The Uber Eats to OnlyFans Pipeline - #1091

27:22They're withdrawing, then they're high again. Like when you kicked off at your video guy. Yeah, so the first thing I want to bring to the table for today is Kratom. Kratom is something I've been looking into because there's, I think, sort of an epidemic happening. And there's a video we got here that I can have pulled up. This is the guy I'm working with who I wigged out on the other day because he didn't buy me$10 of Kratom. And I quit the doc because of that. Yeah, this stuff's strong. Yeah. So what he's talking about to contextualize all this is 7-OH is 7-hydroxymitrigine, which is one of the, I guess, we could just call it a chemical.

28:05It's in here. I don't know the science behind it. We're going to go actually interview a chemist about this stuff. But basically, people are taking Kratom, which is sold over the counter at gas stations and head shops and there's even kratom shops, but it is a leaf that's from Southeast Asia that sort of mimics the effects of certain stimulants, but also opioids. It acts on your opioid receptors and SSRIs. And I think, I know a handful of people that have gotten very addicted to it and they're saying that it is, the withdrawal is worse than heroin, which is pretty unbelievable given that heroin withdrawal is horrendous and that's it there yeah man i should have brought some for everybody so but you're just drinking that yeah this is a lower dose than i was like you're telling me it's like worse than heroin but you're just so so here's the thing though so there's a difference between and i'm still in the process of figuring all this out um and literally yeah i so i was drinking a bunch of this stuff every day for the past month and then i sort of wigged out on my my documentary partner because uh we got yeah it'll be in the doc but uh there's um there's we're at a head shop and i was like hey dude let's get some of this credit i want to test this stuff out and there's these things there's 70h pills which is it's like almost like percocet basically and it's sold over the counter which is nuts i mean i'm not i'm not bashing it necessarily but it's interesting it's sort of the wild west of this drug and it's not it's not like it's a new thing they tried banning this in 2016 the reason i'm bringing it up is because we're doing this documentary and i think that we're on the verge of potentially an epidemic with it yeah this has been i've seen this in austin since i basically got here so there's a few small glass vials you know like a five-hour energy yeah and there was a company that was making them and one of my friends had another guy who'd been addicted he'd had whatever the addiction gene is addicted to every different drug throughout his entire life there's even youtube channels of these people and they'll say which drug fucked my life up the most and they'll just list every drug because they tried everything they're like well coming off lsd was actually not that bad but i had this period where i was on mdma every single day for like two months and that was really really rough because my serotonin and and uh he said of all of the things that he tried the hardest to get off of was crater and then he knew so much at six in the morning the sunrise mini mart on whatever fucking south on our street or something he was outside like waiting like waiting for this and then this company had taken their uh the kratom content without changing the bottling from five grams of whole leaf to two and a half and he knew and as soon as he had it he was like my fucking kratom's been stepped on he like felt like from the mini mart yeah the sunrise mini mart it stepped on his or whatever the company that was making this because these people aren't treating it like a supplement that it's so psychoactive and okay the one thing i guess i didn't explain very well is that there's a difference between like the pure kratom leaf powder and the stuff that has the 70h in it which is the synthesized version but and the reason i didn't explain that very well is because it's kind of confusing but kratom leaf itself i mean you can still get addicted to it but the 70h stuff is what's fucking people up okay for reference just because i know some somebody that's addicted to kratom is going to watch this and be like that son of a bitch blasphemed my Kratom.

31:30So that is - But the 7-0-H is the really gnarly stuff. Yeah. So I'm going to get some of those pills and start taking them. But yeah, drinking Kratom extract with the 7-0-H in it is basically drinking liquid heroin. What's it feel like? It's very interesting. It's very sneaky. So I was drinking it for a month before I really realized how high I was on it. Have you done heroin? Oh, yeah. I'm from Ohio, dude. so um how how do they how do they compare like 708 if you were if you was if you was personifying them as people like what how do they how do they compare the two if it was a party kratom to heroin yeah well i mean i haven't done high levels of the 708 stuff yet but comparatively the the kratom drinks i've been drinking are called club 13 150 mit which is mitragynine that's the the drug, I guess.

32:24And I was drinking two of those a day, which just turns out it's a lot for that, but there's not a lot of 7-OH in it from what I understand how it works. So I don't have the full scope yet for you, but I would say that heroin is, you know, you're, you're, you, you get really high, you feel great. You get that warm feeling. You've taken painkillers before, right? No, not really. No. Okay. Well, good on you, dude. You're better than me. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Don't mean it that way. Top of the moment. Are you conscious of the experience as you're doing it? Yeah, you know you're high. So I guess the primary difference would be that when you take Kratom, or when I have been, I've been, I just didn't even realize how high I was on this stuff.

33:04Like, I was kind of just in a daze, but you get sort of that euphoric feeling. And I will say that in low doses of it, it's sort of more of a stimulant. and then you take more and you're getting more of an opioid you know the the painkiller sedative isn't that interesting that the curve how much you take almost inverts it's a nuanced drug and i've never really experienced that before which was one of the things i was going to say that's it's sort of sneaky but the other thing is and maybe this is just me uh but i didn't really grasp that i was high as hell on this stuff and i was uh going in sort of thought loops about things like we had to get like a video done right and i was just sort of pacing around my house which i pace a lot already when i think around on the phone but i was just sort of going in these thought loops where i was repeating myself like kind of even talking to myself i was a little psychosis yeah dude and i didn't realize that this was this drug was that strong because it's sold over the counter and that's already i already knew from a number of other people who have gotten addicted to it because i did some you know i put some feelers out there to talk to people they already told me like, hey, be careful.

34:14It's going to sneak up on you more so than you think. Are you scared as somebody who's pretty experienced with drugs? Are you scared of the potential of putting yourself into this particular? You're going to try this 70H thing and it's going to be amazing for the doc and it's going to teach you a lot and you're going to be able to empathize with people that are struggling with this, but you are putting your health and life on the line. I'm aware you've done it in other ways a lot, but like this, I don't know, it feels like a pretty big dice roll to do that. Is that something that you consider?

34:41No. I'm not really worried about it. I mean, what's going to happen? I'm going to have to - Detox. Yeah. I'm going to go to Thailand and see where this stuff comes from now. Okay. Get the real - Jesus Christ. You're going to Mordor and deciding to fucking stare into the eye of Mount Doom or whatever it is. I'll have the Kratom shot in my hand as I'm looking into the eye of Mordor. I've done it once. I've done it once as well. When we was in Vegas. Did you get energy from it? My initial onboarding to Kratom when he was doing the David Doggins podcast, ironically What were you doing? Kratom with David Goggin.

35:13Hey, why didn't we vlog that? I was like, do some bullocks, pussy. So for context, at the time, this is how things change with time. That was the week that we did mushrooms. Yeah, and Kratom was seen as a supplement. It was seen as a nootropic at the time. That was how it was advertised to me. I thought it was going to be a study. I thought I could take it and I could work more. And I remember going, this is shit. But then I realized I had no more problems. I was like, I've got no problems at all. Why do I always think I have problems? I actually have no problems. Because you're high, George. And then I wanted to go...

35:46And then I wanted to get some the next day. Welcome to my world, buddy. Why do you think I've got so few problems? It's weird how you go from no problems and then when it wears off, you've got so many problems. Yeah, and then you're snapping your producer and you're like, hey, fuck you, I quit. It was$10 a Kratom, which is crazy embarrassing. Well, I mean, when did you do it? So I tried Feel Free, which is like this really, really popular company. And that's, for the record, that's one of the companies that's being sort of put under the microscope is this is the not good but they're not using the 70H right that's just whole leaf I gotta look at that you know I'm pretty sure yeah pull it up I'm pretty sure that the this is whole leaf stuff anyway um I this is forever ago this is when I was living in the Airbnb on South Congress when I first moved here and uh everyone's doing it everyone's it's it's literally the in school mom but everyone's doing and so I'm like oh well fucking everyone's doing it and I was like okay I'm gonna try this in the house i'm gonna try half a bottle i don't know i can't remember whether it was five grams two grams whatever tried it and it just made me really anxious anxious and a little sick for like an hour and a half i watched some peaky blinders and i was like that's not and you just drank one bottle of it half a bottle and i was like that's not for me so a lot of people get a feel sick to their stomach after they drink it and throw up and stuff like that it didn't it didn't make me feel good me and z did it again when we went to go and see a band but we didn't realize you are not supposed to drink alcohol on it.

37:07Yeah, it'll make you black out. Also, Feel Free has kava in it too. Correct. But it's only in a little, it might be concentrated. Anyway, so I tried it, didn't agree with me. There's like some things where I think I get quite bad hangovers. I've always got bad hangovers, but they've gotten worse as I've got older. What you've got, if you were someone who doesn't get hangovers, Sonny Webster, Olympic weightlifter, I remember we once partied till four in the morning, 4.30 in the morning and he set off to drive from Newcastle to Edinburgh, 8am to go and do a seminar that started at 10.30. He'd had four hours of sleep, drank more than me and was just up and doing things for the whole morning and then went and gave an entire seminar and was just fine.

37:47I needed to stay in bed the whole day. There's some people for whom the cost versus the benefit, the fucking ratio is just super skewed. They're like, again, they're like the bonnie blue of being able to drink and keep going. dude don't ever use bonnie blue as a reference you're very much the virgin mary of that yeah i am i am very much yeah i'm the lily phillips i can't take as many and uh if if that was like if it was not so painful for me the cost-benefit analysis of drinking would be completely different but we did both me and you have done our intelex dna which by the way this is the fucking sickest shit.

38:26IntellX DNA, a company that's based here in Austin, but you can do it anywhere in the US, you spit into a tube, not affiliated, I just think they're fucking sick, spit into a tube, send it off, they'll give you your full allele genetic profile, and they'll compare you to the population. Hey, you clear caffeine more slowly. You have a protective gene that's good for late onset Parkinson's. You have one which can be a risk for autism or for this or for that or for the other and in loads of behavioral stuff like this has been associated with people who have addictive personalities so i have the the com t uh gene which is a i clear dopamine more slowly that means that i don't deal with chaos and stress particularly well but once i start doing something i get completely fucking obsessed and i lock in and i can't stop it's like literally one of the descriptions was may struggle to stop tasks once started it's like just the the gene of an obsessive person that's not what's sick is once you do it's like three grand or something maybe three grand around about that it's expensive it's not cheap but it's like they're never going to change this is my genes are my genes i always wonder with this did did you learn things you didn't already know about yourself yes yes because that first one you would know like yeah i i don't handle this well so but i do i am able to obsess over tasks so i'll give you so the way i view these intellect stuff and it's like very early days and they're only going to get better and better is have you heard about the uh air force study in the 1950s where they took like 600 air force pilots who were already male certain height certain build um and they tried to build um like the average cockpit for all of them so they tried to make the perfect cockpit by aggregating all of the proportions of the pilots and when they went to test this perfect cockpit that they built it fit zero because essentially averages are completely bullshit no one is average only only I think it was 12 things that they measured, and only three of them hit 3%.

40:23So you can see it here. And even that 3%, it's with a wide range. So the 3 % that hit the range, for example, it would be between 5, 9, and 6 foot, like that level of range. So then they realized, and obviously it's so obvious now, but it's way better to just build a customizable cockpit. And I think we'll look back at everything, like how we've grown up around the way people talk about studies and magnesium and vitamin D and vitamin C is just absolute horseshit. Yeah. Because what Gary should take is very different to what I should take and likewise with Chris. So to give you some concrete examples, one, I found out I was in the bottom 10 % of magnesium absorption for my genetics.

