16 Wise Truths To Improve Your Life - George Mack

Chris Williamson 0:00 Today we're gonna go through some of the best ideas of all time.

George Mack 0:02 Yeah, well, purely subjective by, uh, me and you, so...

Chris Williamson 0:06 Y- yeah.

George Mack 0:06 Who knows? Let's go.

Chris Williamson 0:06 The best ideas that we're aware of.

George Mack 0:08 So the... Right now, that may change in 12 months.

Chris Williamson 0:10 (laughs) Yeah, exactly. The r-

George Mack 0:11 So, let's do it. But that's the beauty of it, it's an infinite game.

Chris Williamson 0:12 Okay, so the first one, is optimism a scam? What's the, uh, skeptic...

George Mack 0:16 Yes, it is.

Chris Williamson 0:17 It's the... (laughs)

George Mack 0:17 It's the, "Shut down the railways, shut down the airlines, shut down electricity, shut down it all. It's all a scam. We need more nihilism. We need more pessimism." No, I, um, I wrote this essay called Is Optimism a Scam? And the pure thesis behind it was... (clicks tongue) What you had about 20 years ago was The Secret, the book that came out, and it was this idea that you could just manifest things into reality. And the cynical, skeptical crowd completely decided to, to destroy that idea. And I always use, like the... So there's three great examples of the secret. So you've got one which is Winston Churchill when he was 19 years old saying, "One day this great city will be under attack. I will be the one that saves it." So that's like 50, 40, 40, 50 years before World War II. You have Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, "I will become the greatest body builder ever and the greatest movie star," or the biggest movie star at the time. There's one which is from John Rockefeller as well which is, "One day I will be the richest man in the world." He said that to his bank teller who like rejected him for a bank apparently. So that's the kind of bull case for like ridiculous affirmations that manifest to reality, but the problem with that is, for every Rockefeller, Schwarzenegger, Churchill, there's 10,000 delusional assholes that say these things and they aren't backed up, so the skeptics are right there. Um, and the problem that the optimism crowd has in my opinion is, it's a marketing problem. They've sold it, they've oversold it, and the best, the best put down ever was Dave Chappelle where he was saying, "If the secret was true, why aren't all the starving kids in Africa manifesting food?"

Chris Williamson 1:43 (laughs)

George Mack 1:44 And you go, that's, that's the ultimate win, right? So optimism as a result has kind of struggled a few outs, and the problem with optimism is, they've oversold the product is my, is my thesis. So imagine if you sold creatine as human growth hormone. That's what I see people have done with optimism. So what we need to do is appeal to skeptic's language to kinda win the optimism game, which is (clicks tongue) if you go to PubMed and search "placebo effect," 100,000 results. Everybody in the scientific community acknowledges the power of the placebo effect. There's one, uh, study where it started in World War II, I forgot the name of the doctor, where it was the US versus the Italians and there was loads of people, loads of, uh, pri- um, soldiers, sorry, struggling, and rather than give them morphine 'cause he'd run out, he started giving them salt water and they could go through surgery with it. So the placebo effect is something magical, it's something powerful, and therefore, I think you can use that a little bit to argue the skeptic's case for optimism. And ultimately, where I go down, this is what optimism is, it's to improve one percent every single day. So this... Have you heard of the cocktail party effect? Have I told you about that?

Chris Williamson 2:47 No.

George Mack 2:47 So the cocktail party effect is me and you sat here like we've been in a few bars or restaurants, at Terry's Barbecue down the road, right, and the background noise is a blur. It's me and you chatting, "Blurr, blurr, blurr, blurr, blurr." But if somebody says, "Voodoo Events," which is Chris's old events company, or s- mentions the North East of England, or whatever it is, suddenly that background noise... (fingers snapping) "What is that?" Um, you, you immediately tune into it. So right now your brain is blurring out infinite inputs, millions of inputs that are happening right now, and you're focusing on what appeals to your reticular activating system. And I think the, the case for optimism is, you're not going to manifest things into reality, but if you have a more optimistic frame, you're more likely to spot those opportunities. And I say market optimism as a one percent improvement every single day, and then you'll probably get more people to believe it. So I think that's the problem with optimism. It was oversold.

Chris Williamson 3:35 Yeah, the baby and bathwater got thrown out together.

George Mack 3:38 Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Williamson 3:39 Right?

George Mack 3:39 They threw... Yeah, the, uh, I put that baby in bathwater meme which is, they throw the baby out, um, which is like, useful optimism with a load of delusional, wishy thinking, Instagram quotes bullshit.

Chris Williamson 3:50 (sighs)

George Mack 3:50 And that's the problem.

Chris Williamson 3:51 Especially the first, kind of like eugenics. Optimism's like eugenics, that the first iteration of really, really aggressive optimism came from Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. This is the woman who said that the 2006 Boxing Day tsunami that killed like tens of thousands of people, I think in Thailand, was due to the Thai people giving out bad vibes that like manifested and attracted this natural disaster.

George Mack 4:20 See, this is the trouble with it. They've complete-... It's like, it's like if you advertise creatine as going to fix everything. It's not. It's a small, one percent improvement every day. But the actual difference is, is you may then have an opportunity that opens up that completely compounds. So I think James Clear has that graph where if you improve 0.1% every single day, if that compounds, that's a 36 impro- 36X improvement in a year. Um, that's the argument I think for optimism, it's a one percent improvement every single day. And ultimately, hu- society is getting better, and I think it's important to repeat that point.

Chris Williamson 4:46 Well, everybody's deluded, right? In one form or another. Everybody has some type of delusion. As far as I can see, and both of us come from the north of the UK, this is like the f- fucking ground zero for...

George Mack 5:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 5:00 ... cynicism, pessimism, skepticism, not necessarily coming from an intellectual place, but almost coming from a genetic place. It feels like there's a predisposition. The weather's gray. The people are gray. The mood is gray. So, everybody has a degree of delusion, right? Why not have a delusion that benefits you? Like, if you're going to not be accurate necessarily, if you know that you're going to be inaccurate about the future and you know that you can't know everything, which is true, I don't think that erring on the side of things are going to get worse, especially given that every quantifiable metric available says that things are getting better, yes. Is it difficult that we're dealing with the existential pain of life direction and all that stuff? Yeah, 100%, I, I, I get that and it's a luxurious position to be in to have an existential crisis because all of the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been sorted, so it's a challenge that very few people have had to deal with so there's not any wisdom that's been archetypally passed down over generations 'cause so few people got to the situation where they were safe from shelter and food and water and connection and blah, blah, meaning and all that stuff. So yeah, I understand it's a difficult challenge but like...... everything is getting better, which means that optimism, wh- what looks like optimism is actually realism.

George Mack 6:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:16 And what looks like realism is actually, like, pessimism.

George Mack 6:20 Yeah, I think anybody who follows me for a while, um, and the ones who haven't, I don't know how to describe this one to you in visu- uh, audio, is there's this matrix which is optimism and pessimism and then low agency and high agency. And I feel that, yeah, if you have optimism with a low sense of agency, that, that isn't valuable at all, but paired with high agency, I think that's one of the most beautiful things. There's this, like, one thing that I, I always come back to as well, which is this Steve Jobs email. I think I, I told you about this one, where he sent to himself 13, 13 months before he died. It came out quite recently. And Steve Jobs wrote this to, uh, to himself. "I grow little of the food I eat, and the little I do grow, I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive or of, or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical ent- uh, attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and I am totally dependent on them for my life and wellbeing." The one guy who could've, A, could be very pessimistic in that scenario, but B, also, rightly so, have a fucking ego. Um, it's sort of like, that, that, I always come back to that. Whenever I feel quite pessimistic, I go, "Fuck, life's actually very, very

George Mack 7:42 good."

Chris Williamson 7:42 How do you reframe it yourself so everybody has this draw towards cynicism and pessimism-

George Mack 7:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:48 ... it's cool to do it on the internet, it somehow becomes sexy to be cynical because it's seen as, like, a, a signal of high intellect. How do you stop yourself tumbling down that rabbit hole?

George Mack 7:59 That's a good question. I think one of them, I have this thing about hardware versus software, which is most people think they have a software problem when they actually have a hardware problem, so if I'm finding myself thinking more cynically, thinking more negatively, I'll just try and fix the hardware, so it's, like, some kind of breathing exercise, sauna, run, exercise, eat well. My friend Dickie says that when he's tired, uh, or in that kind of emotional state, his goal of the day is just to make no decisions. So, I just often, a good night's sleep or, or whatever it is, try and fix it that way, that for me fixes about 95% of my software problems. And then the remaining 5%, which may be legitimate issues, are much easier to solve in that. So, that's the first thing I'd say is fix hardware before you try and fix software. Um, and then I, I think it's a lot about who you're around. It's a lot about studying. Studying history is super important 'cause you go, "Fuck, I could've been born in 1612."

Chris Williamson 8:50 Yeah.

