Modern Wisdom - #095 - George MacGill - Mental Models 102 - The Decision Strikes Back

Episode Date: August 19, 2019

I'm joined by long time friend of the show and all round great human George MacGill to re enter the world of Mental Models. Mental Models are tools you can use to improve your ability to effectively make decisions. Today we are upgrading our minds by thinking about thinking, as we delve into some of mine & George's favourite mental models from Jocko Willink, Paul Graham, Ben Bergeron, Navil Ravikant, Nassim Taleb, David Wong, Rick & Morty and many more. Extra Stuff: Follow George on Twitter - https://twitter.com/george__mack Rick & Morty & Roy - https://youtu.be/szzVlQ653as David Wong's Article - https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom and today we have an absolute treat. It is Mental Models 102 with George McGill. Now Mental Models 101 is the highest performing audio podcast that we have ever done. We've had some that have banged and hit 100k plus on YouTube but in terms of pure audio plays, not about virality, simply about how successful that podcast has been and the value it's added, nothing's beating it. So hopefully today's going to live up to it. Me and George caught up a couple of weeks ago,

I got him up to Newcastle, dragged him out of his hole in London, he's doing like 200 hour work weeks in the space of one week, got a lot on his plate. So I was really glad to see him, great to catch up. Some amazing mental models, some stuff from Jocco, Willink, Paul, Graham, Naval, Ravacant, Rick and Morty, all sorts today. I really hope that this benefits your life. If you are new here or if you are a regular listener, please go and give us

five stars wherever you are listening. It'll only take a couple of seconds of a day, but it is a massive, massive help to me and it'll make me very happy. But without further ado, get ready, moisten your mental models. It's George McGill back on modern wisdom. It's been a long time man, thank you so much for coming back. It's good to be back and brought back. Okay, that's good. I have indeed. A lot has changed since we were last here. Yeah, a lot has changed. we were last year. Yeah a lot has changed for both parties I imagine.

You're down in London now, you're a Manchester last time. Yeah, down in London, but more expensive, but you get what you pay for. Yeah you do, a lot of opportunities. Yeah it's certainly very very different. There's a really good Programme I say Called cities and ambition. Yeah, they're not one of my favorite ones of his. I wonder is why moved and he says that every city sort of whispers something to you Whether it's this sort of conversations that you over here or

The people that you're around or the cars that drive past or the buildings that you see, you're constantly getting whispered to and you don't consciously notice it but you pick up on it. Because I found that, Paul Graham says that in New York, the constant whispering is make more money. I mean, every conversation we were hearing is like, how much money are you making? I made this this month. Whereas in LA it's Be More Famous, it's what it's constantly whispering to you. What's London? Well he says San Francisco is Be More powerful in terms of they don't give a shit if you make like a billion dollars out. But if you've inherited a billion dollars it's more about what you've done. Which London, well, the thing about London is there's almost the little cities with little cities,

but the minute we've been primarily based in Mayfa, you've been to Mayfa before. Yeah. It's like the, it's like the wealthiest part of like right, it's the Buckingham pilots, like Maserati, Maserati, the Lamborghini, the horse. So the worst part to me is I need to work for a Buckingham box, of course. That's the most, that's the big, I get the most guy for me to get in your car. Keeping in that guy, I need to get in your car. I've been driving that box box of course. That is the most, that is the big, I get the most guy probably need to get in your car. Keeping in that guy need to get in your car, I've been driving that box of course.

It's the best thing to drive that much. I don't drive that much, but no, I'm too, I'm too close. Just rent a big dick one. Rent a fucking Maserati when you need it. Yeah. I've got some. It's to be an Instagram boiler, so it's a go.

So the internet is ready and waiting moist for some more metal models. Metal models one models 101 is the highest performing episode ever on Modern Wisdom. Massive shout out to podcast notes for supporting that episode. I mean, who's spoke about James Clea replied to some of our tweets to do with it, and the Val Ravakant got tagged in a load. So we got a little bit of pressure to make this one not shit, but we're gonna be fine.

I've got an absolute belt to start you off with. This is from Gabriel Weinberg's big book of mental models. Gabriel, if you're listening, I know that you're busy man, but I'm ready and waiting whenever you are. And this is a mental model from tennis. Are you okay?

The unforesterro. Oh, okay. So the concept is that you need to focus on being less wrong, not because of an external situation, but because of your own poor judgment or execution. So you got to think about how making a bad first impression. That's your fault. Like if you didn't get ready insufficient preparation, it's an unforeste error. Touches a little bit on some of the asymmetries we were talking about before. You're in a car crash because you were texting unforeste error.

Like you've caused that situation. It wasn't some tornado that came out of somewhere and picked your car up and threw it to one side. This was an error that you caused. So you were talking previously about not aiming to be right all the time, just simply avoiding being wrong. And an unforestedt error is the most basic way that you can be wrong. Independent of all of the circumstances, you don't fucked up. And isn't the argument that I forgot, I've done the complete tennis metaphor, but the

amateurs make way more enforced errors than professionals or it's smut along those lines. Yeah. It's an interesting one that kind of ties into probably the hardest concepts to wrap your head around. You've heard about Jocco, a woman, say extreme ownership, where you just take ownership of every single thing that goes on in your life. And it's always, you know, the famous Good Rant worries. He's one of those, one of the best videos on YouTube. If you haven't had a shit day, I recommend it because it's just

this the hardest Navy Sea. He's like the hard Navy Sea or the Monk's hard Navy Sea. So you don't know where he's made to go fucking out. He's intense. So he's that guy, the, what's the Bradley Cooper film, the American sniper? So Jocco, I think was that guy is like, Commander essentially, the boss. And he's talking about when he was in Iraq and people would come over to him and say, hey boss, we've not got enough machinery

or we've not got X-Fi Z or things gone wrong and he would just always reply with good, no matter what, he goes opportunity to work on this, so opportunities to do that and it's always something that he can control and he's obsessed with this concept of extreme ownership and he tells, I think it's in his TED talk and in his book where he talks about, because it's very, it's very well to like chat in like a nice little podcast about, oh I've been doing XYZ on my gym routine, on my meditation, but when you're at war, I have so much more respect for somebody when they, if they're chatting about interesting concepts and they go, oh I applied this at war, I got, okay I might listen now, because I go, okay, I might listen now. Because I go to my first terrain. Yeah, and that's literally the fucking terrain, right?

It is. Literally. Well, Jockel's knee deep in terrain, face down in terrain. Yeah, so he's up to his knees in terrain, yeah. So he talks about how in a rack where he says that he had some friendly fire go wrong and it was his in his troops that happened and I think it was an Iraqi soldier lost their life

because it was the his sort of friendly Iraqi troops firing back at his own American troops and somebody died and as a high up Navy seal that's one of the worst mistakes you can ever make and the reason he ended up keeping his job is because he took 100% blame over everything and he was so impressive how he managed to just take extreme ownership over it, and it wasn't even, you can't even, it wasn't even his fault, he wasn't directly there, but he said, I get the certain things we could have done, the certain things I could have prepared for, and you think about how much I do all do at the time, like little stuff where I'll be running late and I'll blame it on someone. You know, you know, you need to blame it on something else. And

you go at the concept of extreme ownership of everything that can go wrong is ultimately my fault. And even when it's not, it sometimes still helps to think that, do you get what I mean? There's so many stuff like where if you, at lesser, you have two, I always go back to the thought experiment with two identical versions of yourselves. The one that takes extreme ownership over everything would just always outperform the one who didn't, right?

But what's John Peterson's main stick bean for the last couple of years, writes versus responsibilities? And he says, you have two choices, either nothing matters or everything matters. And if you choose to say that everything matters, then you don't get to use the excuse that it was someone else's fault. It is always something that is within your control. And this touches on another point, Jocka Willink, mental model of what you haven't done yet, anti-fragile.

Yeah, that comes from a NASA, NASA, NASA in Taleb, who wrote the Black Swan full by random, and a few other interesting concepts. And the idea of anti-fragility is, let's say for example, you have quite a, let's say you looked at this glass here. This is by Varynich, as we just found out in the kitchen earlier, we used a smashed glass everywhere, I smucked my head on so it'd be the kitchen behind the scenes that we'll never get released.

If you drop this on a concrete floor or a kitchen floor as we saw then, it's fragile, but it's very nature in that when disorder happens, the whole thing basically disintegrates. So that's something that's fragile and disorder occurs, it breaks down. The contrast to that is what's one known as robust, which is when you drop it on the floor, like a plastic cup, it sort of stays the same, it doesn't get worse, it also doesn't get better. So what talibs sort of identified is there's nothing that's truly the opposite of fragility because robust isn't the opposite of fragility because it's insane. You say minus one to zero. Exactly.

