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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is George Mack. He's a writer, marketer and an entrepreneur. Thinking for yourself is one of the most important skills you can develop. However, it's hard, it's a difficult task to overcome the boring, negative, irrational trends around you, which is why you need some new tools in your mental models box. Expect to learn what the Keynesian beauty contest is, why memes are so influential in society today, which behaviors appear positive but actually harm you in disguise, what the forgetting paradox is, what the most useful emotional state is, why ignorance is bliss is a put down in 2023, and much more. George has been coming on the show for five years now, and every single time that I get to speak to him, I love it. He has one of the best insights into human nature and social trends and why we are the way we are. And I just love it. This is what we talk about over dinner or coffee. And it's exactly the same conversation now, just minus the coffee and the dinner and one week. Today it's Christmas. It's gonna be Christmas Day and there will be no episode on Christmas day. Time to put your phone down and spend it with the people that you enjoy that are around you. But we've got a Christmas special coming out. We've got a Lessons from 2023 episode this Thursday, which is so good and was one of the biggest, most played episodes of last year. So you don't wanna miss that. And then in between Christmas and New Year, we've got some more special stuff too. So I hope that you are winding down appropriately ready for the new year. Also, if you need an annual review, you can get that right now for free by going to ChrisWillex.comreview. it's an annual review template that I've used every single year to recap the lessons from the last 12 months and plan the year ahead. You can get that right now for free@chriswillx.com review. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome George Mac. The Keynesian Beauty Contest. What's that?
- [02:16]
B
So the Keynesian Beauty contest is this idea of different levels of human interaction with things. So let's say you lined up a hundred people and Chris has to go rank them in order of who's the most attractive. That's like level one, but level two, that's quite a simple idea. But level two is when you're also predicting what everybody else in the room will think. And what's really interesting is what Chris will rank is very different to what he will think. Everybody Else will think. And then level three is another layer when you have to factor in everybody else, knowing that everybody else is playing the game. And what's interesting is when they run these experiments, let's say they ask people to rate the cutest dog video what they think is the cutest versus what the group, then when they vote for the group will be the cutest. It completely becomes different. So when people are aware of other people's perceptions, it completely shapes things. So in terms of, like a practical application for this, there was a period where the Lib Dems were voting higher and higher in the polls, almost up there with Conservative and Labor. So people were saying, oh, these guys are great, these guys are great. But then when it comes to that level two thing, well, what is everybody else going to vote for? People don't actually vote for them because they're factoring in everybody else. So when you're dealing with thinking systems or other people and predicting what they're going to do, the behavior becomes a lot more complex as a result.
- [03:40]
A
Yeah. There's an interesting study that was done on women giving their level of education when they know that other people are going to see the answers and when they think that it's going to be kept private. And female intrasexual competition says that women should downplay their successes so that they don't get sabotaged by potential other females that are trying to derogate them and manipulate them in some way or another. Get that new tonic in you. Go on, let's go. Get it down you. And what it means is that when women know that other people are going to see that other people are going to see their answers, they downplay what it is that they've achieved. When they're keeping it private, they tend to be a little bit more truthful. But you know the Abilene Paradox. Familiar with this? Oh, mate, you're going to absolutely adore this. So Gwinda first introduced me to it, Right. And it's just again, when you see it, you can't unsee it. The Abilene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group's members because each member assumes the others approve of it. It explains how a number of accurate individuals can become idiots when they get together. So think Emperor's New Clothes, in a way. An acquaintance invites you to his wedding despite not wanting you there because he thinks you want to attend. You attend despite not wanting to because you think he wants you there. At a business meeting, someone suggests an idea he thinks the others will like, perhaps recruiting a trans influencer as the face of the brand. Each member has misgivings about this, but assumes the others will think that they are transphobic if they speak out. So everyone approves the idea despite no one liking it. Or every member of a family in North Korea who hates communism. But they never mention this to each other because each assumes that the others approve of it.
- [05:25]
B
You have this or I've had this on social occasions as well, where you'll be at dinner and it'll be getting later and later and nobody's left yet. And sometimes I'll be sat there looking at the clock am I going to leave? Am I going to leave?
- [05:37]
A
And then one person leaves the high agency exit. There's a Mexican wave of people exiting,
- [05:41]
B
the whole thing exits. And what's beautiful about the Keynesian beauty contest is it. It deals with reflexive systems where people's perceptions shape reality and reality shapes perceptions. There's this great. So George Soros does this amazing Financial Times article that he wrote about reflexivity and Taleb said this on Ferris. I didn't know if you knew this, that Soros wanted to be a philosopher, but basically just had this shadow career of crashing the pound and becoming like one of the biggest hedge fund managers in there. But one of his ideas is this concept of reflexivity which is like so a statement of the. Whether it's going to be rainy today, that's not reflexive because I'm dealing with a natural phenomenon in the sense that my thinking or my words doesn't shape reality. So if you said that on tv, it doesn't change the weather. But if you go on TV and go this is a revolutionary moment, the statement impacts reality. So you see these feedback loops between perception, reality, thinking and reality. So when you're dealing with human beings, the systems are so much more complex, which is why you see these meme stocks pump and down because people are. Everybody else is thinking the meme stock is going to.
- [06:50]
A
Everyone is trying to not only work out what they think about a thing, but future project what other people will think about a thing. And then adapting their projection and trajectory of the future to account for that.
- [07:03]
B
Yes. And then also thinking that other people are thinking about the overall thing as well. So that's how complex things can become.
- [07:10]
A
Robin Dunbar taught me that the main reason in his opinion that human beings brains got so big is not so that we could more accurately remember where the food is or use tools or fire or contemplate the higher Mysteries. It's because if you live in a 30 person pod of 150 person tribe, and I know George, and I know that George is friends with Dean, but Dean used to be friends with George's ex friend Josh, and now Dean and Josh. And it's this very complex intersecting web of hierarchies and who's in and who's out and by how much. Merchant, who used to be like this. So the human brain largely is a Facebook friend tracker with knobs and dials that you can keep in touch with. And that's why he said that human brains got so big, because computationally, to try and do you know this, it's like, you know, 1 squared versus 2 squared versus 3 squared versus 4 squared. The numbers just run away with each other. And that's kind of how it works. It's like 30 square. It's like 30 people and each of their interactions with each different person now and in the past and in the future. And what do we think is going to happen?
- [08:27]
B
I think, yeah, the idea of reflexivity as a whole and then when you see it, you can't unsee it. I don't know if you've ever done any cognitive behavioral therapy, but there's this most simple model in there which when you go, ah, okay, this all makes sense now. And it's like the reflexivity of the human mind where you have a triangle, which is how you think, how you act, how you feel, and all three of them impact one another. So how you feel impacts how you think and act. How you act impacts how you think and feel, and how you think impacts how you feel and act. And then when you begin to see this triangle constantly exist. And I had the biggest midwit me moment ever. Whilst I was away. I was in Lake Como, perfect scenes, and I was driving this little speedboat and I was like, I'm James Bond right now. Like, I'm living the dream, right? Anyway, I see a video back and my face is like. I said to the person who filmed the video, I go, is this what my face is like all the time? They go, yeah, you never really smile.
- [09:27]
A
Resting bitch.
- [09:28]
B
I had resting bitch. And I honestly think one of the highest, like ROI things of just shaping perception is. I mean, you told me you have
- [09:36]
A
a tattoo of a smile, that it's a smile. Yeah.
- [09:38]
B
And listening to the Sam Harris podcast you did of checking on the present moment and just rather than focus on the breath, just focus on how your facial expressions are. And just the simple. It is the highest thing of Just moving it to a brief smile, smile. A, your perception completely changes. But B, as a reflective system, rather than people going, hell, that guy's really serious. It's like, oh, that guy's a bit fun.
- [09:59]
A
Treat him as something else. Yeah, I, I realized that I was socially anxious, especially toward the end of my twenties, at the end of my teens, and then getting into the start of my 20s. And that's a reflexive, recursive system as well. Because if you're nervous around people, people might interpret that as nervousness or as seriousness or whatever, which means people treat you in a manner which is less warm because you appear less warm, which means that you see the world as an adversary, not as a compatriot, which means that you then are less capable of opening up. And there it goes.
- [10:34]
B
Well, that's. It's the same with the thinking, feeling and acting thing, right? So if, for example, you have the thought, I'm, I'm an introvert and I hate going out, therefore you feel a bit more wanting to stay in, a bit down, and then you act like that, and then that cycle completely repeats itself. And it's so simple. And it's why cognitive behavioral therapy has such an impact. When you can see that triangle and then go, well, which lever am I going to pull?
- [11:00]
A
I told you my theory about introversion. Most people aren't introverts. Their friends just suck that even around. Like if you get an introvert around the right people, they're no longer introverted. And it's a recursive loop. As far as I can see. Many of the people that believe that they're introverts are just in the wrong social group.
- [11:20]
B
One of the questions I was going to ask you about is things you've changed your mind on. And on this specific point, I had that realization where when Covid happened, a lot of people experienced this where they start going online and they're meeting so many interesting people. Because the online world, you immediately go to like global maximum, like the best of online. And then you can immediately think that I'm just going to be online from now on. I'm just going to be doing zoom calls all the time. I'm going to be in telegram chats and my online friends are so much more interesting. But the realization that it's just because the get getting to global maximum or like the peak of the Internet, you just log on and you're there and you find your little tribe. But trying to find that in person is really difficult. But then when you find it, it's like 100x correct?
- [12:01]
A
Yeah, it's deeper. One of the interesting things that's happened with the Internet is it's allowed people with very niche interests to find other people that have got niche. This is all of Reddit. Right. Reddit is refined not by individuals but by topics and it makes it unique in some regards. Right. For social media that's been great because people that are into obscure late 80s anime from one particular region of Japan or whatever are able to get together and enjoy whatever it is that they're into. So good for a selection effect, but bad for depth.
- [12:36]
B
Right.
- [12:36]
A
And in person, very difficult to find the three other people in your 500,000 person city that's also into this obscure anime. But if you were to find them the level of depth of connection, which is why I think using the Internet to explore and then using in person to exploit is the best paradigm. That's how we met.
- [12:57]
B
Yes.
- [12:57]
A
You know, we selected to become friends through the Internet and then once you do that, you go, okay, let's twist this into in person.
- [13:05]
B
What's super strange about this though is all you need is one in person event. Like if for example, you never meet and you use the digital layer as the foundation, so you just text, chats, video calls, you could stack like thousands of them versus if you have one physical experience that acts as like the, the, the floor that you then stack everything else on top of, it's so much richer. You only need a few in person meetings to then be able to stack everything.