41:01So I was like, oh, I've got to take way more than if I was to ask anything. I have a specific gene that I found, which was if I have surgery and they give me morphine, I'm very unlikely to wake up with a regular dose. It will probably kill me. So I've got to let doctors know that beforehand. I'm like, oh, that's already paid for the test. And then everything - You'll let that example. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sleeping, right? So yeah, the specifics that you do learn is actually pretty fascinating because then everything gets built on top of - Let me give you this. The thing that it did for me, I didn't learn a tremendous amount that I didn't already know through experience, but it made all of my preferences feel way more legitimate.

41:42right give you permission yeah because i'm like oh this is why i like deep house music because it's quite calming so one of the coolest things both of us did it put it into your llm put all of your labs in as well and it gives a different context the coolest thing that i did kind of useless but again made me feel more legitimate with my life direction it's like um i've just done it again now to my chat gpt project imagine that you know nothing about me erase all of the information that you have exclusively based on my dna genetic test what sort of a person am i and it comes back and it is fucking banger your baseline personality high drive high stress operator your dopamine and stress genetics com t a dbh slc da da da da da high baseline dopamine and adrenal tone faster mental processing strong pattern recognition but low margin for stress before overload you become productive intense goal oriented slightly on edge most of the time but also prone to overthinking easily tipped into anxiety and to sustain pressure sensitive to uncertainty and social evaluation.

42:36This is not a calm, content temperament. It is a perform or perish nervous system. And it just runs that for everything. Motivation pattern, I need to do off and on. I can't do constant low level stress. And I was like, I already knew this, right? Because you learn things about yourself. Both of us have zeroed in on doing meditation. Both of us have zeroed in on relatively early nights, even though both of us have been in previous industries that were way different and i'm like i kind of club promotion should be fun like i should be in a chaotic environment i should be in a highly unpredictable environment but i didn't end up there and i always felt a little bit off and as i've zeroed in more and more so what it did was i think especially for people that are maybe looking for more justification about why they're in the lonely chapter they're struggling to get through and they're like fuck like why don't i fit in is there something wrong with me not at all like this is just your predisposition right now Now, the problem that you can have, and it's kind of cool that this isn't as widespread as it might be, exactly the same as once you have a name for it, you're going to live by it.

43:37This could very much become destiny. Right, it goes both ways. Yeah, exactly. I'm way less intrigued in that kind of cold reading description. I'm way more interested in, like, it's like, oh, you know, it could have been like Virgo says this, right? But what I'm fascinated by is, so what's the strange thing? I've people have always said I'm very very similar to my granddad we have like similar hair I like sometimes find myself like closing my eyes during meals and he did that like it was weird things you did that your birthday on Monday and I did um and I then I then put in the thing I got I asked the thing I go if I'm like trying to not die here like what are my most likely causes of death and they go well your two biggest health concerns are one glaucoma so you'll just kind of gradually go blind which won't kill you um or you'll die of a stroke my granddad glaucoma Phil Collins.

44:24I was going to say it. And stroke. And stroke. Wow. Yeah. So if you've got the money, spend it. It's sick and you can have it interpreted by a clinician or whatever, but you can also just do it here. So I've just done the same thing. If I was likely to die, what am I most likely causes of death? Cardiovascular disease. Chronic stress mediated breakdown. Ooh, that's exciting. Neurovascular neurological issues because of high signaling, environmental toxin sensitivity. I just fucking got popped by milk. They're going to clone you. Yeah, that's true. That is for God. They don't need to. See, I don't need a test like this to know how I'm going to die.

44:57Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got agency over that, my friend. You've got agency over that. I'm going to have a drug-induced heart attack while flying down the highway. Before we continue, as you're probably aware, I'm not a massive drinker, at least not anymore. But even if you too are not drinking, sometimes you just want something cold, frosty, and tasty without the fear of a hangover the next day, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. Thank you very much. Their non-alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing. They've got IPAs, Hazy Goldens. They're so good that you'll forget that there's no alcohol in them until you wake up the next day feeling fantastic.

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46:04Near beer, terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. I need to bring up something that you said at dinner the other evening. Oh, well. Did you say that you think that people remember every porn video that they've ever watched? no it's this it's a private dinner with people who'd paid to be there and you brought it up on the show no no no my my thesis is um like one big meta criticism i have of the u.s that nobody warned me about as a brit um is that the toilets in america like i could be at like dean's like a very nice restaurant in austin i'll be having like a an amazing chat about like kirk of guard think about like kirkagard versus aristotle and they don't sorry let me just pop to the loos rickish your face a bit you go to the loos and in america the cubicles you can see people's feet in them and the worst thing is there's like this slit in every single and this is nationwide you're in the women's you can be in the you can be in the like a billionaire's like hotel and there's a slit there which means they have unisex toilets it's horrific like i don't even go in the unisex toilets for this reasons you look you can see people kind of just this carousel of them sat down squatting and yeah this whole idea that when you watch like graphic content it stores in your brain forever so i've just got thousands of men around austin just like there like these carousels and then you went to the bathroom and this is supposed to be the world's worst superpower the number one country in the world and like this doesn't exist in europe this doesn't exist in the middle east you know what you could do you remember those things like back in the day the the first those cycling cylinders and you look through the slit and if you spin it it makes a horse start to move if you ran really quickly down a very long series of toilets you're just looking at these different men like stages of pooping it's perfect dude you know how i know that i'm watching too many graphic videos is because when you said there's a horse that starts to move i heard there's a whore that starts to move that's not good man jesus every time like i speak to a brit or european now about coming to america and they think like there's going to be this chat about the economy this is the thing that i've got to warn you about it's so surreal and i think about this a lot like when you were talking about like life hacks like how much of life comes down to compartmentalization which is why somebody made a great point the other day why meditation apps often don't take off on phones because you have your meditation up there but then you have your strip club you have um yeah all this kind of yeah all this stuff there um and with these bathrooms you don't have any compartmentalization.

48:37I always say, imagine a house. So my friend lives in an 80-story apartment building. And we kind of sat there in his house. I go, if everything was glass right now, this would be horrific. But because you have compartmentalization, it has such an impact. Well, your point is that you would be able to see one dude's taking a dump over there and another dude's banging his girlfriend right there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Literally just up there. But we've made these arbitrary walls around us. And oh, this is the edge of my safe place in the beginning of yours. I remember where we started. You were like, I have this thesis.

49:10What did we even talk about? You were talking about, somebody said something about porn? Yeah, you brought up the internet. Storing graphics stuff in your brain. Genetics, porn, right. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Question. Go on. How do you feel about feet? Not a fan. No? Gross me out. Okay, how do you feel about feet? Pretty much the same as Sean. How do you feel about feet? I'm totally neutral. Feet neutral? Yeah. Okay. In what capacity are we talking about here? Okay, so there is a woman who does Uber Eats and has started including photos of her feet in the picture of the food drop-off and her tips have gone up by a ton.

49:47So this is - Not mad about it. I mean, as feet go, they're - He said nice pedicure. They're perfectly fine feet, but did not realize that this would blow up fast. And this is the OnlyFans pipeline. like as soon as you as soon as you post something and start to get free money for it you're like well if i put my cash app in here and if you scroll down a little bit more she says get a rotisserie chicken or a pedicure first rotisserie chicken allowance there we go this is the fucking only uber eats to only find pipeline that no one is talking about yeah i mean what's there's like an old joke about what's the how long does it take for a not a bottle source, a strip club waitress to become a stripper.

50:25Two weeks. What's that? I've never heard this. Yeah, like basically every, not every, but a lot of strip club bartenders or hosts, hostesses, they just ended up becoming strippers. And maybe that's just a niche thing that I know because of my vices. Penchant for strip clubs. Yeah, I guess. Dude, I used to have, you know this, I think I've told you this, I used to have this pickup line when I would go to strip clubs where I'd be like, hey uh bill you look just like my future ex-wife and they'd be like oh ha ha ha because they've heard that a thousand times i'd be like no i'm just kidding i'm like a horrible person i've got a felony i'm not allowed to see my son so you don't want nothing to do with me and just they lean in every time wow it's crazy isn't that the fucking craziest pickup line not really i mean american women have been conditioned since the 50s to be into like the bad boy I mean first of all it was a two-parter so that already was sophistication I was asked for yeah the old one too the old one unbelievable that's Gary's shoulder roll that's Gary's life hack by the way oh yeah yeah he asked me for a life hack that's what I came up to that's Gary's life hack Jesus what have you got 17 fucking notes app I don't want to hear about that then tell me about your Claude your Claude project instructions I want to know how to pick up a hooker right I don't even want to do one now have you seen the subreddit male living spaces yes it's funny it's fucking brilliant so this is a subreddit where guys post their bedrooms and their living spaces that they've sort of designed it's sort of peak bachelor like solo degen life and uh the photos are just fucking absolutely spectacular this one this first one this guy's got a lat pull-down machine and a tv the face patrick bateman did that honestly this looks have you ever seen mr beast's office it looks exactly like this he has a bedroom in the office with a bench press right next to it just like that the woman the fucking stormtrooper stormtrooper i love it yep there's a u-shaped couch around just a huge tv it's like literally you couldn't get in there without hitting the tv The reason is because he's wanting to get a big couch But he needs to get in the door So the door won't open He can't fit the couch and the TV in Without not being able to open the door That's actually some fucking Marie Kondo shit

52:58Transparent fucking blow up doll This one's fucking great It's an industrial container with a single deck chair What's the camping chair pointing at? Wow That's the living room yeah yeah that is that's the cuck chair for when i when i'm crushing shit go to the next one this is you gary it's a bedside table made out of just raw breeze blocks yeah you know when i was growing up my dad actually had our old box tv on a set of cinder blocks for a period of time the divorce hit him hard it works as drawers too oh yeah it does work as drawers

53:35wow it's a bottle of kratom in every piece is it uh a flat in london or a prison in norway have you seen that was it not halls of residence was it not british halls of residence there's a few different ones prison in norway or halls of residence in the uk i think was it and uh yeah it's because the fucking quality of the prisons in some scandy countries are unbelievable dude yeah I've seen those that's that pisses me the fuck off what the Norwegians are living in what the people in prison in Norway are doing much better than me it's it really irritates me I'm dead serious because like you know I've been known to commit a crime or two and if I get arrested and go to prison I'm like it just is you get arrested here yeah dude I mean I'm part of me is like man maybe I should just go to Norway and like hedge your bet in a shootout or something I don't know like that you met you guys remember that movie um heat uh i haven't seen the leon um robert de niro film de niro pacino um val kilmer yeah i think danny trejo's even in it but like the there's just that old like you know every guy's like dream way they they're gonna go out is just basically robbing a bank and getting in a shootout or maybe that's just the people i hang out with but are you familiar with this no no no oh okay are you talking about you ever seen those memes or those yeah yeah that's the dream yeah it's just like going out in a blaze of glory basically and then or like dying out and like the you know like that that picture of uh gosling bleeding out in the snow right like the dream dream snow bleed out spot anyways i just uh i'm like man i'd rather just do that it's like it's like i go to norway and i get into a a some sort of criminal enterprise what's the worst thing that happens to me i get to live better than i'm living here that's just where my mind goes uh you know but it works smarter not harder the inverse al salvador yeah yeah yeah yeah dude holy shit well i think the crimes that are being committed in el salvador are probably dramatically worse than in norway you know they were like chopping people up into pieces and stuff but did you follow this uh citrini analyst number three story um no you didn't see this no no have you guys heard about this analyst number three no what's this oh this is amazing this is just like a guy doing a legendary thing so the strait of hormuz is blocked and there's the war part of it but then there's the financial part of it you've seen like oil prices going up down the markets are swinging and so there's this research firm called citrini they do like they basically do research reports sell them to hedge funds and so the hedge fund guys want information if they get better information than they're getting from the news or from the you know the newspaper the next day that's worth you know millions and millions of dollars to them so satrini they're trying to figure out what the hell's going on with this blockade and so this guy has this idea high agency story here for you one of the guys in the office is like what if i just go and they're like what do you mean where you go he's like what if i just go to the to the straight wait, and I'll just count the boats.

