Modern Wisdom - #178 - George Mack - Mental Models 103

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

Long time friend of the show and all round great human George Mack joins me today as we revisit the world of decision making. Mental Models are tools you can use to improve your ability to effectively make decisions. Today we are upgrading our minds as we delve into some of mine & George's favourite mental models from Warren Buffett, Nassim Taleb, Naval Ravikant, Winston Churchill, Tobias Lutke and many more. Sponsor: Check out everything I use from The Protein Works at https://www.theproteinworks.com/modernwisdom/ (35% off everything with the code MODERN35) Extra Stuff: Follow George on Twitter - https://twitter.com/george__mack Sign Up to George's Newsletter - https://eepurl.com/g37gVL Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - 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

Hello humans in podcast land, welcome back. My guest today is none other than long time friend of the show and current modern wisdom all time download record holder George Mac. We're talking about mental models, one of my favorite topics. Having the ability to make good decisions is one of the most important skills you can have in life and hopefully today we will provide you with some more tools to add into your mental model utility belt that will make your choices even more accurate.

We are taking some brilliant learnings from people like Nassim Talab, Naval Ravakan, Winston Churchill and many more. Don't forget, if you are new here, or even if you're a longtime listener who hasn't pressed the subscribe button yet, go and do it now, it will take less than three seconds and it will make me very happy indeed. Also, if you have any friends that you think would enjoy this show,

I would appreciate nothing more than you sending it to them. That is the way that this show is growing, the plays and the listenership are absolutely flying through the ceiling and that is only due to assistance and support from people like you. So the more people that you can send it to, the more that you recommend it, the bigger it gets, which allows me to access even more fascinating humans to deliver directly into your ears. I keep getting messages about the Patreon as well. I am on with that me and video guide in a setting that up as quickly as we can. So the modern wisdom Patreon will be here very soon. I will keep you updated.

But for now, it's time to get better at making decisions with the wise and wonderful George Mac. Oh yeah, PS, while this music's playing, go and check if you've pressed the subscribe button, and if not, give it a hit for me. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap it away. Long awaited return to modern wisdom. How are you brother? I'm good, how are you? Very, very well. The crowd has been anticipating this one for a long time. You feeling ready? Yeah, it's ready as you can be, I guess.

It's got. Yeah, for sure. So my first question, you are currently the title holder of Modern Wisdom's most ever played episode. So just looking at the best played, your first, then Dr. Eric Figelding explaining about a global pandemic. Two episodes with Morgan Haussle who used to write for the Motley Fool, Ben Greenfield, Brian McKenzie, then another episode with you, Derek Sivers, John Assaraffin or Bre Marcus. So that comes out the top 10. Why do you think our episodes are first one specifically and then the second one. Why do you think that resonated so hard?

Bot farms, mainly bot farms everywhere. It's a tea to three month operation, involving about 10 to 20,000 pounds, VPNs, different IP addresses, because you need it all to come from like individual phones as well, but it was well worth it. Yeah, because we also made our episode was the fourth best podcast of 2019 as voted by podcast notes audience. So the bot farm also useful for that as well. Yeah, they do. They do all sorts. I'm trying to divert since a politics as well. they do, they do all sorts. I'm trying to divert sense of politics as well. Okay, so let's say that someone hasn't listened to our first two episodes, which they should totally go back and check out. Let's say that they haven't. What is a mental model? Give us the Twitter bio description of mental models. I always actually struggle with this one. I guess the way I view it is like metaphors, analogies,

or just ways of taking principles from different disciplines, and then almost trying to keep them in your own mental toolkit that you can apply. I just find it a fun way of trying to put together a world with trillions of different inputs. I get it. Yeah, I think the analogy you used on the first episode was if you think of your brain as the operating system, mental models of the different apps that you can install to give you functionality and to improve your decision making. And that's now, although

it's copyrighted, Judge McGill 2019, I've been using that as like my one liner too. So let's get started. What have you been thinking about recently, what you drop in on us today? Yeah, I'm just thinking, I've got a few things here. So I was trying to think what we haven't been through as well. So try and keep things a bit fresh. Yes.

Otherwise, it's just a repeat, right? A repeat after a repeat. So the one that I've been thinking about a lot, just in general, because it comes so difficult to me as a person, and maybe it was like a certain generation I was brought up upon, of like leverage and what that actually means, like the ability, the way I view leverage is similar to way,

I think it's Peter Teele who talks about technology, which is the ability to do more with less. And that for me, of a generation who was brought up on YouTube videos talking about 16 hour work days and like hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle,'s a very hard Concept to sort of wrap your head round and when it when it started to begin to click for me because I was always I was always one of those people who want to talk about how hard they work and you realize a lot of that's just signaling It's just bollocks. It's not actually achieving a result Was the if you might still be up there, but there's something called Steve Jobs's Lost Tape. So have you seen it? No. It's fantastic.

So it's an interview with Steve Jobs, I think, just before he goes back to Apple for the second time, I mean, like 1994 maybe. And the interview was lost for years. The only found it in like 2016, 2015, around about then. And there's a bit in it where I think he's used this metaphor elsewhere as well, but there's a bit in it where he talks about reading something when he was early on, like a studying scientific America where they looked at the efficiency of locomotion for all the animals on earth. And I think it was the condolge is the bird that won, and the human being, which

is the sort of, I don't know, you look, we like to think of ourselves as probably the best animal on the planet, right? Look at all the shit we've done. We was ranked like around about a third way down the list, but what was interesting, Steve says that somebody had the genius to like test a human being on a bicycle, and a human being on a bicycle beat the condor, absolutely destroyed every single animal on there. And you realize that that's what human beings are, we're just tool makers, right?

Oh, that is so good. So the condor, what is a condor type of bird? Is it like a big-legged bird or something? It's a bird, yeah, it's an illustration. Eagle-looking bird. No, like a flying bird. Like the old-spanning birds. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how leverage works by implementing tools because it enhances your ability. Your natural abilities are then augmented.

And then bigger. Naveau has like four forms of leverage that always stick with me. So you have in terms of like modern, like more business side of things, you've got the traditional ones which are like people leverage. IE Chris has a staff of 50 working for him and therefore he can essentially put out the strategy, put out the systems, put out the products in place and then those 50 people provide a service or build things for him. Therefore, his outputs therefore then become even greater than his inputs.

You have financial leverage, which is the Buffet style of things where you invest X and you get a return of Y and you use your money as a form of leverage. There's the two old school ones, but the two new ones which are fascinating are code-based leverage, which obviously powering like Skype as we speak right now or any like like you've got Shopify, you've got Amazon, all these forms of leverage where Jeff Bezos or Toby, you run Shopify aren't working harder than us, but they have code, they have machines or in my case bots working 24-7 for them that works way harder. And then you've got the final one, which I guess is where you specialize in is like media leverage that rather than us just having this conversation

and only us being able to hear in it, you have the ability now to be able to distribute it on mass to lots of people without putting in any extra work. There's no extra cost of replication for what you're doing. So though, yeah, those are the four forms of leverage. And once you actually look around and then any business you go in, you go,

and shit, there's like people leverage, there's media leverage, there's code leverage. And you begin to see it everywhere. And it's fascinating. That's super cool. Yeah, you're totally correct. Everybody knows this, right? I guess there must be a network leverage as well.

I don't know how that would fall in, but- It's number one. Someone saying, I love the Modern Wisdom podcast. That host Chris is handsome and great. And then telling their friends. Oh my God. Yeah, but one of your bots says that. That is not me putting in the work

to source that new listener, right? The fact that that episode, that first episode between us, it's not had any paid ads behind it, but for some reason because of the bots, it's done so well. And it's gone and it's done that. Also to the people that are listening, it might be worth playing a game of either Naval Bingo or Buffett Bingo today.

And I'm... I'm on the Bingo. I'm on the Bingo, yeah. And I'm clocking up one for Naval and one for Buffett so far. So how can people perhaps use leverage? You know, I'm not Jeff Bezos. People listening ain't Jeff Bezos.

Are there any ways that people can apply leverage just at a small scale or in an immediate example in their life? Obviously it's okay specific to every individual. And I think sometimes an issue with ideas like this is that people try and like mass distribute it to everybody and it's, it's so case-dependent. But I just think like looking at trying to reduce your inputs whilst also maximizing your outputs. So however that may be, right? Whether that's via media and you have a greater audience

that way or you hire people who you trust that then obviously work for you and then you can try and increase things that way. I think it's so subject-specific but I think the two ones that are only seem to be getting greater and greater are media leverage and code leverage, but I also think like for unleveraged, I was watching an interview, the Rogan and Elon Musk interview, the new one, the new one. And I caught myself like, obviously, I mean, you end up on a Twitter game where you can find, I find it quite interesting where you find people who obviously think he's the smartest man ever, and then you have the trolls, or maybe rational critics, I don't know, who criticise various different things.

