#801 - George Mack - 13 Life-Changing Ideas You've Never Heard Of

Chris Williamson
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is George Mack. He's a writer, marketer and an entrepreneur. George is one of my favorite writers and probably delivers the highest insights per minute of anyone on Twitter. And today we get to go through some of my favorite ideas from him over the last few months on human nature, tribalism, happiness and politics.

Expect to learn what the busy trap is and how to avoid it. The biggest differences between the US and the UK the contrarian argument for why money doesn't buy happiness, why strategic ignorance is so important. George's favourite story about Charlie Munger, the lessons we both learned celebrating his 30th birthday in Miami and much more. For those of you who enjoyed the vlog we put up on YouTube last week and said, who's that guy sat at the table? He's really interesting and I loved his idea about a bear or bull market for moustaches.

This is him and you get to hear 2 hours of him and he's on fine form today. Lots and lots to take away. So get ready for this one also. People of Australia, I will be inside you very soon. Brisbane, Wednesday 6 November, Melbourne, Friday the 8 November and Sydney, Saturday the 9 November.

Tickets will be available very soon. They will be available tomorrow morning from Chriswilliamson live Australia. So go there, sign up. You can get pre sale tickets available right now and I will see you on the other side of the planet. Pretty sure some people think there's a conspiracy, that Australia doesn't exist and it's all fake.

So I guess I'll get to find out. See you soon. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome George Mac.

What's the busy trap? The busy trap is the idea that we're busy today because we were busy yesterday and we'll be busy tomorrow because we're busy today. And it's this never ending busyness that we get busier because we're busy now. Weirdly, I was looking at Google Trends earlier and if you look at the word busy from 2004, it's like the Apple stock price, it just each year we get about 10% more busier and we're constantly hitting the peak every single year of people searching the word busy. Right?

So busyness is getting busier. Yes. Right. And what do you mean when you say that you waste years not being able to waste hours? So this is a quote from Amos Tversky, who was Daniel Kahneman's writing partner on thinking fast and slow.

George Mack
And when you hear, it's like as a writer, you're like, why didn't I write that that is so good. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. And it's this idea that because we're so busy, we never get around to actually asking the bigger questions. We're constantly on the c tasks rather than the a tasks. And one of the memes I posted with this essay, it's two guys working extremely hard, like being super busy, and there's one guy in the corner who's like, you're right, lads, can I give you a bit of help?

And he goes, we're too busy. And the guy's carrying a wheel, and these guys are carrying everything, but they're too busy to realize that there's a wheel out there. And I think Tversky's point with that is by having a few extra hours in your schedule, you may change your annual direction here or there, but if you're constantly compressing everything into some kind of maximum efficiency, you end up wasting years as a result. Why is the busy trap a trap? Why do we default to busy as opposed to defaulting to lots of spare time?

I think. Well, there's, to quote the philosopher Molly May, there's only 24 hours in the day, Chris, which is a lie, by the way, which is a lie, not having to go to Molly, but there's actually 16 hours in the day. I find the fact that we talk about 24 hours when we sleep for 8 hours is absurd. It's like confusing your revenue with your profit. It's putting up the Shopify screenshot.

It's like, how much did you spend on other things there? So you have, let's say, 16 hours a day. And that's pretty Lindy. That's been consistent throughout human history, our experience of time. Meanwhile, the amount of activities we can now do, the amount of content that gets uploaded to YouTube every minute, the amount of slack messages that are coming through, the amount of emails that are coming through.

The digital. The beauty of digital systems is it's so high leverage as you're sat here right now, there's probably 5000 people watching a clip of Chris as we speak in the next couple of minutes. And that at the digital level for yourself is a constant problem because you only have 16 hours in the day, yet there's things that are constantly coming through. Unless you're proactively trying to put systems in place, you will just get destroyed by the busy trap. We also learn in school to do work without questioning the work.

So one of my old essays was this point around a lot of the behaviors from school that you were rewarded for, you ultimately get punished for later in life. And a lot of the behaviors at school that you were punished for, you ultimately get rewarded for later in life. And it's this sad change of affairs. I realized my age from, like, 20 to 29 was just trying to rewrite what I learned from ten to 19. So it's been a clusterfuck.

And one of the behaviors that you were punished for in school that you get rewarded for later in life is asking, why are we doing this? Does this make sense? Is this the most important thing to be working on? If you said that in your year ten algebra class, it didn't go down well. Shut up, Mac.

Yeah, exactly. But what did go down well is if you just complied and took the schedule as it came through. And I think you basically have these digital systems compounding on top of these weird, or, let's say, incorrect behaviors that you learn at school. Yeah. And what about the trap element of busyness?

Chris Williamson
Why does it sort of continue to. Why does it cyclically make us more prone to being busy in the future? Everyone's experience cleaning out their inbox, and you realize you've not cleaned out your inbox. You've just essentially chopped off Hydra's head, and another head has reappeared. So the more you almost try and defeat busyness, ultimately the more busy you become.

George Mack
Actually, my number one test for myself, because I've been this guy, still, I'm this guy, recovering busy guy. The number one test I have for myself is, I know I'm too busy. If I don't know what the most important question is right now. Do you mean by question, the priority. The thing I need to be answering?

Um, and the irony is, if you don't know what the most important thing to do in your life right now is, or the most important question to answer, or what the number one focus should be, you've actually just found it. So that's quite a beautiful thing within itself. So if you are concerned that you're too busy, whenever I'm concerned that I'm too busy, and I go, I've not figured out what the most important thing to focus on right now is. I've just focusing on what is the most important thing to focus on right now is what to focus on. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
What are some other signs that you're too busy? Like, when you think back to the times when you've been drowning in busy work, what are some of the other things that come along for the ride? I think it's so. It's a funny, funny message. I got sent the other day when I posted this from my friend Phil.

George Mack
And he was saying how the essay hit him. And he asked himself this question, which was, let's say he set his five goals for the week. And he said, if I got them done by Tuesday, how would I feel? Or what would I do? And he goes, I think I'd go in this full blown anxiety of what do I do for the rest of these few days?

And the irony is, he goes, that problem means that it just stretches out throughout the week versus if he just said to myself, how about I sprint, get everything done by Tuesday, then I'm relatively free Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But this busyness, because you're so busy, you constantly need to stay busy. You're addicted to that feeling. You're like, the rationale when the cheese comes out, whenever I found I'm too busy is I know that Peter Drucker has this great thing called the activity trap, which is essentially the idea. You have your activity and you have your output.

And your activity is just inputs going in the system, doing things, replying to messages, clicking buttons and moving around and feeling like you've done something. But often at the end of the day, nothing's happened. So the activity trap is if you stress activity, you don't necessarily increase output whenever you stress output. So the end result, you'll always improve output, but you'll often actually, ironically, decrease activity. So the biggest thing for me is if I'm sat there at the end of the day and I feel exhausted, I'm like, what actually got done?

Chris Williamson
Yeah. Well, yeah. Not what did I do? What got done? Yes.

Because what I did doesn't actually always result in something being done on the other side. What was that Andy Groves quote that you told us, uh, in Miami? It's. Yeah, it gave me goosebumps, this one. The quote is people.

George Mack
There's so many people working so hard and achieving so little. What's that mean to you? It's. It's the type a personality trap, which I easily fall into where you end up exactly what my friend said earlier, where they would rather get their five goals done for the week, on the Friday. So they're constantly feeling busy, then actually done sooner.

What it means is there's so much inputs going into the system without any outputs. And because we're so busy, we never actually get time to question the outputs that we're producing. There's another element of this, especially for people that work in offices, the demonstration of effort. You're not cranking widgets. You can't see the bucket of widgets to be cranked, the one you're cranking in the bucket of widgets that you have cranked today.

Chris Williamson
So how do people demonstrate their work, their effort, their optimizing for signals of busyness, which is always being the quickest person to reply. Didn't you tell me that some dude in your slack channel, he was the only guy in the entire company that checked slack on Christmas Day? Yes. Yeah, he's incredible, that guy. Bradley.

George Mack
So, yeah, I mean, Slack's a problem itself, I was thinking, and I'd be surprised if we don't look back five to ten years from now about how broken Slack is, because sometimes I'll check Slack like a social network. I'm just, like, refreshing the feed just to see what's going on. Even in channels that you're not supposed to be supervising, you just happen to be in because you're an admin. So Sam Caracas, the guy that could have butchered his last name there, but fuck it. The guy that runs levels, he said it was a study recently where the average tech worker checks Slack every seven minutes, which is quite an absurd, absurd idea for people that are trying to increase outputs, to be constantly moving things, just messages and bits back and forth.

Chris Williamson
What about energy? How does sort of energy flows throughout the day play into the busy trap? Yeah. I think the lore I found with my own personal energy levels is that if I don't get proactively schedule things in that increase my energy, they'll never happen. And if I don't proactively defend things that decrease my energy, they will eat up my calendar.

George Mack
It's kind of like running a business. It's almost like the laws of physics that your revenue is trying to go down every day and your costs are trying to go up every day. And it's exactly the same with energy. And I weirdly found this when I was traveling or when I'm going through super stressful periods of life, that the natural idiot brain that I have is when I have. Imagine your energy levels, like inflows and outflows, like an engineering system.

Whenever there's lots of energy outflows on the system, that is, I'm super stressed. That is, I'm traveling right now. The natural weird thing that we do is to turn off all the energy. Inflows to give ourselves more time to work on the outflows. The outflows.

And then you end up completely burnt out. Whereas actually what you need to do is crank up the energy inflows more to deal with the higher costs on the system. Last week I tweeted there's no such thing as being overworked, only under rested. Yeah. How much truth do you think's in that?

I think it was, it was one of the. I forgot which president it was who said that I never stand up when I can sit down, and I never, I never work. Sorry, I never work. Stood up when I can be working. Sit down, sat down and I never work.

Sat down when I could be lay down. And even Churchill, when you think about grinding Churchill, World War two, that's some sigma serious Sigma grindset right there, the apex. And even him taking multiple naps throughout the day, that's one of the reasons how he managed to work throughout the nights. And, yeah, that concept of there's no such thing as under rest, there's just. Sorry, there's no such thing as being overworked as just under rest makes so much sense from a utility perspective.

It might not necessarily be true, but. It reframes it, I think anybody, it's one of those things that probably doesn't work in theory, but does work in practice, where you can pick that apart as a pithy little aphorism. But if you actually think about what your felt experience of being a very busy person in the world is like, have you ever been overworked when you haven't been under arrested? Has there ever been a time when you've gone, wow, I'm rested, but also overworked? No, almost never.

Chris Williamson
Because of the busy trap, because of the fact that you continue to loop yourself back. Oh, well, I'd better reject all of the things that give me more energy by meditating or breath work, or getting up early, or going for a walk, or going to the gym, or spending time with friends, or turning the Airpods off for five minutes today you don't do any of those things. So it's kind of a sort of a self answering question, which is that those two things are the same for most people. They're not the same in theory, but in practice they are. Being overworked and being under arrested are the same thing.

They're two sides of the same coin. And you can have scenarios where you've not worked in weeks, but you've been on TikTok 9 hours a day, still. Not under arrest, still not rested, still not rested. And you can have other scenarios where you've worked the hardest you have in your entire life, but because youve got those energy inflow systems dialed, you dont reach the same burnout that you would. And its another hidden and observable metrics problem too, right?

That what youre trying to optimize for is quality of life, clear thinking, great ideas, opportunity to have leverage on what it is that youre coming up with. Where does that appear on my slack? Analytics on my balance sheet, it doesn't even really appear on my fucking whoop data. But the number of emails that I sent, the reduction in my total number of unread messages, all of that stuff, super easy to quantify. So you're sacrificing the thing.

You want clear thinking for the thing which is supposed to get it, which is clearing out admin tasks. Yeah. Quite horrific how much time we waste. One of the experiments is to go back to your Google calendar this time last year and look at certain things that you did, and you'll often realize that most of it was a complete waste. Does any of this matter?

George Mack
I mean, there's always that power law that exists. I heard yesterday that even Warren Buffet, in one of his shareholder letters said that. I think it was only twelve of his investments that really moved the needle for Berkshire haveaway, which was about 4%. So even the guy, the best allocator in this case of capital rather than time, only 4% of his bets were correct. And that's him spending so much time thinking every single day.

And if you're then so busy, we're not even going to get past the 1%. Or at least I'm not. You said bringing a victorian factory worker mindset to the age of infinite leverage is like bringing boxing gloves to a drone war. Yes. One of my favourite lines.

I think I need to flesh this idea out more, but this was kind of an aphorism to myself. I try and paint on the back of my eyelids, which is this idea that, let's say you have, quote unquote type A, type B personalities. I don't know if it's an actual thing, but just for the utility of categorizing them, you have type A personalities that they have what feels like a work ethic problem. They constantly feel lazy, but it's actually a work ethic problem. It's actually a leverage problem disguised as a work ethic problem.

And type B personalities have a, they think they constantly have a leverage problem, but they actually have a work ethic problem. And you'll be able to immediately bucket those people inside your head immediately. Yeah, I think a lot about trying to dial back busyness. Both of us are kind of permanently fighting this entropy on a morning. Well, maybe time block the morning and protect it.

