Modern Wisdom - The Most Important Questions Of Our Time - George Mack - #1124

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

George Mack is a writer, marketer and entrepreneur. What are the most important questions of our time? Some search for the meaning of life. Others wonder how to leverage California’s gay subsidy. Both are equally valid, but one is definitely more interesting. So what are today’s biggest questions, and do any of the answers actually matter? Expect to learn if AI-generated stories can win awards, what qualifies for California’s gay certification program, who the chicken farmer who fooled Hitler was, why men aren’t great at receiving and expressing their emotions, why George is obsessed with Gymshark’s finances, the best lessons Chris and George have learned from this past year and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Who Is Cristiano Ronaldo Named After? (03:13) Is This the Worst Walkout Song? (07:41) Should AI Be Winning Writing Awards? (12:46) Beckham vs Pitt: Who Do Women Prefer? (17:43) Do Trends in the East Always Translate to the West? (27:24) The Truth Behind California’s “Gay Certification” (32:02) How a Chicken Farmer Defeated Hitler (38:52) Is This the Greatest Civilian Hero Story? (45:37) Why We Experience Survivor’s Guilt (55:53) Are Men Homophobic or Femmephobic? (01:04:05) Why Cash Flow Cycles Matter More Than You Think (01:09:27) The Life Lessons You Come Back to Most (01:22:08) Where to Find George 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

Speaking of football, do you know who Cristiana Ronaldo was named after? Go on. You're a big fan of football. One of the most famous, maybe the most famous player on the planet. Who do you think Cristiano Ronaldo was named after? Well, it wouldn't be the Brazilian Ronaldo because he was almost overlapped in terms of careers. Oh, is it Ronald Reagan? Yes.

Yes. Yes. Wow. My parents named me after Ronald Reagan, because they both liked this name and thought it sounded strong Ronaldo, whose full name is Christiana Ronaldo's. Dos Santos Aviero said in a GQ cover story. I know that my father admired him. Ronaldo was born February 5th, 1985, while Reagan was still president of the United States,

but according to Ronaldo, his dad was a fan. Long before then, told Riley that Reagan was his dad's favorite actor. That said, he wasn't too sure how the Republican leader would have felt about Ronaldo's outfit in the GQ cover that accompanied the article. Let's just say it's not very conservative. We've got an image of the outfit that... Ronaldo heard. Oh, wow. Ronald Reagan.

I mean, identical, right? That's very much nominative determinism right there. I forgot, because I was so, I've not been in America too young for it as well, I forgot the fact that Reagan was an actor. He was an actor beforehand. Has he in big movies and stuff? I believe so, yeah. It's kind of the prequel to Trump in a lot of way.

There's also, if you like footballers names, There's a South American player called Osama Vin Laden, whose brother is, I believe, called Saddam Hussein. Can you search Chat GPT? And is it VIN? I think it's Vin Laden and Saddam Hussein, two brothers in South America. This does sound too good to be true, and like you've been gazumped by it. Well, it's interesting, particularly like Brazilian names. They often decide their own name. So you've got Ronaldino, Fred, Hulk, great name.

Pepe? Well, Pepe's Portuguese, but they often just, unlike us, they just kind of, they don't often go with their own name. Yes, there we go. There's a Peruvian football named Asama Vinladen, Jimenez Lopez, often written simply as Asama bin Laden, very good. He attracted international attention because it sounds almost identical to Osama bin Laden. Actually, in Spanish, it's even closer because V and B are pronounced the same. some unusual details that have been widely reported he said he was named after assama bin laden his brother is named saddam hussein a spanish spelling of saddam hussein to avoid controversy his jersey typically disposed only a sama rather than his full survey wow i mean i want to i want to meet his parents

I want to know what they've been reading You can just do things clearly You can just name your kid after the most famous Terrorist of the 21st century The year after now I don't too Oh fucking hell yes Shit that was done one year So really hopping on the bandwagon post

That's buying Bitcoin while it's on a rip Is it Jesus Christ What's that story of Rory McDonald's Warcat music Oh Rory MacDonald UFC fighter used to walk out to some of the strangest songs. And people would kind of laugh as he was walking out. Like, why does he have such a weird niche in music? And it was, when it came out, he was interviewed. Like, why are you playing out some of these super strange songs? It would mix from like classical music. It would also have, Jared, look it up, like the different

Roy McDonald's songs. And when they interviewed him, he was like, it's not me who's picking the songs, it's the UFC. Then they go to the UFC and say, Rory's saying you're picking the songs. And it's like, no, we text him before every single UFC. And when it actually got into it, they were texting his old phone number, which had been given to somebody. If you go on the, yeah, go on Reddit. So here's the song. So he has a violin orchestra by George A Quintero. one more road to cross by DMX personal favorite

can't touch this by MC Hammer UFC 133 grew up a screw up by ludicrous so you got the thing he goes from light work lupé fiasco I love the fact he did

we found love twice in a row he came out to St Anger by Metallica twice in a row as well he came out by 46 and 2 by tool that's a fucking slamming and then got the life back on okay but so he says the UFC chooses,

the UFC says he chooses, what's the truth? Well, it was somebody had his old phone number. So the UFC was texting it and this person was obviously a UFC fan that was kind of in on the joke and just absolutely went on a rampage for multiple years. What would be the worst song to walk out to for you?

For me, yeah. Or best. Well, when I, I came down the love lift for Take Me Out, my first dating show. I wanted Jamie Jones hungry for the power, because at the time I thought I was really cool because I'd just done the season in Ibiza, and everybody did remixes of it saying, hungry for the powder. And I was like, oh, I'm fucking sick, man.

I used to go to a, I'm sniffing cadamine in Ibithra and that. And the producers looked at me and said, why have you got this very low energy deep house track for the walkout? We're going to give you example, love kickstarts again. Was that, okay. Fair enough. So that's like, as you come down and everyone's doing this, clapping above the heads. And the love kick starts again.

Chris Williamson. Yeah. Single man reveal yourself. That's what it is. Did you get, how did you perform? Did you get a date off? Take me out. Did I get a date?

I don't know. You might have got a media out. The bloke before me did. Yeah. Everyone was backstage shitting themselves that they were going to get a blackout. How did you, how did you fare? I got unwell. What was a deep.

conspiracy about taking me out, which for the American people is a British staple dating show, the first of many dating shows for me. And the biggest fear that anybody had was that all of the girls would turn their lights off. But earlier in the season, because for every time that they don't go on a date, that's another week that they're on TV. So all of the girls were incentivized at the start of the season to hit their lights so that you didn't get. And I was episode two. So I was doing it on hard mode, mate. I was doing it on hard mode. Still had 11 goals to choose from at the end.

Show me the incentives. I'll show you the outcome. Yeah, the ITV producers of Take Me Out, do not. I have not read the almanac of Charlie Munga, is my concern. What would you want to walk out to? For a fight. Take me out or a fight? Because I see them both as the same thing.

You've got to go. You already know. I think you've got to go big Phil. Which song? Big Phil. I think in the air tonight Yeah, I'm both my fighting music and my love making music That would

Yeah, 1.6 speed Yeah, yeah, 1.6 speed depending on Depending on the opponent, both in the ring Okay, so is it faster, is it faster for dating or faster for fighting? That's a great question. That's a great question. I think, no, I think you probably want to slow it, slow it down a little bit for the, for the dating, 1.4. Is that to make it feel like you've lasted longer? Yes.

