Mental Models 104 - Bear Or Bull? | George Mack | Modern Wisdom Podcast 253

George Mack 0:00 What's fascinating about Bezos, he's very similar to Musk in the sense that he has one guiding principle that every decision goes through. So for Bezos, it's just, "If it can enhance the customer experience, let's do it." Rather than, like, profit margin, it's just long-term, long-term, long-term. "Will this enhance the customer experience?" So he says this example of, "10 years from now, will people say to me, 'I want slower deliveries and a higher cost?'" And he's like, "No, no, nobody's ever gonna say that to me. They're always gonna say, 'I love the fact that it arrives next day. I love how cheap it is.' Therefore, I double down on that." And then Elon Musk, for as complex as an individual as he is, as intelligent as he is in how much he understands, every decision goes through, "Will this get me nearer to Mars or not? It's yes or no." And it's very, like, crazy how somebody as complex, sophisticated, and nuanced as that has just one guiding thing that shapes every single decision. At the scale they're at, the, uh, decision you have to make is just, "Will this enhance customer experience, or will this get me nearer to Mars? Yes or no?"

Chris Williamson 1:01 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined all the way from Dubai by the man himself, Mr. George Mack. How are you?

George Mack 1:08 I'm not too bad. I'm not too bad. How are you?

Chris Williamson 1:11 I'm well. How could we not be well on the 25th floor, this beautiful Dubai Marina apartment? There's worse places to do a podcast, isn't there?

George Mack 1:19 Yeah. It's a contrast to Newcastle and Manchester, right? Strong contrast.

Chris Williamson 1:23 Or Skype.

George Mack 1:23 Yeah, and, or Skype, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:25 The year of Zoom finished up in Dubai. So yeah, not, not bad. Big year, 2020. A lot of stuff's happened. What's some of the main insights that you've realized in 2020?

George Mack 1:35 Oh, it's a good, that's a good question. Um, I was thinking obsessively about remote work and the effect that that has on location. Which, I mean, even the fact-

Chris Williamson 1:45 (laughs)

George Mack 1:45 ... that we're here right now is qui- quite a good little A/B test of that. Um-

Chris Williamson 1:48 Yeah.

George Mack 1:49 Proof's in the pudding. But it's gonna be very, very interesting 'cause we were saying, like, "Are you bullish or bearish on people moving," particularly out of the UK, because the UK has very poor weather. Um, and for me at the minute, I've been thinking if I move abroad, what, what would the checklist be, or if I want to work remote? And as long as it has good weather, good time zone, and, like, relatively good economic, social activity, what does the UK have that, that... You know what I mean? Like, the UK, for me, is only viable for a few months of the year, and it's gonna be very interesting to see how many people leave en masse, or if they do leave en masse.

Chris Williamson 2:23 Mm. And I think as well, that's probably not just gonna be for the UK. Everyone thinks the place that they grew up, unless it's unbelievably good-

George Mack 2:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:31 ... is probably a bit crap.

George Mack 2:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:33 You know, everyone's disparaging about their hometown, even if your hometown was Dubai Marina.

George Mack 2:38 Mm.

Chris Williamson 2:38 'Cause it's just what you're used to.

George Mack 2:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 2:40 It's not cool or different anymore. So yeah, I wonder whether you're going to get mass swapping of populations from different countries.

George Mack 2:47 I think once you've opened that door, even though I do think it will, sort of pendulum will swing back to more and more office-based stuff. Once you've opened that door, there's some people who are gonna refuse to go back.

Chris Williamson 2:56 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 2:56 So it's a very, very interesting time to be living through. And whether, 'cause you've got two thought processes that run in your head. You've got obviously A, vaccine comes out and things go back to normal, but even then you've potentially got B, which is you have mass migration at levels you've never seen before. Like, I was chatting to somebody in the property business, and they said when COVID happened, they expected everything to come tumbling down. But actually they had the busiest two months that they've ever had. It was like the equivalent of a year. 'Cause I've got this idea that I've been thinking about,

George Mack 3:26 which is you have throughout childhood, you've kind of got very clear events. You've got primary school, you've got year one, you've got year two, or grade one, grade two. And then you go, in the UK, you've got GCSEs, you've got A-levels, you've got your degree. But then in adulthood, all you've basically got is house, marriage, kids, death.

Chris Williamson 3:43 (laughs)

George Mack 3:43 But I think that COVID-

Chris Williamson 3:45 Are those the, those are the three big ones? (laughs)

George Mack 3:45 ... COVID's now an event that exists, like, there's people who are like, "Oh, pre-COVID," and then post-COVID.

Chris Williamson 3:50 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 3:50 So it causes a lot of behavior change. It's really fascinating to see.

Chris Williamson 3:53 Well, think about what the UK's trying to do at the moment. They've called it a circuit breaker lockdown. Why have they called it a circuit breaker lockdown? It's because they're trying to create a, a jolt in the system, you know? They've just added another little module in, just a little bookmark. And you're, you're correct. People live their life in epochs. This is what I learned from Tucker Max. Live your life in epochs. You're the, the sports guy, for you, like the football freestyler as a kid. You're the, the s- university student. You're the young entrepreneur. You're the young mother or father. You're the, the, um, person who's in a relationship and, and retired somewhat. Like, you know what I mean? That's how we break our lives up. And you're correct. Maybe this is going to be one of those bookmarks in life for people.

George Mack 4:39 Mm.

Chris Williamson 4:39 Um, yeah, well, you're totally right. I mean, we flew out here on three days' notice. Two, well, we just decided on, like, 48 hours' notice. Got a PCR test. You drove across Manchester to get a PCR test off some guy in a pair of tracksuit bottoms. (laughs)

George Mack 4:52 Shoved it down my throat, yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:53 Yeah, he did.

George Mack 4:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:54 He did. You have to pay extra for that usually.

George Mack 4:55 And then he did the PCR test. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 5:00 (laughs) All right. So everybody is here for Mental Models. Big Pressure one, two and three were wildly successful online. What have you got for us today?

George Mack 5:09 Yeah. Well, Rocky IV is my favorite film. So I, I'm a big fan of the fourth episode of things, so I thought I'd come with some heat. So late last night, I was reading through, uh, Poor Charlie's Almanack, which is sort of Charlie Munger's collection of all his essays. And I originally found out this thing from Ben Francis, the guy who's the founder of Gymshark. I was watching one of his vlogs, and he said, "Within this book, Poor Charlie's Almanack, there's a less, um, an essay/lecture on Coca-Cola that's like the best thing he's ever read." Um, and it's sort of Charlie Munger, but he says in the book afterwards that he kind of regretted doing it 'cause nobody really understood it, or it was too complex, or it was, it wasn't politically correct enou- or whatever. But when you go through it, it's like, Jesus Christ. The context of this talk is, um, Charlie basically says if you're in 1884, and you have all the sort of base mental models or academic principles in place-... and, uh, uh, multimillionaire George Glatz comes along and he's got a competition countrywide and says, "Pitch me, um, basically a new drinks beverage idea that if I give you $2 million in 1884, by I think 2024 or 2034, it will be worth two trillion." So how do you turn two million into, I believe, two trillion? And basically, Charlie says you could have predicted everything that Coca-Cola did and how it succeeded by just base level mental models. So he goes through and goes like, "Okay, what's my checklist to begin with? Uh, how would I explain it to this millionaire to get investment?" And what's fascinating about this is the context is Charlie owns Coca-Cola or, like, Berkshire Hathaway basically own Coca-Cola now, so you can tell that he's mentally gone through this and looked at every single mo-

Chris Williamson 6:56 The fundamentals of how this business he's highly invested in-

George Mack 6:59 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 6:59 ... why it's being so effective, yeah.

George Mack 7:01 And he basically says this is the issue of academia, they don't teach it like this, so he said there's five things to go through when you're doing it. So number one, decide like a big no-brainer question, the big no-brainer stuff. Number two, use math to help explain the world. Number three, inversion, so think problem three in reverse. Number four, the best wisdom is sort of elementary academic wisdom, so he comes on to, like, classical conditioning, operant conditioning from psychology. And then number five, how do you get big LOLIPOser effect where it's all these things tied together? So he says, like, to begin with, like, for the no-brainer side of things, um, we are n- uh, we- we're never going to create something worth two trillion by selling some generic beverage, therefore we must make your name Coca-Cola because he says that, like, if you called it, like, George Glatz's drink, right? Y- you nee-... In order to get global appeal, you need a name that appeals globally is the first thing, so this will require developing a product having universal appeal because it h- harnesses powerful elementary forces. The next thing he goes on to, he goes on to a few more no-brainers but uses maths to explain the world, and this is one of the things I probably struggle with because maths is... I think the way they teach it in school makes you think it's very, very boring, but when you actually understand that maths is the only thing that's probably true, like, when you really think about it. Um, and I- I, like, I work in obviously, like, the D2C e-commerce space, which has blown up right now, and I'll have calls with founders each week about, like, how they want to scale things, and everybody's very, very clear about their, like, brand values and their brand guidelines very often, and this vision that they have, but nobody knows their margins, nobody knows their-

Chris Williamson 8:37 (laughs)

George Mack 8:37 ... nobody knows their LTV, nobody knows the scale they have to hit. They-

Chris Williamson 8:40 Why do you think that is?

