#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny

26:46You have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Pete Atil, I was thinking about this the other day, he has this question of what do or what does what opinion do you hold that few people agree with you on? And this idea of trying to get you to become an independent thinker, which is quite a difficult question to answer. I certainly struggle with it. But there's a flip of that question, which is what do essentially most people agree upon but nothing's changing? And I think it's the education system is definitely not a good thing. It's obviously not necessarily, there's worse options, right?

27:21Before it existed. But I can't think of anything that as many people agree upon that this thing doesn't prepare you for real life. And a good indicator of a training system, I was thinking about this. A good indicator of a training system is how closely mimics the actual thing. So driving lessons are incredible because you're literally driving. And it's painful. But meanwhile, how much do you remember from school? Essentially zero. I was thinking about, you know, who I'd love to meet, whoever is in charge of foreign languages in the UK at the department level. I've never met anybody who's learned Spanish, French, apart apart from like Bonsia or Ola.

28:01That's it. But we still keep going. Dedicated two hours a week for two years to it. Yeah, it's bizarre. I have an issue with the early on education system. I know that you've got a massive issue with university as well. For me, I found university to be useful as like a crash course in socialization. But it feels like you've ordered a main course that tasted like dog shit and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the gravy that came along with it or the plate that it was put on, the plate that this dog shit food was served on. That was an enjoyable experience. I took a lot away from that plate.

28:44It's very well designed, great quality. I really remember it. But yeah, it does feel like if you're trying to create a highly agentic populace, school isn't exactly the best preparation. Have you seen, I need to double verify these studies, I'd be interested to replicate them. There's a guy called I think Dr. Land who worked for NASA and designed these creative thinking tests to basically gauge how creative somebody is and the way they would do that is ask, for example, number of solutions, different types of solutions they come up with, how they vary from everybody else's solutions, things like that.

29:24And a five year old an average of the 1500 that they surveyed, scored like 98 % on creativity, kind of follows up every five years and it just, it looks like the reverse of Bitcoin's price, it's just, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, down, down, down, down, down. And you know, we spoke on the previous show of the average person dies at 25 and isn't buried until 75. At the follow -up of the study, the 25 year olds, 2 % was the, 2 % of them scored as like creative thinkers. And it kind of makes sense when you put through this model of wrong, right answer, set curriculum for you, Pavlovie, and Dutton, get outside of the box.

30:02Yeah. Don't question the question ever. That doesn't go down well at schools. No. Why do we need to learn this? What's the point of doing that? No, you'd be able to a disruptive kid. You'd be a bad student. You'd be a bad student if you ask questions about the question. My brother tells me this funny story of when he was at school, and he was probably not the most well -behaved kid at school. but one day he was like flicking around on the history books and came fascinated by like communism in Russia and China and all these people going down this bad ideology. And the teacher like goes, what are you doing?

30:32I'm just absolutely fascinated by this. That's great, but that's not on the curriculum and just went back to something about Henry VIII completely changed the curriculum. But it is fascinating that I do think we're at this momentous period of time where you now have chat GPT Claude all these AI tools coming in where even the work now just completely redundant even this model of preparing for an exam Like talk about feedback loops. You don't find out your exam results to even forget even judging exams itself Not finding out your exam results for three months is such a terrible feedback loop within itself Yeah Rory Sutherland told me this really be funny, parable.

31:14So he said, a copywriter, a graphic designer, and an account executive step onto a plane together. And they open up the overhead locker, and the genie comes out. He says, God, I've been locked in there for so long. Thank you. Thank you for giving me. I'll give you one wish each. So the designer says, I think I'd like to have DaVinci's life. I like to have his skills and stability to represent things graphically. He says, done the way he goes. And then the copywriter comes over. He says, I think I'd like to live like Hemingway did. You know, the women, the lifestyle, writing ability, oh, the writing ability.

32:00Done. He can't exactly if he comes over. He says, what would you like? And he says, I'd like those two guys back, we've got a meeting in two and a half hours. That's working. That's so rory. Well, off topic, but I have to include it. There's the on top of plain experiments. Charlie Munger tells that one of, he goes on a plane, terrorists hijacked the plane and say, right, you've got one last dying wish before we blow this sucker up. Think wisely. Then he goes, can I tell you about the beauty of Costco's business This one. There's an equivalent about aliens come down to earth and they say humanity, we can do whatever you want.

32:42You can ask us any question and some idiot that listens to your podcast from the back shout, what's your morning routine? A fuck may be. Okay, good. What about, I mentioned some of my sort of real peak high agency people, the evacuated one with this guy that was self taught. Is there anyone else that comes to mind? Yes. Let me um, let me skip ahead. So skip ahead. Just before I go onto that one, we have, I just wanted to show you this because it's just fucking cool to see if you this is the topography of tears. Have you seen this? The topography of tears. Yes. Like so yeah, this um photographer, I will come back onto your question but just quickly let me blast through this.

33:23This photographer took different types of tears and put them under a microscope. And here, for example, is tears of grief. Here is tears of joy. They actually look different under a microscope. Wow. So this was just a way for me to try and get into the show, because it looks so cool. But like the agency example here is being a funeral and thinking, fuck, I never got in touch for the last few years. And now they're gone. Tears of grief. at the other end, tears of joy of fuck. I'm so glad that we did that holiday together, and I'm so glad that I arranged all those trips that I did with them. So I thought that was a, that's fascinating.

34:09I wonder why that's the case. I want to know what those structures are made of. I want to know what those lines are. So for the people that are listening, the tears of grief, much more sparse, whatever the lines, there's some kind of structure. It looks a little bit like a halfway between little cells and electrical circuits, and then the other end, the tears of joy, have a lot more activity, a lot more structure in them, there's lines everywhere. And I wonder what that is. We can dig deeper and come back. Let me go back to your question. I really ignored. So essentially, I want to come on to the most high agency person, but I just want to address probably the YouTube comments at this point.

34:50So I wanted to steal, I wanted to steal man the other side. So for example, life happens to people, you piece of shit. Hope you get full stage cancer. So I can call you up and tell you to happen to life. Can't wait to tell the orphans they just need to happen to life. And big nose twat. Do you've written that? That was just one of somebody from your task or awful. I don't know. You do seem to have a very accurate perception of what the comments are going to be. If everyone can comment small nose twat in the, in the section below, that'd be great. Essentially, the most apex high agency example is this guy coming up now.

35:27So, let's just linger on that thing for a second. The, why do you think it is that conversations around being able to happen to life, self -authorship, agency, taking control? So why do you think it is that it triggers that particular immune response from people?

35:49I think they're right. I think they're right at the end of the day. That's why I'll come onto it in a second, but I don't want to misconvey that life doesn't happen. It definitely happens. Going back to the London example earlier, like if it wasn't for the heat,

36:09if it wasn't two to three hours hyperthermia and death. So I don't think they're wrong, and I think it makes sense. But then when this is why I take it away from a self -help conversation, when you begin to go, well, does it defy the laws of physics in terms of knowledge creation? Mm. Well, no, it doesn't. So therefore it is possible. It doesn't mean that awful things aren't going to happen. They're almost guaranteed to happen, which is why I tried to update the model based off their feedback. I don't think they're rock. So essentially, it's more of a four -dimensional model that the higher agency somebody has, the more life is happening, sorry, the more agency that they ultimately have.

36:55Which is why I wanted to come on to. So life is happening is there is a pressure up against you and there is a pressure of you leaning into it at the same time. Yeah, that's interesting. I was having this conversation. Destiny taught me this. I think I gave it some wanky me name of the two -step theory of two -step flow potential, I think I called it, two -step theory potential. So, Destiny, I felt was kind of an interesting person to put this to, because he's somebody that's from the left, but also has quite a lot of agency. In fact, I'm reading a book at the moment by Martin Salligman that has a quiz.

37:32And much of the quiz is asking you questions about agency, a person steals something from a shop, what are the reasons for why they stole? Like, did they have choice? Could they have done differently, et cetera? And this is supposed to map you on the spectrum from left to right. And but destiny seems at least when I asked him these questions, to be someone who kind of does take charge, it doesn't really sort of outsource to structure and environment things which are maybe of personal responsibility. And I asked him this question about, well, how do you marry the fact that people are both at the mercy of the environment around them and the authors of their own life that you don't want to externalize your sense of control?

