The Most Valuable Skill In The Modern World – George Mack

This is a long time coming. I think agency since we've been talking is the topic, the thing that we've both been obsessed with the most. So, introduce people to it. What's high agency? High agency is, in my opinion, the most underdised and most important idea in, let's say, the 21st century. It's one of those ideas that once you see it, you can't quite unsee it. It's it's everywhere. But the problem with it is it's quite hard to define. And there's that um Justice Potter Stewart line of around when he was trying to define pornography when he was asked in a government inquiry, can you define pornography? And he came back with the ultimate reply of, well, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. So, in lie of the episode today, I know you rent out all these beautiful studios. I wanted to be the first guest ever to bring some props to kind of get people to experience high agency and then we can define it with words. So cool. First off is high agency in a meme. Okay. So as you can see here you have person A and person B. And essentially for the people that are listening you have two people trapped on a desert island. Identical people but with two different fundamental frames of reality. One is using the wood to get help. The other is using the wood to kind of escape the island. And you kind of see this idea that two people with exact same fundamental realities but a completely different like low agency uh here, high agency here. So you see high agency and a meme there. Then and this one was quite difficult to get printed in London without people asking questions. is high agency. High agency in a in a moment. So again, for the people listening, you have a series of Nazis saluting to Hitler in 1936, and you have this guy in red here who's believed, there's debate who it is, but he's believed to be a guy called August Landmasser. What I love about his story was he originally like most people have this idea that when Nazi Germany comes around that they're going to be the one that puts Anne Frank in their house and stands up, but realistically we're way more likely to be these individuals here. And according to the story, um August was part of the Nazi party, kind of went along with the LAR because it kind of made sense. Um fell in love with a Jewish woman and very much okay began to hit an agency test with reality. and you see all these Nazis saluting at once and he's the one guy with his arms crossed. He ends up um getting punished for marrying a German woman, ends up in a concentration camp, she dies in the concentration camp, but there's just that beauty of every single person saluting as a Nazi and him there with his arms crossed just beautifully signifies high agency in a moment. Mhm. Next thing I would like to run through is we have um two videos. So one which is high agency in a video and another which is low agency in a video. Okay. So this is Sasquatch Music Festival 2009 guy starts dance party. So for the people listening at home there's this absolute nut job on a hill dancing like a madman and the whole crowd is looking at him like he's lost his mind. One guy's joined. One guy's joined. He starts dancing with him. Yes. And slowly but surely, people begin to join the dance party more and more throughout the video. But before you know it, you begin to see the whole crowd who go from 15 people now judging him to joining. Oh my god. 2 minutes in, it's 150 people. Yeah. And then toward the end there's no one sat down. There's only a few people sat down. So yeah, that's high agency in a video. And just to contrast this, now the next video in terms of getting people to actually experience it is low agency in a video from Darren Brown. But they were actually taking part in a compliance [Music] test. The three people on the left are actors. They've been briefed to stand or sit when they hear this. Everyone else that's brought in is a genuine short-listed applicant. They've been given no instructions other than to fill out their forms. My team and I were secretly watching from another room. [Music] The more socially compliant a person is, the more they're likely to look to others for signs of how to behave. This is going to be your spot. And the more people, the greater the pressure to join in. In this case, whether to stand or sit. [Music] So funny how the third guy is now taking those people that didn't follow the crowd. [Music] Oh, she just cracked on. I think we have to lose Amy sadly. Oh, so this was a test of compliance. Wow. Once we had a full house. Very. Before you know it, we got rid of the actors. Yeah. Before you know it, they removed the actors and you just have 10 people standing, leaving us with a room full of complian standing up. And I love that video because yeah, it perfectly encapsulates low agency where and it's so easy to fall into of just looking around at other people assuming that they know best and then realizing that all the other people were just looking around at other people and it's this giant game of Emperor's New Clothes and and then and then you die and you realized it was one giant lap live action roleplay the entire time. Yeah. And I suppose the that's that mimemetic sense has got implications that you can be the first mover both to start something which snowballs down or to stop something which is snowballing right now 100%. So finally um in terms of the high agency this is like show and tell from home one we've discussed a lot of times so here we go this is the high agency question. So for people uh listening at home, the way to identify the highest agency person in your life is if you woke up here and you have sweat with dirt and dirt with sweat all over your body. You've people listening, this is a photo of a prison cell. Yes. um you've not drank in days and you've woken up in a third world prison cell and you have a phone passed under your door and you can call one person to try and get you out of there. Who is it? And everybody weirdly has this kind of idea in their head of who they would call in this scenario. And when you actually begin to grill people about who they would call, it's not the amount that they bench press. It's not the car that they drive. It's not the novels that they've read. It's not the family background they're from. It's maybe sometimes if they're the royal family, then maybe it's it's something else. And that something is is high agency. And yeah, I'm looking forward to the chat today because we can go into more of the specifics of it. But the problem once you've actually begin to experience it, you get a more of an understanding. But then the real problem that I kind of struggled with is how do you actually it's a janiqua like it's difficult to describe in words like what is what is it? So I kind of created this like model here which I call the high agency spectrum. Spectrum being the operative word. Yes. So essentially imagine you have two doors. Behind them are all the people you would call when stuck beh in a third world jail. And at the other end of the spectrum is peak low agency is the last people that you would call when stuck in a third world jail. If you were stuck in like a paper bag, you wouldn't call them, right? Yeah. And what is the fundamental difference between these two groups? Cuz if you looked at them on paper, you go, there's no gender, race, age, politics, wealth, career title, LinkedIn profile. like what specifically is it? And I was stuck on this idea for years like trying to chip away, chip away, chip away, chip away and essentially kind of came to the conclusion of like this is actually the most simple way of defining high agency is are they happening to life or is life happening to them. So what you'll ultimately um anybody who you would call to break you out of a third world jail, you would define as happening to life, the people that you would be least likely to break you out of a third world jail are the ones that life is happening to them. Um and then once you begin to see that spectrum, it's such a more simple like Okam's razor of really understanding my agency. And fundamentally this isn't it can be like a nice okay this is a cool like self-help concept but actually agency is bigger than that out of the six to seven million species on earth human beings are the only ones capable of agency in the known universe of what we know and by the way we only know this via agency we are the only thing that we know of capable of agency um even today like we are sat in a studio in London And I was listening to David Deutsch explain this concept of we're in London today and it's only thanks to agency because it's December right now in London that me and you aren't dead within two to three hours because it's the clothes that we wear human agency. It's the heating here like the UK itself is a product of agency of human agency because without clothing which we kind of born into and assume has always been a thing but no it was the result of human agency without heating another thing that we just take completely for granted the UK would not be possible. So he argues that this idea that we're going to um go to Mars and terraform it and shape it that it's actually a livable habitat the UK is already that. Mhm. Nobody should feasibly live here. But it's just human agency. It's agency all the way down. All the way down. And what that's why once you see it, you can't fundamentally unsee it because it's the only it's the not the only thing that makes human beings unique. But we are the only species that is fundamentally capable of happening to life. Why is it so important to you? It's an interesting definition. I can see why you happening to life, not life happening to you, is important. Why do you care? Why is it so crucial? Why is it the most important idea of the 21st century to you? I think like growing up in the UK, you naturally potentially have a default low agency setting. I remember when I first heard the idea, it was Eric Weinstein on Tim Ferrris's podcast and I had to pull over the car and like write this down. I was like, "Oh, okay. This kind of begins to explain so much of the world and so much of my personal world." And then, as I mentioned, once you begin to see it, you you can't unsee it. You see it every single way. And I've got some examples on the boards that I'll come on to. But it's so important to me because once you realize um you know your line of like skill issue, everything is just skill issue. Everything is basically an agency issue. Like you when you actually uh one of the fundamental beliefs I think of around high agency is that all problems are solvable. And once you begin to take that on board as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics like this isn't self-help, it's physics. All problems are solvable with enough knowledge. Um, what what are some good examples of high agency like Okay, so using the spectrum, I've got two examples that you're going to like. Here we go. So on the right hand side of the high agency spectrum, we have SpaceX. So the recent chopsticks landing. So SpaceX starts with Elon selling PayPal and deciding as you do to just get into rocket science and rather than go to university he decides that that's a painfully slow download process to learn. So just gets a load of rocket science bucks and starts like happening to life, creates SpaceX and one professor, SpaceX was this early startup, not the juggernaut that it is today, the best rocket scientist um professor I believe in America. He uh he goes, "I can't believe it. Like five of my top 10 students are working at this company called SpaceX." He goes, "I need to meet the guy that runs that." So Elon arranges the interview and this guy has a load of questions for Elon. What are you doing? And immediately he realizes the reason why Elon's taking this meeting is to find out who the other five were and boom. So anyway, it keeps obviously goes through all the ups and downs and you end up with a rocket reverse landing catching with the chopsticks and reducing the legs that's needed uh the amount of repairs that's needed as a result massively accelerates the human's ability to happen to life to be able to escape the planet. just on the the SpaceX thing, Bill Perkins introed me to one of the guys that works for Elon and uh this guy bet his entire career on the belly flop maneuver. Have I told you this story? No. So, when these rockets re-enter because the purpose is for them to be reused, they're coming into land, they're not going to land sideways. You're not going to put thrusters on the side of it. You're going to land it upright like this. But the problem of bringing it into land like that is that this is aerodynamically the one that has the least drag. So they thought, right, okay, how can we use air friction to reduce the speed of re-entry whilst also still landing the thing upright so that we get to use the same boosters to slow it down that we used to get it to take off. And he created the belly flop maneuver. So if you watch it when it comes in, it's coming in sideways like this. And then only at the last moment does it rotate and it stops. So this guy apparently the first time that it ever happened like if it hadn't worked and he'd left I can't remember where NASA some huge you know illustrious uh organization bet his entire career all of his reputation and at this new company would have been a laughing stock of the entire industry and makes it work [ __ ] cool. Wow. All problems are solvable, right? Well, I say that. Let's now contrast that with Do you recognize this on the left? It's a train in the UK. Yes. It's not just any train in the UK, Christopher. It's Northern Rails trains. So for people outside the UK, these would be the trains that you have Northern Rail in the Northeast, right? It's not just a Northwest thing. Cool. So I would have got on this um coming from the northwest of the UK. And just to contrast, SpaceX obviously at the other end of the high agency spectrum and Northern Rail at the other uh end of the high agency spectrum. So what I wanted to I did bring it just to read it out. So this is a recent inquiry into Northern Rail. So you have the mayor of Manchester sitting down with the head of the trade unions for um Northern Rail or the people that work quite high up at Northern Rail. And throughout the last few years, anybody who's experienced Northern Rail, it's too expensive. Um it there's trains getting cancelled constantly. There's