Modern Wisdom - Kratom Addiction, Naked Justice & The Uber Eats To OF Pipeline - #1091

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

In the second edition of this new experimental episode format, we explore: - If Kratom is more addictive than heroin - What the latest and greatest life hacks are - Who actually is the highest-earning athlete in history - and much more… Guests: - Gary Faust is a comedian and writer. - Shaan Puri is an entrepreneur, former CEO, podcaster and an angel investor. - George Mack is a writer, marketer and entrepreneur. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Timestamps: (0:00) Peanuts in Coke… Is This a Good Idea? (2:19) The Most Ridiculous Paycheck in Sports History (5:53) Is the Mainstream Media Overhyped? (13:45) UK vs the Roman Empire: Who’s Actually Better? (16:31) Would Claude Beat Grok in a Fight? (17:38) Is the LGBTQ+ Acronym Getting Out of Hand? (23:42) Why No One Takes Mental Health Seriously Anymore (27:26) Is Kratom More Addictive Than Heroin? (38:19) What Can DNA Testing Reveal About You? (46:09) Do You Remember Every Porn Video You’ve Ever Watched? (49:18) The Ultimate Trick to Boost Uber Eats Tips (51:48) The Peak Bachelor Pad Setup (53:38) Are Norwegian Prisoners Living Better Than Us? (55:44) The Analyst Who Sounded the Alarm on Hormuz (01:00:20) Are Gay Relationships a CIA Strategy? (01:05:14) Is Flighty the Greatest Life Hack? (01:08:08) Can We Trust Studies Anymore? (01:12:17) Is California Trying to Bury Fraud? (01:18:04) Do Your Game Choices Define You? (01:23:13) Are Likes and Views Changing How We Consume Content? (01:34:19) Does Everyone in the UK Know the King? (01:40:05) Could a Dinner Have Stopped WWII? (01:41:55) FTX’s Painful Anthropic Fumble (01:47:53) Does Momentum Suffocate Talent? (01:52:28) What If Ja Rule Co-Founded Apple? (01:53:19) How Supernormal Stimuli Hijack Your Brain (01:59:23) The Burning Monk and the Extremes of the Human Mind (02:03:29) Why Everyone’s Dooming About AI (02:06:18) Could AI Replace Doctors? (02:11:19) The Craziest One-Day Price Move (02:13:07) Is AI Learning From Indian Factories? (02:17:12) Wait… His Dad’s in the Rock Hall of Fame?! Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George, you're a connoisseur of beverages. Would you say so? As you open another carbonated beverage, well, gentlemen. Cheers. Oh. Have you ever had full-fat Coke with salted peanuts in it? No. I have not. Say less. Take a glass. Okay.

Take a Coke. Take a peanut. So, there's a viral tweet that goes out. About 30 years ago, I read in a Haruki Murakami essay that in America, it's popular to drink cola with peanuts in it. I just went, huh, and a long time passed since then, but I finally tried it. What the hell is this? It's ridiculously delicious. No kidding. It's at a level where I don't want to drink cola any other way anymore. So we are going to drink. Have you before? Or are we going to find that? I've saved this. I saw that and I've been edging myself with fucking cola and peanuts since then. Is there an order you have to do this one? I think.

That's crazy, right? Peanuts first. Peanuts first seems more insane. Yeah, it's like cereal. I've blown my load early. Hold on. Okay. Peanuts in Coke is the most accidentally perfect food pairings in history. The chemistry explains why this guy can't go back. Coca-Cola sits at pH 2.5, roughly the same acidity as stomach acid. What's awful about? We need to show the camera what this looks like. It does not look as good as that. But look at how much it's fizzing.

Anyway, there's a load of signs. Salt on the peanuts suppresses the bitter taste receptors on your tongue, which amplifies your perception of the sweetness. you can, without adding a single gram of sugar. The carbonation does two things. CO2 dissolved in liquid forms carbonic acid, which, wait. So I think we need to leave it. So we're going to have, we're going to set this down. We'll come back to it.

We'll come back to it in like, I don't know, a little bit. Honestly, the original Coke like this alone already would have blown my mind. Yeah. I haven't had, have you, like, you had this. This is like, this is actually cratom. This is actually cratom. You need this. You're going to have a high potency on yours unless you feel it up.

Yeah. Anyway, so this is, you're a connoisseur of beverages, especially sparking ones. Should we take a starter sip? No, I think we wait. I think we wait. We're going to wait for a little bit and then come back to it. And this doesn't get you high or anything? Well, no.

It's the only thing that you're interested. He's no longer interested. No, I'm interested in other things as well. Okay, all right. What does it do? Question. Question. Who do you think is the highest paid athlete of all time?

I know the answer to this. Okay, well, don't. One year, all time? All time. All time. All time. Who's the highest paid athlete? Um, Michael Jordan. Rinaldo, Messi, they come to mind.

Michael Jordan will be second. Mm-hmm. Tiger Woods, third. Joey Chastonop. Arnold Palmer, Bonnie Blue, actually. It's probably, depends what. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Percompatency. It's real endurance. Can I throw a guess out there? Yeah. There was a Roman. chariot racer who allegedly made over a billion dollars correct you owes palman because you just you just predicted what he was going to say his free teacher yeah well cratum does crazy things to your

mind gaius apoleus diocles uh so michael jordan has earned 1.8 billion tiger woods 1.7 billion arnold palmer 1.4 billion jack nicholas 1.2 billion oh it was 15 billion billion dollars in today's money he basically 35,863, 120 Sesteres, by some estimation, over $15 billion in 2011. And that's pure income from the sport? So I assume because back then there's probably no sponsorship. No sponsorship. No shoe deal. Hashtag ad, yeah.

Oh, wow. Shield deal. Yeah, I wonder who could have, I wonder who could have offset his Bodecilla budget. Wow. 15 billion, dude. And the tweet says, eat shit Michael Jordan. You broke a bit. Yeah, I think I saw that same thing.

That's why I knew that. That's what I've contributed. You did kind of ruin it by knowing the answer. No. Let that slide. Do we have a photo of this guy? Just search that dude, Jared. The fucking Gaius Apaleus Diocles.

I'm sure you can spell that. It's fascinating coming from the UK to the US and seeing how Europe is kind of criticized as being like a socialist place and the US is seen as this capitalist place. meanwhile our sports are way more capitalist and I still don't understand how US sports work where you have because I went to go and watch a Miami Heat game and I searched a guy's salaries and one guy's on like 50 million and then the rest are on like his entire salary combined which is absurd and he can't make more than that it's capped huh which is un-American right but we get what why and then you have the whole um like draft at the end of the season where whoever finished last gets rewarded the most like it's the most on-american

thing. It's a communist approach. All right, should we drink this Coke? Should we see? It's been staring at me. All right, cheers, gentlemen. Cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers.

Fuck that, mate. Fuck that. It tastes quite a lot like Coke. Yeah, should I eat? Coke, but then I ate the peanuts. Yeah, it's the, um... Which was nice. You know what it tastes like?

Coke with peanuts. It did not change the flavor at all for me. It's less, um... It's less different. Maybe we need to... I think it's more the aesthetic. Oh, you think that we're, this is. an art piece.

Yes, like even if you made a... It looks like what happens if you've eaten too much Mexican food. Yeah, if you are the best Michelin's... Yes. Just looks so much like there's too much fucking...

Yeah. I do enjoy chewing while drinking Coke, so that's good. That's a positive. I'm going to keep going with that. Yeah, what if you... I mean, can you choke on the peanuts? That's always a risk.

Yeah. I have a question. question for the group. I wanted to ask people on. Bullish or bearish on certain trends. So I kind of want to know trends that are big right now in society or aren't big right now that you think should be bigger. So just give me things that people maybe particularly popular about right now that you think don't deserve to be and vice versa. Overpriced and underpriced. Yeah. Okay. What are things overhyped at the moment? I want to say AI, but then it's probably going to change the fucking world. I just feel sick of hearing about it. I'm kind of sick of hearing permanently

about how it's going to be the end of everything or the beginning of everything. And there's no one that's in the middle. There's no one that's like, yeah, AI is pretty cool. It's people who are complete Dumers or just like David Friedberg. Like there's only two ends of the barbell. But I would quite like AI to chill out a little bit in terms of everyone talking about it. I guess we've never lived through a mania like this. I guess the nearest one would have been the internet. Crypto. with NFTs was a little bit, but it was different. Crypto with NFTs was fucking hard, dude. That would have been top of my list.

But I think a lot of sensible people were skeptical about NFTs for sure, aspects of crypto, whereas I feel like, you know, AI right now. Even the people who are Dumers, they're not saying AI sucks. They're saying, it's too powerful. It's either this is so powerful, life is going to be amazing. Or this is so powerful, life is like over for us.

And nobody's really, nobody really like, hey, this is, this is a flash in the pan. Like in the early internet, there's famous articles where it's like, the internet won't amount to anything. This is a fancy fax machine. There's articles you can go pull up now and mock people. I feel like with AI, we kind of all know. Hmm. What about you?

What do you think? I'm getting really into Metaverse real estate. It's, it's the place. Now's the time to get in. So I'm buying up a lot of land. I've got a place next to Snoop Dog. This feels a little bit like kicking a dead body whilst it's on the ground and saying that you killed it.

Do you know what I mean? You can't say the metaverse is overhyped when it's already dead. You know that's Simpsons meme where it's like, stop, stop. He's already dead. I don't see you hanging a board ape up in here, do you? So there you go. Why don't you talk about your cryptos? You know, here's actually a weird one that I was, I did all right on that toad.

Did all right on that toad, baby. All right. You can look it up on Shane as well, actually. So there's no fraud there. There's no lies you can verify my NFT activity. good stuff. You know one that I'm weirdly, because I'm thinking about, there's lots of stuff you could say where it's almost trite, right? So you go, AI is going to change the world. And it's like most people will probably agree with that. So therefore, it's kind of a neutral statement. And I was thinking, well, what are people, what's cliched to be bearish on right now? And then what's the bullish take for that. My two big ones are, number one, the mainstream media. I'm ridiculously bullish in the next five years on the very hour the mainstream media has, which is like the, oh, it's kind of like, don't. and go to college kind of statement, whereas it's kind of saying almost the opposite now of go to college. Mainstream media in particular, it's almost like they have the highest value audience in the

world because nobody I know listens to mainstream media, and that's kind of part of the joke, except Donald Trump, except Kistama, except Macron. Like we was at dinner the other night, we wouldn't say who, but we're somebody who used to work in the cabinet in the UK. And one of my favorite questions to ask people, apart from that question previously, is when you meet somebody who knows a lot about the industry of you've worked in this thing for ages, what do like laymen's like me just not appreciate that's really fascinating on the inside? And he paused for a while to answer the question about what it's like being inside number 10. And the thing he reiterated was how much of the conversation is shifted by what's on the BBC or what's on the Guardian. And you kind of see

this with Trump a little bit now when he'll address, he'll know like each, news reporter by name. And it's like, meanwhile, nobody reads this, nobody consumes this, but it still has such an impact on policy. He's got little rivalries with, oh, that's such and such from the lame times or whatever. And I'm like, what the fuck? Yes. And likewise, number 10, the amount of reactionary time just goes to what's on the headlines that nobody's reading, really, apart from a few geriatric 65-year-olds. Therefore, there's still, it's kind of weirdly underpriced. Well, there's always going to be prestige in the mainstream media because there's a limited amount of time and a limited amount of space.

Anybody can make a YouTube channel, which is awesome and subversive and rebellious and whatever, but also that means anyone can make it. So there's no prestige associated with doing it. There's only 24 hours in the day on CBS. So if you get 15 minutes of that day, implicitly you're being given something. There's a kind of prestige with it. That being said, does anyone ever watch Discovery Life? Have you ever seen Discovery Life?

Uh-uh. Discovery Channel Life? No. So I'm fucking training in the gym. And there's so many different TV screens, brand new gym. So apparently everybody needs to watch. It's like a three-year-old playing subway surfer whilst watching TikTok at the same time. So fucking screens everywhere.

And I'm looking over and there's a lovely lady on TV, black lady, like nicely dressed, a floral outfit thing. And she is having one of her own fingernails extracted from behind her own ear. Like at 10 a.m. in the morning. Discovery Life is an American cable television network. The channel primarily focuses on reality programming dealing with life events. It's programming targets, female audience, blah, blah. It is fucking medical emergencies at 10 in the morning.

And I'm watching this like five inch long pair of tweezers extract this very nice ladies fingernail from behind her own fucking eardrum. I'm like, I'm trying to do bicep curls. and it cut from that to the next one and it was someone's ribs being punctured. Fucking 10.30 in the morning. Only in America would it be like health care's become basically a competitive sport now that you can fucking broadcast on the internet. So I don't know.

I feel like this is the sort of thing you would have watched at an after party. No, I've never seen that. I had this realization. I'm trying to find it now, but I wrote about it ages ago, which was I was once similar to you in the gym working out and the news was on. and it was just like this number of people have died in Ukraine today

this number of people have died in Gaza today and then take these pills and I was like and I imagined it of like if this was a bloke that was in the gym

that was saying this or it was a friend I'd be like I'm never speaking to you ever again and it's like when you begin to personalize it like that it's just you view it so differently except it would

be a guy that was shouting into the entire room. Yes. He wouldn't even be saying it to you specifically. He'd just be saying, this black lady had her fingernail caught behind her eardrum. Do you want me to tell you about the lady that took it out of her? Well, I work out at Planet Fitness, so we have people. You've actually seen this. I'm alive.

Yeah, yeah. There's like hopeless people in there wigging out while we're all trying to get fit. And it's a good motivation. To be able to run away. All it is. It's a holy shit. I need to make more money and work out somewhere else. Is Atlanta Fitness, like, with your membership comes, like, free pizza or something?

Dude, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you don't get the pills, but you do get a tootsie roll. It is, it's embarrassing, dude. I need to get a different gym. Dude, it's interesting that you say that, though, about being bullish on mainstream media because they basically have hit the basement in terms of really everything. So there's no way you could think they're going to do worse in my opinion. You couldn't be more bearish.

Yeah, so you're correct. Well, I'll give you, on hitting the basement right now, one that I would buy the shit out of is the United Kingdom. Everybody right now, the UK, literally, I think yesterday, the news came out around. It's like the worst economic change in terms of the bond rating. Like the doom and gloom around the UK is so strong right now. But you just go, it's with a goat. Hang on.

Are you going to say never bet against the UK? No, no, no. Long term, yes. Long term, yes. Just from, even if they do nothing again, just from, even if they do nothing again, just from a pure IP perspective. Like, just what you have, like, I was thinking I was getting an argument today with Claude in the car.

