#801 - George Mack - 13 Life-Changing Ideas You’ve Never Heard Of

27:25So I think the funniest guy in the world right now is is probably in a Greg's in Wigan, or he is in a pub in Portsmouth. And because of that crabs in a bucket mentality, Americans are way more likely to get on stage and go, I want to be a funny person because that's part of the American DNA. Meanwhile the Brits who I think are actually funnier don't end up doing as much sound like entrepreneurial, as well as entrepreneurial. But even within that, that sort of self -belief, it's one in the same. I think it's agency, it's the preparedness to go against the grain. And, you know, this, we're going to talk about subprime audiences later on.

28:02But, you know, this audience is like, I would guess, I would say like, it's full of like, A's and double A's of people, especially the ones from the UK. And I think the reason that this resonates, I'm not saying it to disparage the UK, I don't think either of us are, but to kind of reassure the people for whom they feel a little bit like a square peg in a round country that's sat in the UK, you know, some normal town, you're in fucking Wakefield or Carl Isle or Middlesbrough, Rochtdale, wherever you are. And you think, you know, this is the sort of conversations I really love to have. This is the kind of thoughts that I think about.

28:42And I really want to have big dreams for myself. And then I just really struggled to resonate with the people around me. I really, really failed to do that. And I think I wish that I'd had when I was younger, more reassurance that I wasn't the problem. I, you know, there's no value judgment. People that have big dreams, people that don't have big dreams, but there's nothing inherently wrong with you having those dreams. And there's no reason that you should be castigated or have the piss taken out of you because you want to do something different because you don't intend being born, living, working, and dying within the same 20 mile radius of, you know, where your parents grow up, yes.

29:19But even at a walking around level, you see this. So if you walk around America, there's flags everywhere. There's kind of pride in the nation. If you walk around the UK and you see a flag, you go, oh, fuck it. EDL members. They might be a Nazi, which is great. Unless there's a football tournament, then everybody does it. That's the weird paradox of the UK. So it's even at that level, you see this kind of pride at the nation level. In other UK, it's almost like this weird autoimmune condition. Do you have any idea why? the British football team uses three lions rather than the St. George's cross.

29:53Don't know. Isn't that interesting? Because I don't think Scotland does. I don't think Islanders and I don't think Wales do. And I can't think of any other team. Actually, the England cricket guys will do the same thing. There must be a reason. Someone will be correcting me in the comments, as we speak. But that's yet for the Americans that are listening. British national pride, like BNP, British national pride, and it's not that, but like, it's just, it doesn't exist. And then you come over here and it is nice. It's nice to hear the people have got pride in their country. So the, probably the critique people have of us right now is that we're critiquing Britain way more than we are critiquing America, but I'd also point out that's part of being British.

30:42You're way more naturally to critique yourself and to critique other people. and I do love that side of being British because you're way more self -analytical. I think in terms of other differences between the UK and the US that I've noticed, in terms of benefits for Brits, is because Brits take the piss out of one another, on average, way more. It means that you do have maybe that lowering self -belief, but you're almost a bit more anti -fragile. So if people do say a remark, you've already cracked a joke worse than that in the past or your friends have, particularly, and I think the more northern in the country you go, the more that.

31:19It is the further away from London that you get, the more piss you have taken out of you. Exactly. Whereas in America, I think people are a lot more, could be more fragile to comments like that, whereas the Brits. The same way I always say, another difference, there's two big differences that I think explain the differences between Americans and Brits. So one is simple AB test of when you meet an American and they're super enthusiastic and excited. And the Brits aren't. If you actually go historically back, there was a simple AB test, which is when the boats came and said, hey, there's this promised land far, far away.

31:53We can't show you a video because videos don't exist yet. You may die on the boat. Do you want to come and visit this crazy land? The Brits were the ones who were like, what a ridiculous idea that is. I'm going to stay here. I'm staying in Skegnas. And the Americans were the ones who were like, yeah, bring it on. And that AB test fundamentally explains it as well as when you think about it historically Americans have Apart from Pearl Harbor and that was quite far away from America. Let's be honest Have never had an attack on their homeland in recent history. Well, I'm 11 knockout The 9 -11. Yeah, there you go.

32:32That's one example But comparing that to the bombing like World War One and World War two like the whole cities Completely destroyed So there's definitely more scar tissue built up that makes Brits, I think, a little bit more grittier in some regards than Americans as well. Yeah, I don't know, man. I'm pessimistic. Yeah, I can tell. It's... For certain people, I had this discussion with Piers Morgan. Piers was like, I like people bringing me back down to Earth. I like the mockery and stuff. I'm like, Piers, that's great for you. It doesn't seem to work too well for me. Like, my desperate requirement for validation and reassurance from the world wasn't being very satiated in Stockton, right?

33:10A whole new castle. And then you come over here, one of the best things, and this is something that anybody anywhere on the planet should do, and this is one of the coolest life hacks I've taken since being in America. You've seen me do it to you, and you've, like, told cold at a bunch of parties, which is when, in America, at least in my group of friends, you are the new person in a group. Your friend that knows you and knows the group will introduce you and tends to do it in and the best 30 second show reel of you that anybody could give. You know, it's got this amazing marketing agencies, a phenomenal writer and he's pivoting his kind of champagne homeless at the moment.

33:46He does all of these things. And like, that's a really lovely gesture. It's your friend. It's an opportunity for them to do something nice for you. It gives you the best impression on the group and it reminds you about what your friend kind of says about you behind your back when you're not there. And it's like, it inflates you a little bit and makes you feel good and warm and stuff. What would the equivalent be if you were a British friend, being introduced to British friends by a British friend? It would be your worst ever story. Correct. Certainly the Norver, again, this is the Norver thing.

34:14This is George, shit himself last week. Like, you still have wet dreams. Yeah. Like, you know, yeah, it is interesting. Like the introduction side, how we introduce one another. I've definitely found Americans are much better at selling themselves immediately, whereas I think Brits often downplay themselves immediately. There's a big difference there in terms of like ever -so -slite cultural differences. One of the reasons why I think America has been so successful so far and one thing Britain could improve upon is if you look at human beings, I think what makes human beings, if you put one human being in a jungle, it's that classic phrase that you put one human being in a jungle, and you just introduce prey into the environment.

35:00But if you put a thousand human beings into the jungle, you've just introduced a apex predator of which the world's never seen before. So the only thing that really makes special, if you look at us, we don't hear that well compared to our animals, we're not that fast, we're not that strong, we're pretty shit to cross the board. But our ability to cooperate is what makes us unique. It's the classic Steve Jobs thing of, if you looked at, But I think it's energy efficiency in movement. Humans are so far down the rankings. There's so many animals ahead of us in terms of to do a mile how much energy they need to burn.

35:37But if you look at a human being on a bicycle, human beings have to blow through the charts and he has this great quote which is the computer is the bicycle of the mind. And if you then go back to, well ultimately the only thing that makes us unique human beings because we're shit about everything compared to other animals is our ability to cooperate if you have a more enthusiastic society that supports one other more. But you can cooperate more, which means that you'll then have way more economic output because in a certain country that's more optimistic that goes, I've got this idea, a load of naive Americans are like, great idea.

36:08Let's do it tomorrow. Whereas a culture that's more maybe cynical means that those ideas don't happen, which I think explains why across these universities we have essentially the same IQ levels, the same intelligence levels. Better accents. Better accents. More salmon. But 5X the number of entrepreneurs in America. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Grammily. With Grammily, you no longer need to spend hours on emails. Now you simply write an email with all of the grammatical errors, literally all of them left in. Then you use Grammily's app to fix it and make sure that it matches your tone.

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37:19What was that thing? Another person So two guys that I wanted to have this conversation with. First one, a ballroom bankrupt, and that's fine. Like he wants to take a step back. Second one, Tom Blomfield, guy that founded Monzo. Which is where I got the thing from. Swinging a miss. Another one for me. I got rebuffed twice in the space of a day. Well, it's interesting both the founder of Monzo and the founder of Revolut. So the two, you'd argue, the most successful UK companies that have come out recently. Both of them are having huge issues with the UK, I believe. So Tom obviously brought that piece about the UK culture and how he's trying to fix it.

37:52And I think the founder of Revolute has either left or wanting to leave because of the regulation that exists there. So two of our best entrepreneurs. Thomas and Emma. Right? He's part of Y Combinator. What else do you learn anything else from that Tom Blumfields article? He wrote it on fucking Tumblr. I really? That blog post is on Tumblr. Oh wow. Yeah, bring it here. Who knew that CEOs of internet, savvy internet startup bank and 13 year old girls posting emo photos. That's the like horseshoe, horseshoeed around. I mean, probably the overtake away, I would say, is vision. So I always look at, let's say, and again, a lot of people who listen to this podcast might hate these places, but the one thing you can give them is when you go there, you kind of get a vision.

38:36So whether that's Austin, whether that's Dubai, whether that's Miami, whether that's Singapore, whether that's Al Salvador right now, or even Saudi Arabia, you may not like those places at all, but when you're there or you kind of see what they're doing, you go kind of get where you go in. There's something happening. Whereas with the UK, I think fundamentally, that's probably one of the problems right now is that you don't fully know where the country's going. Yeah, that's a really, really great problem. A great, great point. I reached out, I got Dominic coming's email. I got his personally email address, so I've reached out to him.

39:08So last time we were on the show, we spoke about how the head of cybersecurity for the UK government job role title was at 65 grand a year. Someone's now made the meme of that original screenshot with I think it's the like TikTok. Yes, some person who's maybe high of cybersecurity TikTok is like 360 grand a year. It's like wow, the contrast is there. Yeah, and I know, man, part of my live show is me saying that I want to make enthusiasm great again and re -import the American enthusiasm back over to the UK. That being said, no matter where you're from, I think that you have the opportunity to be the enthusiastic person.

39:53And I've been really getting into direct communication instead of shadow sentences recently. And a lot of the time, I think to myself, what would have happened 10 years ago if in the Northeast of the UK, the group of friends that I had that were around then, you know, Darren, Johnny, you, Seth, like those guys. What if I'd gone to them and I'd said, like, I want to make a real hard left turn in terms of the sort of demeanor and the way that I view the world. And I've heard about the fact that more enthusiastic groups of people seem to do better. They have a five times increase in entrepreneurial success.