- [13:30]
A
It's the reason why I put it in my newsletter this week. I think it was always say yes to dinner. And if someone's coming through town and you may be a little bit tired and you just don't know and whatever, whatever. But you've been kind of a bit interested in this person in a while. You've been chatting to them on the Internet or something. Just say yes to go to dinner. And the number of times that just saying yes to a meeting, a quick coffee with somebody, a catch up or whatever it is, the number of friends that you have on the Internet is so vast and the number of people that you've met in the real world is so small that if you can be the sort of person who steps out of Internet friend and into real world friend, which only takes 30 or 60 minutes to, you know, traverse that particular. Because if you were to just like high five someone in an airport as you're both rushing for planes, I don't think that does it. I think there needs to be a little bit of cost, there needs to be a little bit of investment of time put in around about 60 minutes. You know, dinner. A dinner would be more than enough to be able to get this done. But if you can do, you know, a trip with somebody, if you can go away with somebody, or if you can go through something a little bit more difficult, like taking mushrooms whilst doing VR, then, yeah, you can. You can get out on the other side. Memes. Both of us are massive fans of memes. You're going to meet Mary Harrington a little bit later on today, who came up with meme first. Explain later, before we even get into talking about the most important memes that I want to run through with you. Why? What is it about memes and stickiness of ideas that's so important? Why do you think that's so crucial to get right?
- [14:59]
B
So the first point is that meme itself, the word, is an ironic word. It's kind of like dyslexia. Like, no dyslexics can spell dyslexia. And the word meme is itself quite a bad meme, because when you say meme to most people, what do they think? They think of dog photo, Dog photo on the Internet. So you need to zoom out a little bit first and go, a meme is essentially just a spreadable idea and how it's. The story spreads from people to people. So dog photos is part of that. But you have. Okay, Boomer, you have Karen, learn to code. Learn to code. Make America great again. Like, all these things, whether you hate them, love them, whatever are memes, and they spread. And you see this where there's ideas that have existed that haven't had the right meme. Kind of like a product that hasn't had the right marketing. And then you create a meme for it. And like, charisma's been around for so long, people have spoke about it, but it's always. So charisma was like the most uncharismatic topic to talk about, ironically.
- [16:04]
A
Sorry, Charlie Hooper, Sorry.
- [16:06]
B
But all of a sudden, you create
- [16:08]
A
the word riz and everyone wants res,
- [16:11]
B
and then the language shapes perception, and then people are actually talking more about it. Same with the word ick. Like, the fact that you then have this placeholder to then discuss these things. But I think the fundamental thing with a good meme is the almost look at it like a simple algorithm. And thanks to Covid, like, I. I've known about K factors for ages, right? Or R numbers. It's essentially for, let's say, with COVID different strains. How if I had it or one person had it, how many people they spread it to? So if you go over one, then it's exponential growth. This is a big thing in the startup and tech space for a while. So when you're analyzing a Facebook coming along, how many. When Chris joins, if he brings one more person with him on average, then just infinite growth until. Until it disappears. But with a meme, what you need for that K factor is essentially the level of emotion and the friction for it to spread and how simple it is to understand. The more complex it is, the. The less the meme. Whereas when you shorten it down to Riz and it's catchy and it's three. It's three in letters, all of a sudden.
- [17:21]
A
Is it four?
- [17:21]
B
Could be. It could be.
- [17:22]
A
All right. It depends if you're north, north or south London. Yeah. I was talking to the dude that founded Legendary Foods, the cinnamon roll thing that I gave you earlier on. And I was saying to him, what do you call the category of products that you've got there? We've got a craft for everyone that's pointing in this direction. There's a craft table filled with protein goods over there. And I was like, what do you call what you do? And he's like, we've been trying to, like, nomenclature this for ages because the closest thing is protein bar. Right. But it doesn't capture what's there because there's crisps and there's a cinnamon roll and there's a pop tart and there's like, donuts and stuff. So it's not a protein bar, health snack, a protein conscious confection retreat. Like, healthy, sweet, like what you know. And it's all about getting the meme right.
- [18:08]
B
Yes.
- [18:09]
A
And if you get the meme right, everything downstream from that works. The episode I did with Eric Weinstein, he made a really nice tweet about the fact that he was talking about making the temporary archival, I think the ephemeral archival. And he likes the idea of filming things in high quality because he gives it more gravitas and more evergreen sort of lindy nature. But he said to me over text, in a stickiness arms race, great ideas don't stick around because they're insufficiently sticky. So you can have an amazing idea that's called protein bar, but it needs a better meme name. Yeah. And you can do the reverse as well, which is what people are very skeptical of, which is this is a cool sounding name, product category, movement, whatever. But there's no, there, there. Right. It's just meme and no. Yeah, all meme, no substance.
- [19:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And my, I mean it's already happened. So I don't even think this is a crazy prediction. But you look at the 2024 election or insert future elections now thanks to social media, that will be decided by who has the best memes, not who has the best policies. And once you see that, you can't unsee it. And I think the, the key thing to then factor in is now you have global Internet and the next level you kind of seeing it now is Spotify. Two years from now, maybe we'll be speaking right now in Portuguese because of this AI language translation. So you then factor in language is no longer going to be a barrier. Internet adoption is going to be completely global as like parts of the third world fully hop online and the older generation dies out. The ability for a meme to go from nothing to 24 hour infestation of the entire world like a virus, either positive and beautiful or negative and destructive is, is about to happen.
- [19:59]
A
I was talking to somebody who, his book title was a pun, right? Which is kind of like a meme, like a play on words. It was like a book about sex called you're doing it wrong or something like that, right? And he mentioned that he was selling the translation rights. But because words, what you're doing with me with puns specifically, which is a kind of meme, is playing in multiple interpretations of the same word or the same sentence, but by design that doesn't translate over into other languages. So his great piece of advice was if you're going to write a book title that you intend to go international, don't use a pun because you can end up like talking about the flight of pigeons or something by accident. Because they're trying to retrofit your pun to this new language, which doesn't work, which means that you have to either compromise the pun entirely or keep the pun but lose what the actual context is.
- [20:52]
B
Well, on that specific point, the to explain memes is essentially to say people judge a book by its cover. The age old advice of don't judge your book by its cover is because people judge the book by its cover. So if you can spread it, they're
- [21:06]
A
trying to stop us from enacting our nature.
- [21:08]
B
So one meme that I think is terrible, that I think so important for people to understand is and we use me and you use this word a lot. Like if you had to graph it in terms of words we speak after, like the. And. And a few others. Water. This one's up there, which is leverage. Like, we use leverage all the time. And I originally got it from the Val's book Almanac. And I. When I heard it, I almost didn't want to admit I didn't fully understand it because I didn't want to sound stupid. So I'd go and research it. I go, okay, so this guy called Archimedes, and if you have enough leverage in engineering, you can create things where the. For the input can produce a much greater output.
- [21:48]
A
Yeah.
- [21:48]
B
So people will use it like that. That. So when I created a company, I tried to create the cultural value around leverage. Right. So I created this Google sheet, and everybody would input in there, like, the highest leverage task that week. So that was one of the values that we tried to create as a company. And every other value made sense. But we'd go. We'd go in there and we'd do these weekly checking calls, and everyone would be like, I'll be honest with you, I don't know what highest leverage task means. And I was like, huh? And then you zoom out. Right now you've got, like, the Instagram gurus who chat about, I'm the hardest working man in the room.
- [22:18]
A
Yeah.
- [22:19]
B
And then you have the kind of meme of smart work versus hard work.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And none of it. None of it really sticks, especially coming from an educational system.
- [22:26]
A
Yeah.
- [22:27]
B
And then when you begin to fully understand, like, code leverage, media leverage, capital leverage, labor leverage, it begins to stick a little bit more. And I was thinking, how do you actually get this into an idea that begins to translate? One of the terrible ideas that I do have for this, which I'll bring up, because I. It's. It's on here, which is a lot of napkin maths, but is essentially, I wanted to. This is a kid's story, but I need to change the name to begin with. I animate it. It's called Hungover Jeff Bezos on his yacht. Right. Versus. Versus. The world's hardest working man. So we have this story of these two individuals competing against each other. Because I identify with the world's hardest working man. I grew up watching, like, Eric Thomas videos of, like, you've got to want it as bad as you want to breathe, like, that kind of stuff. And ultimately. So let's say, for example, we give this Instagram guy who talks about hard work. This guy's better than everybody else because he doesn't slee works 24 hours a day, right? Jeff woken up at like 11:50, like nagging headache. He's probably got one of the best vitamin IV drips in the world. Goes on his jet ski that day, probably does a zoom call with his chess coach, like, whatever, who's worked harder that day. If you judge it in the old fashioned interpretation that I think a lot of us have that don't understand leverage because we don't get engineering and things like that, you go, well, he's worked 24 hours that day. Jeff's done a few slack messages. But I was like trying to go, well, what if you actually ran the napkin math? So right now, if you looked at it as purely as like output. So this guy's got 24 outputs of hours of manual work that he's been doing, whereas Jeff's been sat on his ass. If you look at like that, that's 24 to 0. But all of a sudden when you begin to quantify leverage, you go, ah, this begins to click a little bit. So this is napkin masks from about a year ago. So the point of napkin masks is not to be in the comments section saying that this is right. I know some of these numbers are wrong, but just it's for the metaphor. So Jeff has 1.6 million people that work for Amazon. So let's say they all work 8 hours per day. Jeff's achieved 20.8 million hours of work that day. Then if you looked at robot leverage. So Amazon's warehouse, when I looked at these statistics, has 500,000 roaming factory robots. AWS has 1.8 million servers. They all work 24,7 for him. That's 55 million hours of robot work per day whilst he's been sat on that yacht. And I'm not even going to get into how much more output a robot can achieve per hour than if you. Let's just give the hardest working guy that, that you can keep up with them. Okay? Then you look at advertising leverage. Amazon spends $46 million per day on marketing. Assuming, assuming it costs him $20 to reach 1,000 people, he's receiving 2.3 billion impressions per day. Hardest working guys going around knocking on doors, right, Trying to sell his product. So, so Jeff's advertising leverage is about the equivalent of doing 95 million hours of door knocking per day. Then you look at media leverage. So Twitch gets 71 million hours of content viewed every day. Amazon prime has 117 million subscribers. Let's assume that the 10% watch one hour per day. That's 11 million hours of content. Viewed every single day. So that's 82 million hours of storytelling done in person that this guy would have to do. So and then let's not go into all the other things you could think of related to Amazon. So hardest working guy in the rooms work 24 hours. Jeff sat on his yacht with a hangover and watching bits of succession and zooming away has achieved 244 million hours of output. And then when you view it like that, the whole leverage complexity, the, the reason why leverage is a bad meme is because you need other topics and other realizations from engineering to understand it, which prevents it from spreading. But when you go oh, hungover Jeff Bezos on his yacht versus hardest working man in the world, you realize that in the 21st century, despite probably the PTSD from the education system, leverage is more important. But it's a shit meme.
