The Tragic Decline Of Rationality In Society - George Mack (4K)

the keian beauty contest what's that so the keian beauty contest is this idea of different levels of human interaction with things so let's say you lined up a hundred people and Chris has to go rank them in order of who's the most attractive that's like level one but level two that's quite a simple idea but level two is when you're also predicting what everybody else in the room will think and what's really interesting is what Chris will rank is very different to what he will think everybody else will think and then level three is another layer when you have to factor in everybody else knowing that everybody else is playing the game and what's interesting is when they run these experiments let's say they ask people to rate the cutest dog video what they think is the cutest versus what the group then when they vote for the group will be the cutest it completely becomes different so when people are aware of other people's perceptions it completely shapes things so in terms of like a practical application for this there was a period where um the lib Dems were voting higher and higher in the polls almost up there with conservative and labor so people were saying oh these guys are great these guys are great but then when it comes to that level two thing well what is everybody else going to vote for people don't actually vote for them because they're factoring in everybody else so when you're dealing with thinking systems or other people and predicting what they're going to do the behavior becomes a lot more complex as a result yeah there's a an interesting study that was done on women giving their level of Education when they know that other people are going to see the answers and when they think that it's going to be kept private and female intersexual competition says that women should downplay their successes so that they don't get sabotaged by potential other females that are trying to uh dagate them and manipulate them in some way or another get that new tonic and you're go on let's go get it down you um and what it means is that uh when women know that other people are going to see uh that that other people are going to see their answers they downplay uh what it is that they've achieved when they're keeping it private they tend to be a little bit more truthful uh but you know the abalene Paradox you familiar with this oh mate you're going to absolutely adore this so ginda first introduced me to it right and it's just again when you see it you can't unsee it the abene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group's members because each member assumes the others approve of it it explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together so I think Emperor's New Clothes in a way an acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend you attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there at a business meeting someone suggests an idea he thinks the others will like perhaps recruiting a trans influencer is the face of the brand each member has misgivings about this but assumes the others will think that they are transphobic if they speak out so everyone approves the idea despite no one liking it or every member of a family in North Korea who hates communism but they never mention this to each other because each each assumes that the others approve of it you have this or I've had this on social occasions as well where you'll be at dinner and it'll be getting later and later and nobody's left yet and sometimes I'll be sat there looking at the clock am I going to leave I going to leave and then one person leaves the high agency exit it's a Mexican wave of people exiting the whole thing exits and what's beautiful about the Keynesian beauty contest is it it deals with reflexive systems where people's perceptions shape reality and reality shapes perceptions does this great so George Soros um does this amazing Financial Times article that he wrote about reflexivity and Talib said this on feris I didn't know if you knew this that Soros wanted to be a philosopher but basically just had this Shadow career of crashing the pound and becoming like one of the biggest hedge fund managers in there but one of his one of his ideas is this concept of reflexivity which is like so a statement of the WEA is going to be rainy today that's not reflexive because I'm dealing with a natural phenomenon in the sense that my thinking or my words doesn't shape reality so if you said that on TV it doesn't change to ever but if you go on TV and go this is a revolutionary moment the statement impacts reality so you see these feedback loops between perception reality thinking and reality so you're dealing with human beings the systems are so much more complex which is why you see these meme stocks pump and down because people are everybody else is thinking the meme stock is going to pump as well everyone is trying to not only work out what they think about a thing but future project what other people will think about a thing and then adapting their projection and trajectory of the future to account for that yes and then also thinking that other people are thinking that about the overall thing as well so that's how complex things can become Robin Dunbar taught me that the main reason in his opinion that human beings brains got so big is not so that we could more accurately remember where the food is or use tools or fire or or contemplate the higher Mysteries it's because if you live in a 30 person pod of 150 person tribe and I know George and I know that George is friends with Dean but Dean used to be friends with George's ex-friend Josh and now Dean and Josh so and and it's this very complex intersecting web of hierarchies and who's in and who's out and by how much and who used to be like this so the human brain largely is a uh like Facebook friend tracker uh with knobs and dials that you can keep a keep in touch with and that's why he said that human brains got so big because computationally to try and do you know this it's like you know one squared versus 2 squ versus 3 squ versus four squ the numbers just yeah run away with each other and that's kind of how it work it's like 30 squar it's like 30 people and each of their interactions with each different person now and in the past and in the future and what do we think's going to happen I think just yeah the idea of reflexivity as a whole and then when you see it you can't unsee it I don't know if you ever done any cognitive behavioral therapy but there's this most simple model in there which when you go ah okay this all makes sense now and it's like the reflexivity of the human mind where you have a triangle which is how you think how you act how you feel and all three of them impact one another so how you feel impacts how you think and act how you act impacts how you think and feel and how you think impacts how you feel and act and then when you begin to see this triangle constantly exist and I had the biggest midwit Mee moment ever whilst I was away I was in late Como perfect scenes and I was driving this little speedboat I was like like I'm [ __ ] James Bond right now like I'm living the dream right anyway I see a video back and my face is like I I said to the person who filmed the video I go is this what my face is like all the time they go yeah you never really smile resting [ __ ] F I had resting [ __ ] and I honestly think one of the highest like Roi things of just shaping perception is I me you told me you have a tattoo of a smile there it's a smile yeah and listening to the Sam Harris podcast you did of checking in the present moment and just rather than focus on the breath just focus on how your facial expressions are and just the simple like it is the highest thing of just moving it to a brief smile a your perception completely changes but b as a reflective system rather than people going [ __ ] hell that guy's really serious it's like oh that guy's a bit fun treat him as something else yeah I uh I realized that I was socially anxious especially toward the end of my 20s at the end of my teens and then getting into the start of my 20s and that's a reflexive recursive system as well because if you're nervous around people people might interpret that as nervousness or as seriousness or whatever which means that people treat you in a manner Which is less warm because you appear less warm which means that you see the world as an adversary not as a compatriot which means that you then are less capable of opening up and there it goes well that's it's the same with the thinking feeling an acting thing right so if for example you have the thought I'm I'm a introvert and I hate going out therefore you feel a bit more wanting to stay in a bit down and then you act like that and then that cycle completely repeats itself and it's so simple and it's why cognitive behavioral therapy has such an impact right when you can see that triangle yeah and then go well which lever am I going to gonna P I've told you uh my theory about introversion most people aren't introverts their friends just suck that even around like if you get an introvert around the right people they're no longer introverted and it's a recursive loop as far as I can see many of the people that believe that they're introverts are just in the wrong social group one of the questions I was going to ask you about is things you've changed your mind on and on this specific point I had that realization where when covid happened a lot of people experienced this where they start going online and they're meeting so many interesting people because the online world you immediately go to like Global maximum like the best of online and then you can immediately think that I'm just going to be online from now on I'm just going to be doing Zoom calls over time I'm going to be in telegram chats and my online friends are so much more interesting but the realization that it's just because the get getting to Global maximum or like the peak of the internet you just log on and you're there and you find your little tribe but trying to find that in person is really difficult but then when you find it it's like a 100x corre better it's deeper one of the interesting things that's happened with the Internet is it's allowed people with very Niche interests to find other people that have got Niche this is all of Reddit right Reddit is refined not by individuals but by topics and it makes it unique in some regards right for social media um that's been great because people that are into obscure late 80s anime from one particular region of Japan or whatever are able to get together and enjoy whatever it is that they're into so good for a selection effect but bad for depth right and in person very difficult to find the three other people in your 500,000 person City that's also into this obscure anime but if you were to find them the level of depth of of connection which is why I think uh using the internet to explore and then using in person to exploit is the best Paradigm that's how we met yes you know we selected to become friends through the internet and then once you do that you go okay let's twist this into in person what super strange about this though is all you need is one inperson event like if for example you never meet and you use the digital layer as the foundation so you just text chats video calls you could stack like thousands of them versus if you have one physical experience that acts as like the the the floor that you then stack everything else on top of it's so much richer you only need a few inperson meetings to then be able to stack it's the reason why I I put it in my um newsletter this week I think it was uh always say yes to dinner and if someone's coming through town and you may be a little bit tired and you just don't know whatever whatever but you've been kind of a bit interested in this person in a while you've been chatting to them on the Internet or something uh just say yes to go to dinner and the number of times that just saying yes to a meeting a quick coffee with somebody a catchup or whatever it is the number of friends that you have on the Internet is so vast and the number of people that you've met in the real world is so small that if you can be the sort of person who steps out of Internet friend and into real world friend which only takes 30 or 60 Minutes to you know Traverse that particular CU if you were to just like five someone in an airport as you're both rushing for planes I don't think that does it I think there needs to be a little bit of cost there needs to be a little bit of investment of time put in run about 60 Minutes you know dinner a dinner would be more than enough to be able to get this done but if you can do you know a trip with somebody if you can go away with somebody or if you can go through something a little bit more difficult like uh taking mushrooms whilst doing VR um um then yeah you can you can get out on the other side memes both of us are massive fans of memes you're going to meet Harrington a little bit later on today who came up with meme first explain later before we even get into talking about the most important memes that I want to run through with you why what is it about memes and stickiness of ideas that's so important why do you think that's so crucial to get right so the first point is that Meme itself the word is an ironic word it's kind of like dyslexia like no dyslexics can Spell dyslexia and the word meme is itself quite a bad meme because when you say meme to most people what do they think they think of uh dog photo dog photo on the internet so you need to zoom out a little bit first and go a meme is essentially just a spreadable idea and how it the story spreads from people to people so dog photos is part of that but you have okay Boomer you have Karen learn to code learn to code make America great again like all these things whether you hate them love them whatever are memes and they spread and you see this where there's ideas that have existed that haven't had the right meme kind of like a product that hasn't had the right marketing and then you create a meme for it and like charisma's been around for so long people have spoke about it but it's always so nerdy IDE Charisma was like the most uncharismatic topic to talk about ironically Sorry Charlie Hooper sorry um but all of a sudden you create the word RZ and everyone wants and then the language shapes perception and then people are actually talking more about it same with the word ick like the fact that you then have this placeholder to then discuss these things but I think the fundamental thing with a good meme is the almost look at it like a simple algorithm and thanks to covid like I I've known about K factors for ages right or our numbers it's essentially for let's say with Co different strains how if I had it or one person had it how many people they spread it to so if you go over one then it's exponential growth this is a big thing in the startup and Tech space for a while so when you're analyzing a Facebook coming along how many when Chris joins if he brings one more person with him on average then just infinite growth until until it disappears but with a meme what you need for that K factor is essentially the level of emotion and the friction for it to spread and how simple it is to understand the more complex it is um the the less the meme whereas when you shorten it down to Riz and it's catchy and it's three it's three letters all of a sudden is it could be it could be um depends if you're north north or south London um yeah I was talking to the dude that founded legendary Foods the cinnamon roll thing that I gave you earlier on and I was saying to him what do you call the category of products that you've got there we've got a craft everyone that's pointing in this direction there's a craft table filled with protein Goods over there and um I was like what do you call what you do and he's like we've been trying to uh like nomenclature this for ages because the closest thing is protein bar right but it doesn't capture what's there because there's crisps and there's a cinnamon roll and there's a poptart and there's like donuts and stuff so it's not a protein bar a health snack a protein conscious confectionary treat like healthy sweet like what you know and it's all about getting the meme right yes and if you get the meme right everything Downstream from that works um the episode I did with Eric Weinstein he made a really nice tweet about the fact that he was talking about making the uh the temporary archival I think or the ephemeral archival and he likes the idea of filming things in high quality because he gives it more gravitas and more Evergreen sort of Lindy nature but he said to me over text uh in a stickiness arms race great ideas don't stick around because insufficiently sticky so you can have an amazing idea that's called protein bar but it needs a better meme name yeah and you can do the reverse as well which is what people are very skeptical of which is this is a cool sounding name product category movement whatever but there's no there there right it's just Meme and no yeah all meme no substance yeah yeah yeah once you see it you can't unsee it and my I mean it's already happened so I don't even think this is a crazy prediction but you look at the 2024 election or insert future elections now thanks to social media that will be decided by who has the best memes not who has the best policies and once you see that you can't unsee it and I think the the key thing to them factor in is now you have global internet and the next level you're kind of seeing it now is Spotify two years from now maybe we'll be speaking right now in Portuguese because of this AI language translation so you then factor in language is no longer going to be a barrier internet adoption is going to be completely Global as like of the third world fully hop online and the older generation dies out the ability for a meme to go from nothing to 24-Hour infestation of the entire world like a virus either positive and beautiful or negative and destructive is uh is about to happen I was talking to somebody who his book title was a pun right which is kind of like a meme like a play on words it was like a a book about sex called you're doing it wrong or something like that right uh and he mentioned that he was selling the translation rights but because words what you're doing with me with puns specifically which is a kind of meme is playing in uh multiple interpretations of the same word or the same sentence but by design that doesn't translate over into other languages so his great piece of advice was if you're going to write a bck title that you intend to go International don't use a pun because you can end up like talking about the flight of pigeons or something by accident because they're trying to retrofit your pun to this new language which doesn't work which means that you have to either compromise the pun entirely or keep the pun but lose what the actual context is well on that specific point the to explain memes is essentially to say people judge your book by its cover the age-old advice of don't judge your book by its cover is because people judge the book by its cover so if you can spread it they're try they're trying to stop us from enacting our nature so one meme that I think is terrible that I think so important for people to understand is and we use me and you use this word a lot like if you had to graph it in terms of words we speak after like the and uh and a few others water this one's up there which is leverage like we use leverage all the time and I originally got it from n Val's book Almanac and I when I heard it I almost didn't want to admit I didn't fully understand it cuz I didn't want to sound stupid so I'd go and research it and I go okay so there this guy called archimedian and if you have enough leverage in engineering you can create things where the the input can produce a much greater output so people will use it like that so when I created a company I tried to create the cultural value around leverage right so I created this Google sheet and everybody would input in there like the highest leverage task that week so that was one of the values that we tried to create as a company and every other value made sense but we'd go we' go in there and we do these weekly checking calls and everyone would be like I'll be honest with you I don't know what highest Leverage task means and I was like huh and then you zoom out right now you've got like the Instagram gurus who chat about I'm the hardest working man in the room and then you have the kind of meme of smart work versus hard work and none of it none of it really sticks especially coming from an educational system and then when you begin to fully understand like code leverage media leverage Capital leverage labor leverage it begins to stick a little bit more and I was thinking how do you actually get this into an idea that begins to translate one of the terrible ideas that I do have for this which I'll bring up because I it's it's on here which is a lot of napkin maths but is essentially I wanted to do this as a kid story but I need to change the name to begin with i animate it it's called hung over Jeff Bezos on his yacht right versus versus the world's hardest working man so we have this story of these two individuals competing against each other cuz I identify with the world's hard hardest working man I grew up watching Eric Thomas videos of like You' got to want it us better does you want to breath like that kind of stuff and ultimately so let's say for example we give this Instagram guy who talks about hardwork this guy is better than everybody else cuz he doesn't sleep he works 24 hours a day right Jeff woken up at like 11:50 like nagging headache he's probably got one of the best vitamin IV drips in the world goes on his jet ski that day probably does a zoom call with his chess coach like whatever who's worked harder that day if you judge it in the old fashioned interpretation that I think a lot of us have that don't understand leverage because we don't get engineering and things like that you go well he's worked 24 hours that day Jeff's done a few slack messages but I was like trying to go well what if you actually ran the napkin math so right now if you looked at it as purely as like outputs so this guy's got 24 outputs of hours of manual work that he's been doing whereas Jeff's been sat on his ass if you look it like that that's Z 2 24 to zero but all of a sudden when you begin to quantify leverage you go ah this begins to click a little bit so this is napkin mask from about a year ago so the point of napkin mass is not to be in the comment section saying that this is wrong I know some of these numbers are wrong but just it's for the metaphor so Jeff has 1.6 million people that work for Amazon so let's say they all work eight hours per day Jeff's achieved 20.8 million hours of work that day then if you looked at robot leverage so Amazon's Warehouse when I looked at these statistics has 500,000 roaming Factory robots AWS has 1 8 million servers they all work 24/7 for him that's 55 million hours of robot work per day whilst he's been sat on that yacht and I'm not even going to get into how much more output a robot can achieve per hour than if you let's just give the hardest working guy that that he can keep up with them okay then you look at advertising leverage Amazon spends $46 million per day on marketing assuming assuming it costs him $20 to reach 1,000 people um he's receiving 2 .3 billion Impressions per day hardest working guy is going around knocking on doors right trying to sell his product so so Jeff's advertising Leverage is about the equivalent of doing 95 million hours of door knocking per day then you look at medial leverage so twitch gets 71 million hours of content viewed every day Amazon Prime has 117 million subscribers let's assume that the 10% watch one hour per day that's 11 million hours of content viewed every single day so that's 82 million hours of Storytelling done in person that this guy would have to do so and then let's not go into all the other things you could think of related to Amazon so hardest working guy in the rooms worked 24 hours Jeff sat on his yacht with a hangover and watching bits of succession and zooming away has achieved 244 million hours of output and then when you view it like that the whole leverage complexity the the reason why Leverage is a bad meme is because you need other topics and other realizations from engineering to understand it which prevents it from spreading but when you go oh hung over Jeff Bezos on his yard versus hardest working man in the world you realize that in the 21st century despite probably the PTSD from the education system Leverage is more important but it's a [ __ ] meme in other news this episode is brought to you by cozy Earth we sleep onethird of Our Lives do not spend 33% of your life in anything other than unbeatably comfortable sheets getting a good night's sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer and the sheets that you have are massive determinant of just how comfortable you feel cozy Earth has the most premium bedding and loungewear that I've ever found they're made from super soft Visos from highly sustainable bamboo temperature regulating so you will sleep comfortably all year round and an enhanced weave quality that won't pel so it's higher quality will last longer and you will have a more comfortable night's sleep and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized plus there is a 10year warranty on all of their products that's how confident they are that they're going to last but don't just take my word for it Oprah has chosen cozy Earth as one of her favorite things for 5 years in a row now you can get an exclusive 35% discount sitewide on everything by going to Cozy earth.com slod wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 35 a checkout cozy earth.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout Shan Puri has this idea about what you work on is way more important than how hard you work and he says hard work is very overrated uh and he's I think he refers to himself active refers to himself as like a successful lazy man uh and he optimizes for laziness and frictionless and um yeah it's the same you know the janitor or some guy that's working double or triple shifts that amount of effort doesn't have an in-kind return to them compared with somebody who is able to leverage code or Media or labor or capital or even just picking the same amount of input that they've got with very limited leverage but on a better task a task that has more potential upside long term the the key thing is to remove the conversation around hours work that we had from school and just be inputs outputs so I have this number of inputs what number of outputs am I getting and remove the concept of ours work remove everything else and all of a sudden that Meme is a little bit stickier whether that's going to be a a kid story or not probably not I need to adapt the title a bit but I think to view view leverage through that makes it an easier idea for people to understand but the reason why Leverage is a bad meme is because people don't have the engineering knowledge it doesn't spread which is why it's such a Silicon Valley concept and I think this idea still hasn't fully rippled through Society don't forget as well that exponentials and squares aren't something that the human brain is built to work out it's like that um I want one square of one piece of rice on the first square of the chessboard and two pieces of rice on the second square of the chessboard all the way up and by the time you get to the final Square on the chessboard you've got more pieces of rice than there are [ __ ] particles in the universe or something we just don't deal well with exponentials which means that leverage inherently given that it's dealing with um unfair multiplicativity system rather than an additive system for the most part it's this times this not this plus this uh it's just going to be tough to understand you've got a an idea the best memes compress Mass emotion into a simple contagious concept like okay Boomer or Karen what's that mean well first off look at okay Boomer who doesn't understand that two words Karen who doesn't understand that make America great again who doesn't understand that you can hate those memes but it's compressed so much emotion so let's say the okay Boomer one it's compressed so much emotion of the millennial and gen Zed being spoken down to by the boomer generation who have messed up a lot and it's completely compressed all that down and boom that spreads same with Karen same with even the word make America great again like there's so much emotion way more than it's for Words yes it's way more than the constituent Parts yes yes yes and with memes it's all it's I forgot who said it it's the idea of I'm sorry I didn't write you a shorter letter but I didn't have time yes so the people look at it and go oh that's so unfair I wrote this 10,000w essay that nobody ever read but versus this meme has spread but you need to be able to optimize for that K Factor but you need to be able to compress as much emotion into that word for it to sprad did the meme industrial complex used to be the purview of mainstream media were they ever creating memes effectively or is this a internet thing again it's it's a little bit reflexive in the sense that they both interact right so what rup Murdoch would put on the news would be because he kind of knew what people would like and then what people liked was kind of because what they saw on the news and there's this constant thing here so rupop Murdo or that generation of the meme industrial complex that owned everything and could control the narrative I actually think it's ironic that they've made succession now because they wouldn't have been able to make it 10 years ago because he had so much power right versus now it's like we can do what we want it would it would have seemed more like a documentary than a drama and you can see why the mainstream media dislikes social media so much because the mainstream media had the meme industrial complex in that they could put ideas out there and control the narrative whereas now the meme Industrial Lex is essentially this bottom down approach of complete decentralized meritocracy to some extent yeah it's all the users rather than The Gatekeepers that are creating and a few algorithm developers who nobody these faceless algorithm developers a little bit there and comp and go you know what on YouTube now we actually prefer long form podcasts in the algorithm boom and that just completely shifts things so it's weird how you've got these kind of faceless algorithm creators now and these face craters that own the meme industrial complex the last memes most of the memes that you see that come out of mainstream media are accidental memes so it's a a guy trying to propose to his wife a baseball game or something that gets wiped out by a security guard or something it's not it's never something that is designed to be funny it's always the byproduct of something that was supposed to be something else which has come through in that way I've also got this idea about how if you want to be able to predict the future look at a current cultural movement or meme that hasn't had the inverse already made so um 2020 Co gets released that summer everyone has to stay in the house 2021 Megan the stallion starts talking about hot girl summer last year you weren't able to be free and liberated therefore this year uh you can be your best self you Glam up go out with the girls sleep with the guy Etc 2022 is feral girl summer which is you know treat yourself like an animal don't watch wash don't shave just put baggy clothes on and and and don't take any care of yourself um another version pickup Artistry uh comes out sort of late 20s early 2010s then you get that sanitized by me too which is a counterculture movement in some regards not just to that but to other stuff then you have red pill then very quickly you have mtow and black pill that comes out of it so if you want to predict the future of memes look at a meme that's been created that hasn't had its inverse M uh come out too because every movement needs its counter movement in order to be able to balance it because there is a market there is a meme market for anything which is not the thing which is currently popular for every movement there will always be it's like the equal and opposite Force thing for every meme there is an equal and opposite meme that comes out well question for you is what do you think is you know we had the chat last time of what is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians and what we're kind of saying there is what's a really important topic that hasn't had its full meme moment yet right yeah and what do you think bars what do you think are super important topics that just haven't like haven't been me correctly that's a really really haven't caught on yet or will catch on like what ideas sound crazy today but five 10 years from now I'll be like oh yeah that's the thing yeah I think [Music] um a lot of individual personalities uh so this this seems to be a very effective way to get memes to move you know like the M the of the sigma male uh which is kind of the guy who steps outside of the of the hierarchy I don't think that there's very many uh good memes for women I don't think that there's been many like archetypes most of them are like derogatory in a lot of ways so like you know like the Karen the party girl the like Dubai yach chick um there's not many there that I think are are like almost aspirational in a way and maybe this speaks to female personality and disposition that they don't have you know I don't know about girls but guys would happily have like He-Man or the rock or whatever on a bedroom post to wall but girls would also a lot of the time have guys like some hot uh singer I don't know whether uh girls use role models and aspirational admirable figures like if you went into a teenage girl's bedroom and had a post of Jordan Peterson quotes on the wall you'd think like let take you off to psychotherapy um so uh yeah certainly individuals in some ways like memes for uh irational memes for girls I think that there's a massive market for them um what about you this is I think one of the most important topics but it's so ugly and boring and I I even like I'm fearsome of saying this because I can just feel people like skipping to the next YouTube chapter as soon as I say this but give me like a minute to just say it and it s even the word now right you're going to go right cyber crime right it's just like nobody takes it seriously but it's so [ __ ] important and just to maybe give a bit of a story that's going to help with this have you heard of the Bangladeshi bank heist no now we're talking right this is g to blow your mind and again it doesn't sound good right now but it's going to be good so the biggest bank robbery in history was I think it's about $60 million in Brazil in about 2015 2016 with cyber crime recently they almost hacked $1 billion from the Bangladeshi Bank using the Swift system right for context that year the Bangladeshi GDP was like 230 billion so think with GDP as well it's movement of money it's not total money if Chris sends George 10 and I send it back boom bo boom that acts towards the GDP but it's just us exchanging money so imagine taking $1 billion dollar like that from a developing country immediately um and the only reason that fail the only reason this isn't there will be I I think five within 5 to 10 years there will be a covid like moment you remember pandemics before covid it was like bird flu swine flu you just be like oh the sun's just trying to get clicks and things like that I remember I used to tell people about Co in January February I won't say who but they used to call me conspiracy George for bringing up covid and now obviously pandemics are taken very seriously but there will be a 911 or a covid like moment for cyber where things get very very dark very fast I think the Bangladeshi bank heist is only a tiny example of that where you go from 60 million robbery in person to 1 billion overnight and the you know the only reason why it failed is because the hackers that were working on this system so they emailed they sent an email with a CV application the person at the bank clicks on the CV infects everything yeah they're working on it for a year they time it perfectly during the New Year's holidays everything about this height has gone perfect bear in mind this bank would only move about 300K around the Swift system so it goes to the Federal Reserve in America says sees 1 billion and they're like yeah sure so it's like the the security systems weren't in place the only reason it failed is cuz two two things one they had a typo for the addresses so literally it didn't fail because of the amount it failed because of human error human error like and it was a really basic English spelling that they made a mistake and then two the bank in the Philippines they were sending it to was called Jupiter Street and Jupiter was a company associated with Iranian money laundering so it just happened to flag in the system otherwise it would have gone through both of which were human a billion would have been taken from Bangladesh like one of the poorest countries in the world like that and the impact that has and you then begin to realize what happens at one point when certain airlines get attacked certain banking systems get attacked and we're so but because I say the word cyber security and only 3% of the audience have carried on right now so boring but we need we need stronger memes around it because it's such an important topic yeah wasn't it uh you told me some story about the salary that was yes offered for for the British head of cyber security so the head of cyber security in the UK we spoke about this last time got offered a salary or like on link in jobs it was 55 to 65k pounds for the UK uh 7,000 80,000 yeah which listen is obviously a great income for most of the world but for the head of cyber security when you're dealing with hackers that are trying to steal $1 billion dolls yeah yeah it's just evidently something but it's that's specifically I'm going to guess a uh governmental problem because I'm going to presume the head of cyber security at Facebook is paid an ungodly amount of money because they are already red pilled on just how big of a deal this ish but if Facebook goes down it's obviously a big issue but if Government systems go down a lot worse if the emotion caused by the meme is greater than the friction of spreading it you've cracked the meme algorithm it's exactly that that that is an example of a simple but not easy truth that is all memes does the emotion outweigh the friction of spreading it if so you've created that positive one number that it begins to spread Spread spread Spread spread it's so simple you've got one in here that's the same as mine the easiest way to predict the next meme is to look at the current memes and bet on counter memes appearing you take that from me you better have done potentially it was my idea the fastest growing companies in the next 10 years will have a chief meme officer working for them directly or indirectly I like if you look at all these fast growing consumer businesses they are they either have a chief meme officer in house so you can think of these influencer celebrities that are cre a McGregor with proper 12 the McGregor Meme and all the kind of sub memes that he creates around him who the [ __ ] is that guy etc etc then product there or they'll have memes working bu through them indirectly that they'll ride on so like we was chatting about marck health this isn't a plug but um you obviously your testosterone numbers going through the roof and people huberman the huberman meme people chatting about optimization and I guess they do have Derek running it but still riding that Meme movement yeah if they would have done it five to 10 years from 10 years ago it probably wouldn't the Imp that it's happening but now Chief meme officer indirectly or directly boom yeah it's I think the I learned about this word you're glowing you taught me about that a while ago Zach taught me about it and then Mark w't show up about it as well you know what that is like when someone looks like a federal plant and they're putting across information that is to um persuade the populace but people can see through the fact that they're actually doing it on behalf of the CIA ex CIA agent says that CIA isn't actually listening to your phone calls mate you're glowing right like that's that's that's the sort of [ __ ] that they'll say um but I think people are skeptical now even of memes perfect perfect perfect example did you see what Jim shark did with Francis and ganu where he broke that door switch it out get the get the orange boy in there come on um you see where Francis and ganu uh broke a door no right so Jim shark like fed a video onto Reddit that they created of CCTV of a person that was supposed to Francis and garu didn't turn out to be him uh breaking the door of a corner shop the glass door that wased yes right and they staged it created it used a stunt double instead of Francis for the bit wether glass brakes put Francis back in had him get shouted at by this fake shopkeeper in a fake shop front uh fed it using a burner account onto Reddit and then from Reddit it got picked up by Twitter and then from Twitter it got picked up and Signal boosted and some people saw through it like this looks like a cuz he's wearing gym shark this looks like a a plant from gym shark or whatever whatever but for the most part made headlines papers picked up on it all the rest of it so yeah the how would you say the like contrived meme complex or the manipulated meme complex like the MMC uh is something that everyone's skeptical about you know I look at each platform now like a meme information Highway and each one produces different memes just due to the constraints of it so the memes that get produced from Tik Tok are quite unique and correct yeah they don't export particularly well yeah whereas people that come out of YouTube like yourself slightly different um what's interesting though is most memes that get created you go back and it's Reddit it's fourchan maybe bits of Twitter and it goes down the meme information highways and then ends up at LinkedIn I wonder all roads lead to lead to Boomer Facebook yeah WhatsApp message from parents yeah um I wonder whether one of the reasons that forchan and uh Reddit work particularly well is are written memes the most robust of all because you can turn something that's works on written into video into spoken but the reverse isn't necessarily true like there was that one of the dude drinking was he drinking like ocean fresh cranberry juice whilst skateboarding down the street listening to Le Zeppelin or something it's like some song from some band and then this song's now number one across the world because this one dude skateboarded while drinking cranberry juice or something [ __ ] sales of cranberry juice went through the roof and he's now the Ambassador for [ __ ] ocean fresh or something um that doesn't necessarily translate across onto written word but most written word memes can be translated across and do get used potentially but I think another factor to so it's you have you heard the l lapal loser effect it's why you stack multiple multiple biases so on that specific point I think you've got that but it's not just that it's also the fact that most people on there are pseudonymous and Anonymous which means they can just see the Overton window here and go I'm through I'm going to go through here and then ultimately it's the memes that shift the Overton window with time but the ability for them to be pseudonymous and Anonymous and then create something that they can they can go into territories that right now the the meme industrial complex won't touch and then they push it through I had this idea about how um there is a lot of derogation of mainstream media at the moment you know like mainstream media is dying and uh no one really cares about it anymore and it's all about Independent Media and it's all about YouTube and podcasts and stuff like that but what you do forget is that there is still quite a lot of status associated with going on mainstream media because it's a scarce resource yeah right there is an unlimited number of YouTube videos that everybody can upload there's no status or Prestige associated with uploading a YouTube video getting lots of subscribers or getting lots of plays or having lots of followers on Tik to or whatever but anyone that's got an iPhone can work Twitter or work Tik Tok or work YouTube but there's only 200 Dr Phil guests per year right so because it's inherently a scarce resource there is still uh value and Prestige associated with it because of the selection effect oh you've had to be pre-selected it's like the [ __ ] Hunger Games right so I think that something that's probably not been priced in is first the that General uh scarce resource Prestige associated with still associated with mainstream media because it's a limited resource and secondly uh the huge swath of Boomer parents and people who aren't chronically online who see Dr Phil you know all of Middle America you know that whole daytime TV thing the loose women thing like they still move culture they just don't move culture in a way that we care about at the moment um there's this really interesting just a side point this really interesting uh is it Liberty Mutual of someone it's this Bank in America and they're playing it really well it's like um uh we can't stop you from becoming your parents but we might be able to help you invest and save and all of the adverts are about like um younger people than should be complaining about these particular problems complaining about problems that are beyond their age like someone who's um parking over like two parking spaces and they're like shaking their fist kind of like their parents would do what someone that's cutting the Hedge too early in the morning or something like complaining about things their parents might have once complained about but they're too young for it and the point is like you're going to grow into complaining about the complaints that your parents have got so let's say it's Liberty Mutual or something they're using the meme of okay Boomer as almost self-deprecating for us all to Future project ourselves out into that uh but yeah mainstream media scarce resource what do you think again I think there's a little bit of a lolip pooa that exists as well in the sense yeah it's a scarce resource it still has a shadow of its former self like even if I see a seven-year old boxer I know who that guy used to be and he can still even if even if he's like I could beat him up now he still has that shadow of his former self so I think it's that it's when I did the Fox News thing for the Kalin cocaine phone which followed like the most serious news stories that it was me in Amsterdam with sliders on my feet and like a Blazer here chatting about that yeah and that even though it probably got way less views than this or anything else that I've done was treated so differently because of the fact it was mainstream media pres yeah there's this um an idea called conceptual inertia which is that it takes a long time for ideas to change even if the science does uh I spoke to this um he's like a a science historian and he was talking about the development of um science and then belief over time so for instance when you get the uh is it like the geocentric as opposed to the heliocentric view of the solar system that it's not the Earth that's at the center it's the sun that's at the center and um when that happened even though it was after a while first off it was heretical then it was exploratory then it was proven but tons and tons of the populace just hadn't come along for the ride ideas die one generation at a time and it takes a good chunk of time for people to catch up and it's kind of the same with mainstream media right not only are there still people around that hold mainstream media like even I do to some degree you see some person on [ __ ] Dancing with the Stars and you're like oh well done for that person even if I wouldn't want to do it um so not only is there still people around that are living that but also even once they're gone the echo of what they valued is still valued and it takes a little bit of time for this stuff to go away how on that point though of ideas die one generation at a time how do you is there any way to speed that up as we're because because technolog is changing so much faster and faster right now an idea is Holocaust but like how do you deal with like gpt3 gbt 4 and people being able to catch up with I don't think there's I don't think that there's a solution for it mate I think that humans run at the speed that they run at I think you can overclock humans in the same way that you can overclock technology you're just playing this game and we're going to move along uh and and what you end up with if you try and do too quickly is you end up with fire hosing which is the problem of overloading people with information isn't that they start to believe one narrative increasingly more frequently they begin to distrust all narratives overall because they just can't get but first it was this thing and then it's this thing Co everybody during almost everybody during covid almost everybody during the last election almost everybody during the [ __ ] Israel Hamas War which we're not talking about like that is it's this thing and and no it's not it's actually this thing it wasn't them that did it and then actually yeah it is those and no it's not your tactic your story was wrong and what people end up doing is just saying all right I check out so the answer I've had for this is if you look at something like David Deutsch's beginning of infinity which I think is an amazing idea but the meme is tough the problem that exists is and we spoke about this before where five years ago you cringe at your former self but the what would have probably have sped that up maybe doing five months rather than five years to realize those mistakes was thinking five years from now I'm going to cringe at former me what are those things yes so there's almost this simple expression I developed which is like everything is wrong is the first bit of it and you just assume every belief that I hold is wrong everything George and Chris has said to some extent is wrong anything that defies the laws of physics is wrong and will be we will look back at it 5 to 10 years Lo opinions loosely held yeah but the problem with that is it just opens up this Vortex of like where do I like the what do I do yeah the floor's gone like you're just in this spinning infinite Rick and Morty Loop and you don't you don't know what is what and people would prefer to have strong beliefs than just complete nihilism and complete everything's wrong so the conclusion I have with that is that everything's wrong but there are better or worse ideas so constantly looking at okay so I've got this new idea in my head it can have a placeholder there and I I like it and it was better than the previous idea that I had and then you're constantly playing this infinite game of stacking up knowledge and stacking up knowledge but always realizing cuz what will happen is you'll get the new idea and then you think that idea is right how how many times have me and you developed some new morning routine become completely addicted to it and being like this is it this is the answer I found the answer and then a couple of months later we got it wasn't the answer the Lindy effect works so far well with that if if a person sends you about this new app new meditation habit new XYZ morning you been doing it once you've been doing it for six months let's check in because then it's serious Thiago Forte uh the reason that he doesn't use anything other than Evernote is he refuses to use software that's not 10 years older or old or older it's like it has to have been around for 10 years and it's basically the exact same as what you're talking about there Lis Perry taught me yesterday this great quote uh tradition are the experiments that worked H yeah that's the thing that yeah the thing that people are often defending was once the replacing thing yes yes yes yes yes because unless it's been around for [ __ ] forever like and how many things are axiomatically just like unmovable or unmoving from when it first ever happened what's this Trojan horses to avoid thing so he having a uh phone call with a good friend of mine and his business is he's doing very very well and he says to me he goes I've stopped listening to all business podcasts I was like hold on I like your business is doing really really well and you but you've also stopped like consuming new information about business he goes yeah I just watched NFL stuff I'm like huh I I I getting mid wited meme right here and I was like why is that he goes well the problem was particularly like the stuff that isn't just like Lindy business content like new ideas this this industry is popping off he would just get shiny object syndrome yeah and the critique of that like self-improvement space of how can you watch football or how can you do that is the problem with him with the business podcast is that it was like Trojan content or pck porn like a pck victory it was a Trojan content in the sense that he felt it was good for him but it was actually harming him and I'd say that is often a lot worse than the things that you know are going to harm you so I if you eat a takeaway and you know it's bad for you I think that's not you account for it the next day yeah that's not as bad as thinking something's healthy a trojan horse getting in and it's actually really bad for you how was the business podcasts just dig into how they were Trojan horses a bit more well in the sense that he has a business that's working really well and he just has to exploit and focus and work hard whereas when they're then going oh there's this new AI thing that's popping off and people are getting funding here or this guy's exited his business for ABC and he's been doing it half the time so he'd just get envious he'd get shiny object syndrome versus just putting on the football he's like switch the brain off know what I need to do and you can see these Trojan horses that exist everywhere so like you could have I I call it like a Trojan pay rise where you kind of get this incredible job that not not incredible job or job I had this happen to me where a job comes along enough as you double the salary but you stop learning as a result and on the one hand yeah you've got this thing that feels like you've made progress but actually on a long enough time Horizon it's going to massively reduce your potential because you're no longer learning so looking at these Trojan horses everywhere a long commute would probably be one of those um you we've been talking a lot about uh hidden and observable metric and a really great observable metric is salary and a really great hidden one is commute length uh you know know the dation of your energy to do things when you get home the quality of your relationships and your friendships the amount of time that you have to be able to learn new things and yeah you can trade in your ability to upgrade yourself for a better salary but you're right over a long enough time Horizon what was it that was going to give you more happiness or satisfaction or even salary in the end it was presumably going to be your skills and the rapidity of you to be able to upgrade them so yeah I that's very interesting have you noticed in your life any uh Trojan horses that you've let sneak in I I'd say certain bits of content I find I'm a lot more specific with like my information diet now so even stuff of I trying I used to try and keep on top of the world's cutting events and then I'm because I felt like I needed to be a responsible Citizen and I needed to be on top of things and I realized that a the current thing would just disappear there's this constant new current thing that will then disappear two months ago parel calls it the was it the Perpetual now yeah and by the time by the time it's on Twitter it's like the peak stock price it's you know what I mean by the time it's everybody it's the B it's as big as it's going to get so avoiding um constantly keeping on top of all the world's in constant which I used to think like I was being an informed citizen because people would use the term I wrote about this people would use the term ignorance is bliss and I go you know you're in this like Nichi and upside down Society where people are using Bliss as a shaming mechanism cuz I think we like I I realized this where it's something like I think there's like 500 million tweets uploaded per day there's 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube per minute and I think something like 67 million people die per year right so we're all in the ignorance gutter but it's like some of us will be looking at the stars and I think you have to be so specific with that information di because by definite you can cannot consume all the world's information it's why I used to have my you know this I used to have my Twitter trending topics to Angola so I just keep up to date with like the Ang so basically on Twitter you'd have the trending topics in your region and it would be like I'd get distracted by all these complex issues and I just feel like [ __ ] afterwards it's like Trojan content yeah so I just updated it to Angola and know Angola now unfortunately for me because it's it's done it the way that as you're as you've realized you can't hack it with Angola I'm still in the UK based on um Twitter which means that at least twice a week at the moment Chris Williamson Trends Chris Williamson MP of course the unfortunately named Labor uh I think it's darbishire that he's a part of uh very anti-semitic which means given the current geopolitical climate it's a bad time to be a Chris Williamson at the moment but I always used to think whether or not uh he would look and see his name trending but it not be him and think like what's my love Island Ultra ego done this time [ __ ] hell he's gone on another reality TV show I've got I'm doing this live show with James Smith in Dubai in a couple of months time next month actually uh and I wondered given what Chris Williamson has been talking about his very you know like Pro Middle Eastern uh talking points whether there's going to be a a huge welcome party for me as I step off the plane at dxb airport and how disappointed they will be when this Chris Williams strides off the plane yeah reality so far has just been an SEO Warfare between you two and everybody else watching this is just NPCs in the simulation that is that do you ever watch the one with Jet Lee that film no uh it's like he in this other Universe he's able to move between like 350 universes or whatever and there's a version of you in each of them and if you kill yourself the power of all of you gets shared between you so this guy tries to become the one this evil jet Le goes around killing all of the other jet Lees in all of the other different universes and that's kind of the SEO battle between me and Chris Williamson darbishire MP at the moment [ __ ] it out on the uh looping back round because I was be an infinite Vortex there with the information diet hack I recommend and people think this takes way longer than it is but I do warn people that you will stare deeply into the abyss and the abyss deeply back into you YouTube they should remove this but YouTube has this Buton where you can see your history and I I went through I clicked on it and I was like I just go through the last 100 videos that I watched it takes like five minutes to do and I just ranked them in terms of regret neutral and like glad I watch that and 72% of the content I watched I booket it under recret so that's an example of Trojan content well the post content Clarity thing was an idea that I came up with uh to try and help me it's exactly that just like less statistical um while you're watching something it's almost always compelling even if it's [ __ ] for you and making you feel worse because if it wasn't compelling you would be watching something that was it's like the meme uh evolution of the Mr Beast countdown to the 1 billion doll yacht that he's going to spend time on or whatever right like that's the most compelling piece of content so even stuff that you don't like is compelling in the moment or else you would have switched and watched something more compelling but it's only after the it's like a post kital pillow talk with yourself after after you've done a session on YouTube where you get to say okay and how did that stuff make me feel like do I want to ring my friends do I want to go outside do I feel like the world is against me or for me um do I feel like I can go and Achieve things do I feel more educated more wise more in tune with myself or do I feel the opposite and a lot of the time I think the things that you watch are limic hijacking and compelling but the after effect like the come down the content come down is so so strong that uh if you were able to Future project yourself forward and realize what's the hangover that I'm going to get or the content come down I'm going to get from this the post content Clarity um yeah the pillow talk that you have with yourself actually would remind you that it's not worth it and YouTube actually is a a platform for this is kind of useful because there's a few options you can put in um don't recommend channel uh if you just see something on your home screen you can just press the three but three dots and say don't recommend Channel and you'll never see that channel again unless you search for it right it'll never just randomly appear on your feed which is phenomenal uh so I think that's you know if you were talking about crafting and shaping the information landscape that we're a part of and it's all esoteric and [ __ ] like philos philosophical and stuff but from a tactical perspective like that's one thing um if people use Twitter on desktop which I do I don't have the app on my phone I very rarely use it on my phone um tweex uh which may now be called tweee um is a way that you can see the most popular tweets from people but it's a Google Chrome extension that when you're on your home screen it actually sits over the top of the trending news so it'll hide trending news so you can't put yourself in Angola well you can but it doesn't work but you can use tweex or tweepy uh and the Google Chrome extension will hide that and replace it with like top tweets from one of the people that you follow I think we've probably got about 5 years left of this algorithmic Warfare of trying to get you to stay on platform as long as POS because as soon as more and more AI tools come on and then you begin to have these Dynamic conversations of how you want to feel based off these algorithms I think we'll look back at this as a very very weird time in history when most content was created by humans as opposed to robots no in the sense that that to some extent but more importantly like for example you see the difference when you go from YouTube to YouTube premium and you can skip certain things and you can download things why can't I just customize my algorithm more why can't I have a kale algorithm during the week and then a cocaine algorithm on Saturday night versus this kind of static algorithm because the problem with the algorithms I actually realized when I was doing that YouTube audit the best the YouTube is amazing when you use it for search and it's such a high agency thing there where you're sitting there thinking and going oh okay I want to learn about X or I want to do ABC and you search it versus the explore page when it's just fun mely solo agency because by definition it's trained on your past data so it's keeping you stuck in the past whereas when you're actually searching on YouTube for topics you you're actually breaking out of the past and creating a new data set that's TR there's multiple use so I've realized this Uber does this very well actually um where at different times of the day I take different Journeys so if it's first thing in the morning it'll know that I tend to want to go to the gym uh if it's the middle of the day there's a couple of restaurants that I typically go to uh if it's on a a Wednesday at this time it knows that I usually go and get an appointment at this place or it's a haircut or it's a whatever and it knows that I go from certain places to other places very well done right but that's because there's multiple use at multiple periods of the day YouTube hasn't yet realized that I only watch long form documentaries about like the in-depth trench warfare strategies of World War I on an evening time like at night to fall asleep so I like listen to like some Ken Burns documentary or like some long or whatever like some 11 part uh psychoanalysis of Hitler that I'm me balls deep in at the moment right um that only happens on an evening time but it means that it resurfaces it to me during the day so yeah there's multiple U's at multiple times and you know like you can go from dark mode to light mode it's like do I want to go from learning mode to entertainment mode but I I don't think that that that doesn't seem to be likely just because what the platforms always want you to be in is click on mode right they don't want you to have agency over what it is they just want maximized time on site let Outsource it to don't forget especially YouTube that algo is a black box if you were to go to YouTube the engineers and say tell us what you're doing show us the algorithm they're like yeah what do you think we know you think we know what our algorithm does we set it like two [ __ ] uh reward functions like time on site click through that's it and then just let it run it's just this recursive nightmare where everyone descends towards UFC knockout compilations all the way down the stack yeah yeah H what's the forgetting Paradox so thanks to your Sam Harris podcast I started going more and more down a mindfulness Rabbit Hole bunch of people did that I was with someone recently that said that it's so good and within that he has this few things that I had out the back of it that then created the forgetting Paradox which which is you start to observe your thoughts and Sam presents this idea of like think of a candle and he goes well are you that candle it's like well no of course I'm not that candle so it's like why do you therefore identify of every other thought and then he has this scenario where it's like think of or basically wait for the next thought to appear in your head and try and predict it as it's happen or like just try and observe it as it's happening sorry my one was so is so Niche this my one was so I sat there and from nowhere this is when I realized I wasn't control my own thoughts it was just iron Robin cutting in on the left wing he's like this former football player who retired like 8 years ago and I'm like that it's almost like a dream state and I was like that's why I called it waking uput wrers that's fantastic yeah and the thing that I hadn't heard Sam talk about that I realized off the back of that was ask you I'll ask you this question now how many thoughts like clear sentence thoughts do you remember from yesterday very few almost none can you think of any like a sentence one over dinner that I spoke to Alex about who's debating Ben Shapiro today but I didn't say it to him okay because he was talking so you remember one thought from yesterday what about the day before I assume day before zero right yeah I so so you have 10,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day and you captured one anyone listening at home pause it and just go how many thoughts do I remember from yet like clear sentences not I feel hungry or whatever clear sentences so from a 24-hour window kind of like Twitter or Tik Tok the mind's thoughts completely disappear and it's quite a useful tool that then when a thought Loop appears you just go oh this is going to disappear tomorrow and you realize the forgetting Paradox is this is not just at the individual psychological level it's at the general societal level of we forget how many things we forget because by definition we've forgotten them and if we hadn't have forgotten them therefore we would have remembered them the same way you had 10 to 70,000 thoughts yesterday and you remember one but you don't remember you don't even realize how many thoughts you forgot because by definition you completely forgot them and you see this with like trending topics as well where it comes and then someone will mention that and you'll go [ __ ] I I haven't thought about that in years it's only when the that pops back in do you see the forgetting Paradox that guy cutting back in on the left wing yeah yeah yeah well you're very good at this it's one thing I've changed my mind upon as a result of this like there's a probably a whole wave of guys that listen to your podcast who are like just ghost in Instagram guys they don't really post the social media but one of the uh second and third all the consequences of that is you don't capture much of your life yeah and I'm stting here now at 29 I've always avoided photos and videos because I didn't want to be seen as that vain guy on Instagram yeah but I think something you're very good at is capturing content and as I get older you realize how important that is because you go [ __ ] but you decoupled I realized this too that coming from like whatever a [ __ ] I come from a love Island background um which is um the problem of that that is I Associated taking photos with posting on social media and being go right I did lunch on Sunday from the plane uh with Douglas Murray in this nice [ __ ] restaurant somewhere I had Crocs on uh and Douglas was in a full suit and we had lunch and we it was four hours and we got to have this great conversation and I was like I want to remember this not that I don't not that I would forget it in any case but I want to properly remember this but you're like when do you take a oh mate come here let's take a photo hang on a this will when that resurfaces on my memories or whatever I'm not taking aot to it on social media but because most people only take photos so that they can then post them on social media I dissociated taking photos and remembering my life with being a vain Instagram idiot not the same we need to like make photos great again for guys yeah like decouple taking photos from thinking that you are creating content right or being narcissistic or doing this to to cor and that's even worse if you're a content creator right if you're someone that's posting stuff on the internet you're like oh here we go again like better [ __ ] switch the workface on whatever it's not like that it's like I'm just taking a photo to be with my friends but I wonder about how uh how much people think about the the focus on the thoughts that arise how much they they consider what they're going through right now to be unbelievably important you forget how many things you've forgotten because you've forgotten how much you forgot this has always been a justification for me to get people to force thoughts into words either spoken written even art in some regards but I think it's best to do it in actual words because I've said this a million times on the show but when you have a thought it's like a cloud right it's like trying to hold smoke it's like this wispy ephemeral kind of like it's a smell it's like this Ambiance that you've got and you're like it's yeah I kind of know what it is it's okay tell me like tell me what that idea is and then you try and squeeze it down into words and you go I actually don't have any idea about this and I remember before I had the podcast I but after I'd started thinking about things more seriously but before I had an outlet that caused me to be rigorous and highly scrutin uh scrutinize heavily what I was thinking about I had ideas that I didn't know I had ideas that I didn't know right this sense but I'd never forced it into to take form and it concretizes thing that's why writing is such a good tactic for this or or having conversations with people that you care about you know the strategy of um recording a podcast with a friend that you're never going to publish like 30 minutes once per week put the voice recorder on if you don't want to be a content creator or you just can't be bothered or you're not confident enough yet sit down with a friend press record have a conversation about whatever you want but it's focused it's rigorous so on well there's a few things here so one there's this idea I store from baji which I call it the BAGI Transformer which is when you wanting to become creative he tries to understand everything from a written perspective then from a algorith like he'll create an algorithm of the same piece then he'll speak it out loud then he'll draw it on a whiteboard like Walt Disney's business plan map and the when you transform it from thought to words to written to visual drawing you actually that action of transforming is where the creativity begins to occur or the clarity um on this specific point though I think relating to the forgetting Paradox that begins to exist as a result is or we we've particularly going back looping back round to CBT that we spoke about at the beginning this is like such midwit simple [ __ ] but it's so good like we talk spoke about the the CBT triangle at the beginning the next thing that they get you to do is so let's say you have like a recurring thought of I'm a [ __ ] loser like something really dark the natural thing like the Instagram gurus are like no you believe in your like pump your chest up so in CBT what they'll what they'll get you to do is we just write down the thought that you have and the ability to move it from mind to paper and you just kind of look at it there and then the next thing which is great what they do is rather than just like try and fight that thought which then kind of creates balloons it more and more and more because you're repressing it it's like what's five like bits of evidence that support that it's like well I'm losing Touch of all my friends I've not been to the gym in weeks I I I thought I'd be here by 25 or 35 and I'm not there and you write down all those reasons and then you go you get all the [ __ ] air out of the balloon of that thought and then in CBT it just goes okay and what's all the evidence that you haven't considered it's like well well when I go to XYZ party people are so happy see me or and then at the end kind of like the jury the for and against you just go well based off all the evidence I have now what's some more useful potential for on this specific point Have you heard of true uh it's from Derek civas which is so good which is this idea of um not true but useful yeah I've been playing with something similar which is figuratively true but literally false and literally true but figuratively false yeah whereas we had that chat about determinism right whereas I think determinism is potentially true but harmful and good what I realized now for the determinism debate just say I'm I completely agree with you guys unfortunately I'm just a 100% determined to believe Free Will is true yeah and I'm just it's just determined it's I can't change it um but a good example that civas has there is yeah useful or sorry not true but useful beliefs and essentially anything outside of physical reality to some extent can fall in that of it might not be true but what's useful and with cognitive behavioral therapy you can just analyze both for and against and then come to your own conclusion yeah the figuratively true but literally false literally