Right. I need that. We were talking about AI in writing yesterday. One of the Commonwealth short story prizes appears to have been awarded to an obviously AI-generated story. This is a relatively prestigious prize. The prize-winning stories all appeared in Granta magazine, and the editor's response was basically a shrug. When asked whether it was AI-generated, AI concluded that it was almost certainly not produced unaided by a human. and a computer scientist claimed that the empty metaphors

that often plague the prize-winning story and that plague all AI writing as well, they come from human written fan fiction. So this is the source of a lot of the very strange, very clunky analogies that you see. So, for instance, the rare phrase, the patience of a reptile, which appears in this allegedly AI-generated story,

also occurs in a fan fiction based on the Japanese anime and manga Naruto. There's no way to be sure that the LLM sucked it up, spat it back out, but it's worth remembering that a meaningful amount of the text inside of these machines was written by people who were playing pretend with anime characters. So the reason being, if you were to take the total amount of time people playing football globally and you were to learn how to play football as a robot or an AI system by watching everybody on the planet play football,

there are far more people that are bad at football than good at football. Therefore, you will learn to be quite bad at football. And this is the same thing with writing. If you think about how few books that are written get published, how little writing is made for a book, and how many books that are written are actually good and go on to sell anything, I don't think that there's that much of a waiting

in terms of the LLM that James Clear's Atomic Habits on Moby Dick, is worth 10 million times that of an anime and manga blog. However, by sheer numbers, the amount of bad writing outnumbers, the amount of good writing. So there's a sentence from that story, but a belly sound as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there. Pretty jarring. It's not really what you're finding good writing. Don't worry, this might have been potentially drawn from a fan fiction web page,

the fall of a phoenix, where the original sentence was, he swallows a shout of pain, breathing heavily, his whole body trembling. Another sentence, his eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him. Eyes narrowed against the glare outside sounds like unnecessarily vain and ominous in a way that's unnecessary. The reason could be that it was drawn from a random horror blog, the original sentence being his eyes narrowed against the glare of the halogen strip lights. And speaking of the darker glare, whilst it's pretty common, it appears in

another fan fiction story. So basically, you can't work out what's inside of an LLM's brain, which is probably for the best, but it's entirely possible that when you prompted to write fiction, it's not scouring through the greatest works ever put together. It's looking at like random fan fiction manga and anime websites written by somebody at 2am who really shouldn't have been doing it. Well, what makes sense there? And again, snapshot in time, six months, 12 months from this may be completely different, but what's interesting is on a coding side of things, it's currently way more capable than the writing side. And I wonder if that's because code itself, it's a lot easier to come to an objective conclusion. So thing did compile,

thing didn't compile, or thing did work, thing didn't work. Button appeared, button didn't appear. Whereas with writing, it's so much more around, It's so much more subjective. So it's harder to almost give the feedback loop of success or failure. But it's interesting that you wouldn't, that argument there that you would just have the widest dataset possible for writing versus having an LLM that's trained a lot more. But what would be interesting, in theory, that's quite easy to do. So has anybody done that?

Probably. But it's still, even when I've given it great writing, it can't, it can't for whatever reason and repeat it. Maybe it's not going to large enough. The physics that it's built on top of, it's not just here is good writing. It has to understand what each word inside of that writing means, and the way that it understands what the word inside of the writing is is based on the

bigger corpus that it has outside of it. It's a little bit like saying, I've got Usain Bolt, but he's running into a 35 mile an hour headwind. Regardless of how great the talent is that you're trying to push forward, I think that you're always going to be working against this. Now, it's got to be a relatively complex but

simple, sorry, like arduous but simple solution, to be like, just weighted toward great pieces of work. It's not arduous, Chris. It's simple. Said like a true Roman senator. Question. Question. What man could get the most number of women on the planet to turn up at his house if he gave them the invite?

That's, philosophers have pondered this question for hundreds, if not thousands of years, Christopher. So the real philosophical insight that's plagued the industry. is which man alive could post his address right now and have the largest line. Who do you go for? You need international appeal. Yeah. You probably need to skew a little bit older. Big a tam.

Yeah. Yeah, you got to expect. Especially with a declining population. Yeah. Aging population means that I think anyone under age 35 is probably going to strike. Anyone underage 30 is really going to struggle. I don't think that you're going to want as a mid-50s, 60s-year-old woman. I don't know whether you probably do want to be ravaged by that, but I don't think you're going to go.

The likelihood of you upping sticks and getting on the bus, getting on the 59 bus to go to wherever this person's address is. So my call for this, I think it's between Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm trying to think about who the pop star or rock star would be that would be up there. I bet somebody like a Drake would probably. be able to do some damage. I don't think so. He's done his damage. He has done a lot of damage.

Yeah. But I think I would put my money, I would say I would put my money on Brad Pitt. I think it's very hard to fight back against Brad. Pitt and DiCaprio are very much the Intel or Microsoft in this moment. In that I think 10 years ago, I think you're correct. But I think you've got to be looking at a little bit more blue chip. I think David Beckham's probably the Apple stock here. Been around for a while, but I think Beckham still outperforms Pitt.

and DeCaprio, because I think Beckham's actually more global. Because you've got to be looking at Africa, you've got to be looking at South East Asia. I'm always looking at Africa. What was the last thing that David Beckham did that was globally recognized? If you turned on the World Cup recently, he's on every single advert, my friend. I don't think that that is enough. I don't think. But I also think Debex, D7 still has quite a clean, beautiful image whereas Brad Pitt doesn't? Pitt? No, definitely not. I think less so as he's got older. And DiCaprio seems to have... DiCaprio's really tanked his own stock prices. Intel. This is what I'm saying.

Right. I understand. I understand. But I don't think that you're right about David Beckham. I don't think that you're going to get... I don't think he's going to reach out into the Middle East in the way that Brad Pitt would. I think that you get... I think David Beckham's going to nail it in like East Asia. I think he's going to absolutely. crush it because that kind of sports crazy over there. I don't think... You're joking me, with the Saudi League and the Qatar World Cup. I think D. Bex is well known out there. And the English accent still goes a long way, my friend. I just don't think he's done anything relevant for a long time. Okay. We can agree to disagree. I do think...

Who's an outside favor? I think Stiles is very much the NVIDIA of our moment, yes. It may fall. The market may collapse, but he is very much leading the charge. Timothy Chalameh is like Chachy-B-T or OpenAI. He's currently private because he's in a committed long-term relationship. De Bexas as well. It's not necessarily about private or public stock here. David Beckham was close to the SpaceX pre-IPO. Yes.

Yes. Very established for quite a long time, a lot of investment from a variety of countries. People really cared about his success, and then finally he's being able to cash out if he manages to break up with Victoria. Fascinating philosophical question. This is the most important question of our time. 95% of people don't get enough fiber. which is why Momentus built Fiber Plus,

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Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to livemometus.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern. wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. Dopamine websites are becoming a new trend in South Korea. These services let users endlessly browse food delivery menus, read reviews, fill shopping carts and even track a courier. The only catch, you can't actually place an order. There are also virtual smoke breaks where users join anonymous chat rooms and socialize with

strangers, recreating the feeling of taking a break without smoking a single cigarette. The idea is simple, get the familiar dopamine hit without spending money, smoking or giving in to other impulsive habits. I saw that. And I think the argument they, a big argument you'll see online is this behavior is happening in Asia. Therefore, it's going to downstream happen in the West. And I think it's a little bit of a coin toss. Sometimes Asia is ahead of us, but sometimes it's just such a different culture. So I think it was, I forgot which Facebook product manager was talking about how they'd release a new feature and they'd test it often in the Philippines. And there'd be this crazy reaction. And they go, we have to launch this new feature immediately. And the amount of times they'll then

test it on the West or anywhere else in the world and it wouldn't work. So he actually banned doing tests or stop doing tests for a lot of features in the Philippines. Because their phone usage is so different to ours. They spend so much more time on their phones than any other part of the world. So it's just where is it like a huge? human thing that these people are just ahead versus where is it just a cultural thing. Have you ever, have you ever come across Montania's lists? No. Do you know who Montania is?