56:38Like, what do you mean count? He's like, I'll just see, like how many are going through and we'll know if it's like blocked. Because basically there were people trying to figure out, is it blocked? Is it not blocked? And the gas, crude oil prices were going parabolic and then they were thrashing day over day. And so they had to figure out what was going on. And so this guy, basically, one of their analysts, they call him analyst number three, and he wrote this field blog. So just, I see this, it goes, and I read this and this sucked me into the story. It goes, the front desk inform me, there's two gentlemen from the CID downstairs to ask me questions.

57:04CID in the Gulf is like the CIA. I checked my phone in a safe, grabbed the burner, because they had seen tweets about analyst number three. Thanks a lot, James. And then it says, I went downstairs in my pajamas and slippers. There's a piece of OPSEC you learn when you're an Arab speaker. If things is sticky, you only speak English because Arabic opens the door you don't want opened. The possibility that you're a spy, a sympathizer, blah, blah, blah, basically play dumb. So I'll go downstairs and I say, hello guys, how are you? I speak English. The hotel receptionist, the same man I've been chatting with in Arabic all day, turned to the agents and goes, this guy speaks perfect Arabic.

57:34And so this guy blogged his entire thing. So he basically left the US, went to the Middle East. They show his briefcase of what he took. It's pretty hilarious. So this is what he took for his field trip. His anxiety bike. He's got two Zins. He brought cigars. He brought a pack of clothes. And then he had a pair of Meta recording glasses. And so he goes and this guy makes it all the way. So he gets to Oman. he bribes a guy they bring him in and they're like he's crossing the thing they're like you're not trying to do any journalism or anything are you he's like journalism no i'm i'm an adventurer explorer you crazy and they're like they check his bag they don't notice that the ray-bans are the glasses one are the camera ones he gets through he bribes this guy to take him on a like a paddle boat to get into the strait and he has footage of himself on the strait smoking a cigar watching like the oil one of the oil tankers that got attacked and counting the other boats And he realized that all the mainstream media was reporting that the strait was closed.

58:34He's like, dude, I'm here. I see them going through. It's not fully closed. And they were figuring out what was going on. It turns out, like, actually, the Iranians were checking. Like, if you're not U.S. affiliated and you pay us a toll, we'll let you through. And that's why, like, there hadn't been this huge oil shock because actually the tankers were getting through. But nobody knew. Everybody was using these, like, the tracking data from the boats. But he's like. Some of the boats aren't going to be tracked. They're just like, hey, watch this. They just turn it off. We don't want to be tracked.

59:02They don't want us saying that we're going through. So no problem. Turn that shit off. And they would go through. And so this is this epic story of this guy who made it back. He got thrown in jail for a couple of days. And he got out. Because of the CIA? No, he's just part of a research firm in New York. He got caught because of this. They held him. And they were like, we're going to check you out. And then they couldn't find anything. The CID is the Middle Eastern equivalent of the CIA. Oh, OK. Got you. And they popped it. That actually, that bag is the male equivalent of an anxiety bag. Yeah, that's what I said.

59:33A full pack of Cubans, two Zins and a pair of pants. Don't trust, verify. Well, that is basically someone using dark tourism to benefit from a capitalist way, similar to Lord Miles. Do you see that Lord Miles got called out by CoffeeZilla? No, no, no. Wow. So Lord Miles has done some kind of rug pull that's to do with him and Polly Market that he was going to do a 40-day fast and that he bet just before he got picked up by the police, the local police of wherever he was, someone had put a huge position that he was going to lose. And it turns out if you trace that wallet back, it's somebody that knows him.

1:00:14And then he thinks that he put the bet on and then got the police to go. And it was like a fucking mess. But anyway, that guy might as well be Lord Miles. Speaking of the Gulf CIA, I got a story about a time I accidentally did a CIA field strategy, so to speak, if you guys want to hear it. When I was in college in Santa Barbara, my buddy and I were absolutely hammered, just wasted out of our minds. And we had just run from a cab and some other shenanigans had occurred. And we got back to my apartment, which was on the second floor of the spot, but it was on a hill. So out the window was like a huge, it was like probably 60 yards to a pavement, to a parking lot behind a chase bank.

1:01:01And we were hammered and we were at this place, the electricity had gone out. So all the food in the fridge was bad and it smelled like shit. So we just started throwing it all out the window because we thought it was funny. And then we started throwing bottles out the window and then like some furniture and stuff. And somebody called the police and we're sitting there, we're all fucked up. and we just hear do do do do santa barbara police open up and we're like oh fuck dude we the cops and he looks at me and he's like dude get naked and i was like what he's like trust me and i was like all right so we get butt naked and i'm like oh we're definitely going to fucking jail so i i immediately went to the bathroom because taking a shit in jail sucks so i was like i'm gonna go force out a turd wow so i'm in the bathroom and all i hear is this like thump noise and then i hear the door open i hear a creak like and and it's just a cop and he goes what the fuck what are you doing and i hear i hear like feet stumble around and and then i hear my buddy go sorry officer i must have forgotten my pants and the cops are like what the fuck are you talking about and uh they're like put some fucking clothes on so the cops come grab me and uh naked and they realized well they thought they realized that we were two gay dudes in an argument so we faked a homosexual domestic violence situation and they were like they were like oh shit these are two gay dudes and uh yeah so they just ended up making us go clean it up because they felt they felt bad because they thought that well and my buddy was a lot bigger than me too so now i'm realizing telling this story that they probably thought i was just getting beat up by this guy but anyways um so years later uh i've told this story a couple times before to people and you know it's funny haha but years later i find out from this guy jack karaku cia dude yeah that this is like an old cia strategy that they employ all the time i didn't even know play the play the video here headquarters says we want you to pretend that you're gay i said oh come on no we really need the information you gotta pretend that you're gay i said okay i'll do it i'll do it for uncle sense so i called and i said hey i have two tickets to this show and I was hoping maybe you'd be free.

1:03:12Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards. He said, yeah, I'd love to. So we go to the show. He thoroughly enjoyed it. And we go for sushi afterwards. Then we go out again. And he says, why don't you go over to my place some night and I'll make dinner. I said, great. So I go over to his place. He made a lovely dinner. And then I thought, well, I have to invite him to my place. So I told my wife, you're going to have to like get out. So Sheila, I made dinner. I removed all the pictures of us together and we had just gotten married. So we had like our wedding picture up and everything. At the dinner, he leaned in to kiss me and i instinctively backed off and he said oh my god i'm sorry i thought you're gay and i said oh no i am gay i'm not into hairy guys and he's like oh okay i said i'm sorry i think you're great but i'm i'm not feeling it you didn't kiss no and uh i think there's another there's i don't remember if it was him but there was another person who used an example of faking they were gay to like get out of trouble but yeah just that's another life hack for you just get naked I mean could you not just appear gay rather than be naked because who fights naked Two gay dudes banging.

1:04:13Okay, okay, okay. The idea that you were so small that they thought, this guy's a world-renowned power bottom. You can't believe he's getting fucking pounded from every angle. God, yeah. It's not a good look looking back on it. Why have you got trash in your truck? Well, I got another life hack for you, Chris. Remember to take out your trash cans. Yeah, I got a couple bags of garbage in the back of my truck that he commented on when I pulled up. And he's like, why do you have like four bags of garbage? And I was like, well, I forgot to take out the trash two weeks in a row. So there's just a bunch of - Use it in the bed of your truck.

1:04:49You just carry it around as additional - Yeah, it's just in the bed of the truck. Damn. There's a dumpster behind a movie theater that I'm going to go throw it out in after this, actually. Thanks for reminding me. You're welcome. You could do a full season. Three months like that. Just 20 bags of trash in the truck. All right, so you have three life hacks. That's pretty good. Yeah, three life hacks. One more and you do it for all of us. One is really conspiracy and I'm addicted to creative. That's what I'm bringing to the table today. Did you have a life hack? That was good. I'll go on. Well, you know, the first ever series that I did on this show was life hacks.

1:05:20So there's like a thousand that I've got to pick from. But the one that I've been using the most, especially because I just got back from tour, it was in Australia, New Zealand and Bali, is an app called Flighty. So Flighty connects with your email. And when you book flights, it automatically pulls it over. and it tells you everything that's going on with your flight. What gate you're going out of, where your plane is inbound, where it's going to go when you're on the journey as well. It also tracks everything. So it pre-downloads the map so that when you're flying in the air, even without Wi-Fi, it knows sort of how long the journey is going to be.

1:05:51It can give you information about what the wait time is going to be like at your future destination, connection times, gate to gate, what carousel your baggage is going to be at. It lives in just a little island at the top, you know, the floating island thing at the top of your iPhone. And it just fucking rules, dude. like the number of times that there's been some last minute bullshit change and because i'm not watching the board or i've got my airpods in you're just in an airport doing your thing you it's just on your phone it's quicker than the app there was one flight that got diverted from austin because gale force winds got diverted to houston and i was recording with andrew schultz that day it's like fuck like i need to get back this better not be laid and blah blah blah and i thought it was great and then the plane just did like that took up again as it was coming into land and i was like it must be coming back around for another one before the pilot even came over the tannoy it updated and said like you're now basically you're landing in houston and i was like oh so in some ways it can be disappointing before everybody else knows but uh it's fucking great flighty and it's like 30 bucks a year and you can have friends on it as well you can add friends flights to it so if you've got a your missus is flying in you don't need to do it it's fucking epic a quick aside look you know sleep matters but let's be real most nights you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative.

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1:08:08My, my, uh, my life hack at the minute is, um, it's more kind of a, a philosophical stance to some extent. I think of a lot of gibberish that comes up where it's probably in the last 20 years, there's this particular discourse that happens online, but also in books where you'll see, will make a point and then they'll go so this study says or studies say and i think what happens for me for a while now previously i would default to whatever this person's about to say now is completely true but often my new default is whatever this person is about to say now is complete horseshit um because first off my friend billy made this great point of do you know anybody who's been in a study um then have you actually ever inspected a lot of these studies so i think previously what people used to do nine out of nine out of ten times they would believe the study's true and one out of ten is gibberish i actually think the policy is much better the other way that nine out of ten studies that you hear about particularly psychological studies guess what physics doesn't need a study physics goes here's how it works and you want to always opt like it's kind of the deutsch argument you always want to go for good explanations rather than studies of psych grads with people that had a specific hypothesis they wanted to confirm beforehand.

1:09:21And you'll often see these things that go viral on Twitter that get 4 million views. It's like 15 participants of college mails that are then making... Then the Daily Mail covers it, the Telegraph covers it. Huge sweeping generalizations. It's one giant scam. The other one is... My favorite one is Science Says, or Science Backed, or trust the science. And my new default is, if somebody says this, they're about to say something that's completely unscientific. Because by definition, oh, sorry about that. By definition, if something is science-backed, I didn't invest, there we go. If something is science, if something is - Fucking Etonics has research-backed ingredients on the side of it.