Chris Williamson
Go through some of the tactics from a strategic perspective that you've used personally to try and defend the busy trap. Go back to cocaine, KL phone. Everybody should know that by now. Two separate phones. I'd say the busy trap for me probably the easiest thing is having a big three.

George Mack
So I got this from the concept of 4000 weeks and having a big three of things I need to do. And then everything else just goes to the everything else section. And the idea of only being able to have three tasks on the big three makes you prioritize things by definition. I think ultimately the opposite of the busy trap is prioritization, which is such a difficult skill when there's infinite things coming at you. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
If there's so much that you could be focused on and permanent notifications, this ambient sense that you're falling behind. Oliver Berkman has this beautiful sentence where it's in the productivity debt essay that he does and he says, I just have this vague sense, this vague fear that I'm falling behind. And I think that that kind of really encapsulates, at least for me, if I take too much time off. And here's the brutal thing. You realize that you have become your own taskmaster in many ways.

You complain about the prison of your busyness but you realize that you're the guard that's holding the keys to it. You've locked yourself in and thrown them out. Perfect example of this. Spend a ton of time working and working and working and all I can think about is, oh God, it would be so cool to just have a couple of days and I do, I play pickleball and I have fun with my friends and go and do this thing. And about 10 hours into the first day of that I think I really could do with getting a bit of graph done.

What if I just, you know, there and then you smack up with a little bit of slack or you get on an email or you do, you know, you complete a little bit of work. So yeah, we are the prison guards of the jail that we're complaining about in many ways, which actually, I think when people fully realize this, which everyone listening will have done because we've spoken about it a lot and they're all reasonable, there's a lot of shame that can come along with that too, which adds another layer of difficulty on top. She said, God, you know, I'm choosing to do this to myself. I don't need to answer my boss's email at 11:00 p.m. at night.

He's not expecting it. I think it's even illegal in France or something. They made that law right, where you can't contact. This is stinks of a threat of you that you can't contact workers outside of their hours of work. I think they, it might even be like how China used that streaming service to stop kids from playing computer games.

It might be like cold turkey or frozen turkey, but for work, email or something. But yeah, they just, they're trying to have this sort of workers health act where people don't work outside of it. But it's you. It's always been you. And then you realize, oh God, it's me.

And then you think, how shameful am I that I'm wasting my life? I'm choosing to do this to myself. And then you start to layer all of these stories on top. Yeah. I came up with this idea of the Midwit review, the midwit week review, which was previously I'd done end of week reviews, three hour session, there's like 60 different points.

George Mack
And my midwit version now is for each area. So like health, life, work, what were the three wins this week? And then what are the three things that would actually move the needle for each one? And then when you say move the. Needle, I can play in terms of leverage, in terms of prioritization because otherwise, unless you really think about each action, I put that thing in the essay, which is if you dont have 20 minutes each day to think about whats the most important thing, you probably need an hour.

So getting another note to myself, and what I mean by move the needle is I think probably one of the underpinnings of the busy trap is that you never really write down your hypothesis like a scientific experiment. You never say, okay, so theres option one I can do today, I can reply to this slack message or all these slacks. Option two, I could build out this new marketing funnel that will take me 2 hours. Option three, I could go see my parents, whatever it is in terms of that, and then actually mapping out okay, according to all my different priority areas, what's that going to deliver? It's much woollier in life, I guess.

But from a business perspective, we very, very rarely ever go, okay, here's the five decisions we can make. How much time is each one do we anticipate? Each one will make, each one will take, and how much revenue or profit will this thing make? But only then when you. But we're having to play within the observable metric paradigm again.

Chris Williamson
Yes, like look what we're defaulting to say, well, quality of life. Ah, time with parents. Ah, the sanity of the internal texture of my mind. Profit. I can see that on a balance sheet.

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That's livemomentous.com modernwisdom. So you've been in the US three weeks now? Yeah. No, more. More, actually, because you did Miami.

George Mack
Yeah. We've been talking a lot about differences between the UK and the USA. What have you come to believe about that? So my biggest takeaway from being in America as a Brit is it's like finding out my dad had a kid with another woman that I never met. And we meet for the first time and I'm like, you're kind of me, but you're not me.

It's like he spent a bit more money on you. He made you believe in yourself. Your mom was clearly much nicer or kinder, and you go, oh, Americans, we're kind of the same. But it's like Brits with self belief. Brits with self belief is what Americans are, is one of the difference.

There's lots of problems, pros, and there's lots of cons for both. But that was my overwhelming, overwhelming takeaway. The second biggest takeaway I have is that Brits don't really truly realize how impactful the british accent is until you leave Britain. And the metaphor I came up with for describing the british accent to Brits is imagine everywhere else in the world there's a salmon famine, right? And a british accent is like selling salmon.

And the only place in the world where there's an abundance of salmon is in the UK. So if you're there using that, it basically gets you nothing in the UK, but you suddenly leave or go outside. Anywhere else and you're exhausted anywhere else. And they think you're smarter, they think you're more attractive. Yeah.

Chris Williamson
Americans often ask me when they talk about that, and I do think it's true that Brits have an unfair advantage in America of being seen as more learned. Everyone presumes that were part of the aristocracy or something, and they often ask me, well, what do you think of american accents in the UK? And that was a really interesting question. I was like, I actually dont know. I think its like certainly for me on girls, its kind of sexy.

That feels exotic in some way. Definitely energetic, overly enthusiastic and excitable. Especially when you've got one American in a bunch of Brits. When you're the Brit and a bunch of Americans, oh, you know, everyone's just sort of excitable and first line cocaine energy. But when you drop one American in a like Newcastle or something.

Oh my God, who is that? It's a nuclear warhead surrounded by a bunch of swords. Yeah. I think since being here, it's made me reflect on the UK. I hate being disparaging about the UK.

It's the country that gave me and you our start. We both went to university there, we both had our first jobs there, we both built businesses there. I think we're both in one form or another still registered. You'll be on company's house in some vestigial old fucking thing. I really wish that I didn't sort of talk badly about it, but you sent me a tweet last week and I've been watching bald and bankrupt.

Awesome YouTube channel. I invited him on the show, he replied. He said he'd love to, but he's actually trying to actively wind down his public exposure. So he said he keeps getting asked for too many selfie photos in Tesco. And he does strike me as the kind of man that probably doesn't want to be overexposed.

You know, he was doing for the people that don't know this guy who does kind of like dark tourism stuff. He got trafficked across the border into Mexico. He was detained in a russian jail for a while, and then he decided he was going to take on the final boss of dangerous places, which was seaside towns of the UK. And he just travels around sort of looking at all of these bad places. And you sent me that tweet last week, which I think nails it, which is the UK has the 6th largest economy in the world.

But people are confused. The UK doesn't have the 6th largest economy in the world. London has the 6th largest economy in the world. It just has a really poor country attached to a very rich city. Yeah.

George Mack
And then there was another one, which was us universities. So I think in the top ten universities in the world, the UK has three and the US has three. Yet the US outputs five times those us universities output, five times the number of entrepreneurs that those uk universities do. So, in theory, these people are as intelligent as one another. Across, like, I think it's Oxford, Cambridge, and another universities, kings, maybe Durham, maybe.

Yeah. And what's interesting, when you go across global university rankings and outputs of entrepreneurs, in the study that was shared, the UK university, which was Oxford, so that's the number one for entrepreneurial output, was 50th across the whole world, despite the fact we ranked so high in education. Yet actually transforming that into entrepreneurship doesn't seem to happen. And I wonder again whether that's the self belief thing. You also see this weirdly, and I could be mistaken here, I have this bias that I think Brits are fundamentally more funnier than Americans.

However, way more great stand up comedians that are american than british. Like, we have Ricky Gervais, we have Jimmy Carr, and then in terms of global appeal, outside of that, there's not a huge amount more. And my theory behind that is, so why do you have the funniest people, yet not the biggest standup comedians out of those names there? And I think the same crabs in a bucket mentality that makes people so funny, because we can shoot people down and shoot ourselves down, is the same thing that makes it absurd as a concept to go and get on stage and say, I want to be a funny person like that in the UK. So I think the funniest guy in the world right now is probably in a Greggs in Wigan, or he is in a pub in Portsmouth.

And because of that crabs in a bucket mentality, Americans are way more likely to get on stage and go, I want to be a funny person, because that's part of the american DNA. Meanwhile, the Brits, who I think are actually funnier, don't end up doing as. Much standard entrepreneurial as well as entrepreneurial. Yeah. But, you know, even within that, that sort of self belief, it's one in the same.

Chris Williamson
I think it's agency, it's the preparedness to go against the grain. And, you know, this. We're going to talk about subprime audiences later on, but this audience is like. I would guess I would say it's full of a's and double as of people, especially the ones from the UK. And I think the reason that this resonates, I'm not saying it to disparage the UK, I don't think either of us are.

But to kind of reassure the people for whom they feel a little bit like square peg in a round country that sat in the UK, you know, some normal town you're in, fucking Wakefield or Carlisle or Middlesbrough, Rochdale, wherever you are, and you think, God, you know, this is the sort of conversations I really love to have. This is the kind of thoughts that I think about. And I really want to have big dreams for myself. And then I just really struggle to resonate with the people around me. I really, really fail to do that.

And I think. I wish that I'd had, when I was younger more reassurance that I wasn't the problem. You know, there's no value judgment. People that have big dreams, people that don't have big dreams, but there's nothing inherently wrong with you having those dreams. And there's no reason that you should be castigated or have the piss taken out of you because you want to do something different, because you don't intend being born, living, working and dying within the same 20 miles radius of where your parents grew up.

George Mack
Yes, but even at a walking around level, you see this. So if you walk around America, there's flags everywhere. There's kind of pride in the nation. If you walk around the UK and you see a flag, you go, oh, fuck. EDL member there might be a Nazi, which is cr.

Unless there's a football tournament, then everybody does it. That's the weird paradox of the UK. So it's even at that level, you see this kind of pride at the nation level and at the UK, it's almost like this weird autoimmune condition. Do you have any idea why the british football team uses three lions rather than the St George's cross? Don't know.

Chris Williamson
Isn't that interesting? Because I don't think Scotland does and I don't think Ireland does, and I don't think Wales do, and I can't think of any other team.

Actually. The England cricket guys will do the same thing. There must be a reason someone will be correcting me in the comments as we speak. But that's yet for the Americans that are listening. British national pride.

Like BNP, british national pride. I know it's not that, but, like, it's just. It doesn't exist. And then you come over here and it is nice. It's nice to hear that people have got.

Have got pride in their country. So probably the critique people have of us right now is that we're critiquing Britain way more than we are critiquing America. But I'd also point out that's part of being british. You're way more naturally to critique yourself and to critique other people. And I do love that side of being british because you're way more self analytical.

George Mack
I think in terms of other differences between the UK and the US that I've noticed in terms of benefits for Brits is because Brits take the piss out of one another on average, way more. It means that you do have maybe that lowering self belief, but you're almost a bit more antifragile. So if people do say a remarkable. You've already cracked a joke worse than that in the past, or your friends have particularly. And I think the more northern in the country you go, the more it.

Chris Williamson
Is, the further away from London that you get, the more piss you have taken out. Exactly. Whereas in America, I think people are a lot more, could be more fragile to comments like that. Whereas the Brits, the same way. I always say, another difference.

George Mack
There's two big differences that I think explain the differences between Americans and Brits. So one is simple a B test of when you meet an American and they're super enthusiastic and excited, and the Brits aren't. If you actually go historically back, there was a simple A B test, which is when the boats came and said, hey, there's this promised land far, far away. We can't show you a video because videos don't exist yet. You may die on the boat.

Do you want to come and visit this crazy land? The Brits were the ones who were like, what a ridiculous idea that is. I'm going to stay here. I'm staying in Skegness. And the Americans were the ones who were like, yeah, bring it on.

And that a b test fundamentally explains it as well as, when you think about it, historically, Americans have, apart from Pearl harbor, and that was quite far away from America, let's be honest, have never had an attack on their homeland in recent history. 911 not count 911. Yeah, there you go. That's one example. But comparing that to the bombing, like World War one and World War two, the whole city's completely destroyed.

So there's definitely more, like, scar tissue built up. That makes Brits, I think, a little bit more grittier in some regards than Americans as well. Yeah. I don't know, man. I'm pessimistic.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, I can tell. It's for certain people. I had this discussion with Piers Morgan. Piers was like, I like people bringing me back down to earth. I like the mockery and stuff.

I'm like, Piers, that's great for you. It doesn't seem to work too well for me. Like, my desperate requirement for validation and reassurance from the world, like, wasn't being very satiated in Stockton, right, or Newcastle. And then you come over here, one of the best things, and this is something that anybody, anywhere on the planet should do. And this is one of the coolest life hacks I've taken since being in America.

