#919 - George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny

Summary

Modern Wisdom Podcast Episode #919: George Mack - How To Take Control Of Your Own Destiny

Introduction to High Agency

In episode #919 of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson engages in a profound discussion with guest George Mack about the concept of agency—particularly focusing on what Mack terms high agency. They explore how agency influences personal destiny and societal progress, emphasizing its critical role in navigating the complexities of the 21st century.

Defining and Understanding High Agency

George Mack introduces high agency as "the most under-discussed and most important idea in the 21st century" (00:12). He likens high agency to a perceptual shift that, once experienced, becomes inseparable from one's worldview. Mack illustrates this with a Justice Potter Stewart analogy: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it" (00:12).

To demystify high agency, Mack presents various memes and videos:

• Memes illustrating individuals on a desert island with differing approaches to survival, highlighting high vs. low agency.
• A historical example featuring August Landmasser, a Nazi who exhibited high agency by defying the collective behavior of his peers, ultimately facing severe consequences (00:56).

High Agency in Action: Examples and Contrast

Mack contrasts high agency actions with low agency scenarios through videos:

• A high agency example from the Sasquatch Music Festival 2009, where one individual's dance party snowballs into a large, engaged crowd (03:03).
• A low agency demonstration from Derren Brown's compliance test, where social pressure leads individuals to follow the crowd without independent thought (05:14).

Low Agency Traps: Understanding and Avoiding Them

Mack identifies several low agency traps that impede personal and societal progress:

1. Midwit Trap: Overcomplicating solutions without taking actionable steps (52:47).
2. Rumination Trap: Endless overthinking that prevents decisive action (56:13).
3. Vague Trap: Lack of specificity in goals and actions, leading to ineffective outcomes (66:10).
4. Cynic Trap: Pervasive skepticism that discourages innovation and effort (74:14).

Characteristics and Traits of High Agency Individuals

High agency individuals exhibit four core traits:

• Clear Thinking: Ability to distill complex problems into actionable insights.
• Resourcefulness: Creativity and persistence in overcoming obstacles.
• Bias to Action: Proactive behavior focused on achieving tangible results.
• Disagreeability: Willingness to challenge the status quo and dissent from popular opinion (53:16).

Mack emphasizes that high agency is not just about self-help but aligns with fundamental physics principles: "All problems are solvable with enough knowledge" (11:23).

The Role of Education Systems in Agency Development

Both Mack and Williamson critique traditional education systems for fostering low agency by promoting conformity over creativity. Mack argues that educational institutions, rooted in the Prussian model, prioritize producing factory workers over independent thinkers, thereby stifling agency from a young age (25:42).

Strategies to Cultivate High Agency

To counteract low agency tendencies, Mack suggests:

• Breaking Goals into Micro Steps: Inspired by video game design, breaking tasks into manageable levels to build momentum (72:20).
• Specificity in Goals: Transforming vague ambitions into clear, actionable objectives to enhance focus and effectiveness (67:06).
• Viewing the Present with a Historian’s Frame: Detaching from immediate emotions to assess situations with long-term perspective (104:43).

He introduces the concept of the "Video Game Apple Note", a method to structure goals into discrete, achievable steps, thereby fostering continuous progress and reducing overwhelm (74:12).

Beliefs and Worldviews of High Agency People

Mack outlines five key beliefs that underpin high agency:

1. No Unsolvable Problems: Everything is solvable unless it defies physical laws.
2. No Guarantee Against Dying Screaming: A stark reminder of mortality fuels proactive behavior (78:14).
3. Adults Don't Exist: Suggesting the continual evolution of self beyond traditional roles and identities.
4. No Memory of Normal: Rejecting conformity and embracing individualistic approaches (84:24).

Inverse Charisma: A New Perspective

Mack introduces the concept of inverse charisma, where the most well-liked individuals are those who make others feel interesting and appreciated, rather than relying on their own magnetism. He shares anecdotes, including one about Winston Churchill’s wife feeling like the most interesting person after dinners with political leaders (87:34).

Reflections and Conclusions on Agency

In concluding the episode, Mack reflects on the importance of agency in both personal growth and societal advancement. He urges listeners, especially those from environments that may stifle agency like the UK, to embrace high agency principles to unlock their potential and contribute meaningfully to the world.

Notable Quotes

• George Mack: "All problems are solvable with enough knowledge." (11:23)
• George Mack: "The Wright brothers managed to get their plane by breaking things down into micro steps." (96:52)
• George Mack: "Inverse charisma is making others feel the most interesting, not yourself." (84:24)

Conclusion

Episode #919 delves deep into the essence of agency, distinguishing between high and low agency through historical examples, personal anecdotes, and practical strategies. George Mack provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how to harness agency to shape their destinies and effect positive change in the world.

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For more insights and discussions on personal growth and agency, visit highagency.com and follow George Mack on Twitter.

Transcript

[A]

This is a long time coming. I think agency, since we've been talking, is the topic, the thing that we've both been obsessed with the most. So introduce people to it. What's high agency?

[B]

High agency is, in my opinion, the most under discussed and most important idea in, let's say, the 21st century. It's one of those ideas that once you see it, you can't quite unsee it. It's everywhere. But the problem with it is, is it's quite hard to define. And there's that Justice Potter Stewart line of around when he was trying to define pornography, when he was asked in a government inquiry, can you define pornography? And he came back with the ultimate reply of, well, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. So in lieu of the episode today, I know you rent out all these beautiful studios, I wanted to be the first guest ever to bring some props to kind of get people to experience high agency and then we can define it with words.

[A]

So cool.

[B]

First off is high agency in a meme, okay? So as you can see here, you have person A and person B. And essentially for the people that are listening, you have two people trapped on a desert island. Identical people, but with two different fundamental frames of reality. One is using the wood to get help, the other is using the wood to kind of escape the island. And you kind of see this idea that two people with exact same fundamental realities, but a completely different, like, low agency here, high agency here. So you see high agency in a meme there. Then this one was quite difficult to get printed in London without people asking questions. Is high agency, high agency in a. In a moment. So again, for the people listening, you have a series of Nazis saluting to Hitler in 1936. And you have this guy in red here who's believed. There's debate who it is, but he's believed to be a guy called August Landmasser. And what I love about his story was he originally, like most people, have this idea that when Nazi Germany comes around that they're going to be the one that puts Anne Frank in their house and stands up. But realistically, we're way more likely to be these individuals here. And according to the story, August was part of the Nazi Party, kind of went along with the LARP because it kind of made sense. Fell in love with a Jewish and very much okay, began to hit an agency test with reality. And you see all these Nazis saluting at once. And he's the one guy with his arms crossed. He ends up getting Punished for marrying a German woman, ends up in a concentration camp. She dies in the concentration camp. But there's just that beauty of every single person saluting as a Nazi and him there with his arms crossed just beautifully signifies high agency in a moment. Next thing I would like to run through is we have two videos. So one which is high agency in a video, and another which is low agency in a video.

[A]

Okay, so this is Sasquatch Music Festival 2009. Guy starts dance party.

[B]

So for the people listening at home, there's this absolute nut job on a hill dancing like a madman. And the whole crowd is looking at him like he's lost his mind.

[A]

One guy's joined, one guy's joined. He starts dancing with him.

[B]

Yes. And slowly but surely, people begin to join the dance party more and more throughout the video. But before you know it, you begin to see the whole crowd who go through 15 people now judging him to joining.

[A]

Oh, my God. Two minutes in, it's 150 people. And then toward the end, there's no one sat down. There's only a few people sat down.

[B]

So, yeah, that's high agency in a video. And just to contrast this now, the next video in terms of getting people to actually experience it is low agency in a video from Derren Brown. But they were actually taking part in a compliance test. The three people on the left are actors. They've been briefed to stand or sit when they hear this. Everyone else that's brought in is a genuine shortlisted applicant. They've been given no instructions other than to fill out their forms. My team and I were secretly watching from another room. The more socially compliant a person is, the more they're likely to look to others for signs of how to behave. This is going to be your spot. And the more people, the greater the pressure to join in. In this case, whether to stand or sit.

[A]

So funny how the third guy's now.

[B]

Just taking those people that didn't follow the crowd.

[A]

Oh, she just cracked on.

[B]

I think we have to lose Amy, sadly. Oh.

[A]

So this was a test of compliance.

[B]

Wow. Once we had a full house.

[A]

Very kind.

[B]

Before you know it, we got rid of the actors. Yeah, before you know it, they remove the actors and you just have 10 people standing, leaving us with a room full of compliance. Sound of a bell standing up. And I love that video because, yeah, it perfectly encapsulates low agency where. And it's so easy to fall into, of just looking around at other people, assuming that they know best, and then realizing that all the other People were just looking around at other people and it's this giant game of Emperor's New Clothes. And then you die. And you realized it was one giant LARP live action roleplay the entire time.

[A]

Yeah. And I suppose that mimetic sense has got implications that you can be the first mover both to start something which snowballs down or to stop something which is snowballing right now 100%.

[B]

So finally, in terms of the high.

[A]

Asian, this is like show and tell.

[B]

He's brought from home, one we've discussed a lot of times.

[A]

So here we go.

[B]

The. This is the high agency question. So for people listening at home, the way to identify the highest agency person in your life is if you woke up here and you have sweat with dirt and dirt with sweat all over your body.

[A]

For the people listening, this is a photo of a prison cell.

[B]

Yes. You've not drank in days and you've woken up in a third world prison cell and you have a phone passed under your door and you can call one person to try and get you out of there. Who is it? And everybody weirdly has this kind of idea in their head of who they would call in this scenario. And when you actually begin to grill people about who they would call, it's not the amount that they bench press, it's not the car that they drive, it's not the novels that they've read, it's not the family background they're from. It's maybe sometimes if they're the royal family, then maybe it's. It's something else. And that something is. Is high agency. And yeah, I'm looking forward to the chat today because we can go into more of the specifics of it. But the problem, once you've actually begin to experience it, you get more of an understanding. But then the real problem that I kind of struggled with is how do you actually. It's a je ne sais quoi. Like it's difficult to describe in words like what is, what is it? So I kind of created this model here which I call the high agency spectrum.

[A]

Spectrum being the operative word.

[B]

Yes. So essentially imagine you have two doors. Behind them are all the people you would call when stuck in a third world jail. And at the other end of the spectrum is peak low agency is the last people that you would call when stuck in a third world jail. If you were stuck in like a paper bag, you wouldn't call them. Right. And what is the fundamental difference between these two groups? Because if you looked at them on paper, you go there's no gender, race, age, politics, wealth, career title, LinkedIn profile. Like, what specifically is it? And I was stuck on this idea for years, like trying to chip away, chip away, chip away, chip away. And essentially kind of came to the conclusion of like, this is actually the most simple way of defining high agency is are they happening to life or is life happening to them? So what you'll ultimately, anybody who you would call to break you out of a third world jail, you would define as happening to life. The people that you would be least likely to break you out of a third world jail are the ones that life is happening to them. And then once you begin to see that spectrum, it's such a more simple, like Occam's razor of really understanding my agency. And fundamentally this isn't. It can be like a nice, okay, this is a cool like self help concept, but actually agency is bigger than that. Out of the 6 to 7 million species on Earth, human beings are the only ones capable of agency in the known universe of what we know. And by the way, we only know this via agency. We are the only thing that we know of capable of agency. Even today, like we are sat in a studio in London and I was listening to David Deutsch explain this concept of we're in London today and it's only thanks to agency, because it's December right now in London that me and you aren't dead within two to three hours. Because it's the clothes that we wear, human agency, it's the heating here, like the UK itself is a product of agency, of human agency. Because without clothing, which we kind of born into and assume has always been a thing, but no, it was the result of human agency. Without heating, another thing that we just take complete for granted, the UK would not be possible. So he argues that this idea that we're going to go to Mars and terraform it and shape it, that it's actually a livable habitat, the UK is already that nobody should feasibly live here, but it's just human agency.