1:10:00Research-backed a little bit. I can say firsthand, this shit definitely works. Going off Adderall. Well, I guess the question is, but then actually investigate what the research is essentially saying, which most of us, we just default to, this is true so i read uh adam mastriani experimental history everyone needs to subscribe on substack fucking rules and um he posted today there was a wonderful one two part of living fossils that rob korsban does and uh experimental history had these two things about the replication crisis and uh adam's entire point is that psychological theories don't ever be killed they just become embarrassing so um power posing being completely disproven but has now just been sort of retconned into, it's like expansive posture science and stuff.

1:10:43They've just renamed it. Growth mindset, total bullshit, totally does not replicate. Ego depletion, like willpower stuff, total bullshit, does not replicate. What about retard maxing? Retard maxing actually is at the forefront of cutting psychological science. If it doesn't replicate, do a 360. Moonwalk out of there. The problem with the replication stuff is that it goes back to the conversation we had around genetics that actually some of this stuff may work for certain people depending on their specific genetic set. What you may have is 10 % it really, really works for and 90 % it doesn't do anything, which is a way more fascinating conversation.

1:11:19But as soon as you just default to, it feels like I have a point that disagrees with Gary now, and I'm just going to say, well, studies say, and I've won, and there's never any critical conversation around, well, can you explain the specific variables here that causes this outcome? It's just studies say, I'll let me tell you about the study. So increased skepticism, is that what you're saying? Yes, as a whole. Including around Oswald. All the way up. I think the other side of that, the life hack is use this all the time because for every one George who's skeptical, out of 100 people, how many have your stance?

1:11:51It's the other way, yeah. Yeah, it's going to be 99. So actually the hack is just start saying study say, even when there's no study at all, and everybody will take you very seriously. It's similar to how people reference mainstream media, even though, like you said, with the the straight, how there were still ships going through there and the media was saying that they weren't. It's the same thing, right? Where somebody, instead of referencing a study, they're like, well, Fox News said, or CNN or whatever bullshit people - Appeals to social authority. Yes. Yeah. Dude, speaking of which, that actually ties into the other thing I sent you.

1:12:21Did you guys hear about the Stop Nick Shirley Act in California? Dude, this is crazy. So there was - Because he's trying to do the same thing he did in Minnesota and California, right? He needs to do that in Puerto Rico, dude. seriously i mean if you get a list of the places so california has this act now who's this is it this is the bill right here they basically put put together this legislation that says it's called the stop nick shirley act it's like a draft what is it like prohibits a person business or association from knowingly publicly posting or publicly disclosing or distributing on internet websites or on social media the personal information or image of any designated healthcare services patient provider or assistant or other individuals residing at the same home address with the intent to incite a third person to cause imminent great bodily harm to the person identified in the posting or display or to a co-resident of that person as specified or to threaten the person identified in the posting or display or a co-resident of that person as specified.

1:13:18So it's basically an extreme fascist bill that they're trying to pass to prevent people from exposing fraud. So you think that they're getting out ahead of having exposed in California what was exposed in Minnesota and by making it essentially this kind of investigational legal. Yeah, and that's of interest to me given all the financial stuff I've exposed down in Puerto Rico. But if you extrapolate that and map it onto freedom of speech as a whole, this is a big problem. I mean, I don't know. This shit is fucking gnarly, dude. Having to read this thing, like the, here we go. This guy, yeah, he explains it a little bit better here.

1:14:03It warns that it would restrict the release of investigative videos and impose penalties on watchdogs who expose fraud. It's a, I mean, I don't really believe in the two-party system. I think they're all just too, everybody's full of shit, but it is a Democrat that put this out. And of course there's, you know, the backlash from this guy is probably a Republican. So it sounds like what they're saying is when he exposed the Somali learning centers, that then creates sort of hostile potential violence against the Somali people. So in order to protect threats of violence against immigrants, here's this act.

1:14:35Right, right, right. Which is totally like a load of bullshit because the real way you would protect from somebody being harassed like that is to stop the fraud in the first place from happening. Yeah, or just separately prevent like violence in the way that we prevent assault. Yeah, yeah, or I mean, I'm just saying that, Yeah, there's a number of other ways to handle it. But yeah, it's crazy, right? Yeah. I was looking at this the other day. I'm kind of interested in how it plays out, you know? You do a lot of investigative journalism, right? You were down in Palisades almost immediately after the fire, exposing a ton of stuff around FEMA.

1:15:12You've done the Puerto Rico thing. What are the big ones have you done recently? um well after going to puerto rico i i kind of uh was i shelved the the deep dive investigations because it's so much work to look through all the just everything dude it was also really it was fucked up man like people in puerto rico don't have we we met a guy who doesn't have a fucking roof still he hasn't had electricity for eight years it's crazy dude i you gotta watch it I don't know if I ever sent it to you. You didn't send me this one. Yeah, it's insane. In theory, I mean, I can give you the layout real fast.

1:15:52Basically, in 2016, Congress, with Obama's approval, signed off on a financial board that more or less acts like the shadow government of Puerto Rico now. And they've funneled around$2 billion of taxpayer money, Puerto Rican taxpayer money, off the island to Wall Street consultants, executives and attorneys to consult on the bankruptcy down there because the whole island is bankrupt. And part of that process is to resolve the PREPA bankruptcy, which is the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the government power company. And then it was privatized with this company, Luma and yada, yada, yada.

1:16:30The power is horribly unreliable down there. It's one of the most expensive in the entire country. And they're basically having money funneled off the island like and they're all more or less connected to wall street but it's crazy and the reason i bring that up in relation to this is because um you know the somalian daycare thing sure there's there's some some stuff going on there but puerto rico has been basically getting shit on forever and i think this is possibly an even worse situation that's going on down there and they just revoked some transparency act down there too recently in the past like four or five months they're going to try and get out ahead of people that are doing investigative journalism i mean that's what it seems like to me they don't want they want it to be more difficult for people to to foyer request stuff essentially like one of the things they revoked on the transparency act down there in puerto rico was when you when you request information it doesn't show who you are specifically right to to the to the people that you're requesting it from but they they're changing that so that they can see so they'll be like oh gary faust the guy that's been talking a bunch of shit about us is requesting this information we're gonna you know deny that yep it's crazy but this is similar to that and i think this is actually uh branded as the transparency act because who can who can say well it was it was existing legislation that was good yeah yeah yeah they're yeah um but yeah this is this is crazy i don't even know what else to say about it because not much has transpired but in my field of work i mean that would that would basically prevent me from doing my job.

1:18:04I have a quote that I love. This is a little more positive. I feel like we've had some conspiracy, some darkness, some getting in trouble. Good. I want to bring a little positivity here. All right. So I saw this quote from Blake Mikoski, who created Tom's Shoes. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but he's like, I've had this on the wall of every office. He says, a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to determine if he is working or playing.

1:18:40To him, he always appears to be doing both. And I just like, that to me has just been a very useful, I don't know, guidepost or like, oh yeah, like that is the highest calling. If you yourself basically don't differentiate between your work and your play, or, you know, are you, is this something that you have to do or you should do or you want to do, the more those blend together and the less you sort of bucket things, I think the more you solve the problem of balance that I think nobody feels like they have. And so I just thought this was awesome and I'm going to put this up in my office wall.

1:19:13This seems similar to what Michael was talking about of the childlike thing. You remember on the first episode that we did and he quoted some scripture, he said, be childlike my children or something like that. I think one of the problems that you have is working for yourself sounds great because it sounds like choose whenever you want to work. But for most people, what it results in being is just work all the time because there's no one to tell you to stop. And a great idea to think about if this doesn't feel like play to me, scrutinize it and maybe try and get rid of whatever I can from this particular area of my life.

1:19:52But when you're compelled by, oh, well, I just want to be more successful and more well-known, that is rewarding in and of itself, but it's not the type of reward that you want. So you need to almost be skeptical and discerning in the rewards that you get too. This feels like play, but it might actually be just shallow juvenile status seeking, or it might be me playing the game of accumulating money when I already have enough. It's that line from James Clear where he says, if you already live a good lifestyle and you sacrifice it in order to make more money, by definition, it's a bad trade. And I think sometimes people are bad at distinguishing, determining what is and is not play, what is and is not just more like limbic rewards.

1:20:39Does that make sense? So there's this book that I'm reading. It talks exactly about this called The Score. You guys ever heard of this book? It's basically this guy who's a philosophy professor, but he loved games growing up. He only plays games. He uses games as this analogy. And I think in general, a far more important thing in life than being a good player is picking a good game. Because it's very easy to be, you know, you were talking about Joey Chestnut earlier, right? And like, you know, the philosopher Joey Chestnut. No knock on him, but like just generally choosing to be a competitive eater, not the best game to play in life, right?

1:21:12Like you could choose many things to try to be great at. There are some that are better and worse. Every game comes with a scoreboard. The scoreboard is very unique in that It basically programs you, it rewires your mind for what you now want. The game dictates what you want, right? Because it says that's how you win. This is the scoreboard. So therefore I've implanted a desire. Your behavior changes appropriately. And then it tells you who you need. And then it changes your identity. Who do you need to be to win this game? So you play Call of Duty, you better be a psychopathic murderer, right?

1:21:41You got to be ruthless. You play charades, you better be a team player, a great communicator. You play poker, you better be great at the art of deception. And so the game you choose will not only choose for you what you want, it'll choose your motivation. It'll end up dictating your identity. Who do you need to be to win that game? So he talks about like, you know, he became a philosopher or philosophy professor because he loved answering the big questions about life. That's what got him into it. Then he got there and he realized there's a ranking system for the professors nationwide. And how do you go up?

1:22:13So he's a competitive person by nature, like many of us are. So he started trying to win the game. Now he had a scoreboard. The scoreboard said, in order to get more points, you have to write more peer-reviewed published articles about these niche topics. So then he spends two years winning that game and then basically feeling miserable because he's like, this is not what he enjoys about philosophy. So he made himself miserable winning the game. And he talks about how there's something called value capture. Value capture is basically when the game gives you the metric that is super simplified, easy to digest, but it may not have been what you want out of this.

1:22:46So, for example, we're on YouTube, right? YouTube gives you one big score, views. You can make a life-changing episode that gets half the views of another episode, but it doesn't know how to measure life-changing. It just measures views. And it's going to keep giving you that metric. And, I mean, let's be honest. How many YouTubers don't just respond to views, right? It's like a very, very powerful motivation because it's in your face. Everybody sees it. And that's the scoreboard that determines success or failure in that game. I mean, we've like spoke about this at hours. And yeah, this is one of our favorite.

1:23:18You hit one of our trap cards. Like there's a, weirdly, part of the thoughts I was thinking about this week was going down like how, you know that Marshall McHugh line that we like shape our tools, then our tools shape us. It's a great example of Nietzsche. Nietzsche used to write by a hand and then his eyesight began to go. So he started to write in a typewriter and his writing completely changed. He went way shorter, way punchier. He almost completely changed as an individual. And I've been thinking about that with a lot of these tools where, so I would like, one of my life hacks at the minute is what I call boom scrolling.

1:23:50So rather than doom scrolling, I go on a treadmill at like 15 ink line, three in. I've got share believe on loop playing. I'm spinning around. I'm having a fucking great, I'm just sending links to people. If you are either in his contacts, high on the top of his list of iMessage contacts recently because he's got massive recency bias so he only sends it to the people that he can see and if you're in lifetime on south lamar and you walk downstairs and you see him it's you with something from the 80s some hair metal or like some like big pop star from the 80s and he's just furiously sending fucking links that's how social media i think supposed to be consumed if you're 130 uh that's how it's supposed to be yeah if you're 130 heart like heart rate per minute you just like forget about like all the like new stuff goes and i'm just in like these holes like finding stuff but one of the reflections you've managed to find a social media flow state yeah social media boom scrolling it's it's coming back um so one of my one of my actual realizations when i was in this high was one thing you when you become when you're in like a flow state or when you're more mindful you begin like the a lot of meditators describe it as the frame rate of reality completely slows down so it's kind of like going from a standard definition tv to a hd where everything's a bit clearer everything's a bit slower and i started to notice this thing in my head i was really embarrassed about that when i would scroll i'd see a tweet or i'd see a post and there's this little thing in me that just looks at the views it gets and then like determines if i'm going to consume it or my reaction beforehand and it's almost like imagine what we've created for this mimetic algorithm imagine before you ever heard like a piece of music or you ever tasted a bit of food it's like like people clapping or people going, that's a bit shit.

