Transcript for:
High Agency: Understanding and Cultivating It

this is a long time coming I think agency since we've been talking is the topic the thing that we've both been obsessed with the most so introduce people to it what's high agency High agency is in my opinion the most under disussed and most important idea in let's say the 21st century it's one of those ideas that once you see it you can't quite unsee it it's it's everywhere but the problem with it is it's quite hard to Define there's that um Justice Potter Stewart line of around when he was trying to Define pornography when he was asked in a government inquiry can you define pornography and he came back with the ultimate reply of well I can't Define it but I know it when I see it so in lie of the episode today I know you rent out all these beautiful Studios I wanted to be the first guest ever to bring some props to kind of get people to experience High agency and then we can Define it with words so cool first off is high agency in a me okay so as you can see here you have person a and person B and essentially for the people that are listening you have two people trapped on a desert island identical people but with two different fundamental frames of reality One is using the wood to get help the other is using the wood to kind of escape the island and you kind of see this idea that two people with exact same fundamental realities but a completely different like low agency uh here High a agency here so you see high agency in a meme there then and this one was quite difficult to get printed in London without people asking questions is high agency High agency in a in a moment so again for the people listening you have a series of Nazis saluting to Hitler in 1936 and you have this guy in red here who's believed there's debate who it is but he's believed to be a guy called August l M and what I love about his story was he originally like most people have this idea that when Nazi Germany comes around that they're going to be the one that puts an Frank in their house and stands up but realistically we're way more likely to be these individuals here and according to the story um August was part of the Nazi party kind of went along with the LP because it kind of made sense um fell in love with a Jewish woman and very much okay began to hit an agency test with reality and you see all all these Nazis saluting at once and he's the one guy with his arms crossed he ends up um getting punished for marrying a German woman ends up in a concentration camp she dies in the concentration camp but there's just that beauty of every single person saluting as a Nazi and him there with his arms crossed just beautifully signifies High agency in a moment MH next thing I would like to run through is we have um two videos so one which is high agen in a video and another which is low agency in a video okay so this is Sasquatch music Festival 2009 Guy starts dance party so for the people listening at home there's this absolute nut job on a hill dancing like a madman and the whole crowd is looking at him like he's lost his mind one guy's joined one guy's joined he starts dancing with him yes and slowly but surely people begin to join the dance party more and more throughout the video but before you know it you begin to see the whole crowd who go people now judging him to joining oh my God 2 minutes in it's 150 people yeah and then toward the end there's no one sat down there's only a few people sat down so yeah that's high agency in a video and just to contrast this now the next video in terms of getting people to actually experience is low agency in a video from Darren Brown but they were actually taking part in a compliance [Music] test the three people on the left are actors they've been briefed to stand or sit when they hear this everyone else that's brought in is a genuine shortlisted applicant they've been given no instructions other than to fill out their forms my team and I were secretly watching from another room [Music] [Music] the more socially compliant a person is the more they're likely to look to others for signs of how to behave this is going to be your spot and the more people the greater the pressure to join in in this case whether to stand or [Music] sit so funny how the third guys now just taking those people that didn't follow the [Music] crowd she just cracked on I think we have to lose Amy sadly oh so this was a test of compliance wow W once we had a full house very before you know it we got rid of the actors yeah before you know it they removed the actors and you just have 10 people standing leaving us with a room full of compound of aell standing up and I love that video because yeah it perfectly encapsulates low agency where and it's so easy to fall into of just looking around other people assuming that they know best and then realizing that all the other people were just looking around at other people and it's this giant game of Emperor's New Clothes and and then and then you die and you realized it was one giant LP live action role play the entire time yeah and I suppose the that's that mimetic sense has got implications that you can be the first mover both to start something which snowballs down or to stop something which is snowballing right now 100% so finally um in terms of the high agency like Show and Tell I brought from home one we've discussed a lot of times so here we go this is the high agency question so for people listening at home the way to identify the highest agency person in your life is if you woke up here and you have sweat with dirt and dirt with sweat all over your body you've people listening this is a photo of a prison cell yes um you've not dranking days and you've woken up in a third world prison cell and you have a phone passed under your door and you can call one person to try and get you out of there who is it and everybody weirdly has this kind of idea in their head of who they would call in this scenario and when you actually begin to grill people about who they would call it's not the amount that they bench press it's not the car that they drive it's not the novels that they've read it's not the family background they're from it's maybe sometimes if they're the royal family then maybe it's it's something else and that something is is high agency and yeah I'm looking forward to the chat today because we can go into more of the specifics of it but the problem once you've actually begin to experience it you get more of an understanding but then the real problem that I kind of struggled with is how do you actually it's a Gena like it's difficult to describe in words like what is what is it so I kind of created this like model here which I call the high agency Spectrum Spectrum being the operative word yes so essentially imagine you have two doors behind them are all the people you would call when stuck be in a third world jail and at the other end of the spectrum is Peak Clow agency is the last people that you would call when stuck in a third world jail if you were stuck in like a paper bag you wouldn't call them right yeah and what is the fundamental difference between these two groups cuz if you looked at them on paper you go there's no gender race age politics wealth career title LinkedIn profile like what specifically is it and I was stuck on this idea for years like trying to Chip Away Chip Away Chip Away chip away and essentially kind of came to the conclusion of like this is actually the most simple way of defining High agency is are they happening to life or is life happening to them so what you'll ultimately um anybody who you would call to break you out of a third world jail you would Define as happening to life the people that you would be least likely to break you out of a third world jail are the ones that life is happening to them um and then once you begin to see that Spectrum it's such a more simple like aams razor of really understanding High agency and fundamentally this isn't it can be like a nice okay this is a cool like self-help concept but actually agency is bigger than that out of the six to seven million species on Earth human beings are the only ones capable of agency in the known universe of what we know and by the way we only know this via agency we are the only thing that we know of capable of agency um even today like we are sat in a studio in London and I was listening to David Deutch explained this concept of we're in London today and it's only thanks to agency because it's December right now in London that me and you aren't dead within two to three hours because it's the clothes that we wear human agency it's the heating here like the UK itself is a product of agency of human agency because without clothing which we kind of Bor into and assume has always been a thing but no it was the result of human agency without Heating and another thing that we just take completely for granted the UK would not be possible so he argues that this idea that we're going to um go to Mars and terraform it and shape it that it's actually a livable habitat the UK is already that nobody should feasibly live here but it's just human agency it's agency all the way down all the way down and what that's why once you see it you can't fundamentally unsee it because it's the only it's the not the only thing that makes human beings unique but we are the only species that is fundamentally capable of happening to life why is it so important to you it's an interesting definition I can see why you happening to life not life happening to you is important why do you care why is it so crucial why is it the most important idea of the 21st century to you I think like growing up in the UK you naturally potentially have a default low agency setting I remember when I first heard the idea it was Eric Weinstein on Tim Ferris podcast and I had to pull over the car and like write this down I was like oh okay this kind of begins to explain so much of the world and so much of my personal world and then as I mentioned once you begin to see it you you can't unsee it you see it every single where and I've got some examples on the boards that I'll come on to but it's so important to me because once you realize um um you know your line of like skill issue everything is just skill issue everything's everything is basically an agency issue like you when you actually uh one of the fundamental beliefs I think of around High agency is that all problems are solvable and once you begin to take that on board as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics like this isn't self-help it's physics all problems are solvable with enough knowledge um what what are some good examples of high AG like okay so using the Spectrum I've got two examples that you're going to like here we go so on the right hand side of the high agency Spectrum we have SpaceX so the recent Chopsticks Landing so SpaceX starts with Elon selling PayPal and deciding as you do to just get into rocket science and rather than go to university he decides that that's a painfully slow download process to learn so just gets a load of rocket science bucks and starts like happening to life create SpaceX and one Professor SpaceX was this early startup not the Juggernaut that it is today the best rocket scientist um Professor I believe in America he uh he goes I can't believe it like five of my top 10 students are working at this company called SpaceX he goes I need to meet the guy that runs that so Elon arranges the interview and this guy has a load of question questions for real what are you doing and immediately he realizes the reason why elon's taking this meeting is to find out who the other five were and boom so anyway it keeps obviously goes through all the ups and downs and you end up with a rocket reverse Landing catching with the Chopsticks and reducing the legs that's needed uh the amount of repairs that's needed as a result Mass massively accelerates the human's ability to happen to life to be able to escape the planet just on the the SpaceX thing Bill Perkins intro me to one of the guys that works for Elon and uh this guy bet his entire career on the belly flop maneuver if I told you this story no so when these Rockets reenter because the purpose is for them to be reused they're coming into land they're not going to land sideways you're not going to put thrusters on the side of it you're going to land it upright like this but the problem of bringing it into land like that is that this is aerodynamically the one that has the least drag so they thought right okay how can we use air friction to reduce the speed of re-entry whilst also still Landing the thing upright so that we get to use the same boosters to slow it down that we used to get it to take off and he created the belly flop maneuver so if you watch it when it comes in it's coming in sideways like this and then only at the last moment does it rotate it stops so this guy apparently the first time that it ever happened like if it hadn't worked and he left I can't remember where NASA some huge you know illustrious uh organization bet his entire career all of his reputation and at this new company would have been a laughing stock of the entire industry and [ __ ] cool wow all problems are solvable right yeah well I say that let's now contrast that with do you recognize this on the left it's a train in the UK yes it's not just any train in the UK Christopher it's Northern rails trains so for people outside the UK these will be the trains that you have Northern rail on the northeast right it's not just a Northwest thing cool so I would have got on this um coming from the northwest of the UK and just to contrast SpaceX obviously at the other end of the high agency spectrum and Northern rail at the other uh end of the high agency Spectrum so what I wanted to I did bring it just to read it out so this is a recent inquiry into Northern rail so you have the mayor of Manchester sitting down with the head of the trade unions for