16 Wise Truths To Improve Your Life - George Mack

today we're going to go through some of the best ideas of all time yeah well purely subjective I have me and you so yeah who knows the best ideas that we're aware of right now that may change but that's the beauty of it it's an infinite game okay so the first one is optimism a scam what's the Skeptics is it shut down the railways shut down Airlines shut down electricity shut down it all it's all a scam we need more nihilism we need more pessimism No I um I wrote this essay called is optimism a scam and the pure thesis behind it was what you had about 20 years ago was the secret the book that came out and it was this idea that you could just manifest things into reality and the cynical skeptical crowd completely describes to destroy the idea and I always use like this so there's three great examples of the secret so you've got one which is Winston Churchill when he was 19 years old saying one day this great City will be under attack I will be the one that saves it so that's like 50 40 50 years before World War II you have Arnold Schwarzenegger saying I will become the greatest bodybuilder ever and the greatest movie star or the biggest movie star at the time there's one which is from John Rockefeller as well which is one day I will be the richest man in the world he said that to his bank teller who had rejected him for a bank apparently so that's the kind of ball case for like ridiculous affirmations that manifest reality but the problem with that is for every Rockefeller Schwarzenegger Churchill there's 10 000 delusional that say these things and they are backed up so the Skeptics are right there um and the problem that the optimism crowd has in my opinion it's a marketing problem they've sold it they've oversold it and the best the best put down ever was Dave Chappelle where he's saying if the secret was true why aren't all the starving kids in Africa manifesting food and you go that's that's the ultimate win right so optimism as a result has kind of struggled a few out and the problem with optimism is they've oversold the product is my is my thesis so imagine if you sold creatine as human growth hormone that's what I see people have done with optimism so what we need to do is appeal to Skeptics language to kind of win the optimism game which is if you go to PubMed and search placebo effect 100 000 results everybody in the scientific Community acknowledges the power of the placebo effect there's one uh study where it started in World War II I forgot the name of the doctor where it was the US versus the Italians and there was loads of people loads of uh um soldiers sorry struggling and rather than give the morphine because he'd run out he started giving them salt water and they could go through surgery a bit so the placebo effect is something magical it's something powerful and therefore I think you can use that a little bit to argue the Skeptics case for optimism and ultimately where I go down this is what optimism is is to improve one percent every single day so this have you heard of the cocktail party effect have I told you about that no so the cocktail party effect is me and you sat here like we've been in a few bars or restaurants at Terry's barbecue down the road right and the background noise is a blur it's me and you chatting blah blah blah blah blah but if somebody says Voodoo events which is Chris's old events company or mentions the northeast of England or whatever it is suddenly that background noise what is that um you immediately tune into it so right now your brain is blurring out infinite inputs millions of inputs that are happening right now and you're focusing on what appeals to your reticular activating system and I think the the case for optimism is you're not going to manifest things into reality but if you have a more optimistic frame you're more likely to spot those opportunities and I say Market optimism is a one percent Improvement every single day and then you'll probably get more people to believe it so I think that's the problem with optimism it was oversold yeah the baby in bath water got thrown out together exactly the fruit yeah I put that baby in bath water meme which is they throw the baby out um which is like useful optimism with a load of delusional wishy-thinking Instagram quotes and that's problem especially the first kind of like Eugenics optimisms like Eugenics that the first iteration of really really aggressive optimism came from Ronda burns the secret this is the woman who said that the 2006 Boxing Day tsunami that killed like tens of thousands of people I think in Thailand was due to the Thai people giving out bad vibes that like manifested and attracted this natural disaster it's like it's like if you advertise creatine is going to fix everything it's not it's a small one percent Improvement every day but the actual difference is is you may then have an opportunity that opens up that completely compounds so I think James Clear has that graph where if you improve 0.1 every single day if that compounds that's a 30 second 36x Improvement in a year um that's the argument I think for optimism it's a one percent Improvement every single day and ultimately Society is getting better I think it's important to repeat that point Well everybody's deluded right in one form or another everybody has some type of delusion as far as I can see and both of us come from the north of the UK this is like the Ground Zero for cynicism pessimism skepticism not necessarily coming from an intellectual place but almost coming from a genetic place it feels like there's a predisposition the weather's gray the people are gray the mood is gray so everybody has a degree of delusion right why not have a delusion that benefits you like if you're going to not be accurate necessarily if you know that you're going to be inaccurate about the future and you know that you can't know everything which is true I don't think that erring on the side of things are going to get worse especially given that every quantifiable metric available says that things are getting better yes is it difficult that we're dealing with the existential pain of Life Direction and all that stuff yeah 100 I I get that and it's a luxurious position to be in to have an existential crisis because all of the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been sorted so it's a challenge that very few people have had to deal with so there's not any wisdom that's been archetably passed down over Generations because so few people got to the situation where they were safe from shelter and food and water and connection and blah blah meaning and all that stuff so yeah I understand it's a difficult challenge but like everything is getting better which means that optimism what looks like optimism is actually realism and what looks like realism is actually like pessimism yeah I think anybody who follows me for a while um and the ones who haven't and have to describe this one's your listen uh audio is there's this Matrix which is optimism and pessimism and then low agency and high agency and I feel that but yeah if you have optimism with a low sense of agency that that isn't valuable at all but paired with high agency I think that's one of the most beautiful things there's this like one thing that I always come back to as well which is this Steve Jobs email I think I told you about this one where he sent to himself 13 13 months before he died it came out quite recently and Steve Jobs wrote this to uh to himself I grow little of the food I eat and the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds I do not make any of my own clothing I speak a language I did not invent or refine I did not discover the mathematics I use I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive or of or legislate and do not enforce or adjudicate I am moved by music I did not create myself when I needed medical attention I was helpless to help myself survive I did not invent the transistor the microprocessor object oriented programming or most of the technology I work with I love and admire my species living and dead and I am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being the one guy who could have a could be very pessimistic in that scenario but B also rightly so have a ego um it's so like that that I always come back to that whenever I feel quite pessimistic I go life's actually very very good how do you reframe it yourself so everybody has this draw towards cynicism pessimism it's cool to do it on the internet somehow becomes sexy to be cynical because it's seen as like a signal of high intellect how do you stop yourself tumbling down that rabbit hole it's a good question I think one of them I have this thing of like Hardware versus software which is most people think they have a software problem when they actually have a hardware problem so if I'm finding myself thinking more cynically thinking more negatively I'll just try and fix the hardware so it's like some kind of breathing exercise sauna run exercise eat well my friend Dicky says that when he's tired uh or in that kind of emotional state his goal of the day is just to make no decisions so I just often a good night's sleep or whatever it is try and fix it that way that for me fixes about 95 of my software problems and then the remaining five percent which may be legitimate issues are much easier to solve in that so that's the first thing I'd say is fix Hardware before you try and fix software um and then I think it's a lot about who you're around it's a lot about studying studying history is super important because you go I could have been born in 1612 yeah or I could have been part of World War II which was a blink of an eye away um and when you actually look at it from a historical perspective it's like well where's better than now I don't think there is a better time than now yeah I came up with this yesterday I told you about the alpha history fantasy oh yeah yeah so uh modern men who are angry at the world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe they would have done better in medieval times they're somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being Canon fodder peasant number one million 373 582 whose Favela was sacked and destroyed that would have been me yeah you think he would have been Cannon for the peasant 100 okay well I think um heberman's got this quote where he says you cannot change the mind to the mind you have to change it with the body it's not strictly true because meditation is precisely changing the mind with the mind but I think broadly it's true that most of the problems that people encounter are Hardware problems rather than software problems I learned this during covid for the first time in my entire life I had a stable sleep and wake pattern I went to bed and got up at the same time seven days a week for the first time since I was 18. I was 32. so I'm like right okay there's something to this there's something to having a set routine and I'd listen to I'd sent it to you I remember sending to you uh Matthew Walker on Rogan being like wow look how important sleep is meanwhile staying up until four in the morning cashing up nightclubs like two or three nights a week so you need to really sort of see it and feel it yes on a hardware problem also I had this idea called the cynicism safety blanket I don't know that one I'm happy with this so this is explaining why cynicism is uh incredibly trendy especially in the modern world cynicism is a guarded response which sets yourself up against disappointment its role within the system is to protect you against experiencing anything bad it is a preemptive strike against a perceived threat if I tell myself that all women are bad then I'm less likely to seek relationship with women and as a consequence I'm never going to feel the pain of rejection if I tell myself that everything is or that things will never get better then I am excused of ever having to try at anything it's more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism the cope is framing hope as pathetic and embarrassing and optimism is delusion it's sour grapes at an existential level if everything sucks and everyone is horrible and the reality is disappointing and you know that for a fact then it's the people acting like things that can be better that are dumb delusional and the problem the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure and I also think that ties into the cocktail party effect what we just spoke about where if you have that cynical Outlook and you have that pessimistic Outlook I mean you can still win the lottery of course but you will if there's so much sensory inputs that's trying to go into your brain you will just see it more you will see more of it you'll end up down darker YouTube rabbit holes you'll end up watching those things you'll end up in those suspects so it's this kind of Perpetual flywheel that then begins to compound yeah you're looking both ways yeah you're looking for evidence that confirms the world view that you didn't want to have but that you somehow have inculcated from being on the internet too much Scott Adams the credit deal but he has this idea in one of his books where it's called the weed filter and he used to think that if he smoked weed people became way nicer to him so he started smoking more and more weed and then he began to realize actually he was just more relaxed because he was so tight and stiff that all of a sudden his interaction with the world also has an effect on how they interact with him when he was way more relaxed people were then way more relaxed around him it wasn't actually that we only realized it wasn't actually the weed itself it was purely the filter that he was viewing things through um yeah it's trying to push optimism is a tough it's a it's tough yeah it's a really hard road yeah I mean I then like going back to what we said is you didn't have Hardware software I think it's more just looking around just looking at the reality of the situation one of my favorite stories is uh I forgot the writer who did it but he tried to make a chicken sandwich from scratch have you heard this story he tried to create a chicken sandwich purely from scratch so the first principle sandwich first principles took him six months it cost him 1500 pounds oh so you had to grow the wheat or whatever that was ground up to make the flower to do that right okay you just you just don't think about those things of how really when you look at human beings there's nothing actually that special about them but the ability a to create ideas which we spoke about to begin with and then B the ability to cooperate at scale it's that thing about if you try to create a pencil you couldn't no one knows how to create a pencil because the like rubbers from here the leads from here no one knows it and that is quite beautiful and you need optimistic people in order to be able to collaborate to play those positive some games it's so important and listen is it going to fix cancer if you've got cancer of course not but like one of my favorite examples is Brian Armstrong who used to do write down every single day I will create a billion dollar company do I think that created a billion dollar company no of course not it was like hard work he's probably ridiculous IQ he's probably got a great Network he had the right idea he went through y combat he had all those things but could that have helped a little bit possibly I would love to see the case for pessimism like the only reason that I can see that pessimism would potentially be the case that would be put forward would be that it protects people emotionally from the pain of failure that's really the only thing if you set your sights so low you can never be disappointed by reality I mean one of the things I'd kind of thought this conversation here is I do think there's there's some utility to pessimism and like that kind of George orwellian double thing like the ability to hold two ideas at the same time is so important so if you can actually take a pessimistic frame and go oh what's the worst scenario that can happen here it's that Tim Ferriss fear setting idea I think that's super valuable as well um and the ability to constantly use optimism and pessimism when you need it but I'd say on the whole I think optimism's more useful I likewise if you can take a high agency frame when you need it and also the