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- [00:01]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Hey, everyone. Jim here with a quick note.
- [00:04]
We're taking a brief break from new episodes to spotlight a couple of golden oldies from the Infinite Loops archive.
- [00:12]
Years later, these remain some of my favorite conversations I've had on the podcast.
- [00:18]
We'll be back with fresh episodes soon.
- [00:21]
But in the meantime, enjoy this trip through time. Thank you. Hi, I'm Jim o', Shaughnessy, and welcome to Infinite Loops. Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like Infinite Loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the world way we think and how we might be able to change that. To avoid going in Infinite Loops of thought, we hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens, including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions, help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker. With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together. Thanks for joining us. Now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
- [01:41]
Well, hello, everybody. It's Jim o' Shaughnessy with potentially one of my favorite previous guests rejoining me. I have with me today George Mack, who is God. George, I don't even really know how to describe what you do. What you do is you come up with the coolest point 1% of ideas that you've come across, and razors, and you go down rabbit holes. Maybe a DNA test. I might have been active in England over right around nine months before you got born. George, welcome.
- [02:17]
George Mack
Well, thank you for having me, Jim. One of my favorite podcasts to listen to and one of my favorite people to speak to. So it's good to be back.
- [02:23]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
It was funny because as I was getting ready and going back through your stuff, I came across the video game idea, and it involves Rick and Morty, which I adore Rick and Morty. I had not discovered Rick and Morty, and my daughter was visiting from California, this is several years ago, and she's like, well, dad, you must absolutely adore Rick and Morty. And I'm like, what's Rick and Morty? And she goes, oh, oh, my God, this is going to go into my scrapbook is one of the best days, because you are going to love Rick and Morty and you've talked A lot about there might be some real advantage to thinking about your life as a video game. I used to call it back when in video games there was God mode. And I always said, okay, I'm just going to shift into God mode here and it's very, very helpful, but, but please develop the thesis for me and share with our listeners. I guess the question one of my teammates said, I think what you really ought to ask him is if life is a video game, how can our listeners and viewers play on easy mode?
- [03:32]
George Mack
It's a big question. I think the video game hypothesis was partially inspired by the Roy scene from Rick and Morty and then partially also inspired by like the simulation hypothesis, which for the kind of new age atheist crowd was the most depressing, nihilistic thing. Just this NPC and this simulation of infinite simulations that exist. And you have the debate around that moving the dial from simulation hypotheses to video game hypotheses. Is it true? That's not what I'm here to kind of consider, to be honest with you. But is it useful? That's a completely different question. And I do think viewing things as a video game is incredibly useful. So I don't actually encourage anybody to go on YouTube and search Roy the Rick and Morty scenes two to three minutes long. But the key thing for me with the video game hypothesis or living life as a video game is first off the video game industry worth more than music, TV and entertainment combined. And then I think it's like you add a 2x multiple and then you roughly get there, right? So whatever they're doing, it's working. I think video game psychology is massively neglected because it's seen as a thing that people waste their time with. It's seen as something silly, which again is usually a great area to study because people are kind of moving it to the side. And the key realization I had with being video game psychology is that the laziest, nihilistic people I know, least disciplined imaginable, could spend 16 hours back to back conquering a video game. So you then ask the question, well, is that person lazy or is reality just a very poorly designed video game? And that's when I was like, ah. And I began to look at all the times where I'd be motivated on a project or excited to do a project or excited to do a thing, and then the inverse when I didn't want to do the thing or I hated it. And you began to realize it was just whether it was a well designed video game or a Poorly designed video game. There's two offshoots of the conversation that you can then go super philosophical as well as you can go very, very tactical with it, too.
- [05:47]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I think that what would be fun to explore is the idea Wittgenstein had a great line, which is, don't look for meaning, look for use. I kind of live my life that way. So many people are like, oh, what's the meaning of life? Or what's the meaning of this? And that's a rabbit hole that I've been down. And then I had this realization when I came across something. I'm like, I don't believe this. But, man, if I believed it, it would be really useful in my life. And so I started experimenting as if. So I'm going to act as if, even though I don't really believe it. So how do you get our listener or viewer into that mind frame? How do you get them to think, here's what I want to do, and here's my talents as I perceive them? One of the things that I found that is very useful, that I think you agree with, is sometimes if you look at yourself in the third person, what happens is you see yourself actually as other people see you as opposed to the way you see yourself. And that can be quite disconcerting. But then it can get very, very helpful. If George came to me and said, hey, Jim, I'm having this problem, what advice would I give? Guess what? The advice I'm going to give to you is going to be much better than if I have exactly the same problem and I personalize it. Take us through what would be helpful for our listeners, viewers to set the stage for this idea that, okay, it's wrong, but maybe life is a video game. How do I maximize the things that I think I want in life? And that would get us from strategy.
- [07:32]
George Mack
To tactics, I think, as you mentioned then, around the Wittgenstein quote, truth and meaning, again, there's the whole truth conversation, which is one point of a day. But particularly around meaning in the modern age, there's such a lack of meaning. And the one thing that video games do insanely well is there's so much meaning when people are playing them, even though there's no meaning. So it's quite paradoxical in its nature. So you have that. The second factor you have is viewing the character that you're playing. So viewing Roy in the Rick and Morty scene, which he shows where he goes from having all these dreams, and then he gets stuck at the carpet store, and then he Constantly thinking about leaving the carpet store, gets cancer and goes back to the carpet store. And then ultimately he falls off the carpet store rack, dies, and immediately is woken up and realized the whole thing was a video game. So if you could have that frame that you just one day going to take off the VR headset and you go, I was only gone for five minutes, but this whole thing felt like 70 to 80 years. How different would that be? And it's an interesting question then of why is there such a dichotomy of people who are such good video game players but then have such terrible time at life? And I do come back to that, of what is it? A well designed video game. So then looking at every single thing about how could I turn this into a more fun video game? Even basic psychology principles, if you're creating a project. One of the things that I used to do before I had this realization was let's say the project is build a website that is just essentially setting level 37 of the video game that I'm playing. And at any point I've not built that website, I'm a constant failure. So if I was to release that as a computer game tomorrow, nobody would play it because it has no feedback loops, it's not aware of the stage I'm at, there's no dopamine, there's no nothing. Versus if I break that project all the way down to, okay, well, level one, let's just write down all the ideas I could do about this. And then level two is, well, how about I start structuring the levels? And what's beautiful about that is once you've checked off level one and level two, you've already made a little bit of momentum, things are moving for you, you're already aware of all the next levels you have to do and you've chunked it step by step. And most importantly, you feel like a success at each individual stage versus when you go back to that project mindset of Level 37, a build website, that you're constantly in this binary state, which is why I think so many people procrastinate forever. And it's really interesting, as soon as people get a little bit of momentum behind them, as soon as people get the little win on the video game, and it's that perfect sweet spot of that flow state of enough that it's challenging, enough that you can complete the next step, but also not too much that it's overwhelming. And constantly looking at every little individual area like you were hired by Grand Theft Auto or a Video game designer to make it as addictive as possible. And I know, even though I know this, even though I've written about this, every single time I fall off something, it always pretty much comes back to it being a poorly designed video game.
- [10:32]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George is deciding what he wants to do and he's in Jerry's apartment. Jerry goes, well, what do you like? And George goes, I really like making comments about professional sports. Maybe I could be a commentator on one of the networks. And Sherry goes, yeah, George, those jobs are usually reserved for people who had a long career in broadcasting or were athletes themselves. And so George had set this crazy thing up here that as I watched it, and the reason it's funny, I think, is because it's making your point. George is going up to the hundredth level and saying, from level one, that's what I want. And of course he's setting himself up just for complete disappointment because there's no alignment between where he is now and where he wants to be. And so I love the idea of starting with level one because I agree completely that if you have crazy ass goals and you just put them up here, you're setting yourself up for failure because you're just going to be disappointed.
- [11:46]
George Mack
Despite to make it broader for the audience here because there'll be a lot of people like, oh, that's cool, my son plays video game, but I never do. But when you actually really begin to just zoom out and go, well, let's just call it a game. And then all of a sudden you can kind of see that everywhere. You can see how Twitter is a game where follower count is the metric. You can see how money, which I've spoken about before, I think money is the best video game ever designed because it's multiplayer. It's a single number going up and going down. And you can contrast yourself constantly to where it was last year. It is the single best video game ever. You can even look at Brazilian jiu jitsu, which has become so big right now. And when I speak to people who do it, one of the most rewarding things they find is the belt system. From white belt, one stripe, two strike, three strike, blue belt, and all the way up purple belt, brown belt. And you're constantly getting these little stripes, even with CrossFit, the way they do the rep maxes and things like that. And you notice everything that really begins to take off is a super well designed video game or a game, period. And things that really struggle both from an individual and A societal perspective or when the. Just the game mechanics are terrible.