norn rail or the people that work quite high up at Northern Rail and throughout the last few years anybody who's experienced Norther ra it's too expensive um it there's trains getting canceled constantly there's delays Etc so they're doing an inquiry into what's going on it starts with the mayor I've heard you're still using fax machines to do these things can that possibly be true it's very much true chair how how on Earth is that the case in 2024 well that's a very reasonable question it's our challenge to get rid of them we have plans to get rid of them you could do it tomorrow we absolutely could are you going to do it tomorrow we're not going to do it tomorrow why because the tools we use to get information and messages to our crew will on faxes amazingly we will get there in the end because we're forced to because fax technology in telecoms turns turns off our plan that we're putting forward anyway it cuts in it's like how the mayor goes on to say like how have we poured millions of millions of privatized money into this and it's still we're still using fax machines in 2024 um and he goes on and talks about yeah we're going to get round to it we're going to get round to it and it just ends with I mean I personally don't think many people watching this will consider replacing fax machines as an issue as depth of depth and complexity so just the two contrasts here of fax machines on the terrains in the UK and reverse like Landing a rocket is two complete polar opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to travel and Logistics from our inside into the British National Health Service through youf we both know that the NHS still heavily heavily relies not only on faxes faxes between departments and not only faxes the whole thing is run on Windows XP when I don't even know how you have access I don't even know how machines are able to run Windows XP anymore there's an incredible Twitter account of the minute called days of NHS spending you sent me this you sent me this the other day what was it the Palm JRA Beach yeah so the Palm JRA beach in Dubai um it's a tweet where it talks about it's the most expensive Ive I think physical infrastructure ever built and it equates to 30 days of NHS spending and he just constantly anytime anybody talks about a number that's going to be saved or a crazy amount of spend it's just constantly Quantified into the number of days of NHS spending absurd we'll get back to talking to George in one minute but first I need to tell you about Aid sleep sleep isn't just about how long you rest but also how well your body stays in its optimal temperature zone throughout the night and this is where eight sleep comes in just add their brand new pod 4 ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time sleep phases HRV snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy it even starts cooling or heating your bed an hour before your bedtime and that's why it's been clinically proven to increase Total Sleep Time by up to 1 hour every night I've been using my eight Sleep mattress for years and I literally can't imagine life without it I'm on the road at the moment in London and uh it feels medieval to not have an actively cooled and heated mattress topper it is a total Game Changer best of all they have a 30- night sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days if you don't like it they'll give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get $350 off the Pod 4 ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's EIG ghts sleep.com slod wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout what about what about uh examples of agency like you both of us have kind of become addicted I guess to accumulating these stories of people that are high Agency for me uh s Adrien Paul Jan Katon Dart the unkillable soldier um sir Ernest Shackleton that attempted the first Antarctic Crossing 1914 uh the Forgotten Highlander alist Kart you know uh Victor Frankle man search for meaning in some ways too um I had that recent one that Amo koven and Guy the dude that took 30 an entire platoon's worth of meth and outran Russians for a month we only stopped his resting heart rate was 200 BPM and he weighed 50 kilos um who are some of yours who brings me on to my uh my next one okay so we have two contast here one end of the spectrum we have the US Department of Education on the low agency end which it something around 20 to $30,000 they spend on um students per year and they are ranked it's the highest in the world the US spends on education meanwhile they're ranked uh between 20th and 35th both for literacy and numeracy so spending so much money getting so little out of it is a wild start of something along the lines of over 50% of Americans have lower than sixth grade literacy yep so on the right end is one of the best books I've ever listened to it's about an hour long and I'll just open up the question first because it's completely reset this question for me which is what is a 10-year-old capable of and this book kind of answers that question so it started to it's called don't tell me I can't it's written by a 14-year-old at the time called Cole Summers and essentially just to contrast it to the Department of Education it starts with him very early on around about five or six years old and his dad um served in the military and had issue in training that basically left him disabled and with injuries for the rest of his life and one day he's getting raised by his dad and he's about to hit the age of going to primary school and they see these kids like misbehaving and saying some like awful [ __ ] outside of their house and they decide you know what we're going to we're going to homeschool him and he he opts him for that decision because I don't want to hang out with those kids unfortunately his dad then ends up needing lots of operations throughout his home uh throughout his home schooling and his he one day is kind of sat there his dad's recovering from um all these surgeries and he says to his dad how do people get rich and his dad just replies I imagine at the time on so much medication and just trying to keep his kid busy he goes um I don't know cuz they're a poor family goes maybe go watch some Warren Buffett videos on YouTube so six-year-old goes and start watching Warren Buffett Charlie Munga videos on YouTube consumes everything about Warren Buffett and Charlie Monga understands like monga's iron laws of prescription um starts learning everything about business and compound interest all by for your on YouTube then at the age of seven the age of seven just goes well I'll just start my first company seven-year-old starts his first company um selling rabbit to the local restaurants gets it up to $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue and that's real Revenue not like a Shopify [ __ ] screenshot right $1,000 for a seven-year-old at the age of eight he then learns about Amazon not paying uh tax how do how is Amazon not paying tax so he starts just teaching himself the tax code on the online at the age of eight at the age of 9 he buys his first vehicle like a car um it so for the uh for the farm so not him but he owns the vle but people are working on it yeah and uh at the age of 10 he buys his first house for $10,000 watches YouTube videos learns like flooring um how to do the wiring completely flips the house makes a profit on the house and uh has he got any help is anyone assisting him with this I I I don't I don't know the ins and outs of that specifically I've got a probably do more research on that but the book is um is incredible and there's a bit in there where he goes to Scouts cuz he's still interacting with other kids but what the crazy thing is is he didn't know that that wasn't normal he was just going online and he goes to Scouts and he's chatting to the other kids about like what they've been up to that day and they're saying yeah we've just been remembering the planets and like so we have Earth here and Mars and D D D D D he's like when are we ever going to use this he goes what about you what have you been up to and he chats them about like payroll tax compliance let pict this 9-year-old at Scouts but not that I think the key asteris on that story is not that everybody should not not every 10-year-old should be buying their own house but it makes you question like the education model that we discussed earlier and I think that's probably one of the biggest inputs of low agency into people and his story in particular yeah makes you question well what is a a young person capable of well I suppose the education system in both America and in the UK I don't know if there's anywhere that it isn't very much life is happening to you yes there is no you happening you're not you know until when's the first time in the UK school system that you get to choose your sort of Specialties sort of 13 it's after you're nine I think remember you're going to pick your gcses that you're going to focus on and then from there you pick your as you pick your A Levels then you pick your degree so up until that point up until the age of 12 13 13 you're just on a set of train tracks you don't even get to discriminate what you learn let alone how you learn uh in Broad strokes and then in specific Strokes it's like well this is the sequence this is how the curriculum is put together and um yeah what's your thing about uh the behaviors that you were rewarded for in early life or the ones that you get punished for in later life yes like in uh in school if you copy people you're punished and given a detention in life if you copy people you're labeled a successful franchisee owner but there's like endless amounts of those behaviors where a lot of adult life is about from my experience at least seems to be about unlearning behaviors that happened during school when you actually go down the rabbit hole of the education system like this prushan model that came over and it was primarily created for in to create industrial Factory workers and it still looks like that to this very day that you have bells that ring they use the same bells in British schools that they were using in the factories like the most pavlovian early on condition it's [ __ ] wild you have you have um somebody who's in charge of the classroom you have people moved from cell to cell uniform or uniform yeah and you also you're told when you can eat you're told when you can go to the bath you have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom Peter teal I was thinking about this the other day he has this question of what do or what does what opinion do you hold that few people people um agree with you on and this idea of trying to get you to become an independent thinker which is quite a difficult question to answer I certainly struggle with it but like there's a flip of that question which is what do essentially most people agree upon that nothing's changing and I think it's the education system is definitely not a good thing it's it's obviously not necessarily there's worse options right before before it existed but I can't think of anything that as many people agree upon that this thing's a doesn't prepare you for real life and a good indicator of a training system I was thinking about this a good indicator of a training system is how closely it mimics the actual thing so driving lessons are incredible because you're literally driving and it's painful but meanwhile School how much do you remember from school essentially zero of I was thinking about you know who I'd love to meet whoever is in charge of foreign languages in the UK at like the department level I've never met anybody who's learned Spanish French from school apart from like bonja bonja or H that's it but we still keep going dedicated two hours a week for two years to it yeah yeah it's bizarre uh I I have an issue with the early on education system I know that you've got a massive issue with University as well um for me I found University to be useful as like a crash course in socialization um but I it feels like uh you've ordered a main course that tasted like dog [ __ ] and you're like yeah yeah yeah but the gravy that came along with it or the plate that it was put on the plate that this dog [ __ ] food was served on that was an enjoyable experience I took a lot away from that plate it's very well designed great quality really I remember it um but yeah it does feel like if you're trying to create a highly agentic populace school isn't exactly the best preparation have you seen I need to double verify these studies I'd be interested to replicate them there's a guy called I think Dr land who worked for NASA and designed these creative thinking tests to basically gauge how creative somebody is and the way they would do that is ask for for example number of solutions different types of solutions they come up with how they vary from everybody else's Solutions things like that and a five five-year-old average of the 1500 that they surveyed scored like 98% on creativity kind of follows up every five years and it just it looks like the reverse of bitcoin's price it's just down down down down down and the you know we spoke on the previous show of the average person dies at 25 and isn't buried until 75 at the follow-up of the study the 25 year olds 2% was the 2% of them scored as like creative thinkers and it kind of makes sense when you put through this model of wrong right answer set curriculum for you pavlovian don't think outside of the box don't question the question ever that doesn't go down well at schools no why do we need to learn this what's the point of doing that no you'd be labeled a a disruptive kid you'd be a bad student you'd be a bad student if you ask questions about the question my brother tells me this funny story of when he was at school and he was probably not the most well- behaved kid at school but one day he was like flicking around the history box and came fascinated by like communism in Russia and China