- [26:26]
A
Sean Puri has this idea about what you work on is way more important than how hard you work. And he says hard work is very overrated. And I think he refers to himself, actively refers to himself as a successful lazy man. And he optimizes for laziness and frictionlessness. And yeah, it's the same, you know, the janitor or some guy that's working double or triple shifts. That amount of effort doesn't have an in kind return to them compared with somebody who is able to leverage code or media or labor or capital or even just picking the same amount of input that they've got with very limited leverage but on a better task, a task that has more potential upside long term.
- [27:11]
B
The key thing is to remove the conversation around hours work that we had from school and just be inputs, outputs. So I have this number of inputs, what number of outputs am I getting? And remove the concept of hours worked, remove everything else and all of a sudden that meme is a little bit stickier. Whether that's going to be a kid story or not, probably not. I need to adapt the title a bit, but I think to view view leverage through that makes it an easier idea for people to understand. But the reason why Leverage is a bad meme is because people don't have the engineering knowledge, it doesn't spread, which is why it's such a Silicon Valley concept. And I think this idea still hasn't fully rippled through society.
- [27:49]
A
Don't forget as well that exponentials and squares aren't something that the human brain is built to work out. It's like that, I want one piece of rice on the first square of the chessboard and two pieces of Rice on the second square of the chessboard all the way up. And by the time you get to the final square on the chessboard, you've got more pieces of rice than there are fucking particles in the universe or something. We just don't deal well with exponentials. Which means that leverage, inherently given that it's dealing with unfair multiplicatives. Right? It's a multiplicative system rather than an additive system. For the most part. It's this times this, not this plus this. It's just gonna be tough to understand. You've got an idea. The best memes compress mass emotion into a simple contagious concept. Like, okay, Boomer or Karen. What's that mean?
- [28:35]
B
Well, first off, look at okay, Boomer, who doesn't understand that two words, Karen, who doesn't understand that make America great again? Who doesn't understand that you can hate those memes, but it's compressed so much emotion. So let's say the OK Boomer one, it's compressed so much emotion of the millennial and Gen Z being spoken down to by the Boomer generation who have messed up a lot, and it's completely compressed all that down and boom, that spreads. Same with Karen. Same with even the word make America great again. Like there's so much emotion.
- [29:14]
A
Way more than its four words.
- [29:15]
B
Yes.
- [29:16]
A
It's way more than the constituent parts. Yes, yes, yes.
- [29:19]
B
And with memes, it's all. It's. I forgot who said it. It's the idea of I'm sorry I didn't write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time.
- [29:29]
A
Yes, yes.
- [29:29]
B
So, yes, the people look at it and go, oh, that's so unfair. I wrote this 10,000 word essay that nobody ever read versus this meme has spread. But you need to be able to optimize for that K factor. But you need to be able to compress as much emotion into that word for it to spread.
- [29:47]
A
Did the meme industrial complex used to be the purview of mainstream media? Were they ever creating memes effectively or is this a Internet thing?
- [29:55]
B
Again, it's a little bit reflexive in the sense that they both interact, Right? So what Rupert Murdoch would put on the news would be because he kind of knew what people would like. And then what people liked was kind of because what they saw on the news and there's this constant thing here. So Rupert Murdoch or that generation of the meme industrial complex that owned everything and could control the narrative, I actually think it's ironic that they've made succession now because they wouldn't have been able to make it 10 years ago because he had so much power, right versus now. It's like we can do what we want.
- [30:23]
A
It would have seemed more like a documentary than a drama.
- [30:25]
B
And you can see why the mainstream media dislikes social media so much. Because the mainstream media had the meme industrial complex in that they could put ideas out there and control the narrative. Whereas now the meme industrial complex is essentially this bottom down approach of complete decentralized meritocracy. To some extent.
- [30:45]
A
Yeah. It's all the users rather than the gatekeepers that are creating it.
- [30:48]
B
And a few algorithm developers who nobody, these faceless algorithm developers can meet a little bit there and come and go. You know what, on YouTube now we actually prefer long form podcasts in the algorithm boom. And that just completely shifts things. So it's weird how you've got these kind of faceless algorithm creators now and these face creators that own the meme industrial complex.
- [31:13]
A
The last memes, or most of the memes that you see that come out of mainstream media are accidental memes. So it's a guy trying to propose to his wife a baseball game or something that gets wiped out by a security guard or something. It's never something that is designed to be funny. It's always the byproduct of something that was supposed to be something else which has come through in that way. I've also got this idea about how if you want to be able to predict the future, look at a current cultural movement or meme that hasn't had the inverse already made. So 2020 Covid gets released that summer, everyone has to stay in the house. 2021, Megan the Stallion starts talking about Hot Girl Summer. Last year you weren't able to be free and liberated. Therefore this year you can be your best self, glam up, go out with the girls, sleep with the guy, et cetera. 2022 is feral girl Summer, which is, you know, treat yourself like an animal, don't wash, don't shave, just put baggy clothes on and don't take any care of yourself. Another version, pick up artistry comes out sort of late 20s, early 2010s. Then you get that sanitized by MeToo, which is a counterculture movement in some regards, not just to that, but to other stuff. Then you have red pill, then very quickly you have mgtow and black pillow that comes out of it. So if you want to predict the future of memes, look at a meme that's been created that hasn't had its inverse come out too. Because every movement needs its counter movement in order to be able to balance it. Because there is a market, There is a meme market for anything which is not the thing which is currently popular. For every movement, there will always be. It's like the equal and opposite force thing. For every meme, there is an equal and opposite meme that comes out.
- [32:56]
B
Well, question for you is, what do you think is. You know, we had the chat last time of what is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians. And what we're kind of saying there is what's a really important topic that hasn't had its full meme moment yet?
- [33:11]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [33:11]
B
And what do you think protein bars? What do you think are super important topics that just haven't, like, haven't been memed correctly?
- [33:19]
A
That's a really, really haven't caught on
- [33:20]
B
yet or will catch on. Like, what ideas sound crazy today, but five, ten years from now, I'll be like, oh, yeah, that's the thing.
- [33:27]
A
Yeah. I think a lot of individual personalities, so this, this seems to be a very effective way to get memes to move, you know, like the, the meme of the Sigma Male, which is kind of the guy who steps outside of the, of the hierarchy. I don't think that there's very many good memes for women. I don't think that there's been many, like, archetypes. Most of them are like, derogatory in a lot of ways. So, like, you know, like the Karen, the party girl, the like Dubai Yacht Chicken. There's not many there that I think are like, almost aspirational in a way. And maybe this speaks to female personality and disposition that they don't have. You know, I don't know about girls, but guys would happily have like he man or the rock or whatever on a bedroom poster wall. But girls would also a lot of the time have guys like some hot singer. I don't know whether girls use role models and aspirational, admirable figures. Like, if you went into a teenage girl's bedroom and had a poster of Jordan Peterson quotes on the wall, you'd think like, let's take you off to psychotherapy. So, yeah, certainly individuals in some ways like memes for aspirational memes for girls. I think that there's a massive market for them. What about you?
- [34:44]
B
This is, I think, one of the most important topics, but it's so ugly and boring. And I even, like, I'm fearsome of saying this because I can just feel people like Skipping to the next YouTube chapter as soon as I say this, but give me a minute to just say. And it's even the word now, right? You're going to go, oh, right, cybercrime, right? It's just like, nobody takes it seriously, but it's so important. And just to maybe give a bit of a story that's going to help with this. Have you heard of the Bangladeshi bank heist?
- [35:17]
A
No.
- [35:17]
B
Now we're talking, right? This is going to blow your mind. And again, it doesn't sound good right now, but it's going to be good. So the biggest bank robbery in history was, I think it's about $60 million in Brazil in about 2015, 2016 with cybercrime. Recently, they almost hacked $1 billion from the Bangladeshi bank using the Swift system. Right. For context, that year the Bangladeshi gdp was like 230 billion. So think with GDP as well, it's movement of money, it's not total money. If Chris sends George 10 and I send it back, boom, boom, boom. That acts towards the GDP, but it's just us exchanging money. So imagine taking $1 billion like that from a developing country immediately. And the only reason that failed, the only reason this isn't there will be, I think, five, within five to 10 years, there will be a Covid like moment. Do you remember pandemics? Before COVID it was like bird flus. Fine mouth, you'd just be like, oh, the sun's just trying to get clicks and things like that. I remember I used to tell people about COVID in January, February. I won't say who, but they used to call me Conspiracy George for bringing up Covid. And now obviously pandemics are taken very seriously. But there will be a 9, 11 or a Covid like moment for cyber where things get very, very dark very fast. I think the Bangladeshi bank heist is only a tiny example of that, where you go from $60 million robbery in person to 1 billion overnight. And you know, the only reason why it failed is because the hackers that were working on this system, so they emailed, they sent an email with a CV application. The person at the bank clicks on the cv, infects everything. Yeah, they're working on it for a year. They time it perfectly. During the New Year's holidays, everything about this height has gone perfect. Bear in mind, this bank would only move about 300k around the Swift system. So it goes to the Federal Reserve in America because it sees 1 billion and they're like, yeah, sure. So it's like the security systems went in place. The only reason it failed is because two, two things. One, they had a typo for the addresses. So literally it didn't fail because of the amount. It failed because of human error. Human error. Like and it was a really basic English spelling that they made a mistake. And then two, the bank in the Philippines they were sending it to was called Jupiter street and Jupiter was a company associated with Iranian money laundering. So it just happened to flag in the system. Otherwise it would have gone through both
- [37:35]
A
of which were human.
- [37:36]
B
A billion would have been taken from Bangladesh like one of the poorest countries in the world. Like that. And the impact that has. And you then begin to realize what happens at one point when certain airlines get attacked, certain banking systems get attacked. And we're so like. But because I say the word CyberSecurity and only 3% of the audience have carried on right now. So boring. But we need, we need stronger memes around it because it's such an important topic.
- [37:59]
A
Yeah. Wasn't it? You told me some story about the salary that was offered for the British head of cybersecurity.
- [38:10]
B
So the head of CyberSecurity in the UK we spoke about this last time got offered a salary or like on LinkedIn jobs. It was 55 to 65k pounds for the UK.
- [38:21]
A
$60,000. $80,000.
- [38:22]
B
Yeah. Which listen is obviously a great income for most of the world. But for the head of cybersecurity when
- [38:28]
A
you're dealing with hackers that are trying to steal $1 billion. Yeah. It's just evidently something sexy. That's specifically I'm going to guess a governmental problem because I'm going to presume the head of cybersecurity at Facebook is paid an ungodly amount of money because they are already red pilled on just how big of a deal this is.
