? Maybe doing five months rather than five years to realize those mistakes was thinking five years from now I'm going to cringet form a me. What are those things? Yes. So there's almost this simple expression I developed, which is like everything is wrong. It's the first bit of her. And you just assume every belief that I hold is wrong. Everything George and Chris has said to some extent is wrong. Anything that defies the laws of physics is wrong and will be, we will look back at it five to ten years.

51:02Do some opinions loosely held? Yeah, but the problem with that is it just opens up this vortex of like, where do I, like the, what do I do? Yeah, there's flaws gone, like you're just in this spinning, infinite, rick and more elope and you don't, you don't know what is what and people would prefer to have strong beliefs, then just complete nihilism and complete everything's wrong. So the conclusion I have with that is like everything's wrong, but they're a better or worse ideas. So constantly looking at other case, I've got this new idea in my head, it can have a placeholder there. And I like it.

51:32And it was better than the previous idea that I had. And then you're constantly playing this infinite game of stacking up knowledge and stacking up knowledge, but always realizing, because what will happen is you'll get the new idea. And then you think that ideas, right? How many times have me and you developed some new morning routine, become completely addicted to it and been like, this is it. This is the answer. I found the answer. And then a couple of months later, we go, it wasn't the answer. The Linde effect works so far well with that. If a person sends you about this new app, new meditation habit, new XYZ, more than you've been doing it.

52:00How long have you been doing it? Once you've been doing it for six months, let's check in. Because then it's serious. Tiago Forte, the reason that he doesn't use anything other than Evernote is he refuses to use software that's not 10 years older or older older. It has to have been around for 10 years. It's basically the exact same as what you're talking about there. Louise Perry taught me yesterday this great quote, tradition are the experiments that worked. Hmm. Yeah, that's the thing that, yeah, the thing that people are often defending was once the replacing thing. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Because unless it's been around for fucking forever, like, and how many things are axiomatically just, like, unmovable or unmoving from when it first ever happened, what's this Trojan horses to avoid thing?

52:46So it's having a phone call with a good friend of mine and his business, he's doing very, very well. And he says to me, he goes, I've stopped listening to all business podcasts. I was like, hold on. I was like, your business is doing really, really well. And you've also stopped consuming new information about business. He goes, yeah, I just watched NFL stuff. I'm like, huh, I'm getting mid -witted meme, right? Yeah. And I was like, why is that? He goes, well, the problem was, particularly like the stuff that isn't just like Lindy business content, like new ideas, this industry is popping off, he would just get shiny object syndrome.

53:18And the critique of that self -improvement space of, how can you watch football or how can you do that? Is the problem with him, with the business podcast, is that it was like Trojan content or Piric porn, like a Piric victory. It was Trojan content in the sense that he felt it was good for him, but it was actually harming him. And I'd say that is often a lot worse than the things that you know are going to harm you. So, if you eat a takeaway and you know it's bad for you, I think that's not for the next day. Yeah, that's not as bad as thinking something's healthy, a Trojan horse getting in, and it's actually really bad for you.

53:55How was the business podcast just dig into how they were Trojan horses a bit more? Well, in the sense that he has a business that's working really well, and he just has to exploit and focus and work hard, whereas when they're then going, oh, does this new AI thing that's popping off? and people are getting funding here, or this guy's exited his business for ABC, and he's to be in it half the time, so he'd just get envious, he'd get shiny objects in Rome, versus just putting on the football. He's like, switch to brain off, know what I need to do, and you can see these Trojan horses that exist everywhere.

54:27So like, you could have, I call it like a Trojan pay rise, where you kind of get this incredible job, not an incredible job, or a job, I had this happen to me, where a job comes along and offers you double the salary, but you stop learning as a result. And on the one hand, yeah, you've got this thing that feels like you've made progress, but actually on a long enough time horizon, it's going to massively reduce your potential because you're no longer learning. So looking at these Trojan horses everywhere. A long commute would probably be one of those. We've been talking a lot about hidden observable metrics, and a really great observable metric is salary, and a really great hidden one is commute length.

55:05You know, the derogation of your energy to do things when you get home, the quality of your relationships and your friendships, the amount of time that you have to be able to learn new things. And yeah, you can trade in your ability to upgrade yourself for a better salary, but you're right over a long enough time horizon. What was it that was going to give you more happiness or satisfaction, or even salary in the end? It was presumably going to be your skills and the rapidity of you to be able to upgrade them. So yeah, that's very interesting. Have you noticed in your life any Trojan horses that you've let sneak in?

55:45I'd say certain bits of content I find I'm a lot more specific with my information diet now. So even stuff of I used to try and keep on top of the world's cutting events. And then I'm, because I felt like I needed to be a responsible citizen and I needed to be on top of things. And I realized that a, the current thing would just disappear. Then there's this constant new current thing that would then disappear to your mom's account. Perl calls it the, was it the perpetual now? Yeah. By the time it's on Twitter, it's like the peak stock price. It's, you know what I mean? By the time it's, every big is it's going to get.