But even I caught myself falling into the brand, I'd listen to the interview, and literally anything I'd hear him say, I was then trying to rationalize it into genius, and talking to me wrong, a lot of it probably is. But that power of a brand, open house, or even the most controversial example where Trump has now, where people use these brands as a form of leverage and it works for them. And they can say something that if somebody else said, all of a sudden it can be interpreted as genius or they get a second chance or they have defenders for them just around a brand so to speak. And I think brands is another form of leverage that doesn't get discussed enough because it's hard to pinpoint, it's hard to really explain, but we all like feel

it. It's the icing on the cake, which makes everyone presume that it's going to taste good before they even eat it. I think that's one way to look at it, right? That you see this cake and you're like, oh my God, not only is this cake coming out of that bakery that I've eaten that before, and everyone else eats at this bakery, and they all think it's mint, and I've eaten that before and everyone else eats at this bakery and they all think it's mint and I've eaten there before and I think it's mint and this cake looks so good. It's got all the trappings of the previous ones but obviously as you've hit on there that can become kind of a little bit of a trojan horse that delivers something that's got less substance. You hit it with a hammer and you find out it's hollow inside as opposed to filled with delicious jam and cream filling, which is what we want. You've touched on two things, which link into, I haven't got that many points, this is a platform

for you to do your thing and to drop some bombs, but I've got two things that link into what you've come up with there. So I'm going to give a couple of bits. We haven't done multiplied by zero yet. Have you heard of that mental model? Yeah, it's an interest. It's not really a complex one. It's a really simple, like, everybody, like year three maps, I guess, knows that you can have 10 billion times, 322 million, add 52 billion.

But if you then take that number and multiply it by zero, you end up with zero. So I guess it's kind of talibs thing to try and avoid absolute ruin, try and avoid. Yeah, that that multiplier by zero, i.e. if you get caught as an athlete doing steroids, you're gone basically. Like, it's very hard. The guardless of talent, the guardless of whatever's going on. Yeah, identifies the weakest link in the chain. And no system is stronger than its weakest component, right?

But the same could be made for you have spent all your life working on longevity. You've been intermittent fasting. You've not been eating processed foods. You don't drink alcohol. You don't smoke. You don't do drugs. But one day you decide to drive without your seatbelt on

and get into a car crash. Like you're very dead. You know, you, you, it doesn't matter how healthy you are when you're very dead. And the same thing goes for you working real hard on your finances, on liberating yourself And the same thing goes for you working real hard on your finances, on liberating yourself so that you have freedom, so that you can pursue the things that you want,

so that you don't have any financial burdens or any responsibilities, or whatever it might be. But upon one drunken night of unprotected sex, either you get pregnant or you get somebody pregnant, and then there is a very big burden that you need to pursue. You go, you go, you go look after that, and it's like, okay, that's multiplying by zero. Like, doesn't matter all the good stuff, all the good stuff you've done in the past,

there is something now which is such a large burden. Maybe the, maybe it's not multiplying by zero for the kid, but it's definitely putting a very hard stop, you know, on a lot of the things that you, that you potentially had planned. And the point is that it wasn't something that was planned. So yeah, multiply by zero is a really important one, I think, for people to just look at where the weakest links in their chain are, right? Like a lot of the time we see this with productivity people say, oh, mate, I posted an image of alpha brain the other day, I don't take it that much. Just a new topic. And I got tons and tons of messages,

bro, is this any good? Like tell me, like, you know, what are the sort of effects that I might try and get it? And it's expensive as hell. You've got to pay an import charge from on it in the US because they haven't sorted though, like their customs tracking thing either. But if I post something up about Cal Newport's deep work

or doing Pomodoro's or like a new productivity strategy, no one cares. And it's like because that is the weakest link in their chain. And often it's the one that shows kind of the most, the most discomfort is associated with it. Yeah, it's a similar, like a bit of a model I've been thinking about as well, which is like product versus marketing. And it's somebody who's a marketer or operates the marketing world. You definitely, I don't know if Dean can put it in, but we can attach it to the notes.

But there's a recent like Google Trends of like the word best and the word cheap. And best is going like that. And cheap over time is just going like that. And I think that's a result of a huge focus on marketing and these hacks and without fixing the product. I always use the best example of, like, is the fire festival. Like, a fire festival for me is one of the most fascinating business cases where, as deceitful and arguably wrong what,, well definitely wrong what he did, you cannot deny that guy was a genius marketer

and a genius salesperson. And if you look at like great combos, if you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, you had Jobs, you obviously was a market for genius and then you had Wozniak who was a product genius. And obviously Jobs was like a product genius as well, but that combination of marketing and products is what made those guys so strong.

And I find that if you have jarool as your business partner, and not so, I always wondered if he had a Steve was NIAQ, how different would that fire festival have turned out? If he had like a cute for a boy, you can like execute and focus on the operations and made that party happen, maybe he would be a billionaire right now, Maybe he would be one of the best entrepreneurs of our generation. But the fact that he had jar all, and I always wonder if Steve Jobs had jar all, how different would he have been? If I had jar all, fuck knows what I'd be doing. So

I do sometimes when they're like, like, the product and the marketing, because you see it more and more, like what's fascinating? If one of the holes I've been down in quarantine is the Toby Lock Key, he was like the Shopify CEO. I think he's such an honest humble and like clear thinker. And what's fascinating is, as opposed sometimes, and I think wrongly, by the media shop of fine Amazon,

I wear Amazon, I centralizing e-commerce and Shopify are decentralizing it and making it about the merchants. People see Lookkey and Bezos as almost two opposing figures, which I don't think is true. I think they both admit that. If you look at their shareholders' letters from 2015 or even Bezos' 1999, it's always about two things. We don't care about short-term revenues.

We don't care about all this marketing stuff. All we care about is long-term thinking and customer satisfaction. So even like Shopify, one thing in like growth marketing that brands will do, if you as a growth marketer and you came in at Shopify early doors, one of the things you would have said to do is always have powered by Shopify on the store. marketer and you came and shopper fire early doors. One of the things you would have said to do is

always have powered by Shopify on the store. Therefore, like MailChimp do this. So, therefore, when somebody comes on the store and sees it, they'll go, oh, this is Shopify, I'll then use it. And as a result, Shopify would have a way bigger brand because they basically power, like, over 100 billion in e-commerce revenue. And there's so many people who don't know what Shopify is, who doesn't know what Shopify is who doesn't exist in this, but you know for a fact they bought the Shopify store, but Toby purposely was so merchant focused, refused to have that powered by Shopify there, because he knew that actually providing the merchants with as much value in the short term would

provide so much more long-term value. So you put the product in that case before the marketing, and I think we're going to see a shift more and more towards that. I do think market is still super valuable, but when you are so market in focus, so hack-focused, it only gets you so far. And I think that everybody cares more about the product at the end of the day. Even from just a non-financial viewpoint as well, there's more integrity associated with actually fulfilling the thing that you're saying that you're doing. If your company is there to enable the e-commerce provider, the e-commerce store, to maximize everything that they do, put your money where your mouth is. If you take your thumbnail watermark away,

and that makes an impact, that actually makes the store look better, then really, if you're sticking to your values, and that is your true values, regardless of what it does to revenue, you should be doing it. Again, in this world of shareholder agreements and early annual reports and stuff like that. That is the, it's going

to stand out, not only does it give you distinctiveness, but it genuinely should be more fulfilling to you. The only problem is when you've got shareholders who's desire for the bottom line outweighs that, I guess. You mentioned before as well, via festivals, something I've been thinking about so much since I watched the documentary, which is phenomenal, is how seduced we all are by success, right? So that guy, who's the guy that run it? What was his name again? Is it Billy? Billy McFarlane, that's it. So Billy McFarlane, the only reason that people slated him and that he's a crook and that he's trying to take advantage of people is because he failed. If he'd succeeded, even if he'd partially succeeded and it hadn't been a total nightmare, he would

have been hailed as marketing genius, new Steve Jobs, this, that and the other. There would have been so many people that said, I think this is an unfair way of doing marketing. I think that he's leveraging the lowest common denominator of influencer marketing and stuff like that. But had he have farted out a semi-successful festival, right? People would have said, oh my God, look at what this guy has achieved, look at how phenomenal the marketing was. Like, next year is going to be insane because we are so sed how phenomenal the marketing was. Like, next year's gonna be insane,

because we are so seduced by the end product. It's success by any means, right? Everybody just cares about, okay, can, is this person the next hype train? Is this person the next Steve Jobs? Is this person the next, whatever it might be? And yeah, I realized that the only reason that people slated it was because the festival failed, really not because of his methods in getting there.

I kind of get what you mean, but I think that then just goes back to the whole product and marketing thing. If you have the best CBO Facebook campaign where you have 10 ad sets structured perfectly and you've used dynamic creative testing to AB test everything and you're getting eight rowers on a pair of jeans. But the jeans turn up and there's a fucking rip through the crotch part. People are going to be mad at you, right? And I think rightly so, right? If you've advertised a product that isn't good enough,

I think that's almost a good thing. I think that this focus on the product is super important. I think it's going to be even a great, a great focus in the next 10, 20 years. I would agree. Also, there is a model that I got introduced to by Richard Shotton, who have you listened to that episode yet?

I listened to the first one, I've not listened to the second one. Good, because that means I can tell you this for the first time. So in a study, there was a number of different aphorisms that were given to people, like these sort of rules, right? And for instance, woes unite foes, right? That's one of them. But in another version of the study, they might have been told woes unite enemies. And what that indicated, and this was run over a number of different aphorisms, a number of different sentences, what it indicated was that people see rhyming sentences as more believable than ones that don't rhyme. And when they were asked in reflection, so why was it that you chose the, this is the most believable one or whatever.

They didn't, no one said like, oh, he was because it rhymed. And even they asked them, they were like, oh, so was it because it rhymed? No, no, no, it's got nothing to do with that. It's just, you know, I really feel like it connects with me and whatever it might be. But that wasn't the truth when you control for everything it wasn't the truth. It's because it rhymed. What that tells us is that mental fluency

is associated with truthfulness. And that has such huge implications, right? You know, Grant Cardone is someone who's unbelievably fluent. The way he's able to deliver things with power and with conviction and all this sort of stuff. And yet there's entire websites dedicated to calling him out for some of the stuff that he does. Now, that's not to make a value column, whatever it is, it's true or false, how he operates his business.

But you can't deny the fact that that is someone who is using mental fluency to augment their truthfulness, right? And I think that that kind of links into what you're saying there with this kind of marketing first approach, which again, hit it with a hammer, you find there's nothing inside. It's dangerous. Yeah, I agree. It takes once like a model I've been thinking about I've laid, which I kind of call like the linguistic matrix

or like a linguistic red pill. And I realize that how much of your reality is just shaped by the words that you have available and the ability to then put like placeholders on things. So even like a word that like Shorden Freud, for example, is a So even like, I word the like Shroden Freud for example is a word that's I think it's German, it's a very English thing of taking pleasure and somebody else's failure or pain. The ability to actually have that shunced into a word, a completely completely given ability to understand reality slightly differently,

but I think if you look right now like I Wanting I absolutely hate because it's just a team sport is that most modern politics and If you really if you look at most these like 280 character debates on Twitter where there's just all caps and swear words and clap and calling anybody with ifs at the end or Yeah, it's just it's both both teams are exactly the same and one of the things that is often an issue is that there's a whole if you can imagine you've got this whole like jenga tower that this bait is based on and they're sword fighting at the top is jenga tower but they still never ever define the fundamental words that they're

using so like sometimes they'll be debating about a specific word without actually defining it. Like even like two, two, like what examples I have that are not political, but let's say the word like ego for example, is an interesting one. Use it for so many different meanings that then two, I can then sometimes try

and understand something, but it's within the word ego, I've got five different meanings, and I think it completely distorts my view of reality. So like people will word ego, I've got five different meanings and I think it completely Distorts my view of reality. So like people will use ego for example in the Kanye West sense of Like thinking that I'm the fucking man and Like nobody can stop me that style or like the Michael Jordan on the court style of ego and then like the more like buddhist Eckhart totally perspective of ego is the sense of self, the sense that you're

an individual and you're not completely just an organism connected to all the billions of organisms out there. And I find that we actually should define the individual instances within that, to even have a clear understanding of reality. Like one of them that's fascinating as well is the word entrepreneur, because within the word entrepreneur, there's so many different kinds of entrepreneurs. My favorite example is Joe Rogan. I talk about media leverage. He has maybe what, like four or five members of staff, like him, Jamie, and I'm sure he's got a few

of the people behind the scenes. Does like a hundred plus mill revenue from his podcast alone? You know, he doesn't even have a personal assistant. Does he not? No, he said it on a podcast the other day, he says he refuses to have a personal assistant. He's like, fuck that.

Well, do I need someone to just tell me when the, the train tickets are booked for? Tell me when my flight leaves. It's like, I'll book the flight myself, motherfucker. So funny. I was probably wise quite well connected to everything that's going on as well. I think that's probably actually an advanced advantage to him.

But he has insane media leverage. But one of the things that you wouldn't be able to say about Joe is that he's like an entrepreneur, because when you think of entrepreneur, you think of like, okay, I'll give him 10 grand, he'll flip it into 20 grand and he'll do all these sales, that's not roving in the slightest, he's not a CEO, he's not that kind of guy. But he has a business worth over $100 million that employs a few members of staff with what, like 99% of how is that? No, I'm not. But there's an issue with that that we need to then define the words within the words,

because we end up just keep chunking, chunking further and up. And we, that's one of the reasons why I love Eric Weinstein, for example, because he just creates words all the time. And I find that you go through your whole life with these words that have been given to you rather than trying to actually create your own vocabulary based off what you're seeing in reality. You're always trying to outsource people to make words for you. It's really weird.

I think this probably strikes at why so many people talk past each other online. When you think you've got different points of view, you have two people that inherently want to disagree. So they're already looking for that disagreement, perhaps. Then they're all excited and anxious and stuff for being online and typing away some action in the keyboard. And then even the terms that they are using that they are debating aren't agreed on. It's like, bro, you're never, you might as well be speaking

different language. You know, you're never going to make that work. And this, I keep bringing this up. I'm going to do it again. If you have not read 1984, you have to go and read it, especially if you like the idea of what George is talking about here. I learned more from 1984 about the way that I operate, than I have done for a lot of personal development, self-development books, right? And the thing that it taught me was that the ability to articulate words, the ability to put your thoughts into a noise that comes out of your mouth or into words that go down on paper, is directly proportional to the quality of your thoughts.

Like if you can't say it, it never takes form. And if it never takes form, it's no longer an actual concept, it's just a notion. You know, it's like the smell of the thing that you think. And you're like, oh, that's interesting. It's kind of a bit like that. So roll that forward. The implication is if you want better thoughts, you need a bigger vocabulary. The more words that you

have at your disposal, genuinely, the better your, the quality of your thoughts is going to be. And this is why I've got such a love for language, right? Like a door, by picking up, blow the eight, I discovered the other day, which I absolutely adore, which is kind of like someone that gaffors and talks a lot about stuff without actually really saying anything, right? It's analogous to a ton of different words. But blow V8 has, like, that's cool. I now have a word that I can use for when someone is blow V8ing. But until I have that word, it's just a sense or it's me having to use another word, which is analogous to that, it's a proxy for that, right?

And yeah, not only does it make life richer, but it genuinely improves the quality of your thoughts. So I'm 100% on board with that. Yeah, it's almost like, rather than having all these detailed lines of code, somebody's just put it into one function and then you can just execute on that. It's so much smooth.

If you look at the way, I'm not the guy who talked about software systems, but if you look at the way that those are going, it's constant. I abstract where they're making it easier and easier and the chunking and chunking people's previous work. It makes sense that to be able to actually have a specific word as opposed to like a fluffy concept and then words within those words is a much precise and clear way of operating. One of the things I was thinking about, and this is a bit woolly, but the word time is itself quite deceptive and a bit of a proxy. I think obviously a lot of people in a weird situation right now

where they reflect on how they spend their time day to day. And you'll talk about, I work full time or I do XYZ. But time is life. That's what it is at the end of the day. It's a proxy for the world life. And when you actually then think about, I said, you're doing a full time job that you hate. It's actually a full life job that you hate, it's actually a full-life

job that you hate. You know what I mean? It's your life, but I think time is itself at this weird proxy for the word life, and we almost, it's almost a lot more existentialist if you have to use the word life. And I think it's actually quite a useful tool to change those two words. The worst time is this thing that you have money and it it's, it's just this, it's all you've got and it's slowly pouring away and it may end at any second, I guess. It's depressing as that sounds. Hey, man, if people don't want to be depressed, they should listen to a different podcast. It's the one resource that you can't not spend as well, right? Like you can save money,

you can save calories, can choose not to buy that coffee, you can choose not spend as well, right? Like you can save money, you can save calories, you can choose not to buy that coffee, you can choose not to eat that cake. You can't choose to not exist for the next hour. That time's going to be spent, so you just better choose that you spend it as well as you can. What do we got next? What's up next? So, one of the ones I've been thinking about her because of everything that's going on,

I imagine a lot of people have experienced it is like forcing functions. So something, it's almost, a lot of people talk about the wonders of freedom and the beauty of liberty and I completely like a green love freedom and love liberty, but sometimes that sounded like I'm a BDSM kind of guy. without sounding like I'm a BDSM kind of guy. There's some beauty to having restricted freedom in the sense that I always use the example. I know some lazy fuckers, like some really lazy people, including myself at times. But if they have to be at a job for 9am, they will get up on time and they will attend. But as soon as that's taken away, they'll begin up at 1pm, they'll get up on time and they will attend. But as soon as that's taken away, they'll begin to put 1 p.m. They'll get up at 2 p.m. And the only thing that's changed

is a forcing function of what? Daniel Bross is an example with two examples. One with a YC demo day. Like the ability, he says that a lot of Y combinators success, not success, but the reason one of the beauties behind going through YC is that you have a deadline at the end of it. And as a result, the work just fits to that deadline. If that deadline didn't exist, it maybe takes two years, maybe takes three years.

So that's like a hard forcing function. And he also says like one of the reasons why a lot of amazing technology, particularly in a defense space, comes out of Israel, it's because they have to, right? Like, you know what I mean? Like in the UK, there's not all the US, there's not as much attack on your like land or I'm gonna say, yeah. Yeah, no imminent danger shall we say? So that's one of the reasons why Israel has such a forcing function,

but Israel doesn't produce snapchats of the world. It doesn't really produce Twitter's of the world as a result because they don't have, when you have that more relaxed freedom, they tend to produce that, but when you have a forcing function, it can produce some amazing things like Peter T. Oversey, even now, the amount of companies who would never have in a million years let their employees work from home have now been forced to do it, and they're going, actually, we don't need an office anymore, we're going to go full remote. Like, it's crazy as a result of this,

like, forcing function that is a pandemic, I guess. Yeah, shout out to Chris Sparks, forcingfunction.com. He's a big lover of that. So how do you actually define what a forcing function is? I think it comes from the actual model itself, it comes from programming, but it's something that you just can't get passed without doing a certain thing.

But then the way you obviously chunk that for other areas is almost you're forced to do a certain thing, basically, all the pain of not doing it is way greater than the pain of putting it up. Is that even right? The pain of not doing it is way greater than the pain of doing it. So I think that's how I describe it. All the pleasure of doing it is way greater than the pleasure of not doing it. So just real simple pleasure and pain, incentives, which is another model I guess.

Where does the incentive start? But when you have like a dead, like even today, like we'll, like we'll dick around with like a podcast idea for ages, I refuse to do Skype and other years. Yeah, yeah, you are right indeed, man. Um, one of the things that I've been thinking about to do with that kind of forcing function and how it ties in is just Parkinson's law.

I can't remember whether we brought this up last time and I don't even know if it classes as a mental model, but we're free flow in today. We can do what we want. Parkinson's law work expands to fill the time given for it. So that's the same reason that you don't do your university assignment until the night before. It's the same reason that the project that you need in for work

requires an all night. It's to be pulled. And I think using a forcing function like that, when you think about the YC days and things, it actually requires you to focus on what the minimum viable product is as well. Like if you know that you've only got six weeks to complete this particular project for YC,

you're not going to bother this particular project for YC, you're not going to bother gesticulating for two weeks on whether the brand logo should be mostly read or mostly yellow. Like it's going to force you to focus on the things that move the needle. And when those degrees of freedom get expanded out, as you've identified right now, there's no boss telling you why you not awake at 9 a.m. What do you call it earlier on? A furloughed prenaur. Furlough prenaur, yeah. It's a furloughed prenaur, it's just the best. The absolute best. When you don't have that,

you don't have anybody who is the disciplinarian who's telling you to do these things, you realize, oh hang on, actually, or the only reason I was overcoming my own inertia was because of this structure, this buttress, this scaffolding that was layered around my life. And I think that those increased degrees of freedom are causing people a lot of, rightly so, they're causing people a lot of discomfort. As I've said on a number of different podcasts, I was taking a lot of pleasure in the beginning until I sort of checked myself and said, stop being a dick. I was taking a lot of pleasure with other people struggling to self-discipline. I was watching people suffer with the same

challenge that I faced as a self-independent entrepreneur for the last 13 years. I was like, oh, so hard working from home, isn't it? Can't imagine what that's like. And then I checked myself and I was like, how am I gonna fucking second mate? Like you need to, let's be a little bit more empathetic here. Like you shouldn't be taking pleasure at the fact that other people have stepped into your nightmare. You know?

Like, so, but it's, it's right, increased degrees of freedom for your forcing functions. Yeah, I just think that one of the things I always find actually like great content is whenever you hear somebody say, like, when they, when they turn 30 or when they turn 40, when they turn 50 units, either like a letter to their 20 year old cell, 30 year old cell, etc. One of the consistent themes seems to be like putting the proper things off or putting the things off that they should have done. And I think that for myself, I probably don't do enough, but I think in general, a lot of

the consistent themes when people talk about those regrets is that there wasn't enough forcing functions in place to actually get them to do it. It was always this pipe dream in the future. And I think that if we had more sometimes restricted freedom in certain areas that we purposely do ourselves, whether that's putting up like a just giving fun because you're gonna run a marathon or whatever it is, it actually works. Even though you whilst you're doing it,

you kind of hate yourself for actually putting yourself through it, but at the end, you're always like, fan clock, I did that. I think it's a beautiful concept even though it feels horrific at the time. That's really, really, really clever way of putting it together, man. Yeah, I mean, everyone that's listening has decided to obsess over the things that don't matter because it's a form of procrastination on getting onto the stuff that actually does. And, you know, for me with this podcast, like I still feel like I got it out early,

like, you know, the start of 2018, by no one's estimations is early, but by now, like when you look at how many people are now bringing them out and how much more the podcast network is growing and stuff like that, it feels early, right? But at the time, I'd already messed around for six months. I'd spent six months I'd gone through tons of different brands, I'd played with different and then I came up with Modern Wisdom like at 3am woke up and was like, add this name.

I was like, yes, finally got the name. Right, now onto the logo. And you're like, bro, it doesn't matter. People want to tune in because of what you say, because of the content that you put out. And in reflection now, I can say pulling the pin on that and just deciding to do it and messing up with the audio, messing up with the video and not having support and not doing this correctly and doing all these problems, right? You're like, over time, right now, I am so glad that past me did that because present me

is reaping all of the rewards and you just iterate over time. What we got next, what else you got on the menu? One of my favorite ones at the minute, and I love it when you have, because the thing about the models as well is that it's sometimes just a bit fluffier until you have like real world examples that you can rest it on. So global versus local maximum. And again, as I mentioned, I've been going down a bit of a Tobias looky hole, the Shopify CEO, and he uses a great example to explain the global versus local maximum, which I'll come on to, but it's basically local maximum, local maximum is operating. So let's say, for example, it would be focusing on optimizing one specific variable.

So that may be the focus on getting the best exhaust possible for your car, constantly trying to optimize 1% gain for the exhaust. When you realize you're not going to fucking steer wheel. So you've got to sometimes, whereas that's what the global maximum is, of like looking like almost from an absolute objective perspective at the whole thing, and then optimizing for that. So one of the entrepreneurs that doesn't get anywhere near enough attention, because it's not sexy, and you'll realize this, like everybody knows who Mark Zuckerberg is, but nobody knows who the CEO of like city bank is or Goldman, right?

Because it's way more B2B. It's not B2C, but Malcolm McLean. Do you know Malcolm McLean is? So basically he was the guy that basically came up with the idea of shipping containers. He was a comic-camerate, and this is where I'll often He was a comic, and this is where I'll often global maximum will come from. At the time, everybody was focused on getting faster and faster ships, so we could basically create globalization as we know it now, where you can get bananas from the other side of the world in January. And they were getting faster and faster ships. And he was, as a truck driver, was one day on, I think it was Thanksgiving, was sat there

in nine hours with cargo on his back waiting for people to get each individual box off and then back. And he says, why don't we just truncate altogether and you just take that off as a container and you can just place it on the ship and then you literally take, and then once the ship arrives, you can just take the one container, stick it onto a tray in all rail and ship it that way. And everybody basically laughed at him and thought it was ridiculous idea because they were optimized on getting each individual box off at the time. And for some context of how good this idea was, at the time it was $6 a ton doing the

previous method. And they were focused on the local maximum of trying to make the ships go faster. When he implemented what he did, it went down to 16 cents a ton. Oh, God. So it goes to show that, and also instead of a week for them to load a ship,

it was then eight hours for them to load a ship. So you think about him as an individual on the global maximum perspective, like the impact that has on the world is insane. Like every trade, everything imaginable. The fact that there's not a day named after him goes to show that if you're not beat to see it, it's not sexy, you're rich and anonymous, but like to me, that is a perfect example. Now, I think I think he's dead now, I think, because this is like, um, uh, I think it, yeah, this is like the 50s when it began to come in place. I think he's dead now. But, um, the, but the Shopify CEO, he has a great example where he, Toby says that when he gets asked in the interview, um,

I think it's on the knowledge project where he says, my whole goal as the CEO is to assume right now that where we're at in modern day business, I'm at a six. Maybe the best company in the world is like a six. The goal is to get it to a seven. And that's my life's mission to get to a seven. So he's basically working on the assumption that he's always wrong.