and all these people going down this bad ideology and the teacher like goes what are you doing he go I'm just absolutely fascinated by this sir he go yeah that's great but that's not on the curriculum and just went back to something about Henry VII completely changed the curriculum but it is fascinating that I do think we're at this momentous period of time where you now have chat GPT Claude all these AI tools coming in where even the work now just completely redundant even this model of preparing for an exam like talk about feedback loops you don't find out your exam results to even forget even judging exams itself not finding out your exam result for 3 months is such a terrible feedback loop within itself yeah uh Rory southernland told me this really uh funny Parable so he said um a copywriter a graphic designer and an account executive uh step onto a plane together and they uh open up the overhead locker and Genie comes out he says God I've been left locked in there for so long thank you thank you for get me I'll give you uh one one wish each so the uh designer says I I think I'd like to have uh Da Vinci's life I like to have his skills his ability to represent things graphically he says done the way he goes and then the copyrighted comes over I I think I think I'd like to live like Hemingway did you know the women the lifestyle the writing ability oh the writing ability done the account executive comes over he says what what would you like he says I'd like those two guys back we've got a meeting in two and a half hours that's [ __ ] that's so Rory well um off topic but I have to include it there's the uh on top of plane experiments uh Charlie Munga tells that one of he goes on a plane terrorists hijack the plane and say right you've got one last dying wish before we blow this sucker up um think wisely then he goes can I tell you about the beauty of Costco's business model there's an equivalent about uh aliens come down to earth and they say Humanity we can do whatever you want you can ask us any question and some idiot that listens to podcast from the back shouts what's your morning routine [ __ ] me okay good what about I mentioned some of my sort of real Peak High agency people you accumulated one with this guy that was selftaught is there anyone else that comes to mind yes let me um let me skip ahead so skip ahead just before I go onto that one we have I just wanted to show you this because it's just [ __ ] cool to you this is the Topography of Tears have you seen this the Topography of Tears yes like so yeah this um photographer I will come back on to your question but just quickly let me bless through this uh this photographer took different types of tear and put them under a microscope and here for example is tears of grief here is tears of joy they actually look different under a microscope wow so this is this was just a way for me to try and get this into the show because it looks so cool but like the agency example here is being at a funeral and thinking [ __ ] I never got in touch for the last few years and now they're gone mhm tears of grief at the other end tears of joy of [ __ ] I'm so glad that we did that holiday together or I'm so glad that I arranged all those trips that I did with them so I thought that was a um that's fascinating I wonder why that's the case I want to know what those structures are made of I want to know what those lines are so for the people that are listening the tears of grief are much more sparse whatever the uh lines there some kind of structure it looks a little bit like halfway between little cells and electrical circuits and then at the other end the tears of joy have a lot more activity a lot more structure in them there's lines everywhere and um I wonder what that is we can dig deeper and and come back to it let me go back to your question that I rudely ignored so essentially the I want to come on to the most high agency person but I just want to address like the probably the YouTube comments at this point so I wanted to steal I wanted to steal man the other side so um for example life happens to people you piece of it um hope you get fourth stage cancer so I can call you up and tell you to happen to life can't wait to tell the orphans they just need to happen to life and big nose [ __ ] no who's written that that was want something from your that's awful I don't know you you do seem to have a very uh accurate perception of what the comments are going to be uh if everyone can comment small nose [ __ ] in the in the section Bel that would be great essentially the most Apex HIgh agency example is this guy coming up now actually let's just Linger on let's just Linger on that that thing for a second the why do you think it is that conversations around being able to happen to life self-authorship agency taking control um why do you think it is that it triggers that particular immune response from people I I think they're right I think they're right at the end of the day that's why I'll come on to it in a second but I don't want to misconvey that life doesn't happen it definitely happens going back to the London example earlier like if it wasn't for the heat if it wasn't for the clothes that we take for granted we'd literally be within two to three hours hypothermia and death so I don't think they're wrong and I think it makes sense but then when this is why I take it away from a self-help conversation when you begin to go well does it defy the laws of physics in terms of knowledge creation well no it doesn't so therefore it is possible it doesn't mean that awful things aren't going to happen they're almost guaranteed to happen which is why I tried to basically update the model based off their feedback like I don't think they're wrong um so essentially it's more of a four-dimensional model that the higher agency somebody has the more um sorry the the more life is happening sorry the more agency that they they ultimately have which is why I wanted to come on to so life is happening uh is there is a pressure up against you and there is a pressure of you leaning into it at the same time yeah that's interesting I was having this conversation Destiny taught me this I think I I gave it some wanky me name of like the the two-step theory of two-step flow potential I think I called it a two-step theory of potential so uh Destiny I thought it was kind of an interesting person to put this to because he's somebody that's from the left but also has quite a lot of agency uh in fact I'm reading a book at the moment by Martin saligman uh that has a quiz and much of the quiz is asking you questions about agency uh a person steals something from a shop what are the reasons for why they stole like did they have Choice could they have done differently Etc uh and this is supposed to map you on the Spectrum from left to right uh and but Destiny seems at least when I asked him these questions to be someone who kind of does take charge it doesn't really sort of Outsource to structure and environment things which are maybe of personal responsibility and uh I asked him this question about well how do you marry the fact that people are both at the mercy of the environment around them and the authors of their own life that you don't want to externalize your sense of uh uh control um but you also have to understand that there are limits to what you can do and he basically describes it as having uh a range within which your uh outcomes in life your capacities sit and this range is determined by your genetics the environment you're in the time that you were born like you could be the best guitar player in history but if you were born before the guitar was invented guess what it's not happening uh so he says there is a range that you sit within and this is uh determined by the environment you're in things are outside of your control but within that range everything is exclusively on you and for some people it's easier for some people it's harder but there is a range that you sit within and I think that that kind of marries things quite nicely some people me and you probably not going to do very well in the NBA but within the range that we do have football freestyle perhaps you can get a bit further yeah I think I think just to on that specific point it it's not that problems don't happen it's that fundamentally all problems are solvable so and it all comes down to agency like cancer as horrific as it is and it happens to people it's truly [ __ ] horrific but it's ultimately a a Humanity level it's an agency problem right get your next get your next slide out for the lads in other news this episode is brought to you by function did you know that your annual physical only screens for 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function health.com slod wisdom the most Apex HIgh agency guy do you recognize this guy guy called Wilbur no great name so um let's just start off with life happening to him so smart kid Wilbur he wants to go to Yale University he's about to get in he's playing hockey one day and his face smashed in so badly by a bloke it's interesting studying history this bloke was clearly a Nutter and guess what they used to do for Nutters they'd prescribe them cocaine I know a few Nutters like that mainly in Northern rail over the years so anyway gets prescribed cocaine smashes this guy's face him so much so he's bedridden for two to three years wow so Yale University's cancelled whilst he's bedridden his mom is terminally ill so he's kind of in bed I might imagine caring for her while she's in bed back and forth so truly life is happening uh Wilbur this [ __ ] guy man this guy sat there in bed asked the question why can birds fly but humans can't okay what like why is that so just sits there in bed getting book after book and there's not many books back then about uh aerodynamics and how things can fly but he's studying Birds Wilbur teams up with his brother becomes fascinated by the question um and starts to move over on the Spectrum a little bit over here to like happening to life his surname is Right indeed indeed so Wilbur and um Orville his brother they reverse from first principles where is the best place with wind and sand um in America because they need to test flight they need to find somewhere with a soft landing and with enough wind to begin to test it yeah so they get all the weather bureau consensus data which back then there's no internet so they're just reaching out to the local Council and finding the [ __ ] and he um sorry they have all this uh weather data and they realize it's 700 mil away in Kittyhawk and I realized well oh they can just fly that I oh no they can't they can't fly there right so this is the furthest they've ever been from home they go all the way down to Kittyhawk and the two of them talk about happening to life the two of them and by the way back then this is a key thing that people I always forget about history is that it it was a mocked thing flying was seen as everybody who tried it failed or died and there was poems at the time of how ridiculous it would be like to even think you could fly like it was a it was a joke of the time so the two of them um are seen in Kittyhawk these imagine there so so you're looking outside your window and there's these two brothers there're for hours at the outside just like moving their arms like this pretending they're different types of birds just mimicking the way Birds move their [ __ ] wings so they're there for ages they then begin to design like a wing uh a wing system based off the way birds do the next problem that they have is they realize that all the measurements around aerodynamics that they've been given at the time from um a German fell were completely incorrect so they have to they build when they go back home they build a wind tunnel in their garage like um that can go about 27 milph and they're creating little objects and pulling it through and they reverse andine know oh everything that we know about aerodynamics is completely wrong so they fix that problem and it's problem after problem it's next building an engine that's light enough and you end up with a scenario before they create the airplane they failure after failure after failure after failure after failure Wilbur looks brother one day and says no man will ever fly for a thousand years one year later he's up there in the airplane and flies for the first time ever and that for me is I think Wilbur right and obviously his brother Orville is the Apex example of high agency and the impact it then has Because unless you study history you just go well band's always been able to fly and you go no this is been since the early 1900s that we've been able to do it the amount of times I don't how how many times a week do you you think about the right brothers ever since you sent me that photo I I encountered a situation at the toward the start of this year and I explained it to you and you sent me this photo and it must be is it Wilbur in the plane and oval on the The Hill in front of him and he's doing this yeah and he's jumping and he's got his hands in the air and this plane's off the ground and uh yeah I know that you use this to uh basically tyrannize your staff I I I me I think about I think about it like once a week like it's so so I'll be like staring when there's a plane going by once you once you know the story I'll be staring once a plane goes by my girlfriend be like you thinking about the right Brothers yeah I am yeah I am because the fact that most people don't know their names the fact there's not statues the fact there's not a day and then meanwhile there's like me getting on an emerance flight like stressing out my [ __ ] it's 20 minutes late and you're now there going what do you mean they've not got Diet Cokes on the plane and there's TV entertainment there but it's just a it's just agency like a problem that seemed completely insolvable didn't defy the laws of physics it was possible and now we we our whole me and you