- [38:54]
B
But if Facebook goes down, it's obviously a big issue. But if government systems go down a
- [39:00]
A
lot worse, if the emotion caused by the meme is greater than the friction of spreading it, you've cracked the meme algorithm.
- [39:07]
B
It's exactly that. That is an example of a simple but not easy truth that is all memes. Does the emotion outweigh the friction of spreading it? If so you've created that positive one number that it begins to spread. Spread, spread, spread, spread. So simple.
- [39:28]
A
You've got one in here that's the same as mine. The easiest way to predict the next meme is to look at the current memes and bet on counter memes appearing. You take that from me, you better have done potentially. It was my idea. The fastest growing companies in the next 10 years will have a chief meme officer working for them directly or indirectly.
- [39:43]
B
If you look at all these fast growing consumer businesses, they either have a chief meme officer in house. So you can think of these influencer celebrities that are creating a McGregor with Proper 12, the McGregor meme meme and all the kind of sub memes that he creates around him. Who the is that guy? Yeah, etc. Etc. Then product there or they'll have memes working by through them indirectly that they'll ride on. So like we was chatting about Marik Health, this isn't a plug but you obviously your testosterone numbers going through the roof and people huberman, the Huberman meme people chatting about optimization and I guess they do have Derek running it, but still riding that, that meme movement. If they would have done it five to 10 years ago, it probably wouldn't have the impact that it's happening. But now chief meme officer, indirectly or directly, Boom.
- [40:35]
A
Yeah, I think I learned about this word. You're glowing. You taught me about that a while ago. Zach taught me about it. And then Mark won't show up about it as well. You know what that is? Like when someone looks like a federal plant and they're putting across information that is to persuade the populace, but people can see through the fact that they're actually doing it on behalf of the CIA. Ex CIA agent says that CIA isn't actually listening to your phone calls, mate. You're glowing. Right, like that's the sort of shit that they'll say. But I think people are skeptical now even of memes. Perfect, perfect, perfect example. Did you see what Gymshark did with Francis Ngannou where he broke that door. Switch it out. Get the orange boy in there. Go on. You see where Francis Ngannou broke a door?
- [41:23]
B
No.
- [41:24]
A
Right, so Jim Shark, like fed a video onto Reddit that they created of CCTV of a person that was supposed to be Francis Ngannou. Didn't turn out to be him breaking the door of a corner shop.
- [41:44]
B
The glass door that was closed in this, yeah.
- [41:47]
A
Yes. Right. And they staged it, created it, used a stunt double instead of Francis for the bit where the glass breaks, put Francis back in, had him get shouted at by this fake shopkeeper in a fake shop front, fed it using a burner account onto Reddit. And then from Reddit it got picked up by Twitter and then from Twitter it got picked up and signal boosted. And some people saw through it like this Looks like. Cause he's wearing Gymshark. This looks like a plant from Gymshark or whatever. Whatever. But for the most part made headlines. Papers picked up on it, all the rest of it. So, yeah, the. How would you say, the like contrived meme complex or the manipulated meme complex, like the MMC is something that everyone's skeptical about.
- [42:31]
B
You know, I look at each platform now like a meme information highway, and each one produces different memes just due to the constraints of it. So the memes that get produced from TikTok are quite unique and correct.
- [42:42]
A
Yeah. They don't export particularly well.
- [42:43]
B
Yeah. Whereas people that come out of YouTube. YouTube like yourself, slightly different. What's interesting though, is most memes that get created, you go back and it's Reddit, it's 4chan, maybe bits of Twitter.
- [42:56]
A
Yeah.
- [42:56]
B
And it goes down the meme information highways and then ends up at LinkedIn.
- [42:59]
A
I wonder. All roads lead to Boomer Facebook.
- [43:03]
B
Yeah, yeah. WhatsApp message from parents. Yeah.
- [43:07]
A
I wonder whether one of the reasons that 4chan and Reddit work particularly well is. Are written memes, the most robust of all. Because you can turn something that works on written into video into spoken, but the reverse isn't necessarily true. Like there was that one of the dude drinking. Was he drinking like ocean fresh cranberry juice whilst skateboarding down the street listening to Led Zeppelin or something? It's like some song from some band and then this song's now number one across the world because this one dude skateboarded whilst drinking cranberry juice or something. Fucking sales of cranberry juice went through the roof and he's now the ambassador for fucking ocean fresh or something. That doesn't necessarily translate across onto written word, but most written word memes can be translated across and do get used, potentially.
- [43:56]
B
But I think another factor to. So it's, you know, have you heard the lollipop lollapalooza effect?
- [44:00]
A
It's why you stack multiple biases when
- [44:02]
B
you have multiple biases. So on that specific point, I think you've got that. But it's not just that, it's also the fact that most people on there are pseudonymous and anonymous, which means they can just see the Overton window here
- [44:14]
A
and go blast through it.
- [44:15]
B
I'm going to go through here. And then ultimately it's the memes that shift the Overton window with time. But the ability for them to be pseudonymous and anonymous and then create something that they can go into territories that right now the meme industrial complex Won't touch and then they push it through.
- [44:30]
A
I had this idea about how there is a lot of derogation of mainstream media at the moment. You know, like mainstream media is dying and no one really cares about it anymore. And it's all about independent media and it's all about YouTube and podcasts and stuff like that. But what you do forget is that there is still quite a lot of status associated with going on mainstream media because it's a scarce resource.
- [44:54]
B
Yeah, right.
- [44:55]
A
There is an unlimited number of YouTube videos that everybody can upload. There's no status or prestige associated with uploading a YouTube video, getting lots of subscribers or getting lots of plays or having lots of followers on Tik Tok or whatever. But anyone that's got an iPhone can work Twitter or work Tik tok or work YouTube. But there's only 200 Dr. Phil guests per year.
- [45:19]
B
Right.
- [45:19]
A
So because it's inherently a scarce resource, there is still value and prestige associated with it because of the selection effect. Oh, you've had to be pre selected. It's like the Hunger Games. Right? So. So I think that something that's probably not been priced in is first, that general scarce resource prestige still associated with mainstream media because it's a limited resource. And secondly, the huge swath of Boomer parents and people who aren't chronically online who see Dr. Phil, you know, all of middle America, you know, that whole daytime TV thing, the loose women thing, like they still move culture. They just don't move culture in a way that we care about at the moment. There's this really interesting, just a side point, this really interesting. Is it Liberty Mutual or someone. It's this bank in America and they're playing it really well. It's like we can't stop you from becoming your parents, but we might be able to help you invest and save. And all of the adverts are about like younger people than should be complaining about these particular problems, complaining about problems that are beyond their age. Like someone who's parking over like two parking spaces and they're like shaking their fist, kind of like their parents would do. Or someone that's cutting the hedge too early in the morning or something like complaining about things their parents might have once complained about but they're too young for it. And the point is you're going to grow into complaining about the complaints that your parents have got. So let's say it's Liberty Mutual or something. They're using the meme of okay, Boomer as almost self deprecating for us all to future project ourselves out into that. But yeah, mainstream media, scarce resource. What do you think? Think
- [47:07]
B
again. I think there's a little bit of a lollap palooza that exists as well, in the sense. Yeah, it's a scarce resource. It still has a shadow of its former self. Like even if I see a 70 year old boxer, I know who that guy used to be and he can still, even if, even if he's like, I could beat him up now, he still has that shadow of his former self. So I think it's that it's interesting when I did the, the Fox News thing for the Kaelin cocaine phone, which followed like the most serious news stories, that it was me in Amsterdam with sliders on my feet and like a blazer here chatting about that. Yeah. And that even though it probably got way less views than this or anything else that I've done, was treated so differently because of the fact it was mainstream media prestige. Yeah.
- [47:49]
A
Yeah. There's this an idea called conceptual inertia, which is that it takes a long time for ideas to change, even if the science does. I spoke to this, he's like a science historian and he was talking about the development of science and then belief over time. So for instance, when you get the. Is it like the geocentric, as opposed to the heliocentric view of the solar system, that it's not the earth that's at the center, it's the sun that's at the center? And when that happened, even though it was after a while, first off it was heretical, then it was exploratory, then it was proven, but tons and tons of the populace just hadn't come along for the ride. Ideas die one generation at a time and it takes a good chunk of time for people to catch up. And it's kind of the same with mainstream media. Right. Not only are there still people around that hold mainstream media like even I do, to some degree, you see some person on fucking Dancing with the Stars and you're like, oh, well done for that person. Even if I wouldn't want to do it. So not only is there still people around that are living that, but also even once they're gone, the echo of what they valued is still valued. And it takes a little bit of time for this stuff to go away.
- [49:01]
B
On that point though, of ideas die one generation at a time. How do you. Is there any way to speed that up as we're. Because technology is changing so much faster
- [49:13]
A
and faster running ideas holocaust.
- [49:16]
B
But how do you deal with GPT3 GPT4 and people being able to catch up with.
- [49:24]
A
I don't think that there's a solution for it, mate. I think that humans run at the speed that they run at and think you can overclock humans in the same way that you can overclock technology. You're just playing this game and we're going to move along. And what you end up with if you try and do it too quickly is you end up with fire hosing, which is the problem of overloading people with information isn't that they start to believe one narrative increasingly more frequently. They begin to distrust all narratives overall because they just can't get. But first it was this thing, and then it's this thing Covid, everybody during almost everybody during COVID almost everybody during the last election, almost everybody during the Israel Hamas war, which we're not talking about like, that is. It's this thing. And no, it's not. It's actually this thing. It wasn't them that did it. And then actually, yeah, it is those. And no, it's not your tactic, your story was wrong. And what people end up doing is just saying, all right, I check out.
- [50:16]
B
So the answer I've had for this is if you look at something like David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity, which I think is an amazing idea, but the meme is tough. The problem that exists is, and we spoke about this before, where five years ago, you cringe at your former self. But what would have probably have sped that up, maybe doing five months rather than five years, to realise those mistakes was thinking, five years from now I'm going to cringe at former me. What are those things?
- [50:44]
A
Yes.
- [50:44]
B
So there's almost this simple expression I developed which is like, everything is wrong is the first bit of it. And you just assume every belief that I hold is wrong. Everything George and Chris has said to some extent is wrong. Anything that defies the laws of physics is wrong and will be. We will look back at it five
- [51:02]
A
to 10 years, loose opinions loosely held.
- [51:04]
B
Yeah, but the problem with that is it just opens up this vortex of like, where do I.
- [51:08]
A
Like, what do I do?