And it's kind of true, but if you look at at sport for example, if you look at football or soccer or whatever you want to call it, like the gap between the modern athletes and 40 years ago is just huge. But we weirdly have this thing at the time where we assume that this is the best thing possible, that the iPhone is like, is never going to get better than this, but it always does. And I think the first thing to do is assume that everything's wrong and your goal is to be to be less wrong. And I think that then helps with potentially getting a nearer to a global maximum, if that makes sense.

I love that concept, man. That's the first time that I've heard of it. It's kind of like a rate limiting step from chemistry as well, right? Like, which also ties into what we were talking about before, which is the weakest multiplied by zero, like you're only as strong as your weakest link. What did I have in my head there? How do I do in my head? Oh, yeah. Can you do why it's better to avoid failure than to face success or why not being stupid is better than trying to be clever? I can talk about it, but I can't necessarily do it in action. That's for sure.

Yeah, I think, yeah, just I guess looking at things that are going to take you down, some I struggle with, but again, it goes back to that multiplied by zero. I think a model that's actually quite useful for identifying that. I've been playing since quarantine, been playing a ton of chairs. I'm still a chef, but I've been playing a ton. There's cool lessons that come from that. One which is that your assumptions will, assumptions is everything and there's always the right move that was there. The same way with the shipping container. It wasn't like that idea didn't exist. It was just that people's assumptions was a better way to do it. They was focusing on the local maximum rather than the global maximum. But there's

a Gary Casper of point, which Gary Kasper was one of the best chess players of all time. And I think sometimes people extrapolate chess to life and there's loads of lessons you can take, which I do think partially true, but partially bollocks, but there are a few. And one of the ones that Kasper of has

is the way he used to analyze his game. So let's say, for example, he made a mistake where he moved the bishop to E4. Most people would come at it from analyzing that move. So they would go, OK, I moved bishop to E4 and then I got in a trap and I lost my bishop. Therefore, never do bishop to E4. And instead, what Casper of the way he analyzed his game and what he said was so different about his approach was to not just analyze the move, but analyze the thinking behind the

move, like what did I have for dinner that day, what was I thinking about at the time, what assumptions did I have in my head, and you have almost this system mindset, which is similar to systems versus goals, but looking at things in a much wider system. So like Safi Bakali talks about this where he uses the example of, so you come home and you argue with your wife after a hard days work, work for work about the dishes, for example. Like almost thinking about the individual item or the pawn to, the bishop to E4 would be, okay, I'm never going to bring up the dishes again, but instead actually try and think about what was the thinking before all that happened and you go, oh,

actually, the cause of the mistake was me coming home from work tired and angry and I took it out on my wife. And the good thing that the genius thing about this is if you went from perspective of, okay, let's not just use the, let's never argue about the dishes again, and rather instead focus about the, let's not come home from work, angry, or is the, you prevent thousands of similar mistakes from happening rather than that just one. Again, that's an idea that is lovely in theory,

but even harder to implement, and I'm not perfect at it at all, more important. Well, it's much more scalable, right? And we were talking about this before we started where I was saying about strategies versus character and the fact that a lot of strategies supplement for poor character traits, you know, like a strategy of only ever having three beers so that you never cheat on your wife is a strategy to ensure that you never cheat on your wife, but the trait of being faithful to your wife is much more scalable, you know, regardless of how much alcohol you have. Now, that's not to say that you should

still increase risk by having a bunch of booze when you're in a strip club or whatever it might be. But the principle is the same. And I think it's kind of like this malignant side effect of the 21st century. And we contribute to this. I'm contributing to this. And I think it's kind of like this malignant side effect of the 21st century. And we contribute to this, I'm contributing to this. And we're doing it right now that we give people these piecemeal solutions to what is a very global problem. It's like, if you work on your character, if you work on your values and your virtues, what is it that matters to you? What is the reason that you are here on this planet for? Like genuinely, as an existential, as terrible of an existential crisis inducing question as

that is. Like what is the reason for that? Because that, those values, those virtues, those non, non-compromisable reasons for your existence are much more scalable than having a strategy about like the best way I once read a book about how's the best to bring kids up there for I'm going to follow this strategy. It's like, well, yeah, but where do you think that strategy came from, that strategy probably came from people who loved their kids and did the things that were right for their kids. So there's again, like that marketing versus product thing, there is a combination between the deployment of a strategy and what is the essence of the reason

that the strategy exists? And can you combine the two? Can you deploy something which is effective and also have something to back it up? It's, yeah, it's much easier in theory and hard in practice. Does that quote? I don't know if it's Taliban, but I know it might be Yogi Bear and Taliban uses it in theory. There's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

And I think this ties me on to another thing I've been thinking about of this is a model that comes from I'm a fine of him. I even I think he steps sometimes Sometimes it always like his content, but I think on the whole I think he's actually fantastic and there's a lot of good for the world, which is Gary V And he has a concept called dirt and clouds Which I think I actually like probably his best video and these best piece of content, which is the way he thinks about things is purely from a dirt and clouds perspective. So the way he defines that for himself is the cloud is like the high-end vision and the high-end

principles and the high-end characters that we're talking about. So for him, I think it's fine, like the New York Jets and providing like unreal value to the world and his funeral, I think Gary talks about this. He wants more people at his funeral, the other funeral, that's how he defines every action by. And then the dirt for him is like the specific tactical things of, so for him, it will be knowing the TikTok was a platform to get on before anybody else. And he was investing a load of time on time on that or the reason why pretty snapchat because he's got hands on. Similar to the way Rogan doesn't have a personal assistant that if you do have like a PA or with Gary if he outsources it to every bit like the junior employees, he's no longer in the dirt, he's no longer relevant and he loses touchy things but the dirt and the clouds. So like the

high end top level theory and then the pure execution, the pure dirt and the clouds. So like the high end top level theory and then the pure execution, the pure action. And then basically it says everything else in the middle, which is where you can so easily spend your time. It's just absolute garbage. And it's much easier said than done. Obviously, only focus on the dirt and the clouds, but the politics, the the the the nonsense just spending time like doing passive things that you don't even enjoy is just pointless. But the actual dirt and the clouds are the two most important things. Throw back to the first episode, grey area thinking, barbell strategy. You mentioned there, you couldn't work out whether it was Taleb or whether it was Yogi Bear or whatever it was. And I mentioned to you on the phone, I was going to, I was going to red pill you

on this. Churchill, Chillion Drift, have you heard of it? Oh, yeah. No. Okay. We'll wait. Churchill, Chillion Drift is the term coined by British right, right, a Nigel Reese, which describes the widespread misattribution of quotes by obscure figures to more famous figures, usually of their time period. The term connotes the particular agrarianess of misattributions to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and this is just so funny, they always slide up, right?

It's never like John that has the ice cream van that came up with this thing. It's always like Talib or Neval or there we go another one for Bingo. It's always that and I find myself doing it as well. There's that quote that keeps on being attributed to Aristotle, which is we are what we repeatedly do excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. And that's supposedly Aristotle, but then if you actually dig into the etymology of that particular quote, you find that there's quite a lot of criticism and sort of skepticism around who came up with it. And Richard Shorten told me, I can't remember the website, I'll have to try and find it. That there's basically an equivalent of like ancestry.com, but for quotes.

And you can go back through the tree of where it first appeared. And then you'll see it slide, that the church-hillion drift will occur over time as it gets attributed to like more, more and more famous people. But I think again with that, that's probably again another kind of malignant side effect of the 21st century that we presume

that people who are in positions of authority and in positions of power are the only ones that can deploy wisdom, you know. On that note, there's a bit in zero to one. This is a exact quote, because I know he says this. Peter's Peter Teal says that he uses that example where I think we talk about the quote is it where it's apparently that Einstein said compound interest is the eight wonder of the world over there. Yeah, eight wonder of the world. And obviously Teal goes on on that point and he says that actually it probably wasn't Einstein who said that, but he goes to say that Einstein's brand was so good. It's actually quite ironic that it obviously compounds after he dies that people are still misattributing quotes to him, so it goes to actually show that compound

interest is the 800 world. But on that note though, there is some weird contagion that goes on where I find I'll have ideas in my head about ways to behave or things that are true. And when I actually try and backtrace the source, I may have overheard it on a podcast or I may also say, oh, you know, the XYZ was created by this person. And then I just wouldn't really think anything of it, but he actually really certain. And then I'll catch myself going, oh no, it was XYZ, who created that, you know. And then sometimes I go, I have caught myself, like sometimes making points and I go,

that might not be true actually. And I have to, you have sometimes have to call yourself out because you can easily, if somebody says stuff with enough confidence, you just pass it on. And then before you know it, it becomes, it becomes a gospel. It's really weird. Mental fluency is associated with truthfulness, man.

