The Uber Eats To OnlyFans Pipeline

Chris Williamson 0:00 George, you're a connoisseur of beverages. Would you say so? As you open another carbonated beverage. Well, gentlemen.

George Mack 0:07 Cheers. Oh.

Chris Williamson 0:08 Have you ever had full-fat Coke with salted peanuts in it?

George Mack 0:12 No.

Chris Williamson 0:12 I have not.

0:14 Say less. Uh, take a glass.

George Mack 0:16 Okay.

Chris Williamson 0:16 Thank you.

0:17 Take a Coke, take a peanut. Um, so there's a viral tweet that goes out, "About 30 years ago, I read in a Haruki Murakami essay that in America it's popular to drink cola with peanuts in it. I just went, 'Huh?' And a long time passed since then, but I finally tried it. What the hell is this? It's ridiculously delicious. No kidding. It's at a level where I don't want to drink cola any other way anymore." So we are going to drink-

0:42 Have, have you before, or are we gonna find out?

0:44 I've been... I've saved this. I saw that, and I've been edging myself with fucking-

Guest 0:48 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 0:48 ... cola and peanuts since then.

George Mack 0:50 Is there an order you have to do this in?

Chris Williamson 0:51 Peanuts first?

0:51 I think, uh-

George Mack 0:52 Shit.

Chris Williamson 0:53 That's crazy, right?

0:54 Peanuts first. Peanuts first seems more insane.

George Mack 0:56 Yeah, it's like cereal.

Chris Williamson 0:57 Okay. I've o- I've, I've blown my load early. Hold on. Okay.

Guest 0:59 Kratom last.

Chris Williamson 1:00 Uh, peanuts in Coke is the most accidentally perfect food pairings in history. The chemistry explains why this guy can't go back. Coca-Cola sits at pH 2.5, roughly the same acidity as stomach acid. You... What, what's awful about it?

1:13 We need to show the camera what this looks like. It does not look as good as that photo. [laughs]

1:16 But look at how much it's, look at how much it's fizzing. Anyway, there's a load of signs. Salt on the peanuts suppresses the bitter taste receptors on your tongue, which amplifies your perception of the sweetness you can... without adding a single gram of sugar. The carbonation does two things. CO2 dissolved in liquid forms carbonic acid, which... Uh, wait. So I think we need to leave it. So we're gonna, we're gonna have-

George Mack 1:37 Yeah, I, I agree

Chris Williamson 1:37 ... we're gonna set this down and come back to it. We'll come back to it in, like, I don't know, a little bit.

1:40 Honestly, the f- original Coke like this alone-

1:43 Is pretty good

1:43 ... already would've blown my mind.

1:45 Yeah.

1:45 I haven't had... Have you, like-

George Mack 1:46 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:46 ... have you had this? This is, like, this is kratom. This is actually kratom. [laughs]

1:49 Yeah. Jared, you need, you need this. Don't forget.

George Mack 1:51 You need to have a high, high potency on yours unless you fill it up.

Chris Williamson 1:54 Yeah, no, I gotta fill it up more.

1:55 Yeah. Anyway, so this is, this is... You're a be- a connoisseur of beverages, especially sparkling ones.

2:01 Mm-hmm.

2:01 This is my-

2:01 Should we take a starter sip?

2:02 No, I think we wait.

2:03 Hopefully.

2:03 I think we wait.

George Mack 2:04 Okay.

Chris Williamson 2:04 We're gonna wait for a little bit and then come back to it. Um-

2:06 Mary.

George Mack 2:06 And this doesn't get you high or anything?

Chris Williamson 2:07 Well, no. [laughs]

Guest 2:09 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 2:09 It's the only thing that you're interested in.

George Mack 2:11 He's no longer interested in kratom.

Chris Williamson 2:12 No, no, no, I'm interested in other things as well.

2:14 Okay. All right. [laughs]

George Mack 2:17 What does it do? [laughs]

Chris Williamson 2:19 Question.

George Mack 2:20 Question.

Chris Williamson 2:20 Who do you think is the highest paid athlete of all time?

George Mack 2:25 I know the answer to this.

Chris Williamson 2:27 Okay. Well done.

2:29 One year? All time?

2:30 All time. All time, who's the highest paid athlete?

George Mack 2:33 Um, Michael Jordan.

Chris Williamson 2:35 Ronaldo, Messi, they come to mind.

2:37 Michael Jordan will be second.

George Mack 2:39 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 2:41 Tiger Woods third.

George Mack 2:42 Joey Chestnut.

Chris Williamson 2:44 Arnold Palmer. Bonnie Blue, actually, is probably [laughs] the-

George Mack 2:46 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 2:46 [laughs]

2:46 ... depends what-

George Mack 2:48 Yeah

Chris Williamson 2:48 ... kind of sport you're talking.

George Mack 2:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:49 It is-

George Mack 2:49 Per, per competition.

Chris Williamson 2:50 Yeah, it's real endurance.

George Mack 2:51 Can I throw in a guess out there?

Chris Williamson 2:53 Yeah.

George Mack 2:54 There was a Roman chariot racer-

Chris Williamson 2:56 [laughs]

George Mack 2:56 ... who allegedly made over a billion dollars.

Chris Williamson 2:59 Correct.

George Mack 3:00 You owe us Pullman, 'cause you just-

Chris Williamson 3:01 Yeah. [laughs]

3:02 [laughs]

George Mack 3:02 ... you just predicted what he was gonna say.

Chris Williamson 3:03 He was our history teacher.

George Mack 3:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 3:05 Well, kratom does crazy things to your mind.

3:07 Gaius Appuleius Diocles. Uh-

3:09 [laughs]

3:10 So Michael Jordan has earned $1.8 billion. Tiger Woods, $1.7 billion. Arnold Palmer, $1.4 billion. Jack Nicklaus, $1.2 billion.

George Mack 3:18 Oh, it was $15 billion he made.

Chris Williamson 3:20 $15 billion-

George Mack 3:22 Yeah

Chris Williamson 3:22 ... in today's money.

George Mack 3:24 Wow.

Chris Williamson 3:24 He basically won 35,863,120 sesterces. By some estimation, over $15 billion in 2011.

George Mack 3:34 And that's pure income from the sport?

Chris Williamson 3:37 Income from-

George Mack 3:37 So I assume, 'cause back, back then-

Chris Williamson 3:38 No sponsorship

George Mack 3:38 ... there's probably no sponsorships.

Chris Williamson 3:39 No sponsorship, no.

3:40 Not another shoe deal.

George Mack 3:40 #ad, yeah.

Chris Williamson 3:42 [laughs]

George Mack 3:42 Wow.

Chris Williamson 3:42 Shield, a shield deal. [laughs]

3:43 Yeah, I wonder, I wonder who could have, I wonder who could have offset his Boadicea budget.

George Mack 3:48 Wow.

Chris Williamson 3:49 15 billion, dude. And, uh, the tweet says, "Eat shit, Michael Jordan, you little bitch." [laughs]

3:55 [laughs]

George Mack 3:55 [laughs] Yeah, I think I saw that same thing. That's why I knew that.

Chris Williamson 3:59 That's what I've, that's what I've contributed. That's what I've got to contribute.

4:01 Yeah, you did kind of ruin it by knowing the answer, but-

4:03 No

4:04 ... we'll, we'll let that slide.

George Mack 4:04 Well.

Chris Williamson 4:04 No.

4:05 Do you, do we have a photo of this guy? 'Cause, like-

4:07 Uh, just search that dude, Jared. The fucking Gaius Appuleius Diocles. I'm sure you can spell that.

4:13 [laughs]

George Mack 4:13 It's, uh-

Chris Williamson 4:14 Yeah

George Mack 4:15 ... it's fascinating coming from the UK to the US and seeing how Europe is kind of criticized as being, like, a socialist place, and the US is seen as this-

Chris Williamson 4:23 Right

George Mack 4:23 ... capitalist place. Meanwhile, our sports are more, way more capitalist, and you... I still don't understand how US sports work, where you have... 'Cause I went to go and watch a Miami Heat game, and I searched the guys' salaries, and one guy's on, like, 50 million, and then the rest are on, like, his entire salary combined.

Chris Williamson 4:40 Right.

George Mack 4:40 Which is absurd.

Chris Williamson 4:41 Mm.

4:41 And he can't make more than that. It's capped.

George Mack 4:44 Huh.

Chris Williamson 4:44 Which is un-American, right?

George Mack 4:45 But yeah, why, why... And then you have the whole, um, like draft at the end of the season where whoever finished last gets rewarded the most. Like, it's the most-

Chris Williamson 4:53 Very communist

George Mack 4:53 ... un-American thing. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:54 It's a very communist approach to this.

4:56 Yeah.

George Mack 4:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:56 All right. Should we drink this Coke? Should we see-

George Mack 4:57 Okay, let's go

Chris Williamson 4:57 ... it's been staring at me. All right. Cheers, gentlemen.

4:59 Cheers.

George Mack 4:59 Cheers, cheers. Fucking hell.

Chris Williamson 5:00 Cheers.

George Mack 5:02 Fuck that, mate. Fuck that.

Chris Williamson 5:05 [laughs]

Guest 5:05 Sweet and salty.

Chris Williamson 5:06 Tastes quite a lot like Coke.

5:07 Yeah.

5:08 Should I eat-

5:08 It tastes like Coke, but then I ate the peanuts.

George Mack 5:09 Yeah. It's the, um-

Chris Williamson 5:10 Which was nice.

George Mack 5:11 [laughs] You know what it tastes like? Coke with peanuts.

Chris Williamson 5:15 [laughs] It did not change the flavor at all for me.

George Mack 5:17 No.

Chris Williamson 5:17 Maybe we need to let it sit longer.

5:19 It's less, um, it's less different. May- maybe we need to, yeah.

George Mack 5:20 I think it's more the aesthetic.

Chris Williamson 5:23 Oh, you think that we're, we're... this is an art piece?

George Mack 5:25 Yes. Like, even, even if you made a, um-

Chris Williamson 5:28 It looks like what happens-

5:29 Like, this is a classic

5:29 ... if you eat too much Mexican food.

George Mack 5:30 Yeah. If you, if you had the best Michelin s-

Chris Williamson 5:33 [laughs]

George Mack 5:33 Yes. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 5:37 [laughs]

5:37 It just looks so much like there's too much fucking...

George Mack 5:41 Yeah, look... Huh.

Chris Williamson 5:42 I do enjoy chewing while drinking Coke, so that's good. That's a positive.

5:46 I'm gonna keep going with that.

George Mack 5:47 Yeah. What if you... I mean, couldn't you choke on the peanuts? In theory.

Chris Williamson 5:51 That's always a risk.

George Mack 5:52 Yeah. [laughs]

George Mack 5:54 I have a question for the group that I wanted to ask people on.

Chris Williamson 5:56 Can we get a spoon for this? [laughs]

George Mack 5:57 Um, bullish or bearish on certain trends? So I kinda wanna know, um, trends that are big right now in society or aren't big right now that you think should be bigger. So just give me, um, things that people are maybe particularly, um, popular about right now that you think don't deserve to be, and vice versa.

Chris Williamson 6:15 Overpriced and underpriced?

George Mack 6:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:17 Okay. Uh-

George Mack 6:19 What are things overhyped at the moment? I wanna say AI, but then-

Chris Williamson 6:23 Mm

George Mack 6:23 ... it's probably gonna change the fucking world.

Chris Williamson 6:25 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 6:25 I just feel sick of hearing about it.

Chris Williamson 6:26 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 6:27 I'm kind of sick of hearing permanently about how it's going to be the end of everything or the beginning of everything.

Chris Williamson 6:32 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 6:32 And there's no one that's in the middle. There's no one that's like, "Yeah, AI, AI is pretty cool." It's people who are complete doomers or just like David Friedberg.

Chris Williamson 6:40 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 6:40 Like, there's only two ends of the barbell.

Chris Williamson 6:42 Mm.

George Mack 6:42 But I'd, I would quite like AI to chill out a little bit in terms of everyone-

Chris Williamson 6:46 [laughs]

George Mack 6:46 ... talking about it.

Chris Williamson 6:47 Well, y- I guess we've never lived through a mania like this. I guess the nearest one would've been the internet.

George Mack 6:53 Mm.

Chris Williamson 6:53 Crypto with NFTs was a little bit, but it was different.

George Mack 6:56 Oh, crypto with NFTs was fucking hard, dude. That would've been top of my list.

Chris Williamson 6:59 Mm.

Shaan Puri 7:00 But I think a lot of sensible people were skeptical about NFTs for sure, aspects of crypto. Whereas I feel like, you know, uh, AI right now, I mean, even the people who are doomers, they're not saying AI sucks. They're saying it's too powerful. It's either this is so powerful, life is gonna be amazing-

George Mack 7:20 Mm

Shaan Puri 7:21 ... or this is so powerful, life is, like, over for us. And nobody's really, nobody really like, "Hey, this is, ah, it's, it's just a flash in the pan." Like, in the early-

George Mack 7:28 Mm

Shaan Puri 7:28 ... internet, there's famous articles where it's like, "The internet won't amount to anything. This is a, a fancy fax machine." There's, you know, there's articles you can go pull up now and mock people. I feel like with AI, we kind of all know.

George Mack 7:40 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:41 Hmm. What about you? What do you think's-

George Mack 7:42 Well, I'm getting really into, um, uh, metaverse real estate. It's, it's the place... Now, now's the time to get in, so I'm buying up a lot of land. I've got a place next to Snoop Dogg.

Chris Williamson 7:50 This feels, this feels a little bit like kicking a dead body whilst it's on the ground-

George Mack 7:53 Mm

Chris Williamson 7:53 ... and saying that you killed it.

George Mack 7:54 Mm.

Chris Williamson 7:55 Do you know what I mean? You can't say the metaverse is overhyped when it's already dead. You know that Simpsons meme where it's like, "Stop! Stop! He's already dead!"

George Mack 8:04 [laughs] Don't see you hanging a Bored Ape up in here, do you?

Chris Williamson 8:06 [laughs]

George Mack 8:07 So there you go. You-

Chris Williamson 8:07 Why don't you talk about your cryptos?

George Mack 8:08 You know, here, here's actually a weird one that I was... I, I did all right on that toad.

Chris Williamson 8:12 [laughs]

George Mack 8:12 Did all right on that toad, did he? All right. Um, you can look it up on chain as well, actually, so-

Chris Williamson 8:19 [laughs] You have to verify it

George Mack 8:19 ... there's no, there's no fraud there. There's no lies. You can, you can verify-

Chris Williamson 8:22 There's a protocol if you own it

George Mack 8:22 ... my NFT activity. Good stuff.

Chris Williamson 8:24 Yeah.

George Mack 8:24 Um, you know, one that I'm weirdly... 'Cause I was thinking about, there's lots of stuff you could say where it's almost trite, right? So you go, "AI's gonna change the world," and it's like most people will probably agree with that, so therefore it's kind of a neutral statement. And I was thinking, well, what are people, what's cliche to be bearish on right now? And then what's the bullish take for that?

Chris Williamson 8:40 Right.

George Mack 8:41 My two big ones are, number one, the mainstream media. I'm ridiculously bullish in the next five years on the power-

Chris Williamson 8:48 I'm bullish on mainstream

George Mack 8:49 ... that mainstream media has. Um, which is, like, the, oh, it's kinda like don't go to college kind of statement, whereas it's kind of saying almost the opposite now of go to college. Mainstream media in particular, this is... It's almost like they have the highest value audience in the world because nobody I know listens to mainstream media, and that's kind of part of-

Chris Williamson 9:07 Mm-hmm

George Mack 9:07 ... the joke, except Donald Trump, except Keir Starmer, except Macron. Like, we was at dinner the other night, won't say who, but with somebody who, um, used to work in the cabinet in the UK, and one of my favorite questions to ask people, apart from that question previously, is when you meet somebody who knows a lot about of an industry of you've worked in this thing for ages, what do, like, layman's like me just not appreciate that's really fascinating on the inside? And he paused for a while to answer the question about what it's like being inside Number 10, and the thing he, uh, reiterated was how much of the conversation is shifted by what's on the BBC or what's on The Guardian, and you kind of see this with Trump a little bit now when he'll address, um... He'll know, like, each news reporter-

Chris Williamson 9:50 What's his name? [laughs]

George Mack 9:51 ... by name, and it's like meanwhile the, nobody reads this. Nobody consumes this, but it still has such an impact on policy.

Chris Williamson 9:56 Hmm. You've got little rivalries-

George Mack 9:57 Yes

Chris Williamson 9:57 ... with, "Oh, that's such and such from the lame times" or whatever the fu- And I'm like, "Who the fuck?"

George Mack 10:01 Yes.

Chris Williamson 10:02 Yeah.

George Mack 10:02 And, and likewise, um, in Number 10, the amount of reactionary time just goes to what's on the headlines that nobody's reading really, apart from a few geriatric 65-year-olds. Therefore, there's still, it's kind of weirdly underpriced.

Chris Williamson 10:14 Well, there's, there's always gonna be prestige in the mainstream media because there's a limited amount of time and a limited amount of space. Anybody can make a YouTube channel, which is awesome and subversive and rebellious and whatever, but also that means anyone can make it, so there's no prestige associated with doing it.

George Mack 10:29 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:30 There's only 24 hours in the day on CBS, so if you get 15 minutes of that day, implicitly you're being given something.

George Mack 10:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:38 There's a kind of prestige with it. That being said, has anyone ever watched Discovery Life?

George Mack 10:43 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 10:44 You ever seen Discovery Life?

George Mack 10:45 Uh-uh.

Chris Williamson 10:46 Discovery Channel Life?

George Mack 10:47 No.

Chris Williamson 10:47 So I'm fucking training in the gym, and there's so many different TV screens. Brand-new gym, so apparently everybody needs to watch... It's like a, a three-year-old playing Subway Surfer whilst watching TikTok at the same time-

George Mack 10:59 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 10:59 ... so fucking screens everywhere. And I'm looking over, and there's a, a lovely lady on TV, Black lady, like, nicely dressed, a floral, floral outfit thing, and she is having, um, one of her own fingernails extracted from behind her own ear, like, at 10:00 AM in the morning.

George Mack 11:19 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 11:19 Uh, Discovery Life is an American cable, uh, television network. Uh, the channel primarily focuses on reality programming dealing with life events. Its programming targets a female audience, blah, blah. It, it, it is fucking medical emergencies at 10:00 in the morning, and I'm watching this, like, five-inch long pair of tweezers extract this very nice lady's fingernail from behind her own fucking eardrum.

George Mack 11:42 Ooh.

Chris Williamson 11:42 Like, I'm trying to do bicep curls, and it cut from that to the next one, and it was someone's ribs being punctured.

George Mack 11:51 Mm.

Chris Williamson 11:52 Fucking 10:30 in the morning. Only in America would it be... Like, healthcare's become basically a competitive sport-

George Mack 11:58 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 11:59 ... now that you can fucking broadcast on the internet. So I don't know. I, I, I feel like this is the sort of thing you would've watched at an afterparty.

Shaan Puri 12:05 I, I've never seen that.

George Mack 12:07 I had this realization. I'm trying to find it now, but I, I wrote about it ages ago, which was I was once similar to you in the gym working out, and the news was on, and it was just like, "This number of people have died in-

Chris Williamson 12:18 Yeah

George Mack 12:18 ... Ukraine today. This number of people have died in Gaza today. Um, and then take these pills." And I was like [both laughing] ... And I imagined it of, like-If this was a bloke that was in the gym that was saying this-

Chris Williamson 12:32 He's locked up

George Mack 12:32 ... or it was a friend, I'd be like, "I'm never speaking to you ever again." And it's like when you begin to personalize it like that, it's just you view it so differently.

Chris Williamson 12:43 Except it would be a guy that was shouting it to the entire room.

George Mack 12:46 Yes.

Chris Williamson 12:46 He wouldn't even be saying it to you specifically. He'd just be saying, "This Black lady had an, had, had her fingernail caught behind her eardrum. Do you want me to tell you about the lady that took it out of her?"

Gary Faust 12:55 Well, I work out at Planet Fitness, so we have people like that. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 12:59 You've actually seen this happen live.

Gary Faust 13:01 I know it. Yeah, yeah. There's, like, homeless people in there wigging out while we're, while we're all trying to get fit, and, um, it's good motivation.

Chris Williamson 13:09 To be able to run away at any moment.

Gary Faust 13:10 And that's about all it is [laughs] is holy shit, I need to make more money and work out somewhere else.

Shaan Puri 13:13 Is it Planet Fitness, like, with your membership comes, like, free pizza or something?

Gary Faust 13:17 Dude, yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri 13:17 Like, there's a pizza slice-

Gary Faust 13:18 Yeah

Shaan Puri 13:18 ... station at the gym.

Gary Faust 13:20 Yeah, so you don't get the pills, but you do get a Tootsie Roll. It is... It's, it's embarrassing, dude. I, I need to get a different gym. [laughs] I... Dude, it's interesting that you say that, though, about being bullish on mainstream media because they basically have hit the basement-

Chris Williamson 13:37 Mm-hmm

Gary Faust 13:38 ... in terms of really everything.

Chris Williamson 13:40 Right.

Gary Faust 13:40 So there's no way you could think they're gonna do worse in my opinion.

Chris Williamson 13:43 You couldn't be more bearish.

Gary Faust 13:45 Yeah. So you're correct.

George Mack 13:46 Well, I'll give you ano- on hitting the basement right now, um, one that I would buy the shit out of is the United Kingdom. Everybody right now, the UK literally I think yesterday the news came out around it's, like, the worst, um, economic change in terms of the bond rating. Like, the doom and gloom around the UK is so strong right now, but you just go, it's we're the GOAT. Like, it's-

Chris Williamson 14:06 Hang on. Are you gonna say never bet against the UK?

George Mack 14:08 No, no, no. Long term, yes. Long term, yes.

Chris Williamson 14:11 [laughs]

George Mack 14:11 Just from, just from even if they do nothing again, just from a pure IP perspective, like, just what you ha- Like, I always think... I was getting in an argument today with Claude, um, in the car. Um, and sometimes I'll u- I'll, like, bounce between Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok. That's my, like, hack.

Chris Williamson 14:23 That's like when, that's like when one of your side pieces won't put out.

Gary Faust 14:28 [laughs]

George Mack 14:30 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 14:30 You pivot to another one.

Gary Faust 14:31 Holy shit. That's accurate.

Chris Williamson 14:32 It's like, I went, I went to dad and he said no. Mom.

Gary Faust 14:35 Yeah. [laughs] Exactly.

George Mack 14:36 Well, I posed the question to Claude, and I'm interested in your guys' take on this, of who's had more... Who's more impactful to the world, the Roman Empire or United Kingdom? And I think it's the United Kingdom pound for pound. I think pound for pound, we're one third the size of Texas, and, like, who can... Who, who's managed to, um, do this level of output that we've managed to do? Which is a very un-British thing to say.