Whereas the plus one would be something that's anti-fragile that it gets stronger from disorder. So the most obvious examples you immune system that you give it a little bit of tuberculosis and all of a sudden, oh, it gets used to dealing with that and now it's much better dealing with that. Whereas if you prevent a child from sort of playing around in the mud and damaging a little bit of its immune system each time, you never grow. If you never exercise and put your body under stress, you never grow. So your body's almost an anti-fragile machine in the more disorder you give it, the more it adapts. Of course, it has a breaking point where you can overstep the mark and you break your legs

or whatever you do. Yeah. But you catch tuberculosis. Yeah. So you catch tuberculosis. But the concept of anti-fragility is an interesting one because you see it all the time where you see two people go through very, very similar events and some people say that's the best thing that ever happened to them

And then compound as a result and they use that and then other people who did use that same thing It's the worst thing that ever happened to them and yeah, I think Becoming more anti-fragile is it's difficult, but it's Some I need to get better at something that's very very difficult today. I think I think so. So some of the ideas that comes to mind, I saw a tweet earlier on, hilarious tweet. Someone's five-year-old child had said to his mother, the reason he wasn't cleaning my room was because it was good for his immune response. I mean, like, you cut a little stage. Hey, you fucking cut a little faster who like Joshua why haven't you cleaned your room I was good for my immune immune system. Fuck you Joshua, you smart wolf, a little five-year-old bastard.

So one like really good practical example I heard came from Josh Wolff who he's the the founder of Lux Capital, very very very clever guy. He has quite a few mental models, which you can go on to, but he talked about when he was deciding to invest in a certain company, which was nuclear cleanup, so cleaning up nuclear waste essentially. And he realised that it was an anti-fragile decision in the sense that no matter what chaos occurred, it was upside for him, because let's say for example, the world carried on investing heavily in nuclear ways, well at one point there's going to be an accident, which means that there's going to be need for nuclear cleanup, or if the world decides you know what we need less nuclear

activity, therefore they need a nuclear clear-up company. However, and as a result, obviously Fukushima happened and he made a lot of money because he was the only company that could deal with that. Not only did he make a lot of money, but he saved so much damage. College as well. So that's a good example of where you apply it to business in particular as well. A couple of good examples here where Antifragile that he's been applied in an athletic sense, and you can take this and adopt it for yourself in a very personal sense. Catherine David's daughter, CrossFit athlete, one of the fitness women on the planet,

was the fitness woman on the planet a couple of times. I remember seeing an interview with her as a part of Ben Bergeron's Chasing Excellence fantastic book, highly recommended if you've not read it, very easy, very narrative-based, quick read. And she says sometimes when people haven't had enough sleep or they haven't prepped right for a day's training, they go into the gym and they've got to feed this mentality and they say, well, I'm not feeling very good, I'm tired, I'm this, I'm that and the other. Whereas she goes in and her mentality is, this is an opportunity for

me to train at sub-optimal preparation scenario. So this is the CrossFit Games last year. They didn't know, but they just got pulled out and put on the Wednesday. They didn't know there was going to be a Wednesday event out of nowhere. Then on the flight back, the plane was delayed. Everybody was like, everyone was going to get less sleep for the next day. And that was the one day that they were supposed to recover and blah, blah, blah. All of that, she is preparing herself for that. She leans into, she calls it leaning into discomfort as if you've invited it through the door. So she doesn't shy away from it. The same as if you put your hand on somebody's chest and you press against them, they press back, you press a bit harder and they press back a

little bit more. And that's the kind of mindset that she's cultivated. You might want to talk about the who was the guy from Josh Wateskin. Josh Wateskin and his reframfriend of his child's reign. Oh yeah, that's one of my favorite ones of, I always think about when I do have a kid to touch with someday. Not someday soon to touch with again. That'll bite me in the ass, that's not. The lessons you want to apply, and I think obviously everybody's almost playing this weird, quite meta-dial-winny in game, obviously they're literally passing on their parents

DNA, by the nature of it, and everybody's passing on their parents DNA, and then they're passing on their parents DNA, but you're also kind of passing on, okay, what was the stuff that my parents did write, what did I like about it? Obviously you need to do a little iOS update for the current generation, because obviously these things weren't around. But then so now you've got a think of smartphone policies, right? But you try and take what your parents did right,

and then what your parents could have or should have done as well. You have an idea. The idea is as well. And the better childhood you have, the more the less stuff that you have to change, you just, you just copy and paste over. And then you obviously look at ideas

that you hear from other parents, sort of a parenting stuff. And I've not really gone deep down the parenting realm yet again, hopefully for a while. But he talks about how when his son was very, very young, first few years of his life, the first thing that parents will do to change the lousts of control of a child, and it's not a conscious figure, it's very, very subconscious, and it's one of the most consistent conversations you ever hear.

Certainly, I don't know about other countries, but particularly in the UK, of the conversation about the weather, where it's, well, weather's nice, so those in there, it's great, and it's like this, which really happens over here, whether it's miserable to those, yeah, the weather's miserable, isn't it? And he noticed that parents would constantly have this conversation with their kids, whereas if the weather was bad outside, therefore,

oh, we should feel a bit rubbish, and we should just stay in and play board games. And he realized that that is one of the first moments that a kid gets conditioned to have this low, low cost of control and what he did instead was flip it on its head, which is whenever it's pissing it down outside, oh look at how beautiful it is and you can argue it is beautiful, right? There's rain coming down the storms and the thunder, so the perspective is definitely is beautiful. And let's go out and play in the rain. And then you So the perspective is it definitely is beautiful. And let's go out and play in the rain. And then you condition the mind that,

oh, whilst everybody else gets really upset about this moment, this is actually a moment to truly experience and appreciate. And I try and like now when it's raining, I catch my, that's one of the metaphors that's stuck in my head for the longest. Because even it's raining now, I fucks sake, get my clothes up.

I go, first off, it's not that bad. It's water. It's not that bad. And yeah, and if you just say good, and I know like a psychopath, because there's people in the rain, like some couple like that, and I'm fucking buzzing, smiling,

so I've got that metaphor in my head. Yeah, yeah. And it's just good to go to the jockeye willing good thing as well, when everything's going, so this is a weird one I've tried to practice a little bit of later, when everything's going so this is a weird one I've tried to practice a little bit of ladies. When everything's going bad I say good and when everything's going good. I say bad because I know that Cyclo, Cycologically, sometimes take my foot off the gas.

You've stood in the rain like the guy at the end of Shawshank Redemption crawling out of the pipe of shit looking off and being like, yeah, basically, I'm just trying to think about like bad news, like oh, you girlfriend is just broken up, you good. Opportunity to, she was a bitch. Yeah, spend more time with yourself, but then when something, oh, just made a hundred million pounds of bad, you might lose your ambition. You know what I mean, you've got a constantly have that to fact check your stuff. Yeah, it's some weird Zen paradox going on at the

concert you're playing. Another great example actually from a podcast earlier this year with Alex Hutchinson who wrote the book Injure. So this is the definition of antifragile as far as I'm concerned. He's got elite performing athletes varying degrees on the top end, sat on a bike doing a Vio2 max test, they got a face mask on which is controlling the air in and out of their lungs. And these guys are doing maths questions on an iPad while they're doing it. So they're a fairly high heart rate, they're completing these maths questions on the iPad on the bike. So they don't actually need to think much, it's not a cognitively demanding task to exercise legs are just turning, but it is a cognitively demanding task that they've got on the screen in front

of them. Then they start to push the heart rate a little bit higher, a little bit higher, and get them really quite far up into the high percentages of their max. Then they restrict the air through the mask so that it's like breathing through a straw or breathing at altitude. And the absolute best performers, obviously a lot of people, their cognition drops, they're distracted, they're feeling comfortable, the absolute best performers get better at their maths problems when they restrict the air through the mouth because that's when they start to lean in to that discomfort as if they've invited it through the door. And I just, I love, love that, that whole concept.