George Mack 8:41 Um, twofold. One, I think people, uh, or some people just naturally ignore numbers from bad experiences at school, and then two, numbers is reality, and I... we try and avoid reality where we can as well.

Chris Williamson 8:56 Yeah, I wonder how much of it perhaps is just that you can wing brand values and marketing and creative ideas. If you turn up to a meeting and you don't know your LTV or you don't know your bottom line, you can't just make it up. Like, it's either there or it's not there.

George Mack 9:14 Mm.

Chris Williamson 9:15 There is no in between. Whereas you can turn up to a brand meeting and be like, "Right, (claps) brand values," and just-

George Mack 9:22 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:22 ... create something on the spot. So I think the charlatans-

George Mack 9:27 Very hard to falsify.

Chris Williamson 9:27 ... the charlatans get found out much more with that. So what's next?

George Mack 9:30 So on that, so just to, just to sort of hit the, the math side of things home is, so he says here, on average, uh, so if we had to get to three trillion, we can guess reasonably by 2034, there will be about eight billion beverage consumers in the world. So on the, yeah, on the numerical fluency, he then breaks down looking at Coca-Cola's business model, so the opposite I was saying then where it's all brand guidelines. So if he's thinking of how do we get to two trillion by 2034, he breaks down the whole market, so understands the total addressable market. So on a- uh, so on average, each consumer will be much more prosperous in real terms than the average consumer of 1884. Each consumer is composed mostly of water and must ingest about 64 ounces of water per day. This is eight eight-ounce servings. Therefore, if our new beverage, and can flavor and otherwise improve only 25% of ingested water worldwide, we can occupy half of that new market. Therefore, he breaks down the numbers, we can sell 2.9 trillion eight-ounces servings in 2034, and if we can net four cents per serving, we will earn $117 billion annually, which will equate to a net, um, the business valued at two trillion. So though that numerical fluency, the, like, the base numeracy that people ha- I'd say people talk about, like, what's the modern numeracy? I don't think there is a modern numeracy because it doesn't exist. Modern numeracy is the modern numeracy, if that makes sense, because we very rarely ever think in numbers-

Chris Williamson 11:00 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 11:00 ... as a result.

Chris Williamson 11:01 It seems there that you're deciding the direction of where you're going to lay some paving-

George Mack 11:07 Mm.

Chris Williamson 11:08 ... with that value. You can't hit the number that you want. And all of the other stuff, the taste, the marketing, everything else, that's the traffic signs, that's the road markings, that's the particular way that you manage the traffic, but in terms of road, this is what we need to hit, this is where we're starting, that's where we need to finish. How can we apply that to something which is a little bit less abstract than-

George Mack 11:29 So-

Chris Williamson 11:30 ... a billion, trillion dollar drinks brand?

George Mack 11:34 So, well, there's a good example, one of my favorite ones that, again, it's so easy to know this thing and, and sometimes hard to implement it because you just catch yourself on your own bullshit, of, um, Kiefer Boy uh, who w-... I think he's taken more companies public than anybody ever. Um, he's part of the PayPal mafia. I think he was involved at YouTube, LinkedIn, Square, a lot of companies, really good follow on Twitter. Um, and he did a talk at Stanford called How To Operate, and he says the biggest thing with, like, elite level CEOs that he does, like, the biggest breakthrough exercise is he'll say, "What's, like, your priorities at the minute?" And they'll say, "Uh..."... number one priority is recruitment, number two priority is sort of marketing and sales, and then number three is X, Y, Z. And he goes, "Cool." So he gets them to write their priorities down, and then he gets them to track their time for a week, and then at the end of the week, goes through and just purely like on a numerical basis, he goes, "So recruitment was your number one priority, yet 5% of your time was allocated to that?" So I think even time, just as a, a way of measuring things is something that we very, very rarely use.

Chris Williamson 12:40 How would you class the model that we're talking about here, then?

George Mack 12:43 So j- I mean, it, how you describe it as a model is just basic numeracy, like, basic arithmetic, like, taking principles from mathematics and applying it, 'cause so few people apply basic arithmetic. And I find that when I chat to people who are starting brands online, the biggest difference is that there's always one person who uses basic numeracy, and if they don't, if there's not one there-

Chris Williamson 13:10 In the team.

George Mack 13:11 ... it, uh, i- it never works.

Chris Williamson 13:13 Yeah.

George Mack 13:13 It never works. It's guaranteed to fail.

Chris Williamson 13:15 I-

George Mack 13:15 Which, it makes sense because that is, if you're trying to build a successful business, it's underpinned by numbers, and if you don't even look at the fucking numbers-

Chris Williamson 13:22 (laughs)

George Mack 13:23 Like, y- you may get a few edge cases like where it's, like, a Kylie Jenner, but even then I imagine she's got a guy or a girl who's crunching the numbers.

Chris Williamson 13:31 Yeah. What's next? What we got next?

George Mack 13:32 Um, so then, just moving through that, he then talks about, like, operant and classical conditioning. So if you was looking at, b- he says it's how you could explain Coca-Cola. So you've gone through the numeracy, you've gone through the no-brainer questions, and then let's look at, like, the operant/classical conditioning that you'd use. So number one, from a operant conditioning, which is basically rewarding people for behaviors, um, and then classical conditioning is sort of Pavlov's dogs, so when they associate a certain thing. So what's fascinating when, like, looking at Pavlovian conditioning, he talks about, um, why... And this is interesting, he says, "You should not let anybody have the name Cola, because as soon as you do, you lose that association with your brand, so other people can start having it. They can hop on your classical conditioning." And it's, he does numerous points in here that Coca-Cola broke, um, and how they almost ruined it. So another example is when Coca-Cola changed their recipe, and he's-

Chris Williamson 14:29 Yeah.

George Mack 14:29 ... Charlie Munger lost his shit about it, I think, and he was like saying, "It almost killed the company," he argues. He says the two things you can't do in the speech, looking at it from classical conditioning, is one, have, let anybody have the trademark Coca-Cola, which is why they enforce it so hard, um, but even then you've got, like, RoLa Cola, and you've got all these knockoffs-

Chris Williamson 14:44 Pepsi-Cola.

George Mack 14:45 And you gotta think the damage that's done to their, their business model is huge. Um, and then changing the recipe, like, a recipe that people have built up an associated over the years of having this reward, having this reward, the damage that can do. And then you understand, like, how interesting/nuanced Coca-Cola's business is via classical conditioning. So they ha- they used, he talks about in the speech, of you want something that never has a negative feedback loop, you want something that can never have negative classical conditioning. So with... A good example of, of that or maybe even negative operant conditioning is you start drinking the drink, and the more you drink it, the more sick you get of the drink.

Chris Williamson 15:20 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 15:20 But Cola removes all sort of taste memory. It's built to remove all taste memory, so people can drink it like water and just keep ingesting it, keep ingesting it. So that's part of one of his principles for how it can become so big, is that you can never get sort of a negative operant conditioning loop going, or a negative classical conditioning loop going, so it's just constant positive reinforcement. And then he breaks down, okay, using classical conditioning, using operant conditioning, do we go for a hot drink or do we go for a cold drink? And he basically looks at the world, going back to numbers, looks at the world and says, "It's much easier to provide something that cools people down, therefore go for a cold drink, because on average, people want something that cools them down rather than heats them up." And they, people will drink Coca-Cola in the morning.

Chris Williamson 16:01 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 16:01 But hot drinks, people tend to drink o- at certain periods, whereas the cooling effect people then associate, y- so when you're hot and you drink Coca-Cola, you have that cooling effect, you associate it with something positive.

Chris Williamson 16:14 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 16:14 So it's just fascinating, that, seeing all these principles intertwine, and he even gives examples with the trademark and with the, um, the almost changing the recipe as ways where Coca-Cola almost fucked up, but their business model is so good-

Chris Williamson 16:27 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 16:27 ... based on these mental models and these principles, that they still are getting there/have got there.

Chris Williamson 16:32 Do you think... How much of this do you think was thought through, and how much of it is emergence and luck?

George Mack 16:37 Good question. Good question. Well, he argues that you could have thought it through. And I guess that's why he invested in the business.

Chris Williamson 16:41 'Cause he's post-kalking the shit out of it.

George Mack 16:42 He is post-fucking- kicking the shits about it. But his basic argument is, is these elementary principles still exist-

Chris Williamson 16:47 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 16:47 ... so even now, like, let's say for example, you were sitting down and trying to come up with certain ideas. Using those fundamentals-

Chris Williamson 16:54 Yeah.

George Mack 16:54 ... will still be incredibly... Whether you can come up with Coca-Cola, obviously there's so much luck involved, um, and there's so... I mean, you gotta l- you've gotta go through the whole talk and you see how much nuance there is to the ways of thinking about it-

Chris Williamson 17:04 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 17:05 ... but I would say those elementary principles of mathematics, um, stuff like, that you shouldn't avoid. He was saying, like, "We should always avoid letting people have our trademark, letting people do this." Um, classical conditioning, operant conditioning. If you actually then begin to look at so many different brands-

Chris Williamson 17:21 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 17:21 ... you just see these fundamental principles beneath them.

Chris Williamson 17:25 Mm-hmm. One of the interesting stories that I heard about Coca-Cola was, I remember the world's first portable water distillation unit, about three times the size of a refrigerator, and they were trying to look at different ways to get clean water. It was this philanthropist guy, engineer, and they were looking at different ways to get it to people, and they were thinking, like, "How on earth are we supposed to deliver something like this, of this size, to the backwaters of Africa, to places where there's no roads?" And as they're there, they're sat outside of a little kiosk café, you know, like, a classic sort of, uh, Third World café type thing that's just plastic chairs, and they looked, and it's got Coca-Cola branding above it. They're like, "Coca-Cola has access to give people Coke-"... where they can't get clean water.

George Mack 18:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:21 Um, and that really is just notoriety. It's interesting when you think about that, when you really zoom out and you realize that the world isn't that big. It's massive from an individual perspective, but from a market perspective, like there's only one Coca-Cola. Pepsi are also big, and there's other drinks brands that are large, like Red Bull and stuff, but no one's Coca-Cola.

George Mack 18:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:40 And there's only seven billion people. There, there, you can't ... There's no room for another Coca-Cola until you kill that one off. You couldn't have two running in parallel, but you could imagine another universe in which there's an earth with 35 billion people on. Is there room for competition then, do you know what I mean?

George Mack 18:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 18:58 Um, but yeah, that's, that's interesting. One of the mental models that we haven't spoken about yet is anchoring.

George Mack 19:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:05 And I'm a big fan of anchoring, and I was reading not long ago, uh, about ... It was from Rob Henderson's newsletter about how people can use anchoring to get laid. So can you explain what anchoring is first? And then I'll, uh ...

George Mack 19:20 Anchoring, um, we ... I think we mentioned it the other day when we was chatting actually-

Chris Williamson 19:24 Oh, yeah.

George Mack 19:24 ... like this example. Oh, yeah, I- in business negotiation of sort of almost stating a cer- ... Apparently Trump says this a lot in The Art of the Deal. So he'll state like a, a price that's super high to begin with, which means that then when he ... Let's say, for example, he wants five million. He will state 10 million 'cause now he's anchored them around 10 million. So when they barter down to five million, his actual price, he's anchored it to this 10 that they feel like they've got a deal, but he's got what he wanted. Whereas if he came in at five, maybe they'd say, "One?" 'Cause you realize a lot of these negotiation stuff is just people putting their finger in the air.

Chris Williamson 19:59 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 19:59 And then ... But I mean, that ties quite s- a, a slight fork on the idea is this idea of like reflexivity and how much ... Do you know what reflexivity is, the-

Chris Williamson 20:08 No.

George Mack 20:08 ... m- model there? I think George Soros, he's like obviously the huge ... Like people go mental about.

Chris Williamson 20:13 He's the guy behind everything bad, isn't he?

George Mack 20:15 He is, um, Alex Jones's arch nemesis-

Chris Williamson 20:18 (laughs)

George Mack 20:18 ... right? In Alex Jones's head. May- maybe he is in the real world as well, right? I don't know. So but he has a very good essay on reflexivity. Um, and the best example I got from reflexivity is: Let's say you have two standup comedians. You have one standup comedian that, um, that tells a joke, another standup comedian that tells a joke. I saw almost a parallel universe. One where he immediately apologizes for the joke afterwards, going, "Oh, I sh- ... Uh, sorry, I shouldn't have said that." And the other one who just kind of laughs it through and moves onto the next one, Dave Chappelle style. Even though they've told the exact same joke and they're the exact same person in the exact same environment and the exact same crowd, how they react to it influences the way the crowd reacts.

Chris Williamson 20:58 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 20:58 And you can then see that a lot. So I found that, like, if I have a friend who's ... Um, let's say they've broken up with somebody and they're, like, really depressed about it. Then I, then, like, I start reacting to that, if that makes sense.

Chris Williamson 21:12 Yes.

George Mack 21:12 And then I'm, like, thinking about them more da, da, da. But if they're just, like, super ... You're just kind of constantly looking at other people's facial expressions-

Chris Williamson 21:19 Yes.

George Mack 21:19 ... 'cause we have these nudge chips.

Chris Williamson 21:20 So that's more like a, a psychological, mimetic anchoring-

George Mack 21:23 Exactly.

Chris Williamson 21:23 ... in body language. That's really interesting.

George Mack 21:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:25 I hadn't even thought about that. But the, my favorite example of anchoring is that everyone that owns a restaurant should have quite a high price platter as one of the first things that people see when they look on the menu. So some sort of s- special appetizer sharing platter deal thing at the top. And if you say that that's £45-

George Mack 21:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 21:46 ... the starter that's 11 quid but should be eight actually looks like a great deal. So there's a famous example from The Economist that many people listening may be familiar with where they play around with prices, and you see by changing nothing other than the anchor, you can increase the value of the customer by, like, 50%-

George Mack 22:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:06 ... which is mad. And the example that Rob Henderson gave, which, again, is a psychology one, I suppose, is you can use anchoring to look more attractive when you're going out dating. So what you want to do, his argument is, is find a friend that looks kind of similar to you, but is uglier. And the reason for that is that people will use them-

George Mack 22:28 Is that why you're going around with me? (laughs)

Chris Williamson 22:32 (laughs) They, they will look at them and you as within the same league.

George Mack 22:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:38 You know? Like if someone was to say, "This is how much the appetizer is, but that car over there is worth this much money," that kind of doesn't really work. You're not anchoring within the same category. So if you go out with an Asian friend who's, like, any ... Pick your attractiveness level. It's like, "Well, I can't ... You don't look Asian." Like-

George Mack 23:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 23:01 So the- there's no point in doing it. So yes, if you want to get laid, find a friend who looks a bit like you-

George Mack 23:06 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 23:06 ... but is uglier, and-

George Mack 23:08 Oh my goodness.

Chris Williamson 23:08 ... you can do that, and also, there's ... I've got some buddies, and I'm sure that you do as well, who will decide to go to live music events.

George Mack 23:15 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:16 Like go to gigs because they look like a knockoff-

George Mack 23:19 Right.

Chris Williamson 23:19 ... version of the artist.

George Mack 23:20 Yeah. Yeah, it's, um ... Uh, that only helps if then the crowd that you find attractive is that. So, like, my issue with that is my crowd would be, like, the Busted McFly-

Chris Williamson 23:32 (laughs)

George Mack 23:32 ... side of things. Uh, yeah, it's not, it's not my, not my type really.

Chris Williamson 23:36 Yeah, no. Interesting. What you got next?

George Mack 23:38 Power laws. So I wanted to get this up, hence why I was on my phone just then. So power laws comes from statistics. Um, and I'm not gonna try and go through, like, the actual, like, um, equation side of things, but a power law essentially is ... It's kind of like the way you can explain monopolies. They're basically whi- ... What's the, um, the line from the, uh, film where it's like first prize is a ... What is it? Like, um, first prize is a car of some sort. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize, you're fired. So, like, Facebook's a good example of that-

Chris Williamson 24:10 (laughs)

George Mack 24:10 ... where basically a, a power law is something where, um, the more you win, the more you win. So it's like a nonlinear relationship.

Chris Williamson 24:18 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 24:19 So, um ...... for example, uh, the best example of a power law I've found is all the... You're seeing it now to some extent, where all the wealth... Like, look at Jeff Bezos as a power law. Like, the more wealth he has, the more wealth he's getting.

Chris Williamson 24:32 Yeah.

George Mack 24:32 And you can easily end up with a scenario where J- Jeff Bezos has, like, 50% of, of the world, right, because he just keeps compounding year after year, and it's compounding on the compounding.

Chris Williamson 24:41 Yes.

George Mack 24:41 It's like, who can keep up? And, like, a weird nuanced one, so I've done a lot previously in social media and, um, like, different brands, marketing, et cetera, and you'll see with social media managers, I have this thing where 95% of them shouldn't get paid. They're useless. They don't add any value. If anything, sometimes they're just taking up your payroll. They're posting on Instagram posts that nobody fucking sees apart from them and you. Right? It's just, it's just useless. But for, um, like 5% of the social media managers, or maybe 1% of the social media managers... Like, we saw one recently with, like, Tesco, where it was like saying, um, "If you can quote-tweet this and get zero likes, we'll give you a free meal." And obviously everybody who's trying to quote-tweet can't do it. Everybody's talking about it.

Chris Williamson 25:23 When we checked yesterday, after about 12 hours, I think it was on 130,000 quote-tweets.