38:15But you also have to understand that there are limits to what you can do. And he basically describes it as having a range within which your outcomes in life, your capacity sit and this range is determined by your genetics, the environment you're in, the time that you were born, that you could be the best guitar player in history. But if you were born before the guitar was invented, guess what? It's not happening. So he says, there is a range that you sit within and this is determined by the environment you're in, things are outside of your control. But within that range, everything is exclusively on you.

38:55And for some people, it's easier for some people it's harder, but there is a range that you sit within. And I think that that kind of marries things quite nicely. Some people mean you probably not going to do very well in the NBA. But within the range that we do have football freestyle, perhaps you can get a bit further. Yeah, I think just to on that specific point, it's not the problems don't happen. It's that fundamentally all problems are solvable. So, and it all comes down to agency like cancer, as horrific as it is and it happens to people. It's truly fucking horrific, but it's ultimately a humanity level.

39:32It's an agency problem. Get your next slide out for the slides. In other news this episode is brought to you by Function. Did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers? That leaves a lot of gaps when it comes to understanding your health, which is why I partnered with function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one. They've got a team of expert physicians that takes that data, put into a simple dashboard and gives you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, thyroid function, plus Dr.

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40:41I call Wilbur. No, great name. So let's just start off with life happening to him. So smart kid, Wilba. He wants to go to Yale universities about to get in. He's playing hockey one day and gets his face smashed in so badly. By a bloke, it's interesting studying history. This bloke was clearly a nutter. And guess what to do for nutters, they prescribe them cocaine. I know a few nutters like that, mainly in Northern Rail over the years. So anyway, it's prescribed cocaine. Smashes this guy's face him. So much so, he's bedridden for two to three years. Wow. So Yale University's canceled. Whilst he's bedridden, his mum is terminally ill, so he's kind of in bed.

41:31I imagine caring for her while she's in bed back and forth. So truly life is happening. Wilba, this fucking guy, man, this guy sat there in bed, asked the question, why can birds fly, but humans can't? Why is that? So just sits there in bed, getting book after book, and there's not many books back then about aerodynamics and how things can fly, but he's studying birds. Wilbur teams up with his brother, becomes fascinated by the question and starts to move over on the spectrum a little bit over here to like happen if he was. Yes, his surname is right. Indeed indeed. So Wilbur and Orville, his brother, they reverse from first principles, where is the best place with wind and sand?

42:28in America because they need to test flight, they need to find somewhere with a soft landing and with enough wind to begin to test it. So they get all the weather bureau consensus data which back then there's no internet so they're just reaching out to a local council and finding the ship and he Sorry, they have all this weather data and They've realized it's 700 miles away in Kitty Hawk and I realized well, are they can just fly it? I was like, oh no, they can't fly there, right? So this is the furthest they've ever been from home. They go all the way down to Kitty Hawk and the two of them, talk about happening to life.

43:05The two of them, and by the way, back then, this is a key thing that people, I always forget about history, is that it was a mock thing. Flying was seen as everybody who tried it failed or died. There was poems at the time of how ridiculous it would be, like to even think you could fly like it was a joke at the time. So the two of them, a scene in Kitty Hawk, I'm not quite sure. Imagine this. You're looking outside your window and there's these two brothers. They're for hours at the egg tide, just like moving their arms like this, pretending they're different types of birds, just mimicking the way birds move their fucking wings.

43:40So they're there for ages. They then begin to design like a wing system based off the way birds do. The next problem that they have is they realize that all the measurements around aerodynamics that they've been given up a time from a German fellow were completely incorrect. So they have to, they build when they go back home, they build a wind tunnel in their garage, like they can go about 27 miles an hour and they're creating little objects and putting it through. And they reverse engineer, oh, everything that we know about aerodynamics is completely wrong. So they fix that problem. And it's problem after problem.

44:15It's next building an engine that's light enough and you end up with a scenario. So before they create the airplane, they have to fail you, have to fail you, have to fail you, have to fail you. Wilbur looks at his brother one day and says, no man will ever fly for a thousand years. One year later, he's up there in the airplane and flies for the first time ever. And that for me is, I think Wilbur, right, and obviously his brother all the, is the apex example of high agency and the impact it then has. because unless you study history you just go, well, bands always been able to fly. And you can know this has been since the early 1900s that we'd be able to do it in the amount of time.

44:55I don't, how many times a week do you think about the right purpose? Ever since you sent me that photo, I encountered a situation that was toward the start of this year and I explained it to you and you sent me this photo and it must be, is it Wilbur in the plane and Orville on the hill in front of him and he's doing this? Yeah. And he's jumping and he's got his hands in the air and this plane is off the ground. And yeah, I know that you use this to basically tyrannize your staff. I think about it once a week. So I'll be like staring when there's a plane going by. Once you know the story, you'll be staring when there's a plane going by.

45:30I'm a girlfriend and be like, you're thinking about the Wright brothers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the fact that most people don't know their names, the fact that it's not statutes, the fact that it's not a day. And meanwhile, there's like me getting on an ember, it's like stressing out my fucking... 20 minutes late. And you're now there going, what do you mean they've not got diet coax on the plane? And there's TV entertainment there. But it's just agency, like a problem that seemed completely insolvable, didn't defied the laws of physics. It was possible. And now we, our whole world, me and you being here today flying into London is purely because of these two fuckers.

46:00I kind of like that. I'd love to dig a bit deeper into his story and do a little bit more research around the fact that he said that a man went for a thousand years but didn't stop and then gone there a year later. I've been really, really spending a lot of time thinking about not believing that you're worthy of achieving a thing and yet still managing to attain it anyway. This sort of make it until you fake it basically. A lot of the time we believe that we need to have faith in a thing before we can go and do the thing. But it's an unnecessary precursor. It may make the process more enjoyable.

46:39it may make you have more confidence, it may make you more efficient and the things that you do may make me more effective at getting the outcomes that you need. But it's largely an unnecessary step. If we assume that what you're optimizing for is outcomes, not inputs. If you can do the outcomes, regardless of how you got that, whether you believe that you were going to do it or not, whether you thought it'd be a thousand years or either you thought it'd be six months, if you do, someone could have been Wilbur, alternate universe, slightly different personality and been like, we're going to get it done in three weeks and it would have taken a year.

47:06If you'd done the same things, it's not going to be the Cuban manual want fly for a thousand years. And it's going to happen in a year. So just, you know, me and you talk about we obsessed about this a lot of your birthday this summer. But the more and more that I think about it, optimizing for outcomes, not for inputs is just it sides through everything and oddly is quite a high agency way to to do this because the true or another element of high agency would be accepting that you live in an irrational world and that your psychology is one that is not built to be able to accurately identify how outcomes are going to come from inputs.

47:49So stop believing that you know how this is going to work. And just okay, this thing seems to be happening in whatever way. Both me and you are on ridiculous diets. Come, do you know why it works? A kind of, I can probably grow science, cobble something together, some doctor probably could do. But I bet that there's maybe even more explanations for why it shouldn't work or doesn't or whatever is ridiculous. I'm like, yeah, but I feel better when I'm on it. I'm optimizing for outcomes. I'm not bothered about the mechanism. I'm not bothered about the inputs. Yes, because fundamentally it was possible.

48:20That's the big thing. And this is a try and say this in the least offensive way, but I think there's some truth to it that a lot of high achievers or high -agency people are often described as being on the ass purges or autism spectrum. And I think the reason behind that is that all their bottlenecks are just logistics and operations. Just you look at someone like Elon or Zucker, somebody like that, Bezos, and a lot of it is just logistics operations bottlenecks, whereas for maybe people who like myself that go through the education system and really struggle to then break out of that way of thinking bottleneck.

48:59It's creativity bottleneck, it's a emotional bottleneck. There's a big one of like, what will people think if I do this? Yep. But there's so many different bottlenecks that aren't logistics and operations, but for people who have a little touch of the tizentism or the aspergers. What's the opposite of high -agency? It would be low -agency. It would be outsourcing your worldview to other people who are just outsourcing their worldview to you. And you just have this kind of reflexive mirror. What's your one around the, is it the Faberine paradox? Is it that one? But Abeline paradox. Abeline paradox.

