The Uber Eats to OnlyFans Pipeline - #1091

Summary

Modern Wisdom Episode #1091 Summary

Kratom Addiction, Naked Justice & The Uber Eats To OF Pipeline
Host: Chris Williamson
Guests: George, Sean, Gary
Release Date: April 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this rich and wide-ranging roundtable, Chris Williamson and his guests dive into some of the oddest, most revealing, and culturally resonant trends, personal anecdotes, and philosophical debates of the present moment. Core topics include substance use and addiction with a special focus on kratom, the blurring of personal and public boundaries in American life, evolving social values (from mainstream media prestige to lifehacks and skepticism of “studies say” science), the rise of novelty careers (Uber Eats to OnlyFans), AI’s social impact, and the perpetual arms race for attention, both online and offline. The team balances humor, hard-earned confessions, unsparing irreverence, and moments of genuine insight.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Cola and Peanuts—Opening Banter [00:00–06:00]

• The crew tests out the classic Southern combination of coke with peanuts, riffing on viral food experiments and why certain pairings work.
• Chris: "Peanuts in Coke is the most accidentally perfect food pairing in history...Salt on the peanuts suppresses the bitter taste receptors...amplifies your perception of the sweetness." [00:56]
• They use this as a jumping off point for social media-driven trends and the science behind taste.

2. Bullish/Bearish: Social & Economic Trends [06:00–16:30]

• Each guest discusses overrated and underrated social trends.
• AI: Overhyped in conversation, but transformative in reality.
• Mainstream media: George argues that, contrary to the online narrative that legacy media is dead, it still has enormous influence among elites. "I'm ridiculously bullish in the next five years on the very power the mainstream media has..." [08:14]
• UK vs. Roman Empire: Playful debate on British outsized impact historically, touching on everything from Newton to the Internet, and how national identity shapes personal and collective ambition.

3. Mental Health, Identity, and Generation Z [18:00–27:00]

• Chris highlights a NY Post article about Gen Z carrying “anxiety bags”—EDC (“everyday carry”) kits for panic attacks.
• Confessional and comic moment as Gary admits his own “anxiety bag” is just a bag of drugs.
• Discussion expands to modern mental health discourse:
  • The swing from under- to over-diagnosis.
  • The conversion of “mental health” from strictly medical discourse to identity and trend.
  • “Mental health is both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. There's people who don't have it that just live through it...and people who don't have it that make it their entire personality.” – Chris [25:10]
• Debate on whether over-psychologizing everyday struggles may hamper individual agency.

4. Kratom: Addictive Leaf or Innocuous Supplement? [27:10–38:00+]

• Gary details personal experimentation with kratom, a Southeast Asian leaf with opioid-like effects, and describes withdrawal as “worse than heroin.”
  • “This is...the wild west of this drug. They tried banning this in 2016. I think we're on the verge of potentially an epidemic with it.” [28:45]
• Chris and George recall initial perceptions of kratom as a “nootropic” or innocuous supplement, contrasting this with current, much darker realities of addiction.
• Cautionary tales emerge about “supplements” that quickly become substances of abuse.

5. DNA Personalization, Identity, and Self-Understanding [38:00–44:45]

• Detailed discussion of “IntellX DNA,” a genetic test to personalize health and behavioral traits.
  • George: “I found out I was in the bottom 10% of magnesium absorption for my genetics...”
  • Both Chris and George observe that DNA merely legitimizes what experience has already taught, but can become a limiting identity label if overemphasized.
• Parallels drawn between understanding oneself via DNA and via psychological metrics (e.g., using mental health diagnosis as identity).

6. Bathroom Culture, Compartmentalization, and Porn Memories [46:11–50:43]

• George’s critical outsider take on American public bathrooms becomes a humorous metaphor for American openness vs. European compartmentalization.
• Conversation about “compartmentalization” as an essential function in both life and digital habits—meditation apps next to “strip club apps.”

7. Modern Pipelines: Uber Eats to OnlyFans [49:01–51:32]

• Chris shares a viral story where a woman increases Uber Eats tips by including foot pictures—an example of how online monetization pathways (e.g., OnlyFans) are seeping into everyday side hustles.
  • “This is the Uber Eats to OnlyFans pipeline that no one is talking about.” [50:07]

8. Male Living Spaces and Life Hacks [51:48–65:07]

• The team reviews the jokey subreddit “Male Living Spaces,” reflecting on young men’s creative adaptation to limited means.
• Life hacks segment—ranging from practical (apps for flying, sleep-tracking devices) to meta (suspicion of science-backed claims).
  • George: “Nine out of ten studies that you hear about, particularly psychological studies...my new default is, they're about to say something that's completely unscientific.” [69:31]
  • Sean counters that, in practice, most people (unlike the skeptical minority) are still easily swayed by dubious studies and authority markers.

9. Investigative Journalism and Censorship [72:17–78:04]

• Gary describes how new laws in California and Puerto Rico may criminalize certain forms of investigative journalism, especially those exposing government or financial fraud.
  • “It's basically an extreme fascist bill that they're trying to pass to prevent people from exposing fraud.” – Gary [73:18]
  • The value and peril of FOIA requests is discussed; surveillance and transparency are recurring themes.

10. Mastering Life as Play: A Counterpoint to Doom [78:04–81:03]

• The episode’s “uplifting quote” segment: Sean shares Blake Mycosky’s quote about the blurring of work and play.
  • “He hardly knows which is which...he simply pursues his vision of excellence...and leaves others to determine if he is working or playing.” [78:48]
  • Chris and Sean debate the tension between gamification (metrics) and authenticity/personal fulfillment.

11. Metrics, Incentives, & Social Media Psychology [81:03–95:04]

• Extended meditation on how engagement metrics (views, likes) affect creators’ behavior, public perception, and mental health.
  • Chris: “We end up intending to measure what matters, but instead what we can measure just ends up mattering.” [88:34]
• The “McNamara Fallacy” is introduced—mistaking metrics for reality, at the cost of the unmeasurable (soul, vibe, moral).
• Supernormal stimuli—how digital and physical environments hack ancient instincts (notably via food, beauty, content algorithms).
  • “You pity the moth for confusing the lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” – Quoted tweet by Jay Alto [118:18]
  • Discussion of radical sensory detox (staring at a wall, no screens) as an antidote.

12. AI’s Disruptive Promise and Perils [124:11–130:19]

• Giddy, worried conversation about the “manias” of AI development and adoption.
  • George shares a personal story where AI (Google Gemini) outperforms doctors in diagnosing and curing his chronic skin problem.
  • But others warn that the rapid evolution of AI, deepfakes, and the “post-truth” era will make it ever harder to know what’s real.

13. Economic Absurdity—The AI Pivot and Hype [131:19–133:12]

• The bizarre modern phenomenon of companies (Allbirds, once a shoe company) being massively revalued overnight simply by branding themselves as “doing AI.”
  • “Just by saying, 'we did AI', the one day price move is 582%.” – Chris [132:51]
• Laughs and alarm at the speculative nature of markets in the age of meme-stocks and AI manias.

14. Human “Training Data”—Humans Training Their Own Replacements [133:12–136:15]

• Story about Indian factories paying humans just to record and collect data to train robots, with speculation on Tesla's future using purely robotic “self play” in a warehouse to train next-gen agents.

15. Philosophy, History, and The Power of Narrative [95:05–113:31]

• George shares the almost-meeting between Churchill and Hitler, reflecting on how “great men” narratives have shaped our understanding of events.
• Other reflections: Forbes “30 Under 30 Fraud List,” Billy McFarlane and Fyre Festival, and how momentum blinds us to fraud—while beauty and music are uniquely immune to social bias.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Chris (on Kratom): "I've seen this in Austin since I basically got here...one of my friends...said of all of the things that he tried, the hardest to get off of was Kratom." [29:46]
• Gary: "It's very interesting. It's very sneaky. So I was drinking it for a month before I really realized how high I was on it." [31:43]
• George (on UK’s legacy): "We’re basically the technical guy that makes no money and comes up with all the ideas and then these guys are just great at sales and marketing." [15:07]
• Chris: "Mental health is both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. There's people who don't have it that just live through it...and people who don't have it that make it their entire personality." [25:10]
• Sean (on social media): "The game you choose will not only choose for you what you want, it'll choose your motivation. It'll end up dictating your identity." [81:05]
• Chris (on metrics): "We end up intending to measure what matters, but instead what we can measure just ends up mattering." [88:34]
• Jay Alto Tweet (quoted): "You pity the moth for confusing the lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world." [118:18]
• George (on supernormal stimuli): “That’s kind of nature’s equivalent [of engagement metrics]...the same dynamic.” [118:07]
• Audience Laughs: Chris’s recurring bits about British class, American bathrooms, and Ja Rule as the key to business success.
• Closing Reflection: “Optimizing for your...the quote on the wall of your man or the childlike joy or the, you know, good hang vibe...” [92:18]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–06:00 — Peanuts & Coke; Virality of trends
• 06:00–16:30 — Bullish/Bearish on AI, mainstream media, and national prestige
• 18:00–27:00 — Gen Z anxiety bags and mental health identity
• 27:10–38:00 — Kratom: drug or supplement? Personal addiction confessions
• 38:00–44:45 — DNA-based personalization, lab tests, and identity
• 46:11–50:43 — American bathrooms as metaphor; compartmentalization
• 49:01–51:32 — Uber Eats to OnlyFans pipeline
• 51:48–65:07 — Male living spaces; life hacks; study skepticism
• 72:17–78:04 — Censorship, transparency, and investigative journalism
• 78:04–81:03 — Work/life blend: “play” as philosophy
• 81:03–95:04 — Social media metrics, McNamara fallacy, and “supernormal stimuli”
• 124:11–130:19 — AI’s disruptive promise, hype, and social impact
• 131:19–133:12 — “AI pivots” in business: Allbirds case

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Overall Tone and Style

The conversation is unfiltered, playful, and insightful, moving rapidly between comic personal anecdotes, hard social truths, and conceptual/theoretical discussion. Jokes often turn into deep reflections. The group is self-deprecating, skeptical, semi-sentimental, and always ready to undercut each other for a laugh.

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For Further Listening/Reading

• DeepMind documentary ("The Thinking Game")
• Jay Alto (@jay__alto) tweet on "the moth and the lamp"
• Ken Burns’ "Vietnam" documentary (re: Vietnamese self-immolation protests)
• 'Experimental History' substack

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a microcosm of Modern Wisdom’s core strengths: revealing the shape of new problems, lampooning cultural inconsistencies, exposing blind spots in our myths of progress, and, crucially, offering a human context for the failings, fads, and breakthroughs of contemporary life.

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Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

George, you're a connoisseur of beverages. Would you say so as you open another carbonated beverage? Well, gentlemen, cheers. Oh, have you ever had full fat Coke with salted peanuts in it?

[George]

No, I have not.

[Chris Williamson]

Say less. Take a glass.

[George]

Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

Take a Coke. Take a peanut. So there's a viral tweet that goes out about 30 years ago. I read in a Haruki Murakami essay that in America it's popular to drink cola with peanuts in it. I just went, huh? And a long time passed since then, but I finally tried it. What the hell is this? It's ridiculously delicious. No kidding. It's at a level where I don't want to drink cola any other way anymore. So we are going to drink.

[Sean]

Have you before or are we gonna.

[Chris Williamson]

I saved this. I saw that. And I've been edging myself with fucking cola and peanuts since then.

[Gary]

Is there an order? You have peanuts first, I think.

[George]

Shit.

[Sean]

That's crazy, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Peanuts first. Peanuts first seems more insane.

[George]

Yeah, it's like cereal.

[Chris Williamson]

I've blown my load early. Hold on. Ok. Peanuts in Coke is the most accidentally perfect food pairings in history. The chemistry explains why this guy can't go back. Coca Cola sits at Ph 2.5, roughly the same acidity as stomach acid. What's awful?

[Sean]

We need to show the camera what this looks like. It does not look as good as

[Chris Williamson]

that, but look at how much it's. Look at how much it's fizzing. Anyway, there's a load of signs. Salt on the peanuts suppresses the bitter taste receptors on your tongue, which amplifies your perception of the sweetness. You can. Without adding a single gram of sugar. The carbonation does two things. CO2 dissolved in liquid forms carbonic acid, which. Wait, so I think we need to leave it. So we're gonna. We're gonna have. We're gonna set this. We'll come back to it. We'll come back to it in like. I don't know. Honestly.

[Sean]

Honestly, the original Coke, like this alone already would have blown my mind.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Sean]

I haven't had. Have you like. Have you had this? This is like. This is Kratom. This is actually Kratom. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Jared, you need this.

[Gary]

Don't forget, you're gonna have a high, high potency on yours. Unless you. Yeah, no, I gotta.

[Chris Williamson]

Anyway, so this is. You're a connoisseur of beverages, especially sparkling ones. This is my.

[Sean]

Should we take a starter sip?

[Chris Williamson]

No, I think we wait. I think we wait. We're going to wait for a little Bit and then come back to it.

[Gary]

And this doesn't get you high or anything?

[Chris Williamson]

Well, no. It's the only thing that you're interested in.

[George]

He's no longer interested.

[Gary]

Now I'm interested in other things as well.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. All right. So what does it do? Question, Question. Who do you think is the highest paid athlete of all time?

[Gary]

I know the answer to this.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. Well done.

[Sean]

One year. All time.

[Chris Williamson]

All time. All time. Who's the highest paid athlete?

[George]

Michael Jordan.

[Sean]

Ronaldo Messi. They come to mind.

[Chris Williamson]

Michael Jordan will be second. Tiger woods third.

[George]

Joey Chestnut.

[Chris Williamson]

Arnold Palmer. Bonnie Blue, actually, is probably an injury. Depends what kind of sport you're talking. Yeah, Real endurance.

[Gary]

Can I throw a guess out there?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Gary]

There was a Roman chariot racer who allegedly made over a billion dollars.

[George]

Correct. You owes Perlman because you just predicted what he was gonna say.

[Gary]

Yeah, well, Kratom does crazy things to your mind.

[Chris Williamson]

Gaius Apuleius Diocese. So Michael Jordan has earned 1.8 billion. Tiger Woods 1.7 billion. Arnold Palmer, 1.4 billion. Jack Nicklaus, 1.2 billion.

[Gary]

Oh, it was 15 billion.

[Chris Williamson]

He made $15 billion in today's money. He basically won 35 million. 863. One hundred and twenty Sesteris. By some estimation, over $15 billion in 2011.

[George]

And that's pure income from the sport. So I assume because I backed them, there's probably no sponsorships.

[Chris Williamson]

No sponsorships.

[Gary]

Hashtag ad.

[George]

Yeah.

[Gary]

SHIELD deal.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. I wonder who could have offset his boadicea budget.

[Sean]

Wow.

[Chris Williamson]

15 billion, dude. And the tweet says, eat shit, Michael Jordan. You.

[Gary]

Yeah, I think I saw that same thing. That's why I knew that that's what I've.

[Chris Williamson]

That's what I've contributed. That's what I contributed.

[Sean]

Did kind of ruin it by knowing the answer, but let that slide.

[Gary]

No.

[Sean]

Do we have a photo of this guy?

[Chris Williamson]

Because, like, just search that dude. Jared. The fucking Gaius Apuleius Diocles. I'm sure you can spell that, because it's.

[George]

It's fascinating coming from the UK to the US and seeing how Europe is kind of criticized as being, like, a socialist place, and the US Is seen as this capitalist place. Meanwhile, our sports are way more capitalist. And I still don't understand how US Sports work where you have. Because I went to go and watch a Miami Heat game, and I searched a guy's salaries, and one guy's on, like, 50 million, and then the rest are on, like, his entire salary combined, which is absurd.

[Sean]

And he can't make more than that. It's capped huh. Which is un American.

[George]

Right. But yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Why?

[George]

Why? And then you have the whole, like, draft at the end of the season where whoever finished last gets rewarded the most. Like, it's the most un American thing. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Communist approach.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

All right. Should we drink this Coke?

[Sean]

Should.

[Chris Williamson]

We've been staring at me.

[George]

All right.

[Chris Williamson]

Cheers, gentlemen.

[Sean]

Cheers.

[Gary]

Cheers.

[Sean]

Cheers.

[George]

Cheers. Fuck that, mate. Fuck that.

[Chris Williamson]

Sweet and salty. Tastes quite a lot like Coke.

[Sean]

Yeah, Tastes like Coke. But then I ate the peanuts.

[George]

Yeah, it's the nice.

[Gary]

You know, it tastes like Coke with peanuts.

[Sean]

It did not change the flavor at all for me. Maybe we sit longer.

[Chris Williamson]

It's less different. Maybe we need to.

[George]

I think it's more the aesthetic.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, you think that this is an art piece?

[George]

Yes. Like, even. Even if you made a.

[Chris Williamson]

It looks like what happens if you've eaten too much Mexican food.

[George]

Yeah. If you had the best Michelin. Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Just looks so much like there's too much fucking.

[Gary]

Yeah.

[Sean]

I do enjoy chewing while drinking Coke. So that's good. That's a positive.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm gonna keep going with that.

[Gary]

Yeah. What if you. I mean, couldn't you choke on the peanuts?

[Chris Williamson]

There's always a risk. Yeah.

[George]

I have a question for the group. I wanted to ask people on bullish or bearish on certain trends. So I kind of want to know trends that are big right now in society or aren't big right now that you think should be bigger. So just give me things that people may be particularly popular about right now that you think don't deserve to be and vice versa.

[Chris Williamson]

Overpriced and underpriced. Okay. Royal things overhyped at the moment. I want to say AI. But then it's probably going to change the fucking world. I just feel sick of hearing about it. I'm kind of sick of hearing permanently about how it's going to be the end of everything or the beginning of everything. And there's no one that's in the middle. There's no one that's like, yeah, AI is pretty cool. It's people who are complete doomers. Or just like David Friedberg. Like, there's only two ends of the barbell. But I would quite like AI to chill out a little bit in terms of everyone talking about it.