being here today flying into London is purely because of these two [ __ ] I kind of like that I I'd love to dig a bit deeper into his story uh and do a little bit more research around the fact that he said that man W Fly for a thousand years but didn't stop and then got there a year later I've been really really spending a lot of time thinking about not believing that you're worthy of achieving a thing and yet still managing to attain It Anyway this sort of make it until you fake it basically that you I a lot of the time we believe that we need to have faith in a thing before we can go and do the thing but it's an unnecessary precursor it may make the process more enjoyable it may make you have more confidence it may make you more efficient in the things that you do may make me more effective at getting the outcomes that you need but it's largely an unnecessary step if we assume that what you're optimizing for is outcomes not inputs if you can do the outcomes regardless of how you got there whether you believe that you were going to do it or not whether you thought it'd be a thousand years or whether thought it'd be 6 months if you do someone could have been Wilbur alternate universe slightly different personality and being like we're going to get it done in 3 weeks and it would have taken a year if he'd done the same things what it's not going to a human man won't fly for a thousand years and it's going to happen in a year so just you know me and you talk about we obsessed about this a lot your birthday this summer but the more and more that I think about it optimizing for outcomes not for inputs is just it sides through through everything and oddly is quite a high agency way to to do this because the true or another element of high agency would be accepting that you live in an a rational world and that your psychology is one that is not built to be able to accurately identify how outcomes are going to come from inputs so stop believing that you know how this is going to work and just okay this thing seems to be happening in whatever way both me and you are on ridiculous diet come do you know why it works kind of I can probably broscience Cobble something together some doctor probably could too but I bet that there's maybe even more explanations for why it shouldn't work or doesn't or whatever is ridiculous I'm like yeah but I feel better when I'm on it I'm optimizing for outcomes I'm not bothered about the mechanism I'm not bothered about the inputs yes because fundamentally it was possible that's the big thing um and this is I try and say this in the least offensive way but I think there's some truth to it that a lot of high Achievers or high agency people are often described as being on the Aspergers or Autism Spectrum spectrum and I think the reason behind that is that all their bottlenecks are just Logistics and operations it's just like just you look at someone like Elon or zck or somebody like that Bezos and a lot of it is just Logistics operations bottlenecks whereas for maybe people who like myself that go through the education system and struggle to then break out of that wayt it's creativity bottleneck it's a emotional bottleneck is a big one of like what will people think if I do this yep um there's so many different bottlenecks that aren't Logistics and operations but for people who have a a little touch of the tism tism or the asperges what's the opposite of high agency um it would be it would be low agency um it would be Outsourcing your worldview to other people people who are just Outsourcing their worldview to you and you just have this kind of reflexive mirror what's your one around the um is it the fabine Paradox is it that one abene par paradox abene paradox yeah that uh somebody invites you to their wedding thinking that you want to go you say yes despite not wanting to be there because you think that you they want you there um it describes how in a system especially a social system people can arrive at a suboptimal scenario for everybody because everybody presumes that everybody else wanted it it's not too dissimilar to the keian beauty contest that you spoke about previously which is where you make a judgment in a a beauty contest not of who you think is the most beautiful but who you think other people will think is the most beautiful and then you can continue to scale this back right it's just an infinite regress of prediction all the way back so are you talking about low agency you know both me and you since we've you first came on the show six years ago inversion is one of those really powerful tools uh so half maybe a third of what people should try to do is become High agency but probably twoth thirds of what they should do is try to avoid being low agency so talk to me about how you come to think about that side of the equation yeah well in the essay around High agency that I've written which we can link to essentially what I call them low agency traps that are just easy uh and I've documented maybe nine or 10 but I think there's infinite amount of agency traps just part of being a human being so there's a few which I I can read now so I one is called the midwit Trap and the way I was thinking what's a fun way of actually explaining this without boring people and it's a SMS message so imagine you're in a third world jail and you've got somebody who's in the midwit Trap and you text them hey any updates on breaking me out of this jail this is how the midwit Trap would thing yeah yeah yeah uh lots of updates from me I'm on day 30 my juice cleanse I've thinking of doing a degree in criminology to specialize in how jails work so I can get you out um and I've also watched 30 TED talks on the topic so the midwit Trap I've got PhD in the midwit Trap is this uh idea of trying to be smarter than you are um an over complicating thing so for the midwit Trap where it comes from is the midwit meme so you have the guy on the left the guy on the right the guy on the middle two opposite ends of the IQ bell curve and the guy on the left and the guy on the right often come to the same simple conclusion the guy on the left can't overthink things so he just goes for the simple answer the guy on the right is so intelligent that he's he's demystified everything and come back to the simple [ __ ] and the guy in the middle is the one who's managed to over complicate things and overthink things so like one meme that I made is guy on the left makes something people want guy on the right makes something people want when it comes to business then in the center it's I'm going to do this 5year consultancy program and then I'm going to watch all these TED talks and then once I've done these surveys d d d I'm ultimately going to find the thing so the guy in the midw Trap would never even get moving with the any agency towards breaking you out of a FW jail because he's constantly overthinking and trying to intellectualize things too much yeah uh I think specificity as well is something else that me and you talk about a lot avoiding vagueness and um it's necessary but not sufficient to be in to become High agency or to avoid low agency is to have intentionality right to choose what it is that you're going to do if if High agency is winning at the game intentionality is choosing which game you're going to play well when I was thinking about high agency originally I had four things that underpin it so if you imagine High agencies like this table here and then you have the the four legs the four things that I think underpin it are clear thinking resourcefulness bias to action and disagreeability so if you even go back to the right Brothers story there the amount of clear thinking that they needed to do throughout of oh okay oh the aerodynamics let's actually take these to First principles and test it um the amount of resourcefulness of and i' probably think resourcefulness interest to get your opinion on this it's like creativity and persistence combined like the ability to create new novel Creative Solutions um bias to action is just like moving moving moving Napoleon style and disagreeability is the guy earlier when Darren Brown rings the bell who sits there and goes well maybe there is maybe I don't have to follow everybody else and perfect example being the right Brothers rather than just carrying on their bike shop and trying to build that into an Enterprise disagreed with the whole consensus based off the laws of physics that people could fly so you have those four things and I think going back to your point there intentional intentionalism is is like a sister of like clear thinking yes it's like a clear thinking leads to intentionalism yeah doing what you meant to do yes because yeah there's definitely um a difference between High agency like you could you could fund theoretically be high agency and unintentional that we've spoken about before AB psychopath a few a few people like that yeah but it it results in you being very original and action oriented in service of something that's a total [ __ ] waste of time uh and I mean that that would be kind of like a version of hell because you had all of the difficult raw materials you had all of the skills you had all of the networking you had all of the capacity to actually bring to bear something on this [ __ ] very hard to Wrangle planet and you were pointing in totally the wrong direction it's the uh it's the George Soros thing right it's George Soros um who I'm I'm sure we're going to get flagged immediately on YouTube for mentioning the Soros but uh becoming one of the most successful hedge fund managers ever and if rumors are to be true um or believe to be true he wanted to be a philosopher and he spent his whole life like just crashing the pound you know what I mean but just kept going up Bill Perkins has that bit in his book about that mate of his who um said stop me when I get to 20 million and just keeps going at 50 million in he's now at like multiple billions and he's still going cuz he's addicted to it so yeah it's you could have resourcefulness clear thinking biased action disagreeability but without intentionalism is a uh yeah you're [ __ ] dangerous one you're fully [ __ ] uh what are some of the other low agency traps um another one kind of related to what you mentioned there is the uh is the rumination trap so hey any updates on breaking me out of this jail sorry for the slow reply I've been thinking about it I know I've spent the last year thinking about it I think I just need more time to think I'm trying to think about my overthinking problem if I can solve that I think I can start so the rumination trap is when I began to learn a lot more from doing cognitive behavioral therapy and it's just this endless loop I mean we were talking about this the other day of if you could analyze the 50 to 60,000 thoughts per day and really see them the problem with the human brain is you have these 50 to 60,000 thoughts but because they're constantly in short-term memory you don't fully if you could see the graph you'd love a dashboard yeah if you could see the dash you go [ __ ] I've thought about I've worried about that conversation with somebody 20% of the week for the last three years and it's just ruminating around but when it's there fresh in Consciousness you don't you don't see the dash Bo you don't see that so you just there two things going on there there's the fact that you're in a new place a new time of life and you can always have an old thought in a slightly New Way gives it a sense of novelty so you kind of are kidded into believing that it's something new and the other part is that we're creatures of habit and old thoughts even ones that are quite uncomfortable are familiar to us and that familiarity gives us a sense of comfort and that Comfort gives us a sense of sort of habituation you know you might not obviously not with this show because fantastic but many people will watch or listen to YouTube channels that they kind of don't really enjoy anymore but they just know where they're going to go it's very predict it's like putting on an old comfortable leather pair of shoes like slide my feet into these I know what his opinion is going to be this is sweet and the algorithm just keeps you in this in the static of of course it does so yeah rumination trap so rumination trap I'm going to guess is uh diametrically opposed to bias for Action yes the it's the opposite of that so a a personal rumination story that I had was and the problem with rumination is you try and forast into the future constantly that's the big thing from cognitive behavioral therapy is you're they call it the crystal ball or you're trying to forecasting the future ahead and unless you can get a perfect outcome you just kick the can down the road and then ultimately you end up with not much Road left and just a lot of cans yes so one that came to mind for me so when I when I was thinking about clear thinking there's the three big decisions right there's where you live who you're with and what you're doing and one thing I struggled with for ages was I'm in this location right now maybe I could go to this other location and what would happen in my head is I would have option A of me staying in current location or option b going to new location and when I would think of option A it would go nightmare mode so everything that could possibly go wrong would go wrong and the other option has worked out perfectly and then I'd to the other option and the reverse was true when I um had left and gone to that location everything's gone wrong and I've now missed out on everything and as a result it's this Doom Loop that then begins to occur and the more you kick the can down the road the more you ruminate yeah the bigger this thing becomes and it's this absolute Doom Loop cycle and then you I don't want to think about this which makes the thing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger MH yeah I mean this's a conversation I had recently about action being an antidote