You told me that story the first time I'm sat on my, the hairs are standing up on my arms because I'm like, fuck, that's so cool. These guys are in there at the peak of discomfort. And then someone turns the discomfort up more and they go, good, that's why I'm here. That's what I'm here to do. And you just think that is the difference. Another perfect example we talked about passion in life. Steffi Graf, one of the great tennis players of all time, gets tested at 12 years old as part of I think she's German, part of the German youth tennis program. They test her and they're testing all of the athletes on two broad domains. First one is skill, mechanical skill, second one is passion and inspiration

to train, and she scores 10 out of 10 on both of them. So it's like, good fucking look, trying to beat her. Like, not only is she more talented than you, but she will outwork you and it won't even feel like work to her. Hmm. Well, she creates an individual like that. It's the perfect story. So many there, there's so many stuff in the algorithm. I definitely find the biggest influence in my output, general awareness and... I just say output and the way I think is whom around. And I know that sounds fucking cliché, so I don't even have some Tony Robbins seminar. You just have to get new friends, man. But when you, I just find, I always use this sport experiment

of pick the purse, imagine you again, identical, but we tweak two variables in these two parallel universes. One where you spend the most amount of time, or the person you spend the most amount of time with, is the person you know, whether you know them in your actual real life, or you follow them on Instagram, you see them on YouTube,

who is the most positive, or has the best output work ethic, the way they think that you truly admire. You're around that individual the most. That's the other guy, like David Goggins, and he's just constantly like going, making a jump in ice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just getting the fucking ice, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've got that guy versus the, everyone has one in their friendship circle, just a sloth. You know what I mean? He's constantly going, oh, he's not actually that good. He's only because he's this or, yeah, yeah, that rubbish. You know, that sort of individual who's cons, you, when you fix minds, when you leave your makes, you feel like you've got an illness and you've got fucking, I'm slower, I'm fatigued, I, I, life is worse as a result of that individual. And imagine you spend, again, the exact same in your DNA, your genetics, your, your situation, one where you spend it with the best person,

one where you spend it with the worst person, and after a year, those two people, as in your two posing cells in these two universes, suddenly some Rick and Morty shit happens and you fucking meet one another, those are two different people. Very much so. It's difficult man, like, you are so much less in control of the people that you're around than you are of yourself. And I think that... What's it mean? Well, I can't tell you, let's say that I spend every day with you for the next year,

I can't tell you how to be. I can choose who I choose to be with, but I have a limited number of people that I can choose to be with. I don't know everybody. I don't know who is necessarily good for me. It takes me time to work out who's toxic and who's not. I also think that it's hard making friends when you're older. That's true. That's true. No one ever talks about this

because it sounds like some sort of like weird autistic social leper bullshit. But it's true. It's really how it is. Like no one ever wants to say, I wish I had some new friends. I'm 25, 30, 35, 40 years old. Be really cool if I had some new friends or some different friends. And you think, well, hang on a second, people say all the time that they would love a partner, they can be single and love to have a partner that was like X and Y and Z.

But we just assume that the social circle that we're in will have people come and go like a fucking tide and we'll pick up some random ones. But what we're talking about in the last one, the most valuable asset of the 21st century as far as you were concerned, high agency. High agency people will seek out those friends. You know who I think's mega, mega high agency person, David Perrell. David Perrell told me on a podcast, he actively seeks out spending time with influencers off Instagram, spending time with comedians, spending time with intellectuals. He's always the dumbest person in the room in one of multiple domains and he keeps changing the domain.

Like can you imagine what David fucking perels phone books like Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like you know, you know, with the weirdest form that comes to the social stuff is that it happens really early on at these weird look at the dyes, like the classic example is in university or college when people you end up at a random uni, sometimes you even choose that one you stand up there, and then the people who happen to be placed near you in halls. And it's literally, it's literally Susan on a Excel spreadsheet who randomly decides it. It's matter think, the amount of Susan's or Derrick's that have designed people's best friends

forever, and they automatically assume that, oh, we should have been best friends, but I always use this example, so one of the call mental model to follow, because this then goes down a relationship tangent. But if you look at, and this comes from Josh Warth earlier with the anti-fragility stuff, is he has this great mental model of the directional arrows of progress, where if you look at the computer in the 1950s, it was the size of probably the house that we're in now in a university where there was maybe only a limited amount of them in the world and very, very few people could use them. And then as decades go on, you get to nearer the 70s, you have the home

computer and all of a sudden it's got smaller in size but it's cheaper and it's more powerful and then you get the laptop which we have here in the a few decades gone by then the next few decades you get the smartphone it's even more smaller it's even more compact and now it sits in your pocket and now you look at now you've got the air pods that now sit in your ears so So you see these directional arrows of progress. And I know the Toby look either Shopify CEO has a similar thing where he's trying to analyze future trends of following this direction arrow progress. So you can't predict the future, but you can assume computing as we know it,

or hardware as we know it, will continue to get smaller, more powerful, cheaper and nearer to our bodies and obviously everybody talks about the contact lens that's coming or whatever it's going to be. And I always apply this with relationships, isn't it? If you look to our maybe great great great great grandparents generation where you would you might marry, well if you let's say we go back to Hunts from Gava time, you might just marry whoever you got assigned to in the tribe or whoever you had to fight Dave and see what happened or fight Jets and see what happened. And then obviously you go to our grandparents time where

you would literally, if you wasn't married by 18 or 21 or whatever that little age window was, you was an outcast and you would meet someone from your school on your next donate, but that was it. You've had someone from your school on your next own, but that was it. You might be someone from your school or your next own neighbor, who's it going to be? So you had 15 people to choose from. And then obviously you have women coming into the workplace and you have the feminism movement and people would sort of delay marriage a little bit and you had a wider choice. You'd maybe meet people at work or you might meet them at a bar. And then you have okay cupid that comes along.

So now you can meet people online, but it tends to be a bit of an older demographic, then you have Tinder that comes along, and there's more and more choice, and you can, you can meet, I know people now, I know more and more couples, who are from different countries, and I go, how often would that have happened?

50 years ago, that is such a recent thing of the amount of kids that are gonna be born, who are gonna be dual nationality. So you're looking at the direction that are as a progress there of more choice, more people you're dating, you get to get more and more resources and there's a novel called After On, Great Podcast as well. Oh, well read. Yeah, have you listened to After On yet? The book. Oh, no, sorry, not the book, but the podcast.

Really good. Fantastic. So he has a scene, a bit he writes in that where the AI gets so good that it matches, it's like a imagined Tinder, but it's an AI that sorts it for you and picks a perfect person based off your interest, their personality, the way you like someone to look and the way that person likes someone to look, because you're going to realize there's probably a thousand people out there who would be the best relationship you could ever imagine. And you've got to think 99.99% of relationships. This sounds really an awful thing to say. But on probably the best relationship for that individual, if you look to it from maybe a completely objective so many simulations running at once we settle on the

Nearest best thing. Yeah, basically, but I mean it's getting better But you're looking at direction of it. It's not least it's not your school in your next one a but you know the meaning at least It's getting better, but you can imagine a scenario in the future where Everybody meets that truly Perfect individual or if that exists. That will be that will be interesting That's what Rob Reid's high-profises is anyway. I like it. Next one.

Availability bias. Oh yeah, this is one, there's a hilarious example I have about this one, which is I went back when I was at social chain. They have a Harry Potter fan page, it's like the biggest Harry Potter community in the world. I'm not a Harry Potter fan at all, but I was trying to do this morning meditation, and I went upstairs and one of the rooms was trying to meditate there. I remember what he used to do this. It wasn't the, it's just the bit about the drinks.

Yes! So there's a Harry Potter jigsaw in the middle of the room. And I've seen, I think I saw the first two Harry Potter's, and I dipped her. You know how for our generation, it was such a big thing, I couldn't give a shit about Harry Potter. I got a good friend Hannah who loves Harry Potter so she can help you for that. But couldn't give a shit about Harry Potter and I sat there meditating and I just observed my own thoughts. I just observed my own thoughts and I remember I just catch myself maybe five minutes and I go I wonder how Hermione and Ron felt about Harry being the face.

I go, I want to think about it. Come back to your breathing, come back to your breathing. And I go, I know it's the light being Daniel Radcliffe and that's famous. It must have been crazy being that famous. I go, come back to your breathing, come back to your breathing. I'm like, I wonder how JK Rowling managed to get that out. And I remember a close meditation session going, I thought more about Harry Potter in the last 20 minutes than I had in my entire life just because there's a fucking Harry Potter

day. So at the minute, I was chatting to one of the guys from work and there's some digestive biscuits in the kitchen. And none of us liked digestive biscuits. But reading digestive biscuits every single day because they just are there in the jar biscuits in the kitchen. And none of us like digestive biscuits, but reading digestive biscuits every single day because they just are there in the jar, the seafood jar. And yet, whatever's available to you, you've got to almost instill willpower to avoid it.

Which means that given enough time, given enough laugh of sleep, given enough exercise, you're probably gonna give in at some point. So yeah, design the environment's key. There's a really good example again, Gabriel Weinberg, a serolitchens time to the study where people were asked about 41 leading causes of death, and they massively overestimated the risk of sensationalized types. So tornadoes, floods, botulism or smallpox vaccines were 50 times overestimated and struck and diabetes were 100 times underestimated.

Interest there. Because the availability bias of the news and that links into filter bubble, availability bias of the news. And that links into Philip bubble, of course, which is like an echo chamber that occurs due to this availability bias. That's reinforced by the algorithms that we see online because what you agree with, you will tend to click on more, which then reinforces feeding you more of this stuff because the system thinks, oh, he's clicking on that. Therefore, he wants to see more of that. But as Jordan Peterson says, be friends with people that want the best for you, doesn't mean with be friends with people who tell you what you want to hear.

Very different. The kid always wants sweets. Doesn't mean the kid that sweet is always good for the kid. So the system constantly feeding things that you agree with isn't necessarily the best for you. But the issue with that, and I have this is that how do you then go about fixing this problem of social media?