ability to empathize with what the low agency version of this will be the ability to operate in multiple mindsets I think super important is that George Fitzgerald quote which is like you can tell the you can tell the mark of a first-rate intellect by the ability to hold two thoughts two opposing thoughts at the same time and that's very rare these days people either go to one end of the spectrum or the other and I'm often quite obsessed with what's that third door yeah orthogonally yeah because this team's here this team's here what's that here you've mentioned it a couple of times today one of mine in your favorite words High agency yeah why are you so obsessed with high agency people why is it important because it's applied optimism I guess without it nothing changes and we was at dinner last night with Jared and we were saying to I asked he for reference for the audience he recruits that high level execs and I asked him what do all these guys have in common when you get to like that Uber level of big big big companies and he said like energy transference and high Agency for me is a combination of energy transference the ability to either just accept the story or change the story and then you have this kind of debate again you can have these two thoughts in your head at the same time of the great man theory of history or um kind of things just happen societally and change that way and again I think there's truth truth to both but ultimately the at the individual level having a sense of agencies extremely valuable and these figures like one of my favorite questions to ask is what films aren't we making because we're too busy making Transformers 12. and if you actually look at all my work it's often questions rather than answers it's my favorite Oasis lyric is questions are the answers you might need and often in this platform it's a guru platform you can give these easy platitudes I actually prefer to ask a question and then leave that open loop with the audience and then go hey here's my answer to the question but then you may get and hopefully we do you get a lot of DMS from people going actually this is the story that they should be making instead of Transformers 12. have you heard about this person have you heard about this person or have you heard about this story um or were you crowdsourcing the insights exactly and that I think that's such a better way it goes back to what we said at the beginning that's an infinite game where if you try and go I think XY Dead's true and I have this Guru Insight of ABC versus having a question of an open loop those are questions that you can kind of answer over a career and still never answer it's an infinite game okay so high agency is the ability to change to enact change if it was to be in a single sentence I would say it's that yeah I think uh low agency is life happening to EU High agency is you happening to life I'd say that's the fundamental difference and you'll know people who life happens to them and then you know people who happen to life and ultimately it's a constant battle you can have the most high agency Steve Jobs who dies of pancreatic cancer um obviously the stuff around the characters and things like that but but ultimate environments still have a factor but it's the ability to have that double think and know okay well I can still have the most amount of optimism still the most about high agency and have an impact environments are still going to have a huge impact too so who are some of your favorite High agency humans throughout history going back to what I said earlier of what films aren't Hollywood making right now because they're making Transformers 12 of Fast and Furious 15. um the most underrated one in terms of how few people know and the most high agency individual is a guy called rudolferber so Rudolph Verma um was in auswitch as a teenager um he was in a unique position where he was essentially in the operations of the train so he would help Jews come off the trains um particularly women and children and then they get exported to the gas Chambers one of the things like I met a principal today today that I've kind of massively changed my mind the last 24 months is when you when you study history you begin to understand things completely differently so when I go into this rudolfer story the thing that people don't appreciate is they view it in hindsight versus at the time the Nazis didn't announce to people hey get on these trains and this is what's going to happen to you that wasn't the case and as a result lots of other governments who were fighting the war against them didn't even know that was the case there was a few people who suspected it was but it's only in hindsight do we know that so he then began to see he was one of the few people that knew who wasn't on the Nazis team that could see this just killing machine that was happening um and okay so you can imagine here talk about pessimism has every reason to be pessimistic he's seeing the worst of humanity that's ever existed talk about agency he's literally a prisoner and if you try and Escape out switch they will they will just essentially if they find you they'll put a three-day dog Squad they will hunt you down and they will hang you in front of the everybody else just to show what happens to you so he teamed up with Alfred wetzler um actually just a rewind for a second but the most harrowing thing about his story going why why he could be so pessimistic and solo agency is he meets a girl in the concentration camp called Alice Monk and loses his virginity in the concentration camp and then she gets killed the next day in the gas Chambers and he kept seeing that and again talk about pessimism talk about low agency every single reason to be but decided you know what it I'm gonna try and Escape so he teamed up with Alfred wetzler and essentially what they did was there was some wood just outside the camps that they hid under these barrels of wood Boom the Nazis as they're counting in at the and they go where's 44070 because they take their names from them so they just have numbers where are they they released the dog Squad and they hid under these barrels of Ward the most high agency part of it they cover themselves in gasoline and tobacco so the Nazi dogs couldn't find them even though they were right literally on the perimeter there's one point where they almost find them and he has a knife because he's about to take his own life okay they don't find them three days goes by they haven't air they've kind of stayed awake they escape um they Sprint as fast as they can run all the way through Slovakia no good run through Slovakia in concentration camp uniforms where everyone surrounding them a Nazi sympathizers because that's what they put in place with no Google Maps no Uber no fight no no no WhatsApp to chat to this like the squad you know I mean like this is like the most harrowing thing where and if they get caught killed immediately um run I think it's like a hundred and a hundred or so Miles through get all the way there and then the most beautiful part is kind of the few things that happens afterwards so one rather than write an incredibly emotional Rapport which you should have done like they killed the girl he lost his virginity to right it's dark you could tell them like they killed the girl I looked they wrote the most objective mckinsey-like Rapport of this killing machine that was Auschwitz um and that people didn't believe them for quite a while again rather than rest on his Laurels this guy goes and joins the Slovakian Army and they say we're not going to give you a pistol we'll give you a machine gun because of like the kind of guy you are just based off this story yeah we don't give boys like you pistols yes we give we give them uh machine guns so that's the kind of guy again just Escape that but he's back on the front line the beautiful thing well there's a dark side and there's a beautiful side but the dark side is because going back to what I said earlier people didn't understand what was happening at the time it wasn't believed for a while until Churchill and the pope ultimately got the report and then began to put more and more pressure on the Nazis um so it was a big factor they recommend the reckon uh they reckon he saved 200 000 lives just from his actions alone after the war he goes and lives in America he's a lecturer at pharmacist pharmacology basically none of his students know the story of what he did and the most beautiful thing I found a YouTube video that has 56 views on it where this guy who used to know him very well said that everybody apart from verba who he knew that escaped or went through Auschwitz um verba dressed insanely well because he never wanted that freedom to be taken away from him ever again so he dressing like the most outlandish amazing suits and for me talk about a film that is better than Transformers 12. better than Fast and Furious 8 but nobody knows who I mean a few people do but most people do not know who he is and why isn't there a day named after him it's it's for me it's Insanity the most high agency man of all time I think in terms of uh name to agency ratio yeah name to awareness it's Rudolph for sure that's very cool yeah the um I put dick Fosbury in the tedx talk that I did a few years ago and I think that that's a good example as well uh you know someone who was being maligned in a very different way but he was mocked you know to to try and break the existing hegemony that was the scissor kick I think was the current one that people were using uh and he was an engineer by trade so he had analyzed what was happening with regards to center of gravity how he could get yourself as low as possible and yeah he was laughed at by everybody you know he he competed in the Olympics I think it was maybe uh Japan or Korea or somewhere like that in the 60s when he did win he had two different pairs of Nikes on he didn't have the same pair of shoes and he missed the opening ceremony because he wanted to go to a museum so this guy was an unbelievable outlier but he had the courage of his convictions and I think that that's that's one of the big differences oh it's that idea which is if he was to go back to 1850 and try and explain the concept of Wi-Fi it would blow their but it would not be seen as fathomable but the idea exists you just needed a combination of ideas what we spoke about earlier and then High agency individuals and Humanity uh working together and compounding so the question you then think is but what is going to be Wi-Fi for us now they're 100 years from now however long it's gonna be oh that was so obvious like one of my favorite examples which is a much more base level is wheeled suitcases so before I think it was 1970s everybody used to carry their suitcases everywhere Eric Weinstein has that great bit of the smartest men at the time the smartest physicist used to get on the train or the plane carrying their their suitcases and the question is is well where's the Wheeled suitcases right now there's one guy who comes along and goes hold on let's put some wheels on that Jim Jefferies has a great bit in his new Netflix special where he says feasibly Neil Armstrong as he was getting on the Rockets I was there carrying on his suitcases because one day we'll put a rocket on these without realizing okay so and that's again going back to questions questions are the answers that you need where is the Wheeled suitcase right now and that's a question that can keep you up at night where it's so obvious but everyone's just copying the crowd and being nomatic so a lot of people will think I would be high agency I want to be around people that are high agency how can you tell if your friends and the people that you hang with are high or low agency I I think going back to what we mentioned earlier which is do they kind of bend the environment so no matter what situation you put them in do they bend it um the the dinner last night he said energy transference so I had this essay I've never pulled the published which is sofa friends versus treadmill friends and there's certain friends that I hang around with afterwards I need to lie on a sofa because they kind of drain you of that energy and then there's other friends that we mean you know where you hang around with them and you're like seven mile run let's go we overclock our brains that's so I think a big thing that you'll see is energy transference I I always say that uh Steve from Diary of a CEO who I used to work at his company there was this thing where I would walk in the office in the morning and I'd open the door and bear in mind Steve could be in the London office Manchester office Berlin office New York office he's constantly jet setting around and I go I could just see from people's faces and how much energy was in the room I got our Steve's here today without even seeing him and I think that's like often thing is when they enter a room the energy just completely changes I think that's often combination of high agency individuals you had weird teenage Hobbies we are teenage Hobbies is another one so I often hire for this like I can be a job interview and if they mention a weird teenage hobby I kind of lean in quite a lot which I probably shouldn't say probably you know because now people are going to start bringing those up but when you're young then it when especially when you're a teenager it's probably your low most low Agency State because you want to copy the crowd you want to be mimetic of everybody around you however if you can at that age whilst everyone else is going playing football or rugby be super into yo-yoing or super into football freestyle or super into whatever it is for me that's a good sign because if you can swim against the tide When You're 15 or the environment of people mocking you so much easier as you're an adult well it's so formative as well right A lot of the things that you do in later life or Echoes of what you did when you were a kid yeah there's a really great study that I looked at that the music that you listen to between the ages of 11 and 15 imprints on you for the rest of your life wow so that's why you have generations of Music trends that go like I still love emo and post hardcore because I grew up in like the Hawthorne Heights and blink 18 to era that was my that was what I listened to right and then there'll be other people that listen to whatever it might be you know God help the people that are growing up now like Megan D Stallion and cardi B but um you've got the golden question as well which is something that we've used I think you might have spoken about this on the first ever episode that we did what's what's the golden question the golden question is if he was stuck in a third world prison or you were stuck on an island and you had to call someone to bail you out who would you call and that alone will identify the most high agency person in your life because within that you need a combination of I mean some kind of delusional optimism to be able to pull that off you need some Relentless kind of resourcefulness to try and operationalize that and you're going to need to be have that energy transference to be able to convince people or whatever the whatever plan you're gonna have to put together so I'd say that is probably the most impactful thing when predicting High agency one that I see as well is immigrant mentality so if somebody's moved from their hometown quite a good sign if someone's moved from their home country even greater sign and you then see these like immigrants across particularly America right who absolutely dominate because if you can sit there and go I'm in the wrong place and so I have to acknowledge Him in the wrong place I have to admit I think everybody else or other people around me I disagree with their decision at least for me um and to have the growth mindset to then operationalize a move and start from zero that event itself is kind of quite a meta story it doesn't mean that every everybody who uh migrates is high agency but I'd say it is quite common not being able to predict people's opinions as well I think is I have a friend of mine called catty and I love hanging around with him because I don't know what he's going to say because I like he he doesn't just line up with oh uh for example like you'll have like the bodybuilder who you'll stereotype them you probably get this a little bit as well right