George Mack 8:50 Or I could've been part of World War II, which was s- a blink of an eye away. Um, and when you actually look at it from a historical perspective, it's like, well where is better than now?

Chris Williamson 8:59 Yeah.

George Mack 9:00 I don't think there is a better time than now.

Chris Williamson 9:01 Yeah. I came up with this yesterday, I told you about the alpha history fantasy.

George Mack 9:05 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:05 So, uh, modern men who are angry at the world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe they would've done better in medieval times. They're somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1,373,582 whose favela was sacked and destroyed.

George Mack 9:24 (laughs) That would've been me. That would've been me. 100%.

Chris Williamson 9:25 Yeah? (laughs) You think you would've been cannon fodder peasant?

George Mack 9:27 100%.

Chris Williamson 9:28 Okay. Well, I think, um, uh, Huberman's got this quote where he says, "You cannot change the mind with the mind, you have to change it with the body."

George Mack 9:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 9:36 It's not strictly true because meditation is precisely changing the mind with the mind, but I think broadly it's true, that most of the problems that people encounter are hardware problems rather than software problems.

George Mack 9:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 9:46 I learned this during COVID. For the first time in my entire life, I had a stable sleep and wake pattern. I went to bed and got up at the same time seven days a week for the first time since I was 18, and I was 32. So, I'm like, right, okay, there's something to this. There's something to having a set routine. And I, I'd listened to, I'd sent it to you, I remember sending to you, uh, Matthew Walker on Rogan, being like, "Wow, look how important sleep is." Meanwhile, staying up until 4:00 in the morning cashing at night clubs, like, two or three nights a week.

George Mack 10:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:14 So, you need to really sort of see it and feel it. Yes, on hardware problem. Also, I had this idea called the cynicism safety blanket.

George Mack 10:22 I don't know that one.

Chris Williamson 10:23 Fucking, I'm happy with this.

George Mack 10:25 Let's go.

Chris Williamson 10:25 So, this is explaining why cynicism is, uh, incredibly trendy, especially in the modern world. Cynicism is a guarded response which sets yourself up against disappointment. Its role within the system is to protect you against experiencing anything bad. It is a preemptive strike against a perceived threat. If I tell myself that all women are bad, then I'm less likely to seek a relationship with women, and as a consequence, I'm never going to feel the pain of rejection. If I tell myself that everything is shit or that things will never get better, then I'm excused of ever having to try at anything. It's more comfortable to get fatalistic and call it pragmatism. To cope is framing hope as pathetic and embarrassing and optimism as delusion. It's sour grapes at an existential level. If everything sucks and everyone is horrible and the reality is disappointing and you know that for a fact, then it's the people acting like things, that can be better, that are dumb, delusional, and the problem. The upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure.

George Mack 11:22 Mm-hmm. And I also think that ties into the cocktail party effect, what we just spoke about, where if you have that cynical outlook and you have that pessimistic outlook, I mean, you can still win the lottery of course, but you will, i- if there's so much sensory inputs that's trying to go into your brain, you will just see it more, you will see more of it. You'll end up down darker YouTube rabbit holes, you'll end up watching those things, you'll end up in those cesspits, so it's this kind of perpetual flywheel that then begins to compound.

Chris Williamson 11:44 Mm-hmm. Yeah, you're looking-

George Mack 11:46 And you can see it both ways.

Chris Williamson 11:46 Yeah, you're looking for evidence that confirms the world view that you didn't want to have...

George Mack 11:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 11:51 ... but that you somehow have inculcated from being on the internet too much.

George Mack 11:54 Mm-hmm. Scott Adams, the

Narrator 11:55 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 11:55 ... creator of Dilbert, he has this idea in one of his books where it's called the weed filter, and he used to think that if he smoked weed, people became way nicer to him, so he started smoking more and more weed. And then he began to realize, actually, he was just more relaxed 'cause he was so tight and stiff, that all of a sudden, his interaction with the world...

George Mack 12:14 ... also has an inf- effect on how they interact with him. When he was way more relaxed, people were then way more relaxed around him. It wasn't actually the weed, and then he realized it wasn't actually the weed itself, it was purely the filter that he was viewing things through.

Chris Williamson 12:24 Mm. Yeah, it's, trying to push optimism is a tough, it's a-

George Mack 12:29 Oh, it's tough, yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:30 It's a really hard road.

George Mack 12:31 You know, I mean, I then, like, going back to what we said at the start, you don't have hardware, software kind of thing, it's more just looking around and just looking at the reality of the situation. Like one of my favorite stories is, uh, I forgot the writer who did it, but he tried to make a chicken sandwich from scratch. Have you heard this story?

Chris Williamson 12:45 What? (laughs) What the fuck do you mean?

George Mack 12:46 So he tried, he tried to create a chicken sandwich purely from scratch, so the bread-

Chris Williamson 12:49 First principles sandwich.

George Mack 12:50 First principles, took him six months and cost him-

Chris Williamson 12:52 (laughs)

George Mack 12:52 ... £1,500.

Chris Williamson 12:54 Oh. (laughs) So he had to grow the-

George Mack 12:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:56 ... wheat or whatever that was ground up to make the flour to do the, right, okay.

George Mack 12:59 And you don't, you just, you just don't think about those things of how really when you look at human beings, there's nothing actually s- special about them but the ability, A, to create ideas, which we spoke about to begin with, and then B, the ability to cooperate at scale, it's that thing about if you tried to create a pencil, you couldn't. No one knows how to create a pencil.

Chris Williamson 13:15 (laughs)

George Mack 13:15 Because the like, fucking rubber's from here, the lead's from here, no one knows it, and that is quite beautiful. And, and you need optimistic people in order to be able to collaborate to play those positive sum games. It's so important. And listen, is it going to fix cancer if you've got cancer? Of course not. But like one of my favorite examples is Brian Armstrong, who used to do, write down every single day, "I will create a billion dollar company." Do I think that created a billion dollar company? No, of course not, it was like hard work, he's probably ridiculous IQ, he's probably got a great network, he had the right idea, he went through Y Combinate, had all those things. But could that have helped a little bit? Possibly. Same with Churchill-

Chris Williamson 13:48 What, what's interesting-

George Mack 13:48 ... same with Arnold, same with all of them.

Chris Williamson 13:49 ... I, I would love to see the case for pessimism. Like the only reason that I can see that pessimism would potentially be, uh, th- the case that would be put forward would be that it protects people emotionally from the pain of failure. That's really the only thing. If you set your sights so low, you can never be disappointed by reality.

George Mack 14:07 I mean, one of the things I, I'd kind of fork this conversation here is I do think there's, there's some utility to pessimism, and like that kinda George Orwellian double think, like the ability to hold two ideas at the same time is so important, so if you can actually take a pessimistic frame and go, "Oh, what's the worst scenario that can happen here?" It's that Tim Ferriss fear setting idea, I think that's super valuable as well, um, and the ability to constantly use optimism and pessimism when you need it. But I'd say on the whole, I think optimism's more useful. Uh, likewise if you can take a high agency frame when you need it, and also the ability to empathize with what the low agency version of this will be, the ability to operate in multiple mindsets I think is super important. It's that George Fitzgerald quote which is like you can tell the, you can tell the mark of a first rate intellect by the ability to hold two thoughts, two opposing thoughts at the same time, and that's very rare these days. People either go to one end of the spectrum-

Chris Williamson 14:52 Mm.

George Mack 14:52 ... or the other, and I'm often quite fucking obsessed with, well, what's that third door?

Chris Williamson 14:56 Yeah.

George Mack 14:56 And then once I see-

Chris Williamson 14:56 What happens if I go orthogonally?

George Mack 14:57 Yeah, because this team's here, this team's here, what's that here?

Chris Williamson 15:01 You've

Chris Williamson 15:02 mentioned it a couple of times today, one of mine and your favorite words, high agency.

George Mack 15:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:06 Why are you so obsessed with high agency people? Why is it important?

George Mack 15:14 Because it's applied optimism, I guess. Without it, nothing changes. And we was at dinner last night with Jared, and we were saying c- I asked he, f- for reference for the audience, he recruits like high level execs, and I asked him, "Wh- what do all these guys have in common when you get to like that uber level of big, big, big companies?" And he said like, "Energy transference." And high agency for me is a combination of energy transference, the ability to either just accept the story or change the story, and then you have this kind of debate, again you can have these two thoughts in your head at the same time of the great man theory of history, or, um, kind of things just happen societally and change that way. And again, I think there's truth, truth to both, but ultimately at the, at the individual level, having a sense of agency is extremely valuable, and these figures, like one of my favorite questions to ask is, what films aren't we making because we're too busy making Transformers 12? And if you actually look at all my work, it's often questions rather than answers, it's m- my favorite Oasis lyric is, "Questions are the answers you might need." And often in this platform, it's a guru platform, you can give the easy platitudes. I actually prefer to ask a question-

Chris Williamson 16:23 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 16:23 ... and then leave that open loop with the audience and then go, "Hey, here's my answer to the question." But then you may get, and hopefully we do, you get little DMs from people going, "Actually, this is the story that they should be making instead of Transformers 12. Have you heard about this person? Have you heard about this person? Or have you heard about this story?" Um, or-

Chris Williamson 16:38 So you're crowdsourcing the insights, right?

