Crypto Scams, Dopamine Websites, Tasteful Slop & Vape Shop Energy - Rabbit Hole #6 - #1168

0:00What were you explaining about how Europe is like Android and America is like iOS? Yeah, yeah. That's great. Let's start with that. Fucking money. It has a lot of better features in many ways, but iOS is just... Yeah. Just works. Just works. Even the small one... Pull this sucker in. Not you going forward, you pull it toward you. Oh, we was in... You're doing the same thing! What do you mean, move it toward you oh we was in uh what do you mean move it okay okay okay um sorry it's early um we was in uh sicily which was where the second series of white lotus was filmed and you're at this kind of beautiful extravagant italian restaurants and i flew into new york and we went to one of these kind of flip up franchise restaurants that are all over America right now, like private equity clearly coming.

0:49Blank street coffee. Yeah. And they go, you offer like three things and it's purely we're going to get customers in and out, same ingredients, maximize the margins. But it's a strange thing about America that UK doesn't have this and Europe doesn't have this, where you have people on staff that can't serve you, where they're like, they do the drinks. So they pour your drink and I go, can I order food as well? And they'll be like, oh, let me get the person who takes the orders. I'm like, this is really strange. But what was fascinating, the guy that did the waters was in the PE, franchised American system, was better than any waiter I experienced in the whole of Italy. So it's just a difference of culture that exists.

1:29Were you expected to tip in an American manner when you were there? No. All right. So you get all of the advantages of American service without the burden of American tipping. Exactly. That sounds like my dream. A big arbitrage. That sounds like my dream. I think it's the tipping culture goes a long way. I think if you had to actually look at one of the reasons why America is such an entrepreneurial culture is because of tipping, because you have millions of people that start as these mini entrepreneurs. They've gaslit you. Well, that's what the word tip means, right? To ensure proper service. And so it's like, it has a function. It was meant to ensure proper service. And so the incentive worked.

2:03You're kidding me. That's not the etymology of that. That's what I was told. That's retroactive. I thought it would be like a T. Yeah, that might be a retro. I mean, it definitely works. All right, Jack, I've been needing to ask you about this. What the fuck is happening with this Jean Phil guy? You know what? I'm actually not as clued up on this as i should be but the the initial like analysis of that was this is like a completely unique one-of-a-kind person creating content in was it on instagram originally do you see i think so it's on we got a ton of it on x i think we've like we've crossed the chairs you guys have seen this right i know none of this i saw this yesterday are you been in Android for too long? This is the whole thing.

2:57That's George at the private equity. That's you trying to get good service off a guy that's giving you water. And from this, he's like doing a coin but yeah i i i'm actually maybe i'm maybe i'm uh ill-informed in here but he doesn't exist does he it's he's ai right yeah it is ai but the initial launch of that people assumed he was real for a long enough period of time for it to become this big thing and yeah there's infinite number of cryptocurrencies attached to his likeness that people are gambling upon. And then there's derivative content now where people are making like counterfeit AI of that AI. And I guess, you know, you can say, do you own your own likeness? But do you own your AI's own likeness

3:40is much more of a difficult question. Like fake Gucci bag of this guy. Yeah, well, it's the fake Gucci bag of the fake Gucci bag. It's like you've made a mockery of my mockery. I don't know, between this and Hunter Biden's laptop coin, it's not looking good, you think? It's really, really the world of crypto. I'm holding diamond hands with my Melania coin, so it's wait and see. Yeah, that's wait and see. Well, you know what's interesting? In the last like 24, 48 hours, there's this thing that's taken over Twitter over twitter sean you've probably been familiar enough with this but they're like there's this mechanic shall you say in like crypto trading where people will try and get somebody to attach themselves to a coin that gets launched right it's like it

4:21gets permissionlessly launched off the back of some conversation or trend, and then the person that started that trend, uh, gets continually harassed to like attach themselves to it. Basically like say this guy had a Twitter account, somebody launches a coin. They'll be in the comments of that. Everything he posts until he makes a decision one way or another to say, just nagging, this is yeah, this is I'm attached to this or I'm not. And this in the last couple of weeks, this money you know the like payment infrastructure on x so in the u.s you can you can create an x money account which allows you to like send and receive dollars and now there's these sort of systems that have been built where people are permissionlessly sending the proceeds of the trading volume of these coins to Twitter accounts.

5:11I saw someone talking about this. So in the last 24, 48 hours, you've seen like people that are just like opening their Twitter and being like, wow. I got 13 grand. I have 70 grand sitting here because like I made this video and somebody like attached my name to it. And then it became this there was but those people are doing it as a honey trap or like essentially to try and reel them in oh imagine how much money you could get if you were properly involved with this so you're liquidating your reputation with a billion dollars actually the um remember when like the dog coins like shiba inu and all those dog coins yeah it was doge it was shiba there this people started creating more doge coins because why not and they realized well people's your crypto wallet like the it's

5:52like your email address it's public like people know you can't they can't take your money but they can know where to send you money and uh so they just sent it to vitalik the creator of ethereum and they were like look it's in his wallet he believes and this is very early on so people like they just airdropped it to him because it was worthless. They created it that night. And then the next morning they're like, Vitalik is all in on this. Oh, it's the most like guerrilla form of charity. It's like aggressive guerrilla charity. But what he did was brilliant. He actually turned it into charity. So it, the thing started to go up and he's like, and he, you know, he, instead of just being like, guys, I don't endorse this, this is bullshit.

6:25And then people are just like losing money on the way down to, he just donated it all to India and gave a billion dollars to like an Indian nonprofit. And that was the end of it. And so like a lot of good actually happened from one of these at the beginning. So could you, if some, if somebody sends you, um, you can't be, you can't reject it on, you can't set up a piece of code which is like only transactions i've approved can come through no and that's you know guys free money doing not for me thank you but the like the downstream effects of that is like tax return with like 10 million transactions for half a cent because all of this stuff is like i want to identify everybody that owns this thing and then yeah and and now you can do that with like one line of

7:12english prompt right two or three years ago it's like there's actually some like technical lift to make this happen now it's just like it's kind of like the you know dead internet like you're interacting with like complete, like mirages of people. And now this is just like the cat, the, you know, horses left the stable, whatever analogy you want to use. It's just like, how are we even going to begin to like wrangle this stuff? The amount of information that's just being just exploding every second. And, and like, weirdly you have the, I guess you could make the argument that the ai could take like handle it on the other end like do the accounting of the like 10 trillion things that happen in every second and going straight to your address or or it all just goes back to cash and

7:56you then get swing so far the other way i'm very down for a cash-based society again as an ex-club promoter i love the idea of cash williamson um i heard of a professional gambler who his hedge because in the uk gambling proceeds are completely tax-free so there's uh like some of the highest if you look at the highest um net worth in the uk a lot of them are like the lady who runs bet 365 but when you're actually a betting company you pay tax so one of the largest tax contributors in the uk is ironically a gambling company probably a vaping company shortly followed yeah um but if you're an actual gambler yourself you don't pay anything on your proceeds and somebody who made a fortune in gambling um he would create a lot of algorithms like almost

8:39run like a hedge fund but now because ai is caught up so much he's now going a lot more old school where he will go to the specific sports matches of these semi-pro games and notice who's at the bar drinking or who has certain friendships or who has like little bits of insider information that claude can't pick up on so i wonder if you have this kind of have you seen the there's like clips of people at like baseball games or whatever with like multiple phones in their hand and they're trying to like catch the result before it gets reported yeah there's a slight delay charging time yeah like they have to be you know like on millisecond delay to capture that like slight uh i'm sure there's a a little while ago maybe about five

9:21or ten years ago there was people in china doing this with football games soccer games that the amount of time the duration was long enough that you could get a bet in and just arbitrage like i know what's going to happen and the exchange or whatever hasn't caught up to it which is pretty fun it's the human betting equivalent of moving your stock your um trading company closer down manhattan toward where the actual exchange is yeah there's a good there was a good uh uh instance of this like right when the polymarket stuff came out originally for weather and you could bet on like the temperature in paris today didn't some guy use a hairdryer yes do you see this no no no it was the the bet was you gotta

10:02point it's like cctv footage of it It's great. Will the temperature in Paris... Like at Charles de Gaulle Airport. At Charles de Gaulle Airport. Break 20 degrees or 21 degrees Celsius. And supposedly someone went in with a lighter or a hairdryer, blew it. And if you look at the actual temperature, it just goes flat, flat, flat, flat. Peaks, breaks 20 degrees, comes back down again, market closed. Wow. So you are, we are moving back into the real world, like what can not be manipulated by a computer? What is like more, yeah, what's outside the, basically the grasp, the purview, the territory purview of, of AI now. And like people are trying to almost like reverse engineer, like pastoralism in some sort of

10:45a way like i can't you can't influence the size of my watermelons this summer or something like that you know wow is there a thing around um when you're kind of being reflexive with polymarket and doing things like that is it legal is it illegal is it still very early days yet that they haven't quite figured it out good question it. I think they like have to honor these and then they, they update there. Cause it's not like the law. It's like how poly market will resolve the bet. And they have some rules on how they're going to resolve the bet. If you play within that, they, they are supposed to honor it. Now they might, they might try not to and say, come, you know, you can sue us if you want the money,

11:23but it's not illegal to do that. They've got like a, whatever, enforcement and safety team or an enforcement and fairness team. I watched a documentary about Polymarket and Kalshi. And to be fair, they managed to get both of the CEOs on and they were talking about how it works and is it predatory and so on and so forth. Is it encouraging gambling? And it does cut to the enforcement and fairness team or whatever. And it's just four blokes sat around computers discussing whether or not like, so this hairdryer thing that happened, do we think that that's fair? It's like garage ethics. You know, it's like pub table philosophy debate, but with potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line for people.

12:02There was that journalist who had said that a piece of debris that had landed in a Middle Eastern country was from a drone, not from a missile. And he started getting death threats from people who had made bets on Polymarket saying that a missile would land on this particular day saying, you need to change the story so that you say that it was a missile, because if you do, the market's going to close out in our favor. But if you don't, then we've lost all of this money. So the incentives now, it really is, it's perilously close to black mirror. What do you think happens with prediction markets? Do you think they're just going to continue to happen or is there going to be some legislation that comes in and fucks it? I think there's going to have to be legislation. I can't

12:40imagine that this just runs amok. I mean, the funny thing is like they used to be, they used to present themselves as we are like the bearers of truth. Like let the markets say what's true. Forget the mainstream media, blah, blah, blah. But it's now the volume is literally, I think like 98% sports betting. So it's like- Even on Polymarket. On both Cal State and Polymarket. Which is why Novick and Sidney Sweeney make so much sense. Especially now like football season, it's, like, insane. There's one guy who was a very prolific sports bettor back in the day. And I kept in touch with this guy. You know, there's a group of these people that they kind of make their money in these arbitrage-y types of ways.

13:21Very smart people, but they're always playing this cat and mouse game. You know, so when he was sports betting, it's like you get an edge and then the casino realizes what's going on. They shut you down. So you start giving money to Floyd Mayweather and celebrities as your beards to go bet. That works for a while. Then that gets shut down. And then you move to the next thing, crypto. Then you move to the next thing, this. And so now they're all in on Polymarket. So I gave this guy a million dollars. And he basically started producing 1% returns every day. And what he was doing, the short version of it is, the way a lot of these sites work, people go and they put 10 bucks and they want this amazing payout

13:52if these 15 different things happen. And the odds of those 15, whatever, like the Cowboys will score the first touchdown and the national anthem goes this long and this half. It's like an accumulator. It's an ACCA in the UK. It's Parlay, yeah. ACCA. As you go, the more you go, the better the payout. down and the national anthem goes this long and it's like it's an acca in the uk yeah so like uh as you go the more you go the better the payout so 10 could be two grand and the guy's happy and he's he's gonna enjoy watching the game more but the real odds of that happening are like two million to one and you're paying two thousand and so you can just be the market so like all these quant firms like jane street and whatever like not jane she's like more like jump street like

14:23smaller quant firms instead of better instead of playing Wall Street market maker, they're going on these prediction markets and they, they take action from people who want to do this. So the platform is not the house. You can kind of go be the house and bet and like take the action for these people. If you think the odds are a million to one, and this guy's willing to take the bet for a thousand to one, you just picked up like all the spread of that actual event happening it's pretty amazing you know i i think is like an under appreciated thing about the like takeoff of prediction markets is like how legible they made betting like split it into two percentages like when we're growing up you look at five to one

15:03oh what's 13 to two that this horse is gonna win this or if this game is gonna have a goal in this minute it's gonna be this was and this is just like show me a fucking graph and it's a market that you have a position in in real time right and i think like maybe 10 years ago these like growing up in the uk betting is just like it was around like there's a betting shop on every corner before every shithouse village has on america is like yeah we're like toddler like mormons yeah we're married and we're like It was around like there's a betting shop on every corner before. Every shithouse village has an American. America is like a toddler betting house. Yeah, we're married and we're like, wow, we can have sex.