And you've seen me do it to you, and you've, like, toe cold at a bunch of parties, which is when in America, at least in my group of friends, you are the new person in a group. Your friend that knows you and knows the group will introduce you and tends to do it in the best 32nd showreel of you that anybody could give. You know, he's got this amazing marketing agency. He's a phenomenal writer, and he's pivoting. He's kind of champagne homeless at the moment.

He does all of these things, and, like, that's a really lovely gesture. It's your friend. It's an opportunity for them to do something nice for you. It gives you the best impression on the group, and it reminds you about what your friend kind of says about you behind your back when you're not there. And it's like it inflates you a little bit and makes you feel good and warm and stuff.

What would the equivalent be if you were a british friend being introduced to british friends by a british friend? It would be your worst ever story. Correct? Certainly the north, again, this is the northern thing. This is George shit himself last week.

Still has wet dreams.

George Mack
It is the introduction side, how we introduce one another. I've definitely found Americans are much better at selling themselves immediately, whereas I think Brits often downplay themselves immediately. There's a big difference there in terms of ever so slight cultural differences. One of the reasons why I think America has been so successful so far, and one thing Britain could improve upon is if you look at human beings, I think what makes human beings, if you put one human being in a jungle, it's that classic phrase that you put one human being in a jungle and you've just introduced prey into the environment. But if you put a thousand human beings into the jungle, you've just introduced a apex predator of which the world's never seen before.

So the only thing that really makes special, if you look at us, we don't hear that well. Compared to our animals, we're not that fast, we're not that strong. We're pretty shit across the board. But our ability to cooperate is what makes us unique. It's the classic Steve Jobs thing of if you looked at, I think it's energy efficiency and movement.

Humans are so far down the rankings. There's so many animals ahead of us in terms of to do a mile, how much energy they need to burn. But if you look at a human being on a bicycle, human beings have just blown through the charts and he has this great quote, which is the computer is the bicycle of the mind. And if you then go back to, well, ultimately, the only thing that makes us unique human beings, because we're shit about everything compared to other animals, is our ability to cooperate. If you have a more enthusiastic society that supports one another more, you can cooperate more, which means that you'll then have way more economic output.

Because in a certain country that's more optimistic, that goes, I've got this idea. A load of naive Americans are like, great idea, let's do it tomorrow. Whereas a culture that's more maybe cynical means that those ideas don't happen. Which I think explains why across these universities, we have essentially the same iq levels, the same intelligence levels, better accents, better accents, more salmon, but five x the number of entrepreneurs in America. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Grammarly.

Chris Williamson
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So your writing is always personalized, consistent, and matches the right context every time. Honestly, upgrading to Grammarly premium saves so much time and makes you sound way smarter than you are. Its the writing equivalent of having a british accent. So sign up to upgrade to Grammarly premium and level up your productivity by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to Grammarly.com modernwisdom. Thats G r a m m a r l dash.

Modern wisdom what was that thing? Another person. So two guys that I want you to have this conversation with. First one, bald and bankrupt Ben. That's fine.

Like he wants to take a step back. Second one, Tom Blomfield, guy that founded Monzo, which is where I got the thing from swinging a miss. Another one for me, I got rebuffed twice in the space of a day. It's interesting, both the founder of Monzo and the founder of Revolut. So the two, you'd argue, the most successful UK companies that have come out recently, both of them are having huge issues with the UK, I believe.

George Mack
So Tom obviously wrote that piece about the UK culture and how he's to fix it. And I think the founder of Revolut is either left or wanting to leave because of the regulation that exists there. So two of our best entrepreneurs, Tom. Lives in SF now, right? He's part of y combinator.

Chris Williamson
What else? Do you learn anything else from that Tom Blumfield article? He wrote it on fucking Tumblr. I really didn't even notice that blog. Post is on Tumblr.

George Mack
Oh, wow. Yeah. Who knew that CEO's of a Internet savvy Internet startup bank and 13 year old girls posting emo photos. That's the like, horseshoe, horseshoe around. I mean, probably the other takeaway, I would say, is vision.

So I always look at, let's say, and again, a lot of people who listen to this podcast might hate these places, but the one thing you can give them is when you go there, you kind of get a vision. So whether that's Austin, whether that's Dubai, whether that's Miami, whether that's Singapore, whether that's El Salvador right now, even Saudi Arabia, you may not like those places at all, but when you're there or you kind of see what they're doing, you go kind of get where you're going. There's something happening. Whereas with the UK, I think fundamentally that's probably one of the problems right now, is that you don't fully know where the country's going. Yeah, that's a really, really great problem.

Chris Williamson
A great point. I reached out, I got Dominic Cummings email, I got his personal email address. So I reached out to him. So last time we were on the show, we spoke about how the head of cybersecurity for the UK government job role title was at 65 grand a year. Someone's now made the meme of that original screenshot with, I think it's the TikTok.

George Mack
Yes. Some person who might be high of cyber security at TikTok it's like 360 grand a year. It's like, wow, the contrast is there. Yeah. I don't know, man.

Chris Williamson
Part of my live show is me saying that I want to make enthusiasm great again and re import the american enthusiasm back over to the UK. That being said, no matter where you're from, I think that you have the opportunity to be the enthusiastic person. And I've been really getting into direct communication instead of shadow sentences recently. And a lot of the time, I think to myself, what would have happened ten years ago if, in the northeast of the UK, the group of friends that I had that were around then, Darren, Johnny, Youssef, like those guys, what if I'd gone to them and I'd said, look, I want to make a real hard left turn in terms of the sort of demeanor and the way that I view the world. And I've heard about the fact that more enthusiastic groups of people seem to do better.

They have a five times increase in entrepreneurial success and we have the same levels of skill. Better accent, more salmon. Why can't we deploy this? I really want to try and cultivate the most positive friend group that we can. Why don't we just try this?

Why don't we pretend to be british American or like British Saudi or whatever the. Whatever you want to be. Why don't we try and do that? And I wonder how much direct communication in that sort of a way, in a safe space where there isn't one person in the corner that's always going to default to gay. Like if.

Because that person, everyone. It's like a regression to the mean. It's like regression to being mean. You know what I mean? Like, the meanest person in the room is the one that everyone defaults to because that person always seems less naive.

They seem a little bit sort of more sardonic and smart and cool. And again, if you're american and this is. I don't like being around those people at all. Go to the UK for a couple of weeks and they are everywhere. But, yeah.

Tom Blomfield's article on Tumblr about the difference between the UK and the US, I think is fascinating. And that just is a frame. What a phenomenal frame to say the UK isn't a successful economy. London is a successful economy that has a poor country attached to it. So to flip the script, though, so we don't get lots of angry Brits.

We already do. What do you miss about the UK? Or you think the UK has its strengths over America? Because I would say America definitely has greater blow up risk. I could easily imagine a scenario where the US goes to civil war quicker than the UK does.

I would imagine that there's many more people, many more entrepreneurs that have gone bankrupt in the US because they're just swinging for the fences a lot more. It's my belief that most people who do things like entrepreneurialism, from a good standpoint, are more risk averse than they are prepared to deal with risk. So most people actually need to crank that up. They need a little bit more encouragement. Things that are problems in America is certainly that there are blind spots that many of them have.

There's an entitlement that a lot of Americans have to think about. The fact that as you're coming up through school, maybe less so now, when America is the most misogynistic, xenophobic place on the planet. But for the most part, up until maybe about five or ten years ago, children were promised the american dream is still alive and well. Blue sky thinking, helicopter vision will loop back by end of week. And if that's what you've been told as a child, and then you arrive in adulthood and you're not given that, you throw your toys out of the pram, this wasn't the world that I was told.

And I think that that's why the entitlement and the victimhood culture is more propagated in America and it isn't in the UK, because all hopes and dreams that you had for a life that was remotely good are just stamped out of you. To so many people in the UK, and this isn't a knock to so many people in the UK. Success is getting a solid graduate job at 23 on 35, 40 grand a year, and then slowly climbing the corporate ladder to make six figures by 40, and then to retire with a solid pension toward the end of life. The british dream. Yeah, that is the british dream.

And it's just. It's much more on a set of train tracks. There's fewer variations, and again, that is a perfectly acceptable, perfectly successful life. But more people slot themselves into that because they don't think about stuff going in other directions. I think the opposite problem occurs in America, which is kind of the paradox of choice.

Well, I can do anything I want. I basically got 50 countries attached within one big continent. I can go wherever I want, I can work there, I can use the same currency, I can speak the same language, I've got the light, all of the things. What should I do? I don't fucking know.

Way more homeless people. Yes. Way more prescription drugs. I wrote about that in the. What is neglected by the media, but will be studied by historians, that I think five of the top.

George Mack
Sorry, the top five news networks in the US, either the number one biggest advertiser or the number two biggest advertiser is a pharmaceutical company, which, as a Brit, sounds absurd. And there's only two countries in the world that that's allowed. New Zealand. New Zealand and America. Yeah.

Um, so that's definitely a difference. But I think one of the things that you mentioned there is that ability for each state in America to have a lot more control. And it feels like if you don't like what's going on in this state, you can move to a different state and you can run these A B tests. Whereas in the UK, as you mentioned, London has this stranglehold. It's that thing I used to say to Americans when I was explaining the UK is in the US, if you want to get into tech, you go to San Francisco.

If you want to get into finance, you go to New York. If you want to get into entertainment, entertainment, you'd typically go to LA. If you wanted to get into politics, you'd typically go to Washington. In UK, it's London. London, London, London.

And obviously that's changing. Manchester's beginning to boom a little bit. But if we could begin to decentralize things a lot more, that Newcastle could go, you know what? We're going to be the AI capital, and if you come here, we're going to have all these incentives that the Yi. Fascinating thing.

Chris Williamson
Oh, yes. Fucking got it. There we go. All right.

Why do you say that adults don't exist? Oh, fucking hell. This is probably my most. When I had this idea, somebody asked the question of, if you could have something on the billboard for everybody to see, what would it be? And it would just be, adults don't exist.

George Mack
And it's just a big mistake of mine, like having not that much agency growing up and still at times trying to improve it, where you constantly think there's this adult class out there. And again, it kind of comes from the education system of teachers. You have these teachers and they've kind of figured out life and they're giving you all this advice, and these are adults. And I say there's kind of two red pills that make you realize that adults don't exist. So the first one is when you go to college or university and one of your friends or people that you know, who's just so, like, all over the place, unintentional, hungover all the time, doesn't know what they want to do with their life and they go, thinking of becoming a teacher and you go, hold on.

Well, all my teachers, or a significant amount of my teachers, that person who just didn't know what they wanted to do, and I put them on this pedestal. So it's this kind of low agency mindset of thinking that theres these emperors out there that are wearing these beautiful clothes and theres these CEO's, theres these politicians. But actually the more high agency perspective is realizing that theyre just grown up children. They were a sperm cell that fertilized an egg, that came out screaming, that looked at things around them, learnt this language and puberty kicked in and then theyre a quote unquote adult. And the other realization you have is when youre 15 and you meet like a 25 year old, you go, wow, 25, that's like old, that's an adult.

And you become 25 and you go, I still don't. When am I going to become an adult? When am I become an adult? And you realize, oh, 30 is the same. And I think it'll just be the same all the way throughout.

So these adults just don't exist. Yeah, I have this sort of undue respect, I think, and I place an awful lot I did for a long time, similar to yourself, place an awful lot of credence in authority. I think this is a big british thing, too. Brits love a queue, love queuing, can't wait to queue. And that sense that the people in charge know what they're doing.

Chris Williamson
Ah, they've got it all sorted. You know, think about America. Think of a perfect example of this. Perfect example not to bring it back to the UK US thing. Look at the first dose vaccine uptake in the UK compared with the US.

I think first dose in the UK will probably by now be 96%. It was at least 92 a couple of years ago, so 96%. And I think the US, it wasn't even two thirds. So there are so many more people on this side of the pond that are prepared to say, I don't think the people in charge know what they're fucking doing. I have distrust in our officials, in the people that say that they are beyond us.

I wonder whether this is at least in part downstream from having a monarchy. Your Highness. It's someone that is raised above us. Highness. Right.

You're literally positioning yourself. This is Alex O'Connorism. I argued with Piers Morgan about this. Yeah. I put a lot of undue weight in the words of people who knew no more than me.

And it's that same thing about business. Degree lecturers at university. Like, these are the people teaching you about business. What is the outcome? You want to be successful at business?

Okay, if you were successful at business, would you be teaching business in a UK Newcastle university? Probably not. I'd probably be busy running my business. Like not everyone's Scott Galloway, swanning in to give a, like, community speech once every quarter and saying that he still teaches at NYU. An honorary position for Scott Galloway.

Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, he paid 14 mil in taxes last year. Like, he's got proof in the pudding. But yeah, I think it's idiots all the way up. And it's the same for any industry that you care to care about, whether it's status, whether it's athletics, whether it's podcasting, whether it's like, any of the people that you respect probably don't have that much of a clue about what they're doing.

They all fumbled through the way. The number of people that I've met that have a really well constructed thesis, first principle, fundamental view of why they do the things they do, how the world works, why they've got to the place that they are. Almost everybody just stumbled into it. There was that thing from my live show that adulthood is like being pushed down a set of stairs at age 18 and trying to catch your feet until you die, just permanently building it as you go, like, oh, fuck, we're in the air. Like, all right, we put a wing on the plane and let's get a propeller and let's do this thing.