[George]

Well, I guess we've never lived through a mania like this. I guess the nearest one would have been the Internet. Crypto with NFTS was a little bit, but it was different.

[Chris Williamson]

Crypto with NFTS was fucking hard, dude. That would have been top of my list.

[Sean]

But I think a lot of sensible people were skeptical about NFTs for sure aspects of crypto. Whereas I feel like, you know, AI right now, even the people who are doomers, they're not saying AI sucks, they're saying it's too powerful. It's either, this is so powerful, life is going to be amazing, or this is so powerful, life is, like, over for us. And nobody's really. Nobody really like, hey, this is, ah, it's just a flash in the pan. Like in the early Internet, there's famous articles where it's like, the Internet won't amount to anything. This is a fancy fax machine. There's, you know, there's articles you can go pull up now and mock people. I feel like with AI, we kind of all know.

[Chris Williamson]

Hmm. What about you? What do you think?

[George]

I'm getting really into metaverse real estate. It's. It's the place. Now's the time to get in. So I'm buying up a lot of land. I've got a place next to Snoop Dogg.

[Chris Williamson]

This feels a little bit like kicking a dead body whilst it's on the ground and saying that you killed it. Do you know what I mean? You can't say the metaverse is overhyped when it's already dead. You know that Simpsons meme where it's like, stop, stop. He's already dead.

[George]

Don't see you hanging a bored ape up in here, do you? So there you go.

[Chris Williamson]

Why don't you talk about your cryptos?

[George]

You know, here's actually a weird one that I was. I did all right on that toad. Did all right on that toad, baby.

[Chris Williamson]

All right.

[George]

You can look it up on chain as well, actually. So there's no fraud there. There's no lies. You can. You can verify my NFT activity, good sir. Um, you know, one that I'm weirdly. Because I was thinking about. There's lots of stuff you could say where it's almost trite, right? So you go, AI is going to change the world. And it's like, most people will probably agree with that. So therefore, it's kind of a neutral statement. And I was thinking, well, what are people? What's cliche to be bearish on right now? And then what's the bullish take for that? My two big ones are, number one, the mainstream media. I'm ridiculously bullish in the next five years on the very power the mainstream media has, which is like the, oh, it's kind of like, don't go to college kind of statement, whereas it's kind of Saying almost the opposite now of go to college. Mainstream media in particular, it's almost like they have the highest value audience in the world because nobody I know listens to mainstream media. And that's kind of part of the joke except Donald Trump, except Keir Starmer, except Macron. Like we was at dinner the other night once, I hear, but with somebody who used to work in the cabinet in the uk and one of my favorite questions to ask people, apart from that question previously is, is when you meet somebody who knows a lot about the industry of you've worked in this thing for ages, what do laymans like me just not appreciate? That's really fascinating on the inside. And he paused for a while to answer the question about what it's like being inside number 10. And the thing he reiterated was how much of the conversation is shifted by what's on the BBC or what's on the Guardian. And you kind of see this with Trump a little bit now when he'll address, he'll know each other news reporter by name. It's like meanwhile, nobody reads this, nobody consumes this. But it still has such an rivalries

[Chris Williamson]

with oh, that's such and such from the lame times or whatever. And I'm like, what the f. Yes.

[George]

And likewise in number 10, the amount of reactionary time just goes to what's on the headlines that nobody's reading really, apart from a few geriatric 65 year olds. Therefore there's still, it's kind of weirdly underpriced.

[Chris Williamson]

What does. There's always going to be prestige in the mainstream media because there's a limited amount of time and a limited amount of space. Anybody can make a YouTube channel, which is awesome and subversive and rebellious and whatever, but also that means anyone can make it. So there's no prestige associated with doing it. There's only 24 hours in the day on CBS, so if you get 15 minutes of that day, implicitly you're being given something, there's the kind of prestige with it. That being said, does anyone ever watch Discovery Life? You ever seen Discovery Life, Discovery Channel Life? No. So I'm fucking training in the gym and there's so many different TV screens, brand new gym, so apparently everybody needs to watch. It's like a three year old playing subway surfer whilst watching TikTok at the same time. So fucking screens everywhere. And I'm looking over and there's a lovely lady on tv, black lady, like nicely dressed, floral outfit thing and she is having one of her own fingernails extracted from behind her own ear, like at 10am in the morning. Discovery Life is an American cable television network. The channel primarily focuses on reality programming dealing with life events. It's programming targets of female audience. Blah, blah. It is fucking medical emergencies at 10 in the morning. And I'm watching this like 5 inch long pair of tweezers extract this very nice lady's fingernail from behind her own fucking eardrum. I'm like, I'm trying to do bicep curls. And it cut from that to the next one and it was someone's ribs being punctured. Fucking 10:30 in the morning. Only in America would it be like healthcare has become basically a competitive sport now that you can fucking broadcast on the Internet. So I don't know. I feel like this is the sort of thing you would have watched at an after party.

[Gary]

No, I've never seen that.

[George]

I had this realization. I'm trying to find it now, but I wrote about it ages ago, which was, I was once similar to you in the gym working out and the news was on and it was just like, this number of people have died in Ukraine today. This number of people have died in Gaza today. And then take these pills. And I imagined it of like, if this was a bloke that was in the gym that was saying this or it was a friend, I'd be like, I'm never speaking to you ever again. And it's like when you begin to personalize it like that, it's just you view it so differently.

[Chris Williamson]

Except it would be a guy that was shouting it to the entire room.

[George]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

He wouldn't even be saying it to you specifically. He'd just be saying, this black lady had her fingernail caught behind her eardrum. Do you want me to tell you about the lady that took it out of her?

[Gary]

Well, I work out at Planet Fitness, so we have people like, you've actually seen this? Yeah, yeah. There's like homeless people in there wigging out while we're, while we're all trying to get fit. And it's good motivation to be able to tell. It's, holy shit, I need to make more money and work out somewhere else.

[Sean]

Is it Planet Fitness? Like with your membership comes like free pizza or something? Slice Station at the gym.

[Gary]

Yeah. So you don't get the pills, but you do get a Tootsie Roll. It is, it's, it's embarrassing, dude. I, I need to get a different jam. I. Dude, it's interesting that you say that though, about being bullish on mainstream media because they've basically have hit the basement in terms of really everything. So there's no way you could think they're going to do worse. In my opinion.

[Sean]

You couldn't be more bearish.

[Gary]

Yeah, so you're correct.

[George]

Well, I'll give you a note on hitting the basement right now. One that I would buy the shit out of is the United Kingdom, everybody right now, the uk literally. I think yesterday the news came out around it's like the worst economic change in terms of the bond rating. Like the doom and gloom around the UK is so strong right now, but you just go, it's with a goat.

[Chris Williamson]

Hang on, are you going to say never bet against the uk?

[George]

No, no, no. Long term, yes. Long term, yes. Just from, just from. Even if they do nothing again, just from a pure IP perspective, like just what you have. Like I said, I was think I was getting in an argument today with Claude in the car and sometimes I'll like bounce between Claude, Chatgpt and Grok.

[Chris Williamson]

That's my hat. That's like when one of your side pieces won't put out, you pivot to another.

[Gary]

That's accurate.

[Chris Williamson]

I went to dad and he said, no, Mom.

[George]

Well, I posed the question to Claude and I'm interested to get your guys take on this of who's had more, who's more impactful to the world, the Roman Empire or United Kingdom? And I think it's the United Kingdom. Pound for pound, I think pound for pound we're one third the size of Texas. And who's managed to do this level of output that we've managed to do, which is a very unbritish thing to say, really.

[Chris Williamson]

Living on fucking borrowed time though, mate.

[George]

Not really. Not really.

[Chris Williamson]

When was the last thing we did that was cool?

[George]

DeepMind AI. Like the whole AI industry comes out of essentially London.

[Chris Williamson]

How many people do you think know

[George]

that this is it? We're basically the technical. The way of viewing UK to the US is like we're the technical guy that makes no money and comes up with all the ideas and then these guys are just great at sales and marketing. Like you can do AI, essentially the uk you could do Tim Berners Lee the Internet, you could do. I mean, I don't know if this is fully true, but because maybe he's such a genius that he fought this through, but bitcoin white paper written in British English to correct English.

[Sean]

Oh, come on. We don't know who he is.

[George]

We don't know who he is, but there's a little bit, there's a little bit of something that all of a sudden the Indians. But like if you look at. Yeah. If you want to keep going back. I always had this thing of if God had like Top Trumps of greatest country and like each country tries to play their hand. The UK is a very tough one to compete with.

[Chris Williamson]

Very dwindling though like when you think about what the market's trend is at

[George]

the moment, Newtonian physics.

[Sean]

Still he's being on mainstream worthy of.

[Chris Williamson]

It's fucking 500 years old.

[George]

But if you. I'm talking about the history of civilization. Roman Empire, what the Italians doing. But the Roman Empire still gets a lot of credit these days. But I just think going back to the question, I'm bullish on the UK just in terms of pure IP and impact on the world.

[Chris Williamson]

But bullish would suggest that you'd invest in it.

[George]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

What with money.

[George]

I put it all into the metaverse. I've got the Snoop Dogg metaverse.

[Sean]

Cnn.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sean]

Bridgerton. Yeah.

[Gary]

What do you think about Claude?

[George]

What do you mean?

[Gary]

Do you like it?

[George]

The AI?

[Gary]

Yeah.

[George]

I personally think each. Each different AI slightly different. So I'll use what you might know if somebody's created this yet what I want and I kind of vibe did this, but I couldn't be bothered actually turning it into a product which I just want a group chat where I can post something in there. They all reply and then they roast one another back and forth again.

[Chris Williamson]

Isn't it? General adversarial network. That's what that's called.

[Sean]

Big brain on Chris. That was amazing.

[Chris Williamson]

Fucking that's it. Jim o' Shaughnessy's got it for his super crazy fucking AI thing. And he said, yeah, they can get all of the different models to argue with each other behind the scenes. And then whoever has the best answer for this one does it.

[Sean]

When you use Grok, they show it. So if you use like heavy Grok or super Grok or whatever Elon calls it, you ask a question and Agent one pops up, he starts talking. I think what he wants to know is, blah, blah, blah, Agent two comes in.

[Gary]

Right.

[Sean]

Well, that wouldn't really be fully accurate. He should really be thinking about this agent three and it'll show up to 16 or 16 agents basically, like within the same AI.

[Chris Williamson]

What you're talking about is you want Claude arguing with ChatGPT. Arguing with fucking Opus.

[George]

Arguing with like literally a group chat.

[Chris Williamson]

Jared, pull up that New York Post article that I sent you. Stressed Gen Z is carrying around anxiety bags with tools to calm their nerves. Hannah Fowles was spiraling. It'd been a grueling day at work, and by the time the 22 year old from Provo, Utah, got home, panic was bubbling in her chest and thoughts raced as her cheeks flushed red. I was starting to get super overheated. I couldn't calm, fowles told the Post. Nothing that I normally do, like breathing exercises or lying down in a dark room is working. Then she saw the bag.

[Gary]

Jesus Christ.

[Chris Williamson]

Just weeks earlier, Fowles and her therapist had put together a small grab and go kit filled with items to calm her when anxiety strikes. And she flicked on a small portable fan, letting the cool air wash over her face, pressed a cull pack to the back of her neck, while on the other hand, she gripped a spiky fidget toy, feeling its prongs dig into her palm as the panic began to ebb. Now. Well, I know what you want to do. What you want to do is make fun of these people for having. Look how it's an EDC bug out bag that, like military guys have, but for Gen Z. Gen Z people. What I want to know. What I want to know is what would be in your anxiety bag, Gary?

[Gary]

Well, I actually have one of those bags. It's called a bag of drugs, Chris. Thank you for asking me.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, just 5 grams of whole leaf. Kratom.

[Gary]

We got Kratom. We've got some amphetamines in there, We've got new tonics, we've got Valiums.

[Chris Williamson]

Anxiety or just.

[Gary]

Oh, no, I'm just addicted to drugs

[George]

now.

[Sean]

This is.

[Gary]

This is.

[Sean]

What was the question?

[Gary]

I don't think you should make fun of people like this, though, because it's not really their fault that they're being sort of conditioned to have this obsession with mental health. That's my theory.

[Chris Williamson]

That's exactly. That's exactly like you take dei.

[Sean]

DEI starts from a good place. Hey, we should include more people. We should be more equitable. Everyone should get a fair opportunity and a shot. But then these movements can get hijacked and the movements can get hijacked and stretched and to the point where it doesn't really resemble where it started. I don't. You guys see this thing with the Canadian politician who was using the LGBTQ acronym?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Sean]

But it was, like, 14 letters long.

[Chris Williamson]

It's. What is it? Murdered and missing women and children. Indigenous women and children. Mm.

[Sean]

Yeah. Jared, pull that up.

[Chris Williamson]

M, M, I, S, J.

[Sean]

Did you see this?

[Chris Williamson]

Uh, it's a full sentence long.

[George]

No, listen, this.

[Sean]

She's giving a press conference. And she stands there and she just, with a straight face, says she wants to express her, like, you know, condolences or whatever to the MMIWG2SL. There's a number in there. 2SL, GBT, G, B, T, Q, I, A plus. And she just says that with a straight face. And then people were like, what the hell was all that? And it's like includes like murder victims,

[Chris Williamson]

murderers, missing women and children, Indigenous people. Like two spirit. The two is for two spirit. Which is like. Yeah, double song. Is there a is in there which is asexual. So here it is.

[Gary]

Holy shit. That's long was released.

[Chris Williamson]

I was shocked to find out that

[Gary]

Prime Minister Carney is cutting $7 billion

[Sean]

between Indigenous Services Canada and Crown Indigenous Relations.

[Chris Williamson]

They provided $0 to deal with the

[Sean]

ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQIA plus.

[George]

That's impressive.

[Sean]

That was honestly great.

[George]

That's really.

[Chris Williamson]

Actually, she runs it back. Indigenous women across this country.

[Sean]

Indigenous women, girls, to slgbtqia.

[Chris Williamson]

Dude, it's fucking wild.

[Sean]

She's not feeding off anything. No, she's off the dome. That's Eminem.

[Chris Williamson]

She's like the fucking Harry Mack of coming up with acronyms. You know that dude that he's like, shout out three words and it's like umbrellas, stakes, shoes. And he like freestyle raps an entire thing about it.

[Gary]

The Jay serious about this too. That's not even a joke. That's what.

[George]

No, this is not SNL on. On your mental health point.

[Gary]

If this is why this. That it's.

[George]

But I think what ends up happening is you end up with these swings. You can then have a swing so far the other way where it's like. I mean, everybody's known somebody's taking their own life, right? Like, it's a. That side of things is like serious. Totally. The problem with a lot of these things is you get to like a lot of the root of human experiences, which is like, ironically, a little bit of that. But so much of it is around the language that we use. And within mental health, you bundled up so much that you bundled up 7 billion individuals and it's become such a black and white term. Whereas I always use the example, like diabetes is quite interesting one.

[Chris Williamson]

Right?

[George]

Because you have type 1 diabetes, which is a genuine medical condition that somebody's had from birth. And then you have type 2 diabetes, which is a little bit more. It's a lot more your choice in your environment. And it feels like you don't have that kind of nuance.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm going to try and speedrun my diabetes. Because this is getting better, by the way. Yeah, actually, it's getting better. Try it again.

[Sean]

Coke on the nuts.

[Chris Williamson]

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[George]

You do have some of these language hacks that exist. I always joke that cybersecurity, nobody takes it serious as an industry because the naming is just awful. And the biggest thing the cybersecurity industry could do is no new technology. If they just branded it as ctis, like taking it from sti. It's computer transmitted infections. All of a sudden I'm like, I feel a little bit more dirty about it. And likewise, the homeless problem right now. How many people who are homeless, is that the main cause? It's often. It'll be some, ironically, some serious mental health issue that's going on.

[Gary]

Oh yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

So like the language that I'm interviewing.

[Gary]

I've interviewed so many homeless people, dude, half of them want to be homeless. And to be quite frank, I don't really blame them if you want to go live in the woods. As long as you're not.

[George]

Why would, why would somebody want to be. Why would somebody want to be homeless?

[Gary]

Because they're not being tethered to this system that we're all living within that is currently kind of going down the drain. I mean, I don't. I don't really blame them. That thing that we just pulled up, though, is exactly why people aren't taking mental health seriously anymore, though, because there's a fucking in that. What's it called, the DSVM3 or whatever. There's a. There's a disease for everything, right? You know, so, like, for example, when I was growing up, I got diagnosed all sorts of shit, but really I was just a little asshole. And when you start saying, I got ADHD or I'm bipolar, I got borderline, or you got this or that or whatever, you know, I got a crutch I can lean on for every single fucking shitty thing I do to somebody, which is awesome.

[Chris Williamson]

There's a great line that someone said to me, which was, mental health is both underdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. There's people who don't have it that just live through it, dude, and don't know, and people who don't have it that make it their entire personality.

[Gary]

All the people that actually have serious mental health problems that I'm at least friends with are mostly undiagnosed, and they're just kind of, you know, wandering through life, too.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, dude, seriously, I agree with you. And I think it's easy to be, like, callous or whatever, like, flippant about these. The people that have been diagnosed or self diagnosed or found their sort of mental health become more fragile. They don't want to be fucked. Like, they don't. They don't want to be that fragile. They're just trying to hold on to some sense of certainty, and the certainty is now come from their diagnosis rather than their agency. Like, they just can't make that thing happen. They're in a world that seems to pedestalize, you know, I mean, there's even a trend on Instagram of people having their mental health maladies in their bio. Like, chicks do, like Jesus in bio, or you do pronouns, it's these are my maladies. Because that's where they're trying to find some sense of identity. And they. I don't think they want that. Well, yeah, something sucks for those people.