[A]

It's agency all the way down, all the way down.

[B]

And that's why once you see it, you can't fundamentally unsee it, because it's the only, it's not the only thing that makes human beings unique. But we are the only species that is fundamentally capable of happening to life.

[A]

Why is it so important to you? It's an interesting definition. I can see why you happening to life, not life happening to you, is important. Why do you care? Why is it so crucial? Why Is it the most important idea of the 21st century to you?

[B]

I think like growing up in the uk, you naturally potentially have a default low agency setting. I remember when I first heard the idea, it was Eric Weinstein on Tim Ferriss podcast and I had to pull over the car and like write this down. I was like, oh, okay. This kind of begins to explain so much of the world and so much of my personal world. And then as I mentioned, once you begin to see it, you, you can't unsee it. You see it every single way. And I've got some examples on the boards that I'll come onto. But it's so important to me because once you realize, you know your line of like, skill issue, everything is just skill issue, everything's agency, everything is basically an agency issue. Like when you actually. One of the fundamental beliefs I think around high agency is that all problems are solvable. And once you begin to take that on board, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics. This isn't self help, it's physics. All problems are solvable with enough knowledge.

[A]

What are some good examples of high agency?

[B]

Okay, so using the spectrum, I've got two examples that you're going to like.

[A]

Here we go.

[B]

So on the right hand side of the high agency spectrum we have SpaceX. So the recent chopsticks landing. So SpaceX starts with Elon selling PayPal and deciding as you do to just get into rocket science. And rather than go to university, he decides that that's a painfully slow download process to learn, so just gets a load of rocket science books and starts happening to life creates SpaceX. And one professor, SpaceX was this early startup, not the juggernaut that it is today. The best rocket scientist professor I believe in America, he goes, I can't believe it. Five of my top 10 students are working at this company called SpaceX. He goes, I need to meet the guy that runs that. So Elon arranges the interview and this guy has a load of questions for Elon, what are you doing? And immediately he realizes the reason why Elon's taking this meeting is to find out who the other five were. And boom. So anyway, keeps obviously goes through all the ups and downs and you end up with a rocket reverse landing, catching with the chopsticks and reducing the legs that's needed. The amount of repairs that's needed as a result of massive points massively accelerates the human's ability to happen to life, to be able to escape the planet.

[A]

Just on the SpaceX thing Bill Perkins introed me to one of the guys that works for Elon, and this guy bet his entire career on the belly flop manoeuvre. Have I told you this story?

[B]

No.

[A]

So when these rockets re enter because the purpose is for them to be reused, they're coming in to land. They're not gonna land sideways. You're not gonna put thrusters on the side of it, you're gonna land it upright like this. But the problem of bringing it into land like that is that this is aerodynamically the one that has the least drag. So they thought, right, okay, how can we use air friction to reduce the speed of reentry whilst also still landing the thing upright? So that we get to use the same boosters to slow it down that we use to get it to take off? And he created the belly flop maneuver. So if you watch it, when it comes in, it's coming in sideways like this, and then only at the last moment does it rotate. It stops. So this guy, apparently, the first time that it ever happened, like, if it hadn't worked and he'd left, I can't remember what NASA, some huge illustrious organization, bet his entire career, all of his reputation and at this new company would have been a laughingstock of the entire industry and makes it work.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Fucking cool.

[B]

Wow. All problems are solvable. Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, I say that. Let's now contrast that with. Do you recognize this on the left?

[A]

It's a train in the uk, yes.

[B]

It's not just any train in the uk, Christopher. It's Northern Rails trains. So for people outside the uk, these would be the trains that you have Northern Rail in the Northeast. Right. It's not just a Northwest thing.

[A]

Cool.

[B]

So I would have got on this coming from the northwest of the UK. And just to contrast SpaceX, obviously, at the other end of the high agency spectrum, and Northern Rail at the other end of the high agency spectrum. So what I wanted to. I did bring it just to read it out. So this is a recent inquiry into Northern Rail. So you have the Mayor of Manchester sitting down with the head of the trade unions for Northern Rail, or the people that work quite high up at Northern Rail. And throughout the last few years, anybody who's experienced Northern Rail, it's too expensive, there's trains getting cancelled constantly, there's delays, et cetera. So they're doing an inquiry into what's going on. It starts with the mayor. I've heard you're still using fax machines to do these things. Can that possibly be true? It's Very much true. Chair. How. How on earth is that the case in 2024? Well, that's a very reasonable question. It's our challenge to get rid of them. We have plans to get rid of them. You could do it tomorrow? We absolutely could. Are you going to do it tomorrow? We're not going to do it tomorrow. Why? Because the tools we use to get information and messages to our crew will iron faxes. Amazingly, we will get there in the end because we're forced to, because fax technology in telecoms turns, turns off our plan that we're putting forward anyway. It cuts in. It's like how the Mayor goes on to say, like, how have we poured millions of millions of privatized money into this? And it's still, we're still using fax machines in 2024. And he goes on and talks about, yeah, we're going to get around to it, we're going to get around to it. And it just ends with, I mean, I personally don't think many people watching this will consider replacing fax machines as an issue, as depth of depth and complexity. So just the two contrast here of fax machines on the trains in the UK and reverse, like landing a rocket is two complete polar opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to travel and logistics.

[A]

From our insight into the British National Health Service through youcef, we both know that the NHS still heavily, heavily relies not only on faxes, faxes between departments and not only faxes. The whole thing is run on Windows xp. I don't even know how you have access. I don't even know how machines are able to run Windows XP anymore.

[B]

There's an incredible Twitter account at the minute called Days of NHS Spending.

[A]

You sent me this. You sent me this the other day. What was it? The Palm Jumeirah Beach.

[B]

Yeah. So the Palm Jumeirah beach in Dubai. It's a tweet where it talks about it's the most expensive, I think, physical infrastructure ever built and it equates to 30 days of NHS spending. And he just constantly, anytime anybody talks about a number that's going to be saved or a crazy amount of spend, it's just constantly quantified into the number of days of NHS spending. Absurd.

[A]

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[B]

Whoa, brings me on to my, my next one. Okay, so we have two contrasts here. One end of the spectrum, we have the US Department of Education on the low agency end which it something around 20 to $30,000 they spend on students per year. And they are ranked it's the highest in the world the US spends on education. Meanwhile they're ranked between 20th and 35th, both for literacy and numeracy. So spending so much money, getting so little out of it is a wild start of something along the lines of over 50% of Americans have lower than sixth grade literacy. So on the right end is one of the best books I've ever listened to. It's about an hour long and I'll just open up the question first because it's completely reset this question for me, which is what is a 10 year old capable of? And this book kind of answers that question. So it's called Don't Tell Me I can't. It's written by a 14 year old at the time called Cole Summers. And essentially just to contrast it to the Department of Education, it starts with him very early on, around about five or six years old, and his dad served in the military and had issue in training that basically left him disabled and with injuries for the rest of his life. And one day he's getting raised by his dad and he's about to hit the age of going to primary school and they see these kids like misbehaving and saying some like awful shit outside of their house and they decide, you know what, we're gonna homeschool him. And he opts in for that decision. He goes, I don't wanna hang out with those kids. Unfortunately, his dad then ends up needing lots of operations throughout his homeschooling and his. He one day is kind of sat there, his dad's recovering from all these surgeries and he says to his dad, how do people get rich? And his dad just replies, I imagine at the time on so much medication and just trying to keep his kid busy, he goes, I don't know, because we're a poor family. He goes, maybe go and watch some Warren Buffett videos on YouTube. So a six year old goes and start watching Warren Buffett, Charlie munger videos on YouTube, consumes everything about Warren Buffett. And Charlie Munger understands like Munger's iron laws of prescription. Starts learning everything about business and compound interest all for himself on YouTube. Then at the age of seven, the age of seven just goes, well, I'll just start my first company. Seven year old starts his first company selling rabbits to the local restaurants, gets it up to $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And that's real revenue, not like a Shopify bullshit screenshot, right? $1000 for a 7 year old at the age of 8. He then learns about Amazon not paying tax. He goes, how, how is Amazon not paying tax? So he starts just teaching himself the tax code on the online at the age of eight, at the age of nine, he buys his first vehicle, like a car.

[A]

What's he do with it?

[B]

So for the, for the farm. So it's not him, but he owns the vehicle, but people are working on it. Yeah. And at the age of 10, he buys his first house for $10,000, watches YouTube videos, learns like flooring, how to do the wiring, completely flips the house, makes a profit on the house. And has he got any help?

[A]

Is anyone assisting him with this?

[B]

I don't know the ins and outs of that specifically. I've got to, I'll probably do more research on that. But the book is incredible. And there's a bit in there where he goes to Scouts cause he's still interacting with the kids. But what the crazy thing is he didn't know that that wasn't normal. He was just going online and he goes to scouts and he's chatting to the other kids about like what they've been up to that day. And they say, yeah, we've just been remembering the planets and like so we have Earth here and Mars and da da da, da da. And he's like, when are we ever going to use this? And he goes, what about you? What have you been up to? And he chats to them about like payroll tax compliance. It's pictured this nine year old at Scouts, but not that. I think the key asterisks on that story is not that everybody should, not every 10 year old should be buying their own house, but it makes you question the education model that we discussed earlier. And I think that's probably one of the biggest inputs of low agency into people. And his story in particular makes you question, well, what is a young person capable of?

[A]

Well, I suppose the education system in both America and in the uk. I don't know if there's anywhere that it isn't very much life is happening to you. Yes, there is no you happening. You're not, you know, until. When's the first time in the UK school system that you get to choose your sort of specialty? Sort of 13, it's after year nine, I think. Remember you're going to pick your GCSes that you're going to focus on and then from there you pick your as, you pick your A levels, then you pick your degree. So up until that point, up until the age of 12, 13, 13, you're just on a set of train tracks. You don't even get to discriminate what you learn, let alone how you learn in broad strokes and then in specific strokes, it's like, well, this is the sequence, this is how the curriculum is put together. And yeah, what's your thing about the behaviors that you were rewarded for in early life are the ones that you get punished for in later life?

[B]

Yes, like in, in school, if you copy people, you're punished and given a detention. In life, if you copy people, you're labeled a successful franchisee owner. But there's like endless amounts of those behaviors where a lot of adult life is about, from my experience at least, seems to be about unlearning behaviors that happened during school. When you actually go down the rabbit hole of the education system, like this Prussian model that came over and it was primarily created for in. To create industrial factory workers. And it still looks like that to this very day, that you have bells that ring.

[A]

They used the same bells in British schools that they were using in the factories. Like the most Pavlovian early on, conditioning.