to anxiety and that the buers for Action just look you might think that by worrying and obsessing and ruminating and thought looping in fearing and gripping your way through this problem that it reduces down the likelihood of it happening somehow that it brings to be more control that uh it almost like impact reality in some sort of a way it makes no difference again what are we focused on we're focused on outcomes not on inputs and uh the people that have that bias for action they end up just finding out whether or not this thing is going to work way quicker the biggest thing that I actually found with for people listening who probably had that Doom Loop that I have and still have is in terms of getting a bias to action is rather than calling it a decision just moving to experiments yep so just looking at the two and going okay I think this one has 60% probability this one has 40% probability I'm going to go with the 60% one and I'm going to fully back the decision and I'll book time six months from now to review how it went and then change if not cuz I realized in the 5 years spent ruminating about the two different options I could have lived in both cities multiple times both of us have done things where we've uh spent more time taking making a decision than it would have taken to have worked out whether it was going to work or not yes so much time wasted and the thing I love the thing I love about that is if you actually just did the thing the amount of real data that you're a migdala can't just sit there creating these doomsday scenarios the the big realization I had when I spoke to the CBT guy that I worked with was when you you actually look at those nightmare modes that are playing what's really strange about rumination is it skips like two to three years in the future and the worst case scenario it's always I won't be able to cope the worst case scenario will happen I won't be able to cope and people will judge me is what happens in the Doom Loop in the rumination cycle but it always skips two to three years in the future and he made a great point of it's like a horror film it just starts now and goes two to three years in the future he goes but real life's more like a documentary what's you have agency what's all the steps that that lead you up bail out or change or adjust course at any point along that yeah I think a a good way of moving out the rumination cycle I I kind of call it the difference between clear thinking and muddy thinking and ultimately we spoke about this the other day the kind of aphorism I have you know the nature thing of never trust a thought that happens indoors never trust a thought that happens in your head is a good rule of thumb and I I like that BAGI idea of transformation so if um thought happens in my head it's not true until I've drawn it out written it down spoken it out loud to another person created an equation put it in a spreadsheet whatever it is and I actually think probably 50% of the benefits of therapy is just going from head to out it's more it's more than that you know this is one of the reasons why uh I'm I'm not on substack but I'm an avatar for people having a substack or some form of written publicly consumed uh form of artistic output uh or self-reflection specifically for self-reflection uh I'm a really good avatar for someone that would not have been able to keep up a writing practice for four and a half years or however long it's been now since I launched my newsletter and now we like a quarter of a million words written in whatever four and a half years something like that but it's invariably the best part of my week it's my favorite thing the guy that does the podcast his favorite thing is the hour and a half that he spends writing every week because of that precise and it synthesizes down the most Salient thing that I've learned from that one week and I know you only have whatever 500 words or a th000 words to write this in so I need to be like high in brevity I need to be pretty precise uh I need to triage what it is I want to talk about well if I talk about this I can't talk about that so which one's it going to be which one's more important to you which one are you feeling more right now and um yeah you know big big fan of people having especially a public facing version of this I understand here we go no cut uh we'll get back to talking to George in 1 minute but first I need to tell you about element for the last 3 years every single day I have started my morning with element it's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't you might not 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able to say things that you can't for public consumption but I get the sense that at least for me when I write things for public I'm held to such a rigorous standard for precision to really really clarify my thinking that I'm sure I miss lots of advantages that proper journaling would would allow but it also does other things which is I think it's easier for you to create structures and Frameworks and ideas that you can then later refer to supposed to like referring to this messy thing that's kind of all over the place that's in a journal so yeah it's a it's a mixed bag one thing one thing on the writing side that I found specifically useful related to that is a photo can't do this a video can't quite do this but writing actually gives you the ability to go back 10 years let's say 10 years in the future now and understand how you think today or be able to now today go back 10 years snap out of your mind that yeah that's how I thought and because so many of the thoughts um just Disappear Completely down the drain it's so beautiful in that regard what about some more traps some more traps so the we mentioned specificity there so this is the uh the vague trap so hey any updates on breaking me out of this jail yes I've been working around the clock amazing any specific updates I don't have any timelines yet or deadlines or action items but I'm working on it and yeah the vague trap is I think such an easy one to fall into because you're just trying to avoid falsifiable criteria the biggest takeaway I took from um musk biography was it's just it's just like endless anecdote of um we're going to do this by X dat this time and then there's a timer around the office to the second counting down to that specific thing and then the gas the um you know the metaphor around if you have a container the gas will just expand or decrease based off the size of the container constantly Parkinson's law written all over the yeah the factory there's a great line of um General ambition gives you um General ambition gives you anxiety specific ambition gives you Direction and even but I mean specificity everywhere um is so important even even in writing the or talking the more specific that you are the the more impactful it the more impactful it can be and I actually find the reason why specificity we avoid it people in the vague trap at least myself the reason why we avoid it is because there's a failure point if there's no criteria for Success there's no criteria for fail yeah and if you can just live in that generality um it's it's impossible to ever have agency I think so when I played Cricket uh when I was getting towards 17 18 I was on the box to Durham which is uh Top Flight Club team in the UK would be equivalent to whatever Manchester United Academy or something like that and I remember that on a Monday uh the coach would call and he'd ask how I got on he might have checked the papers he might not have done because my uh performance would have been in the papers in terms of numbers but he would ring me and he'd ask how I got on and I remember the weeks where I was really low confidence which would happen quite a lot uh the specific Style of cricket that I played was uh kind of like a special match circumstance so the conditions needed to be very right it was leg spin which is like a complex type of bowling and um if the game wasn't at the right format if it was too short you didn't tend to get bowled if the uh pitch was too wet if the ground wasn't gripping if wickets were tumbling or weren't tumbling sufficiently quickly there were you were very far down the list you were very powerful but only to be used in specific break glass in case of specific circumstance and um there's something on Cricket called a TFC thanks for coming and it's when you don't bat you don't bowl and all you do is field TFC thanks for coming because that's what your captain would say to you at the end thanks for coming mate as opposed to well played or we can do better next time and um I remember I would get these calls and on the weeks when I wasn't confident uh a lot of the time I'd just have a TFC and he would say how'd you get on of the weekend I was like oh dude you know what it is like I wish that I could have I really wanted the opportunity secretly I didn't a lot of the time I didn't want the opportunity to have done it because by setting the potential for success by having the opportunity for Success there would have then been a criteria for failure so a lot of it was fear of failure and that was something that largely now I've managed to get I mean once you've done a live show in front of three and a half thousand people the potential for failure is you know you've looked it in the face uh but I think I'm a good avatar for someone I think his disposition would have been low confidence low self-esteem as a kid and now largely that's that's not the same sort of problem that I have anymore and you think a large amount of that is down to specificity or being less vague certainly being less vague but uh largely it's just crushing volumes of testing yourself in the real world uh because again you can make it until you fake it if you just keep on doing things and stuff goes well there's only so long that impostor syndrome or low confidence a low self-esteem or a lack of self-belief or whatever can exist before it just gets Neutron starred out of existence you're like I have this [ __ ] super dense body of work that self-belief is overrated generate evidence that Ryan holiday quote and um he just generates so much evidence that it sucks the living [ __ ] out of whatever it is that you were worried about but talking about the vague trap I was in the gym in London I told you this story I was in the gym in London last week the day of the show and um it's the Kensington the gym unmanned like it's a it's a Cellar it's a cell that has a gym in it that's open 24 hours and there's no staff at all looking after it me and Z go in and a couple of people ask for photos which is really nice and one of the kids asked for photos young guy maybe 21 22 something like this and he comes up take the take the selfie or whatever uh and then as I'm leaving I'm on my way out and he comes up and he's got a I think he was recording maybe had a mic in his hand or something he was recording it and uh he said broke it like broken English hey um I I I know that you're going to be busy but I just wanted to ask you a question I want you to ask uh you know I I really want to become rich uh and I'm 22 at the moment I'm working in a full-time job but I really want to have more self-discipline and I want to make more money can you teach me how to have more self-discipline and make more money and I remember thinking Zach stood there and Max's videographer stood there and this this kid and I'm thinking well you know he's asked this is obviously something that's important to him come up and he asked this person and he's said that he appreciates you know I've got I've got places to be and such I don't want to just give a flipping answer but I remember thinking like that's a [ __ ] question that's a really bad like can you teach me how to have more self-control and make money language barrier etc etc but yeah I think I told you this and your response would have [Music] been the the question I mean the question [ __ ] like it's fundament you have said the first the first thing I would do is ask a better a question yeah ask that's the first bit of advice You' give is ask a better question and I think if if you look at the uh the bag trap and how often it comes up it's because of just even the question he asked there it's just a lack of it's a complete lack of clear thinking it's just like clear like muddy thinking what I call it is just like vague gifts in my head or like jpegs or words that are popping up and it's never going what does that mean oh writing that down getting more specific more specific more specific like a great example would be um how can I be happy it's probably the vaguest [ __ ] question that's ever existed and if you just view the brain as a questioning answering device that we're constantly asking asking questions and you basically it's like asking a computer just a endless loop that never closes and it just completely expands into Infinity which then leads to this anxiety but let's say for example okay example of general question how can I be happy specific question would be what does my dream week look like hour by hour mhm um what does my nightmare week look like hour by hour where am I right now between the two and then how what's the easiest first step to move up that that's so much more specific versus like a a general thing and I think that's probably the biggest sign I notice whenever I'll get a DM whether it's a personal thing or a business thing the easiest questions to answer or the best people are always I mean the most high agency people it tends to be super specific I've tried ABCDE I saw that you mentioned F I've done this specific thing here this problem happened here what do you think versus hey mate um like I want to do this anything question mark it's so vague and as a result it's so it's so boundless that you can almost never apply knowledge because it's too it's too general what other the traps is there anything else let me see um yeah we have the um the final one which is the the