[Gary]

That's because, like I was saying, the same reason homeless people are like, yeah, I'm checked out of this thing. It's because they don't fit into the system, really, because the system's just not working, you know, And I'm using this. This system just as, like, a generality. Because it is so massive. But when you have people that are, like, not fitting into it, they want to find community within the other people that are all not fitting into my head. You know, I mean, it's the same reason why drug. Drug addicts all hang out together. And I think drug addiction is another thing that's mis. Diagnosed. Like, so if you're misdiagnosed, drug addiction, like, I didn't. I didn't. I guess I didn't say that. Well, people that are drug addicts, which can, I think, pretty much happen to anybody, certain people are probably more predisposed, disposed to it. But people that are drug addicts get misdiagnosed as having some sort of mental health problem. But really they're just on drugs and then off of drugs. They're withdrawing, then they're high again.

[Chris Williamson]

Like when you kicked off at your video guy.

[Gary]

Yeah. So the first thing I want to bring to the table for today is Kratom. Kratom is something I've been looking into because there's, I think, sort of an epidemic happening. And there's a video we got here that I can. I can have pulled up. This is the guy I'm working with who I wigged out on the other day because he didn't buy me $10 at kratom. And I. I quit the doc because of that. Yeah, this stuff's strong.

[George]

Yes.

[Gary]

Like, so what he's talking about for. To contextualize all this is seven. Oh, is seven hydroxy mitragine, which is one of the. I. I guess it. We could just call it a chemical that's in here. I don't know the science behind it. We're gonna go actually interview a. Like, a chemist about this st. Basically, people are taking Kratom, which is sold over the counter at gas stations and head shops, and there's even Kratom shops. But it is a leaf that's from Southeast Asia that sort of mimics the effects of certain stimulants, but also opioids. It acts on your opioid receptors and SSRIs. And I think I know a handful of people that have gotten very addicted to it. And they're saying that it is. The withdrawal is worse than heroin, which is pretty unbelievable given that heroin withdrawal is horrendous.

[George]

And that's it there.

[Gary]

Yeah, man, I should have brought some for everybody, so.

[Sean]

But you're just drinking that?

[Gary]

Yeah, this is a lower dose than I was.

[Sean]

Like, you're telling me it's, like, worse than heroin, but you're just so.

[Gary]

So here's the thing, though. So there's a difference between. And I'm still in the process of figuring all this out. Literally. Yeah. So I was drinking a bunch of this stuff every day for the past month, and then I sort of wigged out on my documentary partner because we got. Yeah, it'll be in the dock. But we were at a head shop and I was like, hey, dude, let's get some of this Kratom. I want to test this stuff out. And there's these things. There's seven. Oh pills, which is. It's almost like Percocet, basically. And it's sold over the counter, which is nuts. I mean, I'm not bashing it necessarily, but it's interesting. It's sort of the wild west of this drug. And it's not like it's a new thing. They tried banning this in 2016. The reason I'm bringing it up is because we're doing this documentary, and I think that we're on the verge of potentially an epidemic with it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, this has been. I've seen this in Austin since I basically got here. So there's a few small glass vials, you know, like a five hour Energy. And there was a company that was making them. And one of my friends had another guy who'd been addicted, had whatever the addiction gene is addicted to every different drug throughout his entire Life. There's even YouTube channels of these people, and they'll say, which drug fucked my life up the most? And they'll just listen. Every drug, because they tried everything and they're like, well, coming off LSD was actually not that bad. But I had this period where I was on MDMA every single day for like two months. And that was really, really rough because my serotonin and da da, da, da, da. And he said of all of the things that he tried the hardest to get off of was Kratom. And then he knew so much. At six in the morning, the Sunrise Mini Mart on whatever fucking South Lamar street or something, he was outside, like, waiting, like, waiting for this. And then this company had taken the. The Kratom content without changing the bottling, from five grams of whole leaf to two and a half. And he knew. And as soon as he had it, he was like, my fucking Kratom's been stepped on.

[Sean]

He felt like from the Mini Mart.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, the Sunrise Mini Mart had stepped on. It's whatever the company that was making this, because these people aren't treating it like a supplement that it's so psychoactive.

[Gary]

And the one thing I guess I didn't explain very well is that there's a difference between, like, the pure Kratom leaf powder and the stuff that has the seven oh in it, which is the synthesized version. And the reason I didn't explain that very well is because it's kind of confusing. But kratom leaf itself, I mean, you can still get addicted to it, but the 7oh stuff is what's fucking people up. Okay, for reference, just because I know some. Somebody that's addicted to Kratom is going to watch this and be like, that son of a bitch blasphemed my Kratom.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Gary]

So that is.

[Chris Williamson]

But the seven oh is the really gnarly stuff.

[Gary]

Yeah. So that's. I'm going to get some of those pills and start taking them. But, yeah, drinking Kratom extract with the seven oh and it is basically drinking liquid heroin.

[Chris Williamson]

What's it feel like?

[Gary]

It's very interesting. It's very sneaky. So I was drinking it for a month before I really realized how high I was on it.

[George]

Have you done heroin?

[Gary]

Oh, yeah.

[George]

I'm from Ohio, dude. So

[Chris Williamson]

how.

[George]

How do they. How do they compare?

[Chris Williamson]

Like 708 if you h e R

[Gary]

I O N if you was.

[George]

If you was personifying them as people, like, how do they. How do they compare the two?

[Gary]

If it was a party Kratom to heroin?

[George]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Gary]

Well, I mean, I haven't done high levels of the 7oh stuff yet, but comparatively, the. The kratom drinks that I've been drinking are called Club 13, 150 MIT. MIT, which is mitraginine. That's the. The drug, I guess. And I was drinking two of those a day, which is. It turns out it's a lot for that. But there's not a lot of 7 oh in it, from what I understand how it works. So I don't have the full scope yet for you, but I would say that heroin is, you know, you get really high, you feel great, you get that warm feeling in your stomach. You've taken painkillers before, right?

[George]

No, not really. No.

[Gary]

Okay, well, good on you, dude. You're better than me.

[George]

Yeah. No, no, no, no. Don't mean it that way.

[Gary]

Top of the morning.

[George]

Are you conscious of the experience as you're doing it?

[Gary]

Yeah. You know you're high. So I guess the primary difference would be that when you take Kratom or when I have been, I've been. I just didn't even realize how high I was on this stuff. Like, I was kind of just in a daze, but you get sort of that euphoric feeling. And I will say that in. In low doses of it, it's sort of more of a stimulant. And then you take more and you're getting more of an opioid, you know, the. The painkiller sedative.

[Chris Williamson]

Isn't that interesting that the curve, how much you take almost inverts?

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Gary]

It's a nuanced drug, and I've never really experienced that before, which was one of the things I was go say. That's sort of sneaky. But the other thing is. And maybe this is just me, but I didn't really grasp that I was high as hell on this stuff. And I was going in sort of thought loops about things. Like we had to get, like, a video done. Right. And I was just sort of pacing around my house, which I pace a lot already when I think or I'm on the phone. But I was just sort of going in these thought loops where I was repeating myself, like, kind of even talking to myself.

[Chris Williamson]

I was psychosis.

[Gary]

Yeah, dude. And I didn't realize that this was. This drug was that strong because it sold over the counter. And that's already. I already knew from a number of other people who have gotten addicted to it because I did some. You know, I put some feelers out there to talk to people. They already told me, like, hey, be careful. You're gonna. It's gonna sneak up on you more so than you think.

[Chris Williamson]

Are you scared? As somebody who's pretty experienced with drugs, are you scared of the potential of putting yourself into this particular. You're going to try this 7oh thing, and it's going to be amazing for the doc, and it's going to teach you a lot, and you're going to be able to empathize with people that are struggling with this. But you are putting your health and life on the line. I'm aware you've done it in other ways a lot, but like this. I know it feels like a pretty big dice roll to do that. Is that something that you consider.

[Gary]

No, I'm not really worried about it. I mean, what's going to happen? I'm going to have to just detox. Yeah, I'm. I'm gonna go to Thailand and see where this stuff comes from, though.

[George]

Okay.

[Gary]

And get the real.

[Chris Williamson]

Jesus Christ. You're going to the. It's like going to Mordor and deciding to, like, fucking stare into the eye of Mount Doom.

[Gary]

I have the Kratom Shot in my hand as I'm looking into the eye of Mordor.

[Chris Williamson]

I've done it once.

[George]

I've done it once as well. When we was in Vegas.

[Gary]

Did you get energy from it?

[George]

So, well, my initial onboarding to Kraton when he was doing the David Doggins podcast, ironically. What were you doing?

[Chris Williamson]

Kratom with David Goggins.

[George]

I was like, I don't.

[Chris Williamson]

Hey, why didn't we vlog that? I was like, I did Kratom pussy.

[George]

So for context, I at the time, like, this is how things change with time.

[Chris Williamson]

That was the week that we did mushrooms. Yeah.

[George]

And Kratom was seen as, like, a supplement. Like, it was seen as a nootropic at the time. That was how it was advertised to me.

[Gary]

It wasn't looking.

[George]

I thought it was going to be a study. I thought I could take it and I could work more mini adult. And I remember, like, going, this is shit. But then I realized I had no more problems. I was like, on it. I've got no problems at all. Why do I always think I have problems? I actually have no problems.

[Gary]

Because you're high, George.

[George]

And then I wanted to go,

[Sean]

and

[Chris Williamson]

then I wanted to get some. Welcome to my world, buddy. I think I've got so few problems. Yeah.

[George]

It's weird how you go from no problems and then when it wears off, you've got so many problems.

[Gary]

Yeah. And then you're snapping your producer and you're like, hey, you, I quit. Is it $10 a kratom? Which is crazy embarrassing.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I mean, when did you do it? So I tried Feel Free, which is like this really, really popular company.

[Gary]

That's for the record. That's one of the companies that's being sort of put under the microscope. Is. Is the. Not good?

[Chris Williamson]

But they're not using the seven. Oh, right. That's just whole leaf.

[Gary]

I gotta look at the. You know what?

[Chris Williamson]

I'm pretty sure. Yeah, pull it up. I'm pretty sure that this is whole leaf stuff. But anyway, this is forever ago. This is when I was living in the Airbnb on South Congress when I first moved here. And everyone's doing it. Everyone's. It's literally the in school mom. But everyone's doing. And so I'm like, oh, well, fucking everyone's doing it. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna try this in the house. I'm gonna try half a bottle. I don't know. I can't remember whether it was five gram, two gram, whatever, but tried it and it just made Me really anxious. Anxious and a little sick for like an hour and a half. I watched some Peaky Blinders and I was like, that's not for me.

[Gary]

And you just drank one bottle of it.

[Chris Williamson]

Half a bottle. And I was like, that's not for me.

[Gary]

So a lot of people get to feel sick to their stomach after they drink it and throw up and stuff like that.

[Chris Williamson]

It didn't make me feel good. Me and Z did it again when we went to go and see a band, but we didn't realize you are not supposed to drink alcohol on it.

[Gary]

Yeah, it'll make you blackout. Also feel free. Has kava in it too.

[Chris Williamson]

Correct. But it's only in a little. It might be concentrated. Anyway. So I tried it. It didn't agree with me. There's like some things where I think I get quite bad hangover. I've always got bad hangovers, but they've gotten worse as I've got older. What you've got, if you were someone who doesn't get hangovers. Sonny Webster, Olympic weightlifter. I remember we once partied till 4 in the morning, 4:30 in the morning. And he set off to drive from Newcastle to Edinburgh, 8am to go and do a seminar that started at 10:30. He'd had four hours of sleep, drank more than me and was just up and doing things for the whole morning. And then went and gave an entire seminar and was just fine. I needed to stay in bed the whole day. There's some people for whom the cost versus the benefit. The fucking ratio is just super skewed. They're like, again, they're like the goggin. They're the Bonnie Blue of being able to drink and keep going.

[Gary]

Dude, don't ever use Bonnie Blue as a reference.

[George]

You're very much the Virgin Mary of that.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, that's. I am. I am very much. Yeah. I'm the Lily Phillips. I can't take. And if that was like. If it was not so painful for me, the cost benefit analysis of drinking would be completely different. Like we did both me and you have done a Intellex DNA, which by the way, this is the fucking sickest shit. Intellex DNA company that's based here in Austin. But you can do it anywhere in the us you spit into a tube. Not affiliated. I just think they're fucking sick. Spit into a tube, send it off. They'll give you your full allele genetic profile and they'll compare you to the population. Hey, you clear caffeine more slowly. You have a protective gene that's good for late onset Parkinson's. You have one, which can be a risk for autism, or for this or for that or for the other. And loads of behavioral stuff like this has been associated with people who have addictive personalities. So I have the Comti gene, which is I clear dopamine more slowly. That means that I don't deal with chaos and stress particularly well. But once I start doing something, I get completely fucking obsessed and I lock in and I can't stop. It's like literally one of the descriptions was may struggle to stop tasks once started. It's like just the gene of an obsessive person.

[Gary]

That sounds pretty cool.

[Chris Williamson]

What's sick is once you do, it's like three grand or something. Maybe three grand around about that.

[George]

It's expensive. Three, four grand.

[Chris Williamson]

It's cheap. But it's like they're never going to change. This is my genes and my genes.

[Sean]

I always wonder with this, did you learn things you didn't already know about yourself?

[George]

Yes, yes.

[Sean]

Because that first one you would know, like, yeah, I don't handle this well, but I am able to obsess over tasks.

[George]

So I'll give you. So the way I view these intellect stuff, and it's like very early days and they're only going to get better and better, is have you heard about the Air Force study in the 1950s where they took like 600 Air Force pilots who were already male, certain height, certain build, and they tried to build like the average cockpit for all of them.

[Chris Williamson]

So they measured them all. They made the perfect cockpit, aggregating all of the proportions of the pilots.

[George]

And when they went to test this perfect cockpit that they built, it fit zero. Because essentially averages are completely bullshit.

[Chris Williamson]

No one is average.

[George]

Only. Only I think. So it was 12 things that they measured and only, only three of them hit 3%. So you can see it here. And even that 3%, it's with a wide range. So the 3% that hit the range, for example, it would be between 5, 9 and 6 foot, like that level of range. So then they realized, and obviously it's so obvious now, but it's way better to just build a customizable cockpit. And I think we'll look back at everything, like how we've grown up around the way people talk about studies and magnesium and vitamin D and vitamin C is just absolute horseshit.

[Gary]

Yeah.

[George]

Because what Gary should take is very different to what I should take. And likewise with Chris. So to give you some, to give you some concrete examples, one I was in, I Found out I was in the bottom 10% of magnesium absorption for my genetics. So I was like, oh, I've got to take way more than if I was to ask anything. I have a specific gene that I found which was if I take, if I have surgery and they give me morphine, I'm very unlikely to wake up with a regular dose. It will probably kill me. So I've got to let doctors know that beforehand. I'm like, oh, that's already paid for the test. And then everything built on top example, sleeping great. So yeah, the specifics that you do learn is actually pretty fascinating because then everything gets built on top of.

[Chris Williamson]

But let me give you this. The thing that it did for me, I didn't learn a tremendous amount that I didn't already know through experience, but it made all of my preferences feel way more legitimate.

[Sean]

Right. Give you permission?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Because I'm like, oh, this is why I like deep house music because it's quite calming. So one of the coolest things both of us did, it put it into your LLM, put all of your labs in as well. And it gives a different context. The coolest thing that I did, kind of useless, but again made me feel more legitimate with my life direction. It was like, I've just done it again. Now to my ChatGPT project. Imagine that you know nothing about me. Erase all of the information that you have exclusively based on my DNA genetic test. What sort of a person am I? And it comes back and it is fucking banger. Your baseline personality, high drive, high stress operator. Your dopamine and stress genetics, comt, aa, db, H, slc, DA da da da. High baseline dopamine and adrenal tone. Faster mental processing, strong pattern recognition, but low margin for stress. Before overload, you become productive, intense, goal oriented, slightly on edge most of the time, but also prone to overthinking, easily tipped into anxiety and to sustain pressure. Sensitive to uncertainty and social evaluation. This is not a calm, content temperament. It is a perform or perish nervous system. And it just runs that for everything motivation pattern. I need to do off and on. I can't do constant low level stress. And I was like, I already knew this. Right? Because you learn things about yourself. Both of us have zeroed in on doing meditation. Both of us have zeroed in on relatively early nights, even though both of us have been in previous industries that were way different. And I'm like, I kind of club promotion should be fun. Like I should be in a chaotic environment. I should be in a highly unpredictable environment. But I didn't end up there. And I always felt a little bit off. And as I've zeroed in more and more. So what it did was, I think, especially for people that are maybe looking for more justification about why they're in the lonely chapter they're struggling to get through, and they're like, fuck, like, why don't I fit in? Is there something wrong with me? Not at all. Like, this is just your predisposition now, the problem that you can have. And it's kind of cool that this isn't as widespread as it might be. Exactly the same as once you have a name for it, you're gonna live by it. This could very much become destiny.

[Sean]

Right, both ways.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, exactly.

[George]

I'm way less intrigued in that kind of cold reading description. I'm way more interested in, like, it's like, oh, you know, it could have been like, Virgo says this. Right. But what I'm fascinated by is, so what's the strange thing? People have always said I'm very, very similar to my granddad. We have, like, similar hair. I sometimes find myself closing my eyes during meals. And he did that. It was weird things.

[Chris Williamson]

You did that your birthday on Monday.

[George]

And I did. And I then put in the thing, I asked the thing, I go, if I'm trying to not die here, what are my most likely causes of death? And they go, well, your two biggest health concerns are one in glaucoma. So you'll just kind of gradually go blind, which won't kill you, or you'll die of a stroke. My granddad. Glaucoma,

[Gary]

I was gonna say.