people don't expect you to be in great shape form a model and then chat about Neuroscience with a guy coming on and hold your own so I love people when you can't fully predict their opinions or you have um The Beauty Queen who's super into Nietzsche or the marketer who's obsessed with the history of War whenever someone just falls into that obvious stereotype makes you think that they haven't thought about things but when they go hold on a second like you was on love Island but you're super into talking about astrophysics dagger that's probably quite a high agency individual because they've they've clearly gone against what should be their default programming yeah if you know one opinion that somebody holds and from it you can accurately predict everything else that they believe yeah they're probably not a serious thinker they're just they're just NPCs just downloading scripts but there is somebody out there who falls into the perfect mold of uh I am pro-life and I'm pro-gun and I'm Pro First Amendment and I'm like small government and I'm like anti-immigration and I'm blah blah blah like you are the complete caricature stereotype of the person that's from the right and there is the same from the person that's from the left but most people are so idiosyncratic that you should have something that doesn't fit should be this nice smooth Circle except for those two bits you're like what's that doing there like why are you uh pro-choice but pro-gun or why are you like uh pro-immigration but pro-small government like why did those things go together and when you find somebody that has a non-typical suite of beliefs it's interesting because you think oh you've arrived at this point on your own this is one of the things I did this video about Sam Harris ages ago three four years ago why Sam Harris is annoying everybody it seems like he he's like continued like true to form over the last few years um but I have to respect what he's done with regards to that because he pays an unbelievably high price to hold the opinions that he does which gives me a great amount of faith that he truly believes in them it would be much easier for him to fold either one way or the other like how can it's a very untypical to be pro-vax but anti-woke like anti-trump but also kind of anti-biden like you know he just holds a suite of beliefs that whether you agree with them or not and almost everybody disagrees with some of them right there's very few people that hold the exact same as Sam Harris Suite of beliefs that Sam Harris does but the price that he pays to hold them is so high that for me it's a reliable signal of authenticity because there are much easier routes to existing in the world than holding that odd conglomeration of views um it makes you think they've thought it through and I realized the favorite my favorite people to hang around and I don't have to agree with them on anything but have they thought things through I find that fascinating and then do they update their beliefs the other one on the high agency list was are they mean to your face but nice behind your back and you often don't see the people who are nice to your face and mean behind your back because by definition it's behind your back so another concept we come on to is hidden metrics but on that specific thing it is a hidden metric you don't see people being rude behind your back and I think often a good indication of somebody probably being nice behind your back is probably someone who's mean to your face well at least you know that and if not at least they're consistent what people that are nice about other people who aren't there to your face that's a good one or the inverse are they amazing friend amazing friend leaves the room and they go oh have you seen what they're wearing or have you seen XYZ that's for me a sign of like it takes a lot of agency to go against gossiping which is one of the most innate human things correct being a gossip tells you as much about the person who is gossiping as it does about the person that they're gossiping about because what it tells you is that as soon as the scrutiny of the person that they're talking about is no longer there they're going to be prepared to talk about you I've said before like the stuff that is on this phone would break the internet for weeks for weeks dude I have on there which is like crossover dread pirate robbers um but I you know I it's my way of going about life that I'm like okay well I guess I'm just gonna like hold this secret for the rest of time it's exciting for me to have like one of the other ones as well I think is um sending people Niche content um going back to the rudolfer story I found that from one of the things talents I have that I can't remonetize it I spot content creators really early on going back to begin the conversation probably listen to you on the first ever episode it took a while for that stock that penny stock to finally boom it's doing well now right um and there's a lot of other examples like that and one of the low agency things is okay this has six million views therefore I will click on it what I now do is I'll go on the Twitter feed or the YouTube explore feed or whatever and I look for things the algorithm is recommending me with like a very few views and I click on that and list nine out of ten times it's absolutely a waste of time but one out of ten you'll tap into something that everybody else isn't tapping into but by definition that is the meme of seeing a crowd like uh the I create that Meme about how to be productive versus how to be creative and everybody's queuing outside how to be productive but no one's queuing out how to be creative but a meta level that's a concept right of what are the things that nobody's clicking on that will then potentially be big in the future and you have to do that like a VC where you know nine out of 10 of your bets are going to be completely incorrect but one out of 10 is clicking on a Bitcoin article in 2014. yeah like how many of you've had what 30 million views on that verbal story I think on Twitter because whereas everyone else is then just regurgitating the same versus if you can tap into other inputs that was my big thing about creativity the essay that went viral on that which is creative the problem with creativity is people treat it like productivity where they just try and do the same thing harder versus try and get as many different inputs into the system as possible and now YouTube explore page and all these things can just keep you in this hamster wheel so you need to try and break out because you're predictable and search weird things and before you know it you find some bizarre inputs that can either go one way or the other yeah the niche content thing and looking for different ideas and where do they come from is a really interesting way to conceptualize productivity versus creativity really interesting idea to look at there is what's the work environment that you're doing this particular job in so for instance if you've ever walked into an artist studio Zach my housemate his missus is an artist right so I go into the room where she does her art and there's stuff everywhere there's like Vapes and there's there's halfton sketches and there'll be like a dog brush and they'll be like a a Bluetooth speaker but it's like upside down and there'll be can't also it's chaos chaos that is the place that you want to be and there'll be books and all sorts of other stuff that's the place that you want to be if you want creative ideas it's not the place you want to be in if you're doing your taxes no when you're doing your taxes you want to be a nice clean desk you want to have all of your stuff in front of you you don't have any distractions and yeah the Obsession that people have over productivity is so all-encompassing that I don't think many people in the modern world have ever looked at a problem and thought anything except for I need more productivity every single lock gets filled with the key of more focus more productivity the reason I can't do this is because I'm insufficiently attentive well sometimes and maybe even a lot of the time and this may be a comment on how um replicable and almost formulaic a lot of people's jobs are now that you know many roles should be concerned about the forthcoming GPT Revolution but a lot of the time okay what's the creative angle to the thing that I'm trying to do if you're trying to write a book sometimes you need to sit down and just put your nose against the grindstone because you're not getting the stuff out but if you're struggling with ideas you probably need to go for a walk yes but we we come from an institutionalized system which is the education system which was designed to create factory work I wondered when we would get onto education it can't take you anywhere without you blasting the education system so I think that's that's definitely a factor but it goes back to that question of where is the wheel suitcases and constantly asking that at a societal level but even right now in your very life like where is that Simple Solution that's so obvious that's just staring you in the face but because you're trying to be so productive you can't quite see it yeah so a good example for me I've started doing Barry's boot camp first thing in the morning I've been telling you about this I've been struggling with motivation to train consistently I can train on a weekend with friends but training on my own is getting way way harder and I think it's because I'm under a fair bit of pressure with the show and I've known for a very long time that classes for me externalize my motivation they give me a time that I need to be there they condense down the training into a short period of time there's a coach that makes sure the programming and stuff it outsources everything that I need to do and I just forgot that that was an option and then one day was walking past Barry's on the way to go to flower child where we went for dinner last night thought I should I should book in to go there sure enough signed up online and I've been to tons and tons of classes now and by 8 30 am I've got 50 minutes of training in I've done my morning routine and by 9am I can be on a call having trained and done all of my morning stuff I'm like wow even if I'd been at home it would have I would have struggled to have been as efficient so oddly the creative solution has opened up a degree of productivity as well the three biggest things I found for coming up with creative ideas are one uh you can get this spinning wheel app on your iPhone I just searched Spinning Wheel app on uh the App Store and collect going back to questions early just collect great questions that you hear like where's the Wheeled suitcase right now in my life and as you collect more of those questions things you hear on podcast things people say to you just spin that wheel before bed leave it with your subconscious overnight and then journal on that thing first thing before any any inputs absolutely fantastic for coming up ideas uh second biggest one is this idea called sakoko I believe it how I know that's how you actually pronounce it but I was sat in the Maldives for a week without any inputs and I came up with this idea which is the if you ask anybody where they want to travel everybody certainly I know are like 90 say Japan why is Japan's why do people want to travel to Japan so much but if you study the history of Japan they practice sokoko I believe again probably butchering the pronunciation where they closed the borders for 250 260 years anybody who tried to leave and come back killed anybody who tried to enter killed and as a result whilst the rest of the world was trading ideas it developed this crazy insane beautiful unique culture that where there's nowhere else in the rest of the world and that's why people want to go and visit it because it's so creative and so new because it wasn't Cosmopolitan it didn't get diluted down by other cultures exactly and then go back to the double think idea though at the other end of a spectrum is another tool which is that if you search on YouTube Swedish House Mafia creating one and it starts with them like tapping like this and they go all the way up to them just jamming in a studio like three creative guys to creating one live in like the space of a minute of the edit and it's amazing and you can see like you put three people in a room with no inputs from the outside world and they just pick a ball or idea tennis their way to it so I think Spinning Wheel helps time alone definitely helps and the longer the better as well as getting some kind of idea camp with the smartest people you know and just and shutting out the world that way we came up with similar ideas I came up with anxiety cast and you came up with thinking costs what's thinking cost thinking cost everyone will relate to which is this idea that your brain is a supercomputer but and you can try this I'll give this as an experiment to anyone listening right now try and have two thoughts at the same time and maybe there's the elite IQ guys that me and you definitely aren't and the Nicola Tesla's out there that could do it but I can't have two thoughts at the same time so with that in mind you've got this weird thing where you have a supercomputer but it can only one run one program at a time quite a quite a particle the human brain Paradox and why this is interesting is when you have super dramatic super negative people going back to what we said at the beginning where ideas are probably the most important thing it's hard to think about the wheels on suitcases when your girlfriend's rhyme with you about XYZ or somebody in the WhatsApp chat kicking off and you and then because what people don't see which is a hidden metric but everybody has it well I know I have it so I think everybody else has it which is when those events happen then when you're in the shower it's running and it's just eating away that super cute super computers Ram constantly so there's a opportunity cost that exists for every single thought so whenever you have a thought there's trillions other thoughts that you could be having but because your supercomputer can only run one program at a time it's not having so you've got to have a defense and an offense system that I think anyway so the defense system is avoid dramatic people as much as you can Paul Graham has my favorite essay ever which is life is short and I read it whenever either anybody gets sick or anybody dies and he kind of closes the whole thing off of like relentlessly prune so just get relentlessly prune whenever it gets in your life prune it purely because there's a thinking cost to everything that you do or every thought that you have and all so whenever but I never see what will happen is you will still have those dramatic Loops that get in there you can't have a complete um defense against them but then anchor the thought which is whenever you have a thought Loop that happens what is the opportunity cost of this thought like what is the wheels on suitcase that I could be thinking about instead and then you kind of Judo throw its momentum against it so thinking cost is the idea that every cost every thought has an opportunity cost and you should be hyper Vigilant to that yeah Peterson said the first time I ever brought him on the show about the price that you pay for inaction contemplate the price you pay for an action you're already in a little hell you know perfectly well it's going to get worse the thing about inaction is that you're blind to it do not make the assumption that an action has no price and this is the same thing that the thinking cost actually is the price that you pay but it's so unseen right people are prepared to waste the Peace of their own mind over and over and over and over again in order to not make a difficult decision because the difficult decision feels more real but peace of mind is one of the key desires that almost everybody should be striving toward the problem with peace of mind is it's a hidden metric so if you kind of Zoom all the way out I have a few fundamental questions I keep going back to with all my writing and then you kind of Zoom a bit higher and it's the optimism High agency thing and if you actually Zoom the highest point which I've not actually written about just yet which is kind of viewing everything going back to Rick and Morty's Roy or the video game of life