40:27And, you know, we have the same levels of skill, better accent, more salmon. Why can't we deploy this? I really want to try and cultivate the most positive friend group that we can. Why don't we just try this? Why don't we pretend to be British American or like British Saudi or whatever you want to be? Why don't we try and do that? And I wonder how much direct communication in that sort of a way, in a safe space, where there isn't one person in the corner that's always going to default to gay. Like, because that person, everyone, it's like a regression to the mean. It's like regression to being mean, you know what I mean?

41:00like the meanest person in the room is the one that everyone defaults to because that person always seems less naive. They seem a little bit sort of more sardonic and smart and cool. And again, if you're American and this is, I don't like being around those people at all, go to the UK for a couple of weeks and they are everywhere. But yeah, Tom Blumfield's article on Tumblr about the difference between the UK and the US, I think it's fascinating. And that just is a frame. What a phenomenal frame to say, the UK isn't a successful economy. London is a successful economy that has a poor country attached to it.

41:35What do you, so to flip the script though, so we don't get lots of angry brits? What do you already do? What do you miss about the UK or you think the UK has its strengths over America? Because I would say America definitely has great a blow up risk. I could easily imagine a scenario where the US goes to civil war quicker than the UK does. I would imagine that there's many more people, many more entrepreneurs that have gone bankrupt in the US because they're just swinging for the fences a lot more. It's my belief that most people who do things like entrepreneurialism from a good standpoint are more risk of us than they are prepared to deal with risk.

42:10So most people actually need to crank that up. They need a little bit more encouragement. Things that are problems in America is certainly that. There are blind spots that many of them have. There's an entitlement that a lot of Americans have to, you know, think about the fact that as you're coming up through school, maybe less so now when America's the most, you know, misogynistic xenophobic place on the planet. But for the most part, up until maybe about five or ten years ago, children were promised the what the American dream is still alive and well. Blue Sky thinking, helicopter vision will loop back by end of week.

42:42And if that's what you've been told as a child, and then you arrive in adulthood and you're not given that, you throw your toys out of the prime. This wasn't the world that I was told, and I think that that's why the entitlement and the victimhood culture is more propagated in America and it isn't in the UK because all hopes and dreams that you had for a life that was remotely good are just stamped out of you. It's too so many people in the UK and this isn't a knock to so many people in the UK success S is getting a solid graduate job at 23 on 35, 40 grand a year and then slowly climbing the corporate ladder to make six figures by 40 and then to retire with a solid pension toward the end of life.

43:34The British dream. Yeah, that is the British dream. And it's just, it's much more on a set of train tracks. There's fewer variations. And again, that is a perfectly acceptable, perfectly successful life. But more people slot themselves into that because they don't think about stuff going into the directions. I think the opposite problem occurs in America, which is kind of the paradox of choice. Well, I can do anything I want. I've basically got 50 countries attached within one big continent. I can go wherever I want. I can work there. I can use the same currency. I can speak the same language.

44:06I've got the light. All of the things. What should I do? I don't fucking know. Way more homeless people. Yes. Way more prescription drugs. I wrote about that in the what is neglected by the media, but we'll be studied by historians that I think five of the top Sorry, the top five news networks in the US Even the number one biggest advertiser or the number two biggest advertiser is a pharmaceutical company Which is a Brit sounds absurd and there's only two companies two countries in the world that that's allowed New Zealand New Zealand and America yeah, so that's definitely a difference but I think one of the things that you mentioned there is that ability for each state in America to have a lot more control.

44:47And it feels like if you don't like what's going on in this state, you can move to a different state. And you can run these AB tests, whereas in the UK, as you mentioned, London has this stranglehold. It's that thing I used to say to Americans when I was explaining the UK is, in the US, if you want to get into tech, you go to San Francisco. If you want to get into finance, you go to New York. If you want to get into entertainment, you'd typically go to LA. If you wanted to get into politics, you'd typically go to Washington in UK. It's London. London. London. And obviously that's changing. Manchester's beginning to boom a little bit.

45:22But if we could begin to decentralize things a lot more that Newcastle could go, you know what, we're going to be the AI capital. And if you come here, we're going to have all these incentives. That's the way I, fascinating. Why? Why? Oh, yes. Yes, fucking got it. All right. Fuck it. Why do you say that adults don't exist? Oh, fucking hell. This is probably my most, when I had this idea, somebody asked a question of if you could have something on the billboard for everybody to see what would it be and it would just be adults don't exist. And it's just a big mistake of mine, like having not that much agency growing up and still at times trying to improve it, where you constantly think there's this adult class out there.

46:12And again, it kind of comes from the education system of teachers. You have these teachers and they've kind of figured out life and they're giving you all this advice and they, they're, these are adults. And I say there's kind of two red pills that make you realize that adults don't exist. So the first one is when you go to college or university and one of your friends or people that you know who's just so like all over the place, unintentional, hung over all the time, does not know what they want to do with their life and they go, thinking of becoming a teacher and you go, hold on. Well all my teachers, all were significant amount of my teachers, that person who just didn't know what they wanted to do and I put them on this pedestal.

46:55So it's this kind of low agency mindset of thinking that there's these emperors out there that are wearing these beautiful clothes and there's these CEOs, there's these politicians. But actually the more high agency perspective is realizing that they just grown up children, like they were a sperm cell that fertilized an egg that came out screaming, that looked at things around them, learnt this language, and pubic e -kick tin and then there a quote unquote, adult. And the other realization you have is when you're bifteen, you meet like a 25 year old, you know, wow, 25, that's like old, that's an adult.

47:31And you become 25 and you go, I still don't, when am I gonna become an adult? When am I gonna become an adult? And you realize, oh, 30's the same. And I think it'll just be the same all the way throughout. So these adults just don't exist. Yeah, I have this sort of undue respect, I think, and I place an awful lot. I did for a long time, similar to yourself. Place an awful lot of credence in authority. I think this is a big British thing too. You know, like, Brits love a cue. Love queuing. Can't wait to cue. And that sense that the people in charge know what they're doing. They've got it all sorted.

48:15You know, think about America. Think of a perfect example of this. Perfect example, not to bring it back to the UK, US thing. Look at the first dose vaccine uptake in the UK compared to the US. I think first dose in the UK will probably by now be 96%. It was at least 92 a couple of years ago. So 96%, I think the US, it wasn't even two thirds. So there are so many more people on this side of the pond that are fed say, I don't think the people in charge know what they're fucking doing. I have distrust in officials and the people that say that they are beyond us. I wonder whether this is at least in part downstream from having a monarchy.

48:55You know, your highness, it's someone that is raised above us. Hines, right? You're literally positioning yourself. This is not like so, Connorism. You know, I'll get you with peers Morgan about this. Yeah, I put a lot of on you, wait in the words of people who knew no more than me. And it's that same thing about business, degree, lecturers at university. Like, these are the people teaching you about business. What is the outcome you want to be successful at business? Okay, if you were successful at business, would you be teaching business in a UK, Newcastle university, probably not, and probably busy running my business.

49:33Like not everyone's Scott Galloway swanning in to give a community speech once every quarter and saying that he still teaches at NYU. Get an honorary position for Scott Galloway. Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, he paid 14 mil in taxes last year. Like he's got proof in the pudding. But yeah, I think It's idiots all the way up and it's the same for any industry that you care to care about, whether it's status, whether it's athletics, whether it's podcasting, whether it's like any of the people that you respect probably don't have that much of a clue about what they're doing. They all fumbled through the way the number of people that I've met that have a really well -constructed thesis, first principle, fundamental view of why they do the things they do, how the world works, why they've got to the place that they are.

50:19Almost everybody just stumbled into it. That was that thing from my live show that adult hideers like being pushed down a set of stairs at age 18 and trying to catch your feet until you die. You're permanently building it as you go. Like, oh fuck, we're in the air. Like, all right, we put a wing on the plane and let's get a propeller and let's do this thing. Yeah, I come back to one of the problems with adulthood as well is during childhood, there's these milestones that you have not being able to talk, like being able to talk, walk, I guess it's the reverse order. Then first grade, second grade, third grade.

50:50Oh, you have these big birthdays every single year that people celebrate. GCSEs in our case, A levels or middle school, high school, whatever they have out here. And then adulthood, it's pretty much mortgage wedding, like death, funerals of other people. Kids maybe, or close, sorry, kids being born. Mortgage wedding, kids, funerals of, funerals of loved ones, then your own funeral. So there's so few milestones. was really interesting is COVID then acted as a quite an interesting milestone. Now, where was when you talk to people about COVID, there's a before COVID moment, and then after COVID moment.

51:25And I actually think it's interesting when you get to experience other cultures for the first time. And you go, of course, that's such a better way of doing things. So in the Jewish community, they celebrate bar mitzvahs, which is a big coming of age when you're 13. And I think there should be some kind of bar mitzvah for 2025, because your brain kind of fully develops when you're 25. And it's when it's definitely 25. Yeah, no, still struggling. It's when the rail guards of life are like fully released at 25 as well You have some friends who are in prison you have others that are like selling NFTs online And you have this person who has three kids and it feels like 25 That Benjamin Franklin quote of the average person dies at 25 and is embarrassed until 75 I Think we should probably do more milestones in adulthood because if not you end up to loop back the conversation to the start in the busy traveling.

52:12It just before you know it. So you've run, you've run through everything without any milestones. We'll get back to talking to George in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. 90 % of Americans are not getting the nutrients. Didn't think I was going to catch that. Did you? Yes, 90 % of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy. AG1 provides daily nutrients and got health support in one comprehensive, convenient, and tasty daily drink. The average supplement is tested for 10 contaminants. AG1 is tested for 950, including pesticides, heavy metals, toxins, and more.

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53:18That's drink AG1 .com slash wisdom. I had this take where I wanted to normalize girls getting a single round of IVF with egg freezing for the 21st birthday. I think that if you could instantiate that into culture I think that that would result in an awful lot more freedom for women. And I get a lot of criticism for being like way too pro male, apart from all of the pro male people online, who think that I'm way too pro women. But I think that this is just a win for everybody. I don't know anybody who loses. It's not a fertilized egg. So the abortion community debate doesn't have a problem with it presumably unless they have a problem with every period that a girl has, which I'm going to guess maybe someone does.

54:02But 21st birthday, don't buy them a watch, Don't buy them shoes, don't buy them a holiday to Zanty with their friends. I mean, it's more expensive. This is, you know, high, it's a significantly bigger investment. But I think that it just opens up so much. And that would be another milestone in some way. And it would be the best insurance policy that you could think of. And it would help to combat declining population, declining birth rates. It's just that 21 peak fertility, fantastic quality of eggs. One round of IVF is going to get you, I don't know what you get, 21. I've never even seen data on it, like maybe like 15, 20 viable eggs that you'd get, pop it away, put it in the fridge, and then you're 38 and you've worked on your career for a long time or you're 29 and your partner and you are having fertility, whatever, it's just It's straight up optionality.