[B]

It's fucking wild. You have, you have somebody who's in charge of the classroom. You have people moved from cell to cell, uniform or uniform. And also you're told when you can eat, you're told when you can go to the bathroom, you have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. Peter Thiel, I was thinking about this the other day. He has this question of what do or what does. What opinion do you hold that few people agree with you on? And this idea of trying to get you to become an independent thinker, which is quite a difficult question to answer, I certainly struggle with it. But there's a flip of that question which is what do essentially most people agree upon? But nothing's changing and I think it's. The education system is definitely not a good thing. It's obviously not necessarily. There's worse options right before it existed. But I can't think of anything that as many people agree upon that this thing doesn't prepare you for real life. And a good indicator of a training system. I was thinking about this. A good indicator of a training system is how closely it mimics the actual thing. So driving lessons are incredible because you're literally driving and it's painful. But meanwhile school. How much do you remember from school?

[A]

Essentially zero of.

[B]

I was thinking about, you know who I'd love to meet whoever is in charge of foreign languages in the UK at like the department level. I've never met anybody who's learned Spanish, French from school apart from like, bonjour, bonjour, hola. That's it.

[A]

But we still keep going, dedicated two hours a week for two years to it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's bizarre. I. I have an issue with the early on education system. I know that you've got a massive issue with university as well. For me, I found university to be useful as like a Crash course in socialization. But it feels like you've ordered a main course that tasted like dog shit and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the gravy that came along with it or the plate that it was put on the plate that this dog shit food was served on, that was an enjoyable experience. I took a lot away from that plate. It's very well designed, great quality. Really. I remember it. But yeah, it does feel like if you're trying to create a highly agentic populace, school isn't exactly the best preparation.

[B]

Have you seen? I need to double verify these studies. I'd be interested to replicate them. There's a guy called I think Dr. Land who worked for NASA and designed these creative thinking tests to basically gauge how creative somebody is. And the way they would do that is ask for example, number of solutions, different types of solutions, they come up with how they vary from everybody else's solutions, things like that. And a five year old on average of the 1500 that they surveyed scored like 98% on creativity. Kind of follows up every five years and it just, it looks like the reverse of Bitcoin's price. It's just down, down, down, down, down. And we spoke on the previous show of the average person dies at 25 and isn't buried until 75. At the follow up of the study, the 25 year olds, 2% was the 2% of them scored as like creative thinkers. And it kind of makes sense when you're put through this model of wrong right answer set curriculum for you Pavlovian.

[A]

Don't think outside of the box, don't question the question ever.

[B]

That doesn't go down well at schools.

[A]

No. Why do we need to learn this? What's the point of doing that? No, you'd be labeled a disruptive kid. You'd be a bad student. You'd be a bad student. If you ask questions about the question.

[B]

My brother tells me this funny story of when he was at school and he was probably not the most well behaved kid at school, but one day he was like flicking around on the history books and became fascinated by communism in Russia and China and all these people going down this bad ideology. And the teacher goes, what are you doing? He goes, I'm just absolutely fascinated by this, sir. He goes, yeah, that's great, but that's not on the curriculum. And just went back to something about Henry viii completely changed the curriculum. But it is fascinating that I do think we're at this momentous period of time where you now have chatgpt Claude. All these AI tools coming in, where even the work now is just completely redundant. Even this model of preparing for an exam. Talk about feedback loops. You don't find out your exam results, forget even judging exams itself. Not finding out your exam result for three months is such a terrible feedback loop within itself.

[A]

Yeah, Rory Sutherland told me this really funny parable. So he said a copywriter, a graphic designer and an account executive step onto a plane together and they open up the overhead locker and a genie comes out. He says, God, I've been locked in there for so long. Thank you. Thank you for getting me. I'll give you one. One wish each. So the designer says, I think I'd like to have da Vinci's life. I'd like to have his skills, his ability to represent things graphically. He says, done. Away he goes. And then the copywriter comes over, he says, I think I'd like to live like Hemingway did, you know? So the women, the lifestyle, the writing ability. Oh, the writing ability. Done. The account executive comes over, he says, what, what would you like? And he says, I'd like those two guys back. We've got a meeting in two and a half hours.

[B]

That's fucking. That's so Rory. Well off topic, but I have to include it. There's the on top of plane experiments. Charlie Munger tells that one of he goes on a plane, terrorists hijack the plane and say, right, you've got one last dying wish before we blow this sucker up. Think wisely. Then he goes, can I tell you about the beauty of Costco's business model?

[A]

There's an equivalent about aliens come down to Earth and they say, humanity, we can do whatever you want. You can ask us any question. And some idiot that listens to podcasts from the back shouts, what's your morning routine?

[B]

Fuck me.

[A]

Okay, what about. I mentioned some of my sort of real peak high agency people you've accumulated one with this guy that was self taught. Is there anyone else that comes to mind?

[B]

Yes, let me, let me skip ahead.

[A]

Sorry, skip ahead.

[B]

Just before I go on to that one, we have. I just wanted to show you this because it's just fucking cold. To interview. This is the Topography of Tears. Have you seen this?

[A]

The Topography of Tears?

[B]

Yes. Like so, yeah, this photographer. I will come back onto your question, but just quickly, let me blast through this. This photographer took different types of tears and put them under a microscope. And here, for example, is tears of grief. Here is tears of joy. They actually look different under a microscope.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

So this was just A way for me to try and get this in the show because it looks so cool. But the agency example here is being at a funeral and thinking, fuck, I never got in touch for the last few years and now they're gone. Tears of grief at the other end, tears of joy of fuck, I'm so glad that we did that holiday together. Or I'm so glad that I arranged all those trips that I did with them. So I thought that was a.

[A]

That's fascinating. I wonder why that's the case. I want to know what those structures are made of. I want to know what those lines are. So for the people that are listening, the tears of grief are much more sparse. Whatever the lines, there's some kind of structure. It looks a little bit like halfway between little cells and electrical circuits. And then at the other end, the tears of joy have a lot more activity, a lot more structure in them. There's lines everywhere and I wonder what that is. We can dig deeper and come back to it.

[B]

Let me go back to your question I rudely ignored. So essentially the. I want to come on to the most high agency person, but I just want to address like the. Probably the YouTube comments at this point. So I wanted to steal, I wanted to steal man the other side. So for example, life happens to people. You piece of shit. Hope you get fourth stage cancer so I can call you up and tell you to happen to life. Can't wait to tell the orphans they just need to happen to life. And big nose twat. No, who's written that?

[A]

That was just.

[B]

I wanted somebody from your. That's awful.

[A]

I don't know. You do seem to have a accurate perception of what the comments are going to be. If everyone can comment small nose twat in the, in the section below, that'd be great.

[B]

Essentially the most apex high agency example is this guy coming up now.

[A]

So actually let's just linger on, let's just linger on that thing for a second. Why do you think it is that conversations around being able to happen to life, self authorship, agency taking control. Why do you think it is that it triggers that particular immune response from people?

[B]

I think they're right. I think they're right at the end of the day. That's why I'll come onto it in a second, but I don't want to misconvey that life doesn't happen. It definitely happens. Going back to the London example earlier, like if it wasn't for the heat, if it wasn't for the clothes that we take for granted, we'd literally be within two to three hours, hypothermia and death. So I don't think they're wrong and I think it makes sense. But then when. This is why I take it away from a self help conversation when you begin to go, well, does it defy the laws of physics in terms of knowledge creation? Well, no, it doesn't. So therefore it is possible. It doesn't mean that awful things aren't going to happen. They're almost guaranteed to happen, which is why I tried to basically update the model based off their feedback. I don't think they're wrong. So essentially it's more of a four dimensional model that the higher agency somebody has, the more. Sorry, the more life is happening. Sorry the more agency that they ultimately have. Which is why I wanted to come on to.

[A]

So life is happening is there is a pressure up against you and there is a pressure of you leaning into it at the same time. Yeah, that's interesting. I was having this conversation. Destiny taught me this. I think I gave it some wanky me name of like the two step theory of two step flow potential. I think I called it two step theory of potential. So Destiny, I thought was kind of an interesting person to put this to because he's somebody that's from the left but also has quite a lot of agency. In fact, I'm reading a book at the moment by Martin Seligman that has a quiz and much of the quiz is asking you questions about agency. A person steals something from a shop. What are the reasons for why they stole? Like did they have choice, could they have done differently, et cetera. And this is supposed to map you on the spectrum from left to right. But Destiny seems, at least when I asked him these questions, to be someone who kind of does take charge. It doesn't really sort of outsource to structure and environment, things which are maybe of personal responsibility. And I asked him this question about, well, how do you marry the fact that people are both at the mercy of the environment around them and the authors of their own life that you don't want to externalize your sense of control. But you also have to understand that there are limits to what you can do. And he basically describes it as having a range within which your outcomes in life, your capacities sit. And this range is determined by your genetics, the environment you're in, the time that you were born, you could be the best guitar player in history. But if you were born before the guitar was invented, guess what? It's not happening. So he says there is a range that you sit within. And this is determined by the environment you're in, things that are outside of your control, but within that range, everything is exclusively on you. And for some people it's easier, for some people it's harder. But there is a range that you sit within and I think that that kind of marries things quite nicely. Some people, me and you, probably not going to do very well in the NBA, but within the range that we do have, football, freestyle, perhaps you can get a bit further.

[B]

Yeah, I think just on that specific point, it, it's not that problems don't happen, it's that fundamentally all problems are solvable. So. And it all comes down to agency. Like cancer, as horrific as it is and it happens to people, it's truly fucking horrific. But it's ultimately a humanity level. It's an agency problem, insolvable.

[A]

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[B]

The most apex high agency guy. Do you recognize this guy? Guy called Wilbur. No, Great name. So let's just start off with life happening to him. So smart kid, Wilbur. He wants to go to Yale University. He's about to get in. He's playing hockey one day and gets his face smashed in so badly by a bloke. It's interesting studying history. This bloke was clearly a nutter. And guess what they used to do for nutters? They'd prescribe them cocaine. I know a few nutters like that. Mainly in Northern Rail over the years. So anyway, he gets prescribed cocaine, smashes this guy's face, him so much, so he's bedridden for two to three years.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

So Yale University's cancelled whilst he's bedridden. His mum is terminally ill, so he's kind of in bed, I imagine, caring for her while she's in bed, back and forth. So truly, life is happening. Wilbur. This fucking guy, man. This guy sat there in bed, asked the question, why can birds fly but humans can't? What? Like, why is that? So just sits there in bed getting book after book. And there's not many books back then about aerodynamics and how things can fly. But he's studying birds. Wilbur teams up with his brother, becomes fascinated by the question and starts to move over on the spectrum a little bit over here to like happening.

[A]

His surname is right?

[B]

Indeed, indeed. So Wilbur and Orville, his brother, they reverse from first principles. Where is the best place with wind and sand in America? Because they need to test flight. They need to find somewhere with a soft landing and with enough wind to.

[A]

Begin to test it.