[George]

And stroke. And stroke. Wow. Yeah. So if you've got the money, it's

[Chris Williamson]

sick, and you can have it interpreted by a clinician or whatever, but you can also just do it here. So I've just done the same thing. If I was likely to die, what are my most likely causes of death? Cardiovascular disease. Chronic stress mediated breakdown. Ooh, that's exciting. Neurovascular neurological issues because of high signaling environmental toxin sensitivity. I just fucking got popped by milk.

[Gary]

They're gonna clone you.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, that's true. That is for God. They don't need.

[Gary]

See, I don't need a test like this to know how I'm gonna die.

[George]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got agency over that, my friend. You've got agency over that.

[Gary]

I'm gonna have a heart attack. A drug induced heart attack while flying down the highway.

[Chris Williamson]

Before we continue, as you're probably aware, I'm not a massive drinker. At least not anymore. But even if you too are not drinking, sometimes you just want something cold, frosty and tasty without the fear of a hangover the next day. Which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Company. Thank you very much. Their non alcoholic brews taste just as good as the real thing. They've got IPAs, Hazy Goldens. They're so good that you'll forget that there's no alcohol in them until you wake up the next day feeling fantastic. It means that you can enjoy the ritual without the wreckage. No hangover, no 3am panic, no wasted Sunday. Recovering from Saturday. That is why I partnered with them. You can find Athletic Brewing Company's bestselling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you. Or best option, you can get the full variety pack of four flavors shipped right to your door. Right now, get up to 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athletic. Athleticbrewing.com ModernWisdom using the code ModernWisdom at checkout, that's athleticbrewing.com ModernWiry and ModernWisdom at checkout near. Beer terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company Fit for all times. I need to bring up something that you said at dinner the other evening.

[George]

I will.

[Chris Williamson]

Did you say that you think that people remember every porn video that they've ever watched?

[George]

No, no, it's this. It's a private dinner with people who'd paid to be there. And you brought it up on the show. No, no, no. My thesis is like one big metacriticism I have of the US that nobody warned me about as a Brit. Is that the toilets in America, like I could be at like Dean's, like a very nice restaurant in Austin. I'd be having like an amazing chat about like Kierkegaard. Think about like Kierkegaard versus Aristotle. Sorry, let me just put to the loose your face. But you go to the loos and in America, the cubicles, you can see people's feet in them. And the worst thing is there's like this slit in every single. And this is nationwide.

[Chris Williamson]

You're in the women's.

[George]

You can be in the. You can be in the like a billionaires like hotel. And there's a slit there which means they've unisex toilets. It's horrific. Like I don't even go into unisex toilets for this reasons. You look, you can see people kind of just this carousel of them sat down, squatting and yeah, this whole idea that when you watch, like, graphic content, it stores in your brain forever. So I've just got thousands of men around Austin just like there, like these carousels.

[Chris Williamson]

And then you went to the bathroom

[Sean]

and this is supposed to be world's worst superhero.

[George]

This is supposed to be the number one country in the world. And like, this doesn't exist in Europe. This doesn't exist in the Middle East.

[Chris Williamson]

You know what you could do? Do you remember those things, like, back in the day, the first those cycling cylinders and you look through the slit and if you spin it, it makes a horse start to move. If you ran really quickly down a very long series of toilets, that's. You're just looking at these different men at, like stages of pooping.

[George]

It's horrific.

[Gary]

Dude. You know how I know that I'm watching too many graphic videos is because when you said there's a horse that starts to move, I heard there's a whore that starts to move.

[Chris Williamson]

Jesus.

[Gary]

That's not good, man. Jesus.

[George]

Every time, like I speak to a Brit or European now about coming to America and they think, like, there's going to be this chat about the economy, I go, this is the thing that I've got to warn you about. It's so surreal. And I think about this a lot. Like, you were talking earlier about life hacks. How much of life comes down to compartmentalization, which is why somebody made a great point the other day, why meditation apps often don't take off on phones. Because you have your meditation up there, but then you have your strip club, you have Gary.

[Chris Williamson]

Gary does.

[George]

Yeah. All this kind of. All this stuff there. And with these bathrooms, you don't have any compartmentalization. I always say, imagine a house. So my friend lives in an 80 story apartment building, and we kind of sat there in his house. I go, if everything was glass right now, this would be horrific. But because you have compartmentalization, it has such an impact.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, your point is that you would be able to see one dude's taking a dump over there and another dude's banging his girlfriend right there.

[George]

Yes, yeah, yeah. Literally just up there.

[Chris Williamson]

But we've made these arbitrary walls around us. Oh, this is the edge of my safe place. And the beginning of yours, I think

[Sean]

where we started, you were like, I have this thesis. And then if you.

[Chris Williamson]

What did we even talk about?

[Gary]

You were talking about somebody said something about porn or.

[George]

Yeah, you brought up storing graphic stuff

[Chris Williamson]

in your brain makes porn. Right? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Question. Guam. How do you feel about feet?

[Sean]

Not a fan.

[Chris Williamson]

No.

[Sean]

Gross Me out.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, fan. How do you feel about feet?

[George]

Pretty much the same as Sean.

[Chris Williamson]

How do you feel about feet?

[Sean]

I have like a visual.

[Chris Williamson]

Neutral feet. Neutral?

[Gary]

Yeah. Okay, in what capacity are we talking about?

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, so there is a woman who does Uber Eats and has started including photos of her feet in the picture of the food drop off and her tips have gone up by a tonic. I'm mad about it. I mean, as feet go there, he said, nice pedicure, they're perfectly fine feet. But did not realize that this would blow up fast. And this is the OnlyFans pipeline. Like as soon as you post something and start to get free money for it, you're like, well if I put my cash app in here and if you scroll down a little bit more, she says, get a rotisserie chicken or a pedicure first. Rotisserie chicken allowance. There we go. This is the fucking Uber eats to OnlyFunds pipeline that no one is talking about.

[Gary]

Yeah, I mean there's like an old joke about what's the. How long does it take for a not a bottle source strip club waitress to become a stripper? Two weeks. I've never heard this. Yeah, like, like basically every. Not every, but a lot of strip club bartenders or hosts, hostesses, they. They just end up becoming strippers. But maybe that's just a niche thing that I know because of my vices.

[Chris Williamson]

Penchant for strip clubs.

[Gary]

Yeah, I guess. Dude, I, I used to have, you know this. I think I've told you this. I used to have this pickup line when I would go to strip clubs where I'd be like, hey Bill, you look just like my future ex wife. And they'd be like, oh, ha ha ha. Because they've heard that a thousand times. I'd be like, no, I'm just a horrible person. I've got a felony. I'm not allowed to see my son, so you don't want nothing to do with me. And just they lean in every time. It's crazy.

[Chris Williamson]

Isn't that the craziest pickup line?

[Gary]

Not really. I mean American women have been conditioned since the 50s to be into like the bad boy.

[Sean]

I mean, first of all, it was a two parter, so that already was sophistication.

[Chris Williamson]

I was

[George]

unbelievable.

[Chris Williamson]

That's Gary's life hack back, Floyd Mayweather.

[Gary]

He asked me for a life hack. That's what I came up with.

[Chris Williamson]

Garage fly.

[Gary]

Jesus Christ.

[Chris Williamson]

What have you got some new fucking notes app? I don't want to hear about that. Then tell me about your gone, your Claude, project instructions. I want to know how to pick up a hooker.

[George]

I don't even want to do one now.

[Chris Williamson]

Have you seen the subreddit male living spaces?

[Gary]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

It's funny, it's fucking brilliant. So this is a subreddit where guys post their bedrooms and their living spaces that they've sort of designed. It's sort of peak bachelor like solo D gen life. And the photos are just fucking absolutely spectacular. This one, this first one, this guy's got a lat pull down machine and a tv.

[Gary]

The face, Patrick Bateman.

[Sean]

Honestly, this looks. Have you ever seen Mr. Beast's office? It looks exactly like this. He has a bedroom in the office with a bench press right next to

[Chris Williamson]

it just like that. The one with the fucking stormtrooper. Stormtrooper, I love it. Yep. There's a U shaped couch around just a huge tv. It's like literally you couldn't get in there without hitting the tv.

[Gary]

It's not even a hunger.

[Chris Williamson]

The reason is because he's wanting to get a big couch but he needs to get in the door so the door won't open. He can't fit the couch and the TV in without not being able to open the door. That's the only way he could have. That's actually some fucking Marie Kondo shit. Transparent fucking blow up doll. This one's fucking. It's an industrial container with a single deck chair in the wall.

[Gary]

That's the camping chair pointing out.

[George]

Wow.

[Sean]

That's the living room.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, that is. That's the cuck chair for when I'm crushing shit. Go to the next one. This is you, Gary. It's a bedside table made out of just raw breeze blocks.

[Gary]

Yeah. You know, when I was growing up, my dad actually had our old box TV on a set of cinder blocks for a period of time. The divorce hit him hard.

[Sean]

It works as drawers too.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh yeah, it does work as drawers.

[George]

Wow.

[Sean]

It's a bottle of Kratom in every place.

[George]

Is it a flat in London or a prison in Norway? Have you seen that?

[Chris Williamson]

Was it not halls of residence? Was it not British halls of residence? I think there's a few different prison in Norway or halls of residence in the UK I think, was it. And yeah, it's because the fucking quality of the prisons in some scandi countries are unbelievable, dude.

[Gary]

Yeah, I've seen those. That pisses me the fuck off that

[Chris Williamson]

Norwegians are living in Norwegian prison.

[Gary]

The people in prison in Norway are doing much better than me. It really irritates me. I'm dead Serious. Because I've been known to commit a crime or two, and if I get arrested and go to prison, I'm like, it just is.

[Sean]

Get arrested here?

[Gary]

Yeah, dude. I mean, I'm. Part of me is like, man, maybe I should just go to Norway and like, getting a shootout or something. I don't know. Like that you met. You guys remember that movie Heat?

[Sean]

I haven't seen it.

[George]

The Leon. Robert De Niro film.

[Gary]

De Niro. Pacino, Val Kilmer. Yeah. I think Danny Trejo's even in it. But, like, the. There's just that old, like, you know, every guy's like, dream way they're gonna go out is just basically robbing a bank and getting in a shootout. Or maybe that's just the people I hang out with, but. You familiar with this?

[George]

No, no, no, no.

[Gary]

Oh, okay.

[Chris Williamson]

Are.

[Gary]

You know, I'm talking about. You ever seen those memes of those.

[Sean]

Yeah, yeah. That's the dream.

[Gary]

Yeah. It's just like going out in a blaze of glory, basically, and then. Or like, dying out and like the. You know, like that. That picture of Gosling bleeding out in the snow.

[Sean]

Right?

[Gary]

Like the dream, dream snow, bleed out spot. Anyways, I just. I'm like, man, I'd rather just picture board of these.

[Sean]

Well, it's like.

[Gary]

It's like I go to Norway and I get into a. Some sort of criminal enterprise. What's the worst thing that happens to me? I get to live better than I'm living here.

[George]

What?

[Gary]

That's just where my mind goes, you know?

[Sean]

But work smarter, not harder.

[George]

The inverse. El Salvador.

[Gary]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude. Holy shit. Well, I think the crimes that are being committed in El Salvador are probably dramatically worse than in Norway. You know, they were like, chopping people up into pieces and stuff.

[Sean]

But did you follow this Citrini analyst number three story?

[George]

No.

[Sean]

You didn't see this?

[Gary]

No, no, no.

[Sean]

Have you guys heard about this analyst number three?

[Chris Williamson]

No. What's this?

[Sean]

Oh, dude, this is amazing. This is just like a guy doing a legendary thing. So the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, and there's the war part of it, but then there's the financial part of it. You've seen, like, oil prices going up, down, the markets are swinging. And so there's this research firm called Citrini. They do, like. They basically do research reports, sell them to hedge funds. And so the hedge fund guys want information. If they get better information than they're getting from the news or from the, you know, the newspaper the next day, that's worth, you Know, millions and millions of dollars to them. So Citrini, they're trying to figure out what the hell's going on with this blockade. And so this guy has this idea, high agency story here for you. One of the guys in the office is like, what if I just go? And they're like, what do you mean, where you go? He's like, what if I just go to the Strait and I'll just count the boats? Like, what do you mean, count? He's like, I'll just see, like, how many are going through, and we'll know if it's, like, blocked. Because basically they're people trying to figure out, is it blocked, is it not blocked? And the gas crude oil prices were going parabolic, and then they were crashing day over day, and so they had to figure out what was going on. And so this guy, basically one of their analysts, they call him analyst number three. And he wrote this field block. So just I see this. He goes, and I read this. And this sucked me into the story. He goes, the front desk informed me there's two gentlemen from the CID downstairs to ask me questions. CID in the Gulf is like the CIA. I checked my phone in a safe. Grab the burner, because they had seen tweets about analyst number three. Thanks a lot, James. And then it says, I went downstairs in my pajamas and slippers. There's a piece of opsec you learn when you're an Arab speaker. If things get sticky, you only speak English because Arabic opens the door you don't want opened. The possibility that you're a spy, a sympathizer, blah, blah. Basically play dumb. So I'll go downstairs and I say, hello, guys.

[Chris Williamson]

How are you?

[Sean]

I speak English. The hotel receptionist, the same man I've been chatting with in Arabic all day, turned to the agents and goes, this guy speaks perfect Arabic. And so this guy blogged his entire thing. So he basically left the US Went to the Middle East. They show his briefcase of, like, what he took. It's pretty hilarious. So this is what he took for his field trip.

[George]

He's anxiety about it.

[Sean]

He's got two zins. He brought cigars. He brought, you know, a pack of clothes. And then he had, like, a pair of Meta recording glasses. And so he goes, and this guy makes it all the way. So he gets to, like, Oman. He bribes a guy, they bring him in, and they're like, he's crossing the thing. They're like, you're not trying to do any journalism or anything, are you? He's like, journalism, no I'm an adventurer, explorer, you crazy? And they like, they check his bag. They don't notice that the Ray Bans are the glasses one or the camera ones. He gets through. He bribes this guy to take him on a mini, like a paddle boat to get into the strait. And he has footage of himself on the strait smoking a cigar, watching like the oil. One of the oil tankers that got attacked and counting the other boats. And he realized that all the mainstream media was reporting that the strait was closed. He's like, dude, I'm here. I see them, I see them going through. It's not fully closed. And they were figuring out what was going on. It turns out, like, actually the Iranians were checking. Like, if you're not US affiliated and you pay us a toll, we'll let you through. And that's why, like there hadn't been this huge oil shock because actually the tankers were getting through, but nobody knew everybody was using these, like the tracking data from the boats. But he's like, some of the boats

[Chris Williamson]

aren't gonna be tracked.

[Sean]

Yeah, they're just like, hey, hey, watch this. They just turn it off. Like, we don't wanna be tracked. They don't want us saying that we're going through, so no problem. Turn that shit off. And they would go through. And so this is this epic story of this guy who made it back. He got thrown. He got like thrown in jail for a couple days and he like got out and you know.

[Gary]

Because of the CIA?

[Sean]

No, he's just part of a research firm.

[Gary]

He got caught because of that.

[Sean]

They held him and they were like, we're going to check you out. And then they couldn't find anything.

[Chris Williamson]

CID is the Middle Eastern equivalent of the cid.

[Gary]

Okay, gotcha.

[Chris Williamson]

And they popped him that. Actually that bag is the male equivalent of an anxiety bag.

[George]

Yeah, I saw it.

[Gary]

That's right.

[Chris Williamson]

A full pack of Cubans, two Zins and a pair of pants.

[George]

Don't trust Verify.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, that is basically someone using dark tourism to benefit from a capitalist way similar to Lord Miles. Do you see that Lord Miles got called out by Coffeezilla?

[George]

No, no, no.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. So Lord Miles has done some kind of rug pull that's to do with him and Polymarket that he was going to do a 40 day fast and that he bet just before he got picked up by the police, the local police of wherever he was, someone had put a huge position that he was going to lose. And it turns out if you trace that wallet back, it's somebody that knows him. And Then he thinks that he put the bet on and then got the police to go, and it was like a fucking mess. But anyway, that guy might as well be Lord Miles.

[Gary]

Well, speaking of the Gulf CIA, I got a story about a time I accidentally did a CIA field strategy, so to speak, if you guys want to hear it. When I was in college in Santa Barbara, my buddy and I were absolutely hammered. Just wasted out of our minds. And we had just run from a cab and some other shenanigans had occurred. And we got back to my. My apartment, which was on the second floor of the Spot, but it was on a hill, so out the window was like a huge. It was like probably 60 yards to a pavement, to a parking lot behind a Chase bank. And we were hammered. And we're at this place. The electricity had gone out, so all the food in the fridge was bad and it smelled like shit. So we just started throwing it all out the window because we thought it was funny. And then we started throwing bottles out the window and then, like, some furniture and stuff. And somebody. Somebody called the police. And we're sitting there, we're all fucked up, and we just hear, do, do, do, do. Santa Barbara police open up. And we're like, oh, fuck, dude. We the cops. And he looks at me and he's like, dude, get naked. And I was like, what? He's like, trust me. And I was like, all right. So we get butt naked, and I'm like, we're definitely going to fucking jail. So I immediately went to the bathroom because taking a shit in jail sucks. So I was like, I'm gonna go force out a turd.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Gary]

So I'm in the bathroom, and all I hear is this, like, thump noise. And then I hear the door open. I hear a creakling, and it's just a cop. And he goes, what the fuck? What are you doing? And I hear, like, feet stumble around. And then I hear my buddy go, sorry, officer, I must have forgotten my pants. And the cops are like, what the fuck are you talking about? And they're like, put some fucking clothes on. So the cops come grab me, and Naked. And they realized. Well, they thought. They realized that we were two gay dudes in an argument, so we faked a homosexual domestic violence situation. And they were like. They were like, oh, shit. These are two gay dudes going on it. Yeah. So they just ended up making us go clean it up because they felt bad because they thought that. Well. And my buddy was a lot bigger than me, too. So now I'm realizing Telling this story that they probably thought I was just getting beat up by this guy. But anyways, so years later, I've told this story a couple times before to people. And you know, it's funny, ha ha, but years later I find out from this guy, Jack Karaku, CIA dude.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Gary]

That this is like an old CIA strategy that they employ all the time. I didn't even know. Play the. Play the video here.

