The Most Important Questions Of Our Time - George Mack - #1124

29:53That's real founder mode right there. Like if you're willing to - Take it up the ass. To, yeah. If you're going to power bottom your way to the top. you can either get fucked by investors or get fucked by someone else craig well look it's gonna it's it's it's i don't know man the the whole is that real is that all real that's real that's literally that's a brand i'm not gonna lie to you i know i know why would i lie to you where do i get this from cityjournal.com there it is inside california's gay certification program the state is pressuring utilities to award 633 million in contracts to lgbt businesses interesting the tip of the spear for lgbt diversity is energy and utilities contracts for state certified gay-owned businesses you get arbitrage the hell out of this you know people say how much would it how much would you have to pay to be gay if the number is less than 633 million dollars your quid's in damn what else what else you got you got some stuff do you bring anything from home yeah go on do i have some stuff as always.

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31:40And Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you actually came here to do, designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Newtonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Story of a Spanish chicken farmer called Juan Poyol. So it's 1941, start of World War I, and he's essentially a failure his entire life. So he's been a chicken farmer, a manager of a one-star hotel before bankruptcy.

32:21And he's after a new job with a tremendous CV. So he's walking along the streets of Madrid, takes a right, goes into the British embassy and says, I want a job at MI5 to help out and spy on the Nazis. And MI5 or the embassy sort of say, okay, how about you put that in writing and we'll come back to you, which is the British way of saying, get the fuck out. So he leaves the building, comes back, walks across, goes into the embassy, says, I want a job of MI5. They ask him to leave, tries again. He just walks across the street and turns around. No, these are multiple future events. So he keeps coming back.

33:06right fourth time he's walking along and he decides he walks up the steps but this time he goes into the german embassy and he goes i hate the brits i want a job for the nazis to spy on britain and the nazis are eyeing him up and he talks about his love for the fjurr the love um for the third reich and how much he hates his new inspired hatred for great britain and the nazis end up training him up, giving him little tasks, and he keeps proving himself, learns how invisible ink works, ends up recruiting multiple agents inside of Great Britain. So he builds his way up, and then he walks back street of Madrid, goes to the British embassy, and says, I now want a job at MI5 because I'm one of the most valuable spies for the Nazis.

33:59So he got rejected, rejected, rejected, and was like, okay, I'll take matters into my own hands. So he then becomes the most valuable spy for Britain during World War II. He builds up a network of 27 sub-agents inside of Britain that the Nazis believe are true, but it's all his own imagination. All these different agents that he would create stories from that they were doing. so much so when he arrived the mi5 called him garbo because garbo at the time was the most famous actress in the world greta garbo yes so named after for his acting skills so juan poyol the spanish chicken farmer the most important moment in world war ii was d-day so as d-day was happening, Juan gave so much fake information, he convinced them that D-Day was going to happen in Calais.

34:57So Hitler and Himmler were getting these reports from Juan. They thought the war was going to happen in Calais, so they sent some of their most important armies to Calais. Then D-Day happens, and Juan was so convincing, even with his fake reports, that Hitler gave him the Iron Cross. So he's the only agent to get both an iron cross from Hitler and an MBE from - No way. Yeah. Do you know what's tragic though? So they say that when it comes to D-Day, the most important day of World War II, the three most important people were Eisenhower, who looked after the US. I think Montgomery, who looked after the Great Britain, and Juan Poyol, the Spanish chicken farmer.

35:42Those are the three most important people in D-Day in terms of the impact. But this guy who gets these double awards ends up dying in 1949, Mozambique to malaria. And in the 1980s, three of the agents that worked with him in MI5 are sat at a bar. So they're all in their late 80s now, and they're talking about the war. They're in this former little intelligence pub and they're chatting about the war and having a few drinks and they have this kind of confused look on their faces this old guy's walking towards them and they get more and more confused with their face and then this 80 year old man who's a mi5 spy breaks down in tears crying and they go it can't be you're supposed to be dead so his final last act was to fake his own death in 1949 and he lived in a bookstore in venezuela so the not so the nazis would never know where he was that's insane spanish chicken farm was he really worried about nazi retribution in 1949 yes were the nazis still going around and chasing people ironically even though he's in venezuela there was a lot of nazis in south america yeah but if he'd not gone to fucking venezuela He supposedly caught malaria in Africa.