15:30It's amazing. It's like giving alcohol to the Native Americans. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Totally evolutionarily novel stimulus. I do think there's a place for a hedge fund that just uses polymarket and cal sheet and just shorts America in international sports. Because like, do you remember in the World Cup when the USA was playing Belgium? And you could tell like, no, Americans don't really give a shit about soccer, but because the World Cup was a thing, they'd get into it. And it's like, Belgium has Courtois Ingalls, one of the best goalkeepers of all time. Kevin De Bruyne in like attacking midfield is one of the best players of all time. And America with like 63%. Yeah. It's like, this is... That is like naive.

16:10They got waffles. Right, okay. So you're saying you need to bet against like national pride. I think I could become George Soros by just looking at any sport that America isn't good at, just looking at them betting against it. Because they've got such blue sky vision. Yes. America's a delusionally optimistic. What's your line? That the British affliction is cynicism and the've got such blue sky vision. Yes. America's a delusionally optimistic. What's your line? That the British affliction is cynicism and the American affliction is bullshit? Yes. Like you can just bet against the bullshit. Yes. And then yeah. Or if an American says how well their business is doing, probably half the revenue. Why about that? But if a Brit

16:37says how badly it's doing, probably think it's about twice as good as they say. It's a good rule of thumb. Did you see the NFL controversy, the hypocrisy that just happened? Like the Cat Dallas Cowboys player, he scores a touchdown and his celebration was he took the football and he kind of made it look like he's shotgunning a beer. So they clamped down and they fined him, you know, whatever, $30,000 or whatever it is. For the celebration. For the celebration. And people on Twitter are like, I can can't i'm so glad they did this i can't believe they're going to promote this on the nfl brought to you by draft kings they showed this on the bud light jumbotron there's children in the audience and then literally the as the guy was

17:21giving the press conference like apologizing the background of the Step and Repeat banner is Bud Light as the presenting sponsor of the Dallas Cowboys. It's this weird blend of like complete libertarian market freedom and like puritanism at the same like this. These two things coming together. It is kind of it really is. It's just young. It's just what happens when you're when you're kind of a teenage country, which is kind of, it really is, it's just young. It's just what happens when you're kind of a teenage country, which is sort of what America is. And it's like, oh yeah, like maybe I should get a tattoo. I should get an eyebrow piercing. Right. An eyebrow piercing would be cool. Like we should make a guy

17:56from reality TV the president. Wouldn't that be sick? Right. This is American pie. It's American pie. Yeah. It is, to go back to Jack's point around the numbers, just changing it, the impact it has, but also just the Russell conjugation idea of Chris sweats, Jack glows, Sean perspires. And you've said the same thing, but it sounds great for Jack and not as good for you two. It feels that... Winnie the Pooh meme. Which one's the Winnie the Pooh meme? You know where he's like with the monocle in the bottom and he's like... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a paper round. I do media distribution. Yes. Yes. Betting exchange prediction mark. Yeah, exactly. Oh, you've gone from like basement sofa masturbator to...

18:41To quant. Quant. Refined. It's the Mayo Aoli rebrand like you know i can't believe that they pulled this off the sports betting to prediction yes what have you got g you've been we haven't been together for two months basically yeah i know so we have this idea of uh blue brain which is similar to being blue balls but it's when you and your friend haven't been together for long enough that you've accumulated loads of shit that you want to talk about so what have you been blue braining me with? A little question, actually. Question. And I can kind of talk through one of my answers for it. But one of the things I was thinking about is what is a power law in a thing that if you neglect it, everything else is irrelevant?

19:20What is a power law? Yeah. So like, for example, I'll give you my realization. It was, went through the whole classic arc eight years ago when the whole big, big sleep came on the scene around the average person is significantly underslept and all the- The Matthew Walker revolution. Yeah. And I think the peak of it was when Matthew Walker did like the eight part series on sleep with Huberman. And I joke that my friend Quinny, who's like never overthinks anything after four beers, just saying, just shut your eyes, lad. We'll sleep better than anybody who listens to that podcast. And the power law, and I think Matthew and Huberman probably actually agree that the power law I took from sleep was all the other stuff like um temperature control um wind down

20:07routines is ultimately the first thing is the more you try to sleep the worse you will sleep and therefore anything else that's stacked on top of that without taking that serious is completely wiped out so the the if you don't take that serious or anything that you do after that canceled it out. Um, and I think a lot about that power law that I was like, Oh, sometimes in life, you've got to think about it. It's a little bit the midwet meme, but the power law wipes everything else out. If you get this one thing, right. Or if you get this one thing wrong, everything else becomes irrelevant. And lots of people, there's this whole trend right now that people have gone down the whole, uh, trying to improve their sleep and ironically ended up

20:47insomnia, which is like trying to end up like improve your margin by 10% and you've gone bankrupt. So you've gone backwards. Like a lot of people that have got into this sleep science stuff have actually gone backwards because what they'll do is they'll have, and this is what happened to me is I'll think that I had one night where I slept eight hours and I felt great. And I go, oh, I'm a person that sleeps eight hours. And it's like, no, the previous night I slept five and then I slept eight that night to overcompensate. So I felt great. Now I started having this meme in my head that I need to sleep eight hours per night. So I then go, right, if I need to be up at six, I'll go to bed at 10 and I'll get into bed awake, which is the single worst thing you can do for your sleep to

21:25just lie there and go, why am I not going to sleep yet? Why am I not going to sleep yet? And then you end up waking up. I know you've had this at times when you wake up at 3am and then you'll be ruminating about this whole sleep thing. And it's just like this absolute doom because you've neglected the power law. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests, spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test 20 markers. Function runs over 160. It's huge. Best of all, you test

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22:44is around training which is that you can try to optimize absolutely everything, but ultimately if you're not training hard, everything else doesn't matter. You can have the perfect sets, reps, form, the right amount of protein consumption, but ultimately you need to stress the system. And the best way to work out if you're stressing the system is whether or not it is stressful, i.e. is it hard? So I trained with Sam Sulek out if you're stressing the system is whether or not it is stressful i is it hard uh so i trained with sam sulek do you know that guy is i fucking jacked 24 25 year old guy just got married like animal all he does is train hard his one criteria for when he's in the gym is like did i fuck myself up and you could argue maybe he swung a little bit

23:23far on the non-science based way, but he has a physique that is suggestive that training hard is pretty fucking good as long as you can recover from it. So yeah, one of the ones that I would think is you can optimize your intra workout protein window with pre-digested whey and the right amount of maltodextrin to shuttle the carbs into the muscle and all the rest of it. But like, if you didn't train hard, if there weren't a few sets in there where you felt like oh fuck like i really don't know if i can get through this everything else kind of doesn't matter and you can probably fix a lot you can also paper over a lot of cracks which is the same like if you just don't stress about sleep and have like a principle of i should probably be in bed for around about eight hours ish

24:04cold dark quiet if I can, whatever. If you don't stress about sleep, your sleep is probably good. Like if you don't stress about all of the other macronutrient adjacent things and you just work on training hard, you'll cover more of the bases than maybe any other one thing. So that would be something that I think is kind of similar. Jack, have you heard his blue light glasses sleep story? Please, take it from the top. Take it the top incredible story this is um have you heard this or no this is like this is a few years ago so when i'm like peak okay oh so i can i can become the best sleeper in the world right so like this is peak optimization window like six years ago and so i've gone like right well if i just start

24:45stacking more i'm gonna sleep even better so i've got like the full-on nonce red light glasses on i've got the wind down routine of like no stimulation before bed i've got all my magnesium l-theanine shit that i'm taking um and this is with my ex-girlfriend love you girl and uh i'm doing this i mean i think i'm like brushing my teeth in the dark like that and she obviously whistles in hits the lights in the bathroom oh i'm like blinded like that oh god why have you done that and then i'm like lay in bed like five minutes later she's already asleep and i'm just lay there like see thing and i go oh like midwit meme yeah 100 my my answer was going to be basically the same as chris's but in a different world is like the

25:33planning versus the doing in any like commercial endeavor right where you're sitting down making notes about what people are going to like like what line are people going to respond to how they it's like just ship the thing and then see. The market will tell you immediately what it thinks and you can get stuck in that loop forever. One of my favorite tweets of my own in the last few weeks. I love citing myself. Well, this is many years of pain condensed into one sentence. It's like if you want real feedback, add a buy button. Oh, so great. What's that line? That was actually a pretty good tweet thank you very much second only to uh moving from theory to practice will always cost you status it's another

26:12one of yours yeah i like that one to the uh just the this and it's referring to the same thing where it's like okay i'm i can have this like beautiful architected idea or theory on paper or and even made even worse now by your 20 a month super intelligence collaborator that's telling you everything you do is phenomenal you know sent from the divine you're you're a genius and then you put it out as crickets and the only thing that gives you like any kind of information to improve it is putting it out and getting crickets or getting you know whatever kind of feedback you get and uh yeah midwit meme i actually made a midwit meme maybe it was probably back in probably five years ago which is the um you know do a risk assessment like convene with everybody on your team and

27:00talk about this this and this and it's like post the thing, just post the thing on either side. And, uh, it remains true to this day. Same idea as just go to the gym. Mark, it doesn't lie. Dead. What's yours? Do you have any? Uh, well, I have a health one that was like a real, a lived example. Uh, I was at a conference and like, they had like a lunch break. So we're sitting at a table. It's me and this guy. I know, and both of us had been trying to lose weight and we were talking about how's it going? Oh, you Oh, you look great. And I'm like, yeah, not so bad myself. I did a little progress. And people were like, oh, so what do you do? And now it's basically like, it's like a scene from Silicon Valley. It's like the stupidest trope we fell into where he's talking about how he bought his own dexa scanner for like whatever six grand or 16 grand whatever it is

27:45i'm not sure for what but he's like yeah i bought that and i did this and i do this and i'm taking this peptide i'm doing this thing and this and so he's like talking about it i'm like yeah well you know but the thing about dexa is and i'm like it's not as accurate as you know doing this other thing so we're both talking and we talk for like 42 minutes no No, like lunch is 45 minutes. Last three minutes. Uh, I look over and there's this very fit guy who's just been sitting at the corner. He's like, you know, one of the guy's girlfriends is like, Spencer, what do you do? He's like, um, you know, I love surfing. So I just surf like a lot. I surf all the time. It's really fun. And it just keeps you in pretty good shape.

28:19And I was like, oh shit. We just midway all over this table. I apologize about the DEXA and all these other things we were talking about. It's like, wait, it's probably as simple as, you know, find an activity like surfing that you love and you're going to have a great time and be in great shape by default. And like, shut up. All the other stuff, just shut up about it. My dad had a good one growing up. All the gear and no idea. You ever heard that one? Yeah, of course. Yeah. But it's all of the idea and none of the action. As Luke, my co-founder in Nutanix, says, all fart, no poo. More accessible version. Timeless wisdom. It's all fart, no poo. Mark, have you got that diagram? So I don't know whether you made this, but that idea that you're talking about, I came across this this morning.

29:00Did you make this? Yeah. Can you take us through this? This is one of the best things I've ever seen, and I loved it being resurfaced. I'll tell you the story of this. I'm at a Tony Robbins event, and on day two, Tony doesn't perform anymore, which I didn't know. So you go to Tony Robbins. He does day one. It's amazing. You show up for day two. They're like, by the way, Tony's been doing this for 40 years. His vocal cords are shredded. He just did 15 hours on stage yesterday. So he takes the second day off. He comes back the third day. So this other guy gets up there, and he does a warm warmup game. So he's like, we're going to play Simon Says. And like, as if being at a Tony Robbins self-help seminar was not already like,

29:32you know, humiliating enough. Now we're playing Simon Says with 5,000 people in an auditorium, but you know, I'm at the event, so let's play along. So he said, you know, stand up. So everybody stands up and he starts playing Simon Says. and I like part of me is just like, this is kind of stupid, but let me give it a shot. I, um, so within five minutes, the game is over, which is kind of amazing out of 5,000 people. Like the game ends very quickly. There's like four people left at the end and he calls them up on stage. And I'm like, dude, we don't need to hear their victory speech. It was Simon says, it's no big deal. And he, he brought up a very interesting point. He goes, uh, dude, we don't need to hear their victory speech. It was Simon Says. It's no big deal. And he brought up a very interesting point.

30:05He goes, okay, you guys won. He goes, let me ask you a question. For the people in the crowd, when I said we're going to play Simon Says and you looked around and saw 5,000 people stand up, how many of you believed you were going to win Simon Says? And he's like, stay standing if you believed you were going to win. And already, like 80, 90% of the people sat down. Like we just, we didn't care. We didn't think it just seemed unlikely. And so he goes, um, these four people were only competing against these 32 people. And he's like, so, you know, and when I saw that, I was like, wow, that's actually a pretty good parallel for life. So I wrote this blog post much later, which is in any endeavor, let's say there's, you know,

30:43a thousand people, the first half too afraid to try. They won't put the buy button on the tweet because they don't want to find out the answer. They don't want to pay that price of status for going and doing. Then you have the people who are the dabblers. They'll give up within three attempts and they'll say, we tried it. It doesn't work. And so they'll, they'll tell you a great story. Then you have the people that are doing it, but they're moving so slowly. They've effectively lost all momentum. You got the people at the end who get distracted by a shiny object. And then finally it's you and one other dude at the end and like competition, the idea that the world is so saturated, so competitive,

31:17like people get, you get fed this idea. I just don't actually believe it's true. And like Charlie Munger has this, has this phrase, which he says, take a simple idea and take it seriously. And it is shocking how few people will take a simple idea and take it seriously. Like I would say your career slash Instagram account is what, like you literally take one idea. You started off with like Naval said some dope shit. Let me just try to make a black and white dots and lines like you know like pen and paper drawing of that idea but you took it seriously you did it better than anyone else would do it and like suddenly you did it first you moved quick enough to do it first too it might have felt that way i

31:56bet there's other people like that were quoting him repackaging him but you did it differently and you're talented i'm not trying to take away from that. But like, my point is you can get so far ahead with a very simple idea. Change the direction of your life, you know, in a way. And you have a million followers and all these great things. But everybody would tell you it's too noisy, too complicated, too competitive, super podcasting. It's so competitive, right? Like it's all so competitive. Everything's so competitive. It's like, well, it's not really when you realize the distribution of attitudes in the human population. I know a guy who won a surfboard off a Sprite can when we were in high school. Sounds like the beginning of a J from the in-betweeners.