like it's a simulation hypotheses but just forked that's more optimistic more High agency which is the video game hypothesis and one of my fundamental things of this kind of religion philosophy is metrics are one of the most important things and one of the reasons why people obsess over money is because money and your bank account is the best video game ever designed it's multi multiplayer competing against other people oh this person makes this much I only make that much number going up and as a result things like peace of mind which is a metric that we can't quite measure yet but we all feel it we only really begin to look look at it when we're in rehab or when we have an anxiety attack on the bus into work or whatever it is and that's why I think hidden metrics once you see it well you never see it but then once you kind of mentally see it you begin to see it everywhere hormuzy has that great bit of the Instagram model you take the Instagram model the Metro the visible metric is quite clear right you get to post her on your Instagram it's gray everyone thinks you're cool but when you kind of lie in bed at night with somebody who got I have nothing in common with you at all the damn problem I'm sure he's happy but uh you don't see the hidden metric um yeah why uh why is it that you are such a fan of the Roy scene from Rick and Morty it's the header on your Twitter and you've got a hoodie you've got a custom printed hoodie that I met you on the way to Dubai because the mask as well during covered with Roy on as well I I think it's because it's the knit like so one of my favorite things that I began to notice that was happening is you hit 25 and life goes mental so up from 0 to 25 everybody's on the same path pretty much this is the slight variance but everyone has these guard rails of first year second year third year um High School University but then you hit 25 and there's so much variance that happens where I have friends that are selling nfts for ridiculous amounts of money I've got friends going to prison I've got friends having a baby like there's so much variance that begin to happen and you begin to go like religion is quite a useful tool but as a lot of people who are atheist agnostic there's nothing out there that quite exists and the simulation hypothesis is probably the best we've got and it has nihilistic isn't it like this idea there's just infinite versions of me sat in a machine but if I can move that to like the video game hypotheses where I know I began to notice that the laziest people I know the most nihilistic pessimistic low agency people I know could sit and play a video game for 15 hours and be amazing at it so I have this theory that video game designers know more about human psychology than 99 of psychologists the video game industry is bigger than music TV and entertainment combined the amount they know about human psychology I think is fascinating so the kind of Roy is just viewing Life as a video game and trying to shift from first person shooter of me identifying with this to just third person whether it's true or not probably not it might not be a video game but is it a useful bleeder hat probably yeah I think depersonalizing a lot of things is good like that's one of Peterson's questions right um like treat yourself like you are somebody you're responsible for helping like treat your life like a character that you are responsible for playing it's the same as Rogan's thing uh imagine that you're the hero of your own story you know all of these like what what do all of these different ideas have in common it takes a third person perspective it depersonalizes a lot of the things that are going on to you because it's very difficult to give yourself you're so embedded in the experience of being you and there's so much going on That clouds your ability to make good decisions that actually being able to have a third person perspective is probably about as close to a superpower as you can be and gamification like people talk about God is dead therefore what's the point why do we do anything but with a video game you're not replaying it for any reason but it's just a game and I feel there's so much to be unpacked about video game psychology that can get implied but the biggest thing or certainly one of the biggest things is this concept of metrics when you have a clear metric that people can optimize what's that the Cobra effect wherein uh the Brit started offering Indians money for uh cobras because there was such a big problem with them and then they started breeding them so you know what a better version of that is it was to do with um rats another country they had a massive problem with rats and what they said was that they would pay people to bring in rat tails what they realized was that there was thousands and thousands of tailless rats running all over the city so that so that's it's you uh keeper boy has that concept of parametrics where you have two metrics so if you have a customer support team and you say hey increase decrease the fraud rate well then they start treating every single customer like a potential fraud says yeah you may achieve that goal but every customer hates you forever good Hearts yes you need to balance that with an opposing metric so going back to like the money video game which is a great video game but if you could then have peace of mind as an opposing metric and I wonder if you could literally visualize Peace of Mind as a dashboard that you could see every single day I think the impact that would have on people's lives would be so significant 100 I mean you know this is what people fundamentally don't understand about homozy is that he finds Peace of Mind through doing business so and I didn't understand it until I really really drilled drilled deep with him and he may be lying to me and I don't know but like at least what he says is that he finds his most peace when he's chasing money so for him money and peace are the same thing but because most people don't have that particular opinion when it comes to their work they can't they don't have theory of mind to understand what it would be like to be Alex homozy like what would it be like for your work and the most peaceful thing that you do to align to the point where you and your partner believe that not having kids is a smarter idea because you can literally serve the world better through Legacy through a company than you can through children well I challenge you that people don't can't empathize with that they maybe just have an added frame to them correctly where people can always think of a game they played that's so addictive that they end up playing for the sake of playing what were some of what were some of yours did you ever get addicted you've got your brothers like professional Esports player he was very very good so I saw that firsthand but for me football freestyle was my thing right so I'd train four hours every single night and do that and then decided I actually want to lose my virginity at one point I stopped doing that um so when you have something that you're just doing purely for the sake of doing I mean you're doing this with a podcast right yeah we spoke last night and I said you're the only person I know that would have stuck at it as long as you did without the metric really but you was playing it purely for the sake of playing it but your metric so the difference your metric wasn't the subscribers or the view count really part of it for sure but I knew if it was you would have quit yeah but it was purely an infinite game that you was playing and because it was such a well-designed video game for you then it keeps going the biggest uh the biggest piece of advice for people that ask about you know I want to start a podcast like what should I do or how should I begin or you know but what's your piece of advice like if you don't enjoy it don't do it because you are not it's going to take you 150 episodes to earn anything it's going to take you 400 episodes before you're probably unless you're gotten existing platforms can take you 400 episodes before anybody really cares about what you're doing it's going to take so long and that's weekly an idea I have with that is pricing things in so I I think it's a hedge fund term where you kind of price in upcoming events and when you're starting new things like that so when I take uefoiling which people who don't know it's like a electronic surfing everyone saw Mark Zuckerberg which is one of my funnest videos you don't even DJ Khaled DJ Khaled drop that clip in there Dean um so with that one big thing I've now recognized because I always take new people with me I'll say to them I go you're going to fall off 50 times before you get good at this versus if they don't if they come at it with just oh I'm gonna I'm gonna be good at this immediately and then they start falling off it it immediately rocks their self-esteem whereas if you say hey they're gonna be 50 times before you get good at it Mr B says that as well with YouTube he goes just make 100 videos and then and then we'll chat yeah and I think you've got to constantly price and things and go okay it's gonna take me 12 months in the gym before I see anything and if you price that and I always like really conservative pricing in because that's how you say 500 episodes you've got a new podcast and you get it at episode 212 you feel great but if they go into the mindset of well level one it's going to work therefore but again I I structure all my Apple notes to-do list so like for the every single day it's the most Lindy thing I've done for years is level one thought dump dump everything I've got to do today level two decide on the levels and boom I'm already feeling good and every project I do will be designed like that because just me writing down what I've got to do I've already hit Level and I can feel that momentum growing versus if it's like have a successful day I'm constantly trying to play level 32 and failing so again it goes back to that how do you given that what you've suggested there is essentially to price in difficulty and to also kind of have low expectations of success how does that marry with the Skeptics Guide to optimism well it goes back to that one percent every day it goes back to the secret is like you're not going to immediately change things you're going to need to combine optimism combine agency but the most important thing is infinite games that you can play for the sake of playing them that that's exactly the thing called Mosey at least the impression I have of him he's he's doing it like a game and he wants to do this until he dies and that's why he can keep playing and keep companion exactly the same with you with this podcast which is why you didn't quit it's going to be very difficult to be beaten by somebody that isn't having fun if you are yeah right like what's that uh Thiago Forte it's incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's having fun yeah so I that was thinking cast which was yours anxiety cast was similar um but a little bit more uh acute a bit more short-term this is what I'd come up with so as you identified uh you can only have one thought at a time and by making any kind of decision um inevitably you're going to um cut off some of the potential wasted thoughts thinking about that undone task so let's say every single morning when you wake up your daily to-do resets right I need to walk the dog and meditate and and take a and and speak to my mum or whatever it is that you do every single day right there are certain things that you do every single day the longer that you wait to do those things the more time is taken up thinking about the fact that you haven't yet done those things which is an argument for front loading stuff into your morning right versus the interest rate constantly yeah every single time that you think I need to meditate today I need to meditate today I need to meditate today could have been that's wasted thinking cost or anxiety cost as I called it that you could have fixed by simply meditating when you woke up and looking at your day not only through Ebbs and flows of energy but also in terms of what captures a lot of my thought what causes me stress how can I get that so that it's and not only here's the other thing not only do you get to gain not thinking about the thing and being anxiously concerned that you still need to do it you also get to sort of bask in this beautiful self-righteous glow from your high horse of productivity because you went out and you fist it first thing in the morning it's perfect so um next stuff raises both massive fans of razors you did a super thread and one of the I've selected some of my favorites I've added in some of mine as well the first one bragging razor if someone brags about their successor happiness assume it's half what they claim if someone downplays their success or happiness assume it's double what they claim the map is not the terrain a hundred percent and there's obviously exceptions to the rule but I think that's quite a consistent rule that I see when I hear someone particularly if it's money or if it's things like that when they're bragging overtly I'm ah probably don't really believe this but if someone's kind of playing it down there's a few subtle towels it's the classic midwit meme right you've got the probably my favorite meme of all time which is the low IQ guy on the left the kind of Midway in the middle and the super high IQ guy there where the low IQ guy says I'm the guy on the left the guy in the middle says I'm the guy on the right and the guy on the right says I'm the guy on the left so and you see this with wealth as well you see the super rich try and hide the welfare as it's the kind of people who were like the money Twitter crowd screenshot the Shopify store and things like that where it's but why are you trying to signal that when you're trying to overtly signal you're probably trying to compensate for something again there's exceptions to the rule but when someone's signaling so hard it's probably a sign that they don't have we were in fact we were in uh a location in Austin over the weekend and a Gentleman came up to us and one of the first sentences out of his mouth was 1500 people in the world have started a one billion dollar business I'm one of them no I I believe you even less now anyone who's seen Carl pilkington's if you wanted to go yeah yeah I um I think what it kind of suggests when somebody does steaming and um start with achievements first is or any kind of bragging basically suggests to us it's a low status very easy to fake signal of authenticity right like a hard uh signal of authenticity would just be show me a bank balance or Show Me Your Capacity is someone telling you how smart they are is way less reliable of a signal than someone having a conversation with you that flows perfectly and you think holy like that's really cool so yeah I you know we're into personality quirks here around people's desire to be seen and their needs for validation from the world around them but I think generally the bragging razor of thinking if I want to come across well allowing my achievements to arise as a byproduct of someone asking me about what I do this is another thing that happens in in Austin that I had to introduce you to which is since I've been here when you join a new group at a party or a gathering or whatever and you get introduced by the one person that you probably do know in that Circle they usually tell the group what you do and that allows everyone to bypass the bragging razor because your friend bigs up your best achievements but again it's a reliable adjudicator presumably I'm not going to lie about what you know he's got a 17-inch penis and I'm pretty sure that he's got the world high jump record and he's like the first man on the moon like I'm not gonna say that right I'm going to say the things reliably that that people can can assume so next one I love this one instagram razor when you see a photo of an influencer looking attractive on Instagram assumed that there were 99 worst variations of that photo you haven't seen they just picked the best one 100 and me and Josh my business partner when we travel around will be in sometimes very nice restaurants and we see the beautiful couple okay like I don't think it's them necessary but the kind of Tommy Fury Molly main looking couple not referring to them and he's just kind