George Mack 16:40 Exactly. And that, I think that's such a better way, it goes back to what we said at the beginning, that's an infinite game, where if you try and go, "I think X, Y, Z's true, and I have this guru insight of A, B, C," versus having a question of an open loop, those are questions that you can kind of answer over a career and, and still never answer, it's an infinite game.

Chris Williamson 16:56 Okay. So high agency is the ability to change, uh, to enact change. If it was to be in a single sentence, I would say it's that.

George Mack 17:04 Yeah, I think, uh, low agency is life happening to you, high agency is you happening to life. I'd say that's the fundamental difference. And you'll know people who life happens to them, and then you know people who happen to life. And ultimately it's a constant battle, you can have the most high agency per- Steve Jobs, who dies of pancreatic cancer. Um, obviously there's stuff around the carrot juice and things like that, but, but ultimate, environment still have a factor, but it's the ability to have that double think and know, okay, well, I can still have the most amount of optimism, st- still the most amount of high agency and have an impact, environment's still gonna have a huge impact too.

Chris Williamson 17:33 Mm. So who are some of your favorite high agency humans throughout history?

George Mack 17:37 Going back to what I said earlier, what films aren't Hollywood making right now because they're making Transformers 12 or Fast & Furious 15? Um, the most underrated one in terms of how few people know and the most high agency individual is a guy called Rudolf Vrba. So Rudolf Vrba, um, was in Auschwitz, uh, as a teenager, um, he was in a unique position where he was essentially in the operations of the train, so he would help Jews come off the trains, um, particularly women and children, and then they'd get exported to the gas chambers. One of the things, like a meta principle I, today, today that I've kind of massively changed my mind in the last 24 months is, when you w- when you study history, you begin to understand things completely differently. So when I go into this Rudolf Vrba story, the thing that people don't appreciate is they view it in hindsight versus at the time. The Nazis didn't announce to people, "Hey..."... get on these trains and this is what's gonna happen to you, that wasn't the case. And as a result, lots of other governments who were fighting the war against them didn't even know that was the case. There was a few people who suspected it was, but it's only in hindsight that we know that. So he then began to see, he was one of the few people that knew, who wasn't on the Nazis' team, that could see this just killing machine that was happening. Um, and okay, so you can imagine here, talk about pessimism, has every reason to be pessimistic. He's seeing the worst of humanity that's ever existed. Talk about agency, he's literally a prisoner and if you try and escape Auschwitz, they will, they will just essentially, if they find you, they'll put out a three-day dog squad, they will hunt you down and they will hang you in front of the- everybody else, just to show what happens to you. So he teamed up with Alfred Wetzler, um, actually just to rewind for a second, the m- the hot, most harrowing thing about his story going why, why he could be so pessimistic and so low agency is he meets a girl in the concentration camp called Alice Munk and loses his virginity in the concentration camp. And then she gets killed the next day in the gas chambers. And he kept seeing that, and again, talk about pessimism, talk about low agency, every single reason to be, but decided, "You know what? Fuck it. I'm gonna try and escape." So he teamed up with Alfred Wetzler and essentially what they did was there was some wood just outside the camps that they hid under these barrels of wood. Boom, the Nazis, as they're counting at the end, they go, "Where's 44070?" Because they take their names from them, so they just have numbers. "Where are they?" They released the d- uh, the dog squad and they hid under these barrels of wood, the most high agency part of it, they cover themselves in gasoline and tobacco, so- so the Nazi dogs couldn't find them, even though they were right literally on the perimeter. There's one point where they almost find them and he has a knife 'cause he's about to take his own life. Okay, they don't find them, three days goes by, they haven't ate, they've kind of stayed awake. They escape, um, they sprint as fast as they can, run all the way through Slovakia. No Google Maps-

Chris Williamson 20:18 Run through Slovakia?

George Mack 20:19 ... in- in concentration camp uniforms where everyone surrounding them are Nazi sympathizers 'cause that's what they put in place. With no Google Maps, no Uber, no Fi- no- no- no WhatsApp to chat to the s- like the squad. This is like the most harrowing thing where... And if they get caught, killed immediately. Um, run I think it's like a hundred and e- uh, a hundred, uh, or so miles through, get all the way there, and then the most beautiful part is kind of the few things that happens afterwards. So one, rather than write an incredibly emotional report, which he should've done. Like, they killed the girl he lost his virginity to, right? S- It's dark. He could've told them, like, "They killed the girl I love." They wrote the most objective McKinsey-like report of this killing machine that was Auschwitz, um, and th- people didn't believe him for quite a while. Again, rather than rest on his laurels, this guy goes and joins the Slovakian Army and they say, "We're not gonna give you a pistol. We'll give you g- a machine gun because of like the kind of guy you are," just based off this fucking story.

Chris Williamson 21:16 Yeah, "We don't give boys like you pistols."

George Mack 21:18 Yes. "We give, we give them, uh, machine guns." So that's the kind of guy. Again, just escaped that, but he's back on the front line. The beautiful thing... Well, there's a dark side and there's a beautiful side. But the dark side is, because going back to what I said earlier, people didn't understand what was happening at the time, it wasn't believed for a while until Churchill and the Pope ultimately got the report, and then began to put more and more pressure on the Nazis. Um, so it was a big factor. They recommend- they recko- uh, they reckon he saved 200,000 lives just from his actions alone. After the war, he goes and lives in America, he's a lecturer at pharm- uh, lectures pharmacology. Basically, none of his students know the story of what he did. But the most beautiful thing, I- I found a YouTube video that has 56 views on it where this guy who used to know him very well said that everybody, apart from Vrba, who he knew that escaped or went through Auschwitz, um, Vrba dressed insanely well, 'cause he never wanted that freedom to be taken away from him ever again, so he'd dress in like the most outlandish amazing suits. And for me, talk about a film that is better than Transformers 12, better than Fast & Furious, eh? But nobody knows who... I mean, a f- a few people do, but most people do not know who he is and why isn't there a day named after him? It's- it's, for me, it's insanity.

Chris Williamson 22:28 The most high agency man of all time.

George Mack 22:30 I think, I think in terms of, uh, name to agency ratio, yeah, it's- it's-

Chris Williamson 22:34 Name to awareness.

George Mack 22:35 It's- it's Rudolf Vrba for sure.

Chris Williamson 22:36 That's very cool. Yeah, the, um... I- I put Dick Fosbury in the TEDx Talk that I did a few years ago and I think that that's a good example as well. Uh, you know, someone who was being maligned in a very different way, but he was mocked, you know?

George Mack 22:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 22:50 To- to try and break the existing hegemony that was the sciss- the scissor kick I think was the current-

George Mack 22:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 22:57 ... one that people were using. Uh, and he was an engineer by trade, so he had analyzed what was happening with regards to center of gravity, how you could get yourself as low as possible. And yeah, he was laughed at by everybody. You know, he- he competed in the Olympics, I think it was maybe, uh, Japan or Korea or somewhere like that in the '60s when he did win. He had two different pairs of Nikes on, he didn't have the same pair of shoes. And he missed the opening ceremony 'cause he wanted to go to a museum. So this guy was an unbelievable outlier, but he had the courage of his convictions and I think that that's the-

George Mack 23:32 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 23:32 ... that's one of the big differences.

George Mack 23:34 Well, it's that idea which is if you was to go back to 1850 and try and explain the concept of wifi, it would blow their bu- it would not be seen as fathomable. But that idea exists, you just needed a combination of ideas, what we spoke about earlier, and then high agency individuals and humanity, uh, working together and compounding. So the question you then think is, "Well, what is gonna be wifi for us now that 100 years from now or however long it's gonna be, 'Oh, that was so obvious'?" Like one of my favorite examples which is much more base level is wheeled suitcases. So before, I think it was 1970s, everybody used to carry their suitcases everywhere. Eric Weinstein has that great bit of the smartest men at the time, the smartest physicists used to get on the train or the plane carrying their- their suitcases. And the question is, is "Well, where's the wheeled suitcases right now?" There's one guy who comes along and goes, "Hold on. Let's put some wheels on that." Jim Jefferies has a great bit in his new Netflix special where he says...... feasibly, Neil Armstrong, as he was getting on the rockets, like was there carrying all his suitcases.

Chris Williamson 24:40 (laughs)

George Mack 24:40 And goes, "One day, we'll put a rocket on these," w- without realizing. Okay, it's so true. And, and that's again going back to questions. Questions are the answers that you need. Where is the wheeled suitcase right now? And that's a question that can keep you up at night, where it's so obvious that everyone's just copying the crowd and being

George Mack 24:55 memetic.