Philosopher. Yeah. So French philosopher would be fascinating to hear his perspectives on the old Q debate. But Montania used to have lists that he would keep of what different cultures thought were acceptable throughout history, just so he could remind himself that this whole thing is largely made up. It's largely social contagion. So some of my like favorite from Montania's lists. So one, where it's normal to grow out your hair on the right side of your body, but shave everything on the left, where white teeth is deemed as unattractive, so they purposely get their teeth blacker

and blacker and blacker, where at a certain age, you're supposed to kill your own father. When you and your father hit a certain age, you say goodbye. Another one on Montania's lists are when at a funeral you're supposed to chop up the dead, grind them to a pulp, pour it into wine, and then drink them on the day of the funeral. And a final one, one for you, actually, Christopher, because I'm sure you've attended many events like this, which is certain cultures for their weddings, the success of a wedding was judged by how many of the groom's friends could sleep with the bride, which I know is actually quite common in the North East. of England. But that's only if they're family. So Montaigne kept these lists to himself,

like more and more and more examples like that, just to hold a mirror up to himself and the times that he's in. So he's collecting weird cultures, cultures that we would find strange and that their norms are different to ours in an attempt to try and highlight, hey, whatever it is that you think is normal is just consensus because of where you are. And if you were to be somewhere else, your consensus would be totally different. Yes. Do you want, I tell you what, do you want a list of, I was thinking, okay, let's say Montania came back today. I was writing this chapter recently. So let's say Montana came back today and was like, well, what's normal today?

So normal consumes 17 teaspoons of sugar per day. Normal has $104,755 in debt. Normal is 30 pounds overweight, OZMPIC pending. Normal averages less than 4,000 steps per day. Normal spends 90,000 hours of their life at work disengaged. Normal stays indoors for 22.3 hours per day. Normal spends more time on the toilet than exercising. Normal hasn't finished a book in the last 12 months.

Normal experiences under 10 minutes per day in silence. Normal will spend 20 years of their life watching TV or scrolling social media. Under 10 minutes a day in silence. And more time on the toilet than a day. exercising. Averages. But then there's always a criticism around averages that you end up netting it out. But when you begin to look at, oh, this is just what's accepted today.

And maybe tomorrow, weddings will be back that you like to attend. In the 1830s in Massachusetts, beards were so uncommon and strange that a man named Joseph Parker was mocked and shunned for wearing one. Assailants tried to forcibly shave him, but he fought them off with a knife and was imprisoned for assault. He refused to pay his fine or court fees, so he remained in prison for over a year and this at least gave him the excuse to create an all-time classic tombstone. Oh wow. The right to a full beard is honored by the grave of a man who was attacked in jail due to his

facial hair. Talk about norms mate. That's a great beard. On the, one of the things that everybody kind of has discussed in the marketing space for ages is that live streaming will become normal in the West because it's normal in the East. But I'm yet to see, like, live shopping where people sit there for hours and hours per day. I'm yet to see that fully take off. Well, it depends what you mean, because live streaming, kick, Twitch, obviously that's streaming. Yes. But actual live shopping, sorry.

Live shopping, different. IRL streaming feels, I don't know whether they've got that in, I bet they don't have that in Asia. You know, the IRL stuff where people are walking about, sometimes causing news. and doing predator stings and I imagine that they don't because a good bit of Asia feels like it's got honor culture where you don't want to disrupt. I mean, you've seen the Japanese subways, the Japanese tube, and I've been on the phone to a friend who lives in Japan, and he'll warn me while he's on the side of the subway waiting at the terminal, and then he'll tell me, look, I'm just about to get on, and he won't say anything. He won't respond to me on the

phone, he won't even whisper. So I'll be talking to him for three minutes without him being able to respond. And then he'll get off and he'll talk back to me. That's how, and he's not native, Irish, and that's how much reverence people have just complete silence. So they're playing your drill rap on the back of the bus, not that, not even whispering, not even talking to each other. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Do you know that? I didn't know that. It's interesting how much of who you think you are is just postcode. Oh, it's so much of its ecology, right? I mean, and that's the reason why changing your environment has such a big impact on your life. If you, both me and you change gyms over the last six months, and that made a massive impact. Just a different routine.

Didn't change me as a person, but it changed the way that my day was shaped. Like, oh, actually, my routine is largely built around some of the other things that I already do. And if I change where I go and do them that alters, having the office, having the office in the studio. That's made a massive difference as well. So what do you think from stuff that's happened in Asia that has prophetically come across to America? Ooh, a Lububu's Asian? They look like they are. What's a libubu? It's these little stuffed animals. It was the Dubai chocolate at the stuffed animal world and people were queuing up for ages to get a key ring and yeah. And collect It's funny how we're being in the West, we talk about Asia.

The same way, I always find it absurd when we talk about Europe. Obviously, Brexit means Brexit, so we're no longer in Europe. But the idea that Asia is this place or Africa is this place. It's probably being absolutely massive. Yes. And I'm going to Europe. What the fuck does that mean? But because we're so far away, we don't think of Asia as being anything different

than just one big hegemon. And there seems to be a recurring mammoth. trend throughout geography, which is you think two places because their next door neighbor are very similar to one another or get home with one another. But historically, it is the opposite. Yeah. I laugh whenever I interact with the French that we are 23 miles away. So different. So fundamentally different. It's actually hard to find a culture as different to Britain in Europe, I would say, than the French. And we're next door neighbors. yeah we are but i mean speaking as somebody that's dressed as an ex-italian essentially you would

you would know you would know you would understand yeah i uh i don't know about the agent i definitely know that there's a lot of stuff that goes on over there that doesn't happen over here you can buy used period pants in vending machines i saw craig jones do this on a vlog no some ladies had menstruated through her pants and then you can buy them in a little it comes in a little pokey ball like that and it's in a specially sealed bag inside of a poker ball. I don't think that's taking off in the West anytime soon. Yeah, there are certain areas that are resisting globalization.

It's kind of impressive. California's gay certification. California is pressuring public utilities to award $633 million in special contracts to LGBT-owned firms. To qualify, residents must go through the state's official gay. certification program and face up to a urine jail if they're not gay enough. By 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission established a goal for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state certified LGBT businesses,

0.5% of procurement in 2021, 1% in 23, 1.5% in 24 and beyond. If large CPUC regulated utilities meet these goals in 2024, they would have sent 633 million. to LGBT-owned firms. The scheme raises an obvious question. How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website.

Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an LGBT organization attesting to their sexual preferences, proof that a newspaper identified them as LGBT, or three letters from personal contacts written on company letterhead attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who falsely represent their business as gay face up to a Yerring County Jail. Supply Clearinghouse also accepts gay certification letters from the National

LGBTQ Plus and Allied Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has its own list of accepted documents including human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. As it states on its website, Certification is a journey, not a destination. Wow. I think you'd be able to pull off getting California's gay certification to receive $633 million. So what percentage do you need?

To be gay? Yes. You need to be gay. It's not a percent. So it's not a recruitment percentage. No. Oh, okay. No.

So you have to hit if you have a certain level that you get the funding. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you also need to be gay to unlock it. So if you're not gay, you don't get it. And if you're not big enough, you don't get it. But if you're big enough, they need to be finding sufficiently diverse. So these companies actually, one of the best ways to do this would be to hire, this is an incentive to hire C-suite executives that are gay.

Damn. It would unlock an awful lot of CPUC funding in California. Damn. And you face it, you're in county jail. That's real founder mode right there. Like if you're willing to take it up the ass. To, yeah. If you're going to power bottom your way to the tower.

You can even get fucked by investors or get fucked by Someone else Craig Well look, it's gonna it's it's it's I don't know man The whole Is that all real? That's real

That's literally that's a brandy I'm not gonna lie to you I know I know Why would I lie to you? Where do I get this from? CityJournal.com There it is inside California's gay certification program The state is pressuring utilities to award 633 million in contracts to LGBT businesses

Interesting The tip of the spear for LGBT diversity is energy and utilities. Contracts for state-certified gay-owned businesses. You get arbitrage the hell out of this. You know, people say how much would it, how much do you have to pay to be gay? If the number is less than $633 million,

your quid's in. Damn. What else? What else you got? You got some stuff? Do you bring anything from home? Yeah, go on. Do I have some stuff, as always? Oh, my bag of cash is getting in the way. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US.

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You actually came here to do designing and selling the thing that you love. So, upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Newtonic with Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below. or heading to Shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Story of a Spanish chicken farmer called Juan Poel. So it's 1941, start of World War I. And he's essentially a failure his entire life.

So he's been a chicken farmer, a manager of a one-star hotel before bankruptcy. And he's after a new job with a tremendous CV. So he's walking along the streets of Madrid. takes a right, goes into the British embassy and says, I want a job at MI5 to help out and spy on the Nazis. And MI5, or the embassy sort of say, okay, how about you put that in writing and we'll come back to you, which is the British way of saying, get the fuck out.

So he leaves the building, comes back, walks across, goes into the embassy, says, I want a job of MI5. They ask him to leave. Tries again. He just walks across the street and turns around. No, these are multiple, like, future events. So he keeps coming back.

Fourth time, he's walking along, and he decides, he walks up the steps. But this time, he goes into the German embassy. And he goes, I hate the Brits. I want a job for the Nazis to spy on Britain. And the Nazis are eyeing him up, and he talks about his.

love for the Fyre, the love for the Third Reich and how much he hates his new-inspired hatred for Great Britain. And the Nazis end up training him up, giving him little tasks, and he keeps proving himself, learns how invisible ink works, ends up recruiting multiple agents inside of Great Britain. So he builds his way up. And then he walks back Street of Madrid, goes to the British embassy and says, I now want to. a job at MI5 because I'm one of the most valuable spies for the Nazis. So you got projected, rejected, rejected and was like, okay, I'll take matters into my own hands. So he then becomes the most valuable spy for Britain during World War II. He builds up a network of 27

sub-agents inside of Britain that the Nazis believe are true, but it's all his own imagination, all these different agents that he would create stories from that they were doing. So much so when he arrived, the MI5 called him Garbo, because Garbo at the time was the most famous actress in the world. Greta Garbo. Yes, so named after for his acting skills. So Juan Poyol, the Spanish chicken farmer, the most important moment in World War II was D-Day.

So as D-Day was happening, Juan gave so much fake information. He convinced them that D-Day was going to happen in Calais. So Hitler and Himmler were getting these reports from Juan. They thought the war was going to happen in Calais, so they sent some of their most important armies to Calais. Then the D-Day happens. And Juan was so convincing,

even with his fake reports, that Hitler gave him the Iron Cross. So he's the only age. agent to get both an Iron Cross from Hitler and an MBE from... No way. Yeah. Do you know what's tragic, though? So they say that when it comes to D-Day, the most important day of World War II, the three most important people were Eisenhower, who looked after the US, I think Montgomery,

who looked after the Great Britain, and Juan Poyal, the Spanish chicken farmer. There's the three most important people in D-Day in terms of the impact. but this guy who gets these double awards ends up dying in 1949 Mozambique to malaria and in the 1980s three of the agents that worked with him in MI5 are sat at a bar

so they're all in their like late 80s now and they're talking about the war they're in this former little intelligence pub and they're chatting about the war and having a few drinks and they have this kind of confused look on their faces, this old guys walking towards them. And they get more and more confused with their face.

And then this 80-year-old man, who's a MI5 spy, breaks down in tears, crying, and they go, it can't be. You're supposed to be dead. So his final last act was to fake his own death in 1949, and he lived in a bookstore in Venezuela. So the Nazis would never know where he was. That's insane.

Spanish chicken farmer. Was he really worried about Nazi retribution in 1949? Yes. Were the Nazis still going around and chasing people? Ironically, even though he's in Venezuela, there was a lot of Nazis in South America. Yeah, but if he'd not gone to fucking Venezuela, he supposedly caught malaria in Africa. There's still a lot of... Where's Mozambique?

Mozambique is, I think, West Africa. Right. Okay. But in 19449, or even onwards, First off, we're viewing history few hindsight. At the time, there was still millions of Germans that served for the Nazis that was still alive. Yeah, there was lots of Nazis afterwards. And they would have wanted retribution for people that it...

I guess I don't know what... The most impactful man during D-Day, who was a double agent that gave them all this false information, if there's one person, they're going to try and kill. Yeah, that's true. I guess I don't know what happened in Germany after they lost. I don't know how quickly everybody capitulated. Waldy was this I was listening to Finn versus history

and they was talking about how in when after the Nazis commit the Holocaust I think they were banned for the World Cup or from like international games for four years but when Liverpool had the incident in Juventus where loads of fans died they were banned for six years

and it's like it's not doesn't scale quite even out does it scale accordingly yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's I mean unbelievable amount of agency I suppose to be a guy that wants a job so badly that you take the opposite job to get the first job, it's just as well that he really did want to work for MI5, because if you didn't, he would have

just been a great asset for the Nazis. But it's having that level of theory of mind of, okay, I've been rejected from something. What does this person want that would make me completely invaluable? Because I think there's this kind of myth that, oh, if you've been rejected, just keep going and they're idiots, versus can you get inside of their head and think how they're think. Yeah. Yeah, I think, um, is it time to push or is it time to pivot, is it time to pivot, it's kind of the age old question, but he did both. Mm. Right, he pivoted into a new one. All right, so that's your story time. This is a new segment, a new segment on our episode's story time. My story time. Shavash Carapetian. Do you

familiar with Sharvash Carapetian? No. Okay. So, uh, 1979 in, uh, Yerevan, and there's a trolley bus carrying around about 90 passengers. We don't know what happened. Uh, Some people say that the driver of the bus had a heart attack. Some people say that he was having an altercation with a passenger on board. Whatever happened, it crashed into a reservoir, gerovan. The bus sank roughly 10 meters, so 30 feet to the bottom, freezing murky water. There's a 23-year-old man who's training with his brother nearby, Chavez Carapagapaghan. And without giving it much thought, jumps into the water and ordered his brother to help him from the shore.

He said it was scary at first. It was so loud as if a bomb went off. I almost drowned several times. I could imagine the agony of those 92 people, and I knew how they would die. The thing was, Carapetian wasn't an ordinary bystander. He was a 17-time world champion and 11-time world record holder in Finn swimming. It was one of the best underwater swimmers on Earth. Immediately he dives into the water to help.

Visibility is basically zero, because the reservoir. was full of mud and sewage and debris as well. Obviously the bus has gone in so it's kicked up all of this silt. It's basically impossible to see. So he swims down into the dark, locates the bus. He called it a traveling coffin for all of these 92 people. He kicks the rear window in underwater to get inside, dives down, dive after dive, holds his breath, finds a trap passenger, drags them back to the surface, hands them to the rescuers and his brother in a rowboat, goes straight back down again, reportedly made dozens of dives of around about 20 minutes and physically pulled out about 37 people. 20 of them survived.

During one dive, he accidentally grabbed a leather seat cushion instead of a passenger because his visibility was so poor. It would be one of these old school buses that would have had movable cushions and he grabbed this leather cushion and brought it up thinking it was maybe a small human. He later said that this one decision haunted him for years because he believed someone may have died while he carried up the cushion instead. Carapetian was hospitalized, along with the victims of the accident, because he'd lacerated all of his legs, all of his body from going through the broken glass, from breaking the glass himself. Septic fever, double-sided pneumonia and nervous prostration had doctors fighting for his life for over a month. When he was finally discharged, Chavash went back to practice, but swimming underwater echoed painfully in his lungs. But he wouldn't give up without having one final medal. So during the next championship that he swam in a haze, still wasn't in any way back to full capacity.

His brother, Camo, ran along the side of the pool, ready to jump in case he suddenly lost consciousness. But he came in first and set another world record without even realizing that he'd done it at the time. He was so delirious. But the rescue that he'd done of the bus had destroyed his athletic career, broken glass shredded his legs, polluted water had caused severe pneumonia in sepsis he couldn't recover from. and he spent all of those weeks plus then months critically ill and then recovering. Soviet authorities initially downplayed the story, so it remained relatively unknown for yours,

and today the rescue was considered one of the greatest acts of civilian heroism ever recorded. Jesus Christ. There's him. Thick Russian. Carapetian. Yeah, yeah, like a serious Russian guy. That's him there and just a pair of pants, and everybody else is trying to pull it up.

Wow. Isn't that insane? Wow. There's an award. Jared, ask a bold friend. What's the name of the award that's given to people who risk their lives for strangers? The award you're likely thinking of is the Carnegie Medal. It's given to civilians who risk their lives to save or attempt to save strangers.

Is there anything interesting about the demographics of the people who've been given that award? There are some patterns worth noting. The Carnegie Hero Fund, which awards the medal, has found that receiving the recipients, recipients come from all walks of life. Age, gender and background vary widely. It's not interesting. Historically, men have been the majority of recipients, but women have also been recognized.

How many men won? The Carnegie Hero Fund has awarded thousands of people since its inception in 1904. It's so fucking world. Historically, the majority have been men. What's the percentage of men that have won the Carnegie Award? The Carnegie Hero Fund reports

that historically, about 90% of recipients have been. All right, shut up. I just, I, whatever happened in 2020 continues to carry over now. Do you know what I mean? Like, California thinks that the most important thing to do with its utilities is not give people cheap and reliable energy, but to make sure that the diversity of the sexuality of the people who own the companies is important.

And you, fucking 5.5. I need to have a chat with someone about you. Anyway, that Carapetian, I love that story. I think it's fucking awesome. And the kind of kicker is the fact that he made such a personal sacrifice, but then also was ravaged by the fact that he picked up a fucking cushion, having gone down 37 times. And one time he made a mistake in pitch blackness when he couldn't see,

what's the likelihood that the guy that's running on the side of the road with his brother, like he's got his pants on. He's got the, he's got the number one fin swimmer, deep seas swimmer in the world, 17 times 11 world records tragic Yeah tragic If you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole The RP Strength App is the best place to start

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That's RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout. Yeah, it's interesting how often that is the case where you'll have these acts of great heroism that don't have 100% success right, and then the individual spends so much time looping on that. Yeah, that's survivor guilt, I suppose, right? I've known some people who've done some incredible things, like in the police or firework, for example, and it's the same thing. They don't ruminate on the heroism. It's the, it's the mistakes that they made. Yeah. The people they could have saved. I wonder what that's what. I guess

that adaptively, it's trying to get you to focus on this is something prosocial that you could have done if you'd been more prepared, more skillful. Therefore, in future, you need to adapt your approach so that this doesn't happen again. Maybe that's the reason for survivor guilt. Actually, Jared, just type it in, chat, Ghibit, what is the reason? What is the adaptive reason for survivor guilt? Or adaptive explanation for survivor guilt? The only thing that I can think of is that it's supposed to try and guide your future behavior so that, well, I mean, fucking Bluetooth came up as a thousand-year-old Norse god or something like that. So the fuck knows if we're going to find out.

What is the adaptive explanation? From evolutionary or adaptive perspective, survivor guilt can be understood as a byproduct of mechanism to help humans maintain social bonds, cooperation, and group cohesion. Okay, so my hypothesis is looking good so far. Basic idea is that in ancestral environments, humans survive and reproduce largely through belonging to a group,

a one person benefited while others suffered. There were often social consequences. So the inverse of that, okay. Maintaining group cohesion. If you survive a dangerous event while close allies did not, feeling distress rather than indifferent signals. Oh, that's cool. so because if something bad happens and you were one of the few that survived if you show that you feel distress as opposed to indifference it reinforces to everybody else that you weren't selfish and an asshole that you actually regret the fact that they died and that you didn't i am still a part of the group i didn't take it all for myself i didn't just swim out the back of the bus myself i really did try um reciprocal altruism and fairness mechanisms they've got strong intuitions so when we receive an unexpected

benefit relative to others even when we did nothing wrong. Our minds may interpret the situation as a violation of fairness expectations. Survivor guilt may arise from the same psychological machinery machinery that makes people pretty uncomfortable receiving disproportionate rewards. Okay. Motivation to help survivors. Yeah. Okay. So it encourages caring for bereaved families, supporting injured group members. Counterfactual learning. Humans are unusually prone to imagining alternative outcomes. The counterfactual helps us learn from near misses in dangerous situations. Dude, don't fucking test me on evolutionary theory, okay? Don't test the hamburger on evolutionary theory.

My intuitions are strong. Costly signal of commitment as well, grief and function. You can't fake it. That's an interesting one. That's the reason why would it be the case that when you're sad or distressed or overwhelmed with negative emotion, that the same thing your eyes do to make sure that your eyes stay lubricated would go into overdrive? Why do we cry?

Like what's the reason for crying? And one of the adaptive explanations for this, which is pretty fascinating, is it's such a costly signal to do because the most important sense you have is your eyes. And if you're prepared to fill them with water to say how much I've been hurt or how much I'm suffering, you're in an unbelievably vulnerable position. You can't fight, you can't see, you can't defend yourself. tears are coming out and you can't fully operate. This is how much I'm in pain. I'm in so much pain that I'm essentially exposing my neck to you. So how do you then factor in tears of joy? Why do we cry out of joy? I did ask this question. So it could be a spandrel, which is just a crossover between the two, but it could just be the same thing. It could be a very costly signal, hey, look at how much

I love this thing that's happening. I am here, collective effervescence, me and the group, are one, I experience this thing with you too. And I do think when it comes to sort of emotions, sadness, like peak joy, joyful experiences, beautiful experiences, and sad or sort of dreadful experiences, they kind of have this same, like, part of the pitch of the chord that they play is kind of similar, right? It's like an outside of the body, at least when I experience stuff that's like really intense, whether it's good or bad. I always feel it's sort of across the top of my shoulders,

my traps and like sort of everything feels like it lifts up a little bit. If I'm being delivered bad news by somebody, or if there's something that's really beautiful happening, it always feels like I'm sort of being lifted a bit. So there seems to be similarities, resonance between those two. There's two visuals, Jared, if you could pull them up, there's one of how emotion feels in the body. I don't know if you've seen this one where it's like all the gap.

Heat map. Yeah. And there's all... Heat map of emotions. Yeah. There's also the topography of tears, how different types of tears look under a microscope. And they're slightly different. No way.