56:20It's as big as it's going to get. So avoiding constantly keeping on top of all the world's cutting content of edge, which I used to think like I was being an informed citizen. Because people would use the term, I wrote about this, people would use the term, Ignorance's Bliss. And I go, you know you're in this like Nietzsche and upside down society where people are using Bliss as a shaming mechanism. Because I think, I realize this where it's something like, I think there's like 500 million tweets uploaded per day. There's 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube per minute. And I think something like 67 million people die per year.

56:56right? So we're all in the ignorance gutter. But it's like some of us will be looking at the stars and I think you have to be so specific with that information diet because by definite you cannot consume all the world's information. It's why I used to have my you know this, I used to have my Twitter trending topics to Angola. So I just keep up today with like the Ang... So basically it's on Twitter you'd have the trending topics in your region and it was be like I'd get distracted by all these complex issues and I just feel like shit after it is like Trojan content. So I just updated it to Angola and you'll elaborate it.

57:28Unfortunately for me, because it's done it the way that, as you realize, you can't hack it with Angola, I'm still in the UK based on Twitter, which means that at least twice a week at the moment, Chris Williams and Trends, Chris Williams and MP, of course, the unfortunately named Labour. I think it's Darby's show that he's a part of very anti -Semitic, which means given the current geopolitical climate, it's a bad time to be a Chris Williamson at the moment. I always used to think whether or not he would look and see his name trending, but it not be him and think like what's my love Island alter ego done this time.

58:09Fucking Ellie's gone on another reality TV show. I've got, I'm doing this live show with James Smith in Dubai in a couple of months time. The next one actually. And I wondered given and what Chris Williamson has been talking about is very, you know, like pro Middle Eastern talking points, whether there's going to be a huge welcome party for me as I step off the plane at DXB Airport and how disappointed they will be when this Chris Williamson strides off the plane. Yeah, reality so far has just been at SEO warfare between you two and Chris Williamson. Everybody else watching this is just NPCs in the simulation that is that.

58:45Do you ever watch The One with Jet Li? That film. No. It's like he, in this other universe, he's able to move between like 350 universes or whatever, and there's a version of you in each of them. And if you kill yourself, the power of all of you gets shared between you. So this guy tries to become The One. This evil jet Li goes around killing all of the other jet Li's and all of the other different universes. And And that's kind of the SEO battle between me and Chris Williamson, Darbyshire M .P. at the moment. Oh, good. Oh, good. Oh, good. On the loopy butt row because I was an infinite vortex there.

59:21With the information diet, hack I recommend. People think this takes way longer than it is, but I do warn people that you will stare deeply into the abyss and the abyss. There's an information hazard. Deeply back into you. YouTube. They should remove this. YouTube has this button where you can see your history. And I went through it. I clicked on it. And I was like, I just go through the last 100 videos that I've watched. It takes about five minutes to do. And I just rank them in terms of regret, neutral, and like, glad I watch that. And 72 % of the content I watched, I book it under regret. So that's an example of Trojan content.

59:55Well, the post content clarity thing was an idea that I came up with to try and help me. It's exactly that, just like less statistical. while you're watching something, it's almost always compelling, even if it's bullshit for you and making you feel worse, because if it wasn't compelling, you would be watching something that was. It's like the meme evolution of the Mr. Beast countdown to the $1 billion yacht that he's going to spend time on or whatever, right? Like that's the most compelling piece of content. So even stuff that you don't like is compelling in the moment or else you would have switched and watched something more compelling, but it's only after the, it's like a post -coital pillow talk with yourself, after you've done a session on YouTube where you get to say, okay, and how did that stuff make me feel?

1:00:41Like, do I want to ring my friends? Do I want to go outside? Do I feel like the world is against me or for me? Do I feel like I can go and achieve things? Do I feel more educated, more wise, more in tune with myself? Or do I feel the opposite? And a lot of the time, I think the things that you watch are limitically hijacking and compelling, but the after effect, like the come down, the content come down, is so strong that if you were able to future project yourself forward and realize what's the hangover that I'm going to get, the content come down, I'm going to get from this, the post -content clarity.

1:01:15Yeah, the pillow talk that you have with yourself actually would remind you that it's not worth it. And YouTube actually is a platform for this is kind of useful because there's a few options you can put in. Don't recommend channel. If you just see something on your home screen, you can just press the three dots and say, don't recommend channel and you'll never see that channel again unless you search for it, right? It'll never just randomly appear on your feed, which is phenomenal. So I think that's, you know, if you were talking about crafting and shaping the informational landscape that we're part of.

1:01:50And it's all esoteric and fucking like philosophical and stuff, but from a tactical perspective, like that's one thing. If people use Twitter on desktop, which I do, I don't have the app on my phone. I very rarely use it on my phone. Tweemex, which may now be called Tweepie, is a way that you can see the most popular tweets from people, but it's Google Chrome extension that when you're on your home screen, it actually sits over the top of the trending news. So it'll hide trending news. So you can't put yourself in Angola where you can, but it doesn't work. But you can use Tweomex or Tweepie. And the Google Chrome extension will hide that and replace it with like top tweets from one of the people that you follow.

1:02:34I think we've probably got about five years left of this algorithmic warfare of trying to get you to stay on platform as long as possible. Because as soon as more and more AI I told come on and then you begin to have these dynamic conversations of how you want to feel based off these algorithms. I think we'll look back at this at a very, very weird time in history when most content was created by humans as opposed to robots. No. In the sense that that to some extent, but more importantly, like, for example, you see the difference when you go from YouTube to YouTube premium and you can skip certain things and you can download things.