George Mack
Yeah. I come back to one of the problems with adulthood as well, is during childhood, there's these milestones that you have. Not being able to talk. Like being able to talk walk. I guess it's the reverse order.

Then. First grade, second grade, third grade. Oh, you have these big birthdays every single year that people celebrate. GCse's, in our case, a levels or middle school, high school, whatever they have out here. And then adulthood.

And it's pretty much mortgage wedding, like death. Funerals of other people. Kids, maybe. Sorry. Yeah, kids being born, mortgage wedding, kids.

Funerals of loved ones than your own funeral. So there's so few milestones. What's really interesting is Covid then acted as a quite an interesting milestone now. Whereas when you talk to people about COVID there's a before COVID moment and an after Covid moment. And I actually think it's quite.

It's interesting when you get to experience other cultures for the first time. You go of course, that's such a better way of doing things. So in the jewish community, they celebrate bar mitzvahs, which is a big coming of age when you're 13. And I think there should be some kind of bar mitzvah for turning 25 because your brain kind of fully develops when you're 25 and it's when it's big for yourself. 25?

Yeah. No, still struggling. It's when the rail guards of life are like fully released at 25 as well. You have some friends who are in prison, you have others that are selling nfts online. You have this person who has three kids and it feels like 25.

What's that Benjamin Franklin quote of the average person dies at 25 and isn't buried until 75? I think we should probably do more milestones in adulthood because if not, you end up to loop back the conversation to the start in the busy trap and it just before you know it. Yeah, you've run through everything without any milestones. We'll get back to talking to George in 1 minute. But first I need to tell you about ag 190 percent of Americans are not getting the nutrients that they need every day to be healthy.

Chris Williamson
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If you're not sure about trying it, there is a 90 day money back guarantee so you can buy it, use it every single day for three months, and if you do not like it, they will give you all of your money back. That's how confident they are that youll love it. Right now you can try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin d three and k two, plus five free ag one travel packs with your first purchase by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinkag one.com wisdom. Thats drinkag one.com wisdom. I had this take where I wanted to normalize girls getting a single round of ivf with egg freezing for their 21st birthday.

I think that if you could instantiate that into culture, I think that that would result in an awful lot more freedom for women. And I get a lot of criticism for being like, way too pro male, apart from all of the pro male people online who think that I'm way too pro women. But I think that this is just a win for everybody. I don't know anybody who loses. It's not a fertilized egg.

So the abortion community debate doesn't have a problem with it, presumably, unless they have a problem with every period that a girl has, which I'm gonna guess maybe someone does. 21st birthday. Don't buy them a watch. Don't buy them shoes, don't buy them a holiday to Zanti with their friends. I mean, it's more expensive.

This is high. It's a significantly bigger investment, but I think that it just opens up so much. And that would be another milestone in some way, and it would be the best insurance policy that you could think of, and it would help to combat declining population, declining birth rates. It's just that 21, peak fertility, fantastic quality of eggs. One round of IVF is going to get you.

God, I don't know what you get at 21. I've never even seen data on it. Like, maybe like 1520 viable eggs that you'd get, pop it away, put it in the fridge, and then you're 38 and you've worked on your career for a long time, or you're 29 and your partner and you are having fertility. Whatever. It's just.

It's straight up optionality. And I think that just thinking about where are we missing milestones? I'm going to freeze my sperm. I've got legacy sperm, by the way. I did a ton of research and spoke to a bunch of friends that are, like, in the IVF world, legacy sperm, in America at least, is what it seems to be.

The number one. How much it is to get 25 years of frozen your sperm? Two separate units of frozen sperm. Five grand. Wow.

Five grand for a quarter of a decade, a quarter of a century to freeze your sperm for. And I was like, why? Why? Five grand is not a nominal amount of money. Like, it's a big amount of money.

Why wouldn't I just come in a cup? Yeah. I'm just picturing someone like Youssef trying to do his own home, keeping it in a freezer to find. Don't diy it. It's in there next to the Ben and Jerry's.

George Mack
Well, Bill Ackman, I think, had this idea I could be butchering it, but it was along the lines of, rather than pensions, the government would, when the child's born, put money in the S and P 500 or some kind of ETF, and by the time they're 65, it will be millions. And you could almost guarantee that across every single citizen versus them having to slowly but surely realize when they're 36 that they probably should start contributing towards a pension. But again, trying to get these ideas to be tested, you would need looping the conversation around, again, multiple states, particularly in the UK, to be able to do that. I don't think it'd be very, very difficult, I think, to get that through the House of Parliament. What is your contrarian take about whether money buys happiness or not?

So everybodys probably heard the question, does money buy happiness? And then therell be a big debate either way. But the correct way to actually answer that question is to say, that is the stupidest question that ive ever heard and ill explain why. So we can use an example here. Lets say you've used 95% of your salary to get this crazy penthouse in New York to show off to everybody, and you realize in the first night that your next door neighbor's p.

Diddy and he's just having these like wild, loud orgies all night and it's just. Beating his wife in the corridor outside. Yeah, a nightmare to live next to. Right? In that case, did money buy happiness?

Actually, money might have bought misery. Let's say you then go on Amazon prime and get those earplugs, silicone ones that mold to your ear, that block out all noise and it costs you $10. Well, in that case, a little bit of money bought a lot of happiness. So the problem with this phrase, does money buy happiness? As it implies, all money is created equal and all happiness is created equal.

And you can see if you ask the question. So when people ask you that question, the best question to reply with is, does money buy good investments? Well, I know some people that have. Bought, depends what you invest. Credible stocks really early on.

And I know some people that have bought bitcoin one, two, three and had a terrible time. So ultimately, it completely depends on what you've invested in. So the actual, what the question's trying to get to, or what the real answer to the question should be, is that strategic money buys happiness and unstrategic money can buy misery, or strategic money can buy happiness, and unstrategic money can buy misery. Exactly the same of investments. So the reason why this question exists is because within itself it's a presupposition.

It presupposes that all money is created equal, and it presupposes that all happiness is created equal when it's not. It's a completely individualistic thing, like an investment. What is a way to strategically spend money and what is a way to unstrategically spend money. The honest answer is, and this makes it into a terrible YouTube clip. But the honest answer is that it's so personalized to the individual.

By definition, it's what may make one person happy with one purchase. May make another person happy with another purchase. I gave you a pickleball paddle. That's brought an awful lot of happiness. If I gave that pickleball paddle to Zach, it would become a doorstop.

Yes. So its looking at the cost of thing, service, product, experience and impact that has on you. Utility of the person. Utility? Yeah, I mean, Zach said the other day at yours that you guys have a sauna that you spent a little bit of money on.

And he says that is an example of strategic money can buy happiness. Yeah, its a very interesting reframe on the question and wed spoken about this before. I think both of us are fortunate that we have a low materialism set point. And ive always thought about this as a competitive advantage for people. So if you grew up in a household that was gifts and public presence and stuff were kind of displays of affection, if large things were made out of birthdays and of christmases, and there was sort of keeping up with the Joneses mentality, maybe mom or dad would always looking to improve the car and stuff like that, that's fine.

Chris Williamson
But it is likely that as you grow into an adult, you will tie an awful lot of your self worth and your place in the world to the possessions that you have, or your ability to provide possessions to other people, or maybe the way that they give gifts and possessions to you as a show of their love and affection. And again, hidden versus observable metrics, it's very. In a society that is obsessed with more, more, more. It is a radically revolutionary thing to say that I have enough. And I have always seen of all of the different mental pathologies I've got, and it's a fucking laundry list.

One of the ones I'm most glad that I don't have after alcoholism and sort of substance stuff is a need for materialistic possessions to make me feel satiated and satisfied and enough. So if you are the sort of person that doesn't have that, if you don't have a drive to get more possessions in order to make yourself happy, you can basically see that as your happiness burn rate is way lower. It's ten times less, 100 times less than somebody else. And you could have been brought up or born with the predisposition where you had to have the newest car, you had to have the fanciest bag. You had to always be flying away on holidays.

Is it fun? Yeah. But basically that means that your operating costs as a human are way higher.

George Mack
Yeah, it's a good point. I reminded of I forgot who said it might be Coco Chanel of the best things in life for free. And the second best things are really, really, really expensive. But yeah, the more stress I've realized as I get older is. Yeah, the money by happiness question is so absurd.

And all it comes down to is how strategic you can be with your money. When it comes to you. You said it was personalized. When it comes to you, what are the places that you have found a disproportionate investment leverage. Where when you spend a dollar on it, are you getting ten x return in terms of your money for happiness?

Earplugs. Not because I'm next to diddy, but earplugs, especially when I'm traveling around. Because if I have one bad night sleep and I get these silicone moldable ones that I exchange each time, it's like five to $10 a week, which sounds like quite a hefty airplane budget, but it's definitely way more than any materialistic purchase that I've made. Essentially anything that makes me feel better throughout the day or speeds up time. What sorts of things?

Paying for access to a sauna. I can regularly go there, for example. Or if Im looking at an option where Im staying thats slightly nearer a gym. Thinking through just based, I always come back to one of the things I think about is high leverage relaxation. So look at things that recharge you, that give you the most amount of energy and what has the lowest cost or the lowest energy to produce that.

So those two things in particular, being able to see friends like Dicky gave us this at my birthday because I've never experienced until I came here the difference between Ubers and Uber comforts. And in America, the uber can be any car that pulls up, whereas an Uber comfort, you're getting this like comfy little Tesla and it's only an extra $2 sometimes for the journey, depends on the ride. And that is like an example of a little bit of money there, strategic money. But if I'm going somewhere like today and I'm in like a nice Tesla beforehand, and I can think about what being the chat about versus if I'm in a clapped up car that's breaking down, it's a bit more of a problem. Yeah, those are really good ones.

Chris Williamson
Dicky had it. You can go all the way down to the very bottom, which is Exec XL, which is a big Yukon or an Escalade or something. And you realize when you actually price it together for the number of people that are going, especially if you're going XL, it's maybe twice as expensive. But you feel like P. Diddy, right?

Without the violence. Without the violence, yeah. You feel like P. Diddy in his heyday. That's great.

I'm trying to think about other stuff for me, certainly paying for assistance with things that I want to do. So you're talking about high leverage recovery. Going to the gym is great. Going to the gym with the trainer, you leave with more energy than you went in with. It doesn't SAP your willpower.

There's just somebody there that's telling you what to do. Same thing would be true for going to a Crossfit class, paying for a CrossFit membership, the gym or planet fitness or something. I can get that for 13 pounds a month. Okay, but how much of your energy is it sapping? Or how much of your willpower are you having to use to get yourself into the stage where you can get some energy back?

Like you're spending energy to get energy. Whereas if you go into a crossfit class or a Barry's boot camp, or you get a PT or you do whatever. Last night I did a breath work class. I think it was $15. $15 for a breath work class for an hour.

I did as much breath work last night as I did all of last week. An hour of breath work last night, and I think I managed to get 415 minutes sessions in last week, and it cost $15. So I think externalizing motivation, that's a big one for me. Good quality coffee. Like nice coffee, nice water, stuff like that.

And these are, for many people, goods that would push their spend to income ratio up a little bit. But yeah, you can get an awful lot of happiness out of quite low spend. And you'd be surprised at the places that it comes from. Yeah, the obvious answer is things that you use a lot as well. So shoes, laptop.

George Mack
Laptop. Laptop riser. Yeah. Why have you been obsessed with Roger Federer and Djokovic and Nadal? Because you just won't show up about them.

Ah, this is so good. So this came from Matthew Syed. And for me, this is. I've always enjoyed, like, self help and self improvement, but there's a part of it that always felt a bit icky. And this metaphor kind of explains my problem with it.

And Matthew Syed is a big tennis fan, and he talks about. He would go and watch tennis. And it was such a unique point in history because you had the three goats at once. So in football, you had, arguably the two goats at once. You had Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

In tennis, you had Djokovic, Nadal and Federer. And obviously in the self help world or that space, it's like, this is the way. Or you see these instagram reels and it's like, if you do ABC, this will happen. And what's beautiful about this metaphor that sayed tells is you have. He used to watch at Wimbledon, the warm up courts, so he'd turn up and Nadal's there.

And Nadal is like full on goggins, like biceps bulging, screaming as he's hitting the shots. In warm up? Yeah, in warm up, sprinting up and down to get himself into the zone, like going as hard as he can. Then you have Djokovic, who comes out, who's almost an emotionless robot, who's just laser focused on getting the job done, watches him warm up. It's like, hold on, these are the two goats at the same time.

Completely different way of doing things. Then Federer turns up and you can hear him laughing before he arrives at the court. He's trialing trick shots, he's doing dinks, he's laughing with his friends, he's just finessing the ball left, right and center. And these three, and obviously, there's a debate between them, but these three are arguably the three goats of there at the exact same time, give or take, and had completely different philosophies to doing things. And that that goes to show, and I've always now took that metaphor.