- [13:01]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
You mentioned metrics there and you've written a lot about metrics and how oftentimes we just have the wrong metric. You mentioned about Twitter. I look at Twitter as performance art. Basically, the follower count I could give a shit about. I think it's a vanity metric. I think it is absolutely meaningless. But as you point out, if that is the metric that people are focused on, that is going to elicit all sorts of behavior, because they're looking at that metric and they're thinking, how do I get more followers? How do I get more followers? And then you see the same kind of dreck and bullshit, I don't know, threads lifted right out of Wikipedia. And now that we have AI, oh my God. That's a metric that I find absolutely has negative value. Really. I care about reaching people like you. I found you on Twitter. So I kind of optimize the people that I follow and the way I post things as a beacon. Hey, are you interested in this stuff too? And that works so much better for me because it allows me to meet people like you, to meet people like half the team at o' Shaughnessy Ventures I found on Twitter. Talk a bit about that aspect of it. How can people get better metrics than the obvious one, like follower count on Twitter?
- [14:28]
George Mack
Oh, this is a six hour conversation. Strap yourself in, Jim. So I think on this point there's so much to be said. So zooming in at Twitter and then we can zoom out. When you have these metrics, you do end up creating these feedback loops or these weird parts of the video game that then occur. So as you mentioned, then there's people who then post to Twitter and then purely judge the quality of that post based off the likes and the reach that it has. And the fundamental problem with that is you're optimizing for width. And I understand why. Because they can't measure the depth. There's no depth measurement. One of the ideas I posted a while ago, and I hope one day it gets picked up, whether it's this version or an iteration of this, is like some kind of golden light system where people have one golden like per week that they can use. And I would love to gauge the quality of my posts of that versus the number of likes and reach that I get, even myself. Now I'd find myself at certain points getting a little bit hooked to the Algo or that video game. And I go, oh, that's actually a really bad video game to play. So what I do now is either post and then I ghost. So I don't see the numbers, don't see the metrics and just detach from it. It's been so much healthier canceling that video game. And then I really focus on the quality of would have like just purely the metric of the following. Would I consume this? So if I was the reader, would I like this if that's the number one metric and then number two is the DMS or the quality of people that share it or message me, etc. Etc. And that has completely changed my writing style by focusing on that. However, the problem is right now I have to kind of bootstrap that together of like, oh, a little bit of gut feel around who DM me the. But I can't fully measure the depth, I can't fully measure these things. And I think there's so much to be said there's so much to be said about when hidden metrics become visible. As a result, the players in the video game completely change their realities, completely changed our outputs. Super small example of you've seen alcohol consumption decrease quite a lot. And I don't think it's the soul factor, but certainly a factor even with myself has been sleep trackers. People track their sleep and even though they still had that hangover feeling, they still kind of felt tired the next day. Seeing graph go down like the 2008 crash is very different. So when it goes from being hidden to visible, the behavior completely changes and you can see and you extrapolate further and further out and you can look at something like Money, where again, money, the best video game ever designed, but how well that person sleeps at night or their peace of mind are things that you can't really measure, nor can that individual measure. And one of the fascinating things about hidden metrics, so let's say something like peace of mind, time with parents, time with loved ones, stress levels is they're hidden all the way up until the point they hit zero and then they become the most visible thing ever. So when they go from unmeasurable, immeasurable, immeasurable disappears, I. E. Time your parents goes to zero or stress levels go to zero and you have a mental breakdown all of a sudden, then they become extremely visible. But the problem is right now is the certain metrics that we can measure in life's video game and the certain metrics that are much harder and I'd encourage people to bootstrap them where they can using the example I use for Twitter there, because otherwise you can end up adrift playing a video game that you don't want to be playing purely because of the scoreboard that somebody else has designed.
- [18:01]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Extending it then to life. We talked about Twitter, but I think you can also extend this to your own life. If I was hiring you as a consultant and you were going to come in and you were going to work with me to say, so, Jim, let's think of life as an infinite game instead of a finite game. What kind of questions would you ask me to try to get me to optimize on the correct metric? Because I totally agree with your assessment about people optimizing for the wrong metric. They're not even thinking about it. But then, as your next example of sleep metrics, I don't use them, and I don't use them for a specific reason. My son loved them. He was all over them, and he was like, dad, you're going to love this because it's quantifying everything. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that. And then he was like, you're crazy, dad. And then, I don't know, a year goes by, and he says to me, oh, by the way, I stopped with all of the metrics on the sleep. And I went, okay, why? And he goes, well, because I woke up, I felt great. I'm so looking forward to today. I was pumped, I was ready. And he goes, and then I looked at the metrics, and the metrics told me I had a shitty night's sleep. And he goes, and literally it took over my body, this weird placebo or nocebo effect looking, saying, here's how I feel. This tells me I'm not feeling that way. And then that has a really powerful nocebo. So consult with me, tell me how to optimize gym on that specific point.
- [19:42]
George Mack
And then I'll zoom out to the gym game, which I think you're obviously doing incredibly well with, but we'll give it a go. So, on the specific sleep ones, I thought about this as well. I think that's a perfect example of what a metric's gone wrong, where that's almost the metaphorical equivalent. Refreshing the stock price every day, and it's gone down slightly and you're selling everything. If these devices actually gave you the ability to only check, you got a weekly report of how you slept. Based off the things that you did, I'm surprised they haven't done that yet because it would bring back quite a bit of retention of people that I've seen that have churned from them because you do have those inverse placebos that do exist. Zooming out to the wider thing around the video game as a whole. Ultimately it comes down to it's quite tough without obviously understanding the individual's goals and the individual's values. However, I think the key thing is to flesh out what those things are and then designing infinite games that you can play as regular as possible and then figuring out the feedback loop that makes sense for that metric. I sleep daily probably doesn't work, but other metrics of time left with insert important person finding that out every decade might not be optimal either. So really thinking that through, the next thing I think is just constantly getting momentum. Once you design those values and those goals, just constantly getting momentum with set periods and set constraints. I think the more constraints that you can then enforce on something, the better. Like one things video games do really well is constraints. I was chatting to a friend of mine the other day who was having a tough time of his business. I said, if you saw little tomorrow, I go, what would you do? Because I just played golf for six months. I go, okay. I go, why? And then we started going through it and ultimately golf's just an amazing game. And he loves the fact that there's a constraint of ball here. All needs to go in whole and I can improve it every single day. So then looking at every project, whether that's I want to learn how to code, I want to learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I want to reach XYZ at the law firm reverse engineering. So let's say for example, level 10, or let's say even further level 50 is black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or making $1 million that year. What's 11 10? Level 10 is probably going to be making a hundred thousand dollars that year all the way down. And maybe you know what level one is? Making the first dollar online. And the great thing about that is I say you make the A gives you the momentum to make the first dollar online or to go to the first Jiu Jitsu class or whatever it is. So you get that momentum to get started, which is half the battle with all of these things, you can see the next one, you can see the next one versus when it's make the million, get the black belt, become head of the law firm. You're constantly in this gap all the way until you get there that you're a loser or that you've lost the video game. And then you get there and you get the classic 5 minute brief high and it disappears anyway versus with the video game approach, step by step by step, you're stacking wins, wins, wins, wins, wins, which is actually ultimately the whole infinite game mindset anyway and more important than the specific outcome that you come towards. So, yeah, just to loop back round, it's so hard to design it. I know people like to be tried these days and give specific advice, but without knowing their values and their goals. However, the fundamental principles of creating milestones, designing systems, having a level one all the way to level 50 framework of whatever that big goal is, and having clear constraints with specific things as well are the key fundamental values that I'd be thinking about. That's applying a video game to somebody's life. And then last but not least, the metrics that you use, whether they're available for you or you have to bootstrap them and how often you're going to.
- [23:31]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Check those metrics, I think that's great advice. One of our mottos at Oshawa Sea Ventures is crawl, walk, run. It seems to resonate very much with the team because we're starting a book publishing company. Rather than say, yes, we're going to be the most important book publishing company ever. No, we crawl, we're going to publish one book. Let's see how we do. Let's see if we can get that done. What's funny is that you can just see the change in demeanor of the entire team. Oh, okay. Well, yeah, we can do that. And then all of that time gets spent learning. Oh, didn't think about this. Ooh, didn't think about that. I think one of the problems with many people is you've just eloquently put it. You don't start out at the black belt in the martial art. You start out as a novice who's gonna everything up for the most part. If I was taking martial arts, what would be my goal for day one? Just do one thing right. Just one. All I want to do is one thing right. I assume I'm just gonna do everything else wrong. What's cool about that is what happens if I do two things right? Wow, I just did two things right. So I'm going to get really excited about that and as you say, carry the momentum. The other thing that you write a lot about and I think that we're really simpatico on, is agency. High agency people are the people you really, really want to associate with. And you have a great thing on agency. And we'll talk a little bit more about it. But I love the one question that you ask about agency. And if you're thinking about all your friends and you want to figure out who has the highest agency, you ask what one person would I call if I was stuck in a third world prison? I love that. Are there other ways to find people with agency? Are there markers for the ones they seem to have a lot of talent and everything, but it just don't have any agency.