[Sean]

Headquarters says, we want you to pretend that you're gay. I said, oh, come on. No, we really need the information. You gotta pretend that you're gay.

[George]

I said, okay, I'll do it.

[Sean]

I'll do it for Uncle Sam. So I called and I said, hey, I have two tickets to this show and I was hoping maybe you'd be free. Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards. He said, yeah, I'd love to. So we go to the show. He thoroughly enjoyed it, and we go for sushi afterwards and we go out again. And he says, why don't you go over to my place some night and I'll.

[Chris Williamson]

I'll make dinner.

[Sean]

I said, great. So I go over to his place. He made a lovely dinner. And then I thought, well, I have to invite him to my place.

[George]

So I told my.

[Chris Williamson]

What?

[Sean]

You're going to have to like, get out. So, Sheila, I made dinner. I removed all the pictures of us together. And we had just gotten married, so we had like our wedding picture up and everything. At the dinner, he leaned in to kiss me and I instinctively backed off. And he said, oh, my God, I'm sorry, I thought you're gay. And I said, said, oh, no, I am gay. I'm not into hairy guys.

[Chris Williamson]

And he's like, oh, okay.

[Sean]

I said, I'm sorry. I think you're great.

[Gary]

I'm.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm not feeling it.

[Gary]

You didn't kiss him? No. And I think there's another. There's. I don't remember if it was him, but there was another person who used an example of faking they were gay to like get out of trouble. But yeah, just. That's another life hack for you.

[Chris Williamson]

Just get naked.

[Gary]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

I mean, could you not just appear gay rather than be naked? Because who fights naked?

[Gary]

Two gay dudes banging, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, okay, okay. The idea that you were so small that they thought, this guy's a world renowned power bottom. You can't believe he's getting pounded from every angle.

[Gary]

Oh, God. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's not a good look looking back on it.

[Chris Williamson]

Why have you got trash in your truck?

[Gary]

Well, I got another life hack for you, Chris. Remember to take out your trash cans? Yeah, I got a couple bags of garbage in the back of my truck that he commented on when I pulled and he's like, why do you have like four bags of garbage? And I was like, well, I forgot to take out the trash two weeks in a row. So there's just a bunch of.

[Chris Williamson]

Use it in the bed of your truck. Carry it around as additional.

[Gary]

Yeah, it's just in the bed of the truck.

[Chris Williamson]

Surplus.

[Gary]

There's a dumpster behind a movie theater that I'm going to go throw it out in after this, actually. Thanks for reminding me.

[Sean]

Welcome. You could do a full season, three

[Gary]

months like that with just 20 bags of trash in the truck.

[Sean]

So you have three life hacks. That's pretty good.

[Gary]

Yeah, three life hacks.

[Sean]

You do it for all of us.

[Gary]

One is really conspiracy and I'm addicted to Kratom. That's what I'm bringing to the table today.

[Sean]

Did you have a life hack that was good?

[George]

I'll go on.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, you know, the first ever series that I did on this show was life Hacks. So there's like a thousand that I've got to pick from. But the one that I've been using the most, especially because I just got back from tour, it was in Australia, New Zealand and Bali, is an app called Flighty. So Flighty connects with your email and when you book flights, it automatically pulls it over and it tells you everything that's going on with your flight. What gate you're going out of, where your plane is inbound, where it's going to go when you're on the journey as well. It also tracks everything so it pre downloads the map so that when you're flying in the air, even without wi fi, it knows sort of how long the journey is going to be. Can give you information about what the wait time is going to be like at your future destination, connection times gate to gate, what carousel your baggage is going to be at. It lives in just a little island at the top, you know, the floating island thing at the top of your iPhone. And it just fucking rules, dude. Like the number of times that there's been some last minute bullshit change. And because I'm not watching the board or I've got my AirPods in, you're just in and out of doing your thing. It's just on your phone, it's quicker than the app. There was one flight that got diverted from Austin because it was gale force winds. It got diverted to Houston And I was recording with Andrew Schultz that day. It's like fuck, I need to get back, this better not be laid, blah blah blah. And I thought it was great. And then the plane just did whoop like that took up again as it was coming in to land and I was like oh it must be coming back around for another one. Before the pilot even came over the tannoy it updated and said like you're now basically you're landing in Houston. And I was like so in some ways it can be disappointing before everybody else knows, but it's fucking great flighty and it's like 30 bucks a year and you can have friends on it as well. You can add friends flights to it. So if you've got your missus is flying in, you don't need to do a It's fucking epic. A quick aside look, you know sleep matters, but let's be real. Most nights you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative. 8 Sleep Pod 5 fixes that. It's a smart cover that you throw over the top of your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. They've even added a temperature regulating duvet and pillowcase so you and your partner can sleep at your preferred temperatures, covered head to toe like some temperature controlled mummy. Plus it's got upgraded sensors that run health checks when you're asleep, tracking things like abnormal heartbeats and breathing issues and sudden HRV changes. There's a built in speaker for white noise. The autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns, makes real time adjustments to improve your sleep. It even detects when you're snoring and lifts your head a few inches to help you breathe better. That is why eight Sleep is clinically proven to add up to an hour of quality sleep per night. And best of all, they have a 30 day sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights and if you don't like it they will just give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get up to $350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com modernwisdom and using the code ModernWisdom at checkout that's E I G H T sleep.com ModernWisdom and ModernWisdom at checkout.

[George]

My life hack at the minute is it's more kind of a philosophical stance to some extent. I think of a lot of gibberish that comes up where it's probably in the last 20 years. There's this particular discourse that happens online but also in books where you'll see they'll make a point and then they'll go. So this study says, or studies say. And I think what happens for me for a while now, previously I would default to whatever this person's about to say now is completely true. But often my new default is whatever this person is about to say now is complete horseshit. Because first off, my friend Billy made this great point of do you know anybody who's been in a study? Have you actually ever inspected a lot of these studies? So I think previously what people used to do, 9 out of 10 times they would believe the study's true and 1 out of 10 is gibberish. I actually think the policy is much better the other way that nine out of ten studies that you hear about, particularly psychological studies, guess what? Physics doesn't need a study. Physics goes, here's how it works. And you want to always up like it's kind of the Deutsch argument. You always want to go for good explanations rather than studies of site grads with people that had a specific hypothesis they wanted to confirm beforehand. And you'll often see these things that go viral on Twitter that get 4 million views. There's like 15 participants of like college mails that are then making like. Then the daily mail covers it, the Telegraph covers it.

[Chris Williamson]

Sweeping generalization.

[George]

It's one giant scam. The other one is my favorite one is science says or science backed or trust the science. And my new default is if somebody says this, they're about to say something that's completely unscientific because by definition. Oh, sorry about that. By definition, if something is science backed, I didn't best. There we go. If something is science, if something is

[Chris Williamson]

mutonic, says research backed, ingredients research.

[Gary]

Quite a little bit I can say firsthand. This shit definitely works.

[Chris Williamson]

Got you off.

[George]

Adorable, I guess. I guess the question is, but then actually investigate what the research is essentially saying, which most of us we just default to. This is true.

[Chris Williamson]

So I read Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History Everyone needs to subscribe on substack fucking rules. And he posted today there was a wonderful one, two parter living fossils that Rob Kurzban does and Experimental History had these two things about the replication crisis. And Adam's entire point is that psychological theories don't ever be killed, they just become embarrassing. So power posing been completely disproven but has now just been sort of Retconned into It's like expansive posture science and stuff. They've just renamed it growth mindset. Total bullshit. Totally does not replicate. Ego depletion. Like willpower stuff. Total total bullshit. Does not replicate.

[Gary]

But what about retard maxing?

[Chris Williamson]

Retard maxing actually is at the forefront of cutting psychological science.

[Sean]

If it doesn't replicate do a 360

[Chris Williamson]

moonwalk out of that.

[George]

The problem with the replication stuff is that it goes back to the conversation we had around genetics that actually some of this stuff may work for certain people depending on their specific genetic set. What you may have is 10% it really really works for and 90% it doesn't do anything. Which is a way more fascinating conversation. But as soon as you just default to. It feels like I have a point that disagrees with Gary now. And I'm just going to say. Well studies say and I've won and there's never any like critical conversation around. Well, can you explain the specific variables here that causes this outcome? It's just studies say.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, let me tell you about the statement increased skepticism. Is that what you're saying? As a yes.

[George]

As a whole.

[Chris Williamson]

As a whole. Including around Oath all the way up.

[Sean]

I mean I think the other side of that the life hack is use this all the time. Because there's. For every one George who's skeptical, out of a hundred people, how many have your stance?

[George]

Oh, it's the other way.

[Sean]

Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be 99. So actually like the hack is. Well, there's actually a start saying study.

[George]

There's actually a study about this.

[Sean]

There's no study at. And everybody will take you very seriously.

[Gary]

It's similar to how people reference mainstream media. Even though like you said with the straight how there were still ships going through there and the media was saying that they weren't. Yeah, it's the same thing right? Where they're. Where somebody instead of referencing a study they're like well FOX News said or CNN or whatever bullshit.

[George]

People appeal to social authority. Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Gary]

Dude. Speaking of which, that actually ties into the other thing I sent you. Did you guys hear about the Stop Nick Shirley act in California? Dude, this is crazy. So there was.

[Chris Williamson]

Because he's trying to do the same thing he did in Minnesota and California.

[Sean]

Right.

[Gary]

He needs to do that in Puerto Rico. Dude, seriously.

[Chris Williamson]

I mean if you list the places

[Sean]

that are California has this act now. Who's. Who's.

[Chris Williamson]

This is it.

[Gary]

This is the bill right here. They basically put put together this legislation that says it's called the Stop make sure the act.

[Sean]

Wait, it's like a draft.

[George]

Why is that?

[Chris Williamson]

Existing law prohibits a person, business or association from knowingly publicly posting or publicly disclosing or distributing on Internet websites or on social media the personal information or image of any debt, designated healthcare services, patient provider or assistant or other individuals residing at the same home address with the intent to incite a third person to cause imminent great bodily harm to the person identified in the posting or display or to a co resident of that person as specified or to threaten the person identified in the posting or display or a co resident of that person as specified.

[Gary]

So it's basically an extreme fascist bill that they're trying to pass to prevent people from exposing fraud.

[Chris Williamson]

So you think that they getting out ahead of having exposed in California what was exposed in Minnesota and by making it essentially this kind of investigation.

[Gary]

Yeah, and that's of interest to me given all the financial stuff I've exposed down in Puerto Rico. But the, On a. If you strap like that and map it onto freedom of speech as a whole, this is a big problem. I mean, I, I don't know what.

[Chris Williamson]

This shit is fucking gnarly, dude. Having to read this thing like the. Oh, here we go.

[George]

This guy.

[Gary]

Yeah, he explains it a little bit better here. It warns that it would restrict the release of investigative videos and impose penalties on watchdogs who expose fraud. It's a, I mean, I don't really believe in the two party system. I think they're all just too. Everybody's full of shit. But it is a Democrat that put this out. And of course there's the backlash from. This guy's probably a Republican.

[Sean]

So it sounds like what they're saying is when he exposes the Somali learning centers that then creates sort of hostile potential violence against the Somali people. So in order to protect threats of violence against immigrants, here's this act.

[Gary]

Right, right, right. Which is totally like a load of bullshit because the real way you would protect from somebody being harassed like that is to stop the fraud in the first place from happening.

[Sean]

Yeah. Or just separately prevent like violence in the way that we prevent assault.

[Gary]

Yeah, yeah. Or I mean, I'm just saying that, yeah. There's a number of other ways to handle it, but. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Yeah, I, I was looking at this the other day. I'm, I'm kind of interested in how it plays out. You know, you're, you're, you do a

[Chris Williamson]

lot of investigative journalism, right. You were down in Palisades almost immediately after the fire, exposing a ton of stuff around. Female. You've done the Puerto Rico thing. What are the like, big ones have you done recently?

[Gary]

Well, after going to Puerto Rico, I kind of was, I shelved the, the deep dive investigations because it's so much work to look through all the, just everything.

[Sean]

Dude.

[Gary]

It was also really, it was fucked up, man. Like people in Puerto Rico don't have. We met a guy who doesn't have a fucking roof still.

[George]

Wow.

[Gary]

He has, he hasn't had electricity for eight years. It's crazy, dude, I, you gotta watch it. I don't know if I ever since

[Chris Williamson]

you didn't send me this one.

[Gary]

Yeah, it's, it's insane. I, I, in theory, I mean, I can give you the, the layout real fast. Basically, in 2016, Congress, with Obama's approval, signed off on a financial board that more or less acts like the shadow government of Puerto Rico now. And they've funneled around $2 billion of taxpayer money, Puerto Rican taxpayer money, off the island to Wall street consultants, executives, attorneys to consult on the bankruptcy down there because the whole island is bankrupt. And part of that process is to resolve the prepa bankruptcy, which is the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the government power company. And then it was privatized with this company, Luma and yada yada, yada. The power is horribly unreliable down there. It's one of the most expensive in the entire country. And they're basically having money funneled off the island, like, and they're all more or less connected to Wall street. But it's crazy. And the reason I bring that up in relation to this is because,

[Chris Williamson]

you

[Gary]

know, the Somalian daycare thing, sure, there's, there's some, some stuff going on there, but Puerto Rico's been basically getting on forever. And I think this is possibly an even worse situation that's going on down there. And they just revoked some transparency act down there too, recently in the past like four or five months.

[Chris Williamson]

They're going to try and get out ahead of people that are doing investigative journalism.

[Gary]

I mean, that's what it seems like to me. They don't want, they want it to be more difficult for people to FOIA request stuff essentially. Like one of the things they revoked on the transparency act down there in Puerto Rico was when you request information, it doesn't show who you are specifically. Right, right. To, to the, to the people that you're requesting it from. But they, they're changing that so that they can see, so they'll be like, oh, Gary F. The guy that's been talking a bunch of about us is requesting this information. We're going to, you know, deny that.

[Chris Williamson]

Yep.

[Gary]

It's crazy. But this is similar to that. And I think this is actually branded

[Sean]

as the Transparency act, because who can.

[Gary]

Who can say it was existing legislation that was put.

[Sean]

Equals Good.

[George]

Yeah.

[Gary]

Yeah, they're. Yeah. But, yeah, this is crazy. I don't even know what else to say about it, because not much has transpired. But in my field of work, I mean, that would basically prevent me from doing my job.

[Sean]

I have a quote that I love. This is a little more positive. I feel like we've had some conspiracy, some darkness, some getting in trouble. I want to bring a little positivity here. All right, so saw this quote from Blake Mycosky, who created Tom's Shoes. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but he has this. He's like, I've had this on the wall of every office. So he says, a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to determine if he is working or playing. To him, he always appears to be doing both. And I just like, that, to me, has just been a very useful,

[Chris Williamson]

I

[Sean]

don't know, guidepost or like, oh, yeah, that is the highest calling. If you yourself basically don't differentiate between your work and your play. Or is this something that you have to do or you should do or you want to do, the more those blend together and the less you sort of bucket things, I think the more you solve the problem of balance that I think nobody feels like they have. And so I just thought this was awesome. And I'm going to put this up in my office wall.

[Chris Williamson]

So this seems similar to what Michael was talking about of the childlike thing. You remember on the first episode that we did, and he quoted some scripture. He's like, be childlike my children or something like that. I think one of the problems that you have is working for yourself. Sounds great, because it sounds like, choose whenever you want to work. But for most people, what it results in being is just work all the time, because there's no one to tell you to stop up. And a great idea to think about. If this doesn't feel like play to me, scrutinize it, and maybe try and get rid of whatever I can from this particular area. Of my life. But when you're compelled by, oh, well, I just want to be more successful and more well known, that is rewarding in and of itself, but it's not the type of reward that you want. So you need to almost be skeptical and discerning in the rewards that you get, too. This feels like play, but it might actually be just shallow, juvenile status seeking. Or it might be me playing the game of accumulating money when I already have enough. It's that line from James Clear where he says, if you already live a good lifestyle and you sacrifice it in order to make more money, by definition, it's a bad trade. And I think sometimes people are bad at distinguishing, determining what is and is not play what is and is not. Just more like limbic rewards. Does that make sense?

[Sean]

So there's this book that I'm reading. It talks exactly about. It's called the Score. You guys ever heard of this book? It's basically this guy who's a. He's a philosophy professor, but he loved games growing up. He always plays games. He uses games as this analogy. And I think in general, a far more important thing in life than being a good player is picking a good game game because it's very easy to be. You know you were talking about Joey Chestnut earlier, right?