delays, etc. So they're doing an inquiry into what's going on. It starts with the mayor. I've heard you're still using fax machines to do these things. Can that possibly be true? It's very much true, Chair. How How on earth is that the case in 2024? Well, that's a very reasonable question. It's our challenge to get rid of them. We have plans to get rid of them. You could do it tomorrow. We absolutely could. Are you going to do it tomorrow? We're not going to do it tomorrow. Why? Because the tools we use to get information and messages to our crew rely on faxes. Amazingly, we will get there in the end because we're forced to because fax technology in telecoms turns turns off our plan that we're putting forward. Anyway, it cuts in. It's like how the mayor goes on to say like, how have we poured millions of millions of privatized money into this? And it's still we're still using fax machines in 2024. Um, and he goes on and talks about, yeah, we're going to get round to it. We're going to get round to it. And it just ends with I mean I personally don't think many people watching this will consider replacing fax machines as an issue as depth of depth and complexity. So just the two contrasts here of fax machines on the trains in the UK and reverse like landing a rocket is two complete polar opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to travel and logistics. From our insight into the British National Health Service uh through you, we both know that the NHS still heavily heavily relies not only on faxes, faxes between departments and not only faxes, the whole thing is run on Windows XP. Mhm. When I don't even know how you have access I don't even know how machines are able to run Windows XP anymore. There's an incredible Twitter account at the minute called Days of NHS spending. You sent me this. You sent me this the other day. What was it? Uh the Palm JRA Beach. Yeah. So the Palm JRA Beach in Dubai. Um it's a tweet where it talks about it's the most expensive I think physical infrastructure ever built. And it equates to 30 days of NHS spending. And he's just constantly anytime anybody talks about a number that's going to be saved or a crazy amount of spend is just constantly quantified into the number of days of NHS spending. Absurd. We'll get back to talking to George in one minute, but first I need to tell you about eight sleep. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but also how well your body stays in its optimal temperature zone throughout the night. And this is where eight sleep comes in. Just add their brand new Pod 4 Ultra to your mattress, like a fitted sheet, and it automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed. It's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, sleep phases, HRV, snoring, and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. It even starts cooling or heating your bed an hour before your bedtime. And that's why it's been clinically proven to increase total sleep time by up to one hour every night. I've been using my eight sleep mattress for years and I literally can't imagine life without it. I'm on the road at the moment in London and uh it feels medieval to not have an actively cooled and heated mattress topper. It is a total game changer. Best of all, they have a 30- night sleep trial. So, you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get $350 off the Pod4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to eight.com/modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's ei.com/modernwisdism and modernwisdom at checkout. What about what about uh examples of agency? Like you both of us have kind of become addicted, I guess, to accumulating these stories of people that are high agency. for me. Uh, Sir Adrien Paul Jlane Katon Dwart the Unkillable Soldier. Um, Sir Ernest Shackleton that attempted the first Antarctic crossing 1914. Uh, the forgotten Highlander, Alistister Urkhart, you know, uh, Victor Franklman, Search for Meaning in some ways, too. Um, that recent one, that AO Kvenan guy, the dude that took 30 an entire platoon's worth of meth and outran Russians for a month when he was stopped. His resting heart rate was 200 BPM and he weighed 50 kilos. Um, who are some of yours? Well, brings me on to my uh my next one. Okay, so we have two contrasts here. Uh, one end of the spectrum. We have the US Department of Education on the low agency end, which it something around 20 to $30,000 they spend on um students per year and they are ranked it's the highest in the world the US spends on education. Meanwhile, they're ranked uh between 20th and 35th both for literacy and numeracy. So, spending so much money, getting so little out of it, it's a wild stat of something along the lines of over 50% of Americans have lower than sixth grade literacy. Yep. So, on the right end is one of the best books I've ever listened to. It's about an hour long. And I'll just open up a question first because it's completely reset this question for me which is what is a 10-year-old capable of and this book kind of answers that question. So it start it's a it's called don't tell me I can't. It's written by a 14-year-old at the time called Cole Summers and essentially just to contrast it to the Department of Education. It starts with him very early on around about five or 6 years old. And his dad um served in the military and had issue in training that basically left him disabled and with injuries for the rest of his life. And one day he's getting raised by his dad and he's about to hit the age of going to primary school and they see these kids like misbehaving and saying some like awful [ __ ] outside of their house and they decide, you know what, we're going to we're going to homeschool him. and he he opts in for that decision. He goes, "I don't want to hang out with those kids." Unfortunately, his dad then ends up needing lots of operations throughout his home uh throughout his homeschooling. And his he one day is kind of sat there. His dad's recovering from um all these surgeries. And he says to his dad, "How do people get rich?" And his dad just replies, I imagine at the time, on so much medication and just trying to keep his kid busy. He goes, "Um, I don't know." because they're poor family goes, "Maybe go and watch some Warren Buffett videos on YouTube." So six-year-old goes and start watching Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger videos on YouTube. Consumes everything about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Understands like Munger's iron laws of prescription. Um starts learning everything about business and compound interest all but for himself on YouTube. Then at the age of seven, the age of seven just goes, "Well, I'll just start my first company." seven-year-old starts his first company um selling rabbits to the local restaurants, gets it up to $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and that's real revenue, not like a Shopify [ __ ] screenshot, right? $1,000 for a 7-year-old. At the age of eight, he then learns about Amazon not paying uh tax. He goes, "How how is Amazon not paying tax?" So, he starts just teaching himself the tax code on the online at the age of eight. at the age of nine, he buys his first vehicle, like a car. Um, he do with it for the uh for the farm. So, it's not him, but he owns the vehicle, but people are working on it. Yeah. And uh at the age of 10, he buys his first house for $10,000, watches YouTube videos, learns like flooring, um how to do the wiring, completely flips the house, makes a profit on the house, and uh has he got any help? Is anyone assisting him with this? I I I don't I don't know the ins and outs of that specifically. I've got to I'll probably do more research on that. But the book is um is incredible. And there's a bit in there where he goes to scouts cuz he's still interacting with other kids. But what the crazy thing is he didn't know that that wasn't normal. He was just going online and he goes to scouts and he's chatting to the other kids about like what they've been up to that day and they're saying, "Yeah, we've just been remembering the planets and like so we have Earth here and Mars and D." And he's like, "When are we ever going to use this?" He goes, "What about you? What have you been up to?" And he chats to them about like payroll, tax compliance, especially this 9-year-old at Scouts. But not that I think the key asterisk on that story is not that everybody should not not every 10-year-old should be buying their own house, but it makes you question like the education model that we discussed earlier. And I think that's probably one of the biggest inputs of low agency into people. and his story in particular. Yeah. Makes you question, well, what is a a young person capable of? Well, I suppose the education system in both America and in the UK, I don't know if there's anywhere that it isn't very much life is happening to you. Yes, there is no you happening. You're not, you know, until when's the first time in the UK school system that you get to choose your sort of specialtity? Sort of 13. It's after year nine, I think. you remember you're going to pick your GCSEs that you're going to focus on and then from there you pick your AS you pick your A levels then you pick your degree. So up until that point, up until the age of 12, 13, 13, you're just on a set of train tracks. You don't even get to discriminate what you learn, let alone how you learn. Uh in broad strokes and then in specific strokes, it's like, well, this is the sequence. This is how the curriculum is put together. And um yeah, what's your thing about uh the behaviors that you were rewarded for in early life are the ones that you get punished for in later life? Yes. Like in uh in school, if you copy people, you're punished. and given it attention. In life, if you copy people, you're labeled a successful franchisee owner. But there's like endless amounts of those behaviors where a lot of adult life is about, from my experience at least, seems to be about unlearning behaviors that happened during school. Yeah, when you actually go down the rabbit hole of the education system like this Prussian model that came over and it was primarily created for to create industrial factory workers and it still looks like that to this very day. You have bells that ring. They used the same bells in British schools that they were using in the factories like the most Pavlovian early on conditioning. It's [ __ ] wild. You have you have um somebody who's in charge of the classroom. You have people moved from cell to cell. Uniform or uniform. Yeah. And you also you're told when you can eat. You're told when you can go to the B. You have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Peter Teal, I was thinking about this the other day. He has this question of what do or what does what opinion do you hold that few people um agree with you on? And this idea of trying to get you to become an independent thinker, which is quite a difficult question to answer. I certainly struggle with it. But like there's a flip of that question which is what do essentially most people agree upon but nothing's changing and I think it's the education system is definitely not a good thing. Yeah, it's it's obviously not necessarily there's worse options, right, before before it existed, but I can't think of anything that as many people agree upon that this thing's a doesn't prepare you for real life. And a good indicator of a training system, I was thinking about this, a good indicator of a training system is how closely it mimics the actual thing. So, driving lessons are incredible because you're literally driving and it's painful. But meanwhile, school, how much do you remember from school? essentially zero of I was thinking about you know who I'd love to meet whoever is in charge of foreign languages in the UK at like the department level I've never met anybody who's learned Spanish French from school apart from like bonja bonjour or hola that's it but we still keep going dedicated two hours a week for two years to it yeah it's bizarre uh I I have an issue with the early on education system. I know that you've got a massive issue with university as well. Um for me, I found university to be useful as like a crash course in socialization. Uh but I it feels like uh you've ordered a main course that tasted like dog [ __ ] and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but the gravy that came along with it or the plate that it was put on, the plate that this dog [ __ ] food was served on, that was an enjoyable experience. I took a lot away from that plate. It's very well designed, great quality. It really I remember it. Um but yeah, it does feel like if you're trying to create a highly agentic populace school isn't exactly the best preparation. Have you seen I need to double verify these studies. I'd be interested to replicate them. There's a guy called I think Dr. land who worked for NASA and design these creative thinking tests to basically gauge how creative somebody is. And the way they would do that is ask for for example number of solutions, different types of solutions they come up with, how they vary from everybody else's solutions, things like that. And a five year a 5-year-old an average of the 1500 that they surveyed scored like 98% on creativity. Kind of follows up every 5 years. And it just it looks like the reverse of Bitcoin's price. It's just D down, down, down, down, down. And the, you know, we spoke on the previous show of the average person dies at 25 and isn't buried until 75. At the followup of the study, the 25 year olds, 2% was the 2% of them scored as like creative thinkers. And it kind of makes sense when you're put through this model of wrong, right answer, set curriculum for you, Pavlovian, don't think outside of the box, don't question the question ever. That doesn't go down well at schools. No. Why do we need to learn this? What's the point of doing that? No, you'd be labeled a a disruptive kid. You'd be a bad student. You'd be a bad student if you ask questions about the question. My brother tells me this funny story of when he was at school and he was probably not the most well behaved kid at school. But one day he was like flicking around in the history books and became fascinated by like communism in Russia and China and all these people going down this bad ideology. And the teacher like goes, "What are you doing?" He I'm just absolutely fascinated by this sir. Yeah, that's great, but that's not