cynic trap so hey any updates on breaking me out of this jail question Mark um I posted my idea on Reddit for feedback this user called [ __ ] monkey 72 broke down why it was a dumb idea and then I spoke to my cynical British friends and they said People Like Us don't do big things I don't think there's any hope sorry and just the reply is you've literally not attempted anything yet I think the the cynicism thing is definit that's one of the reason I mentioned the British thing in there it's definitely a a close a one that's close to heart just experiencing the uh difference between Britain and America that we've spoken about countless times yeah it's there's also a degree I suppose of a lack of specificity it's there's a vagueness to it as well that if you don't try you don't have to fear the pain of failure right if I tell myself that all women are [ __ ] then I'm never going to seek a relationship with a woman and as a consequence I never have to feel the pain of rejection if I tell myself that things are never going to get better then I'm excused of ever having to try right uh the cope is framing hope as delusion and optimism as embarrassing and if you know that things are bad and that they're never going to get better then it's the people acting like things can improve that are dumb and delusional and the problem yeah the the the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure the upside of never trying is never having to feel the P of fail yeah I I think that's that's partially true but I think if you then if you zoom out so that's at the individual level I think that's true but if you zoom out the kind of arrogance to be cynical when you look at just from the wheel to the horse and carriage to the car to the airplane to the rocket I think I tried to create a word for it once you going to hate this because it's terrible branding but um like this Alzheimer's of the zeit guys like I call it Z zeit Sal it's [ __ ] awful I know it's it shouldn't be on the podcast but um we just have this weird cynicism around new basically all the crazy ideas that have occurred we now just completely take for granted and then when we look at agency in the future um well that's just absurd so we're in this weird middle zone of never appreciating the just the riper of you know like back like backto back high agency people high agency people high agency people then I'm sat there on an Emirates flight getting annoyed because my diet CES flat um never appreciating that and also not being able to uh appreciate that there's literally infinite potential knowledge creation it's so easy to be cynical trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of Brands may say they top quality but few can actually prove it which is why am such a massive fan of momentos they make the highest quality supplements on the planet if you've been struggling with your Sleep Quality there sleep packs are one of my favorite products which I use every single night before I go to bed they contain only the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly stay asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning they come pre-loaded in little pouches which means if you're on the road if you're traveling or if you just can't be bothered fishing around inside of all of your different pots on an evening it's perfect I've got them with me here while I've been in London I've been using them every single night they're phenomenal they really really improve my sleep also there is a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it completely risk-free try it and if you do not like it for any reason they will give you your money back plus they ship internationally right now you can get up to 20% off everything sitewide by going to the link in the description below or heading to liv.com modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's l i ment us.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout those are traps what about beliefs what what are the um values and worldviews that high agency people are going to focus on primarily yeah there's there's five um key ones that I identified so there's um there's no unsolvable problem unless it defies the laws of physics um there's no adults we spoke about previously adults don't exist adults don't exist there's no way um there's uh there's no guarantee you won't die screaming which is one of my favorite ones um I'll tell you the uh the story behind that one there's a old Joe Rogan podcast uh called with a guy called Kevin Smith and he comes on and [ __ ] man this is he he comes on and he's telling the story of his dad and he talks about how his dad was this great guy like was one of the people that never made any mistakes worked for the Postal Service just kind of gave up on his hopes and dreams just to make his family happy he said never make never saw him make a mistake once and he's out for dinner one evening with his mom and his dad and his family had this amazing dinner his dad um goes back to the hotel he gets a call at 3:00 a.m. and and his his brother says you need to come down to the hospital now like dad's not well at all he turns up to the hospital and his mom is crying like hysterically in a way he's never seen anybody cry before and his brother just looks at him and like gives him the nod and just said like can just tell that his his dad's died and he says three words that he says sticks with him that still haunt him to this day he died screaming and as a result of that he said [ __ ] it like even a good guy like that he died screaming it's just an absolutely horrific sight and he kind of Justified that for having agency of his existence is that ultimately if you can do everything everything everything correct and you ultimately die screaming what's the point in not like chasing whimsies or just doing ridiculous [ __ ] that you can think of because it's such a um I think the amount of people that die screaming that never get spoken about everybody has this idealized fantasy that they're just going to die peacefully in their sleep um or take a load of like LSD and sleep with hookers and come their way out of it um but realistically yeah there's no guarantee that you won't die screaming what does that justify well I think it's the most extreme way of like a stoic way of looking at Mort potential mortality in its uh in its face and realizing not only am I going to die I may die screaming therefore you know what the bell's ringing right now people are standing up why do I why do I have to stand up or yeah I've got this bike shed right now that's doing really well but maybe man could fly who knows right and I think um yeah that it's just staring at the ticking clock of death I think there's few greater fuels for for agency what about there's no way is that there's no particular technique there's no one specific solution yeah so we spoke about this last time just to recap it's the story of federa adal jovic um and then there's a new version which I want to tell you about so federa Nadal jovic ma Matthew S goes to see them warm up um and we have the three greatest of all time competing at the exact same time first off uh Nadal turns up and his biceps of bulin he's just like David Goggins like in the zone just [ __ ] hitting the ball back and forth um just pushing himself to the Limit next up jovic turns up and he's just like a calculated psychopath no emotion just getting the job done and then finally turning up late giggling as he's arriving at the court is Roger federa who's doing these like beautiful dinks trick shots just having fun the entire time so there's not you have the three greatest of all time and there's no way that they did it apart from personalizing it to themselves which is like kind of probably a Core theme of um High agency there's a new one I discovered recently which is it's between um Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen who were two of at the period like it's like the Drake or Kendrick of their day like the two main guys making music and I think they had a lot of admiration for one another but also like different bits of competition with one another and his son tells a story of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan sitting down at this Cafe in Paris and they're comparing notes at the end of their career kind of like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at that photo shoot and Dylan asks Cohen how long did it take you to make Hallelujah and Cohen lies he he goes um it was about two to three years it was actually seven but he wanted to play it down he spent seven years making that song one of the best songs of all time and Cohen Returns the question about a specific Dylan song that he admires and loves how long did it take you to to write that 15 minutes and it goes to show like two of the best songwriters of their day one took years to produce one of their best songs Dylan took 15 minutes to produce one of their best songs but this idea I think in the social media age of you have to do X or you have to do a you have to do B you have to do C or whatever it is there fundamentally is no way apart from the way that works again that's focusing on outcomes not on inputs yeah the I don't know I'm increasingly fascinated by this what's the we've done four there's no unsolvable problems there's no way there's no guarantee you won't die screaming I've missed one haven't I hold on and adults don't exist there's no memory of normal oh yeah there's no memory of normal so this is the um yeah the idea that we spoke about before that ultimately all normal behavior or all downloading the trib's behavior and trying to fit in just we do it because we want other people to like us and ultimately it ends up in the memory bin like the only thing you remember about people is their weird eccentricities when they have a only the irrational Behavior vies have you have I told you about inverse Charisma have I told you this one this is [ __ ] fire so uh both me and you have kind of been interested in the uh Arc of Charisma to Riz like making Charisma charismatic again uh or sexy again because Charisma sounds like something that I don't know some real social dynamics pickup artist would have taught you in 2010 uh standing outside of Top Shop working on your Kino escalation um and then Riz is kind of I don't know it's like it's it's more cool it's so I think a lot of people think that they want to be charismatic uh and when they say that they mean kind of energizing sort of electric compelling interesting uh they cause people to sort of be in awe when they walk into a room uh and that's true like there's certainly people that are kind of magical like that but I thought about the people that I like to spend the most of my time around and sure some of them are charismatic because some of them are charismatic in little ways but I think one of the reasons that you know I love you as a friend is not because you walk into a room and are the most charismatic person in there but that often when I'm at dinner with you I feel like the most interesting or charismatic person in the room so I think it's significantly easier to be somebody who makes other people feel amazing and feel interesting and feel charismatic and feel compelling then it is to be that yourself also it's way more pro-social it doesn't trigger this sort of jealousy status response because you're not stepping in to try and sort of take over in anything you're facilitating you're helping everybody else to kind of be the best that they can be I'm using dinner as an example but you know it works at kind of any social situation so I came up with this idea of uh inverse Charisma which is most people think that in order to be well-liked they need to be interesting but actually the most well-liked people the people who make other people feel the most interesting there's this great uh story about I think it's Winston Churchill's wife and uh she goes for dinner with the potential two next presidents of the United States it's like Harry Truman and and and somebody else so she leaves the first dinner there a couple of weeks apart leaves the first dinner and says I left that feeling like he was the most interesting person in the world of course he could run the country then she went for dinner with the the second presidential candidate the one that ended up winning and she said I left that feeling like I was the most interesting person in the world and uh that's inverse Charisma it reminds me of the meme there's a meme where um there's a huge cue on one side and then like there's like no Quee for the next thing and the one cue with the loads of people behind it is like how to make money and then the other one is like how to provide value to people and it's kind of a similar thing to Charisma right is that ultimately uh making money is just value change at scale but we often think of like how do I make how do I extract resources from people versus how do I actually give something turn it into a positive some game that's I've never thought about it like that that's a really good point I [ __ ] adore inverse Charisma dude and you know embracing that as well the reason that I really really like it is that it seems much more in reach for most people just be interested in other people and they will find you interesting it was like a really cool study that was done they got a guy uh the um a plant whatever they're called in a a a study to go into a plane and they said when need to sit next to this gentleman on a long whole flight you need to give him zero information about yourself for the entirety of the flight so this guy gets on speaks to this gentleman next to him just asks questions ask questions ask questions ask questions the whole way and then they get off and they interview the person that they were sat next to the person who was asking all of the questions up they say we're just uh we're just doing a short survey about your experience on flight today you know we're making sure that