- [25:37]
George Mack
The key asterisks on that question, which I need to add is almost imagine that you take away all their contacts and all their wealth. So my friend Chris from Modern Wisdom asked Steve from Diary of a CEO this exact question. And Steve replied like he'd call Prince William, he's a friend of his, right? I go, well, that's an example where the question breaks, right? You've got to have the specific criteria of they have no contacts, they can't use their wealth, but they're purely through a combination of different things. That's a great thing of identifying high agency because it's like, what are those things? It's not just IQ because we know people who have super high IQ that couldn't get you out of a cupboard. So it's not iq. It seems to be. And it's not just pure work ethic, Eva, because we know people who would work for so hard and again, still wouldn't be able to get you out of the cupboard. So what is it and why is it those people would be the people you would pick? And I think it's a combination of resourcefulness is probably the most important thing of just being able to figure out a solution to a problem. That seems to be a huge factor with seems to also be a combination of resourcefulness, the ability to think extremely quick on their feet, the ability to have a high locus of control. Because even the act of thinking you can break somebody out of a third world prison is an absurd thing that most of the people are just gonna be like, I can't do it, mate. You almost need this absurd self belief that you can do it. Paired with a high locus of control, paired with relentless resourcefulness and a sprinkle of some kind of different forms of intelligence in that that seems to be the fundamental stack that creates high agency. Because they have to look at the world and be able to say, a, this is just a video game, I can change this, B I've got this some kind of skill to be able to do it and see if not, I will eventually figure it out. And D, that determinism that they will not quit. It's a weird mix of different things paired together, you immediately know it when you see it. Which is why everybody who's listening to the podcast now can immediately go, oh, I know who I called to break me out of a third world jail. And I'm willing to bet typically they aren't the most academic person in their group. Typically they're not the most athletic person. It's something else of those combination or factors that we discuss there that those people have, whenever you get around those kind of people, they have a few different things as well. So one, they tend to have quite weird teenage hobbies is one thing that I've noted. Because by definition, if you've been able to like learn how to juggle when you were 14, no girl found that sexy. None of the boys at school go, oh, look at the guy that can juggle. Great, he's here. But if you then get when despite the prefrontal cortex not even being developed yet, that you're still going to learn how to juggle and get laughed at, there's a sense of locus of control and obviously resourcefulness in terms of figuring it out, and a determinism to keep going that exists. Other things on the checklist are an energy distortion field. I mean, I think you've got this gym we spoke online about treadmill versus sofa friends and high agency people. I've noted that when they go into a room, the energy of the room can completely change. They completely destroy it. Or you could see them really bummed out, you're ready to quit on everything, you don't know what to do anymore and you have 15 minute chat with them and you're ready to go and run on a marathon treadmill ultra incline. So they just seem to distort energy to some extent. I don't know the scientific version of that. I don't know how to describe that Again, you just know it when you feel it. Another thing is you can't guess their opinions, so they don't line up. Because by definition, if they have agency, they've thought about things with their locus of control and sandbox society's opinions through their own unique filter. You might not agree with them on everything. You might disagree with them a lot. And the worst kind of person is a high agency sociopath. That's a dangerous, dangerous person. That's the kind of person who ends up on a Netflix documentary. If you can't guess their opinions, though, that's a good thing because by definition, if, oh, okay, you have blue hair and you live in this part of town. If I can go check Check, check, check, check, check. You're going to believe, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Probably quite low agency. And that's not whether that person's right or wrong. It's just by definition. If you downloaded all your team's opinions, again, there's probably not that much agency there. However, if you go, hold on a second, your this like boxer hard man, but I've just looked at your notepad and pen here, and you write the most beautiful poems. For you to have done those two things displays agency, because you had to have almost moved those two things in completely different directions and not cared about what other people think about you. Or if you have this beauty queen on Instagram that has 2 million followers in this fashion deal, but she's obsessed with nature. Again, quite a lot of agency that exists there, right? Because it doesn't line up. Three more, I'd add. One is the kind of immigrant mentality. Fundamentally, immigrants tend to be higher agency because by definition, you've had to have moved from somewhere. You've had to have looked around at your surroundings and gone. This isn't for me, this isn't the best place in the world. So there's some kind of emotional intelligence that exists there or ability to go against the crowd. You then had to operationalize a move which takes resourcefulness, it takes breaking into some kind of mini little jail. And then you had to have started all the way from the ground up. And it's quite a crazy start. Of number of unicorn founders in America, it's something like 50% or so, give or take, year or year are immigrants. And that kind of lines up and begins to make sense. It's interestingly, I think Americans tend to have higher agency than Brits. And I've been fascinated by potentially why that is. I think one of the reasons is when I went to America, this realization which was, we have so much in common between Brits and Americans, but also some things different. And fundamentally, it can all be explained when you realize that the Americans were the ones when the boats came and it was like, hey, we're gonna go to this island far, far away, to the middle of nowhere. You may die on the trip, but there's gonna be freedom. The Americans were the ones who were like, yeah, let's go. And the Brits were the ones who were like, sounds ridiculous. I'm going to stay here. And you actually can understand a lot of differences between the UK and the US as a result of that. And as a result, one thing the UK could take from America, it's a lot more agency. There's a few other things that can filter through Jim, but I don't know if you've got anything to run through on them.
- [32:36]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
There's actually a book about that, and it's called the Hypomanic why America Being a Little Crazy. I'm forgetting the subtitle. But essentially that is the thesis of the book. The thesis of the book is America is America, because it was all the crazy motherfuckers who got on the boats and came over here, which demonstrates agency and willingness to take risk and all of those types of things. And I have a lot of British friends, and I love British humor because it's very different than American humor in many regards. Because one of the other things that I noticed is, for example, the designer who we work with for our homes and offices, she's a Brit and she's from the north of England. And she was saying to me, we were out at dinner and we subsequently became very good friends with her and her husband. Husband's a creative director. They've lived all around the world. Very interesting. And I'm like, so why are you staying in America as opposed to going back home to London and practicing your craft there? And she just started laughing and her husband did too. And I said, why are you laughing? And she goes, jim, in the uk, none of the posh people would hire us. And I'm like, why? She goes, listen to my accent. Literally, I just looked at her dumbfounded and I'm like, what? She goes, you don't understand. We apparently don't have a class system in the UK anymore. She goes, we bloody well do. And you can tell instantly when somebody opens their mouth whether you're going to be willing to work with them. She goes, here, you Americans don't give a shit. And you just think, oh, lovely British accent. And she goes, so here it's this amazing advantage back home in the uk, it would be a disadvantage for me. And then we kind of got in. Her husband mentioned. He said, the other thing you Americans don't have is tall poppy syndrome. And I'm like, okay, that one's new to me. And then he explained the tall poppy gets cut down, which occasioned me to say that America and the UK are really kissing cousins, but they are united by a language that both of them use completely differently, divided by a common language. God, that just makes me think about so many questions. Say you're trying to gain agency. Do you think that it is genetic? Do you think that it's environment? I'm thinking also of the German general who categorized clever and lazy. They should be at the highest level of command. Stupid and lazy, they're cannon fodder. Send them to the front. And is there a way that somebody can kind of gain an ability to be a more agenic person?
- [35:37]
George Mack
The truthful answer is I think it's probably a lot generic. But going back to at the start, I think having that as a belief will make you lower agency. So it's probably useful to go, yes, it's 100% in your control. The irony is saying that is quite a high agency thing to say. Right.
- [35:55]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
So.
- [35:57]
George Mack
Already figured out the problems yet? We have that going on. I think fundamentally it can. As a magician in the uk, he's not that big. In America, it's absolute shock. You need to check him out, Jim, if you haven't. It's a guy called Darren Brown.
- [36:10]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
He's one of my heroes. When I was a teenager, that was my first job. I was a professional magician. I love Darren Brown. I've watched all of his stuff. I've read his book on happiness. I just love him. But continue.
- [36:23]
George Mack
There's a documentary called the Push where he filters people beforehand and then essentially, long story short, just conformity by conformity begins to say hey to the person. And bear in mind, they don't know it's him. It's all actors all set up and they didn't even realize they got accepts onto the TV show. You could definitely have some moral quandaries around that. But again, we'll leave that with truth for a conversation for the other day where step by step they get him to conform. From putting meat in the vegan platter all the way up to moving a disabled person, all the way up to hiding a body. Finally, last but not least, the police are going to get here unless you push this man off the building. And you can see there how you can just slowly but surely remove somebody's agency. Like if they started off and tried to get him to push him off the building, he would have said no. And I'm sure they scored him for hyper agreeable. So even then they had to chip away. So by definition, if you can chip away at somebody's agency, my natural inclination is, well, therefore, yes, you can increase it step by step in some kind of video game fashion. I think realistically, it's probably just cranking up the dial day after day, day after day, probably being quite delusional and just having Civas ism, Derek Sivas ism of what's useful. But not true that everything that I'm responsible for, even though it's cost. True. But having that will likely begin to crank up the agency dial or two habits that you can do that I think can increase agency is one, check out as much niche content as you can. Even the act. This is the bicep curl of agency right here. Go to YouTube and just click on the thing that has 320 views. Well, I click on the thing that society is pulling you towards, that is the bicep curl. And nine out of ten times there'll be duds, but one out of ten times you'll find like insane content creators really, really early on or trends really, really early on. So I think that is a big thing that you can do. I think there's a Chrome extension that removes all engagement metrics from Twitter and things like that. So that's almost like having the stabilizers on agency where you're realizing the amount of stuff that you used to consume is just because of number of likes or number of views on it. So I'd say that's a big thing. I'd say if where you can ultimately just be around more and more high agency people. It's a very cliche trope thing, but it definitely begins to rub off on you. And likewise, being around low agency people I found personally also begins to rub off on me. One thing to really identify high agency people, which is quite counterintuitive, is that high agency people will tend to be quite mean to your face. What my friend Chris Williamson calls toxic compassion. They don't have that. They'd rather be rude to Jim upsetting now. But realistically, that problem is going to solve itself out versus quite low agency people. They want the reverse trade off. They want to be nice to you because they don't want to have to deal with any form of conflict or disagreeability. And then they want the social benefit of being able to psych you off behind your back because that gains their social points over there. So I definitely think if you can decrease agency, therefore you can increase agency. I think it's a video game. Step by step, there's things you can do around niche content, there's things you can do around how you surround yourself with. But ultimately, I think going back to what we had at the start of the conversation of if you view life as a video game, that alone increases your agency because you just decrease. Oh, this thing is just a game. So if it's just a game, you decrease the setting, you decrease the fear, you decrease a lot of Anxiety that comes with that and constantly trying to clock back into realizing there's just a VR headset on all along.