37:08There's still a lot of - Where's Mozambique? Mozambique is, I think, West Africa. Right, okay. But in 1949 or even onwards, there was - First off, we're viewing history through hindsight. At the time, there was still millions of Germans that served for the Nazis that were still alive. So yeah, there was lots of Nazis afterwards. And they would have wanted retribution for people that it - I guess I don't know - The most impactful man during D-Day who was a double agent that gave them all this false information. if there's one person they're going to try and kill yeah that's true i i guess i don't know what happened in germany after they lost i don't know how quickly everybody capitulated well there was this i was listening to finn versus history and they was talking about how in uh when after the nazis commit the holocaust i think they were banned for the world cup or from like international games for four years but when liverpool had the incident in uventus where loads of fans died, they were banned for six years.

38:01And it's like, it's not, it doesn't scale. It's quite even out. It doesn't scale accordingly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's, I mean, unbelievable amount of agency. I suppose to be a guy that wants a job so badly that you take the opposite job to get the first job, it's just as well that he really did want to work for MI5. Because if he didn't, he would have just been a great asset for the Nazis. But it's having that that level of theory of mind of, okay, I've been rejected from something. What does this person want that would make me completely invaluable? Because I think there's this kind of myth that, oh, if you've been rejected, just keep going and they're idiots versus can you get inside of their head and think how they think?

38:42Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, is it time to push or is it time to pivot? It's kind of the age old question, but he did both. Right. He pivoted into a new one. All right. So that's your story time. This is a new segment, a new segment on our episode Storytime. My Storytime, Shavash Karapetian. Are you familiar with Shavash Karapetian? No. Okay. So, 1976 in Yerevan, and there's a trolley bus carrying around about 90 passengers. We don't know what happened. Some people say that the driver of the bus had a heart attack. Some people say that he was having an altercation with a passenger on board. whatever happened, it crashed into a reservoir, Yerevan.

39:24The bus sank roughly 10 meters, so 30 feet to the bottom, freezing murky water. There's a 23-year-old man who's training with his brother nearby, Shabaz Karapetian, and without giving it much thought, jumps into the water and ordered his brother to help him from the shore. He said, it was scary at first. It was so loud as if a bomb went off. I almost drowned several times. I could imagine the agony of those 92 people, and I knew how they would die. The thing was, Carapetian wasn't an ordinary bystander. He was a 17-time world champion and 11-time world record holder in fin swimming. He was one of the best underwater swimmers on earth.

40:06Immediately dives into the water to help. Visibility is basically zero because the reservoir is full of mud and sewage and debris as well. Obviously, the bus has gone in, so it's kicked up all of this silt. It's basically impossible to see. So he swims down into the dark, locates the busk. He called it a traveling coffin for all of these 92 people. He kicks the rear window in underwater to get inside, dives down, dive after dive, holds his breath, finds a trap passenger, drags him back to the surface, hands them to the rescuers and his brother in a rowboat, goes straight back down again. reportedly made dozens of dives of around about 20 minutes and physically pulled out about 37 people.

40:4320 of them survived. During one dive, he accidentally grabbed a leather seat cushion instead of a passenger because his visibility was so poor. It'd be one of these old school buses that would have had movable cushions. And he grabbed this leather cushion and brought it up thinking it was maybe a small human. He later said that this one decision haunted him for years because he believed someone may have died while he carried up the cushion instead. Karapetian was hospitalized along with the victims of the accident because he'd lacerated all of his legs, all of his body from going through the broken glass, from breaking the glass himself.

41:18Septic fever, double-sided pneumonia and nervous prostration had doctors fighting for his life for over a month. When he was finally discharged, Shavash went back to practice, but swimming underwater echoed painfully in his lungs, but he wouldn't give up without having one final medal. So during the next championship that he swam in a haze, he still wasn't in any way back to full capacity. His brother, Camo, ran along the side of the pool, ready to jump in in case he suddenly lost consciousness. But he came in first and set another world record without even realizing that he'd done it at the time.

41:52He was so delirious. But the rescue that he'd done of the bus had destroyed his athletic career, broken glass shredded his legs, polluted water had caused severe pneumonia and sepsis he couldn't recover from, and he spent all of those weeks plus then months critically ill and then recovering. Soviet authorities initially downplayed the story, so it remained relatively unknown for years, and today the rescue is considered one of the greatest acts of civilian heroism ever recorded. Jesus Christ. There's him. Thick Russian. Carapetian. Yeah, yeah, like a serious Russian guy. That's him there in just a pair of pants, and everybody else is trying to pull it up.

42:27Wow. Isn't that insane? Wow. There's an award. Jared, ask a bold friend. What's the name of the award that's given to people who risk their lives for strangers? The award you're likely thinking of is the Carnegie Medal. It's given to civilians who risk their lives to save or attempt to save strangers. Is there anything interesting about the demographics of the people who've been given that award? There are some patterns worth noting. The Carnegie Hero Fund, which awards the medal, has found that recipients come from all walks of life. Age, gender, and background vary widely. That's not interesting.