- [51:10]
B
Yeah, there's floors gone. Like, you're just in this spinning infinite Rick and Morty loop and you don't. You don't know what is what. And people would prefer to have strong beliefs than just complete nihilism and complete everything's wrong. So the conclusion I have with that is like, everything's wrong, but there are better or worse ideas. So constantly looking at, oh, okay, so I've got this new idea in my head. It can have a placeholder there, and I. I like it. And it was better than the previous idea that I had. And then you're constantly playing this infinite game of stacking up knowledge and stacking up knowledge, but always realizing, because what will happen is you'll get the new idea and then you think that idea's right.
- [51:44]
A
How many times have me and you developed some new morning routine, become completely addicted to it and being like, this is it. This is the answer. I found the answer. And then a couple of months later we go, it wasn't the answer.
- [51:53]
B
The Lindy effect works so far well with that. If a person sends you about this new app, new meditation habit, new XYZ
- [52:00]
A
morning, how long have you been doing it?
- [52:02]
B
Once you've been doing it for six months. Let's check in, because then it's serious.
- [52:04]
A
Tiago Forte, the reason that he doesn't use anything other than Evernote is he refuses to use software that's not 10 years older or older. Older. It's like, it has to have been around for 10 years. And it's basically the exact same as what you're talking about there. Louise Perry taught me yesterday this great quote tradition are the experiments that worked.
- [52:24]
B
Hmm. Yeah. That's the thing that. Yeah. The thing that people are often defending was once the replacing thing.
- [52:32]
A
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Because unless it's been around for fucking forever. Like, how many things are axiomatically just, like, unmovable or unmoving from when it first ever happened. What's this Trojan horses to avoid thing?
- [52:46]
B
So I was having a phone call with a good friend of mine and his business. He's doing very, very well. And he says to me, he goes, I've stopped listening to all business podcasts. I was like, hold on. I was like, your business is doing really, really well, but you've also stopped, like, consuming new information about business because, yeah, I just watched NFL stuff. I'm like, huh, am I getting midwitted meme right here? And I was like, why is that? He goes, well, the problem was particularly, like, the stuff that isn't just like, Lindy business content, like new ideas, this. This industry's popping off, that he would just get shiny object syndrome.
- [53:18]
A
Yeah.
- [53:19]
B
And the critique of that, like, self improvement space of how can you watch football or how can you do that is the problem with him with the business podcast is that it was like, Trojan content or Pyrrhic porn. Like a Pyrrhic victory. It was a Trojan content in the sense that he felt it was good for him, but it was actually harming him. And I'd say that is often a lot worse than the things that you know are going to harm you. So I. If you eat a takeaway and you know it's bad for you, I think
- [53:48]
A
that you're not for it the next day.
- [53:49]
B
Yeah, that's not as bad as thinking something's healthy. A Trojan horse getting in, and it's actually really bad for you.
- [53:55]
A
How was the business? Podcasts. Just dig into how they were Trojan horses a bit more.
- [54:00]
B
Well, in the sense that he has a business that's working really well and he just has to exploit and focus and work hard. Whereas when they're then going, well, there's this new AI thing that's popping off and people are getting funding here. Or this guy's exited his business for ABC and he's been in it half the time. So he'd just get envious. He'd get shiny object syndrome versus just putting on the football. He's like, switch the brain off, know what I need to do. And you can see these Trojan horses that exist everywhere. So, like, you could have. I call it like a Trojan pay rise, where you kind of get this incredible job. That not incredible job or a job. I had this happen to me where a job comes along and offers you double the salary, but you stop learning as a result. And on the one hand, yeah, you've got this thing that feels like you've made progress, but actually on a long enough time horizon, it's going to massively reduce your potential because you're no longer learning. So looking at these Trojan horses everywhere,
- [54:53]
A
a long commute would probably be one of those. We've been talking a lot about hidden observable metrics, and a really great observable metric is salary. And a really great hidden one is commute length. The derogation of your energy to do things when you get home, the quality of your relationships and your friendships, the amount of time that you have to be able to learn new things. And yeah, you can trade in your ability to upgrade yourself for a better salary, but you're right. Over a long enough time horizon, what was it that was going to give you more happiness or satisfaction or even salary? In the end, it was presumably going to be your skills and the rapidity of you to be able to upgrade them. So, yeah, that's very interesting. Have you noticed in your life, any Trojan horses that you've let sneak in?
- [55:45]
B
I'd say certain bits of content. I find I'm a lot more specific with my information diet now. So even stuff of, of I'll try and I used to try and keep on top of the world's cutting events and then I'm. Because I felt like I needed to be a responsible citizen and I needed to be on top of things. And I realized that a. The current thing would just disappear, then there's this constant new current thing that will then disappear.
- [56:10]
A
Two months ago, Perel calls it the. Was it the perpetual. Now.
- [56:13]
B
Yeah. And by the time, by the time it's on Twitter, it's like the peak stock price. It's. You know what I mean? By the time, it's every quarter, it's as big as it's going to get. So avoiding constantly keeping on top of all the world's cutting content of edge, which I used to think like I was being an informed citizen because people would use the term I wrote about this, people would use the term ignorance is bliss. And I go, you know, you're in this like Nietzsche and upside down society where people are using bliss as a shaming mechanism. Because I think we like I realize this where it's something like, I think there's like 500 million tweets uploaded per day. There's 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube per minute. And I think something like 67 million people die per year. Right. So we're all in the ignorance gutter. But it's like some of us will be looking at the stars. And I think you have to be so specific with that information diet because by definite you cannot consume all the world's information. So I used to have my, you know this, I used to have my Twitter trending topics to Angola. So I just keep up to date with like the Angola. So basically it's on Twitter where you'd have the trending topics in your region and it would be like I'd get distracted by all these complex issues and I just feel like shit afterwards. It's like Trojan content.
- [57:25]
A
Yeah.
- [57:26]
B
So I just updated it to Angola
- [57:27]
A
and nobody now unfortunately for me because it's, it's done it the way that as you're, as you've realized you can't hack it with Angola. I'm still in the UK based on Twitter, which means that at least twice a week at the moment. Chris Williamson Trends Chris Williamson mp Of course the unfortunately named Labour. I think it's Derbyshire that he's a part of. Very anti Semitic, which means given the current geopolitical climate, it's A bad time to be a Chris Williamson at the moment. But I always used to think whether or not he would look and see his name trending, but it not be him and think like, what's my love island alter ego done this time? Fucking hell. He's gone on another reality TV show. I'm doing this live show with James Smith in Dubai in a couple of months time next month actually. And I wondered, given what Chris Williamson has been talking about, his very pro Middle Eastern talking points, whether there's going to be a huge welcome party for me as I step off the plane at DXB airport and how disappointed they will be when this Chris Williams strides off the plane.
- [58:38]
B
Yeah, reality so far has just been an SEO warfare between you two and everybody else watching. This is just NPCs in the simulation that is that.
- [58:45]
A
Do you ever watch the one with Jet Li, that film?
- [58:48]
B
No.
- [58:49]
A
It's like he. In this other universe, he's able to move between like 350 universes or whatever and there's a version of you in each of them. And if you kill yourself, the power of all of you gets shared between you. So this guy tries to become the one, this evil jet liquid goes around killing all of the other Jet Lis in all of the other different universes. And that's kind of the SEO battle between me and Chris Williamson, Derbyshire MP at the moment.
- [59:16]
B
Fuck it out on the looping background. Because there was an infinite vortex there with the information diet hack I recommend, and people think this takes way longer than it is. But I do warn people that you will stare deeply into the abyss and the abyss is an information hazard. Deeply back into you. YouTube, they should remove this. But YouTube has this button where you can see your history. And I want. I went through, I clicked on it and I was like, if I just go through the last 100 videos that I've watched, it takes like five minutes to do. And I just ranked them in terms of regret neutral and like, glad I watch that. And 72% of the content I watched, I book it under regret. So that's an example of Trojan content.
- [59:56]
A
Well, the post content clarity thing was an idea that I came up with to try and help me. It's exactly that. Just like less statistical. While you're watching something, it's almost always compelling, even if it's bullshit for you and making you feel worse. Because if it wasn't compelling, you would be watching something that was. It's like the meme evolution of the MrBeast Countdown to the $1 billion yacht that he's gonna spend time on or whatever. Right? Like, that's the most compelling piece of content. So even stuff that you don't like is compelling in the moment, or else you would have switched switch and watch something more compelling. But it's only after the. It's like your post coital pillow talk with yourself after you've done a session on YouTube where you get to say, okay, and how did that stuff make me feel? Like, do I want to ring my friends? Do I want to go outside? Do I feel like the world is against me or for me? Do I feel like I can go and achieve things? Do I feel more educated, more wise, more in tune with myself? Or do I feel the opposite? And a lot of the time, I think the things that you watch are limbically hijacking and compelling. But the after effect, like the comedown, the content comedown, is so strong that if you were able to future project yourself forward and realize what's the hangover that I'm gonna get, the content come down, I'm gonna get from this. The post content clarity. Yeah. The pillow talk that you have with yourself actually would remind you that it's not worth it. And YouTube actually, as a platform for this, is kind of useful because there's a few options you can put in. Don't recommend channel. If you just see something on your home screen, you can just press the three dots and say, don't recommend channel. And you'll never see that channel again unless you search for it.
- [61:39]
B
Right.
- [61:40]
A
It'll never just randomly appear on your feed, which is phenomenal. So I think that if you were talking about crafting and shaping the information landscape that we're a part of, and it's all esoteric and fucking, like philosophical and stuff, but from a tactical perspective, that's one thing. If people use Twitter on desktop, which I do, I don't have the app on my phone. I very rarely use it on my phone. Tweemex, which may now be called Tweepy, is a way that you can see the most popular tweets from people. But it's a Google Chrome extension that when you're on your home screen, it actually sits over the top of the trending news. So it'll hide trending news. So you can't put yourself in Angola. Well, you can, but it doesn't work. But you can use Tweemex or Tweepy, and the Google Chrome extension will hide that and replace it with like, top tweets from one of the people that you Follow.
- [62:34]
B
I think we've probably got about five years left of this algorithmic warfare of trying to get you to stay on platform as long as possible. Because as soon as more and more AI tools come on and then you begin to have these dynamic conversations of how you want to feel based off these algorithms. I think we'll look back at this as a very, very weird time in
- [62:52]
A
history when most content was created by humans as opposed to robots.
- [62:56]
B
No, in the sense that that to some extent, but more importantly, like for example, you see the difference when you go from YouTube to YouTube Premium and you can skip certain things and you can download things. Why can't I just customize my algorithm more? Why can't I have a kale algorithm during the week and then a cocaine algorithm on Saturday night versus this kind of static algorithm? Because the problem with the algorithms, I actually realized when I was doing that YouTube audit, the best YouTube is amazing when you use it for search and it's such a high agency thing there where you're sitting there thinking and going, oh, okay, I want to learn about X or I want to do abc and you search it versus the Explore page. When it's just fundamentally solo agency. Because by definition it's trained on your past data, so it's keeping you stuck in the past. Whereas when you're actually searching on YouTube for topics, you're actually breaking out of the past and creating a new data set that's all training on.