49:38Yeah, that somebody invites you to their wedding thinking that you want to go, you say yes, despite not wanting to be there because you think that they want you there. It describes how in a system, especially a social system, people can arrive at a suboptimal scenario for everybody because everybody presumes that everybody else wanted it. It's not too dissimilar to the Keynesian beauty contest that you spoke about previously, which is where you make a judgment in a beauty contest, not who you think is the most beautiful, but who you think other people will think is the most beautiful. And then you can continue to scale this back, right?

50:13It's just an infinite, regressive prediction all the way back. So talking about low agency, you know, both of me and you, since you first came on the show six years ago, inversion is one of those really powerful tools. goals. So maybe a third of what people should try to do is become high agency, but probably two thirds of what they should do is try to avoid being a low agency. So talk to me about how you come to think about that side of the equation. In the essay around high agency that I've written, which we can link to, essentially what I call them low agency traps that are just easy. And I've documented maybe nine or ten, But I think there's infinite amount of agency traps just part of being a human being.

50:58So there's a few, which I'll, I can read now. So I, one is called the Midwit trap. And the way, I think in what's a fun way I'm actually explaining this about boring people. And it's an SMS message. So imagine you're in a third world jail and you've got someone who's in the Midwit trap and you text them, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? This is how the Midwit trap would think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lots of updates from me. I'm on day 30 of my juice cleanse.

51:32I'm thinking of doing a degree in criminology to specialise in how Jail's works so I can get you out. And I've also watched 30 TED talks on the topic. So the Midwit trap, I've got PhD in the Midwit an over complicating thing. So for the midwit track where it comes from is the midwit meme, so you have the guy on the left, the guy on the right, the guy on the middle, two opposite ends of the IQ Belkov, and the guy on the left and the guy on the right often come to the same simple conclusion. The guy on the left can't overthink things, so he just goes for the simple answer. The guy on the right is so intelligent that he's demystified everything and come back to the simple shit, and the guy in the middle is the one who's managed to overcomplicate things and overthink things.

52:20So like one meme that I made is, Guy on the left, make something people want, Guy on the right, make something people want when it comes to business. Then in the center it's, I'm going to do this five year consultancy program and then I'm going to watch all these TED talks and then once I've done these surveys, I'm ultimately going to find the thing. So the guy in the midwet trap would never even get moving with any agency towards breaking out of a federal jail because he's constantly overthinking and trying to intellectualize things too much. Yeah. I think specificity as well is something else that me and you talk about a lot, avoiding vagueness.

52:56And it's necessary but not sufficient to become high agency or to avoid low agency is to have intentionality, right, to choose what it is that you're going to do. If high agency is winning at the game, intentionality is choosing which game you're going to play. When I was thinking about high agency originally, I had four things that underpin it. So if you imagine high agencies like this table here, and then you have the four legs, the four things that I think underpin it are clear thinking, resourcefulness, biased action, and disagreeability. So if you even go back to the right brother story the amount of clear thinking that they needed to do throughout of OOK, oh, the aerodynamics, let's actually take these to first principles and test it.

53:51The amount of resourcefulness of, and I'd probably think resourcefulness, interesting at your opinion on this, it's like creativity and persistence combined, like the ability to create new novel creative solutions. Bios to action is just like moving, moving, moving Napoleon style. And disagreeability is the guy earlier when Darren Brown rings the bell who sits there and goes, well, maybe there is maybe I don't have to follow everybody else and perfect example being the right brothers rather than just carrying on their bike shop and trying to build that enterprise, disagreed with the whole consensus based off the laws of physics that people could fly.

54:25So you have those four things and I think going back to your point there, intention out, intentionalism is like a sister of like clear thinking. Yes. It's like a clear thinking leads to intentionism. Yeah. Doing what you meant to do. Yes. Because yeah, there's definitely a difference between high agency. You could fund it theoretically be high agency and unintentional that we've spoken about before. Yeah, we know. Absolutely. A psychopath. A few people like that. Yeah. But it results in you being very original and action oriented in the service of something that's a total fucking waste of time.

55:02And I mean that, that would be kind of like a version of hell because you had all of the difficult raw materials, you had all of the skills, you had all of the networking, you had all of the capacity to actually bring to bear something on this fucking, very hard to wrangle planet. And you were pointing in totally the wrong direction. It's the George Soros thing, right? It's George Soros who I'm sure we're going to get flagged. immediately on YouTube for mention. So Ross. But becoming one of the most successful hedge fund managers ever, and if rumors are to be true or believed to be true, he wanted to be a philosopher.

55:42And he spent his whole life just crashing the pound and trailing away. But just kept going up. Bill Burkins has that bit in his book about that mate of his who said, stop me when I get to 20 million and just keeps going at 50 million. and he's now at like multiple billions and he's still going because he's addicted to it. So yeah, you could have resourcefulness, clear thinking, biased action, disagreeability, but without intentionalism is a dangerous one. You're fully fucked. What are some of the other low agency traps? Another one kind of related to what you mentioned there is the rumour nation trap.

56:21So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Sorry for the slow reply. I've been thinking about it. I know I've spent the last year thinking about it. I think I just need more time to think. I'm trying to think about my overthinking problem. If I can solve that, I think I can start. So the rumination trap is... One, I began to learn a lot more from doing cognitive behavioral therapy. and it's just this endless loop. I mean, we were chatting about this the other day of if you could analyze the 50 to 60 ,000 thoughts per day and really see them, the problem with the human brain is, you have these 50 to 60 ,000 thoughts, but because they're constantly in short -term memory, you don't fully, if you could see the graph.

57:11You'd love a dashboard. Yeah, if you could see the dashboard, I thought about, I've worried about that conversation with somebody 20 % of the week for the last three years. and it's just ruminating around, but when it's their fresh and consciousness, you don't see the dashboard. You don't see that. So you just want to do things going on there. There's the fact that you're in a new place, a new time of life, and you can always have an old thought in a slightly new way, gives it a sense of novelty. So you kind of kid it into believing that it's something new. And the other part is that we're creatures of habit, and old thoughts, even ones that are quite uncomfortable, are familiar to us.

57:48And that familiarity gives us a sense of comfort, and that comfort gives a sense of sort of habituation. You might not, obviously not with this show, because it's fantastic. But many people will watch or listen to YouTube channels that they kind of don't really enjoy anymore, but they just know where they're gonna go. They're very predicted. It's like putting on an old comfortable leather pair of shoes. Like slide my feet into these. I know it is opinion is gonna be, this is sweet. And the algorithm just keeps you in this static loop. Of course it does. So, yeah, rumination traps. So the rumination trap, I'm gonna guess is, diametrically opposed to bias for action.

58:23Yes. It's the opposite of that. So a personal rumination story that I had was, and the problem with rumination is, you try and forecast into the future constantly. That's the big thing from cognitive behavioral therapies, they call it the crystal ball or your trunner forecast in the future ahead. And unless you can get a perfect outcome, you just kick the can down the road. and then ultimately you end up with not much road left and just a lot of cans. Yes. So one that came to mind for me, so when I was thinking about clear thinking, there's the three big decisions, right? There's where you live, who you're with and what you're doing.

59:01And one thing I struggled with for ages was, I'm in this location right now, maybe I could go to this other location. And what would happen in my head is I would have option A of me staying in current location, or option B, going to new location. And when I would think of option A, it would go nightmare mode. So everything that could possibly go wrong would go wrong. And the other option has worked out perfectly. And then I'd flip to the other option, and the reverse was true. When I had left and gone to that location, everything's gone wrong, and I've now missed out on everything. And as a result, it's this doom loop that then begins to occur.

59:37And the more you kick the can down the road, the more you ruminate, the bigger this thing becomes. and it's this absolute doom loop cycle. And then I don't wanna think about this, which makes the thing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Yeah, I mean, there's a conversation I had recently about action being an antidote to anxiety and that the bias for action just, look, you might think that by worrying and obsessing and ruminating and thought looping and fearing and gripping your way through this problem, that it reduces down the likelihood of it happening somehow, that it brings to bear more control, that it almost like impacts reality in some sort of a way, it makes no difference.

1:00:20Again, what do we focus on? We're focused on outcomes, not on inputs. And the people that have that bias for action, they end up just finding out whether or not this thing is going to work way quicker. The biggest thing that I actually found with for people listening who probably had that doom loop that I have and still have is, in terms of getting a bias to action, is rather than calling it a decision, just moving to experiments. Yep, so just looking at the two and going, oh, okay, I think this one has 60 % probability, this one has 40 % probability. I'm gonna go over the 60 % one and I'm gonna fully back the decision and our book time, six months from now to review how it went and then change if not.