43:06Historically, men have been the majority of recipients, but women have also been recognized. How many men won? The Carnegie Hero Fund has awarded thousands of people since its inception in 1904. It's so fucking woke. Historically, the majority have been men. What's the percentage of men that have won the Carnegie Award? The Carnegie Hero Fund reports that historically, about 90 % of recipients have been... All right, shut up.

43:36Whatever happened in 2020 continues to carry over now. Do you know what I mean? California thinks that the most important thing to do with its utilities is not give people cheap and reliable energy, but to make sure that the diversity of the sexuality of the people who own the companies is important and you fucking 5.5 need to have a chat with someone about you anyway uh that carapetian i i love that story i think it's fucking awesome and um what what the kind of kicker is the fact that you know that he was he made such a personal sacrifice but then also was ravaged by the fact that he picked up a fucking cushion having gone down 37 times and one time he made a mistake in pitch blackness when he couldn't see.

44:17What's the likelihood that the guy that's running on the side of the road with his brother, like he's got his pants on. He's got the, he's got the, he's the number one Finn swimmer, deep seas swimmer in the world. 17 times, 11 world records. Tragic. Yeah. Tragic. Yeah. If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for two decades and And it wasn't until this last year that I had some of the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around the obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain.

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45:32That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Yeah, it's interesting how often that is the case where you'll have these acts of great heroism that don't have 100 success right and then the individual spends so much time looping on that yeah that's that's survivor guilt i suppose right i've known some people who've done some incredible things like in the police or firework for example and it's the same thing they don't ruminate on the the heroism it's the it's the mistakes that they made yeah yeah the people they could have saved i wonder what that's why i guess that adaptively it's trying to get you to focus on this is something pro-social that you could have done if you'd been more prepared more skillful um therefore in future you need to you need to adapt your your approach so that this doesn't happen again.

46:32Maybe that's the reason for survivor guilt. Actually, Jared, just type it in, chat GPT, what is the reason, what is the adaptive reason for survivor guilt or adaptive explanation for survivor guilt? The only thing that I can think of is that it's supposed to try and guide your future behavior so that, well, I mean, fucking Bluetooth came up as a thousand-year-old Norse god or something like that, so fuck knows if we're going to find out. what is the adaptive explanation from an evolutionary or adaptive perspective survivor guilt can be understood as a byproduct of mechanism to help humans maintain social bonds cooperation and group cohesion okay so my hypothesis is looking good so far basic idea is that in ancestral environments humans survive and reproduce largely through belonging to a group or one person benefited while others suffered there are often social consequences so the inverse of that okay maintaining group cohesion if you survive a dangerous event while close allies did not feeling distress rather than indifferent signals oh that's cool so because if something bad happens and you were one of the few that survived if you show that you feel distress as opposed to indifference it reinforces to everybody else that you weren't selfish and an asshole that you actually regret the fact that they died and that you didn't i'm still a part of the group i didn't take it all for myself i didn't just swim out the back of the bus myself i really did try um reciprocal altruism and fairness mechanisms they've got strong intuitions.

47:54When we receive an unexpected benefit relative to others, even when we did nothing wrong, our minds may interpret the situation as a violation of fairness expectations. Survivor guilt may arise from the same psychological machinery that makes people pretty uncomfortable receiving disproportionate rewards. Okay. Motivation to help survivors. Yeah. Okay. So it encourages caring for bereaved families, supporting injured group members, counterfactual learning. Humans are unusually prone to imagining alternative outcomes. the counterfactual helps us learn from near misses and dangerous situations dude don't fucking test me on evolutionary theory okay don't test the hamburgler on evolutionary theory my intuitions are strong costly signal of commitment as well grief and function you can't fake it that's an interesting one that's the reason um why would it be the case that when you're sad or distressed or overwhelmed with um negative emotion that the same thing your eyes do to make sure that your eyes stay lubricated would go into overdrive.

48:53Why do we cry? What's the reason for crying? And one of the adaptive explanations for this, which is pretty fascinating, is it's such a costly signal to do because the most important sense you have is your eyes. And if you're prepared to fill them with water to say how much I've been hurt or how much I'm suffering, you're in an unbelievably vulnerable position. You can't fight, you can't see, you can't defend yourself. Tears are coming out and you can't fully operate. This is how much I'm in pain. I'm in so much pain that I'm essentially exposing my neck to you. So how do you then factor in tears of joy?