of there staring into the distance and she'll be there just going through her phone of like infinite photos of her and then on this girl trying to find the right filter one of the biggest red pills I had recently was where I was at a bar and then I looked over and there's a girl on a photo of herself and she was face tuning it live in real time and I now realized you it's the classic where's the sausage made and you've got to realize that everything on Instagram that you see is absolute it's just it's just not true it's the metaverse it really is the amount of us Everyone's an animated character completely edited it's it's bizarre I love the fact that you have to assume as well that this is the best option out of what everybody had and especially if it's someone that's got a pretty well curated Instagram feed that I suppose that's one of the advantages of as you get to a particular level with creating content online you don't even know what's going on it's you know the spin the wheel thing I have no idea what video goes out each day like the shorts team finds things that they love and sometimes they'll be like oh this bit with Mark Normand was really fun like you should maybe put that out but they treat me like a child like they've got a strategy and they know what they're doing so I'm like oh okay well I guess I'm just like uh close your eyes and put your hand in here celebrations tin and pull out of today it's a bounty tomorrow it's a malteser a good razor as well kind of related to this is both these razors are trying to avoid signals and then try and actually study the noise so like not not the noise sorry but the actual thing So Meta games I think are super important because you can learn a lot so I have this rule which is if I want to work with a personal trainer I want the personal trainer to be an insane shape and that's way better than any marketing Spiel he can give for me if I see a SAS product which is selling landing page software I want when I click on their landing page for that software to be incredible like the landing page should look if you're if you're the landing page software guy and your landing page isn't great that's a sign one of my favorite one of my heroes throughout history in marketing space is David Ogilvy and David Ogilvy I forgot which magazine it was they wrote a headline which is is David Ogilvy a genius question mark and Ogilvy was a great marketer because the way he marketed himself he replied to that headline by getting his lawyer to sue them for the question mark or at least that's the story that he released I go even within that you can see how good he is at Market he doesn't have to say like what he's done there is genius so whenever you can study these meta games which is not what people say what they do or how they carry themselves is super super important narcissism narcissism razor if you're worried about people's opinions remember they are too busy worrying about other people's opinions of them 99 of the time you're an extra in someone else's movie yeah and then just when you realize everybody else has a separate video game that they're playing and you're just they're too busy when you're thinking about them and you're worried about them assume the amount of thought you give to other people they're giving to you and then you realize how delusional that is one of my friends was chatting about Envy recently and he was talking about how he wants to get rid of Envy as a thing I mean one thing that's useful With Envy is to realize that there's somebody out there who's so envious of you who probably checks your Instagram checks for these things and constantly is thinking about you and when you view it through that frame you go Jesus that's really bad I'm actually not that worthwhile being envious of and you realize oh everybody else thinks the way I think and that then enables you to go to like third person shooter and begin to zoom out and just see oh I'm not that important no there's that quote of um we would care far less about what other people thought of us if we realized how rarely they did yeah um does this other one did you see that story about Churchill that I posted of the young guy who was showing around the houses of Parliament this was good so a young MP was being shown around Parliament by Winston Churchill as he wandered through the halls and offices he asked questions about how the building was put together Churchill obliged and gave the young man advice on how this world worked upon entering the House of Commons chamber Churchill's new friends started referring to the MPS on the other benches as the enemy Churchill reportedly said that's the opposition Dear Boy the enemies behind you and what I loved about that was it became obviously what he's talking about is the fact that like the people who you need to be concerned about are the ones that are on your team because you have something that they want that's the opposition you know that they're out to get you to the people behind you the snakes that will stab you in the back but figuratively or symbolically I think that I love that story because it reminds us that we are Our Own Worst Enemy most of the time that we see the world as being some sort of um adversary that is trying to do things against us the world gives zero about you the world doesn't care less literally the entire universe is indifference to all of our existence right nope not a blind blink and I imagine that this is one of the reasons why when we get to look at the night sky it fills us with a degree of dread and awe and insignificance that I think is very important to keep our egos small because we realize that everything's just going to keep on turning but also this goes back to the cynicism skepticism thing you can personify the world as being a thing you know you hear people say stuff like this like you know the world is an evil and mean place and it will try and break you down I've even nodded as Goggins said something similar on the podcast and I there are degrees to how it can be useful to see um to be um alert to threats out there and to have resilience ready for things that are difficult to occur in the world but the world's indifferent to you the world doesn't care and personifying it and creating a an enemy out of the world I think is pointing the finger in the wrong direction it's like it needs to be turned inward you are the person that knows all of your weaknesses you can say the most disgusting terrible things to yourself you know all of the trigger points that you should go through you chastise yourself for falling short even though you've tried your hardest like you are Your Own Worst Enemy there will never be anybody that can be as brutal to you as you can to yourself realizing that helps you to ameliorate this adversarial view of the world the world's just a tool yeah it doesn't care about you that there are some people out there who genuinely have enemies right but it's a rarified Strutter of people and they've done something yeah exactly yeah I think so there's the nihilistic version of that or it can be framed as noticing pessimistic which is or nobody cares about you what's the point then but it goes back to the root opening of the conversation which is ideas are probably more important than people like the concept of electricity is so important or the idea of critical thinking or whatever it is this is why ideas are so much more important and you can find as a atheist or an agnostic you can find God to some extent in these ideas something that's way bigger than you that can last way longer than you that is so so damn important there was a one that I came up with this is my my first one I'm running it into the mix which you'll have seen before Schultz's razor do not attribute to group group conspiracy that which can be explained by cancellation anxiety so that that's a great one there's the Cummings razor as well which kind of forks on the idea which is Balaji one of my favorite followers on Twitter tweeted out why don't why doesn't every government in the world have a dashboard so you can see how well they're doing it is well think of the core map you could debate over the core matches you can even debate how you measure them and maybe have different parties and things like that but all the core measurements number of homeless people on the street obesity rates death rate why why don't we have a bbc5 channel where you can just tune in like a CEO checking their dashboard and we don't operate that way um and Dominic Cummings Boris is former right-hand man retweeted that and said and I call this Cummings Cummings razor which is whenever you get confused by politicians or you think it's some great conspiracy theory it's basically this which is Cummings wrote I can confirm at the time Boris does not have a dashboard that he checks every day it's not run by it like a CEO he just reacts to newspaper stories that come in each day if everybody saw this they'd sell everything and flee and that's a fundamental problem is yeah there's not actually a lot of malice that's going on it's just a complete lack of strategy design everything gwynda had a post today that was money the idea of sinister Elites controlling everything is popular because it's more comforting than the truth that even our leaders don't know what they're doing and Society is ruled mostly by chance so good there was this this other idea called compensatory control do you remember I I taught you about this ages and ages ago compensatory control um so it's Rich another Richard shotton here so he's talking about how um people that were very early on before there was reason to believe that it was a lab leak uh people were um attributing to Global conspiracy the fact that we had this pandemic that was released like the people that were right weren't right because they were educated they were right because they were closing their eyes and throwing it at a dartboard if they're right at all uh compensate we control when we feel uncertain when Randomness intrudes Upon Our Lives we respond by reintroducing order in some other way superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need it is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces this is why for some it makes more sense to believe we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the chance mutation in a silly little microbe we just want to personify you see whether it's that personification again as well and one of the big reasons is that the world is chaotic we try to bring order to that chaos by personifying it so many different things that we could do what should we focus on where should I put my time am I doing it right am I doing it right please just tell me if I'm doing it right and as soon as you can create a narrative it's no longer random chaos oh there's a story it's like Harry Potter or it's like succession or it's like Pretty Little Liars going back to what we said earlier now you can never guess their opinions for high agency people one of the things I love is as soon as somebody kind of and I can be nearly this as well I'm sure you can but someone kind of steamrolls with their identity belief or whatever their team sport is it's just if you had to give the best version of the other team's opinion what is it then you just see a crumble a lot of the mongers mongers it's like steam mining something you just completely see it crumble and I'll often they'll go well there is no argument for it and he said well therefore this is why did why did that's such a that is the most insane perspective that totally disregards the um fundamental way that humans work if you believe the same things that your opponent believed you would be convinced by it too yeah as soon as you can be convinced that two plus two equals four you can no longer unsee the fact that two plus two equals four until somebody convinces you of something else like you don't get to choose to be convinced right you just are it just happens now you can refuse to listen to things you can be bone-headed around stuff but once you're convinced that's it it's game over so understanding that if you were that person you would have that belief as well I don't mean in a we have no free will determinism type scenario that their particular Suite of understandings and worldview perspective has resulted in them believing this thing which is counter to what you believe I learned this from gwynda as well he's coming back on a couple of weeks uh rogerian rhetoric so it's kind of like the um uh what's the dialogue method that the Greek philosopher came up with was it Aristotle or people are going to be screaming into their airpods anyway there's this like the Socratic method for that um rajira and rhetoric's kind of a little bit like the Socratic method but it's more investigative so you're almost trying to work out just trying to work out what's true through asking questions and there isn't Socratic method seems to be more like asking questions so that this person arrives at the outcome that you want them to it's like you know the Earth being flat like could you maybe think that it could be due to this could it maybe due to that could it maybe and you try to guide somebody toward an outcome regiring rhetoric seems to be less biased it's got less of a um an agenda to it and uh yeah I I love that as an outcome because you're like I just want to find out I just want to know I want to know what that person believes because if I believed it I would be convinced too leaning in with curiosity versus like immediate judgment is and sometimes you may change your mind and I feel you can see that at like a political level or a societal level but then you zoom in all the way at the micro and you everyone can relate to this where go on search facebook.com if you're old enough and click on your own profile and go back five years and you'll cringe for whatever reason you will you will cringe whether it's the outfit you wore or the person you were dating the opinions that you had and if you have if you aren't cringy and then you you definitely should be because you don't involved as a human being however you then have to price in out five years from now what am I going to be thinking and that's one of the things if you can start skipping ahead to that question now versus waiting the five years maybe you'll actually get to that point in a year the worst thing is man when you do this game which both of us have done Lots right what in five years time is The Wheels on the suitcase of my life that I should be looking at right now where are the blindingly obvious changes that I need to make that I'm going to wish that I did earlier that I'm going to wish that I committed myself to if you do the game of what do I wish that me 10 years ago changed uh altered did adjusted in terms of texture of existence or the way that I perceive the world lots of those are still going to be the same ones that you need to do now yeah for 10 years time yeah like it's the same pattern it's the same way skin has the idea of Bridging the Gap where the mistake he made five years ago it'll be a theme of something that will keep occurring and yeah the actual specific mistake may change but it could even just be the fact that I keep thinking I figured out the answer so you go you look back yourself five years ago well I figured out now but you've not priced in the five years from now you're gonna go oh thank I've actually figured it out now and it's the same thing each time going back to the sekoko thing I had this the weirdest one again a lot of alone time can both be great but also very bad I don't know where this idea is I think it's even my greatest idea or my worst idea yeah and I've thought about turning into a guided meditation which is meditations useful you can kind of observe yourself but as uh APS agnostics people who don't have an immediate religion to fall into they don't have really any alternative to prayer and I really like the kind of Jeff Bezos deaf Bears minimization framework as well as the kind of Roy it's just a video game and I came up with this thing I just sat there with no phone no nothing my mind's just wondering and a little bit of Christmas Carol thrown in there where you calm your breathing and you skip ahead seven years in the future and you kind of go you take off the VR headset and you now as you are now listen to this podcast was just a complete VR trip you're actually 