Whenever somebody gives me, oh, you need to do things this way, or this is the way this gets done. And realizing, okay, that's the Djokovic way of doing it. That might not apply to me, or that's the federal way of doing it, or that's the Nadal way of doing it. Ironically, Nadal actually had the most amount of injuries, which is one thing you could take into consideration. But ultimately, there's no the way, as shown by those three, there's completely different ways of achieving essentially the exact same output.

Chris Williamson
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Also, they have a no B's, no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. Right now you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink. Lmnt.com modernwisdom that's drinklmnt.com modernwisdom I wonder whether one of the reasons that people look for one size fits all answers to questions is that if there's three potential answers to the question, that then puts the onus back onto them to work out how to do it right. What people want is a reliable set of inputs that can get them the outcomes someone else got.

They don't need to go, what is the way for you to get the outcome? It's the same thing again. It's what are you focusing on, inputs or outcomes? You want to get the outcomes, but if someone says, here is the answer, there is no answer. There are multiple different ways, and here are some principles and you need to work out.

It's like, I fucking I paid dollar 500 for this course. I've paid $500 for the productivity course. And you're telling me that it isn't that I need an external brain, but I might do. And it isn't that I need to do spaced repetition, but I might do. And it isn't that I need to do time blocking, but I might do.

Yeah, I think a huge hesitation should be placed on saying, this person achieved success and did this thing. Therefore, doing the thing that they did will cause me, different person, different disposition, different background, different set point, to get the same outcome that they did.

George Mack
I think it then comes down to the scientific method. We live in the enlightenment period. It's only been, what, not a couple hundred years or so that we've had electricity, had all the things that we take for granted now, and that comes out the scientific revolution. And applying a scientific frame to viewing these problems of, okay, that's the Nadal way of doing it. That's the Djokovic way of doing it.

That's the federal way of doing it. How about, I'll try this, see how that goes? I'll try this, see how that goes? Try this and see how that goes. And then judging, based off the experiments, how it worked personally for you, you're seeing this huge boom in nutrition, right, where for the last 50 years, it was like, there's this diet, there's the only banana diet, there's the vomit, three times a day diet.

And now it's actually what is probably the best diet for Chris is different to what's the best diet for George, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And I think we'll just find out more and more with time that personalization is more and more important than we think. But as you mentioned, then, it's hard to sell that. So it's not as gimmicky, it's not as easy to get people into a funnel that buys the 699 course, because it's often a lot more personalization, and the people need to have a lot more agency over their existence. The work is put back onto the person who needs to do the work.

Yes, but it's the truth. It's the way. Yeah, yeah, I think that you're right. We also had this discussion in Miami about why hard work is something that people often pray at the altar of. And I'm one of these people.

Chris Williamson
Right. You know, hormones have been on the show, goggins, Jocko, etcetera. I don't disagree. Hard work is a very reliable route to achieving success. But I think that optimizing exclusively for hard work causes you to miss an awful lot of the higher leverage routes, and also maybe some of the more personalized ones, too.

There's very few problems in life that aren't made easier by working harder, but there are other higher leverage, higher return, less painful routes to achieving the same outcome. Those are less reliable, though, right? Like, hard work will almost always get you closer to your goal. Working harder will almost always get you closer to your goal incrementally. Therefore, it's like a moderately effective but highly robust drug that I could give you to deal with some malady that you're dealing with.

And then here's five other options, four of which won't work at all, but one of which will work ten times better than you just doing the hard work thing. And maybe hard work sits sort of alongside it. You kind of loop them in as a combination. But, yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why praying at the altar of hard work is something that's so pedestalized because when has anybody ever worked harder and it hasn't helped at least a little bit. So it's the panacea, but it's actually only working at sort of a ceiling capped sort of rate.

And there's way more effective versions that you could look at alongside that or outside of that. That isn't just okay, just get up earlier, go to bed later, spend more time in front of the screen. What's an example for yourself that's more productive or impactful than hard work or things that you often neglect because you're too busy working hard? That often is a bigger lever reading. So I asked myself this question during my end of your review.

I think I asked you this as well. What are the things I think are productive but aren't, and what are the things that are productive but I don't realize are? And that's just such a phenomenal question because you're starting to see where am I investing into hard work, kind of reliable, but could be not so useful. And where am I not seeing the penny stocks that have got a thousand x potential upside. So for me, sitting in front of the computer when I'm not working or when I'm low on energy makes me feel like I'm working.

It makes me feel like I'm busy. I actually don't really get anything done. Being on slack, being on emails and taking calls, for the most part, very, very low Roi does move me incrementally closer to the goal of whatever it is that I'm trying to do. Stuff that is productive, but I don't realize it. Going for a walk without my Airpods in and without a phone reading, which is huge.

Reading and writing probably should have been in there. Focused reading and writing. Massive, massive upsides. Going for coffees with friends and going for dinner with people that come through town for a short period of time. So next week we're going to go for dinner.

We're going for nut pudding with Brian Johnson and a bunch of his friends. And it's like it's a Thursday night. It's going to be one of the last nights that you're here. Do we really want to spend the time with people? We're not too sure, but I can almost guarantee that I will come away from that evening with an amazing story or some cool insights or a new friend or something cool.

So I just think saying yes to more novelty is a good start, one. I'd add on to the list that's really meta that I think when we discussed the UK issue earlier, and I know you chat to young guys a lot, or in that space about feeling lonely or loneliness epidemic, one of the things that doesn't feel productive, I'd say is the most productive thing I've ever done is whenever I'm on social media, which is by definition often quite unproductive time, or I describe Twitter now as swimming through sewage, searching for gold. And every day I'll get a bit of gold, but I'm covered in shit. And it's like, that's the trade off that I kind of make with social media platforms now. And one of my friends recently was saying how he's not got a circle like himself where he is, he's got his old friends, he's not got a circle like himself.

George Mack
And he goes, so I might start go into a yoga class or a crossfit class and see if I can meet these people. I go, that's definitely better than doing nothing. But the odds of it, of that is quite slim relative to online. So I go back to how me and you met, right? I think I was sat on the loo and I dmed you.

So it was just like, hey, mate, and what did I mention about Chrome extensions? You said, I see that you're coming to my office, coming to my place of work in a couple of weeks time. Let's exchange Google Chrome extension so that. In terms of finding people who produced something cool online and dming them like, hey, I thought, this is awesome. Few ever here, let's do something together.

The amount of people that do that is so slim, I bet even, and the mistake people make is they'll go, right? And this one, Grant cardone, yeah, they'll go, they'll try and punch way above their relative standing. And I mean the foot. The good news is that even if you do that, even someone like you, you probably get so many DM's. I know I get quite a few, but 99% of it is absolutely shite.

So if you can even provide some value, you're immediately in the 1%. But I think the mistake that young people make, or that I made, is that you then try and punch, you try and punch upwards. So you try and go, oh, let's find the guy who's got 2 million ABC or has got all this, like my dream, whatever. But actually what you want to do is meet piers. So when we both met, it was basically you had relatively nothing, two nobodies, just like now, it was back my favorite period of Chris, when he would be interviewing some of the, like, world's most hardcore niche philosophers on the trolley problem.

So I'd go on his Instagram Stories, see the trolley problem with some doctor at Cambridge, and then the next Instagram story was two for one tonight at voodoo. Get your Jager bombs in at this price, then boom, back to the trolley. It was like the Batman clout Kent single feed. Yes. So just finding people like that and dming them and by the way, the only people will, then the imposter syndrome will kick in.

It's like, well, I don't make any content or I don't have a following. Honestly, it doesn't matter. All you need is a buy that says this person isn't a fucking weirdo. So, like just some kind of nice, savvy bio and a little bit of content on there. And that's, I think, all you need.

And you're better off finding peers than trying to find people you're fans of because you're always going to have this, like, vertical, weird relationship. Whereas if you meet people early on, you can then grow together, which is way more enjoyable because if you say you're 20 now and you try and become best friends with you, you're much older, you're not going to be going to like Ibiza with them, you're going to be boring relative to them. So finding peers that are on your level, and it's so easy just by scrolling through social these days and people do not do that. Don't forget as well that if you find somebody that is at your level, yeah. They are going to be dealing with the same problems that you are now.

Chris Williamson
Me at 36, I can still remember most of the problems I had at 26, but at 16, I can't remember any of them. I don't know what my mindset was like at 16. I can't even put myself in that theory. Ali Abdaal. I keep coming back to this.

I don't know where he said it. He said, you want to teach people that are about two steps behind you because you can't remember the problems of someone that's ten steps behind you. So he has this idea of permanently sort of laying a trail of breadcrumbs and you basically get to lay and follow the trail of breadcrumbs when you're with somebody that's on that same level as you, right? Your similar age bracket, similar sort of background, similar sort of desire for where you want to go in life. The only thing really, that you need to optimize for two things.

First one being vibes. When you spend time with them, are they a sofa friend or a treadmill friend? Do you feel energized and revitalized and regulated after you've been with them, or do you feel a bit fucking irritated and you're like, God, like, I need to chill out after that. That was like antagonistic, or, I didn't like this. It just something felt off.

Like, how do you feel post content clarity? Like post conversation clarity? And then the second thing, are you, are they optimizing for growth? Do they have a personal growth vehicle that they are moving along with? Basically, are they prepared to change?

Because if you want to be someone who changes and you're around someone who doesn't change, it's always going to struggle because you're always going to be suggesting new things. They're going to feel like it's a value judgment on them and they're going to feel like accused a little bit and you're going to feel held back. So vibes and personal growth velocity, if you can match those two things, you've got a great set of friends that you'll continue to grow with. And it's so much easier to do that online. So going back to the reference of my friend who was like, I might go to the Crossfit club, and by the way, that's not a bad way to do it.

George Mack
The brick and mortar way of doing it. It's so much more. I had this idea as you were talking about it, that the finding someone online who you can tell you're going to get on with is a targeted strike from a sniper. Right. It's one of those drone.

Chris Williamson
Drone bombs that hit an individual going to crossfit classes. Carpet bombing. Yes. And hoping for the best. That being said, I do actually think that spreading the, like, you know, in a typical crossfit class, maybe there's 20 people in a typical gym, there's 100.

Like, that's a. There's a pretty big net there. So you are probably going to find, I mean, dude, run clubs. Jesus Christ. The run club that Noah runs here, raw, raw dog run club, is fucking huge.

And if you are the sort of person that at 08:00 a.m. or 09:00 a.m. wants to stand outside of a pizza truck and set off on a 4.5 miles loop, that's a. You've selected for a very unique sort of category of person there. So the more unique that it is.

But if it was like a. I don't know, random yoga class. Yeah. Something that's the barrier to entry is a little bit lower. You're actually going to be selecting for a broader range of people.

Yeah. Or like a networking event is probably the worst example. Right. Any conference, any professional conference. So I go back to if what's really interesting is we've now caught up where ten years ago saying you'd meet people, saying you'd date somebody online, you was like this absolutely basement dweller weirdo.

George Mack
And now it's completely at the whole dating market and more than 50% of people meet online and I'm convinced the number's higher. But people lie, so. But weirdly, if you start talking about making friends online, it still has this stigma that dating online ten years ago did, but it's purely just of like this momentum that exists. But I go back to, I reckon it's going to change with Gen Z. I think that's probably one of the most reliable or the highest conversion rate way of meeting people that are high signal.

Chris Williamson
The problem is that that locks people into only having online friendships or meeting people never. But it's. If you never transition out. And that's the problem with Gen Z. Yes, the Gen Z problem is that they're locked in to online friendships without transitioning them or graduating them to being in the real world.

But yeah, I think there was an analogy that I remember realizing when I was thinking about pickup artistry like forever ago, and lots of guys were doing day game and kino escalation and stuff in the UK and there was an ick. There's still an ick, I think, that many girls have around guys that say that they've actively learned sort of communication around dating. If you rebrand it actually to. I've learned direct communication or nonviolent communication, which actually has the worst branding in the world. Like nonviolent communication.

NBC is like, like phenomenal as a modality, fucking awful as branding, because it's like you learned nonviolent communication. What's the subtext of that? That you had to fix your violent communication like, that doesn't sound particularly great. My point being, if there's an ick that some women have around a guy that has purposefully gone out and learned how to communicate well with women, because maybe it sounds a bit machiavellian, am I being manipulated here? But I believe that the real underlying ick is, oh, so you naturally don't have the talent to be able to do this and you had to learn it, which is absurd because it's like saying, oh, you go to the gym so you're not naturally jacked and in shape, or you train at hitting the golf ball so you can't just walk up and hit it.

Everything is trainable, right? And almost no one. But when you're talking about charisma, it almost feels like personality. It's a natural outgrowth of who you are. And playing around with that is bad is sometimes seen as bad when it comes to friends and friendship.

How like despondent and feeble does it sound as a 25 year old guy or girl to say, I need to consciously work at having friends, I need to find friends. I need to go out and find them? You think, well, what's the subtext of that? Oh, you don't already have friends? What's wrong with you?