1:00:55Because I realized in the five years spent ruminating about the two different options, I could have lived in both cities multiple times. So, of us have done things where we've spent more time taking and making a decision than it would have taken to have worked out whether it was going to work or not. Yes, so much time wasted. And the thing I love about that is, if you actually just did the thing, the amount of real data that you're a mid -dolar, can't just sit there creating these doomsday scenarios. The big realization I had when I spoke to the CBT guy that I worked with was when you actually look at those nightmare modes that are playing, what's really strange about rumination is it skips like two to three years in the future.

1:01:34And the worst case scenario, it's always, is I won't be able to cope. The worst case scenario will happen. I won't be able to cope and people will judge me. Is what happens in the doom loop in the rumination cycle. But it always skips two to three years in the future. And you made a great point of, it's like a horror film. It just starts now and goes two to three years in the future. It goes, but realize more like a documentary. What you have agency, what's all the steps that lead you up? You can be allowed or change or adjust costs at any point along that. Yeah, I think a good way of moving out the rumination cycle, I kind of caught the difference between clear thinking and muddy thinking.

1:02:06And ultimately, we spoke about this the other day. The kind of aphorism I have, you know, the Nietzsche saying, I've never trust a thought that happens indoors. Never trust a thought that happens in your head is a good rule of thumb. And I like that balaji idea of transformation. So if thought happens in my head, it's not true until I've drawn it out, written it down, spoken it out loud to another person, creating an equation, put it in a spreadsheet whatever it is. And I actually think probably 50 % of the benefits of therapy is just going from head to mouth. It's more. It's more than that. You know, this is one of the reasons why I'm not on substake, but I'm an avatar for people having a substake or some form of written publicly consumed form of artistic output or self -reflecture, specifically for self -reflection.

1:02:59I'm a really good avatar for someone that would not have been able to keep up a writing practice for four and a half years I however long it's been now since I launched my newsletter and now we're like a quarter of a million words written in Whatever four and a half years something like that But it's invariably the best part of my week my favorite thing The guy that does the podcast his favorite thing is the hour and a half that he spends writing every week because of that precise reason, it synthesizes down the most salient thing that I've learned from that one week. And I know you only have whatever 500 words or a thousand words to write this in.

1:03:34So I need to be like high in brevity, I need to be pretty precise. I need to triage what it is I wanna talk about. So if I talk about this, I can't talk about that. So which one's it gonna be? Which one's more important to you? Do you need feeling more right now? And yeah, you know, big fan of people having, especially a public -facing version of this. I understand, here we go. Yeah, go, go now. Uh, we'll get back to talking to George in one minute, but first I need to tell you about element. For the last three years, every single day, I have started my morning with element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.

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1:04:44That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any box by going to link in the description below. are heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. We have a, people that journal it phenomenal in many ways because you're able to say things that you can't for public consumption. But I get the sense that at least for me, when I write things for public, I'm held to such a rigorous standard for precision to really, really clarify my thinking that I'm sure I miss lots of advantages that proper journaling would allow, but it also does other things, which is I think it's easier for you to create structures and frameworks and ideas that you can then later refer to, supposed to like referring to this messy thing that's kind of all over the place that's in a journal.

1:05:38So yeah, it's a mix bag. One thing on the writing side that I found specifically useful related to that is a photo can't do this, a video can't quite do this, But writing actually gives you the ability to go back 10 years, let's say 10 years in the future now, and understand how you think today, or be able to nap today, go back 10 years in the eye. Just nap. Yeah, that's how I thought. And because so many of the thoughts just disappear completely down the drain. It's so beautiful in that regard. What about some more traps? Some more traps. So, we mentioned specificity there. So, this is the vague trap.

1:06:17So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Yes, I've been working around the clock. Amazing. Any specific updates? I don't have any timelines yet. Or deadlines. Or action items, but I'm working on it. And, yeah, the vague trap is, I think, such an easy one to fall into because you're just trying to avoid falsifiable criteria. The biggest takeaway I took from musk's biography was, it's just like endless anecdote of, we're going to do this by X -Day this time, and then there's a timer around the office to the second, counting down to that specific thing, and then the gas, the metaphor, if you have a container, the gas will just expand or increase based off the size of the container.

1:07:05Constantly, it seems to come back. Constantly, it's law written all over the factory. There's a great line of general ambition, give you, general ambition, give you anxiety, specific ambition, give you direction. And I mean, specificity everywhere is so important, even in writing, or talking, the more specific that you are, the more impactful it can be. And I actually find the reason why specificity, we avoid it, people in the vague trap, or at least myself, the reason why we avoid it is because there's a failure point. There's no criteria for success. There's no criteria for failure. Yeah. And if you can just live in that generality, it's impossible to ever have agency, I think.

1:07:48So when I played cricket, when I was getting towards 17, 18, I was on the box to Durham, which is a top flight club team in the UK, would be equivalent to whatever Manchester United Academy or something like that. And I remember that on a Monday, the coach would call and got on. You might have checked the papers, you might not have done because my performance would have been in the papers in terms of numbers. But he would ring me and he'd ask how I got on. Now remember the weeks where I was really low confidence, which would happen quite a lot. The specific style of cricket that I played was kind of like a special match circumstance.

1:08:31So the conditions needed to be very right. It was the leg spin, which is like a complex type of bowling. And if the game wasn't at the right format, if it was too short, you didn't tend to get bold. If the pitch was too wet, if the ground wasn't gripping, if wickets were tumbling or weren't tumbling sufficiently quickly, you were very far down the list. You were very powerful, but only to be used in specific, break glass in case of specific circumstance. And there's something on cricket called a TFC, thanks for coming. And it's when you you don't bat, you don't bowl and all you do is field. TSC, thanks for coming.

1:09:05That's what you captain would say to you. The end, thanks for coming mate. As opposed to well played or we can do better next time. And I remember I would get these calls and on the weeks when I wasn't confident, a lot of the time I'd just have a TFC and he would say, I have to get on over the weekend and I was like, do you know what it is? I wish I could have, I really wanted the opportunity. Secretly, I didn't, a lot of the time I didn't want the opportunity to have done it because by setting the potential for success, by having the opportunity for success, that would have been in criteria for failure.

1:09:32So a lot of it was fear of failure. And that was something that largely now I've managed to get it. I mean, once you've done a live show in front of 3 ,500 people, the potential for failure is, you know, you've looked it in the face. But I think, I'm a good avatar for someone. I think his disposition would have been low confidence, low self -esteem as a kid. And now, largely that's not the same sort of problem I have anymore. And you think a large amount of that is down to specificity or being less vague. Certainly being less vague, but largely it's just crushing volumes of testing yourself in the real world because again, you can make it until you fake it.

1:10:17If you just keep on doing things and stuff goes well, there's only so long that imposter syndrome or low confidence or low -southosteema or a lack of self -belief or whatever can exist. Before it just gets neutron start out of existence, you're like, I have this fucking super dense body of work that self -belief is overrated, generate evidence that Ryan Holiday quote. And you just generate so much evidence that it sucks the living shit out of whatever it is that you're worried about. But talking about the vague trap, I was in the gym in London, I told you this story. I was in the gym in London last week, the day of the show.

1:10:50And it's the Kensington, the gym, unmanned, it's a seller, it's a seller that has a gym in it that's open 24 hours and there's no staff at all looking after it. Means he go in and a couple of people ask for photos which is really nice. And one of the kids asked for photos, young guy maybe 21, 22, something like this and he comes up, take the selfie or whatever. And then as I'm leaving, I'm on my way out and he comes up and he's got a, I think he was recording, maybe I had a mic in his hand or something, and he was recording it. And he said, he broke it slightly, broken English. Hey, I know that you're gonna be busy, but I just wanted to ask you a question.

1:11:31I wanted to ask, I really want to become rich, and I'm 22 at the moment. I'm working in a full -time job, but I really want to have more self -discipline, and I want to make more money. Can you teach me how to have more self -discipline than make more money? I remember thinking, Zach stood there and Max, videographers stood there, and this is kid and I'm thinking, well, you know, he's asked, he's obviously something that's important to him. He's come up and he asked this person and he's said that he appreciates it. I've got places to be and such. I don't know, just give a flip and answer. I remember thinking like, that's a shit question.