on the curriculum and just went back to something about Henry VII completely changed the curriculum. But it is fascinating though. I do think we're at this momentous period of time where you now have chat GPT cord all these AI tools coming in where even the work now just completely redundant. Even this model of preparing for an exam like talk about feedback loops. You don't find out your exam results to even forget even judging exams itself. Not finding out your exam result for 3 months is such a terrible feedback loop within itself. Yeah. Uh Rory Sutherland told me this really uh funny parable. So he said um a copywriter, a graphic designer, and an account executive uh step onto a plane together and they uh open up the overhead locker and a genie comes out. He says, "God, I've been left locked in there for so long. Thank you. Thank you for coming out. I'll give you uh one one wish each." So the uh designer says, "I I think I'd like to have uh Da Vinci's life. I I like to have his skills, his ability to represent things graphically. He says, "Done." The way he goes. And then the copyriter comes over. He says, "I think I think I'd like to live like uh Hemingway did, you know, the women, the lifestyle, the writing ability." Oh, the writing ability. Done. The account executive comes over. He says, "What what would you like?" And he says, "I'd like those two guys back. We've got a meeting in two and a half hours. That's [ __ ] That's so Rory. Well, um, off topic, but I had to include it. There's the, uh, on top of plane experiments. Uh, Charlie Munger tells that one of he goes on a plane, terrorists hijack the plane and say, "Right, you got one last dying wish before we blow this sucker up. Um, think wisely." Then he goes, "Can I tell you about the beauty of Costco's business model?" There's an equivalent about uh aliens come down to earth and they say humanity we can do whatever you want. You can ask us any question and some idiot that listen to the podcast from the back shouts what's your morning routine. [ __ ] me. Okay. What about I mentioned some of my sort of real peak high agency people. You've accumulated one with this guy that was selftaught. Is there anyone else that comes to mind? Yes. Let me um let me skip ahead. So skip ahead just before I go on to that one. We have I just wanted to show you this because it's just [ __ ] cool to you. This is the topography of tears. Have you seen this? The topography of tears. Yes. Like so yeah this um photographer I will come back on to your question but just quickly let me blast through this. Uh this photographer took different types of tears and put them under a microscope. And here for example is tears of grief. Here is tears of joy. They actually look different under a microscope. Wow. So, this is this was just a way for me to try and get this into the show because it looks so cool. But like the agency example here is being at a funeral and thinking, "Fuck, I never got in touch for the last few years and now they're gone." Mhm. Tears of grief. At the other end, tears of joy of [ __ ] I'm so glad that we did that holiday together. Mhm. I'm so glad that I arranged all those trips that I did with them. So, I thought that was a um That's fascinating. I wonder why that's the case. I want to know what those structures are made of. I want to know what those lines are. So, for the people that are listening, the tears of grief uh much more sparse, whatever the uh lines, there's some kind of structure. It looks a little bit like halfway between little cells and electrical circuits. And then at the other end, the tears of joy have a lot more activity, a lot more structure in them. There's lines everywhere. And um I wonder what that is. We can dig deeper and and come back to it, but let me go back to your question I rudely ignored. So essentially the I want to come on to the most high agency person, but I just want to address like the probably the YouTube comments at this point. So I wanted to steal I wanted to steal man the other side. So, um, for example, life happens to people, you piece of [ __ ] Um, hope you get fourth stage cancer so I can call you up and tell you to happen to life. Can't wait to tell the orphans. They just need to happen to life. And big nose [ __ ] No. Who's written that? That was just I wanted somebody from your That's awful. I don't know. You You do seem to have a very uh accurate perception of what the comments are going to be. Uh, if everyone can comment small nose [ __ ] in the in the section below, that'd be great. Essentially, the most apex high agency example is this guy coming up now. So, actually, let's just linger on let's just linger on that that thing for a second. The why do you think it is that conversations around being able to happen to life, self- authorship, agency, taking control, um, why do you think it is that it triggers that particular immune response from people? I I think they're right. I think they're right at the end of the day. That's why I'll come on to it in a second. But I don't want to misconvey that life doesn't happen. It definitely happens. Going back to the London example earlier, like if it wasn't for the heat, if it wasn't for the clothes that we take for granted, we'd literally be within 2 to three hours hypothermia and death. So, I don't think they're wrong and I think it makes sense. But then when this is why I'd take it away from a self-help conversation, when you begin to go, well, does it defy the laws of physics in terms of knowledge creation? Well, no, it doesn't. So, therefore, it is possible. It doesn't mean that awful things aren't going to happen. they're almost guaranteed to happen, which is why I tried to basically update the model based off their feedback. I don't think they're wrong. Um, so essentially it's more of a four-dimensional model that the higher agency somebody has, the more um sorry, the the more life is happening. Sorry, the more agency that they they ultimately have, which is why I wanted to come on to So life is happening uh is there is a pressure up against you and there is a pressure of you leaning into it at the same time. Mhm. Yeah, that's interesting. I was having this conversation. Destiny taught me this. I think I I gave it some wanky me name of like the the two-step theory of twostep flow potential. I think I called it twostep theory of potential. So, uh, Destiny, I thought, was kind of an interesting person to put this to because he's somebody that's from the left, but also has quite a lot of agency. Uh, in fact, I'm reading a book at the moment by Martin Seligman, uh, that has a quiz, and much of the quiz is asking you questions about agency. Uh, a person steals something from a shop. What are the reasons for why they stole? Like, did they have choice? Could they have done differently, etc. Uh, and this is supposed to map you on the spectrum from left to right. Uh, and but Destiny seems, at least when I asked him these questions, to be someone who kind of does take charge. it doesn't really sort of outsource to structure and environment things which are maybe of personal responsibility and uh I asked him this question about well how do you marry the fact that people are both at the mercy of the environment around them and the authors of their own life that you don't want to externalize your sense of uh uh control um but you also have to understand that there are limits to what you can do and he basically describes it as having u a range within your uh outcomes in life, your capacities sit. And this range is determined by your genetics, the environment you're in, the time that you were born. Like you could be the best guitar player in history, but if you were born before the guitar was invented, guess what? It's not happening. Uh so he says there is a range that you sit within, and this is uh determined by the environment you're in. Things are outside of your control. But within that range, everything is exclusively on you. And for some people it's easier, for some people it's harder. But there is a range that you sit within. And I think that that kind of marries things quite nicely. Some people, me and you, probably not going to do very well in the NBA. But within the range that we do have, football freestyle, perhaps you can get a bit further. Yeah. I think I think just to on that specific point, it it's not that problems don't happen. It's that fundamentally all problems are solvable. So, and it all comes down to agency. Like cancer, as horrific as it is, and it happens to people. It's truly [ __ ] horrific, but it's ultimately a a humanity level, it's an agency problem. All right, get your next get your next slide out for the lads. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Function. Did you know that your annual physical only screens for around 20 biomarkers? That leaves a lot of gaps when it comes to understanding your health, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over a 100red biomarkers. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one. They've got a team of expert physicians that takes that data put into a simple dashboard and gives you actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels, thyroid function. Plus, Dr. Andrew Hubman is their scientific adviser and Dr. Mark Heyman is their chief medical officer. So you can trust that the data and insights you receive are scientifically sound and practical. Getting your blood work analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function it's only $500. And right now you can get the exact same panels I get. Plus bypass their 400,000 person weight list by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. the most apex high agency guy. Do you recognize this guy? Guy called Wilbur. No. Great name. So, um, let's just start off with life happening to him. So, smart kid Wilbur, he wants to go to Yale University. He's about to get in. He's playing hockey one day and gets his face smashed in so badly by a bloke. It's interesting studying history. This bloke was clearly a nutter. And guess what they used to do for nutters? They'd prescribe them cocaine. I know a few nutters like that. Mainly in Northern Rail over the years. So anyway, gets prescribed cocaine, smashes this guy's face in him. So much so he's bedridden for two to three years. Wow. So Yale University is canceled. Whilst he's bedridden, his mom is terminally ill. So, he's kind of in bed. I I imagine caring for her while she's in bed back and forth. So, truly life is happening. Uh Wilbur, this [ __ ] guy, man. This guy sat there in bed asked the question, "Why can birds fly but humans can't?" Yeah. What? Like, why is that? So just sits there in bed getting book after book and there's not many books back then about aerodynamics and how things can fly but he's studying birds. Wilbur teams up with his brother becomes fascinated by the question um and starts to move over on the spectrum a little bit over here to like happening. Yes, his surname is right. Indeed. Indeed. So Wilbur and um Orville, his brother, they reverse from first principles. Where is the best place with wind and sand um in America? Because they need to test flight. They need to find somewhere with a soft landing and with enough wind to begin to test it. Yeah. So they get all the Weather Bureau consensus data, which back then there's no internet. So, they're just reaching out to a local council and finding the ship and he um sorry, they have all this uh weather data and they realize it's 700 miles away in Kittyhawk and I realized, well, oh, they can just fly there. I know they can't they can't fly there, right? So, this is the furthest they've ever been from home. They go all the way down to Kittyhawk and the two of them talk about happening to life. the two of them. And by the way, back then, this is a key thing that people I always forget about history is that it it was a mocked thing. Flying was seen as everybody who tried it failed or died. And there was poems at the time of how ridiculous it would be like to even think you could fly. Like it was a it was a a joke at the time. So the two of them um are seen in Kittyhawk like these. Imagine this. So, you're looking outside your window and there's these two brothers there for hours at the outside just like moving their arms like this, pretending they're different types of birds, just mimicking the way birds move their [ __ ] wings. So, they're there for ages. They then begin to design like a wind uh a wing system based off the way birds do. The next problem that they have is they realize that all the measurements around aerodynamics that they've been given at the time from um a German fell were completely incorrect. So they have to they build when they go back home they build a wind tunnel in their garage like um that can go about 27 mph and they're creating little objects and putting it through and they reverse engineer. Oh, everything that we know about aerodynamics is completely wrong. So they fix that problem and it's problem after problem. It's next building an engine that's light enough. And you end up with a scenario before they create the airplane. They have failure after failure after failure after failure after failure. Wilbur looks at his brother one day and says, "No man will ever fly for a thousand years. One year later, he's up there in the airplane and flies for the first time ever." And that for me is I think Wilbur Wright and obviously his brother Orville is the apex example of high agency and the impact it then has because unless you study history you just go well band's always been able to fly and you know this is been since the early 1900s that we've been able to do it. The amount of times I don't how how many times a week do you think about the right brothers? Ever since you sent me that photo, I I encountered a situation at the toward the start of this year and I explained it to you and you sent me this photo and it must be is it Wilbur in the plane and Orville on the the hill in front of him and he's doing this? Yeah. And he's jumping and he's got his hands in the air and this plane's off the ground and uh Yeah, I know that you use this to uh basically tyrannize your staff. I I mean I think about I think about it like once a week like it's so funny. So I'll be like staring when there's a plane going by. Once you once you know the story, I'll be staring once a plane goes by and my girlfriend will be like, "You thinking about the Wright brothers?" Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because the fact that most people don't know their names, the fact there's not statues, the fact there's not a day and then meanwhile there's like me getting on an Emirates flight like stressing out my [ __ ] It's 20 minutes late and you're now there going, "What do you mean they've not got Diet Cokes on the plane and there's TV entertainment there?" But it's just it's just agency. Like a problem that seemed completely insolvable, didn't defy the laws of physics. it was possible and now we we our whole world me and you being here today flying into London is purely because of these two [ __ ] I kind of like that. I I' I'd love to dig a bit deeper into his story uh and do a little bit more research around the fact that he said that a man won't fly for a thousand years but didn't stop and then got there a year later. I've been really really spending a lot of time thinking about not believing that you're worthy of achieving a thing and yet still managing to attain it anyway. this sort of make it until you fake it basically that you I a lot of the time we believe that we need to have faith in a thing before we can go and do the thing but it's an unnecessary precursor it may make the process more enjoyable it may make you have more confidence it may make you more efficient in the things that you do may make more effective at getting the outcomes that you need but it's largely an unnecessary step if we assume that what you're optimizing for is outcomes not inputs if you can do the outcomes regardless of how you got there, whether you believed that you were going to do it or not, whether you thought it'd be a thousand years or whether you thought it'd be 6 months. If you do, someone could have been Wilbur alternate universe, slightly different personality, and been like, we're going to get it done in 3 weeks and it would have taken a year if he'd done the same things. What it's not going to the human man won't fly for a thousand years and it's going to happen in a year. So I just, you know, me and you talk about we obsessed about this a lot at your birthday this summer, but the more and more that I think about it, optimizing for outcomes, not for inputs, is just it sides through everything. And oddly is quite a high agency way to to do this because the true or another element of high agency would be accepting that you live in an irrational world and that your psychology is one that is not built to be able to accurately identify how outcomes are going to come from inputs. So stop believing that you know how this is going to work and just okay this thing seems to be happening in whatever way. Both me and you are on ridiculous diets. Come. Do you know why it works? Kind of. I can probably bro science cobble something together. Some doctor probably could too. But I bet that there's maybe even more explanations for why it shouldn't work or doesn't or whatever is ridiculous. I'm like, "Yeah, but I feel better when I'm on it. I'm optimizing for outcomes. I'm not bothered about the mechanism. I'm not bothered about the inputs." Yes. Because fundamentally, it was possible. That's the big thing. Um, and this is I try and say this in the least offensive way, but I think there's some truth to it that a lot of high achievers or high agency people are often described as being on the asperes or autism spectrum spectrum. And I think the reason behind that is that all their bottlenecks are just logistics and operations is just like just you look at someone like Elon or Zuck or somebody like that Bezos and a lot of it is just logistics operations bottlenecks. Whereas for maybe people who like myself that go through the education system and really struggle to then break out of that way of thinking it's creativity bottleneck. It's a emotional bottleneck is a big one of like what will people think if I do this? Y um there's so many different bottlenecks that aren't logistics and operations but for people who have a a little touch of the tism or the asperes. What's the opposite of high agency? Um it would be it would be low agency. Um it would be outsourcing your worldview to other people who are just outsourcing their worldview to you and you just have this kind of reflexive mirror. What's your one around the um is it the Fableene paradox? Is it that one? Abene paradox. Abene paradox. Abeline paradox. Yeah. That uh somebody invites you to their wedding thinking that you want to go. You say yes despite not wanting to be there because you think that you they want you there. Um, it describes how in a system, especially a social system, people can arrive at a sub-optimal scenario for everybody because everybody presumes that everybody else wanted it. It's not too dissimilar to the Keynesian beauty contest that you spoke about previously, which is where you make a judgment in a a beauty contest, not of who you think is the most beautiful, but who you think other people will think is the most beautiful. And then you can continue to scale this back, right? It's just an infinite regressive prediction all the way back. So talking about low agency, you know, both me and you since we've you first came on the show six years ago, inversion is one of those really powerful tools. Uh so half maybe a third of what people should try to do is become high agency, but probably twothirds of what they should do is try to avoid being low agency. So talk to me about how you come to think about that side of the equation. Yeah. Well, in the essay around high agency that I've written, which we can link to, essentially what I call them are low agency traps that are just easy uh and I've documented maybe nine or 10, but I think there's infinite amount of agency traps just part of being a human being. So, there's a few which I'll I can read now. So, I one is called the midwipit trap and the way I thinking what's a fun way of actually explaining this without boring people and it's a SMS message. So, imagine you're in a third world jail and you've got somebody who's in the Midwick trap and you text them, "Hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail?" This is how the Midwick trap would think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, lots of updates from me. I'm on day 30 of my juice cleanse. I've thinking of doing a degree in criminology to specialize in how jails work so I can get you out. Um, and I've also watched 30 TED talks on the topic. So, the Midwit trap, I've got a PhD in the Midw trap, is this uh idea of trying to be smarter than you are. Um, an over complicating thing. So, for the Midwit trap, where it comes from is the Midw me. So, you have the guy on the left, the guy on the right, the guy in the middle. Two opposite ends of the IQ bell curve. And the guy on the left and the guy on the right often come to the same simple conclusion. The guy on the left can't overthink things. So he just goes for the simple answer. The guy on the right is so intelligent that he's he's demystified everything and come back to the simple [ __ ] And the guy in the middle is the one who's managed to over complicate things and overthink things. So like one meme that I made is guy on the left make something people want. Guy on the right make something people want when it comes to business. Then in the center it's I'm going to do this fiveyear consultancy program and then I'm going to watch all these TED talks and then once I've done these surveys da d I'm ultimately going to find the thing. So the guy in the midw trap would never even get moving with the any agency towards breaking you out of a furler jail because he's constantly overthinking and trying to intellectualize things too much. Yeah. Uh I think specificity as well is something else that me and you talk about a lot avoiding vagueness and um it's necessary but not sufficient to be in to become high agency or to avoid low agency is to have intentionality right to choose what it is that you're going to do. If if high agency is winning at the game, intentionality is choosing which game you're going to play. Mhm. Well, I when I was thinking about high agency originally, I had four things that underpin it. So, if you imagine high agency's like this table here and then you have the the four legs, the four things that I think underpin it are clear thinking, resourcefulness, bias to action, and disagreeability. So if you even go back to the Wright brother story there, the amount of clear thinking that they needed to do throughout of oh okay oh the aerodynamics let's actually take these to first principles and test it. Um the amount of resourcefulness of and I probably think resourcefulness interested to get your opinion on this. It's like creativity and persistence combined like the ability to create new novel creative solutions. Um bias to action is just like moving moving moving Napoleon style and disagreeability is the guy earlier when Darren Brown rings the bell who sits there and goes well maybe there is maybe I don't have to follow everybody else and perfect example being the Wright brothers rather than just carrying on their bike shop and trying to build that into enterprise disagreed with the whole consensus based off the laws of physics that people could fly. So you have those four things and I think going back to your point there, intentional intentionalism is is like a sister of like clear thinking. Yes. It's like a clear thinking leads to intentionalism. Yeah. Doing what you meant to do. Yes. Because Yeah. There's definitely um a difference between high agency. You could you could fun theoretically be high agency and unintentional that we've spoken about before. We know psychopath a few a few people like that. Yeah. But it it results in you being very original and actionoriented in service of something that's a total [ __ ] waste of time. Uh, and I mean that that would be kind of like a version of hell because you had all of the difficult raw materials. You had all of the skills. You had all of the networking. You had all of the capacity to actually bring to bear something on this [ __ ] very hard to wrangle planet. And you were pointing in totally the wrong direction. It's the uh it's the George Soros thing, right? It's George Soros. Um, who I'm I'm sure we're going to get flagged immediately on YouTube for mentioning Soros, but uh, becoming one of the most successful hedge fund managers ever. And if rumors are to be true, um, or believe to be true, he wanted to be a philosopher, and he spent his whole life like just crashing the pound and trading away. Do you know what I mean? But just kept going up. But Bill Perkins has that bit in his book about that mate of his who um said, "Stop me when I get to 20 million." And just keeps going at 50 million and he's now at like multiple billions and he's still going because he's addicted to it. So yeah, it's you could have resourcefulness, clear thinking, biased to action, disagreeability, but without intentionalism is a uh yuck dangerous one. You're fully [ __ ] Uh what are some of the other low agency traps? Um, another one kind of related to what you mentioned there is the uh is the rumination trap. So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Sorry for the slow reply. I've been thinking about it. I know I've spent the last year thinking about it. I think I just need more time to think. I'm trying to think about my overthinking problem. If I can solve that, I think I can start. So the rumination trap is one I began to learn a lot more from doing cognitive behavioral therapy and it's just this endless loop. I mean, we were chatting about this the other day of if you could analyze the 50 to 60,000 thoughts per day and really see them. The problem with the human brain is you have these 50 to 60,000 thoughts, but because they're constantly in short-term memory, you don't fully If you could see the graph, you'd love a dashboard. Yeah. If you could see the D, you thought about I'm worried about that conversation with somebody 20% of the week for the last 3 years and it's just ruminating around. But when it's there fresh in consciousness, you don't you don't see the dashboard. You don't see that. So, you just going there. is the fact that you're in a new place, a new time of life, and you can always have an old thought in a slightly new way, gives it a sense of novelty. So, you kind of are kided into believing that it's something new. And the other part is that we're creatures of habit and old thoughts, even ones that are quite uncomfortable, are familiar to us. And that familiarity gives us a sense of comfort and that comfort gives us a sense of sort of habituation. You know, you might not, obviously not with this show because it's fantastic, but many people will watch or listen to YouTube channels that they kind of don't really enjoy anymore, but they just know where they're going to go. It's very predictive. It's like putting on an old comfortable leather pair of shoes like ah, slide my feet into these. I know what his opinion's going to be. This is sweet. And the algorithm just keeps you in this static loop. Of of course it does. So yeah, rumination trap. So the rumination trap I'm going to guess is uh diametrically opposed to bias for action. Yes. But the it's the opposite of that. So a a personal rumination story that I had was and the problem with rumination is you try and forecast into the future constantly. That's the big thing from cognitive behavioral therapy is you're they call it the crystal ball or you're trying to forecast in the future ahead and unless you can get a perfect outcome, you just kick the can down the road and then ultimately you end up with not much road left and just a lot of cans. Yes. So one that came to mind for me so when I when I was thinking about clear thinking there's the three big decisions, right? There's where you live, who you're with, and what you're doing. And one thing I struggled with for ages was I'm in this location right now. Maybe I could go to this other location. And what would happen in my head is I would have option A of me staying in current location or option B going to new location. And when I would think of option A, it would go nightmare mode. So everything that could possibly go wrong would go wrong. And the other option has worked out perfectly. And then I'd flip to the other option and the reverse was true. When I um had left and gone to that location, everything has gone wrong and I've now missed out on everything. And as a result, it's this doom loop that then begins to