And sometimes I'll, like, bounce between Claude, chat GPT and crock. That's my, like, that's like, that's like when one of your side pieces won't put out. Holy shit. It's accurate. I went to dad and he said, no, mom. Well, I posed the question to Claude, and I'm interested in your guys take on this of who's had more, who's more impactful to the world?

the Roman Empire or United Kingdom. And I think it's the United Kingdom, pound for pound. I think pound for pound. We're one third the size of Texas. And like who can, who's managed to do this level of output that we've managed to do? Which is a very unBritish thing to say. Really living on fucking borrowed time though, mate. Not really.

Not really. When was the last thing we did that was cool? Deep mind. AI, like the whole AI industry comes out of essentially London. How many people do you think know that? This is it. We're basically the technical. The way of you in UK to the US is like, we're the technical guy that makes no money.

and comes up with all the ideas. And then these guys are just great at sales and marketing. Like you can do AI, essentially the UK. You could do Tim Berners-Lee, the internet. You could do, I mean, I don't know if this is fully true, because maybe he's such a genius that he fought this through, but Bitcoin White Paper written in British English to correct English. Oh, come on.

We don't know who he is. We don't know who he is, but there's a little bit of something that you probably. He's probably all the side of the Indian. But like if you look at, yeah, If you want to keep going back, I always had this thing of if God had like top trumps of Grace's country and like each country tries to play their hand. The UK is a very tough one to compete with. Very dwindling though.

Like when you think about what the market's trend is at the moment. Newtonian physics still. He's being on mainstream. He's fucking 500 years old. But if you, I'm talking about the history of civilisation. Roman Empire, what the Italians do. But the Roman Empire still gets a lot of credit this day. But I just think going back to the question,

I'm bullish on the UK, just in terms of pure IP and impact on the world. But bullish would suggest that you'd invest in it. Yes. With money? I put it all into the metaverse. I've got the sleep on. Metaverse, CNN. Yeah.

Bridgeton. What do you think about Claude? What do you mean? Do you like it? The AI? Yeah. I personally think each different AI, slightly different. So I'll use what I, you might know if somebody's created this yet.

What I want, and I kind of vibe did this, but I couldn't be bothered actually turning it into a product, which I just want a group chat where I can post something in there. They all reply and then they roast one another back and forth in the replies, it's the best. It's a GAN, isn't it? General adversarial network. That's what that's called. Look at the big brain on Chris. That was amazing. Big fucking that's it. Jim O'Shaughnessy's got it for his super crazy fucking AI thing. And he said, yeah, they can get all of the different models to argue with each other behind the scenes. And then whoever has the best answer for this one, Does it?

When you use grok, they show it. So if you use like heavy grok or super grok or whatever Elon calls it, you ask a question and Agent 1 pops up, he starts talking. I think what he wants to know is blah, blah, blah, blah. Agent 2 comes in. Well, that wouldn't really be fully accurate. He should really be thinking about this, Agent 3. And it'll show up to 16.

The thought process. 15 or 16 agents, basically like within the same AI. Within the same AI. What you're talking about is you want Claude arguing with chat GPT, arguing with fucking opus arguing with dat, dot, dot, like literally a group chat. Jared, pull up that New York Post article that I sent you. stressed Gen Z is carrying around anxiety bags with tools to calm their nerves.

Hannah Fowles was spiraling. It'd been a grueling day at work, and by the time the 22-year-old from Provo, Utah got home, panic was bubbling in her chest, and thoughts raced as her cheeks flushed red. I was starting to get super overheated. I couldn't calm myself down. Fowles told the post, nothing that I normally do like breathing exercises or lying down in a dark room as working. Then she sawed the bag. Jesus Christ.

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

Gen Z people, what I want to know, what I want to know is what would be in your anxiety bag. Well, I actually have one of those bags. It's called a bag of drugs, Chris. Thank you for asking me. Yeah, just five grams of whole leaf cratum. We got cratom. We've got some amphetamines in there.

We've got new tonics. We've got valiums. It's going to help to anxiety or just? Oh, no, I'm just addicted to drugs. What was the question? I don't think you should make fun of people like this, though, because it's not really their fault. that they're being sort of conditioned to have this obsession with mental health.

That's my theory. That's exactly what I said. Like you take DEI. DEI starts from a good place. Hey, we should include more people. We should be more equitable. Everyone should get a fair opportunity and a shot. But then these movements can get hijacked.

And the movements can get hijacked and stretched into the point where it doesn't really resemble where it started. You guys see this thing with the Canadian politician who was using the LGBTQ acronym. Yeah. But it was like 14 letters long. It's, what is it, murdered and missing women and children, indigenous women and children, MM, M-I-J. Did you see this?

It's a full sentence long. No, listen to this. She's giving a press conference and she stands there and she just with a straight face says, she wants to express her, like, you know, condolences or whatever to the MM-I-W-G-2-S-L. There's a number in there, 2-S-L, G-B-T-Q-Q-Q-Q-I-A-plus. And she just says that with a straight face. And then people were like, what the hell was all that? And it's like, includes like murder victims, murderers.

Murder than missing women and children, indigenous people, like, two spirit. The two is for two spirit, which is like, yeah. Double son. A is in there, which is asexual. So here it is. Holy shit, that's long. It was released. I was shocked to find out that Prime Minister Carney is cutting $7 billion between

Indigenous Services Canada and Crown Indigenous Relations. they provided zero dollars to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG to S-LG-L-G-L-G-L-G-T-Q-Q-QI-A-A-P Plus. That's impressed. That was honestly great. That's really, actually, she runs it back. Indigenous women across this country, Indigenous women girls' 2S LGBTQI-A plus. Oh, dude. It's fucking wild.

She's not reading off anything. No, she's off the dome. That's M&M. She's like the fucking Harry Mac. of coming up with acronyms. You know that dude? He's like, shout out three words. And it's like, umbrellas, steaks, shoes.

And he like freestyle wraps an entire thing about it. The Jay-Z. And they're serious about this, too. That's not even a joke. That's what's insane. It's not SNL. But on your mental health point, if, this is why this, it's. But I think what ends up happening is you end up with these swings,

you can then have a swing so far the other way. Overcrank. Where it's like, I mean, everybody's known somebody's taking their own life, right? That side of things is like serious. Totally. The problem with a lot of these things is you get to like a lot of the root of human experiences, which is like ironically a little bit of that, but so much of it is around the language that we use.

And within mental health, you bundled up so much that you bundled up seven billion individuals that it's become such a black and white top. Whereas I always use the example, like diabetes is quite an interesting one, right? Because you have type one diabetes, which is a genuine medical condition that somebody's had,

from birth. And then you have type 2 diabetes, which is a little bit more, it's a lot more your choice in your environment. And it feels like you don't have that kind of nuance around that. I'm going to try and just speed run my diabetes. This is getting better, by the way. Yeah. Actually, it's getting better. Try it again. Coke on the nuts. Yeah. Before we continue, most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink.

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and modern wisdom at checkout. You do have some of these language hacks that exist. I always joke that like cybersecurity nobody takes it serious as an industry because the naming is just awful. And the biggest thing the cybersecurity industry could do is no new technology if they just branded it as CTIs and like taking it from STI's like computer transmit infections.

All of a sudden, I'm like, I feel a little bit more about it. And likewise, the homeless problem right now, how many people who are homeless is that the main cause? It's often it'll be some, ironically, some serious mental health issue that's going on. Oh, yeah. So, like, the language that we use. I've interviewed so many homeless people. Dude, half of them want to be homeless. And to be quite frank, I don't really blame them.

If you want to go live in the woods, as long as you're not. Why would somebody want to be homeless? Because they're not being tethered to this system that we're all living within. is currently kind of going down the drain. I mean, I don't really blame them. That thing that we just pulled up, though, is exactly why people aren't taking mental health seriously anymore, though, because there's a fucking in that, what's it called,

the DSVM3 or whatever, there's a disease for everything, you know? Like, for example, when I was growing up, I got diagnosed all sorts of shit, but really I was just a little asshole. And when you start saying I got ADHD or I'm bipolar, or I got borderline, or you got this or that or whatever, you know, I got a

crutch I can lean on for every single fucking shitty thing I do to somebody, which is awesome. There's a great line that someone said to me, which was mental health is both underdiagnosed and over diagnosed. There's people who don't have it that just live through it.

Dude. And don't know. And people who don't have it that make it their entire personality. All the people that actually have serious mental health problems that I'm at least friends with are mostly undiagnosed and they're just kind of you know, wandering through life. Yeah, dude. Seriously.

I agree with you and I think it's easy to be like callous or whatever, like flipping about the people that have been diagnosed or self-diagnosed or found their sort of mental health become more fragile. They don't want to be fucked. Like they don't want to be that fragile. They're just trying to hold onto some sense of certainty. And the certainty has now come from their diagnoses rather than their agency. Like they just can't make that thing out.

And they're in a world that seems to pedestalize. I mean, there's even a trend on Instagram of people having their mental health maladies in their bio. You know, like chicks do like Jesus in bio or pronouns. It's these are my maladies because that's where they're trying to find some sense of identity. And I don't think they want that. It fucking sucks for those people. That's because like I was saying, the same reason homeless people are like, yeah, I'm

checked out of this thing. It's because they don't fit into this system. really because the system's just not working, you know, and I'm using this, this, uh, the system just as like a generality because it is so massive. But when you have people that are like not fitting into it, they want to find a community within the other people that are all not fitting up in the head, you know, I mean, it's the same reason why drug addicts all hang out together. And I think drug addiction is another thing that's misdiagnosed. Like, I mean misdiagnosed drug addiction. Like, I didn't, I guess I didn't say that well. People that are drug addicts, which can, I think pretty much happen to anybody, certain people are probably more predisposed to it. But people that are drug addicts get misdiagnosed as having some sort of mental health problem.

But really, they're just on drugs and then off of drugs. They're withdrawing. Then they're high again. Like when you kicked off at you a video guy. Yeah. So the first thing I want to bring to the table, for today is cratum. Cratum is something I've been looking into

because there's, I think, sort of an epidemic happening. And there's a video we got here that I can have pulled up. This is the guy I'm working with who I wigged out on the other day because he didn't buy me $10 a cratim and I quit the dock.

Yeah, this stuff's strong. Yeah. So what he's talking about to contextualize all this is 7-0-H is 7-hydroxy-mitrogen which is one of the, I guess we could just call it a chemical. It's in here. I don't know the science behind it. We're going to go actually interview a chemist about this stuff.

But basically, people are taking cratum, which is sold over the counter at gas stations and head shops, and there's even cratum shops. But it is a leaf that's from Southeast Asia that sort of mimics the effects of certain stimulants, but also opioids. It's actually your opioid receptors and SSRIs. And I think I know a handful of people that have gotten very addicted to it and they're saying that it is, the withdrawal is worse than heroin, which is pretty unbelievable given that heroin withdrawal is horrendous.

And that's it there? Yeah, man. I should have brought some for everybody. But you're just drinking that. Yeah, this is a lower dose than I was great. Like you're telling me it's like worse than heroin, but you're just casual. So here's the thing, though. So there's a difference between.

And I'm still in the process of figuring all this out. Literally. Literally. Yeah. So I was drinking a bunch of this stuff every day for the past month. And then I sort of wigged out of my documentary partner because we got, yeah, it'll be in the dock. But there's, we're at a head shop. And I was like, hey, dude, let's get some of this credit.

I want to test this stuff out. And there's these things, there's 70H pills, which is, it's like almost like Perkis said, basically. And it's sold over the counter, which is nuts. I mean, I'm not bashing it necessarily, but it's interesting. It's sort of the wild west of this drug. And it's not like it's a new thing. They tried banning this in 2016. The reason I'm bringing it up is because we're doing this documentary.

And I think that we're on the verge of potentially an epidemic with it. Yeah. This has been, I've seen this in Austin since I basically got here. So there's a few small glass vials, like a five-hour energy. Yeah. And there was a company that was making them. and one of my friends had another guy who'd been addicted, he'd had whatever the addiction gene is,

addicted to every different drug throughout his entire life. There's even YouTube channels of these people, and they'll say, which drug fucked my life up the most? And they'll just list every drug, because they tried everything. They're like, well, coming off LSD was actually not that bad, but I had this period where I was on MDMA every single day for like two months,

and that was really, really rough because my serotonin and da-tut-da-da-da. And he said, of all of the things that he tried, the hardest to get off of, was Kratom. And then he knew so much at six in the morning the sunrise mini mart on whatever fucking South Lama R Street or something. He was outside like waiting, like waiting for this. And then this company had taken the Kratom content without changing the bottling from five grams of whole leaf to two and a half. And he knew. And as soon as he had it, he was like, my fucking Kratom's been stepped on. He felt like, from the mini mart. Yeah, the sunrise mini mart. It's stepped on. It's,

whatever, the company that was making this, because these people aren't treating it like a supplement, that it's so psychoactive. And, okay, the one thing I guess I didn't explain very well is that there's a difference between like the pure cratum leaf powder and the stuff that has the 70H in it, which is the synthesized version. And the reason I didn't explain that very well is because it's kind of confusing. But cratum leaf itself, I mean, you can still get addicted to it, but the 70H stuff is what's fucking people up.

Okay. For reference, just because I know somebody that's addicted to Crabtonleaf itself. Kratom is going to watch this and be like, that son of a bitch, blasphemed my cratum. So that is a... But the 70H is the really gnarly stuff. Yeah. So I'm going to get some of those pills and start taking them. But yeah, drinking Kratom extract with the 70H and it is basically drinking liquid heroin.

What does it feel like? It's very interesting. It's very sneaky. So I was drinking it for a month before I really realized how high I was on it. Did you... You've done heroin? Oh, yeah. I'm from Ohio, dude.

So... How do they compare? Oh, 708, H-E, R-I-O-N. If you was personifying them as people, like, how do they compare the two? If it was a party. Cratum to heroin?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I haven't done high levels of the 70-H stuff yet, but comparatively, the cratim drinks that I've been drinking are called Club 13, 150 MIT, which is mitragenine. That's the drug, I guess. and I was drinking two of those a day, which turns out it's a lot for that.

But there's not a lot of 70H in it, from what I understand how it works. So I don't have the full scope yet for you, but I would say that heroin is, you know, you're, you get really high, you feel great, you get that warm feeling. You've taken painkillers before, right? No, not really, no.

Well, get on you, dude. You're better than me. Yeah, no, no, no, don't mean that way. Top of them all. Are you conscious of the experience as you're doing it? Yeah. No, you're high. So I guess the primary difference would be that when you take Kratom or when I have been,

I've been, I just didn't even realize how high I was on this stuff. Like, I was kind of just in a daze, but you get sort of that euphoric feeling. And I will say that in low doses of it, it's sort of more of a stimulant. And then you take more and you're getting more of an opioid, you know, the pain killer, sedative feeling. Isn't that interesting that the curve, how much you take almost. Inverts the effect. It's a nuanced drug. And I've never really experienced that before, which was one of the things I was going to say that's sort of sneaky.

But the other thing is, and maybe this is just me, but I didn't really grasp that I was high as hell on this stuff. And I was going in sort of thought loops about things. Like we had to get like a video done, right? And I was just sort of pacing around my house, which I paced a lot already when I think around on the phone. But I was just sort of going in these thought loops where I was repeating. myself, like, can't I even talking to myself? I was losing a little bit. Yeah, dude.

And I didn't realize that this was, this drug was that strong because it's sold over the counter. And that's already, I already knew from a number of other people who have gotten addicted to it because I did some, you know, I put some feelers out there to talk to people. They already told me like, hey, be careful. You're going to, it's going to sneak up on you more so than you think. Are you scared as somebody who's pretty experienced with drugs? are you scared of the potential of putting yourself into this particular?

You're going to try this 70H thing, and it's going to be amazing for the doc, and it's going to teach you a lot, and you're going to be able to empathize with the people that are struggling with this, but you are putting your health and life on the line. I'm aware you've done it in other ways a lot. But like this, I don't know, it feels like a pretty big dice roll to do that. Is that something that you consider? No. I'm not really worried about it.

I mean, what's going to happen? I'm going to have to just withdraw. Yeah. I'm going to go to Thailand. see where this stuff comes from now. Okay. You get the real... Jesus Christ, you're going to go into Mordor and deciding to like fucking stare into the eye of Muldoole.

I'll have the Kratom's shot in my hand as I'm looking into the eye of Mawndon. I've done it once. I've done it once as well. When we was in Vegas. Did you get energy from it? So, well, my initial onboarding to Creighton when you was doing the David Doggins podcast, ironically. What were you doing?

Create him with David Gorgon. I was like, hey, why didn't we vlog that? I was like, I did create a bullet, pussy. So for context, I, at the time, at the time, Like, this is how things change with time. That was the week that we did mushrooms. Yeah, and Creighton was seen as, like, a supplement. Like, it was seen as a new tropic at the time.

That was how it was advertised to me. It wasn't looked at a drone. I thought it was going to take it and I could work more. And I remember, like, going, this is shit. But then I realized I had no more problems. I was like, on it, I've got no problems at all. I go, why do I always think I have problems? I actually have no problems.

Because you're high, George? And then I wanted to go. And then I wanted to get some next day. Welcome to my world, buddy. Why do you think I've got so few problems? It's weird how you go from no problems and then when it wears out you've got so many problems. Yeah, and then you're snapping how you're producer and you're like, hey, fuck you, I quit. It's $10 a crate of which is crazy embarrassing.

Well, I mean, when did you do it? So I tried feel free, which is like this really, really popular company. And that's, for the record, that's one of the companies that's being sort of put under the microscope is this is not good. But then not using the 7-0-H, right? That's just whole leaf. I got to look at that. You know what? I'm pretty sure.

But yeah, pull it up. I'm pretty sure that this is whole leaf stuff. Anyway, this is forever ago. This is when I was living in the Airbnb on South Congress when I first moved here. And everyone's doing it. Everyone's literally the in-school, mom, but everyone's doing it. And so I'm like, oh, well, fucking everyone's doing it. And it's like, okay, I'm going to try this in the house.

I'm going to try half a bottle. I don't know. I can't remember whether it was five gram, two grand, whatever. Tried it. And it just made me really anxious. Anxious and a little sick for like... an hour and a half, I watched some peeky blinders, and I was like, that's not for me. And you just drank one bottle of it? Half a bottle. And I was like, that's not for me. So a lot of people get a

feel sick to their stomach after they drink it and throw up and stuff like that. It didn't, it didn't make me feel good. Me and Z did it again when we went to go and see a band, but we didn't realize you are not supposed to drink alcohol on it. Yeah, it'll make you blackout. Also, feel free has kava in it too. Correct. But it's only in a little, it might be concentrate. Anyway, so I tried it, didn't agree with me. There's like some things where I think, I get quite bad hangovers. I've always got bad hangovers, but they've gotten worse as I've got older. What you've got, if you were someone who doesn't get hangovers, Sunny Webster, Olympic weightlifter, I remember we once party till four in the morning, 4.30 in the morning, and he set off to drive from

Newcastle to Edinburgh, 8 a.m. to go into a seminar that started at 10.30. He'd had four hours of sleep, drank more than me, and was just up and doing things for the whole morning, and then went and gave an entire seminar and was just fine. I needed to stay in bed the whole day. There's some people for whom the cost versus the benefit, the fucking ratio is just super skewed. They're like, again, they're like the gogged. They're the Bonnie Blue of being able to drink and keep going. Dude, don't ever use Bonnie Blue as a reference point. You're very much the Virgin Mary of that. I am. I am very much. Yeah, I'm the Lily Phillips. I can't take as many. And if that was, If it was not so painful for me, the cost-benefit analysis of drinking would be completely different.

But we did, both me and you have done our IntellX DNA, which by the way, this is the fucking sickest shit. IntellX DNA, company that's based here in Austin, but you can do it anywhere in the US. He spit into a tube, not affiliated, I just think they're fucking sick. Spit into a tube, send it off. They'll give you your full allele genetic profile and they'll compare you to the population. hey, you clear caffeine more slowly. You have a protective gene that's good for late-onset Parkinson's. You have one which can be a risk for autism or for this or for that or for the other.

And loads of behavioral stuff, like this has been associated with people who have addictive personalities. So I have the com tea gene, which is a clear dopamine more slowly. That means that I don't deal with chaos and stress particularly well. but once I start doing something, I get completely fucking obsessed and I lock in and I can't stop. It's like literally one of the descriptions was May struggle to stop tasks once started.

It's like the gene of an obsessive person. That sounds pretty cool. What's sick is once you do, it's like three grand or something. Maybe three grand or something? Maybe three grand. It's expensive, but it's not cheap, but it's like they're never going to change.

This is my genes and my jeans. I always wonder with this. Did you learn things you didn't already know about yourself? Yes. Yes. Because the first one you would know. Like, yeah, I don't handle this well, but I do, I am able to obsess over tasks.

So I'll give you, so the way I view these intellect stuff, and it's like very early days, and they're only going to get better and better, is have you heard about the Air Force study in the 1950s where they took like 600 Air Force pilots who were already male, certain height, certain build, and they tried to build like the average cockpit for all of them? They tried to make the perfect cockpit by aggregating all of the proportions of the pilots. and when they went to test this perfect cockpit that they built, it fit zero. Because essentially averages are completely bullshit. No one is average.

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

concrete examples, one, I found out I was in the bottom 10% of magnesium absorption for my genetics. So I was like, oh, I've got to take way more than if I was to ask anything. I have a specific gene that I found, which was if I take, if I have surgery and they give me morphine, I'm very unlikely to wake up with a regular dose. It will probably kill me. So I've got to let doctors know that beforehand. I'm like, oh, that's already paid for the test. And then everything built on top of that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sleeping, right? So yeah, the specifics that you do learn is actually pretty fascinating because then everything gets built on top of that. Let me give you this. The thing that it did for me, I didn't learn.

a tremendous amount that I didn't already know through experience, but it made all of my preferences feel way more legitimate. Right. Give you pressure. Yeah, because I'm like, oh, this is why I like deep house music, because it's quite calming. So one of the coolest things, both of us did it, put it into your LLM, put all of your labs in as well, and it gives a different context. The coolest thing that I did, kind of useless, but again, made me feel more legitimate with my life direction. It's like, I've just done it again now to my chat GPT project. Imagine that you know nothing about me. Erase all of the information that you have exclusively based on my DNA genetic test, what sort of a person am I? And it comes back and it is fucking banger. Your baseline personality, high drive, high stress

operator, your dopamine and stress genetics, Comte, AA, DBA, SLC, da-da-ta-ta-ta, high baseline dopamine and adrenal tone, faster mental processing, strong pattern recognition, but low margin for stress before overload. You become productive, intense, goal-oriented slightly on edge most of the time, but also prone to overthinking, easily tipped into anxiety and to sustain pressure, sensitive to uncertainty in social evaluation. This is not a calm, content temperament. It is a perform or perish nervous system. And it just runs that for everything. Motivation pattern. I need to do off and on. I can't do constant low-level stress. And I was like, I already knew this, right? Because you learn things about yourself. Both of us have zeroed in on doing meditation. Both of us have

zeroed in on relatively early nights, even though both of us have been in previous industries that were way different. And I'm like, I kind of, club promotion should be fun. Like, I should. should be in a chaotic environment. I should be in a highly unpredictable environment, but I didn't end up there. And I always felt a little bit off. And as I've zeroed in more and more, so what it did was, I think, especially for people that are maybe looking for more justification about why they're in the lonely chapter. They're struggling to get through. And they're like, fuck, like, why don't I fit in? Is there something wrong with me? Not at all. Like, this is just your predisposition. Now, the problem that you can have, and it's kind of cool that this isn't as widespread as it might be, exactly.

the same as once you have a name for it, you're going to live by it. This could very much become destiny. Right. It's both ways. Yeah, exactly. I'm way less intrigued in that kind of cold reading description. I'm way more interested in. It's like, oh, you know, it could have been like Virgo says this, right? But what I'm fascinated by is, so what's the strange thing? People have always said I'm very, very similar to my granddad. We have like similar hair. I like sometimes find myself like closing my eyes during meals and he did that. Like, it was weird things. You did that your birthstone Monday. And I did.

And I then put in the thing. I got, I asked the thing, I go, if I'm trying to not die here, like, what are my most likely causes of death? And they go, well, you two biggest health concerns are, one, glaucoma, so you'll just kind of gradually go blind, which won't kill you. Or you'll die of a stroke. My granddad. Glacoma. Phil Combs. I was going to say.

And stroke. And stroke. Wow. Yeah. So if you've got the money, spend it. It's sick. And you can have it interpreted by. clinician or whatever, but you can also just do it here.

So I've just done the same thing. If I was likely to die, what am I most likely causes of death? Cardiovascular disease. Chronic stress-mediated breakdown. Ooh, that's exciting. Neurovascular neurological issues because of high signaling, environmental toxin sensitivity. I just fucking got popped by milk.

They're going to clone you. Yeah, that's true. That is for God. They don't need a test like this to know how I'm going to die. You've got agency over that, my friend. You've got agency over that. I'm going to have a drug-induced heart attack while flying down. the highway. Before we continue, as you're probably aware, I'm not a massive drinker, at least not

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shipped right to your door. Right now, get up to 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom at checkout. Using the code Modern Wisdom at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. Near beer, terms and conditions apply, athletic brewing company, fit for all times. I need to bring up something that you said at dinner the other evening. Oh, well. Did you say that you think that people remember every porn video that they've ever watched?

No, it's this. It's a private dinner, the people who paid to be there, and you brought it up on the show. No, no, no. My thesis is, like, one big meta-criticism I have of the US that nobody warned me about as a Brit. is that the toilets in America, like I could be at like Deans, like a very nice restaurant in Austin. I'll be having like an amazing chat about like Kierkegaard.

Think about like Kierkegaard versus Aristotle. I'm going to do, do, do, do you just pop to the Luz. I'll keep your face a bit. And you go to the Luz and in America, the cubicles, you can see people's feet in them. And the worst thing is there's like this slit in every single, and this is nationwide. You're in the women's.

You can be in the, like, a billionaire's like hotel. And there's a slit there, which means they've unisex toilets is horrific. Like, I don't even go in the unisex toilets for this reasons. You look, you can see people kind of just this carousel of them sat down, squatting. And yeah, this whole idea that when you watch like graphic content, it stores in your brain forever. So I've just got thousands of men around Austin just like there, like these carousels are. And then you went to the bathroom. And this is supposed to be the world. This is supposed to be the number one country in the world. And like, this doesn't exist in Europe. This doesn't exist in the Middle East. You know what you could do.

Remember those things, like back in the day, the first, those cycling cylinders, and you look through the slit and if you spin it, it makes a horse start to move? If you ran really quickly down a very long series of toilets, you're just looking at these different men, like stages of pooping. It's horrific. Dude, you know how I know that I'm watching too many graphic videos is because when you said there's a horse that starts to move? I heard there's a whore that starts to move. that's not good man every time like I speak to a Brit or a European now about coming to America and they think like there's going to be this chat

about the economy I go this is the thing that I've got to warn you about it's so surreal and I think about this a lot like one of you were talking about like life hacks like how much of life comes down to compartmentalization which is why somebody made a great point the other day why meditation apps often don't take off on phones because you have your meditation up there but then you have your strip club you have um Gary does yeah all this kind of all this stuff there. And with these bathrooms, you don't have any compartmentalization. I always say, imagine a house. So my friend lives in an 80-story apartment building. And they kind of sat there

in his house. I go, if everything was glass right now, this would be horrific. But because you have compartmentalization, it has such an impact. Well, your point is that you would be able to see one dude's taking a dump over there and another dude's banging his girlfriend. Right. Yes. Yeah, yeah, Literally just up there. But we've made these arbitrary walls around us. And oh, this is the edge of my safe place in the beginning of yours. I thought where we started, you were like, I have this thesis. And then if you were, what did we even talk about?

You were talking about somebody said something about porn? Yeah, you brought up. Storing graphics stuff in your brain. Genetics, porn. Yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Question. How do you feel about feet?

Not a fan. No? Gross me out. Okay. How do you feel about feet? Pretty much the same as Sean. How do you feel about it? I have like a visceral.

Totally neutral. Feet neutral? Yeah. Okay. In what capacity are we talking about here? Okay. So there is a woman who does Uber Eats and has started including photos of her feet in the picture of the food drop off and her tips have gone up by a ton. So this is, I mean, as feet go, they're.

He said nice pedicure. They're perfectly fine, feet. But did not realize that this would blow up fat. And this is the OnlyFans pipeline. Like as soon as you post something. and start to get free money for it, you're like, well, if I put my cash app in here, and if you scroll down a little bit more,

she says, get a rotissory chicken or a pedicure, first rotissory chicken allowance. There we go. This is the fucking Uber Eats to OnlyFunds pipeline that no one is talking about. Yeah, I mean, there's like an old joke about what's the, how long is it take for a, not a bottle source girl,

strip club waitress to become a stripper two weeks? What's that? Yeah, like basically every, Not every, but a lot of strip club bartenders or hostesses, they descend of becoming strippers. But maybe that's just a niche thing that I know because of my vices. Punch on for strip clubs. Yeah, I guess. Dude, I used to have, you know this, I think I've told you this, I used to have this pickup line when I would go to strip clubs where I'd be like, hey, you look just like my future ex-wife.

And they'd be like, oh, ha, ha, ha, because they've heard that a thousand times. I'd be like, no, I'm just kidding. I'm like a horrible person. I've got a felony. I'm not allowed to see my son, so you don't want nothing to do with me. And just... They lean in.

Every time. Wow. It's crazy. Isn't that the fucking craziest pickup line? Not really. I mean, American women have been conditioned since the 50s

to be into like the bad boy. I mean, first of all, it was a two-parter. So that already was... Sophistication I was... Yeah, the old one too. Unbelievable. That's Gary's...

That's Gary's Life Hack, by the way. Oh, yeah. He asked me for a lie-haired. Fax, that's what I came up. That's what I got? Jesus. What have you got something fucking notes at? I don't want to hear about that.

Then tell me about your Claude project instructions. I want to know how to pick up a hooker. I don't even want to do one now. Have you seen the subreddit male living spaces? Yes. It's funny. It's fucking brilliant. So this is a subreddit where guys post their bedroom. and their living spaces that they've sort of designed.

It's sort of peak bachelor, like solo D-Gen life. And the photos are just fucking absolutely spectacular. This one, this first one, this guy's got a lap, pull-down machine. And the TV. The face, Patrick Baton. Honestly, this looks,

have you ever seen Mr. Beast's office? It looks exactly like this. He has a bedroom in the office with a bench press right next to it, just like that. The woman to fucking... Stormtrooper. Stormtrooper. I love it.

Yep. There's a U-shaped couch around just a huge TV. It's like literally you couldn't get in there without hitting the TV. It's not even a hung on the wall. The reason is because he's wanting to get a big couch, but he needs to get in the door. So the door won't open. He can't fit the couch and the TV in without not being able to open the door. That's the only way he could have.

That's actually some fucking Marie condo shit. transparent fucking blowup doll this one's it's an industrial container with a single deck chair in the middle what's the camping chair

pointing out that's the living room yeah yeah that is that's the cuck chair for when I'm crushing shit go to the next one this is you Gary

it's a bedside table made out of just raw breeze blocks yeah you know when I was growing up my dad actually had our old box on a set of cinder blocks for a period of time.

The divorce hit him a hard. It works as drawers, too. Oh, it does work as drawers? Wow. It's a bottle of cratim and every piece. Is it a flat in London or a prison in Norway? Have you said that? Was it not Holes of Residence?

I think it was a few different ones. Prison in Norway or Holes of Residence in the UK, I think was it. And yeah, it's because the fucking quality of the prisons in Some Scandy countries, unbelievable. Dude, yeah, I've seen those. That pisses me the fuck off. What, the Norwegians are living in... The people in prison in Norway are doing much better than me.

It really irritates me. I'm dead serious because, like, you know, I've been known to commit a crime or two. And if I get arrested and go to prison, I'm like... If you get arrested here? Yeah, dude. I mean, part of me is like, man, maybe I should just go to Norway and, like,

getting a shootout or something. I don't know. Like that, you guys remember that movie, um, Heat? I haven't seen it. The, Leonardo, Robert De Niro, Pacino, um, Val Kilmer. Yeah, I think Danny Trejo's even in it. But like the, there's just that old, like, you know, every guy's like dream way they're going to go out is just basically robbing a bank and getting in a shootout. Or maybe that's just the people I hang out with, but are you familiar with this?

No, no, no, no. Oh, okay. Are you doing what I'm talking about? You ever seen those? Are those? Yeah, yeah, that's the dream. Yeah, it's just like going out in a blaze of glory, basically. Or like dying out in like the, you know, like that, that picture of Gosling, bleeding out in the snow.

Right. Like, dream snow bleed out spot. Anyways, I just, I'm like, man, I'd rather just do that. A Pinterest board of these? Well, it's like, it's like I go to Norway and I get into some sort of criminal enterprise. What's the worst thing that happens to me? I get to live better than I'm living here. That's just where my mind goes.

You know, but... It works smarter, not harder. The inverse El Salvador. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, holy shit. Well, I think the crimes that are being committed in El Salvador are probably

dramatically worse than in Norway. You know, they were like chopping people up into pieces and stuff. But... Did you follow this Citrini analyst number three story? No? You didn't see this? No, no, no. Have you guys heard about this?

Analyst number three? No. What's this? Oh, dude, this is amazing. This is just like a guy doing a legendary thing. So the Strait of Hormuz is blocked. And there's the war part of it, but then there's the financial part of it. You've seen like oil prices going up, down, the markets are swinging.

And so there's this research firm called Citrini. They basically do research reports, sell them to hedge funds. And so the hedge fund guys want information. If they get better information than they're getting from the news or from the, you know, the newspaper the next day, that's worth, you know, millions and millions of dollars to them. So Satrini, they're trying to figure out what the hell's going to be. going on with this blockade. And so this guy has this idea, high agency story here for you. One of the guys in the office is like, what if I just go? And they're like, what do you mean?

What do? He's like, what if I just go to the straight and I'll just count the boats? Like, what do he's like, I'll just see, like, how many are going through? And we'll know if it's like block. Because basically there were people trying to figure out, is it blocked? Is it not blocked? And the gas and the crude oil prices were going parabolic and then they were crashing day over day. And so they had to figure out what was going on. So this guy basically, one of their analysts, they call him analyst number three. And he wrote this. field blocks. It just, I see this. It goes, and I read this and this sucked me into the story. He goes, the front desk inform me, there's two gentlemen from the CID downstairs to ask me questions.

CID and the Gulf is like the CIA. I check my phone in a safe, grab the burner because they had seen tweets about analyst number three. Thanks a lot, James. And then it says, I went downstairs in my pajamas and slippers. There's a piece of obsequic you learn when you're an Arab speaker. If things is sticky, you only speak English because Arabic opens the door, you don't want to open. The possibility that you're a spy, a sympathizer, blah, blah, blah. basically play dumb. So I'll go downstairs and I say, hello guys, how are you? I speak English. The hotel receptionist, the same man I've been chatting with

an Arabic all day, turned to the agents and goes, this guy speaks perfect Arabic. And so this guy blogged his entire thing. So he basically left the U.S., went to the Middle East. They show his briefcase of like what he took. It's pretty hilarious. So this is what he took for his field trip. He's anxiety, you buy it.

He's got two sins. He brought cigars. He brought a pack of clothes. and then he had a pair of meta recording glasses. And so he goes and this guy makes it all the way. So he gets to like Oman, he bribes a guy. They bring him in and they're like, he's crossing the thing. They're like, you're not trying to do any journalism or anything, are you?

He's like, journalism. No, I'm an adventurer, explorer. You crazy? And they're like, they check his bag. They don't notice that the Raybans are the glasses one or the camera ones. He gets through. He bribes this guy to take him on a paddle boat to get into the straight. and he has footage of himself on the strait smoking a cigar,

watching one of the oil tankers that got attacked and counting the other boats. And he realized that all the mainstream media was reporting that the strait was closed. He's like, dude, I'm here. I see them going through. It's not fully closed. And they were figuring out what was going on. It turns out, like, actually the Iranians were checking. If you're not U.S. affiliated and you pay us a toll, we'll let you through.

And that's why there hadn't been this huge oil shock because actually the tank. are getting through, but nobody knew. Everybody was using the tracking data from the boats, but he's like... Some of the boats aren't going to be tracked. Yeah, they were just like, hey, watch this. They just turn it off. Like, we don't want to be tracked.

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

No, he's just part of a research firm in New York. He got caught because of them. They held him and they were like, we're going to check you out. And then they couldn't find anything. The CID is the Middle Eastern equivalent of the CIA. And they popped in. That actually, that bag is the male equivalent of an anxiety bag.

Yeah, that's what's that. That's right. A full pack of Cubans, two zins and a pair of pants. Don't trust. Verify. Well, that is basically someone using dark tourism to benefit from a capitalist way, similar to Lord Miles. Do you see that Lord Miles got called out by Coffee Zilla?

No, no, no, wow. So Lord Miles has done some kind of rugpole that's to do with him and Polly Market that he was going to do a 40-day fast and that he bet just before he got picked up by the police, the local police of wherever he was, someone had put a huge position that he was going to lose. And it turns out if you trace that wallet back, it's somebody that knows him. And then he thinks that he put the bet on and then got the police to go and it was like a fucking mess. But anyway, that guy might as well be Lord Miles. Well, speaking of the Gulf CIA,

I got a story about a time I accidentally did a CIA field strategy, so to speak, if you guys want to hear it. When I was in college in Santa Barbara, my buddy and I were absolutely hammered, just wasted out of our minds,

and we had just run from a cab and some other shenanigans had occurred. And we got back to my apartment, which was on the second floor of the spot but it was on a hill so out the window was like a huge um it was it was like probably 60 yards to a pavement to a parking lot behind a chase bank and we were hammered and we're at this place the electricity had gone out so all the food and the fridge was bad and it smelled like shit so we

just started throwing it all out the window because we thought it was funny and then we started throwing bottles out the window and then like some furniture and stuff and uh somebody somebody called the police and we're sitting there, we're all fucked up, and we just hear, do, do, do, do. Santa Barbara police open up, and we're like, oh, fuck, dude, we, the cops. And he looks at me and he's like, dude, get naked. And I was like, what? He's like, trust me.

And I was like, all right. So we get butt naked and I'm like, oh, we're definitely going to fucking jail. So I immediately went to the bathroom because taking a shit in jail sucks. So I was like, I'm going to go force out a turd. Wow. So I'm in the bathroom, and all I hear is this like thump noise. and then I hear the door open I hear it creak like

and it's just a cop and he goes what the fuck? What are you doing? And I hear like feet stumble around and then I hear my buddy go sorry officer I must have forgotten my pants and the cops are like what the fuck are you talking about

and they're like put some fucking clothes on so the cops come grab me and naked and they realized well they thought they realized that we were two gay dudes in an argument So we faked a homosexual domestic violence situation And they were like they were like oh shit These are two gay dudes and uh

Yeah So they just ended up making us go clean it up because they felt they felt bad because they thought that Well and my buddy was a lot bigger than me too So now I'm realizing telling this story that they probably thought I was just getting beat up by this guy But anyways um so years later I've told this story a couple times with four to people and you know it's funny ha ha but years later, I find out from this guy, Jack Caracu, CIA dude. Yeah.

This is like an old CIA strategy that they employ all the time. I didn't even know. Play the video here. Headquarters says, we want you to pretend that you're gay. I said, oh, come on. No, we really need the information. You got to pretend that you're gay. I said, okay, I'll do it.

I'll do it for Uncle Sennis. So I called it. And I said, hey, I have two tickets to this show. And I was hoping maybe you'd be free. Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards. You said, yeah, I'd love to. So we get at this show. He thoroughly enjoyed it.

And we go, we're sushi afterwards. And we go out again. And he says, want to you go over to my place some night? And I'll make dinner. I said, great. So I'd go over to this place. He made a lovely dinner. And then I thought, well, I have to invite him to my place.

So I told my what? You're going to have to, like, get out. So, Sheila, I made dinner. I removed all the pictures of us together. And we had just gotten married. So we had, like, our wedding picture up and everything. At the dinner, he leaned in to kiss me. And I instinctively backed off.

And he said, oh, my God, I'm sorry. I thought you're gay. And I said, oh, no, I am gay. I'm not into Harry guys. And he's like, oh, okay. I said, I'm sorry. I think you're great. I'm not feeling it.

You could guess, no. And I think there's another, there's, I don't remember if it was him, but there was another person who used an example of faking they were gay to like get out of trouble. But yeah, that's another life hack for you. Just get naked. Yeah. I mean, could you not just appear gay rather than be naked? Because who fights naked?

Two gay dudes banged. Right. Okay, okay, okay. The idea that you were so small that they thought, this guy's a world-renowned power bottom. You can't believe he's getting, he's getting fucking pounded from every angle. God, yeah, it's not a good look looking back on it.

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

Use it in the bed of your truck. Carried around as additional... Yeah, it's just in the bed of the truck. Damn. There's a dumpster behind a movie theater that I'm going to throw it out in after this, actually. Thanks for reminding me. Welcome. You could do a full season.

Three months like that. Just 20 bags of trash in the truck. So you have three life facts. That's pretty good. Yeah, three life facts. You do it for all of us. One is really conspiracy. and I'm addicted to create them.

That's what I'm bringing to the table today. Did you have a life hack? That was good. I'll go home. Well, you know, the first ever series that I did on this show was Lifehacks. So there's like a thousand that I've got to pick from. But the one that I've been using the most,

especially because I just got back from tour as in Australia, New Zealand, and Bali, is an app called Flighty. So Flighty connects with your email and when you book flights, it automatically pulls it over. And it tells you everything that's going on with your flight,

what gate you're going out of where your plane is inbound, where it's going to go when you're on the journey as well. It also tracks everything, so it pre-downloads the map so that when you're flying in the air even without Wi-Fi, it knows sort of how long the journey's going to be, can give you information about what the wait time's going to be like at your future destination, connection times, gate to gate, what carousel your baggage is going to be at. It lives in just a little island at the top, you know, the floating island thing at the top of your iPhone. And it just fucking rules, dude. Like the number of times that there's been some last minute bullshit change. And because I'm not watching the border, I've got my AirPods in. You're just in an airport

doing your thing. It's just on your phone. It's quicker than the app. There was one flight that got diverted from Austin because it was Gale Force wins. It got diverted to Houston. And I was recording with Andrew Schultz that day. It's like, fuck. Like, I need to get back. This better not be laid, blah, blah, blah. And I thought it was great. And then the plane just did like that took up again as it was coming into land. And I was like, oh, it must be coming back around for another one. before the pilot even came over the tannoy, it updated and said like, you're now, basically, you're landing in Houston. And I was like, oh. So in some ways, it can be disappointing before everybody else knows.

But it's fucking great. Flighty, and it's like 30 bucks a year. And you can have friends on it as well. You can add friends flights to it. So if you've got your misses it's flying in, you don't need to do it. It's fucking epic. A quick aside, look, you know sleep matters, but let's be real. Most nights, you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative.

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hour of quality sleep per night. And best of all, they have a 30-day sleep trial. So you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they will just give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the pod five by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to 8thleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code Modern Wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T-Sleep.com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. My life hack at the minute is more kind of a philosophical stance to some extent. I think of a lot of gibberish that comes up where it's probably in the last 20 years.

There's this particular discourse that happens online but also in books where you'll see, we'll make a point and then they'll go, so this study says or studies say, and I think think what happens for me for a while now, previously I would default to whatever this person's about to say now is completely true. But often my new default is whatever this person is about to say now is complete horseshit. Because first off, my friend Billy made this great point of, do you know anybody who's been in a study? Have you actually ever inspected a lot of these studies? So I think previously what people used to do, nine out of ten times they would believe the study's true and one out of ten is gibber.

I actually think the policy is much better the other way, that nine out of ten studies that you hear about, particularly psychological studies. Guess what? Physics doesn't need a study. Physics goes, here's how it works. And you want to always opt, like, it's kind of the Deutsch argument. You always want to go for good explanations rather than studies of psych grads with people that had a specific hypothesis they wanted to confirm beforehand. And you'll often see these things that go viral on Twitter that get four million views. There's like 15 participants of like college males that are then making like, then the daily mail covers it, the telegraph covers it. sweeping generalizations. It's one, it's one giant scam. The other one is, my favorite one is science says or science backed or trust the science. And my new default is, if somebody says this, they're about to say something that's completely unscientific. Because by definition, oh, sorry about that, by definition, if something is science backed, I didn't invest, there we go. If something is science, if something is... Fucking Eutonics says research-backed ingredients on the side of it. Research back a little bit. I can say first-hand, this shit definitely works.

I guess the question is... But then actually investigate what the research is essentially saying, which most of us we just default to this is true. So I read Adam Masriani, our experimental history, everyone needs to subscribe on substack fucking rules. And he posted today, there was a wonderful one-two part of Living Fossils that Rob Corsband does. And experimental history had these two things about the replication crisis. And Adam's entire point is that psychological theories don't ever...

be killed. They just become embarrassing. So, um, power posing being completely disproven, but has now just been sort of retconned into it's like expansive posture science and stuff. They've just renamed it. Growth mindset, total bullshit, totally does not replicate. Ego depletion, like willpower stuff. Total, total, total bullshit does not replicate. But what about retard maxing? Retard maxing actually is at the forefront of cutting psychological science. If it doesn't replicate, do a 360. Moonwalk out of that. The problem with the replication stuff

is that it goes back to the conversation we had around genetics. That actually some of this stuff may work for sudden people depending on their specific genetics. What you may have is 10% it really, really works for and 90% it doesn't do anything,

which is a way more fascinating conversation. But as soon as you just default to, it feels like I have a point that disagrees of Gary now, and I'm just going to say, well, studies say, and I've won. And there's never any, like, critical conversation around, well, can you explain the specific variables here that causes this outcome?

It's just studies say, I'll let me tell you about this study. So increased skepticism. Is that what you're saying? Yes, as a whole. Including around Oswald. All the way up. I think the other side of that, the life hack is use this all the time because for every one George who's skeptical, out of 100 people, how many have your stance? It's the other way, yeah.

Yeah, it's going to be 99. So actually, like, the hack is just start saying study say. There's actually a study about this. No study at all, and everybody will take you very seriously. It's similar to how people reference mainstream media, even though, like you said with the straight, how there were still ships going through there, and the media was saying that they weren't.

Yeah. It's the same thing, right? Where somebody, instead of referencing a study, they're like, well, Fox News said or CNN or whatever bullshit people. Appealed to Social Authority. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Dude, speaking of which, that actually ties into the other thing I sent you. Did you guys hear about the Stop Nick Shirley Act in California? Dude, this is crazy. So there was... Because he's trying to do the same thing he did in Minnesota and California, right? He needs to do that in Puerto Rico, dude. Seriously. I mean, if you could enlist the places that are...

So California has this act now? This is the bill right here. They basically put together this legislation that says it's called the Stop Nakesh Shirley Act. Is it like a draft? Existing law prohibits a person, business, or association from knowingly publicly posting or publicly disclosing or distributing on internet websites or on socializing. social media, the personal information or image of any designated healthcare services, patient, provider or assistant or other individuals residing at the same home address with the intent to incite a third person to cause imminent, great bodily harm to the person identified in the posting

or display or to a co-resident of that person as specified, or to threaten the person identified or to threaten the person as specified. So it's basically an extreme fascist bill that they're trying to pass to prevent people from exposing fraud. So you think that they're getting out ahead of having exposed in California what was exposed in Minnesota and by making it essentially this kind of investigational. Yeah. And that's of interest to me, given all the financial stuff I've exposed down in Puerto Rico. But the, if you strap like that and map it on to freedom of speech,

a whole. This is a big problem. I mean, I don't know what the shit is fucking gnarly, dude. Having to read this thing, like the, here we go. This guy. Yeah, he explains it a little bit better here. It warns that it would restrict the release of investigative videos and impose penalties on watchdogs who expose fraud. It's a, I mean, I don't really believe in the two-party system. I think they're all just two, everybody's full of shit, but it is a Democrat that put this out. And of course, there's, you know, the backlash from this guy is probably a Republican. So it sounds like what they're saying is when he exposed the Somali learning centers, that then creates sort of hostile potential violence against the Somali people.

So in order to protect threats of violence against immigrants, here's this act. Right, right, right, which is totally like a load of bullshit because the real way you would protect from somebody being harassed like that is to stop the fraud in the first place from happening. Yeah, or just separately prevent, like, violence in the way that we prevent assault. Yeah, yeah. I'm just saying that, yeah, there's a number of other ways to handle it. But yeah, it's crazy, right? Yeah. I was looking at this the other day. I'm kind of interested in how it plays out, you know? You do a lot of investigative journalism, right? You were down in Palisades almost immediately after the fire exposing a ton of stuff around FEMA. You've done the Puerto Rico thing. What are the big ones have you done recently? Um Well, after going to Puerto Rico

I kind of I shelved the the deep dive investigations because it's so much work to look through all the just everything, dude it was also really it was fucked up man

like people in Puerto Rico don't have we met a guy who doesn't have a fucking roof still he hasn't had electricity for eight years it's crazy dude you got to watch it

I don't know if I ever sent you didn't send me this one yeah it's it's insane. In theory, I mean, I can give you the layout real fast. Basically, in 2016, Congress with Obama's approval, signed off on a financial board that more or less acts like the shadow government of Puerto Rico now. And they've funneled around $2 billion of taxpayer money, Puerto Rican taxpayer money,

off the island to Wall Street consultants, executives and attorneys, to consult on the bankruptcy down there because the whole island is bankrupt. And part of that process is to resolve the PrEPA bankruptcy, which is the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the government power company. And then it was privatized with this company Luma and yada, yada, yada, yada. The power is horribly unreliable down there. It's one of the most expensive in the entire country. And they're basically having money funneled off the island. And they're all more or less connected to Wall Street. But it's crazy. And the reason I bring that up in relation to this is because, you know, the Somalian daycare thing, sure, there's some stuff going on there. But Puerto Rico has been basically getting shit on forever.

And I think this is possibly an even worse situation that's going on down there. And they just revoked some transparency act down there too recently in the past like four or five months. Are they going to try and get out ahead of people that are doing investigative journalism? I mean, that's what it seems like to me. They don't want, they wanted to be more difficult for people to FOIA request stuff essentially. Like one of the things they revoked on the Transparency Act down there in Puerto Rico was when you request information,

it doesn't show who you are specifically, right? To the people that you're requesting it from, but they're changing that so that they can see. So they'll be like, oh, Gary Faust, the guy that's been talking a bunch of shit about us is requesting this information. We're going to, you know, deny that. Yep.

It's crazy, but this is similar to that. And I think this is actually... You're branded as the transparency. Act because who can who can say? Well, it was existing legislation that was putting in place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're yeah. But yeah, this is this is crazy.

I don't even know what else to say about it because not much it's transpired, but in my field of work, I mean, that would, that would basically prevent me from doing my job. I have a quote that I love. This is a little more positive. I feel like we've had some, some conspiracy, some darkness, some, some getting in trouble. Good. I want to bring a little, little positivity here. All right.

So saw this quote from Blake Mikoski, who created Tom's shoes. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but he has this, he's like, I've had this on the wall of every office. He says, a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction

between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to determine

if he is working or playing to him, he always appears to be doing. both. And I just like, that to me has just been a very useful, I don't know, guidepost or like, oh yeah, like that is the highest calling. If you yourself basically don't differentiate between your work and your play or, you know, are you, is this, is this something that you have to do or you should do or you want to do? The more of those blend together and the less you sort of bucket things, I think the more you solve the problem of balance that I think nobody feels like they have. And so I just thought this was awesome. And I'm going to put this up in my own.

office wall. This seems similar to what Michael was talking about of the childlike thing. You remember on the first episode that we did? And he was said, he quoted some scripture. He said, be childlike my children or something like that. I think one of the problems that you have is working for yourself sounds great because it sounds like choose whenever you want to work. But for most people, what it results in being is just work all the time because there's no one to tell you to stop. And a great idea to think about, if this doesn't feel like play to me, scrutinize it and maybe try and get rid of whatever I can from this particular area of my life. But when you're compelled by, oh, well, it wouldn't be more successful and more well-known. That is rewarding in and of itself,

but it's not the type of reward that you want. So you need to almost be skeptical and discerning in the rewards that you get too. This feels like play, but it might actually be just, shallow, juvenile status seeking, or it might be me playing the game of accumulating money when I already have enough. It's that line from James Clear where he says, if you already live a good lifestyle and you sacrifice it in order to make more money, by definition, it's a bad trade. Right. And I think sometimes people are bad at distinguishing, determining what is and is not play, what is and is not just more limbic rewards. That makes sense. So there's this book that talks that I'm reading, it talks exactly about this, it's called The Score. You guys ever heard of

this book? It's basically, it's this guy who's a philosophy professor, but he's, he loved games growing up. He always plays games. He uses games as this analogy. And I think in general, a far more important thing in life than being a good player is picking a good game. Because it's very easy to be, you know, you were talking about Joey Chestnut earlier, right? And like, you know, the philosopher, Joey Chestnut. No knock on him, but like, just generally, choosing to be a competitive eater, not the best game to play in life, right? Like, you could choose many things to try to be great at.

There are some that are better and worse. Every game comes with a scoreboard. The scoreboard is very unique in that it basically programs you, it rewires your mind for what you now want. The game dictates what you want, right? Because it says, that's how you win. This is the scoreboard. So therefore I've implanted a desire.

Your behavior changes appropriate. And then it tells you who you need, and then it changes your identity. Who do you need to be to win this game? So you play call of duty, you better be a psychopathic murderer, right? You got to be ruthless. You play charades. You better be a team player, great communicator.

You play poker. You better be great at the art of deception. And so the game you choose will not only choose for you what you want. It'll choose your motivation. It'll end up dictating your identity. Who do you need to be to win that game? So he talks about like, you know, he became a philosopher or a philosophy professor because he loved answering the big questions about life.

That's what got him into it. Then he got there and he realized there's a real. ranking system for the professors nationwide. And how do you go up to, so he's a competitive person by nature, like many of us are. So he started trying to win the game. Now he had a scoreboard. The scoreboard said, in order to get more points, you have to write more peer-reviewed published articles about these niche topics.

So then he spends two years winning that game and then basically feeling miserable because he's like, this is not what he enjoys about philosophy. So it made himself miserable winning the game. And he talks about how there's something called value capture. Value capture is basically when the game. the game gives you the metric that is super simplified, easy to digest,

but it may not have been what you want out of this. So for example, in life, like, we're on YouTube, right? YouTube gives you one big score, views. You can make a life-changing episode that gets half the views of another episode,

but it doesn't know how to measure life-changing. It just measures views. And it's going to keep giving you that metric. And, I mean, let's be honest, how many YouTubers don't just respond to views, right? Like, it's like a very, very powerful motivation.

because it's in your face, everybody sees it. And that's the scoreboard that determines success or failure in that game. I mean, we've like spoke about this at hours. And yeah, I think this is one of our favorite. You hit one of our trap cards. Like there's a weirdly part of the force I was thinking about this week was going down like how, is you know that Marshall MeQMline that we like shape our tools and our shoe, that our tool shape us.

It's a great example of Nietzsche. Nietzsche used to write by a hand. And then his eyesight began to go. So he started to write in a tight. writer and he's writing completely changed. He went way shorter, way punchy. Like, he almost completely changed as an individual. And I'd been thinking about that with a lot of these tools were. So I would, like one of my life hacks at the minute is what I call boom scrolling. So rather than doom scrolling, I go on a treadmill at like 15 ink line, three in. I've got share,

believe on loop playing. I'm spinning around. I'm a fucking great, I'm just sending links to people. If you, if you are either in his context, high on the top of his list of iMessage contacts recently, because he's got massive recancy buyers, so he only sends it to the people that he can see. And if you're in lifetime on South Lamar

and you walk downstairs and you see him, it's you with something from the 80s, some hair metal or some like big pop star from the 80s, and he's just furiously sending fucking links to people.

That's how social media, I think, supposed to be consumed. If you're at 130 beats per minute, if you're at 130 heart rate per minute, you just like forget about it. Like, all the new stuff goes and I'm just in like these holes, like finding stuff.

But one of the reflections, You've managed to find a social media flow state. Yeah, yeah, the flow state for social media. Boom scrolling. It's coming back. So one of my actual realizations when I was in this high was, one thing you, when you're in like a flow state or when you're more mindful, you begin, like the, a lot of meditators describe it as the frame rate of reality

completely slows down. So it's kind of going from a standard definition TV to a HD where everything's a bit clearer, everything's a bit slower. And I started to notice this thing in my head that I was really embarrassed about. that when I would scroll, I'd see a tweet or I'd see a post, and there's this little thing in me that just looks at the views it gets and then like determines if I'm going to consume it or my reaction beforehand. And it's almost like, imagine what we've created with this memetic algorithm.

Imagine before you ever heard like a piece of music or you ever tasted a bit of food. It's like people clapping or people going, no, but shit. You don't actually ever experience social media content. So one of the two big changes I'd like to see is one, could I just turn off all engagement metrics? And I'd be fascinated to run a study and compare the two and see like the impact that that would have. And then the second one, because I've thought a lot about this, which is your point shown around the depth metrics, that it's very hard for us to measure depth. It's very easy for us to measure width is right now one of the problems with social media is you can only kind of pay with a like. Like that's the currency, which, and then I if you have a thought experiment, if you imagine the world,

where the only currency was one dollar, like a $1 bill, and you can't pay more than $1. What would you have? The dollar store theory. You'd have dollar store everywhere. It means you wouldn't have Michelin Star restaurants. You wouldn't have like luxury brands. You wouldn't have all these stuff that you'd, those are actually shit examples because I hate them. But you know, stuff that you would actually want to pay more money for.

And I thought even just as simple as like, YX don't just implement like a golden like. Where I only have one per week. It's completely meaningless. But I have one per week and I press it. And then I can also go on the golden like feed. I know, this is the thing that Sean says out of everything he's consumed this week is the best. I think the change you would have in terms of content, we're huge. The worst thing is that you proposed this to me over dinner, what, five years ago or something probably?

And I was that fucking stupid idea. And then YouTube brought in hype. We've seen hype. No, what is that? If you're a channel with under 100,000 subscribers, you as a user are allowed, I think you're allocated about 1,000 hype points per week. And you can only spend it on videos that are high performing. I think it might be videos over 100K on channels less than 100K, something like that.

But it's like non-fundshundable, the limited, right? So the Bitcoin of your likes. Right. And it's fucking great. And I find myself using it on videos that I really want to. Here's a small creator that's nailed it with some great documentary explaining why the straight of whole moves is hard to get through, whatever fuck. And I want to send the hype thing.

Michael Smoke had one video that broke through and I wanted to do it for his thing. So yes, you're right. Other thing, McNamara fallacy, you familiar with that? No. Okay, so McNamara was the guy that was in charge of working out what was going on with the troops in the Vietnam War. And his issue was that he was measuring the wrong metrics. So the McNamara fallacy or quantitative fallacy is the mistake of making decisions based solely on metrics while ignoring qualitative unmeasurable factors. Named after U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it assumes that if something cannot be easily measured, it is not important.

does not exist. So the issue that the McNamara fallacy had was that enemy body count metric is taken to be a precise and objective measure of the success or failure of the Vietnam War, but it wasn't at all. It was domestic casualties, domestic injuries, and the far more important, what's the vibe? What's the tone? The morale? Yes. The soul. Yeah, precisely. So the line is we end up intending to measure what matters. But instead, what we can measure just ends up mattering. Yeah. And everything else is disregarded.

So you could, like I say, how obviously golden-like idea, like, is there any ways you guys are like for yourselves, whether it's for the actual platforms, themselves or just for you as an individual, have found a way out of this? There was one I heard. I didn't do this. But Hormozzi had a thing with this where he starts getting popular on YouTube. And then he hires a team and they're like, hey, let's punch this up. Let's do this video. Let's do this video. Oh, people will love this.

Do what you're eating. Do what you, how you guys met. Do this. He started as a business channel and then he's doing everything. And of course, things that are, you know, there's not a lot of people who want to understand how to do better cold calls in sales, right? Like, that's a super niche topic. But like, don't be broke is a bigger topic.

And then bigger than that is going to be harsh truths about being a man, whatever. Right. So those are pot. Those get two million views. So why make those shitty 20,000 views about, you know, how to, how to improve your sales funnel or whatever. But he realized, like, well, what was my mission? My mission was like, I love business. I want to share what I know about business. And so what he did was, uh, he started selling his book for 99 cents. And he put it in this bio, right? So he's basically

just used the assumption of instead of measuring the success of these videos based on views, let's just measure it on book sales. It's like, presumably only a business person, the type of people I'm making condo for would buy a business book about sales or about $100 million offers, only somebody who liked the video and trusted me more from this video would go and convert. So it's like, let me create my own, like, it's like people who do their own sampling, like are their own polling. Like, I don't know if you heard about this before the election, but there was a guy who did the, who made a huge bet on Polly Market that Trump was going to win.

I don't know if you guys remember this. Some French guy made like $50 million. And the reason why was the mainstream media polls were showing like a neck and neck race. and he did what's called, something like the Friends and Neighbors poll. You can pull this up, Jared. But like, I think their premise was, if you ask people who they're going to vote for,

they'll tell you, but like some people hedge and there was like closeted Trump voters. But if you ask them, who do you think your neighbor's going to vote for? They'll give you a different question. This is like the Keynesian Beauty Contest. Yeah. Yeah.

And so he used the data from, he commissioned his own poll, which cost him like a few hundred thousand dollars or whatever, and he ended up making $40 or $50 million on a bet. because he understood the actual probability of success was far different than the the priced odds on these markets on these markets. So what you're saying that Alex did was he found a metric that was more important and more accurate than all of the other metrics.

B-Y-O-B. He brought his own metric to YouTube, which he had to hack around, right, to figure out how to do. James Smith does this. So he's got his business channel, which is the other thing. He basically shut down his main one, which he's got half a million subs. And he'll put a video up that gets 20,000 plays and make $50,000. because the people that go onto that video are precisely his target market at a high conversion and they've got some special tracking link that's for each different video.

So he knows, oh, this one video, because it's only this link in that one video and it's pinned in the comments or whatever it might be. And he can, he's now optimizing for the outcome that he wants. That makes sense. Now, the problem is that you then start to optimize for book sales. Right. And what optimizing for book sales, because you're all. always optimizing for something, unless you're optimizing for vibe or optimizing for feeling.

And that's what the, you know, to break the fourth wall, that's the reason that I wanted to do this. I don't know if these episodes will ever be bigger than me sitting down with McConaughey. I think they've kind of weirdly got the legs to be. But the reason I wanted to do it is because I thought it would be fun. And I think the optimizing for your, the quote on the wall of your man or the childlike joy or the, you know, good hang vibe. It's, yeah, knowing when to use metrics, when to avoid them. And then also, I think you said and around studies, like how much of this is you and then how much of this is the wider. I have to give you credit. You did this. When you released your high agency thing, I was the one

who went on similar web and looked at the traffic to your blog. I was like, dude, there's a million people have read your blog. You're like, really? I'm like, what are your analytics saying? That's similar web. He's like, I didn't have Google analytics in. Yeah. I was like, you're a marketing guy. How do you not have it in? You intentionally didn't have it in. Well, even that bit of advice there of like, do a blog post? Like blog posts are essentially the UK or the mainstream media. You know what I mean? Like, it's like the ultimate like undervalue. Undervalue.

Like, don't do it. You can't link to it. And at that time, Twitter completely shadow ban links. But then, yeah, I think doing something fundamentally different. And this is the challenge of when do you know, and I struggle with this a lot, when you're a bit of a weird guy, which fucking all four of us are probably, right? When do you know that you're kind of on to something? You're on the edge? Or when are you just a bit bad shit mentally?

And that, and knowing that is a fucking skis. That's what you've got to have good friends, I think. as well as sometimes just balls and you make mistakes. No, no, you just ignore, you just always assume you're onto something. Put the glasses, put the glasses on and hope the bed. That's what I do. Delusional. This is the difference.

You know what I mean? That's our GDP gap right there. That's the GDP gap right that. That's the GDP gap, right that. Yeah. You think so what's gonna tell you if you're on to something? Come on. Yeah. Really? Really, it is.

I'm always onto something. That's right, baby. We're like, next thing you know, I'm not. Too sure. Maybe I'll wait two decades. That's a metocratic society where we've got an old school aristocratic society. Exactly. Exactly. We've been handed down. And also the other thing is that we can't raise out of our status. You're going to be middle class for the rest of your life in the eyes of British people. I'm going to be working class for the rest of my life in the eyes of British people. It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter how many plays I get, how much money I make. When I go back home, they know where I went to school. They know what postcode my parents lived in. They know what my accent's like. It's like, I think that that that puts a kind of cap on how much people think that they, how big their dreams should be and how much faith they should have in themselves. This is a

Alande Boton talked about this. He's like, people that come from in the UK working class backgrounds, they're probably not going to try and rock the boat because that's not their place. It's not your place to do that. America's like nascent. It's a fucking two years old, right, in the grand scheme of things. We've got a thousand years of uninterrupted, uninvaded history, right, apart from some planes in fucking like August of 1940. That's it, right? And then fucking Rudolph Hess when he decided to try and land in Scott. Do you know that story? Rudolf Hess Oh gee, do you want to tell it? You tell it better than me.

Okay, so Rudolf Hess was one of the... That was the most English shit ever. You want to tell it? No, you tell it better than me. Click on. Rudolph Hess was a German fighter ace in World War I and he then becomes one of the inner circle for Hitler in World War II.

He starts to slowly lose favor toward the end of the war. I think 43, 44, he starts to lose favor with Hitler. And he sees himself being shunted to the side a little bit. So he decides that he's going to do something courageous and heroic that's going to save the war and also bring him back into the inner circle with regards to Hitler. Because he's got this sort of win, this group of sycophants around him. He's got Himler, he's got Goebbels, all of these guys that are around him.

And Rudolf Hess has been shunted out to the side. So Hess gets a two-seat plane, one of the long. range bomber planes that the Germans were using. He gets it modified so that it can be flown by one person as opposed to two. He gets additional fuel tanks strapped to it and he flies it without telling anybody in the middle of the night from Germany over to Scotland because he once met some aristocratic Scottish nobleman and thinks because he's got this perspective of Brits that it's all one Renaissance Bridgeton novel, that he is going to know Winston Churchill and the king, and he's going to be able to, or the queen, and he's going to be able to petition Britain to have an armistice, to put down their arms. So he leaves a note for the furor and leaves a note for his wife and just sets off. Now, he doesn't know where he is when he gets to Scotland because it's dark. By the time he gets to Scotland, it's dark. And he, can't see where he wanted to land.

He can't see the fucking palace or the house of this nobleman. So he just pulls the ejector seat, lands in a farmer's field. Lans in a farmer's field. Very quickly gets picked up by the British military. They find out this is the fourth-ranking Nazi in the entire Reich. Immediately take him into custody. He doesn't get to see the king, doesn't get to see the queen, doesn't get to see anybody.

Doesn't get to see anybody at all. Doesn't get anywhere close to the nobleman he meant to go out and there and see. However, the British now have the fourth-ranking Nazi. world and Hitler is furious, absolutely fucking furious, like apoplectic, apparently. And it just goes to show, I think, like, first off, the weird incentives and the way that people respond to a tight sphere of a social circle with power struggles that keep on going on. It causes people to do crazy. It's being in a relationship with a hot, cold girlfriend, right? You're just doing fucking insane thing. You're like throwing rocks at her window, holding a boombox with a mixtape, and then the next

You're naked fucking getting, you know, being beaten up by her or whatever. I told you that story in confidence. And the other thing is that people still have this kind of archaic interpretation of what British life is like, especially back in the day. He should have done a 360 and then moon walked out of that. Have you ever heard of the story of Churchill and Hitler getting dinner? This episode is brought to you by Whoop. According to my whoop, I've tracked nearly 2,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens.

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That's join. Dotwop.com slash modern wisdom. Early 30s, Churchill's very much out of the picture. And Hitler's on the come up. So I think he's just, he's either just became chancellor, he's just about to come chancellor. And one of the fascinating things that you, when you really study history, is how blurry it is at the time. So I always use the example of the Roman Empire.

I think it's like four, seven, six, eight. is where the Roman Empire fell. But if you ask, well, when did the people recognize it fell? And it's a bit like, hmm, the same with the British Empire. Like, when did the British Empire fall? It's like, hmm, like you could point to certain parts of World War I. You could go further back. You could go to World War II. You could go to 60s, 70s, whenever you want to go to it. When do people actually recognize the thing? It's always later. And even like Hitler, like Churchill, who obviously ends up becoming Hitler's like nemesis, was intrigued by a dinner with him. So there was this guy called Ernst Putsi Hengels Fegan. You can probably search that one, Jared. And good luck. And he

was like a socialite in Germany who wanted to arrange the meeting. And Churchill basically said, listen, he was really concerned about communism at the time, but he was also concerned with Hitler's anti-Semitism. So Putsi says, well, come through, I'll introduce you to Adolf, you guys will get on really well. Churchill turns up, he's got his whole family there. And kind of chatting to Putsi, he's still not here, still not here. So they kind of have dinner. Hitler's not there. And Churchill's like, where is he? So Putsi goes, leave it with me. So Hitler famously lives in an apartment building in Berlin.

So he goes to his apartment building. Shit you not, Hitler's there just shaving his mustache. So he's just shaving his mustache at the time. That's the thing about his mustache. There's a lot of work that goes into that thing. So he's shaving the mustache. And he goes, Winston Churchill, very important British politician, wants to meet you. And he's like, what am I going to say to him?

And what am I going to say? I have no interest in talking to that guy. And Putsi, like, argues with him for ages. And he goes, right, I'll come. So he goes back, tells Churchill, Churchill his family sit there, Hitler never comes. So Putsy says, I'll settle it up the next day. Sets up another dinner, Hitler never comes.

And it's like those moments of history that if those two met, because famously, I didn't realize this until I was reading about it recently, that Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler. He flew over to Germany and he was impressed. Do this, give us a handshake. He was impressed by the handshake because Hitler does these like double handshakes. And he was drawn in by his charisma and believed, oh, this guy will never invade.

But it's just this fascinating counterfactual that if Adolf and Winston met, what would have happened? What year was that? I want to say 31, 32, around about then. Fuck. Yeah, that's so cool. Have you seen the Forbes under 30 under 30 fraud list? Oh, wow.

Yeah. It's crazy. Jared. How long is it now? So it's just, this stinks of you to. This is kind of just a gift for you too. but this is the 30 under 30 fraud watch list. So if we scroll down a little bit

and you hover over San Backman Fried, you'll see incarcerated, terraform labs, incarcerated, Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos incarcerated, we'll keep going down. There we go. Time served for Martin Scroly. And if you go to the black bit where it's like redacted,

just scroll over the black text. The real numbers were 300, that's it. So the student loan app to JPMorgan for 175 million claim 4.24. million users, the real number was 300,000, and she hired a data scientist to fabricate the rest. J.P. Morgan bought it anyway. Then noticed, oops. If we go all the way down to the bottom, there's actually a risk list. So this is people who've been on the 30 under 30. It's like a, how would you say, prototypical algorithm that looks at some of the hype around the market. So

these are companies that they think is going to be likely to be on the fraud list. So I don't know any sphere, cursor. Do you know what that is? Shon. Kers. Cursor is. Super legit. I would say, cursor, super legit, but... They're not going to come for you. The crazy one is Sam Bamfrey. It came out today. Polymarket there. Oh, Shane. Sam Bamfrey came out today that the shares, FTX,

so Sam Bambride put an investment in Anthropic that owns Claude. It would have gotten them out of the bankruptcy. It's something like that. No, it's like $60 billion. $60 billion, which Coinbase is worth $50 billion or something like that. So it's... FTC at its peak was 30. So basically he's one of the...

had he not gone to jail for fraud and had not been using customers. Would have been one of the richest people on the planet. And he would have been seen as one of the best investors in the world because he was early in Salani. It was early in this. Do they still have that position or did they have to liquidate the position? No, that's the sad part. When they did the bankruptcy, they bring in this guy. He's a famous guy.

He did the Enron bankruptcy, something like something rice or something. I forgot his name is he's got a cool, cool sounding name. They bring him in. So what do they do? They immediately like freeze all payments. They like have like a protocol of bankruptcy. see. And so one of the things is they take all these illiquid shares and they say, we need to sell them. And they sell them by this huge discount right away into the market. Oh my God. And so they sold the whole lot. Do you know what they sold it for? So they sold the whole lot for like, I think like a billion dollars of, like a billion dollars of all the investments that he had made. And so it was like a fraction of whatever it was like worth essentially. And just the one anthropropic position alone is a $60 billion position. Would that have paid off all of the multiple tons? Many tons of. So all of the people. who were missing money,

had they have just helped, when was the FTX thing, three years ago? Yeah, something like that. Had they had they held the FTX position in Anthropic simply for what? Thousand days,

thousand more, even let's say it was like they did it, it was last year, it would have been three years. That would have cleared off everybody's debts. Everybody would have got their money back.

Right. Well, you got screwed because if, let's say you held Bitcoin in FTX. You did nothing wrong. You bought Bitcoin on this exchange. You think you have Bitcoin. In reality,

FTCs either didn't buy the Bitcoin, just took your cash. They showed you. You own 10 Bitcoin, but they never bought the Bitcoin. They just took the cash and did something with it. Or you did have Bitcoin and they went and used it again for their own slush fund of investing, which they were not supposed to do. Now, even when the bankruptcy happened and it's like, oh, you're going to get paid out. You got paid out based on the Bitcoin price when it happened, not the fact that Bitcoin was up three, four, five X since then. Why is it?

It was like that it's the way that I guess the bankruptcy process works. I don't know. The technicality of the way that they did it. And so you had this money that should have been appreciating that was locked up. And then you get paid on the four years ago price or whatever it was the day, the day that it happened is pretty bad. Sean, your knowledge of fucking niche business stuff, dude, is terrifying. It's like George for random historical facts. It's really fucking terrifying. Galloway did something cool with us. Have you heard what he did? So when the bankruptcy happened and people, So like for me, I had some cash. FTX was one of our sponsors.

They gave us a bunch of money. They gave us like 100 or 200 grand to write one article about them on the Milk Road. And we actually wrote it and I wrote in the thing. I was like, yeah, there's this weird relationship between FTX, which everybody thinks is the best company in the world right now. And Alameda research his like hedge fund. And it's like it's unclear the relationship. It's a bit of a.

So you called this up. So I called that part. I'm not an investigative journalist. I wasn't going to go. It's not my job to go figure that out, but I just noted like, hey, like, here's a bunch of really interesting things about them. Here's something that's unexplained.

I don't fully know. It sounds a little bit sketch. And so we sent it to them. We're like, hey, we're ready to post. And they were like, you need to take that part out. No fucking one. And so I was like, well, I think I'm not going to take it out. Right.

And they were like, okay, we'll get back to you. And they just never talked to me again. They never took the money back. They never asked for the money back. They just disappeared. And you never posted it? We were like, okay, I guess we'll just, I guess they'll get back to us. They just never did. And then it came out that that was like this link that was like a really problematic thing. That was their defensive way of handling that basically. Did you ever talk about that? That's crazy. Bring up the fact that you presciently fucking accidentally just nudged the trip why. You didn't fully break it, but you nudged the trip why that was going to cause like the biggest banking scandal of the last five years. The Epstein girls, the two girls. But I'm like a dog setting it off. I wasn't really like clever in how I was doing it. You backed into it. You moonwalked into it. Yeah, I was just like, that sounds weird. Is there an explanation with this? They're like, no.

And I was like, okay, still sounds weird to me. That was it. It's really interesting to consider, and it kind of links to the, like, study says, science says, of we just have this default bias of if people think this thing is successful. It's this giant game of Empress New Clothes that exists. One of the things that I've always had a bit of a problem with, maybe because I was such an unpopular kid, but the fact that talent isn't enough, momentum is more important for the most part. we can let a lot of people get away with some pretty gnarly shit if it seems like they're crushing it. I always use this example of a fire festival. Billy McFarlane from Fire Festival.

The festival was an entire catastrophe, multiple documentaries made about it. People are in basically FEMA shelters instead of the five-star huts that they were promised. Blink 182 doesn't turn up. People have got these like small cheese sandwiches. Maybe they're going to be stranded on an island. There's not enough water, all the rest of it. But if Billy McFarland had been able to put together a half-competalant, competent festival, just passable.

He would have been held as a marketing genius. The Orange Square, all of that stuff is hugely influential. And this is because we will forgive almost every sin of someone's if they're successful. And in a meritocracy, this makes complete sense, right? If you are crushing it, that means that I want to be around you. The blast radius of your success is so great. Fucking canonical, perfect example that happened two weeks ago, Kanye West. Kanye West just sold out SoFi Stadium two nights, right?

And the stage show is fucking spectacular. All that anyone can talk about is how cool the production was. And he's got all of these guests coming on. It's fucking amazing. He hasn't exactly showered himself in glory over the last five years. It would be difficult for a musician to try and torpedo their own musical career more aggressively than Kanye West did. But Homeboy's got bangers. If you've got bangers, dude.

It's all forgiven. You can do whatever the fuck you want. And that's on one side, what happens with music, your point and beauty, two things that hack the human brain so effectively that you will stay going back to the fucking crazy stripper girl because she's so, even though she's bad for you, you will listen to the person who put out literal Heil Hitler song fucking six months ago because he's got three and a half hour worth set of straight heaters. and the same thing is also true with momentum. If somebody seems to be crushing it,

we'll just, we're, we're, Sam Bankman Fried. He's playing fucking, what was he playing? Like, fucking World of Warcraft or something? During the meeting. And he's like, oh my God, this guy's a fucking cheap. Genius. Yeah, exactly.

And it's like, no, no, no. Because any person would be scrutinized, but if you've got the right momentum, people are happy to just fucking shunt that to decide. And I've never liked it. And it goes to my theory about why, people say the only insults that hurt are the ones that you believe. And I don't think it's true.

I think the insults that hurt the most are the ones that you know are untrue, but that you fear other people might believe. Because that's optics management, because you have not only the unfairness, but you have the indignation of knowing that it isn't true. And this is the opposite side of the same dynamic that we're talking about here. You could put out something which is amazingly researched, a fantastic piece of work.

But if other people say you're a bad guy, or that was done incorrectly or we don't think he's cool, it's not going to get anywhere. But that can't happen with beauty because it hacks the human brain. It is so hard to say, you can say, that girl or that guy that's very good looking, they're an asshole, there are this, there or that. And you go, yeah, but they're so fucking hot.

The same with Kanye West. You can say he's an anti-Semi, we don't like him. He's crazy. He's addicted to nitrous. We do, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's like, he's got fucking heaters, dude. And for as long as he's got heaters, it doesn't matter. I do think that's my fucking...

I do think music and beauty are unique in that regard that the more successful you are as a musician, the more you can probably get away with more so than any other realm. People can kid themselves into not liking something that is objectively good because they don't like the person putting it across in most art forms. If you don't like somebody on a podcast and they tell a really interesting story, you can convince yourself that it wasn't that interesting other an asshole. Even comedy. Someone can tell a joke and you can be like, no, wasn't that good. Wasn't that good? Didn't think it was that good. The same thing is not true for music. It is so penetrating emotionally to people. It fucking just cuts through your biases. It cuts through your defenses in a way that other art forms can't. And beauty, especially like female beauty for guys is just you can be the craziest like total cluster B personality nightmare curse. If your heart, guys are just going to keep coming back. Wait till you hear, Epstein, SoundCloud. You know, I always used the example with Billy McFarlane of, like, Steve Jobs is a little bit of a very, very different figure to Billy McFarlane. But reality is distortion field, kind of makes things happen.

And like the counterfactual that, like the ultimate thing that McFarlane did, or one of the big things is like his business partner, his co-founder, was Jarrell. And like I always look like the counterfactual if Steve Jobs' co-founder was Jarrell rather than Steve Wozniak. The McFarland story is very, obviously it's on him for selecting Jarl. But if you would have selected a good operate. Operate. Yeah, what would have happened? Question. Question.

What businesses would be made better by adding Jarloulin? That's a great question. You see the old thing? What does Jha have to say about this? Yeah. One of the all-time old internet memes. There's a phrase that I've been very interested in recently called supernormal stimuli.

Have you heard this? Yeah. It's pretty fascinating. You know, really with this? You might be able to explain it. Skinerian behaviorism stuff. Yeah, basically there was a scientist back in the Nobel Prize for this.

And what he studied was, he got famous because instead of doing studies in a lab, he just went out into the wild. It was like, what do I observe is actually true? And then if I tweak a variable, can I just leave it in the real environment and see what happens? And so what he did was, you know, birds, the core behavior of a bird is to sit on the egg. egg warm. That's your baby. That's like the entire like Darwinian pressure is to keep this egg alive. So he goes, awesome. Bird loves egg. Does bird love bigger egg? Does bird love pink polka dot egg?

So he started putting a fake bigger egg with bigger dots and bigger, brighter colors. Put it next to it and guess what the bird does? Gets off its real egg and goes sits on the fake egg because it's more stagued, hijacked the brain. And so his point was it like it's not like some rational pros and cons. list decision. Bird just had a deep, like, part of his brain that you could just hijack by changing the, to give a, what he calls, a supernormal stimulus. So he'd give him a bigger, and you could just keep doing this up until the point where it's almost comical. The egg is so big that a bird, finally when he's like, I can't even sit on this egg, okay, I guess that's too big. Right. And like, you know, you walk around and you'll see people with crazy lip fillers and

BBLs. And it's like, what is it? It's a super normal stimulus. It's the same thing. It's like, there's a way to hijack the mind, beauty, color. If you go to the grocery store, what do the food companies do? They basically take your normal stimulus. So, like, you know, the humans were evolved to, we like salt because we need electrolytes. We like fat for a certain reason. We need certain things in our diet. So they just said, well, what if I give you a lot of salt?

What if I give you fucking Doritos, Kula, ranch? What if I give you triple, you know, triple pack Dorito, Loco, Taco, whatever? And you eventually get a supernormal stimulus that you really can't, like, resist. Your body has this like an extreme like pull towards it. You know my favorite supernormal stimuli is hunter gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time. Wow. Because it is so unique. There's a process called orification.

So orification is the design of texture of foods. And if you think about ancestrally, almost every food that you can think of is a single texture. Meat, cooked, slimy-ish, a little bit. There's baby. There we go. stimulate with it. Let's see how this is getting on. Yeah. Fuck of that. Yeah, I'm out on this now.

Two hours in. I'm still enjoying it. I think I'm hungry. Oreos. Crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. Fries. But what's interesting about the cheesecake thing is that you have fat with carbs and sugar, unbelievably rare. And you have sort of the crunchiness of the base

and you can tell I'm hungry. And the fluffiness of the top of the cheesecake. And they give these to hunter-gatherers and these, their fucking minds. It's a flavor explosion. But yeah, there's a really great one that I think it's beetles, a type of beetle, dung beetle perhaps, or some of the beetle that are attracted, they're sexually attracted to the shininess of the shell, the shininess of the top. But as glass bottles became prevalent, the beetle population was going down because the glass bottles were shinier and bigger than the beetles were. So they were driving themselves into extinction, not mating with each other and just mating with glass bottles.

Because that was a supernormal stimuli. And what happens with the cosmetic surgery, the big lips, the big boobs thing, you get something called Fischerian Runaway. So Ficharian Runaway is this sort of recursive, insane expansion of typically, like sexually dimorphic traits, sexually provocative traits. And you end up with peacocks who've got tails so big that they can't move. With deer whose antlers are so large they can't lift their heads up and they die. with women who've got boobs that are so big that they end up with back pain.

And, you know, they're unable, let's say that you took it to the absolute extreme. You were no longer able to procreate the reason for that trait in the first place, but you'd done something that destroyed your hips. And now it meant that you needed to have that hysterectomy and you couldn't have your uterus anymore. And now you've killed your chance at doing the thing by having it run away with itself. The same as some of those dears or rams where the size of their like antips, Things dig into their own head and kill them. Oh, yeah, I've seen that.

Fucking Molly. Wow. It's funny how it's kind of like a meta discourse where, you know, you're talking earlier about the platforms and the feedback loops and then you end up like going so awry, but that's kind of nature's like homegrown version. It's the same dynamic. That's what it's, what you've seen on social media is tapping into this exact dynamic. It's the same thing.

It's just that you've had to replicate it digitally. There's a great tweet that this guy. Jay Alto said, he said, you pity the moth for confusing the lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world. Fucking slug. It's one of the best, one of the best tweets of this year. Yeah, it's amazing. But there is a solve, right? Because like, you hear this and you're like, oh, great, we're fuck. It's like, no, what's, well, there's got to be some sort of antidote to this. And the interesting part was, the equation goes like this. It's basically, how powerful is the stimulus? So the flavor of the food, the size of the feathers, whatever, versus your baseline

norm, what you are used to. And the cool thing is basically like, there's this arms race where they keep escalating. So the more you do it, the more you get used to it, then you need a bigger stimulus and a bigger, you need a bigger tweet and a bigger TikTok and more views on the next video and you need a stronger flavor. But all you got to do is basically detox for a very short amount of time and reset. Like if anybody's ever given up soda for like, you know, a couple months or a couple years, you never done that. If you go back to it, it tastes like horrible. It's like so syrupy. It's too sweet. You can't handle it. But you used to drink eight Diet Coke's and the reason why is because you can reset the denominator essentially instead of trying to avoid the, the, the,

the forces of, you know, commercialization that are trying to stimulate you. What's that, uh, Cuckfucius substack that me and you like? You see his staring at a wall experiment? No. So this guy's substack, it's pretty niche, but it's fucking, cocfucious. Cucfuge. He's great. He's great. Really well written. You would love it.

Fucking great. I mean, George introduced me to him and now I'm pretty, his first post that I saw was, I am Andrew Puberman. That was the first blog post that I read from him. Subscribe. And he's doing an experiment. He did an experiment, I think, for 30 days where he stared at a wall for an hour. And this is kind of a twist on an ancient Eastern practice, which I think Dr. Kay's got his clients to do as well. After 20 minutes, some people that burst into tears, some people are screaming. They kind of go a little bit.

Yeah, because at least what I think is happening, their baseline of stimulus is so low. even if you're in the shower, even if you're going for a walk, things are moving past you, right? You're locomoting and you see the fucking world. But all they're doing is staring at a wall? Staring at a wall for an hour.

I mean, let's see. You know it would be an interesting test? Take people that have been to jail and compare them to people that haven't. That's basically what you still is. Dude, I was in fucking in school suspension

when I was a teenager for like weeks on end and all I did was stare at a fucking wall. It didn't make me go crazy. That's just weird. I'm in present. evidence may suggest I don't know. Well, says the man in the sale. It was just a fucking delayed onset, dude.

Wasn't it? There's a few, like the most, the most extreme versions of this you've got, I've never fully verified this one, but of monks who've meditated for such a significant period of time are in, I think it's like three standard deviations. Happiness. Of happiness. So like it's like the 0.0.0.0.0.1%. My favorite, and then I'm always a bit like, it's a bit of a study.

But I'm like, fuck, this one's not a study of the guy who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War. I don't know if Jared, if you could pull that one up. The monk? Yeah, the monk who set himself on fire, who just literally walks out, sits in a lotus position, sets himself on fire. Doesn't premise, blink or flinch? And at that moment, I was like, huh, maybe there is something to meditate. Studies don't need to show. Yeah, studies don't need to show.

Photos show. It's physics. I think it's Ken Burns, Vietnam documentary that covers this really. well. You know about his heart? Who's heart? The guy. So this is like kind of a Buddhist, a Buddhist philosophy that, or like a Buddhist part

of the story, which was his heart didn't set on fire. So his heart was like kind of completely normal. His whole body went to Chris, but his heart was still there. I think you could check this jarrup. I think in the cremation period, they tried to cremate his heart and it refused to burn. It's a very serious. It could be a complete myth. Okay.

But as soon as I see this, any of my questions around what the human mind is capable of goes out the window. Homeboy sat in full low. just barbecuing anything around it. Yeah, that's crazy. You can see the gasoline time now. There's a guy who's trying the screen experiment. Have you seen this?

The guy who's doing one year no screens. He's trying to Brian Johnson, but just a no screen. And he's scanning his brain before and after. How far into it is he? Like a day. He just started. He just started at the beginning of a year. He just finished all the things.

He's like, I'm going to avoid. Yeah, this guy, David Dane's. Today I'm scanning my brain before I spend a year without screens. they expect brain function to change but whether the structure self-changes nobody seems to know and he's got his website where you could just like you're going to be able to see the updates of the results

imagine how hard it would be to not it's like not being exposed to fucking microplastics dude there's I mean he's going to be looking at a screen in an airport he's going to go to the gym and there's going to be stuff around so he's really it applies to that too no screens anywhere I assume that's his goal

I assume he meant like phone TV like personal screen you mean he's not going to ever look at any I think that's the intensity. He's going Amish. If it's not, come on. That's pretty true. You've got to go all the way. You're going to have fucking blinkers on.

See if you can find the rules of the challenge. But yeah, that's pretty unwritten. Hey, what was that quote you said maybe 10 minutes ago about the person that you look at the screen and it's reality? What did you say? Like, we laugh when the moth confuses, you know, a lamp for the moon, but here we are confusing the screen for the world. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Map that onto AI.

What do you mean? Just in general, like, I don't know, in 50 years, people are going to be like laughing at us because of whatever we were doing right now. Like we're confusing AI for real intelligence, or what do you mean? I don't really know. I just, when you said that it made me think of how AI is going to be like people are going to laugh at us in 50 years for what we thought was good AI. That's what I thought of when you said that for some reason. Yeah, I mean, that curve of technology. Like, they're going to look at us right now.

In 50 or 100 years, like, where the fucking moth that thinks the lamp is a, what you get, did you guys watch the, you mentioned Dennis. You mentioned Demis from, uh, deep mind. Did you watch the documentary? Yes. Oh, amazing. Dude, it's so, it's amazing. Good.

He's got this, uh, the guy who created deep mind, which kind of kicked off this whole AI wave. He has his documentary on Amazon, I think, called The Thinking Game. It's on YouTube. Oh, it's on YouTube. It's so good. Highly recommend to anyone. Dennis, if you're, if you're listening, I want to bring you on the show, reply to my emails. Dude, he's, he's, he's cool. It was like a six-year-old child prodigy, chess player,

etc. But like that moment of move 37 is just like, chos, you know what I mean? I feel like that's like a turning point in human history was this move 37 moment. Basically, Google Deep Mind has, I mean, they seem to be the most safety conscious kind of very human approach to this AI race at the moment. Yes. But I don't know if, I mean, that the whole point of this, which is why Scott Alexander thinks that Anthropic is the Antichrist, because the Antichrist will come and make you think that they're not. So in this whole AI, that was the whole point that I had with Tristan Harris, is everyone wants to cast aspersions, a company, like Open AI, I don't like you because you did that. I don't like Google because they did that. Or GROC, I don't like you because you did the whatever. It's like, hey, dude,

doesn't matter what somebody's stated fucking safety goals are. These guys are speed running through model development as quickly as possible. Right. And if they don't, they lose. They lose. So just look at the incentives. Don't look at the fucking press release. Right. Like yeah, the Anthropic Super Bowl ads were fucking hilarious. But don't, and they decided not to do the thing for the Department of War and they did whatever stuff. It's like, dude, don't fucking like get lost in the source. These people are playing the exact same fucking game just with slightly better PR. Yeah. It does seem there's a huge Duma, like, narrative right now around AI that's becoming more and

more popular. Listen to more Freedberg. Yeah. I mean, like, from the wider question of what happens, I don't know, but from first-hand, like, experience, like, for myself, I, um, because the image models are getting so good now, I've had, like, a, like, it's called Suburomic dermatitis for about 10 years. Like, sometimes it gets so bad, I wouldn't want to, like, go outside, like, level of bad. I just showed as a Gemini.

What does that mean? So it's basically that you're kind of like, there'll be a lot of people listening that you have it. It affects like 5 to 10% of the population and your face will just break out in like really bad exma. So I went to one doctor who basically got them in a steroid cream and said the reason why you have it is because of stress. It's like quite well known because of stress. Carried on, I said like meditating, like fixing my diet. I basically didn't eat sugar for like two years and it calmed it down. I was like, oh, it's because of sugar.

And then I saw her second doctor and she said, yeah, you're too stressed out. I'm like, fuck, I'm getting stressed out by your diagnosis that I'm stressed out. So she recommends another steroid cream. I end up tracking it for ages and I just upload the whole document to Gemini and it goes, oh no, just put Nisarol on your face. So anybody who has subatomic dermatitis, it fixes it for like 90% of people.

And Nisrol is a medicine or it's like shampoo. It's a fucking shampoo. Shampo you can get for a few dollars. It's like Cels and Blue. And like, I've never had it ever again sense. I have 10 years, never had it ever again sense. And that's just that. But these stories are like, it's not as,

it's not as sexy as like the guy who speaks to the LLM and decides to take his own life. It's like, not that that's like a, obviously, a horrific story. If it's even fucking true, I don't know. But like, I know just so many people who's like health is genuinely being like revolutionized by these things. And it's just, we just have such an anchor towards negativity. Also, you're always going to push back against something, some new technological development. Yes, it's, it's the most recurring lesson throughout history. Like I was reading, because I was fascinated by with AI coming on, I was like, I want to

go study the industrial revolution. What was fascinating at the time, you had two groups that came up, you had the Luddites who would just basically go and smash the factories in. And you're sure this recently with Sam Altman having a Molotov cocktail front at his house a week ago. But then you also had the Romantics. So the Romantics would kind of pine about, and you kind of see this now they are where it's like they'll call things swap, which are. And there is, there's a, what you do want the Luddites and you do want the romantics because they kind of act as a balancing arc to, to the progression. But I think like net net, most people alive today do not want to go back to pre-industrial revolution. They do not want, like, the option is to go

to Amish if you do want to. Like, that is available if you want to go Amish, but nobody does. I think AI is going to make people go fucking insane. Yeah? Yeah, because they were getting into a point where... I was going to say, but Paul, Jared, if you can pull up the new thing, I don't know, the F.C. produces, I don't know how true it is. But essentially, they argue it's making people less polarized immediately,

where social media was pushing people further to the left and the right, whereas AI, you can kind of already see with GROC now. They fact-checked people a lot more. So they're bringing a lot more people into the center. Well, why do you think it'll make people... We live in a post-truth age now. There's no way to determine what flavor is it? This is sweet whiskey.

You want sweet whiskey? Yeah, I do. You're going to have two toothpicks in? Yeah, I'm doubling down. Let's go. Jesus Christ. Well, I'm not using them to actually pick my teeth. No, no, but you need so many stimulants that you've got one Newtonic toothpick, one Zippix toothpick.

Yeah, no, and I'm coming down off that crate them right now. I feel like him. You quiet. You're slow motion. I think that deep fakes and. Maybe it's more so in America than other places, but after the Charlie Kirk assassination, there's all these conspiracy theories left and right about whether it was Israel did it or it's a hologram or this guy was real.

Like there's all this crazy shit, right? And nobody's going to be saying it's something like, oh, this is a hologram or this was AI without the advent of AI being able to create deepfakes that are largely, I mean, look at, look at boomers. Dude, they believe all sorts of crazy shit. And we're like, fucking idiots. That's what I was kind of getting at, I guess, with what I was saying to you about that comment. But we're never going to know, I mean, ever what actually has happened with anything we know anymore.

Truth is no longer even fucking matters because it can't be determined unless you experience it with your own five senses. So there's a great chapter in a book called The Beginning of Infinity. And essentially his idea is what's called known as the precautionary principle, which is essentially the history of humanity is essentially problems. Like we start like even Great Britain, like me and Christopher, is this human concept. Like it shouldn't exist. Like we, in Great Britain, me and my family should fucking die of hypothermia. But because of like we created central heating, we created clothing.

But so we essentially have this whole arc of just problem solving, problem solving, problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. And the problem that you then have, ironically, is that when a new problem comes along like this, is that you have what's known as the precautionary principle, which is we can see the problem, but we can't see the solution. But by definition, people, human beings can't forecast a solution. Because if you have the solution for it, we would implement it and be worth trillionaires. But what you end up having is kind of 7 billion people working towards this potential problem. You sort of with COVID. Like, I'm, I'm, I think it's very unsexy to say, but I'm pretty optimistic when it comes to

humans' abilities to solve problems. I think, I think like a lot of this stuff we can fix. Speaking of AI, did you see this Allbirds pivot? Oh, dude, it's insane. Can you explain for the class, please? What the fuck just happened? Allbirds, which was like a popular shoe amongst tech guys, at least. I don't know how popular got outside of that, but it was like a niche shoe.

a wool sneaker. They were like, started small, became a public company, but then they started failing. And so like the stock has been going down for years. I think they were last like, you know, at one point, like a billion dollar company, they were like a $50 million company now. So the stock had been falling, falling, falling, falling, falling. And there was really no path. And so these guys bought it, I think. And I think what they did was they purchased it. And they just pivoted to AI. And it's like, well, how does a shoe pivot to AI? What does that mean? They're like, well, we raised all this debt. We're going to buy GPUs and sell them.

And the stock, like, as of this morning is sorry. I don't think this is a sustainable thing. But the stock is out by what? The company valued at around $4 billion at its peak, sold the intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. 39 million. And then they renamed it like, what, free bird or something? What do they name it?

The shoe company had a market cap of $21 million on Tuesday, which climbed to $148 million on Wednesday. Just by saying, we do AI. The word's AI. And this happened during crypto. There was like an iced tea company that was like, yeah, we're an iced tea company, but we're a blockchain, ice tea company. And then there was tons of these companies. They would just change their name. They didn't even change the underlying business.

They just changed the name to like, you know, blockchain motor controls. And then their stock would pop just because of stupidity. Yeah, dude, the one day price move is 582%. Yeah, it's stupid. There's stupid things that happen. There's like, you know, the efficient market hypothesis, and then you hear this, right? Yeah, I saw somebody putting like the intelligent investor in the bin. It's like giving up on this.

Speaking of A, did you guys see, this kind of blew my mind. This is more in the kind of fear and doom stuff, but did you see the Indian, the Indian factory AI thing? Do you see this? Whether training people with the cameras? Headset. Yeah, to fold clothes and shit. They're sewing shirts. They're basically folding towels.

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

Do you know how Tesla made itself driving so good? Do you know how it was trained? With a human? Yeah. So these guys are just working. And these guys have like neck pain and all this such as they're wearing this eight hours straight. Hey, Sean. their heads.

There's a company that's basically making a lot of money creating this data and selling it back to the AI AI labs, which is pretty wild. And Elon actually, he gave this interview, he said something that nobody really has talked about, but I thought it was pretty bad shit crazy. They were like, well, the next thing for Tesla is not cars. It's his robot. They're like, how are you going to train the robot to do all this stuff? You don't, like, for cars, you got the data because humans were driving the cars.

So you were able to learn on millions and millions of miles. How are you going to do it with the robots? He's like, well, we're building this, I don't know, 100,000 square foot warehouse, and we're going to put 10,000 robots in there. Oh, my God. And they're going to self-play. So he's like, so if you watch, like, how they train the AI to beat like Go and chess, there was one way, which was you have grandmasters tell hard code rules.

Okay, what's better than that? You train it on only grandmasters game, game logs. And then they did this thing called Alpha Zero, where they're like, We're just going to tell you the rules of chess. You play yourself 100,000 times to see what happens. And that became better than all of the other models with no data of how to play chess or how to play Go. And so Alpha Zero is a huge breakthrough when DeepMind did it. So now Elon's trying to do the same thing with robots where he's like, yeah, we could do this where we get all the data from like human people like recordings.

Or we could just create a warehouse where we tell them the objectives of the different stations. And then we let them just like fumble around trying to figure out like how to use their arms. And eventually, they're just going to figure out. I'll put 10,000 robots in this box. I'm like, I would pay so much money to watch this live stream. What was that? It's better than Netflix.

Neo? Is that the at-home robot? What was the one that's made of kind of knitted? Yeah, I think Neo is the name of it. Neo. So this was an at-home assistance robot. There was two versions. You could buy it outright.

It could rent it. I think to rent it was actually quite expensive. It was it $300 a month, something like that, $400 a month. And someone videoed their Neo trying to close the dishwasher and it looks like someone at the end of a party on too much ketamine trying to do the same thing. It's all sort of janky and it's going down and it just cannot close this fucking dishwasher. That reminds me of I-Robot. Yeah.

You remember that movie? Yeah, Will Smith. Classic. And he has the live-in robot and he's like, I don't trust this fucking thing. Well, the way that the Tesla training data was done was that they took the top 5%, 1% of drivers and basically said they're going to drive on our behalf. because the self-training thing has to be harder when you're talking about the physical world. Yeah, exactly. Because the parameters of outcome, success, and failure are way harder to work.

Like, is this folded right? Like, there's a million ways that you could fold it. It turns out, like, you know, it's one of those fucking origami. It's a swat. It's a goose. And you don't want that. It's nice and beautiful, but it doesn't fit the parameters right. It's a more oversight, or at least like a base training data of like, hey, here are some of the –

because what are the rules of the game of folding clothes? Right. They kind of, it's kind of strange to, but once you've got this, raw training set, but this is the fight, this does feel a little bit like finishing off the champagne on the Titanic. You know, it's like we're going down and we'll just, oh, you're on the way down, I'll make a little bit of extra money from doing this thing. To round out, George, good news about your dad. Phil Collins is a rock and roll, Hall of Fame 2026 inductee.

Have you go? Any idea what your dad said in response? Very British response, this. Obviously, I'm pleased and honoured to be inducted. It wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music. Obviously, I'm pleased. Sounds a little bit passive aggressive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Took a while until 2026 to get this. Obviously, I'm pleased and honored to be inducted. It wraps up what has been a wonderful life in music. Boys, this has been fucking sick. Appreciate you all. All right. Unreal. Phil Collins, George's dead. Let's go. All right. Goodbye everybody. I've never seen Phil Pellon. Oh, you've never seen it? Wow. My first time I've ever seen

Joe. Woo! Bro, so much fun. One last swig? Have it? I mean, this is just going to pee again. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found fiction and nonfiction and there's real life stories

and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillex.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.