true but figuratively false is great so um porcupines can throw their quills literally false figuratively good to stay clear of the [ __ ] porcupine um religion throughout time looked at pigs uh as uniquely sort of morally dirty animals uh literally false but figuratively their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load typically than other animals like for like so let's not eat them good the reverse literally true true but figuratively false or functionally useless would be a different way to put it belief that uh Free Will doesn't exist okay right everyone seems to say all the smart people seem to say that that's the case and all of the people that seem to have some counterargument to it it's all like lexical Brazilian jiu-jitsu where they actually change what free will means like Dan dennet kind of does this he just sort of kicks the can down the road all of the like compatibilism stuff seems to kind of Kick the Can down the road but I spiraled a ex Club manager into a two we depression because I sent him 45 minutes of Sam Harris on Joe Rogan redpilling him about Free Will and he didn't leave the house for two weeks cuz he's like well I've got no free will it's [ __ ] pointless right that's [ __ ] information Hazard I don't need to know about that I definitely don't need to believe it and I don't need put any stock in believing it so it I guess it's a bit of a slippery slope if the only things that you believe are functionally the things that are beneficial to you because you can end up actually no because useful useful is the word not beneficial useful because self deluding yourself to something that's so grandstanding and harmful isn't useful it's anything that's fundamentally useful to you and the people around you what's the new ideas that sound crazy but will be normal 10 to 20 years from now yeah so obviously last time we had the what is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians and what ideas sound crazy today but we'll be we'll look back and go oh [ __ ] kind of like when you know the internet comes along and it's like like everyone was mocking it and boom we're here now I have a a list of these so one which is my greatest meme I've ever created so going back to cyber that it's kind of an ugly industry one industry that might be uglier than cyber there's two so one is Plumbing industry and as a result there's so many entrepreneurs creating woot bands aura rings like trackers glucose it's super sexy creating a smart toilet like a the total addressable Market is huge yeah if you have a smart toilet and the meme I created was like the toilet speaking to you which is like good news you're hydrated bad news you've got chlamidia right and a smart toilet could feasibly eradicate all STI and STDs like that you could the amount of data that's in piss and [ __ ] yeah that exists but nobody wants to touch that because it's a bit bit icky right the same when uh another similar strand to this which I don't like to say out loud but we're going to have to so m g porn company that own every single porn site you can think of had the biggest Technological monopoly of all time but nobody spoke about it there was no government bodies getting involved because they didn't want to touch it because it was icky and I think a lot of these ideas are potentially icky another one I think about is with AI coming along right now all my single friends complain dating apps that they hate the swiping they like the dates but they hate the swiping and when dating apps came along it was it was seen as the ickiest thing people people mocked it but now like is like 50% of people meet their potential partner online and the everything else has gone through the floor in terms of how they meet the only one that's gone up is restaurants and bars have you seen this so the only one that goes up in that chart of how did you meet outside of dating gaps because dating gaps is at the whole market like Mark Andre software reading the world is restaurants and bars and I'm convinced that's [ __ ] I'm convinced it's people who met on dating apps that don't want to say that they met on dating apps because there's a huge bracket of those so dating apps at the whole market and I think with AI coming along it's going to be so obvious where where it moves to a more matchmaking model where you're not swiping based off your data sets and then you're getting a few specific candidates keeper. a no uh I'm pretty sure that this is like algo Matchmaker It's a combination of I think personal uh individual actual functional human and AI matchmaking keeper it's for people who want long-term relationships and uh yeah they're trying to use data sets to find compatibility between people it makes sense right it's like the anti-dating app dating app versus manually swiping and judging it purely off looks and then you meet them and it's completely different and they don't look that way and they've lied and it's a completely broken system yeah it's looking at what will be accepted as a plausible future technology I certainly don't think I know that you've been on this for a while you were you were pretty sure that pseudonymity on the internet would become more widely accepted I still don't think that that's going to be the case where' you sit on that now I've got a weird opinion on this one I could be so man all these op because all your other opinions have been so normal so normal so far uh all of these opinions I think will ultimately there's high risk in that right if it a lot of them allow it to fail because by definition if they sound weird today it's because they're [ __ ] weird or they're wrong right but I do think as soon as these you're already seeing these virtual influence come along and I think you'll have the pity combined with a virtual influencer because if you look at traditional media reality TV was really late only came along in like the 90s like as it came along versus social media it's always been reality TV there's no James Bond in social media there's no Spider-Man in social media there's no Superman there's no Batman of these characters with IP that begin to exist so I do think that's where that there's a guy we spoke about him called the cultural tutor on Twitter and he's just gone um so I I do think that's got potential but yeah I don't think it's necessarily as big the pseudonymity thing hasn't taken off yet but is that because it won't take off yet or because it's had certain technological restrictions um I'd say the other one which you you red pilled me on this so me and you are on a flight like three years ago this is inside the actor studio and Chris's like this is bear in mind Chris's podcast at that point we're on a beach after that flight and he goes if I can get things to 100,000 subscribers I think I'll be happy um and you say to me on that flight or we got our face masks on you go I'm thinking of working with a speaking coach and I was like as a friend I was like do I say something here because I don't think this is the right move and in my defense I was concerned that you'd go the full politician it would sterilize any character I had when politicians speak like this and it just immediately is Horseshoe Theory like you you're so charismatic it becomes uncharismatic and I was concerned that would happen to you and I told you that and you you rightfully ignored me and then like three years later I'm listening to that Rogan podcast and he said that the way you pronounced words if you was running for president he would uh vote for you right and I texted you going one I'm sorry I was wrong two can I get an intro right wanted an intro to the speech coach so I do wonder whether Charisma will become the new fitness so the same way Instagram made people concerned more about how they look voice memos podcasts recorded Zoom calls remote work people hearing themselves back will begin to become a bigger bigger thing yeah that's a that's a very good point we're definitely being more surveillance scrutinizes your delivery right in a way that you didn't do previously um have we seen people take writing classes so they can do better Facebook statuses I'm not sure um but no but even like going back to what we said earlier of RZ becoming a meme and then people at least just thinking about yeah whether there'll be more like doing exactly what you did probably not but there'll be I I think it'll become an area that people are a lot more mindful of the same way people who work out aren't necessarily paying for a PT yeah that's true the Gap in the gain was something I think I introduced you to as well this idea that there are two ways to live either comparing yourself to where you want to be or comparing yourself to where you were and one of them is like running toward the Horizon which is every step that you move forward you are inevitably going to push the desires that you have one step further away from yourself Morgan housel his quote about the best way to win the game is to stop moving the [ __ ] goal posts uh and I had this conversation with big Dan belerian over the weekend and said um every time that you achieve something what you're doing is positing a new minimum bar which you have to get over right fantastic I've just done this many plays or made this piece of art that's sold for a particular amount of money or whatever how exciting and almost immediately mediately there is this sort of like postal [ __ ] realization that oh my God that's the new bar for my best performance that's really high that means I now need to be even better at my next thing and someone recently won the largest lottery in history A1 billion Lottery someone just won that from a life trajectory perspective that's potentially one of the most disastrous things that you could have happen to you because how are you ever going to have a better day than the day you woke up and found out that you'd won a billion dollars it's the argument is uh slow success strategy would be to purposefully try and drag out the wins that you have so or Buffet sty a tactical way that you could do this would actually be let's say that you um start to accumulate more wealth Financial Freedom and stuff like that and you can afford your absolute dream car but instead of buying the absolute dream car you buy one of the dream cars that's kind of on route to that one it was the the 50% or the 75% car that goes in between because you'll still take a good bit of pleasure from that one and you'll have something to look forward to that you know is within your control and you're not then looking for the overclocked 150% dream car right I mean the hel I'm buying yachts and I'm buying boats and all this other stuff so I think and I said this to Dan you know somebody who you know winning um poke games and stuff is large influxes of cash uh in kind of out of nowhere and he seemed to agree that um it expedites your ability to just like play the honic adaptation game but it overclocks the pace at which you have access to it and it's dangerous so yeah slow success strategy as a counter to the Gap in the gain sort of game that we play with each other and this whole honic adaptation thing h i don't it's one of those things though of theory then reality like can you actually slow yourself down once that dopamine kicks in that takes a lot of wisdom right it takes a hell of a lot of restraint yeah I I mean I don't I don't know and like what are you going to do like say oh no I don't want that billion dollars from the lottery please sir but you know even with that okay can I get someone to set up some sort of fund or trust that like drip feeds this to me or invests it in a particular way or I I don't know just placing trying to place your self worth in different different ways different different Loc but I I I mean the Gap in the gain is one of the most important ideas that I keep forgetting about it's like a Ben Hardy bck from three years ago and he came on the show to talk about and it's really great every time that I find myself getting too deep into dopamine Chris uh we should talk about that we should talk about the difference between dopamine George and serotonin George and then also probably cortisol George as well um but we both feel this and I think a lot of people do that you just live in this sort of next task next achievement overclocked hustle grind culture I will get my pleasure from my accomplishments as opposed to the one that actually ends up being more fulfilling which is I spend time with my friends lying in the park under a tree like eating some snacks that somebody brought along or something like that's the more serotonin side of things I think the Gap in the game is just a better meme for abundance and scarcity mindset