occur. And the more you kick the can down the road, the more you ruminate. Yeah. The bigger this thing becomes, and it's this absolute doom loop cycle. And then you I don't want to think about this, which makes the thing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Mhm. Yeah. I mean, there's a conversation I heard recently about action being an antidote to anxiety and that the bias for action. Just look, you might think that by worrying and obsessing and ruminating and thought looping and fearing and gripping your way through this problem that it reduces down the likelihood of it happening somehow that it brings to bear more control that uh it it almost like impacts reality in some sort of a way. It makes no difference. Again, what are we focused on? We're focused on outcomes, not on inputs. And uh the people that have that bias for action, they end up just finding out whether or not this thing is going to work. Yeah. Way quicker. The biggest thing that I actually found with for people listening who probably had that doom loop like I have and still have is in terms of getting a bias to action is rather than calling it a decision, just moving to experiments. Yep. So just looking at the two and going, "Okay, I think this one has 60% probability. This one has 40% probability. I'm going to go with the 60% one and I'm going to fully back the decision and I'll book time 6 months from now to review how it went and then change if not because I realized in the 5 years spent ruminating about the two different options, I could have lived in both cities multiple times. Both of us have done things where we've uh spent more time taking making a decision than it would have taken to have worked out whether it was going to work or not. Yes. So much time wasted. And the thing I love the thing I love about that is if you actually just did the thing, the amount of real data that your amydala can't just sit there creating these doomsday scenarios. The the big realization I had when I spoke to the CBT guy that I worked with was when you actually look at those nightmare modes that are playing, what's really strange about rumination is it skips like 2 to 3 years in the future. And the worst case scenario, it's always I won't be able to cope. The worst case scenario will happen. I won't be able to cope and people will judge me is what happens in the doom loop in the rumination cycle. But it always skips two to three years in the future. And he made a great point of it's like a horror film. It just starts now and goes two to three years in the future. He goes, "But real life's more like a documentary. What's you have agency? What's all the steps that that lead you up? You can bail out or change or adjust course at any point along that." Yeah. I think a a good way of moving out the rumination cycle. I I kind of call it the difference between clear thinking and muddy thinking. And ultimately, we spoke about this the other day, the kind of apherism I have, you know, the nature thing of never trust a thought that happens indoors. Never trust a thought that happens in your head is a good rule of thumb. And I I like that bali idea of transformation. So if um thought happens in my head, it's not true until I've drawn it out, written it down, spoken it out loud to another person, created an equation, put it in a spreadsheet, whatever it is. And I I actually think probably 50% of the benefits of therapy is just going from head to it's more it's more than that. You know, this is one of the reasons why uh I'm I'm not on Substack, but I'm an avatar for people having a Substack or some form of written publicly consumed uh form of artistic output uh or self-reflection specifically for self-reflection. Uh, I'm a really good avatar for someone that would not have been able to keep up a writing practice for four and a half years or however long it's been now since I launched my newsletter. And now we're like a quarter of a million words written in whatever four and a half years, something like that. But it's invariably the best part of my week. It's my favorite thing. The guy that does the podcast, his favorite thing is the hour and a half that he spends writing every week because of that precise reason. It synthesizes down the most salient thing that I've learned from that one week. And I know I only have whatever 500 words or a thousand words to write this in. So I need to be like high in brevity. I need to be pretty precise. Uh I need to triage what it is I want to talk about. Well, if I talk about this, I can't talk about that. So which one's it going to be? Which one's more important to you? Which one are you feeling more right now? And um yeah, you know, big big fan of people having especially a public facing version of this. I understand. Here we go. Go. Uh, we'll get back to talking to George in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Element. For the last 3 years, every single day, I have started my morning with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. You might not be tired. You might not need more caffeine. You might just be dehydrated. Proper hydration is not just about drinking sufficient water. It's having the right amount of electrolytes in your body to let yourself use those fluids. element contains a sciencebacked electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients or any other junk. It's a game changer. This orange salt first thing in the morning tastes phenomenal. And they have a no questions asked unlimited duration refund policy. So, you can buy it, try the entire box, and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. And you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modern wisdom. We have a people that journal. It's phenomenal in many ways because you're able to say things that you can't for public consumption. But I get the sense that at least for me when I write things for public, I'm held to such a rigorous standard for precision to really really clarify my thinking that I'm sure I miss lots of advantages that proper journaling would would allow. But it also does other things which is I think it's easier for you to create structures and frameworks and ideas that you can then later refer to as opposed to like referring to this messy thing that's kind of all over the place that's in a journal. So yeah, it's a it's a mixed bag. One thing, one thing on the writing side that I found specifically useful related to that is a photo can't do this. A video can't quite do this. But writing actually gives you the ability to go back 10 years, let's say 10 years in the future now and understand how you think today or be able to now today go back 10 years a Yeah, that's how I thought. And because so many of the thoughts um just disappear completely down the drain, it's so beautiful in that regard. What about some more traps? Some more traps. So, the we mentioned specificity there. So, this is the uh the vague trap. So, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Yes, I've been working around the clock. Amazing. Any specific updates? I don't have any timelines yet or deadlines or action items, but I'm working on it. And yeah, the vague trap is I think such an easy one to fall into because you're just trying to avoid falsifiable criteria. The biggest takeaway I took from um Musk's biography was it's just it's just like endless anecdote of um we're going to do this by X date this time and then there's a timer around the office to the second counting down to that specific thing and then the gas the um you know the metaphor around if you have a container the gas will just expand or increase based off the size of the container constantly Parkinson's law written all over the the factory there's a great line of um general ambition gives you um general ambition gives you anxiety, specific ambition gives you direction and e but I mean specificity everywhere um is so important even even in writing the or talking the more specific that you are the the more impactful it the more impactful it can be and I actually find the reason why specificity we avoid it people in the vague trap um at least myself the reason why we avoid it is because there's a failure point there's no criteria for success there's no criteria for failure yeah and if you can just live in that generality. Um it's it's impossible to ever have agency I think. So when I played cricket uh when I was getting towards 17 18 I was on the box to Durham which is uh top flight club team in the UK would be equivalent to whatever Manchester United academy or something like that. And I remember that on a Monday uh the coach would call and he'd ask how I got on. He might have checked the papers, he might not have done because my uh performance would have been in the papers in terms of numbers, but he would ring me and he'd ask how I got on. And I remember the weeks where I was really low confidence, which would happen quite a lot, uh the specific style of cricket that I played was uh kind of like a special match circumstance. So the conditions needed to be very right. It was leg spin, which is like a complex type of bowling. And um if the game wasn't at the right format, if it was too short, you didn't tend to get bowled, if the uh pitch was too wet, if the ground wasn't gripping, if wickets were tumbling or weren't tumbling sufficiently quickly. There were you were very far down the list. You were very powerful, but only to be used in spec break glass in case of specific circumstance. And um there's something on cricket called a TFC. Thanks for coming. And it's when you don't bat, you don't bowl, and all you do is field. TFC, thanks for coming. because that's what your captain would say to you at the end. Thanks for coming, mate. As opposed to well played or we can do better next time. And um I remember I would get these calls and on the weeks when I wasn't confident uh a lot of the time I'd just have a TFC and he would say how to get over the weekend, man. I was like dude, you know what it is? Like I wish that I could have I really wanted the opportunity. Secretly I didn't. A lot of the time I didn't want the opportunity to have done it because by setting the potential for success, by having the opportunity for success, there would have then been a criteria for failure. So a lot of it was fear of failure and that was something that largely now I've managed to get I mean once you've done a live show in front of three and a half thousand people the potential for failure is you know you've looked it in the face. Uh but I think I'm a good avatar for someone I think whose disposition would have been low confidence, low self-esteem as a kid and now largely that's that's not the same sort of problem that I have anymore. M and you think a large amount of that is down to specificity or being less vague? Certainly being less vague, but uh largely it's just crushing volumes of testing yourself in the real world. Uh because again, you can make it until you fake it. If you just keep on doing things and stuff goes well, there's only so long that imposter syndrome or low confidence or low self-esteem or a lack of self-belief or whatever can exist before it just gets neutron starred out of existence. You're like, I have this [ __ ] super dense body of work that self-belief is overrated. Generate evidence, that Ryan Holiday quote. And um you just generate so much evidence that it sucks the living [ __ ] out of whatever it is that you worried about. But talking about the vague trap, I was in the gym in London. And I told you this story. I was in a gym in London last week, the day of the show. And um it's the Kensington the gym unmanned like it's a it's a seller. It's a cellar that has a gym in it that's open 24 hours and there's no staff at all looking after it. Me and Z go in and a couple of people ask for photos which is really nice. Uh and one of the kids asks for photos, young guy, maybe 21, 22, something like this. And he comes up, take the take the selfie or whatever. Uh, and then as I'm leaving, I'm on my way out and he comes up and he's got a I think he was recording maybe had a mic in his hand or something. He was recording it and uh he said broken slightly broken English. Hey um I I I know that you're going to be busy, but I just wanted to ask you a question. I wanted to ask uh you know I I really want to become uh rich uh and I'm 22 at the moment. I'm working in a full-time job, but I really want to have more self-discipline and I want to make more money. Can you teach me how to have more self-discipline and make more money? And I remember thinking, Zach stood there and Max videographer stood there and there's this kid and I'm thinking, well, you know, he's asked obviously something that's important to him. He's come up and he asked this person and he's said that he appreciates, you know, I've got I've got places to be and such. I don't want to just give a flippant answer. I remember thinking like that's a [ __ ] question. It's a really bad like can you teach me how to have more self-control and make money language barrier etc etc but yeah I think I told you this and your response would have [Music] been the the question I mean the question [ __ ] I guess fundamentally you would have said the first the first thing I would do is ask a better question yeah ask ask that's the first bit of advice you give is ask a better question and I think if if you look at the the vague trap and how often it comes up it's because of just even the question he asked there. It's just a lack of it's a complete lack of clear thinking. It's just like clear like muddy thinking is what I call it is just like vague GIFs in my head or like JPEGs or words that are popping up and it's never going what does that mean or writing that down getting more specific more specific more specific like a great example would be um how can I be happy it's probably the vaguest [ __ ] question that's ever existed and if you just view the brain as a questioning answering device that we're constantly asking asking questions and you basically it's like asking a computer just a endless loop that never closes and it just completely expands into infinity which then leads to this anxiety. But let's say for example, okay, example of general question, how can I be happy? Specific question would be what does my dream week look like hour by hour? Um what does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? Where am I right now between the two? And then how what's the easiest first step to move up