Say something with enough conviction and some minority of people will believe. If you want the best example of that is Frank Abingale. Yeah. Catch the East Japan. So obviously the Leonardo DiCaprio did a film on him, but there's a talk at Google, Frank Abingale, where he basically tells his whole story. It's actually quite emotional. He talks about his lack of dad. He's obviously turned his life around now.

He works for the FBI. And if you want to talk about, you understand why he was the greatest con artist ever, just because of how well he speaks with absolutely no self-doubt when he tells stories. It's crazy. I think he says like, er, twice we're in the whole speech, it's incredible.

He's just, this guy was pretending to be a pilot at the age of 16 or whatever, right? I think you can see why. So volzy, man. For the right, think about that. Sorry, I always had this interesting one, which is the best comment, everybody does, there's documentaries on that

and who the best comment ever were. Realistically, there's probably, the best comment can everybody just, this documentary is on that here, the best comment ever were. Realistically, there's probably, the best comment can't be in a documentary because there's still nobody knows who they are. This is weird like survivorship bias, right? Is that the inverse? That is a really weird... Conmem bias.

Yeah, conmem bias. What's next? What's next on the menu? What we got? So in terms of what I've got here, this is a bit of a weird one that I've been thinking about. Winestein brought it up in the Rogen podcast about this concept of like K-Fade, which is again, I'm still struggling to wrap my head around, but we've seen it more and more. And it kind of goes on to what I'm talking about. Then about this weird contagion where

professional wrestling is something that people know is fake, but people kind of still love it. And you're seeing it, I think you're seeing it at a political level with Trump that you seem to have, again, I don't wanna go down to politics where I have it also, literally, if I start chatting about politics one of 30 seconds to jump in and change the topic. But you have him, for example, where you have,

obviously you have the, like, die hard believers, but you also have people who are in spans that know he's playing this weird game and that he's purposely saying things, almost like, from a market in or a sales perspective. And people almost, this K-Fade thing, like, almost applies to yourself. I find actually sometimes being irrational is actually a very rational strategy. So let's say, for example, this concept of resistance, which comes from the War of Art book where Stephen Pressfield says like procrastination is this external force that's trying to conquer you and defeat you. Of course, that's absolutely bollocks, but I think

interpreting it is true is actually an effective strategy. And there's probably nothing more, if something's effective, you could argue it's, it may be a serrational, but maybe it's the rational thing to do and then it gets something done. You see it with professional athletes, how many professional athletes are atheists? It's quite rare. And I think whether there's a god or there's not a god at what? Probably believing that as you about to go in an octagon and fight, or as you're about to go in a football, pitch, or lull cup final, that God is on your side.

Having that placebo in place is actually probably very, very useful. So is that like a athletes Pascal's wager? Kind of in a way, like, there's benefits, there's benefits of irrationality and we've seen it more and more like this blur between, you see it with the fire festivities, like fake it to you make it, but sometimes that becomes,

and I think there's a negative strain of it, which I think we need to avoid, but sometimes it can be used as a positive side of things of almost believing something irrational, but it actually works as an effective measure. Well, I mean, it's- It's apparently not. It highlights- It highlights the fact that we are not perfectly rational beings. And the more that I read into evolutionary psychology and its book called Blind Sight by Prince Gouman and Matt Johnson,

holy shit man, like I had the guys on, they're just a small, just a couple of dudes. And it just shows how fallible we are. Our minds are completely just useless. The fact that we don't just get hit by open traffic is a miracle as far as I'm concerned. And the more that you realize that, the more you realize that an irrational system trying to be fixed with rational solutions is probably not always going to work. And that when you add those two things together, you can manipulate the system into rationality by time-zing irrationality by irrationality,

as long as it's the right levels of each, right? I'm a quote from Shane Parish, actually, which was put on his FS.blog newsletter, which kind of relates to what you're talking about there. Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem is mutated or disappeared, often it is still there as strong as it ever was that's Donald Kingsbury. That's that's name. It's cool, isn't it? I think that kind of relates to a lot of what Jordan Peterson talks about as well, right?

You know he talks about these archetypes and these these kind of meta themes that have been with us for years or millennia. And when you read anything that's ancient but classic Marcus Aurelie's Meditations or whatever it might be, you realize that the problems that you attribute as side effects of the 21st century are just inbuilt parts of our nature that everyone's been fighting with for forever. And I love, I really like that.

And that's another Rory Sutherlandism actually. There's one And that's another Rory Sutherland, isn't actually. There's one for Bingo for Rory Sutherland, which is that he says, the opposite, what is it about the opposite of a good idea, not always being a, the opposite of a bad idea or also being a bad idea or the opposite of a, I'm gonna butcher this.

Give me one second. I know what you mean. This is Rory. It's so sorry, bro. Here's me trying to try and quote you Rory. So that I'll end opposite of an idea. Let's see if this comes up. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.

That's it. Don't design for average. It doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of retention affects the nature of our experience. Thanks, Rory. Yeah, it depends how you define rationality, but if you look at it almost as again, but rationality may be one of those words that has numerous words within it that we talked about earlier, but some of the most rational people I know seem to end up with the most average or boring results.

Whereas because by very definition they're often like following the crowd's logic and everything that makes looks perfectly logical at the time. So going back to the box container example earlier. So I think actually being a bit weird, again it's a bit of a barbell. It can even go horrifically bad or horrifically right. And I think that the religion in professional sports is a perfect example of that. And I think we need more and more weird people. I think it's very... everybody seems to play this point scoring game now online. And I guess it's driven by getting likes and getting more and more followers. But by very definition, you need people who go

completely against everything that's currently there to actually get the desire. Like if you look at going back to the shipping container, there's the reason why that's there is, because you had a very, very stubborn man who looked like an absolute idiot to a lot of people. And I think we've seen the death of that. Why do you think it's about this? Where we have a focus on excellence now, becoming the best at your craft, whereas we don't have that many rebels of people who actually go,

that whole craft is a load of nonsense. We should be doing it this way instead. We should, like, the guy, the table tennis player, I think we checked about this previously, who decided to put like foam on the bat. And as a result, he was like the worst player on the Japanese team, and all of a sudden he was the best of all time, or you have like the Fosprey flop.

The way now the high jump is now jumped as a result of him. But he was mocked for a while. And obviously now everybody does it that way. And I think that with social media now it's a bit harder to be a maverick, it's a bit harder to be a weirdo. And I think we often chastise people for thinking differently. Like even like Elon Musk, whatever criticisms or praise you have of it, a lot of people at the minute are going like, look how erratic and weird he is. And they go, yeah, no shit, like do you not think it takes an imagined him to come up with the idea of building a rocket company? It's clearly a weird individual.

Clearly, it doesn't pick up on social cues as much as other people, otherwise you don't get that result. So I do think irrationality, obviously, has its downsides, but a lot of people don't talk about its upsides. I love it, man. I don't know whether it's just the particular sliver

of the world that I'm exposed to, but I'm not sure how much I agree with people kind of compromising themselves down to the lowest common denominator or popularity being kind of the first thing that they search for. I see now an increasingly burgeoning underground movement of people who are fully embracing their true nature as long as it's legal. And coming up with ideas which are contrarian and not being afraid to put them out online. line. Obviously, there's particular spheres within which this can be a little bit more challenging politics or, I guess, rights as well, law, stuff like that. But in terms of world views, personal development strategies, things like that, there's a million different iterations and subcultures of things that you want. Like, if you wanted to spend a year

in the desert where the piece of rope and a top and a bottle, a couple of bottles of water, there's probably out there a holiday company that would be able to do it for you and would keep supplying you with water or something like that, you know. And as the market starts to reward people who don't just want to do the status quo, I think that increasingly people will feel more and more empowered to be themselves. And this is why I know you've got a particular soft spot for Eric Weinstein. I'll let you riff on that a little bit if you want to about why you think that he's so good. But having someone like Rogan who is kind of on the surface a very typical every man alpha bro who has this ridiculous reach, him giving someone

like Eric or Lex Friedman, right? Like there's no way that Lex should have been on Rogan's pocket. He's been on like five or six times in the last probably 18 months pocket. He's been on like five or six times in the last probably 18 months maybe. He's been on a ton. And now Lex has got his own ridiculously big podcast and he's getting cool people on it, all this sort of stuff. And you're like, what, you know Lex is definitely on the spectrum, I absolutely adore him.