I've seen somebody who knows this very well, that people will insist on, okay, we'll face what needs to change its algorithms where it gives people content they don't want to see, but then they won't spend time on the platform. So I'm looking at, if you look at Mark Zucker I'm kind of getting your decisions a little bit. And I look at it and go, because you've seen the recent news about the American center where they want to basically have it installed in the app that wants somebody's scrolled so much they get cut off.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is some weird Georgia or well-shit. And you know, it's Nancy from Florida who's heard about Instagram and an article and she's trying to enforce it. So if we're dealing with what's up? Yeah, that exact stuff is shit. But I think about this a bit and I thought there's two ways to potentially fix this problem. First one is that instead of trying to fix a heroin problem, look at the needles.

So instead of trying to stop the heroin going around, the social media addiction, let's look at the needles, look at the needles. So instead of trying to stop the heroin going around, the social media addiction, let's look at the needles, which is the smartphones, the Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. and never going to fix the problem because that will come on system second, but that's their incentives, that's their business model, they're never going to stop doing it. McDonald's aren't this, that's selling kale. I'm sure they have, but it was a horrific idea, right? And then you did it for a PR bin. But they're never going to be their full products of kale. It's going to be greasy fries and greasy burger because that's what people go

there for and that's what they're incentivized to do and that's what their business model is. So instead, the people who have the power, Apple and Google who go and Android obviously, so what you need to do, they've recently released a screen time stuff, but why isn't it that people can't, let's say you flip a quarter of the ultimate judo move where you flip social media or the mental models that social media have about the way they've conditioned people on its head. And with the screen time stuff you create a social network where I can see out of my friends who spend the most amount, or the least amount of time on Instagram and it's ranked with

them at the top of the leaderboard and that would be quite a cool feature And then the final one they should do is if it's decided if it's to say oh, I think they should do Is if it's decided that these things are bad for people's mental health? Okay, well, let's tax them 5% or 10% whatever that tax is agreed to be which would be millions of dollars and instead of millions of dollars and instead of focusing it on government bodies that have a clue what they're going to do, just doing ex-price where okay, whichever top 20 entrepreneurs come up with a solution that's falsifiable by science in terms of helping people with mental health, they get the funding, they get the funding and you filter the money away from these things that are going to be damaging people's mental health into these companies and then

Facebook and Caribbean, Facebook, Instagram, Karen being Instagram, Snapchat and Karen being Snapchat but people have the control in terms of they can customize their own screen time way more, play games that way and the money's getting filtered into these mental health startups. I like the analogy about the needle and the drug. It is it's the delivery mechanism isn't it through the phone. I would love to see the relative time on site desktop versus mobile now because I think previously at the last time I checked is that 85% mobile, I bet that's even gone up, I bet that's gone up more, but it's like 90, 95%.

That's not to say that the desktop version of the apps isn't that good, it's just that the mobile version is so overwhelmingly addictive and convenient that people can't get around. This is my thing about the sort of anti-social social network, and these are again a PR stuff as most of us do, these are nail-ins though. But basically, what's a lot of the social networks do is almost have these, takes our relationships and puts them in this weird little digital stuff and this little hierarchy going on. Whereas being on Instagram for five hours a day, if you've heard someone, if you watch me doing that, it's quite a sad thing. And if that was in the leaderboard and you go, oh, and Dave knew that everyone else was looking when you spend five hours on Instagram to know, you actually look like a bit of a loser.

Yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about. And you can actually use the biases that these social media outlets have used on the whole of humanity. I'm just full on judo move, you use them again. There's an interesting app. I can't remember the name of it. I'll find it and put it in the show notes where you pick a time that you're not going to be on your phone for and it plants a treat and the longer time that you pick, you're not going to be on for the bigger the tree grows and you add friends, kind of like a game, social networking game, and then if you pick your phone up during the time that you promise you won't be on it, you tree dies, you've got dead tree, and it's a game between you and your friends

to see who can get the biggest orchard. Okay. And it all animated and the trees look cool and it Christmas have changed, it's Christmas trees. So that's kind of similar to what you're talking about there. But you're right, I don't know. There needs to be some real innovation when it comes to the problem of social media at the moment because it's getting to that stage now where I think it's a little bit more than just people

looking at it and going, well that's an interesting problem, people spend too much time on their phones. You've got children growing up now who've got iPads at two years old. What does that actually do? Like when you've got someone who is conditioned to a screen this far from their face with the dopamine drops that you get and most people aren't potentially going to be armed with 74 minute long blog posts like some of the stuff that gets posted in the modern wisdom in a circle that's how to reduce notifications, turn your screen grey scale like all this sort of stuff. That's a lot of time from a young age to be conditioned to something that we've never ever ever had before. You were

discussing earlier on what would happen if someone did MDMA twice a week for an entire year? What would that do to the synapses in their brain? Well, what does it do to someone's brain who's using this sort of technology from your age? I know you're a tech optimist, so you're still a tech optimist. Yeah, and I do, like,

because I always think it's so easy with a lot of this stuff to focus on the negatives because they're so overwhelming. But let's look at how many people have become millionaires or being able to run their own business because of these platforms. Let's look at how many people, I think 70% of this is completely a stat I've overheard someone else say, but I imagine it's a run about that. I've something like 70% of relationships.

And now start on the internet. The amount of WhatsApp group chats, I think it's a crazy start, which is the age of people coming out of the closet, homosexual people with a gay or lesbian, or whatever they want to identify as, is significantly gone down, because they can find similar examples like them and join a reddit community

about what it's all grinders. It's Grinder. But what I'm just going to... Hold on, we was chatting earlier about Grinder. Grinder, yeah, because that's what we're in Chris obviously about. And every single day, the set up here does look like an adult film set. But Chris is casting caps. But basically what we're saying earlier is 70 to 80 years ago.

We've got that right. Yeah, roughly. Roughly. Um, conscription. Yeah, we would have been in a world war in the trenches. And realistically, we probably would have died or would have sinned off that if I would have sinned a film off right now I'd probably be still having nightmares of it 12 months later. So part I can't, I could you imagine telling someone in

the trenches oh I'm addicted to insure. Shut the, you know what I mean? So I get it. So I have, part of me is like, we go back to the extreme ownership and personal responsibility. Log off. Sign out.

I get it. Delete the app. I get it if you're underage and that's what stuff, yes, that's a different question. But we see him as our condition as humanity. So this is one of my mental models that thought about a lot, which is, I call it the zeit-cellmates. So it's across over the current zeitgeist and Alzheimer's. So we kind of, every generation assumes that their problems are the worst, the reason

forgets about the fact that we are just a, a blinking humanity's history, but we're also connected to all these previous generations, and we don't really realise it. And our generation is chatting about social media addiction, whereas I think it was my great-granddad, where who was a doctor, my dad was saying, and he was, I think it was World War I, I forgot which battle line it was at. And so many people were dying on the battlefield. He ran out and was just rescueing bodies for hours and hours and then.

And I'm fucking complaining about Instagram stories. Do you know what I mean? So what I think you've got to take a wider frame of this. And of course there's some stuff we can do and we can look at the ex prizes we've still been mentioned earlier. But come on. Because if we fix the Instagram problem,

people start moaning about some hours. I've known I'm sounding like a 50s dad right now. I don't really like that. I get it, man. So, I mean, first off, I think you need to be careful because everything that you say will be used on the internet. And if you don't continue to brand well, Zite Selmer's, which, to me, to me, sounds like sparkling water,

is going to be quoted by people on the internet. If I go to a market and I'm like, do you know how I think I can work on that? Yeah, anybody who wants to rebrand some of George's mental models, please, for the love of God, get in touch because they're terrible. But yeah, I get what you mean. I had a brief discussion with Theo and Eve from social chain,

the same day that we had our mental models, one-on-one show. In that discussion, I said exactly the same thing as you, however, as society progresses, the fidelity and resolution with which we look at our wellbeing has to advance as well. It's no good saying a hundred years ago you'd have been in the trenches because it is not a hundred years ago. The advancement of wellbeing of humanity as a whole requires us to continue to look at this with a finer and finer viewpoint.

We need to continue, okay, just because it's not as bad as it was, to look at this with a finer and finer viewpoint. We need to continue, okay, just because it's not as bad as it was, doesn't mean it's good. I get that, yeah. And I get what you mean. I do, I appreciate it. Somewhere between, I think, what we're both of us saying, there's some happy medium there. I think of a slightly tangent note that as society continues progressing, because we face an issue

now too much of abundance, that's what all that problems are, we've got too much information, we've got too much food that's making this fat, you know what I mean, we've got too many things going on, life's too good, that as a result we're kind of like a heroin addict who's got everything, constantly getting everything, as a result ends up feeling nothing. And I think that we'll see richer and richer, sorry, as society gets richer and richer, people start paying weirdly for negative experiences. You see it now with the likes of meditation. How big people, like half-marifers, and I'm seeing marifers more and more on meditation retreats, and ultimately I think, would it come down to a scenario where I was wondering,

would I pay for this or where? Imagine a crazy VR scenario where I could go and be for five minutes, see what it was really like in the trenches. I could see what it was like in the trenches. And I could see that and I go, oh, and I take that off and there's a resort going back to contrast and the last one, it was fucking hell, it's so good, life is so good. I couldn't have been fighting a war. And we don't we forget how, again, I don't want to sound like Tony Robbins here.