1:12:05It's a really bad, like, can you teach me how to have more self control and make money, language barrier, etc., etc. But yeah, I think I told you this and your response would have been... The question, the question, shit. Like it's fundamentally... You would have said the first thing I would do is ask about a question. Yeah, I asked, that's the first bit of advice you give is ask about a question. And I think if you look at the big trap and how often it comes up, it's because of just even the question he asked there, it's just a lack of, it's a complete lack of clear thinking. It's just like clear, like muddy thinking, what I call it, is just like vague gifts in my head.

1:12:45or like JPEGs or words that are popping up and it's never going, what does that mean? Oh, grating that down, getting more specific, more specific, more specific. Like a great example would be, how can I be happy? It's probably the vaguest fucking question that's ever existed. And if you just view the brain as a question and chewing device that we're constantly asking questions and you basically, it's like asking a computer just an endless loop that never closes and it just completely expands into infinity, which then leads to this anxiety. But let's say for example, okay, example of general question, how can I be happy?

1:13:19Specific question would be, what does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? Where am I right now between the two? And then what's the easiest first step to move up that? That's so much more specific versus like a general thing. And I think that's probably the biggest sign I notice whenever I'll get a DM, whether it's a personal thing or a business thing, the easiest questions to answer or the best people are always, I mean, the most high agency people, it tends to be super specific. I've tried ABCDE, I saw that you mentioned F, I've done this specific thing here.

1:13:57This problem happened here, what do you think, versus, hey mate, I wanna do this at anything, question mark. It's so vague and it's so boundless that you could almost never apply knowledge because it's too general. What are the traps? Is there anything else? Let me see. We have the final one, which is the cynic trap. So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Question mark. I posted my idea on Reddit for feedback. This user called TwattMonkey72 broke down why it was a dumb idea. And then I spoke to my cynical British friends and they said, people like us don't do big things. I don't think there's any hope.

1:14:41Sorry. And just the reply is, you've literally not attempted anything yet. I think the cynicism thing is definitely, one of the reasons I mentioned the British thing in there is definitely a close, a one that's close to heart, just experiencing difference between Britain and America that we've spoken about countless times. Yeah, it's, there's also a degree, I suppose, of lack of specificity. There's a vagueness to it as well that if you don't try, you don't have to fear the pain of failure. Right? If I tell myself that all women are shit, then I'm never going to seek a relationship with the woman and as a consequence, I never have to feel the pain of rejection.

1:15:18But tell myself that things are never going to get better, then I'm excused of ever having to try. The cope is framing hope as delusion and optimism as embarrassing. And if you know that things are bad and that they're never going to get better, then it's the people acting like things can improve that are dumb and delusional on the problem. Yeah, the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. The upside of never trying is never having to feel the feel of failure. Yeah, I think that's partially true. But I think if you then, if you zoom out, so that's at the individual level, I think that's true.

1:15:52But if you zoom out, the kind of arrogance to be cynical, when you look at just from the wheel to the horse and carriage to the car to the airplane to the rocket. I think I tried to create a word for it once you're going to hate this because it's terrible branding. But like this Alzheimer's of the zeitgeist, like I call it zeit sound, it's fucking awful. No, it shouldn't be on the podcast. But we just have this weird cynicism around basically all the crazy ideas that have occurred We now just completely take for granted and then when we look at agency in the future Well, that's just absurd so in this weird middle zone of never appreciating the Just the right part of it, you know like back to back high -agency people high -agency people high -agency people Then I'm sat there on an ember its flight getting annoyed because my diet coax flat I'm never appreciating that and also not being able to appreciate that there's literally infinite potential knowledge creation.

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1:17:56A checkout that's LIV E M O M E and T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. Those are traps. What about beliefs? What what are the values and world views that high agency people are going to focus on primarily. Yeah, there's five key ones that I identified. So there's no unsolvable problem unless it defies the laws of physics. There's no adults, which is about previous adults don't exist. Adults don't exist. There's no way.

1:18:34There's no guarantee you won't die screaming, which is one of my favorite ones. I'll tell you the story behind that one. There's an old Joe Rogan podcast with a guy called Kevin Smith and he comes on and fuck man this is he comes on and he's telling the story of his dad and he talks about how his dad was this great guy like was one of the people that never made any mistakes work for the postal service just kind of gave up on his hopes and dreams just to make his family happy. So he never made never saw him make a mistake once. And he's out for dinner, one evening with his mom and his dad and his family.

1:19:17Now this amazing dinner, his dad goes back to the hotel. He gets a call at 3am and his brother says you need to come down to the hospital now, like dad's not well at all. He turns up to the hospital and his mom is crying like hysterically in a way he's never seen anybody cry before. And his brother just looks at him and like gives in the nod and just said, like, can just tell that his dad's died. And he says three words that he says sticks with him that still haunts him to this day. He died screaming.

1:19:58And as a result of that, he said, fuck it, like even a good guy like that, he died screaming. is just an absolutely horrific sight and he kind of justified that for having agency of his existence is that ultimately if you can do everything everything everything correct and you ultimately die screaming what's the point in not like chasing whimsies or just doing ridiculous shit that you can think of because it's such a I think the amount of people that die screaming that never gets spoken about because everybody has this idealized fantasy that they're just going to die peacefully in their sleep I'll take a load of our LSD and sleep the hookers and come their way out of it.

1:20:33But realistically, yeah, there's no guarantee that you won't die screaming. What does that justify? Well, I think it's the most extreme way of like a stoic way of looking at potential mortality in its face and realizing, not only am I going to die, I may die screaming. Therefore, you know what, the bells ringing right now and people are standing up. Why do I have to stand up? Yeah, I've got this bike shed right right now that's doing really well, but maybe man could fly, who knows, right? And I think, yeah, that is just staring at the ticking clock at death. I think there's few greater fuels for agency.

1:21:13What about, there's no way, is that there's no particular technique, there's no one specific solution. Yeah, so we spoke about this last time just to recap. It's the story of Federer and the Dahl -Jokovic. And then there's a new version which I want to tell you about. So Federer and the Dow, Jockovich, Matthew Sied goes to see them warm up. And we have the three greatest of all time competing at the exact same time. First off, the Dow turns up and he's biceps a bull gene. He's just like David Goggins, like in the zone just fucking hitting the ball back and forth. I'm just pushing himself to the limit.

1:21:50Next up, Jockovich turns up and he's just like a calculated psychopath, no emotion, and just getting the job done. And then finally, turning up late, Giga Ling, as he's arriving at the court, is Roger Federer, who's doing these beautiful, ding, strict shots, just having fun the entire time. So you have the three greatest of all time, and there's no way that they did it apart from personalizing it to themselves, which is probably a core theme of high agency. There's a new one I discovered recently, which is it's between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who were two of, at the period, it's like the Drake or Kendrick of their day.

1:22:29The two main guys making music, and I think they had a lot of admiration for one another, but also different bits of competition with one another. And his son tells a story of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan sitting down at this cafe in Paris, and their comparing notes at the end of their career, kind of like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at that photo shoot. And Dylan asks Cohen how long did it take you to make hallelujah? And Cohen lies. He goes, it was about two to three years. It's actually seven. But he wanted to play it down. He spent seven years making that song one of the best songs of all time.

1:23:10And Cohen returns the question about a specific Dylan song that he admires and loves. How long did it take you to write that? 15 minutes. It's going to go to show like two of the best songwriters of their day, one took seven years to produce one of their best songs, Dylan took 15 minutes to produce one of their best songs, but this idea, I think, in the social media age of you have to do X or you have to do A, you have to do B, you have to do C or whatever it is, the fundamentally is no way apart from the way that works. Mmm, again, that's focusing on outcomes, not on inputs. Mmm -hmm, yeah. I don't know.

1:23:45I'm increasingly fascinated by this. What's the, we've done four, there's no insolvable problems, there's no way, there's no guarantee you want that screaming. I miss one, haven't I, hold on. And adults don't exist. There's no memory of normal. Oh yeah, there's no memory of normal. So this is the, yeah, the idea that we spoke about before that ultimately all normal behavior or all downloading the tribe's behavior and trying to fit in, just we do it because we one of the people to like us and ultimately it ends up in the memory bin. The only thing you remember about people is their weird eccentricities.