Chris Williamson 14:57 Really living on fucking borrowed time though, mate.

George Mack 14:58 No, not really. Not really.

Chris Williamson 15:00 When was the last thing we did that was cool?

George Mack 15:01 Um, DeepMind. AI. Like, the whole AI industry comes out of essentially London.

Chris Williamson 15:06 How many people do you think know that?

George Mack 15:07 Um, th- this is it. We're basically the technical-

Gary Faust 15:09 I didn't know that.

George Mack 15:10 The way of viewing UK to the US is like we're the technical guy that makes no money and comes up with all the ideas, and then these guys are just great at sales and marketing.

Chris Williamson 15:17 Marketing and marketing. [laughs] Yeah.

George Mack 15:17 Like, you can do, um, uh, AI, essentially the UK. You could do Tim Berners-Lee, the internet. You could do, um... I mean, I don't know if this is fully true, but because maybe he's such a genius that he thought this through, but Bitcoin whitepaper wr- written in, um, British English, the correct English.

Shaan Puri 15:33 Oh, come on.

George Mack 15:34 So-

Shaan Puri 15:34 We don't know who he is. Can't do that

George Mack 15:35 ... we don't know who he is, but there's a little bit-

Shaan Puri 15:36 He's Indian for sure

George Mack 15:36 ... there's a little bit of something there probably. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 15:38 He's probably of South Asian Indian. Yeah.

George Mack 15:41 But, like, if you look at, um... Yeah, if you wanna keep going back, I always had this thing of if God had, um, like, top trumps of greatest country, um, and, like, each country tries to play their hand, it's, it... The UK is a very tough one to compete with.

Chris Williamson 15:54 Very dwindling, though. Like, when you think about what the market's trend is at the moment.

George Mack 15:59 Newtonian physics still-

Shaan Puri 16:00 He's big on mainstream media too

George Mack 16:01 ... still working.

Chris Williamson 16:01 But he's fucking 500 years old.

George Mack 16:03 But if you- I'm talking about the history of civilized... W- Roman Empire, what're the Italians doing? But the Roman Empire still gets a lot of credit these days.

Chris Williamson 16:10 Whoa. [laughs]

George Mack 16:10 But I just think, um-

Chris Williamson 16:11 Yeah

George Mack 16:11 ... going back to the question, um, I'm bullish on the UK, um, just, just in terms of pure IP, um, and impact on the world.

Chris Williamson 16:19 But bullish would suggest that you'd invest in it.

George Mack 16:22 Yes.

Chris Williamson 16:22 What, w- with money actually?

George Mack 16:24 I put it all into the metaverse. I've got the, uh, Steve Jobs.

Chris Williamson 16:26 [laughs]

George Mack 16:27 So, yeah.

Shaan Puri 16:28 Metaverse, CNN.

Chris Williamson 16:29 Yeah.

George Mack 16:30 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 16:30 Bridgerton.

Chris Williamson 16:31 Yeah.

Gary Faust 16:31 What do you think about Claude?

George Mack 16:33 What do you mean? The-

Gary Faust 16:33 Do, do you like it?

George Mack 16:34 The AI?

Gary Faust 16:35 Yeah.

George Mack 16:35 I personally think each, each different AI slightly different, so I'll use what... I, you might know if somebody's created this yet. What I want, and I kind of, I did this, but then I couldn't be bothered actually turning it into a product, which I just want a group chat where I can post something in there, they all reply, and then they roast one another back and forth in the replies. What's the best-

Chris Williamson 16:51 Do you not call it a GAN? It's a GAN, isn't it? General Adversarial Network. That's what that's called. So-

Gary Faust 16:55 Look at the big brain on Chris.

Chris Williamson 16:56 I know. Thank you

Gary Faust 16:57 That was amazing. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 16:57 Yeah. Big, big fucking... That's it. Um, uh, Jim O'Shaughnessy's got it for his super crazy fucking AI thing.

George Mack 17:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:05 And, uh, he said, yeah, they can get all of the different models to argue with each other behind the scenes, and then whoever has the best answer for this one does it.

Shaan Puri 17:12 When you use Grok, they show it, so that if you use, like, Heavy Grok or Super Grok or whatever Elon calls it, you ask a question and Agent 1 pops up, he starts talking. "I think what he wants to know is blah, blah, blah." Agent 2 comes in-

Gary Faust 17:23 Right

Shaan Puri 17:23 ... "Well, that wouldn't really be fully accurate. He should really be thinking about this," Agent 3. And it'll show up to six-

Gary Faust 17:27 The thought process as it goes

Shaan Puri 17:28 ... 15 or 16 agents basically, like-

Chris Williamson 17:30 Within the same AI. What you're talking about-

Shaan Puri 17:32 Within the same AI

Chris Williamson 17:32 ... is you want Claude arguing with ChatGPT arguing with fucking Opus arguing with da, da, da.

George Mack 17:37 Yes. Like, literally a group

George Mack 17:38 chat.

Chris Williamson 17:38 Jared, pull up that New York Post article that I sent you. "Stressed Gen Z is carrying around anxiety bags with tools to calm their nerves. Uh, Hannah Fowles was spiraling. It'd been a grueling day at work, and by the time the 22-year-old from Provo, Utah, got home, panic was bubbling in her chest, and thoughts raced as her cheeks flushed red. 'I was starting to get super overheated. I couldn't calm myself down,' Fowles told The Post. 'Nothing that I normally do, like breathing exercises or lying down in a dark room, was wo- working.' Then she saw the bag."

Gary Faust 18:06 [laughs]

George Mack 18:06 Jesus Christ.

Chris Williamson 18:08 "Just weeks earlier, Fowles and her therapist had put together a small g- grab-and-go kit filled with items to calm her when anxiety strikes. And, uh, she flicked on a small portable fan, letting the cool air wash over her face, pressed a cold pack to the back of her neck, while on the other hand, she gripped a spiky fidget toy, feeling its prongs dig into her palm as the panic began to ebb." Now, well, I, I know what you wanna do. What you wanna do is make fun of these people for having... Look how it's an EDC bug out bag that, like, military guys have, but for Gen Z, Gen Z people. What I wanna know, what I wanna know is what would be in your anxiety bag?

Gary Faust 18:42 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 18:43 Gary.

Gary Faust 18:44 Well, I actually have one of those bags. It's called a bag of drugs, Chris.

Chris Williamson 18:47 [laughs]

Gary Faust 18:47 Thank you for asking me. Uh-Yeah, just, uh

Chris Williamson 18:52 Five grams of whole leaf kratom?

Gary Faust 18:53 D- we got kratom, we've got some amphetamines in there, we've got nootonics, we've got valiums

Chris Williamson 18:59 But it's gonna help the anxiety or just-

Gary Faust 19:01 Oh, no, I'm just addicted to drugs. [laughing] But, um, no, this is, this is, uh...

Chris Williamson 19:07 What was the question? [laughs]

Gary Faust 19:08 I don't think you should make fun of people like this though, because it's not really their fault that they're being sort of conditioned to have this obsession with mental health.

Chris Williamson 19:17 It's, it-

Gary Faust 19:17 That's my theory about it

Chris Williamson 19:18 ... that's exactly, that's exactly what I said

Shaan Puri 19:19 Like you take DEI. DEI starts from a good place. Hey, we should include more people. We should be e- more equitable. Everyone should get a sh- fair o- opportunity and a shot. But then these movements can get hijacked, and the movements can get hijacked and stretched until the point where it doesn't really resemble where it started. I don't... You guys see this thing with the Canadian politician who was using the LGBTQ acronym?

Chris Williamson 19:39 Yeah, but it's-

Shaan Puri 19:39 But it was like 14 letters long

Chris Williamson 19:40 ... it's, what is it? Murdered and missing women and chil- indigenous women and chil- MM-

Shaan Puri 19:45 Yeah, Jared pulled that up. You know that?

Chris Williamson 19:45 ... MMISJ.

Shaan Puri 19:47 Did you see this?

Gary Faust 19:47 Uh-uh.

Chris Williamson 19:47 It's a full sentence long, and, uh-

Shaan Puri 19:50 No, listen to this

Chris Williamson 19:50 ... it's, it-

Shaan Puri 19:51 She, she's giving a press conference, and she [chuckles] stands there and she just, with a straight face says she wants to express her like, you know, condolences or whatever to the MMIWG2SL, there's a number in there, 2SLGBTQQIA+. And she just says that with a straight face, and then people were like, "What, what the hell was all that?" And it's like, includes like murder victims, murderers-

Chris Williamson 20:14 Murdered, missing women and children, indigenous people, like two spir- the two is for two spirit, which is like... Yeah, like-

Shaan Puri 20:22 Double, double spirit

Chris Williamson 20:23 ... A, A is in there, which is asexual. So here it is.

Gary Faust 20:26 Holy shit, that's long.

Speaker 20:28 Was released, I was shocked to find out that Prime Minister Carney is cutting $7 billion between Indigenous Services Canada and Crown Indigenous Relations. They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.

Chris Williamson 20:48 That's impress- That's impressive.

Shaan Puri 20:49 That was honestly great.

Chris Williamson 20:50 That's really actually... She, uh, you... She runs it back.

Speaker 20:53 Indigenous women across this country, Indigenous women, girls, 2SLGBTQQIA+.

Shaan Puri 20:59 Oh, dude. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 21:01 It's fucking wild.

Gary Faust 21:01 So good.

Shaan Puri 21:02 She's not reading off anything.

Chris Williamson 21:03 No, she's-

Shaan Puri 21:03 That's off the dome.

Chris Williamson 21:04 Yeah. She's like-

Gary Faust 21:05 Off the dome.

Shaan Puri 21:05 That's Eminem

Chris Williamson 21:06 ... she's like, she's like the fucking Harry Mack [laughing] of coming up with acronyms. You know that dude that fu- he's like-

Gary Faust 21:12 Oh

Chris Williamson 21:12 ... "Shout out three words," and it's like, "Umbrellas, steaks, shoes."

Gary Faust 21:16 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 21:16 And he like f- freestyle raps an entire thing about it.

Gary Faust 21:19 The, the Jay-Z. And they're serious about this too. That's not even a joke.

Chris Williamson 21:21 You know, you-

Gary Faust 21:22 That's what's insane

Chris Williamson 21:22 ... no, this is not SNL. This is like-

Shaan Puri 21:23 But on, on your mental health point, I, if-

Gary Faust 21:26 Well, th- this is why this, the, it's...

Shaan Puri 21:28 But I think what ends up happening is you end up w- with these swings, you can then have a swing so far the other way-

Gary Faust 21:34 Overcorrect

Shaan Puri 21:35 ... where it's like, I mean, everybody's known somebody who's taken their own life, right? Like it's, uh, that side of things is like serious.

Gary Faust 21:40 Totally.

Shaan Puri 21:40 The problem with a lot of these things is you get to like a lot of the root of human experiences, which is like ironically a little bit of that, but so much of it is around the language that we use.

Gary Faust 21:49 Mm.

Shaan Puri 21:49 And within mental health, you've bundled up so much that you've bundled up seven billion individuals.

Chris Williamson 21:55 Mm.

Shaan Puri 21:55 And it's become such a black and white term. Whereas I always use the example, like diabetes is quite an interesting one, right? Because you have type 1 diabetes, which is a genuine medical condition that somebody's had, um, from birth, and then you have type-

Gary Faust 22:09 Genetic

Shaan Puri 22:10 ... type 2 diabetes, which is a little bit more, it's a lot more your choice and your environment.

Gary Faust 22:15 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 22:15 And it feels like you don't have that kind of nuance around that.

Chris Williamson 22:17 Yeah, I'm gonna try and, I'm gonna try and just speed run my diabetes with this. This is getting better, by the way.

Gary Faust 22:21 [laughs] Yeah. Actually.

Chris Williamson 22:23 It's getting better. Try it again.

Shaan Puri 22:25 Coke on the nuts.

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Shaan Puri 23:42 You, you do have, um, like some of these language hacks that like exist. I, I always joke that like cybersecurity, nobody takes it serious as an industry because the naming's just awful. Like, and the biggest thing the cybersecurity industry could do is no new technology, if they just branded it as CTIs, like taking it from STIs, like computer transmitted infections. All of a sudden I'm like, I feel a little bit more-

Gary Faust 24:04 Dirty

Shaan Puri 24:04 ... calm about it. And likewise, the homeless problem right now, how many people who are, um, are homeless, i- is that the main cause? It's often it'll be some, ironically, some serious mental health issue that's going on.

Gary Faust 24:14 Oh, yeah.

Shaan Puri 24:14 So like the language that we use-

Gary Faust 24:15 You spend a lifetime interviewing these people. I've interviewed so many homeless people, dude. Half of them want to be homeless, and I'm... And to be quite frank, I don't really blame them. If you wanna go live in the woods, as long as you're not like murdering and raping-

Shaan Puri 24:24 Why would, why would somebody want to be, why would somebody want to be homeless?

Gary Faust 24:27 W- because they're not being tethered to this system that we're all living within that is currently kinda going down the drain.

Shaan Puri 24:34 Huh.

Gary Faust 24:34 I mean, I don't, I don't really blame them. That thing that we just pulled up though is exactly why people aren't taking mental health seriously anymore though, because there's a fucking, in that, what's it called? The DSVM III or whatever. There's a, there's a disease for everything.

Chris Williamson 24:47 Right.

Gary Faust 24:48 You know?

Shaan Puri 24:48 So, yeah, but you, 'cause you-

Gary Faust 24:49 Like, for example, when I was growing up, I got diagnosed all sorts of shit, but really I was just a little asshole, and-

Chris Williamson 24:55 [laughs]

Gary Faust 24:55 ... when you, when you start saying, "I got ADHD," or, "I'm bipolar," or, "I got borderline," or you got this or that or whatever, you knowI got a, I got a crutch I can lean on for every-

Chris Williamson 25:05 Mm

Gary Faust 25:05 ... single fucking shitty thing I do to somebody, which is awesome.

Chris Williamson 25:09 There's a-

Gary Faust 25:09 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 25:10 There's a great, a great line that someone said to me, which was, "Mental health is both under-diagnosed and over-diagnosed."

Gary Faust 25:15 Mm, mm.

Chris Williamson 25:16 There's people who don't have it that just live through it-

Gary Faust 25:18 Dude

Chris Williamson 25:19 ... and don't know, and people who don't have it that make it their entire personality.

Gary Faust 25:22 All the people that actually have serious mental health problems that I'm at least friends with are mostly undiagnosed, and they're just kind of, you know, wandering through life.

Chris Williamson 25:32 Trying to make do.

Gary Faust 25:33 Yeah, dude. Seriously.

Chris Williamson 25:34 But I, I th- I agree with you, and I, I think, uh, it's easy to be, like, callous or whatever, like, flippant about these, the people that have been diagnosed or self-diagnosed or found their sort of mental health become more fragile. They don't wanna be fucked. Like, they don't, they don't want to be that fragile. They're just trying to hold onto some sense of certainty, and the certainty is now come from their, uh, diagnosis rather than their agency. Like, they just can't-

Gary Faust 25:58 Yeah

Chris Williamson 25:58 ... make that thing happen.

Gary Faust 25:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:59 They're in a world that seems to pedestalize... You know, I, I mean, there's even a trend on Instagram of people having their mental health maladies in their bio. You know, like chicks-

Gary Faust 26:10 Yeah

Chris Williamson 26:10 ... do, like, a status symbol

Gary Faust 26:11 Like Jesus in bio.

Chris Williamson 26:12 Or y- you do pronouns. It's th- these are my maladies because that's where they're trying to find some sense of identity, and they w- I don't think they want that.

Gary Faust 26:21 Well, yeah, and I-

Chris Williamson 26:21 It fucking sucks for those people 'cause-

Gary Faust 26:22 That's because, uh, like I was saying, the same reason homeless people are like, "Yeah, I'm, I'm checked out of this thing," it's because they don't fit into the system really because the system's just not working, you know. A- and I'm using this, this, uh, this system just as, like, a generality because, uh, it is so massive. But when you have people that are, like, not fitting into it, they wanna find a community within the other people that are all-

Chris Williamson 26:49 Not fitting in as well

Gary Faust 26:49 ... fucked up in the head, you know. I mean-

Chris Williamson 26:50 Yeah

Gary Faust 26:51 ... it's the same reason why drug a- drug addicts all hang out together. And I think drug addiction is another thing that's mis, uh, diagnosed. Like, uh, so if you're-

Chris Williamson 27:00 What do you mean misdiagnosed drug addiction? [laughs]

Gary Faust 27:01 Like, uh, or I didn't, I didn't, I guess I didn't say that well. People that ha- are drug addicts, which can, I think, pretty much happen to anybody. Certain people are probably more predis- disposed to it, but people that are drug addicts get misdiagnosed as having some sort of mental health problem. But really they're just on drugs and then off of drugs. They're withdrawing, then they're high again.

Chris Williamson 27:24 Like when you kicked off at your video guy.

Gary Faust 27:27 Yeah. So the first thing I wanna bring to the table for today is kratom. Uh, kratom is something I've been looking into because there's, uh, I think sort of an epidemic happening. And, uh, th- there's a video we got here that I can, I can have pulled up. This is the guy I'm working with who I wigged out on the other day 'cause he didn't buy me $10 of kratom, and I, I quit the doc-

Chris Williamson 27:50 Huh?

Gary Faust 27:50 ... because of that. Yeah, this stuff's strong.

Chris Williamson 27:52 Yes.

Gary Faust 27:52 Like, so what he's talking about for, to contextualize all this, is 7-OH is 7-Hydroxymitragine, which is one of the, um, I, I guess it, we could just call it a chemical that's in here. I don't know the science behind it. We're gonna go actually interview a, like, a chemist about this stuff. But basically, people are taking kratom, which is sold over the counter at gas stations and head shops, and there's even kratom shops. But it is a leaf that's from Southeast Asia that sort of mimics the effects of certain stimulants but also opioids. It acts on your opioid receptors and SSRIs, and I think, I, I know a handful of people that have gotten very addicted to it, and they're saying that it is, the withdrawal is worse than heroin, which is-

Chris Williamson 28:40 Wow

Gary Faust 28:41 ... pretty unbelievable [laughs] given that heroin withdrawal is horrendous.

Chris Williamson 28:45 And that's it there?

Gary Faust 28:46 Yeah, man. I should've brought some for everybody.

Chris Williamson 28:49 So [laughs] , but you're just drinking that?

Gary Faust 28:51 Yeah. This is a lower dose than I was doing.

Chris Williamson 28:53 Like, you're telling me it's, like, worse than heroin, but you're just casually-

Gary Faust 28:55 So, so here's the thing, though. So there's a difference between... And I'm still in the process of figuring all this out. Um, and it-

Chris Williamson 29:02 Literally

Gary Faust 29:03 ... it literally, yeah. I, so I was drinking a bunch of this stuff every day for the past month, and then I sort of wigged out on my, my documentary partner because, uh, we [laughs] got... Yeah, it'll be in the doc. But, uh, there's, um, there's, we were at a head shop, and I was like, "Hey, dude, let's get some of this kratom. I wanna test this stuff out." And there's these thing, there's 7-OH pills, which is b- it's, like, almost like Percocet basically, and it's sold over the counter, which is nuts. I mean, I'm not, I'm not bashing it necessarily, but it's interesting. It's sort of the Wild West of this drug, and it's not, it's not like it's a new thing. They tried banning this in 2016. The reason I'm bringing it up is because we're doing this documentary, and I think that we're on the verge of potentially an epidemic with, uh-

Chris Williamson 29:46 Wow.

Gary Faust 29:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:47 This has been... I, I've seen this in Austin since I basically got here. So there's a few, uh, small glass vials, you know, like a 5-Hour Energy.

Gary Faust 29:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:55 And there was a company that was making them, and one of my friends had another guy who'd been addicted. He'd had whatever the addiction gene is, addicted to every different drug throughout his entire life. There's even YouTube channels of these people, and they'll say, "Which drug fucked my life up the most?" And they'll just list every drug 'cause they tried everything.

Gary Faust 30:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:11 And they're like, "Well, coming off LSD was actually not that bad, but I had this period where I was on MDMA every single day for, like, two months, and that was really, really rough 'cause my serotonin and da, da, da, da, da, da." And, uh, he said of all of the things that he tried, the hardest to get off of was kratom.

Gary Faust 30:27 Wow.

Chris Williamson 30:27 And then he knew so much. At 6:00 in the morning, the Sunrise Mini Mart on whatever, fucking South Lamar Street or something-

Gary Faust 30:35 Holy shit

Chris Williamson 30:35 ... he was outside, like, waiting, like-

Gary Faust 30:37 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 30:38 ... waiting for this. And then this company had taken their, uh, the kratom content without changing the bottling from five grams of whole leaf to two and a half, and he knew. And as soon as he had it, he was like, "My fucking kratom's been stepped on." He li- felt like-

Gary Faust 30:52 From the Mini Mart.

Chris Williamson 30:53 Yeah. It was the f-

Gary Faust 30:54 Yeah

Chris Williamson 30:54 ... the Sunrise Mini Mart had stepped on his, or whatever, the, the company that was making this because these people aren't treating it like a supplement, that it's so psychoactive.

Gary Faust 31:02 And, uh, okay.The one thing I guess I didn't explain very well is that there's a difference between, like, the pure kratom leaf powder and the stuff that has the 7-OH in it, which is the synthesized version. The, and the reason I didn't explain that very well is because it's kinda confusing. But kratom leaf itself, I mean, you can still get addicted to it, but the 7-OH stuff is what's fucking people up.

Chris Williamson 31:22 Okay.

Gary Faust 31:23 For reference, just 'cause I know some- somebody that's addicted to kratom is gonna watch this and be like, "That son of a bitch blasphemed, uh-

Chris Williamson 31:29 [laughs]

Gary Faust 31:29 ... my kratom."

Chris Williamson 31:30 Yep.

Gary Faust 31:31 So that is, uh-

Chris Williamson 31:32 But the 7-OH is the really gnarly stuff.

Gary Faust 31:34 Yeah. So that's, I'm gonna get some of those pills [laughs] and start taking them. But yeah, drinking kratom extract with the 7-OH in it is basically drinking liquid heroin.

Chris Williamson 31:41 What's it feel like?

Gary Faust 31:43 It's very interesting. It's very sneaky. So I was drinking it for a month before I really realized how high I was on it. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 31:49 Have you-

Gary Faust 31:50 Which is kinda-

Chris Williamson 31:50 You've done heroin.

Gary Faust 31:51 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:51 I, so-

Gary Faust 31:52 I'm from Ohio, dude.

Chris Williamson 31:53 So [laughs] um, how, how do they-

Gary Faust 31:57 I know

Chris Williamson 31:57 ... how do they compare? Like-

Gary Faust 31:58 O-H

Chris Williamson 31:58 7-OH

Gary Faust 31:59 H-E-

Chris Williamson 31:59 [laughs]

Gary Faust 32:00 ... R-I-O-N. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 32:01 If you, if you was, if you was personifying them as people, like, how do they, how do they compare, the two? If it was a party.