We forget, and I don't really do for Tony, but we forget how bad it's been throughout so much of human history. Because the issue is, everyone else is around us aboard now. So you don't get to see Dave from the trenches, we've got, how was your day mate? You've just been here. Echo Chamber availability bias contrast.

But that's why I'd say the most important thing on the sort of VR front to watch, my favorite Cliff of all time, everybody who I sent it to you guys, it's changed me. It's the best like three minutes or two. Yeah, if Roy from Rick and Morty, in the show notes below, go watch it. Just fantastic. Don't go back to the carpet store, is that so?

Do not go back to the carpet store. I actually, so one of the things, I don't know, you might know this, it's not in my new places, when I was in Manchester. It's above my wall of the wall of the wall. Above where I got changed is Roy falling off At the final scene where he falls off breaks his back and dies and it's the Roy score all over Yeah, and I catch myself playing that like Tim Urban talks about this from wait, but why and you go Realistically

This is just a video game Like what we're playing is just a video game Like, what we're playing is just a video game. What are you, and this sounds really weird, but you just born one day and you're this shabin' chimp and you take care of it, I've got an iPhone and I do, and then it just, you die and it's, depending on, I guess, your original stuff, but I'd say you just die and it's like, overall, you certainly won't remember much in the next life. It says just a video game. And I think watching that Roy clip quite regularly, everyone who watches it goes,

oh, that's what life basically, it was just playing a game of Roy. So Roy, for the people that are listening, Roy is seen from Rick and Morty, Morty goes into a virtual reality game where he's born, becomes an NFL player, lives the life of this guy called Roy then he dies at the end comes back out But he's lived this whole life right comes back out and Rick then does a like analysis of how he played how he played the game and it you totally right it is that The ability to view things with that broad perspective and to take yourself out of the situation is a big part of it. So what I want to move on to is, I can't remember what

we did last time, but let's quickly go through Hanlon's razor, Ockham's razor, and then let's do McGill's razor. Yeah, again, internet, if we can find something to rebrand it with, then please feel free. So I guess, uh, up on the raises, probably the most like well known one from philosophy of if in doubt you go with the, if you're presenting with two similar arguments and you can't make your mind upon which one you go with the most simplest solution or you, the reason why it's called a razor is because you lean towards it. People often, I think, and again, I might not know this well enough, but people often think, no, therefore the simplest solution is always the answer. No, no, no, you assume the simplest solution is the answer, but then you work from there and you look for counter evidence, etc.

But you assume that whereas Handman's razor is another version of that where if you're, let's say somebody's pissed you off and you have equal evidence, was it out of malice or was it out of them not just thinking of it? Do not attribute to malice what can be afforded to stupidity. Exactly. So, Hans Raser is just assume that it was down to the stupidity or it was down to the negligence. Like thinking it wasn't because they're a bad person. And then the reason I have is if presented with two situations choose the one that will bring about the most amount of luck.

And I'd say this is, if I had to give, I always say every episode, if I had to pick one minute and I'll pick a different one each, if I could have said, Well, that's fine. But I guess as I get older, these things change, and I'd say in terms of actual output towards me and what I do, and I don't know, I've done anything particularly special yet, or in general, in that this one, by far, has the most amount of impact. So I'll give you like more practical examples of this. So quite recently, a guy was messaging me and we're

supposed to go for a drink and he was like, oh, should we go for a drink tonight? We should be delay it. And I was like, going, I'm going to just court myself and I was going, what's going to bring about the most luck here? Me going and sitting at home and just chilling out and doing nothing, or going for a drink, or like my new guy I've never met before, and seeing what happens. And of course I was like, well definitely the latter is, but even though naturally I was going out, I just kind of tired, I want to go home. I was like, okay, let's just put the look at the option. As a result, lots of stuff came off the back of that. And constantly looking for where,

okay, I've got two potential decision trees to go down here. Which one do I think is going to bring about the most amount of luck? And constantly doing that. One of my favorite examples is my mates, James and Reese, where they were at a Drake concert. And the MEN, those two guys, the massive Drake fans, and they were both in the toilet. So I make James is proper into like sneakers, he's one of the sneakheads, and he sees a massive guy in the toilets, and he says, mate, I love your shoes,

and he just randomly compliments a stranger, and he gets chatted. Hand up peanuts. Chatted and up peanuts. Was he hand up peanuts? He's doing the whole, the cross-bid. There were hands on each other's penis, right? Of course, of course.

And I don't know up to a point there. So yeah, they sit, are compomiting money shoes and they get chatting back and forth. And anyway, that guy turned out to be Drake's DJ. And he goes, do you want to come back to the IP with the person hanging around with Drake and like Kevin DeBarrion and Paul Pobber and Odell Beckham Jr.

And they went out with, like the A-list of the A-list of the A-list I'm not saying that's something that you want to aspire to, but that's a fucking cool story, right? And a great night. And as a result, when result whenever Drake comes to town They text that DJ and he sorts them out and go that just came down to Confirmate the guy in his shoes, I know but let's say you was sat there and sometimes people don't want to chat to a stranger Or something don't a compliment stranger

Well, what's going to bring about the most amount of luck me just keeping that fall in my head It's not gonna bring about that much luck Whereas if I go hey mate like this in my head. It's not gonna bring about that much luck. Whereas if I go, hey mate, like this, da da da da da. Of course you might just say, all right mate, Jaze, bye. Be a dick, you've not lost anything.

But the potential amount of luck that's constantly existing, I always think about it. And you only see this stuff backwards is that, you know, the whole sliding doors phenomenon, where you look back and you go, oh, if I've gone out that night, where I ended up meeting my mother of my kids. Imagine if I would have just gone out and said at home that night. So we're constantly having these sliding doors, even as we're chatting

right now the sliding doors moments going on but you don't see them at the time, you can only see them looking backwards. So the sliding doors are invisible when you go through them but constantly visible when you look back and I think the only, I really say so much if it comes down to look, therefore just having some default raised in place of going, what about things going to bring about the most amount of luck here and just doing that? It's something I'm trying to get better anyway. I think it's a really, it's something that I'm thinking about a lot after the podcast I did with Laura Vanderkamp, which I thought was really insightful. If you haven't listened

to it yet, I highly recommend that you go and see it. Time management expert and she talks about the fact that the present self is spoiled like a petulant child. We have three selves in this life, the future self, the past self and the present self. But as you've said, when the present self comes around, you're actually thinking, arm tired, it's cold outside, I've had a long day, I've done this that and the other, staying in bed and reading or watching Netflix or not doing the thing which involves more action. Your body will always resort to inertia or the path of least resistance over that

of one which requires more effort. And I think seeking out, going back to what we were talking about before, extreme ownership, leaning into discomfort, all of these things are jelling together in a way that's I think actually better than the matter of the matter. going back to what we were talking about before, extreme ownership, leaning into discomfort. All of these things are jelling together in a way that's, I think, actually better than mental models 101. But they're all linked together. If you find a point where you think, well, hang on a second, am I going to really appreciate me making this effort for me tomorrow when I look back? Because if you hadn't sent me that message a year ago

Yeah, it's we wouldn't be mates. That's what you've done all of these cool things. Perfect I remember just a bit in there. I remember where I sat there Thinking oh sure I said that message and I was like there's genuinely a three-second pauses ago So I said go ahead. I said yeah, fuck it. What's going on? I did it and I did it and that's literally why we're chatting right now. So yeah, that's weird, isn't it? A symmetry is going back to the metal models from the last episode, talking about that, about the fact that, yeah. On-site, so huge.

Yeah, action is almost always going to result in that. So talk to the girl at the bar. And again, a concept from pick a party street, like assume attraction is a really good way to go about things because it just encourages when you assume there are tracks it's just always assume attraction. Reason being that it will encourage you into action as opposed to into inertia. Which is the natural state. Yes. I think yeah if you just actually ask yourself what's going to bring about the best Royor at the end of the day? What's up, man? I mean, that's the great idea.

Yeah, that's how he's fucking Roy Scor. Roy Scor, and I, I don't know, it's weird, me and my mate Josh, now I know, and I see him, just go like, how's your Roy Scor getting up? And that's how he catches up now, and he's free. And he gives you that friend guy. Shit, this is just a fucking Roy Scor. Fucking Roy Scor. So I've got one that you might not know.

Have you heard of third story? Have you heard of this? No, no, no. Maybe. Cool. So, third story, you can imagine that in any normal situation, you have your point of view, my point of view. But then you'd also have a third point of view, which would actually be from someone

outside of the situation looking at both. A lot of the time, people will discuss the fact that you want to see things from someone else's perspective. You don't just need to see that because that might not actually be the best place to see this from. The totally impartial observer probably has the best view of both. Now, we spoke at length about how much we love John Peterson and some Harris's approach to the beginning of their debate together and they steal man each other's arguments. And is it Warren Buffett who says he refuses to have a position on anything Charlie Munger says.