49:32Why do we cry out of joy? I did ask this question. So it could be a spandrel, which is just a crossover between the two, but it could just be the same thing. it could be a very costly signal hey look at how much i love this thing that's happening i am here collective effervescence me and the group we are one i experienced this thing with you too and i do think when it comes to sort of emotions um sadness like peak joy joyful experiences beautiful experiences and sad or sort of dreadful experiences they kind of have this same like part of the pitch of the of the the chord that they play is kind of similar right it's like an outside of the body at least when i when i uh experience stuff that's like really intense whether it's good or bad i always feel it sort of across the top of my shoulders my traps and like sort of everything feels like it lifts up a little bit if i'm being delivered bad news by somebody or if there's something that's really beautiful happening it always feels like i'm sort of being lifted a bit so there seems to be similarities resonance between those two there's two visuals, Jared, if you could pull them up there's one of how emotion feels in the body I don't know if you've seen this one where it's like heat map heat map of emotions there's also the topography of tears how different types of tears look under a microscope and they're slightly different no way, the constitution yeah, this artist produced it top left so here is yeah how uh emotions at least feel in the body which kind of makes sense but is that a map mapping emotion so is that self-report i think this is more self-report of how it how it feels okay so anger seems pretty right so anger's sort of above the like upper chest arms and hands a lot lower face a lot and head and if you start with neutral on the right so you kind of see okay this is neutral and then you compare that to all the different ones surprise is definitely a lot in the head that's cool sadness is kind of in the middle of the chest happiness sort of everywhere disgust definitely in the stomach so disgust disgust and anxiety both in the stomach the most that would make sense because uh disgust is a pathogen rejection uh fear middle of the chest i think that seems quite right interesting that happiness is basically just tuned down love depression's cool the depression it says here it's just sort of a low energy state or on your extremities as opposed to anxiety and i would agree with that i think anxiety is a much more active version of depression contempt ex uh like existing exclusively in the head is pretty cool pride so the swelling in the chest makes sense shame the uh cheeks that's people get embarrassed and envy sort of little bit of head and some heart that's actually would you disagree with any of those i think it feels it feels accurate as trying to be neutral right now uh could you search topography of tears please jared this was done by i think an artist that made this

52:46uh go to that video that instagram video let's just see what this uh what this lady's got to say third one click and open but that your tears look different underneath a microscope depending on the emotion that you're experiencing. This project was called the topography of tears by Rosalind Fisher. She's a photographer and what they did is they looked at tears underneath the microscope and you will see that depending on what these participants were experiencing, their tears look different. This is tears of laughter versus tears of change, tears of grief versus tears from cutting onions. Wow. This is tears when someone is experiencing a moment of catharsis whereas someone is experiencing a moment of change.

53:25I'm a therapist and I often show this to my clients because I think it gives a really good demonstration that crying is actually really important at times to release certain things from our body and being able to see that our tears actually look different depending on what we're experiencing I think really demonstrates that really well did you know insane that's cool I want to know what the fuck it just ask Jared from the topography of tears study what are the differences in the structure of tears or why are they there because i want to know what what is inside of the tear that's different is it more salt content is it like what how much shit's in tears like i guess maybe you could have you could i don't know is cortisol in the blood that leaks into the tears but surely tears are kind of like sperm produced in advance and then released uh there are three main categories basal tears constantly produced to lubricate the eyes reflex tears produced in response to irritants like onions and emotional tears key biochemical difference here we go is that emotional tears contain higher concentrations of certain proteins and hormones including prolactin adrenocorticotropic hormone stress-related hormone leuencafelin a natural pain-relieving peptide differences in minerals such as potassium and manganese when tear dries on a slide these dissolved substances crystallize into different patterns wow there isn't a simple one-to-one mapping of grief or grief always looks like x and joy always looks like y the patterns vary considerably even within the same emotional category the amount of ratios of protein salts hormones and other biocompties I didn't realize that you had that much.

55:11Obviously, you can cry for different reasons. If I start cutting an onion in front of you, or if you're in pain, or if you're feeling something, or if you're just lubricating your eyes. Testosterone tears as well. The higher T that you have, they're completely different. That's Greg Levecchia. Greg Levecchia's tears from Bloom are actually a protein shake. For the people that don't know, Greg Levecchia has got 2 ,000 nanograms per deciliter of testosterone.

55:37Greg's tears. that's actually in this bag it's not money it's just greg's next testosterone you pull up greg's tears they're just fucking draining exactly they've got their vascular tears uh yeah yeah it's uh the emotions thing's been interesting uh trying to navigate this over the last 18 months or so i still think kind of interested in what the the conversation around men showing emotions is obviously I've talked about it a lot, like everyone's talked about it a lot. But one of the interesting wrinkles that I learned about was, I don't think that men are particularly good at receiving other men's emotions.