[B]

So they get all the Weather Bureau consensus data, which back then there's no Internet, so they're just reaching out to the local council and finding the ship. And he. Sorry. They have all this weather data and they realize it's 700 miles away in Kitty Hawk. And I realized, well, oh, they can just fly. That I was, oh, no, they can't. They can't fly there. Right? So this is the furthest they've ever been from home. They go all the way down to Kitty Hawk and the two of them talk about happening to life, the two of them. And by the way, back then, this is a key thing that people. I always forget about history. Is that it? It was a mock thing. Flying was seen as everybody who tried it failed or died. And there was poems at the time of how ridiculous it would be to even think you could fly. Like, it was a. It was a joke at the time. So the two of them are seen in Kitty Hawk, these two. Imagine this. So you're looking outside your window and there's these two brothers there for hours at the outside, just like moving their arms like this, pretending they're different types of birds, just mimicking the way birds move their fucking wings. So they're there for ages. They then begin to design, like a win a wing system based off the way birds do. The next problem that they have is they realize that all the measurements around aerodynamics that they've been given at the time from a German fellow were completely incorrect. So they have to. They build. When they go back home, they build a wind tunnel in their garage that can go about 27 miles an hour. And they're creating little objects and putting it through. And they reverse engineer. Oh, everything that we know about aerodynamics is completely wrong. So they fix that problem and it's problem after problem. It's next building an engine that's light enough and you end up with a scenario. Before they create the airplane, they failure after failure after failure after failure after failure. Wilbur looks at his brother one day and says, no man will ever fly for a thousand years. One year later, he's up there in the airplane and flies for the first time ever. And that for me is I think Wilbur Wright. And obviously his brother Orville is the apex example of high agency and the impact it then has. Because unless you study history, you just go, well, Band's always been able to fly. And you can know this has been since the early 1900s that we've been able to do it. And the amount of times, how many times a week do you think about the Wright brothers?

[A]

Ever since you sent me that photo, I encountered a situation toward the start of this year and I explained it to you and you sent me this photo and it must be, is it Wilbur in the plane and Orville on the hill in front of him and he's doing this and he's jumping and he's got his hands in the air and this plane's off the ground. And yeah, I know that you use this to basically tyrannize your staff.

[B]

I mean, I think about it like once a week. It's so funny. So I'll be like staring when there's a plane going by, once you know the story, I'll be staring once a plane goes by. And my girlfriend will be like, are you thinking about the Wright brothers? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the fact that most people don't know their names, the fact there's not statues, the fact there's not a day. And meanwhile there's like me getting on an Emirates flight, like stressing out my. It's 20 minutes late and you're now there going, what do you mean? They've not got Diet Cokes on the plane and there's TV entertainment there, but it's just agency. Like a problem that seemed completely insolvable, didn't defy the laws of physics. It was possible. And now our whole world, me and you being here today, flying into London is purely because of these two fuckers.

[A]

I kind of like that. I'd love to dig a bit deeper into his story and do a little bit more research around the fact that he said that man won't fly for a thousand years, but didn't stop and then got there a year later. I've been really, really spending a lot of time thinking about not believing that you're worthy of achieving a thing and yet still managing to attain it anyway. This sort of make it until you fake it basically. A lot of the time we believe that we need to have faith in a thing before we can go and do the thing. But it's an unnecessary precursor. It may make the process more enjoyable, it may make you have more confidence, it may make you more efficient in the things that you do, may make you more effective at getting the outcomes that you need. But it's largely an unnecessary step if we assume that what you're optimizing for is outcomes, not inputs. If you can do the outcomes regardless of how you got there, whether you believe that you were going to do it or not, whether you thought it would be a thousand years, or whether you thought it'd be six months if you do, someone could have been Wilbur, alternate universe, slightly different personality and being like we're going to get it done in three weeks and it would have taken a year if he'd done the same things. It's not going to. The human man won't fly for a thousand years and it's going to happen in a year. So just, you know, me and you talk about, we obsessed about this a lot. Your birthday this summer. But the more and more that I think about it, optimizing for outcomes, not for inputs is just it scythes through everything. And oddly it's quite a high agency way to to do this. Because the true or another element of high agency would be accepting that you live in an irrational world and that your psychology is one that is not built to be able to accurately identify how outcomes are going to come from inputs. So stop believing that you know how this is going to work and just, okay, this thing seems to be happening in whatever way. Both me and you are on ridiculous diets. Do you know why it works? Kind of. I can probably bro science cobble something together. Some doctor probably could too. But I bet that there's maybe even more explanations for why it shouldn't work or doesn't or whatever is ridiculous. And I'm like, yeah, but I feel better when I'm on it. I'm optimizing for outcomes. I'm not bothered about the mechanism, I'm not bothered about the inputs.

[B]

Yes, because fundamentally it was possible. That's the big thing. And this is a try and say this in the least offensive way, but I think there's some truth to it that a lot of high achievers or high agency people are often described as being on the Asperger's or autism spectrum spectrum. And I think the reason behind that is that all their bottlenecks are just logistics and operations. It's just like, just you look at someone like Elon or Zoc or somebody like that, Bezos, and a lot of it is just logistics, operations, bottlenecks. Whereas for maybe people who like myself that go through the education system and really struggle to then break out of that creativity model day, it's creativity bottleneck. It's a emotional bottleneck, is a big one of like, what will people think if I do this? Yep. There's so many different bottlenecks that aren't logistics and operations. But for people who have a little touch of the TSM or the Asperger's.

[A]

What'S the opposite of high agency?

[B]

It would be low agency. It would be outsourcing your worldview to other people who are just outsourcing their worldview to you. And you just have this kind of reflexive mirror. What's your one around the. Is it the Fabylline paradox? Is it that one?

[A]

Abilene Paradox? Abilene paradox, yeah, that somebody invites you to their wedding thinking that you want to go. You say yes, despite not wanting to be there because you think that they want you there. It describes how in a system, especially a social system, people can arrive at a suboptimal scenario for everybody because everybody presumes that everybody else wanted it. It's not too dissimilar to the Keynesian beauty contest that you spoke about previously, which is where you make a judgment in a beauty contest not of who you think is the most beautiful, but who you think other people will think is the most beautiful. And then you can continue to scale this back. It's just an infinite, infinite regressive prediction all the way back. So are you talking about low agency? You know, both me and you, since you first came on the show six years ago, inversion is one of those really powerful tools. So half, maybe a third of what people should try to do is become high agency, but probably two thirds of what they should do is try to avoid being low agency. So talk to me about how you come to think about that side of the equation.

[B]

Yeah. Well, in the essay around high agency that I've written, which we can link to, essentially what I call them are low agency traps that are just easy and I've documented maybe nine or 10. But I think there's infinite amount of agency traps just part of being a human being. So there's a few which I can read now. So one is called the Midwit Trap. And the way I was thinking, what's a fun way of actually explaining this without boring people? And it's a SMS message. So imagine you're in a third world jail and you've got somebody who's in the Midwit trap and you text them, hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? This is how the Midwint trap would think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Lots of updates from me. I'm on day 30 of my juice cleanse. I'm thinking of doing a degree in criminology to specialize in how jails work so I can get you out. And I've also watched 30 TED talks on the topic. So the Midwit trap. I've got a PhD in the midwit trap is this idea of trying to be smarter than you are, an overcomplicating thing. So for the Midwit trap, where it comes from is the Midwit meme. So you have the guy on the left, the guy on the right, the guy in the middle, two opposite ends of the IQ bell curve, and the guy on the left and the guy on the right often come to the same simple conclusion. The guy on the left can't overthink things, so he just goes for the simple answer. The guy on the right is so intelligent that he's demystified everything and come back to the simple shit. And the guy in the middle is the one who's managed to overcomplicate things and overthink things. So like one meme that I made is guy on the left make something people want. Guy on the right make something people want. When it comes to business, then in the center it's, I'm going to do this five year consultancy program and then I'm going to watch all these TED talks. And then once I've done these surveys, da, da, da, I'm ultimately going to find the thing. So the guy in the Midwit Trap would never even get moving with any agency towards breaking you out of a third world jail because he's constantly overthinking and trying to intellectualize things too much.

[A]

Yeah, I think specificity as well is Something else that me and you talk about a lot. Avoiding vagueness and it's necessary but not sufficient to be in. To become high agency or to avoid low agency is to have intentionality. Right. To choose what it is that you're going to do if. If high agency is winning at the game. Intentionality is choosing which game you're going to play.

[B]

When I was thinking about high agency originally, I had four things that underpin it. So if you imagine high agencies like this table here and then you have the, the four legs, the four things that I think underpin it are clear thinking, resourcefulness, bias to action and disagreeability. So if you even go back to the Wright brother story there. The amount of clear thinking that they needed to do throughout of. Oh, okay. Oh, the aerodynamics. Let's actually take these to first principles and test it. The amount of resourcefulness of. And I probably think resourcefulness. Interested to get your opinion on this. It's like creativity and persistence combined, like the ability to create new novel creative solutions. Bias to action is just like moving, moving Napoleon style. And disagreeability is the guy earlier when Derren Brown rings the bell, who sits there and goes, well, maybe there is. Maybe I don't have to follow everybody else. And perfect example being the Wright brothers rather than just carrying on their bike shop and trying to build that into enterprise. Disagreed with the whole consensus based off the laws of physics that people could fly. So you have those four things and I think going back to your point there, intentionalism is like a sister of clear thinking.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

It's like a clear thinking leads to intentionalism.

[A]

Yeah. Doing what you meant to do.

[B]

Yes. Because yeah, there's definitely a difference between high agency. You could theoretically be high agency and unintentional that we've spoken about before.

[A]

We know.

[B]

Absolute psychopath.

[A]

A few people like that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But it results in you being very original and action oriented in service of something that's a total fucking waste of time. And I mean that, that would be kind of like a version of hell because you had all of the difficult raw materials, you had all of the skills, you had all of the networking, you had all of the capacity to actually bring to bear something on this fucking very hard to wrangle planet. And you were pointing in totally the wrong direction.

[B]

It's the George Soros thing, right? It's George Soros, who I'm sure we're going to get flagged immediately on YouTube for mentioning the Soros. But becoming one of the most successful hedge fund managers ever. And if rumors are to be true or believed to be true. He wanted to be a philosopher and he spent his whole life like just crashing the pound and trade away, do.

[A]

You know what I mean?

[B]

But just kept going up. Bill Perkins has that bit in his book about that mate of his who said stop me when I get to 20 million and just keeps going at 50 million and he's now at like multiple billions and he's still going because he's addicted to it. So yeah, you could have resourcefulness, clear thinking, biased action, disagreeability, but without intentionalism is a dangerous one.

[A]

You're fully fucked. What are some of the other low agency traps?

[B]

Another one kind of related to what you mentioned there is the, is the rumination trap. So hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Sorry for the slow reply. I've been thinking about it. I know I've spent the last year thinking about it. I think I just need more time to think. I'm trying to think about my overthinking problem. If I can solve that, I think I can start. So the rumination trap is one I began to learn a lot more from doing cognitive behavioral therapy. And it's just this endless loop. I mean we were chatting about this the other day of if you could analyze the 50 to 60,000 thoughts per day and really see them. The problem with the human brain is you have these 50 to 60,000 thoughts, but because they're constantly in short term memory, you don't fully. If you could see the graph, you'd love a dashboard. Yeah, if you could see the dashboard. I've thought about, I've worried about that conversation with somebody 20% of the week for the last three years. And it's just ruminating around, but when it's there, fresh in consciousness, you don't see the dashboard, you don't see that.