1:03:05Why can't I just customize my algorithm more? Why can't I have a kale algorithm during the week and then a cocaine algorithm on Saturday night versus this kind of static algorithm. Because the problem with the algorithms, I actually realized when I was doing that YouTube order, the best YouTube is amazing when you use it for search and it's such a high agency thing there where you're sitting there thinking and going, oh, okay, I want to learn about X, so I want to do ABC and you search it versus the explore page when it's just fundamentally solo agency. And because by definition, it's trained on your past data.

1:03:39So it's keeping you stuck in the past, whereas when you're actually searching on YouTube for topics You look you're actually breaking out of the past and creating a new data set. There's all so many there's multiple use So I've realized this Uber does this very well actually Where at different times of the day I take different journeys So if it's first thing in the morning, it'll know that I tend to want to go to the gym If it's the middle of the day, there's a couple of restaurants that I typically go to if it's on a Wednesday at this time, it knows that I usually go and get an appointment at this place, or it's a haircut, or it's a whatever, and it knows that I go from certain places to other places.

1:04:13Very well done, right? But that's because there's multiple views at multiple periods of the day. YouTube hasn't yet realized that I only watch long -form documentaries about the in -depth trench warfare strategies of World War I on an evening time, like a night, fall asleep. So I like listen to like some Ken Burns documentary or like some long documentary or whatever like some 11 part psychoanalysis of Hitler. I mean balls deep in at the moment, right? That only happens on an evening time, but it means that it resurfaces it to me during the day So yeah, there's multiple use at multiple times and you know like you can go from dark mode to light mode It's like do I want to go from learning mode to entertain that mode, but I don't think that that that doesn't seem to be likely just because what the platform always want you to be in is click on mode, right?

1:05:05They don't want you to have agency over what it is. They just want maximize time on site. Let's outsource it to don't forget, especially YouTube, that algorithm is a black box. If you were to go to YouTube, the engineers and say, tell us what you're doing, show us the algorithm. They're like, yeah, what do you think we know? You think we know what our algorithm does. We set it like two Fucking reward functions like time on site click through. That's it And then just let it run. It's just this recursive nightmare where everyone descends towards UFC knockout complations All the way down the stack.

1:05:42Yeah Hmm. What's the forgetting paradox? So thanks to your Sam Harris podcast. I started going more and more down a mindfulness, rabbit hole. A bunch of people did that. I was with someone. I think they said that. It's so good. And within that, he has this, few things that I had out the back of it that they created the forgetting paradox, which is you start to observe your thoughts. And Sam presents his idea of like, think of a candle. And he goes, well, are you that candle? He's like, well, no, of course I'm not that candle. So it's like, why do you therefore identify every other thought? And then he has this scenario where it's like, think of, oh, basically wait for the next fort to appear in your head and try and predict it as it's happened.

1:06:23Oh, like just try and observe it as it's happening, sorry. My one was so, it was so niche this. My one was, I sat there and from nowhere, since when I realized I wasn't controlling my own thoughts, it was just I and Robin cutting in on the left wing. He was like, this form of football player who retired like eight years ago, and I'm like, it's almost like a dream state. And I was like, that's why he called it waking up right. I was like, it's fantastic. And the thing that I hadn't heard Sam talk about that I realized off the back of that was, I'll ask you this question now. How many thoughts, like clear sentence thoughts, do you remember from yesterday?

1:06:57Very few, almost none. Can you think of any, like a sentence?

1:07:05One over dinner that I spoke to Alex about who's debating Ben Shapiro today. But I didn't say it to him, actually I was talking. So you remember one thought from yesterday, I assume day before zero, right? Yeah, okay, excellent. So you have 10 ,000 to 70 ,000 thoughts per day, and you captured one. Anyone listening at home pause it and just go, how many thoughts do I remember from yet? Like clear sentences, not I feel hungry or whatever. Clear sentences. So from a 24 hour window, kind of like Twitter or TikTok, the mind's thoughts completely disappear. And it's quite a useful tool that then when a thought loop appears, you just go, oh, this is gonna disappear tomorrow.

1:07:41And you realize the forgetting paradox is, and this is not just at the individual psychological level, it's at the general societal level of we forget how many things we forget, because by definition, we've forgotten them, and if we hadn't forgotten them, therefore we would have remembered them. The same way you had 10 to 70 ,000 thoughts yesterday, and you remembered one. But you don't even realize how many thoughts you've forgotten, because by definition, you completely forgot them. And you see this with like trending topics as well, where it comes and then someone will mention that and you go, I haven't thought about that in years.

1:08:20It's only when that pops back in, you see the forget in paradox. Like I'm cutting back in on the left wing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're very good at this. It's one thing I've changed my mind upon as a result of this. Like there's probably a whole wave of guys that listen to your podcast who are like, just ghost Instagram guys. They don't really post the social media. But one of the second and third dollar consequences of that is you don't capture much of your life Yeah, and I'm setting here now at 29 now I've always avoided photos and videos because I didn't want to be seen as that vain guy on Instagram Yeah, but I think something you're very good at is caption content and as I get older you realize how important that is because you go Fuck where you decoupled I realized this too that Coming from like whatever a fucking I come from a live island background which is And the problem of that is I'd associated taking photos with posting on social media and being gauche, right?