85 years old and you're in the worst Care Home imaginable and as your eyes slowly open you begin to realize then you try and embody this and feel the emotion that you're you if all your worst traits took over if all your pessimism took over if all your low agency took over if all you're isolating yourself from your friends and bitching about people everything that you can think about your worst version of yourself took over you're in a care home where there's cockroaches on the floor and the nurses never come in to see you and as you stumble around you're just repeating all the mistakes that you've made in your head repeating all them and like physically feel that emotion and then as you're feeling that intensity you get a knock on the door you move over with your Zimmer frame and your hips that feel like you've just run a marathon the day before and standing back as you open the door is the absolute best version of yourself and for whatever reason he's he's lean he's like he's got none of the injury issues he's just built like RFK yeah he's built like RFK and his prime he's on all the creatine right he looks fantastic and he pulls up an iPad and he plays you all the amazing memories where the best version of you took over and you feel that emotion to such an extreme intensity of that envy that you have for the best version of yourself and you look over and there's a clock on the wall and there's just five minutes ticking it's how long you've got left to live and the emotion that intensifies but before the uh the best version of yourself before the RFK version yourself walks out he says okay if I could give you the ability to go back in time now what would you do I give you all my money in my bank account he goes okay let's do it let's do the trade however you have to give me one thing today that you're gonna show the best version and write that down and then actually action it and I started doing that it's like out I almost got like crying in a Starbucks one day yeah you put an information Hazard warning before posting that online which I think is probably worthwhile it's pretty intense thing to do are there any realizations are there any changes that you've made from that that aren't so personal that you can share um yes I I think really just thinking in much longer time Horizons so thinking okay well if I go to that 80 90 year old self I really want to play games that I can play Forever or that I can play for a long period of time that video games that I can set up that compound out as well so I've kind of changed a lot of the way I think the way I operate the way I work around much more long-termism much more long-termism because that's where all the that's where all the gains that's what you said to me last night of if anybody with a bit of talent a bit of IQ a bit of everything sticks out something for five years like you did like playing the video game without the scoreboard going up but Stick it and then boom the compounding game happens like what percentage of your audiences come the last 12 months like 90 more that's insane right yeah it's so hard for people that come from uh going back to the education system an education system like that to comprehend how things compound all of a sudden but when you can zoom out and play those long-term games they can come back and the beautiful thing is going back to it is even if your podcast never took off even if this thing never worked out and it's still me and you just making another one you still had fun which is kind of if you can find a game that you can play Forever a you'll probably end up making a lot of money and then worst case scenario if you don't at least it's it's it's a fun video game anyway the early late Razer if it's a talking point on Reddit or Twitter you might be early if it's a talking point a LinkedIn or Facebook you're definitely late yeah that's a confirmation there's a I try and think quite a lot about future Trends and as a result you end up going back to what I said earlier it's VC bets nine out of 10 will be wrong but one out of ten will be right and the biggest thing I have is the amount of Trends I spotted that came via Twitter and how far ahead you can live by living on the right reddits the right twitters and even now it'll be like WhatsApp chats telegram chats things like that and you can literally see it slowly go all the way through and then hits Peak mainstream when it's on Facebook or when it's on LinkedIn dude I did this the other day this was from this week's newsletter and I think I told you about this one too the parental clout gauge I don't know this one do you know how I know when a news story has reached genuine mainstream significance it's not when it Trends on Twitter or hits daytime news or lands on front pages it's when my dad message me messages me on Facebook about it I see your colleague Mr Rogan has been in the news again he also sent me one toward the back end of last year saying that Andrew Tate spelled t-a-i-t that Andrew takes a nasty piece of work isn't he and I was like oh God Tate you've really gone full mainstream now that's that's a good full of fun I think as well what one thing I've taken since a book called The sovereign individual which is a fantastic book predicted a lot of future Trends and they have within that which is this concept that if the Roman Empire when the Roman Empire fell since like 476 A.D or whatever um they didn't acknowledge it at the time it wasn't people going around the Roman Empires fell it was only with the historians glaze that we could acknowledge oh that's when the Roman Empire will fall and this idea I don't think the American Empire is ending by any stretch of the imagination but one day I assume it will end and the concept that you think you'll go on CNN one day and they'll go oh by the way today the American Empire ended no what will happen is it'll be 70 to 80 years afterwards historians will declare oh it's when X happened that it ended and that's the reason why you really can't Outsource things to the news because if you wait for the news to tell you you'll either be late or you'll be wrong thinking about how this reflects and works for the personal as well I learned this from Mark Manson identity likes Reality by one to two years there's a lot of psychological Fallout from a rapid change in status and this kind of relates to the what will you in five years think about you today what did they wish that you had known only in retrospect do our lives make sense a lot of the time so that quote about uh the funny thing about life is that it needs to be lived forward but it only makes sense in reverse and identity likes Reality by one to two years means that you are permanently permanently playing catch-up especially if you have big changes in lifestyle and personal growth you know everybody that's listening to this podcast is is working on personal growth they're trying to become better people every single day which is beautiful but it's very unstabilizing very very unstabilizing because you know within the space what's that uh every seven years every single cell in your body has changed right it's the ship of Theseus idea that you can replace each individual plank on this ship and after long enough like is it the same ship and there's also a way that girl break up meme Pages have used this to be like girl don't worry after seven years there won't be a cell in your body left that was around when you were with him she's actually kind of a nice way to think about it I suppose if you're trying to get over a bad breakup but it's very destabilizing to have all of this stuff happening right and especially if identity likes Reality by one to two years it's really really tough Okay so who's me what does it mean to be me right what does it mean to be me like who am I am I the me that I aspire to be am I to me that I am now am I the me like it's a very very uh destabilizing world to be in and I think that trying to Future proof Yourself by thinking carefully by reflecting carefully on on what it is that what the universal rules are that you're trying to follow I think is a much safer way to go about things yeah I think I think the more rules of thumb and raises that you can just have the more useful that is Brian Johnson the which one good good point the uh here's the point I don't know a single name that has more people in the public eye attached to it than Brian Johnson Brian Johnson singer of AC DC Brian Johnson guy that started optimize.me forgot about him didn't you Brian Johnson hey guys Brian here um Brian Johnson the liver King Brian Johnson the longevity expert in in the marketing space that's what we call an SEO Warfare I want about the longevity expert where he has uh the 4 P.M is it 4pm Brian or 5pm Brian yeah yeah he just he's fired him he doesn't let him make a decision but yeah I think the more rules of thumbs that you can have it simplifies things and then I actually think the ultimate hack we've been speaking about a lot whilst I've been here is who you are around and I know that's the kind of oldest Dale Carnegie Trope but the memetic forces I I wrote this essay a while ago which is cognitive biases are a bit of a scam or they've been sold incorrectly so cognitive don't tell Shane Parish cognitive biases I think you'll agree which is cognitive biases are pessimistic and low agency versus you can actually just reframe them same way you take the simulation hypothesis and end up with video game hypotheses you can reframe them up to the optimism High agency stack and its cognitive superpowers so you can just move things like so mimesis everybody talks about mimesis often in a negative frame model you just copy your desires from other people and there's some truth to that and some beauty to that but also you can actually use that as a tool I mean maybe a lot of these things have actually been designed not as cognitive biases but things that are very hyperbolic discounting but you've managed to reverse that what's the name that you've given to the study by historians question have you named it yet oh the the what is ignored by yeah have you named that yeah so what is ignored by uh the media that will be studied by historians and then people point out well there was this one example where the media mentioned this the whole thing of it is like the media historian Gap so what is super prominent uh so what is not prominent in the media right now that I think will be humongously portioned up by history and there's so many things when you begin it's another question it's another open but you leave at the audience and versus like oh this is the thing here's my answer I've got a list of ten the headline death Gap the headline death Gap so this is image maybe Dean can whack it on the screen of what headlines say will cause your death or what they focus on versus what will and obviously terrorism is like off the charts things like that are off the charts versus heart disease gets almost no mention in the media and it is absolutely humongous I have this uh bit that you did with Peter Atia where the is it the mortality gap between smoking and non-smoking smoker and a non-smokers 40 the mortality gap between the bottom 25 of exercise fitness and the top two percent is 400 so here's a question for you an open loop for you where is the where's the great Pro exercise campaigns right now if it's if it's 10x or however much X the the difference and if we can save that many lives there's because I collect like the best ads of all time and there's one in there which is uh like smoking and there's an actual study on smoking ads that the US government did it saved millions of lives they expect so where's the pro exercise campaigns they don't exist based up based off that based off purely off that data alone they should exist on mass the interesting the reason that the question is interesting and I've I've called it a Max Steel question because Peter thiel's question of what do you believe that most people is it most people would find abhorrent and most people would disagree with uh it's like yeah what what do you believe that everybody else essentially disagrees with you on it right yeah I feel like again like everything I'm a budget version of a much budget version of Peter teal yeah so not even as gay who knows the knight's young right um so on that point yeah the media historian Gap and then you begin to see it everywhere it was more like a point of annoyance where I just see these things like why is that not getting discussed and it goes back to opportunity cost as well where what are the things that we aren't discussing because we're focused on things like that the more important things Fast and Furious turn Fast and Furious time well I mean we've said this actually this is an interesting one I used to say five years ago um most of the greatest minds of the 21st century have had their time working out how to get people to click on ads yeah but that changed about three years ago to many of the greatest minds of the 21st century have had their time taken up arguing about whether men and men and women are women or not which is also true like you know John Peterson very formative for me uh during my intellectual Awakening from Manchild to adult infant and I love his insights around the existential pain of living I don't go to him for insights around Sports Illustrated models does just better things and the weird thing about some of the ideologies that have captured attention of the opposite side so you understand about how um cultural memes are also evolved too right that the ones that are built um to propagate and to be continued to the ones that stick around and there are other ones that don't right cultural memes act the same way that genetic genes do too um but there's something that happens on the opposite side of the fence that it causes the effective cultural memes that stick around are good at triggering us a response from the other side they trigger an antibody response which further propagates the meme because it lends more Credence to it now sometimes I suppose the opposing side could keep on battering away to the point where it gets destroyed I think the word woke and the word politically correct are two good examples of that that comedians used it to it was so quickly turned from non-ironic to ironic and and mocked through satire that no one uses the word woke in a non-ironic way anymore everyone that uses it is using it as a piss take so there are ways that you can repurpose it it's not an argument to never push back against Bad ideology but it is an argument to realize that if you start to play the game of the other side whatever side you're on and whichever side you hate if you begin to play that game by pushing more attention toward what they're doing you do uh it's like a a Hydra it like just chop one of their heads off and it grows too more well if you look at kind of the root structure the conversation today if you actually zoom out it's constant gaps right so you've got the media historian Gap you've got the thinking cost Gap the gap between what I I should be thinking about versus that and the Beautiful Things Are is that these are questions are the answers that you need these are questions that you can kind of explore for the Transformers Fast and Furious Gap right like what what's the the media focusing on there's questions that you can kind of explore for a lifetime as well as it's quite a decentralized thing it's the audience can then participate that model versus hey here's the answer I would love to create a page of some kind I guess it can just happen in the comments but it would be great for you to put a page out what is neglected by the media but will be studied by historians if you crowd source that yeah that'd be that'd be a fascinating one and then you can obviously retrospectively see it throughout time as well um there's so many of those Gap that's another one that I two that I have at the minute which is what problems can't cap what problems aren't we solving because capitalism can't solve them what like I think I think so we spoke about this one cyber bullying I think that's a really difficult problem for capitalism to solve because the incentives aligned to get people to be online yeah that's a real difficult one and I think therefore you've got you've got to maybe have some kind of Enterprise idea or something outside the box for that I have another