that? that's so much more specific versus like a a general thing. And I think that's probably the biggest sign I noticed whenever I'll get a DM, whether it's a personal thing or a business thing. The easiest questions to answer or the best people are always I mean the most high agency people, it tends to be super specific. I've tried ABCDE E. I saw that you mentioned F. I've done this specific thing here. This the problem happened here. What do you think? Versus, hey mate, um like I want to do this. anything question mark like it's so vague and as a result it's so it's so boundless that you could almost never apply knowledge because it's too it's too general. What other traps? Is there anything else? Let me see. Um yeah, we have the um the final one which is the the cynic trap. So hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Um I posted my idea on Reddit for feedback. This user called [ __ ] Monkey 72 broke down why it was a dumb idea. And then I spoke to my cynical British friends and they said, "People like us don't do big things. I don't think there's any hope. Sorry." And just the reply is, "You've literally not attempted anything yet." I think the the cynicism thing is definitely that's one of the reasons I mentioned the British thing in there. It's definitely a close a one that's close to heart. Just experiencing the uh difference between Britain and America that we've spoken about countless times. Yeah, it's there's also a degree, I suppose, of lack of specificity. It's there's a vagueness to it as well that if you don't try, you don't have to fear the pain of failure. Right? If I tell myself that all women are [ __ ] then I'm never going to seek a relationship with a woman and as a consequence, I never have to feel the pain of rejection. If I tell myself that things are never going to get better, then I'm excused of ever having to try. Right? uh the cope is framing hope as delusion and optimism as embarrassing. And if you know that things are bad and that they're never going to get better, then it's the people acting like things can improve that are dumb and delusional on the problem. Yeah. The the the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. The upside of never trying is never having to feel the feel. Yeah. I think that's that's partially true. But I think if you then if you zoom out, so that's at the individual level. I think that's true. But if you zoom out, the kind of arrogance to be cynical when you look at just from the wheel to the horse and carriage to the car to the airplane to the rocket. I think I tried to create a word for it once. You're going to hate this cuz it's terrible branding, but um like this Alzheimer's of the zeitgeist, like I call it zeit zeite salmon. It's [ __ ] awful. No, it's it shouldn't be on the podcast, but um we just have this weird cynicism around new basically all the crazy ideas that have occurred we now just completely take for granted. And then when we look at agency in the future, um well, that's just absurd. So, we're in this weird middle zone of never appreciating the just the right, you know, like back like backto back high agency people, high agency people, high agency people. Then I'm sat there on an Emirates flight getting annoyed cuz my diet cokes flat. um never appreciating that and also not being able to uh appreciate that there's literally infinite potential knowledge creation ahead. It's so easy to be cynical. Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say they're top quality, but few can actually prove it, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentous. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet. If you've been struggling with your sleep quality, their sleep packs are one of my favorite products which I use every single night before I go to bed. They contain only the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. They come preloaded in little pouches, which means if you're on the road, if you're traveling, or if you just can't be bothered fishing around inside of all of your different pots on an evening, it's perfect. I've got them with me here while I've been in London. I've been using them every single night. They're phenomenal. They really, really improve my sleep. Also, there is a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can buy it completely risk- free. Try it and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 20% off everything sitewide by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemus.com/modern wisdom and using the code modernwisdom a checkout. That's lim n.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Those are traps. What about beliefs? what what are the um values and worldviews that high agency people are going to focus on primarily? Yeah, there's there's five um key ones that I identified. So there's um there's no unsolvable problem unless it defies the laws of physics. Um there's no adults we spoke about previously. Adults don't exist. Adults don't exist. There's no way. Um there's uh there's no guarantee you won't die screaming, which is one of my favorite ones. Um I'll tell you the uh the story behind that one. There's a old Joe Rogan podcast uh called uh with a guy called Kevin Smith and he comes on and [ __ ] man this is he he comes on and he's telling the story of his dad and he talks about how his dad was this great guy like was one of the people that never made any mistakes worked for the postal service just kind of gave up on his hopes and dreams just to make his family happy said never made never saw him make a mistake once and he's out for dinner one evening with his mom and his dad and his family. Have this amazing dinner. His dad um goes back to the hotel. He gets a call at 3:00 a.m. and his his brother says, "You need to come down to the hospital now." Like, "Dad's not well at all." He turns up to the hospital and his mom is crying like hysterically in a way he's never seen anybody cry before. and his brother just looks at him and like gives him the nod and just said like can just tell that his his dad's died. And he says three words that he says sticks with him that still haunt him to this day. He died screaming and as a result of that he said [ __ ] it. Like even a good guy like that he died screaming. is just an absolutely horrific site. And he kind of justified that for having agency of his existence is that ultimately if you can do everything everything correct and you ultimately die screaming, what's the point in not like chasing whimsies or just doing ridiculous [ __ ] that you can think of? Because it's such a um I think the amount of people that die screaming that never get spoken about cuz everybody has this idealized fantasy that they're just going to die peacefully in their sleep um or take a load of like LSD and sleep the hookers and come their way out of it. Um, but realistically, yeah, there's no guarantee that you won't die screaming. What does that justify? Well, I think it's the most extreme way of like a stoic way of looking at mortal potential mortality in its uh in its face and realizing not only am I going to die, I may die screaming. Therefore, you know what? The bell's ringing right now and people are standing up. Why do I why do I have to stand up? Yeah, I've got this bike shed right now that's doing really well, but maybe could fly. Who knows, right? And I think um yeah, that is just staring at the ticking clock at death. I think there's few greater fuels for for agency. What about there's no way is that there's no particular technique? There's no one specific solution. Yeah. So, we spoke about this last time. Just to recap, it's the story of Fedra Nadal Jovovich. Um, and then there's a new version which I want to tell you about. So, Fedra, Nadal, Jovovic, Ma, Matthew Side goes to see them warm up. Um, and we have the three greatest of all time competing at the exact same time. First off, uh, Nadal turns up and his biceps are bulging. He's just like David Boggin, like in the zone, just [ __ ] hitting the ball back and forth. Um, just pushing himself to the limit. Next up, Jovovich turns up and he's just like a calculated psychopath. no emotion, just getting the job done. And then finally, turning up late, giggling as he's arriving at the court is Roger Federer, who's doing these like beautiful dinks, trick shots, just having fun the entire time. So there's no, you have the three greatest of all time, and there's no way that they did it apart from personalizing it to themselves, which is like a kind of probably a core theme of um high agency. There's a new one I discovered recently which is it's between um Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen who are two of at the period like it's like the Drake or Kendrick of their day like the two main guys making music and I think they had a lot of admiration for one another but also like different bits of competition with one another and his son tells a story of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan sitting down at this cafe in Paris and they're comparing notes at the end of their career. kind of like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at that photo shoot. And Dylan asks Cohen, "How long did it take you to make Hallelujah?" And Cohen lies. He He goes, "Um, it was about 2 to three years." It was actually seven, but he wanted to play it down. He spent seven years making that song, one of the best songs of all time. And Cohen returns the question about a specific Dylan song that he admires and loves. Uh, how long did it take you to to write that? 15 minutes. And it goes to show like two of the best songwriters of their day, one took seven years to produce one of their best songs. Dylan took 15 minutes to produce one of their best songs. But this idea, I think, in the social media age of you have to do X or you have to do A, you have to do B, you have to do C or whatever it is. There fundamentally is no way apart from the way that works. Again, that's focusing on outcomes, not inputs. Mhm. Yeah. The I don't know. I'm increasingly fascinated by this. What's the We've done four. There's no unsolvable problems. There's no way. There's no guarantee you won't die screaming. I've missed one, haven't I? Hold on. And adults don't exist. There's no memory of normal. Oh, yeah. There's no memory of normal. So this is the um yeah the idea that we spoke about before that ultimately all normal behavior or all downloading the tribe's behavior and trying to fit in just we do it because we want other people to like us and ultimately it ends up in the memory bin like the only thing you remember about people is their weird eccentricities when they have agency. Only the irrational behavior survives. Yeah. Have you have I told you about inverse charisma? Have I told you this? No. H this is [ __ ] fire. So, uh, both me and you have kind of been interested in the, uh, arc of charisma to RZ, like making charisma charismatic again, uh, or sexy again, because charisma sounds like something that, I don't know, some real social dynamics pickup artist would have taught you in 2010, uh, standing outside of Topshop working on your keynote escalation. Um, and then RZ is kind of, I don't know, it's like it's it's more cool. It's so I think a lot of people think that they want to be charismatic. Uh and when they say that they mean kind of energizing, sort of electric, compelling, interesting. Uh they cause people to sort of be in awe when they walk into a room. Uh and that's true. Like there's certainly people that are kind of magical like that. But I thought about the people that I like to spend the most of my time around. And sure, some of them are are charismatic or some of them are charismatic in little ways. But I think one of the reasons that you know I love you as a friend is not because you walk into a room and are the most charismatic person in there, but that often when I'm at dinner with you, I feel like the most interesting or charismatic person in the room. So, I think it's significantly easier to be somebody who makes other people feel amazing and feel interesting and feel charismatic and feel compelling than it is to be that yourself. Also, it's way more pro-social. It doesn't trigger this sort of jealousy status response because you're not stepping in to try and sort of take over in anything. You're facilitating. You're helping everybody else to kind of be the best that they can be. I'm using dinner as an example, but you know, it works at kind of any social situation. So, I came up with this idea of uh inverse charisma, which is most people think that in order to be well-liked, they need to be interesting, but actually the most well-liked people are the people who make other people feel the most interesting. There's this great uh story about I think it's Winston Churchill's wife and uh she goes for dinner with the potential two next presidents of the United States. It's like Harry Truman and and and somebody else. So she leaves the first dinner. They're two a couple of weeks apart. Leaves the first dinner and says, "I left that feeling like he was the most interesting person in the world. Of course, he could run the country." Then she went for dinner with the the second presidential candidate, the one that ended up winning. And she said, "I left that feeling like I was the most interesting person in the world." And uh that's inverse charisma. It reminds me of the meme. There's a meme where um there's a huge queue on one side and then like there's like no queue for the next thing and the one queue with the loads of people behind it is like how to make money and then the other one is like how to provide value to people and it's kind of a similar thing to charisma right is that ultimately uh making money is just value exchange at scale but we often think of like how do I make how do I extract resources from people versus how do I actually give something turn it into a positive game. That's I've never thought about it like that. That's a really good point. I [ __ ] adore inverse charisma, dude. And you know, embracing that as well. The reason that I really really like it is that it seems much more in reach for most people. Just be interested in other people and they will find you interesting. It was like a really cool study that was done. They got a guy uh the um a plant, whatever they're called in a a a study to go into a plane. They said, "I need you to sit next to this gentleman on a long whole flight. You need to give him zero information about yourself for the entirety of the flight. So this guy gets on, speaks to this gentleman next to him, just asks questions, ask questions, ask questions, ask questions the whole way. And then they get off and they interview the person that they were sat next to, the person who was asking all the questions up. They say, "We're just uh we're just doing a short survey about your experience on the flight today. You know, we're making sure that people are placed appropriately and how did you find the flight?" He said, "Oh god, it was great. I sat next to this guy. He was so interesting. He was so fascinating. They go, "Oh, that's brilliant. Can you tell us can you tell us his name?" He goes, "No. Uh oh, I didn't get his name." He said, "Well, can you tell us anything else about him?" He goes, "No, actually, I I can't." No, he didn't tell me anything at all. The most interesting person was the person that made you feel like the most interesting person. Damn. Two two things on that. I'm Esper. I know we've uh spoken about this before of the um uh How to Know a Person, that book. Mhm. One of the big takeaways I got from that is Yeah. I used to try and like turn up and go, "Okay, I've seen this Will Smith video when he on that on that." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he like I'm going with a Donald Trump handshake and I'm like out alpha them and stuff like that. And one of the things I would do, I try and ask questions and then I'd be like I'd be like, "So, um, where are you from?" I'm from Manchester. Oh, yeah. What's the What's the weather like there? Yeah, it's cold. Um, uh, what town in Manchester? And it's just these closed question. Close question. Closed question. Um, versus, okay, where are you from? Manchester. So, what's it like there? Yeah. Great question. And then you just open up for them to be able to speak forever and ever. Dude, I asked I went for I went for Shuama with Myron Gaines in Miami at the start of this year. Yeah, I know. What a You weren't expecting that one. How much did you pay on that rap? And uh, we were talking about he he went, you know, he's like a gregarious guy or whatever. He went all over the place. And um, I can't remember what we were talking about. I think we were maybe talking about something to do with his show or something to do with like the internet or or something to do with his history and uh I asked him I just said, "Oh, that's interesting. How'd that make you feel when that was going on?" Like what what how did you feel about that? And it just really pattern interrupted the whole conversation and um it was quite to be honest it was quite a charming moment cuz he took a moment and was like, "Huh, I've never really thought about that thing before." It made me kind like feel a little bit sad cuz I was like, "Huh?" Like, I really like I don't know. It would be maybe it would be an indication that more people around you asking that kind of question would be would be something good for you. I don't know. Yeah, we often just how are you and then it's and then default back. How are you? There's a story in that how to know a person where it's a teacher in front of a classroom and some one of the kids asks, "Are you married miss?" And she's like, "Oh, no, no, no." And they go, "Why? go, I'm divorced. And they're why and they just keep going that and she in two minutes just flooding flooding in tears. [ __ ] sake. Flooding in tears because and it goes back to the education stuff where they're so naive. They're just Yeah. Why? Alan was as was talking about that too that there's this sort of innocent spontaneity, this unencumbered transparency that kids have and we have a kind of envy about them. you know, the lack of social mores that have shaved off the interesting parts of their personality. And uh yeah, so much of life, so much of adult life is getting back to that more childlike curiosity state. I think uh okay, so people want to become more high agency presumably. We've said it's important. We've identified what it is, how it works, some ways that people can fall into traps to stop them from being it, some beliefs that those people have. Are there give me something give me a pair of breasts, give me something tangible, a piece sake, um I'd say so there's a there's a few, right? So the first one that I I've mentioned a few times, but I really want to actually get into it, which is the um does it defy the laws of physics question? Because okay um the going back to the brain is a question answering device. So if you say why or what's great about my life, it'll start finding answers. If you say what's awful about my life, it will start finding answers. And let's say we go to a venue together and the guy on the front door says, "Sorry, not tonight, mate." And then you just go, "Okay, accept that social reality." And it's well, does it fundamentally defy the laws of physics? Does it go against Newton's laws of motion? Chris getting into um Tiger Tiger tonight? No. Um does it defy Einstein's relativity? No. And that point sounds trit, but then when you actually begin to understand that, well, you go, well, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics, anything is um theoretically possible with human knowledge. And again, it sounds trit saying that, but you just look at the last few hundred years since the Enlightenment and you have this period before it where nothing happened in humanity. We would just your great great great great great great granddad's life look the same as as yours. Um, and meanwhile, we have this change and the ability for humans to understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment that we just now completely take for granted. like me getting annoyed at the flat diet coke on the Emirates flight um is a big thing. The second thing which is probably a little less esoteric that I I really really like as a a metaphor is when you're in the complete low agency and everything is super general and it's like I don't even know I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know where to start. One thing I I love doing a little experiment I got was going okay let's say have a problem right now um of had a friend at the minute who who uh he's an extreme but a friend we both know actually he's an extreme workaholic to a point that I've never I've never seen before and he was talking about how it's a problem he just doesn't know where to start and I said to him I go okay where are you at right now out of 10 and it suddenly takes this kind general infinite universe all the way down to okay well a bit of a binary choice and you can never say seven right so he goes he goes um I'm at a three and I go okay and I go why why are you at a um a three by the way like why aren't you at a two and he goes to be honest with you cuz I've actually like not worked tonight and I've come here to see you I go okay so we're getting some specificity here and I go okay well what would take it up to a four and he goes well if I left the office before 8 p.m. I'd give that a four. I go, "Okay, great." Got a little step down. I go, "Well, we take it to a five. We'll take it to a six, seven, eight, nine, 10." I go, "Okay, first off, let's just do the four immediately." And then as soon as you have that, you have momentum. One of the things I love, and I'll probably put it in the piece of like a template that people can use is just what I call the video game Apple Note. So, you have, let's say, for example, to-do list in Apple Note. Build a website. The problem with that is that's starting the video game on level 56. M so one I had this fascinating realization that um two sorry one person that I knew was the laziest person I've ever met couldn't like open his mail like couldn't get out of bed and like make himself some food but was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world and would spend 16 hours a day on this video game and I go well do they have an agency problem or is their reality just a poorly designed video game. So the video is just level one. Let's say whatever it is, whe they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up. Again, completely the opposite of school. So level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic. And what I love about that is no matter how complex the thing is, from curing cancer to flying planes to opening the mail, you can always dump down thoughts and then you check it off. And level two is create the next five levels based off level one. And what's beautiful is when you check level one, a level one's small enough to start but isn't overwhelming. So you you have that video game bit of dopamine. Then when you check it off, you're like, "Fuck, let's go. I'm on level two." And then each step is enough. So key thing with video game design is it's enough of a step to feel a challenge but without overwhelm. And if you if it's too big of a step like level 56 build website that's too big of a step you just are constantly in frustration so you just quit the video game. It's a terribly designed video game but breaking things down into micro steps is such a uh a key thing in video game design and ultimately increasing agency. Yeah. I mean this is the productivity 101. You write your epigraph. You work in sevenyear seasons. You work in threeyear blocks. You work in one year sprints broken down into 90-day chunks broken down into daily actions. And you know, minuteby minute, you've got your life planned out. Uh, and it's kind of trit because it's so obvious, but the flest the smallest first step imaginable is how the Wright brothers managed to get their plane to go. It's how you launched your marketing agency in a different country. period. It's how this podcast started. Yes. And yeah, you need to be able to if you can figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step because 50% of the battle um is that first step. So if you have that um great tool, another tool um more related to so we spoke earlier about the four four tenants of high agency. You have clear thinking, you have bias to action, you have resourcefulness and disagreeability. On the disagreeability point, which I think is a huge huge part of it, the question I like to ask people is who's your favorite podcaster, creator, me, thinker. So, let's say all the people listening to it right now who have the Spotify wrapped with you top of the list. What do you disagree with Chris on? Because there'll be a percentage, nothing, right? It's all good, baby. Yeah, but there'll be a percentage of the audience, unfortunately, probably less so with your audience, but there'll be a percentage of the audience that says Chris says sky is red, therefore sky is red. And that's actually a great disagreeability test because the amount of times I've put gurus on a pedestal and then they'll start they'll say a lot of wise [ __ ] and then I'll just start drifting out over their skis. Yeah. Yeah. And then you start they'll start drifting and I'll just go with them. But that ability to say who do you admire the most and what do you disagree with them on is a great disagreeability test. That's really lovely. Another one is who do you disag like who do you what's the maybe the strongest held opinion that you have whether that's politically, business-wise, theoretically, and who's the best person on the other side that you've heard? Yeah. Can you answer those two questions? Both of us have done you've got your uh Max Content Razor. Uh would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. And I think that works for songwriting. Would you listen to your own music? If not, don't write it. Off for your own podcasts. Would you listen to your own podcast? If not, what the [ __ ] are you doing spending hours and hours? It's why I've never posted to Pornhub. I haven't watched that. Have you seen I've told you about this before, but I've never done it, but I'm still kind of tempted to do it. I'd do it if you did it as an accountability buddy with me. Paul, is it? Uh, it's only fans. Um, was it 100 days of rejection? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've seen that, right? ask for a free coffee. Um, ask a stranger in the street to give you 20 pounds. Like try and get all of these different things that escalate toward ever increasing levels of social discomfort. And um I feel like that from maybe it's maybe it's not quite the same as disagreeability, but disagreeability triggers that that sort of clamping. Yes. That that fear of um being uh exiled from the tribe like Napoleon, his small little island. I think a big thing in that that I got from CBT to loop it back to what we said earlier is when you're doing disagreeability things is to write down the prediction beforehand that your amydala has given you. So for example, oh and then you get to stress test between what I thought was going to happen and what actually ends up happening. Ex. And then you begin to slowly but surely take away the weapons that that monkey mind has. And it'll still fire, but you go, "Okay, I mean, it's interesting. You're firing about me going and asking out this girl or chatting to her." But I remember last time you talked about how, oh, if you go and approach this girl, she's going to throw a drink in your face and blah blah blah is going to happen. But we actually I got a number and we went on a few dates. So just comparing your brain's forecasting mechanism which will always be the amydala firing the nightmare mode when it's always actually more likely a documentary. Well, you also don't get to take a snapshot of your mind unless you do the writing thing, right? And it's captured in the best way through writing. Uh I I mean we we've seen this even with the election in America that uh we had this political [ __ ] superp position, this like quantum world in which it's going to be close. people could see it either way. Yet ardent supporters on one side. Rory Stewart ate a lot of humble pie. Absolutely. It's a slam dunk. She's going to and presumably he said that because he believed it, not just because he was trying to influence the electorate or or or say something cool or popular or whatever. Uh so, but in retrospect, it couldn't have been any other way because it wasn't. It couldn't have been any other way because Trump won. and the ability I even I think back to where my mind was before that election happened and I go [ __ ] hell like it could be it could be it could go either way. I'm pretty sure that a couple of months out is I think Kamala's got it in the bag and