George Mack 25:30 Exactly, so this is wh-... And then you, you think about the individual behind that, uh, the value that they provide, i- they, they should probably get a 10X raise in their salary. So all the, all, all the distribution goes right towards the end of the, the scale, if that makes sense. So-

Chris Williamson 25:45 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 25:45 ... that's what, like, a power law is. And it's very interesting that, yeah, the, the higher up you get, the more the rewards are. So even if you look at, like, a sport like the UFC, like, the difference betw- on salary between Conor McGregor and somebody 10 places down from him is so astronomical, but the difference in skill actually isn't that high. But it's, yeah, it's fascinating to see how these power laws play out. And it's why in, in Silicon Valley, they always talk about, like, how can you get a monopoly? 'Cause if you get a monopoly, you, you, you own the world, basically.

Chris Williamson 26:16 How can people utilize that? Is it just a case of moving quickly?

George Mack 26:22 That's a good question. I would say, one, probably do something that... Um, it's hard to give, like, specific advice for everybody without having so much nuance to their, their, their, their situation. But, um, I think from a power law perspective, uh, finding out what you s- sort of super unique to you and then doubling down on that, because you, if you can come the top 1% of something-

Chris Williamson 26:44 Yeah.

George Mack 26:44 ... the fact the returns are so, so great and so high, that that's where I think the focus should probably lie.

Chris Williamson 26:51 I think that makes sense. We were talking about this the other day, that, um, the difference between the person that comes first in the 100 meters and everybody else in terms of effort, actual time is not a lot, but in terms of impact, there's an awful lot. And when you get to the far-flung reaches of performance, we spoke about Coca-Cola, that once you've got that distribution network, you compound on compounding. So yeah, I like, uh...

George Mack 27:17 Well, yeah, 'cause you've gotta think then they can get... Y- If you have models of, they can get, uh, more, uh, network effects, so more and more people... The more word-of-mouth marketing you have, the more word-of-mouth marketing you get. The more, um, Coca-Cola bottles you can produce, the cheaper your margins get. So it's like how-... As soon as those power laws begin to kick in, you can get cheaper advertising, cheaper product, higher quality pro-... Like-

Chris Williamson 27:38 More scale.

George Mack 27:38 ... everything, everything. And it's just nobody can keep up at that stage.

Chris Williamson 27:41 Do you, um, do you think that there's a, there is a challenge in a society where we're trying to bring up people, we're trying to have more not, we're trying to have fewer have-nots and everybody be part of the haves? Is there an issue with that, with power laws? 'Cause inevitably, you're going to end up with winners and everybody else.

George Mack 28:07 What I was hearing A- Alex Becker, the YouTuber, talking about, he's very sort of libertarian, very entrepreneurial, and he was, like, saying, "Fucking hate Jeff Bezos," because he's gonna create a scenario where the rest of the world extremely resent the rich. Because if you actually, if you look at his stale, he's obviously not paying any tax. He's got around that. And you're gonna have a buildup of people really hating him, but he's untouchable. Like, try and get Jeff Bezos, he's got everything around him. He's got armed guards. You can't get near him. So they end up going for the moderately rich, which is where he is, right? And that's where his la-

Chris Williamson 28:38 The Jeff Bezos avatar.

George Mack 28:39 Exactly. So, um, and that's who gets screwed with tax. That's who gets screwed with everything else. So yeah, it's, um, it's a really fascinating argument of where government should intervene versus where they shouldn't intervene, like the whole libertarian debate versus the-

Chris Williamson 28:55 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 28:55 ... um, sort of Keynesian debate. It's a fascina-... Even now, like, you, I think you look at... I've thought a, a lot about this, of you, 'cause of COVID and everything else that was inevitably happening, even if you don't fully buy into the whole AI debate, there's obviously gonna be some jobs that are automated.

Chris Williamson 29:09 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 29:09 And for me, I'd be fascinated to see, again, I've not, I don't know the numbers, so I'm, I'm probably going void on my previous point, but if the government offered a stimulus right now to, let's say you took the top 50 job shortages, so software engineering, UX engineering, everything that's gonna be very, very future-proofed, and there's gonna be more demand for it in the future. An offering of stimulus for people to drop out of their current job to retrain for a year or 18 months and pay them and pay the company to do it, of course there's a, there's a hit in terms of taxpayer money there. But the value to that economy over time would be... I wonder if one country did that, would they be the world's leading economy 30 years from now? Because you've taken... 'Cause right now, let's say, for example, you're doing a regular job that may get automated soon. If you wanna drop out and become a UX engineer, you've either gotta do it in your own time, take huge financial risk, um, and that, a- soon as you get to a certain age, that's just almost unfathomable for most people. So offering that pre-built in would be very, very interesting.

Chris Williamson 30:07 Do you think Amazon should be broken up? Is it too big?

George Mack 30:10 Fuck knows. Like, I think, um, one of the fascinating ones is sort of John, John Rockefeller's, uh, biography. And you begin to learn about that, like, how they, they, um, they broke up his businesses.I think because of the power law distribution, they're gonna end up where they own everything. But what's interesting from this Charlie talk, he says when you go through the inversion list, one of the things... so stuff you should avoid is to avoid envy. And he says that the psychology textbooks, if you go through them, there's, there's nothing on envy, right? Which is crazy, because in the Bible, it's like one of the first things, "Thou shalt not envy," and how big of a thing envy is. And he says the way to kind of get around envy is to deserve it, so people are a lot less resentful if you have like a world-class quality product. So he says, um, in here, "Third, with such- with so much success coming..." So when he's talking about Coca-Cola's thing. "... we must avoid bad effects from envy. Given a prominent place in The Ten Commandments, because envy is so much a part of human nature, the best way to avoid envy recognized by Aristotle is to plainly deserve the success we get. Therefore, we will be fanatic about product quality, quality of product presenta- presentation, and reasonableness of prices, considering the harmless pleasure it will provide." And Amazon have kind of done that. So they've still got a lot of envy, a lot of resentment, a lot of hatred, but nobody's boycotting them, and the-

Chris Williamson 31:26 From people, from people who are messaging off phones charged by wires they bought on Amazon.

George Mack 31:31 Exactly. And then, and then they're going onto Twitter or they're going onto Instagram, uh, complaining about it on an AWS server, right?

Chris Williamson 31:39 (laughs)

George Mack 31:39 So it's, um... That, that's the thing about Amaz- Everybody I know who resents Amazon for like the tax side of things and how much they're monopolizing everything still uses them. So it's kind of... Yeah, I, I don't know. It's a very interesting question.

Chris Williamson 31:54 I've watched a really... We both have watched some interesting Amazon documentaries over the last few months, and I started to see just how beastly their operation is, and you realize that there's probably going to come a point pretty soon where that growth and the amount of impact that they have, especially when they start to ramp up automated delivery, perhaps with drones or with driverless cars, that you'd be able to do a one-hour delivery, remote, warehouse to customer, without anyone intervening.

George Mack 32:29 Well, the craziest thing about, um, Amazon is that AWS was, or still is, m- profitable, as profitable or more profitable than Amazon, and nobody really knows what AWS is. So that's another business that they own.

Chris Williamson 32:43 What is Amazon Web Service again?

George Mack 32:44 Amazon Web Service. So anybody... Almost like Netflix, for example, will use Amazon Web Service, so you can imagine the amount of bandwidth that they, they, they flow through, right?

Chris Williamson 32:52 (laughs)

George Mack 32:53 So... And that, that's Bezos again. What's fascinating about Bezos, he's very similar to Musk in the sense that obvi- I think people can get so complex with it, and I understand why, but... And obviously these two are geniuses that not everybody can imitate or mimic, but he has one guiding principle that every decision goes through. So for Bezos, it's just, "We just care about the customer." That's all. "If it can enhance the customer experience, let's do it," basically. If you look at every decision Amazon make, if you go back through the book, um, uh, The Everything Store, every decision he makes is, "Will this enhance the customer experience?" Rather than like profit margin, it's just long-term, long-term, long-term. "Will this enhance the customer experience?" So he says this example of, "Ten years from now, will people say to me, 'I want slower deliveries at a higher cost'?" And he's like, "No, no, nobody's ever gonna say that to me. They're always gonna say, 'I love the fact that it's arrived next day. I love how cheap it is.' Therefore, I double down on that." And then Elon Musk, there's an interview on Lex Fridman's show where... I've forgot who it is that worked with him, and he said that Elon Musk, right, for as complex as an individual as he is, as intelligent as he is, and how much he understands, every decision goes through, "Will this get me nearer to Mars or not? Yes or no?" And it's very like crazy how somebody as complex, sophisticated, and nuanced as that has just one guiding thing that shapes every single decision, whereas a lot of us are like, "Uh, I've got this part of my life, I've got this part of my life, I've got this interest, I've got this." Whereas for those two, at the scale they're at, the amount of decision you have to make is just, "Will this enhance customer experience or will this get me nearer to Mars? Yes or no?"

Chris Williamson 34:33 Well, it makes for... When you've got a chaotic world with an awful lot of different decisions, you need a simple guiding principle.

George Mack 34:39 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:40 And I wonder whether in a world with far too much stimulation, um, people with poorly defined goals, goals that they've adopted from their family, from their culture, from what they think they should want, it's not surprising that people struggle with decision-making, because the single guiding principle that they have isn't theirs, and there's 40 of them.