56:18That we often talk about guys need to open up more, look at all of the people that are taking their own lives, whatever it is, however many men per minute or men per day are doing this, you need to open up. But a lot of the time, if a guy does that on the internet, it's not just women that are unaccommodating to a guy that's maybe crying or feeling bad or seeming a little weak. Like guys, I would guess on average are actually more discarding. Men are less accommodating of other men's sad emotions than women are. And a lot of the time, these would be the same men that would say something to the effect of, well, men's mental health's in a state, like nobody really cares that much.

56:59You go, okay, so which one is it? Because if you're not prepared to hold your boy while he's going through a hard time, you don't also really get to say, we need to talk about men's mental health more. You need to put your emotions where your mouth is, so to speak. My natural thought, at least from my experience, is I don't expect friends to be these pure mixed martial artists that have everything across the board. So I know if, let's say, for example, I want to break down tears to certain people who I'd speak to. And then there's other friends where if I, you know what I mean, want to fucking pull it together, I'll speak to them.

57:37So this, like having a little bit more of a decentralized on-chain friend base. I just think, yeah, I think expecting the person who helps you to pull it together to then also be the person that's perfect with your emotions. It's hard to have that. I agree. But if it's the person who is saying we need to have better resources for men's mental health but they're also not being accommodating that just seems like a kind of hypocrisy to me and this is from a men are good tom golden's thing and um it makes sense because what you basically have as a like i think that it takes a lot of work for guys to get over their sort of visceral ick of other men's sad emotions this is a price that's maybe not seen by women or it's also hidden by men but if there's a guy who's able to sit in her like charlie hubert for instance or conor beaton or joe hudson or dr k these are people that are trained professionally to be able to do this obviously the fact that they can sit they have had to get over a lot of their programming because your programming as a man is if i'm around another guy who doesn't seem to be able to hold it together emotionally he's an unreliable ally.

58:45How do I know that when we go on our next hunt or when the tribe from the next valley comes and tries to attack us, that he's actually going to be able to hold it together? How do I not know that he's going to break down in tears? There's the same reason, this is a spicy one, I need to put a second fucking pair of glasses on for this. William Costello taught me that most homophobia in men isn't homophobia, it's femophobia. so we're actually the disgust mechanism that gets turned on or the aversion that some men have to seeing gay men isn't necessarily about the gayness it's about the femininity that is being presented by a man and that's the same mechanism that unreliable ally if this guy doesn't seem to be showing the typical masculine uh uh sort of control conquer aggression 10 toes forward energy that i expect from other guys what happens when there is some sort of altercation or issue in future that we need to to step in on so yeah femophobia homophobia is like kind of interesting i immediately think of who's the most masculine gay man who then breaks that who creates a paradox tell me who's the most masculine gay man that you know I don't know I'm usually multiple drinks deep at the time

1:00:07that is a fucking great question

1:00:15a lot of the tech bro people would you look at Peter Thiel and guess gay I don't think I'd look at him and guess gay he was in the closet for a long time until gorker yeah yeah with the hulk hogan thing by the way uh if you need a new listen on audible of a very old relatively old book ryan holiday's book conspiracy guy that's written a lot about stoicism books on stoicism are good this one's his best one by a distance so fucking good have you ever you tell me you've read it a while ago it's fucking amazing it's so fantastic it's the plot it's around hulk hogan so um peter teal gets ousted by Gawker.

1:00:58I think it's Gawker's subsidiary company. I can't remember what it's called. That was reporting on Silicon Valley. And I swear the headline was something like Peter Thiel's gay as shit people. And at this point, he still wasn't out about the fact that he is. And he held onto this for maybe five or six years. and he's building this case behind the scenes and he recruits this guy called Mr. A. Mr. A was this operator that came to him who was just going to be able, a legal expert, Machiavellian conniving sort of guy. And they start to look for ways to take down this company. And then the Hulk Hogan sex tape happens.

1:01:42And during the trial for the Hulk Hogan sex tape, it turns out that uh terry baleo hulk hogan's just got like infinity money he's got the best lawyers he's got he just can drive this thing into the ground to keep on taking gorka down it turns out that peter teal uses the hulk hogan sex tape as a way to get back at the organization and reporters that ousted him as gay like nearly 10 years ago by the time that this thing happens and it the Revenge is a dish best served cold. There's no better epitomized by any other story than that. A decade of just sitting on it and seething and having, you know, this huge secret that you've kept as a very public person who's early into Facebook and supporting conservative candidates.

1:02:29And yeah. It's widely discussed the evil nature of social media or the ills of social media that exist today. A lot of people hark back to this previous long gone era. Where you're from. but the where i am from no not not quite there just yet but the golden the thing people forget about the golden era that they're harking back to is the shit we always forget the shit and even the journalist standards that used to exist the amount of journalists particularly british press that would pay people to sleep with people then report the stories this was a regular thing in journalism in the uk even um numerous football players athletes they'd have to be constantly wary of does this person actually like me or has uh a well-known british publication who i shan't name because they're still going is paying or they may pay somebody to approach me um is using it as a story that was a thing that was why that was common like honeypot type scenario.