54:57And I think that, you know, just thinking about where are we missing milestones? I'm going to freeze my sperm. I've got a legacy sperm, by the way. I did a ton of research and spoke to a bunch of friends that are like in the IVF world. Legacy sperm in America at least is what it seems to be the number one. No much it is to get 25 years of frozen sperm, your sperm, two separate units of frozen sperm, five grand. Wow. Five grand for a quarter of a decade. a quarter of a century to freeze your sperm for. And I was like, why? Why? Five grand is not a nominal amount of money. Like it's a big amount of money.

55:33Why wouldn't I just come in a cup? Yeah, I'm just picturing someone like you, Seth, trying to do his own home. You can get a freezer to try and save the five grand. Don't DIY it. It's in there next to the Ben and Jerry's. Well Bill Akman, I think, had this idea. I could be butchering it, but it was along the lines of rather than pensions, the government would, when the child's born, put money in the SMP 500 or some kind of ETF. And by the time they're 65, it will be millions. And you could almost guarantee that across every single citizen versus them having to slowly but surely realize when they're 36, they probably should start contributing to all depression.

56:10But again, trying to get these ideas to be tested, you would need looping the conversation around again, multiple states, particularly in the UK to be able to do that. I don't think it'd be very, very difficult, I think, to get that through house appartement. What is your contrarian take about whether money buys happiness or not? So everybody's probably heard the question, does money buy happiness? And then there'll be a big debate, an evil way. But the correct way to actually answer that question is to say, that is the stupidest question I've ever heard and I'll explain them why. So we can use an example here.

56:46Let's say you've used 95 % of your salary to get this crazy penthouse in New York to show off to everybody. And you realize in the first night that your next door neighbor's P Diddy and he's just having these like wild, loud orgies all night. And it's just a beating his wife in the corridor outside. A nightmare to live next to, right? In that case, did money by happiness. Actually, money might have bought misery. Let's say you then go on Amazon Prime and get those earplugs, silicone ones, that multi -oreal, that block out all noise, and it cost you $10. Well, in that case, a little bit of money bought a lot of happiness.

57:30So the problem with this phrase does money by happiness as it implies all money is created equal and all happiness is created equal. And you can see if you ask the question, So when people ask you that question, the best question to reply with is, does money buy good investments? Well, I know some people that have bought, depends what you invested in. Incredible stocks really early on. I know some people that have bought Dick coin 1, 2, 3, and had a terrible time. So ultimately, it completely depends on what you've invested in. So the actual, what the question is trying to get to or what the real answer to the question should be is strategic money by his happiness.

58:09An on strategic money can buy misery. Or strategic money can buy happiness. An on strategic money can buy misery. Exactly the same of investment. So the reason why this question exists is because within itself it's a presupposition. It presupposes that all money is created equal and it presupposes that all happiness is created equal when it's not. It's a completely individualistic thing like an investment. what is a way to strategically spend money and what is a way to un -strategically spend money. The honest answer is, and this makes it into a terrible YouTube clip, but the honest answer is, is that it's so personalized to the individual.

58:48By definition, what may make one person happy with one purchase may make another person happy with another purchase. I gave you a pickable that's brought north a lot of happiness. If I gave that pickleball paddle to Zach, it would become a door stop. Yes. So it's looking at the cost of thing, service, product, experience, and impact that has on your life. Utility of the person. Utility, yeah. I mean, Zach said the other day, you guys have a sauna that you spent a little bit of money on. And he says that is an example of strategic money can by happiness. Mm -hmm. Yeah. It's a very interesting reframe on the question and we've spoken about this before.

59:29I think both of us are fortunate that we have a low materialism set point. And I've always thought about this as a competitive advantage for people. So if you grew up in a household that was gifts and public presence and stuff, we're kind of displays of affection. If large things were made out of birthdays and of Christmases and that was sort of keeping up with the Jones' mentality, maybe Mama, Dad would always looking to improve the car and stuff like that. That's fine, but it is likely that as you grow into an adult, you will tie an awful lot of yourself worth and your place in the world to the possessions that you have, your ability to provide possessions to other people, or maybe the way that they give gifts and possessions to you as a show of their love and defection.

1:00:18And again, hidden versus observable metrics, it's very in a society that is obsessed with more, more, more. It is a radically revolutionary thing to say that I have enough. And I have always seen of all of the different mental pathologies I've got, and it's a fucking laundry list. The one of the ones I'm most glad that I don't have after alcoholism and sort of substance stuff is a need for materialistic possessions to make me feel satiated and satisfied and enough. So if you are the sort of person that doesn't have that, if you don't have a drive to get more possessions in order to make yourself happy, you can basically see that as your happiness burn rate is way lower.

1:01:05You know, it's 10 times less, 100 times less than somebody else. And you could have been brought up or born with the predisposition where you had to have the newest car, you had to have the fanciest bag, you had to always be flying away on holidays. is it fun? Yeah, but basically that means that your operating costs as a human are way higher. Yeah, it's a good point. I reminded of, I forgot who said it might be co -coation out of the best things in life for free and the second best things are really, really, really expensive. But yeah, the more I've realized as I get older is the money by happiness question, is so absurd on all it comes down to is how strategic you can be with your money.

1:01:51When it comes to you, you said it was personalized. When it comes to you, what are the places that you have found a disproportionate investment leverage? Where, when you spend a dollar on it, are you getting 10x return in terms of your money for happiness? earplugs. It's quite solid, not because I'm next to Diddy, but earplugs, especially when I'm traveling around, because if I have one bad night's sleep and I get these silicone multiple ones that I exchange each time, it's like five to ten dollars a week, which sounds like quite a hefty earplug budger, but it's definitely way more than any like materialistic purchase that I've made.

1:02:31Essentially anything that makes me feel better throughout the day or speeds up time. Lots of things. Paying for access to a sauna. I can regularly go there, for example, or if I'm looking at an option where I'm staying that's slightly nearer a gym. Thinking through just based, I always come back to one of the things I think about is like high leverage relaxation. So look at things that recharge you that give you the most amount of energy and what has the lowest cost or the lowest energy to produce that. So those two things in particular, being able to see friends, like Dickie gave us this at my birthday, because I've never experienced until I came here the difference between Uber's and Uber comforts, and in America, the Uber can be any car that pulls up.

1:03:22Whereas in Uber comfort, you get this like comfy little Tesla, and it's only an extra $2 sometimes for the journey, depends on the ride. And that is like an example of a little bit of money there, strategic money. But if I'm going somewhere like today, and I mean like a nice Tesla beforehand, and I can think about what being the chat about versus if I'm in like a clapped -up car that's breaking down, it's a bit more of a problem. Yeah, those are really good ones. Dickey, you can go all the way down to the very bottom, which is exec Excel, which is a big Yukon or an escalator or something. And you realize when you actually price it together for the number of people that are going, especially if you're going Excel, Well, it's like maybe twice as expensive, but you feel like you feel like P.

1:04:02Diddy, right? But without the violence, without the violence, you feel like P. Diddy in his heyday. That's great. I'm trying to think about other stuff for me. Certainly paying for assistance with things that I want to do. So you're talking about high leverage recovery. Going to the gym is great. Going to the gym with the trainer. You leave with more energy than you went in with. It doesn't sap your willpower. There's just somebody there that's telling you what to do. Same thing would be true for going to a CrossFit class, you know, paying for a CrossFit membership. Like, yeah, you know, the gym or planet fitness or something.

1:04:34I can get that for 13 pounds a month. Okay, but how much of your energy is it sapping? How much of your willpower you're having to use to get yourself into the stage where you can get some energy back like you're spending energy to get energy. Whereas if you go into a CrossFit class or a Barry's bootcamp or you get a PT or you do whatever, last night, I did a breathwork class. I think it was $15? Yeah. $15 for a breathwork class for an hour. I did as much breathwork last night as I did all of last week. An hour of breathwork last night and I think I'm going to actually get four, 15 minute sessions in last week and it cost 15 bucks.

1:05:09So I think externalizing motivation, that's a big one for me. Good quality coffee, nice coffee, nice water, stuff like that. And these are, for many people, goods that would push their spend to income ratio up a little bit, but you can get an awful lot of happiness out of quite low spend and you'd be surprised at the places that it comes from. The obvious answer is things that you use a lot as well. So shoes, laptop. Laptop. Laptop, riser. Yeah. Why have you been obsessed with Roger Federer and Jack of itch and Nadal, because he just won't show up about them. Ah, it's so good. So this came from Matthew Sired.

1:05:51And for me, this is, I've always enjoyed self -help and self -improvement, but there's a part of it that always felt a bit icky. And this metaphor kind of explains my problem with it. And Matthew Sired is a big tennis fan, and he talks about he would go and watch tennis, and it was such a unique point in history because you had the three goats at once. So in football, you had arguably the two goats that once you had Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. In tennis, you had Jocovic, Nadal and Federer. And obviously in the self -help world or that space, it's like, this is the way. Or you see these Instagram reels and it's like, if you do ABC, this will happen.

1:06:36And what's beautiful about this metaphor that Sia tells is you have, he used to watch at Wimbledon, the warm -up courts. So he'd turn up and Nadal's there. And Nadal is like full on goggins, like biceps bulging, screaming as he's hitting the shots. In warm -up. Yeah, in warm -up sprinting up and down to get himself into the zone, like going as hard as he can. Then you have Jockovitch, who comes out, who's almost an emotionless robot, who's just laser focused on getting the job done. Watch his hip warm up, he's like, hold on, these are the two goats at the same time, completely different way of doing things.

1:07:16Then Federer turns up and you can hear him laughing before he arrives at the court. He's trialling like trick shots, he's doing dinks, he's laughing with his friends, he's just finessing the ball, laugh right in center. And these three, and obviously the debate between them, but these three arguably the three goaps of there at the exact same time give or take and had completely different philosophies to doing things. And that goes to show and I've always now took that metaphor whenever somebody gives me, oh you need to do things this way or this is the way this gets done and realizing, ah okay, that's the job of it's where I'm doing that.