1:09:10I did lunch on Sunday from the plane with Douglas Murray in this nice fucking restaurant somewhere. I had crocs on and Douglas was in a full suit and we had lunch and it was four hours and we got to have this great conversation. And I was like, I wanna remember this. Not that I don't, not that I would forget it in any case, but I wanna properly remember this. But you're like, when do you take a photo, I'll make, come here, let's take a photo. I was like, I'm gonna second, no, like this will, when that resurface is on my memories or whatever, I'm not taking a photo to post it on social media. But because most people only take photos so that they can then post them on social media, I'd associated taking photos and remembering my life with being a vain Instagram media.

1:09:53Not the same. We need to like make photos great again. For guys. Yeah, particularly. De -couple taking photos from thinking that you are creating content, right, or being narcissistic or doing this to create, and that's even worse if you're a content creator, right? If you're someone that's posting stuff on the internet, you're like, oh, here we go again, like, better fucking switch the work face on. Whatever, it's not like that. I'm just taking a photo to be with my friends. But I wonder about how much people think about the focus on the thoughts that arise, how much they consider what they're going through right now to be unbelievably important.

1:10:38You forget how many things you've forgotten because you've forgotten how much you've forgotten. This has always been a justification for me to get people to force thoughts into words either Spoken written even art in some regards, but I think it's best to do it in actual words because I said this a million times on the show but when you have a thought it's like a cloud, right? It's like trying to hold smoke. It's like this wispy a femoral kind of like it's a smell. It's like this ambience that you've gotten you like it's yeah I kind of know what it is. So, okay, tell me. Like, tell me what that idea is.

1:11:14And then you try and squeeze it down into words and you go, I actually don't have any idea about this. And I remember before I had the podcast, I, and after I'd started thinking about things more seriously, but before I had an outlet that caused me to be rigorous and highly scrutinized heavily what I was thinking about, But I had ideas that I didn't know. I had ideas that I didn't know, right? This sense, but I'd never forced it into take form and it concretises this thing. That's why writing's such a good tactic for this or having conversations with people that you care about. You know, the strategy of recording a podcast with a friend that you're never going to publish, like 30 minutes once per week, put the voice recorder on.

1:12:00If you don't want to be a content creator or you just can't be bothered or you're not confident enough, yeah. sit down with a friend, press record, have a conversation about whatever you want, but it's focused, it's rigorous. So on that, there's a few things here. So one, there's this idea I saw from Balaji, which I call it the Balaji Transformer, which is when you're wanting to become creative. He tries to understand everything from a written perspective, then from an algorithm, like he'll create an algorithm of the same piece, then he'll speak it out loud, then he'll draw it on a whiteboard, like Walt Disney's business plan map.

1:12:30And when you transform it from four to words, to written, to visual drawing, you actually, that action of transforming is where the creativity begins to occur or the clarity. On this specific point though, I think relating to the forgetting paradox that begins to exist as a result is, or we've particularly going back leaping back round to CBT that we spoke about at the beginning, this is like such mid -wet simple shit, but it's so good. We spoke about the CBT triangle at the beginning. The next thing that they get you to do is, so let's say you have a recurring thought of, I'm a fucking loser.

1:13:12It's something really dark. The natural thing, like the Instagram gurus are like, no, you believe in your set, pump your chest up. So in CBT, what they'll get you to do is, we'll just write down the thought that you have, and the ability to move it from mine to paper, and you just kind of look at it there. And the next thing which is great what they do is rather than just like trying to fight that for which then kind of creates balloons it more and more and more because you're repressing it. It's like, well, what's five bits of evidence that support that? It's like, well, I'm losing touch with all my friends.

1:13:43I've not been to the German weeks. I thought I'd be here by 25 or 35 and I'm not there. And you write down all those reasons and then you go, you get all the fucking air out of the balloon of that thought. And then in CBT, it just goes, okay, what's all the evidence that you haven't considered? It's like, well, when I go to XYZ party, people are so happy to see me or burda da da da. And then at the end, kind of like the jury, the four and against, you just go, well, based off all the evidence I have now, what some more useful potential for. On this specific point, have you heard of True from Derek Sivas, which is so good, which is this idea of not true but useful?

1:14:23Yeah, I've been playing with something similar, which is a figuratively true, but literally false and literally true but figuratively false. Whereas we had that chat about determinism, right? Whereas I think determinism is potentially true but harmful. Yeah. And a good information has it. What I realize now for the determinism debate, just say, I completely agree if you guys, unfortunately I'm just 100 % determined to believe free will is true. Yeah. And I'm just determined. I can't change it. Yeah. But a good example that Sivas has there is yet useful, or sorry, not true but useful belief, and essentially anything outside of physical reality to some extent can fall in that of, they might not be true, but what's useful?