- [40:06]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
That actually was an idea that I thought would be cool. I don't think we're there with the tech yet, but then you had something on it too, which is another great way to elongate. One of the things that I find that really is a problem with so many people is their hyperbolic discounters of time. You made the point if you're clicking refresh on the stock, you're going to fail. I can almost guarantee you that. I learned a great lesson from one of my first clients in asset management. He was a 72 year old guy in the western part of America. He'd made his fortune in gold prospecting and he had sold all of his mines to Barrick Gold, which is a Canadian company. And so he had this huge fortune. He had read my book, what Works on Wall Street. So he called me and he I want you to manage my money because I like the way you're doing things. So I went out there and I'm like, okay, so given your age, we probably should have this kind of portfolio. And it was pretty conservative. He's sitting in there and he's got this wonderful face, just weather beaten and just this beam of sunshine at the same time. And he looks at me and he goes, chip, Jim, don't talk to me about that stuff. And I go, well, what do you mean? And he goes, what would you put your grandchildren in? I said, well, I don't have grandchildren yet. He goes, okay, well, what would you put your kids in? I'm like, well, I put them in this very, very aggressive thing over here. And he looks at me and he goes, talk to me about that. And then he points at a photo right next to him and it's him with his kids and his grandkids, even had some great grandkids. And he goes, my time horizon is infinite. And he said that pointing at the picture, I'm like, oh my God, that is so brilliant. So I literally adopted it for myself. My time horizon is infinite because now I have five grandchildren. Hopefully I'm going to have great grandchildren. And there's charities that I want to be able to support after I die. That change alone just gives you such a different look. And then you did this in the idea of VR where you're 90 years old and you're the worst version of yourself. So you're like, everything is wrong, you've done nothing in your life. And suddenly there's A knock on the door. And on the other side of the door is the best version of you. Talk a little bit about that because I loved that piece of yours.
- [42:45]
George Mack
I came up with this idea and again, probably add this to the high agency checklist, which is spending time alone, some form of solitary confinement. And solitary confinement is probably like squatting certain amount of time, a certain amount of. It's good, but if you squat forever, it's probably going to break every single hip and knee. But I think naturally we err towards too little solitary confinement in the modern age. Anyway, so I went away, had electronics, no social media, and was just with my own thoughts around about day of three or four. Things get a bit weird, they get a bit crazy, both good and bad. But you do begin to realize a lot of the stuff you're doing is just purely just outsourcing your agency to the tide. And one of the things that came to my mind was, how do you stop just outsourcing your agency to the tide? And one of the wacky weird thoughts I had was, well, if you looked at a combination of Roy, the whole Christmas carol idea of the past and the present, and the whole Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework, and you created this weird love orgy and Frank's monster of the three. And you're sat there and you take the VR headset off. So you close your eyes and you imagine this whole thing was a video game the entire time. You take the VR headset off and you was just, it's 2075 and this was just an app where you could throw back to your younger years. And you realize you're in the worst care home imaginable. There's just dirt everywhere. The maids still haven't come in to check on on you. You're wandering around, your whole body's just feeling like you've run a marathon. And the higher intensity you can crank that emotion, the less agency you need to change, the more emotional you are, the less agency you need to change things. And you're reflecting on if every worst trait that you had, like the worst version of you completely took over everything from your relationships to your decisions to your career choices, etc. Etc. What would that look like? You get a really ugly image. And then as you're at the peak of that regret, you get the knock at the door, and it's whatever, that door opens. And that version is whatever reason is, he's lying on his feet, he's still got a full set of hair, he dresses a little bit better, he's not a care home because he's still with his family and things like that. And he's then replaying the memories of the life that you could have had. And then you realize there's five minutes left on the clock once you've been through that process. And it's ticking, ticking, ticking, ticking all the way down to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And at that peak emotion of, oh, I'd give everything to go back to George at 29 or Jim at 61. You have that trade with the devil where he says, listen, I can make you go back, but you have to do something different that moves you towards the higher self today. And that, as an exercise that doesn't require psychedelics, which can often go wrong for a lot of people, can get you into a state of, I think, a lot of changes without having to ingest some chemical. So wouldn't necessarily recommend it if you're not a stable person. But it is quite a powerful exercise.
- [46:03]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I love that. And something I learned, luckily young, was that idea of quiet time. People over complicated, in my opinion. Oh, no, no, no. To meditate correctly, which is basically what I call quiet time. To meditate, you've got to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and you just, bollocks. No, I'm not. You can achieve almost exactly the same thing. And I've done this for, I don't know, 30 years. Literally at the start of every day, I sit for 20 minutes with no electronics, no music, no nothing, and just sort of sit. And it is wild. When I started it a long time ago, I just thought for like the first, I don't know, three or four weeks, I'm like, this is stupid, this is stupid, this is stupid. The timer. Back then, I didn't have an iPhone, right? I had a stopwatch. And so you just look at it. It's like, sick dick ticket. You know, 20 minutes, felt like 20 hours. Then all of a sudden, if you persist and you stick with it, all of a sudden you start getting flooded with all sorts of ideas that you're kind of like wondering where the did that come out of? And so again, as I think about it, and I put it in your context, basically, if I didn't persist for that first four weeks, I would have never known this. And so I know that Chris is a friend of mine as well, and we've talked about this in the past, all you got to do sometimes is just persist a little bit. If you want to be a podcaster or a writer or you want to do any of these things, there's going to be this whole period of time where like nothing happens and then shit goes vertical. And so that's what I found with this quiet time. Basically it's invaluable to me now. Don't have to do it the way I do it. Take a shower, I don't know, whatever. Just stop thinking about, I need to do this, I need to do this, I need to do this. And do the quiet meditation.
- [48:22]
George Mack
There's a few thoughts on this that immediately come to mind. So there's so much alpha in that right now because so few people are doing it. So so many people are immediately getting on their cocaine first thing in the morning and just inhaling everything that comes in. So there's so much alpha. In the same way, maybe having a personal computer in the 80s or 70s was a thing. Back then nobody had any information, whereas now they have so much information. That ability to just add a digestive system is so, so important, particularly in an age of infinite leverage. I agree. The other realizations I had two on this was one. Maybe run a little thought experiment here, Jim, of like, how many thoughts can you remember from yesterday? There's not that many. If you look at the data, it suggests like 10 to 70,000 thoughts a day happen. And you realize so much of this is just going into the abyss and you're constantly having these thoughts. So the ability to slow them down and process them I think is so valuable. And particularly being at the start of the day. But a bigger version of this I found is talking about video games at the beginning. 0 to 25 is an amazing video game because there's constant little milestones. Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, all the way up college, boom, boom, boom. And you're constantly getting these summer breaks and there's milestone, milestone, milestone. Whereas if adulthood, it's just that you look after 25, it's maybe wedding, mortgage, kid funerals, funerals of loved ones followed by your funeral and maybe Covid sprinkled in there. That's the one thing that was a silver lining of the COVID thing is people see things as pre covered and post Covid and it acted as a milestone in a lot of people's lives. And I know the US has much worse holidays than the uk. The UK has quite a lot of holidays that people can take as paid leave. But just plotting almost whether it's a quarterly, bi, monthly, whatever works for you, some time out to set, reassess, go again. So at the micro level, that 20 minute again, or whatever works for the individual, but also at the macro level as well. Having that time to filter things through is, I think, so important because otherwise you almost want to assume you have no agency to play. Devil's Advocates. My opposition, like one you run a game of. Well, if I have such low amount of agency, at least if I pause things for a while, it stops the momentum of things. So it requires a lot less agency to make a change. Which I think is what's beautiful about your 20 minute thing, or my kind of socioca, where you take four to five days out and just be with a notepad and pen and maybe a few podcasts, is that it fundamentally one acts as a milestone. So nice little video game marker of before and after, pre and post. But also you fundamentally slow down time and slow down momentum that you can change tracks and it requires less agency. So when you wake up first thing in the morning and sit still for 20 minutes, you're then starting from such a calm base to move from and build from, versus if he was on Instagram. And then you pulled into this thing and then, oh, you're on this quick zoom call now, before you know it, you're in the care home, you're taking off the VR headset. That's where you're at.