[George]

And like, you know, the philosopher Joey

[Sean]

Chestnut, no knock on him, but like, just generally choosing to be a competitive eater. Not the best game to play in life, right? Like, you could choose many things to try to be great at. There are some that are better and worse. Every game comes with a scoreboard. The scoreboard is very unique in that it basically programs you. It rewires your mind for what you now want. The game dictates what you want, right? Because it says, that's how you win. This is the scoreboard. So therefore I your behavior. And then it tells you who you need, and then it changes your identity. Who do you need to be to win this game? So you play Call of Duty, you better be a psychopathic murderer, right? You got to be ruthless. You play charades, you better be a team player, a great communicator. You play poker, you better be great at the art of deception. And so the game you choose will not only choose for you what you want, it'll choose your motivation. It'll end up dictating your identity. Who do you need to be to win that game? So he talks about, like, he became a philosopher or philosophy professor because he loved answering the big questions about life. That's what got him into it then he got there and he realized there's a ranking system for the professors nationwide and how do you go up? So he's a competitive person by nature like many of us are. So he started trying to win the game. Now he had a scoreboard. The scoreboard said in order to get more points you have to write more peer reviewed published articles about these niche topics. So then he spends two years winning that game and then basically feeling miserable because he's like this is not what he enjoys about philosophy. So he made himself miserable winning the game. He talks about how there's something called value capture. Value capture is basically when the game gives you the metric that is super simplified, easy to digest but it may not have been what you want out of this. So for example in life like we're on YouTube, right? YouTube gives you one big score views. You can make a life changing episode that gets half the views of another episode but it doesn't know how to measure life changing. It just measures views and it's going to keep giving you that metric. And I mean let's be Honest, how many YouTubers don't just respond to views, right? Like it's like a very, very powerful motivation because it's in your face, everybody sees it and that's the scoreboard that determines success or failure in that game.

[George]

Game. I mean we've spoke about this hours

[Chris Williamson]

and yeah this is one of our favorite fucking you hit one of our trap cards.

[George]

There's a weirdly part of the thoughts I was thinking about this week was going down like how you know that Marshall McEwen line that we like shape our tools then our shape us. A great example of Nietzsche. Nietzsche used to write by a hand and then his eyesight began to go so he started to write in a typewriter and he's writing completely Czech. He went way shorter, way punchier. Like he almost completely changed as an individual. And I've been thinking about that with a lot of these tools where so I would like one of my life hacks at the minute is what I call boom scrolling. So rather than doom scrolling I go on a treadmill at like 15 incline 3 in I've got share believe on loop playing. I'm spinning around, I'm having a fucking great. I'm just sending links to people.

[Chris Williamson]

If you are either in his contact high on the top of his list of imessage contacts recently because he's got massive recency bias so he only sends it to the people that he can see and if you're in lifetime on South Lamar and you walk downstairs and you see him, it's you with something from the 80s, some hair metal or like some like big pop star from the 80s, and he's just furiously sending fucking links to that.

[George]

That's how social media, I think, is supposed to be consumed. If you're at 130, I thought it

[Chris Williamson]

was supposed to be.

[George]

Yeah. If you're at 130, heart rate per minute, you just like forget about like all the like new stuff goes. And I'm just in like these holes, like finding stuff. But one of the reflections, you've managed

[Chris Williamson]

to find a social media flow state.

[George]

Yeah, yeah, flow state for social media. Boom. Scrolling. It's coming back. So one of my actual realizations when I was in this high was one thing you, when you become, when you're in like a flow state or when you're more mindful, you begin like a lot of meditators describe it as the frame rate of reality completely slows down. So it's kind of like going from a standard definition TV to a HD where everything's a bit clearer, everything's a bit slower. And I started to notice this thing in my head that I was really embarrassed about that when I would scroll, I'd see a tweet or I'd see a post and there's this little thing in me that just looks at the views it gets and then like determines if I'm going to consume it or my reaction beforehand. And it's almost like imagine what we've created with this memetic algorithm. Imagine before you ever heard like a piece of music or you ever tasted a bit of food, it's like people clapping or people going, that's a bit shit. And that's your whole experience. You don't actually ever experience social media content. So one of the two big changes I'd like to see is one, could I just turn off all engagement metrics? And I'd be fascinated to run a study and compare the two and see the impact that that would have. And then the second one, because I've thought a lot about this, which is your point sian around the depth metrics, that it's very hard for us to measure depth. It's very easy for us to measure width is. Right now one of the problems with social media is you can only kind of pay with a. Like, that's the currency which. And if you have a thought experiment, if you imagine the world where the only currency was like a $1 bill and you can't pay more than $1. What would you have?

[Sean]

The dollar store theory.

[George]

You'd have dollar store everywhere means you wouldn't have Michelin star restaurants, you wouldn't have luxury brands, you wouldn't have all these stuff that you'd. Those are actually shit examples because I hate them. But stuff that you would actually want to pay more money for. And I thought even just as simple as Y X don't just implement a golden like where I only have one per week. It's completely meaningless. But I have one per week and I press it. And then I can also go on the golden like feed, I can go. This is the thing that Sian says out of everything he's consumed, this week is the best. I think the change you would have in terms of content would be huge.

[Chris Williamson]

The worst thing is that you proposed this to me over dinner, what, five years ago or something probably. And I was like, fucking stupid idea. And then YouTube brought in hype. Have you seen hype?

[Sean]

No, what is that?

[Chris Williamson]

If you're a channel with under 100,000 subscribers, you as a user are allowed, I think you're allocated about a thousand hype points per week and you can only spend it on videos that are high performing. I think it might be videos over 100k on channels less than 100k, something like that. But it's like non fungible the limited. Right. So the bitcoin of your likes and it's fucking great. And I find myself using it on videos that I really want to. Here's a small creator that's nailed it with some great documentary explaining why the Strait of Hormuz is hard to get through whatever the fuck. And I want to send the hype thing. Michael Smoke had one video that broke through and I wanted to do it for his thoughts thing. So yes, you're right. Other thing. McNamara fallacy, you familiar with that?

[Sean]

No.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, so McNamara was the guy that was in charge of working out what was going on with the troops in the Vietnam War. And his issue was that he was measuring the wrong metrics. So the McNamara fallacy, or quantitative fallacy, is the mistake of making decisions based solely on metrics while ignoring qualitative, unmeasurable Factors. Named after U.S. secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it assumes that if something cannot be easily measured, it is not important or does not exist. So the issue that the McNamara fallacy had was that enemy body count metric is taken to be a precise and objective measure of the success or failure of the Vietnam War, which it wasn't at all. It was domestic casualties, domestic injuries, and the far more important, what's the vibe? What's the tone around it? The moral. Yes.

[Gary]

The soul.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, precisely. So the line is, we end up intending to measure what matters, but instead what we can measure just ends up mattering.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And everything else is disregarded. So you could, like I say how

[George]

obviously golden, like, idea, like, is there any ways you guys have, like, for yourselves, whether it's for the actual platforms themselves or just for you as an individual, have found a way out of this?

[Sean]

There was one I heard I didn't do this, but Hormozi had a thing with this where he starts getting popular on YouTube and then he hires a team and they're like, hey, let's. Let's punch this up. Let's do this video. Let's do this video. Oh, people will love this. Do what you're eating. Do what you. How you guys met. Do this. Right. He started as a business channel and then he's doing everything. And of course, things that are, you know, there's not a lot of people who want to understand how to do better. Cold calls and sales, right. Like, that's a super niche topic. But, like, don't be broke is a bigger topic. And then bigger than that is going to be harsh truths about being a man, whatever, Right? Like, so those are pop. Those get 2 million views. So why make those shitty 20,000 views about, you know, how to improve your sales funnel or whatever? But he realized, like, well, what was my mission? My mission was like, I love business. I want to share what I know about business. And so what he did was he started selling his book for 99 cents and he put it in this bio, right? So he's basically just used the assumption of instead of measuring the success of these videos based on views, let's just measure it on book sales. Presumably only a business person, the type of people I'm making content for, would buy a business book about sales or about $100 million offers. Only somebody who liked the video and trusted me more from this video would go and convert. So it's like, let me create my own. It's like people who do their own sampling, like their own polling. I don't know if you heard about this before the election, but there was a guy who did the. Who made a huge bet on Polymarket that Trump was going to win. I don't know if you guys remember this. Some French guy made like $50 million. And the reason why was the mainstream media polls were showing like a neck and neck race. And he did what's called something like the Friends and Neighbors poll. You can pull this up, Jared, but I think the premise was if you ask people who they're going to vote for, they'll tell you. But some people hedge. And there was closeted Trump voters. But if you ask them who do you think your neighbor's going to vote for, they'll give you a different question, a different answer.

[Chris Williamson]

It's like the Keynesian beauty contest.

[George]

Yes.

[Sean]

And so he used the data from. He commissioned his own poll, which cost him like a few hundred thousand dollars or whatever, and he ended up making 40 or 50 million dollars on a bet because he understood the actual probability of success was far different than the priced odds on these markets. On these markets.

[Chris Williamson]

So what you're saying that Alex did was he found a metric that was more important and more accurate than all of the other metrics.

[Sean]

He brought his own metric to YouTube, which he had to hack around. Right. To figure out how to do.

[Chris Williamson]

James Smith does this. So he's got his business channel, which is the. The other thing. He basically shut down his main one, which has got half a million subs, and he'll put a video up that gets 20,000 plays and make $50,000. Because the people that go onto that video are precisely his target market at a high conversion. And they've got some special tracking link that's for each different video. So he knows, oh, this one video. Because it's only this link in that one video and it's pinned in the comments or whatever it might be. And he can. He's now optimizing for the outcome that he wants.

[George]

That makes sense.

[Chris Williamson]

Now the problem is that you then start to optimize for book sales and what? Optimizing for book sales. Because you're always optimizing for something unless you're optimizing for Vibe or optimizing for feeling. And that's what, you know, to break the fourth wall. That's the reason that I wanted to do this. I don't know if these episodes will ever be bigger than me sitting down with McConaughey. I think they've kind of weirdly got the legs to be. But the reason I wanted to do it is because I thought it would be fun. And I think that optimizing for your. The quote on the wall of your man or the childlike joy or the, you know, good hang vibe, it's.

[Gary]

Yeah.

[George]

Knowing when to use metrics, when to avoid them. And then also then you said then about studies like how much of this is you. And then how much of this is the wider.

[Sean]

I have to give you credit. You did this when you released your high agency thing. I was the one who went on similar web and looked at the traffic to your blog. I was like, dude, there's a million people have read your blog. You're like, really? I'm like, don't. What are your analytics say? That's a similar website. He's like, I didn't have Google Analytics in.

[George]

Yeah.

[Sean]

And I was like, it was peak. You're a marketing guy. How do you not have it in? You intentionally didn't have it in.

[George]

Yes, yes. Well, even that bit of advice there of like do a blog post. Like blog. Like blog posts are essentially the UK or the mainstream media. You know what I mean? Like it's like the ultimate like undervalued undervalue. Like don't do it. You can't link to it. And at that time Twitter completely shadow banned links. But then, yeah, I think doing something fundamentally different and this is the challenge

[Chris Williamson]

of when do you know.

[George]

And I struggle with this a lot. When you're a bit of a weird guy, which fucking all four of us are probably right. When do you know that you're kind of onto something, you're on the edge or when are you just a bit batshit mental? And that and knowing that is a fucking sc. That's where you've got to have good

[Chris Williamson]

friends, I think as well as sometimes just balls.

[George]

And you make mistakes.

[Sean]

You just always assume you're onto something.

[Chris Williamson]

Put the glasses.

[Sean]

You always 100% assume you're onto.

[George]

That's what I do.

[Gary]

Delusional cut.

[George]

This is the difference.

[Sean]

You know what?

[Chris Williamson]

That's our GDP gap. And this side of the table, that's

[George]

the GDP gap right there.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Versus America.

[Sean]

If you're on to something.

[Gary]

Come on. Yeah, really, really.

[Chris Williamson]

It is, it is.

[Sean]

I'm always onto something. That's what I'm baby. Dude.

[Gary]

Next thing you know, I'm going to

[Chris Williamson]

be sure, maybe I'll wait two decades.

[George]

That's a metacratic society where we've got an old school aristocratic society.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, exactly. We've been handed. And also the other thing is that we can't raise out of our status. You're going to be middle class for the rest of your life in the eyes of British people. People. I'm going to be working class for the rest of my life in the eyes of British people. It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter how many plays I get, how much money I make. When I go back home, they know where I went to school, they know what postcode my parents lived in. They know what my accent's like. It's like, I think that that puts a kind of cap on how much people think that they, how big their dreams should be and how much faith they should have in themselves. This is. Alain de Botton talked about this. He's like people that come from in the uk, working class backgrounds, they probably not going to try and rock the boat because that's not their place. It's not your place to do that. America's like nascent. It's like fucking two years old, right? In the grand scheme of things, we got a thousand years of uninterrupted, uninvaded history, right? Apart from some planes in like August of 1940. That's it, right? And then fucking Rudolph Hess when he decided to try and land in Scotland. Do you know that story? Rudolph Hest? Oh, oh gee. Do you wanna tell it?

[George]

You tell it better than me.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, so Rudolph Hester Hess was one of the.

[Gary]

That was the most English shit ever in a. You want to tell it now?

[Sean]

You tell it better than me. Crack on.

[Chris Williamson]

Rudolf Hess was a German fighter ace in World War I. And he then becomes one of the inner circle for Hitler in World War II. He starts to slowly lose favor toward the end of the war, I think 43, 44, he starts to lose favor with Hitler and he sees himself being shunted to the side a little bit. So he decides that he's going to do something courageous and heroic that's going to save the war and also bring him back into the inner circle with regards to Hitler because he's got this sort of group of sycophants around him. He's got Himmler, he's got Goebbels, all of these guys that are around him. And Rudolf Hess has been shunted out to the side. So Hess gets a two seat plane, one of the long range bomber planes that the Germans were using. He gets it modified so that it can be flown by one person as opposed to two. He gets additional fuel tanks strapped to it and he flies it without telling anybody, in the middle of the night from Germany over to Scotland because he once met some aristocratic Scottish nobleman and thinks because he's got this perspective of British, that it's all one Renaissance bridgeton novel, that he is going to know Winston Churchill and the King and he's going to be able to. Or the Queen and he's going to be able to petition Britain to have an Armistice to put down their arms. So he leaves a note for the Fuhrer and leaves a note for his wife and just sets off. Now, he doesn't know where he is when he gets to Scotland because it's dark. By the time he gets to Scotland, it's dark, and he can't see where he wanted to land. He can't see the fucking palace or the house of this nobleman. So he just pulls the ejector seat, lands in a farmer's field, Lands in a farmer's field. Very quickly gets picked up by the British military. They find out this is the fourth ranking Nazi in the entire Reich, immediately take him into custody. Doesn't get to see the king, doesn't get to see the queen, doesn't get to see anybody. Doesn't get to see anybody at all. Doesn't get anywhere close to the nobleman he meant to go out in there and see. However, the British now have the fourth ranking Nazi in the world. And Hitler is furious. Absolutely fucking furious. Like, apoplectic, apparently. And it just goes to show, I think, like, first off, the weird incentives and the way that people respond to a tight sphere of social circle with power struggles that keep on going on, it causes people to do crazy. It's being in relationship with a whole hot, cold girlfriend, right? You're just doing insane things. You're, like, throwing rocks at her window, holding a boombox with a mixtape, and then the next day, you're naked, getting, you know, being beaten up by her or whatever.

[Gary]

I told you that story in confidence.

[Chris Williamson]

And the. The other thing is that people still have this kind of archaic interpretation of what British life is like, especially back in the day.

[Gary]

He should have done a 360 and then moonwalked out of there.

[George]

Have you ever, ever heard of the story of Churchill and Hitler getting dinner?

[Chris Williamson]

This episode is brought to you by whoop. According to my whoop, I've tracked nearly 2,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens. That's because Whoop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day. Your sleep, your workouts, your recovery, your breathing, your heart rate, even your steps. And over time, you get to see what's working and what isn't. And the Whoop 5.0 is the best version yet. It's 7% smaller. You get more than two weeks of battery life from a single charge. It's got healthspan tracking to see how your daily habits affect your pace of aging. It's Even got hormonal insights for the women that are listening. I'm a huge fan. This thing rules. It's been a huge part of my health journey and it's why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. Best of all, you can join for free. Pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap and you get your first month for free. And there's a 30 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it for free. Try it for free. If you don't like it after 29 days, they just give you your money back. Right now you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and that 30 day free trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.commodernwisdom that's join.whoop.commodernWisdom Early 30s, Churchill's very

[George]

much out of the picture and Hitler's on the come ups. I think he's either just became Chancellor, he's just about to come Chancellor. And one of the fascinating things that you, when you really study history is how blurry it is at the time. So I always use the example of the Roman Empire of you can, I think it's like 4, 7, 6 AD is where the Roman Empire fell. But if you ask, well, when did the people recognize it fell? And it's a bit like the same with the British Empire, like when did the British Empire fall? It's like you could point to certain parts of World War I, you could go further back, you could go to World War II, you could go to, to 60s, 70s, whenever you want to go to it. When do people actually recognize the thing? It's always later. And even Hitler, Churchill, who obviously ends up becoming Hitler's nemesis, was intrigued by a dinner with him. So there was this guy called Ernst Putzee Hangelsfagen. You can probably search that one, Jared, and good luck. And he was like a socialite in Germany who wanted to arrange the meeting. And Churchill basically said, listen, he was really concerned about communism at the time, but he was also concerned with Hitler's anti Semitism. So Putzi says, well, come through, I'll introduce you to Adolf. You guys will get on really well. Churchill turns up, he's got his whole family there and kind of chatting to Putzi. Still not here, still not here. So they kind of have dinner. Hitler's not there and Churchill's like, where is he? So Putsie goes, leave it with me. So Hitler famously lives in an apartment building in Berlin. So he goes to his apartment building. Shit. You notice or not? Hitler's there just shaving his mustache. So he's just shaving his mustache at the time. Because you've got to. That's the thing about his mustache. Like, there's a lot of work that goes into that thing. So he's shaving the mustache and he goes, winston Churchill, very important British politician, wants to meet you. And he's like, what am I going to say to him? What am I going to say? I have no interest in talking to that guy. And puts. He, like, argues with him for ages. And he goes, right, I'll come. So he goes back, tells Churchill. Churchill and his family sit there, there. Hitler never comes. So Pudzi says, I'll set you up. The next day sets up another dinner. Hitler never comes. And it's like those moments of history that if those two met. Because famously, I didn't realize this until I was reading about it recently, that Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler. He flew over to Germany and he was impressed. Do this. Give us a handshake. He was impressed by the handshake because Hitler does these double handshakes. And he was drawn in by his charisma and believed, oh, this guy will never invade. But it's just this fascinating counterfactual that if Adolf and Winston met, what would have happened?