one which is like the the product marketing gap which is most people think they hate marketing but they don't they just hate it when marketing is better than the product um the the secret or optimism exact exactly that um and I one thing I'd leave for the audience to I'd recommend I always recommend this my friend Julian Shapiro sent me it which is this documentary searching for Sugarman you've still not senior have you anger's meter no no end sorry watch that tonight so searching for Sugarman um spoiler alert is about a musician who was more talented than Bob Dylan um everyone who worked with him was like this guy's incredible he's going to be the next big thing and he just disappeared there's rumors that he set himself on fire like what happened to this guy um and meanwhile in South Africa his music became a big thing during the apartheid he was bigger than Elvis he sold hundreds of thousands of records and everyone in South Africa was like he was he was an icon but everyone thought he died or whatever turns out the guy was just a builder on a building site for the rest of his life and it's only thanks to the internet beginning to start that he realizes that he was the superstar in South Africa and I quote the Rodriguez effect which is when you have a incredible product people think decided oh you just build it they will call him if you have an incredible product but no that's that's the importance sometimes of marketing that if you don't actually Market someone who's in talented as him you end up with something like Rodriguez where they have the most Talent I'll give you one of the most talented artists of his generation who never truly took off apart from he had that little win in South Africa but he never took off elsewhere tell me about Kanye West's market research oh it's my favorite one so this is what I call the Olsen thermometer so there's this going back to finding Niche content on the Internet is this Diplo animation where Diplo is chat about he gets called up to Cat by Kanye to work on I'd argue probably one of his best albums which is Watch the Throne him and Jay-Z and he goes in the studio he's producing beats and he looks over I know you're saying earlier your artist's friend does like e-cigs everywhere and there's things on the floor in Kanye Studio there's just the Olsen twins and Diplo is like why why are Mary Kate and Ashley here Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and Kanye says oh they're my thermometer for what white girls like in music so I just play tunes and see what they like and I go obviously that's the most can you think ever but it's also genius which is when you have and when you're creating something for yourself it's really easy but when you're creating something for different demographics having an awesome thermometer in the room is very very useful the Friendship recession another one that the ignored by the media was studied by historians yeah yeah I think that you know the number of men who reported having zero close friends in 1990 was three percent in 2020 was 15 um the I mean people are starting to talk about it with young girls there's this recent study that came out I think it's like 60 percent of teenage girls in America say that they have persistent or constant feelings of hopelessness like it's just the most brutal I would love to see the study and actually break down what's going on um Global millionaire migration what's that yeah there's the US went from I think 10 000 millionaires net migration to like 1500 which is like an 85 drop really quick um and the UK is now at a net loss whereas elsewhere Australia the UAE I think Canada has gone up so that's definitely thing that just doesn't really get talked about like why is this happening again another one is uh Japan's homeless rate why does Japan have so few homeless people relative to the rest of the world they might be lying with their statistics who knows and it's so it's so low it's insanely low a lot of the reasons that when you actually watch documentaries about it is these gaming cafes so that that's one question too so they live in gaming living live in gaming cafes the people who would be homeless like this kind of like a bed and a chair and they play games which is obviously a terrible outcome but is it better than somebody sleeping on the streets good question to pose another one that I think will become bigger with the next election cycle which you already take advantage of this is something they're called a great social media merge so I got this idea from Mr Beast which is every platform for the first time ever is kind of you have that unbundling then bundling effect everything's just merging on this kind of tick tockization of real shorts but even Reddit even Twitter's now going on video and you're going to see this Spotify Spotify Amazon so all you back in the day you needed to create something for LinkedIn then something for this and it meant actually going viral was so much harder whereas now it's actually never been easier to go viral because the same clip because every platform's bundling together can go on mass viral and I don't think they priced in how quick are people are going to get famous yeah that's looking at content strategy there's certainly different audiences that it resonates with so just because something that's 916 vertical we put stuff that reliably does well on Instagram that falls flat on its ass on Tick Tock um animation videos reliably do well on Instagram can't even get off the ground on YouTube no one cares so there is um although the format of the platform maybe the same the physics the drive it are different different but I wouldn't be surprised if over time those begin to merge more and more together another thing on this specific topic is I have one point in the essay of don't ignore India I think in the uh it's possibly the most fascinating country right now which particularly is a British and American Media doesn't really get focused on that much so Indians are now the number one population in the world they're overtaking China this year or last year they export more in software engineering than Saudi Arabia's in oil so there's so much going on there they're the number one users of every single social media platform so number one uses a WhatsApp number one uses a Facebook and one use of Instagram and one uses of YouTube which means that if you're going to be creating things online they're going to be there like in the area and also India bear in mind obviously previously the British Empire where India was a colony of Britain has now flipped so India's economy the other uh last year overtook the UK and again that's barely discussed but 20 years from now we're gonna go that was a big event yeah uh an interesting Insight I learned from a couple of tech YouTube friends with massive channels when they do um expensive like Apple devices their RPM and their CPM per thousand on AdSense on the back end of YouTube is very high but if they do cheap Android devices tons and tons of Indians watch it and that drives through the floor Android's huge there yeah um also Ali abdall talks about Ali's from some subcontinental Heritage and when he does book summaries his book summaries often listened to or watched by people from India but it drives his CPM through the floor so he's like he needs to balance Revenue with but again I think I think you're going to see I know we spoke about this a long time ago where remote work was the best thing ever to happen to Skilled people in the developing world and short people oh yeah and yeah quite a little pin that one and skillless people in the developed world because all the money is going to flow out and again that will be something that will be spoke about five years from now as all this money flows out to what Balaji calls the ascending world and the descending world as a better model versus developed and developing world that's the ultimate meritocracy it's the ultimate meritocracy but what will happen is people will not like that because you'll see all this money and then all of a sudden the the cpms in India will get higher and well also it's it's going to drive populist uprisings more and more you know if you we need stronger borders okay please try and police your virtual borders for a Workforce like you've got this cohort of seven million Prime working Agent Man between the ages of 22 and 50 who are not working they're not in education employment or training needs um they spend a few thousand hours on average per year playing video games 50 of that time is either on prescription drugs or smoking weed from this 7 million man cohort seven million out of 330 million isn't much but when you look at uh capable men within that age bracket it's actually a massive proportion huge huge number if those people aren't going to work there is a vacuum that will be filled by other workers from elsewhere another one on this is literally this point of what's neglected or what's ignored by the media will be studied by historians is the bricks so if you combine the bricks so like Brazil Russia India China South Africa and I think uh Korea as well that's okay to see it's a c for China and yeah that's true actually but they're literally about to overtake the G7 in terms of economic size it's like the g7's going down like down relative to Global GDP and that's going like that and again these will be things that they will not talk about the news going back to the Roman Empire Point earlier nobody says Roman Empire's Fallen it's the historians that say that so the historian frame is so much more useful but again you can see going back to what I said earlier there's the way I think or it's probably sometimes you end up visualizing weird things in bed as we discussed earlier but there's a lot of root structures and themes there of these gaps of taking the historian's perspective both at the societal level and also at the individual level yes the future you right looking back exactly the same uh I think my two my two certainly at the moment will be that population collapse that's a big one I brought about that one that's a huge one absolutely massive I keep harping on about it um it's an interesting it's not even necessarily ignored by the media it's disincentivized to be spoken about by the media because it runs counter to a climate change narrative that this is what we should be focused on AI risk I think is still now largely in the public seen as like a well you know but I can get it to tell me the recipe or I can get it to tell me five interesting stories about Winston Churchill and yeah you can but I mean in if the people that are concerned if like Eleazar yukowski is right then there is no no there's going to be no historians in the future to be able to worry about what happened in the past in any case so it doesn't really matter it's going to be all paper clips uh YouTube is the new TV yeah this is a crazy start and one of my new favorite things when I see a viral YouTuber I go in the comment section and the amount of times I'll say hey X I'm a 15 year old and I love your business content it's just flooded and if you actually see you can find the image I post on Twitter where YouTube now is something like 25 of kids say they spend almost all their time or such a significant proportion of their time on YouTube and you're then seeing this war that play out to the attention economy where you have like centralized major Studios so Netflix Amazon Prime Disney all these which is kind of top down we pay billions for ideas but the best directors in the world when we create that versus bottom up which is like YouTube anyone can go viral it's completely decentralized and I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube ultimately I think they'll both win but I think YouTube will eat more and more of the attention Market I'm pretty sure that the amount of time spent on Tick Tock uh last year versus uh Netflix Netflix watch time let's see uh I did not mean that watch time um Insider intelligence predicts that users over the edge of a team will spend an average of four 58 minutes per day on Tick Tock this year compared with 48.7 minutes for YouTube Oh Netflix still within the leader at 62 minutes so it's like 58 minutes a day on Tick Tock 48 minutes a day on YouTube 62 minutes a day on Netflix that's for people over the age of 18 right so under the age of 18 is probably going to be pivoted a lot that's like that's that's three hours of your day here's an interesting one right the number of hours that people have in the day hasn't changed but the number of the amount of time that people spend on online platforms has that time has to be squeezed from somewhere yeah you don't just get to create this time from nothing so when people talk about you know what have been the massive changes why is why the discourse is this way in the mental health and all of the rest of the stuff look at it as a hardware problem as opposed to a software problem is it the globalist conspiracy is it the estrogens in the water and the stuff it might contribute to it a little bit maybe it's the fact that foreign years ago the total amount of screen time that people spent was probably on average like two hours or one hour a day and now it's including work it's probably closer to 10. so let but let's go back to the beginning of the conversation optimism agency right so if you look at when the smartphone first launched it was magic pocket computer wow how incredible this is that I get this thing that sits in my pocket and I can reach anybody do anything I can watch Richard Feynman lectures whenever I want I could go on Stanford University I can I can chat to somebody in India just sat here right now like that is incredible 10 years later brain killing device what's what's going on we've gone all the way from the optimism High agency all the way down to pessimism low agency and the number one which I never thought would be my most popular essay in terms of when I meet people that they want to talk about going back to the third door like what is the thing that no one's discussing is I call it the smartphone Paradox so right now there's two things people are presented with smartphones either one be a phone addict who's addicted to it 12 hours a day every single day refreshing it and yeah you get the upsides of constant optionality and things like that but you're stuck to your phone all day or you've got the phoneless Luddite who leaves his phone at home or leaves our phone at home which is great but you can't get an Uber anywhere if you've got an idea you can't use your notes if your mum's ill you don't find out until four weeks later um and you so you have I have the two virgin memes like the phoneless ladai and then the phone addict which is the two options that have been presented by Society right now and then I was like okay well where's the where's the Wheeled suitcase right now and I came up with the cocaine phone and the kale phone so this is my cocaine phone here this is my kale phone here and rather than have a phone you're addicted to or no phone that you're addicted to what about this so on the kale phone essentially is all the positive optimistic apps notes Google Maps utilitarian Uber audible Kindle and it's sometimes so boring I just can't even be asked checking it and if anybody wants to get in touch I've got like a few emergency contacts that have this number so I still have if anything kicks off I've still got that and then on my cocaine phone it's wild Tick Tock Instagram everything on there and what's really interesting about this is when I spend all my time on my KL phone so I usually won't check my cocaine phone to like one or two p.m in the afternoon it completely resets my Baseline so then when I use the cocaine one I'm I'm bored of it right now it's too much after about an hour and I want to go back and that single piece alone I get people writing to me weekly saying this thing's like completely changed it so I call that the smartphone Paradox and it goes back to well you can kind of go oh well Apple when are they going to fix this or tick tock's evil it's like or you can you can take it into your own hands and design some wheels in the suitcase the bottom line is that you need to take control of your own technology I would go as far as to say that like my relationship with technology has probably been the most consistent challenge that I've had to fight with over