Gary Faust 32:07 Kratom to heroin?

Chris Williamson 32:08 Yeah, yeah.

Gary Faust 32:09 Well, I mean, I haven't done high levels of the 7-OH stuff yet.

Chris Williamson 32:12 Okay

Gary Faust 32:12 ... but comparatively, the, the kratom drinks that I've been drinking are called Club13 150 MIT, MIT, which is mitragynine. That's the, the drug, I guess, and I was drinking two of those a day, which is, it turns out it's a lot for that. But there's not a lot of 7-OH in it, from what I understand how it works. So I don't have the full scope yet for you.

Chris Williamson 32:35 Yeah.

Gary Faust 32:35 But I would say that heroin is, you know, you're, you're, you, you, you get really high, you feel great, you get that warm feeling in your stomach. You've taken painkillers before, right?

Chris Williamson 32:44 No, not really. No.

Gary Faust 32:45 Okay. Well, good on you, dude.

Chris Williamson 32:46 Yeah.

Gary Faust 32:47 You're better than me.

Chris Williamson 32:47 Yeah. No, no, no. [laughs] Don't mean it in that way.

Gary Faust 32:49 Well, top of the morning.

Chris Williamson 32:49 And you c- you c- [laughs] are you conscious of the experience as you're doing it?

Gary Faust 32:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 32:53 Yeah.

Gary Faust 32:53 You know you're high.

Chris Williamson 32:54 Okay.

Gary Faust 32:55 So the, the, I guess the primary difference would be that when you, when you take kratom, or when I have been, I've been... I, I just didn't even realize how high I was on this stuff.

Chris Williamson 33:04 Uh-huh.

Gary Faust 33:04 Like, I was kinda just in a daze, but you get sort of that euphoric feeling. And I will say that in, in low doses of it, it's sort of more of a stimulant.

Chris Williamson 33:14 Mm-hmm.

Gary Faust 33:14 And then you take more, and you're getting more of an opioid, you know, the, the painkiller-

Chris Williamson 33:19 Sedative type thing?

Gary Faust 33:20 ... sedative feeling.

Chris Williamson 33:20 Isn't that interesting that the curve, how much you take almost inverts the effect?

Gary Faust 33:24 Yeah, it's a nuanced drug, and I've never really experienced that before, which was one of the things that I was gonna say that's, it's sorta sneaky. But the other thing is, and maybe this is just me, uh, [laughs] but I didn't really grasp that I was high as hell on this stuff.

Chris Williamson 33:40 Hmm.

Gary Faust 33:40 And I was, uh, going in sort of thought loops about things. Like, w- I, we had to get, like, a video done, right? And I was just sort of pacing around my house, which I pace a lot already when I think or when I'm on the phone. But I was just sort of going in these thought loops where I was repeating myself, like, kind of even talking to myself and losing it a little bit.

Chris Williamson 33:56 Oh, was there psychosisy?

Gary Faust 33:57 Yeah, dude. And I didn't realize that this was, this drug was that strong-

Chris Williamson 34:01 I see

Gary Faust 34:01 ... because it's sold over the counter. And that's already, I already knew from a number of other people who have gotten addicted to it, 'cause I did some, you know, I put some feelers out there to talk to people. They already told me, like, "Hey, be careful. You're gonna, it's gonna sneak up on you more so than you think."

Chris Williamson 34:16 Are you scared, as somebody who's pretty experienced with drugs, are you scared of the potential of putting yourself into this particular... You're gonna try this 7-OH thing, and it's gonna be amazing for the doc, and it's gonna teach you a lot, and you're gonna be able to empathize with-

Gary Faust 34:29 Yeah

Chris Williamson 34:29 ... the people that are struggling with this. But you are putting your health and life on the line. I'm aware you've done it in other ways a lot, but, like, this, I don't know, it feels like a pretty big dice roll to do that. Is that something that you consider?

Gary Faust 34:41 No. I'm, I'm not really worried about it. I mean, what's gonna happen? I'm gonna have to just withdraw-

Chris Williamson 34:46 Detox.

Gary Faust 34:46 Yeah, I mean-

Chris Williamson 34:47 Yeah

Gary Faust 34:48 ... I'm just gonna... I'm gonna go to Thailand and see where that stuff comes from, though.

Chris Williamson 34:51 Okay.

Gary Faust 34:51 Get the, the real pure shit.

Chris Williamson 34:52 Oh, Jesus Christ. You're going to the m- it's like going to Mordor and deciding to, like-

Gary Faust 34:55 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 34:55 ... fucking stare into the eye of Mount Doom or whatever it is.

Gary Faust 34:57 Yeah, I got, I'll have the, the kratom shot in my hand as I'm looking into the eye of Mordor.

Chris Williamson 35:01 Well, I've done it once.

Gary Faust 35:02 I've done it once as well, when we was in Vegas.

Chris Williamson 35:04 Did, did you get energy from it?

Gary Faust 35:06 So, well, my initial-

Chris Williamson 35:07 What took you to Vegas?

Gary Faust 35:07 My initial onboarding to kratom when you was doing the David Goggins podcast, ironically.

Chris Williamson 35:11 What were you doing [laughs] kratom with David Goggins?

Gary Faust 35:13 I was like, "I don't-"

Chris Williamson 35:14 Hey, why didn't we vlog that?

Gary Faust 35:15 I was like-

Chris Williamson 35:16 I did kratom with David Goggins

Gary Faust 35:17 ... "Give me some pulls, pussy." [laughs]

Chris Williamson 35:17 So for context, I, at the time, like, this is how things change with time. Kratom-

Gary Faust 35:21 That was the week that we did mushrooms

Chris Williamson 35:22 ... yeah, and kra- kratom was seen as, um, um, like a supplement. Uh, like, it, it was seen as a nootropic at the time. That was how it was advertised to me.

Gary Faust 35:28 Yeah, it's, it wasn't looked at like a drug.

Chris Williamson 35:29 I thought it was gonna be a study. I thought I w- I could take it and I could work more.

Gary Faust 35:32 It's mini Adderall.

Chris Williamson 35:32 And I remember, like, going, "This is shit." But then I realized I had no more problems. I was like, "On it. I've got no problems at all." I go, "Why do I always think I have problems? I actually have no problems."

Gary Faust 35:41 [laughs] 'Cause you're high, George.

Chris Williamson 35:43 And then I wanted to g-

Gary Faust 35:44 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 35:46 And then I wanted to get some the next day.

Gary Faust 35:48 Welcome to my world, buddy.

Chris Williamson 35:49 Yeah.

Gary Faust 35:49 No problems.

Chris Williamson 35:49 Why do you think I've got so few problems?

Gary Faust 35:51 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 35:51 It's weird how you go from no problems, and then when it wears off, you've got so many problems.

Gary Faust 35:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:54 Yeah.

Gary Faust 35:54 And then you snap at your-

Chris Williamson 35:55 You have, you have more problems

Gary Faust 35:55 ... your producer, and you're like, "Hey, fuck you, I quit."

Chris Williamson 35:57 Yeah.

Gary Faust 35:58 "Where's the $10 in kratom?" Which it's crazy embarrassing.

Chris Williamson 36:01 Well, I mean-

Gary Faust 36:02 When did you do it?

Chris Williamson 36:03 Uh, so I tried Feel Free, which is, like, this really, really popular company.

Gary Faust 36:07 And that's, for the record, that's one of the companies that's being sort of put under the microscope as, "Hey, this is the not good."

Chris Williamson 36:14 But they're not using the 7-OH, right? That's just whole leaf.

Gary Faust 36:17 I gotta look at the... You know what?

Chris Williamson 36:18 I'm pretty sure.

Gary Faust 36:18 No.

Chris Williamson 36:18 Yeah, pull it up. I'm pretty sure that the, the, this is whole leaf stuff. Anyway, um, I, this is forever ago. This is when I was living in the Airbnb on South Congress.

Gary Faust 36:25 Okay

Chris Williamson 36:26 ... when I first moved here, and, uh, everyone's doing it. Everyone's... It's, it's literally the in school, "Mom, but everyone's doing it." And so I'm like, "Oh, well, fucking everyone's doing it."

Gary Faust 36:34 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 36:35 And I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna try this in the house. I'm gonna try half a bottle." I don't know. I can't remember whether it was five gram, two gram, whatever. Tried it, and it just made me really anxious. Anxious and a little sick for like-

Gary Faust 36:48 Yeah

Chris Williamson 36:48 ... an hour and a half. I watched some Peaky Blinders, and I was like, "That's not for me."

Gary Faust 36:51 And you just drank one bottle of it?

Chris Williamson 36:52 Half a bottle, and I was like, "That's not for me."

Gary Faust 36:54 So a lot of people get a, uh, feel sick to their stomach after they drink it and throw up and stuff like that.

Chris Williamson 36:59 It didn't, it didn't make me feel good. Me and Z did it again when we went to go and see a band, but we didn't realize you are not supposed to drink alcohol on it.

Gary Faust 37:07 Yeah, it'll make you black out. Also, Feel Free has kava in it, too.

Chris Williamson 37:10 Correct.

Gary Faust 37:10 Which-

Chris Williamson 37:11 But it's, uh, only in a, a littleIt might be concentrate. Anyway, so I t- I, I tried it. It didn't agree with me. There's, like, some things where I think, um, I get quite bad hangover. I've always got bad hangovers, but they've gotten worse as I've got older. What you've got, if you are someone who doesn't get hangovers, Sunny Webster, Olympic weightlifter, I remember we once partied till 4:00 in the morning, 4:30 in the morning, and he set off to drive from Newcastle to Edinburgh, 8:00 AM, to go and do a seminar that started at 10:30. He'd had four hours of sleep, drank more than me, and was just up and doing things for the whole mor- and then went and gave an entire seminar and was just fine. I needed to stay in bed the whole day. There's some people for whom the cost versus the benefit, the fucking ratio is just super skewed. They're like, again, they're like the Goget. They're the Bonnie Blue of being able to drink and keep going. [laughs] And-

George Mack 38:01 Dude, don't ever use Bonnie Blue as a reference point. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 38:04 No, she's a, she's a-

George Mack 38:05 You're very much the Virgin Mary of that. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 38:07 Yeah, that's... I am. I am very much. Yeah, I'm the Lily Phillips. I can't take as many. And, uh-

George Mack 38:12 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 38:12 If, if that was, like, if it was not-

George Mack 38:14 Jesus

Chris Williamson 38:15 ... so painful for me, the cost-benefit analysis of drinking would be completely

Chris Williamson 38:19 different.

George Mack 38:19 Mm.

Chris Williamson 38:19 Like we did, both me and you have done a Intelix DNA-

George Mack 38:22 Yes

Chris Williamson 38:22 ... which by the way, this is the fucking sickest shit. Intelix DNA, company that's based here in Austin, but you can do it anywhere in the US. You spit into a tube. Not affiliated, I just think they're fucking sick. Spit into a tube, send it off. They'll give you your full allele genetic profile, and they'll compare you to the population. Hey, you, uh, clear caffeine more slowly.

George Mack 38:44 Mm.

Chris Williamson 38:44 Um, you have a protective gene that's, uh, good for late onset Parkinson's. You have, uh, one which can be a risk for, uh, autism or for this or for that or for the other. And in loads of behavioral stuff like this has been associated with people who have addictive personalities. So I have the, the COMT, uh, gene, which is a, uh, I clear dopamine more slowly. That means that I don't deal with chaos and stress particularly well. But once I start doing something, I get completely fucking obsessed, and I lock in, and I can't stop. It's like literally one of the descriptions was, "May struggle to stop tasks once started."

George Mack 39:19 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 39:19 It's like just the, the gene of an obsessive person.

George Mack 39:21 That sounds pretty cool.

Chris Williamson 39:22 What's sick is once you do it, it's like three grand or something, or maybe three grand?

George Mack 39:25 Uh, roundabout that. It's expensive, but it's worth it.

Chris Williamson 39:27 Three, three, four grand. It's not cheap, but it's like they're never gonna change. This is, my genes are my genes.

George Mack 39:31 So I always wonder with this, did, did you learn things you didn't already know about yourself?

Chris Williamson 39:35 Yes. Yes. Specifically-

George Mack 39:36 Like, 'cause that first one you would know, like, yeah, I, I don't handle this well.

Chris Williamson 39:40 So-

George Mack 39:40 But I do, I am able to obsess over ta- tasks. What-

Chris Williamson 39:43 So I'll, I'll give you... So the way I view these Intelix stuff, and it's like very early days and they're only gonna get better and better, is have you heard about the, uh, Air Force study in the 1950s where they took like 600 Air Force pilots who were already male, certain height, certain build, um, and they tried to build, um, like the average cockpit for all of them. So imagine the more- They tried to make the perfect cockpit- Perfect cockpit ... by aggregating all of the proportions of the pilots

George Mack 40:07 And when they went to test this perfect cockpit that they built, it fit zero.

Chris Williamson 40:12 [laughs]

George Mack 40:12 'Cause av- essentially-

Chris Williamson 40:13 Really?

George Mack 40:13 ... averages are completely bullshit.

Chris Williamson 40:15 No one is average.

George Mack 40:16 Um, only, only, I think for, so it was 12 things that they measured, and only for, only three of them hit 3%, so you can see it here. And even that 3%, it's with a wide range. So the 3% that hit the range, for example, it would be between 5'9" and 6' like that level of range. So then they realized, and obvious- obviously it's so obvious now, but it's way better to just build a customizable cockpit. And I think we'll look back at everything like how we've grown up around the way people talk about studies and magnesium-

Chris Williamson 40:45 Right

George Mack 40:45 ... and vitamin D and vitamin C is just absolute horseshit.

Chris Williamson 40:48 Yeah.

George Mack 40:48 Because what Gary should take is very different to what I should take, and likewise with Chris. So to give you some, to give you some concrete examples, one I was in, I found out I was in the bottom 10% of magni- magnesium absorption for my genetics. So I was like, "Oh, I've got to take way more than if I was to ask anything."

Chris Williamson 41:05 Yeah.

George Mack 41:06 Um, I have a specific gene that I found, which was if I take, um, if I have surgery and they give me morphine, I'm very unlikely to wake up with a regular dose. It will probably kill me, so I've got to let doctors know that beforehand. I'm like, "Oh, that's already paid for the test."

Chris Williamson 41:20 Right.

George Mack 41:20 And then everything built on top of that.

Chris Williamson 41:22 Should have led with that example.

George Mack 41:23 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 41:23 Not magnesium one.

George Mack 41:23 Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Sleeping, sleeping great. That was, um, um...

Chris Williamson 41:27 [laughs]

George Mack 41:27 So you, you, yeah, the, the specifics that you do learn is actually pretty fascinating because then everything gets built on top of that.

Chris Williamson 41:33 Well, give, let me give you this. Uh, the thing that it did for me, I didn't learn a tremendous amount that I didn't already know through experience, but it made all of my preferences feel way more legitimate.

George Mack 41:42 Right. Gave you permission.

Chris Williamson 41:43 Right. Yeah.

George Mack 41:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 41:44 Because I'm like, oh, this is why I like deep house music-

George Mack 41:46 Right

Chris Williamson 41:46 ... because it's quite calming. So one of the coolest things, both of us did it, put it into your LLM, put all of your labs in as well, and it gives a different context. The coolest thing that I did, kind of useless, but again, made me feel more legitimate with my life direction.

George Mack 41:58 Right.

Chris Williamson 41:58 It was like, um, I've just done it again now to my ChatGPT project. Imagine that you know nothing about me. Erase all of the information that you have. Exclusively based on my DNA genetic test, what sort of a person am I? And it comes back, and it is fucking banger. Your baseline personality, high drive, high stress operator. Your dopamine and stress genetics, COMT, AA, DBH, SLC, da, da, da, da, da, da. High baseline dopamine and adrenal tone, faster mental processing, strong pattern recognition, but low margin for stress before overload. You become productive, intense, goal-oriented, slightly on edge most of the time, but also prone to overthinking, easily tipped into anxiety under sustained pressure, sensitive to uncertainty and social evaluation. This is not a calm, content temperament. It is a perform or perish nervous system. And it just runs that for everything. Motivation pattern I need to do off and on. I can't do constant low-level stress. And I was like, I already knew this, right? Because you learn things about yourself.

George Mack 42:51 Right.

Chris Williamson 42:51 Both of us have zeroed in on doing meditation. Both of us have zeroed in on relatively early nights, even though both of us have been in previous industries that were way different. And I'm like, I kind of... Club promotion should be fun. Like, I should be in a chaotic environment. I should be in a highly unpredictable environment, but I didn't end up there. And I always felt a little bit off. And as I've zeroed in more and more... So what it did was, I think especially for people that are... maybe looking for more justification about why they're in the lonely chapter. They're struggling to get through, and they're like, "Fuck, like why don't I fit in? Is there something wrong with me?" Not at all. Like, this is just your predisposition.

Gary Faust 43:26 Right.

Chris Williamson 43:26 Now, the problem that you can have, and it's kind of cool that this isn't as widespread as it might be, exactly the same as once you have a name for it, you're gonna live by it. Uh, this could very much become destiny.

Gary Faust 43:40 Right.

George Mack 43:40 Mm-hmm.

Gary Faust 43:40 Cuts both ways.

Chris Williamson 43:41 Yeah, exactly.

George Mack 43:41 I'm way less intrigued in that kind of cold reading description. I'm way more interested in-

Chris Williamson 43:46 [laughs] Cold reading

George Mack 43:47 ... like it's like, uh, you know, the, could've, it could've been like Virgo says this, right? Um, but what I'm fascinated by is, so what's... The strange thing, I've... People have always said I'm very, very similar to my granddad. We have, like, similar hair. I, like, sometimes find myself, like, closing my eyes during meals, and he did that. Like, there's weird things. Um-

Chris Williamson 44:04 You did that at your birthday on Monday.

George Mack 44:05 And I did. Um, and-

Chris Williamson 44:07 Very weird

George Mack 44:07 ... I then, I then put in the thing. I go, "How..." I asked the thing. I go, "If I'm, like, trying to not die here, like, what are my most likely causes of death?" And they go, "Well, your two biggest health concerns are, one, glaucoma, so you'll just kind of gradually go blind, which won't kill you, um, or you'll die of a stroke." My granddad, glaucoma-

Gary Faust 44:22 Full circle

George Mack 44:23 ... and [laughs] dun-dun-

Chris Williamson 44:23 I was gonna say.

George Mack 44:25 Dun-dun, dun-dun, dun-dun. And, um-

Chris Williamson 44:27 [laughs]

George Mack 44:28 ... and stroke. And stroke.

Chris Williamson 44:28 Wow.

George Mack 44:28 Yeah. So, um, it's, if, if you've got the money, spend it.

Chris Williamson 44:31 Fucking sick, dude. It's sick, and, uh, you can have it interpreted by a clinician or whatever, but you can also just do it here. So I, I've just done the same thing. If I was likely to die, what are my most likely causes of death? Cardiovascular disease. Uh, uh, chronic stress-mediated breakdown. Ooh, that's exciting. Neurovascular/neurological issues because of high signaling. Environmental toxin sensitivity. I just fucking got popped by milk.

Gary Faust 44:49 They're gonna clone you.

Chris Williamson 44:51 Yeah, that's true.

Gary Faust 44:52 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 44:52 That is for good. They don't need me.

Gary Faust 44:53 See, I don't need a test like this to know how I'm gonna die.

Chris Williamson 44:56 [laughs]

George Mack 44:56 [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gary Faust 44:58 I know exactly what it's gonna be.

George Mack 44:58 You've got, you've got agency over that, my friend. You've got agency over that.

Gary Faust 45:00 I'm gonna have a heart attack-

Chris Williamson 45:01 Yeah.

Gary Faust 45:01 ... drug-induced heart attack while flying down the highway.

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Chris Williamson 46:09 I need to bring up something that you said at dinner the other evening.

George Mack 46:11 Oh, go on.

Chris Williamson 46:12 Did you say that you think that people remember every porn video that they've ever watched?

George Mack 46:17 No, no, it's this-

Chris Williamson 46:19 [laughs]

George Mack 46:19 [laughs] It's a, it's a private dinner-

Chris Williamson 46:21 [laughs]

George Mack 46:21 ... the people had paid to be there, and you brought it up on the show. No, no, no. My, my thesis is, um, like one big meta criticism I have of the US that nobody warned me about as a Brit, um, is the, the toilets in America. Like, I could be at, like, Dean's, like a very nice restaurant in Austin. I'll be having, like, a, an amazing chat about, like, Kierkegaard. And I think, think about, like, Kierkegaard versus Aristotle, and I'm like, "Da, da, da. Sorry, let me just pop to the loos. Wipe your face a bit." And, like, you go to the loos, and in America, the cubicles, you can see people's feet in them, and the worst thing is there's, like, this slit in every single... And this is nationwide.

Chris Williamson 47:01 You're in the women's.

George Mack 47:02 You can be in the n- you could be in the n- like a billionaire's, like, hotel.

Chris Williamson 47:05 Right.

George Mack 47:05 And there's a slit there, which means with unisex toilets, it's horrific. Like, I don't even go in the unisex toilets for this reasons. You, you look. You can see people kind of just this carousel of them sat down squatting. And yeah, this whole idea that when you watch, like, graphic content, it stores in your brain forever. So I've just got thousands of men around Austin just, like, there, like these carousels of them.

Chris Williamson 47:25 And then you go to the bathroom.

George Mack 47:26 And this is supposed to be-

Gary Faust 47:26 You have the world's worst superpower

George Mack 47:27 ... this is supposed to be the number one country in the world. And, like, this doesn't exist in Europe. This doesn't-

Chris Williamson 47:31 [laughs]

George Mack 47:31 ... exist in the Middle East.

Chris Williamson 47:32 You know what you could do? Do you remember those things, like back in the day, the f- the first, uh, those cycling cylinders, and you look through the slit, and if you spin it, it makes a horse start to move? If you ran really quickly down a very long series of toilets-

George Mack 47:48 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 47:48 ... and you're just looking at these different men at, like, stages of pooping.

George Mack 47:52 It's horrific.

Chris Williamson 47:52 Uh, what-

Gary Faust 47:52 Dude, you know how I know that I'm watching too many graphic videos is because when you said there's a horse that starts to move, I heard there's a whore that starts to move. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 48:02 Jesus.

Gary Faust 48:03 That's not good, man.