Is this art... Yeah, this artist produced it where... So top left. So here is, yeah, how emotions at least feel in the body, which kind of makes sense. But is that a map? Mapping emotion. So is that self-report? I think this is more self-report of how it, how it, how.

it feels. I haven't gone any deeper into it. Anger seems pretty right. So anger's sort of above the like upper chest, arms and hands a lot, lower face a lot and head. And if you start with neutral on the right, so you kind of see, okay, this is neutral. And then you compare that to all the different ones. Surprise is definitely a lot in the head. That's cool. Sadness is kind of in the middle of the chest. Happiness sort of everywhere. Disgust, definitely in the stomach. So disgust, disgust and anxiety both in the stomach the most, that would make sense because disgust is a pathogen rejection. Fear, middle of the chest. I think that seems quite right. Interesting that happiness is basically just tuned down love. Depression's cool. The depression,

it says here, it's just sort of a low energy state on your extremities as opposed to anxiety. And I would agree with that. I think anxiety is. a much more active version of depression. Contempt, like, existing exclusively in the head is pretty cool. Pride, the swelling in the chest makes sense. Shame the cheeks. That's people get embarrassed. And envy sort of a little bit of head and some heart.

That's actually, would you disagree with any of those? I think it feels, it feels accurate as trying to be neutral right now. Could you search topography of tears? Please, Jared. This was done by, I think, an artist that made this. Go to that video, that Instagram video. Let's just see what this lady's got to say. Third one.

Click and open. Your tears look different underneath a microscope depending on the emotion that you're experiencing. This project was called the Topography of Tears by Rosalind Fisher. She's a photographer, and what they did is they looked at tears underneath a microscope. And you will see that depending on what these participants were experiencing, their tears look different. This is tears of laughter versus tears of change. Tears of grief versus tears from cutting onions. Wow. This is tears when someone is experiencing a moment

of catharsis, whereas someone is experiencing a moment of change. I'm a therapist, and I often show this to my clients because I think it gives a really good demonstration that crying is actually really important at times to release certain things from our body. And being able to see that our tears actually look different depending on what we're experiencing, I think really demonstrates that really well. Did you know? Insane. That's cool.

I want to know what the... Fuck it. Just ask Jared. As chat, G.T. From the topography of Tia's study, what are the differences in the structure of Tiers or why are they there? Because I want to know what is inside of the tier that's different. Is it more salt content?

Is it, like, how much shit's in tears? Like, I guess maybe you could have, I don't know, is cortisol in the blood that leaks into the tears? But surely tears are kind of like sperm produced in advance and then released. There are three main categories, basal tears, constantly produced to lubricate the eyes, reflex tears produced in response to irritants like onions and emotional tears. Key biochemical difference, here we go,

is that emotional tears contain higher concentrations of certain proteins and hormones including prolactin, adrenococotropic hormone, stress-related hormone, lew encafellin, a natural pain-relieving peptide, differences in minerals such as potassium and manganese. When tear dries on a slide, these dissolved substances, crystallize into different patterns. Wow, there isn't a simple one-to-one mapping, grief always looks like X and Joy always looks like why. The patterns vary considerably, even within the same emotional category. The amount of ratios of Protein, salts, hormones, and other biocampus, I didn't realize that you had that much. Obviously, you can cry for different reasons.

If I could start cutting an onion in front of you, or if you're in pain, or if you're feeling something, or if you're just lubricating your eyes. Testosterone tears as well. The higher tea that you have, they're completely different. That's Greg Levecchio. Greg Levecchio's tears from Bloom are actually a protein shake. For the people that don't know, Greg Leveckew has got 2,000 nanograms per deciliter of testosterone. Greg's tears. That's actually in this bag.

It's not money. It's just Greg's next testosterone. You pull up Greg's tears. They're just fucking detrain it. Yeah, exactly. They've got vascular tears. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, uh, the emotions thing's been interesting. Trying to navigate this over the last 18 months or so. I still think kind of interested in what the conversation around men showing emotions is. Obviously, I've talked about it a lot. Like everyone's talking about it a lot. it a lot. But one of the interesting wrinkles that I learned about was I don't think that men are particularly good at receiving other men's emotions. That we often talk about guys need to open up more, look at all of the people that are taking their own lives, whatever it is. However many

men per minute or men per day are doing this, you need to open up. But a lot of the time, if a guy does that on the internet, it's not just women that are unaccommodating to a guy that's maybe crying or feeling bad or seeming a little weak. Like, guys, I would guess on average, are actually more discarding. Men are less accommodating of other men's sad emotions than women are. And a lot of the time, these would be the same men that would say something to the effect of, well, men's mental health is in a state? Like, nobody really cares that much.

You go, okay, so which one is it? Because if you're not prepared to hold your boy, like, while he's going through a hard time, you don't also really get to say we need to talk about men's mental health more. You need to put your emotions where your mouth is, so to speak. My natural thought, at least from my experience, is I don't expect friends to be these pure mixed martial artists that have everything across the board.

So I know if, let's say, for example, I want to break down tears to certain people who I would speak to. And then there's other friends where if I, you know what I mean, want to fucking pull it together, I'll speak to them. So this, like, having a little bit more of a decentralized, on-chain, friend base. I just think, yeah, I think expecting the person who helps you to pull it together to then also be the person that's perfect with your emotions. It's hard to have that. I agree, but if it's the person who is saying we need to have better resources for men's mental health, but they're also not being accommodating,

that just seems like a kind of hypocrisy to me. And this is from men are good, Tom Golden's thing. And it makes sense because what you basically have as a matter. I think that it takes a lot of work for guys to get over their sort of visceral ick of other men's sad emotions. This is a price that's maybe not seen by women. It's also hidden by men. But if there's a guy who's able to sit in a like Charlie Hooper, for instance, or Conabiton, or Joe Hudson, or Dr. Kay, these are people that are trained professionally to be able to do this, obviously. the fact that they can sit,

they've had to get over a lot of their programming because your programming as a man is if I'm around another guy who doesn't seem to be able to hold it together emotionally, he's an unreliable ally. How do I know that when we go on our next hunt or when the tribe from the next valley comes and tries to attack us,

that he's actually going to be able to hold it together? I don't know that he's going to break down in tears. There's the same reason... This is a spicy one. I need to put a second fucking pair of glasses on for this. William Costello taught me that most homophobia in men isn't homophobia, it's femophobia. So we're actually the disgust mechanism that gets turned on or the aversion that some men have to seeing gay men isn't necessarily about the gayness. It's about the femininity that is being presented by a man.

And that's the same mechanism that are unreliable ally if this guy doesn't seem to be showing the typical masculine, in our sort of control, conquer, aggression, 10 toes forward energy that I expect from other guys what happens when there is some sort of altercation or issue in future that we need to step in on. So yeah, femophobia, homophobia is like kind of interesting. I immediately think of who's the most masculine gay man in the world. Who then breaks that, who creates a paradox? Tell me, who's the most masculine gay man that you know? I don't know. I'm usually multiple drinks deep at the time. That is a fucking great question.

A lot of the tech bro people, would you look at Peter Thiel and guess gay? I don't think I'd look at him in guest gay. He was in the closet for a long time until Gorka. Yeah, with the whole Kogan thing. By the way, if you need a new listen on Audible of a very old, relatively old book, Ryan Holiday's book, Conspiracy, guy that's written a lot about stoicism.

Books on stoicism are good. This one's his best one by a distance. So fucking good. You tell me you've read it. A while ago. It's fucking amazing. It's so fantastic. What's the plot?