[A]

So you just want two things going on there. There's the fact that you're in a new place, a new time of life, and you can always have an old thought in a slightly new way. Gives it a sense of novelty. So you kind of are kidded into believing that it's something new. And the other part is that we're creatures of habit and old thoughts, even ones that are quite uncomfortable, are familiar to us. And that familiarity gives us a sense of comfort and that comfort gives us a sense of sort of habituation. You know, you might not, obviously not with this show because it's fantastic, but many people will watch or listen to YouTube channels that they kind of don't really enjoy anymore, but they Just know where they're going to go, that it's very predictive. It's like putting on an old, comfortable leather pair of shoes. Like, slide my feet into these. I know what his opinion is going to be. This is sweet.

[B]

And the algorithm just keeps you in this static loop.

[A]

Of course it does. So, yeah. Rumination trap. So the rumination trap, I'm going to guess, is diametrically opposed to bias for action. Yes, it's the opposite of that.

[B]

So a personal rumination story that I had was. And the problem with rumination is you try and forecast into the future constantly. That's the big thing from cognitive behavioral therapy is they call it the crystal ball. Or you're trying to forecast in the future ahead, and unless you can get a perfect outcome, you just kick the can down the road and then ultimately you end up with not much road left and just a lot of cans. Yes. So one that came to mind for me. So when I was thinking about clear thinking, there's the three big decisions, right? There's where you live, who you're with, and what you're doing. And one thing I struggled with for ages was I'm in this location right now. Maybe I could go to this other location. And what would happen in my head is I would have option A of me staying in current location or option B going to new location. And when I would think of option A, it would go nightmare mode. So everything that could possibly go wrong would go wrong. And the other option has worked out perfectly. And then I'd flip to the other option and the reverse was true. When I had left and gone to that location, everything's gone wrong. And I've now missed out on everything. And as a result, it's this doom loop that then begins to occur. And the more you kick the can down the road, the more you ruminate, the bigger this thing becomes and it's this absolute doom loop cycle. And then you go, I don't want to think about this. Which makes the thing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, there's a conversation I heard recently about action being an antidote to anxiety and that the bias for action. Just look, you might think that by worrying and obsessing and ruminating and thought looping and fearing and gripping your way through this problem that it reduces down the likelihood of it happening somehow. That it brings to bear more control, that it almost like impacts reality in some sort of a way. It makes no difference. Again, what are we focused on? We're focused on outcomes. Not on inputs. And the people that have that bias for action, they end up just finding out whether or not this thing is going to work way quicker.

[B]

The biggest thing that I actually found for people listening who probably had that doom loop that I have and still have is in terms of getting a bias to action is rather than calling it a decision, just moving to experiments. So just looking at the two and going, okay, I think this one has 60% probability. This one has 40% probability. I'm going to go with the 60% one and I'm going to fully back the decision. And I'll book time six months from now to review how it went and then change. If not. Because I realized in the five years spent ruminating about the two different options, I could have lived in both cities multiple times.

[A]

Both of us have done things where we've spent more time taking, making a decision than it would have taken to have worked out whether it was going to work or not.

[B]

Yes. So much time wasted. And the thing I love, the thing I love about that is if you actually just did the thing, the amount of real data that your amygdala can't just sit there creating these doomsday scenarios. The big realization I had when I spoke to the CBT guy that I worked with was when you actually look at those nightmare modes that are playing. What's really strange about rumination is it skips like two to three years in the future. And the worst case scenario it's always, I won't be able to cope. The worst case scenario will happen, I won't be able to cope and people will judge me. Is what happens in the doom loop in the rumination cycle. But it always skips two to three years in the future. And he made a great point of it's like a horror film. It just starts now and goes two to three years in the future. He goes, but real life's more like a documentary. What's. You have agency. What's all the steps that lead you up.

[A]

You can bail out or change or adjust course at any point along that.

[B]

Yeah, I think a good way of moving out the rumination cycle. I kind of call it the difference between clear thinking and muddy thinking. And ultimately, we spoke about this the other day, the kind of aphorism I have, you know, the Nietzsche thing of never trust a thought that happens indoors, never trust a thought that happens in your head is a good rule of thumb. And I that Balaji idea of transformation. So if thought happens in my head, it's not true until I'VE drawn it out, written it down, spoken it out loud to another person, created an equation, put it in a spreadsheet, whatever it is. And I actually think probably 50% of the benefits of therapy is just going from head to head out loud.

[A]

It's more, it's more than that. This is one of the reasons why I'm not on substack, but I'm an avatar for people having a substack or some form of written, publicly consumed form of artistic output or self reflection, specifically for self reflection. I'm a really good avatar for someone that would not have been able to keep up a writing practice for four and a half years, or however long it's been now since I launched my newsletter. And now we're like a quarter of a million words written in whatever, four and a half years, something like that. But it's invariably the best part of my week. It's my favorite thing. The guy that does the podcast, his favorite thing is the hour and a half that he spends writing every week because of that precise reason. It synthesizes down the most salient thing that I've learned from that one week. And I know I only have whatever 500 words or a thousand words to write this in, so I need to be like high in brevity. I need to be pretty precise. I need to triage what it is I want to talk about. Well, if I talk about this, I can't talk about that. So which one's it going to be? Which one's more important to you? Which one are you feeling more right now? And yeah, you know, big, big fan of people having especially a public facing version of this. I understand. Here we go.

[B]

No go.

[A]

We'll get back to talking to George in one minute. But first I need to tell you about Element. For the last three years, every single day, I have started my morning with Element. It's a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. You might not be tired, you might not need more caffeine, you might just be dehydrated. Proper hydration is not just about drinking sufficient water. It's having the right amount of electrolytes in your body to let yourself use those fluids. Element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients or any other junk. It's a game changer. This orange salt first thing in the morning tastes phenomenal and they have a no questions asked unlimited duration refund policy so you can buy it, try the entire box and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back and you don't even need to return it. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com modernwisdom that's drinklmnt.com ModernWisdom we have a people that journal. It's phenomenal in many ways because you're able to say things that you can't for public consumption. But I get the sense that, at least for me, when I write things for public, I'm held to such a rigorous standard for precision to really, really clarify my thinking that I'm sure I miss lots of advantages that proper journaling would allow. But it also does other things, which is I think it's easier for you to create structures and frameworks and ideas that you can then later refer to as opposed to like referring to this messy thing that's kind of all over the place that's in a journal. So, yeah, it's a mixed bag.

[B]

One thing on the writing side that I found specifically useful related to that is a photo can't do this. A video can't quite do this. But writing actually gives you the ability to go back 10 years, let's say 10 years in the future now, and understand how you think today or be able to now today go back 10.

[A]

Years to snapshot of your mind.

[B]

Yeah, that's how I thought. And because so many of the thoughts just disappear completely down the drain, it's so beautiful in that regard.

[A]

What about some more traps?

[B]

Some more traps. So we mentioned specificity there. So this is the vague trap. So. Hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? Yes, I've been working around the clock. Amazing. Any specific updates? I don't have any timelines yet or deadlines or action items, but I'm working on it. And yeah, the vague trap is, I think, such an easy one to fall into because you're just trying to avoid falsifiable criteria. The biggest takeaway I took from Musk's biography was it's just like endless anecdote of we're going to do this by X day this time. And then there's a timer around the office to the second, counting down to that specific thing. And then the gas, the, you know, the metaphor around. If you have a container, the gas will just expand or decrease Based off the size of the container. Constantly it just seems.

[A]

Parkinson's Law written all over the. Yeah, the factory.

[B]

There's a great line of General ambition gives you. General ambition gives you anxiety. Specific ambition gives you direction. And I mean specificity everywhere is so important, even even in writing the. Or talking. The more specific that you are, the more impactful it, the more impactful it can be. And I actually find the reason why specificity, we avoid it, people in the vague trap, or at least myself. The reason why we avoid it is because there's a failure point.

[A]

There's no criteria for success. There's no criteria for failure.

[B]

And if you can just live in that generality, it's impossible to ever have agency, I think.

[A]

So when I played cricket, when I was getting towards 17, 18, I was on the boxer Durham, which is a top flight club team in the uk, would be equivalent to whatever Manchester United academy or something like that. And I remember that on a Monday the coach would call and he'd ask how I got on. He might have checked the papers, he might not have done because my performance would have been in the papers in terms of numbers. But he would ring me and he'd ask how I got on. And I remember the weeks where I was really low confidence, which would happen quite a lot. The specific style of cricket that I played was kind of like a special match circumstance. So the conditions needed to be very right. It was leg spin, which is like a complex type of bowling. And if the game wasn't at the right format, if it was too short, you didn't tend to get bowled if the pitch was too wet, if the ground wasn't gripping, if wickets were tumbling or weren't tumbling sufficiently quickly, you were very far down the list. You were very powerful, but only to be used in specific break glass in case of specific circumstance. And there's something on cricket called a tfc. Thanks for coming. And it's when you don't bat, you don't bowl and all you do is field tfc. Thanks for coming. Because that's what your captain would say to you at the end. Thanks for coming, mate, as opposed to well played or we can do better next time. And I remember I would get these calls and on the weeks when I wasn't confident, a lot of the time I'd just have a TFC and he would say, how'd you get on over the weekend, mate? I was like, dude, you know what it is like, I wish that I could have. I really wanted the opportunity. Secretly. I didn't A lot of the time I didn't want the opportunity to have done it because by setting the potential for success, by having the opportunity for success, there would have then been a criteria for failure. So a lot of it was fear of failure. And that was something that largely now I've managed to get it. I mean, once you've done a live show in front of three and a half thousand people, the potential for failure is, you know, you've looked it in the face. But I think I'm a good avatar for someone I think whose disposition would have been low confidence, low self esteem as a kid. And now largely that's not the same sort of problem that I have anymore.

[B]

And you think a large amount of that is down to specificity or being less vague?

[A]

Certainly being less vague. But largely it's just crushing volumes of testing yourself in the real world because again, you can make it until you fake it. If you just keep on doing things and stuff goes well, there's only so long that imposter syndrome or low confidence or low self esteem or a lack of self belief or whatever can exist before it just gets neutron starred out of existence. You're like, I have this fucking super dense body of work that self belief is overrated. Generate evidence that Ryan Holiday quote and you just generate so much evidence that it sucks the living shit out of whatever it is that you were worried about. But talking about the vague trap. I was in the gym in London. I told you this story. I was in the gym in London last week, the day of the show. And it's the Kensington, the gym, unmanned, like it's a, it's a seller, it's a cellar that has a gym in it that's open 24 hours and there's no staff at all looking after it. Me and Z go in and a couple of people ask for photos, which is really nice. And one of the kids asks for photos, young guy, maybe 21, 22, something like this. And he comes up, take the, take the selfie or whatever. And then as I'm leaving, I'm on my way out and he comes up and he's got a, I think he was recording, maybe he had a mic in his hand or something. He was recording it and he said, broke it slightly. Broken English Hey, I know that you're going to be busy, but I just wanted to ask you a question. I want you to ask, you know, I really want to become rich and I'm 22 at the moment. I'm working in a full time job, but I really want to have more self discipline and I want to make more money. Can you teach me how to have more self discipline and make more money? I remember thinking, Zach stood there and Max videographer stood there and this is kid. And I'm thinking, well you know, he's asked, he's obviously something that's important to him. He's come up and he asked this person and he's said that he appreciates, you know, I've got, I've got places to be and such. I don't just give a flippant answer, but I remember thinking like that's a shit question. It's a really bad like can you teach me how to have more self control and make money? Language barrier, etc. Etc. But yeah, I think I told you this and your response would have been.