32:32He was the only person who sent in. No way. I have a friend who did exactly this. Every can of Sprite for six months or however long they run a campaign in the UK. One bloke. And he's like, I can't believe I won. And whoever the market was like, yeah, you're the only. One bloke. And he's like, I can't believe I won. And whoever the like market was like, yeah, you're the only person who said that. My buddy Dan in college did this. He would always, he won like six or seven things. You know, the sandwich shop Spicy Pickle. They have a mascot. Guess who won the mascot naming contest? Dan won it. He named him Spicy Pickle. It's a spy themed pickle. He wins a lifetime supply of Spicy Pickle. He won a lifetime supply of Stride gum.

33:03He was like, hey, let's go audition for Prices Right right now. And then we went and we both got casted on the show. And it's unbelievable. Like most people just aren't even trying to do any of these things. And he just believed in himself enough to like shoot a shot. Like he just shoots a shot like, you know, more often than anyone else. And I can name six of the wins. He's probably done a thousand others that I don't even know about. But he just, he tries because he, I don't know. He didn't really overthink it he just does it but i think it's because nobody else is even doing isn't that great like doesn't that just make accessing success and cool shit in life feel so much more within reach well because the the uh devil's advocate position or the

33:40alternative that i think sean's going against is it'll be the classic statistic approach of, well, actually 90% of businesses go bust in the first year. And it's like, yeah, because they did it for a week or it's only when you actually zoom into the statistics, whenever you have like vague statistics, but you actually zoom in, um, it reveals a lot more and you, and it's that teal idea of, um, you're not a lottery ticket yeah like it's not just an evenly distributed just based off a random chance there is some form of control that's going on in the same way as if bill gates walks into a football stadium everyone on average becomes a millionaire this is the failure equivalent of that right around i think you misattributed a great quote

34:22to me once about uh podcasts like how many podcasts you need to do to be in the top one percent okay i read it on reddit somewhere and i think i told you and then i think i get tagged i get tagged as the inspired millions yeah yeah 90 of podcasts don't make it past episode three and of the 10 that do 90 of those don't make it past episode 20 so by doing 21 podcasts during the top percentile of all podcasters ever quote jack butcher yeah it's the fucking inspired a lot of people to start podcasting centipede but just like the guy at the front is no one knows who he is it's like that um that quote around uh albert ein Albert Einstein what compound interest is the seventh, eighth round of the world, sorry.

35:08And it's then pointed out The seventh is Niagara Falls or something. Then pointed out that Einstein didn't actually say that. It's in zero to one. Einstein didn't actually say that, but Einstein's brand is so powerful that even posthumously he's getting random quotes given to him. Churchillian drift. Churchillian drift is great. Overtime quotes that don't get attributed to anyone get attributed to Churchill or Einstein. What you want, I think, the ultimate version of great brand for anybody that's supposed to be like a public smart person is to have such gravitas that unattributed quotes get assumed. I think it was Sean Poorey that once said that is accumulating free alpha everywhere. Talk about arbitrage.

35:48That's the freest arbitrage that you can think of. A quick aside. If you wanted an eight sleep but could never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better and cheaper at the same time. Introducing the brand new Pod 6. It's now 50% smaller, meaning it fits under most bed frames. And there are nine times more sensors built into it. Despite all of these upgrades, the Pod 6 now starts at just $1,999, the lowest starting price 8Sleep has ever offered. Best of all, for the first time, 8Sleep has introduced solo sizes, including single side options for Queen, King and California King beds. And they've got a 30-day sleep trial, so you can buy and sleep on it for 29 nights and if you don't like it they'll just give you your money back plus

36:29they ship internationally so don't be scared by the currency amount right now you can get up to 350 off the pod 6 by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Have you guys done any non-shopping lately? Have you done any never arrive shopping? I heard about that. Dopamine websites. Yeah, these are crazy. Have you seen this? Okay, we've all seen it. Maybe I should have. I haven't seen it in action. I haven't seen it and I've heard about it. I went and actually used it. It's surprisingly a little less, I think there's room for improvement in this,

37:06but the concept is basically what porn did for sex, the South Koreans have figured out to do for everything else. And so they're doing it for shopping. Because they've already got a birth rate so low that sex is pointless. Well, so basically they have these food delivery apps where you can go and you can order. So this is food never comes. You go and you install the app. So I had the app and I went and I started shopping at all these restaurants that don't exist. And I started picking dishes that I'm never going to eat. Jesus Christ, there's pop-ups. And then I've got Chrome extension. I paid for expedited shipping for a product that's never going to ship. And then at the end of the day, I got the satisfaction

37:40of shopping without ever having to pay a cent. And so the makers of food never comes have now released, um, like the, like travel never comes or something like that. It's basically like you can shop for a holiday that you never going to go on. You plan a vacation, uh, that never, that doesn't cost you a cent cause you're not going to go on it. And this is actually apparently quite popular. It's at the top. Yeah. Trip skip the airport. I would way rather have a Shopify store that's just going up. So I look at it. I've made 5 million today. And then I'm getting offers from my private equity companies. Business never sells. Yeah. Business never sells. There was an app where- The live stream one?

38:16Yeah. That's crazy. Have you seen that? Where you can like, it's a simulate, it's a live stream with like thousands of followers. You go live, but you're like like speed where your chat is going nuts the hearts are flying guys have used this to pull chicks in clubs exactly yeah that's fucking crazy there's another one i think it was south korea as well where you could go for a smoke break an imaginary smoke break with co-workers but you didn't smoke and you didn't have co-workers so what did you do exactly like what it was to do it was fake smoke breaking like you just went out to whatever the local like the gangway out front and got to hang out it was like a break from your own life but you were doing it on the internet there's a few of these come out like video games

38:56that people have built with the new tools that make it easy for anybody to make a video game like easy i shouldn't say that but more accessible where there's like monotony built into this stuff and there's like there's one watching paint dry was one of them like getting needles out of a haystack from the haystack was another one where like literally one by one wading through this thing forever or like there was a nine to five simulator i saw as well what did you do when you were younger yeah i mean i was talking to someone about this the other day it's like the dopamine like the speed of dopamine on the computer games that we grew up on versus now is like i used to play runescape when i was a kid it's just like click click like you sit there for

39:36hours and like the input output was so low bandwidth compared to like a fortnight or something right that you like in comparison that's like meditation now we were having this conversation about the amount transcendental runescape we were talking about um the exposition the increased exposition that's needed in tv shows now where what was the word that was used it's not exposition piloting piloting it's called piloting where okay so it's really important we need to make sure that we've got the rock salt in the shotgun you've got it right cool okay three minutes later they're about to go into the bank and it's like don't forget the rock salt in the shotgun and then the rock salt in the shotgun

40:17becomes a pivotable part because someone forgot to do it and then they kill someone or whatever but you need to continually restate the premise because people are double screening or they're not paying attention quite so much and the same thing's true i think that there's a study mark see if we can chat gpt this might be out outside of its realm but go big dick pro um what are the number of cuts in each fast and furious movie and i'm sure that the total volume of cuts has gone up over time. It's like the Big Mac index of attention. It's like Fast and Furious is the perfect index of people's attention, because it'll be around forever. When was the first Fast and Furious? 20 years ago? 15 years ago? Had to be 20.

40:58And then it was just two guys drag strip racing, and now they're firing cars off ramps into helicopters, you know, faster and furious, more fast and more furious. Yeah, exactly. And more racially diverse as well, which I think is important. This may take a little bit of time. Have you seen the guy who's building his empire off of fast and furious deep cuts? The guy on Instagram who basically he's just a Somali a, a fast and furious. So he'll be like, he's just sitting in and he's complete. His character's amazing. He's so deadpan. He'll be like, he's just sitting in, and he's complete, his character's amazing. He's so deadpan. He'll be like, top five key tosses in Fast and Furious. Let's take it from the top.

41:32Vin, classic left-hand toss, no look catch. Number four, we have this. Take a simple idea. But he's doing it on every minor thing that could happen. Didn't he do one about like best beer chinks? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Best Corona swings. Corona swings in Fast and Furious.'s exploded let's get him up let's make him more famous i mean i binged his stuff i was like this is honestly like you gotta get niche you gotta get niche with that it's incredible anyone that loves anything that much yeah or is that good at anything there's these dudes called crown cinema they the O is missing. And they do the most obsessive deep dives into movies. It's a little bit more expertise. It's not like flippant around something

42:10that's kind of a bit silly, but the most incredible breakdowns of like Shutter Island or Inception and like the best explanation of a million things that you didn't notice. Even if someone's like, yeah, Inception is one of my favorite movies. I get it, like Christopher Nolan's a bit of a genius or whatever. And you go, oh, I thought I was at level four. I'm actually at level one and a half. And there's all of this shit below. And they're so great. But this is your theory that content on the internet now needs to be either one end of the barbell, like completely simple, it's a hang with the boys, or it's the best, the absolute best. And there'll always be room for better. But there'll always be room for more relatable.

42:49and the middle all of the stuff in the middle is where you go yeah it's where you go to die have you seen those two lads that do the commentator overlays like they there's they're like it's like breaking the fourth wall they'll show the sports clip one top at the top of the screen and then the two of them they'll film themselves as if they were the commentators announcing that part of the game you haven't seen this no okay if you can find it it is weird that you're coasting off this thing that people have already seen that is like you know has this so much cultural relevance and power and then they like put their own pre-tested content it's like reaction videos you know like a new song comes out you like somebody's take on it it feels like where

43:32things are it's just their enthusiasm that just draws you in again did you guys see this guy speaking of like somebody else's obsession and passion even if you have zero interest in the subject sucks you in and you guys see the the number one scrabble guy in the world no no oh my god i watched this like 30 minute documentary on youtube about this guy and i don't care about scrabble did you find find it? Yeah. It's called Shep Mates. S-H-E-P. Yeah, Shep Mates. Oh God. They really, they've got dressed as well. They've put the woolen hat on and everything. I think you boys are going to love this. Okay. All right. Oh, they're like legit good. The guy in the background is the best. He's like... Everybody pinned once, but go down the...

44:43They're voiceovering it. So it's not them doing it themselves. So they're like remembering... This is all Australian football for some reason. You keep nostalgia association. Try and find like a World Cup one or something. That looks pretty good. It's not even in their own language. There's so much work they put in. The old one eye they just got infinite infinite supply of stuff that is really great arbitrage every all all success is arbitrage isn't it in one form or form or another. It's so good. But I got to tell you about the Scrabble guys. Unbelievable story. So the claim is this. This guy is better at Scrabble than anyone is at any game compared to their peers. So the gap between him and everybody else is bigger than Magnus and everybody in chess,

45:49Jordan and everyone in basketball. And so if you watch this thing, the story is crazy. This guy doesn't play Scrabble until he's 28 years old. And now he's like, you know, world champion so many times over. But not only is he the world champion in like US Scrabble, he then won the UK championship, which is like oddly has 50,000 words difference that you can't use and can use. Wow. Then they were like, okay, great. You're just the best at Scrabble. No big deal. So he goes and he wins the sip the spanish and french also despite not knowing how to speak the language he is literally like uh such a mental dictionary that he studied the language and he can beat the best players from those countries who've been playing since they were children and

46:29are fluent in that language and he defeats all of them and so he won it in france he couldn't even at the acceptance speech he couldn't say like thank you so much so he's like can you just tell them thank you uh but he just dominated the competition and you could see all these guys their whole life they've been playing and it's like it's like the guy who uh you know lost to ai in go and they were just like my life is meaningless this guy's like uh ben's kid with math but for scrabble he's a fucking savant you should put up a picture he looks exactly like you would expect as well nigel richards yeah this guy and so like his first tournament he rode his bike 222 miles to get to it one and then like rode home so he's just unbelievable and the clips i'm watching clips

47:14and they're like all right he gets watching clips and they're like, all right, he gets these letters and they're like, C-H-D. Oh, he's going to be able to play children. That's going to be a very nice score. We're excited about children. And then he, they're like, he's pausing. Why is he pausing? What could he be thinking? Nigel, what do you have up your sleeve? And then he'll go chlorodine. And they're like, lose their mind. I want the guys that did the commentary to go over the top with the i love looking at anything that exists and you think it's shallow and as soon as you meet somebody who's an expert you go there's depth so even scrabble even i never thought there'd be this level at scrabble even even wooden tables there'll be a person out there in the world that could talk about wooden tables for a depth that you've never discovered. I saw the thing recently. of two different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, again, I've been eating chicken my entire life.