[Chris Williamson]

What year was that?

[George]

I want to say 31, 32. Around about then.

[Chris Williamson]

Fuck, yeah. That's so cool. Have you seen the Forbes under 30 under 30 fraud list?

[George]

Oh, wow.

[Gary]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Chris Williamson]

Jared.

[Sean]

How long is it now?

[Chris Williamson]

So it's just. This stinks of you two. This is really something. This is kind of just a gift for you two. But this is the 30 under 30 fraud watch list. So if we scroll down a little bit and you hover over Sam Bankman Fried, you'll see incarcerated. Terraform Labs, incarcerated. Elizabeth Holmes Theranos, incarcerated. Will keep going down. There we go. Time served for Martin Shkreli. And if you go to the black bit where it's, like, redacted, just scroll over the black text. The real numbers were 300,000. That's it. Sold a student loan app to JP Morgan for 175 million. Claimed 4.25 million users. The real number was 300,000, and she hired a data scientist to fabricate the ranking. JP Morgan bought it anyway, then noticed, oops, if we go all the way down to the bottom, there's actually a risk list. So this is people who've been on the 30 under 30. It's like how would you say prototypical algorithm that looks at some of the hype around the market. So these are companies that they think is going to be likely to be on the fraud list. So I don't know any sphere. Cursor. Do you know what that is, Sean?

[Sean]

Cursor is super legit. I would say cursor's super legit, but.

[Chris Williamson]

But they're not going to come for you.

[George]

The crazy one is Sam Bankman Fried. It came out today, Polymarket there.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, Shane.

[George]

Sam Bankman Fried. It came out today that the shares ftx. So Sam Bankman Fried put an investment in Anthropic that owns Claude.

[Chris Williamson]

It would have gotten them out of the.

[George]

It was. It's something like that.

[Sean]

No, it's like $60 billion.

[George]

60 billion. Which Coinbase is worth 50 billion or something like that. So it's.

[Sean]

But the FTX at its peak was 30. So. So basically he's one of the. Had he not gone to jail for fraud and had not been using, would've

[Chris Williamson]

been one of the richest people on

[Sean]

the planet and he would've been seen as one of the best investors in the world. Cause he was early in Solana. He was early in this. He was early in.

[Chris Williamson]

Do they still have that position or did they have to liquidate the position?

[Sean]

No, that's the sad part. When they did the bankruptcy, they bring in this guy, he's a famous guy, he did the Enron bankruptcy. Something like. Something Rice or something, I forgot his name is. He's got a cool, cool sounding name. They bring him in and so what do they do? They immediately like freeze all payments. They like have like a protocol of bankruptcy. And so one of the things is they take all these illiquid shares and they say we need to sell them and they sell them at this huge discount right away into the market.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh my God.

[Sean]

And so they sold.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you know what they sold it for?

[Sean]

So they sold the whole lot for like, I think like a billion dollars of like a billion dollars of all the investments that he had made. And so it was like a fraction of whatever it was like worth essentially. And just the one anthropic position alone is a $60 billion that paid off all of the.

[George]

Oh, multiple times. Oh, many times. Oaks.

[Chris Williamson]

So all of the people who were missing money, had they have just held. When was the FTX thing? Three years ago?

[Sean]

Yeah, something like that.

[Chris Williamson]

Maybe. Had they have held the FTX position in Anthropic simply for what, thousand days? Thousand even. Let's say it was like they did it, it was last year, it would have been three years that would have cleared off everybody's death debts. Everybody would have got their money back, right?

[Sean]

Well, you got screwed. Because if, let's say you held bitcoin in ftx, you did nothing wrong, you bought bitcoin on this exchange, you think you have bitcoin in reality. FTX either didn't buy the bitcoin, just took your cash. They showed you you own 10 bitcoin, but you didn't. They never bought the bitcoin, they just took the cash and did something with it. Or you did have bitcoin and they went and used it again for their own slush fund of investing, which they were not supposed to do. Now, even when the bankruptcy happened and it's like, oh, you're going to get paid out. You got paid out based on the bitcoin price when it happened, not the fact that Bitcoin was up 3, 4, 5x since then.

[Gary]

Why is that?

[Sean]

It was like, it's the way that, I guess the bankruptcy process works. I don't know the technicality of the way that they did it. And so you had this money that should have been appreciating that was locked up and then you get paid on the four years ago price or whatever it was the day that it happened. It is pretty bad.

[Chris Williamson]

Sean, your knowledge of fucking niche business stuff, dude, is terrifying. It's like George, for random historical facts,

[Sean]

Galloway did something cool with this. Have you heard what he did? So when the bankruptcy happened and people every. So like for me, I had some cash. FTX was one of our sponsors. They gave us a bunch of money, they gave us like 100, 200 grand to write one article about them on the milk bread. And we actually wrote it and I wrote in the thing, I was like, yeah, there's this weird relationship between ftx, which everybody thinks is the best company in the world right now, and Alameda Research, his like hedge fund. And it's like, it's unclear the relationship. It's, it's a bit of a.

[Chris Williamson]

So you called this out?

[Sean]

So I called that part. I, I'm not an investigative journalist. I wasn't going to go, it's not my job to go figure that out. But I just noted like, hey, like here's a bunch of really interesting things about them. Here's something that's unexplained. I, I don't fully know. It sounds a little bit sketch. And so we sent it to them. We're like, hey, we're ready to post and they were like, you need to take that part out.

[Chris Williamson]

No.

[Sean]

And so I was like, well, I think I'm not gonna take it out.

[Gary]

Right?

[Sean]

And they were like, okay, we'll get back to you. And they just never talked to me again. They never took the money back. They never asked for the money back. They just disappeared.

[Chris Williamson]

You never posted it?

[Sean]

We never posted it. We were like, okay, I guess we'll just. I guess they'll get back to us. They just never did. And then it came out that that was like this link that was like a really problematic thing.

[Gary]

That was their defensive way of handling that.

[George]

Did you ever talk about that?

[Chris Williamson]

Did you bring up the fact that you presciently fucking accidentally just nudged the tripwire? You didn't fully break it, but you nudged the trip y that was going to cause like the biggest banking scandal of the last five years.

[George]

The Epstein girls. The two girls.

[Sean]

But I'm like a dog setting it off. I wasn't really like clever in how I was doing it.

[Chris Williamson]

You backed into. You moonwalked in?

[Sean]

Yeah. I was just like, that sounds weird. Is there an explanation for this? They're like, no. And I was like, okay, still sounds weird to me. That was. It does this whole.

[George]

It's really interesting to consider and it kind of links to the like study says, science says of. We just have this default bias of if people think this thing is successful kind of. It's this giant game of Emperor's New Clothes that exists.

[Chris Williamson]

One of the things that I've always had a bit of a problem with, maybe because I was such an unpopular kid, that the fact that talent isn't enough momentum is more important for the most part, you know, we can let a lot of people get away with some pretty gnarly shit if it seems like they're crushing it. I always use this example of a fyre festival. Billy McFarlane from Fyre Festival. The festival was an entire catastrophe. Multiple documentaries made about it. People are in basically FEMA shelters instead of the five star huts that they were promised. Blink 182 doesn't turn up. People have got these like small cheese sandwiches. Maybe they're going to be stranded on an island. There's not enough water. All the rest of it. But if Billy McFarland had been able to put together a half competent festival just passively, he would have been hailed as a marketing genius. The orange square, all of that stuff was hugely influential. And this is because we will forgive almost every sin of someone's if they're successful. And in a Meritocracy. This makes complete sense, right? If you are crushing it, that means I want to be around you. The blast radius of your success is so great. Fucking canonical. Perfect example that happened two weeks ago. Kanye West. Kanye west just sold out SoFi Stadium two nights, right? And the stage show is fucking spectacular. All that anyone can talk about is how cool the production was. And he's got all of these guests coming on. It's fucking amazing. He hasn't exactly showered himself in glory over the last five years, right? It would be difficult for a musician to try and torpedo their own musical career more aggressively than Kanye west did. But homeboy's got bangers. Yeah, if you've got bangers, dude, it's all forgiven. You can do whatever the fuck you want. And that's on one side. What happens with music, Your point and beauty. Two things that hack the human brain so effectively that you will stay going back to the fucking crazy stripper girl because she's so hot, even though she's bad for you. You will listen to the person who put out literal Heil Hitler song fucking six months ago because he's got three and a half hour worth set of straight heaters. And the same thing is also true with Momentum. If somebody seems to be crushing it, we'll just. Sam Bankman fried. He's playing fucking. What was he playing? Like fucking World of Warcraft or something?

[Sean]

During the meeting?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, during. And he's like, oh, my God, this guy's a fucking genius. Super genius.

[George]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

And it's like, no, no, no, no. Because any person would be scrutinized, but if you've got the right momentum, people are happy to just fucking shunt that to the side. And I've never liked it. And it goes to my theory about why people say the only insults that hurt are the ones that you believe. And I don't think it's true. I think the insults that hurt the most are the ones that you know are untrue, but that you fear other people might believe. Because that's optics management. Because you have not only the unfairness, but you have the indignation of knowing that it isn't true. And this is the opposite side of the same dynamic that we're talking about here. You could put out something which is amazingly researched, a fantastic piece of work, but if other people say you're a bad guy or that was done incorrectly, or we don't think he's cool, it's not going to get anywhere. But that can't happen with Beauty because It hacks the human brain. You, it is so hard to say. You can say that girl or that guy that's very good looking. They're an, they're this, they're that. And you go, yeah, but they're so hot. The same with Kanye West. You can say he's an anti semi. We don't like him. He's crazy. He's addicted to nitrous. It's like he's got fucking heaters, dude. And for as long as he's got heaters, it doesn't matter. That's my fucking.

[George]

I do think music and beauty are unique in that regard. That the more successful you are as a musician, the more you can probably get away with. More so than any other, any other realm.

[Chris Williamson]

People can kid themselves into not liking something that is objectively good because they don't like the person putting it across. In most art form forms, if you don't like somebody on a podcast and they tell a really interesting story, you can convince yourself that it wasn't that interesting. Other than an even comedy. Someone can tell a joke and you can be like, no, wasn't that good, Wasn't that good. Didn't think it was that good. The same thing is not true for music. It is so penetrating emotionally to people. It fucking just cuts through your biases. It cuts through your defenses in a way that other art forms can't. And beauty, especially like female beauty for guys is just, you can be the craziest, like total cluster B personality nightmare curse. If you're hot, guys are just going to keep coming back.

[George]

Wait till you hear Epstein's SoundCloud. You know, I always use the example with Billy McFarlane of like Steve Jobs is a little bit of a very, very different figure to Billy McFarlane, but reality distortion field kind of makes things happen. And the counterfactual that the ultimate thing that MacFarlane did or one of the big things is his business partner. His co founder was Ja Rule. And I always the counterfactual. If Steve Jobs co founder was Ja Rule rather than Steve Wozniak, the McFarlane story is very obviously it's on him for selecting Ja Rule. But if he would have selected a good operator, what would have happened?

[Chris Williamson]

Question, question, question. What businesses would be made better by adding Ja Rulin?

[George]

That's a great question.

[Sean]

Have you seen the old thing? What does Ja have to say about this? One of the all time old Internet memes, There's a, there's a phrase that I've been very interested in recently called supernormal stimuli. Have you guys heard this? Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. You're not familiar with this, you might be able to explain it.

[Chris Williamson]

Skinnerian behaviorism stuff.

[Sean]

Yeah. Basically there was a scientist back then. He won the Nobel Prize for this. And what he studied was, he got famous because instead of doing studies in a lab, he just went out into the wild. Was like, what do I observe is actually true? And then if I tweak a variable, can I just leave it in the real environment and see what happens? And so what he did was birds. The core behavior of a bird is to sit on the egg, keep the egg warm. That's your baby. That's like the entire, like Darwinian pressure is to keep this egg alive. So he goes, awesome. Bird loves egg. Does bird love bigger egg? Does bird love pink egg? Bird love pink polka dot egg. So he started putting a fake bigger egg with bigger dots and bigger, brighter colors, put it next to it, and guess what the bird does? Gets off its real egg and goes. Sits on the fake egg because it's more stimulated. Hijacked the brain. And so his point wasn't like, it's not like, like some rational pros and cons list decision. Bird just had a deep, like, part of his brain that you could just hijack by changing the. To give it a what he calls a super normal stimulus. So he would give him a bigger. And he could just keep doing this up till the point where it's almost comical. The egg is so big that a bird finally, when he's like, I can't even sit on this egg. Okay, I guess that's too big, right? And like, you know, you walk around and you'll see people with crazy lip fillers and bbls and stuff. It's like, what is it? It's a supernormal stimulus. It's the same thing. It's like there's a way to hijack the mind. Beauty, color. If you go to the grocery store, what do the food companies do? They basically take your normal stimulus. So like, you know, the humans were evolved to, we like salt because we need electrolytes. We like fat for a certain reason. We need certain things in our, in our diet. So they just said, well, what if I give you a lot of salt? What if I give you fucking Doritos Koola ranch? What if I give you triple, you know, triple pack, Dorito, loco, taco, whatever, and you eventually get a super normal stimulus that you really can't, you can't resist. Your body has this extreme pull towards

[Chris Williamson]

it, you know, My favorite supernormal stimuli is hunter gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time. Wow. Because it is so unique, there's a process called aurification. So aurification is the design of texture of foods. And if you think about ancestrally, almost every food that you can think of is a single texture. Meat cooked. Slimy. Ish.

[Gary]

A little bit.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. There we go. Supernormal stimuli. Let's see how this is getting on.

[Sean]

Yeah, I'm out on this now. Two hours ago.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm still enjoying it. I think I'm hungry. Oreos. Crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Fries. But what's interesting about the cheesecake thing is that you have fat with carbs and sugar, unbelievably rare. And you have sort of the crunchiness of the base, and you can tell I'm hungry. And the, like, fluffiness of the top of the cheesecake. And they give these to hunter gatherers, and these. Their fucking minds are. It's a flavor explosion. But, yeah, there's a really great one that I think it's beetles, a type of beetle, dung beetle, perhaps, or some other beetle. They're attracted. They're sexually attracted to the shininess of the shell, the shininess of the top. But as glass bottles became prevalent, the beetle population was going down because the glass bottles were shinier and bigger than the beetles were. So they were driving themselves into extinction, not mating with each other and just mating with glass bottles because that was a supernormal stimuli. And what happens with the cosmetic surgery, the big lips, the big boobs thing, you get something called Fisherian runaway. So Fisherian runaway is this sort of recursive of insane expansion of typically, like, sexually dimorphic traits, sexually provocative traits, and you end up with peacocks who've got tails so big that they can't move. With deer whose antlers are so large they can't lift their heads up, and they die. With women who've got boobs that are so big that they end up with back pain and they're unable. Let's say that you took it to the absolute extreme. You were no longer able to procreate, the reason for that trait in the first place. But you'd done something that, like, destroyed your hips, and now it meant that you needed to have, like, hysterectomy and you couldn't have your uterus anymore. And now you've killed your chance at doing the thing by having it run away with itself. The same as some of those deers or rams where the size of Their, like, antler things dig into their own head and kill them.

[Gary]

Oh, yeah, I've seen that, Molly.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[George]

It's funny how it's kind of like a meta. This course where you were talking earlier about the platforms and the feedback loops and then you end up going so awry. But that's kind of nature's equivalent.

[Chris Williamson]

It's the same dynamic. That's what you've seen on social media is tapping into this exact dynamic. It's the same thing. It's just that you've had to replicate it digitally.

[Sean]

There's a great tweet that this guy, Jay Alto, said. He said, you pity the moth for confusing the lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.

[Chris Williamson]

Fucking slammer. It's one of the best tweets of this year.

[Sean]

Yeah, it's amazing. But there is a solve, right? Because you hear this and you're like, oh, great, we're fucked. It's like, no, well, there's gotta be some sort of antidote to this. And the interesting part was the equation goes like this. It's basically how powerful is the stimulus? So the flavor of the food, the size of the feathers, whatever, versus your baseline norm, what you are used to. And the cool thing is basically like, there's this arms race where they keep escalating. So the more you do it, the more you get used to it. Then you need a bigger stimulus and a bigger. You need A bigger. A bigger tweet and a bigger TikTok and more views on the next video, and you need a stronger flavor. But all you gotta do is basically detox for a very short amount of time and reset. Like, if anybody's ever given up soda for, like, you know, a couple months or years, if you go back to it, it tastes, like, horrible. It's like, so syrupy. It's too sweet. You can't handle it. But you used to drink eight Diet Cokes. And the reason why is because you can reset the denominator, essentially, instead of trying to avoid the forces of. Of, you know, commercialization that are trying to stimulate you.

[Chris Williamson]

What's that? Cuck Fuchsias substack that me and you like. You see, he's staring at a wall. Experiment.

[George]

No.

[Chris Williamson]

So this guy's substack. It's pretty niche, but it's fucking cook fuchsias. He's great.

[George]

He's great.

[Chris Williamson]

Really well written. You would love it.

[Sean]

Fucking great.

[Chris Williamson]

Me and George introduced me to him and now I'm pretty. His first post that I saw was, I Am Andrew Puberman. That was the first blog post that I read from him.

[George]

Subscribe.

[Chris Williamson]

And he's doing an experiment. He did an experiment, I think for 30 days, where he stared at a wall for an hour. And this is kind of a twist on an ancient Eastern practice which I think Dr. K's got his clients to do as well. After 20 minutes, some people burst into tears, some people are screaming. They kind of go a little bit. Yeah. Because at least what I think is happening, their baseline of stimulus is so low, even if you're in the shower, you're doing stuff, even if you're going for a walk, things are moving past you, right? You're locomoting and you see the fucking

[Gary]

world, but all they're doing is staring at a wall.