1:25:30And that's your whole, you don't actually ever experience social media content. So one of the two big changes I'd like to see is one, could I just turn off all engagement metrics? And I'd be fascinated to run a study and compare the two and see like the impact that that would have. And then the second one, because I've thought a lot about this, which is your point, Sean, around the depth metrics, that it's very hard for us to measure depth. It's very easy for us to measure width is right now, one of the problems with social media is you can only kind of pay with a like like that's the currency which and then i if you have a thought experiment if you imagine the world where the only currency was one dot like a one dollar bill and you can't pay more than one dollar what would you have the dollar store theory you'd have dollar store everywhere means you wouldn't have michelin star restaurants you wouldn't have like luxury brands you wouldn't have all these stuff that you'd those are actually shit examples because i hate them but you know stuff that you would actually want to pay more money for and i thought even just as simple as like why x don't just implement like a golden like where i only have one per week it's completely meaningless but i have one per week and i press it and then i can also go on the golden like feed i know this is the thing that sean says out of everything he's consumed this week is the best i think the change you would have in terms of content the worst thing is that you you proposed this to me over dinner what five years ago or something probably and i was like fucking stupid idea and then youtube brought in hype we've seen hype no what is that if you're a channel with under 100 000 subscribers you as a user are allowed i think you're allocated about a thousand hype points per week and you can only spend it on videos that are high performing i think it might be videos over 100k on channels less than 100k something like that but it's uh like non-fundible the limited right so the bitcoin of your likes right and it's fucking great and i find myself using it on videos that i really want to i'm here's a small creator that's nailed it with some great documentary explaining why the whole the Strait of Hormuz is hard to get through whatever fuck and I'm like I want to send the the hype thing Michael Smoke is had one video that broke through and I wanted to do it for his thing so yes you're right other thing McNamara fallacy you familiar with that no okay so uh McNamara was the guy that was in charge of working out what was going on with the troops in the Vietnam war and his issue was that he was measuring the wrong metrics.

1:27:46So the McNamara fallacy or quantitative fallacy is the mistake of making decisions based solely on metrics while ignoring qualitative and measurable factors. Named after US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it assumes that if something cannot be easily measured, it is not important or does not exist. So the issue that the McNamara fallacy had was that enemy body count metric is taken to be a precise and objective measure of the success or failure of the Vietnam War, but it wasn't at all. It was domestic casualties, domestic injuries, and the far more important, what's the vibe? What's the tone around it?

1:28:20Yes. The soul. Yeah, precisely. So the line is, we end up intending to measure what matters, but instead what we can measure just ends up mattering. Yeah. And everything else is disregarded. So you could - Like I say, how, obviously, golden-like idea. Like, is there any ways you guys have, like, for yourselves, whether it's for the actual platforms themselves or just for you as an individual, have found a way out of this? There was one I heard, I didn't do this, but Hormozy had a thing with this where he starts getting popular on YouTube. And then he hires a team and they're like, hey, let's punch this up.

1:28:59Let's do this video. Let's do this video. Oh, people will love this. Do what you're eating. Do what you, how you guys met. Do this, right? He started as a business channel and then he's doing everything. And of course, there's not a lot of people who want to understand how to do better cold calls in sales. That's a super niche topic, but don't be broke is a bigger topic. And then bigger than that is going to be harsh truths about being a man, whatever. So those are pot. Those get 2 million views. So why make those shitty 20 ,000 views about how to improve your sales funnel or whatever? But he realized, well, what was my mission?

1:29:32My mission was like, I love business. I want to share what I know about business. And so what he did was he started selling his book for 99 cents. And he put it in this bio, right? So he's basically just used the assumption of instead of measuring the success of these videos based on views, let's just measure it on book sales. Presumably, only a business person, the type of people I'm making content for, would buy a business book about sales or about$100 million offers. only somebody who liked the video and trusted me more from this video would go and convert. So it's like, let me create my own, like, it's like people who do their own sampling, like their own polling.

1:30:10Like, I don't know if you heard about this before the election, but there was a guy who did the, who made a huge bet on poly market that Trump was going to win. I don't know if you guys remember this. Some French guy made like$50 million. And the reason why was the mainstream media polls were showing like a neck and neck race. And he did, um, what's called like something like the friends and neighbors poll. You can pull this up Jared, but like, I think the premise was if you ask people who they're going to vote for, they'll tell you, but like some people hedge and there was like closeted Trump voters.

1:30:38But if you ask them, who do you think your neighbor's going to vote for? They'll give you a different question. This is like the Keynesian beauty contest. Yeah. And so he used the data from, he commissioned his own poll, which cost him like a few hundred thousand dollars or whatever. And he ended up making 40 or$50 million on a bet because he understood the actual probability of success was far different than the priced odds on these markets. So what you're saying that Alex did was he found a metric that was more important and more accurate than all of the other metrics that came up. He brought his own metric to YouTube, which he had to hack around, right?

1:31:11To figure out how to do. James Smith does this. So he's got his business channel, which is the other thing. He basically shut down his main one, which has got half a million subs. And he'll put a video up that gets 20 ,000 plays and make$50 ,000 because the people that go onto that video are precisely his target market at a high conversion. And they've got some special tracking link that's for each different video. So he knows, oh, this one video, because it's only this link in that one video and it's pinned in the comments or whatever it might be. And he's now optimizing for the outcome that he wants.

1:31:45Now the problem is that you then start to optimize for book sales. And what optimizing for book sales, because you're always optimizing for something, unless you're optimizing for vibe, or optimizing for feeling. And that's what, you know, to break the fourth wall, that's the reason that I wanted to do this. I don't know if these episodes will ever be bigger than me sitting down with McConaughey. I think they've kind of weirdly got the legs to be. But the reason I wanted to do it is because I thought it would be fun. And I think the optimizing for the quote on the wall of your man or the childlike joy or the, you know, good hang vibe.

1:32:18It's yeah. Knowing when to use metrics, when to avoid them. And then also, I think you said then about studies, like how much of this is you and then how much of this is the wider. I have to give you credit. You did this when you released your high agency thing. I was the one who went on similar web and looked at the traffic to your blog. I was like, dude, there's a million people have read your blog. You're like, really? I'm like, don't, what are your analytics? That's a similar web. He's like, I didn't have Google analytics in. Yeah. And I was like, you're a marketing guy. How do you not have it in?

1:32:43You You intentionally didn't have it in. Yes, yes. Well, even that bit of advice there of like, do a blog post. Like blog posts are essentially the UK or the mainstream media. You know what I mean? Like it's like the ultimate like - Undervalue. Undervalue. Like don't do it. You can't link to it. And at that time, Twitter completely shadow banned links. But then, yeah, I think doing something fundamentally different. And this is the challenge of when do you know, and I struggle with this a lot, when you're a bit of a weird guy, which fucking all four of us are probably, right? When do you know that you're kind of on to something?

1:33:12You're on the edge? or when are you just a bit bad shit mentally? And that, and knowing that is a fucking, that's why you've got to have good friends, I think, as well as sometimes just balls and you make mistakes. No, no, you just ignore, you just always assume you're onto something. Put the glasses on and hold the bed. You always 100 % assume you're onto something. That's what I do. Delusional. The Lulu is the Lulu. This is the difference. You know what I mean? That's our GDP gap right there. This side of the table and this side of the table. That's the GDP gap, right there. Yeah, that's the GDP gap.

1:33:35You think I'm going to tell you if you're onto something? Come on. Really? Really, it is. It is. I'm always onto something. That's right, baby. Next thing you know, I'm going to be. Maybe I'll wait two decades. That's a metocratic society where we've got an old school aristocratic society. Exactly. We've been handed down. And also the other thing is that we can't raise out of our status. You're going to be middle class for the rest of your life in the eyes of British people. I'm going to be working class for the rest of my life in the eyes of British people. It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter how many plays I get, how much money I make.

1:34:04When I go back home, they know where I went to school. They know what postcode my parents lived in. They know what my accent's like. It's like, I think that that puts a kind of cap on how much people think that they, how big their dreams should be and how much faith they should have in themselves. This is, Alain de Botton talked about this. He's like, people that come from in the UK working class backgrounds, they're probably not going to try and rock the boat because that's not their place. It's not your place to do that. America's like nascent. It's like fucking two years old, right? In the grand scheme of things.

1:34:34We've got a thousand years of uninterrupted, uninvaded history, right? Apart from some planes in fucking August of 1940. That's it, right? And then fucking Rudolf Hess when he decided to try and land in Scotland. Do you know that story? Rudolf Hess. Amazing. Oh, gee, do you want to tell it? You tell it better than me. Okay, so Rudolf Hess was one of the - That was the most English shit ever. You want to tell it? No, you tell it better than me. Fuck on.

1:35:05rudolph hess was a german fighter ace in world war one and he then becomes one of the inner circle for hitler in world war ii he starts to slowly lose favor toward the end of the war i think 43 44 he starts to lose favor with hitler and he sees himself being shunted to the side a little bit so he decides that he's going to do something courageous and heroic that's going to save the war and also bring him back into the inner circle with regards to Hitler. Because he's got this sort of group of sycophants around him. He's got Himmler, he's got Goebbels, he's got all of these guys that are around him.

1:35:39And Rudolf Hess has been shunted out to the side. So Hess gets a two-seat plane, one of the long-range bomber planes that the Germans were using. He gets it modified so that it can be flown by one person as opposed to two. He gets additional fuel tanks strapped to it and he flies it without telling anybody in the middle of the night from Germany over to Scotland because he once met some aristocratic Scottish nobleman and thinks because he's got this perspective of Brits that it's all one Renaissance Bridgerton novel that he is going to know Winston Churchill and the king and he's going to be able to or the queen and is going to be able to petition Britain to have an armistice, to put down their arms.

1:36:31So he leaves a note for the Fuhrer and leaves a note for his wife and just sets off. Now, he doesn't know where he is when he gets to Scotland because it's dark. By the time he gets to Scotland, it's dark and he can't see where he wanted to land. He can't see the fucking palace or the house of this nobleman. So he just pulls the ejector seat, lands in a farmer's field, lands in a farmer's field very quickly gets picked up by the british military they find out this is the fourth ranking nazi in the entire reich immediately take him into custody doesn't get to see the king doesn't get to see the queen doesn't get to see anybody doesn't get to see anybody at all doesn't get anywhere close to the nobleman he meant to go out in there and see however the british now have the fourth ranking nazi in the world and hitler is furious absolutely fucking furious like apoplectic apparently and uh it just goes to show i think like first off the weird incentives and the way that people respond to a tight sphere of a social circle with power struggles that keep on going on it causes people to do crazy being in a relationship with a hot cold girlfriend right you're just doing fucking insane thing you're like throwing rocks at her window holding a boombox with a mixtape and then the next day you're naked kid fucking getting, you know, being beaten up by her or whatever.