1:07:53That might not apply to me or that's the federal way of doing it or that's the Nadal way of doing it. Ironically, Nadal actually had the most of my injuries which is is one thing you could take into consideration, but ultimately there's no the way. I've shown by those three, there's completely different ways of achieving essentially the exact same output. In other news this episode is brought to you by Element. If you dread the thought of drinking plain water all day, sugary electrolyte drinks and lemon water that turn your TTHO just don't cut it, which is why I've partnered with Element. They make the best tasting electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.

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1:08:59Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. I wonder whether one of the reasons that people look for one size fits all answers to questions is that if there's three potential answers to the question, that then puts the owners back onto them to work out how to do it. Right? What people want is a reliable set of inputs that can get them the outcomes someone else got. They don't need to go, what is the way for you to get the outcome?

1:09:40It's the same thing again. It's what you're focusing on inputs or outcomes. You want to get the outcomes. But if someone says, here is the answer. There is no answer. There are multiple different ways and here are some principles and you need to work out It's like I've fucking I paid five hundred dollars for this course I've paid five hundred dollars for the productivity course And you tell me that it isn't that I need an external brain, but I might do and it isn't that I need to do space for repetition But I might do and it isn't that I need to do time blocking, but I might do Yeah, I think a huge hesitation should be placed on saying this person achieved success and did this thing.

1:10:17Therefore, doing the thing that they did will cause me different person, different disposition, different background, different set point to get the same outcome that they did. I think it then comes down to the scientific method. We live in the enlightenment period. It's only been what, not a couple hundred years or so, that we've had electricity, he had all the things that we take for granted now and that comes out the scientific revolution and applying a scientific frame to viewing these problems of, okay, that's the Nidale way of doing it, that's the Jocke of it's way of doing it, that's the Federal way of doing it, how about I'll try this, see how that goes, I'll try this, see how that goes, try this and see how that goes, and then judging based off the experiments, how it worked personally for you, you're seeing this huge boom in nutrition right where for the last 50 years it was like there's this diet there's the only banana diet there's the vomit three times a day diet and now it's Actually what was probably the best diet for Chris is different to what's the best diet for George Etc etc etc and I think we'll just find out more and more of time that personalization is More and more important than we think but as you mentioned then it's hard to Sell that so it's not as gimmicky it's not as easy to get people into a funnel that buys the 699 course because it's often a lot more personalization and the people need to have a lot more agency over their existence.

1:11:44The work is put back on to the person who needs to do the work. Yes, but the truth is the way. Yeah, yeah, I think that you're right. We also have this discussion in Miami about why hard work is something that people often pray at the altar of and I'm one of these people, right? You know, almost has been on the show, Goggins, Choco, etc. I don't disagree. Hard work is a very reliable route to achieving success, but I think that optimizing exclusively for hard work causes you to miss an awful lot of the high leverage routes and also maybe some of the more personalized ones too. There's very few problems in life that aren't made easier by working harder, but there are other high leverage, higher return, less painful routes to achieving the same outcome, those are less reliable though, right?

1:12:32Like hard work will almost always get you closer to your goal, working harder will almost always get you closer to your goal incrementally. And therefore, it's like a moderately effective but highly robust drug that I could give you to deal with some malady that you're dealing with. And then here's five other options, four of which won't work at all, but one of which will work 10 times better than you're just doing the hard work thing. And maybe hard work sits sort of alongside it. You kind of loop them in as a combination. But yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why praying at the altar of hard work is something that's so...

1:13:16It's so pedestalized because when has anybody ever worked hard and it hasn't helped at least a little bit. So it's the panacea, but it's actually only working at sort of a ceiling cap sort of rate and there's way more effective versions that you could look at alongside that or outside of that that isn't just okay just get up earlier go to bed later spend more time in front of the screen. What's an example for yourself that's more productive or impactful than hard work or things that you often neglect because you're too busy working hard that often is a bigger reading. So I asked myself this question during my interview review, I think I asked you this as well, what are the things I think are productive but aren't?

1:13:58Yes. What are the things that are productive, but I don't realize are? That's just such a phenomenal question because you're starting to see, where am I putting, investing into hard work, kind of reliable, but could be not so useful? Where am I not seeing the penny stocks that have got a thousand X potential upside? So for me, sitting in front of the computer when I'm not working or when I'm low on energy makes me feel like I'm working, it makes me feel like I'm busy. I actually don't really get anything done. Being on Slack, being on emails and taking calls. For the most part, very, very low ROI.

1:14:33Does move me incrementally closer to the goal of whatever it is that I'm trying to do. Stuff that is productive, but I don't realize it. Going for a walk without my app odds in and without a phone. reading, which is huge, reading and writing probably should have been in there. Focus reading and writing, massive, massive upsides. Going for coffees with friends and going for dinner with people that come through town for a short period of time. So next week we're going to go for dinner, but going for nut pudding with Brian Johnson and a bunch of his friends. And it's like, you know, it's a Thursday night and we wanted the last night that you're here.

1:15:11We really want to spend the time with people, not too sure, but I can almost guarantee that I will come away from that evening with an amazing story or some cool insights or a new friend or something cool. So I just think saying yes to more novelty is a good start. One add on to the list does really matter that I think when we discuss the UK issue earlier, and I know you chat to young guys a lot, or in that space about feeling lonely or loneliness epidemic. One of the things that doesn't feel productive, I'd say is the most productive thing I've ever done is whenever I'm on social media, which is by definition often quite unproductive time, or I describe Twitter now as swimming through sewage, searching for gold, And every day I'll get a bit of gold, but I'm covered in shit.

1:16:00And it's like, that's the trade off. That's the trade off that I kind of make with social media platforms now. And one of my friends recently was saying how he's not got a circle like himself, where he has his old friends, he's not got a circle by himself. And he goes, so I might start going to like a yoga class or a crossfit class and see if I can meet these people. I go, that's definitely better than doing nothing. But the odds of it of that is quite slim relative to online. So I go back to how me and you met, right? I think I was sat on the loo and I DMed you. So I was just like, hey mate, and what do I mention of some about Chrome extensions?

1:16:39I said, I see that you're coming to my office, coming to my place of work in a couple of weeks time, let's exchange Google Chrome extension. Right. So that in terms of finding people who produced something cool online, and DMing them, like, hey, I thought this is awesome. If you ever hear, let's do something together. The amount of people that do that is so slim. I bet even, and the mistake people make is, they'll go right, and this like, Grant Cardone. Yeah, they'll go, they'll try and punch way above their, like, relative standing. And I mean, the good news is that even if you do that, even someone like you, you probably get so many DMs, I know I get quite a few, but 99 % of it is absolutely shite.

1:17:18So if you can even provide some value, you immediately in the 1%, But I think the mistake that young people make or that I made is that you then try and punch You try and punch upwards. So you try and go oh, that's fine the guy who's a two million ABC I was got all the like my dream whatever But actually what you want to do is meet peers so when we both met was basically so you had relatively nothing Nobody's just like yeah, it was back my favorite period of Chris when he would be interviewing some of the like worlds most hardcore for niche philosophers on the trolley problem. So I'd go on his Instagram story, seeing like the trolley problem with some doctorate Cambridge.

1:17:52And then the next Instagram story was two for one tonight, voodoo, get your yeager bombs in at this price. Then boom, back to the trolley problem. It was like the Batman Clark can single feed. Yes. So just finding people like that and DMing them. By the way, the only people will then the imposter syndrome will kick in. It's like, well, I don't make any content or I don't have a following. Honestly, it doesn't matter. So all you need is a bio that says this person isn't fucking weird. So like just some kind of nice savvy bio and a little bit of content on there. And that's what I think all you need.

1:18:24And you better off finding peers, then trying to find people you're fans of because you're always going to have this like vertical weird relationship. Correct. Whereas if you meet people early on, you can then grow together, which is way more enjoyable. Because if you're 20 now and you try and become best friends with you, you're much older, you're not going to be going to like Ibifilm with them. It's going to be you're going to be boring relative to them so finding peers that are on your level And it's so easy just by scrolling through social these days and people do not do that Don't forget as well that if you find somebody that is at your level Yeah, they are going to be dealing with the same problems that you are now me at 36 I can still remember like most of the problems I had at 26 but at 16 I can't remember any of them.

1:19:06I don't know what my mindset was like at 16 I can't even put myself in that that theory Ali Abdal, I keep coming back to this. I don't know where he said it. He said, you want to teach people that are about two steps behind you, because you can't remember the problems of someone that's 10 steps behind you. So he has this idea of permanently sort of laying a trail of breadcrumbs, and you basically get to lay and follow the trail of breadcrumbs when you're with somebody that's on that same level as you, right? You're a similar age bracket, similar sort of background, similar sort of desire for where you want to go in life.

1:19:36The only thing really that you need to optimize for two things, first one being vibes. When you spend time with them, are they a sofa friend or a treadmill friend? Do you feel energized and revitalized and regulated after you've been with them? Or do you feel a bit fucking irritated? And you're like, oh God, like I need to chill out after that. That was a antagonistic or I didn't like this. It's just something felt off. Like how do you feel post -content clarity, post -conversation clarity? And then the second thing, are you, are they optimizing for growth? Do they have a personal growth vehicle that they are moving along with basically are they prepared to change?

1:20:09Because if you want to be someone who changes and you're around someone who doesn't change, it's always going to struggle because you're always going to be suggesting new things. They're going to feel like it's a value judgment on them and they're going to feel like accused a little bit and you're going to feel held back. So vibes and personal growth velocity. If you can match those two things, you've got a great set of friends that you'll continue to grow with. And it's so much easier to do that online. So going back to the reference of my friend who was like, I might go to the CrossFit Club.

1:20:35And by the way, that's not like a bad way to do it. It's just the brick and mortar way of doing it. Well, it's so much more... I had this idea that, as you were talking about it, that the finding someone online who you can tell you're going to get on with is a targeted strike from a sniper, right? It's one of those drone bombs that hit an individual, going to CrossFit classes carpet bombing. Yes. And hoping for the best. That being said, I do actually think that spreading the typical CrossFit class, maybe there's 20 people in a typical gym, there's a hundred. Like, there's a pretty big net there, so you are probably going to find, I mean, dude, run clubs.

1:21:14Jesus Christ, the run club that Noah runs here, Raw Dog Run Club is fucking huge. And if you're the sort of person that it 8am or 9am wants to stand outside of a pizza truck and set off on a 4 .5 mile loop, That's a, you've selected for a very unique sort of category of person there. So the more unique that it is. But if it was like, I don't know, random yoga class. Yeah. Yeah. Something that's the barrier to entry is a little bit lower. You're actually going to be selecting for a broader range of people. Yeah. Or like a networking event. It's probably the worst example, right? Any conference, any professional conference.