Lex, if you're listening, I'd love you to reply to my email. But he's great, but you're listening, I'd love you to reply to my email. But he's great. But like, why him, you know, and then you have someone who who permits these subcultures to rise to the surface and the more that you have role models like that, of people who are unapologetically just doing them, you know, like, just do your thing, sister. Like, you get more that you've got those people doing that. I think it sets a fantastic example for people moving forward. Yeah, I completely agree.

I think that's one of the things that Rogan has done very well in the comedy space, but wider that he is the most probably positive son man on the planet. He's maybe a matter of people who owe careers to him and like, it's incredibly talented people. And he's done a lot of good for the world and that he's constantly bringing people up, but it's not this negative some game because I think he quickly realized that attention is everywhere and there's seven billion people on the planet, so providing more and more positive some I think is better.

A slightly new one to note though is that, and even you may have this to some extent, you may try and be like the most, become the most enlightened version of yourself, but when you're under the name Chris Williams-Surnin, you have, you still have your identity to protect. You're still always playing a bit of a, at least I, I know I have to, you only play this bit of a weird ego game that you still have an identity to protect. And often the best going back to like either end of the spectrum, the best accounts on the internet, I'd say, and the worst accounts on the internet are often anonymous because they're then free to do things about their

identity. And you have, I look at this, you look at the social knock on motor, like if the person who created Bitcoin was known, like he would either be, well, I, God knows what would happen. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, what would happen. I imagine the purpose of reason why he or she did that, and I think it's worked out quite well. We say we've like Jed McKenna, the writer. I think there's something about a non-immunity at times that people want to banish from social media because of the trolling that goes on,

but I actually think it's an incredibly important thing in protecting people's identity, and you can then be a bit weirder. And I think there's, I would be surprised if there's actually a lot of anonymous accounts out there of people who are very famous and well known and they actually have sub-anonymous accounts as well. So we can put out a bit of ideas.

So we can put out a bit of ideas. So we can put out a bit of ideas. So we can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. We can put out a bit of ideas. Eric. Going back to that Eric has this weird thing where when he's doing he's like 18 hour map sessions trying to figure out the geometric patterns of the universe.

He talks about it of what's the condition where you can just sometimes say the wrong words and swear a lot. Correct. Correct. Yeah, so he calls it like voluntary Tourette. So you'll sit by a room and himself, and he'll just, this is all he has to get, but he's, this is my age great.

He's so, Eric. Eric doing an Eric. And he's therefore like in the mindset of like, just fully thinking different to everybody else. Yeah, it's fascinating. I love it, man. Um, what else, what else we got on the, or do you wanna do an, do you wanna,

do you wanna riff on Eric for a bit, or do you wanna, do a, do you want to join a riff on Eric for a bit or do you want to join a go into some else? No, I think, I think what are the points where it's to go back to, I just have it ripped down. I was trying to do is that when we went back to the leverage thing as well, one of the points I didn't make at the end,

which is what Steve Jobs says, which is, we go back to the whole bicycle, the human on the bicycle being the most effective thing, which is that the internet or the computer, I think he says the computer at the time, is the bicycle of the mind. And I think that's one of the most beautiful ways of understanding, like leverage, a modern leverage. And I think that the, yeah, there's a lot of,

with everything that's going on, there's gonna be so many careers that come out of the internet. And just absolutely fascinated by the space. It's beautiful to see. Yeah, I agree, man. I think it's gonna be interesting to see what happens after this, you know, like, it's all well and good having a global pandemic in a society that's in the early 1900s that can

adapt a little bit of change but not tons and certainly not globally. But when you have a site which is able to move as quickly as ours is now and has technology can do leverage, can have instant communication, you know, all that sort of stuff. The pace of change, when change is forced upon it, kind of almost bounces back twice as hard. You know what I mean? It's like throwing the tennis ball at the wall, and then the wall moving towards you,

like a tennis racket and whacking you back in the face with it. So I think that'll be really interesting. Tell you one thing, so this is only going to be probably for British people. This is just something to not even a mental model, but it was something I was thinking about the other day while I was in the Azteh, self-service thing. And I've seen tons of people complain about how annoying the Azda self-service narrator lady is. So you

can imagine if you're American, you're listening to this, you're in Costco or wherever it might be, like Target or something, and you're going through one of the self-service checkouts. And in Azda, you're going to have to imagine this. So you're scanning your stuff. And the lady's voice that says, thanks, that scan, now put it in the basking at the bagging area, is so quick. And it does not stop, right? So you just got like, thanks, that scan, and you're like, fuck, that I don't want to hear it. And you're thinking, this is every single time. And you might have 40 items in your basket. For those of us that are AirPod Pro's aficionados, it kind of doesn't really matter so much. Turn that noise constantly non-boy. It's super annoying. And what I realized was actually

that because you can cut it off if you're super quick, so that could be programmed in to ensure that people scan their stuff, put it in the bagging area as quickly as possible because they don't want to hear that lady's voice. I'm like, Azda, you smart, smart little guy. It's so fun. Even within that, you've got two things.

You've got like second, third, all the consequences that come of like bugs and stuff like that. And you have like second third order consequences that come of like bugs and stuff like that. And you have like the psychological versus the logical, one of my favorite Rory Sutherland things, which I guess we briefly mentioned earlier, but how things are, you have the like engineering efficiency of like logic of 1 plus 1 equals 2. But then you have this weird psychological irrational world that human beings operate under. I'm not sure if it's still true, but when the whole corona thing happened, they were reports that like the corona being a sales like plummeted.

Oh, bro, look, the worth, I think it's like a hundred million that they've gone down by and Americans were surveyed. And over a third of Americans said that they would not buy a coronavirus fear of infection. But this is one of the things that is purely psychological, like you can see, like psychologic, that even I think the people who would say they wouldn't drink coronavirus anymore, because I reckon you've got two forms of consumers, you've got the ones who are consciously, like almost idiot, to like, yeah, I won't drink corona. And then you've actually

got a lot of people who, for whatever reason, they just, they're maybe less likely to buy it because they're going to get a soul. I'm going to fancy a, I fancy a Madello now. Exactly. There's no Madello virus out there with it. But it's weird, but that's a, that's a thing, isn't it? And that, like, you've seen that there where there's clearly no logic behind it. But in our heads, there is a form of logic. And I think that a rational community will often just dismiss that as stupidity and idiocy, but I think it's supposed to show a lot about the way we think and the way we operate. What's really bizarre?

Well, also naturally risk-averse creatures, right? And rightly so, when you see or when you learn the multiplied by zero mental model that we dropped earlier on, like, it makes sense. It makes sense to have an existential fear of walking out of your door. It makes sense to double check that that condom doesn't have a hole in it. It makes sense to make sure that you're wearing your seatbelt, you know? Like, of course it does. And that again, it links into the quote from Shane Parish. Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems,

throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Like that's why you have these things over time and I spent my birthday this year in Athens. So I spent it cycling around Athens seeing the Stoa Poicoli, which is where Xeno of Sittium created Stoicism. So Stoicism, Stoa is like a sort of building verandotype thing. And it's the Stoa. The Stoa Poiclet is where Stoicism was created. So I'm walking through the gardens where Seneca and Plato would have walked, right? And Xeno of City, which is like

modern-day Cyprus, would have done as well. And I'm walking through there and I'm looking around and we went on this amazing tour, anyone that goes to Athens, the mythology tour is fantastic. And you're looking at these ancient stowers and buildings and you go see the Acropolis, right, and you go up into the Temple of Nike and the Parthenon and all that sort of stuff. And, um, you're looking at the stories that are displayed in these huge, uh, sculptures and all the different, all the different elements that, uh, parts of these stories. And you realize you're like, hang on so much of what they're talking about here are universal, universally applicable laws.

The things which then maybe they were symbolic, perhaps there was something that was only believed in a very narrative sense. Everything was personified, right? Because it was stories. There wasn't certified fact checking, you know, there was no, There wasn't a certified fact checking. You know, there was no, what's that fact checking website for when people have rumours, not Wikipedia, the other one. I know. I know. I know. Snopes.

Snopes. Yeah. There's no, like ancient snopes or whatever, just a bunch of stone tablets that you can go through. But I was just walking through and it really, really made me appreciate standing on the top of the Acropolis, looking out over Athens, seeing all of this beauty and wisdom, but symbolically. And I think in like a hyper rational society, what happens is that we discard the wisdom of the past.

You know, there's been people around for a lot longer than you. And I know that there's value in science and I know that there's value in logical and reduction like reductionist reasoning. But there's been a lot of minds working at this for a long time. I also think that you mentioned then that you just scarred the wisdom of the past. I also think when you're so consensus focused or, so television is that example of the absence of evidence is an evidence of absence and you you realize this, like, people like quote, like there's no study for that, bro, there's no study for that.