1:37:49I told you that story in confidence. And the other thing is that people still have this kind of archaic interpretation of what British life is like, especially back in the day. He should have done a 360 and then moonwalked out of there. Have you ever heard of the story of Churchill and Hitler getting dinner? This episode is brought to you by Whoop. According to my Whoop, I've tracked nearly 2 ,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens. That's because Whoop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day, your sleep, your workouts, your recovery, your breathing, your heart rate, even your steps.

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1:39:01And there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30-day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom. Early 30s, Churchill's very much out of the picture, and Hitler's on the come-up. So I think he's either just became chancellor or he's just about to become chancellor. And one of the fascinating things when you really study history is how blurry it is at the time.

1:39:37so i always use the example of the roman empire of you can i think it's like 476 ad is where the roman empire fell but if you ask well when did the people recognize it fell and it's a bit like the same with the british empire like when did the british empire fall it's like no like you could point to certain parts of world war one you could go further back you could go to world war two you could go to 60s 70s whenever you want to go to it um when do people actually recognize i think it's always later. And even like Hitler, like Churchill, who obviously ends up becoming Hitler's nemesis, was intrigued by a dinner with him.

1:40:11So there was this guy called Ernst Putzi-Hangelsweger. You can probably search that one, Jared. Good luck. And he was like a socialite in Germany who wanted to arrange the meeting. And Churchill basically said, listen, he was really concerned about communism at the time, but he was also concerned with Hitler's antisemitism. So Putzi says, well, come through. I'll introduce you to Adolf. You guys will get on really well. Churchill turns up. He's got his whole family there and kind of chatting to Putze. He's still not here. Still not here. So they kind of have dinner. Hitler's not there. And Churchill's like, where is he?

1:40:43So Putze goes, leave it with me. So Hitler famously lives in an apartment building in Berlin. So he goes to his apartment building. Shit you not, Hitler's there just shaving his mustache. So he's just shaving his mustache at the time. That's the thing about his mustache. There's a lot of work that goes into that thing. So he's shaving the mustache and he goes, Winston Churchill, very important British politician wants to meet you. And he's like, what am I going to say to him? What am I going to say? I have no interest in talking to that guy. And Putze argues with him for ages and he goes, right, I'll come.

1:41:15So he goes back, tells Churchill, Churchill and his family sit there, hit the never cunts. So Putze says, I'll set it up the next day. Sets up another dinner, hit the never cunts. And it's like those moments of history that if those two met because famously i didn't realize this until i was reading about it recently that chamberlain met adolf hitler he flew over to germany and he was impressed do this give us a handshake he was impressed by the handshake because hitler does these like double handshakes and he was drawn in by his charisma and believed oh this guy will never invade um but it's just this fascinating counterfactual that if adolf and winston met what would have happened what year was that i want to say 31 32 around about then fuck yeah that's so cool uh have you seen the forbes under 30 under 30 fraud list oh wow yeah it's crazy jared how long is it now um so it's just this stinks of you two this is really something this is kind of just a gift for you two um but this is the uh 30 under 30 fraud watch list so if we scroll down a little bit and you hover over sam backman freed you'll see uh incarcerated terraform labs incarcerated elizabeth holmes theranos incarcerated we'll keep going down there we go time served for uh martin scrolly um and if you go if you go to the black bit where it's like redacted just scroll over the black uh text the real numbers were 300 that's it sold a student loan app to jp morgan for 175 million claimed 4.25 million users the real number was 300 000 and she hired a data scientist to fabricate the rest.

1:42:46JP Morgan bought it anyway, then noticed, oops. If we go all the way down to the bottom, there's actually a risk list. So this is people who've been on the 30 under 30. It's like a, how would you say, prototypical algorithm that looks at some of the hype around the market. So these are companies that they think is going to be likely to be on the fraud list. So I don't know any sphere, Cursor. Do you know what that is, Sean? Yeah, Cursor is super legit. I would say Cursor is super legit, but they're not going to come for you. The crazy one is Sam Bamman-Fried. It came out today. That Polymarket there?

1:43:21Oh, Shane. Sam Bamman-Fried. It came out today that the shares, FTX. So Sam Bamman-Fried put an investment in Anthropic that owns Claude. It would have gotten them out of the bankruptcy. It's something like that. No, it's like$60 billion. $60 billion, which Coinbase is worth$50 billion or something like that. So it's, but the - FTX at its peak was 30. So basically he's one of the, had he not gone to jail for fraud and had not been using customer response. Would have been one of the richest people on the planet. And he would have been seen as one of the best investors in the world because he was early in Solana.

1:43:50He was early in this. He was early in - Do they still have that position or did they have to liquidate the position? No, that's the sad part. When they did the bankruptcy, they bring in this guy. I forgot he's a famous guy. He did the Enron bankruptcy, something like something Rice or something. I forget what his name is. He's got a cool sounding name. They bring him in. So what do they do? They immediately freeze all payments. They have a protocol of bankruptcy. And so one of the things is They take all these illiquid shares and they say, we need to sell them. And they sell them by this huge discount right away into the market.

1:44:17Oh my God. And so they sold the whole lot. Do you know what they sold it for? So they sold the whole lot for like, I think like a billion dollars of, like a billion dollars of all the investments that he had made. And so it was like a fraction of whatever it was like worth essentially. And just the one anthropic position alone is a$60 billion position. Would that have paid off all of the - Oh, multiple times. Many times. So all of the people who were missing money, had they have just helped, when was the FTX thing? Three years ago? Yeah, something like that. Had they have held the FTX position in Anthropic simply for what?

1:44:51A thousand days? A thousand months? Even let's say it was like they did it. It was last year. It would have been three years. That would have cleared off everybody's debts. Everybody would have got their money back. Right. Well, you got screwed because if, let's say you held Bitcoin in FTX, you did nothing wrong. You bought Bitcoin on this exchange. You think you have Bitcoin. In reality, FTX either didn't buy the Bitcoin, just took your cash. They showed you, you own 10 Bitcoin, but they never bought the Bitcoin. They just took the cash and did something with it. Or you did have Bitcoin and they went and used it, again, for their own slush fund of investing, which they were not supposed to do.

1:45:21Now, even when the bankruptcy happened and it's like, oh, you're going to get paid out, you got paid out based on the Bitcoin price when it happened. Not the fact that Bitcoin was up 3, 4, 5x since then. Why is that? It was like, it's the way that I guess the bankruptcy process works. I don't know, the technicality of the way that they did it. And so you had this money that should have been appreciating that was locked up and then you get paid on the four years ago price or whatever it was the day that it happened. It's pretty bad. Sean, your knowledge of fucking niche business stuff, dude, is terrifying.

1:45:57It's like George for random historical facts. It's really fucking terrifying. Galloway did something cool with this. Have you heard what he did? So when the bankruptcy happened and people, every, so like for me, I had some cash. FTX was one of our sponsors. They gave us a bunch of money. They gave us like 100, 200 grand to write one article about them on the Milk Road. And we actually wrote it and I wrote in the thing, I was like, yeah, there's this weird relationship between FTX, which everybody thinks is the best company in the world right now, and Alameda Research, his like hedge fund. And it's like, it's unclear the relationship.

1:46:32It's a bit of a... So you called this out. So I called that part. I'm not an investigative journalist. I wasn't going to go. It's not my job to go figure that out. But I just noted like, hey, like here's a bunch of really interesting things about them. Here's something that's unexplained. I don't fully know. It sounds a little bit sketch. And so we sent it to them. We're like, hey, we're ready to post. And they were like, you need to take that part out. No fucking way. And so I was like, well, I think I'm not going to take it out. Right. And they were like, okay, we'll get back to you. And they just never talked to me again.

1:47:00They never took the money back. They never asked for the money back. They just disappeared. And you never posted it? We never posted it. we were like okay i guess we'll just i guess they'll get back to us they just never did and then it came out that that was like this link that was like a really problematic thing that was their defensive way of handling that did you ever that's crazy bring up the fact that you presciently fucking accidentally just nudged the trip why you didn't fully break it but you nudged the trip why that was going to cause like the biggest banking scandal of the last five years the epstein girls the the two girls but i'm like a dog setting it off i wasn't really like clever and how I was doing it.

1:47:31You backed into it. You moonwalked into it. Yeah, I was just like, that sounds weird. Is there an explanation for this? They're like, no. And I was like, okay, still sounds weird to me. That was it. It's really interesting to consider and it kind of links to the study says, science says, of we just have this default bias of if people think this thing is successful, kind of it's this giant game of Empress New Clothes that exists. One of the things that I've always had a bit of a problem with, maybe because I was such an unpopular kid, that the fact that talent isn't enough, momentum is more important for the most part.

1:48:05You know, we can let a lot of people get away with some pretty gnarly shit if it seems like they're crushing it. I always use this example of a fire festival. Billy McFarlane from Fire Festival. The festival was an entire catastrophe. Multiple documentaries made about it. People are in basically FEMA shelters instead of the five-star huts that they were promised. Blink-182 doesn't turn up. People have got these like small cheese sandwiches. is. Maybe they're going to be stranded on an island. There's not enough water, all the rest of it. But if Billy McFarland had been able to put together a half competent festival, just passable, he would have been hailed as a marketing genius.

1:48:40The Orange Square, all of that stuff was hugely influential. And this is because we will forgive almost every sin of someone's if they're successful. And in a meritocracy, this makes complete sense, right? If you are crushing it, that means I want to be around you. The blast radius of your success is so great. Fucking canonical, perfect example that happened two weeks ago, Kanye West. Kanye West just sold out SoFi Stadium two nights, right? And the stage show is fucking spectacular. All that anyone can talk about is how cool the production was. And he's got all of these guests coming on. It's fucking amazing.

1:49:14He hasn't exactly showered himself in glory over the last five years, right? It would be difficult for a musician to try and torpedo their own musical career more aggressively than Kanye West but homeboy's got bangers yeah if you've got bangers dude it's all forgiven you can do whatever the fuck you want and that's on one side what happens with music your point and beauty two things that hack the human brain so effectively that you will stay going back to the fucking crazy stripper girl because she's so even though she's bad for you you will listen to the person who put out literal heil hitler song fucking six months ago because he's got three and a half half hour worth set of straight heaters.

1:49:59And the same thing is also true with momentum. If somebody seems to be crushing it, we'll just, we'll, Sam Bankman Freed is playing fucking, what was he playing? Like fucking World of Warcraft or something? During the meeting. Yeah, during, and he's like, oh my God, this guy's a fucking genius. Genius, yeah, exactly. And it's like, no, no, no, no. Because any person would be scrutinized, but if you've got the right momentum, people are happy to just fucking shunt that to the side. and I've never liked it. And it goes to my theory about why people say the only insults that hurt are the ones that you believe.

1:50:34And I don't think it's true. I think the insults that hurt the most are the ones that you know are untrue, but that you fear other people might believe. Because that's optics management, because you have not only the unfairness, but you have the indignation of knowing that it isn't true. And this is the opposite side of the same dynamic that we're talking about here. You could put out something which is amazingly researched, a fantastic piece of work. But if other people say you're a bad guy or that was done incorrectly, or we don't think he's cool, it's not going to get anywhere. But that can't happen with beauty because it hacks the human brain.

1:51:06It is so hard to say, you can say that girl or that guy that's very good looking, they're an asshole. They're this, they're that. And you go, yeah, but they're so fucking hot. The same with Kanye West. You can say he's an anti-Semite. We don't like him. He's crazy. He's addicted to nitrous. We don't, da, da, da, da, da, da. It's like, he's got fucking heaters dude and for as long as he's got heaters it doesn't matter i do think i do think music and beauty uh are unique in that regard that the more successful you are as a musician the more you can probably get away with more so than any other any other realm people can kid themselves into not liking something that is objectively good because they don't like the person putting it across in most art forms if you don't like somebody on a podcast and they tell a really interesting story, you can convince yourself that it wasn't that interesting other than an asshole.