48:16I've never thought that deeply about it. But I just literally pulled it up then. It's a new sleep for you. Yeah. Basically, there's dozens of breeders of different types of chicken, and it's shrunken all the way down to Cobb Vantras, owned by Tyson, and Avergeon, owned by German's EU Group. Their flagship products, the Cobb 500 and the Ross 308. And we basically got rid of all of the different variations of chicken. I assume it's kind of like... Genetically, there's only two chickens. It's almost like there's only Poodle and Rockweiler. I see. We've kind of slowly, because these chickens, whether it's to do with the fatness and how we eat them, and the amount of these chickens, the line was something around if um oh these are two yeah this is the cob five thousand a cob 500 yeah i'm a massive fan of

49:00the cob 500 yeah yeah i'm a big cob 500 guy but uh yeah how quickly they grow somebody was saying that if you was to just look at the um kind of biodiversity of earth as an alien you just see the number of chicken skulls because we're getting through millions of the sorry trillions of these carb 500s a year if you're going to spend an hour in the gym you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it and honestly who wants to be in the background of a tiktok is highlight reel dressed like a chump gymshark makes some of the best men's and women's training gear on the planet and something that i realized a few years ago is that when you actually like what you're wearing in the gym, you show up differently, you train harder, you stay longer and get way more

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50:15wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at checkout where i thought this i was walking the gym the other day and there was a ton of birds sat on a lamppost lots of birds where are all of the dead animals that's a great question where because there's loads of animals that i see that are alive and almost none that i see that are dead but the dead ones have to go the live ones end up dead somehow get ingested by where are all the vultures then that are eating them right like okay so foxes okay but foxes eating the skulls of squirrels yeah where's all the squirrel skulls they eat skulls and i think they just like a python got an instagram page i think they just i think they just don't they they're not like just how

50:53they just house the whole animal but it's um i can't tell if you're just saying it confidently or you know the answer i mean it must be yeah it's not like a surely it's this okay but my dog okay my dog will like if it found a carcass in the garden it's just gonna eat it it's gone yeah and like feral animals will definitely do that but But I don't see. What I love though, and you can do this. Raccoon. There will be a guy or a woman out there who's spent 20,000 hours around animal decomposition. And they'll be the person of Scrabble for this. And I love, I told Chris this one before, but whenever I meet somebody who's an expert in any industry of, I'll often come at them with my questions of like, so what's happening here?

51:33And they kind of answer my layman shit but my favorite question now is to just go what's the most fascinating thing that people like me don't appreciate but keeps that you think is the most intriguing thing and it's like a fucking hole such a banger it's such a banger question what do you think about that for like art that like layman's like me chris or Sean don't really think about, but is actually really intriguing to people in the industry? the mechanisms underneath the images. So this is not going to be interesting to anyone listening probably that has no inherent interest in this, but the idea that so much of art history is actually about what happened around the art versus the art itself.

52:32Why is the Mona Lisa incredibly incredibly famous it was stolen a bunch of times and there's like all of this like cultural lore around these pieces another thing uh another great one is the the last supper like why is the last supper one of the most famous images in the world is it because it's an amazing image isn't it and it depicts this like piece of western culture that everybody refers to as like, you know, an inception moment, or is it because the printing infrastructure at the time, the aspect ratio of it was perfect to reproduce that. And it's that like, that's, that's like one of the biggest contributing factors to why that image is so, uh, like notorious because it could be reproduced at

53:12scale because of the vast majority of printers were operated in that aspect ratio so it's like it's always something like you know you misattribute the the the significance of something to like it's be careful how i say this like it's inherent value versus like story the environment around it that produced the story i just read this thing this morning it was like you've seen this like new biological uh breakthrough or research around like if you put a sorry if you put an old heart into a young body it gets younger the organ gets younger and like the macro observation there is like the environment is more important than the single variable and it sort of reminds me of that it's like all the story and the law is like the environment is more important than the single variable and

53:55it sort of reminds me of that it's like all the story and the law and like the great artists in the world today and and previously either you like manufacture the narrative yourself while you're alive or something amazing happens and then you are like attributed you know his the vict what was it like the the winner writes this story or the history. And so many artists careers are defined by like amazing storytellers and like stewards of their work where they've been able to, what the Senra did an amazing readout of a biography of, um, the guy that inspired, um, I forget it's like huge art dealer today, but there was like an art dealer of a previous generation who like rent these mansions in England,

54:40put paintings up on the walls and then bring like a Vanderbilt and like a competing business person of that era and then have them like see each other in the driveway. And then he'd come in and be like, yeah, no's he's pretty interested and he said he's going to go back and just get the money together and it's like oh i have to have it now you know it's like the memetic games we did that we did that in nightclubs if we had the two biggest table if you go into a nightclub there will be one table typically which is only available it's usually behind the d booth. It's the most expensive table in a club, classic super club Vegas style thing. Maybe it's even above the DJ booth in an area that's only accessible through security and stuff like that. And that's what Dana White is on New

55:23Year's Eve having a scrap with his wife or whatever. And then there's a couple of other tables that are kind of the top middle ones. They will always be opposite another table. And that's where you put the guys that are the ones that have actually got the small man syndrome and you put them opposite each other one gets a bottle delivery service which is 15 grand and then the other ones are like they got the one they got the one with the motorcycle they get the one where the guy comes out on the motorcycle and they go well i mean in fact the one that's 20 grand you get like they dress up as nuns and they come out as that and it's like get the fucking nun one dude and then they're like yo they just they just dogged us on that thing like

55:58get the like and you just right it's an auction bidding service for attention inside of a night club and you leave the number of times that we left events three in the morning lights come up everyone fucks off and you look at the table and there's unopened bottles of champagne there's bottles of vodka that nebuchadnezzar's four and a half liter six liter bottles of off and you look at the table and there's unopened bottles of champagne. There's bottles of vodka that never can as is four and a half liter, six liter bottles of stuff. And you're like, they've had a 10th of this. And by the way, very, very high, uh, expenditure bottles of liquor and champagne. The most expensive part of it is the bottle, not the contents of the bottle.

56:32Like it is much more expensive to produce the glass that that goes into because it's such a low volume and it's so thick and it's so da-da-da-da-da and they're consuming just this tiny, tiny amount of it. Mimetic tax. Yeah, it is, it is, it is. It's small man tax. Damn. That's kind of the story of Grey Goose. Do you guys know this backstory of Grey Goose? The guy who started Grey Go goose is such a legend he um he first uh popularized uh jagermeister but the like it basically all started because of a like fight in the family so i think like he married this woman she's great her father was in the spirits business and then they have a falling out and he basically gets kicked out of the family business but in a sort of memetic rivalry with the father he decides like not only will i be successful i

57:20will be successful in the spirits business so he's walking around town he's thinking like what's the entryway like i have no experience no contacts like pretty competitive saturated market what am i gonna do and he sees this like german group of uh you know older people and they were drinking something in like a small thing, like a little tiny shot glass, but they were like sipping it. And he said, what is this? And they were like, oh, it's Jägermeister. It's a sort of aperitif. It's like an after dinner, like sort of thing that you sip on. And it's like, it's almost like tastes medicinal if you, you know, had Jäger. And so he, he goes and starts reading about it and he's like, okay, uh, no good news is, uh, bad news is it tastes bad. And nobody really cares about an app after

58:01dinner, sipping, you know, liquor. He's like, but the good news is the rights are available because nobody wants this afternoon or thing. So he gets the rights to it. And he realizes like, I have to create the story around this. So he's like, he gives it to some people to taste this. He's like, you know, this liquor has some pretty special properties. Can you figure out what they are? Like, I'm curious. And he just lets people just brainstorm what it might be. And someone's like, I think this is kind of like an aphrodisiac. They come back and he's like, sure is. So he starts promoting it that way. And so he goes to bars. He's like, oh, it's for young people. So he goes to like college towns.

58:33And then he's like, it's an aphrodisiac. He starts putting like newspaper clippings in the urinals that are like banned aphrodisiac from Europe makes its way to the U S parents warn of its effectiveness, whatever, you know, doctors swear that this happens. And then he starts hiring like hot nurses to like inject, like, like shoot it into your mouth. And like, it's this med it's this medicine and he turns it into like this whole thing. So he wins with Jaeger. And then when he's in his seventies, he's like, you know what I'm going to do? Co-found a new startup. And he decides I'm going to go for vodka. And his process to create Grey Goose was go find me the highest priced bottle of vodka. What is it? They're like,

59:06oh, it's absolute. He's like, what's the price? He's like, great. We're 50% more than that. That's thing number one. We know he goes thing two, uh, we want to be top shelf. So he's like, we need a, how big is the shelf height? We need to be taller than that. So the only place you could put it as the top shelf, um, it has to sit up there. So he designs the bottle and they're like, uh, okay, we're working on the bottle. We don't even have the vodka. He's like, don't worry. We're going to get the vodka, go to France and get the vodka. They're like, vodka is made in Russia. He's like, yeah, but who wants that dirty Russian vodka? Imagine French vodka. And they're like, okay. He's like, go find me some French vodka. And so they go find it. And that was basically how he created Grey Goose was those

59:42three elements working backwards and creating it. Uh, it's really wild. This guy lived a wild life. This guy, Sidney Frank, like he was, he got so old, but he just loved having a good time. He loved golfing. So when he couldn't golf, he would just pay four pro golfers to like golf on his behalf. And they would like kind of carry him wheelchair him out onto the course. And he would like fly private with these guys. They would just have a good time. But like all the videos of him are like, kind of like even in his nineties, being carried into the car, having a great time. This guy lived a big life. Meanwhile, there is someone having their fifth hour of conversations about their business plan with chat gpt but that's kind of that where does it like how

1:00:21deep does it go it's like well the mark marketing will like disillusion you right because you realize like all these everyday products that are so popular the psychology underneath them was crazy the rabbit hole goes deep deep deep deep um i will on this like topic uh i've been thinking more about of there's two the two words of 2026 i think and they're almost it's kind of david foster wallace the fish can't see the water anymore but the two words that are thrown around constantly taste and slop. And I'm fascinated by these two words and how little discussion there is around these two words. And taste in particular is a word that you can just, you can say, and I get to say how high status I am by going, the thing that's really important in 2026 is taste,

1:01:09and you fucking peasants don't have any fucking taste. and slops like the inverse of that where somebody can just say the word slop now with no definition of what why they mean slop it's kind of like in a less emotionally charged way but like the word racist or sexist that you can just throw it around now you throw it around willy-nilly you can band it around the office willy-nilly um and nobody knows exactly what it is and there's a great essay um george orwell's politics and the english language and he talks about how there's these new turns of phrase like as a writer you can just put in there at the end of the day or just turns of phrase which can just signal that i think people will like this right and i can seem smart but there's no depth to this

1:01:50at all and i'm fascinated by because jack you're somebody who i'd say has like what people describe as taste but i've been fascinated by how do you actually develop that muscle and there's a wonderful exercise i got from my friend billy where it's like it's always very simple billy oppenheimer and he has this thing called um what i like about what i like where whenever he sees something that he likes he will just capture it put in his phone and then try and explain to himself why he likes it and then i created a what i dislike about what i dislike and then when i see something i don't like i'll capture it and write it down and then you also have like a little swipe file to go through when you're doing it but i'm just fascinated

1:02:33by right now these two words in particular that everybody's using them and nobody defines it. Can you find, um, there's a quote by Ira Glass. It's like, if you put Ira Glass, taste gap, it's like a one paragraph definition of like having taste means you will always be dissatisfied with what you produce. This quote is from the American author Ira Glass. Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste, but there is this gap. For the first couple of years, you make stuff. It's just not that good. It's trying to be good. It has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

1:03:12And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We go through this. And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you've got to know it's normal. And the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took too long to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met.

1:03:45It's going to take a while. It's normal to take a while. You just got to fight your way through it. Damn. Bang. There is ship at what's the i can't remember i think it was shane parish who said um like um maybe tiago forte like procrastination is bad because it stops you from doing stuff but it's mostly bad because it stops you from shipping work at a volume sufficiently enough to work out what works like if you don't ever it's your about, I'd rather be high conviction and wrong than low conviction and right. Yeah. I'd rather be, um, I'd rather be an idiot than a coward. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you don't ever put stuff out or if you only put stuff out when you know that it's going to work, you haven't actually learned all that much. Learning a lot means,

1:04:28okay, I've got a big sample set. I've thrown a load of stuff out, but I mean, the shortest thing, at least for me, like taste is the ability to discern between good and not good and yeah i would like i would pair up the slop comment with basically your outsourcing taste i think that's what people are trying to refer to when they use the word slop it's like there is a lacking intention in the output and a lot of people think that that is like if any tool that has like an incredible amount of power was used you're giving up some agency and i think that's like the done without taste so i think swap is done without taste and and like the way that these things are trained it's like the claude there's like textbook like little marks on there that if you did not

1:05:12guide this with a certain amount of intention is just going to show up every time and my my like rebuttal or the next level that i think exists is that's fine and to say slop when you see slop is fine but that is slop so you just i just call that slop slop yeah so if you're going to say your criticism is also an original if you're going to say slop tell me why yeah explain what's on your list you said you have a list now of like things why i dislike what i dislike or um let me pull it up hold on one second it's interesting around the uh this is seen as low effort because that john mark uh guy broke the fucking internet the first one of him where he's shadowboxing and he's just like he's sort of doing like a little dance but everyone was

1:05:55completely mystified by this guy like there's so much aura until you found out it was ai so that right okay so there's something the same thing but finding out i mean if you watch hoog or fern or any of these big explainer youtube channels i love their documentaries i think that they're great they put a disclaimer at the very start that says all of our animation is done by humans because they need to show effort upfront because the gap in terms of output, like finished article is difficult to determine for us. So what I have to do is basically say, even if you can't tell the proof of work is there to show that we put a lot of effort into making this. Did I send you the gossip goblin thing? The love Island thing. Can you find gossip

1:06:41goblin on, on Instagram? What is it? This is like AI film. And it's like, you're not going to mistake it for not being AI film, but the level of craft is absolutely unbelievable. Right. And so they're taking something that people would typically see as low effort and slop, but pushing it to its absolute limit. And I would say they're putting in like a level of effort in the production that you would associate with like any kind of like S tier Hollywood production studio you'll see in these outputs. So like, what kind of birds are you into, love? You like them all sexy and stuff? Well, all types, yeah. I love all birds, girls. But, yeah, if I had to pick, I'd say I like the pretty ones when these look all sexy and stuff.