Chris Williamson 24:55 So a lot of people will think, "I want to be high agency. I want to be around people that are high agency." How can you tell if your friends and the people that you hang with are high or low agency?

George Mack 25:08 I think going back to what we mentioned earlier, which is do they kind of bend the environment? So no matter what situation you put them in, do they bend it? Um, the dinner last night, he said energy transference, so I had this essay I've never pulled b- published, which is sofa friends versus treadmill friends. And there's certain friends that I hang around with, afterwards I need to lie on a sofa because they kinda drain you of that energy. And then there's other friends that we mean you know, when you hang around with them, and you're like, "Fuck. Seven-mile run, let's go." We overclock our brains.

Chris Williamson 25:40 Yeah.

George Mack 25:40 Like, that's ... So I think a big thing that you'll see is energy transference. I always say that, uh, Steve from Diary of a CEO, who I used to work at his company, there was this thing where I would walk in the office in the morning, and I'd open the door, and bear in mind Steve could be in the London office, Manchester office, Berlin office, New York office, he's constantly jet-setting around, and I'd go, "Oh." I could just see from people's faces and how much energy was in the room, I go, "Ah, Steve's here today," without even seeing him. And I think that's like a often thing is when they enter a room, the energy just completely changes. I think that's a often combination of high-agency individuals.

Chris Williamson 26:14 Mm. You had weird teenage hobbies.

George Mack 26:17 Weird teenage hobbies is another one. So I often hire for this, like I can be in a job interview and if they mention a weird teenage hobby, I kind of lean in quite a lot, which I probably shouldn't say publicly now because now people are gonna start bringing those up. But when you're young, the n- it- when y- especially when you're a teenager, it's probably your low, most low agency state because you want to copy the crowd. You want to be memetic of everybody around you. However, if you can at that age, whilst everyone else is going playing football or rugby, be super into yo-yoing or super into football freestyle or super into whatever it is, for me that's a good sign 'cause if you can swim against the tide when you're 15 or the environment or people mocking you, so much easier as you're an adult.

Chris Williamson 26:56 Well, it's so formative as well, right? A lot of the things that you do in later life are echoes of what you did when you were a kid.

George Mack 27:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:01 There's a really great study that I looked at that the music that you listen to between the ages of 11 and 15 imprints on you for the rest of your life.

George Mack 27:08 Wow.

Chris Williamson 27:09 So that's why you have generations of music trends that go. Like I still love emo and post-hardcore because I grew up in like the Hawthorne Heights and Blink-182 era. That was my ... That was what I listened to, right? And then there'll be other people that'll listen to whatever it might be. You know, god help the people that are growing up now like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B.

George Mack 27:29 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 27:29 But, um, you've got the golden question as well, which is something that we've used. I think you might've spoken about this on the first...

George Mack 27:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:34 ... ever episode that we did. What's, what's the golden question?

George Mack 27:37 The golden question is-

Chris Williamson 27:39 (coughs)

George Mack 27:39 ... if you were stuck in a third world prison or you're stuck on an island and you had to call someone to bail you out, who would you call? And that alone will identify the most high-agency person in your life, 'cause within that you need a combination of, I mean, some kind of delusional optimism to be able to pull that off. You need some relentless kind of resourcefulness to try and operationalize that. And you're gonna need to be, have that energy transference to be able to convince people or whatever the fuck, whatever plan you're gonna have to put together. So I'd say that is probably the most impactful thing when predicting high agency. One that I see as well is immigrant mentality. So if somebody's moved from their hometown, quite a good sign. If someone's moved from their home country, even greater sign. And you then see these like immigrants across particularly America, right, who absolutely dominate, because if you can, um, sit there and go, "I'm in the wrong place, and so I have to acknowledge I'm in the wrong place. I have to admit ev- I think everybody else o- or the people around me, I disagree with their decision, at least for me," um, and have the growth mindset to then operationalize a move and start from zero, that of in itself is kind of quite a, a meta story. It doesn't mean that every- everybody who, uh, migrates is high agency. But I'd say i- i- it is quite common.

Chris Williamson 28:56 Not being able to predict peoples' opinions as well, I think, is, is a huge one.

George Mack 28:59 Yes. Oh, yeah, one of my favorites.

Chris Williamson 29:00 Like...

George Mack 29:00 I, I have a friend of mine called Katty, and I love hanging around with him 'cause I don't know what he's going to say, because I, I ... Like he, he doesn't just line up with, oh, uh, for example, like you'll have like the body builder who you'll stereotype them. You probably get this a little bit as well, right? People don't expect you to be in great shape, former model, and then chat about neuroscience with the guy coming on a hold your own. So I love people when you can't fully predict their opinions. Or you have, um, the beauty queen who's super into Nietzsche, or the marketer who's obsessed with the history of war. Whenever someone just falls into that obvious stereotype makes you think that they haven't thought about things. But when they go, "Hold on a second, like y- you was on Love Island but you're super into chatting about astrophysics," there I go, that's probably quite a high-agency individual because they've- they've clearly gone against what should be their default programming.

Chris Williamson 29:47 Yeah. If you know one opinion that somebody holds, and from it you can accurately predict everything else that they believe...

George Mack 29:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:54 ... they're probably not a serious thinker.

George Mack 29:55 No, they're just, they're just NPCs, just downloading scripts.

Chris Williamson 29:57 But there is somebody out there who falls into the perfect mold of, uh, "I am pro-life, and I'm pro-gun, and I'm pro First Amendment, and I'm like t- small government, and I'm like anti-immigration, and I'm blah, blah, blah." Like you are the complete caricature stereotype of the person that's from the right, and there is the same from the person that's from the left. But most people are so idiosyncratic that you should have something that doesn't fit. Should be this nice smooth circle except for those two bits. And you're like, "What's that doing there? Like why are you, uh, pro-choice but pro-gun?" Or, "Why are you like, uh, pro-immigration but pro-small government? Like why do those things go together?"

George Mack 30:37 Mm.

Chris Williamson 30:37 And when you find somebody that has-... a non-typical suite of beliefs, it's interesting because you think, "Oh, you've arrived at this point on your own." This is one of the things, I did this video about Sam Harris ages ago, th- three, four years ago. Uh, why Sam Harris is annoying everybody. It seems like he, he's, like, continued, like, true to form over the last few years. Um, but I have to respect what he's done with regards to that because he pays an unbelievably high price to hold the opinions that he does. Which gives me a great amount of faith that he truly believes in them. It would be much easier for him to fold either one way or the other. Like, uh, how can, w- it's very untypical to be pro-vax, but anti-woke, like, anti-Trump but also kind of anti-Biden.

George Mack 31:25 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 31:26 Like, you know, he just holds a suite of beliefs that whether you agree with them or not, and almost everybody disagrees with some of them, right? There's very few people that hold the exact same Sam Harris suite of beliefs that Sam Harris does. But the price that he pays to hold them is so high, that for me, it's a reliable signal of authenticity because there are much easier routes to existing in the world than holding that odd conglomeration of views.

George Mack 31:51 Mm. Y- It makes you think they've thought it through. And I realize the favorite, my favorite people to hang around me now, I don't have to agree with them on anything, but have they thought things through? I find that fascinating and then do they update their beliefs? The other one on the high agency list was, are they mean to your face, but nice behind your back? And you often don't see the people who are nice to your face and mean behind your back because by definition, you, it's behind your back. So, an- another concept we can come onto is hidden metrics, but on that specific thing, it is a hidden metric. You don't see people being rude behind your back. And I think often a good indication of somebody probably being nice behind your back is probably someone who's mean to your face. Well, at least you know they- that... And if not, at least they're consistent.

Chris Williamson 32:32 What people that are nice about other people who aren't there to your face.

George Mack 32:35 Yep. That's a good, that's a good one. Or the inverse. Are they amazing friend, amazing friend leaves the room and they go, "Oh, have you seen what they're wearing?" Or, "Have you seen X, Y, Zed?" That's, for me, a sign of, like, it takes a lot of agency to go against gossiping, which is one of the most innate human things.

Chris Williamson 32:52 Correct. Being a gossip tells you as much about the person who is gossiping as it does about the person that they're gossiping about-

George Mack 32:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:59 ... because what it tells you is that as soon as the scrutiny of the person that they're talking about is no longer there, they're gonna be prepared to talk about you. I've said before, like, the stuff that is on this phone would break the internet for weeks.

George Mack 33:11 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:11 For weeks, dude. I have shit on there-

George Mack 33:14 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:14 ... which is f- like-

George Mack 33:17 Cross Orbit level.

Chris Williamson 33:19 (laughs)

George Mack 33:19 Red Pirate Roberts. Yeah, okay.

Chris Williamson 33:20 It's, it's DPR.

George Mack 33:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:21 Um, but I, you know, I, it's my way of going about life that I'm like, "Okay, well, I guess I'm just gonna, like, hold this secret for the fucking rest of time." That's exciting for me to have. Like, one of the other ones as well, I think, is, um, sending people niche content.

George Mack 33:38 Oh, man. That's what... Going back to the Rudolph Verber story, I found that from one of the things, uh, talents I have that I can't remonetize yet, I spot content creators really early on, going back to the beginning of the conversation probably listened to you on the first ever episode. It took, took a while for that stock, that penny stock to finally boom-

Chris Williamson 33:53 (laughs)

George Mack 33:53 ... but it's doing well now, right?

Chris Williamson 33:55 (laughs)

George Mack 33:55 Um, and there's a lot of other examples like that. And one of the low agency things is, "Okay, this has six million views, therefore I will click on it." What I now do is I'll go on the Twitter feed or the YouTube explore feed or whatever, and I look for things the algorithm's recommending me but with a f- like very few views. And I click on that and list nine out of 10 times it's absolutely a waste of time. But one out of 10 you'll tap into something that everybody else isn't tapping into. But by definition that is the meme of seeing a crowd, like, uh, uh, the... I created that meme about how to be productive versus how to be creative and everybody's queuing outside how to be productive, but no one's queuing outside how to be creative. But at a meta level that's a concept, right, of what are the things that nobody's clicking on that will then potentially be big in the future? And you have to do that like a VC where you know nine out of 10 of your bets are gonna be completely incorrect-

Chris Williamson 34:38 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 34:38 ... but that one out of 10 is clicking on a Bitcoin article in 2014.

Chris Williamson 34:41 Yeah, like how many... You've had, what, 30 million views on that Verber story-

George Mack 34:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:45 ... I think, on Twitter.

George Mack 34:46 Because, uh, whereas everyone else is then just regurgitating the same shit-

Chris Williamson 34:49 Yes.

George Mack 34:49 ... versus if you can tap into other inputs. That was my big thing about creativity, the essay that went viral on that, which is creati- the problem with creativity is people treat it like productivity where they just try and do the same thing harder, versus try and get as many different inputs into the system as possible. And now YouTube explore page and all these things can just keep you in this hamster wheel-

Chris Williamson 35:08 Right.

George Mack 35:08 ... versus you need to try and break out-

Chris Williamson 35:09 Because you're predictable.

George Mack 35:10 ... and click on different shit and search weird things and before you know it you find some bizarre inputs that can either go one way or the other.

Chris Williamson 35:17 Yeah, it, the niche content thing and looking for different ideas and where do they come from is, uh, a really interesting way to conceptualize productivity versus creativity. Really interesting idea to look at there is what's the work environment that you're doing this particular job in. So for instance, if you've ever walked into an artist studio, Zach, my housemate, his missus is a- an artist, right? So I go into the room where she does her art and there's stuff fucking everywhere.

George Mack 35:44 Yes.

Chris Williamson 35:44 There's, like, vapes and there's, there's, there's, uh, half-done sketches and there'll be, like, a dog brush and there'll be, like, a, a Bluetooth speaker but it's, like, upside down and there'll be can... Also it's chaos. It's fucking chaos. That is the place that you want to be. And there'll be books and all sorts of other stuff. That's the place that you want to be if you want creative ideas.

George Mack 36:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 36:03 It's not the place you want to be in if you're doing your taxes.

George Mack 36:05 No.

Chris Williamson 36:06 When you're doing your taxes, you want to be in a nice clean desk, you want to have all of your stuff in front of you, you don't want to have any distractions. And yeah, the obsession that people have over productivity is so all-encompassing that I don't think many people in the modern world have ever looked at a problem and thought anything except for, "I need more productivity."

George Mack 36:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 36:27 Every single lock gets filled with the key of more focus, more productivity. The reason I can't do this is because I'm insufficiently attentive.

George Mack 36:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 36:37 Well, sometimes and maybe even a lot of the time, and this may be a comment on how, um, replicable and almost, uh, formulaic a lot of people's jobs are now, that, you know, many-... uh, roles should be concerned about the forthcoming GPT revolution. But a lot of the time, okay, where's- what's the creative angle to the thing that I'm trying to do? If you're trying to write a book, sometimes you need to sit down and just put your nose against the grindstone because you're not getting the stuff out. But if you're struggling with ideas, you probably need to go for a fucking walk.

George Mack 37:07 Yes. But we, we come from an institutionalized system, which is the education system, which was designed to create factory workers.

Chris Williamson 37:15 I wondered when we would get onto education.

George Mack 37:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:17 Can't take you anywhere without you blasting the education system.

George Mack 37:20 Can't bring it up, bring it out. So I think that's, that's definitely a factor, but it goes back to that question of where is the wheeled suitcases?

Chris Williamson 37:28 Mm.

George Mack 37:29 And constantly asking that at a societal level, but even right now in your very life, like where is that simple solution that's so obvious, that's just staring you in the face, but because you're trying to be so productive you can't quite see it?

Chris Williamson 37:41 Yeah, so a good example for me, I've started doing Barry's boot camp first thing in the morning. I've been telling you about this. I've been struggling with motivation to train consistently. I can train on a weekend with friends, but training on my own is getting way, way harder and I think it's because I'm under a fair bit of pressure with the show. And I've known for a very long time that classes for me externalize my motivation, they give me a time that I need to be there, they condense down the training into a short period of time, there's a coach that makes sure the programming's done, it outsources everything that I need to do, and I just forgot that that was an option. And then one day was walking past Barry's on the way to go to Flower Child's where we went for dinner last night, thought, "I should, I should book in to go there." Sure enough, signed up online and I've been to tons and tons of classes now, and by 8:30 AM I've got 50 minutes of training in, I've done my morning routine, and by 9:00 AM I can be on a call having trained and done all of my morning stuff. I'm like, wow, even if I'd been at home-

George Mack 38:37 Mm.

Chris Williamson 38:37 ... it would have, I would have struggled to have been as efficient. So oddly the creative solution has opened up a degree of productivity as well.

George Mack 38:43 The three biggest things I've found for coming up with creative ideas are, one, uh, you can get this spinning wheel app on your iPhone. Like just search spinning wheel app on, uh, the App Store and collect, going back to questions earlier, just collect great questions that you hear like, "Where's the wheeled suitcase right now in my life?" And as you collect more and more of those questions, things you hear on podcasts, things people say to you, just spin that wheel before bed, leave it with your subconscious overnight, and then journal on that thing first thing before any s- any inputs. Absolutely fantastic for coming up with ideas. Uh, second biggest one is this idea called s- Sakoku, I believe is how, I- I don't know if that's how you actually pronounce it, but I was sat in the Maldives for a week without any inputs and I came up with this idea which is the, if you ask anybody where they want to travel, everybody, certainly I know, like 90% say Japan. Why is Japan s- why do people want to travel to Japan so much? But if you study the history of Japan, they practiced Sakoku, I believe, again probably butchering the pronunciation, where they closed the borders for 250, 260 years. Anybody who tried to leave and come back, killed. Anybody who tried to enter, killed. And as a result, whilst the rest of the world was trading ideas, it developed this crazy, insane, beautiful, unique culture that w- there's nowhere else in the rest of the world and that's why people want to go and visit it because it's so creative and so new and so unique.

Chris Williamson 40:05 Ah, because it wasn't cosmopolitan. It didn't get-

George Mack 40:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 40:08 ... diluted down by other cultures.

George Mack 40:10 Exactly. And then go back to the double think idea though. At the other end of a spectrum is another tool which is that if you search on YouTube "Swedish House Mafia creating one" and it starts with them like tapping (tapping sounds) like this and they go all the way up to them just jamming in a studio, like three creative guys, to creating one live in like the space of a minute of the edit. And it's amazing and you can see like you put three people in a room with no inputs from the outside world and they just pickleball or idea tennis their way to it.

Chris Williamson 40:38 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 40:38 So I think spinning wheel helps, time alone definitely helps and the longer the better, as well as getting some kind of idea camp with the smartest people you know-

Chris Williamson 40:48 (sighs)

George Mack 40:48 ... and just, and shutting out the world that way.

Chris Williamson 40:50 We came up with similar ideas. I came up with anxiety cost and you came up with thinking cost.

George Mack 40:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 40:54 What's thinking cost?

George Mack 40:56 Thinking cost everyone will relate to which is this idea that your brain is a super computer but, and you can try this, I'll give this as an experiment to anyone listening right now, try and have two thoughts at the same time. And maybe there's the elite IQ guys that me and you definitely are and the Nikola Teslas out there that can do it, but I can't have two thoughts at the same time. So with that in mind, you've got this weird thing where you have a super computer but it can only one, run one program at a time. Quite e- quite e- I call it the human brain paradox. And why this is interesting is when you have super dramatic, super negative people, going back to what we said at the beginning where ideas are probably the most important thing, it's hard to think about the wheels on suitcases when your girlfriend's wrong with you about X, Y, Z or somebody in the WhatsApp chat's kicking off and you, and then... Because what people don't see which is a hidden metric but everybody has it, well I know I have it so I think everybody else has it which is when those events happen then when you're in the shower it's running and it's just eating away that super q- super computer's RAM constantly.

Chris Williamson 42:05 Mm.

George Mack 42:05 So there's a opportunity cost that exists for every single thought so whenever you have a thought there's trillions of other thoughts that you could be having but because your super computer can only run one program at a time it's not having. So you've got to have a defense and an offense system that I think anyway. So the defense system is avoid dramatic people as much as you can. Uh, Paul Graham has my favorite essay ever which is Life is Short and I read it whenever either anybody gets sick or anybody dies and he kind of closes the whole thing off with like relentlessly prune bullshit. So just get relentlessly prune bullshit. Whenever it gets in your life prune it... Purely because there's a thinking cost to everything that you do or every thought that you have and also whenever y- but inevitably what will happen is you will still have those dramatic loops that get in there, you can't have a complete, um, defense against them. But then anchor thought which is whenever you have a bullshit thought loop that happens...... what is the opportunity cost of this thought? Like what is the wheels on suitcase that I could be thinking about instead? And then you kind of judo throw its momentum against it. So thinking cost is the idea that every cost, every thought has an opportunity cost and you should be hyper vigilant to that.

Chris Williamson 43:15 Yeah. Peterson said the first time I ever brought him on the show about the price that you pay for inaction. "Contemplate the price you pay for inaction. You're already in a little hell. You know perfectly well it's going to get worse. The thing about inaction is that you're blind to it. Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price." And this is the same thing that the thinking cost actually is the price that you pay, but it's so unseen, right? People are prepared to waste the peace of their own mind over and over and over and over again in order to not make a difficult decision because the difficult decision feels more real. But peace of mind is one of the key desires that almost everybody should be striving toward.

George Mack 43:59 The problem with peace of mind is it's a hidden metric. So if you kind of zoom all the way out, I have a few fundamental questions I keep going back to with all my writing and then you kind of zoom a bit higher and it's the optimism high agency thing, and if you actually zoom the highest point, which I've not actually written about just yet which is kind of viewing everything going back to Rick and Morty's Roy or the video game of life, like the s- simulation hypothesis but just forked that's more opt- optimistic, more high agency, which is the video game hypothesis. And one of my fundamental things of this kind of religion/philosophy is metrics are one of the most important things. And one of the reasons why people obsess over money is because money and your bank account is the best video game ever designed. It's multi- uh, multiplayer, compete against other people. "Oh, this person makes this much. I only make that much." Number going up. And as a result, things like peace of mind, which is a metric that we can't quite measure yet but we all feel it, we only really begin to look at it when we're in rehab or when we have an anxiety attack on the bus into work or whatever it is. And that's why I think hidden metrics, once you see it, well you never see it, but then once you kind of mentally see it, you begin to see it everywhere. Hormozi has that great bit of the Instagram model. You take the Instagram model, the metro- the visible metrics quite clear, right? You get to post it on your Instagram, it's gray, everyone thinks you're cool. But when you kind of lie in bed at night with somebody who you go, "I have nothing in common with you at all."

Chris Williamson 45:21 The Dan Bilzerian problem.

George Mack 45:22 You don't- you don't see that. Yeah, the Dan... Uh, I'm sure he's happy, but, uh, you don't see the hidden metric.

Chris Williamson 45:27 Mm.

Chris Williamson 45:30 Yeah. Why, uh, why is it that you are such a fan of the Roy scene from Rick and Morty? It's the header on your Twitter.

George Mack 45:39 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:39 And you've got a hoodie, you've got a custom printed hoodie that I met you on the way to Dubai.

George Mack 45:43 I had a custom mask as well during COVID with Roy on as well.

Chris Williamson 45:46 (laughs)

George Mack 45:46 I, I think it's because it's the n- Like, so one of my favorite things that I began to notice that was happening is you hit 25 and life goes mental. So up from zero to 25, everybody's on the same path pretty much. There's, there's slight variance, but everyone has these guard rails of first year, second year, third year, um, high school, university. But then you hit 25 and there's so much variance that happens where I have s- friends that are selling NFTs for ridiculous amounts of money. I've got friends going to prison, I've got friends having a baby. Like there's so much variance that begins to happen and you begin to go, "Fuck, like religion is quite a useful tool." But as a lot of people who are atheist, agnostic, there's nothing out there that quite exists. And the simulation hypothesis is probably the best we've got, and that's fucking nihilistic, isn't it? Like this idea that there's just infinite versions of me sat in a machine, but if I can move that to like the video game hypotheses where I no- I began to notice that the laziest people I know, the most nihilistic, pessimistic, low agency people I know could sit and play a video game for 15 hours and be amazing at it. So I have this theory that video game designers know more about human psychology than 99% of psychologists. The video game industry is bigger than music, TV and entertainment combined. The amount they know about human psychology I think is fascinating. So kind of Roy is, is just viewing life as a video game and trying to shift from first person shooter of me identifying with this to just third person. Whether it's true or not, probably not, it might not be a video game, but is it a useful belief to have? Probably.

Chris Williamson 47:14 Yeah. I think depersonalizing a lot of things is good.

George Mack 47:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:17 That's one of Peterson's questions, right? Um, like treat yourself like you are somebody you are responsible for helping. Like treat your life like a character that you are responsible for playing. It's the same as Rogan's thing, uh, w- imagine that you're the hero of your own story. You know, all of these, like what, what do all of these different ideas have in common? It takes a third person perspective. It depersonalizes a lot of the things that are going on to you because it's very difficult to give yourself the... You're so embedded in the experience of being you and there's so much going on that clouds your ability to make good decisions that actually being able to have a third person perspective is probably about as close to a superpower as you can be.

George Mack 48:02 And gamification. Like people talk about God is dead, therefore what's the point? Why do we do anything? But with a video game, you're not really playing it for any reason, but it's just a fucking game. And I feel there's so much to be unpacked about video game psychology that can get implied. But the biggest thing, or, or certainly one of the biggest things is this concept of metrics. When you have a clear metric that people can optimize for, it's like the cobra effect wherein, uh, the Brits started offering Indians money for, uh, cobras 'cause there was such a big problem with them and then they started breeding them. So you've got to be super careful what a better version of that is? What?

Chris Williamson 48:35 It was to do with, um, rats. Another country, they had a massive problem with rats and what they said was that they would pay people to bring in rat tails. What they realized was that there was thousands and thousands of tailless rats running all over the city.

George Mack 48:49 (laughs) So that, so that's it. So you, key for has that concept of pairing metrics where you have two metrics that, so if you have a customer support team and you say, "Hey, increa- decrease the fraud rate." Well then they start treating every single customer like a potential fraud to you. So yeah, you may achieve that goal, but every customer hates you forever.

Chris Williamson 49:04 Yeah. Good heart, good heart Yes, you need to balance that with a- an opposing metric. So going back to like the money video game, which is a great video game, but if you could then have peace of mind as an opposing metric, and I, I wonder if you could literally visualize peace of mind as a dashboard that you could see every single day, I think the impact that would have on people's lives would be so significant.100%. I mean, you know, this is what people fundamentally don't understand about Hormozi, is that he finds peace of mind through doing business, so ... A- and I didn't understand it until I really, really drilled, drilled deep with him. And he may be lying to me and I don't know, but, like, at least what he says is that he finds his most peace when he's chasing money. So for him, money and peace are the same thing.

George Mack 49:48 Yep.

Chris Williamson 49:48 But because most people don't have that particular opinion when it comes to their work, they can't ... They don't have theory of mind to understand what it would be like to be Alex Hormozi.

George Mack 49:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 49:57 Like, what would it be like for your work and the most peaceful thing that you do to align to the point where you and your partner believe that not having kids is a smarter idea because you can literally serve the world better through legacy through a company than you can through children?

George Mack 50:13 Well, I cha- I challenge you that people don't ... can't empathize with that, they maybe just haven't had it framed to them correctly, where people can always think of a game they played that's so addictive-

Chris Williamson 50:23 Mm.

George Mack 50:23 ... that they end up playing for the sake of playing. But that's-

Chris Williamson 50:24 What were some of ... What were some of yours? Did you ever get addicted?

George Mack 50:26 W-

Chris Williamson 50:26 You've got your brothers are, like, professional eSports player.

George Mack 50:29 Yeah, yeah, they're super ... Yeah, yeah, he was very, very good, so I saw that firsthand, but for me, I ... Football freestyle was my thing, right, so I'd train four hours every single night and do that, and then decided I actually wanted to lose my virginity at one point so I stopped doing that. Um, so when you have something that you're just doing purely for the sake of doing it, I mean, you're doing this with a podcast, right?

Chris Williamson 50:43 Yeah.

George Mack 50:43 We spoke last night and I said, "You're the only person I know that would've stuck at it as long as you did without the, the metric really." But you was playing it purely for the sake of playing it, but your metric ... This is the difference, your metric wasn't the subscribers or the view count, really. Part of it, for sure, but I knew if it was, you would have quit.

Chris Williamson 51:02 Yeah.