1:51:55Even comedy. Someone can tell a joke and you can be like, no, no, wasn't that good. Wasn't that good. Didn't think it was that good. The same thing is not true for music. It is so penetrating emotionally to people. It fucking just cuts through your biases. It cuts through your defenses in a way that other art forms can't. And beauty, especially like female beauty for guys, is just, you can be the craziest, like total cluster b personality nightmare curse if you're hot guys are just going to keep coming back wait till you hear Epstein SoundCloud um you know I I always use the um example with Billy McFarlane of like Steve Jobs is a little bit of a very very different figure to Billy McFarlane but reality distortion field kind of makes things happen um and like the counterfactual that like the ultimate thing that McFarlane did or one of the big things is like his business partner his co-founder was Ja Rule.

1:52:48And I always put like the counterfactual if Steve Jobs' co-founder was Ja Rule rather than Steve Wozniak. The McFarlane story is very, obviously it's on him for selecting Ja Rule. But if you would have selected a good operator, what would have happened? Question. What businesses would be made better by adding Ja Rule in? That's a great question. Have you seen the old thing? What does Ja have to say about this? One of the all-time old internet memes. There's a phrase that I've been very interested in recently called supernormal stimuli. Have you guys heard this? Yeah. It's pretty fascinating. You might be able to explain it.

1:53:31Yeah, Skinnerian behaviorism stuff. Yeah, basically there was a scientist back then. He won the Nobel Prize for this. And what he studied was, he got famous because instead of doing studies in a lab, he just went out into the wild and was like, what do I observe is actually true? And then if I tweak a variable, can I just leave it in the real environment and see what happens? And so what he did was, you know, birds, the core behavior of a bird is to sit on the egg, keep the egg warm. That's your baby. That's like the entire like Darwinian pressure is to keep this egg alive. So he goes, awesome.

1:54:03Bird loves egg. Does bird love bigger egg? Does bird love pink egg? Bird love pink polka dot egg? So he started putting a fake bigger egg with bigger dots and bigger, brighter colors, put it next to it. And guess what the bird does? Gets off its real egg and goes sits on the fake egg because it's more stable. Hijacked the brain. And so his point wasn't like it's not like some rational pros and cons list decision. Bird just had a deep part of its brain that you could just hijack by changing to give it what he calls a supernormal stimulus. So he would give him a bigger egg. And he could just keep doing this up to the point where it's almost comical.

1:54:39The egg is so big that a bird, finally, when he's like, I can't even sit on this egg. Okay. I guess that's too big. Right. And like, you know, you walk around and you'll see people with crazy lip fillers and BBLs. And it's like, what is it? It's a super normal stimulus. It's the same thing. It's like, there's a way to hijack the mind, beauty, color. If you go to the grocery store, what do the food companies do? They basically take your normal stimulus. So like, you know, the humans were evolved to, we like salt because we need electrolytes. We like fat for a certain reason. We need certain things in our, in our diet.

1:55:09So they just said, well, what if I give you a lot of salt? What if I give you fucking Doritos, Kula Ranch? What if I give you triple pack Dorito, Loco Taco, whatever? And you eventually get a supernormal stimulus that you really can't resist. Your body has this extreme pull towards it. You know, my favorite supernormal stimuli is hunter-gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time. Wow. Because it is so unique. There's a process called orification. So orification is the design of texture of foods. And if you think about ancestrally, almost every food that you can think of is a single texture.

1:55:46Meat, cooked, slimy-ish a little bit. There we go. Supernormal stimuli. Let's see how this is getting on. Fuck that. Yeah, I'm out on this now. Two hours in. I'm still enjoying it. I think I'm hungry. Oreos. Crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Fries. But what's interesting about the cheesecake thing is that you have fat with carbs and sugar, unbelievably rare. And you have sort of the crunchiness of the base. And you can tell I'm hungry. And the fluffiness of the top of the cheesecake. And they give these to hunter-gatherers and their fucking minds, it's a flavor explosion. but yeah there's a really great one that i think it's beetles a type of beetle dung beetle perhaps or some of the beetle they're attracted they're sexually attracted to the shininess of the shell the shininess of the top but as glass bottles became prevalent the beetle population was going down because the glass bottles were shinier and bigger than the beetles were so they were driving themselves into extinction not mating with each other and just mating with glass bottles because that was a super normal stimuli.

1:56:53And what happens with the cosmetic surgery, the big lips, the big boobs thing, you get something called Fisherian Runaway. So Fisherian Runaway is this sort of recursive, insane expansion of typically like sexually dimorphic traits, sexually provocative traits. And you end up with peacocks who've got tails so big that they can't move, with deer whose antlers are so large, they can't lift their heads up and they die. With women who've got boobs that are so big that they end up with back pain. And let's say that you took it to the absolute extreme, you were no longer able to procreate the reason for that trait in the first place, but you'd done something that destroyed your hips.

1:57:34And now it meant that you needed to have a hysterectomy and you couldn't have your uterus anymore. And now you've killed your chance at doing the thing by having it run away with itself. The same as some of those deers or rams where the size of their like antler things dig into their own head and kill them oh yeah i've seen that fucking molly wow it's funny how it's it's kind of like a meta discourse where you know you're talking earlier about the platforms and the feedback loops and then you end up like going so right but that's kind of nature's it could like homegrown version it's the same dynamic that's what It's...

1:58:10And what you've seen on social media is tapping into this exact dynamic. It's the same thing. It's just that you've had to replicate it digitally. There's a great tweet that this guy Jay Alto said. He said, you pity the moth for confusing the lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world. Fucking slob. It's one of the best tweets of this year. Yeah, it's amazing. But there is a solve, right? Because you hear this and you're like, oh, great, we're fucked. It's like, no, there's got to be some sort of antidote to this. And the interesting part was the equation goes like this.

1:58:39It's basically how powerful is the stimulus, so the flavor of the food, the size of the feathers, whatever, versus your baseline norm, what you are used to. And the cool thing is basically like there's this arms race where they keep escalating. So the more you do it, the more you get used to it. Then you need a bigger stimulus and a bigger – you need a bigger tweet and a bigger TikTok and more views on the next video and you need a stronger flavor. But all you got to do is basically detox for a very short amount of time and reset. Like if anybody's ever given up soda for like a couple months or a couple years.

1:59:05I've never done that. If you go back to it, it tastes like horrible. It's like so syrupy. It's too sweet. You can't handle it. But you used to drink eight Diet Cokes. And the reason why is because you can reset the denominator, essentially, instead of trying to avoid the forces of commercialization that are trying to stimulate you. What's that Cuckfusius substack that me and you like? You see his staring at a wall experiment? No. So this guy's substack, it's pretty niche, but it's fucking - Cuckfusius. Cuckfusius. He's great. He's great. Really well written. You would love it. Fucking great. I mean, George introduced me to him and now I'm pretty, his first post that I saw was, I am Andrew Puberman.

1:59:45That was the first blog post that I read from him. Subscribe. And he's doing an experiment. He did an experiment, I think for 30 days, where he stared at a wall for an hour. And this is kind of a twist on an ancient Eastern practice, which I think Dr. K's got his clients to do as well. And after 20 minutes, some people burst into tears. Some people are screaming. They kind of go a little bit. Yeah, because at least what I think is happening, their baseline of stimulus is so low. Even if you're in the shower, you're doing stuff. Even if you're going for a walk, things are moving past you, right?

2:00:22You're locomoting and you see the fucking world. But all they're doing is staring at a wall? Staring at a wall for an hour. I mean, let's see. You know what would be an interesting test? Take people that have been to jail and compare them to people that haven't. That's basically what I've been saying. That's so used to being bored. Dude, I was in fucking in-school suspension when I was a teenager for like weeks on end. And all I did was stare at a fucking wall. It didn't make me go crazy. That's just weird. I mean, present evidence may suggest otherwise. Well, says the man in the sailor. It was just a fucking delayed onset, dude.

2:00:55Wasn't it? There's a few. Like the most extreme versions of this, you've got, I've never fully verified this one, but of monks who've meditated for such a significant period of time are in, I think it's like three standard deviations of happiness. So it's like the 0.0000001%. My favorite, and I'm always a bit like, it's a bit of a study, but I'm like, fuck, this one's not a study of the guy who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War. I don't know if Jared, if you could pull that one up, um the monk yeah the monk who set himself on fire who just literally walks walks out sits in lotus position sets himself on fire doesn't grimace blink or flinch and at that moment i was like huh maybe there is something to meditate studies don't need to show yeah yeah studies don't need to show i think it's uh i think it's ken burns vietnam documentary that covers this really well you hear about his heart whose heart the guy so this is like kind of a buddhist a buddhist philosophy or like a Buddhist part of the story, which was his heart didn't set on fire.

2:01:59So his heart was like kind of completely normal. His whole body went to crisp, but his heart was still there. I think you could check this, Jared, but I think in the cremation period, they tried to cremate his heart and it refused to burn. It's like, it's a very surreal. It could be a complete myth, but as soon as I see this, any of my questions around what the human mind is capable of goes out the window. Homeboy sat in full Lotus, just barbecuing anything around him. Yeah, that's crazy. You can see the gasoline tank there. There's a guy who's trying the screen experiment. Have you seen this?

2:02:26The guy who's doing one year no screens. He's trying to Brian Johnson, but just a no screen. And he's scanning his brain before and after. How far into it is he? Like a day. He just started. He should have done it at the beginning of the year. He's been staring at a wall. He finished all the things. He's like, I'm going to avoid this guy, David Danes. Today, I'm scanning my brain before I spend a year without screens. They expect brain function to change, but whether the structure itself changes, nobody seems to know. and he's got his website where you could just like you're going to be able to see the updates of the results.

2:02:56Imagine how hard it would be to not it's like not being exposed to fucking microplastics, dude. I mean, he's going to be yeah, he's going to be looking at a screen in an airport. He's going to go to the gym and there's going to be stuff around. So he's really I assume no screens anywhere. That's his goal. I assume he meant like phone TV like personal screens You mean he's not going to ever look at any He's going Amish is what it is. If it's not come on. That's pretty cool. You've got to go all the way. You're going to have to have fucking blinkers on. See if you can find the rules of the challenge.

2:03:26But yeah, that's pretty unreal. Hey, what was that quote you said maybe 10 minutes ago about the person that you look at the screen and it's reality? What did you say? We laugh when the moth confuses a lamp for the moon, but here we are confusing the screen for the world. Okay, map that onto AI. What do you mean? Just in general. Like, I don't know, in 50 years, people are going to be like laughing at us because of whatever we were doing right now. Like we're confusing AI for real intelligence? Or what do you mean? I don't really know. I just, when you said that, it made me think of how AI is going to be like, people are going to laugh at us in 50 years for what we thought was good AI.

2:04:09That's what I thought of when you said that for some reason. Oh, yeah. I mean, that curve of technology. technology like they're gonna look at us right now in 50 or 100 years like we're the fucking moth that thinks the lamp is a what you get did you guys watch the the you mentioned demis you mentioned demis from uh yes deep mind did you watch the documentary yes amazing dude it's amazing good he's got this uh the guy who created deep mind which kind of kicked off this whole ai wave he has this documentary on amazon i think called the thinking game it's on youtube now oh it's on it's on youtube so good highly recommend to anyone dennis if you're if you're listening i want to bring you on the show reply to my emails dude he's he's he's cool he was like a six-year-old child prodigy chess player etc but like that moment of move 37 is just like cheers you know what i mean i feel like that's like a turning point in human history was this move 37 moment basically google DeepMind has, I mean, they seem to be the most safety conscious kind of very human approach to this AI race at the moment.