1:14:59And with cognitive behavioral therapy, you can just analyze both, four and against, and then come to your own conclusion. Yeah, the figuratively true, but literally false, literally true, but figuratively false is great. So, um, porcupines can throw their quills, literally false, figuratively, good to stay clear of the fucking porcupine. Um, religions throughout time looked at pigs, uh, as uniquely sort of morally dirty animals, literally false, but figuratively, their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load typically than other animals like for like, so let's not eat them. Good. The reverse, literally true, but figuratively false, or functionally useless would be a different way to put it, belief that free world doesn't exist.

1:15:42Okay, right? Everyone seems to say, all the smart people seem to say that that's the case, and all of the people that seem to have some counter argument to it. It's all like lexical Brazilian jujitsu where they actually change what free will means. Like, Dan Dennett kind of does this. He just sort of kicks the can down the road. All of the like, compatibilism stuff seems to kind of kick the can down the road. But I spiraled a ex club manager into a two week depression because I sent him 45 minutes of Sam Harris on Joe Rogan red -pilling him about free will. And he didn't leave the house for two weeks because he's like, well, I've gotten a free will.

1:16:16with fucking pointless. That's fucking information hazard. I don't need to know about that. I definitely don't need to believe it. I don't need to put a putty stock in believing it. So, I guess it's a bit of a slippery slope if the only things that you believe are functionally the things that are beneficial to you because you can end up... I actually know because... That's a useful, useful is the key word, not beneficial, useful because self -deluding yourself to something that's so grand standing and harmful isn't useful. It's anything that's fundamentally useful to you and the people around you.

1:16:47What's the new ideas that sound crazy but will be normal 10 to 20 years from now? Yeah, so obviously last time we had the what is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians and what ideas sound crazy today but we'll be we'll look back and go oh shit. Kind of like the went you know the internet comes along and it's like everyone was mocking it and boom we're here now. I have a list of these so one which is my greatest meme I've ever created. So going back to cyber that it's kind of an ugly industry, one industry that might be ugly than cyber was two. So one is plumbing industry. And as a result, so many entrepreneurs cranking wood bands, or rings like trackers, glucose, but it's super sexy.

1:17:30Crating a smart toilet. Like, the A, the total addressable market is huge. Yeah. If you have a smart toilet. And the meme I created was like the toilet speaking to you, which is like, good news, you're hydrated. Bad news, you've got Climidia. Right? And a smart toilet could feasibly eradicate all STIs and STDs like that. You could the amount of data that's in the picture. The exists but nobody wants to touch that because it's a bit, er, if it's Iki, right? Same with another similar strand to this which I don't like to say out loud but we're going to have to. Some mind geek porn company that own every single porn site you can think of had the biggest technological monopoly of all but nobody spoke about it.

1:18:11There was no government bodies getting involved because they didn't want to touch it because it was Yikki. And I think a lot of these ideas are potentially Yikki. Another one I think about is, with AI coming along right now, all my single friends complain, dating apps that they hate the swiping. They like the dates, but they hate the swiping. And when dating apps came along, it was seen as the Yikkiest thing. People mocked it, but now like, is it something like 50 % of people meet their potential partner online? And everything else has gone through the floor in terms of how they meet. The only one that's gone up is restaurants and bars.

1:18:42Have you seen this? So the only one that goes up in that chart of how did you meet outside of dating apps because dating apps has at the whole market and Mark Andreessen, software reading the world, is restaurants and bars. And I'm convinced that's bullshit. I'm convinced it's people who have met on dating apps. I don't want to say that they met on dating apps because there's a huge bracket of those. So dating apps have at the whole market. And I think with AI coming along, it's going to be so obvious where it moves to a more matchmaking model where you're not swiping based off your data sets.

1:19:08And then you're getting a few specific candidates. Pita .ai. No. I'm pretty sure that this is like, I'll go matchmaking. It's a combination of, I think, personal, individual, actual functional human and AI matchmaking keeper. It's for people who want long -term relationships. And yeah, they're trying to use data sets to find compatibility between people. It makes sense, right? It's like the anti -dating app, dating app. This is manually swiping. I'm judging it purely off looks and then you meet them and it's completely different and they don't look that way and they've lied and it's a completely broken system.

1:19:50Yeah, it's looking at what will be accepted as a plausible future technology. I certainly don't think, I know that you've been on this for a while, you were pretty sure that pseudonymity on the internet would become more widely accepted. I still don't think that that's gonna be the case. Where'd you sit on that now? I've got a weird opinion on this one. I could be so, bear with me, all of your other opinions have been so normal. So, no, all so far. All of these opinions, I think, will ultimately, there's high risk in that. If it, a lot of them like it to fail because by definition, if they sound weird today, because they're fucking weird or they're wrong, right?

1:20:30But I do think, as soon as these, You already seen these virtual influencers come along. And I think you'll have the pseudonym E combine with a virtual influencer, because if you look at traditional media, reality TV was really late. Only came along in the like the 90s, like as it came along. But as a social media, it's always been reality TV. There's no James Bond in social media. There's no Spider -Man in social media. There's no Superman. There's no Batman of these characters with IP that begin to exist. So I do think that's where that, there's a guy we spoke about him called the Cultural Tutor on Twitter.