- [51:24]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
It feeds so many questions as well. Another thing that I think that we are really sympathical on is the idea of optimism versus pessimism. I call myself a rational optimist. And what does that mean? It means that I'm not Panglossian about shit. Yeah, you know what? If all this stuff happens that I am working to make happen, it's going to create lots of problems. And rather than say, oh no, it's going to be perfect. I always budget in. If this works, the problems that it creates are going to be so much better problems than the problems that I have right now. I like to say, like, pessimists sound smart, optimists make money. And yet I also had seen something else that you had talked about, which was people get even the terms wrong because when you say optimistic to a lot of people, they think naive optimism. I saw something where you were, I think it was you talking to Chris actually, where you were talking about the book the Secret. And you can manifest this and manifest that. And of course, I kept journals all my life and I found this thing that I wrote when I was, I don't know, 26 or whatever. And it was life's formula. And I had energy of mind, thought times, energy of action. Times energy of random occurrences squared. And I got that one wrong, I think because your luck raiser solves that one. Like if you've got two opportunities, pick the one that's going to give you the greatest amount of luck or the potential for the greatest amount of luck. But where I think that naive optimism gets it really wrong is oh gee, I just have to think that I'm going to be a millionaire or I'm going to get the hot girl or. And that's it. If you put it in that formula, energy of mind could be a hundred man, you could be manifesting all day. But if you're sitting on the couch and you're not doing anything, energy of action equals zero. And this is a criticism, anything times zero is zero. How does that fit in? Do you think that tying it into agency, tying it into shorter feedback loops that allow you to gain momentum Compounding is another really important thing because it goes Buffett, he made the vast majority of his wealth after I think age 65. Where does the idea if you're going to bring optimism and pessimism in, how would they factor into the way you're looking at this?
- [53:57]
George Mack
The whole optimism and pessimism debate is a strange one where people shout back and forth at one another versus if you turn it into a matrix of optimism, pessimism on one side and then low agency and high agency on the other and you can see the matrix there all of a sudden. You then factor out Jim's example of the guy who's super optimistic or like I'm going to be a billionaire, but is that sat on the couch, super low agency. So there's like one of my favorite all time Twitter moments was I realized this because it's not just obviously good enough to be optimistic. Agency is the ultimate factor. So there's this Peter Thiel quote which is if you think you're going to win, it doesn't mean you're going to win. If you think you're going to lose, you will lose. If you think you're going to get an A on the test, you won't always get my A. But if you think you're going to get an F, you'll always get an F. I posted that and then I think Elon Musk replied with, well, I thought Tesla and SpaceX were going to. I had a 10% chance of failing. And he's like the probably the prime example where I had to update my model. Ultimately he's an example of somebody who's probably actually quite pessimistic or bounces between pessimism and optimism, depending on how much he's like slept that night or whatever, his agency's off the charts. So ultimately optimism and pessimism is an interesting one. But the agency is probably the single most important factor. But it is quite rare you get somebody who's pessimistic and high agency like him, he's probably an absolute freak. But the ultimately, the most important thing is agency. And. But I think ultimately to get agency for most people, you need optimism in the first place because if you think the future is going to be terrible, that it almost fakes in that you have no control over it, versus, I think for an individual like him, he's pricing in so many different variables that he can still factor in 10%, but therefore I need to give it a go. And he believes in his agency so much that he can make an impact. So I think having a debate of pessimism versus optimism is incorrect. It's that multi dimensional of high agency, high optimism and low agency pessimism or low agency optimism. There's lots of different variables that you can consider and contemplate.
- [56:08]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
One of the things that we're trying to do at OSV is we think, for example, Hollywood has stopped making good movies, so we have a film division and essentially we're going to try to make those good movies because we're very mimetic creatures. And that's great because the mirror neurons. There's a great quote that I put up on Twitter a little while back, William von Hippel, and he goes, speaking about human beings, drop one of us naked and alone in the wilderness, and you fed the creatures of that part of the wilderness. Drop 100 of us naked and alone, and you've introduced a new apex predator to that part of the forest. And the reason I love that quote is, is duality. Not everything is a dichotomy. Oh, should I be competitive or should I be cooperative? Well, the way I look at it is you should be both. Because as that quote makes very, very plain, the reason you and I are having this conversation. Where are you today, physically?
- [57:16]
George Mack
I'm in Dubai.
- [57:17]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
You're in Dubai, I'm in Greenwich, Connecticut. We're looking at each other. We're having a great conversation. We. Why is that? It's because people cooperated and built on other knowledge and built on other knowledge and built on other knowledge, and here we are. And so ultimately being cooperative, that's the solution to the prisoner's dilemma too, which is the game theory. Douglas Hofstadter In Go to Leisure, Bach had a great appendix. His notes are even better than his text sometimes. And he wrote it a long time ago when people were still coding. And so they had a game where people were going to play the Prisoner's Dilemma. And that for those who don't know it, you and I are both criminals and we're partners. We both get caught, they separate us. They put me in one room and you in the other room. And then they say, all right, listen, Jim, if you give him up, you go free. George goes to jail for 10 years. If he gives you up, you're going to go to jail and he's going to go free. If you both rat on each other, you both go to jail. What's the optimal strategy? Well, the optimal strategy, as anyone would intuitively know, is that we both keep our mouth shut because they don't have enough evidence. They need one of us to finger the other guy. So Hofstadter talks about how they played this as a computer game and most of the code was like pages and pages and pages and pages long. But the model that won consistently was called Tit for Tat. It was a three line code. Start the game with your first round cooperating. If you get ratted out, retaliate, but then go back to cooperation that always wins.
- [59:10]
George Mack
I just feel like when you say that as well, that is a case point for the mid with me, that the three line code, what they're both the idiot and the genius, is the three line code versus all the complex theories. Wow. On them. There's a specific point you mentioned then that I wanted to bring up around creating movies and entertainment. One thing I've not really heard anybody discuss, I don't know if you've got any thoughts on this, which is if you look at the history of entertainment, reality TV is quite modern. So reality tv, I don't know about America, but in the UK we had like Big Brother and things like that that came along in the 90s, early noughties, but before that it was all entertainment. There wasn't really much reality tv, whereas social media is kind of flipped. So social media was immediately reality TV of people posting about their lives and uploading things. And because of the fact that the tools that existed, I can write about my life and I can post a LinkedIn status about what I'm doing today. But for me to create a four hour movie that I've created in my head, it requires a lot of investment and a lot of technology that doesn't exist yet. However, with new Tools that begin, whether we're five years away from this or 20 years away or five months, who knows? Is that going to flip things where you're going to see the ability for movies to become decentralized the same way reality TV became social media, even though it looks a bit different. Likewise, I suspect the movies of the future will look a bit different, or the fictional characters of the future will look a bit different. Really, really intrigued to see what happens with that once you remove the money and technology moat that Hollywood currently have.
- [60:51]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Yeah, I think the tech is going to be here partially. It's here already. I'm very involved in AI as well. What AI is, is a tool. It's a fucking amazing tool. And it's maybe the biggest lever that we as humans have ever created. But essentially, I think that AI married to a human got to be married to a human. We're going to see a tsunami of just direct, just bullshit. And that's going to be the stuff that was 100% generated by an AI and then we're going to see 10%. That is really gripping. That is really great. And that's going to be the result of a human interacting with the leverage that the AI can help them in the creation of that movie, in the story development, in all of those things. Now, will they be similar like Heroes Journeys? I've talked to people who are basically like every great book ever, every great movie, everything that you've ever consumed and loved is the hero's journey. And so I went down that rabbit hole and it's kind of right, because essentially, back to Rick and Morty, he calls it the story wheel, but it's basically the hero's journey. And that's Campbell, Joseph Campbell and Star wars and Harry Potter. I saw something online that was brilliant. It showed the outline for Star wars and then it crossed off all of the character names in Star wars and inserted the Harry Potter names. And they fit. They're just absolutely perfect. Going down. The idea that I think we're moving into a period where we're going to see a huge burgeoning of creativity because the tools are going to be available again, brings us back to agency, because all of the highest agency people are going to say, ooh, look at these tools that I can use. I'm going to experiment with that. And they're going to go back and forth. It's called the Cenotar model in AI, Senators being the mythical creature which were half beast, half man. And I definitely think that is coming. I would predict that you will See a movie, hopefully from Infinite Tomes that was essentially created that way. And it's going to be intensely gripping. So I think that we're moving from a time period of mass production to mass customization. I call it the Great Reshuffle. Everything's got to change. We are still saddled with in America and I think in the uk, antiquated educational systems that basically were put in place to make sure that you would be a good lad and sit quietly in that fucking room and do as you're told. It selects for everything that is wrong with the age we're going into. It selects for low agency, willingness to conform, willingness to sit before do your thing, correct answer machine, insert it in your head. And now we're going to move, I think to individualized education. We invested in a company called Synthesis, which essentially does that. It has an AI tutor and it models itself on you, George. You learn a certain way and that's the way it's going to teach you. But the broader thing that I see happening here, mass production, moving to mass customization and the tools are now becoming available where like literally five years from now you're going to have. I'll make a prediction, hopefully I'll be able to convince you to do it with infinite books. You're going to have three best selling books. You're going to have little movies that are based on those books that are on YouTube that you can charge for. You're going to have this whole thing that is you. It's going to be super cool. But again, you're narrow casting, you're not broadcasting. That's the other thing. 64 million Americans watched an episode of I Love Lucy. The closest thing we've got to that would either be the Harry Potter movies or Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones, 18 million people. We're moving to this period, in my opinion, where there are going to be all sorts of little hills that you can conquer. The power law isn't going away. However, the amount of places where the power law can occur are expanding geometrically exponentially. You don't have to care about 99% the way a broadcast. You don't have to think like I Love Lucy. You can think like Game of Thrones. You can think and then produce that.