I think he says he refuses to have a position on anything unless he can state the other side better than the other side can. Basically it's what it is and I think he calls that his iron discipline. And that catches me a lot is where I have an opinion on something and I'll keep researching my side of the opinion, keep going over it and over it and over it. And I'm not even looking at the other side. And it kind of holds you accountable and not chatting about some of the other day I was having a chat with a mate and we've just strategized and it worked. And I go, I catch myself and I I'll proper Charlie Munger moment, where he's talking about a certain market that we should look at potentially best now. And I go, you know what, I actually think that's a,

I actually don't have an opinion. I can't wait so good. I don't necessarily like the other sign, I actually don't know the subject well enough. We just want the sound clever, don't we? So much, man. And I feel like we talked about earlier the benefit of identifying probabilities in India. Like anybody ever listening to this, watching this, please know that I am

an Inverseal, and I say that mainly for myself, because we was chatting about earlier, when you, you recently, and I'm sure people who have heard the podcast a lot, you talked a lot about the benefits you got from Ron Warden, now you've done a bit of a U-turn on that, and the about the benefits you got from Ron Warden. Now you've done a bit of a U-turn on that and the Woot Band, you've done a bit of a U-turn on that, right? And once you go out there shouting out, I am an ex or I'm a Republican, I am a Democrat, I'm a smart person. Whatever you wanna do, whenever you have those labels,

it's then very hard to, once you've set it out loud to everyone, to then pivot and do a U-turn it often because people don't want to be seen as being a hypocrite but I admire people so much more once they've been so gunned ho on something and they go the other way like people who've been in like Scientology or the who the what's the church in America, the shouts at the soldiers, funerals, and they leave and they go against their whole family. Like the ability to go against your identity, which I think is the hardest thing to do is so impressive,

which is why I was identifying an idiot. Because if I identify as an idiot, they would have used stupid stuff. It's like the minimum viable. The minimum viable product to be a thinker, isn't it? Like what is the lowest grade entry that I can have? Lowest barriers to entry, idiot. And I think, you know, from my perspective,

this is something that I touched on earlier with you. And I haven't thought this before. But mercifully, one of the advantages of being a podcast host, and this is where Rogan gets it so correct, is that you don't actually ever end up being the smartest person in the room. It's very rare that Rogan gets it so correct is that you don't actually ever end up being the smartest person in the room. It's very rare that Rogan's the smartest person in the room on whatever the topic is, maybe MMA sometimes, maybe comedy sometimes, but even in that, he might be

sacros from Francis and Garnam. He's a bit better at MMA than you are, maybe not his knowledge, maybe some nuance of that Rogan's better, or he might be sacackross from Brian Callum, you know, well, who's the better comedian, that's up for debate, et cetera, et cetera. The advantage of being someone who is in the middle of a lot of other people and then presents that information in the way that a podcast host does is that you're never expected to actually be the, like, paragon of knowledge within an area, you're just a mere simulacrum representation of what everyone else has been. And that actually allows you to hold much less concrete views because everybody appreciates that really all you

are is just a little reflection of all the people you've been exposed to. But that's all that anyone is. The only difference is when someone makes their identity about it, Aubrey Marcus, when you talk about how much you love polyamory, look at the comments on Aubrey Marcus's break up video with his wife Whitney talking about how they're transitioning their relationship and polyamory is still the way to go. And by the way, if you want to find out what happened to Whitney's podcast this Wednesday on blah, blah, blah. And the people in the comments are going, man, say how it is. Say that Polly Annry was a bad decision and say that you're breaking up not transitioning.

But those guys have planted the flag in the ground so hard. And maybe they do still believe this. But when you've been so forthcoming with talking about Whitney's off to go and see her boyfriend in Texas to get railed off some guys, the 24-year-old stallion or some shit from Austin. Yeah. And you're like, right, after you've done that, where'd you go from there? It's very difficult to allow that identity to simmer back down again.

And for you to actually say, do you know what it is? Might have been wrong. Hmm. And there's a there's a mental model that I've been thinking about for a little bit called the self-serving bias where you often have self-serving reasons for your own actions and behavior, but when you're observing others, you excuse it as part of their intrinsic in intrinsic nature. So I cut someone up in traffic. It's because I'm in a rush. Someone else cuts me up in traffic. It's because they're a cunt. Yeah. I can see and that is a part due to a different view of perspective. Obviously, the fact that you can only see what's inside your own head, not someone else's, but you still do that. It's called the fundamental attribution error when you

attribute others' behaviors to their motivations rather than to external factors. Someone puts you up in traffic. They might have been in a rush, you say, to what? But when it's about yourself, you always have the excuse. Self-serving bias. Yeah, it's very, very difficult to... I don't know, did we speak about this last time about the Warren Buffett who you'd invest in, who you thought, did we chat about that last time? I don't even remember that. So yeah, being able to look at yourself as a third party and I find it very, very difficult if you actually try, I don't think it's possible to do that, the way I find it most useful,

look at other people, look at stuff that I like or my disagree, I'm not in terms of like a very judgmental thing, they need to stop doing that, but something I don't like personally, and they go, oh, when do I do that stuff? Or what do I like? I go, oh, how can I do more of that stuff? And actually, you can almost flip that weird bias

that we have in our head that we can see other people so clearly. By looking at other people, look at mistakes they're making, and assume you're making the mistake that they're making, where actually is that making the mistake that they're making, they're where actually is that, and trying to hunt it down that way, I feel that most of these cognitive biases and stuff, rather than trying to fight them, which is what a lot of people seem to do,

as soon as they get in that whole psychological rabbit hole, rather than trying to fight them, just use them. Like, so again, if you realize, okay, whatever I identify as, it's gonna be very, very difficult for me to break that. Rather than trying to break that, and going, oh no, I'm the guy who can defies identity, no, don't do that. But when you just identify as what you actually want to use and use those weird little cognitive biases as a way forward,

and I think that's the most like meta mental wall of thing I found is rather than trying to fix your own cognitive biases, of course, you want to almost play defense where you have to be aware of them. You want to be aware of them, even though you probably can't be that aware, just use them. Like use certain stuff, realize that you're a shave chimp with millions of years of evolution and you're probably not going to rewrite the program in yourself and just go for the highest-roist. Yeah I think certainly for instance we're talking about the difficulty in retraining your identity let's say whatever you want to choose that to come up with why not say I'm a happy person I'm a positive person tell your friends if you tell your

friends I'm a happy person I'm a positive person, tell your friends. If you tell your friends, I'm a happy person, I'm a positive person. You're now socially accountable to your mate, hang on, I thought you said you were a happy person, a positive person. Oh shit, that's something that I want that is pretty much indefensibly a good idea for me to do. Where are you going to go from there? You want to continue to do that. So I spent, I was the, when I was younger, I was fascinated by discipline and pushing myself. And I found that I could perform, the only time I stuck at habits for six months and could pick up a new habit every single month,

I was gonna have an app called HabitShare, where every month I had various different friends would say, okay, I'm doing this habit this month, what are you gonna do? Lose a bystander at the end of the month. And the habit share, they can see if you check in that day, you get push notifications when they check in, and you're directly competing against one another.

And all of a sudden, I didn't need any willpower, I didn't need any discipline, I just used the comments of bias of being asked what other people are thinking about me because again, we're social creatures. Rather than try and fight that, let's just use that. For the listeners at home, I was getting sent screenshots of your habit

share thing and I'm not even on habit share. You were showing it off to me. Yeah, exactly. Be dicking it to me. Yeah. So a couple of things that have been floating around in my head recently. So anchoring, which is kind of a little bit like first impressions matter. So where someone pos it to price to you when you begin,

you then make everything else relative to that. There's a really good example of about economist pricing, have you heard this one? No. So let me run you through this. So, in predictably irrational, there's an example from the economist's pricing strategy, okay? So, three options to subscribe. You heard this one?