And you've seen, like, with all the health prices going on, I have this thing's constantly changing, then, people who were saying things three months ago, and how wrong and now, now that's wrong, and it's constantly changing. But I think to go back to the home, more mental models, not only do you discard the wisdom of the past, you also discard,

and probably even more importantly, or at least equally or significantly importantly, the wisdom and the value of the future trends as well. Because I think that, let's say, if in 2009 somebody was talking to you about cryptocurrencies, you can what do you want about? It was just so against the consensus. And if you have such a closed mind of where there's been studies so far or where Goldman Sachs are putting their money, you're just always gonna get average results because you're following the crowd and don't get me wrong.

It may actually be a safe investment strategy. You may just get normal, you know what I mean? You never go to zero. So at least you might be safe. But you rarely ever get to see specific knowledge, like the intricacies of frontiers and nuance. And that's why I love hanging around with curious people because you'll find

that you'll tell you the weirdest new thing that's happening. So an example of this will be, let's say you've got into Facebook marketing in 2010, when it was seen as this like fab, why would anybody advertise next to a farm-built thing, then a photo of like some relationship status? That was such a weird thing, but if you would have been on that frontier and been that weirdo, you had so much future value. And I think particularly for young people, like there's so much value on being on the

edge of frontiers as opposed to going. As you've seen now, everything that's happened, actually a job at Deloy or a big consultancy for her might not be the most like the safest option actually. The riskier option is often in taking no risks. I think the edge of specific knowledge is fascinating and I think that we have to be a bit weird. Man, I absolutely love that. I think as well, we keep on harping on about it. We did on the first one and I created an entire video off the back of a quote about you, what you set me on, thinking about weird people and the way that we are and stuff like that. But I really do hope that some of the things that we talk about do kind of give people the license to embrace their ununiqueness and their own individuality. And again, like this isn't for either of us to say, like both of us know that we're just

fallible, shavin' chimps, right? And that we're totally like not even slightly actualized. And we haven't got a clue what's going on. But one of the things that I do know is true in this life is that your unique offering to this world is your power. Like there is no one else by definition who has your life experiences and your genetic makeup and has inhabited all of the different space, the particular spatial coordinates that you have, it's impossible, it hasn't happened. Therefore, by synthesizing all of those things, by synthesizing the way you were brought up

and your traumas and your predispositions and your fears and your joys and your successes and everything, by adding that together, that is your competitive advantage. That is how you move the needle in the world and in your own life. So on that, one of the, my going back to leverage a little bit, is like the mental model of almost like a judo throw, of like using something's own momentum against itself

and therefore you apply a lot less force. And the biggest thing, and certainly I struggled with, and I think most people do, if you know one of the out of the crowd, you don't want people to think you're weird, you don't want people to think you're weird, you don't want people to think you're a loser. It's just so socially conditioned and probably biologically programmed. But almost to flip that on its head and go to yourself, like, almost have a razor in place, which is, if people don't think you're weird, if people don't aren't like

sniving laughing about you a little bit, you're probably almost definitely not taking enough risks. And that's fine, if you just wanna fit in, that's fine, but you almost have to reframe that to yourself to try and judo throw that social condition in that biological programming and go, if that's not happening, I'm by very definition, I'm just fitting in with the crowd, I'm not taking any risks at all.

So is that McGill's razor number two, the weirdness razor? I mean, releasing more razors than gelat at the minute. Oh, look at that mic drop. I love it. So is this quote from Atomic Habits that James Clears got? I always come back to this. Changing your habits often requires you to change your tribe. Each tribe has a set of shared expectations. Behaviors that conform to the shared expectations are attractive, behaviors that conflict with

the shared expectations are unattractive. It's hard to go against the group, often changing your behaviors requires you to change your tribe. So a lot of the time now, I'm a big subrite, the advocate, right? And this is one of the things that I actually use. It's a razor technically that I used to work out whether your friends want the best for you, whether you should stay friends with them. It's like, if when you start to enact behavior change and grow, your friends don't support you. Instead, they get triggered by the fact that their own shortcomings are being identified by your growth. You are in the wrong group of friends. Like the opportunity

for you to do a podcast, the first thing that I think is, fuck, I want to listen to that, I want to subscribe to that, I want to help you. We've been talking about how to do your audio, about what Mike you need to buy, about what webcom you need to put all this sort of stuff, right? Like, I want that for you because I don't feel threatened by your growth. I feel like if you were to grow that it would not only grow me, but I just want the best for you, right? There's a lot of people out there who have friends that that don't want the best for them. Yeah, it's true. Or sometimes it's not even what they're best for them, but their conditioning may be so different. I keep seeing great tweets of like, if you post, oh, I've just started my masters,

or I've just started another degree, like, or I've just graduated, which I think I swear, who doesn't graduate, unless you drop out, how do you fail like a modern non-stem degree is insane? Like, it's harder to fail than it is to. But it is, that's why. If you post that on, I don't mean to be too rude or anything, but if you post that on there with your certificate,

everybody gets hundreds of likes and it's like this, every graduation day, there's this big thing about it. But realistically, when you break it down to first principles, you've entered a horrific amount of debt to get a piece of paper, which I don't think is as meaning versus like the full anti-college university people make out because there's definitely like social value, et cetera, et cetera that I think online courses have not been able to do yet.

But if you then contrast that way when friends like, so I've just launched this new business and you get like four likes and people will even, like when people invite them to like the Facebook page, people even see the page and not like it. It's really weird, but I think that's because it's where I've seen outside the box to try and start something like that. As opposed to, hey, I've got this degree. We've all got the degrees. If you like this, therefore we're all in this same matrix together and it all makes sense because if you've got it, I've got it.

It's all working and let's ignore the debt. because if you've got it, I've got it. It's all working and let's ignore the debt. Yeah, it's almost like, what's that thing when comedians aren't that funny, but they get the audience claps because they agree? So they say something that's like, you've got like a super sort of lefty crowd or whatever and you say something that criticizes Trump

or you've got like a super righty crowd and you say some of the criticizes, like Bernie or whatever. And it's not actually that funny, but it's just like, I don't see that. Yeah, kind of playing like that and you're right, it's like the same thing. I had this tweet the other a couple of months ago that hit the nail and I heard about that man, like, people need to gas their friends up more, like they have to do it. And there's no other alternative word for it. Gassing your friends up is exactly what the term should be regardless of how colloquial or particularly

you want to be about it. If your buddies start up a business, like support them, it's fucking mad. How many people will share a new Rihanna X Puma collaboration video? Like, oh my god, yes, queen. And you're like, bro, your buddy just opened a coffee shop That's a mile away from your house and you've never been like what are you doing?

I think two notes though to judo throw that against itself is to almost because you Is to then say to the person who let's say for example you you're doing something yourself and then they're sharing Rihanna's new Underwear Underwear range, right? Which I didn't... I didn't sleep there, George. I did share myself actually. But first, you know, I'm afraid against yourself,

and just, I imagine this is how I'd at least try and think whatever it is, I can actually put it in practice is different. Of, okay, it's a good filter of actually who your friends are, so it's almost a positive thing in a sense. But I think, I just think it so much of it comes down to what's what's expected and what isn't expected and the conditioning conditioning that goes on and it's really, really bizarre. Yeah, man. Look, George, we made it, man. Mental models, 103. Have you got anything else

that you need to get off your chest before we finish? No, I think that's pretty much it. I guess the biggest takeaway is if you can be a bit weird or if you cannot be able to laugh at you more. I think I say this out loud because it then tries to encourage me to do it a bit too. I think the world would be a bit of a better place. It's probably a bit really's cliche as that sounds. No, man, I absolutely agree. So what's your Twitter now? It keeps changing.

Nice to set it. It's George Mack. George underscore, underscore Mack. George underscore, underscore Mack. You need to go and follow him. You're going to be tweeting, I'm sure, over the next few weeks, as more interesting stuff comes in. I've noticed an up-regulation in your tweet in recent, the attorney a

little bit more. Quarantine, a few more times, I think. So yeah, um, thank you so much, man, you know, this, uh, I absolutely do adore having you on and it makes me feel very gratified that, uh, your number one, you know, we got all of these guys. There's no reason, apart from the bot farm, but there is no reason that you should be number one, you know, we got all of these guys. There's no reason, apart from the bot farm, but there is no reason that you should be number one, you know, like there's no reason, up against like,

the biggest guys on the planet, Douglas Murray, it Robert Green, five times New York Times best selling author, and then just sat at the top, it's just some guy from the middle of the UK. Who the fuck is that guy? Oh, the fuck is that guy? It's George, it's George underscore, underscore, Mac on Twitter.

That's who it is, ladies and gentlemen. Look, man, thank you so much. I'm sure that we will be back with mental models 104, the link to George's Twitter and anything else that we find that's interesting will be linked in the show notes below. George, man, thank you. Stay weird, much love.

See you later, Chris. Thank you for having me.