George Mack 35:05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very important.

Chris Williamson 35:06 They have... They're being pulled in a million different directions, which comes back to direction over speed, right? Or just have a direct.

George Mack 35:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 35:13 Before you even think about speed, just get a direction.

George Mack 35:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 35:16 Um, and yeah, that's a... that's a really interesting insight. I, I, I wonder how people can try and find a guiding principle in their life. You know, because it's too trite to say, "Oh, just do what makes you happy," you know? Like, you just sit and masturbate at home all day or-

George Mack 35:34 So maybe that's your guiding principle, right? Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:35 Fanta-... That would work, yeah.

George Mack 35:37 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:37 Um, what else have you got for us?

George Mack 35:39 So this is one I've, I've made up. I don't think we've been through it before. We may have done. Um, so it's called opportunity costs blindness, so OCB, a play on sort of OCD, um, where... This is really hard to explain without experiencing it, but just how blind we are to the amount of opportunity cost there is. So often when I've found... I mean, I've not, I've not had that many relationships, but when you're in a relationship, it's either them or single, them or single, them or single. And it's so hard to actually realize that it's them or single or eight billion other people you haven't been with.

Chris Williamson 36:17 (laughs)

George Mack 36:17 So, it's so... But it's so hard to know the opportunity. Same with jobs, like we'll, we'll know certain people where they're miserable in a job and it's either, okay, job-... or leave job, an unemployed job, or le- uh, leave a job at a... So there's only one opportunity cost, but they forget how much there is, 'cause it's like the law of large numbers. I think we really struggle, or I really struggle, to just comprehend how much else exists when you can only see the options that are available to you. And you only realize that in hindsight when you go, "Fucking hell, I was, like, in this job for four years, and I was, like, having this argument with my boss every single day in the shower. How much now I'm in this other opportunity, like, how laughable that was and how serious I took that," because you don't even comprehend the amount of opportunity out there. So I think almost having a filter of, "I, right now, do not... I'm... I've got such opportunity-cost blindness. I cannot even fathom how much opportunity there is out there."

Chris Williamson 37:09 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 37:09 And to start from that base-level filter is probably a smart thing to do, which is tough though. It's very tough.

Chris Williamson 37:15 It's reassuring, you know, when you've got difficult decision in front of you. But how many times have people obsessed over what they're going to... "I don't know. I'm scared about breaking up with a relationship that I know is wrong, or leaving a job that I don't enjoy, or moving to a new city, or, uh, uh, retraining, st- starting educa-," whatever it might be. And then as soon as you do, you realize, "Oh, hang on, like, there's so many more paths down here. I just thought it was this or that." For instance, our trip away to Dubai-

George Mack 37:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 37:45 ... we decided to take a trip away, and like, "Oh, God," like, uh, "I don't know whether I should go. There's all of this stuff." And you meet a little bit of resistance, but once you overcome that initial inertia, you realize once you're out here that the, the one thing that you had written as, "Go to Dubai during lockdown," actually consists of a million different other routes that are in there. So yeah, we, we certainly bundle together, uh, blocks of opportunities-

George Mack 38:11 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 38:11 ... into individual sections, which can make for a, make for a more simplistic worldview in a way that blinds us.

George Mack 38:20 Mm-hmm. Well, I think even, um... Uh, I was chatting to a guy called, uh, uh, Adam Townsend on Twitter, and he's got some fantastic stuff on this. And he, he talks about how, like, we're so addicted to work, like, you almost to get over that, he said, "I just need to take three months out." And you just completely realize, like, there's just so much more there, but you, you need the time and the space and often different opportunities. Like, since being out here, we were just saying, like, how you're just in a different news cycle.

Chris Williamson 38:47 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 38:47 You don't even realize that you're constantly o- this, this, this news cycle is just in your software just running all the time. It's just, you know, I don't know about you, but when you have, like, um, like, dodgy software on your, on your laptop, and you only realize because-

Chris Williamson 39:00 You, you've got loads of it.

George Mack 39:01 (laughs) Yeah, perks of the dark web.

Chris Williamson 39:04 (laughs)

George Mack 39:04 So you've got all this dodgy so-... And it's just eating your bandwidth, but you don't know it until you're out of it.

Chris Williamson 39:08 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 39:08 And I do think there's so much opportunity-cost blindness, that even if you can pre-build in like, "Okay, I'm not sure if I wanna break up with somebody. Let's just do, like, three weeks over here with my f-" And build in these AB tests of like, "Okay, if I try this, what happens here? If I try this, what happens here?" Scott Adams has this hilarious bit of (laughs) I fucking love Scott Adams. He, he says, um, in his book, the mistake people make with seeking jobs is they wait till they're unhappy in their job to seek it, and the odds of the perfect job existing when you're ready for it is actually quite slim. So he says as soon as... Uh, uh, you should always be looking at new jobs. Like, just schedule in, like, a day a week to just go, "Is there a new job? Does it pay better? Does it have all this?" 'Cause you know what? It, m- the perfect job for you might be within two months of starting this job.

Chris Williamson 39:52 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 39:52 And he says that that's the key that got him up the corporate ladder, before he went off into cartooning. He, he would just constantly be, like, "What's the best-paying job, or what's the best ROI for me personally?" And not wait until they're unhappy, 'cause it's so true. Like, people will wait three, four years, and they go, "Right, I'm at breaking point." So psychologically, they're done, and now you're searching for a new job, so you've got a two-week window to do it.

Chris Williamson 40:13 Yeah.

George Mack 40:13 And the chances of that two-week window being perfect for you, um, it's gonna be slim.

Chris Williamson 40:19 Isn't it interesting how we map our model of relationships onto jobs? So in a relationship, it would be frowned upon to still be flicking through Tinder and Hinge-

George Mack 40:32 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 40:32 ... whilst you're in a relationship because, "Well, you know, if this goes wrong, I, I, you know, what, what if something better comes along?" You can't really do that. And I think people treat their jobs, the level of loyalty that they have to their job, in a way like that. Um, and I'm not sure, because as a business owner, I want my employees to be loyal, but as a growth-minded individual, I want everybody to maximize their happiness and utility. And I think if you're a boss, it's probably not a bad idea for your staff not to be doing that, because your (laughs) turnover's going to be significantly lower.

George Mack 41:07 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:07 But as a human, I think, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

George Mack 41:10 Well, being able to get that solve the principal-agent problem, which I guess is another mental model of how do you get agents to act like a principal? How do you get them to take-

Chris Williamson 41:17 What's the difference?

George Mack 41:18 Well, a principal is somebody who sort of owns it, and has direct skin in the game by the performance of the thing, and has so much care over it. Um, so somebody who owns a business, if it performs, they make more money. If it doesn't, they lose a lot of money. Um, whereas an agent could just be somebody who's nine-to-five, on the clock, "I get paid regardless of performance pretty much, I've just got to do the bare minimum to get away with it." Um, and being able to... How do you shift agents to principals? So I think Naval says he (laughs) , he works with, like... He always wants to work with one person. So rather than working with, like, a huge agency, it's like, "How can I just work with one person?" Because if they're directly responsible, it's so much more difficult to sort of shrink responsibility, whereas there's 10 people in the room, it's like, "Right, well this might be... That bit's that guy's job. That bit's that." So it means the total thing, the outcome of it, there's a load of agents who, like, don't really have any personal ownership over it, whereas if I'm working directly with Chris and it fails, it's Chris's fault, and if it succeeds, it's Chris's, it's Chris's success.

Chris Williamson 42:16 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 42:16 So it ha- being able to solve for that principal-agent, which is why so many startups give equity. I've seen people who even though the equity game, yeah, there may be a few percent of them win, like, 95, 99 never make anything, people who will justify working...... crazy hours because they have 1% of the business.

Chris Williamson 42:35 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 42:36 So being able to pivot that to a principal mindset is, it's a very interesting thing.

Chris Williamson 42:42 What mental model do you wish that more of your friends and family knew?

George Mack 42:47 I don't know. I don't, wouldn't wanna put something on friends and family. Um, I guess in, in version say, "Stop hanging out with me." No, um-

Chris Williamson 42:58 (laughs)

George Mack 42:58 I dunno. Yeah, so that's a really tough one. I guess it's so, this is the issue I have with even, like, a lot of podcasts and a lot of advice is, it's just so fucking nuanced and so subjective to the individual. And I think you're seeing this with diet as now, right?

Chris Williamson 43:14 (laughs)

George Mack 43:14 I, I know people who, who have nuts and they die, right?

Chris Williamson 43:19 Johnny.

George Mack 43:19 Johnny, yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:20 Yeah.