people are placed appropriately and how did you find the flight said oh God it was great I sat next to this guy he was so interesting he was so fascinating they go that's brilliant can you tell us can you tell us his name he goes no uh oh I didn't get his name he so well can you tell us anything else about him he goes no actually I I can't no he didn't tell me anything at all the most interesting person was the person that made you feel like the most interesting person damn two two things on that I'm yes bro I know we've uh spoken about this before of the um uh how to know a person that book one of the big takeaways I got from that is yeah I used to try and like turn up and go okay I've seen this Will Smith video when he on that on that interview yeah yeah yeah and he like I'm going with the Donald Trump handshake and I'm like out Alpha them and stuff like that and one of the things I would do i' try and ask questions and then I'd be like I'd be like so um where are you from I'm from Manchester oh yeah what's the what's the weather like there yeah it's cold um uh what town in Manchester and it's just these closed question closed question closed question um versus okay where are you from Manchester so what's it like there yeah great and then you just open up for them to be able to speak forever and ever dude I asked I went for I went for shama with myON gains in Miami at the start of this year yeah I know what a you weren't expecting that one how much did you pay on that R and uh we were talking about he he went you know he's like a gregarious guy or whatever he went all over the place and um I can't remember what we were talking about I think we were maybe talking about something to do with his show or something to do with like the internet or or something to do with his history and uh I asked him I said oh that's interesting how'd that make you feel when that was going on like what what how did you feel about that and it just really patent interrupted the whole conversation and um it was quite to be honest it was quite a Charming moment because he took a moment and was like H I've never really thought about that thing before it made me kind like feel a little bit sad CU I was like huh like I really like I know it would be maybe it would be an indication that more people around you asking that kind of question would be would be something good for you I don't know yeah we often just how are you and then it's and then default back how are you there's a story in that how to know a person where it's a teacher in front of a classroom and some one of the kids asked are you married Miss and she's like oh no no no and they go why go I'm divorced and they like why and they just keep going that and she in two minutes she just flooding flooding in tears [ __ ] sake flooding in tears because and it goes back to the education stuff where they're so naive they're just yeah why Alan was as was talking about that too that there's this sort of innocent spontaneity this unencumbered transparency that kids have and we have a kind of envy about them you know the lack of social mores that have shaved off the interesting parts of their personality and uh yes so much of life so much of adult life is getting back to that more childlike curiosity State I think uh okay so people want to become more High agency presumably we've said it's important we've identified what it is how it works some ways that people can fall into traps to stop them from being it some beliefs that those people have are there give me something give me a pair of breasts give me something tangible upes um I'd say so there's there's a few right so the first one that i' I've mentioned a few times but I really want to actually get into it which is the um does it defy the laws of physics question because okay um they're going back to the brain is a question answering device so if you say why or what's great about my life it'll start finding answers if you say what's awful about my life it will start finding answers and let's say we go to a venue together and the guy on the front door says sorry not tonight mate and then you go okay accept that social reality and it's well does it fundamentally defy the laws of physics does it go against Newton's Laws of Motion Chris getting into um Tiger Tiger tonight no um does it defy Einstein's relativity no and that point sounds TR but then when you actually begin to understand that well you go well as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics anything is um theoretically possible with human knowledge and again it sounds TR saying that but you just look at the last few hundred years since the Enlightenment and you have this period before it where nothing happened in humanity we would just your great great great great great great great great granddad's life look the same as as yours um and meanwhile we have this change and the ability for humans to understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment that we just now completely take for granted like me annoyed at the flat Diet Coke on the Emirates flight um is a big thing the second thing which is probably a little less esoteric that I I really really like as a a metaphor is when you're in the complete low agency and everything is super General and it's like I don't even know I don't even know where to begin I don't even know where to start one thing I I love doing a little experiment I got was going okay let's say have a problem right now um of had a friend at the minute who who uh he's an extreme a friend we both know actually he's an extreme workaholic to a point that I've never I've never seen before and he was talking about how it's a problem he just doesn't know where to start and I said to him I go okay where are you at right now out of 10 and it suddenly takes this kind of General infinite Universe all the way down to okay well a bit of a binary choicer and you can never say seven right so he goes he goes um I'm at a three and I go okay and I go why why are you at a um a three by the way like why aren't you at a two he goes to be honest with you because I've actually like not worked tonight I've come here to see you I go okay so we're getting some specificity here and I go okay well what would take it up to a four and he goes well if I left the office before 8:00 p.m. I'd give that a four I okay great got a little step there I go what would take it to a five what take it to a six seven eight nine 10 I go okay first off let's just do the four immediately and then as as soon as you have that you have momentum one of the things I love and I'll probably put it in the piece of like a template that people can use is just what I call the video game Apple note so you have let's say for example to-do list in apple note build a website the problem with that is that's starting the video game on level 56 so one I had this fascinating realization that um two sorry one person that I knew was the laziest person I've ever met couldn't like open his mail like couldn't get out of bed and like make himself some food but was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world I would spend 16 hours a day on this video game and I go well do they have an agency problem or is their reality just a poorly designed video game so the video game Apple note is just level one let's say whatever it is whether it's from opening mail to going to Kitty Hawk and taking the planes into the sky there's always a level one and that's what video games are incredible at that they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up again completely the opposite of school so level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic and what I love about that is no matter how complex the thing is from curing cancer to flying planes to opening the mail you can always dump down thoughts and then you check it off and level two is create the next five levels based off level one and what's beautiful is when you check level one off a level one's small enough to start but isn't overwhelming so you you have that video game bit of dopamine then when you check it off feel like [ __ ] let's go I'm on level two and then each step is enough so key thing with video game design is it's enough of a step to feel a challenge but without overwhelm and if you if it's too big of a step like level 56 build website that's too big of a step you just are constantly in frustration so you just quit the video game it's a terribly designed video game but breaking things down into micro steps is such a uh a key thing in video game design and ultimately increasing agency yeah I mean this is the productivity 101 you write your epigraph you work in seven-year Seasons you work in threeyear blocks you work in onee Sprints broken down into 90-day chunks broken down into daily actions and you know minute by minute you've got your life planned out uh and it's kind of trite because it's so obvious but the fullest the smallest First Step imaginable is how the right Brothers managed to get their plane to go how you launched your marketing agency in a different country it's how this podcast started yes and yeah you need to be able to if you can figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step because 50% of the battle um is that first step so if you have that um great tool another tool um more related to so we spoke earlier about the four four tenants of high agency you have clear thinking you have bias to action you have resourcefulness and disagreeability on the disagreeability point which I think is a huge huge part of it the question I like to ask people is who's your favorite podcaster Creator me thinker so let's say all the people listening to it right now who have the Spotify wrapped with you top of the list yeah what do you disagree with Chris on because there'll be a percentage nothing right it's all good baby but there'll be a percentage of the audience unfortunately probably less so with your audience but there'll be a percentage of the audience that says Chris says sky is red therefore guy is red and that's actually a great disagreeability test cuz the amount of times I've put gurus on a pedestal and then they'll start they'll say a lot of wise [ __ ] and then I'll just start drifting get out over their skis yeah yeah and then they'll start drifting and I'll just go with them but that ability to say who do you admire the most and what do you disagree with them on is a great disagreeability test that's really lovely another one is who do you disag like who do you or what's the maybe the strongest held opinion that you have whether that's politically business-wise theoretically and who's the best person on the other side that you've heard yeah can you answer those two questions both of us have done you've got your uh Max content razor uh would you consume your own content if not don't post it and I think that works for songwriting would you listen to your own music if not don't write it off for your own podcasts would you listen to your own podcast if not what the [ __ ] are you doing spending hours and hours it's why I've never posted to PornHub I wouldn't watched that have you seen I've told you about this before but I've never done it but I'm still kind of tempted to do it I'd do it if you did it as an accountability buddy with it's not por is it uh it's only fans um was it 100 days rejection yeah yeah yeah you've seen that right ask for a free coffee um ask a stranger in the street to give you 20 like try and get all of these different things that escalate toward ever increasing levels of social discomfort and um I feel like that from May it's maybe it's not quite the same as disagreeability but disagreeability triggers that that sort of clamping yes that fear of um being uh exiled from the tribe like Napoleon on his small little island I think a big thing in that that I got from CBT to Loop it back to what we said earlier is when you're doing disagreeability things is to write down the prediction beforehand that your amigdala has given you so for example oh and then you get to stress test between what I thought was going to happen and what actually ends up happening ex and then then you begin to slowly but surely take away the weapons that that monkey mind has and it'll still fire but you go okay I mean it's interesting you're firing about me going and asking out this girl or chatting to her yeah but I remember last time you talked about how oh if you're going to approach this girl she's going to throw a drink in your face and blah blah blah is going to happen but we actually I got a number and we went on a few dates so just comparing your brain's forecasting mechanism which will always be the amydala firing the nightmare mode when it's always actually more likely a documentary well you also don't get to take a snapshot of your mind unless you do the writing thing right and it's captured in the best way through writing uh I I mean we we've seen this even with the election in America that uh we had this political [ __ ] super position this like Quantum World in which it's going to be close people could see it either way yet Ardent support is on one side Rory Stewart ate a lot of Humble Pie absolutely to slam dunk she's going to end presumably he said that because he believed it not just because he was trying to influence the electorate or or say something cool or popular or whatever uh so but in retrospect it couldn't have been any other way because it wasn't it couldn't have been any other way because Trump won and the ability even I think back to where my mind was before that election happened I go [ __ ] hell like it could be it could be it could go either way I'm pretty sure that a couple of months out I think kamal's got it in the bag and then afterward me me trying to think how did I think before that thing happened I I can't not see what the outcome was it's impossible for me to not see that Trump won so all that I do when I look back at my rationalization prior to that is all of the