2:05:12But I don't know if, I mean, the whole point of this, which is why Scott Alexander thinks that Anthropic is the Antichrist, because the Antichrist will come and make you think that they're not. So in this whole AI, that was a whole point that I had with Tristan Harris is everyone wants to cast aspersions at company, like OpenAI, I don't like you because you did this. I don't like Google because they did that. Or Grok, I don't like you because you did the whatever. It's like, hey, dude, it doesn't matter what somebody's stated fucking safety goals are. These guys are speed running through model development as quickly as possible.

2:05:48And if they don't, they lose. They're out, yeah. They lose. So just look at the incentives. don't look at the fucking press release right like yeah the the anthropic superbowl ads were fucking hilarious but don't and they decided not to do the thing for the department of war and they did whatever the stuff it's like dude don't fucking like get lost in the source these people are playing the exact same fucking game just with slightly better pr yeah it does seem there's a huge doomer like narrative right now around ai that's becoming more and more popular listen to more free book yeah i mean like from the wider question of what happens i don't know but from first hand like experience like for myself i um because the image models are getting so good now i've had like a like it's called subaromic dermatitis for about 10 years sometimes it gets so bad i wouldn't like go outside like level of bad i just showed it to gemini what does that mean um so it's basically you're kind of like there'll be a lot of people listening that have it it affects like five to ten percent of the population and your face will just break out and like really bad eczema so i went to one doctor who basically got me a steroid cream um and said the reason why you have it is because of stress it's like quite well known because of stress carried on i started like meditating like fixing my diet i basically didn't eat sugar for like two years and it calmed it down i was like oh it's because of sugar and then i saw a second doctor um and she said yeah you're too stressed out my fuck i'm getting stressed out but you'll realize diagnosis that i'm stressed out so she recommends another steroid cream i end up tracking it for ages and i just upload the whole document to gemini and it goes oh no just just put niserol on your face so anybody who has subatomic dermatitis it fixes it for like 90 percent of people and niserol is a medicine or it's shampoo it's a fucking shampoo you can get for a few dollars and like i've never had it ever again since i have 10 years never had it ever again since and that's just that but these stories are like it's not as it's not as sexy as like the the guy speaks to the llm and decides to take his own life it's not that that's like a obviously horrific story if it's even fucking true i don't know um but like i know just so many people whose like health is genuinely being like revolutionized by these things.

2:07:43And it's just, we just have such an anchor towards negativity. Also, you're always going to push back against something, some new technological development. Yes. It's the most recurring lesson throughout history. Like I was reading, because I was fascinated by AI coming on. I was like, I want to go study the industrial revolution. What was fascinating at the time, you had two groups that came up. You had the Luddites who would just basically go and smash the factories in. And you saw this recently with Sam Altman having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house a week ago. But then you also had the romantics.

2:08:14So the romantics would kind of pine about, and you kind of see this now of AI where it's like, they'll call things slop, which are. And you do want the Luddites and you do want the romantics because they kind of act as a balancing arc to the progression. But I think, like, net net, most people alive today do not want to go back to pre-industrial revolution. They do not want, like, the option is to go to Amish if you do want to. Like, that is available if you want to go but nobody does i think ai is gonna make people go fucking insane yeah yeah because they're they were getting to a point where i was gonna say but pull it jared if you can pull up the new thing i don't know um the ft produces i don't know how true it is but essentially they argue it's um it's making people less polarized immediately where social media was pushing people further to the left and the right whereas ai you can kind of already sit with grok now they fact check people a lot more so they're bringing a lot more people into the center well why do you think it'll make Because, dude, we live in a post-truth age now.

2:09:06There's no way to determine what flavor is it. This is sweet whiskey. You want sweet whiskey? Yeah, I do. You're going to have two toothpicks in? Yeah, I'm doubling down. Let's go. Jesus Christ. Well, I'm not using them to actually pick my teeth. No, no, but you need so many stimulants that you've got one Nutonic toothpick, one Zippix toothpick. Yeah, no, and I'm coming down off that Kratom right now. I was going to say you quiet. Everything's in slow motion. I think that deep fakes and maybe it's more so in America than other places, but after the Charlie Kirk assassination, there's all these conspiracy theories left and right about whether it was Israel did it or it's a hologram or if this guy was real.

2:09:48like there's all this crazy shit right and um nobody's going to be saying it's a something like oh this is a hologram or this was ai without the advent of ai being able to create deep fakes that are largely i mean look at it look at boomers dude they believe all sorts of crazy shit and we're like fucking idiots yeah that's what i was kind of getting at i guess with what i was saying to you about that that comment but we're never gonna know i mean ever what actually has happened with anything we know anymore the truth is no longer even fucking matters because it can't be determined unless you experience it with your own five cents.

2:10:19So there's a great chapter in a book called The Beginning of Infinity. And essentially his idea is what's known as the precautionary principle, which is essentially the history of humanity is essentially problems. Even Great Britain, where me and Chris are from, is this human concept. It shouldn't exist. In Great Britain, me and my family should fucking die of hypothermia. But because we created central heating, we created clothing but so you essentially have this whole arc of just problem solving problem solving problem solving problem solving and the problem that you then have ironically is that when a new problem comes along like this is that you have what's known as the precautionary principle which is we can see the problem but we can't see the solution but by definition people human beings can't forecast a solution because if we have the solution for it we would implement it and be worth trillionaires but what you end up having is kind of seven billion people working towards um this potential problems and you saw it with covet like i'm i'm i think it's very unsexy to say but i'm pretty optimistic when it comes to humans abilities to solve problems i think i think i think like a lot of this stuff we can fix speaking of ai did you see this all birds pivot oh dude it's insane can you explain for the class please what the fuck just happened all birds which was like a popular shoe amongst tech guys at least i don't know how popular it got outside of that but it was like a niche shoes like a wool sneaker they were like started small became a public company but then they started failing and so like the stock has been going down for years there i think they were last like you know they're at one point like a billion dollar company they were like 50 million dollar company now so the stock had been falling falling falling falling falling and there was really no path and so these guys bought it i think and i think what they did was they purchased it and they just pivoted to ai and it's like well how does a shoe pivot to ai what does that mean and they're like, well, we raised all this debt.

2:12:02We're going to buy GPUs and sell them. And the stock, as of this morning, is soaring. I don't think this is a sustainable thing, but the stock is up by what? The company valued at around$4 billion at its peak, sold the intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for$39 million. $39 million, yeah. And then they renamed it like, what, Freebird or something? What did they name it? The shoe company had a market cap of$21 million on Tuesday, which climbed to$148 million on Wednesday. Oh. Just by saying, we do AI. The words, yeah. Yeah, and then this happened during crypto. There was like a Ice-T company that was like, yeah, we're an Ice-T company, but we're a blockchain Ice-T company.

2:12:36And then there was tons of these companies. They would just change their name. They didn't even change the underlying business. They just changed the name to like, you know, blockchain motor controls and then their stock would pop just because of stupidity. Yeah, dude, the one day price move is 582%. Yeah, it's stupid. There's stupid things that happen. There's like, you know, the efficient market hypothesis and then you hear this, right? Yes, I saw somebody putting like the intelligent investor in the bin. It's like giving up on this, yeah. Speaking of AI, did you guys see, this kind of blew my mind.

2:13:05This is more in the kind of fear and doom stuff, but did you see the Indian factory AI thing? Did you see this? Were they training people with the cameras? Headset. Yeah, to fold clothes and shit. They're sewing shirts. They're basically folding towels. They're doing shirts. But there's giant factories now in India where the primary function is you're paid to wear a head like a head camera and it just films you doing a task and they're basically creating all the training data for the robots like the humans basically creating the training jared pull this video up it's just kind of striking when you see it's like it feels like a black mirror episode you know do you know how uh tesla made itself driving so good do you know how that how it was trained with a human yeah so so these guys are just working and these guys have neck pain and all this such as they're wearing this eight hour straight.

2:13:58Hey, shot their heads. There's a company that's basically making a lot of money creating this data and selling it back to the AI labs, which is pretty wild. And Elon actually, he gave this interview, he said something that nobody really has talked about, but I thought it was pretty batshit crazy. They were like, well, the next thing for Tesla is not cars, it's his robot. They're like, how are you going to train the robot to do all this stuff? For cars, you got the data because humans were driving the cars. So you were able to learn on millions and millions of miles. How are you going to do it with the robots?

2:14:28He's like, well, we're building this, I don't know, 100 ,000 square foot warehouse, and we're going to put 10 ,000 robots in there, and they're going to self-play. So if you watch how they train the AI to beat Go and chess, there was one way, which was you have grandmasters tell hard code rules. Okay, what's better than that? You train it on only grandmasters game logs. And then they did this thing called Alpha Zero, where they're like, we're just going to tell you the rules of chess. You play yourself 100 ,000 times to see what happens. And that became better than all of the other models with no data of how to play chess or how to play Go.

2:15:08And so Alpha Zero was this huge breakthrough when DeepMind did it. So now Elon's trying to do the same thing with robots where he's like, yeah, we could do this where we get all the data from human people recordings, or we could just create a warehouse where we tell them the the objectives of the different stations. And then we let them just like fumble around trying to figure out like how to use their arms. And like, eventually they're just going to figure out, I'm going to put 10 ,000 robots in this box. I'm like, I would pay so much money to watch this live stream. What the fucking, what was that?

2:15:36Was it Neo? Is that the at-home robot? What was the one that's made of kind of knitted? Yeah, I think Neo is the name of it. Neo. So this was an at-home assistance robot. There was two versions. You could buy it outright. You could rent it. And I think to rent it, it was actually quite expensive. Was it$300 a month, something like that? $400 a month. And someone videoed their Neo trying to close the dishwasher. And it looks like someone at the end of a party on too much ketamine trying to do the same thing. It's all sort of janky and it's coming down. And it just cannot close this fucking dishwasher.

2:16:06That reminds me of iRobot. Yeah. You remember that, Mary? Yeah, Will Smith, classic. And he has the live-in robot and he's like, I don't trust this fucking thing. Well, the way that the Tesla training data was done was that they took the top 5%, 1 % of drivers and basically said, they're going to drive on our behalf. Because the self-training thing has to be harder when you're talking about the physical world. Yeah, exactly. Because the parameters of outcome, success, and failure are way harder to work. Like, is this folded right? Like, there's a million ways that you could fold it. It turns out like, you know, it's one of those fucking origami.

2:16:39It's a swan. It's a goose. And you don't want that. it's nice and beautiful but it doesn't fit the parameters right so more oversight or at least like a base training data of like hey here are some of the because what are the rules of the game of folding clothes right they're kind of it's kind of strange to but once you've got this raw training set but this is the fight this does feel a little bit like uh finishing off the champagne on the titanic you know it's like we're going down and we'll just on the way down i'll make a little bit of extra money from doing this thing uh to round out george good news about your dad phil collins is a rock and roll hall of fame 2026 inductee have you any idea what your dad said in response very british response this obviously i'm pleased and honored to be inducted it wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music.

2:17:38Obviously, I'm pleased. Sounds a little bit passive aggressive. Took a while, till 2026 to get this. Obviously, I'm pleased and honored to be inducted. Wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music. Boys, this has been fucking sick. Appreciate you all. Unreal. Phil Collins, George's dad. Let's go. Alright. Goodbye, everybody. I've never seen Phil Collins. My first time ever seeing Phil Collins. Bro, so much fun. One last swig. I mean, this is just going to be again. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting.

2:18:18But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.