1:07:24Aw, you calling me fit? You're so sweet. Potsy, you nasty slag! How could you? Gorbo's my man! Welcome to Lover's Lagoon. What now? The show where Nero Cradle's finest's finest flirtiest and feistiest singles fight fornicate and find love so come on and take your hand out of your pants and let's go meet the cast it's been a rough year not gonna lie me hairline wobbled my cool and the gooning got bad real bad but I've locked in now and I'm ready to stop Jester Maxxing and start mogging, bruv. I'm a proper gent. I treat every bird like a princess and her father like an absolute king. Manners cost nothing, sweetheart. I mean, it's even got... I wouldn't say I'm full of myself, but I'm the fittest sort here, aren't I?

1:08:10It's just maths, innit? Don't know, really.. Nice villa though, yeah? I'm a romantic I am. When a fella pulls out a chair for me or opens a door, boom! Me fanny flutters and I'm already planning our baby's names, yeah? What's crazy is this is such a strong like... Except for him, I was about to say what i was about to say was um the ability to distill uh stereotypes like british each of those is an archetype that exists uh but yeah i mean i don't know are people ever going to say this is ai this is something which is typically low effort but you've done it in a way which is high effort therefore i'm going to give you i think there's so much ick around ai generally that you're never really going to no matter how good that's short term yeah i just i

1:09:04agree i think there will be always like the new organic or free range is like handmade is you know it's human made basically they're gonna there's gonna be a word for this like you know, human-made, basically, there's going to be a word for this. I think Rory was talking about how, like, horsepower became a phrase because they needed to describe the speed of something, and they could only describe it relative to the units of something previous. Yeah, and horsepower was needed. And, like, I think the AI industry needs its version of horsepower. It's like, it needs to... It needs its prediction markets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's like these evals are also complicated. Nobody knows what the hell, which one's better or not.

1:09:37I have no idea what. It should just be IQ, right? They need to come up with a number that's like, we got 99, they have 98. Supreme intelligence. You see the poll, the Trump poll. Oh, yeah, the rebrand. Oh, yeah, he's trying. He's ahead of the game, a savant. Oh, yeah. He was trying to name it something else. Supreme intelligence. Supreme was one one and then the other one was um i can't remember he wanted to call it asi but the problem is that asi means artificial super intelligence which is the thing that everyone's worried about yeah it wasn't super it was it was supreme and then it was like superior so i forget but there's like three words the artificial i think the big thing is the artificial yeah which makes sense it's not

1:10:14the best branding. I mean, he knows his branding, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. What was your list? My thingy's not working. Carry on without me. Machine intelligence was another one that I've, like, again, that has the, like, we're getting replaced. What's this? Here's a... Is that a gram? New pickle. What do you think? Woo-hoo. Very nice. Look at that. Picked them up from the deli yesterday. Good coloring. That's dill. And the brine is something called mustard seed. It's very cool, Bateman, but that's nothing. Look at this. That is really nice. Half sour with garlic brine. What do you think? Nice. Jesus. That is really super. How did a nitwit like you get so tasteful? I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's pickle to mine.

1:11:11But wait. You ain't seen nothing yet. Barrel cured, whole peppercorn, extra crisp. Impressive. Very nice. Mmm. Let's see Paul Allen's pickle. I want to know how they put the pickles away. Look at that subtle olive coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my god. It even has little bumps. Something wrong? Patrick? You're sweating. Jesus fucking... Yeah. It is over. It is so close to being over. I had, speaking of tasteful, Alex Wang in Crocs. Mmm. Did you see this? I did look at the breakdown and the breakdown of the breakdown this one yeah yeah so meta's chief ai officer alexander wang stole the show at medic connect by wearing a pair of camo crocs and a camo t-shirt let's have a look yeah just dress for the job you want dude it is so true and keep going

1:12:33meta invested 60 billion dollars into the metaverse almost run out of business then zuck hide the camo crocs in turn and suddenly everything's fixed he's just replied and said gen z riser he had to fact check it he's on a heater right now yeah uh well i have seen i mean as speaking as a man that really, really fucking likes Crocs, in some airports, you're not allowed to wear them on the escalators. Is that right? Because, you know, at the end of an escalator where there's sort of like the teeth of the combs come together, sometimes people's feet get stuck. And if you've got this in sport mode and this starts getting eaten, like people have really injured themselves. Yeah, just ripped your own foot apart from this.

1:13:19But that's why sport mode is only to be used in extreme circumstances. That's my piece of advice. Wow. From an avid croc wearer, got to be careful. In other news, if you're trying to go from Joey Chestnut to Joey Swole, the RP Strength app is the best place to start. I've been in the gym for 20 years, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training sessions of my life, and RP was a massive part of that. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession to beat up their high school bullies and provide the most science-backed effective path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you your exercises, how many sets, reps and weights that you need to do, everything. So all that you have to do is show up and lift. If the RP app could wipe

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1:14:29Let me try and find it. This is your idea that the UK is peak vape shop energy. Yeah, the number of vape shops and betting shops when i was back is truly absurd yeah it's not a great indicator is it show me your high street and i'll show you country this is it the the the um the twitter handle is ktr ivs and the and the article is called Everything is Gooner Casino. The ability to write good headlines since Substack and Twitter articles have come around. Here we go. Everything is Gooner Casino. Yeah, this is it. When I read Jason's tweet on the weekend, I was so viscerally yucked. The last thing you want to see is a middle-aged man who could be your father tweeting about Gooner content on the timeline. Jason, sydney sweeney launches an only fans competitor

1:15:19and she's instantly the world's richest woman i don't agree with this thesis here but that's a combo for another day it seems like if you're a builder right now you have two options creating goona slop or building a casino and if you're feeling ambitious and want real PMF, what's PMF? Product market. You have some combination of both. 50 cent. The saying goes, sex sells. This is not a new concept. Advertisers, marketers, record labels, and notable rappers have been pushing this agenda on us since the beginning of time. I vividly remember watching music videos as a child with 50 cent. There's video vixens dancing in the background. Back when music videos were still a thing, you couldn't find one without hot women. The formula was quite simple. Find a product,

1:15:57find a hot person and create an ad with both pictured and boom, you have people's attention. This was what virality looked like before we had manufactured algorithms and influencers doing the work for us on TikTok. Tom Ford took the concept very literally in his iconic 2007 campaign for Tom Ford for men. The ads were considered too sexy magazines refused to run them yet they're still one of the clearest and most iconic examples of sex selling to date tom ford in two it's pretty long but if you go down there's a there's a two by two matrix that i think will uh illustrate will illustrate but it's obviously based off the on the back of the sydney sweeney stuff but i this is- Oh, I have seen this.

1:16:35Okay. So it's a matrix pornography to not pornography on the Y axis. Casino to not casino on the X axis. And then maybe the next couple of paragraphs will sum it up. I love how Grindr's off the charts. But this is a great meme too, yeah. On one side, it's polymarket and on the other side, it's OnlyFans. It seems like the modern man's brain has been fried, and this has all been turned into a weird slot machine lab rat experiment gone wrong. The future seems dark, but there are two directions we can go in. I'm hopeful we can start course correcting if it's not already too late. Everyone has a responsibility in the future they build. I'll leave you here with a quote from one of my colleagues. When you're working in crypto, real bravery is refusing to build the slot machine. If you can build anything, what's worth building? Be brave. Are you tempted to build the slot machine? You work in crypto.

1:17:22I mean, there's a very fine line between like the frictionless commerce component and the just like pure speculation. Well, you could always just get away with it and be like, it's a commentary on the state of things. It's have a free pass yeah i think that what's interesting about like crypto art specifically and its relationship to like the quote-unquote real art world is like money attention uh like the manufacturing of attention around work in the traditional art world is the same thing is happening just at like a slower pace you know like the idea that what we talked about an hour ago or so the the way you put an artist's work into the spotlight is by increasing demand around it and sort of structuring a market around it. And what crypto art has done is like

1:18:16somewhat democratize the ability for you to do that and like get collectors to participate in your work. And yeah, I feel like there have been in the last eight, nine years that this has been happening. There's like, I strongly believe there's already work in crypto that will be the most valuable artwork that has existed ever already is potentially, but you know, crypto punks familiar with them. If you think about like a portrait in a traditional sense, like, uh, um, like the Da Vinci Salvador Monday sold for 450 million bucks in 2021 i think to like a shake or some like someone in the uae and if you like extrapolate that or you sort of marry that up to like a crypto punks as an analogy if a crypto punk is a hundred thousand dollars one of them

1:19:10and you think of it as one project or one object that collection is worth a billion dollars and it's liquid like you could buy and sell one right now for that price if the salvador monday came back to market would it sell for a billion dollars maybe but these things are eight years old already yeah so i like i have a yeah i have a strong belief in it to the point where like i've you know pivoted a lot of my work into that world despite it being a like reputationally right fraught environment for sure but like it's uh it's a very real thing in in in some pockets and corners but because of the permissionless nature of it's like anything it's like you're going to get 99 carnage slop whatever you want to call it like you bring the barrier down then it's it's uh

1:19:59you get what you expect you know one of the two things i wanted to ask you guys kind of related to that article just then there's two you've got four kids three kids and there's this whole very much pessimism right now around devices and casinos or porn and addiction and all this sort of stuff. But you two are like very kind of optimistic, a little bit more nuanced of all my friends. How are you thinking about kids with devices and using all these things as well as like education as a whole, like bringing kids into this? Because people are making out like it's the worst time ever to be alive, which I disagree with,'s this kind of media narrative to be what age to be like a kid yeah i think so yeah i

1:20:39think to be like a college age kid right now would be very hard but i think like i would agree i think they're like growing pains i don't understand like if you've committed to being taught whatever discipline in the like traditional way it's being taught and what was your major uh graphic communication it was called oh wow okay that's pretty spot on yeah what did you do uh philosophy philosophy would two business degrees okay all right maybe you guys all used your degrees i i was biology i didn't use my degree i don't know i don't know almost anyone that like in my life that i guess i'm talking about the thing they studied turned out to be what they did with the rest of their life because you know you're told to pick when you're 17 in the u.s you

1:21:19major your freshman year of college so you're 17 or 18 years old and you pick a track hey with no knowledge only recently a child decide the rest of the direction your life's going to go in this is the arranged marriage of like yeah i guess that's a good point i think maybe it is like should push you more in the direction of like, I want to do philosophy or I want to study literature, like the, you know, going to, to study. I think there's a whole set of attitudes that might be true, but don't serve you. And it's better to just reject them. Meaning, you know, you could think of this, it's like a breakup. Is a breakup the end or the beginning? You could argue either way. One of them is going to serve you.

1:21:57If you see this as the beginning, the beginning of the next chapter, where I really understand what I want, I'm going to find the right person, and I'm going to be better because of all this. Or is it the end, which is what most people default to. And so it's like, I think it's kind of what you were talking about earlier of, you know, what's a thing that if you got that wrong, kind of doesn't matter what else you do. It's merit forward. It's like if you're at it, it's the worst time ever to be alive or to be a kid or to be a college graduate it's like good luck with the rest of that paragraph because your opening sentence screwed you you know so it's like you really have no choice but to just say it's the best time ever

1:22:26to be a college student why and then start brainstorming from there and then use that like actually is one of the ideas that i was pretty interested in recently was, uh, I read this sub stack about strong links versus weak link theory. I was like, Oh, what does that mean? And so what the guy argues, he's like, there are plenty of systems in the world where you really have to focus on the weak link of the system. So he's like, uh, airport security. You're only as good as your weakest link. Um, jet engine design, uh, only as good as your weakest link food safety. It's like, you have to be, so there's a whole set of systems that the incentive and the important thing is to focus on your weakest link and make it better. He's like, but then, and so, and a lot of people

1:23:04even say that you're only as good as your weakest link, but so you just think that applies to everything. It's like, but there's a whole set of things that are the exact opposite. It's strong link theory. So he's like music, let's say you get you know an artist album you know like the beatles the beatles have made like whatever thousand songs even people who are like i love the beatles can name you know a dozen off the top of their head and so like for a musician it doesn't really matter how many bad songs you make the only bad thing matters is you make one banger song right did you get any strong links in your thread and so strong links apply to all these other things. Science is actually very interesting.