the last decade right it's something every single year when I look at my annual review that no matter how disciplined I've been I always want to be more disciplined and I always see it as a a challenge I was thinking I could have would have should have done better with that um but I'm cocaine kale and then a third one as well right like I've got three and the phone yeah cat Academy phone um I've been rolling with that for a long time and that's been a big do not have social media on the main phone it's the most and the beauty of that is you get the upsides of you get the upsides of having the phone all the craziness of social media finding like random stories what we chatting about earlier but all the upsides of having peace of mind and being able to detach and mindfulness I think Audible and podcasts yeah podcast notes I everything you can think of being able to get an Uber somewhere like all the basics and again Society presents these two extremes that you render the Spectrum but there's always a third door that exists the scale of farmer marketing yeah that's a big one um again going back to as someone who loves advertising loves collecting the best ads of all time only us and New Zealand are allowed to run pharmaceutical advertising I can't quote the exact ones I think it's MSNBC two of a bigger big news networks in the US their biggest advertisers are pharmaceutical companies but it goes back to my point earlier which is okay that's true that's the thing that exists should that exist that's open for debate that's an open question but where are the ICONic exercise campaigns if we know that it can have a 500 increase taking somebody from the bottom 25 of exercise to the top two percent where where are those campaigns and why aren't the government investing in them I put out a thing of if any government wants to invest DM me and I'll help well speaking of DMS yet so speaking about government investment you've got the Great Tech neglect yeah so this is one of my favorite ones which is I could talk about ignored by the media studied by historians the UK government posted a job role for the head of cyber security for the UK government and the proposed salary was 55 000 pounds which again for a lot of people is a lot of money don't get me wrong but for the head of cyber security how is that how is that possible but when you think about your job is in cyber security and the number one floor that all cyber systems have is the human element every single hacker fundamentally is a human hacker first not a computer hacker almost everybody I think it's called Soft hacking or something like that where they try and look for the human element in if this guy is a girl is getting 57 000 pounds per year like how many Bitcoin do you think that a rogue nation has to be able to bribe that person there's your vector of attack yep and the two things I've been really focused on the last kind of 12 20 more 24 months is traveling and studying different cultures because you go why does Japan have so a few homeless people or how can you get UK is doing this but meanwhile in Singapore they pay the average politicians something like 750 000 and they have kpis based off how well the country's performing so study different cultures travel a lot and you begin to see those gaps as well as when you study history you begin to go you begin to take a historian's frame to the present moment how incredible modern Aviation is this is the wildest one and I every time I get on an airplane even when I flew here I always say to myself I go and this is even a gratitude hack I go I'm gonna die today let's be taking off especially because I rant about how modern Aviation is I gotta be the most ironic death for the Pro Mod Aviation guys Elon Musk says that of the most entertaining outcome will happen of the guy that rants about how amazing Aviation is will die on a flight so his two stats I think it's 2021 the number of deaths on uh airline in 2021 was around about 120 to 180 depending on the statistics you look at the number of cardiffs was around about 1.1 million so and think about how much more dangerous an airplane taking off is and that is completely neglected I think probably because it's a positive story and we don't want to focus on it or we just take it for granted the same way we take the sewage system for granted the same way we take electricity system for granted all these great ideas we take for granted and then we focus on all the nonsense with the opportunity costs that we have is humongous that we don't think about how wonderful modern Aviation is well we have this threat detection system right and we also have a smoke detector principle which is it is far better for us to assume that something bad is going to go wrong and it not happen than us assume that something is going to go well and that not occur like there is a bus Bush that shakes over the far side I can either be scared because it might be aligned and run away and it might be a line or it might not but the cost of me running away is relatively low the customer being eaten is very high so we always have this negativity bias it's inbuilt into us it is your job to swim upstream against that and stats like that I think are very very important to remind you like the I mean what's the chance of you dying in the car on route to the airport they say the most dangerous thing about a fly is the drive to the airport well I mean the I remember it's in Matthew Walker's book where he talks about how the number of doctors that have done us I think it's surgeons the number of doctors are surgeons that have worked 12-hour shifts in a hospital that upon their drive home crash and then get taken back to their own hospital to be worked on because of how sleep deprived they are wow I think I there's a book called Black Box thinking which I recommend which studies the aviation industry where they compare well why are Airline deaths going down so much meanwhile hospital deaths are going up so much and he has a few interesting hypotheses about cultural things and with a black box they literally observe once a plane crash is what happens it records it and because often the people are dead there's no ego involved so they can objectively assess it but the lessons from the aviation industry should be applied everywhere and this ties into the next point which is what happened to ticker tape parades like ticker tape parades Peter till has this great point where they used to be huge people would go out in the street and applaud JFK applaud these great individuals and it started off in the 1910s became super popular all the way up to the 1970s and then just slowly fade away the last iconic individual really was Nelson Mandela in 1990 in New York after that is a few sports teams not individuals collectives a few nurses and a few things like that but what happened to that my thesis is like where's the ticker tape parade for the Wright brothers or where's the day off for the Wright brothers because I'm talking out that you think about how talk about high agency individuals well no one can agree on any cultural Heroes anymore there is nobody they're from the Wright brothers are up for debate but new ones like you're not going to throw a ticket parade for the Wright Brothers now oh yeah you know try and think of who do you think is the most unobjectionable person maybe the Rock he probably doesn't do badly and even then he probably scores like 51 to 49 in the policy I mean he he did put his foot in it to do with I think he maybe it was a race thing and maybe it was a trans thing a few years ago so yeah the when the Overton window has become so highly constrained and when concept creepers occurred to the point where everybody will find something that they can justifiably be insulted by there are landmines everywhere for somebody to step on yeah and yeah there's a question I have for you that I was thinking about on the way down we're talking about history a lot here and studying history has given me such a fantastic frame about these things why is it so music is a specific thing where people consume a lot of music from the past even to this day like on the way down I love Christopher Cross Ride Like the win one of my favorite songs from multiple decades ago you think of AC DC Michael Jackson all these amazing artists that's still relevant today and people still consume the music today versus with social media people David prowell has that concept of the never ending now people only consume content the last 24 hours when you probably most people listening to that listening to this still apply this but imagine if you applied that to music where all you could listen to is the island boys like the music that's been made to literary today it'd be terrible but why do we do that for information consumption I've not quite figured that out yet yeah that's an interesting question I think what we go to for music and what we go to for the other types of content that we consume are very different things we go to music for a vibe to put ourselves into a particular kind of emotional state a lot of the time music seems to be a lot more Lindy because there are universal laws no one's going about I always say this about Shapiro's Channel you know Ben's got this rapidly growing Channel and he's been very very successful on YouTube and in podcasting and all the rest of it no one's going back and listening to Ben Shapiro's mid-2020 podcast episodes because they're inherently about relevant yes they're about the last 24 hours but there's so much in history that is relevant or so much amazing content out there that is relevant so on prayer he has this other concept of the Paradox of abundance where right now you've never seen more people in the Obesity levels are off the charts another thing they're probably ignored by the media study by historians off the charts but also the number of Greek people look like Greek gods he's also off the charts you have this weird evil barbell like evil extremes and I think the exact's true of information consumption I posted this thing the other day of like the Paradox of abundance of YouTube you can go back to the smartphone Paradox as well you can use YouTube to search Richard Feynman lecturer Charlie Munger the history of World War II how did Winston Churchill prepare his speeches or you can search WorldStar hip-hop fights or the island boys and that Paradox of abundance exists there's this really cool quote another guinda one here that says the combination of the digital age constantly exposing us to new outrages and cultural Elites constantly creating new outrages out of nothing has skyrocketed the number of outrages we now face in a world prickling with provocations we cannot let our sensitivities roam free if we allow ourselves to be goaded by every invisible and visible indignation we'll endlessly be distracted from our goals and easily controlled by emotional manipulators like trolls disinformation agents and demagogues I block the easily outraged because they're the foot soldiers of the mob who in the old days would have lynched people over the neighborhood rumors those without self-control are seen controlled by others those without self-control are soon controlled by others they're the useful idiots of ideologues the tools of tyranny so with that I think you just show that everybody has a thing that they can find which is reprehensible that the person that they're talking that they're looking at has done which is why the tick type parade thing has stopped who can everybody agree on as being a hero and if you don't have any cultural icons that you can hold up it's very difficult to Rally around like if you tried to hold a ticket parade for pretty much anybody there would be an equally sized anti-parade for the same thing yeah which is insane and also I guess goes back to the the pessimism bias uh most people die at 25 and aren't buried until they're 75. why this reference is what we're trying about earlier where at 25 0 to 25 before that is a beautiful design video game it's like grade one grade two grade three grade four grade five or year one year two year three year four year five if you're English and you kind of progress up like a beautiful Milestone every single year through High School through college and you all of a sudden at 25 those Milestones just become marriage which is obviously might be on the decline mortgage funerals of loved ones kids kids and then your own funeral so the amount of Mile you go from like a milestone so regularly to almost non-existent and big thing I have of reasons why I think it happens is one lack of Milestones institutionalization institutionalization because people go from the education system where they kind of sat there all day over 18 for 18 years asking to go to the toilet and then they're just going I'm thrown out in the wild like a prisoner and as a result people really struggled to adapt to that um I also think people just don't really care about adults I think it's quite sad um support group they haven't got any support groups so the time spent with family time spent with friends even co-workers ultimately goes down towards the end um so you factor in all those things plus that parenting switch thing uh yeah so there's the parenting switch as well which is you go from being The Keg you go from having your caregivers there your entire life support and you supporting you supporting you and again going back to Milestones all of a sudden then one day you get a phone call and you're their caregiver or they're not even here so it just immediately switches on you and all those things begin to stack up which is super depressive super like pessimistic maybe we end on that note like super nihilistic end but no actually the the optimistic answer I wrote about which is a few solutions for that which is one create regular Milestones so I'll try and split the year into quarters now which is enough time to Sprint at things but also then have a week off completely reflect and then rebuild the plan so then you have like four Milestones per year two um try and schedule things in with friends regularly family regularly whole like you can use you use your Google calendar for like weekly meetings with people at work you can use it for friends you can use it for family as well three I think we also have a lack of religion in current society and we've kind of thrown the baby up with a baffle a lot of atheists look down on it but those regular rituals um a thing bigger than you that you're working on so important to have so try and take Sabbath's uh fasting things like that you can take quite a lot from religion and all of a sudden you can then begin to not die at 25 which I think is a huge huge problem it's a silent problem as well George Mack ladies and gentlemen dudes I love you I'm really really glad that you came to see me in Austin what should people do if they want to check out more of your writing you're one of the quickest growing guys on Twitter at the moment where should they go yeah a few things so I put together all the best ideas and resources I found at George mac.com so you can just get that there completely for free and I kind of update it with time and then I'll send a Weekly Newsletter related to that um you can also just literally go to George Dash mark at Twitter and then there's also a load of great ads which is kind of under right now the current URLs marketingplug.com but that will change but you'll still be relevant when people when people hear this before we go though one thing I'd like to say just to break the fourth wall for the audience me and you was sat on a beach few years ago now and you remember what you said to me you said if I can get to 100 000 subscribers and hopefully now we'll be at the million Mark and the big thing I've learned as a Brit touring America is there's a lot we can take from Americans and vice versa they are super complimentary to their friends which we are often quite like mocking of each other quite insulted to each other but proud of you man you've absolutely smashed it and I think for a lot of listeners out there you set an example of an infinite game that you keep that you keep sticking at and boom X percent of the audience has come the last 12 months what a compounding game man and thank you for having me my pleasure man we're going to keep on doing it together thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe