What's the busy trap? The busy trap is the idea that we're busy today because we were busy yesterday, and we'll be busy tomorrow because we're busy today. And it's this never-ending busyness that we get busier because we're busy now.
Weirdly, I was looking at Google Trends earlier, and if you look at the word busy from 2004, it's like the Apple stock price. Just each year, we get about 10% more busier, and we're constantly hitting the peak every single year. of people searching the word busy. Right, so busyness is getting busier. Yes.
Right. And what do you mean when you say that you waste years not being able to waste hours? This is a quote from Amos Tversky, who was Daniel Kahneman's writing partner on Thinking Fast and Slow.
When you hear it, as a writer, you're like, why didn't I write that? That is so good. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It's this idea that because we're so busy, we never get round to actually asking the bigger questions.
We're constantly on the C plus tasks rather than the A plus tasks. And one of the memes I posted with this essay, it's two guys working extremely hard, like being super busy. And there's one guy in the corner who's like, you're right, lads, can I give you a bit of help?
And he goes, we're too busy. And the guy's carrying a wheel. And these guys are carrying everything, but they're too busy to realize that there's a wheel out there.
And I think Tversky's point with that is by having a few extra hours in your schedule. you may change your annual direction here or there. But if you're constantly compressing everything into some kind of maximum efficiency, you end up wasting years as a result. Why is the busy trap a trap?
Why do we default to busy as opposed to defaulting to lots of spare time? I think, well, there's, to quote the philosopher Molly May, there's only 24 hours in the day, Chris, which is a lie, by the way, which is a lie, not having a go at Molly, but... There's actually 16 hours in the day.
I find the fact that we talk about 24 hours when we sleep for eight hours is absurd. It's like confusing your revenue with your profit. It's putting up the Shopify screenshot. It's like, how much did you spend on other things there? So you have, let's say, 16 hours a day, and that's pretty lindy.
That's been consistent throughout human history, our experience of time. Meanwhile, the amount of activities we can now do. the amount of content that gets uploaded to YouTube every minute, the amount of Slack messages that are coming through, the amount of emails that are coming through, the beauty of digital systems is it's so high leverage. As you're sat here right now, there's probably 5,000 people watching a clip of Chris as we speak in the next couple of minutes.
And that at the digital level for yourself is a constant problem because you only have 16 hours in the day, yet there's things that are constantly coming through. Unless you're proactively... trying to put systems in place, you will just get destroyed by the busy trap.
We also learn in school to do work without questioning the work. Yes. One of my old essays was this point around that a lot of the behaviours from school that you were rewarded for, you ultimately get punished for later in life.
A lot of the behaviours at school that you were punished for, you ultimately get rewarded for later in life. It's this sad change of affairs. I realised my age from like 20 to 29 was just trying to rewrite what I learned from 10 to 19. So it's been a clusterfuck. And one of the behaviours that you were punished for in school that you get rewarded for later in life is asking, why are we doing this? Does this make sense?
Is this the most important thing to be working on? If you said that in your like year 10 algebra class, it doesn't go down well. Shut up, Mac.
Yeah, exactly. But what did go down well is if you just complied and took the schedule as it came through. And I think you basically have these digital systems compounding on top of these weird or, let's say, incorrect behaviours that you learn at school.
Yeah. And what about the trap element of busyness? Why does it cyclically make us more prone to being busy in the future? Everyone's experience cleaning out their inbox and you realize you've not cleaned out your inbox. You've just essentially chopped off Hydra's head and another head has reappeared.
So the more you almost try and defeat busyness, ultimately the more busy you become. Actually my number one test for myself, because I've been this guy, still I'm this guy, recovering busy guy. The number one test I have for myself is I know I'm too busy if I don't know what the most important question is right now.
What do you mean by question? The priority, the thing I need to be answering. And the irony is if you don't know what the most important thing to do in your life right now is, or the most important question to answer, or what the number one focus should be, you've actually just found it. So that's quite a beautiful thing within itself.
So if you are concerned that you're too busy, whenever I'm concerned that I'm too busy and I go, I've not figured out what the most important thing to focus on right now is, I've just figured it out. Focusing on what is the most important thing to focus on right now is what to focus on. Yeah.
Yeah. What are some other signs that you're too busy? Like when you think back to the times when you've been drowning in busy work, what are some of the other things that come along for the ride?
I think it's... So it's a funny message I got sent the other day when I posted this from my friend Phil, and he was saying how the essay hit him. And he asked himself this question, which was, let's say he set his five goals for the week. And he said, if I got them done by Tuesday, how would I feel or what would I do? And he goes, I think I'd go in this full blown anxiety of what do I do for the rest of these few days?
And the irony is, he goes, that problem means that it just stretches out throughout the week versus if he just said, to myself, how about I sprint, get everything done by Tuesday? Then I'm relatively three, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But this busyness, because you're so busy, you constantly need to stay busy.
You're addicted to that feeling. You're like the rat when the cheese comes out. Whenever I've found I'm too busy is I know that Peter Drucker has this great thing called the activity trap, which is essentially the idea you have your activity and you have your output. And your activity...
is just inputs going in the system, doing things, replying to messages, clicking buttons and moving around and feeling like you've done something. But often at the end of the day, nothing's happened. So the activity trap is if you stress activity, you don't necessarily increase output. Whenever you stress output, so the end result, you'll always improve output, but you'll often actually ironically decrease activity. So the biggest thing for me is if I'm sat there at the end of the day and I'm feeling exhausted, I'm like, what's actually got done?
Well, yeah, not what did I do? What got done? Because what I did doesn't actually always result in something being done on the other side.
What was that Andy Groves quote that you told us in Miami? It's yeah, it gave me goosebumps. This one, the quote is people, there's so many people working so hard and achieving so little. What's that mean to you? It's, it's the type A personality trap, which I easily fall into, where you end up exactly what my friend said earlier, where they would rather get their five goals done for the week on the Friday, so they're constantly feeling busy, than actually done sooner.
What it means is there's so much inputs going into the system without any outputs. And because we're so busy, we never actually get time to question the outputs that we're producing. There's another element of this. especially for people that work in offices, the demonstration of effort. You're not cranking widgets.
You can't see the bucket of widgets to be cranked to the one you're cranking in the bucket of widgets that you have cranked today. So how do people demonstrate their work, their effort, their optimizing for signals of busyness, which is always being the quickest person to reply. Didn't you tell me that some dude in your Slack channel was the only guy in the entire company that checked Slack on Christmas day? Yes. yeah he's incredible that guy uh bradley um so yeah i mean slack's a problem itself um i was thinking and i'd be surprised if we don't look back five to ten years from now about how broken slack is because sometimes i'll check slack like a social network i'm just like refreshing the feed just to see what's going on what's going on yeah even in channels that you're not supposed to be supervising you just happen to be in because you're an admin so sam karakis the guy that could have butchered his last name there but fuck it uh the guy that runs levels.
He said it was a study recently where the average tech worker checks Slack every seven minutes, which is quite an absurd, absurd idea for people that are trying to increase outputs to be constantly moving things, just messages and bits back and forth. What about energy? How does sort of energy flows throughout the day play into the busy trap? Yeah.
I think the, the law I found with my own personal energy levels is that if I don't get like proactively schedule things in the increase my energy they'll never happen and if i don't proactively defend things that decrease my energy they will eat up my calendar it's kind of like running a business it all all it's almost like the laws of physics that your revenue is trying to go down every day and your costs are trying to go up every day and it's exactly the same with energy and i weirdly found this when i was traveling or when i'm going through super stressful periods of life that the natural idiot brain that I have is. Imagine your energy levels like inflows and outflows, like an engineering system. Whenever there's lots of energy outflows on the system, i.e. I'm super stressed, i.e.
I'm traveling right now, the natural weird thing that we do is to turn off all the energy inflows. To give ourselves more time to work on the outflows. The outflows, and then you end up completely burnt out, whereas actually what you need to do is crank up the energy inflows more to deal with the higher costs on the system. Last week I tweeted, there's no such thing as being overworked, only under-rested.
How much truth do you think's in that? I think it was, it was one of the, I forgot which president it was who said that I never stand up when I can sit down and I never, I never worked, sorry, I never work stood up when I can be working sit down, sat down and I never work sat down when I could be lay down. And even Churchill, when you think about grinding, like Churchill World War II, that's some like Sigma, serious Sigma grind set right there, like the apex.
And even him taking multiple naps throughout the day. That's one of the reasons how he managed to work throughout the nights. That concept of, there's no such thing as being overworked, there's just under rest, makes so much sense from a utility perspective. It might not necessarily be true, but it reframes it. I think it's one of those things that probably doesn't work in theory, but does work in practice.
where you can pick that apart as a pithy little aphorism. But if you actually think about what your felt experience of being a very busy person in the world is like, have you ever been overworked when you haven't been under rested? Has there ever been a time when you've gone, wow, I'm rested, but also overworked?
No, almost never. Because of the busy trap, because of the fact that you continue to loop yourself back. Oh, well, I'd better reject all of the things that give me more energy by... meditating or breathwork or getting up early or going for a walk or going to the gym or spending time with friends or turning the airpods off for five minutes today you don't do any of those things so it's it's kind of a uh sort of a self um answering question which is that those two things are the same for most people they're not the same in theory but in practice they are being overworked and being under rested are the same thing they're two sides of the same coin And you can have scenarios where you've not worked in weeks, but you've been on TikTok nine hours a day. Still not under, still not rested.
Still not rested. And you can have other scenarios where you've worked the hardest you have in your entire life, but because you've got those energy inflow systems dialed, you don't reach the same burnout that you would. And it's another hidden and observable metrics problem too, right? That what you're trying to optimize for is quality of life.
clear thinking great ideas opportunity to to have leverage on on what it is that you're coming up with where does that appear on my slack analytics on my balance sheet it doesn't even really appear on my fucking whoop data but the number of emails that i sent uh the uh reduction in my total number of unread messages the all of that stuff super easy to quantify so you're sacrificing the thing you want clear thinking for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is clearing out admin tasks. Yeah, it's quite horrific how much time we waste. One of the experiments is to go back to your Google Calendar this time last year and look at certain things that you did, and you'll often realize that most of it was a complete waste of time.
Does any of this matter? I mean, there's always that power law that exists. I heard yesterday that...
even Warren Buffett in one of his shareholder letters said that I think it was only 12 of his investments that really moved the needle for Berkshire Hathaway, which was about 4%. So even the guy, like the best allocator in this case of capital rather than time, only 4% of his bets were correct. And that's him spending so much time thinking every single day.
And if you're then so busy, we're not even going to get past the 1%, or at least I'm not. You said, bringing a victorian factory worker mindset to the age of infinite leverage is like bringing boxing gloves to a drone war yes um one of my favorite lines i think i need to flesh this idea out more but this was kind of a aphorism to myself i try and paint on the back of my eyelids which is this idea that let's say you have quote unquote type a type b personalities i don't know if it's an actual thing but just for the utility of categorizing them You have type A personalities that they have a, what feels like a work ethic problem. They constantly feel lazy, but it's actually a work ethic problem.
It's actually a leverage problem disguised as a work ethic problem. And type B personalities have a... They think they constantly have a leverage problem, but they actually have a work ethic problem. And you'll be able to immediately bucket those people inside your head immediately. Yeah, I think a lot about trying to dial back busyness.
You know, we're both of us are kind of permanently fighting this entropy on a morning. Well, what should maybe time block the morning and protect it? Go through some of the tactics from a strategic perspective.
that you've used personally to try and defend the busy trap? So go back to cocaine, KL phone. Everybody should know that by now, two separate phones. I'd say the busy trap for me, probably the easiest thing is having a big three.
So I got this from the concept of 4,000 weeks and having a big three of things I need to do. And then everything else just goes to the everything else section and the idea of only being able to have three tasks on the big three makes you prioritize things by definition i think ultimately the opposite of the busy trap is prioritization which is such a difficult skill when there's infinite things coming at you yeah if there's so much that you could be focused on and permanent notifications this ambient sense that you're falling behind oliver berkman has this beautiful sentence where he it's in the productivity debt essay that he does. And he says, I just have this vague sense, this vague fear that I'm falling behind.
And I think that that kind of really encapsulates, at least for me, if I take too much time off. And here's the brutal thing. You realize that you have become your own taskmaster in many ways.
You complain about the prison of your busyness, but you realize that you're the guard that's holding the keys to it. You've locked yourself in and thrown them out. You know... Perfect example of this, if I spend a ton of time working and working and working, all I can think about is, oh God, it'd be so cool to just have a couple of days.
And I play pickleball and I have fun with my friends and go and do this thing. And about 10 hours into the first day of that, I think, I really could do with getting a bit of graph done. If I just, you know, there, and then you smack up with a little bit of slack or you get on an email or you do. You know, you complete a little bit of work.
So yeah, we are the prison guards of the jail that we're complaining about in many ways, which actually I think when people fully realize this, which everyone listening will have done because we've spoken about it a lot and they're all reasonable. There's a lot of shame that can come along with that too, which adds another layer of difficulty on top. So you say, God, you know, I'm choosing to do this to myself. I don't need to answer my boss's email.
at 11 p.m at night he's not expecting it i think it's even illegal in france or something they made that law right where you can't you can't contact this is it stinks of a threat of you um that you can't contact workers outside of their hours of work i think they it might even be like how china uh used that streaming service to stop kids from playing computer game it might be like cold turkey or frozen turkey but for work email or something but yeah they're just they're trying to have this sort of um workers health act where people don't work outside of it uh but it's you it's always been you and then you realize oh god it's me and then you think how shameful am i that i'm wasting my life i'm choosing to do this to myself and then you start to layer all of these stories on top yeah i came up with this idea of the midwit review the midwit week review which was previously i'd done an end of week reviews and it'd be like a three hour session there's like 60 different points and my midwit version now is for each area so like health life work what are what were the three wins this week and then what are the three things that would actually move the needle for each one and then when you say move the needle i can play in terms of leverage in terms of prioritization because otherwise unless you really think about each action i put that thing in the essay which is if you don't have 20 minutes each day to think about what's the most important thing you probably need an hour so getting another note to myself and What I mean by move the needle is I think probably one of the underpinnings of the busy trap is that you never really write down your hypothesis like a scientific experiment. You never say, so there's option one I can do today, I can reply to this Slack message or all these Slacks. Option two, I could build out this new marketing funnel that will take me two hours.
Option three, I could go see my parents, whatever it is, like in terms of that, and then actually mapping out, okay, according to all my different priority areas, what's that's going to deliver. It's much woolier in life, I guess, but from a business perspective, we very, very rarely ever go, okay, here's the five decisions we can make. How much time is each one going to, do we anticipate each one will make, each one will take and how much revenue.
Or profit will this thing make? And it's only then when you-Of this thing. Yeah.
Yeah. But we're having to play within the observable metric paradigm again. Yes.
Like, look what we're defaulting to. Say, well, quality of life, time with parents, the sanity of the internal texture of my mind. Profit.
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You can get up to a 32% discount site-wide off everything, including their protein, by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom. So you've been in the US three weeks now? No, more. More, actually, because you did Miami.
We've been talking a lot about differences between the UK and the USA. What have you come to believe about that? So my biggest takeaway from being in America as a Brit is it's like finding out my dad had a kid with another woman that I never met.
And we meet for the first time, and I'm like, you're kind of me. but you're not me. It's like he spent a bit more money on you. He made you believe in yourself.
Your mom was clearly much nicer or kinder. And you go, oh, Americans, we're kind of the same. But it's like Brits with self-belief. Brits with self-belief is what Americans are. It's one of the different, there's lots of pros and there's lots of cons for both.
But that was my overwhelming. overwhelming takeaway. The second biggest takeaway I have is that Brits don't really, truly realize how impactful the British accent is until you leave Britain. And the metaphor I came up with for describing the British accent to Brits is, imagine everywhere else in the world, there's a salmon famine, right?
And a British accent is like selling salmon and the only place in the world. where there's an abundance of salmon is in the UK. So if you're there using that, it basically gets you nothing in the UK, but you suddenly leave or go outside anywhere else.
And you're exotic. Anywhere else. And they think you're smarter. They think you're more attractive. Yeah.
Americans often ask me when they talk about that. And I do think it's true that Brits have an unfair advantage in America of being seen as more learned. They say everyone.
presumes that were part of the aristocracy or something. And they often ask me, well, what do you think of American accents in the UK? And that was a really interesting question.
I was like, I actually don't know. I think it's like, certainly for me on girls, it's like kind of sexy. It feels that that feels exotic in some way.
Definitely energetic, overly enthusiastic and excitable, especially when you've got one American in a bunch of Brits. When you're the Brit and a bunch of Americans, oh, you know, everyone's just sort of excitable and first-line cocaine energy. But when you drop one American in a, like, Newcastle or something, oh my God, who is that? It's a nuclear warhead surrounded by a bunch of swords.
Yeah, I think since being here, you know, it's made me reflect on the UK. I hate being disparaging about the UK. Like, it's the country that gave me a new start. We both went to university there.
We both had our first jobs there. We both built. businesses there uh i think we're both in one form or another still registered you'll be on company's house and some vestigial old fucking thing i hate i really wish that i didn't sort of talk badly about it but you sent me a tweet last week and i've been watching bald and bankrupt awesome youtube channel um i invited him on the show he replied he said he'd love to but he's actually trying to actively wind down his uh public exposure so he said he keeps getting asked for too many selfie photos in Tesco.
And he does strike me as the kind of man that probably doesn't want to be overexposed. You know, he was doing, for the people that don't know, this guy who does kind of like dark tourism stuff. He got trafficked across the border into Mexico.
He was detained in a Russian jail for a while. And then he decided he was going to take on the final boss of dangerous places, which was seaside towns of the UK. And he just travels around sort of looking at all of these bad places.
And you sent me that tweet last week, which I think nails it. which is the UK has the sixth largest economy in the world, but people are confused. The UK doesn't have the sixth largest economy in the world.
London has the sixth largest economy in the world. It just has a really poor country attached to a very rich city. Yeah, and then there was another one, which was US universities. So I think in the top 10 universities in the world, the UK has three and the US has three, yet the US out...
output five times the number of entrepreneurs that those UK universities do. So in theory, these people are as intelligent as one another across, I think it's Oxford, Cambridge and another university. King's, maybe Durham.
Maybe, yeah. And what's interesting when you go across global university rankings and outputs of entrepreneurs in the study that was shared, the UK university, which was Oxford, so that's the number one for entrepreneurial output, was 50th across the whole world, despite the fact we rank so high in education. Yet actually transforming that into entrepreneurship doesn't seem to happen. And I wonder again, whether that's the self-belief thing.
You also see this weirdly, and I could be mistaken here. I have this bias that I think Brits are fundamentally more funnier than Americans. However, way more great standup comedians that are American than British. Like we have Ricky Gervais, we have Jimmy Carr. And then in terms of global appeal outside of that, there's not a huge amount more.
And my theory behind that is, so why do you have the funniest people yet not the biggest standup comedians out of those names there? And I think the same crabs in a bucket mentality that makes people so funny because we can shoot people down and shoot ourselves down is the same thing that makes it absurd as a concept to go and get on stage and say, I want to be a funny person. Like that in the UK. So I think the funniest guy in the world right now is probably in a Greggs in Wigan, or he is in a pub in Portsmouth.
And because of that crabs in a bucket mentality, Americans are way more likely to get on stage and go, I want to be a funny person because that's part of the American DNA. Meanwhile, the Brits who I think are actually funnier don't end up doing as much. As well as entrepreneurial. But even within that, that sort of self-belief, it's one in the same. I think it's agency.
It's the preparedness to go against the grain. And, you know, we're going to talk about subprime audiences later on. But, you know, this audience is like, I would guess, I would say like it's full of like A's and double A's of people, especially the ones from the UK. And I think the reason that this resonates, I'm not saying it to disparage the UK. I don't think either of us are.
But to kind of reassure the people for whom they feel a little bit like a square peg in a round country. sat in the UK, you know, some normal town, you're in fucking Wakefield or Carlisle or Middlesbrough, Rochdale, wherever you are. And you think, God, you know, this is the sort of conversations I really love to have. This is the kind of thoughts that I think about.
And I really want to have big dreams for myself. And then I just really struggled to resonate with the people around me. I really, really failed to do that.
And I think I wish that I'd had. when I was younger, more reassurance that I wasn't the problem. There's no value judgment. People that have big dreams, people that don't have big dreams, but there's nothing inherently wrong with you having those dreams.
And there's no reason that you should be castigated or have the piss taken out of you because you want to do something different, because you don't intend being born, living, working, and dying within the same 20-mile radius of where your parents grew up. Yes, but even at a... walking around level you see this so if you walk around america there's flags everywhere there's kind of pride in the nation if you walk around the uk and you see a flag you go off edl member there might be a nazi which is unless there's a football tournament then everybody does it that's the weird paradox of the uk yeah so it's even at that level you see this kind of pride at the nation level and at the uk it's almost like this weird autoimmune condition do you have any idea why the British football team uses three lions rather than the St. George's cross?
Don't know. Isn't that interesting? Because I don't think Scotland does, and I don't think Ireland does, and I don't think Wales do.
can't think of any other team actually the uh england cricket guys will do the same thing there must be a reason someone will be correcting me in the comments as we speak um but that's yet for the americans that are listening british national pride like bnp british national pride i know it's not that but like it's just it doesn't exist and then you come over here and it is nice it's nice to hear that people have got have got pride in their country. So the, the, probably the critique people have of us right now is that we're critiquing Britain way more than we are critiquing America. But I'd also point out that's part of being British.
You're way more naturally to critique yourself and to critique other people. And I do love that side of being British because you're way more self-analytical. Um, I think in terms of other differences between the UK and the US that I've noticed in terms of benefits for Brits.
is because Brits take the piss out of one another, on average, way more, it means that you do have maybe that lowering self-belief, but you're almost a bit more anti-fragile. So if people do say a remark, you've already cracked a joke worse than that in the past, or your friends have. Particularly, and I think the more Northern in the country you go, the more that-It is the further away from London that you get, the more piss you have taken out of you.
Exactly. Whereas in America, I think people are a lot more, could be more fragile to comments like that. Whereas the Brits- The same way I always say there's two big differences that I think explain the differences between Americans and Brits. One is simple A-B test of when you meet an American and they're super enthusiastic and excited and the Brits aren't.
If you actually go historically back, there was a simple A-B test which is when the boats came and said, hey, there's this promised land far, far away. We can't show you a video because videos don't exist yet. You may die on the boat. do you want to come and visit this crazy land?
The Brits were the ones who were like, what a ridiculous idea that is. I'm going to stay here. I'm staying in Skegness. And the Americans were the ones who were like, yeah, bring it on. And that A-B test fundamentally explains it.
As well as when you think about it, historically Americans have, apart from Pearl Harbor, and that was quite far away from America, let's be honest, have never had an attack on their homeland in recent history. 9-11 not count? 9-11, yeah, there you go.
That's one example. But comparing that to the bombing, like World War I and World War II, like the whole cities completely destroyed. So there's definitely more like scar tissue built up that makes Brits, I think, a little bit more grittier in some regards than Americans as well.
Yeah, I don't know, man. I'm pessimistic. Yeah, I can tell.
It's for certain people. I had this discussion with Piers Morgan. Piers was like, I like people bringing me back down to... to earth.
I like the mockery and stuff. I'm like, Piers, that's great for you. It doesn't seem to work too well for me.
Like my desperate requirement for validation and reassurance from the world, like wasn't being very satiated in Stockton, right? Or Newcastle. And then you come over here, one of the best things, and this is something that anybody anywhere on the planet should do. And this is one of the coolest life hacks I've taken since being in America.
And you've seen me do it to you and you've like toe cold at a bunch of parties, which is when in America. at least in my group of friends, you are the new person in a group. Your friend that knows you and knows the group will introduce you and tends to do it in the best 30 second show reel of you that anybody could give. You know, he's got this amazing marketing agency. He's a phenomenal writer and he's pivoting.
He's kind of champagne homeless at the moment. He does all of these things. And like, that's a really lovely gesture. It's your friend. It's an opportunity for them to do something nice for you.
It gives you the best impression on the group and it reminds you about what your friend kind of says about you behind your back when you're not there. And it's like, it inflates you a little bit and makes you feel good and warm and stuff. What would the equivalent be if you were a British friend being introduced to British friends by a British friend? It would be your worst ever story. Correct.
Certainly the Norther, again, this is a Norther thing, I think. This is George, shit himself last week. Like, you know what I mean?
Still has wet dreams. Yeah. Like, you know. Yeah.
The introduction side, how we introduce one another, I've definitely found Americans are much better at selling themselves immediately, whereas I think Brits often downplay themselves immediately. There's a big difference there in terms of ever so slight cultural differences. One of the reasons why I think America has been so successful so far, and one thing Britain could improve upon, is if you look at human beings, I think what makes human beings If you put one human being in a jungle, it's that classic phrase that you put one human being in a jungle and you've just introduced prey into the environment. But if you put a thousand human beings into the jungle, you've just introduced an apex predator of which the world's...
never seen before. So the only thing that really makes us special, if you look at us, we don't hear that well compared to our animals. We're not that fast.
We're not that strong. We're pretty shit across the board, but our ability to cooperate is what makes us unique. It's the classic Steve Jobs thing of, if you look to, I think it's energy efficiency in movement, humans are so far down the rankings. There's so many animals ahead of us in terms of, to do a mile, how much energy they need to burn. But if you look at a human being on a bicycle, human beings are just blown through the charts.
And he has this great quote, which is, the computer is the bicycle of the mind. And if you then go back to, well, ultimately the only thing that makes us unique human beings, because we're shit about everything compared to other animals, is our ability to cooperate. If you have a more enthusiastic society that supports one another more, you can cooperate more, which means that you'll then have way more economic output.
Because in a certain country that's more optimistic that goes, I've got this idea. A lot of naive Americans are like, great idea. Let's do it tomorrow.
Whereas a culture that's more maybe cynical means that those ideas don't happen, which I think explains why across these universities, we have essentially the same IQ levels, the same intelligence levels. Better accents. Better accents, more salmon, but 5x the number of entrepreneurs in America. on emails.
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What was that thing? Another person. So two guys that I want you to have this conversation with.
First one, bald and bankrupt. Ben, that's fine. Like he wants to take a step back. Second one, Tom Blomfield, guy that founded Monzo.
Yeah, which is where I got the thing from. Swing and a miss. another one for me i got i got rebuffed twice in this space in the space of a day well it's interesting both the founder of monzo and the founder of revolute so the two you'd argue the most successful uk companies that have come out recently both of them are having huge issues with the uk i believe so tom obviously wrote that piece about the uk culture and how he's trying to fix it and i think the founder of revolute has either left or wanting to leave because of the regulation that exists there so two of our best entrepreneurs tom lives in sf now right yeah he's part of y combinator um What else do you, do you learn anything else from that Tom Blomfield's article? He wrote it on fucking Tumblr. Oh, really? That blog post is on Tumblr.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Who knew that CEOs of a internet, savvy internet startup bank and 13-year-old girls posting emo photos, that's the like horseshoe, horseshoed around. I mean, probably the other takeaway I would say is vision. So I always look at, let's say, and again, a lot of people...
who listen to this podcast might hate these places, but the one thing you can give them is when you go there, you kind of get a vision. So whether that's Austin, whether that's Dubai, whether that's Miami, whether that's Singapore, whether that's El Salvador right now, even Saudi Arabia, you may not like those places at all, but when you're there or you kind of see what they're doing, you go kind of get where you're going. There's something happening. Whereas with the UK, I think fundamentally that's probably one of the problems right now is that you don't fully know where the country's going. Yeah, that's a really, really great problem.
Great point. I reached out. I got Dominic Cummings'email. I got his personal email address. So I reached out to him.
So last time we were on the show, we spoke about how the head of cybersecurity for the UK government job role title was at 65 grand a year. Someone's now made the meme of that original screenshot with, I think it's the TikTok. Yes, some person. who might be high of cybersecurity at TikTok, it's like 360 grand a year.
It's like, wow, the contrast is there. Yeah, I don't know, man. Part of my live show is me saying that I want to make enthusiasm great again and re-import the American enthusiasm back over to the UK. That being said, no matter where you're from, I think that you have the opportunity to be the enthusiastic person. And I've been really getting into um direct communication instead of shadow sentences recently and a lot of the time I think to myself, what would have happened 10 years ago if in the northeast of the UK, the group of friends that I had that were around then, Darren, Johnny, Yousef, like those guys, what if I'd gone to them and I'd said, look, I want to make a real hard left turn in terms of the sort of demeanor and the way that I view the world.
And I've heard about the fact that more enthusiastic groups of people seem to do better. They have a five times increase in entrepreneurial success. And, you know, we have the same levels of skill, better accent, more salmon. Why can't we deploy this?
I really want to try and cultivate the most positive friend group that we can. Why don't we just try this? Why don't we pretend to be British American or British Saudi or whatever you want to be? Why don't we try and do that? I wonder how much direct communication in that sort of a way, in a safe space where there isn't one person in the corner that's always going to default to gay.
Because that person, everyone, it's like a regression to the mean. It's like regression to being mean. You know what I mean? Like the meanest person in the room is the one that everyone defaults to because that person always seems less naive.
They seem a little bit sort of more sardonic and smart and cool. And again, if you're American, and this is, I don't like being around those people at all, go to the UK for a couple of weeks and they are everywhere. But yeah, Tom Blomfield's article on Tumblr about the difference between the UK and the US, I think is fascinating.
And that just is a frame. What a phenomenal frame to say. the UK isn't a successful economy. London is a successful economy that has a poor country attached to it.
So to flip the script though, so we don't get lots of angry Brits, what do you miss about the UK or you think the UK has its strengths over America? Because I would say America definitely has greater blow-up risk. I could easily imagine a scenario where the US goes to civil war quicker than the UK does.
I would imagine that there's many more people, many more entrepreneurs that have gone bankrupt in the US because they're just swinging for the fences a lot more. And it's my belief that most people who do things like entrepreneurialism from a good standpoint are more risk averse than they are prepared to deal with risk. So most people actually need to crank that up. They need a little bit more encouragement.
Things that are problems in America is certainly that. There are blind spots that many of them have. There's an entitlement that a lot of Americans have too.
You know, think about the fact that as you're coming up through school, maybe less so now when America is the most. misogynistic, xenophobic place on the planet. But for the most part, up until maybe about five or 10 years ago, children were promised the American dream is still alive and well, blue sky thinking, helicopter vision, we'll loop back by end of week. And if that's what you've been told as a child, and then you arrive in adulthood and you're not given that, you throw your toys out of the pram.
This wasn't the world that I was told. And I think that that's why the entitlement and the victimhood culture is more... propagated in America and it isn't in the UK because all hopes and dreams that you had for a life that was remotely good are just stamped out of you. To so many people in the UK, and this isn't a knock, to so many people in the UK, success is getting a solid graduate job at 23 on 35, 40 grand a year, and then slowly climbing the corporate ladder to make.
six figures by 40, and then to retire with a solid pension toward the end of life. The British dream. Yeah, that is the British dream. And it's just, it's much more on a set of train tracks. There's fewer variations.
And again, that is a perfectly acceptable, perfectly successful life. But more people slot themselves into that because they don't think about stuff going in other directions. I think the opposite problem occurs in America, which is kind of the paradox of choice. Well, I can do anything I want.
I basically got 50 countries attached within one big continent. I can go wherever I want. I can work there.
I can use the same currency. I can speak the same language. I've got the light, all of the things.
What should I do? I don't fucking know. Way more homeless people.
Way more prescription drugs. I wrote about that in the, what is neglected by the media, but will be studied by historians that I think five of the top, sorry, the top five news networks in the US. either the number one biggest advertiser or the number two biggest advertiser is a pharmaceutical company, which as a Brit sounds absurd.
And there's only two countries in the world that that's allowed. New Zealand? New Zealand and America.
Yeah. So that's definitely a difference. But I think one of the things that you mentioned there is that ability for each state in America to have a lot more control.
And it feels like if you don't like what's going on in this state, you can move to a different state and you can run these A-B tests. Whereas in the UK, as you mentioned, London has this stranglehold. It's that thing I used to say to Americans when I was explaining the UK is in the US, if you want to get into tech, you go to San Francisco.
If you want to get into finance, you go to New York. If you want to get into entertainment, you'd typically go to LA. If you wanted to get into politics, you'd typically go to Washington.
In UK, it's London, London, London, London. And obviously that's changing. Manchester's beginning to boom a little bit.
But if we could begin to decentralize things a lot more that Newcastle could go, you know what, we're going to be the AI capital. And if you come here, we're going to have all these incentives. They're the YI.
Fascinating. Oh, yes. Fucking got it. There we go. All right.
why do you say that adults don't exist oh fucking hell this is um probably my most when i had this idea somebody asked the question of if you could have something on the billboard for everybody to see what would it be and it would just be adults don't exist and it's just a big mistake of mine like having not that much agency growing up and still at times trying to improve it where you constantly think there's this adult class out there. And again, it kind of comes from the education system of teachers. You have these teachers and they've kind of figured out life and they've given you all this advice and these are adults. And I say there's kind of two red pills that make you realize that adults don't exist.
So the first one is when you go to college or university and one of your friends or people that you know who's just so like, all over the place, unintentional, hungover all the time, doesn't know what they want to do with their life. And they go, thinking of becoming a teacher. And you go, hold on. Were all my teachers, or was a significant amount of my teachers, that person who just didn't know what they wanted to do? And I put them on this pedestal.
So it's this kind of low agency mindset of thinking that there's these emperors out there that are wearing these beautiful clothes, and there's these CEOs, there's these politicians. But actually... The more high agency perspective is realizing that they're just grown up children.
They were a sperm cell that fertilized an egg that came out screaming, that looked at things around them, learned this language, and puberty kicked in, and then they're a quote unquote adult. The other realization you have is when you're 15 and you meet a 25-year-old, you go, wow, 25, that's old. That's an adult.
You become 25 and you go, I've still When am I going to become an adult? When am I going to become an adult? And you realize, oh, 30 is the same, and I think it'll just be the same all the way throughout.
So these adults just don't exist. Yeah. I have this sort of undue respect, I think, and I place an awful lot.
I did for a long time, similar to yourself, place an awful lot of credence in authority. I think this is a big British thing too. Brits love a queue, love queuing, can't wait to queue.
And that sense that the people in charge know what they're doing. Ah, they've got it all sorted. You know, think about America, think of a perfect example of this, perfect example, not to bring it back to the UK-US thing.
Look at the first dose vaccine uptake in the UK compared with the US. I think first dose in the UK will probably by now be 96%. It was at least 92 a couple of years ago.
So 96%. I think the US, it wasn't even two thirds. So there are so many more people on this side of the pond that are prepared to say, I don't think the people in charge know what they're fucking doing. I have distrust in our officials, in the people that say that they are beyond us. I wonder whether this is at least in part downstream from having a monarchy.
You know, your highness, it's someone that is raised above us. Highness, right? You're literally positioning yourself.
This is an Alex O'Connorism. I argued with Piers Morgan about this. Yeah, I put a lot of undue weight in the words of people who knew no more than me. And it's that same thing about business degree lecturers at university. These are the people teaching you about business.
What is the outcome you want to be successful at business? Okay. If you were successful at business, would you be teaching business in a UK, Newcastle university? Probably not.
I'd probably be busy running my business. Like not everyone's Scott Galloway swanning in to give a community speech once every quarter and saying that he still teaches at NYU Stern. It's like an honorary position for Scott Galloway. Yeah, yeah.
Meanwhile, he paid 14 mil in taxes last year. Like he's got proof in the pudding. But yeah, I think it's idiots all the way up.
And it's the same for any industry that you care to care about, whether it's... Whether it's status, whether it's athletics, whether it's podcasting, whether it's like any of the people that you respect probably don't have that much of a clue about what they're doing. They all fumbled through the way the number of people that I've met that have a really well constructed thesis, first principle, fundamental view of why they do the things they do, how the world works, why they've got to the place that they are. Almost everybody just stumbled into it.
There's that thing from my live show that adulthood is like being pushed down a set of stairs at age 18 and trying to catch your feet until you die. You're permanently building it as you go. Like, oh, fuck, we're in the air. Like, all right, we put a wing on the plane and let's get a propeller and let's do this thing. Yeah, I come back to one of the problems with adulthood as well is during childhood, there's these milestones that you have not being able to talk, like being able to talk, walk.
I guess it's the reverse order. Then first grade, second grade, third grade, you have these big birthdays every single year that people celebrate. GCSEs in our case, A-levels or...
middle school, high school, whatever they have out here. And then adulthood, it's pretty much mortgage, wedding, like death, funerals of other people. Kids maybe? Yeah, kids.
Sorry, yeah, kids. Mortgage, wedding, kids, funerals of loved ones, then your own funeral. So there's so few milestones.
What's really interesting is COVID then acted as quite an interesting milestone now, whereas when you talk to people about COVID, there's a before COVID moment and an after COVID moment. And I actually think it's quite... It's interesting when you get to experience other cultures for the first time and you go, of course, that's such a better way of doing things. So in the Jewish community, they celebrate bar mitzvahs, which is a big coming of age when you're 13. And I think there should be some kind of bar mitzvah for turning 25, because your brain kind of fully develops when you're 25. And it's when it's definitely 25. Yeah, I know, still struggling. It's when the rail guards of life are like fully released at 25 as well.
You have some friends who are in prison, you have others that are like... selling NFTs online. You have this person who has three kids and it feels like 25, it's that Benjamin Franklin quote of the average person dies at 25 and isn't buried until 75. I think we should probably do more milestones in adulthood because if not, you end up to loop back the conversation to the start in the busy trap and it just, before you know it, it's all gone.
Yeah, you've run through everything without any milestones. We'll get back to talking to George in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. 90% of Americans are not getting...
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I think that if you could instantiate that into culture, I think that that would result in an awful lot more freedom for women. And I get a lot of criticism for being like way too pro male, apart from all of the pro male people online who think that I'm way too pro women. But I think that this is just a win for everybody.
I don't know anybody who loses. It's not a fertilized egg. So the abortion community debate doesn't have a problem with it, presumably, unless they have a problem with every period that a girl has, which I'm going to guess maybe someone does.
But 21st birthday, don't buy him a watch. Don't buy him shoes. Don't buy them a holiday to Zante with their friends.
I mean, it's more expensive. This is, you know, high. It's a significantly bigger investment. But I think that it just opens up so much. And that would be another milestone in some way.
And it would be the... best insurance policy that you could think of. And it would help to combat declining population, declining birth rates.
Like it's just that 21, peak fertility, fantastic quality of eggs, one round of IVF is going to get you, I don't know what you get at 21. I've never even seen data on it. Like maybe like 15, 20 viable eggs that you'd get, pop it away, put it in the fridge. and then you're 38 and you've worked on your career for a long time, or you're 29 and your partner and you are having fertility problems, whatever, it's just, it's straight up optionality.
And I think that, you know, just thinking about where are we missing milestones? I'm going to freeze my sperm. I've got legacy sperm, by the way.
I did a ton of research and spoke to a bunch of friends that are like in the IVF world. Legacy sperm in America, at least, is what it seems to be the number one. How much it is to get 25 years of frozen, your sperm, to...
separate units of frozen sperm, five grand. Wow. Five grand for a quarter of a decade, a quarter of a century to freeze your sperm for. And I was like, why? Why?
Five grand is not a nominal amount of money. Like it's a big amount of money. Why wouldn't I just come in a cup?
Yeah. I'm just picturing someone like Yusef trying to do his own home. Keeping it in a freezer to try and save the five grand.
Don't DIY it. It's in there next to the Ben and Jerry's. Well, Bill Ackman, I think, had this idea.
I could be butchering it, but it was along the lines of rather than pensions, the government would, when the child's born, put money in the S&P 500 or some kind of ETF. And by the time they're 65, it will be millions. And you could almost guarantee that across every single citizen versus them having to slowly but surely realize when they're 36 that they probably should start contributing towards a pension. But again, trying to get these ideas to be tested, you would need, looping the conversation around again, multiple states.
particularly in the UK to be able to do that. I don't think it'd be very, very difficult, I think, to get that through the House of Parliament. What is your contrarian take about whether money buys happiness or not? So everybody's probably heard the question, does money buy happiness? And then there'll be a big debate, an evil way.
But the correct way to actually answer that question is to say, that is the stupidest question I've ever heard. And they'll explain why. So we can use an example here.
Let's say you've used 95% of your salary to get this crazy penthouse in New York to show off to everybody. And you realize in the first night that your next door neighbor's P. Diddy.
And it's just having these like wild, loud orgies all night. And it's just beating his wife in the corridor outside. Yeah. A nightmare to live next to.
Right. In that case, did money buy happiness? actually money might have bought misery. Let's say you then go on Amazon Prime and get those earplugs, silicone ones that mold to your ear, that block out all noise, and it costs you $10.
Well, in that case, a little bit of money bought a lot of happiness. So the problem with this phrase, does money buy happiness, is it implies all money is created equal and all happiness is created equal. And you can see if you ask the question, so when people ask you that question, the best question to reply with is, does money buy good investments?
Well, I know some people that have bought incredible stocks really early on, and I know some people that have bought Bitcoin 1, 2, 3 and had a terrible time. So ultimately, it completely depends on what you've invested in. So what the question is trying to get to, or what the real answer to the question should be, is that strategic money buys happiness, and unstrategic money can buy misery, or strategic money can buy happiness. and unstrategic money can buy misery. Exactly the same with investments.
So the reason why this question exists is because within itself it's a presupposition. It presupposes that all money is created equal, and it presupposes that all happiness is created equal. When it's not, it's a completely individualistic thing like an investment. What is a way to strategically spend money, and what is a way to unstrategically spend money? The honest answer is, and this makes it into a terrible YouTube clip, But the honest answer is, is that it's so personalized to the individual.
By definition, what may make one person happy with one purchase may make another person happy with another purchase. I gave you a pickleball paddle. That's brought an awful lot of happiness.
If I gave that pickleball paddle to Zach, it would become a doorstop. Yes. So it's looking at the cost of thing, service, product, experience. impact that has on your life. Utility of the person.
Utility, yeah. I mean, Zach said the other day at yours that you guys have a sauna that you spent a little bit of money on. And he says that is an example of strategic money can buy happiness.
Yeah. It's a very interesting reframe on the question. And we'd spoken about this before.
I think both of us are fortunate that we have a low materialism set point. And I've always thought about this as a competitive advantage for people. So if you grew up in a household that was...
uh gifts and um public presents and stuff were kind of displays of affection if large things were made out of birthdays and of christmases and that was sort of keeping up with the joneses mentality maybe mom or dad were always looking to improve the car and stuff like that that's fine but it is likely that as you grow into an adult you will tie an awful lot of your self-worth and your place in the world to the possessions that you have, or your ability to provide possessions to other people, or maybe the way that they give gifts and possessions to you as a show of their love and affection. And again, hidden versus observable metrics. It's very, in a society that is obsessed with more, more, more, it is a radically revolutionary thing to say that I have enough.
And I have always seen, of all of the different mental pathologies I've got, and it's a fucking laundry list. The one of the ones I'm most glad that I don't have after alcoholism and sort of substance stuff is a need for materialistic possessions to make me feel satiated and satisfied and enough. So if you are the sort of person that doesn't have that, if you don't have a drive to get more possessions in order to make yourself happy, you can basically see that as your happiness burn rate is way lower.
It's 10 times less, a hundred times less. than somebody else. And you could have been brought up or born with the predisposition where you had to have the newest car, you had to have the fanciest bag, you had to always be flying away on holidays.
Is it fun? Yeah. But basically that means that your operating costs as a human are way higher.
Yeah, it's a good point. I'm reminded of, I forgot who said it, it might be Coco Chanel of the best things in life for free. And the second best things are really, really, really expensive.
But yeah, the more I've realized as I get older is the money by happiness question is so absurd. And all it comes down to is how strategic you can be with your money. When it comes to you, you said it was personalized. When it comes to you, what are the places that you have found a disproportionate investment leverage?
Where, when you spend? a dollar on it, are you getting 10x return in terms of your money for happiness? Earplugs.
Not because I'm next to Diddy, but earplugs, especially when I'm traveling around. Because if I have one bad night's sleep, and I get these silicone moldable ones that I exchange each time, it's like $5 to $10 a week, which sounds like quite a hefty earplug budget, but it's definitely way more than any materialistic purchase that I've made. Essentially anything that makes me feel better throughout the day or speeds up time.
What sorts of things? Paying for access to a sauna. I can regularly go there, for example.
Or if I'm looking at an option where I'm staying that's slightly nearer a gym. Thinking through, just based, I always come back to, one of the things I think about is like high leverage relaxation. So look at things that recharge you, that give you the most amount of energy. And what has this... lowest cost or the lowest energy to produce that.
So those two things in particular, being able to see friends, like Dickie gave us this at my birthday, because I've never experienced until I came here, the difference between Ubers and Uber comforts. And in America, the Uber can be any car that pulls up. Whereas an Uber comfort, you're getting this like comfy little Tesla, and it's only an extra $2 sometimes for the journey, depends on the ride.
And that is like an example of. a little bit of money there, strategic money. But if I'm going somewhere like today and I'm in like a nice Tesla beforehand and I can think about what we're going to chat about versus if I'm in like a clapped up car that's breaking down, it's a bit more of a problem. Yeah, those are really good ones. Dickie, you can go all the way down to the very bottom, which is Exec XL, which is a big Yukon or an Escalade or something.
And you realize when you actually price it together for the number of people that are going, especially if you're going XL, it's like maybe twice as expensive. but you feel like P. Diddy, right?
Without the violence. Without the violence, yeah. You feel like P.
Diddy in his heyday. That's great. I'm trying to think about other stuff for me.
Certainly paying for assistance with things that I want to do. So you're talking about high leverage recovery. Going to the gym is great.
Going to the gym with the trainer, you leave with more energy than you went in with. It doesn't sap your willpower. There's just somebody there that's telling you what to do. Same thing would be true for going to a CrossFit class. you know, paying for a CrossFit membership, like, yeah, you know, the gym or planet fitness or something.
I can get that for 13 pounds a month. Okay. But how much of your energy is it sapping or how much of your willpower you're having to use to get yourself into the stage where you can get some energy back.
Like you're spending energy to get energy. Whereas if you go into a CrossFit class or a Barry's bootcamp, or you get a PT or you do whatever, uh, last night I did a breathwork class. I think it was $15.
Yeah. $15 for a breathwork class for an hour. I did as much breathwork last night as I did all of last week, an hour of breathwork last night.
And I think I managed to get four 15 minute sessions in last week. And it costs 15 bucks. So I think externalizing motivation, that's a big one for me.
Good quality coffee, like nice coffee, nice water, stuff like that. And these are, for many people, goods that would push their spend to income ratio up a little bit. But yeah, you can get an awful lot of happiness out of quite low spend and you'd be surprised at the places that it comes from.
Yeah, the obvious answer is things that you use a lot as well. So shoes, laptop. Laptop riser.
Yeah. Why have you been obsessed with Roger Federer and Djokovic and Nadal? Because you just won't show up about them. Oh, this is so good.
So this came from Matthew Syed. And for me, this is, I've always enjoyed like self-help and self-improvement, but there's a part of it that always felt a bit icky. And this metaphor kind of explains my problem with it. And Matthew Syed is a... big tennis fan and he talks about he would go and watch tennis and it was such a unique point in history because you had the three goats at once so in football you had arguably the two goats at once you had Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi in tennis you had Djokovic Nadal and Federer and obviously in the self-help world or that space it's like this is the way well you see these Instagram reels and it's like if you do ABC this will happen And what's beautiful about this metaphor that Sayed tells is you have, he used to watch at Wimbledon, the warmup courts.
So he'd turn up and Nadal's there. And Nadal is like full on Goggins, like biceps bulging, screaming as he's hitting the shots. In warmup.
Yeah, in warmup, sprinting up and down to get himself into the zone, like going as hard as he can. Then you have Djokovic who comes out, who's almost... an emotionless robot who's just laser focused on getting the job done. Watches him warm up.
It's like, hold on, these are the two goats at the same time, completely different way of doing things. Then Federer turns up and you can hear him laughing before he arrives at the court. He's trialing trick shots.
He's doing dinks. He's laughing with his friends. He's just finessing the ball left, right, and center.
And these three, and obviously there's a debate between them, but these three are arguably the three goats of their. at the exact same time, give or take, and had completely different philosophies to doing things. And that goes to show, and I've always now took that metaphor whenever somebody gives me, oh you need to do things this way, or this is the way this gets done, and realising, oh okay, that's the Djokovic way of doing it.
That might not apply to me, or that's the Federal way of doing it, or that's the Nadal way of doing it. Ironically, Nadal actually had the most amount of injuries, which is one thing you could take into consideration. But ultimately, There's no the way, as shown by those three.
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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description. in the show notes below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. I wonder whether one of the reasons that people look for one-size-fits-all answers to questions is that if there's three potential answers to the question, that then puts the onus back onto them to work out how to do it, right?
What people want is... a reliable set of inputs that can get them the outcome someone else got. They don't need to go, what is the way for you to get the outcome? It's the same thing again.
It's what are you focusing on inputs or outcomes? You want to get the outcomes. But if someone says, here is the answer.
There is no answer. There are multiple different ways. And here are some principles and you need to work out.
It's like, I've fucking, I paid $500 for this course. I've paid $500 for the productivity course. And you're telling me that it isn't that I need an external brain, but I might do. And it isn't that I need to do space repetition, but I might do.
And it isn't that I need to do time blocking, but I might do. Yeah, I think a huge hesitation should be placed on saying this person achieved success and did this thing. Therefore, doing the thing that they did will cause me, different person, different disposition, different background, different set point, to get the same outcome that they did.
I think it then comes down to... the scientific method. We live in the Enlightenment period, it's only been what, not a couple hundred years or so, that we've had electricity, had all the things that we take for granted now, and that comes out of the scientific revolution and applying a scientific frame to viewing these problems of, okay, that's the Nadal way of doing it, that's the Djokovic way of doing it, that's the federal way of doing it, how about I'll try this, see how that goes, I'll try this, see how that goes, try this and see how that goes, and then judging based off the experiments, how it worked. personally for you.
You're seeing this huge boom in nutrition, right? Where for the last 50 years, it was like, there's this diet, there's the only banana diet, there's the vomit three times a day diet. And now it's actually what was probably the best diet for Chris is different to what's the best diet for George, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think we'll just find out more and more with time that personalization is more and more important than we think. But as you mentioned, then it's hard to sell that. So it's not as gimmicky, it's not as easy to get people into a funnel that buys the 699 course, because it's often a lot more personalization and the people need to have a lot more agency over their existence. The work is put back onto the person who needs to do the work. But it's the truth, it's the way.
Yeah, yeah, I think that you're right. We also had this discussion in Miami about why hard work is something that people often pray at the altar of. And I'm one of these people, right? You know, hormones have been on the show, Goggins, Jocko, etc.
I don't disagree. Hard work is a very reliable route to achieving success. But I think that optimizing exclusively for hard work causes you to miss an awful lot of the higher leverage routes and also maybe some of the more personalized ones too.
There's very few problems in life that aren't made easier by working harder, but there are other higher leverage, higher return, less painful routes to achieving the same outcome. Those are less reliable though right like hard work will almost always get you closer to your goal working hard will almost always get you closer to your goal incrementally uh therefore it's like a um moderately effective but highly robust drug that i could give you to deal with some malady that you're dealing with and then here's five other options four of which won't work at all but one of which will work 10 times better than you just doing the hard work thing. And maybe hard work sits sort of alongside it. You kind of loop them in as a combination.
But yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why praying at the altar of hard work is something that's so, it's so pedestalized because when has anybody ever worked harder and it hasn't helped at least a little bit. So it's the panacea, but it's actually only working at sort of a a ceiling capped sort of rate and there's way more effective versions that you could look at alongside that or outside of that that isn't just okay just get up earlier go to bed later spend more time in front of the screen what's an example for yourself that's more productive or impactful than hard work or things that you often neglect because you're too busy working hard that often is a bigger lever reading so i asked myself this question during my end of your review i think as well What are the things I think are productive but aren't? Yes. And what are the things that are productive but I don't realize are? And that's just such a phenomenal question because you're starting to see where am I investing into hard work, kind of reliable but could be not so useful?
And where am I not seeing the penny stocks that have got a thousand X potential upside? So for me, sitting in front of the computer when I'm not working or when I'm low on energy makes me feel like I'm working. It makes me feel like I'm busy. I actually don't really get anything done. Being on Slack, being on emails and taking calls, for the most part, very, very low ROI, does move me. incrementally closer to the goal of whatever it is that I'm trying to do.
Stuff that is productive, but I don't realize it. Going for a walk without my AirPods in and without a phone. Reading, which is huge.
Reading and writing probably should have been in there. Focused reading and writing, massive, massive upsides. Going for coffees with friends and going for dinner with people that come through town for a short period of time. So next week we're going to go for dinner. We're going for nut pudding with Brian Johnson and a bunch of his friends.
And it's like, you know, it's a Thursday night. It's going to be one of the last nights that you're here. Do we really want to spend the time with people?
We're not too sure. But I can almost guarantee that I will come away from that evening with an amazing story or some cool insights or a new friend or something cool. So I just think saying yes to more novelty is a good start.
One I'd add on to the list that's really meta. I think when we discussed the UK issue earlier, and I know you chat to young guys a lot or in that space about feeling lonely or the loneliness epidemic, one of the things that doesn't feel productive, I'd say is the most productive thing I've ever done is whenever I'm on social media, which is by definition often quite unproductive time, or it's like I describe Twitter now as swimming through sewage, searching for gold. And every day I'll get a bit of gold, but I'm covered in shit.
And it's like, that's the trade off that I kind of make with social media platforms now. And one of my friends recently was saying how he's not got a circle like himself where he is. He's got his old friends.
He's not got a circle like himself. And he goes, so I might start going to like a yoga class or a CrossFit class and see if I can meet these people. I go, that's definitely better than doing nothing.
But the odds of it, of that is quite slim relative to... online so i go back to how me and you met right i i i think i was sat on the loo and i dm'd you so it was just like uh hey mate and what did i mention something about chrome extensions you said i see that you're coming to my office coming to my place of work in a couple of weeks time let's exchange google chrome extension right so that in terms of finding people who produced like something cool online and dming them like hey i thought this is awesome If you're ever here, let's do something together. The amount of people that do that is so slim. I bet even the mistake people make is they'll go right. And this will-Grant Cardone.
Yeah, they'll go, they'll try and punch way above their relative standing. And I mean, the good news is that even if you do that, even someone like you, you probably get so many DMs. I know I get quite a few, but 99% of it is absolutely shite. So if you can even provide some value, you're immediately in the 1%.
But I think the mistake that young people make, or that I made, is- is that you then try and punch upwards. So you try and go, oh, let's find the guy who's got 2 million ABC or has got all this, like my dream, whatever. But actually what you want to do is meet peers.
So when we both met, it was basically, you had relatively nothing really. Two nobodies, just like now. Yeah.
It was back my favorite period of Chris when he would be interviewing some of the world's most hardcore niche philosophers on the trolley problem. So I'd go on his Instagram story, see the trolley problem with some doctor at Cambridge. And then the next Instagram story was two for one tonight at Vudu, get your Jäger bombs in at this price, then boom, back to the troll problem. It was like the Batman Clark Kent single feed.
Yes. So just finding people like that and DMing them. And by the way, the only people will then, the imposter syndrome will kick in.
It's like, well, I don't make any content or I don't have a following. Honestly, it doesn't matter. All you need is a bio that says this person isn't a fucking weirdo.
So like just some kind of nice savvy bio and a little bit of content on there. And that's, I think, all you need. And you're better off finding peers than trying to find people you're fans of, because you're always going to have this vertical weird relationship.
Correct. Whereas if you meet people early on, you can then grow together, which is way more enjoyable. Because if you're 20 now and you try and become best friends with you, you're much older. You're not going to be going to be like, I beef with them.
You're going to be boring relative to them. So finding peers that are on your level, and it's so easy just by scrolling through social these days. And people do not do that.
Don't forget as well that if you find somebody that is at your level, they are going to be dealing with the same problems that you are. Now, me at 36, I can still remember most of the problems I had at 26, but at 16, I can't remember any of them. I don't know what my mindset was like at 16. I can't even put myself in that theory.
Ali Abdaal, I keep coming back to this. I don't know where he said it. He said, you want to teach people that are about two steps behind you.
because you can't remember the problems of someone that's 10 steps behind you. So he has this idea of permanently sort of laying a trail of breadcrumbs. And you basically get to lay and follow the trail of breadcrumbs when you're with somebody that's on that same level as you, right?
You're similar age bracket, similar sort of background, similar sort of desire for where you want to go in life. The only thing really that you need to optimize for two things first one being vibes when you spend time with them are they a sofa friend or a treadmill friend do you feel energized and revitalized and and regulated after you've been with them or do you feel a bit fucking irritated and you're like god like i need to chill out after that that was like antagonistic or i didn't like this just something felt off like how do you feel post-content clarity like post-conversation clarity and then the second thing are you are they optimizing for growth Do they have a personal growth vehicle that they're moving along with? Basically, are they prepared to change?
Because if you want to be someone who changes and you're around someone who doesn't change, it's always going to struggle because you're always going to be suggesting new things. They're going to feel like it's a value judgment on them and they're going to feel like accused a little bit and you're going to feel held back. So vibes and personal growth velocity. If you can match those two things, you've got a great set of friends that you'll continue to grow with.
And it's so much easier to do that online. So going back to the... reference of my friend who was like i might go to the crossfit club and by the way that's not like a bad way to do it it's just the brick and mortar way of doing it well it's so much more i had this idea the as you were talking about it that the finding someone online who you can tell you're going to get on with is a targeted strike from a sniper right it's one of those drone drone bombs that hits an individual going to crossfit classes carpets carpet bombing yes and hoping hoping for the best that being said i do actually think that uh and spreading the, like, you know, in a typical CrossFit class, maybe there's 20 people in a typical gym, there's a hundred. Like that's a, there's a pretty big net there. So you are probably going to find, I mean, dude, run clubs, Jesus Christ, the run club that Noah runs here, raw dog run club is fucking huge.
And if you are the sort of person that at 8am or 9am wants to stand outside of a pizza truck and set off on a 4.5 mile loop, that's a, you've selected for a very unique sort of category of person there so the more unique that it is but if it was like a i don't know random yoga class yeah yeah something that's the barrier to entry is a little bit lower you're actually going to be selecting for a broader range of people yeah or like a networking event it's probably the worst example right any conference any professional conference so i go back to if like what's really interesting is we've now caught up where 10 years ago saying you'd meet people saying you'd date somebody online you was like this absolute basement dweller weirdo. And now it's completely at the whole dating market and more than 50% of people meet online. And I'm convinced the number's higher, but people lie.
But weirdly, if you start talking about making friends online, it still has this stigma that dating online 10 years ago did, but it's purely just of this momentum that exists. But I go back to, I reckon it's going to change with Gen Z. I think that's probably one of the most reliable. or the highest conversion rate way of meeting people that are high signal. The problem is that that locks people into only having online friendships.
But it's if you never transition out. And that's the problem with Gen Z. Yes. The Gen Z problem is that they're locked in to online friendships without transitioning them or graduating them to being in the real world. But yeah, I think there was an analogy that I remember realizing when... I was thinking about pickup artistry like forever ago and lots of guys were doing day game and kino escalation and stuff in the UK.
And there was an ick, there's still an ick, I think that many girls have around guys that say that they've actively learned sort of communication around dating. If you rebrand it actually to, I've learned direct communication or nonviolent communication, which actually has the worst branding in the world. Like nonviolent communication, NBC is like. phenomenal as a modality, fucking awful as branding.
Because it's like, you learned nonviolent communication. What's the subtext of that? That you had to fix your violent communication. That doesn't sound particularly great. My point being, there's an ick that some women have around a guy that has purposefully gone out and learned how to communicate well with women, because maybe it sounds a bit Machiavellian.
Am I being manipulated here? But I believe that the real underlying ick is oh so you naturally don't have the talent to be able to do this and you had to learn it which is absurd because it's like saying oh you go to the gym so you're not naturally jacked and in shape or you train at hitting the golf ball so you can't just walk up and hit it everything is trainable right and almost no one but when you're talking about charisma it almost feels like personality it's a natural outgrowth of who you are and playing around with that is bad is sometimes seen as bad. When it comes to friends and friendship, how despondent and feeble does it sound as a 25-year-old guy or girl to say, I need to consciously work at having friends? I need to find friends. I need to go out and find them.
You think, well, what's the subtext of that? Oh, you don't already have friends? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you that you, as a grown adult who lives on their own and has a degree, doesn't have the perfect group of friends already? And I realize that's just a total fucking fallacy, especially if you have high standards for who you want to be friends with, especially if you're non-typical with the sorts of...
relationships that you want to have with your friends or the way that you want to spend your time or the lifestyle that you aspire to have. Yes. And I think one criticism people will give is, oh, I don't want to, I'm not like an influencer. I don't want to meet influencers.
And that's the natural way to shoot down that thing. The key thing with this is actually on the fewer followers, often the better, right? You want to just, I love people who I'll find and they posted some incredible essay on the sovereign individual.
It has five likes and I'll see the location. Oh, he's in Amsterdam. I go, okay, I want to meet this guy.
I go, Hey man, love this. one of the best things i've seen on the internet this week and then we have a back and forth and i'll catch you in amsterdam and i know with like 99.9 certainty we're probably going to get on most of the time there's obviously exceptions you meet people who are very different to who they are online but this idea that oh therefore you'll meet it you're having to go after people with followings or create content that reaches lots of people it's really not the case and you can you can narrow things down so much more specifically and you just so obviously are right you but there's just this ickiness that exists. And it's just this constant thing that exists in humankind where new technology comes along and we have this ickiness to people that use it.
Naturalistic fallacy thing. The same people that mocked it are the same people that are then using it in 10 years later, or their kids are using it, and they have no memory of mocking it in the first place. Oh God, I hate that. It cycles all the way down from the start of electricity to the wheel.
Probably the first guy that created fire. There were other human beings going, why do you need fire, mate? Yeah.
It's all the way down. So just don't take the opinion seriously. It's one of my least favorite things about people who are unduly critical of different strategies, new technologies, and ardent that this is something that's wrong, who in future end up using it and don't.
You should be forced at fucking gunpoint to issue a retraction about that thing. And I keep bringing this up because it's always in the back of my mind. Do you remember that WhatsApp photo of the single squaddie walking down the streets of London that was forwarded a million times? And it was like, martial law is going to be implemented in London during the middle of COVID.
You're going to be locked in your homes at gunpoint. And this is the way that it's going to work. I got this thing sent and it just got propagated around.
I'm like, you can forward a message on WhatsApp. But then it went onto the real internet, Facebook posts and Twitter threads and a breakdown of how it was all going to work. There were these tanks rolling through Miami Beach and people sharing it. And like...
the World Health Organization are going to have health passports and there's going to be digital ID and it's going to be a surveillance state just like it is in China. All of those people that posted all of that stuff, what the fuck happened? What happened? Oh, well, because we pushed back so much, that's why they haven't been able to, because Klaus Schwab, he really wants to do, but he hasn't yet. And because of how, you know, the revolution, the resistance, we push back, he gets like, no, go fuck yourself.
It didn't happen. You made an insane, you wasted my mind space because that's still stuck in my brain and I can't get rid of it. Right. You owe me an apology.
Yeah. So it comes back to the forgetting paradox, right? We forget more than we forget because by definition we've forgotten it. Therefore, we never realize how much we actually forgot in the first place.
Ironically, when you messaged me yesterday saying, what do you want to chat about? I go, let's chat about the forgetting paradox. And I searched it and we actually chatted about it on the last show.
So it was the most ironic thing ever that I forgot that we spoke about the forgetting paradox. So that constantly exists. And there's a meme online of like the new current thing. And there's constantly a new current thing in society's consciousness.
And it rips so fast. It comes through and it's gone. It comes through and it's gone. Everyone's willing to fight on the street or on the digital street, shall we say, on Twitter about, and then they'll forget their opinion or completely change their opinion. Remember Kony 2012?
Yeah, good example. Good example. People will completely forget. And it's like things that fade away.
When things fade away, you don't notice they're fading away because by definition they're fading away. And if you did, it wouldn't be fading away. So this is constantly happening throughout. I mean, one idea you could potentially build is some kind of Chrome extension, which just keeps a track of people's opinions on the new current thing on chain.
And then whenever they... So let's say they go, oh, okay. Digital ledger of all of your bad types. Here's my opinion on the...
the war that's going on, it's like you click on it and you go, okay, here's your opinion on the last five wars. You really supported this Iraq war thing. That's on chain.
But without that, we never really reflect and we're constantly dealing with the new thing. So we never actually have any reflection mechanism to see what people's past predictions were because we've moved on so fast. There was this question around... if the vaccine came out when, let's say, Trump got elected and he beat the election versus Biden, and it was seen as the Trump vaccine, would we have had a flip where the people on the left would have been more vaccine hesitant and the people on the right would have been more pro-vaccine?
Who knows? I think there was a Democrat who said that, I won't be taking the Trump vaccine, when Trump was doing the classic thing around, I'd create the vaccine before he got hosted out. So it's really interesting, these opinions that constantly change the new current thing. I did this image I found of the biggest talking trends of 2022. It's all the usual political hotbeds, here today, gone tomorrow, here today, gone tomorrow. Of them all, of these most heated talking points for that year, the most consistent one that lasted throughout the year was Wordle, a novelty game that ultimately disappeared.
You've got to be, I think, a lot more strategically ignorant with what you want to consume. What do you mean when you talk about strategic ignorance? strategic ignorance is essentially this idea. So you have the terminology, ignorance is bliss, which is such a weird upside down Nietzschean worldview that we're calling something bliss as an insult. And you essentially realize that there's so much things you can pay attention to in the modern day.
There's so many things constantly getting uploaded that you have to be ignorant. And there's this, oh, well, you're ignorant about this. And it's like, well, what do you think about the situation in Djibouti? Or what do you think about the situation in Eswantini?
Or what do you think about the situation in Jakostan? And they go, what? And what you'll realize is quickly, you don't even realize these countries existed and they have no clue what's going on there. And they didn't realize that Jakostan is a country that I invented.
So you essentially realize everybody's ignorant, but some of us are looking at the stars. So essentially you have what I call low agency ignorance, which is kind of just top down. Like you're just reacting to what's on the newsfeed. constantly.
And by definition, you're only ever going to consume 0.0001% of the world's events, because it's just the way of the world. And then you move on to the next current thing, versus high agency ignorance is at least going, listen, I'm going to be ignorant, but I'm going to try and be intentional about what I'm ignorant to, who I'm going to consume, what I'm going to listen to. So we're all ignorant, but some of us are looking at the stars. So something arises and you go, yeah, that's another post about X thing that's going on. I know that other people think that this is important, but it just doesn't resonate with me.
So I'm not going to invest a tiny amount of time or no time at all and give my opinion. I'm just going to let this one sort of slide by. Yes.
Yeah. Douglas Murray had this idea about normalized saying, I don't know. Yeah. I have no opinion on that. I'm not, I haven't, I don't really know about that thing.
What do you think? Tell me. And I think that the Internet has kind of demanded that we all have an opinion on whatever the topic of the day is, and we all get dragged into it. But ultimately, you know, probably nothing really that contributes to the situation. Like, what do you really know about epidemiology?
Do you really know about Middle Eastern politics? Would you really know about border immigration? And you can, you know, if you're treating news stories like the Kardashians, where you just get to foam finger wave for whoever your favorite team is, or you just want to talk about it because it's gossip, fine.
But if you want to have a meaningful conversation and if you want to get emotionally charged on one side or the other about it, you need to be strategic in your investment of understanding about it because otherwise, you're just allowing yourself to get ragged around by whatever the news story of the day is. Like there is a huge cohort of people for whom every big story is their big emotional investment over and over and over again. And it must be fucking exhausting.
I got criticized for not commenting on COVID. I didn't have anything to say on COVID. Could it have been done better?
In retrospect, absolutely. Could it have been done better at the time? Yes. Were there some things that were fucking ridiculous?
Absolutely. All of the things, all the way down. I'm like, look, I'm not the guy for this, okay?
We did one episode, which was lockdown hacks, which is how to work from home with Johnny and Yusef. And I was like-Who are you the guy for? I'm the guy.
That's my area of expertise. You want me to teach you how to- be productive from a home office? Absolutely.
I can teach you how to do that. But you quickly realize they're not when people go, yeah, but what's your opinion on it? This is a serious topic.
And then you ask them about another serious topic that's maybe 10 times more serious than what they're not considering right now. They were ignorant all along. So you basically realize everybody's ignorant.
Some of us are doing it strategically and some of us are doing it unstrategically by just reacting to random events that are going on. Talk to me about why only the weird behavior survives. So I was at a funeral.
And it's a northern funeral, so it's a mix of like, everyone's emotional, but everyone's also laughing at the same time. And I realized when people were telling stories at the funeral about the person is... the only stories they would tell was about this person's irrational, weird, eccentric behavior that made them them.
And I kind of realized that all the normal stuff like the job and they made their cup of tea and certain words that they would use. And obviously by definition, nobody mentioned that at all. The only thing people would bring up was the crazy stories about that person, what separated them as individual. And I realized that all essentially normal behavior is forgotten. So when you're trying to...
fit into the tribe, which so many of us try and do, and get rid of our individualism because we think it's weird or whatever. The irony is that the only thing, come a funeral time or come once a few years later, when people think about you, the only thing they can really think about is the weird idiosyncratic behaviours that you have. And this desire to fit in with the tribe means that we end up leaving the only thing that they ultimately remember.
I've told you that story about Salvador Dali. right have i talked to you this is this is fucking great man i researched salvador dali for that tedx talk i did forever ago and um my thesis basically was that salvador was an unbelievably unique human his parents had a child nine months or ten months before he was born called salvador who died during childbirth and they were adamant that the actual salvador was a reincarnation of his dead brother so that was how he came into the world That was how he started life. By age 10, he'd found out that he was a masochist and used to throw himself down the stairs for fun. Just enjoyed pain. He once needed to be wrenched out of a deep sea diving suit mid-presentation on stage because he was suffocating because he just tried to do this thing.
He fell in love with this woman. He was married, so was she. They both left their partners to be together and he literally considered her divine.
He thought that she was his muse that had been sent down from the heavens to inspire him in his work. So immediately, as soon as they got together, he bought her a castle that he wasn't allowed to go to. And he had to send formal letters of request like you would to royalty in order to be able to visit her.
Non-fungible, non-typical guy, right? Every different bit of Salvador Dali needed to be expressed in its fullest form in order for him to be able to be... him because as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali and Leonardo da Vinci didn't do Dali and Van Gogh didn't do Dali. In order for us to get everything that he had to offer, the world and the universe, he had to embrace all of the things that were fully him. And had he have compromised on any one of the different bits of idiosyncrasies and weirdnesses that he had, the world would have been fundamentally less because we would have been depleted of what his offering was.
And I think that when you see it is your duty to bring to the world that which only you can. I think that's a really beautiful reassurance. Only you can do this.
You can't, look, Salvador, you can't be Da Vinci. Much as you may try, much as you may have established patterns of success, societal norms, the way you've dealt with past trauma, your fears about shame and mockery, your guilt about not being as successful as you want. your concern for the future or your regret about the past, the only way that you can contribute to the world, that which only you can is by being the thing that only you can be.
But the mistake I've made is when I, and I'm high on the weird scale, is then when I feel that weird thing that I want to do or say come up is I'll go, oh no, I'll do the normal thing because I want the social benefits of that. But the realization I had at that moment of the actually That's not even true. All the social benefits in the short term, but ultimately people completely forget about the behavior. Whereas when you do the weird thing or the idiosyncratic thing or the eccentric thing, in the short term, the immune system kind of goes, oh, Jesus Christ, what's that? But long-term, that's the only thing that people ultimately remember you for anyway.
So all the social benefits... The only reason you was actually making the trade in the first place was because you were scared if you showed your weird side, you wouldn't get the social benefits. But come funerals, come...
like long-term history. The only thing people remember is the weird things. I remember one of my friends, Nike, had a birthday party on and it was kind of like 2021. It was very shallow relationships at that point. I was trying to get the most amount of people to attend my birthday party.
It was ridiculous. And loads of people didn't attend. But my friend Nike came all the way from London to York to be there.
And I was like, we've had so many other interactions about chatting about the weather or the football, but that's the irrational behavior. What are some other good examples of irrational behavior from your life for people around you that you think will survive? For me, it comes down to, I have this terminology called non-fungible humans.
So people now know the word NFTs. So money is itself fungible, a little chimp on the blockchain that has a silly hat, non-fungible. So non-fungible essentially means something that's completely unique, can't be traded out.
And you quickly realize that everybody in your life who are your favorite people are fundamentally non-fungible. I had this realization with Yousef. I go, why do I like Yousef so much?
I go, he's so... non-fungible. He's so uncommon amongst uncommon men. Signs of non-fungible people, and people listening to this will go, check. Think about the person who's non-fungible in your life and they'll have this checklist.
It will be, they have isms, so they have their own language. For example, say what you want about these people. You've got Elon Musk has Musk-isms, Conor McGregor has McGregor-isms, Charlie Munger has Munger-isms. Trump.
Trump has their own... the language that they use, the words that they use or phrases that they use that makes them fundamentally different, that makes them non-fungible, you have stories about them. There's so many stories that that person produces because by definition, they're living, whether you like it or not, some kind of authentic existence. But in this definition, to be fungible, we ultimately completely delete the whole memory stack about us, which is quite ironic because the only reason we were doing it in the first place was to make people like us, and they don't even remember it. My favourite.
irrational behavior of yusef was that he was doing he was practicing no weight no bar olympic lifting in a airport departure lounge during a like in front of a packed group of people because he just wanted to move so he was there but standing up with a pretend barbell above his head better one is what's the one with his bat oh god so i mean this is on the internet this is i think the most played video i slept on the floor for six months to see if it would fix my back you And he'd only just got into a relationship with Amy, his missus, maybe three months or not a long time before, nowhere near a long enough time to be like, in fact, I think he was doing it when they met. I don't think that she'd ever stayed over his house. And he perilously close, like nicked the bottom of, I'm not going to get into a relationship with you or stay in this relationship that I've been in for two months if you make me come around to sleep on the floor. I'm not sleeping on the fucking floor, Yousef.
And he was just, well, okay, well, we can stay at your house and I'll come home and I'll sleep on the bed because he wasn't prepared to break this experiment. So just outstanding. But I mean, you know, this is just personal experimentation, I think. And it kind of comes back to that positive reinforcement thing we were talking about with your group of friends, that if you want to be around people that give you great stories, that have different interesting things that are going on, and that...
show you a different perspective in the world the behavior that you want to encourage needs to be encouraged and if someone does something new or strange i mean you can laugh about it doesn't mean that you need to be even pro it but you need to be able to accept like dude i can't believe you nearly made your brand new girlfriend sleep on the floor at your house like you were in this brand new relationship like I wouldn't have done that. That would have been crazy. That would have been, you know, you can give the criticisms you want, but be accepting of the fact that they've done it.
And he's like, okay, that's reinforcing that person to go and be themselves. And that enriches the color and the, you know, like, uh, Dahlia'sness of their existence enriches yours. It adds flavor and it adds excitement and stuff like that. Three or four big ideas from the last few months. subprime audience what's that so people know in 2008 you had the great financial crash that happened and a lot of it was these subprime mortgages that were getting sold on which were basically just junk mortgages people that couldn't afford to ever pay off those mortgages it was trash mortgages that were then getting sold on en masse and as a result people were buying them the whole credit system was propped up and the whole thing came crashing down and i think you There's a similar-ish thing going on right now with creators and influencers where a lot of them have subprime audiences, where it's just they've created content that they themselves don't like to attract an audience they don't like, and now the audience is beginning to no longer like them as well.
I think it comes back to the hidden visible metrics idea that when you're optimizing for likes, views, clear... width metrics and forgetting about the depth metrics. So there's a big difference between this video got played 10 million times and this video got played a thousand times by a hundred people.
It's so significantly different. I think one of the ideas I have for Twitter that I would like to see percolate or happen is right now with Twitter or even Instagram, a lot of these platforms, you have a like as the currency and a comment, I guess. But if you look at the like, the problem with the like is it's completely, infinitely fungible.
I can like as many pieces of content. And the problem that that means is I could release two pieces of content. One piece that gets a million likes, one piece that gets a thousand likes.
And the million likes was just this cool thing that was here today, gone tomorrow. But the a thousand likes one, there's 200 people in that that have read that thing 10 times and have glued it to their wall and get emotional when they speak to you because it was so impactful to them. But when I look at the screen, I go, well, I need to do more of this one because look at all the likes it's getting. And I had this idea of probably stealing it from dating apps, which is the concept of like a super like these social networks should have where. you get one super like per week.
And it means that there's more value in a specific thing because then you could actually gauge the success based off that. Wow, this is the best thing that someone saw this week. Yes. And then forget about everything else and just go up purely off that.
You can kind of see it with Twitter now with bookmarks versus likes. It's kind of a better indicator. And you can imagine a phase where you could then customize the algorithm more that you're getting more golden likes. I would way rather have my algorithm optimized for golden likes.
So even now you could have it optimized for bookmarks. Yes. Right.
I mean, this is Sahil in the ISIS group that we're in, Iron Sharpens Iron Squad. Yeah. Sean. John. He mentioned, I think he posted some tweet in before that had done relatively okay in terms of numbers, but just had this absurd number of bookmarks on it.
And you go, that's good. And that's, it's kind of similar to your idea of after a while, it doesn't matter how many retweets it gets. It matters who retweets it.
Yeah. You're just optimizing for depth rather than width. I just love the idea.
The subprime audience idea, I think, is so phenomenal because from the outside, it looks like it's full of A's and double A's, but when you get in there, it's C's and double C's. And a good indicator of a subprime audience, or the good indicator of a subprime mortgage is the person selling it wouldn't have bought it. They wouldn't have done it because they know it's junk.
And a good indicator of a subprime audience, it's not always the case, but a good indicator is the person creating the content wouldn't consume it. That's max content, right? Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. And I think a lot of creators or people that, uh, certain people may have issues with it comes down to that fundamental problem.
Well, the problem is that you can gain popularity and win on the objective metrics thing by creating content that you don't care about. And you can lose on the objective metrics thing by creating content that you do care about. But what are you optimizing for?
And again, everything's fucking hidden in observable metrics all over again. All the way down. But yeah, one of the things that I was really not pleasantly surprised by, because you can tell in the comments section a lot of the time, but the comments section also selects for a very particular type of people and blah, blah, blah. The live shows that I did last year, and we're looking at the ones for winter this year as well, every single person, caveat that, almost every single person.
that came to those live shows, I would have happily gone for a coffee with. I bet they're interesting people. They're into cool stuff.
They've got like a cool story. They're working on things. That to me was the biggest reassurance that the direction of the content that I'm making, which I'm interested in. And I get captured by, this is a topic that we should talk about because it's in the news.
Maybe I should do a bit on Diddy. Diddy videos are getting, you know, 2 million plays. Maybe I should talk about Diddy. well, all right, but really does it matter? Am I going to care?
Do I want an audience of people that's here for Diddy gossip? Maybe, but do you want an audience of people who are here for Diddy gossip, then Paris Hilton gossip, then Kim Kardashian gossip, then blah, blah, blah. Because after a while, if you keep on spinning that up, you end up surrounded by people that aren't like you and that consume content that you're not interested in because you've, this is basically the subprime audience is the, um, um, It's the exit liquidity of audience capture. Like that's ultimately what you end up with. If you keep on winning the game of audience capture, you end up with a very successful audience of people who aren't like you and don't like the things that you actually like, because all that you've been doing is feeding them red meat.
And the worst thing with subprime audiences is the hidden metric, sorry, the visible metric are the people who've had a successful strategy with it, which are the ones that have huge... content creators that wouldn't consume their own content. But the irony is, there's a load of hidden ones that are also pursuing the same strategy.
And because it's so shite and never actually getting any form of takeoff versus going back to... my content raiser of would you consume your own thing if you do that you are guaranteed you have at least product market fit with yourself yes and then you can kind of bet there's at least some of a weirdos and maybe a hundred a thousand ten thousand whatever that are going to also fit just due to the law of large numbers but when you have the opposite when you're posting things that you wouldn't yourself consume it might be the case that the total addressable market is zero it's like creating a product idea where you don't want the product and ultimately nobody wants the product did i i think i taught you about i asked people on the internet who use the word grifter for the people who use it what does this mean to you like what is the word grift because you know there's lots of that word gets thrown around an awful lot it's kind of like anybody who monetizes anything kind of but then there's some people that monetize and don't get called a grifter so i was like okay well it's not a word that i particularly use i'm typically on the receiving end rather than on the the like saying end and i asked and the best uh definition that someone gave was if the person selling the product wouldn't use it or buy it themselves that's a grift like would you use or buy this thing yourself if you weren't being paid for it or you wouldn't own it and you know for all of the criticism there's a lot of skepticism i think around podcasts advertising influencer advertising in general at the moment that's the best heuristic if you want to be immune to criticism about the partners that you work with you about the views that you hold about anything that you do like just partner with people that you use their products like you know i wear gymshark i can't get a sponsorship from crocs yet but whoops right like all of the things i talk about i use so even if people have a big problem with it you're at least in some part insulated from it you go well fucking hell i like it like i like an eight sleep you know like i i i use momentous protein you know fucking shoot me I'm not complaining about you and what bedding you you go to bed in the only difference is that you're not talking about it so yeah I think that's and it's similar to your um the subprime audience thing is similar to the golden rule of the internet thing that you've got yeah the golden rule of the internet is if you run enough a b tests you'll eventually end up with a porn site all roads will lead there if you keep going okay we'll start with this thumbnail or we'll start with this intellectual topic and we'll a b test it if you don't have a point of guidelines that things that align in the sand all roads will ultimately lead to a porn site one thing that you said to me ages ago that i liked was you have almost brand guidelines that act as this room slash border and then you're willing to a b test within that but it never goes outside of that correct but i think a mistake that can happen is you never put those in place and just let the a b test decide everything And then you just kind of drift over that. You continue to skew. So you need to balance the art with the science. Because if you go pure science, you will ultimately end up with a porn site.
And if you go pure art, then you end up with something that's probably too ineffective. Yes. You need to play within the rules. I mean, yeah, we have the method that we use for split testing thumbnails on back catalog videos that are over three months old.
Those get QC'd. So the copywriter who already understands the... brand guidelines that we have, gets another person to come in and okay it to ensure that it really, really is just a second set of eyes. So you know what it's like.
You write a marketing headline one day and you go, that's pretty great, that. And then someone you work with goes, ah, swing and a miss there. I don't think that that's quite right.
You need a second set of eyes on top of, I think all marketing copy, I think it's pretty much impossible to get marketing copy right with just one person. Like you always need a second. You woke up that day, you were underslept or overslept. You had a really great gym session and you're caffeinated and everything's amazing. The Uber driver's your best friend now.
And you get in, you go, yeah, this headline's fantastic. You go, ah, no. Even you would look at it in seven days and go, what was I thinking about that?
Ash negative. What's that? It's a concept I got from, I think Eric Weinstein originally, which was the, there's the Ash and Milgram conformity experiments. So the Ash.
conformity experiment was a famous experiment there's questions around the validity of it but the idea itself is quite fascinating which is you would have multiple lines like a b c white lines and imagine a would be four centimeters long b would be six centimeters long and c would be three centimeters long and you'd put people in a room and you'd say what's the biggest line and let's say Nine out of 10 are actors and they go first. And then the final one is the participant. And what would often be found if the nine would vote for C or A, even though the biggest line is B.
that person would often vote in line with everybody else. And ash negative or ash positive is whether somebody in that scenario would go against the consensus of the room. So it's quite a useful bit.
So is ash negative? Ash negative would be somebody who fails the test, therefore called truth. So ash negative would be, well, I think B's, you guys all said A or C or A.
I think it's B, and therefore that person would be ash negative. But ash positive would be... essentially the person who kind of looks at it and goes, I think it might be B, but then goes, it's A or it's C.
Or they're so ash positive that the crowd distorts their own perception. They don't even realize it. So it's like uber ash positive, right? And it's a useful naming convention of being able to split certain people that you know, and you go, oh, that person's pretty ash negative.
And it's quite useful because you know, if I'm asking feedback from somebody, will they give me... honest feedback, or if they're in a certain situation that the crowd goes one way, which way will they go? And I've thought about that. How do you actually create more and more ash negative people?
It's quite an interesting, probably should be taught at schools. It's an interesting idea. Yeah.
Well, outsourcing your thinking to the crowd is always going to be a quicker route. That's why we read books. Someone lives an entire life. They condense that down into 80,000 words.
You read it, you take away five things that you care about the most. You've outsourced your thinking to them. But if you are... uh totally at the mercy of other people's opinions then you end up in this sort of ash positive like uber ash positive scenario i had this idea from a text message thread that i was in about a month ago and i was talking to a guy of a text and we were debating about somebody else and he had a very negative opinion of this particular person and i remember thinking like i don't have the same negative opinion but there's a part of me that's scared to say that I don't have this negative opinion, because if I do, I'm maybe going to deplete in the eyes of this person that I want to like me. And then it made me realize people don't want to hear what they want to hear.
People want to hear what you actually think. And I stuck to my guns and, you know, skirted around my people-pleasing nature, said, actually, do you know what it is? Hasn't exactly showered himself in glory recently. I really love his takes on X, Y, and Z. And the response was like, well, I think he's a dick.
I was like, right, okay, that's fine. And then I reflected and thought, unless it's something that people really care about, me saying like, you know, Saddam Hussein, actually an all right guy. Like, unless it's a really outlier. Cracking cashflow conversion.
Unless it's a real outlier opinion or something that they're very, very precious about. Almost saying something. perfect another perfect example of this homozy um would alex's wife prefer it if he got dressed up to go to dinner in a nice suit and a shirt and all of the rest of it on the short term yes kind of because it's probably nice to not go to dinner with someone who's always in a beater and shorts but in the long term she is more attracted to a person who wants to wear what he wants to wear than wants to wear what she wants him to wear. And that's the same.
People don't want to hear what they want to hear. They want to hear the truth from you. They want to hear what you really think. And that it takes a lot of like confidence and sort of self-belief to be able to say, I have faith that my opinion is sufficiently right that I can stand on my own two feet about whatever this thing is that I think, and that this person is not going to reject me for just saying what I believe.
And it kind of comes back to the subprime audience thing, the observable and hidden metrics thing, the non-fungible humans thing, that would you rather get to the end of life being a popular and successful caricature surrounded by people who don't really know you or like who you are deep down because you've never shown it? Or would you rather be a little bit less popular, but actually maybe more popular by doing the thing that you do? because you're never going to be connected to the things that you say or the opinions that you hold or whatever it might be. I realized this with dating with girls and stuff. Let's say you're flirting back and forth with somebody and they ask, what are you up to today?
Or what did you get up to last night? Or show me your outfit today or whatever, just normal flirty shit. And you go, well, I could send a photo from the archive of me looking all dressed up, or I could send a photo of me walking down the street in Crocs or whatever it is that you're doing at the time. You go, well, if I send the photo of me, that's me dressed up, I may get positive reinforcement because it's me looking cool.
Or maybe I've done my makeup or I've done whatever it is. But that compliment isn't actually going to land. Yes, it's going to get the outcome that I want, which is someone to think X, Y, or Z of me, but I'm not connected to that.
Like they're going to give praise to a previous version of me, but I've lied. I've lied in order to try and get the outcome that I'm looking for. I'm not actually connected and they don't see me and any praise that they give me doesn't land with me.
So it's like two Google Translate things not talking the same language to each other. but somehow like saying, oh, and we understood each other at the end of the day. Again, that's an example of only the irrational behavior survives, right?
Yeah, the guy that refuses to not wear a beater and shorts to go to dinner. What have you come to learn about incentives? Something that we've both been pretty obsessed by recently.
I think incentives are the most under-discussed topic when it comes to the news, when it comes to society, when it comes to... at the individual level, so few people talk about the incentives. And once you understand the incentive, you begin to understand everything.
A few aphorisms on this is, never ask your barber if you need a haircut, because guess what? He'll think you need a haircut. As soon as you go, oh, what's the incentives of the system?
And then begin to understand that, a lot of frustrations that people have with individuals or society begins to make sense. So there's one famous example of, I think it was FedEx that Munger talks about where FedEx were having huge problems of getting deliveries done on time. Staff were working way over into the next day, deliveries were late, and somebody had the genius idea to stop paying them per hour and start paying them by the shift or when the work was done. And all of a sudden, it was no longer a problem.
And there was another example in Greece where... Apparently they had it where to deal with congestion, they created a system where people with their license plate ended in an odd number they could drive this day and then the next day even numbers. And all that happened was people would then game the system.
So rich people would just buy two cars and you ended up with more congestion on the fucking road. So whenever you see the incentives, you'll often have an insight in what the outcome is going to be. What was that British criminals dying thing?
Oh, yeah, this was. I think it goes back to understanding history. The fascinating thing of Australia was essentially where we just sent our criminals. Penal colony. It's wild.
It's one of the reasons why I love understanding history, because you begin to realize how absurd reality is, that the current day is. There's a story from when the Brits were moving prisoners, I believe, over to Australia. They were originally paid per person getting on the boat.
And back then, like... There wasn't great HR policies. They didn't treat people particularly well.
And it was something like 33% would die on the voyage from Britain to Australia, but the people were already paid. They don't give a fuck. Then when they changed the system that they would get paid for when the people arrived in Australia, the survival rate went from 66% to like 99%. So again, all you've done there is change the incentive system.
Looping back to the beginning of the conversation, things that are sometimes more important than hard work, things that are more important than being busy. is actually understanding the incentives of the systems that you're operating in. One tweak in somebody's incentives that's working for you or is in your life, the compounding impact that can have is absolutely absurd. Never attribute to conspiracy what is more easily explained by incentives and incompetence, from Naval. Yeah, that explains so much of modern politics.
That explains so much of people making horrific or in inhumane business decisions wherever there's incentives i always have this idea which is one good razor that i'm trying to implement is whenever somebody tells me something that goes in line with their incentives kind of massively downplay that idea and don't just download it because in the past i've done that somebody will go somebody who lives in this city will tell me why this city's great and i'll go oh i'll download that piece of information and then three years later they leave the fucking city and i go hold on you told me this was amazing and you're no longer here versus when they tell me the opposite. So when they tell me why they hate their city, or let's say they're talking about their partner or their job, if they're going against their incentives and identity, the level of truth that's probably in that is so much greater than when people are going in line with their incentives. There's that classic phrase of never...
I think I wrote actually, it was, there's two things you should never try and do, try and defy the laws of physics and... get somebody to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding or what they're paid for people will not swim against their incentives on average sausage fests Talk to me about Sausage Fest. Sausage Fest, okay.
Fuck it, I don't know what to say on Sausage Fest. Next one, next one. Well, I think that this came out of our Miami trip, which was a 20 person.
How many people came? It was, no, it was like 14, 14 of us. But it's in Miami.
Yeah. And at least half of them are from the UK. Yes. So we realized that Sausage Fests are underpriced.
Underpriced assets, yeah. basically i think the realization is sausage fest is obviously a crude terminology for it but essentially the idea is i think it's both a male thing a female thing a individual personality thing but when you're i think as you get older what tends to happen is people particularly men i think it's particularly a male problem they stop hanging around their friends because they've got their relationship they've got their kids and guys are just busy and we're not really emotional we don't care for one another and guys get lonelier and lonelier and lonelier and i'm convinced it's because they stop hanging around like one of the reasons the suicide rate is so high is because they stop hanging around their friends. And I also think it's, it often benefits their partner as well. I had this realization once when I was with my friend Alex at a bar in Manchester and we're chatting away and I could see these girls kind of like looking over like, Oh, maybe these guys will talk to us. And I just start burst out laughing because I'm in the process of breaking down Gymshark's negative cashflow conversion cycle.
And I go, if only they could hear what we were talking about, they'd immediately find us so unattractive. But I think guys and girls sometimes need, depending on their personality type, obviously some people get it from different means, need that synchronicity where they can get the thing that their partner would find so unattractive out of them in that nerdy environment. And by the way, this is so true, I think, with the reverse as well. I imagine if the girls are doing a girls'night and one of the girls is like, oh, can Danny come? And he's like, just completely ruins the vibe and the girls can't fully let their hair down.
I think that ability to let out your inner nerd is... Have you seen Ryan Long did a sketch, which was the guy that brings his girlfriend everywhere. And it's so fucking clever, man.
Like I love that world of sketches. Shane Gillis is doing it really well. But Ryan, I think is sort of gold standard for it at the moment.
Everyone knows the person, the dude whose girlfriend either doesn't like him to go out on his own or the couple that kind of just always seem cemented together. They just never. never really a part, even if it's supposed to be a boys night or whatever.
And it's the guy who brings his girlfriend everywhere. But this guy is part of a criminal trio that's about to try and rob a bank. So he turns up and the girlfriend's with him.
And the other two dudes are like, why did you bring Stephanie? And he goes, no, she's fine, man. You know, like she's fun.
And then she starts complaining about the fact that she needs to wear all black. And she's like, why do we always have to wear all black? Like, you know, can we not add a little bit of color in?
And they said, right, we've got to put the tights over our heads so that they can't detect. She said, I've just done my hair. I'm not wearing that tight.
And it's just a fucking phenomenal idea. And it's true. It's true.
Sausage fests are underpriced. What's the female equivalent? You can't really say this without coming up with something that will get you fucking cancer.
There's no equivalent. I'm sure that there'll be some words on the internet. It's definitely a male thing where when you're young, you want to hang out with a few. similar like-minded men and then obviously as you hit puberty you want to be around um dating and then as you get older actually the thing the reason why i think a lot of men are depressed is because they stop hanging around there's some really good evidence to suggest that um one of the reasons that men suffer more men are hit harder by divorce not just financially but socially i think the biggest predictor before uh suicide for men over the age of 40 is divorce you The deaths of divorce and deaths of despair. One of the main reasons being that men often subjugate their social networks because women are better at keeping in contact with close friends.
And then the wife's friend group becomes the husband's friend group. And then when the divorce happens, not only does the husband lose a wife, he also loses his entire social circle because their original loyalty lies with her. And he's now in this sort of weird scenario where he's been...
maroon from the most important relationship he had and all of the other ancillary relationships that would have helped him to uh weather those storms robin dunbar talks about the fact that you know he's got this dunbar's number but it's really interesting when you break it down properly he's been on the show twice and he talks about these sort of concentric circles going up and i think it's like maybe a thousand or even five thousand people that you can have that are kind of you know their name or you're aware of who they are or whatever it might be he's got this 150 number but the real important one is the most that the tightest circle in the middle, which is five, states that you can have around about five close friends, really close friends. And in order to sustain a relationship with one of your close friends, you need to spend, I think it's two hours a week. in contact with them, ideally in person. But a relationship, a committed relationship, takes up two spots. So you go from having five friends to actually only having three friends, plus your partner.
That's how much attention needs to be paid on that. And this is on average, as people that can have 10 close friends, I'm sure, or one or whatever, none. But yeah, when you realize, okay, how am I subjugating my friend?
circle for the relationship and i mean it's the meme is as old as time that your boy uh spends all of his time with you when he's single gets into a relationship disappears off the end of the end of the earth and then six months later breaks up and he's like boys i'm back yes but the reason why i think it's a underpriced sausage fest or underpriced assets which i never thought i'd say out loud is that they're seen as so lame even the terminology is quite lame but it ultimately makes That individual will be happier because they can get their nerdy, weird self out, their partner finds them maybe a little bit icky when they talk about Jim Sharp's negative cash flow conversion cycle. So they get that out. They have the insurance policy if anything ever happens to their relationship that they still maintain these incredible friendships that they have.
And ultimately the relationship's then healthier because they've got a bit of alone time and attraction comes back. But it's crazy how often that's sacrificed. And when you see the suicide numbers, it sounds ridiculous. Then link everything back to that.
but I wouldn't be surprised if that plays a small factor. Well, I tell you why Sausage Fester Underpriced is a valid, like we had skin in the game in Miami. So it was George's 30th month ago, month and a half ago or something in Miami and 14 guys come over and we have this big villa and everyone's staying there and we have the most non-typical Miami 30th, which included group breath work, e-foiling at eight in the morning, pickleball. And it was a Saturday afternoon and... we'd done the breathwork thing.
We got up and maybe gone go-karting or something like that earlier on. So he'd had the typical sort of morning and then it's 1.30 PM, beautiful Miami weather in the middle of April. And you think, right, okay, 14 lads who are all aged between 25 and 38 or something. And you go, right, they're going to go send it.
They're going to go to Soho Beach House. They're going to go to downtown. And I've got the contacts. Justin's there. He's like, I can sort you out at one Miami tonight.
You're like, where do you want to go? What you really want to do, you want to do an early dinner here. And then you want to, because the clubs start picking up at around about 11, all the rest of it.
And we've got this huge plan of different things that we could do. And we piece it together and all the rest of it. I can't remember who it was. I don't think it was me. But someone, and we've been talking about this for an hour.
All of the different things and all the guest lists being sorted and all the rest of it. And someone just went, boys, do you feel like just staying in the villa and chatting shit? And that was it for the rest of the night. We took a little trip to Little Havana, came back.
Maybe we did go for dinner. We went for dinner on the nighttime. And then that was the day that we bailed out of everything else. So yeah, we put skin in the game for the sausage fest, uh, like camp. Yeah.
Full skin in the game. Uh, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of this stuff that you're doing.
Yeah. If they want to keep up to date with everything I'm doing, uh, Twitter's always a good spot. Twitter at. george-mack someone's got george mack the bastards and then by the time this is out my website should be live so that's just george-mack.com and that'll have all my best ever essays and a few little nuggets on there and where's the mailing list uh george-mack.com you'll find the newsletter list on there as well hell yeah appreciate you man boom thank you so much for having me thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my full-length three hour long podcast with eric weinstein right here