1:21:49So I go back to if, like, what's really interesting is we've now caught up where 10 years ago saying you'd meet people, saying you'd date somebody online, you was like this absolute basement to Elowirdo. And now it's completely at the whole date market and more than 50 % of people meet online and I'm convinced the numbers higher but people lie. So but weirdly, if you start talking about making friends online, it still has this stigma that dating online 10 years ago did. But it's purely just of like this momentum that exists. But I go back to, I reckon it's going to change with Gen Z. I think that's probably the one of the most reliable or the highest conversion rate way of meeting people that are high signal.

1:22:32The problem is that that locks people into only having online friendships. I'll meet you once. I'll meet you once. But it's if you never transition out there. Yeah, that's the problem with Gen Z. Yes. The Gen Z problem is that they're locked in to online friendships without transitioning them or graduating them to being in the real world. But yeah, I think there was an analogy that I remember realizing when I was thinking about pick a part history like forever ago and lots of guys were doing day game and keynote escalation and stuff in the UK. And there was an Ick, there's still an Ick I think that many girls have around guys that say that they've actively learned sort of communication around dating.

1:23:15If you rebrand it actually to, I've learned direct communication or a nonviolent communication, which actually has the worst branding in the world. Nonviolent communication, NBC is phenomenal as a modality. Fucking awful as branding because it's like, you learned nonviolent communication. What's the subtext of that? You have to fix your violent communication. That doesn't sound particularly great. My point being, if there's an Ick that some women have around a guy that has purposefully gone out and learned how to communicate well with women because maybe it sounds a bit macchi -evalien, am I being manipulated here?

1:23:51But I believe that the real underlying egg is, oh, so you naturally don't have the talent to be able to do this and you have to learn it, which is absurd because it's like saying, oh, you go to the gym so you're not naturally jacked and in shape or you train at hitting the golf ball so you can't just walk up and hit it, everything is trainable, right? And almost no one. But when you're talking about charisma, it almost feels like a personality. It's a natural outgrowth of who you are. And playing around with that is bad. It's sometimes seen as bad. When it comes to friends and friendship, how like despondent and feeble does it sound as a 25 year old guy or girl to say, I need to consciously work at having friends.

1:24:40I need to find friends. I need to go out and find them. You think, well, what's the subtext of that? Oh, you don't already have friends? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? That you as a grown adult who lives on the own and has a degree doesn't have the perfect group of friends already. And I realized that's just a total fucking fallacy, especially if you have high standards for who you want to be friends with, especially if you're on typical with the sorts of relationships that you want to have with your friends are the way that you want to spend your time at the lifestyle that you aspire to have.

1:25:10Yes. And I think one criticism people will give is, I don't want to, I'm not like an influence right it when I meet influencers and that's the natural way to shoot down that thing. The key thing with this is actually on the fewer followers often the better. You want to just, I love people who are fined and they posted some incredible essay on the sovereign individual. And it has five likes. And I'll see the location. I'll be in Amsterdam. I'm like, okay, I want to meet this guy. I go, hey, man, love this. One of the best things I've seen on the internet this week. And then we have a back and forth, and I'll catch you in Amsterdam.

1:25:39And I know we're like 99 .9 % certainty. We're probably going to get on most of the time. There's obviously exceptions. You meet people who are very different to who they are online. But this idea that, oh, therefore you're meeting it, you're having to go after people with followings or create content that reaches lots of people. It's really not the case. And you can narrow things down so much more specifically And you just so obviously are right, but there's just this ickiness that exists. And it's just this constant thing that exists in humankind where new technology comes along. And we have this ickiness to people that use it.

1:26:14Naturalistic fantasy thing. The same people that mocked it, the same people that are then using it in 10 years later, or their kids are using it, and they have no memory of mocking it in the first place. It's constant. It cycles all the way down from the start of electricity to the wheel, probably the first guy that create fire, they were of a human being who's gone, why do you need fire mate? It's all the way down. So just don't take the opinion seriously. It's one of my least favorite things about people who are unjewely critical of different strategies, new technologies, and ardent that this is something that's wrong, who in future end up using it and don't...

1:26:53You should be forced at fucking gunpoint to issue a retraction about that thing. And I keep bringing this up because it's always in the back of my mind. Do you remember that WhatsApp photo of the single squaddy walking down the streets of London that was forwarded a million times? And it was like, martial law is going to be implemented in London during the middle of COVID. You're going to be locked in your homes at gunpoint and this is the way that it's going to work. I got this thing sent and it just got propagated around. I'm like, you can forward a message on WhatsApp. but then it went onto the real internet.

1:27:22Facebook posts and Twitter threads and a breakdown of how it was all gonna work. There were these tanks rolling through Miami Beach and people sharing it, like the World Health Organization are gonna have health passports and there's gonna be digital ID and it's gonna be a surveillance state just like it is in China. All of those people that posted all of that stuff, what the fuck happened? What happened? Oh well, because we pushed back so much, that's why there haven't been able to instant, because Cloud Schwab, he really wants to be, hasn't yet. And because of the revolutions, the resistance we push back, he gets like, no, go fuck yourself.

1:27:56It didn't happen. You made an insane, you wasted my mind space because that's still stuck in my brain. And I can't get rid of it, right? You want me an apology? Yep. So I come back to the forgetting paradox, right? We forget more than we forget. Because by definition, we've forgotten it. Therefore, we never realized how much we actually forgot in the first place. Ironically, when you message me yesterday, and what do you want to chat about? I go, let's chat about the forgetting paradox. And I searched it and we actually chatted about it on the last chat. So it was the most ironic thing ever that I forgot that we spoke about the forgetting paradox.

1:28:28So that constantly exists, and it's a meme online of the new current thing. And there's constantly a new current thing in society's consciousness. And it rips so fast, it's, it's come through, and it's gone, it comes through, and it's gone. What everyone's willing to fight on the street or on the digital street, shall we say, on Twitter, about, and then they'll forget their opinion, or completely changed their opinion. Remember Coney 2012? Yeah, good example. Good example. People will completely forget. And it's like things that fade away. When things fade away, you don't notice they're fading away because by definition they're fading away.

1:29:03And if you did, it wouldn't be fading away. So this is constantly happening throughout. I mean, one idea you could potentially build is some kind of Chrome extension which just keeps a track of people's opinions on the new current thing on chain. And then whenever they did you say they got a ledger of all of your bads, I opinion on the the war that's going on. It's like you click on it and you go, okay, here's the European on the last five. What you really supported this Iraq war thing. That's on chain. But without that, we never really reflect and we're constantly dealing with the new thing. So we never actually have any reflection mechanism to see what people's past predictions were because we've moved on so fast.

1:29:40There was this question around if the vaccine, if the The vaccine came out when, let's say Trump got elected and he won't beat the election bus in Biden. And it was seen as the Trump vaccine. Would we have had a flip where the people on the left would have been more vaccine hesitant and the people on the right would have been more pro vaccine? Who knows? I think there was a Democrat who said that I won't be taking the Trump vaccine. When Trump was doing the classic thing around I created the vaccine before he got hosted out. So it's really interesting. These opinions that constantly change the new current thing.

1:30:11I did this as a image I found of the biggest talking trends of 2022. And it's all the usual political hotbeds here today, gone tomorrow, here today, gone tomorrow. And of them all of these most heated talking points for that year, the most consistent one that lasted throughout the year was Whirl. A novelty game, the ultimately disappeared. So you've got to be strategically, I think, a lot more strategically ignorant with what you want to consume. What do you mean when you talk about strategic ignorance? The strategic ignorance is essentially this idea, so you have the terminology, ignorance is bliss, which is such a weird upside down Nietzschean worldview that we calling something bliss as an insult.

1:30:51And you essentially realize that there's so much things you can pay attention to in the modern day, there's so many things constantly getting uploaded that you have to be ignorant. And there's this, oh, well, you're ignorant about this. And it's like, well, what do you think about the situation in Jibouti? or what do you think about the situation in Eswantini, or what do you think about the situation in Jakostan? And they go, what? And what you'll realize is that they don't even realize these countries existed and they have no clue what's going on there. And they didn't realize that Jakostan is a country that I invented.

1:31:23So, you essentially realize there's everybody's ignorant, but some of us are looking at the stars. So essentially you have what I call low -agency ignorance, which is kind of just top down, like you're just reacting to what's on the news feed constantly. And by definition, you're only ever going to consume 0 .001 % of the world's events because it's just the way of the world. And then you move on to the next current thing. First, it's high -agency ignorance. It's at least going, listen, I'm going to be ignorant, but I'm going to try and be intentional about what I am ignorant to, who I'm going to consume, what I'm going to listen to.

1:31:54So we're all ignorant, but some of us are looking at the stars. So something arises and you go, So yeah, that's another post about X thing that's going on. I know that other people think that this is important, but it just doesn't resonate with me. So I'm not going to invest a tiny amount of time or no time at all and give my opinion. I'm just going to let this one sort of slide by. Yes. Douglas Murray had this idea about normalize saying, I don't know. Yeah. I have no opinion on that. I'm not right. I haven't, I don't really know about that thing. What do you think? Tell me. And I think that the internet has kind of demanded that we all have an opinion on whatever the topic of the day is and we all get dragged into it.

1:32:38But ultimately, you know probably nothing really that contributes to the situation. Like what do you really know about epidemiology? What do you really know about Middle Eastern politics? What do you really know about border immigration? And you can, you know, if you're treating news stories like the Kardashians where you just get to foam finger wave for whoever your favorite team is, or you just want to talk about it because it's gossip, fine. But if you want to have a meaningful conversation and if you want to get emotionally charged on one side or the other about it, you need to be strategic in your investment of understanding about it because otherwise you're just allowing yourself to get ragged around by whatever the new story of the days.

1:33:19Like there is a huge cohort of people for whom every big story is their big emotional investment over and over and over again. And it must be fucking exhausting. Like I got criticized for not commenting on COVID. I didn't have anything to say on COVID. Could it have been done better in retrospect? Absolutely. Could it have been done better at the time? Yes. Whether some things that were fucking ridiculous. Absolutely. All of the things all the way down. I'm like, look, I'm not the guy for this. Okay? I did a, we did one episode which was lock down hacks, which is how to work from home with Johnny and you, Seth.