It's around Hulk Hogan? So Peter Thiel gets ousted by Gorker. I think it's Gorker's subsidiary company. I can't remember what it's called that was reporting on Silicon Valley and I swear the headline was something like Peter Thiel's gay as shit people and at this point he still wasn't out about the fact that he is

and he held on to this for maybe five or six years and he's building this case behind the scenes and he recruits this guy called Mr. A Mr. A was this operator that came to him who was just going to be able like a legal expert are Machiavellian conniving sort of guy and they start to look for ways to take down this company and then the Hulk Hogan sex tape happens and during the trial for the Hulk Hogan sex tape it turns out that Terry Baleo Hulk Hogan's just got like infinity money he's got the best lawyers he's got he just can drive this thing into the ground to keep on taking Gorka down it turns out that Peter Thiel

uses the Hulk Hogan sex tape as a way to get back at the organization and reporters that ousted him as gay, like nearly 10 years ago by the time that this thing happens. And revenge is a dish best served cold. There's no better epitomized by any other story than that. Like a decade of just sitting on it and seething and having, you know, this huge secret that you've kept as a very public person who's early into Facebook and supporting, like, conservative candidates. Yeah.

It's widely discussed the evil nature of social media or the ills of social media that exist today. A lot of people hark back to this previous long-gone era where you're from. But where I am from. No, not quite there just yet. But the golden, the thing people forget about the golden era that they're harking back to is the shit. We always forget the shit. And even the journalists standards that you, used to exist. The amount of journalists, particularly British press, that would pay people to sleep

with people, then report the stories. This was a regular thing in journalism in the UK. Even numerous football players, athletes, they'd have to be constantly wary of, does this person actually like me? Or has a well-known British publication, who I shan't name because they're still going, is paying, oh, they may pay somebody to approach me, is using it as a story. That was a thing. That was why, that was common. A honeypot type scenario. Should be a crime.

And that was, was that, is that legal? Was that legal? I don't know. But guess what's the difference between a kiss and tell and pay and a pay and kiss and tell? Like the order of the money is the only thing that's different here. Yeah. Depends when the invoice technically gets. clears, always comes down to finance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it depends if you've got a negative

cash flow conversion cycle. Do you want to explain why you were so obsessed with Jim Sharks' negative cash flow conversion cycle? No, no, no, no, no. First off, we don't defend yourself. No, no, no, no, no. Stop defending yourself. So for people who want to know what a cash flow conversion cycle is, which is approximately about 1% of people listening, I'll get through it fast, essentially a cash flow conversion cycle is when you get the money. So let's say, for example, Chris is running Newtonic. He'll pay a manufacturer to make this beautiful drink. Then he will obviously sell it to potentially supermarkets, big stores around the UK. There's a crunch period of, well, how much credit can I get with manufacturers? And then how much credit can I get with the

supermarkets? Because if you have to pay your manufacturers today for stock that will arrive in three months and then the supermarket doesn't pay you for three months, that's what's, I think, a positive cash flow conversion cycle. So a negative cash flow conversion cycle is when you get the, you almost have delayed for the manufacturers and then you can sell right away, which is a lot of what e-commerce companies do. So I was once at a bar in Manchester talking to my friend about negative cash flow conversion cycles. And we saw these like... Just repelling any woman within a five-meter radius. Well, no, no, no. We saw these group of girls like, look over and like, say hello. And I I had a girlfriend at the time, so I wasn't going to do anything, but I just started laughing at the thought of if only they could hear. They would be repulsed. Well, we've done that. Was it a summer of loud festival last year in the amphitheater, Georgia amphitheater here in Austin? And we were backstage and we got all the cool passes and were all of these like cool metal chicks walking around. And then a couple came over and sat down next to us. What the fuck were we talking about? I swear it was something like this. There was some debate that we were having.

And these girls sat down from a distance. And we had a couple of our kind of super chatty mates with us. Keegan was with us, right? Who's essentially like proper Roman Adonis, not you laugh. The Chad's Chad. Yeah, he's the Chad's chat. And these women come over and obviously look, thinking, what are they going to be talking about?

It's going to be so cool and sexy. And they came over and they were talking about how we all come from a conversion rate optimization background. The blended NCPA of our Facebook ads manager could be doing with a little bit of improvement. Well, tell me how many of your split testing on the back end. It's interesting. I'm not sure if Opus 5.5 is actually going to be as good as people expect. And they just slowly over time got this look of,

it wasn't boredom, it was closer to disgust. It was like watching somebody desecrate a beautiful temple. Because what they saw was this amazing potential in Keegan, this beautiful man. But the way that he was handling himself and what he was talking about. The biggest takeaway I always get whenever I'm on a friend's birthday or a bachelor party, there'll be a moment where I'll just start chuckling to myself. Often it will be somebody might have a girlfriend.

One of the guys will have like a new relationship where she's been like really wary about him going to this birthday party or bachelor party. Meanwhile, it's me in a one hour debate at dinner talking about whether Rud van Estroy was a better footballer than Tieri-on-Rie. Like that's what they don't see. Or like Jim, Jim Sharks' negative cash flow conversion cycle. I think if a lot of guys, girlfriends or wives can see that they have this imagination that there's going to be all this chaos and these girls that are coming over and the strip club. Meanwhile, it's usually a Google sheet or Excel formulas.

It's us trying to track down that guy that bought the cigars and opened up the straight of Hormuz by sneaking himself into the middle of a run. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wonder if it might be inverse. It might be the fact that the guys that you don't think are getting. up to naughty shit while they're away probably are. Yes. And the guys that you don't think are getting up to it aren't. They're the ones that are talking about how they come from a conversion rate optimization background. Yeah, very, very important. By the way, if you're coming

to the UK and Ireland tour later this year, I'm going to be bringing some of you up on stage to answer your questions. So if you've got a question or a story that you think to be worth me talking about, you can go to Chris Williamson. Live slash questions and give me your questions and I'll be picking the best ones and you can join me on tour. So most people have no idea where the testosterone levels sit. But what if I told you there was a solution? Something that identifies low T faster than a high school bully and it won't cost you all your lunch money. That's where function comes in. Gives you access to over 160 lab tests, including a deep dive into your full hormone panel. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Anything out of range is flagged. You get clear explanations with a personalized protocol

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slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. Little question for you. Yep. I can't pronounce this word, but I'm going to give it a go. Have you heard of, I think it's hypomeneta? No. So I got it from my friend, Henry Carson, who has this wonderful substack. And during my era, the either ancient Greek or Roman era, it's very different to what it was today.

So we have this kind of bombardment of new information. We're constantly scrolling social media. I'm sure you have this where you'll see this amazing pithy tweet or you'll read something incredible and your life's going to change forever after from this point onwards. And then three months later, you see the thing again, you go, I completely forgot about that. And it had no impact at all. So what the ancient Greeks or the Romans used to do would be they would have a book of all these insights that they'd collected. And each morning they would think of a problem that they're facing and they would go and meditate on the specific passage or the specific quote. So what I was actually, this is where my question kicks in is, I'd say you was to have that little notepad, notebook of lessons.

that you often forget or simply just wish that you took more seriously that you would look at each day what is on your list. So what are the most known but not followed? Not necessarily not followed by other people. It could just be or it could even be followed by yourself, just not as much. You always underpriced this lesson. You wish you took it more seriously. something like no amount of worrying is going to make any difference to what happens some lesson along those lines because worrying is very addictive it's very addictive because it feels like making progress homozy once when i started doing investing he gave me this really wonderful piece of advice on a call and he said the most dangerous calls in all of business

are just calling to connect would just love to would just love to would just love to to explain the business to you. Because they have all of the trappings of doing work and making progress, but never result in work being done. You need to join that sequence further down the line, once more scrutiny is being done. Like the first stage, second stage, this is why I think in order to end up in front of him to do Acquisition.com,

you're 10 stages deep into the circle of hell. And worrying kind of feels like the same thing, although it's not as conscious. You're not doing it because you think that it's going to. you forget, this is not moving my situation forward. No amount of anxiety is going to change the outcome. No amount of worrying is going to actually make a difference to anything that happens. And ultimately, all of your worries were a waste of time in any case. There's a great book that I, like book of stories of interviewing all people about their lives.