- [63:48]
A
There's multiple use. So I've realized this Uber does this very well actually, where at different times of the day I take different journeys. So if it's first thing in the morning, it'll know that I tend to want to go to the gym. If it's the middle of the day, there's a couple of restaurants that I typically go to. If it's on a Wednesday at this time, it knows that I usually go and get an appointment at this place or it's a haircut or it's a whatever and it knows that I go from certain places to other places. Very well done, right? But that's because there's multiple use at multiple periods of the day. YouTube hasn't yet realized that I only watch long form documentaries about like the in depth trench warfare strategies of World War I on an evening time, like at night to fall asleep. So I like listen to like some Ken Burns documentary or like some long documentary or whatever, like like some 11 part psychoanalysis of Hitler that I'm in balls deep in at the moment, right? That only happens on an evening time, but it means that it resurfaces it to me during the day. So, yeah, there's multiple use at multiple times. And, you know, like, you can go from dark mode to light mode. It's like, do I want to go from learning mode to entertainment mode? But I don't think that. That doesn't seem to be likely. Just because what the platforms always want you to be in is click on mode. Right. They don't want you to have agency over what it is. They just want maximize time on site. Let's outsource it to don't forget, especially YouTube, that algo is a black box. If you were to go to YouTube, the engineers and say, tell us what you're doing. Show us the algorithm. They're like, yeah, do you think we know. You think we know what our algorithm does? We set it like two fucking reward functions, like time on site. Click through. That's it. And then just let it run. It's just this recursive nightmare where everyone descends towards UFC knockout compilations all the
- [65:41]
B
way down the stack. Yeah, yeah.
- [65:44]
A
What's the forgetting paradox?
- [65:47]
B
So thanks to your Sam Harris podcast, I started going more and more down a mindfulness rabbit hole.
- [65:54]
A
A bunch of people did that. I was with someone.
- [65:55]
B
Yeah, he's. I think that it's so good. And within that, he has this few things that I had out the back of it that then created the forgetting paradox, which is you start to observe your thoughts. And Sam presents this idea of like, think of a candle. And he goes, well, are you that candle? It's like, well, no, of course I'm not that candle. So it's like, why do you therefore identify of every other thought? And then he has this scenario where it's like, think of. Or basically wait for the next thought to appear in your head and try and predict it as it's happening. Or like, just try and observe it as it's happening. Sorry. My one was so, so niche this. My one was so I sat there and from nowhere, this is when I realized I was in control of my own thoughts. It was just Iron Robin cutting in on the left wing. He's like this former football player who retired like eight years ago. And I'm like that. It's almost like a dream state. And I was like, that's why he called it waking up, right? I was like, it's fantastic.
- [66:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [66:45]
B
And the thing that I hadn't heard Sam talk about that I realized off the back of that was actually, I'll ask you this Question now, how many thoughts, like clear sentence thoughts, do you remember from yesterday?
- [66:57]
A
Very few. Almost none.
- [66:59]
B
Can you think of any, like a sentence.
- [67:05]
A
One over dinner that I spoke to Alex about who's debating Ben Shapiro today, but I didn't say it to him. Okay, she was talking.
- [67:13]
B
So you remember one thought from yesterday. What about the day before? I assume day before zero, right?
- [67:17]
A
Yeah.
- [67:17]
B
Okay, so you have 10,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day and you captured one. Anyone listening at home, pause it and just go, how many thoughts do I remember from yet? Like clear sentences, not I feel hungry or whatever, clear sentences. So from a 24 hour window, kind of like Twitter or TikTok, the mind's thoughts completely disappear. And it's quite a useful tool that then when a thought loop appears, you just go, oh, this is going to disappear tomorrow.
- [67:42]
A
Yeah.
- [67:42]
B
And you realize the forgetting paradox is. And this is not just at the individual psychological level, it's at the general societal level of we forget how many things we forget because by definition we've forgotten them. And if we hadn't forgotten them, therefore, we would have remembered them the same way you had 10 to 70,000 thoughts yesterday and you remembered one, but you don't remember. You don't even realize how many thoughts you forgot because by definition you completely forgot them. And you see this with trending topics as well, where it comes. And then someone will mention that and you guys go, I haven't thought about that in years. It's only when the. That pops back in, you see the forgetting paradox.
- [68:23]
A
That guy cutting back in on the left wing.
- [68:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're very good at this. It's one thing I've changed my mind upon as a result of this. Like, there's probably a whole wave of guys that listen to your podcast who are like just ghost Instagram guys. They don't really post the social media. But one of the second and third order consequences of that is you don't capture much of your life.
- [68:42]
A
Yeah.
- [68:43]
B
And I'm sitting here now at 29 now. I've always avoided photos and videos because I didn't want to be seen as that vain guy on Instagram.
- [68:48]
A
Yeah.
- [68:49]
B
But I think something you're very good at is capturing content. And as I get older, you realize how important that is because you go, but you decoupled.
- [68:56]
A
I realized this too, that coming from like whatever a. I come from a Love island background. Which is the problem of that is I dissociated taking photos with posting on social media and being gauche.
- [69:10]
B
Right.
- [69:11]
A
I did lunch on Sunday from the plane with Douglas Murray in this nice fucking restaurant somewhere. I had Crocs on and Douglas was in a full suit and we had lunch and it was four hours and we got to have this great conversation. And I was like, I wanna remember this. Not that I don't. Not that I would forget it in any case, but I wanna properly remember this. But you're like, when do you take a photo? Oh, mate, come here, let's take a photo.
- [69:35]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [69:35]
A
But I was like, hang on a second. No, like, this will. When that resurfaces on my memories or whatever. I'm not taking a photo to post it on social media, but because most people only take photos so that they can then post them on social media. I dissociated taking photos and remembering my life with being a vain Instagram idiot. Not the same. We need to, like, make photos great again for guys.
- [69:59]
B
Yeah. Particularly like, decouple.
- [70:00]
A
Taking photos from thinking that you are creating content. Right. Or being narcissistic or doing this to correct. And that's even worse if you're a content creator, right? If you're someone that's posting stuff on the Internet, you're like, oh, here we go again. Like, better switch the work face on. Whatever. It's not like that. It's like, I'm just taking a photo to be with my friends. But I wonder about how. How much people think about the. The focus on the thoughts that arise, how much they consider what they're going through right now to be unbelievably important. You forget how many things you've forgotten because you've forgotten how much you forgot. This has always been a justification for me to get people to force thoughts into words. Either spoken, written, even art in some regards. But I think it's best to do it in actual words because I've said this a million times on the show. But when you have a thought, it's like a cloud, right? It's like trying to hold smoke. It's like this wispy, ephemeral kind of like. It's a smell. It's like this ambience that you've got and you're like, it's. Yeah, I kind of know what it is. It's like, okay, tell me. Like, tell me what that idea is. And then you try and squeeze it down into words and you go, I actually don't have any idea about this. And I remember before I had the podcast, I. After I'd started thinking about things more seriously, but before I had an outlet that caused Me to be rigorous and highly scrutinize heavily what I was thinking about. I had ideas that I didn't know. I had ideas that I didn't know.
- [71:42]
B
Right.
- [71:42]
A
This sense. But I'd never forced it into to take form. And it concretizes things. That's why writing's such a good tactic for this. Or having conversations with people that you care about. The strategy of recording a podcast with a friend that you're never going to publish, like 30 minutes once per week, put the voice recorder on if you don't want to be a content creator, or you just can't be bothered, or you're not confident enough yet, sit down with a friend, press record, have a conversation about whatever you want. But it's focused, it's rigorous.
- [72:10]
B
So on that. Well, there's a few things here. So, one, there's this idea I stole from Balaji, which I call it the Balaji Transformer, which is when you're wanting to become creative, he tries to understand everything from a written perspective. Then from an algorithm, like, he'll create an algorithm of the same piece, then he'll speak it out loud, then he'll draw it on a whiteboard like Walt Disney's business plan map. And when you transform it from thought to words to written to visual drawing, you actually that action of transforming is where the creativity begins to occur or the clarity. On this specific point, though, I think relating to the forgetting paradox that begins to exist as a result is. Or we've particularly going back, looping back round to CBT that we spoke about at the beginning. This is like such midwit simple shit. But it's so good. We spoke about the CBT triangle at the beginning. The next thing that they get you to do is. So let's say you have a recurring thought of, I'm a fucking loser. Something really dark. The natural thing, like the Instagram gurus are like, no, you believe in yourself. Like, pump your chest up. So in cbt, what they'll get you to do is we'll just write down the thought that you have and the ability to move it from mind to paper, and you just kind of look at it there. And then the next thing, which is great, what they do is rather than just like try and fight that thought, which then kind of creates balloons it more and more and more because you're repressing it. It's like, well, what's five? Like, bits of evidence that support that? And it's like, well, I'm losing touch with all my friends. I'VE not been to the gym in weeks. I thought I'd be here by 25 or 35 and I'm not there. And you write down all those reasons and then you go. You get all the fucking air out of the balloon of that thought. And then in cbt, it just goes, okay, what's all the evidence that you haven't considered? It's like, well, when I go to XYZ party, people are so happy to see me. Or. And then at the end, kind of like the jury, the for and against, you just go, well, based off all the evidence I have now, what's a more useful potential for on this specific point? Have you heard of true? It's from Derek Sivers, which is so good. Which is this idea of not true but useful.
- [74:23]
A
Yeah. I've been playing with something similar, which is figuratively true but literally false. And literally true, but figuratively false.
- [74:30]
B
Yeah. Whereas we had that chat about determinism.
- [74:31]
A
Right.
- [74:32]
B
Whereas I think determinism is potentially true but harmful.
- [74:35]
A
Yeah. And a good information hazard.
- [74:36]
B
What I realize now for the determinism debate, just say, I completely agree with you. You guys. Unfortunately, I'm just 100% determined to believe free will is true.
- [74:45]
A
Yeah.
- [74:45]
B
And I'm just. It's just determined. It's like I can't change it. But a good example that Sivas has there is yet useful. Oh, sorry. Not true, but useful beliefs and essentially anything outside of physical reality to some extent can fall in that of it might not be true, but what's useful. And with cognitive behavioral therapy, you can just analyze both for and against and then come to your own conclusion.