George Mack 48:04 Jesus. Every time, like, I speak to a Brit or a European now about coming to America, and they think, like, there's gonna be this chat about the economy, I go, "This is the thing that I've got to warn you about." It's so surreal, and I think about this a lot. Like, one of... You were talking earlier about, like, life hacks. Like, how much of life comes down to compartmentalization, which is why somebody made a great point the other day why meditation apps often don't take off on phones. Because you have your meditation app there, but then you have your strip club, you have, um-

Chris Williamson 48:28 Mm. Gary does

George Mack 48:29 ... yeah, all this kind of [laughs] yeah, all this stuff there. Um, and with these bathrooms, you don't have any compartmentalization. I always say imagine a house. So my friend lives in a 80, um, story apartment building, and we're kind of sat there in his house. I go, "If everything was glass right now, it... This would be h- this would be horrific." But because you have compartmentalization, um, it has such an impact.

Chris Williamson 48:53 Well, your, your, your point is that you would be able to see one dude's taking a dump over there and another dude's banging his girlfriend right there.

George Mack 48:59 Yes. Yeah, yeah, literally just up there, just down there.

Chris Williamson 49:01 But we've made these arbitrary walls-

George Mack 49:03 Yes

Chris Williamson 49:03 ... around us, and-

George Mack 49:03 And it works

Chris Williamson 49:04 ... oh, this is the edge of my safe place-

Gary Faust 49:06 Yeah

Chris Williamson 49:06 ... and the beginning of yours.

George Mack 49:07 I think-

Gary Faust 49:07 I love where we started. You were like, "I have this thesis," and then if you were-

Chris Williamson 49:10 When did we even-

Gary Faust 49:11 ... you just wrote theses-

Chris Williamson 49:11 What did we even talk about?

Gary Faust 49:12 You were talking about somebody said something about porn or, or-

George Mack 49:15 Yeah, you, you brought up a banner

Gary Faust 49:15 ... storing graphics stuff in your brain.

Chris Williamson 49:17 Genetics, porn.

George Mack 49:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:18 Right, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Question.

George Mack 49:19 Go on.

Chris Williamson 49:20 How do you feel about feet? [laughs]

George Mack 49:22 Not a fan.

Chris Williamson 49:23 No?

George Mack 49:24 No. Gross me out.

Chris Williamson 49:25 Okay.

George Mack 49:25 Not a fan.

Chris Williamson 49:25 How do you feel about feet?

Gary Faust 49:26 Pretty much the same as Shaan.

Chris Williamson 49:28 How do you feel about feet?

George Mack 49:28 Well, I have, like, a visceral-

Gary Faust 49:29 I'm totally neutral

Chris Williamson 49:30 ... gross man. Feet neutral?

Gary Faust 49:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 49:32 Okay.

Gary Faust 49:32 In what capacity are we talking about here?

Chris Williamson 49:33 Okay, so there is a woman who does Uber Eats and has started including photos of her feet in the picture of the food drop-off-

George Mack 49:42 Oh, yeah

Chris Williamson 49:42 ... and her tips have gone up by a ton.

George Mack 49:45 [laughs]

Gary Faust 49:47 Nice pedicure.

Chris Williamson 49:47 So this is-

George Mack 49:47 Not mad about it

Chris Williamson 49:47 ... I mean, that, you know, as feet go, that-

Gary Faust 49:49 He said nice pedicure

Chris Williamson 49:50 ... they're perfectly fine feet. Uh, but did not realize that this would blow up fast, and this is the OnlyFans pipeline.

George Mack 49:57 That's it.

Chris Williamson 49:57 Like, as soon as you, as soon as you post something and start to get free money for it, you're like, "Well, if I put my Cash App in here..." And if you scroll down a little bit more, she says, "Get a rotisserie chicken or a pedicure, first rotisserie chicken allowance." There we go.

George Mack 50:10 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 50:10 This is the fucking Only- Uber Eats to OnlyFans pipeline that no one is talking about.

George Mack 50:14 [laughs]

Gary Faust 50:15 Yeah. I mean, the, uh, what's... There's, like, an old joke about what's the... How long does it take for a bot- uh, not a bottle service girl, a strip club waitress to become a stripper? Two weeks.

Chris Williamson 50:27 What's this?

Gary Faust 50:27 You've never heard this? Yeah, like, like, basically every, not every, but a lot of strip club bartenders or hosts, hostesses, they, they just end up becoming strippers. And maybe that's just a niche thing that I know because of my, uh, vices.

Chris Williamson 50:42 Ponchant for strip clubs.

Gary Faust 50:44 Yeah, I guess. Dude, I, uh, I used to have... You know this. I think I've told you this. I used to have this pickup line when I would go to strip clubs where I'd be like, "Hey, uh," be like, "You look just like my future ex-wife." And they'd be like, "Oh, ha ha ha," because they've heard that a thousand times. I'd be like, "No, I'm just kidding. I'm, like, a horrible person. I've got a felony. I'm not allowed to see my son, so you don't want nothing to do with me." And just-

George Mack 51:05 They lean in

Gary Faust 51:06 ... every time.

Chris Williamson 51:06 Wow.

Gary Faust 51:07 Dude, it's crazy.

Chris Williamson 51:08 Isn't that the fucking craziest pickup line?

Gary Faust 51:10 Not really. I mean, w- American women have been conditioned since the '50s to be into, like, the bad boy.

George Mack 51:18 I mean, first of all, it was a two-parter, so that already was-

Chris Williamson 51:20 Sophistication out with the old, in with the new

Gary Faust 51:21 ... Yeah, the old one-two.

George Mack 51:23 The old one-

Chris Williamson 51:23 Unbelievable

George Mack 51:24 ... got crawled there [laughs] .

Gary Faust 51:25 Shoulder roll

Chris Williamson 51:25 ... That's Gary's, that's Gary's life hack, by the way.

George Mack 51:27 Floyd Mayweather.

Gary Faust 51:27 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:28 That's Gary's life hack.

Gary Faust 51:28 He asked me for a life hack. That's what I came up with [laughs] .

Chris Williamson 51:30 That's Gary's life hack [laughs] .

Gary Faust 51:32 Dude.

George Mack 51:32 Jesus Christ.

Gary Faust 51:33 Dude.

Chris Williamson 51:33 What have you got? Some of your fucking notes app?

Gary Faust 51:36 I don't know.

Chris Williamson 51:36 I don't want to hear about that.

Gary Faust 51:37 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 51:39 Don't tell me about your Claude-

George Mack 51:39 You should've gone last

Chris Williamson 51:40 ... your Claude project instructions. I want to know how to pick up a hooker.

Gary Faust 51:44 Right. I don't even want to do one now.

George Mack 51:47 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 51:48 Have you seen the subreddit Male Living Spaces?

Gary Faust 51:52 Yes. It's funny.

Chris Williamson 51:53 It's fucking brilliant. So this is a subreddit where guys post their bedrooms and their living spaces that they've sort of designed in sort of peak bachelor, uh, like solo degen life, and, uh, the photos are just fucking absolutely spectacular. This one, this first one, this guy's got a lat pull-down machine and a TV.

Gary Faust 52:16 [laughs] The face, Patrick Bateman.

Chris Williamson 52:19 Yeah [laughs] .

George Mack 52:21 That, honestly, this looks... Have you ever seen Mr. Beast's office? It looks exactly like this. He has a bedroom in the office with a bench press right next to it, just like that [laughs] .

Chris Williamson 52:27 Oh, the one with the fucking-

George Mack 52:29 Little stormtrooper

Chris Williamson 52:30 ... stormtrooper.

Gary Faust 52:31 I love it.

Chris Williamson 52:32 Yep.

Gary Faust 52:33 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 52:34 There's a U-shaped couch around just a huge TV. It's just, it's, like, literally you couldn't get in there without-

Gary Faust 52:40 It's not even-

Chris Williamson 52:40 ... hitting the TV

Gary Faust 52:41 ... It's not even hung on the wall.

Chris Williamson 52:42 But look, the reason is because he's wanting to get a, a big couch, but he needs to get in the door, so the door won't open. He can't fit the couch and the TV in without not being able to open the door. That's the only way he could've... That's actually some fucking Marie Kondo shit.

Gary Faust 52:55 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 52:57 [laughs] Transparent fucking blow-up doll.

George Mack 53:01 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 53:01 This one's fucking great. It's an, an industrial container with a single deck chair in the middle.

Gary Faust 53:05 Wow.

George Mack 53:05 What's the, what's the camping chair pointing at?

Chris Williamson 53:06 I don't know [laughs] . And then-

Gary Faust 53:07 Wow

George Mack 53:08 ... that's the living room.

Chris Williamson 53:09 Yeah. Yeah, that is. That's the cuck chair for when I'm-

George Mack 53:11 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 53:12 ... when I'm, when I'm crushing shit. Go to the next one. This is you, Gary.

Gary Faust 53:16 Wow.

Chris Williamson 53:17 It's a bedside table made out of just raw breeze blocks.

Gary Faust 53:20 Yeah. You know, when I was growing up, my dad actually had our old box TV on a set of cinder blocks for a period of time. The divorce hit him hard.

George Mack 53:29 Work, it works as drawers too.

Chris Williamson 53:31 Oh, yeah, it does work as drawers? I did not [laughs] .

Gary Faust 53:35 Wow.

George Mack 53:36 There's a bottle of Kratom in every picture.

Gary Faust 53:37 Is it-

Chris Williamson 53:38 [laughs]

Gary Faust 53:39 Is it, uh, a flat in London or a prison in Norway? Have you seen that?

Chris Williamson 53:43 Was it not halls of residence?

Gary Faust 53:44 Oh, my God.

Chris Williamson 53:44 Was it not British halls of residence?

Gary Faust 53:45 I think there was a few. I think there was a few different ones.

Chris Williamson 53:45 No, sorry, prison, prison in Norway or halls of residence in the UK-

Gary Faust 53:49 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 53:50 ... I think was it. And, uh, yeah, it's because the fucking quality of the prisons in some Scandy countries are unbelievable.

Gary Faust 53:57 Dude, yeah, I've seen those. That, that pisses me the fuck off.

Chris Williamson 54:00 What, that Norwegians are living in-

Gary Faust 54:02 What-

Chris Williamson 54:02 ... Norwegian criminals?

Gary Faust 54:02 ... the people in prison in Norway are doing much better than me.

Chris Williamson 54:05 [laughs]

Gary Faust 54:06 It, it really irritates me. I'm dead serious because, like, you know-

Chris Williamson 54:09 I'm gonna piss him-

Gary Faust 54:09 ... I've been known to commit a crime or two, and if I get arrested and go to prison, I'm like... It just is-

George Mack 54:17 If you get arrested here.

Gary Faust 54:18 Yeah, dude. I mean, I'm... Part of me is like, "Man, maybe I should just go to Norway and, like-

George Mack 54:22 Hedge your bets

Gary Faust 54:22 ... get in a shootout or something. I don't know.

George Mack 54:24 [laughs]

Gary Faust 54:25 Like that, you met, you guys remember that movie, um, Heat?

George Mack 54:29 Uh, I haven't seen it.

Chris Williamson 54:30 The Leon- um, Ro- Robert De Niro film?

Gary Faust 54:32 De Niro, Pacino, um, uh, Val Kilmer. Yeah. I think Danny Trejo's even in it. But, like, the, there's just that old, like, you know, every guy's, like, dream way they're, they're gonna go out is just basically robbing a bank and getting in a shootout. Or maybe that's just the people I hang out with, but are you familiar with this?

Chris Williamson 54:52 No. No, no, no.

Gary Faust 54:52 Oh, okay. Are you know what I'm talking about? You ever seen those memes or those-

Chris Williamson 54:55 Yeah, yeah. That, that's the dream.

Gary Faust 54:56 Yeah. It's just, like, going out in a blaze of glory basically, and then... Or, like, dying out in, like, the, you know, like that, that picture of, uh, Gosling, uh, bleeding out in the snow.

Chris Williamson 55:06 Right.

Gary Faust 55:06 Like, dream, dream snow bleed-out spot. Anyways, I just, uh, I'm like-

George Mack 55:11 You have a comp-

Gary Faust 55:11 ... "Man, I'd rather just do that"

George Mack 55:12 ... a Pinterest board of these? [laughs]

Gary Faust 55:13 Well, no, it's like, it's like I go to Norway and I get into a, a, a, a, some sort of criminal enterprise. What's the worst thing that happens to me? I get to live better than I'm living here?

Chris Williamson 55:22 Mm.

Gary Faust 55:22 What? That's just where my mind goes. Uh, you know, but-

George Mack 55:27 Work smarter, not harder

Chris Williamson 55:28 ... the inverse El Salvador

Gary Faust 55:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah [laughs] . Yeah, dude, holy shit. Well, I think the crimes that are being committed in El Salvador are probably dramatically worse than-

Chris Williamson 55:38 Mm-hmm

Gary Faust 55:38 ... in Norway.

Chris Williamson 55:39 Mm-hmm.

Gary Faust 55:40 You know, they were, like, chopping people up into pieces and stuff.

Gary Faust 55:44 But...

Chris Williamson 55:44 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 55:45 Did you follow this, uh, Citrini analyst number three story?

Gary Faust 55:49 Um, no.

Shaan Puri 55:50 You didn't see this?

Gary Faust 55:50 No, no, no.

Shaan Puri 55:51 Have you guys heard about this, analyst number three?

Gary Faust 55:53 No. What's this?

Shaan Puri 55:53 Oh, dude, this is amazing. This is just, like, a guy doing a legendary thing. So the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, and there's the war part of it, but then there's the financial part of it. You've seen, like, oil prices going up, down, the markets are swinging, and so there's this f- research firm called Citrini. They do, like... They basically do research reports, sell them to hedge funds.

Gary Faust 56:12 [clears throat]

Shaan Puri 56:13 And so the hedge fund guys want information. If they get better information than-

Gary Faust 56:16 Mm

Shaan Puri 56:16 ... they're getting from the news or from the, you know, the, the newspaper the next day, that's worth, you know, millions and millions of dollars to them. So Citrini, they're trying to figure out what the hell's going on with this blockade, and so this guy has this idea. High agency story here for you. One of the guys in the office is like, "What if I just go?" And they're like, "What do you mean, what if you go?" He's like, "What if I just go to the, to the s- strait, and I'll just count the boats?" They're like, "What do you mean count?" He's like, "I'll just see, like, how many are going through, and we'll know if it's, like, block..." 'Cause basically there were people trying to figure out is it blocked, is it not blocked?

Gary Faust 56:44 Oh, oh.

Shaan Puri 56:44 And the gas, the crude oil prices were going parabolic, and then they were crashing day, day over day, and so they had to figure out what was going on. And so this guy [laughs] basically, one of their analysts, they call him analyst number three, and he wrote this field blog. So just, "I see this." It goes... And I, I read this, and this sucked me into the story. He goes, "The front desk informed me there's two gentlemen from the CID downstairs to ask me questions." S- CID in the Gulf is like the CIA. "I chucked my phone in a safe, grabbed the burner," um, because they had seen tweets about analyst number three. Thanks a lot, James. And then it says, "I went downstairs in my pajamas and slippers." There, there's a pie- piece of op sec you learn when, when you're an Arab speaker. If things get sticky, you only speak English because Arabic opens a door you don't want opened.

Gary Faust 57:22 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 57:22 The possibility that you're a spy, a sympathizer, blah, blah, blah, basically play dumb. So I go downstairs and I say, "Hello, guys. How are you? I speak English." The hotel receptionist, the same man I've been chatting with in Arabic all day, turned to the agents and goes, "This guy speaks perfect Arabic." [laughs] And so the, this guy blogged his entire thing. So he basically left the US, went to the Middle East. They show his briefcase of, like, what he took. It's [laughs] it's, it's, it's pretty hilarious. So this is what he took for his field trip.

Gary Faust 57:47 [laughs] His anxiety bag.

Shaan Puri 57:48 He's got two-

Gary Faust 57:49 Yeah

Shaan Puri 57:49 ... two Zinns. He, he brought cigars. Uh, he brought a, you know, pack of clothes, and then he had a, like, um, a m- a pair of meta recording glasses.

Gary Faust 57:56 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 57:57 And so he goes, and this guy makes it all the way. So he, he gets to, like, Oman. He bribes a guy. They bring him in, and they're like, he's crossing the thing. They're like, "You're not trying to do any journalism or anything, are you?" He's like, "Journalism? No, I'm, I'm an adventurer, explorer. What... Are you crazy?" And they're like, they check his bag. They don't notice that the Ray-Bans are the glasses one, or the camera ones.

Gary Faust 58:16 Nice.

Shaan Puri 58:16 He gets through. He bribes this guy to take him on a mini, like, a paddle boat to get into the strait, and he has footage of himself on the strait smoking a cigar, watching, like, the oil, one of the oil tankers that got attacked, and counting the other boats, and he realized that the m- all the mainstream media was reporting that the strait was closed. He's like, "Dude, I'm here. I see them, I see them going through. It's not fully closed." And he f- they were figuring out what was going on. It turns out, like, actually the Iranians were checking, like, are you... If you're not US-affiliated and you brought, you pay us a toll, we'll let you through.

Gary Faust 58:48 Mm.

Shaan Puri 58:48 And that's why, like, there hadn't been this huge oil shock because actually the tankers were getting through, but nobody knew. Everybody was using these, like, the tracking data from the boats, but he's like, he's like s-

Gary Faust 58:57 Some of the boats aren't gonna be tracked.

Shaan Puri 58:58 Yeah, they were just like, "Hey, hey, watch this." And they just turn it off. They're like, "We don't wanna be tracked. They don't want us-"

Gary Faust 59:03 Wow

Shaan Puri 59:03 "... saying that we're going through, so no problem. Turn that shit off." And they would go through.

Gary Faust 59:06 Mm.

Shaan Puri 59:06 And so this is this epic story of this guy who made it back. He got thrown in, he got, like, thrown in jail for a couple days, and he, like, got out, and, uh, you know, he's back home now.

Gary Faust 59:14 Because of the CIA?

Shaan Puri 59:15 No, he's just-

Gary Faust 59:16 The-

Shaan Puri 59:16 ... part of a research firm in New York.

Gary Faust 59:16 No, no, because... He got caught because of the-

Shaan Puri 59:19 They held him, and they were like, "We're gonna check you out."

Gary Faust 59:22 Yeah, border.

Shaan Puri 59:22 And then they couldn't find anything.

Chris Williamson 59:23 The CID is the Middle Eastern equivalent of the CIA.

Shaan Puri 59:26 Oh.

Gary Faust 59:26 Okay, gotcha.

Chris Williamson 59:27 And they-

Gary Faust 59:27 Gotcha

Chris Williamson 59:27 ... they popped him. That actually, that bag is the male equivalent of an anxiety bag.

Gary Faust 59:31 Yeah, that's what I said.

Shaan Puri 59:32 Yeah, yeah [laughs] .

Gary Faust 59:33 That's what it is. Yeah.

Shaan Puri 59:33 Two Zinns.

Chris Williamson 59:33 A full pack of Cubans, two Zinns, and a pair of pants. Uh, yeah.

Gary Faust 59:37 Don't, don't trust, verify.

Chris Williamson 59:39 Uh, well, that is basically someone using dark tourism to benefit from a capitalist way-

Gary Faust 59:46 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 59:46 ... similar to Lord Miles. Do you see that Lord Miles got called out by Coffeezilla?

Gary Faust 59:50 No. No, no. Wow.

Chris Williamson 59:51 So Lord Miles has done some kind of rug pull that's to do with him and Polymarket, that he was gonna do a, a 40-day fast, and that he bet just before he got picked up by the police, the local police of wherever he was, someone had put a huge position that he was going to lose. And it turns out if you trace that wallet back, it's somebody that knows him, and then he thinks that he put the bet on and then got the police to go, and it was, like, a fucking mess. But anyway, that guy might as well be Lord Miles.

Gary Faust 1:00:20 Wow.

Shaan Puri 1:00:20 Well, speaking of the Gulf CIA, I, uh, I got a story about a time I accidentally did a, a CIA field strategy, so to speak, if you guys wanna hear it. When I was in college in Santa Barbara, my buddy and I were absolutely hammered, just wasted out of our minds, and we had just run from a cab, and, uh, some other shenanigans had occurred. And we got back to my, my apartment, which was on the second floor of, uh, of the spot that... But it was on a hill, so it, it, out the window was, like, a huge, um... It was, it was, like, probably 60 yards to a pavement, to, to a parking lot behind a Chase Bank, and we were hammered, and we were at this place. The electricity had gone out, so all the f- the food in the fridge was bad, and it smelled like shit. So we just started throwing it all out the window because we thought it was funny, and then we started throwing bottles out the window, and then, like, some furniture and stuff. And, uh, somebody [laughs] somebody called the police, and we're sitting there. We're all fucked up, and we just hear, "Do, do, do, do. Santa Barbara Police, open up." And we're like, "Oh, fuck, dude. We... The cops." And he looks at me, and he's like, "Dude, get naked." And I was like, "What?"

Gary Faust 1:01:29 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:01:29 He was like, "Trust me." And I was like, "All right."

Gary Faust 1:01:31 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:01:31 So we get butt naked, and I'm like, "Oh, we're definitely going to fucking jail." So I, I immediately went to the bathroom because taking a shit in jail sucks, so I was like, "I'm gonna go force out a turd."

Gary Faust 1:01:41 Wow.

Shaan Puri 1:01:41 So I'm in the bathroom-

Gary Faust 1:01:42 That's a good thing

Shaan Puri 1:01:42 ... and all I hear is this, like, thump noise, and then I hear the door open. I hear it creak, like

Gary Faust 1:01:49 And it's just a cop, and he goes, "What the fuck? What are you doing?" And I hear, I hear, like, feet s- stumble around. And, and then I hear my buddy go, "Sorry, officer, I must have forgotten my pants." And the cops are like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" And, uh, they're like, "Get... Put some fucking clothes on." So the cops come grab me and, uh-

Guest 1:02:09 Naked

Gary Faust 1:02:10 ... and they reali- well, they thought, they realized that we were two gay dudes in an argument. So we faked a homosexual domestic violence situation.

Guest 1:02:18 [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:02:18 And they were like, they were like, "Oh, shit, these, these are two gay dudes." And, uh-

Guest 1:02:23 Going at it.

Gary Faust 1:02:24 Yeah. So they just ended up making us go clean it up 'cause they felt-

Guest 1:02:28 [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:02:28 ... they felt bad because they thought that... Well, and my buddy was a lot bigger than me, too, so now I'm realizing telling this story that they probably thought I was just getting beat up by this guy.

Guest 1:02:37 [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:02:37 But anyways, um, so years later, uh, I've told this story a couple times before to people and, you know, it's funny, ha ha, but years later I find out from this guy Jack K- Karaku, CIA dude-

Guest 1:02:49 Yeah

Gary Faust 1:02:50 ... that this is, like, an old CIA strategy that they employ all the time. I didn't even know. Play the, play the video here.

Speaker 1:02:57 Headquarters says, "We want you to pretend that you're gay." I said, "Oh, come on." "No, we really need the information. You gotta pretend that you're gay." I said, "Okay, I'll do it. I'll do it for Uncle Sam." So I called her-

Guest 1:03:06 [laughs]

Speaker 1:03:06 ... and I said, "Hey, I have two tickets to this show, and I was hoping maybe you'd be free. Maybe we'll grab some sushi afterwards." She said, "Yeah, I'd love to." So we go to the show. He thoroughly enjoyed it, and we go for sushi afterwards. Then we go out again, and he says, "Why don't you come over to my place some night and I'll, I'll make dinner?" I said, "Great." So I go over to his place. He made a lovely dinner. And then I thought, "Well, I have to invite him to my place." So I told my wife, "You're gonna have to, like, get out." So she left. I made dinner. I removed all the pictures of us together. And we had just gotten married, so we had, like, our wedding picture up and everything. At the dinner, he leaned in to kiss me, and I instinctively backed off. And he said, "Oh my God, I'm sorry. I thought you were gay." And I said, "Oh, no, I, I am gay. I'm, uh, I'm, I'm not into hairy guys." And he's like, "Oh, okay." I said, "I'm sorry. I think you're great, but I, I'm, I'm not feeling it."

Guest 1:03:49 You didn't kiss him?

Speaker 1:03:50 No.

Gary Faust 1:03:50 [laughs] And, uh, I think there's another, there's, I don't remember if it was him, but there was another person who used an example of faking they were gay to, like, get out of trouble. But yeah, just a, that's another life hack for you.

Guest 1:04:02 Just get naked.

Gary Faust 1:04:03 You're welcome. Yeah.

Guest 1:04:03 I mean, could you not just appear gay rather than be naked? 'Cause who fights naked?

Gary Faust 1:04:10 [laughs] Two gay dudes banging.

Guest 1:04:12 [laughs] Right. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Gary Faust 1:04:14 What do you-

Guest 1:04:14 But the idea that you were so small that they thought-

Gary Faust 1:04:17 I'm-

Guest 1:04:17 ... this guy's a world-renowned power bottom.

Gary Faust 1:04:19 [laughs]

Guest 1:04:20 We can't believe we're getting, he's getting fucking pounded from every angle.

Gary Faust 1:04:23 Dude, that's... Oh, God, yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's not a good look looking back on it.

Guest 1:04:27 Why have you got trash in your truck?

Gary Faust 1:04:30 Well, I got another life hack for you, Chris.

Guest 1:04:32 [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:04:32 Um, remember to take out your trash cans. [laughs] I'd, yeah, I told- I got a couple bags of garbage in the back of my truck that he commented on when I pulled up.

Guest 1:04:40 [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:04:41 And, um, he's like, "Why do you have like four bags of garbage?" And I was like, "Well, I forgot to take out the trash two weeks in a row, so there's just a bunch of-"

Guest 1:04:48 Just use it in the bed of your truck

Gary Faust 1:04:49 ... trash.

Guest 1:04:49 Do you just carry it around as additional-

Gary Faust 1:04:51 Yeah, it's just in the back of the truck.

Guest 1:04:52 Damn. Surplus there.

Gary Faust 1:04:53 There's a dumpster behind a movie theater that I'm gonna go throw it out in after this, actually. Thanks for reminding me.

Guest 1:04:58 You're welcome. You can do a full season, three months like that.

Gary Faust 1:05:02 [laughs] With just 20 bags of trash in the truck?

Guest 1:05:04 All right, so you have three life hacks. That's pretty good.

Gary Faust 1:05:06 Yeah, three life hacks.

Guest 1:05:07 One more and you do, you do it for all of us.

Gary Faust 1:05:08 One, um, Israeli conspiracy, and I'm addicted to kratom. That's what I'm bringing to the table today.

Guest 1:05:13 Chris,

Guest 1:05:14 uh, you want, did you have a life hack as good?

Chris Williamson 1:05:16 I'll go one. Well, you know, the f- the first ever series that I did on this show was life hacks, so, uh, there's like 1,000 that I've got to pick from. But the one that I've been using the most, especially because I just got back from tour, I was in Australia, New Zealand, and Bali, uh, is an app called Flighty. So Flighty connects with your email, and when you book flights, it automatically pulls it over, and it tells you everything that's going on with your flight, what gate you're going out of, where your plane is inbound, where it's going to go, when you're on the journey as well. It also tracks everything, so it pre-downloads the map so that when you're flying in the air even without Wi-Fi, it knows sort of how long the journey's gonna be, can give you information about what the wait time's going to be like at your future destination, connection times, gate to gate, what, uh, carousel your baggage is going to be at. And it lives in just a little island at the top, you know, the floating island thing at the top of your iPhone, and it just fucking rules, dude. Like, the number of times that there's been some last-minute bullshit change, and because I'm not watching the board or I've got my AirPods in, and you're just in an airport-

Gary Faust 1:06:12 Like, you don't need to think

Chris Williamson 1:06:13 ... doing your thing. You- it's just on your phone.

Gary Faust 1:06:15 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:15 It's quicker than the app. There was one flight that got diverted from Austin because of gale force winds. It got diverted to Houston, and I, I, I was recording with Andrew Schulz that day. I was like, "Fuck," like, "I need to get back. This better not be late," and blah, blah, blah, and I thought it was great. And then the plane just did whoop like that, took up again as it was coming into land. And I was like, "Oh, it must be coming back around for another one." Before the pilot even came over the tannoy, it updated and said, like, "You're now... Basically, you're landing in Houston." And I was like, "Oh." So i- in some ways it can be disappointing before everybody else knows, but, uh, it's fucking great. Flighty, and it's like 30 bucks a year. And you can have friends on it as well. You can add friends' flights to it, so if you've got a, your missus is flying in, you don't need to do it. It's, it's fucking epic. A quick aside. Look, you know sleep matters, but let's be real. Most nights you're probably not getting the sort of sleep that's actually restorative. Eight Sleep Pod 5 fixes that. It's a smart cover that you throw over the top of your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. They've even added a temperature regulating duvet and pillowcase, so you and your partner can sleep at your preferred temperatures covered head to toe like some temperature controlled mummy. Plus, it's got upgraded sensors that run health checks when you're asleep, tracking things like abnormal heartbeats and breathing issues and sudden HRV changes. There's a built-in speaker for white noise. The autopilot feature learns your sleep patterns, makes real-time adjustments to improve your sleep. It even detects when you're snoring and lifts your head a few inches to help you breathe better. That is why Eight Sleep is clinically proven to add up to an hour of quality sleep per night. And best of all, they have a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they will just give you your money back.

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George Mack 1:08:08 My, my, uh, my life hack at the minute is, um, it's more kind of a, a, a philosophical stance to some extent. I think of a lot of gibberish that comes up where it's probably in the last 20 years, there's this particular discourse that happens online, but also in books, where you'll see... They'll make a point, and then they'll go, "So this study says," or, "Studies say." And I think what happens, for me for a while now, previously I would default to whatever this person's about to say now is completely true. But often my new default is whatever this person is about to say now is complete horseshit.

Chris Williamson 1:08:46 [laughs]

George Mack 1:08:46 Um, 'cause first off, my friend Billy made this great point of, do you know anybody who's been in a study? Um, then have you actually ever inspected a lot of these studies? So I think previously what people used to do, nine out of, nine out of 10 times they would believe the study's true and one out of 10 is gibberish. I actually think the policy's much better the other way, that nine out of 10 studies that you hear about, particularly psychological studies.

Chris Williamson 1:09:06 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 1:09:06 Guess what? Physics doesn't need a study. Physics goes, "Here's how it works." And you wanna always opt, like it's kind of the Deutsch argument, that you always wanna go for good explanations rather than studies of psych grads with people that had a specific hypothesis they wanted to confirm beforehand.

Chris Williamson 1:09:21 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 1:09:21 And you'll, you'll often see these things that go viral on Twitter that get four million views. It's like 15 participants of, like, college males that are then making, like... Then the Daily Mail covers it, The Telegraph covers it.

Chris Williamson 1:09:31 Huge sweeping generalizations.

George Mack 1:09:32 It's, it's one, it's one giant scam. The other one is, um, my favorite one, is, um, science says or science-backed or trust the science. And my new default is if somebody says this, they're about to say something that's completely unscientific. Because by definition... Oh, sorry about that. By definition, if something is science-backed, [laughs] um... I didn't vast. There we go. Um, if something is science... If something is-

Chris Williamson 1:09:56 Fucking Neutonic says research-backed [laughs] ingredients on its packaging.

George Mack 1:09:59 Re- re- research-backed a little bit.

Chris Williamson 1:10:01 [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:10:01 Well, I can say firsthand this shit definitely works.

George Mack 1:10:04 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:10:04 Got you off Adderall.

George Mack 1:10:05 Well, I guess, I guess the question is-

Gary Faust 1:10:06 Yeah

George Mack 1:10:07 ... but then actually investigate what the research is essentially saying, which most of us, we just default to this is true.

Chris Williamson 1:10:12 So I read, uh, Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History. Everyone needs to subscribe on Substack. It fucking rules. And, um, he posted today, there was a wonderful one-two parter, Living Fossils that Rob Kurzban does, and, uh, Experimental History had these two things about the replication crisis.

George Mack 1:10:26 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:10:26 And, uh, Adam's entire point is that psychological theories don't ever be killed. They just become embarrassing. So, um, power posing, been completely disproven, but has now just been sort of retconned into, it's like expansive posture science and stuff. They've just renamed it. Uh, growth mindset, total bullshit. Totally does not replicate. Uh, ego depletion, like willpower stuff.

George Mack 1:10:50 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:10:50 Total, total bullshit. Does not replicate. But-

Gary Faust 1:10:53 What about retard maxing?

Chris Williamson 1:10:54 Retard maxing actually is at the forefront of cutting psychological science.

Gary Faust 1:10:57 [laughs] If it doesn't replicate, do a 360.

Chris Williamson 1:11:01 Moon walk out of there. [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:11:03 Moon walk out, man.

George Mack 1:11:03 The, the problem with the replication stuff is that it goes back to the conversation we had around genetics, that actually, um, some of this stuff may work for certain people depending on their specific genetics. That what you may have is 10% it really, really works for, and 90% it doesn't do anything, which is a way more fascinating conversation. Um, but as soon as you just default to, like, it feels like I have a point that disagrees with Gary now, and I'm just gonna say, "Well, studies say," and I've won. And there's never any, like, critical conversation around, "Well, can you explain the specific variables here that causes this outcome?" It's just studies say, or let me tell you about this study.

Chris Williamson 1:11:35 So increased, increased skepticism. Is that what you're saying? Is, uh-

George Mack 1:11:38 Yes, as a whole

Chris Williamson 1:11:39 ... what are you talking?

George Mack 1:11:39 As a whole.

Chris Williamson 1:11:40 Including around Ozempic.

George Mack 1:11:40 All the way up. I mean, which-

Gary Faust 1:11:41 I think the other side of that, the life hack is use this all the time, 'cause there's, for every one George who's skeptical, what perc- out of 100 people, how many have your stance?

George Mack 1:11:50 Oh, um, it's the other way, yeah.

Gary Faust 1:11:52 Yeah, it's gonna be 99. So actually, like, the hack is-

George Mack 1:11:54 Well, there's actually a study

Gary Faust 1:11:55 ... just start saying studies say-

George Mack 1:11:55 There's actually a study about this

Gary Faust 1:11:56 ... even when there's no study at all.

George Mack 1:11:57 [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:11:58 And everybody will take you very seriously.

Chris Williamson 1:11:59 Yeah.

George Mack 1:11:59 It's similar to how people reference mainstream media, even though, like you said with the, the strait.

Chris Williamson 1:12:04 Right.

George Mack 1:12:05 How there were still ships going through there and the media was saying that they weren't.

Chris Williamson 1:12:08 Yeah.

George Mack 1:12:08 It's the same thing, right, where they're, where somebody, instead of referencing a study, they're like, "Well, Fox News said," or CNN or whatever bullshit people reference.

Chris Williamson 1:12:15 Yes.

Gary Faust 1:12:15 It appeals to social authority.

Chris Williamson 1:12:16 Yes.

Gary Faust 1:12:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:12:17 Yeah.

Gary Faust 1:12:17 Yeah.

George Mack 1:12:17 Dude, speaking of which, I, that, that actually ties into the other thing I sent you. Uh, did you guys hear about the Stop Nick Shirley Act in California? Dude, this is crazy. So s- there was, um-

Chris Williamson 1:12:28 'Cause he's trying to do the same thing he did in Minnesota in California, right?

George Mack 1:12:32 He needs to do that in Puerto Rico, dude. Seriously.

Chris Williamson 1:12:34 Oh, I mean, if you're gonna list the places that are-

Gary Faust 1:12:37 So, so California has this act now? Who's, who's-

George Mack 1:12:40 This is it. This is the bill right here. They basically put, put together this legislation that says, it's called the Stop Nick Shirley Act.

Chris Williamson 1:12:47 Wait, the... Wait, is this like a draft? Why is there, like-

George Mack 1:12:48 Existing law prohibits a person, business, or association from knowingly publicly posting or publicly disclosing or distributing on internet websites or on social media the personal information or image of any designated healthcare services patient, provider, or assistant, or other individuals residing at the same home address with the intent to incite a third person to cause imminent great bodily harm to the person identified in the posting or display-

Gary Faust 1:13:10 Yeah

George Mack 1:13:10 ... or to a co-resident of that person as specified, or to threaten the person identified in the posting or display, or a co-resident of that person as specified.

Gary Faust 1:13:18 So it's basically an extreme fascist bill that they're trying to pass to prevent people from exposing fraud.

Chris Williamson 1:13:27 So you think that they're getting out ahead of having exposed in California what was exposed in Minnesota, and by making it-

Gary Faust 1:13:35 Making it illegal

Chris Williamson 1:13:35 ... essentially this kind of investigation illegal?

Gary Faust 1:13:38 Yeah. Yeah, and that's, um, of interest to me given all the st- the financial stuff I've exposed down in Puerto Rico. But the g- and on a, if you strap like that and map it onto freedom of speech as a whole, uh, this is a big problem. I mean, I, I don't know what the-

George Mack 1:13:56 This shit is fucking gnarly, dude. Having to read this thing, like the... Oh, here we go

Gary Faust 1:14:00 This guy, yeah, he explains it a little bit better here. It warns that it would restrict the release of investigative videos and impose penalties on watchdogs who expose fraud. Uh, it's a... I mean, I don't really believe in the two-party system. I think they're all just j- two... Everybody's full of shit, but it is a Democrat that put this out, and of course, there's, you know, the backlash from this guy. He's probably a Republican.

Shaan Puri 1:14:21 Okay, so s- sounds like what they're saying is when he exposed the Somali learning centers, that then creates, you know, sort of hostile potential violence against the Somali people. So in order to protect threats of violence against immigrants, uh, here's this act.

Gary Faust 1:14:36 Right, right, right.

Shaan Puri 1:14:36 So you can't expose that kind of shit.

Gary Faust 1:14:36 And which is totally, like, a load of bullshit because the real way you would protect from somebody being harassed like that is to stop the fraud in the first place from happening.

Shaan Puri 1:14:47 Yeah, or just separately prevent, like, violence in the way that we prevent vi- assault and violence in general.

Gary Faust 1:14:51 Yeah, yeah, or, I mean, and I, I'm just saying that, yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:14:53 [laughs] Right.

Gary Faust 1:14:53 There's a number of other ways to handle it, but yeah, it's crazy, right?

Shaan Puri 1:14:57 Yeah.

Gary Faust 1:14:57 I, um, I was looking at this the other day. I'm, I'm kind of interested in how it plays out, you know?

Shaan Puri 1:15:03 You're, you're, you do-

Gary Faust 1:15:05 It's kind of-

Shaan Puri 1:15:05 ... a lot of investigative journalism, right? You were down in, uh, Palisades almost immediately after the fire, exposing a ton of stuff around FEMA. Uh, you've done the Puerto Rico thing. What are the, like, big ones have you done recently?

Gary Faust 1:15:17 Um, well, after going to Puerto Rico, I, I kind of, uh, was, I shelved the, the deep dive investigations because it's so much work to look through all the, just everything, dude. It was also really f- it was fucked up, man. Like, people in Puerto Rico don't have... We, we met a guy who doesn't have a fucking roof still.

Shaan Puri 1:15:37 Wow.

Gary Faust 1:15:37 He has, he hasn't had electricity for eight years. It's crazy, dude. I- you gotta watch it. I don't know if I ever sent it to you, so.

Shaan Puri 1:15:43 I d- you didn't send me this one.

Gary Faust 1:15:45 Yeah, it's, um, it's insane. I th- I, i- in theory, I mean, I can give you the, the layout real fast. Basically, in 2016, Congress, with Obama's approval, signed off on a financial board that more or less acts like the shadow government of Puerto Rico now, and they've funneled around $2 billion of taxpayer money, Puerto Rican taxpayer money, off the island to Wall Street consultants, executives, uh, at- and attorneys to consult on the bankruptcy down there because the whole island is bankrupt. And part of that process is to resolve the PREPA bankruptcy, which is the, uh, Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority. It's the government power company, and then it was privatized with this company, LUMA, and yada, yada, yada. The power is horribly unreliable down there. It's one of the most expensive in the entire country, and, uh, they're basically having money funneled f- off the island. Like, and they're all more or less connected to Wall Street, but it's crazy. And, and the reason I bring that up in relation to this is because, um, you know, the Somalian daycare thing, sure, there's, there's some, some stuff going on there, but Puerto Rico's been basically getting shit on forever, and I think this is possibly an even worse situation that's going on down there. And they just revoked some transparency act down there too recently, in the past, like, four or five months.

Shaan Puri 1:17:06 They're gonna try and get out ahead of people that are doing investigative journalism.

Gary Faust 1:17:09 I mean, that's what it seems like to me. They don't want... They want it to be more difficult for people to, to re- FOIA request stuff, essentially. Like, one of the things they revoked on the transparency act down there in Puerto Rico was, y- when you, when you request information, it doesn't show who you are specifically, right?

Shaan Puri 1:17:26 Mm-hmm.

Gary Faust 1:17:26 To, to the, to the people that you're requesting it from. But they, they're changing that so that they can see. So they'll be like, "Oh, Gary Faust, the guy that's been [laughs] talking a bunch of shit about us, is requesting this information. We're gonna, you know, deny that."

Shaan Puri 1:17:39 Yep.

Gary Faust 1:17:39 It's crazy, but this is similar to that, and I think this is actually, uh-

Shaan Puri 1:17:42 Then it can be branded as the Transparency Act, 'cause who can, who can say no to transparency?

Gary Faust 1:17:45 Well, it was in, it, it was existing legislation that was put into place.

Shaan Puri 1:17:48 Trans- transparency equals good. [laughs]

Gary Faust 1:17:49 Yeah, y-

Shaan Puri 1:17:49 Yeah

Gary Faust 1:17:50 ... yeah, they're, yeah. Um, but yeah, this is f- this is crazy. I don't even know what else to say about it 'cause not much has transpired, but in my field of work, it, I mean, th- that would, that would basically prevent me from doing my job.

Shaan Puri 1:18:04 Uh, I have a quote that I love. This is a little more positive. I feel like we've had some, some conspiracy, some darkness-

Gary Faust 1:18:10 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:18:10 ... uh, some, some getting in trouble.

Gary Faust 1:18:12 Good.

Shaan Puri 1:18:12 I wanna bring a little, little, uh, positivity here.

Gary Faust 1:18:15 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:18:15 All right, so saw this quote from Blake Mycoskie, who created Toms Shoes. Uh, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but he, he has this... He's like, "I've had this on the wall of every office." So he says, "A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he's doing and leaves others to determine if he is working or playing. To him, he always appears to be doing both."

Gary Faust 1:18:42 Hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:18:43 And I just like, that, to me, has just been a very useful, um, I don't know, guidepost, or like, oh yeah, like, that is the highest calling. If you yourself basically don't differentiate between your work and your play, or, you know, are you... Is this, uh, is this something that you have to do, or you should do, or you want to do? The more those blend together and the less you sort of bucket things, I think the more you solve the problem of balance that I think nobody feels like they have. And so I just thought this was awesome, and I'm gonna put this up in my office wall. So-

Gary Faust 1:19:13 Well, this seems similar to what Michael was talking about of the childlike thing.

Shaan Puri 1:19:17 Hmm.

Gary Faust 1:19:17 You remember on the first episode-

Shaan Puri 1:19:18 Right

Gary Faust 1:19:19 ... that we did? And he was s- uh, be, he quoted some scripture. He was like, "Be childlike, my children," or some-

Shaan Puri 1:19:24 Mm-hmm

Gary Faust 1:19:24 ... some, some, something like that. I think one of the problems that you have is working for yourself sounds great because it sounds like choose whenever you want to work. But for most people, what it results in being is just work all the time because there's no one to tell you to stop. And a great idea to think about, if this doesn't feel like play to me, scrutinize it and maybe try and get rid of whatever I can from this particular area of my life. But when you're compelled by, oh, well, I just wanna be more, wanna be more successful and more well-known, that is rewarding in and of itself. But-

Chris Williamson 1:20:01 It's not the type of reward that you want. So you need to almost be skeptical and discerning in the rewards that you get too.

Shaan Puri 1:20:08 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:20:08 This feels like play, but it might actually be just shallow, juvenile status seeking-

Shaan Puri 1:20:14 Right

Chris Williamson 1:20:14 ... or it might be me, uh, playing, uh, the game of accumulating money when I already have enough. It's that line from James Clear where he says, um, "If you already live a good lifestyle and you sacrifice it in order to make more money, by definition it's a bad trade."

Shaan Puri 1:20:29 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:20:29 And I think sometimes you... People are bad at distinguishing, determining what is and is not play, and what is and is not just more like limbic rewards. Does that make sense?

Shaan Puri 1:20:39 So there's, there's this book that talks, uh, that I'm reading, it talks exactly about this, called The Score. You guys ever heard of this book? It's basically, um, it's this guy who's a phil- he's a philosophy professor, but he's, he loved games growing up. He always plays games. He, he uses games as this analogy, and I think in general, uh, f- a far more important thing in life than being a good player is picking a good game.

Chris Williamson 1:20:58 Mm.

Shaan Puri 1:20:58 Uh, because it's very easy to be, you know... Uh, you were talking about Joey Chestnut earlier, right? Um, and like, you know-

Chris Williamson 1:21:04 The philosopher Joey Chestnut.

Shaan Puri 1:21:05 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:21:06 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:21:06 No knock on him.

Chris Williamson 1:21:07 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:21:07 But like just generally choosing to be a competitive eater, not the best game to play in life, right? Like you could choose many things to try to be great at. Th- there are some that are better and worse.

Chris Williamson 1:21:17 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:21:17 Every game comes with a scoreboard. The scoreboard is very unique in that it basically programs you. It rewires your mind for what you now want. The game dictates what you want. Um-

Chris Williamson 1:21:28 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Shaan Puri 1:21:28 ... right? Because it says that's how you win. This is the scoreboard-

Chris Williamson 1:21:30 Yeah

Shaan Puri 1:21:30 ... so therefore I've implanted a desire.