1:23:36He was like, the scientific community is so uptight about publishing papers and replication, all this, that they focused so much on weak links, meaning the smartest people believe what you should do is try to disqualify as much bad, bad theories, bad hypotheses as you can versus realizing that like all we care about in science is actually breakthroughs and improve human lives, which only come when you are actually just scanning for the strong link that actually works versus focusing on like, you know, negating any possible bad, bad paper. Um, and it's like, oh yeah, that's actually kind of true. And you need to know which game you're in to be able to optimize for, you know? So like, I think it's kind of the same thing, oh yeah, that's actually kind of true. And you need to know which game you're in to be able to optimize for, you know?

1:24:15So like, I think it's kind of the same thing, like in, you know, college students or whoever it is that are trying to figure out what to do. Like you can't, you have to find the strong link theory of what you're doing and like, oh, now I can do that. Yeah. Well, that changes everything for me. And even if these other nine things don't are now not going my way, this one is enough to make up for the other nine that are now against me. And even if these other nine things don't are now not going my way, this one is enough to make up for the other nine that are now against me. I agree with the like agency component at the individual level. I suppose my comment is like the curriculum at the university moving fast enough to be like, Hey guy, this exists now.

1:24:46How can we rethink it? Or is it like, we've been teaching it the way this way for this long, and we're going to continue to do that that's the like muddy water but if you're in the position to be like actually you know i see this as like whatever i'm doing i can actually fulfill my university obligations in that's why alpha school the idea of it is so great because they were like what if like how long does school actually take like how long do you need to learn every day and if the number is the same as it was 50 years ago, like what the hell? I talked to a dentist. He's like, it's crazy that dental school is still the same exact amount of time. How is it possible that we train people the exact amount

1:25:23of time? Nothing has improved in our training ability. We got the internet, we got computers, we got zero efficiency games. That's insane. And it costs more. Obviously the incentive is keep you there, charge you as much as you can versus the opposite. Whereas alpha school is like, All right, if the students were only learning two hours a day, how well could you teach them two hours? And it turns out they do two grades of progress in every one year with only two hours a day. So you're using, whatever, one-fourth the time and making double the progress. So it's crazy. If you go down an age to younger ages, how are you two thinking about devices and education for kids? We have zero devices. Zero? zero no tv no device at this age

1:26:08would you like to meet my nanny my pacifier my like if i'm at a restaurant i'm trying to like have a conversation with my wife like okay take the phone play a game i play i play a lot of video games with my kids um i think that's like part of it is i use it with them. Like I will not give them social media because I know like how, if my brain cannot resist the social temptations of trying to be seen as popular on social media. A developing brain. And just consuming, like consuming, consuming, consuming. There's no chance. They stand no chance. So like, to me, I'm like, that's cigarettes. I'm not going to give my kid total cigarettes. But I have myself plus met so many people that played a lot of video games growing up.

1:26:47And like, you get a lot of benefits. Like I played a lot of poker growing up. It's not really the most, like my mom wasn't that happy. It's kind of a degenerate activity, but you do gain a lot if you're able to like control the dose. So I think it's like, you know, you've got to control the dose, but everybody's got a different dose. Some people think an hour a week is a lot. There's a study that I saw this morning on X that's going around. It's trending at the moment. Mark, you might be able to pull this up. It's a number of brain scans based on how many hours per day people use, might be screens or it might be social media, less than one versus one to two versus three to four versus four and over. And it just, I think everybody is concerned about what it

1:27:23does to kids. The thing that I would be most worried about that I think I would find most difficult if I was at university now, I left university 15 years ago. So I was at uni for quite a while. I was at uni for half a decade. And during that time, Facebook was around and had been around since 2006. And I left in like 2011, something like that. But it wasn't compelling. I still was on a BlackBerry. I think the level of distractibility over the last decade and a half has gone up through the roof. And not only that, but now you have to not use the equivalent of the empty process calories cognitively of relying on AI. So even if you can focus on your work, there is now always this permanent shortcut that's there,

1:28:05which is a simulacrum of you learning. But at least based on most of the studies, it was that one that came out of Harvard, somewhere in Boston, I think, that suggests people that students that are using AI retain so much less information, et cetera, et cetera. I know that this will be triggering all of your techno optimist. No, no, no. I was going to build on your argument for a second. Really? Yeah, I was going to build on it. So you remember the old school brain imaging of black cabs in London, people that learned to black cab drive, and they have to remember it for about three years. Structural changes in the brain. Structurally changes the location of the brain. But what's fascinating, I would like to fund this.

1:28:45Follow-up. Well, not just follow-up, but Uber drivers, in theory, are doing as many miles driving around, maybe even more. But I would be willing to bet there's almost no structural change or a tiny percentage comparatively to the black cap drivers within that there's something quite fascinating because it seems to be the big thing for change at the brain level is the risk of failure and if you if you ask the ai something and there's no risk of failure even i think the one one thing i'll do now when i'm asking claude or i'm asking chat gpt something is to just ask it pause try and think my own answer and then contrast and compare versus purely. I think I don't know why the risk of failure maybe,

1:29:30but friction is pretty much. What's the difference between friction and risk of failure? What do you mean? Uh, you, something can be difficult and you can still know that it would go well. I think that it's the difficulty. It's the removal of the difficulty. Like learning the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, being able to remember something isn't to do with failure, it's to do with friction. Could you elaborate a little bit more? Like doing the rep. Yes. Whether it was like high stakes or- If you reread a page, but you could like reread the wrong page or something, that wouldn't change how much you retained. What changes how much you retain is, are you self-testing? Are you closing the book and trying to recall what's on the page? Or are you just reading it over and

1:30:06over and over again? So maybe the failure thing plays into that. Well, I think in that, like knowing, I think the friction helps, but then if you fail, you're significantly more likely to remember, which makes sense because of the pain that's associated. Motivating force. Failure is friction. This might be a stupid distinction, but like the cost of failure, like not knowing where you're going as a taxi driver is like bankruptcy right you know like the like if you can put yourself in a position where like if i don't know this i can't perform said function but even at university now it's like if you're studying a certain topic like i can produce the materials that i've been asked to produce the vast majority of people are just going to go that route. I did this film earlier this year

1:30:47with a lady who teaches film at a university in Hong Kong. And she's like, I can't stop the students just submitting like 80 pages of bullshit that comes out of an LLM. And I was like, why didn't you just tell them to submit the prompt? Just cut all of this out and just be like... Whoever writes the best prompt, but they're just going to prompt for the prompt. Just grade the prompt. Yeah, they'll prompt for the prompt. There's no end to it. They'll still prompt for the prompt, but then I said, okay, grade it with the LLM then. You make the student the grader. So you give the student five LLM outputs and they have to just tell you which one is the best and why. Okay, that's pretty good. And then that forces them to at least have tasteM outputs and they have to tell you which one is the best and why.

1:31:28And then that forces them to at least have taste, judgment, and have to think. Do you guys think there's going to be like brain gyms? Like, you know, there weren't gyms when we all worked and did manual labor. Interesting. Like the idea of like coming home from the field and being like, let me just get a quick pump. That wasn't a thing. It was like, I just slogged in the field all day. It's when we all stopped slogging in the fields and the minds that we had to like we're just sitting all day we had to come up with a place to go to go pick up heavy objects and put them back down is that what's gonna happen like are we going to brain gyms where artificial cognitive friction yeah like you go do

1:31:57sudoku and shit and like you're it's like oh yeah they lock up the device and you have to get an hour in i'm like man i got such a good brain pump today. You know what I mean? Is that what's going to happen? That's a great point. But there isn't as much bottle service upside to the brain gym. Straight and also you can't see. You know what I mean? My big theory about the gym, about why it's so popular for a lot of people, especially bodybuilding. You need belts like jujitsu or something like that. Yeah, exactly. You need some other like signal. I grade it. Bandanas. The karate kid of Soku. That guy thinks. That guy fucking thinks, man. Oh, man. I've heard he thinks. The advantage of going to the gym is that you get a pump,

1:32:36which is a preview of what you will be like if you keep doing it. You don't have the same, it's not the same when you try to learn Italian. During the process of doing your Italian class or Duolingo or whatever, you're not briefly six months progressed in Italian. No, you do a puzzle. I do a puzzle. I feel absolute dopamine when I solve a little slider puzzle. I understand. But that's not the same as when you go into the gym, you lift something and you're like, if I keep going, I will walk around looking like I do now, having just finished my training session with a pump in six months. This is your experience at the gym. My experience at the gym is wildly different than yours. You have this euphoric experience. Like this is who I am. I feel great. I'm becoming

1:33:15myself. Yeah. I go to the gym and I look at myself. I'm like, Oh my God. Can somebody turn the mirror around? What's going on? But the like project, regardless of how you experience it, the projection, like the utility that my physique is going to give me is going to be way higher than the the utility of one iq point in a world where intelligence is free but people meditate not many people pretend to or they want to they try to they say they do well you could have it if you could actually um like mri or scan your brain as soon as that becomes more that could become the flex i'm like jesus have you seen and it might be it might be like the you know the the january gym signups with the brain gym

1:33:55it might be just purely you know the direct debit coming out makes you feel good about wanting to increase the increase on your frontal lobe exactly there was. Did you ever use that Muse headband back in the day? Me, Johnny, and Yousef were on it. Have you seen this? So it was a EKG brain thing. So kind of like a headband. Yeah. This is it. Forge the skill of attention. Measure, track, and improve your most valuable asset. Used by NASA, Harvard, and over 1,000 plus research labs. Trained on a billion minutes of data. Yeah. yeah so this is focus see when your mind drifts train it back endurance train mental stamina with f n i r s sleep uh oh well they've really tuned this thing back in the day the muse to the top right thing was what we used to use

1:34:41that thing that was what we used to use which was for um uh meditation and you would put this on and it would have little bird sounds when you were like locked in no when you were locked in the sound would get louder as you were more distracted and then as your brain waves quite i have no idea if this is even possible i don't even know if it worked we were all adamant this is going to be the fix for my meditation technique and do all the rest of it. But yeah, you can see that active, neutral, calm. And yeah, it was your quote, all the gear and no idea. It's easy to not be destructive when anybody attractive will leave the room. I, unless you have a colored version. It's a black. I don't think there's a's i don't think there's much overlap unfortunately i like intellect has not been a it's like very unusual for it to be like primarily

1:35:35sought after sought after thing like the the the outcomes of intellect are more but maybe that shifts like wasn't it back in the day like being fat was uh yes attractive because it was a signal of wealth yeah and then like that changed as we got abundant and then you know what so do you think that maybe now big brain maybe it's my time are you saying that being stupid in future could be a signal of high status that you have to think so little because all of your army of ai agents are just thinking on your behalf oh my god he must have a chat gpt pro membership like he's he's so post money little quicker quicker question question um what's an idea you've changed your mind upon in the last 12 24 6 3 months just a something you used to hold

1:36:25quite strongly or you no longer hold an idea you've changed your mind on do you have one to lead us off warm us up no no okay brilliant all right thank you you gotta give us a little a little time what process we got i've. The longer you sit in silence, the more sophisticated what you're about to say sounds. Definitely sounds, but not necessarily is. Correct. But it's all about appearances, Christopher. But I benefit from low expectations. What the fuck have I changed my mind on? I think I just had it all right. Yeah, that's a big one. Sorry, I'm not a good guy to ask. It's still right. It doesn't have to be somewhat big. It could be somewhat small. Something that is relatively, that's just a bit surprising

1:37:15from like a cultural perspective is I think that there is increasing like cool alpha available in being a moderate Democrat democrat like a moderate left leaning person at the moment i think that the the swing that you see yeah maybe people don't like the 5 a.m call to prayer in new york from mamdani and like maybe his optics are a bit bad maybe he's like a faux socialist maybe alexandria ocasio-cortez is a little bit whatever but like all of these people are like normalizing their memes in a way that isn't being mocked so like aoc breaks off her engagement freezes her eggs starts live streaming it yeah people are like well there's hypocrisy here because there were free vasectomies outside of the dnc last year and like you know you don't really seem to care about birth rates and

1:37:58but like pretty quickly it was like yeah but she looks hot in yoga clothes you know like she became her own meme a little bit and people like she's got her place within the culture. And the same thing with Mamdani. Like, I think if you were to go two years ago, right, just before the 24 election on the left, it was all about mockery, wokeism, overreach, all of this stuff and when i see when i sort of track the world of left versus right now when you think about what the right are talking about it feels very boomery because it feels out of touch because it's like are you still bringing up like this thing about have we not already done the like oh woke people and progressive stuff like it just feels like beating a dead horse

1:38:40so um at least the positioning of people that are left of center now that are moderate not the insane ones um i think is less cringe to be associated with and seems to be like culturally more except you're seeing more left-leaning comedians that are doing more left-leaning jokes like uh mike rice and vittorio from the uk both like you know uh um jacob and jake from screen rot that's just the uk right like, you know, Jacob and Jake from Screen Rock. That's just the UK, right? And then you come over here and there's like a variety like Trevor Noah. These guys are more widely accepted. Not that Trevor's been like, he's a fucking superstar, obviously. But that was like a, not me changing my mind, but something that I've noticed as a cultural switch.