- [75:03]
A
Yeah. The figuratively true, but literally false. Literally true, but figuratively false is great. So porcupines can throw their quills. Literally false. Figuratively good to steer clear of the fucking porcupine. Religions throughout time looked at pigs as uniquely sort of morally dirty animals. Literally false, but figuratively. Their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load typically than other animals. Like for like, so let's not eat them. Good. The reverse. Literally true, but figuratively false or functionally useless would be a different way to put it. Belief that free will doesn't exist. Okay. Right. Everyone seems to say. All the smart people seem to say that that's the case. And all of the people that seem to have some counter argument to it. It's all like lexical Brazilian jiu jitsu, where they actually change what free will means. Like, Dan Dennett kind of does this. He just sort of kicks the can down the road. All of the Compatibilism stuff seems to kind of kick the can down the road. But. But I spiraled a ex club manager into a two week depression because I sent him 45 minutes of SAM Harris on Joe Rogan red pilling him about free will and he didn't leave the house for two weeks because he's like, well, I've got no free will. It's fucking pointless. That's fucking information hazard. I don't need to know about that and I definitely don't need to believe it and I don't need put any stock in believing it. So I guess it's a bit of a slippery slope if the only things that you believe are functionally the things that are beneficial to you because you can end up actually no, because useful.
- [76:33]
B
Useful is the key word. Not beneficial, useful because self deluding yourself to something that's so grandstanding and harmful isn't useful. It's anything that's fundamentally useful to you and the people around you.
- [76:47]
A
What's the new ideas that sound crazy but will be normal 10 to 20 years from now?
- [76:52]
B
Yeah. So obviously last time we had the. What is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians and what ideas sound crazy today? But we'll look back and go, oh shit. Kind of like the Internet comes along and it's like, like everyone was mocking it and boom, we're here. Now I have a. A list of these. So one, which is my greatest meme I've ever created. So going back to cyber that it's kind of an ugly industry. One industry that might be uglier than cyber. Well, there's two. So one is plumbing industry and as a result there's so many entrepreneurs creating W bands, aura rings like trackers, glucose sport, super sex. Creating a smart toilet like a. The total addressable market is huge if you have a smart toilet. And the meme I created was like the toilet speaking to you, which is like good news you're hydrated, bad news, you've got chlamydia. Right. And a smart toilet could feasibly eradicate all STIs and STDs like that. The amount of data that's in piss and shit that exists, but nobody wants to touch that because it's a bit icky. Right. Same when another similar strand to this, which I don't like to say loud but we're going to have to. So Mindgeek porn company that own every single porn site you can think of, had the biggest technological monopoly of all time, but nobody spoke about it. There was no government bodies getting involved because they didn't want to touch it because it was icky. And I think a lot of these ideas are potentially icky. Another one I think about is with AI coming along right now, all my single friends complain dating apps that they hate the swiping. They like the dates, but they hate the swiping. And when dating apps came along, it was, it was seen as the ickiest thing. People, people mocked it. But now like, is it something like 50% of people meet their potential partner online?
- [78:37]
A
Yeah.
- [78:37]
B
And the, everything else has gone through the floor in terms of how they meet. The only one that's gone up is restaurants and bars. Have you seen this? So the only one that goes up in that chart of how did you meet outside of dating apps? Because dating apps is at the whole market like Mark Andreessen software reading the world is restaurants and bars. And I'm convinced that's, I'm convinced it's people who met on dating apps that don't want to say that they met on dating apps because there's a huge bracket of those. So dating apps is at the whole market. And I think with AI coming along, it's going to be so obvious where it moves to a more matchmaking model where you're not swiping based off your data sets and then you're getting a few specific candidates.
- [79:13]
A
I'm pretty sure that this is like algo matchmaker. It's a combination of I think personal, individual, actual functional human and AI matchmaking keeper. It's for people who want long term relationships and yeah. They're trying to use data sets to find compatibility between people.
- [79:36]
B
It makes sense. Right.
- [79:36]
A
It's like the anti dating app.
- [79:38]
B
Dating app versus manually swiping and judging it purely off looks. And then you meet them and it's completely different and they don't look that way and they've lied and it's a completely broken system.
- [79:50]
A
Yeah. It's looking at what will be accepted as a plausible future technology. I certainly don't think I know that you've been on this for a while. You were pretty sure that pseudonymity on the Internet would become more widely accepted. I still don't think that that's going to be the case. Where do you sit on that now?
- [80:14]
B
I've got a weird opinion on this one. I could be. So bear in mind all these.
- [80:17]
A
Because all of your other opinions have been so normal.
- [80:19]
B
So normal so far. All of these opinions I think will ultimately there's high risk in that. Right. If it a Lot of them are likely to fail because by definition, if they sound weird today, it's because they're fucking weird or they're wrong. Right. But I do think as soon as these, you're already seeing these virtual influencers come along, and I think you'll have the pseudonymity combined with a virtual influencer. Because if you look at traditional media, reality TV was really late. Only came along in like the 90s, like, as it came along versus social media. It's always been reality TV. There's no James Bond in social media, there's no Spider man in social media, there's no Superman, there's no Batman of these characters with IP that begin to exist. So I do think that's where there's a guy, we spoke about him called the Cultural Tutor on Twitter and he's just gone. So I do think that's got potential. But, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily as big. The pseudonymity thing hasn't taken off yet. But is that because it won't take off yet or because it's had certain technological restrictions? I'd say the other one, which you red pilled me on this. So me and you were on a flight like three years ago. This is Inside the Actor Studio. And Chris's like, this is. Bear in mind Chris's podcast at that point, we're on a beach after that flight and he goes, if I can get things to 100,000 subscribers, I think I'll be happy. And you say to me on that flight, or we've got our face masks on, you go, I'm thinking of working with a speaking coach. And I was like, as a friend, I was like, do I say something here? Because I don't think this is the right move. And in my defense, I was concerned that you, you'd go full politician.
- [81:51]
A
It would sterilize any character I had.
- [81:53]
B
When politicians speak like this, and it just immediately is horseshoe theory. Like, you're so charismatic, it becomes uncharismatic. And I was concerned that would happen
- [82:04]
A
to you too much res.
- [82:04]
B
And I told you that. And you, you rightfully ignored me. And then like three years later, I'm listening to that Rogan podcast and he said that the way you pronounce words, if you was running for president, he would vote for you. Right? And I texted you, going, one. I'm sorry, I was wrong too. Can I get an intro right?
- [82:19]
A
I need an intro to the speech curse.
- [82:20]
B
So I do wonder whether charisma will become the new fitness. So the same way Instagram made People concerned more about how they look. Voice memos, podcasts, recorded zoom calls, remote work. People hearing themselves back.
- [82:32]
A
Yeah.
- [82:32]
B
Will begin to become a bigger and bigger thing.
- [82:34]
A
Yeah, that's a. That's a very good point. We're definitely being more. Surveillance scrutinizes your delivery. Right. In a way that you didn't do previously. Have we seen people take writing classes so they can do better Facebook statuses? I'm not sure. No.
- [82:54]
B
But even like going back to what we said earlier of Rizz becoming a meme and then people at least think about it. Yeah. Whether there'll be more like doing exactly what you did. Probably not, but there'll be. I think it'll become an area that people are a lot more mindful of. The same way people who work out aren't necessarily paying for a pt.
- [83:08]
A
Yeah, that's true. The gap in the gain was something I think I introduced you to as well. This idea that there are two ways to live. Either comparing yourself to where you want to be or comparing yourself to where you were. And one of them is like running toward the horizon, which is every step that you move forward, you are inevitably going to push the desires that you have one step further away from yourself. Morgan housel his quote about the best way to win the game is to stop moving the fucking goalposts. And I had this conversation with Big Dan Bilzerian over the weekend and said every time that you achieve something, what you're doing is positing a new minimum bar, which you have to get over. Right. Fantastic. I've just done this many plays or made this piece of art that sold for a particular amount of money or whatever. How exciting. And almost immediately there is this sort of like post coital fucking realization that, oh my God, that's the new bar for my best performance. That's really high. That means I now need to be even better at my next thing. And someone recently won the largest lottery in history, a $1 billion lottery. Someone just won that. From a life trajectory perspective, that's potentially one of the most disastrous things that you could have happen to you, because how are you ever going to have a better day than the day you woke up and found out that you'd won a billion dollars? The argument is a slow success strategy would be to purposefully try and drag out the wins that you have.
- [84:48]
B
Warren Buffett style.
- [84:50]
A
A tactical way that you could do this would actually be, let's say that you start to accumulate more. More wealth, financial freedom and stuff like that, and you can afford your absolute Dream car. But instead of buying the absolute dream car, you buy one of the dream cars that's kind of en route to that one. It's the 50% or the 75% car that goes in between because you'll still take a good bit of pleasure from that one and you'll have something to look forward to that you know is within your control. And you're not then looking for the overclocked 150% dream car car. Right. I mean, the helicopter. I'm buying yachts and I'm buying boats and all this other stuff. So I think, and I said this to Dan, you know, somebody who, you know, winning poker games and stuff is large influxes of cash in kind of out of nowhere. And he seemed to agree that it expedites your ability to just like play the hedonic adaptation game, but it overclocks the pace at which you have access to it and it's dangerous. So, yeah, slow success strategy as a counter to the gap in the gain sort of game that we play with each other. And this whole hedonic adaptation thing,
- [86:00]
B
it's one of those things though of theory, then reality. Like, can you actually slow yourself down once that dopamine kicks in? That takes a lot of wisdom, right?
- [86:08]
A
It takes a hell of a lot of restraint. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. And like, what are you gonna do? Like say, oh, no, I don't want that billion dollars from the lottery, please, sir. But you know, even with that, okay, can I get someone to set, sort of fund or trust that like drip feeds this to me or invests it in a particular way or, I don't know, just placing, trying to place your self worth in different. Different ways, different, different locations. But I, I mean, the gap in the gain is one of the most important ideas that I keep forgetting about. It's like a Ben Hardy book from three years ago. And he came on the show to talk about. And it's really great. And every time that I find myself, myself getting too deep into dopamine, Chris, we should talk about that. We should talk about the difference between dopamine George and serotonin George, and then also probably cortisol George as well. But we both feel this, and I think a lot of people do that. You just live in this sort of next task, next achievement, overclocked hustle grind culture. I will get my pleasure from my accomplishments as opposed to the one that actually ends up being more fulfilling, which is I spend time with my friends lying in the park under a Tree, like eating some snacks that somebody brought along or something like. That's the more serotonin side of things.
- [87:27]
B
I think the gap in the gain is just a better meme for abundance and scarcity mindset. Abundance and scarcity kind of got hijacked a little bit by a lot of woo woo. Whereas the beautiful thing about the gap in the gain. So you always have three things, right? You, you have who you are now. This fucking future idealized projected version where you've trillionaire and everything's going well and everybody loves you. That gap, no matter again, no matter how much you move up, just grows. It's infinite versus you have a third state which is where you started. So the gain is measuring yourself constantly from where you started and the gap is measuring yourself to this infinite ideal. But the beauty, to be honest with you, it's a nice concept. Right? Right. But that's one of those things, the forgetting paradox. You can learn that and then it disappears two years from now. But going back to like resting serious face or resting smile face. The beautiful thing about the gap of the gain is you can only, you can only exist in one of the two states at once. That's what I loved about that concept is you're either in the gap or you're even in the gain. So it's just constantly throughout the day,
- [88:23]
A
it's either resting serious face or resting smile face.