Chris Williamson 1:21:33 Your behavior changes appropriately.

Shaan Puri 1:21:33 Yeah. And then it tells you who you ne- and then it changes your identity. Who do you need to be to win this game? So you play Call of Duty, you better be a psychopathic murderer, right? You gotta be ruthless. You play Charades, you better be a team player-

Chris Williamson 1:21:44 Yes

Shaan Puri 1:21:44 ... a great communicator. You play poker, you better be, uh, great at the art of deception. And so the game you choose will not only d- choose for you what you want, it'll choose your motivation, it'll end up dictating your identity. Who do you need to be to win that game? So he talks about like, you know, he was a phil- he was, became a philosopher or a philosophy professor 'cause he loved answering the big questions about life. That's what got him into it.

Chris Williamson 1:22:06 Mm.

Shaan Puri 1:22:06 Then he got there and he realized there's a ranking system for the, the professors na- nationwide. And how do you go up? So he's a competitive person by nature, like many of us are, so he started trying to win the game. Now he had a scoreboard. The scoreboard said, "In order to get more points, you have to write more peer-reviewed published articles about these niche topics." So he, then he spends two years winning that game and then basically feeling miserable because he's like, this is not what he enjoys about philosophy. So it made himself miserable winning the game. And he talks about how there's something called value capture. Value capture is basically when the game gives you the metric that, um, is super simplified, easy to digest, but it may not have been what you wanted out of this. Um, so for example, in li- like you, we're, you're, we're on YouTube, right? YouTube gives you one big score, views. You can make a life-changing episode that gets half the views of another episode.

Chris Williamson 1:22:57 Yes.

Shaan Puri 1:22:57 But it doesn't know how to measure life-changing.

Chris Williamson 1:22:58 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:22:58 It just measures views.

Chris Williamson 1:22:59 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:23:00 And it's gonna keep giving you that metric, and I mean, let's be honest, how many YouTubers don't just respond to views, right? Like, it's like a very, very powerful motivation.

Chris Williamson 1:23:07 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:23:07 Um, 'cause it's in your face. Everybody sees it, and that's the scoreboard that determines success or failure in that game.

Chris Williamson 1:23:12 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:23:13 I've got... I mean, we've, we've like spoke about this hours. And yeah-

Shaan Puri 1:23:16 This is one of our favorite fucking-

Chris Williamson 1:23:17 One of my favorite topics

Shaan Puri 1:23:18 ... you, you hit one of our trap- trap cards.

George Mack 1:23:19 Like there's a, weirdly pa- part of the, um, thoughts I was thinking about this week was going down, like how... 'Cause you know that Marshall McLuhan line that we, like shape our tools and our sh- our tools shape us.

Shaan Puri 1:23:30 They're after they shape us, yeah.

George Mack 1:23:30 It was f- this great example of Nietzsche. Nietzsche used to write by hand, and then his eyesight began to go, so he started to write in a typewriter, and his writing completely changed. He went way shorter, way punchier, like he almost completely changed as an individual. And I've been thinking about that with a lot of these tools where, so I would... Like one of my life hacks at the minute is what I call doom scrolling. So rather than doom scrolling, I go on a treadmill at like 15 incline, three in.

Shaan Puri 1:23:54 [laughs]

George Mack 1:23:54 I've got Cher Believe on loop playing. I'm spinning around. I'm having a fucking great... I'm just sending links to people. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:23:59 But if you, if, if, if you, if you are either in his contacts high on the top of his list of iMessage contacts recently, 'cause he's got massive recency bias, so he only sends it to the people that he can see.

George Mack 1:24:09 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:24:09 And if you're in Lifetime on South Lamar, and you walk downstairs and you see him, it's you with something from the '80s, some hair metal or like some like big pop star from the '80s.

George Mack 1:24:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:24:20 And he's just furiously sending fucking links to people.

George Mack 1:24:23 So that's how social media, I think, is supposed to be consumed. If you're at 130, uh, beats per minute-

Shaan Puri 1:24:26 That's how it's supposed to be. [laughs]

George Mack 1:24:27 Yeah. If you're at 130 heart, like heart rate per minute, you just like forget about... Like all the n- like new stuff goes, and I'm just in like these holes, like finding stuff.

Shaan Puri 1:24:34 [laughs]

George Mack 1:24:35 But one of the reflections I-

Chris Williamson 1:24:36 You, you've managed to find a social media flow state.

George Mack 1:24:38 Yeah, yeah, the flow state for social media.

Chris Williamson 1:24:39 [laughs]

George Mack 1:24:39 Boom scrolling, it's, it's coming back.

Shaan Puri 1:24:41 Boom scrolling.

George Mack 1:24:42 Um, so one of my, one of my actual realizations when I was in this high was-

Shaan Puri 1:24:46 [laughs]

George Mack 1:24:48 ... one thing you, when you become, when you're in like a flow state or when you're more mindful, you begin, like the, a lot of meditators describe it as the frame rate of reality completely slows down. So it's kind of like going from a, a standard definition TV to a HD where everything's a bit clearer, everything's a bit slower.

Shaan Puri 1:25:02 Mm.

George Mack 1:25:02 And I started to notice this thing in my head that I was really embarrassed about, that when I would scroll, I'd see a tweet or I'd see a post, and there's this little thing in me that just looks at the views it gets, and then like determines if I'm gonna consume it or my reaction beforehand. And it's almost like imagine what we've created with this memetic algorithm. Imagine before you ever heard like a piece of music or you ever tasted a bit of food. It's like [clapping] people clapping or people going, "That's a bit shit."

Shaan Puri 1:25:30 Mm.

George Mack 1:25:30 And that's your whole... So you don't actually ever experience social media content. Um, so one of the two big changes I'd like to see is, one, could I just turn off all engagement metrics?

Shaan Puri 1:25:39 Yeah.

George Mack 1:25:39 And I'd be fascinated to run a study-

Shaan Puri 1:25:41 Mm

George Mack 1:25:41 ... um, and compare the two and see like the, the impact that that would have. And then the second one, 'cause I've thought a lot about this, which is your point, Shaan, around the depth metrics, that it's very hard for us to measure depth. It's very easy for us to measure width. Is right now, one of the problems with social media is you can only kind of pay with a like. Like that's the currency. Which, and then I, if you have a thought experiment, if you imagine the world where the only currency was $1, like a $1 bill, and you can't pay more than $1.

Shaan Puri 1:26:08 Right.

George Mack 1:26:08 What would you have?

Shaan Puri 1:26:09 The dollar store theory.

George Mack 1:26:10 You'd, you'd have dollar store everywhere.Means you wouldn't have Michelin star restaurants, you wouldn't have, like, luxury brands, you wouldn't have all these stuff that you'd... Those are actually shit examples because I hate them. But, you know, the stuff that you would actually want to pay more money for. And I thought even just as simple as, like, why X don't just implement, like, a golden like where I only have one per week. It's completely meaningless, but I have one per week, and I press it, and then I can also go on the golden like feed. I can go, "This is the thing that Shaan says out of everything he's consumed this week is the best." I think the change-

Chris Williamson 1:26:38 It's great

George Mack 1:26:38 ... you would have in terms of content would be huge.

Chris Williamson 1:26:40 The, the, the worst thing is that you, you proposed this to me over dinner, what, five years ago or something probably. And I was like, "Fucking stupid idea." And then YouTube brought in hype. Have you seen hype?

George Mack 1:26:49 No. What is that?

Chris Williamson 1:26:50 If you're a channel with under 100,000 subscribers, you as a user are allowed... I think you're allocated about 1,000 hype points per week, and you can only spend it on videos that are high performing. I think it might be videos over 100K on channels less than 100K, something like that. But it's, uh, a f- like, non-fungible. The, the, the limited, right? So the Bitcoin of your likes.

George Mack 1:27:11 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:27:11 And it's fucking great.

George Mack 1:27:12 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:27:12 And I find myself-

George Mack 1:27:13 Oh, wow

Chris Williamson 1:27:14 ... using it on videos that I really wanna... Um, here's a small creator that's nailed it with some great documentary explaining why the Ho- the Strait of Hormuz is hard to get through, whatever the fuck.

George Mack 1:27:22 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:27:22 And I'm, I wanna send the-

George Mack 1:27:24 Way better

Chris Williamson 1:27:24 ... the hype thing. Um, Michael Smoke is, had one video that broke through, and I wanted to do it for his thing. So yes, you're right. Other thing, McNamara fallacy. You familiar with that?

George Mack 1:27:33 No.

Chris Williamson 1:27:34 Okay. So, uh, McNamara was the guy that was in charge of working out what was going on with the troops in the Vietnam War, and his issue was that he was measuring the wrong, uh, metrics. So the McNamara fals- fallacy or quantitative fallacy is the mistake of making decisions based solely on metrics while ignoring qualitative and measurable factors. Named after Un- US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it assumes that if something cannot be easily measured, it is not important or does not exist. So the issue that the McNamara fallacy had was that, uh, enemy body count metric is to- taken to be a precise and objective measure of the success or failure of the Vietnam War, which it wasn't at all. It was domestic casualties, domestic injuries, and the far more important, what's the vibe? What's the tone around it?

George Mack 1:28:19 The morale.

Chris Williamson 1:28:20 Yes.

George Mack 1:28:20 The soul.

Chris Williamson 1:28:21 Yeah, precisely. So, uh, the line is we end up intending to, uh, measure what matters, but instead what we can measure just ends up mattering.

George Mack 1:28:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:28:35 And everything else is disregarded. So you could-

George Mack 1:28:38 Like I say, how, um... Obviously golden like idea. Like, is there any ways you guys have, like, for yourselves, whether it's for the actual platforms themselves or just for you as an individual, have found a way out of this?

Shaan Puri 1:28:49 There was one I heard. I didn't do this, but Hormozi had a, a thing with this where he starts getting popular on YouTube, and then he hires a team, and they're like, "Hey, let's, let's punch this up. Let's do this video. Let's do this vi- Oh, people will love this. Do what you're eating. Do what you... The g- how you guys met. Do this." And he started as a business channel, and then he's doing everything. And of course, things that are... You know, there's not a lot of people who want to understand how to do better cold calls in sales, right? There's like a, that's a super niche topic. But, like, don't be broke is a bigger topic, and then bigger than that is gonna be harsh truths about being a man, whatever, right? Like, so those are pop. Those get 2 million views. So why make those shitty 20,000 views about, you know, um, how to, how to improve your sales funnel or whatever? But he realized, like, well, what was my mission? My mission was, like, I'm s- like, I love business. I want to share what I know about business. And so what he did was, uh, he started selling his book for 99 cents, and he put it in his bio, right? So he's basically just used the assumption of instead of measuring the success of these videos based on views, let's just measure it on book sales.

George Mack 1:29:49 Mm.

Shaan Puri 1:29:49 He's like, "But s- presumably, only a business person, the type of people I'm making content for, would buy a business book about sales, uh, or about $100 million offers. Only somebody who liked the video and tr- trusted me more from this video would go and convert." So it's like, let me create my own... Like, it's like people who do their own, um, sampling, like, or their own, uh, polling. Uh, like, I don't know if you heard about this before the election, but there was a guy who did the, who made a huge bet on Polymarket that Trump was gonna w- gonna win. I don't know if you guys remember this. Some French guy made, like, $50 million. And the reason why was the mainstream media polls were showing, like, a neck-and-neck race, and he did, um, a f- what's called, like, something like the friends and neighbors poll. You can pull this up, Jared. But, like, I think the premise was if you ask people who they're gonna vote for, they'll tell you, but, like, some people hedge, and there was, like, closeted Trump voters. But if you ask them, "Who do you think your neighbor's gonna vote for?" They'll give you a different questio- a different answer.

Chris Williamson 1:30:42 This is like the Keynesian beauty contest.

George Mack 1:30:44 Yes.

Shaan Puri 1:30:44 Yeah. And so he used the data from... He commissioned his own poll, which cost him, like, a few hundred thousand dollars or whatever, and he ended up making $40 or $50 million on a bet, because he understood the actual probability of success was far different than the, the priced odds on these markets, on these markets.

George Mack 1:31:00 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:31:00 Yeah. So what you're saying that Alex did was he found a metric that was more important and more accurate than all of the other metrics that came before.

Shaan Puri 1:31:07 BYOB. He brought his own, he brought his own metric to, to YouTube, which he had to hack around, right? To figure out how to do.

Chris Williamson 1:31:11 James, James Smith does this. So he's got his business channel, which is the, the, the other thing. He basically shut down his main one, which has got half a million subs, and he'll put a video up that gets 20,000 plays and make $50,000 because the people that go onto that video are precisely his target market at a high conversion, and they've, they've got some special tracking link that's for each different video. So he knows, oh, this one video, because it's only this link in that one video, and it's pinned in the comments or whatever it might be, and he can... He's now-

George Mack 1:31:43 Wow

Chris Williamson 1:31:43 ... optimizing for the outcome that he wants.

George Mack 1:31:45 That makes sense.

Chris Williamson 1:31:45 Now, the problem is that you then start to optimize for book sales.

Shaan Puri 1:31:50 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:31:50 And what optimizing for book sales... 'Cause you're always optimizing for something.

George Mack 1:31:54 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:31:54 Unless you're optimizing for vibe or optimizing for feeling, and that's what the... You know, to break the fourth wall, that's the reason that I want you to do this. I don't know if these episodes will ever be bigger than me sitting down with McConaughey. I think they've kind of weirdly got the legs to be. But the reason I want you to do it is 'cause I just thought it would be fun, and I think that optimizing for your, your-

George Mack 1:32:13 Me too

Chris Williamson 1:32:13 ... the quote on the wall of your man-

George Mack 1:32:14 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:32:14 ... or the childlike joy or the, you know, good hang vibe

George Mack 1:32:18 It's, yeah, knowing when to use metrics, when to avoid them, and then also, I think you said then about studies, like how much of this is you and then how much of this is the wider-

Shaan Puri 1:32:25 Wait, wait, I have to give you credit. You did this when you released your high agency thing.

George Mack 1:32:28 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:32:28 I was the one who went on Similarweb and looked at the traffic to your blog. I was like, "Dude, there's a million people have read your blog." You're like, "Really?"

George Mack 1:32:35 Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:32:35 I'm like, "Don't... What do your analytics say? That's what Similarweb..." He's like, "I didn't have Google Analytics in."

George Mack 1:32:39 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:32:40 And I was like-

George Mack 1:32:41 It was peak-

Shaan Puri 1:32:41 ... "You're a marketing guy. How do you not have it in? You intentionally didn't have it in."

George Mack 1:32:44 Yes, yes. Well, even that bit of advice there of like do a blog post. Like blog, like blog posts are essentially the UK are the mainstream media. You know what I mean?

Shaan Puri 1:32:51 [laughs]

George Mack 1:32:51 Like, it's like the ultimate, like-

Shaan Puri 1:32:52 Undervalued

George Mack 1:32:53 ... undervalue. Um, like don't do it. You can't link to it. And at that time Twitter completely shadowbanned links. But then, yeah, I think doing something fundamentally different, and this is the challenge of when do you know, and I struggle with this a lot, when you're a bit of a weird guy, which fucking all four of us are probably, right? Um, when do you know that you're kind of onto something, you're on the edge, or when are you just a bit batshit mental?

Shaan Puri 1:33:15 [laughs]

George Mack 1:33:15 Like, and that, and knowing that is a fucking sc- That's why you gotta have good friends, I think, um, as well as sometimes just balls and you make mistakes. What if-

Shaan Puri 1:33:23 No, no, you just ignore. You just always assume you're onto something.

Chris Williamson 1:33:25 Put the glasses-

George Mack 1:33:25 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:33:25 Put your glasses on and hope for the best.

Shaan Puri 1:33:26 You always 100% assume you're onto something.

Chris Williamson 1:33:27 That's what I do. Delusional cock.

Shaan Puri 1:33:28 Delulu is the solulu.

George Mack 1:33:29 This is the difference. This is the difference. You know what I mean?

Shaan Puri 1:33:30 That's our GDP gap right there.

Chris Williamson 1:33:31 It's this side of the table-

George Mack 1:33:32 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:33:32 ... and this side of the table.

George Mack 1:33:33 That's the GDP gap right there.

Chris Williamson 1:33:35 Yeah, that's the difference between us and America.

Shaan Puri 1:33:36 Who are you to say it's gonna tell you if you're onto something? Come on.

George Mack 1:33:37 Yeah. Really.

Chris Williamson 1:33:38 Well, but-

George Mack 1:33:38 Really, it is

Chris Williamson 1:33:39 ... it is. It creates this-

Shaan Puri 1:33:39 I'm always onto something. That's right, baby.

George Mack 1:33:41 Next week. Next thing you know I'm gonna be-

Chris Williamson 1:33:43 Well, like, well, too sure. Maybe I'll wait two decades. Um-

George Mack 1:33:44 That's a meritocratic society where we've got an old school aristoc- aristocratic society where-

Chris Williamson 1:33:49 Yeah, exactly. We've, we've been handed down

George Mack 1:33:51 ... the peasants would have permission.

Chris Williamson 1:33:51 And also the other thing is that we can't raise out of our status. You're gonna be middle class for the rest of your life in the eyes of British people. I'm gonna be working class for the rest of my life in the eyes of British people.

George Mack 1:34:00 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:34:00 It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter how many plays I get, how much money I make. When I go back home, they know where I went to school, they know what postcode my parents lived in, they know what my accent's like. It's like I think that that puts a kind of cap on how much people think that they... How, how big their dreams should be and how much faith they should have in themselves.

Chris Williamson 1:34:19 This is... Alain de Botton talked about this. He's like, people that come from, in the UK, working class backgrounds, they're probably not gonna try and rock the boat because that's not their place. It's not your place to do that. America's like nascent. It's like fucking two years old, right? In the grand scheme of things.

George Mack 1:34:34 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:34:34 We got 1,000 years of uninterrupted, uninvaded history, right? Apart from some planes in fucking like August of 1940. That's it. Right? Uh, and then fucking Rudolf Hess when he decided to try and land in, uh, Scott, do you know that story? Rudolf Hess, one of-

George Mack 1:34:49 Amazing.

Chris Williamson 1:34:49 Oh. Oh, gee, do you wanna tell it?

George Mack 1:34:51 Um, you, you tell it better than me.

Chris Williamson 1:34:52 Okay. So, um, Rudolf Hess was one of the-

Shaan Puri 1:34:56 That was the most English shit ever

Chris Williamson 1:34:57 ... inner-

George Mack 1:34:58 You wanna tell it? No, you tell it better than me.

Shaan Puri 1:35:00 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:35:00 [laughs]

George Mack 1:35:00 Crack on. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:35:05 Rudolf Hess was a German fighter ace in World War I, and he then becomes one of the inner circle for Hitler in World War II. He starts to slowly lose favor toward the end of the war. I think '43, '44, he starts to lose favor with Hitler, and he sees himself being shunted to the side a little bit, so he decides that he's going to do something, uh, courageous and heroic that's going to save the war and also bring him back into the inner circle with regards to Hitler, because he's got this sort of win- this group of sycophants around him. He's got Himmler, he's got Goebbels, he's got all of these guys that are around him. And, uh, Rudolf Hess has been shunted out to the side. So Hess gets a two-seat plane, one of the long range bomber planes that the Germans were using. He gets it modified so that it can be flown by one person as opposed to two. He gets additional fuel tanks strapped to it, and he flies it without telling anybody in the middle of the night from Germany over to Scotland, 'cause he once met some aristocratic Scottish i- i- nobleman, and thinks because he's got this perspective of Brits, that it's all one Renaissance Bridgerton novel, that he is going to know Winston Churchill and the King-

George Mack 1:36:22 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:36:22 ... and he's going to be able to... Or the Queen, and is going to be able to petition Britain to, uh, have an armistice, to put down their arms. Uh, so he leaves a, a note for the Führer and leaves a note for his wife and just sets off. Now, he doesn't know where he is when he gets to Scotland because it's dark. By the time he gets to Scotland, it's dark, and he can't see where he wanted to land. He can't see the fucking palace or the house of this, this nobleman. So he just pulls the ejector seat, lands in a farmer's fie- [laughs] lands in a farmer's field, very quickly gets picked up by the British military. They find out this is the fourth ranking Nazi in the entire Reich. Immediately take him into custody. Doesn't get to see the King, doesn't get to see the Queen, doesn't get to see anybody. Doesn't get to see anybody at all. Doesn't get anywhere close to the nobleman he meant to go out there and see. However, the British now have the fourth ranking Nazi in the world, and Hitler is furious. Absolutely fucking furious. Like w- like apoplectic apparently. And, uh, it just goes to show, I think, like first off, the weird incentives and the way that people respond to a tight sphere of a social circle with power struggles that keep on going on. It causes people to do crazy... It's being in a relationship with a hot/cold girlfriend, right?

George Mack 1:37:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:37:40 You're just doing fucking insane thi- You're like throwing rocks at her window-

George Mack 1:37:43 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:37:43 ... holding a boom box with a mixtape, and then the next day sh- you're naked fucking getting... You know, being beaten up by her or whatever. And, um-

Shaan Puri 1:37:49 [laughs] I told you that story in confidence. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:37:52 [laughs] And, um, uh, the, the other thing is that people still have this kind of archaic interpretation of what British life is like, especially back in the day.

George Mack 1:38:02 Mm.

Shaan Puri 1:38:02 He should've done a 360 and then moonwalked out of there.

Chris Williamson 1:38:05 Moonwalked out of there. Yeah.

George Mack 1:38:06 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:38:06 You know, man. [laughs]

George Mack 1:38:07 Have you ever, um, heard of the story of Churchill and Hitler getting dinner?

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George Mack 1:39:22 Early 30s, Churchill's very much out of the, um, the picture and Hitler's on the come up. So I think he's just, he, he's either just became chancellor or he's just about to become chancellor. And one of the fascinating things that you, when you really study history, is how blurry it is at the time. So I always use the example of the Roman Empire, of you can ki- I think it's like 476 AD is when the Roman Empire fell. But if you ask, "Well, when did the people recognize it fell?" And it's a bit like, "Huh."

Chris Williamson 1:39:50 Yeah.