1:24:22When they have agency only the irrational behavior survived. Have you, have I told you about inverse charisma? I told you this. No, no, no. Oh, this is fucking fire. So, both me and you have kind of been interested in the arc of charisma to Riz, like making charisma charismatic again or sexy again, because charisma sounds like something that I don't know, some real social dynamic picker artist would have taught you in 2010, standing outside of Topshop working on your keynote escalation. And then Riz is kind of, I don't know, it's like it's more cool. So I think a lot of people think that they want to be charismatic.

1:25:03And when they say that, they mean kind of energizing sort of electric compelling interesting, they cause people to sort of be an awe when they walk into a room. And that's true, like there's certainly people that are kind of magical like that. But I thought about the people that I like to spend the most of my time around and show some of them are charismatic, or some of them are charismatic in little ways. But I think one of the reasons that, you know, I love you as a friend is not because you walk into a room and are the most charismatic person in there, but the often one I'm at dinner with you, I feel like the most interesting or charismatic person in the room.

1:25:42So I think it's significantly easier to be somebody who makes other people feel amazing and feel interesting and feel charismatic and feel compelling than it is to be that yourself. Also, it's way more pro -social. It doesn't trigger this sort of jealousy status response because you're not stepping in to try and sort of take over in anything. You're facilitating. You're helping everybody else to kind of be the best that they can be. I'm using dinners as an example, but it works at kind of any social situation. So I can't decide to do inverse charisma, which is most people think that in order to be well liked, they need to be interesting, but actually the most well -liked people, the people who make other people feel the most interesting.

1:26:27There's this great story about, I think it's Winston Churchill's wife, and she goes for dinner with the potential to next presidents of the United States. It's like Harry Truman and somebody else. So she leaves the first dinner, and that's a couple of weeks apart, leaves the first dinner and says, I left that feeling like he was the most interesting person in the world. course he could run the country. Then she went for dinner with the the second presidential candidate, the one that ended up winning. She said, I left that feeling like I was the most interesting person in the world. And that's inverse charisma.

1:27:01It reminds me of the meme. There's a meme where there's a huge queue on one side and then there's like no queue for the next thing. And the one queue with the loads of people behind it is like how to make money. And then the other one is like how to provide value to people. And it's kind of a similar thing to charisma, right? Is that ultimately making money is just value, exchange, at scale. But we often think of like, how do I make, how do I extract resources from people? Versus, how do I actually give something to an it into a positive some game? I've never thought about it like that. That's a really good point.

1:27:34I fucking adore inverse charisma, dude. And you know, embracing that as well. The reason that I really, really like it is that it seems much more in reach for most people. Just be interested in other people. And they will find you interesting. It was like a really cool study that was done. They got a guy, the plant, whatever they called in a study, to go into a plane. They said, and you just sit next to this channel and on a long whole flight, you need to give him zero information about yourself for the entirety of the flight. So this guy gets on and speaks to this channel the next time, just asks questions, ask questions, ask questions, ask questions the whole way.

1:28:11And then they get off and they interview the person that they were sat next to, the person he was asking all of the questions of. And so we're just doing a short survey about your experience on the flight today. You know, we're making sure that people are placed appropriately and how did you find the flight? So, oh God, it was great. I said, next to this guy, he was so interesting. He was so fascinating. They go, oh, that's brilliant. Can you tell us his name? He goes, no, I didn't get his name. So, what can you tell us anything else about him? He goes, no, actually, I can't, no, He didn't tell me anything at all.

1:28:46The most interesting person was the person that made you feel like the most interesting person. Down. Two things on the, I'm, yes, bro. I know we've spoken about this before of how to know a person, that book. One of the big takeaways I got from that is, yeah, I used to try and like turn up and go, okay, I've seen this Will Smith video when he's on that, on the, very slow, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going with the Donald Trump handshake and I'm like, out alpha them and stuff like that. And one of the things I would do, I try to ask questions and then I'll be like, I'll be like, so where are you from?

1:29:19I'm from Manchester. Oh yeah, what's the whatever like there? Yeah, it's called what town in Manchester? And it's just these closed questions and closed questions, closed questions, versus okay, where are you from? Manchester. So what's it like there? Yeah, great. And then you just open up for them to be able to speak forever and ever. Dude, I asked, I went for, I went for Shawarma with Myron Gaines in Miami at the start of Yeah, I know what to say. You weren't expecting that one. How much did you pay on that one? And we were talking about, you know, he's like a gregarious guy or whatever. He went all over the place.

1:29:51And I can't remember what we were talking about. I think we were maybe talking about something to do with his show or something to do with like the internet or something to do with his history. And I asked him, I just said, oh, that's interesting. How'd that make you feel when that was going on? Like what, what, how did you feel about that? And it just really patented interrupted the whole conversation. And it was quite, to be honest, it was quite a charming moment because he took a moment and was like, ah, I've never really thought about that thing before. It made me feel a little bit sad because I was like, ah, I really like, I know it would be, maybe it would be an indication that more people around you asking that kind of question would be, would be something good for you.

1:30:34I don't know. Yeah, we often just how are you? And then it's, and then default back, how are you? There's a story in that how to know a person where it's a teacher in front of a classroom. And some one of the kids ask, are you married, Miss? And she's like, oh no, no, no. And they go, why? I'm divorced. And they go, why? And they just keep going that and she... She is flooding in tears. Fuck thing. Flooding in tears. And it goes back to the education stuff where they're so naive, they're just... Yeah. Why? Alan was as it was talking about that too, that there's this sort of innocent spontaneity, this unencumbered transparency that kids have, and we have a kind of envy about them.

1:31:14You know, the lack of social mores that have shaved off the interesting parts of their personality. And yeah, so much of life, so much of adult life is getting back to that more childlike curiosity state, I think. Okay, so people want to become more high -agency, presumably, who said it's important. We've identified what it is, how it works, some ways that people can fall into traps to stop them from being it, some beliefs that those people have are there. Give me something, give me a pair of breasts, give me something tangible. A piece, it's like. I'd say, so there's a few, right? So the first one that I've mentioned a few times, but I really want to actually get into it, which is the, does it defy the laws of physics question?

1:32:04Because, okay, the going back to the brain is a question answering device. So, if you say, why, or what's great about my life? He'll start finding answers. If you say, what's awful about my life, it will start finding answers. And let's say we go to a venue together and the guy on the front door says, sorry, not tonight mate. And then you go, okay, accept that social reality. And it's, well, does it fundamentally defy the laws of physics? Does it go against Newton's laws of motion, Chris getting into tiger, tiger tonight? No. Does it defy Einstein's relativity? No. And that point sounds trite, but when you actually begin to understand that, well, you go, well, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics, anything is theoretically possible with human knowledge.

1:32:53and again, it sounds right saying that, but you just look at the last few hundred years since the Enlightenment. When you have this period before it, where nothing happened in humanity, we would just, your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandad's life looked the same as yours. And meanwhile, we have this change and the ability for humans to understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment. that we just now completely take for granted, like me getting annoyed at the flat diet coke on the Emirates flight is a big thing.

1:33:27The second thing, which is probably a little less esoteric that I really, really like as a metaphor is when you're in the complete low agency and everything is super general, and it's like I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know where to start. One thing I love doing, a little experiment I got was going, okay, Okay, let's say have a problem right now of had a friend at the minute who he's an extreme but a friend we both know actually. He's an extreme workaholic to a point that I've never seen before and he was talking about how it's a problem. He just doesn't know where to start and I said to him, I go, okay, where are you at right now out of 10?

1:34:13And it suddenly takes this kind of general infinite universe all the way down to, okay, a bit of a binary choice and you can never say seven, right? So he goes, he goes, um, I'm at a three. And I go, okay. And I go, why, why you at a, um, a three, by the way, like, why aren't you at a two? And he goes, to be honest with you, because I've actually like not worked and I've come here to see you, I go, okay, so we're getting some specificity here. And I go, okay, well, what would take it up to a four? And he goes, well, if I left the office before 8 p .m., I would give that a four. I go, okay, great.

1:34:47I've got a little step there. I go, what would take you to a five? What would take you to a six, seven, eight, nine, seven, eight, nine, seven, okay, first off, let's just do the four immediately. And then as soon as you have that, you have momentum. One of the things I love, and I'll probably put it in the piece of like a template that people can use, is just what I call the video game Apple Note. So you have, let's say for example, to do a list in Apple Note, build a website. The problem with that is that starting the video game on level 56. So one, I had this fascinating realization that two, sorry, one person that I knew was the laziest person I've ever met couldn't like open his mail.