- [88:25]
B
Yeah, It's a simple razor, it's midwittable, which is beautiful.
- [88:30]
A
Yeah. What do you think's the most useful emotional state date?
- [88:33]
B
Oh yeah. So this is a, a niche thought experiment, but I'll give it to the audience. So the inspiration for this thought experiment was. You ever heard that kind of bro bar debate of you have the world's best athletes across every 100 top sports. Which one is the technical best athlete in the sense that you take a basketball player, footballer, NFL, MMA, and they'd all do the other 99 sports who would rank the highest. And there's big like bro debate about it. It's great. And I was like, okay, that's an interesting idea. I realized I'd lay there in bed and again, Iron Robin's just like cut in on the left wing. And then this thought pops in my head and I'm like, what would be the. If you applied that for emotions, what would be the most useful emotional state? So you create this Olympics of like happiness, sadness, anger, joy, fear, envy, et cetera, et cetera, etc, and then you looked at 100 different life events you could be in doing A podcast with you. Going for a bike ride. Yeah, Getting a Starbucks. Getting fired from my job.
- [89:34]
A
What's the outcome that you're optimizing for here? Most useful. What's useful?
- [89:40]
B
Probably achieving the outcome that you would. Would have liked upon reflection.
- [89:46]
A
Right. Okay.
- [89:47]
B
Is way I'd probably describe that, but I'd probably need to think about that more. But let's say you have all those situations from marriage to funeral to losing job to first day at job and you had looked at all the different emotions you could have, like which one would perform the best on average. And I realized I go probably calmness. If you could. Like it's not even like the sports debate where it's like up for debate. I go, I think calmness just is top for pretty much them all. Or if not, it's. It's in the Champions League place. It's in that like top four. And. But then I was like, okay, let's steel myself here. I wasn't sleeping that night, so I was like, I. Okay, well, let's say for example, there's a fire breaks out in the building. Would you want to be calm? Would be the criticism of it. And it's like, you wouldn't want to be slothful, you wouldn't want to be lazy, but you'd probably want to be calm. I assume I'm not a fireman. We have bullshit jobs, right? Like we don't do serious jobs. But when you chat to people who have proper jobs, the best guys are the ones that are calm under pressure. So I think it, it kills that. And then the second criticism, if you was to steel man, it as well would be, well, let's say it's your. That may work for neutral events or toxic events or things where it has to go, well, let's say it's your wedding day day. Do you want to be calm? And I was like, that's probably a good criticism. But then I was thinking about it and whenever you speak to me about the wedding day, they always say I was great, but I just wish I soaked it in more. I wish I could slow down time a bit more. And I don't think anything slows down time quite like calmness. And for any criticism you do have where you wouldn't want to be calm, the beautiful thing about calmness is you can. Calmness is such a base state that you can then ramp up any emotion on top of it of. But you can't do the reverse. It's really hard to go from anger to like peak calmness.
- [91:21]
A
Yeah.
- [91:22]
B
So I just looked at it and go, that wins the debate. And then I fell to sleep that night.
- [91:26]
A
Calmly.
- [91:26]
B
Yeah, calmly.
- [91:27]
A
Douglas asked me yesterday what, like, I aim for in life. And I use the word peace, which sounds so cooked. Like, in retrospect, it just sounds so lame, especially when I'm talking to this, you know, like, firebrand fucking, like, cultural commentator guy, like, says things that people don't like and all the rest of it. But it is true that. That if the price is your sanity, you shouldn't pay it for pretty much whatever it is. There's almost nothing that's worth that because ultimately, without your sanity, you can't enjoy any of the things that you're going to get from it in any case. And I think that largely calmness and peace could probably be interchangeable here.
- [92:05]
B
But to critique us here, what I would say as a listener, it's like, yeah, that's fucking nice. And I might forget that as part of the forgetting paradox, but what does that do? It's like, well, how do I become calm? And the answer is, I haven't fucking fully figured that out yet. But I guess the first step is realizing that it's probably the most useful.
- [92:23]
A
It's something to aim for. And again, using the hidden and observable metrics matrix, it's one of the most hidden metrics, the texture of your own mind. I will happily work a job with a boss that's a dick, that pays more money, that makes me feel miserable, that causes me to be anxious before I go into work work, because I can't see the price that I'm paying in terms of my lack of peace or calmness.
- [92:49]
B
Right.
- [92:49]
A
But I can see the increase in my bank balance every month. Right. Just trading it in, trading in that hidden metric for an observable one.
- [92:57]
B
You're seeing that with glucose monitors in the sense that people would just eat whatever, and now they have that orange juice, and then video game dashboard go, terrible that they can begin to piece that together. We unfortunately don't. I've gone back to resting fucking smile face. If there was a way of tracking that throughout the day and you could turn it into a video game of where your facial expressions were sat, I think you'd have a lot happier people. It's weird.
- [93:19]
A
Yeah. What was that? You told me, and you described it really beautifully, and it was the first time that anyone had described the same psychosis that I go through when I'm meditating about. I'm the sort of person that has thoughts about thoughts.
- [93:31]
B
Oh, yeah. We were chatting about this over there where it's this infinite loop that can exist when you're observing your own mind and you get to a state of no thoughts. And then after you've dealt with all the Iron Robin thoughts, what comes up is, oh, look at me having no thoughts. I'm fucking great. And then you end up in that. Well, yeah, because it's a Trojan thought.
- [93:51]
A
Trojan thought. You think, oh, wow, I'm the sort of narcissist that thinks, wow, look at me. The sort of person that has no thought thoughts. And then you think, oh my God, I'm so self deprecating. I'm the sort of person that mocks me for being the sort of person that thinks, wow, I'm the sort of person, oh my God. And then you just.
- [94:10]
B
Cycle of Doom.
- [94:12]
A
So funny, man, so funny. What else you got?
- [94:15]
B
We always have chats about high agency. And again, that's a powerful meme right now. But I've been like collecting like examples. One of them that came from mutual friend David Senra. Have you heard about James Cameron? I was like, this is one of the craziest stories ever. Again, talk about memes or ideas. So you know James Cameron, the movie director. So he was a truck driver when he was 18 and he couldn't afford, he couldn't afford to go to movie. To movie education, would you call it film studio? Film school. And he decided, I can't afford it. So I mean, the low age thing there is like, okay, accept reality, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, this guy's so good that he came up with the idea of going to the library. And everybody who could afford the film degree when they're handing in their dissertations or their work, they'd put it in the library that night. He would just go there, take the pieces late at night, put them in the photocopying machine, photocopy, photocopy, photocopy. And taught himself his whole film degree from scratch because he couldn't afford it. I was like, that is elite Story. Story. So good.
- [95:20]
A
Wow, that is cool.
- [95:23]
B
There's a another one we spoke about a while ago in the High Agency library. I told you about the guy that took down Silk Road. So Silk Road was the biggest black market illegal drugs empire. The FBI were after him, the CIA were after him, the DAA were after him. This guy called Dread Pirate Roberts, who turned out to be Ross Ulbricht. And there's a lot about that case that gets super political. And I don't want to have that conversation because I'm not educated on it, but the specific part that I found fascinating was the way he got caught. So the FBI, with all their resources, best intel, best spyware in the world couldn't catch him. It was this one tax inspector who started working on the case. And this guy just thinks, okay, I'll go and Google and just searches. He goes, what about if I just find the first original post about Silk Road online and he finds it in this bitcoin Fox forum and what the Dread Pirate Roberts did. Obviously when you're at that zero to one stage of a new company, even if it's an illegal drug market empire, you need to get people in. So he create an account line going, oh my God, have people seen this? And he was like, this is the earliest post that exists online. And he reached out to the forum owners, was like essentially reverse engineered this Altoid handle, what the email address was, and it was Rossalbricht gmail.com and he was the first guy to unmask. And I love that story because it's like one guy with Google has beat the FBI, the CIA, the dea, achieving essentially the most wanted man in America at the time. Similar to James Cameron, right? Like a guy with essentially no resources but can massively overperform.
- [96:57]
A
Have you watched, speaking of movies, there's a new Guy Ritchie film out that's an oddly very similar plot to the Gentleman, but is different. I can't remember what it's called. It's on Amazon Prime. Everyone should go and watch it. It's Guy Ritchie. The guy's fucking brilliant. But have you seen it turns out Douglas friends with him and you know that he has created his own like hut slash barbecue sl foot warmer thing. Do you know about this?
- [97:25]
B
No.
- [97:26]
A
Right. So in the Gentleman, if you see Hugh Grant toward the end when he's confronting Charlie Hunan and trying to screw him over the outside, and they're kind of sat under this like kind of a nice sort of indoor outdoor, Mezzanini looking shed type thing. And there's like a fire and a big smoke. Turns out that Guy Ritchie invented that. Like it's his product, right? So this is the ultimate product placement that he's put in. And I think they talk about one of the features that he has in the Gentleman. And then in this most recent one, again it's Hugh Grant playing a very similar sort of role. This time he's like a rich billionaire, like super chat, super dick guy. And he like cuts to this scene and he's explaining how he's like Reverse searing a steak on Guy Ritchie's custom designed thing which you can go and buy. It's super expensive I think, but you can go and buy it on the Internet, search like Guy Ritchie Barbecue and I'm sure it'll come up and yeah, he just, he's just got this product that he's created. I'm pretty sure when he went on Rogan that he talked about it. But yeah, he's just got this product that he created that is now, now featuring in multi million dollar blockbuster movies directed by this great guy. But yeah, ultimately is just like I guess part of the funnel for his
- [98:44]
B
super Chief meme officer.
- [98:45]
A
Chief meme officer. Yeah, it's super expensive, but barbecue. What have you got coming up next? What's the next few months got in store for you?
- [98:52]
B
A few different things. I've got a few essays I want to publish, a few different ideas I'm working on on. But yeah, just. I don't actually know how to answer that question. Just enjoying it.
- [99:04]
A
Good. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with your reading, your writing, all the rest of the stuff.
- [99:08]
B
Yeah. So best places, Twitter or X? Just George Mac. Sign up to the newsletter list as well@georgemac.com or george-Mac.com Some bastards got the thing without the dash. Yeah, you can find it all there.
- [99:22]
A
Hell yeah. George, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, man. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading list, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found, fiction and nonfiction and there's real life stories and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.