1:03:38It should be a crime. And that was, is that legal? Was that legal? I don't know. But guess what's the difference between a kiss and tell and pay and a pay and kiss and tell? Like the order of the money is the only thing that's different here. Yeah. Depends when the invoice technically gets cleared. Always comes down to finance. Yeah. Well, it depends if you've got a negative cash flow conversion cycle. Do you want to explain why you were so obsessed with Gymshark's negative cash flow conversion cycle? No, no, no, no, no. First off - Don't defend yourself. No, no, no, no, no. Stop defending yourself.

1:04:16So for people who want to know what a cash flow conversion cycle is, which is approximately about 1 % of people listening, I'll get through it fast. Essentially, a cash flow conversion cycle is when you get the money. So let's say, for example, Chris is running Newtonic. He'll pay a manufacturer to make this beautiful drink, then he will obviously sell it to potentially supermarkets, big stores around the UK. There's a crunch period of, well, how much credit can I get with manufacturers? And then how much credit can I get with the supermarkets? Because if you have to pay your manufacturers today for stock that will arrive in three months, and then the supermarket doesn't pay you for three months, that's what's, I think, a positive cashflow conversion cycle.

1:05:00so a negative cash flow conversion cycle is when you get the um you almost have delayed for the manufacturers and then you can sell right away which is a lot of what e-commerce companies do so i was once at a bar in manchester talking to my friend about negative cash flow conversion cycles and we saw these like repelling any woman within a five meter radius well no no we saw we saw this group of girls like look over and like say hello and i had a girlfriend at the time so i wasn't wasn't going to do anything, but I just started laughing at the thought of if only they could hear, they would be repulsed.

1:05:32Well, we've done that. Was it a Summer of Loud festival last year in the amphitheater, the Georgia amphitheater here in Austin? And we were backstage and we got all the cool passes and there were all of these like cool metal chicks walking around. And then a couple came over and sat down next to us. What the fuck were we talking about? I swear it was something like this. There was some debate that we were having and these girls sat down from a distance. And we had a couple of our kind of like super chatty mates with us. Keegan was with us, right? Who's essentially like proper Roman Adonis, not you, Laf.

1:06:03The Chad's Chad. Yeah, he's the Chad's Chad. And these women come over and obviously look, thinking, what are they going to be talking about? It's going to be so cool and sexy. And they came over and they were talking about how we all come from a conversion rate optimization background. And the blended NCPA of our Facebook ads manager could be doing with a little bit of improvement. Well, tell me how many are split testing on the back end. It's interesting. I'm not sure if Opus 5.5 is actually going to be as good as people expect. And they just slowly over time got this look of, it's probably, it wasn't boredom.

1:06:33It was closer to disgust. It was like watching somebody desecrate a beautiful temple. Because what they saw was this amazing potential in Keegan, this beautiful man. But the way that he was handling himself and what he was talking about. The biggest takeaway I always get whenever I'm on a friend's birthday or a bachelor party. there'll be a moment where I'll just start chuckling to myself. Often it will be somebody might have a girlfriend. One of the guys will have a new relationship where she's been really wary about him going to this birthday party or bachelor party. Meanwhile, it's me in a one-hour debate at dinner talking about whether Rude Van Isteroy was a better footballer than Thierry Henry.

1:07:18That's what they don't see. Or like Jim Shark's negative cash flow conversion cycle. I think if a lot of guys, girlfriends or wives could see that they have this imagination that there's going to be all this chaos and these girls that are coming over and the strip club. Meanwhile, it's usually a Google sheet or Excel formulas. It's us trying to track down that guy that bought the cigars and opened up the Strait of Hormuz by sneaking himself into the middle of a race. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I wonder if it might be inverse. It might be the fact that the guys that you don't think are getting up to naughty shit while they're away probably are.

1:07:56And the guys that you think are getting up to it aren't. They're the ones that are talking about how they come from a conversion rate optimization background. Yeah, very, very important. By the way, if you're coming to the UK and Ireland tour later this year, I'm going to be bringing some of you up on stage to answer your questions. And so if you've got a question or a story that you think would be worth me talking about, you can go to chriswilliamson.live slash questions and give me your questions and I'll be picking the best ones and you can join me on tour. So most people have no idea where their testosterone levels sit.

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1:09:02Normally, this level of testing would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's$365 a year. That's$1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now you can get$25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save$25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. Little question for you. I can't pronounce this word, but I'm going to give it a go. Have you heard of, I think it's Hypo... Hypo Mineta? No. So I got it from my friend, Henrik Carlson, who has this wonderful substack.