1:35:23I couldn't get out of bed and like make himself some food. But was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world? I would spend 16 hours a day on this video game and I go, well, do they have an agency problem? Or is there a reality just to poorly design video game? So the video game Apple note is just level one. Let's see, whatever it is, whether it's from opening mail to going to Kitty Hawk and taking the planes into the sky, there's always a level one. And that's what video games are incredible at, that they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up, again, completely opposite of school.

1:35:57So level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic. And what I love about that is the matter how complex the thing is from curing cancer to flying planes to opening the mail. You can always dump down thoughts and then you check it off and level two is Create the next five levels based off level what and what beautiful is when you check level one I a level one small enough to start but isn't overwhelming So you you have that video game bit of dopamine then when you check it off you're like, fuck that's got a program I'm on level two and then each step is enough to keeping with video game design Is it's enough of a step to feel a a challenge, but without overwhelm.

1:36:36And if it's too big of a step, like level 56, build website, that's too big of a step. You just, a constantly infrastructure. So you just quit the video game. It's a terribly designed video game. But breaking things down into micro steps is such a key thing in video game design and ultimately increasing agency. Yeah, I mean, this is the productivity 101. You write your epigraph. you work in seven year seasons, you work in three year blocks, you work in one year sprints, broken down into 90 day chunks, broken down into daily actions, and minute by minute you've got your life planned out. And it's kind of tripe because it's so obvious, but the smallest, the smallest first step imaginable is how the Wright Brothers managed to get that plane, to get how you launched your marketing agency in a different country.

1:37:26It's how this podcast started. Yes. And yeah, you need to be able to just if you can figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step because 50 % of the battle is that first step. So if you have that great tool, another tool more related to so we spoke earlier about the four tenants of high agency. You have clear thinking, you have biased to action, you have resourcefulness and disagreeability on the disagreeability point, which I think is a huge, huge part of it. The question I like to ask people is who's your favorite podcaster, creator, me? Vincor. So let's say all the people listen to it right now who have the Spotify wrapped with you top of the list.

1:38:05Yep. What do you disagree with Chris on? Because there'll be a percentage, nothing, right? Oh, good, baby. But there'll be a percentage of the audience, unfortunately, probably less so with your audience, but there'll be a percentage of the audience that says Chris says Guy is red, therefore sky is red. And that's actually a great disagreeability test because the amount of times I put gurus on a pedestal and then they'll start, they'll say a lot of why shit. And then I'll just start drifting it out over their skis. Yeah, yeah. And then you start those that drifting and I'll just go with them. But that ability to say, who do you admire the most and what do you disagree over them on?

1:38:41Is a great disagreeability test. That's really lovely. Another one is who do you dissing, like who do you, or what's the maybe the strongest held opinion that you have, whether that's politically, business -wise, theoretically, and who's the best person on the other side that you've heard? Can you answer those two questions? Both of us have done, you've got your max content razor. Would you consume your own content if not don't post it? And I think that works. The songwriting, would you listen to your own music if not don't write it? Or for your own podcasts? Would you listen to your own podcast if not what the Fucking doing spending hours and hours.

1:39:19Why, I've never posted to PornHub.

1:39:24I didn't watch that. Did you see, I've told you about this before but I've never done it but I'm still kinda tempted to do it. I do it if you did it as an accountability buddy with me. It's not PornHub is it? It's only fun. Was it a hundred days of rejection? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've seen that right. Ask for a free coffee, ask a stranger in the street to give you 20 pounds, like try get all of these different things that escalate toward ever increasing levels of social discomfort. And I feel like that from maybe it's not quite the same as disagreeability, but disagreeability triggers that sort of clamping.

1:40:00Yes. That fear of being exiled from the tribe like Napoleon is small at a island. I think a big thing in that that I got from CBT to loop it back to what we said earlier is when you're doing disagreeability things, is to write down the prediction beforehand that you're a big deal has given you. So for example, and then you get to stress test between what I thought was going to happen and what actually ends up happening. And then you begin to slowly but surely take away the weapons that that monkey mind has, and it'll still fire, but you go, okay, I mean, it's interesting, you're firing about me going and asking out this girl or chatting to her.

1:40:37But I remember the last time you talked about how, if you're going to approach this girl, she's going to throw a drink in your face and blah, blah, blah, blah's going to happen. But we actually, I got a number of, we went on a few dates. So just comparing your brain's forecasting mechanism, which will always be the amygdala firing the nightmare mode when it's always actually more likely a documentary. Well, you also don't get to take a snapshot of your mind unless you do the writing thing, right? And it's captured in the best way through writing. I mean, we've seen this even with the election in America that we had this It's political fucking superposition.

1:41:10There's like quantum world in which it's gonna be close. People could see it either way, yet ardent support is on one side, Rory Stewart ate a lot of humble pie. Absolutely to slam dunk, she's gonna, and presumably he said that because he believed it, not just because he was trying to influence the electorate or say something cool or popular or whatever. But in retrospect, it couldn't have been any other way because it wasn't. it couldn't have been any other way because Trump won. And the ability, even I think back to where my mind was before that election happened, I got fucking out, like it could be, it could go either way.

1:41:48I'm pretty sure that a couple of months out was that I think I was got it in the bag. And then afterward, me trying to think, how did I think before that thing happened, I can't not see what the outcome was. It's impossible for me to not see the Trump one. So all that I do and I look back at my rationalization prior to that is all of the ways in which I would have been right because I could have seen that the outcome that ended up being was the one that I thought. And then you're just constantly, you have the benefit of the historian's hindsight where you begin to see, oh, it was all ABC but in the time when you was living through it, it was so it's, you're living through the fog of war.

1:42:26But it's so easy to forget the fog of war after. It fucked me speaking of fog of war. We might as well bring this up. I was with you in Boseman, Montana this summer when Trump got shot. Yeah. And that was a really formative experience because at 9 .11 I was too young. January 6th was COVID so I was in the house. So what's really fascinating is rapidly developing news story with other people at the same time. So the fact that I was with you and Emily and we went for dinner and you know every five or ten minutes were checking Jack Posovic's fucking Twitter or whatever to find out what new rumors been going on.

1:43:05And yeah, it is even in retrospect one of the things that isn't fully captured is how chaotic news is. And I think the same thing probably occurs for ourselves that in retrospect We can look back and say, well, that was the way, that was the outcome that occurred in any case. Morgan Housel's got this gorgeous story. He talks about how when him and his wife first got together before they were married, I think there were 23, 24 living in New York, they had no kids, no dependents. He looks back and he said to his wife, that really was living, wasn't it? That really was the golden years. Yeah, it's just so amazing.

1:43:38You know, we used to lie in on a Sunday and we could go for lunch and do all the rest of it. His wife said, you are miserable. You hated it. You hated all of those things. And Morgan's realization was in hindsight, you're able to see that the fears that captured you at the time were not worth having. But at the time, you have no certainty that those aren't salient. So what you see in retrospect is how you should have felt had you known what was going to occur. The golden years seem to never happen in the present. It only seems to exist in hindsight. One of the high agency techniques is what I call viewing the present with a historian's frame.

1:44:19So both at the personal level and then at the wider kind of societal level as well. So trying to at the personal level okay, going I see these old photos of me on Facebook. I'm like, I used to wear that. I used to post this shit. I'm like cringing at myself. And then you go, hold on, you can hear that always whispering though, me five years later is going to be cringing. What I'm doing right now. Yeah, correct. And then but try to ask that question now and deal with it, probably speeds up the cycle a little bit because each time there's that story of like the Zen Master where he goes, yeah, one year ago, I thought I had, oh, sorry, after one year of studying Zen, I thought I had all the answers and then I realized I was wrong.

1:45:01Now I have the answers. two, and then after two years, I realized I was wrong again, but now I have all the answers. After four years, I was wrong again, but now I have all the answers. And it ends up with him going to like all the way to his grave and saying the exact same thing again. Now I realize I have all the answers. And just realizing it's constantly wrong. But even then if you zoom out and you go, right, okay, that's at the personal level. But then at the societal level, the ability to view the present moment now with a historian's perspective, trying to detach from the fog of war. There's a beautiful line in the sovereign individual where he talks about the Roman Empire falling.