- [65:39]
George Mack
One thing I don't think people have priced in with this yet is right now, to use a metaphor, you can be a reality TV star online, but you can't be Christopher Nolan. And what that means is most influencers now imagine that if we could only watch reality tv. That for me is kind of what social media is like. And it means which is great when there's people who like to be on camera or who maybe reality TV is not the right metaphor. They like to be a Leonardo DiCaprio. There's so many Christopher Nolans out there right now that are talented, that are kind of left in the wings, to use an analogy, a weird analogy for another industry. When OnlyFans came along, it created this new kind of adult content creator that didn't exist beforehand because you'd have to use the production studios. Whereas now people who wouldn't have gone into that then suddenly saw that as a career. And as usual, the adult industry always leads the way these things. So I think that's not been priced in at all. The amount of Christopher Nolan's that are sat on the sidelines, that can't produce content yet that will flip the Internet, that don't want to be on camera, don't want to be the face of things. That's a big thing to think about. One thing on this though, that I think is kind of ignored by the media, that will be studied by historians and I could be wrong on this and I think it's both a double edged sword in the sense that I do wonder if we're going to see or if we're already seeing, particularly me as a writer, the slow death of reading. That's beginning to happen. So if you look, most people no longer read that much. If you look at the stats in America, it's declining like crazy. So as a writer, that's a potentially really bad thing. However, the good thing is all great content, audio or visual, will need great writing. My hypothesis does kind of make sense in the sense that both video and audio as human beings consuming things goes back a lot further than reading does. Like it's tens of thousands. The visual field is something like 70 million years ago when we evolved that. And I think the true pioneer that we're seeing right now that will get mimicked a lot in the future is Ray Dalio, where Ray Dalio writes the book for like the hardcore 1% and then he releases on YouTube the animated version and that completely blows up. So I think that's probably going to be what the future of writing is like, where the book is actually probably like the vinyl record that the hardcore super nerds do. But realistically, reading is beginning to decay.
- [68:03]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
More and more and more.
- [68:04]
George Mack
Less hardcore people obviously listen, but most likely have these crazy animations that are visual that appeals to them. I think that is A much more likely version of the future for writers.
- [68:16]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
The pushback I would give you there is reading in general is declining. What we would call super readers is actually going up. There are 20 million people in America who read one book a week. Most of the books that they read are fiction. That's new to me. And by the way, I'm learning all this from a company that we just invested in yesterday. And the guy's brilliant and he broke it down. He's like, you're right, reading is going down in general. But there's 20 million people who read a book a week. That's our audience. And so I personally think writing has never been more important and for a reason similar to what you just asserted. I think you're right. I think that the multimedia, the visual, we are visual. We're storytellers and we are visual because that's what evolved first. I love the idea, by the way, of the book being for the hardcore and then the YouTube version or the whatever being for the one that actually pays your bills. But I would tie that back to your earlier statement. There are so many Christopher Nolans out there who up until this point in history, literally it was just, yeah, can't do it. I can't raise that money, I can't move to Hollywood. You don't have to do that anymore. Very hard and again, agency related to move your physical zip code. Very easy to move your digital zip code. Right now we are going to see a Cambrian like explosion in my opinion, because all of those Christopher Nolan's are saying, wait a tick, I can do this and it will create a video. Are you kidding me? And so where writing comes in is you got to start somewhere if you write it out. I'm a huge fan of writing, obviously, because I think it's also good for goal setting and all sorts of things. But the combination of the ability to become a Christopher Nolan with the tools, there's a lot of them. For example, one of the things we do is we give these fellowships. And one of the reasons we do it is because for all of history, God knows how many Einstein's were born, lived and died and we don't know anything about them because they had the misfortune of being born in Bangladesh or sub Sahara Africa or somewhere where there weren't a lot of people. Right now, if you've got one of these, and for those who aren't watching but are listening, I'm holding up an iPhone. You can find you wherever you are. I feel compelled. Part of my thesis is we can now find and fund geniuses. Let's do it. And so I definitely think that we are going into a period where you are going to see this huge expansion of all of these like mini. I don't know that I would make them reality TV based. But stories. There are so many great stories and so many variations on those great stories. Now I'm conflicting with my earlier statement that says everything was a hero's journey, but that's a big palette on which you can paint, you can do all sorts of them. I definitely think that it's coming sooner and that there are going to be all sorts of things. It ties in really well with your idea about what is the media ignoring that historians will spend a lot of time talking about. That's where all the alpha is. Because all the alpha is in things that nobody's paying any attention to. But 100 years from now they're going to say, hey, you know, what was the most important thing that they did back then? And if you'd look and search for those areas. That's one of the reasons why I love what you do because you give people tools to reframe and start thinking about it. If the only thing that comes out of this podcast is huh, I never really thought about being high agency and wow, maybe I can start trying to be more assertive or golly, if he can figure out all of my opinions by hearing one of my opinions, then maybe I'm an NPC and I don't want to be an npc.
- [72:47]
George Mack
Yeah, NPC is the lowest agency setting of the video game. I think on the one arc that's like quite matter but the same way you said everything's the hero's journey is what is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians is the societal level of me on my deathbed. What should I be thinking about now? So it's a very similar to the exercise that we did earlier. Ones at the individual level and ones at the societal level. I mean one of the easy ways or one of the fun ways to do is it might be a book that's coming out about this or different tools that need to get created of what did the media think about previously whilst XYZ was bubbling up and you can see and likewise at the individual level five years ago, knowing what I know now, what was I focused on when I see all those journal entries and what should I have been focused on? This the great Jeff Bezos question as well of also asking, well, what isn't going to change when they Ask him. That's great. Let's chat about all these new innovations that happen. Let's chat about AI. Let's chat about storytelling, how everyone couldn't become their own Christopher Nolan. The problem with that is it's quite hard to predict. And I'm sure we'll look back five years from now and go, we were so right about this one and we're wrong about this one. However, is it the case that 10 years from now, when these tools start, the hero's journey isn't going to be there? Realistically, they're going to be there in a lot of the films. And Bezos has that of, well, listen, I can't tell you everything that's going to change in Amazon's business. But I can tell you, 10 years from now, nobody's going to say, I, I want more expensive prices, I want the delivery time to take longer, I want less choice on the website. So constantly thinking about that. But I think ultimately, yeah, what is ignored by the media, that will be studied by historians or neglected caused so much virality at the societal level? What is current consciousness thinking about? Because it's busy and it's just reacting and it's mimetic versus 20 years from now, what are we going to wish we're going to think about there's such a similarity between that and the whole Deathbed visualization? Or 20 years from now, 50 years from now, what am I going to think about? Because both the individual and the societal can get so caught up in mimetic bullshit because it doesn't have the time to process things, because it isn't doing the 20 minutes in the morning to filter the information.
- [75:10]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
There's a great quote. I can't remember who said it, but it's along the lines of, no matter how intelligent somebody is, no matter how creative, no matter how insightful, you cannot ask them to create a list of things that would never occur to them. And I think that one of our principal problems in our human os, which is our shrink wrap programming, when we come out of the womb, we got human OS in its factory settings. And one of the factory settings for human OS is we think that we fall into the trap that we know everything right now and you can even demonstrate. Yeah, but if you just look like a hundred years back, David Deutsch, who's one of my heroes, who wrote the Beginning of Infinity, it's the best scaffolding for how to think about things that I think, anyway, he's like physicists in 1900. What were their opinions on the Internet and on quantum theory. Well, they didn't have any because nobody had invented either one of those. And so we fall into this trap even when we can look back. If we go back 500 years, you and I, we have a time machine, we jump in the time machine, we go back 500 years. We have already pre selected the 10 most brilliant people that exist on earth at that time. We know where to find them. We go and ask them all of their opinions and guess what, George, they're wrong about fucking everything. And so you can show that and people say, well, yeah, yeah, those people were wrong, but we now know that they were wrong and we're right. So if you play the temporal pincer, like tenet, I love tenet. Most people hate tenet because why do you love it? You can't make any sense of it. Well, it's a temporal pincer movement. If you can project yourself into the past 500 years, try projecting yourself into the future 500 years. That's your idea of what is the media not covering that historians are going to love. And this idea that we think we know everything, it's a real bug, not a feature of human os, if you're willing to admit to yourself probably right now, I would say the vast majority of my beliefs are wrong. I don't know how they're wrong. I know that I try to sort them by which are the most useful, but I might even be wrong there. And so the idea though that the alpha, if you will, that you can find is in the things that you write about and to that end you have a great one that I would like our listeners to hear. And it's where you find something is going to determine whether it's going to be really helpful for you or whether you're way, way too late to the game. And it's the Reddit to Facebook continuum. Talk about that one.