1:09:44And during my era, the either ancient Greek or Roman era, it's very different to what it was today. So we have this kind of bombardment of new information. We're constantly scrolling social media. I'm sure you have this, where you'll see this amazing pithy tweet, or you'll read something incredible, and your life's going to change forever after from this point onwards. And then three months later, you see the thing again, you go, I completely forgot about that. And it had no impact at all. So what the ancient Greeks or the Romans used to do would be, they would have a book of all these insights that they'd collected.

1:10:20And each morning they would think of a problem that they're facing, and they would go and meditate on the specific passage or the specific quote. So what I was actually, this is where my question kicks in is, I'd say you was to have that little notepad, notebook of lessons that you often forget or simply just wish that you took more seriously, that you would look at each day, what is on your list? So what are the most known but not followed? Not necessarily not followed by other people. It could just be, or it could even be followed by yourself, just not as much. You always underprice this lesson.

1:11:09You wish you took it more seriously.

1:11:14something like no amount of worrying is going to make any difference to what happens some lesson along those lines because worrying is very addictive it's very addictive because it feels like making progress homozy once when i started doing investing he gave me this really wonderful piece of advice on a call and he said the most dangerous calls in all of business are just calling to connect. Would just love to explain the business to you. Because they have all of the trappings of doing work and making progress, but never result in work being done. You need to join that sequence further down the line once more scrutiny is being done.

1:11:58The first stage, second stage, this is why I think in order to end up in front of him to do acquisition.com you're 10 stages deep into the circle of hell and worrying kind of feels like the same thing although it's not as conscious you're not doing because you think that it's going you forget this is not moving my situation forward no amount of anxiety is going to change the outcome no amount of worrying is going to actually make a difference to anything that happens and ultimately all of your worries were a waste of time in any case there's a great um book that I, or like book of stories of interviewing old people about their lives.

1:12:36And one of them said, what was one of your best lessons you ever had? And she goes, I had this like nightmare thing that I was ruminating on worrying about. So I called one of my friends and I tell her, I just kept spilling and telling everything that I'm worried about. And she goes, do you remember six months ago when you came to me about this nightmare worry that you had? And she names it back. She goes, no, I don't. And she goes, exactly, just hung up. She goes, it was one of the best lessons of my life. I was like, oh, this thing is going to be here today and then gone tomorrow. I also saw this humorous statistic, which was they had people apparently with generalized anxiety disorder, put down their worries, and then they tracked how many of them came true.

1:13:22and it was found that 91.6 % didn't come true. But if you have true anxiety, you start wondering, well, what about that? What about that remaining 8.4 %? That's real anxiety right there. I'm in the 8.4%. I knew that I would be in the 8.4%. There was another guy who helped Lewis Capaldi of anxiety. I think he wrote a book called addicted to anxiety and he apparently once cured somebody of their anxiety like removed a lot of the issues and they rang them the next day saying i'm anxious where's my anxiety gone it's like almost this uh addiction that exists yeah i was talking to joe hudson yesterday and um there's a bunch of stuff that's maybe exciting or that is exciting that's happening i shouldn't hedge the fact that this thing is maybe exciting a bunch of stuff going on that's exciting and um i was like I'm a little I'm unsure how to navigate this preamble this the build-up toward the build-up and he said uh if I was your coach obviously is it's like if I was your coach I would tell that you need to work on your pleasure anxiety which is that being excited about something in advance often feels an awful lot like anxiety and they're very very close what would it be for you what would the lesson be that you most repeatedly come back to or one of them you know one would be David Ogilvy's line of, you think you're advertising to a standing army, but you're actually advertising to a moving parade.

1:14:53So in the niche world of advertising, Ogilvy applies it in the sense that he would work with these huge brands and these huge brands would be like, why are we still running this ad? I've seen it everywhere. And it's like, nobody else has seen things the way you've seen them. But what I love about that idea is it's not just necessarily ad campaigns. It applies to, we constantly observe ourselves significantly more than anybody else is observing us. So it's this standing army versus moving parade. And how does that relate to you? Well, okay. So like a little one, right? So I put together this list recently of all the best books that I've read and I'll post it out there, highagency.com forward slash books for people listening.

1:15:33I'll post it out there and I will then think about, oh, I don't necessarily want to post it again. People have already seen it, but on the 17th post, somebody go, oh, I've just found this. and often it's the case that nobody has fucking seen it. It's always a moving parade. So that's one lesson. There's a legendary story in advertising circles about automagnate Henry Ford. He had a layout of the company's latest print ad tacked to his wall, which he saw every time he came into his office. One day, he loudly announced that he was tired of the ad. It was high time to create a new one. But Mr. Ford, his assistant stammered, that hasn't even started running yet.