[B]

The question shit.

[A]

You would have said the first thing I would do is ask a better question.

[B]

Yeah, that's the first bit of advice you give is ask a better question. And I think if you look at the vague trap and how often it comes up, it's because of just even the question he asked there. It's just a lack of, it's a complete lack of clear thinking. It's just like muddy thinking. What I call it is just like vague gifs in my head or like jpegs or words that are popping up and it's never going, what does that mean? Writing that down. Getting more specific, more specific. More specific. Like a great example would be how can I be happy? It's probably the vaguest fucking question that's ever existed. And if you just view the brain as a questioning answering device that we're constantly asking questions and you basically, it's like asking a computer just an endless loop that never closes and it just completely expands into infinity which then leads to this anxiety. But let's say, for example, okay, example of general question, how can I be happy? Specific question would be what does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? Where am I right now? Between the two. And then what's the easiest first step to move up that that's so much more specific versus like a general thing. And I think that's probably the biggest sign I notice whenever I'll get a dm, whether it's a personal thing or a business thing, the easiest questions to answer or the best people are always, I mean the most high agency people. It tends to be super specific. I've tried A, B, C, D, E. I saw that you mentioned F I've done this specific thing here, this problem happened here. What do you think? Versus hey, mate, I want to do this. Anything, question mark. It's so vague and as a result it's so boundless that you can almost never apply knowledge because it's too general.

[A]

What are the traps? Is there anything else?

[B]

Let me see. Yeah, we have the final one, which is the cynic trap. So. Hey, any updates on breaking me out of this jail? I posted my idea on Reddit for feedback. This user called twatmonkey72 broke down. Why? It was a dumb idea. And then I spoke to my cynical British friends and they said, people like us don't do big things. I don't think there's any hope. Sorry. And just the reply is you've literally not attempted anything yet. I think the cynicism thing is definitely. That's one of the reasons I mentioned the British thing in there. It's definitely one that's close to heart. Just experiencing the difference between Britain and America that we've spoken about countless times.

[A]

Yeah, it's. There's also a degree, I suppose, of lack of specificity. There's a vagueness to it as well that if you don't try, you don't have to fear the pain of failure.

[B]

Right.

[A]

If I tell myself that all women are shit, then I'm never gonna seek a relationship with a woman and as a consequence I never have to feel the pain of rejection. If I tell myself that things are never going to get better, then I'm excused of ever having to try. Right. The cope is framing hope as delusion and optimism as embarrassing. And if you know that things are bad and that they're never going to get better, then it's the people acting like things can improve that are dumb and delusional. And the problem, yeah. The upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.

[B]

The upside of never trying is never having to feel the feel of failure. Yeah, I think that's partially true, but I think if you. Then if you zoom out. So that's at the individual level, I think that's true. But if you zoom out, the kind of arrogance to be cynical when you look at just from the wheel to the horse and carriage to the car to the airplane to the rocket. I think I tried to create a word for it once. You're gonna hate this because it's terrible branding, but like this Alzheimer's of the Zeitgeist, like I call it Zeit Salmons. It's fucking awful. I know. It shouldn't be on the podcast, but we just have this weird cynicism around. New basically all the crazy ideas that have occurred we now just completely take for granted. And then when we look at agency in the future, well that's just absurd. So we're in this weird middle zone of never appreciating the just the right proverb, you know, like back to back. High agency people. High agency people. High agency people. Then I'm sat there on an Emirates flight getting annoyed because my Diet Cokes flat. Never appreciating that and also not being able to appreciate that there's literally infinite potential knowledge creation ahead. It's so easy to be cynical.

[A]

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[B]

Primarily, yeah, there's five key ones that I identified so there's no unsolvable problem unless it defies the laws of physics. There's no adults we spoke about previously.

[A]

Adults don't exist Adults don't exist.

[B]

There's no way, there's no guarantee you won't die screaming, which is one of my favorite ones. I'll tell you the, the story behind that one. There's a old Joe Rogan podcast called, with a guy called Kevin Smith. And he comes on and fuck, man, this is he. He comes on and he's telling the story of his dad and he talks about how his dad was this great guy, like, was one of the people that never made any mistakes, worked for the postal service, just kind of gave up on his hopes and dreams just to make his family happy. So he never saw him make a mistake once. And he's out for dinner one evening with his mum and his dad and his family had this amazing dinner. His dad goes back to the hotel, he gets a call at 3am and his brother says, you need to come down to the hospital now. Like, dad's not well at all. He turns up to the hospital and his mum is crying hysterically in a way he's never seen anybody cry before. And his brother just looks at him and like, gives him the nod and just like, can just tell that his dad's died. And he says three words that he says sticks with him that still haunt him to this day. He died screaming. And as a result of that, he said, fuck it. Like even a good guy like that, he died screaming. It's just an absolutely horrific sight. And he kind of justified that for having agency of his existence. Is that ultimately, if you can do everything, everything correct and you ultimately die screaming, what's the point in not like chasing whimsies or just doing ridiculous shit that you can think of because it's such a. I think the amount of people that die screaming that never gets spoken about because everybody has this idealized fantasy that they're just going to die peacefully in their sleep or take a load of LSD and sleep the hookers and come their way out of it. But realistically, yeah, there's no guarantee that you won't die screaming.

[A]

What does that justify?

[B]

Well, I think it's the most extreme way of, like a stoic way of looking at potential mortality in its face and realizing not only am I going to die, I may die screaming. Therefore, you know what? The bell's ringing right now and people are standing up. Why do I have to stand up? Or, yeah, I've got this bike shed right now that's doing really well, but maybe man could fly, who knows, right? And I think, yeah, that it's just staring at the ticking Clock of death. I think there's few greater fuels for agency.

[A]

What about. There's no way is that. There's no particular technique. There's no one specific solution.

[B]

Yeah. So we spoke about this last time. Just to recap. It's the story of Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and then there's a new version, which I want to tell you about. So Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Matthew Syed goes to see them warm up, and we have the three greatest of all time competing at the exact same time. First off, Nadal turns up and his biceps are bulging. He's just like David Goggins, like, in the zone, just fucking hitting the ball back and forth, just pushing himself to the limit. Next up, Djokovic turns up and he's just like a calculated psychopath. No emotion, just getting the job done. And then finally turning up late, giggling as he's arriving at the court is Roger Federer, who's doing these, like, beautiful dinks trick shots, just having fun the entire time. So you have the three greatest of all time, and there's no way that they did it apart from personalizing it to themselves, which is like a kind of probably a core theme of high agency. There's a new one I discovered recently, which is it's between Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who were two of at the period. Like, it's like the Drake or Kendrick of their day, the two main guys making music. And I think they had a lot of admiration for one another, but also like different bits of competition with one another. And his son tells a story of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan sitting down at this cafe in Paris, and they're comparing notes at the end of their career. Kind of like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at that photo shoot. And Dylan asks Cohen, how long did it take you to make Hallelujah? And Cohen lies. He goes, it was about two to three years. It was actually seven. But he wanted to play it down. He spent seven years making that song one of the best songs of all time. And Cohen returns the question about a specific Dylan song that he admires and loves. How long did it take you to write that? 15 minutes. And it goes to show, like, two of the best songwriters of their day, one took seven years to produce one of their best songs. Dylan took 15 minutes to produce one of their best songs. But this idea, I think, in the social media age of you have to do X or you have to do A, you have to do B, you have to do C, or whatever it is, there fundamentally is no Way apart from the way that works.

[A]

Mm. Again, that's focusing on outcomes, not on inputs. Yeah. I don't know. I'm increasingly fascinated by this. What's the. We've done four. There's no unsolvable problems. There's no way. There's no guarantee you won't die screaming.

[B]

I've missed one, haven't I? Hold on.

[A]

And adults don't exist. There's no memory of normal.

[B]

Oh, yeah. There's no memory of normal. So this is the. Yeah, the idea that we spoke about before, that ultimately all normal behavior or all downloading the tribe's behavior and trying to fit in, just. We do it because we want other people to like us, and ultimately it ends up in the memory bin. Like, the only thing you remember about people is their weird eccentricities.

[A]

When they have agency, only the irrational behavior survives.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Have you. Have I told you about inverse charisma? Have I told you this?

[B]

No, no, no.

[A]

Oh, this is fucking fire. So both me and you have kind of been interested in the arc of charisma to Riz, like, making charisma charismatic again or sexy again. Because charisma sounds like something that, I don't know, some real social dynamics pickup artist would have taught you in 2010, standing outside of Topshop, working on your keynote escalation. And then Riz is kind of. I don't know, it's like. It's more cool. It's. So I think a lot of people think that they want to be charismatic, and when they say that, they mean kind of energizing, sort of electric, compelling, interesting. They cause people to sort of be in awe when they walk into a room. And that's true. Like, there's certainly people that are kind of magical like that. But I thought about the people that I like to spend the most of my time around, and sure, some of them are charismatic or some of them are charismatic in little ways, but I think one of the reasons that, you know, I love you as a friend is not because you walk into a room and are the most charismatic person in there, but that often when I'm at dinner with you, I feel like the most interesting or charismatic person in the room. So I think it's significantly easier to be somebody who makes other people feel amazing and feel interesting and feel charismatic and feel compelling than it is to be that yourself. Also, it's way more pro social. It doesn't trigger this sort of jealousy status response because you're not stepping in to try and sort of take over in anything you're facilitating. You're helping everybody else to kind of be the best that they can be. I'm using dinner as an example, but, you know, it works at kind of any social situation. So I came up with this idea of inverse charisma, which is most people think that in order to be well liked, they need to be interesting. But actually the most well liked people are the people who make other people feel the most interesting. There's this great story about, I think it's Winston Churchill's wife, and she goes for dinner with the potential two next presidents of the United States. It's like Harry Truman and somebody else. So she leaves the first dinner, a couple of weeks apart, leaves the first dinner and says, I left that feeling like he was the most interesting person in the world. Of course he could run the country. Then she went for dinner with the second presidential candidate, the one that ended up winning. And she said, I left that feeling like I was the most interesting person in the world. And that's inverse charisma.

[B]

It reminds me of the meme. There's a meme where there's a huge queue on one side and then there's no queue for the next thing. And the one queue with the loads of people behind it is like how to make money, and then the other one is like how to provide value to people. And it's kind of a similar thing to charisma, right? Is that ultimately making money is just value exchange at scale. But we often think of like, how do I make, how do I extract resources from people versus how do I actually give something, turn it into a positive sum game? I've never thought about it like that. That's a really good point.

[A]

I fucking adore inverse charisma, dude. And, you know, embracing that as well. The reason that I really, really like it is that it seems much more in reach for most people. Just be interested in other people and they will find you interesting. There was like a really cool study that was done. They got a guy, a plant, whatever they're called in a study, to go into a plane and they said, I need you to sit next to this gentleman on a long haul flight. You need to give him zero information about yourself for the entirety of the flight. So this guy gets on, speaks to this gentleman next to him, just asks questions, asks questions, ask questions, ask questions the whole way. And then they get off and they interview the person that they were sat next to, the person who was asking all of the questions of. They said, we're just, we're just doing a Short survey about your experience on flight today. You know, we're making sure that people are placed appropriately. And how did you find the flight? Oh, God, it was great. I sat next to this guy. He was so interesting. He was so fascinating. They go, oh, that's brilliant. Can you tell us. Can you tell us his name? He goes, no. Oh, I didn't get his name. He said, well, can you tell us anything else about him? He goes, no, actually, I. I can't. No, he didn't tell me anything at all. The most interesting person was the person that made you feel like the most interesting person.