What's wrong with you that you, as a grown adult who lives on their own and has a degree, doesn't have the perfect group of friends already? And I realize that's just a total fucking fallacy, especially if you have high standards for who you want to be friends with, especially if you're non typical with the sorts of relationships that you want to have with your friends or the way that you want to spend your time or the lifestyle that you aspire to have. Yes. And I think one criticism people will give is, oh, I don't want to. I'm not like an influencer.

George Mack
I don't want to meet influencers. And that's the natural way to shoot down that thing. The key thing with this is actually the fewer followers, often the better you want to just, I love people who are fined and they posted some incredible essay on the sovereign individual that has five likes. And I'll see the location, oh, he's in Amsterdam. I go, okay, I want to meet this guy.

I go, hey, man, love this. One of the best things I've seen on the Internet this week. And then we have a back and. Forth and I go, I'll catch you in Amsterdam. And I know with like 99.9% certainty we're probably going to get on most of the time.

There's obviously exceptions. You meet people who are very different to who they are online. But this idea that, oh, therefore you're having to go after people with followings or create content that reaches lots of people, it's really not the case. And you can narrow things down so much more specifically, and you just so obviously are right, but there's just this ickiness that exists and it's just this constant thing that exists in humankind where new technology comes along and we have this ickiness to people that use it. Naturalistic fallacy thing.

The same people that mocked it are the same people that are then using it in ten years later, or their kids are using it and they have no memory of mocking it in the first place. It cycles all the way down from the start of electricity to the wheel. Probably the first guy that created fire. There were other human beings going, why do you need fire, mate? It's all the way down.

So just don't take the opinion seriously. It's one of my least favorite things about people who are unduly critical of different strategies, new technologies, and ardent that this is something that's wrong, who in future end up using it and don't acknowledge it. You should be forced at fucking gunpoint to issue a retraction about that thing. And I keep bringing this up because it's always in the back of my mind. Do you remember that WhatsApp photo of the single squaddie walking down the streets of London?

Chris Williamson
That was forwarded a million times and it was like, martial law is going to be implemented in London during the middle of COVID You're going to be locked in your homes at gunpoint. And this is the way that it's going to work. I got this thing sent and it just got propagated around. I'm like, you can forward a message on WhatsApp. But then it went onto the real Internet, Facebook posts and Twitter threads and a breakdown of how it was all going to work.

There were these tanks rolling through Miami beach and people sharing it, like the World Health Organization are going to have health passports and there's going to be digital id, and it's going to be a surveillance state just like it is in China. All of those people that posted all of that stuff, what the fuck happened? What happened? Oh, well, because we pushed back so much. That's why they haven't been able to instantly, because Klaus Schwab, he really wants to do, but he hasn't yet.

And because of how, you know, the revolution, the resistance, we push back. It gets like, no, go fuck yourself. It didn't happen. You made an insane. You wasted my mind space because that's still stuck in my brain and I can't get rid of it.

Right? You owe me an apology. Yep. So it comes back to the forgetting paradox, right? We forget more than we forget, because by definition, we've forgotten it.

George Mack
Therefore, we never realize how much we actually forgot in the first place. Ironically, when you messaged me yesterday saying, what do you want to chat about? I go, let's chat about the forgetting paradox. And I searched it and we actually chatted about it on the last show. So it was the most ironic thing ever that I forgot that we spoke about the forgetting paradox.

So that constantly exists. And it's a meme online of, like, the new current thing. And there's constantly a new current thing in society's consciousness, and it rips so fast. It's come through and it's gone. It comes through and it's gone.

It's what everyone's willing to fight on the street or on the digital street, shall we say, on Twitter about. And then they'll forget their opinion or completely change their opinion. Remember Kony 2012? Yeah, good example. Good example.

People will completely forget. And it's like things that fade away. When things fade away, you don't notice they're fading away because by definition, they're fading away. And if you did, it wouldn't be fading away. So this is constantly happening throughout.

I mean, one idea you could potentially build is some kind of chrome extension which just keeps a track of people's opinions on the new current thing on chain. And then whenever they, so let's say. They go, digital ledger of all of your bad. My opinion on the war that's going on. It's like you click on it and you go, oh, okay, here's your opinion on the last five wars.

You really supported this Iraq war thing that's on chain. But without that, we never really reflect and we're constantly dealing with the new thing. So we never actually have any reflection mechanism to see what people's past predictions were because we've moved on so fast. There was this question around if the vaccine, if the vaccine came out when, let's say, Trump got elected and he beat the election versus Biden, and it was seen as the Trump vaccine, would we have had a flip where the people on the left would have been more vaccine hesitant and the people on the right would have been more pro vaccine? Who knows?

I think there was a Democrat who said that, I won't be taking the Trump vaccine. When Trump was doing the classic thing around, I'd create the vaccine before he got hosted out. So it's really interesting, these opinions that constantly change the new current thing. I did this, there's this image I found of the biggest talking trends of 2022. And it's all the usual political hotbeds.

Here today, gone tomorrow, here today, gone tomorrow. And of them, all of these most heated talking points for that year. The most consistent one that lasted throughout the year was wordle, a novelty game that ultimately disappeared. So you've got to be strategically, I think, a lot more strategically ignorant with what you want to consume. What do you mean when you talk about strategic ignorance?

Strategic ignorance is essentially this idea. So you have the terminology ignorance is bliss, which is such a weird, upside down nietzschean worldview that we calling something bliss as an insult. And you essentially realize that there's so much things you can pay attention to in the modern day. There's so many things constantly getting uploaded that you have to be ignorant. And there's this, oh, well, you're ignorant about this.

And it's like, well, what do you think about the situation in Djibouti? Or what do you think about the situation in Eswentini? Or what do you think about the situation in Jakistan? And you go, what? And what you'll realize is, quickly, you don't even realize these countries existed and they have no clue what's going on there.

And they didn't realize that Yakastan's a country that I invented. So you essentially realize everybody's ignorant, but some of us are looking at the stars. So essentially you have what I call low agency ignorance, which is kind of just top down, like you're just reacting to what's on the news feed constantly. And by definition, you're only ever going to consume 0.01% of the world's events because it's just the way of the world. And then you move on to the next current thing versus high agency ignorance is at least going, listen, I'm going to be ignorant, but I'm going to try and be intentional about what I'm ignorant to, who I'm going to consume, what I'm going to listen to.

So we're all ignorant, but some of us are looking at the stars. So something arises and you go, yep, that's another post about x thing that's going on. I know that other people think that this is important, but it just doesn't resonate with me. So I'm not going to invest a tiny amount of time or no time at all and give my opinion. I'm just going to let this one sort of slide by.

Yes. Yeah. Douglas Murray had this idea about normalized saying, I don't know. Yeah, I have no opinion on that. I don't really know about that thing.

Chris Williamson
What do you think? Tell me. And I think that the Internet has kind of demanded that we all have an opinion on whatever the topic of the day is, and we all get dragged into it, but ultimately, you know, probably nothing really that contributes to the situation. What do you really know about epidemiology? What do you really know about middle eastern politics?

Would you really know about border immigration? And you can, you know, if you're treating news stories like the Kardashians, where you just get to foam finger away for whoever your favorite team is, or you just want to talk about it because it's gossip, fine. But if you want to have a meaningful conversation and if you want to get emotionally charged on one side or the other about it, you need to be strategic in your investment of understanding about it, because otherwise you're just allowing yourself to get ragged around by whatever the news story of the day is. Like, there is a huge cohort of people for whom every big story is their big emotional investment over and over and over again. And it must be fucking exhausting.

Like, I got criticized for not commenting on Covid. I didn't have anything to say on Covid. Could it have been done better? In retrospect? Absolutely.

Could it have been done better at the time? Yes. Were there some things that were fucking ridiculous? Absolutely. All of the things all the way down.

I'm like, look, I'm not the guy for this, okay? I did a. We did one episode which was lockdown hacks, which is how to work from home with Johnny and Youssef. And I was like, you're the guy for I'm the guy. That's my area of expertise.

You want me to teach you how to be productive from a home office? Absolutely. I can teach you how to do that. But you quickly realize they're not when people go, what's your opinion on it? This is a serious topic.

George Mack
And then you ask them about another serious topic that's maybe ten times more serious than what they're not considering right now. They were ignorant all along, so you basically realize everybody's ignorant. Some of us are doing it strategically, and some of us are doing it unstrategically by just reacting to random events that are going on. Talk to me about why only the weird behavior survives. So I was at a funeral, and it's a northern funeral, so it's a mix of, like, everyone's emotional, but everyone's also laughing at the same time.

And I realized when people were telling stories at the funeral about the person is the only stories they would tell was about this person's irrational, weird, eccentric behavior that made them them. And I kind of realized that all the normal stuff, like the job, and. And they made their cup of tea and certain words that they would use, and obviously, by definition, nobody mentioned that at all. The only thing people would bring up was the crazy stories about that person, what separated them as individual. And I realized that all essentially normal behavior is forgotten.

So when you're trying to fit into the tribe, which so many of us try and do, and get rid of our individualism because we think it's weird or whatever, the irony is that come the only thing, come a funeral time or come once a few years later, when people think about you, the only thing they can really think about is the weird, idiosyncratic behaviors that you have. And this desire to fit in with the tribe means that we end up leaving the only thing that they ultimately remember. I've told you that story about Salvador Dali, right? Have I talked to you? Maybe.

Chris Williamson
This is fucking great, man. I researched Salvador Dali for that TEDx talk I did forever ago. And my thesis, basically, was that Salvador was an unbelievably unique human. His parents had a child nine months or ten months before he was born, called Salvador, who died during childbirth. And they were adamant that the actual Salvador was a reincarnation of his dead brother.

So that was how he came into the world. That was how he started life. By age ten, he'd found out that he was a masochist and used to throw himself down the stairs for fun. Just enjoyed pain. He once needed to be wrenched out of a deep sea diving suit mid presentation on stage because he was suffocating, because he just tried to do this thing.

He fell in love with this woman. He was married. So was she. They both left their partners to be together, and he literally considered her divine. He thought that she was his muse that had been sent down from the heavens to inspire him in his work.

So immediately, as soon as they got together, he bought her a castle that he wasn't allowed to go to. And he had to send formal letters of request, like you would to royalty in order to be able to visit her. Non fungible, non typical guy, right? Every different bit of Salvador Dali needed to be expressed in its fullest form in order for him to be able to be him. Because as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali and Leonardo da Vinci didn't do Dali, and van Gogh didn't do Dali.

In order for us to get everything that he had to offer the world and the universe, he had to embrace all of the things that were fully him. And had he have compromised on any one of the different bits of idiosyncrasies and weirdnesses that he had, the world would have been fundamentally less because we would have been depleted of what his offering was. And I think that when you see it is your duty to bring to the world that which only you can, I think that's a really beautiful reassurance. Only you can do this. You can't.

Look, Salvador, you can't be da Vinci. Much as you may try, much as you may have established patterns of success, societal norms, the way you've dealt with past trauma, your fears about shame and mockery, your guilt about not being as successful as you want, or your. Your concern for the future or your regret about the past. The only way that you can contribute to the world that which only you can, is by being the thing that only you can be. But the mistake I've made is when I, and I'm high on the weird scale is then when I feel that weird thing that I want to do or say come up, is, I'll go, oh, now I'll do the normal thing because I want the social benefits of that.

George Mack
But the realization I had at that moment of that, actually, that's not even true. All the social benefits in the short term, but ultimately, people completely forget about the behavior. Whereas when you do the weird thing or the idiosyncratic thing or the eccentric thing, in the short term, they might be, well, the immune system kind of goes, oh, Jesus Christ, what's that? But long term, that's the only thing that people ultimately remember you for anyway. So all the social benefits.

So the social, the only reason you was actually making the trade in the first place was because you were scared if you showed your weird side, you wouldn't get the social benefits. But come funerals come, like, long term history. The only thing people remember is the weird things. I remember one of my friends, Nike, had a birthday party on, and it was kind of 2021. It was very shallow relationships at that point.

I was trying to get the most amount of people to attend my birthday party. It was ridiculous, and loads of people didn't attend. But my friend Nike came all the way from London to York to be there. I was like, we've had so many other interactions about chatting about the weather or the football, but that's the irrational behavior. Remember, what are some other good examples of irrational behavior from your life or people around you that you think will survive?

For me, it comes down to, I have this terminology called non fungible humans. People now know the word nfts, so money is itself fungible. A little chimp on the blockchain that has a silly hat. Non fungible. So non fungible essentially means something that's completely unique, can't be traded out.

And you quickly realize that everybody in your life who are your favorite people are fundamentally non fungible. I had this realization with youssef. I go, why do I like youssef so much? I go, he's so non fungible. He's so uncommon amongst uncommon men.

And signs of non fungible people. And people listening to this will go check. I'll think about the person who's non fungible in your life. And they'll have this checklist. It will be, they have isms, so they have their own language.

So, for example, say what you want about these people. Youve got. Elon Musk has muskisms, Conor McGregor has macGregorisms. Charlie Munger has mungerism. Trump has their own language that they get words that they use or phrases that they use that makes them fundamentally different, that makes them non fungible.