George Mack 1:39:50 The same with the British Empire. Like when did the British Empire fall? It's like, huh. Like you could point to certain parts of World War I. You could go further back. You could go to World War II. You could go to '60s, '70s, whenever you wanna go to it. Um, when do people actually recognize the thing? It's always later. And even like Hitler,

George Mack 1:40:05 like Churchill, who obviously ends up becoming Hitler's, like, nemesis, was intrigued by a dinner with him. So there was this guy called Ernst Putzi Hanfstaengl. You can probably search that one, Jared. And good luck. Um, and [laughs] he, um, he, he was like a socialite in Germany who wanted to arrange the meeting, and Churchill basically said, "Listen," he was really concerned about communism at the time, but he was also concerned with Hitler's antisemitism. So Putzi says, "Well, come through, I'll introduce you to Adolf. You guys will get on really well." Churchill turns up, he's got his whole family there, and kind of chatting to Putzi. "He's still not here. Still not here." So they kind of have dinner. Hitler's not there, and Churchill's like, "Where is he?" So Putzi goes, "Leave it with me." So Hitler famously lives in an apartment building in, um, Berlin, so he goes to his apartment building. Shit you not, Hitler's there just shaving his mustache. So he's just shaving his mustache at the time. 'Cause you've gotta... You... That's the thing about his mustache, like there's a lot of work that goes into that thing. So he's shaving the mustache and he goes, "Winston Churchill, um, very important British politician, wants to meet you." And, uh, he's like, "What am I gonna say to him? What am I gonna say? I have no interest in talking to that guy." And Putzi like argues with him for ages, and he goes, "Right, I'll come." So he goes back, tells Churchill. Churchill and his family sit there. Hitler never comes. So Putzi says, "I'll set it up the next day." Sets up another dinner. Hitler never comes. And it's like those moments of history-

Chris Williamson 1:41:25 Mm

George Mack 1:41:25 ... that if those two met... Because famously, ch- I, I didn't realize this until I was reading about it recently, that Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler. He flew over to Germany and he was impr- Do this. Gives a handshake. He was impressed by the handshake, 'cause Hitler does these, like, double handshakes, and he was drawn in by his charisma and believed, "Oh, this guy will never invade." Um, but it's just this fascinating counterfactual that if Adolf and Winston met, what would have happened?

Chris Williamson 1:41:47 What year was that?

George Mack 1:41:49 I, I wanna say, uh, '31, '32. Around about then.

Chris Williamson 1:41:53 Fuck.

Chris Williamson 1:41:55 Yeah, that's so cool. Uh, have you seen the Forbes under th- 30 Under 30 fraud list?

George Mack 1:42:01 Oh, wow [laughs] .

Shaan Puri 1:42:02 Yeah. It's crazy.

Chris Williamson 1:42:03 Jared?

Shaan Puri 1:42:04 How long is it now?

Chris Williamson 1:42:05 Um, so it's just, this stinks of you two. This is really some... This is kind of just a gift for you two.

Shaan Puri 1:42:11 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:42:11 Um, but this is the, uh, 30 Under 30 fraud watchlist. So if we scroll down a little bit and you hover over Sam Bankman-Fried, you'll see, uh-

Shaan Puri 1:42:19 Oh [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:42:19 ... incarcerated. Terraform Labs, incarcerated. Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, incarcerated. We'll keep going down. There we go. Time served for, uh-

Shaan Puri 1:42:28 Shkrelli

Chris Williamson 1:42:28 ... Martin Shkrelli. Um, and if you go, if you go to the black bit where it's, like, redacted, just scroll over the black, uh, text. The real numbers were 300,000. That's it. "Sold a student loan app to JP Morgan for 1, 175 million. Claimed 4.25 million users. The real number was 300,000, and she hired a data scientist to fabricate the rest. JP Morgan bought it anyway, then noticed. Oops." If we go all the way down to the bottom, there's actually a risk list. So this is people who've been on the 30 Under 30. It's like a, a, a, how would you say, prototypical algorithm that looks at some of the hype around the market. So these are companies that they think is going to be likely-

Shaan Puri 1:43:05 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:43:05 ... to be on the fraud list. So I don't know. Any Sphere, Cursor? Do you know what that is, Shaan?

Shaan Puri 1:43:10 Yeah. Cur- Cursor is super legit. So-

George Mack 1:43:11 I did say SCPG, yeah

Shaan Puri 1:43:12 ... I, I would say Cursor's super legit, but, uh, this is my-

Chris Williamson 1:43:15 They're not gonna come for you. Uh-

George Mack 1:43:17 The, the crazy one is, um, Sam Bankman-Fried. It came out today-

Chris Williamson 1:43:19 Is that Polymarket there? Oh, shame

George Mack 1:43:21 ... Sam Bankman-Fried, it came out today-

Chris Williamson 1:43:23 Good friend

George Mack 1:43:23 ... that, um, um, the shares, FTX. So Sam Bankman-Fried put an investment in Anthropic, uh, that owns Claude.

Chris Williamson 1:43:28 It would have gotten them out of the bankruptcy

George Mack 1:43:30 ... it was, it's something like that. Uh-

Shaan Puri 1:43:32 No, it's like $60 billion

George Mack 1:43:33 ... 60 billion, which Coinbase is worth 50 billion or something like that.

Shaan Puri 1:43:36 Yeah.

George Mack 1:43:36 So it's, um... But the, uh-

Shaan Puri 1:43:37 FTX at its peak was 30. So basically he's one of the [laughs] ... Had he not gone to jail for fraud and had not been using customer funds-

Chris Williamson 1:43:43 Would've been one of the richest people on the planet.

Shaan Puri 1:43:45 Mm. And he would've been seen as one of the best investors in the world, 'cause he was early in Solana. He was early in this. He was early in-

Chris Williamson 1:43:51 Do they still have that position or did they have to liquidate the position?

Shaan Puri 1:43:55 No, that's the sad part. When they did the bankruptcy, they bring in this guy. I forgot. He's a famous guy. He did the Enron bankruptcy. Something like Something Rice or something. I forget what his name is. He's got a cool l- cool-sounding name. They bring him in. So what do they do? They immediately, like, freeze all payments. They, like, have, like, a protocol of bankruptcy, and so one of the things is they take all these illiquid shares and they say, "We need to sell them." And they sell them at this huge discount-

Chris Williamson 1:44:16 Oh my God

Shaan Puri 1:44:16 ... right away into the market.

Chris Williamson 1:44:17 Oh my God.

Shaan Puri 1:44:18 Um, and so they sold the whole lot.

Chris Williamson 1:44:19 Do you know what they s- do you know what they sold it for?

Shaan Puri 1:44:21 So they sold the whole lot for, like, I think like a billion dollars of, uh, like a billion dollars of all the investments that he had made, and so it was like a fraction of whatever it was, like, worth essentially. And, uh, just the one Anthropic position alone is a $60 billion position.

Chris Williamson 1:44:34 Would that have paid off all of the-

Shaan Puri 1:44:36 Oh, oh, multiple times over

George Mack 1:44:38 Many times over

Shaan Puri 1:44:38 ... many times over.

Chris Williamson 1:44:38 So all of the people who were missing money, had they have just held... When was the FTX thing? Three years ago?

George Mack 1:44:44 Uh, yeah, something like that. Maybe, maybe a bit longer

Chris Williamson 1:44:46 Had they have held, had they have held the FTX position in Anthropic simply for what? Thousand days, thousand mul- even let's say it was like they did it, it was last year, it would've been three years. Uh, that would've cleared off everybody's debts. Everybody would've got their money back.

Shaan Puri 1:44:59 Right. Well, you got screwed because if... Let's say you held Bitcoin in FTX. You did nothing wrong. You bought Bitcoin on this exchange, you think you have Bitcoin. In reality, FTX either didn't buy the Bitcoin, just took your cash. They showed you, you own 10 Bitcoin, but you didn't a- they never bought the Bitcoin. They just took the cash and did something with it. Or you did have Bitcoin, and they went and used it, again, for their own slush fund of investing, uh, which they were not supposed to do. Now, even when the bankruptcy happened, and it's like, "Oh, you're gonna get paid out," you got paid out based on the Bitcoin price when it happened, not the fact that Bitcoin was up three, four, 5X since then.

Chris Williamson 1:45:34 Oh.

George Mack 1:45:34 Why? Why is that?

Shaan Puri 1:45:36 It was like the, this, it's the way that I guess the bankruptcy process works. I don't know the technicality of the way that they, that they did it. And so you had this money that should've been appreciating that was locked up, and then you get paid on the four years ago price or whatever [laughs] it was the day, the day that it ha- that it happened. It's un- it's, it was pretty bad.

Chris Williamson 1:45:52 Shaan, your knowledge of fucking niche business stuff, dude-

Shaan Puri 1:45:56 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:45:56 ... is terrifying. It's like George for random historical facts. It's really-

Shaan Puri 1:46:01 There's a, there's a-

Chris Williamson 1:46:01 ... fucking terrifying

Shaan Puri 1:46:01 ... Galloway did something cool with this. Have you heard what he did? So when the bankruptcy, uh, happened and people, um... Every b- every... So, like, for me, I had some cash. FTX was one of our sponsors. They ga- they actually-

Chris Williamson 1:46:13 [laughs]

Shaan Puri 1:46:13 They gave us a bunch of money. They gave us, like, 100, 200 grand to write an a- one article about them on The Milk Road. And we actually wrote it, and I wrote in the thing, I was like, "Yeah, there's this, uh, weird relationship between FTX, which everybody thinks is the best company in the world right now, and Alameda Research, his, like, hedge fund," and it's like, it's unclear the relationship. It's, it's a bit of a-

Chris Williamson 1:46:33 So you called this out?

Shaan Puri 1:46:34 So I called that part. I even, I did- I'm not an investigative journalist. I wasn't gonna go f- it's not my job to go figure that out. But I just noted, like, "Hey," like, "here's a bunch of really interesting things about them. Here's something that's unexplained. I don't f- I don't fully know. It sounds a little bit sketch." And so we sent it to them. We were like, "Hey, we're ready to post." And they were like, "Uh, you need to take that part out."

Chris Williamson 1:46:50 [laughs] No fucking way.

Shaan Puri 1:46:51 And so I was like, "Well, I think I'm not gonna take it out."

Chris Williamson 1:46:54 Right.

Shaan Puri 1:46:55 [laughs] And they were like, "Okay, uh, we'll get back to you." And they just never talked to me again. They never took the money back. They never asked for the money back.

Chris Williamson 1:47:02 Huh.

Shaan Puri 1:47:02 They just disappeared.

Chris Williamson 1:47:03 And you never posted it?

Shaan Puri 1:47:04 We never posted it. We were like, "Okay, I guess we'll just... I guess they'll get back to us." They just never did.

Chris Williamson 1:47:08 Fuck.

Shaan Puri 1:47:08 And then it came out that that was, like, this link [laughs] that was, like, a really problematic thing.

George Mack 1:47:12 That, that was their defensive way of handling that, basically.

Chris Williamson 1:47:14 Did you ever talk about, did you ever-

George Mack 1:47:15 That's crazy

Chris Williamson 1:47:16 ... bring up the fact that you presciently fucking accidentally just-

Shaan Puri 1:47:19 Well, look at- [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:47:19 ... nudged the tripwire. You didn't fully break it, but you nudged the tripwire that was gonna cause, like, the biggest banking scandal of the last five years.

George Mack 1:47:26 It's like the Epstein girls, the, the two girls having the argument.

Shaan Puri 1:47:28 Not literally, but I'm like a dog setting it off. I wasn't really, like, clever in how I was doing it. I mean-

Chris Williamson 1:47:31 Yeah, you backed into, you moonwalked into it.

Shaan Puri 1:47:32 Yeah, I was just like, "Hmm, that-

George Mack 1:47:33 Yeah

Shaan Puri 1:47:33 ... that sounds weird. Is there an explanation for this?" They're like, "No."

George Mack 1:47:36 Hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:47:36 And I was like, "Okay, still sounds weird to me." [laughs] That was it.

George Mack 1:47:39 Does this, does this whole...

Shaan Puri 1:47:39 [laughs]

George Mack 1:47:40 No, but it's really interesting to consider, and it kind of links to the, like, study says, science says of we just have this default bias of if people think this thing is successful, kind of it's this giant game of emperor's new clothes-

Chris Williamson 1:47:52 So true

George Mack 1:47:52 ... that

George Mack 1:47:53 exists. Um-

Chris Williamson 1:47:53 One of the things that I've always had a bit of a problem with, w- maybe because I was such an unpopular kid, that the fact that talent isn't enough, momentum is more important for the most part. You know, we can let a lot of people get away with some pretty gnarly shit if it seems like they're crushing it. I always use this example of, uh, Fyre Festival.

Shaan Puri 1:48:13 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:48:13 Like, Billy McFarland from Fyre Festival. W- the, the festival was an entire catastrophe, multiple documentaries made about it. People are in basically FEMA shelters instead of the five-star huts that they were promised. Blink-182 doesn't turn up. People have got these, like, small cheese sandwiches. Maybe they're gonna be stranded on an island. There's not enough water, all the rest of it.

Shaan Puri 1:48:31 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:48:31 But if Billy McFarland had been able to put together a half-competent festival, just passable-

Shaan Puri 1:48:38 Right

Chris Williamson 1:48:38 ... he would've been hailed as a marketing genius.

Shaan Puri 1:48:39 Oh.

Chris Williamson 1:48:40 The orange square, all of that stuff was hugely influential, and this is because we will forgive almost every sin of someone's if they're successful. And in a meritocracy, this makes complete sense, right? If you are crushing it, that means I wanna be around you. The blast radius of your success is so great. Fucking canonical perfect example that happened two weeks ago, Kanye West.

Shaan Puri 1:49:01 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:49:02 Kanye West just sold out SoFi Stadium two nights, right? And the stage show is fucking spectacular. All that anyone can talk about is how cool the production was, and he's got all of these guests coming on. It's fucking amazing. He hasn't exactly showered himself in glory over the last five years, right? There, it would be difficult for a musician to try and torpedo their own musical career more aggressively than Kanye West did.

Shaan Puri 1:49:26 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:49:27 But homeboy's got bangers.

Shaan Puri 1:49:28 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:49:29 If you've got bangers, dude-

Shaan Puri 1:49:30 It's all forgiven

Chris Williamson 1:49:31 ... you can do whatever the fuck you want. And that's, on one side, what happens with music-

Shaan Puri 1:49:38 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:49:38 ... your point, and beauty, two things that hack the human brain so effectively that you will stay going back to the fucking crazy stripper girl because she's so hot, even though she's bad for you. You will listen to the person who put out literal Heil Hitler song, uh, fucking six months ago, because he's got three and a half hour worth set of straight heaters. And the same thing is also true with momentum. If somebody seems to be crushing it, we'll just, we'll, we'll... Sam Bankman-Fried is playing fucking, what, what, what was he playing, like, fucking World of Warcraft or something?

Shaan Puri 1:50:12 During the meeting and-

Chris Williamson 1:50:12 Yeah, during, and he's like, "Oh my God, this guy's a fucking super genius."

Shaan Puri 1:50:15 Genius, yes.

Chris Williamson 1:50:15 Yeah, exactly. And it's like, no, no, no, no, because a- any person would be scrutinized. But if you've got the right momentum, people are happy to just fucking-

Shaan Puri 1:50:23 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:50:24 ... shunt that to the side, and I've never liked it. And it goes to my theory about why people say the only insults that hurt are the ones that you believe, and I don't think it's true. I think the insults that hurt the most are the ones that you know are untrue, but that you fear other people might believe.

Shaan Puri 1:50:42 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:50:42 Because that's optics management, because you have not only the unfairness, but you have the indignation of knowing that it isn't true. And this is the opposite side of the same dynamic that we're talking about here. You could put out something which is amazingly researched, a fantastic piece of work, but if other people say, "You're a bad guy," or, "That was done incorrectly," or, "We don't think he's cool"-It's not going to get anywhere. But that can't happen with beauty because it hacks the human brain. You-- It is so hard to say. You can say that girl or that guy that's very good looking, they're an asshole, they're a this, they're a that, and you go, "Yeah, but they're so fucking hot." The same with Kanye West. You can say, "He's an anti-Semite. We don't like him. He's crazy. He's addicted to nitrous. We da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da."

George Mack 1:51:21 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:51:21 It's like, he's got fucking heaters, dude.

George Mack 1:51:24 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:51:24 And for as long as he's got heaters, it doesn't matter.

George Mack 1:51:26 I do think mu-

Chris Williamson 1:51:26 So that's my fucking take

George Mack 1:51:27 ... I do think music and beauty are, are unique in that regard, that the more successful you are as a musician, the more you can probably get away with, more so than any other, any other route.

Chris Williamson 1:51:37 People can kid themselves into not liking something that is objectively good because they don't like the person putting it across in most art forms. If you don't like somebody on a podcast and they tell a really interesting story, you can convince yourself that it wasn't that interesting or they're an asshole. Even comedy, someone can pal- tell a joke-

George Mack 1:51:57 Yes

Chris Williamson 1:51:57 ... and you can be like, "Nah, nah, wasn't that good. Wasn't that good. Didn't think it was that good." The same thing is not true for music. It is so penetrating emotionally to people. It fucking just cuts through your biases. It cuts through your defenses in a way that other art forms can't. And beauty, especially like female beauty for guys, is just, you can be the craziest, like total cluster B personality nightmare curse. If you're hot, guys are just gonna keep coming back.

George Mack 1:52:26 Wait till you hear Epstein SoundCloud.

George Mack 1:52:28 Um, you know, I, I always use the, um, example with Billy McFarland of, like Steve, Steve Jobs is a little bit of a, a very, very different figure to Billy McFarland. But reality distortion field kind of makes things happen. Um, and like the counterfactual that, like the ultimate thing that McFarland did, or one of the big things is like his business partner, his co-founder was Ja Rule. And like I always want, like the counterfactual, if Steve Jobs' co-founder was Ja Rule rather than Steve Wozniak, like it, it, the McFarland story is very, uh, uh, obviously it's on him for selecting Ja Rule. Um, but if he would've selected a, a good operator-

Chris Williamson 1:53:03 He just didn't know what would've happened

George Mack 1:53:03 ... yeah, what would've happened?

Chris Williamson 1:53:04 [chuckles] A question.

George Mack 1:53:05 Question.

Chris Williamson 1:53:06 What businesses would be made better by adding Ja Rule in?

George Mack 1:53:10 [chuckles] That's a great question.

Shaan Puri 1:53:13 Have you seen the old thing, what does Ja have to say about this?

Chris Williamson 1:53:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

George Mack 1:53:16 [chuckles] They, they spell.

Shaan Puri 1:53:17 One of the all-time old internet memes.

George Mack 1:53:19 [chuckles]

Shaan Puri 1:53:20 There's a, there's a, a, a w- phrase that I've been, uh, very interested in recently called supernormal stimuli.

Chris Williamson 1:53:26 Mm-hmm.

Shaan Puri 1:53:26 Have you guys heard this?

Chris Williamson 1:53:27 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:53:28 This is pretty fascinating.

George Mack 1:53:29 No.

Shaan Puri 1:53:29 Are you familiar with this? You, you might be able to explain it. Uh-

Chris Williamson 1:53:31 Yeah, Skinnerian behaviorism stuff.

Shaan Puri 1:53:33 Yeah, there was, basically, there was a scientist, uh, back then. He won the Nobel Prize for this, and what he studied was, he, he got famous because instead of doing studies in a lab, he just went out into the wild and was like, "What do I observe is actually true? And then if I tweak a variable, can I just leave it in, in the real environment and see what happens?" And so what he did was, uh, you know, birds, the core behavior of a bird is to sit on, uh, the egg, keep the egg warm. That's your baby. That's like the entire, like Darwinian pressure is to keep this egg alive. So he goes, "Awesome. Bird loves egg. Does bird love bigger egg? Does bird love pink egg? Bird love pink polka dot egg?" So he started putting a fake bigger egg with bigger dots and bigger, brighter colors, put it next to it, and guess what the bird does? Gets off its real egg and goes sits on the fake egg 'cause it's more stimuli, hijacked the brain.

Chris Williamson 1:54:22 Mm.

Shaan Puri 1:54:22 And so li- his point wasn't like, it's not like some rational pros and cons list decision. Bird just had a, a, a deep like, uh, part of its brain that you could just hijack by changing the st- to giving a, what he calls a supernormal stimulus. So he would give him a bigger, bigger egg. And he could just keep doing this up till the point where it's almost comical. The egg is so big that a bird finally, when he's like, "I can't even sit on this egg. Okay, I, I guess that's too big," right? And like, you know, you walk around and you'll see people with crazy lip fillers and BBLs, and it's like-

Chris Williamson 1:54:50 Correct

Shaan Puri 1:54:50 ... what is it? It's a supernormal stimulus.

Chris Williamson 1:54:53 Mm.

Shaan Puri 1:54:53 It's the same thing. It's like there's a way to hijack the mind. Beauty, uh, color. If you go to the grocery store, what do the food companies do? They basically take your normal stimulus, so like, you know, the humans were evolved to li- we like salt because we need electrolytes. We like fat for a certain reason. We need certain things in our, in our diet. So they just said, "Well, what if I give you a lot of salt? What if I give you fucking Doritos Cool Ranch? What if I give you triple, you know, triple pack Dorito Loco Taco?" Whatever, and you eventually get a supernormal stimulus that you really can't, like resist. Your body has this like, an extreme, like pull towards it.

Chris Williamson 1:55:25 You know, my favorite-

Shaan Puri 1:55:26 Wow

Chris Williamson 1:55:26 ... supernormal stimuli is hunter-gatherers eating cheesecake for the first time.

Shaan Puri 1:55:31 Wow.

Chris Williamson 1:55:32 Because it is so unique. There's a, the, a process called aurification. So aurification is the design of texture of foods, and if you think about ancestrally, almost every food that you can think of is a single texture, right? Meat, cooked, slimy-ish a little bit.

Shaan Puri 1:55:50 There's maybe. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:55:51 Yeah. Well, there we go. Supernormal stimuli with it. Let's see how this is getting on.

Shaan Puri 1:55:53 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:55:54 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 1:55:54 Fuck that. Yeah, I'm out on this now. Two hours in.

Chris Williamson 1:55:56 I'm still enjoying it. I think I'm hungry. Um, Oreos.

Shaan Puri 1:56:00 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:56:01 Crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside.

Shaan Puri 1:56:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:56:03 Fries. But what's interesting about the cheesecake thing is that you have fat with carbs and sugar, unbelievably rare, and you have sort of the crunchiness of the base, and you can tell I'm hungry, and the, uh, like fluffiness of the top of the cheesecake. And they give these to hunter-gatherers, and these, their fucking minds, it's a flavor explosion.

Shaan Puri 1:56:22 Wow.

Chris Williamson 1:56:23 Um, but yeah, the, the, there's a really great one that, uh, I think it's beetles, a type of beetle, dung beetle perhaps, or some other beetle. They're attracted, they're sexually attracted to the shininess of the shell, the shininess of the top. But as, uh, glass bottles became prevalent, the beetle population was going down because the glass bottles were shinier and bigger than the beetles were. So they were driving themselves into extinction, not mating with each other, and just mating with glass bottles because that was a supernormal stimuli.

Shaan Puri 1:56:53 Oh.

Chris Williamson 1:56:53 And what happens with the, uh, cosmetic surgery, the big lips, the big boobs thing-You get something called Fisherian runaway. So Fisherian runaway is this sort of recursive, insane expansion of typically, like, sexually dimorphic traits, sexually, uh, provocative traits. And you end up with, uh, uh, peacocks who've got tails so big that they can't move.