- [78:09]
George Mack
Yeah, this is my idea around predicting future trends within that is if you hear something on Reddit or you hear about a trend on Reddit or even X to some extent certain pockets of X, you might be onto something. If you hear something on LinkedIn or Facebook, you're definitely too late. So like ready and X maybe early Facebook, LinkedIn, definitely late. And they're actually quite useful filters to have because I can know when a meme has hit its $69,000 bitcoin price. You can figure it out as soon as a certain person on a Facebook account post something. But like if my mom was to have post a thing to me about A certain topic that I know they don't care about, I go, oh, okay, this has now hit max way quicker. But what's fascinating is that cycle's getting quicker and quicker and quicker. What used to be you could get alpha maybe two to three years ahead, it now spreads so much faster. It's interesting to see. I'd love to do a post about this. But seeing each platform as its own, like meme information highway and what spreads on TikTok is slightly different to what spreads on Twitter. It's slightly different to what spreads on YouTube and there's different rules and you can see how certain creators that blow up on certain platforms are almost a product of that platform. Where if you took a well known person on YouTube and you tried to get them to work on Twitter, it may work, but often it won't. And often the information highways that exist. So like Reddit that tends to skew more earlier adopter niche pseudonymous helps get break out of that overton window as well as building around communities versus Facebook or LinkedIn which tends to the meme information highways tend to be a lot older people, tend to be a lot more conservative people. Means that by the time the meme has passed all the way through those respective highways and ended up that mean information highway, there's very little alpha in that information. Except the alpha is we're now at peak. That is the alpha that you can get from it.
- [80:14]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I love that I had a version of that and I had a certain group of people who shall all remain nameless that whenever I heard something from them I knew it was totally over. I'll give you an example. During the.com phrase it started really in the late 90s, but it didn't really reach its peak until middle of 2000. And George, how did I know that I knew that because almost all of my people I called it the oh, of course, everybody knows that people when they started calling me and telling me hey Jim, have you heard about this whole online thing? I knew bail, danger, danger, danger. And so I think you could also find that in the various social mediums. I think you're right. I have several experiments that I do on Twitter and 30% of what I do is just for fun, just shits and giggles. But the rest of it is I'm testing hypotheses and reactions are like really great. For example, what's a sorting mechanism for somebody with really low agency? Post a quote and or reference a book and they're the people who respond well, which version of that book should I read or what's the best translation? I can tell you two things, George. They're never going to read it, but if they do, by some accident read it, they're never going to understand it because it's like virtue signaling. When you Virtue signal. A lot of people don't understand that. Again, back to our human os. We see so much virtue signaling because it gives us a dopamine hit that makes it feel like we actually did something. I stand with X there. I showed them. That accomplishes nothing. But if you think about human OS as a system, it accomplishes something for the person doing it. And then you fall into that trap and it gets back to the formula. If energy of action actually taking action equals zero, it doesn't matter. You can signal all day long. And if you don't act against what you're signaling, nothing has been accomplished other than maybe making you feel a little bit better. It also fits in with your midwit thing, which I love. First off, I love that meme. I think it's really, really funny because there's so much truth in it. One of my researchers said the question that I really want you to put to George is what is his most midwit opinion or feeling? What you got for me, that's a.
- [83:04]
George Mack
Good one on the spot. The example you used earlier of the tip for tat strategy might now be on there. That all the thousands of lines of code was ultimately beat by the three lines of code of the tip for tax strategy. That might be one of the ultimate ones that's on there. The midwit meme. It's fundamental and it's really interesting to see Internet memes in the classic sense of image. It's not classic sense, the new sense of funny image, to the kind of Dawkins sense, which is idea that spreads which ones stay and which ones go. Like, some are so hot and then disappear, but others, like, really last a long, long time. And the midwint means an example of that that seems to not be fading. It keeps reappearing. And I think the reason why is it just encapsulates such a human primal experience of idiot and genius coming to the same conclusion and most of us being the person in the middle over complicating things. I think my ultimate favorite midwit meme is like the meta midwit meme, where the idiot and the genius say, I'm the guy on the left, and then the guy in the middle goes, I'm the guy on the right. And that might be my favorite Midw. And I think the ultimate midw razor or filtering process is to just always try and avoid being the genius. Because that's the mistake the midwit makes is he thinks he's the guy on the right. And unless you've got some Tesla level of iq. And even then I still don't think it's necessarily useful, certainly not for a midwit like myself, as a recovery midw going through of like, well, how can I dumb this down? What is the dumbest version of this? Because if I can't dumb this down, where it's super simple of calories in, calories out, or if feeling bad, good night's sleep, if I can make it appeal to the idiot, therefore it may have the chance of passing to the genius as well. But the mistake I'll make is thinking I'm the genius and ending up with the 10,000 line of code that gets beat by the three piece line of code.
- [85:03]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I love that. I think that encapsulates so much because that's the other razor, which is, you know, if you want to know what your own failings are, look at what bothers you the most in other people. The midwit. I'm the genius. That is the classic. I grew up in Minnesota and there was a very popular radio program by Garrison Keillor called the Prairie Home Companion. And he was set in this mythical place called Lake Wobby. God. His tagline was welcome to Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average and everybody is beautiful. That type of thinking is just endemic. Men are especially guilty of this when you look at surveys of men asked to self rate their athletic ability. Amazingly they're all in the first or second decile. And so I'm in the tent, just to be clear. But that is both problem, but also part of the magic. Because as we were talking about earlier, it might be helpful to be delusional. It might be helpful to say, you know what? I can do this, I can go and achieve this. But the thing you've got to try there is then let it forever test against outcome. That's the way I do it. I believe a lot of stupid things, I'm sure. How do I surface like some. Jim, you idiot. How could you have ever thought that that was right is by forever comparing it. Belief, action, outcome. And if the outcome keeps getting fucked up and it doesn't come out anywhere near where that belief in action got to, you're wrong. If you're an investor, I always call it Mr. Market. That's not My term, that's Ben Graham's term. But one of the things that really helped me in my asset management career was coming to the realization that if I thought one thing and the market thought another, I was almost 100% of the time always wrong. That's simpler because there's the market, but here's the way it's valuing whatever. And if you get married to this idea that I'm right, you're wrong, you're going to have a bad life. Because in the market. And it's basically what made me a quant. It was like, okay, well, what does all the evidence say? Okay, here's what the evidence says. Here's the number of, let's say, buying stocks with the lowest PE works 70% of the time. And this is. I'm just making these numbers up. One of the things that you realize is 30% of the time, you're going to be dead wrong. One of the things that I always thought was advantageous to empirical, quantitative approach, a systematic approach, was you have the cheat code. Because, you know, going in, 30% of the things that you're going to buy are not going to work, and you're still buying them because you also realize that you don't know what 30% it's going to be. At my original firm, I used to always pull all of my team. So here's the list that the quant algorithm generated. All right, which 10 stocks are going to be the best ones? Which 10 stocks are going to be the worst ones? Invert. Because invariably, myself included, we always picked the 10 stocks that we thought were going to be the best, and they almost always were the 10 worst performing. And the ones that everyone thought were going to be the worst performing ended up being the ones that hit it out of the ballpark. I don't know, is there a razor for that? That could be useful.
- [88:47]
George Mack
Do you think that's pure randomness? What do you think caused that?
- [88:51]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
That's the question that I'm still struggling with. One of the things that I used to do when you still had to buy music at record stores, I made a habit of going into Tower. I would do this at least twice a year. I would go into Tower and literally buy 50 CDs randomly. And the reason that I did that was because I wanted to discover new music. I love music. That's how I discovered techno. And I discovered techno back when it was called European New Beat. And the only reason that I discovered it was because I randomly bought a couple of techno CDs. And I'm like, oh, this is good. Honestly, I got to think about that. I don't know the answer to that. Whether it's a random or whether maybe it's back to your razor about Reddit versus Facebook. Maybe we subconsciously were picking the 10 most obvious or talked about or referenced or whatever stocks. So they were in our short term memory. The reason we picked them was because everyone is talking about them. I'm going to reserve comment here. Then when I have you back on, hopefully you'll have a better razor than I do.