George Mack 43:20 Shout out Johnny. Whereas I have nuts and I'm fine. It's like... So, so then to have, like, one o- Which is why I kind of like mental models, 'cause you can take different things from each discipline and apply it. But when it's like, "You should do X or you should 10X," right? I just think that's bollocks because it's so subjective and nuanced to the individual. Like, I know we chatted about this previously, like even the word entrepreneur, I have an issue with it, because there's so much, like, microcosms within entrepreneurship. Joe Rogan is so different to Jeff Bezos. If you put Jeff Bezos in Joe Rogan's shoes, it would flop. If you put Joe Rogan in Jeff Bezos's shoes, it would win. But we're told these two people are still entrepreneurs. For me it feels like they're so different. There's so much subjectivity out in the world that I think the only thing when it comes to advice is to look at, again, the fundamental principles, the fundamental foundations. So Gary Vee has that, the dirt and the clouds. The clouds are these big mental models, and the dirt is so specific and tactical to your field-

Chris Williamson 44:16 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 44:16 ... that somebody like me going, chatting to a machine learning engineer or chatting to somebody in physical retail is just bo- Like, yeah, there's a few overlying principles that may help, like compound interest, power laws, da-de-da-da, but there's so much subjectivity to each individual that I think is so neglected by self-improvement and the self-help sector, 'cause it's as nuanced as your diet, it's as nuanced as your genetic code, I think.

Chris Williamson 44:40 Yeah, the, what everybody's trying to do is find a commonality that permits one piece of advice to fit many, like one-size-fits-all advice, right? But I would say, I certainly think that a lot of my friends and family would do with contrast.

George Mack 45:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 45:00 Like, I thi- I, I think there's very few people-

George Mack 45:02 Well, I'd rather talk about myself. I, 'cause I always feel like as soon as I, you start talking about somebody else, you don't know them as well as yourself.

Chris Williamson 45:08 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 45:08 Whereas at least I know me very well. And I think that you, you can easily be in a situation where you give other people advice and you're just so detached from it. You see it, like, so much online and I just think it's a bit...

Chris Williamson 45:18 What mental model do you wish that you could implement more?

George Mack 45:20 Oh, that's a better question. Um, leverage. Leverage, 'cause I'm a workaholic by trade. Like, like, so, like, my, when I was like 11, my dad bet me I couldn't do 10 kick-ups with a football. I then spent five years training five hours a day, doing kick-ups with a football. If anything, it was a great fit-

Chris Williamson 45:38 To do 10?

George Mack 45:38 To do 10, no, no-

Chris Williamson 45:38 Five hours to get 10 kick-ups?

George Mack 45:39 I got, I got a lot better, I got a lot better at it. Um, so I started, that came as a little mini job when I was younger. But that taught me, like, power of working hard and growth mindset. So it was super valuable in that respect. But it also means that I will then try and do 100 responsibilities and I won't understand necessarily the power of leverage as much. So having more people working for you, having more code working for you, having more media working for you, is a, uh, an unbelievable tool that I'm only beginning to wrap my head around.

Chris Williamson 46:12 What was that quote that you gave me about l- lazy people make the best employees, because they'll find shortcuts to do work?

George Mack 46:19 Yeah. Exactly. So you, that, that's the part, like, I, I've said this before. If I could, you know, talk about friends and family, I wouldn't give them, like, any advice or that side of things, 'cause it's so nuanced to them. The only thing I'd say is get working knowledge of Zapier, 'cause if you have, if you have-

Chris Williamson 46:33 (laughs)

George Mack 46:34 If you have... And the reason why is because of leverage and automation.

Chris Williamson 46:36 Shout out to Zapier.

George Mack 46:37 I think Zapier, if you, if, again, going back to government stimuluses, if Zapier said, "We will pay for your five-day leave to learn Zapier," if the government said that, the value to the economy would be un- The amount of people who right now are going on emails, copying something, putting it in a Google Sheet, or going from a Facebook ad and putting it into a different document. All Zapier is, is every major app connected. And this isn't a sponsorship, by the way, I do this for free.

Chris Williamson 47:01 Yeah.

George Mack 47:01 Connected. I genuinely think if you taught people that no-code skill, the ability to automate things and almost become like a, like a developer of 18 months in, like, the space of three days, the productivity for the economy would be amazing. And the first time you have a Zapier thing that works for you, and you can just see this flowing. Like, we could be, like, now I've got Zaps running, it's the best thing ever. I know once our chat's done, it's gonna have taken 100 people from different Facebook ads and it's already automated and sent them an email. Whereas previously, I'd have to go in, get the CSV, send that. So Zapier, for me, in terms of an applied mental model of leverage, is the best thing for somebody who can't code.

Chris Williamson 47:40 That's interesting. That is really, really interesting. I, um, I like... I was taught this from my first ever boss of events company, is outsourcing. And I know that Naval's a, a big fan of if something costs you less than your hourly rate to do it, then either outsource it or just throw it away. Um-

George Mack 48:00 So, yeah, that, I think that's a great nuanced point, if it's the hourly rate type things. But sometimes I will see it with certain businesses that I work with, where they outsource too much and then they become, they become foreign to it, and they just trust people who say they're experts at it.

Chris Williamson 48:16 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 48:16 Like one of the best D2C guys I've met, this guy called Danny Book on Twitter, he said to me, he went into direct to consumer and decided to do all the ads himself. Obviously he outsources, like, learning, and he does hire consultants to come in and train them. But he said, "This is the most fundamental part of the business. I'm not outsourcing it." Whereas I've seen so many other businesses just like, "This is the most fundamental part of our business. Boom, pass it over there." So it's really interesting, like how that balance between outsourcing, but also how do you not get bullshitted by the people you've outsourced to. So you almost need a enough base level knowledge. And maybe that's, like, n- applied mental models for, like, knowing basic numeracy, so when they say certain things to you, you can check things off. But that's an issue that Charlie talks about, uh, that you need these fundamental mental models in place. 'Cause if you do outsource, you need to be able to have enough knowledge of that field to be able to call bullshit-

Chris Williamson 49:01 Mm.

George Mack 49:02 Otherwise, you can just ... somebody can sound smart and just trick you. (exhales)

Chris Williamson 49:07 I wonder how many people lie on the side of the spectrum where they outsource too much, versus how many lie on the side of the spectrum-

George Mack 49:15 Good question.

Chris Williamson 49:15 ... where they do too much. I would say, based on my experience, more people are on the latter, and that might be a selection effect from the type of friends that I've got. But workaholics, people from a classic working class background, um, they will tend to look to save money-

George Mack 49:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 49:33 ... where they can. And on top of that, I think the neuroticism that you have, the fear of something not being done correctly, and the time investment it takes to teach someone how to be georgemack.docx, like, writing that manifesto-

George Mack 49:51 Tough.

Chris Williamson 49:52 ... is such a huge hurdle to overcome. And you think, "Right, okay, I could do that and automate my life, but I'd have to take three months off of my life to do that."

George Mack 50:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:00 And I see it so commonly in business, like one of the most frequent bits of advice that I give people is, "You should not be doing that. That's not your job. That was your job seven months ago or seven years ago. And for some reason, you're still doing ... you're still replying to the Instagram DMs-"

George Mack 50:17 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:18 "... or you s- you're still dealing with the level two customer inquiries over email." Like, the first person that it gets up-leveled to is you after the person that deals with the customers.

George Mack 50:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 50:29 Like, no, that's not your job.

George Mack 50:31 Was there a o- one specific thing for you where ... that you maybe held onto too long and then delegated it, and you was like, "Oh my God, I can't believe how good this is"?

Chris Williamson 50:39 Everything in my business, yeah.

George Mack 50:40 W- any specif-

Chris Williamson 50:41 Yeah, yeah.

George Mack 50:41 Was there one thing where it clicked and you was like, "Oof"?

Chris Williamson 50:43 So the main, the main one, the most stupid thing that I used to do was set up the nightclub on a Saturday morning. So I didn't miss a Saturday at my first weekly event, Voodoo, for 204 weeks, so just shy of four years. And the only reason I missed like the 205th was because I had a chest infection that had me bedbound, like strapped to the bed, bedbound. Other than that, hungover, fresh, ill, what ... every different iteration of life for four years, I was there, outside the same club for four years. And I used to spend my Saturday a- morning into afternoon, 11:00 till 2:00 or 3:00, setting up the club. And that was just hanging up inflatables. Anyone who's ever been to a nightclub and noticed the extra décor, most of that, make sure the decks are right, do a soundcheck, piss off. You could have paid a couple of students 30 quid each. They would've got more value out of it because they need the 30 quid more than I need to lose three hours of my time.

George Mack 51:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 51:40 And I would've retained ... Because I was working every night as well, but for some reason, I was terrified that the cable ties were gonna p- be put on wrongly, "Oh, well if the cable tie isn't that way..." And it, it came from a catastrophic mindset that I presumed if the cable ties were on wrong, that would be the beginning of the avalanche that collapsed the business. It's borne out of working in an industry which is very fickle, very, very fast-moving. Everyone knows what it's like, like, the cool spot to go to last week is ... uh, nobody even goes there this ... It's like COVID just hits one venue at once and everybody dissipates. And that creates a level of ambient anxiety that pervades through the, the source code of the industry. And that was maybe, uh, made worse by my own, um, personality. And when all of that got piled together, yeah, I, I struggled to let go of so much stuff. Setting up the venue was one of them. Doing the accounts was another one. I didn't need to sit and watch the accounts. Oh my God, here's another one. So we used to have ... the way that the guest list was set up for our events, I used to take the plus number, so George Mack plus three, I used to take the plus number and put it in another column. Why? Why on earth ... Like, I don't need a fully justified number column. It makes no difference.