The economist thing. Yeah. Three options to subscribe. Web only is $59. Print only is $125. Print and web $125. The split is Web only, 16% of people purchased. Print only, 0% print and web, 84%. Now if you remove the print and web option, 68% instead of 16 by web only and 32% instead of 84 by print. So by adding in an option which means nothing, you anchor

people's price in a different way. And this relates to something that I'm going to butcher the example, so please send me the proper study, but the concept is still solid. Endoscopies were getting done on people, and they judged the relative amount of discomfort someone was going to be in by the amount of movement. That's apparently a fairly good metric for how much discomfort there's going to be, more movement equals more pain. People went through this particular endoscopy and were asked to rate their overall pain afterwards. Now in one iteration, the pain was at a lower rate, let's call it four out of ten for almost all, but at the very end rose up to around about a seven. In another iteration, the experiment was actually extended, so the operation was longer, but finished at a two instead of a

seven. So overall, the second version, second iteration of this experiment, was more total discomfort. It was longer. I think there was actually potentially like a five out of ten throughout, five or six throughout instead of a four, but then dropped to a two. Ask the patients to rate their relative pain at the end of it. Overwhelmingly, the patients that finished at a lower pain score, much fewer bad memories, much lower pain, rating, even though through every objective measure, it should have been higher. And there's a quote I remember seeing online that talks about if you care about your child and they're going through an operation that they can feel, this is something that you want

to happen. Because despite the fact that through every to happen, because despite the fact that through every objective measure your child will go through more pain. That pain is transient, but the memory is forever, and what they will remember will be less pain. And that, to me, is something that I think about a lot. Final memories, or final impressions matter. The same way that first impressions matter, final impressions matter the same way the first impressions matter final impressions matter as well So perfect example one of the guys that I'm coaching Sam Recently got sent out to some random country to go and train a sales team

Literally two days notice right mate drop your life you got to go out to Istanbul somewhere Okay, cool gets there and has three weeks of chaos. And he's speaking to me about four days before he's going to leave and he's like, what do you think that I should do? And I was like, what personally I think you should do is treat yourself as nicely as you can for the final two days of your holiday. Find the previous spot in Istanbul, take yourself out for a dinner,

find some good music, do something cool, spend a little bit of money by yourself and nice paratrainers, do something, and then when you come back, you are going to lean your memory towards all of the nice, final finishing moments that you had on that trip, and hopefully it'll help you to forget that. So that's a really nice way to help to either double down on a nice experience or to mitigate a bad one, is to try and really finish it off with something that's good. So that's standard comedy 101. You start off with your second best joke and then you finish with your best joke because that is just, yeah, it's what standard comedians always do. That makes a lot of sense. One weird one, which I've been thinking about for a while, and I'm not smart enough to really flesh this one out, but we'll give it a go.

Crack it out. Which is orthogonal thought, which is when you come at something from a completely different angle, somebody else. So this comes from primarily Eric Weinstein and he talks about two particular examples one which is the I forgot the guy but he was on the Japanese table table tennis team and he was one of the worst players on that and I think I'm not sure how many decades ago it was but he decided to put foam on his back. Everybody else was playing with his wooden back. So he puts foam as we know it now,

like I'm on a table tennis, and he would destroy everyone, and he beat everybody around, became the best in the world at the time. And just from, you've got to think he could have spent hours training, like 10,000 hours and probably still wouldn't even make the team. But instead sitting at home and coming at it from a completely different perspective

and just putting foam on the bats and then nobody could compete with him. It's the same with the Fosby flop with the high jump. Everybody else used to do it face first, essentially jump over that way, where he came at it with this weird angle. Obviously people mocked him for a while, but it was a way more efficient and effective way of doing it. And then there's another great example of the whole suitcase on wheels stuff, that suitcase on wheels didn't really exist till that be 80s, or whenever it was, it was a certain pilot that launched it. And you would think everybody was carrying around suitcases,

nobody fought to pop fucking suitcases on wheels. And then one guy does it, and then that's the norm. And I'm fascinated by when you take a perspective that often there's X or there's Y. There's X or there's Y. There's the Robert Hanson, the evolutionary biologist and physicist who chats about this example with like immigration, which is obviously a very, very hotly contested topic, one which is way above my pay grade and I don't really have many opinions on, but he chats about how you

have the Democrat side, which is obviously very, very pro-immigration, and you have the Republican side, which is very, very anti-immigration, and they're just constantly in this tug of war against each other. And instead of having this tug of war gate came coming on, he says, come at it from an all, yeah, well, a fabulous perspective, and you pull it from the middle. So for example, what about if you could every American had their citizenship, and it was worth X, so let's say it was worth $100,000, which meant that they could sell it on to an immigrant who wanted to come into the country and they could move out that way. I mean all of a sudden you fixed a lot of the problems there and of course that might not be the

right or wrong solution but all of a sudden it is an odd goal in the point of view. He's too mad at it from a completely different vector. On a side point to that, I podcasted with Robin Hansen just after he released elephant in the brain and asked him about orthogonal thinking and he was really tired that day. And he did never call me what I was on. I really thought. He was you that had asked it as well.

I was like, I've got cracking questions here, Robby. Right, what do you think about orthogonal thinking and he was fucking lucky. And he was like, oh, not really too sure about that one man. Oh, okay Talking about the Fosbury flop and different ways of doing athletics. What? One of the first people, maybe the first, but definitely one of the first people to ever swim the English channel So he was a British potentially army officer quite high up in the in the armed forces and he did it wearing

a sheepskin wool, a covered in goose fat, drinking whiskey because it would keep him warm and he did the whole thing breaststroke. And when he was asked, why did you not do the front crawl? Because the front crawl had been invented, but recently before, so not very long before, you know, his answer was, it would be unbecoming of a gentleman to put my head under the water. Wow. So he did the whole English channel fucking breaststroke. I love that story. It would be unbeclumbing of a gentleman to put my head under the water. Wow. Here's a different time. It was a better time, man.

When men wouldn't put their head under the water. So on the off-hugginal thought point, one thing that's particularly interesting, it ties into, you know, the Peter Teele question of, what do you believe to be true that the rest of the world disagrees with you on? A very, very, like, contrarian question that I've yet to hear anybody answer. With real crystal. Yeah, with real vigor. Or if they have, it's creeping out, and I guess that's the point of it, because it's so, so should the...

So, here we go. Against the great. So the listeners at home give us a tweet at TristwellX and at George underscore underscore M-A-C-K and answer this question as best you can. What do you believe to be true that the rest of the world disagrees with you on? So like a good example, often what people will do in that scenario they'll go over the education systems backwards. Or obviously a few years ago they said we should legalize gay marriage. If you actually asked most of society, they'll actually agree

of these statements nowadays. A good example would have been 20 years ago saying actually think the way the college education systems go and is backwards and obviously PITLT I've did done was proof and right but trying to have all for example in 2009 or 2008 when Satoshi I guess made Bitcoin, I would say and I think Bitcoin will be this new global digital currency saying it now is going to yeah no shit show up saying it back then would have been a truly contrarian state. When your notes contrarian, when everybody looks at you, like you're an absolute weirder.

But if it's the issue with that, though, is the contrarians just go either end of the spectrum. They're either geniuses that are remembered throughout history or they're writing their own name on a wall and shit. You know what I mean? And that's the issue with it that you don't know who... I'm definitely...

I don't know if it's the Violet Club. The Violet Club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club.

No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. No, it's the club. might be the next Microsoft book and with Contrarians you never know that because if somebody would have been pitching Bitcoin to you and I know it happened to me I watched a YouTube video and I was tired and finished it was probably nothing and trying to pitch those there's Contrarian ideas that in hindsight everyone will look back and go that was so obvious.

Yeah, that was an absolute no-brainer. But because that realistically, 99% of people listening or people in general, if they was around when pre-Galaleo, they would have believed the world was the center of the universe. And if anybody would try to argue with them, they would have thought they were an idiot. And I'm always trying to think now, what 50 years from now will we think is ridiculous? And I also then try and think, okay, more of a person, I'm like, what, if I look back on my behavior five years ago, I'd find it really cringey. What, find it really cringey What find you on any of the years from now will I find cringey?

But anyone who doesn't look back on their behavior Five years ago and find it cringey. No, but the issue. So this is the iOS update on that of course That's true, but the thing is that people forget is that what you're doing right now People You sorry you will find cringey five years from now and you're almost going to come out from the frame And oh shit. There's going to be stuff thatey five years from now. And you're almost going to come out from the Franklin, oh shit, there's going to be stuff that I'm doing right now that's going to be horrific five years from now.

And the same way, and there's a large part of society, what are we doing? The 50 years from now, we're going to go, you're grandkids, you're going to go, you used to do that, you used to eat meat. Again, that's a contentious issue. Meat, meat is one of the ones that I think. Yeah, particularly the factory farming stuff.

So trying to take a perspective of 50 to 100 years from now, contentious issue. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too.

Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too.

Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. like with their fucking I posture just texting each other I reckon that's what those theme part is are gonna be like yeah because We'll be different communication methods by learning this weird Constant you have to you look at like the neural link stuff that you know must doing this idea that we're okay And this goes back to all five and all four. Before the whole neural link stuff came along, would you have thought that actually it would make

way more sense if I could just zap it from my brain to your brain? No, you assume it's good keyboard, this is the quickest way to do it. But if you ever actually count how long it takes you to text by a keyboard, it's so long, but because everybody else is doing it, you assume it's the norm, you follow the crowd

and the one the favourite mental model is the tim, I can talk from Tim Urban and it's the screen saver on my laptop, which is the cook versus the chef. Have you heard of that one? No. So, people often assume maybe a cook and the chef are the same thing, but there's a fine, fine difference is what Tim Urban argues. In the cook, it gets a recipe that's been made and makes it. Where is a chef? Great, he's on recipe.