[B]

Damn. Two. Two things on that.

[A]

Yes, bro.

[B]

I know we've spoken about this before. Of the how to know a person. That book. One of the big takeaways I got from that is. Yeah, I used to try and, like, turn up and go, okay, I've seen this Will Smith video when he. On that. On that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going with the Donald Trump handshake, and I'm like, out alpha them and stuff like that. And one of the things I would do, I try and ask questions and then I'd be like. I'd be like, so, where are you from? I'm from Manchester. Oh, yeah? What's the. What's the weather like there? Yeah, it's cold. What town in Manchester? And it's just these. Closed question, closed question, closed question versus, okay, where are you from? Manchester. So what's it like there?

[A]

Yeah, great question.

[B]

And then you just open up for them to be able to speak forever and ever.

[A]

Dude. I asked. I went for. I went for shawarma with Myron Gaines in Miami at the start of this year. Yeah, I know. What a. You weren't expecting that one.

[B]

How much did you pay on that?

[A]

And we were talking about. He went, you know, he's like a gregarious guy or whatever. He went all over the place. And I can't remember what we were talking about. I think we were maybe talking about something to do with his show or something to do with, like, the Internet or something to do with his history. And I asked him, I said, oh, that's interesting. How'd that make you feel when that was going on? Like, what would. How did you feel about that? And it just really pattern interrupted the whole conversation. And it was quite. To be honest, it was quite a charming moment because he took a moment and was like, huh, I've never really thought about that thing before. It made me kind of like, feel a little bit sad because I was like, huh, Like, I really like. I don't know, it would be. Maybe it would be an indication that more people around you asking that kind of question would be. Would be something good for you. I don't know.

[B]

Yeah, we often just how are you? And then it's da, da, da. And then default back, how are you? There's a story in that how to know a person where it's a teacher in front of a classroom and one of the kids asks, are you married, miss? And she's like, oh no, no, no. And they go, why? I'm divorced. And they're why? And they just keep going that. And she. In two minutes she is flooding, flooding in tears.

[A]

Fuck sake.

[B]

Flooding in tears because. And it goes back to the education stuff where they're so naive.

[A]

They're just why Alain was talking about that too, that there's this sort of innocent spontaneity, this unencumbered transparency that kids have and we have a kind of envy about them. You know, the lack of social mores that have shaved off the interesting parts of their personality. And yeah, so much of life, so much of adult life is getting back to that more childlike curiosity state, I think. Okay, so people want to become more high agency, presumably. We've said it's important, we've identified what it is, how it works, some ways that people can fall into traps to stop them from being it. Some beliefs that those people have are there. Give me something. Give me a pair of breasts. Give me something tangible. Uppease.

[B]

I'd say so there's a, There's a few, right, so the first one that I've mentioned a few times, but I really want to actually get into it, which is the. Does it defy the laws of physics questions. Because, okay, the going back to the brain is a question answering device. So if you say why or what's great about my life, it'll start finding answers. If you say what's awful about my life, it will start finding answers. And let's say we go to a venue together and the guy on the front door says, sorry, not tonight, mate. And then you just go, okay, accept that social reality. And it's, well, does it fundamentally defy the laws of physics? Does it go against Newton's laws of motion? Chris, getting into Tiger Tiger tonight? No. Does it defy Einstein's relativity? No. And that point sounds trite, but then when you actually begin to understand that, well, you go, well, as long as it doesn't defy the laws of physics, anything is theoretically possible with human knowledge. And Again, it sounds trite saying that, but you just look at the last few hundred years since the enlightenment and you have this period before it where nothing happened in humanity. We would just. Your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great granddad's life looked the same as, as yours. And meanwhile we have this change and the ability for humans to understand how things work and implement it into reality and happen to life and shape their environment that we just now completely take for granted. Like me getting annoyed at the flat Diet Coke on the Emirates flight is a big thing. The second thing, which is probably a little less esoteric, that I really, really like as a metaphor, is when you're in the complete low agency and everything is super general and it's like, I don't even know where to begin. I don't even know where to start. One thing I love doing a little experiment I got was going, okay, let's say have a problem right now of had a friend at the minute who, he's an extreme, but a friend we both know, actually he's an extreme workaholic to a point that I've never seen before. And he was talking about how it's a problem, he just doesn't know where to start. And I said to him, I go, okay, where are you at right now out of 10? And it suddenly takes this kind of general infinite universe all the way down to okay, well a bit of a binary choice there. And you can never say seven, right? So he goes, I'm at a three. And I go, okay. And I go, why are you at a three, by the way? Like, why aren't you at a two? And he goes, to be honest with you, cause I've actually not worked tonight and I've come here to see you. I go, okay, so we're getting some specificity here. And I go, okay, well what would take it up to a 4? And he goes, well, if I left the office before 8:00pm, I'd give that a four. I'd go, okay, great. Got a little step down. What would take it to a 5? What would take it to a 6? 7, 8, 9, 10. I go, okay, first off, let's just do the 4 immediately. And then as soon as you have that, you have momentum. One of the things I love, and I'll probably put it in the piece of like a template that people can use is just what I call the video game Apple Note. So you have, let's say, for example, to do list in Apple Note, build a website. The problem with that is that's Starting the video game on level 56. So, one, I had this fascinating realization that two, sorry, one person that I knew was the laziest person I've ever met, couldn't open his mail. I couldn't get out of bed and make himself some food, but was one of the best video game players at that specific game in the world. I would spend 16 hours a day on this video game. And I go, well, do they have an agency problem or is their reality just a poorly designed video game? So the video game Apple Note is just level one. Let's say whatever it is, whether it's from opening mail to going to Kitty Hawk and taking the planes into the sky, there's always a level one. And that's what video games are incredible at, that they adapt to where you're at and then just slowly move you up again. Completely the opposite of school. So level one is always just dump down thoughts on topic. And what I love about that is no matter how complex the thing is, from curing cancer to flying planes, to opening the mail, you can always dump down thoughts and then you check it off. And level two is create the next five levels based off level one. And what's beautiful is when you check level one, level one, small enough to start, but isn't overwhelming. So you have that video game bit of dopamine, then when you check it off, you're like, fuck, let's go, I'm on level two. And then each step is enough to. Key thing with video game design is it's enough of a step to feel a challenge, but without overwhelm. And if it's too big of a step, like level 56, build website, that's too big of a step. You just are constantly in frustration. So you just quit the video game. It's a terribly designed video game, but breaking things down into micro steps is such a key thing in video game design and ultimately increasing agency.

[A]

Yeah, I mean this is the Productivity 101. You write your epigraph, you, you work in seven year seasons, you work in three year blocks, you work in one year sprints broken down into 90 day chunks, broken down into daily actions. And you know, minute by minute you've got your life planned out. And it's kind of trite because it's so obvious, but the smallest first step imaginable is how the Wright brothers managed to get their plane. It's how you launched your marketing agency in a different country, it's how this podcast started. Yes.

[B]

And yeah, you need to be able to, if you can Figure out ways that you can constantly make that first step, because 50% of the battle is that first step. So if you have that great tool. Another tool more related to. So we spoke earlier about the four tenets of high agency. You have clear thinking, you have bias to action. You have resourcefulness and disagreeability. On the disagreeability point, which I think is a huge, huge part of it, the question I like to ask people is, who's your favorite podcaster? Creator?

[A]

Me.

[B]

Thinker. So let's say all the people listening to it right now who have the Spotify wrapped with you. Top of the list.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What do you disagree with Chris on? Because there'll be a percentage. Nothing. Right? It's all good, baby. But there'll be a percentage of the audience, unfortunately, probably less so with your audience. But there'll be a percentage of the audience that says, Chris says sky is red, therefore sky is red. And that's actually a great disagreeability test because the amount of times I've put gurus on a pedestal and then they'll start. They'll say a lot of wise shit. And then I'll just start drifting without.

[A]

Over their skis.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And then they'll start drifting and I'll just go with them. But that ability to say, who do you admire the most and what do you disagree with them on is a great disagreeability test.

[A]

That's really lovely.

[B]

Another one is who do you disag? Like, who do you. What's the. Maybe the strongest held opinion that you have, whether that's politically, business wise, theoretically, and who's the best person on the other side that you've heard? Can you answer those two questions?

[A]

Both of us have done. You've got your max content razor. Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. And I think that works for songwriting. Would you listen to your own music? If not, don't write it. Or for your own podcasts. Would you listen to your own podcast? If not, what the fuck are you doing? Spending hours and hours.

[B]

It's why I've never posted to pornhub. I wouldn't watch that.

[A]

Have you seen. I've told you about this before, but I've never done it. But I'm still kind of tempted to do it. I'd do it if you did it as an accountability buddy with me, it's not porn.

[B]

Up is.

[A]

It's OnlyFans. Was it 100 days of rejection?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

You've seen that, right? Ask for a free coffee. Ask a stranger in the street. To give you £20, like, try and get all of these different things that escalate toward ever increasing levels of social discomfort. And I feel like that from. Maybe it's not quite the same as disagreeability, but disagreeability triggers that. That sort of clamping.

[B]

Yes. That fear of being exiled from the tribe like Napoleon on his small little island. I think a big thing in that, that I got from CBT to loop it back to what we said earlier, is when you're doing disagreeability things, is to write down the prediction beforehand that your amygdala's giving you. So, for example.

[A]

Oh, and then you get to stress test between what I thought was going to happen and what actually ends up happening.

[B]

And then you begin to slowly but surely take away the weapons that that monkey mind has. And it'll still fire. But you go, oh, okay. I mean, it's interesting you're firing about me going and asking out this girl or chatting to her, but I remember the last time you talked about how, oh, if you're going to approach this girl, she's going to throw a drink in your face and blah, blah, blah, is going to happen. But we actually. I got a number and we went on a few dates. So just comparing your brain's forecasting mechanism, which will always be the amygdala firing, the nightmare mode, when it's always actually more likely a documentary.

[A]

Well, you also don't get to take a snapshot of your mind unless you do the writing thing. Right. And it's captured in the best way, through writing. I mean, we've seen this even with the election in America, that we had this political fucking superposition, this, like, quantum world in which it's gonna be close. People could see it either way. Yet ardent supporters on one side. Rory Stewart ate a lot of humble pie. Absolutely. It's a slam dunk. She's gonna. And presumably he said that because he believed it, not just because he was trying to influence the electorate or say something cool or popular or whatever. But in retrospect, it couldn't have been any other way, because it wasn't. It couldn't have been any other way because Trump won. And the ability, even I think back to where my mind was before that election happened, I go, fucking hell. Like, it could be. It could be. It could go either way. I'm pretty sure that a couple of months out, I think Kamala's got it in the bag. And then afterward, me trying to think, how did I think before that thing happened? I can't not see what the outcome was it's impossible for me to not see that Trump won. So all that I do when I look back at my rationalization prior to that is all of the ways in which I would have been right, because I could have seen that the outcome that ended up being was the one that I thought, yeah.