George Mack 52:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:59 It's being seen by one guy in the front door, and that guy is me. Like, "I don't need to do this," but I would take ... and the guest list was 300 names, 400 names, doing 1,500 people a night.

George Mack 53:10 400 a night.

Chris Williamson 53:10 And I would be going through ... I wouldn't have done a macro for it, I wouldn't have, like, automated it, I would do it manually, and it took until that one day and I was like, "What am I doing?" So that very much, I think, is sweating the small stuff-

George Mack 53:21 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 53:21 ... and obsessing over things without perspective. One of the problems with being an entrepreneur or a business person or someone that has a hobby that you care about is, when you're this close to it, when you are in the dirt-

George Mack 53:31 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 53:32 ... very hard to get perspective and look at, "Where should I be... Where am I adding the most value," right?

George Mack 53:37 It's opportunity cost blindness again, isn't it, really? Like, you don't have the ability to step out. And, uh, it's interesting that the reason why ... only reason it happened to you is 'cause you said, what, you ended up in hospital, you got ill. It's crazy that you get to the stage ... But imagine if that never happened, you'd probably still be doing it, right?

Chris Williamson 53:50 (laughs)

George Mack 53:50 You'd prob- you'd probably even be here right now, like-

Chris Williamson 53:52 Perhaps.

George Mack 53:52 ... it's, it's weird. It's very weir- so maybe the, the nuance between what I'm saying of don't delegate too much and what you're saying people need to delegate more is, I think there's that ... I think, I don't know if it's Parrish or who, but if it involves judgment or creativity or at least the highest priority thing, then have 100% obsessive ownership over it. And if it's something that doesn't involve that, if it's just like manual tasks or stuff that you can train somebody for, then outsource immediately.

Chris Williamson 54:20 Mm. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot this year is me- mental masturbation.

George Mack 54:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:25 So I think people who enjoy the mental models world can often become too cerebral-

George Mack 54:33 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:33 ... around finding the solutions for it. You can think that all the answers to your questions just lie at the bottom of being able to recite Poor Charlie's Almanack.

George Mack 54:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:43 And that's ... the compliance and the ability to deploy that actually makes all of the difference. It is multiplying by zero if you're not able to do it. So how can people that are listening, perhaps, you know, fourth episode deep in this particular series, have you got any ways that you ensure that you don't just mentally jerk off with this sort of stuff and that you actually try and apply it?

George Mack 55:05 It's so hard, again, without knowing, like-

Chris Williamson 55:07 But how do you do it?

George Mack 55:08 ... but also subjective. It's a good question. It's definitely something I, I've got a lot better at. Um, I think, I think it's much easier when you've committed to certain things, and then there's people that hold you accountable to them.

Chris Williamson 55:20 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 55:20 So, if it's just you working alone on a project, it's much harder. But I think as soon as you're, like, quite public of that you're working on something or you've got a partner to be working on something, or you've got employees you have to do it for, then I don't know, you can't just go like, "All right, guys, I want you to turn up to the Monday morning meeting 'cause I'm gonna go and read for five hours." Like, you've got to then maybe schedule your reading for a certain time, but then you have to execute. So, I think that's great, and then I think going back to numbers as well, I think you just can't cheat numbers. So, if, for example, um, you, I guess you'll know this better than me, but in, like, the gym side of things, you can't cheat the numbers. So, if the numbers aren't changing, i.e., whatever your metric is, whatever you decide on as your metrics, whether that's money or whether that's, I don't know, weights lifting in the gym or whether it's calories consumed or whether it's number of times I'm seeing, uh, my parents -

Chris Williamson 56:07 Revenue, top line sales.

George Mack 56:08 ... or girlfriend, whatever you can basically, I know this sounds very, like, um, people feel like you can sometimes over-quantify life, but I'd say on the most part, people don't do it enough. So, if you quantify things and it doesn't improve, start changing variables. I think that's it. Like, again, you don't, the whole, the whole thing about that answer there, like, the whole mental masturbation, if you then start mentally masturbating over the answer, it's just a fucking, it's just a row here-

Chris Williamson 56:30 End of cycle.

George Mack 56:31 ... it's just a hamster on a thing. So I think get a number of a thing that you want to change and throw variables in. Does the, does it change? If not, why? Change the variable again and just keep doing that, and then just keep a track of that number. So, it's very simple. Has the revenue gone up? Has my time spent on this activity gone up? Has my ELO score at chess.com gone up?

Chris Williamson 56:51 It, has it?

George Mack 56:51 It has indeed. It has indeed.

Chris Williamson 56:52 Nice.

George Mack 56:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:53 Nice. Uh, right. We are going to play a game of bull or bear.

George Mack 56:58 Okay.

Chris Williamson 56:58 And bull or bear is something we've been doing in our WhatsApp chat for a little while-

George Mack 57:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:02 ... which is where one of the guys will post anything and everyone will reply with an emoji, bull or bear.

George Mack 57:09 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 57:09 So you can play, you can play along at home. Uh, bull or bear, faith in the voting system.

George Mack 57:14 Oh. L- Um, faith in the voting system. So, ooh, that's a really hard one. I'm bear on the way it currently is, but I am bull on the way, my way is, where it should be.

Chris Williamson 57:23 What's your solution?

George Mack 57:24 So, well, I've thought about this. Talk about an elephant in the room. 2020 will be remembered as the year where pens and paper were redundant unless it was deciding the most powerful person in the world, or people counting numbers repetitively on low-wage jobs were redundant unless it was deciding the election. Imagine if you go to your bank and, uh, let's say you have 20,000 pounds in your bank, or 10,000, let's say you have 10,000 pounds in your bank, and you go, "How much money do I have in my bank?" Rather than having it automated by computers and robots doing it for you, it's a guy in a back room. He goes, "Right, give me a b- g- give me overnight." And he goes there pound coin by pound coin, going, "Oh, one pound, one pound, one pound. Oh, 10p, 10p, 10p," and he comes back with that number. That number will be false. There's no way about that num- whether you're a Trump fan, a Biden fan, or whoever, I don't know, whatever country you're from, having this system of people counting things and it being done via pen and paper is fucking ludicrous. Like, it is-

Chris Williamson 58:19 (laughs)

George Mack 58:19 ... mental 'cause it's-

Chris Williamson 58:20 It's crazy.

George Mack 58:20 No matter your side, it is wrong. Like, the number will be wrong.

Chris Williamson 58:24 Yeah.

George Mack 58:25 'Cause when they're recounting, it's always a different number.

Chris Williamson 58:26 And the only reason, the only reason it could be right is by the errors on one side fixing the errors on another. But if you've, if you somehow one in a billion, trillion chance they were all correct, it wouldn't be because they were accurately counted. It's because lapses-

George Mack 58:40 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:40 ... on one side would end up... So what's your solution?

George Mack 58:42 Um, blockchain. Yeah, so, well, it's-

Chris Williamson 58:45 (laughs)

George Mack 58:45 It's so, it's so obvious, right? You can just... Everyone has an encrypted key. It, y- you submit it, therefore you can go, you can, everybody can go back and see theirs. It's stored in a blockchain. Nobody can interfere with it. The amount of votes that will go up as a result of it 'cause people can do it from their smartphone rather than having to go to a polling station and catch something. You can't cheat. There's no, it's very hard for electoral fraud to happen. Obviously, when the technology's there, you have to be able to do it. The issue is very few governments are, they're, they're so backwards in their thinking. But that seems inevitable. Like, it seems so inevitable after this year that you can't have pen and paper any- Why is pen and paper still involved? Why are humans still counting numbers? It's ridiculous.

Chris Williamson 59:23 So let's say that pen and paper gets disbanded.

George Mack 59:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:27 But blockchain doesn't get brought in. Are you bearish or bullish there?

George Mack 59:30 Ooh, that's a good, I mean, I, so if you wanna go down a rabbit hole, the best guy content is called, a guy called George Hotz, and he hacks into, he's the first guy, I think, to hack into the iPhone, the first guy to hack into the Sony PlayStation. So he'll hack into anything, and he'll show examples of how easy it is to hack in to your iPhone, just turn your camera on and start recording you.

Chris Williamson 59:52 Oh, shit.

George Mack 59:52 Um, he can hack into-

Chris Williamson 59:54 Scary.

George Mack 59:54 He shows how you can hack into cars. So, if you think the government's IT team, bear in mind, like, in the UK, the government NHS is the largest buyer of fax machines in the world, how backwards they are, I, I reckon even I, with a bit of HTML and five hours on Code Academy could probably hack into it. So, I'm pretty bearish on that unless they bring the best people in. So, I still think it's gonna be a shit show for a while yet.

Chris Williamson 1:00:17 That's not great. Uh, Brian Rose for London mayor, bear or bull?