[Chris Williamson]

Staring at a wall for an hour. I would. I mean, let's see.

[Gary]

You know, it would be an interesting test. Take people that have been to jail and compare them to people that haven't because it's used to being bored. Dude, I was in fucking in school suspension when I was a teenager for like weeks on end, and all I did was stare at a fucking wall. It didn't make me go crazy. That's just weird.

[Chris Williamson]

I mean, present evidence may suggest otherwise. Well, says the man himself, it was just a fucking delayed onset, wasn't it?

[George]

There's a few, like, the most extreme versions of this you've got. I've never fully verified this one, but of monks who've meditated for such a significant period of time are in. I think it's like three standard deviations. Happiness of happiness. So like the. It's like the 0.0000001%, my favorite. And I'm always a bit like. It's a bit of a study, but I'm like, fuck, this one's not a study of the guy who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War. I don't know if Jared, if you could pull that one up.

[Gary]

The monk.

[George]

Yeah, the monk who set himself on fire, who just literally walks out, sits in lotus position, sets himself on fire. Doesn't grimace, blink or flinch. At that moment, I was like, huh, Maybe there is something to meditate.

[Sean]

Studies don't need to show.

[George]

Yeah, yeah, Studies don't need to show.

[Chris Williamson]

I think it's Ken Burns Vietnam documentary that covers this really well.

[George]

You heard about his heart?

[Chris Williamson]

Whose heart?

[George]

The guy. So this is like kind of a Buddhist. A Buddhist philosophy that. Like a Buddhist part of the story, which was his heart didn't set on fire, so his heart Was like, kind of completely normal. His whole body went to crisp, but his heart was still there. I think you could check this, Jarak, but I think in the cremation period, they tried to cremate his heart and it refused to burn. It's like. It's a very surreal. It could be a complete myth, but. But as soon as I see this, any of my questions around what the human mind is capable of goes out the window.

[Chris Williamson]

Homeboy sat in full lotus just barbecuing anything around him. Yeah, that's crazy.

[George]

You can see the gasoline.

[Sean]

There's a guy who's trying the screen experiment. Have you seen this? The guy who's doing for one year, no screens. He's trying to Brian Johnson, but just a no screen. And he's scanning his brain before and after.

[Chris Williamson]

How far into it is he?

[Sean]

Like a day. Right. He's just started staring at a wall. He finished. All the things there's like, I'm gonna avoid. Yeah. This guy. David. David Danes. Today I'm scanning my brain before I spend a year without screens. They expect brain function to change, but whether the structure itself changes, nobody seems to know. And he's got his website where you could just like, you're gonna be able to see the updates of the results.

[Chris Williamson]

Imagine how hard it would be to not. It's like not being exposed to fucking microplastics, dude. I mean, he's. He's gonna be. Yeah, he's gonna be looking at a screen in an airport. He's gonna go to the gym, and there's gonna be stuff around.

[Sean]

So he's really applied to, I assume, no screen Anyway.

[George]

I assume that. I said, I assume he meant, like, phone, tv, like personal screens.

[Chris Williamson]

You mean he's not going to ever look at any?

[Sean]

I think that's.

[Chris Williamson]

He's.

[Gary]

He's going Amish.

[Sean]

Come on.

[Gary]

That's like.

[Sean]

You got to go all the way.

[Chris Williamson]

You put blinkers on, see if you

[Sean]

can find the rules of the. Of the challenge. But yeah, that's. It's pretty unreal.

[Gary]

Hey, what was that quote you said maybe 10 minutes ago about the. The person that you looked the screen and it's real. What did you say?

[Sean]

Like, we. We laugh when the moth confuses, you know, a lamp for the moon, but here we are confusing the screen for the world.

[George]

Yeah. Okay.

[Gary]

Map that onto AI.

[George]

What do you mean?

[Gary]

Just. Just in general, like what? Like, I don't know. In 50 years, people are going to be, like, laughing at us because of whatever we were doing Right now, like,

[Sean]

we're confusing AI real intelligence or what do you mean?

[Gary]

I. I don't really know. I just. When you said that, it made me think of how AI is going to be like people are going to laugh at us for. In 50 years for what we thought was good AI. That's what I thought of when you said that for some reason.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I mean that curve of technology,

[Gary]

like they're gonna look at us right now in 50 or 100 years. Like where the fucking moth that thinks the lamp is a. What you get?

[Sean]

Did you guys watch the. You mentioned Demis? You mentioned Demis from DeepMind. Did you watch the documentary?

[Chris Williamson]

Unbelievable.

[George]

It's amazing.

[Chris Williamson]

Good.

[Sean]

What is it? He's got this, the guy who created DeepMind which kind of kicked off this whole AI wave. He has this documentary on Amazon, I think called the Thinking game.

[Chris Williamson]

It's on YouTube now.

[Sean]

Oh, it's on YouTube.

[Chris Williamson]

It's on YouTube.

[Sean]

So good. Highly recommend to anyone.

[Chris Williamson]

Dennis, if you're listening, I want to bring you on the show. Reply to my emails.

[Sean]

Dude, he's cool. He was a six year old child prodigy chess player, et cetera. But that moment of move 37 is just chills, you know what I mean? That's a turning point in human history. Was this move 37 moment.

[Chris Williamson]

Basically Google DeepMind has, I mean they seem to be the most safety conscious, kind of very human approach to this AI race at the moment. But I don't know if I mean the whole point of this, which is why Scott Alexander thinks that anthropic is the Antichrist, because the Antichrist will come and make you think that they're not. So. So in this whole AI, that was the whole point that I had with Tristan Harris is everyone wants to cast aspersions at companies like OpenAI. I don't like you because you did that. And I don't like Google because they did that. Or Grok, I don't like you because you did the. Whatever. It's like, hey dude, it doesn't matter what somebody's stated fucking safety goals are. These guys are speed running through model development as quickly as possible and if they don't, they lose. They lose. So just look at the incentives. Don't look at the fucking press release. Release, right? Like, yeah, the anthropic super bowl ads are fucking hilarious. But don't. And they decided not to do the thing for the Department of War and they did whatever stuff. It's like, dude, don't fucking like get lost in the source. These people are playing the exact same fucking game. Just with slightly better pr.

[George]

Yeah, it does seem there's a huge doomer like narrative right now around AI that's becoming more and more popular.

[Chris Williamson]

Listen to more Friedberg.

[George]

I mean from the wider question of what happens, I don't know, but from firsthand experience for myself because the image models are getting so good now. I've had it's called subaromic dermatitis for about 10 years. Sometimes it gets so bad I wouldn't want to go outside level of bad. I just showed it to Gemini.

[Sean]

What does that mean?

[George]

So it's basically like you're kind of like there'll be a lot of people listening that have it. It affects like 5 to 10% of the population and your face will just break out in really bad eczema. So I went to one doctor who basically got me on a steroid cream and said the reason why you have it is because of stress. It's quite well known because of stress. Carried on, I started meditating, fixing my diet. I basically didn't eat sugar for two years. And it calmed it down. I was like, oh, it's because of sugar. And then I saw a second doctor and she said, yeah, you're too stressed out. I'm like, fuck, I'm getting stressed out by your guys diagnosis that I'm stressed out. So she recommends another steroid cream. I end up tracking it for ages and I just upload the whole document to Gemini and it goes, oh no, just put nizoral on your face. So anybody who has subatomic dermatitis, it fixes it for like 90% of people.

[Sean]

And Nizoral is a medicine or it's like shampoo.

[Chris Williamson]

It's a fucking shampoo.

[George]

Shampoo you can get for a few

[Sean]

dollars, sell some blood.

[George]

And I've never had it ever again since. Out of 10 years, never had it ever again since. And that's just that. But these stories are like, it's not as sexy as like the guy speaks to the LLM and decides to take his own life. Not that that's like obviously a horrific story, if it's even fucking true. I don't know. But I know just so many people whose health is genuinely being revolutionized by these things. And it's just we just have such an anchor towards negativity also.

[Chris Williamson]

You're always going to push back against some new technological development.

[George]

Yes, it's the most recurring lesson throughout history. I was reading because I was fascinated by AI coming on. I was like, I want to go study the Industrial Revolution. What was fascinating at the time you had two groups that came up. You had the Luddites who would just basically go and smash the factories in. And you saw this recently with Sam Altman having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house a week ago. But then you also had the Romantic. So the Romantics would kind of pine about. And you kind of see this now of AI where it's like they'll call things slop, which are. And you do want the Luddites and you do want the Romantics because they kind of act as a balancing arc to the progression. But I think net. Net. Most people alive today do not want to go back to pre Industrial Revolution. They do not want. Like, the option is to go to Amish if you do want to. Like that is available if you want to go Amish, but nobody does.

[Gary]

I think AI is going to make people go fucking insane.

[George]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gary]

Because we're getting into a point where

[George]

I was going to say, but Jared, if you can pull up the new thing. I don't know. The FT produced this. I don't know how true it is, but essentially they argue it's making people less polarized. Immediately where social media was pushing people further to the left and the right. Whereas AI, you can kind of already see it with Grok, now they fact check people a lot more. So they're bringing a lot more people into the center. Well, why do you think it'll make people?

[Gary]

Because, dude, we live in a post truth age now. There's no way to determine what.

[Chris Williamson]

What flavor is it? This is sweet whiskey. You want sweet whiskey? Yeah, dude, you're gonna have two toothpicks in. That's.

[Gary]

Yeah, I'm doubling down.

[Chris Williamson]

Jesus Christ.

[Gary]

Well, there's. Well, I'm not using them to actually pick my teeth. I'm just.

[Chris Williamson]

No, no, but just you.

[Sean]

You.

[Chris Williamson]

You need so many stimulants that you've got one new tonic toothpick. One Zippix toothpick.

[Gary]

Yeah, no, and I'm coming down off that Kratom right now. Slow motion. I think that deep fakes and. And maybe it's more so in America than other places, but after the Charlie Kirk assassination, there's all these conspiracy theories left and right about whether it was Israel did it or it's a hologram or if this guy was real. There's all this crazy shit, right? And nobody's going to be saying it's something like, oh, this is a hologram, or this was AI without the advent of AI being able to create deep fakes that are Largely. I mean, look at it. Look at boomers, dude. They believe all sorts of crazy shit and we're like fucking idiots. That's what I was kind of getting at, I guess, with what I was saying to you about that comment. But we're never going to know, I mean, ever, what actually has happened with anything we know anymore. Truth is no longer even fucking matters because it can't be determined unless you experience it with your own five senses.

[George]

So there's a great chapter in a book called the Beginning of Infinity. And essentially his idea is what's called, known as the precautionary principle, which is essentially the history of humanity is essentially problematic. Even Great Britain, where me and Chris are from, is a human concept. It shouldn't exist in Great Britain. Me and my family should fucking die of hypothermia. But because of. We created central heating, we created clothing. So you essentially have this whole arc of just problem solving, problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. And the problem that you then have, ironically, is that when a new problem comes along like this, is that you have what's known as the precautionary principle, which is we can see the problem, but we can't see the solution. But by definition, human beings can't forecast a solution because if we had the solution for it, we would implement it and be worth trillionaires. But what you end up having is kind of 7 billion people working towards this potential problem. You saw it with COVID It's very unsexy to say, but I'm pretty optimistic when it comes to humans abilities to solve problems. I think a lot of this stuff we can fix.

[Chris Williamson]

Speaking of AI, did you see this Allbirds pivot?

[Sean]

Oh, dude, it's insane.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you explain for the class please, what the fuck just happened?

[Sean]

Allbirds, which was like a popular shoe amongst tech guys, at least. I don't know how popular it got outside of that. But it was like a niche shoe. It was like a wool sneaker. They were like, started small, became a public company, but then they started failing. And so like the stock has been going down for years. They were, I think they were last, like, you know, they're at one point like a billion dollar company. They were like $50 million company now. So the stock had been falling, falling, falling, falling, falling, selling. And there was really no path. And so these guys bought it, I think. And I think what they did was they purchased it and they just pivoted to AI and it's like, well, how does a shoe pivot to AI? What does that mean? They're like, well, we raised all this debt, we're going to buy GPUs and sell them. And the stock as of this morning is soaring. I don't think this is a sustainable thing.

[Chris Williamson]

But the company, valued at around $4 billion at its peak, sold the intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for 39 million.

[Sean]

39 million. And then they renamed it like what Free Bird or something. What are they named it?

[Chris Williamson]

The shoe company had a market cap of 21 million on Tuesday, which climbed to 148 million on Wednesday.

[Gary]

Wow.

[Chris Williamson]

Just by saying we did AI, the

[Sean]

words AI and then crypto. There was like a iced tea company that was like, yeah, we're IC company, but we're a blockchain iced tea company. And then there was, you know, there was tons of these companies. They would just change their name. They didn't even change the underlying business, they just changed the name to like, you know, blockchain motor controls. And then. And their stock would pop just because of.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, dude, the one day price move is 582%.

[Sean]

Yeah, it's stupid. There's stupid things that happen. There's like, you know, the efficient market hypothesis. And then you hear this, right?

[George]

Yes. I saw somebody putting like the intelligent investor in the bin. It's like giving up on this.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Speaking of, did you guys see this? Kind of blew my mind. This is more in the kind of fear and doom stuff. But did you see the Indian, the Indian factory AI thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you see this, this whether training people with the cameras.

[Sean]

Headset.

[George]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

To fold clothes and shit.

[Sean]

They're sewing shirts, they're basically folding towels. They're doing shirts. But there's giant factories now in India where the primary function is you're paid to wear a head, like a head camera and it just films you doing a task. And they're basically creating all the training data for the robots, like the humans basically creating the training. Jared, pull this video up. It's, it's just kind of striking when you see it. It's like, it feels like a black mirror episode, you know.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you know how Tesla made its self driving so good? Do you know how that, how it

[Gary]

was trained with a human?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, so.

[Sean]

So these guys are just working and these guys have like neck pain and all this stuff because they're wearing this eight hours straight shot. There's like a comp. There's a company that's basically making a lot of money creating this data and selling it back to the AI AI labs, which is pretty wild and Elon actually he gave this interview, he said something that nobody really has talked about, but I thought it was pretty batshit crazy. They were like, well, the next thing for Tesla is not cars, it's his robot. They're like, how are you going to train the robot to do all this stuff for cars? You got the data because humans were driving the cars. So you were able to learn on millions and millions of miles, how are you going to do it with the robots? He's like, well, we're building this, I don't know, 100,000 square foot warehouse and we're going to put 10,000 robots in there and they're going to self play. So if you watch how they trained the AI to beat Go and chess, there was one way which was you have grandmasters tell hard code rules. Okay, what's better than that? You train it on only grandmaster's game logs. And then they did this thing called Alphazero where they're like, like we're just going to tell you the rules of chess. You play yourself a hundred thousand times, see what happens. And that became better than all of the other models with no data of how to play chess or how to play go. And so Alphazero was this huge breakthrough when DeepMind did it. So now Elon's trying to do the same thing with robots where he's like, yeah, we could do this where we get all the data from human people, recordings, or we could just create a warehouse where we tell them the objectives of the different stations and then we let them just fumble around trying to figure out how to use their arms. And eventually they're just going to figure out he's gonna put 10,000 robots in this box. I'm like, I would pay so much money to watch this.

[George]

You could fundraise, livestream.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, the fucking. What was that better than Netflix? Was it Neo? Is that the at home robot? What was the one that's made of kind of knitted.

[Sean]

Yeah, Neo is the name of it.

[Chris Williamson]

Neo. So this was an at home assistance robot. There was two versions. You could buy it outright, you could rent it. I think to rent it was actually quite expensive. It was like $300 a month, something like that, $400 a month. And someone videoed their Neo trying to close the dishwasher. And it looks like someone at the end of a party on too much ketamine trying to do the same thing. It's all sort of janky and it's coming down like. And it just cannot close this fucking dishwasher that reminds me of iRobot.

[Gary]

Yeah, you remember that movie, Will Smith classic. And he has the live in robot and he's like, I don't trust this fucking thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, the way that the Tesla training data was done was that they took the top 5%, 1% of drivers and basically said they're gonna drive on our behalf. Because the self training thing has to be harder when you're talking about the physical world, because the parameters of outcome, success and failure are way harder to work. Is this folded, right? Like there's a million ways that you could fold it. It turns out like a. You know, it's one of those fucking origami. It's a swan, it's a goose. And you don't want that. It's nice and beautiful, but it doesn't fit the parameters, right? So more oversight. Or at least like a base training data of like, like, hey, here are some of the. Because what are the rules of the game of folding clothes?

[Sean]

Right?

[Chris Williamson]

They're kind of. It's kind of strange to. But once you've got this raw training set. But this is the fight. This does feel a little bit like finishing off the champagne on the Titanic. You know, it's like we're going down and we'll just. On the way down, I'll make a little bit of extra money from doing this thing to round out George. Good news about your dad. Phil Collins is a Rock and Roll hall of fame 2026 inductee.

[George]

There we go.

[Chris Williamson]

Any idea what your dad said in response? Very British response. This. Obviously, I'm pleased and honored to be inducted. It wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music. Obviously, I'm pleased. Sounds a little bit passive aggressive.

[George]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It took a while till 2026 to get this.

[Chris Williamson]

Obviously, I'm pleased and honored to be inducted. Wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music. Boys. This has been fucking sick. Appreciate you. All right. Unreal. Phil Collins, George's dad.

[George]

Let's go.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, goodbye.

[Sean]

Everybody seen Phil Collins? My first time ever seeing Phil Collins, bro.

[Chris Williamson]

So much fun.

[Sean]

One last swig. I mean, this just.

[Chris Williamson]

If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction there's real life stories and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.