1:16:10it's only natural for a client to get tired of an ad long before its intended audience does so how can you determine when it's time to change your campaign and they'll see this when when it's this is particularly british syndrome i don't think americans struggle with this as much but when a brit will do some new creative endeavor do a business do anything they almost feel past the first initial ask to follow up yeah it's very un-british christopher do you were you friends with me when I made gas your friends up my tagline for a couple of years? Yes. That would have been at the start of our friendship.

1:16:43I believe I was gassed. Yeah. You've actually been probably the most gassed of all of my friends about everything I've done. But yeah, I just had this line that if you support Rihanna's new single more than your friend's new business, you're a bad friend. It's so fucking true. Like gas your friends up, dude. Buy their shit, support them, share their work, tell them they're doing good. Like obviously don't encourage them to do something which is horrendous and give them feedback but like at the very least you can support it they've done something in their buy the fucking ticket go to the show support your friends it's very uh mimetic though right you kind of have someone needs to begin it's like having it's like having an open uh emotionally intimate relationship until somebody opens up it's different no i mean more that i think one of the reasons why you have less of that is that people see sometimes their friends weirdly as as rivals because they have more similarities in common with them narcissism is small differences maybe but i think my i think my point still stands which is

1:17:46if you want your friends to support you more a great way to do that is to start supporting your friends now it's another joe hudsonism when it comes to communicating that if you show up in your relationship differently after about six or seven, like very differently. There is a typical flow that you and your partner go through. They get to be the bully and you get to be the victim, or they get to be the victim and you get to be the savior. There is a dance, a sort of tone, a rhythm to the way that you communicate. And if when that happens, you show up in a very different way, presumably a much more positive way, more regulated, more calm, more peaceful, more empathetic, it only takes seven times of you doing that they'll notice after the first time after the next few they'll really notice after about seven times on average he said their pattern just can't continue it's like playing tennis with the other person not hitting the ball back so if you want to change the situation that you're in the best thing to do is change your own behavior that's beautiful it's cool that would be on my list what else would you have on your list?

1:18:56your default choices are almost always wrong. If you don't step into your programming and just think a little, and this is where the rumination trap comes in, because you think, ooh, thinking's good for me. Let's do an infinite amount. Let's do an infinite amount of it. No. It's like you need to do just a little bit. You need to practice something before you end up relying on instinct. At least that's a lesson that keeps coming back to me, that most of your defaults are confused chemical signals coming from your body or social norms or passive least resistance or the way that you've dealt with past trauma.

1:19:41Almost all of those are not things that you've consciously chosen. Yes. Like the things that you want aren't the things that you want to want. if you don't take some time designing your desires, you end up following the path that everyone else does. And like outsourcing your wisdom to the group is usually a bad idea. Even what you said then around the questioning the first thought, assuming the first thought isn't necessarily you. I always go back to that wonderful meditation exercise of what's the next thought going to be? Yeah. You sit there, try it now if anybody, where you sit there and you just ask yourself, I'm not going to think, but let's just see what the next four appears is.

1:20:24You just become the watcher. And I find when I did that for the first time, it was simply the Bayern Munich player, Ian Robin, cutting in on his left foot. And then it's like, huh, why is that there? I haven't thought of him in a long, long time. And you you're going to realize a lot of it is just an automatic response. What else do you like from meditation questions? I know that's one of your favorites. What are some of the other ones that have been really resonant with you?

1:20:57The problem with talking about meditation is firstly like a wanker. Well, yeah.

1:21:07It's very late for that. So you've got to address that up front. The second problem is, have you ever heard, there's this great line where when what happens is learning meditation, it's kind of like learning Japanese, and then you go and tell everybody how wonderful it is, but you do so in Japanese. So that's why when you read anything about it, it almost doesn't make sense. a cool one is to try and turn uh like awareness in on itself have you ever tried that where you think of your awareness and then you try and become aware of it and it's almost like this mirror and you go oh shit that's quite scary that's one of uh sam's like quick hit things where you try and catch your own awareness quickly it's kind of strange because most of the time when you're doing any meditation or mindfulness it's this evolving it's slow but this is more like trying to get an animal in a trap except the animal is you and the trap is also you uh anyway george mack ladies and gentlemen love you all thank you very much for tuning in where should people go highagency.com forward slash books read them heck yeah all right goodbye my beauties dude yes let's go hi ryan reynolds here for mint mobile are you looking for a beach read this summer may i suggest your big wireless bill it's got suspense mystery a slightly flat emotional arc and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time.

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