abundance and scarcity kind of Got Hijacked a little bit by a lot of woo woo whereas beautiful thing about the Gap in the gain so you always have three things right you have who you are now this [ __ ] future idealized projected version where you've trillionaire and everything's going well and everybody loves you that Gap no matter again no matter how much you move up just grows it's infinite versus you have a third state which is where you started so the the gain is measuring yourself constantly from where you started and the Gap is measuring yourself to this infinite ideal but the be to honest with you it's a nice concept right but that's one of those it's the forgetting Paradox you can learn that and then it disappears for two years from now but going back to like resting serious face or resting smile face the beautiful thing about the gap of the gain is you can only you can only exist in one of the two states at once that's what I loved about that concept is you're even in the gap or you're even in the gain so just constantly throughout the day either resting serious face or resting smile face yeah it's a simple razor it's mid it's midwit which is beautiful yeah what do you think's the most useful emotional state oh yeah so this is a a niche thought experiment but I'll give it to the audience so the inspiration for this thought experiment was you ever heard that kind of bro bar debate of you have the world's best athletes across every 100 top sports which one is the technical best athlete in the sense that you take a basketball player footballer NFL MMA and they'd all do the other 99 Sports who would rank the highest and there's a big like bro debate about it it's great and uh um I was like okay that's an interesting idea and I realized I'd lay there in bed and again I and Robins just cro like cutting on the left wig and then this thought Pops in my head and I'm like what would be the if you applied that for emotions what would be the most useful emotional state so you create this [ __ ] Olympics of like happiness s sadness anger Joy fear Envy etc etc and then you looked at hundred different life events you could be in doing a podcast with you going for a bike ride getting a Starbucks getting fired from my job what's the outcome that you're optimizing for here most useful what's useful H probably achieving the outcome that you would would have liked upon reflection right okay is the way I'd probably describe that um but i' I'd probably need to think about that more but let's say you have all those situations from married to funeral to losing job to first day at job and you had looked at all the different emotions you could have like which one would perform the best on average and I realized I go probably calm if you could like it's not even like the sports debate where it's like Up For Debate I go I think carness just is top for pretty much the moreall or if not it's it's in the Champions League place it's in that like top four and to but then I was like okay let's steal my myself here I wasn't sleeping that night so I was like okay well let's say for example there's a fire breaks out the building would you want to be calm would be the criticism of it and it's like you wouldn't want to be slothful you wouldn't want to be lazy but you'd probably want to be calm I assume I'm not a fan we have [ __ ] jobs right like we don't do serious jobs but when you chat to people who have proper jobs the best guys are the ones that are calm Under Pressure so I think it kills that and then the second criticism if you was to steal Manet as well would be well let's say it's your that may work for neutral events or toxic events or things where it has to go well but let's say it's your wedding day do you want to be calm and I was like that's probably a good criticism but then I was thinking about it and whenever you speak to people about the wedding day they always say it was great but I just wish I soaked it in more I wish I could slow down time a bit more and I don't think anything slows down time quite like calmness and for any criticism you do have where you wouldn't want to be calm the beautiful thing about calmness is you can calmness is such a base state that you can then ramp up any emotion on top of but you can't do the reverse it's really hard to go from an anger to like Peak calmness yeah so I just looked at it and go that wins the debate and then I fell to sleep that night calmly yeah calmly Douglas asked me yesterday what like I aim for in life and I used the word peace uh which sounds so cooked like in retrospect it just sounds so lame especially when I'm talking to this you know like Firebrand [ __ ] like cultural commentator guy like says things that people don't like and all the rest of it but it is true that like if the price is your sanity you shouldn't pay it for pretty much whatever it is there's almost nothing that's worth that because ultimately without your sanity you can't enjoy any of the things that you're going to get from it in any case uh and I think that largely calmness and peace could probably be interchangeable here but to to critique us here what I would say as a listener it's like yeah that's [ __ ] nice and I might forget that as part of the forgetting Paradox but like what does that do it's like well how do I become calm and the answer is I haven't [ __ ] fully figured that out yet but i s I guess the first step is realizing that it's probably the most useful something to aim for and again using the hidden and observable metrics Matrix like it's one of the most hidden metrics right the texture of your own mind I will happily work a job with a boss that's a dick that pays more money that makes me feel miserable that causes me to be anxious before I go into work because I can't see the price that I'm paying in terms of my lack of peace or calmness right but I can see the increase in my bank balance every month right just trading it in trading in that hidden metric for an observable one you're seeing that with glucose monitors in the sense that people would just eat whatever yeah and now they have that orange juice and then video game dashboard go terrible that they can begin to piece that together we unfortunately don't I was going back to resting [ __ ] smile face if there was a way of tracking that throughout the day and you could turn it into a video game of where your facial expressions were sat I think you'd have a lot happier people it's weird yeah what was that you told me and you described it really beautifully and it was the first time that anyone had described the same psychosis that I go through when I meditating about uh I'm the sort of person that has thoughts about thoughts oh yeah we were chatting about this over dinner where it it's this infinite Loop that can exist when you're observing your own mind and you get to a state of no thoughts and then after you've dealt with all the iron Robin thoughts the what comes up is oh look at me having no thoughts I'm [ __ ] great and then you end up in that well yeah it's a Trojan thought you think oh wow I'm the sort of narcissist that thinks wow look at me the sort of person that has no thoughts and then you think oh my God I'm so self-deprecating I'm I'm the sort of person that mocks me for being the sort of person that thinks wow I'm the sort of person oh my God and then you just cycle of Doom so funny man so funny what else you got um we always have chats about uh High agency and again that's a powerful meme right now but I've been like collecting like examples one of them that came from uh mutual friend David CRA have you heard about James Cameron I like this is one of the craziest stories ever again talk about memes or ideas so you know James Cameron the movie director so he was a truck driver when he was 18 and he couldn't AFF form he couldn't afford to go to movie St uh to a movie uh education what you call it Film Studio film school and he decided I can't afford it so I mean the low AG thing that is like okay it's set reality blah blah blah and I was like this guy's so good that he came up with the idea of going to the library and everybody who could afford the film degree when they're handing in their dissertation all their work they' put it in the library that night he would just go there take the pieces late at night put them in the photocopying machine photocopy photocopy photocopy and taught himself his whole film degree from scratch because he couldn't afford it I was like that is Elite story so good wow that is cool there's a another one we spoke about a while ago in the high agency Library I told you about the guy that took down Silk Road so Silk Road was the biggest black Market illegal drugs Empire the FBI were after him the CIA were after him the da were after him this guy called dread pirate Roberts who turned out to be Ross alri and there's a lot about that case that gets super political and I don't want to have that conversation because I'm not educated on it but the specific part that I found fascinating was the way he got caught so the FBI with all their resources best Intel best spyware in the world couldn't catch him it was this one tax inspector who started working on the casee and this guy just thinks okay I'll go on Google and just searches he goes what about if I just find the first original post about Silk Road online and he finds it in this Bitcoin forum and what the dread pirate robberts did obviously when you're at that zero to one stage of a new company even if it's an illegal drug Market Empire you need to get people in so he create an account like going oh my God have people seen this and he's like this is the earliest post that exists online and he reached out to the Forum owners I was like essentially reverse engineered this Altoid handle what the email address was and it was Ross @gmail.com and he was the first guy to W mask and I love that story because it's like one guy with Google has beat the FBI the CIA the daa achieving essentially the most wanted man in America at the time that's like similar to James Cameron right like a guy with essentially no resources but can massively overperform have you watch speaking of movies there's a new guy Richie film out uh that's an oddly very similar plot to the gentleman but is different I can't remember what it's called it's on Amazon Prime everyone should go and watch it it's guy Richie the guy's [ __ ] brilliant but if you seen it turns out Douglas is friends with him and um you know that he has created his own like Hut SL barbecue slf footwarmer thing do you know about this no right so in the gentleman if you see uh Hugh Grant toward the end when he's confronting Charlie hunen uh and trying to screw him over uh the outside and they kind of sat under this like kind of a nice sort of indoor outdoor mezzanin looking shed type thing and there's like a fire and a big smoke turns out that guy Richie invented that like it's his product right this is the ultimate product placement that he's put in and I think they talk about one of the features that he has in the gentleman and then in this most recent one again it's Hugh Grand playing a very similar sort of role this time he's like a rich billionaire like super super dick Guy and um he's like cuts to this scene and he's explaining how he's like reverse searing a steak on guy Richie's custom designed thing which you can go and buy it's super expensive I think but you can go and buy it on the internet search like guy Richie barbecue and I'm sure it'll come up and um yeah he just he's just got this product that he's created I'm pretty sure when he went on Rogan that he talked about it but yeah he's just got this product that he created that is now featuring in multi-million dollar blockbuster movies in directed by this great guy but yeah ultimately he just like a I guess part of the funnel for his Super Chief meme officer Chief meme officer yeah is super expensive but barbecue what have you got coming up next what's the next few months got in store for you a few different things uh I've got a few essays I want to publish a few different ideas I'm working on but yeah just I don't actually know how to answer that question just enjoying it good where should people go they want to keep up to date with your reading your writing all the rest of the stuff yeah so best place is Twitter or X just George Cormac sign up to the newsletter list as well at george.com or George dm.com some bastard's got the thing without the dash yeah you can find it all there hell yeah George I appreciate you thank you man thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with George you will love my fulllength 2hour Long podcast episode with Douglas Murray go on give it a watch