ways in which I would have been right because I could have seen that the outcome that ended up being was the one that I thought MH yeah and then you're just constantly uh you have the benefit of the historian hindsight where you begin to see oh it was all ABC but in the time when you was living through it it was so it's you're living through the fog of War but it's so easy to forget the fog of War afterwards [ __ ] me speaking of fog of War we might as well bring this up I was with you in Boseman Montana this summer when Trump got shot oh yeah and uh that was a really formative experience because uh 911 I was too young January 6 was Co so I was in the house so what what's really fascinating is uh rapidly developing news story with other people at the same time so the fact that was with you and Emily and we went for dinner and you know every five or 10 minutes we're checking Jack poo bitch's [ __ ] Twitter or whatever to find out what news new rumors been going on and uh yeah it is even in retrospect one of the things that isn't fully captured is how chaotic uh news is and I think the same thing probably occurs for ourselves that in retrospect we can look back and say well that was the way that was the outcome that occurred in any case more H's got this gorgeous story he talks about how when him and his wife first got together before they were married I think they were 23 24 living in New York they had no kids no dependence he looks back and he said to his wife that really was living wasn't it that really was the golden years yeah it's just so amazing you know we used to lie in on a Sunday and we could go for lunch and do all the rest of it his wife said you were miserable you hated it you hated all of those things and Morgan's realization was in hindsight you're able to see that the fears that captured you at the time were not worth having but at the time you have no certainty that those aren't Salient so what you see in retrospect is how you should have felt had you known what was going to occur the golden years seem to never happen in the present it only seems to exist in hindsight yeah one of the uh High agency techniques is what I call viewing the present with a historian's frame so both at the personal level and then at the wider kind of societal level as well so trying to at the personal level okay going I see these old photos of me on Facebook I'm like I used to wear that I used to I used to post this [ __ ] um I'm like cringing at myself and then you go hold on you can hear that voice Whispering go me five years later is going to be cringing what I'm me right now yeah correct and then but trying to ask that question now and deal with it probably speeds up the cycle a little bit because each time there's that story of like the Zen master where he goes yeah one year ago I thought I had oh sorry um after one year of studying Zen I thought I had all the answers and then I realized I was wrong now I have the answers two and then after two years I realized I was wrong again um but now I have all the answers after four years I was wrong again but now I have all the answers and it ends up with him going to like all the way to his grave and saying the exact same thing again now I realize I have all the answers and just realizing it's constantly wrong but even then if you zoom out and you go right okay that's at the personal level but then at the societal level the ability to view the present moment now with a historian's perspective trying to detach from the fog of War there's a beautiful line in the sovereign individual where he talks about the Roman Empire falling and he said that for example it's an easy question right now which is when did the Roman Empire fall and people can just give the specific date that it fell when did the Roman society recognize that the Roman Empire fell for the mo the majority of people it was not on that day someday for some people it was weeks after it was months after for some people it was centuries after that they fully realized that the Roman Empire had fallen and he makes this great line which was if CNN existed as the Roman Empire was falling they would not be on the news saying hey guys the Empire has fallen they'd be denying it they would be by the time the News catches up basically if you wait for the news you will be wrong or you will be late that's your thing about social networks right if you read it on Facebook you're probably late if you read it on on Reddit you're probably early yes good good good rule of Thum that's fire I love that uh what about the patels your favorite Hotel a this is [ __ ] Pete Kai agency man so this I got from um uh the my first million podcast and tells the story of the patels who left India to go to Uganda and the patels essentially start as these kind of slaves or work people that very low down in the society and that kind of Indian work ethic just work their way up to the top of Ugandan society and own like huge businesses um throughout Uganda iDine comes in and says no no Africa is for Africans not for the patels so we are going to take everything off you and nationalize this and give it back to the Africans so not only we going to take everything from you we're going to give you 30 days not like my rent contracts like at least like 90 days notice right so we're going to take everything from you and your families and we're going to kick you out so the patels some of them went back to India but India at the time I think had a Bangladesh um uh problem where they was basically be basically argued that the patels have been gone for so long that you're almost no longer Indian now so they almost have no home a lot of them went to the UK so you have a lot of patels in the UK um and a significant amount or a small amount sorry went to the US so they arrive gone from like high up in Ugandan Society to Immigrant in the US with nothing and the patels what they do they begin to start motels and they realize that well a the whole family is going to work on this so we've got free labor so we can kind of undercut people there we're all vegetarians so the food's going to be quite cheap to keep us going um and we can just live in the motel so that gives us a Competitive Edge there because we don't have any cost for rent so like the cost of our business is so low and we could just start creating uh Motel businesses so start with a few motels um more and more pels arrive and they're constantly helping out their brothers their cousins their uncles their second cousin oh yeah like that and just constantly okay well if we can get 5x um Revenue sorry if we get a loan that's 5x revenue on this we can buy more and we constantly just use a bit of debt buy more motels nobody can compete with us because we have this so the botels kicked out of Uganda arrive in America as nothing keep compounding compounding compounding and it's an absurd stat now of something around 70 to 75% of motels in America are owned by a Patel Just talk about Peak agency like life happening to them and meanwhile manag to completely 70 to 75% of motels in America owned by a Patel so for the people that haven't driven through America there are a lot of motels tons when we were doing our road trip the summer me and you nodding at most of them and going Patel Patel's again yeah yeah uh yeah I don't know man I think it's such this the approach that you have to this the fact that you've been able to break it down and spend so much time writing this piece which again uh people can go and read what are you hoping to achieve by sort of breaking this down are you looking to try and create more agency in your life it seems like you're kind of swimming in enough already no I I I think honestly you could as a writer sometimes go I think this is a really important idea I need it to get out in the world it was more it was psychosis that was like eating my brain and I just wanted to explore the topic because basically the goal of the essay was the thing I would have liked to have read at 13 rather than had written at 30 Y and just exploring that concept because like I said and I sound like a broken horse but once you begin to understand that like everything's essentially just an agency problem the agency issue like the yeah it's endless Endless Possibilities from fixing climate to fixing cancer it's just all agency we're in a country that may be lacking especially for young people agency both of us managed to reach escape velocity uh to to get out of that what would you would you wish British George knew about agency or how to maybe Embrace a little bit more of it so the way I I always joke being outside the UK for two to three years and then coming back I learned more in the two to three years outside of the UK about being British than the 25 years being inside it and funny bit is when we did Fourth of July this year and we're in Nashville we're may have taken a little bit of mushrooms and I mean funny story is Chris uh like everyone's like taking photos of the fireworks I'm looking seeing all these people taking photos of fireworks photos of fireworks like soaking in the moment and there just Chris on app Notes like writing down a quotee from n or something like that and I just said spot the artist to everybody around us anyway it was quite a strange feeling being in that environment where it's people going USA USA and I kind of realized at that moment a few things so one I've never met an American that doesn't celebrate the 4th of July I've never met a Brit that knows their national day I'm called George it's St George's day and I realized Actually I don't even know the day and I realized no Brit even knows the day I think it's April 23rd and I then reflected more on the UK and the way I view the UK right now it's like an icon that has an autoimmune condition on paper it's this like incredible historical figure but he's just kind of eating itself alive and I even think that like people like myself and yourself like one thing that I noticed that maybe people who have a lot of optimism for the UK then complain about people moaning and don't realize that they're then starting this the UK moan so much so I kind of come out things like one of the early thinkers that's definitely affected how I think has been Rory suland I've got I do think the UK has a bit of a marketing problem I don't think you necessarily need crazy technology or things like that to fix this so one of the Absurd ideas that I have um is essentially looking at St George's day and comparing it to the Fourth of July and going well what's happening here like why is nobody celebrating St George's day and why is everybody regardless of their politics celebrating 4th of July again comes back to clear thinking I think 4th of July what it has is a recent enemy which was unfortunately us trying to conquer that beautiful land which we never should have let go and there's a clear story that unites everybody George killed some Dragon I don't know I don't know the story Nobody Knows the story and now it's just associated with racists and uh bigots so my idea would be fix UK's advertising scrap St George's day and announce Dunkirk Day first off good meme sounds good good branding and essentially I think it's a better story than Fourth of July because no matter where you stand in terms of your politics in terms of creating an enemy you could have every problem with the British Empire and the UK and Britain and the state of it dun Kirk was an extraction not an act of War yes and against the AP PEX awful human being of Adolf Hitler who and it's it's still fresh in our minds it's still recent enough to some extent and you could argue if Don Cook didn't happen does Western Civilization even exist now certainly the UK we we probably having the exact same conversation but um spency deuts right German and both of us aren't August landmaster and we're just going along with it like low agency little uh little [ __ ] so first off yeah dun day and I'd argue make it quite unique so first off we have to make it British so from Midnight to 12:00 p.m. on the day everyone can moan everyone can complain it's not too cringe like the American style you allowed to moan about the mistakes the UK has made in its past currently making and he's going taken something from April 4day here yes have a have a until 12 p.m. you can like criticize the country drink tea blah blah blah come 12: p.m. allowed very rarely as Brits to remember just how [ __ ] awesome historically this country has been so Dunkirk being obviously a key a key pivotal moment there and just imagine this in the UK right you've got William Shakespeare Alan shuring John Lennon the Gallagher brothers right you've got uh pank Hurst and the suffrage yets whichever way you want to go like we've got it all the tallest demand that I think you could bring in for dunu day even from like Harry Potter um I mean even uh crick of what's it in Crick who created DNA or discovered DNA one of them was predition it was done in Cambridge University like I'm sorry America but you can't compete with that like the histo the history that this country has and the ability to turn that into a national day that maybe unites people at least for an afternoon and potentially brings in billions of tourist Revenue by just a little bit of marketing I think is completely untapped potential I love it George Mack ladies and gentlemen where should people go they want to read this essay of yours which they should and they also want to keep up to date with everything else you're doing where should they yeah um you want to go to High agency.com and the whole essay that me and agency.com that me and Chris spoke about today um we'll be on there uh you can read the whole thing and anything else just uh George Mack on Twitter my DMs are open dud I love you thank you love you too man thank you what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with George my full- length conversation with Eric Weinstein is a great next meal to eat just him come on