George Mack 1:00:21 Massive bull. Yeah, massive bull.

Chris Williamson 1:00:22 Are you?

George Mack 1:00:22 Yeah, massive bull.

Chris Williamson 1:00:23 Are you really?

George Mack 1:00:23 I don't know. Well, I think he's like-

Chris Williamson 1:00:24 Is he paying you off?

George Mack 1:00:25 ... I think he's third favorite, and, um, I know you're probably a bear. I, I mean, I, yeah, I don't really have an opinion. I'd probably say bull.

Chris Williamson 1:00:31 Kanye 2024, bear or bull?

George Mack 1:00:37 Bear because he'll have to be... If he could win Republican or De- Democrat, then I'm, I'm a bit bull 'cause then he might do a Trump, but I think he'll have to be Independent, and I don't just don't see that happening anytime soon.

Chris Williamson 1:00:47 Yeah. The thing about Kanye is that going on Rogan and getting asked hard questions and then sitting in silence for 30 seconds-

George Mack 1:00:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:55 Like I, I, so many people are seduced by artistic capacity in one domain and presuming that it means genius across them all. Like, there's not that many polymaths out there, and-... that, that kind of, like, bizarrely, they're quite easy to spot. Like, you hear Eric speak and you're like-

George Mack 1:01:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:16 The, he'll, he'll move seamlessly from cephalopods to classical Latin music to, like, complex physics, to whatever. Stephen Wolfram, you'll hear him move between crazy different areas. It comes back to that kind of blagging it mentality.

George Mack 1:01:31 Fashion's very easy to blag as well. Like, fashion is-

Chris Williamson 1:01:34 Built on trends, yeah.

George Mack 1:01:35 ... it's, it's built on blag, it's built on reflexivity, it's just how people react to things. So, yeah, I, I listen to that Rogan thing and it, my mind is a pendulum of "Genius, madman."

Chris Williamson 1:01:42 (laughs)

George Mack 1:01:43 And it would just, it would just swi- it would just switch like that.

Chris Williamson 1:01:44 Back and forth.

George Mack 1:01:44 So it's so hard to say, right? But it's so hard to not be successful at the same time.

Chris Williamson 1:01:48 Uh, bear or bull? Sex robots.

George Mack 1:01:51 Um, personal or, or on a society level?

Chris Williamson 1:01:54 (laughs) Well, y- may- give, give us both of those.

George Mack 1:01:55 Um, I mean, probably, probably bull, I think, I- is the way it ends up, uh, as costs go down. The only thing that I can see ... the only thing that happens potentially before then is the printing viruses, I think is probably inevitable. So whether we get-

Chris Williamson 1:02:13 Oh, okay, so you get a virtual sexually transmitted infection-

George Mack 1:02:16 No, no, no, I just think we could get-

Chris Williamson 1:02:17 ... from this sex robot.

George Mack 1:02:17 I think we could just get killed off before then. But then again, if we do have a printed virus scenario where ... so George Hotz was talking-

Chris Williamson 1:02:23 Are you talking, is this a nanotechnology thing? Is this a bio weapons thing? Or-

George Mack 1:02:25 Was it the, the, some- I was listening to George Hotz. So he does this five-hour Python stream where he's just coding things, and he's just, like, the most intense man ever.

Chris Williamson 1:02:31 (laughs)

George Mack 1:02:31 And he's talking about he'll p- pull up Google really fast and he goes, "How many base pairs are in the coronavirus? 10,000 base pairs." He goes, "How much does it cost to print a base pair?" And it's like $3. He goes, "So, it would cost me $30,000 to start printing the coronavirus. Could you imagine where the future of technology's gonna be?" And he just kind of looks at the camera like that. I'm like, "Oh, fuck. Yeah, he's so right, isn't he?" Like, if the 3D printing technology's gonna go down, you can access the genomes of all these things and just take the base pairs.

Chris Williamson 1:02:53 Whoa.

George Mack 1:02:54 That's ... But then again, if we all, all keep doing these pandemic lockdowns, then sex robots are gonna

Narrator 1:02:58 <<Let's go.>>

Chris Williamson 1:02:58 Sex robots are going up. One of the interesting things I read, it's, uh, Geoffrey Miller's other half, the woman who's scientist on, uh, Sentientist on Twitter, and she was talking about how in a society, an increase in freely available sexual satisfaction actually turns down sexual assaults and overall aggression. And the reason for that is that most of the sexual assaults are born out of people feeling like they can't win in the normal game. But by gaming the system, like, it doesn't matter that you couldn't win in the real world, but you get to win in the fake world and that doesn't fix it. It's like we're able to hack into our own programming so fairly easily.

George Mack 1:03:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:03:47 And that's one of them. So-

George Mack 1:03:48 Watch a mo- watch a movie and see how that works. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:51 Porn does exactly the same thing. Uh, final one. Remote working for the majority of a workforce. Let's consider here before you go into it, people who need contact around others, who require that working environment.

George Mack 1:04:10 It's tough. I'm thinking about this, like, hiring and do we hire ... So on one hand, if you hire remote, you have access to so much more talent and sometimes at a more affordable price. So I said remote work is the best thing possible to happen to talented people in the developing world, and the worst thing possible to happen to talentless people in the developed world.

Chris Williamson 1:04:32 Hmm.

George Mack 1:04:32 Because, like, there's so many things where there's somebody in another side of the world that can do it for a quarter of the price, 10X the work ethic and 5X the brains. So I'm pretty bullish on it, certainly for the developing world and the wonders it's gonna do of flowing money out there. But I do have concerns that, for people who are talentless in the devel- oh, I, no, talentless is a strong word, but aren't as skilled in the developed world, what that does for them.

Chris Williamson 1:05:00 Competition versus competition.

George Mack 1:05:01 Yeah. So I think it's ... the pendulum's gonna obviously shift a bit further back to where it was, but it's never gonna go back that way, just because there's some people who I know that will refuse to take a job that is in an office now.

Chris Williamson 1:05:12 Really?

George Mack 1:05:12 So, yeah, there's definitely people who will. Um, I think the ideal, and there's talk about this where, like, these big tech companies who are, uh, shutting down their offices and now just having, like, WeWork spaces that people can drop in, do meetings, but then they live around the city. I think that's probably more likely. But I said this when, um, when all these tech companies started working from home, I go, "That's a hacker's fucking dream." Like, 'cause now you've got so many people at, at home Wi-Fis and Alexa devices that you can hack into. And then you look at the Twitter hack that happened-

Chris Williamson 1:05:40 Yeah.

George Mack 1:05:40 ... they were all working from home. And the, it came, I remember at the time he's going, "Definitely something's weird isn't working."

Chris Williamson 1:05:45 You know where it came from?

George Mack 1:05:45 Three months later it was a couple of kids, right? Um, but it came from, I think, um, obviously it's the classic they're pretending to be security and they got in that way. But they said that it was way easier because of the fact they were working from home. So if you want a trillion dollar idea, cybersecurity for remote work.

Chris Williamson 1:06:01 Christ. Yeah. I mean, what, what ... the, the level of security that you have that gets built into offices, that's part of the thing that people don't realize that you just presume your office is the brick walls, the air conditioning, and the cafeteria downstairs.

George Mack 1:06:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:17 But it's not. It's all of the infrastructure that permits you to do your work in a secure way as well, that logs stuff, that's got cloud storage, that's constantly updating, that, you know ... Yeah, you, you're really correct. In fact, that's terrifying. There's probably some industries in which remote working just needs to ... like, let's not, let's not decentralize the Pentagon, you know? Let's not have the nuclear football be available on an app on, like, Trump or Biden's phone-

George Mack 1:06:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:47 ... or something like that. Yeah, man. Well, look, that was awesome, dude. I'm so glad that you're out here with me. I'm really happy to go through this as well. I think if people are keen, I reckon that we can do some much longer episodes playing Bear or Bull and-

George Mack 1:07:02 Bear or Bull 101.

Chris Williamson 1:07:03 ... get some submissions through from listeners.

George Mack 1:07:05 Yeah. If you're a bull on Bear or Bull, send a, send a-

Chris Williamson 1:07:08 Send, send a bull emoji.

George Mack 1:07:09 Send a bull ... if you're a bear, just send the bear emoji.

Chris Williamson 1:07:11 Yeah. That's it. Uh, where should people go they want to check out your stuff? And also what you're doing now. People might want to know where, what's happening in your life. Give us the elevator pitch.

George Mack 1:07:19 Yeah. So mainly, uh, blockchain sex robots (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 1:07:23 (laughs)

George Mack 1:07:24 No. So, um, if you want to find me, Twitter's usually the best place. I'm on there a little bit. Um, it's George__mack. Um, and then in terms of myself, primarily e-commerce, D2C agency. So paid social, Shopify builds, customer acquisition, text message, SMS, and then looking at our own products as well. So if you've got product that you want to scale or you just want to have a conversation, let us know.

Chris Williamson 1:07:47 Peace. Dude, it's always a pleasure-

George Mack 1:07:50 Cool