1:39:21Do you think that because whatever uh is sexy cool rock and roll is counter power counterculture to a degree it's it's always sexier to be outside of the tent pissing on it than inside of the tent fighting against each other like you've seen the right has fractured itself into oblivion now because they're in power uh and the left is like counterculture and they're pushing back against this thing i also think that a good chunk of it is just trump has not exactly showered himself in glory. He's maybe showered himself in something else. It's just not, it's such a face plant after face plant against the fundamental principles that lots of people wanted him for and why people want to get him in. And it's like all of this crossover

1:39:57and like people that were never, like never woke us being like anti-Trump now, or at least like Trump skeptical, Trump adjacent, Trump skeptical adjacent. That's just like, I don't know. It's like never woke us being like anti-trump now or at least like trump skeptical trump adjacent trump skeptical adjacent that's just like i don't know it's interesting for me to watch that because we really had a period right of ascendancy in terms of progression progressiveness and the pushback against that which was kind of like the atheism of the mid-2010s like atheism from like the 2000s into the mid-2010s was religion's kind of stupid man. And like, I'm like rational and stuff. And you've got like less wrong.com and you know, like the

1:40:29rationalist movement, long-termism, like, you know, scientism comes through Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and stuff. And then quite quickly that pivots like, Hmm, maybe quite a lot of baby got thrown out with that bath water. I'm not so sure that that was a great idea. And Latin mass is now the most descendant new type of religious service, even though no one, literally no one speaks the language that it's being spoken in. I think that's actually a feature, not a bug. I think the reason that people like it is that their scientism and their rationality isn't able to get in the way of the experience because they're not, you know, they can't scrutinize or be skeptical or cynical or whatever about how it's working.

1:41:02And that, that swing, that same sort of sense, well, like the cool kid rational position was always to be, well, you know, there's like two types of, there's men and there's women, and like these people are silly or whatever. And now that it's just less cool to still be beating that drum, not that the fundamental principle has been accepted. And now we're looking at, okay, well, what's next? Like, is there a different way to do that and i think uh people that assume that a like right-wing slam dunk in 28 is a certainty uh i think that that's that there's a potential for a really fucking huge upset for for all of those people so that's at least something that i've noticed over the last yeah that's a good answer. I thought of one.

1:41:45Go on. It's kind of like this. So what I changed my mind on, I'm not a very, like you were talking about religion. I'm not a very religious person. I posted a tweet the other day that I just said, do you believe in God? Yes or no. And what do you think my like Twitter audience answered that? What percentage said yes? I'd say 35%, 40%. 30, 40. I was going to go 60. Yeah, you're closest. It was like 75% said yes. I was pretty stunned by it. 74. Yeah, 74% said yes. And 3,000 votes as well. 3,000 votes, which is like my audience is, I would have guessed leaned a different way. And I've bumped into a lot of people, but specifically there was a guy who came on the podcast that was talking about, he had studied and read

1:42:28of people who had had near-death encounters, NDEs. And so it was somebody who died for 15 minutes and was resuscitated or it was like, you know, they were out and they were on the brink and then they came back. And it's like, not a lot of these people, but they're fascinating because people go study, like, what'd you see? What happened? And one of the interesting things that he says is commonly, it's like alien spottings where different people say the same thing. You all say it flew this way. Like that's, how did you guys all coordinate that answer? So the thing that popped up was this idea of your life flashes before your eyes, but not in the traditional sense. So when people say that, you know, my life flashed before my eyes, they think you're watching

1:43:09some replay of your life or highlight reel of your life, all the key moments of your life. And actually what these people say is the opposite, that basically you see the events of your life, but from the point of view of the other person in the scene, like, so if you're having a conference, if I was having a conversation with you, when I thought I would see the same conversation, but from your perspective, and it brings up this like really interesting idea of what is heaven and hell. So like, imagine you had left people with these amazing encounters with you and you'd left them feeling good. Then it would look, it would feel like heaven because you would get this replay this barrage of the wonderful impact you had on all these other

1:43:49people and if you were an asshole you would feel it would you would see yourself and feel from their point of view how you made them feel and it's it's karma but like productized it's like the actual like manifestation that like the the shot version of karma where you had to blitz through and experience that. And it would feel like hell. And so like, I haven't looked into it. I haven't gone read, like he mentioned a couple of books and whatnot. I'm going to go read, but it was the first time the idea of heaven and hell didn't feel like a thing that I would tell my kids to scare them into behaving well. It was like, if that actually does, it does happen and like i've experienced things like deja vu that i can't explain i'm like i have i viscerally felt this

1:44:29i don't know what the science is but that shit has happened to me many times so this idea of like your life flash before your eyes or seeing something like you know very quickly in this like weird lucid dreaming type of way i've kind of experienced that in deja vu if that's what happens when you die and i just kind of i almost like the idea of this like visual karma, you know, this blitz through your life. And again, it's kind of like, I don't know if it's true or not, but it definitely serves me if I believed that that was, if I kept that thought in mind as I walked through life. And so it's a very different thing than the me-centered version of like, who am I? What was my life? How is this going?

1:45:02What are all the best things I did? Like, it's such a like amateur looking way of thinking about life versus this other way. Question. Who do you know that you think would experience the most heaven at the end of their life? If that was the sort of experience that. I've told you guys, I told you yesterday about my, my friend Ramon, you know, Ramon Ramon is like this, this absolute like gem of a guy. i've told you guys i told you yesterday about my friend ramon you know ramon ramon is like just this absolute like gem of a guy he's a single father he's like the best friend to any of us like just shows up for everybody uh almost to a literal extent my my buddy had a baby and he heard that they were going to labor and like just bought before he

1:45:42could even think just bought a plane ticket came came down, showed up at the hospital and was just like with gifts and like had, you know, they were like, Hey, we're like still, you know, she's kind of still naked. Like, you know, he goes to their house and just like decorate, you know, he's just like an incredible friend. He's I was telling Chris, like he not only coached like his kids sports team, but even when his kid kind of graduated, he was such a good coach that the community, like he kind of realized that if I, if I don't do this, nobody's really a step up. So he just kept coaching other kids for no reason. He's just constantly been that guy for other people. And I told Chris this, this idea of greatness is not accomplishing something great.

1:46:16It's being great. Just like showing up and being great right here in this situation with the barista, with the old lady in line, with this, with that. And I think that if it was like, if you flashed a million of those small things, it'd be like those flipbooks, where any one page looks like nothing. But the whole thing, when you see it, you're like, wow, that was incredible. I think his life would look like that. Wow. If I had to guess, he has, like, quite high theory of mind. So he could probably think how Sean thinks. Or is that kind of, theory of mind, it seems to probably think how Sean thinks, or is that kind of theory of mind? It seems to come online around about four or five. So I'm sure you guys have experienced this when

1:46:50you're watching the TV. So there's a three-year-old in the room, the three-year-old will happily walk in front of the TV and they genuinely can't comprehend that your views aren't the same. Like their world is the worldview. And there's something about four or five that it comes online. But what was interesting, I look at theory of mine kind of like writing because writing comes online about four or five and most 42 year olds have a higher theory of mind than a five-year-old but also william shakespeare wrote macbeth at 42 so like there's like it can still keep on like compounding and i think like a lot of people with theory like most uh 42 year olds will have a better theory of mind than a five-year-old but they kind of might think and it's so easy to fall

1:47:29into that barista is this kind of automaton right that's getting in the way of my life messed up the coffee oh no this person was up till 3 a.m last night right i read over you and trying to see the world not only is not only you're a little bit more empathetic it's actually a more accurate worldview you kind of move to like to the Earth being the center of the universe to know where the Earth is. And not only is that actually humbling, which is kind of a whole grateful blah never actually thought about properly, but I've just reverse engineered from the last couple of years of life. Every so often leaving an absurdly big tip, if you can afford it, is I think about the times that I've done that. I still think about

1:48:18them now, not in a very gratuitous way, but there was one time that, uh, I, I know you've got a story from Dubai when you left Dubai, which kind of inspired this. Uh, I was in New York on tour last year and this lady came in and she was talking to us about how she basically finished the night shift and it was 10 AM, 10 30 AM. And this was the double shift, but going from night to day as opposed to from day to night and we left like a i left a very big tip and i was like just can we make sure that it goes to the person that was the server i did it uh before a podcast a couple of years ago in florida when i was near chris bumstead's house in a denny's so the guy was just like so great and and and you

1:49:00know really really lovely guy that just as a life generally, I'm aware this is not as big as maybe getting on a plane and going and decorating somebody's house. And it is kind of transactional and flippant. It doesn't still require that much emotional involvement. But if you're on the path to learning to be a better, more pro-social human, I think this is a good, hey, like if you can do a 30% or 100% tip on a meal, like that, I like the idea of that more than I like the idea of regularly doing 25% tips. Yes. Because the impact of that is going to be so much more. So, uh, this is crazy. You said that, like, even when I was just trying to explain, like, it's like, try to explain why Gandhi is great.

1:49:40It's like, um, hold on. Uh, and I'm trying to pick random examples. I can't even think of it, but last night we're hanging out, we're on this boy's trip. And so for the boy's trip, each guy kind of contributed one segment of the trip. So it's like, I was like, oh, we're going to go do this. One guy's like, we're going to go to a Muay Thai gym and spar each other. We're going to go to this, to Barton Springs and go swim, whatever. And so one of the things he did extra, he was like, um, he brought a thousand dollars of cash. And he's like, you know, this is a thing that I do with my son. And he's like, you know, maybe once every couple of weeks, we'll go get some cash at the ATM. And he's like, I just want him to learn like the joy of giving.

1:50:11And so he's like, we spend the rest of the day, we start in the morning and he's like, we just spend the rest of the day, like trying to figure out how we can give this to like light anybody up to really like make a difference in anybody's life that we see. And he's like, sometimes we just go buy dog food and we give it away to dogs at the shelter. Sometimes we pay for groceries and just stay here till, till it runs out. But like, you know, whatever. And he's like, you know, I just do this cause I want my son to learn that. Um, um, but I was his son yesterday where he's like, you know, he hands us the money and, um, I'm like, it was, this was the hardest part. It was harder than sparring was figuring out how to do this.

1:50:44It was like a lot of pressure. How do I give this? And how do I do it? Well, and how do I do it? Like actually with some grace and some poise and not like make the other person feel weird. How do I get over my own hesitation? It's like, this is literally his money. He's handed to me. It's for this purpose. But I'm like, Ooh, no, not that something better than that. They're not going to use it. Well, it's like, what the hell is wrong with me? Right? Like building this muscle. I really haven't used in this way. So I totally agree. And, you know, we ended up where we took the, like, you know, the bike pedicab things at night. So we're like cruising around Austin and the woman happened, you know, we don't kind of already

1:51:14given some of the money away or whatever, but she was like, um, she was telling us like, you know, she had lost her job and she's like, yeah. So I just started doing this. It's like, I don't really have a better idea yet, but like, all right, I'll get on this bike and i'll pedal and i'll think while i'm pedaling and i'll enjoy i'll meet some cool people and so you know so fulfilling just to give a little bit give without hesitation um but you're you're right like um that's a very practical way to do this thing that like sounds good in theory to like be a good person okay but how it's like well here's like different moments different ways yeah and it's like such a simple one anyone can access can you

1:51:47tell that story of when you left dubai i don't think you've ever told this publicly because it's one of those weird ones um but when i was in um i was leaving i was in dubai for a few months i was leaving for the summer and whilst i was there i was in this hotel building and there was a gym next door and i'd walk to the gym each day. And there was a guy on like the parking attendant who I would see each day. You know, some people, you got like a nod. He would give me like a salute each time. It's like a different thing each time. We never spoke to another, but every day I'd walk to the gym, I'd see him, I'd give him a wave and he'd give me like that, or he'd give me a different salute. And I just thought, this guy, I'd always

1:52:22have a bad Zoom call or something could go wrong. I see this guy, I go, this is great. We did it for months. We never spoke, but he'd just do it. I need to give that guy a tip before I go. And I was in bed on my final night and I was watching Liam Neeson, Taken. And my flight was in six hours. It's the wrong film to watch when your flight's in six hours because I'm fucking wired. I'm like, I want to be Liam Neeson. I'm like, oh shit. I forgot to give him this'm fucking wired. I'm like, I want to be Liam Neeson. I'm like, oh shit. I forgot to give him this guy the tip. I'm like, am I going to leave? I've got a flight in six hours. Am I going to go and leave to go and give this guy the tip? I'm like, yes, I am.