1:45:38And he said that, for example, it's an easy question right now, which is when did the Roman Empire fall? And people can just give the specific date that it felt. When did the Roman society recognize that the Roman Empire fell? For the majority of people it was not on that date. Someday, for some people it was weeks after, it was months after, but some people at the centuries after that they fully realized that the Roman Empire had fallen. And he makes this great line, which was, if CNN existed, as the Roman Empire was falling, they would not be on the news saying, hey guys, the empire has fallen, they'd be denying it.

1:46:11They would be, by the time the news catches up, basically if you wait for the news, you will be wrong or you will be late. That's your thing about social networks, right? If you read it on Facebook, you're probably late. If you read it on Reddit, you're probably early. Yes. Good rule of thumb. That's fire, I love that. What about the Patels, your favorite hotelier? This is fucking Pete Kaiege and Seaman. So this I got from the My First Million podcast and tells the story of the Patels who left India to go to Uganda. And the Patels essentially start as these kind of slaves or work people that are very low down in the society.

1:46:54and that kind of Indian work ethic, just work their way up to the top of Uganda and society and own like huge businesses throughout Uganda. Idiarmeen comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no, no. Africa is for Africans, not for the Patelps. So we are going to take everything off you and nationalize this and give it back to the Africans. So not only are we going to take everything from you, we're going to give you 30 days notice. My rent contract is at least like 90 days notice, right? So we're gonna take everything from you and your families and we're gonna kick you out. So the Patels, some of them went back to India, but in the end of the time I think had a Bangladesh problem where they basically argued that the Patels had been gone for so long that you're almost no longer in India now.

1:47:42So they almost have no home. A lot of them went to the UK, so you have a lot of Patels in the UK and a significant amount or a small amount, sorry, went to the US. So they arrive, gone from, like, high up in Uganda and society to immigrant in the US with nothing. And the Patels, what they do, they begin to start motels. And they realize that, well, A, the whole family is going to work on this. So we've got free labor. So we can kind of undercut people there. We're all vegetarians. So the food's going to be quite cheap to keep us going. and we can just live in the motel. So that gives us a competitive edge there because we don't have any cost for rent.

1:48:21So like the cost of our business is so low and we could just start creating motel businesses. So start with a few motels, more and more potels arrive and they're constantly helping out their brothers, their cousins, their uncles, their second cousin, the same preventive. Or yet, like that. And just constantly, okay, well, if we can get five X revenue, sorry, if we get a loan that's five X revenue on this, we can buy more and we can constantly just use a bit of debt by more motels. Nobody can compete with us because we have this. So the Patels kicked out of Uganda, arriving in America as nothing.

1:48:56Keep compounding compounding compounding and it's an absurd stat now of something around 70 to 75 % of motels in America are owned by a Patel. We just talk about peak agency, like life happening to them and meanwhile managed to complete 70 to 75 % of motels in America. I would buy a Patel. So for the people that haven't driven through America, there are a lot of motels, tons. When we were doing a road trip this summer, me and you nodding at most of them are going Patels. Patels again. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man. I think it's such the approach that you have to this, the fact that you've been able to break it down and spend so much time writing this piece, which again, people can go and read.

1:49:39What are you hoping to achieve by sort of breaking this down? Are you looking to try and create more agency in your life? It seems like you're kind of swimming in enough already. No, I think honestly you can, as a writer, sometimes go, I think this is a really important idea. I need it to get out in the world. It was more, it was psychosis that was like eating my brain, and I just wanted to explore the topic. Basically the goal of the essay was the thing I would have liked to have read at 13 rather than had written at 30 and just exploring that concept. Because like I said, and I sound like a broken horse, but when she began to understand that everything's essentially just an agency problem.

1:50:20The agency issue. The, yeah, it's endless, endless possibilities from fixing climate to fixing cancer. It's just all agency. We're in a country that may be lacking, especially for young people, agency. both of us managed to reach escape velocity to get out of that. What would you wish British George knew about agency or how to maybe embrace a little bit more of it? So the way I always joke being outside the UK for two to three years and then coming back, I learnt more in the two to three years outside of the UK about being British than the 25 years being inside it. And funny bit is when we did fourth of July this year and we're in Nashville.

1:51:08And I mean funny story is Chris, like everyone's like taking photos of the fireworks. I'm looking, seeing all these people taking photos of fireworks, photos of fireworks, like soaking in the moment. And there's just Chris on Apple notes, like writing down a quote from Nietzsche or something like that. And I just said spot the artist to everybody around us. Anyway, it was quite a strange feeling being in that environment where it's people going USA, USA. And I've kind of realized at that moment a few things. So one, I've never met an American that doesn't celebrate the 4th of July. I've never met a Brit that knows their national day.

1:51:43I'm called George, St. George's Day. And I realized actually, I don't even know the day. And I realized no Brit even knows the day. I think it's April 23rd. And I then reflected more on the UK and the way I view the UK right now, it's like an icon that has an autoimmune condition on paper. It's this incredible historical figure, but it's just kind of eating itself alive. And I even think that like people like myself and yourself, but one thing that I noticed that maybe people who have a lot of optimism for the UK, then complain about people moaning and don't realize that they're then starting this.

1:52:19Everyone you can moan so much. So I kind of come at things like one of the early thinkers that's definitely affected how I think has been Rory Sutherland. I do think the UK has a bit of a marketing problem. I don't think you necessarily need crazy technology or things like that to fix this. So one of the absurd ideas that I have is essentially looking at St. George's Day and comparing it to the 4th of July and going, well, what's happening here? Why is nobody celebrating St. George's Day? and why is everybody regardless of their politics, celebrating 4th of July, again, comes back to clear thinking.

1:52:52I think 4th of July, what it has, is a recent enemy, which was unfortunately, I was trying to conquer that beautiful land which we never should have let go. And there's a clear story that unites everybody. George killed some dragon. I don't know, I don't know the story. Nobody knows the story, and now it's just associating with racist and bigots. So my idea would be fix the UK's advertising, scrap St. George's Day, and announce Don't Curk Day. First off, good meme, sounds good, good branding. And essentially I think it's a better story than Fourth of July because no matter where you stand in terms of your politics, in terms of creating an enemy, you could have every problem with the British Empire and the UK and Britain and the state of it.

1:53:44Don't cook us an extraction, not an act of war. Yes. And against the apex, awful human being of Adolf Hitler, and it's still fresh in our minds. It's still recent enough to sum extent. And you could argue if Don Cook didn't happen, does Western civilization even exist now? Certainly the UK, we're probably having the exact same conversation, but, um, the frequency Deutsche, right? It's Jörg. Both of us aren't August Landmaster, and we're just going along with it, like, low agency, and see little little bitches. So, first off, yeah, don't cook day. And I'd argue, make it quite unique. So first off, we have to make it British.

1:54:22So from midnight to 12 p .m. on the day, everyone can moan. Everyone can complain. It's not too cringey like the American style. You like to moan about the mistakes the UK's made in its past, currently making, and it's going to be taken something from April Fool's Day here. Yes, haven't had until 12 p .m. You can like criticize the country, drink tea, blah, blah, blah. Come 12 p .m. Rallowed very rarely as Brits to remember just how fucking awesome Historically this country's been so don't cook be in obviously a key a key pivotal moment there And just imagine this in the UK, right? You've got William Shakespeare Alan Shurring John Lennon for Gallagher Brothers, right?

1:55:03You've got a pancreas and the suffragette which every way you want to go like we've got it all the the tourist demand that I think you could bring in for Dunkirk Day, even from Harry Potter. I mean, even Crick of what's it in Crick who created DNA or discovered DNA, one of them was British and it was done in Cambridge University. I'm sorry America, but you can't compete with that. Like the history that this country has and the ability to turn that into a national day that maybe unites people at least for an afternoon and potentially brings in billions of tourist revenue by just a little bit of marketing, I think is completely untapped potential.

1:55:40I love it. George Mack, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to read this essay of yours, which they should, and they also want to keep up to date with everything else you're doing. Where should they go? You want to go to highagency .com and the whole essay that means agency .com. That mean Chris spoke about today. We'll be on there. You can read the whole thing and anything else. Just George Mack on Twitter. My DMs are open. Did I love you? Thank you. Love you so much. Thank you.