George Mack 51:02 But it was purely an infinite game that you was playing and because it was such a well-designed video game for you, then it keeps going up.

Chris Williamson 51:08 It's the biggest, uh, the biggest piece of advice for people that ask about, you know, "I wanna start a podcast, like, what should I do?" Or, "How should I begin?" Or, you know, "What's your piece of advice?" And like, if you don't enjoy it, don't do it.

George Mack 51:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:18 Because you are not ... It's gonna take you 150 episodes to earn anything. It's gonna take you 400 episodes before you're a ... Probably, unless you're a ... got an existing platform, it's gonna take you 400 episodes before anybody really cares about what you're doing. It's gonna take so long, and that's weekly.

George Mack 51:35 Well, an idea I have with that is pricing things in. So, uh, I think it's a hedge fund term where you kind of price in upcoming events, and when you're starting new things like that. So when I take you e-foiling, which for people who don't know, it's like a electronic surfing. Everyone saw Mark Zuckerberg go viral with it, which is one of my funniest video games right now.

Chris Williamson 51:52 You ... Don't you mean DJ Khaled?

George Mack 51:54 DJ Khaled. (laughs) Drop that clip in there, Dean.

Chris Williamson 51:56 (laughs)

George Mack 51:56 Um, so with that, one big thing that I've now recognized 'cause I always take new people with me, I'll say to them, I go, "You're gonna fall off 50 times before you get good at this." Versus if they don't ... if they come at it with just, "Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be good at this immediately," and then they start falling off, it- it immediately rocks their self-esteem, whereas if you say, "Hey, you're gonna be 50 times before you get good at it," Mr. B says that as well with YouTube, he goes, "Just make 100 videos and then, and then we'll chat."

Chris Williamson 52:19 Yeah. Yeah.

George Mack 52:19 And I think you've got to constantly price in things of go, "Okay, it's gonna take me 12 months in the gym before I see anything." And if you price that ... And I always like really conservative-

Chris Williamson 52:26 Mm.

George Mack 52:26 ... pricing in, 'cause let's say you say, "500 episodes, you've got to do your podcast," and you get to episode 212, you feel great. But if they go in with a mindset of, "Well, level one, it's gonna work, therefore ... " But again, I, I structure all my Apple Notes to-do list, so like for the ... every single day, it's the most thing I've done for years is level one, thought dump. Dump everything I've got to do today. Level two, decide on the levels, and boom, I'm already feeling good, and every project I do will be designed like that because just me writing down what I've got to do, I've already hit a level and I can feel that momentum growing. Versus if it's like, "Have a successful day," and constantly trying to play level 32 and failing.

Chris Williamson 52:59 Mm.

George Mack 53:00 So again, it goes back to that psychology.

Chris Williamson 53:01 How do you ... Given that what you've suggested there is essentially to price in difficulty and to also kind of have low expectations-

George Mack 53:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 53:09 ... of success, how does that marry with The Skeptics' Guide to Optimism?

George Mack 53:14 Well, it goes back to that 1% every day. It, it goes back to the secret is bullshit, like, you're not gonna immediately change things, you're gonna need to combine optimism, combine agency, but the most important thing is infinite games that you can play for the sake of playing them. That go- ... That's exactly the thing with Hormozi, uh, at least the impression I have of him, he's, he's doing it like a game and he wants to do this until he dies, and that's why he can keep playing and keep compounding. Exactly the same with you with this podcast, which is why you didn't quit.

Chris Williamson 53:40 It's gonna be very difficult to be beaten by s- somebody that isn't having fun if you are.

George Mack 53:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 53:44 Right? Like, what's that? Uh, Tiago Forte, it's incredibly difficult to compete with someone who's having fun.

George Mack 53:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 53:51 So I ... That was thinking cost, which was yours. Anxiety cost was similar, um, but a little bit more, uh, acute, a bit more short term. This is what I'd come up with. So as you identified, uh, you can only have one thought at a time, and by making any kind of decision, um, inevitably, you're going to, um, t- cut off some of the potential wasted thoughts, thinking about that undone task. So let's say every single morning when you wake up, your daily to-do resets, right? "I need to walk the dog and meditate and, and take a shit and, and speak to my mum," or whatever it is that you do every single day, right? There are certain things that you do every single day. The longer that you wait to do those things, the more time is taken up thinking about the fact that you haven't yet done those things, which is an argument for front-loading stuff into your morning, right?

George Mack 54:41 Versus the interest rate constantly-

Chris Williamson 54:43 Yeah.

George Mack 54:43 ... Having to repay that.

Chris Williamson 54:44 Every single time that you think, "I need to meditate today, I need to meditate today, I need to meditate today," could have been ... That's wasted th- thinking cost, or anxiety cost as I called it, that you could have fixed by simply meditating when you woke up. And looking at your day not only through ebbs and flows of energy, but also in terms of, "What captures a lot of my thought? What causes me stress? How can I get that so that it's ..." And not only ... Here's the other thing, not only do you get to gain not thinking about the thing and being anxiously concerned that you still need to do it, you also get to sort of bask in this beautiful-

George Mack 55:19 Mm.

Chris Williamson 55:19 ... self-righteous glow from your high horse of productivity because you went out and you fist-fucked it first thing in the morning.

George Mack 55:27 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 55:27 It's perfect. So, um, next stuff, razors. Both massive fans of razors.You

Chris Williamson 55:33 did a super thread, and one of the, uh, I've selected some of my favorites. I've added in some of mine as well. The first one, bragging razor: If someone brags about their success or happiness, assume it's half what they claim. If someone downplays their success or happiness, assume it's double what they claim. The map is not the terrain.

George Mack 55:52 100%. And there's obviously exceptions to the rule, but I think that's quite a consistent rule that I see. When I hear someone, particularly if it's money or if it's, it's things like that, when they're bragging overt, I'm, "Uh, probably don't really believe this." But if someone's kind of playing it down and there's a few subtle tells, it's the classic midwit meme, right? You've got the mo- probably my favorite meme of all time, which is the low IQ guy on the left, the kind of midwit in the middle, and the super high IQ guy there, where the low IQ guy says, "I'm the guy on the left." The guy in the middle says, "I'm the guy on the right," and the guy on the right says, "I'm the guy on the left."

Chris Williamson 56:26 (laughs)

George Mack 56:26 So, and you see this with wealth as well, where you see the super rich try and hide their wealth, whereas it's the kind of people who are fli- like, the money Twitter crowd-

Chris Williamson 56:34 The money.

George Mack 56:34 ... that are trying to screenshot their Shopify store and things like that, where it's, uh, why are you trying to signal that? When you're trying to overtly signal, you're probably trying to compensate for something. Again, there's exceptions to the rule.

Chris Williamson 56:44 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 56:45 But when someone's signaling so hard, it's probably a sign that they don't have it.

Chris Williamson 56:48 We were in f- we were in s- uh, a, a location in Austin over the weekend, and a, a gentleman came up to us and one of the first sentences out of his mouth was, "1,500 people in the world have started a $1 billion business. (fingers snapping) I'm one of them."

George Mack 57:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 57:02 I'm like, "Now, I, I believe you even less now."

George Mack 57:05 Anyone who's seen Karl Pilkington's Bullshit Van, it literally (laughs) He wanted to go... (fingers snapping) ... goes like, "Shh, shh, shh, bullshit." Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:11 Yeah. I, um, I think what it kind of suggests when somebody does steam in and, um, start with achievements first is... Or, or any kind of bragging basically suggests to us it's a low status, very easy to fake signal of authenticity, right? Like, a hard, uh, signal of authenticity would just be, show me your bank balance, or show me your capacity. If someone telling you how smart they are is way less reliable of a signal than someone having a conversation with you that flows perfectly-

George Mack 57:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:49 ... and you think, "Holy fuck," like, "That's really cool." So yeah, I, I, I'm, you know, w- we're into personality quirks here around people's desire to be seen and their needs for validation from the world around them, but I think generally the bragging razor of thinking if I want to come across well, allowing my achievements to arise as a byproduct of someone asking me about what I do. This is another thing that happens in, in Austin that I had to introduce you to, which is since I've been here, when you join a new group at a party or a gathering or whatever and you get introduced by the one person that you probably do know in that circle, they usually tell the group what you do. And that allows everyone to bypass the bragging razor because your friend bigs up your best achievements, but again, it's a reliable adjudicator presumably. I'm not gonna lie about what, you know, he's got a 17-inch penis and I'm pretty sure that he's got the world high jump record and he's like, the first man on the moon. Like, I'm not gonna say that, right? I'm gonna say the things reliably that, that people can, can assume. So next one, I love this one, Instagram

Chris Williamson 59:00 razor: When you see a photo of an influencer looking attractive on Instagram, assume that there were 99 worse variations of that photo you haven't seen. They just picked the best one.