And that's the difference between just following, okay, texting is the quickest way I can do this. That's what a cook does, because cooks just follow everyone else to do. Where is a chef thinks about it and goes, actually, if I had to design this recipe, if I had to get a message from my head to Chris's head, the quick is what would it be,

and it'd be literally thinking, just like that, it'd be quicker than this, the quick as a speed of light. So looking at it from a cook's perspective and a chef's perspective, and then it comes back, it's got these things always loop around in the, then Tim Urban argues that,

if you're a chef, explore various different recipes, test it, taste test it, goes, oh, that's a bit shit, that's a bit rubbish. And of course, most of the time you're going to look like you're doing worse than a cook, because they've already got a predefined root. But when a chef does win, they win big and ultimately, you're playing a fucking game of Roy anyway. It is just Roy, man. And I've been searching around to try and find this quote, I I finally found it. Changing your habits often requires you to change your tribe. Each tribe has a set of shared experiences, behaviors that conform to the shared expectations of attractive, behaviors

that conflict with the shared expectations are unattractive. It's hard to go against the group. James Clear, Tommy Cabot. So what do you think will be the look back on 50 to 100 years? I think you're right about that. I think jeans that Lads and Newcastle wear. I think they're probably, they've got to be pretty high up. Tight girl jeans. I'm not sure, man. I mean, the defining characteristics right now, you don't know how quick things are going to move. Like, what's the paradigm going to shift on? Are

we still going to be looking at a political system similar to the one that we've got now? Like, is that really what's going to continue? Is it going to evolve? Or is it just going to be more of the same? We can presume that technology will change, but politics actually hasn't seen any big dynamic Changes our shifts in terms of the way that they're deployed sort of General public vote etc etc Like it requires a large

Movement to occur and because of the way that those things happen They're often unforeseen up until the point in which they do happen. Like, going the other way, like what was going to change from 50 years ago until in 50 years time, considering that now, who could have predicted Facebook, who could have predicted the internet? Like, you don't know that these things are going to happen and you just stand at post, post talking the shit out of it if you do. Like narrative fallacy where you retrospectively explain it and you have this beautiful image in your head. It's the guy called Brad Stone who wrote the everyday store. It's about Amazon and Jeff Bezosen describes

the story of Jeff Bezoson, what happened Amazon and apparently Jeff has a bit of a look to do it. When he first sat down with Brad Stone, he basically said, how are you going to avoid the narrative fallacy? How are you going to make it look back that I had this perfect plan to begin with and it all executed exactly as I had it planned and not retrospectively ignore factors like look and experimentation and failure that went on. I mean, it's yeah, we always look back and just tell ourselves a story. Before we finish, I wondered if you wanted to give us a short breakdown on your favourite blog post of all time. Oh, interesting. I wanna do it?

Yeah, let's do it. Cool. This will be linked in the show notes below. It's one of the worst titles. It is very click baity, but I think the actual content of it, I think it's six harsh truths to make you a better person around those lines.

I think it's David Wong who wrote it. It is, yeah. And he has, you do it. I think you might do a better job than me. So the blog post basically talks, that the synopsis of it is you are what you can present to society and societies only bothered in what it can get from you.

That's the main truth, and the first example is imagine that you're walking on the street with a loved one and a car comes along, hits your lover. They're lying on the floor, bleeding, and you're screaming for someone who has some medical experience. A person comes over and kneels down next to them, and you ask them, you'll have me to them and you ask them, we're going to have you in already.

And you ask them, um, fantastic. Are you a doctor? This person turns to you and starts telling you about how they're a good father, how they're always trustworthy and how they're never late for work. And you go, hang in a second, I didn't, I didn't ask you about that. What I said was, do you have some medical experience? And this person begins to get a little bit irritated now. They say, well, no, you're not listening to me.

I'm a very good person. And I always, I always stick to my promises. And I'm always true to my virtue. And my kids really love me. And you say screaming at them, look, I do not care about your values or your virtues. Tell me whether or not you can save my dying partner on the street. And the analogy that he uses is society is

the dying man on the street. And you are the person standing over them holding a pen knife in a desperate attempt to try and bring them back to life. All that society is concerned about is what you can produce. Do you want to elaborate? Yeah. I think, going back to Paul Green, I think we started off with, I think he used to have it on people,

why he sees wars or his own wars, which is make something people want. Because he would have so many young entrepreneurs, he would come through with these ideas of how they're going to change the world. And they would always fail that fundamental thing of they're not making something that people want. Like nobody actually wants this idea, and if I look at any ideas I've had or friends have had, it's the reason why I often fails is because they've

sort of kept themselves in their own bubble and they've not actually gone and found out if this is actually what people want. And then again you've got to apply that same thing to yourself, But instead of just, there's a great clip from Glen Gary, Glen Ross, I think it is, by Alec Baldwin, I think he's only at eight, nine minutes. He wants an Oscar for that performance. And he just says, nice guy, I don't give a shit. Go home and play with your kids.

And that sounds brutal. It sounds horrific, but it's almost objective of somebody who's never met you before looking at your objective, you're going, what can you do for me? And people see that as a very, very, almost a dark and negative world. But I actually think it's the way we operate. We're always constantly looking at making society better and the reason why I always use the analogy that That sail that story networking in particular again if you talk about contraire and opinions and this is a bit nuanced but networking Can be largely I think overrated by a certain sort of individual

Who very very cat like nice and charismatic and can chat a good game and has read a few books, but there's no substance to anything they've ever done. There's nothing on their actual rap sheet. I can, oh, I can code this, or I know how to build a sales team like this, or I've achieved like this or I've achieved this many things at CrossFit this week or whatever it is right we always just want to be liked for being a nice guy but everyone's a fucking nice very monotope again isn't it going back to to the Navy SEAL stuff another great point that don't want comes up with in that article is where he talks about people believing that they deserve a good partner. And they say, well, look at how trustworthy I am. And I'm really caring. And you know, I've got a good job. And I've got stable income and this, that new and he in the blog post, he says, so fucking what? That is what you

need to get you through the door. And there is a guy out there who has everything you have and he can play the fucking guitar. Yeah. I'm like, David, you got it, man. Like there is a guy out there who has every talent that you have and he can play the fucking guitar. How are you gonna compete with a man

that can play the guitar? I think you are right. It isn't. But he was, he was a great, easy, he has a new one's point in that, he says that what you do or what you've done is actually a real reflection of who you are. So you get what I mean, whereas if who you are is all you are and you're not producing anything, then actually it wasn't what you are. That's all the ballaks, right? What you are is all you are and you're not producing anything, then actually it wasn't what you are, that's a little bollocks, right? What you produce is ultimately your reflection of what your thoughts are, it's that whole slightly weird thing of, if somebody's, let's say there's a hurricane that's gone on, I'll pray for those people, but of course

I think a lot of people who do that are trying to do something good. Yeah, they're trying to do some good, but you can actually do something as well. Don't clean it up. Wow, that's where the real power is. Well, of course, you can pray and do that at the same time, but fucking hell. What were you saying earlier on about the path of least

resistance, about inertia as opposed to movement? You are right. I think it's not a very softly, softly approach. I bet if some of the Navy SEALs read that blog post, I bet they would agree with it, guys that are forced into action, guys that have to do things first. It's not a very sentimental way to view things, but I would struggle to see how looking at output first,

what are the things, what are the explicit tangible objective measures by which I have represented my value in the real world. If you use those, I struggle to see how life comes at you with things that you're going to be unprepared for, or at least I think you give yourself the best chance of being robust or antifragile enough to deal with them. Yeah, because we can all edit our Instagram photos to look like successful entrepreneurs, but your P&L sheet is what actually matters, right? And that's the difference. No, actually that happens that's what actually happens.

What? Roy School. Roy School. I guess that's a good way to learn done. It's just a game. There's a great bit as well, similar to the Roy School bit of, you've seen the Bill Hicks bit, it's just a ride. It's very, very similar to the Roy School of Wear.

You can end up going down lots of different rabbit holes and thinking very, very deeply about stuff, but once you realize we've got a very, very limited time on this earth and a hundred years from now, no one will probably remember your name. Man, it's been fantastic again. I hope that everyone that has tuned in has enjoyed it. Mental Models 102 102 we have finished Yeah, you got me on my cave mate. You forced me up my cave. I know all the way from London Newcastle to coming across a podcast Where are people gonna find you? George underscore MACK on Twitter. I'm gonna force them to tweet at you so that you're forced to reply

Because you too polite to not reply to people but you're not on Twitter at the moment because you're too busy working. Fitting $200 a week into $100 a week. Just avoided the carpet store one day at a time. Good man. Thank you very much for tuning in. Please like, share, subscribe all that good stuff. I do appreciate it every time you do at Chris Rolex on all social media. If you've got any questions at George underscore underscore up Mac on Twitter as well. Thank you very much man. Bye.

Peace. you