You have stories about them. Theres so many stories that that person produces because by definition, theyre living, whether you like it or not, some kind of authentic existence. But in this definition, to be fungible, we ultimately completely delete the whole memory stack about us, which is quite ironic, because the only reason we were doing it in the first place was to make people like us, and they don't even remember it. My favorite irrational behavior of Youssef was that he was practicing no weight, no bar, Olympic lifting, in a airport departure lounge in front of a packed group of people, because he just wanted to move. So he was there standing up with a pretend barbell above his head.

The better one is, what's the one with his bed? Oh, God. I mean, this is on the Internet. This is, I think, the most played video. I slept on the floor for six months to see if it would fix my back.

Chris Williamson
And he'd only just got into a relationship with Amy as misses maybe three months or not a long time before, nowhere near a long enough time to be like. In fact, I think he was doing it when they met. I don't think that she'd ever stayed over at his house. And he perilously close, like nicked the bottom of. I'm not going to, like, I'm not going to get into a relationship with you or stay in this relationship that I've been in for two months.

If you make me come around to sleep on the floor, I'm not sleeping on the fucking floor. Youssef and he was just, well, okay, well, we can stay at your house and I'll come home and I'll sleep on the bed. Because he wasn't prepared to break this experiment. And so just outstanding. But I mean, you know, this is just personal experimentation, I think.

And it kind of comes back to that positive reinforcement thing we were talking about with your group of friends, that if you want to be around people that give you great stories, that have different interesting things that are going on, that show you a different perspective in the world, the behavior that you want to encourage needs to be encouraged. And if someone does something new or strange, I mean, you can laugh about it, doesn't mean that you need to be even pro it, but you need to be able to accept, like, dude, I can't believe that you nearly made your brand new girlfriend sleep on the floor at your house. Like you were in this brand new relationship. Like, I wouldn't have done that. That would have been crazy.

That would have, you know, you can give the criticisms you want, but be accepting of the fact that they've done it. And he's like, okay, that's reinforcing that person to go and be themselves. And that enriches the color and the dahlias ness of their existence, enriches yours. It adds flavor and it adds excitement and stuff like that. Three or four big ideas from the last few months.

Subprime audience. What's that? So people know in 2008, you had the great financial crash that happened. And a lot of it was these subprime mortgages that were getting sold on, which were basically just junk mortgages, people that couldnt afford to ever pay off those mortgages. It was trash mortgages that were then getting sold on en masse, and as a result, people were buying them.

George Mack
The whole credit system was propped up and the whole thing came crashing down. And I think theres a similarish thing going on right now with creators and influencers where a lot of them have subprime audiences, where it's just they've created content that they themselves don't like to attract an audience they don't like. And now the audience is beginning to no longer like them as well.

I think it comes back to the hidden visible metrics idea that when you're optimizing for likes, views, clear width metrics, and forgetting about the depth metrics. So there's a big difference between this video got played 10 million times and this video got played a thousand times by 100 people. It's so significantly different. I think one of the ideas I have for Twitter so I would like to see percolate or happen is right now with Twitter or even Instagram, a lot of these platforms, you have a like as the currency in a comment, I guess. But let's.

If you look at the like, the problem with the like is it's completely, like, infinitely fungible. Like, I can like as many pieces of content. And the problem that then means is I could release two pieces of content. One piece that gets a million likes. One piece that gets a thousand likes.

And the million likes was just this cool thing that was here today, gone tomorrow. But the thousand likes, one, there's. There's 200 people in there that have read that thing ten times and have glued it to their wall and get emotional when they speak to you because it was so impactful to them. But when I look at the screen, I go, well, I need to do more of this one, because look at all the likes it's getting. And I had this idea of probably stealing from dating apps, which is the concept of a super like these social networks should have, where you get one super like per week, and it means that there's more value in a specific thing, because then you could actually gauge the success based off that.

Chris Williamson
The best thing that someone saw this week. Yes. And then forget about everything else and just go up purely off that. You can kind of see it with Twitter now with bookmarks versus likes is kind of a better indicator. And you can imagine a phase where you could then customize the algorithm more that you're getting more golden likes.

George Mack
I would way rather have my algorithm optimized for golden likes. So even now, you could have it optimized for bookmarks. Yes. Right. I mean, this is Sahil in the ISIS group that we're in, Iron sharpens, Iron Squad.

Chris Williamson
He mentioned, I think he posted some tweet before that had done relatively okay in terms of numbers, but just had this absurd number of bookmarks on it. And you go, that's good. And it's kind of similar to your idea of after a while, it doesn't matter how many retweets it gets, it matters who retweets it. You're just optimizing for depth rather than width. I just love the idea.

The subprime audience idea, I think is so phenomenal, because from the outside, it looks like it's full of as and double as. But when you get in there, it's cs and double cs. And a good indicator of a subprime audience. Well, the good indicator of a subprime mortgage is the person selling it wouldn't have bought it, they wouldn't have done, because they know it's junk. And a good indicator of a subprime audience, it's not always the case, but a good indicator is the person creating the content wouldn't consume it.

That's max content, right? Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post it. And I think a lot of creators or people that certain people may have issues where it comes down to that fundamental problem. Well, the problem is that you can gain popularity and win on the objective metrics thing by creating content that you don't care about, and you can lose on the objective metrics thing by creating content that you do care about.

But what are you optimizing for? And again, it just, everything's fucking hidden in observable metrics all over again. But yeah, one of the things that I was really not pleasantly surprised by, because you can tell in the comments section a lot of the time, but the comment section also selects for a very particular type of people. And blah, blah, blah, the live shows that I did last year, and we're looking at the ones for winter this year as well. Every single person.

Caveat that almost every single person that came to those live shows I would have happily gone for a coffee with. I bet they're interesting people. They're into cool stuff. They've got like a cool story. They're working on things that to me was the biggest reassurance that the direction of the content that I'm making, which I'm interested in and I get captured by this is a topic that we should talk about because it's in the news.

Maybe I should do a bit on Diddy. Diddy videos are getting 2 million plays. Maybe I should talk about Diddy. Well, all right, but really, does it matter? Am I going to care?

Do I want an audience of people that's here for Diddy gossip? Maybe. But do you want an audience of people who are here for Diddy Gossip, then Paris Hilton gossip, then Kim Kardashian gossip, then blah blah blah? Because after a while, if you keep on spinning that up, you end up surrounded by people that aren't like you and that consume content that you're not interested in because you've prosthihitis is basically the subprime audience, is the exit liquidity of audience capture. That's ultimately what you end up with.

If you keep on winning the game of audience capture, you end up with a very successful audience of people who aren't like you and don't like the things that you actually like, because all that you've been doing is feeding them red meat. And the worst thing with subprime audiences is the hidden metric. Sorry, the visible metric are the people who've had a successful strategy with it, which are the ones that have huge content creators that wouldn't consume their own content. But the irony is there's a load of hidden ones that are also pursuing the same strategy. And because it's so shy and never actually getting any form of takeoff versus going back to my content razor of would you consume your own thing?

George Mack
If you do that, you are guaranteed you have at least product market fit with yourself. And then you can kind of bet there's at least some of the weirdos of maybe 100, a 1000, 10,000, whatever, that are going to also fit just due to the law of large numbers. But when you have the opposite, when you're posting things that you wouldn't yourself consume, it might be the case that the total addressable market is zero. It's like creating a product idea where you don't want the product and ultimately nobody wants the product. Did I think I taught you about, I asked people on the Internet who use the word grifter for the people who use it, what does this mean to you?

Chris Williamson
What is the word grifter? Because there's lots of. That word gets thrown around an awful lot. It's kind of like anybody who monetizes anything, kind of. But then there's some people that monetize and don't get called a grifter.

So I was like, okay, well, it's not a word that I particularly use, typically on the receiving end rather than on the saying end. And I asked, and the best definition that someone gave was if the person selling the product wouldn't use it or buy it themselves, that's a grift. Would you use or buy this thing yourself if you weren't being paid for it or you wouldn't own it? And you know, for all of the criticism, there's a lot of skepticism, I think, around podcasts, advertising, influencer advertising in general at the moment, that's the best heuristic. If you want to be immune to criticism about the partners that you work with, about the views that you hold about anything that you do, just partner with people that you use their products.

Like I wear gymshark. I can't get a sponsorship from crocs yet, but, whoops. All of the things I talk about, I use. So even if people have a big problem with it, you're at least in some part insulated from it. So you go, well, fucking hell, I like it.

I like innate sleep. I use momentous protein. Fucking shoot me. I'm not complaining about you and what bedding you go to bed in. The only difference is that you're not talking about it.

So. Yeah, I think that's. And it's similar to your. The subprime audience thing is similar to the golden rule of the Internet thing that you've got. Yeah, the golden rule of the Internet is if you run enough a b tests, you'll eventually end up with a porn site.

George Mack
All roads will lead there if you keep going, okay, we'll start with this thumbnail, or we'll start with this intellectual topic and we'll a b test it. If you don't have a point of guidelines that things that are line in the sand, all roads will ultimately lead to a porn site. One thing that you said to me ages ago that I liked was you have almost brand guidelines that act as this room border, and then you're willing to a b test within that, but it never goes outside of that. Correct. But I think a mistake that can happen is you never put those in place and just let the a b test decide everything.

And then you just kind of drift. Over, continue to skew. So you need to balance the. The art with the science. Because if you go pure, pure science, you will ultimately end up with a porn site.

Chris Williamson
And if you go pure art, then you end up with something that's probably too ineffective. Yes. You need to play within the rules. I mean, yeah, you know, we have the method that we use for split testing thumbnails on back catalog videos that are over three months old. Those get QCD.

So the copywriter who already understands the brand guidelines that we have, gets another person to come in and okay it to ensure that it really, really is just a second set of eyes. Do you know what it's like? You write a marketing headline one day and you go, that's pretty great, that. And then someone you work with goes swinging a miss there. I don't think that that's quite, quite right.

You need a second set of eyes on top of, I think, all marketing copy. I think it's pretty much impossible to get marketing copyright with just one person. Like, you always need a second. You woke up that day, you were underslept or overslept. You had a really great gym session.

You're caffeinated and everything's amazing. The Uber driver's your best friend now. And you get in you go, yeah, this headline's fantastic. You go, no. Even you would look at it in seven days and go, what was I thinking about that ash negative.

What's that? It's a concept I got from, I think, Eric Weinstein originally, which was. There's the Ash and Milgram conformity experiments. So the ash conformity experiment was a famous experiment. There's questions around the validity of it, but the idea itself is quite fascinating, which is you would have multiple lines, a, b, c, white lines.

George Mack
And imagine a would be 4 cm long, b would be 6 cm long, and c would be 3 cm long. And you'd put people in a room and you'd say, what's the biggest line? And let's say nine out of ten are actors, and they go first, and then the final one is the participant. And what would often be found if the nine would vote for c or a, even though the biggest line, b, that person would often vote in line with everybody else. And ash negative or ash positive, is whether somebody in that scenario would go against the consensus of the room.

So it's quite a useful bit. Sorry, is ash negative? Ash negative would be somebody who fails the test, therefore called truth. So ash negative would be. Well, I think b's.

You guys all said a or c or a. I think it's b. And therefore, that person would be ash negative. But ash positive would be essentially the person who kind of looks at it. And I think it might be b, but then goes, it's a, or it's c.

Or they're so ash positive that the crowd distorts their own perception to even. They don't even see b. They don't even realize it. So it's like uber ash positive. Right, right.

And it's a useful naming convention of being able to split certain people that you know, and you go, oh, that person's pretty ash negative. And it's quite useful because, you know, if I'm asking feedback from somebody, will they give me honest feedback? Or if they're in a certain situation, that the crowd goes one way, which way will they go? And I've thought about that. Like, how do you actually create more and more ash negative people?

It's quite a. It's an interesting. Probably should be taught at schools. It's an interesting idea. Yeah, well, outsourcing your thinking to the crowd is always going to be a quicker route.

Chris Williamson
Like, you know, that's why we read books. Someone lives an entire life, they condense that down into 80,000 words. You read it, you take away five things that you care about the most, you've outsourced your thinking to them. But if you are totally at the mercy of other people's opinions, then you end up in this sort of ash positive, like uber ash positive scenario. I had this idea from a text message thread that I was in about a month ago and I was talking to a guy over text and we were debating about somebody else and he had a very negative opinion of this particular person.

And I remember thinking like, I don't have the same negative opinion, but there's a part of me that's scared to say that I don't have this negative opinion because if I do, I'm going, maybe going to deplete in the eyes of this person that I want to like me. And then it made me realize people don't want to hear what they want to hear. People want to hear what you actually think. And I stuck to my guns and, you know, skirted around my people pleasing nature said, actually, do you know what it is? Hasn't exactly showered himself in glory recently.

I really love his takes on X, Y and z. And the response was like, well, I think he's a dick. I was like, right, okay, that's fine. And then I reflected and thought, unless it's something that people really care about me saying, like, you know, Saddam Hussein actually an alright guy, like, unless it's. A really outlier cash flow conversion, unless.