1:52:54So I get an Uber, pull it up. I don't even know if he's going to be on the shift. It's like 11 p.m. So I get an Uber, wait for the Uber to come. Gets delayed. The Uber gets canceled. Another Uber comes. I'm like, right, my flight's like five hours now. Getting an Uber, 20 minutes down to go and see this old gym i used to go to to see if this guy's there and i'm wandering around there's loads of people at bars and night clubs i'm like okay i'm literally just trying to find this guy i'm looking i'm looking i'm looking and i go i see him and i go right and i go to the cash machine and i got out because at the time i didn't have a crazy amount of money and i was like like, okay, I'm just going to give him that. So I walk over

1:53:27to him. I go, I know we never speak, but you give me a lovely salute every single day. Here you go. I shake his hand and walk away. And immediately someone's behind me. And then, uh, he's, um, uh, I'm getting an Uber back. So he hasn't even really looked at the money. Um, he then, uh, carries on talking to the person who comes through i'm waiting for the super and i go i don't think he even saw what i've given him and i go and like walk back and he's just broken down like in floods of tears and we just fucking pug it out and it was i still think about that story still gives me goosebumps a bit and it was like i don't know it was an absurd amount of money but it was uh it in hindsight, I should have given more.

1:54:04Right. Dude, I love that story. I really do love that story. Change your mindy. Anything? My stuff, this is not going to be anywhere near as profound. When I was thinking about when you first asked it, it was just all like tool AI stuff that came to my head. Like the last couple of weeks with us us like muse rollout stuff like what does everybody need an agent for when when like you're running and and like building things every day and you're still running out of use cases i think i changed my mind on how useful people are finding that stuff it's not like i changed my mind but it yeah it just turned out to be true that people are finding incredible utility from this stuff i've not paid attention much to the muse stuff is it is it that a lot of people are using a facebook

1:54:49built agent tool that connects to your instagram or whatever else and like instantly instantly looks at your email and it's like okay you could be doing this this and this did you know you've been paying for these subscriptions this long and you could you could like cancel this thing you can enter this giveaway you can and i've got friends that are like messaging me about like this thing just did like all of these amazing things for me and my my you know my technology bias from two months ago i'll be like oh this is just like nobody's gonna find a use case for this and they just the the crocs the croc the crocc presentation turned out to be legit. Don't doubt an Asian guy with a mullet, dude.

1:55:26That's the lesson. But yeah, I mean, I was a pessimist on like how useful that would be. You know, one interesting thing about that, I gave it to my wife and my wife's not really like an early adopter of tech. If I tell her to download an app- Gave what to her? Like not Muse, but Instinct, it's like the same thing. Instinct's like the hot startup version of this and it's like the same thing it's like a instinct is like the hot like startup version of this and then facebook's trying to do it's like back when snapchat came out and facebook was trying to copy it and so i gave her access and i was like hey just use this like it's an assistant it can do anything watch just like tell it to go ask if you

1:55:58if the state of california owes you any money and then it like comes back two minutes later it's like yeah you actually owed two thousand dollars uh would you like me to file the claim? And it'll just get a check mailed to you. And she's like, yes. So, you know, it's like, I'm just trying to show her, I'm like, watch this. And that actually works. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody, it's auto prompt. You should just, that should be the onboarding is like, just ask this question. Cause almost all of us are owed money in some back way. What was she owed from? It'll be like a tax state refund. It'll be like a franchise board thing. It'll be, so you have to load files in and can do no you literally just say log

1:56:29in with gmail and it'll just rip through or it'll just take your name and it'll go search in the databases and it'll just look up like oh yeah you can do this this is fucking insane so that's like an easy one but like you know i was like oh watch this like you keep asking me all these bullshit questions just ask this like uh hey what time is the soccer game on Sunday? And where is it? We're going to have time to go from there to there between. It's like, well, yeah, it has your calendar. It knows exactly what the soccer game is going to tell you. And then it's going to actually recommend like that morning. Don't forget to pack the red jerseys because soccer today we're away. You know, it's like shit like that.

1:56:59So we did our like it helped my wife plan my daughter's birthday party. And then so i was trying to like sell her on the utility i'm like look how useful this is try this try this try this she's liking it and then uh after the birthday party she goes okay i'm blown away i go well it helped you plan it she goes no look and instinct had texted her um how was the birthday party i hope it was awesome with like a heart emoji and i was like and she's like that's amazing like so thoughtful i was like oh shit that's gonna be a whole other dimension to this like the supportive boyfriend dna that none of us were building this shit think about really at all but the people who do it makes a big difference to check in and be like like i have

1:57:41a friend who's gave it to their mother-in-law and they connected to like their bank account and everything. Cause they're like, this is awesome. It could do so much. And they connect to a bank that had $0 in the checking account. And, um, it just goes, it's okay. I like, and it just gave her like a little pep talk. Cause like, I don't, it's okay. Like I, that's okay. No, no problem. Like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And she was like, I love this. I really love this. This is actually like, uh, what is actually like a no judgment always always there people don't people don't do hard things because you don't you have to face somebody that you don't know to talk about that's a great point yeah you're facing the things that you're ashamed of or tax and those kinds of like bills and things

1:58:20i didn't do this form right it also goes to show just how low the bar is for being a good friend. That's true. Right. Something that all of us agree hallucinates and can randomly break out into Mandarin during a conversation with Piers Morgan or whatever. Like there's lots of flaws in this and it's hardly like super duper and, you know, emotionally tuned in is able to do something that emotionally lots of people feel is lacking in their life it's like holy fuck like maybe it wasn't that we need to be able to automate managing your calendar it's just that not enough people say you've done a good job today mate and giving you a pat on the back even if it's digitally that's like yeah that's kind of sad but

1:59:02also i guess kind of great do you know shane mack yeah he started a company years ago huh he started a company years ago based on um something he did for his employees at the time which was like i think they had a great year or something he wanted to like give bonuses to everybody like what do i get them and he got everybody an assistant right so he'd get like 10 assistants and like have them like split across the staff. And it's like, it's like the best response to anything I ever, ever did for my employees. And then he ended up founding a company off that, which was, um, uh, military spouses as assistants. So it's still going to that. Husband is deployed, wife is here, wants something to do from home, part-time, military wife

1:59:46assistance. Yeah. It's a great- Presumably as well. I think it's called squared away. A fucking operator, like a serious operator too. Like you're not going to be in a relationship with a guy that flies fighter jets and not be like competent at home. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's so good. Like derivative military, like just military adjacent people are better than most normal humans at trying to get shit done yeah what about what have you changed your mind on um oh one of them um is uh like a i think a lot of people have this that come from advertising or marketing or sales so if you kind of split the world into two people you've got the engineers and you've got the the people that it. Shape rotators and word sales.

2:00:26And I think both of those people can run into two issues where they become the man with a hammer and they see everything through that. And particularly people that go through like a performance marketing hole, they end up just seeing the customer as something that clicks, something that gives them things. And the big thing for me was really kind of going back to, well, what makes a good product? And kind of forgetting advertising or marketing the same way, like someone who's learned kickboxing can kind of forget it, go and do jujitsu and then come back and you combine them. It's actually quite a useful combination. And for me, again, product market fits one of those words where it's a little bit like taste. It's little bit like what is that um and they'll be like well your mps score if your mps score says that 40 of people like hate the

2:01:09product like what i might give me something like i can drop on my foot like give me a tangible thing and the big takeaway i had was um i got to know james from element um who's like one of the smartest entrepreneurs i know and he's like also annoyingly like a great human being. Like he's the loveliest guy. And, uh, we kind of worked together. I helped him like write a little project and we hung out for like five days. And I realized the realization about product market fit, which was that if James sat me down at the end of those five days and just said, George, can I be nice with you? I'm like, yeah, sure, mate. Of course. He goes, I fucking hate you. He goes, if he said, I think this about your girlfriend. I'm like, yeah, sure, mate. Of course. He goes, I fucking hate you. He goes,

2:01:49if you said, I think this about your girlfriend, I think this about your mom, I think this about your family dog. I think it's all atrocious. I hate your country. I'd be kind of sat there for like four days going, that was one of the worst experiences of my whole life. But come Friday, I'd be back on drinkelement.com ordering the watermelon salt because the product's that good. And that's my realization that product market, like true product market fit is, could you like fuck everything up and people would still buy from you? And the big lesson I actually had from a marketing lens was about five, six years ago, you'll probably know this, Sean. There was a moment in time that everyone's forgotten about now where Apple released this new iOS change that

2:02:22was supposed to impact Facebook ads post the whole Cambridge Analytica stuff. And it's just a storm in a teacup felt everything at the time, and everybody forgets it. But it was this idea that Facebook ads are going to die, and all these businesses are going to close down. And so many advertisers were furious. This is an example of antitrust. This is an example of monopoly. This is an example of abuses of power. How could Apple be allowed to do this in the US government isn't doing anything. That's what all the advertisers were saying. And I didn't see one, I didn't see one give up their iPhone. I was like that's product market. Right. It's so good that I'll buy it in spite of hate. Yeah. And that's like the Amazon box phenomenon. You know, that it's like complain about

2:03:02Amazon's business practices, but have like 10 boxes showing up at your house every day. Actually, Buffett used this. So Buffett made the biggest gains of Buffett's life was the best investment he ever made was his Apple investment like six years ago or something like that, which is crazy because Apple's so obvious. It's not like he found some obscure company in Nebraska nobody's ever heard of. He just literally looked at Apple, which was like the third biggest company in the world at the time or whatever, and just put a huge check into it and grossed like this huge return. And this is like, the iPhone had come out 10 years prior. Like it was no surprise. And they were like, you know, Warren, you never invest in tech usually. In fact, you were really good friends with Bill Gates and

2:03:43you famously didn't invest in Microsoft, even though he told you to and others did and you've said like i just didn't understand it he goes oh yeah because apple's it's not about tech it's about brand and it's about product he goes and so warren is famous for he would go like kind of stand in a store and he would ask people questions so like one of his other wins was american express when they had this big crisis like there was a big fraud that happened in American Express had like American Express had lent this guy a bunch of money because he said he had like a salad oil dressing. And then like later they opened up the barrels and it was just seawater inside. And they were like, oh shit, we lent this guy all this money and there's no salad oil

2:04:17to like collateralize. And he stood in a store and watch people swiping and he talked to the cashier. He's like, do you like distrust if somebody is going to use American Express now? They're like, American Express? That's like, of course. I trust American Express with my, it's always going to go through. So he realized people were mispricing it. Same thing with Apple. He was like, if you have somebody with an iPhone, you have to pry it from their dead lifeless fingers to get them to switch by default. And he's like, that is an unbelievable thing. They have unbelievable pricing power. You have to pry it from their dead lifeless fingers to get them to switch by default. And he's like, that is an unbelievable thing.

2:04:47They have unbelievable pricing power. And so he made all his money just by like talking to people who are iPhone users and realizing the extent of the switching cost to them mentally in their head. Forget even how much you might hate the person that's doing it. Because Kanye West is like the canonical example of that like how many ways can you put both feet in your mouth over a decade's period and then still sell out stadiums and bangers people will listen to his music in spite of hating him and still not be able to not like it right um but the thing with apple that's really impressive is they've even torpedoed their own product but the keyboard makes me feel like i've got cerebral palsy like i can't type on the keyboard the keyboard's gone to fuck uh siri

2:05:29has gotten worse yeah as far as i can see over the last sort of five to ten years uh the apple intelligence thing was a complete flop i hate the liquid glass like i hate that but they had so much headroom right and the integration is so good the fact that i can have my notes here on this and everything my passwords are the it's so perfectly put together in the ecosystem that even with doing that and we've talked about this as well that there's the inertia of having vestigial past love for someone a creator that releases a course and then just face plants over and over again like the creator equivalent of a kanye west and you're like fuck i guess i'll still listen to them i guess i'll still watch their stuff because

2:06:09there's just so much goodwill that's brought up and it's interesting like how big is the bank account of this person that they can continue to withdraw from socially right before they get into negative equity and it's like some people essentially just have an infinite money glitch an infinite social money glitch and there's no amount of foot in mouthing that they can do that doesn't cause them to. Didn't Trump even say this? He's like, I could walk down Fifth Street and take out a gun and shoot somebody in the head and they would still love me. He said something like this, right? Like when he was in his first campaign, it was a crazy statement. Dana White's got plot armor in the same way. Like who else can get into a domestic altercation

2:06:45in public with their wife? Right. And just, whatever, the next day or the day after, just own it and be like, wasn't me at my best, wasn't her at our best, spoken to our sons about it, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then next day, he's like, right, so UFC 203. And you're like, oh my God, this guy's just got a lot of self-awareness, which is Alex O'Connor's idea that you can get away with anything on the internet if you're sufficiently self-aware. Brian Johnson can get away with anything on the internet as long as he's sufficiently self-aware. Mike O'Hearn is the same thing. So do you think Trump is self-aware? That's different. I think that's conviction. That's conviction and congruence.

2:07:24It's a barbell. Either zero self-awareness boys i love you all why should people go to keep it you've got a new project out yeah why should people go to check out a twitter jack butcher on twitter please heck yeah uh get off twitter and social media go read a book a good book I recommend is Think on These Things by Krishnamurti it's a good book heck yeah if you like good books pieagency.com forward slash books all my favorite books boys I love you this is fucking awesome this stuff rules and that's it let's go goodbye my beauties slam slam dude whoop hi I'm Tanner your friend and jeweler at Shane Company as jewelry consultants we help customers find their dream engagement ring at their dream price,

2:08:08and we make it as stress-free as possible. We don't work on commission, so there's no pressure. Our all-inclusive free lifetime warranty covers everything and protects your ring for life. If you want something new down the road, trade up for a new style or carat size anytime with our easy trade-up program. Stop by or visit shaneco.com to see for yourself. Shane Company, your friend and jeweler.