Shaan Puri 1:57:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:57:15 With, um, uh, deer whose antlers are so large they can't lift their heads up and they die. Um, with women who've got boobs that are so big that they end up with back pain.

Shaan Puri 1:57:25 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:57:25 And, you know, they, they're unable... Let's say that you took it to the absolute extreme. You were no longer able to procreate, the reason for that trait in the first place, but you'd done something that, like, destroyed your hips, and now it meant that you needed to have a hysterectomy and you couldn't have your, your, your uterus anymore. And now you've killed your chance at doing the thing by having it run away with itself. The same as some of those deers or, uh, rams, where the size of their, like, antler things dig into their own head and kill them.

Shaan Puri 1:57:52 Oh, yeah, I've seen that. That's crazy.

Chris Williamson 1:57:54 Fucking gnarly.

Shaan Puri 1:57:55 Wow. It's funny how it's, it's kind of like a meta discourse where, you know, you were talking earlier about the platforms and the feedback loops, and then you end up, like, going so awry, but that's kind of nature's-

Chris Williamson 1:58:06 Equivalent

Shaan Puri 1:58:06 ... homegrown version.

Chris Williamson 1:58:06 It's the same dynamic. That's what... It's... What you've seen on social media is tapping into this exact dynamic. It's the same thing.

Shaan Puri 1:58:15 Yeah.

1:58:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:58:16 It's just that you've had to replicate it digitally.

Shaan Puri 1:58:18 There's a great tweet that this guy Jay Alta said. He said, "You pity the moth for confusing the lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world."

Chris Williamson 1:58:25 Fucking love it.

Shaan Puri 1:58:26 Boom.

Chris Williamson 1:58:26 It's one of the best, one of the best tweets of this year.

Shaan Puri 1:58:28 Yeah.

1:58:28 It's amazing.

Chris Williamson 1:58:29 Mm.

Shaan Puri 1:58:30 Yeah.

1:58:30 But there is a solve, right?

Chris Williamson 1:58:31 It's mad.

Shaan Puri 1:58:31 'Cause, like, you hear this and you're like, "Oh, great. We're fucked." It's like, no, what's... Well, there's got to be some sort of antidote to this. And the, w- what the interesting part was, the equation goes like this. It's basically how powerful is the stimulus, so the flavor of the food, the size of the feathers, whatever, versus your baseline norm, what you are used to. And the cool thing is basically, like, there's this arms race where they keep escalating. So the more you do it, the more you get used to it, then you need a bigger stimulus and a bigger s- you need a, a bigger tweet and a bigger TikTok and more views on the next video, and you need b- a stronger flavor. But all you gotta do is basically detox for a very short amount of time and reset. Like, if anybody's ever given up soda for, like, you know, a couple months or a couple years-

Chris Williamson 1:59:05 George has never done that

Shaan Puri 1:59:06 ... you, if you go back to it, it tastes, like, horrible. It's just, like, so syrupy. It's too sweet. You can't handle it. But you used to drink eight Diet Cokes. And the reason why is because you, you can reset the denominator essentially instead of-

Chris Williamson 1:59:17 Mm

Shaan Puri 1:59:17 ... trying to avoid the, the, the forces of, of, you know, commercialization that are trying to s- stimulate you.

Chris Williamson 1:59:23 What's that, uh, Cookfucius Substack that me and you like?

Shaan Puri 1:59:26 That's great.

Chris Williamson 1:59:27 You see his staring at a wall experiment?

Shaan Puri 1:59:29 No.

Chris Williamson 1:59:29 So this guy's Substack, it's pretty niche, but it's fucking-

Shaan Puri 1:59:33 What? Cookfucius?

Chris Williamson 1:59:34 Cookfucius.

Shaan Puri 1:59:34 He's great. He's great.

Chris Williamson 1:59:36 Really well-written. You would love it. Fucking great.

Shaan Puri 1:59:38 I would say that.

Chris Williamson 1:59:38 Me and... George introduced me to him, and now I'm, I'm pretty... He, he, his first post that I saw was, uh, I am Andrew Puberman.

Shaan Puri 1:59:45 [laughs]

1:59:45 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:59:46 That was the first-

Shaan Puri 1:59:47 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:59:47 ... that was the first blog post that I read from him.

Shaan Puri 1:59:48 Subscribe. [laughs]

1:59:50 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 1:59:50 Um, uh, and, um, he's doing an experiment. He did an experiment, I think, for 30 days, where he stared at a wall for an hour. And this is kind of a twist on an ancient Eastern practice, which I, I think Dr. K's got his clients to do as well. And after-

Shaan Puri 2:00:05 Yeah

Chris Williamson 2:00:05 ... 20 minutes, some people burst into tears.

Shaan Puri 2:00:07 Yes.

Chris Williamson 2:00:07 Some people are screaming. They kind of go a little bit-

Shaan Puri 2:00:09 I was gonna ask

2:00:10 What?

Chris Williamson 2:00:10 Yeah, because I th- at least what I think is happening, their baseline of stimulus is so low, even if you're in the shower, you're doing st- even if you're going for a walk, things are moving past you, right? You're locomoting and you see the fucking world-

Shaan Puri 2:00:24 But all they're doing is staring at a wall?

Chris Williamson 2:00:26 Staring at a wall for an hour. I would... I, I mean, I... Let's see. I would sh-

Shaan Puri 2:00:29 You know what would be, you know what would be an interesting test? Take people that have been to jail and compare them to people that haven't.

Chris Williamson 2:00:34 Because basically what you're saying is-

Shaan Puri 2:00:37 That's basically what meditation involved

2:00:38 Dude, I was in fucking in-school suspension when I was a teenager for, like, weeks on end, and all I did was stare at a fucking wall. It didn't make me go crazy. That's just weird. That's-

Chris Williamson 2:00:47 Well, I mean, present evidence may suggest otherwise. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 2:00:49 Well. [laughs]

2:00:51 Says the man in a sailor hat.

Chris Williamson 2:00:51 It was just a fucking delayed onset, dude. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 2:00:55 I mean... [laughs]

2:00:55 Wasn't it... Th- there's, um, there's a few... Like, the most, the m- the most extreme versions of this, you've got, um... I've never fully verified this one, but of, uh, monks who've meditated for such a significant period of time are in, I think it's, like, three standard deviations-

Chris Williamson 2:01:11 Happiness

Shaan Puri 2:01:12 ... of happiness. So, like, the n- it's, like, the 0.000001%. My favorite c- and then I'm always a bit like, "Mm, it's a bit of a study."

2:01:18 Yeah.

2:01:18 But I'm like, fuck, this one's not a study, of, um, the guy who set himself on fire-

2:01:23 Yeah

2:01:23 ... to protest the Vietnam War. I don't know if, Jared, if you could pull that one up. Um-

2:01:27 The monk?

2:01:28 Yeah, the monk who set himself on fire.

2:01:29 Oh, yeah.

2:01:30 Who just literally walks, walks out, sits in lotus position, sets himself on fire. Doesn't grimace-

2:01:35 Flinch. Yeah

2:01:35 ... blink, or flinch.

Chris Williamson 2:01:36 Make no noise.

Shaan Puri 2:01:36 And at that moment, I was like, "Huh, maybe there is something to meditate."

2:01:40 Hence-

Chris Williamson 2:01:40 Studies-

Shaan Puri 2:01:40 Studies don't need to show

2:01:41 ... yes. Yeah, yeah. Studies don't need to show.

2:01:42 Photoshop.

Chris Williamson 2:01:42 I think it's, uh, I think it's Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary that covers this really well.

Shaan Puri 2:01:48 You hear about his heart?

Chris Williamson 2:01:50 Whose heart?

Shaan Puri 2:01:50 The guy. So the c- this is, like, kind of a Buddhist, a Buddhist philosophy that, um, or, like, a B- a Buddhist part of the story, which was his heart didn't set on fire. So his heart was, like, kind of completely normal. His whole body went to crisp, but his heart was still there. I mean, I, I think you could check this, Jared, but I think in the cremation period, they tried to cremate his heart, and it refused to burn. So, like, it's a very surre-

2:02:09 What the fuck?

2:02:09 It could be a complete myth, but-

2:02:10 That sounds like a myth.

Chris Williamson 2:02:11 Okay

Shaan Puri 2:02:11 ... but any, when, as soon as I see this, any of my questions around what the human mind is capable of, um, goes out the window. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:02:16 Homeboy sat in full lotus just barbecuing anything around him.

Shaan Puri 2:02:19 Yeah.

2:02:19 [laughs]

Chris Williamson 2:02:20 Yeah, that's crazy.

Shaan Puri 2:02:21 You can see the gasoline tank now.

Chris Williamson 2:02:23 Tick, tock.

Shaan Puri 2:02:23 There's a guy who's trying the screen experiment. Have you seen this? The guy who's doing-

2:02:27 Yeah, it's been for a year, right?

2:02:27 ... one year, no screens.

2:02:29 Okay.

2:02:29 He's trying a Brian Johnson, but just a no screen, and he's scanning his brain before and after. It'll be very interesting.

Chris Williamson 2:02:33 How far into it is he?

Shaan Puri 2:02:35 Like, a day.

2:02:35 Yeah.

2:02:36 Like, right? Like, he just got it down.

Chris Williamson 2:02:37 He's just started?

Shaan Puri 2:02:37 He just started.

Chris Williamson 2:02:38 He's just been staring at a wall. [laughs]

Shaan Puri 2:02:40 He could fucking go insane.

2:02:40 He finished all the things. He's like, "I'm gonna avoid..." Yeah, this guy, David, uh, David Daines. "Today, I'm scanning my brain before I spend a year without screens." They, they expect brain function to change, but whether the structure itself changes, nobody seems to know. And then he's got his website where you could just, like-

2:02:54 You're gonna be able to see the, the, the updates of the results

2:02:56 ... track him or whatever. Imagine how hard it would be to not... It's like

Chris Williamson 2:02:59 Not being exposed to fucking microplastics, dude.

George Mack 2:03:01 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 2:03:01 There's, I mean, he's, you know-

George Mack 2:03:02 Way to avoid

Chris Williamson 2:03:02 ... he's gonna be, yeah, he's gonna be looking at a screen in an airport.

George Mack 2:03:05 Yes.

Chris Williamson 2:03:05 He's gonna go to the gym, and there's gonna be stuff around. So he's really-

George Mack 2:03:08 Oh, it applies to that too

Shaan Puri 2:03:09 I see, no, I assume-

George Mack 2:03:09 Yeah.

Shaan Puri 2:03:10 No screens anywhere.

Chris Williamson 2:03:11 Oh, that's the goal.

Shaan Puri 2:03:12 I assume, I assume he meant, I assume he meant like phone, TV, like personal screens as versus like an airport.

Chris Williamson 2:03:14 But you mean he's not gonna ever look at any s-

George Mack 2:03:17 I think that's the intent.

Shaan Puri 2:03:17 He's, he's, he's going Amish is what it is.

George Mack 2:03:19 If it's not, come on.

Shaan Puri 2:03:20 That's pretty, you gotta go all the way.

George Mack 2:03:22 If you're in an airport-

Chris Williamson 2:03:22 You gotta have fucking blinkers on.

George Mack 2:03:24 Hmm.

Shaan Puri 2:03:24 See, see if you can find the, the rules of the, of the challenge. But, uh, yeah, that's, it's pretty unreal.

George Mack 2:03:29 Hey, what was that quote you said, uh, maybe 10 minutes ago about the g- the person that you look at the screen and it's reality?

Shaan Puri 2:03:36 Yeah, JL Toto's one.

George Mack 2:03:36 What did you say?

Shaan Puri 2:03:37 Like, we, we laugh when the moth confuses a, you know, a lamp for the moon, but here we are confusing the screen for the world.

George Mack 2:03:42 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Map that onto AI.

Shaan Puri 2:03:47 What do you mean?

George Mack 2:03:47 Just, just, uh, in general, like, what, like, uh, I don't know, in 50 years people are gonna be, like, laughing at us because of whatever we were doing right now.

Shaan Puri 2:03:57 Like we're confusing AI-

George Mack 2:03:57 Yeah, yeah, like-

Shaan Puri 2:03:58 ... for real intelligence, or what do you mean? How?

George Mack 2:03:59 I, I don't really know. I just, when you said that, it made me think of how AI's gonna be, like, um, people are gonna laugh at us for, i- in 50 years for what we thought was good AI. That's what I thought of when you said that for some reason.

Chris Williamson 2:04:11 Oh, oh, yeah. I mean, that, that curve of technology always-

George Mack 2:04:14 Like, like they're gonna look at us right now in 50 or 100 years, like we're the fucking moth that thinks the lamp is a-

Shaan Puri 2:04:22 Right.

George Mack 2:04:22 What, you got, you guys are both transfixed.

Shaan Puri 2:04:22 Did you guys watch the, the, you, you mentioned Demis-

Chris Williamson 2:04:25 Full of AI

Shaan Puri 2:04:25 ... you mentioned Demis from, uh-

Chris Williamson 2:04:27 Yes

Shaan Puri 2:04:27 ... DeepMind. Did you watch the documentary?

Chris Williamson 2:04:28 Yes. Amazing.

George Mack 2:04:29 Oh, dude, it's so fucking good.

Shaan Puri 2:04:29 Unbelievable.

Chris Williamson 2:04:30 It's amazing.

George Mack 2:04:30 What is it?

Shaan Puri 2:04:31 He, he's got this, uh, the guy who created DeepMind, which kind of kicked off this whole AI wave. He has this documentary c- on Amazon, I think, called The Thinking Game.

Chris Williamson 2:04:39 It's on YouTube now.

Shaan Puri 2:04:40 Oh, it's on YouTube.

Chris Williamson 2:04:41 It's on YouTube. It's got 40 million plays.

Shaan Puri 2:04:42 It's so good. Highly recommend to anyone.

Chris Williamson 2:04:43 Uh, Dennis, if you're, if you're listening, I wanna bring you on the show. Reply to my emails.

Shaan Puri 2:04:46 [laughs] Dude, he's, he's, he's cool. Like, he was like a six-year-old child prodigy, chess player, et cetera. But, like, that moment of move 37 is just like chills, you know what I mean? Like, feel like that's like a turning point in human history was this m- move 37 moment.

Chris Williamson 2:05:00 Basically, Google DeepMind has... I mean, they seem to be the most safety conscious, kind of very human approach to this AI race at the moment.

Shaan Puri 2:05:12 Yes.

Chris Williamson 2:05:13 But, uh, I don't know if... I, I mean, that, the whole point of this, which is why Scott Alexander thinks that Anthropic is the Antichrist, because the Antichrist will come and make you think that they're not. Uh, so, uh, in this whole AI... That was the whole point that I had with Tristan Harris, is everyone wants to cast aspersions at company. Like, OpenAI, I don't like you because you did this, and I don't like Google because they did that, or Grok, I don't like you because you did the whatever. It's like, "Hey, dude, it doesn't matter what somebody's stated fucking safety goals are. These guys are speed running through model development as quickly as possible."

Shaan Puri 2:05:48 Right.

Chris Williamson 2:05:48 "And if they don't, they lose."

Shaan Puri 2:05:51 They're out. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:05:52 "They lose. So just look at the incentives. Don't look at the fucking press release."

Shaan Puri 2:05:55 Right.

Chris Williamson 2:05:56 Like, yeah, the, the Anthropic Super Bowl ads were fucking hilarious. But don't cl- and they decided not to do the thing for the Department of War, and they did whatever the stuff. It's like, dude, don't fucking, like, get lost in the sauce. These people are playing the exact same fucking game, just with slightly better PR.

Shaan Puri 2:06:11 Yeah.

George Mack 2:06:12 It does seem there's a huge doomer, like, narrative right now around AI that's becoming more and more popular.

Chris Williamson 2:06:17 Listen to more Friedberg.

George Mack 2:06:18 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:06:18 It's what you need to do.

George Mack 2:06:18 I mean, uh, like from the wider question of what happens, I don't know. But from first-hand, like, experience, like for myself, I, um, 'cause the image models are getting so good now. I've had like a, a, like, it's called seborrhoeic dermatitis for about 10 years. Like, sometimes it gets so bad I wouldn't wanna like go outside, like level of bad. I just showed it to Gemini.

Shaan Puri 2:06:36 What does that mean? What, what

George Mack 2:06:36 Um, so it's basically you're kind of like... There'll be a lot of people listening that have it. It affects like 5% to 10% of the population, and your face will just break out in, like, really bad eczema. So I went to one doctor who basically got me on a steroid cream, um, and said, "The reason why you have it is because of stress." It's like quite well known because of stress. Carried on. I started, like, meditating, like fixing my diet. I basically didn't eat sugar for like two years, and it calmed it down. I was like, "Oh, it's because of sugar." And then I saw a second doctor, um, and she said, "Yeah, you're too stressed out." I'm like, "Fuck, I'm getting stressed out by your guy's diagnosis that I'm stressed out." So she recommends another steroid cream. I end up tracking it for ages, and I just upload the whole document to Gemini, and it goes, "Oh, no, just, just put Nizoral on your face."

Shaan Puri 2:07:13 Hmm.

George Mack 2:07:13 So anybody who has seborrhoeic d- dermatitis, it fixes it for like 90% of people.

Shaan Puri 2:07:16 And Nizoral is a medicine or it's like-

George Mack 2:07:18 It's, it's shampoo.

Shaan Puri 2:07:18 It's a fucking shampoo.

George Mack 2:07:19 You can, for, it's a shampoo. You can get for a few dollars.

Chris Williamson 2:07:21 That's like Selsun Blue.

George Mack 2:07:21 And like, I, I've never had it ever again since. Out of 10 years, never had it ever again since. And that's just that. But these stories are like-

Chris Williamson 2:07:27 Calming down

George Mack 2:07:27 ... it's not as, it's not as sexy as like the, the guy who speaks to the LLM and decides to take his own life. It's like, of... Not that that's like a obviously horrific story, if it's even fucking true, I don't know. Um, but like, I know just so many people whose, like, health is genuinely being, like, revolutionized by these things, and it's just, we just have such an anchor towards negativity. Um, well-

Chris Williamson 2:07:48 Also, you're, you're always gonna push back against something, some new technological development.

George Mack 2:07:52 Yes. It's, it's a, it's the most recurring lesson throughout history. Like I was reading, 'cause I was fascinated by, with AI coming on. I was like, "I wanna go study the, uh, Industrial Revolution." What was fascinating at the time, you had two groups that came up. You had the Luddites, who would just basically go and smash the factories in. I mean, you saw this recently with Sam Altman having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house, um, a week ago. But then you also had the Romantics. So the Romantics would kind of pine about... And you kind of see this now with AI, where it's like they'll call things slop, which, which are. And there is, there's a... What you c- you do want the Luddites, and you do want the Romantics because they kind of act as, um, a balancing arc to, to the, uh, to the progression. But I think, like, net-net, most people alive today do not want to go back to pre-Industrial Revolution. They do not want... Like, the option is to go to Amish if you do want to. Like, that is available if you wanna go Amish, but nobody does.

Chris Williamson 2:08:38 Mm-hmm.

George Mack 2:08:39 Uh-

Shaan Puri 2:08:39 I think AI's gonna make people go fucking insane.

George Mack 2:08:42 Yeah?

Shaan Puri 2:08:43 Yeah, because they're, they're, we're getting to a point where-

George Mack 2:08:45 So pull, pull, pull... I was gonna say, but pull, Jared, if you can pull up the new thing. I don't know, um, the FT produced this. I don't know how true it is. But essentially they argue it's, um, it's making people less polarized immediately, where social media was pushing people further to the left and the right, whereas AI, you can kind of already see it with Grok now. They fact check people a lot more, so they're bringing a lot more people into the center.

Shaan Puri 2:09:03 Well-

George Mack 2:09:03 Why do you think it'll make people go insane?

Shaan Puri 2:09:04 Because, dude, it's, we live in a post-truth age now. There's no way to determine... What, what flavor is this?

Chris Williamson 2:09:08 This is sweet whiskey. You want sweet whiskey?

Shaan Puri 2:09:10 Yeah, I do.

Chris Williamson 2:09:10 You're gonna have two toothpicks in? That's fucking dumb.

Shaan Puri 2:09:12 Yeah, I'm doubling down.

George Mack 2:09:13 Let's go.

Chris Williamson 2:09:13 Jesus Christ.

Shaan Puri 2:09:14 Well, um, there's, uh... Well, I'm not using them to actually

Gary Faust 2:09:18 ... pick my teeth and just, you just-

George Mack 2:09:19 Yeah, no, but just, you, you, you need so many stimulants that you've got one Neutonic toothpick, one Xypix toothpick.

Gary Faust 2:09:25 Yeah, no, and I'm coming down off that kratom right now.

George Mack 2:09:27 It's just that you quiet, you quiet for a bit, yeah.

Gary Faust 2:09:29 I feel like I'm in s- everything's in slow motion.

George Mack 2:09:30 [laughs]

Gary Faust 2:09:30 Uh, uh, I think that deepfakes and, uh, maybe it's more so in America than other places, but after the Charlie Kirk assassination, there's all these conspiracy theories left and right about w- it, it, whether it was Israel did it or it's a hologram or if w- this guy was real. Like, there's all this crazy shit, right? And, um, nobody's gonna be saying it's a, something like, "Oh, this is a hologram," or, "This was AI," without the advent of AI being able to create deepfakes that are-

George Mack 2:09:58 Yes

Gary Faust 2:09:58 ... largely...

George Mack 2:09:59 Mm.

Gary Faust 2:09:59 I mean, look at a, look at boomers. Dude, they believe all sorts of crazy shit.

George Mack 2:10:02 Yes.

Gary Faust 2:10:02 And we're like, [laughs] "Fucking idiots."

George Mack 2:10:04 Yeah.

Gary Faust 2:10:04 That's what I was kind of g- getting at, I guess, with what I was saying to you about that, that comment. But we're never gonna know, I mean, ever what actually has happened with anything we know anymore.

George Mack 2:10:13 Yeah.

Gary Faust 2:10:13 The truth is no longer even fucking matters-

George Mack 2:10:15 I-

Gary Faust 2:10:15 ... because it can't be determined unless you experience it with your own five senses.

George Mack 2:10:19 So there's, um, there's a great, uh, chapter in a book called The Beginning of Infinity, and essentially his w- idea is what's called, known as the precautionary principle, which is essentially the history of humanity is essentially problems. Like, we start... Like, even Great Britain, like where me and Chris are from, is just a c- is this human concept. Like, it shouldn't exist. Like, we, in, in Great Britain, me and my family should fucking die of hypothermia. But because of, like, we, we created central heating, we created clothing. But, so you essentially have this whole arc of just problem solving, problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. And the problem that you then have, ironically, is that when a new problem comes along like this, is that you have what's known as the precautionary principle, which is we can see the problem but we can't see the solution. But by definition, people, human beings can't forecast a solution, 'cause if we had the solution for it,