- [90:03]
George Mack
There's something to be said about the current algorithms keeping people in a box. So obviously there when you're kind of randomly doing things and you find techno really early on. I do have concerns around. I have this theory that if you show me someone's YouTube homepage, I can get to know them better than I would have done in about six months of living with them. But I can kind of go, oh, okay, okay, okay, and totally predict so much about them. The problem with that is a lot of those algorithms are based off your past data. Obviously it's also built off clusters that are similar to you, but even then, the only way they know those clusters are similar to you is based on the past. So does it kind of keep you in this forever loop that you never break out of that you never find techno? And it is this kind of concern of mine, worry of mine that exists of I'm only going to keep getting the same content or content it thinks I'm like based off the past, therefore I'm never evolving. And I actually noticed that's fundamentally so low agency before you page to some extent, requiring this algorithm based off your past data to serve new content as it exists now is quite low agency. And I found that when I would search content manually, when I'd kind of have a bit of agency, I'd find new topics, new creators that I wouldn't just buy random words that would come through, I'd find new things that wouldn't exist. And I'd love to kind of play with that to some extent of how can I have more random content that comes through. That's one of the beautiful things I do find with friends that will send me things that will break me out my filter bubbles that I never would have found that specific content without them. However, we're in this weird point right now of history where the for you just keeps you in this version of you yesterday that really, really struggles to evolve because of the lack of new perspectives. I do wonder with Grok coming through. Like, one of the ideas I've had is when somebody posts particularly anything political, that there's just like a steel man button and then the AI will just like give a steel man argument against that and then you can go steel man more. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens at some point. But it is so difficult right now to break out of those filter bubbles because as soon as you log in, that Explore page has ran so many A B tests on you in the past and it's optimizing for time on site, not personal growth that it's so difficult. So yeah, how do we go about getting more randomness in our schedule is a really difficult task, but it's so valuable.
- [92:29]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
I think that is absolutely a potentially billion dollar idea because I think you are absolutely right that basically, again, let's do the idiot side of this. It's compounding. You keep getting the same thing filtered back to you by the algorithm. What happens, it compounds and the more you read it, the more you like, oh, I really like this. And the algorithm goes, oh, he really likes this. And so gives you the nearest neighbor to that particular thing. That was one of the reasons why I did these kind of random things. Another thing that I would often do, I would program a random number generator on my computer and then I would tie it to an activity. So usually like if I wanted to read five books, I would just say, okay, I would either close my eyes and pick one of them and then do it that way. But I definitely think if we could come up with a way. I'm going to steal this from you because we could commercialize this. If you think of a way that you could introduce a little bit of randomness in. In AI they call it maximizing the objective function. What did most of social media maximize? The objective function for revenue. So what did it give us? It gave us all these algorithms to keep you and your eyeballs on the site. Well, what if we change up that and maximize for joy, maximize for creativity, maximize for discovery. The algorithms are going to do what you tell them to do. If we decide we're going to maximize the objective function for another thing and then include a little bit of randomness in there, that's a great idea.
- [94:13]
George Mack
I think this is doable. And like going back to. We have obviously the golden light thing I mentioned earlier. There's some version of that. I think another version would be, I think this will come of the Steelman thing, which I would love. Whenever I hear a hot political take, I just seal My net. And there's various versions that begin to fight back and forth versus getting stuck in that way of thinking. And people will say this won't happen because people don't want to pay for social media. Ads is where it's all is. And I really love advertising. However, the one thing and I need to go deep on the data here, however, if you assume that YouTube Premium is £15amonth, Twitter X is like $10 or whatever a month. The new Facebook one that they've had to bring in is like 812 pounds per month. Obviously users will massively vary in terms of their value per platform, I. E. Somebody who's on an Android phone that has no money isn't worth that much versus a billionaire that's on the platform is worth a lot more. However, those platforms are kind of openly stating the game theory, which is, if you will pay US$15 or more for YouTube Premium, we're going to make more off you than we are from advertising. I'm naturally assuming based off of that public statement. And then all of a sudden you.
- [95:17]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Go, well, if they're offering me this.
- [95:19]
George Mack
Awesome customizable algorithm, that's this Kale algorithm in the week, if I want to go a bit crazy and political on Friday, Saturday night, I can. How much would I pay for that? And all of a sudden you've seen it now with First X doing get charging, and if you can then get to the stage where you can customize these algorithms and it makes sense from a game theory perspective that the platforms will want to do that because they will get around a lot of the politics that comes up of, oh, you're causing this person to win the election, this person to win the election. Whereas all of a sudden you saw a hint of it with Elon's Gro, where it's like you can change it to funny mode. Why can't we apply that to the algorithm? Why can't I say, I just want to be educated first thing on a Monday morning. I don't want to see the latest drama in ABC that's here today and gone tomorrow. The fundamental thing I've taken from social media as well is even if you try and remember a tweet from last week, it's really difficult. It does seem to be optimizing for just ultimately things that you're forgetting. And I think that's a big problem. I'd be very, very surprised if we are here five years from now based off the game theory, that they're only making £10 to £15 per user on average, monthly anyway. Therefore, if they can offer an awesome experience, $100 a month. £100 per month. I think Georgia Jim would pay multiple folds of that.
- [96:33]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Okay, so let's do this. Let's both think about this and then I'll invite you back on and we'll compare our answers because you are really onto something here. I think you're right. And I think, how cool would that be? And let's just keep it to Twitter. If you could pick an option that is, hey, I don't want to hear about all the stuff that I'm really interested in or think I'm interested in. Surprise me, delight me. Let's move into funny mode or delight me mode or any of those kinds of things. That's such a great idea. And I think that's a really big idea that deserves some time to think about.
- [97:13]
George Mack
Jim, just before we go, if we've got a few minutes, I wanted to ask you this question. Definitely. Game for round two. One of the things I see that seems to be very difficult in life is people, as they get older, keeping their curiosity and their optimism. It's easy to be curious and be curious and optimistic when you're 20. It's like being in shape, but as you age, it does begin to decay. I'm fascinated by you. Like, there's people like yourself, Mark Cuban, Gary Vee, who seem to be getting more curious and more optimistic with age. Why is it purely genetic? Like, what have you got going on here? That means when I get on the call, even though it's like almost 10:30, 11:00pm here, I'm ready to run on a treadmill. Is it something you practice? Is it something that's just came and why do you think it decays for most people, yet it seems to have compounded for yourself.
- [98:00]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Wow, that's a great question. I think genetics absolutely plays a part. I've always been incredibly curious. I got in trouble a lot when I was a kid because I was really, really curious and I would ask a bunch of questions and whatnot. I think that what happens with many people is your idea that you asserted earlier. When you're a kid, 0 to 25, there's so many milestones and they're so different that, oh, first grade, oh, now I'm in high school, now I'm in college. And then people settle in to, okay, this is my life, this is what I do. They become habituated to it, and that makes them dull. Another thing I do is I always think I want to learn one new thing Today. And what I find is that it feeds diving down that rabbit hole. That's the act. Because what happens is you end up finding so many different things that you are like ooh, I never thought about this. Oh wow, I'm going to read more about this. And then it just kind of takes on a life of its own and it's. You're programming yourself in a way. I don't know though, I mean that's a really tough question.
- [99:19]
George Mack
That nugget alone I think is a great one of a beautiful video game like can I learn one thing today? And then that just is an easy level to achieve begins to compound. It's a clear constraint of like a video game as well of did or didn't learn thing. And I think that's great.
- [99:36]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Well listen, this has been as I anticipated. I love talking, talking to you because I just love the way you think you managed to distill these things down to just so many useful things that the vast majority again talk about being brilliant. Being brilliant is being able to take something that might be really complex and whatnot and put it into a razor that people immediately get. And so I will definitely be pitching you on you publishing with Infinite Books because I think we will have a runaway bestseller there. Before we go, as you might remember from the last time you were on, you get another crack at being the emperor of the universe as before. No killing anyone, no putting anyone in a re education camp. I'm going to give you a magic microphone and you can speak into it and you can say two things and all 8 billion people on the planet are going to wake up whenever their tomorrow is and they're going to think that they had those two ideas and we're going to change it just for you. Every person, all 8 billion are high agency people and they're going to act on those two things. What are you going to incept in the world's population?
- [100:56]
George Mack
The two things that spring to mind so off the top of my dome are one, the concept of the forgetting paradox. So you forget how much you forget because you've forgotten it. And by definition you don't remember it because you've forgotten it. And 99.9999999 of things that happen you forget about. You had 10 to 70000 thoughts yesterday. Try remembering one. Within that is the concepts of try and document as much as you can. Try and store as many things as you can. I definitely regret not doing that. And I think we're now at this luxury age where you can do that, but also to not take a thought too seriously. And then the second thing I'd probably say is the book of the video game or the book of the OS is when you try and apply things to yourself, it's really difficult. Even Daniel Kahneman said that after years, right. And thinking fast and slow and everything, you didn't really actually find it that useful for your day to day life. However, it's really useful when we observe other people. So whenever you can shift from first person shooter to third person shooter, I do that. Now, whenever anybody comes to me with advice, all I basically say is, if I came to you with a very, very similar situation, assuming all my circumstances the same, what advice would you give? And people, you know the answer, they don't need any guru, they don't need anybody. If you can apply that, I think that tends to work. So one, you forget more than you forget, because by definition you've forgotten it and you don't realize it because you've forgotten it and you never will. So document as much as you can. And the second thing around, view yourself. The third person character in the video game I think is the ultimate cheat code. And that alone is the midwit meme for left and right. Just third person shooter, baby. That's all you need.
- [102:47]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
Perfect as always. This has been wonderful. Would love to have you back again. I'll figure out a way to capture this idea of delight me mode. I think that we're really onto something there. And then whenever you're in the States, if you're in New York, I'd love to get together in real life.
- [103:05]
George Mack
Perfect. Looking forward to it.
- [103:07]
Jim O'Shaughnessy
All right, thanks so much, George. I love your stuff. Sa.