1:20:59And he's just gone, So I do think that's got potential, but yeah, I don't think it's necessarily as big. The pseudonymity thing hasn't taken off yet, but is that because it won't take off yet, or because it's had certain technological restrictions? I'd say the other one, which you, you, read -pilled me on this. So me and you were on a flight, like three years ago. This is inside the actor's studio. And Chris is probably like, this is very mind -crisis podcast at that point. We're on a beach after that flight and he goes, if I can get things to 100 ,000 subscribers, I think I'll be happy. And you say to me on that fly, or we've got our face masks on, you go, I'm thinking of working with a speaking coach.

1:21:39And I was like, as a friend, I was like, do I say something here? Because I don't think this is the right move. And in my defense, I was concerned that you'd go full politician. It would sterilize any character I had. When politicians speak like this, and it just immediately is horseshoe theory. For like, you're so charismatic, it becomes uncharismatic and I was concerned that would happen to you. Too much risk. And I told you that and you'd be rightfully ignored me. And then like three years later, I'm listening to that Rogan podcast and he said that the way you pronounce words, if he was running for president, he would vote for you, right?

1:22:15And I texted you going, one, I'm sorry I was wrong, two, can I get an intro? Right? I'm running an intro to the speech curve. So I do wonder whether charisma will become the new fitness. So the same way Instagram made people concerned and more about how they look, voice memos, podcasts, recorded Zoom calls, remote work, people hearing themselves back will begin to become a bigger and bigger thing. Yeah, that's a very good point. We're definitely being more surveillance, scrutinizes your delivery in a way that you didn't do previously. Have we seen people take writing classes so they can do better Facebook statuses?

1:22:51I'm not sure. But even like going back to what we said earlier for risk becoming a meme and then people at least think about it Yeah, whether there'll be more like doing exactly what you did probably not But they'll be I think it will become a area that people are a lot more mindful of the same way people who work out aren't necessarily paying for a PT Yeah, that's true The gap in the game was something I think I introduced you to as well this idea that There are two ways to live either comparing yourself to where you want to be or comparing yourself to where you were and one of them is like running toward the horizon, which is every step that you move forward, you are inevitably going to push the desires that you have one step further away from yourself.

1:23:32Morgan Haussle, his quote about the best way to win the game is to stop moving the fucking goalposts. And I had this conversation with Big Dan Belsarian over the weekend and said, every time that you achieve something, what you're doing is positing a new minimum bar which you have to get over. Right? Fantastic. I've just done this many plays or made this piece of art that sold for a particular amount of money or whatever, how exciting. And almost immediately, there is this sort of like post -coital fucking realization that, oh my god, that's the new bar for my best performance. That's really high.

1:24:14That means I now need to be even better at my next thing. And someone recently won the largest lottery in history, a $1 billion lottery. Someone just won that. From a life trajectory perspective, that's potentially one of the most disastrous things that you could have happened to you. Because how are you ever going to have a better day than the day you woke up and found out that you'd won a billion dollars? It's... The argument is a slow success strategy would be to purposefully try and drag out the wins that you have. So, you know, a buffet star. A tactical way that you could do this would actually be, let's say that you start to accumulate more wealth, financial freedom and stuff like that, and you can afford your absolute dream car.

1:25:01But instead of buying the absolute dream car, you buy one of the dream cars that's kind of en route to that one. It's the 50 % or the 75 % car that goes in between, because you'll still take a good bit of pleasure from that one, and you'll have something to look forward to that you know is within your control, and you're not then looking for the overclocked 150 % dream car. Right? I mean, the helicopter, I'm buying yachts and I'm buying boats and all this other stuff. So I think, and I said this to Dan, you know, somebody who, you know, winning poker games and stuff is large influxes of cash in kind of out of nowhere.

1:25:36And he seemed to agree that it expedites your ability to just like play the hedonic adaptation game, but it overclockes the pace at which you have access to it. And it's dangerous. So, yeah, slow success strategy as a counter to the gap in the game, sort of game that we play with each other and this whole hedonic adaptation thing. Hmm. I don't... It's one of those things, though, of theory, then reality. Like, can you actually slow yourself down once that dopamine kicks in? That takes a lot of wisdom, right? It takes a hell of a lot of restraint. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. And like, what are you gonna do?

1:26:12like say, oh no, I don't want that billion dollars from the lottery, please. But even with that, okay, can I get someone to set up some sort of fund or trust that like drip feeds this to me or invests it in a particular way? Or I don't know, just placing, trying to place yourself worth in different ways, different locations. But I mean, the gap in the game is one of the most important ideas that I keep forgetting about. It's like a Ben Hardy book from three years ago. And he came on the show to talk about it. It's really great. And every time that I find myself getting too deep into dopamine criss.

1:26:50We should talk about that. We should talk about the difference between dopamine George and serotonin George and then also probably cortisol George as well. But we both feel this. And I think a lot of people do that you just live in this sort of next task, next achievement overclocked hustle, grind culture. I will get my pleasure from my accomplishments as opposed to the one that actually ends up being more fulfilling, which is I spend time with my friends lying in the park under a tree, like eating some snacks that somebody brought along or something like that's the most serotonin side of things.

1:27:26I think the gap in the gain is just a better meme for a abundance and scarcity mindset. A abundance and scarcity kind of like hijacked a little bit by a lot of woo woo, whereas the beautiful thing about the gap in the gain, so you always have three things right, you have who you are now, there's fucking future idealized projected version where you've trillionaire and everything's going well and everybody loves you. That gap, no matter again, no matter how much you move up, it just grows, it's infinite versus you have a third state which is where you started. So the gain is measuring yourself constantly from where you started and the gap is measuring yourself to this infinite ideal.

1:28:03But the beauty, it's a nice concept, right? But that's one of those things that's forgetting paradox. You can learn that and then it disappears for two years now. But going back to like resting serious face or resting smile face, the beautiful thing about the gap of the gain is you can only, you can only exist in one of the two states at once. That's what I loved about that concept is, you're even the gap or you're even the gain. So it's just constantly throughout the day. It's like the resting serious face or resting smile. Yeah, it's a simple razor, it's midwitterable. It's beautiful. Yeah. What do you think is the most useful emotional state?

1:28:33Oh yeah, so this is a niche thought experiment, but I'll give it to the audience. So the inspiration for this thought experiment was you've ever heard that kind of bro bar debate of you have the world's best athletes Across every 100 top sports which one is the technical best athlete in the sense that you take a basketball player footballer NFL MMA and they'd all do the other 99 sports who would rank the highest and there's big like bro debate about it. It's great and And I was like, okay, that's an interesting idea. I realized I'd lay there in bed. And again, I and Robyn's just like cutting on the left way.

1:29:11And this thought pops in my head. And I'm like, what would be that, if you applied that for emotions, what would be the most useful emotional state? So you create this fucking Olympics of like happiness, sadness, anger, joy, fear, envy, et cetera, et cetera. And then you looked at a hundred different life events you could be in, doing a podcast with you, going for a bike ride, getting a Starbucks, getting fired from my job, what's the outcome that you're optimizing for here? Most useful, what's useful?

1:29:42Probably achieving the outcome that you would have liked upon reflection. Right. Is where I'd probably describe that, but I'd probably need to think about that more. But let's say you have all those situations from married to funeral, to losing job, to first day at job, and you had looked at all the different emotions you could have. like which one would perform the best on average? And I realized I go, probably calmness. If you could, like, it's not even like the sports debate where it's like up for debate, I go, I think calmness just is top for pretty much the more. Or if not, it's in the Champions League places, in that like top four.

1:30:14And to, but then I was like, okay, let's steal my myself here. I wasn't sleeping that night. So I was like, okay, well, let's say for example, there's a fire, break down the building. Would you want to be calm? Would be the criticism of it? And it's like, you want to be sloughful. You wouldn't want to be lazy. But you'd probably want to be calm. I assume I'm not fine and we have bullshit jobs, right? Like we don't do serious jobs, but when you chat to people who have proper jobs, the best guy is the ones that are calm and are pressure. So I think it kills that. And then the second criticism if you were to steal money as well would be, well let's say it's that may work for neutral events or toxic events or things where it has to go well, but let's say it's your wedding day.

1:30:49Do you want to be calm? And I was like, that's probably a good criticism. But then I was thinking about it. And when you have your speech about the wedding day, they always say, I was great, but I just wish I soaked it. In more, I wish I could slow down time a bit more. And I don't think anything slows down time quite like calmness. And for any criticism you do have where you wouldn't want to be calm. The beautiful thing about calmness is, you can calmness is such a base state that you can then ramp up any emotion on top of. But you can't do the reverse. It's really hard to go from anger to like, peak calmness.

1:31:21So I just looked at it and go, that wins the debate and then I fell to sleep that night. Calmly. Douglass asked me yesterday what I aim for in life and I use the word peace, which sounds so cooked, like in retrospect. It just sounds so lame, especially when I'm talking to this, you know, like firebrand, fucking like cultural commentator guy, like, says things that people don't like and all the rest of it. But it is true that like if the price is your sanity, you shouldn't pay it. I would pretty much whatever it is. There's almost nothing that's worth that because ultimately without your sanity you can't enjoy any of the things that you're going to get from it in any case.

1:32:00And I think that largely calmness and peace could probably be interchangeable here. But to critique was here. What I would say as a listener is like, yeah, that's fucking nice. And I might forget that as part of the forgetting paradox. But like, what does that do? It's like, well, how do I become calm? And the answer is I haven't fucking fully figured that out yet. But I guess the first step is realizing that it's probably the most useful. Some say it's way more important again using the hidden and observable metrics matrix. Like it's one of the most hidden metrics, like the texture of your own mind.

1:32:32I will happily work a job with a boss that's a dick that pays more money, that makes me feel miserable, that causes me to be anxious before I go into work, because I can't see the price that I'm paying in terms of my lack of peace or calmness, right? But I can see the increase in my bank balance every month, just trading it in, trading in that hidden metric for an observable one. You're seeing that with glucose monitors, in the sense that people would just eat whatever. And now they have that orange juice and then video game dashboard go terrible, that they can begin to piece that together. We unfortunately don't, I've gone back to resting fucking smile face.

1:33:11If there was a way of tracking that throughout the day and you could turn it into a video game of where your facial expressions were sat, I think you'd have a lot happier people. It's weird. Yeah. What was that? You told me, and you described it really beautifully, and it was the first time that anyone had described the same psychosis that I go through when I'm meditating about I'm the sort of person that has thoughts about thoughts. Oh yeah, we were chatting about this over dinner, where it's this infinite loop that can exist when you're observing your own mind, and you get to a state of no thoughts.

1:33:39And then after you've dealt with all the iron robin thoughts, that what comes up is, I look at me having no thoughts, I'm fucking great. And then you end up in that, ooh, well yeah, cause it's a Trojan thought. Yeah, you think, oh wow, I'm the sort of narcissist that thinks, wow, look at me, the sort of person that has no thoughts. And then you think, oh my God, I'm so self -deprecating, I'm the sort of person that mocks me for being the sort of person that thinks, wow, I'm the sort of person, oh my God. And then you just, cycle of doom. So funny, man. So funny. What else you go? We always have chats about high agency.

1:34:19And I get that as a powerful meme right now. But I've been like collecting like examples. One of them that came from a mutual friend, David Senra. Have you heard about James Cameron? I thought this is one of the craziest stories ever. Again, talk about memes or ideas. So you know James Cameron, the movie director. So he was a truck driver when he was 18 and he couldn't afford to go to movie to movie education, which is called a film studio, film school, and he decided, I can't afford it. So I mean the low age thing there is like, okay, it's that reality blah, blah, blah. And I was like, this guy is so good that he came up with the idea of going to the library and everybody who could afford the film degree when they're handing in their desertations or their work.

1:35:03They'd put it in the library that night. He would just go there, take the pieces later night, put them in the photocopying machine, photocopy photocopy photocopy, and taught himself his whole film degree from scratch because he couldn't afford it. That is elite story. So good. Wow. That is cool. There's another one we spoke about a while ago in the high agency library. I told you about the guy that took down Silk Road. So Silk Road was the biggest black market, illegal drugs empire, the FBI, the CIA, the CIA, the DA, the CIA, this guy called Dreadpire Roberts, who turned out to be Ross Olbrecht.

1:35:41And there's a lot about that case that gets super political and I don't want to have that conversation because I'm not educated on it. But the specific part that I found fascinating was the way he got caught, so the FBI with all their resources best intel, best spyware in the world couldn't catch him. There was this one tax inspector who started working on the case. And this guy just thinks, okay, I'll go and Google. And just searches, he goes, what about if I just find the first original post about Silk Road online? And he finds it in this Bitcoin forum. And what the Dreadpilot Roberts did, obviously when you're at that zero to one stage of a new company, even if it's an illegal drug market empire, you need to get people in.

1:36:23So you create an account like, oh my God, have people seen this? And he was like, this is the earliest post that exists online. And he reached out to the forum owners. I was like, essentially reverse engineer this altoid handle, what the email address was, and it was Ross Olbrick to Gmail .com. And he was the first guy to win a mask. And I love that story because it's like, one guy with Google has beat the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, but achieving essentially the most wanted man in America at the time. I was like, similar to James Cameron, right? Like a guy with essentially no resources, but combassively over -perform.

1:36:57Have you heard speaking of movies, there's a new Guy Richie film out that's an oddly very similar plot to the gentleman, but is different. I can't remember what it's called. It's on Amazon Prime. Everyone should go and watch it. Guy Richie's the guy's fucking brilliant. But if you've seen, it turns out Douglas is friends with him. And you know that he has created his own, like hut slash barbecue slash foot warmer thing. Do you know about this? No, right. So in the gentleman, if you see Hugh Grant toward the end when he's confronting Charlie Hunnen and trying to screw him over the outside and they're kind of sat under this, it could kind of a nice sort of indoor outdoor mezzanini -looking shed type thing.

1:37:44And there's like a fire and a big smoke. turns out that Guy Richie invented that. Like it's his product, right? This is the ultimate product placement that he's put in. And I think they talk about one of the features that he has in the gentleman. And then in this most recent one, again, it's Hugh Grant playing a very similar sort of role. This time he's like a rich billionaire, like super dick guy. And he's like cuts to this scene and he's explaining how he's like reverse searing a stake on Guy Richie's custom designed thing, which you can go and buy. It's super expensive, I think, but you can go and buy it on the internet, such as Guy Richie Barbecue, and I'm sure it'll come up.

1:38:24And, yeah, he just got this product that he's created. I'm pretty sure when he went on Rogan, that he talked about it. But yeah, he's just got this product that he created that is now featuring in multi -million dollar blockbuster movies directed by this great guy, but yeah, ultimately is just, I guess, part of the funnel for his super... Cheek me, Officer. Cheek me, Officer, yeah. His super expensive pub. Barbecue. What have you got coming up next? What's the next few months going stuffy? A few different things. I've got a few essays I want to publish. A few different ideas I'm working on. But yeah, just...

1:39:02I don't actually know how to answer that question. Just enjoy it. Good. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your reading, you're writing and all the rest of the stuff. Yeah, so best places, Twitter or X, just George, underscore underscore Mac, sign up to the newsletter list as well at georgemac .com or george -mac .com. Some bastards got the thing about the dash. Yeah, you can find it all there. Hell yeah, George, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Enough of this banana,

1:39:35just keep in mind that your safe living won't change.