George Mack 59:10 100%. And m- me and Josh, uh, my business partner, when we travel around, we'll be in sometimes very nice restaurants and we see the beautiful couple, ki- like, I don't think it's them necessarily, but the kind of Tommy Fury, Molly Mae look, looking couple, not referring to them, and he's just kind of there staring into the distance. And she'll be there just going through her phone of like infinite photos of her and then I, one of the big-

Chris Williamson 59:35 On VSCO trying to find the right filter.

George Mack 59:36 ... one of the biggest red pills I had recently was where I was at a bar and then I looked over and there's a girl on a photo of herself and she was Facetuning it live in real time. And I, and I realized, you, it's the classic where's the sausage made? And you, you got to realize that everything on Instagram that you see is absolute... It's just, it's, it's just not true. It's the Metaverse. It really is the Metaverse. Everyone's an emoji character, completely edited. It's, it's bizarre.

Chris Williamson 1:00:00 I love the fact that you have to assume as well that this is the best option out of what everybody had, and especially if it's someone that's got a pretty well-curated Instagram feed that... I suppose that's one of the advantages of as you get to a particular level with creating content online, you don't even know what's going out. It's, you know, the spin the wheel thing?

George Mack 1:00:19 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:19 I have no idea what video goes out each day. Like, the shorts team finds things that they love and sometimes they'll be like, "Oh, this bit with Mark Normand was really fun, like, you should maybe put that out." But they treat me like a child. Like, they've got a strategy and they know what they're doing. So I'm like, "Oh, okay, well I guess I'll just, like, uh, fucking close your eyes and put your hand in the celebrations tin and pull out, today it's a Bounty, tomorrow it's a Malteser."

George Mack 1:00:38 A g- a good razor as well kind of related to this is both these razors are trying to l- avoid signals and then trying to actually study the noise. Uh, so, or like, not, not the noise, sorry, but the actual thing. So meta games I think are super important because you can learn a lot. So I have this rule which is if I wanna work with a personal trainer, I want the personal trainer to be in insane shape. And that's way better than any marketing spiel he can give for me. If I see a SaaS product which is selling landing page software, I want, when I click on their landing page, for that software to be incredible. And like, the landing page should look... If you're, if you're the landing page software guy and your landing page isn't great, that's a sign... One of my favorite, one of my heroes throughout history i- in marketing space is David Ogilvy. And David Ogilvy, I forgot which magazine it was, they wrote a headline which is, "Is David Ogilvy a Genius?" And-Ogilvy was a great marketer because the way he marketed himself, he replied to that headline by getting his lawyer to sue them for the question mark. Or at least that's the story that he released. And I go, even within that you can see how good he is at marketing. He doesn't have to say. Like what he's done there is genius. So whenever you can study these meta games, which is not what people say, what they do, or how they carry themselves, it's super, super important.

Chris Williamson 1:01:55 Mm. Narcissism. Narcissism razor. If you're worried

Chris Williamson 1:02:00 about people's opinions, remember they are too busy worrying about other people's opinions of them. 99% of the time you are an extra in someone else's movie.

George Mack 1:02:08 Yeah. And then that's when you realize everybody else has a, a separate video game that they're playing, and you're just... They're too busy with... When you're thinking about them, when you're worried about them, assume the amount of thought you give to other people, they're giving to you. And then you realize how delusional that is. One of my friends was chatting about envy recently and he was talking about how he wants to get rid of envy as a thing. And one thing that's useful with envy is to realize that there's somebody out there who's so envious of you, who probably checks your Instagram, checks all these things, and constantly is thinking about you. And when you view it through that frame, you go, "Jesus, that's really bad. I'm actually not that worthwhile being envious of." And you realize, "Oh shit, everybody else thinks the way I think." And that then enables you to go to, like third person shooter and begin to zoom out and just see, "Oh, I'm not that important."

Chris Williamson 1:02:55 No, there's that quote of, um, "We would care far less about what other people thought of us if we realized how rarely they did."

George Mack 1:03:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:02 Um, there's this other one. Did you see that story about Churchill that I posted of the young guy he was showing around the Houses of Parliament?

George Mack 1:03:09 No.

Chris Williamson 1:03:09 This was good. So, "A young MP was being shown around Parliament by Winston Churchill. As he wandered through the halls and offices, he asked questions about how the building was put together. Churchill obliged and gave the young man advice on how this world worked. Upon entering the House of Commons chamber, Churchill's new friend started referring to the MPs on the other benches as 'the enemy'. Churchill reportedly said, 'That's the opposition, dear boy. The enemy's behind you.'"

George Mack 1:03:33 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:03:33 And what I loved about that was it became... Obviously what he's talking about is the fact that, like the people who you need to be concerned about are the ones that are on your team because you have something that they want. That's the opposition. You know that they're out to get you. It's the people behind you that are the snakes that'll stab you in the back. But figuratively or symbolically, I think that... I love that story because it reminds us that we are our own worst enemy most of the time. That we see the world as being some sort of, um, adversary that is trying to do things against us. The world gives zero fucks about you.

George Mack 1:04:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:06 The world doesn't care less. Literally the entire universe is indifferent to all of our existence, right? No, not... A blind blink. And I imagine that this is one of the reasons why when we get to look at the night sky, it fills us with a degree of dread and awe and insignificance that I think is very important to keep our egos small, to realize that everything's just gonna keep on turning. But also, uh, this goes back to the cynicism skepticism thing, you can personify the world as being a thing. You know, you hear people say stuff like this, like, you know, "The world is an evil and mean place and it will try and break you down." I've even nodded as Goggins said something similar on the podcast. And I, I... There are degrees to how it can be useful to see, um, to be, um, alert to threats out there and to have resilience ready for things that are difficult to occur in the world, but the world's fucking indifferent to you. The world doesn't care. And personifying it and creating a, an enemy out of the world I think is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. It's like it needs to be turned inward. You are the person that knows all of your weaknesses. You can say the most disgusting, terrible things to yourself. You know all of the trigger points that you should go through. You chastise yourself for falling short even though you've tried your hardest. Like you are your own worst enemy. There will never be anybody that can be as brutal to you as you can to yourself. Realizing that helps you to ameliorate this adversarial view of the world. The world is just a tool.

George Mack 1:05:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:36 It doesn't care about you. There, there are some people out there who genuinely have enemies, right? But it's a rarefied strata of people and they've done something-

George Mack 1:05:46 Tim the Swindler.

Chris Williamson 1:05:47 Tim the Swindler. (laughs) Yeah, exactly. (laughs) Yeah.

George Mack 1:05:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I, I think... So there's the nihilistic version of that, or it could be framed as nihilistic pessimistic, which is, "Well, nobody cares about you." And therefore say, "Well, what's the fucking point then?" But it goes back to the r- root opening of the conversation, which is ideas are probably more important than people. That the concept of electricity is so important or the, the idea of critical thinking or whatever it is. This is why ideas are so much more important and you can find... As a atheist or an agnostic you can find God to some extent in these ideas as something that's way bigger than you that can last way longer than you, that is so, so damn important.

Chris Williamson 1:06:27 There was, uh, one that I came up with, and this is my, my first one. I'm adding it into the mix,

Chris Williamson 1:06:32 which you'll have seen before. Schultzy's razor. Do not attribute to group a- group conspiracy that which can be explained by cancellation anxiety.

George Mack 1:06:39 So that, that's a fucking great one. There's, there's the Cummings razor as well, which kind of forks on the idea which is Balaji, one of my favorite followers on Twitter, tweeted out, "Why don't ev- why doesn't every government in the world have a dashboard so you can see how well they're doing?" It is, like think of the core me- You could debate over the core metrics. You can even debate how you measure them and maybe have different parties and things like that. But all the core measurements, number of homeless people on the street, obesity rates, death rate. Why, why don't we have a BBC Five channel where you can just tune in like a CEO checking their dashboard? And we don't operate that way. Um, and Dominic Cummings, Boris' former right-hand man, retweeted that and said, and I call this Cummings, Cummings razor, which is whenever you get confused by politicians or you think it's some great conspiracy theory, it's basically this, which is... Cummings wrote, "I can confirm," at the time, "Boris does not have a dashboard that he checks every day. It's not run by, like a CEO. He just reacts to newspaper stories that come in each day. If everybody saw this, they'd sell everything and flee." And I go, that's a fundamental problem is, yeah, there's not actually a lot of malice that's going on, it's just a complete lack of strategy, design, everything.

Chris Williamson 1:07:44 Gwynder had a, a post today that was m- money. "The idea of sinister elites controlling everything is popular because it's more comforting than the truth that even our leaders don't know what they're doing and society is ruled mostly by chance." So good. There was this-

George Mack 1:07:59 So good.

Chris Williamson 1:07:59 ... this other, uh, idea called compensatory control. Do you remember? I, I taught you about this ages and ages ago. Compensatory control, um, so it's Rich- another Richard Shotton here. So he was talking about how, um, people that were very early on, before there was reason to believe that it was a lab leak, uh, people were, um, attributing to global conspiracy the fact that we had this pandemic that was released. Like, the people that were right