then afterwards me trying to think how did I think before that thing happened. I'm I can't not see what the outcome was. It's impossible for me to not see that Trump won. So all that I do when I look back at my rationalization prior to that is all of the ways in which I would have been right because I could have seen that the outcome that ended up being was the one that I thought. Mhm. Yeah. And then you're just constantly uh you have the benefit of the historian's hindsight where you begin to see, oh, it was all ABC, but in the time when you was living through it, it was so it's you're living through the fog of war, but it's so easy to forget the fog of war afterwards. [ __ ] me. Speaking of fog of war, we might as well bring this up. I was with you in Bosezeman, Montana this summer when Trump got shot. Oh yeah. And uh that was a really formative experience because uh 911 I was too young. January 6 was co so I was in the house. So what what's really fascinating is uh rapidly developing news story with other people at the same time. So the fact that I was with you and Emily and we went for dinner and you know every five or 10 minutes we're checking Jack Pau so bitch's [ __ ] Twitter or whatever to find out what news new rumor has been going on and uh yeah it is even in retrospect one of the things that isn't fully captured is how chaotic uh news is and I think the same thing probably occurs for ourselves that in retrospect we can look back and say well that was the way that was the outcome that occurred In any case, Morgan Hzel's got this gorgeous story. He talks about how when him and his wife first got together before they were married, I think they were 23, 24, living in New York. They had no kids, no dependence. He looks back and he said to his wife, "Wow, that really was living, wasn't it? That really was the golden years." Yeah. So amazing. You know, we used to lie in on a Sunday and we could go for lunch and do all the rest of it. His wife said, "You were miserable. You hated it. You hated all of those things." And Morgan's realization was in hindsight, you're able to see that the fears that captured you at the time were not worth having, but at the time you have no certainty that those aren't salient. So what you see in retrospect is how you should have felt had you known what was going to occur. The golden years seem to never happen in the present. It only seems to exist in hindsight. Yeah. One of the uh high agency techniques is what I call viewing the present with a historian's frame. So both at the personal level and then at the wider kind of societal level as well. So trying to at the personal level, okay, going I see these old photos of me on Facebook. I'm like I used to wear that. I I used I used to post this [ __ ] Um I like I'm like cringing at myself and then you go hold on. You can hear that voice whispering and go me five years later is gonna be cringing what I'm doing me right now. Yeah, correct. And then but trying to ask that question now and deal with it probably speeds up the cycle a little bit because each time there's that story of like the Zen master where he goes, "Yeah, one year ago I thought I had oh sorry um after one year of studying Zen I thought I had all the answers and then I realized I was wrong. Now I have the answers two and then after two years I realized I was wrong again." Um, but now I have all the answers. After four years, I was wrong again, but now I have all the answers. And it ends up with him going to like all the way to his grave and saying the exact same thing again. Now I realize I have all the answers. And just realizing it's constantly wrong. But even then, if you zoom out and you go, "Right, okay, that's at the personal level." But then at the societal level, the ability to view the present moment now with a historian's perspective trying to detach from the fog of war. There's a beautiful line in the sovereign individual where he talks about the Roman Empire falling and he said that for example it's an easy question right now which is when did the Roman Empire fall and people can just give the specific date that it fell when did the Roman society recognize that the Roman Empire fell for the mo the majority of people it was not on that date some day for some people it was weeks after it was months after some people it was centuries after that they fully realized that the Roman Empire had fallen. And he makes this great line which was if CNN existed as the Roman Empire was falling, they would not be on the news saying, "Hey guys, the empire's fallen." They'd be denying it. They would be by the time the news catches up. Basically, if you wait for the news, you will be wrong or you will be late. That's your thing about social networks, right? If you read it on Facebook, you're probably late. If you read it on Reddit, you're probably early. Yes. Good. Good rule of thumb. That's fire. I love that. Uh what about the Patels? your favorite hotelier air. This is [ __ ] p high agency man. So this I got from um uh the my first million podcast and tells the story of the Patels who left India to go to Uganda. And the Patels essentially start as these kind of slaves or work people that are very low down in the society and that kind of Indian work ethic just work their way up to the top of Ugandan society and own like huge businesses um throughout Uganda. Idiamin comes in and says no no no Africa is for Africans not for the Patels. So we are going to take everything off you and nationalize this and give it back to the Africans. So not only we going to take everything from you, we're going to give you 30 days notice. Like my rent contracts like at least like 90 days notice, right? So we're going to take everything from you and your families and we're going to kick you out. So the Patels, some of them went back to India, but India at the time I think had a Bangladesh um uh problem where they was basically they basically argued that the Patels have been gone for so long that you're almost no longer India now. So they almost have no home. A lot of them went to the UK. So you have a lot of Patel in the UK. Um and a significant amount or a small amount sorry went to the US. So they arrive gone from like high up in Ugandan society to immigrant in the US with nothing. And the Patels what they do they begin to start motel and they realize that well a the whole family is going to work on this. So we've got free labor so we can kind of undercut people there. We're all vegetarians, so the food's going to be quite cheap to keep us going. Um, and we can just live in the motel. So, that gives us a competitive edge there because we don't have any cost for rent. So, like the cost of our business is so low and we could just start creating uh motel businesses. So, start with a few motel, more and more Patels arrive and they're constantly helping out their brothers, their cousins, their uncles, their second cousin or Yeah, like that. and just constantly okay well if we can get 5x um revenue sorry if we get a loan that's 5x revenue on this we can buy more and we constantly just use a bit of debt buy more motel nobody can compete with us because we have this so the battel's kicked out of Uganda arrive in America as nothing keep compounding compounding compounding and it's an absurd stat now of something around 70 to 75% of motel in America are owned by a patel Just talk about peak agency like life happening to them and meanwhile managed to complete the 70 to 75% of motel in America owned by a Patel. So for the people that haven't driven through America there are a lot of motel tons. When we were doing our road trip this summer, me and you nodding at most of them and going Patel Patel's again. Yeah. Yeah. Uh yeah. I don't know man. I think it's such this the the approach that you have to this the fact that you've been able to break it down and spend so much time writing this piece which again uh people can go and read. What are you hoping to achieve by sort of breaking this down? Are you looking to try and create more agency in your life? It seems like you're kind of swimming in enough already. No, I I I think honestly you can as a writer sometimes go, "Oh, I think this is a really important idea. I need it to get out in the world." It was more it was psychosis that was like eating my brain and I just wanted to explore the topic because basically the goal of the essay was the thing I would have liked to have read at 13 rather than had written at 30. Y and just exploring that concept because like I said and I sound like a broken horse but once you begin to understand that like everything's essentially just an agency problem. Mhm. The agency issue like the Yeah. It's endless, endless possibilities from fixing climate to fixing cancer. It's just all agency. We're in a country that may be lacking, especially for young people, agency. Both of us managed to reach escape velocity uh to to get out of that. What would you what do you wish British George knew about agency or how to maybe embrace a little bit more of it? So the way I I always joke being outside the UK for two to three years and then coming back I learned more in the two to three years outside of the UK about being British than the 25 years being inside it. And funny bit is when we did Fourth of July this year and we're in Nashville and I mean funny story is Chris uh like everyone's like taking photos of the fireworks. I'm looking seeing all these people taking photos of fireworks, photos of fireworks, like soaking in the moment and there just Chris on Apple Notes like writing down a quote from nature or something like that and I just said spot the artist to everybody around us. Anyway, it was quite a strange feeling being in that environment where it's people going USA, USA. And I kind of realized at that moment a few things. So, one, I've never met an American that doesn't celebrate the 4th of July. I've never met a Brit that knows their national day. I'm called George. It's St. George's Day. And I realized actually I don't even know the day. And I realized no Brit even knows the day. I think it's April 23rd. And I then reflected more on the UK. And the way I view the UK right now, it's like an icon that has an autoimmune condition. On paper, it's this like incredible historical figure, but is just kind of eating itself alive. And I even think that people like myself and yourself, one thing that I noticed that maybe people who have a lot of optimism for the UK then complain about people moaning and don't realize that they're then starting this. Everyone in the UK moans so much. So I kind of come at things like one of the early thinkers that's definitely affected how I think has been Rory Silverland. I've got I do think the UK has a bit of a marketing prop. I don't think you necessarily need crazy technology or things like that to fix this. M so one of the absurd ideas that I have um is essentially looking at St. George's Day and comparing it to the 4th of July and going well what's happening here like why is nobody celebrating St. Georgie's day and why is everybody regardless of their politics celebrating 4th of July? Again comes back to clear thinking. I think 4th of July what it has is a recent enemy which was unfortunately us trying to conquer that beautiful land which we never should have let go. And there's a clear story that unites everybody. George killed some dragon. I don't know. I don't know the story. Nobody knows the story. and now it's just associated with racists and uh bigotss. So my idea would be fix the UK's advertising, scrap St George's Day and announce Dunkkirk Day. First off, good meme. Sounds good. good branding and essentially I think it's a better story than fourth of July because no matter where you stand in terms of your politics in terms of creating an enemy you could have every problem with the British Empire and the UK and Britain and the state of it. Dunkirk is an extraction not an act of war. Yes. And against the apex awful human being of Adolf Hitler who and it's it's still fresh in our minds. It's still recent enough to some extent. And you could argue if Dunkerk didn't happen, does Western civilization even exist now? Certainly the UK, we we're probably having the exact same conversation, but um specy Deutsch, right, in German and both of us aren't August Landmaster and we're just going along with it like low agency little uh little [ __ ] So first off, yeah, dunk day and I'd argue make it quite unique. So first off, we have to make it British. So from midnight to 12:00 p.m. on the day, everyone can moan. Everyone can complain. It's not too cringe like the American style. You're allowed to moan about the mistakes the UK's made in its past currently making and is going. So you taking something from April Fool's Day here? Yes. Have a have a until 12:00 p.m. you can like criticize the country, drink tea, blah blah blah. Come 12:00 p.m. we're allowed very rarely as Brits to remember just how [ __ ] awesome historically this country's been. Dunkirk being obviously a key a key pivotal moment there and just imagine this in the UK right you've got William Shakespeare Alan Shuring John Lennon the Gallagher brothers right you've got uh Pankhurst and the suffragettes whichever way you want to go like we've got it all the tourist demand that I think you could bring in for Dunkoke day even from like Harry Potter um I mean even uh Crick of what's it and Crick who created DNA or discovered DNA One of them was British and it was done in Cambridge University. Like I'm sorry America, but you can't compete with that. Like the histo and the ability to turn that into a national day that maybe unites people at least for an afternoon and potentially brings in billions of tourist revenue by just a little bit of marketing, I think is completely untapped potential. I love it. George Mack, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to read this essay of yours, which they should, and they also want to keep up to date with everything else you're doing. Where should they go? Um, you want to go to high agency.com and the whole essay that me and Chris high agency.com that me and Chris spoke about today um will be on there. Uh, you can read the whole thing and anything else just uh George Mack on Twitter. My DMs are open. Dude, I love you. Thank you. Love you too, man. Thank you. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode with George, my full-length conversation with Eric Weinstein is a great next meal to eat just here.