1:33:54And I was like, I'm the guy for, I'm the guy. That's my area of expertise. You want me to teach you how to be productive from a home office? Absolutely. I can teach you how to do that. But you quickly realize they're not when people go, well, yeah, but we should opinion on it. This is a serious topic. And then you ask them about another serious topic that's maybe 10 times more serious than what they're not considering one now. They were ignorant all along. So you basically realize everybody's ignorant. Some of us are doing strategically and some of us are doing it Unstrategically by just reacting to random events that are going on.

1:34:20Talk to me about why only the weird behavior survives So I was at a funeral and It's a northern funeral so it's a mix of like everyone's emotional but everyone's also laughing at the same time and I realized when people sound stories at the funeral about the person is is the only stories they would tell was about this person's irrational, weird, eccentric behavior that made them them and they kind of realized that all the normal stuff like the job and they made the cup of tea and certain words that they would use. And obviously by definition nobody mentioned that at all. The only thing people would bring up was the crazy stories about that person, what separated them as an individual and I realized that all essentially normal behavior is forgotten.

1:35:08So when you're trying to fit into the tribe, which so many of us try and do and get rid of our individualism because I think it's weird or whatever. The irony is that come the only thing come a funeral time or come once a few years later when people think about you. The only thing they can really think about is the weird idiosyncratic behaviors that you have and this desire to fit in with the tribe means that we end up leaving the only thing that they ultimately remember. I've told you that story about Salvador Dali. Right. I've told you, did you, I've been going to sell. This is fucking great, man.

1:35:43I researched Salvador Dali for that TEDx talk I did forever ago. And my thesis basically was that Salvador was an unbelievably unique human. His parents had a child nine months or ten months before he was born, called Salvador, who died during childbirth. And they were adamant that the actual Salvador was a reincarnation of his dead brother. So that was how he came into the world. That was how he started life. By age 10, he'd found out that he was a masochist and used to throw himself down the stairs for fun. Just enjoyed pain. He once needed to be wrenched out of a deep sea diving suit, mid -presentation on stage because he was suffocating because he just tried to do this thing.

1:36:27He fell in love with this woman. He was married so was she. they both left their partners to be together and he literally considered her divine. He thought that she was his muse that had been sent down from the heavens to inspire him in his work. So immediately as soon as they got together, he bought her a castle that he wasn't allowed to go to, and he had to send formal letters of request like he would to royalty in order to be able to visit her. Non -fungible, non -typical guy, right? it. Every different bit of Salvador Dali needed to be expressed in its fullest form, in order for him to be able to be him, because as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali, and Leonardo da Vinci didn't do Dali, and Van Gogh didn't do Dali.

1:37:14In order for us to get everything that he had to offer, the world and the universe, he had to embrace all of the things that were fully him. And had he have compromised on any one of the different bits of idiosyncrasies and weirdnesses that he had, the world would have been fundamentally less because we would have been depleted of what his offering was. And I think that when you see it as your duty to bring to the world that which only you can. I think that's a really beautiful reassurance. Yes. Only you can do this. You can't... Look, Salvador, you can't be Da Vinci. Much as you may try, much as you may have established patterns of success, societal norms, the way you've dealt with past trauma, your fears about shame and mockery, your guilt about not being as successful as you want, or your concern for the future, or your regret about the past, the only way that you can contribute to the world that which only you can is by being the thing that only you can be.

1:38:14But the mistake I've made is when I'm high on the weird scale, is then when I feel that weird thing that I want to do or say come up is I've got on, I do the normal thing because I want the social benefits of that. But the realization I had at that moment of that actually, that's not even true, all that the social benefits in the short term, but ultimately people completely forget about the behavior. Whereas when you do the weird thing or the idiosyncratic thing or the eccentric thing, in the short term, they might be the immune system kind of goes, well, Jesus Christ, what's that? But long term, that's the only thing that people ultimately remember you for anyway.

1:38:52So all the social benefits. So the social, the only reason you was actually making the trade in the first place was because you were scared if you showed your weird side, you were winning at the social benefit. But confunerals come like long term history. The only thing people remember is the weird things. I remember one of my friends Nike had a birthday party on and it was kind of like 2021. It was very shallow relationships at that point. I was trying to get the most of my people to attend my birthday party was ridiculous and loads of people didn't attend. But my friend Nike came all the way from London to York to be there.

1:39:23I was like, we've had so many other interactions about chat about the weather or the football, but that's the irrational behavior. Remember what are some other good examples of irrational behavior from your life for people around you that you think will survive.

1:39:39For me, it comes down to, I have this terminology called like non -fundable humans. So people now know the word NFTs. So money is itself fungible, a little chimp on the blockchain that has a silly hat, non -fundable. So non -fundable essentially means something that's completely unique, can't be traded out. And you quickly realize that everybody in your life who are your favorite people are fundamentally non -fundable. I had this realization with you, I thought, why do I like you so much? I go, he's so non -fundable, he's so uncommon amongst uncommon men and signs of non -fundable people and people listening to this will go, check, I'll think about the person who's non -fundable in your life and they'll have this checklist.

1:40:18It will be they have isms, so they have their own language. So, like, for example, say what you want about these people you've got, like Elon Musk has mosquisms, Conor McGregor has as McGregorisms, Charlie Munger has Mungerisms, like they trump. Trump has their own language that they think are words that they use or phrases that they use that makes them fundamentally different. They make them non -fungible. You have stories about them. There's so many stories that that person produces because by definition they're living whether you like it or not some kind of authentic existence, but in this definition to be fungible, we ultimately completely delete the whole memory stack about us, which is quite ironic because the only reason we were doing it in the first place was to make people like us and they don't even remember it.

1:41:03My favorite irrational behavior of UCF was that he was practicing no weight, no bar, Olympic lifting in a airport departure lounge during a, like in front of a packed group of people because he just wanted to move. So he was there, but standing up with a pretend barbell above his head. The better one is what's the one with his bat? Oh God, so I mean, this is on the internet. This is I think the most played video. I slept on the floor for six months to see if it would fix my back. And he was, he'd only just got into a relationship with Amy as Mrs. maybe three months or so. Not a long time before, nowhere near a long enough time to be like, I, in fact, I think he was doing it when they met.

1:41:46I don't think that she'd ever stayed over at his house. And he perilously closed, like, Nick to the bottom of, I'm not going to, like, I'm not going to get into a relationship with you, I stay in this relationship that I've been in for two months. If you make me come around to sleep on the floor, I'm not sleeping on the fucking floor, you say. And he was just, well, okay, well, we can stay at your house and I'll come home and I'll sleep on the back because he wasn't prepared to break this experiment. So just outstanding. But I mean, you know, this is just personal experimentation, I think, and it kind of comes back to that positive reinforcement thing we were talking about with your group of friends that if you Want to be around people that give you great stories that have different interesting things that are going on that show you a different perspective in the world The behavior that you want to encourage needs to be encouraged and if someone does something new or strange I mean, you can laugh about it.

1:42:44It doesn't mean that you need to be even pro -it, but you need to be able to accept. Like, dude, I can't believe you nearly made your brand new girlfriend sleep on the floor at your house. Like, you were in this brand new relationship. Like, I wouldn't have done that. That would have been crazy. You can give the criticisms you want, but be accepting of the fact that they've done it. And he's like, okay, that's reinforcing that person to go and be themselves. And that enriches the color and the, you know, like, uh, darliestness of their existence enriches yours. It adds flavor and it adds excitement and stuff like that.

1:43:20Hmm. Three or four big ideas from the last few months. Subprime audience, what's that? So people know, in 2008, you had the great financial crash that happened. And a lot of it was these subprime mortgages that were getting sold on, which were basically just junk mortgages. People that couldn't afford to ever pay off those mortgages. It was trash mortgages that were then getting sold on on mass. And as a result, people were buying them. The whole credit system was propped up and the whole thing came crashing down. And I think there's a similar -ish thing going on right now with creators and influencers where a lot of them have like subprime audiences, where it's just, they've created content that they themselves don't like to attract an audience, they don't like, and now the audience is beginning to no longer like them as well.

1:44:14It's, yeah, when I think it comes back to the hidden visible metrics idea that when you're optimizing for likes, views, clear width metrics, and forgetting about the deaf metrics, so there's a big difference between this video got played 10 million times and this video got played a thousand times by a hundred people. It's so significantly different. I think one of the ideas I have for Twitter, so I would like to see percolate or happen, is right now with Twitter or even Instagram, a lot of these platforms, you have a like as the currency. I'm in a comment, I guess, but let's see if you look at the like, the problem with the like is it's completely, like, infinitely fungible.

1:45:02Like, I can like as many pieces of content. And the problem that there means is I could release two pieces of content, one piece that gets a million likes, one piece that gets a thousand likes. And the million likes was just this cool thing that was here today, gone tomorrow. But the a thousand likes were on this 200 people in that that have bred that thing 10 times and have glued it to their wall and get emotional when they speak to you because it was so impactful to them. But when I look at the screen, I go, well, I need to do more of this one because all the likes it's getting. And I had this idea of probably stealing from dating apps, which is the concept of like a super like, these social networks should have where you get one super like per week.

1:45:39And it means that there's more value in a specific thing because then you could actually gauge the success based off that. Wow. And the best thing that someone saw this week. Yes. Yes. And then forget about everything else and just go up purely off that. You can kind of see it with Twitter now with bookmarks versus likes. It's kind of a better indicator. And you can imagine a phase where you could then customize the algorithm more that you're getting more golden likes. I would way rather have my algorithm optimize for golden likes. So even now you could have it optimized for bookmarks. Yes. Right.

1:46:08I mean, this is Sahil in the ISIS group that we're in. I and Sharpen's, I and Squad. Sean. Sean. He mentioned, I think he posted some, tweet in before that had done relatively okay in terms of numbers, but just had this absurd number of bookmarks on it. You go, that's good. And that's kind of similar to your idea of after a while, it doesn't matter how many retweets it gets. It matters who retweets it. You're just optimizing for depth rather than width. I just love the idea. The subprime audience idea, I think, is so phenomenal because from the outside, it looks like it's full of A's and But when you get in there, it sees and double sees.

1:46:48And a good indicator of a subprime audience, or the good indicator of a subprime mortgage is the person selling it wouldn't have bought it. They wouldn't have done, because they know it's junk. And a good indicator of a subprime audience, not always the case, but a good indicator is the person creating the content wouldn't consume it. That's max content, right? Would you consume your own content if not, don't post it? And I think a lot of creators or people that certain people may have issues where it comes down to that fundamental problem. Well, the problem is that you can gain popularity and win on the objective metrics thing by creating content that you don't care about.

1:47:28And you can lose on the objective metrics thing by creating content that you do care about. What are you optimizing for? And again, it just can, everything's fucking hidden in observable metrics all over again. I know. But yeah, I, you know, one of the things that I was really not pleasantly surprised by because you can tell in the comments section a lot of the time. But the comments section also selects for a very particular type of people and blah, blah, the live shows that I did last year and we're looking at the ones for winter this year as well, every single person, caveat that almost every single person that came to those live shows, I would have happily gone for a coffee with, I bet they're interesting people, they're into cool stuff.

1:48:06They've got like a cool story. They're working on things. That to me was the the biggest reassurance that the direction of the content that I'm making, which I'm interested in. And I get captured by this is a topic that we should talk about because it's in the news. Maybe I should do a bit on Diddy. Diddy videos are getting you know two million plays. Maybe I should talk about Diddy. All right, but really does it matter? Am I going to care? Do I want an audience of people that's here for Diddy Gossip. Maybe, but do you want an audience of people who are here for Diddy Gossip, then Paris Hilton Gossip, then Kim Kardashian Gossip, then blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:48:41Because after a while, if you keep on spinning that up, you end up surrounded by people that aren't like you and that consume content that you're not interested in because you've crossed. This is basically the subprime audience is the exit liquidity of audience capture. That's ultimately what you end up with. If you keep on winning the game of audience capture, you end up with a very successful audience of people who aren't like you and don't like the things that you actually like because all that you've been doing is feeding them red meat. And the worst thing with subprime audiences is the hidden metric, sorry, the visible metric are the people who've had a successful strategy with it, which are the ones that have huge content creators that wouldn't consume their own content.

1:49:27But the irony is, there's a load of hidden ones that are also pursuing the same strategy and because it's so shite and never actually getting any form of takeoff versus going back to my content razor of what you consume your own thing, if you do that, you've a guaranteed you have at least product market fit with yourself. Yes. And then you can kind of bet there's at least some of our weirdos, maybe a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, whatever, that are going to also fit just you to the law of large numbers. But when you have the opposite, when you're posting things that you wouldn't yourself consume, it might be the case that the total address for market is zero.

1:50:02It's like creating a product idea where you don't want the product and ultimately nobody wants the product. Did I think I taught you about, I asked people on the internet who use the word grifter. For the people who use it, what does this mean to you? Like what is the word grift? Because because there's lots of that word gets thrown around and awful lot. It's kind of like anybody who monetizes anything kind of, but then there's some people that monetize and don't get called a grifter. So I was like, okay, well, it's not a word that I particularly use. I'm typically on the receiving end rather than on the like saying and and I asked and the best definition that someone gave was if the person selling the product wouldn't use it or buy it themselves.

1:50:46That's a grift. Like, would you use or buy this thing yourself if you weren't being paid for it or you wouldn't own it? And, you know, for all of the criticism, there's a lot of skepticism, I think, or podcasts advertising, influencer advertising in general at the moment. That's the best heuristic if you want to be immune to criticism about the partners that you work with, about the views that you hold, about anything that you do. Like, just partner with people that you use their products. It's like, you know, a word, gym shock. I can't get a sponsorship from Crocs yet, but whoops, right? Like all of the things I talk about, I use.

1:51:22So even if people have a big problem with it, you're at least in some part insulated from it. You go, well, fucking hell, I like it. Like I like an eight sleep. You know, I use momentous protein. Like it's, you know, fucking shoot me. I'm not complaining about you and what bedding you go to bed in. The only difference is that you're not talking about it. So yeah, I think that's, and it's similar to your, um, the subprime audience thing is similar to the golden rule of the internet thing that you've got. Yeah, the golden rule of the internet is if you run enough AB tests, you'll eventually end up with a porn site.

1:51:59All roads will lead there. If you keep going, okay, we'll start with this thumbnail or we'll start with this intellectual topic and we'll AB test it. If you don't have a point of guidelines that things that align in the sand, All roads will ultimately lead to a porn site. One thing that you said to me ages ago that I liked was you have almost brand guidelines that act as this, like, room slash border, and then you're willing to AB test within that, but it never goes outside of that. Correct. But I think a mistake that can happen is you never put those in place and just let the AB tests decide everything and then you just kind of drift over the skill.

1:52:34Continue to skew. So you need to balance the art with the science, because if you go pure science, you will ultimately end up with a porn site. And if you go pure art, then you end up with something that's probably too ineffective. Yes. You need to play within the rules. I mean, yeah, we have the method that we use for split testing thumbnails on back catalog videos that are over three months old. Those get QC'd. So the copyrighter who already understands the brand guidelines that we have gets another the person to come in and okay it to ensure that it really, really is just a second set of eyes.

1:53:11Do you know what it's like? You write a marketing headline one day and you go, that's pretty great that. And then someone you work with goes, uh, swing in a miss there. I don't think that that's quite, quite right. You need a second set of eyes on top of, I think all marketing copy, I think it's pretty much impossible to get marketing copy right with just one person. Like you always need a second. You woke up that day. you were under slept or overslept, you had a really great gym session and you're caffeinated and everything's amazing. The Uber drivers are your best friend now and you get in, you go, yeah, this headlines fantastic.

1:53:42You know, no, you even, you would look at it in seven days and go, what's it thinking about that? Ash negative, what's that? I see. Concept I got from, I think, Eric Weinstein originally, which was the, there's the ash and milgram conformity experiments. So the ash conformity experiment was a famous experiment. There's questions around the validity of it, but the idea itself is quite fascinating, which is you would have multiple lines, like A, B, C, white lines, and imagine A would be 4 centimeters long, B would be 6 centimeters long, and C would be 3 centimeters long. And you'd put in a room and you'd say, what's the biggest line?

1:54:27And let's say nine out of tenor actors and they go first and then the final one is the participant. And what would be often be found if the nine would vote for C or A, even though the biggest line B, that person would often vote in line with everybody else. And ash negative or ash positive is whether somebody in that scenario would go against the consensus of the room. So it's quite a useful Sorry, is ash negative. Ash negative would be somebody who fails the test, therefore called truth. So ash negative would be, well I think B's, you guys all said A or C or A, I think it's B, and therefore that person would be ash negative, but ash positive would be essentially the person who kind of looks at it and I think it might be B, but then it goes it's A or it's C, or they're so ash positive that the crowd distorts their own perception.

1:55:21So even see me as being. Even realize it's such like Uber ash positive, right? And it's a useful naming convention of being able to split certain people that you know, and you go, oh, that person's pretty ash negative. And it's quite useful because you know, if I'm asking feedback from somebody, will they give me honest feedback, or if they're in a certain situation that the crowd goes one way, which way will they go? And I've thought about that, how do you actually create more and more I ask negative people, it's quite a, it's an interest. It probably should be taught at schools. It's an interesting idea.

1:55:49Yeah, well, outsourcing your thinking to the crowd is always going to be a quicker route. Like, you know, that's why we read books. Someone lives an entire life. They condense that down into 80 ,000 words. You read it, you take away five things that you care about the most. You've outsourced your thinking to them, but if you are totally at the mercy of other people's opinions, then you end up in this sort of ash positive, like Uber ash positive scenario. I had this idea from a text message thread that I was in about a month ago and I was talking to a guy of a text and we were debating about somebody else and he had a very negative opinion of this particular person and I remember thinking like I don't have the same negative opinion, but there's a part of me that's scared to say that I don't have the this negative opinion I mean, because if I do, I'm maybe going to deplete in the eyes of this person that I want to like me.

1:56:50And then it made me realize, people don't want to hear what they want to hear. People want to hear what you actually think. And I stuck to my guns and scurried around my people pleasing nature. It's actually, you know, it has an exactly shout himself in glory recently. I really love his takes on X, Y, and Z. and the response was like, well, I think he's a dick. I was like, right, okay, that's fine. And then I reflected and thought, unless it's something that people really care about me saying, like, you know, Saddam Hussein, actually an all right guy. Like unless it's a really outlier. It's like I can cashflow convert.

1:57:23It's like, unless it's a real outlier opinion or something that they're very, very precious about. Almost saying something perfect, another perfect example of this, Homozi. Would Alex's wife prefer it if he got dressed up to go to dinner in a nice suit and a shirt and all of the rest of it?

1:57:48On the short term yes, kind of, because it's probably nice to not go to dinner with someone who's always in a beater and shorts, but in the long term, she is more attracted to a person who wants to wear what he wants to wear than wants to where what she wants him to wear. And that's the same. People don't want to hear what they want to hear. They want to hear the truth from you. They want to hear what you really think. And that, it takes a lot of confidence and sort of self -belief to be able to say, I have faith that my opinion is sufficiently right. That I can stand on my own two feet about whatever this thing is that I think, and that this person is not going to reject me for just saying what I believe.

1:58:30And it kind of comes back to the subprimodean thing, the observable and hidden metrics thing, the non -fungible humans thing, that would you rather get to the end of life, being a popular and successful caricature surrounded by people who don't really know you or like who you are deep down because you've never shown it, or would you rather be a little bit less popular but actually maybe more popular by doing the thing that you do. Yeah, because you're going, you're never going to be connected to the things that you say or the opinions that you hold or whatever it might be. I realize this with like dating with girls and stuff.

1:59:09You know, like let's say you're flirting back and forth with somebody and they ask, what are you up to today? Or what did you get up to last night or like show me you're outfit today or whatever, you know, just like normal, flirty shit. And I can go, well, you know, I could send a photo from the archive of me looking all dressed up or I could send a photo of me walking down the street in crocs or whatever it is that you're doing at the time, you go, well, if I send the photo of me that's me dressed up, I may get positive reinforcement because it's me looking cool, or maybe I've done my makeup, or I've done whatever it is.

1:59:41But that compliment isn't actually going to land. Yes, it's going to get the outcome that I want, which is someone to think X, Y, or Z of me, but I'm not connected to that. They're going to give praise to a previous version of me, but I've lied. I've lied in order to try and get the outcome that I'm looking for. I'm not actually connected and they don't see me and any praise that they give me doesn't land with me. So it's like two Google translate things not talking the same language to each other, but somehow like saying oh and we understood each other at the end of the day. Again, that's an example of only the irrational behavior survives, right?

2:00:19Yeah, the guy that refuses to not wear a beater and shorts to go to dinner. What have you come to learn about incentives? Something that we've both been pretty obsessed by recently? I think incentives are the most under -discussed topic when it comes to the news, when it comes to society, when it comes to the individual level. So few people talk about the incentives. And when you understand the incentive, you begin to understand everything. A few are a few are aphorisms on this is never ask your barber if you need a haircut, because guess what? He'll think you need a haircut. up. As soon as you go, what's the incentives of the system and then begin to understand that?

2:01:01A lot of frustrations that people have with individuals or society begins to make sense. So there's one famous example of, I think it was FedEx that Munga talks about where FedEx were having huge problems of getting deliveries done on time, staff were working way over into the next day, deliveries were late. And somebody had the genius idea to stop paying them per hour and start paying them by the shift or when the work was done. And all of a sudden, it was no longer a problem. And there was another example of the in Greece where apparently they had it where to deal with congestion, they created a system where people with their license plate ended in an odd number, they could drive this day.

2:01:46And then the next day, even numbers, and all that happened was people would then game the system. So rich people would just buy two cars and you ended up with more congestion on the So whenever you see the incentives, you'll often have an insight in what the outcome is going to be. What was that British criminals dying thing? Oh, yeah. This was, I think, it goes back to understanding history. When you, the fascinating thing of Australia was essentially where we just sent our criminals. Penal colony. Is wild. So what, one of the reasons why I love understanding history, because you begin to realize how absurd reality is, that the current day is.

2:02:22And so there's a story from when the Brits were moving prisoners, I believe, over to Australia. And they were originally paid per person getting on the boat. And back then, like, there wasn't great HR policies. They'd treat people particularly well. And it was something like 33 % would die on the voyage from Britain to Australia. But the people already paid, they don't give a fuck. Then when they changed the system that they would get paid for, when the people arrived in Australia, the survival rate went from 66 % to like 99%. So again, all you've done there is changed the incentive system. Looping back to the beginning of the conversation, things that are sometimes more important than hard work, things that are more important than being busy, is actually understanding the incentives of the systems that you're operating in.

2:03:08And one tweak in somebody's incentives that's working for you or is in your life, the compounding impact that can have is absolutely absurd. Never attribute to conspiracy see what is more easily explained by incentives and incompetence from Navale? Yeah. That explains so much of modern politics, that explains so much of people making horrific or inhumane business decisions, wherever there's incentives. I always have this idea which is one good razor that I'm trying to implement is whenever somebody tells me something that goes is in line with their incentives, kind of massively downplay that idea and don't just download it.

2:03:50Because in the past, I've done that. Somebody will go, somebody who lives in this city will tell me why this city is great. And I go, oh, I'll download that piece of information. Then three years later, they leave the fucking city and I go, hold on, you told me this was amazing. And you're no longer here. Versus when they tell me the opposite. So when they tell me why they hate their city or, let's say they're talking about their partner or all their job, if they're going against their incentives and identity, the level of truth that's probably in that is so much greater than when people are going in line with their incentives.

2:04:18Is that a classic phrase of, never, oh, I think I wrote actually, it was there's two things you should never try and do, try and defy the laws of physics and get somebody to understand something that their salary depends on them, not understanding, or what they're paid for. People will not swim against their incentives on average. sausage fest. Talk to me about sausage first. Sausage fest, okay. Fuck it, I don't know what to say on sausage fest. Next, go on, next one. Well, I think that this came out of our Miami trip, which was a 20 person, how many people came? It was snow, it was like 14, 14 of us.

2:05:00But it's in Miami, and at least half of them are from the UK. Yes. So we realized that sausage fest or under price. underpriced assets. Yeah. Well, basically, I think the realization is, sausage fest is obviously a crude terminology for it. But essentially the idea is, I think it's both a male thing, a female thing, an individual personality thing. But when you're, I think as you get older, what tends to happen is people, particularly men, I think it's particularly a male problem, they stop hanging around their friends because they've got their relationship, they've got their kids and guys are just busy and we're not really emotional, they don't care for one another.

2:05:35And guys get lonely and lonely and and I'm convinced it's because they stop hanging around, like one of the reasons the suicide rate is so high is because they stop hanging around their friends. And I also think it often benefits their partner as well. I had this realization once when I was with my friend, Alex at a bar in Manchester, and we're chatting away. And I could see these girls kind of looking over, like, oh, maybe these guys will talk to us. And I just start burst out laughing, because I'm in the process of breaking down Jim Sharks negative cash flow conversion cycle. And I got, if only they could hear what we were talking about, they'd immediately find us so unattractive.

2:06:09But I think guys and girls sometimes need, depending on their personality type, obviously some people get it from different means, need that synchronicity where they can get the thing that their partner would find so unattractive out of them in that nerdy environment. And by the way, this is so true, I think, with the reverse as well, I imagine if the girls are doing a girls night and one of the girls is like, I can Danny come. And he's like, just completely ruins the vibe and the girls can't fully let their hair down. I think that ability to let out your inner nerd is, if you've seen Ryan long did a sketch, which was the guy that brings his girlfriend everywhere.

2:06:45And it's so fucking clever, man. Like I love that world of sketches. Shane Gillis is doing it really well, but Ryan I think is sort of gold standard for it at the moment. Everyone knows the person, the dude whose girlfriend either doesn't like him to go out on his own, or the couple that kind of just always seem cemented together. They just never, never really a part, even if it's supposed to be a boy's night or whatever. And it's the guy who brings his girlfriend everywhere. But this guy is part of a criminal trio that's about to try and rob a bank. So he turns up and the girlfriends with him and the other two dudes.

2:07:20Okay, like, why did you bring Stephanie? He goes, no, she's fine, man. You know, like she's fine. And then she starts complaining about the fact that she needs to wear all black. And she's like, why do we always have to wear all black? Like, you know, can we not add a little bit of color in and they said, right, we've got to put the tights over our heads so that they can't detect you Said I've just done my hair. I'm not wearing that tight and it's just oh fucking phenomenal idea and it's true. It's true. I Sossi's faster underpriced. What's the equivalent? What's the female equivalent? You can't really say this without coming up with something that'll get you fucking cancer.

2:07:56There's no equivalent I'm sure that there'll be some words on the answer I think it's definitely a male thing where when you're young, you wanna hang out with a few similar like -minded men, and then obviously as you hit puberty, you wanna be around dating, and then as you get older, actually, the reason why I think a lot of men are depressed is because they stop hanging around. There's some really good evidence to suggest that one of the reasons that men suffer more, men are hit harder by divorce, not just financially, but socially. I think the biggest predictor before suicide for men over the age of 40 is divorce.

2:08:32The deaths of divorce and deaths of despair. One of the main reasons being that men often subjugate their social networks because women are better at keeping in contact with close friends. And then the wife's friend group becomes the husband's friend group. And then when the divorce happens, not only does the husband lose a wife, he also loses his entire social circle because their original loyalty lies with her. And he's now in this sort of weird scenario where he's been marooned from the most important relationship he had and all of the other ansitory relationships that would have helped him to weather those storms.

2:09:09Robin Dunbar talks about the fact that he's got this Dunbar's number, but it's really interesting when you break it down properly. He's been on a show twice. And he talks about these sort of concentric circles going up. And I think it's like maybe a thousand or even five thousand people that you can have that are kind of, you know, the name or you're aware of who they are or whatever it might be. You've got this 150 number, but the real important one is the most the tightest circle in the middle, which is five. You say, you can have around about five close friends, really close friends. And in order to sustain a relationship with one of your close friends, you need to spend, I think it's two hours a week in contact with them, ideally in person.

2:09:45But a relationship, a committed relationship takes up two spots. So you go from having five friends to actually only having three friends plus your partner. That's how much attention needs to be paid. And this is on average, just people like an F -tencle as friends, I'm sure, or one or whatever, none. But yeah, when you realize, okay, how am I subjugating my friend circle for the relationship? And I mean, it's the meme as his old age time that your boy Spends all of this time with you when he's single gets into a relationship disappears off the end of the end of the earth And then six months later breaks up and he's like boys I'm back.

2:10:29Yes, but the reason why I think it's a underpriced sausage fester underpriced assets Which you never thought I'd say out loud is the This scene is so lame even the tonology is quite lame But it ultimately makes that individual happier because they can get their nerdy weird self out there their partner gets really, finds them maybe a little bit icky when they talk about Jim Sharp's negative cash flow conversion cycle. So they get that out. They have the insurance policy of anything ever happens to their relationship, they still maintain these incredible friendships that they have. And ultimately, the relationships then healthier because they've got this, they've got some a bit of a loan time and attraction comes back.

2:11:05Yep. It's crazy how often that's sacrificed. And when you see the suicide numbers, it sounds ridiculous, then link everything back to that, but I would be surprised if that plays a small factor. Well, at least. I tell you why Susage Fester underpriced is a valid, like, we had skin in the game in Miami. So it was George's 30th month ago, month and a half ago, something in Miami and 14 guys come over and we have this big villa and everyone's staying there and we have the most non -typical Miami 30th, which included group breath work, e -foiling at eight in the morning, pickle ball, and it was a Saturday afternoon and we'd done the breath work thing.

2:11:42we got up and maybe going to go carting or something like that earlier on. So you'd had the typical sort of morning and then it's 1 .30 pm, beautiful Miami weather in the middle of April and you think, right, okay, 14 lads who are all aged between 25 and 38 or something. And you go, right, they're going to go send it. They're going to go to Soho Beach House. They're going to go to downtown. And I've got the contacts just in there. You say, I can and so you're out at one Miami tonight, you're like, where do you wanna go? What you really wanna do, you wanna do an early dinner here, and then you wanna, cause the club start picking up at around about 11, all the rest of it.

2:12:17And we've got this huge plan of different things that we could do, we piece it together and all the rest of it. I can't remember who it was. I don't think it was me, but someone, so, and we've been talking about this for an hour. All of the different things and all the guests that's been sorted and all the rest of it. And someone just went, And boys, do you feel like you're staying in the villa? And the shot in shit. And that was it for the rest of the night. We took a little trip to Lidl Havana, came back, maybe we did gov' dinner, we went for dinner on the nighttime, and then that was the day that we bailed out of everything else.

2:12:52So yeah, we put skin in the game for the sausage fest like camp, for skin in the game. Where should people go? Don't want to keep up to date with all of this stuff that you're doing. Yeah, if they want to keep up to date with everything I'm doing, Twitter's always a good spot. Twitter at George -DashMac. Someone's got George Mac with bastards. And then by the time this is out, my website should be live. So that's just George -Mac .com. And that'll have all my best ever essays and a few that'll nugget some there. And what's the mailing list? George -Mac .com. You'll find the newsletter list on there as well.

2:13:27Hell yeah. Appreciate you, man. Thank you so much for having me.