It'S a real outlier opinion or something that they're very, very precious about almost saying something perfect. Another perfect example of this hormozi. Would Alex's wife prefer it if he got dressed up to go to dinner in a nice suit and a shirt and all of the rest of it?

On the short term, yes, kind of. Because it's probably nice to not go to dinner with someone who's always in a beater in shorts, but in the long term she is more attracted to a person who wants to wear what he wants to wear, that wants to wear what she wants him to wear. And that's the same. People don't want to hear what they want to hear. They want to hear the truth from you.

They want to hear what you really think. And that it takes a lot of confidence and sort of self belief to be able to say, I have faith that my opinion is sufficiently right that I can stand on my own 2ft about whatever this thing is that I think, and that this person is not going to reject me for just saying what I believe. And it kind of comes back to the sub prime audience thing, the observable and hidden metrics thing, the non fungible humans thing that would you rather get to the end of life being a popular and successful caricature surrounded by people who don't really know you or like, who you are deep down because you've never shown it? Or would you rather be a little bit less popular but actually maybe more popular by doing the thing that you do? Yeah, because you're never going to be connected to the things that you say or the opinions that you hold or whatever it might be.

I realize this with dating with girls and stuff, you know, like, let's say you're flirting back and forth with somebody and they ask, what are you up to today? Or what did you get up to last night? Or like, show me your outfit today or whatever, you know, just like normal flirty shit. And you go, well, I could send a photo from the archive of me looking all dressed up, or I could send a photo of me walking down the street in crocs or whatever it is that you're doing at the time. You go, well, if I send the photo of me that's me dressed up, I may get positive reinforcement because it's me looking cool or maybe I've done my makeup or I've done whatever it is.

But that compliment isn't actually going to land. Yes, it's going to get the outcome that I want, which is someone to think x, y or z of me, but I'm not connected to that. Like, they're going to give praise to a previous version of me, but I've lied. I've lied in order to try and get the outcome that I'm looking for. I'm not actually connected, and they don't see me.

And any praise that they give me doesn't land with me. So it's like two Google translate things not talking the same language to each other, but somehow, like saying, oh, and we understood each other at the end of the day. Again, that's an example of only the irrational behavior survives. Right? Yeah, the guy that refuses to not wear a beater and shorts to go to dinner.

What have you come to learn about incentives? Something that we've both been pretty obsessed by recently. I think incentives are the most under discussed topic when it comes to the news, when it comes to society, when it comes to at the individual level. So few people talk about the incentives, and once you understand the incentive, you begin to understand everything. A few aphorisms on this is never ask your barber if you need a haircut because guess what?

George Mack
He'll think you need a haircut as soon as you go, oh, what's the incentives of the system? And then begin to understand that a lot of frustrations that people have with individuals or society begins to make sense. So there's one famous example of, I think it was FedEx that Munger talks about where FedEx were having huge problems of getting deliveries done on time. Staff were working way over into the next day. Deliveries were late.

And somebody had the genius idea to stop paying them per hour and start paying them by the shift or when the work was done and all of a sudden it was no longer a problem. And there was another example in Greece where apparently they had it where to deal with congestion. And they created a system where people with their license plate ended in an odd number. They could drive this day and then the next day even numbers. And all that happened was people would then game the system.

So rich people would just buy two cars and you ended up with more congestion on the fucking road. So whenever you see the incentives, you'll often have a insight in what the outcome is going to be. What was that british criminals dying thing? Oh yeah, this was. I think it goes back to understanding history of this when you.

The fascinating thing of Australia was essentially where we just sent our criminals. Penal colony is wild. One of the reasons why I love understanding history because you begin to realize how absurd reality is that the current day is. And so there's a story from when the Brits were moving prisoners, I believe, over to Australia and they were originally paid per person getting on the boat. And back then there wasn't great HR policies.

They didn't treat people particularly well. And it was something like 33% would die on the voyage from Britain to Australia, but the people already paid. They don't give a fuck. Then when they changed the system that they would get paid for, when the people arrived in Australia, the survival rate went from 66% to 99%. So again, all you've done there is changed the incentive system, looping back to the beginning of the conversation.

Things that are sometimes more important than hard work, things that are more important than being busy, is actually understanding the incentives of the systems that you're operating in. And one tweak in somebody's incentives that's working for you or is in your life. The compounding impact that can have is absolutely absurd. Never attribute to conspiracy what is more easily explained by incentives and incompetence. From naval that explains so much of modern politics, that explains so much of people making horrific or inhumane business decisions.

Wherever there's incentives, I always have this idea, which is one good razor that I try and implement is whenever somebody tells me something that goes in line with their incentives, kind of massively downplay the idea. And don't just download it, because in the past I've done that. Somebody will go, somebody who lives in this city will tell me why this city is great. And I go, oh, I'll download that piece of information. And then three years later, they leave the fucking city.

And I go, hold on. You told me this was amazing and you're no longer here? Versus when they tell me the opposite. So when they tell me why they hate their city, or let's say they're talking about their partner or their job, if they're going against their incentives and identity, the level of truth that's probably in that is so much greater than when people are going in line with their incentives, is that classic phrase of never. I think I wrote.

Actually, it was. There's two things you should never try and do. Try and defy the laws of physics and get somebody to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding or what they're paid for. People will not swim against their incentives on average. Sausage fests.

Chris Williamson
Talk to me about sausage fests. Sausage fests. Okay, fuck it. I don't know what to say on sausage fests. Next.

George Mack
God, next one. Well, I think that, you know, this came out of our Miami trip, which was a 20 person. How many people came? It was. No, it was like 1414 of us.

Chris Williamson
But it's in Miami. Yeah. And at least half of them are from the UK. Yes. So we realized that sausage fests are underpriced, under priced assets.

George Mack
Yeah. Well, basically, I think the realization is sausage fest is obviously a crude terminology for it, but essentially the idea is, I think it's both a male thing, a female thing, a individual personality thing. But when you're. I think as you get older, what tends to happen is people, particularly men, I think it's particularly a male problem. They stop hanging around their friends because they've got their relationship, they've got their kids, and guys are just busy, and we're not really emotional.

We don't care for one another. And guys get lonelier and lonelier and lonelier. And I'm convinced it's because they stop hanging around. Like, one of the reasons the suicide rate is so high is because they stop hanging around their friends. And I also think it often benefits their partner as well.

I had this realization once when I was with my friend Alex at a bar in Manchester and were chatting away and I could see these girls looking over like, oh, maybe these guys will talk to us. And I just start burst out laughing because im in the process of breaking down Jim sharks negative cash flow conversion cycle. And I go, if only they could hear what we were talking about. Theyd immediately find us so unattractive. But I think guys and girls sometimes need, depending on their personality type, obviously, some people get it from different means, need that synchronicity where they can get the thing that their partner would find so unattractive out of them in that nerdy environment.

And by the way, this is so true, I think with the reverse as well. I imagine if the girls are doing a girls night and one of the girls is like, oh, can Danny come? And he's like, just completely ruins the vibe and the girls can't fully let their hair down. I think that that ability to let out your inner nerd is, have you. Seen Ryan Long did a sketch which was the guy that brings his girlfriend everywhere.

Chris Williamson
And it's so fucking clever, man. I love that world of sketches. Shane Gillis is doing it really well, but Ryan, I think, is sort of gold standard for it at the moment. Everyone knows the person, the dude whose girlfriend either doesn't like him to go out on his own or the couple that kind of just always seems cemented together. They're just never, never really apart, even if it's supposed to be a boy's night or whatever.

And it's the guy who brings his girlfriend everywhere. But this guy is part of a criminal trio that's about to try and rob a bank. So he turns up and the girlfriend's with him and the other two dudes are like, why did you bring Stephanie? He goes, no, she's fine, man. You know, like, she's fun.

And then she starts complaining about the fact that she needs to wear all black. And she's like, why do we always have to wear all black? Like, you know, can we not add a little bit of color in? And they say, right, we've got to put the tights over our heads so that they can't detect. She said, I've just done my hair, I'm not wearing that tight.

And it's just a fucking phenomenal idea. And it's true, it's true. Sausage fests are underpriced. What's the equivalent? What's the female equivalent?

You can't really say this without coming up with something that will get you fucking cancelled. There's no equivalent. I'm sure that there'll be some words. I think it's definitely a male thing, where when you're young, you want to hang out with a few similar like minded men, and then obviously as you hit puberty, you want to be around dating, and then as you get older. Actually, the reason why I think a lot of men are depressed is because they stop hanging around.

There's some really good evidence to suggest that one of the reasons that men suffer more men are hit harder by divorce, not just financially, but socially. I think the biggest predictor before suicide for men over the age of 40 is divorce. The deaths of divorce and deaths of despair. One of the main reasons being that men often subjugate their social networks, because women are better at keeping in contact with close friends. And then the wife's friend group becomes the husband's friend group.

And then when the divorce happens, not only does the husband lose a wife, he also loses his entire social circle because their original loyalty lies with her. And he's now in this sort of weird scenario where he's been marooned from the most important relationship he had and all of the other ancillary relationships that would have helped him to weather those storms. Robin Dunbar talks about the fact that he's got this Dunbar's number, but it's really interesting when you break it down properly. He's been on the show twice, and he talks about these sort of concentric circles going up. And I think it's like maybe a thousand or even 5000 people that you can have that are kind of, you know, their name or you're aware of who they are or whatever it might be.

He's got this 150 number, but the real important one is the most, the tightest circle in the middle, which is five, says that you can have around about five close friends, really close friends. And in order to sustain a relationship with one of your close friends, you need to spend, I think it's 2 hours a week, in contact with them, ideally in person. But a relationship, a committed relationship, takes up two spots. So you go from having five friends to actually only having three friends, plus your partner. That's how much attention needs to be paid on that.

And this is on average, there's people that can have ten close friends, I'm sure, or one, or whatever, none. But yeah, when you realize, okay, how am I subjugating my friend circle for the relationship? And I mean, it's, the meme is as old as time, that your boy spends all of his time with you when he's single, gets into a relationship, disappears off the end of the earth and then six months later breaks up and he's like, boys, I'm back. Yes, but the reason why I think it's an underpriced sausage fest or underpriced assets, which I never thought I'd say out loud, is that they're seen as so lame. Even the terminology is quite lame, but it ultimately makes that individual happier because they can get their nerdy, weird self out, that their partner finds them maybe a little bit icky when they talk about Jim sharks negative cash flow conversion cycle.

George Mack
So they get that out. They have the insurance policy if anything ever happens to their relationship, that they still maintain these incredible friendships that they have and ultimately the relationships then healthier because they've got a bit of alone time and attraction comes back. It's crazy how, how often that's sacrificed. And when you see the suicide numbers it sounds ridiculous. Then link everything back to that.

But I wouldn't be surprised if that plays a small factor, to say the least. I tell you why sausage fests are underpriced is a valid. Like we had skin in the game in Miami. So it was George's 30th month ago, month and a half ago or something in Miami and 14 guys come over and we have this big villa and everyone's staying there and we have the most non typical Miami 30th which included group breath work e foiling at eight in the morning pickleball and it was a Saturday afternoon and wed done the breath work thing. Wed got up and maybe gone go karting or something like that earlier on.

Chris Williamson
So hed had the typical sort of morning and then its 01:30 p.m. beautiful Miami weather in the middle of April and you think, right, okay, 14 lads who are all aged between 25 and 30, probably eight or something, and you go, right, they're going to go send it. They're going to go to Soho Beach House, they're going to go to downtown and I've got the contacts, Justin's there. He's like, I can sort you out at one Miami tonight. You're like, where do you want to go?

What you really want to do? You want to do an early dinner here and then you want to because the clubs start picking up around about eleven, all the rest of it. And we've got this huge plan of different things that we could do and we piece it together and all the rest of it, I can't remember who it was. I don't think it was me, but someone and we've been talking about this for an hour, all of the different things and all the guest lists being sorted and all the rest of it, and someone just went, boys, do you, uh. Do you feel like just staying in the villa and chatting shit.

And that was it for the rest of the night. We took a little trip to little Havana, came back, maybe went. We did go for dinner. We went for dinner on the night time. And then that was the day that we bailed out of everything else.

So, yeah, we put skin in the game for the sausage fest. Like camp foreskin in the game. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of this stuff that you're doing. Yeah, if they want to keep up to date with everything I'm doing.

George Mack
Twitter's always a good spot. George Mac. Someone's got George Mac. The bastards. And then by the time this is out, my website should be live.

So that's just George Dash Mac.com. and that'll have all my best ever essays and a few little nuggets on there. And where's the mailing list? George Dash Mac.com. you'll find the newsletter list on there as well.

Chris Williamson
Hell, yeah. Appreciate you, man. Boom. Thank you so much for having me.

George Mack
Thank you so much for having me.

#801 - George Mack - 13 Life-Changing Ideas You've Never Heard Of

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1: Introduction to George Mack

2: The Busy Trap

3: Differences Between US and UK

4: Questioning Educational Norms

5: Philosophical Insights

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