[B]

And then you're just constantly. You have the benefit of the historian's hindsight where you begin to see, oh, it was all abc, but in the time when you was living through it, it was. So it's. You're living through the fog of war, but it's so easy to forget the fog of war afterwards.

[A]

Fuck me. Speaking of fog of war, we might as well bring this up. I was with you in Bozeman, Montana, this summer when Trump got shot.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

And that was a really formative experience because 9, 11, I was too young. January 6th was Covid. So I was in the house. So what's really fascinating is rapidly developing news story with other people at the same time. So the fact that I was with you and Emily and we went for dinner and, you know, every five or ten minutes were checking Jack Posobitch's fucking Twitter or whatever to find out what news new rumor's been going on. And yeah, it is. Even in retrospect, one of the things that isn't fully captured is how chaotic news is. And I think the same thing probably occurs for ourselves that in retrospect, we can look back and say, well, that was the way that was the outcome that occurred. In any case, Morgan Housel's got this gorgeous story. He talks about how when him and his wife first got together, before they were married, I think they were 23, 24, living in New York. They had no kids, no dependents. And he looks back and he said to his wife, wow, that really was living, wasn't it? That really was the golden years. It's just so amazing. You know, we used to lie in on a Sunday and we could go for lunch and do all the rest of it. His wife said, you were miserable. You hated it. You hated all of those things. And Morgan's realization was, in hindsight, you're able to see that the fears that captured you at the time were not worth having. But at the time, you have no certainty that those aren't salient. So what you see in retrospect is how you should have felt had you known what was going to occur.

[B]

The golden years seem to never happen in the present. It only seems to exist in hindsight. One of the high Agency techniques is what I call viewing the present with a historian's frame. So both at the personal level and then at the wider kind of societal level as well. So trying to. At the personal level, okay, going, I see these old photos of me on Facebook. I'm like, I used to wear that. I used to. I used to post this shit. I'm, like, cringing at myself. And then you go, hold on. You can hear that voice whispering, me five years later is going to be cringing what I'm doing right now.

[A]

Yeah, correct.

[B]

And then. But trying to ask that question now and deal with it probably speeds up the cycle a little bit, because each time there's that story of, like, the Zen master, where he goes, yeah, one year ago, I thought I had. Oh, sorry. After one year of studying Zen, I thought I had all the answers, and then I realized I was wrong. Now I have the answers. And then after two years, I realized I was wrong again, but now I have all the answers. After four years, I was wrong again, but now I have all the answers. And it ends up with him going to, like, all the way to his grave and saying the exact same thing again. Now I realize I have all the answers and just realizing it's constantly wrong. But even then, if you zoom out and you go, right, okay, that's at the personal level. But then at the societal level, the ability to view the present moment now with a historian's perspective, trying to detach from the fog of war. There's a beautiful line in the Sovereign Individual where he talks about the Roman Empire falling. And he said that, for example, it's an easy question right now, which is, when did the Roman Empire fall? And people can just give the specific date that it fell. When did the Roman society recognize that the Roman Empire fell? For the majority of people, it was not on that day. For some people, it was weeks after, it was months after. For some people, it was centuries after that they fully realized that the Roman Empire had fallen. And he makes this great line, which was, if CNN existed as the Roman Empire was falling, they would not be on the news saying, hey, guys, the Empire's fallen. They'd be denying it. They would be by the time the news catches up, basically, if you wait for the news, you will be wrong or you will be late.

[A]

That's your thing about social networks, right? If you read it on Facebook, you're probably late. If you read it on Reddit, you're probably early. Yes.

[B]

Good, good, good. Rule of thumb, that's fire.

[A]

I love that. What about The Patels, your favorite hotelier.

[B]

This is fucking Pete Kai agency, man. So this I got from the My First Million podcast and tells the story of the Patels who left India to go to Uganda. And the Patels essentially start as these kind of slaves or work people that are very low down in the society and that kind of Indian work ethic just work their way up to the top of Ugandan society and own like huge businesses throughout Uganda. IDI Amin comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no, no. Africa is for Africans, not for the Patels. So we are going to take everything off you and nationalize this and give it back to the Africans. So not only are we going to take everything from you, we're going to give you 30 days notice. Like my rent contract's like at least, like 90 days notice, right? So we're going to take everything from you and your families and we're going to kick you out. So the Patels, some of them went back to India, but India at the time I think had a Bangladesh problem where they basically argued that the Patels had been gone for so long that you're almost no longer Indian now. So they almost have no home. A lot of them went to the uk so you have a lot of Patels in the UK and a significant amount, or a small amount, sorry, went to the US So they arrive, gone from high up in Ugandan society to to immigrant in the US with nothing. And the Patels, what they do, they begin to start motels and they realize that, well, a, the whole family is going to work on this, so we've got free labor, so we can kind of undercut people there. We're all vegetarians, so the food's going to be quite cheap to keep us going and we can just live in the motel. So that gives us a competitive edge there because we don't have any cost for rent. So, like, the cost of our business is so low and we could just start creating motel businesses. So start with a few motels. More and more Patels arrive and they're constantly helping out their brothers, their cousins, their uncles, their second cousin or. Yeah, like that. And just constantly, okay, well, if we can get 5x revenue, sorry, if we get a loan, that's 5x revenue on this, we can buy more. And we constantly just use a bit of debt, buy more motels. Nobody can compete with us because we have this. So the Patels kicked out of Uganda, arrive in America as nothing. Keep compounding, compounding, compounding, and it's an absurd stat now. Of something. Around 70 to 75% of motels in America are owned by a Patel. Just talk about peak agency, like life happening to them, and meanwhile manage to.

[A]

Completely 70 to 75% of motels in.

[B]

America owned by a Patel.

[A]

So for the people that haven't driven through America, there are a lot of motels. Tons. When we were doing our road trip this summer, me and you nodding at most of them and going, Patel, Patels again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, man. I think it's such this. The approach that you have to this. The fact that you've been able to break it down and spend so much time writing this piece, which, again, people can go and read. What are you hoping to achieve by sort of breaking this down? Are you looking to try and create more agency in your life? It seems like you're kind of swimming in enough already.

[B]

No, I think, honestly, you can, as a writer sometimes go, oh, I think this is a really important idea. I need it to get out in the world. It was more. It was psychosis that was like eating my brain. And I just wanted to explore the topic because basically the goal of the essay was the thing I would have liked to have read at 13 rather than had written at 30. And just exploring that concept because, like I said, and I sound like a broken horse. But once you begin to understand that, like, everything's essentially just an agency problem.

[A]

Agency issue, like the.

[B]

Yeah, it's endless, endless possibilities from fixing climate to fixing cancer. It's just all agency.

[A]

We're in a country that may be lacking, especially for young people, agency. Both of us managed to reach escape velocity to, to get out of that. What would you. What do you wish British George knew about agency or how to maybe embrace a little bit more of it?

[B]

So the way I. I always joke, being outside the UK for two to three years and then coming back, I learned more in the two to three years outside of the UK about being British than the 25 years being inside it. And funny bit is when we did 4th of July this year and we're in Nashville, may have taken a little bit of mushrooms. And I mean, funny story is Chris, like, everyone's, like, taking photos of the fireworks. I'm looking, seeing all these people taking photos of fireworks. Photos of fireworks, like soaking in the moment. And there's just Chris on Apple notes, like writing down a quote from Nietzsche or something like that. And I just said, spot the artist to everybody around us. Anyway, it was quite a strange feeling being in that environment where it's People going, usa, usa. And I kind of realized at that moment a few things. So, one, I've never met an American that doesn't celebrate the fourth of July. I've never met a Brit that knows their national day. I'm called George. It's St. George's Day. And I realized, actually, I don't even know the day. And I realized, no Brit even knows the day. I think it's April 23rd. And I then reflected more in the UK, and the way I view the UK right now, it's like an icon that has an autoimmune condition. On paper, it's this incredible historical figure, but it's just kind of eating itself alive. And I even think that people like myself and yourself. One thing that I noticed that maybe people who have a lot of optimism for the UK then complain about people moaning and don't realize that they're then starting this. Everyone in the UK moans so much. So I kind of come at things like one of the early thinkers that's definitely affected how I think has been Rory Sutherland. I do think the UK has a bit of a marketing problem. I don't think you necessarily need crazy technology or things like that to fix this. So one of the absurd ideas that I have is essentially looking at St. George's Day and comparing it to the Fourth of July and going, well, what's happening here? Why is nobody celebrating St. George's Day? And why is everybody, regardless of their politics, celebrating fourth of July? Again, comes back to clear thinking. I think fourth of July, what it has is a recent enemy, which was unfortunately us trying to conquer that beautiful land which we never should have let go. And there's a clear story that unites everybody. George killed some dragon. I don't know. I don't know the story. Nobody knows the story. And now it's just associated with racists and bigots. So my idea would be Fix the UK's advertising, scrap St George's Day, and announce Dunkirk Day. First off, good meme, sounds good, good branding. And essentially, I think it's a better story than fourth of July because no matter where you stand in terms of your politics, in terms of creating an enemy, you could have every problem with the British Empire and the UK and Britain and the state of it.

[A]

Dunkirk was an extraction, not an act of war.

[B]

Yes. And against the apex awful human being of Adolf Hitler. And it's still fresh in our minds. It's still recent enough to some extent. And you could argue if Dunkirk didn't happen. Does Western civilization even exist now? Certainly the uk, we're probably having the exact same conversation, but German, and both of us aren't August Landmaster. And we're just going along with it, like low agency little, little bitches. So, first off, yeah, Dunkirk Day and I'd argue make it quite unique. So first off, we have to make it British. So from midnight to 12pm on the day, everyone can moan, everyone can complain. It's not too cringe, like the American style. You would like to moan about the mistakes the UK has made in its past currently making. And it's going.

[A]

So you've taken something from April Fool's Day here.

[B]

Yes. Until 12:00pm, you can, like criticize the country, drink tea, blah, blah, blah. Come 12pm, we're allowed very rarely, as Brits, to remember just how fucking awesome historically this country's been. So Dunkirk being obviously a key, pivotal moment there. And just imagine this in the uk, right, you've got William Shakespeare, Alan Turing, John Lennon, the Gallagher brothers, right, you've got Pankhurst and the suffragettes, whichever way you want to go. Like, we've got it all the tourist demand that I think you could bring in for Dunkirk Day. Even like Harry Potter. I mean, Even Crick of WhatsApp and Crick, who created DNA or discovered DNA. One of them was British and it was done in Cambridge University. I'm sorry, America, but you can't compete with that. Like the historic, the history that this country has and the ability to turn that into a national day that maybe unites people, at least for an afternoon, and potentially brings in billions of tourist revenue by just a little bit of marketing, I think is completely untapped potential.

[A]

I love it. George Mac, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to read this essay of yours, which they should, and they also want to keep up to date with everything else you're doing. Where should they go?

[B]

You want to go to highagency.com and the whole essay that me and task.

[A]

Highagency.Com that me and Chris spoke about.

[B]

Today will be on there. You can read the whole thing and anything else. Just George Mac on Twitter. My DMs are open.

[A]

Dude, I love you. Thank you.

[B]

Love you too, man. Thank you.

[A]

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 non fiction, 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.