And one of them, she said, what was one of your best lessons you ever had? And she goes, I had this like nightmare thing that I was ruminating on worrying about. So I called one of my friends and I tell her, I just kept spilling and tell everything that I'm worried about. And she goes, do you remember six months ago when you came to me about this nightmare worry that you had? And she names it back. She goes, no, I don't. And she goes, exactly. Just hung up.

She goes, it was one of the best lessons of my life. I was like, oh, this thing is going to be here today and then gone tomorrow. I also saw this humorous statistic, which was they had people apparently with generalized anxiety disorder, put down their worries, and then they tracked how many of them came true. And it was found that 91.6% didn't come true. But if you have true anxiety, you start wondering, well, what about that? What about that remaining 8.4%. Yeah, yeah. That's real anxiety right there.

I'm in the 8.4% I knew that I would be in the 8.4%. There was another guy who helped Lewis Capaldi of anxiety. I think he wrote a book called Addicted to Anxiety. And he apparently once cured somebody of their anxiety, like removed

a lot of the issues. And they rang them the next day saying, I'm anxious, where's my anxiety gone? It's like almost this addiction that exists. Yeah, I was talking to Joe Hudson yesterday and there's a bunch of stuff that's maybe exciting. is exciting that's happening. I shouldn't hedge the fact that this thing is maybe exciting.

A bunch of stuff going on that's exciting. And I was like, I'm a little, I'm unsure how to navigate this preamble, this, the buildup toward the buildup. And he said, if I was your coach, it's like, if I was your coach, I would tell that you need to work on your pleasure anxiety, which is that being excited about something in advance often feels an awful lot like anxiety. And they're very, very close. What would it be for you? What would it be for you? the lesson be that you most repeatedly come back to? Oh. You know one would be David Ogilvie's line of you think you're advertising to a standing army, but you're actually advertising to a moving parade. So in the niche world of advertising, Ogilvy applies it in the sense that he would work with

these huge brands and these huge brands would be like, why are we still running this ad? I've seen it everywhere. And it's like, nobody else has seen things the way you've seen them. But what I'd love about that idea is, not just necessarily add campaigns. It applies to, we constantly observe ourselves significantly more than anybody else is observing us. So it's this standing army versus moving parade. And how does that relate to you? Well, okay. So here, like a little one, right? So I put together this list recently of all the best books that I've read and I'll post it out there, highagency.com forward slash books for people listening. I'll post it out there. And I will then think about, oh, I don't necessarily want to post that again.

People have already seen it. But they're on the 17th post. Somebody go, oh, I've just found this. And often it's the case that nobody has fucking seen it. It's always a moving parade. So that's one lesson. There's a legendary story in advertising circles about automagnate Henry Ford.

He had a layout of the company's latest print ad tacked to his wall, which he saw every time he came into his office. One day, he loudly announced that he was tired of the ad. It was high time to create a new one. But Mr. Ford's assistant stammered. that hasn't even started running yet. It's only natural for a client to get tired of an ad long before its intended audience does. So how can you determine when it's time to change your campaign?

And they'll see this when, this is particularly British syndrome. I don't think Americans struggle with this as much, but when a Brit will do some new creative endeavor, do a business, do anything, they almost feel past the first initial ask to follow up. is very unbretish, Christopher. Were you friends with me when I made Gas Your Friends Up, my tagline for a couple of years? Yes. That would have been at the start of our friendship. I believe I was gassed.

Yeah, well, you would try, you were. You've actually been probably the most gassed of all of my friends about everything I've done. But yeah, I just had this line that if you support Rihanna's new single more than your friend's new business, you're a bad friend. It's so fucking true. Like, gas your friends up, dude. Buy their shit, support them, share their work, tell them

they're doing good. Like, obviously, don't encourage them to do something. something which is horrendous and give them feedback. But like at the very least you can support it. They've done something in their prep. Buy the fucking ticket. Go to the show. Support your friends. It's very, uh, memetic though, right? You kind of have someone needs to begin. It's like having, it's like having an open, uh, emotionally intimate relationship until somebody opens up. It's different. No, I mean more that I think one of the reasons why you have less of that is that people see sometimes their friends weirdly as, as rivals because they have more.

similarities in common with them. Narcissism of small differences. Maybe, but I think my point still stands, which is, if you want your friends to support, you more a great way to do that is to start supporting your friends. Now, it's another Joe Hudsonism when it comes to communicating that if you show up in your relationship differently, after about six or seven, like very differently, there is a typical flow that you and your partner go through. They get to be the bully and you get to be the very,

victim or they get to be the victim and you get to be the savior. There is a dance, a sort of tone, a rhythm to the way that you communicate. And if when that happens, you show up in a very different way, presumably a much more positive way, more regulated, more calm, more peaceful, more empathetic, it only takes seven times of you doing that. They'll notice after the first time. After the next few, they'll really notice. After about seven times, on average, he said, their pattern just can't continue. It's like playing tennis with the other person not hitting the ball back. So if you want to change the situation that you're in,

the best thing to do is change your own behavior. That's beautiful. It's cool. That would be on my list. What else would you have on your list? Your default choices are almost always wrong. If you don't step into your programming and just think a little, and this is where the rumination trap comes in

because you think, oh, thinking's good for me. let's do an infinite amount. Let's do an infinite amount of it. No. It's like you need to do just a little bit. You need to practice something before you end up relying on instinct. At least that's a lesson that keeps coming back to me that most of your defaults are confused chemical signals coming from your body or social norms or pass of least resistance or the way that you've dealt with past trauma. almost all of those are not things that you consciously chosen.

Yes. Like the things that you want aren't the things that you want to want. If you don't take some time designing your desires, you end up following the path that everyone else does. And like outsourcing your wisdom to the group is usually a bad idea. Even what you said then around the questioning the first thought, assuming the first thought isn't necessarily you. I always go back to that wonderful meditation exercise of what's the next thought going to be.

Yeah, you sit there, try it now if anybody, when you sit there and you just ask yourself, I'm not going to think, but let's just see what the next thought appears is. You just become the watcher. And I find when I did that for the first time, it was simply the Bayern Munich player, Iron Robin, cutting in on his left thought. And then it's like, huh, why is that there? I haven't thought of him in a long, long time, and you begin to realize a lot of it is just an automatic response. What else do you like from meditation questions?

I know that's one of your favorites. What are some of the other ones that have been really resonant with you? The problem with talking about meditation is firstly like a wanker. Well, yeah. It's very late for that. You've got to address that up front. The second problem is, have you ever heard, there's this great line where when what happens is learning meditation, it's kind of like learning Japanese and then you go and tell everybody how wonderful it is, but you do so in Japanese. So that's why when you read anything about it, it almost doesn't make sense.

A cool one is to try and turn awareness in on itself. you've ever tried that where you think of your awareness and then you try and become aware of it and it's almost like this mirror and you go oh shit that's quite scary that's one of uh sam's like quick hit things where you try and catch your own awareness quickly it's kind of strange because most of the time when you're doing any meditation or mindfulness it's this evolving it's slow but this is more like trying to get an animal in a trap except the animal is you and the trap is also you Anyway, George Mack, ladies and gentlemen, love you all. Thank you very much for tuning in.

Where should people go? Hiagency.com forward slash books. Read them. Heck yeah. All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude. Yes.

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